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Nothing is more amazing than a dream. The ornate intimations of a dream are as inscrutable as they are self-revealing. They are unfathomable because the images in our dreams represent something other than the images themselves. We encounter a snake in a dream, but that may be an expression of our fear of elusively dangerous situations surrounding us in real life. We may fly in our dreams, skimming the rooftops and trees in a liberating defiance of gravity. The flying, however, represents our desire to be liberated from the inhibitions in life that pull us toward sociocultural conformity and workplace servility. A house may be a symbol of our bodies, and shooting someone may symbolize the desire to end a painful situation.

Interestingly, our waking life is also full of symbols that seduce us away from reality. We believe what is presented to our cognitive senses to be the reality, not realizing that it is a representation of something else. The symbolic world in waking life is as lush and complex as it is in dreamworld. There is, however, a profound difference between the two symbolic worlds. We finally wake up from our dreams and realize the unreality of the imagery in the dream, but we do not wake up from the waking life. We do not realize the unreality of what we observe and perceive in waking life. More accurately, we do not realize that what we observe and perceive are symbolic misrepresentations of something else. We do not, for example, realize that, today, price typically does not truly represent the product to which it is attached and that it is not an economic phenomenon. We do not realize that price is a means of exercising power, with no economic content or character. Here, we have an example where a symbol-price in this case-is supposed to be a reflection or projection of a product. Yet, in reality, it is generally an expression of something else-pure power relations.

Many sociorelational processes are expressed in the form of concepts that assume an innocuous universality and abstractness that go undiagnosed as to their real meaning for human life. "Efficiency," for example, is extolled as indisputably and universally good, rational, and natural. However, our idea of efficiency is entrepreneurial; what minimizes costs and leaves relations of authority undisturbed is efficient. Designing an assembly line to manufacture something may indeed be very efficient for the owners of the company. However, when the assembly line not only prevents people from using their talents and abilities, but also dictates a routinized pace they have to obey with their movements and anxieties, then the assembly line is not socially or humanly efficient. Here we have a concept that is registered and interpreted by everyone as something "good," yet it hides dehumanization at the workplace. In fact, "efficiency" is the cognitive/symbolic condensation of human dehumanization and oppression, yet it hides this reality by appearing to our senses as something else.

Certain concepts have become universal cognitive images that rise away from realities of life. "Honesty," "freedom," "love," "democracy," and "efficiency" are examples of such universal concepts. Such concepts are indiscriminately used to misdefine concrete social relations.

In fact, the deceptiveness of certain symbols is in their universality that replaces the need to make judgments about individual instances of social interactions and processes. Abstraction and universalization have the inherent potential to abandon the very thing of which they are abstractions. They have the potential to become totally delinked and divorced from reality. And, at that point, concepts become symbols.

The symbolic nature of these concepts should not be understood only in terms of linguistics. It is not only the word "efficiency" that symbolizes a certain manner of doing things that is understood similarly by most people. When someone hears the word efficiency in a conversation about the production process in a certain factory, she may conceptualize that process as fast, unwasteful, orderly, and inexpensive. However, when she herself is in the factory and observes the coordinated quickness of movements and the orderly flow of the production process, she would get those same thoughts and would conceptualize the operations as fast, unwasteful, orderly, and inexpensive without the word "efficiency" being spoken to her. She aggregates a constellation of observations (quickness, order, minimization of distances the unfinished product travels from one point to another in the manufacturing process, etc.) into a concept that allows her to evaluate and understand the world. More accurately, perhaps, she searches her memory to find an already existing concept that embraces those observations and allows her to understand the world. These predefined concepts are dynamic and lively symbols that are laden with meaning. They do not have the same fixity of meaning of symbols that are objects (a flag, for instance). They are, comparatively, more fluid, penetrable, and changeable.

The use of such universalized conceptual symbols or comprehensional aids is a tangible process of alienation. When we fail to evaluate or judge individual situations or instances of some social situation or activity, and when, instead, we use the meaning attached to the words we hear, or when we use predefined concepts to understand and judge things, we are engaged in a process of alienation because we allow an already existing and preevaluated concept to guide us instead of invoking our own sense of judgment and justice each time. This means we disengage our sense of judgment; we disengage part of ourselves, part of who we are. Each time we use the predefined conceptual reservoir, or each time we use the symbolic aids of comprehension, we practice alienation. It is strange, it is intriguing, but we are engaged in the creation of our own alienation every day.

