Cultural Poison as a Challenge to Freedom of Thought

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

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

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philosophy, politics

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

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

Two Main Points of Personally Strategic Orientation

First: Equality and the Discontinuity of Subjectivity

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

Art, Representation, and Interior Sensibility

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

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

Second: The History of Cultures in the Interconnectedness

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

Childhood and the Transcendent Non-Actuality of Subjective Interiority

25 Tuesday Sep 2012

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

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

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

Waking From History, Episode Three

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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

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An Analogy

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

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

The Delusion of a Noble Lie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equality and Monadic Interiority

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

Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Political

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

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

The System of Reality

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

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

Individualism and Government

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

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

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

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

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

Waking From History, Episode Two

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

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

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Belittled

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

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

How Can Freedom Be Possible in a Hostile Political Context?

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

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

The Comfort Zone

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

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

Culture Consciousness and The Transcendence of Monads

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

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

Surprise Horizons

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

Creative Process

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

Divine Mind

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

The Richness of Non-Actuality

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

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

The idea of individual innocence is meaningful and important.

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

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

Creative people are ordinary people.

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

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

First Language Nurture

12 Thursday Jul 2012

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

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Right-Wing Political Hegemony

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

Nurture

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

The Divinity of Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcendental Humanism

06 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Political Situation of Any Human Consciousness

Any subjective intelligence will find itself within a social interconnectedness that includes a polarity between the culture-pods of alpha-trophy-looting (ATL) and first-language-nurture (FLN). (Please see posting 29, April 27, 2012, Gender Culture in the Political Situation.) Any political theory which does not identify the ATL cultural heritage and its relation to the FLN heritage is ignoring the most important division in the body politic. The gender based ATL – FLN polarity operates biologically and culturally within every family, and that patriarchal, alpha-dominated, family is universally used as a default model of ideal social and political arrangements in general, at all scales of organization. Confucianism is possibly the most straightforward declaration of that principle. A political philosophy, or any attempt to illuminate the situation of individual subjective intelligence, must recognize that there will always be ATL culture supporting a certain segment of the population to act out narcissistic compulsions to appropriate everything, and there will always be the FLN-based great human interconnectedness for ATL culture-pods to use as their medium of acting out.

The FLN culture has an intrinsic tendency toward promoting equality because it is common knowledge within that culture that huge investments of loving care, personal attachment, energy, strategy, and work go into the survival and linguistic engagement of every human being, and it is bestial and criminal to waste any single one. Disrespecting any person is disrespecting all that sacred investment of nurture.

The political polarity between the culture-pods of alpha-trophy-looting (ATL) and first-language-nurture (FLN) is going to exist in any human society, but philosophic humanism, individual-focused humanism, is strictly a European tradition with a unique origin in ancient Greek culture, in the two strongest vectors of ancient philosophy. Those vectors of philosophy are still elemental points of orientation and definitive of secular humanism. The first is a project to remove disembodied personifications from explanations of events in nature. “Nature” here refers to the material world conforming to the laws of physics, laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism, conservation of mass-energy, and gravitational attraction, for example, and not nature in the sense of wildlife. A lot of wildlife is embodied intelligences, and so transcendent with respect to pre-determined nature. There is no denying the beauty and wonder of nature, but it is absurd to personify it. The second vector is a project to understand subjective intelligence as transcendent, to become self-aware as transcendent intelligence. The vector of ancient philosophy to understand the transcendence of personal intelligence (sometimes conceived as ‘mind’) is the flip side of removing capricious personalities from explanations of nature. The ‘understanding subjectivity’ vector was a recognition of subjective intelligence as a primordial blind spot in experience, a blind spot with the potential to be mirrored by some deliberate reflexive self-awareness. Philosophic humanism is not a claim that humans are more important than animals (since humans are animals), or more important then brute nature, but rather that embodied intelligence is always transcendent in every individual without exception and not more so in some special individuals, and strictly absurd in incorporeal entities. (Please see posting 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence.)

Confucianism sometimes claims to be humanism, but Confucian humanism is anti-egalitarian, like all Confucianism. Confucian “humanism” promotes the patriarchal family as a divine revelation and as the law of nature, and as such the only legitimate framework of personal orientation at every level of social organization. Confucianism is a variant form of father-religion in which any father figure is god-like. The force of European-style humanism is very different from Confucian filial piety toward father figures, and also, incidentally, from Buddhist pessimism (“All life is suffering.”). The message of European-style humanism is: “Nature is impersonal and individual subjectivity is transcendent.” Patriarchal forces (ATL forces) are currently on another offensive against alternative visions and so, if the future is to be saved from oppressive Confucian-style hierarchy and from the gloomy passivity of Buddhist-style pessimism, then it is time that philosophic humanism was re-asserted.

Humanist Individualism

There are opposing visions of individualism, each an active political threat to the other. One is the alpha-trophy-looting vision of winner-take-all star systems, in which only the most victorious get to be valued as individuals. That ATL vision is profoundly anti-egalitarian, based on trophy accumulation from defeating people. Although that is what Americans and market-commerce enthusiasts in general have been trained to promote as “individualism”, it is unworthy of the name. Authentic humanist individualism asserts the transcendence of every individual intelligence, founding value on subjective inwardness, and on bringing the freedom and creativity of inwardness out in projections into the shared world of physical determinism and political control. Humanist individualism is egalitarian, achieved in self-awareness and personal agency. Neither star systems nor egalitarian humanism can imagine surviving without the system of human interconnectedness forged in the endless working of the first-language-nurture culture.

The patriarchal ideal remains unquestioned in all societies other than the European, in which humanist philosophy was revived and preserved as a minority report at the centre of advanced literacy by a peculiar Medieval institutionalizing of antiquarian studies, Latin literacy, conserving a fascination with ancient Roman and Greek history and thinking. That peculiar high culture of literacy was cultivated for centuries by the European network of universities from around 1088, with humanism as a stowaway within patriarchal Christianity. That fragile legacy of humanism has been the most effective counter-force against the effects of the patriarchal family model in promoting, explaining, defending, legitimizing, justifying, and excusing the crimes of alpha-trophy-looting dominance and empire building.

The Political Situation of Humanism

Humanism, recognizing individual intelligences as transcendent, as the only transcendence, still has a mighty struggle for survival. The humanist vision of individual intelligences, projecting markers of their freedom and creativity out into the shared world of nature and culture, is both common sense and elemental, and yet nearly unthinkable because of the lingering dominance of father-god religions, which monopolize creativity in the personified father-god as an unquestionable stipulation of official rationality.

When common sense humanism is almost unthinkable then we must conclude that nasty political forces are responsible, forces nasty enough to sustain a reality-distorting campaign of ideology which has been effective on a vast scale. (Not many issues could be more intellectually intriguing than that.) Egalitarianism is what sets humanism apart as a force that certain interests would want to repress by means of reality-distorting counter-ideologies. As such, humanism faces the wrath of anti-egalitarian interests which are completely bestial in their aggression against all potential threats to their dominance and control. That is the political situation in which we people of modernity find ourselves, all revealed by the near unthinkability of common-sense humanism: individual intelligences, projecting markers of their transcendent freedom and creativity, frequently building mutual attachments in doing so, out into the shared world of nature and culture.

The Political Intent of Disembodied Personality

Disembodied spirits are never anything but inappropriate projections of human intelligence onto inanimate pieces of nature, or onto nature as a whole, or even ‘beyond nature’ into incorporeal presences. The ideas of will, teleology, moral judgment, or caring, are all meaningless without particular embodiment. Personality without embodiment is absurd, and so the idea of a dictator-father god has precisely the incoherence of a nightmare. Nobody has a special or exclusive hotline to divine will, because there is no divine will, just nature, individual subjective intelligences, and the projections of intelligences constituting culture.

