April ‘25 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Alfred Korzybski)
In April's 1-to-1 Wiseletter we're looking at a quote by Alfred Korzybski, a 20th-century Polish philosopher of semantics.
Alfred Korzybski
QUOTE
The map is not the territory
I spent well over a decade of my professional life in corporate America and Korzybski’s statement would have been my unsolicited parting advice to it. Thousands of spreadsheets were generated every day to predict the future, diagnose the past and, much worse, change the present.
Photo credit: (Lukas Blazek)
I remember when one of our computer systems inexplicably stopped processing orders for a customer. This was penalizable according to a service level agreement we had signed which guaranteed 99.99% uptime on the system. The customer was furious (rightfully so) and demanded money from us.
Our engineers had the system report its uptime: 100%. No downtime. You can imagine how much the customer appreciated learning that their orders were backing up in a system that was apparently working just fine. Our executives pushed to show this report to the customer and not pay them. Because we all sat at keyboards in our home offices, making nothing, just processing and transmitting abstract information, about as far apart from concrete reality as you can get, we felt prepared to show the customer the map and tell her it was the territory.
Language is to blame, I fear. Language is an abstraction of the world. It models the world so that we can plan for the future and organize big numbers of people in concert (business, military strategy, civilization). This same modeling action of language also generates a model of you, . This is self-reflection. It’s no wonder the ancients stood in awe of language as a kind of divine magic.
Photo credit: Constantinos Kollias
The magic of language has allowed humanity to rise above primitive dirt, escape the overwhelming insistence of the present moment and build civilization, but at a cost.
But there’s a trade off. The more sophisticated the model gets, the more insulated its user becomes from the world. The more complex the world model, the more articulate the model of self becomes. The better at mapping the world we become through nouns, verbs, and, let’s say, the exotic mathematics of Quantum mechanics, the more frightfully self-aware we become.
Language allows us to model reality so that we can do things like showing up on time to Pilates class to running multi-national companies to splitting the atom and dropping that power of the sun on the heads of our enemies. We are as separated as ever from our bodies and our instincts (and fundamental morality?) as a result.
We can’t just dance, we need to see the steps. We can’t just give birth, we need to go to birthing class. We can’t just relax, we need to try to relax first. Show me the instructions. The generator of language, conscious intellect (or is it generated by language? I can’t tell), demands to be in charge so everything must first be considered and then proceed in that slow clickity-clack one-at-a-time series (like the words on this page). It’s opposite, unconscious intuition, acts in that spontaneous all-at-once mode of instinct.
No surprise about this pop question floating around these days: “Do we live in a simulation?” Our intellects are so insulated from concrete reality that the world’s realness has fallen into question. In subconsciously sensing its own abstract, illusory nature, the ego throws it back at the world. The world isn’t real because secretly I don’t feel real.
Korzybski’s warning us against falling too far into the illusion of language. Use language and its powers properly as a tool to represent the world, but don’t use it as a replacement for the world. You can’t eat money and you can’t build a house with kilograms and inches. The world is the present moment. The present moment is direct experience. No one has any good ideas on where it comes from, but its amazingly consistent at being here.
(We paid that customer, by the way)
QUESTION
What’s one way you can get out of your head and into your body?
Cheers,
John
