Author Archives: Sandy MacDonald

Beyond the Imprinted Parent

10 Thursday Apr 2014

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  The Argument

We have a system of human interconnectedness that is institutionally parasitic on most people (for the benefit of a small faction) but which has everyone oriented within distortions of reality that obscure and sanctify the parasitism. Specifically, we are oriented within beliefs that our situation is exclusively a personal creation such that as long as we dare to dream big and don’t blame others or rock the boat we can by our own efforts ride the social mobility bus up levels of dignity/ support/ love/ money/ power/ honour/ glory and achieve the best life-of-our-dreams possible given our talents, energies, and personal circumstances; in other words, that the capitalist politico-economic system efficiently provides the best possible life to those who deserve and earn it, to those who prove they are worthy. The argument presented here against that distorted orientation is that the politico-economic system in fact consists of parasitic systems of subordination which are institutionalized and maintained in place by deliberately manipulating mass reverence for fictitious parent-forms, externalized pseudo-intelligences declared to be sacred, supposed enlargements of ordinary intelligence situated externally as gods, nature, history, sovereign governments, corporations, and the oligarchic celebrity systems often used to represent communities. However, all such parasitic distortions can be overcome non-violently by any individual through recognizing the unique transcendence of all individual intelligences, and there are good consequences, both personal and collective, philosophical and political, in the self-possession that results from doing that.

Exploiting Child-to-Parent Conditioning

The primordial system of subordination is childhood. For every human newborn, infant, or toddler, there is a deep dependence on an inexplicable parental intelligence which is just there in the structure of the world, along with gravity and ground, and whose limits are unrecognizable. That experience of child-orientation is exploited and used as training in perpetual subordination, looking outward for the initiation of agency, direction, approval, self-definition, and life goals. When an individual matures to adulthood, that psychological pattern of emotional dependence should fade away, but certain cultural mechanisms intentionally keep it active to enable an institutional takeover of the role of supervisory intelligence with indefinite limits. One of those cultural mechanisms is religion and another is institutional sovereignty.

Real Parents are Often Self-Sacrificing

Although there are often parasitic practices in the treatment of older children by their parents, a crucial difference between actual parental intelligence and false parental avatars is that parents are generally devoted, to the point of self-sacrifice, to the fullest development of their children, but the institutional parental avatars work to formalize and preserve systems of life-limiting parasitism on those they supervise.

Just There: The Parental Alpha-Structure of Sovereignty

We all know that there is a sovereign superstructure around here with a whole set of warnings put into effect by watchers and investigators, agents prepared with special equipment for assaults, arrests, and facilities for confinement, and with methods of gathering information and justifying their controlling behaviour. The superstructure makes proclamations of laws and penalties. “Anyone in our territory caught doing X, or not doing Y, will have penalty Z imposed on him or her.” There is a claim to power and a warning about how the power will be used. On the basis of such warnings each person in the territory makes decisions about how to act. That supervising superstructure is just there when we arrive on the scene, as the buildings and streets of a city are just there, and just as to newborns, infants, and toddlers parental intelligences are just there. To carry on a livelihood here you have to get used to dealing with that watchful, interfering, and sometimes brutal supervising organization.

Sovereign superstructures are territorial and display strong drives to preserve and strengthen unlimited control of resources especially people. They organize defined borders and control the passing of properties and persons across borders. They proclaim and enforce exactly who gets to enter or leave their territory. Various branches of the superstructure watch and investigate the world beyond the borders for threats or opportunities for gaining advantages. It has been very common for neighbouring superstructures to do deliberate damage to one another in efforts to gain advantage and dominance. Some proclamations of superstructures require mainly young adult males to serve in lethal-force assault and defence formations to destroy threats and exploit opportunities. The lives of individuals are often destroyed in a superstructure’s promotion of its policies.

Different superstructures have different ways of originating proclamations, edicts, and decrees. Some base themselves on a single person with total authority. Those people often have ongoing conversations with a select group of advisors who assist in forming proclamations and supervising compliance. Other superstructures have collectives of several hundred people to discuss and approve proclamations. Selection to membership in such collectives is done in different ways, sometimes by nomination by political clubs and public election by region, and sometimes by a tradition of primogeniture from the most propertied social categories. Sometimes the superstructure canvasses people in its territory for ideas about how it should conduct business and who should have executive authority. Sometimes it has branch organizations that give certain people the opportunity to vote for candidates for positions of authority or for new policy and project proposals. This is unusual, however. Usually people with authority in a superstructure get to recruit their replacements. For such parental-type authority which is “just there”, mass compliance works exactly the same way in democracies, monarchies, single-party states, or overt dictatorships. People generally accept that the sovereign authority is “just there” and organize their activities accordingly.

The sovereign superstructure is surrounded by supporting branches which gather money and materials for its functions. Some of its proclamations stipulate which categories of people must submit portions of their wealth and income to the superstructure, or must pay the superstructure whenever they buy certain goods or services, cross certain borders, or periodically for items of property in their possession, or for whatever reason the superstructure proclaims. Whatever the superstructure proclaims is backed by its watching, investigating, lethal-force, and penalizing institutions.

The superstructure makes proclamations, takes money, and requires periods of service of some categories of people within its territory. It is not going to stop operating just because there are people who dislike what it does, so the sovereign superstructures do not operate contractually. In fact, the superstructure could not be based on a “social contract” because the concept of a contract requires equality of power among contracting parties (otherwise there is duress of the weaker by the stronger, voiding the concept ‘contract’). The supervising power recruits and acts through a lot of people trained and screened to support and agree with each other. Those people are not encouraged to question the arrangements. They are very strongly encouraged to carry on with established practices and functions of the superstructure, and to enjoy benefits to themselves which it provides. Shared culture and a chain of command unify a large selection of apparent individuals.

For many centuries in the historical past superstructures explained their proclamations (and their existence) as god’s commands and claimed special knowledge of the most powerful god or the only real God. Fear of the God’s retribution in an afterlife has proved a powerful instrument of control and supervision, coupled with promises of sublime and eternal rewards for obedient submission. Typically superstructures which use this technique have meeting facilities in every settlement, where people are expected to come regularly for small-group lessons on afterlife retribution and reward, and to make contributions of money.

Within monotheist religions, the individual’s situation suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among ancient middle-eastern herder-nomads, where the ideas originated, was childhood fear and awe of the father’s unpredictable and mysterious rages. The God of Abraham is that kind of father in the sky, all-knowing, all-powerful, not limited by any rules or finiteness and so unpredictable and dangerous, quick to anger and inclined to terrifying violence. The relationship of that God to the humans He creates, commanding devoted obedience, fervent declarations of admiration and submission, and unquestioning service, is quite overtly an idealized image of the relationship of the herder to his flocks, the herder father to his dependants. Such an orientation situates every individual on an externally imposed axis of submission to, or defiance of, an absolute self-justifying power, an externally imposed axis of grace or disgrace, reward or punishment. However, that peculiar sense of the sacred is not confined to ancient herder-nomads, because the early orientation of every human newborn, infant, and toddler is similarly dominated by the inexplicable external intelligence of parents. On that basis, every human acquires very early in life the psychological disposition to gaze outward for the initiation of agency, direction, purpose, validation, and even self-definition.

Within that cultural background it is well worth observing that the raging power of an angry parent is not sacred. What is sacred within the pre-determined world of nature is the transcendent freedom of every intelligence-as-such. For the majority of citizens the supervising apparatus of nation-state sovereignty is just there, in exactly the same way as the inexplicable parental intelligence is just there for every newborn, infant, and toddler, but as an adult the only influence possible with the sovereign superstructure is to vote every four or five years from very limited choices which are pre-determined by the superstructure itself. That negligible possibility of influence does not apply to all people, however. A gross misrepresentation of sacredness has been exploited to render masses of people compliant to external forces, to render people controllable, because in addition to the cultural mechanisms to perpetuate the child-orientation there are social factions with special advantages in profiting from the mass psychological/ emotional manipulation those mechanisms enable, factions which are fixated on the rewards of maintaining and perfecting that manipulation. There are factions of any politico-economic system which know how to influence and profit from the superstructure, and they use it as a Wizard (of Oz) avatar, working the levers and mechanisms that play out the persona of transcendent Parent, the fictitious higher intelligence.

Any arrangement or mechanism that appeals to and exploits the universal pre-conditioning to orient toward an external parent-type of inexplicable intelligence will take on the character of divinity, will become a god avatar, no matter how ordinary it may be in origin and actuality. Pretty much anything can be deified. Monarchies and dictatorships (as well as nominally democratic political parties) build larger-than-life personality cults around the leader, who is undeniably embodied in the ordinary way. They do it by taking advantage of the universal childhood conditioning. The cultural construction of an inexplicable parental intelligence, like the angry father in the sky, attracts emotional projection of parental qualities onto an external force, fixating subordinated people in an emotional mental pattern characteristic of childhood.

The reason to go beyond the imprinted parent is not just political, to avoid parasitic exploitation by parental pretenders, but even more fundamentally philosophical, for basic self-discovery and self-possession.

Legitimacy of Sovereign Superstructures

The way in which superstructures of power formed, now encountered by succeeding generations as “just there”, has been described below in posting 68, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/lines-of-human-parasitism-through-western-civilizations/), in addition to postings 55, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/finishing-the-work-of-the-enlightenment-part-1of-2/) and 56, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/finishing-the-work-of-the-enlightenment-part-2-of-2/). The origin of sovereign superstructures in human-on-human parasitism has determined the behaviour and character of institutional power ever since, and it serves parasitic power well to be accepted as “just there”. Power is never an end in itself, but instead is always a means of reaping the benefits of parasitism on those over whom the power is exercised. (Michel Foucault (1926-84) politely refrained from recognizing parasitism as the purpose and product of power.) The sovereign superstructure protects top-down human-on-human parasitism partly by devoting itself to resisting and controlling bottom-up or petty human parasitism (fighting crime, maintaining “law and order”) which is laudable as far as it supports a degree of public safety and stability. However, in spite of the fact that institutions of mass subordination do their best to insinuate themselves into the semi-blind spot of ordinary habituation to parental influence, a question of ultimate legitimacy must be faced.

