America, The Idea

Sorry, MAGA Racists: The USA Was Indeed Founded on Active Intellectual Engagement With Philosophic Ideas, Ideas Which in Logic Ultimately Lead to Acceptance of the Rights of Nonwhite Immigrants

Stuart K. Hayashi

This Time magazine special edition commemorating the founding’s 250th anniversary admits that the American Revolution was and is a “Revolution of Ideas”

You may ask, ‘How did this tradition get started?’ I’ll tell you. . . . I don’t know.
—Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof

Introduction
I notice an internal contradiction in what is said by MAGA white nationalists. MAGA white nationalists shriek that nonwhites, such as engineers from India, are ruining the West by immigrating to it, and therefore they should be barred from entry. In reply, free-enterprisers point out that the MAGA white nationalists are contradicting the Declaration of Independence and the very philosophy upon which the American republic was founded. Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, has turned out to be surprisingly articulate in explaining this position. He began as a conventional leftwinger blaming capitalism for the world’s problems. But, as he says in a speech to Georgetown University, he came to realize that political-economic liberalization is actually the strongest remedy for the Third World’s poverty. And in holding up the liberalizing philosophy of the USA’s founding as his case study, Bono praises the republic as an idea. To quote his own words, 

 ...America is an idea, isn’t it? I mean Ireland’s a great country but it’s not an idea. Great Britain’s a great country but it’s not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world: as one of the greatest ideas in human history, right up there with the Renaissance... right up there with crop rotation... ....that idea, the America idea, it’s an idea, the idea is that you and me are created equal...

The idea that life is not meant to be endured, but enjoyed. The idea that if we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us, we can do the rest. ...

This country was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper. And God love you for it, because these aren’t just American ideas anymore. ... You’ve brought them into the world. . . . I know Americans say they have a bit of the world in them, and you do. The family tree has a lot of branches. But the thing is… the world has a bit of America in it, too. These truths — your truths — they are self-evident in us. 

In 1983, Leonard Peikoff as well made this explicit. The USA, he ascertained, “at root is an ideology. . . . The Founding Fathers explicitly championed a certain philosophy, which they made the basis of America’s distinctive political institutions and national character, and that philosophy to some extent survives among the citizens to this day.” And we free-enterprisers have repeatedly emphasized that this philosophy refutes everything spewed by the MAGA white nationalists.

Hence, the MAGA white nationalists have a rejoinder to us free-enterprisers. MAGA white nationalists stamp their feet and cry out that the USA “is not a collection of ideas.” That’s how failed comedian turned white supremacist Sam Hyde phrases it. In his viral Twitter video with over 21 million views and over 29 thousand retweets, he moans, “There is this disturbing idea...that America is just a collection of ideas.” No, “You have to fight for not...the notion of ‘America as this collection of ideas.’ That’s not what it is.” He dismisses the Declaration and other founding documents as an empty set of words. “You’re not fighting for a paragraph” (emphasis his). J. D. Vance, the vice president under Donald Trump, similarly sneers, “People will not fight for [philosophic] abstractions...”

Rather, MAGA white nationalists such as Hyde and Vance maintain that America consists of two other objects. “America is not just an ‘idea,’” J. D. Vance continues. “It is a group of people with a shared history.” — shared ethnic history. “. . . It is, in short, a nation,” with nation here having a meaning similar to ethnic tribe, such as in how the Huns, Vandals, Angles, Franks, and Biblical Moabites were a “nation.” These are all euphemisms for blood. And Vance would have that although Americans will not fight for “abstractions,...they will fight for their home” — in effect, the soil. Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance would have it that the USA is all about blood and soil. But when they don’t want to admit so explicitly that it’s all about race for them, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists say the USA is not about “ideas” but traditions (translation: only the traditions associated with those of their own skin color) — what J. D. Vance euphemizes as white Americans’ “shared history.” 

As a case study in tradition, Hyde pontificates, “Nothing significant that gets built, gets built on an individualistic scale. The greatest things that get built: cathedrals — and, if you disagree with this, you’re just wrong . . . — cathedrals are built over hundreds of years. They’re built not just by the army of stone masons who build them but by the towns who pay for it.” And he continues, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. . . . It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”

And in showing a complete lack of understanding of what culture entails, Sam Hyde adds, “This is not learned stuff.”

This denigration of the Founding philosophy — denying America’s status as an idea — is a new low from the political Right, especially its members who claim to be American. Prior to Donald Trump’s initial run for President in late 2015, the USA’s political conservatives frequently gave lip service to the Founding Fathers. These political conservatives were never consistent. They conveniently evaded the fact that their efforts to unite church and State directly contradicted the words and spirit of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Joel Barlow. But these MAGA white nationalists have given up this old pretense of respecting the Founders. And, I suppose, it is best that they do. It exposes MAGA white nationalists in their fundamental anti-Americanism.

Of special interest to me here is the internal contradiction in proclaiming that rather than “ideas,” America is about “culture” and traditions (“culture” and traditions of white people, apparently). The fact is that culture and traditions are, by definition, learned. More to the point: culture and traditions are expressions of ideas, and therefore traditions ultimately come down to ideas. But these “traditions” that the white nationalists uphold are ideas and abstractions to which they want Americans to pledge passively and unthinkingly. When they deride “ideas,” philosophy, and “abstractions,” what Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance really mean is that they reject the active engagement with ideas that was practiced by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and the other Founders.

All Traditions Are Customs, But a Tradition Has a Symbolic Meaning That Goes Beyond the Custom Itself
To understand what is meant, we can do something that Sam Hyde has neglected to do: we can bother to consider what is the definition of tradition. Traditions are customs practiced in particular types of settings and on particular occasions, and these customs have become long-established in their respective societies. So far, Sam Hyde and the other MAGA white nationalists would agree. But there is a second part of the definition that they omit. All traditions are customs, but not all customs are traditions. For a custom to be a tradition, there must be an additional component. What else makes an action a tradition is that is a gesture. Culture consists of actions considered important not only in and of themselves but also as symbolic representations of something else important to that society. And all symbolic gestures exist in the realm of ideas.

Consider a traditional Western wedding ceremony. Absent of any formal marriage ceremony, people can form pair bonds. They can form a unit where people live together, pool their assets, and have sex. These can be considered common-law marriages, and the marriage ceremony is not needed for that. Rather, the nuptials are a formalized ritual to codify the pair bond that already exists. The wedding ceremony, like all traditional ceremonies, is a ritual in which people express their appreciation for a set of actions — the pair-bond and all it entails — and is not the actual set of actions being celebrated. The wedding ceremony is not the pair bond but a symbol expressing appreciation for lifelong commitment to the pair bond in question. To phrase it differently, the wedding ceremony is not the marriage but a supplemental performance of the idea of the marriage.

Within this larger symbol are smaller symbols. The bride wears white as a gesture to represent her relative chastity prior to the marriage. The throwing of the bouquet is a ritual symbolizing the idea that other wedding attendants, too, will soon be able to enjoy what the bride and groom get to have.

Eating particular types of food has practical value, and need not have tradition attached to it. But sometimes eating a particular food on a particular occasions is said to have cultural value and be a tradition. When that happens, that particular dish is no longer valued only for the directly practical values of nourishment, nutrition, and the pleasure of taste. Indeed, the dish becomes a symbol of something — something of value in that society — other than the dish itself. And ideas are involved there as well.

The is seen, and tasted, with the tradition of eating turkey on Thanksgiving. Many Americans could prepare a turkey feast almost any other day of the year. But eating this bird on Thanksgiving is a ritual for family members to represent their gratitude for what everything good in their lives, including each other. Hence, the feast itself is not about the turkey as much as it is about the values the ritual represents — again, specific ideas.

