by William Bowman

Created on: January 23, 2011

Can we be swayed by symbols?

How can we not?  Our entire reality is symbolic.  To quote the movie: "You really think that's air you're breathing?"  Descartes led us down a truly ugly thorny path with the whole Evil Demon/Cogito thing.  Once you've accepted the possibility that your senses may be lying to you or being lied to themselves, you have to question everything.

If you doubt your senses, EVERYTHING is a symbol.  The real reality - if there is one - is unknowable.  Language, art, music...these things become symbols of symbols.  Our very identities get called into question, for who are we but a collection of instincts and memories?  Again, symbols of symbols. 

You can say "Cogito," and that's fine.  Latin does have some few advantages over English in that regard, not having separate subject and verb in such cases, but it still evades the ugly truth.  We have no idea what's really going on once we step outside the solid empirical fact of awareness.  No clue as to the true nature of things.

It may well be a dark and disturbing Lovecraftian nightmare of a universe for all we know.  Out of fear, we tell ourselves stories about how the world is.  We invent atoms and chemistry and physics.  We invent a million gods.  We invent morality and immorality.  We invent history.  We symbolize.  Let me reiterate this point: we do this to ourselves.  It is a means of avoiding insanity or paralyzing doubt and confusion.  We don't even think about it after a while.  Have you ever really looked at a newborn?  Notice that glazed, slightly stoned look?  That's only partly because its eyes aren't focusing right.  It's also because it hasn't built a protective web of symbols by which to interface with reality.  It is blinded not just by weak ocular muscles, but by too much senseless sensory input.  By chaos, as far as it can tell.

So look around you.  Re-evaluate your circumstances and motivations.  You live in a residential building of some sort because it symbolizes home, you work for money because it symbolizes authority, you lust after attractive people because they symbolize sexual pleasure.  The list goes on and on.  Our root motivations are the same as they have been for thousands of years, but the means we choose to employ to fulfill them, those are dictated by symbols that we often don't so much as pause to think about.

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