Category Archives: Class War

Freedom against Power: An Historical Precedent

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

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

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

Christendom to Modernity

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

Philosophy in a Historical Context

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

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

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

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

Critique of the Malevolent Christian Oligarchy

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

Next: Finishing the Job of the Enlightenment

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

Cultural Poison as a Challenge to Freedom of Thought

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

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

≈ Leave a comment

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.

Machiavelli’s Prince

07 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Leadership, Political Power

≈ Leave a comment

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) grew up in the hotbed of the dawning European Renaissance, the Italian city of Florence, and after an eventful career in the diplomatic service of that city, a career interrupted by an abrupt regime change in Florence, he composed a book of advice, The Prince, addressed to a member of the newly restored ruling family of Florence, the Medici, a person who was an ideal example of the Renaissance Italian prince. Machiavelli’s prince was an epitome of sophistication, born to wealth and high culture, a cultural model of nobility, and his nobility is never questioned. Machiavelli advises any such person who aspires to success as a prince to be prepared to use secrets, lies, violence, and grand deceptions, to be in effect a savage noble. To a modern evaluation Machiavelli’s prince is perhaps not noble in anything but title. He is a straightforward crime family boss.

In 1534 when the English King Henry VIII officially displaced the Pope and the Roman Church hierarchy as supreme supervisor of religion in Tudor realms, it was a natural consequence of the ideas put into circulation in 1513 by Machiavelli in The Prince, implicitly rejecting the senior supervisory authority of the Church and instead justifying and promoting the independent power of great aristocratic and royal families, crime families. Machiavelli’s The Prince made it thinkable for elder sons of such families to abandon the religious culture of chivalry and assert ultimate power without being subordinate to the mystique of religion. Machiavelli counselled princes to rule on their own authority without any supervision by the Church. Henry VIII’s break from Roman authority is a familiar example of that advice being actualized. It was the death-knell of the theocratic empire of Christendom. The central theocratic force of social control, exercised by the hierarchy of Catholic Christianity, was thus finally fractured, and afterward Christendom survived as an increasingly fictitious idea.

The Church did not disappear upon the self-assertion of the Tudors, but ‘household’ arrangements made by reigning families developed into administrative institutions of nation states. The supernatural authority of social supervision became more remote and tenuous. The collectivism of the Church was weakened, with the consequence that more individual enterprise was possible and even required. Crime family state institutions were collective-minded only when armies were required by the sovereign, which was often since military service was important training in subordination for the general population, and good sport for the ones on horses. Otherwise individuals were on their own and normally subject to the exploitation of a local turf-lord or capitalist. That self-assertion by great families was the formation of Europe’s Old Regime from many of the pre-existing institutions of Christendom. Machiavelli’s vision was not modernity but rather one step toward it from the initial condition of Medieval Christendom. Modernity was to be the era of the illusion that professional expertise based on science, rationality, and enlightened institutions could tranquilize the self-interested dominance and control of crime families and their religious cults, the illusion that their alpha-trophy-looting value system could be smoothed into a bearable basis for community life. Machiavelli’s thinking was a movement in that direction. Even though Machiavelli was not entirely modern in his vision of effective political power, he acted out a scenario of modernity by playing the part of a middle-class advisor who devised a partnership between himself, as a practitioner of the scribal or book-based arts, which clever people from any class can make their own, and the wealthy alphas of the horse-and-armour class, with the goal of engineering a sustainable institution of radical inequality.

It is characteristic of the middle class, represented well by Machiavelli, to take that sort of enabling attitude toward the class of ownership crime families. The middle class does not repudiate the controlling overclass but rather accepts it as pack leader, to use a canine metaphor, just as Machiavelli did with respect to the Medici family, offering special assistance based on cultivated skills, normally scribal, literary, legal, and scholarly in nature, consistent with fine clothing and other markers of rising dignity. It serves the interests, aspirations, and self-image of the middle class to promote a manic optimism, which relies on a set of comforting fictions deriving from a conviction that the predatory crime family class can be professionalized and integrated into a meritocracy, the rule of law, and due process, and in a later era even formal democracy. What keeps the whole system working, including the economic functions, is mainly imitating what was done previously, sometimes with straightforward variations, habits or traditions repeated unthinkingly, with many features kept unexamined by popular misconceptions such as “we’re all in this together”, “people reap what they sow”, “our political representatives have our best interests at heart”, or “there is a meritocracy of the most competent people in control”. Acceptance of institutional social inequality is inseparable from such constructs of orientation.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), and Martin Luther (1483-1546) were all central-European contemporaries in the development of post-medieval culture. Copernicus published the unsettling discovery that the Earth is not the centre of the universe but only one of the smaller satellites of the sun. After that group of bold thinkers, a generation went by before the next wave appeared in the persons of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), and Rene Descartes (1596-1650). By the time that later wave appeared, an aristocratic coup, just illustrated by Henry VIII’s part of it, had established a new regime in Europe: what Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) called, looking back, the Old Regime. That wave was followed closely by another in the persons of John Locke (1632-1704) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727).

