the fictional nature of human meanings

Horizons | Man’s answers to the problem of his existence are in large measure fictional. His notions of time, space, power, the character of his dialogue with nature, his venture with his fellow men, his primary heroism - all these are embedded in a network of codified meanings and perceptions that are in large part arbitrary and fictional. This begins early in childhood … In the symbolic world limitations are overcome. Here the child can grow to “enormous size” as the child / individual identifies with giants, gods, heroes of myth, and legend, or historical figures of a particular culture … The ego, or self, becomes indistinguishable from the cultural worldview because the worldview protects the ego against anxiety. The ego now feels warm … the mind flies out of the limits of the puny body and soars into a world of timeless beauty, meaning and justice

This is already a shocking conclusion to symbolic animals who pride themselves on living in a real world of intense experience … But can it all be a fiction, a mirage, “a tissue spun in happy hours” as James put it? Ludwig von Bertalanffy wrote [1955] that evolution would soon have weeded man out, if his cultural categories of space, time, causality, etc. were entirely deceptive. Anthropology has taught us that when a culture comes up against reality on critical points of its perceptions and proves them fictional, then that culture is eliminated by what we would call “natural selection”