THE MATHEMATICIAN AND general semanticist Alfred Korzybski once wrote, “The map is not the territory.” Anyone who’s ever used a road map can tell you that all those little lines and dots don’t adequately describe the sights you’ll see along your journey.
But when Korzybski wrote his famous line, a road map wasn’t what he had in mind. He was referring to the very words we use to communicate with one another, words that can have many meanings and easily could convey a message through a quick reading that’s quite the opposite of what’s intended.
If Korzybski were alive, he would’ve felt at home with the semantic intricacies of last year’s postal reform debate. A reform bill failed to pass before time ran out in the first session of the 109th Congress. Ironically, one of the key measures (S. 662) died not because of anything done by the Bush administration, the U.S. Postal Service or the USPS’ competitors. It died due to irreconcilable differences between two groups that ostensibly supported reform. The problem centered on a disagreement over the meaning of two key words — fairness and equity.
At first blush it’s hard to believe anyone would object to the inclusion of these words in any reform bill. That is, until it was revealed that in this case “fairness” and “equity” had nothing to do with one another.
The proponents of the fairness-and-equity dogma were a group of mailers who didn’t want to end the subsidies they received from other, more efficient mailers. They wanted to bind forever more-costly with less-costly mail. This would allow them to reap the benefits of others’ hard work, even though it also could hasten the end of our postal system.
This time, those who opposed fairness and equity were on the side of the angels. They wanted a postal system that was open to innovation and a finer tuning of products and services to better meet changing postal needs.
Indeed, as Korzybski could tell you, when it came to the language that made up this year’s postal debate, the map most definitely was not the territory.
GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.
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