The Veil of Illusions

23 Tuesday Dec 2025

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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caring, culture, deity, embodiment, empathy, evil, History, hive-mind, ideality, nationality, patriarchy, philosophy, religion, spirituality, theology, value, violence

Fragment 219, Word Count: 2,841.

Tags: empathy, caring, evil, deity, nationality, hive-mind, value, patriarchy, violence, embodiment, philosophy, culture, theology, ideality.

The Cultural Veil

There is a culturally conditioned veil of illusions that stands in the way of any ordinary acquaintance with some of the most important features of life as a personal subjectivity. The blocked features of subjective existence, however, remain relevant and ready to be appreciated. We human individuals derive joy and meaning from imitating people around us, from attaching emotionally and soaking up culture like sponges. Within the general culture of ways of thriving in a particular surroundings, there are also fanciful speculations, stories that misconstrue the powers and necessities that determine events in the world, exaggerations of common fears and wishes that make them fetishistic and barriers to important discoveries. All of the cultural complexes that contribute to the veil of illusions also contribute to a general nastiness of life shaped by their influence, forming the distinctly dystopian societies so familiar to us. Of course, even the most dystopian societies have factions who benefit from the arrangements and are pleased with themselves and with pretty much everything. It is those factions who are especially empowered to create, and be heroes of, the stories that depict their societies, and part of their culture is to celebrate stability and heroic resistance to change. Broadly speaking, this is the overall situation that inspires much of the mental and literary tradition of philosophy.

The Lens of Orientation

Our sense of being at a particular place, doing what we are doing, involves far more then what can be perceived from any given location. We work within a sort of interior model of all the routes we have moved through and we reorient the model as we reorient and place ourselves within a broad sense of the arrangement of things, the arrangement featuring our important destinations, especially featuring the personalities with whom we share an emotional attachment. Ordinary perception is mainly a selectively targeted sensory confirmation that current actuality conforms to what we are expecting based on our elaborate sense of place, directionality, and the possible personal futures already sketched out from elements of previous experiences and from intentions we have to advance personal dramas. This interior orientation serves as a sophisticated lens through which we selectively direct attention, searches, and applications of effort at the surroundings. All the cultural complexes we learn, including speculations, stories, and exaggerations, are, by that learning, incorporated into the structure of our personal orientation lens and they contribute decisively to the shape and the mood of the world we move and live within.

Illusions of Masculine Supremacy

One of the strongest complexes in the dystopian veil of illusions is the culture of masculine supremacy, macho or patriarchal culture. Traditional masculine values are illustrated in stories of ancient Greek and Roman warriors: hardness, strength, endurance, courage, self-promotion, and disregard for weaker beings. Before theocratic Christianity there was the crime family aristocracy of the strongest, dedicated to trophy hoarding. Capital was wealth-generating real estate, and the land-hoarding aristocracy cultivated the ancient culture of organized violence with the intent of looting as the means of possessing capital. Specialists in coercive force cultivate athletic proficiency with weapons, readiness for aggression, the hyper-masculine ethos adulating strength, violence, kinetic action, competitive conflict, and properties that need armed protection. Trophy property is understood as the actualization, the manifest proof, of personal worth, and is normally accompanied by contempt for mere subjective interiority.

Patriarchy, institutionalized sovereign rights of father-figures, is an overt expression of the guiding principle of masculine dominance: that the strongest have rights over everyone else, rights to the property and lives of the weaker, the right to be parasitic on the weaker. Such assumptions derive from the traditional family in which the father is the strongest and women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. This culture worships and celebrates competition for the benefits of dominance. The key benefit of dominance is top-down human-on-human parasitism, from which other benefits flow. Many such benefits are the symbols and pageantry of dominance, for example in the scale of property possession and in relationships shaped by hierarchical master/slave inequality. Money culture, market wealth, is a branch of dominance culture because the scale of property possession is crucial in the pageantry and symbolism of dominance. Part of this alpha-trophy culture is denigration of alternative culture streams (such as the scribal/ literary tradition, the socially crucial child-nurturing culture, or varieties of interior spirituality) defining them as inferior and dependent, keeping them in some degree of dishonour and disgrace. The alpha-trophy culture of blood-sport dominance developed into military institutions as well as non-lethal competitive gaming and sports, into corporate culture and violence-ready sovereign states. There is a growing recognition of just how much the misogynist, racist, and predatory culture of hyper-masculinity is structured into the fabric of economic and political institutions.

The once ubiquitous culture of masculine dominance constructed and spread a certain kind of human bonding featuring strict hierarchies of authority maintained by operations of a core culture of violence with high value assigned to trophies of violence. It created aristocracy as a control-by-coercive-force faction in viciously top-down hive-minds nominally justified by a totalitarian father-god ideology in which everything is seen as pre-determined by an inexplicable occult masculine force, irritable, harsh, and quick to take offence, appeased only by displays of abject and gleefully grateful submission. Dominance culture asserts that this style of tightly controlled human clustering demanding conformity, exclusive emotional attachment and pageantry typical of religion, is the inevitable working of nature (especially human nature). However, these dystopian hierarchies of violence are the artifacts of a particular evil: the targeted denial of empathy. With the gradual development of alternative cultures, those large scale structures of attachment, by which individuals bind themselves into dystopian hive-mind collectives, start breaking down.

There is an ancient equivocation in the claim that human beings are essentially communal, such as Aristotle’s assertion that man is a polis animal. Aristotle’s claim makes it seem that the choice is between submission to a patriarchal sovereign state or just starkly solitary existence. That is a ridiculously oversimplified falsehood. Although sociability is crucial to the kinds of work and play within which humans can thrive, sociability is best fulfilled in the absence of violence, hierarchy, or self-denial by any individual. Patriarchal top-down command is sometimes justified by the idea that individuals are nothing but bundles of hard-wired drives for egoistic gratification, if they aren’t taught fear of superior power and a deferential orientation upward toward figures representing the overwhelming forces of religion and armed institutions. However, no matter how it is officially defended, the largely gratuitous nastiness of life in patriarchal societies is obvious and undeniable.