Noble Lies: Forbidden Knowledge and The Noble Elect

There is a relationship between the “noble lie” from Plato’s Republic and the occult idea that only a small group of ‘the elect’ or worthy nobility, unlike the human masses, merit profound spiritual and metaphysical knowledge as well as special immunity and privilege (the essential crime family ethos). People who consider themselves to be among that elect minority feel entitled to promote Plato’s lie of inequality as justice. Machiavelli’s conception of appropriate behaviour for a prince highlights that there are two very different notions of justice, morality, and criminality. From the point of view of crime family ethos the moral problem and the essence of criminality is disobedience, insubordination, or disorder among the masses. From the point of view of the commonality of people the moral problem, the great injustice, is the imposition and institutional organization of inequality and other deceptions by a powerful faction.

Another facet of the “noble lie” is the boosting of “home team spirit”, declarations that this is the best community, the most expressive of justice, the bravest and cleverest and most worthy to survive and shine. For example, in the case of European culture, there is the claim that, at the “fall” of the Roman Empire, civilization was saved by the Irish, instead of by the ancient eastern cities and communities, by Muslims and the people of Iran, India, and China. It is an example of the old crime family fear of Copernican revolution, a fear that people will stop accepting authority and institutions of control if their legitimacy does not derive from being the centre of the cosmos, favoured by nature. (Forbidden knowledge alert.) Of course no collective is the centre of the cosmos, but the interiority of intelligence makes each and every person his or her own universe of orientation and that is where the elemental centre really exists.

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

Working

21 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Leadership, Political Power

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

In ancient Sumer the grandest monuments were temples on high platforms, called ziggurats. Like pyramids and Gothic cathedrals, ziggurats have a mountainous and sacred quality. Each is a monumental elaboration of its piece of ground, too much to be taken in from any single view. A considerable organization over a long time was required for these structures to be created and this level of organization is possible only in special circumstances. One looks at old ziggurats, castles, and pyramids and sees their beauty or functional design, but not the work required to bring them into being. When the work was finished, the scaffolding and the construction organization vanished and left the visible structure in mysterious isolation. It might be a surface feature of the local geology except for something about the shape, and perhaps an inscription cut into hard stone in the structure. The buildings appear miraculous because the work that built them is not part of their appearance. Work tends to go unidentified in many situations.

Bricks were the main building material of the most ancient civilizations, Egypt as well as Sumer. Their bricks were made of mud mixed with straw, moulded and dried in the sun. In the hot, dry climate of those places mud bricks are durable. Bricks are heavy and hard, good material for walls and support columns. The clay or mud for a brick has to be lifted into a mould and dried or baked in an oven to transform it into stone. The thought of using mud out of its natural place, made into a new solid form and subjected to the vision of a builder, is invention and imagination and involves initiation into cultural secrets. A brick is a piece of borrowed ground, placed in a new relationship to the firmament of ground, in a wall or column of a house, temple, or castle. Walls of brick are cultural elaborations of ground, and we find their essential qualities first in the hardness and heaviness of ground itself. The ground, planet Earth, keeps pulling the brick back toward its centre. The worker must exert effort against that. The cost in effort required to raise a single brick is not very great. As the size of construction increases, the effort becomes more and more difficult and reaches a point of tedium and fatigue that goes far beyond what anyone would choose. The worker feels his vital energies go out of him into the shape of the rising wall. After a day at the job, the strength of the worker is gone, he or she is empty and sucked dry. This is the bargain, a day’s strength for another day’s subsistence.

Effort on that scale is normally demanded by somebody’s project of making a gigantic mark on the environment. The worker takes on some relation to that mark in the process of spending his vitality on it. The intimate contribution he makes to its realization justifies and maybe demands that he feel some ownership. Yet there are a number of circumstances that conflict with his sense of ownership. The design and inspiration are not from him, but are foreign. Between his shifts and when his work is finished he is required to leave the thing he has made. The shape of his relationship to it in space and time is controlled by others. The wall he builds shuts him out. Credits for the construction, maybe inscribed somewhere on the structure to be witnessed by the world at large, do not include his name or an account of his part in authorship. So the worker’s attachment to his product is both inescapable and unacknowledged, stipulated by his investment in the job and then severed, alienated, stolen.

Property-possession and labour have been rival claimants to society’s rewards and honours. Like work in one way, property such as land and money is often a source of income. “Let your money work for you.” Income from property, investment, and speculation always depends on and derives from the actual work of someone. Lack of productive property forces some to submit to the dominance of people who control such things as land and money. Labour has always been the under-dog. Deprivation of property forces people into a physical dependence on resources controlled by property owners, a sort of slavery. To some it has seemed the plainest injustice that inheritors of property should be rewarded more than those working daily to produce necessities of community life. Work is a life-warping burden. It would seem that the bearers of the burden of producing what the community requires should earn most benefits.

That is all common knowledge and the injustice is plain to see. However, the injustice is not often identified, is not prohibited by law, for example, because of the pervasive dominance of crime-family cultural values in the conceptual structure of sovereign power, executive privilege, and wealth as a trophy. The injustice of that relationship of labour to monumental architecture, as well as to all forms of high culture dependent on the tastes and pleasures of those able to afford luxury goods and services such as decorative, performance, and plastic arts, undermines any claims to a legitimacy of command through contributions to civilization. Those forms of high culture are merely another crime family technology for exercising radical inequality.

