Childhood and the Transcendent Non-Actuality of Subjective Interiority

25 Tuesday Sep 2012

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

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

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

Waking From History, Episode Three

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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

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An Analogy

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

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

The Delusion of a Noble Lie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equality and Monadic Interiority

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

Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Political

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

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

The System of Reality

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

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

Individualism and Government

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

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

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

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

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

Waking From History, Episode One

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald 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.

Transcendental Humanism

06 Friday Jul 2012

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

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The Political Situation of Any Human Consciousness

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

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

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

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

Humanist Individualism

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

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

The Political Situation of Humanism

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

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

The Political Intent of Disembodied Personality

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

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

War and Belonging

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

Brand Personification

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

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

Two Specific Assaults

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

Political Consciousness: The Corporate Control-Ethos

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

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

Capitalism Subsists on War

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

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

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

Science

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

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

AI: Counterfeit Intelligence versus Spontaneous Intelligence

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

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

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

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

Intelligence is Situated Politically

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

Multiple Universes

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

Transcendent Embodiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcendental Humanism

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

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

Social Order

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

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

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

Embodiment as a Political Grounding

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

The Elements

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

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

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

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

Violence Doesn’t Work

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

What Comes After Declining Capitalism

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

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

A Preface to Transcendental Humanism

25 Monday Jun 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Blind Spot as Narrative

10 Thursday May 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender Culture in the Political Situation

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald 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.

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The Cynic movement looms behind all the Hellenistic thinking sects to some extent, but most obviously with Epicureans. Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau recapitulated the worldview of ancient Cynics by recognized that culture carries profound corruption, and that makes it a matter of urgency for individuals to find some grounding or framework untouched by culture. Rousseau embraced nature as that grounding, nature in the wild countryside, sea and sky, and in the noble savage. Rousseau’s noble savage was a representation of natural innocence, but perhaps not a perfect role model. Ancient Cynics had pioneered the quest to base orientation in elemental nature, but mostly in human nature as manifested in gratification of the body and the fun of mental play. Epicureans shared with Cynics a quest for a value-orientation based in natural, even bestial, experiences, as an alternative to culturally transmitted fears and anxieties about unknowable aspects of life such as the powers and motives of gods, and the prospect of a promised afterlife.

The arc of philosophy is not entirely a literary, or even linguistic, entity. Cynics and other ancients taught and expressed philosophy in their way of life. Although Cynics produced literature such as satires and diatribes, for them philosophy was far more than literary performances. With spectacular originality, Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 B.C.) embraced nature, both the pleasant and the unpleasant indifferently, which highlights the fact that the philosophical tradition has not been entirely fearful and unfriendly toward nature and animal aspects of the human body. It is said that Cynics lived like dogs, without property or possessions except for a few clothes: plain robe, sandals, walking stick, shoulder bag for food. They lived from handouts and what they could gather from the wild countryside.

Sophists and Cynics: Between Culture and Nature

Cynics and Sophists had opposing views of transcendence. Sophists were professional teachers of virtue, of personal improvement. The kind of transcendence represented by the ancient Greek polis, human society, was exactly what was promoted by Sophists. Society really does constitute a transcendence of brute nature by a collective construct of intelligences, an interconnectedness of intelligences. Sophists emphasized the collective construct as a wealth of opportunities for ambitious individuals.

Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420 B.C.) and Ancient Greek Humanism

Protagoras of Abdera, a pre-Socratic Sophist, is credited with authoring a myth of the founding of cities from a previous state of nature in which humans lived as isolated individuals, a myth not unlike the one proposed by Hobbes, outlined in the posting of February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era. His myth illustrated that it was the founding of cities which transformed humans from individually isolated brutes into a cultured interconnectedness with power, knowledge, and comfort. A lawgiver is the hero in that kind of story.

The western tradition of subjective individualism can be seen to have a beginning in the work of Protagoras, who wrote the ancient Greek equivalent of “Man is the measure of all things …” Protagoras’ claim expressed consciousness that not everything is merely natural, not everything is Nature. There is a crucial contribution to any experience from the human intelligence having the experience. Whether the primary cosmic substance is earth, air, fire, or water, it has no intelligibility until measured by the senses, body, and mind of a person. Protagoras was recommending a transfer of admiration, that once went to gods, to the accomplishments and potential of human persons. It was more than a shift in focus from the supernatural world to the social and political life of cities. It was a new exploration of humans as individuals.

