The Forest of the Order – Outersite.org

On the Gifts and Costs of Living Through Symbols,
and Possible Ways Forward

by Alex Nikolov

Our recent weekly WiseValue discussions have been exploring symbology; Alex published the following article on LinkedIn. There is also a 20 minute podcast.

We are born clean! We are born innocent! Then we are claimed by the
order of symbols and put to walk the forest. This essay asks what is given
to us in that claiming and what is taken from us — how the symbol gave
us mathematics, law, cooperation at scale, and the inner life itself, and
how it also tilted the brain toward separation over coherence, pulled us
order is not a prison from which to escape, nor a paradise to which to
submit. It is a forest, planted long before us, through which we are walked
from the moment we are named. Without it we would not be human; with
too much of it, we are no longer fully alive. The path forward is neither
nostalgia nor revolt but a patient re-balancing — re-embodiment,
renewed ritual, a bilingualism of attention, and the old discipline of
holding the symbol lightly — so that we may walk again, this time of our
own accord, with our bodies, our senses, and one another, between the
trees.

haiku
Words carve the world whole
Before the child speaks, it waits—
Language claims the real

I. Lost in the Forest

We are born clean! We are born innocent! Then we are claimed by the
order of symbols and put to walk the forest. The letters of this
sentence, the price sticker in a shop, the wedding ring on a ﬁnger, the
ﬂag above a courthouse, the icon on a phone screen, the word “love”
itself — each is a sign standing in for something else, a shortcut, a
substitute. By the time we can ask what they are, they have already
named us. Ernst Cassirer called the human animal symbolicum, the
symbol-making creature, and argued that we no longer inhabit a
merely physical universe but a “symbolic universe” of language, myth,
art and science (Cassirer, 1944). Jacques Lacan went further: to enter
language is to enter the Symbolic Order, the network of signiﬁers that
pre-exists us and which we cannot fully leave (Lacan, 1966/2006).

The forest gave us shelter. It also became so dense that we forgot
what light through leaves once looked like. The image with which this
essay begins — that we got lost in the forest of symbols — is not a
complaint against the trees but a description of where we are
standing. What, then, did the symbol give us? What did it cost us? And
how might we learn again to walk among symbols rather than be
walked by them?

II. The Symbol as Gift: What We Gained

A symbol is a radical act of compression. The word “tree” carries no
bark, no resin, no shade — and that is precisely its power. By stripping
a particular tree of its particularity, the word allows us to speak of all
trees, of trees we have never seen, of trees that do not yet exist.

Cognitive anthropologists have called this the uniquely human
capacity for symbolic reference, and have argued that it is what
separates human language from every other animal signalling system
(Deacon, 1997).

This compression made several great goods possible. It permitted
mathematics, where ﬁve apples and ﬁve sorrows share the integer
ﬁve. It permitted law, where a stranger’s promise can bind a city. It
permitted memory beyond a lifetime, since a clay tablet, a printed
page, a magnetic disk all encode meaning that long outlives the
bodies that produced it. It permitted cooperation at scale: as Yuval
Noah Harari has popularised the point, Homo sapiens conquered the
planet not because we were stronger than other primates but
because we could collaborate ﬂexibly in very large numbers around
shared ﬁctions — gods, nations, money, human rights (Harari, 2014).
None of these is a physical object you can touch; all of them are
symbolic structures that, once enough people believe in them,
organize behavior more reliably than any genome. Émile Durkheim
earlier described this as the way collective representations bind
societies together (Durkheim, 1912/1995).

Symbols also opened the inner life. Lev Vygotsky argued that thought
itself is in large part internalized speech, and that higher mental
functions are mediated by signs (Vygotsky, 1934/1986). The capacity
to ask “who am I?” presupposes a self that can be named and held at
a distance — a self made possible by the very symbols we then use to
interrogate it. Religious and philosophical traditions across the world
have used symbol — parable, koan, icon, mantra — to point toward
what cannot be said directly, much as a ﬁnger points at the moon
(Jung, 1964; Eliade, 1957/1987). Even the suspicion of symbols is itself
a gift of symbolic life: to write “the word is not the thing” is already to
use words against their own ambition.

Before turning to the costs, it is worth saying plainly: the symbolic
order is not a mistake. Without it there is no medicine, no history, no
music written down, no law beyond the strongest ﬁst, no science, no
novel, no possibility of feeling oneself addressed by a stranger’s
sentence centuries later. Any honest accounting must begin here.

III. The Symbol as Toll: What We Traded Away

And yet the forest grows.

