Tag Archives: History

Two Lessons from History: Bad News First

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

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

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The Malice of Civilization

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

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

Culture is Strategic Propaganda

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

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

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

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

See also:

1215: The Year of Magna Carta, written by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham, Published by Touchstone (2005), ISBN-10: 0743257782, ISBN-13: 978-0743257787. This is an illuminating glimpse of life in Europe at an important moment in the development of law. At that moment it was perfectly clear that the social layer made up of the landowning aristocracy or nobility was nothing other than crime families.

The Wars of the Roses, written by Robin Neillands, published by Brockhampton Press (1999), first published in the UK 1992 by Cassell plc, Villiers House, London, ISBN 1860199976.
The brutality of the European military aristocracy is clearly illustrated in this narration of dynastic conflict through generations of the extended Plantagenet family.

For a glimpse of the adaptation of top-down culture control to modern conditions listen to the following audio documentary:
World War One and the Birth of Public Relations, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Radio One, Program: Ideas, (Wednesday, November 26, 2014) Ira Basen reports on how the science and industry of public relations arose from American institutions promoting World War I.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

Beyond the Imprinted Parent

10 Thursday Apr 2014

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  The Argument

We have a system of human interconnectedness that is institutionally parasitic on most people (for the benefit of a small faction) but which has everyone oriented within distortions of reality that obscure and sanctify the parasitism. Specifically, we are oriented within beliefs that our situation is exclusively a personal creation such that as long as we dare to dream big and don’t blame others or rock the boat we can by our own efforts ride the social mobility bus up levels of dignity/ support/ love/ money/ power/ honour/ glory and achieve the best life-of-our-dreams possible given our talents, energies, and personal circumstances; in other words, that the capitalist politico-economic system efficiently provides the best possible life to those who deserve and earn it, to those who prove they are worthy. The argument presented here against that distorted orientation is that the politico-economic system in fact consists of parasitic systems of subordination which are institutionalized and maintained in place by deliberately manipulating mass reverence for fictitious parent-forms, externalized pseudo-intelligences declared to be sacred, supposed enlargements of ordinary intelligence situated externally as gods, nature, history, sovereign governments, corporations, and the oligarchic celebrity systems often used to represent communities. However, all such parasitic distortions can be overcome non-violently by any individual through recognizing the unique transcendence of all individual intelligences, and there are good consequences, both personal and collective, philosophical and political, in the self-possession that results from doing that.

Exploiting Child-to-Parent Conditioning

The primordial system of subordination is childhood. For every human newborn, infant, or toddler, there is a deep dependence on an inexplicable parental intelligence which is just there in the structure of the world, along with gravity and ground, and whose limits are unrecognizable. That experience of child-orientation is exploited and used as training in perpetual subordination, looking outward for the initiation of agency, direction, approval, self-definition, and life goals. When an individual matures to adulthood, that psychological pattern of emotional dependence should fade away, but certain cultural mechanisms intentionally keep it active to enable an institutional takeover of the role of supervisory intelligence with indefinite limits. One of those cultural mechanisms is religion and another is institutional sovereignty.

Real Parents are Often Self-Sacrificing

Although there are often parasitic practices in the treatment of older children by their parents, a crucial difference between actual parental intelligence and false parental avatars is that parents are generally devoted, to the point of self-sacrifice, to the fullest development of their children, but the institutional parental avatars work to formalize and preserve systems of life-limiting parasitism on those they supervise.

Just There: The Parental Alpha-Structure of Sovereignty

We all know that there is a sovereign superstructure around here with a whole set of warnings put into effect by watchers and investigators, agents prepared with special equipment for assaults, arrests, and facilities for confinement, and with methods of gathering information and justifying their controlling behaviour. The superstructure makes proclamations of laws and penalties. “Anyone in our territory caught doing X, or not doing Y, will have penalty Z imposed on him or her.” There is a claim to power and a warning about how the power will be used. On the basis of such warnings each person in the territory makes decisions about how to act. That supervising superstructure is just there when we arrive on the scene, as the buildings and streets of a city are just there, and just as to newborns, infants, and toddlers parental intelligences are just there. To carry on a livelihood here you have to get used to dealing with that watchful, interfering, and sometimes brutal supervising organization.

Sovereign superstructures are territorial and display strong drives to preserve and strengthen unlimited control of resources especially people. They organize defined borders and control the passing of properties and persons across borders. They proclaim and enforce exactly who gets to enter or leave their territory. Various branches of the superstructure watch and investigate the world beyond the borders for threats or opportunities for gaining advantages. It has been very common for neighbouring superstructures to do deliberate damage to one another in efforts to gain advantage and dominance. Some proclamations of superstructures require mainly young adult males to serve in lethal-force assault and defence formations to destroy threats and exploit opportunities. The lives of individuals are often destroyed in a superstructure’s promotion of its policies.

Different superstructures have different ways of originating proclamations, edicts, and decrees. Some base themselves on a single person with total authority. Those people often have ongoing conversations with a select group of advisors who assist in forming proclamations and supervising compliance. Other superstructures have collectives of several hundred people to discuss and approve proclamations. Selection to membership in such collectives is done in different ways, sometimes by nomination by political clubs and public election by region, and sometimes by a tradition of primogeniture from the most propertied social categories. Sometimes the superstructure canvasses people in its territory for ideas about how it should conduct business and who should have executive authority. Sometimes it has branch organizations that give certain people the opportunity to vote for candidates for positions of authority or for new policy and project proposals. This is unusual, however. Usually people with authority in a superstructure get to recruit their replacements. For such parental-type authority which is “just there”, mass compliance works exactly the same way in democracies, monarchies, single-party states, or overt dictatorships. People generally accept that the sovereign authority is “just there” and organize their activities accordingly.

The sovereign superstructure is surrounded by supporting branches which gather money and materials for its functions. Some of its proclamations stipulate which categories of people must submit portions of their wealth and income to the superstructure, or must pay the superstructure whenever they buy certain goods or services, cross certain borders, or periodically for items of property in their possession, or for whatever reason the superstructure proclaims. Whatever the superstructure proclaims is backed by its watching, investigating, lethal-force, and penalizing institutions.

The superstructure makes proclamations, takes money, and requires periods of service of some categories of people within its territory. It is not going to stop operating just because there are people who dislike what it does, so the sovereign superstructures do not operate contractually. In fact, the superstructure could not be based on a “social contract” because the concept of a contract requires equality of power among contracting parties (otherwise there is duress of the weaker by the stronger, voiding the concept ‘contract’). The supervising power recruits and acts through a lot of people trained and screened to support and agree with each other. Those people are not encouraged to question the arrangements. They are very strongly encouraged to carry on with established practices and functions of the superstructure, and to enjoy benefits to themselves which it provides. Shared culture and a chain of command unify a large selection of apparent individuals.

For many centuries in the historical past superstructures explained their proclamations (and their existence) as god’s commands and claimed special knowledge of the most powerful god or the only real God. Fear of the God’s retribution in an afterlife has proved a powerful instrument of control and supervision, coupled with promises of sublime and eternal rewards for obedient submission. Typically superstructures which use this technique have meeting facilities in every settlement, where people are expected to come regularly for small-group lessons on afterlife retribution and reward, and to make contributions of money.

Within monotheist religions, the individual’s situation suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among ancient middle-eastern herder-nomads, where the ideas originated, was childhood fear and awe of the father’s unpredictable and mysterious rages. The God of Abraham is that kind of father in the sky, all-knowing, all-powerful, not limited by any rules or finiteness and so unpredictable and dangerous, quick to anger and inclined to terrifying violence. The relationship of that God to the humans He creates, commanding devoted obedience, fervent declarations of admiration and submission, and unquestioning service, is quite overtly an idealized image of the relationship of the herder to his flocks, the herder father to his dependants. Such an orientation situates every individual on an externally imposed axis of submission to, or defiance of, an absolute self-justifying power, an externally imposed axis of grace or disgrace, reward or punishment. However, that peculiar sense of the sacred is not confined to ancient herder-nomads, because the early orientation of every human newborn, infant, and toddler is similarly dominated by the inexplicable external intelligence of parents. On that basis, every human acquires very early in life the psychological disposition to gaze outward for the initiation of agency, direction, purpose, validation, and even self-definition.