Ancient Greeks generally were conscious of culture as something like “civilization”. Their sense of it was based on familiar differences between themselves and outsiders they called “barbarians”. Barbarians seemed to Greeks to be deficient in something Greeks had achieved beyond mere nature, the special craft of living together in the polis. Greeks were polis animals and proud of it. In that context culture was seen in a positive glow. The idea that civilization might have special costs and negative consequences seemed ridiculous to ordinary Greeks of ancient times, who considered Diogenes the Cynic simply crazy.

Both Sophists and Cynics carried on cultural criticism, but their criticisms were very different. Both began from an awareness of cultural relativism, awareness that different communities have different gods and religious practices, different foods, manners, traditions, and values. Sophists used that observation to justify their claim that, since nothing is either right or wrong except from arbitrary social convention, the wise operator will say and do whatever is most effective in getting what he wants, normally reputation, wealth, and power. Sophists would teach their clients to argue convincingly on both sides of any issue, since ‘truth’ is often mutable, malleable, and selectable. Sophists assumed that there is no viable alternative to operating within culture.

The ancient Athenian Sophist enterprise was teaching aristocratic young men virtue for public discourse, similar to Renaissance humanistic self-development for politics, business, art, or literature. The virtue of a knife is cutting, and the virtue of a man is speaking intelligently, participating in the important conversations of his community. Voice has always been a marker of individual intelligence, and already a close association between thinking and language was identified. For Sophists, there was a kind of transcendence in knowledge of virtue in oratory, and in the polis as the fulfillment of man as a speech-making being. The learning and teaching of virtue contributes to the perfection of a person. Plato and Aristotle expressed a dismissive attitude toward Sophists, but the systematic deliberations that Sophists devoted to issues in logic, ethics, and nature provided a lot of important groundwork for subsequent philosophical work.

Cynic Innocence

Diogenes and other Cynics were also profoundly conscious of culture, and one Cynic effort was to escape the grip of culture and live according to nature. For Cynics, cultural relativism means culture is arbitrary, random, accidental, but typically claiming total loyalty, reverence, and obligatory participation as the unquestioned standard of truth and goodness, as illustrated in Plato’s allegory of the cave. As such, immersion in a culture is confinement within a deception, a mighty disabler of freedom and individual authenticity. Cynics seem to have acted out an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory, with the cave interpreted as immersion in culture. Cynics were focused on exploring subjective innocence rather than on explicating culture or nature at large. Their identification of culture was in what they rejected in their way of life. Cynics explored freedom from culture by an embrace of individual body-nature such as appetites and sensual gratifications, experiences also valued by Epicureans. Nature was not evil or a mirage for Cynics. It was where humans belong, where we can be authentic.

Cynics identified a need to “deface the currency” as a way of connecting with the nature manifested by human individuality outside the influence of cultural norms, laws, and traditions. Cynics also emphasized the complete indifference of external valuables. Cultivation of subjective freedom was for them so vastly rewarding that all the commonly enjoyed goods such as wealth, health, and reputation, simply paled by comparison. To cultivate externals was to distract yourself from the cornucopia of subjectivity itself. In a specific expression of subjective innocence, Cynics were playful and liked to write satires and jokes. Their focus on the pleasure of play reveals their conception of living according to nature. Cynics exerted a strong mental discipline to maintain their innocent playfulness toward all situations indifferently, although they did not have the elaborate ideology of Stoics about exerting the inward spark of Logos in rationality. Humour and playfulness are rare in philosophy, and playful Socratic innocence was an inspiration for Cynics.

When Cynics said “live according to nature” they were talking about innate animal nature rather than about the beauties and balances of the wild countryside and sky, since all externals were to be accepted indifferently. (This is where Stoics learned the idea of the indifference of externals.) However, the indifference of externals reveals that it was not brute animal nature that Cynics were embracing. Indifference to all externals takes mental deliberation and determination. So Cynic innocence is not quite animal innocence. It is a rationally chosen and rationally maintained discipline of innocence.

Cynics did not accept that people have an enemy lurking within the make-up of subjectivity itself. The enemy was culture. It is often argued that virtue is sophistication of some kind, specialized knowledge, a rule-governed activity that can be taught and learned. It was Plato’s view, for example, that virtue is knowledge of the Good. Cynics declared that virtue is nothing other than innocent expression of appetites, self-declaration, play, and wonder. They also demonstrated that innocence does not result in an egoistic hostility toward, or exploitation of, other people. Such aggression is motivated by culture, by the quest for a reputation, showy trophies, gravitas.

Cynics, like Sophists, contrasted social convention to natural or innocent subjectivity, but Cynic intuitions of subjectivity were much more radically individual than those of Sophists. For Cynics, ‘nature’ denoted individual nature as realized in or driven by the body. Anything related to social reputation was culturally determined and so perfectly non-natural. Wealth and power measured or defined in objective terms were likewise perfectly non-natural. Cynics had discovered elemental bedrock in subjective innocence. Cynic freedom is freedom from attachment to externals generally, and culturally sanctioned attachments specifically, and you can have authentic happiness only on the basis of inward freedom.

