Fragment 219, Word Count: 2,841.
Tags: empathy, caring, evil, deity, nationality, hive-mind, value, patriarchy, violence, embodiment, philosophy, culture, theology, ideality.
The Cultural Veil
There is a culturally conditioned veil of illusions that stands in the way of any ordinary acquaintance with some of the most important features of life as a personal subjectivity. The blocked features of subjective existence, however, remain relevant and ready to be appreciated. We human individuals derive joy and meaning from imitating people around us, from attaching emotionally and soaking up culture like sponges. Within the general culture of ways of thriving in a particular surroundings, there are also fanciful speculations, stories that misconstrue the powers and necessities that determine events in the world, exaggerations of common fears and wishes that make them fetishistic and barriers to important discoveries. All of the cultural complexes that contribute to the veil of illusions also contribute to a general nastiness of life shaped by their influence, forming the distinctly dystopian societies so familiar to us. Of course, even the most dystopian societies have factions who benefit from the arrangements and are pleased with themselves and with pretty much everything. It is those factions who are especially empowered to create, and be heroes of, the stories that depict their societies, and part of their culture is to celebrate stability and heroic resistance to change. Broadly speaking, this is the overall situation that inspires much of the mental and literary tradition of philosophy.
The Lens of Orientation
Our sense of being at a particular place, doing what we are doing, involves far more then what can be perceived from any given location. We work within a sort of interior model of all the routes we have moved through and we reorient the model as we reorient and place ourselves within a broad sense of the arrangement of things, the arrangement featuring our important destinations, especially featuring the personalities with whom we share an emotional attachment. Ordinary perception is mainly a selectively targeted sensory confirmation that current actuality conforms to what we are expecting based on our elaborate sense of place, directionality, and the possible personal futures already sketched out from elements of previous experiences and from intentions we have to advance personal dramas. This interior orientation serves as a sophisticated lens through which we selectively direct attention, searches, and applications of effort at the surroundings. All the cultural complexes we learn, including speculations, stories, and exaggerations, are, by that learning, incorporated into the structure of our personal orientation lens and they contribute decisively to the shape and the mood of the world we move and live within.
Illusions of Masculine Supremacy
One of the strongest complexes in the dystopian veil of illusions is the culture of masculine supremacy, macho or patriarchal culture. Traditional masculine values are illustrated in stories of ancient Greek and Roman warriors: hardness, strength, endurance, courage, self-promotion, and disregard for weaker beings. Before theocratic Christianity there was the crime family aristocracy of the strongest, dedicated to trophy hoarding. Capital was wealth-generating real estate, and the land-hoarding aristocracy cultivated the ancient culture of organized violence with the intent of looting as the means of possessing capital. Specialists in coercive force cultivate athletic proficiency with weapons, readiness for aggression, the hyper-masculine ethos adulating strength, violence, kinetic action, competitive conflict, and properties that need armed protection. Trophy property is understood as the actualization, the manifest proof, of personal worth, and is normally accompanied by contempt for mere subjective interiority.
Patriarchy, institutionalized sovereign rights of father-figures, is an overt expression of the guiding principle of masculine dominance: that the strongest have rights over everyone else, rights to the property and lives of the weaker, the right to be parasitic on the weaker. Such assumptions derive from the traditional family in which the father is the strongest and women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. This culture worships and celebrates competition for the benefits of dominance. The key benefit of dominance is top-down human-on-human parasitism, from which other benefits flow. Many such benefits are the symbols and pageantry of dominance, for example in the scale of property possession and in relationships shaped by hierarchical master/slave inequality. Money culture, market wealth, is a branch of dominance culture because the scale of property possession is crucial in the pageantry and symbolism of dominance. Part of this alpha-trophy culture is denigration of alternative culture streams (such as the scribal/ literary tradition, the socially crucial child-nurturing culture, or varieties of interior spirituality) defining them as inferior and dependent, keeping them in some degree of dishonour and disgrace. The alpha-trophy culture of blood-sport dominance developed into military institutions as well as non-lethal competitive gaming and sports, into corporate culture and violence-ready sovereign states. There is a growing recognition of just how much the misogynist, racist, and predatory culture of hyper-masculinity is structured into the fabric of economic and political institutions.
The once ubiquitous culture of masculine dominance constructed and spread a certain kind of human bonding featuring strict hierarchies of authority maintained by operations of a core culture of violence with high value assigned to trophies of violence. It created aristocracy as a control-by-coercive-force faction in viciously top-down hive-minds nominally justified by a totalitarian father-god ideology in which everything is seen as pre-determined by an inexplicable occult masculine force, irritable, harsh, and quick to take offence, appeased only by displays of abject and gleefully grateful submission. Dominance culture asserts that this style of tightly controlled human clustering demanding conformity, exclusive emotional attachment and pageantry typical of religion, is the inevitable working of nature (especially human nature). However, these dystopian hierarchies of violence are the artifacts of a particular evil: the targeted denial of empathy. With the gradual development of alternative cultures, those large scale structures of attachment, by which individuals bind themselves into dystopian hive-mind collectives, start breaking down.