Inappropriate projections of human intelligence normally serve a political function by ascribing the alpha-trophy-looting type of personality to the boss spirit, self-aggrandizing for the control faction, and intimidating for everyone else. The father-dictator-in-the-sky, caring, reliably judging and evaluating but unreliably rewarding, delivering justice, and meeting needs, is a cultural and psychological control device to prevent anyone from orienting within the transcendence of their innocent freedom. The effort to personify nature itself, or an imagined creator of nature, conjures up an overpowering and terrifying super-person within whom all the boundless and unmanageable forces of nature are enlisted to intimidate. It is training in perpetual subordination, looking outward for the initiation of agency, direction, and mission definition. Fixation on an external father-in-the-sky-god combines the opposites of both vectors of humanism: personification of disembodied presences, and an outward focus for the identification of transcendence. That externalizing ideology has been a crucial force in a matrix of individual self-blindness and denial of self-possession, and also reinforces a universal oppression of women. Where the father-in-the-sky god is worshipped there will always be war and rumours of war and the basic military/ religious training to keep the general population ready for sacrifice.

War and Belonging

War offers an intense experience of belonging to a collective at the expense of personal agency and self-possession, and also at the expense of justice. In war much is looted from everyone. You are pushed around and disrespected. Your freedom is looted when you are controlled and supervised. There is a generalized operational assumption of radical inequality, secrecy, lies, and suspicion, and your personal agency is displaced upward on the organization chart, the chain of command. In military training, individuals have personal agency systematically undermined so that it can be replaced by totalitarian belonging to a hierarchical “brotherhood” of radical inequality. Posting 10, November 8, 2011, Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality, describes the leadership myth which legitimizes the looting of credit for productive work. (Recognition of the situation in which credit moves up the organization chart, glorified as a “chain of command”, in which leaders are looters, is a useful point on an elemental re-orientation grid.) The corporate/ investment-friendly state is the war-making state that requires reverence and personal sacrifice from ordinary citizens and so requires the state to be accepted as a personified deity and leaders as his prophets. Authoritarian societies are good only for those who qualify to be advantaged, and such societies emphasize and value the radical inequality of separate social levels.

Brand Personification

The orientation grid of modernity is built on new variants of disembodied personifications, “brands” of national military states, political parties, and on corporate brands. That grid features national, class, and consumer pride, an economy of emotion where “brand” is a personification of something other than an individual human body, the same technique of political control pioneered by personification of father-spooks in the sky. The point of such strategic personification is to inspire emotional attachment between individuals and some personified fiction, disabling personal control over emotional responses. It is a technique for triggering the uncritical protective urgency normally extended only to family members and the closest of friends, which leaves emotional responses vulnerable to stealthy manipulation by the sophisticated agencies controlling every apparently benign brand. With the orientation grid of modernity, a control faction is operating a manufactured sensitivity to insults, threats, and injuries to national pride, for example, injuries to brands which seem to have extended a sense of inclusion, belonging, and personal value, as friends and family members really do. The control faction is establishing an orientation grid which, it calculates, will channel the emotionally-impulsive behaviour and psychology of people in exactly the way it plans and from which it benefits. If you are persuaded that you belong to a personified collective, then you abandon some crucial agency as well as your claim to credit for your contribution to the group product. The control apparatus relies on that psychological technique, but reinforced by police forces and prisons, as well as by military forces, spies, and police actions which bypass courts of law.

In modernity the animism of previous superstitions changed to personifications of national brands, class, linguistic, ethnic, religious, racial, commercial, and corporate brands. Western modernity is no different from previous spook-obsessed control arrangements in that way. The fundamental obsession with disembodied personifications is still very active and controlling. Personifying the ideas of such collective entities is the modern version of superstition, social control by the strategic use of spooks. Disembodied personifications are all malicious fictions. Ignore reports of your national or religious brand being insulted. It can’t be insulted because it does not exist. It’s a fraud. The alpha-trophy-looting ethos of radical inequality (inequality of control) is the driving force in all that.

Two Specific Assaults

Just as the alpha-trophy-looting god is a device to control adult mentality into subordination-to-external-authority and accompanying self-blindness, the selection of history we are taught is a device to legitimate the control structure that currently reigns, the status quo of capitalism, the corporate-military state, and patriarchal religion. Whatever noble values the control factions profess in public, their incumbents are quite openly dependent on two vicious and anti-humanist practices. The first is pageants of radical inequality, highlighting their own superiority. Inequality itself is the central incentive and reward of alpha-trophy-looting orientations. It is the origin of the need for so much money and conspicuous consumption. Trophies are symbols of inequality, and all the special occasions, the official rules, stages, costumes, roles, postures, gestures, speeches which legitimize the awarding of a trophy, are all the pageantry of inequality. The second anti-humanist practice is the technique of promoting brand loyalty, subordination of individuals to disembodied personifications such as corporate brands, religious brands, national, regional, ethnic, and linguistic brands. Such personifications are always fictions, spooks, created with intent to control people through fraud and deceit. Both of those practices effectively resist the egalitarian force of every individual’s coming to know his or her own personal intelligence as transcendent.

Political Consciousness: The Corporate Control-Ethos

It is no secret, and nobody could deny, that, very much like national states, religions and profit-driven commercial organizations do their utmost to control both their employees and the general ‘consumer base’ population. Developments in clinical/ academic psychology and social science have added considerable sophistication, effectiveness, and stealth to those control efforts. Academics do not work for free, and large scale investors and corporations control the money. The same impulse-to-control connects like-minded investors and holders of power, privilege, and wealth within an overarching control faction ethos. Messages from government, business, employers, schools, and nearly all other faces of wealth, authority, and power, are intended to glorify the eternal and exemplary superiority of the alpha-structure, the control faction. The parts of that system of emotional manipulation that touch us continually are the ads. “People will love you better when your life looks like this.” “Everybody cool thinks this.” “It is normal to need this surgical improvement, this medication.” We are manipulated aggressively and stealthily through advertising media. There is also a carefully pruned depiction, by big pervasive media networks, of the world and its troubles in a montage of news stories. There is the careful selection of research and scholarship that gets funded and celebrated. Behind all is a vast pool of organized wealth and old, semi-conscious alpha-trophy-looting ideology. Wealth is organized by the financial industry: investment ‘banks’ and various commercial and private agencies for speculating on owning debt, equity, or derivatives, with the intent to gain by buying cheap and selling dear, without adding value. Wealth is organized also by charities and foundations. The political wings of organized investor forces are not just delivering low tax and limited government, balanced budgets, precarious jobs, and shopping opportunities, but also radical inequality, war, as well as secret controls, secret operations, and secret intents in the processes of power. (Suggested reading: Google Plutonomy and the Precariat by Noam Chomsky.)

The pitch from the alpha-structure is that you don’t need much in the way of inward self-awareness to enjoy perfect freedom. All you need is an unregulated commercial market which produces some choice of consumer products to shop for, including policy packages from political brands, and a personal chance to compete for the scarce goods and treasures of life. (“May the odds be ever in your favor.” Thank you Suzanne Collins.) It is crucial to that alpha-story that the goods and treasures of life are scarce, and progressively scarcer as their value increases, so only the most worthy, divinely endowed celebrities, achieve the holy grails. It is such a beautiful story. The problem is that the greatest treasures of life are subjective intelligence and its expressive voice, powers freely intrinsic to everybody, and so the alpha-pitch is a total scam.