Truth to Power

In Cynicism, the higher state is freedom in playful spontaneity, and the lower state is immersion in cultural myths. Cynic freedom meant unrestricted expression of the spontaneous quests of the body such as sex and sunshine, and also unrestricted vocal expression of thoughts and judgments, freedom of speech. Speaking truth to power is normally dangerous because power is a cultural construct which corrupts the relationship of individuals to truth. There is a story that Alexander the Great made a journey to speak to Diogenes of Sinope who was living in very meagre circumstances. He asked Diogenes if he needed anything that Alexander could provide. Diogenes said yes, Alexander could stand aside so Diogenes would not be in his shadow. In another story Alexander is quoted as saying that if he were not Alexander then he would want to be Diogenes.

Epicureans: Intelligent Embodiment

The founder of the Epicurean movement, Epicurus, lived between 341 and 270 B.C.. For Epicurus and his students, having the mental power and freedom to transcend reflexive impulses and first impressions puts happiness within individual control. The project of freedom is to live in happiness by means of strategic thinking, navigating sources of pleasure and pain in a determined application of rationality to evaluating the consequences of different possible actions. What emerges from that practice is wisdom, awareness that mental pleasure in exercising rational freedom is itself the greatest pleasure. Epicureans placed more emphasis on individual powers of rational thinking than Cynics did and placed less emphasis on a general struggle against culture.

Hellenistic Rationality

Since at least Plato, human desires, emotions, and sensitivities, specified as bestial appetites and a self-interested spirit of competition and ambition, were recognized as forces of subjectivity. However, they carried the taint of unfreedom, the indignity of slavish compulsion. Epicureans were surprisingly radical in their integration of desires and feelings with rational thinking. The Epicurean individual was the bearer of pleasure and pain, rather than, as conceived by Plato or Aristotle, pure intellect, but intellect was still very much present. Integrating rational thinking with experiences of pleasure and pain was a way of transcending the compulsive and bestial nature of human embodiment without alienating embodiment from authentic self-experience. The Epicurean self was philosophically special because in the mainstream there was thought to be a separation between the higher rational locus of knowledge and language, and the lower bestial or compulsive passions. It was still the vision of a higher self fallen into and imprisoned within brutish nature. On that view, rationality bears the heavy load of responsibility to liberate and rescue humans from vile imprisonment within a lower, more primitive, subjectivity. The Epicurean approach accepted value from body-centered experiences in close involvement with deliberative intelligence. Higher and lower moved closer together and entered a mutually beneficial relationship.

For Epicureans, the emphasis on rationality was in aid of the fullest enjoyment of embodied pleasure, quite a different project from contemplating an eternal and universal Logos. There is a difference between the propositional thinking engine conceived within Stoicism, and the Epicurean self, for example. Whereas the Stoic will say, “I am thinking rationally, therefore I exist,” the Epicurean will say, “I am striving intelligently for pleasure and avoiding pain, therefore I exist.” Agony, pain, and misery are markers of individuality. Each individual must create his or her own way through those experiences. The Epicurean individual was indeed a sufferer of pleasure and pain, but also the author of strategic action for achieving pleasure and happiness instead of pain. The idea of the individual as a distinct existential entity of deliberation combined with emotion and sensitivity broadened the dignity of the person.

Hellenistic Transcendence

Nature in itself was neither hateful nor providential for Epicureans, but merely a given to be engaged for the practicalities of a subjectively good life. Epicurean transcendence was, again, achieved through the exercise of rational thinking, specifically in calculating the way to minimize pain and maximize pleasure, with the mental pleasure of wisdom being best of all. Epicurean transcendence is remarkably inclusive of the complexities of experience. Emphasis on subjectivity, happiness, expresses some rejection of external nature in a way that has a similarity to the indifference practiced by Cynics and Stoics and the rejection of vile nature in primal dualism.