This is still on the way to Machiavelli and Nietzsche.

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

≈ Leave a comment

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.

Machiavelli and Nietzsche: Class Conflict and Modernity

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

We of Modernity

We of Modernity are different from people of Christendom, and from people of all previous societies. We have a far less spooky, less enchanted world. The gods and demons are more distant worries. We are less rooted at a piece of land among the family dead and local gods. Urban life, the anonymous urban crowd, is available and normal. We enjoy our urban detachment from fertile ground, replaced by attachment to a market system. In modernity mobility may be the reigning narrative. Class consciousness is less oppressive and less definitive (another aspect of mobility), leaving us less rooted within social hierarchies. Although we still live within a nexus of social supervision, we have less fear of, less trust in, and less emotional reliance on authorities of all kinds. These mobilities have realized a certain kind of freedom at the price of greater dependence on markets (money) and impersonal institutions. Our individuality looms much larger in our personal experience and we are more often adrift from collective narratives, more often in doubt, feeling the absence of certainty in institutional patterns of meaning.

Since modernity is the cultural sea in which we all swim, there are challenges to finding a critical perspective on it and on our individual relationship to it. Modernity originated in the same region which was for so long a poor backwater on a remote and isolated peninsula of the world, Europe. Modernity is the organization style of those societies which developed after the popular abandonment of European Christendom. Modernity is not elemental in any way, any more than Christendom was, and so there is no essence of modernity, even though a central principle might be identified as the middle class idea of meritocracy, inseparable from mobility. No ultimate divine mind or plan is depicted in the shape of history. History is not sacred or monumental as a whole because it is a haphazard collection of more or less randomly organized experiments by ordinary fallible and desperate human persons, each exercising some creative freedom from their interior non-actuality, in projections into nature and culture. Modernity is a partly random co-existence of conditions and cultural bearings.

The fact that the modern west now dominates the planet as a whole, for better or worse, raises questions about the origins of its peculiar power. The standard answer is that science placed unlimited power into the hands of western industries and militaristic nation states. Historians of science and of the material mechanisms of economic and social change point to the magnetic compass, the printing press and paper, guns and gunpowder as revolutionary forces for change in the old world. However, the west owes all those mechanisms and many more to the Mongol world system (largely based in China), often through Italian traders crossing the Black Sea to meet their Mongol equivalents, and so there is the question of why it was the west rather than the senior cultures of the east which transfigured into this brave new world. A case can be made for the decisive influence of Hellenistic humanism with its focus on individual intelligence, and the way that played out in struggles over thinking within the culture of Christendom.

Modernity and Class Conflict

It is not possible to understand modernity without some consciousness of social class plate tectonics. The beginning of social class structure was the launching of violent appropriation operations by extended family units with a cultural system typical of crime families. Class conflict is, therefore, along with the conflict of gender cultures, central to the political situation of people in all societies. Machiavelli and Nietzsche, for example, were both very clearly conscious of the identity between crime families and ‘sovereign’ power. Both Machiavelli and Nietzsche, along with pretty much everyone, accepted a claim to legitimacy by the crime family class founded on its sponsorship of art, music, and large-scale architecture, generally called high culture or even just culture. The concentration of wealth and capital accomplished by crime family looting and exploitation of others enabled (still does) construction of large scale cultural monuments to beauty, eternity, to the thrill of power, and to the power-class which commands the construction. It is generally accepted that an essence of some mysterious elevating force called civilization springs from those monuments. However, accepting the legitimizing force of such things requires a narrowly selective editing of historical knowledge and requires discounting awareness of living through the work that accomplishes the actuality of culture. Nietzsche recognized class friction as a consequence of crime families and their exploitative ethos of control and inequality, but he admired the will to power, the will to be superman, that has always been characteristic of crime families. Nietzsche is, therefore, a model of the politically right-wing even without being interested in the spooks the Nazis emphasized, such as racial blood and the metaphysical bond between a folk-nation and the soil that nurtures it. Nietzsche was influenced by Max Stirner (1806-56) in asserting that any individual should, as much as possible in personal circumstances, embrace an outlook very close to the crime-family ethos as described in Machiavelli’s The Prince. However, Nietzsche did not believe everyone is capable of being superman. He believed rather that only special persons are capable of that.

To be continued.

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

Waking From History, Episode Three

13 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ Leave a comment

An Analogy

Mythology about the power of astrological demons, specifically the sun, moon, planets, and constellations of the zodiac, is a fair allegory of the individual’s exposure to the cultural power of reality-distorting ideology and emotional control mechanisms. Proponents of astrology (Hermetism, Cabalism, and Gnosticism, for example) are completely wrong in ascribing supernatural personalities to astral phenomena (angelic or otherwise, mainly intent on controlling and toying with the lives of humans), but they are not wrong about humans being born into a controlling and oppressive system in which freedom involves finding an understanding of the situation that goes deeper than the commonly accepted construct of reality.

