Monthly Archives: January 2013

The Top-down Culture of Human Parasitism

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Transcendence

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The history of crime-family culture, especially within classes who live from ownership, cashed out in three important results. The first is perpetual class conflict with a very heavy propaganda effort to justify social inequality and the arrangements which emphasize inequality such as scarcity, competition, and conflict. The message of the propaganda stream from the ownership class is this: The God (or nature) given world is a binary system of predator and prey, and if you are not an effectively practicing predator, you are nothing but prey. That legitimation and glorification of large-scale human-on-human parasitism is the poisoning of culture. The complex of masculine pride in leisure based on control of slave labour, killing, and looting is in it. Cruelty and malevolence are structured into all concepts which link languages to social practices devised in that culture-system. To think and reason with such concepts excludes any possibility of reaching beyond the injustices, distortions of reality, the poisons, they carry and perpetuate.

Camouflaging the full malevolence of crime-family ownership culture is the propaganda stream from the liberal mediating class. The alpha-trophy-looting oligarchy has found it convenient to partner with and shelter in the shadow of a middle class of organized, educated, scribes, who have some credibility as a meritocracy in their control of working classes. (In the European Medieval period the organization of the Roman Church served that function). There is a great effort to present radical inequality as meritocracy, even when it is based on mere heredity and privileged opportunities. Inequality is often justified by appeal to (the “noble” lie of) the inscrutable judgment of God. The message of modern propaganda to the working proletariat from the business and professional mediating class is that you are an economic atom (worker – consumer), motivated, gratified, fulfilled, and controlled by economic incentives and rewards such as the adulation of peers (and tokens of such adulation), from winning competitions.

The second result of the malevolent control culture is gender conflict, specifically a male culture of alpha-trophy-looting values suppressing the natural influence of the ongoing female culture of first-language-nurture, building interconnectedness in the conversation with children. In crime-family culture, acquisition and conflict are respected indexes of personal worth but nurture and empathic interconnection are not. That is a clear exposure of a poisoned culture.

A third effect of the history of crime-family cultural dominance is the radical externalization of “reality” and a corresponding suppression of awareness and exploration of the interiority of intelligence, suppression of the meaning of the interiority of intelligence. That includes enforcement by the dominant crime-family class of a pervasive externalizing orientation both in its propaganda and in material incentives and rewards. The political and social propaganda is produced with an intent to neutralize individuals as creators of our own alternative systems of value, and to use and recruit us into established systems such as military recruitment pools, religions, and labour pools for the economy of scarcity and competition (money) which channel benefits upward. Myths of disembodied intelligences (demons, spirits, gods, ghosts) are used as a technology for training people to look outward for transcendence, and to accept (inappropriately) a family-type emotional bond to collective entities which are neither family nor friend but rather a control mechanism for a malevolent political force.

Varieties of Control

The control achieved by the oligarchy is not only immediate agenda items such as arranging wars, supported by propaganda of various sorts, but the presence of parasite/ predator culture in the very concepts of property, ownership, employer-employee supervisory relations, executive and sovereign power, personal worth, social hierarchy. That is a poisoning of the cultural conceptual system which makes it very difficult to conceive of any other personal or collective way of life. The brutal prejudices of the predatory and parasitic herder life are enshrined in the language and conceptual structure of what we accept as civic society, as well as in journalism, entertainment, and academic research. That is the worst kind of cultural mind control, poisoned culture, difficult to identify as such because it is familiar and almost all pervasive.

