Alfred Korzybski Series #10
As you know all too well, in your biological nature, you are an animal. Every day you have basic biological needs to gratify in order to stay alive and thrive with sufficient energy for life’s highest meanings. While the lower biological needs are not “the ultimate meaning of life” they are life’s values and meanings when they are in the state of deficiency. Apart from your consciousness, your understanding, and your awareness, they create impulses in your body that you experience as drives, needs, and urges. Regarding this, Abraham Maslow said, “Be a good animal; have good appetites.” Then get busy coping and mastering these deficiency needs in effective ways.
Being “a good animal” with vital biological needs is the foundation for a healthy life. It enables us to move upward and onward to the truly human needs. Yet if we do not, we can so misuse our basic needs, that we can act and live “like an animal.” This diminishes possibilities and potentials. That’s one way to go wrong and become animalistic in our way of life. Korzybski added another way in which we can become animalistic, it relates to how we use our neurology (or nervous systems).
“We discover that there is a sharp difference between the nervous reactions of animal and man, and that judging by this criterion, nearly all of us, even now, copy animals in our nervous responses, which copying leads to the general state of un-sanity reflected in our private and public lives, institutions, and systems. … If we copy animals in our nervous responses through the lack of knowledge of what the appropriate responses of the human nervous system should be, we can stop doing so …” (1933, p. 7)
If “copying animals leads to un-sanity” we need to differential how we use our nervous systems from that of how animals use theirs. Do you know and use that physiological difference in nervous reactions? How do humans copy animals in reacting? We copy animals in nervous responses when we treat stimuli around us (words, people, events, etc.) as automatic and unthinking “unconditional” triggers. Korzybski labeled this a semantic reaction:
“[A semantic reaction] is psycho-logical responses to words and other stimuli in connection with their meanings” (1933, p. 9)
“Semantic reaction—this can be described as the psycho-logical reaction of a given individual to words and language and other symbols and events in connection with their meanings, and the psycho-logical reactions, which become meanings and relational configurations the moment the given individual begins to analyse them or somebody else does that for him.” (1933, p. 24)
When you semantically react to something, you react to some stimulus that pushes your buttons and activates your fight / flight, or a stress response, or an over-reaction of some sort. You are behaviorally reacting—reacting in your neurology, emotions, speech, or actions as if someone “pushed your button.” And in this reacting, you are actually not reacting to the thing itself, but to what that trigger means to you. A purely physiological reaction would be like blinking when something impacts your eye, it is a reaction of the body to a stimulus. A semantic reaction is different. It is not the trigger that causes the reaction, it is your meanings about that trigger. And that explains why different people will have different reactions to the same trigger. It does not mean the same thing to the different persons.
This, in Korzybski’s terminology is animal unconditionality. Now “an animalistic unconditionality of responses” that is appropriate and therefore healthy for animals is pathological in humans: “What is animalistic in animals is pathological for man.” It’s pathological because we thrive and develop healthy science and sanity through thinking, through conscious learning, through being conscious of what we are doing, and through “consciousness of our abstracting.” In other words, we need conditionality.
While there is a similarity of neurology, our nervous systems are also very different, and it is this difference that requires we use our neurology in a very different way. Maslow described the difference in terms of animals having instincts and we having only instinctoids (leftover remnants of instincts without the content information). Korzybski described the difference in terms of the increased complexity of nerve fibers in our brains due to the more complex interrelations of association fibers and went into great detail about the lower and higher levels of information processing in the brain. Korzybski also noted that any and every animalistic nervous reaction in us is vicious in its effects.
“The main difference between the brain of a man and of a higher ape …is in the association paths which are enormously enlarged, more numerous and more complex … If these association paths are blocked to the passage of nervous impulses by some psycho-physiological process, the reactions of the individual must be of a lower order and such blockage must give the effect of the given individual’s being organically deficient and must result in animalistic behavior.” (1933, p. 18)
World of Animals World of Man
Unconditionality Conditionality
Linear Circularity
Identification Denial of Identity
Non-freedom Freedom
Fixed / Rigid Fluid
Blocked Open
We copy animals in our nervous responses to the extent that confuse triggers with our meanings, identify our words and meanings with some trigger, and lose the conditionality that would otherwise give us choice. We use our neurology like an animal when we are not mindful and do not use the full potentiality of our brain. So instead of conscious awareness we operate from habit especially semantic habits. We stop re-evaluating and just “know” what something is. Yet this animalistic use of your neurology can be transformed and brought up to the human level. You can do that as you discover and use the neural mechanisms to make your responses more conditional. Doing that will give you more flexibility, more choice, more freedom.
Now if you don’t correct your semantic reactions they will lead to and create semantic blocks. These blocks are animalistic, unconditional responses that limit your choices. When you are semantically reacting, you are preventing information from being processed by the higher cortical levels of your brain. When doing that, you are copying animals in their way of reacting to the world.
“We see that by a simple structural re-education of the semantic reactions, which in the great mass of people are still on the level of copying animals in their nervous reactions, we powerfully affect the semantic reactions…” (p. 29)
“The most important form of copying of animals was, and is, the copying of the comparative unconditionality of their conditional reflexes, or lower order conditionality; the animalistic identification or confusion of orders of abstractions, and the lack of consciousness of abstracting, which, while natural, normal, and necessary with animals, becomes a source of endless semantic disturbances for humans.” (p. 36)
“Only an analysis of structure and semantic reactions, resulting in consciousness of abstracting, can free us from this unconscious copying of animals, which must factor in human nervous and semantic reactions and so vitiates the whole process.” (p. 37)
The solution? Stop the semantic reacting and learn to moments of silence so that you can give the higher levels of your brain to think again, to think freshly, to make new evaluations, to become mindful, and to develop the semantic flexibility of choice. And that will be the subject of the next article in this series.
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
