Off the Map

Another day, another day working background on a television show.

I like this kind of work.  Sometimes, though, it can be a bit painful.  When you call a voicemail number for your calltimes, the voice of the voicemail can set up your orientation to the project you’re working on.

Enough shows’ voicemail voices provide a neutral stance about the production.  This approach might be generally preferred.  Why?  Because most days on set are pretty humdrum.  You approach work just like regular work.  Compare the always-neutral voice with the always-excited voice that could be on the voicemail.  Such a voice might get you excited about the day!!!  You approach work with excitement!!!  But if the day only ends up humdrum, you might feel misled, then cynical about the production.

Some shows’ voicemail voices, though, put out a negative attitude.  One voicemail I listen to every once and awhile really puts me in a bad mood.  The way it’s worded, it sounds condescending.  It sounds as if it’s berating me.  The pay is relatively low compared to other projects, and the lists of “musts” we must abide by are high, which is a rather backward arrangement in my opinion.  I like working on the show, though I hate having to endure the dreaded condescending, berating voicemail.

It is also long.  It takes up my time.  It takes up my time sometimes when I don’t have that time.  It takes up my time when I am sleepy and want, even need, to go to bed.  If I miss a detail in the voicemail, guess what?  I have to listen to the dreaded thing all over again.

This is not a post bitching about voicemail voices.  This is a post about morale.  It is a post about morale and its effect on mood.  And it’s a post about morale, its effect on mood, and its effect on what some people might call “mental illness.”

When I am berated or condescended to, I don’t feel very good.  My morale is lowered.  I go from feeling like a professional, responsible working actor to feeling like a fuck-up.  One condescension or beration might feel bad enough, but when you are repeatedly condescended to or berated over the course of, say, a voicemail, or even just a few sentences, the net effect is that you feel pretty schmucky.

This is to say, with my morale lowered, my mood tanks.  I get frustrated.  The frustration comes from not getting the respect I want.  With that frustration comes anger.  I then start to get emotional and maybe exaggerate a bit the kind of treatment I’m getting.  I start to want to represent the condescension and beration as worse than they probably are.  This can make my mood tank more because I feel my morale lowered more.  Soon enough I may develop a furrowed brow and an obnoxious attitude toward, say, production.  And I might become more non-cooperative.  I don’t want to give into every whim demanded by the voicemail.  I want to fight back.  Much of this, just because of the wording and approach to a freakin’ voicemail.

It might be said that if my morale weren’t lowered, my mood wouldn’t tank like this.  That is, if my morale were boosted in the voicemail, I would likely feel good rather than bad.  I wouldn’t want to be non-cooperative.  I’d probably be more inclined to be cooperative.  Production would be something I’d be happier to accommodate.  My delusions about production wouldn’t be negative; they’d probably be positive.  I’d be emotional, but emotional in a friendly, positive way.

What is interesting about the relationship of morale and behavior dubbed “mental illness”?  Some “mental illnesses” are conceptualized as “mood disorders.”  I don’t know what’s “disordered” about feeling bad.  If someone is condescending to you, or berating you, are you supposed to feel good or something?  No.  You’ll probably feel bad.  Maybe not necessarily, but probably.  That’s not a stimulus to continually experience if you want to feel good.

But sometimes there is no clear somebody-else who is condescending or berating you when you exhibit your supposed “mood disorder.”  Some people might say it’s because there’s some kind of chemical imbalance.  Those people might have a point some of the time, but in my opinion, they have a point less often than they think they do.  When you’re feeling bad and there’s no clear somebody-else doing the berating, it seems to me that the berating is being done by you.  You are berating yourself.  You are allowing yourself to berate yourself.  Maybe you’ve been conditioned to do this by a berating parent.  Maybe you think it’s the right way to behave toward yourself.  Maybe you accidentally developed the habit on your own.  Whatever the case, you are either thinking berating thoughts or saying berating things all about yourself.  And, understandably, as a result, you’re feeling pretty bad.

