The Quarrel over Apex Existence – Part 2.

08 Tuesday Sep 2026

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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bi-modal existence, caring-ideality, cults, History, hive-mind, illusions, nature, philosophy, politics, property, religion, science, social contract, sovereignty, STEM, teleology

Fragment 229, Word count: 968.

Tags: history, philosophy, bi-modal existence, nature, science, STEM, property, sovereignty, illusions, hive-mind, cults, teleology, caring-ideality, social contract.

The Quarrel over Apex Existence – Part 1. (Fragment 228, September 1, 2026)

Part 2.

Science and Cultural Illusions

In the contemporary Euro-American cultural system the party of Nature is powerfully present in the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering, mathematics. This is a seriously organized effort, with a distinguished legacy, that claims to be the portal to ultimate understanding of the human condition, the final and authoritative edifice of knowledge and the only engine of genuine progress in human affairs. (Commercial ventures in technological innovation put on this sheep’s fleece to distract from a toothy wolfish sneer.) However, not one of all the STEM disciplines has so far managed to identify, observe, or study the distinctly dystopian features of advanced societies, the illusions used to bind individuals into hive-mind cults fixated from within by a culturally implanted superego which stipulates masculine supremacy, trophy supremacy, collective supremacy, and the supremacy of untethered teleology, disembodied supremacy. Although these and other supremacies may be observable as social facts, as in patriarchy, as in various modes and degrees of theocracy, in the legacy of vicious aristocratic parasitism still preserved by institutions of sovereignty and property, they are unnecessary and dystopian injustices that hinder and harm people taught to accept them. In spite of this, scientific studies of culture and the relationship of individuals to collectives have proven incapable of discovering this cultural veil of illusions, partly because it would surely endanger their funding. This failure reveals the illusion of science as the supreme portal to understanding the human condition.

What is required to identify the cultural illusions is a conception of the unique improvisational creativity of individual caring-ideality in its ordinary embodied instances. This involves recognition of individual caring-ideality as metaphysically anomalous with respect to the brute actuality of nature, as described in The Quarrel over Apex Existence – Part 1, and the further awareness of the historical culture-punch of original thinking about subjective and cultural contributions to any person’s sense of reality. These provide convincing grounds for recognizing the creative power of personal inquisitive innocence oriented outside a dominant culture. Science does not recognize, encourage, or cultivate such a perspective except as it is overwhelmingly focused on objective materiality as apex existence to the extent that eliminating caring-ideality from the conception of existence is part of the methodology. However, understanding the human condition is impossible without understanding this individual interiority.

The necessity for communities to bind individuals into hive-mind cults is generally justified by the cultural illusion of collective supremacy, direct denial of the uniqueness of the improvisational creativity of individuals since accepting collective supremacy rests on the supposition of a vastly more powerful teleology in the collective. This claim is rarely made explicitly because there are obvious problems locating the seat of any communal teleology. This reveals it as another instance of teleology gone wild and untethered, again being asserted, often indirectly, as apex existence. One example of an attempt to rationalize the idea of a collective teleology is the suggestion by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) of a ‘general will’, the will of individual citizens when they take on the identity of their community as a unitary whole; and even more familiar is the idea of a social contract, a voluntary individual submission to a communal teleology, exchanging some personal power and identity in return for a vastly greater identity as Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)). The idea of a social contract has been profoundly attractive because within the general background of fearful unknowing there is an impulse for safety in numbers, for individuals to self-camouflage by blending with the herd, partly in aid of a pragmatically self-protective reluctance to question a coercive and morally void leadership. A generous interpretation of the idea of a social contract creating a collective teleology would be that all the sensitivities, knowledge, insights, intelligence, and purposive power of individuals are thereby compounded into an all-inclusive communal entity. Nothing of the sort happens. Instead, every individual internalizes a culturally imposed superego including the supremacist illusions which block individual self-recognition along with the creative power that comes with it.

Costs of Hive-Mind Illusions

There is no untethered god-like collective teleology, only a culturally standard orientation, a hive-mind. The costs to be paid for merging with a hive-mind follow directly from supremacist illusions. The costs are effective acceptance of patriarchy, conformist orientation toward morally void leadership, reliance on competitions for markers to define your personal rank in the stratified hierarchy of individual worth, superstitious fearful unknowing, and participation in thuggish mass murders and material destruction in the inevitable wars among hive-minds. In such acceptance you give up the possibility of an authentically spiritual life, a life of sociable self-possession grounded in self-recognition as specifically embodied and metaphysically anomalous caring-ideality, agent of a unique but contested future. The ephemeral life of caring-ideality is neither Being nor Becoming, but is rather an improvisation of fragments of new reality. The cost for merging with the hive-mind is loss of the joy and dignity of owning and dwelling in personal creativity and inquisitive innocence.

There is no Prize for philosophy. It has always been a phantom culture, difficult to define and without a sparkly product. It isn’t even possible to talk about it in casual conversation (where the veil of illusions reigns supreme) without descending into platitudes, bewildered silences, or someone pontificating insufferably. All it has is a hint of excitement at finding the border between dystopian culture and deep (Socratic) innocence. Here hive-minds lose their charm and supremacist illusions lose their glamour. Any external supremacy obscures and dismisses the individual interiority of caring in its arc of improvising a unique future. The booming travel and tourism industry inspires people to spend grandly for encounters with innocence, but with philosophy the price is only some careful questioning, inquisitive ideation, reading and writing, sensing the freedom of an un-lonely loneliness at the open border, in a life of spiritual agency.

Embedded links:

Fragment 228, September 2, 2026, The Quarrel over Apex Existence – Part 1 (Word count: 907)

Fragment 224, June 24, 2026, The Culture Punch of Philosophy (Word count: 2,070)

The Quarrel over Apex Existence – Part 1.

02 Wednesday Sep 2026

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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Being, bi-modal existence, caring-ideality, consciousness, culture, History, knowledge, metaphysics, nature, philosophy, religion, spirituality, time

Fragment 228, Word count: 907.

Tags: history, philosophy, bi-modal existence, caring-ideality, time, religion, nature, knowledge, culture, Being, metaphysics.

Part 1.

In the long record of human worrying about and searching out the boundaries, possibilities, and peculiarities of existence as a person, a dominant feature noticed has been a stark bi-modality in the structure of experience. The duality is between, on one hand, an individual interiority of dramatic caring devoted to searching through marginally coherent sensitivities in aid of the improvisation of an arc of personal movement and agency; and, on the other hand, a vast impersonal externality constitutive of the whole enveloping setting that specifically locates and grounds every caring interiority. This fundamental duality has made possible and perhaps inevitable a quarrel over the identification of apex existence. Which of them was first, which the more impressive power? From the very early conceptions of deity in the traces of human lives it seems that the first identification of apex existence went to the creative power of dramatically caring teleological agency, but in an abstracted form free of the restricting localization of embodiment, so both like and unlike human caring, similarly self-aware and expressive but exaggerated in all ways: omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, an ultimate transcendence. Regrettably, this early assessment of apex existence featured forms of caring teleology gone wild and untethered from normal embodiment, not only in deity but also in flagrant over-personification of numerous things in nature that included examples of animism, disembodied spirits, magic, angels and demons, witches and wizards. In the context of a world full of teleology gone wild and untethered the caring interiority of regular embodied individuals seemed to be an inferior imitation, dismissible and insignificant.

Object Dominant Knowledge and Being

Probably there has always been a minority report, or a minority suspicion, that the brute actuality of enveloping nature is what really merits the title of apex existence. Nature has an implacability, a vastness of uncaring determinism, an infinity of extension and a solid core of stability that suggests eternity. Those impressions of infinite and eternal presence give the vast externality a plausible priority, a primordiality, and with it plausibility as the source and matrix of embodied teleology, of caring-ideality at the scale of the human individual, and so plausibility as the evident face of ultimate Being. The problem here is that our surroundings of brute actuality do not present any evidence of deliberation over options, of making choices expressive of marginal preferences or of desperation, not a trace of empathy or of enjoying the pleasure of improvisation, which is to say, no evidence of the power to be creative. This problem notwithstanding, the minority view has inspired the work of a ‘party of Nature’ which has much to show for itself, including the accomplishments of mathematics, useful discoveries of different categories of forces and substances, and of predictable regularities in the way certain important things exist and interact with one another.

The party of Nature goes so far as to dismiss entirely the creative input of caring-ideality from conceptions of reality. One effect of this, within the general effect of diminishing teleology gone wild and untethered from embodiment, is rejection of magical thinking and of once ubiquitous superstitions of angels and demons, witches and wizards,. However, it goes further and also dismisses the creative input of personal caring-ideality. In this way knowledge can be conceived without consideration of individual knowers. On that view knowledge is some kind of impersonal map or model of the externality, of objective reality. This transitions easily into a claim that features of Nature are more than happenstance contingencies but instead are primordial and in a certain sense transcendently imposed as fundamental Being. The move from a description of how something is to the assertion of its necessity is the creation of metaphysics. (Deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ was observed to be invalid by David Hume (1711-76).)

