Category Archives: Leadership

Sovereignty and Spooks

25 Friday Nov 2011

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

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

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

Materialism in Nature

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

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

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

Thinking and Freedom from Spooks

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

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

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

 

Politics and the Personal Use of Thinking

18 Friday Nov 2011

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

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The Value of Stardom

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

Right-Wing Oversights and Misrepresentations

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

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

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

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

Psychological War

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

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

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

 

Employment as a Force-Field of Distorted Reality

08 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Hierarchy, Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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