God, the Personification of Our Relationship with Existence

When I was growing up, I believed God existed. This God was a superhero, and his powers were to know everything, to manipulate reality with his thoughts, and to be perfectly good in all ways. As I learned science and contemplated philosophy, I came to realize that such a superhero does not exist. For me, that was sufficient to start calling myself an atheist. However, I remain open to non-physical, naturalism-compatible interpretations of God, such as an archetype, the impersonal, unconscious principle that separates what exists from what does not exist, or today’s topic, a hypothetical person who knows and understands everything.

As human beings, we struggle with existence. We strive to understand our place in it, how we relate to those around us, to the world, and to the universe. When difficult times happen, we want to know why. As individuals, there is so much we don’t know; most of this world is beyond our comprehension, not to mention the rest of the universe. This can be absolutely terrifying, as is captured by the fictional genre of cosmic horror. But we can find relief from this fear by imagining that there is a person who knows and understands it all, and whom we can talk to and get advice and comfort from: a God.

Of the many ways we conceptualize God, one of them is as a friend, a mentor, or even a parent. We imagine God as a person with us, who has our best intentions in mind and understands and fully appreciates the world both as it is and as it could be, who understands the whole picture and our place within it. When we talk to this God, either by words or thoughts, we call it prayer. We act as though this God is with us always, seeing our thoughts and emotions without judgment or bias, and when we are tempted to do something we feel isn’t right, thinking of how God would see the situation helps us to follow our conscience.

Some atheists criticize this version of God for being nothing more than an imaginary friend. But “imaginary friend” has childish implications, and it comes across as an insult rather than a criticism. God is much more than an imaginary friend; he is an archetype, a mythological figure with the qualities of knowledge, compassion, and empathy taken to infinite extremes.

Believers will also bristle at the word, “imaginary,” since it has connotations of being made-up and arbitrary. But archetypes are not arbitrary; they are the personification of profound things. In my mind, God is not real, because a thing is only real if it is real in the same way as matter and light and space and time; that is, physical. But archetypes are discovered, not invented, and for some people that is enough to call them real despite being non-physical. Thus, an argument here would be pedantic.

This version of God is not specific to any religion. Archetypes do not depend on the narratives in which they are expressed. My favorite short story is “The Egg,” by science fiction author Andy Weir, where the main character dies and has a conversation with this version of God about humanity and its purpose.

Despite calling myself an atheist and having a lot of issues with religions, I still sometimes act as though I am sharing my experiences with a God, and I still pray from time to time. I am not ashamed of this, nor do I see it as being inconsistent. Because what ultimately matters is not beliefs, but actions and their consequences, and sometimes acting in a spiritual or religious way helps us cope with the difficulties of life, appreciate the good things, and find the meaning in existence. This view is called Spiritual Naturalism. Like all great mythology and fiction, God does not have to exist in order to be significant.

The Barrier – A Short Story

This is a work of fiction. Characters, events, locales, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The Barrier

by Christian Horst

At the end of a canyon lies a town, and all who live there share in abundance and joy. There is no way to the town but through a canyon, and the canyon walls cannot be climbed. My tribe has journeyed far to reach the town, as have many others from all over the land.

Before us stands a great vertical surface, stretching from wall to wall and high into the air. It is transparent like tinted glass, darkening the view of the other side. I wonder about it, but no one else seems to mind, walking through it as if it isn’t there. When I reach it I pause in curiosity. What is this boundary, and why is it here? I reach out my hand and touch it, and find it solid as a wall of plastic.

“Hey.” One of the elders of the tribe calls my name. “You going to stand there all day? Come on.” He passes by me and walks through the barrier.

Confused, I feel around on the area of barrier he just walked through. It is as solid as the rest.

He turns around. “Why are you just standing there? Get a move on.”

I raise my eyebrows and knock on the barrier. The hollow sound echoes through the canyon.

The elder steps toward me and says my name. “Don’t be difficult.”

I throw up my hands. “What am I supposed to do?”

He looks at me for a long moment, and then turns around and says, “If you won’t come, then we’ll move on without you.”

He steps forward, and the rest of the tribe follows, walking around me, passing through the barrier as if it doesn’t exist. I stare after them, tongue-tied at the elder’s casual cruelty, and the ease at which the other tribe members follow his lead. The last member passes by, looks at me, and keeps walking forward. I am left standing alone.

