Decolonization is Defining Left-Wing Politics

01 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

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decolonization, human nature, imperialism, left-wing politics, patriarchy, right-wing politics, sovereignty

Posting 127, Word Count: 139.

A refined understanding of the political left-wing is needed to distinguish it clearly from any form of patriarchy, the political right-wing. This develops the position in posting 125 that the philosophical origin of the political left is a recognition of human nature as not intrinsically requiring sovereign supervision (also an insight motivating those previously colonized to decolonize themselves). Patriarchy is structured on two crucial claims: that the strongest has the right to exercise sovereignty over the less strong (founding claim of imperialism), including the right to use lethal violence; and that human nature is such as to require sovereign supervision. Both of those claims are false and rejected by any legitimately leftist politics. That means that the communist regimes of the twentieth century were not expressions of genuinely left politics, since they were all very distinctly patriarchal.

Two Quick Notes on Nature

25 Friday May 2018

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Leadership, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Copernican Revolution, dualism, Hierarchy, ideality, merit, nature, sovereignty, transcendence

Posting 126, Word count: 229.

Merit

There is an equivocation in the word and notion “hierarchy”, especially in the combination “natural hierarchy”. This equivocation is often exploited by ideologues of the political right-wing. The fact is that ability ranking does not imply command or supervisory legitimacy. Neither competence nor merit of any kind carries special rights to sovereignty. Superior ability or giftedness does not confer any kind of ownership of other people or the work of other people. There is no legitimate way for any gradient of competences to become a chain of command, which morphs so effortlessly into a food chain.

Copernican Dualism

The Copernican Revolution highlights a basic dualism in experience. Not only does the cosmos not revolve around us but it also has no other specific accommodation for our sensitivity, consciousness, freedom, or teleology. Objective actuality does not care, respond, or prepare. Subjectivity, which is to say, spirituality, is not determinative of objective actuality as a whole or on the grand scale. Considering the dire fears of social authorities at the time of the Copernican revolution, it is remarkable that it is no longer taken as a devastating idea that the objective world of actuality would roll along quite unaffected in the total absence of our presence as spiritual ideality. This highlights the transcendent peculiarity of caring sensitivity and consciousness and of the teleological freedom in our preparing and responding.

Brentano’s Gift

08 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Freedom, Gender culture, Leadership, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Franz Brentano, freedom, ideality, intentionality, Sarah Bakewell, Simone de Beauvoir, sovereignty, time, transcendence

Homage to Franz Brentano (1838-1917) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

Posting 123, Word count: 999.

In her delightful history, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, Sarah Bakewell reviews the origins of phenomenology and existentialism in Edmund Husserl’s encounter with Franz Brentano’s idea of ‘intentionality’ (1874).

“In a fleeting paragraph of his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano proposed that we approach the mind in terms of its ‘intentions’ – a misleading word, which sounds like it means deliberate purposes. Instead it meant a general reaching or stretching, from the Latin root in-tend, meaning to stretch toward or into something. For Brentano, this reaching toward objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, …” (At the Existentialist Cafe, p. 44.)

Edmund Husserl (1858-1938) was so inspired by Brentano’s conception of ‘intentionality’ that he used it as the foundation of his ambitious project of phenomenology, describing in strict detail the objects of perception and experience. Husserl’s work in turn inspired many other people, including Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. It is safe to say that the idea of intentionality was foundational in the existentialist philosophies created by those authors. In that light, consider the following passage from Simone de Beauvoir.

“Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence lapses into imminence, there is degradation of existence into “in-itself”, of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned with justifying his existence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to transcend himself.” (The Second Sex, pp. 16-17).

The word “concretely” is right, but open to misunderstanding. There is always more than concreteness. The reaching in Beauvoir’s text is not toward perceived objective actualities but instead toward possibilities in an open future: non-actualities, ideas. It is an affirmation of subjective ideality not defined by phenomena alone. A reaching is still at the centre of this new conception, but Simone de Beauvoir is no longer focused on a reach toward objects, but on the subjective reaching toward a non-actuality that exists only in the orientation, the spirituality, of the subject, namely, the subjects bearing toward a semi-specific future situation. The spiritual reaching is now a clear transcendence of brute actuality by operating in time. Recognition of the reaching-beyond-itself of spirituality is crucial, but conceiving it as a reach toward sensed objects results in an obsession with studying objects (“To the things themselves!”, At the Existentialist Cafe, p. 2.) as constituting the whole of experience, leaving the spiritual person or intelligence, the reaching itself, a mere nothingness, as declared by Sartre after his study of Husserl. A focus on objects fails to capture the crucial transcendence of the reaching, since objects are definitive of imminence. When your reach is toward ‘things’ then what confronts you, your destination, is something determinate and definite, compared with which personal spirituality disappears into “nothingness”, since the experience is formed entirely by the objects encountered. Although it is important that the reaching is nothing like an object, it is not otherwise nothing: it is an active caring, often desperate, a curiosity, a (gusher of) specific personal questioning, an investigation, an impulse to intervene to make a change, to make a specific personal mark in brute actuality’s time to come. Those peculiarly spiritual forces are all temporal. Putting the emphasis on sensed objects evades recognition of the spiritual transcendence of time, and so endorses from the outset a metaphysics of eternal necessities: Being. Reaching mentally toward an object is not an intervention, but the reach toward an aspirational future is most emphatically a creation and an intervention into nature from an ideality outside nature, from a subjective interiority. To recognize the real transcendence of spiritual reaching it must be temporal, toward not-yet. When your reach is toward a non-actual but merely possible future situation with a crucial openness for personal intervention then your destination is to be determined by the projection of spiritual creations, a personal teleology, into brute actuality, and suddenly this reaching is the creation of freedom.

Recognizing this spiritual reaching as a personal curiosity or questioning more accurately brings into focus the interpretation of no-longer as a specific context of relevance being applied to the reading of the most immediate sensations. It isn’t just that an existential being transcends itself by acting into a future, but the teleological reach of such beings transcends nature itself.

Metaphysical Upgrade

To think is to occupy, to dwell in, the transcendent moment: the personal tilt or bearing beyond now and beyond no-longer, toward the open not-yet that waits to be created. It is crucial to recognize the discordance between this conception of consciousness and the historically dominant conservative metaphysics of human nature: that individuals without a strict superego supplied by religion and civic authority are nothing but bundles of hard-wired drives for egoistic gratification (update on ‘original sin’); which conception purports to justify patriarchal top-down sovereignty within a hyper-masculine ethos glorifying the use of force, violent conflict, and trophies.

In the conservative concept of human nature, time itself is taken as an unproblematic given of nature, and an individual’s orientation within time is taken as entirely pre-determined by impersonal biological and socio-cultural forces and structures. The specific personal sense and meaning of time passing at a moment in a life is not interrogated, and so the ideality of orientation is hidden in a blind spot. The transcendence of freedom disappears. There is no acknowledgement of the personally created ideality of that orientation, and so no recognition of the transcendent freedom inherent in the basic ideality of time.

References

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, written by Sarah Bakewell, published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada (2016), ISBN 978-0-345-81095-3.

The Second Sex, Written by Simone de Beauvoir [Le deuxieme sexe © 1949, by Editions Gallimand, Paris], translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Introduction by Judith Thurman, published by Vintage Books (May, 2011), a division of Random House, Inc., ISBN 978-0-307-27778-7.

Rudiments of Thinking

18 Saturday Nov 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence, Why thinking?

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agency, David Hume, Gender culture, hive mind, metaphysics, patriarchy, philosophy, Plato's cave, self-possession, sovereignty, superego, thinking, Thomas Hobbes, transcendence

In the search for transcendence there is no longer any plausibility in a gaze toward far horizons, and finally we must recognize that transcendence is only in the gaze itself.

posting 119, word count 1,919.

There is no way to prevent the formation of neighbourhood street gangs exercising competitive team spirit when team spirit and competitions between team-spirit-bonded collectives is universally glorified and modelled at all levels of social organization, from school sports teams to nations in violent conflict, all expressing the manly culture and value system of “us against them” for the glory of winning trophies.

The large scale team-spirit-bonded collectives such as the USA, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, for example, are conspicuous examples of collective hive minds (and not the only ones). The broad national acceptance of American exceptionalism and the civic religion of militaristic American patriotism reveals that for many Americans there is nothing to be gained by knowing other orientations, other forms of interconnection, discoverable, for example, in other people and in the history of ideas, and so they remain ignorant of world history at large, and, like North Koreans, swallow the steady stream of carefully de-contextualized, edited, and slanted stories of history, ideas, and current events flooding mass media, propaganda that glorifies and terrorizes them through their identification with national institutions and symbols. No one would deny that modernity is an age of scientifically engineered messaging, of corporate, political, and ideological efforts to control public opinion, streamed pervasively through mass media, all at the command of the small group with the ability to mobilize great wealth.

