Metaphysics in the History of Dystopia

16 Monday Mar 2026

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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aristocracy, books, creativity, culture, dominance culture, freedom, History, humanism, ideality, literacy, metaphysics, philosophy, politics, Power, theology, time, violence

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.

Opening Frontiers of Philosophy

24 Friday Oct 2025

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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aristocracy, books, culture, evil, existence, Francis Fukuyama, History, hive-mind, ideality, literacy, philosophy, politics, religion, sovereignty, violence

Fragment 217, word count: 1017.

Tags: sovereignty, violence, aristocracy, ideality, existence, literacy, religion, philosophy, evil, Francis Fukuyama, history, culture, hive-mind, politics.

“The day of the political philosopher is over.” *

A surprising but decisive theme of western history has been an intellectual or ideological contest over the moral legitimacy of systems of sovereignty. This contest is an artifact of a more fundamental cultural rivalry, namely, between the legacy of aristocratic violence, the matrix of all sovereignty, and, on the other side, the legacy of literacy, fostered for a long dark time within the theocratically inclined organizations of Christianity but finally launched independently via humanistic pursuits in universities. The use of violence, the core of aristocratic culture, requires a denial of empathy, a refusal or rejection of empathy toward all but a select group of people. The refusal of empathy is the precondition of acts of evil. Without the legacy of books and authorship the exercise of violence-and-superstition-based sovereignty would enforce a uniformity of dogma, but there would be no thoroughly elaborated ideology expressing ambitious thinking incorporating a variety of points of view. Without the literary legacy there would be no contest over the legitimacy of sovereign dominance through coercive power. In spite of having origins in thinking about morality, disputes over the legitimacy of particular assertions of sovereignty have often occasioned violence, the predictable defensive response of aristocratic culture.

Fukuyama and New Frontiers of Philosophy

Francis Fukuyama highlighted the contest over the moral legitimacy of sovereignty in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), when he famously interpreted the collapse of communism in The Soviet Union as the end of “… the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies … (Wikipedia)”. Fukuyama: “What we may be witnessing is … the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution …”. Fukuyama was considering political/ economic ideology specifically, but political ideology always expresses a more general ecosystem of philosophical ideas and so his assertion implies that all ideas foundational enough to have political consequences have already been elucidated and litigated, that there can be no more philosophical discoveries, no opening frontiers of philosophy. He has, like many others, declared the end of philosophy. That idea is profoundly attractive, a wish fulfillment, to the conservative mind and to the religious and the scientific mind. However, it is false, arrogant to the point of absurdity, as demonstrated by a few considerations. An obvious one would be a consideration of the vast lack of attention to and understanding of cultural and non-cultural variability in the clustering and un-clustering of human attachments (the foundation of polities and so of politics). This could be described as issues in the identification and investigation of culturally constructed hive-minds that seem to dominate human political attachments. Another crucial consideration is the hitherto relentlessly negative conceptions of human experience as a mode of existence. The easiest example is the Augustinian conception of human experience as compulsively determined by the legacy of “original sin”, irresistible needs to pridefully assert the exclusive importance of the individual self through competitive acquisition and other forms of personal gratification. The more modern conceptions of “economic man” and the Freudian id-ego-superego model are just light edits of the Christian idea, all plainly derogatory depictions of individual subjective existence. Negative conceptions of human existence as ideality have origins in common superstitious myths of a disembodied super-spirit, powerful, knowing, and emotionally volatile, unpredictably moved to interfere in human affairs. Such a being must always be appeased, and the first rule of appeasement is the necessity of general human humility before the super-spirit, the necessity of loudly declaring the vast inferiority and weakness of the human spirit. It follows that factions of the strongest, apparently favoured and chosen by the super-spirit, must do their best to stifle and control the generality of people within their reach. In this way, derogatory conceptions of individual existence have imprinted a punishing and malevolent quality on the societies built on them, making them dystopias claiming to be the best of possible worlds. To recognize this, it is necessary (and possible) to judge from outside the influence of the derogatory conceptions. A confrontation with this history of culturally distorted and intentionally humiliating conceptions of human existence must surely be an obvious unexplored frontier of philosophy.

Primordial Beings at the Edge of Creation

If we reject the superstitious legacy of myths of the disembodied super-spirit who must be appeased, it is easy to find a non-derogatory conception of human-ideality-as-a-mode-of-existence, and, following that, it will be possible to imagine non-dystopian clustering of human attachments. The humanistic legacy of literacy and authorship points the way. Ideality is always personality, all about inventing the personal drama of time, the sense of time passing in an embodied life. Drama is a caring anticipation of future conditions and events, an anticipation that includes personal stakes and uncertainty about harms and benefits. The experience of time springs from caring and involves active recollections, abstractions, and suppositions, curiosity and questions, searches and constructions of a framework of directional orientation. We are active points and arcs of creation at the opening edge of unfinished existence, effective ideality with the dramatic structure of an embodied living “I”, subject of a personal drama which is an individual’s life in the world.

