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The Political Situation of Personal Identity: Identity Politics, Identity Theft

22 Monday Jul 2013

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The situation in which any person seeks to clarify or define his or her personal identity is inherently political. Even before the beginning of any individual’s existence there are external claims of ownership (sovereignty) over the individual, both religious claims and secular political claims, and those include claims on the right to define and identify the individual. Such imposed definitions of identity make it difficult for individuals to recognize their personal freedom and the transcendence of that freedom.

Collective Rights

Collective rights are usually claimed by religious communities, such as Roman Catholicism, for example. It is claimed that the collective culture has the absolute right to perpetuate itself, to force its children to embrace its religious and linguistic heritage, all overseen by a leadership structure, the supervisory control and power hierarchy of the collective. Such claimed collective rights have no grounding in anything but the institutionalized power of hierarchies, and they are clearly parasitic on innocent new arrivals. “Collective rights” always translate into the rights and privileges of a faction practicing the supervisory culture, the pinnacles of the controlling hierarchies. Collective rights are just rights to perpetuate parasitic inequality in the name of leadership. Individuals are just as much colonized by the “mother” culture as they might be by any “foreign” culture, and a foreign culture might distort reality less, might legitimize human-on-human parasitism less, and might enable more self-possession.

Political Sovereignty

It will be no surprise to anyone that religion is a cultural background that influences the public discourse and thinking done in communities practicing religion. It is more of a surprise, although exactly parallel, that the ideology (for example, myths of meritocracy or good breeding ) by which the economically dominant faction of a community legitimizes its powers, immunities, and privileges also has profound influence on thinking generally and on the security prospects of people who communicate anything publicly. Efforts at thought control always begin with utterance control, restrictions on speech, often informal sanctions in support of a political correctness or politeness. (That is based on a false belief that thinking is limited to language, that thinking is a function of language.)

Politics is the struggle among factions to gain control of sovereign law and law enforcement, the struggle for institutionalized powers of sovereignty, including the sovereign monopoly on violence, a monopoly often conceived as unlimited. Although those terms of politics bring to mind the social stability based on law codes, books of regulations, questions of compliance in behaviour, and armed hierarchies such as police and armies to supervise and enforce compliant behaviour, there is vastly more, a demand for spiritual and psychological subordination of the individual, sometimes called patriotism, allegiance, civic duty, patriotic duty. That duty of spiritual subordination or submission, a quasi-religion of the nation-state, is an issue of self-definition for every individual.

Personal unfreedom is the condition of self-alienation caused by the suppression of innocent personal identity as elemental intelligence-as-such, replaced by a definition of personal identity drained of personal transcendence, and instead limited to ethnic group membership, nationality, religious tradition, and the economic situation determined by competitive placements, trophies, and grade of parasitism in the mountainous economic/ production hierarchies cultivated by those collectives. The primal crime against the individual is the suppression of innocent personal identity from a personal intelligence.

Ordinary Illusion

Based on these observations, ordinary life, and especially identification of personal identity in ordinary life, really is full of illusion, as claimed by ancient philosophers such as Plato, for example, in the narrative of the Cave of Shadows in his Republic. Day to day life in hierarchical societies really is a fallen condition for us, unworthy of intelligence-beings. Only, the illusion, the misidentification of what is real, is not imposed by nature or by human nature (and not by metaphysics) but instead is imposed politically through an accidental culture which distorts reality. On that interpretation, the state of disgrace, the fallen condition, is the one in which culture, poisoned with legitimations of parasitism (collective rights) by the most powerful groups in the social structure, has alienated every individual from self-possession or self-knowledge as transcendent intelligence-as-such. (By “pure reason” Immanuel Kant plausibly meant much the same as intelligence-as-such.) Philosophy, to the extent that it is elemental re-orientation or elemental thinking, is an intrinsically political and personal act, an act of self-possession as intelligence in the teeth of cultural claims of sovereign possession. The discontinuity between an elemental identity definition (for example, the construct of actuality and non-actuality in personal agency-in-time) and a cultural identity definition reveals the ordinary illusion of everyday experience.

