Category Archives: Blind spots in thinking

Bottom-up vs Top-down Political Forces

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

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

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

What Historians Must Not Say

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

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

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

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

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

Two Distinct Streams of Class Propaganda

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

Corporate Liberalism

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural Poison as a Challenge to Freedom of Thought

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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

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

Two Main Points of Personally Strategic Orientation

First: Equality and the Discontinuity of Subjectivity

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

Art, Representation, and Interior Sensibility

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

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

Second: The History of Cultures in the Interconnectedness

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

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

The Poisoned Culture

03 Thursday Jan 2013

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

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

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

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

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

Rethinking Stoic Interiority

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Following-up the previous posting: Intelligence as a Creative Force

The Interiority of Intelligence

There is an old philosophical idea which is best identified as ‘the interiority of intelligence’. Ancient Stoicism was one of the first explorations of that idea, since it is founded on a peculiar interiority: what every individual can control, as opposed to the external world of nature which is beyond control and in fact entirely predetermined. What is entirely predetermined cannot be controlled, by definition, and therefore what can be controlled is not predetermined and as such offers the potential for freedom.

By “intelligence” neither I nor Stoics mean any special genius or even any specialized mental function, but just the ordinary engagement with life of an ordinary person. The interiority of intelligence is not sensitivity to the interior of the body. It is not a spacial interiority at all. It is strictly peculiar to intelligence, since it is an interiority of non-actuality (everything in measurable space is a brute actuality).

The ancient philosophical observation that “Man is the measure of all things” (Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Sophist c. 490-420 B.C.) is another statement or declaration of the interiority of intelligence, because the measuring done by persons does not create or put limits on nature. Nature rolls along quite independently of being measured or not. However, “man” as a particular intelligence is the measure of things becoming internal to that person’s orientation or direction of force in the world. The action efforts of individual intelligences are a sort of sonar or radar which reflect back to intelligence a digest or construct of the shape and quality of the environment. That is the sense in which “Man is the measure of all things”.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is another statement of the same insight. The “eye” in which beauty has its being is not the anatomical eye but rather the interiority of the beholder’s intelligence.

As another example, the take-away lesson from Leibniz’ monadology is the interiority of intelligence. Although there are multiple beings in Leibniz’ vision of the world, he constructed a description of individual subjective experience as entirely self-contained as a windowless ‘monad’ with no access to other beings or anything but phenomena injected by God strictly for the interiority of each particular intelligence.

The Non-Actuality of that Interiority

A common concept of knowledge is one in which consciousness is a receptive slate upon which is stamped, little by little, an imprint of the world beyond the self, the features of objective nature. However, perception exists within an individual’s taking action in constructing a sustainable life; for example, speculating on probable futures, imagining, remembering, searching and selecting, feeling gratification, irritation or desperation, and striving to make some imagined possibility into reality. There is vastly more to learning than soaking up data and facts about the world. Every individual’s innate mental process or intelligence radiates curiosity, questioning, and changes of orientation. For choices of action, there is far more than immediate responses stimulated by sensory perception. Intelligence has the power of deliberation, of presenting itself with conflicting propositions or pretended scenarios and evaluating their merits by ranging over a substantial body of mental contents such as elaborate memory constructs and enduring intentions to create a certain personal future-in-life. In adjusting its orientation, its bearings out of the past and into the increasingly remote and improbable future, intelligence has the power to identify relevant causes and effects from a context which includes remote features as well as possibilities, probabilities, and negations, none of which are present in the strict actuality of nature. Temporally remote events do not exist in nature, but are inseparable from the normal orientation of an intelligence. Deliberative intelligence has powers of making sense of perceptions by fragmenting and isolating pieces of the deluge of sensuality, and re-connecting selections of the fragments by various principles of relevance, involving conceptual invention, pattern recognition, pattern fabrication and projection, and extrapolation, for example. It isn’t knowledge that fountains up from subjectivity but rather what might be called inspiration, questing, and questioning: the need and readiness for knowledge. Action does result but skepticism does not apply.

Rather than merely opening to let the world in, a person executes a process of construction that relates brief and fleeting sensory stimulations to more enduring mental expectations, patterns, dreams, and narratives which are simple, schematic, and ideal. You search for dandelions in your grass and you don’t see any, and don’t see any, and then you see one and then another and then lots that must have been there all along. A curve drawn on paper does not have to be perfectly round and regular or completely closed to be seen as a circle. An observer will ‘fix’ imperfections, and see a circle. We ‘read’ that mark drawn on paper on the basis of the briefest possible encounter, the quickest impression, and read it as ‘meaning’ a circle. No one is ever aware of nature or culture except as sampled, probed, filtered, and then re-constituted, remodelled, or re-mixed by their struggling intelligence in desperate flight. These are normal operations of subjectivity. Each individual is a source of selective questions and structuring creativity in combination with a specific and limited capacity to sense and make sense of externally supplied data. Awareness of limitations is part of the ‘desperate flight’ of intelligence.

“Man is the measure of all things” refers to the fact that anyone’s interior impression of the measurable world will be edited and evaluated in terms of that person’s location and sensitivities, as well as biases, projects, needs, wishes, and fears. There are personal and culturally influenced filters. There is no such thing as a pure disinterested blank slate, no ‘pure’ cognitive rationality. All consciousness weighs and measures the impediments and resistances which enclose and restrict its getting further.

