by Hugh M. Lewis

Human beings are the prisoners of their own heads. Their brains granted them "world openness"--freedom from the constraints of natural instinct and libidinal impulses--but in return it exacted a heavy price. This cost was the price of true behavioral freedom from cognitive constraint. The chains are largely invisible and transparent to ourselves--we look through the windows of our eyes, but we do not see the bars that define the outlines of our view of the world. These chains are psychological first and foremost. 

How to explain this? Our brains, in their hyper-development of certain centers for speech and cognitive apprehension, for rationality, emotion and the ability to plan and trick, for greater manual dexterity, fine motor skills, speech and hand-eye coordination, resulted in a form of over-development and over-reliance as well as basic dependency upon symbolic forms, such that, without these cognitive-based symbolic forms, we cannot operate in the world. If we look at madness, we see people who are in solitary confinement in their own minds, so much so that they cannot effectively interact or develop rapport with anyone else in their world, or adapt effectively to the normal demands placed upon sane individuals in the world. And if we observe them in naturalistic settings, the key set of features we see shared by them is this capacity for living in a world of their own imagination, albeit one that seems to bear little relation to the real world around them.

And supposedly normal and sane individuals are really not too different from this--they also live in worlds of their own making, by and large, albeit these worlds just tend to be better coordinated and articulated with real reference points in the real world. We have  a wonderful illusion that we are really following and are actually guided by external reference points, and we fail to see that these may actually be symbolic figments of our imagination, cognitive constructs in our heads that map the external world in precise and sometimes tedious detail. The wonderful thing about our brains is that this entire mapping process is mostly preconscious and unconscious, and requires very little real thinking or deliberation on our part. It is a process that occurs automatically, like instinctual clockwork, and it thus frees our attention and our limited capacities for intentional thought and behavior to do things and take action in critical ways. We follow the maps in our own heads, and we carry the illusion that these maps are really the real world that they project onto.

The symbolic reification of reality, the psychology of misplaced concretization of our apperceptive apprehension of the world, is the illusion that mistakes our symbolic-cognitive maps of reality, for the actual experience of reality itself. It is an easy illusion to fall prey too. In fact it is our normal mode of conscious functioning. Freud was the first to point out the great extent that our conscious behavior was motivated and directed by unconscious feelings and thoughts. It would be too difficult to act and function otherwise, if we were always attempting to distinguish what was just in our heads from what actually exists "out there" in the real world.

So Homo sapiens has evolved not only as big-brained symbolic creatures, but as symbol-dependent creatures in a very fundamental way. Imagine a world in which everyone walks around "lost in internal space," wrapped up in their own heads, and talking to others only as if they were reflections or shadows of what they know and see in their own mind's eye. We can say that human beings are symbolically, psychologically solipsistic--our primary coordinate reference points are not external markers, except as much as we project and displace onto external signals--rather they are internalized symbolic-cognitive constructs that help us to organize our experiences of reality and allow us to respond effectively to reality. Our realities are psychologically relative.

This is pretty much how it is, and it leads to many kinds of difficulties characteristic of human beings. It predisposes us to certain kinds of chronic problems that seem unique to the human species. We have for instance few instinct-based inhibitions or control channels, so we have an almost wanton sexual promiscuity that can, under circumstances of symbolic transformation, turn into perversion. We are an aggressive species with few natural inhibitions to our aggression, such that we are prone to chronic violence, often even to large-scale blood-baths of violence. We can even take this aggression out upon ourselves, in strange ways, and end even in suicide, a phenomenon that is very rare if not completely absent among any other species of mammal or other animal. Why would nature bring us into the world just to have us self-destruct?

In order to protect us from ourselves, and from one another, and in order to create some facsimile of order in what would amount otherwise to a very chaotic world, human beings evolved not only a dependency upon symbols, but a dependency upon culture as well. Culture may be said to be an externalized, socially reinforced extension of our symbolic maps upon the effective environment. It provides us conventionalized reference points to guide and constrain our behavior. Of course, culture has been defined so many ways by anthropologists and non-anthropologists alike, that saying so might seem like a trivial generalization. But there is a little known definition of culture that derives from cross-cultural research and the challenges of understanding how people think and behavior differently from one another. We can call it a working research or methodological or operational definition of culture, defined in experimental terms, that allows us to form fairly specific hypothesis and then to empirically test these hypothesis under both controlled and natural conditions. 

This definition, coming from the anthropology of knowledge and cognitive and symbolic anthropology, is really not a complex one. We can define culture as the "measure of different behavioral response patterns that are shared by a common group of people." It is a measure of the extent to which certain behavioral affinities are shared by people, these behavioral affinities being defined in different ways, but always in terms of patterned and holistic behavioral response patterns, or, in other words, as symbolic behavior. Culture can be operationally defined as the sum total system that results from the sharing of significant symbols by a social grouping of people that are organized together for some set of purposes, whether this is work, play, living, procreation, nurturance, etc. Such a definition renders the study of culture empirically available and even measurable in an objective manner, and it allows us to circumvent certain issues of randomness assumed in statistical models.

Human beings have constructed symbolic worlds so that we can share symbols with one another, and by this means render our worlds as similar and consonant to one another as possible. Restrictive cultural orientations reinforce a narrow range of sharing, and prohibits or inhibits the adoption of alternative symbolic patterns. Open cultural orientations tend to be tolerant of a wide range of symbolic-behavioral alternation. Common culture allows us an intuitive apprehension and gestalt comprehension of how other peoples think, see, feel and respond to the world, and it allows people to coordinate their views of the world so that they may respond to one another and to the larger world in appropriate ways.

