A Man Without Mastery
- January 12th, 2009
- Posted in Blog
- By thirdprophet
- Write comment
What controls us in our daily lives?
Pause – reflect. What is it, in the everyday, which drives us to do as we do, to think as we think, to act and react how we do, defining and shaping the very moments of our day?
I think that to a large extent, humanity is driven by images and symbolism. What do I mean by this? Imaginary lines drawn in the dirt which symbolize nations. Lines of paint drawn on asphalt roads – and if you cross them, you can be fined. A red light means STOP – and people obey. There is no power in a light source coming through a red-tinted piece of plastic to make you come to a halt at the line. But people do anyway. The symbol of it compels you to. A red stamp over a form with the four-letter word “VOID” can mean so much. Has it changed so much since before the stamp?
Of course, there are larger forces at work behind those symbols. But that’s what symbols are – indications of something greater that lies beneath. Lines are symbols of law, property, boundaries. Colors symbolize states of action or emotion; we recognize these simple things without any deeper thought. They become simply as they are. The symbolism of the symbol is lost, and it becomes an entity in and of itself. I think that this has been the course of human history – something that represents, becomes the thing it represents.
Take money, for example. Money didn’t always exist, obviously – and currency itself was representation of an actual good or service. Now, for most people, money is a thing in and of itself – it doesn’t represent value, or currency. It is value and currency. And we’ve now moved far past the evolution of symbols as self-entities and moved into assigning symbolism to things which in and of themselves do not represent such.
My mind is a bit muddled tonight, so this is a hard concept for me to translate from thought to writing. What I want to drive at is the power of imagery and symbolism in our lives, and how much credit we attribute to it – perhaps without realizing it. How much we follow the dictates of pictures and icons without thinking twice. I’m not saying, run the red light, or go into the women’s bathroom instead of the men’s (if you’re a male, that is). I’m just saying – have you really thought about the why, and realized the power of these simple things?
Of course, this whole issue has become obfuscated further with the digital age. Our computers are built off imagery and symbolism. Icons on our desktops represent something – folders, or applications, or whatever – and hyperlinks are just words that represent a connection to something else farther away. On this two-dimensional screen is a gateway to a world of pictures and words that are so much larger than themselves. Can we truly comprehend the scope of how much we have given ourselves to this idea?
It really makes me reel to think about it. This is without even going into the age-old idea of how much TV and media controls our lives and thoughts with the way that they present their materials. That’s a whole other post in and of itself, really. Looking around in this room alone, I’m surrounded by this concept – symbols as representations which have evolved into an understood self-sufficient entity, accepted by society the world over.
How did we get here? How did these things gain the power to tell us how to act, how to react? Is it necessarily a bad thing? I think it could be, if we lose sight of what’s really here and in front of our very eyes. This blinking blue light doesn’t mean anything. It’s just electricity flowing through an LED off of an alternating current. But to me, it represents internet connectivity, network activity, it means that I’m online. When that light goes dead, I understand that I’m offline.
Every action, every word, and even every thought can be reduced further to drive deeper into what they really mean and represent, I think. It is maddening to think about, which is why I think that we so often live at face-value. But I find it very difficult sometimes to go through my day or even just watch a movie without thinking of all the implications contained therewithin. Am I the only one who’s this crazy? Surely, it couldn’t have always been like this. Is there something about the evolution of mankind that has led to this gradual replacement of meaning with masks?
Yo.
It’s an interesting thought process you’ve got going on here. As I was reading I came to wonder what the difference was between these “symbols” and any other form of communication. Take, for example, a stoplight. It tells us to stop.
But right there, the word ‘stop’. Your theory includes the perspective that the symbols have become their meaning. Is that not also true for words? ‘Stop’, for example, is a word that represents the act of halting an action.
Hell, take it a step further. ‘No trespassing’ is two words that would have a meaning similar to that of, say, yelling and banging on things and throwing stuff at trespassers, or pissing on a tree.
My point I suppose is that I see the symbols here as almost a higher form of communication. The transparency of the fact that they’re mere symbols is no different than the transparency of the fact that what I’m writing here is also just symbols. It’s no wiser to ignore a stoplight than it is to ignore a court order or an army or a horde of angry monkies.
I think that’s true, but I also think that words are separate from symbols – because they’re not images. I think at some level I distinguish language and symbols (but not necessarily symbols IN languages), because they are two different things. But there must have been a circular evolution of communication there. We thought up language to represent in logical cohesion the things that we see and label – and then ended up using those very things to symbolize (in crude forms, perhaps) the language we’d invented.
Language, I can understand the natural evolution of. Symbols, too. It’s when symbols begin to take on a power of their own that I start to become baffled. It’s understandable, but astounding in its pervasiveness in our everyday lives. It’s taken for granted in many cases, I think, and that’s when it seriously begins to challenge my view of life.
Not that symbols should be ignored, but that they should be understood. There’s so many levels of communications happening there – what’s being shown (red light), what’s being stated (stop), what’s being implied behind the statement (or you’ll be fined), the natural understanding of these things and the simple compliance therewith, on top of the simple evolution of language and understanding that had to happen before such symbols could begin to take force.
What’s the next step, really? We’ve gone from grunting to saying words to writing to establishing formal language to giving abstracts in language to symbols and up even further. We’re such easily suggestible creatures, and animals of habit. We become accustomed, we accept, and then it becomes the norm.