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Metaphysics in the History of Dystopia

16 Monday Mar 2026

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Fragment 221, Word count: 2,971.

Tags: history, philosophy, theology, power, culture, aristocracy, dominance, violence, literacy, ideality, time, freedom, creativity, politics, metaphysics, humanism.

The spirit of two philosophical traditions runs through the Fragments of In The Blind-Spot. First is the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope, a city on the south shore of the Black Sea into which Diogenes was born around 410 BCE. Diogenes was the original philosophical Cynic, elaborating the idea that social convention, culture, is an artificial lens of interpretation passing as elemental reality but effectively alienating individuals from the natural primordiality of their existence as human. Diogenes practiced a strict form of de-culturing in his shockingly unusual way of living, to be free of what he identified as false social reality. The Cynic tradition developed also in Epicureanism (“ignore the talk going around about gods”) and to some degree in Stoic self-possession, all exploring a distinct humanism in the ancient Greek cultural system.

Fragment 27, April 12, 2012, The Polis versus Elemental Embodiment: Sophists versus Cynics and Epicureans (word count: 2,898)

Fragment 35, July 6, 2012, Transcendental Humanism (word count: 6,844)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is also in the vicinity of Diogenes but is partly disqualified by his devotion to the supremacy of “the general will”. Rousseau, proud citizen of Calvinist Geneva, did, on the other hand, present a critique of the mainstream culture of arts and sciences of his time, and generally wrote in opposition to the style of life supposedly envied and sought after by everyone and exemplified by Voltaire, a life of wealth, privilege, celebrity, high consumption, and patronage of the arts, inevitably accompanied by pride in social superiority and exclusive elite class membership.

The second tradition is clearly related, being arguably a development from ancient humanism, namely the modern Euro-American Enlightenment, but especially, within that broad cultural movement, the Lutheran spirit of Protestantism, which developed alongside a body of discoveries in mathematical science (building from strong accomplishments imported from the Islamic world and ancient India), all in the context of the Republic of Letters, a network of independent scholars of various backgrounds and nations publishing mainly outside institutions such as Church foundations and universities. The printing press, since its launch in the fifteenth century, had spread through private business ventures, free of immediate institutional control, and in combination with the graduating cohorts from Europe’s universities, trained to be active in secular professions, it energized a self-directing network of communication about ideas, and an expanding body of literature, much of it in the international language of scholarship, Latin, releasing an extraordinary flourishing of the scribal culture of advanced literacy. It was the blogosphere of the late medieval/ early modern period.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement to get beyond and get free of the most dominating cultures and factions of Christendom: The Roman Church, aristocracy, and monarchy, a classic example of a tight working alliance between forces of dominance-by-violence and those of dominance-by-dread-of-the-supernatural, all grounded in a metaphysical ideology featuring a disembodied almighty will-to-power. Agents of the Church acted as indispensable mediators between the righteous wrath of God and helpless individual sinners. Within that entrenched dystopia a revival of ancient Epicurean metaphysics, notably in the effective materialism of Baruch de Spinoza (1632-77) enabled a radical critique of the Old Regime’s institutions of sovereign dominance and promoted a more strictly scientific world-view. Materialism undermined claims by the upper strata of society to be enforcing the will of the supernatural almighty.

Both science and Protestantism were intellectual revolts against the established religious edifice of knowledge guarded ferociously by the Roman Church hierarchy, although they expressed two starkly opposing metaphysical foundations. Lutheran protestantism rests on an identification of faith as a spiritual act of autonomous individual agency, eliminating any mediation between the individual and primordial reality. Any such external mediation, such as the Roman Church’s mediation between the individual and the Deity, is a portal for misinformation, illegitimate domination, and abusive exploitation. There has been a phenomenal philosophical evolution from Luther’s conception of the inherent spiritual autonomy of individual subjective ideality. The tendency of that evolution is to retain a sense of the transcendent creative freedom of ideality, first attributed to an almighty Deity, but increasingly to relocate that transcendence from the remote Deity to the individual intelligences of human personalities. We see this worked out by a series of post-reformation Lutheran philosophers: Leibniz, Kant, Fichte. Fichte’s drift to a cosmic absolute self-positing “I” seems to flip the progression on its head, and that cosmic absolutism was taken in a nostalgic Aristotelian direction by Hegel, also Lutheran. The following philosophers were brought up in Lutheran households and communities:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) – subjectivity is a monadic interiority; reviving aspects of Aristotle

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – moral agency is self-legislating, requires no sovereign commands, no externally sourced superego

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) – subjectivity has the form of a self-positing “I”, Existentialism’s dawning

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) – phenomenology of spirit, investigation of spirit in the shape of history, the Absolute connects Hegel to Fichte

Max Stirner (1806-56) – a version of self-possession universalizing Machiavelli

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) – “…an act of will in self-sufficient inwardness”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) – God is dead. Ubermench is beyond the reach of cultural norms.