Truth to the Masses

Elected officials with their advisors and assistants spin out narratives based on a perceived duty to mediate between factions with established power and the ordinary majority of people. The message that serves the purpose of politics will always be what seems most likely to reconcile a mass audience to the expectations or whims of the most powerful. The narrative that best supports the most powerful people and factions will always seem the most responsible and realistic. So it is that trying to be a responsible journalist, for example, often prevents a determined search for, or presentation of, fully contextualized truth. The danger of telling truth to power is a cliche, but politicians, academics, and journalists face real risks telling truth to the masses, and the masses are not the source of the danger.

Hive minds all work the same way, cultivating in every member a personal orientation to look up to authorities, to a commanding height, for a declaration of the personal/ collective situation, for updates on the story which defines the situation of everyone personally and of collective institutions. It is an orientation of cognitive and emotional dependence on the narration from a commanding height, or, in other words, it is patriarchy. In terms of individual psychology the orientation toward commanding height is the superego. A superego which you have been socialized to accept without question strictly limits your thinking. To begin to think autonomously you first have to recognize that much of your orientation was provided culturally with intent to immerse you in the hive mind story, and that important features of reality, of history for example, have been distorted or edited out to construct your orientation, so that your impression of reality is very unlike actual reality. It is possible to reconnect with reality, as illustrated in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, through a certain kind of self-directed re-education with a component of philosophical thinking (because metaphysics is crucial).

Two claims are made for the necessity of patriarchal sovereignty, and both are false. The first claim is that only the manly force imposed by the patriarchal hierarchy maintains social order against centripetal forces of self-interest, against the “state of nature” which would be a war of all against all (Thomas Hobbes). The problem with that claim is that it isn’t the the top-down power structure, a manifestation of a traditional hyper-masculine ethos, that enables the functioning of civil society. Instead, the sociability that makes civil society work is constructed perennially by the first-language-nurture socializing work performed continuously by women caring for infants and children. Language is a model of bottom-up social engagement operating independently of the commanding top-down hierarchy of force and law. The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy but something entirely different: mutually nurturing systems of sociability. Those processes that actually construct the coherence of societies are already operating reliably, but, absurdly, the profundity of their effects remains absent from even the most liberal of intellectual conversations.

The second claim is that the hierarchical organization of force is the eternal and natural order of things. This is a metaphysical claim, an assertion of eternal necessities decreed by a transcendence at the far horizons: god or natural law, obedience to which constitutes virtue. The appeal to natural law becomes metaphysics as soon as findings about what “is” are asserted as evidence for what “ought” to be. (Thanks David Hume.) Patriarchal thinking operates within an orientation in which eternal necessities, decreed from the farthest horizons, pre-determine what is correct thinking and perception for every individual, so that everyone’s subjectivity must be and should be formed by, and subordinate to, the determinate structures and categories of the objective world, including social, economic, and political structures. This metaphysical claim is the ultimate justification of an orientation that looks to a commanding height for declarations of value, order, and identity, because the transcendence at the far horizons is the ultimate commanding height from which all others draw legitimacy. However, this metaphysical claim is untenable, merely privileging selected aspects of reality by appeal to something mysterious and too remote to be examined, and as such is a superstition. There is a more plausible alternative metaphysics based on anyone’s personal experience: the transcendence of individual creative consciousness, of individual free agency. More of this in a moment.

Hive Minds Make War

The kind of hive mind constructed within human social systems is always a way to persuade a majority to remain unthinking about the legitimacy of political and economic institutions. It demands blind faith in arrangements by the most powerful to proclaim the collective story, for example, proclaiming the need for a pre-emptive military strike against another collective. Cultural hive mind is a readiness for emotional responses to culturally supplied triggers, programmed belief and collective response. The ultimate reason for this unthinking is to defend and perpetuate a structure of sovereignty, the compulsory control over a majority by a minority faction, maintaining the immunities, advantages, and privileges of those who benefit most from and sponsor this sovereignty as a system of perpetual and acute inequality. It isn’t merely that controllers of great wealth have by far the most influence on government policies and practices, through political party funding, control of ‘think tanks’ and news media, and the paid activity of lobbyists, but also that the military-legal-police essence of governments as they exist is an expression of a peculiarly top-down hyper-masculine ethos glorifying a commanding height, a legacy and manifestation of entrenched power and wealth inequality, of self-preserving oligarchy.

A third claim made in defence of patriarchy is that individuals can’t do without immersion in some herd or other because individual personhood (individual thinking) does not exist. The first thing wrong with this is that any learning or socializing requires the activity of a pre-existing individual subject or self exercising an already coherent spiritual bearing. There is no now without a then, no here without a there, and every there and then is brought to the here and now spiritually by a person’s intelligence reorienting to immediate sensation, to its unique embodiment. Any situation is given meaning and sense by the action of a personal sensibility bringing specific context (specific questioning, curiosity, expectation, caring, hope: bearing, the sense of the passage of time) to it, transforming sensation into perception by interpreting sensation through a personal context. It is creative activity, a thought or idea of temporal opening that is thinking itself into the world. All of that must be active already before any cultural imitation or socialization can occur, so an individual’s thinking always retains a fundamental independence from any collective orientation or cultural norms. Individual personhood, independent of hive minds, is guaranteed by the rich individuality of consciousness and embodiment separate from any cultural socialization. Autonomous thinking exists, and there’s nothing more fulfilling.

This is where the previous refutation of the metaphysics of far horizons shows its consequences, because here we have a replacement metaphysics. In the search for transcendence there is no longer any plausibility in a gaze toward far horizons, and finally we must recognize that transcendence is only in the gaze itself. Consciousness itself, the being of a spiritual person, a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world, is the only fountain of unforeseeable possibilities creating the openness to an otherwise inertial and entropic world. That makes thinking the transcendent power and eliminates the imperative to orient to an external commanding authority. Consciousness (thinking) is not a single occurrence but a multitude of separate and distinctly embodied instances, individual animal bodies, some of them human. Since transcendent consciousness (freedom) occurs at the level of the embodied individual, and collectives have no original consciousness, there is no collective transcendence. With no transcendence at the top, collectives have to be legitimized from the level of the individual. Just as the metaphysics of far horizons implied a top-down social organization, this new metaphysics of individual consciousness implies a bottom-up organization. It means that metaphysics lines up on the side of women against patriarchy.

Another mistake in that third claim for patriarchy is the implication that human interconnectedness requires force, that there would be no culture or community without it. However, getting rid of patriarchal orientation does not require getting rid of human interconnections in general. Hive minds can be replaced with the better kinds of interconnection that already exist, with social arrangements among people who do not have or need an orientation toward a commanding height, but who instead interact with others in the joy of sharing the powers of creative consciousness among distinct individuals. Mutually nurturing systems of sociability are already operating and the patriarchy is merely a parasitic system imposed on them. For an orientation outside hive minds, human history is still human history, profoundly misrepresented by the stories that are used to fashion hive minds. Every individual still participates in that larger history that includes the whole collection of hive minds as well as what exists beyond them. As a self-possessed agent you have a special place in the historic cultural movement dissolving patriarchal dystopia.

In the ancient conception of philosophical thinking, the goal was to achieve imperturbability, which followed from what was identified as transcendent, namely eternity, eternal necessities. When the world is eternally pre-determined then cultivating imperturbability makes sense as an accomplishment of thinking. With rejection of totalitarian eternal necessities, replaced by recognition of transcendent individual freedom-in-the-passing-of-time, the whole point of philosophical thinking changes. In this orientation the intended achievement of thinking is autonomous agency, claiming and practicing the creative freedom which is the transcendence of spiritual beings in a life in the world. Agency is the truest expression and realization of human spirituality. In this age of scientifically engineered propaganda, of corporate, political, and ideological mass messaging, of identity politics, philosophical thinking as a portal to self-possession or agency has become crucial.

Western History

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Equality, Hierarchy, Political Power

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History, hive mind, modernity, politics, sovereignty

What makes the history of the Euro-American cultural system interesting is not the west’s imperialistic dominance of the world at large, and it isn’t the development of empirical science and technology which contributed so much to that imperialism. It isn’t even the economic developments that present such a wealth of consumer goods and services and generally improved health, longevity, and leisure, making modernity the age of abundance driven by competitive materialism and reliable capital gains. Instead, and contrary to the story of human history presented to students in high schools or STEM programs, the decisive theme of western history has been a contest over the legitimacy of systems of sovereignty. This is most clearly evident in the historical spiral of revolt which began in Europe with John Wycliffe about thirty years after the Great Plague of 1348-50 and culminated in the French Revolution of 1789-99. In response to the attempt by the ruling factions of Medieval Christendom to perfect the strictest uniformity of collective hive mind, there blossomed the most profound resistance, critique, and assertion of alternatives. Universal literacy, mass education, a research imperative, and some democratic influence (elections) on institutions of sovereignty are all conspicuous consequences of the ongoing opposition to perennial oligarchic dominance, and of the central place in western history of an ongoing series of challenges to the legitimacy of such sovereignty. This is the real treasure of the west.

