The Neuro-Semantic Basis of Madness
What Had To Be for The Holocaust To Be, Part II
by
Dennis K. Chong and Jennifer K. Smith Chong ©
In this paper, the male pronoun will apply to either gender. The plural pronoun will apply to both authors. The nominal pronoun will apply to the first author.
We dedicate this work
to
Louisa Schamroth, Bet-Shemesh, Israel, our friend and aunt,
and
Professor Lar Clausen, Kiel, Germany, our friend and man of heart.
In Part I of this paper, we showed that the horror of the Holocaust is born out of very special kinds of evil that can be in any of us. They included:
the ability to stand, hold and witness pain and suffering when one party inflicts it upon another1 to whatever degree and limit it is done. Children who torture cats and dogs are of this ilk
the facility to truly delight in and enjoy what is done to the sufferer2 by the persecutor
the pressing want to co-participate and an intense desire to co-contribute in such acts of torture on another
an utter and undivided knowing that the entity who is suffering means absolutely nothing to that the other person and is of no value in the order of creation save to serve. This speaks of self-importance and ego3 of an incredible proportion:
For Cicero, the Roman people - not to mention the Emperor - were "Princeps Gentium"/Lord of Peoples.
Robert Eisenman: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians Elements Books Ltd. page 307.
We now believe that it is not only Princeps Gentium but also Princeps Omnes (Lord of everything) that is in this equation. As we cited above, it is with this attitude that there are children who love to torture animals and who have the capacity to put them to death. They grow up loving to hurt and kill. They did this in the Roman arena and today they do it in the bull rings of Latin countries and in the pits of cock fights. Can this, in a self-reflexive way be applied to the ultimate animal life form on this planet - humans? Of course the answer is "Yes." In Part I of the paper we cited some terrible examples. And the Holocaust itself is the ultimate example. It is the ultimate example because it was done in a manner that only a 20th Century modern state could. And it was done for the purpose of genocidal extermination. The Romans, to their credit and grace, did it for sport.
Now, with these elements in position (as we delineated in Part I), this paper must now address the structural conditions4 that have to exist for the Holocaust to have occurred. These elements have to do with the form of thinking that powered it and for which the Holocaust was its terrible metaphor.
The science of Evolution has determined that we have come from pre-human life forms5. These pre-human life forms had to survive. To do so they had to think of how to do it. Their thinking had to involve some effective and efficient grammar, syntax and fitting semantics to achieve such a goal. So, what form might it take. This is what is proposed:
The social imaginings and plans contemplated by apes would be linear, forward-looking, limited and probably coarse-grained permutations from current situations.
The ape mind is situated, reflex, confined to present perception and motivation (the fixed point), yet able to imagine on-line forward-looking but partial alternative to current states of affairs. The imagining is probably cued by genetic priming as well as past experiences and expectations about standard multilateral arrangements of the zero-sum sort (kinship, reciprocation, alliances, dominance).
Radu J. Bogdan: Minding Minds MIT Press 2000 page 62.
In this work Bogdan entitles this type of mind as the Aristotelian ape mind. For us, the title is singularly apt since Aristotle is the father of Cause and Effect. It is a universal system of thinking that has the most deleterious and destructive consequences. In a significant way Alfred Korzybski mapped out what they were in his work Science and Sanity. We, in turn, in our published books and articles have substantially and critically expanded on them
This Aristotelian ape mind is set upon its goal, namely its survival:
The models coming from conflict and game theory, suggest that the zero-sum nature of rough politics practiced by non-human primates (I win, you lose and vice versa) raises representation and computation problems that are different from and simpler than those faced in the non-zero-sum forms of epistemic and communal coordination, which are uniquely human.7 The idea is that non-human primates do not appear to evolve specialized interpretive skills dedicated to the non-zero-sum epistemic and communal activities (such as learning or co-operation) whereas humans do evolve such skills.8 This is the mighty difference anticipated earlier, because it is such skills of non-zero-sum coordination which matter most in driving the evolutionary complicity between interpretation and mental rehearsal toward metamentation.
Radu J. Bogdan: Minding Minds MIT Press page 62.
This evolutionary phylogenetic engram is in us. We can witness that this is so because of the many occasions and times when there was that instinct in us to strive for end game:
"I win, you lose"
The ape is in us.