Elemental and Innocent Orientation

Although there are lots of internal parts and distinctions within nature, subjective intelligences, and culture, none of them can be reduced, translated, or broken down into one or both of the others. (Well, culture does break down into projections of intelligences onto nature, but culture is so important in connecting elemental intelligences among ourselves, and in mediating between elemental intelligences and nature, that it merits mention as being itself elemental in some relevant sense, maybe as the category of primal combination of the other two categories.) There is an irreducibility to that set of categories. There is an elemental simplicity about them as a set and as such they are crucial reference categories in an alternative and innocent framework of orientation. You unplug from culture by paying attention to something else, to pre-cultural reality which has never gone away and is always still there.

The situation of subjectivity in terms of an elemental orientation is this: subjectivity is intelligence embodied in nature but with the power, peculiar to intelligence, of overcoming nature’s absolute particularity. Subjectivity is embodied in nature but as intelligence attaches with a vast interconnectedness of other individual intelligences, largely through culture, but always grounded in the individual interiority of intelligence, the inwardness of subjectivity.

Every individual has an innocent grounding of experience that does not depend on the cultural constructs in the human environment. Neither a personal orientation nor creative self-assertion is dependent on cultural constructs. Every individual has his or her own questions, curiosities, doubts, and means (a body) of investigating the surroundings to construct an orientation and launch personal vectors into the brute actuality of nature. Intelligences have inherent powers of transcending actuality, simultaneously pretending many non-actual variations of what might be made actual. That is the freedom of an intelligence, and, given the completely pre-determined nature illuminated by science, freedom is the transcendence of intelligence.

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

 

Philosophy as The Upward Path

20 Thursday Jun 2013

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Everyday Propaganda

It is commonplace to claim that mass communication (education and religious indoctrination are also mass communications) has a psychologically controlling effect on the populations it reaches, especially in technologically advanced nations where the ambience of persuasive messages is intense and constant. That claim is generally understood and there is a certain amount of common sense recognition of mass media influence accomplished by the application of advanced research in social science, especially by commercial interests but also in support of the political agendas of groups and individuals with great wealth, since crafted mass communication is within the reach only of great wealth.

Every publisher or broadcaster, as well as every school board and pulpit, has an editorial policy which always picks a worldview to promote, and always expresses the hopes, fears, and beliefs of owners, investors, or funding source, whose interests are never to reveal disinterested truth, or even just to make an honest buck. Editorial policies merge into broad codes of political correctness, often unstated but distinctly enforced. Concentration of ownership and funding in journalism, entertainment, and cultural industries generally, means a uniformity of political correctness, consisting of opinions that may be said safely, facts that may be mentioned safely in public conversations or presentations, the unspoken rules of a discourse, altogether creating an edited and artificial model of reality. It is no surprise to anyone that religion is a cultural background that always influences the public discourse and thinking done in communities practicing religion. It is more of a surprise, although exactly parallel, that the ideology by which the ruling faction of a community legitimizes its privileges also has profound influence on the security prospects of people who communicate anything publicly, and so on the thinking considered reasonable. There is no other plausible reason for anyone to edit and alter reality by creating discourses of political correctness, to be so dedicated to maintaining control over others by all means necessary, than to legitimize specific forms of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Consequently, one thing always excluded from respectable discourse is top-down human-on-human parasitism.

Private ownership of the means of production in itself does not tell the story of capitalism. It is also necessary to recognize that ownership is the same thing as wealth, wealth equals income-generating ownership, and since the vast proportion of wealth is concentrated in about 1% of the population, the private ownership of means of production is concentrated in that 1%. Now that is a story of inequality of control and so of parasitism.

