Category Archives: Gender culture

Bottom-up vs Top-down Political Forces

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

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

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

What Historians Must Not Say

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

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

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

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

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

Two Distinct Streams of Class Propaganda

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

Corporate Liberalism

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

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

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

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

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

Waking From History, Episode One

24 Friday Aug 2012

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

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Culture Consciousness

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

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

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

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

Law as a Microcosm of Culture and History

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

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

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

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

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

Infant Monads

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

Energy Control and Hard-Boy Gangs

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

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

Transition to Modernity, the Schematic Version

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

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

Leadership Incompetence

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

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

The incompetence of the leadership class is firmly rooted in the basic value system they champion and express, namely the crime-family derived alpha-trophy-looting worldview. The heart of that worldview is revealed in academic economic theory and social philosophy, in which self-interest and egoism are advanced as the universal human motivating forces. The point that is proved by the philosophical emphasis on egoism and atomic self-interest, in combination with the common experience of mothers supporting one another in devotion to nurturing children, is that there are two very distinct and contrasting worldviews in the human community, and one of them, but only one, is very authentically depicted in all that academic emphasis on egoism. The other worldview, the first-language-nurture culture, is regarded with contempt and so largely unknown by the egoist/ self-interest faction. The incompetence of the leadership class is an inevitable expression of the narrowness of its competitive egoistic culture.

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

Sharing Awareness

26 Thursday Jul 2012

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

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Elemental Bonding

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

Conversation

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

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

Intelligence as Overt Discretionary Acts

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

Conversational Self: Personality

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

Productive Attachment

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

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

Functional Self-Identification

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

Imitation and the Herd

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

The Political Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interconnectedness is Shared Awareness

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

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

First Language Nurture

12 Thursday Jul 2012

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

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Right-Wing Political Hegemony

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

Nurture

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

The Divinity of Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcendental Humanism

06 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by 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.

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

A Preface to Transcendental Humanism

25 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by 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.

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

In the Blind Spot as Narrative

10 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Gender culture, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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As an individual subjective intelligence, you wake up in innocence and look around to get your bearings. You concentrate on discovering your situation, where you are and what’s going on around you that bears on your welfare and prospects. In that process you discover culture and politics, and you discover that you are in the middle of a raging war that is, in effect, a great secret because hardly anyone notices it. It is a psychological war, a war of incompatible visions, and it looks like the bad guys have the upper hand.

This blog, In the Blind Spot, generally explores the history and current state of that war, the rivalry and combat between two visions of the human situation, two very old enemies. On one side is the philosophical vision of people as individually transcendent intelligences, the tradition of humanist rationalism and Stoicism, for example. My attempts at interpreting and extending that tradition are typically in aid of clarifying the overall situation of individual subjectivity: in aid of self-discovery, self-possession, personal empowerment, and voice. Postings of that kind include:
Encountering subjectivity
Existential non-appearance
What is being called thinking?
The transcendence of intelligence
The brute actuality of nature

If we can characterize modernity roughly as the era of state sovereignty, science, money, human rights, and proletarian literacy, then the presence of the last two items means the vision of individual transcendence has not been utterly defeated. In humanism, the legacy of classical heroism is manifested in a narrative of the dignity and sanctity of individual self-invention, classical heroism turned inward and made universal. That has been an influence against the legitimacy of slavery and abuse. We could not call any society modern that accepts slavery. The ownership class claims the freedom to enslave workers (value them less so to achieve and depict radical inequality in material displays), but in modernity the freedom to enslave confronts humanist individual dignity. Literacy also has been crucial because voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence. Authorship engraves and extends a voice beyond the ephemerality of conversation and speech. The literary voice is both public and private, internal and external, straddling the distinction. Reading and writing, literacy, has been a technology of honouring individual voices. Having a voice is godlike, that is, transcendent. Holy books have been thought to carry the divine voice.