Hellenistic philosophical sects all shared the program of exercising personal rationality to achieve a transcendent state of intelligence. All recognized each individual as a peculiar and distinct quest for happiness. Intelligence was the higher force and happiness required intelligence to exert itself against other impulses generally associated with the human body and the life of the body within the world of bodies. The individual was the strategic achiever of happiness or self-possession in the face of troubling vulnerabilities and disadvantages, since rationality accumulates knowledge of causes and effects in the engagement of the human body with its surroundings. Partly inspired by Cynics, Epicureans and Stoics did not consider the world of bodies to be essentially flawed, evil, or a mirage. Cynics and Epicureans acknowledged that appetites occasion as much pleasure and joy as they do pain and anguish. In addition, appetites and the assertive spirit are the most creative parts of Plato’s divisions of the subjective soul. They leave a particular person’s mark on surroundings by creating new shapes and arrangements in the world. To dismiss these as slavishly bestial or as entirely conventional and imitative, is too narrow. The bestiality of the body includes the pleasure of embodied power, being a lion in remaking pieces of the world, as well as including animal appetites, pleasures and animal misery.

This work was ethics, deliberating on acting from and realizing the higher self of intelligence rather than merely acting out immediate impulses. Without freedom there cannot be much point to discussion of how action can sometimes lead to self-fulfillment or happiness. The point of ethical thinking in the Hellenistic period was to achieve the existential state of happiness, not a condition of the world such as the greatest good for the greatest number, or maintaining social order and investor confidence. The question was: what kind of action within the complete control of any individual can lead to his or her own happiness? However, there was no interest in a kind of happiness that might be possible from burying your head in sand. Happiness had to be an all-things-considered accomplishment, real heroism turned inward.

Materialism and the Gods

For Epicureans, the metaphysical situation of humans does not prevent the personal achievement of happiness. Nature at large is materialistic but includes deliberate acts of freedom. Gods exist remotely and do not interfere with the individual freedom to achieve happiness.

Epicureans explored aspects of innocent subjectivity that explicitly rejected aspects of culture. For example, Epicureans, like Stoics, were materialists but went much farther than Stoics in removing the will of divinities from the events and conditions of the world. Epicureans did not deny the existence of gods, but judged that gods exist in their own dimensions, remote from the human world, with no interest in mortals. Earlier Greek philosophers presented materialist descriptions of the world in terms of hypothetical elements, not only water, fire, air, and earth, but moist and dry, hot and cold. Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-371B.C.) came up with a theory of atoms in a void that is still with us. Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans defended the atomic metaphysics of Democritus, but with their own freedom-enabling modifications. The Epicurean program of materialism was a secularizing project, removing spooks from explanations of events and removing fear of gods and of an afterlife. In spite of their materialism, their focus was subjective and existential since the central question was how to manage fear and dread in a troubling world and exercise freedom in creating a happy life.

Elemental Orientation

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald 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.

Briefing Notes for My Political Representatives

15 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Political Power

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While You Were Busy With Good Work

Politicians have many calls upon their attention and they have a lot of details to sort out. Dedication to routine work makes it very easy to lose a firm grip on the current big picture. So, for those of you who have been busy, here is a big picture snapshot.

Public Perception

The conduct of military forces and clandestine state functions has probably never been much constrained by the rule of law, or even by ordinary ideas of decency, but something has changed about public perception. Combining the World Wide Web with the mass distribution of pocket computers equipped with movie camera technology has made reality more broadly visible. From time out of mind it was possible for leadership elites to arrange for selective perception among the citizens of urban-industrial nations. However, peer-to-peer investigation and information sharing among ‘proletarian’ individuals and groups all over the world is now commonplace. The blogosphere is recapitulating the political effects of the Republic of Letters of an earlier era. A new consensus is taking shape against the networks which have controlled national and international narratives from the top down. In 2011, large popular protests were conspicuous in Chile, Spain, Greece, France, Israel, The North African and Middle Eastern Arab Spring nations, Russia, China, and in numerous cities across the U.S.A., Canada, and the U.K. in the Occupy Wall Street movement. That these are not isolated incidents is the really encouraging feature of the current big picture. It is the good news to keep in mind as we turn to darker features.

Subverted Democracy

From the new sources of information, it is now broadly acknowledged that democracy has been subverted by organized wealth in the U.S.A.. There has been a slow but effective coup d’etat completed by something like the military-industrial complex which was introduced into public consciousness by Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th. president of the U.S.A.. Donors of political funding, corporate lobbyists, and agents of influence of foreign governments pre-determine the candidates, policies, and programs which political parties can offer the public. Organized wealth also owns mass media, and controls think-tanks and educational institutions by attaching conditions and delayed disbursement schedules to outrageously large donations. Votes can’t influence official conduct in anything but cosmetic ways, even though public money pays for it. This is generally perceived to be the case in spite of the chatter that passes for standard journalism from the advertising and government funded media.

