What about with a goat?

Dr. Seuss, "Rape Culture," and orders of symbolic meaning

You confide
In images in things that can be
Represented which is their dimension you
Require them you say This
Is real and you do not fall down and moan

Not seeing the irony in the air

Everything that does not need you is real

—The Widow, by W.S. Merwin

This morning, I found myself thinking about Green Eggs And Ham, by Doctor Seuss.

There’s a long story as to why, and to be honest I don’t know exactly how my mind got there. It’s been at least 35 years since I’ve actually seen a copy of that book in person, and Doctor Seuss isn’t ever really in my head. But nevertheless, this morning, there it was.

Not just the story, though. Rather, an argument I remember encountering about the story somewhere on social media a few years back. Someone, I remember, was explaining how that story perpetuates “rape culture,” and then someone suggested it didn’t, and then that person was quickly smeared as a “rape apologist” by all the others.

The argument, if I recall correctly, was that the speaker who declined to eat green eggs and ham had set a clear boundary, and the other person, the one who keeps insisting perhaps the other might like to try them anyway, was constantly—over 62 illustrated pages—violating that boundary.

Now, obviously one would hope that people might be able to draw a distinction between an unfamiliar food and the act of rape, but of course on the internet it’s all one big slippery slope of unbounded metaphors where everything means exactly what other people think you meant by it, provided they are loud enough.

Again, I don’t really know why this was in my head this morning, but I have an idea. It’s one of those really bizarre examples where the internal logic of a position seemed so pristine to those who held it that their conclusion was completely obvious. I mean, how could you not read that story as one of the many foundational texts of rape culture?

Of course, though, outside that internal logic, where resides the rest of humanity, the “obvious” conclusion doesn’t seem so obvious.

There are many aspects of this which fascinate me, but I’ll write about only one of them here. That’s the core mechanism of such collective hysteria, which is the same that functions in the entire woke madness.

No doubt you’ve seen countless examples of the same thing. One thinks of the activist anger in Portland, Oregon four years back about a Dr. Martens boot advertisement featuring red laces, which was an “obvious” symbol of white nationalism.¹ It’s the same process where someone finds “obvious” fascist references in essays, films, speeches, and even tea kettles and app logos. ²

This phenomenon isn’t limited to the woke mobs, by the way. I haven’t written much about this, but as a teenager I was in a hyper-evangelical Christian church, and finding the “obvious” satanic and occult influences in advertising, television, music, books, films, video games, and pretty much everything else that wasn’t explicitly Christian was quite an obsession. Besides the much laughed-at “backmasking” (where hidden Satanic messages were discovered when a record was played backwards)³, did you know the Muppets are all demons?⁴

Orders of the Symbolic

The core mechanism operating in such false associations is actually a problem with the symbolic, or rather that the person is stuck in one of the orders of the symbolic. If you look at the symbolic as a hierarchy, you can see the problem more clearly:

• First order: The thing representing itself.

• Second order: The thing represented.

• Third order: Representation free from the thing (“abstract” meaning)

• Fourth order: Representation defining things (religion, ideology, culture)

• Fifth order: The thing resistant to representation (the world without forms).

I’ll explain these all really briefly.

First Order of the Symbolic: This is when you use a thing to represent another just like it. For instance, if you want someone to open a door, you open a door yourself. Almost all people can understand this level of the symbolic.

Second Order of the Symbolic: A word or an image that is used to represent something. A picture of a door, or the word “door.” Again, most people understand this, but some autistic children have trouble with this level.

Third Order of the Symbolic: This is the level of symbol most of us think of as the symbolic, where most of human communication happens. These are metaphors, similes, and also mathematics. A map is a good example of this level. This level requires some degree of cultural training or education (a parent explaining how a map works, for instance). This is the level where autistic people and people with developmental disabilities start to run into problems understanding others.

Fourth Order of the Symbolic: I call this the “order of meaning,” but you could also call this religion, ideology, cosmology, or worldview. Here, the symbolic defines the way we see the world, rather than the symbolic only being a representation of the world. It’s also at this level that the set of symbols themselves are determined and sorted. For instance, the letters that can be used to spell a word, the number and other ciphers that are usable in mathematics, etc.

