"The accusations of cultism leveled against Korzybski's followers are not altogether unfounded. In the United States there is a large floating population of 'truthseekers'. Many of them lack the capacity of strenuous intellectual effort required in a fruitful pursuit of knowledge and wisdom; others lack the power of critical evaluation, which would enable them to tell the genuine from the false. Still others cannot be comfortable until they find a panacea to believe in. These people support 'movements' and cults. They are as likely to 'go for' Christian Science as for technocracy, for psychoanalysis as for theosophy, for the Great Books programme as for dianetics. And so inevitably one finds some of them among the adherents of general semantics ... Whether they were actually helped by general semantics or by other factors cannot be determined without sufficient controls. But they went about spreading the faith, thus giving a cultist flavour to the 'movement'."
React to this quote
More by Anatol Rapoport
See allResonant Thoughts
"There is no doubt that the contrast is patent between what we call, with too gross a classification, the developed and the undeveloped countries. ... Why is there this difference, this divergence, thi…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"But no - what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak. That is not all: wood-mice are gnawing awa…"
— Shashi Tharoor"Deep learning will make you acceptable to the learned; but it is only an obliging and easy behaviour, and e…"
— James Burgh"I'd rather she grew up here than grew up as an orphan, you know I can tolerate anybody's orphans but my own."
— Woody Allen"It was like finding some weird tribe in the middle of the jungle and, you know, they all come out and go: "…"
— Bruce Dickinson"I don’t know if I would want him as vice president. He and I have the same strengths. But to serve in other…"
— John McCain"The Regime has become so smug it can't tell the difference among the revolutionary, the innovative, or the …"
— Sheri S. Tepper
Related Thinkers
Related Topics
Deep Dives
- Leonardo da Vinci on knowledge
- Blaise Pascal on knowledge
- Nicholas of Cusa on knowledge
- Kenneth Arrow on knowledge
- W. Edwards Deming on knowledge
- Charles Babbage on knowledge
- John Wallis on knowledge
- William A. Dembski on knowledge
- Leonardo da Vinci on life
- Leonardo da Vinci on nature
- justice & Beauty
- justice & Change