The Matrix

Maybe the best artistic metaphor of mass thought control was in the movie The Matrix (released in 1999, written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving). In the dystopian future depicted in the movie, the brain of every human is supplied electronically with impressions of a fictitious reality by a vast system of computer-based artificial intelligence. The deception permits the artificial intelligence to carry on a secure parasitism, drawing for itself the energy from human bodies. The vision is not unlike that of Gottfried W. Leibniz (1646-1716), in which completely isolated person-monads (individual minds) are supplied by God with impressions of an eventful external world which does not otherwise exist. In Leibniz’s vision the interiority of monadic minds is the medium in which God creates the best of all possible worlds, all pre-determined.

In the actual world of the present, the system works by getting people to identify with the interests of oligarchs, but not in a straightforward way. Take a soldier in battle, for example. The deceptions and propaganda involved in persuading him into the foxhole effectively reduce him to a slave, enslaved by being conditioned to believe that he is heroically resisting enslavement. That is a tricky operation involving layers of deception. People are persuaded to identify with a fictitious superhuman collective entity which is effectively controlled as a parasite’s host by semi-covert oligarchs, as a projection and expression of the ethos and will of those oligarchs, and institutionalizing their parasitism.

To end war, pass a law requiring that the owners of the most wealth and property to protect, say people in families with net worth greater than five million dollars, must be the nation’s protective combatants, must serve in the military roles most in harm’s way, as grunts, marines, paratroopers, and front line troops.

The Downward Path, the Upward Path*

Although the effectiveness of commercial, religious, and political propaganda is generally accepted, there is not very much discussion about how and why the illusory reality constructed by mass media was founded nor about how to break out of it to a better alternative, and there is certainly no consensus on a reliable process by which to escape its influence. That’s where the idea of ‘the upward path’ kicks in. The idea of ‘the downward path and the upward path’ is a metaphor borrowed from ancient theories of reincarnation, where it refers to narratives of the soul’s descent, on the downward path, into entrapment in the illusions of time and material embodiment, and then what an individual must do to rise above that entrapment on the upward path. In the present context, the downward path refers to the historical conquests and evolving influence of parasitic animal herding cultures from the semi-desert pastures of the world. They subjected the human communities they assaulted to the same parasitism they had imposed on herds of migratory grass-eating animals, but to stabilize their human parasitism they found it necessary to construct distortions of reality through cultural doctrines which legitimized their parasitism, such as wildly exaggerated criteria of individual merit and identity based on their nomadic cowboy ideal of masculine accomplishment, alpha-trophy-looting masculinity. The upward path refers to what must be done to rise above the illusions, especially illusions of personal identity, constructed by the current carriers of the ancient parasitic cultural legacy, controllers of mass media, religion, and education. The upward path is not a common sense idea, but in the present context involves cultivating elemental innocence, elemental orientation, and the application of what is learned in innocence.

* The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, written by Thomas C. McEvilley, published by Allworth Press, (2001), ISBN-10: 1581152035, ISBN-13: 978-1581152036. See page 41, but read the whole book.

Philosophy is a scholarly tradition, including a considerable body of literature, with a history of engagement in political struggles for individual freedom of thought such as in the historical movement called the Enlightenment, for example. That scholarly tradition is at present barely clinging to the outer margins of respectability because of current academic fashions, but some of it is worth dusting off in the context of resisting the thought control created by mass communication.

There are two realities “hidden in plain sight” which are made recognizable by philosophy’s elemental thinking. The first is the transcendence of individual intelligence in its conceiving futurity, thereby creating freedom and grounding personal identity in an interiority of intelligence. The second is patterns of human-on-human parasitism, legitimized in violation of that fundamental identity of intelligences-as-such. Philosophical thinking enables recognition of those two “hidden” realities by fostering a search for the elemental grounding of intelligence-as-such, and in doing so developing an orientation which is independent of any culture. It is a monumentally important fact that intelligence exists only in individual embodied units, individual persons, but champions of communitarian power and cultural authority always resist that elemental truth.