In the Enlightenment energy system of Protestantism, the Republic of Letters, and Science, following the celebrated humanism of the Renaissance in which Medieval Christendom searched out the intellectual accomplishments of alien cultures that it recognized as more advanced, Protestantism was an engine promoting the spread of literacy beyond the professional scribal classes to the population at large. John Wycliffe inspired a movement for popular vernacular literacy in the 1380’s, promoting Bible reading as essential personal piety, an early expression of the spirit of Protestantism that highlights its origins in the culture of literacy. Science especially enabled the accumulation of an even vaster edifice of new knowledge. However, science never managing to replace the old metaphysics of Christian theology because its rejection of the concept of human spirituality was never convincing. These antagonistic culture-pools settled into a truce with each other and with the legacy of the aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence.

Fragment 163, May 11, 2020, A Western Project (word count: 750)

Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

John Wycliffe (1328-1384) – popular vernacular literacy, the Bible in vernacular languages

Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) – the Earth is not the centre of the universe

Martin Luther (1483-1546) – individual justification by faith alone

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) – the Earth moves

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) – Cogito, ergo sum. anti-Aristotelian physics, mathematics, metaphysics

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – mass, distance, & the universal law of gravitational attraction

The French Revolution (1789-99) – sovereignty of the National Assembly

Culture Pools in the Historical Narrative

Already from this sketch of philosophical influences, it is apparent that a historical narrative, especially of the Euro-American cultural system, but with forays beyond, is a core interest in the Fragments, in which narrative the focus becomes the profound confrontation between an aristocratic culture of dominance-by-violence (still dominant, still dystopian) and certain counter-cultures inherently antagonistic to it and partly stifled under its dominance. 

Aristocratic Dystopia: The Culture of Dominance by Violence

Because of the ongoing ascendance of the aristocratic-violence culture focused on competitive masculine strength-testing with strictly limited empathy, current and previous ‘civilized’ societies have all been dystopian systems of top-down parasitism derived originally from the culture of animal herding on the Great Eurasian Steppe. For techniques of herd parasitism to be applied to human communities after violent conquest, effective stabilization of extractive practices required construction of a haze of popular illusions in which hierarchy is created by setting up commanding authority in certain persons who are credible as cultural icons of dominance, and as such become internalized by individuals as cultural elements of a superego. The human receptivity to authoritative superego figures is a spiritual vulnerability trained through the long childhood years of dependence on parents. Dominance culture consistently constructs an enduring type of culture-bound collective, effectively a human hive-mind, bound together by a set of culturally embedded illusions of the primal and ultimate supremacy of certain forces: masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, collective supremacy, and trophy supremacy, all reinforcing the hierarchical pattern of the dominant faction. Aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture first created the illusion of masculine supremacy in which rights belong to the strongest. Masculine supremacy sets up the most successfully violent persons as superego icons in aid of enforcing obedience and loyalty in a hierarchical social order: an all-inclusive food-chain of top-down command and value extraction, promoted as the primal and ultimate Great Chain of Being.

Disembodied supremacy culture developed into an edifice of authoritative knowledge of primal and ultimate things, largely non-evident or hidden things, claimed to be selectively revealed to the rare chosen prophet. (theology) Disembodied supremacy involves an imagined contrast and conflict between ordinary human embodied ideality and an ideality that is cosmically primordial and as such prior to all embodiment, unrestricted by embodiment, all-creative. Disembodied supremacy sets up certain charismatic persons as superego icons, persons asserting their special knowledge of the ways and will of powerful disembodied spirits, based on a claim of being divinely chosen to receive revelations of the otherwise hidden ultimate Truth. Behind those visible persons looms the imagined Deity within its cloud of unknowing. Disembodied supremacy culture exploits the human tendency to personify everything, an overuse of the ability of embodied ideality to recognize in external phenomena the alien dramas of separate emotionally engaged wills, to recognize evidence of external ideality expressing its personal caring, knowing, and intending. This ability is the portal to all-important sociability and empathy, but inappropriate recognition of this kind results in fear of powerful disembodied aristocrats (lords) in the sky and in nature, violently coercive forces of willful self-assertion with strong excitable intentions. Their having power implies strictly limited empathy, as is typical of supremacist masculinity, and their disembodiment implies power beyond the predictably physical. Such invisible power inspires a pervasive inescapable dread.

