The American Mass Mind: Perceptions, Beliefs and Operations

By Tom Calderon

Popular culture is a kind of unconscious religion and mass media is its electronic temple. The psychological forces engaged by today's entertainment, news, and advertising are the same as those manipulated by superstition and ritual in the past. Like any religion, pop culture has instilled a system of beliefs in its followers, a mass faith which serves the interests of economic and political elites. The American Mass Mind examines these beliefs, the psychological operations that cultivate them, and how they have led us through the decades into the present global crisis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781312875722

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The American Mass Mind: Perceptions, Beliefs and Operations

THE AMERICAN MASS MIND

Perceptions, Beliefs and Operations

Tom Calderon

Copyright Tom Calderon, 2015

ISBN 978-1-312-87572-2

INSPIRATION

My memory of the day I was moved to start writing American Mass Mind is very clear. It started unusually early for me, so early that it was only technically morning. I woke in the darkness of a hotel room in Lake Tahoe Nevada. Being too alert to fall back into sleep, I slipped out of bed, taking care not to wake my wife as I made my way into the next room. We’d gotten married the previous afternoon in a tiny ceremony on a mountainside overlooking the sapphire waters of the lake. Besides bride and groom, only the minister and his wife attended. The minimal scale of our wedding had been deliberate: both of us had made and broken marriage vows before, so we wanted to spare our families the irony of a repeat performance. After finding my way to the suite’s living room, I knelt in front of the couch with my elbows on the seat cushions, and my face resting on my hands in the posture associated with prayer. My body was piously positioned, but it would be an exaggeration to say my spirit was in deep communion with The Supreme Being. As I recall, much of the time was either devoted to keeping my mind from wandering from the subjects of my requests, or to refocusing my attention when it did. I had once been a pastor of a medium sized evangelical church in California’s Silicon Valley, but almost twenty years had passed since I’d been a practicing Christian; you might say I was spiritually rusty.

In the decade of training and study that prepared me for ordained ministry, I’d developed a formal understanding of the Judeo-Christian belief system and learned how to communicate its faith to others. The years I spent in the Church also provided me with an informal education in the behavior of groups, as well as with various techniques of persuasion that can be used to mobilize them. But eventually, I grew disillusioned with what I now call the dysfunctions of contemporary American Christianity, and left the ministry to pursue an art career. Although this path led me to explore some of the frontiers of what conservative Christians call secular humanism, I found that what I learned about psychology, history, anthropology, philosophy, and political science, did not really cause me to lose my faith; actually, my appreciation for the life and teachings of Jesus was increased by this knowledge.

As I delved into the arts, the mental tools that were previously used to interpret the parables and proverbs of the Bible proved to be assets that focused my artistic interests upon the relationship of symbols to the human psyche, as well as upon the ways in which popular culture fosters beliefs. As I applied these tools of analysis to entertainment, advertising and news reporting, I saw a dangerous mix of toxic messages circulating in the networks of mass media, and recognized how religion was being manipulated by political forces in America for pernicious ends. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s I used performance art and photomontage to describe the dystopian future being cultivated by these conditions. But strangely, much of what was obvious to me seemed invisible to others- even to the many critics of mainstream culture who populate the artistic underground and Progressive political press. I realized that the somewhat rare combination of a foreground in art and a background in theology was responsible for my insights.

By the time George W. Bush literally took office at the beginning of the new millennium, the destructive potential I saw brewing in popular culture had withered the importance of all other subject matter to me; it was impossible to ignore the increasingly powerful role that unconscious religious dynamics were playing in our supposedly secular democracy. I began to seek relevant information at an accelerated pitch, trying to develop my comprehension of the political and economic forces at work behind mainstream media’s influence and agenda. At the same time I was trying to revitalize the spiritual energies that I believe to be the wellspring of creativity, hoping to contribute in some way to the awakening of a nation that seemed to be sleepwalking off a cliff. This is how I began that first morning of my honeymoon praying in a hotel room in Lake Tahoe.