Our lives are replete with concepts, forms, symbols, and appearances that constantly fool us in our perception of reality. Once these representations assume universal character and meaning, they become detached from the reality they were supposed to represent. They become decontextualized conceptual images that fool us into interpreting concrete and specific situations or social relations within the narrow confines of the meaning that has come to be inherently and universally associated with them.

Our fascination with "number one" is an incredibly strange phenomenon. As a concept or an ideal, "number one" is as noble and precious as the supreme human ideals of love, freedom, and justice. "Number one," whatever it is, can be devoid of content or life significance. As long as the label can be attained, the sense of pride and self-actualization, and the glory in which one can bask is there to enjoy. Even frog-jumping can win someone a "number one" citation!

A movie, apparently based on a true story, told the life story of a runaway teenage girl who became a prostitute. She had experienced the degradation, dehumanization, and the pain of being a prostitute. Dejection and emotional turmoil were ravaging her soul. Yet, when she was nominated as the best actress in porno movies, she was overcome with a sense of pride and joy. The reality, of course, remained unchanged. She was still a prostitute who had to submit to the stinking bodies and the humiliating domination of her customers. However, a simple designation of "number one" distorted the reality for her; what was disgraceful and shameful could now, somehow, become a source of pride and self-worth.

The grueling preparation that runners and other athletes go through for years in anticipation of winning a sporting contest and perhaps become "number one" in the world or in the nation is sadly funny. It is masochistic, and it is utterly senseless. One needs to look at the gaunt and tortured faces of marathon runners to wonder why on earth they need to run for years preparing themselves for that moment of truth when social absurdity will be demonstrated and affirmed by a piece of metal that will decorate the lowered neck of one person. What is the significance of this circus? This ridiculous pageantry?

All of us are constantly fooled by symbols and designations that misshape the reality for us every day. "Number one," very much like the phantom of reality for the teenage prostitute, is a mental mirage that transshapes reality. "Number one" is an illusion that contorts not only our perception of reality, but it weakens and corrupts the social nature of human existence. In pursuit of this symbol of achievement we strive for a ludicrous array of positions, titles, roles, and status designations. The path to this terrestrialized nirvana is via an intense process of competition and a quest for winning-a journey that is sometimes experienced only as a subjective mental fancy.

The quest for "number one" separates us from fellow human beings. It is the nemesis of the social nature of human existence. "Number one" symbolizes achievement, worth and self-actualization. But, in reality, the pursuit of this mirage by the masses paints the sad story of the social deconstruction of community and society. Humanity is betrayed each time someone becomes "number one." The much-lauded scenario of "lifting oneself by one's own bootstraps" is the portrait of human alienation, of the lack of societal support of an individual. It is the portrait of a lonely and dismothered human being. This social deconstruction of community and society is the true reality behind "number one," and we passionately race toward it, toward our own demise.

The obsession with "number one" is antithetical to the notion of equality. We cherish equality, yet we strive not to be equal, but to be superior to all others. We seek to receive the affirmation of others by separating ourselves from them rather than embracing them.

Our concept of equality, by the way, is mathematical. We typically have very little difficulty defining equality because we think of it as something quantifiable and measurable. This mathematical concept of equality is very much evident in one of our symbols of justice-the scale of justice. This is perhaps, partly at least, due to the fact the humans and life have become objectified and quantified. In an unfree, oppressive society, people are devalued. Their existence is enmeshed and embroiled in relations that position them as objects vis-à-vis employers and other institutions. When employers can discipline us, lay us off or fire us, that means they treat us as objects, and we gradually become used to being treated as such. How we are treated or "handled" in the workplace becomes the observable and understandable realm for the notion of equality. The wages employers determine for various job categories become the reference for our conceptualization of equality. Employers create layered job classifications tied to pay scales they have decided upon. There are jobs such as bookkeeping, garbage collecting, secretarial work, sales, programming, etc. When we talk about equality, we no longer refer to people in general, but only to those who are bookkeepers, or programmers, or secretaries. If we notice a disparity of pay among programmers, including a difference in pay between men and women, we may feel wronged and we may protest. But if there is a dissimilarity of wages between programmers and sales clerks, it does not bother us. Typically, there are layers of programmers in a company. There are job classifications like "programmer I," "programmer II," "programmer III," "senior programmer," so on and so forth. When we notice an inequality in pay, we concern ourselves about pay disparities among those who are programmer IIs or IIIs, etc. This means the number of people who are the targets of our sense of justice gets smaller and smaller.