There is an ancient equivocation in the claim that human beings are essentially communal, such as Aristotle’s assertion that man is a polis animal. Aristotle’s claim makes it seem that the choice is between submission to a patriarchal sovereign state or just starkly solitary existence. That is a ridiculously oversimplified falsehood. Although sociability is crucial to the kinds of work and play within which humans can thrive, sociability is best fulfilled in the absence of violence, hierarchy, or self-denial by any individual. Patriarchal top-down command is sometimes justified by the idea that individuals are nothing but bundles of hard-wired drives for egoistic gratification, if they aren’t taught fear of superior power and a deferential orientation upward toward figures representing the overwhelming forces of religion and armed institutions. However, no matter how it is officially defended, the largely gratuitous nastiness of life in patriarchal societies is obvious and undeniable.
Illusions of Disembodied Supremacy
The veil of illusions also includes the fanciful metaphysics expressed in stories of disembodied intelligences: angels, demons, and deities, capricious free-floating entities who somehow care about and seem to have a stake in human behaviour, purportedly because humans were created by the will and power of these entities to be their toys and playthings. These stories are made frightening and also enticing by supposing that spirit-beings have unlimited powers, which means they must be considered and placated in all things to turn them into kind guardians instead of demanding and punishing masters. Imagining that the world at large and in detail is the deliberate act of an unpredictably powerful thinking and caring agency, often capricious, sometimes inexplicably malicious, means that acting in a way that pleases or placates that force, generally on the say-so of opaque but charismatic social authorities, just might have the effect of making the world a more benign situation. This cultural stream expresses a confusion about intelligence itself such that the cosmos at large somehow expresses a super-intelligence that pre-determines how everything should be (yet not always how it is!), but with some degree of negotiable grace as a reward for formulaic pageantry expressing extravagant praise, fearful self-abasement, and symbolic sacrifice.
The idea of a divine plan and a supernatural planner who irresistibly determines everything has been crucial in legitimizing the lethal power of patriarchal sovereignty. Divine personality has been conceived as all-powerful creator, judge, and ever-present tester and score-keeper of human persons, the model of fatherly sovereignty as absolute ownership over the less powerful. Cultures of disembodied intelligences insist on adulating the cosmic almighty who promotes its earthly kindred spirits: the mighty of the earth. With such a capricious and all powerful patriarchal deity, the crucial focus of orientation is divine commands, and ethical action is obeying a list of rules, duties, obligations, virtues, and vices. Nature in this vision is the actualized will of the divine personality. The idea of divinity sustaining the world by uttering commands and projecting divine will into human affairs through sovereignty of the strongest is, in a variety of forms, ancient and deeply embedded in human societies.
Teleology of creation is the crucial identifier of personality, of spiritual existence both human and divine. It encompasses conceiving and enacting, moment by moment, the future conditions of things in the world. Teleology is ideality: curiosity, caring, seeking, supposing, questioning, knowing (accumulating orientation through discoveries), and fountaining specific preferences expressed in deliberate actions or voice-utterances within the ceaselessly changing context of temporality. Religion makes personality the creative source of everything, recognizing teleology as transcendently alive, creative, caring, and expressive, but truly at home only at some dimly imagined cosmic horizon, making individual human consciousness a frail echo of the cosmic master. Human ideality as a mode of existence was recognized as carrying with it the vestige of an insubordinate claim to equal and rival the divine. Here, in the frightening sameness of human and divine existence, is the source of the idea of original sin and inherent guilt which all humans are supposed to share and which supposedly taints the existence of humanity. In the context of widespread fear of an all-powerful supernatural watcher, this sensed sameness, made miserable for humans by the needs and indignities of embodied living, was enough to create a perverse appetite for denigration of human personality, part of an effort to distance embodied ideality from any but the weakest claim to divine-like creative freedom, on the hope that denigration of embodiment would atone for this plausible claim to divinity and so eventually qualify human individuals for an eternal afterlife finally free of embodiment. This is the root superstition that makes creationist deism toxic and destructive. Its denigration of human personality created the context for every kind of cruelty, insult, and injury in human relations, perversely sanctifying human-on-human parasitism.
The patriarchal conception of cosmic teleology inspired and sanctified very rigid, restricted, exploitative, and repressively hierarchical societies, dedicated to the culture of violet masculinity, and determined to remain essentially static for eternity, supposedly to persuade the cosmic power to tilt benign. Such are the foundations of our current dystopian patriarchies. In the long transition through childhood to the adult condition everyone is trained in this fabric of perverse superstition. The original rationale for sovereign government as it still exists is this nasty dystopian fable. These societies are not echoes of divine nature but expressions of misconceptions and superstitions developed into enduring cultures, the most extreme fears and fantasies institutionalized and culturally enforced.