Eating any particular cuisine at least in part due to its ethnic history is about ideas. The Japanese diet originally formed because of geographic isolation. Japan is an archipelago surrounded by sea animals, and therefore seafood figures prominently in the Japanese diet. Historically, it was easier to be a fisherman than to try to be like the Steppes peoples and raise livestock. Originally, then, Japanese people ate seafood only for practical reasons.

But with global trade, a rich person in Japan now can theoretically go for long periods of time eating food not caught from the ocean. Often, people eat traditional Japanese food not only for the taste. Those of Japanese descent want to experience something that their ancestors did, such as eat the same food. When non-Japanese people try Japanese cuisine, it has a lot to do with wanting to experience other cultures — the idea is to be exploratory. Eating food from other cultures is an expression of one’s openness to new experiences and new kinds of people. Accordingly, in the modern world the tradition of eating “ethnic food” has a lot to do with ideas.

(As Murray Rothbard-influenced, patent-hating anarcho-“capitalists” often make common cause with white nationalists, some might interject here. In trying to stigmatize intellectual property rights as some form of protectionism and monopolism, this is the point where I have heard them say in their usual churlishness, But a patent or copyright claims you own an idea. If a tradition is an idea, you want a corporation to patent your ethnic traditions? That is a false conflation on their part. Customs and traditions are generalized ideas, as are entire product categories. By contrast, patents and copyrights recognize your ownership over a very specific configuration of your own origination. I have written of that difference here and here and here and here.)

An apologist from the Intellectual Dark Web might chime in, “Yes, ideas are important. But what we object to, is people talking only about ideas that are pie-in-the-sky and not focusing on the actual actions taken to help the American people.” As Sam Hyde says in his viewed-21-million-times tirade, “...America’s not a collection of ideas; America is a people [a race]: Americans.” But for the Intellectual Dark Web to say that its criticism of America-as-an-idea is not about practicability is for the Intellectual Dark Web to whack at a straw man. No free-enterpriser who stresses the importance of ideas does so at the expense of concrete action. The point of ideas is to implement them. A plan — a complex set of ideas — to buy a home is made for the purpose of buying the home. A schematic explaining an invention is drafted to produce units of that invention. 

In turn, the Founders drafted the Declaration not to muse idly in a parlor, but to put such ideas into practice. Hence, they produced a social system freer than what it had existed before. And to the extent that such a social system was successful, it was not due to, but in spite of, political collectivists such as Sam Hyde.

Sam Hyde’s cry that “you’re not fighting for a paragraph,” as is J. D. Vance’s pronouncement that people “will not fight for abstractions,” is belied by the very oath required of those serving in the federal government. The President of the United States and personnel of the armed forces do not take an oath to serve and defend Sam Hyde’s white race — “a people.” Nor is the oath for the white people’s “shared history” of which J. D. Vance speaks. Instead, they take an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution — every “paragraph” of it. More specifically, it is that insofar as the U.S. military is employed wisely against genuine threats, the U.S. military fights to defend the sort of civilian life that the “paragraph” describes.

The Choice Is Not Traditions Versus Ideas, But Respectively of Passive Conformity to Some Ideas Versus Active Intellectual Engagement With Evidence
And, of course, even the MAGA white nationalists’ use of the term tradition is a red herring. They don’t value “traditions” in general. They disparage Islamic traditions. Even MAGA white nationalists who are Catholic are unfriendly toward the Catholic traditions of Latinos. The white nationalists only like “traditions” that they associate with their own skin color. And their skin color is just something unchosen that they just have. That is apparent in Sam Hyde’s conflation of skin color with “culture.” To revisit the quotation from earlier, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. This is not learned stuff. It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”

Notice Sam Hyde’s equivocation of “culture” with “genetic memory” and that which is innate, “hardwired.” Culture and traditions consist of sets of actions that people enact voluntarily. By definition, they are not “hardwired.” But in the warped (mis)interpretation of Sam Hyde and his many white-nationalist fans, such human actions are as innate and involuntary as skin color. Hence Sam Hyde says nonsensically, “This is not learned stuff.”

To test Sam Hyde’s assertion, you can look at differences in traditions among people who are of the same racial heritage but who live in different parts of the globe. Persons of Korean descent in the USA often behave with different customs — different ideas on what is, or is not, socially appropriate — than do people in North Korea. In the USA, rap music is considered “Black culture.” But rap music was not associated with Black people in the 1940s or 1970s, prior to rap music being invented. Rap music is not as popular among Black people in West Africa as it is in the USA. That is because culture is indeed something that is not hardwired. Culture consists of customs. Every custom had to be invented by some individual. Afterward, other people adopted that custom — to wit, they learned it.

Every tradition began as an untraditional innovation and was therefore adopted for reasons other than “It’s a tradition.” As white nationalists frequently invoke the fall of Rome in misleading ways, a particular historic account from ancient Rome is instructive. Yes, MAGA white nationalists say that the Western Roman Empire fell from being to open to outsiders — (white-skinned) Germanic barbarians — and the modern West will destroy itself through similar openness. By contrast, in an actual ancient Roman debate about openness to foreigners, the emperor Claudius made an important observation about traditions which these same MAGA white nationalists prefer to evade. Tacitus quotes the emperor as saying, “Everything, Senators, which we now hold to be of the highest antiquity [tradition], was once new. . . .This [new] practice [with regard to openness to outsiders] too will establish itself, and what we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.”

This, and every other tradition, was something learned. A tradition might have begun as a practice done squarely for practical value. That was the case of Japanese people mostly eating seafood. But the custom might have begun, from the start, as a symbolic gesture. In either case, what is now called a tradition is called such — rather than only a custom or practice — because it is a gesture representing some value other than itself. Traditions are ideas.

But there are two different approaches we can take to traditions and all other ideas that have ingrained themselves into the culture. We can take a passive-and-uncritical approach to them. Conversely, we can engage with traditions and other long-cherished ideas, which means being critical and selective about them, which requires actual thought.

The passive-and-uncritical approach is to accept a tradition unthinkingly. The insinuation is that the tradition was good enough for my family, and so I should practice it, and there is no more to consider. That is the approach taken by those who say, “You should follow a tradition because it’s our tradition, and that’s that.” A variant that is only slightly more thoughtful, and which was popular among twentieth-century European political conservatives who cite Edmund Burke, is one that goes, The fact that the tradition has lasted so long, into our own day, is already proof that the tradition is time-tested and has served us well. So the fact that the custom has earned the status of ‘tradition,’ means the custom is worthy. In that respect, I am justified in saying ‘That a particular custom is a tradition is justification enough to practice it.’

And, of course, that unthinking approach is lazy. For millennia, slavery was traditional. Slavery was a tradition not merely because of its ostensive practical benefits for the slave masters, but because it represented particular ideas that were convenient for the politically-influential in general. It embodied their larger assumption that those in power have every rightful authority to domineer over others by force. In some Mesoamerican Empires, such as that of the Aztecs, ritual human sacrifice was considered an indispensable tradition. The traditional sermons delivered in the very cathedrals that Sam Hyde extols are all about ideas. And, contrary to Sam Hyde, the ideas in such sermons are due for critical reexamining. That a custom is a tradition, is indeed not justification enough. That brings us to the second approach to traditions.

The second and contrasting approach is to recognize that traditions themselves must be subject to judgment and scrutiny other than “It’s a tradition.” It means embracing the realization that some traditions are good and worth preserving, whereas others are inadequate and due for abandonment, replacement, or at least modification. And that is a major role of Enlightenment philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy calls upon us to examine our traditions and select the good from the bad. 

