184 evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



We have said that the human child is born into any of 

 hundreds of cultural differences and is not taught to ques- 

 tion the beliefs of the religions of his culture, nor how to 

 strive for a clear and concise meaning in the use of the sym- 

 bols of his language. It is, according to the semanticists, 

 "false-to-fact language habits" more than any other one fac- 

 tor that retards and makes difficult the development of bet- 

 ter human societies. These habits include verbal distortions, 

 falsifications, improper evaluation, improper definition, and 

 a willful orientation toward rumor, myth, and fiction in- 

 stead of turning to the facts and abiding by them. The child 

 is greatly influenced by the neuro-linguistic, neuro-seman- 

 tic environment into which it is born, and it is the role of 

 general semantics as envisioned by Alfred Korzybski to 

 build up "sanity in education," and hence in human living. 



Semantics is a science of fundamental importance to man, 

 and the neuro-linguistic factors of human behavior are be- 

 coming of more and more interest to the psychologist, the 

 psychiatrist, and the cultural anthropologist. In these disci- 

 plines human experience is seen as selecting only certain 

 stimuli out of an infinity of environmental stimuli and then 

 organizing the experiences in behavior patterns. General se- 

 mantics holds that the behavior patterns, and hence the se- 

 lecting processes, are definitely related to linguistic habits 

 and the structure of language. In Chapter 6 it was seen that 

 in man's culture a new kind of evolution is operating, the 

 transmission of acquired social characters. Man is able to 

 transmit experience by means of language, spoken and writ- 

 ten; and, because of this, as Korzybski once said, man is a 

 "time binder." He interacts with his ancestors and descend- 

 ants over long periods of time. The selection that will pre- 

 vail socially through the transmission of acquired social 

 characters could, provided man through language can trans- 

 mit "true-to-fact orientations," bring about a greater and 

 greater control and mastery over himself and his environ- 

 ment. The converse is equally true: if man transmits "false- 