In the precarious life of human individuals within nature and among other humans, the illusion of collective supremacy is easily sold as a necessary condition for safety in numbers. Collective supremacy sets up certain authoritative/ powerful persons as superego icons, persons asserting their uniquely authentic expression of the collective as the transcendent home for its people.

A culture of trophy supremacy is acted out and projected by the life of looting aristocrats or oligarchs. As apparently the most delicious form of gratification, chosen by the strongest, it tends to be imitated universally, derived from masculine supremacy and culturally accepted as the universal measure of personal value. Trophy supremacy sets up envied celebrities with the most property or the best property as superego icons, role models.

Collective Drama

This set of supremacist illusions, sometimes with still others (such as family supremacy or language supremacy), tend to form a mutually supportive structure, such that masculine supremacy is supported by the assertion that divine will determines everything including social hierarchy and individual power. The aristocratic obsession with trophies tends to convince everyone that competing for celebrity status is inherent in human nature. Collective supremacy is proclaimed by the authorities of both disembodied and masculine supremacy to help bind their flocks of subordinates in an illusion of shard collective welfare. Effective hive-mind construction does not, however, require the whole set. Any one of them can bind a collection of people together by training all to share the same orientation up to a supreme guide declaring the direction of the collective drama.

Literacy and a Life of the Mind

The alternative culture-pool that has been most impressively confrontational against the standard supremacist configuration has been literacy/ scribal culture, scholarship, the graphic recording of voices in language, by which it is made possible to choose to either distribute the record of an individual’s thinking to an audience, small or large, or to preserve it privately as a personal reminder of an accomplishment from which to advance and build. Since literacy is the craft and skills of preserving and cultivating knowledge in the mode of language, it has often been treasured within organizations focused on the illusion of disembodied supremacy in their frantic speculations concerning primal and ultimate things. Literacy has thrived in such institutions and inspired many generations to create astonishing feats of research, imagination, and reasoning. The super-powers of scribal ideality, such as enabling development of a unique reading/ writing persona, a personal literary voice, along with easing the effort of prolonged mental activity, eventually became a force sufficient, as a non-property based source of value, to oppose and rival the culture of violence (war and other looting) in terms of personal gratification from beauty and beneficial effect, importance of accomplishment, and a socially recognized foundation of respect and dignity. The experience of having a rich and powerful personal interiority through literacy is the foundation of humanism, an original map of values re-defining the adventure of existence as human ideality.

Fragment 128, June 8, 2018, Politics is More than Nature (word Count: 867).

It must be recognized that the fact of human existence, generation after generation, establishes that the under-acknowledged but really dominant source of gratification for most humans is the focus of the mainly female culture of first-language-nurture, the mutual support and caring most often found in the protection and nurturing of children. This most essential counter-culture pool has persisted eternally in the closest and most difficult proximity to the trophy/ looting/ dominance culture. Feminism has become an important challenge to supremacist hive-minds.

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700). A survey of some main culture-pools

The Linchpin is always Metaphysics

The linchpin of the whole thing is that all the supremacist illusions divert attention from, and so hide and alienate, what is really supreme in the life of a human: personal ideality constructing suppositional time as the portal to expressive freedom. The literary gaze is inward, to the voices and conversations of personal ideality, the immediate experience of a private creative fountain of caring curiosity, ideas, and questions. Ideality is a fabric of suppositional non-actuality, which distinguishes it decisively from the brute actuality and determinism of nature. Personal ideality is metaphysically anomalous as a power creating freedom through the supposition of time structured as an opening for the personal expression of caring. The sense of the passing of time has two vectors. One consists of leavings and losses: things given up, slipping by, falling away into increasingly distant priority. The other vector is a dramatic leap into a suppositional future expected to have both grounding familiarity and surprising novelty. Time is the dimension of teleology, agency, of creativity at the core of subjective spirituality. The very concepts of immateriality and transcendence are abstractions from the non-actuality of time as a dramatic construct, the indispensable grounding of not-yet and no-longer, the non-actuality of purposive caring in the shape of orientation. Above all, it is only the metaphysically anomalous caring in creative personal dramas that makes anything matter. Caring is always a drama, unfinished in the dual instability of suppositional time. An ordinary living consciousness is a self-creating wave-in-time, living in and through passing and arriving in time. Freedom must always be unfinished. The genius of ideality is turning ephemerality from imminent oblivion to enduring existence in freedom made possible by constant flight through a personally suppositional time.

