The Map and the Territory

Perhaps there is something in our collective madness in the West that relates to our tendency to confuse the "word and the thing", the "map and the territory", the "signifier and the signified". It's a serious fallacy that Alfred Korzybski pointed out when describing the frequent confusion between the semantics of a term and what it represents.

All societies have constructed a representation of themselves, but none before ours had slipped into the hyper-logical insanity consisting in thinking that this representation is both true and real.

Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges both referenced the strange relationship that a world would have with the map that represents it if this map were on a 1:1 scale. The very title of Borges' story, "On Exactitude in Science", suggests that it is the very grip of logic on the mind that might lead us to get lost in the map rather than inhabit the world. As if our mind, having become flat, crushed the map and the world onto each other, replacing the relationship of meaning with a relationship of identity.

Western psychopathology would thus be inscribed in this map-territory. If we contemplate this revelation, the questions that arise are then metaphysical... Did the map we inhabit have its own will, with the purpose of possessing us? Does this possession, which deprives us of our humanity, drive us to create a machine-world, a total machine?