There was one of these wonderful examples of NLP6 "rapport" when one founding party sought to claim trade mark control. In this he was resisted. This knowledge is in the public domain. One party lost and the other party won. Now as Michaevili7 urged and advised, the winner must now pursue the other to the finish. You see this in lions. When three new dominant males win over the pride, the dispossessed alphas are pursued to their death. This also happens in an ape troop when an alpha is overthrown by a younger and more powerful strut.
When you are Princeps Gentium et Omnes, you can dispose of anything, at and by your whim. What was now required for the Holocaust are two more things. It required a frame of thinking to run the ape mind. That frame of thinking is known as Causality or thinking by Cause and Effect or thinking by the Question of WHY8. The very structure and consequences of thinking by Cause and Effect were, on one hand delineated in three books and one the other in a series of articles. The three books were (a) Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski, (b) Don’t Ask WHY?! and (c) Power and Elegance in Communication. The latter two were written by the authors of this paper. The series of articles they wrote were published in the web site www.neurosemantics.com and in the journals Rapport and the Medical Psychotherapist.
From this body of work, what will be very clear is that this frame of thinking9 compels us to interpret everything according to whether they are RIGHT or WRONG10. Wrong is never to be tolerated. The ultimate witness to this is the contemporary fashion for zero tolerance for this and zero tolerance for that and zero tolerance for just about everything. In another day and age it was termed differently. It was anathema, excommunication, damnation and perdition. Wrong is to be eliminated, erased and obliterated. Today we invoke all sorts of penalties for infringements of zero tolerance. In another day and age, we would take them to the Plaza Mayor, Madrid11 and have an auto de fé. This euphemism, meaning "an act of faith" was the occasion of burning the heretic alive.
Right is always to prevail and be pre-eminent. In our pursuit of zero tolerance, we truly warm the heart and vitals of that Dominican scoundrel and devil Tomas Tocquemada, Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.
Now, with the condition of Princeps Gentium et Omnes and an Aristotelian ape mind trapped within Cause and Effect, it is logically clear that it only requires one more structural element for the horror of the Holocaust to have happened. And it is found here:
The Pilate described by the Gospels is not a historical figure. That picture is a malicious anti-Judaic legend. As the Evangelists see it, by recognizing and declaring Jesus’ innocence, Pilate makes the infamy of the Jews obvious. In their blind fanaticism they have no scruples about shedding innocent blood - indeed royal and divine blood. Pilate may wash his hands to protest his innocence, but the Jews cannot. That is the meaning of this story, The Blood of the Redeemer sticks to their hands. By washing his hands, Pilate exposes the fact that they are a pack of murderers, unconcerned with justice but keen to satisfy their hatred. In doing so, he lays the foundation for the long and bloody history of the persecution of the Jews as the murderers of Christ.
Uta Ranke-Heinemann13: Putting Away Childish Things HarperSanFrancisco 1992 page 110.
And so, now:
The Gospels’ story of Pilate proclaims no "good news"; it sows the seed of hatred. almost two thousand years after the fact, people can still quote the Jews as saying that their persecution by Christians and their annihilation in the gas chambers was a fate they deserved. That such a statement is even possible shows the maliciousness of a bias (evident back in New Testament times) that claims to be representing the cause of Christ that constitutes its perversion: The calumny against the Jews in the New Testament became the Christian legal title to their persecution and destruction.
Uta Ranke-Heinemann: Putting Away Childish Things HarperSanFrancisco 1992 page 112.
It only needed an alpha dominant monster ape to emerge in the canvass of human history and assert the clarion call that to be a Jew was WRONG and this WRONG was best eliminated; and so the wolf pack then gathered together. All of us just love zero tolerance and we love to be part of the pack.
And how are we ever to solve this problem?
Oh yes!
The problem is still here, alive and well.
It appears that no one seems to realize that the problem is here today, for example in countries like the United States, Canada or Germany. It exists in spite of all the social and legal structures in place. It is not in spite of them, but especially because of them that the problem exists. These social and legal constraints presuppose the existence of the problem and the potential of the problem. Therefore, it is not eliminated. It, therefore, exists by presupposition and this is far more powerful than anything one can do to bring it about! It is much more powerful than if it were formal and overt. What chance is there for any American or group of Americans, today, to formally create an anti-Semitic party so as to project its anti-Semitic ideas upon the body of the American politic. It would not a have the chance to lift off. It would be torn down at once. However, if you presuppose the existence of the entire corpus of ideas and concepts that form anti-Semitism, then it exists and then, it is impossible to tear it down.
