Language creates symbolic worlds, worlds where things aren’t just things, worlds where non-things are given power over people, worlds where things of actual substance may or may not be recognized for what they really are.
Contrast this with the world of a nonlinguistic creature, say, a dog. Dogs are unable to penetrate beyond the symbolic surface. Dogs live in a world of signs and signals, a world of indications, a world of smells and sounds and sights and movement. There is nothing arbitrary about a sign; the relation it shares with the thing that it signifies is direct: a footprint and the foot that created it share an intimate and insoluble bond across time. The aggressive posture of another dog’s body is predictive precisely because it is a nonarbitrary external expression of an actual internal state.
Not all signs are equally reliable, of course. Some signs are vague indications while others are direct evidence. Still others can be purposely deceptive. Humans long ago evolved the ability to use signs as tools for social manipulation, for example. Facial expressions are perhaps the most obvious case of this. But even in the case of deceptive facial expressions, the signal is nonarbitrary, and linked directly to the manipulative intentions of the signaler and the predictable interpretations of the receiver.
Symbols, in stark contrast to signs, are entirely arbitrary, and can have no bearing on reality at all except by transmutation through a mythical parallel universe, an ersatz universe, a stylized imitation of an imagined universe. Symbols are mediators that inevitably become barriers to the abundance of the concrete world. Symbols can operate only inside a symbolic world, and language frequently leaves humans trapped on the symbolic inside where myth becomes reality and reality languishes unattended in the shadows.
Humans swim in an insulated make-believe linguistic pond, and come to see the whole cosmos as saturated with its rarefied waters.
And then a strange alchemy occurs in which words, arbitrary symbols, become signs. The arbitrary becomes the determined. And, especially among the civilized, words are treated as if they held more signifying power than how they are being expressed. Written language pushes this to the extreme, where the how becomes completely invisible, and even the addition of symbols designed to convey the emotional context, emojis and the like, are unable to compensate for the massive amount of information that is lost in the process. The inside-out topsy-turvy way that civilization reframes reality has made the distinction between symbols and signs sloppy and difficult to untangle. As a result, the symbolic becomes the default, the arbitrary becomes primary. The problem with this should be obvious.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the symbol-enchanted civilized human mind, nothing is obvious.