Eternal Necessities vs Agents of Ephemeral and Contested Futurity

Given the structural duality of experience, the choice of one side over the other leans into some particular metaphysics, which means it makes a claim about primordial or ultimate Being. In the case of caring-ideality, any claim of its effective existence as locally improvised interventions into the creation of shape in events contradicts the universal uncaring determinism of Nature-as-Being, and as such presents ideality as existentially anomalous and non-reducible in such a way as to require a separate set of descriptive concepts, including the concept of a radically unfinished world with an ever-opening edge at the coming into existence of an indeterminate non-actual future always largely still to be created but pre-conceived and made actual in certain of its fragments in teleological arcs expressive of the dramatic caring of individual agents. Teleology is a living in the future. On this view the material world is a stage-set supporting the ephemeral dramas of caring that make any of it matter, the caring-dramas of individually embodied agents of a contested future.

Either of two presuppositions make it impossible to recognize the unique creativity of individually embodied caring teleology. One is elimination of caring-ideality from conceptions of fundamental existence, as in materialism. The other is conceptions of caring teleology gone wild and untethered as in angels, demons, deities, and inappropriately personified items of nature. This alienation of caring-teleology from the only context in which it is experienced directly, in expressions of ordinary embodied individuals, is regrettably the universal norm, so that even in cultural settings which conceive caring-teleology as apex existence, ordinary individuals are not granted the dignity appropriate to that metaphysical status.

… To Be Continued.

The Intuition of Apex Existence

16 Sunday Aug 2026

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apex existence, caring-ideality, culture, drama, fearful unknowing, Fichte, History, hive-mind, inquisitive innocence, knowledge, Luther, Nietzsche, philosophy, science, spirituality, teleology, time, vast externality

Sunday, August 16, 2026

Fragment 227, word count: 2,091.

Tags: philosophy, history, fearful unknowing, apex existence, caring-ideality, inquisitive innocence, vast externality, teleology, time, hive-mind, knowledge, drama, Luther, Fichte, Nietzsche.

An interest in philosophy is inseparable from an interest in history because philosophy exists first within the fabric of drama in which people live and that we feel ourselves playing out day to day. ‘Philosophy’ here denotes a configuration of orientation, a culturally shared set of features that structure the subjective interiority of individually embodied future-opening caring personalities. This is ‘wallpaper’ philosophy, uncritically familiar as casual background encompassing ways of understanding what is foundational, primordial, and ultimate within the personal experience of human existence. There is also artisanal and ‘fine art’ philosophy, original questioning of orientation from inquisitive innocence, resulting in texts or utterances, personal voices expressing that questioning. Whereas there is a reliable market for normal fine art as investment grade items of luxury decor, the audience for artisanal philosophy is typically non-commercial and almost entirely scholarly. Artisanal philosophers mostly form academic guilds, clusters and streams of influence, homage, and conceptual cohesion, each stream with school-defining celebrities, methods, questions, and pre-approved conclusions. The thing to watch for is that philosophical conceptions sometimes burst beyond their niche of origin and change the cultural taste in wallpaper.

From this context, it is clear that the work and ideas of any inquisitively innocent writer must be considered in relation to the wallpaper ideology-of-reality at their cultural time and place, the ancient Greeks in relation to Greek mythology, or Enlightenment-era rationalists in relation to post-Reformation Christianity, aristocracy, and monarchy, for example. Greek philosophers often conflicted with their ambient culture of Olympian gods. Socrates was executed on the charge of introducing new gods. Again, during the Euro-American Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a politically radical philosophical movement that was officially persecuted. However, usually the philosophical ‘fine art’ tradition has accepted much of the ‘wallpaper’ embraced by politically powerful factions who benefit from and defend the dystopian culture of their violently stratified societies.

Existence as Caring-Ideality

The most common philosophical conceptions of specifically human existence, existence as embodied caring-ideality, have been diminishingly oversimplified, reflecting the requirements of ambient culture. In the context of Christendom, for example, it was mortally dangerous to propose a concept of human spirituality with anything but a minimum of creative freedom, for fear of seeming to rival deity. The shocking degree of this problematic self-denial or self-effacing in the legacy of human reflections on what is ultimate and primordial in our existence defines the core of philosophy.

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312)

Metaphysically Apex Existence

The only direct acquaintance anyone has of ideality is their own experience of living as a dramatically caring person embodied in the world, supplemented by expressions of bonding over shared caring by familiar people and other animals. It is clear from cultural constructs all around this that caring-and-creative-ideality is often enough intuited as an anomalous metaphysically apex existence. The materials of our surroundings overwhelmingly lack evidence of a complicated and peculiarly individual interiority of caring out of which they express well-being or ill-being, urgent intent, or discretionary attachments. They do not question, remember, or foresee their future. They present a specifically material nature that is already everything it can be. In relation to that material nature, the desperate vulnerability and power of foresight and effective agency in personal experience is taken to qualify as anomalous, with a different order of purposive outward reach, sensitivity, apprehension, conception, and ideation, a metaphysically apex existence. However, because of the vastness of fearful unknowing in human experience, and our genius for forming imitative attachments, there has been a collective unwillingness to accept the exclusiveness of this apex existence. The specific fear often preventing this recognition has been fear that accepting the status of metaphysical apex would enrage some other more powerful metaphysical apex and result in retribution in the form of punishment and destruction. In the common discourse of communities, the freedom and creativity of ideality has been conceptually and culturally alienated from humanity, exported to suppositional other beings, and replaced in ourselves by diminishing versions of determinism.

Fragment 216, October 2, 2025, Self Portrait as Spirit (Word count: 311) deity

Two additional reasons that have made it variably dangerous to acknowledge the full creative freedom of embodied ideality are coercive hierarchical politics and deterministic materialism. First it was politically dangerous to recognize too much inherent dignity and power in individuals universally because that would undermine justifications for the coercive top-down social control and human-on-human parasitism that hierarchical power arrangements manifest. When the demands of apex social factions began to be contested, there was a cultural turn to materialist explanations for everything, banishing all spontaneous personally discretionary teleology and insisting that the brute physicality of nature required everything to exists exactly as it was, is, and has to be, completely determined by mathematical cosmic laws. There is no room anywhere in this strictly scientific view for the dignity and discretionary power of individual creative freedom.

Even with conceptions of ideality distorted by these manifestations of fear, it still must be attributed in some form to ordinary individuals because we obviously care and impose our dramas of caring in arcs of teleology vectoring future-ward, but ordinary ideality is culturally required to be restricted to include only enough creative freedom to justify individuals being punished for certain actions, and otherwise overwhelmingly determined by forces beyond ourselves. In the process of being exported and alienated from individuals in the conceptual construction of communal cultures, the personal ecosystem of ideality as lived has been disassembled and reduced to subsets of its existence in versions of idealism. In Plato’s idealism, for example, there is an eternally unchanging primordial mind, the One, contemplating the complete set of Ideal Forms of objective existence. Personal discretion in the face of a risky and only partly predictable future has been removed along with the whole lived complexity of agency-in-time. An even more common form of exported apex idealism retains the creative improvisational spontaneity of ordinary ideality but completely removes the limitations of embodiment by conceiving the apex ideality as omnipotent, omniscient, and disembodied, resulting in the terrifying concept of deity.

Determinism

Determinism in various forms has been the official version of human behaviour and mental activity. The determining forces mainly fall into the categories of deity or brute nature, so either an external primordially apex teleology or a world of utterly unreflective materiality in which any identification of teleology is false, deceptive, a mirage. (Note that mistakes and illusions are exclusively features of ideality.) A third category of determining force sometimes separated off from the others is a universal human nature which imposes, from within every individual, urges, impulses, drives, and pre-conceptions which remove any profound freedom or spontaneous creativity from individuals even if their occurrence is so random or chaotic that predictability is difficult. The Freudian model of subjectivity represents the scientific requirement by attributing an individual’s self-sourced motivation (id) to animal biology, in a remodelling of the conception of human nature from feudal Christendom featuring enslavement by the inherited taint from the sin of Adam. Vicious motivation from inherent vice is taken to be easy to reduce to mechanisms, and so suited to scientific explanation.