Fifth Order of the Symbolic: This is actually a kind of return to the first order. Here, the thing becomes the only possible true representation for it itself. That is, a particular door is the only door that can represent that door, because representation is now understood to be completely unrelated to things. Here, ideologies become interchangeable, seen as mere symbol-sets that can be discarded or altered. This is a very rare symbolic order in which to operate, and most of us are ever on this level very briefly, usually during a “crisis of faith.” Mystics are the only ones here for very long.

Between each of these orders is a kind of “leap” you have to make, which requires a degree of mental strength. The jump from the first order to the second, or the second to the third, is quite easy for almost all people. There are points of course where we all get a little confused in the third order, however, as with not understanding a metaphor or “getting” someone’s joke or sarcasm.

The fourth is where almost all of us get stuck. This is the “systems thinking” that tech-inspired TED-talk people are always on about: understanding the sets of meanings and representations as part of a combined whole, rather than disparate things.

Here, in the fourth order, all representations take on an extra “hidden” or “true” meaning. This is where religion happens: Christianity and the crucifixion, for example, defines the meaning of all crosses. Political ideology happens here as well, as with the ideas of Democracy, or Communism, or Fascism, each of which redefines social relations to have a “true” purpose or “hidden” order.

The Coming Nigredo

Returning to the Dr. Seuss book, the people who saw the “obvious” rape culture in Green Eggs and Ham were stuck on this fourth level, just as those who thought Dr. Martens was “advertising white supremacy” were also stuck. The order of meaning (belief system, or ideology, but really let’s just call it religion) of wokeness taught them to find the “hidden” oppressions in the everyday because it asserts that oppression is everywhere (just like evangelicalism taught me to see the satanic everywhere).

That’s how a woke person can find microaggressions in even the kindest human interactions, or signs of “creeping fascism” on a billboard, and something offensive or oppressive anywhere. Their ideology tells them that is how the world works.

The fourth order of the symbolic is the ideological, but again it’s not the final order. In the fifth order, the world without forms, you become decoupled from any particular ideology and see it as a mere symbol set. Even though you have the sense of looking at such things “from above,” this isn’t really an ascendant position, more like an outside one.

If you have ever left a religion or political ideology, or otherwise severely changed your belief system, or even just left your birth country, you have experienced the world without forms. It’s like the alchemist’s nigredo process, a breaking down of everything that was. Basically, everything falls apart and you re-experience the world directly again without an ideological order telling you the true meaning of things.

Eventually, the person who has entered that state returns through the first three levels into the fourth level again, perhaps adopting a new ideology with hopefully more insight into where it can be useful, and where it can lead us wrong. This might seem like a problem, a return to the same trap, but I don’t think so.

That’s because that fourth order of the symbolic is also the order of cultural meaning. Regardless of what one might think of religion or other ideologies, it is a full tapestry of meaning in which people weave their lives. And here we should stress that religion and ideology are on the same level; even though ideology pretends to have no sacred, what is sacred is merely obscured. What is sacred to the communist but the power of their own labor? What is sacred to the Democrat but the rule of the enlightened and “egalitarian” masses? What is sacred to the woke but the righteousness of the victim (regardless of how nebulous and shifting that concept is defined)?

Symbolic orders are not the problem. What is the problem is that we forget they are merely symbolic orders: that though we might see Hitler in a tea kettle or rape culture in a children’s book, that doesn’t mean either were actually there. The only way to understand that, however, is to experience the process of nigredo at least once and preferably countless times, to have our entire symbolic order shatter and glimpse the world beyond all our symbols.

I think such a crisis of faith is coming for the woke, and it’s not going to be the creeping fascism and white supremacy and rape culture they see everywhere they look. Instead, I think it will be the climate, all the environmental chaos already wreaking havoc on the world. Nature will always trump ideology with storm, flood, drought, and fire. All our certainties and identities will collapse in the face of the Real, and what remains will be everything the symbolic cannot hide.

1. I wrote about this in “White Purity and Woke Nationalism.” Short answer: no, no it isn’t.

2. Here is an “obvious” JC Penny Hitler teakettle. And an “obvious” Hitler Amazon app logo. No, they’re not Hitler.

3. Here’s a fun example if you’ve never encountered this.

4. It was so “obvious” to me back then that I don’t remember why. I think it had something to do with the Swedish Chef because he says “borg borg” and that’s an “obvious” reference to Emmanual Swedenborg, but I don’t remember the next step in the logic chain…