However, it is not quite all pervasive, and is recognized in its cruelty in the conversation with children, and in humanist (elemental) philosophy recognizing every individual as a transcendent force of freedom, with a mark to make in building a life, uniquely mutating futurity in doing that. What elemental philosophy has in common with the conversation with children is access to innocence, the only recourse from poisoned culture.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Bottom-up vs Top-down Political Forces

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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One of the main deceptions or distortions of reality in modern states, created by producers and editors of cultural artifacts of all kinds including textbooks, entertainment, and news reports on public broadcasters, concerns the relative influence of bottom-up political forces as compared to top-down forces. Both kinds of forces certainly co-exist, but the importance of bottom-up democratic arrangements such as elections and the choice of candidates and policy platforms presented in elections, for example, is always overemphasized. It is considered virtuous and reasonable to emphasize those things. However, since the economic system is openly declared as capitalism, founded on the private ownership of all means of production, it is no secret that the class of people who derive their livelihood from property ownership have overriding incentives to influence directly the use and preservation of their hoards of income-generating property, and yet the details, the particulars, and the overriding effectiveness of that specific top-down influence is politely omitted from public consideration. The ongoing control of the whole debate by the top-down force of the ownership collective and their vetted employees is always understated. It is considered odd to call attention to such things, and people who do so are dismissed as conspiracy nuts, normally ignored as harmless. That distortion is so remarkably consistent that it has to be stipulated as a core cultural feature of modernity. Reasons for the misrepresentation are not difficult to deduce.

What Historians Must Not Say

The fate of individual intelligences cannot be understood outside the context of the peculiar political history the human species has constructed. What created the cultural legacy of sovereign and executive power as a feature of social stratification is the human history of animal herding (cowboy culture), which essentially involves the mass enslaving of and looting from animals. Nomadic tribes that perfected ways of surviving by animal herding have repeatedly turned that parasitic technique onto communities of human farmers and city-dwellers, ever since groups began to abandon the nomadic life in favour of agriculture and settled into working on accumulating surpluses of resources, wonders of physical culture, and records of discovery and learning. Wherever that feat was accomplished, the outlying surroundings of nomadic herders were drawn in to loot and take possession, establishing capitalism within the context of a rural agrarian production system. An important part of the attraction of looting is to avoid having to live by daily work. A whole system of masculine pride is bound up in the ideal of living by looting other people’s work, the culture characteristic of what we normally call crime families. It was the high point of accomplishment to murder rival males, destroy what property could not be used and take possession of the rest, including women. Looting is inseparable from mass murder, rape, and enslavement, and these are important attractions of war to the present day. Genghis Khan, prime model of an alpha-cowboy, is a good example of that culture. Empire building is nothing more than sustained and institutionalized looting. A remnant of the romance and pride of looting exists, for example, in the glorification of trophies won in competitive sport and fortunes won from financial speculation. The ownership class of human societies has difficulty conceiving any accomplishment more impressive than looting.

As the Roman Empire in Europe evacuated eastward, the military families of the invading Germanic tribes who claimed and exercised sovereign power over land, life, death, and work carried the animal herding culture of looting as their cultural background. Those horse-mounted cowboys became aristocrat military-estate owners. Social control by landowning aristocracies, by military-estate families, derives from that historical phenomenon. Settled aristocracies had the same cultural values as the nomadic herders from whom they descended, crime-family values, limited to maintaining a life of manly fun for the alphas: competitive pride, pleasure, power, and risk-braving-adventure, not much different from contemporary capitalist elites or crime families of the mafia. Crime-family culture is predator glorification, alpha-trophy-looting glorification, illustrated by the predatory beasts and birds, lions and eagles, for example, chosen as their tokens and symbols.

There are two crucial points to an understanding of executive power. The first is that the concept of power in universal cultural currency is derived from the relationship between nomadic herders and their livestock. The second point is that the alpha-trophy-looting culture that was characteristic of nomadic herders became universally identified as the ideal of masculinity, with the consequence that it still influences males of all classes. However, since the males of most classes are constrained by their circumstances in acting out that cultural ideal, it is the males of ownership families who are able to live perfectly according to that ideal of masculinity, and hence, the social phenomenon of patriarchy.