Myth of a Social Contract

In spite of the fact that sovereign institutions are just there for most citizens, there are theorists, such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who claim that citizens agreed to this, that there is (or was at some point) a contract or agreement among citizens to create sovereign power, and by that agreement citizens gave up some liberty and autonomy for the stability and security which a sovereign power imposes on everybody. (On Hobbes’ view the sovereign is not a party to the contract, which would disqualify the social contract as instituting the rule of law. While claiming to champion the rule of law, sovereign governments routinely evade and violate their own laws, interpreting the social contract as Hobbes did.) Hobbes was specifically trying to remove the obscurity of supernatural foundations from sovereign power.

The basic mistake made by Hobbes was thinking entirely within the culture of reverence for the imprinted parent, and specifically within the version of that culture based on alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, which originated with ancient nomadic herding groups and became the universal ideal of masculinity. That is the cultural source and origin of the whole edifice of sovereignty. Political power structures and theories have always been cooked up among male-only clubs of the most privileged, and those structures and theories always project the ethos of alpha-trophy-looting herder masculinity by celebrating some (supposedly obvious) inherent alpha-male right to rule, in other words, superiority to (and fear of) women and other unprivileged groups. Hobbes believed that creating a super-father is the only way to avoid a war of all against all, which he imagined as the pre-contract course of nature. In that faith there is a sort of Confucian myth of the divinely ordained transcendence of father-power. That is how Hobbes smuggled false transcendence into his justification (sanctification) of sovereign power. There is a set of assumptions about how the new father-sovereign would behave: something like a good aristocratic father, imposing order through rational fear of the father’s violence. However, the proposal to designate a great parent wouldn’t even make sense without the childhood habituation to the external “sovereign” intelligence of parents, the primordial model of external transcendence. In addition, for Hobbes, the social contract institutes Leviathan, the superhuman collective, the super-family, that also has the presence of transcendent necessity since is supposedly expresses the same nature as the common family. According to Hobbes, just as nature and human (male) nature decree an original war of all against all, so also the seam of rationality in human nature decrees agreement to the social contract and so the cultural construction of Leviathan as the only relief from eternal war (a clearly failed promise). Hobbes’ theory claims to identify sovereignty as the product of a co-ordinated act of multiple rational intelligences. However, Hobbes shared the restricted concept of rationality that was becoming current in his time, in which rationality was just an alignment of a basic animal drive for self-preservation or self-interest with the necessities of nature, in this case the supposedly natural consequences of father-power.

What Hobbes failed to recognize or imagine is the fact that there is another generally known approach to human interconnectedness, namely from within the feminine culture of intense personal engagement with newborns, infants, and toddlers for the project of initiating them into the connection of intelligences through language, shared culture, caring, and nurture generally; in other words, the first-language-nurture worldview generally cultivated by women. From that alternative state of nature the interconnectedness develops without the social contract or a super-father. The fact that women carry on with their nurture culture is what actually accounts for the stability of human interconnectedness. Sovereignty is not the source of that stability. Language and mutual support create for intelligences the opportunity to experience more of the best of values, namely intelligence itself.

The Norms Fallacy

When philosophers (pragmatists and utilitarians, for example) talk about an indispensable framework of community norms, it is difficult for them to be quite specific and historically accurate about the meaning or referent of “community” or “civil society”. There is no recognition in their claims that the actions of states in conducting wars (often clandestine), for example, and actions of corporations in looting the earth’s natural resources, express a crime-family ethos that extends back historically to nomadic animal herders and from there forward into universally celebrated ideals of masculinity, modelled most conspicuous in parasitic aristocracies of medieval societies (armed men on horses) which invented and imposed the forms of organization now called “sovereign government” and “corporations”, as ways of institutionalizing subordination through the universally imprinted parent. That crime family ethos is intrinsically and irredeemably parasitic on subordinated humans and, since it expresses the cultural norms of the social faction which directly influences the actions of national governments and their covert agencies, armed forces, and police, it stands as a clear revelation that there is no coherent system of community norms. The routine use of deception and violence by national governments and corporations is completely contrary to norms and values respected and considered definitive of decency by the mass of wage-dependant families, but is entirely representative of the crime family ethos which animates ownership/ governing classes. In clear contradiction of ideas about a social contract, there is actually a semi-stable system of human-on-human parasitism, kept operating by strenuous and increasingly scientific and technological efforts at behaviour and thought control by the beneficiary factions, which is obviously not a decent or dependable foundation for anyone’s values or standards of truth. In that situation of effective manipulation and pacification of host classes by parasitic classes anything like a social contract would be strictly tactical (deceptive) in an adversarial sense.

In pre-modern cultures, after the general diffusion of the culture of herder masculinity, everything was ascribed ultimately to the will of patriarchal gods, to divine involvement; whereas in modern cultures everything is ascribed to nature as an unalterable nexus of causal chains, but the old assumptions of divine involvement are so ingrained in the culture that they are still called on for the sanctification of power, and even lurk within the scientific conception of nature. In the modern world of nearly-nihilism, strictly utilitarian economic incentives and rewards are the everyday “front window” justifications for superstructures of sovereign power and authority (“peace, order, and good government”). Appeals to transcendent justifications are not normally made up-front, but they are always held in reserve for times when emotions run high in the collective. Nature is now just as much an externalized projection of parental super-intelligence as gods have always been.

Nature Takes its Inevitable Course

One of the justifications of capitalism as well as of sovereign superstructures is the claim that this is just the normal course of nature with a minimum of rational tweaking to reduce nature’s more abhorrent forms of brutality. However, that claim expresses the view of a particular cultural faction, specifically the faction of herder masculinity. The alpha-trophy-looting culture of that cowboy masculinity claims the exclusive distinction of authentically expressing nature, but that claim is a ridiculous bias. The female cultivated culture of first-language-nurture has every bit as legitimate a claim to express nature (and a greater claim to intelligence), and points toward a social organization much different from capitalism. The claim, that the capitalist politico-economic system efficiently provides the best possible life to those who deserve and earn it, depends on a claim that the superstructure of sovereign government, as well as corporate operations, are just (immutable, unalterable) nature taking its course. There is a claim of scientific necessity for their just being there, too immutable and gigantic to be resisted or re-conceived. “Just there” is a version of “it’s just nature running its course”.

There is always an unspecified suggestion of Intelligent Design in such appeals to nature and history, and behind every Intelligent Design there is an implied super-intelligent Designer, if not overtly a separate disembodied divinity then a spirit manifested through inspired geniuses, so inexplicable as to be incomprehensible by ordinary people, and so adding up to divinity. The apparatus of state sovereignty claims to represent design in history: the great unthinkable Parent was erected by forces including inspired statesmen and brave military heroes, sanctified by the blood of sacrificed soldiers, and rationalized by rigorous science, scholarly research, and tried-and-true business know-how.

Nature and Intelligences: Beyond Nature’s Parental Embrace

Arguments of the form, “this social arrangement is just part of nature running its inevitable course” all crash against the recognition that social arrangements are creations of intelligences, and intelligences in every case operate outside the course of nature. That is to say, intelligences transcend nature. Intelligences can’t be part of nature because nature consists of strict actualities, the totality of the categorically actual (being), but we intelligences orient and define ourselves (live our lives) in a structure of time (becoming) which is a fabric of non-actuality, almost entirely beyond what is actual; for example, constructing a directionality always exiting a non-actual past and with a heading or bearing structured in terms of increasingly improbable possibilities for a non-actual future. It isn’t that intelligences just make imperfect wild guesses at things that really exist in some actuality, because past and future really have no actual existence. They are creations of intelligences. That orientation-complex of non-actuality defines “the interiority of an intelligence” outside the actuality of nature, and it is a unique creation by every individual intelligence. There is no requirement for, or benefit from, postulating some separate initiating or originating super-intelligence behind or beyond individuals.

Before anyone has a gender or becomes a child of a certain religion, language, family, landscape, or nationality, before any of that, he or she is already a particular intelligence, and those other features are just variables in the situation of that intelligence. The ground on which to stand to judge culture of any kind, and so masculinity, is the innocence of intelligence-as-such, deep underneath gender culture.

Because of the dominance of outward-gazing science in modern culture, contemporary people have difficulty with the idea that intelligences are outside nature, each an individual interiority which transcends nature. Apparently it is comforting for contemporary people, in the current culture of nearly-nihilism, to imagine belonging within the embrace of cosmic nature. However, recognition of the remarkable freedom of intelligences requires recognition that intelligences are separate from nature. Nature has become the great unthinkable parent and it is urgent to recognize that intelligences operate beyond its deterministic embrace. Only when we stop looking outward for validation, even from nature, can we recognize our innocent inward identity as transcendent freedom in self-created time, and begin re-creating our precious interconnectedness beyond the imprinted parent-forms that are being abused by factions expressing a culture of human parasitism.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

 

Correcting East-West Philosophical Traditions on Freedom

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

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Part I: Where Zombies Come From

There is an important thread of support for individual freedom in modern western culture, derived from the same historical roots as the thread of equality, namely, ancient Athenian democracy (plausibly derived from the military importance of the Athenian proletariat); a philosophical individualism from Hellenistic humanism which was partly incorporated into Christian doctrine and eventually blossomed into Luther’s idea of inward faith; and finally, the success of a fourteenth century European movement for universal access to Bible reading through vernacular literacy, eventually developing into the social norm of universal literacy. That crucial cultural legacy should not be minimized, but recognition of individual freedom has never gone uncontested, and the unique transcendence of individual freedom has never been broadly recognized.

