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Machiavelli’s Prince

07 Friday Dec 2012

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

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

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

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

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

Noble Lies: Forbidden Knowledge and The Noble Elect

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

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

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

Working

21 Wednesday Nov 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is still on the way to Machiavelli and Nietzsche.

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

Machiavelli and Nietzsche: Class Conflict and Modernity

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

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We of Modernity

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

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

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

Modernity and Class Conflict

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

To be continued.

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

Waking From History, Episode Three

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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

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An Analogy

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

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

The Delusion of a Noble Lie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equality and Monadic Interiority

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

Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Political

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

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

The System of Reality

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

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

Individualism and Government

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waking From History, Episode One

24 Friday Aug 2012

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

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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.

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.

Elemental Orientation

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Leadership, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity

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Personal Agency: Good Work

Finding and exercising your ability to create good things from within yourself, practicing individual agency, is an essential accomplishment. You can’t depend on the world for much of anything. Nature will be what it will be, and so will the human surroundings. As individuals we have some influence on the immediate surroundings, but sometimes not very much. The best thing about a good job is that it presents opportunities to create good things. However, it is often not outwardly personal even though the challenges of doing a job must be made intimately personal in order to be overcome. No matter how common or menial a work-product may be, it has taken up its portion of a worker’s life, personal intelligence, creativity, courage, and commitment to the effort. Most jobs don’t provide much experience of personal agency and reduce any fulfillment by alienating the product from the worker. The product is alienated when it is attributed to the organizational machine, and credit for the product’s creation displaced upward to the directors and the C.E.O.. In this way, leaders are often looters. Workers as individuals disappear into the machinery. Since jobs are so unreliable in that way, it is of absolute importance that individuals be able to cultivate for themselves the experience of competence, intelligence, or personal agency through a creative process.

Strategic Elemental Orientation

It isn’t news that in our age of pervasive advertising media, corporate ideological advocacy, and strident adventurism from the military-financial-industrial complex (adding ‘financial’ since war and imperialism require vast sums of money borrowed at vast sums of interest to pay dealers in weapons, transport, and support services of violence), in such an age as this, then, it isn’t news that the normal individual is on the receiving end of a blast of messages intended to persuade him or her to feel good about various causes and brands. It isn’t news, but it highlights the question of how an individual is to avoid being manipulated psychologically and politically into supporting causes and campaigns which, in the light of the whole truth, are diabolical. The whole truth is elusive when both advanced science and great wealth are devoted to a selective presentation of reality. However, there might be a groundedness, a strategic self-possession, focused on personal agency, within the power of everybody.

Pulling out of Corporate and Official Propaganda

To think is to re-orient yourself. We are always re-orienting ourselves in facing new situations with new information. (I am thinking, therefore I am.) However, some features of experience are more foundational or elemental than others. The identification of elemental features in experience grounds thinking in a system of intrinsic value. Perhaps no single one of these experiences is, by itself, a portal to freedom, moral certainty, or ultimate value, but a reasonably complex collection will be an extraordinary grounding. Personal agency is central in elemental experiences, and responsible personal agency follows from the kind of orientation being proposed here. The connection of a grid of elemental experiences within a particular subjectivity is a foundation for personal autonomy.

In every age people have been immersed in superstitions, family expectations, religious stipulations, and demands from a social stratum of dominance and wealth determined to prevent competition and opposition. In that context, philosophy has always been a feeling around experience for an elemental grounding. Being there on that elemental grounding has intrinsic value. If there is no reality-distorting propaganda stealthily engulfing us, then adding some philosophical points of orientation will merely add a bit of breadth to our outlook, doing no harm. However, if reality is being distorted by the stream of messaging through which we move, then there opens the possibility of removing ourselves mentally to a protected viewpoint.

