Symbolater Syndrome, Pt. 2 of 4

or, Those Who Destroy a Great Value As They Perform Gestures That Symbolize Preservation of That Very Same Value


Stuart K. Hayashi


Due to the length of the original “Symbolater Syndrome” article, I am serializing it into four parts. This is Part Two of Four. 


Part One | Part Three | Part Four | Entire Essay on One Page

Christian Bale in Batman Begins, dir. Christopher Nolan,
prods. Larry J. Franco, et al., (Warner Bros., 2005).

Courtesy Pixabay.

Dangerous Political Actions That Symbolize Loyalty to a Value But Concretely Undermine That Value



Minimum-Wage Increases As Symbolatry
This is frequently visible in the case of raising the minimum wage — in the cases of alleged antipoverty legislation in general. Suppose there is no legally mandated minimum wage, and I am jobless. Then someone named Lysander offers to hire me for $5 per hour. I accept. That is a pay raise right there — I went from making zero to making five dollars per hour. Then the government decrees that there is a minimum wage of $15 per hour. If Lysander is caught paying me $5 per hour, he could be fined or imprisoned. On a cost-benefit analysis, Lysander decides that while he could profit from paying me $5 per hour for the value I add to his business, I don’t add enough value to his business where he would still profit from paying me $15 per hour for that same work. He decides he should not have me working for him. As for the people already in Lysander’s employ, either he fires some of them or keeps them all on while cutting their hours. Far from helping the poor, this measure hurts them. Absent of the minimum wage, I would be making five dollars per hour. With this minimum wage, I am stuck at zero.

For decades, supporters of raising the minimum wage have denied that such a measure has any adverse effect on employment. There is nothing surprising about that. Yet in more recent years, I have noticed a more worrying trend: there are people who support raising the minimum wage who do not deny it.

I first noticed this in my correspondence with a particular woman online. She and I had become acquainted when discussing GMOs (genetically modified organisms). She properly wanted the government to stop interfering with GMOs — and, later, I learned that she improperly wanted the government to continue interfering with pretty much every other industry. Part of her desire for such interference to continue and expand was her tirades demanding an increase in the minimum wage to what she called a “living wage.”

One of our mutual online acquaintances then showed this woman a study that evinced that, everything else being equal, raises in the minimum wage contribute to reductions in employed work hours for the poor and unskilled.

The woman then replied something to the effect of, Yes, I know the economic argument. I support raising the minimum wage because I care about the well-being of low-income families.

I was floored by her reply. I expected that she would deny that the minimum wage contributes to unemployment among the poor and unskilled. She did not deny it. She refrained from denying it and then she still asserted that raising the minimum wage is “for the poor” and unskilled.

That turned out not to be a fluke, as a higher-profile instance of this phenomenon followed. In early April of 2016, California governor Jerry Brown gave this rationale for demanding an increase in the state’s mandated minimum wage [in the link, I cued it to the precise spot where he begins what I quote him saying]:

Economically, minimum wages may not make sense. But morally and socially and politically they make every sense, because it binds the community together and makes sure that parents can take care of their kids in a much more satisfactory way [emphases Governor Brown’s].

He says it at the 1 minute, 24 second mark.

Let’s translate this. What does it mean for a raise in the minimum wage to “make sense” “economically” or not? An increase or decrease in the poor’s average income, as affected by legislation, is an economic effect. For most of the past five decades, hardly any supporter of a raise in the minimum wage would dispute that the very purpose of a law adjusting the minimum wage is to have an economic effect. Legislation on the minimum wage is, by definition, economic legislation. That is just as the purpose of a comedian telling jokes is to make the audience laugh. To say that you don’t care what is the economic effect of your own legislation — legislation that is, by your own design, touted as economic legislation — is comparable to a comedian announcing that he doesn’t care if his jokes are funny.

A government-mandated increase in the minimum wage making sense economically means that raising the minimum wage does exactly what its supporters of the past 50 years have claimed it would do: improve the living standards of the poor and unskilled. To admit “economically, minimum wages may not make sense” is to admit that legally mandated minimum wages do not in fact help the poor and unskilled as was previously claimed, but that they in fact hurt the poor and unskilled. Then, as if Governor Brown did not remember what he admitted a second earlier, he said raising the minimum wage “makes sure that parents can take care of their kids in a much more satisfactory way.” What is the source of this seeming contradiction? Governor Brown explains that it makes “every sense” to him “morally.”

To wit, Governor Brown first inadvertently admitted that raising the minimum wage harms rather than helps the poor (the poor being his ostensive value), but he will go through it anyway as a gesture to indicate his moral concern for the well-being of the poor.

If Governor Brown genuinely valued the well-being of the poor, he would do what “makes sense” for them “economically” — refrain from raising the minimum wage and, more than that, work to abolish it altogether. In lieu of that, he performs a ritual that “makes sense” for him “morally,” which is offering a symbolic gesture of concern for the poor that, by his own inadvertent admission, does actual harm to the poor. The same goes for that aforementioned woman who didn’t even deny the minimum wage raise’s actual effect on the poor. What is purported to be the real value (the well-being of the poor) is being sacrificed and destroyed for the sake of performing a symbolic ritual that is intended to be interpreted as a show of solidarity for those same poor. That is symbolatry in practice.




This Is Beyond “Virtue-Signaling”
Some people might respond that, in this context, my introduction of the term “symbolatry” is unnecessary. They might say there is already a term for this, and it is a term much beloved on Twitter by right-wing people who have cartoon characters for their avatars: “virtue-signaling.” But I am not accusing Governor Brown and that aforementioned woman of mere “virtue-signaling”; there are important differences. To accuse a man of “virtue-signaling” is to put emphasis on his desire to convince other people of his own exalted moral status.

 Rather, my suspicion is that Governor Brown and that woman are performing the ritual of pushing for this legislation in order to convince themselves that they are caring and morally upright. Furthermore, when a man is accused of “virtue-signaling,” the implication is usually that this symbolic gesture is merely empty and of no effect. My accusation against Governor Brown and that woman is much harsher: they are trying to convince themselves that their performance of the ritual indicates compassion for the poor and yet, on some level, they are at least vaguely aware that the ritual’s completion — meaning successful passage of the minimum wage increase — will actually harm poor people in real life. This symbolatry is much more harmful than mere “virtue-signaling.”