Within that cultural background it is well worth observing that the raging power of an angry parent is not sacred. What is sacred within the pre-determined world of nature is the transcendent freedom of every intelligence-as-such. For the majority of citizens the supervising apparatus of nation-state sovereignty is just there, in exactly the same way as the inexplicable parental intelligence is just there for every newborn, infant, and toddler, but as an adult the only influence possible with the sovereign superstructure is to vote every four or five years from very limited choices which are pre-determined by the superstructure itself. That negligible possibility of influence does not apply to all people, however. A gross misrepresentation of sacredness has been exploited to render masses of people compliant to external forces, to render people controllable, because in addition to the cultural mechanisms to perpetuate the child-orientation there are social factions with special advantages in profiting from the mass psychological/ emotional manipulation those mechanisms enable, factions which are fixated on the rewards of maintaining and perfecting that manipulation. There are factions of any politico-economic system which know how to influence and profit from the superstructure, and they use it as a Wizard (of Oz) avatar, working the levers and mechanisms that play out the persona of transcendent Parent, the fictitious higher intelligence.

Any arrangement or mechanism that appeals to and exploits the universal pre-conditioning to orient toward an external parent-type of inexplicable intelligence will take on the character of divinity, will become a god avatar, no matter how ordinary it may be in origin and actuality. Pretty much anything can be deified. Monarchies and dictatorships (as well as nominally democratic political parties) build larger-than-life personality cults around the leader, who is undeniably embodied in the ordinary way. They do it by taking advantage of the universal childhood conditioning. The cultural construction of an inexplicable parental intelligence, like the angry father in the sky, attracts emotional projection of parental qualities onto an external force, fixating subordinated people in an emotional mental pattern characteristic of childhood.

The reason to go beyond the imprinted parent is not just political, to avoid parasitic exploitation by parental pretenders, but even more fundamentally philosophical, for basic self-discovery and self-possession.

Legitimacy of Sovereign Superstructures

The way in which superstructures of power formed, now encountered by succeeding generations as “just there”, has been described below in posting 68, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/lines-of-human-parasitism-through-western-civilizations/), in addition to postings 55, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/finishing-the-work-of-the-enlightenment-part-1of-2/) and 56, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/finishing-the-work-of-the-enlightenment-part-2-of-2/). The origin of sovereign superstructures in human-on-human parasitism has determined the behaviour and character of institutional power ever since, and it serves parasitic power well to be accepted as “just there”. Power is never an end in itself, but instead is always a means of reaping the benefits of parasitism on those over whom the power is exercised. (Michel Foucault (1926-84) politely refrained from recognizing parasitism as the purpose and product of power.) The sovereign superstructure protects top-down human-on-human parasitism partly by devoting itself to resisting and controlling bottom-up or petty human parasitism (fighting crime, maintaining “law and order”) which is laudable as far as it supports a degree of public safety and stability. However, in spite of the fact that institutions of mass subordination do their best to insinuate themselves into the semi-blind spot of ordinary habituation to parental influence, a question of ultimate legitimacy must be faced.

Myth of a Social Contract

In spite of the fact that sovereign institutions are just there for most citizens, there are theorists, such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who claim that citizens agreed to this, that there is (or was at some point) a contract or agreement among citizens to create sovereign power, and by that agreement citizens gave up some liberty and autonomy for the stability and security which a sovereign power imposes on everybody. (On Hobbes’ view the sovereign is not a party to the contract, which would disqualify the social contract as instituting the rule of law. While claiming to champion the rule of law, sovereign governments routinely evade and violate their own laws, interpreting the social contract as Hobbes did.) Hobbes was specifically trying to remove the obscurity of supernatural foundations from sovereign power.

The basic mistake made by Hobbes was thinking entirely within the culture of reverence for the imprinted parent, and specifically within the version of that culture based on alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, which originated with ancient nomadic herding groups and became the universal ideal of masculinity. That is the cultural source and origin of the whole edifice of sovereignty. Political power structures and theories have always been cooked up among male-only clubs of the most privileged, and those structures and theories always project the ethos of alpha-trophy-looting herder masculinity by celebrating some (supposedly obvious) inherent alpha-male right to rule, in other words, superiority to (and fear of) women and other unprivileged groups. Hobbes believed that creating a super-father is the only way to avoid a war of all against all, which he imagined as the pre-contract course of nature. In that faith there is a sort of Confucian myth of the divinely ordained transcendence of father-power. That is how Hobbes smuggled false transcendence into his justification (sanctification) of sovereign power. There is a set of assumptions about how the new father-sovereign would behave: something like a good aristocratic father, imposing order through rational fear of the father’s violence. However, the proposal to designate a great parent wouldn’t even make sense without the childhood habituation to the external “sovereign” intelligence of parents, the primordial model of external transcendence. In addition, for Hobbes, the social contract institutes Leviathan, the superhuman collective, the super-family, that also has the presence of transcendent necessity since is supposedly expresses the same nature as the common family. According to Hobbes, just as nature and human (male) nature decree an original war of all against all, so also the seam of rationality in human nature decrees agreement to the social contract and so the cultural construction of Leviathan as the only relief from eternal war (a clearly failed promise). Hobbes’ theory claims to identify sovereignty as the product of a co-ordinated act of multiple rational intelligences. However, Hobbes shared the restricted concept of rationality that was becoming current in his time, in which rationality was just an alignment of a basic animal drive for self-preservation or self-interest with the necessities of nature, in this case the supposedly natural consequences of father-power.

What Hobbes failed to recognize or imagine is the fact that there is another generally known approach to human interconnectedness, namely from within the feminine culture of intense personal engagement with newborns, infants, and toddlers for the project of initiating them into the connection of intelligences through language, shared culture, caring, and nurture generally; in other words, the first-language-nurture worldview generally cultivated by women. From that alternative state of nature the interconnectedness develops without the social contract or a super-father. The fact that women carry on with their nurture culture is what actually accounts for the stability of human interconnectedness. Sovereignty is not the source of that stability. Language and mutual support create for intelligences the opportunity to experience more of the best of values, namely intelligence itself.

The Norms Fallacy

When philosophers (pragmatists and utilitarians, for example) talk about an indispensable framework of community norms, it is difficult for them to be quite specific and historically accurate about the meaning or referent of “community” or “civil society”. There is no recognition in their claims that the actions of states in conducting wars (often clandestine), for example, and actions of corporations in looting the earth’s natural resources, express a crime-family ethos that extends back historically to nomadic animal herders and from there forward into universally celebrated ideals of masculinity, modelled most conspicuous in parasitic aristocracies of medieval societies (armed men on horses) which invented and imposed the forms of organization now called “sovereign government” and “corporations”, as ways of institutionalizing subordination through the universally imprinted parent. That crime family ethos is intrinsically and irredeemably parasitic on subordinated humans and, since it expresses the cultural norms of the social faction which directly influences the actions of national governments and their covert agencies, armed forces, and police, it stands as a clear revelation that there is no coherent system of community norms. The routine use of deception and violence by national governments and corporations is completely contrary to norms and values respected and considered definitive of decency by the mass of wage-dependant families, but is entirely representative of the crime family ethos which animates ownership/ governing classes. In clear contradiction of ideas about a social contract, there is actually a semi-stable system of human-on-human parasitism, kept operating by strenuous and increasingly scientific and technological efforts at behaviour and thought control by the beneficiary factions, which is obviously not a decent or dependable foundation for anyone’s values or standards of truth. In that situation of effective manipulation and pacification of host classes by parasitic classes anything like a social contract would be strictly tactical (deceptive) in an adversarial sense.