Knowledge of the Vast Externality

Both Rationalists and Empiricists were focused on understanding knowledge. Mathematical science was showing great power and promise. In this niche intellectual culture there was considerable optimism about finally achieving an empowering certainty about the non-teleological vast externality that envelopes the human body, not ephemeral or localized but plausibly constitutive of eternal and universal Nature, a presence that earns some recognition as perhaps the actual apex existence, especially with recognition of the power of human ideality repressed and conceptually alienated. Rationalists and Empiricists each had a core conception of that ultimate object of knowledge, the vast externality to be grasped. Both accepted that their object of knowledge was elementally prior to and more important by far than knowers. For Rationalists it was their version of Logos, the underlying principle of math, language, intelligence, and material reality, at once interior and exterior to knowing individuals. For Empiricists it was the world of brute actuality, measurable and map-able nature comprising the whole cosmic setting of human lives, distinctly exterior to the knowing of individuals, and revealed only by objective perception.

Martin Luther as Philosopher:

The Metaphysics of Eternal Necessities vs

The Metaphysics of Creative Caring-Ideality

Luther merits considerable credit as a philosopher. So much of modernity derives from his assertion of “Justification by faith alone”, which translates directly into Descartes’ “I think, therefore I exist.” (Descartes’ dualism, featuring extended substance and thinking substance, was his inevitably awkward effort to combine all-determining mathematical ‘Logos’ partly revealed in clear and distinct perceptions, with the Lutheran subjective power to overcome the most profound doubt in a creative act of self-definition, all in the context of an ambient culture of an all-determining Catholic Deity.) “Justification by faith alone” also translates directly into Kant’s vision of the self-legislating moral agent, also into Fichte’s self-positing “I”, and into Kierkegaard’s self-sufficient inwardness. Fichte’s vision is completely congruent with Sartre’s existentialism featuring “existence before essence” as the heart of human existence. Luther’s assertion of an individual’s power of faith in the context of unanswerable uncertainty is pure metaphysics, a recognition of the anomalous creative power of individual caring ideality. As such, his intervention was crucial in the historic shift of influence between two great adversarial systems of reality, first, the metaphysics of eternal necessities, asserted by Plato, Christianity, and science, for example, here contested at last by the metaphysics of creative caring-ideality in embodied individuals.

Luther and those inspired by him were not focused on knowledge. Luther experienced profound uncertainty about what he considered most important in existence, the presence of God, creative and discretionary teleological caring-ideality as apex existence. That vast externality for Luther was a cloud of unknowing, unanswerable doubt, instead of knowledge. In the face of that uncertainty Luther turned to the creative power of caring ideality interior to each individual, the power to create and impose structure within the drama of living. To choose faith is to set the future shape of the personal drama of caring. What matters in the future-facing life of a person is not determined by any vast externality, since no externality includes or creates a person’s caring or the future opened by that caring.

Luther, Nietzsche, and Hive-Mind

“Justification by faith …” cashes out as: you can’t live in the world as a spiritual power of agency if you are expressing a culturally imposed hive-mind, doing conventional things such as ‘good works’ assigned conventional values. Instead, to own your apex existence (or in Luther’s case your likeness to apex existence) you have to go profoundly alone, to a personal interiority which no one else can surveil, judge, police, or stipulate. This rejection of immersion in the orientation of a human herd was something Nietzsche got directly from Luther.

Fragment 181, October 8, 2021, The Loneliest Un-Loneliness (word count: 913)

The Philosophical Turn From Knowledge to Drama

Nietzsche has been identified as a pioneer existentialist and as a Romantic (recall Wagner), expressing both of these conflicting but closely related visions of specifically human existence, each inspired by Fichte’s philosophical voice. Romantics and existentialists are not so interested in knowledge or any grand and ultimate objects of knowledge (remarkably, since Fichte’s big project was constructing a science of knowledge). Instead, they are focused on the dramas of living as a person embodied in the world, on the dramatic quality of personal experience. Drama was the new focus because drama is the temporal shape of any person’s caring, improvised among stakes and risks in the ephemerality of living, and as such caring-in-time is metaphysically anomalous as apex existence. Here is the epochal turn in western philosophy away from the metaphysics of eternal necessities and toward the metaphysics of subjective caring-ideality. The former is the foundation of everything politically conservative, whereas the latter leans into a profoundly different political future which is yet to be worked out, a post-hive-mind collective bonding. The looming of this unfinished business is the root of the current malaise of the polarized and aimless Euro-American cultural system.

Cultures of the past preserved ways of facing a fearful unknowing. It is perverse to cling to that condition. The very common impulse to preserve at all costs a legacy language, religion, or the charming trophies of a wealth class or other niche culture always leads to a repetitive dead end of violent exceptionalism, cruel repression, and disabling isolation. No communal bonding can ultimately negate the metaphysically anomalous creativity of every individual caring-ideality.

Fearful Unknowing and Hive-Mind Superego

14 Tuesday Jul 2026

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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creativity, hive-mind, ideality, metaphysics, personal identity, pessimism, philosophy, religion, Romanticism, social hierarchy, spirituality, subordination, time, unknowing

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Fragment 226 (word count: 1,110)

Tags: romanticism, pessimism, subordination, personal identity, hierarchy, hive-mind, unknowing, creativity, time, metaphysics, ideality.

Legacy Pessimism

There is a foundational pessimism in human experience as a legacy of the fear that dominated people of our past. Embodied/ teleological existence as lived by individuals is ephemeral, fragile, and vulnerable in an often unhelpful and sometimes apparently hostile environment. In our vast unknowing of fundamental principles of nature and existence, there is a strong temptation to over-personify environmental occurrences, to interpret them as messages and expressions of judgment by disembodied caring powers who, like mysterious and unreliable parents, need to be appeased, placated, obeyed, and given gifts and tokens of adulation and acknowledgements of our inferiority, in hope of kindlier treatment in life and possibly after death. This has often been the best we can think of to understand and control the conditions upon which we depend for life. In this context, pessimism is based on a disparaging conception of what is essential to existence as an embodied/ teleological individual, starting with vast inferiority to unfathomable spirits moving nature, coupled with our apparent predisposition to displease and disappoint those same definitive judges of what is good and worthy in our actions, desires, and inquisitive subjectivity.

Within this ancestral background of pessimism and fearful unknowing, certain assertions of guiding heights, of supreme forces imposing shape on the caring and strivings of human life, came to be broadly accepted and culturally enshrined across many different communities: masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, communal supremacy, and trophy supremacy. Although every one of these imposing forces was questionable, sometimes disputed, and always mysterious in its ultimate justification, the general experience of vast and fearful unknowing made acceptance of them practical as aids to survival. They formed a framework of personal orientation that was culturally distributed enough to establish a stable and predictable communal life. One main reason for the questionability of these particular guiding heights has always been that the supremacy of something means the subordination of something else, in this case the subordination of certain individuals by those asserting their own superiority as embodiments of natural and supernatural supremacies. Personal superiority becomes family superiority which in turn becomes elaborately stratified as a hierarchy of social classes on a descending scale of privilege and dignity. What was for a long time the sovereignty of a violent aristocratic class expressing masculine supremacy in alliance with patriarchs of religious life claiming knowledge of disembodied supremacy, developed, with the increased importance of markets and long-distance travel, into an ethos that could be called the romanticism of an aristo-commercial hive-mind. It is a founding feature of the informal ethos of romanticism to celebrate superiority and the freedom, power, pleasure, and deep sadness that come with it, sadness from the practical necessity of setting aside the question of ultimate justice. In the setting aside of certain questions of justice and injustice, romanticism is the willing embrace of dramatically engaging illusions as a shelter from the nihilism that its adherents believe follows from an unfiltered gaze upon human existence, which is to say, from philosophy. At its core, romanticism is a principled pessimism coupled with a consolation prize, with emphasis always on the thrill of the prize for those who win it.

It is not surprising to find the romantic ethos expressed, informally, in the central illusions of the aristo-commercial cultural hive-mind. The force of ‘supremacy’ in these illusions is an assertion of particular dimensions of subordination inherent in the existence of individuals. So, it is asserted, individuals have a need to accept some place of subordination in the most-masculine-first hierarchies of strength and force. Likewise, in this discourse, individuals need subordination to collective practices, judgments, norms, expectations, and assignments of personal identity. Further on the matter of personal identity, and in particular of personal value, worth, or dignity, individuals are subordinate to the value of trophies culturally stipulated as the uniquely legitimate objects of desire, competitive striving, satisfaction in possession, and definers of personal quality. Most of all, in many cultures, individuals are taught that they need subordination to the disembodied First and Greatest Teleology whose whim and limitless power is the source and engine of all existence, of meaning, purpose, and drama in existence, and in particular of what is good or bad behaviour and thinking, as declared by moral and religious patriarchs. Such assertions of individual subordination, when they are structural features of a developed communal culture, soon exist within the interior orientation lens of individuals as what Freud called a superego, the cultural mechanism that stipulates in every individual the particular shape of subordination demanded by the long legacy of community wisdom, as well as the shape of any particular individual’s legitimate aspirations, hopes, and dreams.

