Category Archives: Equality

Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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No one can, by looting property or by any other kind of violence, get beyond the control of the macro-parasitic capitalist faction and its structures of cultural influence, because violence and property are the operating mechanisms of the parasite faction itself. The most important and valuable personal possessions aren’t property anyway but rather the system of ideas by which a person’s orientation is constructed: conceptions of nature, transcendence (the supernatural), community, and personal subjectivity, all provided originally by the ambient culture into which a person is born, and presented as reality. Getting beyond the control of a dominant faction has to be done by getting beyond the cultural system of reality which legitimates the parasites and their operations. Specifically, it is necessary to get beyond the top-down orientation of popular systems of reality, because that orientation enables the use of those systems as ideological legitimations of macro-parasitism. For example, the fact that cheetahs prey on antelope is cited (since Darwin) as proof that human-on-human macro-parasitism is decreed by the laws of cosmic nature. However, every Great Chain of Being that serves as a food chain is a political construct to legitimate predatory behaviour and institutions. To re-orient freely, you have to disconnect from the message built into culturally assigned personal identity that you are a product, creature, construct, or function of the ambient cultural system, of your ethnic and religious background and your relation to the economic system. That involves going beyond the stories and formulaic word groupings in common currency.

Spiritual Vulnerability Number One

Any survey of human behaviour at large finds striking uniformity, and that is often used against the idea of individual autonomy and creativity. However, there is widespread uniformity because culture provides circumstantial compulsions. All of that cultural uniformity is founded on a fascination that individual intelligences have with other intelligences. The most interesting thing to any individual intelligence is other intelligences, and it is undeniable that individuals are almost helpless and completely unviable without the support and nurturing of a surrounding group of people. It could be argued that the mutual attraction of intelligences is the ultimate spiritual vulnerability, because we are very often ready to put up with great discomfort and un-fulfillment to maintain our interconnection with others. One thread of romanticism holds that, due to the dependence of individuals on the support of other humans, the most important thing, the crucial thing, is that individuals be provided culturally with a sense of belonging and social attachment, no matter if that sense is based on outright falsehoods and deceptions. Because we are spiritual beings in the uncertain process of self-creation, and because we are uncertain of our spirituality, we begin by accepting the stories going around ambient culture, including the assignment of personal identity in terms of ethnicity, family, religion, nationality, gender-role, sexual orientation, job aptitudes, or trophies won, until we recognize that, along with belonging, they impose a sense of personal diminishment and a disabling false finality. That leads to a philosophical questioning of the ambient cultural system of reality, and of personal orientation within that reality, especially upon recognizing that top-down concepts of subjectivity, spirituality, and identity which produce personal diminishment and false finality also maintain control by the macro-parasite faction.

Embodiment and Spirituality

The incongruence between personal embodiment and spirituality has always been an important inspiration for philosophical questioning (in addition to the two vulnerabilities described in the previous posting). The challenging nature of the embodiment – spirituality duality is already expressed in ancient Orphic philosophy: a story about spirituality exiled and cast down from divinity, and imprisoned in matter by embodiment. That ancient story illustrates a longstanding approach to spirituality as the reach for “something higher”, as an inherent sense of relation between personal spirituality and a universal divinity. In fact, the inspiration to search for “something higher” is nothing other than the sense of unknowing or uncertainty about personal spirituality (what is personally “higher” in relation to dead matter), for example, the search for how personal aspirations and accumulated lessons learned are present invisibly (which is the immediate presence of “something higher”). The same impulse that goads the quest for the “higher” (non-apparent) presence of personal bearings or directionality is full enough of hopes and fears to fixate on the most grandiose possibility of the “something higher” in the form of deity, a non-apparent cosmic master intelligence or spirituality.

The rejection of such upward-orientation is not a rejection of spirituality. Spirituality is the creating of time as accomplished by every individual intelligence. Time is freedom into which an intelligence projects itself creatively, a personal hyper-space of ‘metaphysical’ non-actuality. Freedom is possible because time is a device or technique created by individual intelligences to transcend (be free of) nature’s determinism, and so it could be said that being-in-time is what distinguishes intelligences from the natural world within which we build lives. This is an unfamiliar idea, but time is the conception (opening) of freedom-from-nature and as such the transcendence of intelligences. Temporality is teleology. Transcendence is in the questioning directionality of any human gaze (always into futurity) and not in free-floating deities (there are none), nor in the vastness of nature itself, nor in the supposed one-ness of all existence. Individuals cannot claim to be creative masters of nature, but each person creates a time-system (a life) of possibilities and probabilities in our own universe of interiority, a personal orientation within non-actuality, which is then actually imposed on brute nature with variable success, and shared by building interconnections with other ordinary intelligences. **

There are several ways in which it is correct (but also misleading) to say that there is no spiritual self. The basic nature of the spiritual self is to evade a final particularity of itself, to project its self-creation continually into a not-yet of futurity. In that way spirituality is inseparable from time, and both have the same immateriality or ‘metaphysical’ quality, without appearance. The self is a no-thing-ness, neither a thing nor a structure of things, but instead is a spirituality or intelligence: a flight expressive of an interiority of non-actuality, time, and freedom. What time as a personal mirror shows is exactly spirituality. The immateriality of spirit is precisely the same thing as the immateriality of time. Time is not an appearance (does not appear), but instead is the orientation (spirituality) of an intelligence engaging with brute actuality, living its particular life and imposing that life onto brute actuality. An individual’s aspirations and lessons learned are present as shaping forces in this moment of engagement with the surroundings, but they are not perceived or perceivable. They are not “backstage” as images somehow pushing. They are present only in the non-appearing directionality (orientation) itself.

The only way to truly or fully embrace spirituality is to recognize the strict and inescapable individuality of embodiment. Spirituality is nothing other than freedom, the non-particularity of intelligence is the non-particularity of freedom, and freedom is actualized in gestures of the body. We have a tendency to overemphasize our particularity based on the finality of bodies, since bodies are measurable in great detail, mappable, chartable, locatable, and so we are very clear about our presence as a body-particular, up to a point (another vulnerability). We are much less clear about spirituality since it is a no-thing-ness, only a directionality pointing out away from itself. So, under the influence of cultural teachings, we underrepresent the never-yet-particularity of personal spirituality (intelligence) in our self-identification. That is why the emphasis here is on identity as spirituality with its creative freedom. The realms of experience most expressive of embodiment are, first, placement (being here), then, effortful mobility within, and effortful mobilization of, brute actuality, grounded in a person’s accumulated sense of the metabolic cost-shape of the world, and third, communication and interconnection with other people which, surprisingly enough, cannot be done strictly spiritually, but instead require gestures of the body. Embodiment defines a strict spiritual individuality.

The Bog of Yin/ Yang Spiritual Dualism

The no-thing-ness of spirituality is not a void to be filled from outside itself, but instead is a gusher of curiosity, questions, projections of marks and patterns, and expeditions of discovery and creation. That is why the proponents of macro-parasitic patriarchy would like to appropriate spirituality as a masculine quality. There is an historical attempt to connect mentality, specifically rational thinking, with masculinity, coupled with an attempt to associate femininity with embodiment. However, there are possibly more metaphorical congruences of spirituality with aspects of female sexual biology, based on spirituality as no-thing-ness, an absence, labyrinthine, creative, undefined and as such free. The positivism of embodiment surely is more congenial as representing a certain dominant style of masculinity. Not much should be made of any such metaphors, no metaphysical conclusions please, especially since far too much has been made of them historically. Spirituality is gender neutral, and metaphysics is not gendered.

It is obvious that no individual’s re-orientation beyond the dominant culture is going to cause the institutions of macro-parasitism to vanish, so that pay-off is strictly off the table. Getting past the typical top-down orientation does not objectively negate the power of the entrenched macro-parasitic faction and their decisive influence on culture-at-large. So, it is fair to ask what is achieved by getting past looking up to sovereignty, divinity, tradition, institutions, ethnicity, the language community, or anything like that. The process of philosophical liberation, the re-orientation accomplished by a critique of common reality, leads back to a new recognition of personal spirituality, to embracing spiritual individuality as defined by embodiment, and nullifying the typical alienation of autonomous creativity. The only pay-off is life as a spiritual being than which there is none greater or higher, embodied among others, conscious of the transcendent freedom of individual intelligences as distinct from the unfreedom of inertial nature, without guilt from any mythical inherent flaw, original sin, or from interpreting the will to live itself as a fatal weakness. The immediate result of going beyond culturally assigned definitions of personal identity is taking on the burden of spiritual no-thing-ness, which is the project of self-creation at every moment, engagement in a personal creative process. That has to be the new way to enjoy engaging with the surrounding cluster of other spiritual beings, all relating to one another using our precious embodiment.

** An earlier iteration of this paragraph can be found in posting 74, June 7, 2014, The Use and Abuse of Spirituality.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.

 

Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Embodiment, Equality, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Who am I? Why am I here? Where have I come from? Where am I going? These questions are personal, and at the same time reach beyond the personal, in a spiritual quest. A spiritual quest begins from a questioner’s recognizing the imperfection of self-awareness or self-possession, recognizing itself as its own blind-spot, recognizing the blind-spotness of itself to itself. It is a questioner’s sense of unknowing and curiosity about its own impulse (or imperative) to question and discover, about its own curiosity and its resulting construction of ever accumulating orientation, so, about its intelligence. Out of that sense of unknowing, a spiritual quest is a search for a fuller acquaintance with, or understanding of, this personal situation of intelligence in its aspect as the human situation.

Intelligence or spirit is (and intelligences are) the most interesting dimension of the situation of human life, but not the only one. There is a contrast between acquaintance with material surroundings on one hand and acquaintance with manifestations of intelligence such as the impulse to question and discover on the other, standing as a fundamental dualism in the quest for improved acquaintance with intelligence. Acquaintance with intelligence would not need a quest unless our ordinary acquaintance is mainly with something else, something not-spirit, normally identified as material nature or inertial nature, forces of unfreedom. Intelligence confronts nature. Deliberate teleological striving confronts lifeless falling. The freedom of curiosity confronts the unfreedom of inertia. Non-actuality (interior to an intelligence) confronts actuality (exteriority or the space of nature). Subjectivity confronts objectivity.

This dualism of human embodiment is not incidental to our situation but is essential and fundamental. Human life is played out by individuals in the encounter between non-actualities of our subjectivity (futurity, memory) and the brute actuality of objective nature. Many people find this dualism to be unsettling, even unthinkable, but to deny it is to evade the dynamic forces at the core of human lives. Philosophical consciousness is an orientation based on recognition of self as intelligence, but an embodied intelligence in a horizontal dualism with the non-intelligent (unfree) actuality of nature. In other words, it is an orientation based on recognition of self, paradoxically, as a spiritual presence with no appearance, with no-thing-ness, an embodied interiority of non-actuality, constructing and projecting freedom by constructing time within nature.

Metaphysics: Time is the Mirror of Intelligence

On the question of intelligence encountering and discovering itself (in its own blind spot), time is the crucial consideration, the self-revelation of experience. If you are searching for subjective intelligence in the perception of the world, you identify it in the essential temporal dimension of the world as perceived, in the subjectivity of our human position in time. Contemplation of time is the portal to the self-discovery of an intelligence. Time is, not incidentally, the main inspiration for metaphysics, an example of time being the mirror of intelligence. All metaphysics points to intelligence, but unfortunately often misconstrued as an alienated or disembodied cosmic intelligence.

