Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the originators of “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” (which they derived, in part from their study of Korzybski’s General Semantics) wrote: “The meaning of your communication is the response that you get. If you can notice that you are not getting what you want, change what you’re doing.”
This way of stating a potentially useful point leads to problems relevant to issues of communicating factually and responsibly both as speakers (writers) and listeners (readers). If people feel insulted by what I say, they can claim, according to the statement above, that their feeling of insult ‘is’ the ‘meaning’ of my communication, for which I––the speaker––am totally responsible. It takes a solipsistic woke worldview that believes that however a listener chooses to interpret the message IS it; in other words the listener’s map of what I say, ‘is’ the territory of what I intended to convey with my remarks—and they’re offended. Really? That seems like a prescription for perpetual misunderstanding and for learning nothing new. If understanding what you say is all just a matter of someone else’s subjective judgement, where did any objective, external standard of the truth of anything go? No need to inquire further.
This has important implications for the dynamics of insult, issues related to “political correctness,” etc. For example, as a student of Korzybski and Peirce, although I do intend to challenge absolutist evaluating, I don’t intend to insult anyone if I can help it. However, I cannot guarantee that some individuals will not feel upset, even insulted, by some of the things that I write or say. Many people don’t do well with any challenge or criticism. At the limit, the truth may hurt those who feel more comfortable with delusions. I take responsibility for communicating as clearly as I can to get my intended ‘meanings’ across. Beyond that, I deny having the ultimate responsibility for anyone else’s interpretations which may be faulty, including their feeling insulted. Many people remain tenaciously bound to their own limited understandings. Am I obligated to stay silent because someone could conceivably get offended by some statement of mine that I contend is the truth about a matter or by even a joke I make? Even if I intended to insult you with something I say or do, do you have to get insulted or at least stay feeling insulted?. Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “No one can insult you without your consent.” At the very least, even if you do feel insulted you don’t have the right to ‘cancel’ me through censorship or worse.
From my perspective, I aspire to the kind of calm displayed by my good friend Milton Dawes, a long-time teacher and writer of Korzybski’s work who lives in Montreal. Milton was once standing and waiting on a Montreal street corner. Born in Jamaica, Milton has dark brown, chocolate-colored skin. A young ‘white’ man came up to him and asked him: “Are you a nigger?” Milton looked at him calmly and asked, “What do you mean?” The young man looked perplexed and asked: “How come you don’t get upset like the others?” Milton replied: “I don’t think like that. I live on a higher plane.” The young man walked away still perplexed,
So how does one get to a higher plane? As Charles Sanders Peirce noted, in order to learn and get closer to what we might call the truth of anything, there is the necessity to not be satisfied with what we are already inclined to think. Conversely, Peirce called the inclination to think whatever I’m already inclined to think “the method of tenacity”. With tenacity, I’ll stick with what I believe simply because I already believe it, and I am in danger of putting myself in a cage of my own possibly very flawed understandings of things. Further inquiry and learning is effectivly blocked. Extremists of all kinds may augment this with what Peirce called “the method of authority” (‘I believe what I believe because my society and its leaders, celebrities,‘holy books’, etc., tell me what is the ‘truth’ that must be acknowledged and obeyed; and woe to those who don’t go along with that’ ).
Interestingly, this is not just the viewpoint of religious extremists like the Muslim jihadists who seek to have a world-wide Caliphate ruled by Sharia law where all unbelievers must convert, become second-class subjects, or die. Interestingly this dogmatic sort of view is reinforced by the post-modernist, deconstructionist view of far-leftists who act as if reality is whatever you can get away with and the question of ‘truth’ simply a matter of competing narratives. If I decide that whatever you say means only what I think it means and nothing more, there is no need for inquiring further. According to this ‘woke’ view, if in addition I find it insulting, that is not my responsiblity but yours. Does this explain the on-the-surface confusing alliance of the woke radical Left with radical Islam?
Instead, I contend that the only method of reliably finding things out remains a generalized scientific method, which itself took centuries to develop in any conscious fashion. This was the foundation of the broader ‘logic’ that Peirce called semiotics, the science of signs; the practical side of which Korzybski formulated independently and called general semantics.
Peirce noted the basis of scientific method in his 1877 essay “The Fixation of Belief”:
“To satisfy our doubts…it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency -- by something upon which our thinking has no effect. …Our external permanency would not be external, in our sense, if it was restricted in its influence to one individual. It must be something which affects, or might affect, every man. And, though these affections are necessarily as various as are individual conditions, yet the method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion.”
An example of what Peirce called the methods of tenacity and authority is provided by fundamentalist Muslims (unfortunately not just a vocal minority in the Muslim world) who years ago felt insulted by novelist Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses. Muslims got offended with this novel which contained a segment featuring a fictionalized narration of the life of Muhammad in which the prophet first accepts the so-called Satanic Verses (actually based on controversial historical accounts of the Quran) accepting the existence of three polytheistic goddesses of the pre-Islamic Arab pagans. Muhammad later renounced these verses as devil-inspired illusions. Feeling insulted is one thing, but a large portion of the Muslim world went much further.
In what may be the ultimate expression of the kind of ‘political correctness’ that Bandler and Grinder seemed to legitimize and which the woke left celebrates; a fatwa (a formal pronouncement of Islamic law by a religious authority) was issued on February 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini, the first combined ‘spiritual’ leader of Shiite Muslims and secular ruler of Iran who took over in an Islamic Revolution there in 1979. The fatwa called for Rushdie’s death and a generous bounty was offered to any Muslim who would kill him. Rushdie, a British citizen, went into hiding under heavy security for a number of years. There were riots. Some of the rioters were injured and some died. Some of the translators of The Satanic Verses were targeted and at least one was murdered. On August 2022 in Chautauqua, New York while giving a speech, Rushdie himself—who after many years had managed to survive—was viciously attacked by a jihadist with a knife seeking glory. Rushdie survived although he suffered serious injuries and lost the sight of one eye.
Many Muslims approved of the fatwa. Some who did not, nonetheless argued for their own form of cancel culture saying that the book ‘insulted’ their religion and that at the very least it should be banned and taken out of circulation. Was the ‘insult’ in the book? Did Rushdie have responsibility for the ‘insult’ that many Muslims experienced? He was certainly presenting a challange to their tenacious and authoritarian viewpoint. But did he as a writer have ultimate responsibility for the ‘meanings’ fanatical Muslim jihadist supremicists made of it?
Now it’s not just fanatical Muslims. In the present day, we have reached a whole new level of people getting offended. Wokeness has become a new trend for people with mental health problems. Becoming woke involves going along with the tenacious agenda that ‘reality’ depends solely on what someone wants it to be and insisting—no, demanding—that you go along with it too. A boy can become a girl or a girl can become a boy because they feel that they were born in the wrong body. This used to be called “gender dysphoria” and was considered a psychological problem. Now it’s encouraged and you can pick your own pronouns which the rest of us must supposedly comply with using. I really do feel compassion for someone who has gotten so confused by something so basic. I aspire to be kind towards everyone. But is it kind, for example, to go along with the idea that a biological man who wants to compete in womens’ sports competitions should be allowed to do so because of what he feels. Thereby he is disadvantaging the actual biological women who didn’t have the advantage of the testosterone boost, bone density, muscle mass, etc., of being a biological male which makes men generally physically stronger.
At some point, the truth may hurt and the one who gets hurt by the truth may be as likely to get offended as someone who is confronted by lies. I’m not saying that one should never ever ever ever get offended by anything. But, in the end if something someone says offends me, who else but myself is ultimately responsible for how I react?