Category Archives: Hierarchy

Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era

10 Friday Feb 2012

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

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Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, and Benedict de Spinoza, would be my picks to represent Baroque rationalism. They all loved geometry and mathematics generally and judged it to represent a fundamental structure which also underlay nature, thought, and language. Language and mathematics belonged together as logical structures which extended into nature and into rational thinking. In fact it was unity with the logical structures of nature and mathematics which made thinking especially powerful for those philosophers. Language competence was inseparable from logical competence, and logic was a foundation common to extended substance or nature, as well as rational thought, mathematics, and even music (music of the spheres). However, language competence and the voice it enabled were also inseparable from an enduring and individual thinking entity, a person.

Although Baroque rationalists worked to undermine or overthrow the power of Christianity, they retained a basically Christian world view which included the dualism of body and soul. None of those philosophers would have questioned the presence and power of a bestial aspect in human motivation. The bestial was considered to be both compulsive, slavish, and urgently self-interested, without any sense of bonding to a collective or to mutual relationships. These impulses endured as the lower aspects of human nature, but they were not the whole story. Mathematics, and especially geometry represented a higher level.

There is very little sense of human freedom rising above nature in the work of Baroque rationalists. The effect of philosophical rationalists was to push thinking and objective nature closer together. These philosophers did not doubt the existence of the ‘spiritual’ entity assumed to be the individual human person or subject, and they did not doubt the importance of thinking and individual intelligence. They were professional practitioners of higher levels of human nature, and respected those powers. Yet, they did not have a profound sense of the transcendence of intelligence. They sensed that nature was flexible enough to include intelligence, and so they made efforts to describe how that might be conceived. These philosophers make an interesting contrast to the Hellenistic humanists (Sophists, Epicureans, Skeptics), also a variety of rationalist, since those humanists were achieving a mental state of ‘being in the world without being of it.’ By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people were much more interested in being in and of the world, and they weren’t convinced that intelligence could do much more than engage with nature, figure it out, and create a better life by controlling and exploiting it.

Nature as Clockwork

For rationalists, nature was no longer spooky and frightening but possibly rewarding. It was no longer a realm of spirits but merely extended substance, dead clockwork, and as such measurable, chartable, available for painstaking study. That created an urgent need for “freedom to philosophize” which was not available under Christendom.

The Baroque and Enlightenment sense of philosophy was the application of individual thinking, modeled on geometry, to achieve an accurate understanding of nature which would exclude beliefs inspired by superstition and fear of the unknown. That was different from the Stoic tradition, although still based on the power of rational thinking. Baroque philosophers aspired to transcend nature not through indifference to it but by understanding the principles of its determinism. The old philosophical idea of a separation of eternal reality from ephemeral appearances was evolving into the relationship between natural law and particularity. An intense gaze into the clockwork of nature, a calculating and measuring embrace of nature, would enable human control. That aspiration to control nature at the foundation of science was another transcendence of nature by intelligence, and yet it was a vision in which humans belong in nature instead of outside it.

There is still a whiff of transcendence in the Baroque attitude to math, especially geometry, a sublime realm available to pure reason. Yet that transcendence is relevant mainly in the service of science. There is also a whiff of the taint of original sin on human nature, seen as mainly selfish appetites and ambitions. For Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), humans are selfish atomic egos in a war of all against all. Hobbes envisioned a distinction between that “state of nature” and the social contract, which shows awareness of cultural contributions to individuals in everyday activities, especially from institutions of sovereign power: law enforcement and courts, and also other symbols of national belonging including warfare. Hobbes understood culture, in the form of enforceable law, as a gift from secular sovereign power, and so represents the movement away from Christian theocracy.

Both lower and higher natures are clearly present in Hobbes’ account of civil society. The innate force of natural self-preservation or self-interest acted as a centrifugal force that tended to prevent formation of, or to break down, social attachments. This is very similar to Augustine. Hobbes gives the impression that social attachments are fragile and difficult to achieve, “unnatural” in a certain sense and so not to be engineered into experimental forms once civil society is established. Hobbes did not deny the importance of rationality in these self-preserving atoms, and argued that rationality enabled people to agree to a contract to create civil society by establishing a sovereign with the power of life and death over his subjects. The egoistic force could be controlled by a rational fear of death imposed by a sovereign. Rational self-interest was taken seriously because rationality could be conceived as the region of self-interest which searches for relevant facts, and judges their strategic meaning.

