Overcoming Conservative Characteristics

Society, Self and Sanity

Tom Valcanis

What are Conservative Characteristics?

• First mentioned by Alfred Korzybski in Science and Sanity

• An extension of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s theories

• Offered explanation of mental illnesses as “semantic arrested development” (p. 493)

Explaining Conservative Characteristics

• Korzybski: “‘Mental’ illnesses (infantilism included) appear as semantic arrested development or a regression to lower levels; to those of primitive man”

• Korzybski via Jelliffe: Four periods – Archaic (9mo.), Autoerotic (7yrs.), Narcissistic (7-14yrs.), Social (14yrs+)

• A failure in adaptation to “reality” falling short of “maturity”

• An inability to move past the infantile “general orientation” (Johnson)

Theorizing Conservative Characteristics

• Considering oral/traditional cultures are mainly non-literate and modern culture as literate (Strate)

• Major maladjustments are a result of an non-consciousness of abstraction (Johnson)

• “What has been learned thalamically must be unlearned thalamically”

GS Nomenclature to explain CCs

• A tendency for subjects to exhibit:– Allness– Two-valued thinking/evaluation– Confusion of logical levels– Revert back to the adolescent or

juvenile states of thinking

• Extreme examples found in schizophrenics and bi-polar disorder

• Moderate examples in clinical depression

Historical Origins

• Plato’s theory of forms – “abstractions are the true reality”

• Leap forward from low levels of abstractions in pre-literate cultures (Strate)

• The limits of this thinking highlighted by emerging media

Society’s Role

• Literate societies routinely decontextualize their thoughts via communication and use higher-level abstractions

• Along the way, the Aristotelian-Platonian subject-predicate, law of excluded middle, law of non-contradiction, is of identity emerges as dominant bias of communication

• The media – newspapers, books, TV, radio et. al. abstract and decontextualize as routine behavior (Watzlawick)

Media Ecology and CCs

• Media Ecology owes a debt to GS

• Neil Postman was editor of “ETC.” from 1976-86

• “Information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems”

• Inherent bias in education

Media Reinforcement

• A focus on allness, the “label-libel” function

• Thought destroying aphorisms

• Media is the “technology in which a culture grows” (Postman)

• Information reduced to trivialities, irrelevancy

Methods of Escape

• Using Ellis’ A-B-C model in RET (related to GS)

• Asking critically “how do we/they know what we know?” (Watzlawick)

• Developing a mature non-attachment to outcome

Acknowledgements and Selected References

• Dr. Lance Strate of Fordham University for his valuable contributions to this presentation

• David Hewson for guidance and input

• Other esteemed members of the AGS• Korzybski, A. Science and Sanity: an introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and General Semantics (5th ed.) Institute of General Semantics: Dallas, TX, 1994.• Johnson, W. People in Quandaries, Harper & Bros: USA, 1946.• Ellis, A. and Harper, R. A Guide to Rational Living, Melvin Powers Book Co.: Chatsworth, CA, 1997.• Postman, N. and Weingartner, C. Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Penguin Books: Middlesex, UK, 1969.