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March 15, 2007
College Professor Makes Students Vomit by Uttering Three Words
Here's one of the sidebars from my upcoming print book simple●ology - due out on 30 March 2007 ...
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While teaching a class on General Semantics, Dr. Alfred Korzybski once pulled a beautiful trick on his students. He said that he was hungry and couldn't wait any longer to eat, so he pulled out a box of biscuits from his desk. He started eating one and then offered some to his class. After chewing on the biscuits and discussing how good they were, the good doctor pulled off the wrapper of the box to reveal that they were in fact dog biscuits. The legend goes that a few of the students vomited on the spot. It goes to show how our language defines our model and how our model defines our personal reality. The students' experience of the biscuits was immediately changed by simply giving them a new label. |
It's interesting to juxtapose this with two of my past entries:
- In the post where I suggest
Che
committed murder, it made some of the socialists in our tribe here "vomit" - and
also assume I'm a "right winger."
- In the post where I point out that Bill O'Reilly incorrectly dismissed the Johns Hopkins study as being from a "far left website," it made some of the conservatives in our family "vomit" - and also assume I'm a "lefty." (see the blog comments)
I'm actually neither. (I don't think there's a name yet for my political viewpoint - but that's not the point ...)
What's going on here?
Why do we tend to create illusory left/right, black/white, for/against dilemmas and then assume everything falls into that tidy little model of the world?
These dilemmas bind our thinking and thus our actions.
And there are other (invisible) things that bind our actions as well ...
I call these "The Invisible Walls" that keep us locked up in our own personal asylums. These invisible walls come in many flavors.
More about them in the coming days and in my upcoming book.