“Left-Wingers Care About Intentions; Conservatives, Results”? Those Who Recite That Cliché Do Not Understand Intentions 
When gestures which symbolize help for the poor — and are actually known to harm the poor — are prioritized above the poor themselves, I do not consider that a good intention. As I said before, it is for that reason that I object to the common right-wing accusation that left-wing supporters of antipoverty measures are all about good intentions while not caring the results. As one Wall Street Journal op-ed put it, “Too many policy makers evaluate new interventions — labor rules, wage laws, environmental regulations — only by what they hope to accomplish. They do not consider the consequences, the unintended effects, and the trouble that their policies will cause for employers and workers…” (emphases added). The subheading that Journal’s editors (not the op-ed’s author) chose was, “Free enterprise is under assault from politicians who only care about good intentions, not results.” A conservative who says this reveals a flaw in his thinking far larger than the flaw he imputes to the left-wingers, as that conservative overlooks the very meaning of a sincere intention.

Just as the concept of “50 percent” derives from “a single unit,” the concept of “sincere intention” derives from the concept of “producing the results desired.” Should I have a sincere intention to erect a stable house or not, then I definitely care if, as results of my efforts, the house gets built and remains standing and stable in the ensuing years. But suppose I announce my strong motivation to build a house and, five years later, you notice no house is built and, when you ask me about it, I shrug it off. Moreover, ever since the day subsequent to my announcement, I made no effort to have the house built. Insofar as I am indifferent to the results, it is proper for you to conclude that I held no sincere intention to build that house after all. And a sincere intention is the only kind of intention there is — to be insincere in professing to intend to build a house is to lack the intention of building a house.

 You can observe the degree to which a person intends to do something by observing the degree to which that person cares about obtaining the results he claims to desire. Even if a person enters a competition she knows she probably will not win, if you observe that she made every effort to do her best within the rules, you know her intention was still to win.

Suppose my home has an insect infestation. I decide to do something about it — I obtain Brand A of an insecticide and spray it. I say that my intention in this is to kill the insects. After the first try, the insect infestation remains. I try four more times; the insects remain. I therefore decide that to attain the desired goal — eliminate the insects — I must try some other measure. I therefore hire an exterminator who uses Brand B on the insects. Finally the insects are gone and I am satisfied.

In that scenario, you can tell that when I claimed my intention was to kill the insects, that was indeed my intention. You can tell as much by how I handled my methodology. I said that I intended to bring about a particular result, and that I was using a particular method — Brand A insecticide — to try to bring about that result. After repeated attempts with this one method, I did not obtain the desired results. Because I was not lying to anyone — not even myself — about intending to kill the insects, I was therefore willing to try another method. In short, if the person saying that he intends to reach that desired goal has tried one method to reach it repeatedly and has always failed with that method, you can tell whether he intends to reach that desired goal by observing his willingness to try some alternative method to reach the desired goal.

 It is therefore illogical to assert that someone has a particular intention when not caring about the result. Someone intends a specific outcome insofar as this person concerns him- or herself with bringing about the result that is this same outcome. The allegation that a politician “cares about intentions and not results” implies that the politician does not care if X happens but does care to take an action solely or mainly in pursuit of making X happen. An intention without concern for results is a contradiction in terms. For a conservative to accuse anyone of caring about intentions and not results is for that conservative to reveal that he does not understand the meaning of “intention.”

Now suppose I say that I intend to kill all the insects in my home and I try Brand A insecticide. I try four more times and it hasn’t worked. I am introduced to other options. I reject them in favor of trying Brand A insecticide 95 more times, contaminating my house and filling it with fumes. Is it really my intention to eliminate the insects? You would be proper in judging the answer to be no. More likely, my intention was not to eliminate the insects but to go through the motions of “taking action” with respect to fighting off the insects. If my intention was to kill the insects, then the result of killing the insects would take priority over trying Brand A insecticide over and over again after a consistent record of failure.  Indeed, “going through the motions” might have been the original expression for someone making gestures representing a firm commitment to a goal while not being so committed in reality.

Likewise, if a man says that the intention of his legislation is to reduce poverty, you can observe how much this really was his intention by whether he pays attention to whether that legislation actually reduced poverty. Should it be the case that this man and his colleagues successfully pass such legislation across the country and, after four decades of failure, they are still pushing for more legislation of this type, there will come a point where you are rational for doubting that their intention is to reduce poverty. The likelier explanation is that their intention is to go through the motions of “doing something” about it, just as a man who uses the same ineffective insecticide a hundred times intends not to kill the insects but instead to go through the motions of “doing something” about the insects.




What It Looks Like When Someone Sincerely Intends to Fight Poverty
Let’s take a look at someone who truly intends to reduce poverty. When he first started his campaigns to fight poverty, the musician Bono put all his emphasis on the most conventional measures, such as calling for increased foreign aid and trying to pressure the World Bank to forgive debt to developing countries so that they could obtain even more loans. Back in 2002, Bono told People magazine with some ambivalence, “We are taught not to court success here” in his native Ireland. “There’s an old story about an American and an Irishman looking up at a mansion. The American looks at it and says, ‘One day I’m going to live in that place.’ The Irishman looks at it and says, ‘One day I’m going to get the bastard who lives in that place.’”

But after years of his campaigning, Bono observed that to place most of his emphasis on taxpayer-funded aid was not a winning strategy. Because he did intend to fight poverty, he was therefore willing to adjust his methodology. He eventually observed that political-economic liberalization — what he explicitly called “capitalism” — is the most effective antipoverty measure. In 2015, Bono admitted to Rolling Stone that he had decided to make it a priority “to understand commerce — I think that’s very important. If you told me 20 years ago that commerce took more people out of poverty than aid and development, I’d have scoffed.” He is not scoffing anymore. True, he has not given up entirely on recommending taxpayer-funded foreign aid or debt forgiveness, but his willingness to shift emphasis and recommend more liberalization is what evinces that his stated intention to try to fight poverty was indeed his real intention.



Bono talks about capitalism at the 38 minute, 4 second mark.


