Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reversed order and so non-survival evaluation. If we use the nervous ystem in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival. Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction.
Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
ignorance, metaphysics, survival