The Politics of Left and Right

Beginning from the Enlightenment era, and especially from the French Revolution of 1789-99, the political Left has been the effort to critique and oppose the entrenched legacy of aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture, with its standard structure of supremacist illusions. As such it must identify the crippling errors of that legacy at the same time as envisioning and promoting a preferable alternative, a political vision that represents the full scope and power of existence as a human and facilitates the general expression of that existence. This has made the left the party of bottom-up philosophies, of care and expression for the many instead of just the exceptional few. Historically, mistakes have been made in identifying such a political vision, for example in claims that the left is for bargaining within capitalism for a better deal for precarious wage earners, for the subordinated, proletarian labouring and serving class. Such efforts are crucial certainly but the political left must not limit its vision by accepting societies as permanent and inevitable structures of unequal classes, conceding the inevitability of the peculiar type of hive-mind polities forged by aristocratic dominance-by-violence culture. The left is hindered by an inability, so far, to replace the metaphysical foundation of hive-mind polities. The materialism of the Enlightenment, and of Marx, has proven insufficient to accomplish that essential task.

The Meaning of War

Of course the cultural system of the current world-order is stuck. Even after the whole drama of the history of literacy, it is still dominated by patriarchal veil-of-illusions hive-minds, ever ready for the vast killing and destruction of war. Its ancient and traditional metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, the guilt-ridden fear of some capricious external invisible almighty father-force has been challenged and partly replaced by the determinist nihilism of mathematical-materialist science. (Will-to-power is Nietzsche’s idea of the pure essence of personal existence, so also the mind of God.) Science is a straightforward refusal of metaphysics, so the choices left are the childhood terror of judgment from the cloud of unknowing that must be appeased in all things, or the despair of utter inevitability. In this ridiculous state it is only war that gives life meaning for far too many people.

What Matters and Why

A way beyond the increasingly fragile dystopias of the current world-order is conceivable, but it requires enough overcoming of the old metaphysics of disembodied wills-to-power, and also of determinist science, to find grounding in a humanist metaphysics that recognizes improvisational freedom at the level of embodied individuals, a freedom expressing deeply personal dramas of caring and attachment, the dramas that make some things truly and profoundly matter within the uncaring actuality of nature.

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.

The Veil of Illusions

23 Tuesday Dec 2025

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Fragment 219, Word Count: 2,841.

Tags: empathy, caring, evil, deity, nationality, hive-mind, value, patriarchy, violence, embodiment, philosophy, culture, theology, ideality.

The Cultural Veil

There is a culturally conditioned veil of illusions that stands in the way of any ordinary acquaintance with some of the most important features of life as a personal subjectivity. The blocked features of subjective existence, however, remain relevant and ready to be appreciated. We human individuals derive joy and meaning from imitating people around us, from attaching emotionally and soaking up culture like sponges. Within the general culture of ways of thriving in a particular surroundings, there are also fanciful speculations, stories that misconstrue the powers and necessities that determine events in the world, exaggerations of common fears and wishes that make them fetishistic and barriers to important discoveries. All of the cultural complexes that contribute to the veil of illusions also contribute to a general nastiness of life shaped by their influence, forming the distinctly dystopian societies so familiar to us. Of course, even the most dystopian societies have factions who benefit from the arrangements and are pleased with themselves and with pretty much everything. It is those factions who are especially empowered to create, and be heroes of, the stories that depict their societies, and part of their culture is to celebrate stability and heroic resistance to change. Broadly speaking, this is the overall situation that inspires much of the mental and literary tradition of philosophy.

The Lens of Orientation

Our sense of being at a particular place, doing what we are doing, involves far more then what can be perceived from any given location. We work within a sort of interior model of all the routes we have moved through and we reorient the model as we reorient and place ourselves within a broad sense of the arrangement of things, the arrangement featuring our important destinations, especially featuring the personalities with whom we share an emotional attachment. Ordinary perception is mainly a selectively targeted sensory confirmation that current actuality conforms to what we are expecting based on our elaborate sense of place, directionality, and the possible personal futures already sketched out from elements of previous experiences and from intentions we have to advance personal dramas. This interior orientation serves as a sophisticated lens through which we selectively direct attention, searches, and applications of effort at the surroundings. All the cultural complexes we learn, including speculations, stories, and exaggerations, are, by that learning, incorporated into the structure of our personal orientation lens and they contribute decisively to the shape and the mood of the world we move and live within.