The Non-Actuality and Transcendence of Interiority

Freedom is specifically not a feature of the actuality of nature, and so freedom is one way of defining the interiority of intelligence. It was the Stoic way of defining that interiority. The transcendence of us entities of intelligence is our being outside actuality, encountering actuality from outside it, from within our interiority of possibilities, guesses of probabilities, bearings toward desired future possibilities and bearings away from dreaded possibilities. The non-actuality out of which an intelligence encounters the brute actuality of nature includes a structure of temporal depth (past and future) richly alien to actuality. That includes a presence with the non-existent future as a dimension of creative discretionary construction, for example. The intelligence entity that continuously re-orients itself is also a pretender, a dream-fabricator. The freedom and creativity of such monads is in being outside actuality in their unique interiority. The non-actuality of personal orientation requires a conception of monadic interiority as discontinuous with the actuality surrounding it. That is definitive of monadic existence as transcendent within nature. The non-actuality of any monadic intelligence is not identical to the non-actuality of any other. For example, the non-actuality from which author Suzanne Collins encounters the world of actual nature and culture is clearly not the same as the non-actuality from which J.K. Rowling does. Actuality (nature) is only one horizon with respect to which any intelligence constructs and continually refreshes its bearings, orientation, or directionality of agency. There is also an interior horizon, a horizon of non-actuality (a gusher). Both interior and the exterior horizons bring surprises into the situation of the monad and in that sense they are both surprise horizons. That idea of surprise horizons emphasizes the integrative agency of an entity of orientation, balancing inward and outward novelties and also launching initiatives in both directions. Inward initiatives are acts of re-orientation, thinking.

The interiority of intelligence is invisible to scientific measuring instruments because it is an interiority of non-actuality. Since we are dealing with a kind of interiority that is not in the space of the common objective world, an interiority which is discontinuous with the space of actuality, we have to describe each intelligence, each orientation within a life, as its own separate universe of non-actuality. Each intelligence is a universe of non-actuality in relationship with a common exterior world of strict, non-intelligent, pre-determined actuality, the world of nature. An intelligence can never be specified as a particular determinate thing (nor as a cluster of “objects of consciousness” as hypothesized in phenomenology) because its essential nature is an interiority of incomplete and continuously renewing non-actuality.

Freedom Makes Intelligence Transcendent and Discontinuous with Nature

The freedom of intelligence has two aspects: strategic insight in the design and execution of action in the world, and transcendence of mute nature. Moving in the grip of instinct, random impulse, or external forces is not freedom, and neither is clashing with rivals in reflexive efforts of self-inflation. For a person to be free there must be a continuity of evaluating action-impulses for their relevance to self-definition, self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments to others. Embedded in individual deliberative power, language endows intelligence with a unique public voice. A person must have a voice before acquiring language. The transcendence of voice or speech combines monadic originality with cultural knowledge in the creation of utterances that connect with other intelligences. Intelligence manifests an individuating personal genius with deliberative freedom. Intelligence is able to rise above the brute actuality of any moment to judge action which will be good over-all with respect to increasingly remote lifetime outcomes and goals.

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

Intelligence as a Creative Force

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The question presented in the comment to the posting Working, November 21, 2012, offers an opportunity to explore certain elements of a set of ideas I have been calling ‘transcendental humanism’, enough that an answer qualifies as a whole new posting. (Please read the entire comment attached to that posting.) The question is:

“Aren’t the “crime-family cultural values” you mention rooted somehow deep down in the fabric of human being?”

Answering the question can be approached with reference to a distinction made in ancient philosophy between nature and intelligence. Two vectors of ancient humanist philosophy were: 1) to remove gods, demons, and spirits (disembodied intelligences) from conceptions of nature, and 2) to understand and experience the ordinary intelligence of individual people as transcendent. There is no caring in nature, no reasons, no morals, no justice. Caring, reasons, morals, and justice are all peculiar to intelligences. Nature is not intelligent. The world of brute nature is not static, but its movement is only a continuous, pre-determined, kind of falling, just falling. Embodied intelligences, as bodies, are certainly falling with it, but by projecting outward from the subjective interiority of intelligence, an interiority of non-actuality, we can turn the falling, to some extent, into flight. Although there is no justice in nature, identifications of justice and injustice are important to many intelligences. Intelligences transcend nature and reshape parts of nature all the time, transforming parts of nature into culture, overwriting nature with culture. We cut natural tree trunks into timbers and build houses that are outward projections of intelligence, but which are not otherwise in or from nature. The individual creativity of intelligences makes nature fly instead of merely falling. Humans have created far more elaborated cultures than any other known species, which makes us more free of nature than the others. Human cultures have a history of restless transformation. Intelligences are among the forces that shape that transformation, and it is plausible that certain influences of brutish nature that have so far dominated cultures, such as crime family values, can be displaced by creations of more caring intelligences.

What Can Be Said

Explanations of things based on fundamental necessities sometimes include an unstated assumption that those necessities are the expression of a cosmic will and intelligence, a force that is dangerous and impious to question or resist. However, our clear and foundational acquaintance with intelligences is ordinary persons, embodied in very specific local structures. The analogy by which the cosmos as a whole is a person in a grander and more august form is so implausible as to be silly. All that can be said about the cosmos as a whole, other than strictly scientific measurements, is something like this: Inexplicably, there is something instead of nothing, and it seems that the various features and complexities of that something constitute a single whole in some sense. The anomalous feature is a discontinuity between the wholeness of beautiful but unintelligent nature, brute, predetermined actuality, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the interiority of intelligences, each its own universe of non-actuality. In spite of that radical discontinuity, it is undeniable that actuality and those multitudes of non-actualities are profoundly entangled. The non-actuality of intelligences is routinely projected onto the shapes of actuality, and brute actuality contains materials that unreliably sustain and restrict the intelligences, who are otherwise discontinuous universes.

