On society as a symbolic order

It is often said (and taught) to us that societies generally move from agricultural to industrial and ultimately to service-based. That is, up to the 18th century, most people seem to have worked in the first, agricultural sector. With the onset of industrialization in the Western hemisphere, the second (industrial) sector attracted more and more people until most of the workers were employed there. Then, over time, less and less workforce was needed to produce the victuals necessary for a society. In our time, with the most people (again in Western countries) working in the third sector ("services"), only a small portion of a society occupies itself with supplying the rest with material goods. What the rest of us do, by and large, is entertaining ourselves in a perpetuated symbolic order.

For, in the strict, material sense, there is no need for theatre, literature, television and the like. There is no need for roads, telecommunication and infrastructure in general. Feudal societies, for example, appear to have consisted of small, agriculturally self-sustainable regions. There's no need for the bank sector money itself being a symbolic order meaningless outside itself.

All of the above mentioned systems are based on conventions, like figure skating or cue sports or scholarly activity in the field of humanities. People in these fields generally start with practicing the selected vocation, then move on to educating the juniors. This way a group is formed around an arbitrary set of rules perpetuated by the succession of generations. As a group, it begins to exert an attractive force on those outside it, telling others "you are successful only if you belong here and do what we do." And thus, a new profession is born. What is important to realize is that the set of conventions these groups are formed around are arbitrary; they do not correspond to any reality or material necessity. Having fulfilled our biological needs, we play this grand symbolic game called "modern society" which we ourselves have created.

It is not by chance that bookstores in our days are flooded with writings teaching us to be in harmony with ourselves. As "success" in this game-society has no longer any objective definition based on crude reality, the only definition that remains -- perhaps it has always been the only criterion -- is to deem ourselves successful, in other words, to be satisfied with our place in the symbolic order. So we can either struggle to convince ourselves that our lot is the best that could befall us, or -- alternatively -- we may attempt to alter the system itself. After all, this is a game that we created. So we might as well change its rules to our image and likeness. Or at least try.