Since the founding of the republic, reading Enlightenment philosophy has itself become a tradition. The fact that the free-enterprise philosophy of the Founders and the rest of the Enlightenment has become a tradition in America is frequently cited by pretentious anti-capitalists as proof that such free-enterprise philosophy is conservative, stodgy, and obsolete. These pretentious people then tout their tired old Socialism and Progressivism as the hip new innovation on the cutting edge, omitting how their verbiage is broadly a repackaging of the political-economic collectivism of medieval guilds that Enlightenment liberal free-enterprise philosophy supplanted. 

Contrary to those pretentious anti-capitalists, it is the case that Enlightenment philosophy and Founders such as Thomas Jefferson have told us that free-enterprise philosophy becoming a tradition is not a basis good enough to embrace it. Once again, even these — the best of ideas — must be justified by some other, more-objective standard rather than appealing to “tradition.”

Anticipating our century’s nonsense about tradition-for-tradition’s-sake, Thomas Jefferson elucidated, “...institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, ...new truths disclosed, ... institutions must advance also...” Those who uphold tradition unthinkingly “might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” And in terms of actually yielding equitable results, his free-enterprise philosophy has held up very well. The free-enterprise philosophy of the Enlightenment, enshrined in the USA’s Founding documents — what Sam Hyde denigrates as just a “paragraph” — is indeed a great American tradition. But, contrary to Friedrich August von Hayek, it is not great on account of being a tradition.

Consider a well-publicized contrast. The MAGA white nationalists’ appeal to American traditions not out of any appreciation for what those traditions represent but out of demand that everyone conform to the norms of the white Christian majority. That is why they throw tantrums about American football players kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality but simultaneously deny that the republic was founded upon “ideas” and denigrate the founding documents as just some “paragraph.”

This is self-contradiction comparable to how similar American rightwingers — there is overlap between they and MAGA — prioritize the American flag over free speech. The American flag symbolizes freedom, including freedom of speech. That includes the right to be on the land of a willing landholder as you burn, in protest, a U.S. flag that is your own rightful possession. Those who would outlaw flag-burning are expressing not appreciation for what the flag represents but instead turning it into a fetish — an expression not of reverence for the American flag’s meaning but as an artifact of mindless idolatry. That is fitting, as mindless idolatry is the most consistent manifestation of MAGA. Thomas Jefferson would shake his head in dismay.

That brings to mind the MAGA white nationalists’ self-contradiction and hypocrisy over free speech and the First Amendment themselves. As numerous private parties were peaceably avoiding them, these MAGA people mischaracterized such avoidance as “censorship,” branding themselves “free-speech absolutists.” That these demagogues denigrate the fact of the republic’s founding in abstract philosophy demonstrates they do not understand or care about the freedom of speech and the First Amendment.

The First Amendment exists exactly because of the American republic being founded upon active engagement with philosophic ideas. The Declaration of Independence invoked the liberal republican Enlightenment-philosophy ideas of John Locke and “Levelers” like Richard Overton that throughout the prior century the Crown had tried to squelch. In the name of such ideas and their further development, the Founders established the First Amendment.

Freedom of speech, contrary to Sam Hyde’s cohorts and to Donald Trump, is not about the visceral ejaculation of every prejudice on whim. Rather, freedom of speech is the processing and exchanging of ideas, a facet of the larger freedom of thought, which is what the First Amendment is supremely about. Among the amendments to the Constitution, this one is the first exactly because the freedom of thought is the one of prime importance — freedom of thought, as we have discussed earlier, gives rise to the freedom of action that is freedom in general. In deriding the USA’s founding upon philosophic ideas, the MAGA nationalists minimize the very basis of the First Amendment that they pretend to cherish.

For a long time, I was under the misapprehension that the opposite of bigotry from white nationalists was: the policy of being open to new ideas. But simply keeping oneself open is too passive. It is too passive to wait for new ideas to come along. The true opposite of bigotry is curiosity. This means proactively pursuing one’s own curiosity — like babies and the Biblical Eve —out of one’s own selfish desire to know. That results in exactly what Sam Hyde fears: engagement with ideas, so much so that an entire republic can be founded upon innovative philosophy. Speaking of Sam Hyde’s precious centuries-long construction projects, the play Inherit the Wind puts it very well: “An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.”

Conclusion: The Nation of the Enlightenment
Ayn Rand has observed the exceptionalism here of the USA’s founding. Sam Hyde’s fellow white nationalists wail that white people have no ethno-state of their own. The reality is that almost all white-majority countries are ethno-states founded by a single tribe. It’s called England because it was founded by the tribe after which it was named, the Angles. Yet another well-known nation is called France because it was founded by the Franks. Inasmuch as these tribes founded a country to maintain their traditions, the founding was based on ideas. But as far as it was about “tradition” per se, it was from an uncritical acceptance of those ideas — of accepting them from one’s elders without question.

What makes America exceptional was not only that it was founded by ideas, but by very conscious examination of, and grappling with, such ideas. Upon separation from England, Americans could have set up a new monarchy because that was the tradition of the people from whom they descended. But upon examining that form of government and comparing it against others, the Founders decided to go with institutions previously tried by the ancient Athenians and the Romans but with the aid of the newest philosophic ideas to make these institutions more liberal than what their Mediterranean forebears had conceived. Ayn Rand notes that whereas these other Western societies, including those of the Greeks and Romans, were a result of “historical accident,” the American republic was from “philosophical design.”

Leonard Peikoff, too, observes, “America is the only country in history created not by meaningless warfare” nor some “geographical accident” in which some tribe like the Angles found itself, “but deliberately, on the basis of certain fundamental ideas.”

Thomas Paine understood how the founding of America was more about innovation than incurious adherence to tradition. In Common Sense, the very pamphlet instrumental to inspiring the American Revolution, he reminded readers, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And that is what the Founders did.

Migo: “But you want to . . . what? Tear down everything our world is built on?”

Meechee: “It’s not just about tearing down old ideas. It’s about finding new ones.”
—Smallfoot

Enlightenment philosophy’s celebration of such curiosity is so vital to the USA’s founding that it is enshrined in our Constitution. A major impetus for the founding document’s codification of the rights to copyright and patent is that, as accurately noted in the document itself, these intellectual property rights reward and thereby “promote the progress of science and the useful arts...” The search for new developments is our American tradition but the new developments themselves, of course, begin as something that is definitionally the opposite of tradition.

Bono is right about America. America never could have become a global leader had it been only a set of traditions and, as Sam Hyde also puts it, “a people” (a tribe). As noted in a very American movie,

People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do it as Bruce Wayne. As a man [and as just “a people” —S.H.] I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol? As a symbol I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.

Ah, but Donald Trump and Sam Hyde are trying their hardest to corrupt it. The fact that America is an idea is the source of what has made it so important and so powerful for over two centuries, prior to MAGA finally being able to threaten it. As a symbol — an idea — America carries an influence that goes beyond the sum total of its human population, those who are white and otherwise. It is as a symbol — an idea — that America inspires people the world over who are yearning for greater freedom, the exact people whom Donald Trump and Sam Hyde are trying to shut out. That is what the historian James Truslow Adams meant when he coined the American dream. The expression the American dream is just another way of iterating that America is a great philosophic idea. And America is a great symbol and great idea because it is not a symbol and idea only, but enacts its own founding philosophic values to the extent that it finally allows for the liberty of all. It is not those of Latin or Middle Eastern descent, but the ugliness of Sam Hyde and Stephen Miller that needs to be deported. 

 
Both approaches to tradition — the incurious approach of Sam Hyde and the other Great-Replacement white nationalists versus the curious approach of the Founders — involve ideas. But note that the latter involves much more thinking and, hence, ideas play a much more active role. As Ayn Rand noted, the USA was founded not only upon ideas, but upon very conscious engagement with them. And that is why this latter approach to tradition is anathema to Sam Hyde and other white nationalists screeching about a “Great Replacement.”