Capitalism Subsists on War

If you squint as you look, you can almost see capitalism without a war industry, without the financial industry laundered money from organized crime, without unproductive fortunes sucking value from the economy by financial speculation. However, capitalism, war, and organized crime are inseparable. Capitalism subsists on the war industry. Claims that capitalism is just the laws of nature organizing the human collective are insults to human creativity, as well as attempts to conceal the cultural/factional (as distinct from natural) forces sustaining capitalism.

The “business friendly” faction announces that it is leading the politico-economic situation of the world, the overall situation of adult experience and general welfare, toward a best possible state, a state of dynamic opportunity for human potential. In fact, the control faction has not the slightest idea of the reality of any such optimal condition. What the control faction actually does is disempower anyone who is not enrolled into supporting its ideology. The control faction is moving heaven and earth to strengthen its own controlling power. The current baby-boom cohort of the control faction has finally revealed the ultimate triviality of its mission and values. We know its addictions to self-aggrandizing, gambling, and the profits from war and from human vice and misfortune. It is impossible to progress to an optimal human situation on the basis of war, gambling addictions structured into the financial industry, laundering of profits from organized criminal trafficking in slaves, drugs, weapons, and money. The control faction feeds on all of that crime and truly has no other mission than to maintain the revenue streams as they are, and to increase them. We know that power chooses to dwell in conspicuous and grandiose material representations of its own glory. There is nothing of value to be learned there, nothing to envy.

The death-grip control intrinsic to alpha-culture is exercised by an obsession with objectivity, and contempt for subjectivity to discourage everyone from drawing the full potential of pleasure and action from inward intelligence and creativity. To objectify something is to remove it completely from any claim to transcendence. The result is a culturally-induced state of subjectivity-phobia, self-blindness, and disconnection from personal sources of creative power, not to mention political suppression of the natural social influence of the first-language-nurture culture which is considerably more subjectively focused.

Science

In modernity, the other cultural force against the thinkability of common sense humanism is the ideology of science which asserts that everything is unfree and totally determined, that freedom and creativity are impossible.

Science did not begin as an anti-humanist force, but rather as one vector of ancient humanist philosophy. Science began as the vector to create ways of explaining events in nature without animism or personification, without ascribing personality to the causes of such events. That ‘scientific’ vector was only half of a duality, originally joined to the project to understand mind or intelligence as known subjectively, which was commonly experienced as transcendent in a way which inspired the kind of investigation possible by reflexive self-awareness. The scientific, “natural philosophy”, half of the humanist project revealed a great deal of power and became so successful that it attracted the interest of previously existing social control factions, forces for weapons development and military based radical inequality, and under that influence the collective culture of science came to the conviction that science was the only source for understanding everything. It lost the ability to be aware of subjectivity (where questions come from) as its blind spot. When military and commercial control factions took over science, the other vector, the more philosophical vector focused on self-awareness of intelligence as transcendent, simply became a liability because of its tendency to distribute transcendence universally rather than concentrating it in the controlling factions. So science became one of the four thugs of totalitarian, reductionist, objectification: father-in-the-sky religion, military-based sovereignty, market-culture, and science.

AI: Counterfeit Intelligence versus Spontaneous Intelligence

The discrepancy between the pop-star buzz around artificial intelligence, AI, and the nearly total absence of discussion about common spontaneous intelligence reveals the self-blindness of science. Since developments in computer technology in the 1970’s, there has been a well publicized effort to create artificial intelligence. Nobody hesitates to discuss artificial intelligence, but at the same time nobody discusses intelligence that is spontaneously occurring in ordinary human persons. In respectable discourse, any approach to inward experience must be limited to concepts appropriate to the determinism of outward experience, a lethal reductionism operating on a cultural and political scale. Conversations that drift toward thinking processes soon drift onto something else. However, without the spontaneous intelligence we take for granted in ourselves and people around us, there would be nothing for the investor/ research community to counterfeit.

Spontaneous intelligence, subjectivity, is profoundly mistrusted and poorly understood. It is so mistrusted that we hardly ever want to face it in ourselves, to own and explore it, to face the subtleties and profundities of personal subjectivity. It is actually frightening, indeed one of the main terrors of philosophy. (Philosophy is absent from school curricula because certain people find it terrifying, not because it is imprecise or pointless.) We are largely disabled from reflexive self-awareness by the needs and demands of capitalist-commercial organization, demands to be “career oriented” and to live in imitation of officially recommended role models. Yet everyone is a personal instance of spontaneous intelligence. Everybody has privileged access to an intelligence unmediated by questionnaires, mazes, experimental design, and hypothetical assumptions.

The discrepancy between the buzz around AI and the lack of buzz around spontaneous intelligence is the result of the dominance of science. Spontaneously occurring intelligence is personal subjectivity, and personal subjectivity is creative, which is to say that it cannot be reduced, ultimately, to material cause-effect clockwork. Since science is nothing but the craft of removing personality by reducing experiences to material cause-effect, science hits a wall at spontaneous intelligence. However, only subjective intelligence generates curiosity, original questions, awe at patterning and beauty, and ways of overcoming its own particularity, and even though such forces are the entire foundation of science, science cannot account for the forces that are questions, for example, either for questions in general or for the particularity of specific questions: subjectivity is science’s blind spot.

The scientific effort to create artificial intelligence is another effort to reduce the concept of intelligence to materialist clockwork. Specifically, the effort is to create, in mechanisms crafted by human design, behaviours which are indistinguishable from what passes as intelligent behaviour in people. That effort is nothing new. Since at least 1600 and the emergence of mathematical rationalism within the European Ancien Régime, there have been similar intellectual projects. The reductionist intent of the AI effort means only that the subjective side of spontaneously occurring intelligence is being stipulated by Dr. Frankenstein as irrelevant to the game he wishes to play.

Intelligence is Situated Politically

Since the political forces just described perceive benefits for themselves in perpetuating self-alienation in every intelligence, the prospects for self-awareness or self-knowledge by any individual are largely a matter of political consciousness. The political forces bearing on intelligence must be identified and disabled on a personal level before self-awareness is possible. The ideological repression of humanism is the repression of freedom and creativity in every individual, and such an effect can be carried off only by rigorous training in self-blindness, self-alienation. Father-god religions (sometimes in the Confucian variant in which any father figure is god-like) and science ideology are two ways to accomplish that rigorous training, and both are impressively pervasive and sophisticated. Capitalism, the exclusivity of consumption and inequality itself as values in market commerce, is also a very effective system of training in anti-humanist inequality and self-blindness.

Multiple Universes

Each embodied intelligence is a separate universe of self-positioning (orientation, bearing), each vectoring within a personal grid of non-actuality, each an ever more complicated, self-elaborating question, and yet all marooned together within, and each passing like a storm system through, the same elemental world of natural laws, forces, and structures, and in that world building interpersonal attachments under the influence and example of language and nurture communities, ethnic communities, political forces, and intimate personal interconnectedness.

Transcendent Embodiment

Each embodied intelligence is already a complete person prior to, and always transcending, engagement with and acquisition of cultural ways of living, language, and the issues of a time in history. We need the personal powers of embodiment and basic intelligence to build interconnectedness with others, and in doing that we enter the political currents and influences about assignment of values, roles, and tolerable appearances, for example. Those currents of influence and fashion within the interconnectedness almost alienate our orientation from its innocent embodiment and intelligence experiences, but never totally. Political inducements pull us toward conformity with certain general types or ideal categories, but we never completely lose a grounding in our particularity. We have a personal voice prior to, and continuing after, learning languages.

A voice is not the same as the language or words uttered. A voice is also more than the sounds of physiological vocal organs. In addition to the language and the vocal organs there is a composed musicality to each voice, emotionally expressive qualities from an intelligence in a life-situation. The voice expresses a personal style-competence, a continuity of inventions and choices, deliberate acts of self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments. As such, the voice carries or expresses a character, persona, or avatar in addition to any meaning that might be denoted or connoted by linguistic sounds.