The Clustering and Un-Clustering of Human Attachments

Discarding the derogatory conceptions of human existence that pre-determined dystopian clustering of human attachments opens another frontier of philosophy: consideration of cultural and non-cultural variability in the foundation of polities and politics. Social attachments free from superstitions of past and current dystopias will not need the hierarchical stratification of personal value based on competitions for scarce honours and properties. They will not need hierarchies of authority maintained by operations of a culture of violence. It has been a common sense assumption that this style of tightly controlled cultured clustering demanding conformity, exclusive emotional attachment and pageantry typical of religion, is simply the inevitable working of flawed human nature, but that is false. We are not, fortunately, completely subject to the values, categories, and dramas of the ambient cultural system. It is possible to recognize the fundamental reality of autonomous individual spirituality. Release from collective identity follows from recognition of the preponderance of non-linguistic ideation in ordinary experience, personal experience outside what is controlled by culturally ambient hive-minds.

* Len Deighton in Billion-Dollar Brain, published by Triad, Grafton Books (1987), ISBN 0-586-07395-7. See p. 322. First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd. 1966.

Aristocratic Glamour and the Spiritual Alternative

19 Thursday Dec 2024

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity

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aristocracy, arts-washing, History, ideality, philosophy, politics, religion, science, spirituality, time, value culture, violence

Fragment 209, Word count: 579.

tags: aristocracy, value culture, violence, science, religion, arts-washing, spirituality, time, ideality.

The culture of violence is a core element of aristocracy, out of whose practices in an earlier historical era emerged the forms of modern sovereign state governments. The culture of violence separates aristocracy from ‘bourgeois’ culture, which aspires to achieve the same luxuries, prestige, and level of consumption without the overt and personal use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the modern world, even in the most democratic polities. Sovereign states still base their authority on a near monopoly of violence. Crime families and criminal organizations (true heirs of aristocracy) generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do the political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing. The culture of violence is inseparable from the aristocratic value culture of tangible rewards, mainly clustered around competitions for scarce and exclusive property wealth, trophy possessions, along with coercive power, and such a value culture still dominates popular aspirations and conceptions of personal success. A great deal of arts-washing has always been showcased to hide the viciousness of aristocratic venality and to manufacture an image of aristocratic glamour.

The Ultimate Left

Ultimately, the political left must be a spiritual alternative to the material treasures of violence-based wealth systems grounded in competitive property possession, but also to the great-spirit-in-the-sky religions of our dystopian past. The spiritual alternative is a matter of recognizing the anomalous existence of teleological orientation and bearing, ideality busily self-amending as an embodied “I” active in the creation and recreation of futurity. To say that intelligence is caring is to say that intelligence is an “I”, a personality, an embodied idiosyncratic caring. Caring expresses a very strict kind of particularity: of sensitivities in aid of felt dramas, of powers to recognize relevance and structural connections for interior model-world-construction as the framework and lens of perception within personal orientation, particularity of point of view, of quests and questions, of curiosity, of pleasures, of aesthetic gratifications, of energy, of the self-declaring voice. Perception is not an imprinting somehow made upon an innocent and passively receptive consciousness. It is an active intervention by an ideality, a reaching and taking hold, an interest-driven study that is performed in a vast echo-chamber of personal recollections and anticipations. The “I” of this discreet spiritual existence, this ideality, is appropriately followed by a name, indicative of a rich uniqueness: “I, Odysseus”.

Each such anomalous existence is one among a multitude of points and arcs of improvisational indeterminacy in existence, the existential opposite of a black hole, creating new reality all the time and experiencing value in creating. The inventive freedom of each individual ideality means that no form of social, economic, or cultural organization is strictly determined (say, by divine fiat or natural law) to be or remain as it has been. It follows from this that the scientific consensus on fundamental reality is decisively incomplete, and, as such, wrong, just as any previous religious consensus was. The fact of ideality’s metaphysical status as an anomaly (shining peak vs black hole) with respect to the brute actuality of nature, means that neither individually embodied instances of spirit nor their creations are subject to the two normal justifications for social hierarchies: decrees of capricious divine will and the deterministic laws that describe brute material actuality.

Embedded links:

Fragment 195, October 21, 2022, Spirituality of the Left (word count: 474)

Fragment 205, February 3, 2024, Our Dystopian Past (word count: 1,543)

The History of Knowledge in Dystopia

06 Monday Nov 2023

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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aristocracy, culture, empiricism, humanism, ideality, John Locke, literacy, Power, progress, Rene Descartes, time, violence, voice, writing

Fragment 203, word count: 2,365.