Historically, there have been strong streams of philosophy with a focus on individual intelligence as identity, beginning most clearly in the humanism of ancient Hellenistic Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. The significance of philosophical studies of the interiority of intelligence such as Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and much of Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is that they show the grounding of pre-cultural identity in individual intelligences, in every individual person. They show that the interiority of intelligence is not a mere screen but is instead a particular and original force and power with a great deal of independent originality, a grounding of every person’s innocent identity. That provides a fundamental means of evaluating the injustice of identity definitions derived from ambient culture, a means to recognize and understand the political entrapment those identity definitions impose and enforce on individuals. People cannot be seen as equal because of the identity definitions imposed by their cultural situation.

The philosophical search for grounding in intelligence-as-such gets started by the personal experience of culturally derived negations of an intuition of transcendence, an intuition that is often only semi-conscious and unidentified. The intuition of transcendence is normally resisted by ambient cultural discourses, cultural “correctness” concerning a focus on economic practicalities, traditional religious beliefs, and specific political possibilities. Communities certainly recognize the individual intuition of transcendence, and normally arrange to channel it into external and formalized expressions of spirituality and religion controlled by top-down hierarchies. Dissatisfaction with such externalizations can inspire a personal search for clarity on the conflict between culture and personal innocence.

The subjective intuition of transcendence can be an interior force which is offended by culturally assigned personal identity definitions drained of transcendence to accomplish a complete immersion in established patterns of economic inequality which always normalize and attempt to legitimize top-down parasitism. The upward path out of a thought controlling environment begins with recognizing the identity theft involved in the imposing of such cultural identity definitions. Authentic identity is something that indisputably belongs to each individual and nothing justifies repressing it. The fundamental parasitism of the cultural regime is evident in the hierarchical placement intrinsic to definitions of personal identity assigned to people. When you are looking at the people around you for their original intelligence as definitive of their personal identity, then it becomes obvious that the identity designations assigned them by the socio-cultural system are distortions of and constraints on their intelligence and so also on their freedom. You can see the injury and insult that results. If you want to evade the psychological control and conditioning of mass media and “politically correct” journalism, entertainment, religion, and education then think past the evaluative definitions of personal identity assigned to people, and instead find the elemental ground of equality, which is the transcendence of individual intelligence-as-such.

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

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.

 

Political Strategy: The Dumbledore Doctrine

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

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Here in Zombie-Land, enjoy the little things, find a family, but also don’t shy away from recognizing the reality that zombies are legion and in control politically. What might keep people from recognizing this reality is its undeniable ugliness, and a fear that there is no viable response to it, the fear that recognizing the truth would be psychologically overwhelming, a short path to despair. However, there is a viable response. There are ways of dealing with the shocking malevolence, the entrenched deceptions and violations of humane values. First, let’s admit there is a problem. Many of the cultural distortions of reality listed last time (posting 58, April 4, 2013, Living in Zombie-Land) have the effect of diverting attention away from the actual seat of effective sovereign power and from the malevolent belief set and value system this power expresses. Even though there are some bottom-up political forces, the seat of sovereign power is not a democracy, not a meritocracy or even an aristocracy, but something more like a confederacy of crime families embracing and expressing an ideology based in an old warped ideal of masculinity. Capitalism is a huge top-down cultural and political force in addition to its more familiar presentation as a fruitful economic arrangement. Capitalism means plutocracy; it isn’t complicated.

The importance of a certain ideal of masculinity in that plutocracy’s world-vision has been drawn quietly into the background in response to the force of feminism (one of the bottom-up political forces), but that masculinity is still foundational in the politically “conservative” worldview. It is entrenched in the culture of military organizations, male team sports, police services, male dominated professions and clubs, and all mainly male regions of organizational and management hierarchies. The resort to war as a glorification of that old masculinity is always available to the plutocracy when it senses any serious questioning. War is also very profitable for the plutocracy, and so is vital in many ways to its continuity of covert sovereignty. Resisting war is a good starting place for any active political movement toward justice.