Since rocks and bushes do not speak, there appears to be a transcendence revealed by the speaking of subjectivity. The speaking of subjectivity has, therefore, inspired a great deal of interest in language. Language is certainly larger than any individual, but is also a kind of red herring. Curious investigators of the human situation have widely assumed that understanding language would bring with it an understanding of the transcendence of subjectivity, of intelligence, but it has failed to do so. It has also failed to explain away the transcendence of speaking and of speakers. Voices have instead been ignored, as bookshelves groaned under the weight of grammars, dictionaries, and theoretical linguistics. Without particular voices, language would cease to exist; but not the other way around. Voices have inspired study of language, but not the other way around.

Because of how important culture and interconnectedness are in our survival, “being in the world” is a political situation. Intelligences are embodied in such a way that survival depends absolutely on social attachments to family, friends, nurture and support providers, to opportunity providers. The necessity of attachment carries with it the learning of language and other cultural systems, “the way we live in our group”, always including a political situation that involves tension between gender cultures, specifically an ATL faction doing its utmost to own and control everything, and especially to control the FLN faction, in every family and at all levels of social organization. The challenges and obstacles that make self-awareness and thinking about “being in the world” difficult are mainly the political effects of father-religion, military-based sovereignty, market-culture, and science, constructed deliberately and specifically by ATL enthusiasts to distract everyone from self-possession.

The personal use of philosophical thinking is inherently political because it is self-possessing. It exercises subjective powers of self-directed re-orientation, including personal curiosity, gratification, questioning, skepticism, and rational doubt. In doing that, it is a direct rival to external controlling forces such as patriarchal families, schools, profession guilds, religions, employment organizations, and military states, all expressing alpha-trophy-looting ideals and controlling individuals by, for example, flashy incentives and by personifying various disembodied entities, often collectives. As a counter-force, self-directed re-orientation draws on an individual’s particularity of sensitivity, embodiment, and expressive voice.

Disengaging from the matrix of self-blindness puts all the certainties of ATL modernity into question. However, that is not to abandon or damage the great human interconnectedness, but rather to make better lives for ourselves and everyone by reducing the cultural and political oppression that is currently imposed within the interconnectedness. A crucial part of that oppression involves the dishonouring and disempowerment, by the alpha-trophy-looting uber-system, of all other cultural sub-systems, including even introverts. The interconnectedness needs to be nudged toward a new orientation.

Transcendental Humanism

Two oppressive practices by leadership collectives are specific assaults against individuals to defend against in building an alternative orientation. One way to begin is with the two vectors of humanist philosophy. First, remove disembodied personifications from your mental construct of the world. Disengage emotionally from the official grid, the current system of animism in collective ‘brands’ of all kinds. Second, come to know the transcendence of your own personal intelligence. Replace externals with self-awareness as transcendent intelligence, a personal creative process projecting constructs into nature and culture. You are an original, continuously self-constructing question, a surprise horizon, a time-well into non-actuality, a projector of particular freedom. The transcendent intelligence of all other embodied persons follows from personal acquaintance with transcendence, and that disables the value of inequality as an incentive and reward. Inequality is the entire substance of ATL motivation and value. Detach from a focus on property, consumption, and celebrity as achievements and markers of personal identity. Pageants of belonging through brand attachments, encouraged and rewarded by competitions for personal validation from trophies, are all unequalizing distractions from self-awareness as transcendence, and distractions from a universal distribution of dignity and respect based on recognition of intelligences in other embodied persons. Instead of attaching emotionally to spooks and icons of celebrity systems, build a more equal distribution of respect for ordinary embodied personalities. That is nothing more than the implicit program of ancient humanism.

Humanist re-orientation eliminates the core pillars from the alpha-trophy-looting belief-system, pillars such as father-figure-worship, hierarchical meritocracy, personification of the military nation, and the self-sufficiency of science, which some people have cherished as substitute parental figures, as places to just stop in thinking about the complexity of being in the world and in assessing one’s own ability to make sense of it. Defenders of the military-Christian tradition, for example, focused as they are on generic “human nature” (as carrier of original sin) instead of on individuals, promote the view that common sanity requires externally provided supports for mental stability, adult substitutes for the unquestioning trust that children place in parents. That assumption is very popular and especially popular among the leadership faction, generations of which have been promoting it. That vision reaches a point at which the legitimacy of power or the truth of religious claims is completely irrelevant because, it asserts, without unalterable belief in external authorities and the certainties they proclaim, people would plunge into nihilistic insanity and complete social disorder. Fortunately, the alpha-trophy-looting vision of life is not the only one. The humanist journey is a place and orientation free from the lies, manipulation, and disempowerment projected from the control faction without being left with the wreckage, ruin, and powerless despair predicted by its conservative vision.

Social Order

The guarantor and binding mechanism of social order and human communication networks is not the authority of the star-system meritocracy, nor police forces, armies, guns, or prisons. Social order and interconnectedness are products of the informal non-family collectives which groups of mothers form with their children to have the children play together and learn to speak the communal language: the first-language-nurture cultural system. Those groups build on and extend accomplishments from the countless hours that mothers spend engaged with their children, one on one. The whole first-language-nurture cultural system builds on the elemental pleasure and mutual inspiration that particular intelligences experience in connecting with each other. There really is a robust first-language-nurture culture providing real parenting, belonging within personal interconnectedness, language skills, and mutual adult support. Re-thinking humanism requires recognition of overriding importance in the first-language-nurture culture, especially in creating the human interconnectedness that is so easy (under alpha-trophy-looting influence) to take as merely given by nature. It is not a given, but a continuously constructed collective work of intelligences.

Renaissance humanism, unlike ancient Hellenistic humanism, existed in the Christian context of an overbearing idea of transcendence belonging to the father-god. The power of individual intelligence was conceived, in Renaissance humanism, as limited to self-specification or cultivation, the power to make something particular of yourself, or not. It was an alternative to total slavery to original sin and dependence on divine grace, but strictly limited.

Contrary to the promoters of external pillars of inward stability, there is far more reliable and elemental inward experience on which to ground effective sanity, namely the grounding of personal embodied transcendence. When personality is attributed to disembodied entities such as spirits in the sky, human collectives, institutions, or corporations, all efforts at understanding transcendence collide with an impenetrable wall, because there is no transcendence out there. When transcendence is recognized at its source, individual subjective intelligence, then the whole approach is altered. Instead of transcendence inspiring wheedling fear and cowering beneath an angry looming father, it now inspires creative self-expression, and the approach becomes, “we should all be having fun with this.” If disembodied personifications and inequality as such were to lose their celebrity status and reputation there would be completely novel opportunities for self-awareness and a more universal respect for human dignity and the value of individual peculiarity. Transcendence is a personal experience, subjective, inward. “I am here and elsewhere.”

Embodiment as a Political Grounding

We find our innocent grounding in embodiment experiences and the force of intelligence, basic positioning and active effectiveness in mobility and endurance, the energy flows of a particular embodiment. Re-orientation processes are grounded there. Intelligence is rarely aware of its own transcendence. Authentic self-consciousness is consciousness of the bearings of intelligence. The accumulating bearing is an ever more complicated question, with sensitivities, vigils, and directions of force. It is continuously renewing from a gushing fountain of pretend orientations, questions, curiosities, conjectures, and impulses to play with particularity. Transcendence is always the relationship of intelligence to the brute actuality of nature, but noticing that relationship requires a degree of active innocence. Innocence is a certain condition of intelligence, a frame of orientation bracketing out culturally (politically) stipulated features. Innocence and awareness of transcendence are the same region of experience. It is possible to think what innocence is and to reach it. There is an inner source and voice there at your personal surprise horizon, not just passive consciousness. The subjective surprise horizon fountains out a trail of breadcrumbs which has to be recognized, from a range of increasingly remote memory, as a voice. A voice exists only through time. Embodied intelligence is the ultimate innocence beneath social attachment, linguistic convention immersion, and cultural conditioning.