Equality references job categories and classifications that are arbitrary and artifactual creations of corporations. Occupational categories and designations can proliferate, and the referential arena for equality can become further particularized and atomized. But then, the humans behind these different job categories are the same people in terms of their claim to life. They are people who have similar needs for dignity, happiness and fulfillment. Here we see how the concept of equality becomes understood and dealt with in reference to reified occupational designations. Equality loses its real, sociorelational meaning. And pretty soon, it is not the humans that should be equal, but positions occupied by humans in arbitrary and artifactual classifications.

Our concept of equality does not begin with life itself and where it will take people in their lifecourse. Equality in pleasure, in every life chance, and in living a fulfilling and self-enhancing life-irrespective of earning capacity-has become a wish, a fancy, a distant ideal. And this is partly because of a mass pathological absence of self-worth. The system has devalued us through an invidious process of objectification. Our self-awareness is pathologically objectified. We mentally roll over and "understand" ourselves and social relations as objects. In this self-deprecating life milieu, we perceive ourselves as objects. This is why instead of conceptualizing equality on the basis of our claim to life, it becomes easy for us to use the notions of the world of objects to conceptualize equality. Life-irrelevant notions of equality concocted by employers become the criteria by which we judge how fairly we are treated. The devaluation and objectification of human beings makes it easy for mathematical-hence, symbolic-notions of equality to take over our perceptional manners. The symbol of equality, taken from mathematics or borrowed from the world of science, corrupts our entire notion and understanding of equality. We allow this socially meaningless concept of equality that deals with inches and weights and minutes and dollars to define for us joy, misery, chances, and need. The abstract mathematical notion of equality replaces our judgment about fairness in life. It fools our perceptual and comprehensional senses into envisioning equality in ways that unrelate and unconnect it from reality.

Another process through which concepts tend to be reduced to symbols is the dissociation and disjunction between our values and our actual practices and behaviors in life. We claim we believe in equality, but our actions and behaviors are immersed in inequality. We claim democracy is a sacred and inviolable right, yet we condemn as deviant values and lifestyles that deviate from the valueset of the majority. We consider homosexuality as immoral and find blue hair as indecent. We say loving our neighbors is a virtue, but we seldom relate to our neighbors in a loving manner. Our values have thus become abstract intellectual images or concepts, unanchored and delinked from how we live our lives and how we interpret the world around us. Concepts thus become alien to what they are supposed to denote.

The reason for and the process of the disjunction of values and actions is, to a considerable extent, related to the universalization of concepts-infused with standardized meaning-that replaces the need for making judgments about each individual social event or interaction we witness or confront. This, of course, is ultimately due to the fact that we do not routinely participate in the making of society and that we have forfeited, or have never acquired, the natural habit of making judgments; our unfreedom has long dulled the habit of making judgments because it has made our opinions irrelevant to how things happen in society. In a sense, our symbolic world is the result of and, at the same time, a cause of this alienation.

Once a concept degenerates into a symbol, it can evoke interpretations of social events that are convoluted and unreal. If democracy, which is a practice, is not experienced through active participation in the making of society, it degenerates into a symbol and, therefore, makes it possible for people to understand and interpret it in contorted and hallucinatory ways.

Just as the notion of equality in mathematics obscures our perception of equality in life, notions borrowed from physics define our sense of social dimensions. Time in social life, for instance, is understood and conceptualized with the same referents of the physical world. We measure time on the basis of the revolution of the earth around the sun and around its own axis. An hour is one twenty-fourth of one revolution of the earth around its axis, and one month is one twelfth of the revolution of the earth around the sun.