The verbiage of Sam Hyde and other white nationalists does not consist of actual arguments but instead of a litany of slogans. “Demography is destiny.” “Don’t be a soy-boy.” “Go Woke, go broke.” “You can have a welfare state or you can have open borders. You can’t have both.” “You’re a cuck.” “I was red-pilled.” “It’s White Genocide.” “It’s the Great Replacement.” These amount to thought-stopping clichés. A thought-stopping cliché is a tactic of a dangerous mind-control cult. When they notice underlings beginning to question the cult leader’s arbitrary dictates, the underling’s supervisors recite pithy slogans to them to quell them and preempt them from weighing pros and cons of what they are presented with. The sloganeering is the “cliché” part, and the preemption is the “thought-stopping.” Technically, thought-stopping clichés are themselves ideas, but they are the sort of ideas intended to precluded further thought and further inquiry, as all such rationalizations do. They are stale, simple ideas crafted to discourage people from philosophizing more sophisticated, more advanced ideas into their heads.

Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists, of course, would have us embrace their racism unthinkingly, going as far as conflating customs and traditions and culture as being as inherent as skin color — “This is not learned stuff.” Bothering to examine the facts about culture, tradition, and the learned-versus-unlearned is what immunizes someone against Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists. In that respect, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists are correct to hate the fact that America was founded upon “ideas.” The fact that some people still bother to think is a fact that prevents Sam Hyde and other white nationalists from winning over the rest of the population, white-skinned and otherwise. And, on at least some implicit level, Same Hyde and the other white nationalists notice this.

It is not mere random coincide that MAGA denigrates the USA’s founding on philosophic “ideas” and also demands that exclusion of persons of other “races.” The first is in service to the second. To recognize that USA’s founding upon “ideas” would lead to renewed attention on what those specific ideas were and are — that, though far from being applied as consistently as they should have been, both back then and now, they were always about cognizance of the equal rights of all human beings to liberty. And this is the liberty that MAGA is denying to dark-skinned people, such as engineers from India, in denying them entry. To acknowledge (1) the USA’s founding upon the ideas of Enlightenment liberty is ultimately to acknowledge (2) the rights of dark-skinned people. MAGA is trying to kill both.

And note that for most of its history, that acknowledgment of the equal right to liberty for all “races” has not been part of the history of white people or the Judo-Christian religious tradition. It was only subsequent to the rise of Enlightenment liberty philosophy, as promulgated by secularists like Josiah Wedgwood, Adam Smith, and Denis Diderot, that particular Christian sects — mostly the Quakers, Methodists, and Unitarians — took a strong interest in abolishing chattel slavery. When Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists uphold most white-people traditions but conspicuously not the Enlightenment-liberal philosophy one, they are able to uphold most white-people traditions while excluding the one aspect of Western Civilization that was singly most responsible for enfranchising all of the nonwhite denizens of that culture.

That, despite the past codification of racial discrimination into the USA’s laws, the Founding philosophy ultimately requires the abolition of such discrimination, is acknowledged implicitly in Sam Hyde’s diatribe. In the diatribe, he proclaims that if many engineers from India migrated to Japan, you would be wrong to think that this could “turn an Indian person into a Japanese person...”, and this also applies to engineers from India moving to the United States. Hyde is still cowardly to say directly that he conflates “American” with “white,” and that their non-whiteness precludes anyone from India from being American. That cowardice is why Sam Hyde instead makes the insipid analogy about how someone from India can never truly be a Japanese national. But Sam Hyde does say directly that immigrants from India “are being used” — by whom exactly, Sam Hyde does not specify — “to replace white people.”

But American independence from Great Britain was not about the racial anxieties mouthed by Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance. The Declaration of Independence did not say that the American colonists had come to interpret themselves as being a different ethnicity or race from those of English metropole, and that, as a separate ethnicity or “race,” they wanted the new republic as an independent ethnostate. No. The American colonists separated themselves from the British government based not on race — not on them being a separate “people” — but on a difference in governing philosophy, on their having different ideas on how the colonies should be governed. J. D. Vance’s assertion that Americans “will not fight for abstractions” would have been news to those who fought in the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was chock-full of philosophic abstractions.

I have heard similar white nationalists pronounce that the observation that the USA is a “nation of immigrants” is not from the Founding period but only gained currency in the year 1959 when Ted Sorensen and Jules Davids ghostwrote for John F. Kennedy, Sr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning book with that title. As these white nationalists uphold white people’s “traditions” as inherently good, their insinuation is that the recognition of the USA is a nation of immigrants is diminished if the recognition turns out to be relatively new and not-so-traditional after all. That goes along with these same white nationalists lamenting that the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, largely championed by John F.’s younger brother Ted Kennedy, created the USA’s “open border.” As I have written before (1, 2, 3), the Hart-Celler Act did not do that, and, though it liberalized immigration in some aspects, the same bill made immigration more difficult in others.

But the truth is that a good idea is good on its own merits regardless of whether it is old or new. The celebration of America’s immigrants would be worthwhile even if the idea came from 1959 rather than the Founding period.

Yet the reality, as usual, is that these white nationalists are incorrect about American history. The observation that the USA is a nation of an increasingly diverse set of immigrants is one that goes back at least as far as John Adams, the USA’s second president and the brains behind American independence. And in the same observation, Adams acknowledged how the founding had been about active engagement with ideas. Writing in the year 1818, and looking back on how, decades earlier, American colonists were initially reluctant to separate from British rule, Adams commented on how it was active engagement with philosophic ideas that eventually united the diversity in the immigrant populations in this cause. As he verbalized it,

This radical change in the principles, opinions sentiments and affection of the people, was the real American Revolution. . . . The Colonies had grown up under...so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners and habits had so little resemblance...that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprize. The complete accomplishment of it, in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.

Adams said it himself — that rigorous philosophizing by a diversity of peoples was “the real American Revolution.” America, at her best, is an idea. And she will remain a great idea to the extent that we uphold and defend this idea against Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Sam Hyde, and other racist illiberals like them.

On Saturday, January 17, 2026, I added the point about the First Amendment and the quotations from J. D. Vance. On Sunday, January 18, 2026, I added the quotation from John Adams about the American colonies being a collection of diverse immigrant groups. On Saturday, May 9, 2026, I changed the thumbnail photo of this post to my April 8, 2026 photo of me holding the Time magazine special issue commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Americsan foudning and noting that the U.S. founding was and is a “Revolution of Ideas.”

Happy Stu Year?

Stuart K. Hayashi

Uploading the image above has become a New Year’s tradition for me. But I’m sad to say that, once uploading this, the year has never been happy for me. I first uploaded it onto Instagram on December 31, 2019. Well, 2020 was not the year I’d be going on new journeys — definitely not geographically, though I did intellectually.

I uploaded this again on December 31, 2020. Then, on January 12, 2021, my mother died. Twelve days in, and 2021 was already the worst year of my life. I uploaded the image again for Dec. 31, 2021. Then in 2022, my father, over whom I was primary caregiver, died. I uploaded it again on Dec. 31, 2022. Throughout 2023 a new horrible situation was imposed on me, one that continues as I type this. 2024 was not happy for me either. The imposition will be finalized in 2025. If 2025 is a good year for me at all, it will be in spite of it.

But I insist on uploading this image yet again. As I see it, if the prehistoric fish in the image failed in its first six attempts to come onto land, I would not be surprised if it tried again. I resolve to upload this image every time until I finally have a Happy Stu Year.

