Fragment 215, word count: 2,660.

Tags: history, war, dystopia, Christendom, hive-minds, science, Lutheranism, literacy, humanism, rationality, Enlightenment, culture war, philosophy, self-possession.

The re-militarized world that is the fever-dream of Putin, Xi, Modi, Netanyahu, Trump, Orban, and everybody involved with NATO, etc. is the worst kind of old-fashioned culture, a fetishistic nostalgia for a metaphysical and religious essentialism from old dystopias. It is the supremacy of “manly” dominance culture as described here. Whereas vast numbers of younger people in the post-Enlightenment cultural system and everywhere consider themselves citizens of the world, war between nation-states is being planned and equipped to drag humanity back into a feudal sensibility: polities self-identify as uniquely precious but under siege from dangerous disruptors within and without; adulation of the mighty and of an imagined almighty who promotes its earthly kindred spirits; 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!) within some degree of negotiable treatment as rewards for formulaic pageantry of extravagant praise, fearful self-abasement, and symbolic sacrifice. There is always deep misogyny in this frame of mind. Such dystopias are internally stratified and viciously hierarchical based on ideas of different grades of value among human beings. Some kind of cruel religious faith-based orthodoxy is often declared foundational, sometimes fraudulent science taken as religious certainty. Preserving a parasitic hierarchy is always foundational.

This old culture of masculine dominance, once ubiquitous, constructed and spread a certain kind of human hive-mind featuring strict hierarchies of authority maintained by operations of a core culture of violence with high value assigned to trophies of violence. It has been a common sense assumption that this style of tightly controlled cultured human clustering demanding conformity, exclusive emotional attachment, and pageantry typical of religion, as just mentioned, is simply the inevitable working of nature, but that is false. These dystopian hierarchies of violence are the products of very particular and undesirable circumstances. With the gradual development of alternative cultures, those old dystopian hive-minds start breaking down. This has happened on several occasions in modern history.

Regression into old-fashioned dominance culture is being revived now because new cohorts of young people all over the world are moving to a different orientation in which the old religious and political/economic hive-minds don’t matter, or at least are not worth living and dying for. Our reactionary crop of despots wants to smother that new orientation in the crib. The current directions of cultural evolution that are breaking down old certainties, as also began on previous occasions in history, are not this time attributable to new philosophy. The flame-keepers of philosophy have recently kept away from questioning the existence of human hive-minds. However, collateral effects of the humanism that emerged historically from widespread personal literacy, combined with huge advances in communications technology, have enabled an ever-widening extension of empathy beyond previously typical subgroups. For example, the relatively unhindered television coverage of the American war in Viet Nam (1965-75) educated masses of non-combatants about the brutal indecency of war for perhaps the first time, resulting in a mass international anti-war movement. That has never been allowed to happen again, and the process of generational forgetting has been proceeding. However, the advent of live-streaming from smart phones has now, once again, made the indecency of war immediately and globally available.

Legacy of Aristocratic Violence

A core culture of violence has always been a crucial element of aristocracy, out of whose ancient and medieval practices modern sovereign state governments developed. The culture of violence separates aristocracy from commercial culture, which imitates aristocracy by aspiring to the same luxuries, prestige, and level of abundant consumption, but without the overt use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the world, even in the most democratic polities. Sovereign states still base their authority on a near monopoly of violence, and focus their efforts on protecting and preserving property, the treasured trophy of violence. Crime families and criminal organizations generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing (just as swords worn on the hip were important to old-style aristocracy). The pre-existing aristocratic culture of earthly rewards, mainly clustered around the thrills of competitions, high consumption, trophy possessions, and badges of prestige, remains normative (even if aspirational) for most people due to pervasive cultural propaganda.