Sovereignty and the Myth of Human Nature

20 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Nature

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anarchism, culture, freedom, law, left-wing politics, sovereignty, the great chain of being, Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) described his imagined ‘state of nature’ as a vicious anarchy that was a continuous war of all against all, and Hobbes’ vision has become the default or common idea of anarchism. Hobbes did not recognize that the humans of his vision, who behave as missiles of (aggressive) self-gratification, are under the influence of a certain culture, a culture of human macro-parasitism perfected by nomadic animal herders in very ancient times and soon enough transferred to conquered human communities. A suitable name for that macro-parasitic culture would be ‘Aryan masculinity’ from the most famous historical group of conquering herders out of the great Eurasian steppes (‘Aryan(s)’ means ‘lord(s)’*). When there are lords, or better, barons, expressing the culture of Aryan masculinity there are always human livestock, underling workers forced into servitude to the barons. Since that is a culture and not a racial trait (nor inherent to human nature), the practitioners are long past being visibly Aryan or anything else in particular. The cultural poisoning from Aryan masculinity ( “to the victor belong the spoils”, glorification of living from top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism) is even now pervasive and normalized, and was so already in Hobbes’ time, which accounts for his (and the previous Christian) view of human nature. The war of all against all is the concept of ‘anarchy’ from within the cultural matrix of Aryan masculinity. If the human population consisted entirely of Aryan-cultured males, each expressing his alpha-trophy-looting will-to-power impulses, then indeed the human condition would tend toward a war of all against all.

Law

When the Aryan-cultured barons got around to attempting to limit their own lethality among themselves, they constructed a personified law by making a person into law, a sovereign, constituting the nucleus of a single Aryan superman on a massive collective scale. They did it by designating the most dominant among them as sovereign leader and then all aligning as projections and extensions of that person. The alignment was primarily military, an organization of aggressive violence, with all sovereign operations conceived as variants of the military organization and spirit. The collective beast so created, which Hobbes called Leviathan, a sovereign-owned-and-operated collective (and which we still endure today) is a mammoth replica of the individual Aryan male driven by competitive ambitions, with a brittle pride (honour) quick to take offence at disrespect, insubordinate autonomy, or resistance; its acquisitive appetites engorged by culture to smother universal empathy and nurturing impulses generally. Devotees of the macro-parasitic culture are persuaded to put up with some personal limitations within the social beast Leviathan because each one can participate in the institutional projection of a massive will-to-power and feel himself enlarged by the conquests and sparkly trophies of his sovereign Leviathan, a share of those trophies becoming personal rewards for devoted loyalty. The most commonly recognized form of Leviathan is the sovereign state, originally some form of monarchy, but other forms are common and can include corporations, crime families, and organized religions, as well as less formal cultural associations or communities of ethos such as organized class consciousness.

The father-figure sovereign, as sovereign, was mythologized as a redeeming force, seeming to lift individuals out of their selfishness, but in fact just absorbing them into a larger selfishness. Rejection of that kind of sovereignty, lordship, and hierarchy is the essence of the egalitarian political left-wing, but rejection of Aryan-type or Leviathan sovereignty, in which the body social is an institutionalized Aryan male on a gigantic scale, is not promotion of war of all against all. Instead, it is promotion of a richer understanding of individual creative intelligence, lacking the top-down idea that humans as individuals need to be redeemed or saved by a herder of some kind, inherently in inescapable debt, owing everything to the higher power which was able to herd them (obvious Aryan propaganda).

The Big Lie of the Macro-Parasite Faction

Whenever there is an authoritarian form of society, a chain-of-command society with a top-down structure of power, it is a legacy of the culture of Aryan masculinity which glorifies macro-parasitism. The grand strategy of the macro-parasitic patriarchy is to convince everyone that Aryan masculinity is the inevitable essence of human nature. “Yes, we all contain evil, but we are the same as everybody, just doing what anyone does when they can, because that is human nature. We need a higher power to press us to do somewhat better.” (The real essence of “human nature”, or rather human individuality, is living in time, which is to say, freedom. Culture has the effect of masking the creative freedom of individuals.) As long as the Aryan view of human nature is accepted, then some authoritarian sovereignty, such as the one described by Hobbes, is necessary for the most basic security of person. However, Aryan masculinity is not inevitable human nature, and insisting that it is is the Big Lie, the Big Ignoble Lie, of the macro-parasite faction. Fear of philosophical thinking is built into the culture of that faction because a philosophical ‘phenomenology of innocence’ refutes the lie and enables a more accurate recognition of human individuality. Another way of saying this might be be to say that the strategy of the macro-parasitic faction is to convince everyone that there is a determinate human nature within a determinate Great Chain of Command (Being), whereas a personally conducted phenomenology of innocence reveals freedom.

* Indian Thought and its Development, written by Albert Schweitzer, translated from German by Mrs. Charles E.B. Russell, published by Henry Holt and Company Inc. (1936). See page 20.

Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity

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anarchy, culture, Enlightenment, freedom, Freud, intelligence, nature, philosophy, Plato, reality, sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes

Of the two lessons from history mentioned in the title, the bad news lesson was sketched in the previous posting. The second lesson inspires more optimism, and it is that there was a philosophically led cultural movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries called the Enlightenment, the accomplishments of which we treasure more as their fragility becomes more and more evident. The three most influential Enlightenment philosophers, on Jonathan I. Israel’s view, were Benedict Spinoza (1631-77), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), and Denis Diderot (1713-84). In light of the lesson from history sketched in the previous posting, it is clear that the Enlightenment movement was not an unqualified success, although it was and is very far from being ineffectual. In all of history, only that philosophical movement has made noteworthy progress against the entrenched culture of human parasitism, and that was done with a three punch combination.

One punch was a new cultural wave of materialist science. The scientific perspective began to undermine the religion and metaphysics that promoted the legitimacy of top-down parasite factions within Christendom: monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. Descartes, Hobbes, and others of their generation were crucial in that conceptual groundwork for science, breaking away from Aristotelian-religious ideas as previously codified by Thomas Aquinas. The conceptions of materialist science were persuasive and far-reaching enough to create structural instability and a cultural vacuum in the orientation system of Old Regime reality. A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories (tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as typical ways of acting and material culture, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature, community, and individual subjective interiority. The cultural instability in Old Regime Christendom caused by scientific ideas enabled the effectiveness of a second Enlightenment punch: a campaign of strengthening the dignity and autonomy of individuals, in contrast to the Augustinian concept of human nature tainted and enslaved by original sin. That was done by recognizing universally distributed rationality: an individually innate human ability to judge what is true and real based entirely on commonly available perceptions. The previous history of the spread of proletarian literacy from the time of Wycliffe in the fourteenth century was crucial in this increasing dignity and power of human nature at the individual level. Philosophers of the radical stream of the Enlightenment presented rationality as empowering bottom-up control of society, re-enforcing universal equality, human rights, and democracy, specifically contradicting any top-down social control in the name of rationality now routinely blamed on the Enlightenment.

The third punch was a promotion of the autonomous application of rationality for the most ambitious philosophical thinking, for a re-conceptualization of the most fundamental realities without appeal to any kind of ‘superego’ such as the omniscient/ omnipotent deity supposedly expressed through established authorities, both religious and civic. Re-thinking reality is distinctly a philosophical project, evading culture with intent to re-model culture, and the enlightenment movement was self-consciously philosophical. ‘Philosophical’ meant making use of rationality without religious assumptions of cosmic or divine purpose for people, without cosmic teleology or any kind of external superego. (Teleology does not necessarily mean cosmic purpose, divine purpose, or purpose in nature.) ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘rationally non-religious’ and consequently de-centralized, asserting a pluralism and diversity of thinking quite foreign to religious cultures.

The radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era re-conceptualized all three branches of the Christian system of reality: nature, community, and individual subjectivity. In medieval and Old Regime reality the human essence was thought to be an immortal soul or spirit, truly at home in a realm of eternity outside and above nature (nature considered as the realm of time or semi-delusional becoming in which human souls are temporarily stranded and tested) and every soul’s destiny was thought to be determined entirely by an omnipotent and eternal deity. The radical rationalists re-conceived nature scientifically as a strictly physical system of ‘clockwork’ completely free of disembodied spirits and their power, free of cosmic teleology, purpose, or destiny. They re-conceived individual subjectivity as universally educable to rationality and capable of spontaneous rationality, even though usually trained by existing institutions to a condition of non-rational credulity, superstition, and abject deference to entrenched authorities. The Enlightenment rationalists upset the Christian system of reality by bringing the human essence back from eternity into nature, rejecting all super-natural entities or realms of being, and then arguing that in the primordial ‘state of nature’, prior to establishment of arbitrary social conventions, all people would have had equal freedoms and rights. In that way, society was re-conceived as a system of equal persons with equal rights and freedoms of thought, expression, and association, best organized as a democratic republic (bottom-up political force). This thorough re-conceptualization of the system of reality profoundly weakened the legitimacy of monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

The strongest social and cultural authorities have always persisted in an anti-enlightenment campaign, for obvious reasons. The cultural and political situation at the launch of the twenty-first century reveals that elements of the enlightenment re-conceptualization of reality failed the test of determined opposition. Enlightenment theory contained some flaws and mis-conceptions. Still, the intent here is to learn lessons from the Enlightenment about re-thinking reality so as to reach a point in history where we get beyond the influence of human parasites.