Thus, not only we are symbolic and symbolically dependent creatures, but we are also therefore cultural and culturally dependent creatures. We depend upon a mechanism of sharing and transmission of common symbolic constructs by which to organize and coordinate our worldview and our response patterns to the world among a common social group. And like our symbolic dependency and its unconscious ice-berg structure, cultural behavior and sharing is also marked by the illusion of transparent reification, as well as by the fact of being primarily embedded in our unconscious awareness and response to the world. And if we are prisoners of our own heads, we become also, by virtue of our development and growing up in social groupings, prisoners of the cultural life-world that we are born or bound into life-circumstances.

And if human nature has paid a heavy price for massive symbolic-cognitive apparatus of the brain, it has also had to make other kinds of sacrifices for the sake of cultural dependency. Our prolonged period of infant dependency, and the delayed process of developmental maturation, can be considered to be very expensive evolutionary adaptations of the human species that promote cultural and thereby pro-social development and growth of the individual human being. Overall, we call it "learning" how to become more human, and how to operate successfully in the world. This learning process begins the day we were born, and continues till the day we die. It of course changes and shifts focus and emphasis as we progress to different periods of our lives.

We see this in tiny tots who have not yet socialized or been enculturated into the life-world of their effective environment and principle care-takers. They babble to invisible people, and live largely in imaginary worlds, where the objective stimuli around them are merely the vessels for their own imaginary constructions.

Of course, this being said, human development is never complete nor perfect. Neither symbolic nor cultural acquisition is ever complete or satisfactory to the tasks of day-to-day human adaptation. This is why we are daily engaged in the reevaluation of our symbolic worlds, in our dreams, in our conversational apparatus with those significant others who surround us, and in our symbolic behavior and acting out of our impulses, feelings, intentions and thoughts. This serves the purpose of keeping our symbolic edge clean and sharp, and rendering it continuously coordinate with the world around us. The mass media, particularly newspapers and television, also serves this important function of symbolic reinforcement and mediation of change in our life worlds.

We depend upon the fact and frequency of cultural sharing in terms of symbolic behavior and related attitudes, by means of the cognitive mapping of standard cultural models, as a means of achieving cultural consonance and coordination of our adaptive behavior in a larger social setting. Frequency of sharing reinforces our behavioral adaptation and its cultural consonance daily.

Symbolic and cultural sharing reinforces a common framework, a common symbolic-cognitive apparatus, that allows us to coordinate our behavior in relationship to one another, and thus to function effectively at both individual and group levels of adaptation. Of course, such sharing is never total or complete. We will be lucky if we find only a strong percentage of sharing between people. But it is commonly found that we do not need to share everything, or even most things, with others if we engage in interaction with others for limited purposes only. Large scale, stratified and complex societies can in fact hang-together quite effectively with on a modicum of sharing between different groupings of people. In fact, the measure of complexity of human social organization can be accurately and realistically determined not in terms of the degree of overall sharing, but the degree of differences in patterns of sharing among sub-groupings.

Neither is sharing an all or none kind of thing. We may share parts of things, and this in only a partial manner. Thus our shared world is fraught with uncertainties and defined by few clear-cut boundaries. Communicative efficacy in the transmission and sharing process frequently demands resorting to the lowest common denominators among the largest number of people possible--advertising and marketing executives understand this requirement and exploit it regularly in their attempts to persuade people to buy their merchandise.

This principle has provided the empirical foundation for a symbolic framing methodology that underlies and forms the basis for a scientific, comparative approach to human systems research. Through its demonstration I have been able to demonstrate clear patterns of similarity and difference in behavioral response patterns between complex groupings of people at many different levels of elicitation and analysis.

Cultural systems take on traditions and become to some extent ossified structurally and symbolically as conventional frameworks that tend over time to resist structural change or transformation, though which also have proven to be quite resilient and flexible in being able to effective adapt to changes. Cultural systems have traditionally been quite conservative in orientation, as the principle function and objective of such systems was the reproductive survival and perpetuation of the group and of the cultural institutions and associated symbolism, in as complete and intact a manner as possible. Cultural convention acquires in time a sense of coercive momentum and constraint, both through direct and indirect sanctioning, that reinforces the maintenance of the system within a structural status quo and emphasizing foremost conformity and the maximum possible degree of symbolic sharing of behavior. Any changes in such a context are mostly likely to be construed as a threat to the survival and longevity of the system, and hence efforts are made to deal with such changes appropriate. Alternation of symbolic behavior is a form of change that must be controlled and strictly managed, especially in very conservative contexts. Hence alternative symbolic orientations will tend to be negatively sanctioned, and those possessing or promoting such orientations will tend to be either rehabilitated or annihilated.

One of the key factors influencing change in cultural systems and symbolic patterning of groups of people have been due to inter-cultural relations and cross-cultural contact, that largely result in alternation and frequent conflict of symbolisms and symbolic systems, with the destructive disintegration of one system, referred to as desymbolization, and its displacement by another system that is possibly in some ways inconsistent or disconsonant with the established framework of culture. 

This process is generally referred to as acculturation, and I would remark that all acculturative process is first and foremost symbolic acculturation in cause and effect, before it becomes anything else. People who are trapped historically in such transitional contexts are in a sense imprisoned to a symbolic sense of order that no longer sufficiently serves their needs, and may be considered in some fundamental sense disordered or even diseased. Such a context often proves unable to be rehabilitated. Symbol systems become dysfunctional and sometimes even counter-adaptive to the purposes of real living, and, as was remarked in the beginning for individuals suffering mental illness, so to can it become for entire social groupings of people who are symbolically dispossessed and live in a cultural world that is disconnected from the exigencies and realities of the larger world.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I