Symbol Rich
The biggest project of our times is the self. We are constantly called to be authentic: find our true selves, love ourselves, maximize our potential, and be all we can be. As they say, you do you.
This hasn’t always been the case: At other times, the village, the church, or the worker’s union guided people. In the past, most people lived to experience a sense of permanence to a greater whole, and achievements were primarily measured in contributions to the broader community. People were not asked to be authentic or to bring their true self to work; they were called to belong and do their part.
Of course, thinking about what each of us wants is not a new phenomenon. There is a long tradition of introspection, looking for purpose and meaning inside. The key difference is that, before, that search was aimed outward: the question we asked was what is my role and how do I contribute. Now, the question is internal, and so is the project. The psychological man is trying to figure out what he wants, why he wants it, and how to get it.
Today, the outside world is not a set of demands and constraints but something to be molded by our psychological forces. We want the world to respect us, love us, and value us. To that purpose, the modern man not only asks for change but also molds language and institutions to reflect his values.
This is not a uniquely liberal or left-wing phenomenon; it encompasses everyone. There are many flavors of conservatism in politics, as there are many interpretations of the great religions, with many churches. A modern religious person often decides which church to attend by how it makes them feel. A hundred years ago, or even fifty, not only did people have a different way of choosing their church, it was not even a decision to be made. In short, no one seems to be outside the individualistic perspective.
Work and consumption have also moved from material needs to psychological needs: work must first be an activity we want to do, and second provide substance. Consumption is increasingly about signaling - what clothing says about us, what traveling reveals about our values - and less about replacing, repairing or even improving on what we own.
There are many ideas that help establish the self to its current role (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Sartre…) but no idea has had the impact that technology has played in the rising primacy of the self.
Technology allows us to change the world as we please; this, in turn, erodes the notion of a stable outside and opens the perspective of reality as a blank slate. As technology evolves, we have been able to extend the transformational power of technology inwards: narcotics, digital technology, and medical advances help us think about the individual, also a blank slate: ideas, emotions, and physicality, all subject to change in favor of our needs and wants.
Without limitations of the world around us and our own mind and body, the self now has the primacy to reassess fundamental notions like justice, fairness, progress, love, and happiness.
Our current society is vested in technological progress that enables these notions to materialize to fit our own psychological needs, and in doing so, overwriting historical, cultural, and even past material limitations.
There is a strong, positive aspect of this focus on oneself. There are personal and communal gains from this era of individualism.
The first one is social. There is a saying where I grew up:* pueblo pequeño, infierno grande* (small town, big hell). Meaning, people can suffer a great deal when they live in a place surrounded by others who don’t share their same values.
Today, people can explore the world digitally and physically to find others like them. Together, they can redefine what it means to be “us.” These new tribes enhance people’s sense of meaning and happiness.
Individualism also has a tremendous economic and cultural impact, as it allows people to collaborate and contribute in new and unique ways that go unnoticed or unserved in more significant cultural or economic movements.
The current focus on the self has come with a rebalancing in values: authenticity over belonging or compliance, dignity over honor, self-preservation over courage. This refocus has been of immense benefit to many oppressed in the past, and contributes to many aspects of society that benefit all.
But these changes don’t come without a tradeoff. In return, we lose a sense of stability and permanence. The cost is not just one of comfort; it is not just about getting used to the new and the difference, to be ok with an ever-changing reality. What we lose is our symbolic life; that is, the set of common agreements that gives a share and stable ground and keep us from being trapped in our heads.
A symbol is a conventional, mutually recognized representation of an idea, a thing, or an act. In our everyday lives, we use rituals to organize our day-to-day lives around symbols.
For example, take a simple greeting: we meet someone on the street, and we say hi and smile, or we shake hands, or bow, or give three kisses, depending on the culture and circumstances. If, in this context, you decide to do something else, say, a jump with a dance, to self-express and mold the interaction for you, where does that leave the other person? And that encounter and their relationship? If they don’t share agreement on the ritual of greeting each other, and the symbol of trust, affection, respect exchanged in it, there is no actual place for them to meet, here and now, to say hello to each other in shared meaning and sentiment.
A greeting is a simple gesture, but you can quickly extrapolate this to friendships, romantic relationships, workplaces, religious groups, academic institutions and politics. If we don’t have common symbols, we won’t find common ground.
When everyone runs around on their own internal symbols, a lot of things become unattainable or unstable: romance becomes less about sharing and more about self-disclosures, friendships turn into activity groups, academic institutions, instead of forming individuals are staging for performances of individualism, and politics, instead of the art of compromise around common symbols, becomes a battlefield of a growing list of ever-growing private symbols.
In a world of rapid change and seemingly infinite malleability, symbols are old and historical. Symbols cannot be reinvented every morning, otherwise, they are just information, not something that can carry meaning.
If you feel a little something when you sing Happy Birthday to your grandma, it is because the song and your grandma both have a specific meaning, more so together. If every birthday everyone signs Happy Birthday however they want, not only could we not all sign together, but our minds and hearts could not connect the package of meaning that grandma represents with the historical meaning of all the times you sang happy birthday and all the time your grandma heard the happy birthday song for her.
In this sense, traditions are in opposition to the clean slate world and inner self that constitutes the very core of everyone’s identities today. This is not a small problem: how we say hi, or sing happy birthday are somewhat trivial examples of traditional life in society: there are old, enduring traditions around courage, honor, romance, family, and many more.
The current state of affairs is one of tension between self and tradition, between individual and symbolic life. We are free, but disconnected. We are individuals but our common spaces have been reduced to sharing our individualities, not connecting with each other in commonality.
We have built a world that reinforces the individual and the impermanent: private spaces like houses are getting bigger and richer, public spaces like plazas are getting smaller and poorer. Unique, permanent things are rarer, and new, dynamic things are now the most common object. The iphone, unlike a dinner table, is ever changing. Watching tv series is not watching movies. It’s all informational and fluent, very little is symbolic and permanent.
And this world, which has granted us unbounded options and freedom, has also rendered people very lonely, mentally unhealthy, and aimless.
At the pinnacle of the psychological self, all its great and terrible things are becoming transparent. It is plain to see all that there is to gain, and all that there is to lose.
I don’t think the answer is brute-forcing everyone out of the self.
There is no turning back the clock. But we do need shared symbols; we need to be outside of our heads and into the world, together, lest we go mad. And we can’t be making up new rites and traditions every year, no matter how economically advantageous that might be to those who make them and market them.
One good first step out of the trap of the self could be returning to the value of time and seasons: we need to celebrate, mourn, and suffer together. And we need to do it with a deep sense of belonging, and courage, sacrifice and honor. We need times to rest, and times to be active, times to go on our own, and times to band together. There is a lot of wisdom in ancient symbols and in how they help us organize time, not unlike how technology has helped to organize space.
We can think of a birthday, a rite of passage or a funeral as houses made to shelter our time: similarly to the way we make a clearing in the ground and raise a house so there is a space to be together, we can make houses in time: that is, moments to meet in shared rituals and traditions which make time to be together.
The tension between the self and the symbols is not to be won by one or the other: we need to have an inner life and a symbolic life together.
We need our individual lives to be symbolically rich. Wealth and freedom are worthy goals to pursue; maybe we should add to that list, a desire to be symbol rich.