Philosophers have always been dealing with the agonies of being in a life in the world. (Agony and misery are markers of individuality. Each individual must supply his or her own way through.) The world is dangerous on a biological/ natural level, a political/ cultural level, and on a conceptual level. In the history of philosophy, concern over the misery of the objective world was gradually replaced by concern over nature’s brute determinism. Development of science in the seventeenth century contributed to a shift from the focus on misery to a focus on determinism, and the Baroque rationalists were part of that. It makes a difference because to transcend misery you seek tranquility and calm, you rise above passions which are the turmoil of experience, and in doing so establish a more authentic self-possession. In the struggle against misery, calm and strategic rationality look like transcendent freedom. By contrast, to transcend determinism you need a richer sort of freedom. Stoic rationality was not free enough to transcend scientific determinism. To transcend determinism, freedom needs to be conceived as unpredictability or whimsy as it is in romanticism.

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

 

Debunking Radical Inequality

09 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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Nihilism is a Bogeyman

Freud observed that humans are polymorphously perverse, meaning that if one method of erotic pleasure is made difficult then other methods will be devised to fill the void. Something similar can be said about the experience of meaning in life. When one framework of meaning is discredited then others are found. Ordinary people derive a sense of meaning from close loving attachments; from expressing an authentic voice in conversations, working and playing with others, helping and nurturing others (including plants and animals); learning and practicing crafts and skills, noticing the beauty of nature, craft, and art; polymorphous perversity; thinking about dreams; being creative without supervision, and having intelligent agency in making a life as well as marks on the environment.

Often the view from upper levels of social hierarchy is that inequality itself is the source of everybody’s meaning in life, so that questioning inequality amounts to “nihilism” which opens a terrifying abyss of meaninglessness. When celebrities of power feel their narratives and privileges being questioned they cry out, “Without us, the rest of you are nothing. …” (in the spirit of Atlas Shrugged) Leaders of the Church uttered this when the fear and gloom of Christendom lost its grip on the popular imagination. Aristocrats uttered it when the French Revolution tore at the old regime. Yet people generally still muddle along not especially worse-off then people were before. It would seem from this that meaninglessness is the recurring nightmare of “masters of the universe” who live off old myths of elite exceptionalism. Leaders of business and industry got worried by the flower-power counter-culture of the sixties, and especially by feminism. Their control of culture was put at risk by those movements and a counter-stroke was organized and executed using great wealth to increase control of news media, the selection practices of representative government, and judicial appointments.

That recent history was witnessed by the baby-boom generation and suggests that “capitalism” isn’t simply “private ownership of the means of production”, but actually the permanent control of key parts of an economy by particular groups which are motivated to retain control by an ideology glorifying their exclusive superiority. It would mean that the surface structure of capitalism conceals a deep structure dedicated to perpetuating radical inequality under the control of a self-appointing group aiming for decisive influence over taxes, laws, and war.

It isn’t uneven accumulation of property which is vicious, but rather the claims of a minority to have a mysterious right to control and supervise the whole collective. Uneven accumulation of property is simple inequality, but control and supervision is radical inequality. There have been theories of radical inequality since at least the time of Plato. Plato belonged to an anti-democratic aristocratic social pod and had a personal interest in legitimizing an aristocratic overthrow of Athenian democracy. He fantasized an apparently reasonable stratification of society and then imagined his model of stratification to be innate within the subjectivity of every individual. The three parts of subjectivity for Plato were appetites, competitive spirit, and abstract rationality. It is possible to interpret appetite and competitive spirit as motives for quick fix consumption and conflict which provide momentary thrills followed by deepening emptiness, the abyss of meaninglessness. Those impulses were the ones Plato claimed to dominate most people. Plato imagined the higher rational mind to be receptive to cosmic ideal forms, his ultimate source of meaning, but Plato gratified his class vanity by granting effective rationality exclusively to an educated and gifted few, so justifying control of the polis by the only social class with the leisure for higher education, the class of slave-owners.

