Monthly Archives: April 2013

Political Strategy: The Dumbledore Doctrine

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

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Here in Zombie-Land, enjoy the little things, find a family, but also don’t shy away from recognizing the reality that zombies are legion and in control politically. What might keep people from recognizing this reality is its undeniable ugliness, and a fear that there is no viable response to it, the fear that recognizing the truth would be psychologically overwhelming, a short path to despair. However, there is a viable response. There are ways of dealing with the shocking malevolence, the entrenched deceptions and violations of humane values. First, let’s admit there is a problem. Many of the cultural distortions of reality listed last time (posting 58, April 4, 2013, Living in Zombie-Land) have the effect of diverting attention away from the actual seat of effective sovereign power and from the malevolent belief set and value system this power expresses. Even though there are some bottom-up political forces, the seat of sovereign power is not a democracy, not a meritocracy or even an aristocracy, but something more like a confederacy of crime families embracing and expressing an ideology based in an old warped ideal of masculinity. Capitalism is a huge top-down cultural and political force in addition to its more familiar presentation as a fruitful economic arrangement. Capitalism means plutocracy; it isn’t complicated.

The importance of a certain ideal of masculinity in that plutocracy’s world-vision has been drawn quietly into the background in response to the force of feminism (one of the bottom-up political forces), but that masculinity is still foundational in the politically “conservative” worldview. It is entrenched in the culture of military organizations, male team sports, police services, male dominated professions and clubs, and all mainly male regions of organizational and management hierarchies. The resort to war as a glorification of that old masculinity is always available to the plutocracy when it senses any serious questioning. War is also very profitable for the plutocracy, and so is vital in many ways to its continuity of covert sovereignty. Resisting war is a good starting place for any active political movement toward justice.

All this is to say that, politically, something very close to the worst case scenario is our actual situation, even though that reality is normally masked and distorted into appearing like a democracy by having the effectiveness of bottom-up political forces exaggerated and top-down forces left unexamined and often totally unmentioned. It raises the question of how a good life embracing profound reality can be possible in this situation. Of course, in this situation, a good life must involve resistance to the parasitic forces.

Happy Thought, Grim Politics

The Harry Potter canon is an excellent source of metaphors for the political situation. For example, in book three of the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, (written by J.K. Rowling, published by Raincoast Books via Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (1999), ISBN-10: 1551922460, ISBN-13: 978-1551922461) a powerful and difficult (and fictitious) magical charm is introduced, the Patronus Charm, especially effective in self-defence against soul-sucking dementors. The foundation for launching the Patronus Charm is a personally powerful and inspiring happy thought. In the world of political reality, the parasites use cultural norms as dementors that suck the creativity and power from individuals. To face the ugliness of political reality, a profound inspiration, an awesome happy thought, is necessary.

The first happy thought that comes to mind is the work that women and children do: connecting, caring, nurturing. Undefeated by all the parasitism imposed on them by powerful collectives and zombie individuals, many women persist in their work of building connection with the new human arrivals, engaging face to face through innumerable hours of an infant’s learning language and the ways of human interconnectedness. Mothers in that situation also find one another and share in building the culture of nurture and caring support. It is enough to give a person hope for humanity, and as such an indispensable happy thought for politics.

Protected Identity and Equality in Particularity

Another happy thought, not so distant from the work that women and children do, is elemental intelligence and its transcendent freedom. The most important philosophical idea of all time is the idea of the interiority of intelligence. To be philosophical is nothing other than to recognize the particularity of the interior powers and situation of each innocent personal intelligence as definitive of a personal identity. Do that and you are a practicing philosopher for the purposes of politics. It is an elemental self-identification, and also the way to perceive equality with every other particular intelligence. The particularity of intelligence is not competitive, not hierarchical. The freedom of each intelligence is profoundly particular, and each is equally transcendent as a unique point of creative power engaged with nature and culture in a particular way. That is the wonderful philosophical happy thought, to be combined with the work that women and children do as the foundation of our Patronus Charm, which, to re-mix the metaphors, acts as a hazmat suit to protect against despair within the poisoned culture.

The great myth maintained by mass media is that capitalism is the best that human society can ever be, because it manifests the double aspect of human nature, masculinity and femininity, almost perfectly, and so could be said to be instituted by God or Nature. However, the animal-herding culture of parasitic masculinity, the ideal of capitalism, takes any perceivable difference, such as race or gender, as the mark of prey, an invitation to loot, to exercise parasitism. However, that is not an essential feature of masculinity, but rather the peculiarity of a particular cultural tradition that was made to “go viral”, by violent force of arms, at crucial stages of history. Almost all expressions of masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs, not manifestations of nature. The really profound revelation of human freedom, individual intelligence, is prior to and more elemental than masculinity and femininity. It transcends them and is completely unidentified in capitalist culture, indeed it invokes a very different vision of human interconnectedness based on empathy and equality. The capitalist economic and cultural system does not express human nature appropriately in the least, but misrepresents it in deeply debilitating ways.