Human being is embodied intelligence, normally conditioned within portions of an elaborate culture constructed through a particular history by a multi-generational interconnecteness of intelligences. The force of intelligences is such that the fabric of human being is not pre-determined as nature is. It can be re-created to express ever more of the transcendence of intelligence. This is one way in which it becomes possible to think that war and slavery in all its forms can be ended.

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

The Shapes of Projected Intelligence

14 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Embodiment

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There is a human need for markers of our presence. Individually we are vulnerable to bewilderment in the face of the hazards and mysteries of the world. Our physical presence and energy is small and fragile. The presence of our bodies among other objects in the landscape is not our best nature. Yet, among objects, we are not sure what we might be and should be. Everyone feels some insecurity about knowledge and understanding, about whether the best experiences and all the dangers have been noticed and considered. We look for opportunities to make a mark distinctive enough to represent what we might be and should be. Each looks to others for a comparison. An interconnected human collective charms individuals by demonstrating a power to be present brilliantly in the teeth of the material world.

Imagine a desert nomad in ancient times seeing the pyramids at Giza in their new perfection with facets of polished white rising out of the rock and sand. The sight might inspire terror or ecstasy but, no matter which, there would be a recognition that this represents both a material power to shape the world and the power of invention to conceive an original presence for intelligence, mountains with an absolute perfection of form. Egyptian pyramids were not simply amazing monuments but tombs conceived to insure the survival after death of the Pharaoh. Death is at the core of the human sense of having a tenuous presence in the world. It inspires creation of marks meant to be eternal, in contrast to our individual ephemerality. The Egyptian pyramids are an extreme example but such projects are characteristic of human communities. We have individual and collective ways of crafting things that look like nothing in nature. We polish surfaces and make edges heroically regular, uniform, purposeful, and simple or ideal. Arrangements for producing the human mark can be powerful charmers.

Kinaesthetic/ Metabolic Shock, Sweat, Dirt, and Repetitious Tedium

However, accepting heroic art and architecture as the legitimizing force for crime families requires a strictly selective editing of historical knowledge and of the personal awareness of physical work. It has been customary, culturally structured, for people to unload tedium, fatigue, discomfort, and filth onto others when they can. Based on this, tedium, fatigue, and filth, ordered onto you by someone in a more powerful position, are defining qualities of the experience of work. The individual’s ability to work has been brutally expropriated for this purpose through slavery, serfdom, corvée, military conscription, the press-gang, and the job. Civilization is an arrangement for expropriating the work of most people so a few dominants can be relieved of work in order to have the leisure to decide and control what work is done. It is also an arrangement to perpetuate rewards to the heirs of the culture of domination. Crime-family alphas, trying to shape the world without working, have contributed various forms of coercion and violation to the organizational structures of social entities. These structures take on a life of their own by being accepted as ‘the way we live in our group’ by children brought up in that environment.

For the whole of history people have hated spending time and vitality working under command. This applies to people in industrial societies who take jobs for a living just as much as to people in agricultural societies who work the landlord’s land. So much of the work commits the worker to metabolic shocks as well as sweat, dirt, and tedious repetition.

Sweat is a result of being hot, muscles heated from high effort lifting, carrying, pushing, pulling, or moving quickly; from overcoming or at least straining against heavy resistance. The feeling of that strain, as well as the feeling of depletion that is part of it, has something like the shock of a personal loss. Enough repetition of the strain adds actual pain to the experience. To work is to get tired and continue to get more and more tired. Dirt is uncomfortable, irritating, and disrupts a person’s appearance by seeming to break down the difference between a human and the local geology or compost. We humans attempt to distinguish ourselves from the ground that continuously pulls us against and into itself. This is a feature of our dignity and we lose that strand of dignity when we have to endure dirt. Prolonged repetition is mind numbing and soul numbing. It requires the denial of mental inclinations to keep watch, to include a variety of sensations and observations in a process of orientation, to reflect on memories, to imagine, plan, invent, and play. The impulsive self rebels against repetitious tedium and so does a higher thinking self.

Elimination of those burdens of work would be a drastic improvement in human life. We long to live in a practical state of Grace. Nevertheless, being adult normally means you work. You take care of the shop, the garden,the house, the children. Most of the time an adult in our culture is at a job, working for pay, or at a domestic chore: cooking, cleaning up after meals, shopping, tinkering with household maintenance, doing laundry, going from place to place on errands; struggling to keep fed, housed, healthy, and socially attached.

More work on the way …

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

Childhood and the Transcendent Non-Actuality of Subjective Interiority

25 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity

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In childhood the interiority of subjectivity is vastly more complex and immediate than impressions of stable external structures. It takes many years for a child to accumulate personal knowledge of a structured environment into which to project intentions. All the while the subjective interiority of each child is very rich and very active with invention. The process of maturation is a gradual but unrelenting increase in mental impressions of the external world of metabolic costs and benefits, and increasing complexity of orientation by reference to external place markers. Without the adult attachment to making a living and cycling through cost-benefit routines in the environment, the child retains a huge absorption in creative subjectivity. With age and experience the balance of richness between interiority and exteriority shifts as the child learns the structures of larger and larger swaths of the environment along with the expectations of social surroundings. The utilitarian narrowness of adult mentality which results from immersion in the external confines of actual nature and culture is not even possible for the child. For the child, thinking, the creative non-actuality of subjectivity, is and has to be its own reward. Sometimes knowledge is a form of power, but freedom is a consequence of the non-actuality of subjective interiority, striving in the way unique to intelligence to create a viable opening between the brute particularity of nature (embodiment) and the ethereal, impersonal universality of ideas. The experience of childhood seems to be the high point of the human experience of freedom of thought, and adults value conversation with children at least partly because it maintains direct contact with the freedom of ascendent interiority, at a peak in the mentality of children. So it is no wonder that adults keep re-creating childhood and childhood mentality, not as a gift to some future community of the faith or of the nation, but to help balance the lives of adults in the present.