Tags: literacy, violence, humanism, progress, ideality, time, writing, power, aristocracy, empiricism, voice, value, culture, Rene Descartes, John Locke.

It is no accomplishment to damage or wreck the established dystopia if in doing so a worse dystopia is left in its place. When undertaking to change the dystopia, which obviously has an urgent need for changes that reduce it as a dystopia, it is of the utmost importance to avoid making a worse dystopia. Any method of altering the dystopia which involves violence is certain to result in something worse. A culture of violence is a crucial part of dystopian societies. Violence, and the authoritarianism that is inseparable from it, is a great temptation to some visionaries of change because it seems to promise quick and decisive alteration in the dystopia, but the result is always worse. Violence doesn’t get anywhere near threatening the core of dystopia. The idea of progress is crucial here. Sometimes, within a dystopia, conditions can be made better for some people, and even in dystopia there are factions which are comfortable, pleased with themselves and their situation, and oblivious to dystopian reality. The idea of progress stands at the core of political debate because the very idea of progress carries a muted recognition that current societies, as devised by the ancestors, have always been disastrously flawed. People who merge their personal identities with the specific cultural forms of their society find this insulting. Reverence for ancestors and for the particular cultural forms they created dictates that this society must be the best, or nearly so. Nothing much better is considered possible because dystopian culture claims knowledge that individual human existence itself is innately miserable as a consuming vortex of unrelenting hungers, often desperate and vicious, and that the arrangements of society merely exhibit those flaws along with measures possible to regulate them and limit the damage. However, progress is not a simple matter of material circumstances but also touches conceptions of the self, judgments of the self, considered independently of the culture of an ambient society.

Legacy Culture

From a tender age, everyone is confronted by some vast edifice of knowledge and supposition embedded into culture, language, and institutions all around. The edifice is authoritative and fetishistic. Prior to development of mathematical/ materialist science at around the time of (and partly through the agency of) Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the various edifices of knowledge were structured around religious certainties, fleshed out with selections from ancient philosophy. In Christendom those core ideas included original sin and pervasive supernatural surveillance for the purpose of supernatural moral ledger-keeping on everyone’s every thought and deed, all leading toward an inescapable, generally merciless, and eternally binding reckoning at the time of an individual’s death. Of course, this made the ever-present prospect of death terrifying. The new mechanistic system of conceiving the human situation, asserted by mathematical/ materialist science, gradually disrupted and made progress in discrediting and replacing that incessant religious blame-game as the authoritative core of knowledge in Euro-American culture, at the cost of diminishing or cancelling the idea of individual freedom and originality. Perhaps because of that cost, the popular acceptance of the new knowledge, as extensive as it has been, has been uneven and shallow. The religious edifice is still asserting itself aggressively, and has always influenced crucial conceptions in the scientific framework. Overall, however, the scientific vision of the human situation did replace the vaguely imagined possible rewards of a life-after-death (earned by difficult moral accomplishments, especially obedience to authority) by embracing the pre-existing aristocratic culture of earthly rewards, mainly clustered around competitions for scarce and exclusive wealth, trophy possessions, and coercive power.

A core culture of violence is a crucial element of aristocracy. This separates aristocracy from bourgeois culture, which aspires to achieve the same luxuries, prestige, and level of prosperity without the overt use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the modern world, even in the most democratic polities. Crime families and criminal organizations generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do the political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing.

Empiricism

In the cultural transition to the scientific mythos, philosophers around the time of John Locke (1632-1704) were obsessed with acquiring knowledge of an objective external reality, what they were coming to conceive as the only genuinely important knowledge. This attitude was a novel development and a repudiation of the longstanding Christian mythos that the objective material world lacked fundamental importance (reality) since it is merely the staging and backdrop for the central drama of all existence: the moral journey of the human spirit. In the new scientific mythos the two foci changed places in a certain way. The human sense of self-existence (along with its drama) was reduced to a derivative product of larger natural systems, and those natural systems, conceived as entirely independent of human experience, were newly considered fundamental Reality and so the focus of any serious pursuit of ultimate knowledge. The resulting empiricist emphasis on the passive receptivity of a perceiver receiving impressions from outside itself complements the conception of human existence as a consuming vortex of unrelenting hungers grasping for external gratifiers.

Both of those legacy knowledge cultures maintain the falsehood that the most fulfilling peak experiences are few and rarely accessible, competitively exclusive and remote from ordinary life. This gives these cultures a narrow and exclusionary conception of a life well-lived, with the profoundly dystopian effect of de-valuing the lives of the majority of people.

