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)

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.