Abdullah Jan
Islamabad: A thought-provoking essay by writer Ali Rehman Malik thus week explores the role of symbols in shaping human understanding, arguing that many of society’s most enduring disagreements arise because people mistake symbolic concepts for straightforward factual propositions rather than recognizing them as compressed repositories of history, culture and lived experience.
Published on July 22, the essay, A Symbol Is a Compression: Differentiation Before Re-coherence, examines how symbols function as cognitive shortcuts that condense complex networks of relationships, memories, institutions and traditions into a single word, image or object.
According to the author, modern debates frequently become polarized because concepts such as freedom, democracy, nation, justice, religion, love and truth are treated as simple claims that can be declared either true or false. In reality, he argues, these ideas represent centuries of accumulated human experience that cannot be fully understood without first unpacking the layers of meaning embedded within them.
To illustrate the argument, Malik turns to the example of a candelabra. While it can be described in purely functional terms as a metal object designed to hold candles, its symbolic significance varies widely depending on cultural, historical and personal contexts. For some, it evokes religious rituals and remembrance; for others, it recalls Gothic architecture, family traditions, craftsmanship or romantic settings. These meanings, the essay notes, do not reside in the object itself but have developed through generations of interaction between people, culture and circumstance.
The author contends that reducing such objects to their simplest physical descriptions may make agreement easier but strips away much of their deeper significance. Instead of discarding symbols or remaining confined by inherited interpretations, he proposes a process of “decompression”—carefully separating the multiple relationships and meanings that have been folded into a symbol before attempting to reconstruct a coherent understanding.
This process, which the essay describes as “differentiation before re-coherence,” is presented as a necessary step toward more productive dialogue. Rather than immediately defending or attacking symbolic concepts, readers are encouraged to examine the historical experiences, institutions, values and assumptions that have contributed to their present meanings.
The essay further argues that symbolic compression is not inherently problematic. On the contrary, it is portrayed as essential to the functioning of civilization itself. Language, memory and institutions all depend upon compression to make communication and collective organization possible. Without such mechanisms, conveying complex ideas would become nearly impossible.
However, Malik warns that symbols can become increasingly detached from reality when societies forget that compression has occurred. Over time, some symbols remain responsive to changing circumstances, while others become rigid and ceremonial, losing the capacity to adapt even when confronted with contradictory evidence.
He distinguishes between maintaining contact with reality and possessing the ability to learn from it, suggesting that some intellectual or institutional frameworks continue to encounter new information without developing mechanisms to revise their underlying assumptions. In such cases, disagreement persists not because reality is absent, but because existing symbolic structures cannot register or accommodate contradiction.
The essay concludes by suggesting that many of the world’s deepest social, political and cultural disputes originate not from fundamentally different perceptions of reality but from competing symbolic compressions that are mistakenly treated as simple factual assertions. Before asking whether an idea is true or false, Malik argues, a more productive question may be what historical relationships, experiences and meanings have been compressed within it.
By reframing symbols as dynamic repositories of collective human experience rather than static propositions, the essay offers a philosophical perspective on why public discourse often becomes polarized and why genuine understanding may require first unfolding the layers of meaning concealed beneath the words people use most frequently.