The faint glow of sunrise was leaking slowly into the room from around the edges of the thick drapes.  Eventually, when I was able to distinguish the furniture from the receding darkness, I rose from my knees, switched on a lamp, and reclined on the couch to read from the Bible. After reading a few chapters, I lay listening to the sounds of distant traffic and chirping birds rise with the day. Sunlight reflecting off the swimming pool outside was now dancing on the ceiling above the draped window. I was hungry. Breakfast was provided to guests in a banquet room across the garden, so I dressed and tiptoed outside without waking my wife. She enjoys sleeping in as much as I like bagels and coffee. After ambling along the ivy-lined pavement near the pool, I reached the hotel’s main entrance and hurried across the thick carpet of the lobby, hoping to hide the unshaven, uncombed and wrinkled appearance that seemed so out of place in the lobby’s luxurious surroundings. As I pushed through the heavy swinging doors of the banquet room, I immediately noticed that something was wrong. There were only three or four people present, and they were all standing transfixed in the middle of the room, staring at a television screen suspended from the ceiling. I joined them in gaping at the spectacle. An oddly familiar skyscraper was on fire, its gleaming edifice belching orange flames and black smoke into a cloudless blue sky. Seconds later, an airliner hit the tower next to it.

THE HIDDEN RELIGION

From the initial glimpse I had of the burning towers, I was gripped by a deep misgiving I can only describe as mortal dread. But it was not terrorists I feared as I watched the airliner ram the skyscraper, it was the mass reaction among my own countrymen that I knew was sure to come. I’d already seen the dark side of the national psyche surface a decade earlier in the appalling spectacle of millions celebrating the Gulf War’s awful destruction, and the scariest thing about that episode was that the response was automatic, motivated by hidden cultural forces that were not subject to reason or debate. It reminded me of the image by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, in which a man who has fallen asleep with his head resting on a writing desk is surrounded by a bewitching cloud of bats and owls and cats. The print is titled: "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters."

Just as I feared, Desert Storm’s knee-jerk jingoism was dwarfed by the mass psychic phenomenon invoked by the attacks of September 2001. Irrational forces welling up from under the radar of consciousness swept through the United States in waves of hysteria that launched America’s Global War on Terrorism with the fanatic zeal of a religious crusade. The planet’s most scientifically advanced society was being carried away by forces of hatred and fear that belonged to the Dark Ages.  As the media told us again and again, Everything will be different after September 11. In the Homeland, freedoms would be sacrificed to paranoid ideals of security, while overseas our revenge would bring death to countless innocents.

When informed that Islamic militants were responsible for the attack, most Americans were faced with an event they were not consciously prepared for. It was like the proverbial lightning bolt from the blue. To explain the mystery, Newsweek magazine asked the question, Why do they hate us? Then, they proceeded (like the rest of the corporate media) to give misleading answers that preserved the mass ignorance and guided the mass reaction. The hysteria of those weeks presented another mystery that could have been investigated by asking another question: Why are Americans reacting like this? After all, the irrational support the American people have given to a borderless and endless war is also responsible for today’s unstable world.

Understanding the psychological dynamics of religion can help solve this mystery of mass behavior. American Mass Mind is therefore -in part- a book about religion, a hidden religion operating secretly under several centuries of misunderstanding about the role of religion in human psychology and culture. Though many are unaware of its existence, this religion is just as alive and active as it was during those primitive eras when we assume that humanity was ruled by superstition and ignorance. The difference is that now, creeds, rituals and devotions are disguised in seemingly non-religious features of culture such as political ideology, spectacles of entertainment, or in consecration to the ideals of personal achievement. America’s system of mass communications is the temple where the iconography of this invisible religion is on display, and where a kind of media priesthood proclaims its faith to millions of dedicated followers. The aim of this book is to make this hidden religion visible to the reader, and to show how mass media culture manipulates these unconscious instincts on behalf of economic and political interests.

I am aware that readers will approach this text from one side or the other of a cultural abyss that seems to increasingly divide America. For some, the ideas I will use from the worlds of art, philosophy and psychology may not present a problem, but concepts taken from the Old and New Testaments will. For others, the orthodoxy of my faith or the locus of my political views may be the most important things to consider. I know from personal experience that it can be intimidating to cross cultural divides as wide as those spanned by this text; but I also have found that if you test what you read against your own knowledge, experience and intuition, it is possible to maintain both the openness of mind which allows us to learn, and the vigilant skepticism that keeps us from being deceived. To thoughtfully consider the source of any communication is an exercise of this kind of skepticism, so as American Mass Mind’s source, I will try to answer a few questions about my motives and perspectives.