The Elements

In an elemental reorientation, the elements are individual intelligences, along with nature and culture, and within that ever-changing culture, the political factions and especially the first-language-nurture faction and the alpha-trophy-looting faction.

Humanist philosophy is an invitation to a personal journey of elemental re-orientation, and it puts at risk every part of a ATL-approved orientation, for example, your sense of your political situation. You were told it was an equal opportunity melee, a free-for-all competition, established and maintained because it is the only realistic mechanism to authenticate and legitimize the most worthy and ablest meritocracy. In fact, it has been a rigged game forever, with a control faction which acts to improve its own control, reaching down to the individual level. You are not the objectified avatar you have been influenced to assume, and the effective history of your world is not what you were taught in school. Instead, effective history has been the assaults launched by the self-perpetuating ATL faction against other cultural factions such as the faction promoting humanist personal transcendence and the faction of first-language-nurture.

The elemental orientation grid is a counter-force against standard cultural tags which impose a definition on each person. Let the outward tags of identity be muted, socioeconomic niche, job title, life-style, clothing style, neighbourhood. Identify subjectively your sustainable-life-building bearing, adjusting a personal path within the rigid structures of nature, culture, and personal attachments. Identify the surprise horizon in your subjective blind spot, your private doubts and curiosities, the kinds of play you find to be fun.

Having an elemental orientation grid is something like the experience some people have their first time seeing the night sky in really good conditions, with clear clean air and a total absence of nearby lights or tall obstacles on the ground. The milky way disk spreads out before your eyes. All your life you have been a creature of turf, mud, rocks, and bushes, held to the ground. Now you are a creature of stars and galaxies, of that mysterious black void behind everything. This is where you live. You remind yourself to breathe. It is an elemental enlargement of personal and human dignity. General improvements in dignity, such as that inspired by the spread of proletarian literacy and direct access to vernacular Bibles, have had great historical consequences.

Violence Doesn’t Work

Only crime families and religious cults benefit from anarchy, and they always combine to bring actual anarchy to a nasty end. Violent revolutions don’t work because they create their own elite of official criminal violence and have to defend the superficially successful new order against all conceivable forces of anarchy and counterrevolution, typically by repressive social supervision and force for a long time. That point is illustrated by the three great revolutions of modern times: United States of America (1776), France (1789), Soviet Russia (1917). They all end as top-down, centralized, and militarized societies. Such considerations shed some positive light onto certain aspects of the modern system of democratic legal jurisdictions with assigned responsibility to protect civic society and individuals against crime families, religious cults, and repressive supervision. Governments can be assessed on how well they remove those forces from their field of influence.

What Comes After Declining Capitalism

Capitalism is a mental construct which focuses attention on conspicuous consumption and transferrable wealth. It’s a massive distraction from self-awareness and self-possession. Changing that on a grand scale will not be easily done. However, consider that nobody had a pre-constructed alternative to the tyranny of Church and crime families in feudal Christendom, but the Christian construct lost moral credibility, and that liberated individuals and groups to invent alternatives piece by piece over a long period. The protestant reformation and rationalist philosophy eventually brought down the mental structure of feudal Christendom. Literacy and classical Greek humanism gave some reality to the idea of equality in the European cultural system and humanist elemental re-orientation is again a promising possibility. Cultural/mental constructs do change and adjust to events and developments, and capitalism is losing legitimacy.

In dealing with the question of the specific design of a better future, an approach might be borrowed from the movie, The Matrix (released in 1999, written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski). Near the middle of the movie there is a scene in which a child sits on the floor with a silver spoon in her hand. The spoon is bending into different shapes. Neo accepts the spoon from the child to try to do the same. Nothing happens. The child says: “Do not try to bend the spoon. It’s impossible. Instead, just try to realize the truth.” “What truth?” asks Neo. “There is no spoon,” says the child. In that spirit, we are in no position to design an entire alternative future right now. That should not be used as an excuse to restrain our thinking in re-orienting ourselves within our political situation. Building a better future will proceed as we do our best to realize the truth. The spoon will bend.

A Preface to Transcendental Humanism

25 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Gender culture, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Each intelligence is transcendent as a distinguishable universe of temporality and creativity. Transcendence is being not-limited-to-actuality. There are parts to that. Any person’s main bearing is almost completely beyond actuality since it is oriented to the whole personal past (which does not actually exist) of this intelligence, and also toward a completely fictitious and increasingly remote and improbable future. There is also a subjective surprise horizon within that main bearing, fountaining new questions, for example. Part of transcendence is the indefinability or unplottability of intelligence within actuality. It isn’t only embodiment experience that trumps cultural embeddedness and linguistic determinism, but also the powers of intelligence as described in blog posting 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence, the power of intelligence to pretend and orient itself in non-actual time.

Those different universes of orientation (individual persons) are very much dependent on the shared actuality of pre-determined nature, and on mentally constructed interconnectedness with multiple different universes of orientation (individual persons), so they cannot be called autonomous. However, the transcendence of each one as an intelligence does have some crucial subjective grounding with which to establish a profoundly self-possessed orientation. The individual cannot do without human interconnectedness, or culture, or nature, but neither is the individual ever completely a creature of those sources and influences.

The human interconnectedness is excessively oppressive at present due to widespread unconsciousness about its basic operating elements, namely individual intelligences, nature, and culture, but also because of unconsciousness about the basic political antagonism within the interconnectedness, the antagonism between the culture of alpha-trophy-looting (ATL) versus the culture of first-language-nurture (FLN), and because of the dominance of ATL control operations. So far in political and social theory, the concept of political or civic power has expressed only the ATL ethos, completely excluding the worldview and rational claims of the FLN faction based on the FLN contribution to social interconnectedness. Religion, sovereign power, capitalism, science, are all expressions of the ATL ethos or worldview, completely in denial of the whole FLN construct of society. The FLN culture has an intrinsic tendency toward promoting equality because it is common knowledge within that culture that huge investments of loving care, personal attachment, energy, strategy, and work go into the survival of every human being, and it is bestial and criminal to waste any single one. Disrespecting any person is disrespecting all that sacred investment of nurture. The FLN cultural inclination to be egalitarian clarifies the incompatibility and hostility between ATL and FLN in the most fundamental operation of human societies, and also suggests why the ATL forces want to explain language and social interconnectedness in any way that avoids mention of FLN operations and effectiveness.

Nobody would want to abandon or damage the great human interconnectedness, but it is only rational to consider how to make better lives for ourselves and everyone by reducing the cultural and political oppression that is currently imposed by the interconnectedness. A crucial part of that oppression involves the dishonouring and disempowerment, by the alpha-trophy-looting uber-system, of all other cultural sub-systems, including even introverts. The interconnectedness can be nudged toward a less unbalanced condition.