Since the market economy draws the most energy and value from individuals if those individuals are exclusively devoted to and fixated on market production and consumption, the value rhetoric of market culture specifically diverts people from the power of non-actuality that each has in personal subjective interiority (monadic interiority). Thinking, creative interiority, is assigned a low value in market culture. Competitive sport has all kinds of incentives and rewards from the earliest stages of education, but creative thinking, not the same as remembering the answers to test questions, is rarely explored seriously and certainly never glorified as sport is. If thinking were not assigned such a low value then certain kinds of knowledge would be commonplace instead of being culturally marginalized. Knowledge of the foundations of equality is an example of that, and also historical knowledge that sovereign power and governments developed directly from crime families and religious cults. Philosophy itself, the craft of personally re-orienting to an elemental orientation grid, is also marginalized knowledge.

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

Waking From History, Episode Two

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Belittled

The hostile environment into which every infant monad arrives is one in which destiny for everyone is pre-determined by cultural forms. That is not to say that a particular destiny is pre-determined for every individual, but that personal destinies are conceived as fitting within cultural categories, within the social hierarchy of personal worth marked with accumulation of trophies or various tags of dignity or esteem. Whatever niche a person finds to occupy in the hierarchies, others take that niche as a license to stick a particular value to the person. Ordinary socially and culturally stipulated roles and assumptions limit individuals to categories each valued as more or less stupid, uneducated, culturally ignorant, petty, dull, slow, powerless, untalented, timid, uninteresting, confused, hopeless, and contemptible, all generally lined up with the categories of social class, racial and ethnic heritage, age, gender, property possession, and power level in the economic-institutional hierarchies. No matter what category a person falls into, it constricts, diminishes, writes off, and actually condemns every individual by assuming that they are contained and revealed by, and actually fit within, that category; but nobody does. The power of the spiritual entity of every person transcends every cultural category.

The currently dominant reality-construct sanctions such grotesque distortions of reality in everyday discourse. The invisibility of the first-language-nurture faction as the foundation of civil society is another distortion, the glorification of war and war heroism is another. Behind all is a totalitarian ideology of the value of radical inequality. The very idea of political or corporate power is saturated with a grotesque caricature of egoistic masculinity, a crime family cultural tradition. That idea of power nearly excludes responsibility to others (nurture), and has far more in common with the idea of divine incorrigibility, as revealed in the leadership culture of secrecy and immunity from ordinary social norms.

How Can Freedom Be Possible in a Hostile Political Context?

The Olympic Games of London 2012 displayed perfectly the obsessive futility of lives based in the value system which celebrates inequality as such, measured with trophies. The consequence of the current obsession with destructive wars and other criminal activity demanded by alpha-trophy-looting cultural dominance is a state of being stuck as a civilization. That is echoed in the stuckness of ordinary adult mentality, the repetitive, obsessive monotony of aspirations and forms of life under this cultural regime.

A problem with the anti-war movement, in spite of its unquestionably legitimate and courageous aspirations, is that the ideological understanding of war and militarism that informs its operations is inadequate. If you want to come to terms with deep politics then it doesn’t get much deeper than the contradictory historical forces of alpha-trophy-looting culture against first-language-nurture culture. It doesn’t get any deeper than the contradiction between the profound equality of individually transcendent monads each worthy of nurture, and the top-down hierarchical constructs of alpha-trophy-looting ideology, truly fulfilled only in the march to war. The peace movement must face this question: how much middle-class self-admiration and assumed entitlement to privilege has to be given up along with the war industry?

The Comfort Zone

The crime family trophy-inequality culture is completely dominant, has always been dominant, and is currently advancing aggressively. In addition, the vast majority of educated, actively literate, people is deeply reluctant to leave the mental comfort zone of an orientation anchored to alpha-trophy-looting ideology, imitating reverence for a dictatorial father-God in some selection from: national patriotism, reliance on the legitimacy of institutional authority, and respecting meritocracy and the professional middle class as role models grounded in legitimizing mechanisms such as markets, money, and ultimately nature as depicted by scientific research and the system of education. (The adventure will be to leave all that behind forever. Does that stack up to a week in space?)

Prospects for adult mentality are stuck in those tired repetitious forms of self-blindness. It isn’t nature that interferes with our freedom, but the weight of culture. Educated skepticism and critical thinking are not enough in the current situation of overwhelming psychological manipulation by cultural messages. Freedom is possible only by undertaking a wholesale mental disengagement from the distortions of reality constructed throughout history, a releasing of all moorings to the standard reference points listed above, and a journey of re-orientation to a very different set. There is an ocean of creativity to be released when we shrug off the energy-sucking weight of leadership ideology in an adventure of personal transcendence.