Good Fiction Is the Truth

or, How Thinking About That Which Is Non-Literal Is Not a Lie But Instead Integral to Knowing Reality

Stuart K. Hayashi

“People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol? As a symbol I can be incorruptible; I can be everlasting.”
—Batman Begins

 

Fiction and representational art are not literal, and so many famous people have said half-jokingly that fiction and representational art are “lies.” In his book SeinLanguage, Jerry Seinfeld quipped that he appreciates how bookstores are divided by section “into fiction and nonfiction. In other words, these people are lying, and these people are telling the truth. That’s the way the world should be” ([New York: Bantam, 1993], 1). Likewise, in an interview for the May 1923 issue of The Arts, Pablo Picasso said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand...” Similarly, in Minima Moralia, Frankfurt school neo-Marxist Theodor Adorno pronounced, “Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”

Seinfeld is half-joking. Picasso and Adorno think they are being clever and cute in stating a paradox that good art is both a lie and the truth. None of these people are entirely serious in saying good art is a lie. But what bothers me is that they do, on some level, believe it, otherwise they wouldn’t think this is such a funny irony. Their phrasing is woefully misleading. I do think there is a funny irony here, but not the one they believe. The actual funny irony is this:

1. Our ancestors came to experience and interpret sensory stimuli in a manner they knew to be nonliteral. That is how symbolism arose.
2. It is through this cognitive process that we have gained a greater understanding of what happens literally.

In short: it is through a mental methodology in which we understand sensory stimuli in a nonliteral manner, that we gain complex knowledge over what does happen on the literal level.

This essay is about semiotics — the study of symbols. I thank Asher Wolfstein for introducing me to the term. Before then, the most I had known of academic study of this topic was silliness from The Da Vinci Code about “Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon.”

As for the men I quoted above, here is the source of the confusion: “lies” are being conflated with every interpretation that is “nonliteral.” Every symbolic representation of events is nonliteral. Hence, the fallacious syllogism goes, “Symbolic representations of events — such as fiction and realistic paintings — are not what happened literally. Lies are not what happened literally. Therefore, symbolic representations of events — such as fiction and realistic paintings — are lies.”

While it is true that all lies are nonliteral, it is it not true that everything nonliteral is a lie. And to the degree that the use of the nonliteral in communication might be a form of tricksterism, there is another fashion in which this can be phrased. It is that all liars are tricksters, but not all tricksters are liars. 

Not Literal and Not Lying

A lie is told under the following circumstances. Person 1 presents to Person 2 some claim that is not true literally but which Person 1 intends for Person 2 to interpret as the direct literal truth. Fiction honestly presented as fiction — and this includes performances by stage magicians — does not consist of lies, as the art is not presented as the literal truth. Yet I will argue in this essay that though artworks are not the literal truth, an art piece resonates with you when you interpret it as dramatizing some principle that you interpret as being true literally.

There is an entire profession or discipline of artists who are tasked with depicting reality for the purpose of providing scientific understanding. This genre is known as “scientific illustration.” A wildlife painter is supposed to paint animals and their environments accurately. Our knowledge of extinct prehistoric animals is far from perfect and complete. But the job of “paleo-artists” is to portray prehistoric animals in a manner that is up-to-date and consistent with what is known at the time about these beasts. A well-shaded painting of a Tyrannosaurus with three fingers on each hand — a painting that was started and completed in the year 2025 — might be a high-quality illustration, but it would not be high-quality scientific illustration; the T. rex having three fingers on each hand instead of two is a glaring inaccuracy to scientists.

Let’s say that for a book that is to be educational for children, an artist provides a detailed and accurate painting of a male lion.

The purpose is to convey to small children what a lion looks like. For the painting, the painter did not use a direct photo reference. Instead, the painter consulted many different photos of many different individual male lions. Hence, the lion shown in the painting is not based on any one male lion in particular. Is the painting a lie? No. It is a symbol, and it is a symbol that conveys accurate-enough information to children on what a lion looks like.

Symbolism occurs when X is not Y literally but X still represents Y in your mind. As noted in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, symbols are inherent to the use of concepts. A concept is an abstracted symbol representing all particular instances of an entity or event, all grouped together by their shared traits relevant to that which defines the concept. The concept “dog” encompasses all dogs that have ever lived and will ever live, both ones you have observed and ones you haven’t, and includes all breeds. The concept “dog” is the symbol for all dogs that exist literally. And the word “dog” symbolizes, in your mind, the concept of “dog.”

And it’s not the case that these words are only for communicating oneself with others. Rather, you gain clarity from introspecting to yourself with these words. Languages are sometimes presumed falsely to be no more than tools of communication. But first they are tools of thought, of thinking to oneself. You use words to communicate with others but, even more importantly, you use them to communicate with yourself. Symbols are inherent in this. Symbols are integral to rational thought itself.

You may remember René Magritte’s silly painting of a pipe that has the caption “This is not a pipe.” By that, the painter meant it is not a pipe literally; it is a symbolic representation of a pipe.

There is great variation in the degree of precision and accuracy that a symbol can take in its depiction of entities that it represents. The word snake does not come very close to providing a visually accurate representation of a snake, but a wildlife photograph of one usually does. Both of those are symbols for snakes. Earlier I mentioned a drawing of a T. rex that inaccurately places three fingers on each hand. That is a symbol of a T. rex, but that symbol is less preferred by scientists than a drawing that more accurately places two fingers on each hand. That some symbols are less accurate than others is not a fault of symbolism per se. In the marketplace of ideas and communication, the symbols that are inadequate in how closely they represent the truth can be outcompeted and supplanted by ones that do it better.

Our Ancestors Coming to Realize That They Can Interpret Sensory Stimuli in Ways Other Than Literal

How our ancestors came to understand symbols might have gone this way. There are animals that camouflage to avoid being eaten by predators. Jackson’s chameleons are an example. When an animal in front of you has camouflaged successfully, it means that you are looking at the animal literally in front of your face and yet you do not notice it. Rather, you misinterpret the animal as part of the scenery.

When our ancestors discerned that animals are capable of camouflage, that was a big deal in the history of epistemology. It meant our ancestors came to an important realization. That was that someone can interpret and experience a sensory stimulus in a manner other than what is happening literally. In the case of the chameleon in front of you escaping notice, what is happening literally is that the chameleon is in front of you. But, in your interpretation, it as though the chameleon were absent. It mattered a lot for our ancestors to come to understand that someone can interpret and experience a sensory stimulus in a manner other than what is happening literally. That is because that is what a symbol is. It is what happens when you are engrossed in an exciting work of fiction. Immersed in an adventure novel, you react emotionally as though you were there. But what happened literally was that you spent hours staring at a series of standardized markings on sheets of paper.

If a camouflaged animal successfully escapes your notice, then you never learn that this particular interpretation of the event was different from what happened literally. By contrast, when you read a novel that you love, you know consciously that the events described did not happen literally. But, in both instances, the interpretation and the experience of the sensory stimulus were something other than what happened literally. And insofar as a clever handling of a truth that is far from obvious might be tricksterism, this understanding about camouflage might be considered an instance where tricksterism is not a form of scientific fraud but instead a clever advance in disciplines related to science.

When I first wrote the above, I thought I might have been the first to make that connection. However, in a 1998 book on popular science, biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence W. Deacon also argues as much.

Human understanding of symbols may have been a byproduct of classical conditioning, such as in Ivan Pavlov’s experiments with his drooling dogs. I think something like the following might have happened. Upon seeing snakes for the first time, our hunter-gatherer ancestors may have been indifferent to them. But then a snake attacked someone. Hence, the snake came to be associated with danger. As soon as a hunter-gatherer saw a snake of that species, he grew scared even before the snake attacked.

Such mental associations were the start of symbolism. Chronologically, a simile was understood before a metaphor was. There came a point in history where the snake was not only associated with danger but became the representation of danger. Just an image resembling a snake could induce fear. That’s why, in our own times, tough guys in biker gangs get tattoos of snakes.

Accurate chemical formulae discovered by scientists are all symbols. But they convey what happens literally. The formula showing how the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen creates water is a symbol. But that is also what happens literally.

