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Lines of Human Parasitism Through Western Civilizations

09 Thursday Jan 2014

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A crucial thread in tracing the progress of top-down human-on-human parasitism is the history of disembodied spirits in human culture, and especially the fear of an angry father in the sky, a projection of the culture of human alpha-power onto the cosmos at large. The humanistic progress made by ancient Greek Stoics and Epicureans was eventually forced underground (in a cultural sense) by violent empire-building that swept over the Mediterranean regions, swamping philosophical movements under a resurgence of God-cultures associated with conquerors who subordinated the known world from around 300 B.C.: Alexander of Macedon and later the Roman imperium. Although conquering looters are often materialist in their evaluation of assets, they normally place great importance on their connection with a special personal god or gods, and assert such a connection to their troops and victims. Because of that, generals do not support secular or humanist world-views. That wave of imperialist activity in ancient Mediterranean societies created a cultural atmosphere that was unfriendly toward secular humanism, and rewarded belief in a spooky spirit world.

The example of Alexander the Great illustrates that the history of religion is intimately intertwined with the history of looting-family dominance. Alexander of Macedon was the great event that separated the stories of embodied gods in ancient Greece (and the Greek philosophical humanism that branched off from them) from the cultural diffusion westward of the One incorporeal God from the Arabian deserts. The ancient importance of the individual Greek polis and its gods was shockingly diminished by military defeat at the hands of Alexander, followed by supervision and exploitation by a distant imperial city representing a more powerful God. Alexander, like the One angry father in the sky, attracted emotional projection of parental qualities onto a single external force, fixating subordinated people in an emotional mental pattern characteristic of childhood. Alexander was the prototype and paradigm of the One God of monotheism, even though personally Alexander seems to have favoured the dualistic worldview of ancient Persia, and even expressed admiration for Diogenes the Cynic philosopher.

The Christian religion originated in the area of the Arabian peninsula where the God of Abraham emerged, an area of deserts dominated by nomadic tribes of animal herders. An overview of the individual’s situation within the worldview of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among those ancient herder-nomads, as represented by Abraham, was childhood fear and awe of the father’s unpredictable and mysterious rages. The God of Abraham is that kind of father in the sky, all-knowing, all-powerful, not limited by any rules or finiteness and so unpredictable and dangerous, quick to anger and inclined to terrifying violence. Such beliefs situate every individual on an externally imposed axis of submission to, or defiance of, an absolute self-justifying power, an externally imposed axis of grace or disgrace, reward or punishment. All the Abrahamic traditions embrace the existence, unity, primordiality, and incorporeality of a creator God, uniquely commanding and meriting obedience and worship from humans. God attends to and knows the actions of individuals, will resurrect the dead, and then reward the obedient and punish the disobedient. The relationship of the Abrahamic God to the humans He creates, commanding devoted obedience, fervent expressions of admiration, and unquestioning service, is quite overtly an idealized image of the relationship of the herder to his flocks, the herder father to his dependants. However, instead of direct Revelation of Himself to the flocks, Abraham’s God uses certain special persons as prophets, His messengers and avatars on earth. God’s prophets cannot be verified for authenticity, and yet they claim a totalitarian sovereignty by divine authority, and regrettably serve as perennial role-models of sovereignty within our cultural tradition.

The ancient (Epicurean) consciousness of the general hegemonic effect of culture was completely transfigured in the floods of religion that swept out from the Arabian deserts into the whole Mediterranean world, from the missionary expeditions of St. Paul around 50 A.D. to the Islamic conquest (via Northern Africa) of distant Spain in 711 A.D. and for centuries after. Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire after 313 A.D., and after 600 Islam was launched into the world. In that tide, religious culture was understood as not natural but supernatural, a force, knowledge, and technology from outside the world of individual persons, a divine gift. Proponents of that religious culture believed people benefited from having that grace imposed on them, which encouraged and justified great concentrations of power in a few central patriarchs. Divine religious culture went well beyond the words in the holy books, especially in creation of religious law and supervisory organizations. It included the hierarchies and entire myth systems of entangled organizations of religion and worldly power.