So then you start to exaggerate and get emotional and delude yourself about your circumstances.  So then your morale lowers more, your mood tanks more, your delusions grow.  For some people, they reach a point and stop.  For other people, they don’t reach a point and stop, or the point at which they’d stop is far, far from other people’s stopping points.

If you’re interesting in having cooperative people, treat them well.  Maintain their morale to the degree that you can.  You can’t control people’s thoughts: While you may attend to someone’s morale, that person may not attend well to her own morale.  But choose lifting morale over plummeting morale has an effect on mood, cooperative, and even their diagnoses.

I suppose attending to morale could be considered “social responsibility.”  I’m not sure of the value of lowering morale in the practice of social responsibility.

COMMENTS

Leave a Comment (0 So Far)

See also: delusion, mental-illness, mood, mood-disorder, morale, social-responsibility

One of my most recent essays in this blog (an entry titled “General Semantics: The Study of How We Represent Our Experiences”) did a number on me.  It started to get me focused on how people (others as well as myself) represent their experiences in words.  And it got me paying attention especially to how frequently people (others, though not so much myself) misrepresent their experiences in words.

It was as if general semantics developed as a door wedge.

That probably doesn’t make sense to you, but it makes sense to me.  General semantics got people paying attention to the words they use to represent reality.  And as a result, it tuned people into times when, say, they don’t represent reality well with their words.  There’s the precise sense of representation–as when a scientist represents reality with dispassionate, structurally correct words–but there’s also the less precise, more social sense of representation–as when you or I chat.

In truth, people do a lot of misrepresenting.

‘

(Nice pun!)

Sometimes our plight is to show that someone is lying.  That plight can be a bit too challenging because it is hard to prove that someone’s intent was to misrepresent.  Sometimes, it would seem to me, that just showing misrepresentation is enough.  That is, if you can demonstrate that someone is misrepresenting reality, that may be enough to damn a person.

You might not need to show the intent to misrepresent, as implied by the term “lying.”  You might just need to show the misrepresenter the facts, then see if she corrects her speech to speech that better represents facts.  If she keeps misrepresenting, you may see the problem the person is.  Misrepresentation may be a liability, enough to can someone who does it whether actively or neglectfully.

And we can do it innocently, as when we do it accidentally or naïvely.  Who knows how I’ve misrepresented myself out of naïveté.  When I catch myself misrepresenting events accidentally, oftentimes I aim to correct the error.  I might even do that months later to the person who heard my erroneous words.

But it is as if general semantics developed as a door wedge.  It jammed in people’s brains so that they didn’t just let themselves close them on events just because of how the events were represented in words.   General semantics kept the doorbrain open to possibilities other than those represented, or potentially misrepresented, in words.

COMMENTS

Leave a Comment (0 So Far)

See also: lying, misrepresentation, representation

“The map is not the territory,” Alfred Korzybski is presumed to have said.  Language–a primary subject in the field he founded called general semantics–is viewed like a map of a territory in general semantics.

What struck me yesterday is a wonder: Might Korzybski have been more specifically referring to symbols? That is, is he saying more that symbols are like maps as opposed to language is like a map?

Consider: We might agree that the function of a symbol is to represent something. When a symbol represents something empirical, it cannot represent everything about that empirical thing. For instance, take the symbol “Ben Hauck,” which represents me.  You don’t think of everything about me when you see or hear that symbol.  Instead, when you see or hear that symbol, you call to mind a relatively few characteristics related to me from the near infinitude of characteristics I possess.  Given that understanding, we see that symbols, perhaps without exception, represent relatively few characteristics of an empirical thing. That is, there are a great number of characteristics symbols don’t represent or that they leave out.

Now think of maps. Maps function similar to symbols. In fact, a map is composed of symbols. Maps might be considered “symbols par exemplar.”  By their nature, maps leave out details like blades of grass and trees, fish in rivers and cars rushing to work.  They only call to attention a relatively few characteristics.

The usefulness of thinking of symbols as maps is that it’s a very, very visual conceptualization of symbols. By maps being so visual a concept, a person can usually easily grasp the notion of symbols.