The Current System

The Freudian model of individual subjectivity is a fair codification of the currently prevailing system of reality. Since Freud, it has been common to explain social behaviour, culture, and history as projections of human psychology, always expressing strictly natural forces, forces other than individual creative freedom. The parasite culture loves a conception of subjectivity dominated by natural drives or universal compulsions because such impulses are reliably available to be culturally triggered, stimulated, managed, manipulated, channelled, and controlled so as to sustain a set of mass demands that can be supplied at a profitable price, for example, or to arrange mass lessons and training exercises in obedience and subordination such as wars. In addition, the apparently chaotic and atomizing force of such compulsions provides a convenient excuse to insist on institutionalizing some version of a great unquestionable parent, structuring reality to include an authoritarian power which parasite factions intend to reserve for themselves to occupy and operate. In the Freudian model, that parental role is called the ‘superego’. Historically earlier systems of reality featured myths of disembodied super-intelligent powers such as gods and demons, or an all-determining realm of eternity, whose power accounted for and sanctified the worldly power of the parasites. Modern theorists often proceed from the observation that there just are social supervisors, no matter what their legitimacy or origin, and people must become “well adjusted” by internalizing their influence. However, in the absence of ‘just so stories’ or appeals to divine intervention in appointing social supervisors, the modern system of reality falls back onto social contract theory as a foundation for social authority figures.

Hobbes’ vision of the ‘state of nature’ is a decently accurate description of the culture-world of will-to-power masculinity (distinct from human nature, even though Hobbes presented it as human nature), always on the brink of war of all against all. On the Hobbesian vision, the carriers of the masculine will-to-power avoid the all-destructive war of anarchy by agreeing to acquire the benefits of social order and civil society by instituting a contract by which a sovereign, with absolute power over life and death, is established to decree laws by which all will be bound (when they can’t evade enforcement). The social contract essentially confers ultimate and unlimited ownership of persons and properties upon the sovereign. So, from nothing more than cowboy rational self-interest (now assumed to be determined biologically), authority figures of civil society emerge to constrain the many anarchic expressions of self-interest, naturally pre-determined compulsive egoism. This is a vision which has eliminated transcendence completely, satisfying the demands of respectability imposed by science. Hobbesian theory, from Leviathan, like Plato’s model of the three-part soul from Republic, is one of those intellectual images of reality which became ingrained in culture at many levels, to the point of being considered obvious and difficult to question.

The Freudian Model

When Plato’s ancient but perennial model of a three-part subjectivity (expressed outwardly in a stratified society) is combined with Hobbes’ theory of socially contracted sovereignty, what emerges is codified in Freud’s model of personality or subjectivity, from which the term “superego” is taken along with the other elements of the structure, namely “id” and “ego”. (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had already developed these ideas.) In that model, the main vectors of force are the id, bestial lusts for pleasure, sparkly things, power, and status (the lower two-thirds of Plato’s model, on the Freudian view reducible to nature in the form of biological compulsions); and the superego, representing authority figures from ambient society such as parents, teachers, priests, and police, internalized within each individual’s subjectivity by exposure to education, religion, and secular socialization. Those two vectors of force, nature and society, confront and balance one another in every person’s subjectivity, and at their point of balance a semi-stable image seems to appear, an image called the ego, the individual personality. There is no original or autonomous force or substance to that ego on this model, no reality. The ego has only the force of id as bent into some semblance of social conformity by the force of authority figures. That is all there is to an individual Freudian-type intelligence, really just another iteration of the pre-Lutheran Christian vision of human nature enslaved by original sin but civilized by the ever-ready whips and gallows of Church and military-monarchical states.

So, Freud’s model of the individual’s psychological interior is a structure of three elemental positions, two of which are forces: the set of instinctive or biological drives collectively called the id, and the aforementioned superego consisting of internalized authority or parental figures featuring officials of various kinds representing the institutional realities of sovereignty and deity, the ultimate and unlimited owners of all persons and property. Between the id and the superego is the image called the ego, and it is all position and no original force or content, merely the balancing point between instinctive drives and socially derived constraints. That ego, nothing more than a semi-stable image, can be recognized as another view of “zombie shells” (invoked in earlier posts) when other forces of social influence are considered, such as role models among peers influencing appearance, interests, and attitudes toward people in various economic situations, people with different ways of making a living; and also role models thrown up by teachers or media personalities, for example, in terms of careers, style of life, appearances of pleasure, power, and status. Everyone needs to be accepted socially, and so has to conform to some accepted style of life and style of person. All these social approvals/ disapprovals are forces which shape a person’s outward presentation into an image of a social personality, an ego. However, that image of personality is not created by social pressures and biological compulsions alone, but most importantly by an individual intelligence managing those forces while remaining quite distinct from the ego image.

The Thinking Subject

We need to re-model the system of reality codified in the Freudian vision by adding a new creative force, namely individual intelligence, which creates the ego image as part of its management of a whole array of impulses and forces acting on it. The social and cultural dominance of parasite factions can never be complete or irrevocable because of an elemental, autonomous, and creative freedom to individual intelligences (simply as intelligences) which asserts itself and which, in asserting itself, is able to recognize and to mark its divergence from forces tending to control, deceive, and diminish it. One of the ways in which individual freedom asserts itself is in thinking about itself within a system of reality and developing self-awareness and self-identification, which is to say, in a sort of philosophical thinking.

Thinking is self-directed reorientation in increasingly refined and elaborated questioning, acting on specific curiosity in searching experiences to open the world in novel patterns of recognition and identification. That reorienting search is not entirely directed outward. Ideas are not imposed on intelligence by sensations. There are two surprise horizons at play in the individual’s process of reorientation. Inseparable from the outward sensory reach there is also an inward opening to growth and development in the integration and restructuring of accumulated bearings from past experience and so to what is being sought, in the specifics of curiosity, wonder, or questioning, in a sense of possibilities, patterns, or ideas. Inseparable from that is a developing sense of what it is that is curious and questions and gazes and listens and opens to new recognitions and new bearings, of thinking as a personal creative act. Individuals create completely original and unique states or shapes of orientation, just in the course of the ordinary process of building a particular life. Although linguistic utterances are often used in reorientation, they are not the main story. The reality of thinking without language is important since language is culture and loaded with the malice of parasitic influence. Thinking without language is just reorienting in patterns far too complex to be codified in language. Language is too rigid structurally, rule-bound, too standard and conventional to help much in self-directed reorienting. The sense of effortful, metabolically costly embodiment is more important. From personal curiosity you seek out the niche aspects of experience, previously unidentified within the increasingly big picture, which open new prospects you are ready to explore and to mark.

Archaic Superegos

The subjective interiority described in the standard Freudian model is a culturally programmed nearly-reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Superegos do loom large for most individuals. The individual’s sense of self-definition is often not much more than an image or shell patched together from cultural fragments, and appetites and competitive spirit are culturally triggered and encouraged along certain channels. However, this model and the nearly-reality it depicts are products of parasitic cultural influences and profoundly misrepresent individual intelligences. Just as radical rationalists of the Enlightenment era built on certain cultural legacies which increase the recognition of dignity and power in individual intelligences, maintaining progress requires another assertion of individual autonomy.

The autonomous force of intelligence is far richer than the instinctive-biologically driven id. There is an intelligence in a particular natural and cultural situation building a sustainable life. That intelligence is very far from being identical with the ego image, although it constructs the ego image to survive. History shows that superegos all represent the control of top-down parasite culture, driven by malign and ignoble origins, pretences, and motives. Superegos all claim ownership of the individual subject, both body and subjectivity, at the same time as doing their utmost to obscure and disguise their actual parasitism. There is no legitimacy to any ownership of individual intelligences, and so it is crucial to repudiate the claim of parasite factions and institutions to own individuals. To be un-owned is an absolute requirement of freedom, by definition and in practice. Anyone undertaking to think philosophically, for example, must not be owned but must be consciously autonomous. To abandon superegos is to recognize your own condition of not-being-owned, and in doing that, you have to recognize the same for every other individual intelligence. Philosophy can never be an assertion of top-down intellectual authority because it throws authority to every individual, based entirely on the power of intelligence-as-such.

As a consequence of recognizing the autonomous power of individual intelligences, the currently prevailing system of reality as depicted in the Freudian model can and should be re-constructed by removing superegos completely. The normal fear raised to justify the necessity of superegos or sovereign supervisors is the vision of individuals as missiles of compulsive self-gratification, but that is only true of individuals conditioned to the traditional culture of will-to-power masculinity. When that cultural conditioning is unloaded, what is left is a much more complicated innocent intelligence which empathically recognizes and responds to the presence of other separate intelligences. The innate importance and force of individual intelligence means that abandoning all forms of the superego does not unleash the bestial lusts of nature in the form of id, but rather unleashes the individual to realize its autonomy and creative power, which includes the force for empathic interconnectedness. The only way to have an authentic morality is by developing the innocent empathy that remains when the cultural influences are removed that insist on defining some persons in such a way as to legitimize the use of them as hosts for parasitic purposes. Anyway, superegos founded in human parasitism are strictly absurd as guardians of morality. Their whole way of being is anti-empathic immorality.