Why apply a Judeo-Christian perspective to an analysis of propaganda? Because despite visions of a melting pot, platitudes about pluralism, or the egalitarian aims of the nation’s laws, American culture is an extension of processes with historical roots that can be traced back through twenty centuries of European Christianity, with antecedents in Judaism that go back through the millennia before that. American social, political, economic and legal institutions all bear structural imprints from this history. In addition, the ancestry of American culture is even more distinctly Judeo-Christian in the lineage of the nation’s dominant tribe, the Anglo-Saxon Protestants. They were the first colonizers of the land and the founders of the republic; their tongue is America’s unofficial official language, and they are still represented more than any other ethnic group in positions of power within the society. Today’s ruling elite may not be an openly Christian, socially conservative and politically reactionary White Tribe returning their nation to a quasi-theocratic order with the Holy Scriptures as the law of the land, but a very large and very influential percentage of the population does fit this profile. This is the essence of what has been called nativism. Americans of this kind are living in every region of the country, holding positions in nearly every branch and level of local, state and federal government, working in nearly every occupation within the private sector, and exercising political and financial influence on many important issues. Their messages are disseminated through every kind of media format, and elected officials at the highest levels of government must appear to be their allies if they want remain in power. American Christians may not be designing their culture from the top, but they are a force within the culture that must be manipulated from the top if the American masses are to be directed as a whole. So, even though it is prohibited by the Constitution and politically incorrect to say so, there is an undeniable sense in which the United States of America is culturally a Christian nation. This may not be apparent to insiders who do not see the ethnically specific character of the culture’s norms, but it is obvious to America’s outsider citizens. By writing this I am not trying to demonize anyone, I am acknowledging the powerful influence of a subculture upon the wider culture.

An extremely volatile symbolic cargo has become attached to the Christian tradition, not only by the history of its Crusades, Inquisitions, and Imperialism, but also through America’s ongoing culture wars and through the clash of civilizations ideology that now justifies an endless, borderless War on Terror. As a result, the mere mention of anything associated with Christianity or the Bible is capable of automatically closing minds and arousing antipathy. To differentiate my faith from these historical manifestations of Christianity, I will borrow a buzz-word coined by the Bush Regime; in my view, faith in Jesus Christ has been high-jacked by a series of empire builders for the last 2000 years. Just as Islam has been high-jacked to inspire a terrorist jihad, religious devotion was wedded to the projects of European nations expanding their domains on nearly all of the world’s continents; this, despite the fact that Jesus made a clear distinction between his spiritual kingdom, and a world empire:

My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight. (John 18: 36).

Today’s Christians in America, like many Christians before them, have ignored this crucial distinction and confused allegiance to their nation-state with service to God’s kingdom. In effect, they render to Caesar…the things that are God’s (Mark 12:17). This conflation is what breeds the notion that as citizens of a Christian nation Americans are in some sense, a chosen people.

In contrast to this, when I apply the Scriptures to the contemporary world order, I see the Old Testament’s emphasis on justice for the poor, and Jesus’ critique of the principles that perpetually govern human existence as revolutionary, in the purest and most thorough sense. This interpretation has been obscured by centuries of contradictions perpetrated by those who’ve been Christian (Christ-like) in name only.

Although I am critical of Christianity, I do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I believe in Jesus Christ, and accept the revelations of the Bible as divinely inspired, but I have not written The American Mass Mind to make converts. My purpose is to make the reader aware of ongoing psychological operations in American culture that manipulate religious dynamics in the human psyche. You do not have to hold spiritual beliefs of any kind to understand the book’s ideas, and its perspectives are not limited to those of the Bible. You will find that ideas from Jungian psychology, from the media studies of Marshall McLuhan, and from many other intellectual traditions have all contributed to the vision that I’ve articulated.