Longstanding culture, both popular and intellectual culture, has prevented appropriate recognition of the transcendent freedom of ordinary intelligences. Ideas about gods and spirits have imposed limits on such recognition, since gods (sometimes in the form of stars and planets) were believed to impose specific fates on humans. Ancient philosophical efforts to remove gods and demons from the process of making sense of events, and to recognize ordinary intelligences as transcendent (philosophical humanism again), were isolated islands in a vast cultural stream. When, leading up to and immediately after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from Europe, monotheistic religions from middle-eastern deserts flooded the cultured territories around the Mediterranean, the Christian-Augustinian idea of original sin certainly diminished the possibilities of individual freedom. A bit of Christian theology typical of monotheism insists that creativity is a special and definitive attribute of divinity alone, so only God is capable of creativity, which rules out creativity as an individual human quality. In Christendom, though, everyone’s life was supposed to be given grand purpose by the divine plan for creation as a whole. Christian and even post-Christian freedom is freedom granted on the whim of the omnipotent sovereign authority, a tentative loan from God via His earthly vicars, and its main function has been to sanctify punishment. A person cannot reasonably be condemned without the freedom to have acted differently. There is still loose talk about freedom left over from that blame-sin-punishment culture of Christianity, but individual freedom doesn’t have strong roots in our culture and didn’t in Christendom either. When, in seventeenth century Europe, the intellectual revolution of science spread through educated classes, the transcendence which was challenged by science was the transcendence of the Christian God because that was the only conceivable transcendence in the cultural universe of Christendom. In a western cultural system still quietly dominated by religious metaphysics from middle-eastern deserts there is only so far the philosophy of subjectivity is permitted to think. God’s transcendence contradicted and categorically repudiated all other transcendence, and ended by tainting the very idea of transcendence as some kind of superstition. So, even though God’s grand purpose was gone, which used to give meaning to ordinary life, the power of individual freedom to fill that vacuum was never recognized, and could not be recognized because of a culturally induced blindness.

Modernity is Zombie-like Nearly-Nihilism

With that cultural background, it is not too surprising that the idea of profound individual freedom does not fit easily into modern ideologies. Although contemporary right-wing corporate and political groups put spectacular emphasis on every individual’s freedom to compete for the scarce goods of life, the intent of the idea is mainly to justify the privileges of a small entrenched faction and to blame the mass of the excluded for their exclusion. (That ideological/ rhetorical use of freedom is remarkably similar to the punishment-justifying rhetoric of Christendom.) Science is unable to say anything in support of freedom, and science is broadly accepted as the standard for final explanations of anything and everything. Social science and economics accordingly present things in terms of causes and effects, and free individual creativity does not count as a cause in that lexicon. In the cultural universe of science, the old gods and their plans and purposes for humanity have been discredited, great Pan is dead, but with the same principles science has convinced everybody that individuals are just pre-programmed (slightly re-programmable) machines, just like the cosmos as a whole. For science, since everything is part of eternal causal chains (with allowances for a degree of random chaos), all things are as they have to be, and there is no freedom in that system.

However, the cultural thread of personal freedom noted at the beginning is still active, partly because it makes us feel better, partly because it is indispensable rhetorically to justify institutionalized systems of economic parasitism, and because something about it rings true for most people. It is that meagre culture of personal freedom which qualifies modernity as only a nearly-nihilism instead of a flagrant all-in nihilism, an abyss of personal and collective pointlessness. The problem is that the cultural legacy of personal freedom contradicts the overall tendency of modernity, which, to be brief, is scientific reduction to cosmic unfreedom. In a collective orientation dominated by science, repudiating all transcendence, nothing can be perceived or identified other than measurable externals. So it is that this modern Nearly-Nihilism leads directly to the reduction of modern ways-of-life to corporate-sourced incentives and rewards, imposed self-definition by measured economic externals. However, that immersion in a hedonistic/ narcissistic culture of self-definition through accomplishments, competitions, and acquisitions feels disconnected from anything like profound personal freedom, ungrounded in individual creativity. There is an uneasy sense that the modern rhetoric of freedom has been detached from freedom’s authenticity, and, so detached, trivialized into a means of manipulation. The massive cultural phenomenon of the zombie apocalypse expresses the generally felt inauthenticity of contemporary ideas of freedom.

Part II: Blind-Spot Philosophy

Modernity is Nearly-Nihilism because its historical cultural matrix invested (almost) everything in the false transcendence of an externalized projection of intelligence, a disembodied father-in-the-sky God in which all creativity and freedom must reside. However, it can still be recognized that ordinary intelligences create their own transcendent freedom innocently, simply in virtue of being intelligences. There is that authentic grounding of individual freedom, and it is still possible to find it in both culture and in personal experience. In spite of the vast cultural conditioning against it, the freedom of intelligences should be recognized in any serious contemplation of contemplation, any self-consideration of intelligence-as-such, an effort that traditionally fell within the scope of philosophy.

The cultural grounding for a recognition of freedom does exists in the history of philosophy, and specifically in the category of what could be called inward-turning philosophy. Contemporary philosophy, as professionalized in western universities, has completely repudiated that philosophy. The English language tradition from British Empiricism confines itself to the logic of natural and artificial languages, possibly on an unuttered assumption that intelligence will recognize its full nature in language alienated from its grounding in particular voices, leaving an externalized edifice of rules (a scientific kind of false God). Confinement to a gaze upon language-without-voices also characterizes continental European philosophy, to which there is nothing but text. Neither has anything to offer against Nearly-Nihilism, and they combine to form part of its fabric. The old philosophy which declared that ultimate wisdom comes from looking inward rather than outward is more associated with “eastern philosophy” or “eastern mysticism” rather than with traditions developed from Ancient Greece. However, Thomas C. McEvilley, in his The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, is entirely convincing in his demonstration that the inward orientation of thought was a dominant stream in the Greek tradition as well, from Orphic roots (plausibly originating in Egypt and Mesopotamia) that were developed overtly in Pythagoras, Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle; Hellenistic Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics; and Neoplatonists starting with Plotinus.

It was a basic understanding of the nature of philosophy from the Early Iron Age on, (The Shape, p. 560) that it concerned intelligence contemplating its own interiority. The philosophical consensus (it exists!) then was that ordinary knowledge, such as science, comes from an outward gaze onto objective, measurable phenomena, but ultimate knowledge is the same as profound self-knowledge and comes from (in Aristotle’s terms) “thought that thinks itself” (p. 560, see also p. 558). In spite of the inward-turning philosophy in the western tradition, it is only the eastern tradition which is now widely recognized. Various meditation philosophies, inward-turning philosophies, have been popular in western mass media culture since the aftermath of the World War of 1939-45. Sacred books of the east, especially Indian but also Taoist and Zen texts, were important in the worldview of the American Beat Generation of the 1950’s. Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, serves as an example, as do the popular writings of J.D. Salinger. (Salinger certainly moved the culture, and me personally, in that direction.) In the 1960’s The Beatles famously moved to India to study Transcendental Meditation, and their example inspired large numbers of others. Ever increasing masses of people study and practice Yoga. In the face of this mass culture of inward-turning philosophy, the question confronts us: If inward-turning philosophy is the source of authentic recognition of transcendent freedom, why hasn’t the popularity of those inward philosophies worked to re-orient people generally to authentic individual transcendence? The answer is that a certain correction is required in those inward-turning philosophies.

Mass acquaintance with inward-turning philosophy has not worked mainly because such philosophies are always presented in the context of some theory of Monism in which the individuality of intelligence is interpreted as illusion, hiding the reality of a great cosmic intelligence or spirit you should sense in the process of inward meditation. No sort of monism could form the basis of individual freedom which is inevitably pluralistic. In the minds of monists, the inward-searching philosophy (blind spot philosophy) is not a route to encountering individual freedom even though it is a route to the transcendence of intelligence (not so much the transcendence of freedom as of over-arching singularity, of unity transcending plurality), because in monism the individual merges with the All-One, and everything is as it must inevitably be. In The Shape of Ancient Thought, McEvilley identifies the Neoplatonism developed by Plotinus, along with the Vedantic texts of Hinduism, as “the world’s two great corpora of intense systematic thought about monism.” (page 552) Those two corpora are remarkably similar to one another, and Plotinus fits within a western tradition that began much earlier. McEvilley lists the tradition of western monism as extending “from Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Plato, to Spinoza, Hegel, and Heidegger.” (page 505) (Fichte and even Schopenhauer should be inserted between Spinoza and Hegel.) It has been impossible to separate the philosophy of inwardness from the philosophy of Monism, and yet that separation is the portal to an encounter with profound individual freedom.

Philosophical monism always fails to overcome a basic dualism of freedom vs unfreedom, and always includes that dualism in some form. The main effort in theories of monism is to find some way of describing the All-One which can embrace the fundamental existence of both intelligence (which is active, creative, and effective in making change, that is, the manifestation of freedom) and cosmic Unity or Being (which must be indivisible in any way, eternally uniform and unmoving, the manifestation of unfreedom). Both Vedanta and Neoplatonism require their ultimate foundation to be an all-embracing intelligence, because both assert that ultimately it is such a cosmic consciousness that creates the world of objective phenomena (of change or becoming), by thinking it. (Mere passive consciousness is impossible except as an aspect of a richer and active intelligence.) That cosmic intelligence, the creative principle, freely creates the thought (world) of non-intelligence or unfreedom, and encloses itself within a prison (body) of that unfreedom, and so diminishes to a form which experiences itself ordinarily as limited individual intelligence. So when, in meditation, intelligence encounters its own immediate activity, it supposedly intuits beyond the dream-like enclosure of unfreedom out to the original activity of the cosmic All-One.

It is a story with real charm, but with an entirely unnecessary construct of mythology. That All-One intelligence of the cosmos is no longer interior to the embodied intelligence doing the meditation. The cosmic intelligence sensed inwardly is yet another externalized projection of imaginary super-intelligence, the Great Parent imprinted on childhood experience and always difficult to abandon. Based on that imprinting, there is always a culturally engendered higher sovereign power looming close that everyone is trained to keep in mind, and the monist All-One is another of its avatars. The encounter of thinking with itself does not need to be interpreted as anything but the most straightforward possibility, which is the self-experience of an individual embodied intelligence. The inward-turning tradition of philosophy needs to be corrected precisely by recognizing personal interiority as an independently transcendent individual intelligence instead of equating it with the Monist Cosmic Interiority. The resulting pluralism is repugnant aesthetically to some people, which is not a convincing reason against it.

