Count Alfred Korzybski

Count Alfred Korzybski was an influential writer and speaker in the 1930s and influenced people like Hubbard and the NLP people.

Korzybski used many principles. For example, he said that our language was elementalistic - that is, we split what should not be split. When we find an idea that seems independent of other things and for which we can find no clear example, we might have split this off from something and treated it as a thing.

One example he gave is of an observer and something observed. We often think of things independently of someone observing them. In Quantum Physics, the observer and the observed are considered to be closely related.

If I say I see a cat, then what I see depends in part on me. I might think 'Horrible cat' whilst you might think, "How pretty'. What is observed depends on who is looking.

Another example is intention. Korzybski says that we often split intention into ends and means and forget the means. So when we intend to do something, we are often unaware of how what we do helps or hinders our getting the object of our intention (end).

Another thing we tend to do when we are elementalistic is to split things into extremes and forget the gradations in the middle. This leads us to think in "either ... or" terms instead of in degrees. We think of people as good or bad rather than to some degree good or to some degree bad.

The solution is to fit the split-off bits together and become aware of the gradations between the extremes. So we get not observer or observed, but observer-observed. The degree to which the observer is emphasised is the degree to which the observation is subjective, and the degree to which the thing observed is emphasised is the degree to which the observation is objective.

We could consider theta (thought/spirit) and MEST (Matter, Energy, Space, and Time) as totally different or as ends of a continuum, when we would speak of spirit-MEST. Of course, spirit or MEST could be zero, which would give us extremes. In normal life everything is to some degree theta and to some degree MEST. If only because of observer-observed, everthing we perceive is theta-MEST.

MEST by the way, is the result of avoiding the idea that matter, energy, space, and time are completely different when according to Relativity Theory, they are part of a whole (emphasised by writing MEST). If we took Korzybski to heart, we might write it as MESTO, to include the observer.

The value of this is obvious to those involved in polarity handling!

Ken Ward