Illusions of Disembodied Supremacy

The veil of illusions also includes the fanciful metaphysics expressed in stories of disembodied intelligences: angels, demons, and deities, capricious free-floating entities who somehow care about and seem to have a stake in human behaviour, purportedly because humans were created by the will and power of these entities to be their toys and playthings. These stories are made frightening and also enticing by supposing that spirit-beings have unlimited powers, which means they must be considered and placated in all things to turn them into kind guardians instead of demanding and punishing masters. Imagining that the world at large and in detail is the deliberate act of an unpredictably powerful thinking and caring agency, often capricious, sometimes inexplicably malicious, means that acting in a way that pleases or placates that force, generally on the say-so of opaque but charismatic social authorities, just might have the effect of making the world a more benign situation. This cultural stream expresses a confusion about intelligence itself such that the cosmos at large somehow expresses a super-intelligence that pre-determines how everything should be (yet not always how it is!), but with some degree of negotiable grace as a reward for formulaic pageantry expressing extravagant praise, fearful self-abasement, and symbolic sacrifice.

The idea of a divine plan and a supernatural planner who irresistibly determines everything has been crucial in legitimizing the lethal power of patriarchal sovereignty. Divine personality has been conceived as all-powerful creator, judge, and ever-present tester and score-keeper of human persons, the model of fatherly sovereignty as absolute ownership over the less powerful. Cultures of disembodied intelligences insist on adulating the cosmic almighty who promotes its earthly kindred spirits: the mighty of the earth. With such a capricious and all powerful patriarchal deity, the crucial focus of orientation is divine commands, and ethical action is obeying a list of rules, duties, obligations, virtues, and vices. Nature in this vision is the actualized will of the divine personality. The idea of divinity sustaining the world by uttering commands and projecting divine will into human affairs through sovereignty of the strongest is, in a variety of forms, ancient and deeply embedded in human societies.

Teleology of creation is the crucial identifier of personality, of spiritual existence both human and divine. It encompasses conceiving and enacting, moment by moment, the future conditions of things in the world. Teleology is ideality: curiosity, caring, seeking, supposing, questioning, knowing (accumulating orientation through discoveries), and fountaining specific preferences expressed in deliberate actions or voice-utterances within the ceaselessly changing context of temporality. Religion makes personality the creative source of everything, recognizing teleology as transcendently alive, creative, caring, and expressive, but truly at home only at some dimly imagined cosmic horizon, making individual human consciousness a frail echo of the cosmic master. Human ideality as a mode of existence was recognized as carrying with it the vestige of an insubordinate claim to equal and rival the divine. Here, in the frightening sameness of human and divine existence, is the source of the idea of original sin and inherent guilt which all humans are supposed to share and which supposedly taints the existence of humanity. In the context of widespread fear of an all-powerful supernatural watcher, this sensed sameness, made miserable for humans by the needs and indignities of embodied living, was enough to create a perverse appetite for denigration of human personality, part of an effort to distance embodied ideality from any but the weakest claim to divine-like creative freedom, on the hope that denigration of embodiment would atone for this plausible claim to divinity and so eventually qualify human individuals for an eternal afterlife finally free of embodiment. This is the root superstition that makes creationist deism toxic and destructive. Its denigration of human personality created the context for every kind of cruelty, insult, and injury in human relations, perversely sanctifying human-on-human parasitism.

The patriarchal conception of cosmic teleology inspired and sanctified very rigid, restricted, exploitative, and repressively hierarchical societies, dedicated to the culture of violet masculinity, and determined to remain essentially static for eternity, supposedly to persuade the cosmic power to tilt benign. Such are the foundations of our current dystopian patriarchies. In the long transition through childhood to the adult condition everyone is trained in this fabric of perverse superstition. The original rationale for sovereign government as it still exists is this nasty dystopian fable. These societies are not echoes of divine nature but expressions of misconceptions and superstitions developed into enduring cultures, the most extreme fears and fantasies institutionalized and culturally enforced.

Illusions of Collective Supremacy

The veil of illusions also includes distorted national histories that promote a sense of collective identity by highlighting emotional dramas uniquely involving a population defined by geographical location. Within the general culture there are certain limitlessly imposing political super-structures, culture-based arrangements of authority and dependence which bind clusters of people together by a shared sense of norms of conduct and of the power centres that enforce them. These are top-down arrangements of coercive power and access to resources, which seek emotional possession of individuals, forming a shared group orientation, a hive-mind which benefits from each individual’s gifts, abilities, and energy.

It has been asserted as self-evident that individuals need, as part of a general need for felt supervision or authority, a dominant collective attachment, emotional and cognitive identification with the master narrative of a collective entity, something like a home hive, as a crucial element of personal identity and sense of meaning. That assertion is supposed to account for the fact that each modern sovereign state is still, in spite of progressive influences, a personified territorial power demanding reverent patriotic devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedience enforced by an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force. Each state has its edifice of theatrical pageantry and symbolism to invoke the unity and sacred grandeur of the collective: flags, monuments, and anthems, oaths and pledges, officials and military officers encrusted with exotic glitter, august regalia and titles; state uniforms and weapons laden with national symbols and emblems; ceremonies of remembrance and renewal of devotion invoking the sacred history and mission of the hive, synchronized movements in processions, special word formulas to be spoken in mass unison. Such pageantry is not intended to encourage creative or rational thinking or the individuality that enables those, but rather to replace thinking with passive embrace of an orthodox official story, a standardized hive-mind. The supposed necessity of hive-mind belonging is used routinely to justify nationalist propaganda, censorship, and violent repression. Such cultural systems often specifically suppress empathy toward people beyond the home collective. Immersion in such a hive-mind can enable individuals to commit acts of cruelty, brutality, and self-destruction that they would not contemplate as de-cultured individuals.