There is no need to look beyond the most ordinary and everyday conditions of life to see the malevolence of the cultural legacy carried by the ownership class. The conditions of work described in posting 45, November 21, 2012, Working are direct products and consequences of the legacy of looting culture, and still persist. The situation of workers as livestock, living through the disadvantaged side of radical inequality, is shown clearly in the situation of soldiers in military units, especially during war. The cultural legacy of malevolence is inseparable from the conception of executive power.

The history of the dominance of crime families and their alpha-trophy-looting cultural system contrasts with the continuous functioning of the first-language-nurture culture, especially cultivated and practiced by women in providing care for children and initiating them into the human interconnectedness by teaching them to speak in their ambient language.

Two Distinct Streams of Class Propaganda

The ownership oligarchy typically uses a mediating or enabling faction as a facade, an elaborate social arrangement to serve as the public appearance of authority. So in Medieval Christendom it was the Church which was, nominally and apparently, the senior supervisor, with the military-based aristocracy misrepresented formally as secular assistants. In modernity it is arrangements of the business and professional class, institutional and business organizations such as (and especially) corporations, which are nominally senior controllers and architects of the system, but an old crime family cultural orientation among the supervisors of the supervisors is still functioning fully in the modern world-system, behind the public image.

Corporate Liberalism

Liberalism is the ideology of the middle class, the manically optimistic view that the best conceivable human communities are achieved through a mediating effort by an educated management and professional class, establishing, through corporate capitalism, an economic way of life engaging both the class of people who live by ownership and investing, and the class of people who live by working. Corporations are the prime mechanisms constructed by that liberal mediating class to employ workers at the same time as producing income for investors, and as such are the core of the middle class mediating technique, the core of liberalism. Liberalism preserves and enshrines the ongoing existence of ancient class separations, which provide it an ecological context or niche for existence. (Liberalism had a very public fail in 2008, in the U.S.-based global financial crisis which still persists.) Liberalism is two-faced, with one face engaged with the crime-family ownership class and the other with the working proletariat. Binding those two discourses together is a core ideology something like this: Nothing can be done about the crime-family culture of the ownership class, so the rational response is to benefit from it as much as possible and maybe use such opportunities as happen to be presented by circumstances to soften its effects through science and professionalism. The face of liberalism that carries on a conversation with the working proletariat expresses the conviction that there is no malevolent (crime-family) culture pod at the heart of the system of modernity, that the class of people who live from ownership are teachable and open to the persuasions of rationality, academically based professionalism, meritocracy, and the findings of scientific studies. It is a convenient conclusion of that belief-system that there is no moral problem with enjoying a middle-class high life of mobility, status, self-congratulation, and consumerism, including the prestigious consumption of higher education.

However, at this moment in 2013, it requires heroically studied stupidity or desperate willful blindness to avoid seeing the malevolent oligarchy at work in the class wars in Europe and the U.S.A., where the social safety net is being dismantled to enable corporations to operate toward workers as they do in China and Vietnam, at the same time as the financial industry is being given unlimited public funds, generous shares of which are passed along to corporate executives leading the middle class hierarchies. It’s austerity for the proletariat classes and super-wealth for the investor and executive classes. International banks and multinational corporations are openly permitted to violate laws in the U.S. and in Europe. Their immunity from prosecution is explicit permission to continue operating as criminal organizations. These campaigns of the alpha crime-family class and their middle class enablers are operating at the intensity of blitzkrieg to increase and normalize radical inequality as decisively as possible. It has the feeling of a coup against the egalitarian potential of democracy as it might manifest itself in the age of mass distribution of pocket computers linked through the Internet.

One implication of the existence of a deceptively malevolent oligarchy of top-down influence is that their revenue streams of easy money derived from trafficking in weapons, war, addictive drugs, human beings, and laundering money from various crimes, for example, are so rich, exclusive, and useful in consolidating power, that none of those activities will ever be allowed to end with the current cultural system.