Citing the world-views of a couple of Roman emperors illustrates the shift from humanist philosophy to father-in-the sky religion. Marcus Aurelius, emperor 161-180 A.D., was a Stoic philosopher. Emperor Constantine, in power 306-337, converted to Christianity late in life. Constantine moved the Empire’s head office east of Greece to Byzantium/ Constantinople, closer to the heartland of ancient civilization, and his imperial Edict of Milan, 313, legalized Christianity within the Roman Empire. Then, with the influx of waves of Germanic tribes, the Empire withdrew completely from western Europe and carried on for centuries in the east as the Byzantine Empire, incorporating organized Christianity, the Greek Orthodox Church, as the imperial religion. When a Rome-based Christian Church branched off independently, spreading west again around and after the sixth century A.D., that Church adopted a policy of placing Church officials who were literate, educated, and well connected socially and professionally, into the executive councils and households (often as tutors of youths) of the most powerful (looting) families among the new Germanic conquerors, providing those families with much needed advisors and executives. That technique put the Church into a position to act as the power behind the thrones. Such officials were in a position to influence everything about the operations of those families, but especially to insist that all persons under their control become active Catholics under the direction of the Church. The faith was to be spread by decree from the militarily powerful. So, from very early in the medieval rebuilding of Europe after the Roman imperial organization abandoned it to move east, the organization of Christianity deliberately rode the coattails of those military-estate families, essentially crime families, to establish itself in power. There was also an ongoing “revolving door” between the Church and those families. Many of the ‘second sons’, who could not inherit a family’s aristocratic title and lands, would go to school (Church operated) for a good education and then into positions of power in the Church hierarchy.

From these considerations it is clear that the partnership of the Medieval Church and the violence-based military-estate oligarchy was deep and profound. The military class of medieval Europe was united with the ethos of Christianity and its hierarchy by the patriarchal and parasitic culture of nomadic animal herders. Since the Germanic tribes who occupied the western Roman Empire originated in the east, in close proximity to, if not within, the great Eurasian Steppe where nomadic herders and their culture of parasitism dominated, their original culture of masculine parasitism came from involvement with that established ethos of the Steppe. Reinforcing that cultural background were very specific engagements with the nomadic herder culture of the Middle East.

Legacies of The Crusades

The Crusades of the period 1096-1291 were wars of aggression incited by popes promising crusaders forgiveness of sins and all the loot they could take. The Crusades were expeditions for the looting of wealth, especially in the form of ancient Christian relics, old bones and artifact fragments considered sacred and magical, from what Europeans call the holy lands. (A main reason for the achievements of Gothic cathedral architecture was to house the looted relics in suitably intimidating splendour.) The European knight practiced a style of battle centred on formations of armoured combatants mounted on heavy horses. The social class which could afford such military equipment and the training it required was made up of families exploiting vast land holdings secured by their private armies, crime-families. Combatants from those families became invaders of the communities of the Middle East, with full support from the Christian hierarchy and its considerable myth generating capacity. The aristocratic culture of Chivalry took on its enduring character in that context, in an effort to refine and glorify the most brutal parasitic looting by dressing it in Christian myths and symbols.

The enemy that confronted the looting class of Western Europe when it reached the Middle East was the military class of the Arabs, just a few generations removed from their own nomadic herding way of life, now preserving the values of that culture while combining it with the sophistication of societies they had conquered in Egypt, North Africa, Iraq, and Iran. The knights of the west came to admire the manly values of their Arab adversaries, and flattered them by imitation. If the parasitic animal herding values of the western military class had been softening, they were refreshed and energized by the Crusades. The arrogant cruelty practiced in assaults on foreign non-Christians was brought back with the crusading knights to their domestic life, to relations with each other, to relations with other orders of society, and especially with ‘heretics’ and social dissenters of all kinds. That legacy is still very obvious.