All this is to say that, politically, something very close to the worst case scenario is our actual situation, even though that reality is normally masked and distorted into appearing like a democracy by having the effectiveness of bottom-up political forces exaggerated and top-down forces left unexamined and often totally unmentioned. It raises the question of how a good life embracing profound reality can be possible in this situation. Of course, in this situation, a good life must involve resistance to the parasitic forces.

Happy Thought, Grim Politics

The Harry Potter canon is an excellent source of metaphors for the political situation. For example, in book three of the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, (written by J.K. Rowling, published by Raincoast Books via Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (1999), ISBN-10: 1551922460, ISBN-13: 978-1551922461) a powerful and difficult (and fictitious) magical charm is introduced, the Patronus Charm, especially effective in self-defence against soul-sucking dementors. The foundation for launching the Patronus Charm is a personally powerful and inspiring happy thought. In the world of political reality, the parasites use cultural norms as dementors that suck the creativity and power from individuals. To face the ugliness of political reality, a profound inspiration, an awesome happy thought, is necessary.

The first happy thought that comes to mind is the work that women and children do: connecting, caring, nurturing. Undefeated by all the parasitism imposed on them by powerful collectives and zombie individuals, many women persist in their work of building connection with the new human arrivals, engaging face to face through innumerable hours of an infant’s learning language and the ways of human interconnectedness. Mothers in that situation also find one another and share in building the culture of nurture and caring support. It is enough to give a person hope for humanity, and as such an indispensable happy thought for politics.

Protected Identity and Equality in Particularity

Another happy thought, not so distant from the work that women and children do, is elemental intelligence and its transcendent freedom. The most important philosophical idea of all time is the idea of the interiority of intelligence. To be philosophical is nothing other than to recognize the particularity of the interior powers and situation of each innocent personal intelligence as definitive of a personal identity. Do that and you are a practicing philosopher for the purposes of politics. It is an elemental self-identification, and also the way to perceive equality with every other particular intelligence. The particularity of intelligence is not competitive, not hierarchical. The freedom of each intelligence is profoundly particular, and each is equally transcendent as a unique point of creative power engaged with nature and culture in a particular way. That is the wonderful philosophical happy thought, to be combined with the work that women and children do as the foundation of our Patronus Charm, which, to re-mix the metaphors, acts as a hazmat suit to protect against despair within the poisoned culture.

The great myth maintained by mass media is that capitalism is the best that human society can ever be, because it manifests the double aspect of human nature, masculinity and femininity, almost perfectly, and so could be said to be instituted by God or Nature. However, the animal-herding culture of parasitic masculinity, the ideal of capitalism, takes any perceivable difference, such as race or gender, as the mark of prey, an invitation to loot, to exercise parasitism. However, that is not an essential feature of masculinity, but rather the peculiarity of a particular cultural tradition that was made to “go viral”, by violent force of arms, at crucial stages of history. Almost all expressions of masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs, not manifestations of nature. The really profound revelation of human freedom, individual intelligence, is prior to and more elemental than masculinity and femininity. It transcends them and is completely unidentified in capitalist culture, indeed it invokes a very different vision of human interconnectedness based on empathy and equality. The capitalist economic and cultural system does not express human nature appropriately in the least, but misrepresents it in deeply debilitating ways.

The Freedom of Elemental Intelligence

Capitalist enablers deny and ridicule the idea that a wonderful change is possible, but it is possible. Think and live elementally. See through the distortions of reality created by parasitic/ plutocratic culture. 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 to engage with nature in their creation of sustainable lives. Those disembodied personifications are examples of the large body of culturally imposed fables and false values, such as alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, all of which can be cleared away by anyone’s thinking to disclose the elemental situation of intelligence.

Human being is embodied intelligence, normally conditioned within portions of an elaborate culture constructed through a particular history by a multi-generational interconnectedness of ordinary individual intelligences. The force of intelligences is such that the fabric of human being is not pre-determined as nature is. It can be re-created to express ever more of the transcendent freedom of intelligence. So it becomes possible to think that war, slavery, and human-on-human parasitism in all its forms can be ended: Big happy thought.