“Hey,” a woman’s voice says. I turn to see a beautiful woman standing nearby, a stranger, smiling at me. She holds out her hand and introduces herself. I shake it and give her my name in turn. “I’m going to the town,” she says. “Want to walk together?”

“I’d love to,” I reply, “but I’m having trouble getting through here.”

“What do you mean?” She asks.

I pat the barrier. She continues to look at me with questioning eyes. “I mean I can’t get through,” I say slowly. “I don’t understand what’s confusing about that.”

“Well,” she says, “I guess if you’re not going, then it was nice to meet you.” She walks through the barrier.

“Wait,” I say, “I’m going, I just can’t get through the barrier.”

She turns around and looks at me. “What barrier?”

I narrow my eyes at her. “What do you mean, what barrier?” I say, hitting it several times with my hand. “The one you just walked through? The one that’s about as easy to miss as the color of the sky?”

She frowns at me. “Look, maybe we’ll meet again in town.” She turns and walks away.

“Wh—” I say, holding up a hand. But she recedes into the distance without looking back.

It suddenly dawns on me what the difficulties I’m having with communication must be. Not only are other people unhindered by the barrier, but they can also neither see nor hear it. It appears that this barrier, as incredible as it may be, only exists for me.

Determined to find a way through, I search the barrier from one wall of the canyon to the other, from the ground to as high as I can reach. Every inch feels as solid as the rest. After a second time through, and a third, I sit down on the ground, exhausted. All around me, strangers continue to walk through the barrier, completely unaware of its existence.

I fall asleep on the grass. When I awaken the next morning, I lie there, staring at the barrier, trying and failing to think of any options for attempting to get past it.

In the corner of my eye, I see a man walking by wearing a psychologist’s uniform. With a spark of hope, I sit up and call out to him. “Hey, can I ask for your help?”

The man sees me and smiles. “Sure,” he says, “what can I do for you?”

“There’s this barrier preventing me from going forward,” I say. “No one else seems to be able to see it.” I tell him about what happened to me yesterday.

“I see,” the psychologist says. “It sounds like you’ve had some failures, and you’re discouraged by them.”

I look down for a moment, thinking. “Yeah,” I say, meeting his eyes again. “I guess that’s true.”

“Well then, if you’re willing to work with me, I’ll have you back on your way toward town in no time.”

I smile and stand up. “All right!” I say. “What do I have to do?”

The psychologist beams. “Great job! That’s the first step down with flying colors! Now, repeat after me. ‘I am not a failure.’”

“I am not a failure,” I say.

“Good. Now say, ‘I have what it takes to succeed.’”

“I have what it takes to succeed.”

“Head high, back straight! ‘I am worthy of success.’”

Enthusiasm boils up within me. “I am worthy of success.”

“‘I am worthy of esteem.’”

“I am worthy of esteem.”

I continue repeating after him, saying things like, “People like to be around me,” and, “I belong in town.” By the time we finish, I am full of vigor, shouting the lines with all the energy I have.

“Awesome!” the man says, clapping me on the back. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? I’ll see you in town.” And without another word, he strolls off.

I hold out my hand, pressing on the barrier. “B-but . . .” He is too far away and doesn’t hear me. I mutter, “But what about the barrier?”

I rap my knuckles against the barrier. It’s still as solid as ever. I wrack my brain, trying to think of where I went wrong, of what I could have said to make the psychologist understand my problem instead of assuming it was in my head.

Maybe he did understand it. Since nobody else can see the barrier, maybe it really is in my head after all. Maybe all I need to do to get it to stop blocking my path is to stop letting it. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. There is no barrier. I am just like everyone else. On my way to town, where there is food and celebration and friendship. There is nothing in my way. I confidently start forward on my journey.

Pain explodes through my nose and forehead, and then my rear. In a daze, I open my eyes to find myself sitting on the ground, the barrier looming above me, dark and solid as ever.

Reality is a bitch. I groan through gritted teeth, and sorely lift myself back to my feet.

Several voices call my name. I turn around to see around ten of my friends coming my way. I sigh, and smile at them. They approach me. “We’re going to town. Come with us!”