Defending Parasitism with an Ideology of Nihilism

When the Christian father-God-in-the-sky lost credibility, starting after the Great Plague in the mid-fourteenth century, there remained a cultural legacy, a culturally conditioned disability to accept the equal dignity and transcendence of every individual person as an intelligence. Even in the shadow of Christendom, Christianity was still an important cultural presence, and individuals were generally thought to be intrinsically sinful, tainted (the Gnostic taint) with an impulse toward disobedient pride and autonomy. That very identification of the human taint reveals that the idea of individual freedom was present, ambiguously, but very weak in Christianity and its aftermath. To fill voids left by the declining credibility of the Christian vision, other forms of externalized transcendence were given increased emphasis. As examples from the Renaissance era (roughly), the political theorists Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) were indifferent to the Church and Christianity as such, but supported the sovereignty of princes (still claiming divine right), convinced that the mass of individuals required strict and awe-full guidance (herding) from a source accepted as higher in some profound way. As a widespread proletarian spiral of revolt gained credibility, advancing the wave of cultural disillusionment recognizing the illegitimacy of (violence based) monarchy and aristocracy, then the privileged classes started to create an ideology of nihilism, declaring that any general denial of external transcendence opens an abyss of chaos, hopelessness, absurdity, and meaninglessness, the contemplation of which is ultimately fatal (first to sanity), and which must anyway be false because of its intuitive repugnance. In spite of the fact that the ideology of nihilism was formulated specifically to be rejected and discredited, there was also some real fear and even covert acceptance that nihilism is the truth, because the external transcendences really are shams.

That crisis of nihilism was especially, maybe exclusively, an experience of powerful privileged factions of European society, the factions with a literary voice: The propertied faction, families who had their livelihood from ownership and investing, and their scribes, the specialists of advanced literacy, professionals, knowledge and book specialists, who for centuries had been coddled and controlled by the Church and indeed to a great extent were the Church. The meaning of the parasitic lives of those privileged factions had been sanctified by the old mythology of Christendom, and without it they found themselves in an abyss of naked parasitism, which they preferred to interpret as cosmic nothingness. Of course the great mass of the population had been engaged in the miseries and delights of surviving all along and were actually liberated by the death of Christendom.

The basic enabling error for nihilism is a prior identification of transcendence as external to ordinary individual intelligences, as in, for example, a disembodied father-figure in the sky. Since that external identification of transcendence is always a distortion of reality it will never be completely convincing. Inevitably there will be intuitions inspiring doubts and questions leading some people and groups to recognize the falseness of the external identifications. The overwhelming cultural training in outward orientations will make it nearly impossible to trace or accept the true transcendence of the interior freedom of ordinary intelligences. With all hopes pinned on the false transcendence, the immediate response to its loss will be a vision of an abyss of hopelessness: nihilism. In spite of the fact that individual freedom was recognized to some extent, that freedom could not be recognized as uniquely transcendent, as it truly is. The whole nihilist turn of mind was possible because of a culturally conditioned, post-monotheist disability to accept the transcendence of every individual person, in spite of the egalitarian effects of spreading proletarian literacy, Renaissance humanism, and the Republic of Letters of the rationalist Enlightenment era. In the trembling world-view of the privileged factions of society, only a supernatural source, external to nature and individual persons, could be convincing as the bestower of a kind of meaning which would legitimize their top-down human-on-human parasitism.

The Roman Christian tradition always sees an abyss of meaninglessness as the only alternative to the Christian story (to itself), and, since it held the position of hegemonic worldview in European civilization for centuries, it goes on engendering irrationalist reactions to an ideology of nihilism it both loves and fears. However, there is also the humanist tradition of individual freedom philosophy carried through a Protestant and post-Protestant line of influence that includes Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) as well as the interpretation of Martin Luther (1483-1546) by Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) (the individual’s inward and creative leap), which convincingly pointed toward the answer to nihilism. It is an answer which Church loyalists, Romantics, and even Deconstructionists (there is nothing but text) are unwilling to accept. They can’t accept the answer of individual transcendent freedom because they remain under the influence of cultures constructing a blind spot over the experience of that transcendence, partly with a romantic love of the drama in their vision of darkness and the cultural conservatism it speciously seems to legitimize.