Literacy

A fascinating stream of cultural development with ancient beginnings, crucial to both religious and scientific institutions of knowledge, is the technology of graphically recorded language, the practices of literacy, including its physical crafts, how it is taught, and arrangements for its preservation and distribution, for maintaining and expanding its use from generation to generation. Until quite recently, it was only a small minority of scribes in any society that was comfortably literate. If a society’s intelligentsia is that portion which has advanced scribal skills, with fluent literacy and broad education in the texts carrying a record of human thinking, then Christendom’s intelligentsia was mainly the personnel of the Church hierarchy, until universities sent enough of their graduates into secular activities to enable a Republic of Letters. With graphically recorded language anyone might put in the time and effort it takes to construct utterances without having an available listener or interlocutor who would be interested, patient, and indulgent enough to follow the threads of thought being expressed. This makes it possible to have, explore, develop and preserve threads of thought that don’t fit into an available set of conversational relationships, threads of thought that can be especially personal, original, and contrary to what may be considered acceptable, orthodox, or realistic in the cultural moment. Thought can become untethered from the common discourse. Written utterances can join a conversation with people long dead or with imagined future people. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that are familiar to contemporary contacts. This is a gateway to experiences of surprisingly big fun, and launches thinking as a force capable of outperforming and discrediting violence and its trophies. On this basis, the culture of reading and writing inspired so many institutions, such as universities, such monumental products, and so many innovative personal initiatives that it took on a developmental momentum all its own, beyond the control of any pre-existing authorities. It was literacy as spread by Church institutions in Christendom which created the matrix from which fundamentals of mathematical and scientific knowledge could explode beyond the cloistered sub-culture of scribes. Only in the society in which universal literacy became an urgent project of religious piety, as it was in Protestantism, could a fundamentally new public sense of reality itself be imagined. The new reality, totally impersonal nature as pre-determined by discernible laws, came into focus through the lens of mathematical/ empirical science, but there was not just one scientific vision of this reality. Marxism, for example, was a new vision of reality based on science, a science which discerned in nature laws of socio-economic development that entirely pre-determined the past and future course of human history. Like many other new visions of reality, it turned out to be pseudo-science, and incidentally it was comfortable with using violence, so doubly dystopian. It illustrates that there are disagreements about what is self-evident, that what is recognized as self-evident involves creative (spiritual) input from a perceiver in addition to purely objective conditions. Reality is mutable.

Humanism

Literacy, book culture, and literary crafts produced such a profound framework of orientation, opening vast new realms of freedom and creativity for thinking, that they also engendered or became a movement with a different focus of caring and a different sense of what is importantly self-evident from that of mathematical science, yet still cultivating an alternative to ascribing all real value to a feared but unknowable life-after-death, as was typical with religion. This movement, known as Humanism, celebrates and studies the power of human freedom and creative originality. It began as a specifically literary cultivation but gradually expanded to embrace the whole high culture of the more privileged and propertied strata of society, with an emphasis on the culturally exceptional and difficult examples of decorative and performance arts as well as especially expensive luxuries and hedonistic pleasures. It celebrates the human capacity to enjoy the pre-death world, on the quiet assumption that this is the one that matters. As with science, many versions of Humanism have been conceived, and some are as exclusive and elitist in their way as the parade of saints, the elect, or the enlightened is in religion. By embracing the high culture of the privileged and propertied strata of society, Humanism, like science, embraces the hunger games of dystopia as the default and eternal human condition.

Living: Neither Being nor Becoming (instead Creating)

The only existence of the past is in individual ideality. Memory is ideality, individual recollection built into the sense of personal location and direction in an arc of activity, agency, some of which remains to be created by specifically targeted effort. There is no ‘the past’ otherwise. Similarly for futurity. It only exists in the orientation and bearing sensed by individual people, in the sense a person has of enacting intentions, of doing something in particular, going somewhere, having a purpose. Time, therefore, as commonly understood, is a creation of spirit, a definitive phenomenon of spiritual creativity. Spirit is anomalous existence in that, without exception, embodied spirit is radically unfinished. Being unfinished involves the individual ideation of time as an opening for personally purposive acts of intervention into surroundings, ideation of time as containment for everything that went before including a stable enough, enduring, framework or grounding for personal action. Time is conceived as world-containment, open in such a way as to be containing without enclosing.

Living existence, ideality, conceives itself within an opening at an active edge where there is a meeting between a completed and fully occupied world and an empty extension of that world waiting for the creation of what will fill it, and at that edge living existence is exerting itself to create personally crucial parts of what occupies the ever-emerging emptiness. Continuous loss and the continuous possibility of surprise make the emptiness dramatically and unrelentingly problematic. The emptiness is a relentless opening-up that brings loss and an ever-renewing possibility of surprise.