In his book, The Undiscovered Self, the eminent psychiatrist Carl Jung warned about a hidden religious dynamic in mass psychology that operates even in a secular nation-state. His research and experience as an analyst convinced him that human beings were driven by a religious instinct every bit as real as the sexual instinct, a natural function of the psyche which did not disappear when people merely ceased to believe in a spiritual world. If denied expression in religion, the religious function as he called it, would be expressed in some non-religious form:

…I shall not enumerate all the parallels between worldly and otherworldly beliefs, but shall content myself with emphasizing the fact that a natural function which has existed from the beginning, like the religious function, cannot be disposed of with rationalistic and so-called enlightened criticism. You can, of course, represent the doctrinal contents of the creeds as impossible and subject them to ridicule, but such methods miss the point and do not hit the religious function which forms the basis of the creeds. Religion, in the sense of conscientious regard for the irrational factors of the psyche and individual fate, reappears- evilly distorted- in the deification of the state and the dictator (The Undiscovered Self, C.G. Jung, 1958)

By calling it a natural function Dr. Jung placed this instinct in a category of things that are scientifically explainable. To accept what he says you do not have to believe in a spiritual world inhabited by spirits, be they human or divine. You can interpret what he calls the religious function in whatever way seems reasonable. If you define it as a survival strategy encoded in our brain chemistry you will still get the point, which is that human beings have always everywhere believed in and produced things with magical or religious significance to them. As a natural function, its manifestations are not confined to Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, or any other specific forms of spirituality associated with the term religion. Its expressions can be seen in everything from the cult magic of prehistoric hunters to the Church of Scientology. If not evidence of some universal psychological dynamic, what is behind this worldwide legacy of painted images, statues, sacred songs, dances, myths, shrines, tools of divination, masks and incantations? And, when scientifically enlightened moderns stop believing in the supernatural, does the natural function of religious instinct instantly disappear? Jung says no, it merely finds expression in new vehicles

When Dr. Jung wrote about this phenomenon of mass psychology the fascist spectacles of the Third Reich were still fresh manifestations of an essentially religious fervor expressed in the surrogate of nationalism, so his book, The Undiscovered Self focuses on the harnessing of these unconscious powers for political ends. He does however point to the dangers of their commercial manipulation as well. Regardless of what outlets a culture offers for the expression of this religious function, because it is natural like our sexual instinct, it continues to be a vital and creative force. When the gods who once received religious devotions are removed intellectually from their thrones, the psychic reality of devotion itself remains active, finding new mediums of expression. A passage from Joseph Goebbels’ diary illustrates this:

National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and rituals. One day soon, National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel. (The Diary of Joseph Goebbels, October 16, 1928)

In every generation this conscientious regard for the irrational factors of the psyche and individual fate exists, but when a culture’s prevailing belief-system denies and discredits the creeds of religion, not only is this instinct expressed in non-religious forms, but the conscientious regard or awareness of these drives as essentially religious is lost. The desire for ecstatic experience is no longer recognized as a desire for the rapture of worship, the hunger for entertainment is no longer recognized as a hunger for inspirational instruction, nor are ceremonies of state recognized as unifying rituals. This unconsciousness is one of the defining signs of a developed nation, so of course, America is a world leader in this process too: nowhere has the religious function been more fully reinvested in the idols and creeds of popular culture, and nowhere does the fundamentally religious nature of our engagement with mass media go more unrecognized.

Even though it is simple for us to see the symbols and beliefs which form the culture of a primitive tribe as expressions of religion, a philosophical obstruction obscures the symbols and beliefs of a technologically advanced nation from being viewed in the same way. Though the shared symbols and beliefs of religion have been basic organizing principles of tribes and civilizations since humankind’s beginning, modern societies assume they have somehow transcended these verities by declaring themselves secular. This secularizing of society has roots in the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement which influenced the shaping of the United States of America through people like Thomas Jefferson. The major themes articulated by Enlightenment thinkers guided the restructuring of society from the traditional hierarchies authorized by religion to more horizontal relationships modeled on ideals of humanism. The means towards these ends was the application of human reason. A supposedly blind faith in religion’s description of the cosmos was replaced by the supposedly rational application of science; the authority of God-ordained monarchies was reinvested in democratic republics; and the concentrated economic power of the nobility was dispersed into enterprising merchants profiting in market systems.