The Fate of Nearly-Nihilist Zombification

The question returns: Could the wide recognition of this correction in the tradition of inward-turning philosophy, widespread recognition of personal transcendent freedom, result in a cultural transformation away from the zombified Nearly-Nihilism of modernity? Could philosophy be the guide that gives zombies back their individual voices? Blind-Spot philosophy does not restore anything like the comfort of a super-parental type of external intelligence. In time, we must lose our parents in all their forms and avatars. We have to become the parent at the same time as retaining a grounding in innocence where we find individual freedom. There is a kind of personal interiority which is outside nature (Being), peculiar to intelligences. Blind-Spot philosophy constructs a mirror of that non-spacial interiority of intelligence. Being is not intelligence and never could be. Being is eternal and has no time, as declared by the iconic Greek monist Parmenides. Being is timeless unchanging eternity, but intelligences creates time for themselves, and actively expresses creative freedom in time. Intelligences are creative and so free, but Being just is. There is no route of transformation between Being-unfreedom and the freedom of intelligence. Neither can be reduced to the other, and so the eternal and unavoidable relation that intelligences have to Being is transcendence. So it must be recognized that the freedom of individual intelligences is transcendent with respect to pre-determined nature which is equivalent to never-changing Being.

If all the avid students of yoga encountered their individual transcendent freedom to create instead of learning a passive resignation that everything is as it must be; and if in doing so they also identified the cultural repression of that freedom, a difference would certainly be made.

Reference cited:

The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, written by Thomas C. McEvilley, Published by Allworth Press (2001), ISBN-10: 1581152035, ISBN-13: 978-1581152036.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

A Syllogism in Homage to Martin Heidegger

31 Friday Jan 2014

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Being and Freedom

If Heidegger was correct that the meaning of Being is time, then,

since time is the self-created freedom of every individual intelligence, 

the meaning of Being is the freedom of every individual intelligence.

Concerning the Second Premise: Creativity and Time

In the brute actuality of nature, the past does not exist and neither does futurity. However, the only way that an intelligence can engage with nature is by acts of primal creativity, namely by constructing internally-to-itself some orientation including bearings to an accumulating non-actual past and a rich mutable future full of possibilities and with some continuity with its constructed past and with nature. Every individual does that individually. Please see below, posting 54, February 6, 2013, Freedom and Time, especially paragraph three.

Concerning the First Premise

Although I am very far from being an authority on Heidegger, or even a disciple, reading Being and Time left permanent course alterations in my thinking about philosophy and about being an embodied intelligence in a life in the world.

Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), written by Martin Heidegger, Translated from German by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Published by Harper & Row (1962), Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-7289.

My specific source for “the meaning of being is time” as an interpretation of Being and Time is the great Rudiger Safranski:

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Ewald Osers, published by Harvard University Press (1999), ISBN 0-674-38710-4. See page 148 for “the meaning of Being is time”.

Taking this opportunity for a more general homage to Safranski: Reading these books, especially the translations by Ewald Osers, has been a high philosophical adventure. As Safranski documents, there have been wild years of philosophy, and there could be more.

Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated by Ewald Osers, Published by Harvard University Press (1991), ISBN-10: 0674792769, ISBN-13: 978-0674792760. This is history of philosophy at its most engaging and enlightening.

Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated by Shelley Frisch, published by W.W. Norton & Company Inc. (2002), ISBN 0-393-05008-4.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

Lines of Human Parasitism Through Western Civilizations

09 Thursday Jan 2014

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A crucial thread in tracing the progress of top-down human-on-human parasitism is the history of disembodied spirits in human culture, and especially the fear of an angry father in the sky, a projection of the culture of human alpha-power onto the cosmos at large. The humanistic progress made by ancient Greek Stoics and Epicureans was eventually forced underground (in a cultural sense) by violent empire-building that swept over the Mediterranean regions, swamping philosophical movements under a resurgence of God-cultures associated with conquerors who subordinated the known world from around 300 B.C.: Alexander of Macedon and later the Roman imperium. Although conquering looters are often materialist in their evaluation of assets, they normally place great importance on their connection with a special personal god or gods, and assert such a connection to their troops and victims. Because of that, generals do not support secular or humanist world-views. That wave of imperialist activity in ancient Mediterranean societies created a cultural atmosphere that was unfriendly toward secular humanism, and rewarded belief in a spooky spirit world.

The example of Alexander the Great illustrates that the history of religion is intimately intertwined with the history of looting-family dominance. Alexander of Macedon was the great event that separated the stories of embodied gods in ancient Greece (and the Greek philosophical humanism that branched off from them) from the cultural diffusion westward of the One incorporeal God from the Arabian deserts. The ancient importance of the individual Greek polis and its gods was shockingly diminished by military defeat at the hands of Alexander, followed by supervision and exploitation by a distant imperial city representing a more powerful God. Alexander, like the One angry father in the sky, attracted emotional projection of parental qualities onto a single external force, fixating subordinated people in an emotional mental pattern characteristic of childhood. Alexander was the prototype and paradigm of the One God of monotheism, even though personally Alexander seems to have favoured the dualistic worldview of ancient Persia, and even expressed admiration for Diogenes the Cynic philosopher.

The Christian religion originated in the area of the Arabian peninsula where the God of Abraham emerged, an area of deserts dominated by nomadic tribes of animal herders. An overview of the individual’s situation within the worldview of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among those ancient herder-nomads, as represented by Abraham, was childhood fear and awe of the father’s unpredictable and mysterious rages. The God of Abraham is that kind of father in the sky, all-knowing, all-powerful, not limited by any rules or finiteness and so unpredictable and dangerous, quick to anger and inclined to terrifying violence. Such beliefs situate every individual on an externally imposed axis of submission to, or defiance of, an absolute self-justifying power, an externally imposed axis of grace or disgrace, reward or punishment. All the Abrahamic traditions embrace the existence, unity, primordiality, and incorporeality of a creator God, uniquely commanding and meriting obedience and worship from humans. God attends to and knows the actions of individuals, will resurrect the dead, and then reward the obedient and punish the disobedient. The relationship of the Abrahamic God to the humans He creates, commanding devoted obedience, fervent expressions of admiration, and unquestioning service, is quite overtly an idealized image of the relationship of the herder to his flocks, the herder father to his dependants. However, instead of direct Revelation of Himself to the flocks, Abraham’s God uses certain special persons as prophets, His messengers and avatars on earth. God’s prophets cannot be verified for authenticity, and yet they claim a totalitarian sovereignty by divine authority, and regrettably serve as perennial role-models of sovereignty within our cultural tradition.

The ancient (Epicurean) consciousness of the general hegemonic effect of culture was completely transfigured in the floods of religion that swept out from the Arabian deserts into the whole Mediterranean world, from the missionary expeditions of St. Paul around 50 A.D. to the Islamic conquest (via Northern Africa) of distant Spain in 711 A.D. and for centuries after. Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire after 313 A.D., and after 600 Islam was launched into the world. In that tide, religious culture was understood as not natural but supernatural, a force, knowledge, and technology from outside the world of individual persons, a divine gift. Proponents of that religious culture believed people benefited from having that grace imposed on them, which encouraged and justified great concentrations of power in a few central patriarchs. Divine religious culture went well beyond the words in the holy books, especially in creation of religious law and supervisory organizations. It included the hierarchies and entire myth systems of entangled organizations of religion and worldly power.

Citing the world-views of a couple of Roman emperors illustrates the shift from humanist philosophy to father-in-the sky religion. Marcus Aurelius, emperor 161-180 A.D., was a Stoic philosopher. Emperor Constantine, in power 306-337, converted to Christianity late in life. Constantine moved the Empire’s head office east of Greece to Byzantium/ Constantinople, closer to the heartland of ancient civilization, and his imperial Edict of Milan, 313, legalized Christianity within the Roman Empire. Then, with the influx of waves of Germanic tribes, the Empire withdrew completely from western Europe and carried on for centuries in the east as the Byzantine Empire, incorporating organized Christianity, the Greek Orthodox Church, as the imperial religion. When a Rome-based Christian Church branched off independently, spreading west again around and after the sixth century A.D., that Church adopted a policy of placing Church officials who were literate, educated, and well connected socially and professionally, into the executive councils and households (often as tutors of youths) of the most powerful (looting) families among the new Germanic conquerors, providing those families with much needed advisors and executives. That technique put the Church into a position to act as the power behind the thrones. Such officials were in a position to influence everything about the operations of those families, but especially to insist that all persons under their control become active Catholics under the direction of the Church. The faith was to be spread by decree from the militarily powerful. So, from very early in the medieval rebuilding of Europe after the Roman imperial organization abandoned it to move east, the organization of Christianity deliberately rode the coattails of those military-estate families, essentially crime families, to establish itself in power. There was also an ongoing “revolving door” between the Church and those families. Many of the ‘second sons’, who could not inherit a family’s aristocratic title and lands, would go to school (Church operated) for a good education and then into positions of power in the Church hierarchy.

From these considerations it is clear that the partnership of the Medieval Church and the violence-based military-estate oligarchy was deep and profound. The military class of medieval Europe was united with the ethos of Christianity and its hierarchy by the patriarchal and parasitic culture of nomadic animal herders. Since the Germanic tribes who occupied the western Roman Empire originated in the east, in close proximity to, if not within, the great Eurasian Steppe where nomadic herders and their culture of parasitism dominated, their original culture of masculine parasitism came from involvement with that established ethos of the Steppe. Reinforcing that cultural background were very specific engagements with the nomadic herder culture of the Middle East.

Legacies of The Crusades

The Crusades of the period 1096-1291 were wars of aggression incited by popes promising crusaders forgiveness of sins and all the loot they could take. The Crusades were expeditions for the looting of wealth, especially in the form of ancient Christian relics, old bones and artifact fragments considered sacred and magical, from what Europeans call the holy lands. (A main reason for the achievements of Gothic cathedral architecture was to house the looted relics in suitably intimidating splendour.) The European knight practiced a style of battle centred on formations of armoured combatants mounted on heavy horses. The social class which could afford such military equipment and the training it required was made up of families exploiting vast land holdings secured by their private armies, crime-families. Combatants from those families became invaders of the communities of the Middle East, with full support from the Christian hierarchy and its considerable myth generating capacity. The aristocratic culture of Chivalry took on its enduring character in that context, in an effort to refine and glorify the most brutal parasitic looting by dressing it in Christian myths and symbols.