This anomalous existence of spirit within time is a constant activity which is generative, fountaining, giving, putting outward. Caring is a feature of the radical incompleteness of spiritual existence, a spiritual power. Projecting interest and curiosity is a spiritual projection of power. Part of this activity reaches for and takes hold of impressions of a not-self surroundings. An individual’s decisions, questionings, curiosity-powered searches, eureka! breakthrough recognitions and expressive acts are present to that individual as self-assertions and exertions of personal power to create, as outgoing interventions, projections of spontaneous will and the dramatic and context-rich intentions that are the focus of living.

And So

Both religious and scientific hoards of knowledge conceive the individual self-experiencing human as crucially derivative: in religion, as the creature of a vastly greater willing and purposeful force, and in science as derived from larger impersonally natural processes. Both religious and scientific hoards of knowledge conceive the individual human as the mainly passive receiver of a flow upon it from beyond itself, sometimes reacting to the impact of that flow. Contrary to that, it should be recognized that the flow that most characterizes spiritual existence is outward from personal creativity, creating the world both conceptually and practically. Peak experiences of value and gratification derive from that personally expressive outward flow of creative power, rather than being rare hidden treasures that need to be hunted down in the mountains. Recognition of human existence as ongoing world creation, as the cosmically anomalous fountain of ongoing creativity, changes the possibilities for human self-judgment, shakes it free of cultural determinism, and the only effective way to undertake changing the dystopia is to launch revisions to the dominant edifices of knowledge, at the level of the fundamental vision of reality.

Humanism fails through being too ready to celebrate all culture as the ultimate human achievement. In fact, culture is often oppressive and injurious to individuals. There is an individual spiritual fountain of activity which operates separately from culture, although, from a love of the pleasures of sociability, easily influenced by culture. A humanism worth the name would clarify that profound experiences are embedded in the very existence of living persons, that they fountain from that anomalous existence, and that, far from being exceptional, they are co-extensive with living persons. A humanism worth the name would repudiate the vanities and inhumanities of the trophy-merit reward economy of the aristo-bourgeois culture bubbles. There is an authentic spiritual alternative inherent in the lived experience of any person, through self-acquaintance with the transcendence of embodied spirituality.

Links:

Fragment 122, January 26, 2018, Ethics in the Philosophy Project (word count: 1,483)

Fragment 125, March 21, 2018, The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left! (Word count: 1,799)

Fragment 140, January 25, 2019, The Most Important Event in History (word count: 1,077)

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189)

Fragment 148, May 22, 2019, The Birth of the Left (word count: 628)

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

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

On Literacy and Humanism

Papyrus: the Invention of Books in the Ancient World, written by Irene Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle, Published by Knopf (2022). ISBN 978-0593318898. See especially section 55, The Religion of Culture, pp.126-128.

Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, written by Ian Mortimer, published by The Bodley Head (2023), The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group. ISBN 978-1-84792-744-6. See Chapter 6, Literacy, pp. 145-169.

Byzantine & Renaissance Philosophy, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2022), ISBN 978-0-19-285641-8. (see p. 130).

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, written by Sarah Bakewell, published by Alfred A. Knopf (2023). Alfred A. Knopf Canada is a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. ISBN 978-0-7352-7430-3.

Zarathustra’s Abyss

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Political Power, Transcendence

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aristocracy, Christendom, Hierarchy, Nietzsche, nihilism, patriarchy, Stoicism, values, will

Fragment 187, word count: 392.

Tags: Nietzsche, values, aristocracy, Christendom, patriarchy, Stoicism, Nihilism, hierarchy, will.

Nietzsche didn’t do anything like revalue all values, and it is revealing to consider what values he did not question: namely aristocratic superiority within the social hierarchy of wealth and power. Nietzsche was retreating into a strong cultural current from feudal Christendom, namely the ‘feudal’ current: aristocratic crime-family culture, derived originally from patriarchal dominance in herding culture: men with weapons on horses. Nietzsche loathed and worked to discredit the other cultural current from Christendom, namely Christianity, because it promoted an otherworldly (heavenly) focus that gave priority to “selfless” values. He dismissed altruism, selflessness, meekness, and turning the other cheek, which he thought of as slave values, feminine values, and nihilistic, in favour of ancient and traditional masculine dominance values, as exemplified in ancient Greek warriors: hardness, strength, endurance, courage, dominance, self-promotion, and disregard for weaker beings. Nietzsche despised and blamed the victims of conquest and oppression. He gazed upon the same European history as Rousseau and Marx but did not fault the crime family aristocracy for being parasites on the subsisting majority, but instead accepted their claims of nobility (projecting onto them the nobility he experienced in his own creativity) and admired their viciousness. He blamed the oppressed for being weak. Their weakness made them deserve whatever oppression they experienced. Nietzsche gave the crime family class credit for whatever he found positive in European culture. As historical fact, European aristocracy could not have established the wealth and power it did without the senior partnership of the Church of Rome promoting its elaborate religious ideologies. In a superstitious age, it was the religious culture of desperate fear and hope that utterly subdued resistance and solidified mass resignation. Yet, Nietzsche blamed the Church for proclaiming a set of values that persuaded the weak and oppressed to find meaning in their oppression and de-valued the manly military values of aristocracy.