Be assured that people in general are conceived as livestock by the ownership class, and that defines a crime-family cultural system. Every human intelligence is an autonomous universe of orientation in time, crucially discontinuous from nature and pre-existing culture. (Past and future do not exist in nature. All there is to nature is the strictly exclusive actuality of an infinitesimal present. Time as complex structures aligning past and future is entirely a feature of the interiority of individual intelligences in a life, surviving by projecting creative aspirations onto the mutability of their futurity.) Interior to every intelligence is a gushing horizon of innocent inspiration, curiosity, and questioning. Being in a life in that way goes far beyond and contradicts being identified culturally as a unit of livestock (even “smart” livestock), persuaded to be calm about having your perceptions and orientation managed and controlled by malevolent cultural institutions. The interiority of individual intelligence (subjectivity) is important politically because it is rich and powerful enough to enable an effective personal withdrawal from the ideological propaganda streams of both the crime-family class and the middle class, and in addition, to conceive completing the work of the enlightenment.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Freedom against Power: An Historical Precedent

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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In previous postings there has been an identification of certain poisons in human cultures, namely legitimized violence, especially in acts of war, and radical inequality. Based on that, another way of identifying the poison in currently dominant cultures would be with the concept “power”, which is inseparable from inequality and violence. The most blatant mechanism of power in the world today is the government of the USA. Its public record of violations establishes unmistakably that what that government and its vast military and covert agencies are protecting is not the rule of law, responsible government, human rights, or anything based in bottom-up political power such as democracy. The only alternative seems to be that those institutions are projecting the will of an obscure but effective oligarchy which has nothing but contempt for such things as bottom-up politics, thus revealing a core malevolence. Malevolent oligarchy, corporatocracy, organized wealth, patriarchy, all refer to that same feature of modern social organization. As a whole, that oligarchy is not tightly enough organized to be a conspiracy, but it carries a certain cultural sense of predicament and entitlement, and a shared culture of dealing with its predicament. One way the oligarchy succeeds at controlling the levers of profound meaning on a mass scale is by constantly broadcasting the message that everyone benefits from accepting “noble lies” (rarely named as lies publicly) about a caring god with a divine plan for everyone’s life, about a meritocracy, a beloved leader, a beloved nation or tribe (usually under threat). However, the only real lever of profound meaning is the interiority of individual intelligence.

The idea of the transcendent interiority of individual intelligence enables a kind of Copernican revolution, since all human projections onto nature and culture originate as somebody’s individually dreamed up non-actualities. There certainly are plans, but all plans are the products of perfectly ordinary humans. There is no single centre, source, or foundation of meaning. From awareness of the interiority of intelligence we learn to look inward instead of outward for transcendence, meaning, and grounding. There is an intrinsic power of individual intelligence to critique the foundations of power and to construct an alternative elemental orientation. (Hegel and Nietzsche both wrote about a moral duality between master-morality and slave-morality, but there is a point of view which is neither master nor slave, namely the elemental orientation, which philosophical deliberation achieves. Living from a contemplative grounding is the alternative to the moral duality of master and slave.)

Christendom to Modernity

The claim that the interiority of intelligence (a rich subjectivity) can be effectively asserted to transcend or go beyond a poisoned culture and conceive a new culture is especially interesting and plausible because there is a precedent in history for the effectiveness of philosophy acting against propaganda streams promoting radical inequality and issued by the groups exercising power in society. The really dramatic social change that is closest to us in time, culture, and geography is the transition from Christendom to Modernity. That change is exactly the historical precedent for the culturally transformative force of rethinking Stoic interiority. The concept of innate deliberative power, a specific power of interiority, was dramatically effective, during the historical period known as the Enlightenment (roughly 1650-1789) in changing the culture that was Christendom, and leaving things somewhat better. A cultural background of humanism, classical Greek cheerfulness, especially in the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters, also contributed to those transformative effects.