Claims to Virtue

Countries in the Euro-American cultural system, post-Christendom successor states, seem to maintain an unshakable conviction of their moral superiority, in spite of their actual record of behaviour, based, apparently, on a lingering self-identification as “Christian” nations and as such carriers of a culture of spiritual sensitivity. There is an unacknowledged assumption, again in spite of historical facts, that Christianity is peak-morality. Given the genocidal colonialism, slavery, and casual cruelty perpetrated by nations and religious institutions in this group, their claim to superior virtue is factually ridiculous, which makes it a phenomenon begging for identification and philosophical understanding. A more serious piece of cultural heritage that is also cited in the context of special spiritual sensitivity in the Euro-American cultural system is the Enlightenment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, featuring the rise of mathematical science and ushering in a far more secular attitude toward both the natural world and human affairs. The spiritual force of this culture was an upgrade in the conception of individual human dignity, now able and worthy to understand the hidden workings of things through scientific thinking, and so also with inherent rights to decent and honourable treatment simply as human beings. This was bolstered considerably by widespread personal literacy as promoted by protestantism and also by protestant emphasis on the interiority of individual spirituality.

Patriarchal racist imperialism somehow coexists with the legacy of the Enlightenment and of literary humanism beginning from remote ancient cultures. Over a long history, 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 the pre-existing authorities of religious and aristocratic institutions. Energizing that arc of development, the spirit of protestantism called into question and actually rejected the mythical foundations of hierarchy and the gradients of status, precedence, and authority in the society that was Christendom. This was done in two stages: first the claim of direct interaction between individuals and deity without the Church as intermediary; and second, in the work of a string of philosophers with a Lutheran background, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Kierkegaard, relocating the transcendent freedom of creative ideality from an imagined remote deity to ordinary individuals. This philosophical idealism was no longer Christian, but still a remarkable conception derived, by chance, as a cultural evolution from Christianity. The legacy of the Enlightenment completely contradicts and negates that of aristocratic violence culture and the authoritarian re-militarization now so popular. What is remarkable is how little this humanist culture of spiritual sensitivity has influenced the core of political or governing practice. The patriarchal culture of old aristocracy has always dominated political power, and the kind of spiritual sensitivity on offer from Christianity had already turned cruel as early as the creation of feudal Christendom involving the project of imposing coercive imperialism in cooperation with factions dedicated to gaining what can be gained through violence.

Backlash against Enlightenment Philosophy

In fact, a broad cultural suppression closely followed the European Enlightenment and the subsequent Revolution in France, 1789-99. There was a distinct internationalism as well as a rejection of class hierarchies in the spirit of the Revolution. That backlash included the famously repressive rigours of the Victorian era, 1837-1901. A huge effort mostly succeeded in marginalizing a tentative re-conception of individual human power and potential that was breaking down old cultural certainties. However, the effects of humanist literacy, rationalist science, and protestant individualism had been under development for centuries leading up to the Enlightenment, and had penetrated widely and deeply in the Euro-American cultural system, so this humanistic spirituality has survived to watch for opportunities to flourish. Another feature of the backlash, literary and artistic romanticism, emerged from fear that philosophical thinking, specifically the Enlightenment identification of rationality, notably by Kant and Fichte, as the primary process of personal interiority empowers all individuals so much that it discredits the traditional social hierarchy, disclosing civilization as an ugly regime of human-on-human parasitism. The romantic defence of traditional social hierarchy requires that primary process be irrationality. Romanticism reverted to something like the earlier view asserted by Hobbes (remotely Plato), as it “re-enchanted” the world with disembodied spirits and flourishes of magical thinking.

Mention should be made of tragic attempts at transformative social change in Russia beginning during the global war of 1914-18. This was another manifestation of philosophy taken seriously, but already incorporating a distinct whiff of romanticism. This time it was Hegelian idealism (Hegel being another Lutheran) made over into a materialist science of history: Marxism. The social changes made were flawed from the beginning by a lack of empathic humanity and by top-down control through brutal violence. Still, the efforts endured through most of the twentieth century. Marxist materialism and the Hegelian idealism it represented were alien ideologies to most people, and, if they were to become a foundational discourse by which power and economic production and distribution were understood as a matter of common culture, they had to be imposed by force and ideological re-education. There was a brutality about that effort and the imprint of the ideas has been shown by subsequent history to be shallow and transitory.