It doesn’t take very much reading of history to learn of the historical dominance of crime families and their alpha-trophy-looting bias. Crime family culture permeates the whole idea of merit-based inequality structured into social and economic hierarchies, and that is very popular culture. To go beyond the social and cultural dominance of crime families, to wake from that history, we have to out-think the oligarchy by finding ways of orienting ourselves independently of the propaganda and messaging from their media. Having a critical awareness of relevant thinking from the past helps establishes a framework for orientation, a thinking space for interpreting current messages delivered with the intent of manipulating our energies.

The Delusion of a Noble Lie

Every incumbent of power clings to the myth of the noble lie, originated in Plato’s Republic, the myth that everyone is better off accepting inequality, maintaining the stability of hierarchies, even though every hierarchy, every system of inequality, is founded on lies, usually some variation of the assertion that inequality is ordained by the God of creation, and ordained because it is best. However, that whole perspective and assessment of what is best is a cultural peculiarity of crime families who have no other purpose than to secure their own advantage over others. How can freedom still be possible? Freedom is possible by waking from history, specifically the history of cultural dominance by purveyors of the lie of inequality. Political and historical consciousness is the dawn of that waking.

Political consciousness is consciousness that all claims of radical or profound inequality are lies. Political consciousness is recognition that cultural influences which proclaim the “noble” lie, inequality, are deceivers, manipulators, and exploiters, and as such, enemies. Political consciousness is identification of that enemy as a particular faction with a particular history, carrying the ethos of inequality, the source of the hostility in the cultural context of any person. Culture is an historical accumulation. Without historical narratives a person’s experience of the world resets to elementality. Without history, cultural presences reset to non-natural shapes without any story other than, “this part of actuality was shaped by an intelligence, by an impulse to play and to create a sustainable life in hope of long duration”.

“I am thinking, therefore I exist.” Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

(Please see the brief introduction to Descartes in posting 22, March 1, 2012, Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom.)

There are parallels between the adventure of discovering the ground of equality and the method of progressive and systematic doubt by which Descartes found himself through questioning ordinary certainties, as described in Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641. Not much is more personal than doubt. Doubt is a marker of a personal intelligence, the entity with an original questioning voice, the existence of which is unquestionably asserted by every question and every doubt. Descartes’ process of systematic doubt in search of an elemental grounding in a situation possibly pervaded by unidentifiable manipulation and control, illusion and deception, is an algorithm built on a link between freedom and undistorted knowledge (truth). Freedom and undistorted knowledge are inextricably linked. The question is this: Is it possible to be free enough to discover, recognize, and live with the truth? Rather than “The truth will make you free,” we have “The accessibility of truth, the unquestionability or immediacy of some knowledge, is the test, the proof, and the measure of freedom.” Freedom is the power to live with undistorted knowledge.

In that aspect of his work, Descartes represents a stream of practicing philosophy as the craft of waking from history by encountering an immediate and elemental orientation grid. Starting from an encounter with the entity of your personal intelligence (elaborated by, for example, posting 6, October 6, 2011, What is Being Called Thinking: An Introduction). The perspective of such philosophy is an alternative to the perspectives of any socioeconomic class or ethnic “identity”. It is possible to find and know the ground of equality by re-orienting to that philosophical perspective.

The philosophical journey departs from the middle class comfort zone (or any class comfort zone) and finds a way to abide in the elements: nature, culture, monadic interiority (subjectivity), and the deliberate interconnectedness of intelligences. What is gained by casting off from standard cultural moorings is a mature innocence which is a revaluation of elemental reality, a new appreciation of monadic interiority, of embodiment within nature, of the brute actuality of nature experienced through embodiment, of other intelligences with their own creative and unfathomable interiority, of the efforts and strategies required to build interconnectedness with other intelligences, the limitations of interconnectedness, and of culture as projections of intelligent interiority, culture in the light of political consciousness.

To recapitulate and proceed from Descartes, the basic “I am thinking, therefor I exist” corresponds to monadic interiority: doubt, questions, curiosities are blossoms of a coherent entity of creative power. There is authentic personal identity in the unique non-actuality of each monadic interiority. Creative process is more than interiority, but not in the sense dear to American consumerism. When the economic atoms (persons) of capitalist theory think about creative dreams, of “dreaming big” they think the American dream: winning a new car, selecting property or distinctions to covet or desire, acquisition of external property or some other conspicuous symbol of being better than others. That’s a crime family perversion of the creative process. The creative process, understood in its transcendence, is its own reward. Creative process is more than interiority, without ignoring the intrinsic rewards of interiority. Monadic interiority is projected onto the forms of nature in a creation of culture, a transformation of nature into culture via the force of monadic interiority. Personally doubting everything possible, we still have the agency of a creative process guessing at and projecting a sustainable life among the elements, into increasingly remote and improbable futures, deriving meaning and grounding from the inner horizon, the force of creativity.