Furthermore, a secondary usefulness of the map analogy becomes apparent: The use of symbols carries with it an ethics.  Seeing symbols as maps circumscribes a particular ethics around the use of symbols: A right symbol represents, and a wrong symbol misrepresents.  By the map analogy, symbols should represent appropriately. If a bad map is one that misrepresents its territory, a bad symbol is the same–it misrepresents what it was chosen to represent. 

‘

Presumably fire fighters have the grammatically incorrect word “flammable” on their fire trucks because the grammatically correct “inflammable” brings to mind for many people “resistant to flame”–the exact opposite characteristic the symbol is meant to represent. “Inflammable” might be said to be a bad symbol in that light, despite being grammatically correct.

General semantics looks at the symbols we use, the symbols we choose, and studies their use relative to our experiences. It studies our truths and our lies, our humble statements and our exaggerations, our journalism and our propaganda. It studies many sorts of representation.  It notes our chosen symbols and compares those symbols to our experiences. It sometimes offers criticism when there’s a considerable misrepresentation–or even just a small one.

As a standard of experience to measure representation, general semantics looks to science. For general semantics, science “tells it like it is”; science provides the best standard for what’s true about reality and our experience of it.  If for the scientist something is unknown, then for the everyday reporter, that something is unknown, too, and the everyday reporter can’t know more.  If the everyday reporter communicates in symbols that that something isn’t unknown, that he actually knows it, this everyday reporter would be misrepresenting experience, at least relative to the barometer of science.

Of note, much of science is probabilistic and technically unknown or can’t be proven (only evidenced), so nearly anytime this everyday reporter or you or I speak with certainty about something empirical, we misrepresent ourselves.  General semantics calls our attention to this, and as a result recommends operating using a general principle of uncertainty that guides us to speak more often probabilistically and less often with unflappable certitude.  But of course, science also provides us with a list of “facts” and if we speak outside those facts, we potentially speak in a misrepresentational way.  Science provides general semantics not only with a map of the territory, but also a mindset about the territory.

All this mindset really is, is a list of facts about our personal experience abilities.  It might be a fact that we can’t 100% know something.  Here, the territory is ourselves and our abilities; the map is “We can’t 100% know something”; this is also our mindset.  We’ve “set our minds” on this fact and operate from this setting.

And I come to this blog post after having it strike me yesterday that I might argue general semantics is the study of how we represent our experiences.  From that, the importance of the symbol came to mind, and the diminished importance of language followed.  Not that language is unimportant in general semantics, it’s just that symbols strike me as a bit more important.  Symbols include words, representational images, phrases, gestures, and so on.  Language might be thought of as merely a combination of symbols, used to communicate an idea more complex than a single symbol can communicate.  That is, language is a collection of maps much like the collection of maps you see inset in driving directions.  One symbol can represent reality; several symbols can represent a more complicated reality that a single symbol may not be able to.

Let’s go with this definition of general semantics and see where we go with it.

COMMENTS

Leave a Comment (1 So Far)

See also: definition, general-principle-of-uncertainty, maps, science, symbols

A few minutes ago, in reading Alfred Korzybski’s big blue book (though in PDF form), one of his phrasings made me think of how semantic reactions appear on the Structural Differential.

Granted, I can’t corroborate this take at the time, but it seems to me that the strings in Korzybski’s Structural Differential modeling the process of abstracting represent semantic reactions.

This would mean that the Structural Differential depicts a chain of related but different kinds of semantic reactions. There are semantic reactions to events, ones to the objects in our heads, ones to the labels and descriptions we give for those objects, as well as the language that those labels and descriptions inspire.

This understanding may suit Bruce Kodish, who has complained somewhat more vociferously than some others that I have had too narrow of an interpretation of Korzybski’s term “semantic reaction,” which I defined as “a reaction to words” in my essay “A Simple Definition of General Semantics.” Bruce, et al., urged a broader interpretation of something more like “a reaction to words and events.” For a time, I had trouble arguing that point of view.

COMMENTS

Leave a Comment (0 So Far)

See also: science-and-sanity, semantic-reaction, structural-differential