A major media narrative is being constructed to "explain" the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords in Arizona. Many of them, in fact. These nascent mythologies carry with them certain assumptions required of you, the reader/viewer/listener -- the citizen -- for you to "buy in" to one over the others.
Some hope this event and the facts of it will challenge our very paradigm about the political situation in which we find ourselves. President Obama certainly hopes that this event will invite us to pause and reflect and open ourselves to the opportunity of enabling a perfection of our union. E Pluibus Unum was invoked many times at the memorial service in Arizona. What does that mean?
When else in history, in the cusp of transformation of our nation as it is and as we believe it to be, has this kind of crisis been faced? What light could an example from another time could we shine on these present events which could help us in our moments of pondering?
As Kossacks who have read many of my diaries know, I am a student of general semantics. We are a rag-tag bunch, loosely organized mostly by seeking out and reading the works of other students of it. One of my kindred general semanticists named Ben Hoack, an actor and writer, has produced one of the best collections of how the work of Alfred Korzybski applies to our lives now.
So I will start with an excellent summary of our shared passion from his blog Off The Map:
General semantics is a field founded in 1933 by Alfred Korzybski. Korzybski was deeply disturbed by the world war that he had lived through and fought in, and wanted to address the problems and unsanity that led to it. He didn’t want it to happen again. From its inception, the field of general semantics dealt with the unsanity crisis at the social scale as well as the personal scale. To accomplish his goal, Korzybski had to start with the unsanity of individuals to diminish social unsanity and improve social sanity. Despite such a large goal, he set to it by educating thousands of students in seminars and lectures sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics and other organizations. His methods were incredibly effective at improving sanity, greatly influencing people still in this day.
Introduction to the site Off The Map
Korzybski was an officer in the Polish Military during World War I. He had seen unsanity in full flower. Soldiers were are the mercy of killing machines and deadly chemical wizardry on an unprecedented scale. A war in which machines did the killing more than people did. A war unlike any other before. That war was a pivotal event in the history of all mankind and a disturbing rupture of history's narrative for most nations of the world. These ruptures, these cusps in which the dynamic systems of our politics and civic life must transform to something new and, hopefully, stable -- these times of peril and promise -- must be faced by every responsible citizen.
Sanity As Obama's Policy
President Obama uses this idea throughout all his policies: become a responsible citizen. Learn your civic duty and then live it. Sanity, in this sense, is applying our minds and hearts to the problems of our fellow citizens, as they would to our problems if they were sane. Participate in the disciplines requiring the highest levels of education, practical and theoretical. Apply the knowledge and insight you can then bring to as effective a solution as possible to the service of your fellow citizens.
Public service can be a way to fulfill this duty. His Administration has moved back to the hiring model based on merit and expertise instead of pedigree and loyalty. Behind all the vissitudes of daily news cycles and crises, a steady shift is underway throughout the Federal government. The effect of that shift will be an increase in sane behavior by public servants.
Imagine -- imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that some day she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us -– we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.
President's Speech In Tucson
This shift will take a while to take hold in such a large government. But it will improve the quality and quantity of services provided to the most constituencies per unit time. More resources will be shifted to identifying problems which the Federal level of government can address most profitably for the nation as a whole and letting those grievances against the current situation be heard and more real heads and hands dispatched to address them. In our system of government, a sane response is to hear and address the grievances of citizens. An unsane response is to put forward imagined grievances while saying "the People" have lifted those grievances up from the citizenry itself.
Are we listening? Really listening?
Media Message Machines
Inserting these filters for a nation as a whole requires mass communications media. The imagined grievances must be creatively transformed into daily broadcasts but remain consistent. The coordination and expertise required is extensive. Unsanity emerges the more each of us gets tired of constantly changing our own maps of the world. Our brains are not designed for that kind of work. As we grow up, we become resistant to changing our minds about things around us in the world. We have to focus on our careers, our disciplines, our families. We have to maintain a standard of living with which we are comfortable. Who can stay open to new facts on all these fronts every frickin' day?
In addressing unsanity, general semantics focuses largely on an individual’s speech–both spoken words and written words. Speech could be thought of like a map. A map outlines a territory. From this perspective, the relationship between speech and delusion becomes clear: Sometimes, the speech we use outlines a territory that does not exist. Essentially, when we are deluded, we speak about something that does not truly exist but seem to believe it does. General semantics aims foremost to point out these inconsistencies between map (speech) and territory (the physical world). It aims to get people to speak and write more correctly relative to the physical world. In order to reduce delusion and unsanity, general semantics encourages and trains people to revise their maps and to align their maps to better fit the territory.