A tilt of the brain

The neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has argued, in The Master and
His Emissary, that the two hemispheres of the human brain attend to
the world in fundamentally diﬀerent ways: the right hemisphere holds
a broad, embodied, contextual, ambiguous awareness; the left
hemisphere isolates, names, categorises, manipulates (McGilchrist,
2009). A healthy mind needs both, and uses them in the right order —
the right perceives, the left dissects, the right reintegrates. Western
modernity, McGilchrist suggests, has progressively allowed the left
hemisphere’s representational world to take itself for reality,
mistaking the map for the territory. Whether or not one accepts every
neurological detail of his argument, we increasingly trust the symbol over the
sensed. Alfred Korzybski’s slogan that “the map is not the territory”
(Korzybski, 1933) has become both proverb and warning.

The retreat from embodiment

Maurice Merleau-Ponty insisted that perception is not the brain’s
interpretation of data but the body’s living engagement with the
world; meaning arises in the ﬂesh before it is ever spoken (Merleau-
Ponty, 1945/2012). Antonio Damasio’s neuroscience of emotion
converges on a related claim: feelings are bodily events, “somatic
markers” without which reason itself becomes pathological (Damasio,
1994). When we replace the smell of bread, the weight of a tool, the
heat of a quarrel, the looseness of a long walk with their textual or
pictorial substitutes, we do not merely lose pleasure; we lose
information our bodies were designed to carry. Children raised in
front of screens, adults whose touch is largely mediated by glass — all
of us are conducting a vast unplanned experiment in dis-
embodiment, and the signs (anxiety, sleep loss, attentional
fragmentation) are not encouraging (Twenge, 2017; Han, 2015a).

Love compressed into letters

The unspeakable, layered, contradictory experience that older
languages tried to break apart into eros, philia, agape and storge gets
crushed in contemporary discourse into the single English word LOVE
— or worse, into a red heart emoji and a count of likes. Erich Fromm
warned half a century ago that love had become a “marketable
feeling,” a consumer good rather than an art to be practised (Fromm,
1956). Sherry Turkle’s later work documents how digital substitutes
for intimacy can leave us “alone together,” each person curating a
presentation rather than risking encounter (Turkle, 2011). The symbol
of love is far easier to circulate than love; and it is circulation, not love,
that such systems are optimized to produce.

Money and symbolic self-enslavement

Karl Marx already noticed that money is the universal equivalent, a
symbol that can stand in for anything because it stands for nothing in
particular (Marx, 1867/1990). David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000
Years, traced how older webs of mutual obligation — gift, credit,
neighborly memory — were progressively rendered into the
quantiﬁed abstraction of monetary debt, with consequences that
include the moralization of poverty and the legitimation of new forms
of bondage (Graeber, 2011). The point is not that money is evil; it is
that a symbolic instrument originally invented to mediate exchange
has been allowed to redeﬁne what counts as work, worth and
freedom. We labor not so much because our bodies require it but
because the symbolic system requires us to (Weber, 1905/2001;
Graeber, 2018). Freedom, in this regime, contracts to the brief
sensation of spending — a point Erich Fromm anticipated in Escape
from Freedom (Fromm, 1941) and Herbert Marcuse sharpened in
One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse, 1964). Byung-Chul Han has updated
the critique for the present: in the “achievement society,” domination
is so completely internalized that the worker becomes their own
overseer (Han, 2015a). The corporal violence of slavery, as your draft
puts it, was replaced by symbolic self-submission to the order of
money.

The conquest of time

Pre-industrial communities lived by overlapping rhythms — the body’s
hunger and tiredness, the sun, the moon, the seasons, the saint’s day,
the harvest. The mechanical clock and, later, the standardized time
zone replaced this rich polyphony with a single grid of identical hours
(Mumford, 1934; Thompson, 1967). E. P. Thompson’s classic study
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism showed how factory
time had to be drilled into populations that had previously
experienced time as task-bound rather than clock-bound. Lewis
Mumford went so far as to call the clock, not the steam engine, “the
key-machine of the modern industrial age.” Today the calendar app
and the meeting invite extend this conquest into the last interstices of
attention.

Ritual codiﬁed, then hollowed

Rituals once arose, ecologically, from the body and the group: shared
meals, dances, mourning’s, initiations, the small repeated gestures by
which families and communities tune themselves to each other
(Eliade, 1957/1987; Turner, 1969). With literate civilizations, many of
these practices were standardized, written down, and centralized by
larger institutions — temples, churches, eventually states (Asad, 1993;
Bell, 1992). Codiﬁcation preserves; it also ﬂattens. A liturgy printed in
a missal can be repeated, but it can no longer be invented. When the
state takes over the calendar of festivals, work-weeks and
commemorations, what remained of ancestral, local ritual is often
reduced to nostalgia or tourism (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983). Byung-
Chul Han argues in The Disappearance of Rituals that a society
without genuine ritual loses its capacity for shared time and shared
meaning, and replaces them with consumption and performance
(Han, 2020).