At the edge of every conceptual system of reality there is some unavoidable vision of metaphysics to deal with the contradiction between actuality and the non-actual certainty of change, the contradiction between actuality and futurity, between actuality and memory. This is true also of materialism, which makes heroic efforts to avoid recognizing the creative contributions of intelligence in constructing reality. Material objects are models of perfect self-subsistence except as they exist under the aspect of time. There is always more than meets the eye, since time is non-apparent. Saying that there is an interiority to subjectivity is a way of acknowledging that it is non-apparent, and the non-appearance of time is exactly the non-appearance of subjective intelligence.

Looking Up

What often stamps a form or structure onto the dualism of the spiritual quest is a very old idea, already formed in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, that the intelligence of each ordinary individual person is a limited and inferior replica of, particle of, or a window on, a single grand intelligence, the cosmic intelligence. The spiritual quest then becomes a search for that obscure source intelligence, the greatest or highest intelligence, and the conception of the source intelligence typically expands into a conception of the creative source of everything, because only intelligence strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation. (This teleology of creation is another identifier of intelligence, to add to curiosity, questioning, accumulating orientation, and expressive voice.) So the idea of the source intelligence becomes an idea of intelligence as “higher” than the material surroundings in which it finds itself, higher conceptually by being the creator, and experientially as being represented in the ethereal vista of the starry night sky.

Lessons from the Failure of Alchemy

There has been a long history of searching nature for signs and signatures of the great source spirit or intelligence, since the personally interior intelligence, in its aspect of blind-spot, resists attempts to pin it down as anything in particular. Perhaps the most thorough and sophisticated search program in that history was practiced by alchemists, who thought that the material world must be some sort of map or image of intelligence or spirituality, designed by a gracious Creator as a guide for humans to find a way out of our spiritually fallen condition (trapped by ignorance within matter and time). Their idea of the philosophers’ stone, for example, was part of a projection onto nature of the spiritual quest. Alchemists thought that if they could find the process that transformed base metal into gold it would be a guide to moving the individual’s spirit out of its confinement in time and matter, along an upward path, to be reunited with divinity and eternity, a fulfillment of the spirit’s ultimate divine destiny. The philosophers’ stone was supposed to be the missing link between both base metal and gold, and between the mortal life of spirit and its divine life in eternity or timelessness. Alchemists were searching for eternity (immortality) as an escape from time itself.

So science, the study of nature as strict actuality, was a spiritual quest in the beginning, rigorously developed by alchemists. Alchemists made the mistake of supposing there must be a mirroring, a sameness of structure, dynamics, forces and processes, of intent, between the spiritual (which they conceived to be primarily inner in some way, as well as higher) and material nature (outer, lower). The researches and experiments of alchemists failed to discover the upward path they predicted, but their failure established quite convincingly that material nature is not a guide to the destiny or nature of intelligence, and does not present messages, signs, or signatures of a grand source intelligence. That was and is progress. Indeed, the failure of alchemy also goes a long way to proving the futility of the whole idea of the source intelligence, the grand master intelligence. There is nowhere in the world for such a thing. Their search was self-defeating all along because it is exactly time as the form of freedom which requires and so reveals intelligence in ordinary individuals. However, the alchemists’ error is still with us, as for example in the academic philosophers’ obsession with language as an objective map of thought or human interiority, instead of as a culturally constructed mechanism of imposing a collective orientation.

Something that stands out in alchemy as a spiritual quest is its acceptance or assumption of metaphysical hierarchy. The spiritual quest was preconceived as an upward path which rose from the low world of time and material objects, soaring to the glorious and noble heights of pure spirituality and eternity, to a reunion with divinity, hinted at by the ethereal vista of the clear night sky. This is an illustration of a profound problem with traditional conceptions of dualism, namely its vertical orientation, with spirit enjoying dominion or mastery over nature.

Re-Orientation to Horizontal Dualism

The fundamental situation of any person, the relationship between actuality (nature) and non-actuality (intelligence), is not hierarchical, but is instead horizontal. This is contrary to the historically normal assertion that spirit stands higher in the spirit-material encounter. The encounter of intelligence with nature can still be said to be horizontal and non-hierarchical even though the intelligence side (freedom) is also said to transcend the brute determinism of nature. The creative life of intelligences does have freedom-in-time whereas inertial nature does not, and that is a profound transcendence. However, the survival and freedom of intelligences is entirely dependent on engaging with nature. There is no immaterial heaven or occult dimension from which intelligences were somehow exiled and where we might return to manifest our full transcendent freedom. We depend on our embodiment, embedded in nature, in our very construction of teleological time and so of our freedom. The embeddedness of intelligences in nature prevents any assertion of metaphysical hierarchy giving spirit mastery over nature. The two sides of the dualism are so profoundly other with respect to one another, and yet so entangled, that there is no scale applicable to both to rank one above the other. Nature seems to subsist quite independently of intelligences. Having life-in-time does establish intelligences as profoundly different or ‘other’ with respect to nature, one side of an insurmountable and spectacularly creative, dynamic, and yes, freedom-producing dualism. Intelligences aren’t things of nature in spite of our embodiment (because freedom is not something of nature), but the bodies of intelligences are things which project or present the creativity of intelligences into nature. That is the situation and matrix of freedom. To embrace any universal totalizing absolute, you would have to abandon individual’s freedom-in-time, life itself.

The historical norm has been a misconception of transcendence as a soaring beyond experience, out from placement within time and so out into eternity. However, time itself is transcendence (freedom/ non-actuality) and the only transcendence. (Perhaps there is some sort of timelessness in acquaintance with time as an interior construct of personal intelligence.)

Pity the Culture-Bound

In the absence of an inherently clear individual self-intuition as autonomous intelligence (non-actuality/ time/ freedom), macro-parasitic cultures (sponsored and enforced by human macro-parasite factions, developed around ideology which legitimates and sanctifies such parasitism) declare that individuals carry an inherent vice, an original sin, from which we must be saved or redeemed by a higher exterior power. Such cultures exploit our blind-spot-ness to ourselves, our lack of a clear self-intuition, just as they exploit the whole complex of experiences inclining us to settle into a top-down model of reality, as described in posting 85, July 15, 2015, Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality. The parasite faction asserts itself as representative of the higher power, claiming to maintain the social order that God or nature decrees from above, and in that effort assigns individuals personal identities and values that fit a macro-parasitic agenda. When hegemonic cultures define and value individuals in terms of their economic niche, for example, the overall message is that the individual is a product of, a creation of, the social and cultural system they operate within, without which they are nothing. This has even acquired an academically rigorous ideology and the status of an indisputable given.

Human cultures misrepresent that which is peculiarly human to their host humans and so make an institution of our alienation from authentic self-acquaintance. For example, intelligences are not naturally prepared to fit easily into particular economic niches. Economic niches are always artificial. Yet every individual must find some niche in the social structure of an economic system, and focus considerable devotion to it. In capitalism, individuals are encouraged to construct a sense of personal identity and value from the economic niche they inhabit, and on the reward patterns of commercial consumption constructed into that niche. Under peer pressure we do our best to represent ourselves as some version of “economic man” expressing competitive self-interest in the hierarchical arrangements. Correcting this is a matter of identifying that which is peculiarly human in the human situation, or personal in the personal situation, which is intelligence (freedom, time, non-actuality) in a horizontal dualism with the brute actuality and unfreedom of nature, also encountering, within nature, multitudes of other embodied intelligences, all normally expressing the normative and controlling influence of an ambient culture. Culturally constructed self-alienation is what misdirects us to expect to locate transcendence in some ethereal milky-way of the supernatural, outside time. But no. The freedom of time is the only transcendence, and it is interior to individual lives, embodied and engaged with nature and with culture tainted with the macro-parasite orientation.

The taint at the source of human brutality and injustice is culture and not human nature (intelligence) which is non-actuality/ time/ freedom at the individual level. The failing is in the historical legacies of a particular human culture, derived from the essential thing about the lives of cowboys (armed men on horses, prehistoric, ancient, and modern): their violent macro-parasitism on migratory herd animals such as cattle and horses. It is a macro-parasitism anciently transferred onto human collectives. Cultural forms and traditions which structure the interconnection of individual intelligences, all tainted by human macro-parasitism and ideological efforts (metaphysical, ideological) to justify and legitimate that parasitism, are the source of the brutality and injustice in the systems of interconnection among individuals, and of our stubbornly persistent self-alienation. These are systems of reality in which the main value promoted by cultural incentives and rewards (proofs of manliness) is to be a parasite. However, that is not the way to freedom. There is an innate individual freedom which does not depend on brutality and injustice, or on the force of a higher power.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Class War, Embodiment, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity

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Certain givens of nature are crucial for any individual’s orientation in the world: gravity, solidity, the spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation, chemical transfers of energy. The givens of nature are modelled and measured by science. Culture is just as important for orientation: language, technology, economic infrastructure, and institutions. If you approach everything as culture (emerging from biology in some way) then probably you are an anthropologist or sociologist, working to perfect an account of the scientific determinism of human behaviour. You might also be philosophically postmodern, approaching everything as “text”. With some exceptions such as that, to think philosophically is to recognize that personal or subjective non-actualities are also crucial in any individual’s orientation, and that culture and the brute actuality of nature are constructed within a creative orientation which is interior to individual intelligences. Human life is played out by individuals in an encounter between the non-actualities of personal subjectivity and the brute actualities of objective nature. That we are also sponges of culture reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we experience from interconnection with others and their orientations. Culture also constitutes a crucial problem for individuals because it has been tainted by longstanding efforts to legitimize and even sanctify human-on-human macro-parasitism.

The Supernatural in Systems of Reality

In claiming that official systems of reality consist of conceptual constructs of nature, community, and individual subjectivity (in posting 79, January 15, 2015, Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality), it was not helpful that the supernatural went unmentioned. The supernatural is normally given far more emphasis and cultural elaboration than nature, and both nature and culture are often approached as encrypted messages from and about the supernatural. What is crucial, however, is that there is always a special connection between what is supernatural and individual subjectivity, often jointly conceptualized as “spirit”. That special connection is present because the whole idea of the supernatural originates in the experience of ordinary subjectivity: personal intelligence and the intelligences of other ordinary people. Caring, for example, is always and only interior to intelligences. Ethics and ethical judgements, identifications of justice and injustice, are always and only acts of intelligence. It is the same with ideas, abstractions, generalities, and categories. Teleological time, plans for the future, hopes or fears of a certain future, aspirations and intentions to create a certain future and to play among alternative plausible futures, are always and only interior to individual intelligences. Each individual constructs a pluralistic teleology, temporal bearings out of a past and toward an array of increasingly improbable futures, all non-actualities, which is to say, separate from the brute actuality of nature. Time is the miracle of intelligence because it is the matrix of freedom in its non-actuality. Caring, judgments of ethics or justice, and teleological time are all interior to ordinary intelligences. In spite of the fact that everyone’s direct and original acquaintance with those features of experience is in ordinary people, such features still have a supernatural quality. They express novelty and initiative (being alive) instead of merely inertia. Ordinary intelligence, then, is the primary supernatural, and that is why all ideas of the supernatural are ideas about intelligences or features of intelligence.

Whenever these interior features of intelligences are ascribed to the world at large, to nature, or to disembodied entities of any sort, they are inappropriate projections of what can only be interior to an ordinary person’s intelligence. As such, they are distortions of reality, fables, and deceptions that have disabling effects since they falsely personalize or personify nature, transforming nature into a super-person and infusing the whole arrangement with an overriding and centralized moral purpose and caring that cannot be there. Personalizing nature in that way subordinates individual subjectivity within a top-down structure, and trivializes individual subjectivity catastrophically in comparison with some fabulous (false) super-person. It is crucial for intelligence to be present in any model of fundamental reality, but it is just as important that the force of intelligence be correctly located in ordinary individuals.

