Tag Archives: macro-parasitism

Life after Hive-Mind

15 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Why thinking?

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Posting 132, Word Count: 1,454.

It has been asserted as self-evident that individuals need, as part of a general need for felt supervision or authority, a dominant collective attachment, emotional and cognitive identification with the master narrative of a collective entity, something like a home hive, as a crucial element of personal identity and sense of meaning. That assertion is supposed to account for the fact that each modern sovereign state is still, in spite of liberal influences, a personified territorial power demanding reverent patriotic devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedience enforced by an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force. Each state has its edifice of pageantry and symbolism to invoke the unity and sacred grandeur of the collective: flags, monuments, and anthems, oaths and pledges, officials and military officers encrusted with exotic glitter, august regalia and titles; state uniforms and weapons laden with national symbols and emblems; theatrical ceremonies of remembrance and renewal of devotion invoking the sacred and obscure “us against them” mission of the hive, synchronized movements in processions, special word formulas to be spoken in mass unison. Such things are not intended to encourage creative or rational thinking but rather to replace thinking with passive embrace of an orthodox official story line, a standardized hive-mind. The supposed necessity of hive-mind belonging is used routinely to justify nationalist propaganda and censorship.

The Enlightenment idea of human nature as having no intrinsic need for sovereign authority is now an old idea, the real core of liberalism, and it always went against the conservative dogma, from religion, that everyone needs supervision structured within the symbols, pageantry, and authoritative superego of collective solidarity and belonging. The historical endurance of the state as sovereign authority shows that the enrichment of the idea of human nature from the Enlightenment was effectively smothered by that pre-existing culture. That pre-existing culture of authoritative supervision was an entrenchment in institutions of the traditional rights of the father, an overt expression of the principle that the strongest has sovereign rights over everyone else, rights to the property of the weaker, rights to the lives of the weaker, generally the right to be parasitic on the weaker. These cultural assumptions grow from the traditional patriarchal family in which the father is the strongest and women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. The Enlightenment and liberal conception of human nature was murdered in the crib by traditional patriarchal practices, and that is what accounts for the hive-mind efforts of modern states.

It is now clear, however, that there are multitudes of people with very elastic and insubstantial attachments to collective entities. For example, the globalization of capital has fostered an internationally educated and mobile professional and business class. Academics, engineers, medical practitioners, business and financial professionals are all educated in an international context and trained to have a cosmopolitan outlook, quite detached from any specifically national or territorial master narrative which is the normal core of hive-mind. Additionally, the loyalty and national belonging of the investor class generally evaporates instantly upon election of a socialist government, so is always largely a pretence. Yet, these groups and individuals conduct lives they find meaningful. They are not without a cultural framework of orientation, but it is more a culture of trophy property as primary value. A focus on possession of property always includes fear for the security of possession, requires protection by at least the readiness of force, and so includes a culture of reverence for intimidating strength and power, control of taxes, laws, and war, the organization of violence, all still core features of patriarchy. Obviously this property-based cosmopolitan framework still has a stake in maintaining the institutions of nation-state sovereignty, especially police, military, and intelligence agencies, but strictly as service providers, supplemented or replaced by private suppliers when convenient.

The cosmopolitan perspective of these factions shows that there are experiences of gratification, identity, and meaning, which make identification with a national collective completely unnecessary. Gratification from symbols and pageantry of collective identity, embedded in the narrative of national peril and exceptionalism, is not necessary for a meaningful life, as demonstrated by the contented lives of the masses of people with scant engagement with such things. Gratification from property possession is still part of traditional patriarchal culture, inextricably invested in organized force, and by far the most culturally dominant and celebrated gratification experience, but there are others. Nurturing children (or nurturing animals, even plants), socializing them into the linguistic community and having ongoing conversations with them as they develop is inherently gratifying. This nurturing sociability is an independent non-property based source of profound value, meaning, and sense of identity, in fact the most important source for most people, although studiously unrecognized as such. Still another realm of gratification experience is thinking, often in the form of ‘scribal’ ideality. Philosophers have frequently asserted that the greatest human pleasure, the most fun, is thinking. A great deal of human fulfillment is derived from following personal curiosity, learning, reading, writing, and synthesizing ideas, interrogating history and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between subjectivity and subjectivity. This gratification is individually interior, the model of spiritual autonomy, although always with some important relationship with sociability, communication, and human interconnectedness. Yet again, craftsmanship is another source of value experience, expressing and performing creativity, knowledge, and skill in working with tools and materials, actualizing a previously conceived shape in observable objects. There can also be pleasure in experiencing any skillful power of the human body, but assigned donkey work is boring, dirty, sweaty, energy sucking, exhausting and that is why a ‘working’ class does not have an independent culture of value experience, whereas ‘homemakers’, certain kinds of scribes, and craftspeople certainly do.

