Symbols Arise, Symbols Degrade
Sometimes they get violently replaced
Nothing is our own. Not the ideas in our heads either. They arise and fall away like anything else. And the fact that they arise is the result of causes and conditions like anything else. Why are the ideas in my head mostly in English, if they are articulated into language – because most of the language around me most of my life has been in English. I’d like to think of myself as a free thinker, but the truth is my mind, like every other, is only free within bounds, within the bounds of the causes and conditions it has been exposed to.
The mind has all sorts of ideas about things, people that it has no direct experience with. They are symbols.
Symbols arise, symbols pass away like anything else
There is, for example, the symbol of Elon Musk. Never met the guy. The symbol that arises in me in regards to him ten years ago is very different from what it is now.
What did I think of him before? Probably some sort of innovator. I associated him with some of the on the spectrum boys at my specialized math/science high school. Mostly just earnestly interested in math and science. I didn’t have anything against him really, didn’t doubt the intelligence he supposedly had.
My eyebrow did raise a bit once though, when he talked unequivocally positively about Winston Churchill. Perhaps Churchill was a positive force in Britain but he definitely was not in India. And he was generally a good old boy who thought his particular class from his particular region of the world were entitled to rule the world – my symbol of Churchill.
That symbol of Churchill likely was formed from various other influences that taught me to look with suspicion on “heroes” – maybe at a certain point in early adolescence when it became very clear that so many of those who were put on a pedestals as heroes – parents, priests – behaved in purely self-serving ways, abusing the positions they were entrusted with.
It was just a bit of an eyebrow-raise, a first weakening of that initial opinion, a picture softening and re-forming, a bit.
And now what do I think of Musk? “Twat” comes to mind. Can’t get much more crystallized than that. When he got into right wing politics, for a while I still thought he was still probably basically intelligent, despite the voices from the democratic informational landscape saying otherwise. But that change instantaneously when I saw this tweet from him:
I’m a software developer. This is complete unadulterated, self-serving, agenda-driven bullshit.
A cascade of thoughts:
What a bullshitter.
He must of just been bullshitting through his entire life.
Look at him, jumping up and down on stage, in his ill-fitting black clothing.
Twat.
There was an immediate and probably permanent crystallization of that opinion, that symbol. I see everything he does through that lens now.
Symbols arise, symbols degrade. Sometimes, they get violently replaced.
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