Intelligence, and so what is supernatural, has generally been erroneously located and attributed. The main error has been in imagining that the intelligence or spirit that is experienced in ordinary people was placed there somehow by a vaster and ‘higher’ intelligence, some grander version of, or entity of, intelligence. Jumping to that conclusion plausibly follows from all the experiences we have of ‘things’ descending from the sky into our local situation. For example, rain arrives from the sky and washes the countryside and streets of the city. It waters thirsty grass, trees, and crops. Later the sun comes out from the clouds and warms the entire face of the earth with its powerful light, and the plants reach up to it. Our immediate survival depends on our eating, drinking, and breathing local bits of that vast environment which is vivified from above. Such experiences arrive in the context of the overwhelming and awesome vista of the starry night sky as seen from our position as embodied individuals, effectively rooted or tethered to solid ground, emphatically located, local, limited, and small compared with the world around us which is apparently endless; and also in the context of our childhood conditioning to having and depending on parental seniority presenting us gifts from the accumulated aids to orientation of a mysterious ambient culture. We are persuaded to imagine top-down models of cosmic reality by this whole awesome vista in which we can seem to be passive receivers.

However, in the case of intelligence, that pattern of remote origination, of fertility, is inappropriate and in fact pernicious. As soon as you posit an original higher intelligence, then it follows that everything that exists is a product of the plans, judgements, intentions, and caring of that higher intelligence. Nature becomes personified as the voice or expression of the higher intelligence, and not only nature but culture as well. The social order and the distribution of power and property all become expressions of the super-intelligence, and as such, sacred and unquestionable. In that context, any imperfections, flaws, or problems have to be attributed to human nature (or flawed co-gods) as a meagre imitation of the super-intelligence, and such a claim has often been used as both a license and an excuse for heinous brutality. However, nothing other than experiences such as rain and the beauty of the Milky Way indicates a remote origin for ordinary intelligence, and such experiences are unconvincing and inapplicable for this purpose. The intelligence of ordinary individuals does not originate from some grander, vaster, version of itself, but rather, each is autonomous in every person, and there is no grander version of intelligence anywhere. And yet, intelligence is still supernatural in every instance. (The imaginative projection of intelligence onto inanimate nature is a testament to the creative power of ordinary intelligences to invent non-actualities.) Ours isn’t the sort of supernatural which magically overrides and negates certain givens of nature, and yet, where nature is restricted to brute actualities, intelligences clearly dream or fountain up multitudes of non-actualities, and then live from them with variable degrees of success.

Re-Conceptualizing Systems of Reality

The mistake of projecting intelligence into the sky, out onto the cosmos at large, has catastrophic consequences by creating a conceptual niche for macro-parasite factions of humans, and those factions have developed pervasive official cultures to exploit that top-down structure. Re-conceptualizing reality is very largely a matter of replacing that longstanding top-down structure, which depends on personifying nature, with a bottom-up structure. In this revised conception of reality, the supernatural is identical with individual subjectivity. When the moral purpose and caring have been purged from the brute actuality of nature and correctly attributed to individual persons, there are consequences for social structure, politics, and economics, since we get beyond the imaginary imprimatur of God or nature on social and political inequality. On this bottom-up perspective, all individual intelligences are supernatural and fundamentally autonomous in their encounter with the givens of nature. The human landscape now becomes more equal and non-hierarchical, not structured as a Great Chain of Being conceived as a chain of command and subordination. However, that we are sponges of culture still reveals how much enlargement of intelligence or enrichment of orientation we can experience from interconnection with others.

Thinking Off-Grid and Leaving the Matrix

Carrying on within the top-down orientation that is massively supported by the ambient culture could be described as “living on the grid”, or “thinking on the grid”. It doesn’t matter if you have a bank account and subscribe to municipal utilities and electronic service networks. Those grids do impose certain limitations and a degree of predictability on an individual’s behaviour, but in terms of a personal orientation which internalizes mechanisms by which external manipulations operate, the great chain of cosmic command is the grid to keep in mind, because it is a cultural matrix in which we project noble motives upward onto the existence of authority instead of recognizing the otherwise obvious motive of macro-parasitism. Anyone with such an orientation can be carried along by culturally crafted voices and image streams claiming authority, spinning out emotional tides through mass corporate media, for example, dramas of mythical collectives such as nation, race, religion, language tribe, class, profession, or economic niche, full of conflicts and crises, the pageantry of nobility and villainy. One of the main incentives and rewards of macro-parasitism is the feeling of (false) grandeur and superiority expressed in and supported by pervasive and elaborate cultural pageantry of inequality and hierarchy. The consumption and luxury of capitalism is all pageantry supporting the illusion of exceptionalism and superiority. Off-grid, what is supernatural is all on the same level, the level of ordinary embodied intelligences, bringing the identification of the supernatural back to its origins and rejecting the unjustifiable fables it has inspired. Off-grid, it is no longer necessary to sanitize the motives and intentions behind the very existence of power and authority. It is possible to replace all the false drama and hierarchy with the project of expressing a personal creative process and cultivating mutually supportive interconnection among equal intelligences. Off-grid the human world is flat but at the same time multiply supernatural and as such unpredictably creative, even though the culture we have inherited from our murky history and which binds us to that history still remains a massive toxic force to be managed.

Note

For an introduction to macro-parasitism see:

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.

Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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

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Of the two lessons from history mentioned in the title, the bad news lesson was sketched in the previous posting. The second lesson inspires more optimism, and it is that there was a philosophically led cultural movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called the Enlightenment, the accomplishments of which we treasure more as their fragility becomes more and more evident. The three most influential Enlightenment philosophers, on Jonathan I. Israel’s view, were Benedict Spinoza (1631-77), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), and Denis Diderot (1713-84). In light of the lesson from history sketched in the previous posting, it is clear that the Enlightenment movement was not an unqualified success, although it was and is very far from being ineffectual. In all of history, only that philosophical movement has made noteworthy progress against the entrenched culture of human parasitism, and that was done with a three punch combination.

One punch was a new cultural wave of materialist science. The scientific perspective began to undermine the religion and metaphysics that promoted the legitimacy of top-down parasite factions within Christendom: monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Descartes, Hobbes, and others of their generation were crucial in that conceptual groundwork for science, breaking away from Aristotelian-religious ideas as previously codified by Thomas Aquinas. The conceptions of materialist science were persuasive and far-reaching enough to create structural instability and a cultural vacuum in the orientation system of Old Regime reality. A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories (tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as typical ways of acting and material culture, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature, community, and individual subjective interiority. The cultural instability in Old Regime Christendom caused by scientific ideas enabled the effectiveness of a second Enlightenment punch: a campaign of strengthening the dignity and autonomy of individuals, in contrast to the Augustinian concept of human nature tainted and enslaved by original sin. That was done by recognizing universally distributed rationality: an individually innate human ability to judge what is true and real based entirely on commonly available perceptions. The previous history of the spread of proletarian literacy from the time of Wycliffe in the fourteenth century was crucial in this increasing dignity and power of human nature at the individual level. Philosophers of the radical stream of the Enlightenment presented rationality as empowering bottom-up control of society, re-enforcing universal equality, human rights, and democracy, specifically contradicting any top-down social control in the name of rationality now routinely blamed on the Enlightenment.

The third punch was a promotion of the autonomous application of rationality for the most ambitious philosophical thinking, for a re-conceptualization of the most fundamental realities without appeal to any kind of ‘superego’ such as the omniscient/ omnipotent deity supposedly expressed through established authorities, both religious and civic. Re-thinking reality is distinctly a philosophical project, evading culture with intent to re-model culture, and the enlightenment movement was self-consciously philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ meant making use of rationality without religious assumptions of cosmic or divine purpose for people, without cosmic teleology or any kind of external superego. (Teleology does not necessarily mean cosmic purpose, divine purpose, or purpose in nature.) ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘rationally non-religious’ and consequently de-centralized, asserting a pluralism and diversity of thinking quite foreign to religious cultures.

The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era re-conceptualized all three branches of the Christian system of reality: nature, community, and individual subjectivity. In medieval and Old Regime reality the human essence was thought to be an immortal soul or spirit, truly at home in a realm of eternity outside and above nature (nature considered as the realm of time or semi-delusional becoming in which human souls are temporarily stranded and tested) and every soul’s destiny was thought to be determined entirely by an omnipotent and eternal deity. The radical rationalists re-conceived nature scientifically as a strictly physical system of ‘clockwork’ completely free of disembodied spirits and their power, free of cosmic teleology, purpose, or destiny. They re-conceived individual subjectivity as universally educable to rationality and capable of spontaneous rationality, even though usually trained by existing institutions to a condition of non-rational credulity, superstition, and abject deference to entrenched authorities. The Enlightenment rationalists upset the Christian system of reality by bringing the human essence back from eternity into nature, rejecting all super-natural entities or realms of being, and then arguing that in the primordial ‘state of nature’, prior to establishment of arbitrary social conventions, all people would have had equal freedoms and rights. In that way, society was re-conceived as a system of equal persons with equal rights and freedoms of thought, expression, and association, best organized as a democratic republic (bottom-up political force). This thorough re-conceptualization of the system of reality profoundly weakened the legitimacy of monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

The strongest social and cultural authorities have always persisted in an anti-enlightenment campaign, for obvious reasons. The cultural and political situation at the launch of the twenty-first century reveals that elements of the enlightenment re-conceptualization of reality failed the test of determined opposition. Enlightenment theory contained some flaws and mis-conceptions. Still, the intent here is to learn lessons from the Enlightenment about re-thinking reality so as to reach a point in history where we get beyond the influence of human parasites.

The Current System

The Freudian model of individual subjectivity is a fair codification of the currently prevailing system of reality. Since Freud, it has been common to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of human psychology, always expressing strictly natural forces, forces other than individual creative freedom. The parasite culture loves a conception of subjectivity dominated by natural drives or universal compulsions because such impulses are reliably available to be culturally triggered, stimulated, managed, manipulated, channelled, and controlled so as to sustain a set of mass demands that can be supplied at a profitable price, for example, or to arrange mass lessons and training exercises in obedience and subordination such as wars. In addition, the apparently chaotic and atomizing force of such compulsions provides a convenient excuse to insist on institutionalizing some version of a great unquestionable parent, structuring reality to include an authoritarian power which parasite factions intend to reserve for themselves to occupy and operate. In the Freudian model, that parental role is called the ‘superego’. Historically earlier systems of reality featured myths of disembodied super-intelligent powers such as gods and demons, or an all-determining realm of eternity, whose power accounted for and sanctified the worldly power of the parasites. Modern theorists often proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or origin, and people must become “well adjusted” by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of ‘just so stories’ or appeals to divine intervention in appointing social supervisors, the modern system of reality falls back onto social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures.

Hobbes’ vision of the ‘state of nature’ is a decently accurate description of the culture-world of will-to-power masculinity (distinct from human nature, even though Hobbes presented it as human nature), always on the brink of war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the masculine will-to-power avoid the all-destructive war of anarchy by agreeing to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by instituting a contract by which a sovereign, with absolute power over life and death, is established to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t evade enforcement). The social contract essentially confers ultimate and unlimited ownership of persons and properties upon the sovereign. So, from nothing more than cowboy rational self-interest (now assumed to be determined biologically), authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain the many anarchic expressions of self-interest, naturally pre-determined compulsive egoism. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science. Hobbesian theory, from Leviathan, like Plato’s model of the three-part soul from Republic, is one of those intellectual images of reality which became ingrained in culture at many levels, to the point of being considered obvious and difficult to question.