Conversely, consider some elderly political Progressives, such as Ralph Nader. Purporting to intend to reduce poverty, Ralph Nader has continued for a half-century to urge the very same policy of raising the minimum wage, and, after proclaiming that poverty has not been reduced, he urges this some more. If reducing poverty was Nader’s consistent intention, there would have been some reconsideration on his part, self-reflection comparable to Bono’s. It is not that Ralph Nader cares about his own intentions and not about the results. Rather, Nader does care about the results, and he is getting the results he intends — to go through the motions and make gestures that symbolize concern for the poor. And as Nader and his disciples obtain success in their having their measures ratified, the poor are hurt.

For someone to agitate for legislation that symbolizes helping the poor, all the while knowing on some level that the legislation’s passage will hurt some poor individuals, is not to have good intentions.

Here, the stolen concept or stolen value is “concern for the poor.” By pushing for legislation that demonstrably harms the poor, Governor Brown has relinquished any rightful claim to the value that is “concern for the poor.” Yet, by invoking his legislation as a gesture to indicate his concern for the poor, he is trying to claim custody over the value that is “concern for the poor” anyway — wrongfully. “Concern for the poor” is a concept and value which Governor Brown is trying to steal.

Insofar as a value is sacrificed and demeaned in a ritual or gesture that ostensibly represents devotion to that same value, that ritual or gesture is a symbol that has been corrupted.

Rush Limbaugh categorizes instances such as this one as “liberals” putting “symbolism over substance.” Sadly, conservatives such as Limbaugh are not immune to that malady either.

Trump’s Border Wall As Symbolism Over Substance

We can see that with the position taken by supporters of President Donald Trump in his yearly demands that there be federal funding to build a wall on the USA’s southern border to keep out undocumented immigrants. In rallying around President Trump on this cause, the supporters’ stated main intention is to have the result of there being a net reduction in the number of undocumented immigrants in the USA. Yet, there is plausibility in doubting that this is the supporters’ main intention, and some reason to suspect that, on some level, a number of supporters know that it is not their main intention.

U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP) provided Congress a ranked list of items that needed funding in order for the agency to perform its operations. CBP ranked a funded wall for the southern border as a low-priority request. By that, CBP meant that if it could have all the funding it wanted, it would not reject the offer for a border wall, but that, if budgetary constraints prevented the agency from getting everything it wanted, the border wall would be among the first items it would sacrifice. What sort of funding, then, does CBP rank as a higher priority? The CBP placed greater urgency on securing funding for additional surveillance technology, such as additional drones and motion-detection sensors along the border, citing this as a much more cost-effective in blocking or deporting undocumented migrants, providing more bang for every buck taken from a taxpayer who genuinely desired to rid the country of undocumented migrants.

As Sen. Dick Durbin paraphrased what the CBP wanted, “What they said over again was technology. They don’t rule out barriers. They don’t rule out fences. But that isn’t the first priority.”

In 2018, Congressional Democrats balked at funding Trump’s border wall. As a counteroffer, they proposed giving the CBP what it wanted — additional and upgraded surveillance tools in lieu of the wall. Trump’s apologists tried to spin this counteroffer as an example of Democrats being far less responsive to unauthorized border-crossings and far more lenient on undocumented migrants than Trump and Congressional Republicans. The irony of this is that if the Congressional Democrats completely triumphed over Trump and the GOP, the result would have been a wider net reduction in undocumented immigrants being in the USA than would Trump having his way, the construction of a border wall going completely unopposed in Congress.

Reece Jones, a geographer at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa who specializes in studying border walls and the extent to which they are effective, noted on Twitter, “If Dems stop the wall and get a ‘win’ by agreeing to more surveillance, drones, sensors, and agents, it will be worse for people on the move. The reality is walls don’t work but all the other stuff can.”

Here is the thing that worries me about the wall debate. If Dems stop the wall and get a 'win' by agreeing to more surveillance, drones, sensors, and agents, it will be worse for people on the move. The reality is walls don't work but all the other stuff can.

— Reece Jones (@reecejhawaii) January 9, 2018

Could it be that Trump’s supporters, so zealously in favor of having the border wall, are simply mistaken in rejecting the Congressional Democrats’ counteroffer as less likely to give them the outcome they desire? Could it be that they genuinely believe the border wall would do more to reduce the number of undocumented migrants in the USA than would the Democrats’ counterproposal? They would have to dismiss a lot of empirical evidence concerning borders that are already heavily fortified. The most fortified national border for Europe is between Morocco and Spain, with five fences, barbed wire, and a ditch. Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa have been able to get through even that. Decades earlier, fleeing people were able to get past the armed guards placed along the Berlin Wall.

And when the fortification of a border prevents people from bypassing it directly, there are other methods of getting around it — literally. The most militarized border on Earth is the one separating North and South Korea. Rather than cross this Demiliatarized Zone, the favored method that North Korean refugees use to get into South Korea is first to cross into mainland China illegally. Then, from mainland China, they travel into South Korea. And consider the first immigrants to come into the USA illegally from Mexico: Chinese workers. When they couldn’t enter the USA from the south, they got in through the north.

The very engineer tasked with designing Trump’s border wall — himself an immigrant from Mexico — has explained publicly why the wall deserves little confidence.

Given the mountains of evidence that the Congressional Democrats’ offer would do more to block undocumented immigrants than would Trump’s border wall, why does the latter captivate Trump’s followers so? The reason is its symbolism. As the budget negotiations faltered, Trump apologist Dinesh D’Souza suggested to right-wingers that they become resigned to the “wall” being more “symbolic” than literal. But it was always symbolic. First, mentions of a wall were a mere mnemonic device that Roger Stone, Sam Nunberg, and Steven Bannon devised to help Trump remember to bring up the topic of immigration while campaigning. And, for many of Trump’s voters, the wall became a perfect gesture to express their resentment for Latin Americans coming across the border. As noted by Ben-Gurion University scholar Sarai Aharoni, unsympathetic toward that attitude, “Walls are rarely built of stones or bricks alone. Fortresses are created through a wall-mindset.” To that, Reece Jones added, “The wall is a symbol of all of the other exclusions behind it.”

Walls are rarely built of stones or bricks alone. #Fortresses are created through a wall-mindset.

