What happens in human society is … the spirit of the alpha male can be symbolised: let’s say, ‘the crown of the king’, let’s say ‘the cross’, the symbol of Christ. To the extent that the symbol can be separated from the substance which gave it rise, humans find that they can organise themselves around the symbol, and their behaviour therefore can become much more complicated… if we agree on the meaning of the symbol… now our society has begun to complicate itself by the specification of tasks which we are capable of by agreement on the meaning of a symbol…

This bears much resemblance to the theories expounded in Julian Jaynes’ ideas of the bicameral mind. But for Jaynes the symbol is Godlike, and begins to break apart as society becomes more and more complex and people need to have more reactive organising powers of their own. So the bicameral mind, in which one half is issuing orders from the Godhead, begins to break apart into the far less organised but far more contemplative mind of modern consciousness. Milch gets pretty into the ‘e pluribus unum’ bit earlier on in the lecture, and there perhaps we see something of the experience of making contact once again with that sense of wholeness, that sense of a shared identity through the higher power that we’ve lost.

“The agreement on the meaning of the symbol liberates energy.”

We’re talking here about social realities: social constructions in fact, that have causal power, but no actual basis beyond their symbolic materials,  shoring up the cosmos of our shared cultural values.