Because American culture is an heir of this historical process, The Enlightenment still structures much of American thinking. The crucial element in this restructuring, the part most relevant to understanding why the religious function is obscured from contemporary awareness, is the part about blind faith being replaced by human reason. Jung’s quote refers to the transference of intellectual authority this way: You can, of course, represent the doctrinal contents of the creeds as impossible and subject them to ridicule, but such methods miss the point and do not hit the religious function which forms the basis of the creeds. The intellectual authority of religion is overthrown by scientific reason, but this does not alter the unconscious psychic power of religious instinct, which continues to exist under secular auspices.

Contributing to this incognito status of religion is the flawed assumption that faith is totally blind and reason completely rational. But an absolute contradiction between faith and reason does not actually exist, either in religious practice or in the application of reason. Faith is exercised in conjunction with reason, and reason, even scientific reason, depends on mental processes that are essentially indistinguishable from religious faith. First we’ll examine faith:

So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. (Romans 10:17) 

The Christian faith, like most belief systems, is primarily communicated by words, either spoken or written. Words are symbols decoded by mental processes which determine not only the meaning of statements, but also make other calculations and associations, such as the measuring of one statement against another for contradictions, or the comparing of a statement to personal experience in order to judge its credibility. This decoding of words is an intellectual process, a function of the mind that is very rational, involving the comparison-making that the root word ratio suggests. Reading or listening to a speaker is an exercise of human reason. If the content of the speech or text is judged to be unreasonable, it will not be believed. In this very practical sense, faith and reason are not mutually exclusive; to have genuine faith, you must have good enough reasons for believing.

The Church’s persecution of scientists who contradicted the dogmatic belief that the Earth was circled by the Sun is the emblematic episode used to show religious faith as blindly irrational; but if this story is followed to the present it actually demonstrates faith’s rational side. Though in the past it seemed a reasonable explanation for what the faithful witnessed with their eyes, today’s Christians do not believe the sun rises and sinks on the horizons of a flat earth: since Galileo’s time there has been a rational adjustment to accommodate scientific knowledge. In order to continue to have faith, the interpretation of the words in the Bible on which Church dogma was based, were reclassified from the category of scriptures to be interpreted literally, to those scriptures that are decoded poetically. This adjustment is an application of human reason practiced by people whose faith is communicated through words. The ignorance which supported a particular tenet of the faith was dispelled by knowledge, and the faith continued in a reasonably adjusted form.

Ignorance limits the ability to rationally assess the credibility of something posited as being true. When no information or experience exists with which to make comparisons and judgments, the hearer or reader either must ignorantly believe a statement is false, or else ignorantly accept it as true. But the exercise of completely blind faith- a belief totally unconditioned by reason- is rare. This is also true of human reason, for words are not only the medium of religion, they are also the primary means used to communicate the truths of science. No one can escape the necessity of believing. The limits of human perception require us all to place faith in the reported experience of others. When making decisions or taking actions with consequences, we all trust in descriptions of realities we have not personally witnessed. Theories and findings of science, the reports of journalists, the testimonies of witnesses, the advice of stock analysts, and the policy justifications of presidents are all words generated from outside our firsthand experience. We must rationally process and either believe or doubt these words in the same manner as we do those of a religious text. Every time we accept as trustworthy, any information coming to us in words rather than as firsthand experiences, we are engaged in believing, and every time we apply these beliefs in decisions or actions we are exercising faith. I write this to stress faith’s non-mystical nature: it is not some specialized behavior only expressed in a religious context. Believing is a psychological process that is mistakenly limited to religious practice because religion was the original collective system that hosted the believing process. Faith is invested in the veracity of information every day; its form easily accepts scientific, political or commercial content, embracing facts with the same vitality of conviction invested in religious truths.