An Elemental Grid

Some reference points:

1) personal agency, as sketched just above.
2) embodiment within nature: from posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky.
3) Socratic innocence: “I know only that I know nothing.” see posting 16, January 12, 2012, The Two Traditions.
4) the transcendence of intelligence: from posting 8, October 19, 2011, The Transcendence of Intelligence.
5) disinterestedness: from posting 5, October 5, 2011, Contemplative Disinterestedness: the Vita Contemplativa, overcoming self-absorption
6) the three graces: nature, culture, subjectivity (more anon)
7) the eternal moment (anon)
8) political consciousness: understanding left-wing and right-wing worldviews (The first law of strategic thinking is: recognize your enemy.) (more anon)
9) this moment in the history of ideas (culture). The history of ideas has been a struggle between ideas of equality and radical inequality, between autonomy and control of adult mentality.

Changing the orientation grid in this way changes the overall project of building a life by striking a stronger presence of thinking subjectivity in relation to nature and culture. Innocent subjective creativity is progressive re-orientation by questioning, mental opening of experiences through various principles of relevance, discovering the consequences of different assumptions and possibilities. The internal flood of questions and impulses is generally more interesting and productive than travel, professional conferences, luxurious consumer goods, winning trophies, or height on an organization chart. The internal creative fountain does more than keep a person engaged, it keeps a person grounded against the mythical spooks, feuds, and fashions glorified in culture. (How about that as a vision of freedom and equality?) It has no use for competitions, ambition, or standing, for personal comparisons of any kind, and as such is a threat to commercial values. The personal use of thinking could alter cultural values by radically raising the value of thinking itself, because thinking gives each person his or her individual genius and with it experiences of value which are prior to market value. Practicing a creative process is not best used as a gateway into the money economy but as an alternative to it.

Creative Process as Grounding Against Fads, Fashions, and Supervisory Systems

In modern market societies there is an important myth of institutional hierarchies as the primary organizing principle of life. Meritocracy is the most common modern form of oligarchy, and the cultural assumption is that there is no alternative, and so true individual autonomy is worthless and even self-destructive. Mental autonomy, autonomy of values or self-possession, is inspired unofficially by humanities studies (now under threat), but is thought to be dangerous by people within the cultural nexus of professional oligarchies. However, the much celebrated financial autonomy of commercial entrepreneurship is an illusion because money can do nothing but focus attention on the market’s incentives and rewards. Innocent subjectivity, non-trivial, dynamic individual personality is a ground to stand on that is truly independent of oligarchies. Identifying the elemental orientation grid is intended to blunt the dominance of the grid of official modernity which especially sanctions three reference points: the state, science, and money.

1) In modernity each military/ industrial state is a territorial religion manifesting an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force, demanding reverent devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedient behaviour as a framework for production of transferrable wealth (interest, dividends, speculative gains, for example), armed forces recruitment, and decisions of justice. The state is a protection device for accumulated capital (property and person) and also an internally motivating culture of social control, accepting worship as a transcendent arbiter of life and death. The state is focused on armed protection of a hoard of national resources, treasure, and weapons. The state is the framework in which politics is acted out, and politics is part of the mediation of class conflict.

2) Within science ideology the world is beautiful but entirely impersonal forces and structures, dead and falling, revealed by measurement, plotting, and calculation. This is a worldview of totalitarian objectivity. There is no transcendent questioning here, but since it builds from questions, science lurks in its own blind spot. The experience of questioning intelligence has been exiled from this current myth of reality, since there is no place for living creativity. However, as a system of denying the legitimacy of spooky disembodied personalities, science has considerable value.

3) An overriding emphasis on consumption and production for exchange, as structured into money-based competitive markets, is the mechanism by which the scribal class mediates and occults an underlying class conflict. Making a living in the modern state depends on accumulated capital, entrepreneurship, and the coordination of specialist functions, with vast consumption of the ‘found’ energies of nature. In the market or economic view of the person, human motivation and activity resolve into predictable and controllable natural drives without creative power, easily made obedient by incentive and reward. The controllability of ‘economic man’ is the basis of the scribal class’s confidence in its system of mediation. People have little acquaintance with transcendence, but there is some indistinct experience of this cultural system as a place of exile where subjective intelligence wanders unrecognized.

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

 

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.