The opposing vision in this great war is the religious vision of monotheistic divine dictatorship and the radical inequality that follows from it. That vision of divine dictatorship is cultural malware which infects and infests the great human interconnectedness. With the spread and dominance of the monotheistic religious traditions over the homelands of Hellenistic humanism, there descended a philosophical dark age that began under the Roman Emperor Theodosius I (347-395 A.D.). The dark age extended roughly from 380, when Theodosius declared Catholic Christianity the only legitimate religion of the Roman Empire, until well after Martin Luther (1483-1546) began a revival of something like Stoic humanism. That long age was dark because there were insane punishments for thinking unorthodox thoughts. The thirteenth century struggle in which the Roman Church exterminated the Cathars of Languedoc was a defining moment in which the Church revealed its mission of death-grip social control. In the case of the Cathars, the Church first applied its old technique, launching a crusade (1209-29), and then followed up with a special invention for the purpose: the Inquisition (1233). The murder of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), executed by burning alive by the Roman Inquisition in 1600, is a late example of that same vicious repression. Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics as such did not burn anyone, no matter how much disagreement there might be. Burning people was a Christian speciality.

The debate or war between the monotheistic worldview of divine dictatorship and the philosophical tradition of individual transcendence is a clash of cultures within western civilization itself. That culture clash is as lethal as any between different civilizations. It is also asymmetrical warfare, since the divine dictatorship fable was, from the beginning, and continues to support, a projection of the archaic alpha-trophy-looting model of predatory masculinity. The war is not a contest for power, but rather a lust for and possession of power on one side against an urge for self-possession and freedom on the other. Capitalist alpha-trophy-looting culture (ATL) is the modern face of the ancient malware that is divine dictatorship, reinforced in post-Roman Europe with a glorification of looting by nomadic invaders from the north-east. Capitalist sovereignty draws its brutality, energy, and orientation from that tradition, and has been extending its dominance. Nothing is gained through stopping the vision-war by giving up, but only by defeating the oppression. Blog postings that map out that historical drama are:
The Two Traditions
Reality as a Construct for Concealing Class War
Gender Culture in the Political Situation
Origins of the Concepts of Equality and Freedom
Theological Black Holes

The war of visions is not a closed system, however. A third cultural force and tradition was identified in posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations, and then elaborated in posting 29, April 27, 2012, Gender Culture in the Political Situation, namely the female-carried culture of first language acquisition and nurture (FLN – first-language-nurture). First-language-nurture groups create the interconnectedness in the first place and work on it continuously day in and day out, so when the interconnectedness is poisoned there is bound to be some alienation and rage among people working to keep it vital. It adds another layer to the rage and alienation from having the work and persons of females disrespected almost universally, a situation that is made difficult to correct because of the immediate demands of nurturing work. That third force carries far more antiquity, energy, and potential than the philosophical tradition, and it would be hopeful if those forces could be allies in creating alternatives excluding the common enemy.

The raging of the vision-war came into focus in the original attempt to find bearings as a subjective intelligence, waking up in innocence and concerned about the prospects for a satisfying life. The vision-war is of crucial importance but is not the whole story in the problematic situation of any subjectivity. There is something like an innate subjective imperative to discover itself, arising from the fact that subjectivity seems to have a blind spot and in fact itself resides in that blind spot. The elusiveness of self-identification highlights the fact that both inward and outward investigations are crucial in the effort to establish personal bearings. A special sort of mirror is needed to show a blind spot containing a force with no face, but the project of inward investigation has been marginal among commonly respected human efforts. There is a cultural history in that as well, the same history that features the war of the two visions. A primordial failure to reflect on subjectivity, inwardness, maroons us on a kind of surface of subjectivity, stranded within external surroundings. Lacking the grounding of self-awareness, we are enabled to feel and grasp our own being only by accomplishing overt gestures and representations, often shaped by the needs of simple survival, and often grandiose demonstrations supposed to defy any hints of uncertainty, to express contemptuous rejection of elusive inwardness. That orientation became a shell, comfortable, habitual, and culturally normal. Within that orientation of strident outwardness the heroes and exemplars of confident human power would always be the alpha trophy accumulators, who then project their own version of personification onto the cosmos as the father-god, the ultimate dictator and war-god. The counterweight to that can be only the assertion of inwardness, and so we are brought back again to that first set of postings on interpreting and extending the tradition of individual transcendence.

This narrative is a small catalog of reference points for an alternative, elemental, orientation.

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

Gender Culture in the Political Situation

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by in Class War, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power

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The international financial collapse of 2008 completely revealed the contemporary high culture of leadership. The undeniably world-class leaders of the biggest financial corporations in world history, along with the political leaders of the most powerful nations in world history, could think of nothing better than to use any means at hand to get back to the way things were before, as quickly as possible, all the while denying all responsibility for any problems. Creative reform for accountability and transparency was ridiculed as impractical.

