Fragment 223, Word count: 573.

Tags: history, sovereignty, politics, deity, philosophy, hive-mind, culture, supremacist illusions, dystopia, existence.

Every person’s subjectivity is molded by the day-to-day practices and verbalizations of their ambient society. Specific forms of sociability and social control are gradually learned and internalized as a map and icon of human necessity, an orienting lens of expectations, intentions, and evaluations, sometimes called a superego. In the context of a political and cultural regime shaped by a history of war-focused patriarchy and grotesque religious metaphysics demanding irrationally uncritical belief and fervently demonstrative reverence to both a home collective and a wildly implausible idea of divine sovereignty, philosophy has been the mental exercise of untethering from the culturally modelled map and template of what is necessary or practically necessary on the mission to inhabit in some degree-of-fullness the potential, the genius, of human living. Philosophy leans into a cultivated innocence, a creative and self-revealing questioning, an opening to discovery and self-possession.

Metaphysics of Sovereignty

Patriarchal metaphysics is an assertion of the primordial necessity of formal sovereign dominance in social arrangements. It includes all kinds of top-down essentialist idealism such as Platonism (which established itself at the core of Christian theology), in addition to culturally embraced personified spooks such as disembodied gods and demons (as in creationist theism), and even includes mechanistic materialism with its iron laws of nature featuring a biologically determined food chain, imposing the past onto the future in the form of backward-looking cycles. Patriarchal metaphysics has been forming the map and icon of reality within subjectivities for as long as anyone knows.

At the core of the current civilizational incapacity to move past the working co-existence of nihilist science and father-god superstition is the fundamental tenet of the political centre and right-wing in their mission to assert the metaphysics of sovereignty: that master/ slave social organization is inevitable because of how human-nature is determined by God or nature, sanctifying a hierarchical social order in which a privileged few extract inordinate wealth from power over subordinated multitudes. However, stable subordination has always depended on a culturally hyped bundle of illusions (masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, collective supremacy, trophy supremacy) with the intent to produce an individually disabling hive-mind collective identity.

The Opposition

There are two notable forces of opposition against the metaphysics of sovereignty at the source of dystopian features in societies forged by the controlling culture-pools of feudal Christendom, namely the totalitarian hierarchy of father-God Christianity (asserting illusions of disembodied supremacy and collective supremacy) in working alliance with the class of looting-by-violence families known as aristocracy (modelling illusions of masculine supremacy and trophy supremacy). The first and oldest force of opposition was the humanism that developed since ancient times from the milieux of literacy, especially advanced and loosely communal literacy (such as the Enlightenment era Republic of Letter, for example). The second force of opposition is an artifact of, and fits within, the arc of literary humanism, namely the post-reformation line of Lutheran philosophical development, which begins from “justification by faith alone” and moves to a conception of primordial human existence as self-thinking idea.

Primordial Human Existence

There is a knowable truth of metaphysics because of unmediated access between individual ideality and its primordial existence as caring-within-time. Primordial caring is any caring. This bears upon politics because primordial human existence as embodied ideality, creatively inhabiting dramas of personal caring in the suppositional opening of time, is alone what sets the limits and potential for any relationship of individuals to a home collective, to collectives in general, and to other individuals.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.