Chapter 63 - "What – Me Worry?": Part 4 - "What – Me Worry? "

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Meanwhile planning had begun for the anticipated big event of 1948, the Third Congress on General Semantics, first announced in the fall of 1947. A postcard to members in February gave the dates and location, October 29 to 31 at the University of Denver, and included a request for getting abstracts to Kendig by March 1. In March, Kendig made another call for papers and announced a Pro Tem Committee for the Congress, with herself and Douglas Kelley as Co-Chairs, Korzybski consulting, and Hansell Baugh assisting them. In April, she took a whirlwind trip for the Institute to Washington D.C.; then to Denver for several days of planning with Elwood Murray and others at the University of Denver; then back to Lime Rock by way of Chicago, where she stopped to see Mira, and met with a number of people from the ISGS to promote—if she could—cooperation with the Institute. She returned to Lime Rock exhausted, but the plans for the Congress seemed well under way. Almost immediately, however, things began to unravel. 

It came down to a manpower shortage. Guthrie Janssen had just left the Institute. In a little more than a month, Hansell Baugh, another highly productive member of the IGS staff, would leave. The relative isolation of Lime Rock had begun to wear on him. In April, he had gone on vacation to New York City and the city’s attractions grabbed him and wouldn’t let go. By the time he left the Institute at the start of June, Kendig—awash in contributor’s papers to evaluate—was beginning to drown under them and the growing wave of other programming and planning details. She had committed herself to teach in the first two weeks of Elwood Murray’s five-week Basic Communication Workshop “Evaluation in Communication” at the University of Denver starting July 26 and then would have to rush home for the mid-August IGS seminar-workshop being held in Millbrook, New York. When would she have time to work on the Congress? With Douglas Kelley going to England to represent the Institute for a mid-August International Congress on Mental Health, delaying the Denver Congress until sometime in 1949 seemed inevitable. The delay, until an as-yet-uncertain date the following summer, was announced in early August; although to keep some momentum going, the Committee decided to hold a Congress Colloquium for planners and participants in Chicago over the same weekend in October for which they had planned the Congress.

They met on Saturday evening, October 30, at Abbot Hall on the Chicago Campus of Northwestern University where, after introductions from Kendig, Douglas Kelley, the moderator, explained what the program committee was looking for in papers, i.e., rigorous applications of non-aristotelian methodology. Elwood Murray spoke on the arrangements in Denver and suggested a general theme, “A Method of Integration Without Regimentation”. Each of seventeen people intending to present, gave three-minute summaries of their papers. Although successful, Kendig found her weekend in Chicago fraught with tension: she and Kelley had met with Institute Trustees there and she also conferred with Francis Chisholm and the ISGS Board of Directors on the long sought and frustrating issue of better coordination between the two organizations. After returning to Lime Rock, she collapsed into bed for two days.(12)

Several months earlier, in July, when the October Congress still seemed imminent, Korzybski had come to New York City with Charlotte to get away from the hubbub of the Institute in order to put together an Introduction to the Second Edition of Manhood—but he couldn’t complete it. The trip had started off badly. After their arrival at the train station, a stranger had picked up Alfred’s bag (borrowed from Ralph Hamilton) containing his papers and his copy of Manhood. Visits to the police proved fruitless in getting it back. Then, once they got down to work, Korzybski found the process of formulating the Introduction painful and difficult. They had nice rooms on the 12th floor of Hotel 33 on West 51st Street, a new place for them, across from Radio City Music Hall. Neither of them seemed to have gotten out much; although Charlotte, more mobile, had various items of business to do around town. Alfred spent much of the time in his room reading, mulling, and then talking over the proposed content while Charlotte took notes. He was reading a number of books on Russia, among them, John Fisher’s Why They Behave Like Russians and David Shub’s new biography Lenin, which soon took a prominent place on his recommended reading list for students. Shub, a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward in New York, had participated in the early Russian socialist movement and had known Lenin before 1917. His portrait of Lenin left no doubt that the Stalinist dictatorship of 1948 constituted a logical extension of Lenin’s earlier regime and vision. Both derived not only from Marxism, but also from the heritage of the older Russian autocracy. The book reminded Korzybski of his own days living as a subject of the Tsarist regime, and jogged his formulating about dictatorship from the perspective of time-binding. 