In pre-modern cultures, after the general diffusion of the culture of herder masculinity, everything was ascribed ultimately to the will of patriarchal gods, to divine involvement; whereas in modern cultures everything is ascribed to nature as an unalterable nexus of causal chains, but the old assumptions of divine involvement are so ingrained in the culture that they are still called on for the sanctification of power, and even lurk within the scientific conception of nature. In the modern world of nearly-nihilism, strictly utilitarian economic incentives and rewards are the everyday “front window” justifications for superstructures of sovereign power and authority (“peace, order, and good government”). Appeals to transcendent justifications are not normally made up-front, but they are always held in reserve for times when emotions run high in the collective. Nature is now just as much an externalized projection of parental super-intelligence as gods have always been.

Nature Takes its Inevitable Course

One of the justifications of capitalism as well as of sovereign superstructures is the claim that this is just the normal course of nature with a minimum of rational tweaking to reduce nature’s more abhorrent forms of brutality. However, that claim expresses the view of a particular cultural faction, specifically the faction of herder masculinity. The alpha-trophy-looting culture of that cowboy masculinity claims the exclusive distinction of authentically expressing nature, but that claim is a ridiculous bias. The female cultivated culture of first-language-nurture has every bit as legitimate a claim to express nature (and a greater claim to intelligence), and points toward a social organization much different from capitalism. The claim, that the capitalist politico-economic system efficiently provides the best possible life to those who deserve and earn it, depends on a claim that the superstructure of sovereign government, as well as corporate operations, are just (immutable, unalterable) nature taking its course. There is a claim of scientific necessity for their just being there, too immutable and gigantic to be resisted or re-conceived. “Just there” is a version of “it’s just nature running its course”.

There is always an unspecified suggestion of Intelligent Design in such appeals to nature and history, and behind every Intelligent Design there is an implied super-intelligent Designer, if not overtly a separate disembodied divinity then a spirit manifested through inspired geniuses, so inexplicable as to be incomprehensible by ordinary people, and so adding up to divinity. The apparatus of state sovereignty claims to represent design in history: the great unthinkable Parent was erected by forces including inspired statesmen and brave military heroes, sanctified by the blood of sacrificed soldiers, and rationalized by rigorous science, scholarly research, and tried-and-true business know-how.

Nature and Intelligences: Beyond Nature’s Parental Embrace

Arguments of the form, “this social arrangement is just part of nature running its inevitable course” all crash against the recognition that social arrangements are creations of intelligences, and intelligences in every case operate outside the course of nature. That is to say, intelligences transcend nature. Intelligences can’t be part of nature because nature consists of strict actualities, the totality of the categorically actual (being), but we intelligences orient and define ourselves (live our lives) in a structure of time (becoming) which is a fabric of non-actuality, almost entirely beyond what is actual; for example, constructing a directionality always exiting a non-actual past and with a heading or bearing structured in terms of increasingly improbable possibilities for a non-actual future. It isn’t that intelligences just make imperfect wild guesses at things that really exist in some actuality, because past and future really have no actual existence. They are creations of intelligences. That orientation-complex of non-actuality defines “the interiority of an intelligence” outside the actuality of nature, and it is a unique creation by every individual intelligence. There is no requirement for, or benefit from, postulating some separate initiating or originating super-intelligence behind or beyond individuals.

Before anyone has a gender or becomes a child of a certain religion, language, family, landscape, or nationality, before any of that, he or she is already a particular intelligence, and those other features are just variables in the situation of that intelligence. The ground on which to stand to judge culture of any kind, and so masculinity, is the innocence of intelligence-as-such, deep underneath gender culture.

Because of the dominance of outward-gazing science in modern culture, contemporary people have difficulty with the idea that intelligences are outside nature, each an individual interiority which transcends nature. Apparently it is comforting for contemporary people, in the current culture of nearly-nihilism, to imagine belonging within the embrace of cosmic nature. However, recognition of the remarkable freedom of intelligences requires recognition that intelligences are separate from nature. Nature has become the great unthinkable parent and it is urgent to recognize that intelligences operate beyond its deterministic embrace. Only when we stop looking outward for validation, even from nature, can we recognize our innocent inward identity as transcendent freedom in self-created time, and begin re-creating our precious interconnectedness beyond the imprinted parent-forms that are being abused by factions expressing a culture of human parasitism.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

 

The Zombie Apocalypse in the Rearview Mirror

04 Saturday May 2013

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Something as catastrophic as, and quite analogous to, a zombie apocalypse happened a long time ago, and not just once but in many historical times and places. The enduring effect of those catastrophes is that individuals are culture-bound into conventional zombie shells of collective and personal identity, and as such, shut out from our own elemental transcendence as intelligences. That is why philosophical thinking exists and has a purpose.

What the celebrated French academic Michel Foucault (1926-84) got right is that knowledge, culture-derived knowledge, is riddled with covert legitimations of a social structure of power inequality. For whatever reason, Foucault did not recognize that the structure of power inequality is a structure of human-on-human parasitism, and that its parasitism renders all legitimations of the power structure false and deceptive. The social and cultural entrenchment of that structure of parasitic power inequality was the zombie apocalypse relevant here, the legitimation of which has poisoned human cultures by forcing externally controllable identity definitions (zombie shells) on everyone, identities which are all embedded as rankings in the hierarchy of benefits from parasitic power.

Philosophy is Happy Thought (Seriously)

Political reality in this post-zombie-apocalypse world of entrenched human parasitism is undeniably grim and violent, and improvements such as ending war, for example, seem pretty hopeless. There would have to be some seriously profound and unexpected circumstances, something really surprising, to inspire happiness and hope in the face of knowing the nasty truth of political power. Well, it happens that there is: the happy thought is intelligence, individual intelligence. Intelligence isn’t best represented by abstract operations such as deductive logic, mathematics, or the memorization of long texts, but more by, for example, enjoying music. Music is a presentation or performance of sound patterns that can be represented mathematically but which engage intelligence sensually and pre-symbolically, make immediate sense to an intelligence, and yet have no coherence, sense, or shape without being experienced by an intelligence. (Luca Turin argues conclusively that perfume also works by appealing directly to intelligence.) This is the sense in which intelligence is the political happy thought. The political happy thought is not special intelligence, but ordinary personal subjective intelligence.

The big happy thought to launch against the grim realities of politics is the same as it was in the historical Enlightenment era: individual intelligence, with something like Greek-style humanist philosophy as a rough guide to recognizing the elemental reality in which intelligence plays. It is worth emphasizing that the philosophical happy thought is not a theory or an ideology itself but instead a certain personal re-orientation to elemental reality. Philosophical writing is meant only as a guide to self-recognition as an intelligence (as a sort of mirror for something which has no appearance and is not a thing), to self-recognition as an intelligence even though you prefer listening to music to working on math or logic problems. Holding such a mirror is pointless unless it works to uncover the invisible self, and then the mirror becomes unnecessary. It turns out that elemental reality, beyond the reality-distorting force-fields of cultures which are poisoned by legitimations of human parasitism, has many surprises.

The Particularity of Personal Intelligences

Intelligence, elemental intelligence, innocent intelligence, is not featureless or profoundly opaque. For Plato, for example, every intelligence had some particular proportions of three inalienable aspects: acquisitive appetite; competitive spirit or ambition; and abstract, mathematical rationality or reflective contemplation. Plato’s conception of intelligence is not ridiculous (good of me), but it contains a fatal problem (to be specified below) because it was conceived in the context of accounting for the hierarchical class divisions in the society of ancient Greece, a slave-labour based society. Waves of the zombie apocalypse were already in the rear-view mirror of Plato’s time and its legitimations were already well entrenched.