The distribution of self-awareness as individual transcendence is a window on, and an index within, the political situation within the interconnectedness. Right now, the generally low level of popular self-awareness reveals the effects of ATL dominance aggressively stifling self-knowledge in order to maintain its ethos of radical inequality. The ethos involves aggressive interference with individuals by the use of cultures of disembodied personifications (‘brand loyalties’) and pageantry of inequality. The market culture headline is “gratifying consumption” but the story beneath is “bitter inequality”. It is all competitions and comparisons. Some people do enjoy those activities, and there is nothing wrong with sensual pleasure. However, the competitions are nothing but pageants of inequality used as control mechanisms, incentives, rewards, inducements. They declare that the way to define and measure your worth and substance is in the melee of specified competitions. All that pageantry reveals a lack of acquaintance with personal transcendence in a personal creative process. Self-definition by competition is just as much a distraction from self-awareness as is identification with disembodied spooks, exploiting the appeal of sheltering within a powerful personified collective. The ATL control faction uses brand loyalties, including the national belonging excited by war, to externalize, again, individual self-definition. Since disembodied personifications still dominate the cultural landscape as ‘brands’, science has failed its primary mission to move society beyond animism.

Self-defense is legitimate against such interference, and it is the subjective grounding available to individuals that enables self-defense. The control structure is very prepared to win every contest based on violence, and that is sufficient reason to avoid violence. The main reason to avoid violence is that violence disrespects its victims as well as all the nurture that supported their survival. Instead, find the ideological blind spots.

Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom

01 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Equality, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Christendom

Christendom existed as a pan-European theocratic practicality from the time of Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 A.D.. The centralized Church hierarchy based in Rome exerted senior supervisory control (more or less) from then until Henry VIII’s separation of the English Church in 1534: 734 years. Medieval Christendom began as a society fallen from the glories of the Roman Empire. The economy was subsistence farming characterized by tenant families bound within feudal contracts to specific pieces of land under the control of a military-estate family or a Church foundation. There was an intimate connection between military families and the Church because the ‘second sons’ who could not inherit the family’s noble title and lands would often go to school for a good education and then into the Church hierarchy. The rural-subsistence economy without much money was based on contractual and traditional obligations. Peasant farming families were at the mercy of wild nature, disease, and marauders, and nature was considered to be personified by disembodied spirits who might be anywhere, unseen and yet powerful.

Christian Relics

Ancient investments of effort in monument-creating, such as construction of the Egyptian pyramids, came from ideas about a supernatural stratum of existence. The pyramids were acts to connect with such a stratum, and they illustrate an economy of the supernatural in which earthly wealth is founded upon gods and spirits and the qualities of their world. That conception of wealth was still important in the European middle ages, during the construction of the Gothic cathedrals. Those magnificent fortresses of the faith were built in part to house, in suitable glory, bones of a saint or a fragment of the cross on which Jesus was crucified, considered to have supernatural power and influence. Something of the spirit of the dead saint was supposed to reside in the material remnant. Just as a reason for achievements in cathedral architecture was to house relics, the Crusades were expeditions for the looting of wealth in the form of relics from the holy land. Christianity was, at one level, a cult of relics, thought to be radiant with supernatural energy. Relics were high-status luxury goods and there was a lucrative commerce supported by the demand for them. Such were the treasures of those times.

Christians, like Stoics, believe the world of bodies manifests a providential divine will. Stoics considered the world to be eternal and uncreated, identical with Logos, whereas Christians believe nature to be the creation of a separate deity. For both of them, the common world of natural bodies has much to love, distinctly unlike the visions of Plato and ancient Zoroastrians, for example. Yet there is still a crucial transcendence in the Christian vision, since God’s separateness from His creation is exactly transcendence.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 A.D.)

Medieval Christianity was by far a darker, harsher, spookier world view than that of the modern Roman Church. Catholic Christendom was characterized by a human-hating obsession with hereditary sin and an imaginary after-death world. The influential writings of Augustine of Hippo asserted that human nature is essentially evil because of Adam’s original sin, and the only way people can be good is by being forced to obey the laws of God and secular authorities. Virtue is obedience and self-denial. There is in Augustine’s view a form of anticipation of Freud’s theory of the superego, that moral behaviour originates outside the individual. In Freud the superego was internalized authority figures. For Augustine, the relevant authority figures were officials of the Church. Officials of religion believed that overpowering impulses to individual self-gratification were continually pulling social attachments apart, and any loss of a popular fear of hell and satan, or supernatural powers generally, would result in uncontrolled female sexuality leading to general social breakdown.

Confirmed in Dependence on the Church

The Church was happy to encourage most people to “be fruitful and multiply”, even though human flesh and its pleasures were considered tainted, because it confirmed the sinfulness of people and their resulting dependence on magical sacrament-performing priests. Strong institutional supervision of adults was required by Augustine’s assertion that people are normally vicious and/ or weak and so can behave virtuously only by means of strong and often harsh control by a powerful hierarchy of the religiously and militarily sophisticated. From roughly 800 A.D. to 1534 the Church’s claim to legitimate authority was persuasive to most people. The influence of Augustinian Christianity went well beyond religious practice as such. It pervaded the culture of western society generally as the common-sense idea of human nature and value. The resulting fear and gloom achieved a firm psychological grip. Soaring cathedrals of stone and glass were fortresses of the doctrine, intimidating symbols of wealth and dominance, presiding over the pessimistic gloom of Christendom. Eventually the Holy Inquisition (1233) was created to exterminate people with unorthodox thoughts.

Transcendence is the link between philosophy and religion. In Christendom the culture of transcendence, which had been a minority report in ancient Greece, was made into a legal obligation by the theocratic Church of Rome. In that sense philosophy as ideology of transcendence had taken control of society, but Christianity removed the decisive power from individual intelligence at the same time as it reversed the philosophical project of understanding nature as an impersonal system. The Church taught the best way to live based on a claim of divine revelation to officials, but the work of rational proof was also considered important to confront heresy and convince the skeptical. The literate class, especially within the universities, were dedicated to recapitulating ancient achievements of rational sophistication. In the panorama of ancient and medieval thinking, a tainted nature was an enemy with humans firmly in its claws. Christianity deified cosmic evil in the demonic figure of Satan, the devil. Whereas the philosophical portal out was transcendence through a non-mystical form of individual mental focus, the Christian transcendence, greatly influenced by Augustine, was collective and corporate, a merging with the body of the Church in return for an eventual transcendent afterlife.

Individualism, Original Sin, and Augustine

The idea of original sin is profoundly anti-individualistic. It means that all human beings share in the same single, sinful, nature. Individual persons are not original on this view but merely new eruptions of one nature. So, in spite of Augustine’s Confessions exploring individual psychology in an original autobiographical way, the effect of Augustine’s teaching was not individualistic, but the opposite. His conclusion was that, although an individual might be able to figure out what is right and even want to do right, rationality is never powerful enough to overcome original sin, appetites, and selfish ambitions of the passionate and lower part of human nature. People will want to do right, but never just yet.

In the Christian tradition the individual is a bearer of generic original sin as well as bearer of responsibility for moral choices in day to day life. If there is no person there is no local sin, no specific responsibility, and not much justice in punishment or reward. So, although the Church emphasized generic human nature and the human collective, the individual could not be completely negated because reward and punishment applied at the level of the individual, and reward and punishment were core values and instruments of the Church.

In the Christian world view, the after-death world was more important than the tangible world, and the reflective sense of individuality was not highly developed. Generalized ‘human nature’ was more in focus culturally, and it was considered tainted by the original sin which resulted in human exile from Eden. That is an echo of the pre-Christian sense of taint on the world of nature. The taint applied in Christendom mainly to human nature, from original sin, but the rest of nature did not escape. After all, the world in which humans find themselves is a veil of tears, a long way down from Eden.