The screen and the simulacrum

Finally, the symbolic order in our century has acquired a new technical
density. Jean Baudrillard described a sequence in which the image
ﬁrst reﬂects a reality, then masks it, then masks its absence, and
ﬁnally bears no relation to reality at all — the pure simulacrum
(Baudrillard, 1981/1994). Guy Debord earlier saw the spectacle as
“capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes image”
(Debord, 1967/1995). The smartphone is the most intimate prosthesis
the species has ever adopted; through it the symbolic order now
reaches into the bedroom, the bathroom, the inside of the eyelid
before sleep. Hartmut Rosa speaks of a corresponding loss of
resonance — the felt sense of being answered by the world — and its
replacement by ever faster cycles of access and consumption (Rosa,
2019).

The pattern across these examples is the same: a symbol that
originally served life is permitted, by long habituation, to substitute
itself for life. The map eats the territory. The menu replaces the meal.
The like replaces the look in the eye.

IV. Ways Forward: Tending the Forest

The mistake would be to imagine an exit. There is no pre-symbolic
Eden to return to; the human is the symbolizing animal, and a
campaign against symbols would itself be conducted in symbols. The
task is not abolition but apprenticeship — learning, individually and
collectively, to use the symbolic order rather than to be used by it.
Several lines of practice converge.

Re-embodiment

Practices that put the body back at the centre of attention — somatic
therapies, contemplative traditions, dance, sport, gardening, manual
craft, time outdoors — are not luxuries but correctives. Eugene
Gendlin’s work on the “felt sense” (Gendlin, 1978) and Bessel van der
Kolk’s clinical synthesis The Body Keeps the Score (van der Kolk, 2014)
both argue that information ignored by language is preserved in the
body, and that healing often requires returning to it. McGilchrist’s
prescription is structurally similar: let the right hemisphere lead again,
and use the left in its service rather than the other way around.

Renewed ritual

Communities that have re-discovered shared, repeated, embodied
practice — a weekly meal cooked together, a regular walk, a song
circle, a small civic festival — report that meaning re-emerges almost
without eﬀort (Putnam, 2000; Han, 2020). The point is not nostalgia
for any particular religion but recognition that rituals are technologies
the species cannot do without. Where the state cannot or will not
provide them, families and neighborhoods can. Where the church no
longer ﬁts, secular liturgies — from twelve-step meetings to running
clubs to civic holidays carefully kept — occupy some of the same niche
(Bellah et al., 1985; Taylor, 2007).

A bilingualism of attention

We can learn, deliberately, to switch registers: to read and write, then
to put the page down; to track metrics, then to look out the window;
to call a friend, then to sit with them in silence. Cal Newport’s notion
of “digital minimalism” (Newport, 2019) and Jenny Odell’s How to Do
Nothing (Odell, 2019) describe practical disciplines for reclaiming non-
symbolic time within a symbol-saturated environment. The aim is not
silence forever but rhythm — symbol, body, symbol, body — as breath
alternates.

Symbols as servants, not masters

At the social level, the question is how to design symbolic systems
that remain accountable to embodied life rather than the reverse.
Proposals span the political spectrum: shorter working weeks
(Graeber, 2018; Pang, 2020), the recovery of commons (Ostrom, 1990),
participatory budgeting and local currencies, “right to disconnect”
laws, slow-media movements, and renewed attention in education to
the arts of perception, dialogue and the body (Robinson, 2011). None
of these is a panacea; together they trace a direction.

A diﬀerent relation to money, love and time

Concretely, this might mean: treating money as one symbol among
several rather than the universal measure of worth; refusing to
confuse “likes” with love and rebuilding the slow practices in which
aﬀection grows; resisting the colonization of every hour by the clock
and recovering, where possible, task-based or seasonal rhythms; and
remembering that work, on any humane account, is for life and not
the other way around.

A philosophical stance

Finally, an old discipline: hold the symbol lightly. The word “tree” is a
ﬁnger pointing at the moon; never mistake the ﬁnger for the moon.
Zen expresses this directly (Suzuki, 1970). The mystics across
traditions, scientists who recall that a model is a model, lovers who
refuse the available cliche — all are engaged in the same quiet work:
keeping a small distance between sign and signiﬁed, so that life can
breathe between them.

V. Conclusion: Walking in the Forest

The symbolic order is not a prison from which we must escape, nor a
paradise to which we must submit. It is a forest, planted long before
us, in which we make our home. Without it we would not be human;
with too much of it, we are no longer fully alive. The path forward is
neither nostalgia nor revolt but a patient re-balancing: to honor the
gift of the symbol, to refuse its tyranny, and to walk again with our
bodies, our senses, and one another, between the trees.

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On the Gifts and Costs of Living Through Symbols,and Possible Ways Forward