The Social Explosion of Symbols

Reading through a fine text on the philosophy of language recently I arrived at a chapter on symbols and metaphor. Words exist in a kind of temporal continuum of a discrete nature with lexicons as a kind of ontology illuminated like a nebula from the formation and forces of a dust cloud-perhaps even unto the miniature scale of strings or monads. Symbols are one way of creating semiotic tokens or indicators of larger meanings or formations of word meanings.

Metaphor too has a similar process. One might be a liar if one's metaphor is taken literally. An example is saying that a basketball player is a tiger on the court, or a lion when the public plainly can see that he is a human being. The meaning of symbols and metaphors is in relation to something else not implicitly contained in the symbol or metaphor. Like most words that aren't onomatapoetic, symbols and metaphors comprise a kind of abstract address for the object of described.

Social metaphors and symbols may arise that have a given meaning and value to which other people dissent. The explosion of a metaphor into the social lexicon may be brought by a political revolutionary or reformer-the symbol of the metaphor-perhaps a hammer and sickle may herald the arrival of the creative destruction of the existing social order. Interpretation of the symbol may be positive or negative as might the social effects of the deeper forces supporting the power criterion of the symbol or metaphor.

For social dissidents the formerly explosive symbol may become kitch-a paradigm for bad or obsolete things. Alternatively a symbol may arrive and fizzle failing to detonate efficiently generating stagflationary political anomie. Atheist dissidents to Christian symbolsm have for decades attacked Christian symbolism in order to neutralize the value. One example is that of the symbol of the fish on bumper stickers followed with a fish being eaten by a larger fish. The Christian concept of God providing creatively as Jesus so often did for his disciples is attacked with the nullification of economic providence in leftist American circles.