A Semantic Parable
Once upon a time (said the Professor), there were two small
communities, spiritually as well as geographically situated at a con-
siderable distance from each other. They had, however, these prob-
lems in common: Both were hard hit by a depression, so that in
each of the towns there were about one hundred heads of families
unemployed. There was, to be sure, enough food, enough clothing,
enough materials for housing, but these families simply did not
have money to procure these necessities.
The city fathers of A-town, the first community, were substantial
businessmen, moderately well educated, good to their families, kind-
hearted, and* sound-thinking. The unemployed tried hard, as un-
employed people usually do, to find jobs; but the situation did not
improve. The city fathers, as well as the unemployed themselves,
had been brought up to believe that there is always enough work
for everyone, if you only look for it hard enough. Comforting them-
selves with this doctrine, the city fathers could have shrugged their
shoulders and turned their backs on the problem, except for the
fact that they were genuinely kindhearted men. They could not
bear to see the unemployed men and their wives and children starv-
ing. In order to prevent starvation, they felt that they had to provide
these people with some means of sustenance. Their principles told
them, nevertheless, that if people were given something for nothing,
it would demoralize their character. Naturally this made the city
fathers#even more unhappy, because they were faced with the hor-
rible choice of (i) letting the unemployed starve, or (2) destroying
their moral character.
The solution they finally hit upon, after much debate and soul-
searching, was this. They decided to give the unemployed families
relief of fifty dollars a month; but to insure against the pauperiza-
tion of the recipients, they decided that this fifty dollars was to be
accompanied by a moral lesson, to wit: the obtaining of the assist-
2
A SEMANTIC PARABLE
ance would be made so difficult, humiliating, and disagreeable that
there would be no temptation for anyone to go through the process
unless it was absolutely necessary; the moral disapproval of the
community would be turned upon the recipients of the money at
all times in such a way that they would try hard to get of? relief
and regain their self-respect. Some even proposed that people on
relief be denied the vote, so that the moral lesson would be more
deeply impressed upon them. Others suggested that their names be
published at regular intervals in the newspapers, so that there would
be a strong incentive to get off relief. The city fathers had enough
faith in the goodness of human nature to expect that the recipients
would be grateful, since they were getting something for nothing,
something which they hadn’t worked for.
When the plan was put into operation, however, the recipients
of the relief checks proved to be an ungrateful, ugly bunch. They
seemed to resent the cross-examinations and inspections at the hands
of the relief investigators, who, they said, took advantage of a man’s
misery to snoop into every detail of his private life. In spite of uplift-
ing editorials in A-town Tribune telling them how grateful they
ought to be, the recipients of the relief refused to learn any moral
lessons, declaring that they were “just as good as anybody else.”
When, for example, they permitted themselves the rare luxury of
a movie or an evening of bingo, their neighbors looked at them
sourly as if to say, “I work hard and pay my taxes just in order to
support loafers like you in idleness and pleasure.” This attitude,
which was fairly characteristic of those members of the community
who still had jobs, further embittered the relief recipients, so that
they showed even less gratitude as time went on and were con-
stantly on the lookout for insults, real or imaginary, from people
who might think that they weren’t as good as anybody else.* A num-
ber of them took to moping all day long, to thinking that their
lives had been failures; one or two even committed suicide. Others
found that it was hard to look their wives and kiddies in the face,
because they had failed to provide. They all found it difficult to
maintain their club and fraternal relationships, since they could
not help feeling that their fellow citizens despised them for having
sunk so low. Their wives, too, were unhappy for the same reasons
A SEMANTIC PARABLE
3
and gave up their social activities. Children whose parents were on
relief felt inferior to classmates whose parents were not public
charges. Some of these children developed inferiority complexes
which affected not only their grades at school, but their careers after
graduation. Several other relief recipients, finally, felt they could
stand their loss of self-respect no longer and decided, after many
efforts to gain honest jobs, to earn money by their own efforts,
even if they had to go in for robbery. They did so and were caught
and sent to the state penitentiary.
The depression, therefore, hit A-town very hard. The relief policy
had averted starvation, no doubt, but suicide, personal quarrels, un-
happy homes, the weakening of social organizations, the maladjust-
ment of children, and, finally, crime, had resulted. The town was
divided in two, the “haves” and the “have-nots,” so that there was
class hatred. People shook their heads sadly and declared that it all
went to prove over again what they had known from the beginning,
that giving people something for nothing inevitably demoralizes
their character. The citizens of A-town gloomily waited for prosper-
ity to return, with less and less hope as time went on.
