Universal to human beings time-immemorial and worldwide is that they traffic in symbols, and this trafficking in symbols is a source of both objective and subjective power for all people. Successful truck with symbols results in the increase of power, and a sense of growing empowerment in the world. Unsuccessful negotiation with symbols results in the loss of power and a growing sense of powerlessness in the world. The paradox of human reality, and the anthropological relativity of this reality, is that though humans must deal in the world in terms of the world, the manner in which they thus deal are defined symbolically. When they love another person, they love that person not as the person in and of oneself, but as a symbol, as an living embodiment of something in the mind of the lover. Human beings have no choice but to deal with the world, and other people, in terms symbolic to their nature. Wherever we watch the parade and pageant of power in the human world, there we will find human actors who are manipulating and managing key symbols, and serving as embodied symbols, within a larger social system.

I bring up the fundamental relationships between symbols and power in human reality for several interrelated reasons. 

First, human beings are in a sense prisoners of their own symbol systems, and they cannot escape these prisons, as they are carried around in their own heads and constrain all way may do or even wish to do. We may refer to a fundamental symbolic solipsism of human consciousness that is the foundation of the anthropological relativity of human reality. This influences not only our attitudes, our worldview, our knowledge, but our behavior and our social relations as well.

Second, these symbol systems are fundamentally arbitrary in the sense of not being bound by natural instinct or genetic endowment or hormonal fluctuations. We have a not unlimited capacity to manipulate, control and select our own symbol systems, even if the overarching tendency is for these systems to dominate and control us.

Third, these symbol systems are the primary mechanisms that mediate our adaptive behavioral relationships with our environment. They are the principle mechanism of human cultural integration and social-environmental adaptation on earth, and they are the universal basis for human cultural ecology.

Fourth, human relationships and human society in general is organized on the basis of human symbol systems. We would be loathe to admit it, but even our most intimate relationships, and even always our most intimate relationships, are in essence a kind of symbolic acting out and elaboration of our own fantasies, in our own heads. It is not that all other people are merely or only "objects" of our own symbolic dreams, because there occurs an important process of interaction and negotiation of symbolic forms between people.

One of the key characteristics that partition off the psychotic from the normal is the lack of social rapport and in a sense the fixation and inflexibility of internalized symbolic structures. For neurosis, we find a basic social dependency and rigidity of symbolic structures that are incapable of being modified, particularly through self-initiated efforts.

The key difference therefore between what we can call normal and abnormal appear to me to be in terms of the cultural sharing of symbolisms and the mutual reinforcement and modification of these symbolisms, probably upon multiple levels of their articulation. Abnormal behavior becomes deviant to the norm to the degree that such behavior is idiosyncratic and not shared in any cultural sense. 

The relativity of cultural patterning and social order arises from the social consequences of the symbolic relativity of human behavior and consciousness. The tremendous variation of cultural patterning worldwide demonstrates several things: 1. that cultural patterning is independent of genetic constraint; 2. that cultural patterning is highly susceptible, as systems, to processes of symbolic construction and modification; 3. that cultural patterning arises in the interdependencies of human social interactions and symbolic mediation of these relationships through time and across space.

I bring up the topic of symbols and power because I want to emphasize the tremendous power that symbols and symbolisms have for human behavior and human "nature." What we do in a material sense are without meaning if they are not imbued with symbolic importance. There is a great deal of room for error and manipulation in symbols, this is the source of their power and adaptive capacities for human beings. The world attaches tremendous importance to vital symbols, even the importance of life and death itself, and there is thus much power to be gained in the manipulation and control of symbolic forms in social life.

General Systems Essays, Vol. II