— Sarai Aharoni שרי אהרוני سراى اهرونى (@saraia555) January 9, 2018

The wall is a symbol of all of the other exclusions behind it

— Reece Jones (@reecejhawaii) January 9, 2018

The wall is so seemingly perfect in its symbolism that Trump’s supporters self-deludedly overlook the imperfection of its execution.

Hence, in their fervor to support construction of Trump’s border wall, Trump’s supporters sacrifice their supposed main intention and value — minimizing the number of undocumented immigrants in the USA — in favor of having their precious gesture representing a desire to minimize undocumented immigrants in the USA. This, too, is going through the motions.

Longtime readers know that I want aspiring immigrants to succeed in getting past these arbitrary obstacles to their long-term settlement in the USA. For that reason, it almost became tempting for me to root for Trump’s border wall over the Congressional Democrats’ counteroffer. But I cannot root for either. Besides my opposition to taxpayer funding in general, I do not condone the eminent domain being exercised to seize private land for the border wall’s construction. And the Congressional Democrats’ counteroffer violates private property rights as well, allowing border-enforcement agencies to place their surveillance equipment on private citizens’ land against their consent.

But as one who abhors the unjust placing of obstacles against peaceful immigration, the one piece of praise I can give the border wall is that it would divert resources away from more-effective measures of border enforcement and result in there being more undocumented immigrants in the USA than there otherwise would be.

If the border wall gets built, I will not chalk up its failure to keep out undocumented immigrants as an example of the wall’s right-wing apologists prioritizing “intentions” over “results.” When the wall stands and fails to stop unauthorized crossings of the border, it will be that the wall’s proponents have actually fully realized their main intention — to have their gesture representing a desire to keep out foreigners, the erection of a monument to their own spitefulness toward Latin Americans. The wall will amount to that.

And the border wall is not the only immigration-related topic where right-wingers — Rush Limbaugh included — forsake their stated value for a symbol of that value instead. The same applies to their very citation of law and order to rationalize their animus toward undocumented, impoverished immigrants.


To be continued...here.

___

Part One | Part Three | Part Four | Entire Essay on One Page


On July 22, 2017, I added the quotations of Bono from 2002 and 2015. On Saturday, November 23, 2019, I added the section on the Trump Border Wall.

Symbolater Syndrome, Pt. 1 of 4

or, Those Who Destroy a Great Value As They Perform Gestures That Symbolize Preservation of That Very Same Value


Stuart K. Hayashi


Due to the length of the original “Symbolater Syndrome” article, I am serializing it into four parts. This is Part One of Four. 


Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Entire Essay on One Page

Christian Bale in Batman Begins, dir. Christopher Nolan,
prods. Larry J. Franco, et al., (Warner Bros., 2005).

I want to talk about symbols.

Courtesy Pixabay.

No, not cymbals! Symbols!

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 (emphasis Christian Bale's)

Is Bruce Wayne right? Is a symbol incorruptible?


How the Use of Symbols Makes Us Who We Are
As human beings, we need symbols — without them we could not think. Every concept is a symbol of various particulars; the concept dog is a symbol of many different individual dogs of different breeds. Every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb is a symbol representing some concept. When you see the three letters d-o-g, you know they represent the concept of “dog”; when you see the word, the image of dogs comes to your mind. Even the word symbol is symbolic in another context. The suffix -bol means “to throw,” and the prefix sym- means “the same.” “Symbol” means to throw more than one entity of the same type. That is, when I “throw” the word or concept for a particular entity at you, you know that both the entity and the symbol of that entity are the same in that they both represent the entity. When I show you a dog and then I say “That’s a dog” to you, you know that the dog represents itself and the word dog represents the dog; conceptually, both the literal entity and the symbol for that entity are the same in your mind. In that demonstration I threw together the entity and the symbol for it, rendering them the same in your mind.

As Ayn Rand explained in the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, our perceptual awareness can focus itself on only so many particulars at once. If I show you three lines, as in | | | , you know those are three lines immediately. But if I show you too many lines at once, such as ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||, you do not know immediately how many lines there are. Hence, we have Arabic numerals — symbols —to help us out. As you perform arithmetic — perhaps calculating the number of monetary units you spent and how many monetary units you have left over in your custody — the symbols “38” are easier for you to work with in your mind than is ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||.

 A plan of action — such as a recipe — symbolizes in our mind the sequence of actions we are to take to accomplish a specific goal. Absent of symbols, we could not plan for the future; it is through symbols that we communicate our most complex thoughts. A punch to your face can convey hostility to you on a visceral level, but a motion picture is a set of symbols that conveys so many more emotions to you in a vastly more complex fashion.

A ritual is a set of actions that conveys a symbolic meaning. We human beings need rituals to remind ourselves of what we consider important in our lives. In the United States, it is a ritual on February 14 for romantic partners to exchange tokens of affection, such as flowers and candy and cards. People find meaning in this ritual because it is their method of reminding themselves of how much they value this romantic love during the other 364 days of the year.

At their best, symbols are cognitive tools that we use to help us expand upon our understanding of what is true in the literal, concrete context. (Note the very metaphor — that is, symbolism — in my referring to symbols as “tools.”) As I explained in the second issue of Hannah Eason’s Scout and Engineer magazine, when a work of fiction resonates with people, it is because on some visceral level they judge it to be a symbolic depiction of truths about human psychology that are applicable to real life — that is, our favorite works of fiction are symbols that remind us of what we consider important in reality.

Lex Luthor clone to Clark Kent/Superman [here]:
“The truth is, by the time you had dragged me to shore, something new had crept into your heart — pride, the most damning of the seven deadly sins. Now you wear that pride on your chest — right here in that self-righteous symbol.”

Symbols are so ubiquitous that we take them for granted; we are so accustomed to them that it would be cumbersome if, every time we encountered a symbol, we stopped to think to ourselves, “That’s a symbol.” In any instance wherein Y represents X in your mind, and X and Y are not literally the same, Y is a symbol for X. (I just used symbols to explain that.) A photograph is a symbol. A stop sign is a symbol. An obscene hand gesture is a symbol.