Illusions of Trophy Supremacy

Another cultural stream in the veil of illusions involves the sense of what makes any person good, worthy, or successful, the sense of anyone’s personal score on the goodness scale, the sense of personal value. Even people who are not emotionally invested in the symbols and emblems of their nation state, for example, who do not care about civic celebrations or their nation’s standing among nations, even such non-patriots are likely to be oriented in their sense of personal potential and value (self-worth, personal force of being) within the cultural norms of the economic structures around them, the hierarchy of occupations ranked by wealth and fame, attitudes about the gradients of interesting and eventful lives, and how those things match up with personal abilities and accomplishments.

We have the misfortune of living in a dystopia in which individuals are judged by acquisitiveness and competitiveness, both attaching value to scarcity and objective externality, and in which success as a life-in-progress is measured by ranking an individual’s performances as expressions of those drives. The inevitable spectacle of inequality is itself widely embraced as a value. The commercial sense of earning value through competition is just a light edit of the primal aristocratic value matrix, rooted in the culture of violence, possession of property, and a tightly restricted allowance of empathy. In our dystopia, the great drama is the competitive struggle for scarce prestige, dominance, notice, and trophies to fabricate an exterior depiction of an undiscovered spiritual interior. Our culture’s most trusted authorities assert that the great human drama is to compete for the scarce goods and symbols that show you are fabulous, or at least good enough, that biological drives are inescapable, drives for dominance, excitement, security, or for signs of worldly agreement that you have a place on the spectrum of being fabulous.

Personal Ideality

These complexes, along with similar supremacist-cultures such as family, class, accent, or craft, all keep individuals’ focus directed emphatically outward, away from contributions to experience which originate in personal interiority, in subjective ideality or spirituality. The overwhelming cultural message is that subjective interiority is best kept under strict control, restricted and mostly ignored. This has the effect of making the particulars of the world and of human relationships seem externally controlled and even pre-determined by rigid necessity. There is a distinct charm and comfort in the certainty of essentialism: the fetishistic assumption that everything is as it must be as created by inexplicable but utterly all-determining forces. Essentialism lines up with an urgency to resist change and keep arrangements stable for eternity. With this conception, individuals are merely spectators of the spectacle of events. However, the core concept of personality, of personal spirituality, as already observed above, is teleology of creation, discretionary, improvisational invention in the face of an entirely suppositional future, and the caring ideality with that power exists only at the level of the embodied individual. We are immediately acquainted with caring spirituality only in ourselves and in people around us, however much the idea may be inappropriately projected onto gigantic cosmic mysteries. The metaphysical anomaly of creative teleology at the level of the embodied individual means, first, that individual self-possession is achievable, but also that we must judge a good life partly on how well the veil of illusions has been overcome. Individual spirituality is a basis for universal empathy and mutual respect among animate beings, and political and economic relationships could be re-invented in a way that enables the power of subjectivity instead of denigrating it as is typical in dystopian societies. In a truly spiritual life, the primary source of value is the personally interior creative fountain, and not the rarity of exterior treasures.

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Fragment 218, December 14, 2025 Metaphysics Dawns on the Edge of Creation (word count: 213).

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.

War, Hive-Minds, & Dystopia

19 Thursday Jun 2025

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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community, culture, Hierarchy, innocence, metaphysics, nature, non-linguistic ideation, personality, philosophy, self-possession, spirituality, value

Thursday June 19, 2025

Fragment 214. word count: 1,561.

Tags: community, culture, value, hierarchy, non-linguistic ideation, personality, innocence, self-possession, philosophy, nature, metaphysics.

It may seem that people generally must take their given social surroundings, their community’s cultural edifice of norms, values, treasures, and respectable achievements, as their whole personal range of expectation and opportunity, embracing styles of life, pathways through the institutionally structured life-cycle, that offer some degree of prosperity, reputation, and dignity within available practices. Since the hive-mind form of social organization (structured by common identity definitions and broadly shared dramas featuring emotional triggers spread by public media) has been plausibly ubiquitous in human history, there has always been a community-based cultural and mental framework that encloses individuals by external authority within a larger, purportedly immortal, abstract person. There has always been a culture-derived mental framework internalized by individuals involving personal confinement within hierarchies of prestige, strata of personal value, freedom, and power. Not all hive-minds have a formal hierarchy with a dominant leader, a chain of command, and a legally compulsory code of good and evil. Some hive-minds (for example, sport team fan groups) have only common heroes and saints, a common orientation toward select events and goings-on, and something like orthodox attitudes and triggers of approval and disapproval. There is still a sense of belonging and of some degree of closeness to an inner-circle with exceptional knowledge and style who speak to and for this cultural niche.

Partisan culture-war movements, common on social media, are also significant hive-minds, as are organizations insisting on a strong “corporate culture”. Military forces, their constituent units and divisions, and similar organizations such as police and sport teams themselves are all examples of very tight hive-minds. Embracing a culturally stipulated category as a personal identity definition is joining a herd, also a form of hive-mind. This includes gender identity, class identity, racial, ethnic, religious, demographic niche, geographical origin, social presentation style, or any hierarchical sub-category.

Polity-defining hive-minds are structured by dramas which are deadly serious communal pageantry, all requiring dedication and acquisition of skills and knowledge, and they rest on myths that happen to have gained cultural currency. There are national dramas in the competitions among nations for power, prestige, and wealth, involving evil enemy nations and virtuous friendly nations, with always the possibility and often the actuality of war. There are religious dramas involving personal and collective merit and guilt in relation to fictitious supernatural persons with ultimate power, unrestrained by embodiment, threats and promises of eternal reward or punishment in an afterlife, and the teasing possibility of miraculous divine interventions. There are gender dramas in which every individual must closely orbit some ideal type of male or female. There are social class dramas involving pressures to accumulate wealth and trophies, as well as to perfect performances of certain manners, tastes, and appearances, a certain accent in speaking. There are civic sports dramas delivering ecstasy from victory and misery from defeat. These are socially staged emotional engagements with stakes and consequences for interpersonal bonding and approval, for self-esteem, status, and avoidance (or not) of a range of indignities and miseries. Together they make a framework of social meaning.