What makes such cultural assertions of supremacy and subordination illusions is that individuals have no inherent need of any of them. What is inherent to the sociability of individual caring-ideality does not include subordination or any essential needs for subordination. All forces of subordination originate outside an individual and are imposed on individuals because they provide asymmetrical benefits to a hegemonic faction. Nothing inherent to individual ideality opposes engaging with others always as equals. This is because what is really supreme is the inherent and individually sufficient creativity of embodied caring-ideality, the power of positing an ephemeral existence as future-existence in ceaselessly opening time, as a personally opening drama to be shaped from the interior of the individual in effortful engagement with exterior forces and structures including a surroundings of embodied caring idealities. Embodied ideality lives in the future, in the non-actuality that is the anomalous reality of subjectivity. Individuals are fundamentally self-defining in this way as a matter of anomalous metaphysical existence prior to external markers or the declarations of judges (natural or supernatural), and so also prior to markers of gender, whether cultural or biological.

Metaphysical creativity occurs entirely at the level of the embodied individual. There is no communal version, and so no inherently superior category of creativity with a possible claim to override individuals. The assertion of communal supremacy is based on fear, in the context of vast unknowing within a fragile and unreliable environment, and in the false hope of safety in numbers, in a dissolving into the herd. The costs to individuals of communal supremacy far exceed the benefits. The culturally implanted superego which shapes this subordination is the mechanism of hive-mind, and cultural hive-minds are a debilitating prison for human individuals. Hive-mind superegos always block awareness of the metaphysically anomalous creativity of individuals by broadly imposing a disparaging and false depiction of what is interior and inherent to human existence as embodied ideality. That is the foundational illusion of any hive-mind superego at all levels of the bonding of individuals into collective identities.

Related Fragments:

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Fragment 219, December 23, 2025, The Veil of Illusions (word Count: 2,841)

Fragment 220, February 21, 2026, De-Constituting Power (word count: 525)

Romantics in a Crisis for Dystopia

04 Saturday Jul 2026

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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aristocracy, art, artificial intelligence, Christianity, Enlightenment, European history, existence, French Revolution 1789-99, History, metaphysics, philosophy, religion, Romanticism, social hierarchy, theology

Saturday, July 4, 2026

Fragment 225, Word count: 542.

Tags: French Revolution 1789-99, romanticism, metaphysics, Enlightenment, aristocracy, European history, Christianity, social hierarchy, philosophy, art, human existence.

Romanticism is founded on the conviction that the truth of human existence is irredeemably and indecently ugly and brutal, inspiring only nihilism, and since philosophy is the quest for truth, it will be increasingly dispiriting and dark as it makes advances. Romantic philosophers felt that advances in materialist-mathematical science had reduced life and the world far too much to dead clockwork, and they concluded that the best antidote to the resulting nihilism was to revive the enchantments of the past. They wanted to re-enchant the world. So, in Romanticism, art is vastly more important than philosophy, beauty more important than truth. The power of human imagination is the light in the abyss, with power to construct beautiful stories, poems, songs, and images to inject a measure of brief pleasure and joy into human lives.

The core negativity of Romanticism comes from the ugly, but thoroughly ‘enchanted’, drama of sinful human nature in the context of divine command and punishment in Christianity, and it resonates with the politically conservative world-view which evolved from that old culture. The negativity also comes from the aristocratic fear, especially after the Revolution in France from 1789-99, that Enlightenment philosophy, especially in the work of Kant and Fichte, had come to a new kind of metaphysics that would undermine the hierarchical social order of the whole European past. That new metaphysics had no need of divine or otherwise supernatural teleological forces, no gods or demons, no afterlife of heaven or hell; and the teleological forces that remained, namely embodied humans, showed up as all equally and independently creative in positing the external world, their own individual essence, and the force of self-legislated laws. Such power and elemental equality simply negated utterly the old aristocratic and Christian universe, and the aristocratic young Romantics recoiled in fear and loathing from the social upheaval it implied, with the Revolution still fresh in collective memory.

From time out of mind, aristocrats have believed that their worldly exceptionalism is a demonstration of divine approval. In Christian societies their wealth put them in a position to accumulate vast divine merit by good works, mainly donating grandly to various Church related causes and institutions. They were comfortably certain that wealth and power would save them from the righteous wrath of divine, or any other, judgment. (The present day class of billionaires believes likewise that their wealth and power will save them from environmental and social collapse.)

The new metaphysics might have been embraced as inspiring great hope, since its conception of human nature is strongly positive, not in the least dystopian, unlike the legacy Christian conception. The original philosophical Romantics, however, experienced the loss of exceptional privileges by their social stratum as catastrophic and overwhelmingly tragic. Deeply embedded within their legacy of Euro-Christian culture, they had no ability to conceive a less dystopian configuration of their society, and they clearly represented the fears of the most powerful factions of European society. Their response was to encourage and participate in a revival of thrilling enchantments from the past: stories of magicians, capricious spirits, damsels in distress rescued heroically by mighty knights, brave soldiers, tragically beautiful lost causes, restless young men on wild windswept hills; and their appeal was sufficient to take popular culture along with them.

See: Fragment 182, November 4, 2021, The Thrill of It (word count: 335) (of gods & demons).

The Culture Punch of Philosophy

24 Wednesday Jun 2026

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Aristotle, Christendom, culture, Enlightenment, gods, History, literacy, nature, philosophy, Protestantism, rationality, reality, science, teleology

Fragment 224, Word count: 2,070.

Tags: history, reality, culture, gods, teleology, Christendom, Enlightenment, rationality, nature, science, literacy, Protestantism.

The Ancient Greek Reconceptualization

Ancient Greek philosophers re-conceived their culture’s system of reality as a whole by marginalizing supernatural personalities, notably the Olympian gods, in their explanations of the world. Those gods were not disembodied spirits, although disembodied spirits were also represented in the culture. The gods of Mount Olympus had bodies including the appetites of human bodies, but they were not ordinary flesh and blood since they had the power to change shape and appearance. They were in principle immortal and had individual and collective superpowers, but as personalities they were not so different from normally embodied persons. Humans who did extraordinary deeds caught the attention of the gods and sometimes inspired divine admiration and support and sometimes malice. Heroes were the favourites of certain gods.

There were materialist philosophers who denied the existence of gods, but for Plato, Aristotle, and others there were still important supernatural forces in the world, and those forces had the character of personality since they were teleological, with the future-directed orientation of caring ideality: attentive, inquisitive, judging, and thinking. Both Plato and Aristotle gave importance of the highest order to a god or gods in an obscure but conceivable dimension of the world: Aristotle’s first unmoved mover and Plato’s One and the Demiurge. These were still very god-centred views of life and the world, but the nature of deity was transformed from that in Homer. Aristotle’s god is pure intellect, thinking thinking about thinking, pure actuality without matter (potential, for Aristotle). Aristotle associated this deity with the “fixed stars” visible in a clear night sky, and his conception of cause/ effect in nature was still god-focused since the unmoved mover, located at the top of the layers of the spherical cosmos (with planet Earth at the bottom/ centre), was an ultimate cause of everything. Changes, impulses, or motions passed from Thinking at the top, down through the layers of fixed stars, planets, and finally into the sublunary world inhabited by humans. Also, in Aristotle’s view, every substance is defined by its own internal essential teleology or final cause, a destiny toward which it strives as if pulled or called from the future. Plato’s Demiurge is very much like pure intellect eternally contemplating the unchanging Ideal Forms, which each send out images of themselves in layers of decreasing accuracy and stability, down to the layer of ceaseless change familiar to ordinary experience. Plato’s divine One seems also to exist under another aspect as the Form of the Good.

Although Plato and Aristotle were not materialists, it is clear that the materialism of Stoicism and especially Epicureanism was meant to free people from fear of gods and enable individual self-possession. This was an important theme of ancient philosophy, and the rough rationalism of Plato and Aristotle was part of that effort. Socrates, teacher of Plato, was executed by the democratic polis Athens for offending the gods, so this was not a trivial pursuit. The philosophical effort was to transfigure gods from unruly personalities into transcendent metaphysical moorings or shorings for the barely stable world of ordinary experience. The gods of the philosophers were more natural regularities rather than capricious supernatural personalities, and that was the dawn of a less terrifying construct of fundamental reality, based on an intuition that traditional conceptions were over-complicated, over-personified, and mostly expressions of fear in the face of the vast mysteries of human existence.

The philosophical sects or schools of ancient Greece were very focused on particular teachers, each with special messages and a specific legacy of ideas, and although texts were written and the messages launched into the literate social milieux of aristocratic young men of the polis, the larger cultural uptake of these ideas was minimal. In the Hellenistic era Stoicism and Epicureanism did become somewhat unmoored from direct contact with the line of successors from a founding teacher, and attracted more interest among a wider public. Philosophical views became familiar and respected enough within the community of the comfortably literate to require some degree of homage from rival systems of ideas, including the new religion of Christianity. Early Christianity was deeply informed by especially Platonism and some Stoicism. Christian authors were outright hostile to Epicureanism, which asserted that if gods exist somewhere they have no interest in humans, and that rationally chosen pleasure is the primary good.