By the time he and Charlotte returned to Lime Rock in early August, after rather agonizing efforts, he had a lot of notes Charlotte had taken and, however inadequate, a tentative first draft. Although the front matter of the recently released Third Edition of Science and Sanity had listed a 1948 Second Edition of Manhood under “Volumes Already Published”, the delay of the Congress removed some of the incentive for producing the Introduction so quickly. Korzybski must have felt a measure of relief.

Charlotte described some of Korzybski’s process of working in a letter to Kendig on August 5, just before their return. Alfred had apparently responded somewhat gruffly to something Kendig had said to Charlotte (probably in a phone conversation) that Charlotte, in turn, had conveyed to him. Charlotte didn’t want Kendig to take his reaction personally:

He is so wrapped up in ‘thinking’ that nothing else makes the slightest impression on him. I can barely talk to him myself. He says that his present evaluation of Manhood, introduction, rather, is the most difficult thing he has written since Manhood, more difficult than writing S&S. He now has to include them both in his evaluation. It has been very painful for him, and I get kicked out regularly when he wants to be alone. It is a most frustrating and painful procedure all the way around. No talking, pleading, cajoling, considerations of the seminar [scheduled to start in one week], etc., etc., make the slightest bit of difference. Perhaps that is ‘what it takes’. Perhaps if you and I were like that we would get some creative work done. Well, this is just by way of sympathies, not really trying to be an explanation, but trying to point out that persons – you or I – or situations – the Institute, the seminar – etc., just don’t matter in this instance, and while feelings of bitterness, etc., may be justified from one point of view, from Alfred’s point of view they are un-understandable to him, at least at present. Present things that you and I and others would be deeply concerned in, simply do not enter his consciousness particularly. (13)

Still, whatever his creative agonies and apparent gruffness, he was managing to maintain at least a pinch of humor. On July 30, Charlotte wrote a letter to Kendig, including in the envelope a postcard with the by-then ubiquitous image (non-copyrighted) of the big-eared, gap-toothed smiling boy that Mad Magazine would later take as its mascot “Alfred E. Neuman” in the 1950s. The card had “to MK from AK [and] CS” written on its back. Charlotte ended the letter by referring to the boy’s by-this time equally ubiquitous catchphrase underneath the picture: “Didn’t you love the little ‘What – Me Worry’ card? A. says to send to all our trustees.”(14)

Maybe he had gotten beyond worry, but he certainly seemed to have serious concerns about completing the Introduction and getting out the Second Edition of Manhood of Humanity without further delay. It would take up a major part of his time and effort during his remaining lifetime. Over the next year and a half, he would have several more sojourns in New York City at Hotel 33 for concentrated work on it with Charlotte. He would produce many more drafts of the Introduction and his fussiness about making it as good as possible reflected the importance he gave to it—even as it increased the book’s delay. His concern about clarifying his own intellectual legacy against the background of growing misrepresentations of his work, including those by students—e.g., getting past the confusion of his work with ‘semantics’—probably added impetus to his struggles here. Not surprisingly, more than he had ever done since the earliest days of his work, he would emphasize time-binding in his presentations and writing; stressing its foundational importance to his work, its connections to his subsequent formulations and those of others, and its unexplored implications, particularly in human relations and politics.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

12. Kendig to Elwood Murray, 4/ 9/1949. IGS Archives. 

13. Charlotte Schuchardt to M. Kendig, 8/5/1948. IGS Archives. 

14. Charlotte Schuchardt to M. Kendig, 7/30/1948. IGS Archives.

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Chapter 63 - "What – Me Worry?": Part 3 - "What I Believe"

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

In February, back at the Institute, Korzybski had as his most immediately pressing task getting out Selections from Science and Sanity and the Third Edition of Science and Sanity. That month, he finished his 7-page “Author’s Note” to Selections mainly “dealing with the misinterpretations of general semantics and confusions with semantics.”(7) (As it was going to press, Korzybski added a note on Allen Walker Read’s paper “An Account of the Word ‘Semantics’”, published in August 1948, since it provided supporting data for his efforts to differentiate his work from ‘semantics’.) By the beginning of April, the Institute announced publication and began taking orders for the initial limited printing run of 3000 copies of Selections. As an “experimental” production, it had a plain, blue, thick paper cover showing only the title, so production remained relatively simple. The 274-page volume, with later additions (an index produced by David Bourland that summer and some extra text from S&S put in several decades later) stayed in print for many years and provided an easy-to-handle format of Korzybski’s work for use by university classes and reading groups, perhaps more inviting to those who felt leery about tackling “the blue peril” itself. 