Within the legacy of Zarathustra, to which Nietzsche was drawn, the world where we humans live is irredeemably abysmal as the creation of an evil god, the lesser of the duality of high gods. Rejecting any heavenly escape, Nietzsche found himself faced with a choice between utter nihilism or the Stoic (and Romantic) determination to prove personal transcendence by a supreme act of will to accept existence as whatever it is, and even to will its eternal recurrence in every ugly detail.

Embedded links:

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 84, June 17, 2015, Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism (word count: 1,869)

Wildcard Time-World Idealism

25 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Embodiment, Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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aristocracy, creativity, culture, drama, dystopia, Edmund Husserl, empathy, idealism, nature, phenomenology, Plato, politics, Romanticism, sensibility, time

Fragment 169, word count: 1,230.

At the heart of Romanticism is the cultural perspective of aristocracy, essentially a pessimistic fatalism, definitive of the political right-wing, in which the brutality of master/ slave social organization is taken to be inevitable, decreed for eternity by nature or God. In that dystopia, only reveries of magic, beauty, and masculine heroism provide the precious little light in the tragically inescapable gloom. However, nothing in human affairs is really inevitable because human affairs are constructs of multiple idealities, and idealities, persons, are fountains of spontaneous novelty, of original interventions into the situation of a moment, fountains of freedom. Conceptions of this freedom are forms of idealism.

A way of distinguishing one kind of idealism from another is by the extent each understands ideality as creatively projecting novelty into otherwise predetermined actuality conceived as in standard materialism: utterly devoid of purpose. For example, there is no novelty of a willfully creative and spontaneous kind in Plato’s idealism, although some accidental novelty might occur randomly in the illusions experienced as ordinary appearances. Plato’s idealism, and generally the muted idealism at the core of rationalism, builds on a reverence for mathematics by speculating that the perfection of mathematics reveals an immaterial, timeless, and primordial reality from which is projected (imperfectly) the eventful world we experience. In the context of understanding human affairs, mathematics is a short road to dystopia.

Time-World Idealism in the Dystopian Context

Recognition of time as the primordial context of individual human existence is the portal to an idealism that is relevant in the dystopian political and cultural context as a countervailing force against the declarations of natural or divine determinism (the perspective of aristocracy) which are crucial features of dystopian world-system concepts.

The problem with logical argument as a technique of inquiry into things as experienced was pointed out by Bertrand Russell: Logical argumentation is not how original insights are discovered. Using other means, people come upon claims they judge to be important and worth defending and then search for premises and arguments that produce them as logical conclusions. Philosophical insights are first generated by something like phenomenology, an innocent curiosity about lived experience and agency. So, the primary technique of thinking philosophically, the technique that brings us to the crucial idealism, is engaging with experience from innocent curiosity, a curiosity that has been de-cultured and so released from normal bias and prejudice.

Phenomenology is always an effort to bring ideality into some degree of conceptual focus. It is never a scientifically measuring object-ology. It is explicitly a description of experience as ideality, objects as taken in and made sense of by a questioning, knowing, interested, and caring subject. So, all phenomenology is phenomenology of spirituality, plausibly the only way to quest for knowledge of spirituality. Since Edmund Husserl (1858-1938), the definitive move of phenomenology is bracketing off the question: does this appearance accurately represent something that is completely independent of being perceived?, so to remove any suggestion of defining knowledge of a “thing in itself” as objective reality. And yet, even in Husserl and his massive legacy there remains an emphasis on objects and objectification.

The problem with phenomenology has been that sensory impressions are taken as the elemental evidence, taken in a way that is already objectified. They are conceived as patches of colour, an auditory pitch, a feeling of roughness or pressure, a scent or taste of coffee, all removed from the context of a personal dramatic purpose-in-time which brings someone to notice them. There is the usual assumption that time is not primordial, but instead a superstructure to be put aside in describing the basic phenomena from which everything else, including time, will be assembled later. However, the thinking subject, a questioning future-ward-leaping will-to-learn and will-to-express-itself, cannot be assembled from the passive excitations of sensory impressions, or from the objects they make available for discovery and identification. Sensory impressions or the objects they locate cannot be made into care, cannot be made to construct an interest in themselves. Caring is prior, and primordially a leaping future-ward, using knowledge of the time-world as personal possibility.