Equality and Monadic Interiority

With creative interiority there is no ground for hierarchy, and so the universe of monadic interiority is the font of equality. The genius of the non-actuality of interiority is its own reward, and equally so for everyone, establishing everyone’s justification by creative projection. (Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55): Subjectivity is truth.) To embrace your peculiar universe of elemental non-actuality is to make your creative process your new best friend, and not your only friend. Elemental reference experiences include the riches of embodiment and the creative process of intelligence, personal bearings and reorientation processes, an internal fountain of re-orientation possibilities (questions) building a bearing and expressing its voice. Practice a creative process, a voice-expressive process, and celebrate it in others.

Identity

You don’t lose identity in casting off from an ethnic cultural setting because identity is intelligence, the spiritual entity of monadic individuality, the entity holding and building your quests, vigils, and bearings. Intelligence is an embodied particular, an entity of individual agency. You don’t lose identity but instead you reclaim an identity which was previously hijacked by a hostile cultural setting. When you cast off from the moorings of control-faction motivational manipulation you aren’t left with nothing, but rather with a launch pad of political consciousness in a grid of elemental orientation. To have political consciousness is to be aware of yourself and every transcendent monad (person) as elemental in the political situation. Political consciousness is also awareness of the ideological force obstructing that vision of equality, awareness of the pervasive ideology which rationalizes the worldview of crime-families, the worldview of inequality, of the display, celebration, and enforcement of inequality, of factional control and motivational manipulation. The journey of political consciousness brings you away from culturally prescribed moorings and off on the quest for elemental moorings. When your motives are not being manipulated by promotors of the ideology of crime-families, you have a chance to develop your personal voice.

Descartes moved quickly from the brilliance of his self-discovery, impossible to doubt, to the dubious deduction of a benevolent God. He then used that finding as the basis for other comforting platitudes. Since Descartes went off the rails so quickly, it remains necessary to re-think the re-orientation he was attempting. From the encounter with monadic interiority, you can remodel a broader orientation from the other elements, resistances which draw us out from, or stand as a setting for, our own universe of non-actuality. (See posting 33, June 14, 2012 Reality is Three Givens: Nature, Subjective Intelligences, and Culture.)

Philosophy is the search for an elemental re-orientation grid that enables disengagement from cultural myths and narratives that depict a reality that is specifically distorted to serve the interests of particular factions such as the partnership of crime families and religious cults. That is the sense in which philosophy is a search for truth. Freedom is possible by undertaking the transcendental adventure, the philosophic journey to touchstones of reality beyond the distorting force-field of alpha-trophy-looting culture, to elemental experiences enabling a reorientation to a more reality-based sense of the situation, abandoning grids anchored to the dictator-alpha-god and his institutional avatars.

In an elemental re-orientation you have cultural-reality as a severely biased political construct, social hierarchies as mountains of counterfeit transcendence. Release that tainted grid by disengaging emotionally from the cultural matrix of inequality and personifications of non-embodied persons. With respect to those, freedom is disorganization. What you gain by casting off from the moorings of conventional ideals is your own monadic spiritual entity. The power of the spiritual entity of every person transcends every social/cultural/economic category. That is a very substantial gain. Something else gained by casting off the standard comfort zone of cultural assumptions is all other human beings as transcendent, as monads of non-actuality, freedom and creativity, able to project original visions into nature and culture. That is a considerable promotion compared with their being cashed out as inmates of boxes on the economic hierarchy. What is gained is sensitivity to the transcendence of everyone around you, all universes of creative non-actuality. What makes sense in that reality is a nurturing attitude to people and honour for those devoted to nurturing.

As explored in posting 37, July 26, 2012, Sharing Awareness, we retain our elemental engagements with other people, built from innate intelligent embodiment alone. Any two people can re-invent language from scratch, (language is inapplicable to a solitary intelligence) and since we always do some degree of that re-invention, society is not monolithic. Every family, friendship, partnership, and personal association is a separate cultural unit to some degree. Such units turn inward and motivate themselves. Human motivation doesn’t come mainly from above, from leadership, the civilization, or the nation. Those factions manipulate and prey on motivation that originally comes from individuals, partnerships, groups of people personally devoted to one another, and groups of mothers and children who collect and depend on each other for support in nurturing, for example. Withdrawing from the moorings of tainted political influences does not harm the basic engagements of interconnectedness and especially the conversation with children. As a force for social stability, the most vastly undervalued asset is children. Couples often reach a point of wanting to part company, but it is very rare for anyone to want to separate from their children until they reach the natural independence of maturity. Even parents who become alienated from adult children reach out again when grandchildren appear. The bond with children seems to be the strongest in human experience. (Children also keep re-inventing language instead of just passively learning it.) As a social foundation, then, we retain a focus on arrangements around the conversation with our children and the innocent love and playfulness they offer. That includes the reality and force of first-language-nurture culture, authentic attachment, elemental bonding, and sharing awareness. (Please see posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations.)

Also crucial among assets gained by elemental re-orientation is a newly innocent appreciation of embodiment within nature, of the brute actuality of nature experienced through embodiment, and of culture as projections of intelligent interiority, culture in the light of political consciousness. We have the calculus of work-costs and the need to construct a sustainable life with our powers of thinking, building a bearing, bearing into building a bearing. As explored in posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky, we have our embodied engagement with nature and a work-based cost-sense of reality as a particular, personal, situation. That mature innocence of intelligent embodiment is an intense appreciation of what it is to be alive.

