The Myth of Communication Systems

In this posting I try to combine Scott Adams' critique of communication with the concept of Jungian Archetypes.

In "God's Debris" Scott Adams notes that humans can be differentiated from other living organism by having elaborate communication structures, that, by this day and age, allow us to communicate with each other regardless where we are.

One could assume that our increased ability to communicate also helps us to protect ourselves better than other organisms, but yet at times it seems as if all this even gets in our way. For example, animals don't have artificial communication systems, and yet they are better than us to recognize environmental threats like earth quakes or tsunamis. Each year many scientists work together hard on a new vaccination against seasonal flu viruses, but still many times those simple creatures are smarter to recognize how they can avoid termination.

I would say that our communication systems are a little too inefficient to be just for exchanging information, and yet very few people question communication, begging the question whether we just perceive communication systems to be a great idea. Or, saying it in Jungian terms: Communication systems are cultural complexes that are most attractive to our psyches rather than giving us a real benefit.

This all leads to concepts related of the Jungian Archetypes which argue that there is a raw, unconscious, and unstructured way of communication. On top of this I would add that for most living organisms archetypal communication is probably quite natural and only for us humans it is not easy to perceive. Maybe this is one of the reasons humans had to invent communication systems in the first place.