On Symbolic Engineering

A liberating thought passed through my mind again: Amovera. And with it, the entirety of what I was working on in theology was reduced again to objective reality, and I saw again the framework of Symbolic Engineering as the ideal mode of understanding ethics, religion, and politics.

As my mind shifted to the new modus operandi, I stopped dreaming of a religious movement or a political revolution, but instead, a revolution in the sciences where the many fragmented soft sciences could be seen through the lens of geopolitical forces and available cultural ideas being engineered into language structures and narratives—symbols reacting to perceived necessity, perception limited by symbolic abstraction.

It is becoming clear to me that this is the future—not political rallies or prophetic ministers, but one where symbology is engineered and directly applied to demystify a population and give them new, more adaptive frameworks to interpret reality with intent and precision.

Symbolic Engineering as a science is to be framed within the contexts of Structural Absurdism and Amovera, so that meaning is something people construct and there is no meaning inherent to the universe or life itself by nature. This means even ethics are absurd and structured based on function and social cohesion, and so too are politics and religions symbolically engineered to fit the moral paradigm and condition a response to the symbology that structures a society.

This engineering is being grasped at these days, but it has not been fully grasped, as it has not only the power to manipulate symbols but to create and destroy them—treating rituals, myths, and narratives as engineered psychological frameworks.

These frameworks serve as operating systems that a mind or society interfaces with, structuring their paradigms and consequently structuring their behaviors. Political and religious frameworks are then self-contained symbolic structures that shape cognition and behavior. They are reactive to perceived necessity, and if cultural strengths and values are available while resources are limited, these values may be restructured to try and overcome the resource shortage.

So, there is a geopolitical root to socio-symbolic adaptation, which is limited by the geographic, economic, and technological contexts that a society finds itself in. To change the outlook, the world could change, or the symbols can change, and to change the symbols, all that needs to change is the narrative that is moving those symbols. While certain governments are already changing values through cyber campaigns, none seem to have freedom themselves from their own values to see things as they objectively are, nor have they been able to engineer a better symbolic operating system due to the cultural rigidity of religion and historical political attitudes.

My Gnostic Revisionism is alien and strange to most because this is what I have done for myself, and the result is a free-form interpretation of religion through objective science. The symbols I find most valuable are the ones that benefit human freedom, but also those that ensure maximized human freedom through tempered, pragmatic ethics.

Still, that is the value I have because, to me, having a society where people are as free as possible is desirable thanks to my Western upbringing. Many collectivist societies absurdly come up with equally valid yet different ethics that bring them comfort. They are willing to fit into a greater whole at the expense of personal freedom, and to many, this is the best mode since it requires less of each individual—bringing psychological freedom from having to do everything themselves, instead of the physical freedom to be able to do everything themselves.

The symbolic environment then produces a metaphysical pressure on a population, while the realities they find themselves in produce environmental pressures, which ultimately form the other side of the equation. If there is a better political organization, it needs to be brought into existence by transmuting the society’s existing symbology rationally while simultaneously transforming industries’ operations to benefit from the new political apparatus being proposed. It is not impossible—it just has to happen simultaneously, which rarely happens naturally.

Ritual is behavior, and cultural practices are often real-world means of memorizing and storing cultural symbols, which have higher, more transcendental meanings attached to them. These function as “low-intensity symbolic reprogramming,” and so having some form of ritual participation is necessary if a population is going to retain and digest the symbolic changes to their paradigms needed to cause social change. Even if it is wearing a badge and talking about it, this is often enough to continually condition the new symbolic framework into a population’s mind.

The whole societal transformation is much more easily processed if observed as symbolic structures that need to be revised to change behavior. However, freedom of thought in my philosophy is the objective mode from which creativity is most free to come up with objectively practical solutions. So, the disassociation from symbolic conditioning and becoming unbiased and mindful of factual information is paramount in working with symbols to begin with.

This symbolic reconditioning involves becoming aware of where the biases come from, what their symbolic significance is, and how they affect our behavior so that through awareness and the intent to decondition the mind, the mind becomes demystified of its own cultural symbolic conditioning. Eventually, with enough education in the nature of symbols, we may develop ways to form “symbolic immunity” to symbolic engineering in general.

All of this would need to be mapped out and tested, and the individuals involved would need to catch up to me in the theory and practice of symbolic engineering. Once this systemic organization or society begins to test symbolic engineering as a science, then it could be employed as both a means of changing cultures and deploying strongly resisted political ideals, while also studying ethics themselves objectively, without bias, and understanding in which societies which values are actually beneficial and which are symbolic artifacts that no longer serve the people that hold onto them.

In general, I am proposing a Symbolic Engineering Study Group to start to look into these issues, both online and in person. We will meet, discuss avenues of inquiry, and prepare experiments to study the effects of symbolic conditioning while seeking funding and formal recognition. The entire operation will be based in the sciences but will also be oriented toward psychologically reconditioning its members to eliminate moral bias, instill neutrality and freedom of thought, while also seeking active change in politics and society at large.

This, then, is the basis of the Society of Symbolic Engineering.