The story of the other community, B-ville, was entirely different.
B-ville was a relatively isolated town, too far out of the way to be
reached by Rotary Club speakers and university extension services.
One of the aldermen, however, who was something of an economist,
explained to his fellow aldermen that unemployment, like sickness,
accident, fire, tornado, or death, hits unexpectedly in modern society,
irrespective of the victim’s merits or deserts. He went on to say that
B-ville’s homes, parks, streets, industries, and everything else B-ville
was proud of had been built in part by the work of these same
people who were now unemployed. He then proposed to apply a
principle of insurance: If the work these unemployed people had
previously done for the community could be regarded as a form of
premium paid to the community against a time of misfortune, pay-
ments now made to them to prevent their starvation could be re-
garded as insurance claims. He therefore proposed that all men of
good repute who had worked in the community in whatever line
of useful endeavor, whether as machinists, clerks, or bank managers,
be regarded as citizen policyholders, having claims against the city
A SEMANTIC PARABLE
4
in the case of unemployment for fifty dollars a month until such
time as they might again be employed. Naturally, he had to talk
very slowly and patiently, since the idea was entirely new to his
fellow aldermen. But he described his plan as a “straight business
proposition,” and finally they were persuaded. They worked out
the details as to the conditions under which citizens should be re-
garded as policyholders in the city’s social insurance plan to every-
body’s satisfaction and decided to give checks for fifty dollars a
month to the heads of each of B-ville’s indigent families.
B-ville’s claim adjusters, whose duty it was to investigate the
claims of the citizen policyholders, had a much better time than
A-town’s relief investigators. While the latter had been resentfully
regarded as snoopers, the former, having no moral lesson to teach
but simply a business transaction to carry out, treated their clients
with businesslike courtesy and got the same amount of information
as the relief investigators with considerably less difficulty. There
were no hard feelings. It further happened, fortunately, that news
of B-ville’s plans reached a liberal newspaper editor in the big city
at the other end of the state. This writer described the plan in a
leading feature story headed “B-VILLE LOOKS AHEAD. Great
Adventure in Social Pioneering Launched by Upper Valley Com-
munity.” As a result of this publicity, inquiries about the plan began
to come to the city hall even before the first checks were mailed out.
This led, naturally, to a considerable feeling of pride on the part of
the aldermen, who, being boosters, felt that this was a wonderful op-
portunity to put B-ville on the map.
Accordingly, the aldermen decided that instead of simply mailing
out the checks as they had originally intended, they would publicly
present the first checks at a monster civic ceremony. They invited
the governor of the state, who was glad to come to bolster J>is none-
too-enthusiastic support in that locality, the president of the state
university, the senator from their district, and other functionaries.
They decorated the National Guard armory with flags and got out
the American Legion Fife and Drum Corps, the Boy Scouts, and
other civic organizations. At the big celebration, each family to re-
ceive a social insurance check was marched up to the platform to
receive it, and the governor and the mayor shook hands with each
A SEMANTIC PARABLE 5
of them as they came trooping up in their best clothes. Fine speeches
were made; there was much cheering and shouting; pictures of the
event showing the recipients of the checks shaking hands with the
mayor, and the governor patting the heads of the children, were
published not only in the local papers but also in several metro-
politan picture sections.
Every recipient of these insurance checks had a feeling, therefore,
that he had been personally honored, that he lived in a wonderful
little town, and that he could face his unemployment with greater
courage and assurance, since his community was back of him. The
men and women found themselves being kidded in a friendly way
by their acquaintances for having been “up there with the big
shots,” shaking hands with the governor, and so on. The children
at school found themselves envied for having had their pictures in
the papers. All in all, B-ville’s unemployed did not commit suicide,
were not haunted by a sense of failure, did not turn to crime, did
not get personal maladjustments, did not develop class hatred, as
the result of their fifty dollars a month. . . .