The enemy that confronted the looting class of Western Europe when it reached the Middle East was the military class of the Arabs, just a few generations removed from their own nomadic herding way of life, now preserving the values of that culture while combining it with the sophistication of societies they had conquered in Egypt, North Africa, Iraq, and Iran. The knights of the west came to admire the manly values of their Arab adversaries, and flattered them by imitation. If the parasitic animal herding values of the western military class had been softening, they were refreshed and energized by the Crusades. The arrogant cruelty practiced in assaults on foreign non-Christians was brought back with the crusading knights to their domestic life, to relations with each other, to relations with other orders of society, and especially with ‘heretics’ and social dissenters of all kinds. That legacy is still very obvious.

Defending Parasitism with an Ideology of Nihilism

When the Christian father-God-in-the-sky lost credibility, starting after the Great Plague in the mid-fourteenth century, there remained a cultural legacy, a culturally conditioned disability to accept the equal dignity and transcendence of every individual person as an intelligence. Even in the shadow of Christendom, Christianity was still an important cultural presence, and individuals were generally thought to be intrinsically sinful, tainted (the Gnostic taint) with an impulse toward disobedient pride and autonomy. That very identification of the human taint reveals that the idea of individual freedom was present, ambiguously, but very weak in Christianity and its aftermath. To fill voids left by the declining credibility of the Christian vision, other forms of externalized transcendence were given increased emphasis. As examples from the Renaissance era (roughly), the political theorists Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) were indifferent to the Church and Christianity as such, but supported the sovereignty of princes (still claiming divine right), convinced that the mass of individuals required strict and awe-full guidance (herding) from a source accepted as higher in some profound way. As a widespread proletarian spiral of revolt gained credibility, advancing the wave of cultural disillusionment recognizing the illegitimacy of (violence based) monarchy and aristocracy, then the privileged classes started to create an ideology of nihilism, declaring that any general denial of external transcendence opens an abyss of chaos, hopelessness, absurdity, and meaninglessness, the contemplation of which is ultimately fatal (first to sanity), and which must anyway be false because of its intuitive repugnance. In spite of the fact that the ideology of nihilism was formulated specifically to be rejected and discredited, there was also some real fear and even covert acceptance that nihilism is the truth, because the external transcendences really are shams.

That crisis of nihilism was especially, maybe exclusively, an experience of powerful privileged factions of European society, the factions with a literary voice: The propertied faction, families who had their livelihood from ownership and investing, and their scribes, the specialists of advanced literacy, professionals, knowledge and book specialists, who for centuries had been coddled and controlled by the Church and indeed to a great extent were the Church. The meaning of the parasitic lives of those privileged factions had been sanctified by the old mythology of Christendom, and without it they found themselves in an abyss of naked parasitism, which they preferred to interpret as cosmic nothingness. Of course the great mass of the population had been engaged in the miseries and delights of surviving all along and were actually liberated by the death of Christendom.

The basic enabling error for nihilism is a prior identification of transcendence as external to ordinary individual intelligences, as in, for example, a disembodied father-figure in the sky. Since that external identification of transcendence is always a distortion of reality it will never be completely convincing. Inevitably there will be intuitions inspiring doubts and questions leading some people and groups to recognize the falseness of the external identifications. The overwhelming cultural training in outward orientations will make it nearly impossible to trace or accept the true transcendence of the interior freedom of ordinary intelligences. With all hopes pinned on the false transcendence, the immediate response to its loss will be a vision of an abyss of hopelessness: nihilism. In spite of the fact that individual freedom was recognized to some extent, that freedom could not be recognized as uniquely transcendent, as it truly is. The whole nihilist turn of mind was possible because of a culturally conditioned, post-monotheist disability to accept the transcendence of every individual person, in spite of the egalitarian effects of spreading proletarian literacy, Renaissance humanism, and the Republic of Letters of the rationalist Enlightenment era. In the trembling world-view of the privileged factions of society, only a supernatural source, external to nature and individual persons, could be convincing as the bestower of a kind of meaning which would legitimize their top-down human-on-human parasitism.

The Roman Christian tradition always sees an abyss of meaninglessness as the only alternative to the Christian story (to itself), and, since it held the position of hegemonic worldview in European civilization for centuries, it goes on engendering irrationalist reactions to an ideology of nihilism it both loves and fears. However, there is also the humanist tradition of individual freedom philosophy carried through a Protestant and post-Protestant line of influence that includes Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) as well as the interpretation of Martin Luther (1483-1546) by Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) (the individual’s inward and creative leap), which convincingly pointed toward the answer to nihilism. It is an answer which Church loyalists, Romantics, and even Deconstructionists (there is nothing but text) are unwilling to accept. They can’t accept the answer of individual transcendent freedom because they remain under the influence of cultures constructing a blind spot over the experience of that transcendence, partly with a romantic love of the drama in their vision of darkness and the cultural conservatism it speciously seems to legitimize.

Sources for the origins of human-on-human parasitism:

A Study of History, written by Arnold J. Toynbee, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI, by D.C. Somervell, published by Oxford University Press, 1947, and Abridgement of Volumes VII-X, by D.C. Somervell, published by Oxford University Press, 1957 (Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 47-2302). In the 1947 volume (Volume 1 of the Somervell abridgements) see pages 152, 172-4, 181-2 for indexed discussions of “nomads as shepherds of men”. In the 1957 volume (Volume 2 of the Somervell abridgements) see page 230. Toynbee was the first to explore the parasitism of nomadic animal herders in my personal reading experience, and is certainly the source of the idea in my thinking.

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor Books (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224. See page 6 for the description of human-on-human macroparasitism, pages19-20 for humankind as a disease, page 48 for agriculture-based humans as attractive hosts for macroparasitic groups (among whom the most importantly are nomadic herders), page 75 for the example of China.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

The Cultural Construction of Blind Spots

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

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Stories

It is difficult to find anything more fun than a good story. Everyone’s intelligence is gratified and stretched by the emotional roller coaster ride of struggles and triumphs with characters navigating through situations that are emotionally charged with risks, conflicts, and splendid opportunities, finally resolved in some vision of beauty or high truth. The emotional mechanism of stories works on the fact that to have a relationship with someone is to take on personally the emotional life of that person, to re-orient empathically inside that person’s experience of the world and their particular situation. To connect and share awareness with other people is to share something of their emotional particularity, some awareness of, and immersion in, their inner life, along with features of their outward orientation. This applies even (maybe especially) to fictional characters. Connecting with others is a way for individuals to enlarge the experience of being human, of being an intelligence.

Emotional Structuring: Tragedy, Comedy, Melodrama, Farce

Every novel, every joke, every song, is an emotional pretending-journey with the characters or voices carrying or appearing to utter the story. For example, you start with happiness about a surprisingly pleasing situation, such as living at leisure at Bag End in Middle Earth, but soon at an initial turning point happiness becomes fear and worry as the situation comes under threat and there is some damage and injury, but there is rising hope and determination because decent and charming characters resolve to test themselves and do something to preserve a good that was previously taken for granted. Various complications and vicissitudes develop with emotional impacts, loss and grief and the taste of small victories, and finally there is a decisive turning point leading to an emotional resolution: tragedy, comedy, melodrama, or farce.

Everyone is familiar with the pleasures of a good story, and quite deliberately we seek out the kinds of stories that gratify us personally. However, there are stories that are insinuated into everyone’s experience at a semi-conscious level, and which are deeply absorbing at the same time as being mainly unidentified as stories. For example, every sporting event is also a simulated and structured emotional path: tragedy, comedy, farce, or operatic melodrama. Even more surprising is that every newspaper, magazine, and broadcast news show, every school history lesson, is emotional programming in exactly the same way. Particular publications not only search for emotionally provoking stories, but for stories that provoke a particular emotional arc, an arc which serves their editorial policy.

The thing to notice in cultural presentations of any kind is the emotional changes you experience going through it. That is crucial as the primal content and is often the stealth-message of the presentation, just as much in presentations that are framed as information, education, or news. Whatever information there is in newspapers (of whatever form) is submerged in stories, and it is the stories which determine the sense made of the information.

Suspension of Critical Disbelief

It is generally accepted that the ordinary appreciation of fiction and theatre involves and requires a willing suspension of critical disbelief by the reader or audience. We enter the emotional current of a narrative by turning off our rational moorings to strict realities, to the connection between conclusions and relevant evidence. Just as there are unidentified stories pervading cultural experiences, there is also an unconscious or unwilling suspension of disbelief, of critical rationality, when the emotional current of a story is strong enough, even in situations in which fiction is not supposed to be involved and in which critical thinking powers should be dominant and active, as, for example, in politics, economics, religion, or ideology in general. The drama and pathos of a good story are easily appealing enough to displace curiosity about reality. For example, there are people who love re-reading The Hunger Games, written by Suzanne Collins, (Published by Scholastic Press (2008), ISBN-10: 0439023483, ISBN-13: 978-0439023481). They want to immerse themselves in the story and live through Katniss’s emotional situations, without distractions or interruptions, approaching an experience of total immersion. That’s exactly what religious or patriotic devotion is, no more or less, emotional immersion and absorption in the stories a religion repeats and repeats. In an indifferent and often hostile world, people have been desperate for a mental shelter, even one made only of the clarity of an absorbing pretence.

Gangs are Stories

By the way, there is no way to prevent the formation of neighbourhood gangs expressing competitive team spirit when competitions between team-spirit-bonded collectives are universally glorified and modelled at all levels of social organization, all building stories expressing the mainstream cowboy-masculine culture and value system, from school sports teams, religious sects, business and corporate operations, to nations in conflict. Every gang is an exciting tragedy, and in exactly the same way every club, school, profession, corporation, and nation is an emotional thrill machine, an emotional current to plug in and ride.