However, within the frame of Cause and Effect, a person can disown and disclaim the evil that he perpetrates. He can always say, "You caused him to do it." And it is such a shock that anyone would index you in this way. As a result, Cause and Effect is known also as the Blame Frame. People do think this way. In fact we all do:
We have generalized the notion of semantic ill-formedness to include sentences such as:
My husband makes me mad.
The therapist can identify this sentence as having the form:
Some person causes some person to have some emotion.
When the first person, the one doing the causing, is different from the person experiencing the anger, the sentence is said to be semantically ill-formed and unacceptable. The semantic ill-formedness of sentences of this type arises because, it, literally, is not possible for one human being to create an emotion in another human being - thus, we reject sentences of this form. Sentences of this type, in fact, identify situations in which one person does some act and a second person responds by feeling a certain way. The point here is that, although the two events occur one after another, there is no necessary connection between the act of one person and the response of the other. Therefore, sentences of this type identify a model in which the client assigns responsibility for his emotion; rather, the emotion is a response generated from the model in which the client takes no responsibility for experiences which he could control.
Richard Bandler & John Grinder14: The Structure of Magic15 Science and Behaviour Books Inc. 1975 pages 51 - 52.
To describe something as semantically ill-formed is but a genteel and elegant way to say it is bereft of logic and rationality. When something is illogical and irrational, but has humour, it is the condition of fun and laughter. When it does not have humour, it is INSANE and then, it is the condition of pain and suffering, woe and tears. It is illogical and irrational to smoke in the face of a person who has exacerbating asthma, emphysema and chronic bronchitis. It is illogical and irrational to be suffering from a state of Depression every day of one’s life when he/she does not know what he/she is depressed about. It is illogical and irrational to be witless with anxiety and fear every day of one’s life over something that person does not even know. But then people do. It is illogical and irrational to bite your fingernails until they bleed. It is illogical and irrational to scream, rant and rave at what for most people, is the most trivial of provocation and so forth and so forth. The offices of Medical Doctors, Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Certified Hypnotherapists, master social workers are full of clients who are under the bane of some illogicality and irrationality.
The first step is to de-frame ourselves of the Blame Frame. However, Causality is a mother paradigm. All other life’s blueprints are under its governance. Thus, every issue and sub-issue that appertain to religious, social, cultural and legal matters are sorted by the two valued subsystem of RIGHT and WRONG of Causality. From it comes two significant derivatives:
The channel for us to know what SHOULD BE and what SHOULD NOT BE. Explicitly we now have the corpus of our EXPECTATIONS
Implicitly we have the entire body of JUSTIFICATION to underpin the positions that are taken across any scan of consideration.
To de-frame ourselves from the Blame Frame, we need to:
know that it has a contrapunctum16. Its contrapunctum is the No-Y-ian Frame18
analogically collapse17 out all the semantic logical levels of Cause and Effect
acquire the language system of the No-Y-ian Frame
learn how to use and live by the No-Y-ian Frame.
The need and the requirement to do this is critical. If we do not escape the semantic ill-formedness of the Blame Frame, we will be scammed into "the zero-sum nature of rough politics practiced by non-human primates (I win, you lose and vice versa)" which we will apply to our fellow human beings. Today, as a thinking and doing, we see it in the attitudes and actions of white Maritime fishermen versus native Canadian fishermen, Caucasians versus black Americans, Hindus versus Indian Moslems, Jews versus Palestinians, Malays versus Chinese, Indonesians versus West Papuans, Brazilians versus Amazonian tribes people, Germans versus guest workers, Japanese versus the Ainu. This list is endless.
Yet in the end, there is no one, nothing that is making us do these things:
The belief in the Devil as the cause of evil is a superstition. Man has invented the Devil to get himself off the hook. Man doesn’t want to be responsible for his actions, but he remains the only responsible party. He and nobody else is the Prince of Hell on earth - which is not to diminish the power of evil and even the devilishness of evil in the world.
Uta Ranke-Heinemann: Putting Away Childish Things HarperSanFrancisco 1992 page 59
There is no way to control the phylogenetic trace of the Aristotelian Ape mind unless our mind is a No-Y-ian mind. Our only hope is to think with a truly Humean human mind. And it thus the only way by which to end the virus of the Holocaust.
