Reviews and Comments

Imagine finding social distancing comfortable. Since I could easily imagine it, I became interested in the author of an article to this effect by Olga Khazan that led me to this book. Who reads a book titled Weird anyway? The blurb says that most of us have felt that way at times, which suggests to me that the publisher had high hopes for this book--a readership of "most of us."

It turns out that this book is about successful people whose differences did not hold them back. I can see that as an appealing topic but, weirdly, it does not appeal to me. The supposedly weird Russian Jewish immigrant growing up in Texas was, for my tastes, even too successful as a child. She may have wanted to fit in (and what child does not!) and felt bad in her failures to do so, but either she didn't feel bad enough, or she didn't convey to me how painful her struggle was. And now, writing with such confidence on this topic makes her distinctly un-weird. Her ideas in this book are mostly mainstream, which, as a weirdo, I find offensive. In the end, lacking what it must take to finish it, I gave up reading this book.

More to my taste was [b:Hello Cruel World|7847732|Hello Cruel World|Kate Bornstein|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|11900] whose author reaches out to the weird offering alternatives to suicide. This was written by an author who clearly suffered for her weirdness and is reaching out to other sufferers to let us know how we might survive the cruelty which is the fate of the non-conforming. Thus, not how to succeed, but how to survive.

Back in the 1930s, [a:Alfred Korzybski|63523|Alfred Korzybski|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1500150938p2/63523.jpg], a Polish engineer, wrote a book [b:Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics|18747369|Science and Sanity An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics|Alfred Korzybski|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1383369094l/18747369.SX50.jpg|105796] which I found unreadable the few times I tried. But back then it was a big deal. Nowadays, most people have never heard of him and if you google his name, you'll find he is mainly known for having said "The map is not the territory."

My introduction to Wendell Johnson was a quote I liked (can't remember where I saw it) "A similarity is a difference that doesn't make a difference." It turns out it comes from the book I am reviewing (not verbatim but close). Before I started to read it, I was unaware that Mr Johnson was a "follower" of Korzybski, and that he wrote a book that I was capable of reading which covers the gist of what Korzybski had to say. (Korzybski read this book and it has his blessing.)

I put "follower" in quotes because Korzybski's movement, known as "General Semantics" is not exactly a cult but has a following like one. For him and Johnson, they were doing science but it never quite made it into the main stream, not because it was wrong, so much as because it was different. At any rate, a lot of what they have to say is both instructive and should be better known if you could separate it out from some of their more cult-like utopian beliefs. I will try and do some of that here in this review.

Basically, General Semantics is an attempt to make language less ambiguous and reflect reality, or failing that, to make speaker and listener aware of how it neglects to do so. It is an attempt to create a technology that would make arguments that are actually not arguments at all but misunderstandings more easily detectable and resolvable. This is extended to arguments within ourselves--i.e. mental confusion, and even to a form of psychotherapy to systematically unconfuse us. The underlying idea is that most (all?) quandaries exist not in reality (the territory) but in how we talk/think about them (the map).

Another way to say this is that sanity will come if we approach the world as scientists and insanity is there because so often we don't. If we are confused or disagree about the world, there should be some sort of experiment we could perform to find the truth, at least in principle (some experiments would be impractical or physically impossible in which case we could agree there is no possible answer to disagree about). And if there were not such an experiment, that the source of confusion/disagreement is "merely" semantic. Or else the statement of the problem is ultimately meaningless.

If this sounds to you like the philosophy known as logical positivism or its practical application, you'd be right. The timing (1930s) matches nicely too.

As a method of psychotherapy, General Semantics is similar in spirit to CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In this form a treatment, one is taught to recognize and give up ones cognitive distortions--false beliefs about the world leading to unnecessary bad feelings.

There are (at least) two problems with this solution, the first being that it presumes all difficulties are cognitive.