The intriguing point, however, is that many aspects of our economic life are organized around a concept of time that is quite external to personal and social life. How funny it is to say that one twenty-fourth of the earth's revolution around its axis is worth $5 for a salesperson, $15 for a plumber, and $200 for a lawyer. The basis for our wages becomes the ever-changing distances of celestial bodies that are irrelevant to life. The basis for wages becomes separated from and alien to human life. The concept of time, if it is to have meaningful relevance for humans, needs to be tied to lifecourse. A celestial body may travel through the universe, and time may be referenced by its distance from other celestial bodies as it approaches and disappears past them. People, however, travel through life experience and lifecourse. We travel through our roles as children, adolescents, adults, and old persons. More important, however, is life experience-different for each one of us-that gives time its meaning at personal and social levels. Life may be full of events such as new relationships, birth of children, adventures, intellectual achievements, and death. Also, life may be full of moments of joy, moments of happiness, celebrations, purposeful endeavors, and gratifying interpersonal and community interactions. But it also can be uncolorful, drab, unpurposeful, stagnant, and uneventfully lifeless.

If a person leads a monotonous life in poverty, always trying to earn enough money to subsist and, therefore, does not experience many occasions for fulfillment and joy, time, which is a progression through lifecourse, has not been actualized. In a sense, social time or lifetime has ceased to dimensionalize life.

Life is like a landscape filled with events, moments of achievement and joy, and social activities. With prolonged uneventfulness, monotony, dejection, and experiential void, this lifescape has not been enriched and traversed. Life has been shortened even though, with astronomical references, time has passed. In reality, time has been in a standstill, a standstill that does not mean there is much more to come, but that we have unexperientially warped past potential life liveliness and self-actualization.

Lifetime also finds its external expression with events and situations marked by the assumption or dissociation of certain roles, responsibilities, and activities. The beginning of sexual life, romantic relationships, graduation, breadwinning, becoming a parent, and retiring are all major reference points for social time. The economic organization in our society has little respect for a concept of time that is germane to life experience. The abrupt drop in the income of a person who retires or stops work due to illness or disability, in fact, stops the actualization and dimensionalization of time for those who find themselves retreating to uneventful boredom and a loss of authority, respect, and welcome.

Unlike astronomically referenced time, which is a continuous unidimension, as we ordinarily understand it, social time is not continuous; it rumbles around, glides through joy and passion, and slows to nonexistence with experiential void and banality. Unemployment, for instance, may stop the actualization of time because the lack of income frustrates the chances of traveling through life-enriching pleasures, contribution to society through work and talents, and toward a social self that requires empowerment. Lifetime, or social time, is a travel through a succession of life experiences toward an everemerging destination. But this destination is not a point, and it is not death. The destination is an experiential journey through significant events, roles, joy and happiness, the chances of fulfillment and self-actualization.

The deceptive power of symbols fools us into judging lifetime by the hurtling of the earth around the sun and its spinning around its axis. And we organize our modern economic activities around such a concept of time. Such a concept of time is irrelevant and alien to social life. The concept of time should emanate from life experience itself.

Astronomical time becomes a symbol by which we judge the progression of life. This symbol of time, as with other symbols elsewhere, distorts reality. It distorts our understanding of how life progresses. It impairs our understanding of how health, and the opportunities of fun, pleasure and self-development are bypassed by having to work for decades at dehumanizing and stupefying jobs.

Given the grand confusion of life, the lack of control over the social environment, and the alien nature of what swells around us, time gives us a sense of how things are unfolding, how things are happening, how things are organized. Time is a quantification tool. In the socioeconomic environment that treats people as objects, time measures things that happen to us and makes them definable; it makes life understandable. For example, if the manager of a store schedules a salesperson for only 15 hours of work in a particular week, there is an easy explanation for the financial hardship that month. The person may attribute the financial hardship of the month to the insufficient number of hours worked. The person's understanding of the situation may stop there and not progress to an explanation of the larger economic and political reasons for his depravation. In a sense, time is a symbol of how things proceed and progress. In this example, the legitimacy of time and the habit of stagnating at the level of symbols prevent us from realizing that the number of hours worked is irrelevant to human claim to life and dignity.