Notwithstanding Plato, an all-at-once unity of the following experiences, cannot be separated from any intelligence:
Being located in relentlessly dislocating time, in a particular embodied life in time, within constructs of a non-actual past and an increasingly improbable future;
Curiosity;
Doubt and questioning of future, past, present;
Striving to project particular personal aspirations onto present and future actuality (acting on curiosity, for example);
Striving to enjoy the powers and sensitivities of intelligence, to remember and recognize patterns in an increasingly remote past, to think into the increasingly improbable future, to play, to imitate, and to engage with the directional force or orientation of other intelligences (in part by imitation and play);
Striving to make a distinctively personal mark on the world, make some of it a belonging, personal, a home;
Striving to enjoy the powers and sensitivities of embodiment, to taste, feel, and grip the world, to feed on it, to pass through the world.

That’s a lot of pre-cultural or innocent particularity of position, force, and quality or character, enough for a pre-cultural personal identity, and enough to enable a critique of culture from outside culture. Consciousness is no crystalline simplicity of openness or reflection, but instead is always constructed from an increasingly remote past and an increasingly improbable future. As such, it is always a construct of temporal non-actuality by an intelligence. Behind Plato’s three part soul stands a view of time itself as a realm of illusion, with reality reserved for what is eternal and outside time. However, Plato admitted mind into eternity through mind’s contemplative power, and in doing so makes his position incoherent, since intelligence and time are inseparable. If Plato means “intelligence” by the ancient Greek expression he used for mind, then he had passed into self-contradiction.

A big surprise is that, because of intelligences, there is such a thing as creative non-actuality (which science cannot even conceive) in an elemental relationship with the widely celebrated actuality of measurable nature. Personal orientation is a fabric of non-actuality and since there are individually distinctive and creative features in orientation (such as personal aspirations for a future with a particular mutability), every intelligence is a separate universe of non-actual orientation. As an intelligence, you are continuously re-locating yourself within a personal universe of non-actuality locked in an elemental relationship with the strictly exclusive actuality of a continuously dislocating nature. As a creative fountain of non-actuality, actively mutating actuality, you are transcendent with respect to brute pre-determined nature.

External Alienation of Transcendence

The subjective experience of being an intelligence, a fountain of effective non-actuality, is the only evidence there is for transcendence in the whole of cosmic being. The other phenomena sometimes suggested as evidence of transcendence, mathematics, the night sky, beauty, the accumulated knowledge and power of human collectives, are all either artifacts of ordinary embodied intelligences or obvious projections of some impression of intelligence for the purpose of providing an easy explanation for phenomena which are merely not understood and so frightening, a sort of “here be dragons” on unknown regions of old maps. However, the reality of the transcendence of ordinary intelligence is almost universally contradicted by cultural traditions preserving a social structure of parasitic power inequality, and it is not difficult to think why.

The two main clusters of distortions-of-reality in this, namely false transcendence in personifications of abstract legal fictions (school spirit, national spirit, corporate brands) and in fables of disembodied super-intelligences (demons, ghosts, and gods), are projections of the basic fable of parasitic masculinity. Both are primarily externalizations of (and as such reality-denying alienations of) transcendence. Carriers and practitioners of the culture of alpha-trophy-looting masculinity find subjectivity too indeterminate, too ephemeral, too private for the purpose of establishing alpha-status and justifying a chain of servitude, and so unworkable as a foundation for competitive personal identity definition. It’s also too equal from one person to another, or at least it’s indeterminacy makes it possible that it might be equal from person to person, and so, again, personal intelligence is ineffective as a public marker of victory or other trophy accomplishments. From within the logic of competitive masculinity, transcendence must be external to individuals so that it can be the ultimate un-equalizer, consecrating every conquest, every victory, every trophy. As the ultimate ground of inequality, externalized transcendence is perfectly depicted as a disembodied version of the powerful, mysterious, and capricious father, inspiring terror in everyone. Being masters of the ground by virtue of force and the wealth that parasitic force accumulates, practitioners of the warped ideal of parasitic masculinity are in a position to dictate cultural practices, to decree a cultural submission to fables of the frightening father in the sky, for example. That is how the real transcendence of individual intelligences is buried and hidden under layers of cultural conventions, traditions, practices, and things people always say and teach to children.

There is nothing necessary about that cultural ideal of masculinity. It comes from a particular, very marginal, historical origin, the cowboy culture of animal herding on semi-barren wastelands. What only feminist writers and the feminist movement more generally got right (what women know in their bones) is that gender culture is the heart of profound injustices in human social systems.

Externalized transcendence in all forms is an example of the large body of culturally imposed fables and false values that result from alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, all of which can be cleared away by anyone’s thinking, cleared away to disclose the elemental situation of intelligence. The two top-down ideologies of modern power inequality, plutocratic predator-prey theory and business/ professional ‘meritocracy of economic atoms’ theory, are both just different presentations of the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity. Predators are economic atoms understood in a simplified-to-bare-bones context. In thinking the elemental situation of intelligence, clear away all the disembodied spirits, the demons, ghosts, guardian angels, collective spirits of peoples, states, tribes, teams, and all such personified abstractions, leaving individual intelligences, in the relationships they build as intelligences, to engage with nature in creating sustainable and gratifying lives.

The way to deal with the myriad of different cultures is not to respect every one equally, but to reject every one equally, at least to the extent that they impose non-transcendent identities onto individuals, or grant individuals a second class, derivative sort of transcendence. We don’t want another French Revolution (which obviously didn’t succeed), but rather an event that reverses the zombie apocalypse, that voids the distortions of reality imposed by poisoned cultures, something more like the historical Enlightenment. The European historical movement known as the Enlightenment is especially interesting because it connected personal or subjective changes of orientation with cultural and political arrangements in European society, and did so in such a way that individual initiatives of the former kind formed a foundation for profound renovations of the latter.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Cartesian First Philosophy and The Elemental Hazmat Suit

21 Thursday Mar 2013

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Recognition of a pervasively poisoned culture calls for a recapitulation of the journey pioneered most famously by Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650), who was forced by rigorous skepticism to reach the elemental thought that could not be doubted: “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” He was brought, in other words, to the interiority of his own intelligence as a secure grounding of reality, and from there undertook to re-think back outward by searching for other elemental features of experience. In the course of the meditations posted on this blog, we also have been driven back to subjective interiority, but via a different route from Descartes’. With Descartes it was systematic doubt about what can be known with certainty. A century earlier, Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) had been similarly forced, by the uncertainty, unprovability, of the claims of Christianity, onto the grounding of “justification by faith alone”. “I am thinking, therefore I exist” has crucial common ground with “justification by faith alone”. Both Luther and Descartes were making a fundamental appeal to the interiority of personal intelligence in a humanistic affirmation of its power. (Calvin, by contrast was anti-humanist in the tradition of Augustine, completely denying the power of the individual.) Luther created massive cultural turmoil throughout Europe, and the tendency of his thinking was certainly known by Descartes, which makes direct inspiration very probable.

However, right here and now we are forced back to the interiority of intelligence as bedrock through a process of cultural analysis of the historical and political situation of every individual, revealing that our ambient culture is pervasively poisoned by legacies of legitimized top-down human-on-human parasitism, distorting the whole cultural discourse of reality in which we operate. Instead of searching for certainty, as Descartes and Luther were, we are searching for something un-poisoned by ambient culture, reality undistorted by culture, namely elemental experiences of innocence.

Itemizing the Parasitic Legacy

There are a number of layers and features to the cultural legacy of top-down human-on-human parasitism, each of which must be counteracted one by one by powers of innocent or elemental intelligence.

There is the predator-prey alpha-trophy-looting cultural worldview of the capitalist ownership oligarchy. The culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism is sometimes misleadingly called “the class war”, conceived by the ownership class as the harvesting of prey by predators, all ordained and sanctified by God or nature.

There is the liberal ideology (mind-set of the business/ professional/ liberal class) that individuals are economic atoms, determined by nature to jockey for a place in the hierarchical structure of a meritocracy molecule, individually value-identified by the results of competitions, often team or group competitions. (The meritocracy is a food chain of ever more concentrated parasitism preying on ever increasing subordinate layers.)

