Conspiratorial Lingo

In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves, “Whoa.”

Over the weekend, waiting for the hunk of junk to get its oil changed, I browsed through a copy of Everything Is Under Control, Robert Anton Wilson’s compendium of every whisper of conspiracy ever uttered under the sun. The essential learning aid for the conspiracy theorist in your family.

Uh oh. Now they know about me. I’ve left an electronic paper trail. Oh well.

Anyway, I picked it up to search for a new conspiracy, now that I’ve been convinced to my satisfaction that the JFK assassination was the result of a conspiracy of One Lone Nut. In some bizarre, campy, creepy, nerdy, titillating way, I enjoy these things. I love the Medved show when he has Conspiracy Day and challenges his callers to provide him with a conspiracy he can’t debunk. As a kid I was heavily into all the UFO and sasquatch stuff, and as I got older I got into the more sinister, man-made shadiness of history and politics. Of which the JFK conspiracy was probably the most consuming, especially every November.

So I’m thumbing through Wilson’s One-Stop-Cover-Up-Shop in search of something to catch my eye. Very distracted by the little ones feuding and fighting over scraps of pizza crust. But this caught my eye, and I like it:


“But Korzybski made a more radical discovery, namely, that our perceptions / conceptions (reality-tunnels) are also shaped by the structure of the language we use. A Native American, an African, a Chinese, etc. – anyone using a non-Indo-European language structure – will live in a different universe than those who only know Indo-European. Considering mathematics a language, Korzybski also claimed that the mathematically literate live in a different semantic system than those who only know verbal structures.”

- “Language as Conspiracy,” Everything Is Under Control, by Robert Anton Wilson, pg. 277


What does this mean? What can this possibly mean? Is this to be taken literally, or ... metaphorically, I guess? In the immortal words of PeeWee Herman, “I ... DON’T ... KNOW!”

It does call to mind a post from two weeks’ back about Songlines. The whole suchness that I’ve only partially explored about those Australian Aborigines whose experience of reality and dreamtime is precisely perpendicular to ours. I have had a book about that – and how the whole dang thing ties into quantum physics, nonetheless – in my basement for years that I’ve never delved into past the first chapter. I should read that book someday.

How could you test out Korzybski’s theory? Maybe you could find a set of identical twins separated at birth. One would be raised in, say, an African or Asian socio-linguistic culture, another in a Western one. Reintroduce them to each other as well-matured adults, and teach them the other’s language. Then get Korzybski or one of his disciples to psychoanalyze the two. Mix shake stir. Serve the results over ice.

As a coda to all this, last night I was surfing online and discovered Korzybski talks about all this in his book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. And this insomnia cure is actually in my local library!

Whoa!