Mathematical concepts cloud our thinking in interesting ways. We have all heard the argument about adding apples and oranges; "but that's like adding apples and oranges," we say. Apples and oranges can be easily added, though. One apple and one orange make two pieces of fruit. Slices of apples, oranges, pears, and cantaloupe make one bowl of fruit salad.

One might wonder if the Gross National Product (GNP) is not arrived at by adding apples and oranges. The GNP is a composite measure of the economic output of a nation by adding the values of thousands of products and services. The same scientific thinking and methods that reject the addition of apples and oranges blatantly forgive the addition of apples and oranges in economic indicators such as the familiar GNP figure. The GNP is, in fact, calculated by adding apples and oranges. It adds up butter and sugar and machine guns and Michael Jordan's ungodly salary and the billions lost in Las Vegas, and, and, and. However, this adding up of everything under the sun is achieved by expressing everything in dollars, which supposedly provides a single measure that allows the addition of the myriad of goods and services. In appearance, everything is converted either into apples or into oranges. The dollar becomes a universal measure of value that allows a comparison of the values of different and disparate things. It allows economists to add up the values of different things without violating mathematical principles.

The question is not really whether we can add apples and oranges, but whether the addition of whatever it is we are adding still deals with and reflects reality, or whether it creates an unreality that deceives people. In the case of a bowl of fruit salad, we can add apples and oranges because a new humanly relevant reality has been created, whether the discipline of mathematics condones it or not. However, adding up economic efforts via a universal measure-the dollar-making everything supposedly comparable and addable, is meaningless. The cognitive mistake here is that by assigning a dollar amount to products or services things become comparable and addable. When everything is expressed in dollars, we think there is an equalized basis of evaluation for the relative value of products and services. How can we compare or add bread and napalm bombs? Baby formulas and the production of a commercial for a product?

If, for a minute, we disengage ourselves from any awareness of money, we can see that adding a napalm bomb and a loaf of bread is meaningless. It has no relevance to a person's life; we should really not make any sense of it. If we do, we are engaged in a hallucinatory exercise of creating a reality out of nonsense. In the absence of money, no one is going to add a napalm bomb and a loaf of bread. The presence of a symbol-a dollar figure in this case-allows illusory and delusional excursions of the mind, because instead of addressing and confronting reality itself we confront its symbol. In the absence of the ability to accurately perceive and analyze social relations, symbols transshape themselves into representations of something other than what they are. If there is one thing with which humans are particularly gifted, it is the ability to engage in delusional thinking and creating reality out of unreality.

The dollar amount that is assigned to a product or service is, ultimately, the sales price of that product or service. In today's economy, the sales price is virtually set arbitrarily in most cases. Even when the sales price is somehow influenced by factors such as cost, what makes up that cost is so varied and disparate that comparative values are meaningless. What goes into the cost of a stealth fighter, for example, may include an unbelievable amount of waste in the form of lobbying, irrelevantly expensive purchasing, fraudulently generated expenses, research and development costs and, of course, superprofits already made by the suppliers of parts and services. The cost of a loaf of bread, on the other hand, may include only labor, needed ingredients, and typical overhead costs.

We need a meaningful basis for the relative valuation of different things. Hypothetically, and simply as one imaginable example, one might suggest that the labor used in the production of goods or services allows a comparative valuation of products and services. Not that the amount of labor is a good basis for the comparative valuation of products, but it is an attempt to stay connected with reality. Since human labor creates commodities, the assumption that it provides a basis for comparison, whether true or not, is connected to the realities of life and is something with which people have had life experience; the comparative valuation is not through alien concepts.

The cost or the price of a stealth fighter and a loaf of bread simply cannot be comparable. But this is exactly what we do when we express the value of things in terms of dollars, which provides a false and illusory basis of comparison and relative valuation. The dollar, in fact, is a symbol of value and, like most other symbols, conceals reality. The dollar artifactually allows a comparative valuation of a stealth fighter and a loaf of bread, and makes them addable; they both go into the GNP. But to add up a stealth fighter and a loaf of bread, our cognitive processes must create a "reality" out of absolute senselessness. This symbolic deception corrupts our general perceptual and cognitive habits. It creates ways of perceiving and understanding things that are delusional. We live in a world of mass delusion, and we are perpetually engaged in the social construction of mass mental illness.

