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During an escape attempt, he’s cut to pieces by machine-gun fire and, for good measure, fried by an energy beam.
    When he wakes up, he’s in a Venusian forest, in a spanking-new body, a clone of the original. Thus far, he’s been murdered, resurrected in a new body and transported to another planet, but no worries—it’s all good: Gosseyn’s rigorous training in the mind-body coordination techniques of General Semantics hasrendered him immune to trauma. All he needs to do is take a brief “cortico-thalamic pause,” and he’s ready to face the next bizarre plot twist. During the “pause,” a Null-A elite is able to throw off all previous cultural programming and process new sense data from a serene perspective. Eventually, we find out that Gosseyn is actually a mutant, a breakthrough in human evolution, a superbeing with an “extra brain” who’s being manipulated by the cosmic chess player in order to combat galactic conspirators who want to wipe out the General Semantics crowd and take over the universe. Got that, chillun’?
    Wow, I thought, this is great, immediately realizing that this “cortico-thalamic pause” business could serve as a psychological defense against Parent-Things, Teacher-Things and Life-Things in general. Moreover, like Gilbert Gosseyn, I could be a good mutant and combat the forces of evil throughout the galaxy. But how do I get the training? There was no Institute of General Semantics. It was just something out of A. E. van Vogt’s imagination.
    Wrong, little Donny. If I’d just done a bit of research, I would’ve found out that a very real Institute of General Semantics was housed in a country estate in Lime Rock, Connecticut, a few hours’ drive from Kendall Park. It seems that van Vogt was using his novel to illustrate his greatest intellectual passion: the system of General Semantics as described in
Science and Sanity
, a very thick book by a jaunty Polish aristocrat, Count Alfred Korzybski.
    After serving in the Polish army during World War I, Korzybski decided that people had better find a way to get along with each other. Of course, the same idea had generatedCommunism, Fascism, Anarcho-Syndicalism and a hundred other political isms. The Count, though, saw all problems in human relations as problems in semantics, that is, the fact that words mean different things to different people. Moreover,
General
Semantics, his own invention, would also take into account neurological events: the ways in which people reacted to new words, new information and new situations. Confronted with a stressful stimulus, one’s reflexes and/or conditioned behavior often preempted the appropriate measured response.
    Korzybski wondered whether there was a way to align the cortex, the part of the brain that has dominion over rational thought, and the thalamus, the seat of emotions (hence van Vogt’s cortico-thalamic pause). For starters, people had to change the way they perceived and evaluated the world around them. Rather than employ Aristotelian logic—that is, the binary, yes/no, black versus white type of thinking—the Count favored multivalued, pluralistic thought that was modulated by—but not ruled by—subjective feeling. Basically, Korzybski was saying, Hey, be cool: “Don’t get mad—get Null-A!”
    One of the Count’s most quoted sentences is “The map is not the territory.” In other words, don’t confuse the word with the object, the description with the thing itself. People who want to sell you something intentionally take advantage of this confusion. For instance, political speeches, TV commercials and Fox News use language rife with “truthiness” instead of truth and contain “factoids” rather than facts.
    General Semantics also advances the concept of time-binding: the fact that humans can leave books and recordings and films to transmit knowledge to