The Medieval theory of social order in Christendom identified three functional groups which combined in a sort of human pyramid. Those higher in the pyramid had the right and duty to supervised and control those below. Muscle-power workers formed the most numerous and lowest stratum. Those peasant agricultural workers were identified as Plato’s appetite driven workers. Masters of war formed the next level up, were much fewer than workers, and held formal possession of most land and natural resources. That was the class of military-estate families, the aristocracy, identified as Plato’s spirited fighters. Priests and their organization, the Church, formed the apex of the pyramid. The priestly clergy were supposed to be Plato’s contemplative, highly educated, other-worldly ruling class. The upper hierarchy of the Church claimed special knowledge of God’s will through divine revelation, and exclusive ability to evaluate everybody’s compliance. Augustine’s teaching was that ordinary people needed to be supervised harshly in order to prevent them from expressing their hereditary sin and intrinsic evil derived from Adam’s and Eve’s original sin and expulsion from Eden. That doctrine was exploited by the Church hierarchy, as well as by military-estate families, to depict themselves as divinely appointed supervisors and as such justified in their parasitic taxing of peasants. Of course, there was an intimate connection between military families and the Church because the second sons, who would not inherit the family’s aristocratic title and estates, would often go to university and into the Church hierarchy. Peasants were not part of society as conceived by aristocrats, but merely parts of the natural environment to be exploited.

Both the class of military-estate families and the personnel of the Church were parasitic upon the agricultural labouring families. What those peasant families received in return for the labour and product confiscated from them as rents, fees, taxes, and tithes was very little, and it was meant to maintain a radical inequality between them and their lords. Often the rural labouring people had a status near slavery. Yet, they were not taught the skills of surviving from the land by the military-estate families or by officials of the Church. Those vital skills were part of the ‘folk’ culture of the peasants themselves, and they would have survived on their own using those skills. They did not need the social groups which taxed them.

In yet another version of radical inequality theory, right-wing expressions of Romanticism idolized special celebrity geniuses and understood them as incarnations of a supra-individual cosmic spirit. Napoleon Bonaparte was a great inspiration for such Romantics. The genius should be permitted to do whatever he wants and he must be forgiven. Napoleon illustrates the Romantic vision of how societies grow and develop. So could Hitler. Right-wing Romantics could see creativity only in celebrity geniuses. The contemporary cult of celebrity and the star system is a legacy of that nineteenth century Romanticism. The Romantic worship of celebrity geniuses contains a mixed message about individualism. It is the worship of certain special individuals only and includes a dismissal of “the crowd” which is assumed to consist of less than truly human specimens. Rigidly hierarchical social class was standard in Europe at the time, and inclined Romantics to think of creativity as a divine gift granted to few. They supposed that creative geniuses merited special treatment as “supermen” who were above the laws of society, not only because of their special contributions to art, literature, music, math, science, commerce, and government, but because they were uniquely animated by divine inspiration. Unlike the ordinary rabble they were incarnations of a feature of God or the metaphysical creativity which sustains the world. That was close to the idea of aristocracy which had endured since Medieval times.

The Economic Theory

The current form of radical inequality theory is an application of the idea that economic consumption, accumulation, production, and exchange express the dominant force in human nature. Every individual’s personal identity is culturally assigned on the basis of his or her way of making a living, both in terms of a specific purchasing power and a function or title in the system of production. In a market economy you can quantify the social esteem of each category of work by how much it is paid. The market price is an exact measure of its cultural value-assignment. Within that culture, people become their economic niche. Each individual is the inheritor of a unique kit of genetic and cultural characteristics, which then determine his or her personal economic place, each with a particular level of trophies, dignities, influence, and wealth from competitions for scarce resources. The consumer-competitor does not suffer the burden of work as punishment for original sin, but to merit a quantified license, in the form of money, to consume in pursuit of elusive happiness. Need and deficiency come first, and deficiency is the stimulus which drives productive labour. When economic accomplishment is the quintessential human fulfillment then subjectivity disappears into the objects it consumes and the trophies it wins.

