Symbolizing With Truth

Human beings are symbolic creatures--great at recognizing patterns and finding correlations between abstract concepts and the physical world, using symbols to bridge that gap. For example--a tiger might be used to symbolize ferocity, and this is accurate because the tiger displays that quality sometimes (although not all the time).

In fact, the very word tiger is a symbol itself, as is all language--as the sound/word represents the tiger, but as Shakespeare would say, it would still be that regardless of the name used to symbolize it. This applies to anything humans try to symbolize, either metaphorically or with language. So, symbols only really work when there is an understanding or consensus that connects the symbol with the symbolized--in this way, all symbols are false in that they are only as correct as the people using the symbol think.

Say a word repeatedly, it doesn't matter which word. Everyone has had the bizarre experience where, after repetition or extended consideration, a word sounds weird. Like it doesn't actually mean anything at all! Now think about the fact that money is a way that we symbolize things and concepts--and we treat that symbol as if it was a good representation. Is it though? A friend was considering trading a talented leather-worker for an extremely nice journal, one that had taken 16 hours for the craftsman to finish. Does that make the journal worth 160 dollars, for ten dollars an hour of labor? That doesn't sound right, on an instinctual level, the way that repeating a word over and over makes it sound wrong too.

Perhaps if art itself was the currency, the way we symbolized value would change and become in line with the value of the thing to the individual(s) that are bartering for it. Everyone has things that are important to them because of their uniqueness or personal connection to the object, and that personal value is subjective, but pretending that objects have universal objective value is certainly not correct.

What I'm saying is, make things, trade things!