We use symbolism to explain to ourselves Aristotle’s Law of Identity and, upon having it written out symbolically, it becomes easier for us to apply it deductively to various situations. Take the expression of this Law, “If A = B, and B = C, then A = C.” Then take the syllogism, “If only birds have feathers, and if penguins have feathers, then penguins are birds.” Here, A represents birds, B represents the exclusive attribute of possessing feathers, and C represents penguins. “If A = B, and B = C, then A = C” is the symbolic representation of the fact that if the first and second item are the same in the pertinent context, and the second item and third item are also the same in the pertinent context, then the first and third item are the same in the pertinent context as well. As observed in psychologists’ Relational Frame Theory (RFT), this deductive application of Aristotle’s Law of Identity is something that babies that are 22 to 27 months old are able to apply on their own without any adult caregiver having consciously taught them to do so.

Even a principle or rule of conduct is a symbol. If society had no rules, no one would ever know how to behave around anyone else; we would all be in a state of perpetual culture shock. Rules of social conduct — such as etiquette — emerged through repeat interactions among people so that the next time those same people met for a specific purpose, they would have a better idea of what to expect from one another. A general rule of behavior is a symbol in that it represents, in your mind, the same sort of behavior you must repeat every time a particular social context repeats. I’m in the New York subway and I hear someone sneeze. I say “God bless you,” even though I am an atheist; the sentence is a gesture representing my goodwill toward people who are ill, or who feel awkward and undignified on account of the sneeze. Then I go back home to Hawaii and I hear an aunt sneeze. Again I say “God bless you”; the same goodwill is implied. Then I got to work and hear my secretary sneeze. I say “God bless you.” There are all of these different particular situations but they have a commonality — observance that someone sneezed, and the rule “Say ‘God bless you’ after someone sneezes” is itself a symbol that I use to remember what course of action to take in each instance where someone around me sneezes.

As of this writing, I am composing my own work of fiction that plays up symbolism heavily — some of it might be too on-the-nose (the very expression on the nose is highly symbolic, of course). If you want a hint on what the fiction is about, here is one of my favorite symbols:

A symbolic change to a symbol that symbolizes
another symbol. (This modifies a
fish symbol that symbolizes Jesus, and
Jesus is already a symbol.)
Courtesy Pixabay.

When you notice how strongly we human beings depend upon symbols to think, it becomes less surprising how emotionally invested people are in their favorite symbols. You may have heard of how, back in the 1980s, a very puerile “artist” created a work he called Piss Christ; this involved his dunking a crucifix in a bucket of urine. In 2013, Florida Atlantic University professor Deandre Poole commanded his students to write “Jesus” on a piece of paper and then stomp on it. Very understandably, many Christians were offended by these gestures. I am an atheist — even a Christopher Hitchens-style militant anti-theist — and I am offended by these gestures; they are gratuitously cruel. One might ask the offended, “What do you care? It’s not as if someone actually socked you in the nose; all that happened was that the symbol that is Jesus was shown disrespect.” Yes, that is true, but billions of people have pledged themselves and their families to the ideas behind that symbol.

When Professor Poole ordered his Christian students to stomp on a sheet saying “Jesus,” that was itself a symbolic act — he was ordering his Christian students to commit a symbolic act of disrespect toward so much of what they and their families hold dear and believe to be right. The same applies to Piss Christ — it was the artist’s symbolic gesture indicating his presumption that so much of what Christians value deserves to get pissed on. The reason why, as a committed critic of religion, I find zero value in Piss Christ and in Professor Poole’s orders is that they were not offering any real criticism of the myriad faults and fallacies in Christianity; theirs was just a symbolic gesture designed to convey hostility as such.

Symbolism is also at the center of the blowup over newspaper cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. A very obvious reply to Muslims is, “That was just a cartoon; it wasn’t smacking you around; what do you care?” To most Muslims, the act was a symbolic show of disrespect toward a set of ideas to which devout Muslims have dedicated their entire lives. I don’t think you appreciate someone else implying that everything you love and cherish ought to be so casually dismissed. Of course, it’s embarrassing that this even needs to be said: no cartoon, however offensive or vile, justifies a violent response in the form of riots. But the point here is that there is actually nothing unusual about anyone getting highly emotional over a symbol — as we will see shortly, that is a common occurrence in the more secular First World, among the religious and atheists alike.

Due to the intense emotional reactions that symbols arouse, it also should not surprise that the most effective forms of propaganda are the ones that make the most effective use of symbolism. The most notorious political advertisement in U.S. history is a television commercial from 1965, run on behalf of Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson. The commercial depicts a little American girl pulling the pedals off a flower and counting the number of pedals she pulled. Then, off-screen, there is a voiceover of a man doing his own countdown from ten to zero. It turns out that the man's countdown is the countdown for the launch of a nuclear missile. Though it commences off-screen, the girl and everyone else presumably perishes. This heavy-handed symbolism was to imply that if Americans voted into office LBJ’s Republican rival, Barry Goldwater, nuclear apocalypse would be the result.




Indeed, people not only employ symbolism to emphasize what they like and wish to promote, but also what they wish to oppose. Many people who are paranoid about corporate control over the food system launch all sorts of fanciful and false accusations against Monsanto Corporation. Do those people have any sort of personal grievance against Monsanto? The truth is that they do not; they don’t know any Monsanto employees and can point to no instance of having been harmed directly by Monsanto. Rather, they are using Monsanto as a symbol; by denouncing Monsanto, they believe they are striking a blow against a phenomenon that is actually much larger than Monsanto (and a phenomenon that, in many respects, is actually beyond the control of Monsanto’s top executives). (See my refutation to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's smears about Monsanto and GMOs here).

Symbolism is also the basis of politically motivated “debunking biographies.” Some historic figures are taken as symbols of particular ideas. To many Americans, Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan and Ayn Rand symbolize the principles of free-market capitalism. For that reason, some anti-capitalists have penned biographies to besmirch Jefferson and Reagan and Rand. The implication is that if Jefferson and Reagan and Rand — the symbolic representations of free-market capitalism — are discredited, then the practice and implementation of free-market capitalism shall likewise diminish in reputation. To many on the political Right, Barack Obama symbolizes political leftism. To them, if Obama’s reputation is tarnished, then the reputation of political leftism should be tarnished with it.