Early Modern Enlightenment

Descartes’ generation of early modern philosophers again re-conceived fundamental reality, banishing Aristotle’s substance-essences and final causes from inanimate objects and from nature at large. These Baroque era rationalists were still in the belly of Christendom’s very totalitarian hive-mind beast, which used lethal force to impose an orthodox metaphysics featuring prophets of a personal father-God in the sky, supported by writings from Plato and Aristotle. Augustine of Hippo was grounded in Platonism, and Thomas Aquinas had structured Aristotle into the fabric of the Christian system of reality. The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment re-conceptualized all three branches of the Christian system of reality: nature, community, and the drama of human subjectivity.

Nature

The rationalists re-conceived nature scientifically as a strictly physical system of ‘clockwork’, completely free of disembodied spirits and their power, free of cosmic teleology, purpose, or destiny, leaving just strictly impersonal forces and structures. Descartes, Hobbes, and others of their generation were crucial in that conceptual groundwork for science, breaking away from Aristotelian-religious ideas as previously codified by Aquinas. The conceptions of materialist science were persuasive enough and far-reaching enough to provide an answer to a cultural instability and vacuum that had developed at the core of Old Regime Europe’s sense of reality. The roots of that instability probably lie in the horrific collective experience of a pandemic, the Black Death bubonic plague of the late 1340’s and early 1350’s which, over a period of half a decade of extreme trauma reduced the population of western Europe by half without otherwise harming the environment, infrastructure, material culture, or the distribution of wealth in the society.

Subjectivity

The cultural instability in Old Regime Christendom, initiated by the personal and collective trauma of inexplicable disasters, enabled the effectiveness of a second Enlightenment culture punch by creating a widespread readiness for new foundational ideas. What participants in the ‘Republic of Letters’ came to offer was a humanistic campaign of strengthening the dignity and autonomy of individuals, in contrast to the Augustinian concept of human nature inherently tainted and enslaved by original sin. Individual subjectivity was re-conceived as universally educable to rationality and capable of spontaneous rationality, even though it was usually trained by legacy institutions to a condition of non-rational credulity, superstition, and abject deference to entrenched authorities. There was a new assertion of universally distributed rationality as an individually innate human ability to judge what has value and what is true and real based entirely on commonly available perceptions. The previous spread of proletarian literacy from around the time of Wycliffe in the 1380’s was crucial in fostering this increasing dignity and power of creative rationality at the individual level. The emerging spirit of Protestantism was also animated by a similar conception of the inherent power and dignity of the individual and became an inescapable cultural force defining and institutionalizing a literate subjectivity as the universal human norm.

Now at last a large and moderately stable society with an historically complex culture and an emerging collective sense of needing to get better was embracing the long philosophical work of re-conceiving reality based on commonly observable relevant evidence rather than on fear of a profoundly personified nature, the work that had begun in the ancient world. There were layers and niches in this society’s sense of needing to get better, and conservative devotion to medieval fear-culture was still strong among the most privileged. However, the devastations of the Great Plague lingered for generations in popular discourse and the need for recovery into a more just arrangement of society was part of that discourse, especially among less privileged classes. Also, there was an increasing cultural recognition of the relatively low level of accomplishment by the society that was western Christendom relative to foreign societies beyond the borders and to societies of the past. Christendom understood itself to be a society at risk of being surrounded and overpowered because of certain cultural inferiorities. Since the Spanish conquest of Muslim Toledo in 1085 there had been a growing excitement among the intellectually curious in the community of advanced literacy. The discovery of ancient works of Aristotle and Islamic philosophers in the libraries of Toledo inspired a profound response, including large scale translation and distribution of these works within Christendom, and the organizing of a number of universities. In the niche of advanced literacy there was fervent engagement with the mathematical, scientific, and philosophical achievements of ancient Greek and Medieval Islamic intellectuals. The fall of Constantinople to Islamic Turkish forces in 1453 sent a shock of vulnerability through Western Christendom, but also sent scholarly refugees from Byzantium into Italy and beyond with books of intellectual treasures from ancient Rome.

The foundational culture-punch of philosophy was promotion of the autonomous application of rationality for the most ambitious thinking, for a re-conceptualization of the most fundamental realities without appeal to any kind of ‘superego’ such as the omniscient/ omnipotent deity supposedly expressed through established authorities, both religious and civic. Re-thinking reality is distinctly a philosophical project, evading culture with intent to re-model it, and the Enlightenment movement was self-consciously philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ meant making use of rationality without religious assumptions of cosmic or divine purpose for people, without disembodied teleology or any kind of external superego. ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘rationally non-religious’ and consequently de-centralized, asserting a pluralism and diversity of thinking quite foreign to religious cultures and communities.

The earlier political philosophers of the modernizing era, notably Machiavelli and Hobbes, made an effort to justify the sovereignty of the fiercest of the aristocracy without a need for divine or Church authorization. (Hobbes thought the primeval ‘state of nature’ was a war of all against all.) Even in later stages of the Enlightenment it was urgently dangerous to question the established practices or ideology of sovereignty. Philosophers of the later and more radical stream of the Enlightenment presented rationality as ultimately justifying bottom-up control of society, re-enforcing universal equality, human rights, and democracy, specifically contradicting any justification for top-down social control in the name of rationality (sometimes falsely blamed on the Enlightenment). The materialist perspective began to undermine the religious metaphysics that promoted the legitimacy of Christendom’s top-down parasite factions, monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies; instead conceiving a society of equals as a natural potential and possibly a pre-historic actuality that was unjustly hijacked by priests, aristocrats, and monarchs. The Enlightenment rationalists upset the Christian system of reality by finally bringing the human essence back from some faint hope of transcendent eternity, back into nature, rejecting all super-natural entities or realms of being, and then arguing that in the primordial ‘state of nature’, prior to establishment of arbitrary social conventions, all people would have had equal freedoms and rights. In that way, society was re-conceived as a system of equal persons with the same rights and freedoms of thought, expression, and association, best organized as a democratic republic (bottom-up political force).

There is a progressive enrichment of the individual as potential reader/writer throughout the history of literacy at the core of these cultural developments. In the earliest stages the individual was considered less important than the technology of letters, and the creative power of personal teleology was thought to reside in supernatural beings at large in the world outside and beyond human subjectivity. Such invisible power was thought to inhabit the concrete marks shaped as words and letters, making them speak. It was the work of a string of philosophers that very gradually had the effect of relocating the creative freedom of caring-ideality from supernatural entities, such as a remote deity, to ordinary individuals. Wycliffe’s views improved the status of the general reader/ writer substantially. By the era following the French Revolution of 1789-99, in a Euro-American culture struggling to come to terms with the rationalist Enlightenment, progressive pools of culture recognized the creative power to exist within the individual human who was assigning and interpreting meanings. The objective world had been simplified dramatically by removal of magical and supernatural entities and powers. The human individual was conceived as deep, complicated, powerful, and more important by far than the concrete marking systems, as useful as those might be.

Opening the Self-Thinking Idea

11 Monday May 2026

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culture, deity, dystopia, existence, History, hive-mind, philosophy, politics, sovereignty, spirituality, supremacist illusions

Fragment 223, Word count: 573.

Tags: history, sovereignty, politics, deity, philosophy, hive-mind, culture, supremacist illusions, dystopia, existence.

Every person’s subjectivity is molded by the day-to-day practices and verbalizations of their ambient society. Specific forms of sociability and social control are gradually learned and internalized as a map and icon of human necessity, an orienting lens of expectations, intentions, and evaluations, sometimes called a superego. In the context of a political and cultural regime shaped by a history of war-focused patriarchy and grotesque religious metaphysics demanding irrationally uncritical belief and fervently demonstrative reverence to both a home collective and a wildly implausible idea of divine sovereignty, philosophy has been the mental exercise of untethering from the culturally modelled map and template of what is necessary or practically necessary on the mission to inhabit in some degree-of-fullness the potential, the genius, of human living. Philosophy leans into a cultivated innocence, a creative and self-revealing questioning, an opening to discovery and self-possession.

Metaphysics of Sovereignty

Patriarchal metaphysics is an assertion of the primordial necessity of formal sovereign dominance in social arrangements. It includes all kinds of top-down essentialist idealism such as Platonism (which established itself at the core of Christian theology), in addition to culturally embraced personified spooks such as disembodied gods and demons (as in creationist theism), and even includes mechanistic materialism with its iron laws of nature featuring a biologically determined food chain, imposing the past onto the future in the form of backward-looking cycles. Patriarchal metaphysics has been forming the map and icon of reality within subjectivities for as long as anyone knows.