Illusions of Masculine Supremacy

One of the strongest complexes in the dystopian veil of illusions is the culture of masculine supremacy, macho or patriarchal culture. Traditional masculine values are illustrated in stories of ancient Greek and Roman warriors: hardness, strength, endurance, courage, self-promotion, and disregard for weaker beings. Before theocratic Christianity there was the crime family aristocracy of the strongest, dedicated to trophy hoarding. Capital was wealth-generating real estate, and the land-hoarding aristocracy cultivated the ancient culture of organized violence with the intent of looting as the means of possessing capital. Specialists in coercive force cultivate athletic proficiency with weapons, readiness for aggression, the hyper-masculine ethos adulating strength, violence, kinetic action, competitive conflict, and properties that need armed protection. Trophy property is understood as the actualization, the manifest proof, of personal worth, and is normally accompanied by contempt for mere subjective interiority.

Patriarchy, institutionalized sovereign rights of father-figures, is an overt expression of the guiding principle of masculine dominance: that the strongest have rights over everyone else, rights to the property and lives of the weaker, the right to be parasitic on the weaker. Such assumptions derive from the traditional family in which the father is the strongest and women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. This culture worships and celebrates competition for the benefits of dominance. The key benefit of dominance is top-down human-on-human parasitism, from which other benefits flow. Many such benefits are the symbols and pageantry of dominance, for example in the scale of property possession and in relationships shaped by hierarchical master/slave inequality. Money culture, market wealth, is a branch of dominance culture because the scale of property possession is crucial in the pageantry and symbolism of dominance. Part of this alpha-trophy culture is denigration of alternative culture streams (such as the scribal/ literary tradition, the socially crucial child-nurturing culture, or varieties of interior spirituality) defining them as inferior and dependent, keeping them in some degree of dishonour and disgrace. The alpha-trophy culture of blood-sport dominance developed into military institutions as well as non-lethal competitive gaming and sports, into corporate culture and violence-ready sovereign states. There is a growing recognition of just how much the misogynist, racist, and predatory culture of hyper-masculinity is structured into the fabric of economic and political institutions.

The once ubiquitous culture of masculine dominance constructed and spread a certain kind of human bonding featuring strict hierarchies of authority maintained by operations of a core culture of violence with high value assigned to trophies of violence. It created aristocracy as a control-by-coercive-force faction in viciously top-down hive-minds nominally justified by a totalitarian father-god ideology in which everything is seen as pre-determined by an inexplicable occult masculine force, irritable, harsh, and quick to take offence, appeased only by displays of abject and gleefully grateful submission. Dominance culture asserts that this style of tightly controlled human clustering demanding conformity, exclusive emotional attachment and pageantry typical of religion, is the inevitable working of nature (especially human nature). However, these dystopian hierarchies of violence are the artifacts of a particular evil: the targeted denial of empathy. With the gradual development of alternative cultures, those large scale structures of attachment, by which individuals bind themselves into dystopian hive-mind collectives, start breaking down.

There is an ancient equivocation in the claim that human beings are essentially communal, such as Aristotle’s assertion that man is a polis animal. Aristotle’s claim makes it seem that the choice is between submission to a patriarchal sovereign state or just starkly solitary existence. That is a ridiculously oversimplified falsehood. Although sociability is crucial to the kinds of work and play within which humans can thrive, sociability is best fulfilled in the absence of violence, hierarchy, or self-denial by any individual. Patriarchal top-down command is sometimes justified by the idea that individuals are nothing but bundles of hard-wired drives for egoistic gratification, if they aren’t taught fear of superior power and a deferential orientation upward toward figures representing the overwhelming forces of religion and armed institutions. However, no matter how it is officially defended, the largely gratuitous nastiness of life in patriarchal societies is obvious and undeniable.

