Postal Reform: "The Map Is Not The Territory"

The following is a perspective by postal commentator Gene Del Polito for Direct magazine. The views expressed are not only the author's, but also the views of many others whose economic lifeblood depends on a viable universal mail delivery system.

The mathematician and general semanticist Alfred Korzybski once wrote: "The map is not the territory." Anyone who's ever navigated to a destination with a road map can tell you that the little lines and dots you see on a map do not adequately describe the sights you'll see along your journey. The map simply is not the territory.

When Korzybski wrote his famous words, however, he didn't have road maps as the principle he had in mind. He was referring to the very words we use to communicate our thoughts with one another. Words that sometimes have many meanings that are the antithesis of what otherwise might be conveyed by a simple reading.

If Korzybski was alive today, he would have felt at home with the intricacies of general semantics as they played out in the postal reform debate of 2005. As most now know, Congress failed to pass a postal reform bill before time ran out in the first session of the 109th Congress. Ironically, one of the key bills (S. 662) died not because of anything the Bush Administration, or the Postal Service, or the competitors of the Postal Service did. Rather, it died because the irreconcilable differences between two groups that ostensibly supported reform that was born of a disagreement over the meaning of a few key words. In this case, those words were "fairness and equity."

At first blush, one would find it hard to believe that anyone would object to the inclusion of these words as a cardinal commandment in any postal reform bill. Until, that is, it was revealed that "fairness and equity," in this instance, had nothing to do with either.

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 to enable them to reap the benefits of others' hard work, even though doing so could hasten the demise of the postal system as we know it today.

In this case, those who opposed "fairness and equity" were on the side of the angels. They wanted a postal system that was open to innovation, new product development, and a finer tuning of postal products and services to better meet a nation's changing postal needs.

Indeed, as Korzybski could easily tell you, when it came to the words that made up this year's postal debate, the map most definitely was not the territory.