Symbols I: Action at a Distance

The affairs of men are conducted by our own, man-made rules and according to man-made theories. Man’s achievements rest upon the use of symbols. For this reason, we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule symbols, rule us."                                Alfred Korbzyski, Science and Sanity, p. 76.

“Magic” may be defined as symbol manipulation. Symbols sent via any medium, from ink markings on parchment to bits and bytes on the Internet, can be defined as action at a distance.

My shopping list affects primarily myself and the merchant with whom I do business, but it also affects his supplier(s) and his/their supplier(s), and so on, back to the origins of what I bought and what they were made or grown from.

This may seem self-evident in the case of food or other products, but this kind of mutual affection also applies to non-tangibles like thoughts and ideas, and of symbols of all sorts, especially those things to which any kind of emotional charge of affectation can be attached. The symbols of mathematics exist almost entirely without emotional content, having only semantic content, while symbols associated with religious or political groups can have an immense amount of emotional content with little or no semantic content.

The disassociation of symbols from any emotional content is difficult, even if the affect is solely personal and not communal. There exist ways to diffuse these emotional bombs, but this may take isolation for the community to keep the process from being sabotaged, either accidentally or deliberately. This is becoming harder to do because of the ubiquitousness of mass media and the ham-handed collectivism of the modern state.

Symbols can affect the reptilian brain, the most primitive part of the human central nervous system, and thus often affect us without our being conscious of it. This seems especially true with symbols dealing with boundaries and tribal identification. Patriotism often exists as the last refuge of the unaware. The alpha dickhead barks, and the rest of the troop falls into line. This barking often references symbols associated with tribal identity, either internal cohesion or a threat, real or imagined, from another troop with different identifying symbols. The “enemy” troop can be within the same physical territory as well as external to it, and the “territory” may be internal or mental as much as geographical.

Being cognoscente of symbols and their manipulation qualifies as a basic necessity for rational thinking which would exist independent of emotionally charged symbols and their influence. The psychological effect is probably similar to the physical effect of standing in the eye of a hurricane: an uncanny feeling of stillness and the effect of the abnormally low pressure. But, like being in the eye of a hurricane, there is a lot of debris flying around in the periphery, and one must take care not to be hit by any of it.