None of the phenomena of receptive sensations can combine to construct the desperate future-ward leap of curiosity, the drama of a questioning will to gaze, to search, to leave a personal mark and make a personally gratifying life. Sensory perception cannot assemble whatever questioning sensibility is expressing the vector of such drama in an act of perceiving, a drama formed of complex expectations, vectors of intention in action, and this moment of searching curiosity. You know your own sensibility by self-creating and inhabiting your life-drama. The sensibility performing a perceiving cannot be an object of sensory perception, and requires a conception of its presence different from perceived actuality: primordially purposeful ideality.

Phenomenology of Personal Drama: An Idealism

Humanity/ personality, as ideality, is the creation of freedom by supposing the possibility or impossibility of multiple personal futures, and so freedom through creativity is fundamental and universal to individual personalities. We individually create a supposition of decreasingly remote approaching not-yet and increasingly remote receding no-longer as an imprint on the newness and open incompleteness in which we act, a primordial context of time in which we intervene in brute actuality as purposive, dramatic, agents. Personality supposes (posits as ideality) a context that enables its agency in a personal drama, a time-world of personally specific approaching futures, both possible and impossible non-actualities, a mutable opening in the fabric of reality. Ideality is what leaps ahead, a leaping that makes the world matter. That ideality is empathic is crucial to its personal drama, and along with empathy comes the drama of good and evil. Good is acting with the purpose of expressing empathy, evil is acting in contradiction, denial, or refusal of empathy.

Wildcards

Ideality leaps into an opening of its own supposing, as a vector of time which plunges future-ward with a specific spur-of-the-moment creative will to inject spontaneous (not random) novelty into actuality at the location of personal embodiment. Such a will-to-create a personally suitable future is obviously not nature, which always just falls predictably according to laws of inertia and entropy, a vector of time in which everything is slipping away. The vector of time which leaps toward a future of its personal devising transcends nature by its personal injection of unpredictable creativity. Creation of the world is unfinished, undecided, continuing through the agency of a multitude of embodied wildcard idealities. We are more time-waves than particles of any kind, individually self-shaping waves through time.

The reason for a culturally obligatory reliance on socially constructed outward representations of personal identity with trophies (possessions, status, career path, social network, costumes, titles) is that there is no comfort with any conception of personal interiority in culturally dominant conceptual systems founded on ideas of God and nature. As an alternative to the historically aristocratic and patriarchal glorification of trophy property as manifest demonstrations and proofs of personal power and worth, we place inward consciousness and agency: the ability and opportunity to feel and follow a delighted questioning curiosity, as from a profound innocence, exercising creative freedom to engage in the ethical enterprise of aligning personal freedom with the transcendent freedom of everyone around.

Embedded links:

Fragment 19, February 10, 2012, Mathematical Rationalism in the Baroque Era (word count: 1,101)

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

Two Lessons from History: Bad News First

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Equality, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Political Power

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aristocracy, civilization, class, culture, History, human parasitism, oppression, politics

The Malice of Civilization

Human-on-human parasitism is not something civilization strives to overcome, not some accidental or unanticipated by-product of the social and political institutions called civilization, but rather is the entire intent and matrix of, the fundamental goal and reason for, the arrangements of civilization. Political and economic arrangements originated historically in the violent coercion of human communities by certain human factions determined to enjoy the benefits of parasites by means of that coercion. History reveals a human community divided between parasite factions and the human masses they prey upon. The most obvious lesson from history is the global triumph and entrenchment of a culture supporting top-down human-on-human parasites. It isn’t human nature which preserves the common injustices which constitute parasitism, but rather a specific dominant, pervasive, and institutionalized culture dependent on inequality and subordination, a culture which could be called will-to-power masculinity. For oppressions of ethnicity, race, class, gender, or religion (or atheism), it isn’t human nature that has to be confronted and somehow overcome, but the parasite faction’s culture (a “unified field theory” of oppression). What is waiting for everyone riding the social mobility bus north into the corporate and investor class is benefits from the practices of parasites.