Enough difficulties are cognitive that general semantics techniques (and CBT techniques) should be more widely known.
The problem arises when these techniques are expected to solve those difficulties which are outside their scope, especially when the fault of the difficulty is assigned to the persons on whom it fails to work. (e.g. "You are being irrational!") Johnson understands this and thus his treatment of stutterers is directed on lowering their anxiety and self blame.

The second problem, one that has gotten much attention in philosophical circles yet I rarely see addressed outside of them, is the belief that values can be derived from facts. In actuality, people can agree on all the facts but differ on what is morally right or wrong. General Semantics could still make it clear that the argument isn't resolvable.

Similarly, you can agree with the facts I present about this book yet disagree with me about its worth.

On yet another note, one thing I enjoy about reading books like this is to marvel at the certainty with which its understanding is expressed and think about all we're similarly certain about eighty-something years later.

As an occupant, I enjoyed this guide to the body. I especially liked the less useful information and the gossip. It's amazing how often reknowned medical scientists were, outside of the discoveries that made them famous (if they weren't actualy the discoveries of others who never got credit) were involved in unsavory, illegal, or otherwise crazy schemes of which most of us are unaware. It's relatively recent that doctors are actually able to help their patients. George Washington died because of how his doctors chose to treat a minor sore throat.

A few random facts I recall: The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. Hair and nails do not continue to grow after death. Near death paliative care cancer patients live longer than those who continue to get chemotherapy. Despite superior American health care, natives of Costa Rica live longer because of their healthier life styles. Most grave sites are no longer visited fifteen years after death. Vitamins were originally called "Vitamines"--short for vital amines. Blood type O was really blood type zero. People at first thought that radiation was good for you. Ones DNA unwound would extend from here past the (non) planet Pluto. All the penicillin we have today is descended from the mold on a single canteloupe. If cancer were cured today, our average lifespan would increase by less than three years. When Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, it was years before it was accepted as fact, in part because no one knew what blood was for. Chemotherapy was discovered because of the effects of chemical weapon mustard gas.

The White Working Class, as any class, is a culture in the anthropological sense. The values of a culture make sense within the culture but are seen as irrational from the outside.
After reading this book, I can see that many of those seeming irrationalities makes various kinds of sense and that there are beliefs of my own culture--e.g. that the merits rewarded in a liberal meritocracy aren't innately superior to the merits in WWC values. Ultimately much depends on getting WWC and PME cultures to understand one another rather than condemning one another and this book is a small part of the solution.

Written in the language of the PME, it only works in one direction, however. Someone needs to explain the PME to the WWC in a sympathetic way and no one is doing it. Ms. Williams makes a few suggestions: frame "pro choice" as strengthening families rather than as "self-actualization", replace means-tested benfits with those that benefit everyone (e.g. free college/trade schools), better explain government programs to those who are already benefiting but don't know it's because of government. But these are the barest beginnings. I worry about our future.

Of the 5 biggest risks facing a new administration, one of them--the one this book addresses--is the risk that the government starts to be mainly run by people focused on their own enrichment instead of people working for the mission of bettering the country. Most people have a very narrow understanding of all the things government does to keep them alive and safe. This is partially because it often doesn't explain itself well. (It is poorly marketed.) But it's also because there are people who make a profit off of this information NOT being known. We've had kleptocracies before but this is the first administration that is trying to run the country the way organized crime runs a business it has taken over--maximizing the short term gains while it is run into the ground. I wonder how many of the people who need to know what this book has to say will actually get to read it?

There are rational things to say about Zen, a method of consciousness transformation that eschews the rational, but you're not going to get to them by insisting that irrationality is ipso facto a bad thing. If you want to understand how rationality imprisons you, the koan you should look at is "show me your original face." You weren't originally rational but now it's hard to be otherwise, though it's less about rationality, ultimately and more about convention and pattern and fear of change.