The Freedom of Elemental Intelligence

Capitalist enablers deny and ridicule the idea that a wonderful change is possible, but it is possible. Think and live elementally. See through the distortions of reality created by parasitic/ plutocratic culture. In thinking the elemental situation of intelligence, clear away all the disembodied spirits, the demons, ghosts, guardian angels, collective spirits of peoples, states, tribes, teams, and all such personified abstractions, leaving individual intelligences to engage with nature in their creation of sustainable lives. Those disembodied personifications are examples of the large body of culturally imposed fables and false values, such as alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, all of which can be cleared away by anyone’s thinking to disclose the elemental situation of intelligence.

Human being is embodied intelligence, normally conditioned within portions of an elaborate culture constructed through a particular history by a multi-generational interconnectedness of ordinary individual intelligences. The force of intelligences is such that the fabric of human being is not pre-determined as nature is. It can be re-created to express ever more of the transcendent freedom of intelligence. So it becomes possible to think that war, slavery, and human-on-human parasitism in all its forms can be ended: Big happy thought.

Horcruxes

Emphasis on the imminent power of the malevolent plutocracy can also be exaggerated, however, because most of the work of preserving and operating top-down parasitism is accomplished by entrenched and widespread cultural legacies from history. Once again to draw on the Harry Potter canon as a source of metaphor, the socially conditioned distortions of reality cited in posting 58, April 4, 2013, Living in Zombie-Land are cultural legacies serving as the horcruxes of the parasites. (See: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, written by J.K. Rowling, published by Raincoast Books via Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (2005), ISBN-10: 155192756X, ISBN-13: 978-1551927565.) Horcruxes are living fragments of a dark wizard’s soul, removed from his original body and magically hidden for permanent safekeeping in separate objects. Fragments of the soul of parasitism are stealthily embedded in the cultural legacies just cited, every bit as effective and malevolent as plutocratic activists, but functioning independently of them. Simply outing and disabling a particular oligarchic group will not solve the problem of human parasitism, because its horcruxes, such as the cultural ideals of masculinity, will exert their malevolent influence and re-create another parasitic oligarchy.

The main role of activist factions among the ownership oligarchy and the corporate/ professional collective is to bolster, support, conserve, and promote the enduring structural layers and features of the cultural legitimation of top-down human-on-human parasitism, such as the cultural ideals of masculinity as enshrined in good old “family values” as well as in supposedly wholesome activities such as team sports. It is made to look benign, charitable, well meant, innocent. There does not need to be a cabal, meeting in secret, to arrange and manage operations on a day to day basis. The parasitism is nothing as straightforward as a conspiracy, but is, rather, a broad and deep cultural legacy of institutional structures and values. The ordinary content of mass media is quietly demonstrating a specific political correctness to normalize the parasitism on an ongoing basis.

The Strategic Doctrine of Albus Dumbledore

In his struggle against organized dark magic, the fictitious wizard Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter’s headmaster at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry) devised the strategy of first identifying and destroying the malevolent Lord Voldemort’s horcruxes. He deduced that it would be futile to confront the main body of the enemy before the horcruxes had been destroyed. The same strategy is transferable from fiction to reality for resistance to the political reign of legitimized parasitism. In general, first target the cultural horcruxes for sustained debunking. For example, since so much cultural emphasis is placed on concealing the power and even the existence of the modern plutocracy, it is an easy conclusion that one tactic of resistance is to recognize the plutocracy, watch for its manifestations, and expose its lies, crimes, and incompetence in everyday discourse. This is already in progress, as is resistance to some wars. Weakening the cultural underpinnings of the malevolent sovereignty of the Old Regime is exactly how Enlightenment rationalists succeeded.

Another act of resistance, possibly more difficult than recognizing the plutocracy, is debunking the old ideals of masculinity, plutocracy’s foundational fable. Nothing much will change without the destruction of that old horcrux. However, it is not complicated. Decline participation in the culture of combat, sport, and fashion. Avoid associating with any groups that celebrate or tolerate violence, or groups that use uniforms, logos, insignia (especially insignia of rank), formal gestures (salutes, handshakes) or postures (standing at attention, bowing or kneeling), synchronized movements, drills, or rituals. Those are all cultural zombie tags and weapons against intelligences. When confronted with competitions, recognize that these are mechanisms for externalizing and poisoning self-definition (self worth) by anchoring it to the justification of parasitism on everyone lower in the ranks of competitors. There might be no way out of competing, but that should be counteracted with attention to the innocent interior process of building your life, the origins of projecting your aspirations onto a future which is mutable by the force of your embodied intelligence.