Of course raw data collected by observing scientific experiments is potentially a more credible basis for faith than mere words. But empirical evidence is to the reader of scientific literature what personal experience is to the reader of religious doctrine, a factor in the calculation and comparison process that seeks to produce a credible interpretation. Here, scientific reason- like religious faith- is also limited to some degree by ignorance. When making interpretations of observed phenomena in experiments, the accuracy of the findings is increased by having other observations of the same phenomena to measure in comparison. When comparisons are few or don’t yet exist, calculations are made in ignorance of important factors that will come to light after knowledge in the field accumulates through related research. Since some ignorance always conditions human knowledge, it’s not surprising that erroneous beliefs and preposterous conclusions fill the history of Western scientific development just as fully as moral contradictions fill the history of religion. Even in our own time, the discoveries of advanced medical research contradict previous findings so frequently it should be obvious that with science we are not dealing with a completely reliable system of truths. Like religious faith, scientific beliefs must be adjusted by reason from time to time.

Another irrational factor that the application of human reason shares with religious faith is the influence of the unconscious mind upon perception. Even a consciously unbiased observer, recording data without any outwardly recognizable bias, may be observing a reality distorted by unconscious psychic forces. The theories of Social Darwinists and racist beliefs of the Nazis were intellectual achievements made by liberating human reason from Christian dogma about the brotherhood of man. It demonstrates how the assumed objectivity of human reason can be twisted by unconscious forces. The history of rational man since the Enlightenment is full of these puzzling contradictions to the notion of great progress made after scientific reason replaced religious superstition in Western Civilization.

This reconstruction of Western thinking has indelibly stigmatized faith, dismissing it as a relic of superstitious times that only exists now within highly specialized expressions of religious fundamentalism. As a result, American heirs of the Enlightenment can see Dark Age fanaticism in Al Qaeda, but are blind to the reality that their own armed Crusade to remake the Middle East is equally an expression of religion’s archaic form. By examining contradictions like these I hope you will conclude as I do, that the greatest flaw in the narrative of Western Enlightenment is assuming that faith was ever replaced.

Before we leave this subject of faith and reason, I will briefly mention the suspension of disbelief, a psychic state strongly associated with faith, experienced by the religious and the rationalist alike. Suspension of disbelief is that state of mind in which one’s skepticism is temporarily and voluntarily decommissioned in response to compelling symbolic realities of any category. Most often this psychological phenomenon is experienced through entertainment, as when watching a Shakespearean play you ignore the reality of the 21st Century around you, and become transfixed by the virtual reality dramatizing timeless issues on stage in the language and costume of Elizabethan England. You become engaged by voluntarily suspending your rational objections to the credibility of the experience; if it’s sufficiently absorbing, entrancing, enchanting, or spellbinding, disbelief seems to vanish almost without volition. This is not religious faith, but it is a religious experience, a fertile state of mind in which the symbols of faith are best internalized, whatever the particular belief system might be. We will explore this mental state in greater depth as we look at the essentially religious nature of many mass media techniques.

Tracing the outlines of the religion’s generic form may provide something like a thermal image that will make the hidden religious function visible. Simplified to the basics, religions are composed of beliefs and their symbols. Beliefs are the content and symbols are the form of religion. Beliefs and their symbols are also the content and form of culture. These dynamics of culture are the same as those of religion because the earliest human culture was magical-religious in character, and faith is associated with religion since religion was the original expression of faith. The particular beliefs and specific symbols of religion/culture may change, but the essential structure of religion/culture does not: our beliefs are part of the inner world of consciousness, while symbols represent those beliefs in the outer, physical world.  Notice the similarity in the dynamics of cultures as different on the surface as Hells Angels and the Amish:  for both, the symbols that identify them outwardly reflect the beliefs, values, and attitudes they identify with inwardly. This is not only true of eccentric groups, but shared beliefs represented by shared symbols also structure the cultural identity of a nation-state. Seeing culture as structurally religious is an awareness gained by removing the obscuring wall erected by Enlightenment between secularity and religion. Cultures are expressions of the religious instinct regardless of whether their beliefs and symbols are based in magic or reason.