Sources for the origins of human-on-human parasitism:

A Study of History, written by Arnold J. Toynbee, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI, by D.C. Somervell, published by Oxford University Press, 1947, and Abridgement of Volumes VII-X, by D.C. Somervell, published by Oxford University Press, 1957 (Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 47-2302). In the 1947 volume (Volume 1 of the Somervell abridgements) see pages 152, 172-4, 181-2 for indexed discussions of “nomads as shepherds of men”. In the 1957 volume (Volume 2 of the Somervell abridgements) see page 230. Toynbee was the first to explore the parasitism of nomadic animal herders in my personal reading experience, and is certainly the source of the idea in my thinking.

Plagues and Peoples, written by William H. McNeill, Published by Anchor Books (1977), ISBN-10: 0385121229, ISBN-13: 978-0385121224. See page 6 for the description of human-on-human macroparasitism, pages19-20 for humankind as a disease, page 48 for agriculture-based humans as attractive hosts for macroparasitic groups (among whom the most importantly are nomadic herders), page 75 for the example of China.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.

The Cultural Construction of Blind Spots

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

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Stories

It is difficult to find anything more fun than a good story. Everyone’s intelligence is gratified and stretched by the emotional roller coaster ride of struggles and triumphs with characters navigating through situations that are emotionally charged with risks, conflicts, and splendid opportunities, finally resolved in some vision of beauty or high truth. The emotional mechanism of stories works on the fact that to have a relationship with someone is to take on personally the emotional life of that person, to re-orient empathically inside that person’s experience of the world and their particular situation. To connect and share awareness with other people is to share something of their emotional particularity, some awareness of, and immersion in, their inner life, along with features of their outward orientation. This applies even (maybe especially) to fictional characters. Connecting with others is a way for individuals to enlarge the experience of being human, of being an intelligence.

Emotional Structuring: Tragedy, Comedy, Melodrama, Farce

Every novel, every joke, every song, is an emotional pretending-journey with the characters or voices carrying or appearing to utter the story. For example, you start with happiness about a surprisingly pleasing situation, such as living at leisure at Bag End in Middle Earth, but soon at an initial turning point happiness becomes fear and worry as the situation comes under threat and there is some damage and injury, but there is rising hope and determination because decent and charming characters resolve to test themselves and do something to preserve a good that was previously taken for granted. Various complications and vicissitudes develop with emotional impacts, loss and grief and the taste of small victories, and finally there is a decisive turning point leading to an emotional resolution: tragedy, comedy, melodrama, or farce.

Everyone is familiar with the pleasures of a good story, and quite deliberately we seek out the kinds of stories that gratify us personally. However, there are stories that are insinuated into everyone’s experience at a semi-conscious level, and which are deeply absorbing at the same time as being mainly unidentified as stories. For example, every sporting event is also a simulated and structured emotional path: tragedy, comedy, farce, or operatic melodrama. Even more surprising is that every newspaper, magazine, and broadcast news show, every school history lesson, is emotional programming in exactly the same way. Particular publications not only search for emotionally provoking stories, but for stories that provoke a particular emotional arc, an arc which serves their editorial policy.

The thing to notice in cultural presentations of any kind is the emotional changes you experience going through it. That is crucial as the primal content and is often the stealth-message of the presentation, just as much in presentations that are framed as information, education, or news. Whatever information there is in newspapers (of whatever form) is submerged in stories, and it is the stories which determine the sense made of the information.