Being Political

Elemental re-orientation brings a certain cultural and political mission, a re-conception and revaluation of freedom and equality. There is widening awareness of vicious intent in addition to incompetence and conceptual bankruptcy on display in the multitude of failures of the controlling faction. Since elemental re-orientation is based in intelligence, we have strategic thinking in our collection of assets: recognizing the enemy, and the enemy’s blind spots. From political consciousness there arises a clear vision of progress: cultivating and asserting the perspective of philosophic elementality, and bringing the orientation of first-language-nurture operations into balance with the lethal alpha-trophy-looting orientation. The problem is to think how it is possible to divert energy from the omnipotence of the ruling crime-family faction when it has projected its ideology so deeply into universal culture. The first strategic advance has to be withdrawing consent from the leadership of control factions, and assuming personal responsibility to re-orient to a realistic assessment of the political situation. The category of assets retained and re-valued also includes cultural elements, literacy and the free market in books and ideas, freebooting reading and writing, especially within the currently open blogosphere.

At the same time as freedom must be projected into the world of physics and politics, an individual’s happiness cannot depend on saving the world, on objective incentives and rewards, or on some possible future evolutionary development. Happiness must derive from expressive agency, bringing good things into the outward situation from the gusher of inward impulses, curiosities, and ideas. Everybody needs some stuff from markets but you can channel creative energy from within with relatively little of the stuff controlled by the hard-boy alpha-structure. It is possible to think of ways to work around the game being run by that structure.

The System of Reality

When we talk about freedom, we don’t mean anything involving separation from human interconnectedness and shared awareness. Rather, we want certain re-valuations, as outlined above, within that sharing of awareness. The system of reality is the political situation of intelligence: Multiple universes of freedom and creativity (monads) projecting into a common world of pre-determined nature and historically accumulated culture, the cultural elements of which generally prevent awareness of being one among multiple universes of freedom and creativity.

Because of the reality distortions essential to the cultural and political dominance of alpha-trophy-looting culture, there is some knowledge (truth) which is subversive. You don’t have a serious theory of knowledge without accounting for that, without including a political philosophy which traces the effects of the dominant factional ideology. Since politics is the dynamics of power and control over people and resources, including over what people are permitted to know, knowledge cannot be separated from politics. Fundamental questions of knowledge (including self-knowledge) cannot be separated from questions of the freedom enabled by individually innate power to elude cultural conditioning and find a grounding in personal innocence.

Individualism and Government

One proposal for individual action to reclaim self-possession in the face of the superstructure of control in modern societies is libertarian individualism. The libertarian individual is very much an alpha-trophy-looting type male, with a few surface modifications. This individualist is a self-sufficient, gun-toting, trigger happy, homesteading separatist, hoarding supplies for the fervently desired collapse of civilization. The only moral advantage of this figure over Genghis Khan, exemplar of the ideal alpha-trophy-looting type of cowboy, is that the libertarian’s declared ambition is self-reliance and self-sufficiency, harming no one unless they trespass on his hoarded property, of which he claims absolute possession, and which he is anxious to defend with his beloved guns. However, that moral advantage is fragile and mutable, since it contains enough self-absorption, self-admiration, and contempt for others to justify looting a few trophies and controlling other persons he considers unworthy of liberty, which is most other people.

As described in the sketch of sovereign law in Episode One, it is true that government as such has thoroughly questionable historical roots. However, efforts to sublimate the predatory impulses at the core of government have had some praiseworthy effects. If the sovereignty of law, the rule of law, could be based on a truly democratic foundation and (cautious) refresh mechanism, then the enforcement of sovereign law looks like the best way of constraining the predatory hostility of hard-boy crime families and religious cults. Those predators are never going away. Unfortunately, current mechanisms of representative democracy have been subverted and brought under the stealthy control of crime family capital, and so innovation in the mechanisms of democracy is necessary. For example, legislatures and parliaments should be conceived as juries and picked the way juries are picked, a random sampling made by lottery of the people governed. That would at least do away with financial and ideological control over hegemonic political parties and bring everybody into the political process. History has now demonstrated that elections do not produce democracy. Participation is more effective than representation.

Transcendental humanism forms the strongest foundation for democracy. If you want to assert bottom-up politics, as opposed to crime family politics, then you have to come from the equal transcendence of every individual as the most thoroughly authentic justification. Current models of democracy are compromises between the ruling crime families and people who perceive benefits from bargaining with them. The point here is that the total rejection of government that is fundamental to libertarian individualism is based on an assessment of government that is fatally over-simple, and on an assessment of individual human value that is inherently hierarchical. It seems likely that libertarians are a movement of nostalgia for feudalism, who reject government exactly because it might be a little democratic, and so contemptible on their view due to representing “everyman”, to whom the libertarian feels vastly superior. Libertarians insist on eliminating the nurturing functions of government but not so much the manly war-making functions.