At the core of the current civilizational incapacity to move past the working co-existence of nihilist science and father-god superstition is the fundamental tenet of the political centre and right-wing in their mission to assert the metaphysics of sovereignty: that master/ slave social organization is inevitable because of how human-nature is determined by God or nature, sanctifying a hierarchical social order in which a privileged few extract inordinate wealth from power over subordinated multitudes. However, stable subordination has always depended on a culturally hyped bundle of illusions (masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, collective supremacy, trophy supremacy) with the intent to produce an individually disabling hive-mind collective identity.

The Opposition

There are two notable forces of opposition against the metaphysics of sovereignty at the source of dystopian features in societies forged by the controlling culture-pools of feudal Christendom, namely the totalitarian hierarchy of father-God Christianity (asserting illusions of disembodied supremacy and collective supremacy) in working alliance with the class of looting-by-violence families known as aristocracy (modelling illusions of masculine supremacy and trophy supremacy). The first and oldest force of opposition was the humanism that developed since ancient times from the milieux of literacy, especially advanced and loosely communal literacy (such as the Enlightenment era Republic of Letter, for example). The second force of opposition is an artifact of, and fits within, the arc of literary humanism, namely the post-reformation line of Lutheran philosophical development, which begins from “justification by faith alone” and moves to a conception of primordial human existence as self-thinking idea.

Primordial Human Existence

There is a knowable truth of metaphysics because of unmediated access between individual ideality and its primordial existence as caring-within-time. Primordial caring is any caring. This bears upon politics because primordial human existence as embodied ideality, creatively inhabiting dramas of personal caring in the suppositional opening of time, is alone what sets the limits and potential for any relationship of individuals to a home collective, to collectives in general, and to other individuals.

Spirituality and The Ecosystem of Caring

28 Tuesday Apr 2026

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aristocracy, caring, creativity, Fichte, History, hive-minds, Martin Luther, metaphysics, Nietzsche, philosophy, religion, Spinoza, spirituality, wealth

Fragment 222, Word count: 997.

Tags: spirituality, hive-minds, aristocracy, wealth, history, caring, metaphysics, creativity, Spinoza, Luther, Fichte, Nietzsche.

In the contemporary culture of capitalism there is only wealth as the measure of a good life. However, it is profoundly not true that a life without wealth is a diminished or lesser one. The measure of life is a spiritual matter, of which wealth is no indicator, or possibly even a negative indicator, as suggested by the proliferation of fascist billionaires. No amount of arts-and-culture-washing, patronage, fandom, or aristocratic Romanticism can reconcile wealth with spirituality. It does have to be admitted that the idea of spirituality was gradually made unserious and distasteful by the long-established father-god religions which teach that spirituality requires ownership of inherent guilt, inescapable debt, and vast personal insufficiency under the all-determining Gaze of a cosmic caring super-power who might provide miraculous relief and rescue if properly appeased. An obsession with accountable assets provides at least some appearance of relief from that old nightmare. However, it just sets up a vicious duality, both sides of which still manifest the legacy of cultural delusions at the core of hive-minds that have shaped human history. Unburdened from that weight of revered but perverse tradition, spirituality is a matter of the metaphysical anomaly of caring inherent in any temporal ideality, the metaphysical anomaly that some things matter because someone cares, and the course of existence is decisively bent away from any simple fall-line, from any aspect of eternity (looking at you, Spinoza), by this quirky way in which things matter.

The Ecosystem of Caring

Subjectivity, temporal ideality, is an ecosystem of caring, a cloud of inter-related dramas shaped as curiosity, questioning, and desperately felt needs, specific emotionally-crucial self-declarations as well as a constructed orientation toward energy and gratification, all within a complex of attachments that subjective ideality-clouds feel and nurture with each other. There is a fundamental pattern of building up latent energy followed by pre-conceived projections of that energy beyond personal subjectivity in the effort to print personal intuitions of what is right morally and aesthetically onto an entirely suppositional, non-actual, future. It is entirely a construct of time, of suppositional expectations, intentions, vectors away from no-longer and tilting into not-yet, always probing the texture of unknowing in ever-present surroundings. Full innocent ownership of this metaphysical power has proven itself sufficient to eclipse the value of trophies, applause, imitations of lifestyle models, and symbols of competitive exceptionalism.

Luther through Fichte

This simple spirituality, which enables identification of the confining effects of culturally imposed hive-mind binding structures, was already implicit in the two key claims advanced by Martin Luther: first, justification by faith alone; but also, unmediated access of the individual to primordial existence, which Luther conceived as the primordial caring of God, but strictly, in the existence of ideality the primordial caring is every caring. Luther was asserting that individual caring-idealities have the inherent power to posit conceptions of reality (there is nothing to limit this power to acts of faith), as well as to encounter reality without any need for the intercession of culturally imposed collective ideologies such as that of Roman Christendom. Spirituality is not submission to authoritative doctrine, or to anything, but rather it is agency at the level of the embodied individual, self-declaration in the full awareness of an autonomous personal creativity.

Fragment 93, April 20, 2016, The Misconception of Spirituality in Platonism (word count: 2,528)

The conception of spirituality fundamental to the Lutheran line of philosophical development has always been profoundly subversive of the dystopian actuality of hierarchical hive-mind societies that grew from the combination of aristocratic and father-god religious dominance in Christendom and the Old-Regime. As such, it has been unwelcome and shunted to the margins of culture, even of scholarly academic culture, which of course increasingly depends on gifted funding. Aristocracy has been the model culture-pool focused on the value of wealth as ultimately taken and protected by violence. By the end of the eighteenth century those historical foundations of European civilization had been seriously contested by upstart materialist science and by the effects of Protestantism including the French Revolution (without “justification by faith alone” there would be no “Cogito, ergo sum.”), but the old foundations always fought to maintain supremacy and were even given a fresh boost by nineteenth century Romanticism. The play of these cultural forces eventually produced our current extractive investor-supremacist bourgeois capitalism in which wealth is the universal aspiration driving consumption that is laying waste to our finite planet.

Existentialism

The accomplishment of Fichte’s work in the Lutheran tradition has been decisively misconstrued by interpreting it through the distorting glass of what Hegel and the Romantics did after. Fichte’s absolute “I” was not relocating personal ideality from the individual to the cosmos at large, to a world-scale teleology nudging human history according to an intentional caring plan. Rather, Fichte was uncovering the foundations of the self-positing existence-before-essence of existentialism. Fichte, standing on the shoulders of Kant’s development of Luther’s foundations, removed (if so awkwardly) some literary clutter to face the absolute self-positing, caring, “I”.

Nietzsche and the Human Herd

A main theme of Romanticism in the aftermath of Fichte’s work was, again, the glorification and sanctification of aristocracy, dedicated to unaccountable self-indulgence and ever-ready for violence, and that theme of Romanticism was embraced by Nietzsche, who enjoyed thinking of himself as a descendent of aristocracy. That regrettable Romanticism in Nietzsche’s thought shows itself in his uncritical acceptance that a kind of natural aristocracy results because only exceptional individuals can be creative. However, nothing supports that claim other than the culturally encouraged wishful thinking of a certain privileged social faction. Creativity and caring are inseparable in the existence of ideality. Nietzsche was sustained in his poverty and un-lonely isolation by the joy of his personal creativity. In the light of that experience of creativity Nietzsche declared the supreme importance of a Lutheran individualism, the necessity for individuals to cut themselves free of the cult mentality of any human herd (hive-mind) to liberate an innate agency, the power to self-declare in creative acts of re-shaping reality.

Metaphysics in the History of Dystopia

16 Monday Mar 2026

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Fragment 221, Word count: 2,971.

Tags: history, philosophy, theology, power, culture, aristocracy, dominance, violence, literacy, ideality, time, freedom, creativity, politics, metaphysics, humanism.

The spirit of two philosophical traditions runs through the Fragments of In The Blind-Spot. First is the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope, a city on the south shore of the Black Sea into which Diogenes was born around 410 BCE. Diogenes was the original philosophical Cynic, elaborating the idea that social convention, culture, is an artificial lens of interpretation passing as elemental reality but effectively alienating individuals from the natural primordiality of their existence as human. Diogenes practiced a strict form of de-culturing in his shockingly unusual way of living, to be free of what he identified as false social reality. The Cynic tradition developed also in Epicureanism (“ignore the talk going around about gods”) and to some degree in Stoic self-possession, all exploring a distinct humanism in the ancient Greek cultural system.

