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Introduction

The study of symbols, memes, and the meanings behind them are covered by a variety of different academic lenses, from semiotics, to ontology, to memology. These lenses are used with the intention of understanding the ‘why’ of symbols; where they came from, how they are employed, and what cultures they have influenced.

To this end semioticists separate out the signifier from the signified. The Signifier is the symbol itself, a representation, sometimes quite abstract, of a signified object, action, or ‘thing’ that has been physically or mentally observed. When we witness a signifier, we translate its meaning, and understand it to indicate something about the signified.

Two critical factors dealt with in this book’s symbolism are fitness and naturalization, which are interconnected in their expression. Fit symbols find a niche culture where they can spread rapidly and hold their meaning over time.

Symbols that score strongly in their fitness are often tied to common human experiences and natural events, such as the sun, the moon, and the stars. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone alive who has not experienced one of these signified objects.

To the end of fitness, symbols can find a good niche, but they also change to fit the niche, adapting the signifier’s shape as well as their own informational content to become more likely to spread.

Generationally, fit symbols hang around in roughly the same form for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Other symbols may have a better fit for narrower slices of time but across a wider area.

While both types of fitness are interesting, the main subjects within this book are mythologies; memetic media that stay fit over long time periods, though not always through virality or having the best fit for any prevalent culture.

Information Theorists might step in at this point and suggest there is a connection between symbols and the environments they occupy, that symbols are simultaneously caught between maximizing their informational content (entropy), and their resistance to the distortive effects of the channel they occupy (noise). It is rarely possible to have both, so symbols largely face a trade-off that shapes them into the unique structures we recognize them as today.

The related factor of naturalization looks at what happens when symbols are so fit that we find ourselves foregoing translation; rather, the symbol is the thing itself reacted to, not what it signifies.

This may sound a little strange, so it helps to look at traffic lights as an example. In the high-speed world of automobiles, you can’t stop to translate the meaning of a red light, unpacking the full connotations of who is sending the message, why it is being sent, and for what purpose.

A driver simply sees the symbol and reacts by stopping, no further translation needed. Similarly, within that niche the number of symbols that mean ‘stop’ proliferate; see something standing in the middle of the road? Stop. Hear a loud noise? Stop.

Within a naturalized world, we don’t need to know what the signified object is, only what is required in how we respond to it.

There is of course an atom of the original meaning translated through the signifier, but it is so small and critical that a wealth of information is lost with the assurance of expediency. This is the key to a fit naturalization; reactions to naturalized symbols has, in many ways, the same effect as careful consideration and decision-making regarding the information they contain.

This gives the person an optimal use case: expediency in decision-making, and conservation of attention for other information. The state in which we constantly react to symbolic signifiers without overly concerning ourselves with what is signified is called Hyper-Reality[i].

That is to say, when doing this we are in a state that has gone beyond the real through an excess of symbolism to such a degree that we can no longer distinguish between what is authentically real and what is simulating reality. You can think of the experience of Hyper-Reality as a sort of zany mesh of emotions, intuitions, and heuristics that guide us through iconographic landscapes where symbols are omnipresently naturalized. Reacting naturally to the symbols in turn has realistic effects – or, at the very least, highly convincing simulations of real effects.

Hyper-Reality, which we might imagine as a realm of the eminently human, an interwoven fabric of communication, is rather something along the lines of an animal domain; a return to nature by switching off that conscious picking-apart critique that, in unending sequences of parity checks, asks whether what is being experienced is ‘authentic’ or ‘fake’.

Animals we can imagine as highly symbol-based creatures, easily fooled by supernormal stimuli, hoodwinks, and scarecrows. Humans, while undeniably animal, only ever surpass this by denaturalizing symbols. That is to say, making a habit of looking beyond the signifier, to the signified, and finding what we might call the ‘authentic’, or the ‘truth’.

This compendium is largely about finding the truth in domains of hyperrealism.
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[i]Hyper-Reality as a concept is more fully discussed by Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper-Reality (1990)