Manhood of Humanity: Human Understanding
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“For a while he trampled with impunityn laws human and divine but, as he wasbsessed with the delusion that two and two makes five, he fell, at last a victim to the relentless rulesf humble Arithmetic.
“Remember, stranger, Arithmetic is the firstf the sciences and the motherf safety.”
Brandeis.
It is the aimf this little book to point the way to a new science and art—the science and artf Human Engineering. By Human Engineering I mean the science and artf directing the energies and capacitiesf human beings to the advancementf human weal. It need not be argued in these times that the establishmentf such a science—the sciencef human welfare—is an undertakingf immeasurable importance. None can fail to see that its importance is supreme.
It is evident that, if such a science is to be established it must be foundedn ascertained facts—it must accord with what is characteristicf Man—it must be based upon a just conceptionf what Man ] is—upon a right understandingf Man's place in the schemef Nature.
None need be told how indispensable it is to have true ideas—just concepts—correct notions—of the things with which we humans have to deal; everyone knows for example, that to mistake solids for surfacesr lines would wreck the science and artf geometry; anyone knows that to confuse fractions with whole numbers would wreck the science and artf arithmetic; everyone knows that to mistake vice for virtue would destroy the foundationf ethics; everyone knows that to mistake a desert mirage for a lakef fresh water does but lure the fainting traveler to dire disappointmentr death. Now, it is perfectly clear thatf all the things with which human beings have to deal, the most important by far is Man himself—humankind—men, women and children. It follows that for us human beings nothing else can be quite so important as a clear, true, just, scientific conceptf Man—a right understandingf what we as human beings really are. For it requires no great wisdom, it needsnly a little reflection, to see that, if we humans radically misconceive the naturef man—if we regard man as being something which he is not, whether it be something higher than manr lower—we thereby commit an error so fundamental and far reaching as to produce ] every mannerf confusion and disaster in individual life, in community life and in the lifef the race.
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Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski (July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain's responses to reality. His best known dictum is "The map is not the territory".