Hive-minds structure their group orientation on assumptions held as certainties, as unquestionable knowledge and definitive categories of everything: essentialism. This cultural certainty follows from embracing either divine decree or fundamental laws of nature as imposing a discernible necessity in all things. Of course, different hive-minds have their own certainties, so immersion in any of them is a limitation on encountering reality.

Even people who are not emotionally invested in the symbols and emblems of their nation state, for example, who do not care about civic celebrations or their nation’s standing among nations, even such non-patriots are likely to be oriented in their sense of personal value and potential (self-worth, personal force of being) within the cultural norms of the economic structures around them, the hierarchy of occupations ranked by wealth and fame, attitudes about the gradients of a good life, and how those things match up with personal abilities and performances.

It has been widely accepted that such cultural multi-mind collectives are good for individuals and possibly necessary. Immersion within a hive-mind culture does include a “sense of belonging” along with other benefits. However, people with influence and control within a hive-minded collective conventionally interpret “belonging” as “being owned by” the collective, granting the collective power to confer individual freedom or repression, sometimes life or death. The flip side of belonging is being owned, being the collective’s property. Serious hive-minds make war in which killing and dying are glorified and individuals are dehumanized and sacrificed as expendable.

Human communities have generally been dystopian, repressive and randomly cruel, overly controlled by a competitive and acquisitive male-strength-glorifying culture, and as such, profoundly questionable at the level of most individuals. The dogmatic essentialism of hive-minds always ignores and strives to exclude from attention a great swath of individual experience. The sense of self or personal identity is at play in this positioning of an individual within or only partly within a cultural meaning system. This is not merely about a variable sense of self-worth, but of the metaphysical status of personally existing as a particular “I”. Personal being-in-the-world can be defined as a rank in the hierarchies of culture: manners, norms, appearances, possessions, ways of presentation and performing socially, but these are traps in the shallowness of sophistication. To get to richer levels of human existence it is necessary to get beyond cultural pre-digestion through a personal cultivation of innocence.

Language is a crucial cultural system that provides a complex structure of pathways for thinking. However, in thinking about the inner processes of an individual’s acts of learning and creating intentions and acts of personal agency, it isn’t helpful to focus too strictly on the acts called “thinking”, which are always deeply associated with language. There is a vast swath of non-linguistic ideation that includes the whole context of personal orientation in space, time, and embodiment, orientation to culture and to relationships with other people, the personal cloud of dramas that express and specify any individual’s caring in their making a world that matters personally. Caring is not perceived but rather initiates, directs, and colours the spiritual reach or search that is the first personal movement of perception. The individual fountain of creative caring and curiosity is the spiritual force of individual existence as an “I”, and is never convincingly honoured or expressed in collective life. It silently looms as a discordant context surrounding the accidental certainties of cultured life, and beckons as the richer freedom of self-possession. Each of unorthodox religious speculation, philosophical questioning, and mind-altering drugs, sometimes combined, have been techniques used in different societies by individuals to explore that spiritual context as an exit from the confinement of a personal identity stipulated by hive-mind culture.

Ideality is willfully improvised becoming, building a future while questioning, learning, and working, the exact opposite of either being or a simple becoming. As just noted about caring, subjective ideation is not entirely receptive, reactive, or perceptual. A whole fundamental swirl of experience is a personal exertion to make something of felt existence, and to make something relevant to personal caring from received stimulations. Projecting the personal drama of interest and curiosity is a spiritual power of agency. This is creative world building in the medium of ideality, developing a sense of place-and-heading in a world shaped by external objects and forms internalized as relevant in personal dramas. Each fountain of caring, curiosity, questioning, attachment, and personal construction of orientation is an anomalous presence in the world of otherwise inescapable conservation, inertia, and entropy. The force of personality is not a thing of that nature, but, as point and arc of spontaneous creation, stands outside nature and transcends it. The creative power of ideality is not in Platonic heaven or in gods and demons, but only in ordinary personalities, in the embodied existence of dramatically vulnerable agents. There is no equivalent to this genius at a collective or community level.

By using the separation of people into niches of dignity, power, opportunity, status, value, and esteem, by using that separation as the structuring principle of a community, hive-minds alienate people from one another, block the reach of anyone’s empathy, and normalize a relative disrespect/ contempt for so many. Being held in contempt is dystopian. This way of categorizing people severs everyone from recognizing the stark metaphysical anomaly of subjective ideality as such. In restricting an individual’s grounds for self-evaluation and definition so much, hive-minds create a need and opportunity for philosophical questioning as a spiritual enlargement.

Thoughtful, cultivated innocence is the core of philosophy as an original consideration of the situation of a perceptive and reflective “I”. Philosophical work is a self-guided change in the way the world as a presence and the reflecting agent as a presence are perceived, conceived, and experienced; an achievement, by private questioning, of as perfect an innocence as can be dared. This cultivation involves effective de-culturing, with inherited prejudices made irrelevant. The state of de-cultured unknowing isn’t merely a void. It remains in the vicinity of questioning and caring as special states of a particular spirituality, a unsatisfied readiness for discovery.

AI is a Prisoner of Hive-Mind Cultures

30 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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AI, culture, dystopia, family, hive-minds, innocence, language, philosophy, religion, self-possession, spirituality

Fragment 211, March 30, 2025, word count: 696.

tags: AI, culture, hive-minds, language, religion, family, dystopia, spirituality, philosophy, self-possession, innocence.

Hive-minds are products of cultural packages which identify, glorify, recruit for, and reinforce an idea of a collective person, a super-person, into which selected individuals can merge for a sense of attachment, belonging, and shelter within a grand collective edifice of knowledge and purpose. There is always some degree of siege mentality emphasizing the importance of loyalty and safety in numbers. These collective-person-constructs include unfinished dramas such as grievances from the past, threats from enemies, and a sense of the exceptional communal genius which ought to be more fully expressed and celebrated. Hive-minds include a hierarchy of esteem and power, and an equally important system of dis-esteem toward identified enemies. There is also an essentialist metaphysics to sanctify and declare as unquestionable a variety of cultural forms and categories, especially hierarchical inequalities and race and gender identities. This metaphysics is normally attributed to divine decree, the supernatural work of gods and demons, but sometimes to a speculative hidden stratum of (Platonic) ethereally perfect existence, eternal template and source of the world known to human experience, and sometimes to a brute fatalist Nature.

