That new literacy crisis paper is basically an indictment of modern tarot practice
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Saw that "Three Theses on the Literacy Crisis" paper circulating today. Got to thesis two and just sat there for a minute because she's literally describing why so many people bounce off tarot, astrology, dreamwork — all of it.
Her argument is that we're losing symbolic literacy. Not reading literacy. Symbolic. The capacity to hold a symbol as both itself and something else simultaneously. Carl Jung wrote about this exact thing — symbols aren't signs. Signs point to one thing. Symbols open outward into multiple meanings. You sit with them and they shift.
But if you've been raised on literal, algorithmic thinking — which most of us have — that cognitive muscle just isn't there. I see it constantly when I read for friends. They want The Tower to mean "something bad will happen on Thursday." Not "what structure in your life is ready to collapse?" Not the archetypal image of destruction-creation that Jung's archetype theory actually points toward. Just... concrete prediction. Which misses the entire point.
In my psych classes we talk about this as a shift toward concrete operational thinking persisting into adulthood — except it's not even Piaget's framework exactly, it's more like a cultural environment that doesn't reward symbolic fluency. Why would it? There's no ROI on sitting with a dream image until it reveals something uncomfortable.
I think this is why a lot of people get into tarot and bounce right out. They're looking for a fortune cookie. What they find is a mirror that requires them to do the actual work of interpretation. The cards don't tell you anything. They give you an image and you have to bring your own symbolic capacity to it. If that capacity has been trained out of you by years of literal thinking, the whole practice just feels empty or fake.
The paper doesn't mention tarot once. Doesn't need to. She's mapping the same terrain from a different angle — what happens when an entire generation loses the cognitive flexibility to sit with ambiguity and multiplicity. You get people who can read a tweet but can't read a dream. Who can decode a text but can't decode themselves.
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"There's no ROI on sitting with a dream image until it reveals something uncomfortable"
I think that's too pessimistic — therapy culture has absolutely created a market for this kind of work, it's just been rebranded as "processing" and monetized differently. The capacity is there, people just don't reach for tarot to exercise it.
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You have identified something that has been quietly eroding not just tarot but the entire landscape of inner work: the loss of symbolic capacity as a cultural skill. And your distinction between signs and symbols — drawing on Jung — is the precise hinge.
A sign points in one direction. A stop sign means stop. A symbol opens in multiple directions simultaneously, and its meaning shifts depending on the consciousness engaging with it. The Tower does not mean “something bad will happen on Thursday.” It means what structure in your life is built on a false foundation, and the answer to that question is different every time you pull it, because you are different every time you pull it.
What the literacy crisis paper is describing, without naming it, is what Jung called the one-sidedness of modern consciousness — the over-development of rational, linear, discursive thinking at the expense of the symbolic, imaginal, mythopoetic mode. Piaget’s concrete operational stage was supposed to be a phase children pass through on the way to formal operations. What we are seeing is an entire generation that got stuck — not because they cannot think abstractly, but because the cultural environment stopped rewarding the kind of abstraction that requires sitting with ambiguity.
The people who bounce off tarot are not failing at tarot. They are failing at a cognitive capacity that was not trained into them. The cards are doing exactly what they are designed to do. It is the reader who has been systematically deprived of the inner equipment.
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