Illusions of Disembodied Supremacy

The veil of illusions also includes the fanciful metaphysics expressed in stories of disembodied intelligences: angels, demons, and deities, capricious free-floating entities who somehow care about and seem to have a stake in human behaviour, purportedly because humans were created by the will and power of these entities to be their toys and playthings. These stories are made frightening and also enticing by supposing that spirit-beings have unlimited powers, which means they must be considered and placated in all things to turn them into kind guardians instead of demanding and punishing masters. Imagining that the world at large and in detail is the deliberate act of an unpredictably powerful thinking and caring agency, often capricious, sometimes inexplicably malicious, means that acting in a way that pleases or placates that force, generally on the say-so of opaque but charismatic social authorities, just might have the effect of making the world a more benign situation. This cultural stream expresses a confusion about intelligence itself such that the cosmos at large somehow expresses a super-intelligence that pre-determines how everything should be (yet not always how it is!), but with some degree of negotiable grace as a reward for formulaic pageantry expressing extravagant praise, fearful self-abasement, and symbolic sacrifice.

The idea of a divine plan and a supernatural planner who irresistibly determines everything has been crucial in legitimizing the lethal power of patriarchal sovereignty. Divine personality has been conceived as all-powerful creator, judge, and ever-present tester and score-keeper of human persons, the model of fatherly sovereignty as absolute ownership over the less powerful. Cultures of disembodied intelligences insist on adulating the cosmic almighty who promotes its earthly kindred spirits: the mighty of the earth. With such  a capricious and all powerful patriarchal deity, the crucial focus of orientation is divine commands, and ethical action is obeying a list of rules, duties, obligations, virtues, and vices. Nature in this vision is the actualized will of the divine personality. The idea of divinity sustaining the world by uttering commands and projecting divine will into human affairs through sovereignty of the strongest is, in a variety of forms, ancient and deeply embedded in human societies.

Teleology of creation is the crucial identifier of personality, of spiritual existence both human and divine. It encompasses conceiving and enacting, moment by moment, the future conditions of things in the world. Teleology is ideality: curiosity, caring, seeking, supposing, questioning, knowing (accumulating orientation through discoveries), and fountaining specific preferences expressed in deliberate actions or voice-utterances within the ceaselessly changing context of temporality. Religion makes personality the creative source of everything, recognizing teleology as transcendently alive, creative, caring, and expressive, but truly at home only at some dimly imagined cosmic horizon, making individual human consciousness a frail echo of the cosmic master. Human ideality as a mode of existence was recognized as carrying with it the vestige of an insubordinate claim to equal and rival the divine. Here, in the frightening sameness of human and divine existence, is the source of the idea of original sin and inherent guilt which all humans are supposed to share and which supposedly taints the existence of humanity. In the context of widespread fear of an all-powerful supernatural watcher, this sensed sameness, made miserable for humans by the needs and indignities of embodied living, was enough to create a perverse appetite for denigration of human personality, part of an effort to distance embodied ideality from any but the weakest claim to divine-like creative freedom, on the hope that denigration of embodiment would atone for this plausible claim to divinity and so eventually qualify human individuals for an eternal afterlife finally free of embodiment. This is the root superstition that makes creationist deism toxic and destructive. Its denigration of human personality created the context for every kind of cruelty, insult, and injury in human relations, perversely sanctifying human-on-human parasitism.

The patriarchal conception of cosmic teleology inspired and sanctified very rigid, restricted, exploitative, and repressively hierarchical societies, dedicated to the culture of violet masculinity, and determined to remain essentially static for eternity, supposedly to persuade the cosmic power to tilt benign. Such are the foundations of our current dystopian patriarchies. In the long transition through childhood to the adult condition everyone is trained in this fabric of perverse superstition. The original rationale for sovereign government as it still exists is this nasty dystopian fable. These societies are not echoes of divine nature but expressions of misconceptions and superstitions developed into enduring cultures, the most extreme fears and fantasies institutionalized and culturally enforced.

Illusions of Collective Supremacy

The veil of illusions also includes distorted national histories that promote a sense of collective identity by highlighting emotional dramas uniquely involving a population defined by geographical location. Within the general culture there are certain limitlessly imposing political super-structures, culture-based arrangements of authority and dependence which bind clusters of people together by a shared sense of norms of conduct and of the power centres that enforce them. These are top-down arrangements of coercive power and access to resources, which seek emotional possession of individuals, forming a shared group orientation, a hive-mind which benefits from each individual’s gifts, abilities, and energy.