Ben Hauck
We can improve our odds of staying sane by paying attention to the need to keep the struggle alive. Sanity takes work. It takes constant learning all of your life. It requires a feeling of responsibility for the state of our world as we find it and for what state it will be in when we leave it.
President Obama fundamentally believes in this force. If enough citizens can take up this challenge, regardless of their political affiliations, we can adapt to a changing world together and preserve our ideals. His call for sanity from citizens bombarded with unsane frames through an infosmog of media devices and programming seems a fool's errand at times. He has been criticized and villified for such simplistic thinking.
The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better. To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.
We should be civil because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American Dream to future generations.
They believed -- they believed, and I believe that we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved life here –- they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that’s entirely up to us.
President's Speech In Tucson
He ends up often being the only sane person in the room. He is willing to adjust as the facts today demand and defer other policies until the facts change. He thinks of different scenarios in the future and demands his staff play them out and bring the results back. Experimentation. Conditional thinking. Openness to contrary facts from competent experts in their respective fields.
Adjustment. Every day. For your whole life. Adaptation. All while not hardening your heart to the pleas of fellow citizens for justice and equality. This road is the hardest road for any person. Any citizen. Any public servant.
But it is our best chance for a future in which we want our children to live. The slack is gone. Oil is going to get expensive. Resources are running out. Too many actors in the world have access to machines and chemicals which can unlease the horrors Korzybski saw in World War I anywhere at any time.
It is time for humanity to grow up, already.
Civilization: The Hardest Game In Town
Human civilization is not a game. Is not handed down from God nor does it arise from particular doctrines like "capitalism" or "socialism" or "communism". Capitalists are perfectly happy to do business with communists. These labels are themselves obsolete. Civilization is earned every day, or it falls. Everyone who is a member of it has a responsibility to earn their reputation within it. Everyone has to be civil to each other. Chaos is the natural state of the world. Civilization is redefined every day as reality changes around and within us. Such an edifice of order now layered up over centuries of time by many generations of people can fall if we allow myth to blind us to necessity and suffering.
We must work on our sanity. We have no choice as citizens; no slack as a nation among nations. It often seems there is no hope. Sanity is not just staying out of the asylum, it is each of us at our very best, every day, all the time. Unsanity is when we are not at our best. We all have our lists of things we mean to do, want to write, plan to read. The further we fall behind on our own life work, the more unsane our reactions to daily stress and challenges will become.
Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "When I looked for light, then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we have to guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.
For the truth is none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind. Yes, we have to examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future. But what we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other.
That we cannot do.
President's Speech In Tucson
Are We The People up for this kind of challenge? This question is the one President Obama is putting to us all. He hopes the answer will be yes. He knows it could well be no.
Becoming Saner Together
In this series, I will present Alfred's techniques and methods which help us resume our life work amid the stress and chaos of our daily lives. I will relate them to President Obama's public persona and speeches. I hope to relate the ideas of a fellow citizen from decades ago to the struggle of another fellow citizen to govern our nation during our time of crisis and decision. Korzybski's ideas arose from the horror of World War I and World War II demonstrated his worst fears realized. With the rise of a President whose success or failure may well depend on the sanity of our reponse to the real issues facing us as a nation -- and is willing to be elected or rejected in 2012 on the merits of his fidelity to the principled adherence to sanity above all else -- I find myself unable to contain myself.
So sudden loss causes us to look backward -– but it also forces us to look forward; to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us.
We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we're doing right by our children, or our community, whether our priorities are in order.
We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame -– but rather, how well we have loved -- and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.
And that process -- that process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions –- that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires.
For those who were harmed, those who were killed –- they are part of our family, an American family 300 million strong. We may not have known them personally, but surely we see ourselves in them.
Ibid.
I see in Obama another "student of general semantics" (whether he has ever heard of Alfred Korzybski or not), and I am fascinated by the experiment he is conducting, as President of the United States no less. Join me in exploring this phenomenon. Help me become more sane. The President is asking it of all of us and each of us. He needs us to rise to this challenge as we hold him to it as well. That's how civilizations rise, and ours is on the edge of collapse in a thousand ways. Each such challenge to our civic order is being lifted up through grievances of our fellow citizens dedicated to those issues. We have to remove the log from our eyes to see the splinters in theirs. Those splinters will fester and poison the body politic if not addressed. Our common weal is our civic responsibility. Each of us. All of us.
None of us can be at our best alone. Let us strive to get saner together. There really isn't another way to a progressive future for our nation and our world.
Sanity is contagious. Pass it on.