Culture Consciousness and The Transcendence of Monads

Thinking through the distinction between nature and culture (as in posting 33, June 14, 2012, Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture) soon establishes a mental condition of culture-consciousness. In culture consciousness you have culture tagged in such a way that it can be bracketed to leave a remainder of innocence in pre-cultural embodiment experiences, metabolic measurement of nature, for example, the basics of orientation. Something else gained by casting off the standard comfort zone of cultural assumptions is your own transcendence, the transcendence of intelligence with respect to the brute actuality of nature. The transcendence of us monads is our being outside actuality, encountering actuality from outside it, from within a monad’s own interiority of possibilities, guesses of probabilities, bearings toward desired future possibilities and away from others that are dreaded. The monadic entity that continuously re-orients itself is partly a pretender, a dream-fabricator. The non-actuality out of which an intelligence encounters the brute actuality of nature includes a structure of temporal depth (stretch or reach) richly alien to actuality. That includes a presence with the non-existent future as a dimension of deliberate mutability, for example.

The freedom and creativity of monads is in being outside actuality in that way. The non-actuality of personal orientation requires a conception of monadic interiority as discontinuous with the actuality surrounding it. That is definitive of monadic existence as transcendent within nature. The non-actuality of any monadic intelligence is not identical to the non-actuality of any other. For example, the non-actuality from which author Suzanne Collins encounters the world of actual nature and culture is clearly not the same as the non-actuality from which J.K. Rowling does. Actuality (nature) is only one horizon with respect to which any monad constructs and continually refreshes its orientation or directionality of agency. There is also an interior horizon, a horizon of non-actuality (a gusher). Both the interior and the exterior horizons bring surprises into the situation of the monad and in that sense they are both surprise horizons. That idea of surprise horizons emphasizes the integrative agency of an entity of orientation, balancing inward and outward novelties and also launching initiatives in both directions. Inward initiatives are acts of re-orientation, thinking. The transcendence of voice or speech combines monadic originality with cultural knowledge in the creation of utterances that connect with other intelligences.

Surprise Horizons

People have an ongoing conversation about the objective world as a beautifully designed creation, inspiring wonder because we can’t experience the process of creation. We encounter actuality as a mystery (Why this instead of nothing?) and so as a horizon which blocks perception of creation. Whenever there is creativity there is a surprise horizon. The world of nature and culture is a surprise horizon for everyone, the centre of business and attention and yet crucially unpredictable to some extent, but there is another surprise horizon, namely an inward blind spot of subjective intelligence. Discovery of that inward horizon can be a vertiginous self-consciousness that has nothing to do with the way you appear to others, the social implications of your appearance or your accomplishments. That is why subjectivity is fundamental in spite of the great importance of social interconnectedness. Shaking loose from the self-presentation coaxed into a shape by social relationships, officially approved role models, and economic incentives and rewards is a crucial step toward taking possession of surprises from the personal horizon of non-actuality.

Creative Process

A truly remarkable part of writing almost anything is starting sentences and paragraphs without any distinct idea of what the ending will be, and then having something, something that makes sense and serves the purpose, arrive over some horizon of dreams. For example, the “language is sporting equipment” analogy wasn’t part of the original ideas for posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture, but it turned up when the sentence was launched, half written, and needed a sensible particular. Starting with nothing but a hunch about stages ahead is a way of prodding the inward surprise horizon and getting the creative fountain gushing a stream with a particular relevance. (Such a ‘leap of creativity’ looks like a general process of which Luther’s “leap of faith” is a particular instance.)

Divine Mind

What distinguishes the intelligence of persons from the imaginary mind of God is the quality of absolute power. The imaginary power of God is infinite and unlimited. Embodied persons do not have that power. We lack absolute power over nature in a couple of different senses. We do not have the power to suspend or change the laws of nature, including the law of conservation of matter/ energy. Additionally, we do not have the mental power to totally understand the patterns and dynamics of nature, even collectively after more than 5,000 years of continuous species literacy. The power-within-nature of an embodied individual is strictly local, anchored to what a particular body, and its voice, can perform. Persons cannot create a new nature to replace the nature already given, for example. However, creative power is not an all or nothing proposition. All the time human bodies project into nature unique patterning from their interior non-actuality.

The Richness of Non-Actuality

The richness of the non-actuality out of which, or within which, every individual intelligence encounters the actual world is important because, for one thing, not all of that non-actuality is an original creation of the individual intelligence, although much of it is. Any individual’s orientation of non-actuality can be manipulated culturally and politically to contain serious and avoidable distortions, as sketched in Episode One.

There are consequences, conclusions to be drawn, from the direct acquaintance with personal transcendence as described just above. One of those consequences is that, since individuals are not confined to actuality, or even to depictions of actuality taught them from cultural sources, each has a grounding to assess and critique the culture that surrounds them, from outside it, and the power to conceive something better.

The idea of individual innocence is meaningful and important.

Another consequence is that freedom is shown to have both inward and outward dimensions. Freedom requires some degree of options and mobility in the world of physics and economics, but that is not sufficient. Freedom also requires the inward nurture of personal questions, curiosities, impulses, and inspiration. The sufficiency of mobility, for example, has to be measured by that force from within. Closely involved with the experience of freedom, the self-awareness or sense of identity of the entity of personal individuality has both inward and outward dimensions. There is an unfathomable, “unplottable”, self-possession of every individual that makes cultural trophies irrelevant to the substance and creative force of any individual. Nobody can be assigned a value, because all are equal in creative transcendence, all are actively in the process of becoming something more.

Another consequence is to discredit any account of human nature as an emptiness that can only be made into something, or fulfilled, by consuming and internalizing substances originally external to it. Personal transcendence discredits the economic conception of human nature as a bundle of deficiencies and compulsive drives such as egoistic diminishment of others.