Inseparable from both ideologies just mentioned, there is a general cultural emphasis on radical inequality, hierarchical organization throughout the economic system, for example. Culturally institutionalized inequality is always inherently parasitic, always includes top-down parasitism. Competitions, and assignments of personal identity based on them, are mechanisms for justifying parasitism.

There is the dominant culture of ideals of masculinity: alpha-trophy-looting. Part of that culture is a requirement to trivialize and denigrate the vital importance of the predominant culture of femininity, the first-language-nurture culture which is actually the source of stability in the human interconnectedness. In other words, the gender culture war is another legacy of efforts to legitimize and normalize top-down human-on-human parasitism.

There is also patriarchal religion, including the father-figure personification of abstractions, the attribution of disembodied super-intelligences to inappropriate entities such as nation-states, tribes, teams, and collectives of all kinds, the cosmos, a creator of the cosmos. Emotional attachments to fictions and falsehoods are created from such cultural systems, and those attachments are used to justify the enslaving bloodbaths of war.

There is the military-terroristic institutional mechanisms for declaring, exercising, and projecting sovereign power: lethal weapons held in hair-trigger readiness by rigidly organized formations of people drilled in subordination. The very idea of sovereign power is legitimized parasitism, and war is its ultimate exercise. War is an ultimate slavery because it is legitimized by appeal to supra-individual abstractions, the sacredness of which is enforced by law. Nation states are defined by organization for war.

The consequences of the economic, political, and social dominance of groups who reap benefits from parasitism include other cultural distortions of reality, such as the externalization of transcendence. There is a cultural glorification of economic activity and a trivializing, obscuring, and marginalizing of the interiority of individual intelligence, especially in the definition of personal identity.

There are the everyday concepts of inequality, executive power and privilege, organizational hierarchy, property ownership, capital concentration, sovereignty, employment, civilization, …, many of the concepts that link ordinary language to culturally determined social practices and forms of life, and to individual identity-definition.

Language is full of legitimations of top-down parasitism. Sidestepping those prejudices requires thinking elementally, thinking without language. Intelligence has a thinking “voice” prior to language. The primal, elemental, innocent voice is the sustained developing directionality of personal curiosity, pre-linguistic questioning, and the impulses that express it.

Cultural Identity vs Elemental Identity
(Sloughing off the distorted reality of parasite culture)

Anyone interested in undistorted reality, living in freedom, must sidestep the legitimizing propaganda of the parasites, streaming from the brain trusts of the owning/ controlling class and the liberal mediating class, but also built into enduring social practices and languages. By identifying those poisonous cultural influences, and rejecting them as references for defining personal identity, we follow Descartes to elemental and innocent experience. In the effort to slough off the distorted reality of parasite culture, the portal out is to personally re-orient by reference to the most fundamental elements of experience. The elements to live among in this project are not earth, air, fire, and water, nor the periodic table of elements, since neither of those is capable of comprehending time. Freedom and time are inseparable and also elemental for personal identity, for living life as a person. In that sense of elements, time is elemental, and so is the embodiment of intelligence as experienced in work.

The personal identities assigned by ambient society (tinker, tailor, soldier, beggar-man) are all imbued with the cultural poisons of top-down parasitism, and consequently are distorted and false identities. At the same time as imposing limits on, and sucking value and vitality from, every individual’s creativity, the poisoned culture alienates every individual from transcendence by restricting definitions of personal identity to the individual’s placements in tests and competitions which are externally controlled. Titles, height on the hierarchical organization chart (pay scale, credit for the work of subordinates), and material acquisitions are trophies from the competitions set within the propaganda streams of the parasites. Identities assigned by culture should be reframed as pre-scripted characters that people are induced to play by external incentives such as seniority (power) on the food chain of parasitism. Personal identity can, instead, be reclaimed in terms of the powers and transcendence of personal interiority.

Freedom and Time are Elemental

In sloughing off the poisoned culture, what we find as the innocent remainder is the interiority of time, time as a construct of the freedom of intelligence. Freedom exists only at the level of individual intelligence. (Posting 54, February 6, 2013, Freedom and Time) Time is crucial with respect to freedom. Past and future do not exist in nature. All there is to nature is the strictly exclusive actuality of an infinitesimal present. Time as complex structures of a different past aligning with a different future is entirely a feature of the interiority of particular lives, of individual intelligences, each surviving by projecting creative aspirations constantly onto the mutability of their future. Interior to every intelligence is a gushing horizon of pre-linguistic, pre-cultural, (innocent) inspiration, curiosity, and questioning. Freedom (transcending unfree nature) is in the mutability of an individual’s future under the force of inspiration, curiosity, and questioning from that interior horizon. Freedom depends entirely on a person’s self-adjusting his or her orientation by means of judgments of the probabilities of various events and developments in future time, judgments of a variety of personal powers and possibilities, and judgments of the means for projecting aspirations onto actuality now and in the increasingly remote and improbable future. There can be no freedom of nature since nature lacks the past and future of intelligence. Every human intelligence is, therefore, an autonomous interiority of orientation in time, crucially discontinuous from nature and pre-existing culture. Time is also part of the primordial or elemental connection between an intelligence and nature. The relentless approach of futurity and receding of accomplishments is one of those hard resistances by which we know nature, and yet past and future do not exist in nature.

Elemental Flash

Every adventure is some form of encounter with elements, and here, where transcendent freedom in time is elemental, we find an ultimate adventure. The adventure of elemental living emerges from recognizing just how much of what seems like a crystalline openness of perception to determining forces from nature and culture is instead interior to personal being-as-intelligence, a construct of subjective interiority, over which you can have a great deal of creative control, but which is also manipulated and stealthily influenced (often trivialized and dismissed) by (poisoned) ambient culture. You accept that you are seeing nature move but you aren’t. Your intelligence is re-orienting on the basis of accumulating memories (of events that do not exist in nature), in anticipation of a future which exists nowhere in nature. Time as movement must be interior because past and future cannot exist in nature. That sense of perceiving movement is, instead, an experience of the creative interiority of your intelligence. It is the feeling of the force of your intelligence re-orienting to the increasing remoteness of accomplishments relative to the ongoing projection of aspirations into actuality. Just because you don’t re-orient by discussing everything with yourself in language, does not mean the process is completely determined by outside forces, or that it is opaque.

One thing that makes this adventure very different from Descartes’ is the outcome. Descartes was able to perform some mental gymnastics that assured him he had no reason to doubt everything in the first place, because God just wouldn’t be that twisted. However, that comfort zone is out of bounds for us. We can’t just make the adventure go away as Descartes did. Nothing we can deduce from the interiority of intelligence could have as a consequence that our ambient culture is not riddled with legitimized top-down parasitism. It’s rotten luck, but denial has gotten us nowhere. When we turn to the re-entry process and think our way back into the great wide world, we always know that we are venturing into hostile occupied territory, into a world controlled by the culture of the parasites, and that we have to think out strategically how to live a satisfying life there, and how to apply some moral counter-force against the legitimation of parasitism. The adventure of elemental life flashes into focus when you recognize that you are operating in a culture riddled with (false) legitimations of vicious top-down parasitism, laboriously accomplished by large-scale cultural distortions of reality, by “noble lies” (in fact just nasty lies) in common cultural currency; and in addition, when you truly recognize that orientation in time is entirely a construct of your personal intelligence, empowering your transcendent freedom. In learning this landscape of elemental reality it is important to get fundamentals right, such as how much is interior to intelligence, what is nature, and what is culture. It makes a difference to be aware that the freedom and power of interiority is sufficient to construct a personal self-coherence that is an expression of the inner growth of curiosities and questions, and impulses that express them.