The individual self-construct needs to be re-conceived by displacing instinctive drives with intelligent questioning, an intelligence searching for empathic interconnectedness. (Please see blog posting 77, November 19, 2014, Of Questions and Freedom: A Paradigm Shift for Intelligent Motivation.) This paradigm shift has the effect of re-constructing or re-modelling the whole system of modern reality. It requires that we re-model reality to recognize a discontinuity between unfree nature and free intelligences, to open a space for individual freedom in spite of the brute determinism of nature, especially in the form of biological compulsions. It was the radical Enlightenment rationalists who originally brought the idea of a human essence back from eternity into time and nature, but they were only partly right. They were right that the discontinuity is not as imagined in Christianity, but it isn’t as if we can de-couple intelligences completely from nature. Although individual intelligences are describable as separate universes of time and orientation, each is a universe that is oriented to the world of nature and fundamentally in love with other intelligences with whom it engages always through the medium of nature. It can’t float off to some ethereal cloud of eternity, because intelligence couldn’t construct teleological time without an engagement with nature. What is crucial is a recognition that culture expresses more than nature, that understanding culture requires a recognition of individual creative intelligences.

Note: My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely from the monumental Enlightenment trilogy by Jonathan I. Israel, specifically cited in previous postings.

A Philosophical Consciousness

19 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Strategic thinking

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bell hooks, Enlightenment, freedom, human-on-human parasitism, imprinted parent, philosophy, politics, Power, science, sovereignty, time, transcendence

Toxic Consequences of the Imprinted Parent

Human cultures have been poisoned by both direct and indirect consequences of childhood conditioning to an indefinable parental intelligence, the universally imprinted parent, and because of that it is urgent for individuals everywhere to search out and discover the non-poisoned pre-cultural features of their personal powers, sensitivities, and impulses, which is to say the features of experience which express their innocent intelligence. The interiority of every intelligence has both innocent foundations and additional conditioning by the culture or ways of life of the people surrounding it. (Meditation in traditions related to Transcendental Meditation, for example, has innocence-rescuing aspects such as disengaging from language.) A movement of individual re-grounding in personal innocence is the only way that cultures and the human interconnectedness that those cultures condition can be reconstructed to eliminate distortions of reality, injustices, and other poisons which currently damage and restrict the large numbers of individuals exposed to those cultures. Searching out and discovering the innocence of personal intelligence is a critical thinking process, the building of a kind of philosophical consciousness.

Direct consequences of the imprinted parent are personally embedded habits and expectations of dependency and subordination expressed in a continual search for and orientation to authority figures, leaders, elders, and supervised sophistication. Indirect consequences are cultural distortions of reality and elaborated ideologies developed and broadcast by parasitic groups and factions with the intent of exploiting standard parental conditioning to establish themselves as legitimate, stable, and institutional authorities and supervisors, dominant powers, controllers of wealth and general behaviour in a community as a whole. It is the universality of childhood conditioning to an indefinable parental intelligence which has enabled human-on-human parasitism to establish itself securely in all kinds of communities and to use culture to mask its true nature.

bell hooks on imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy

The vicious qualities that bell hooks identifies in the ordinary functioning of Euro-American society, described as imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, all resolve into top-down human-on-human parasitism. The overt purpose of imperialism is to acquire the benefits of human parasitism as specified in posting 73, May 21, 2014, bell hooks on Freedom, and war as the instrument of imperialism is parasitic on grunt soldiers in a most overt way. White supremacist ideology (or any ideology of racial inequality) is a device to justify human parasitism by de-humanizing (second-classing) certain groups. Patriarchy is an expression of an ideology of gender inequality which provides a (false) justification for males to be parasites on females. Capitalism is an ideology of socio-economic class hierarchy (claiming scientific support from Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest, or similar purported laws of nature) along with a structure of laws and organization of property, production, and distribution which glorifies and privileges owners of the means of production (capital, including conceptual property such as patents), effectively licensing owners to be parasites on non-owning employees who labour to supply, operate, and maintain the means of production. Capital arranges to increase eternally while the acts of labour continuously deteriorate aging labourers. In that way the institutionalized injustices named by hooks are all manifestations of the same underlying culture of human-on-human parasites, and an intent to enjoy the rewards of parasites is the motive for particular groups and factions to exploit basic parental conditioning to establish themselves as authorities, dominant powers, controllers of wealth, and supervisors of communal behaviour. The only way that any of the injustices of those institutions can be ended and prevented is to discredit, discard, and go beyond the culture which glorifies human parasites through exploiting the universal and uncritical expectation of parental-type authority, namely the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity derived historically from nomadic animal herding cultures.

Beyond the Imprinted Parent

It is encouraging to discover that a large-scale project of getting beyond projections of the universally imprinted parent actually began soon after 1600 with the period of Euro-American cultural history known as the Enlightenment. The fundamental impulse of the Enlightenment was to improve the general condition of humanity exactly by eliminating the power and authority of churches, aristocracy, and monarchical institutions, along with their representatives and agents, thus eliminating all the externalized Old Regime avatars of the Great Indefinable Super-Parent. In the Old Regime the sovereign courts of kings and princes were staffed chiefly by activist members of the military-landowning aristocracy, the large-scale capitalists of their era. Governments were really control mechanisms of that overtly parasitic ownership class, direct constructs of the alpha-trophy-looting culture of armed men on horses which originated with conquering nomadic herding confederacies which in their conquered territories evolved into a ruling confederacy of what modern people would call crime families. That parasitic ruling (herding) faction justified its oppressions by an appeal to cosmic intelligent design, claiming appointment and support by divine Providence, the Super-Parent. Of the three main engines of Old Regime social supervision, Church, monarchy, and aristocracy, the second and third rested their legitimacy on that of the Church. The rhetoric of class conflict would clearly apply to aristocracy and monarchy, but less clearly to Church hierarchies, even though the higher Church officials would all represent the aristocratic crime family class.

In the Euro-American cultural system after 1600 there was a significant rate of literacy and advanced education which was partly the result of the humanist movement of the fifteenth century Renaissance, and since the spread of the printing press after about 1450 there had been a growing culture of debate and exchange of ideas in writing (self-consciously calling itself the Republic of Letters) which functioned outside the immediate control of governments and religious foundations such as universities and church hierarchies. People engaging in that literary culture used philosophical ideas and rational arguments to identify and specify injustices of the prevailing forms of feudalism and to propose better alternatives. Fundamentally, it was discovered that if the non-rational claim of divine appointment or supernatural intervention was disregarded then the traditional structures of wealth and power in European society (ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and monarchical) were all exposed as arbitrary, unjustified, illegitimate, and plainly parasitic on the common majority of people. Credit can be given to Spinoza for articulating that insight in a broadly convincing way. It was mainly Spinoza, based on his materialist metaphysics, who argued for abandoning the non-rational claim of traditional powers to represent supernatural intervention, divine will, or a providential deity controlling human society and history.

Enlightenment in general, in the eighteenth century sense, meant recognition of the fundamental power of human rationality and universal principles derived by rational thinking and debate. The ultimate authority of reason is the crux of Enlightenment and the authority of reason both undermined claims of divine intervention in worldly affairs and conferred the crucial dignity and (potential) power of rational thinking, as basic to human nature, upon every individual. In one interpretation, it would mean being educated in the scientific approach to nature as distinct from superstitious and magical thinking typical of religion and other assumptions of disembodied spirits. Rationalists emphasized that appeals to divine will to sanctify inequality of wealth, power, freedom, and privilege are implausible, non-rational, and obscurantist. Rationalists also emphasized that, since appeals to revealed commands of a supernatural dictator are non-rational, it makes better sense to decide appropriate moral action and human interaction by calculating the resulting happiness of and benefit to humanity as a whole. What follows from that is the sovereignty of the collective of all people, the general will, and a requirement for individual empowerment through freedom of thought and expression on a base of rational education, all of which defines a serious kind of universal human equality from which tolerance of racial variety follows and which dislodges any particular culture or religion from a privileged position. Of course, the kind of thinking and expression that was legally forbidden by institutions of wealth and power in the Old Regime was precisely anything that questioned their legitimacy. They did their utmost to use the power of existing institutions to enforce conservatism, mobilizing the already active apparatus of state censorship and the Roman Catholic Inquisition to snuff out freedom of thought and expression, ideas of democracy, and legal recognition of universal human rights.

Legitimation Drift from Providence to Popular Sovereignty

In spite of the fact that we people of modernity consider our science-driven society to be well beyond the superstitions and brutalities of Medieval and Old Regime conditions, there are profound continuities as well, as highlighted by the work of bell hooks. Monarchical and aristocratic forms of violence-based sovereignty have not disappeared but only morphed into new configurations. Although the top-down faction of human parasites still clings to the conservatism of religion, it shifts the base of its legitimacy more to an identification or unification with sovereign governments as ambient cultures become more secular and governments appear more responsible to the majority of citizens. The ownership class justifies and exercises its parasitism through participation in and partnerships with the traditional top-down force of now apparently legitimate governments. The legitimacy of government is bestowed upon the means by which large-scale wealth accumulates ever more wealth: commercial corporations, businesses, and industries which are licensed and fostered by governments to encourage employment and something vaguely called national wealth. Government members must have a proven dedication to the corporate sector, and especially to banking and the investment/ financial industry. The whole ownership faction rides the coattails of the appearance and rhetoric of ‘sovereignty of the people’ created by elections every four or five years offering some choice of ruling political party.