The Freudian Model

When Plato’s ancient but perennial model of a three-part subjectivity (expressed outwardly in a stratified society) is combined with Hobbes’ theory of socially contracted sovereignty, what emerges is codified in Freud’s model of personality or subjectivity, from which the term “superego” is taken along with the other elements of the structure, namely “id” and “ego”. (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had already developed these ideas.) In that model, the main vectors of force are the id, bestial lusts for pleasure, sparkly things, power, and status (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, on the Freudian view reducible to nature in the form of biological compulsions); and the superego, representing authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, priests, and police, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Those two vectors of force, nature and society, confront and balance one another in every person’s subjectivity, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the ego, the individual personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that ego on this model, no reality. The ego has only the force of id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of authority figures. That is all there is to an individual Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature enslaved by original sin but civilized by the ever-ready whips and gallows of Church and military-monarchical states.

So, Freud’s model of the individual’s psychological interior is a structure of three elemental positions, two of which are forces: the set of instinctive or biological drives collectively called the id, and the aforementioned superego consisting of internalized authority or parental figures featuring officials of various kinds representing the institutional realities of sovereignty and deity, the ultimate and unlimited owners of all persons and property. Between the id and the superego is the image called the ego, and it is all position and no original force or content, merely the balancing point between instinctive drives and socially derived constraints. That ego, nothing more than a semi-stable image, can be recognized as another view of “zombie shells” (invoked in earlier posts) when other forces of social influence are considered, such as role models among peers influencing appearance, interests, and attitudes toward people in various economic situations, people with different ways of making a living; and also role models thrown up by teachers or media personalities, for example, in terms of careers, style of life, appearances of pleasure, power, and status. Everyone needs to be accepted socially, and so has to conform to some accepted style of life and style of person. All these social approvals/ disapprovals are forces which shape a person’s outward presentation into an image of a social personality, an ego. However, that image of personality is not created by social pressures and biological compulsions alone, but most importantly by an individual intelligence managing those forces while remaining quite distinct from the ego image.

The Thinking Subject

We need to re-model the system of reality codified in the Freudian vision by adding a new creative force, namely individual intelligence, which creates the ego image as part of its management of a whole array of impulses and forces acting on it. The social and cultural dominance of parasite factions can never be complete or irrevocable because of an elemental, autonomous, and creative freedom to individual intelligences (simply as intelligences) which asserts itself and which, in asserting itself, is able to recognize and to mark its divergence from forces tending to control, deceive, and diminish it. One of the ways in which individual freedom asserts itself is in thinking about itself within a system of reality and developing self-awareness and self-identification, which is to say, in a sort of philosophical thinking.

Thinking is self-directed reorientation in increasingly refined and elaborated questioning, acting on specific curiosity in searching experiences to open the world in novel patterns of recognition and identification. That reorienting search is not entirely directed outward. Ideas are not imposed on intelligence by sensations. There are two surprise horizons at play in the individual’s process of reorientation. Inseparable from the outward sensory reach there is also an inward opening to growth and development in the integration and restructuring of accumulated bearings from past experience and so to what is being sought, in the specifics of curiosity, wonder, or questioning, in a sense of possibilities, patterns, or ideas. Inseparable from that is a developing sense of what it is that is curious and questions and gazes and listens and opens to new recognitions and new bearings, of thinking as a personal creative act. Individuals create completely original and unique states or shapes of orientation, just in the course of the ordinary process of building a particular life. Although linguistic utterances are often used in reorientation, they are not the main story. The reality of thinking without language is important since language is culture and loaded with the malice of parasitic influence. Thinking without language is just reorienting in patterns far too complex to be codified in language. Language is too rigid structurally, rule-bound, too standard and conventional to help much in self-directed reorienting. The sense of effortful, metabolically costly embodiment is more important. From personal curiosity you seek out the niche aspects of experience, previously unidentified within the increasingly big picture, which open new prospects you are ready to explore and to mark.

Archaic Superegos

The subjective interiority described in the standard Freudian model is a culturally programmed nearly-reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Superegos do loom large for most individuals. The individual’s sense of self-definition is often not much more than an image or shell patched together from cultural fragments, and appetites and competitive spirit are culturally triggered and encouraged along certain channels. However, this model and the nearly-reality it depicts are products of parasitic cultural influences and profoundly misrepresent individual intelligences. Just as radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era built on certain cultural legacies which increase the recognition of dignity and power in individual intelligences, maintaining progress requires another assertion of individual autonomy.

The autonomous force of intelligence is far richer than the instinctive-biologically driven id. There is an intelligence in a particular natural and cultural situation building a sustainable life. That intelligence is very far from being identical with the ego image, although it constructs the ego image to survive. History shows that superegos all represent the control of top-down parasite culture, driven by malign and ignoble origins, pretences, and motives. Superegos all claim ownership of the individual subject, both body and subjectivity, at the same time as doing their utmost to obscure and disguise their actual parasitism. There is no legitimacy to any ownership of individual intelligences, and so it is crucial to repudiate the claim of parasite factions and institutions to own individuals. To be un-owned is an absolute requirement of freedom, by definition and in practice. Anyone undertaking to think philosophically, for example, must not be owned but must be consciously autonomous. To abandon superegos is to recognize your own condition of not-being-owned, and in doing that, you have to recognize the same for every other individual intelligence. Philosophy can never be an assertion of top-down intellectual authority because it throws authority to every individual, based entirely on the power of intelligence-as-such.

As a consequence of recognizing the autonomous power of individual intelligences, the currently prevailing system of reality as depicted in the Freudian model can and should be re-constructed by removing superegos completely. The normal fear raised to justify the necessity of superegos or sovereign supervisors is the vision of individuals as missiles of compulsive self-gratification, but that is only true of individuals conditioned to the traditional culture of will-to-power masculinity. When that cultural conditioning is unloaded, what is left is a much more complicated innocent intelligence which empathically recognizes and responds to the presence of other separate intelligences. The innate importance and force of individual intelligence means that abandoning all forms of the superego does not unleash the bestial lusts of nature in the form of id, but rather unleashes the individual to realize its autonomy and creative power, which includes the force for empathic interconnectedness. The only way to have an authentic morality is by developing the innocent empathy that remains when the cultural influences are removed that insist on defining some persons in such a way as to legitimize the use of them as hosts for parasitic purposes. Anyway, superegos founded in human parasitism are strictly absurd as guardians of morality. Their whole way of being is anti-empathic immorality.

The individual self-construct needs to be re-conceived by displacing instinctive drives with intelligent questioning, an intelligence searching for empathic interconnectedness. (Please see blog posting 77, November 19, 2014, Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation.) This paradigm shift has the effect of re-constructing or re-modelling the whole system of modern reality. It requires that we re-model reality to recognize a discontinuity between unfree nature and free intelligences, to open a space for individual freedom in spite of the brute determinism of nature, especially in the form of biological compulsions. It was the radical Enlightenment rationalists who originally brought the idea of a human essence back from eternity into time and nature, but they were only partly right. They were right that the discontinuity is not as imagined in Christianity, but it isn’t as if we can de-couple intelligences completely from nature. Although individual intelligences are describable as separate universes of time and orientation, each is a universe that is oriented to the world of nature and fundamentally in love with other intelligences with whom it engages always through the medium of nature. It can’t float off to some ethereal cloud of eternity, because intelligence couldn’t construct teleological time without an engagement with nature. What is crucial is a recognition that culture expresses more than nature, that understanding culture requires a recognition of individual creative intelligences.

Note: My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely from the monumental Enlightenment trilogy by Jonathan I. Israel, specifically cited in previous postings.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.

Two Lessons from History: Bad News First

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Equality, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Political Power

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The Malice of Civilization

Human-on-human parasitism is not something civilization strives to overcome, not some accidental or unanticipated by-product of the social and political institutions called civilization, but rather is the entire intent and matrix of, the fundamental goal and reason for, the arrangements of civilization. Political and economic arrangements originated historically in the violent coercion of human communities by certain human factions determined to enjoy the benefits of parasites by means of that coercion. History reveals a human community divided between parasite factions and the human masses they prey upon. The most obvious lesson from history is the global triumph and entrenchment of a culture supporting top-down human-on-human parasites. It isn’t human nature which preserves the common injustices which constitute parasitism, but rather a specific dominant, pervasive, and institutionalized culture dependent on inequality and subordination, a culture which could be called will-to-power masculinity. For oppressions of ethnicity, race, class, gender, or religion (or atheism), it isn’t human nature that has to be confronted and somehow overcome, but the parasite faction’s culture (a “unified field theory” of oppression). What is waiting for everyone riding the social mobility bus north into the corporate and investor class is benefits from the practices of parasites.

A clear view of the malicious culture at the heart of civilization can be found in The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception, written by William J. Brandt*, in which a close study of medieval chronicles shows the values and patterns of perception characteristic of European aristocracy, the cultural faction pioneering economic and sovereign power as it still exists, forming institutions of sovereignty, nationality, war, high culture, and wealth distribution that still function throughout the modern cultural system. It is the ethos of an absolute and unending quest for splendour of personal reputation, the culture of manly honour/ profit that still plagues humanity in many forms. Those aristocrat knight/ barons and their literate intelligentsia took themselves (barons) to be models of human nature at its purest, which is to say devoid of and contemptuous of empathy. They also conceived their Christian deity as very much like themselves and as such the source and proof of their superiority. Something that Brandt does not say, but which is implicit in his observations, is that those medieval barons (armed men on horses) were consolidating a way of living as human parasites on many levels. They were parasites on the females of their own class (for their reproductive and nurturing labour), on people outside their class working to create the necessities of sustainable lives, and most immediately on animals, the horses that were forced to carry them and the dogs that did their hunting, for example. The barons acquired ownership of property of all kinds by lethal assault, and refined a culture which glorified their looting. Brandt refers vaguely to the fading of their culture, sometimes called feudal chivalry, but it cannot be doubted seriously that there is a direct line of cultural descent, a single ethos, extending from knight/ barons in the chronicles studied by Brandt to contemporary crime families, corporations (such as investment banks), and governments (especially in their military culture, covert activities, and ‘foreign’ relations), all of which have the means of evading law and so the immunity to act out patterns of behaviour which channel the culture of the barons. The households of barons were organizational embryos of the governments of modern sovereign states, of corporations, and of crime families; and their personal ethos remains the cultural ideal of capitalism and masculinity generally.

Culture is Strategic Propaganda

In their fetish for display, ornamented decoration, pageantry, ceremony, and elaborate entertainment the barons inaugurated the models of high culture and fine art which still endure. The people who can afford to consume the work of artists on a moderate to large scale, to employ artists and to commission particular works, are royals, aristocrats, capitalists and their wealth organizers, princes of the Church, and people in power. When they have their portraits made or commission architecture and monuments, the intent is to idealize, glorify, and immortalize themselves, their culture, and the whole parasitic system of power and wealth they represent. Works of art in that context are intended to overpower and bedazzle, to halt critical thinking by invoking emotional currents with the specious beauty of an image or an impression. Of overriding importance for fine art in the capitalist economic system is that it is a branch of the finance/ investment industry, a luxury goods trade dealing in trophy items promoted as so rare, unpredictable, and impressive that they become an investment hedge for surplus wealth. Of course individual creators are capable of removing their creative process from that superstructure of art culture, but in no case are the artifacts produced important enough, neither individually nor in sum total, to count as justifications for, or legitimizing achievements of, parasitic culture and practice.

