Where lions can chase and kill us and loved ones arrive to embrace us in the physical environment, our semantic environment can produce both greater terrors and equal or greater blessings. There may be no greater manifestation of a continuing terror in our semantic environment than the inquisitions, based on totalitarian ideologies, which appear to dog every age. As we moved from the physical daily risks of the hunting era, the dogmas and doctrines of our increasingly complex semantic environment appear to have provided at least an equal potential for danger for the individual, especially one trying to experience individuality or liberty. And, one should add, the potential for a more fulfilled life.

Aristotle was the world’s first great codifier of our methods of evaluating and the second great codification of our methods of evaluating came from Francis Bacon in his work Novum Organum (1620), named in the spirit of Aristotle's Organon. Bacon's work provided much of the infrastructure for a new stage and the use of inductive logic in science. Alfred Korzybski, who is well-known in general semantics circles and wrote in the 1920s, was the third codifier in Western history, introducing us to more sophisticated ways of understanding how we make meanings.

Here, in a passage from a lecture Alfred Korzybski gave in 1937, is an outstanding example of his thinking, which is relevant to a significant issue in the world today. “Do you all understand the English word incest? Sexual intercourse within the family. Well, take the semantic environment; I can give no better example than that. In white civilization, as a matter of statistics we do not survive incest, never mind why. Wherever we have incest, even not physical but perhaps symbolic incest, we do not survive it. It always ends in prostitution, criminality, or mental illness. In Egypt in the old days of the Pharaohs, incest among them was the rule and did not do any harm. Not any harm at all. Why? Semantic environment. They had a theory that incest was not harmful. Otherwise, evaluation, semantic environment; and the fact that brother was married to sister, etc., did not matter. What did not do harm in their society, in their semantic environment, is not survived in ours. You see that I speak facts. Do you begin to see what semantic environment means? Evaluational environment. Is that getting clear? That the physical facts often do not matter in comparison with semantic facts.”

This so well explains the two worlds of the physical and the semantic. If one is hounded and shunned and perhaps imprisoned for what one reads, writes, or looks at, one’s grief comes not from the physical world but from the semantic or evaluational environment, the world where humans make dogmas, doctrines and laws, described by Samuel Bois, who was deeply influenced by Korzybski, as the world of mental constructs, our man-made and man-organized world of abstractions. So how the rules and laws are made is all-important for both our wellbeing and our survival, but the ways in which the laws are made and implemented are interwoven with the quality of the semantics, or perhaps Bois would say the epistemics, the accuracy and truth or at least truthfulness in the sense of not being artful, deceitful or disingenuous, above all not using constructs simply to communicate but as self-serving, especially to hurt others in the course of achieving our selfish or political ends.

I am well aware that the choice of incest to illustrate the semantic environment above is shocking and as a father I would not have been able to conceive it even as an example were it not for the respect that I hold for Korzybski who forces me to consider it within an epistemic framework, and not just simply as a medical and psychological aberration confined ‘where in our semantic environment it belongs’ to such authorised sources as the DSM, the rulebook of the psychiatriac profession, the modern version of the Malleus Maleficarum, which was the official manual of the Inquisition. A further striking example of the power of our semantic environment is that any deeper consideration, literary, philosophical or other, of incest, not directly related to its medical or psychological examination could expose a writer to criminal action. To stay for a moment with this powerful concept, were we to accept that such a practice, so unacceptable to us today, could indeed have been normal to a society in the distant past, it might cause us to take another semantic step and instead of describing cases of sex within families as ‘abuse’ and ‘rape’ to call them ‘incest’, and we might open a floodgate that would dispose of many other labels that are filled with a priori bias and begin to think in different semantic terms, at the very least with an acceptance that not all is so black and white and that there is a need within semantic evaluation for an acceptance of ambuigity.

The ‘semantic environment’ that accepted the love of boys in Greece and incest in Egypt now encourages society to fear the consequences of an interest in the bodies of children, to the point where some authors associate this fear with the actual naked bodies of children. From the perspective of affect-as-biology, we are being scripted to feel shame, not fear, in relation to those bodies. In general, our semantic environment embraces a civilization that is Aristotelian and shame-ignorance based, in which prejudice and disingenuousness can flourish. In particular, since the seventeenth century in the West, sexuality has become an arena of power.

All this, however, is intended for a further development in an exploration of awareness and a related profound issue which follows and not as propaganda aimed at the undermining of the current ideology of appropriate sexuality, although I have used it elsewhere for that purpose.

The two worlds

J. Samuel Bois, who invented epistemics, describes two worlds in which we live, as follows:

“Let us speak of two worlds in which we live. One is the empirical world of things, people, movements that we can see, phenomena that we can observe. Some call it the world of reality, and we agree to its existence and its properties because we all have the same sensory apparatus and share common perceptions.

“The other world is the world of mental constructs, our man-made and man-organized world of abstractions, or units of discourse. It is the world that we carry around with us wherever we go and whatever we do. I have called it elsewhere our structured unconscious. Each item in this world is a part of speech: noun, adjective, verb, etc. A part of speech is a unit of discourse. These units differ from one culture to another, as our units of measure (inches, feet, yards) differ from the metric system, with its millimetres, centimetres and meters, or as our units of money (dollars, quarters, dimes, and nickels) differ from the pounds and shillings of England. In matters of measurement and of money, it is evident that our mental world determines the manner in which the empirical world is parceled out- - - . From (these) evident facts, let us try to pass to the idea that our whole empirical world is also parceled out according to the mental pattern we carry about in our structured unconscious. In other words, our units of discourse determine the units of ‘reality’ we deal with in our empirical world, or - however paradoxical it may sound at the moment - our world is what we say it is.”