The publication of Selections came in time to provide a kind of ‘parting gift’ for its compiler Guthrie Janssen, who got married that month to Guila Beattie and was leaving his employment at the Institute. Jan and Beat were moving to New York City and would be missed. (Although in the fall they ended up returning to Lime Rock to live and would continue involvement with Korzybski and the Institute.) Besides his editorial work, Janssen had served as the Institute’s membership secretary. These duties would be taken over by Maxine K. Mallach, affectionately known as ‘Mac’, a young woman from Lime Rock, who had started working at the Institute in June 1947. Before the war, she had studied at the American Acadamy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, then served as a sergeant in the WACs (the Women’s Army Corps) in New Guinea. After the war, she worked for a business in New Canaan in Southwestern Connecticut before starting as a typist and office assistant at the Institute, an easy walk from her home where she lived with her parents. Having shown exceptional competence in dealing with IGS office intricacies, she soon became Kendig’s assistant and the seminar registrar before taking over Janssen’s duties as membership secretary as well. With great fondness for Korzybski and esteem for his work, Mac would continue working devotedly for the Institute, over a span of four decades, playing a pivotal role in keeping the IGS operating during some later lean and rather difficult times.

Real pressure existed to get out the Third Edition of Science and Sanity as soon as possible. A letter from Mira on January 16 reflected the wide interest and demand for the book: 

Alfred my dearest one: – 

How a great idea makes strange people kin, to which add this strange coincidence. This noon I was struggling to open the front door and get food bag in when a young woman did both for me and carried the heavy bag up to Apt. *When lo and behold* I saw S&S on her arm. She lives in small apt. just south of this on the alley; is librarian in science library * that smallish bldg Charlotte will remember near lily pond at a 59th St. entrance. It seems that there are 4 copies of 1st Ed. And 4 copies of 2nd ed. and always a waiting list for S&S. The last one of the list was so disappointed that when later a copy came in she grabbed it to satisfy her curiosity and was enthralled at the combination of my being your wife and the beautiful things here. Her husband is a butcher and apparently has had a very limited existence. She offered to bring any books from that library, [I] immediately remembered two on arthritis. Such eager young people are pleasure. (8)

In March, pretty much done with Selections, Alfred, Charlotte, and others worked on page proofs for the Third Edition’s new and revised front material and on its new jacket cover, which would include a quote from his ‘credo’, “What I Believe”, that he was in the process of finishing:

The progress of modern science, including the new science of man as a time-binder, has been due uniquely to the freedom of scientists to revise their fundamental assumptions, terminologies, undefined terms, which involve hidden assumptions, etc., underlying our reflections, a freedom prohibited in ‘primitive sciences’ and also in dictatorships, past and present. (9)

He had written “What I Believe”, at the invitation of Indian author/editor Krishna M. Talgeri for a book The Faith I Live By, a “symposium” of essays with a list of invitees besides Korzybski that included Gandhi, Nehru, and Montessori, among others. The book seems never to have gotten published. Nonetheless, Korzybski would make good use of the essay; besides using a quote from it for the S&S cover, he would later have the essay printed for distribution to Members of the Institute in September 1949 and include it in the content to add to the Second Edition of Manhood. As he wrote in a letter to Members that accompanied that September 1949 mailing, “What I Believe” was “really a summary of my whole life work. ...”(10) 

The essay touched briefly, even impressionistically, on major themes in his work, connecting them to the overarching theme of time-binding. Topics included: discussion of his personal background and purposes in developing the notion of ‘time-binding’; understanding not statistical averages but human potentialities within a theoretical ‘deductive’ framework as the sine qua non for an applied ‘science of man’; the consequent importance of studying human reactions at their best and worst; time-binding and dictatorships; adequate versus inadequate linguistic and grammatical structures and the necessity of developing an adequate “unified terminology of evaluation” for a science of man; the overwhelming importance of “non-verbal, or what I call silent levels” and a working “consciousness of the differences between...the silent and the verbal levels, [as] the key and perhaps the first step for the solution of human problems”; the role in human knowledge of “relations, as factors of structure” and of postulational methods; religions and sciences; the importance of inferential knowledge; and the significance of “self-reflexive and circular mechanisms” as “the uniquely human types of reaction which made our human achievements possible.” He concluded by discussing the historical importance for humans of becoming conscious of their capacities as time-binders: “...this consciousness may now mark a new period in our evolution.”(11) 