The success of the coup is revealed by many things. It is impossible to miss the fact that the president who got elected for change has continued the main policies and practices of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, with only a more charming presentation. There remains a constant push for war in spite of the fact that the U.S.A. faces no credible threats. American police, spies, and military keep receiving additional powers and immunities, even as there is a creeping erosion of ordinary citizen’s legal protection against them. In spite of the catastrophic costs and absence of public benefits from the Iraq war, and in spite of the obvious illegitimacy of the invasion based on official lies about weapons of mass destruction, there is no public inquiry or national conversation about learning lessons and avoiding similar crimes from now on. American war crimes are quietly dismissed. The financial industry which crashed the world economy has not been changed or held responsible in any way, but instead has been richly rewarded with unlimited supplies of public money.

Moral Collapse

Public figures posture and preach as if the U.S.A. and her allies have some claim to moral superiority. However, everybody knows that the assault on Iraq by the U.S.A., the U.K., Australia, and others in 2003 was a war of naked aggression sold to the public by a complex of official lies. Everybody knows about the U.S. Haditha massacre, the conduct of U.S. officials at Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay. Everybody knows about the American campaign of torture and the archipelago of secret prisons established by the C.I.A. to hide some of their criminal activity. Everybody knows about the U.S. use of white phosphorus as an anti-personnel weapon in Fallujah, in violation of international law, about the ongoing use of cluster bombs and land mines, and the development of new nuclear weapons. These are more than enough incidents to reveal a pervasive culture of organized criminality. Everybody knows about the willful blindness of Canadian officials and military personnel concerning the mistreatment of prisoners in Afghanistan. It would be easy to continue this list, but the point is that the allies of the U.S.A. have thrown away the advantage of moral superiority. Law and decency are consulted only when it seems necessary because of intense public scrutiny. Public figures who do not act against this moral collapse are effectively part of it.

There is a direct connection between the coup pulled off by organized wealth and the moral collapse in the institutions of sovereignty in the U.S.A. and her allies. The think tanks and individuals who design the public relations campaigns, policies and programs, the taxes, laws, and wars of the wealth oligarchy have no grounding in any common morality. From the public record as sketched above it appears that the guiding principles are “the end justifies the means” and “might makes right”.

To summarize, while you were busy with good work, the people who consider themselves the meritocracy of the U.S.A. subverted democracy and the rule of law, drained their nation of honour, credibility, and moral legitimacy, and got caught doing it in the flash of a newly invented camera. Having been caught, they show no intention of reconsidering either their agenda of death-grip control or their entitlement. They are more aggressive than ever transferring wealth upward at the same time as denying all responsibility for anything.

The failures of this cultural system are failures of thinking and of institutions of thinking. The age of science has delivered us to an uncertain fate in a society with an insane oligarchy which is drunk on power from unlimited wealth and nuclear weapons.

Fast Forward

Fast forward to The Security Council Resolution on Syria, February 4, 2012, and the veto by China and Russia. The disproportionate force and violence being directed against the insurgency in Syria is deplorable. However, it seems obvious that the government of the U.S.A. or the U.K. would do much the same if faced with an insurgency at home. Consider the state-sponsored violence used to dispose of the totally peaceful Occupy Wall Street protests.

The veto by Russia and China must be considered in the context of both the recent NATO assault on Libya, and the ongoing assault on Iran launched by the U.S.A. and her allies. NATO used the pretext of a UN Security Council resolution to take control of Libya economically, absorbing it along with recently crippled Iraq into the all-consuming empire of the American military-industrial complex. Hundreds of civilians were killed by NATO operations in Libya, apparently without regret or hesitation. It is impossible to doubt that NATO has the same plan for Syria and then Iran. As just shown, NATO has no credibility as champion of morality and justice. Somebody had to draw a line and that is what Russia and China were doing. An attack on Iran would be a threat to vital interests of Russia and China and could well ignite World War III. Anyone who claims concern about Iran’s nuclear program must answer for the provocation presented by Israel’s nuclear arsenal. The middle-east should be a nuclear-free zone. The whole world should be a nuclear-free zone, but for now Russia and China must serve as a deterrent against a nuclear, aggressive, and trigger-happy U.S.A.. The veto was a clear warning to the American war machine that their feeding frenzy must stop. Russia and China were the adults in the room.

The only kind of international intervention which makes sense for Syria would be strictly Arab League action, in spite of the member states’ lack of legitimacy with respect to human rights, due process, and the rule of law. At least they have knowledge of local sensitivities. The American war machine must not be appeased again.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Political Power

Childhood and the Transcendent Non-Actuality of Subjective Interiority

Waking From History, Episode Three

Waking From History, Episode One

Transcendental Humanism

A Preface to Transcendental Humanism

In the Blind Spot as Narrative

Gender Culture in the Political Situation

The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans

Elemental Orientation

Briefing Notes for My Political Representatives