As such a fresh and vivid example illustrates, what keeps the whole social system working, including the economic functions, is mainly imitating what was done previously, habits repeated unthinkingly, traditions, sometimes encouraged by appeals to popular misconceptions such as “we’re all in this together”, “people reap what they sow”, “our political representatives have our best interests at heart”, or “there is a meritocracy of the most competent people in control”. However, even more important than habit, tradition, and popular misconceptions, is the interconnectedness of intrinsically rewarding human attachments learned within the female-managed nexus of first-language acquisition, child nurture, play, unconditional love, practical support and care, sharing, and mutuality. Please see below, blog posting 9, October 25, 2011, Political Considerations for some elaboration of nurture culture. Those are the binding forces of social systems, a framework within which ordinary individuals work at building interesting and sustainable lives, and in doing so keep production and support systems working. Recognition of these foundations of societies is the root system of left-wing political thinking and the reason it can be described generally as “bottom-up” politics.

It is remarkable then, that the extraordinary cultural emphasis on leadership reveals a worldview in which it is a superstructure of leaders who hold the social and economic system together. In the discourse of management/ professional ideology, it is leadership which brings a community together and makes it function, and in doing so sustains and benefits everybody to the degree possible given the specific powers and impediments that individuals bring with them. The leader is presented as bringing people into effective accord by displaying superior energy and dedication, hard work and a work ethic, optimism, self-confidence, self-knowledge, communication and visioning skill, prudent judgment, strategic plans, in sum a tower of strengths upon which others can fix their gaze and be inspired together. This ideology of leadership is the taproot of right-wing political thinking, and the reason it counts as “top-down” politics. That this is an especially alpha-male cultural product reveals that the key to differences between leftist and rightist policies is not class war based on wealth inequality but instead it is gender culture.

There is a deeper layer to the culture of leadership. There is an assumption that leadership is so essential and effective that it brings into being a sort of singularity, a version of the idea of divine power, a power of sovereignty. In the case of sovereignty, the divine entity is “the nation”, “the people”, a social collective united into a “more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts” creature, superhuman and even supernatural, meriting privileges, powers, and licenses that no individual can claim on his or her own, such as sending people to death in war, or deliberately exposing them to dangerous living and working conditions generally. Sovereignty is an extraordinary abstract power imagined to reside in a supra-individual social entity, and it is often invoked to create a warm glow of uncritical belonging in residents of a geographical area, sometimes with a uniformity of culture, language, and ethnicity, but more often not. (In appealing to the warm glow of interconnectedness, leaders are stealing credit for the nexus of first language acquisition, which is really created by people who nurture children.) For achieving the magisterial feat of leadership, the stars of the system take credit for creating legitimate power over life and death, and entitlement to act beyond law and morality to whatever extend they may wish.

People talk about “rising above” or “getting beyond” the political division between the left wing and the right wing, but beneath that division are profound conflicts which are standard features of human communities. Due to the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95) there is elaborate ideology basing the left-wing orientation in the working class of industrial societies. Left-wing political activists do their best to represent the interests of people who must earn a living by working for wages. However, placing exclusive emphasis on the worker – capitalist relationship is a vast oversimplification, and has been used to cast leftist ideals into disrepute as merely the politics of envy.

Plural Conflicts

Certainly there is an opposition between those families who can live from ownership and those who must live from working for wages. Working for wages is a life-warping burden. However, a far more pervasive and longstanding conflict is between an especially masculine trophy culture and an especially feminine culture of child nurture. There is also a structural conflict between generations, between people old enough to be approaching the last stages of life in opposition to those in the first stages of life. Young people generally are still carrying memories of the female managed culture of nurture, and without having been bent out of shape by irresistible incentives and rewards, have little but an innate sense of justice to guide them.

Appeals to “family values” sound like bottom-up politics, but in fact refer to family values as perceived by the alpha-male focused patriarchal family. The female managed first-language-nurture culture tends to ignore family separations and instead creates informal collectives pragmatically with any willing mothers in the vicinity. It is the culture of predatory masculinity which insists on using family groups as rigid stand-alone cells, reminiscent of the alpha-male harem social organization of gorillas, for example. Again, gender culture illuminates the political alternatives.