“I would like to more than anything,” I say, “but there is a barrier preventing me from moving forward. It seems to only affect me. Look.” I lean against the barrier in such a way that without it, gravity would pull me to the ground.

“Huh,” one of the men says. “That’s weird.”

A woman points and says, “Have you tried going that way?”

I follow her finger to a path in the side of the canyon. Its entrance is on the other side of the barrier. I shake my head. “I can’t reach it.”

“Oh.”

They stay with me for a while, talking and laughing. For a time, I can forget the barrier and the town, and enjoy the company of these wonderful people. But eventually things start to wind down, and they decide to move on.

“We hope you can join us in town soon,” one of them says.

“If it takes a long time, we’ll come visit,” another says. “And you can give us a call anytime you need someone to talk to.” She points to a phone on a small table . . . which is on the other side of the barrier. “See you.” They turn and leave.

I smile sadly and wave. “Bye.”

Others pass me as the days go by. Most ignore me. Some give me dirty looks or shake their heads while pretending not to notice me. Some are kind and believe me, and I can see in the eyes of a few that they have barriers of their own. But I can’t see theirs, and none of them can see mine. Some come back from town to visit me from time to time. They brainstorm ideas with me, or talk about the joys and struggles of town life. I treasure their support. But I learn that I am the only one who can understand my barrier. I am the only one who has a chance at finding a way through.

There is one thing that gives me hope. When I press my thumb hard into the barrier, so much that it starts to hurt, it leaves an indent, which takes about a minute to smooth over again. With no other options, I press hard. Then, I push on the lip of the indent, widening it.

It is a long, tedious task. I have to keep applying pressure to the whole area, lest it rebound and force me to start over from the beginning. I keep pressing until the skin of my thumbs is raw and I start to bleed from beneath my nails. Then I switch over to my knuckles and push with them until they are skinned and my joints throb. Still I keep pushing, hoping that if I push enough, the barrier will tear and I will be able to open a hole big enough to crawl through. I don’t know if that is possible, but there is nothing I can do but try.

People continue to pass by me. Most don’t understand. They don’t see the effort I’m making. A few call me lazy, and tell me that if I refuse to move forward, I don’t deserve to live in the town. I ignore them and keep pushing. They were lucky enough not to have barriers, and because of that, they have the luxury to believe that the world is fair.

As I lean my shoulder to rest against the area I have been pushing on, I notice that others are struggling too. Some lean forward, as if pushed back by a strong wind. Some lift their feet with effort, as if crushed under a great weight. And I realize there is so much more going on, a whole world of struggles and barriers that most people never notice.

At the moment, I don’t have energy to put into anything but my own efforts to get to the town. But somewhere in the back of my mind, a seed is planted, and I think that maybe, once I reach the town, I might devote a portion of the happiness and energy I receive there to helping others through their invisible barriers.

Of Numbers, Deadlines, and Mental Health

Since the last Friday of December, I have published a new blog post every week without fail. I’ve written about quantum physics, metaphysics, futurism, and all kinds of mind-bending subjects. On top of that, I have been making YouTube videos as well. Today brings my blog streak to 34.

Last night, I was working on today’s blog post, when I realized it just wasn’t going to work. The quality was poor, and I was just rehashing ideas that I’ve already talked about. This was not what I wanted to give my readers.

I went to bed discouraged, a dilemma playing in my mind. Should I publish the post and maintain my streak even if it means delivering something of poor quality? Should I let myself take a break and lose my streak, which took me half a year to build up? Or should I aim for a miracle and write something new all in one day?

I woke up feeling tired and uncreative. Looking through my folder of partially-written discussions, all of them required more mental energy than I had available. I asked a friend for advice, and she suggested I let myself take a break, that 33 is a good number, and the quality of my blog posts and taking care of myself are more important than keeping the streak going.

I agreed, and was just about ready to let go, when I got a new idea: why don’t I write about the struggle I am facing right now? I am already talking about it with my friend via text chat, so it was easy to switch over to Scrivener and write my thoughts there.

And here it is, a new blog post, written entirely in just a few hours. And so, the streak continues, at 34 and counting.