If it seems like connecting with people might be difficult in the absence of “tribal” logos, gestures, and insignia, just remember that ordinary conversations do not require them. Here in Zombie-Land, enjoy the little things, find a family, and also, out of the abundant happiness of being alive in elemental reality, externalize freedom by strategic resistance to the legitimation and practice of top-down human parasitism.

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

 

Living in Zombie-Land

04 Thursday Apr 2013

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Through a study of history, philosophy, and politics, we have come to recognize an historically derived poisoning of the culture we inhabit, a poisoning with the effect of normalizing and legitimizing social patters involving pervasive and progressive top-down human-on-human parasitism, whole cultural systems distorting reality in support of a perverse political correctness. Since we are aware of that poisoning of culture, we have to admit that we are faced with surviving in something like a real-life version of Zombie-land. (The movie Zombieland (2009) was directed by Ruben Fleischer, written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, Produced by Gavin Polone, Relativity Media, Pariah, Columbia Pictures, starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin.) Most of the people we deal with every day are completely unconscious of distortions of reality engineered by the culture of parasitism, and play along, however unwillingly, with self-identifications imposed by malevolent social and cultural forces around them, in effect acting through a zombie shell or avatar.

Cultural Distortions: Zombie Reality

It will be no surprise to anyone that religion is a cultural presence that always influences the public discourse, thinking, behaviour, and perceptions of people in communities practicing religion. It is more of a surprise, although exactly parallel, that the ideology by which a ruling faction of a community legitimizes its privileges and immunities also has profound influence on everyone’s thinking and on the security situation of people who communicate anything publicly. For example, journalism claims to be about telling truth to power and about power, but almost always is just telling entertaining stories that support the master story narrated by the business, corporate, and military community. In those stories, the legitimacy of institutions, especially private commercialized activities and military-ready masculinity must always be confirmed and celebrated, as a declaration of faithful (religious) patriotism.

Typical modern distortions of reality, broadly accepted falsehoods, are these:
that corporate, professional, and political hierarchy is meritocracy, in spite of pervasive inequality of opportunity, and in spite of the wide variety of interests, talents, and powers different people develop;
that rankings from competitions justify a progressively concentrated top-down parasitism: “to the victor belong the spoils”;
that the purest masculinity expresses itself as audacious human-on-human parasitism, that boys will thus be boys, and that such grand masculinity is the foundation of the glorious accomplishments of humanity, that the force of masculinity binds human collectives together and so is the foundation of civilization;
that top-down human parasitism is thus legitimate and benevolent, even in extreme forms such as war and exclusively private ownership of capital;
the political correctness of never publicly detailing the influence that owners of capital exert over their property, through the political system, in nominally democratic countries;
that countries have democratic sovereignty because they have elections every four or five years, even though the cost to participate as a candidate is prohibitively high (For a nation to be truly democratic, one requirement would be that assemblies which exercise sovereignty, that draft and proclaim laws, would have to be recruited like juries, by a draft of all citizens except for lawyers, doctors, police and military officers and generally those presently excused from being called for jury duty. Consider: Why aren’t they?);
that corporate capitalism is the best possible economic, social, and political arrangement, and that no better system is possible because this one manifests human nature almost perfectly, and so could be said to be instituted by God;
that the commonly feminine nurturing engagements are less consequential, less valuable, than the commonly masculine competitive and military-style engagements;
that masculinity is appropriately represented by the professional sport industry, and that femininity is appropriately represented by the fashion industry;
that the self-identification or self-definition of a person can be made using cultural tags such as labour-market categories, gender markers, and competitive placements;
that transcendence resides in something other than, and external to, individual intelligences;
that abstractions such as nation-states and economic institutions (markets) have transcendent (semi-divine or divine) personality suitable for emotional attachments typical of fundamentalist religion;
that there is disembodied intelligence, sometimes disembodied super-intelligence (the great spirit).

The Zombie Metaphor

It seems obvious that the whole idea of zombies is a metaphor for the deadening effect of living and working within a set of reality distortions and culturally supported falsehoods including those just listed, the regimented systems of modernity. Culturally acquired ways of expressing those distortions shape the public appearance of each individual into a zombie-like shell. Of course, the striking difference between the world portrayed in the movie Zombieland and our real life situation is that the people around us are all still very much living intelligences who must always be treated ethically and non-violently. In the movie, the people who have become zombies do not have to be treated ethically any more. The surviving humans are relieved of the need to think and act ethically in relation to them. In real life it is exactly the opposite. Dealing with people expressing those cultural distortions of reality, and so inhabiting and acting out zombie shells, is the normal situation requiring ethical thinking and acting.