That Big Thing

This issue goes back to Socrates and his observation, depicted in Plato’s Republic, about the old quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Socrates was aware that poetry often works by emotional enrolment and programming which is crucially different from philosophical questioning. Socrates saw the alternative to stories as a persistent questioning of ideas, a method elaborated later in Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641. Identifying and withdrawing from cultural story-content is essentially the philosophical method described by Descartes, systematically removing his assent and belonging from every belief he held, stripping away everything cultural until a bedrock was found: Intelligence-as-such as an elemental grounding. Descartes called it thinking. Any critical thinking strategy requires objectifying all the stories carried by culture, being especially sensitive to stealth stories, and then withdrawing from their emotional program.

Many different sorts of claims and arguments have been called philosophical. Notwithstanding the merits of any of those, philosophy can be thinking on the insight that the externalizing gaze of science is incapable of grasping some important features of experienced reality. This casts philosophy as a kind of discovery thinking which goes to the blind spot of science, the blind spot of intelligence itself: the questioning subjectivity that is intelligence itself. On that basis philosophy claims the seriousness and general relevance of science without being in competition with it.

Nature is just physics, completely pre-determined stuff, in eternal instantaneous freefall structured by invariable regularities, but intelligences don’t exist as physics. We exist as metaphysics, separate specks (universes), each living an embodied life in time rather than simply in instantaneous nature. Intelligences do something metaphysically remarkable, stretching nature’s instantaneous freefall and in doing so creating time, not by slowing nature’s fall or by speeding it, but instead by constructing a universe of non-actuality through remembering, simultaneously with perceiving, anticipating, pretending, aspiring, building and pushing open a non-actual future. That thing you sense that is bigger than yourself is the universe of your own intelligence. The primordial experience of transcendence is the experience an intelligence has of itself. The original and authentic experience of transcendence is always an intelligence’s awareness of itself as a power of freedom in the creation of time, taking a feature of nature and spinning freedom from it in the form of time.

The historical influence of nomadic herding conquerors stunted the development of human cultures and stranded those cultures at the primitive condition of fixating on false external projections of transcendence. Everyone is bound and controlled by culture, even within controlling factions, everyone except individuals who have kept a sense of their innocent elemental orientation, or who re-discover and work to restore it. We are still stuck culturally because the myth of external transcendence has been used effectively to sanctify a system of top-down human-on-human parasitism which defends and perpetuates itself tenaciously through culture. The promise of progress through science and technology is yet another avatar of externalized transcendence.

Thinking

The alternative to psychological immersion in a cultural story-sphere is re-orienting to an actual human situation that is stunningly different from ordinary assumptions and perceptions. It is possible to objectify the stories and disengage from their emotional currents, their pre-determined emotional arc which carries with it a sense of inevitability which overrides any individual’s creative freedom. All those stories are an emotional diversion away from (making a blind spot of) the emotion that is appropriate to the human reality, serving to divert everyone away from noticing the top-down human-on human parasitism in the ordinary arrangements of social organization, and from noticing the primordiality of transcendence in every individual intelligence. It is not easy to specify the emotional state that is appropriate to a clear encounter with that situation, the situation of living as a zombie in Zombie-land, but it surely involves excited curiosity, amazement, determined re-orientation, intelligence sensing itself as emotion in actively expressing freedom and power. Ancient Epicureans and Stoics identified the emotion of active intelligence as happiness.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

A Quarrel with Buddhism

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

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The Buddhist tradition seems to share the conclusion presented as Proposition Seven in Seven Propositions On Transcendence, (posting 65, September 10, 2013) that the strategic response to political injustice is for each individual to search inward and thereby to overcome the primordial philosophical problem. Political consequences would inevitably follow from widespread discovery of the original transcendence of individual intelligences. Such an interpretation could account for the lack of overt political commentary in traditional Buddhism, which otherwise seems close to teaching resignation to political injustices of the status quo. Resignation to political injustice is definitely supported by the idea of karma, which serves to support and align with the politics of parasitic power. The myth of the karmic hierarchy of lives, social mobility upward or downward from one incarnation to the next in a long course of reincarnation, legitimizes the structure of parasitism institutionalized in hierarchical class structured societies. Although Buddhism is sometimes presented as a religion without a deity, the intelligent design of a cosmic moral hierarchy of lives points to the agency of a discretionary “great spirit” behind the structuring of society and politics, as behind everything, and such an agency is another instance of the political appropriation of false projections of intelligence as a means of sanctifying human-on-human parasitism. The actual source of the intelligent design in this sort of case is the person who projects the idea of a moral hierarchy onto the social hierarchy. These political considerations indicate that Buddhist explorations of the foundations of experience missed the reality of primordial transcendence in individual intelligence as such. The explorers did not comment on the political problem because they accepted it as the design of the great spirit, just as most advocates of the Abrahamic religions did and do.

Since there is an implication of “the Great Spirit” in the Buddhist myth of a moral hierarchy of lives over the long process of karmic re-incarnation, there is also the implication that, when an individual turns inward to sense transcendent intelligence, it is really the cosmic intelligence of “the Great Spirit” which is sensed as the source and giver of transcendence and of the world in which all experience occurs. That, again, is the great error of misidentifying transcendence.

Any assertion of cosmic spiritual unity implies a conservative admiration of hierarchy. It brings to mind the romantic adulation of the hero, the prince, the champion, the celebrity genius, the saint, the prodigy, and is a complete denial of the fact of universal individual transcendence, and an aggressive denigration of ordinary lives and ordinary people. Contrary to that view, any intelligence, engaged as we all are in building a sustainable and gratifying life in particular personal circumstances, is as transcendent as anything ever gets. Every time someone receives the revelation of a higher good, a higher beauty, a higher truth, some version of an übermensch, then lots of ordinary (transcendent) intelligences are in mortal danger of being brutalized, enslaved, tortured, and murdered in the name of the false transcendence. Hero (celebrity) fixation is another manifestation of the culture of cowboy masculinity, which identifies the majority of humans as livestock as a fundamental worldview.

Intelligence, Nature, Time, and Illusion

It was quite common among ancient philosophers to claim that the realm of time, the world of change and becoming, is an illusion (the Buddhist maya). There was also an old idea that the human essence was exiled into the world of time, is temporarily confined here, but belongs at home in eternity. There wouldn’t be much point in trying to improve social justice within a fleeting illusion, so that kind of view is politically conservative. What was right about those old ideas is that intelligences are not part of nature, even though profoundly embedded in nature, certainly arising within nature in some crucial sense. In every instance, intelligence transcends nature and escapes partly from the determinism of nature by inventing and constructing time, and time is not part of nature. Time is an intelligence’s construct from encountering a feature of nature, specifically an instantaneous dislocation in nature, but that feature of nature in itself is not time as intelligences have time. Nature is no more than the entirety of what is actual in the strictest sense, brute actuality, and that actuality has no mutually negating possibilities. There are no possibilities in nature (only actualities), but possibilities are inseparable from the time of intelligences.

The observation that time is not part of nature (because it is full of the freedom of possibilities) is pretty close to the ancient claim that the world of time is an illusion. However, time is only an illusion if intelligence is an illusion, but the claim that intelligence is an illusion goes nowhere. Only an intelligence could have such a thought. Cogito ergo sum. Time is intelligence overcoming the instantaneous (timeless) actuality of nature. Time is the freedom of intelligence, overcoming the vanishing imposed by the determinism of nature without vanishing by merging with a universal, category, form, ideal, or type. When an individual’s time comes to an end there is a return to the instantaneous eternity of nature. As intelligences, time is our transcendence and freedom from nature.

The illusion or appearance of banality or mediocrity in ordinary life (so despised by a romantic such as Nietzsche, for example) results from a general acceptance of the culture of the externality of transcendence, which fixes the orientation of everybody outward in search of (parental-type) command, guidance, and reward, and so it grounds the legitimacy and sanctity of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Overcome that cultural malaise and all the old gods and demons are gone, nobody is coming, great Pan is dead, original sin is gone, the fictitious collective personality-entities are gone (except as functioning clusters of interconnected intelligences), there is no social mobility between lives from moral action, and the social hierarchy is not a moral hierarchy in any way. All the old celebrity systems disappear, since no one needs vicarious transcendence when there is an interior supply.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

Seven Propositions On Transcendence

11 Wednesday Sep 2013

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One: A New Identification of Transcendence

Transcendence is freedom derived in the construction of time, including futurity (a construct of pretendings), by an individual intelligence.

Two: Always and Only

The experience of subjective transcendence described in Proposition One is always the original case, the authentic and defining instance, paradigm, or model of transcendence.

Three: The Primordial Philosophical Problem

Authentic transcendence, being in the blind spot of intelligence, namely the very being of intelligence itself, gets largely overlooked and unidentified, and a distorted representation or image of transcendence (capricious personality) gets inappropriately and falsely projected outward onto entities in nature and culture, as imaginary disembodied spirits, demons, personality in nature or in collective entities and institutions such as tribes and nations, for example.

Four: Political Appropriation

Those externalized and falsely identified instances of transcendence get appropriated by the carriers of a parasitic culture of cowboy masculinity (paradigm Genghis Khan) and used as a technique to sanctify, legitimize, justify, and normalize (by “noble” lies, for example) their parasitism on other humans. In that way the primordial philosophical problem gets complicated by the addition of a political problem, since it becomes illegal to question the externality of transcendence, and so philosophy and politicized culture become inextricably entangled.

Five: The Two Problems

This leaves us with two main problems, one philosophical and one political. The philosophical problem is, how do we elude the influence that the dominant culture has (distorting reality to sanctify top-down human-on-human parasitism) on our general orientation and perceptions, so that we can re-orient toward authentic transcendence? The political problem is, how do we de-legitimize, de-sanctify, de-normalize the culture of cowboy masculinity which has institutionalized human parasitism and so enslaved human kind without any widespread recognition of that enslavement as anything other than economic and social organization within a framework of religious and nationalist organization.