Becker acknowledges his fear of death and his fear of losing the gains of western civilization which he sees under attack. This "attachment" as Buddhists would have it is what Zen aims to get you to give up--not to replace with an attachment to irrationalism but to surrender. Becker sees surrender in the old political way as giving in to a tyranny. He see's all change as a change from one attachment to another. If you're attached by therapy, that can help you but because the therapists does it all for you (as they put it at McDonalds). Otherwise, you're attached to someone doing it all for themselves--a dictator--a brain washer. That's not really rational but looks that way to someone with his attachments.
We all have our attachments--things we identify with--things we believe ourselves to be--ways we claim to be hard wired.

Satori is the experience that we needn't be wired at all.

I'm a big fan of the author but when he reads his own words in the audiobook version, it's almost as if he doesn't think we'll get the joke if he doesn't signal with his voice that it's meant to be funny. In fact, it more often ruined the joke to do that so I'd like to suggest you stick with the old fashion text version of this book, at least for the first half.

I'm not sure if civilization is collapsing or if it's been crumbling for years but the current rot is merely more apparent to us. The individual situations differ, of course, but though, for example, the university has certainly devolved in the many ways outlined in the essay American Fight Song, we need to also remember some of the awful ways it used to be that are no longer the case. Admission of minorities, or even merely those of the wrong class, used to rarely happen at all back when America was great. And even though you were taught by actual scholars instead of adjuncts, some of those scholars didn't communicate as well as they did research. I've been an adjunct and though I'm aware that I was being underpaid, I could teach a better course than many having tenure.

Similarly, Trump being president may represent a new low or may merely be what was always present becoming less hidden because Trump is incapable or unwilling to hide who he is. Never the less, I wish I could make everyone read the final chapter America Made Great Again in which Frank spells out Trump’s potential path to reelection as president of the United States for a second term.

I'm not the target audience for this book because I already pretty much agree with Dr. Maté's view of addiction and the war on drugs. I even agree in broad strokes with his spirituality. As a result, I kind of found myself noticing the parts of the book that were more background to it's main thrust. For me, it became a story of the author's spiritual struggle to find meaning in his life.

As a doctor, there were many paths open to him but he chose the one less traveled by. In this context, he celebrates the rawness of life on the streets--people with no buffer other then chemistry from the pain and joy and terror of being alive. He could have had a cushy doctor's existence but instead he chooses to be the savior of the fallen, those forsaken by "the system" and living on the margins. Is this choice somehow related to his having himself been rescued from the Nazi death camps by his parents managing to send him abroad while they remained behind to die in Auschwitz? Is he paying forward his own rescue?

Too young to understand what was happening, he remembers feeling abandoned and rejected by his parents actions. He attributes his feeling of being unwanted and not good enough to that separation and his subsequent psychological problems to an attempt to escape those feelings.

In his view, addiction is an understandable response to unbearable feelings. Those feelings are imagined to be worse than any of the real world consequences of their drug use and thus the threat of punishment will not convince an addict to give up their drug which is their only escape from a much worse punishment. Maté' sees himself in the same situation, compelled to purchase classical music CDs to relieve his inner turmoil. And yet he knows he's not really the same as those he cares for. There's a class difference, and often an education difference as well--one exception being the Ralph who can quote Goethe from memory in between his neo-Nazi drug-inspired rants. Gabor knows we're all just humans but he finds himself judging and lecturing and retreating to his caretaker role.

Gabor wants to assert that he's an addict too, but his classical CD addiction is a first-world problem. He doesn't have to live out on the street. It would be good to get over it but it's not going to kill him. He can mine it for insights into the addictive process and it will help with his book. I see an element of survivor guilt--he, the rescued, wanting to be one of the victims.

Ths book, though insightful and beautifully written at times, is way too long as if Dr Maté thinks he can overwhem his critics with logic. He wonders why obviously failing policies are continued and expanded while he himself simultaneously understands that logic is limited in its ability to cause change. Logic couldn't even change his own addiction. He blames himself for failing to surrender even as he knows self-blame is more problem than solution. He forgives his patients for finding him annoying but he can annoy his readers as well with that same preachiness. In the end I will give him 4 stars rounded up from 3 something as a vote for him to continue his work.