That also happened in the case of Matthew Josephson. During the 1930s Josephson — then a member of the Communist Party of the USA — resented the Du Ponts and other businessmen who opposed the New Deal. Considering such historical industrialists as John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and John Pierpont Morgan, Sr., to be symbols of laissez-faire capitalism, Josephson wrote a scurrilous book smearing them as robber barons (Josephson says that these men were already being called this name by the populists of the Granger movement in the late nineteenth century; he neglects to mention that the association of industrialists with “robber baron” was esoteric to everyone outside of the granger movement, and that it was Josephson himself who brought the robber baron epithet into the mainstream). Josephson figured correctly that if he ruined the reputations of particular famous industrialists, he could contribute to the negative image of for-profit enterprise as such. As was hoped, the Du Ponts and other industrialists who criticized the New Deal were dismissed by the public as the moral equivalent of the previous century’s “robber barons,” and the New Deal went on facing less opposition thereafter. (For a rebuttal to Josephson’s falsehoods, read Maury Klein.)

Yes, Bruce Wayne, a Symbol Is Corruptible
And one symbol can spawn another. For instance, a male lion has come to symbolize royalty because it reminds people of a symbol of another symbol. The male lion’s mane, with so many strands sticking out, reminds people of the spikes on a crown; crowns and coronets are themselves symbols. The spikes on a crown represent the rays of the sun, and it was ordinary for early civilizations to worship the sun. The ancient Egyptians worshiped the sun. So did the Mesoamericans, and the spikes sticking out of their priests’ headdresses, too, represent the sun’s rays. The Japanese have also, and that is why the sun is on the Japanese flag. The halo around the head of Jesus and angels in paintings represents the sun as well. The sun was considered divine — godly — and, to emphasize to his subjects his own godliness, many a European king would wear a coronet that reminded everyone of the sun, that symbol of power and divinity. Hence, the lion’s male symbolizes royalty because it reminds people of a king’s crown, and the king’s crown was a symbol of the sun, and the sun was used as a symbol of power, both social and physical power.

Yet one sun symbol also demonstrates that, in some contexts at least, Bruce Wayne was wrong. A symbol can be corrupted. The people of ancient India created their own distinctive emblem to represent the sun, and this was also associated with mystical energy. This sun symbol was then culturally appropriated by a European mystic, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, for her new neo-pagan religious movement Theosophy (theo- as in “god” and -sophy as in “wisdom”; it was about “God’s wisdom”) . Theosophy became popular among Germans obsessed with race and ethnicity and of their own ethnic group’s history in a particular region — this was the pan-German Volkish movement, the alt-right “White Identitarian” movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As many members of the Volkish movement were mystical and wanted to revive the iconography of the religions that dominated Europe and Asia Minor before Christianity, the Volkists were greatly interested in Theosophy. They added their own racist components to Theosophy and called this new hybrid philosophy by the name of Ariosophy — wisdom about the Aryan race. The Ariosophists appropriated the symbol that Madame Blavatsky had appropriated from India. Adolf Hitler helped turn Volkism into a political movement and, due to Volkism’s ties to Ariosophy, Hitler adopted that same sun symbol that the Ariosophists got from Theosophy. That was the swastika.

Nowadays, when most people in the West see the swastika, India does not come to mind at all; nor do people think of the sun. They are instead reminded of racism, prejudice, and mass murder. What was once a symbol of the sun became a symbol of supernatural power and then it became a symbol of hate. Contrary to Bruce Wayne, the meaning of a particular symbol is not “everlasting”; one group of people can steal someone else’s symbol and then add new cultural meaning to it, a meaning quite different from, or even contrary to, the original meaning. Unfortunately for Master Wayne, a symbol is not incorruptible — as the creator of the “Pepe the Frog” character learned all too tragically.

Some of the great evils taking place in the world today relate to a specific manner in which symbols have been corrupted. This form of corruption is what I call symbolatry (simm-BAWL-uh-chree) — the worship of symbols. Specifically, it is the worship of a symbol to such an extent that the symbol takes precedence over the concretes that the symbol was originally crafted to represent. At its worst, symbolatry involves the denigration and sacrifice of a value in the course of upholding or advancing some symbol of appreciation for that same value.


The Worthiness of a Symbol Depends Upon the Worthiness of the Real Entities and Phenomena That the Symbol Represents
In the philosophic branch of epistemology, there is a very nauseating school called anti-realism. Anti-realist philosophers posit the “theoretic possibility [sic]” that everything you experience — your great accomplishments, making love, giving birth to your children, raising your children — is just a dream or delusion. Maybe none of that is real, they say, and you are completely ignorant of the real world, assuming there is one. (As you can imagine, ever since the year 1999, most people who posit this arbitrary scenario cite The Matrix, itself a symbolic representation of other symbolic representations.) What I just described is the extreme version of anti-realism; the “moderated” versions are not much better.

One moderated version of anti-realism is called “representationalism.” Representationalism acknowledges that there is an objective reality external to your own consciousness. However, the representationalist is similar to the more extreme anti-realist in positing arbitrarily the “possibility” that your perceptions of reality are highly distorted. I paraphrase the argument as such.

There is a reality, but you experience it through the media of your sense organs. That is, inputs that inform you about reality pass through your sense organs, such as your skin and your eyes. Maybe something is lost in translation, such as in a game of “telephone” [note that this is yet another symbol]. In a game of telephone, you have one person at the far left and one person at the far right, and 98 people in between them. The person on the far left whispers a sentence in the ear of the person directly to his right. Then that person is to pass on the message verbatim. This second person is to whisper that exact same sentence into the ear of the person directly to her own right. This is to continue from person to person. By the time the sentence reaches the person on the far right, the message is garbled. Perhaps something similar happens when we interpret data. Maybe, for instance, the sky is not blue; perhaps the sky is really orange and we are all color-blind.  

Therefore, we must make room for the possibility that we do not experience reality directly, and the sensory inputs can never be more than crude symbolic representations of that reality. If reality is a beautiful artwork such as Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man, then our sensory experiences are not even a copy of that but a crude stick-figure version of it. (Note that because every realistic painting or drawing is a symbolic representation, a crude stick-figure version of Vetruvian Man would be a symbolic representation of a symbolic representation.) That it can be imagined is basis enough to conclude that it is theoretically possible that life and the universe, as you know them, are nothing more than simulations.