Top-Down against Bottom-Up Political Forces

The problem with that foundation of capitalist legitimacy is that democracy is more myth than reality, and consequently the legitimacy of familiar governments is an illusion. The concentration of wealth in a small faction enables that faction to exercise decisive political influence, vastly overpowering the bottom-up political forces such as voting every four or five years. As discovered and documented by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page (2014) there is an overpowering influence of great wealth in all political processes. Behind the great wealth is the malign culture of alpha-trophy-looting cowboy masculinity which honours and glorifies the accomplishments of human parasitism. In any country claiming to be democratic, inequality is eventually fatal to the legitimacy of power because it removes even the appearance of democracy.

It is now common to acknowledge that, even in the most modern democratic countries, the top-down political force of organized wealth (class-conscious strategic action within the corporate owning and controlling faction of society) is far more influential, effective, and agenda-driven (funding political parties, political candidates, and lobbyists, for example, in addition to owning and controlling mass media, academic research, and large scale employment opportunities) than any bottom-up forces such as citizens voting for party controlled representatives in government every four or five years. That vast inequality of political influence is not new, and has been the political reality in some form since long before the emergence of national governments with democratic fig-leafs such as elections, but the current state represents the dramatic reversal of a trend in the direction of greater bottom-up inclusion. Since the Enlightenment era of Euro-American history, since the French Revolution of 1789, but especially since The Great War of 1914-18 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 there was a trend toward greater bottom-up democratic influence. That trend was rapidly reversed around the time of the truncated presidency (1969-74) of Richard Nixon, apparently in reaction to the American anti-war and counter-culture youth movements of the 1960’s and 70’s. Nixon was soon followed by a sustained wave of political, economic, and ideological support for top-down dominance. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of The United Kingdom through 1979-90. In the USA Ronald Reagan held the presidency through 1980-88. The trend reversal against greater bottom-up political influence has been so thorough and effective that it is now reasonable to identify it as a coup d’état by the ownership class against the beginnings and promise of a more authentic democracy. It is an ongoing anti-democratic creeper-coup managed strategically over roughly half a century, maybe from around the assassination of JFK in 1963.

The Politics of Metaphysics

In the historical context of Medieval European Christendom and the Old Regime, there was a much abused identification of transcendent discretionary creativity with an externalized and centralized cosmic super-parent who commanded universal obedience: the Christian God. Spinoza’s version of materialist monism, amplified and broadcast culturally in the writings of radical rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eventually had its intended effect, largely discrediting the legitimacy of all institutions of wealth and power (Church, aristocracy, and monarchies) which founded their legitimacy on the omnipotence of the cosmic super-parent. That’s the big deal about Spinoza. However, a strict materialism eliminates all philosophical idealism, which in this context is the same as transcendent discretionary creativity intrinsic to some entity or entities. Materialism eliminates all forms of discretionary creativity because with materialism everything is pre-determined for all eternity by omnipotent and unalterable laws of nature. So, as a political ideology, materialism soon encountered the limits of its liberating effects, because when interpreted strictly it eliminates the freedom of all individual people as well as the authority of gods, disembodied spirits, and anyone claiming to be their appointed agents. To get beyond those limits of materialism it is necessary to re-admit transcendent creativity back into the philosophical foundation of human relations generally and politics in particular. This time, however, the recognition of transcendent creativity has to avoid the mythological elaboration of residing in an externalized, centralized, or universalized super-parent and instead accept restriction to the individual interiors (non-spacial interiors) of de-centralized animate biological entities, that is to say, all individual animals including humans. There is no super-parental entity here, although on this view discretionary creativity comes with the vulnerability and predicament of being in a particular life in time. This de-centralizing of discretionary creativity is a partial recapitulation of the Enlightenment act conferring profound dignity and (potential) power on every individual at the same time as removing claims to sovereign privilege other than from a grounding in a far stronger and more authentic democracy than has ever yet existed.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the crucial philosophical project was to dispute the claim of parasitic power to be based on omnipotent Providence. There are no parental presences in a philosophical consciousness. It was right for Enlightenment rationalists to marshal philosophy against parasitic pretenders to parental authority over whole communities, and they were right to articulate a philosophical vision, scientific materialism, that had the effect of undermining such claims. As it turned out, scientific materialism was not effective over the long run. Now, again, a philosophical consciousness is required to dispute the claim of parasitic power to be justified by materialist science.

Time As the Condition of Discretionary Creativity

Nothing in nature, neither at the cosmic level nor at any local level, is moved by teleology, by intentions, goals, or aspirations, and in that sense there is no future or futurity in nature (and so no time in nature). A definition of nature could be: the set of non-teleological events and objects, what might be called the set of inertial events and objects. However, there are also a plurality of individual intelligences (ordinary embodied people) and those intelligences (as intelligences) are close to being entirely teleological, and teleology is temporality, futurity, a bearing toward a future. As teleology we are outside nature but certainly operating into or upon nature, and each intelligence is also interior to itself, which is to say, there isn’t just one great teleological striving, drive, or desire manifesting itself through all the individual intelligences. There are indeed vast numbers of separate individual teleological intelligences. Plurality isn’t tidy, so it will lack aesthetic appeal to some, but it is not helpful to ignore this untidiness of reality.

Non-Superstitious Transcendence: the Question in the Gaze

Not all conceptions of transcendence are vulnerable to the charge of superstition in the way that ideas of disembodied spirits or of cosmic super-parental intelligences are. There is a non-superstitious transcendence: time as a condition of every individual’s personal intelligence. All three of vacant space, time, and intelligences (spirits) have been suggested as ethereal or immaterial. In the case of spirits, the plausible grounding of the very idea of spiritual non-materiality is the inseparability of intelligence and time. Every intelligence is a voice, and voice exists only in time. It is a trail of breadcrumbs which has to be recognized, from a range of increasingly remote memory, as a voice. Since space could be described as a condition of strict material actuality, and the experience of space has to be a temporal construct, the one and only true and familiar non-materiality is time, and time is exactly definitive of the interiority of the question or teleological bearing in any human gaze. Knowledge has its existence in that bearing. Time so experienced as a fabric of possibilities does not exist in the strict actuality of nature, but is a creation of individual intelligences in their living a degree of freedom from the determinism of nature. Time is uniquely not physical, far more than a condition of material actuality, and, to that extent people have an aspect which is not material or physical because as intelligence each exists and self-creates through time and only through time, which doesn’t even exist as physical matter or substance.

Leaders perpetuate the belief that fulfillment in life is achieved from devoted service to the supervisory and educational hierarchies of knowledge, wealth, and power, from the sophistication and rewards that long service accumulates. However, the very idea of hierarchy is yet another version of the imprinted parent. Only within an uncritical acceptance of the child-parent pattern of subordination does merit somehow transfigure into meritocracy. The ideology of meritocracy is part of the poisoning of culture to justify parasitic top-down control of populations, and the glorification of parasitism discredits culture generally as a guide to reality, value, self-identification, and human relations. Philosophical consciousness of innocent intelligence enables empathy to the individual transcendence of everyone, each individual with its own elaborate interiority of time and teleology out of which emerges from each its empathic recognition of other intelligences. Philosophic empathy is recognizing all individual intelligences as both physical and creatively teleological entities, as individual eruptions into nature of discretionary creativity, as individual spinners of freedom in transcendent time.

My impressions of the Enlightenment are largely interpretations of:

Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790, written by Jonathan I. Israel, published by Oxford University Press (2011), ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0.

Radical Enlightenment : Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, written by Jonathan I. Israel, Published by Oxford University Press (July 2002), ISBN: 0-19-925456-7.

Beyond the Imprinted Parent

10 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Uncategorized

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Being, female culture, freedom, Gender Politics, History, imprinted parent, intelligence, male culture, Michel Foucault, nature, philosophy, politics, Power, social contract, sovereignty, the norms fallacy, Thomas Hobbes, time, transcendence

The Argument

We have a system of human interconnectedness that is institutionally parasitic on most people (for the benefit of a small faction) but which has everyone oriented within distortions of reality that obscure and sanctify the parasitism. Specifically, we are oriented within beliefs that our situation is exclusively a personal creation such that as long as we dare to dream big and don’t blame others or rock the boat we can by our own efforts ride the social mobility bus up levels of dignity/ support/ love/ money/ power/ honour/ glory and achieve the best life-of-our-dreams possible given our talents, energies, and personal circumstances; in other words, that the capitalist politico-economic system efficiently provides the best possible life to those who deserve and earn it, to those who prove they are worthy. The argument presented here against that distorted orientation is that the politico-economic system in fact consists of parasitic systems of subordination which are institutionalized and maintained in place by deliberately manipulating mass reverence for fictitious parent-forms, externalized pseudo-intelligences declared to be sacred, supposed enlargements of ordinary intelligence situated externally as gods, nature, history, sovereign governments, corporations, and the oligarchic celebrity systems often used to represent communities. However, all such parasitic distortions can be overcome non-violently by any individual through recognizing the unique transcendence of all individual intelligences, and there are good consequences, both personal and collective, philosophical and political, in the self-possession that results from doing that.