The rugged libertarian is not the only alternative to Genghis Khan as an individualist. Transcendental humanism conceives individuals as transcendent, each a creative source of futurity, for example, but immeasurably enhanced by interconnectedness with a social arrangement prepared to nurture children and adults, and by contributing to a cultural accumulation over generations. The overall arc of transcendental humanism is a switch from the modern orientation of deriving gratification and fulfillment from absorbing everything from the outside environment (everything from consumer goods, to life agendas, and even personal identity and visions of reality) to an opposing orientation of deriving gratification and fulfillment from fountaining out creations from within. The term “self-possession” in transcendental humanism is meant to point at the latter orientation. That emphasis on universal ‘justification’ from within, as distinct from an emphasis on eliminating government, transforms the notion of individualism.

You can stay with the Dursleys if you want, or you can come to Hogwarts.

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

Waking From History, Episode One

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Strategic thinking

≈ Leave a comment

Culture Consciousness

In the science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye, from 1974, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the imagined system of space travel involves something like ‘worm holes’ which are shortcuts between fixed points at widely distant areas of galactic space. One especially important worm hole has an opening so close to the surface of a star that any ship emerging from the hole without appropriate shielding is immediately destroyed. Considering this as an analogy, individual intelligences arrive into cultural interconnectedness in a similar way, and almost literally soak up with their mother’s milk a culture shaped by a hostile ideology of alpha-trophy-looting design.

Given the enormous joys, pleasures, and advantages for us monads in sharing intelligence by forming attachments (as described in posting 36, July 12, 2012, First Language Nurture and in posting 37, July 26, 2012, Sharing Awareness), it is inevitable that structures of artifacts, imitated gestures, and ways of living are going to accumulate rapidly in clusters of people. Soon every infant arrives into a situation of vital support already richly elaborated by a culture made from the creative projections of past generations, most of those projections now alienated from their ad hoc, accidental, and personally inventive origins, and consequently now stipulated as sacred traditions divinely pre-ordained or as necessities of nature.

Every child monad (that is, an original locus of creativity and freedom) is engulfed on arrival by brute nature through embodiment, but every child is also engulfed by the culture carried in the bearings of the caregiving individuals who nurture and share awareness with him or her and who depict “the way we live” by carrying on their lives within the child’s sensitivities. The long hours of first-language-nurture face and voice time with mother, the bonding and shared awareness from that gesture-imitation play, accumulate for an eternity (the passing of time speeds up dramatically with increasing age) before the child begins to use his or her own body to move about and explore the cost-benefit shape of nature. So interconnectedness and some culture come before the full-bodied encounter with nature.

(The Mote in God’s Eye, written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Published by: Pocket Books, Mass Market Paperback: 592 pages, ISBN-10: 0671741926, ISBN-13: 978-0671741921.)

Law as a Microcosm of Culture and History

Sovereign law is connected by history to two deeply suspect social phenomena, namely religious cults, especially those with written teachings of a prophet or divine avatar, and crime families which exercise control by force over the population of a certain turf or territory. (By far most human societies prior to modern democracies have been brutal dictatorial empires controlled by some variant of a crime family in partnership with religious cults.) Both religious cults and crime families are parasitic on self-subsistent groups of families carrying within themselves a cultural heritage of surviving and raising children within the indifferent environment on the surface of planet Earth. So, religious cults, crime families, and self-subsistent first-language-nurture collectives are three fundamental engines of culture and history.

A religious focus on divinely inspired writings tends to interpret those writings as containing divine commands (super-parental commands), an original paradigm of law. The three Abrahamic religions all exemplify how cultures, organizations, and traditions of scholarly study, writing, and ongoing interpretation of holy books grow into a bridge between refined religious orthodoxy and the control of general communal behaviour by pervasively applicable laws. Related to that, law historically exemplifies the mystique of written language. Words were once widely thought to be the mechanism of divine creation and of divine action in general (Logos). The rule of law is the rule of words engraved in a medium which points toward eternity, a work of cultured craft achieving a sublime unification of ethereal words with an elemental and enduring material. Such engraved figures or characters were suspected of sharing in the power of charms and talismans.

Another, closely related, paradigm of compulsory (parental) command is the decree of the effective local warlord, chief of the most powerful crime family. Such organizations reach a point of wanting to regularize, institutionalize, and legitimize their control over a population by supplementing the personal whims of the alpha-chief with enduring public lists of decrees to form an orderly and predictable framework of expectation and performance in the relationship between parasitic crime family and host population, and even impose their ideas of order within the primordial subsistence collective which is the effective grounding of the whole social arrangement.

Such is the origin of law. The organizations of the religious source and the crime family source tend to co-operate and form a partnership to mutually strengthen one another and share in enjoying the “surplus” produced by the primordial collectives under their mutual control. All along the primordial collectives carry on with their focus on raising children.

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by: Anchor (October 11, 1977), Paperback: 340 pages, ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224. (Plagues and Peoples specifically identifies aristocracies as parasitic plagues. See pp. 7-13.)