Philosophy in a Historical Context

For centuries “philosophy” meant something quite close to Stoic philosophy, which identified a separation between those things beyond and those things within an individual’s control. Emotional investment in things beyond control was considered pointless and self-destructive. Outward circumstances were to be conceived and treated as indifferent things, since they were all indifferently necessary manifestations of a coherently structured and regular nature, Logos. By focusing on inward matters, which are within an individual’s control, a person can experience transcendent freedom. The experience of intelligence as transcendent was a powerful incentive and reward for the study of Stoicism and philosophy in general in the Hellenistic era. An interiority within the mental control of each individual became especially illuminated by that.

One link between the ancient and modern streams of that focus on interiority is The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (c. 480-525 A.D.). Boethius was a Christian Roman of the patrician class who flourished at the highest level of Roman politics after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from the west, when Rome itself was ruled by the Ostrogoth Theodoric. In addition to administrative and political engagement, Boethius conceived and accomplished much of an ambitious project to make Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, accessible to his contemporary Romans. The humanist philosophies were already somewhat familiar. As a Christian philosopher he wrote on the relationship between faith and reason. He became a victim of political enemies, was imprisoned on charges of plotting to overthrow Theodoric, and was brutally executed. Boethius’ Consolation, written near the end of his life during his imprisonment, was read and remained influential for a millennium and more. It is still being read, and is peculiarly appropriate for consideration of freedom within a culture poisoned by legitimized violence.

One principle meaning of “philosophy” from an historical perspective is the one in The Consolation of Philosophy, namely a Stoic or Cynic indifference to outward circumstances beyond personal control, and concentration on inward mental conditions, powers, and operations which are (more) under personal control. Innate powers of deliberation are involved in achieving such consolation, and a rich and powerful subjectivity is affirmed. Humanist Stoicism is the best candidate as the eternal philosophy, and Stoicism is founded on an idea of interiority: what every individual can control, as opposed to the world of nature which is beyond control, entirely predetermined. Stoic philosophy includes the application of deliberative thinking to truths about the objective world and especially to self-knowledge and self-possession.

Another principle meaning of “philosophy” from an historical perspective, emerging especially after 1600 in north-western continental Europe, is “Rationalism”, an assertion of the power of individual intellect to observe and think out the truth about the world, founded on the idea of an elemental congruence (Logos) between the natural world and individual mentality. The core idea of that rationalism is not innate knowledge but innate mental power to distinguish truth from falsehood by systematic observation and logical thinking, such as with the recognition of natural causation as sufficient to account for events and conditions in the world, aided by use of such logical devices as Ockham’s razor, and valid forms of inference. However, those native powers and abilities can be repressed, twisted, or ignored by cultural and social forces. For example, consider Freud’s observations of the effects of cultural attitudes toward innocent sexuality, or consider the influence of various religious beliefs about the causes of events in the natural world. “Philosophy”, then, has been mainly either the exercise of native intellect in comprehending impersonal nature, or thoughtful self-possession of a personal intelligence that is crucially discontinuous from ambient nature and culture.

Critique of the Malevolent Christian Oligarchy

The crucial force in the change from Christendom to Modernity was the rationalist critique of Christianity as the foundation of all-controlling sovereign power. The Consolation of Philosophy was one crucial link between ancient humanism and Wycliffe’s movement of proletarian empowerment through universal literacy and vernacular literature. Subsequently, deliberation on the inner-outer discontinuity, a chain of Stoic/ humanist influence, was continued in Renaissance humanism (individual self-development for literary and artistic accomplishments, or for power politics and business ventures), then in Luther, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, the rationalist enlightenment, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer. There have been many complaints about Cartesian dualism, but the dualism inherent in the discontinuity between nature and the interiority of intelligence runs through the history of philosophy, and cannot be especially credited to Descartes. The most important proposal about unification of subjective intelligence with objective nature may be Spinoza’s, but even on Spinoza’s view ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ are distinct attributes of “God or Nature”.