The Elemental Hazmat Suit: Interior Identity

To exist safely within a culture that is viciously poisoned by legitimations for top-down human parasitism which normalizes a mass disabling and self-alienation of people, an individual has to construct a kind of mental hazmat suit. Such a hazmat suit is not an ideology, but rather a re-orientation to elemental experiences. The hazmat suit is re-interiorizing reality to include personal freedom as a fragile element, protected by being wary, politically conscious and informed, when venturing into the human interconnectedness. Since language is an important vehicle of the poisoned culture, the only way to get deeper than the prejudices embedded in language is to think without language, with elemental or innocent thinking. Intelligence, the engine of freedom, recognized as personal identity, is the hazmat suit.

Any claim that there is nothing interior to intelligence, that intelligence must always construct a fable of interiority from consciousness of objects which are entirely external to it, including the norms of ambient social practice, overlooks much of experience, and specifically parts which are politically grounding. (Please see posting 48, December 19, 2012, Rethinking Stoic Interiority and the postings immediately following it.) When you recognize that your identity is a particularly situated freedom, and a particularly empowered freedom, then you can sense the abuse there is in anyone’s identifying you in other ways, especially in externalizing ways which trivialize, marginalize, or deny personal freedom. The interior identity is freedom (intelligence) judging the navigation of time in a person’s particular situation of life. However, freedom is not a finished or determinate entity.

An intelligence is more like a voice than like a face, shaped through time rather then in space. Objects which are shaped and extended in space, and as such have an appearance, can display their image, a distinct force of presence, in a flash. Without an appearance, intelligence has to intentionally construct itself by exercising agency through a lifetime. The shape that a voice inscribes through time has to be assembled from memory by other intelligences. It exists nowhere in nature since nature is limited to the timeless actuality of the instant. Since intelligence has no flash-image as a bounded, continuous, and exclusive entity, it is vulnerable to acute self-uncertainty within a world of things which have appearances. Ever since the ancient Greek sage Heraclitus of Ephesus, who is famously quoted as saying of his thinking “I have searched myself”, a recurring intent in the personal use of thinking has been discovery of, or encounter with, the self-who-has-no-appearance, subjective questioning and intent in-the-blind-spot of day to day activity. When Heraclitus went searching within himself he found a river which was always different from one moment to the next. A river is a force and a voice. (From posting 17, January 20, 2012, No Stinking Badges (voices vs. political brutality).

An identity based on the interiority of intelligence and its freedom in time has political consequences. It means that there is no need for exterior assignments of identity, no need to identify with personifications of abstract fictions of the kind imposed by patriarchal religion, including the attribution of disembodied father-figure super-intelligences to inappropriate entities such as nation-states, tribes, teams, or factional collectives of any kinds, the cosmos, a creator of the cosmos. Your elemental identity excludes such things and all the emotional attachments to fictions and falsehoods they require. In addition, there is no need for identity based on competitions. As such, the intrinsic freedom of intelligence is an effective shield against the predator/ prey propaganda stream of the oligarchy, and against the meritocracy propaganda of the business/ professional mediating class. It opens a personal situation appropriate for the adventure of living consciously in a poisoned culture, for approaching culture with political consciousness.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 2 of 2)

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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Enlightenment Rationalism in Perspective

The rationalism of the Enlightenment is sometimes blamed for major problems of modernity such as the militaristic organization of the economy, an inhumane corporate obsession with efficiency, environmental destruction arising from alienation of human-kind from nature, and the subversion of democracy by corporate interests. Nietzsche (no fan of democracy) blamed ‘the academic voice’ (a rational style of discourse he traced back to Socrates) for sucking the fun and vitality out of life. Such charges are false and ill founded. What is really sucking vitality and causing the destruction of the planet is the cultural poison of legitimized top-down parasitism that derives from a very particular historical source. In modernity the profit-collecting class is exercising industrial scale parasitism on the whole planet.

Back to The Revolution

The attack of radical rationalists against the legitimacy of totalitarian Christian supervision of society was so effective in the long run that by the time of the French Revolution of 1789 the sovereign power structure in France had been effectively discredited in the popular mind by the spread of rationalist ideas. That was a main event in the slow historical spiral of revolt by which Christendom withered and Modernity emerged, and it was effective enough to enable the Revolution. The Revolution reveals profound hostility toward the crime-family aristocracy in addition to the Church, and also shows acute consciousness of the culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism, misleadingly called “the class war”. However, that consciousness and hostility was strongest among the rural/ agricultural proletariat and not so much among the educated urban commercial and professional classes who also had substantial involvement in the Revolution and in the eventual restoration of civic order. Those urban classes wanted to emulate and benefit from certain features of the crime-family success story, and so they complained about specific practices only, for example, about trade monopolies or prejudicial taxes and fees which they found too restrictive for their aspirations. There was never a penetrating and sustained historical-conceptual critique of aristocratic/ crime-family culture, the parasitic and predatory alpha-trophy-looting culture which was the other foundation of sovereign power in a profound partnership with patriarchal Christianity. That partnership was so profound because both had cultural origins in parasitic nomadic animal herder societies.

The Enlightenment critique of Christian authority succeeded in discrediting the pretensions of both Church and aristocracy to sovereignty by divine appointment, and both of those groups began to wither away, but the military-based institutions by which sovereign power was practiced and projected were enduring models of control which the new rising lot of commercial/ professional crime-families exploited to defend their own legitimacy as effective sovereigns. There are always varieties of crime-families eager to take the places of any that get exposed and put out of business. Since the conceptual foundations of the Old Regime mechanisms or institutions of power were never objects of a thorough discrediting critique, they were simply accepted and conserved on the basis presented by Hobbes, the claim that the only alternative to them was a jungle-like war of all against all. Even Rousseau advised that the institutions of sovereign authority and law should be honoured. Consequently, ‘modernity’ emerged as a period when the culture of power was only partly understood, only partly deconstructed.

Top-Down Political Force on Debate about Crime

One cultural reality-distortion that follows from the uncompleted work of the Enlightenment is that, based on the influence of well-funded right-wing political propaganda, political debate remains silent about, and apparently blind to, top-down human-on-human parasitism at the same time as keeping up a continuous campaign to alarm the public about bottom-up parasitism in the form of petty crimes. There is a connection between the political correctness of never mentioning top-down capitalist power in democracies and the right-wing “tough on crime” alarmism about bottom-up parasitism. The connection is that attention on the political force of capitalist ownership families would risk revealing the top-down human-on-human parasitism of the culture they accept and practice, far more destructive than the kind of crime that is commonly recognized as such. It is a blatant tactic to divert public attention away from the cultural source of intractable criminality. The only real solution to bottom-up crime is the eradication of legitimized top-down parasitism.

Only now, with so much more research into history enabling an identification of top-down human-on-human parasitism (developed from parasitic and predatory animal herding and elaborated into the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity and of uber-masculine crime-families and father-God-in-the-sky religions) as the oppression and malaise at the core of western concepts of sovereignty, executive power, and leadership, can we have a chance to finish the work of the Enlightenment. Now we have to face the fact that the deepest of ancient evil, transmitted culturally, escaped the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Revolution, and still remains in operation at the foundation of our poisoned conceptions of power, hierarchy, social inequality, meritocracy, and sovereignty, for example, not to mention the specific and blatant instances of class, race, and gender parasitism. So the self-justifying culture of the ownership class is only one head of the many-headed cultural legacy of ancient human parasitism. On the bright side, it is still possible to recapitulate the successful strategies of the rationalist Enlightenment, appropriately updated, in marshalling insights into the interiority of individual intelligence. To do that we identify the principles and grounds of our liberating re-orientation.

Vital Knowledge: Documenting the Historical Arc of Top-Down Parasitic Culture

It isn’t necessary to take any particular person’s word for the historical arc of culture. A few books of recent historical research, listed below, make it convincingly clear. What is so inspiring about these works is that the careful and determined accuracy about particular details of events, conditions, and ideas is combined with an equally determined questing and searching for, and recognition of, large scale arcs which are intrinsic to the sense and reality of the details. They create in that way a breathtaking vision, synthesized from masses of observations and pieces of evidence.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, written by Jack Weatherford, Published by Crown (2004), ISBN: 0609610627.