Exploiting Child-to-Parent Conditioning

The primordial system of subordination is childhood. For every human newborn, infant, or toddler, there is a deep dependence on an inexplicable parental intelligence which is just there in the structure of the world, along with gravity and ground, and whose limits are unrecognizable. That experience of child-orientation is exploited and used as training in perpetual subordination, looking outward for the initiation of agency, direction, approval, self-definition, and life goals. When an individual matures to adulthood, that psychological pattern of emotional dependence should fade away, but certain cultural mechanisms intentionally keep it active to enable an institutional takeover of the role of supervisory intelligence with indefinite limits. One of those cultural mechanisms is religion and another is institutional sovereignty.

Real Parents are Often Self-Sacrificing

Although there are often parasitic practices in the treatment of older children by their parents, a crucial difference between actual parental intelligence and false parental avatars is that parents are generally devoted, to the point of self-sacrifice, to the fullest development of their children, but the institutional parental avatars work to formalize and preserve systems of life-limiting parasitism on those they supervise.

Just There: The Parental Alpha-Structure of Sovereignty

We all know that there is a sovereign superstructure around here with a whole set of warnings put into effect by watchers and investigators, agents prepared with special equipment for assaults, arrests, and facilities for confinement, and with methods of gathering information and justifying their controlling behaviour. The superstructure makes proclamations of laws and penalties. “Anyone in our territory caught doing X, or not doing Y, will have penalty Z imposed on him or her.” There is a claim to power and a warning about how the power will be used. On the basis of such warnings each person in the territory makes decisions about how to act. That supervising superstructure is just there when we arrive on the scene, as the buildings and streets of a city are just there, and just as to newborns, infants, and toddlers parental intelligences are just there. To carry on a livelihood here you have to get used to dealing with that watchful, interfering, and sometimes brutal supervising organization.

Sovereign superstructures are territorial and display strong drives to preserve and strengthen unlimited control of resources especially people. They organize defined borders and control the passing of properties and persons across borders. They proclaim and enforce exactly who gets to enter or leave their territory. Various branches of the superstructure watch and investigate the world beyond the borders for threats or opportunities for gaining advantages. It has been very common for neighbouring superstructures to do deliberate damage to one another in efforts to gain advantage and dominance. Some proclamations of superstructures require mainly young adult males to serve in lethal-force assault and defence formations to destroy threats and exploit opportunities. The lives of individuals are often destroyed in a superstructure’s promotion of its policies.

Different superstructures have different ways of originating proclamations, edicts, and decrees. Some base themselves on a single person with total authority. Those people often have ongoing conversations with a select group of advisors who assist in forming proclamations and supervising compliance. Other superstructures have collectives of several hundred people to discuss and approve proclamations. Selection to membership in such collectives is done in different ways, sometimes by nomination by political clubs and public election by region, and sometimes by a tradition of primogeniture from the most propertied social categories. Sometimes the superstructure canvasses people in its territory for ideas about how it should conduct business and who should have executive authority. Sometimes it has branch organizations that give certain people the opportunity to vote for candidates for positions of authority or for new policy and project proposals. This is unusual, however. Usually people with authority in a superstructure get to recruit their replacements. For such parental-type authority which is “just there”, mass compliance works exactly the same way in democracies, monarchies, single-party states, or overt dictatorships. People generally accept that the sovereign authority is “just there” and organize their activities accordingly.

The sovereign superstructure is surrounded by supporting branches which gather money and materials for its functions. Some of its proclamations stipulate which categories of people must submit portions of their wealth and income to the superstructure, or must pay the superstructure whenever they buy certain goods or services, cross certain borders, or periodically for items of property in their possession, or for whatever reason the superstructure proclaims. Whatever the superstructure proclaims is backed by its watching, investigating, lethal-force, and penalizing institutions.

The superstructure makes proclamations, takes money, and requires periods of service of some categories of people within its territory. It is not going to stop operating just because there are people who dislike what it does, so the sovereign superstructures do not operate contractually. In fact, the superstructure could not be based on a “social contract” because the concept of a contract requires equality of power among contracting parties (otherwise there is duress of the weaker by the stronger, voiding the concept ‘contract’). The supervising power recruits and acts through a lot of people trained and screened to support and agree with each other. Those people are not encouraged to question the arrangements. They are very strongly encouraged to carry on with established practices and functions of the superstructure, and to enjoy benefits to themselves which it provides. Shared culture and a chain of command unify a large selection of apparent individuals.

For many centuries in the historical past superstructures explained their proclamations (and their existence) as god’s commands and claimed special knowledge of the most powerful god or the only real God. Fear of the God’s retribution in an afterlife has proved a powerful instrument of control and supervision, coupled with promises of sublime and eternal rewards for obedient submission. Typically superstructures which use this technique have meeting facilities in every settlement, where people are expected to come regularly for small-group lessons on afterlife retribution and reward, and to make contributions of money.

Within monotheist religions, the individual’s situation suggests that the primal sense of the sacred among ancient middle-eastern herder-nomads, where the ideas originated, 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. The relationship of that God to the humans He creates, commanding devoted obedience, fervent declarations of admiration and submission, and unquestioning service, is quite overtly an idealized image of the relationship of the herder to his flocks, the herder father to his dependants. Such an orientation situates 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. However, that peculiar sense of the sacred is not confined to ancient herder-nomads, because the early orientation of every human newborn, infant, and toddler is similarly dominated by the inexplicable external intelligence of parents. On that basis, every human acquires very early in life the psychological disposition to gaze outward for the initiation of agency, direction, purpose, validation, and even self-definition.

Within that cultural background it is well worth observing that the raging power of an angry parent is not sacred. What is sacred within the pre-determined world of nature is the transcendent freedom of every intelligence-as-such. For the majority of citizens the supervising apparatus of nation-state sovereignty is just there, in exactly the same way as the inexplicable parental intelligence is just there for every newborn, infant, and toddler, but as an adult the only influence possible with the sovereign superstructure is to vote every four or five years from very limited choices which are pre-determined by the superstructure itself. That negligible possibility of influence does not apply to all people, however. A gross misrepresentation of sacredness has been exploited to render masses of people compliant to external forces, to render people controllable, because in addition to the cultural mechanisms to perpetuate the child-orientation there are social factions with special advantages in profiting from the mass psychological/ emotional manipulation those mechanisms enable, factions which are fixated on the rewards of maintaining and perfecting that manipulation. There are factions of any politico-economic system which know how to influence and profit from the superstructure, and they use it as a Wizard (of Oz) avatar, working the levers and mechanisms that play out the persona of transcendent Parent, the fictitious higher intelligence.

Any arrangement or mechanism that appeals to and exploits the universal pre-conditioning to orient toward an external parent-type of inexplicable intelligence will take on the character of divinity, will become a god avatar, no matter how ordinary it may be in origin and actuality. Pretty much anything can be deified. Monarchies and dictatorships (as well as nominally democratic political parties) build larger-than-life personality cults around the leader, who is undeniably embodied in the ordinary way. They do it by taking advantage of the universal childhood conditioning. The cultural construction of an inexplicable parental intelligence, like the angry father in the sky, attracts emotional projection of parental qualities onto an external force, fixating subordinated people in an emotional mental pattern characteristic of childhood.

The reason to go beyond the imprinted parent is not just political, to avoid parasitic exploitation by parental pretenders, but even more fundamentally philosophical, for basic self-discovery and self-possession.

Legitimacy of Sovereign Superstructures

The way in which superstructures of power formed, now encountered by succeeding generations as “just there”, has been described below in posting 68, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/lines-of-human-parasitism-through-western-civilizations/), in addition to postings 55, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/finishing-the-work-of-the-enlightenment-part-1of-2/) and 56, (https://intheblindspot.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/finishing-the-work-of-the-enlightenment-part-2-of-2/). The origin of sovereign superstructures in human-on-human parasitism has determined the behaviour and character of institutional power ever since, and it serves parasitic power well to be accepted as “just there”. Power is never an end in itself, but instead is always a means of reaping the benefits of parasitism on those over whom the power is exercised. (Michel Foucault (1926-84) politely refrained from recognizing parasitism as the purpose and product of power.) The sovereign superstructure protects top-down human-on-human parasitism partly by devoting itself to resisting and controlling bottom-up or petty human parasitism (fighting crime, maintaining “law and order”) which is laudable as far as it supports a degree of public safety and stability. However, in spite of the fact that institutions of mass subordination do their best to insinuate themselves into the semi-blind spot of ordinary habituation to parental influence, a question of ultimate legitimacy must be faced.