By definition, symbols are nonliteral. But, when used properly, they help us understand what happens literally. That is the true funny irony in this: the fact that we can experience and interpret stimuli in a manner that is nonliteral has given our species an unprecedentedly complex ability to comprehend what happens literally.

And, of course, fiction is also not literal but only literary. Yet I argue that, to the degree that you are emotionally attached to an artwork, it largely rests upon your interpreting some aspects of the artwork you do deem to be true literally.

 

How Good Fiction Is True
When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher waxed enthusiastically about how fiction is rich with symbolism. However, I still did not comprehend what that meant. When someone talked about symbolism in art, I thought it meant the artist being pretentious and purposely hard-to-understand.

What came to mind was a hipster splashing a blotch onto a canvas and announcing, “This is the human condition. This spatter of paint dramatizes the capitalist oppression of the masses.” But symbolism does not have to be that way. Alternatively, a deliberate symbol in a story is especially successful if it can be taken at face value as just part of the story while, on another level, it can be recognized as demonstrating something deeper at work. A case study in such symbolism is in Citizen Kane. Charles Foster Kane is married and he keeps getting richer. But his emotional bond to his wife is weakening. We are treated to a montage that shows, over the years, Kane eating dinner with his wife at a long table. Each spouse is on the other end of it. With each subsequent instance of such a scene, the table is longer and Kane is shown being even more callous toward his wife. If we take this only straightforwardly, it makes sense: we see that as Kane gets richer over the years, he can afford to purchase an even longer table. But this represents something more abstract: the growing length of the table represents the growing emotional distance between Kane and his wife.

Both because of the aforementioned obscurantism of many “modern artists,” and because I made the conflation that only that which is literal is real and true, I thought that symbols were all “fake” and too far from being straightforward. That is a variant on the fallacy discussed in the opening of this essay.

Thus, when what you know to be a work of fiction is emotionally gripping to you and sticks with you, it is because you implicitly interpret that story to be true on a deeper level. My go-to example is the movie Back to the Future. We know that in real life, you cannot travel back in time in a DeLorean. But, in real life, people do have a difficult time relating with their parents and do wish there was a way to be able to meet them on mutual terms. In real life, nerds are subjected to bullying. Confronting these issues directly is usually so painful that we prefer to avoid them.

But when explorations of these issues are repackaged in a more-fantastical setting, that creates some degree of psychological distance that makes it more manageable, mood-wise, to confront them. George McFly does not exist on a literal level. But his story is a symbolic representation that gives us an idea of how we can address the topic of bullying: either continuing to submit to the bullies or stand up to them. The latter approach is riskier but it is ultimately more meaningful.

The first part of what Picasso said is misleading. Art is not a lie. Art is a symbolic representation. And not all symbolic representations are lies, just as an accurate painting of a male lion is not a lie even if the painting is not based on any one particular male lion. And when an artwork stirs your emotions, it is because you interpret it as a symbolic representation that faithfully conveys a principle that is true.

When a cherished memory of an artwork lingers in your mind, it is because, at least on some emotional level, you judge it implicitly as using symbols to convey a truth about human psychology. As a result, Ayn Rand was correct to point out what a misnomer it is when good fantasy fiction is labeled “escapism,” an “escape” from the drudgery of reality. On the contrary, quality fantasy fiction is actually a method through which its fans examine and reflect upon their real-life problems.

Science communication consists of using nonliteral means to elucidate on what happens literally. Likewise, when you enjoy artwork, it is because, on some level, you experience it as a nonliteral means of dramatizing what you interpret to be true literally. That is why all realizations of the literal truth rely upon nonliteral symbolism.

Of course, I should also mention the many instances where symbolism, being misused, leads too many people down a path of falsehood and delusiveness. That is what happened when the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia contributed to belief in a literal God.

How Symbolic Thinking Misled Our Ancestors Into Believing in God and in Grandiose Conspiracies

Drawings are a good example of symbolic representation. It is why, as I said earlier, there are scientific wildlife artists whom scientists expect to be accurate and precise in the details by which they distinguish one species from similar ones in their depictions. I have written about this in another essay, one that refutes the cliché “Every artwork you think is ‘original’ actually still uses already-established conventions, and therefore originality has never existed in artwork or invention.” It has to do with the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia.

That returns us to the topic of creatures disguised as part of the background. Pareidolia is the flip side of camouflage. With camouflage, there is a creature or person or event literally within sight and yet it is interpreted as not being there. By contrast with pareidolia, a particular creature or person or event is not within sight literally and yet, at least on an initial level, it is interpreted as if it is there.

Pareidolia occurs even when our conscious minds do not come to the mistaken conclusion that our initial impression of the presence of a particular creature or person or event is something that is present literally. When I look at a cloud and say that it is shaped like a cat, I know the cloud is not literally a cat, but that still counts as pareidolia.

There have been many occasions in the history of our species, though, where people have indeed been tricked by pareidolia, believing that the illusion is something that is happening literally. Someone who said something important on this topic was the Enlightenment philosopher Constantin-François Chassebœuf de La Giraudais, the Comte de Volney (1757–1825). Recognizing the great informativeness of Volney’s book on religion, Thomas Jefferson himself orchestrated the American effort to translate it into English. In this same volume Volney is one of the relatively early examples of someone pointing out the role that pareidolia played in the emerge of belief in gods.

As our primate ancestors lived in groups, an important part of their evolution and natural selection involved the psychological phenomenon of “theory of mind.” This is also called cognitive empathy. This means that when you see someone’s behavior, you arrive at conclusions about that person’s emotional state. When the edges of a man’s mouth turn downward and he cries, and you recognize that as sadness, that is cognitive empathy. (If recognizing someone as sad makes you sad as well, that is affective empathy.) As members of groups among our ancestors both cooperated with, and conspired against, one another, it became important for them to try to interpret the emotions, thoughts, and motivations of others.

However, a side effect of this theory of mind, noted Volney, was that it did not end with a man trying to discern the emotions of other people. It also led to our ancestors trying to discern the emotional states of such non-human entities as boulders, volcanoes, rivers, and the wind. When a man gets aggressive and makes a lot of noise, we can ascertain that he is angry. Likewise, figured our ancestors, if the wind gets aggressive and makes a lot of noise in the form of a storm, it follows that the wind, too, must have gotten angry. Later generations of shamans decided that the wind itself is not an emotional entity but instead controlled directly by a hidden entity that still emotionally reacts to whether or not humans try to appease it through sacrifices.

That type of conclusion is called animism — the belief that there is consciousness or spirits in all objects. According to theorists such as Volney, that is the likely origin of our ancestors’ beliefs in spirits and gods. As Volney explains it, 

...man began to perceive. The sun gave him light and warmth... ...judging every thing by comparison, and remarking in those beings [the weather and ecosystem] a motion spontaneous like his own, he supposed there be will, an intelligence inherent in that motion, of a nature similar to what existed in himself...

Related to the pareidolia that informed the first religious beliefs is a cognitive module within the human mind that psychologists call the Hyperactive Agent Detection Device, HADD. The ancestral environment of our hominin ancestors was half-forested, half-savannah. In this environment, predators such as large cats would sneak through the foliage. Often the only way to detect them was the subtle rustling of their bodies pushing against leaves and tall grasses.

In such a circumstance, prey — such as us — became hypervigilant. If our ancestors dismissed the rustling as nothing, then that could result in the predator successfully devouring them. Conversely, if our ancestors became more alert and watchful in preparation of an ambush by a predator — and it turned out the rustling was the wind instead — then at least our ancestors would survive. Hence, on a cost-benefit analysis, the advantage was to err on the side of assuming initially that a predator was present.