Creative people are ordinary people.

Any sustainable interconnectedness or political order must recognize the rich originality and peculiarity (or monadality) of each individual as an asset, a source, a value, instead of as a problem requiring cultural categories such as heresy and treason. Individuals are contributors to culture and interconnectedness, and strengthened as such by appropriate nurture.

The currently dominant reality-construct of the alpha-trophy-looting cultural faction is a form of insanity, far more lethal than any kind of skeptical philosophy or existential uncertainty.

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

Sharing Awareness

26 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Gender culture, Leadership, Subjectivity

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Elemental Bonding

Every person is born into a family or some care-giving group. Every care-giving group has ways of presenting itself to the environment, ways of taking possession of places, property, and resources; of incorporating new members, making its mark, and celebrating itself. It has work assignments and categories of delegation, practices of supervision, judgment, and persuasion; practices of controlling its own structure, functions, and boundaries. All these ways and practices, as well as its resources, tools, facilities, and relics of its past, present new arrivals with problems and opportunities, but most of all they present new arrivals with a model and picture of human life: the way we live. To survive, a child must come to know that model of life and make a place for himself or herself within it, imitating its practices, crafts, relationships, judgments, and ways of talking about and valuing things. Culture is that model or image of life presented to people by operating around them and involving them.

Conversation

The most important technique for a shared expression of intelligence is built from imitation, and could be called a conversational form of activity. This does not require language. Language is possible because people enjoy conversational form in their mutual activities. To create a conversation we must move in the way of another person. That is possible because people are directional. Our sensitivities and moving body structures are clustered and directional, and we fulfill appetites, impulses of self-preservation, and inclinations to make a mark, for example, through directing our sensitivities and movements in ways especially relevant to those purposes. We see those same purposes in the direction any person faces and moves. It doesn’t take babies long to notice that people are directional and to discover how to put things in their way. Being together is created by presenting something to another, putting an object or gesture in their way. Every posture becomes a gesture, inviting attention and sometimes pointing out important features of the world, and everyone’s purposes are evaluated by people watching. In that way, any act may be communicative whether or not communication is its purpose. As soon as a person has a sense of being watched, there is the possibility of creating a conversation.

To create a conversation we must do something in the way of another person. They must notice what we do and subsequently do something in our way that imitates or continues what we did. The continuity or imitation communicates memory, a sense of relevance, and togetherness. Imitation is not conversation, though. The response must combine imitation with novelty and surprise, some distinctive characteristic or direction to contribute something new, a distinct other voice in the conversation. Novelty in the context of imitation communicates creativity and personality, playfulness, power, and challenge. After making such a reply, the other must wait in readiness for our reply to them. We must continue what was distinctive in their imitation at the same time as, again, adding something new to it, and yet continuing the voice we have already presented. That is the conversation game.

Intelligence as Overt Discretionary Acts

As people focus on us, direct movements, gestures, and material objects toward us, and respond to what we do, we form an impression of the qualities of personality or intelligence in them, their sensitivities, directional tendencies, memory, and internal motives to act, rather than sensing their moving from momentum and inertia. From encounters with people around us we get our chance to see at a distance an image of how we ourselves might have personality and intelligence. Intelligence as our nature is impressively revealed in other people. Learning how others manifest intelligence gives us an objective model against which to compare our own self-presentation and so to confirm that we are as we should be as compared with the others. The attention of another person gives us a chance to practice being human, to develop a potential we feel intuitively. One intelligence is drawn to others by that special opportunity to experience being intelligent and to develop a mentally stimulated persona and avatar. That opportunity for exciting self-experience attaches us to others.

Conversational Self: Personality

Every act in conversation has the double aspect of continuing things done by others and presenting a distinctive personality, including a set of sensitivities, appetites, and ways of making a distinctive mark on the environment. Being watched and having other people’s actions influenced by us gives us one kind of force of personality. Each person can have a distinctive presence by making contributions to collective attention that add-up to a distinctive and unified set. By declaring appetites and sensitivities, making gestures of claiming territory, interests, feelings, and distinctive observations we build up an impression of our personality and a picture of what life is for us. The mutuality, bonding, and force-of-personality made possible by the conversation game attract and attach us to people who will engage and play with us.

Productive Attachment

In any community there are regular, habitual, or customary practices of production, distribution, and consumption to accomplish vital as well as strictly cultural functions. These practices impose a shape on the experience of individuals. People feel mutually attached by performing work which makes a contribution to the life of their collective, by having a place in an arrangement of vital effort. A community must maintain productive processes through which individuals integrate themselves with the power and material benefits of interconnected efforts.

A person’s greatest assimilation into a social collective may be as a link in the bucket brigade, a structural piece of its survival effort. To attach to collective production, we have to sense a unity of purpose in complex activities and take on a segment of the task. We take up presence in the group by taking a place in the mechanism, by contributing to production and partaking in consumption, joining the collective rhythm of paying the cost in work and enjoying the pleasure of achievement. Although it may seem that people take up a function in the arrangement to claim a portion of the product, this is not the whole story. The main attraction is attachment with the intelligent pattern of the group. The energy, vision, and purpose in the co-operative effort can become part of each individual’s orientation. An individual’s sense-of-self will involve orientation within the whole collective task in which he or she participates.