By the end of April, the Institute had reprints of Korzybski’s new “Preface To The Third Edition 1948” to send as its latest mailing to members. And by the end of May, the Institute received its first copies of the Third Edition, although most of the 5000 books from this first printing would be stored with a firm in New York City. Science Press, the book’s printer, had changed ownership and management and, under the new name of Business Press, would no longer serve as the Institute’s distributor. The Institute office processed orders, printed shipping labels, and sent them to the New York firm, which did the wrapping and shipping. 1,000 back-ordered copies went out immediately and the remaining books sold quickly, approximately 4000 over the next year, a quarter of the total copies sold since the book’s original 1933 publication. By the end of 1948, Charlotte was scrambling to arrange a second printing, which included getting a new printer and getting the printer’s plates shipped from Business/Science Press, etc. (The second printing, ready by May 1949, sold equally quickly, requiring a third printing in 1950.) Mira wrote to Alfred, telling of her pride and delight at seeing a copy in the window of a nearby bookshop. Unlike many of the delayed projects and unmet deadlines that had plagued the Institute since its inception, the publication of the Third Edition of Science and Sanity had come through as announced at the January luncheon.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

7. Korzybski. “Author’s Note” to Selections from Science and Sanity in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 615. 

8. MEK to AK, 1/16/1948. AK Archives, Box 22, Folder 1. 

9. Korzybski, “What I Believe”, in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, pp. 655-656. 

10. Korzybski, “Letter to Friends and Members”, September 1949. Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 663. 

11. Korzybski, “What I Believe”. Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, pp. 643-663. 

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Chapter 63 - "What – Me Worry?": Part 2 - 'Cool' Warrior

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Two presentations he gave in January 1948 reflected Korzybski’s renewed interest in time-binding. Almost as soon as he’d finished the Holiday seminar, he and Charlotte headed for New York City where he gave a lecture at Hunter College on January 9 for the New York Society for General Semantics: “Time-Binding and Human Potentialities: A New Foundation For Human Relations”. The lecture—recorded, transcribed, and later reprinted in Collected Writings—provided an overview of his lifework, seen through the lens of time-binding. He had broached this in writings over the past few years, starting with his ill-fated 1946 Encyclopedia Britannica article. But the Hunter College presentation seemed his most in-depth attempt—since his post-Manhood, pre-S&S writings—to connect later formulations with his earliest work. In the Hunter lecture, he also alluded to an issue he hoped to explore further in his Introduction to Manhood, the relationship between time-binding and democracy : 

...What will work in our world, a dictatorship or some kind of democracy?...From a time-binding point of view a dictatorship of whatever kind simply won’t work, and eventually won’t last; it twists the time-binding of humans, and so humans themselves. And a democracy, however imperfect, after all permits us humans to behave like humans in the time-binding sense.  

These issues are so complex; we have not begun to analyze them fully. (1)

The U.S. government had recently released captured German documents on the Nazi-Soviet pact, which divided up Poland between the two totalitarian powers just prior to the start of World War II. Reading of this in the New York Times had gotten Korzybski exercised; he ordered copies of the government document and sent one to Mira, to whom he wrote: “I was nagged many times for what I had to say about the Soviets in S&S; I always classified the Soviet Bigwigs as collaborators of Hitler and many people somehow did not like it. But here it is in black and white.”(2) His disdain for Stalin (still firmly in power) and the Soviet system seemed apparent when he and Charlotte returned to the city at the end of January for his talk at a luncheon given in his honor at the Chatham Hotel celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Institute of General Semantics, the 15th anniversary of the publication of Science and Sanity, and its to-be-hoped-soon forthcoming Third Edition. The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine covered the event.(3) His short luncheon talk, “Understanding Human Potentialities”, elaborated on the relationship between time-binding and democracy, focusing on the relations between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union.

While he might not have seen democratic socialism as an oxymoron, he clearly indicated the incompatibility of democracy with Stalin’s communist government. Consequently, he saw that the Soviet Union had to fail, though perhaps at great human cost to its own subjects and to the citizens from democratic nations who opposed it. The Soviet leadership (Stalin, et al.) accepting the inevitability of ‘class struggle’ and seeking to encourage conflict around the world, appeared inherently aggressive—and inaccessible to boot. Korzybski didn’t see discussions and negotiations changing them.