This is about formation of the massive Mongol empire, incorporating China, India, Iran, Mesopotamia, and Russia, conquered by armies of tribal nomadic animal herders who then facilitated the distribution and development of cultural elements that impressed them from the various societies they controlled. It has remarkable insight into social conditions in a completely lawless tribal society, in this case the society of the nomadic people of the Asian steppe. The second half has important insights into the flow of cultural property between China, Persia, and India enabled by the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century. The author’s claim is that this flow also branched off into Europe and created the European renaissance by the fifteenth century. It is a wonderfully un-western view of world history which attempts to restore the credit due to the great Asian civilization which flourished as never before under Mongol administration roughly between 1211 and 1332, ended finally by the great bubonic plague which spread from China to the Atlantic. It is impossible that the thriving of that Asian civilization would not have drawn the admiration and imitation of western Europe. Marco Polo is an individual instance of the cultural diffusion into Europe.

1215: The Year of Magna Carta, written by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham, Published byTouchstone (2005), ISBN-10: 0743257782, ISBN-13: 978-0743257787.

An illuminating glimpse of life in Europe at an important moment in the development of law. At that moment it was perfectly clear that the social layer made up of the landowning aristocracy or nobility was nothing other than crime-families.

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (2002), ISBN: 0199254567.

This is packed with information about the Enlightenment and readable through the whole 720 pages. Quite a writing accomplishment, among other things.

The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I: The Complete Text, written by Alexis de Tocqueville, edited and with an Introduction and critical apparatus by Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio, translated by Alan S. Kahan, Published by University of Chicago Press (2004), ISBN: 0226805301 (0-226-80530-1).

This is a fascinating follow-up to Radical Enlightenment because it documents the political consequences of what the Enlightenment movement of ideas had accomplished.

A History of Western Political Thought, written by J. S. McClelland, Published by Routledge (1996), ISBN-10: 0415119626, ISBN-13: 978-0415119627.

The first four historical studies listed just above provide a perspective from which to interpret this stunning overview of political theory. It is striking that, in spite of the philosophical effort to remove demons from descriptions of nature, the main effort of political theory has been to justify something very close to the familiar structure of power at the time and place the theory was being written, almost as if “to justify the ways of God to man”! It was probably that sort of observation that persuaded Karl Marx that economic conditions determine ideas. However, the point it illustrates is that the parasitism that is familiar and in power over a stable human collective is very difficult to think about and to identify for what it is. Watch for discussions of the iron law of oligarchy. Also watch for the discussion of: “embourgeoisment” (pp. 655-657). Enjoy.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Finishing the Work of the Enlightenment (Part 1of 2)

14 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Hierarchy, Narrative, Political Power

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The Philosophical Tradition of Cultural Detox

The projects of ancient philosophy included removal of demons, spirits, and gods from descriptions of nature, in other words, removal of a certain kind of cultural poison that disabled the full power of individual thinking. For the Hellenistic Epicureans, for example, the cultural poison that included belief in various gods resulted in unnecessary anguish, worry, pain, and unhappiness. Roughly 1700 years after the Epicurean movement flourished, the work of the European cultural movement known as the Enlightenment continued that tradition. The work of the Enlightenment was to remove similar poisons which were being used to legitimize the exercise of sovereign power to stifle freedom of thought, for example, by the burning alive of the philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1600 in Rome.

Considering subjective interiority in the context of politics, the Enlightenment stands as an historical precedent for the effectiveness of that interiority against the propaganda of a crime-family oligarchy. During the European “radical Enlightenment” (roughly 1650-1750), and to a lesser extend earlier, during the Renaissance, philosophical humanists made an appeal to “innate rationality” which empowered every individual to question, and to understand the fallacies of, religious superstitions enshrined in Christianity, the religion that legitimized and even sanctified brutal sovereign power. The work of the Enlightenment was to remove cultural justifications for top-down human-on-human parasitism (a concept of life inherited from nomadic animal herders) from Old Regime European culture, and indeed some cultural poison, involved with the sovereignty of the Church as messenger of God, was discredited, a verifiable instance of progress in history.

During the Old Regime (the period of European history between the Renaissance and the French Revolution of 1789) the oligarchy of a crime-family class was quite overt, explicit, and widely acknowledged, but the ideology used to legitimize the powers, privileges, and immunities of that aristocracy had become Christianized. The oligarchy was assumed to have been somewhat tamed and sanitized by its traditional association with organized Christianity, which formed the mediating class of pre-modern European culture. Ultimate justification for sovereignty came from the Christian God’s active engagement in the world, as proclaimed and celebrated constantly by the pervasive organization of the Church. With Machiavelli’s political philosophy (please see posting 46, December 7, 2012, Machiavelli’s Prince) it was recommended that the Renaissance should include a kind of crime-family coup against the senior supervisory authority of the Church. The crime-family aristocracy judged that it had established itself as pack leader on the ground sufficiently to do without the senior partnership of the Church, a judgment bolstered by their claim to create ordered civilization merely by their effective monopoly of armed violence (also made explicit and provided with ideological support by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)). Aristocracy considered social order itself to be their independent claim to be agents of God. However, in spite of that claim to independent legitimacy as sovereign controllers, it turned out that they could not do without some claim of divine intervention in their dominance over others, and the Church still owned the patents on divine will in the popular mind.

The conduct of aristocracy was nasty enough to alienate a lot of people, and when they had to justify their dominance, their strongest claim was always that the whole of existing reality was ordained by God, and the Church could hardly do anything but support that. Consequently, when the carriers of humanist philosophy in the Republic of Letters launched their critique of sovereign ideology, it was specifically religious ideology that was their focus. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1670, was an inspirational event of that movement. The struggle went on long before and after the period 1650-1750, and it eventually succeeded, largely, in de-throning the claims of Church officials and aristocrats to be messengers of God in their disempowerment and exploitation of ordinary individuals.

From a broader point of view, however, that whole effort was only half the battle, because the cultural basis of the strictly aristocratic “half” of medieval oligarchy, the culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism, a concept of life derived from nomadic animal herders, was never identified as part of the fundamental oppression in the organizational culture of western civilization, and the real malaise of the west. Hobbes’ view of the social contract (an important model for Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)) was very much myth instead of history, an over-rationalized and sanitized narrative to account for the existing institutions of civic order, including law and private property. Neither Hobbes nor Rousseau knew, nor could have known, history in enough accurate detail to trace the actual derivation of sovereign power. The parasitism of nomadic herder culture, and its legacy in the culture of crime-families, was not mentioned or considered by either of them. Hobbes, as a courtier, was thinking from a comfortable position inside the privileges enjoyed by sovereign power. Rousseau, in thinking that common people had been tricked into giving up their rights for the social contract, was wrongly assuming that people had surrendered their rights and now had no alternative but to accept the instituted structure of power. At least Rousseau sensed that injustice had been institutionalized, which was an advance beyond Hobbes.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

Freedom and Time

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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De-Legitimizing Human Parasitism

Posting 53, January 31, 2013, The Top-down Culture of Human Parasitism, is a statement of basic political consciousness. It describes the results of a cultural history far more sinister than any mere conspiracy. There is room for optimism, but not in denying or attempting to evade the malaise of the culture or the difficulties for individuals in attempting to live in freedom and justice (equality). Bottom-up human parasitism, petty crime such as theft, has never been legitimized, is always recognized as vicious and criminal. However, top-down parasitism has been completely distorted by the most gifted apologists for oligarchy, distorted into appearing as a contribution to the human community. That is why top-down human parasitism merits special deconstruction and the strongest condemnation. If there were to be a collective institution established to protect the human interconnectedness, its purpose and function must be to disable top-down parasitism, to de-legitimize it, expose the viciousness of its many forms, dismantle it, prevent it from re-emerging. That would be the decisive force for justice, and the necessary focus of any authentic democracy, any institutional and political representation of ordinary people.