As far as natural selection “selected” for the ancient hominins who assumed at first that the rustling indeed indicated a predator, the ones “selected” were the ones whose genes had predisposed them, as a default, to assume the rustling indicated a predator. That was the HADD. After all, among ancient hominins whose genes made them, as a default, likely to assume there was no predator, were the ones who got eaten and thereby unable to transmit those same genes to future generations.

Thus, natural selection in this environment had favored those psychologically predisposed to assume a conscious entity was present around them. And over ninety percent of the history of our genus Homo was spent in this environment in life as hunter-gatherers. That presumption of a predator’s presence translated to the presumption of just about any conscious entity being hidden and lurking nearby. That assumed conscious entity was then thought to be a more humanlike in thought — again, here the theory-of-mind comes into play. That lurking hidden entity was eventually imagined to be a spirit and, centuries later, a god. Over Threads, Jorge Barquin reminded me about this HADD.

And as explicated by psychologist Rob Brotherton, this is also the origin of grandiose conspiracy theories about how a cabal of billionaires controls everything in society. Often many of society’s problems, such as economic crises, are caused by the psychological phenomenon of specific people not feeling accountable when they work for large impersonal organizations that miscommunicate with other large impersonal organizations.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in much smaller communities where every member knew everyone else face-to-face; nothing was impersonal. Largely inheriting the sorts of default cognitive biases that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had, it is still difficult even for our modern brains to comprehend how problems are caused by largely-impersonal societal phenomena. As it was for our ancestors in hunter-gatherer bands, it was easier to ascribe responsibility and blame to a small number of individuals working very consciously to impose harm directly. Hence, many people find it more tempting and imaginable to blame economic crises and other social problems not on miscommunication between big impersonal institutions, but instead on that small number of individuals, the imagined cabal.

When modern political demagogues say a hidden council of billionaires controls everything in society, such as the rise and fall of the economy, it is noteworthy how similar it is to ancient shamans saying that a hidden council of spirits or gods controls everything in the wild, such as the rise and fall of the tides. In this respect, religions are conspiracy theories about Nature.

This, by the way, is why it was groundbreaking when in ancient Greece, Thales and Leucippus — sometimes called the first philosophers, and even first scientists — defied the animism of the shamans and the priests. Thales and Leucippus pointed out that natural phenomena are caused not by the emotional reactions of hidden spirits and gods but instead by consistent impersonal principles. As “ignorance” of the impersonal principles “of nature gave birth to gods,” notes Percy Bysshe Shelley, further “knowledge” of what happens literally in Nature is “made” for the “destruction” of belief in, and therapeutic reliance upon, those gods.

That observation by Thales and Leucippus about the impersonal principles of Nature was revolutionary. That comprehension of Nature was definitely not the psychological default for our ancestors. It was not obvious to our ancestors back then. It is still not obvious to a significant portion of the human population that exists today.

In the form of “God,” I gave an example of pareidolia misleading our ancestors to a misinterpretation that has been the source of great folly for millennia. However, pareidolia also contributed to the development of art and pictures. And art and pictures played a significant role in the development of the written language that has vastly expanded upon humanity’s conceptual powers.

How Pareidolia Contributed to the Great Expansion of the Human Conceptual Faculty and All Human Reasoning
In my essay busting the cliché that “Nothing is original,” I iterated the anthropologists’ theory on how the first cave sculptures and cave paintings may have developed. The theory is that pareidolia was the initial inspiration. With sculpture, it went as follows. Inside a cave, someone noticed a rock formation that, in some part, already resembled something observed in life, such as a buffalo or a woman. However, this pioneering artist thought that the resemblance was incomplete. The pioneering artist consequently remolded the formation so that it would look even more like whatever the pioneering artist had in mind. If the finished product was a buffalo, that rock sculpture was a symbolic representation of real buffalo.

And something similar happened with cave paintings. Sometimes when dust particles of one type of mineral find their way on yet another type of mineral, the first type leaves marks on the second. Some pioneering painter saw a marking in a cave that partially resembled some sort of entity that this person recognized — again, something like a buffalo or a woman. That artist smeared the first type of mineral — probably a wet clay — onto the cave wall so that the marking would resembled even more closely what that artist had envisioned. Hence, humanity gained its first pictures.

This theory is explicated in The History of Art by the father-and-son duo Horst Woldemar Janson and Anthony Hanson ({New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., [1962] 1995 5th ed. revised and expanded}, 51). And as of this writing, Izzy Wisher and her other associates in archaeology continue to expound upon it.

Furthermore, human-created pictures played a major role in the development of written language. As so often with innovation, it began with commerce and the profit motive. Ancient people first bartered with one another and then agreed upon a common medium of exchange — the first money. Even in the Bronze Age, traders began paying for goods through installment plans. Trader 1 might provide Trader 2 half the desired quantity of bushels of wheat today for five cows, and provide the second half of the wheat in a month’s time. To commit themselves to carrying out the terms, the traders imprinted symbols into clay tablets. These symbols indicated the terms of the deal, making these documents the earliest known bookkeeping, accounting statements, and contracts.

Originally these symbols were pictograms — each a standardized and simplified picture indicating a type of object. One standardized picture could be for a cow and another a bushel of wheat. As the terms of these agreements grew more complex, the pictograms were not adequate to delineate the details and complexity of the concepts involved. The pictures represented objects that were relatively concrete and tangible. Eventually, to represent wider abstractions, the traders developed writing. Each written character consisted of lines that were much simpler than the pictograms’, but the simplified characters were combined to form words representing ideas of greater abstractness. The progression going from pictographs to writing was a progression going from more-basic concretes to more-complex abstractions. Stated differently: a word is worth a thousand pictures.

As eludicated by psychologist Neil Cohn, that is the same progression many a child undergo. Small children express their ideas through drawings in crayon. As they process and convey ideas of greater complexity and abstraction, they rely more on written language. In his book Who Ate the First Oyster?, Cody Cassidy lets us know how ingrained such imagery is in human cognition. He tells of still-existing hunter-gatherer bands making contact with Western anthropologists for the first time. Prior to meeting the anthropologists, these hunter-gatherers had never before seen any drawings in their lives, not even pictograms. Yet, as recorded by Janus B. Deregowski, when the anthropologists showed these hunter-gatherers various realistic drawings of native animals, the hunter-gatherers immediately recognized each animal portrayed in each drawing.

The phenomenon of pareidolia inspired the first picture art, and picture art was the first stage in the emergence of written language. And this was written language enabled human beings with a further-advanced and sophisticated method for processing the concepts through which they understand what happens literally. Hence, the nonliteral imagery of pareidolia contributed ultimately to the previously-unprecedented degrees of sophistication in our comprehension of that which is literal.

Thus, we find that when people take their beliefs in spirits and gods very literally, those people use symbolic representations to propagate a rather inaccurate understanding of reality. Yet, conversely, when children are shown artistic depictions of wildlife that get the details right, it is a symbolic representation that provides a very accurate understanding of reality. More to the point, this nonliteral representation assists people in understanding what happens literally. Ultimately, while symbolic representations can mislead people with arbitrary falsehoods, all accurate understanding of what happens literally is still contingent upon the proper — rational — methodology in symbolic representation that is inexorably nonliteral. Pareidolia is about “seeing” what isn’t there, and yet, in a roundabout manner, it has eventually contributed to our seeing what is there — and much more clearly than before.

Even Factual Events Can Be Symbols

Even an account of true events can be a symbol. The story of the persecution of Galileo is a series of events that happened literally. But when people cite the example of Galileo, it is to present it as a case study of something that might still happen today. They are warning that, once again, there might be similar instances of someone being mistreated for telling the truth. As this happens, the account of Galileo and his punishment are symbols of similar injustices that might be repeated but should not be. What happened to Galileo, happened literally. But in the context of today’s society, you are not Galileo literally. Still, if there is a danger that you might be punished for speaking the truth, Galileo can be a fitting symbol for you and your situation.