Hive-minds take many cultish forms, from religions and nation states, to polities of any scale, social classes, professions, corporations, and even less formal groups such as sport team fan groups. Certain families, especially families protecting important assets, take a hive-mind form. Religion has sometimes been family centred, involving attachment to ancestors. A family which is also a religion tends to take a hive-mind form. Hive-minds are inherently dystopian because they use falsehoods to alienate individuals from their primary existential agency and self-possession.

AI and Hive-Mind Infested Languages

Natural languages are infested with such culturally coercive structures of meaning, with biases and superstitious metaphysical misconceptions. Since AI is just a large scale statistical model of a natural language in its mainly textual usages (supplemented by images and images presenting apparent motion), it will replicate all the misconceptions, biases, hierarchies of esteem and dis-esteem, and coercive meaning structures. AI has no grounding or point of reference other than what it logs of a target language. As such, it has no basis on which to appeal to innocence in its engagement with language or any other data, and so no possibility of moving beyond the hive-minds expressed in any target language. This is crucially different from living users of a language, who have a much richer general experience and an inherent constructive and caring ideation beyond what is included in language. AI has no non-linguistic spirituality, no caring or personal drama of any kind, so no grounding on which to go outside of culture, to de-culture. Non-linguistic spirituality involves personally constructed dramas, structures of caring, including a wide range of impulses to self-declare, to make a mark and personalizing the environment. All actual persons operate from and within a rich personal cloud of non-linguistic spirituality and as such can studiously construct a personal state of innocence beyond the biases of their language. That is the beginning of a philosophical sensibility, a reclaiming of inherent self-possession.

It is easy to recognize hive-minds from outside but not so easy for a person to see the same dystopian mechanisms at work in collectives within which that person functions. Evan so, an ordinary person can become aware of the ‘geography’ of various hive-mind loyalty-groups. It is possible to do so because there is always some discordance between the innocent sensibility of an individual and the system of judgments imposed by ambient culture structured as hive-mind collective super-persons. On the basis of that discordance between personal non-cultural spirituality (including experienced embodiment) and ambient social norms and expectations, an ordinary person can recognize specific coercive cultural structures as hive-minds, and detach from all of them. An individual can establish a personal orientation in relation to a whole cultural landscape of co-existing, competing, hive-mind social structures. This studious re-claiming of inherent innocence is the necessary groundwork for the self-possession that initiates philosophical thinking. AI completely lacks the resources that enable this philosophical orientation.

Fragment 206, March 15, 2024, Philosophy as Knowledge (word count: 1,076)

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

Fragment 129, June 15, 2018, Two Quick Notes on Culture (word count: 430)

Fragment 101, December 18, 2016, Metaphysics Matters (word count: 1,550)

Bonfire of Vanities

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Fragment 207, word count: 696.

tags: Savonarola, spirituality, self-possession, value, hierarchy, culture, class, time, dystopia, hive-mind, Spinoza, metaphysics.

There is a perennial conflict, including culture wars, between two tendencies of human motivation. The overwhelmingly popular tendency is based on acquisition, competition, display, and quests for approval and admiration. The other tendency derives from a personal experience of transcendent spirituality. From the spiritual point of view, many objects that are popularly valued seem like mere vanities. Vanities display a dependence on external validation, and an absence of acquaintance with the force of personally autonomous creativity as authentic spirituality. The term “bonfire of the vanities” is typically associated with the fifteenth century Dominican friar Savonarola who preached a fundamentalist Christian theology that emphasized the value of personal spirituality over wealth, status, and public displays of virtue and accomplishment. He famously organized a Shrove Tuesday bonfire in Renaissance Florence on February 7, 1497 into which were thrown all sorts of prideful distractions from his idea of a properly spiritual life. Items burned included, among other things, books, musical instruments, and works of art, all precious to the hearts of the envied, propertied, and highly cultured classes. Savonarola’s specific justification for his bonfire, namely a certain type of Christian theology, was certainly misconceived and, as itself an ostentatious display, its own forum for vanity. It had a warped and malevolent conception of spirituality and transcendence in the human situation. Savonarola was not completely wrong though. He was keenly aware of the perennial conflict noted above.

It is true that everybody needs some stuff and there is such a thing as innocent pleasure, sometimes aesthetic pleasure in the particulars that help make a livable environment and an interesting life. Even so, the capitalist valuables list really does contain a hefty portion of vanities, and not harmless ones either, but vanities which are laying waste to Planet Earth. The legitimacy of hierarchy and of the cultural markers of status must be disputed on the basis of spirituality. There is something more important than nature’s food chain interpreted as a Great Chain of Being decreed by divine or cosmic fiat, and the more important reality is the metaphysically anomalous existence of individual creative spirit, not the religious conception of an external almighty to whom mere humanity is vastly inferior and utterly in debt, but instead a conception which recognizes individual human time-creation as the radiant transcendence.

The World-Lens of Personal Ideality

There is a kind of experience that invites comparison with Spinoza’s “under the aspect of eternity” as a personal encounter with transcendence, but Spinoza’s emphasis on eternity is all wrong. The idea of eternity is a false transcendence. Actual transcendence is the personally crafted sense of the ceaseless opening and passing of time, deliverance from the deadening weight of the Eternal Now via the anticipating living will, the context-bearing gaze that picks out value and novelty by perceiving and acting through a construct of inward ideality, a personally gathered, interpreted, and organized lens-world in living action to understand and inhabit the public world. As storms of ideality, we plunge into a future which is unknowable and malleable, expecting certain features of geography with enough probability as a frame of reference for now. We manage a balance between energy sources and costs in effort, between anxiety and pleasure. It is possible to face full acquaintance with ourselves as human without being overwhelmed by dread, anguish, and complete absurdity.