To understand this paper is to understand, what Professor Ranke-Heinemann has indexed, how it is that anyone of us can be:
"Prince of Hell on earth."
And to understand this epistemology about us is of undoubted value to the fields of Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychotherapy. Sociology, Politics, Psychotherapy, NLP19, NSP20 and Religion.
If someone, anyone, anywhere can propose a better understanding and a more cogent solution, then, please . . . HELP!
Endnotes:
1. the ability to stand, hold and witness pain and suffering when one party inflicts it upon another1 was a feature of two California men, Lake and Ng. They constructed a secret sound proof room in which they inflicted all forms of unspeakable torture and abuse on women they had seduced to their place and then eventually killed them when their interests in them were sated.
2.the facility to truly delight in and enjoy what is done to the sufferer2:
There were a perverse class of people who went into the Roman arena to touch with their hands and maul with taunts those who were about to be killed. They took pleasure in doing this. It got to be such a bother to get them out that on one occasion, the Emperor Caligula lost his patience and ordered the games to begin. The gates were closed the beasts were let in. These unfortunate people, despite all their protests, pleas and cries that they were Roman citizens, failed to move the irritated and irate Caligula.
3. self-importance and ego:
These are the most foolishly overvalued commodities in our world today as witnessed by the incredible number of workshops on "self-esteem" and the seemingly endless stream of books on the topic. Yet there is so much evidence to denounce and declaim them.
The twin of self-importance and ego is pride and in Christian teaching:
Pride is the first cardinal sin.
Then an extra-ordinarily perceptive mind noted:
The third disease is importance, and self-importance is the worst of all. As soon as one thing is "important" then other things aren’t. Importance is a great way to justify being mean and destructive, or doing anything else that’s unpleasant enough to need justification.
Richard Bandler: Using Your Brains - for a CHANGE Real People Press 1985 page 97
You may think, "I have only a little ego left." But, if someone insults your ego, that brings up anger. You may flare up and use harsh words. A person with ego has some deceit as well. In order to prevent his ego from receiving a puncture, he will do deceitful things. In that ego, there is also greed, to become more and more powerful, and to keep others in a subordinate position.
Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanua: Twelve Facets of Reality THE JAIN PATH TO FREEDOM Dodd, Mead & Co. 1980 page 87
(a. Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanu was the first Jain priest to leave the Indian subcontinent to teach in the West.)
To top it all, one has to pay for ones indulgence in stupidity:
But, in his self-love, exaggerated self-esteem , he overlooks his own shortcoming, and blames everybody and everything but himself. In the face of ‘injustice’, he becomes discouraged, timid, or bitter and pessimistic. He is unable to discharge his duties, and becomes a disappointment as a father, husband, friend, and, ultimately, as a human being and citizen. Bitterness, disappointment, and painful semantic shocks pile up on all sides under such conditions.
Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 1980 6th Reprint
4. structural conditions:
The significance about structure and structural conditions is evidenced here:
As the only possible content of knowledge is structural, as given in terms of relations and multi-ordinal and multi-dimensional order; numbers, which establish an endless array of exact, specific, and, in each case, unique, relations are obviously the most important tools for exploring the structure of the world, since structure can always be analysed in terms of relations.
Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 1980 6th Reprint page 260
Unless we see in terms of relationships we will not get the meaning of things.
We have already seen that structure is to be considered as a configuration of relations, and that relations appear as the essential factors in meanings and so of s.r.b
Ibidem page 29(b. s.r. stands for semantic reaction in Korzybskian thinking. However, out of the field of Neuro-Semantic Programming there is a non-italicized s.r. This term stands for semantic response. The basis for the difference is that s.r. entails some implicate internal processing. s.r. is more akin to something like a knee jerk reflex.)
5. pre-human life forms:
Despite all counter claims and assertions by creationists, the evidence for pre-human life forms is to be found in the studies of phylogeny, ontogeny, biology, zoology and paleontology.
6. NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a field of study that examines the relationship between the neurology of our linguistics and our sentiency.
7. Michaevili was a social politician in the middle ages. He mapped out, in an opus entitled Prince, the tenets and canons by which a duke in the middle ages could hope to survive in the maelstrom of the intrigue treachery and disloyalties of the times. As I look back on the work it is, in my view, the bible for an Aristotelian ape.
