Debra’s opening quotation is from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a novel in which the “pigs” get fat and prosperous and the “horses” are worked to death. In the novel, “pigs” and “horses” are metaphors for “capitalists” and “workers.” Animal Farm, an extended allegory, was written and published in 1946. In general, those were “dark days,” metaphorically speaking.
Orwell’s most famous novel, 1984, was written in 1949 as the Second World War was ending and the Cold War was beginning. Although people were hopeful that peace would bring prosperity, they had experienced significant loss in the recent past.
Allegory and metaphor have been around for a long time. You may remember something about plato’s Cave from a high school history class. Humans have been using metaphorical language probably since they first began using language, and people have been wondering about linguistic structures probably before the days of written communication. Neurolinguistics, however, are relatively new on the scene.
Neurolinguistic programming had its foundations in the psychology of the 1950s and was developed with the optimism of the 1960s. The principal concept behind Neuro-Linguistic Programming is that linguistic structures, including metaphors, are meaningful and can help people understand behavior (their own as well as that of others). NLP is often presented as a tool to influence others, and while it certainly can be used in that way, it is better used as a tool to help understand one’s own behavior and that of others. Language is inherently metaphorical in that it is a symbolic (linguistic) representation of something else.
If I say, for example, “There’s a wall between us”, I probably don’t mean an actual, physical wall. It is more likely that I have a metaphorical wall in mind. It is also worth noting that all communication influences in one way or another, so the most important thing is to be aware of the influencing nature of communication in general, and language in particular.
The original metaphor about the relationship between maps and territories was the map is not the territory, which was, of course, based on observable differences between maps and the physical territory they represented. Anyone who has done any cross-country driving knows that you do better if you have a current map of the highways and other roads you will need to follow to get from Point A to Point B because the territory changes over time. Once printed, of course, maps don’t change.
Several years ago Debra and I did a number of trainings in a fairly rural location in Tennessee. When we left the place we stayed to head to the training site, the electronic map in my car kept telling us to turn left where the road didn’t turn left—a left-turn at that point, in fact, would have put us down a steep hill into a river. It is always worth remembering that the map is not the territory.
Language is inherently metaphorical. A word is not the thing it represents, and a word can mean different things in different contexts. When we communicate with others, we typically fail to remember that the meanings we ascribe to different aspects of the communication may be interpreted in vastly different ways. I’m pretty sure no one ever said that communication was easy.
There is, after all, always a wall between us, and that’s probably a good thing. That wall allows you to be you and me to be me. It also means that we need to be careful with our communication and avoid “jumping to conclusions.” It is, of course, possible to read too much into that. If someone says, “Good morning” to you, you probably don’t need to ask what he or she meant by that.