Groundwork of Political Dualism

The domestic nexus of first-language acquisition is in some ways a conservative force since stability is necessary for nurturing children. However, it doesn’t value wars, gambling, or radical inequality, the worst plagues on humanity, which are treasured by the alpha-structure. In addition, the domestic nexus always had a competitive alpha-structure to struggle against. The agenda of that trophy-winning superstructure has always been to use the commonality of people to fight wars, cook, clean, work plantations, mines, and assembly lines; and to have them part with their wages to borrow money, land, or a roof. Problems with that result from the retrograde culture of norms and values cultivated by the alpha-structure. The gender culture of novelty seeking masculinity could be progressive, but is exactly the opposite because of historical courses of development.

Alpha Trophy Ideology

The most glamourous culture of masculinity has its source in the ancient life of nomadic animal herders, a variety of cowboy. Ever since human communities began to abandon the nomadic life of gathering and hunting and created surpluses of vital resources, wonders of physical culture, and records of wisdom, their outlying surroundings of still nomadic peoples were drawn in to loot. An important part of the attraction of looting is to avoid having to live by daily work. A whole system of masculine pride was founded on living by other people’s work. It was the high point of accomplishment to murder rival males, destroy what property could not be used and take the rest, including women. Looting is inseparable from mass murder, rape, and enslavement, and those are still attractions of war. Empire building is nothing more than sustained looting. A remnant of the romance and pride of looting exists in the glorification of trophies won in competitive sport, and fortunes won from financial speculation.

Nomadic tribes that devised ways of surviving by animal herding often turned that parasitic technique onto communities of human farmers and city-dwellers. The cowboys became aristocrat estate owners. Social control by aristocracies, warrior-estate families, derives from that innovation. It was capitalism within the context of a rural agrarian production system. Settled aristocracies had the same values as the nomadic herders from whom they descended, values limited to maintaining a life of manly fun, competitive pride, pleasure, power, and risk-braving-adventure, not much different from capitalist elites. We see in ‘crime families’ of the mafia the identical cultural pattern still being re-created. Some families conceive extraordinary ambition and devote their energies to achieving ever more control of resources by whatever means they can get away with. In pre-modern times ambitious families controlled private armies to enforce their possession of lands. Armed violence was their source and refuge. Their focus was protecting and expanding their private property by organized and cultured violence. Their culture was built around organizing subordinated persons into gangs to carry out looting and destruction of other peoples property as well as assaults, murders, and enslavements for the purpose of exercising possession. Other humans were often simply a feature of geography to these families, to be used or removed as needed. Such military families named themselves aristocratic and noble. The use of the term “crime family” here is a means of balancing the usual academic tendency, derived from an art-history “golly-wow” approach, to admire and project positive value on whatever was dominant and powerful, the glorification of winning and wealth as such. That approach is not objective or value-neutral, and merely accepts without question that victors are privileged voices in the telling of history.

Crime Families

The narrative at the core of crime family culture is that the senior members of the family are natural and legitimate authorities and supervisors, and that no authority is superior except possibly supernatural power. All other authorities are merely rivals and threats to the family’s power. Your family is “us” and everyone else is “them”. The vast resources of the family are there to reward and assist those who dedicate themselves loyally to protection and advancement of the family as envisioned and declared by the patriarch. The prizes are high status and influence in the family hierarchy, conspicuous and intimidating wealth, gestures of subordination from everyone, power over others, and immunity from criticism.

Crime families or warrior-estate families were serious organizations who based collective ambition for wealth and power on a core of blood relations aided by carefully selected servants of various ranks and functions. These organizations recognized no outside supervisory authority. They were powers and a law unto themselves, competing with other families of a similar kind for the greatest possible control of people and resources. In ancient Rome the patrician family patriarch was the sovereign law within the bounds of his estates, with power of life and death over his family, servants, slaves, and tenants. The only help or protection possible for any individual was from one family or another. Royal families of Medieval Europe were later examples of this type of cultured family. Their willingness to make war is an illustration of the normalization of violent assault in their culture, and much of the war and business they practiced was conducted covertly by spies, assassins, and agents provocateur. These were the families for whom Machiavelli’s The Prince was written. Another modern version is the capitalist or investor family, hoarding important capital wealth. The hoard is the central value, and the need to protect the hoard inclines such families to distrust whatever they do not control. The origin and continuing main support of the political right-wing is that crime family.