But the dilemma has not been solved. I may have gotten through it this week, but what about next week? What will I do the next time I wake up on a Friday morning and realize I don’t have anything to show? I can only write on this topic once, a single-use get-out-of-jail-free card, and next time there may not be a way to escape by the skin of my teeth.

There will come a time again when I must choose between losing my streak and putting up garbage. When that day comes, I know what I must do. A number is just a number; the only meaning it has is what I give to it. And when the time comes, I will give up the number, because out of everything at stake, the number is the least important. 

Why Talk So Much about Science on My Sci-Fi YouTube Channel?

Two months ago, I started a YouTube channel called “Into the Vortex.” The theme is to look at the kinds of ideas that drew me to both physics and science fiction, ideas that often run counter to our human intuition, the deep, profound, and weird. So it may seem strange that, in a channel with somewhat of a focus on science fiction, to do videos on purely scientific topics, like entropy or next week on the Anthropic Principle.

What I love about science fiction is not the tropes. I’m fine with mech suits and space ships and neon cities and alien invasions, but that’s not what draws me to the genre. What I love about science fiction is that it acts as a means to explore insights into reality and possibility that bend the mind. Questions like, what is outside the universe? What is reality made of? How did life come to be? And on the human side of things, what future societies might we want to aim toward, and which ones should we do everything in our power to avoid? What future discoveries could wreak havoc on the social narratives we tell ourselves? The answers lead to more questions, which lead to even more profound answers. Such is the nature of the pursuit of knowledge.

David Brin is a master of exploring the big questions in his novels, Earth and Existence. In these, he presents feasible pictures of what global society might look like in the near future, exploring the big questions and mysteries of our time, like consciousness, the long-term effects of climate change on society, the Fermi Paradox, extrapolation of wealth inequality, and evolution by natural selection applying in places we might not ordinarily think of it. Brin would not have been able to examine such deep topics if he weren’t intimately familiar with them.

It is this sense of depth and profoundness I strive for in my videos. It is why, not only do I talk about ideas that can easily be used for sci-fi worldbuilding, like faster-than-light travel and looping universes, but I also talk about things like the similarities between the workings of physics and computer simulations. Perhaps there is an author out there who sees my videos, understands the topics, and is inspired to write a great story exploring the questions arising from them.

Our Damaging Narratives of Suffering and Purpose

Life comes with many struggles. One of the most powerful methods of coping with struggles we can do nothing about is to tell ourselves a narrative: that this struggle, and the suffering it causes, gives our lives meaning in a way that we may not understand, but is precious and we would not want to live without. This narrative can be powerful enough to keep us hopeful and grateful, even in circumstances which by all logic should drive us to despair.

But there is a danger to it; when a narrative gives us purpose, we tend to cling to it, even when the circumstances that give birth to it no longer apply. When we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes, everyone had to contribute to the survival of the tribe. This was a struggle against nature, an unchangeable fact of the human condition. By working together as a community, we survived, and that gave us purpose. And so the narrative that the struggle to survive is what gives us purpose was born.

However, over the course of history, things have changed. Industry has made food, comforts, and luxuries abundant. Many people struggle much less than ever before. We are coming closer to—and some would argue we have already arrived at—a place where it would be possible to construct an economy so that people do not need to struggle for survival.

Yet many of us still cling to the narrative that without a struggle for survival, there can be no purpose in life. This is, of course, false. When we are not struggling for survival there are plenty of things we can do that give us purpose, like training ourselves in athletic activities, pursuing scientific research, contemplating philosophy, traveling the world, creating art, competing in games, and striving to further improve the world. Being free from the struggle for survival gives us new opportunities for fulfillment and purpose, albeit of a different flavor from the struggle, but without the downsides of the suffering the struggle imposes upon us.

And that is where the problem lies. We could be so much, and have such fulfilling lives by eliminating the struggle for survival. But the narrative that there would be no purpose to life if the struggle did not exist holds us back. People who cling to this narrative not only don’t help, but sometimes they actively sabotage those who work to mitigate the struggle, by spreading the narrative with their voices, or by voting for those who would impose the struggle upon us.

It is one thing when life is hard because there is no other choice. But if we feel that the struggle is unnecessary and is being imposed upon us by others, all purpose that would have been found in it vanishes.