For human beings, the psychic universe of emotions, intuition, and reasoning is just as real as the physical cosmos that we see, hear, feel, smell and taste through our senses. Both dimensions feed information into our awareness for processing. In the process we produce interpretations. At this nexus between consciousness and physical existence, our beliefs play an interpretive role as the raw information of sights or sounds, ideas or emotions are assembled into a psychological experience. Whether we feel the heat of the summer air or the pain of disappointment, at its most elementary level, these interpretations are made using our beliefs about the reality being perceived. Individual elements are seen, heard, smelled, felt or tasted, identified and categorized; the possibilities and probabilities they represent are calculated and judgments are made about the danger or opportunity the scenario represents. If needed, a creative response may be planned and translated into action. Our beliefs are the system we use to make sense of our experience, to give it its meaning. The same is true of our experience of the inner world: our beliefs are the grid through which desires, emotions, intuitions, thoughts, and fascinations are identified, categorized, calculated, and explained. Conclusions and reactions to reports from this world are also governed by our fundamental beliefs. To illustrate, suppose that one thousand years ago a bird falls from a tree as a man walks through the forest. He examines the bird and interprets the information presented by the feathered carcass. He decides the dead bird is an omen from an ancestor in the spirit world, warning him that the territory the tribe is currently hunting in will not support them through the dry season. He translates this perception into action: a ritual of divination is performed to gain ancestral guidance to a better hunting ground. One thousand years later, another bird falls from a tree as another man walks through the same forest. This man also examines the dead bird and makes an interpretation. He figures the bird has died of poisoning due to pesticide pollution. His thoughts and emotions are translated into the physical action of burying the bird to prevent scavengers from being poisoned by it. Then he returns home and donates money to an environmental fund using the internet. The factors governing the interpretation of experience, and the translation of each man’s conclusions into actions, were their beliefs. The first man was a member of a culture in which magical beliefs framed his interpretations of the world and gave order to his responses. As a member of a culture in which scientific beliefs predominate, the perceptions and actions of the second man were filtered in accord with that system. The content of beliefs was different, but the form of believing was essentially the same. Human beings interact with physical and psychic reality using interpretations based on their beliefs.

Describing the dynamics of human consciousness is akin to flaying a cadaver, removing the organs, labeling each part for display on a table, and then calling it a human being. Artificially separating consciousness into isolated components may be revealing for some purposes, but it can be misleading in other ways. Keep this in mind as I describe what is called a belief system. A belief system is an unbounded variety of elements that are not related by simple progressions where one factor leads to the next in causal succession. Believing is not a sterile list of tasks performed by the brain while in church. A belief system is an integrated complex of elements interacting simultaneously, better described with rudimentary metaphors from chemistry. Like chemical elements, beliefs possess individual properties which determine the range of their own relationships with other elements. Some chemicals form natural bonds, others do not. A belief in the threat posed by terrorism will have specific relations with other contents of the belief system. For instance, welcoming increased immigration is incongruent with a fear of terrorism. A word used to describe another kind of element in the belief system is values. Value is the priority or importance we give to things. A belief in terrorism’s threat grants a specific value to the services of your protectors: the greater the threat, the greater the value of national security. At the same time, a belief in imminent terror would drastically lower the value of offering asylum to refugees. This chemistry of beliefs and values can be bonded together to form attitudes, or positions that pre-determine our responses to a range of issues. Once attitudes are formed, the particular merits or liabilities of issues are not subjected to reasoned analysis one by one, but they may be clustered together within general conclusions about everything from increasing military budgets to relaxing limits on domestic surveillance, to drilling for oil on protected lands, to considering international legal conventions outdated, to cutting federal aid for social spending. Attitudes are predictable behaviors potentially available for manipulation, not only in the individual, but in the aggregate form of mass attitudes based on the values and beliefs shared by the whole culture.  It is only in written description that elements of human consciousness are separated and labeled with terms. In reality our convictions, priorities and positions are integrated. You can express an attitude by saying, The Geneva conventions are antiquated, or a value such as I think more domestic surveillance is our greatest protection, or the belief: I fear another terrorist attack is imminent. All of these statements are really aspects of an integrated belief system. Because of this integration, the system can be altered or maintained through any of its components: beliefs can be formed by repeatedly stressing values, and the structure of attitudes can be reinforced with messages that magnify specific beliefs. Access to the belief system (the stressing, reinforcing and magnifying) is through the symbols that express its tenets in the physical domain of the senses.

