- AMONG THE MOST PERVASIVE SYMBOLS OF OUR TIME ARE HOW TO
- AMONG THE MOST PERVASIVE SYMBOLS OF OUR TIME ARE FULL
AMONG THE MOST PERVASIVE SYMBOLS OF OUR TIME ARE FULL
It is a short leap from a society being nonjudgmental to a society full of people who don’t give a damn what they do or think. Many, if not most, of us walk around in a fog of words. There is no worse sin, we are told, than being judgmental. So, it is not enough that we not make choices by incorrectly categorizing people, we must now accept any thing, any idea, any person, no matter how vile, obnoxious, or ridiculous. Unfortunately, over the last thirty years or so, we have been conditioned to believe that we not only should be unprejudiced, but that we should also be indiscriminate. For example, a discriminating wine drinker would only drink the best wines. To be discriminating used to mean to show good taste – to be careful in one’s selections. Prejudice involves this kind of mistaken lumping together of people or things into symbolic categories discrimination, in it’s original meaning, is a positive thing. However, it is important to recognize the distinction between prejudice and discrimination. This is the essence of racial and gender prejudice – by assigning an individual into a category designated by a symbol, then attributing characteristics to the symbol, we make quick (usually incorrect) determinations about individuals from the symbol. On a more everyday level, words lose their meanings when they become substitutes for thinking, as happens when we decide about particulars too quickly from generalities. The level of abstraction becomes so great that they become entangled in the symbols and are unable to derive any meaning from them. This is why many people have trouble with advanced mathematics. Symbols lose their meaning once the abstraction is taken too far. The word dog is a symbol which stands for all dogs, just as an (actual, physical) flag stands for a whole nation, and the word flag stands for all of those things which have the aspects attributed to flags. Dog does not have physical existence it is a category – an abstraction – of the concept of what attributes every animal who is in the category shares. Think for a moment: who among us has ever seen dog? I’ve seen my dog – but I have never seen dog. And, although we may think that the words we use are very concrete, they are always used to express abstract thoughts. Words, by there very nature, stand for things. We do not elect truth.Īs pervasive as these kinds of symbols are, our lives are even more affected by another kind of symbol: words.
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Truth is unaffected by opinion, no matter how many people hold that opinion. In the U.S., if we go to a ball game or a community meeting we may pledge allegiance to a symbol: the flag of the United States of America.
AMONG THE MOST PERVASIVE SYMBOLS OF OUR TIME ARE HOW TO
Our appliances have symbols called icons which tell us how to turn them on and off. Our whole lives, no matter how conventional, are a constant stream of creating and interpreting symbols.
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He was particularly interested in a symbol called a mandala, which he found in many, diverse cultures throughout the world, and which he thought added credence to his theory. The drawings that we see on traffic signs and in airports are also symbols for such things as “No Pedestrian Crossing” and “No Smoking.” Carl Jung wrote at length about the symbols in our dreams, which he thought were shared among all humankind through what he called the collective unconscious. So, in an algebra problem, x stands for the number of miles between ‘here’ and New York. A symbol is something that stands for something else- usually something abstract.