There is nothing wrong in itself with pursuing delights, and possessions can be authentic resources, tools, and guides in the desperate spiritual adventure. However, the enjoyment of life should be approached with full awareness of the transcendence of spirit over things, even things that are excellent works of spirit, and with recognition of the deceptions of hive-mind constructs meant to normalize for everybody that there is nothing better than to ape people with the most or most stylish possessions, and that nothing can be done about the resulting dystopian society. If, respecting the dignity of persons and understanding the reality-distorting effects of dystopian cultural legacies, a person takes delight in some possessions or cultural products, there is room for this, so long as the enjoyment isn’t the foundation for an affectation of serious personal or group superiority.

Philosophy as Knowledge

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Fragment 206, word count: 1,076.

tags: writing, history of philosophy, spirituality, culture, hive-mind, self-possession, value.

It is very common in philosophical work to find critiques of any account of reality that comes as a cultural package, as widely shared culturally orthodox conceptions of reality. Such cultural packages include justifications for the existing social hierarchies and forms of exchange, of inequalities of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power. The canonical values of such an orthodoxy will be the values and treasures declared and embraced by factions which are most esteemed at the top of the hierarchy. The carriers of a culturally packaged reality typically form a collective with a sense of unity and identity, held together by competition for and imitation of certain styles of living, by a shared superego abstracted from exemplars of the life-best-lived, groups with most power, property, public attention and approval, awards, celebrated talents, and evident good fortune. The collective drama of inequality is rooted in orthodox conceptions of weaknesses and dangerous powers in the individual human spirit. Such culturally orthodox conceptions of reality are fetishistic in the sense that it is considered transgressive to doubt or question them.

Here are eleven examples of such philosophical critiques.

Socrates went to the Athenian marketplace to question people, and his intent was to show that ordinary assumptions about justice and virtue were far from well founded and often incoherent.

Plato extended Socrates’ identification of popular illusions to include all change and the experience of time itself. From the metaphor of the cultural community as a cave fixated on shadows, we learn that Plato thought that perceiving reality as it truly is would be a vision of the eternal.

Diogenes of Sinope, arguably the original Cynic, lived according to ‘nature’ in contrast to normal people, whose culturally formed style of living he declared an oppressive fantasy imposed on human nature.

Martin Luther is an example of profound self-possession and alienation from orthodox assumptions about fundamental reality as represented in Roman Christian orthodoxy.

Descartes carried through a rigorous inventory of everything that can be doubted about normal assumptions, but that people usually avoid thinking about.

Spinoza, like Plato, thought that properly perceived reality would be “under the aspect of eternity”. Since this is far from the norm, then normal perceiving involves some profound illusions about reality.

David Hume found rational grounds for scepticism about material substance, cause-effect, and the continuity of objects and of the subjective person. He concluded that, because of our psychological nature we soon forget our philosophical rationality and revert to ‘common sense’ habits of assuming we know what we really don’t know.

J.J. Rousseau did a critique of his contemporary culture, a critique of up-to-date arts and sciences in the tradition of “the bonfire of the vanities” and in the tradition of Diogenes the Cynic. Rousseau’s critique was launched in opposition to the ‘man of the world’ style of living promoted by Voltaire, the life of wealth, privilege, consciousness of social superiority and exclusive group membership, consumption and patronage of the arts and sciences.

Kant figured out that individuals are self-legislating, and so not fundamentally in need of any exterior sovereign. That was a peculiarly philosophical discovery with profound political and social implications firmly rooted in the Lutheran tradition. Just as Luther conceived the individual as independent of the mediation of the Church, so Kant followed by showing the individual independent of the state or any other externally imposed superego.

Nietzsche wrote explicitly about common human herd mentality and the necessity of breaking out of it to do anything creative.

Wittgenstein saw his philosophical work as a way of “getting the fly out of the fly-bottle”. For Wittgenstein, the fly in the fly bottle was people caught in philosophical problems, snared by “language on holiday”. However, it isn’t just the vanishingly small population of philosophers who get themselves caught in the fly bottle. Culturally orthodox ways of conceiving reality also can do the same for all users of a common discourse.

A Graphically Projected Language Model of Thinking

Something that emphatically enables an exceptional perspective outside collective orthodoxy is the personal use of writing in the process of developing and expressing judgements and ways of understanding reality. Of the examples listed, only Socrates seems not to have been a writer, although he was likely literate. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and available people, untethered from the common discourse. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces an assumption of inevitability about the way things are.

The experience of breaking free from common discourse itself involves the acquisition of some uncommon knowledge, such as knowledge of the power of community discourse to impose collectively shared conceptions of what is thinkable and what is unquestionable in community orientation, as well as knowledge that the community orientation is capable of hiding reality, including the reality of human existence itself. Philosophers often speak from knowing that the sense of reality which is normal and normative for speakers of any given language is largely supplied by ambient culture and carried in the meaning structure of the language as used in ordinary conversations. This is knowing that there are cultural hives of false reality, and that human collectives construct themselves as such hives in part to shelter from the potential terror of not knowing the most profound truths of existence, in part to fabricate a human unit larger and stronger than the embodied individual in the face of the cosmic vastness, but also to preserve certain dystopian injustices from which powerful factions benefit.

As the examples show, a philosophical sensibility often includes recognition of a personal discordance with the orientation stipulated by a culture-hive, and a sense of curiosity about encountering existence in a way beyond cultural influences. This is acquaintance with an individual spiritual power that is completely at odds with a top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. It is an experience of profound self-possession and creative power, and as such discovery of a human spirit not confined as cultural orthodoxy stipulates. Such knowledge is transcendently important, bringing gratification that is non-competitive, non-imitative, and adventuresome.

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Fragment 104, April 6, 2017, In Plato’s Cave (word count: 926)

Our Dystopian Past

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Fragment 205, word count: 1,543.

tags: Christendom, modernity, literacy, justice, progress, religion, science, sovereignty, hive-mind, time, humanism.