Religions very often teach that nature was preceded and created by spiritual forces, and that the world of physical appearances is merely a temporary, unstable reflection of a spiritual reality that it represents. The preeminence this gives to a non-physical dimension of reality, locates the religious function in the world of human consciousness. Spiritual beings are invariably encountered in dreams, visions, or as disembodied voices, so it is safe to say that religion is a manifestation of psychological forces. Whether the psyche is the origin and extent of religion ("it’s all in your head") or just the usual channel of human contact with a supernatural reality, is beside the point. What I’m saying is that expressions of the religious function issue from the inner world of human consciousness into the natural world. This can be demonstrated by the most familiar translation of consciousness into symbols: the act of speaking. When speaking, we are all functioning to some degree as prophets and poets, spontaneously giving audible expression to the ideas that spoken words represent. Regardless of what symbolic medium is used, the principle is the same: the intangible contents of consciousness are manifested in the world of the senses by physical articulation: beliefs in a goddess are articulated into a carved statue representing her attributes; magical relationships with animals are represented in ideograms woven into baskets; prophetic words give voice to the thoughts of an invisible Spirit, and mythic narratives are represented in the world of sensory perception through the ritualized movements of masked dancers.

In our Post-Enlightenment age we categorize such symbolic expressions as expressions of art. As an expression of the religious instinct, making symbols of magical beliefs is art’s original purpose. We call the magical-religious expressions of early hunter-gatherer tribes artifacts. The artifacts tell us that in the tribe every aspect of life was governed by superstitious beliefs or a sense of the sacred. When tribal beliefs were translated into symbols, it seems it was done with a larger purpose than the self-expressive acts and strategies we usually associate with artists today. But seeing a difference is a misperception: symbol-makers are performing a cultural function whether they are conscious of it or not. The famous artist of today may be unconsciously symbolizing the fundamental myths of a capitalist, individualist culture. Artists create the links of cohesion and continuity on which their cultures depend because although the religious form of believing is inherent in human beings, the specific content of beliefs that identify a specific group, are not passed from one generation to the next genetically. The faith that becomes the inner interpretive framework of individuals in the group, be it a tribe or a nation-state, must be installed in their psyches through some non-biological means. This medium is the legacy of symbols. Beliefs are passed on in the form of symbols which reenter the domain of consciousness as individuals internalize the group’s convictions, values and attitudes. This production and consumption of symbols is what we call culture. It is the universal human practice that preserves a people’s interpretations of the world and organizes their psychological forces into cooperative action. For most of human history, this symbolic function has made religion the basis of social cohesion in every generation, and the link of continuity between generations. A common set of beliefs represented by shared cultural symbols gives otherwise separate individuals a collective identity, organizing their interpretations and reactions within a single coherent system. The cultural environment- like a language- has a vocabulary and grammar that make relationships and interactions intelligible to the members of the society. Symbols function as a means of collective coordination. People who share beliefs identified by specific symbols can be led by referring to their beliefs through those symbols. In Cultural symbols therefore not only represent forces of consciousness in the physical world, but forces of the physical world (leaders) are represented in consciousness by the same symbols. This is Art’s age-old function as a servant to power: it fashions the symbols of the shared beliefs that are used by leaders to unify and direct the group. The power of leaders has always existed in their authority to utilize these symbolic keys, and today’s media system has developed this power to an unprecedented state of the art. Contemporary America’s myths are communicated in hit songs; socially approved attributes are represented by moving images of cinema gods; and the society’s ideals are celebrated in the ritual competitions of reality TV. All of these together form a culture where even tools and weapons are symbols with the religious significance of America’s destiny as the harbinger of Progress. The dynamics are the same when an empire’s history is read in books, its leaders valorized in movies, its values displayed in advertising, and its technologies exalted as signs of a special destiny on the vanguard of Progress.

The role of artists in creating the symbols that signify beliefs has not essentially changed. As I use the words art or artists, I give these words wider definitions than those limited to associations with High Brow or Avant-garde expressions. This expanded definition of art is important to consider because, like our ideas about what is meant by religion or culture, our secularized notions about art have also acquired boundaries of meaning that hide the true scope of artistic operations. The traditional division of art into the categories of fine and commercial for instance, is a concept that limits awareness to a specific field. Some are aware of the psychic impact of fine art, and even welcome its transfiguring powers, but they