Another narrative we tell ourselves of the meaning in suffering regards the inevitability of death. For our entire history, death by old age has been one of the most significant limitations of the human condition. We have many myths of the fruitlessness of chasing immortality, and have come to terms with it by telling ourselves that without the ticking clock in our lives, we would not be able to enjoy the time we have, because we would never be motivated to do anything.

However, with modern science, we may soon have the ability to reverse aging . . . if the right research gets funded. And something which has always been with us, the briefness of life, may no longer be an unchangeable fact of existence. And thus, the narrative that death gives life meaning, which once gave us solace and helped us accept the inevitable, turns on us and holds us back from reaching for a greater existence.

There are legitimate concerns regarding anti-aging research, such as how would we feed everyone, and worries about exacerbating inequality by creating a new class of rich immortals while everyone else is stuck working for subsistence. But the narrative that the briefness of life is an essential ingredient for meaning in life is not one of them.

In this era of increasing technology and understanding, we must not cling to narratives of purpose in suffering. When there is nothing we can do about it, these narratives can help us cope and find meaning in life. However, we must set aside a corner of our minds for the knowledge that we are empowered to find meaning despite our suffering, not because of it. Then, if it becomes possible to eliminate that suffering, through technology or the economy, we will not be held back from working toward it by narratives of acceptance that we no longer need.

Symbolic Cognition

For years, I’ve been grappling with a question: Why do we expect life to make sense like a story? Why do we try to piece together the events of history and our lives in ways that make narrative sense, rather than logical sense?

I have a hypothesis about this, which I call symbolic cognition. When we see something or think of a concept, we don’t just see it as it is, but also with layers of symbolism. Today, we are going to discuss symbolic cognition through four types of associations: aesthetics and metaphors, memorization, objects with morality, and facts with meaning.

Before we move on, I want to take a moment to talk about the term, symbolic cognition. While contemplating the ways we construct our views of the world through symbols, I searched for an official field of science devoted to it. The closest I could find is a sociological theory called “symbolic interactionism.” However, as far as I could tell, symbolic interactionism is specifically focused on how we view our identities through our relationships with others, whereas symbolic cognition is a framework by which to analyze one of the ways we construct our knowledge and worldviews. If there is an official term for symbolic cognition, or if symbolic interactionism does indeed cover it, I apologize.

Aesthetics and Metaphors

What is it like to hear the murmuring of a crowd? Is it soothing like a babbling brook? Eerie like a flock of squawking crows? Perhaps it’s full of energy, all the people as busy as bees. But a crowd is not bees or crows or a brook, it’s people. The comparisons come to mind because they stimulate our aesthetic senses in similar ways.

When we bite into a strawberry, we sometimes describe it as an explosion of flavor. Why an explosion? It’s because the flavor of a good strawberry can be as intense to our sense of taste as an explosion is to our senses of sight, sound, and touch. Few people are confused when we describe it this way.

When we think and experience concepts and sensations, the information gets all mixed up in our brains. As a result, our entire conceptualization of the world is a web of connections, many of which are not logical, but a this-is-like-that relationship. This is why abstract art and music without lyrics can be so powerful to us. The associations between the colors and the strokes of the brush evoke within us the same emotions as a sunset or a beautiful day in the city. Our unconscious minds make the connections, even if our conscious minds don’t understand it.

Associative Memorization

Our ability to associate logically disconnected concepts gives us an ability for memorization so incredible it might as well be a superpower. Let’s consider the strawberry we mentioned in the previous section. When we bite into the strawberry and experience its explosion of flavor, we see a firetruck drive by, its sirens blaring. This reminds us of a time we were walking by the river and a firetruck drove by, rudely interrupting our peaceful contemplation. Looking at the ripples on the river, we think of mountains being formed and crumbling from the long-term forces of plate tectonics in the Earth’s crust. With this sequence of associations, we can remember the list, “strawberry,” “fire truck,” “river,” “Earth’s crust,” despite the fact that these items have no logical connection with each other.

With practice and creativity, we can remember lists of hundreds or even thousands of items for long periods of time. A great technique for this is to use a memory palace, a place or object we are familiar with enough that we can see it vividly in our mind’s eye. This could be our house or a walk around our neighborhood, or even something like a statue we can hold in our hands. When we want to memorize something, we walk through this palace, associating every item with something we see.