The conception of social organization in feudal Christendom identified three Platonic functional groups stacked as a power pyramid. Muscle-power workers formed the most numerous and the lowest stratum. Baronial fighting families formed the next level up (a big step up) and were far fewer than workers. The barons held formal possession of land, natural resources, and often workers, and maintained a culture of armed violence (chivalry, armed men on horses) to enforce that possession. Priests and their organization, the Church of Rome, formed, in theory, the high point of the pyramid. The clergy were supposed to be Plato’s contemplative, highly educated, other-worldly ruling class. They also claimed to be God’s agents on Earth. The baronial aristocracy disputed this way of understanding things to some extent but could not maintain their position of parasitic dominance without the authority that came from the culture and organization of religion.

The two power-factions asserted the necessity of an eternal stability in the order of society. Both aristocracy (of which monarchy is just a feature) and the theocratic hierarchy of the Christian religion planned with fervent determination to keep the arrangement of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power exactly as they had arranged it for their own parasitic benefit. There was a Platonic influence here as well since Plato declared that reality was strictly unchanging. The passing of time was an illusion for Plato. However, there was a way in which some change and continuity were reconciled, and that was by something like Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same”. Seasons change, but in a continuously repeating cycle that expresses a circle, an eternally closed loop. The vast majority of the general population accepted metaphysical determinism in the social order and found it a theme of common discourse. They were taught by the parasitic power factions to be afraid and to feel dependent. Notwithstanding this intent and practical control, nothing like complete stability was ever realized. Medieval horizons* expanded profoundly, and yet, there were blind spots, directions in which horizons did not expand. The general parasitic hierarchy of society persisted and still does.

In Christendom the core ideas of religion included universally inherited guilt coupled with supernatural surveillance for the purpose of moral ledger-keeping on every person’s thoughts and deeds, all leading toward an inevitable, generally merciless, and eternally binding reckoning at the time of an individual’s death. Of course, that made the ever-looming prospect of death terrifying, and the Church proclaimed itself as essentially God-on-Earth, the only way out. Just as the coercive power of aristocracy resulted from its culture of violence, the power of the Church depended upon its monopolistic culture of sacred knowledge, the Revelation it claimed to possess concerning the Divine drama involving every individual’s fate after death. As for the aristocracy, their iconic form was as armed men on horses, claiming everything as their property and asserting that claim with practiced violence toward anyone unable to resist with equal violence. These are the cultural niches which conceived and put into practice the form of human organization which would mutate into the sovereign state. Sovereignty was focused on securing the ownership of private property by force but also on religious mystery-cult insistence on group belonging and conformity (communal hive-mind). Patriarchs of religious pageantry were from time immemorial more bookish than the captains of horses and chariots. In Medieval Europe the clergy still cultivated the scribal culture of book knowledge. Their literary and mental skills were indispensable in their role as advisers and administrators for aristocrats, keeping records of contracts, costs, products, properties, distributions, income, and consumption. However, in monastic libraries and after 1088 in increasing numbers of universities, they also kept alive surviving vestiges of ancient pagan literary culture. The rediscovered texts of philosophy, science, and mathematics from ancient Greece, Rome, India, and the Islamic east were recognized as profoundly more complex and advanced than anything native to Western Christendom, containing knowledge and courses of thought that opened vast horizons.

Although there was a very early association of writing with supernatural powers and magic, and with top-down imperial organization, scribal culture developed in a way that makes it independently relevant wherever language-based ways of learning and understanding are involved, and ultimately cultivates the inscribing of individual voices, beyond the reach of other streams of culture. Intrinsic to scribal culture, although often uncredited, is an experience of spirituality that is completely at odds with the top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and proximate people, 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 engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. Time as experienced in the process of personal writing untethered from commonplace conversations opens in the direction of discoveries and creative opportunities and as such is progressive (modern) and starkly different from the cyclical repetitive time as normally represented in traditional conservative community discourse. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces the assumption of stable continuity. Humanism, as an exploration of the independent voice untethered from common discourse, is the expression of the individualistic experience that develops from moving through that portal. Ultimately, the humanist project of self-cultivation through reading and writing, expresses a claim about the fundamentals of human living, including individual freedom and creativity. It points toward a philosophy of living spirit that has never been articulated. (Although Existentialism could be a humanism in this sense. Thank you, Sartre.) Individualism was always the core of Humanism, based on the privacy of the written voice. This individualism was created by literacy, and so was not an invention of the Euro-American Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had an ancient flowering long before the Enlightenment and before the also famous Renaissance flourish.

By contrast with medieval and old regime devotion to stability, the idea of progress is what defines modernity, and it emerged from the experience of literacy. This culturally transmitted idea of progress includes the certainty that justice requires progressive change in the ordering of society, that justice is impossible without a different organization of property, status, knowledge, and power. Modernity embraces progress as a requirement for health and well-being as well as for justice because the past has been revealed as pervaded by ignorance, superstition, violent oppression, misogyny, tribalism, monotony, poverty, and conformity imposed by fear-based myths of safety in numbers. To various degrees in different places, those dystopian conditions are still normal, but now often recognized as reasons for improvement. Modernity has embraced the idea of future justice through progressive change in the social order, but it has no clear vision of how to overcome the forces that benefit from established injustice. The French Revolution** of 1789-99 was a major effort at government by and for the majority but it was subverted and descended into the Reign of Terror and the imperialism of Napoleon. Marxism was another major effort at justice through equality, but it became a cult of inevitability about the laws of history, highly dependent on a central sovereign power exercising death-grip control by violence, and so could never approach genuine equality. The conservative backlash against these essays in general justice that failed has almost discredited the very idea of progress.