Suspension of Critical Disbelief

It is generally accepted that the ordinary appreciation of fiction and theatre involves and requires a willing suspension of critical disbelief by the reader or audience. We enter the emotional current of a narrative by turning off our rational moorings to strict realities, to the connection between conclusions and relevant evidence. Just as there are unidentified stories pervading cultural experiences, there is also an unconscious or unwilling suspension of disbelief, of critical rationality, when the emotional current of a story is strong enough, even in situations in which fiction is not supposed to be involved and in which critical thinking powers should be dominant and active, as, for example, in politics, economics, religion, or ideology in general. The drama and pathos of a good story are easily appealing enough to displace curiosity about reality. For example, there are people who love re-reading The Hunger Games, written by Suzanne Collins, (Published by Scholastic Press (2008), ISBN-10: 0439023483, ISBN-13: 978-0439023481). They want to immerse themselves in the story and live through Katniss’s emotional situations, without distractions or interruptions, approaching an experience of total immersion. That’s exactly what religious or patriotic devotion is, no more or less, emotional immersion and absorption in the stories a religion repeats and repeats. In an indifferent and often hostile world, people have been desperate for a mental shelter, even one made only of the clarity of an absorbing pretence.

Gangs are Stories

By the way, there is no way to prevent the formation of neighbourhood gangs expressing competitive team spirit when competitions between team-spirit-bonded collectives are universally glorified and modelled at all levels of social organization, all building stories expressing the mainstream cowboy-masculine culture and value system, from school sports teams, religious sects, business and corporate operations, to nations in conflict. Every gang is an exciting tragedy, and in exactly the same way every club, school, profession, corporation, and nation is an emotional thrill machine, an emotional current to plug in and ride.

That Big Thing

This issue goes back to Socrates and his observation, depicted in Plato’s Republic, about the old quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Socrates was aware that poetry often works by emotional enrolment and programming which is crucially different from philosophical questioning. Socrates saw the alternative to stories as a persistent questioning of ideas, a method elaborated later in Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641. Identifying and withdrawing from cultural story-content is essentially the philosophical method described by Descartes, systematically removing his assent and belonging from every belief he held, stripping away everything cultural until a bedrock was found: Intelligence-as-such as an elemental grounding. Descartes called it thinking. Any critical thinking strategy requires objectifying all the stories carried by culture, being especially sensitive to stealth stories, and then withdrawing from their emotional program.

Many different sorts of claims and arguments have been called philosophical. Notwithstanding the merits of any of those, philosophy can be thinking on the insight that the externalizing gaze of science is incapable of grasping some important features of experienced reality. This casts philosophy as a kind of discovery thinking which goes to the blind spot of science, the blind spot of intelligence itself: the questioning subjectivity that is intelligence itself. On that basis philosophy claims the seriousness and general relevance of science without being in competition with it.

Nature is just physics, completely pre-determined stuff, in eternal instantaneous freefall structured by invariable regularities, but intelligences don’t exist as physics. We exist as metaphysics, separate specks (universes), each living an embodied life in time rather than simply in instantaneous nature. Intelligences do something metaphysically remarkable, stretching nature’s instantaneous freefall and in doing so creating time, not by slowing nature’s fall or by speeding it, but instead by constructing a universe of non-actuality through remembering, simultaneously with perceiving, anticipating, pretending, aspiring, building and pushing open a non-actual future. That thing you sense that is bigger than yourself is the universe of your own intelligence. The primordial experience of transcendence is the experience an intelligence has of itself. The original and authentic experience of transcendence is always an intelligence’s awareness of itself as a power of freedom in the creation of time, taking a feature of nature and spinning freedom from it in the form of time.

The historical influence of nomadic herding conquerors stunted the development of human cultures and stranded those cultures at the primitive condition of fixating on false external projections of transcendence. Everyone is bound and controlled by culture, even within controlling factions, everyone except individuals who have kept a sense of their innocent elemental orientation, or who re-discover and work to restore it. We are still stuck culturally because the myth of external transcendence has been used effectively to sanctify a system of top-down human-on-human parasitism which defends and perpetuates itself tenaciously through culture. The promise of progress through science and technology is yet another avatar of externalized transcendence.