A clear view of the malicious culture at the heart of civilization can be found in The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception, written by William J. Brandt*, in which a close study of medieval chronicles shows the values and patterns of perception characteristic of European aristocracy, the cultural faction pioneering economic and sovereign power as it still exists, forming institutions of sovereignty, nationality, war, high culture, and wealth distribution that still function throughout the modern cultural system. It is the ethos of an absolute and unending quest for splendour of personal reputation, the culture of manly honour/ profit that still plagues humanity in many forms. Those aristocrat knight/ barons and their literate intelligentsia took themselves (barons) to be models of human nature at its purest, which is to say devoid of and contemptuous of empathy. They also conceived their Christian deity as very much like themselves and as such the source and proof of their superiority. Something that Brandt does not say, but which is implicit in his observations, is that those medieval barons (armed men on horses) were consolidating a way of living as human parasites on many levels. They were parasites on the females of their own class (for their reproductive and nurturing labour), on people outside their class working to create the necessities of sustainable lives, and most immediately on animals, the horses that were forced to carry them and the dogs that did their hunting, for example. The barons acquired ownership of property of all kinds by lethal assault, and refined a culture which glorified their looting. Brandt refers vaguely to the fading of their culture, sometimes called feudal chivalry, but it cannot be doubted seriously that there is a direct line of cultural descent, a single ethos, extending from knight/ barons in the chronicles studied by Brandt to contemporary crime families, corporations (such as investment banks), and governments (especially in their military culture, covert activities, and ‘foreign’ relations), all of which have the means of evading law and so the immunity to act out patterns of behaviour which channel the culture of the barons. The households of barons were organizational embryos of the governments of modern sovereign states, of corporations, and of crime families; and their personal ethos remains the cultural ideal of capitalism and masculinity generally.

Culture is Strategic Propaganda

In their fetish for display, ornamented decoration, pageantry, ceremony, and elaborate entertainment the barons inaugurated the models of high culture and fine art which still endure. The people who can afford to consume the work of artists on a moderate to large scale, to employ artists and to commission particular works, are royals, aristocrats, capitalists and their wealth organizers, princes of the Church, and people in power. When they have their portraits made or commission architecture and monuments, the intent is to idealize, glorify, and immortalize themselves, their culture, and the whole parasitic system of power and wealth they represent. Works of art in that context are intended to overpower and bedazzle, to halt critical thinking by invoking emotional currents with the specious beauty of an image or an impression. Of overriding importance for fine art in the capitalist economic system is that it is a branch of the finance/ investment industry, a luxury goods trade dealing in trophy items promoted as so rare, unpredictable, and impressive that they become an investment hedge for surplus wealth. Of course individual creators are capable of removing their creative process from that superstructure of art culture, but in no case are the artifacts produced important enough, neither individually nor in sum total, to count as justifications for, or legitimizing achievements of, parasitic culture and practice.

The coercion practiced by parasite factions has been normalized through efforts of that faction’s intelligentsia to construct benign explanations and justifications for it, normally by appealing to an omnipotent divine intelligence, to “justify the ways of God to man” (John Milton, Paradise Lost). Any religious culture featuring omnipotent cosmic forces serves instantly to justify whatever happens to exist. Intellectual work, including philosophy, is always written in a cultural context controlled by top-down human-on-human parasites, and intellectuals normally belong to, or owe their livelihood to, the parasite faction, and like everyone have to contend with the coercion of ambient parasites. In that context many philosophers devote themselves to an attempt to justify, even sanctify, existing institutions and avoid thinking beyond the belief system which supports inequalities of wealth and power. The fact that Aristotle invented justifications for slavery, for example, illustrates the longstanding effort by philosophers to conceive grounds of morality other than empathy, so that universal equality could be avoided and the brutality of sovereign states and the baronial classes which operate them could evade a true moral evaluation.

So, not only are the parasites diverting benefits disproportionately to themselves, but, far more importantly, by decisive influence on both high culture and popular culture, including religions, art, entertainment, media of advertising and journalism, and intellectual culture, they arrange messaging to convince everyone that their arrangements are inevitable, pre-determined by higher powers, by God or nature, the best of all possible worlds. In aid of that, there is cultural support for the assumption that individuals are not competent to identify and think about this issue, that we do best keeping a narrowly practical focus, earning and consuming as much as we can manage, refreshing ourselves with cultural entertainments and doing our utmost to ride the social mobility bus up, changing nothing but our personal circumstances. The idea of human equality has such a difficult time being broadly understood and embraced because the entire culture of institutionalized sovereign states and their economic organization is founded on top-down human-on-human parasitism constantly declaring justifications for itself.

*The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception, written by William J. Brandt, published by Schocken Books (1973), ISBN 0-8052-0408-3.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Tag Archives: aristocracy

Metaphysics in the History of Dystopia

Opening Frontiers of Philosophy

Aristocratic Glamour and the Spiritual Alternative

The History of Knowledge in Dystopia

Zarathustra’s Abyss

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Wildcard Time-World Idealism

Two Lessons from History: Bad News First