The coercion practiced by parasite factions has been normalized through efforts of that faction’s intelligentsia to construct benign explanations and justifications for it, normally by appealing to an omnipotent divine intelligence, to “justify the ways of God to man” (John Milton, Paradise Lost). Any religious culture featuring omnipotent cosmic forces serves instantly to justify whatever happens to exist. Intellectual work, including philosophy, is always written in a cultural context controlled by top-down human-on-human parasites, and intellectuals normally belong to, or owe their livelihood to, the parasite faction, and like everyone have to contend with the coercion of ambient parasites. In that context many philosophers devote themselves to an attempt to justify, even sanctify, existing institutions and avoid thinking beyond the belief system which supports inequalities of wealth and power. The fact that Aristotle invented justifications for slavery, for example, illustrates the longstanding effort by philosophers to conceive grounds of morality other than empathy, so that universal equality could be avoided and the brutality of sovereign states and the baronial classes which operate them could evade a true moral evaluation.

So, not only are the parasites diverting benefits disproportionately to themselves, but, far more importantly, by decisive influence on both high culture and popular culture, including religions, art, entertainment, media of advertising and journalism, and intellectual culture, they arrange messaging to convince everyone that their arrangements are inevitable, pre-determined by higher powers, by God or nature, the best of all possible worlds. In aid of that, there is cultural support for the assumption that individuals are not competent to identify and think about this issue, that we do best keeping a narrowly practical focus, earning and consuming as much as we can manage, refreshing ourselves with cultural entertainments and doing our utmost to ride the social mobility bus up, changing nothing but our personal circumstances. The idea of human equality has such a difficult time being broadly understood and embraced because the entire culture of institutionalized sovereign states and their economic organization is founded on top-down human-on-human parasitism constantly declaring justifications for itself.

*The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception, written by William J. Brandt, published by Schocken Books (1973), ISBN 0-8052-0408-3.

See also:

1215: The Year of Magna Carta, written by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham, Published by Touchstone (2005), ISBN-10: 0743257782, ISBN-13: 978-0743257787. This is an illuminating glimpse of life in Europe at an important moment in the development of law. At that moment it was perfectly clear that the social layer made up of the landowning aristocracy or nobility was nothing other than crime families.

The Wars of the Roses, written by Robin Neillands, published by Brockhampton Press (1999), first published in the UK 1992 by Cassell plc, Villiers House, London, ISBN 1860199976.
The brutality of the European military aristocracy is clearly illustrated in this narration of dynastic conflict through generations of the extended Plantagenet family.

For a glimpse of the adaptation of top-down culture control to modern conditions listen to the following audio documentary:
World War One and the Birth of Public Relations, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Radio One, Program: Ideas, (Wednesday, November 26, 2014) Ira Basen reports on how the science and industry of public relations arose from American institutions promoting World War I.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

Enlightenment and l’esprit philosophique

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Nature, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The reason for the seventeenth and eighteenth century efforts at Enlightenment was to unseat the entrenched top-down human-on-human parasites plaguing Old Regime society. Those parasites were disguising themselves as avatars (monarchy, aristocracy, and Church hierarchies) of a fictitious Supreme Parent (projections of the universally imprinted parent), and in that guise systematically curtailing the liberty, initiative, individuality, and material prosperity of the great mass of the population, with the intent to channel disproportionate wealth and privilege to themselves. The purpose of the Enlightenment movement was to improve the conditions of human life generally by dismantling the effects, material, cultural, and psychological, of top-down human-on-human parasites.

Orientation from Strict Rationality or Intelligence

In the work of Spinoza, one of the founding visionaries of the Enlightenment, there is a quite Stoic identification of philosophical thinking with strict rationality, such that a person is thinking philosophically to the extent that their thinking goes entirely beyond the influence of traditions, habits, imitations, the talk going around, commonly accepted assumptions, fads and fashions, the declarations of authorities, or any other cultural givens and influences, not to mention personal guesses and fantasies possibly expressing wishes and fears, and instead proceeds entirely on the basis of clear evidence and mathematical (geometrical-logical) rationality. On that view, l’esprit philosophique is a dedication to thinking rationally and to building a general orientation by a consistent practice of thinking rationally.

In his lecture series about Pre-Platonic philosophers*, Nietzsche focused on the novel kinds of persona constructed and projected by individual philosophers in their philosophical presentations. Spinoza’s strictly rational philosophical person belongs in that line of thinking. To take that line to a conclusion, it can be said that when any sort of person thinks philosophically about issues, they do so entirely as an intelligence. If a person presents claims from thinking as a representative of a particular race, gender, body type, social stratum, ethnicity, religion, profession, or even age, then those claims are limited, culturally biased, parochial, and special, in a way that philosophy needn’t be and shouldn’t be. To think philosophically is to act strictly as an intelligence, but philosophy as such is not the only way to express personal existence as intelligence. Acting creatively from any personal creative process also qualifies. So, to think philosophically in the tradition of Spinoza is to think from a self-identification as pre-cultural (innocent) intelligence.

*The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, written by Friedrich Nietzsche, Translated from German and edited, with an introduction and commentary, by Greg Whitlock, Published by: Urbana, University of Illinois Press. (2001), ISBN: 0252025598. See page 58.

In present circumstances, just as in the Old Regime era, the intent in developing a philosophical consciousness, a practical identification of personal subjectivity as innocent intelligence, is to re-model ordinary culture-influenced consciousness to remove the internal “receptors” that give human parasites the opportunities they need to trigger subordination and the whole system of false values that goes with it, and so to gradually dislodge the current collective of top-down human-on-human parasites, and eventually discredit the culture of parasitic will-to-power masculinity permanently. Getting beyond every vestige of the imprinted parent, probably the most important trigger of subordination, is an aspect of recognizing both personal freedom and the fundamental equality of intelligences.

This is not a move in an endless cultural evolution from one form to another, not a change of fashion resulting from some fundamental instability, dialectic, or taste for novelty in nature or human nature. There is a destination, an end point of this process, which might be described as the popular and widespread achievement of a philosophical consciousness, beyond all vestiges of the imprinted parent and the cultural tags of subordination.

Time is the Form of Freedom

Notwithstanding the spectacular advances of science and technological engineering, the enduring relevance of philosophy derives from its specific orientation to the questioning in any human gaze, and especially to freedom in that individual gaze. Without the question, there is no gaze, no perception, no knowledge. The freedom in that questioning is inseparable from teleology, from futurity, the construction of time. Time is not a substance, nor substantial in any way. No theory of substance, not even the single substance of Parmenides or Spinoza, will help with understanding time or teleology, because teleology is a construct of what does not exist. Time is interior to each individual questioning gaze, and in fact, time is nothing but the question in the gaze. Time is not a dimension of objects (or of nature) except insofar as objects are identified by an intelligence in its building a life.

Empiricism, a strong feature of Spinoza’s vision, depicts an impossibly passive intelligence, and does its best to diminish and marginalize the questioning in the individual gaze, attempting to construe knowledge as if it were entirely a product of sensations. Empiricist knowledge, on that view, is merely an effect of non-intelligent givens, of natural causes. However, contrary to strict empiricism, before an intelligence reacts to its surroundings, or even receives effects, it questions, reaches, searches, selects, and makes some kind of sense of what it finds. There is always an indispensable contribution to what is perceived made by the perceiver. Some conceptual form or sense must be applied to givens, and such conceptual form is a creation of intelligence and is not a sensory given. (That is a version of Kantian idealism, an interpretation of rationalism.)

Nature Excludes Teleology (Freedom)

It would be difficult for anyone to disagree that there are events in the world, such as one’s own deliberate actions, which can be understood properly only as teleological, the results of purpose, aspiration, intent, or the prior conception of future goals in the context of building a life. Yet it is also evident that not all events are teleological. Nature is indeed a completely non-teleological realm. There is no teleology in strictly natural processes, in the playing out of natural laws in the cosmos as a whole or at a local level. However, since we began by recognizing teleological events, that we create them, it is difficult to avoid envisioning a system of two different but interacting sets of events, one of which consists of the deliberate actions of humans or generally intelligent beings. There is nature and additionally a complex category of teleological non-nature. Teleology is temporality, futurity. Orientation toward a future constructed of intelligently conceived but strictly non-actual possibilities, negations, and estimated probabilities is the framework of freedom. The category of non-nature includes both the population of individual (embodied) intelligences about whom it makes sense to talk about teleological freedom, and the cultures which that population has created. Culture is the creation of the population of individual embodied intelligences engaging with one another exterior to exterior, making use of nature to do so. However, the longstanding success of certain factions of humans at being parasites on other humans, and in that effort constructing culture as a mechanism of inequality in power and control, makes culture inextricably coercive, which is to say, political.

Culture as a Parasitic Weapon of Mass Disempowerment

It is not difficult to see how religion, managed by a faction with large-scale parasitic intent, works as mass disempowerment. An organization or person can play on the pre-existing mass conditioning to, and expectation of, some parental-type authority and the superstitious expression of that conditioning in beliefs about all-powerful free-floating parental-type spirits such as a father-god in the sky. Such an organization or person only has to pull off a convincingly theatrical assertion of receiving divine revelations to establish themselves as the chosen prophet, the messenger, the instrument of the invisible Supreme Parent, and suddenly the mass of believers is at their mercy. The Old Regime parasite factions had succeeded in contaminating western culture with superstitious myths of omnipotent disembodied avatars of the Supreme Parent, an ideology which allowed them to carry on brutal parasitism with nearly complete impunity. It is crucial that they based their legitimacy on metaphysics, the metaphysical claim of an omnipotent disembodied super-intelligence, because it turned out that a more plausible metaphysics (and only that) could reveal the falseness of their claim to legitimacy. That was and still is a stunningly surprising vulnerability in the operating of human parasites. Human parasites always appeal to metaphysics, such as cosmic intelligences or materialist determinism, to proclaim the ultimate necessity of human subordination and hierarchy, the institutionalization of parent-child type inequality; and so metaphysics is the first and crucial place they must and can be discredited. That is the enduring relevance of metaphysics. Only a philosophical consciousness (l’esprit philosophique as it was named in the eighteenth century) as distinct from a consciousness projecting and accepting Great Parent avatars of the internally imprinted parent, can think beyond the myths of power entrenched within prevailing culture. A philosophical consciousness implies bottom-up rather than top-down access to reality in the power of critical and creative thinking inherent universally in individual teleology.

So consider, what metaphysics would illuminate the conditions for general human happiness and well being? What is the metaphysics of universal human rights, democratic equality, and individual freedom of thought and expression? In other words, what metaphysics would discredit and remove from the great mass of humanity the burden of top-down human-on-human parasites? The Enlightenment idea of a philosophical consciousness was indistinguishable from the emerging scientific consciousness in which disembodied teleology and parent-type omnipotent teleology were removed completely. Spinoza’s materialism was understood to discredit the pretensions of reigning violent families to be legitimized by divine determination of human affairs because with materialism there could be no divinity distinct from determinate nature to intervene in human affairs. In the vacuum left by the destruction of that traditional authority, the importance of every person as a rational being, and the general will of the collective of all people, emerged as the only plausible foundation of authority. The power of individual rationality was combined with the consequences of materialism for myths of the great unthinkable parent. That was l’esprit philosophique emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The same pre-existing mass conditioning to, and expectation of, parental-type authority still exists in mostly unidentified obscurity. The old father god is still widely taken for granted and, even without that superstition, the idea of parental-type sovereignty of the state is still largely unquestioned, as is hierarchical subordination generally, structured by competitions for recognition, rewards, and upward advancement for those proven most pleasing in the calculating gaze of some great parent avatar. The competition to reach the top in business organizations or professions has a semi-unconscious, unstated, informal, agenda. Just below the surface, the competition is about projecting a sustained impression of masculinity, a culturally stipulated masculinity as the systematic invulnerability to empathy. To be chosen for top positions, females would have to be the most masculine candidate in the competitions, but not many women can do that.