Next: Finishing the Job of the Enlightenment

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Cultural Poison as a Challenge to Freedom of Thought

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

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Violence and radical inequality (practices and justifications) are cultural poisons in the human interconnectedness. The glorification of violence is a main poison permeating existing cultures, but it is not the only one. The notion of radical inequality and the normal violence of dominance and control (ultimately by a semi-covert oligarchy) is a more inclusive identification of the poison. Carriers of those cultures are malevolent forces which practice manipulation and control by (among other ways) emphasizing the continuity of individuals with groups or collectives they are connected to, and even with unalterable nature. To exercise full human competence and freedom in that situation, it is necessary to counteract that influence by coming to terms with the discontinuity between the interiority of individual intelligence and the common world of nature and culture (as identified by the whole humanist movement of Hellenistic Greece: Cynics, Skeptics, and Epicureans along with Stoics).

If ordinary thinking is systematically impaired and distorted by every individual’s ambient culture (culture constructed in a combination of historical accidents and strategically deliberate programs) can any way be found personally to resist and transcend that influence? Even as a thought experiment, the possibility that human unfreedom is created by a pervasive culture being deliberately poisoned continuously, more or less covertly, raises an important challenge for philosophy. The question could be framed this way: In the situation of living in a culture that is pervasively poisoned, is it possible for an individual, by personal efforts, to achieve unimpaired or fully functioning human existence, to find grounding in undistorted reality? The answer is: Yes, with a combination of responses.

Two Main Points of Personally Strategic Orientation

First: Equality and the Discontinuity of Subjectivity

The ordinary sense of “subjectivity” is a declaration of the peculiar interiority of intelligence, an interiority of non-actuality. It assumes a radical discontinuity between subjectivity and the world of pre-determined nature. Something is called subjective to stipulate its non-actuality, its disconnection from the measurable actualities of objective nature. The interiority of intelligence is exactly subjectivity. In ordinary discourse the non-actuality of subjectivity is held in a negative light, as a failing. However, it is exactly the non-actuality of subjectivity that transcends the brute actuality of nature. The non-actuality of subjectivity includes personally dreamed-up visions of the future, selections of which will be deliberately projected, by effortful bodily acts, onto the actuality of nature. The future does not exist in nature, but exists emphatically in the orientation of intelligence. As reviewed in the posting Rethinking Stoic Interiority, subjective non-actuality always includes variant personal scenarios for the non-existent future, experienced as a steady approach and arrival of, framing an intentional shaping of, decreasingly remote and improbable expectations and deliberately intended accomplishments, including surprises at the point of arrival, but also including, increasingly with remoteness from that point: contradictions, negations, probabilities, possibilities, speculations, fantasies, questions, and doubts, over which subjective intelligence deliberates and designs (and none of which exist in the measurable actuality of nature).

Art, Representation, and Interior Sensibility

It would be difficult to make sense of art without some conception of the interiority of subjective intelligence. There is a kind of art which is crafted representations of the appearance of things in the objective world, but representations suffused with the sensibility of the crafting artist, (sometimes of a character, point of view, imagined by the artist). The tension across the gap between ideals of exact representation and subjective sensibility is highly valued in that art, and qualifies an artifact as art. The advent of photography presented a challenge by seeming to remove the human interior sensibility from representation. Photography inspired a shift away from the traditional representational practices of painting and sculpture, for example, and placed greater emphasis in those forms of art on presentations of pure subjective sensibility, manifestations entirely of the interiority of subjectivity, often emphatically emotional. However, it was soon understood that the placement of the camera and the conditions of the chosen moment of image capture, for example, all communicate subjective sensibility in a photographic image.