Two Groups

In the anarchy after the Romans abandoned the western regions of their empire, two groups wanted control of resources on a vast scale, including control of populations. The first was the collection of warrior-estate families, and the other was the organization of Christianity. Both were alpha-male culture pods, still carrying the alpha-glorifying cult of looting. Since the personnel of the Church were nominally celibate males without children, the upper offices of the hierarchy were recruited from warrior-estate families, and so the two cultures had a lot in common. Radical inequality was the focus of the former and collective belonging was the focus of the latter. Crime families and religious cults will always be the winners from anarchy, and both will be leader-centric, animated by the alpha-male legacy of looting culture, rallying people to devote their efforts for the ultimate benefit of the looters.

Warrior-estate families formed a league that combined brutal rivalry with the cultivation of inter-marriages and mutual support. In the middle ages the families who would eventually make a reality of sovereign power were working out their techniques. They were social fetuses which would grow into modern government. The focus of the collective based on this narrative is capital concentration and control, private property and a security apparatus for protecting the privately concentrated capital. Behind it all was still the culture of alpha-type males proceeding with continual war against all other alpha-type males, principally for the fun of it. Their families carried the culture of war and there was no limit to their cruelty in pursuit of supremacy. The general practice in medieval warfare was for armies to break into small units to carry out a widespread looting and burning of villages and crops in a deliberate creation of famine and disease. Sovereignty was focused on private property and securing its ownership by force.

The other cultural entity with aspirations toward total ownership of populations was the Christian Church, based most powerfully at Rome. The main focus of that theocratic engine of sovereignty was control of individual religious belief and obedience to dictates of the Church. Organizational unity over vast expanses, in addition to a grip on fundamental and universal fears, enabled the Church to attempt a theocracy in Medieval Europe. However, the Church was not strong enough to exercise sovereignty on its own. It required alliances with particular crime families and generally with the collective of crime families, the class of aristocrats. That combination developed, especially during the crusades, a military-Christian culture known as Chivalry, which provided great advantages to both groups. Patriarchs of religious ceremonies were from time immemorial more bookish than the captains of horses and chariots. In Medieval Europe the clergy still carried the developing culture of book knowledge. Their literary and mental skills were indispensable, keeping records of costs, products, properties, distributions, and consumption. That uneasy alliance between religious and military cultures in the exercise of sovereignty is very ancient.

Historical Arc of Crime Families

The historical arc of crime families began with control of productive land by brute force, terrorism, and extortion. The power exercised by crime families went through a process of sanctification in the post-Roman history of Europe. Even before the full elaboration of chivalry, the Roman Church had a policy of placing bishops in the households of crime families to organize and advise, and enforce recruitment to the Church of everyone under the family’s power. That supernatural association had a legitimizing effect for the chosen families. The bond between Roman Christianity and power-families became deeply fused by the Crusades. The looting aristocracy of Europe created a new brutality in holy wars against the Islamic middle-east. That brutality was brought back to Europe fused with an outward enamel of religious ritual and pageantry.

This is not fable but history. The power vacuum, created by first bloating and then abandoning the Roman empire in western Europe, was filled by two groups: confederacies of crime families and the organization of Christianity, headquartered at Rome. In the course of the crusades those groups formed a partnership under the title Chivalry, superimposing symbols and pageants of divinity on the mechanisms and practices of lethal brutality, thus hatching the military-spiritual engine of sovereignty, gradually downloading the mechanisms of power to increasingly independent regional dynasties. Hierarchies of crime families and Christianity wanted populations to be devoted entirely to the systems which generated wealth, power, and a sense of superiority concentrated in the hierarchies. Crime families needed people to work the land and the mines, and the Church needed sinners to threaten and punish into begging for divine intervention, tweaking their odds by donating from the little they had. Each had their pageantry of superiority. Because the medieval alpha structure wanted populations to be totally devoted to serving the wealth and grandeur of the alpha-structure they did not want the commonality of individuals to be inwardly self-possessed through the creativity of their own subjectivity. Such a condition would distract from devotion to the very outward work of the hierarchies and possibly hatch rival organizations of effort and discourse, diverting energy, grandeur, and celebrity from the established order.