Thinking

The alternative to psychological immersion in a cultural story-sphere is re-orienting to an actual human situation that is stunningly different from ordinary assumptions and perceptions. It is possible to objectify the stories and disengage from their emotional currents, their pre-determined emotional arc which carries with it a sense of inevitability which overrides any individual’s creative freedom. All those stories are an emotional diversion away from (making a blind spot of) the emotion that is appropriate to the human reality, serving to divert everyone away from noticing the top-down human-on human parasitism in the ordinary arrangements of social organization, and from noticing the primordiality of transcendence in every individual intelligence. It is not easy to specify the emotional state that is appropriate to a clear encounter with that situation, the situation of living as a zombie in Zombie-land, but it surely involves excited curiosity, amazement, determined re-orientation, intelligence sensing itself as emotion in actively expressing freedom and power. Ancient Epicureans and Stoics identified the emotion of active intelligence as happiness.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

A Quarrel with Buddhism

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

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The Buddhist tradition seems to share the conclusion presented as Proposition Seven in Seven Propositions On Transcendence, (posting 65, September 10, 2013) that the strategic response to political injustice is for each individual to search inward and thereby to overcome the primordial philosophical problem. Political consequences would inevitably follow from widespread discovery of the original transcendence of individual intelligences. Such an interpretation could account for the lack of overt political commentary in traditional Buddhism, which otherwise seems close to teaching resignation to political injustices of the status quo. Resignation to political injustice is definitely supported by the idea of karma, which serves to support and align with the politics of parasitic power. The myth of the karmic hierarchy of lives, social mobility upward or downward from one incarnation to the next in a long course of reincarnation, legitimizes the structure of parasitism institutionalized in hierarchical class structured societies. Although Buddhism is sometimes presented as a religion without a deity, the intelligent design of a cosmic moral hierarchy of lives points to the agency of a discretionary “great spirit” behind the structuring of society and politics, as behind everything, and such an agency is another instance of the political appropriation of false projections of intelligence as a means of sanctifying human-on-human parasitism. The actual source of the intelligent design in this sort of case is the person who projects the idea of a moral hierarchy onto the social hierarchy. These political considerations indicate that Buddhist explorations of the foundations of experience missed the reality of primordial transcendence in individual intelligence as such. The explorers did not comment on the political problem because they accepted it as the design of the great spirit, just as most advocates of the Abrahamic religions did and do.

Since there is an implication of “the Great Spirit” in the Buddhist myth of a moral hierarchy of lives over the long process of karmic re-incarnation, there is also the implication that, when an individual turns inward to sense transcendent intelligence, it is really the cosmic intelligence of “the Great Spirit” which is sensed as the source and giver of transcendence and of the world in which all experience occurs. That, again, is the great error of misidentifying transcendence.

Any assertion of cosmic spiritual unity implies a conservative admiration of hierarchy. It brings to mind the romantic adulation of the hero, the prince, the champion, the celebrity genius, the saint, the prodigy, and is a complete denial of the fact of universal individual transcendence, and an aggressive denigration of ordinary lives and ordinary people. Contrary to that view, any intelligence, engaged as we all are in building a sustainable and gratifying life in particular personal circumstances, is as transcendent as anything ever gets. Every time someone receives the revelation of a higher good, a higher beauty, a higher truth, some version of an übermensch, then lots of ordinary (transcendent) intelligences are in mortal danger of being brutalized, enslaved, tortured, and murdered in the name of the false transcendence. Hero (celebrity) fixation is another manifestation of the culture of cowboy masculinity, which identifies the majority of humans as livestock as a fundamental worldview.

Intelligence, Nature, Time, and Illusion

It was quite common among ancient philosophers to claim that the realm of time, the world of change and becoming, is an illusion (the Buddhist maya). There was also an old idea that the human essence was exiled into the world of time, is temporarily confined here, but belongs at home in eternity. There wouldn’t be much point in trying to improve social justice within a fleeting illusion, so that kind of view is politically conservative. What was right about those old ideas is that intelligences are not part of nature, even though profoundly embedded in nature, certainly arising within nature in some crucial sense. In every instance, intelligence transcends nature and escapes partly from the determinism of nature by inventing and constructing time, and time is not part of nature. Time is an intelligence’s construct from encountering a feature of nature, specifically an instantaneous dislocation in nature, but that feature of nature in itself is not time as intelligences have time. Nature is no more than the entirety of what is actual in the strictest sense, brute actuality, and that actuality has no mutually negating possibilities. There are no possibilities in nature (only actualities), but possibilities are inseparable from the time of intelligences.