Illusions of Collective Supremacy
The veil of illusions also includes distorted national histories that promote a sense of collective identity by highlighting emotional dramas uniquely involving a population defined by geographical location. Within the general culture there are certain limitlessly imposing political super-structures, culture-based arrangements of authority and dependence which bind clusters of people together by a shared sense of norms of conduct and of the power centres that enforce them. These are top-down arrangements of coercive power and access to resources, which seek emotional possession of individuals, forming a shared group orientation, a hive-mind which benefits from each individual’s gifts, abilities, and energy.
It has been asserted as self-evident that individuals need, as part of a general need for felt supervision or authority, a dominant collective attachment, emotional and cognitive identification with the master narrative of a collective entity, something like a home hive, as a crucial element of personal identity and sense of meaning. That assertion is supposed to account for the fact that each modern sovereign state is still, in spite of progressive influences, a personified territorial power demanding reverent patriotic devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedience enforced by an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force. Each state has its edifice of theatrical pageantry and symbolism to invoke the unity and sacred grandeur of the collective: flags, monuments, and anthems, oaths and pledges, officials and military officers encrusted with exotic glitter, august regalia and titles; state uniforms and weapons laden with national symbols and emblems; ceremonies of remembrance and renewal of devotion invoking the sacred history and mission of the hive, synchronized movements in processions, special word formulas to be spoken in mass unison. Such pageantry is not intended to encourage creative or rational thinking or the individuality that enables those, but rather to replace thinking with passive embrace of an orthodox official story, a standardized hive-mind. The supposed necessity of hive-mind belonging is used routinely to justify nationalist propaganda, censorship, and violent repression. Such cultural systems often specifically suppress empathy toward people beyond the home collective. Immersion in such a hive-mind can enable individuals to commit acts of cruelty, brutality, and self-destruction that they would not contemplate as de-cultured individuals.
Illusions of Trophy Supremacy
Another cultural stream in the veil of illusions involves the sense of what makes any person good, worthy, or successful, the sense of anyone’s personal score on the goodness scale, the sense of personal value. Even people who are not emotionally invested in the symbols and emblems of their nation state, for example, who do not care about civic celebrations or their nation’s standing among nations, even such non-patriots are likely to be oriented in their sense of personal potential and value (self-worth, personal force of being) within the cultural norms of the economic structures around them, the hierarchy of occupations ranked by wealth and fame, attitudes about the gradients of interesting and eventful lives, and how those things match up with personal abilities and accomplishments.
We have the misfortune of living in a dystopia in which individuals are judged by acquisitiveness and competitiveness, both attaching value to scarcity and objective externality, and in which success as a life-in-progress is measured by ranking an individual’s performances as expressions of those drives. The inevitable spectacle of inequality is itself widely embraced as a value. The commercial sense of earning value through competition is just a light edit of the primal aristocratic value matrix, rooted in the culture of violence, possession of property, and a tightly restricted allowance of empathy. In our dystopia, the great drama is the competitive struggle for scarce prestige, dominance, notice, and trophies to fabricate an exterior depiction of an undiscovered spiritual interior. Our culture’s most trusted authorities assert that the great human drama is to compete for the scarce goods and symbols that show you are fabulous, or at least good enough, that biological drives are inescapable, drives for dominance, excitement, security, or for signs of worldly agreement that you have a place on the spectrum of being fabulous.
Personal Ideality
These complexes, along with similar supremacist-cultures such as family, class, accent, or craft, all keep individuals’ focus directed emphatically outward, away from contributions to experience which originate in personal interiority, in subjective ideality or spirituality. The overwhelming cultural message is that subjective interiority is best kept under strict control, restricted and mostly ignored. This has the effect of making the particulars of the world and of human relationships seem externally controlled and even pre-determined by rigid necessity. There is a distinct charm and comfort in the certainty of essentialism: the fetishistic assumption that everything is as it must be as created by inexplicable but utterly all-determining forces. Essentialism lines up with an urgency to resist change and keep arrangements stable for eternity. With this conception, individuals are merely spectators of the spectacle of events. However, the core concept of personality, of personal spirituality, as already observed above, is teleology of creation, discretionary, improvisational invention in the face of an entirely suppositional future, and the caring ideality with that power exists only at the level of the embodied individual. We are immediately acquainted with caring spirituality only in ourselves and in people around us, however much the idea may be inappropriately projected onto gigantic cosmic mysteries. The metaphysical anomaly of creative teleology at the level of the embodied individual means, first, that individual self-possession is achievable, but also that we must judge a good life partly on how well the veil of illusions has been overcome. Individual spirituality is a basis for universal empathy and mutual respect among animate beings, and political and economic relationships could be re-invented in a way that enables the power of subjectivity instead of denigrating it as is typical in dystopian societies. In a truly spiritual life, the primary source of value is the personally interior creative fountain, and not the rarity of exterior treasures.
Embedded link:
Fragment 218, December 14, 2025 Metaphysics Dawns on the Edge of Creation (word count: 213).
Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.
in the blind spot 