It has been asserted as self-evident that individuals need, as part of a general need for felt supervision or authority, a dominant collective attachment, emotional and cognitive identification with the master narrative of a collective entity, something like a home hive, as a crucial element of personal identity and sense of meaning. That assertion is supposed to account for the fact that each modern sovereign state is still, in spite of progressive influences, a personified territorial power demanding reverent patriotic devotion, worship, sacrifice, and obedience enforced by an iron fist of law, tax, and lethal military force. Each state has its edifice of theatrical pageantry and symbolism to invoke the unity and sacred grandeur of the collective: flags, monuments, and anthems, oaths and pledges, officials and military officers encrusted with exotic glitter, august regalia and titles; state uniforms and weapons laden with national symbols and emblems; ceremonies of remembrance and renewal of devotion invoking the sacred history and mission of the hive, synchronized movements in processions, special word formulas to be spoken in mass unison. Such pageantry is not intended to encourage creative or rational thinking or the individuality that enables those, but rather to replace thinking with passive embrace of an orthodox official story, a standardized hive-mind. The supposed necessity of hive-mind belonging is used routinely to justify nationalist propaganda, censorship, and violent repression. Such cultural systems often specifically suppress empathy toward people beyond the home collective. Immersion in such a hive-mind can enable individuals to commit acts of cruelty, brutality, and self-destruction that they would not contemplate as de-cultured individuals.

Illusions of Trophy Supremacy

Another cultural stream in the veil of illusions involves the sense of what makes any person good, worthy, or successful, the sense of anyone’s personal score on the goodness scale, the sense of personal value. Even people who are not emotionally invested in the symbols and emblems of their nation state, for example, who do not care about civic celebrations or their nation’s standing among nations, even such non-patriots are likely to be oriented in their sense of personal potential and value (self-worth, personal force of being) within the cultural norms of the economic structures around them, the hierarchy of occupations ranked by wealth and fame, attitudes about the gradients of interesting and eventful lives, and how those things match up with personal abilities and accomplishments.

We have the misfortune of living in a dystopia in which individuals are judged by acquisitiveness and competitiveness, both attaching value to scarcity and objective externality, and in which success as a life-in-progress is measured by ranking an individual’s performances as expressions of those drives. The inevitable spectacle of inequality is itself widely embraced as a value. The commercial sense of earning value through competition is just a light edit of the primal aristocratic value matrix, rooted in the culture of violence, possession of property, and a tightly restricted allowance of empathy. In our dystopia, the great drama is the competitive struggle for scarce prestige, dominance, notice, and trophies to fabricate an exterior depiction of an undiscovered spiritual interior. Our culture’s most trusted authorities assert that the great human drama is to compete for the scarce goods and symbols that show you are fabulous, or at least good enough, that biological drives are inescapable, drives for dominance, excitement, security, or for signs of worldly agreement that you have a place on the spectrum of being fabulous.

Personal Ideality

These complexes, along with similar supremacist-cultures such as family, class, accent, or craft, all keep individuals’ focus directed emphatically outward, away from contributions to experience which originate in personal interiority, in subjective ideality or spirituality. The overwhelming cultural message is that subjective interiority is best kept under strict control, restricted and mostly ignored. This has the effect of making the particulars of the world and of human relationships seem externally controlled and even pre-determined by rigid necessity. There is a distinct charm and comfort in the certainty of essentialism: the fetishistic assumption that everything is as it must be as created by inexplicable but utterly all-determining forces. Essentialism lines up with an urgency to resist change and keep arrangements stable for eternity. With this conception, individuals are merely spectators of the spectacle of events. However, the core concept of personality, of personal spirituality, as already observed above, is teleology of creation, discretionary, improvisational invention in the face of an entirely suppositional future, and the caring ideality with that power exists only at the level of the embodied individual. We are immediately acquainted with caring spirituality only in ourselves and in people around us, however much the idea may be inappropriately projected onto gigantic cosmic mysteries. The metaphysical anomaly of creative teleology at the level of the embodied individual means, first, that individual self-possession is achievable, but also that we must judge a good life partly on how well the veil of illusions has been overcome. Individual spirituality is a basis for universal empathy and mutual respect among animate beings, and political and economic relationships could be re-invented in a way that enables the power of subjectivity instead of denigrating it as is typical in dystopian societies. In a truly spiritual life, the primary source of value is the personally interior creative fountain, and not the rarity of exterior treasures.

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Fragment 218, December 14, 2025 Metaphysics Dawns on the Edge of Creation (word count: 213).

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.

Basics of a Liberation Philosophy

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Nature, Political Power, Strategic thinking, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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A ‘system of reality’ is a culturally supplied collective orientation constructed from stories going around (models for tragedy and comedy, heroes and villains), sacred texts, laws, oral descriptions, warnings, exhortations, explanations, popular aspirations, as well as material culture and typical ways of acting, altogether enabling individuals to operate with a semi-stable sense of three crucial givens: nature and the supernatural, community, and individual subjective interiority. The social construction is the repeated, continually re-imitated activities in which people fit into processes of production and consumption, conversations, and crowds.