The culture of property possession as primary value is part of a conception of human nature as a painful emptiness craving to be filled, a sucking pit of needs for definition and gratification from outside itself, a deficiency that grasps for acquisition, consumption, and competition; determined by biological and material laws. However, the importance of gratification from nurturing, from performance of creative craftsmanship, and from scribal ideality clearly refutes the claim that human nature is a consuming emptiness. The ubiquitous practice of nurture shows human nature as a fountain of empathy and compassionate caring. The intrinsic gratification in practicing craftsmanship shows creativity in projecting shapes from personally interior ideality into material actuality. Intellectual activity, a cultivation of ordinary thinking, is a fountain of personal curiosity, questions, directed impulses for relevant exploring, researching, learning, discovering, original conceptualizing, writing, reading, and synthesizing ideas. Every personality is a fountain of such goods, of spontaneous creation of curiosity, questioning, inspiration, and caring, a gusher of impulses to shape the environment and construct interconnections with others. These self-sourced experiences of value are profound enough to build lives upon, and many people do exactly that. In this light, each personality is a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world. This recognition of human nature as self-creating from interior ideality eliminates the primacy of competition and conflict, as well as hierarchical rankings and trophy collections derived from competitions, crucial features of possession of property as primary value. It also means that individuals do not have any inherent dependence on experiences of belonging provided by hive-mind sovereign states or any similar collective entity.

The entire conservative conception of the human predicament, featuring an intrinsic grasping emptiness of human nature, property possession as essential identity definition, inevitable competition and conflict for scarce goods, celebration of strength and violence, the necessity of a sovereign authority to dampen the lethality of conflict (civilization), and the rights of the strongest to be sovereign and parasitic, all supposedly pre-determined by natural law, is a bogus and toxic cultural legacy, a mythical metaphysics to make the world exciting for aspiring heroes in their romantic dreams of a cosmically ordained struggle for dominance. This old mythology is a dystopian nightmare for most people. The way out is cultivating the gratifying activities which express personality as a fountain of ideas for interventions-in-actuality. That creates the alternative experience, acquaintance with a human nature that can trust itself in the complete absence of authority or any vestige of patriarchy, in the absence of any controlling hive-minds projecting sovereignty of the strongest, with no need for the kind of identity and meaning assigned by a controlling collective. There is a far better life after re-orienting outside nationalist hive-minds and also outside any other rat race for symbolic markers of self-worth and identity. Hive-minds make war and are made for war.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Horizontal Dualism and the Spiritual Quest

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Embodiment, Equality, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Who am I? Why am I here? Where have I come from? Where am I going? These questions are personal, and at the same time reach beyond the personal, in a spiritual quest. A spiritual quest begins from a questioner’s recognizing the imperfection of self-awareness or self-possession, recognizing itself as its own blind-spot, recognizing the blind-spotness of itself to itself. It is a questioner’s sense of unknowing and curiosity about its own impulse (or imperative) to question and discover, about its own curiosity and its resulting construction of ever accumulating orientation, so, about its intelligence. Out of that sense of unknowing, a spiritual quest is a search for a fuller acquaintance with, or understanding of, this personal situation of intelligence in its aspect as the human situation.

Intelligence or spirit is (and intelligences are) the most interesting dimension of the situation of human life, but not the only one. There is a contrast between acquaintance with material surroundings on one hand and acquaintance with manifestations of intelligence such as the impulse to question and discover on the other, standing as a fundamental dualism in the quest for improved acquaintance with intelligence. Acquaintance with intelligence would not need a quest unless our ordinary acquaintance is mainly with something else, something not-spirit, normally identified as material nature or inertial nature, forces of unfreedom. Intelligence confronts nature. Deliberate teleological striving confronts lifeless falling. The freedom of curiosity confronts the unfreedom of inertia. Non-actuality (interior to an intelligence) confronts actuality (exteriority or the space of nature). Subjectivity confronts objectivity.

This dualism of human embodiment is not incidental to our situation but is essential and fundamental. Human life is played out by individuals in the encounter between non-actualities of our subjectivity (futurity, memory) and the brute actuality of objective nature. Many people find this dualism to be unsettling, even unthinkable, but to deny it is to evade the dynamic forces at the core of human lives. Philosophical consciousness is an orientation based on recognition of self as intelligence, but an embodied intelligence in a horizontal dualism with the non-intelligent (unfree) actuality of nature. In other words, it is an orientation based on recognition of self, paradoxically, as a spiritual presence with no appearance, with no-thing-ness, an embodied interiority of non-actuality, constructing and projecting freedom by constructing time within nature.