The condition of adult orientation in which no vestige remains of an imprinted parent would be a philosophical consciousness, recognizing bottom-up access to reality, since individual intelligence is what remains when authority vanishes. It was already clear to Enlightenment activists that the crucial means by which to get beyond the universally imprinted parent at a broad cultural scale was to identify, clarify, and distribute l’esprit philosophique as individual empowerment. A philosophical consciousness that would be relevant now should include awareness of the fundamental importance of l’esprit philosophique in the Enlightenment effort for universal equality and human rights, the unique historical precedent of accomplishing a large-scale cultural movement to get beyond the effects (inequality and subordination) of the universally imprinted parent which has been fundamental to entrenchment of human-on-human parasites.

The Question of Enlightenment Individualism

One of the limitations of Enlightenment materialism with its shift of sovereignty from divine Providence (as expressed through Churches, aristocracy, and monarchy) to the general will was a certain lack of attention to human individuality. The principle of the universality of human rationality did serve as a grounding for universal human rights and individual freedom and dignity, but the tendency of strict rationality is generic, and the more creative aspects of human individuality and freedom were not clearly founded in Spinoza’s monism. A philosophical consciousness that would be relevant now must include awareness of the real foundation of universal human rights and equality, which is to say, awareness of individual intelligence-as-such, innocent teleology, the fundamental humanity which eliminates all the culturally determined tags of subordination, alienation, and de-humanization which work as barriers to universal empathy. It should also include awareness of the cultural mechanisms and techniques of the parasite faction to present and preserve inequality as a positive value, and that the crucial challenge of philosophy in the twenty-first century is to repudiate the claim of parasite factions to be justified and legitimized by nature as represented by science.

The Will to Power vs Empathy

The idea that a “will to power” is the core of all vital force, all vitality, an idea from Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation) as interpreted by Nietzsche, is just another expression of the persistent culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, and as such narrowly biased. Another philosophical expression of the same culture can be seen in the idea Hobbes had of the state of nature, a war of all against all, quite accurate within the dominant culture of masculinity. Hobbes, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were all childless males with few profound attachments beyond a small cohort of male peers. The theory of the will to power is properly appreciated as a revelation of their culture of masculinity, what could be called will-to-power masculinity. The overwhelming predominance of males in academic professions, all immersed in that culture, still enables the theory of human nature as will-to-power to be pervasive and persistent, for example in contemporary deconstructionist theory. It dovetails with the legacy of Augustinian Christianity, declaring human nature universally to be the unalterable source of injustice. Such a bias obscures the very possibility of progress (illustrated by Foucault, for example) and also blocks identification of the culture of will-to-power masculinity itself as the historical, and very alterable, source of injustice. Culture is mutable even if nature isn’t.

Empathy

The parasitic culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, cowboy masculinity, works by exploiting opportunities presented by the universally imprinted parent to disable universal empathy. It is difficult to imagine eradicating that whole poisoning culture, but what it comes down to is whether or not it controls you personally, and there are ways for innocent teleology to cultivate its self-possession. Beyond the imprinted parent lies a truly empathic philosophical consciousness. Only when you strip away from personal definition everything except bedrock innocent intelligence (and you can) do you escape the prejudicial tags used within cultures to mark out constructs of superiority and inferiority, tags such as race, gender, ethnicity, abled-ness, body-shape, size, strength, wealth, extroversion, and so on. Those tags are cultivated by the culture of will-to-power masculinity specifically to obstruct any straightforward empathy with other intelligences (people) universally, but when the cultural tags are discredited and ignored what remains is innocent teleology which is discernible, although individual, in all individual eruptions into nature of intelligent animation. Nothing but a philosophical consciousness, which is just self-consciousness as creative teleological freedom, innocent intelligence, can disempower the controlling effects of culture poisoned by the ethos of human-on-human parasites. This all points to a metaphysics that can reboot the Enlightenment movement to dismantle the material, cultural, and psychological effects of top-down human-on-human parasites, and that metaphysics is not any form of deterministic monism.

Beyond the influence of myths and projections of a universally imprinted parent (a dominating super-intelligence or institution of subordination) dawns the recognition of a large number of individual intelligences, each with its own elaborate interiority of time and teleology out of which emerges from each its empathic recognition of other teleological individuals. (Self-consciousness as intelligence includes awareness of both inertial nature and human culture as external to personal innocence.) The same empathy that empowers individuals to sense teleological behaviour, intelligence, outside ourselves also empowers us to sense the effects that inter-intelligence parasitism has on its victims, and so reveals such parasitism as categorically immoral, ugly, vicious, and repulsive.

This is Not Theory

Personal cultivation of that kind of philosophical consciousness (self identification as teleological freedom, without parental-type authorities) is distinct from ideological sophistication, religious faith, speculation, or theories of anything. We don’t need revelations, faith, ideology, or theories, because we can know personal teleology or intelligence by immediate acquaintance, achieved in a process of letting go of cultural influences. Transcendence (freedom) is thinkable and clearly defined without appeal to occult or obscure forces or powers, hidden principles, aliens, or magic. However, there certainly is a contribution to be made by self-directed education in support of sophistication about history, culture, and ideas.

Metaphysics of Freedom

The most important challenge and purpose of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was disputing the metaphysical claim asserted by operators of systematic Old Regime lethal power (Churches, aristocracy, monarchies) to be justified by divine intervention, by Providence, in their violently coercive social supervision. However, the crucial program facing philosophers of every era is to understand individual human freedom (the questioning in the gaze) in the face of so many clearly controlling and determining forces. The roots of a metaphysics of individual freedom go deep in the history of philosophy. The discovery by Martin Luther (1483-1546) of an interior power of teleology to take a creative leap (of faith for him personally) was the breakthrough in modern thinking about individual freedom. Luther drew on ancient Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism which he encountered in his humanist education. The Stoic version of individual freedom was much more limited. Stated strictly, it was just a freedom to assent to the universal Logos in every detail of reality or else to dispute or resist it internally. The personal interiority from which that Stoic freedom emerged included deliberate rationality interacting with emotionally charged appetites and competitive impulses, for example, and the power or freedom of rational deliberation was considerable in that interior context. Luther’s identification of the creative leap was an interpretation of that Stoic interiority, but also a crucial creative leap beyond it.

Luther, Kant, and Freedom

A form of Luther’s idea of the individual leap of faith became fundamental to Kant’s self-legislating ethics, and in fact to his whole kind of idealism as sketched above. Peel away Kant’s technical terminology and the fundamental insight underneath is the personal creative leap that Luther made famous. Fichte’s self-positing ego is yet another expression of the same basic insight. It is no great surprise to find such a Lutheran grounding, since the religious upbringing of both Kant and Fichte was Lutheran. Kant’s contribution was to recognize the broad personal freedom implicit in the power of an intelligence to take creative leaps, that if an intelligence could take a leap of faith then it could take a multitude of different kinds of leap, and so Kant de-coupled Luther’s insight from the conceptual universe of Christendom and Abrahamic monotheism generally. In Kant’s work the leap became an individually created rule or conceptual pattern for structuring personal orientation within phenomena. Still another step is required to de-couple that basic interior creative freedom from the conceptual universe of sovereignty and sovereign rules in which Kant was still immersed.

Kant did not specifically relate his rationalist account of freedom with his recognition that time is contributed to experience by the experiencing intelligence, but he should have. Both the subjectivity of time and the individuality of freedom become clearer in that combination. Time, teleology, is the form of freedom.

The tradition of metaphysics recognizing a plurality of embodied teleologies with individual creative freedom is the philosophical legacy to draw upon to support human rights and freedoms far better than materialist monism or any other kind of fatalist determinism. The Lutheran line of freedom philosophy provides the matrix of an understanding of teleological freedom and the transcendence of intelligence.

The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment attempted to replace a Christian ideology sanctifying arbitrary oppressions exercised by institutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and Churches with ideas supporting democracy and the global equality of all people as individuals, requiring the abolition of slavery, torture, serfdom, and the oppression of women. However, the weight of opinion within the politically engaged public was always skeptical about the competence of individual rationality and generally supported traditional religions and institutions of wealth and subordination, probably out of fear of the unknown, of unpredictable social change. Consequently, strong democracy and global human equality have still not been accomplished, but they are ideals still inspiring many people and having unpredictable political consequences. The forces of top-down human-on-human parasitism have always been winning, most recently since the suppression of the anti-war and counterculture movements of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s which blossomed around the early cultural impact of television. (The only intensively televised war, the most realistically communicated and the most popularly questioned and hated by spectators, was the American war in Vietnam 1965-75.) Here in 2014 the top-down forces are winning spectacularly, although there is also surprising new resistance.

The Enlightenment is not yet a story from history with beginning, middle, and end. We and our times in culture and politics are still very much part of the ongoing struggle of ideas and social arrangements at the core of the Enlightenment movement. The cultural and social transformations effected by rationalist philosophy, especially as presented by Spinoza and his eighteenth century French materialist interpreters, notably Denis Diderot (1713-84) and (Baron) Paul-Henri d’Holbach (1723-89), who worked to define and communicate l’esprit philosophique, defining the categorical criminality of torture and slavery, for example, unquestionably earn the radically bottom-up political philosophy of the Enlightenment a central place in modern philosophy. It is remarkable that the mainstream work of contemporary philosophy shows so little vestige of that legacy.

The reflections here on Enlightenment history, Spinoza, and in particular l’esprit philosophique, have been informed and inspired by:

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2011), ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

A Philosophical Consciousness

19 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Strategic thinking

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Toxic Consequences of the Imprinted Parent

Human cultures have been poisoned by both direct and indirect consequences of childhood conditioning to an indefinable parental intelligence, the universally imprinted parent, and because of that it is urgent for individuals everywhere to search out and discover the non-poisoned pre-cultural features of their personal powers, sensitivities, and impulses, which is to say the features of experience which express their innocent intelligence. The interiority of every intelligence has both innocent foundations and additional conditioning by the culture or ways of life of the people surrounding it. (Meditation in traditions related to Transcendental Meditation, for example, has innocence-rescuing aspects such as disengaging from language.) A movement of individual re-grounding in personal innocence is the only way that cultures and the human interconnectedness that those cultures condition can be reconstructed to eliminate distortions of reality, injustices, and other poisons which currently damage and restrict the large numbers of individuals exposed to those cultures. Searching out and discovering the innocence of personal intelligence is a critical thinking process, the building of a kind of philosophical consciousness.