There is a market incentive-and-reward system to motivate accomplishment, and placing high in that ranking is itself among the greatest goods. People choose professions, knowledge trades, partly to declare themselves as persons of substance and gravitas. Maintaining a high-volume cash flow, say by speculating on asset prices, is another means to the same end. Conspicuous distinction from less accomplished people, from “the crowd”, is crucial to the reward system. Stardom presents inequality in a positive light and glamorizes it as a creative principle.

In the economic system of stratification, just as in the medieval social pyramid, those higher in the system assume the right and duty to supervised and control those below. Hierarchical supervision in the context of knowledge or function-based division of labour might seem to be an instance of necessary and mutually beneficial stratification. However, these rankings are always overgeneralized. They are used to justify a general value assignment or value definition of each person. The value-ranking of individuals is always extended beyond the function that the division of labour is designed to achieve. For the vast majority these value assignments and identities are humiliating and insulting and based on an extremely narrow personal test, or none at all.

It is going to be unavoidable that a person must pick from a list of unsuitable ways of earning an income. An income is still a necessity. What is not unavoidable is social pressure on individuals to think of their means-to-an-income as representing their personality. People should not be led to expect personal fulfillment from what they need to do merely to pay the bills, to survive. Real self-expression is still a personal requirement and takes place outside the workplace and usually outside the market economy.

Leadership

In modern democratic societies citizens vote for representatives to speak for them in legislative assemblies. Political parties appoint party leaders. Somehow when the representatives arrange to form a government under a party leader, that person declares him or herself to be the leader of the people at large. A representative has transformed into a leader by some political alchemy.

Commercial culture has a significant leadership myth which looks like a recapitulation of right-wing romanticism. There is an assumption that important developments happen because of leadership. If you identify the budding leaders among the emerging generation, then you see the future of the society. This is odd with respect to declared democratic values, in which individual voices are supposed to count more or less equally and people are elected as representatives, not leaders.

There are indications that people high on organization charts actually consider themselves to be leaders and not just functional overseers. They believe people lower down on the organization chart need and search for leaders to teach them how to live and deal with problems. They believe people actually look up to them for direction and that they therefore serve a broader social function.

Commercial culture acts toward individual subjectivity as a bundle of deficiencies, needs, appetites, and a compulsion to self-assert, to win. Such an entity is fulfilled by being supplied with consumables and competitions, and the heroes are the few who win their way to the top of the ‘food chain” in the organization of supply. This view assumes that only collective projects and narratives lift individuals from insignificance and decrepitude and provide dignity and meaning to their lives. It supports the legitimacy of meritocracy, leadership, the star system, as if fulfilling purpose is a scarce commodity granted to the masses by special inspired geniuses. We now live within a cultural combination of the romantic vision of a meritocracy of celebrity geniuses mediated through the older system of estate-family hoarding of status, property, and power across successive generations. There is just enough opportunity for entrepreneurial geniuses from outside the permanent hierarchy to maintain the myth of meritocracy. It is taken for granted that the great productive and distributive operations that maintain the economic lives of modern populations inevitably lock people into a supervisory culture which determines how we define and experience our existence.

Dissing the Masses Culture

People in dominant positions encounter, create and participate in, to some degree, a culture of domination which accounts for and justifies their position. It is a culture with roots in Plato, Augustine, and right-wing romanticism. That culture teaches that the majority of humanity is more or less unconscious, stupid, and limited to primitive urges, that the masses are interested in simple forms of food, sex, glitter, other people’s misfortunes, religious spooks, daydreaming, and idle gossip. In their moments of highest alertness their world is full of superstitious terror from which they seek shelter. Since they contribute so little to the alleviation of their problems, help must come from extraordinary persons who conceive projects and arouse the masses to work in realizing visions. These extraordinary persons constitute a natural elite which has a duty to dominate the masses for their own good. This is the only way the masses will ever have a chance to experience something better than superstitious terror or semi-consciousness. The elite creates meaning for the masses, creates whatever small experience of the sublime is possible for them. Although leadership is a high honour and duty it is also a heavy burden, a sacrifice the elite makes for a higher good.