Metaphysics: Time is the Mirror of Intelligence

On the question of intelligence encountering and discovering itself (in its own blind spot), time is the crucial consideration, the self-revelation of experience. If you are searching for subjective intelligence in the perception of the world, you identify it in the essential temporal dimension of the world as perceived, in the subjectivity of our human position in time. Contemplation of time is the portal to the self-discovery of an intelligence. Time is, not incidentally, the main inspiration for metaphysics, an example of time being the mirror of intelligence. All metaphysics points to intelligence, but unfortunately often misconstrued as an alienated or disembodied cosmic intelligence.

At the edge of every conceptual system of reality there is some unavoidable vision of metaphysics to deal with the contradiction between actuality and the non-actual certainty of change, the contradiction between actuality and futurity, between actuality and memory. This is true also of materialism, which makes heroic efforts to avoid recognizing the creative contributions of intelligence in constructing reality. Material objects are models of perfect self-subsistence except as they exist under the aspect of time. There is always more than meets the eye, since time is non-apparent. Saying that there is an interiority to subjectivity is a way of acknowledging that it is non-apparent, and the non-appearance of time is exactly the non-appearance of subjective intelligence.

Looking Up

What often stamps a form or structure onto the dualism of the spiritual quest is a very old idea, already formed in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, that the intelligence of each ordinary individual person is a limited and inferior replica of, particle of, or a window on, a single grand intelligence, the cosmic intelligence. The spiritual quest then becomes a search for that obscure source intelligence, the greatest or highest intelligence, and the conception of the source intelligence typically expands into a conception of the creative source of everything, because only intelligence strives toward a specific not-yet or non-actuality, which is the essence of creation. (This teleology of creation is another identifier of intelligence, to add to curiosity, questioning, accumulating orientation, and expressive voice.) So the idea of the source intelligence becomes an idea of intelligence as “higher” than the material surroundings in which it finds itself, higher conceptually by being the creator, and experientially as being represented in the ethereal vista of the starry night sky.

Lessons from the Failure of Alchemy

There has been a long history of searching nature for signs and signatures of the great source spirit or intelligence, since the personally interior intelligence, in its aspect of blind-spot, resists attempts to pin it down as anything in particular. Perhaps the most thorough and sophisticated search program in that history was practiced by alchemists, who thought that the material world must be some sort of map or image of intelligence or spirituality, designed by a gracious Creator as a guide for humans to find a way out of our spiritually fallen condition (trapped by ignorance within matter and time). Their idea of the philosophers’ stone, for example, was part of a projection onto nature of the spiritual quest. Alchemists thought that if they could find the process that transformed base metal into gold it would be a guide to moving the individual’s spirit out of its confinement in time and matter, along an upward path, to be reunited with divinity and eternity, a fulfillment of the spirit’s ultimate divine destiny. The philosophers’ stone was supposed to be the missing link between both base metal and gold, and between the mortal life of spirit and its divine life in eternity or timelessness. Alchemists were searching for eternity (immortality) as an escape from time itself.

So science, the study of nature as strict actuality, was a spiritual quest in the beginning, rigorously developed by alchemists. Alchemists made the mistake of supposing there must be a mirroring, a sameness of structure, dynamics, forces and processes, of intent, between the spiritual (which they conceived to be primarily inner in some way, as well as higher) and material nature (outer, lower). The researches and experiments of alchemists failed to discover the upward path they predicted, but their failure established quite convincingly that material nature is not a guide to the destiny or nature of intelligence, and does not present messages, signs, or signatures of a grand source intelligence. That was and is progress. Indeed, the failure of alchemy also goes a long way to proving the futility of the whole idea of the source intelligence, the grand master intelligence. There is nowhere in the world for such a thing. Their search was self-defeating all along because it is exactly time as the form of freedom which requires and so reveals intelligence in ordinary individuals. However, the alchemists’ error is still with us, as for example in the academic philosophers’ obsession with language as an objective map of thought or human interiority, instead of as a culturally constructed mechanism of imposing a collective orientation.

Something that stands out in alchemy as a spiritual quest is its acceptance or assumption of metaphysical hierarchy. The spiritual quest was preconceived as an upward path which rose from the low world of time and material objects, soaring to the glorious and noble heights of pure spirituality and eternity, to a reunion with divinity, hinted at by the ethereal vista of the clear night sky. This is an illustration of a profound problem with traditional conceptions of dualism, namely its vertical orientation, with spirit enjoying dominion or mastery over nature.