For instance, the hallway leading out of my apartment has five doors. I could mentally walk past each of the doors, assigning something I want to memorize with each of them. Then, when I want to recall that list, I could mentally walk through again, picking up each item from its assigned door. If I want to memorize more than five things, I could open the doors and assign items to the features inside. For another example, my stove has four dials, each with twelve settings: OFF, LO, 1-9, and HI. With these four dials alone, I could memorize 48 things by assigning them to the positions of the dials and associating them with the items on either side.

Associations can also be made by a process called operant conditioning. When we are presented two things together enough times, we tend to associate them with one another. This is most often discussed in the context of creating a physiological reaction by an association, such as a dog salivating to the sound of a bell after being presented with food accompanied by a bell ringing enough times.

Advertisers take advantage of operant conditioning in us. For example, they condition us to see cars as sexy by repeatedly showing us car ads with attractive women in them, and they condition us to see beer as manly by repeatedly showing us ads of beer being enjoyed by strong, bearded men.

Perceiving Objects as Symbols of Morality

Picture the Holy Grail, the Cup of Christ, be it a jeweled golden chalice in your minds eye or a wooden carpenter’s mug. Now push that image aside and imagine you pick up a piece of furniture to find mold growing in a big stain where the carpet meets the wall. Most likely you saw the cup as good and the mold as bad. Not only do we associate concepts with one another, we also associate concepts with value. We feel like objects can be good or bad.

Moral symbolism can be beneficial when it helps us make healthy choices, but it can be bad when we make moral associations with types of people, forming stereotypes. For example, if you perceive smoking as bad, and you see a lot of tattooed people smoking, you might come to see tattooed people as bad by association. You then might go on to see someone with a tattoo as bad, even if you know that this person does not smoke. Moral stereotyping is, unfortunately, something we humans do very naturally, and we must work hard to train ourselves out of it.

Religions utilize moral symbolism with concepts of the sacred and the profane, worthiness and unworthiness. In the best cases, this can lead us toward fulfilling, positive lives, but it can also be used by religious authorities as a means of control.

Perceiving Facts as Symbols of Meaning

How many constellations are there? What message does a rainbow send? What is the meaning of the existence of natural evil? These questions do not have real answers. Constellations are made up. A rainbow is what happens when water droplets refract sunlight like a prism. And natural evil is just things happening naturally that result in people being harmed. There is no meaning inherent in these things, at least not when there isn’t someone causing them on purpose. But out minds imbue them with meaning by treating them as symbols.

There are a few ways in which facts mean something. If someone organizes things, such as words in a book, with the intention of conveying a message, then the objects used for communication carry the meaning of the communication. Also, we can find logical meaning in an object or place by observing and investigating it, which can tell us about what happened there in the past. However, we have a tendency to see symbolic meaning in things when it isn’t there.

For example, the idea that Earth is the center of the universe feels right, and the idea that there is no center of the universe can make us feel sad. The idea that our ancestors were crafted by the loving hands of God can make us feel much happier than the idea that we evolved from common ancestors with monkeys and apes. Yet we have no reason to feel this way. We are what we are regardless of how our ancestors came to be, and the Earth is our home whether it’s at the center of the universe or somewhere else.

This tendency to see facts as symbols with meaning has an upside: it can make stories more compelling. An author, songwriter, or poet can put objects and imagery into their stories with the intent that they be interpreted to have meaning, and that meaning contribute to the themes and aesthetics of the story.

The dark side of this is, unfortunately, very dark. When bad things happen to us, or we are confronted with the human condition, we tend to assume there must be some meaning in our suffering. We convince ourselves that without this suffering, something essential to the enjoyment of life will be lost.

If there truly is nothing we can do about it, this can be comforting and help us cope with our circumstances. However, if things change and it becomes possible to work toward changing our circumstances and getting rid of our suffering, then the story we tell ourselves of the meaning in that suffering can hold us back. We might remain chained to our suffering, even when the opportunity to get rid of it presents itself. Even worse, we might fight against those who try to move forward and make things better.