The dominating political group wants to believe that other groups are supervised and controlled for a good reason and not just for the advantage of the most vicious. Features of human nature which resist control, such as emotion or appetite, are marginalized and assigned to specific social groups to justify their marginalization and their being kept under special control.

Democracy as a Problem, Freedom from Control as a Problem

People have a problem with the idea of strong democracy because of mistrust of the majority, ‘the crowd’, a legacy of the long tradition of inequality and control theory. The majority of citizens is assumed to be ignorant, lazy, self-indulgent, emotionally flighty, thoughtless, forgetful, dishonest, and shallow. The idea of that lot being on the loose and possibly having political influence is a nightmare for many who see themselves as rational, acute, informed, and hard-working. Although that image of the majority is a gross exaggeration, it is true that we cannot assume some simple conception of good motives and abilities in human beings generally. This does not apply only to the undistinguished majority, however. Fluctuations in the stock market demonstrate the emotional flightiness of the investor class. Enron, Anderson Accounting, tobacco companies, asbestos companies, asbestos company doctors, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Roman Church protected pedophilia, and the laundering of tax evasion and drug money by mainstream banks, have all been tips of icebergs of organized criminal activity among the distinguished meritocracy. Criminals pass through all social filters purported to advance only the most worthy. They demonstrate that there are no trustworthy social filters and that bad motives and incompetence are prominent in the minority elite and are in no way especially characteristic of the majority. The meritocracy as well as the undistinguished majority is too often criminal and generally unworthy to rule.

The legitimate conclusion from general human fallibility and criminal intent is that absolutely nobody is sufficiently trustworthy to have power over others. The way to counteract faults and shortcomings of people is to restrict the control that some have over others and to give everybody the best chance to develop their own gifts and creative agency. No one is qualified or justified to keep the world safe from the masses by making sure we are all organized and supervised into corporate productive activity. That same activity is the inspiration for corruption. Still, we have to avoid somehow the tyranny of the most vicious, which is always the result of anarchy. The rule of law seems the most obvious way. The role of sovereign government must be protection and enforcement of laws against oppression. Acts of oppression and domination are exactly what ordinary people experience as crimes, the clearest cases of evil. Acts of oppression are those which situate people to be unable to proceed with their initiatives, enjoy the products of their work, make a distinctive mark, or be honoured. Tactics of oppression are confinement; corporal or verbal injury, insult, or threats of them; insufficient recognition, reward, or compensation for work or use.

Warnings of the terrors of nihilism exploit the fact that individual subjective intelligence has no appearance. That lack of appearance or substance seems to make it difficult to accept that subjectivity does have directionality and force. It speaks in its own voice. There is no abyss of meaninglessness waiting to swallow us up, because every subjectivity is a transcendent source of meaning. Fear no abyss, we are already soaring.

Copyright © 2011 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.

 

Politics and the Personal Use of Thinking

18 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Subjectivity

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The Value of Stardom

There are important organizations promoting the concentration and centralization of property, power, and esteem, in a structure that makes up the social star system. Those organizations operate to express the beliefs, values, and tactics which achieve those concentrations and so create stardom. Stardom itself is the dominant value, and the organizations promote themselves as opportunities to achieve stardom. Stardom doesn’t have to be fame as played out in popular culture, but sometimes it is. The exercise of power and influence is not always ‘in the limelight’. The security of that system requires a nervous vigilance for threats and alternative visions which might divert energy away. There is an effort to spread the beliefs and values of stardom, and to promote their dominance in the community at large. A tsunami of star-system glamour-imagery is washed over public spaces and communications media. The message put about is that the world simply works this way, that the stars with remarkable accumulations must be permitted special liberties and immunities, must be admired and followed because they are the leaders who create and develop the community culture. In that way the star system functions as a social control mechanism.