Six: First Response

The strategic response to the philosophical problem is to find in experience those elements which operate in intelligence prior to acquisition of culture, so to escape the distorting influence of culture and reconstruct a new orientation from innocent experience. Construction of time is crucial among those elements of innocent experience.

Seven: Strategic Response

The strategic response to the political problem is to overcome the philosophical problem. The plague on human kind, which is normalized and sanctified human parasitism, has in that way an unintended consequence, that overcoming it directs thinking inward onto thinking’s own blind spot, inspiring the perspective required to overcome the primordial philosophical problem.

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

Time as an Innocence from which to Judge

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

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Foundational Time, a Place to Stand

Obviously it has been impossible so far to dislodge the rule of cowboy masculinity, crime-family masculinity, but progress might be possible if we confront it with an entirely novel system of orientation in which individual intelligences, only and all individual intelligences, are acknowledged instances of transcendence, specifically the transcendence of creative freedom. This can be done because a place to stand outside gender roles, social/ economic class designations, ethnic placement, and culture in general has been identified. All those roles and designations are cultural tags, all arbitrary artifacts of political and economic systems riddled with injustice and distortions of reality.

Time, however, is foundational, and time is inconceivable without an encounter between individual intelligence and nature. Please see posting 54, February 6, 2013, Freedom and Time, and  posting 60, May 4, 2013, The Zombie Apocalypse in the Rearview Mirror. Time is a construct of creative intelligence encountering the brute actuality of nature. So individual intelligence is foundational in an encounter with brute inertial nature. Certainly there is social and cultural structuring of time, but the original experience of time is not socially constructed. It is a construct of individual intelligence. Therefore, although much of reality is socially constructed, not everything about experience, about reality, is socially constructed. It follows from this, since time and individual intelligence are inseparable, that the individuality and self-identification of individual intelligences are also not entirely constructed socially or intersubjectively. There is a place of innocence from which to judge the influences of culture, indeed to judge the reality of social constructs. This contradicts the understanding of human subjectivity and of culture based on the Freudian model, which is still profoundly influential.

The Freudian Model

It is commonplace to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of psychology in the Freudian tradition, expressing forces other than individual freedom. In that model the main vectors of force are the Id (representing bestial lusts for pleasure and power, the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model of a three-part soul, but on the Freudian view supposed ultimately to be biological imperatives), and the Superego, (representing authority figures, such as parents, police, priests, from ambient society, internalized by the individual’s exposure to education and socialization). Those two vectors of force confront and balance one another in every person, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the Ego, or personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that Ego image, no reality. The Ego has only the force of Id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of public authority figures. That is all there is to a Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature driven by original sin and constrained only by the scourges of Church and military-monarchical states.

The Civilizing Force

Theorists in the Freudian tradition could proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or their origin, and people must socialize by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of a Christian appeal to divine intervention in the appointment of social supervisors, Freudian theory could also use something like Hobbesian social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures. Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature is a decently accurate depiction of the world of cowboy masculinity: a war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the cowboy masculine will-to-power agree to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by participating in a social contract by which a monarch, with absolute power over life and death, is instituted to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t think of any way around enforcement). So, from nothing more than cowboy self-interest (ultimately determined biologically), the authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain somewhat the many faces of Id. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science.

Seeing social behaviour, culture, and history as a manifestation of instinctive human nature as envisioned in Freudian theory has the same effect as seeing history as acts of God, namely the effect of making history necessarily as it was in every detail, entirely pre-determined and unquestionable. When history is taken as divine (or natural) utterance, then the facts of history are self-justifying and unimpeachable. For example, on those views, both slave-masters and slaves are equally manifesting the same inherent human nature. All are equally sinners in their nature (the will-to-power has the same force as original sin) and the forces of nature are merely working themselves out. That is why, in Foucault’s analysis of oppressive power, it is impossible to identify either a perpetrator or a victim.

However, with the foundational experience of time revealing that individual intelligences are instances of transcendence in their creative freedom, the Freudian type of model fails completely, and what stands out is the monumentally important fact that intelligence exists uniquely in individual embodied units, individual persons. Seeing history as a manifestation of a large number of human intelligences, intelligences with individual creativity and freedom, reveals history as largely provisional, imperfect attempts at indistinct and creative aspirations, where mistakes were made, and where crimes, with identifiable perpetrators and victims, were committed.

There might seem to be a contradiction between the fact that intelligence comes only and always in the form of individual persons, and any criticism of cowboy masculinity, which claims to be the natural expression and pure realization of individualism, rugged libertarian individualism. However, cowboy masculinity is not and never was independence, but instead is always parasitism, and so not an expression of autonomy-of-intelligence. In spite of the claim to be rugged individuals, the primordial cowboys were never actually independent, but always parasitic on herd animals. In addition, they did not choose to stay with the free open wilderness of desert and steppe, but instead formed confederacies and preyed on the settled communities of farmers and cities, and took possession of them to secure the higher level parasitism that human hosts enabled. That is the historical origin of top-down political forces.

As already mentioned, Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature (a war of all against all) is a decently accurate depiction of the world of cowboy masculinity. The carriers of cowboy masculinity resist emotional or empathic (social) interconnections with other people, because they want to be parasitic and to use others as hosts. Decently ethical behaviour arises from empathy, from an ability and a willingness to appreciate and care about the interiority of other people’s experience, and to act from that caring. Morality depends on empathy, is a function of empathy. However, empathic or emotional interconnectedness is exactly what parasites refuse to enter, and so is conspicuously absent from the Hobbesian social contract. That particular unwillingness is the definitive condition of cowboy masculinity and the kind of individualism characteristic of cowboy masculinity.

That intelligence exists only in individual persons is in fact far more compatible with a different kind of expression, especially considering that intelligence is clearly gratified and amplified by identification of and empathic interaction with other intelligences, so much so that the human interconnectedness is the most magnificent creation ever of our multiple intelligences (mainly the work of women), even though it still needs a lot of work. The current culture of femininity cultivates and encourages the attaching/ relationship talent of intelligence, the interconnecting talent. However, champions of communitarian or collective power and cultural authority (normally preserving systems of parasitism) need to stop resisting the elemental truth that intelligence exists only and always in individual persons, which makes it necessary to re-conceive the human interconnectedness on the basis of empathic interactions among individuals. That is the entirely novel system of orientation which eliminates the need for anything like the Hobbesian social contract, and finally dislodges the rule of cowboy masculinity.

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

The Political Situation of Personal Identity: Identity Politics, Identity Theft

22 Monday Jul 2013

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The situation in which any person seeks to clarify or define his or her personal identity is inherently political. Even before the beginning of any individual’s existence there are external claims of ownership (sovereignty) over the individual, both religious claims and secular political claims, and those include claims on the right to define and identify the individual. Such imposed definitions of identity make it difficult for individuals to recognize their personal freedom and the transcendence of that freedom.

Collective Rights

Collective rights are usually claimed by religious communities, such as Roman Catholicism, for example. It is claimed that the collective culture has the absolute right to perpetuate itself, to force its children to embrace its religious and linguistic heritage, all overseen by a leadership structure, the supervisory control and power hierarchy of the collective. Such claimed collective rights have no grounding in anything but the institutionalized power of hierarchies, and they are clearly parasitic on innocent new arrivals. “Collective rights” always translate into the rights and privileges of a faction practicing the supervisory culture, the pinnacles of the controlling hierarchies. Collective rights are just rights to perpetuate parasitic inequality in the name of leadership. Individuals are just as much colonized by the “mother” culture as they might be by any “foreign” culture, and a foreign culture might distort reality less, might legitimize human-on-human parasitism less, and might enable more self-possession.

Political Sovereignty

It will be no surprise to anyone that religion is a cultural background that influences the public discourse and thinking done in communities practicing religion. It is more of a surprise, although exactly parallel, that the ideology (for example, myths of meritocracy or good breeding ) by which the economically dominant faction of a community legitimizes its powers, immunities, and privileges also has profound influence on thinking generally and on the security prospects of people who communicate anything publicly. Efforts at thought control always begin with utterance control, restrictions on speech, often informal sanctions in support of a political correctness or politeness. (That is based on a false belief that thinking is limited to language, that thinking is a function of language.)

Politics is the struggle among factions to gain control of sovereign law and law enforcement, the struggle for institutionalized powers of sovereignty, including the sovereign monopoly on violence, a monopoly often conceived as unlimited. Although those terms of politics bring to mind the social stability based on law codes, books of regulations, questions of compliance in behaviour, and armed hierarchies such as police and armies to supervise and enforce compliant behaviour, there is vastly more, a demand for spiritual and psychological subordination of the individual, sometimes called patriotism, allegiance, civic duty, patriotic duty. That duty of spiritual subordination or submission, a quasi-religion of the nation-state, is an issue of self-definition for every individual.

Personal unfreedom is the condition of self-alienation caused by the suppression of innocent personal identity as elemental intelligence-as-such, replaced by a definition of personal identity drained of personal transcendence, and instead limited to ethnic group membership, nationality, religious tradition, and the economic situation determined by competitive placements, trophies, and grade of parasitism in the mountainous economic/ production hierarchies cultivated by those collectives. The primal crime against the individual is the suppression of innocent personal identity from a personal intelligence.

Ordinary Illusion

Based on these observations, ordinary life, and especially identification of personal identity in ordinary life, really is full of illusion, as claimed by ancient philosophers such as Plato, for example, in the narrative of the Cave of Shadows in his Republic. Day to day life in hierarchical societies really is a fallen condition for us, unworthy of intelligence-beings. Only, the illusion, the misidentification of what is real, is not imposed by nature or by human nature (and not by metaphysics) but instead is imposed politically through an accidental culture which distorts reality. On that interpretation, the state of disgrace, the fallen condition, is the one in which culture, poisoned with legitimations of parasitism (collective rights) by the most powerful groups in the social structure, has alienated every individual from self-possession or self-knowledge as transcendent intelligence-as-such. (By “pure reason” Immanuel Kant plausibly meant much the same as intelligence-as-such.) Philosophy, to the extent that it is elemental re-orientation or elemental thinking, is an intrinsically political and personal act, an act of self-possession as intelligence in the teeth of cultural claims of sovereign possession. The discontinuity between an elemental identity definition (for example, the construct of actuality and non-actuality in personal agency-in-time) and a cultural identity definition reveals the ordinary illusion of everyday experience.