Fragment 27, April 12, 2012, The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans (word count: 2,898)

Fragment 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism (word count: 6,844)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is also in the vicinity of Diogenes but is partly disqualified by his devotion to the supremacy of “the general will”. Rousseau, proud citizen of Calvinist Geneva, did, on the other hand, present a critique of the mainstream culture of arts and sciences of his time, and generally wrote in opposition to the style of life supposedly envied and sought after by everyone and exemplified by Voltaire, a life of wealth, privilege, celebrity, high consumption, and patronage of the arts, inevitably accompanied by pride in social superiority and exclusive elite class membership.

The second tradition is clearly related, being arguably a development from ancient humanism, namely the modern Euro-American Enlightenment, but especially, within that broad cultural movement, the Lutheran spirit of Protestantism, which developed alongside a body of discoveries in mathematical science (building from strong accomplishments imported from the Islamic world and ancient India), all in the context of the Republic of Letters, a network of independent scholars of various backgrounds and nations publishing mainly outside institutions such as Church foundations and universities. The printing press, since its launch in the fifteenth century, had spread through private business ventures, free of immediate institutional control, and in combination with the graduating cohorts from Europe’s universities, trained to be active in secular professions, it energized a self-directing network of communication about ideas, and an expanding body of literature, much of it in the international language of scholarship, Latin, releasing an extraordinary flourishing of the scribal culture of advanced literacy. It was the blogosphere of the late medieval/ early modern period.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement to get beyond and get free of the most dominating cultures and factions of Christendom: The Roman Church, aristocracy, and monarchy, a classic example of a tight working alliance between forces of dominance-by-violence and those of dominance-by-dread-of-the-supernatural, all grounded in a metaphysical ideology featuring a disembodied almighty will-to-power. Agents of the Church acted as indispensable mediators between the righteous wrath of God and helpless individual sinners. Within that entrenched dystopia a revival of ancient Epicurean metaphysics, notably in the effective materialism of Baruch de Spinoza (1632-77) enabled a radical critique of the Old Regime’s institutions of sovereign dominance and promoted a more strictly scientific world-view. Materialism undermined claims by the upper strata of society to be enforcing the will of the supernatural almighty.

Both science and Protestantism were intellectual revolts against the established religious edifice of knowledge guarded ferociously by the Roman Church hierarchy, although they expressed two starkly opposing metaphysical foundations. Lutheran protestantism rests on an identification of faith as a spiritual act of autonomous individual agency, eliminating any mediation between the individual and primordial reality. Any such external mediation, such as the Roman Church’s mediation between the individual and the Deity, is a portal for misinformation, illegitimate domination, and abusive exploitation. There has been a phenomenal philosophical evolution from Luther’s conception of the inherent spiritual autonomy of individual subjective ideality. The tendency of that evolution is to retain a sense of the transcendent creative freedom of ideality, first attributed to an almighty Deity, but increasingly to relocate that transcendence from the remote Deity to the individual intelligences of human personalities. We see this worked out by a series of post-reformation Lutheran philosophers: Leibniz, Kant, Fichte. Fichte’s drift to a cosmic absolute self-positing “I” seems to flip the progression on its head, and that cosmic absolutism was taken in a nostalgic Aristotelian direction by Hegel, also Lutheran. The following philosophers were brought up in Lutheran households and communities:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) – subjectivity is a monadic interiority; reviving aspects of Aristotle

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – moral agency is self-legislating, requires no sovereign commands, no externally sourced superego

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) – subjectivity has the form of a self-positing “I”, Existentialism’s dawning

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) – phenomenology of spirit, investigation of spirit in the shape of history, the Absolute connects Hegel to Fichte

Max Stirner (1806-56) – a version of self-possession universalizing Machiavelli

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) – “…an act of will in self-sufficient inwardness”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) – God is dead. Ubermench is beyond the reach of cultural norms.

In the Enlightenment energy system of Protestantism, the Republic of Letters, and Science, following the celebrated humanism of the Renaissance in which Medieval Christendom searched out the intellectual accomplishments of alien cultures that it recognized as more advanced, Protestantism was an engine promoting the spread of literacy beyond the professional scribal classes to the population at large. John Wycliffe inspired a movement for popular vernacular literacy in the 1380’s, promoting Bible reading as essential personal piety, an early expression of the spirit of Protestantism that highlights its origins in the culture of literacy. Science especially enabled the accumulation of an even vaster edifice of new knowledge. However, science never managing to replace the old metaphysics of Christian theology because its rejection of the concept of human spirituality was never convincing. These antagonistic culture-pools settled into a truce with each other and with the legacy of the aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence.

Fragment 163, May 11, 2020, A Western Project (word count: 750)

Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

John Wycliffe (1328-1384) – popular vernacular literacy, the Bible in vernacular languages

Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) – the Earth is not the centre of the universe

Martin Luther (1483-1546) – individual justification by faith alone

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) – the Earth moves

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) – Cogito, ergo sum. anti-Aristotelian physics, mathematics, metaphysics

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – mass, distance, & the universal law of gravitational attraction

The French Revolution (1789-99) – sovereignty of the National Assembly

Culture Pools in the Historical Narrative

Already from this sketch of philosophical influences, it is apparent that a historical narrative, especially of the Euro-American cultural system, but with forays beyond, is a core interest in the Fragments, in which narrative the focus becomes the profound confrontation between an aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence (still dominant, still dystopian) and certain counter-cultures inherently antagonistic to it and partly stifled under its dominance.

Aristocratic Dystopia: The Culture of Dominance by Violence

Because of the ongoing ascendance of the aristocratic-violence culture focused on competitive masculine strength-testing with strictly limited empathy, current and previous ‘civilized’ societies have all been dystopian systems of top-down parasitism derived originally from the culture of animal herding on the Great Eurasian Steppe. For techniques of herd parasitism to be applied to human communities after violent conquest, effective stabilization of extractive practices required construction of a haze of popular illusions in which hierarchy is created by setting up commanding authority in certain persons who are credible as cultural icons of dominance, and as such become internalized by individuals as cultural elements of a superego. The human receptivity to authoritative superego figures is a spiritual vulnerability trained through the long childhood years of dependence on parents. Dominance culture consistently constructs an enduring type of culture-bound collective, effectively a human hive-mind, bound together by a set of culturally embedded illusions of the primal and ultimate supremacy of certain forces: masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, collective supremacy, and trophy supremacy, all reinforcing the hierarchical pattern of the dominant faction. Aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture first created the illusion of masculine supremacy in which rights belong to the strongest. Masculine supremacy sets up the most successfully violent persons as superego icons in aid of enforcing obedience and loyalty in a hierarchical social order: an all-inclusive food-chain of top-down command and value extraction, promoted as the primal and ultimate Great Chain of Being.

Disembodied supremacy culture developed into an edifice of authoritative knowledge of primal and ultimate things, largely non-evident or hidden things, claimed to be selectively revealed to the rare chosen prophet. (theology) Disembodied supremacy involves an imagined contrast and conflict between ordinary human embodied ideality and an ideality that is cosmically primordial and as such prior to all embodiment, unrestricted by embodiment, all-creative. Disembodied supremacy sets up certain charismatic persons as superego icons, persons asserting their special knowledge of the ways and will of powerful disembodied spirits, based on a claim of being divinely chosen to receive revelations of the otherwise hidden ultimate Truth. Behind those visible persons looms the imagined Deity within its cloud of unknowing. Disembodied supremacy culture exploits the human tendency to personify everything, an overuse of the ability of embodied ideality to recognize in external phenomena the alien dramas of separate emotionally engaged wills, to recognize evidence of external ideality expressing its personal caring, knowing, and intending. This ability is the portal to all-important sociability and empathy, but inappropriate recognition of this kind results in fear of powerful disembodied aristocrats (lords) in the sky and in nature, violently coercive forces of willful self-assertion with strong excitable intentions. Their having power implies strictly limited empathy, as is typical of supremacist masculinity, and their disembodiment implies power beyond the predictably physical. Such invisible power inspires a pervasive inescapable dread.

In the precarious life of human individuals within nature and among other humans, the illusion of collective supremacy is easily sold as a necessary condition for safety in numbers. Collective supremacy sets up certain authoritative/ powerful persons as superego icons, persons asserting their uniquely authentic expression of the collective as the transcendent home for its people.

A culture of trophy supremacy is acted out and projected by the life of looting aristocrats or oligarchs. As apparently the most delicious form of gratification, chosen by the strongest, it tends to be imitated universally, derived from masculine supremacy and culturally accepted as the universal measure of personal value. Trophy supremacy sets up envied celebrities with the most property or the best property as superego icons, role models.

