Each intelligence is transcendent as a distinguishable universe of temporality and creativity. Transcendence is being not-limited-to-actuality. There are parts to that. Any person’s main bearing is almost completely beyond actuality since it is oriented to the whole personal past (which does not actually exist) of this intelligence, and also toward a completely fictitious and increasingly remote and improbable future. There is also a subjective surprise horizon within that main bearing, fountaining new questions, for example. Part of transcendence is the indefinability or unplottability of intelligence within actuality. It isn’t only embodiment experience that trumps cultural embeddedness and linguistic determinism, but also the powers of intelligence as described in blog posting 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence, the power of intelligence to pretend and orient itself in non-actual time.

Those different universes of orientation (individual persons) are very much dependent on the shared actuality of pre-determined nature, and on mentally constructed interconnectedness with multiple different universes of orientation (individual persons), so they cannot be called autonomous. However, the transcendence of each one as an intelligence does have some crucial subjective grounding with which to establish a profoundly self-possessed orientation. The individual cannot do without human interconnectedness, or culture, or nature, but neither is the individual ever completely a creature of those sources and influences.

The human interconnectedness is excessively oppressive at present due to widespread unconsciousness about its basic operating elements, namely individual intelligences, nature, and culture, but also because of unconsciousness about the basic political antagonism within the interconnectedness, the antagonism between the culture of alpha-trophy-looting (ATL) versus the culture of first-language-nurture (FLN), and because of the dominance of ATL control operations. So far in political and social theory, the concept of political or civic power has expressed only the ATL ethos, completely excluding the worldview and rational claims of the FLN faction based on the FLN contribution to social interconnectedness. Religion, sovereign power, capitalism, science, are all expressions of the ATL ethos or worldview, completely in denial of the whole FLN construct of society. The FLN culture has an intrinsic tendency toward promoting equality because it is common knowledge within that culture that huge investments of loving care, personal attachment, energy, strategy, and work go into the survival of every human being, and it is bestial and criminal to waste any single one. Disrespecting any person is disrespecting all that sacred investment of nurture. The FLN cultural inclination to be egalitarian clarifies the incompatibility and hostility between ATL and FLN in the most fundamental operation of human societies, and also suggests why the ATL forces want to explain language and social interconnectedness in any way that avoids mention of FLN operations and effectiveness.

Nobody would want to abandon or damage the great human interconnectedness, but it is only rational to consider how to make better lives for ourselves and everyone by reducing the cultural and political oppression that is currently imposed by the interconnectedness. A crucial part of that oppression involves the dishonouring and disempowerment, by the alpha-trophy-looting uber-system, of all other cultural sub-systems, including even introverts. The interconnectedness can be nudged toward a less unbalanced condition.

The distribution of self-awareness as individual transcendence is a window on, and an index within, the political situation within the interconnectedness. Right now, the generally low level of popular self-awareness reveals the effects of ATL dominance aggressively stifling self-knowledge in order to maintain its ethos of radical inequality. The ethos involves aggressive interference with individuals by the use of cultures of disembodied personifications (‘brand loyalties’) and pageantry of inequality. The market culture headline is “gratifying consumption” but the story beneath is “bitter inequality”. It is all competitions and comparisons. Some people do enjoy those activities, and there is nothing wrong with sensual pleasure. However, the competitions are nothing but pageants of inequality used as control mechanisms, incentives, rewards, inducements. They declare that the way to define and measure your worth and substance is in the melee of specified competitions. All that pageantry reveals a lack of acquaintance with personal transcendence in a personal creative process. Self-definition by competition is just as much a distraction from self-awareness as is identification with disembodied spooks, exploiting the appeal of sheltering within a powerful personified collective. The ATL control faction uses brand loyalties, including the national belonging excited by war, to externalize, again, individual self-definition. Since disembodied personifications still dominate the cultural landscape as ‘brands’, science has failed its primary mission to move society beyond animism.

Self-defense is legitimate against such interference, and it is the subjective grounding available to individuals that enables self-defense. The control structure is very prepared to win every contest based on violence, and that is sufficient reason to avoid violence. The main reason to avoid violence is that violence disrespects its victims as well as all the nurture that supported their survival. Instead, find the ideological blind spots.

Copyright © 2012 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.