The Post-War Left-ing of the West

Some degree of influence from the Enlightenment legacy can be discerned in The New Deal launched in the United States just prior to the global war of 1939-45, launched in response to the Great Depression of the 1930’s, which many at the time perceived as the final failure of capitalism. The European response to the depression was a rise in fascist authoritarian political movements. Wealthy people came to think that some form of fascism was necessary to save capitalism. Fascism is capitalism doing what it can to slow down and stop the momentum of its failure. Others saw capitalism as a lost cause and turned to Marxist communism as a way of getting something better. After the war there were two powerful democratizing forces working on western governments. One was the competition of capitalist societies against Communism. It may have been a stridently patriarchal interpretation of the political left-wing of the French Revolutionary National Assembly (filtered through Hegelian idealism translated into economic materialism), but it was still promising something like a government-managed disruption of the legacy class system, aiming for material equality and a classless society without dystopian hierarchies. As such, it was something of a manifestation of Enlightenment humanism. The second force resulted from involving the mass of ordinary citizens in the effort of total war. Achieving victory through great personal disruption and sacrifices, the general population expected a fair share of the wealth generated by the society. Voters demanded benefits and politics was forced to the left, introducing elements of socialism in the form of unemployment benefits, pensions, child care support, medical care. By the 1980’s the shine was off the communist countries and the current generation of adults hadn’t been part of the sacrifices of the last global war, and they forgot that they had been promised rewards for service to the nation: generational forgetting. In 1989 the Soviet Union collapsed, and so any vestige of a real competition was gone. After that politics was dragged back to the right by the never-relenting cultural mix from feudal Christendom: father-god religion and patriarchal dominance culture.

Capitalism vs Communism

After the widespread failure of ancient religious myths that had convinced people generally that all things, including social, political, and economic hierarchies, were eternally predetermined by an all powerful deity, capitalism only looked acceptable to a wide range of people when the style of living it offered was contrasted against the austere and authoritarian Communism of the Soviet Union. In this way it was profoundly dependent on the existence of the USSR for legitimacy. For a few decades after the war of 1939-45 the capitalism of western nations became more of a consumer-supremacist system as the factions in control of investment felt obliged by that competition to improve the quality of life of the common run of citizens. The collapse of the USSR was the writing on the wall about the end of that kind of “liberal democracy”, and a return to an essentially investor-supremacist capitalism now called neoliberalism. Such capitalism is widely experienced as unacceptable, no longer a broadly appealing or satisfying system of social organization. In the US election in 2024 the most lethal nation on earth fell under the control of a confederacy of extremest anti-democratic ideologues of the political right-wing, heralding an age of romantic reality-denial, proclaiming an imaginary national crisis through pervasive propaganda via mass media, including social networking apps. Such is the situation in which masses of younger people struggle to feel free of the legacy of nationalist hive-minds eager to make war as a means of preserving old hierarchies. 

The relationship between, on one side, an individually embodied knowing and deliberative agent (a dynamic time-plotting system of ideality), and on the other, the ambient culture in which the individual is educated and fostered into some normal orientation in the world; put another way: the ideas and dramas that specify an individual’s sense of place and direction, in relation to the culture carried and cultivated around that individual: this relationship has to be crucial for philosophical questioning. Human individuals derive joy and meaning from imitating people around them, soaking up culture like sponges. Within the general culture of ways of surviving in a particular surroundings, there are these limitlessly imposing political super-structures, culture-based structures of dependence and authority which bind clusters of people together by a shared sense of direction and rules of conduct, top-down arrangements of power and access to resources which seek emotional possession of the individual and benefit from the individual’s gifts, abilities, and energy. 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.

Every hive-mind is a complicated game with its own rules, many of which are arbitrary, its own structures of dramatic quests and challenges, ways of scoring and winning competitions to rise through the layers of esteem and power as set out in the rules. Statements about the world that cannot be verified or falsified by any normal means and yet are held to be true as a matter of popular culture, sometimes called ‘beliefs’, are better understood as rules of a particular hive-mind game. If you are in the game, you accept and play by these guides to orientation. Similarly, the rules of personal duty are hive-mind game specific, rules of a particular collective game. Release from collective identity must be based on recognition of important personal experience outside what is controlled by culturally ambient hive-minds. Self-possession is simple: orientation and gratification from the interior upwelling creative force of personality: curiosity, dreams, an inherent sense of beauty and pleasure, impulses to project shapes on the objective world in the context of supposings about futurity, non-linguistic ideation of personal futurity and the increasingly extended and personally specific context of prior experience. Time is the dimension of teleology, agency, of creativity at the core of subjectivity.

Embedded links:

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

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

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.