The observation that time is not part of nature (because it is full of the freedom of possibilities) is pretty close to the ancient claim that the world of time is an illusion. However, time is only an illusion if intelligence is an illusion, but the claim that intelligence is an illusion goes nowhere. Only an intelligence could have such a thought. Cogito ergo sum. Time is intelligence overcoming the instantaneous (timeless) actuality of nature. Time is the freedom of intelligence, overcoming the vanishing imposed by the determinism of nature without vanishing by merging with a universal, category, form, ideal, or type. When an individual’s time comes to an end there is a return to the instantaneous eternity of nature. As intelligences, time is our transcendence and freedom from nature.

The illusion or appearance of banality or mediocrity in ordinary life (so despised by a romantic such as Nietzsche, for example) results from a general acceptance of the culture of the externality of transcendence, which fixes the orientation of everybody outward in search of (parental-type) command, guidance, and reward, and so it grounds the legitimacy and sanctity of top-down human-on-human parasitism. Overcome that cultural malaise and all the old gods and demons are gone, nobody is coming, great Pan is dead, original sin is gone, the fictitious collective personality-entities are gone (except as functioning clusters of interconnected intelligences), there is no social mobility between lives from moral action, and the social hierarchy is not a moral hierarchy in any way. All the old celebrity systems disappear, since no one needs vicarious transcendence when there is an interior supply.

Copyright © 2013 Sandy MacDonald.

 

 

Seven Propositions On Transcendence

11 Wednesday Sep 2013

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One: A New Identification of Transcendence

Transcendence is freedom derived in the construction of time, including futurity (a construct of pretendings), by an individual intelligence.

Two: Always and Only

The experience of subjective transcendence described in Proposition One is always the original case, the authentic and defining instance, paradigm, or model of transcendence.

Three: The Primordial Philosophical Problem

Authentic transcendence, being in the blind spot of intelligence, namely the very being of intelligence itself, gets largely overlooked and unidentified, and a distorted representation or image of transcendence (capricious personality) gets inappropriately and falsely projected outward onto entities in nature and culture, as imaginary disembodied spirits, demons, personality in nature or in collective entities and institutions such as tribes and nations, for example.

Four: Political Appropriation

Those externalized and falsely identified instances of transcendence get appropriated by the carriers of a parasitic culture of cowboy masculinity (paradigm Genghis Khan) and used as a technique to sanctify, legitimize, justify, and normalize (by “noble” lies, for example) their parasitism on other humans. In that way the primordial philosophical problem gets complicated by the addition of a political problem, since it becomes illegal to question the externality of transcendence, and so philosophy and politicized culture become inextricably entangled.

Five: The Two Problems

This leaves us with two main problems, one philosophical and one political. The philosophical problem is, how do we elude the influence that the dominant culture has (distorting reality to sanctify top-down human-on-human parasitism) on our general orientation and perceptions, so that we can re-orient toward authentic transcendence? The political problem is, how do we de-legitimize, de-sanctify, de-normalize the culture of cowboy masculinity which has institutionalized human parasitism and so enslaved human kind without any widespread recognition of that enslavement as anything other than economic and social organization within a framework of religious and nationalist organization.

Six: First Response

The strategic response to the philosophical problem is to find in experience those elements which operate in intelligence prior to acquisition of culture, so to escape the distorting influence of culture and reconstruct a new orientation from innocent experience. Construction of time is crucial among those elements of innocent experience.

Seven: Strategic Response

The strategic response to the political problem is to overcome the philosophical problem. The plague on human kind, which is normalized and sanctified human parasitism, has in that way an unintended consequence, that overcoming it directs thinking inward onto thinking’s own blind spot, inspiring the perspective required to overcome the primordial philosophical problem.

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

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.