Direct consequences of the imprinted parent are personally embedded habits and expectations of dependency and subordination expressed in a continual search for and orientation to authority figures, leaders, elders, and supervised sophistication. Indirect consequences are cultural distortions of reality and elaborated ideologies developed and broadcast by parasitic groups and factions with the intent of exploiting standard parental conditioning to establish themselves as legitimate, stable, and institutional authorities and supervisors, dominant powers, controllers of wealth and general behaviour in a community as a whole. It is the universality of childhood conditioning to an indefinable parental intelligence which has enabled human-on-human parasitism to establish itself securely in all kinds of communities and to use culture to mask its true nature.

bell hooks on imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy

The vicious qualities that bell hooks identifies in the ordinary functioning of Euro-American society, described as imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, all resolve into top-down human-on-human parasitism. The overt purpose of imperialism is to acquire the benefits of human parasitism as specified in posting 73, May 21, 2014, bell hooks on Freedom, and war as the instrument of imperialism is parasitic on grunt soldiers in a most overt way. White supremacist ideology (or any ideology of racial inequality) is a device to justify human parasitism by de-humanizing (second-classing) certain groups. Patriarchy is an expression of an ideology of gender inequality which provides a (false) justification for males to be parasites on females. Capitalism is an ideology of socio-economic class hierarchy (claiming scientific support from Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest, or similar purported laws of nature) along with a structure of laws and organization of property, production, and distribution which glorifies and privileges owners of the means of production (capital, including conceptual property such as patents), effectively licensing owners to be parasites on non-owning employees who labour to supply, operate, and maintain the means of production. Capital arranges to increase eternally while the acts of labour continuously deteriorate aging labourers. In that way the institutionalized injustices named by hooks are all manifestations of the same underlying culture of human-on-human parasites, and an intent to enjoy the rewards of parasites is the motive for particular groups and factions to exploit basic parental conditioning to establish themselves as authorities, dominant powers, controllers of wealth, and supervisors of communal behaviour. The only way that any of the injustices of those institutions can be ended and prevented is to discredit, discard, and go beyond the culture which glorifies human parasites through exploiting the universal and uncritical expectation of parental-type authority, namely the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity derived historically from nomadic animal herding cultures.

Beyond the Imprinted Parent

It is encouraging to discover that a large-scale project of getting beyond projections of the universally imprinted parent actually began soon after 1600 with the period of Euro-American cultural history known as the Enlightenment. The fundamental impulse of the Enlightenment was to improve the general condition of humanity exactly by eliminating the power and authority of churches, aristocracy, and monarchical institutions, along with their representatives and agents, thus eliminating all the externalized Old Regime avatars of the Great Indefinable Super-Parent. In the Old Regime the sovereign courts of kings and princes were staffed chiefly by activist members of the military-landowning aristocracy, the large-scale capitalists of their era. Governments were really control mechanisms of that overtly parasitic ownership class, direct constructs of the alpha-trophy-looting culture of armed men on horses which originated with conquering nomadic herding confederacies which in their conquered territories evolved into a ruling confederacy of what modern people would call crime families. That parasitic ruling (herding) faction justified its oppressions by an appeal to cosmic intelligent design, claiming appointment and support by divine Providence, the Super-Parent. Of the three main engines of Old Regime social supervision, Church, monarchy, and aristocracy, the second and third rested their legitimacy on that of the Church. The rhetoric of class conflict would clearly apply to aristocracy and monarchy, but less clearly to Church hierarchies, even though the higher Church officials would all represent the aristocratic crime family class.

In the Euro-American cultural system after 1600 there was a significant rate of literacy and advanced education which was partly the result of the humanist movement of the fifteenth century Renaissance, and since the spread of the printing press after about 1450 there had been a growing culture of debate and exchange of ideas in writing (self-consciously calling itself the Republic of Letters) which functioned outside the immediate control of governments and religious foundations such as universities and church hierarchies. People engaging in that literary culture used philosophical ideas and rational arguments to identify and specify injustices of the prevailing forms of feudalism and to propose better alternatives. Fundamentally, it was discovered that if the non-rational claim of divine appointment or supernatural intervention was disregarded then the traditional structures of wealth and power in European society (ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and monarchical) were all exposed as arbitrary, unjustified, illegitimate, and plainly parasitic on the common majority of people. Credit can be given to Spinoza for articulating that insight in a broadly convincing way. It was mainly Spinoza, based on his materialist metaphysics, who argued for abandoning the non-rational claim of traditional powers to represent supernatural intervention, divine will, or a providential deity controlling human society and history.

Enlightenment in general, in the eighteenth century sense, meant recognition of the fundamental power of human rationality and universal principles derived by rational thinking and debate. The ultimate authority of reason is the crux of Enlightenment and the authority of reason both undermined claims of divine intervention in worldly affairs and conferred the crucial dignity and (potential) power of rational thinking, as basic to human nature, upon every individual. In one interpretation, it would mean being educated in the scientific approach to nature as distinct from superstitious and magical thinking typical of religion and other assumptions of disembodied spirits. Rationalists emphasized that appeals to divine will to sanctify inequality of wealth, power, freedom, and privilege are implausible, non-rational, and obscurantist. Rationalists also emphasized that, since appeals to revealed commands of a supernatural dictator are non-rational, it makes better sense to decide appropriate moral action and human interaction by calculating the resulting happiness of and benefit to humanity as a whole. What follows from that is the sovereignty of the collective of all people, the general will, and a requirement for individual empowerment through freedom of thought and expression on a base of rational education, all of which defines a serious kind of universal human equality from which tolerance of racial variety follows and which dislodges any particular culture or religion from a privileged position. Of course, the kind of thinking and expression that was legally forbidden by institutions of wealth and power in the Old Regime was precisely anything that questioned their legitimacy. They did their utmost to use the power of existing institutions to enforce conservatism, mobilizing the already active apparatus of state censorship and the Roman Catholic Inquisition to snuff out freedom of thought and expression, ideas of democracy, and legal recognition of universal human rights.

Legitimation Drift from Providence to Popular Sovereignty

In spite of the fact that we people of modernity consider our science-driven society to be well beyond the superstitions and brutalities of Medieval and Old Regime conditions, there are profound continuities as well, as highlighted by the work of bell hooks. Monarchical and aristocratic forms of violence-based sovereignty have not disappeared but only morphed into new configurations. Although the top-down faction of human parasites still clings to the conservatism of religion, it shifts the base of its legitimacy more to an identification or unification with sovereign governments as ambient cultures become more secular and governments appear more responsible to the majority of citizens. The ownership class justifies and exercises its parasitism through participation in and partnerships with the traditional top-down force of now apparently legitimate governments. The legitimacy of government is bestowed upon the means by which large-scale wealth accumulates ever more wealth: commercial corporations, businesses, and industries which are licensed and fostered by governments to encourage employment and something vaguely called national wealth. Government members must have a proven dedication to the corporate sector, and especially to banking and the investment/ financial industry. The whole ownership faction rides the coattails of the appearance and rhetoric of ‘sovereignty of the people’ created by elections every four or five years offering some choice of ruling political party.

Top-Down against Bottom-Up Political Forces

The problem with that foundation of capitalist legitimacy is that democracy is more myth than reality, and consequently the legitimacy of familiar governments is an illusion. The concentration of wealth in a small faction enables that faction to exercise decisive political influence, vastly overpowering the bottom-up political forces such as voting every four or five years. As discovered and documented by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page (2014) there is an overpowering influence of great wealth in all political processes. Behind the great wealth is the malign culture of alpha-trophy-looting cowboy masculinity which honours and glorifies the accomplishments of human parasitism. In any country claiming to be democratic, inequality is eventually fatal to the legitimacy of power because it removes even the appearance of democracy.

It is now common to acknowledge that, even in the most modern democratic countries, the top-down political force of organized wealth (class-conscious strategic action within the corporate owning and controlling faction of society) is far more influential, effective, and agenda-driven (funding political parties, political candidates, and lobbyists, for example, in addition to owning and controlling mass media, academic research, and large scale employment opportunities) than any bottom-up forces such as citizens voting for party controlled representatives in government every four or five years. That vast inequality of political influence is not new, and has been the political reality in some form since long before the emergence of national governments with democratic fig-leafs such as elections, but the current state represents the dramatic reversal of a trend in the direction of greater bottom-up inclusion. Since the Enlightenment era of Euro-American history, since the French Revolution of 1789, but especially since The Great War of 1914-18 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 there was a trend toward greater bottom-up democratic influence. That trend was rapidly reversed around the time of the truncated presidency (1969-74) of Richard Nixon, apparently in reaction to the American anti-war and counter-culture youth movements of the 1960’s and 70’s. Nixon was soon followed by a sustained wave of political, economic, and ideological support for top-down dominance. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of The United Kingdom through 1979-90. In the USA Ronald Reagan held the presidency through 1980-88. The trend reversal against greater bottom-up political influence has been so thorough and effective that it is now reasonable to identify it as a coup d’état by the ownership class against the beginnings and promise of a more authentic democracy. It is an ongoing anti-democratic creeper-coup managed strategically over roughly half a century, maybe from around the assassination of JFK in 1963.

The Politics of Metaphysics

In the historical context of Medieval European Christendom and the Old Regime, there was a much abused identification of transcendent discretionary creativity with an externalized and centralized cosmic super-parent who commanded universal obedience: the Christian God. Spinoza’s version of materialist monism, amplified and broadcast culturally in the writings of radical rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eventually had its intended effect, largely discrediting the legitimacy of all institutions of wealth and power (Church, aristocracy, and monarchies) which founded their legitimacy on the omnipotence of the cosmic super-parent. That’s the big deal about Spinoza. However, a strict materialism eliminates all philosophical idealism, which in this context is the same as transcendent discretionary creativity intrinsic to some entity or entities. Materialism eliminates all forms of discretionary creativity because with materialism everything is pre-determined for all eternity by omnipotent and unalterable laws of nature. So, as a political ideology, materialism soon encountered the limits of its liberating effects, because when interpreted strictly it eliminates the freedom of all individual people as well as the authority of gods, disembodied spirits, and anyone claiming to be their appointed agents. To get beyond those limits of materialism it is necessary to re-admit transcendent creativity back into the philosophical foundation of human relations generally and politics in particular. This time, however, the recognition of transcendent creativity has to avoid the mythological elaboration of residing in an externalized, centralized, or universalized super-parent and instead accept restriction to the individual interiors (non-spacial interiors) of de-centralized animate biological entities, that is to say, all individual animals including humans. There is no super-parental entity here, although on this view discretionary creativity comes with the vulnerability and predicament of being in a particular life in time. This de-centralizing of discretionary creativity is a partial recapitulation of the Enlightenment act conferring profound dignity and (potential) power on every individual at the same time as removing claims to sovereign privilege other than from a grounding in a far stronger and more authentic democracy than has ever yet existed.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the crucial philosophical project was to dispute the claim of parasitic power to be based on omnipotent Providence. There are no parental presences in a philosophical consciousness. It was right for Enlightenment rationalists to marshal philosophy against parasitic pretenders to parental authority over whole communities, and they were right to articulate a philosophical vision, scientific materialism, that had the effect of undermining such claims. As it turned out, scientific materialism was not effective over the long run. Now, again, a philosophical consciousness is required to dispute the claim of parasitic power to be justified by materialist science.

Time As the Condition of Discretionary Creativity

Nothing in nature, neither at the cosmic level nor at any local level, is moved by teleology, by intentions, goals, or aspirations, and in that sense there is no future or futurity in nature (and so no time in nature). A definition of nature could be: the set of non-teleological events and objects, what might be called the set of inertial events and objects. However, there are also a plurality of individual intelligences (ordinary embodied people) and those intelligences (as intelligences) are close to being entirely teleological, and teleology is temporality, futurity, a bearing toward a future. As teleology we are outside nature but certainly operating into or upon nature, and each intelligence is also interior to itself, which is to say, there isn’t just one great teleological striving, drive, or desire manifesting itself through all the individual intelligences. There are indeed vast numbers of separate individual teleological intelligences. Plurality isn’t tidy, so it will lack aesthetic appeal to some, but it is not helpful to ignore this untidiness of reality.

