Tag Archives: mass media

Superego

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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The idea “superego”, from the Freudian model of subjectivity, identifies a learned force of personal orientation. In that Freudian model the vectors of force are the inherent id, bestial lusts for ecstatic pleasure, sparkly things, power, and esteem (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, on the Freudian view reducible to nature in the form of biological compulsions), and the acquired superego, representing authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, priests, and police, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Many other social influences must also be included: representations by teachers or in media stories, for example, of certain people iconically enjoying pleasure, power, and status, intended to motivate imitation and so to influence career aspirations and style of life. There are also role models among peers influencing appearance, interests, and attitudes toward people with various ways of making a living. Everyone needs to be accepted socially, and so has to conform to some accepted style of life and of person. So the superego includes far more than personified authority symbols, because it encompasses the whole structure over which those figures exert authority, the whole surrounding social landscape in which any individual must make his or her way.

This superego is a learned (as such internalized) model of reality which on one layer is a strictly pragmatic set of local markers that enable an individual to navigate social structures and economic arrangements in order to survive and achieve some personal goals. However, the presence of the active social system and its material infrastructure as a whole is impressive enough to be taken as a manifestation of transcendence, of some unquestionable force of God or nature beyond the grasp of human understanding, and it is especially the most low-definition and abstract symbols of sovereign authority which claim and invoke an origin in, and proximity to, transcendence. The most local markers of collective orientation, typical ways of acting and material culture, lend a readiness for easy acceptance, inspired by the immediacy of their functional utility and their apparent clarity of foundations, to the rest of the superego construct, all the way up to those most abstract symbols of authority which claim that a grounding in transcendence sanctifies their right of primary agency overriding and negating the agency of any individual.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Social Contract as Hive Mind (2)

18 Thursday May 2017

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

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tags: western history, hive mind, Christendom, Roman Empire, social construction, spooks, mass media, legacy culture, dystopia, romanticism

The social construction of hive mind is not new. The historical background of our modern hive minds is Christendom, the way European society conceived itself from, say, the year 800 until Henry VIII’s break from Roman authority in 1534. Christendom was a strenuous and effective attempt at constructing hive mind, based on collective terror of spooky spirit-world angels and demons. Europe was a largely rural-agrarian and illiterate society dominated by a centrally organized Church and a de-centralized military/ propertied aristocracy from the ranks of which emerged regional dynastic monarchies. The Church altar and pulpit were the mass media of Christendom and gave the Vatican an edge over other social elements in arranging uniformity of attitudes and loyalty across vast territories, in fact, a theocracy. The thoroughness of the hive mind engineered throughout Europe by ideologues and agents of Christendom, mainly within institutions connected to the Vatican, established an historically new standard of monumental collective commitment, uniformity, cohesion, and rigidity; a romanticized idea of hive solidarity that continues to plague subsequent societies. Roman Church orthodoxy was a superlatively elaborate and uniform message, having appropriated useful chunks of Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism. Unquestioning assertion of the resulting construct was policed viciously by the inquisition from around 1184 and by military crusades for larger outbreaks of dissent, offering crusaders complete immunity, forgiveness of sins, and all the loot they could manage. The ongoing use of Latin as the language of Church institutions, including universities, is an indication of the small “r” romanticism at the foundation of that hive mind. As far as the Vatican was concerned, Christendom was still the Roman Empire, with all the traditional authority of the Roman Imperium, carrying the weight of Rome’s entire historical imprint on the world: material, military, intellectual, institutional, legal, and spiritual. Prior to Christendom, the Roman Empire was arguably the most effective hive mind in all of human experience, for centuries imposing a heavily armed Roman peace over the Mediterranean world system. The medieval Roman Church did its best to expand the ancient Imperial legacy. A case could be made that it was the grotesque scope and intensity of Christendom’s hive mind that gave Europe its aggressive edge in subsequent encounters with other world cultures.

In the transfiguration from Medieval Christendom to modernity, the centralization of social supervision characteristic of the theocratic hive mind was not demolished but merely fragmented into a number of less all-embracing hierarchies, which learned to cooperate and compliment one another. There is a fundamental identity between old-time religious hive mind construction and the mind control managed by supervising institutions in contemporary societies. Spooks continue to be useful in the form of awesome personified abstractions commanding patriotism and fear such as the U.S.A., the British Crown and Commonwealth, China, the Dear Leader, Capitalism, Islam, IBM, Microsoft, or even the Free World. Modern societies are largely a landscape of mountainous commercial organizations producing profits for investors. Every corporation is a mini-Vatican with its own brand-myth and corporate culture which includes company-spirit and a star-system of corporate celebrities. Every employer expecting brand loyalty and competitive spirit is creating a hive that is structured as a cell within the superstructure of city, nation state, and international capitalism. Indeed, every high school is a training mini-Vatican with its religion of school spirit and sport team troops, its heroes and enemies; patterns downloaded from university collegiate culture. We are trained to hive mind from an early age.

As presented in part 1, the context of these observations is this: There are some clearly positive consequences to predictability and stability in cooperative effort. The question is, are there also negative consequences to this way of creating stability, and is it possible to do anything about them if there are? How might it even be possible to re-orient outside the influence of an ambient hive mind?

… continues.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Social Contract as Hive Mind (1)

10 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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tags: hive mind, social contract, mass media, individual identity, collective identity

The idea of hive mind is a certain interpretation of the collectively goal-directed activity of bees in and around a bee hive, imagining that physically individual bees lack mental individuality and instead all share a single consciousness with a single collective set of perceptions, urges and motives, knowledge, expectations, aspirations, gratifications, and intentions. Since the idea of hive mind in bees is pure speculation, it is possible to imagine it as a perfectly single collective mind. For example, it is possible to imagine that the hive mind of bees is so completely and equally shared that every single bee is constantly enduring the full drudgery of being-the-queen at the same time as always enjoying the full pleasure of being-the-worker-bees gathering pollen from flowers in the sunshine. The meaning of hive mind is that the collective is the primary unit of agency, the source of value definition, creative initiative, and identity definition. With hive mind, a collective is more important than the individuals who make up the collective, the collective owns the individuals, and the individuals belong to the collective. In the case of bees, the single intelligence shared by numerous bee bodies involves, presumably but implausible, a form of telepathy that is inherent in each bee, rather than being constructed of complex cultural teachings, but for human beings an outwardly fair imitation of hive mind is artificially constructed with culturally supplied symbols and pageantry, but not a hive mind that is completely and equally shared in every individual person. With humans, everybody is restricted to living in his or her personal body, with its sensations, pains, and pleasures, but there is a culturally constructed orientation to certain crucial pillars of reality, including messages about threats and opportunities defining a collective situation. It is widely recognized that the shared stories and emotional triggers distributed by pervasive mass media, for example, concentrated under the control of a few corporate owners responsible to the same advertisers and funders, and under irresistible pressure to be patriotic and responsible in maintaining investor confidence in stable and predictable growth, contribute mightily to that shared sense of reality. Unlike our speculation on the shared consciousness of bees, however, in which there is a perfect transparency of experience, and a perfect empathy, among all bees, the shared pillars of reality in human culture support and legitimize a hierarchical inequality of experience and dignity among human individuals by effecting widespread personal identification with the collective in an imagined social contract. There is a conspicuous lack of transparency and empathy across the hierarchical class divisions in the human hive. There is a de-location of personal identity from the high definition of what is strictly personal, to the low-definition of a personified abstraction, a culturally constructed collective. There are some clearly positive consequences to predictability and stability in cooperative effort. The question is, are there also negative consequences to this way of creating stability, and is it possible to do anything about them if there are? How might it even be possible to re-orient outside the influence of an ambient hive mind?

… continues.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.