Final Thoughts

It is likely that we are not blank slates, that we are born with predispositions for certain associations given to us by evolutionary psychology. Things such as character archetypes, hero stories, and dragons, which have been found all over the world in completely disconnected cultures. On top of these templates, we build our models of the world, both symbolic and logical. Being common to all of humanity does not make them objective to the fabric of reality, but they do give us something by which we can all relate to one another.

Symbolic cognition can make it hard to learn true things, because in each instance there may be something we must first unlearn. On the other hand, symbolic cognition gives us the ability to appreciate a rich banquet of stories, arts, music, and philosophy. The symbolic meanings we see in nature may not be real, but properly cultivated, symbolic cognition itself can be a source for the meaning we seek.

It's Time for Stories of Redemption and Reconciliation

In the past five years, we’ve had stories of old former heroes who want to live peaceful quiet lives, but are called back into present-day battles resulting from what they have done in the past. Luke Skywalker and Captain Picard are two examples.

The YouTube channel Wisecrack did an analysis on this post-hero trope. They looked at it through the lens of storytelling as a mirror of society, and proposed that it signified the groaning of the modern world as the deteriorative effects of our modern social narratives begin to show in the daylight.

Right now, it’s become pretty hard not to notice the things that are going bad in society. In addition to climate change, which has been creeping up on us for decades, there has been a pandemic going around for half a year, an economic crisis, and increasing social unrest. And it looks like it’s going to keep getting worse for some time before it starts to get better.

So I think it’s time to start talking about hope, and aiming toward the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s time for redemption and reconciliation stories.

Last year, a fantasy novel came out called Shadow of the Conqueror. The main character is Daylen, an old man who was once an evil dictator who took over the world. He was a despot, a mass-murderer, and a rapist. Through a twist of fate, he finds himself young once again. With deep regret and sorrow for the life he led, he sets out with his curse of youth to do as much good as he can, struggling with the demons of his past life all the while. The implicit question is, can someone who is so evil be redeemed? The book leaves the answer up to the reader, a pivotal choice by the author.

Stories have many interpretive lenses, and Shadow of the Conqueror is no exception. One interpretation of Daylen is a stand-in for Western imperialism. The powers of Europe and its offshoots did a lot of conquering back in the day, a lot of oppression. Daylen reborn represents the white social majority of today, after most of the institutional sources of that oppression have been amended or dismantled, but its systemic aftershocks are still strong.

Daylen is the same person before and after his transformation, whereas white people today are, of course, different people from the conquerors of the past. But in this comparison, Daylen stands for the collective force of imperialism and its legacy, not individual people.

The definition of social majorities and minorities is that injustices happen more often to minorities than majorities. This should not be confused with numerical majorities and minorities, which are a measure of numbers, and which are unrelated. As a social majority citizen, it can be easy to believe that the modern social narratives work and are fair, since we are not the recipients of injustice in most cases.

Many of us have faith in modern social narratives, some willingly, some because we were brought up not knowing any differently. This is compounded for those of us who grew up in the Cold War era, when the fervor for American narratives and paranoia of alternatives was exceptionally high. When we hear of patterns of injustice upon members of groups inside our own society, poking holes in these narratives, we often react in confusion, fear, or in the worst case hostility. Zealous proponents of social justice interpret these reactions as signs of prejudice, which exacerbates the discomfort.

It’s time for a change.

The question of whether Daylen can be redeemed or not is never resolved. However, something far more important happens: he commits to wrestling with the consequences of his past actions, and doing what he can to clean it up. The question we should be asking about our own society is not whether the collective legacy of white imperialism should be blamed or forgiven, but how we can face the scars and open wounds handed down to us, and work together to heal them and find a way forward.

We need more characters like Daylen. We need more characters who go through transformations and pick up the hard task of making amends. They can’t simply be stories of forgiveness; that would put the burden of responsibility on those who have been wronged. These characters must contend with the consequences of their actions, and through sincere struggle come to a mutual respect with those whose lives were negatively impacted by their actions.

If you are reading this, and you are confused or frightened about the way current social and political trends are going, I don’t judge or blame you. Instead, I hold out my hand to you. I hold out my hand to those who are victims of indoctrination and propaganda. And even more than that, I hold out my hand to the good people of the future. I hold out my hand to future former racists, and future former imperialists. You are welcome in the making of a better, fairer society for all.