Freedom and Time

Political consciousness needs to be combined with consciousness of basic personal interiority, the elemental source of freedom and equality. Since one crucial intent and effect of top-down parasitism is to externalize reality, a required part of any defence is to prevent that with an effort to rebalance, to internalize reality with attention to interior powers, indeed to the transcendent freedom of interiority.

Time is a crucial issue with respect to freedom. Past and future do not exist in nature. All there is to nature is the strictly exclusive actuality of an infinitesimal present. Time as complex structures of a past aligning with future is entirely a feature of the interiority of particular lives, of individual intelligences, each surviving by projecting creative aspirations constantly onto the mutability of their future. Interior to every intelligence is a gushing horizon of pre-linguistic, pre-cultural, (innocent) inspiration, curiosity, and questioning. Freedom (transcending unfree nature) is in the mutability of an individual’s future, under the force of inspiration, curiosity, and questioning from that interior horizon. Freedom depends entirely on a person’s self-adjusting his or her orientation by means of judgments of the probabilities of various events and developments in future time, judgments of a variety of personal powers and possibilities, and judgments of means for projecting aspirations onto actuality in the future. There can be no freedom of nature since nature lacks the past and future of intelligence. Every human intelligence is, therefore, an autonomous interiority of orientation in time, crucially discontinuous from nature and pre-existing culture. This freedom-unfreedom dualism is humanist dualism, basically the same as what is often called “Cartesian dualism”.

Humanist Philosophy is the Assertion that Thinking Matters because Freedom Matters

To say that the poisoned culture of top-down human-on-human parasitism has not pervaded humanist philosophy, is to say that it has not pervaded the experience of freedom available to every individual in his or her own interiority, which is the focus, the subject matter, of humanist philosophy: the freedom of the interiority of intelligence. Philosophy isn’t the source of that freedom, but only a record of recognizing it, a reminder of that recognition. It is also to say that the innate freedom of intelligence is an innocence which is never completely muted by an ambient culture poisoned by legitimized top-down human parasitism. In its innocence, intelligence is always free, and in its freedom, intelligence always transcends the poisoned culture.

Humanist philosophy is thinking about the encounter between freedom and unfreedom. “Interiority” is another word for thinking. The case could be made that philosophy is an effort to understand and practice freedom, and that thinking is the crucial act of freedom. Philosophical humanism is an assertion of the force and utility of individual thinking. If subjectivity or interiority has no innate force or foreseeable effect then thinking can’t be decisive in creating the future and doesn’t matter.

When someone suggests overcoming “Cartesian” dualism, the question that must be posed is this: Does this overcoming of dualism preserve individual freedom or exclude it? It is difficult to conceive an alternative to dualism that does not exclude individual freedom. People who are anti-humanist are, on the face of things, devoted to the idea that individual thinking as such has no original force and doesn’t matter. Thinking as an act of freedom is completely different from thinking as unfreedom (say, passive spectator consciousness). Moreover, such exclusions of individual freedom have been construed as justifications for oligarchic human-on-human parasitism.

There are only two historically familiar ways to evade humanist dualism: materialist monism and idealist monism. Materialist monism is the option illustrated by communism, for example, and is typical of science. On that view, all events are pre-determined by eternal laws of physical nature. In fact, dialectical materialism is an attempt at a science of history in which material laws of nature, including biological (Darwinian/ Freudian) drives, determine, in a dialectical causal chain, the formation of every economic system and institutional state, and drive the formation of ideas and ideologies. Individual thinking is not a force in the historical process, nor in creating personal biographies, in the view of materialist monism.

Idealist monism is illustrated in a philosophical tradition that could be called Fichtean Romanticism, in which the existence of “things in themselves” is denied, and all existence is a vast intelligence (an interiority of non-actuality) or some aspect of intelligence such as will (a will to live, to become self-aware, a drive to reproduce, the will to power). However, on that view, the force of the grand-scale cosmic interiority reduces the force of individual thinking to triviality, to merely a local eruption of cosmic Being, a conduit for messages from a strict singularity such as God or Logos, messages sometimes delivered through specially “chosen” individuals or groups. Again, individual thinking as such is not an effective force in the historical or personal life-building process.

Both of those exclusions of individual freedom are used to legitimize top-down human-on-human parasitism, in support of the poisoned culture, and neither one is any good on the issue of time.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

The Top-down Culture of Human Parasitism

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power, Transcendence

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The history of crime-family culture, especially within classes who live from ownership, cashed out in three important results. The first is perpetual class conflict with a very heavy propaganda effort to justify social inequality and the arrangements which emphasize inequality such as scarcity, competition, and conflict. The message of the propaganda stream from the ownership class is this: The God (or nature) given world is a binary system of predator and prey, and if you are not an effectively practicing predator, you are nothing but prey. That legitimation and glorification of large-scale human-on-human parasitism is the poisoning of culture. The complex of masculine pride in leisure based on control of slave labour, killing, and looting is in it. Cruelty and malevolence are structured into all concepts which link languages to social practices devised in that culture-system. To think and reason with such concepts excludes any possibility of reaching beyond the injustices, distortions of reality, the poisons, they carry and perpetuate.

Camouflaging the full malevolence of crime-family ownership culture is the propaganda stream from the liberal mediating class. The alpha-trophy-looting oligarchy has found it convenient to partner with and shelter in the shadow of a middle class of organized, educated, scribes, who have some credibility as a meritocracy in their control of working classes. (In the European Medieval period the organization of the Roman Church served that function). There is a great effort to present radical inequality as meritocracy, even when it is based on mere heredity and privileged opportunities. Inequality is often justified by appeal to (the “noble” lie of) the inscrutable judgment of God. The message of modern propaganda to the working proletariat from the business and professional mediating class is that you are an economic atom (worker – consumer), motivated, gratified, fulfilled, and controlled by economic incentives and rewards such as the adulation of peers (and tokens of such adulation), from winning competitions.

The second result of the malevolent control culture is gender conflict, specifically a male culture of alpha-trophy-looting values suppressing the natural influence of the ongoing female culture of first-language-nurture, building interconnectedness in the conversation with children. In crime-family culture, acquisition and conflict are respected indexes of personal worth but nurture and empathic interconnection are not. That is a clear exposure of a poisoned culture.

A third effect of the history of crime-family cultural dominance is the radical externalization of “reality” and a corresponding suppression of awareness and exploration of the interiority of intelligence, suppression of the meaning of the interiority of intelligence. That includes enforcement by the dominant crime-family class of a pervasive externalizing orientation both in its propaganda and in material incentives and rewards. The political and social propaganda is produced with an intent to neutralize individuals as creators of our own alternative systems of value, and to use and recruit us into established systems such as military recruitment pools, religions, and labour pools for the economy of scarcity and competition (money) which channel benefits upward. Myths of disembodied intelligences (demons, spirits, gods, ghosts) are used as a technology for training people to look outward for transcendence, and to accept (inappropriately) a family-type emotional bond to collective entities which are neither family nor friend but rather a control mechanism for a malevolent political force.

Varieties of Control

The control achieved by the oligarchy is not only immediate agenda items such as arranging wars, supported by propaganda of various sorts, but the presence of parasite/ predator culture in the very concepts of property, ownership, employer-employee supervisory relations, executive and sovereign power, personal worth, social hierarchy. That is a poisoning of the cultural conceptual system which makes it very difficult to conceive of any other personal or collective way of life. The brutal prejudices of the predatory and parasitic herder life are enshrined in the language and conceptual structure of what we accept as civic society, as well as in journalism, entertainment, and academic research. That is the worst kind of cultural mind control, poisoned culture, difficult to identify as such because it is familiar and almost all pervasive.

However, it is not quite all pervasive, and is recognized in its cruelty in the conversation with children, and in humanist (elemental) philosophy recognizing every individual as a transcendent force of freedom, with a mark to make in building a life, uniquely mutating futurity in doing that. What elemental philosophy has in common with the conversation with children is access to innocence, the only recourse from poisoned culture.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.