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sions. In the individual the symptoms of the disorder manifest themselves
by a progressive corruption of his faculty to perceive, with corrupted lan-
guage being the pathogene, that is, the agent that makes the disease so
highly contagious. Worse, in progressive stages of this disorder, the afflicted
become numb, they become less and less aware of their affliction.
This state of affairs makes it clear why I am concerned about perception
when contemplating the future, for:
if we can't perceive,
we can't perceive of the future
and thus, we don't know how to act now.
I venture to say that one may agree with the conclusion. If one looks
around, the world appears like an anthill where its inhabitants have lost all
sense of direction. They run aimlessly about, chop each other to pieces, foul
their nest, attack their young, spend tremendous energies in building arti-
fices that are either abandoned when completed, or when maintained, cause
more disruption than was visible before, and so on. Thus, the conclusions
seem to match the facts. Are the premises acceptable? Where does per-
ception come in?
Before we proceed, let me first remove some semantic traps, for—as I
said before—corrupt language is the pathogene of the disease. Some simple
perversions may come at once to mind, as when “incursion” is used for
“invasion,” “protective reaction” for “aggression,” “food denial” for “poi-
soning men, beasts, and plants,” and others. Fortunately, we have developed
some immunity against such insults, having been nourished with syntactic
monstrosities as “X is better” without ever saying “than what.” There are,
however, many more profound semantic confusions, and it is these to which
I want to draw your attention now.
There are three pairs of concepts in which one member of these pairs is
generally substituted for the other so as to reduce the richness of our con-
ceptions. It has become a matter of fact to confuse process with substance,
relations with predicates, and quality with quantity. Let me illustrate this
with a few examples out of a potentially very large catalogue, and let me
at the same time show you the paralytic behavior that is caused by this
conceptual dysfunction.
Process/Substance
The primordial and most proprietary processes in any man and, in fact, in
any organism, namely “information” and “knowledge,” are now persistently
taken as commodities, that is as substance. Information is, of course, the
process by which knowledge is acquired, and knowledge is the processes
that integrate past and present experiences to form new activities, either as
nervous activity internally perceived as thought and will, or externally
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