...We must, therefore, stand firm and be prepared for eventualities. We will find no ‘salvation’ in wishful ‘thinking’ of any sort. For survival we must have predictability; this requires thorough anthropological and socio-cultural studies as to why the Soviet leaders behave as they do. We can then have some measure of prediction as to what they will do and be prepared for it. (4)

Korzybski’s distaste for the Soviet system and its leadership seems even clearer from a detailed nine-page letter he wrote on February 6 to Anatol Rapoport in response to the galleys of an article, “Dialectical Materialism and General Semantics”, that Rapoport had written for the upcoming Winter 1948 issue of ETC. The article showed that Rapoport, though no longer a Communist party member, had remained a Soviet fellow-traveler—albeit one beginning to have second thoughts. In the article he sought to show how “the general semanticist of today can trace his philosophical geneology both to the dialectical materialist, Engels, and to the ‘empiro-criticist’, Mach.” Stalin, he wrote, “has shown a semantic awareness to a far greater extent than his colleagues. He has also definitely stated that in his opinion the East-West conflict is not inevitable.” In the end, Rapoport appeared to have some criticism of Marxist orthodoxy, but wrote as if it could somehow be reformed by an infusion of general semantics.(5) 

Korzybski wouldn’t stand for this. He had no problem getting linked with Mach, but otherwise took strong exception to Rapoport’s geneology:

If I may be frank, since childhood I rebelled against the ‘facts’ of our civilization but I never had any use for DM [Dialectical Materialism], as I judge by ‘facts’. To link my work with DM is not only false to fact but genuinely harmful to my work; [p. 2]. ...please do not link GS with DM; it has nothing to do with, and in fact is a protest against DM. (6) 

The term “Cold War” had recently come into popular usage, and the policy of “containment” to counter the Soviet Union (including a build-up of U.S. and allied military strength) had begun to get formulated. Korzybski’s anti-Soviet views qualified him as a cold warrior, or at least a ‘cool’ one—focusing as he did on opposing anti-democratic dictatorships of any type, whether ‘communist’ politburos or ‘capitalist’ cartels, rather than on communism per se. The basis for his disdain for the Soviet system seems perhaps most clearly represented in his concern about the persecution of Russian geneticists and the twisting of biological research by Stalin’s ‘Tsar’ for Soviet biology, T. D. Lysenko. Beginning to get significant news coverage in the West, this issue had caught Korzybski’s attention by early 1948 (he had started to clip newspaper articles) and confirmed his views about the incompatibility of dictatorship with optimal time-binding and its expression in the healthy pursuit of knowledge.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

1. Korzybski, “Time-Binding and Human Potentialities: A New Foundation For Human Relations”, Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 630. 

2. AK to MEK, 1/23/1948. Box 22, Folder 1, AKDA 

 3. “Talk of the Town”, The New Yorker, Feb. 7., 1948 and “Guide For U.S. Seen In Soviet Behavior”, New York Times, 1/29/1948. AKDA, IGS Scrapbook 41.480. 

4. “Understanding of Human Potentialities, Key to Dealing with The Soviet Union” in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 642. 

5. Rapoport 1948. 

6. AK to A. Rapoport, 2/6/1948. IGS Archives. 

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Chapter 63 - "What – Me Worry?": Part 1 - Introduction

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Unless a lot of people mistook GS for ‘Group Sex’, there seemed little danger that Manhood of Humanity or Science and Sanity would follow the Kinsey report onto the 1948 bestseller list. Nonetheless, with interest in GS rising, with the proliferation of GS study groups and courses, with numerous books—both pro and con—being written, there actually existed a demand for Korzybski’s books. The unavailability of both of his books at the start of 1948 added to the demand, and the pressure Korzybski and his colleagues felt to get them out again as soon as possible. The delayed appearance of the Second Edition of Manhood of Humanity, promised for several years, seemed sure to frustrate the waiting list of people who had already ordered it. Science and Sanity, out of print now for nearly a year, had around 1000 back orders. People, especially university instructors, were eager for Selections from Science and Sanity as well. Publishing these last two books as soon as possible was at the top of the IGS to-do list. But the delay of Manhood of Humanity, Korzybski’s first book, especially frustrated him. Its theme of time-binding had begun to play an explicit part in his formulating once again, but the writing of a new Introduction, the main bottleneck to getting out Manhood’s Second Edition, would not go easily.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

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