Myth of a Social Contract

In spite of the fact that sovereign institutions are just there for most citizens, there are theorists, such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who claim that citizens agreed to this, that there is (or was at some point) a contract or agreement among citizens to create sovereign power, and by that agreement citizens gave up some liberty and autonomy for the stability and security which a sovereign power imposes on everybody. (On Hobbes’ view the sovereign is not a party to the contract, which would disqualify the social contract as instituting the rule of law. While claiming to champion the rule of law, sovereign governments routinely evade and violate their own laws, interpreting the social contract as Hobbes did.) Hobbes was specifically trying to remove the obscurity of supernatural foundations from sovereign power.

The basic mistake made by Hobbes was thinking entirely within the culture of reverence for the imprinted parent, and specifically within the version of that culture based on alpha-trophy-looting masculinity, which originated with ancient nomadic herding groups and became the universal ideal of masculinity. That is the cultural source and origin of the whole edifice of sovereignty. Political power structures and theories have always been cooked up among male-only clubs of the most privileged, and those structures and theories always project the ethos of alpha-trophy-looting herder masculinity by celebrating some (supposedly obvious) inherent alpha-male right to rule, in other words, superiority to (and fear of) women and other unprivileged groups. Hobbes believed that creating a super-father is the only way to avoid a war of all against all, which he imagined as the pre-contract course of nature. In that faith there is a sort of Confucian myth of the divinely ordained transcendence of father-power. That is how Hobbes smuggled false transcendence into his justification (sanctification) of sovereign power. There is a set of assumptions about how the new father-sovereign would behave: something like a good aristocratic father, imposing order through rational fear of the father’s violence. However, the proposal to designate a great parent wouldn’t even make sense without the childhood habituation to the external “sovereign” intelligence of parents, the primordial model of external transcendence. In addition, for Hobbes, the social contract institutes Leviathan, the superhuman collective, the super-family, that also has the presence of transcendent necessity since is supposedly expresses the same nature as the common family. According to Hobbes, just as nature and human (male) nature decree an original war of all against all, so also the seam of rationality in human nature decrees agreement to the social contract and so the cultural construction of Leviathan as the only relief from eternal war (a clearly failed promise). Hobbes’ theory claims to identify sovereignty as the product of a co-ordinated act of multiple rational intelligences. However, Hobbes shared the restricted concept of rationality that was becoming current in his time, in which rationality was just an alignment of a basic animal drive for self-preservation or self-interest with the necessities of nature, in this case the supposedly natural consequences of father-power.

What Hobbes failed to recognize or imagine is the fact that there is another generally known approach to human interconnectedness, namely from within the feminine culture of intense personal engagement with newborns, infants, and toddlers for the project of initiating them into the connection of intelligences through language, shared culture, caring, and nurture generally; in other words, the first-language-nurture worldview generally cultivated by women. From that alternative state of nature the interconnectedness develops without the social contract or a super-father. The fact that women carry on with their nurture culture is what actually accounts for the stability of human interconnectedness. Sovereignty is not the source of that stability. Language and mutual support create for intelligences the opportunity to experience more of the best of values, namely intelligence itself.

The Norms Fallacy

When philosophers (pragmatists and utilitarians, for example) talk about an indispensable framework of community norms, it is difficult for them to be quite specific and historically accurate about the meaning or referent of “community” or “civil society”. There is no recognition in their claims that the actions of states in conducting wars (often clandestine), for example, and actions of corporations in looting the earth’s natural resources, express a crime-family ethos that extends back historically to nomadic animal herders and from there forward into universally celebrated ideals of masculinity, modelled most conspicuous in parasitic aristocracies of medieval societies (armed men on horses) which invented and imposed the forms of organization now called “sovereign government” and “corporations”, as ways of institutionalizing subordination through the universally imprinted parent. That crime family ethos is intrinsically and irredeemably parasitic on subordinated humans and, since it expresses the cultural norms of the social faction which directly influences the actions of national governments and their covert agencies, armed forces, and police, it stands as a clear revelation that there is no coherent system of community norms. The routine use of deception and violence by national governments and corporations is completely contrary to norms and values respected and considered definitive of decency by the mass of wage-dependant families, but is entirely representative of the crime family ethos which animates ownership/ governing classes. In clear contradiction of ideas about a social contract, there is actually a semi-stable system of human-on-human parasitism, kept operating by strenuous and increasingly scientific and technological efforts at behaviour and thought control by the beneficiary factions, which is obviously not a decent or dependable foundation for anyone’s values or standards of truth. In that situation of effective manipulation and pacification of host classes by parasitic classes anything like a social contract would be strictly tactical (deceptive) in an adversarial sense.

In pre-modern cultures, after the general diffusion of the culture of herder masculinity, everything was ascribed ultimately to the will of patriarchal gods, to divine involvement; whereas in modern cultures everything is ascribed to nature as an unalterable nexus of causal chains, but the old assumptions of divine involvement are so ingrained in the culture that they are still called on for the sanctification of power, and even lurk within the scientific conception of nature. In the modern world of nearly-nihilism, strictly utilitarian economic incentives and rewards are the everyday “front window” justifications for superstructures of sovereign power and authority (“peace, order, and good government”). Appeals to transcendent justifications are not normally made up-front, but they are always held in reserve for times when emotions run high in the collective. Nature is now just as much an externalized projection of parental super-intelligence as gods have always been.

Nature Takes its Inevitable Course

One of the justifications of capitalism as well as of sovereign superstructures is the claim that this is just the normal course of nature with a minimum of rational tweaking to reduce nature’s more abhorrent forms of brutality. However, that claim expresses the view of a particular cultural faction, specifically the faction of herder masculinity. The alpha-trophy-looting culture of that cowboy masculinity claims the exclusive distinction of authentically expressing nature, but that claim is a ridiculous bias. The female cultivated culture of first-language-nurture has every bit as legitimate a claim to express nature (and a greater claim to intelligence), and points toward a social organization much different from capitalism. The claim, that the capitalist politico-economic system efficiently provides the best possible life to those who deserve and earn it, depends on a claim that the superstructure of sovereign government, as well as corporate operations, are just (immutable, unalterable) nature taking its course. There is a claim of scientific necessity for their just being there, too immutable and gigantic to be resisted or re-conceived. “Just there” is a version of “it’s just nature running its course”.

There is always an unspecified suggestion of Intelligent Design in such appeals to nature and history, and behind every Intelligent Design there is an implied super-intelligent Designer, if not overtly a separate disembodied divinity then a spirit manifested through inspired geniuses, so inexplicable as to be incomprehensible by ordinary people, and so adding up to divinity. The apparatus of state sovereignty claims to represent design in history: the great unthinkable Parent was erected by forces including inspired statesmen and brave military heroes, sanctified by the blood of sacrificed soldiers, and rationalized by rigorous science, scholarly research, and tried-and-true business know-how.

Nature and Intelligences: Beyond Nature’s Parental Embrace

Arguments of the form, “this social arrangement is just part of nature running its inevitable course” all crash against the recognition that social arrangements are creations of intelligences, and intelligences in every case operate outside the course of nature. That is to say, intelligences transcend nature. Intelligences can’t be part of nature because nature consists of strict actualities, the totality of the categorically actual (being), but we intelligences orient and define ourselves (live our lives) in a structure of time (becoming) which is a fabric of non-actuality, almost entirely beyond what is actual; for example, constructing a directionality always exiting a non-actual past and with a heading or bearing structured in terms of increasingly improbable possibilities for a non-actual future. It isn’t that intelligences just make imperfect wild guesses at things that really exist in some actuality, because past and future really have no actual existence. They are creations of intelligences. That orientation-complex of non-actuality defines “the interiority of an intelligence” outside the actuality of nature, and it is a unique creation by every individual intelligence. There is no requirement for, or benefit from, postulating some separate initiating or originating super-intelligence behind or beyond individuals.

Before anyone has a gender or becomes a child of a certain religion, language, family, landscape, or nationality, before any of that, he or she is already a particular intelligence, and those other features are just variables in the situation of that intelligence. The ground on which to stand to judge culture of any kind, and so masculinity, is the innocence of intelligence-as-such, deep underneath gender culture.

Because of the dominance of outward-gazing science in modern culture, contemporary people have difficulty with the idea that intelligences are outside nature, each an individual interiority which transcends nature. Apparently it is comforting for contemporary people, in the current culture of nearly-nihilism, to imagine belonging within the embrace of cosmic nature. However, recognition of the remarkable freedom of intelligences requires recognition that intelligences are separate from nature. Nature has become the great unthinkable parent and it is urgent to recognize that intelligences operate beyond its deterministic embrace. Only when we stop looking outward for validation, even from nature, can we recognize our innocent inward identity as transcendent freedom in self-created time, and begin re-creating our precious interconnectedness beyond the imprinted parent-forms that are being abused by factions expressing a culture of human parasitism.

in the blind spot

~ Philosophy in the Dystopian Context

Tag Archives: sovereignty

Decolonization is Defining Left-Wing Politics

Two Quick Notes on Nature

Brentano’s Gift

Rudiments of Thinking

Western History

Sovereignty and the Myth of Human Nature

Two Lessons from History: Mutable Reality

A Philosophical Consciousness