Re-Orientation to Horizontal Dualism

The fundamental situation of any person, the relationship between actuality (nature) and non-actuality (intelligence), is not hierarchical, but is instead horizontal. This is contrary to the historically normal assertion that spirit stands higher in the spirit-material encounter. The encounter of intelligence with nature can still be said to be horizontal and non-hierarchical even though the intelligence side (freedom) is also said to transcend the brute determinism of nature. The creative life of intelligences does have freedom-in-time whereas inertial nature does not, and that is a profound transcendence. However, the survival and freedom of intelligences is entirely dependent on engaging with nature. There is no immaterial heaven or occult dimension from which intelligences were somehow exiled and where we might return to manifest our full transcendent freedom. We depend on our embodiment, embedded in nature, in our very construction of teleological time and so of our freedom. The embeddedness of intelligences in nature prevents any assertion of metaphysical hierarchy giving spirit mastery over nature. The two sides of the dualism are so profoundly other with respect to one another, and yet so entangled, that there is no scale applicable to both to rank one above the other. Nature seems to subsist quite independently of intelligences. Having life-in-time does establish intelligences as profoundly different or ‘other’ with respect to nature, one side of an insurmountable and spectacularly creative, dynamic, and yes, freedom-producing dualism. Intelligences aren’t things of nature in spite of our embodiment (because freedom is not something of nature), but the bodies of intelligences are things which project or present the creativity of intelligences into nature. That is the situation and matrix of freedom. To embrace any universal totalizing absolute, you would have to abandon individual’s freedom-in-time, life itself.

The historical norm has been a misconception of transcendence as a soaring beyond experience, out from placement within time and so out into eternity. However, time itself is transcendence (freedom/ non-actuality) and the only transcendence. (Perhaps there is some sort of timelessness in acquaintance with time as an interior construct of personal intelligence.)

Pity the Culture-Bound

In the absence of an inherently clear individual self-intuition as autonomous intelligence (non-actuality/ time/ freedom), macro-parasitic cultures (sponsored and enforced by human macro-parasite factions, developed around ideology which legitimates and sanctifies such parasitism) declare that individuals carry an inherent vice, an original sin, from which we must be saved or redeemed by a higher exterior power. Such cultures exploit our blind-spot-ness to ourselves, our lack of a clear self-intuition, just as they exploit the whole complex of experiences inclining us to settle into a top-down model of reality, as described in posting 85, July 15, 2015, Philosophy as Critique of Orientation Within Systems of Reality. The parasite faction asserts itself as representative of the higher power, claiming to maintain the social order that God or nature decrees from above, and in that effort assigns individuals personal identities and values that fit a macro-parasitic agenda. When hegemonic cultures define and value individuals in terms of their economic niche, for example, the overall message is that the individual is a product of, a creation of, the social and cultural system they operate within, without which they are nothing. This has even acquired an academically rigorous ideology and the status of an indisputable given.

Human cultures misrepresent that which is peculiarly human to their host humans and so make an institution of our alienation from authentic self-acquaintance. For example, intelligences are not naturally prepared to fit easily into particular economic niches. Economic niches are always artificial. Yet every individual must find some niche in the social structure of an economic system, and focus considerable devotion to it. In capitalism, individuals are encouraged to construct a sense of personal identity and value from the economic niche they inhabit, and on the reward patterns of commercial consumption constructed into that niche. Under peer pressure we do our best to represent ourselves as some version of “economic man” expressing competitive self-interest in the hierarchical arrangements. Correcting this is a matter of identifying that which is peculiarly human in the human situation, or personal in the personal situation, which is intelligence (freedom, time, non-actuality) in a horizontal dualism with the brute actuality and unfreedom of nature, also encountering, within nature, multitudes of other embodied intelligences, all normally expressing the normative and controlling influence of an ambient culture. Culturally constructed self-alienation is what misdirects us to expect to locate transcendence in some ethereal milky-way of the supernatural, outside time. But no. The freedom of time is the only transcendence, and it is interior to individual lives, embodied and engaged with nature and with culture tainted with the macro-parasite orientation.

The taint at the source of human brutality and injustice is culture and not human nature (intelligence) which is non-actuality/ time/ freedom at the individual level. The failing is in the historical legacies of a particular human culture, derived from the essential thing about the lives of cowboys (armed men on horses, prehistoric, ancient, and modern): their violent macro-parasitism on migratory herd animals such as cattle and horses. It is a macro-parasitism anciently transferred onto human collectives. Cultural forms and traditions which structure the interconnection of individual intelligences, all tainted by human macro-parasitism and ideological efforts (metaphysical, ideological) to justify and legitimate that parasitism, are the source of the brutality and injustice in the systems of interconnection among individuals, and of our stubbornly persistent self-alienation. These are systems of reality in which the main value promoted by cultural incentives and rewards (proofs of manliness) is to be a parasite. However, that is not the way to freedom. There is an innate individual freedom which does not depend on brutality and injustice, or on the force of a higher power.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy MacDonald.