The accusations of cultism leveled against Korzybski's followers are not altogether unfounded. In the United States there is a large floating population of 'truthseekers'. Many of them lack the capacity of strenuous intellectual effort required in a fruitful pursuit of knowledge and wisdom; others lack the power of critical evaluation, which would enable them to tell the genuine from the false. Still others cannot be comfortable until they find a panacea to believe in. These people support 'movements' and cults. They are as likely to 'go for' Christian Science as for technocracy, for psychoanalysis as for theosophy, for the Great Books programme as for dianetics. And so inevitably one finds some of them among the adherents of general semantics... Whether they were actually helped by general semantics or by other factors cannot be determined without sufficient controls. But they went about spreading the faith, thus giving a cultist flavour to the 'movement'.
Anatol RapoportRelated topics
believe christian effort evaluation faith false find floating general giving went great intellectual knowledge lack large likely panacea people power programme science support tell theosophy thus wisdom others psychoanalysis semantics states technocracyRelated quotes
Since the number of men is large but the earthly realm is not inexhaustible, one man can no longer profit from the labour of twenty. Moderation, contentment, and frugality must become the general morals of mankind. [...] The whole earth becomes a garden, and nature has at last completed her day's work here below, bringing permanent enlightenment, peace, and felicity together with the greatest possible number of men : she has anointed every man as his own judge, priest, and king; has turned the often-ridiculed tale of the golden age, mankind's favorite idea of old, into a reality by discreetly removing the eternal inequality of wealth, which has been ineffectively combated by all lawgivers and has always has crept back in, and which is the source of the decay of all nations, and the root of servitude, tyranny, and disunity among men, of venality and moral corruption, making it forever impossible through the excessive growth of the human population.
Adam Weishaupt
What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of "false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality-the hypocrisies of ordinary life-but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality.
Isaiah Berlin
You are not traditionally beautiful; and you know it. We women do. But what most people mean by beauty is really a kind of aesthetic acceptability, not so much character as a lack of it, a set of features and lineaments that hide their history, that suggest history itself does not exist. But the template by which we recognize the features and forms in the human body that cause the heart to halt, threatening to spill us over into the silence of death-that is drawn on another part of the soul entirely...But all sing, chant, hymn the history of the body, if only because we all know how people regard bodies that deviate from the lauded and totally abnormal norm named beauty. Most of us would rather not recognize such desires in ourselves and thus avoid all contemplation of what the possession of such features means about the lives, the bodies, the histories of others, preferring instead to go on merely accepting the acceptable. But that is not who I am.
Samuel R. Delany
The spirit acquires an increase of knowledge and experience in each of his corporeal existences. He loses sight of part of these gains during his reincarnation in matter, which is too gross to allow of his remembering them in their entirety; but he remembers them as a spirit. It is thus that some somnambulists give evidence of possessing knowledge beyond their present degree of instruction, and even of their apparent intellectual capacity. The intellectual and scientific inferiority of a somnambulist in his waking state, therefore, proves nothing against his possession of the knowledge he may display in his lucid state. According to the circumstances of the moment and the aim proposed, he may draw this knowledge from the stores of his own experience, from his clairvoyant perception of things actually occurring, or from the counsels which he receives from other spirits; but, in proportion as his own spirit is more or less advanced, he will make his statements more or less correctly.
Allan Kardec
The theories that I (and others) helped develop explained why unfettered markets often not only do not lead to social justice, but do not even produce efficient outcomes. Interestingly, there has been no intellectual challenge to the refutation of Adam Smith's invisible hand: individuals and firms, in the pursuit of their self-interest, are not necessarily, or in general, led as if by an invisible hand, to economic efficiency. The only question that has been raised concerns the ability of government to remedy the deficiencies of the market. Within academia, a significant fraction of economists are involved with developing and expanding on the ideas of imperfect information (and imperfect markets) that I explored. For instance, Edmund Phelps, this year's Nobel Prize winner, belongs to this "school" of thought. But in political discourse, simplistic "market fundamentalism” continues to exert enormous influence.
Joseph Stiglitz