The representationalist position is ridiculous, and it is unfortunate that even philosophers who are often called empiricists, such as John Locke and Herbert Spencer, fall for that argument. Sensory data are the most basic basis for everything we know. To the extent that I gained a false interpretation through a superficial use of my senses — I thought I saw a puddle of water and it turned out to be a mirage — I learn of my error by the further use of the sensory organs (scientists used their senses to discover why there are any mirages).

No arbitrary postulate justly falls into the category of “theoretic possibility.” Any arbitrary postulate can be asserted, such as “Maybe it’s a theoretic possibility that an ice cube will fall to the bottom of a glass of water and remain there for eternity.” No, what makes a proposition a theoretic possibility is that there is evidence to support it.

It is nonsensical to say “There are only probabilities or possibilities and no certainties.” The validity of the concepts “probable” and “possible” presuppose the validity of the concept “certain.” The concept of “fraction” is derivative of “a single unit,” as a fraction is but a section of a single unit. Someone who does not know what a “single unit” is will not know what a “fraction” is, either. A percentage is a type of fraction; any percentage less than 100 is a fraction. The concept of a “50-percent likelihood” that an event will repeat itself presupposes the “100-percent likelihood” (that is, absolute fact) that it happened the first time. If no event can be 100 percent, then, correspondingly, you cannot deem the likelihood of any future event to be 50 percent either.

To say that a proposition is possible means that if the proposition is not necessarily certain, (1) there still exists evidence suggesting its certainty and (2) human beings have the means for ascertaining in the future whether the proposition is certain or not.

If on Sunday you say “It is possible that tomorrow I will bump into my colleague Steve and have a long chat with him,” that presupposes that by Tuesday you will know for certain whether you did or did not bump into Steve on Monday and have a long chat with him. It means that by Tuesday you would know 100 percent whether or not that happened. “Certainty” is the standard whereby any proposition can be judged to be a “possibility” or not. If it is not valid to pronounce any claim to be “100-percent known and certain,” then to pronounce anything a “99-percent possibility” is meaningless. Likewise, if no proposition can be deemed “certain,” then there are no criteria whereby one can justify deeming a proposition to be “possible” either. The validity of the concept “possibility” depends upon the validity of the concept “certain.”

It is ultimately through sensory experience that we ascertain what is possible or not. To say that maybe sensory experience is invalid is to say that the most basic means by which we determine any proposition to be valid or invalid might itself be invalid. The very people who say “Sensory experience might be an invalid method for determining what propositions are valid or invalid” are advancing a proposition that, by their own implicit admission, they cannot justify as valid. Hence, that very proposition is arbitrary and not deserving of further contemplation — and yet, for over a century, too many people in academia have staked entire careers on it.

Now we come to the weakness of representationalism in particular. The representationalist claims that we do not have knowledge of what is literally real; we only possess knowledge of our mind’s symbolic representation of what is real. That is, we do not know what reality is like literally; we only understand our own symbolic representation of what reality is like. The internal contradiction there is that it overlooks that you only know that Y is a symbolic representation of X to the extent that you know what are X’s attributes in the literal, concrete context. If you possess no knowledge of what X is literally — if you do not know what are X’s attributes in the literal context — then you have no basis in so much as suspecting that Y might be a symbolic representation of X.

For example, suppose I am two years old. I have never heard of elephants. I have never heard the word “elephant.” I have never seen an elephant up close in some zoo; I have never seen a photo of one; I have not seen any TV programs depicting elephants. I do not even know the distinction between “animal” and “plant,” or “animal” versus “nonliving object”; no adult caregiver helped explain that distinction to me. Nor has anyone told me what a statue or figurine is.

You have a figurine of an elephant. You show it to me and say “This is an elephant.” I will think “elephant” means this particular figurine. I will not know that the figurine is merely a representation of an elephant. In order for me to have comprehended that the figurine is a symbolic representation of an elephant, I first would have needed knowledge of what an elephant literally is.

Just as the validity of the concept “possibility” depends upon the validity of the concept “certain knowledge,” so too does the validity of the concept “symbolic representation” depend upon the validity of the concept “knowledge of what is literally real.” To know that Y is a simulation of reality or a symbolic representation of reality, you have to know what is actual reality. That is the internal contradiction of anyone who asserts that we do not know actual reality but only know a simulation or symbolic representation of it. Our knowledge of what constitutes reality’s attributes in the literal context is the standard whereby we judge anything to be a simulation or symbolic representation of that reality. If we do not know what reality’s attributes are in the literal context, then we lack any criterion for ascertaining anything to be a simulation or symbolic representation of that reality. Hence, the assertion “Maybe our sensory experiences are not actual reality but only a simulation or symbolic representation of that reality” also amounts to an arbitrary assertion unworthy of further speculation.

The point of this section is that in metaphysics and epistemology, literal reality has primacy over simulation and symbolic representation. Knowledge about literal reality comes first, and from that we derive our simulations and symbolic representations of that reality. Our symbolic representations of that reality — the concepts and words we use to comprehend reality, and the works of art we compose to make even more sense of it psychologically — remain important. But in the philosophic branches of metaphysics and epistemology, those symbolic representations should not be treated as more important than having a highly literal understanding of what goes on in reality.

And what is the ultimate purpose in understanding reality on a highly literal level? Contrary to Plato, the final purpose of learning about reality is not learning and contemplation as ends in themselves. The final point of learning about reality is to thrive in that reality. Thus we arrive at ethics — the science of ascertaining the proper course of action in reality.

It is very fine that many of our actions amount to gestures and rituals that symbolize our loyalty to a particular value. The problem comes when a gesture or ritual symbolizing a person’s loyalty to a particular value ends up being prioritized above the actual value — when people sacrifice and destroy what they purport to be their value for the sake of their performance of a gesture or ritual that is intended to convey their loyalty to that very same value.

Let’s go back to the ritual of lovers exchanging gifts of Valentine’s Day. Imagine that one man wants to provide a very expensive and lavish gift to his girlfriend on February 14 — and that the fanciness and expensiveness of the gift is to be a surprise. He begin working extra hours — to the point that he neglects his girlfriend. He resents the added work and, in turn, comes to resent his girlfriend as well, frequently snapping at her and trying to make her feel guilty for his own misery, all the while not telling her his plans for February 14. Her very presence reminds him of how he’s making himself miserable for her ostensive benefit. By the time that February 14 comes around, he does give her the gift — but, at this point, he hates her guts. Was that man’s effort worth it? No, it was not. The ritual of exchanging gifts of Valentine’s Day symbolizes a particular value — your appreciation for your lover on the other 364 days of the year — and that value is exactly what that man undermined in his prioritization of the symbolic gesture.