Non-Superstitious Transcendence: the Question in the Gaze

Not all conceptions of transcendence are vulnerable to the charge of superstition in the way that ideas of disembodied spirits or of cosmic super-parental intelligences are. There is a non-superstitious transcendence: time as a condition of every individual’s personal intelligence. All three of vacant space, time, and intelligences (spirits) have been suggested as ethereal or immaterial. In the case of spirits, the plausible grounding of the very idea of spiritual non-materiality is the inseparability of intelligence and time. Every intelligence is a voice, and voice exists only in time. It is a trail of breadcrumbs which has to be recognized, from a range of increasingly remote memory, as a voice. Since space could be described as a condition of strict material actuality, and the experience of space has to be a temporal construct, the one and only true and familiar non-materiality is time, and time is exactly definitive of the interiority of the question or teleological bearing in any human gaze. Knowledge has its existence in that bearing. Time so experienced as a fabric of possibilities does not exist in the strict actuality of nature, but is a creation of individual intelligences in their living a degree of freedom from the determinism of nature. Time is uniquely not physical, far more than a condition of material actuality, and, to that extent people have an aspect which is not material or physical because as intelligence each exists and self-creates through time and only through time, which doesn’t even exist as physical matter or substance.

Leaders perpetuate the belief that fulfillment in life is achieved from devoted service to the supervisory and educational hierarchies of knowledge, wealth, and power, from the sophistication and rewards that long service accumulates. However, the very idea of hierarchy is yet another version of the imprinted parent. Only within an uncritical acceptance of the child-parent pattern of subordination does merit somehow transfigure into meritocracy. The ideology of meritocracy is part of the poisoning of culture to justify parasitic top-down control of populations, and the glorification of parasitism discredits culture generally as a guide to reality, value, self-identification, and human relations. Philosophical consciousness of innocent intelligence enables empathy to the individual transcendence of everyone, each individual with its own elaborate interiority of time and teleology out of which emerges from each its empathic recognition of other intelligences. Philosophic empathy is recognizing all individual intelligences as both physical and creatively teleological entities, as individual eruptions into nature of discretionary creativity, as individual spinners of freedom in transcendent time.

My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely interpretations of:

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2011), ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0.

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (July 2002), ISBN: 0-19-925456-7.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 1of 2)

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power

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The Philosophical Tradition of Cultural Detox

The projects of ancient philosophy included removal of demons, spirits, and gods from descriptions of nature, in other words, removal of a certain kind of cultural poison that disabled the full power of individual thinking. For the Hellenistic Epicureans, for example, the cultural poison that included belief in various gods resulted in unnecessary anguish, worry, pain, and unhappiness. Roughly 1700 years after the Epicurean movement flourished, the work of the European cultural movement known as the Enlightenment continued that tradition. The work of the Enlightenment was to remove similar poisons which were being used to legitimize the exercise of sovereign power to stifle freedom of thought, for example, by the burning alive of the philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1600 in Rome.

Considering subjective interiority in the context of politics, the Enlightenment stands as an historical precedent for the effectiveness of that interiority against the propaganda of a crime-family oligarchy. During the European “radical Enlightenment” (roughly 1650-1750), and to a lesser extend earlier, during the Renaissance, philosophical humanists made an appeal to “innate rationality” which empowered every individual to question, and to understand the fallacies of, religious superstitions enshrined in Christianity, the religion that legitimized and even sanctified brutal sovereign power. The work of the Enlightenment was to remove cultural justifications for top-down human-on-human parasitism (a concept of life inherited from nomadic animal herders) from Old Regime European culture, and indeed some cultural poison, involved with the sovereignty of the Church as messenger of God, was discredited, a verifiable instance of progress in history.

During the Old Regime (the period of European history between the Renaissance and the French Revolution of 1789) the oligarchy of a crime-family class was quite overt, explicit, and widely acknowledged, but the ideology used to legitimize the powers, privileges, and immunities of that aristocracy had become Christianized. The oligarchy was assumed to have been somewhat tamed and sanitized by its traditional association with organized Christianity, which formed the mediating class of pre-modern European culture. Ultimate justification for sovereignty came from the Christian God’s active engagement in the world, as proclaimed and celebrated constantly by the pervasive organization of the Church. With Machiavelli’s political philosophy (please see posting 46, December 7, 2012, Machiavelli’s Prince) it was recommended that the Renaissance should include a kind of crime-family coup against the senior supervisory authority of the Church. The crime-family aristocracy judged that it had established itself as pack leader on the ground sufficiently to do without the senior partnership of the Church, a judgment bolstered by their claim to create ordered civilization merely by their effective monopoly of armed violence (also made explicit and provided with ideological support by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)). Aristocracy considered social order itself to be their independent claim to be agents of God. However, in spite of that claim to independent legitimacy as sovereign controllers, it turned out that they could not do without some claim of divine intervention in their dominance over others, and the Church still owned the patents on divine will in the popular mind.

The conduct of aristocracy was nasty enough to alienate a lot of people, and when they had to justify their dominance, their strongest claim was always that the whole of existing reality was ordained by God, and the Church could hardly do anything but support that. Consequently, when the carriers of humanist philosophy in the Republic of Letters launched their critique of sovereign ideology, it was specifically religious ideology that was their focus. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1670, was an inspirational event of that movement. The struggle went on long before and after the period 1650-1750, and it eventually succeeded, largely, in de-throning the claims of Church officials and aristocrats to be messengers of God in their disempowerment and exploitation of ordinary individuals.

From a broader point of view, however, that whole effort was only half the battle, because the cultural basis of the strictly aristocratic “half” of medieval oligarchy, the culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism, a concept of life derived from nomadic animal herders, was never identified as part of the fundamental oppression in the organizational culture of western civilization, and the real malaise of the west. Hobbes’ view of the social contract (an important model for Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)) was very much myth instead of history, an over-rationalized and sanitized narrative to account for the existing institutions of civic order, including law and private property. Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau knew, nor could have known, history in enough accurate detail to trace the actual derivation of sovereign power. The parasitism of nomadic herder culture, and its legacy in the culture of crime-families, was not mentioned or considered by either of them. Hobbes, as a courtier, was thinking from a comfortable position inside the privileges enjoyed by sovereign power. Rousseau, in thinking that common people had been tricked into giving up their rights for the social contract, was wrongly assuming that people had surrendered their rights and now had no alternative but to accept the instituted structure of power. At least Rousseau sensed that injustice had been institutionalized, which was an advance beyond Hobbes.

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

Freedom and Time

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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De-Legitimizing Human Parasitism

Posting 53, January 31, 2013, The Top-down Culture of Human Parasitism, is a statement of basic political consciousness. It describes the results of a cultural history far more sinister than any mere conspiracy. There is room for optimism, but not in denying or attempting to evade the malaise of the culture or the difficulties for individuals in attempting to live in freedom and justice (equality). Bottom-up human parasitism, petty crime such as theft, has never been legitimized, is always recognized as vicious and criminal. However, top-down parasitism has been completely distorted by the most gifted apologists for oligarchy, distorted into appearing as a contribution to the human community. That is why top-down human parasitism merits special deconstruction and the strongest condemnation. If there were to be a collective institution established to protect the human interconnectedness, its purpose and function must be to disable top-down parasitism, to de-legitimize it, expose the viciousness of its many forms, dismantle it, prevent it from re-emerging. That would be the decisive force for justice, and the necessary focus of any authentic democracy, any institutional and political representation of ordinary people.

Freedom and Time

Political consciousness needs to be combined with consciousness of basic personal interiority, the elemental source of freedom and equality. Since one crucial intent and effect of top-down parasitism is to externalize reality, a required part of any defence is to prevent that with an effort to rebalance, to internalize reality with attention to interior powers, indeed to the transcendent freedom of interiority.

Time is a crucial issue with respect to freedom. 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 of a past aligning with future is entirely a feature of the interiority of particular lives, of individual intelligences, each surviving by projecting creative aspirations constantly onto the mutability of their future. Interior to every intelligence is a gushing horizon of pre-linguistic, pre-cultural, (innocent) inspiration, curiosity, and questioning. Freedom (transcending unfree nature) is in the mutability of an individual’s future, under the force of inspiration, curiosity, and questioning from that interior horizon. Freedom depends entirely on a person’s self-adjusting his or her orientation by means of judgments of the probabilities of various events and developments in future time, judgments of a variety of personal powers and possibilities, and judgments of means for projecting aspirations onto actuality in the future. There can be no freedom of nature since nature lacks the past and future of intelligence. Every human intelligence is, therefore, an autonomous interiority of orientation in time, crucially discontinuous from nature and pre-existing culture. This freedom-unfreedom dualism is humanist dualism, basically the same as what is often called “Cartesian dualism”.

Humanist Philosophy is the Assertion that Thinking Matters because Freedom Matters

To say that the poisoned culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism has not pervaded humanist philosophy, is to say that it has not pervaded the experience of freedom available to every individual in his or her own interiority, which is the focus, the subject matter, of humanist philosophy: the freedom of the interiority of intelligence. Philosophy isn’t the source of that freedom, but only a record of recognizing it, a reminder of that recognition. It is also to say that the innate freedom of intelligence is an innocence which is never completely muted by an ambient culture poisoned by legitimized top-down human parasitism. In its innocence, intelligence is always free, and in its freedom, intelligence always transcends the poisoned culture.

Humanist philosophy is thinking about the encounter between freedom and unfreedom. “Interiority” is another word for thinking. The case could be made that philosophy is an effort to understand and practice freedom, and that thinking is the crucial act of freedom. Philosophical humanism is an assertion of the force and utility of individual thinking. If subjectivity or interiority has no innate force or foreseeable effect then thinking can’t be decisive in creating the future and doesn’t matter.

When someone suggests overcoming “Cartesian” dualism, the question that must be posed is this: Does this overcoming of dualism preserve individual freedom or exclude it? It is difficult to conceive an alternative to dualism that does not exclude individual freedom. People who are anti-humanist are, on the face of things, devoted to the idea that individual thinking as such has no original force and doesn’t matter. Thinking as an act of freedom is completely different from thinking as unfreedom (say, passive spectator consciousness). Moreover, such exclusions of individual freedom have been construed as justifications for oligarchic human-on-human parasitism.

There are only two historically familiar ways to evade humanist dualism: materialist monism and idealist monism. Materialist monism is the option illustrated by communism, for example, and is typical of science. On that view, all events are pre-determined by eternal laws of physical nature. In fact, dialectical materialism is an attempt at a science of history in which material laws of nature, including biological (Darwinian/ Freudian) drives, determine, in a dialectical causal chain, the formation of every economic system and institutional state, and drive the formation of ideas and ideologies. Individual thinking is not a force in the historical process, nor in creating personal biographies, in the view of materialist monism.

Idealist monism is illustrated in a philosophical tradition that could be called Fichtean Romanticism, in which the existence of “things in themselves” is denied, and all existence is a vast intelligence (an interiority of non-actuality) or some aspect of intelligence such as will (a will to live, to become self-aware, a drive to reproduce, the will to power). However, on that view, the force of the grand-scale cosmic interiority reduces the force of individual thinking to triviality, to merely a local eruption of cosmic Being, a conduit for messages from a strict singularity such as God or Logos, messages sometimes delivered through specially “chosen” individuals or groups. Again, individual thinking as such is not an effective force in the historical or personal life-building process.

Both of those exclusions of individual freedom are used to legitimize top-down human-on-human parasitism, in support of the poisoned culture, and neither one is any good on the issue of time.

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

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.