Horcruxes

Emphasis on the imminent power of the malevolent plutocracy can also be exaggerated, however, because most of the work of preserving and operating top-down parasitism is accomplished by entrenched and widespread cultural legacies from history. Once again to draw on the Harry Potter canon as a source of metaphor, the socially conditioned distortions of reality cited in posting 58, April 4, 2013, Living in Zombie-Land are cultural legacies serving as the horcruxes of the parasites. (See: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, written by J.K. Rowling, published by Raincoast Books via Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (2005), ISBN-10: 155192756X, ISBN-13: 978-1551927565.) Horcruxes are living fragments of a dark wizard’s soul, removed from his original body and magically hidden for permanent safekeeping in separate objects. Fragments of the soul of parasitism are stealthily embedded in the cultural legacies just cited, every bit as effective and malevolent as plutocratic activists, but functioning independently of them. Simply outing and disabling a particular oligarchic group will not solve the problem of human parasitism, because its horcruxes, such as the cultural ideals of masculinity, will exert their malevolent influence and re-create another parasitic oligarchy.

The main role of activist factions among the ownership oligarchy and the corporate/ professional collective is to bolster, support, conserve, and promote the enduring structural layers and features of the cultural legitimation of top-down human-on-human parasitism, such as the cultural ideals of masculinity as enshrined in good old “family values” as well as in supposedly wholesome activities such as team sports. It is made to look benign, charitable, well meant, innocent. There does not need to be a cabal, meeting in secret, to arrange and manage operations on a day to day basis. The parasitism is nothing as straightforward as a conspiracy, but is, rather, a broad and deep cultural legacy of institutional structures and values. The ordinary content of mass media is quietly demonstrating a specific political correctness to normalize the parasitism on an ongoing basis.

The Strategic Doctrine of Albus Dumbledore

In his struggle against organized dark magic, the fictitious wizard Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter’s headmaster at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry) devised the strategy of first identifying and destroying the malevolent Lord Voldemort’s horcruxes. He deduced that it would be futile to confront the main body of the enemy before the horcruxes had been destroyed. The same strategy is transferable from fiction to reality for resistance to the political reign of legitimized parasitism. In general, first target the cultural horcruxes for sustained debunking. For example, since so much cultural emphasis is placed on concealing the power and even the existence of the modern plutocracy, it is an easy conclusion that one tactic of resistance is to recognize the plutocracy, watch for its manifestations, and expose its lies, crimes, and incompetence in everyday discourse. This is already in progress, as is resistance to some wars. Weakening the cultural underpinnings of the malevolent sovereignty of the Old Regime is exactly how Enlightenment rationalists succeeded.

Another act of resistance, possibly more difficult than recognizing the plutocracy, is debunking the old ideals of masculinity, plutocracy’s foundational fable. Nothing much will change without the destruction of that old horcrux. However, it is not complicated. Decline participation in the culture of combat, sport, and fashion. Avoid associating with any groups that celebrate or tolerate violence, or groups that use uniforms, logos, insignia (especially insignia of rank), formal gestures (salutes, handshakes) or postures (standing at attention, bowing or kneeling), synchronized movements, drills, or rituals. Those are all cultural zombie tags and weapons against intelligences. When confronted with competitions, recognize that these are mechanisms for externalizing and poisoning self-definition (self worth) by anchoring it to the justification of parasitism on everyone lower in the ranks of competitors. There might be no way out of competing, but that should be counteracted with attention to the innocent interior process of building your life, the origins of projecting your aspirations onto a future which is mutable by the force of your embodied intelligence.

If it seems like connecting with people might be difficult in the absence of “tribal” logos, gestures, and insignia, just remember that ordinary conversations do not require them. Here in Zombie-Land, enjoy the little things, find a family, and also, out of the abundant happiness of being alive in elemental reality, externalize freedom by strategic resistance to the legitimation and practice of top-down human parasitism.

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

 

Living in Zombie-Land

04 Thursday Apr 2013

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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.

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.