Collective Drama

This set of supremacist illusions, sometimes with still others (such as family supremacy or language supremacy), tend to form a mutually supportive structure, such that masculine supremacy is supported by the assertion that divine will determines everything including social hierarchy and individual power. The aristocratic obsession with trophies tends to convince everyone that competing for celebrity status is inherent in human nature. Collective supremacy is proclaimed by the authorities of both disembodied and masculine supremacy to help bind their flocks of subordinates in an illusion of shard collective welfare. Effective hive-mind construction does not, however, require the whole set. Any one of them can bind a collection of people together by training all to share the same orientation up to a supreme guide declaring the direction of the collective drama.

Literacy and a Life of the Mind

The alternative culture-pool that has been most impressively confrontational against the standard supremacist configuration has been literacy/ scribal culture, scholarship, the graphic recording of voices in language, by which it is made possible to choose to either distribute the record of an individual’s thinking to an audience, small or large, or to preserve it privately as a personal reminder of an accomplishment from which to advance and build. Since literacy is the craft and skills of preserving and cultivating knowledge in the mode of language, it has often been treasured within organizations focused on the illusion of disembodied supremacy in their frantic speculations concerning primal and ultimate things. Literacy has thrived in such institutions and inspired many generations to create astonishing feats of research, imagination, and reasoning. The super-powers of scribal ideality, such as enabling development of a unique reading/ writing persona, a personal literary voice, along with easing the effort of prolonged mental activity, eventually became a force sufficient, as a non-property based source of value, to oppose and rival the culture of violence (war and other looting) in terms of personal gratification from beauty and beneficial effect, importance of accomplishment, and a socially recognized foundation of respect and dignity. The experience of having a rich and powerful personal interiority through literacy is the foundation of humanism, an original map of values re-defining the adventure of existence as human ideality.

Fragment 128, June 8, 2018, Politics is More than Nature (word Count: 867).

It must be recognized that the fact of human existence, generation after generation, establishes that the under-acknowledged but really dominant source of gratification for most humans is the focus of the mainly female culture of first-language-nurture, the mutual support and caring most often found in the protection and nurturing of children. This most essential counter-culture pool has persisted eternally in the closest and most difficult proximity to the trophy/ looting/ dominance culture. Feminism has become an important challenge to supremacist hive-minds.

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700). A survey of some main culture-pools

The Linchpin is always Metaphysics

The linchpin of the whole thing is that all the supremacist illusions divert attention from, and so hide and alienate, what is really supreme in the life of a human: personal ideality constructing suppositional time as the portal to expressive freedom. The literary gaze is inward, to the voices and conversations of personal ideality, the immediate experience of a private creative fountain of caring curiosity, ideas, and questions. Ideality is a fabric of suppositional non-actuality, which distinguishes it decisively from the brute actuality and determinism of nature. Personal ideality is metaphysically anomalous as a power creating freedom through the supposition of time structured as an opening for the personal expression of caring. The sense of the passing of time has two vectors. One consists of leavings and losses: things given up, slipping by, falling away into increasingly distant priority. The other vector is a dramatic leap into a suppositional future expected to have both grounding familiarity and surprising novelty. Time is the dimension of teleology, agency, of creativity at the core of subjective spirituality. The very concepts of immateriality and transcendence are abstractions from the non-actuality of time as a dramatic construct, the indispensable grounding of not-yet and no-longer, the non-actuality of purposive caring in the shape of orientation. Above all, it is only the metaphysically anomalous caring in creative personal dramas that makes anything matter. Caring is always a drama, unfinished in the dual instability of suppositional time. An ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating wave-in-time, living in and through passing and arriving in time. Freedom must always be unfinished. The genius of ideality is turning ephemerality from imminent oblivion to enduring existence in freedom made possible by constant flight through a personally suppositional time.

The Politics of Left and Right

Beginning from the Enlightenment era, and especially from the French Revolution of 1789-99, the political Left has been the effort to critique and oppose the entrenched legacy of aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture, with its standard structure of supremacist illusions. As such it must identify the crippling errors of that legacy at the same time as envisioning and promoting a preferable alternative, a political vision that represents the full scope and power of existence as a human and facilitates the general expression of that existence. This has made the left the party of bottom-up philosophies, of care and expression for the many instead of just the exceptional few. Historically, mistakes have been made in identifying such a political vision, for example in claims that the left is for bargaining within capitalism for a better deal for precarious wage earners, for the subordinated, proletarian labouring and serving class. Such efforts are crucial certainly but the political left must not limit its vision by accepting societies as permanent and inevitable structures of unequal classes, conceding the inevitability of the peculiar type of hive-mind polities forged by aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture. The left is hindered by an inability, so far, to replace the metaphysical foundation of hive-mind polities. The materialism of the Enlightenment, and of Marx, has proven insufficient to accomplish that essential task.

The Meaning of War

Of course the cultural system of the current world-order is stuck. Even after the whole drama of the history of literacy, it is still dominated by patriarchal veil-of-illusions hive-minds, ever ready for the vast killing and destruction of war. Its ancient and traditional metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, the guilt-ridden fear of some capricious external invisible almighty father-force has been challenged and partly replaced by the determinist nihilism of mathematical-materialist science. (Will-to-power is Nietzsche’s idea of the pure essence of personal existence, so also the mind of God.) Science is a straightforward refusal of metaphysics, so the choices left are the childhood terror of judgment from the cloud of unknowing that must be appeased in all things, or the despair of utter inevitability. In this ridiculous state it is only war that gives life meaning for far too many people.

What Matters and Why

A way beyond the increasingly fragile dystopias of the current world-order is conceivable, but it requires enough overcoming of the old metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, and also of determinist science, to find grounding in a humanist metaphysics that recognizes improvisational freedom at the level of embodied individuals, a freedom expressing deeply personal dramas of caring and attachment, the dramas that make some things truly and profoundly matter within the uncaring actuality of nature.

De-Constituting Power

21 Saturday Feb 2026

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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creativity, culture, hive-mind, ideality, illusion, metaphysics, orientation-lens, philosophy, Power, religion, self-possession, spirituality

Fragment 220, Word count: 525.

Tags: power, hive-mind, culture, self-possession, orientation-lens, ideality, creativity, illusion, metaphysics.

Cultural Illusions and Hive-Mind

All cultural complexes in the veil of supremacist illusions (Fragment 219, December 23, 2025, The Veil of Illusions (Word Count: 2,841)) also bind a plurality of people together within a false conceptual orientation-lens, so constituting a human-style hive-mind. Hive-mind is present to an individual as the common sense of a community, unrecognized as carrying a number of elaborate illusions structured within it and effectively directing attention away from certain crucial features of existence as subjective teleological ideality, and in this way blocking access to personal self-possession. As such, The Veil of Illusions is a critique of power, a critique, from the point of view of an inquisitive philosophical innocence, of the cultural placement of a superego into the interior orientation-lens of each individual. It is a critique of the power derived from such a placement, which includes both political coercive power based on the threat of violence and the financial and ownership power of capitalism.

The False Conceptual Orientation-Lens

Each of our four supremacist illusions establishes power by setting up a specific superego as the mechanism of its supremacy. The superego is an individual’s orientation up for guidance and direction from some authoritative voice or force. Masculine supremacy sets up the strongest, most actively violent persons as superego icons. Disembodied supremacy sets up as superego icons charismatic persons asserting their uniquely privileged knowledge of the ways and will of powerful disembodied spirits. Collective supremacy sets up as superego icons certain persons asserting themselves and their power as especially authentic expressions of the collective. Trophy supremacy sets up as superego icons persons with the most property or the best property.

From time out of mind the culture has been poisoned by the patriarchal culture of hierarchical human parasitism. Building on the universal childhood experience of the power of a parent, the legacy of cultural fixations on patriarchy and the projection of patriarchy onto the cosmos at large has left us assuming that, even if the cosmos is not really personified on the grand scale, there must be some other transcendence from-on-high, maybe the genius of great men or the accumulated wisdom of heroic ancestors, sanctifying the hierarchical order of wealth, power, and celebrity, a transcendent source that would be revealed by a really determined search, which we do not know how to do. That is the illusion of generalized superego. Any culture or ideology which replaces one superego with another, which offers updated replacement superegos, is exploiting the vulnerability derived from generalized superego. There should be no primary orientation toward any high voice of authority.

The View of a Metaphysics of Original Creation

The power of original creation is metaphysically anomalous. Since the power of original, improvisational, effective creativity obviously does exist as subjective teleological ideality, then the world and its contents are not utterly pre-determined and not eternally fixed or stable. Essentialism fails. It is malign and abusive for any agent to act to limit or alienate anyone’s self-awareness as creative power. No external supremacy could ever truly negate the transcendent metaphysical anomaly that is personal subjectivity, constantly reconstructing a suppositional temporality as a navigable opening for somewhat free creative improvisation.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Intuition of Apex Existence

The Culture Punch of Philosophy

Opening the Self-Thinking Idea

Spirituality and The Ecosystem of Caring

Metaphysics in the History of Dystopia

De-Constituting Power