Right-Wing Oversights and Misrepresentations

The star system as just described is the core element of right-wing political thinking. Devotion to stardom is devotion to inequality. So it is that the basic idea of the political right-wing is inequality itself. In addition, the claim is made that inequality is simply natural, and uniquely represents the spirit of nature.

There are fatal problems with these right-wing claims. Perhaps most important is the evidence that people do not need leaders or contracts to create cohesive social systems, language, or meaning in their lives. The creation of those fundamentals is broadly decentralized and nonhierarchical. Leadership is generally parasitic on innocently created social groups. Individuals do not need to be provided with identity by a collective or culture since we already have it with our subjectivity as described in previous blog posts. Additionally, that subjectivity is not savage instincts, lusts, aggression, delusional imaginings, or a blank hole to be filled with outside influences. It is a specific intelligent questioning which accumulates. It does not require close supervision or hierarchical placement to prevent it from harming itself or others.

Right-wing political rhetoric claims to champion simple justice. The appeal is to individuals who have accumulated property through work, diligent application of their abilities and energy, and perhaps personal risk. Such people seem justified in not wanting the rewards of work and talent to be sucked away to support people who might seem lazy and stupid to them. Fair enough, but neither does accomplishment entitle anyone to control, exploit, or torment the less accomplished, and that is an assumption that typically accompanies such an appeal to ‘justice’. The star system as a social control mechanism lurks behind the rhetoric of rugged individualism, and meritocracy is a typical star-system. It is also important to acknowledge that nobody accomplishes anything without a lot of externalities provided by the contributions of many people, externalities such as the stability of law, health care, education, infrastructure development and maintenance, a fruitful and healthy environment, maybe summed up as a healthy human interconnectedness.

Rugged individualism as manifested in star systems takes just as much centralized administration and control as equality. That is why right-wing political forces always balloon the size, powers, and immunities of military forces, police, prisons, and secret intelligence operations and simultaneously reduce civil rights and the transparency of authority. Private property accumulators are terrified that their stuff is going to be revealed to public scrutiny, damaged, destroyed, or stolen. The more property a person has the more psychological coddling they need to feel secure, and the more pressure they can afford to apply to public officials to provide it. That becomes extreme as social inequality increases.

Psychological War

The personal use of thinking is to exercise and experience some agency, initiative, and control in a world where so much is beyond control. That was the point of Stoicism and Hellenistic humanism generally. Hellenistic Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and Skepticism all developed ancient Greek heroism turned inward, the personal use of thinking to act as an individual force in the face of nature and the gods. Their teaching was not competitive, hierarchical, or star-system enabling. The message was a profoundly egalitarian call to exercise creative subjectivity no matter how small it may seem in relation to world-historical events. Feel the transcendence of your subjective intelligence. Find happiness in the freedom, creativity, and transcendence of it. Nurture yourself in happy creativity and Epicurean delight, even when the whole force of nature, gods, and culture works to drown you out and leave you silent. Cultural star-systems are important in those silencing spectacles. The personal use of thinking is still egalitarian. Philosophy has always been a presentation of the thinking of an individual person, not divine revelation or decree from occult inspiration or authority of any kind. It is thinking that can be considered and evaluated, and so thinking that is an invitation and portal to thinking for every individual. The gift of philosophy is validation of the power of individual thinking, and so the self-subsistence of individual identity, freedom, and self-possession.

Given the dominance and force of star-system culture and organization it is not too wild to characterize politics as psychological war raging around us and through us. The stream of messages from standard news and information organizations is a reality distorting campaign in support of systems of stardom. Star-system culture is an enemy trying to disable your agency and creative initiative. Inequality as a political value is an enemy to most people because it specifically discounts and writes off most people. That is the foundation of class war. In that psychological warfare the distribution of property, power, and esteem is far less important than the distribution of self-possession. That is the psychological battlefield on which the war rages between attempts to disempower and efforts to self-empower people at large. Stardom is the opposite of self-possession. The personal use of thinking is to wake up to self-possession.