Freedom

There was an ancient sense of taint effectively rejecting the world of the senses as pervaded by an evil power. Nature, represented by the human body and the impulses and pains of the body, was still effectively hated and feared in Christianity. In Christendom a conception of spirituality replaced rational thinking as the portal to transcendent freedom beyond demonic nature. Focus on the world to come after the death of the body seemed to offer the only such portal of escape. Official spirituality demanded blind trust in, and obedience to, the Church’s teachings on the rewards of the afterlife. Christianity also promised freedom from nature and the body through exercises which enabled a transcendent other-worldly spirituality. Prayer, penance, and various exercises could be practiced in the effort to invoke divine Grace. Once again, as in ancient thinking, freedom and experience of a higher state of being were a glorious possibility for people, but achieved only through special and arduous efforts and trials, removed from ordinary day to day living. Connecting with eternity was still a crucial achievement.

Among the educated in the Church, knowledge was thought to be mental illumination from God, the revelation of something like a Platonic Ideal Form uncovering the character of something at a particular time and place. There is an echo here of Aristotle’s “active intellect”, a single divine entity which participated in the rational mental process of each individual. The Christian theory of knowledge required such acts of divine illumination, and it was the same with freedom. The Church taught freedom of the will to make moral actions, that is, actions which are ‘self’-denying or contrary to original sin or natural impulse, but it was freedom by divine Grace. Humans were made ‘in God’s image’ by a broad original act of Grace, but some extraordinary intervention was required for a specific act of real ‘self’-denial, real freedom from tainted nature. In general people needed the grim guidance of Church authorities displaying their use of the scourge, rack, and stake. In this context freedom of the will was a weak flame largely overpowered by original sin.

Christian Collectivism

The hard-won classical advances in honouring individual subjectivity, as in Stoicism and Epicureanism, stood as a dangerous threat to the totalitarian ambitions of the Church, and the Church devoted considerable resources to burying them. When rules of living are dictated by an omnipotent god, being ethical depends entirely on compliance with the god’s dictates. Treatment of other beings is unimportant in itself. During the Theocracy of Christendom the Church claimed special possession of God’s truth and exclusive ability to teach and evaluate everybody’s compliance. The Church promoted an “other-world” focus which incorporated misery in “this world” into its myth. The other-world focus and the doctrine that human nature is intrinsically evil, condoned gross social injustice. The Catholic God was seen concretely in the feudal social order just as much as in the images collected in or carved into the structure of churches. The message was that the feudal order had to be accepted and preserved as it was, and hope placed in life-after-death. God supposedly acted through the Church to enforce the social order. The Church thus enforced a collectivism around its sacraments, rituals, art, architecture, and hierarchy. The doctrines of the Church transformed the internal individual-to-god connection characteristic of Stoicism, for example, into an external and objectified individual-to-Church-to-social-order-to-god relationship.

John Wycliffe (1328-84) and Vernacular Literacy

The Universities of Christendom, beginning from Bologna around 1088, did not monopolize literacy in Latin, partly because they did not confine their high-end scribes within their walls as monasteries did. Universities projected Latin literacy outward into their communities in the form of graduates: lawyers, medical doctors, (Latin) grammar teachers, and theologians. It is still remarkable that a European movement for popular vernacular literacy began even prior to the invention of the printing press. The beginning of the movement seems to have been the campaign by John Wycliffe, based at Oxford University, for universal vernacular literacy and translation of vernacular Bibles. That was to be the foundation of a world-changing ideal of equality in the European cultural system.

The modern notion of equality has much to do with the medieval European institution of social class (aristocracy, clergy, and peasantry) which looms as a spectacular paradigm of inequality. It was a set of laws and customs which institutionalized systematic and random insults and injuries to the peasantry, who became increasingly alienated and resentful of them. In medieval society land ownership was the main foundation of inequality, since aristocracy was defined in terms of military culture (Chivalry) and land ownership. As mere labourers in the economy of agriculture, peasants were treated as property also, attached to the land. Another crucial feature of medieval inequality was the special power of priests of the Roman Church. Since the Church owned keys to the divine realm and eternal life, there was a set of critical ‘check-points’ in every person’s life, such as joining the community as an infant, coming of age, marriage, and death, which had to be sanctioned by the presence of a priest performing the appropriate sacrament, specific bits of ritual magic. The ability of aristocracy to acquire religious relics, sometimes to donate to the Church for something like naming rights to a chapel, made them participants to some extent in the exclusionary economy of the supernatural.

The drive to make the Voice of God, as manifested in the Bible, available directly to each individual was based on a notion from humanist philosophy, now translated into a ‘proto-protestant’ attitude, in which every individual on his or her own was considered competent and worthy to understand the Voice of God and be elevated by it. Given the importance of the Bible in that culture, access to it was a profound equality and dignity that would influence every other aspect of culture. Suddenly all people, each individually, could have a really transcendent mental power in literacy. Writing is an engraving of voices, and widespread literacy vastly enlarges the cultural presence and weight of individual voices, and with that the recognition of personal intelligence. The movement was recognized as revolutionary by the Church at the time and was violently resisted. The Church restricted both vernacular literacy and direct popular access to Bibles because of the emphasis on original sin injected into Christian culture by Augustine: that individuals have such evil within them that they cannot be trusted to themselves and can be saved only by institutional supervision and control. However, in spite of official resistance to vernacular literacy, important progress was made and soon aided by the spread of printing technology, and then by protestantism.

Movable Type

Johann Gutenberg ( c. 1398-1468) of Mainz, Germany, introduced the printing press into Western culture in the 1440’s. Gutenberg’s major printing project, a Latin Bible, appeared around 1455. It was printer/ publishers trained by Gutenberg who first published vernacular Bibles, a German translation, in the 1460’s. It was duly banned by officials of the Church in 1485, but it illustrates the spread of the movement for vernacular literacy across the European cultural system. The printing press enabled a culture of written conversation outside churches and universities and independent of them, the ‘Republic of Letters’. Universities are often conservative places, as the term “scholastic” has come to mean, preserving an elite orthodoxy. The influence of church schools and universities was important, but widespread literacy outside institutions was the crucial novelty. The emergence of newspapers and a book press outside church, state, and university expanded the consequences of literacy in all aspects of society. People who read, write, and think about profound questions can do so as independent adventurers, under no authority but their own. The Republic of Letters was and is a voluntary and informal communication arrangement, carried on in writing. It wasn’t middle class literacy which ignited the fires of modernity but proletarian literacy, aided by the printing press.

Martin Luther (1483-1546): Doubt and A Personal Leap of Intelligence

Until his break with the Roman Church, Luther was a monk in the Augustinian order, and that grounding persuaded him that humans have no power at all since the exile from Eden, and are absolute slaves to the devil except by God’s whimsical Grace through which some are predestined to have faith and virtue. Both Calvin and Luther show strong Augustinian influence. Calvinism emphasized the intrinsic evil of people, as Augustine’s Catholicism did. However, Luther’s Protestants combined humanist beliefs with the acceptance of original sin and distrust of the body. Luther’s published statements about the German Peasants’ Revolt (1524-25) make it clear he was no crusader for full social equality, and it was not his intention to interfere with the other-world focus of theocratic society. Like most philosophers, Luther’s messages were inconsistent and many of their consequences were more or less unintended.

Luther had the ancient teachings of Hellenistic philosophical sects to draw upon, the Stoics and Epicureans already mentioned, and was proud of that humanist education. He applied the basic humanist insight of self-possession to the credibility of religious claims. The humanist competence of self-development revealed a special importance in the context of those most profound questions of knowledge. Luther discovered that the competence of self-development included the power to make creative leaps, which did not turn speculation into knowledge, but rather revealed God’s image in the leaper.

Christianity as a Mental Process: Luther and Doubt

On October 31, 1517 Luther posted a list of 95 theses on his church door in Wittenberg, Germany, including a defense of “justification by faith alone.” Luther’s emphasis on faith is often put in the context of a removal of emphasis from good works, but a better way to understand it is to put faith in the context of doubt. Luther’s doubt was based on courageous honesty about the impossibility of being certain of the teachings of Christianity, among other knowledge claims. Christian certainty was breaking down, and in the process preparing the way for the breakdown of Christian gloom.

