ATTRACTION TO THE ICONIC
Icons, myths, and archetypes every with every generation.
An icon is an artifact that represents an idea bigger than itself.
Religious artifacts… Lifestyle artifacts: Tetris, Pong, and Pac-Man were the iconic video games in the early arcade era. They stood side-by-side with pinball machines.
Societal artifacts…Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch, and Farah Fawcett were the iconic sex symbols of the Baby Boomers, but the average young man today does not recognize those names. Likewise, the iconic bands, concerts, cars, and video games are no longer of consequence to anyone under 45.
A myth is a story that represents an idea bigger than itself.
[name some myths]
An archetype is the symbol of a behavior pattern that is commonly repeated.
[name some archtypes and some contemporary expressions of them… Darth Vader?]
We have icons, myths, and archetypes because value the symbolic. Visual patterns, auditory patterns, patterns of behavior, and patterns of events are seized upon by the amazing right-hemispheres of our brains.
When a pattern is stored in our subconscious, we call it intuition.
When a pattern is repeated once too often, we call it a cliché.
Liberal and Conservative are categories of political ideology. We all know those words and we use those words as though we all agree on what those words mean.
“I’ve just realized something,” said Nafai.
Issib didn’t answer – he was far enough ahead that Nafai wasn’t sure he could even hear. But Nafai went ahead and said it anyway, speaking even more softly, because he was probably saying it only to himself. “I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It’s a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don’t exist until you say them.”
– Orson Scott Card, Memory of Earth, p. 15
Joseph Campbell wrote, “Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) But I fear that Joseph took that idea too far when he decided that God was just “a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought… Half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts.”
But other than
“God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all categories of human thought. … It’s as simple as that. … Half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts.” – Joseph Campbell