Even Marx himself, who tried to unveil the realities behind economic phenomena, fell victim to the deceptive power of symbols. He finds it necessary to express the value of a commodity by a third commodity common to both of them. He regards money as the universal equivalent in the valuation of products that are exchanged. This is the same cognitive mistake that assumes comparability and equivalency of values when dollar amounts are assigned to products. The expression of commodities in dollars allows comparative valuation and addability of things that simply cannot be compared or added because it is senseless to do so. However, the dollar, a symbol, creates a false reality and taints our cognitive processes; we are fooled into "understanding" the nonsense or the false reality created by a symbol.

Marx's labor theory of value is elaborated on the basis of an equivalence-something equivalent in all commodities. Abstract, undifferentiated, homogenized human labor is the common "substance" in commodities that determines the value of the commodity in the process of exchange. When this common "substance"-abstract human labor-is used to explain the exchange value of commodities, we commit the same conceptual mistake of trying to convert everything either into apples or into oranges. By doing so, we think everything becomes valuationally comparable, quantifiable, and addable. This, then, allows us to very easily venture into the world of unreality. By viewing the labor embodied in commodities as the basis of exchange value, Marx veritably looks for something intrinsic in commodities that determines their exchange value. The human labor embodied in a commodity is the intrinsic aspect of the commodity determining its value. Even though Marx was the champion of seeing social relations in things, his theory of value, while in certain respects remains true to this penchant of Marx, in other respects hides social relations. The exchange value of commodities has little to do with the amount of labor used in their production. The exchange value of a commodity is not intrinsic to the commodity; it is extraneous to it. The exchange value of commodities is primarily decided by power relation. Generally, the power of firms vis-à-vis the people and other businesses determines the exchange value of commodities. The more monopolistic a sector of economy, the more power it has in altering the exchange value of its commodities in relation to others, all this without the intrinsic qualities of commodities having anything to do with what those values are. So, if we hope to find something in the commodities themselves (e.g., embodied human labor), it becomes difficult to see the true social relations or power relations that masquerade themselves in exchange values. In fact, to truly understand exchange values, and so many other "economic" phenomena, we need to abandon the discipline of economics altogether. We must see values and other phenomena as noneconomic in nature. Crude power relations determine processes that have the appearance of economic phenomena. The labor theory of value struggles to stay within the economic domain, and this is, in part, its undoing.

It was more difficult to see the noneconomic nature of value in Marx's time because prices did gravitate toward production costs. It is much easier today to see the disjunction of exchange values and production costs because monopolistic processes have eliminated much of the competition, thus enabling companies with monopolistic positions to set prices arbitrarily.

In his discussion of values, however, Marx uncovers a profound phenomenon-the distinction between concrete labor and abstract labor. Human labor, this creative life force, is reduced to an undifferentiated, universal force that is harnessed into the production of commodities. The creativeness of labor, the talent signature of a person's labor, its varied powers of expression and creation are essentially irrelevant to the corporate world. What is important is the general, universal quality of an abstract ability to produce commodities. This is the abstract labor, the common "substance" "embodied" in commodities.

© Vahik Ovanessian, Ph.D.

Tags: Personality

About the Author

Studied sociology, but my love is psychology. Hence, my work tends to be social- psychological. I think true knowledge about society and social interactions can be gained only if it can be explored and described within the context of everyday life. Why ignore what is abundantly around us and engage in abstract discussions? For years, in my university years, I sat thru social science courses and did not understand. Now, I feel it was because we were not discussing the realities of life. As some people have noted, things are not what they appear to be; this further makes "seeing" the reality a bit difficult. The symbolic nature of what surround us present an appearance that are not quite what they seem to be. My book tries to decipher the symbolic world and get to the reality that is there to see. I think all social sciences should be humanistic. That is, in order to truly understand society and ourselves, things need to be perceived and analyzed with the ultimacy of human freedom and dignity in mind. My second book is going to describe how the learned absence of such a perspective prevents us from understanding society and ourselves.