Mediating Mind: Making Values

Abstract

Values are the highest level organizers of human lives. Yet they are ephemeral—as all non-existing objects they subsist (rather than exist) and therefore can play their overwhelming role in everything human beings feel, think, and do. We are guided by our own generated meanings that have lost real material existence by way of becoming hyper-generalized sign fields that get hold of the whole of our psyche and control our personal integrity. The power of semiotic mediation (explained in Chap. 2) is created by the control of the person over one’s own conduct. Striving for freedom is thus constantly in the process of negotiation with its opposite (non-freedom) and thus keeps us all actively moving ahead in our personal life courses, in participation in the societal dramas of peace, war, revolutions, and counter-revolutions—ending up in the very universal outcome of having lived our lives—as we did. Here there is no difference between the prince and the pauper and the millionaire and the person in deep poverty. Humanity is shared at moments of birth and death—the first liberates us for lifelong experiencing, the other—from it.