Woe to the symbol-minded
Symbols. They have one job: To evoke emotion, producing an immediate response absent of critical thought. It doesn’t matter if it’s a corporate logo, a traffic sign, or a flag. You don’t think, you just react. Symbols have been used to manipulate those who don’t want to think since before writing existed, and in the 21st century, people still haven’t caught on.
I have a distaste for memes. They tend to boil things down to a false dichotomy, or they strawman, or cherry pick, or commit some other fallacy. They abandon critical thought, they don’t inspire it.
To prove that critical thought is abandoned during this process, consider that people recently expressed their disgust with Land O’Lakes by using a meme with a drawing of a Native American woman going missing on a pack of butter. Meanwhile, we have a widespread issue with actual Native American women going missing, and nobody seems to care, because they don’t have an emotional reaction to people, just symbols. They love that symbol more than what it’s supposed to represent.
It’s true of butter, it’s true of brands that transfer stolen loyalty to imported Chinese junk, and it’s true of flags. When people love a symbol more than what it’s supposed to represent, it becomes worthless. Many people who call themselves patriots today, have rendered the American flag worthless, because they’ve forgotten what it stands for.
The United States was a country founded on an experiment, and it required an educated populace to function. When I say that, I don’t mean a college degree or a high school diploma, I mean the ability to critically think, for yourself. That’s what self-governance is about: Leading yourself. You have to be able to make decisions for yourself, and ideally, in this experiment, you’d elect someone to represent the decisions you would make.
But we don’t do that anymore. Why? Symbols! Elephants and donkeys. We care more about the symbol than we do our own beliefs. Butter is a divisive topic, not because butter is important, but because we don’t think beyond symbols anymore. That’s why we’re so easily led, manipulated, and exploited, because any time your chosen party, elephant or donkey, wants your support, all they have to do is wave another symbol, one you’ve pledged your undying loyalty to.
This has created a group of people suddenly concerned about their rights and the national debt, and about inefficiencies in unemployment and assistance programs. Of course, this happened only after their rights were violated, their pensions were put at risk, and they themselves needed government assistance. By their measure, anyone who disagrees with them is a communist or a fascist, and somehow, some way, every action or idea they dislike is a brainchild of Hitler, and all of theirs are founding father approved. They advocate “principle over party,” strapping on their superman tighty-whities to take on the evildoer governors and their henchmen, and those other politicians. But only the ones in the memes…
Where were they over the last 75 years, as those politicians ran up the national debt and eroded our liberties? Electing them, that’s where!
These people have been preyed upon by panderers and Machiavellian opportunists their whole lives. They’ve fallen victim to the sunk costs fallacy, too invested in the corpses of once-meaningful symbols to let go and recognize that the authority figures they trusted lied to them, for a very long time.
We need to start thinking beyond symbols, because we’re headed into legitimate tough times. We’re going to have to critically think. Those in power care about staying in power. They care about using those symbols to manipulate you. They don’t care about you, they’re sitting behind closed doors, doing the math on how many of us can die or lose our jobs while still getting themselves re-elected. They’re not leaders, they’re rulers.
Now, I agree. I think we should clean house and get rid of people who don’t represent us. Whether they’re in memes or not. That includes every elected official who’s a lawyer, a banker, or a millionaire, and rejecting the idea that the symbols of wealth and “success” mean they know better than we do. It includes anyone who voted to reduce our representation in government through PA HB-153, like Pam Snyder, Ryan Warner, and Pat Stefano. It includes the lying sacks of snot who tricked us into raising the retirement age for judges to 75 by deceptively wording the 2016 ballot measure. It includes Matt Dowling, the honorary first customer to buy alcohol at Walmart after selling us out to the Walton family, sucking more money from our local stores and communities and depositing it into the laps of Arkansas billionaires. The average Walmart takes in $120,000 a day. Does anyone believe for a second that selling Christian Klay wine in a few stores makes up for how much of that money is sent overseas and out of state?
But that won’t be enough, because it won’t teach people how to lead, or to think critically. It won’t make people fact-check a Facebook post to see if it’s really just a fake quote plastered over a picture of a famous dead person. Voting for the other party, the same pig with different-colored lipstick, won’t change the system of pandering and propaganda, only changing ourselves will; changing the way we think. The choice is yours.
Justin Sims is a resident of Uniontown