Luther became a new model of the mental process of being Christian. In public debate with Church authorities Luther was continually confronted with the question of how his individual wisdom could match the accumulated store from the whole history of the Church. Luther could well have quoted Socrates: “I know only that I know nothing.” For Luther the mental process of being Christian was an intensely personal struggle against anguished uncertainty, against doubt and the dread that comes from it. For Luther the internal focus and struggle was an obsession. He confronted the impossibility of knowing human and individual destiny, even in the light of the divine revelation of Christianity, and his response pioneered an alternative to skepticism, namely a personal leap of faith. If I take the leap of faith in full rational awareness that it is absurd, it is a declaration of my freedom from ‘laws of thought’. Manifesting that freedom is actualizing human life in the image of God since God’s image is precisely freedom.

Luther’s inner struggles with doubt in the face of desperate need for certainty introduced a thread of ‘existential’ subjectivity into the culture of intellectual debates. Personal doubt and anguish are markers of a thinking and emotional entity, a subjective intelligence with powers of acting from judgments of probabilities, extending into the increasingly remote future. Luther had faith in Truth, but was convinced that Truth could not be known with certainty, so individuals must get along with what innocent subjectivity makes available to them. Basing a sense of identity on knowing, on certainty, makes individuals passive and it loses something crucial in Luther’s inward faith, which is not a knowing and must be active to be authentic. Exactly because it is not knowing, faith is distinctly a person’s act, a personal self-declaration and self-creation, something like “I choose faith, so I exist in the freedom which is the image of God.”

Luther’s relationship with the university at Wittenberg was an important part of the framework of his work. His writing expressed the role of a university scholar at an advancing edge. In that context it is remarkable that Luther’s thinking was personal in contrast to Medieval scholastic logic. Luther’s mental condition as a Christian defined a profoundly individual subjective (existential) state. At the same time, Lutheran inwardness was not mystical, not an abandonment to cosmic wholeness or to the love of a God who is a person. Mysticism is never individual, but instead all encompassing. Faith for Luther was a personal and reasoned decision which removed magical, cultish, and mystical features of religion.

Protestant Christianity offered a model of inward subjective value by emphasizing individual piety, ultimate justification by faith. Faith, and so virtue, is a personal, inward accomplishment, available equally to all and not just the gifted, privileged, or heroic. The thrust of Protestantism is strong and equal individualism, justification by an internal accomplishment which is socially invisible. You cannot tell who is ‘in Grace’ by social position, property, family, cash flow, physical beauty, or overt giftedness of any kind. That was the Lutheran revolution, an overthrow of “establishment” control and supervision by discovery of elemental value in individual subjectivity. Freedom of conscience placed emphasis on a personal inward process of decision. Subjectivity is the ultimate revolutionary force because it bypasses all incentives and rewards under the control of a supervising elite or an ideology. The Church became irrelevant when each individual found direct personal communication with God through his or her own competence.

With Protestantism there was a radical change of what counted as moral action, away from “good works”, which normally involved a transfer of wealth to the Church, to private grace in exercising freedom. Faith for Luther was in contrast to payment of money to the Church for certificates of forgiveness (indulgences) with specific expiry dates. So the nub of Protestantism was a rejection of overt, outwardly observable accomplishments and a concentration on individual inwardness: faith. Luther’s essay The Freedom of a Christian emphasizes a distinction between individual mental “inwardness” and “outward” appearances. That was an essentially Stoic distinction. Morality and sin no longer had to do with observing the sabbath, priestly sacraments, dietary laws, formal sacrifices and prayers, or performing correct rites of purification or charity, but with realizing God’s image in freedom of the individual will. Since God’s relation to his creation is exactly transcendence, that mental process, which recapitulates the image of God in a creative act of freedom, is an experience of transcendence.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Descartes was an amateur genius in mathematics who had been spotted as gifted as a child and educated to be a lawyer. Next after theology, law was the most esteemed of the university faculties. Descartes never worked professionally as a lawyer nor as a university professor, but sometimes as a military aide. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) started the year Descartes turned 22 and continued until he was 52, merely two years before his death. The war raged along during all but a tiny portion of his adult life, and so military work was widely available. When Descartes was a child of 4 the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was executed in Rome. Bruno’s execution by burning alive, by order of the Roman Inquisition, had a profound effect on subsequent generations of philosophers, Descartes among them. Bruno was savagely executed for nothing other than his philosophical thoughts and writings, and far more brutally than Socrates had been. Bruno’s killing clarified the Roman Church as the mortal enemy of philosophy and inspired a fierce determination in an underground movement for “freedom to philosophize”.

Descartes liked to get lost, and found, in thought, and became active in the republic of letters, writing in academic Latin. Descartes’ thinking was moved by doubt, as Luther’s was, and doubt was a crucial act of intelligence for Descartes. For Descartes, doubt was the matrix of personal freedom in thinking. Descartes’ “thinking substance” and “extended substance” follow fairly closely the inward-outward dualism presented in Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian. Luther had no influence on Descartes’ mathematics or science, but the philosophical side of Descartes’ work fits perfectly into the cultural context created roughly a century earlier by the existential doubt explored and made famous internationally by Luther. The demystifying force of Descartes’ science was also in the tradition of reducing magic advanced by protestantism.

Doubt is distinctly individual, in fact definitive of subjective individuality, having the peculiar existence of intelligence rather than of objects. Descartes’ presentation of his method of thinking was a demonstration of the freedom of thinking. Descartes conceived ‘thinking substance’ as individual thinking persons: “I doubt, therefore I exist.” That discovery was fundamental for Descartes, so he intended no scientific dismissal of thinking. The thinking illustrated by Descartes was propositional reasoning, the action of an enduring self with a continuity of language competence, mathematical competence, logical competence, and of voice. In Descartes the “I” or subjective entity of intelligence encounters extended substance, nature, and exerts power in discovering the laws and shapes of nature. So Descartes extended Luther’s vision of subjectivity in a secular direction, but Luther merits considerable credit for beginning the progress of modern philosophy. There is much of Luther’s specific influence in Descartes’ work, as well as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard.

Luther had a strong focus on individual mentality, of which faith was one feature and doubt a closely related feature. According to Luther, people had the mental power to make a creative leap in the absence of sufficient reason or evidence. Western people had gained intelligence in a new cultural way on the basis of Wycliffe’s campaign for popular literacy focused on reading the Bible. The value so placed on mental processes was a foundation on which Luther built. Following Luther, reading the Bible was a requirement for normal protestant piety, and so literacy spread with protestantism. Literacy brings the power to write, to invent original communications and self-expressions, as well as the power to gain awareness of the voices of others. Vernacular literacy, the printing press, and the protestant reformation raised the profile of personal intelligence in the private lives of an uncontrolled portion of the community. Broadening the base of literacy enabled cultures of written conversation, the republics of letters, to develop outside institutions, and subsequently enabled the ‘Enlightenment’ in eighteenth century Europe, when the literate portion of the population became the majority. That rationalist enlightenment was directly inspirational for the American and French revolutions, the most effective events of a spiral of revolt that extended back 400 years to Wycliffe’s work in the immediate aftermath of the Great Plague. When literacy is a minority skill it can be an effective technique of domination by a ruling elite. Universal literacy has been a profound inspiration for equality.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Equality

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Childhood and the Transcendent Non-Actuality of Subjective Interiority

Waking From History, Episode Three

Waking From History, Episode Two

First Language Nurture

Transcendental Humanism

A Preface to Transcendental Humanism

Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom