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Tag Archives: Moral philosophy

Time as an Innocence from which to Judge

07 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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ethics, foundational philosophy, innocence, Moral philosophy, time

Foundational Time, a Place to Stand

Obviously it has been impossible so far to dislodge the rule of cowboy masculinity, crime-family masculinity, but progress might be possible if we confront it with an entirely novel system of orientation in which individual intelligences, only and all individual intelligences, are acknowledged instances of transcendence, specifically the transcendence of creative freedom. This can be done because a place to stand outside gender roles, social/ economic class designations, ethnic placement, and culture in general has been identified. All those roles and designations are cultural tags, all arbitrary artifacts of political and economic systems riddled with injustice and distortions of reality.

Time, however, is foundational, and time is inconceivable without an encounter between individual intelligence and nature. Please see posting 54, February 6, 2013, Freedom and Time, and  posting 60, May 4, 2013, The Zombie Apocalypse in the Rearview Mirror. Time is a construct of creative intelligence encountering the brute actuality of nature. So individual intelligence is foundational in an encounter with brute inertial nature. Certainly there is social and cultural structuring of time, but the original experience of time is not socially constructed. It is a construct of individual intelligence. Therefore, although much of reality is socially constructed, not everything about experience, about reality, is socially constructed. It follows from this, since time and individual intelligence are inseparable, that the individuality and self-identification of individual intelligences are also not entirely constructed socially or intersubjectively. There is a place of innocence from which to judge the influences of culture, indeed to judge the reality of social constructs. This contradicts the understanding of human subjectivity and of culture based on the Freudian model, which is still profoundly influential.

The Freudian Model

It is commonplace to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of psychology in the Freudian tradition, expressing forces other than individual freedom. In that model the main vectors of force are the Id (representing bestial lusts for pleasure and power, the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model of a three-part soul, but on the Freudian view supposed ultimately to be biological imperatives), and the Superego, (representing authority figures, such as parents, police, priests, from ambient society, internalized by the individual’s exposure to education and socialization). Those two vectors of force confront and balance one another in every person, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the Ego, or personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that Ego image, no reality. The Ego has only the force of Id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of public authority figures. That is all there is to a Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature driven by original sin and constrained only by the scourges of Church and military-monarchical states.

The Civilizing Force

Theorists in the Freudian tradition could proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or their origin, and people must socialize by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of a Christian appeal to divine intervention in the appointment of social supervisors, Freudian theory could also use something like Hobbesian social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures. Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature is a decently accurate depiction of the world of cowboy masculinity: a war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the cowboy masculine will-to-power agree to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by participating in a social contract by which a monarch, with absolute power over life and death, is instituted to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t think of any way around enforcement). So, from nothing more than cowboy self-interest (ultimately determined biologically), the authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain somewhat the many faces of Id. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science.

Seeing social behaviour, culture, and history as a manifestation of instinctive human nature as envisioned in Freudian theory has the same effect as seeing history as acts of God, namely the effect of making history necessarily as it was in every detail, entirely pre-determined and unquestionable. When history is taken as divine (or natural) utterance, then the facts of history are self-justifying and unimpeachable. For example, on those views, both slave-masters and slaves are equally manifesting the same inherent human nature. All are equally sinners in their nature (the will-to-power has the same force as original sin) and the forces of nature are merely working themselves out. That is why, in Foucault’s analysis of oppressive power, it is impossible to identify either a perpetrator or a victim.

However, with the foundational experience of time revealing that individual intelligences are instances of transcendence in their creative freedom, the Freudian type of model fails completely, and what stands out is the monumentally important fact that intelligence exists uniquely in individual embodied units, individual persons. Seeing history as a manifestation of a large number of human intelligences, intelligences with individual creativity and freedom, reveals history as largely provisional, imperfect attempts at indistinct and creative aspirations, where mistakes were made, and where crimes, with identifiable perpetrators and victims, were committed.

There might seem to be a contradiction between the fact that intelligence comes only and always in the form of individual persons, and any criticism of cowboy masculinity, which claims to be the natural expression and pure realization of individualism, rugged libertarian individualism. However, cowboy masculinity is not and never was independence, but instead is always parasitism, and so not an expression of autonomy-of-intelligence. In spite of the claim to be rugged individuals, the primordial cowboys were never actually independent, but always parasitic on herd animals. In addition, they did not choose to stay with the free open wilderness of desert and steppe, but instead formed confederacies and preyed on the settled communities of farmers and cities, and took possession of them to secure the higher level parasitism that human hosts enabled. That is the historical origin of top-down political forces.

As already mentioned, Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature (a war of all against all) is a decently accurate depiction of the world of cowboy masculinity. The carriers of cowboy masculinity resist emotional or empathic (social) interconnections with other people, because they want to be parasitic and to use others as hosts. Decently ethical behaviour arises from empathy, from an ability and a willingness to appreciate and care about the interiority of other people’s experience, and to act from that caring. Morality depends on empathy, is a function of empathy. However, empathic or emotional interconnectedness is exactly what parasites refuse to enter, and so is conspicuously absent from the Hobbesian social contract. That particular unwillingness is the definitive condition of cowboy masculinity and the kind of individualism characteristic of cowboy masculinity.

That intelligence exists only in individual persons is in fact far more compatible with a different kind of expression, especially considering that intelligence is clearly gratified and amplified by identification of and empathic interaction with other intelligences, so much so that the human interconnectedness is the most magnificent creation ever of our multiple intelligences (mainly the work of women), even though it still needs a lot of work. The current culture of femininity cultivates and encourages the attaching/ relationship talent of intelligence, the interconnecting talent. However, champions of communitarian or collective power and cultural authority (normally preserving systems of parasitism) need to stop resisting the elemental truth that intelligence exists only and always in individual persons, which makes it necessary to re-conceive the human interconnectedness on the basis of empathic interactions among individuals. That is the entirely novel system of orientation which eliminates the need for anything like the Hobbesian social contract, and finally dislodges the rule of cowboy masculinity.

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

Living in Zombie-Land

04 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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Gender Politics, Moral philosophy, philosophy, politics, Zombieland

 

Through a study of history, philosophy, and politics, we have come to recognize an historically derived poisoning of the culture we inhabit, a poisoning with the effect of normalizing and legitimizing social patters involving pervasive and progressive top-down human-on-human parasitism, whole cultural systems distorting reality in support of a perverse political correctness. Since we are aware of that poisoning of culture, we have to admit that we are faced with surviving in something like a real-life version of Zombie-land. (The movie Zombieland (2009) was directed by Ruben Fleischer, written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, Produced by Gavin Polone, Relativity Media, Pariah, Columbia Pictures, starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin.) Most of the people we deal with every day are completely unconscious of distortions of reality engineered by the culture of parasitism, and play along, however unwillingly, with self-identifications imposed by malevolent social and cultural forces around them, in effect acting through a zombie shell or avatar.

Cultural Distortions: Zombie Reality

It will be no surprise to anyone that religion is a cultural presence that always influences the public discourse, thinking, behaviour, and perceptions of people in communities practicing religion. It is more of a surprise, although exactly parallel, that the ideology by which a ruling faction of a community legitimizes its privileges and immunities also has profound influence on everyone’s thinking and on the security situation of people who communicate anything publicly. For example, journalism claims to be about telling truth to power and about power, but almost always is just telling entertaining stories that support the master story narrated by the business, corporate, and military community. In those stories, the legitimacy of institutions, especially private commercialized activities and military-ready masculinity must always be confirmed and celebrated, as a declaration of faithful (religious) patriotism.

Typical modern distortions of reality, broadly accepted falsehoods, are these:
that corporate, professional, and political hierarchy is meritocracy, in spite of pervasive inequality of opportunity, and in spite of the wide variety of interests, talents, and powers different people develop;
that rankings from competitions justify a progressively concentrated top-down parasitism: “to the victor belong the spoils”;
that the purest masculinity expresses itself as audacious human-on-human parasitism, that boys will thus be boys, and that such grand masculinity is the foundation of the glorious accomplishments of humanity, that the force of masculinity binds human collectives together and so is the foundation of civilization;
that top-down human parasitism is thus legitimate and benevolent, even in extreme forms such as war and exclusively private ownership of capital;
the political correctness of never publicly detailing the influence that owners of capital exert over their property, through the political system, in nominally democratic countries;
that countries have democratic sovereignty because they have elections every four or five years, even though the cost to participate as a candidate is prohibitively high (For a nation to be truly democratic, one requirement would be that assemblies which exercise sovereignty, that draft and proclaim laws, would have to be recruited like juries, by a draft of all citizens except for lawyers, doctors, police and military officers and generally those presently excused from being called for jury duty. Consider: Why aren’t they?);
that corporate capitalism is the best possible economic, social, and political arrangement, and that no better system is possible because this one manifests human nature almost perfectly, and so could be said to be instituted by God;
that the commonly feminine nurturing engagements are less consequential, less valuable, than the commonly masculine competitive and military-style engagements;
that masculinity is appropriately represented by the professional sport industry, and that femininity is appropriately represented by the fashion industry;
that the self-identification or self-definition of a person can be made using cultural tags such as labour-market categories, gender markers, and competitive placements;
that transcendence resides in something other than, and external to, individual intelligences;
that abstractions such as nation-states and economic institutions (markets) have transcendent (semi-divine or divine) personality suitable for emotional attachments typical of fundamentalist religion;
that there is disembodied intelligence, sometimes disembodied super-intelligence (the great spirit).

The Zombie Metaphor

It seems obvious that the whole idea of zombies is a metaphor for the deadening effect of living and working within a set of reality distortions and culturally supported falsehoods including those just listed, the regimented systems of modernity. Culturally acquired ways of expressing those distortions shape the public appearance of each individual into a zombie-like shell. Of course, the striking difference between the world portrayed in the movie Zombieland and our real life situation is that the people around us are all still very much living intelligences who must always be treated ethically and non-violently. In the movie, the people who have become zombies do not have to be treated ethically any more. The surviving humans are relieved of the need to think and act ethically in relation to them. In real life it is exactly the opposite. Dealing with people expressing those cultural distortions of reality, and so inhabiting and acting out zombie shells, is the normal situation requiring ethical thinking and acting.

Justice, Ethics, Morality: Empathy

Postings on this blog frequently emphasize the interiority of individual intelligence, how much of anyone’s experience is strictly interior to his or her constructed orientation, as in, for example, the observation that orientation, the interior of individual intelligence, since it includes creative non-actualities such as a rich past and a mutable future, cannot be part of the strict actuality that is nature. In combination with the fact that interacting with others improves enormously the experience and enjoyment of intelligence, that makes empathy an urgent imperative for effort and attention. The more we are aware of the extent of our monadic interiority, the more important it becomes to make the effort to be empathic with people around us, and the more obvious it becomes that empathy takes special effort.

The ultimate foundation of justice and morality is empathy, awareness of any intelligence’s innate revulsion from insult, injury, contemptuous or inconsiderate treatment, in general the revulsion from being treated in any way which does not honour, respect, and dignify the subjective experience of receiving that treatment. Behaviour that is moral, just, or ethical requires diligence in putting yourself into the subjective orientation of the people you are dealing with and then honouring their experience in the way you act toward them, instead of dishonouring it by ignoring its inclinations, joys, and sufferings. Not every discomfort, inconvenience, or opposition can be or should be avoided, however. After all, most people live inside zombie-shells that suit the oligarchic parasites, but still, violations of their subjectivity must be kept within the limits of dignity, must be acknowledged to them and provided with strong, reasonable justifications. This is much like the Kantian insistence that people always be treated as ends and never only as means to ends.

Preparations for war always include de-humanizing an enemy, often stipulating as a crime any public presentation of empathy for people identified in that way as prey for the agenda of the oligarchic faction. Patriotic citizens are thus conditioned to accept participation in horrendous crimes. War is an illustration of the fact that serious empathy is absent from the predator/ prey worldview and from the ideology of meritocracy. Crime family values promote reliable return on investment to the exclusion of empathy toward people required to sacrifice for that return.

Perceiving Equality

To achieve any serious empathy you have to get past cultural tags. Don’t draw ultimate conclusions from a person’s group memberships, team affiliations, emotional bonds to personified abstractions, trophies, gender, or competitive placements, from clothing or other shell-components. Those tags constitute an individual’s zombie identity. The shell can’t be ignored because people often project and defend it passionately, and it can be brutal and lethal. Be mindful of the force of your own zombie shell, your own accommodation to fictions that enable institutional parasitism. Re-orient through rejecting the distortions, and embracing the realities they mask.

Considering more deeply into another person’s subjective orientation, each is a particularly situated and empowered freedom, a transcendently free intelligence re-making the world by working to construct a satisfying life, but more or less hijacked by ambient culture, distracted from awareness of elemental self-identification. Nobody chooses a zombie identity from a position of profound self-possession. In order to think into another person’s particularly situated and empowered orientation, it is necessary to notice something about the particularity of that situation, without violating privacy. Although “real” zombies are beyond rescue, no person is beyond re-orientation to elemental reality.

When others interact with you they will probably be looking at your cultural identity-tags and miss being aware of your elemental self, as described in posting 57, March 21, 2013, Cartesian First Philosophy and The Elemental Hazmat Suit. The elemental self is usually unidentified and so unnoticed. Since others likely haven’t identified the elemental self very clearly, you will be able to sense it in them possibly better than they can themselves. Do not honour cultural tags, but rather relate to the elemental self in everyone, the freedom. Honour the fragility of anyone’s freedom. Stay away from force and violence, insult and injury. However, clear and urgent self defence is always permissible.

The Equality of Subjective Interiority

Every intelligence is transcendent, and none are more or less transcendent than others. There is nothing in the inherent qualities of interiority to rank one over another, or to give one sovereign or parasitic rights over another. Freedom is freedom, and that is the character of intelligent interiority. There is no justification for one subjective interiority to suck away the freedom of another, to avoid certain kinds of work by preying on the disadvantages and vulnerabilities of others. The strongest and most gratifying expression of intelligence is the enabling of the self-identification of other intelligences. In the interest of a duty to the transcendence of intelligence, it is not enough to obey laws or any other sort of command, but instead, it is necessary to respect the interiority of intelligence, and act respectfully from empathy.

In the movie Zombieland, Jesse Eisenberg’s character, Columbus, works on compiling a list of rules for surviving in Zombieland. Woody Harrelson’s character, Tallahassee, contributes “Enjoy the little things” to that list. By the end of the movie the list should also include “Find a family.” It is obvious from web-based information media that lots of people have come to recognize the cultural distortions of reality that support oligarchic parasitism. It isn’t paranoia because you are not a special target. You are a transcendently free agent with a strategic position and assets, but not a special messenger, no more or less a hero than anyone else. Your political/ spiritual situation isn’t personal, but cultural and profoundly human. Find a family. Enjoy the little things. Act ethically and in a way to help librate people from zombie-shells.

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

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