Elemental and Innocent Orientation

Although there are lots of internal parts and distinctions within nature, subjective intelligences, and culture, none of them can be reduced, translated, or broken down into one or both of the others. (Well, culture does break down into projections of intelligences onto nature, but culture is so important in connecting elemental intelligences among ourselves, and in mediating between elemental intelligences and nature, that it merits mention as being itself elemental in some relevant sense, maybe as the category of primal combination of the other two categories.) There is an irreducibility to that set of categories. There is an elemental simplicity about them as a set and as such they are crucial reference categories in an alternative and innocent framework of orientation. You unplug from culture by paying attention to something else, to pre-cultural reality which has never gone away and is always still there.

The situation of subjectivity in terms of an elemental orientation is this: subjectivity is intelligence embodied in nature but with the power, peculiar to intelligence, of overcoming nature’s absolute particularity. Subjectivity is embodied in nature but as intelligence attaches with a vast interconnectedness of other individual intelligences, largely through culture, but always grounded in the individual interiority of intelligence, the inwardness of subjectivity.

Every individual has an innocent grounding of experience that does not depend on the cultural constructs in the human environment. Neither a personal orientation nor creative self-assertion is dependent on cultural constructs. Every individual has his or her own questions, curiosities, doubts, and means (a body) of investigating the surroundings to construct an orientation and launch personal vectors into the brute actuality of nature. Intelligences have inherent powers of transcending actuality, simultaneously pretending many non-actual variations of what might be made actual. That is the freedom of an intelligence, and, given the completely pre-determined nature illuminated by science, freedom is the transcendence of intelligence.

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

 

Philosophy as The Upward Path

20 Thursday Jun 2013

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Everyday Propaganda

It is commonplace to claim that mass communication (education and religious indoctrination are also mass communications) has a psychologically controlling effect on the populations it reaches, especially in technologically advanced nations where the ambience of persuasive messages is intense and constant. That claim is generally understood and there is a certain amount of common sense recognition of mass media influence accomplished by the application of advanced research in social science, especially by commercial interests but also in support of the political agendas of groups and individuals with great wealth, since crafted mass communication is within the reach only of great wealth.

Every publisher or broadcaster, as well as every school board and pulpit, has an editorial policy which always picks a worldview to promote, and always expresses the hopes, fears, and beliefs of owners, investors, or funding source, whose interests are never to reveal disinterested truth, or even just to make an honest buck. Editorial policies merge into broad codes of political correctness, often unstated but distinctly enforced. Concentration of ownership and funding in journalism, entertainment, and cultural industries generally, means a uniformity of political correctness, consisting of opinions that may be said safely, facts that may be mentioned safely in public conversations or presentations, the unspoken rules of a discourse, altogether creating an edited and artificial model of reality. It is no surprise to anyone that religion is a cultural background that always influences the public discourse and thinking done in communities practicing religion. It is more of a surprise, although exactly parallel, that the ideology by which the ruling faction of a community legitimizes its privileges also has profound influence on the security prospects of people who communicate anything publicly, and so on the thinking considered reasonable. There is no other plausible reason for anyone to edit and alter reality by creating discourses of political correctness, to be so dedicated to maintaining control over others by all means necessary, than to legitimize specific forms of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Consequently, one thing always excluded from respectable discourse is top-down human-on-human parasitism.

Private ownership of the means of production in itself does not tell the story of capitalism. It is also necessary to recognize that ownership is the same thing as wealth, wealth equals income-generating ownership, and since the vast proportion of wealth is concentrated in about 1% of the population, the private ownership of means of production is concentrated in that 1%. Now that is a story of inequality of control and so of parasitism.

The Matrix

Maybe the best artistic metaphor of mass thought control was in the movie The Matrix (released in 1999, written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving). In the dystopian future depicted in the movie, the brain of every human is supplied electronically with impressions of a fictitious reality by a vast system of computer-based artificial intelligence. The deception permits the artificial intelligence to carry on a secure parasitism, drawing for itself the energy from human bodies. The vision is not unlike that of Gottfried W. Leibniz (1646-1716), in which completely isolated person-monads (individual minds) are supplied by God with impressions of an eventful external world which does not otherwise exist. In Leibniz’s vision the interiority of monadic minds is the medium in which God creates the best of all possible worlds, all pre-determined.

In the actual world of the present, the system works by getting people to identify with the interests of oligarchs, but not in a straightforward way. Take a soldier in battle, for example. The deceptions and propaganda involved in persuading him into the foxhole effectively reduce him to a slave, enslaved by being conditioned to believe that he is heroically resisting enslavement. That is a tricky operation involving layers of deception. People are persuaded to identify with a fictitious superhuman collective entity which is effectively controlled as a parasite’s host by semi-covert oligarchs, as a projection and expression of the ethos and will of those oligarchs, and institutionalizing their parasitism.

To end war, pass a law requiring that the owners of the most wealth and property to protect, say people in families with net worth greater than five million dollars, must be the nation’s protective combatants, must serve in the military roles most in harm’s way, as grunts, marines, paratroopers, and front line troops.

The Downward Path, the Upward Path*

Although the effectiveness of commercial, religious, and political propaganda is generally accepted, there is not very much discussion about how and why the illusory reality constructed by mass media was founded nor about how to break out of it to a better alternative, and there is certainly no consensus on a reliable process by which to escape its influence. That’s where the idea of ‘the upward path’ kicks in. The idea of ‘the downward path and the upward path’ is a metaphor borrowed from ancient theories of reincarnation, where it refers to narratives of the soul’s descent, on the downward path, into entrapment in the illusions of time and material embodiment, and then what an individual must do to rise above that entrapment on the upward path. In the present context, the downward path refers to the historical conquests and evolving influence of parasitic animal herding cultures from the semi-desert pastures of the world. They subjected the human communities they assaulted to the same parasitism they had imposed on herds of migratory grass-eating animals, but to stabilize their human parasitism they found it necessary to construct distortions of reality through cultural doctrines which legitimized their parasitism, such as wildly exaggerated criteria of individual merit and identity based on their nomadic cowboy ideal of masculine accomplishment, alpha-trophy-looting masculinity. The upward path refers to what must be done to rise above the illusions, especially illusions of personal identity, constructed by the current carriers of the ancient parasitic cultural legacy, controllers of mass media, religion, and education. The upward path is not a common sense idea, but in the present context involves cultivating elemental innocence, elemental orientation, and the application of what is learned in innocence.

* The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, written by Thomas C. McEvilley, published by Allworth Press, (2001), ISBN-10: 1581152035, ISBN-13: 978-1581152036. See page 41, but read the whole book.

Philosophy is a scholarly tradition, including a considerable body of literature, with a history of engagement in political struggles for individual freedom of thought such as in the historical movement called the Enlightenment, for example. That scholarly tradition is at present barely clinging to the outer margins of respectability because of current academic fashions, but some of it is worth dusting off in the context of resisting the thought control created by mass communication.

There are two realities “hidden in plain sight” which are made recognizable by philosophy’s elemental thinking. The first is the transcendence of individual intelligence in its conceiving futurity, thereby creating freedom and grounding personal identity in an interiority of intelligence. The second is patterns of human-on-human parasitism, legitimized in violation of that fundamental identity of intelligences-as-such. Philosophical thinking enables recognition of those two “hidden” realities by fostering a search for the elemental grounding of intelligence-as-such, and in doing so developing an orientation which is independent of any culture. It is a monumentally important fact that intelligence exists only in individual embodied units, individual persons, but champions of communitarian power and cultural authority always resist that elemental truth.

Historically, there have been strong streams of philosophy with a focus on individual intelligence as identity, beginning most clearly in the humanism of ancient Hellenistic Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. The significance of philosophical studies of the interiority of intelligence such as Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and much of Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is that they show the grounding of pre-cultural identity in individual intelligences, in every individual person. They show that the interiority of intelligence is not a mere screen but is instead a particular and original force and power with a great deal of independent originality, a grounding of every person’s innocent identity. That provides a fundamental means of evaluating the injustice of identity definitions derived from ambient culture, a means to recognize and understand the political entrapment those identity definitions impose and enforce on individuals. People cannot be seen as equal because of the identity definitions imposed by their cultural situation.

The philosophical search for grounding in intelligence-as-such gets started by the personal experience of culturally derived negations of an intuition of transcendence, an intuition that is often only semi-conscious and unidentified. The intuition of transcendence is normally resisted by ambient cultural discourses, cultural “correctness” concerning a focus on economic practicalities, traditional religious beliefs, and specific political possibilities. Communities certainly recognize the individual intuition of transcendence, and normally arrange to channel it into external and formalized expressions of spirituality and religion controlled by top-down hierarchies. Dissatisfaction with such externalizations can inspire a personal search for clarity on the conflict between culture and personal innocence.

The subjective intuition of transcendence can be an interior force which is offended by culturally assigned personal identity definitions drained of transcendence to accomplish a complete immersion in established patterns of economic inequality which always normalize and attempt to legitimize top-down parasitism. The upward path out of a thought controlling environment begins with recognizing the identity theft involved in the imposing of such cultural identity definitions. Authentic identity is something that indisputably belongs to each individual and nothing justifies repressing it. The fundamental parasitism of the cultural regime is evident in the hierarchical placement intrinsic to definitions of personal identity assigned to people. When you are looking at the people around you for their original intelligence as definitive of their personal identity, then it becomes obvious that the identity designations assigned them by the socio-cultural system are distortions of and constraints on their intelligence and so also on their freedom. You can see the injury and insult that results. If you want to evade the psychological control and conditioning of mass media and “politically correct” journalism, entertainment, religion, and education then think past the evaluative definitions of personal identity assigned to people, and instead find the elemental ground of equality, which is the transcendence of individual intelligence-as-such.

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