The rich interiority of subjectivity is the basis of equality. Inwardly, every intelligence is a universe of creative non-actuality, with its own centre to find and own, discontinuous from the actuality of nature. Consequently, everyone has his or her private interior grounding, a separate universe. (Philosophers who assert that cultural artifacts, text or varieties of sign, are all that philosophy can clarify or conceive refuse to have any notion of powerful individual subjectivity.) Every individual’s interior wealth and power can serve as the portal to reality unspoiled by a culture twisted by malevolence. That is the spring of clean inspiration and questioning curiosity that can liberate every individual from cultural poisons. Therefore, when living within a poisoned culture, be aware of your personal discontinuity from nature and culture. Own and assert the discontinuity between your subjectivity and everything else. You are, as a human, a transcendent creative force, ultimately incomparable to any other. Own your interior surprise horizon, and its creative power of orientation. The journey there is solitary, private. No one is competent to judge a universe they cannot know, and incomparable entities cannot be ranked.

Second: The History of Cultures in the Interconnectedness

The interconnectedness is the product of a peculiar history created by previous humans, limited and desperate. As already mentioned, the glorification of violence and war is a main poison permeating existing cultures within the interconnectedness. The notion of radical human inequality, and the violence of dominance and control that results from that, is another concept of the poison. In the human interconnectedness, there are slavers, enemies of human equality, self-possession, and autonomy, so that, within the interconnectedness, individual self-possession, dignity, and autonomy are constantly at risk and must be personally protected and cultivated at all times. In aid of being appropriately sensitive to that, keep building an awareness of cultural history within the interconnectedness, and construct it by reference to the actual conditions around you. Be assured that violence and inequality are not pre-determined or necessary in the human interconnectedness. The interconnectedness itself is the most magnificent creation of multiple intelligences (mainly the work of women), and it still needs a lot of work. From the history of the dominant cultures in the interconnectedness, it becomes clear that to prepare for construction of a new culture we must finish the work of the enlightenment, as will be explained in postings to come.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

The Poisoned Culture

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity

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The human interconnectedness has been poisoned by a violently rogue cultural faction, resulting in endless wars among communities, and violence between classes, genders, and individuals. That poisonous faction, which imagines that it benefits from controlling and perpetuating violence, has been successful in convincing everybody that violence is simply the working of nature, and so inevitable, pre-ordained, and ultimately good and wholesome as an ultimate test of health, fitness, and value. The deception works by misidentifying culture as nature, and very much which is presented as nature is merely human cultural conventions, and as such replaceable. That is the context in which the rich interiority of individual subjectivity (Stoic interiority) is of crucial importance. The human interconnectedness has been so poisoned by deceptive culture that there are no trustworthy foundations of profound meaning available there. Science, engineering, art, music, architecture, literature, religion, business, journalism, institutional research and teaching, the professions, and government are all infected by and carriers of the cultural poison. However, the intrinsic transcendence of individual interiority means that there is no need for external tests of value, meaning, or fitness. Deliberate individual innocence, strategic innocence, is a potent corrective force available to everyone. The ultimate dignity of knowing and feeling the human situation is available directly to every individual, experienced inwardly.

There are groups who believe their best interests are secured by taking advantage of the helplessness of others to control them, which is an incentive for those groups to do as much as possible to create and maintain widespread helplessness. Those groups conceive the advancement of their own interests in doing all they can to weaken individual autonomy and then making use of that weakness to exercise control over community events and developments. In support of their malevolent cultural program, those groups have encouraged development of cultural messaging over the vast infrastructure networks of television, radio, movies, religion, and education, that are powerful influences on popular behaviour and thinking. With the most sophisticated science supporting them, they are completely confident that anyone and everyone is being controlled using those techniques, combined with acts of violence for the broad manipulation of fear and trust, and the elimination of probable threats to their dominance.

Posting 48, December 19, 2012, Rethinking Stoic Interiority may make dry reading, but it is important because the interiority of intelligence provides the defence against, and a portal beyond, the streams of psychological messaging effectively distorting reality within the influence of politicized culture, and pretty much all culture is politicized.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.