Justice, Ethics, Morality: Empathy

Postings on this blog frequently emphasize the interiority of individual intelligence, how much of anyone’s experience is strictly interior to his or her constructed orientation, as in, for example, the observation that orientation, the interior of individual intelligence, since it includes creative non-actualities such as a rich past and a mutable future, cannot be part of the strict actuality that is nature. In combination with the fact that interacting with others improves enormously the experience and enjoyment of intelligence, that makes empathy an urgent imperative for effort and attention. The more we are aware of the extent of our monadic interiority, the more important it becomes to make the effort to be empathic with people around us, and the more obvious it becomes that empathy takes special effort.

The ultimate foundation of justice and morality is empathy, awareness of any intelligence’s innate revulsion from insult, injury, contemptuous or inconsiderate treatment, in general the revulsion from being treated in any way which does not honour, respect, and dignify the subjective experience of receiving that treatment. Behaviour that is moral, just, or ethical requires diligence in putting yourself into the subjective orientation of the people you are dealing with and then honouring their experience in the way you act toward them, instead of dishonouring it by ignoring its inclinations, joys, and sufferings. Not every discomfort, inconvenience, or opposition can be or should be avoided, however. After all, most people live inside zombie-shells that suit the oligarchic parasites, but still, violations of their subjectivity must be kept within the limits of dignity, must be acknowledged to them and provided with strong, reasonable justifications. This is much like the Kantian insistence that people always be treated as ends and never only as means to ends.

Preparations for war always include de-humanizing an enemy, often stipulating as a crime any public presentation of empathy for people identified in that way as prey for the agenda of the oligarchic faction. Patriotic citizens are thus conditioned to accept participation in horrendous crimes. War is an illustration of the fact that serious empathy is absent from the predator/ prey worldview and from the ideology of meritocracy. Crime family values promote reliable return on investment to the exclusion of empathy toward people required to sacrifice for that return.

Perceiving Equality

To achieve any serious empathy you have to get past cultural tags. Don’t draw ultimate conclusions from a person’s group memberships, team affiliations, emotional bonds to personified abstractions, trophies, gender, or competitive placements, from clothing or other shell-components. Those tags constitute an individual’s zombie identity. The shell can’t be ignored because people often project and defend it passionately, and it can be brutal and lethal. Be mindful of the force of your own zombie shell, your own accommodation to fictions that enable institutional parasitism. Re-orient through rejecting the distortions, and embracing the realities they mask.

Considering more deeply into another person’s subjective orientation, each is a particularly situated and empowered freedom, a transcendently free intelligence re-making the world by working to construct a satisfying life, but more or less hijacked by ambient culture, distracted from awareness of elemental self-identification. Nobody chooses a zombie identity from a position of profound self-possession. In order to think into another person’s particularly situated and empowered orientation, it is necessary to notice something about the particularity of that situation, without violating privacy. Although “real” zombies are beyond rescue, no person is beyond re-orientation to elemental reality.

When others interact with you they will probably be looking at your cultural identity-tags and miss being aware of your elemental self, as described in posting 57, March 21, 2013, Cartesian First Philosophy and The Elemental Hazmat Suit. The elemental self is usually unidentified and so unnoticed. Since others likely haven’t identified the elemental self very clearly, you will be able to sense it in them possibly better than they can themselves. Do not honour cultural tags, but rather relate to the elemental self in everyone, the freedom. Honour the fragility of anyone’s freedom. Stay away from force and violence, insult and injury. However, clear and urgent self defence is always permissible.

The Equality of Subjective Interiority

Every intelligence is transcendent, and none are more or less transcendent than others. There is nothing in the inherent qualities of interiority to rank one over another, or to give one sovereign or parasitic rights over another. Freedom is freedom, and that is the character of intelligent interiority. There is no justification for one subjective interiority to suck away the freedom of another, to avoid certain kinds of work by preying on the disadvantages and vulnerabilities of others. The strongest and most gratifying expression of intelligence is the enabling of the self-identification of other intelligences. In the interest of a duty to the transcendence of intelligence, it is not enough to obey laws or any other sort of command, but instead, it is necessary to respect the interiority of intelligence, and act respectfully from empathy.

In the movie Zombieland, Jesse Eisenberg’s character, Columbus, works on compiling a list of rules for surviving in Zombieland. Woody Harrelson’s character, Tallahassee, contributes “Enjoy the little things” to that list. By the end of the movie the list should also include “Find a family.” It is obvious from web-based information media that lots of people have come to recognize the cultural distortions of reality that support oligarchic parasitism. It isn’t paranoia because you are not a special target. You are a transcendently free agent with a strategic position and assets, but not a special messenger, no more or less a hero than anyone else. Your political/ spiritual situation isn’t personal, but cultural and profoundly human. Find a family. Enjoy the little things. Act ethically and in a way to help librate people from zombie-shells.

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