The Desymbolization of Human Life in Contemporary Mass Societies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Judaism and Christianity, the religious traditions most influential on Western civilization, taught that the universe was created by the Word and that human beings were distinguished from all other animals by their use of words. What characterizes our age is a growing reliance on images as our words are being desymbolized. This desymbolization of experience, language, and culture results primarily from what Jacques Ellul has called technique, which has been built up with discipline-based approaches to knowing and doing. It has helped create a new human nature as well as new social forms called mass societies, in which integration propaganda is required to make up the deficits of our highly desymbolized cultures. As a result, life in a mass society defers to science for knowing and to technique for doing, thereby creating a cult of efficiency that is at the root of our economic, social, and environmental crises. How far this desymbolization can go may well turn out to be the decisive issue of the 21st century.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it