As you are not Galileo literally, but your situation might become comparable to his in the relevant context, the use of Galileo as a symbol can convey to you and others the literal nature of your situation. Once again, presentations that are nonliteral can convey accurately a fact that is literal.

Yes, as words are tools of cognition and comprehending reality, that applies to language as a whole. I could eat something that kills me. My meal could poison me or cause me to choke to death. But in the end, it is the case that I eat to live. Likewise, people often use language to tell lies. But as language is instrumental to knowing reality at all, it is ultimately the case that language is the tool for learning, processing, and transmitting the truth. The same principle applies to imagination. As I have written before, the Wright brothers needed vibrant imaginations to conceive of the airplane. Imagination is imperative for deducing causal connections between separate events, and imperative for all long-term decision-making.  As I said in my earlier essay, though people often use their imaginations to indulge in delusions, imagination is really the tool for adhering to reality.

That truth defies the nineteenth-century Romanticist poet William Blake. Blake famously disparaged scientists in general and Isaac Newton in particular. William Blake is one of the figures of history who popularized the misconception that because imagination can be used to conceive of the impossible, it is the case that imagination, which he regards as superior, is in opposition to rationality, which he denigrates as boring and humdrum. I rebut that assertion here. Not interested in points such as mine, Blake sniffs, “The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination.” But as imagination is integral to the scientific models and other symbols whereby we comprehend what happens literally in Nature, one must necessarily be a man of imagination to be a man of reason.

And now I can make an addition to all of the above. When a work of fiction especially resonates with you, it’s because, even if the fiction is fantastical in its depictions, some aspect of it implicitly struck you as being an effective symbolic representation of something you interpret to be an important literal truth about psychology in your real life. In effect, fiction is all about reality.

And that principle applies to the wider phenomenon of symbolism in general. In every instance where a fallacious argument is advanced, a falsehood is told, or a work of fiction gives a misleading impression about something from real life, it is a case where symbols are employed in a manner in which they obscure the truth. And, as I said earlier, hipsters have given us the impression that symbolism in art is about being nebulous and cryptic in message. But I hope I have established in this essay that, overall, symbolism in art and in science communication is ultimately about providing information and ideas with the utmost clarity.

On Sunday, October 19, 2025, I added the new sentences expressing how “Fiction is about reality.” On Monday, October 20, 2025, I added the quotation from William Blake and my commentary on him. On Tuesday, November 25, 2025, I added the sections about pareidolia leading to belief in God and to the first cave sculptures and cave paintings. On Sunday, January 11, 2026, I added the sections about HADD and classical conditioning.

A Fallacy Called ‘Privilege, or It Didn’t Happen’

Stuart K. Hayashi

Ten years ago, if on social media you talked about a strange event that happened to you, often someone would quip, “Show pictures or it didn’t happen.” Well, I notice that when they want to denigrate something or someone, anti-capitalists on social media use a thought-stopping cliché that I identify as “Privilege, or it didn’t happen.” That is, if you’re praising an achievement of someone whom the anti-capitalist dislikes, the anti-capitalist will chime in that the person was able to achieve such primarily due to the person possessing, before the fact, some social privilege that other people lack. The most common type of privilege is having been born to a family with more money than other people. But there are other types of privilege — white privilege, male privilege, even able-bodied privilege.

I notice that almost every time “privilege” is cited like this on social media, it’s seldom the case of the citer merely asking others to be mindful that the achiever had privileges that others didn’t. For instance, it would make sense for someone to say, “Having been born into wealth made it much easier for the nineteenth-century British chemist Henry Cavendish to discover particular chemical elements before other people did. That doesn’t take away from the fact that he made wise choices, of course, that other rich men had not.” Rather, the citation of privilege is almost always done to deny the achievement outright. It’s almost always along the lines of “The arrogant white businessman thinks he deserves the accolades because of what he accomplished. But it was his privilege that put him in the position in the first place where he could accomplish anything,” and then that’s where the rhetoric concludes.

For example, maybe you will be waxing about how impressed you are by Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak having founded Apple Computer. An anti-capitalist will chime in that this is actually because of privilege. The main reason, that anti-capitalist tells you, why the Steves were able to do this — as opposed to other people — is that the Steves were going to school in an area that was geographically close to the capital of the USA’s engineering talent. After all, Wozniak had the privilege of being the son of an engineer who worked for Lockheed-Martin. That gave him access to tools, equipment, and specialized education that other people did not have. That area had already been Silicon Valley since the Great Depression when Hewlett-Packard was founded.

As promulgated by U.C. Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, “Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money. . . . He got rich on what other taxpayers paid for: the banking system...and the judicial system...” On that account, Lakoff concludes, “There are no self-made men!” That, of course, is the “You Didn’t Build That” Fallacy, which I skewered over here. Pierre Proudhon, for one, is known as the frienemy to Karl Marx who said that private property is robbery. Proudhon, too, expressed a version of You-Didn’t-Build-That.

Talents is a creation of society rather than a gift of nature; it is an accumulated capital of which the recipient is only the guardian. Without society, without education and powerful assistance which it gives, the finest nature would be inferior to the most ordinary capacities even in the rare as where it ought to shine.

In the citation of privilege, the implication is, You didn’t build that; your privilege made that happen. At the very least, the credit you receive for an accomplishment had more to do with your preexisting privilege than did any proactiveness on your part.

When an anti-capitalist “corrects” your praise of an achiever like Steve Jobs, you might notice something conspicuous about the correction. Contrary to what the “correction” falsely insinuated, your praise of the Steves’ achievement was not something you were contrasting against other people. You weren’t saying, “Steve Jobs achieved this, as opposed to you. Steve Jobs achieved it, and you didn’t, you dummy!” Rather, you were impressed that anyone did this at all. But rather than be satisfied that the good act was done at all, it’s not unusual for anti-capitalists to misidentify it as some zero-sum game where any one person’s gain must come at the material expense of everyone else.

More to the point, here is why “Privilege, or it didn’t happen” is a fallacy. Even if it is true that the achiever was born into privileges that gave the achiever a head start, it doesn’t invalidate your premise that the achiever still made choices for which accolades are deserved. The reason is that many other people were born into the same privileges as the achiever, but, on account of different choices, did not perform the feats that the achiever did.

In the case of Stephen Wozniak: the fact is that there were hundreds of other white boys his age, who were the sons of Californian engineers, attending schools in the same state that were similar to his own. But those other sons of Californian engineers did not invent the Apple II. Stephen Wozniak did. Even if the “privilege” made it easier for him than it otherwise would be, the privilege was not sufficient. The missing pieces that needed to be added were the choices of Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the initiatives they undertook.

I would argue that there are cases where some people’s privilege can enable them to overshadow others in terms of who gets the credit. I think sexism did play a part in how, for decades, Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure had gone overlooked. One might say that it was because of white male privilege that James Watson and Francis Crick got more attention than she. But I think such a concession is not satisfactory to someone who keeps citing privilege. The privilege-citing anti-capitalist can say that it was because of Rosalind Franklin’s own privilege that she, as opposed to some nonwhite gentile, was in a position in the first place where she could ascertain an image of the double helix structure.

Unearned social privileges do exist. But when someone — even a very privileged person — accomplishes an important feat, it’s usually the case that there were many other people who bore those same privileges but refrained from that feat. The choices of individuals are still what make the difference. And for that, they still deserve credit. To the degree that you make your own choices — choices not made and risks not taken by people from backgrounds similar to your own, and who have the same privileges that you do — you are indeed self-made in character.

On Monday, June 9, 2025, I added the quotation from Pierre Proudhon.