There are plenty of other examples of this phenomenon — some of which have extremely dangerous and violent ramifications in Western society.

Consider Aristotle, one of the earliest philosophers in history to point out that facts, not human or divine authorities, are the final arbiter of truth. He came to many conclusions throughout his life, but stressed that more vital than most of his conclusions is the methodology whereby one is to reach conclusions properly. The methodology is of inductive reason — relying on observational data themselves as the most basic basis of all knowledge. Throughout much of early Christendom, theologians recognized that Aristotle’s approach conflicted with Christian emphasis on faith. For that reason, the Bishop of Paris issued the Condemnation of 1210 A.D., banning Aristotle’s works. That did not last, however, as the most curious theologians, such as Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas, admitted to themselves that Aristotle was too valuable to stow away. Ultimately, it was Aquinas’s approach that won out over the course of the high Middle Ages, and church authorities relented to allowing some amount of study on Aristotle. Unfortunately, recognizing how much of Aristotle’s original works still conflicted with church doctrine, the scholastics bowdlerized him to the point where, later, even such learned scholars of the Renaissance as Francis Bacon and Pierre Gassendi ended up confusing the word of the church with the word of Aristotle. Bacon and Gassendi apparently believed that arguing in favor of inductive reason was some sort of rebellion against Aristotle. Among the empiricists it was only a minority — which includes figures such as Grotius — that recognized that the exercise of inductive reason was the approach that Aristotle recommended all along.

Now we come to the symbolatry. Aristotle concluded that the sun revolved around the Earth. Galileo came to the opposite conclusion — that the Earth revolves around the sun — and he knowingly did so through use of Aristotle’s own method, the method that Aristotle stressed was more important than most of Aristotle’s conclusions. In “Letter on Sunspots,” Galileo pointed out that Aristotle “would not have departed so far” from Galileo’s conclusion “if his knowledge had included our present sensory evidence, since he not only admitted manifest experience among the ways of forming conclusions about physical problems, but even gave it first place.”

Yet the church persecuted Galileo on the premise that Galileo had contradicted Aristotle’s position — which, at this point, had become the church’s official position. In effect, the church’s persecution of Galileo was a symbolic display of loyalty to Aristotle when it, in fact, involved punishing the true Aristotelian for adhering to Aristotle’s method. Here, loyalty to Aristotle in a symbolic context was venerated over someone being loyal to Aristotle in concrete practice.

I can cite a more recent case study. The American flag symbolizes freedom, which includes the freedom of expression, the freedom of speech. Some politicians argue that this symbol of freedom is so sacred, it should be illegal to burn a U.S. flag in your own possession. In other words, if you purchase an American flag with your own money and then, to make some political statement, you burn it in front of a gathering of people on your own land, these politicians will consider that so evil that the government should fine or imprison you. But however offensive it may be, what you do peaceably on your own private property with your own personal effects is free expression. Politicians who would outlaw the burning of the American flag are purporting to defend a symbol of the freedom of speech and, in so doing, they sacrifice the actual freedom of speech.

At first I was tempted to call this idolatry (ī-DAWL-uh-chree) — the suffix -latry meaning worship. Idolatry is the worship of idols, an idol being a material object or image that depicts something important, usually something godly. An American flag qualifies as an idol and icon, and acknowledging it as such does not demean its value. However, a more accurate term for the phenomenon I describe is symbolatry — worship of symbols in which the symbol of some value is worshiped as higher and godlier than the very same value the symbol purportedly depicts. I say symbol rather than idol because symbol is a broader category. Whereas an idol is a solid or visual symbolic representation, a symbol can be any sort of abstract representation; an action can be a symbol, such as a dance, a pantomime, an obscene gesture performed with the body, or an actor’s performance in a motion picture. Those who would worship the flag — the idol symbolizing free speech — to the point where they would sacrifice free speech in the name of defending the idol that symbolizes free speech, are worse than idolaters (ī-DAWL-uh- tûrs); they are symbolaters (simm-BAWL-uh-tûrs; the –tûr at the end of symbolater is pronounced the same as the tur in turn, turf, turkey, terminate, and turpentine).

Instances such as in the quest to outlaw flag-burning are the Stolen Concept Fallacy taken to another level. As explained by Objectivism, knowledge is hierarchical — sometimes for you to understand concept B, you must first understand concept A, such as how you must first understand “certainty” to understand “possibility.”

Someone falls prey to the Stolen Concept Fallacy when that person actually tries to invoke concept B in order to attempt to invalidate concept A, all the while overlooking that concept B depends upon the validity of concept A to be valid itself and that concept B is therefore valid no more than the extent to which concept A is valid. To phrase it differently, someone who uses the Stolen Concept Fallacy has forfeited any rightful ownership over concept A but, in order to make his point, he wrongfully and sneakily claims concept A for himself anyway — hence he has “stolen” the concept A. An example would be if I told you, “I am unable to communicate myself to you.” If you believed what I said, you would be falling prey to the Stolen Concept Fallacy — my being able to tell you I cannot communicate with you would hinge upon the fact that I am capable of communicating with you after all. The claim “There are no certainties, only possibilities and probabilities” is also a Stolen Concept Fallacy. As previously explained, the validity of the concepts “possibility” and “probability” hinge upon the validity of the concept “certainty.”

The politician who tries to outlaw flag burning is stealing a concept — specifically, a value — in practice. By proposing a form of censorship, the politician has forfeited the value of freedom of speech; he has abdicated any rightful ownership over the value that is freedom of speech. Yet by upholding himself as a defender of the symbol of freedom of speech, the politician is trying to claim ownership over the value of freedom of speech anyway — wrongfully.

Many of the most hazardous forms of symbolatry in politics have to do with legislation that is intended to be taken as a gesture symbolically conveying the politicians’ and activist supporters’ compassion and humanitarianism, even as the legislation harms peaceful people.



To be continued...here.
____

Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Entire Essay on One Page