Such is the value nexus that established the culture of sovereign power and social control which we still take for granted as government. The two medieval groups supplying incumbents in power were replaced, in the course of the nineteenth century, by captains of business, finance, and industry as the economic organization of wealth came to base itself on energy from combustible minerals instead of on muscle-force from animals. The new captains remodeled sovereign culture slightly into the modern military-spiritual-industrial state. Captains of industry are much the same as their medieval counterparts, maintaining and elaborating systems of pageantry depicting their special importance and superiority. However, industrial captains could not claim divine appointment, and so had to arrange some fig-leaves of legitimacy through gestures of being accountable to the governed and being constrained by law. The ideology of sovereign control remained much as it was in medieval times. The notion of institutional hierarchy as the primary organizing principle of life is still a staple of market-society, and originates by direct lines of imitation from the ancient crime family.

The alpha-structure devises an economic and political agenda so that wars can still be fought, transferrable wealth funneled upward and concentrated, the gambling addiction of the finance industry celebrated, and the privileges and pleasures of unlimited wealth can be undisturbed. It accepts that the commonality of people are more usable, compliant, obedient, and manageable when kept in a vulnerable psychological state and guided within certain boundaries of experience. The alpha-structure craves economic and political control and the fruits of control, and psychological manipulation is simply an essential aspect of that control. Employment is structured as a systematic psychological confinement. The reality-distorting demands of the alpha-stratum superstructure (detailed in blog posting 10, Tuesday, November 8, 2011, Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality) suppresses self-possession as a psychological and cultural commonplace. It isn’t that the alpha-structure knows anything about the creative freedom of subjective intelligence. It does not intend its strategic agenda specifically to deny that experience. Subjective intelligence is the blind spot of the alpha-stratum. The alpha-stratum acts as it does because it is immersed in the age-old culture of masculine pride and the value alpha-male trophy culture assigns to public displays of adulation. The history of leadership is in the refinement of a caricature of masculinity, pageantry of divine immunity proved by bravado displays of risk-defying, daredevil feats and victories, acting out sufficient contempt for personal danger to call up gasps and cheers of adoration from the crowd.

Between the assassination of JFK in 1963 and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, there were beginnings of what promised to be real cultural change. However, whenever there was a life-style experiment which began to broaden the orientation grid of the commonality of people, such as the French Revolution of 1789 or the Baby-Boom Revolt of 1963-74, there has been a mighty backlash mounted to roll back the advances, so that wars can still be fought and transferrable wealth concentrated upward. There is nothing authentically transcendent in that masterly style-of-life. It has nothing to teach the commonality. It just needs to interfere in order to cling to its own sense of specialness. That alpha-structure sense of superiority is the only thing threatened by general self-possession. A luxurious and opulent style-of-life for a few is certainly not the problem. The problem is that the stratum which celebrates wealth addiction imposes an agenda of strategic control and interference with the discourse of the commonality of people.

By contrast, the history of nurture culture is in the chain of generations joining linguistic communities and getting on with life. To break the death-grip of war and refined forms of looting, to remove the disincentives and barriers to basic self-awareness, a way has to be found to limit the legacy of looting culture and greatly enlarge the influence of the nurture culture practiced by women. It will be necessary to devise a civil society and government based on nurture instead of on looting.

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

Sovereignty and Spooks

25 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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There were in ancient times many culturally acknowledged gods and demons with personal, local, or cosmic influence. Spirits were thought to account for a great deal of the day to day world, with recourse to powers, helpers, and operating methods unknown to mortals, and therefore capable of deeds which seemed miraculous. Each family devoted itself to the spirits of its dead, for example, expecting some help in return. Cities propitiated one or several local patron deities. As noted in an earlier posting, humans have imagined personalities in all sorts of natural phenomena such as trees, storms, and the universe as a whole. Emotion, purpose, or curiosity as explanations of events in the objective world have generally been preferred over ‘brute’ causal explanations, even when the imagined intelligent entity can’t pass the crucial test of carrying on an imitation game with us. Babies can do it but rocks and bushes do not do imitations.

Early philosophers rejected much of the world-view of good and evil spirits. Philosophical efforts were distinctive in removing rowdy and whimsical personalities from nature, the non-human part of the world. That was a main vector of ancient philosophy, a thinking out of nature without magical or spiritual assumptions, removing intelligences from nature. It was not accomplished at a single stroke, however. There were still important divinities in Plato and Aristotle, but they were more like impersonal forces, first or final causes without the capriciousness of persons. They were mainly characterized by eternal sameness rather than by the discretionary responsiveness of intelligence.