Functional Self-Identification

In group activity, functions are defined by example and assigned to different individuals who then include their function in their personal sense-of-self. The specific self-roles made available by a collective’s specialties and division of labour serve as prefabricated short-cuts to a definite identity. People identify themselves and others (often too exclusively) by the function they perform. When people meet they want to know what each does for a living, what function each occupies in the social organization. Each function is granted a different degree of respect. The job or occupation we perform becomes our social avatar. Some of these identity packages are attractions for heroic involvement in a collective. Some people get to be kings, rock stars, celebrity artists, athletes, or scholars, army generals, incredibly wealthy C.E.O.s, wise professors, or daring researchers pushing back the veils of ignorance. Some people get to be clerks and cleaners, some homeless and unemployed. In market capitalism the outcomes are determined, at certain social levels, by a process similar to the hunger games depicted in Suzanne Collins’ novel of that title. When the means of production are private property, then when the agents placed in charge by owners do not like the look of you in some way, at the interview, or something about your job application, you are excluded from the production process. There is no right to work in capitalism. Most people are denied the opportunity to work most of the time. That is not freedom. Calling that freedom is an intentional distortion of reality, blatant Orwellian “newspeak”. Instead of being overtly murdered as in the fictional hunger games, we are marginalized and driven by the motivating force of hunger into pleasing potential employers, if we possibly can. Some never can. When accepted we are cast into roles which have been pre-defined. Taking a place in the community’s productive mechanism is taking on the character that has been scripted for that functional niche. Some functional roles have spectacular rewards that inspire people to compete, and fitting into a functional arrangement does achieve a sense-of-self in terms of particularity of place and status in the organization, in terms of results or effects produced, and in terms of a particular set of relationships with other personalities. There is a great deal of imitation in that kind of attachment, but there is a complex sense of place, personal contribution to productive work, and a sense of different personalities in relation. The attachment with others is appreciated and often provides occasions to create good effects from personal intelligence, and so to experience an extraordinary force of personality. However, people are generally misrepresented by their jobs and struggle to express personal powers and visions in other ways.

Imitation and the Herd

Part of our self awareness as intelligence is a sense of being exposed and open to inspection and interference by other intelligences who may be beyond our personal influence. However, if there are others in the surroundings that look the same as I do, they can diffuse the attention that might otherwise pick me out. When I am among objects that look like myself, I can be indistinguishable. The requirement is conformity of appearance and behaviour. By moving in formation with others, I achieve an effective camouflage, integration into a pattern larger than myself, and reduce the sense of being exposed and vulnerable. That kind of imitation is an intelligent way of forming a union with other beings, a way of being-with them. It is the amalgamation of individual animals in a herd pattern, sometimes elaborately structured, and we human animals do this regularly.

The Political Context

The importance to individuals of these examples of elemental attachments illustrates, for one thing, that there is more than egoism motivating intelligences. That is illustrated most spectacularly in first-language-nurture collectives. What parents, especially mothers, enjoy doing for their children, for each other, for other people’s children, for their parents, siblings, and friends is a conspicuous example of non-egoistic human interconnectedness. That the common distribution of mutual nurture has been ignored so consistently by social and economic philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, who insisted that egoism alone is dominant in individuals, shows that the intended audience of such authors was the collective of privileged males enjoying benefits from acting out the egoistic alpha-trophy-looting ideology.

The point that is proved by all the philosophical emphasis on egoism and self-interest, in combination with the common experience among mothers supporting one another in devotion to nurturing children, is that there are two very distinct and contrasting worldviews in the human community, and one of them, but only one, is very authentically depicted in all that emphasis on egoism. The other worldview, the first-language-nurture culture, is unknown and regarded with contempt by the egoist self-interest faction.

It is also noteworthy that none of these attachments requires language at the fundamental level. They require only intelligences acting toward one another. They enable creation of a shared system of cultural gestures which is a matrix within which language as a system of oral gestures can be elaborated.

These forms of attachment do not require personification of any collective or of any disembodied or analogically embodied entity. However, they create collective unities which have frequently had super-human personality ascribed to them. Individuals have a tendency to ascribe far too much personality to events they cannot identify as their own acts, partly from the habit of depending so completely on the external personalities of parents during the formative years of childhood. There is also the generally daunting human situation within nature that inspires individuals to shelter within collectives (posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky), and again to fall back into ascribing a parental kind of intelligence to something indefinite beyond immediate experience. Emphatic appreciation of intelligent attachments and interaction makes us vulnerable to extreme and exclusive outward self-identification. Those innate impulses make us complicit in our own self-alienation and objectification to such an extent that it is legitimate to ask: Does the political pressure from the faction of leadership and authority do anything that we ourselves don’t already do voluntarily?

As described in posting 33, June 14, 2012 Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture, it is normal for people to pass back and forth between internal sources of gratification (creative expression) and then to outward sources, in a process or rhythm that partly depends on what happens to be going on with personal inspiration inwardly or with interesting developments outwardly. Also to put our outward fixations into context, we start off in childhood projecting parental personification into various aspects of the environment, indiscriminately, inappropriately, but as our experience accumulates we reach a level of maturity and sophistication at which we are ready, both emotionally and intellectually, to stop doing that. What the political pressure from the faction of leadership and authority does, that we certainly do not do voluntarily, is to interfere with that personal context within which we manage attachments with other intelligences.

The political force of the alpha-trophy-looting culture pushes the inner source of gratification in creative expression into disrepute, marginalization, and suspicion of criminality, at the same time as it stigmatizes maturity about projecting parental forms of personification into the environment. The ruling faction does its best to de-legitimize both advanced developmental maturation and creative self-possession, and in doing so it maliciously interferes with innate personal powers.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the interconnectedness built from those elemental attachments. People participate innocently because the interconnectedness helps stupendously with arranging sustainable lives. However, political unconsciousness makes us vulnerable as individuals because these attachments, especially the functional and the herd attachments, open us to exploitation by the pervasive dominance of a cultural faction, the alpha-trophy-looting faction, the intent and effect of which is to create a dependence on ideologically controlled collective culture, unbalanced by each individual’s self-awareness as a particular transcendence, a distinct universe of orientation built from inward freedom and creativity.