This requires much patient reflection, but the rewards for understanding it are very great. Bois was profoundly influenced by Korzybski, whose example of incest so well explains the two worlds that Bois describes. But a note of caution. While it is both desirable and probably essential for our survival to make meanings in a more careful way, ‘making meaning’ is not simply a cognitive exercise (organize, collect, laws, rules, etc.) One only has to picture an ancient man standing alone on a great plain under an even greater sky to appreciate how meaning can begin in silence at the affective level. It may begin with a sense, and combining with past experiences or other things or people around us, evolve into a feeling. The more gifted amongst us may then be able to express it in words or art.

WIGO deals with an examination of this existence and its constituent or subsidiary related expressions as above, saying as it were, “Let us express to the best of our ability, using language and certain codes or rules-about-how-we-make-our-meanings, our understanding, however changing, of what is going on.

What is the relevance of all this to the subjects on this web site? Language and ways of thinking are both misused unknowingly and used and exploited knowingly for purposes of power and profit, and this misuse, going hand in hand with disingenuous and criminal intentionality, has brought about a near police state and gravely threatens our individual liberty and the human imagination itself. Nowhere is this plainer than in the making of draconian laws for the alleged purpose for maintaining public morality, laws that increase the powers of the police state, set up systems of fear, public scapegoating and shunning and fill prisons, laws eagerly embraced by disingenuous politicians, self-interest groups and a media that relates mainly to the public mood, whatever that might be.

A simple early example of how the failure in correct or precise choice of words and over-simplistic thinking can lead is in the results brought about by the doctrinaire approach to human sexuality. A coalition of self-interest groups, politicians, prosecutors, police and the media have worked together to invent a shallow ideology of sexual morality. Their ideology or system is littered with black and white labelling and words and expressions filled with a priori bias. Here are just a few. ‘Disclosure’ means telling or revealing the truth, never a lie or a deception, or even a mere allegation. Its employment presents an allegation as an accepted event that must have happened as ‘disclosure’ is filled with the drama of the long suffering ‘victim’ finally revealing the dark truth. ‘Victim’ is the most common, as it means one that truly suffered and so it excludes all notions of lying for malice revenge or compensation. If the one accused pays privately to have the accusation suppressed or withdrawn, what could more correctly be called extortion or blackmail becomes ‘hush money’ and so-called ‘victims’ can go beyond the mere acceptance of ‘hush money’ (blackmail) to go public anyway and be paid again by the media.

Our assumption/position

This is open or subject to continuing correction, evolution and change. Please contribute.

So what is going on?
We live in an epistemic regime of
Doctrines and dogmas
These are deeply affected by the obsessions caused by a dissociation discussed shortly. Few have the means or courage to oppose them, so they are influenced by, used by, even devised by
Opportunists, demagogues and cabals
Both of the above contribute to
The making of laws
How these laws are interpreted and applied depend on
The system of justice
This can be adversarial, inquisitorial, or in rare cases protective – that is, protecting citizens and their families and property from harm from others.
If the system of justice is inquisitorial or harshly adversarial, heavily influenced by doctrines and dogmas and manipulated by opportunists and demagogues, such as corrupt and greedy members of the legal profession and judiciary we may have
A police state
This results in
The suppression of freedom of expression
Including free speech, art, drama, the use of the imagination, the acquiescence of the media, political correctness, and in general Orwellian conditions. These conditions can be maintained or worsened by moral panics, or fear of an enemy.
This in turn results in
Restriction/suppression of political activity
And in
A decrease in the potential for the repeal of laws

The process is facilitated by
A general 'dumbing down' of the population
Note the power today of television and the printed media and their virtual control by a cabal. Note also how the world's most powerful owner of media is also the biggest publisher of banal pornography over adult television channels and tabloids.

Some reflection on the above

The clear relationship between the elements that make up the police state, including the inevitable ‘legislative creep’ that makes it possible can be seen from the above. A key sub-element in the doctrines and dogmas is the crimen exceptum, the designated crime for which normal law and the processes of justice are suspended – heresy, witchcraft, being a Jew in Nazi Germany, child sex abuse, child porn, and so on. Note how child porn has been used to transform the Internet into a tool of repression and fear and a powerful device for the police and prosecution state. Whenever it is powerful enough fear of the enemy can replace the crimen exceptum, as the instrument for the suspension of justice.

Note also how these devices were used in the early inquisitions, Nazi Germany, countries under the control of the Roman Catholic Church, and McCarthy’s America, and are still being used today in Islamic fundamentalism, moral panics and social control.

A critical element, which tips the state from one of democracy into a full police state, is the suppression of freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is vital for avoiding the slide into totalitarianism, but it must be attacked by the opportunists and demagogues as it exposes and undermines them. The police fear it also. When not moderated by freedom of expression, the process shown above develops almost naturally into the police state, made certain by a fatal combination of public apathy and fear, and moral indoctrination and opportunism by whatever cabal is dominant. The signs that the end of the process is near are when laws are passed that suppress criticism of the law itself and when the media bow to political correctness and to the current social ideology. A test for the last is to ask if there are any questions that are taboo. Would a journalist defend a Jew in Nazi Germany? Would a journalist question the unnatural age of sexual consent laws in Western society?

And for the epistemicists

A fascinating mental exercise is to take the model laid out above which begins with the existence of doctrines and dogmas, and imagine several other ‘domains of meaning’ or ‘levels of awareness’, in an imaginary world where we have moved beyond the domain of doctrines and dogmas, into one where we discard black and white labelling, a priori assumptions, and accept ambiguity.

The dominant narrative

Within the semantic environment there are dominant narratives, which can range from the over-simplistic to the evil. They are discussed here.

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