Whatever happened to images that have meaning?
Remember that symbolic language is necessary to speak of metaphysics, transcendence and non-perceptible realities such as Justice, Fraternity, etc.
Without symbols, everything is reduced to signs, which are linked only to perceptible things, for example, octagonal stop signs on street corners and fast food restaurant logos.
By reducing symbols to signs, we have made our human experience nothing more than an empty, soulless shell. We have become robots that respond to stimuli linked to what is accepted by the collective consciousness.
Losing the ability to relate to symbols has made contemporary thought ill. We no longer understand the meaning of analogy. Our thinking is conformist and dogmatic. For example, dominant contemporary thinking can imagine only economic solutions to the current crisis. It does not see that the crisis is human.
Once free thinkers and free dreamers, we have become mass slaves to our instincts, manipulated like marionettes by propagandists.
To help rehabilitate symbolic language, it is important to understand three historical aberrations that have led to the modern paradigm, to this society devoid of meaning.
First, there is the positivist current of thought, which claims that only things that can be measured and counted exist. But what room is left for art (which has become nothing more than decoration) and religious sentiment (which is channelled these days by preachers in large-scale spectacles or through pseudo-nirvanic states reached in ashrams in India)?
With this scientific positivism, we find ourselves in a world of cold statistics where each of us is nothing more than a number in the social machine.
Symbols have also been reduced in meaning through Freudian psychoanalysis, in which any expression of transcendence is considered to be pathological. And this pathology comes exclusively from the Oedipus complex, which is the repression of an unresolved childhood conflict between libido and its censorship.
Freud’s error — which has become the socialized norm — is that images, rites and myths represent nothing more than emotional regression, or illness. The theory behind the Oedipus complex has long been rejected, but strangely this is not reflected in society at large…
Third, symbols have been reduced to dogmatic images used to protect certain powerful doctrines. We have gone from the symbolic imagination to direct thought, which represses anything transcendent, evading it entirely. We have become attached to the surface of meaning. Images have become purely functional, no longer carrying the potential to provide illumination.
Through all of this, the imperialism of cold reason has emptied images of their meaning, leaving only empty shells. This is “logical” for our civilization, which does the same with the Earth, emptying it of its resources and leaving behind only lifeless deserts.
The roots of the current crisis run deeper than stock market embezzling. They grow out of our collective indolence when we are faced with the destruction of the meaning of life.