Interconnectedness is Shared Awareness

The crucial difference to be recognized is between the human commonwealth of shared awareness, created by mutual contributions from multiple voices, as distinct from a projection of parental sensitivity and caring onto institutions, analogically embodied collectives, or imaged ethereal entities. Shared awareness is the reality of interconnectedness. To share awareness with other people is to share something of their emotional particularity, some awareness of being in their life, along with some of their points of orientation.

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

First Language Nurture

12 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Strategic thinking

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Right-Wing Political Hegemony

The alpha-trophy-looting (ATL) system of social control, as presented in posting 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism (presented as the enemy of transcendental humanism), is what political conservatives wish to conserve, essential right-wing political practice.

Nurture

One thing that emerges from Transcendental Humanism, is the vital importance of intimate human connectedness. From birth through the years of infancy there is hour after hour of face to face eye contact and vocal engagement between a child and (mainly) its mother, a primal meeting of separate intelligences, involving both costs and rewards for both, but special costs for the adult since the mutuality of that particular kind of attachment is limited, especially at the beginning. For the infant intelligence, it is crucial to learn to attribute separate intelligence to what happens. Normally that is accomplished so well that far too much of the world is personified. Perhaps infants initially attribute intelligence to all events, and gradually replace some of that attribution with the inertial work-cost of unintelligent nature.

The Divinity of Mind

The idea that the human mind shares the same nature or essence as a divine mind is perfectly accurate, but not because God created man in His own image. Rather, humans projected aspects of their own subjectivity into imaginings of a super-parent who always cares, who always knows and does what is best. God was made by infant humanity, in the image of parental humanity, optimistically tweaked.

Mothers share their language with their children to enrich the individual voices already there, and not to impose a generic voice. An authentic sense of personal belonging derives from attachments between individuals, experienced primordially in the context of the first-language-nurture attachment. What is always missing from studies of language is recognition that language is made operative by the creative agency of individual human voices. Language is sporting equipment, with no power whatever until some people come along with ideas about how to express some small piece of their creativity with it.

Imitation is one of the distinctive operating principles of intelligence. It distinguishes intelligent beings from objects in the grip of inertia and momentum. Intelligent beings imitate the looks, sounds, and shapes in their surroundings. We do it for fun, to play, because it is intelligent to do it, and because it expresses intelligence overtly, declares intelligence. Imitation is the first declaration of intelligence and, when another person is imitated, it declares unity, sameness, or attachment with that person. The continuity or recapitulation in imitation declares memory, a sense of relevance, and togetherness. The interests of babies and adults are quite different in many ways. A baby can’t participate in the mature interests of an adult, but the adult has some infant interests on which they can be together. They can be together by imitating one another, taking turns handling a toy, for example, or making the same mouth-noises or facial expressions. Imitation is the bedrock upon which the whole edifice of human culture is founded, and it plays this fundamental role because it enables a combination of individual intelligence with personal enlargement by attachment to others.

The fact that the adult companions of children must interrupt their most adult engagements in order to play on common ground with children is always some degree of adult self-denial and a partial self-alienation which is experienced as a stress, a cost, when it comes to dominate an adult’s life. This does not detract in any way from the observation in posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations: “The innocent love of honest attachment and discovery characteristic of children is valuable in itself and not just as a stage to be rushed through on the way to adult mentality. Children are crucial contributers to the vitality of the human conversation.” As much as parents love to be with their children as they develop their powers and voices, adults have to be supported by other adults to continue their own adult development, to sometimes rest from exercising their important skills of operating within their child avatars.

The Meaning of the Invisibility of First-Language-Nurture (FLN)

Under ATL culture, the political marginalization of the FLN culture is so extreme that the arrival of a continuous stream of new persons, linguistically and socially equipped and competent, is taken as an event of brute nature, a given like minerals in the ground. Women, who mainly do the work of building fundamental attachments among separate intelligences, are discounted as fauna, operating under biological compulsions, “maternal instinct”. The fact that the FLN culture and operations are not recognized as the foundations of social order is the real revelation that nasty political forces are at work, and an index of their nastiness.

Every intelligence is intrinsically free in virtue of a partial (creative) detachment from the brute actuality of nature and culture. Ultimately, freedom is creativity. Not-being-controlled is the flip-side of that coin of freedom. Creativity is the perfect case of not-being-controlled. Having an apparent choice of properties to consume is the most meagre possible freedom. Freedom does not come from a market. However, since unfreedom is mainly a collective artifact, there is a collective dimension to freedom. It’s all very well to say that a personal re-orientation is the enabler of freedom, and it is, but something has to be done about the vicious distortions of reality maintained by the hegemonic ATL cultural institutions and ideology. In particular, something has to be done about the part of that distortion of reality which is the political invisibility of FLN operations.

Intelligences are essentially embodied and creativity has to be projected into the world of political forces. Strategic thinking expresses a certain kind of freedom. Freedom is possible by taking up a strategic political orientation in opposition to forces of radical inequality and reality-distorting control. Taking up the political orientation against collective unfreedom creates a cultural and psychological shield in the shelter of which is an opening of not-being-controlled.

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