Materialism in Nature

Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers started materialist descriptions of nature in terms of elements: Water, Fire, Air, Earth, or combinations of these. Democritus of Abderra devised a theory of atoms in the void. The original program of materialism was to remove spooks from explanations of the world to liberate people from the fear of gods and of death, so to achieve existential happiness. Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans defended the materialist metaphysics of Democritus as a secularizing project. In spite of their materialism, their focus was subjective and existential since the central question was how to use reasoning to manage fear and dread and live a happy life as an individual.

The philosophical campaign against unjustified attribution of intelligence to phenomena is still relevant, perhaps most importantly in considerations of sovereignty and nation states. Although nation states are pitched as semi-secular religions, they have no legitimacy as sacred powers. The assumed consent of people to function within a system of production and distribution, over which they have no effective control, can never accomplish the miraculous creation of a semi-divine sacred entity, the nation state. Yet each modern military/ industrial state is a territorial power demanding reverent devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedience enforced by an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force. The state is an internally motivating culture of social control, accepting worship as a transcendent arbiter of life and death. However, states are merely mundane arrangements to protect a system for the concentration of wealth and power, and for armed forces recruitment. The state is focused on armed protection of accumulated private capital as well as of a hoard of national resources, treasure, and weapons. That is not entirely bad. States function as a framework for production of transferrable wealth, security of property and person, and decisions of justice. The state is the framework in which politics is acted out, and politics is class war (with elements of gender and inter-generational conflict) mediated into non-lethal forms. Politicians and government officials are political entrepreneurs and not prophets, not the voices of god or the hands of god, and not the voices or hands of some other spiritual entity arising out of the collective of the people.

Claims to legitimacy of sovereign power typically rely on the model of legitimacy established in ancient times from superstitions about gods and spirits, a mystery-based uber-parental ownership of worldly territories, including ownership of people. States still employ war to found sovereign authority, and so are based on terror and misery artfully made to appear sublime by a rhetorical shift of agency from the actual individuals in command to some aggrandized spiritual entity beyond accountability. An entity is invoked which is claimed to be superior to ordinary individuals and indeed sacred in some unexplainable and occult way. Human collectives certainly can be gigantic, terrifying, and unpredictably destructive, but that is as close to sacredness as they get. There is a fundamental identity between old-time religious mind-control based on terror of spirit-world spooks and that of sovereign elites in contemporary real-world societies.

Thinking and Freedom from Spooks

Freedom of thought is still rooted in the ancient philosophical struggle to be free of the oppressive fear of gods, ghosts, demons, and spooks of all kinds. In the transfiguration from Medieval Christendom to modernity, the centralization of social supervision characteristic of theocracy was not demolished but merely fragmented into a number of less all-embracing hierarchies, which learned to cooperate and compliment one another. Spooks continue to be identified as a variety of awesome abstract entities commanding patriotism such as the U.S.A., Russia, China, “the Dear Leader”, Capitalism, Islam, Christendom, IBM, Microsoft, the R.C.M.P. or even ‘the free world’. Modern societies are largely a landscape of mountainous commercial organizations. Every corporation is a mini-Vatican with its own brand-myth and corporate culture which includes company-spirit and a star-system of corporate celebrities. Corporations are not persons, they are spooks. Indeed, every high school is a training mini-Vatican with its religion of school spirit and sport team troops, its heroes and enemies. Fundamental questioning, criticism, or dissent is received like an offense against something sacred, like heresy. An appeal to the sacred answers all questions simply by killing thinking.

In their internal operations, corporations are force-fields of distorted reality, as detailed in a previous posting. Being presented externally as supra-individual persons with benign intentions and morality is just another face of the reality-distorting field they construct. Spooks are deliberately constructed distortions of reality for the purpose of diverting critical thinking and moral judgment away from organized crime, from acts which are unjust, immoral, or appalling, such as the mass killing and destruction of war; looting and despoiling the natural environment; disempowerment and exploitation of women and children for sexual or reproductive control; malicious blockade of a sub-group defined by race, ethnicity, or class; profiting from the misery of disadvantaged people; or evading just-process for the benefit of private interests. Given that reality, it is especially important to start questioning and investigating for injustice and criminality whenever any spooky ‘higher purpose’ or ‘greater good’ is invoked, whenever there is an appeal to something sacred or more awesome than the ordinary individual person.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Political Considerations