Infant Monads

That brief overview of the origins of law in human culture is a portrait in miniature of the universal history of culture. From time immemorial, we monads arrive as infants into a culture in which the most extreme and grotesque caricature of egoistic masculinity, in the form of crime family ideology, has over-asserted itself to the detriment of the whole system but especially to the detriment of the first-language-nurture segment of the social system. The fundamental parental duality, alpha-trophy-looting father versus first-language-nurture mother, projects itself onto the universal politics of human cultures. Human culture is so dominated by the crime-family caricature of masculinity that the natural influence and cultural expression of the common feminine focuses is disastrously suppressed. There is almost a sense of biological determinism to this problem as an obstacle to be encountered by any interconnectedness of monads which is embodied and gendered on the human model. Societies which have the sense to re-balance to give the feminine first-language-nurture segment equal recognition and cultural expression get to survive and advance. Societies that get stuck in masculine over-assertion reach a point of effective self-destruction.

Energy Control and Hard-Boy Gangs

Freedom in the world of physics is largely a matter of controlling the movement and application of energy, from sources as various as (but not limited to) food, the muscles of animals, flowing water, coal, and oil. Disputes and rivalries over control of energy on a large scale have been dominated by gangs of hard boys. The ordinary individual has little-to-no leverage against those gangs, and no one should have their day-to-day happiness depend on fixing the hard-boy problem. People equipped to tackle that problem directly become the next dynasty of gang-boys. Strategically, that is why revolutions don’t work, but reformations sometimes do. Significant progressive change in economics, politics, and culture was accomplished from small beginnings around the arrival of text printing technology in the middle of the fifteenth century, culminating during the enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, driven by ideas of individual dignity and empowerment from literacy and philosophical ideas of human rationality. Some, but not all, of that has been blunted or rolled back, and the hard-boy regressive forces are still operating.

To this day, even in the most modern and scientifically advanced nations, the ethos and ideology of the class of people which owns and controls capital, the leadership or control class, is a tweaked version of crime family ideology. The core ethos of the crime-family faction is monopoly, full-spectrum dominance by violence and the elimination of potential competition and alternative visions, the alpha-trophy-looting ethos. It is not possible for people high on that Kool-Aid to do anything other than suppress alternative and dissident voices, especially the values expressed in the segment of society devoted to nurturing children and engaging children in the learning of their first language. The result of the dominance of the hard-boy faction is a narrow-spectrum conception of what is possible, resulting in futile political discourse within nominally advanced and democratic political entities, all due to factional control by an ethos dedicated to celebrating inequality as such, to celebrating the dominant faction’s omnipotence and transcendent immunity (a mockery of authentic transcendence).

Transition to Modernity, the Schematic Version

Cast of characters: 1) rural-military crime families, 2) urban-commercial-financial crime families. The post-Roman hegemony of 1) in Europe was eventually followed by the rise and hegemony of 2), but 2) continued to use the mechanisms of social control employed by 1), which were mainly the strict organization of war and religion. In addition, 2) added some of their own techniques such as alienation from land and total dependence on markets, debt, employment for wages, and new commercial narratives delivered outside churches via novel mechanisms of communication.

The controlling faction is more stealthy now than in historical periods when the sovereignty of the most powerful crime families, aristocracy and monarchy, was overt. The new crime family oligarchy is far less open in its economic and political control, masked by the trappings of democracy. Also, a more elaborate legitimizing ideology has penetrated the worldview of all classes through the agency of mass media, commercial advertising, glorification of the Olympic Games and professional sport, and the vilification and dehumanization of dissident or alternative political visions. Mass media have become incomparably more penetrating into individual consciousness, and the predominance of messages carried, not only in explicit sales promotion, is controlled by concentrated media ownership. The educational and research systems are similarly controlled by the necessity of direct funding from private or investor/ donor controlled organizations, which also arrange behind the scenes for restrictions on public funding of education.

Leadership Incompetence

The current twin crises in global economy and in geopolitical conflict clearly establish the incompetence of the control faction. The economic/ financial crisis blossomed in 2007-08 after decades of incompetent public policy, and the geopolitical conflict might be said to have blossomed after 2001, but really goes to the core of American ambitions boosted in the wake of WWII and again after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Keep in mind that, in accordance with the theory proclaimed by the leadership class, the leadership structure is a meritocracy, so those with the most power, influence, and effect are the most talented leaders, the best of the best. It cannot be contested, then, that the ongoing crises just mentioned reveal the incompetence of the best of the leadership class.

Neither the economic crisis nor the geopolitical crisis have been brought into being by the desires and efforts of the common majority of people in any country or from any ethnic cultural tradition. Both the economic crisis and the geopolitical crises are manifestations of a general cultural problem, namely the excessive power and influence of groups expressing a particular ethos, an ethos hatched in the history of crime families, and now faced with a global situation beyond its competence.

The incompetence of the leadership class is firmly rooted in the basic value system they champion and express, namely the crime-family derived alpha-trophy-looting worldview. The heart of that worldview is revealed in academic economic theory and social philosophy, in which self-interest and egoism are advanced as the universal human motivating forces. The point that is proved by the philosophical emphasis on egoism and atomic self-interest, in combination with the common experience of 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 academic emphasis on egoism. The other worldview, the first-language-nurture culture, is regarded with contempt and so largely unknown by the egoist/ self-interest faction. The incompetence of the leadership class is an inevitable expression of the narrowness of its competitive egoistic culture.

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