All credited 'Placid Dingo'
I Heart Intangibles
You used to get your sausages from the person who killed the pig. They lived down the road, and you knew them, and you knew their kids were in school and you’d have conversations with them when you were buying your sausages. You had an emotional connection.
Industrialisation meant that you could then get your sausages and everything else from a supermarket, maybe from a company miles away full of people you didn’t know. You didn’t have an emotional connection with any of them. Go to the person you know, or get your sausages from a paper bag. It’s hard to make friends with a paper bag.
So, they gave it a face.
Now you didn’t know the person whose face was on the bag, so they made sure you met them before you even saw the product, through advertising. Suddenly it wasn’t your local butcher or your local paper bag, it was the butcher or farmer Joe.
People can form emotional connections to intangible concepts. Sports teams, religions (some religions in some sense), political groups… all form a sense of unity and community through a focus on a third thing. People are being brought together through a shared relationship with a TV show or a religious figure or a sports team.
This isn’t a problem as long as you don’t let the map become the terrortory. While we treasure and adore the ideas we form emotional connections with, we need to remember they’re ideas. They’re concepts. They can’t love us back.
The people that become part of our community can. Our fellow Broncos supporters, our Game of Thrones fans, our Communist Comrades build a culture, language and a set of rituals that we can engage in together to bring us all together. We’re like a group sitting around a campfire, singing songs to the flames. When it comes time for a hug, you need to remember- it’s the person beside you who’ll appreciate it, not the fire.
So for us as Discordians, we’ve formed a relationship through a deity generally considered explicitly a symbolic or metaphorical entity. I think we might need to remind ourselves that we are a collection of wonderful, curious people who are brought together by Eris…
But she can’t love us back.