At the conclusion of the Professor’s story, the discussion began:
“That just goes to show,” said the Advertising Man, who was
known among his friends as a realistic thinker, “what good promo-
tional work can do. B-ville’s city council had real advertising sense,
and that civic ceremony was a masterpiece . . . made everyone
happy . . . put over the scheme in a big way. Reminds me of the
way we do things in our business: as soon as we called horse-
mackerel tuna-fish, we developed a big market for it. I suppose if
you called relief ‘insurance,’ you could actually get people to like
it, couldn’t you?”
“WJiat do you mean, ‘calling’ it insurance?” asked the Social
Worker. “B-ville’s scheme wasn’t relief at all. It was insurance.
That’s what all such payments should be. What gets me is the
stupidity of A-town’s city council and all people like them in not
realizing that what they call ‘relief’ is simply the payment of just
claims which those unemployed have on a community in a complex
interdependent industrial society.”
“Good grief, man! Do you realize what you’re saying?” cried the
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A SEMANTIC PARABLE
Advertising Man in surprise. “Are you implying that those people
had any right to that money ? All I said was that it’s a good idea to
disguise relief as insurance if it’s going to make people any happier.
But it’s still relief, no matter what you call it. It’s all right to kid
the public along to reduce discontent, but we don’t need to kid
ourselves as well!”
“But they do have a right to that money! They’re not getting
something for nothing. It’s insurance. They did something for the
community, and that’s their prem — ”
“Say, are you crazy?”
“Who’s crazy?”
“You’re crazy. Relief is relief, isn’t it? If you’d only call things
by their right names . .
“But, confound it, insurance is insurance, isn’t it?”
(Since the gentlemen are obviously losing their tempers, it will be
best to leave them. The Professor has already sneaked out. When
last heard of, not only had the quarrelers stopped speaking to each
other, but so had their wives — and the Advertising Man was threat-
ening to disinherit his son if he didn’t break off his engagement
with the Social Worker’s daughter.)
This story has been told not to advance arguments in favor of
“social insurance” or “relief” or for any other political and economic
arrangement, but simply to show a fairly characteristic sample of
language in action. Do the words we use make as much difference
in our lives as the story of A-town and B-ville seems to indicate?
We often talk about “choosing the right words to express our
thoughts,” as if thinking were a process entirely independent of the
words we think in. But is thinking such an independent process?
Do the words we utter arise as a result of the thoughts we l^tve, or
are the thoughts we have determined by the linguistic systems we
happen to have been taught? The Advertising Man and the Social
Worker seem to be agreed that the results of B-ville’s program were
good, so that we can assume that their notions of what is socially
desirable are similar. Nevertheless, they cannot agree .
Alfred Korzybski, in his preface to Science and Sanity (which
discusses many problems similar to those discussed in this book).
A SEMANTIC PARABLE
7
asks the reader to imagine what the state of technology would be if
all lubricants contained emery dust, the presence of which had
never been detected. Machines would be short-lived and expensive;
the machine age would be a dream of the distant future. If, how-
ever, someone were to discover the presence of the emery, we should
at once know in what direction to proceed in order to release the
potentialities of machine power.
Why do people disagree? It isn’t a matter of education or in-
telligence, because quarreling, bitterness, conflict, and breakdown
are just as common among the educated as the uneducated, among
the clever as the stupid. Human relations are no better among the
privileged than the underprivileged. Indeed, well-educated people
are often the cleverest in proving that insurance is really insurance
and that relief is really relief — and being well educated they often
have such high principles that nothing will make them modify their
position in the slightest. Are disagreements then the inevitable re-
sults of the nature of human problems and the nature of man? Pos-
sibly so — but if we give this answer, we are confessing to being
licked before we have even started our investigations.
The student of language observes, however, that it is an extremely
rare quarrel that does not involve some kind of talking . Almost
invariably, before noses are punched or shooting begins, words are
exchanged — sometimes only a few, sometimes millions. We shall,
therefore, look for the “previously undetected emery dust” (or
whatever it is that heats up and stops our intellectual machinery)
in language — that is to say, our linguistic habits (how we talk and
think and listen) and our unconscious attitudes toward language .
If we are even partially successful in our search, we may get an
inkling of the direction in which to proceed in order to release the
now imperfectly realized potentialities of human co-operation.
P.S. Those who have concluded that the point of the story is that
the Social Worker and the Advertising Man were “only arguing
about different names for the same thing,” are asked to reread the
story and explain what they mean by (i) “only” and (2) “the same
thing.”