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

 

Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality

08 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Hierarchy, Leadership

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People are objectified in terms of the job they perform, and they are diminished and misrepresented by that. Within organizations there is an assumption that the job category occupied by an individual is a representation of that person’s character and personality, and individuals are treated differently according to their place on the organization chart. There is an assumption that individuals choose a job as a way of expressing personal identity. However, people do not base personal identity on being fitted into a box such as a job category or organization. Instead, we construct a sense of identity with the whole range of Plato’s “three-part soul” (from the Republic): appetites that inspire us, impulses to make a distinctive mark on the world, and innocent curiosities. Of course we should add considerations such as loving attachments also. Happiness is related to the flow and fate of these and other personal creative impulses. An individual’s participation with an organization may have connections with some of these but will not completely engage any of them. That is how an individual’s “fit” with his or her job is a kind of being squeezed into a box which is too small.

People cannot be happy if they have to become smaller than they really are to “perform” jobs, and they always do. There are the fragile egos of supervisors to contend with and often those persons do not like to see the people they supervise as anything but smaller than themselves. The pretense required is profound and generally pushed to a level of semi-consciousness because it is just the way the world is.

Incumbents of higher office like to understand themselves as part of a meritocracy instead of, say, a ‘greed-ocracy’, an ‘ego-ocracy’, or a ‘bully-ocracy’. Everyone must collude in the myth that the supervisory system is a meritocracy. The result is that workers must act toward those incumbents as if their merit were greater in some general unspecified way. Every worker must be careful not to give holders of higher power anything that might give offense which could be a motive for retribution or disfavour. The higher you go on the organization chart the more calculated is everything presented to you. That might make day to day life pleasant for higher levels but is a stress for everyone else and can result in disaster.

Everything management communicates is calculated to uphold the meritocracy myth and present supervisors as “on the ball”, decisive, and smart. Much is hidden so employees do not have opportunity to assess and find fault with decisions and practices. People are unhappy at work because of false inequalities which are normalized there, indignities of hierarchical inequality. There are special indignities of inequality for women and visible minorities. Whole categories of people have the experience of being diminished by the culture of their employment, and by the general culture of objective market-values. In addition there are distortions of world-view imposed by corporate culture.

Below grand narratives of general contentment, there are complaints and dissatisfactions. There are ways in which working a job is similar to being on the rack: compulsion, insult, indignity, fatigue, sweat, and tedious repetition. People make the best they can of these conditions because they need money to survive. Even Stoics admitted that it is not possible to be happy on the rack. The counter-examples, martyrs and saints, fit a religious-style appeal to higher inspirational powers. Nobody could defend the claim that the only employees who perform well are those who accept their employer organization as a quasi-divine inspirational power. Yet within organizations there is a culture of denial that doing a job is often intrinsically repulsive. That is a reality distorting force.

It is still possible to have episodes of fun at work. Unpleasant aspects can be “bracketed” psychologically and so placed at some emotional distance from the present moment, much as people normally know that there is a great deal of misery in the world but insulate that knowledge from day to day routine and so avoid being crushed emotionally by grief in the world at large. Everyone needs a lot of this every day. Indeed there are always positives to employment that are good reasons to be happy: evading the great indignities of unemployment and poverty, and having access to things bought with earned money.

If bracketing off negative experience becomes important in an organization’s culture, then that culture has much in common with a collective delusion in which people agree to support one another in focusing on a strictly edited misrepresentation of reality. The whole culture of organizational hierarchy says, “Be very careful what you do or say, because it is not safe to be spontaneous!” That must be quite common, since the challenge of “speaking truth to power” is proverbial. Power is a feature of organizational hierarchy.

The organization of work is an oddly private domain, like an authoritarian family. “A man’s home is his castle” is still interpreted to mean that ‘the boss’ can do what he chooses to do within his organizational domain, and no one may question it. All values are trivialized by the overriding value of stardom itself in that star-system hierarchy.

It is remarkable how little difference has been made in employment organizations, in the organization of production, by scientific research in social sciences and psychology. It has made work more mechanical and formulaic.

These are remarkable realities which co-exist with the now ever-decreasing benefit-packages, pension plans, and decent pay-scales provided with the best modern employment. These abusive and injurious realities form a pattern of corporate value-culture undermining each individual’s interpretation of his or her own experience.

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