Humanist Individualism: The Third Way

Humanism does not present itself as an authoritative edifice of knowledge, even though it specifically contradicts both religion and mechanistic science, which certainly do. Humanism celebrates and studies the power of human freedom and creative originality, but it doesn’t assert an original conception of human existence in nature that advances an individual-sourced power that can overcome the objections of mechanistic theory from science and deterministic religious conceptions such as original sin, Karma, or divine command and judgment. Humanism has declared human freedom and originality by practicing those powers via individual self-cultivation in the medium of literature, reading, and writing. It thrives because the mechanistic vision derived from science is fatally counterintuitive as a representation of living as experienced by a person. Materialist/ mathematical science misses the self-aware agency that explodes from the conception of time as a personal opening. Religions also lose credibility by separating personality, the restlessly unfinished and incompletely defined existence as experienced by a person, from ordinary embodiment and then aggrandizing it to infinity. In doing that, religions cast strictly embodied personality as inferior, secondary, and derivative in relation to some wildly speculative and implausible original. Both of those authoritative systems in effect leave the ordinary self-experience of the individual out of their picture. So, even now, in this age of knowledge, what it is to be a living human person is profoundly misconceived, and the result is dystopian society. Humanism, though, is still developing, and the way we people of modernity know and live in time has the project of progress inherent in it.

* 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.

** The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789, written by Robert Darnton, published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books (2023), ISBN: 978-0-713-99656-2.

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

Democracy, Violence, Culture War

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Fragment 204, word count: 157.

tags: humanism, dignity, property, equality, empathy, value, culture, politics

There is a necessary connection between democracy and the de-valuing of violence. More democracy, less violence. Violence offends the dignity of persons, and empathic recognition and demonstration of universal dignity is the direction of democracy. Universality of dignity, which means general equality, is the authenticating test of democracy. Less equality of dignity, less authentic democracy. This means that the privileged value of property, as compared to the value of dignified personhood, is progressively reduced in democracy. A deep culture war rages here: partisans of property against partisans of inherent personal dignity. Property as elite value always requires protection by imminent violence, and is often the justification or inspiration for an elaborate culture of violence. Property possession is sometimes asserted as the marker and exclusive revelation of dignity. That view is anti-democratic and anti-humanist since a humanist recognition of universal dignity requires the decoupling of dignity from any property that involves a threat of violence.

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.

Popping Hive-Mind Bubbles

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Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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culture, dystopia, metaphysics, phenomenology, politics, reality, spiritual simulation, utopia

Fragment 201, word count: 722.

tags: utopia, dystopia, politics, culture, reality, spiritual simulation, metaphysics, phenomenology.

It is typical of utopian texts from the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to idealize small societies with a strong collective sense of unity *, societies in which every individual agrees with everyone else about the dramas that constitute the emotional vectors of life and especially collective life. This collective cultural and psychological uniformity was, and often still is, seen as the foundation of social stability, and it is supposed that social stability is an ideal to be sought. However, what is always sinister, oppressive, and inhumane about repressive authoritarian governments is the deliberate social engineering of a collective single-mindedness, a cultural hive-mind in which dissent is punished with intent to obliterate. Human hive-minds are far more pervasive and ubiquitous than ordinarily recognized, and there is no point in trying to distinguishing good hive-minds from bad ones. All of them are destructive of individual self-expression, creativity, freedom, and self-possession. Remarkably, and this is the nub of the issue, the richness of sociability and the great human interconnectedness does not depend on hive-mind reality bubbles.

It used to be thought that if people in a community had different religions, for example, or no religion, then social breakdown would soon follow. It is now obvious that societies with a mixture of different religions and no-religion can thrive. The same thinking applied to sexual orientations, to gender identities, to a fixed hierarchy of genders, to race, language, and to reverence for a sovereign leader who, along with various officials who judge and evaluate compliance with social norms, would be universally internalized by people as a dominating superego. It is now obvious that none of these is necessary for a thriving human interconnectedness, and nor are symbols of collective identity such as flags, uniforms, monuments to glorious battles, a romanticized and sanitized history, heroes, weapons, a fearsome and contemptible enemy, an exceptional group destiny. These are all mechanisms to bind individuals into a hive-mind, and there are influencers pressuring people to embrace them, supposedly for the communal good, sometimes called the higher good. The conforming societies that result are not the realization of any higher good.

Assertions about primordial reality, specifically of an essential structure to existence that extends into the order of societies, are always canonized in dystopias to support an exploitative social hierarchy, and that is why philosophy, as a critique of thinking about primordial existence and reality, is inherently political and ultimately unavoidable. Dystopian arrangements become normalized and accepted through the use of fantasy metaphysics to persuade people that hierarchical social arrangements are the inevitable products of God or Nature, both pillars of essentialist belief systems. A phenomenology of spirit, on the other hand, establishes that social arrangements are not inevitable and certainly not pre-determined by God or Nature. Such a metaphysics of experience is the route to de-normalizing dystopia. Any exit from dystopian societies will require the individual self-possession that comes with self-acquaintance unmediated by antique cultural fantasies.

The Spiritual Simulation

The sense of the world by which an individual is oriented and grounded is built from fleeting perceptions and personally curated memory, and since it can’t be a sculptural physical likeness or scale-model of the world, nor any kind of continuous perceptual contact with every part of the world known by the individual, this sense of being oriented within knowledge of some region of the world is a personal simulation of a world. These simulations are constructed of perception-based suppositions arranged in the service of an individual’s pattern of personal caring, all accomplished in the medium of suppositions, ideality, the poise of a busy self-interested spirit at a place in the world. Spirit orients itself and survives by simulating a world un-naturally stretched in time, supposing what it no longer perceives and anticipating the world as staging for a moment by moment enactment of its self-created arc of intended interventions. Supposing, caring, anticipating, and intending are spiritual non-actualities, postures of ideality, the only metaphysical reality. This phenomenology of spirit recognizes that individual creativity in manifesting a caring personal agency is crucial to the shape of all aspects of the human environment. It reveals the very opposite of essentialism, an alternative to the determinism stipulated by theologies or by physical materialism.

Byzantine & Renaissance Philosophy, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2022), ISBN 978-0-19-285641-8. (Chapter 42, pp. 298-304).

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

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