8.That frame of thinking is known as Causality or thinking by Cause and Effect or thinking by the Question of WHY8:
This frame of thinking was designated as the Aristotelian system by Alfred Korzybski, the father of General Semantics. In the fulness of time we were to also describe it as thinking by the Question of WHY. In his work, Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski mapped out the semantic anomalies that flowed from thinking by Cause and Effect. He proposed an alternative system that he entitled the non-Aristotelian system, a.k.a. the non-el system since the Aristotelian was elementalistic a.k.a. el. In our examination of the el system we were to expand much further the structural semantic anomalies that flowed out of Cause and Effect. They were as Bandler and Grinder first termed them - semantically ill-formed.
9. frame of thinking is an imprinted blueprint of thinking. The imprinting is either stamped into the mind or it is engraved into the body language. In its operations, the person will not know either to deny or to question the consequences that flow from its axioms and theorems. Thus, it will not occur to the Holy Father to question the possibility that since God placed the divine seed into Mary by which Christ came to be, she was nothing but a surrogate mother. For the Pope, she IS the mother of Jesus. It will not occur to an Aristotelian Causalist that thinking by Cause and Effect can be insane. It will all seem "right and proper" to sentence a girl to 150 lashes for premarital sex in Nigeria in December2000/January 2001 just as it was once, "right and proper" to dam a Catholic to hell for eating meat on Fridays. The frame of thinking may be a drug. Therefore, an alcoholic will assure you that his thinking is sound and well grounded and so too, a man swept by the winds of his cocaine intoxication.
10. RIGHT or WRONG is a sub-system of thinking within Cause and Effect. In his work, Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski showed this sub-system was about two values. Therefore, to think this way was to apply an anomalous warp on the entire vista of actuality, since we all live in a reality in which there are an infinity of values. It just does not have two, one being right and the other being wrong. In certain conditions the warp is even worse as what is sought and intended is a one-valued system. There can be no wrong. Everything has to be right. This was the way it was in the III Reich of Hitler’s Germany and in the revolutionary Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. However, what is right, is in the end, never universal for time and cultures. It is something that is idiosyncratic and whimsical.
11. Plaza Mayor, Madrid is the main square of the old city of Madrid, Spain. It is here that heretics, Jews and Moors were burnt to death because they were not of the one true faith!
13. Uta Ranke-Heinemann was the first woman who was appointed to a Chair of Theology in a German University. Her research conclusions so irked the Vatican that by the treaty provisions between the Vatican and the German principality, she was removed from her position. This is known as intellectual forbearance, a.k.a. only the right version of things must prevail.
14. Richard Bandler & John Grinder are the co-creators and co-founders of the field of study known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).
15. The Structure of Magic is the core foundational work for the field of NLP.
16. contrapunctum is a neologism coined by Douglas Hoffstadter. It means the natural opposite or invert of a thing.
17. analogically collapse:
This is a manouevre that comes from NLP. Formally, NLP calls it collapsing anchors. What one does is to cull out one internal state or emotion and anchor it. Then one does the same for its natural opposite or contrapunctum. When the two anchors are then fired at the same time, two opposing states will co-exist in a person. This logically, however, cannot be. It is not possible to be in ecstasy and despair at the same time, depression and elation, pride and humility, love and hate, forgivingness and resentment and so forth. They will neutralize each other and a third state will emerge. When this happens the initial contrapunctal states are ended or collapsed out.
In the de-imprinting of the Aristotelian system, Cause and Effect or the Blame Frame, we take each logical semantic level of the frame or system, anchor and collapse it against its natural contrapunctum from the non-Aristotelian system, a.k.a. the No-Y-ian Frame. It is the first phase of the ultimate gestalt switch.
18. language system of the No-Y-ian Frame is the contrapunctum of the Cause and Effect. We know it today as the Watzlawick-Weakland-Fisch-metalanguage (WWF-ML). It is fully described in the work Power and Elegance in Communication. The title of the work speaks to the power and elegance of the WWF-ML.
19. NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It a field of study that examines how human neurology underpins the patterns of natural language and by extension the structure of our subjective reality.
20. NSP stands for Neuro-Semantic Programming. It is a field of study that examines how human neurology determines the patterns of human sentiency and semantics.
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