26 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Gender culture, Political Power

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Right-wing political ideology champions a certain claim about what is natural for the human species. It is very much Thomas Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature, a primal competition of all against all, unfettered individual freedom where the luckiest displace, destroy, or enslave the rest. Such is the right-wing utopia. (That characterization needs to be expanded at some point to account for the contradictory right-wing enthusiasm for interfering in private judgements about such matters as patriotism and sexual orientation. On those issues right-wing ideology demands conformity.) The right-wing utopia is a caricature of masculinity projecting a wish-fulfillment day-dream. It is not difficult to spot the fatal flaw: There are no children to be nurtured in that utopia. It would survive for precisely one nasty, brutish, and short generation. When the value of nurturing children enters the picture then what is natural is co-operation, play, sharing, and love.

The Conversation with Children

People continue to have children not because children are cute, or from brute instinct to continue the species, but because children are contributers to collective experience, essential interlocutors for adults. 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. The realm of child-nurture, managed and cultivated by women, was effectively unknown, ignored, and despised by men from time out of mind. Due to that prejudice there is general lack of recognition for the female managed, child-care focused, culture in which all humans learn our first language and most other profound culture. It is not an unlikely, scarce, or exotic community. It is as universal for humans generally as first-language acquisition itself. There is no place for a contract because social attachment is an innocent accomplishment for ordinary people.

It isn’t just that children bring innocence to their conversation with adults, but also that children are the smartest people on the planet. Their brains are growing so fast that they learn a language from scratch ‘spontaneously’. The Suzuki music teaching method attempts to mimic first language acquisition with parental engagement, positive feedback, and playful repetition. With only these simple declarations of mutual attachment, children learn. Generation after generation of mothers have worked out how to sustain this work with some co-operation and mutual support. First language acquisition is inseparable from the domestic nexus of attachment, co-operation, and play, inseparable from the innocent love of attachment and discovery characteristic of children. Since the general underlying intent and purpose of language is to declare a distinctive voice in mutual play (rocks & bushes do not imitate), language is not as strictly rule-governed and game structured as Wittgenstein and others judged. Proto-linguistic play is fun and done casually all the time.

Hobbes and Schopenhauer represent philosophers who were childless and single privileged men immersed in a special minority culture of alpha-male competition, class, gender, and political dominance. It is not surprising that they grasped human nature as little more than egoism and a war of all against all. In ancient times Plato and, much later, Augustine also were embedded in privileged male culture-pods. Those philosophers believed human attachment is difficult and possible only under special circumstances as a gift from awe-inspiring power. They glorified the state as the greatest human achievement. (Check out Hegel.) The modern state was conceived and put into practice in the cultural matrix accumulated around the strategy for radical inequality which made life interesting and fun for competitive alphas.

On Meaning

A standard criticism of modernity is that secularism, democracy, and commercialism have destroyed meaning in people’s lives. Hegel claimed that meaning is bestowed on people by a hierarchical social order in which everyone has his or her place. (Something like: “It’s not much, but it’s home.”) In a variation of that view, Hitler observed that his best experience of meaning and purpose in life was as a soldier in the Great War of 1914-18. The war provided an overriding need in which everyone was willing to accept regimentation and personal sacrifice for a great cause. Hitler’s gift to his people was their nation at war, gloriously meaningful suffering and death. Leaders of all kinds are influenced by Hitler’s doctrine, often in more moderate forms.

It could be claimed that the ultimate Medieval narrative, the meaning of Medieval life, was the Roman Christian narrative of transcendence. Matching that claim would be that in modernity the ultimate narrative, the meaning of modern life, is competition in the market economy. However, it is just as plausible that the conversation with children and the family life which surrounds it have been more rewarding and meaningful all along. It looks like another instance of a cultured contempt for the female-managed and child-centered value matrix. Children still count as the focus of meaning for all classes. The imperative to nurture children ties people to stability in production and consumption, but not to any particular system. Many things have a presence in a person’s sense of meaning in life, with some being taken as more important if others are reduced. Individuals are fountains of meaning, and creatively confer meaning on their surroundings. A living legacy of classical heroism is the dignity and sanctity of individual self-invention, heroism turned inward. Anyway, mystery and uncertainty are not always problems. There is never a total absence of mystery and people are generally happy with that.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.