All institutional systems of reality have been top-down systems, that is, structured into metaphysical stories in which supernatural beings have decisive involvement. Systems of reality typically include a supernatural super-structure in the form of disembodied and immortal spirits, including gods and demons, or eternal metaphysical realms (heaven), invisible transcendent causes, forces, substances, or special arcane states of being. Such systems are always top-down with respect to ordinary individuals because the individual is explained as a product, result, creation, or effect of prior, larger, or higher forces and structures, often some form of omnipotent will. Whenever ideas, forms, laws, classes, or categories are considered to be prior to ordinary individuals, more real or important than individuals, for example, when language is considered as prior to voices, you have a top-down system. That orientation supports a comprehensive top-down conception of value and power, effectively blocking a true self-recognition of spirituality and stifling the autonomy, creativity, and self-possession of all individuals.

There is nothing inherently parasitic, disempowering, or repressive about human interconnectedness or about cultural forms to formalize that interconnectedness. It is our sociability (as otherwise isolated individual intelligences) which inclines us to welcome culture in as tokens of our connectedness to a collective of spiritual beings. However, culture has been made toxic by a particular historical contingency. Ancient herding groups went from preying on migratory grass-eating mammals to preying on “sedentary” grass-eating mammals which happened to be human grain-growing, grain-eating, communities. That process launched the cultural efforts to celebrate and glorify top-down human-on-human parasitism. It is the ultimate origin of capitalism, still in operation. The historically special, and historically traceable, cultural and political force of the human-on-human macro-parasite faction has eluded recognition, for example by deconstructionists, who instead blame oppression on a tragic, unalterable, flaw in humanity. ‘We are all complicit and co-conspirators in our own oppression’ is just the default rhetoric of cultures still emerging (slowly but surely) from Christendom, a repetition of its declaration of original sin, an inherent vice which turns every individual against itself. Deconstructionists got “everything is political” right, but they completely missed the criminality (perpetrators and victims) in the operation of power. Culture, something everyone depends on, under these conditions becomes critically disabling for individuals.

The systems of reality elaborated and declared by cultural institutions such as religions, economic production and exchange systems, and the military wings of sovereignty, are crucial for any individual’s orientation, and as such they top the list among bits of heritage which must be questioned in critical thinking. Anyone is able to re-orient, to engage in a process of self-directed re-orientation by which the official conceptualization of community, subjectivity, and nature (including the spiritual forces of non-earthly intelligences) are replaced with de-cultured conceptualizations recognizing that human life is played out by individuals in the encounter between the givens of nature and the myriad non-actualities of creative subjectivity, in the play of interior non-actualities against the brute actuality of nature.

The Ultimate Reality System Hack

For such a reorientation to be possible, there must be a framework of orientation that is independent of culturally supplied conceptions, and philosophical questioning (the spiritual quest, critique of orientation) brings it to light by exposing certain elemental features of experience. The elements of the philosophical frame of reference are personal embodiment, spirituality, and sociability. Sociability, the gratification each intelligence derives from engagement with others, is really part of spirituality. What enables the ultimate hack of false systems of reality is contemplation of personal embodiment because embodiment imposes needs, costs, and vulnerabilities, as well as powers and abilities, at the level of the individual. In doing that, personal embodiment defines spiritual individuality. Embodiment decrees individuality. De-cultured acquaintance with embodiment and spirituality (and with it sociability), and with the powers and vulnerabilities that come with them, situates a person for creative autonomy and a re-conceived interconnection with others.

Life for the individual person is the engagement of metaphysics with physics. There is nothing metaphysical about the natural world at large, the cosmic terrain. It is just plain old physics. Metaphysics is entirely interior to individuals, to us embodied spiritual beings. Metaphysics is our interiority, our spirituality. Conceptions of metaphysics emerge from thinking about time, and time has almost always been misconstrued in philosophy as a dimension of objects independent of intelligences. (What is to be made of temporal discontinuity: the fact that past and future do not actually exist?) Theories of a hidden mysterious substrate of material objects, such as a single infinite substance (Spinoza) which must remain the same even though objects change constantly into different objects, are an attempt to translate time (intelligence) into an occult structure of objects or substances, a way of dealing with time in terms of a ‘metaphysical’ structure within objects, separate from intelligences. However, time is the interiority of teleology, a metaphysical non-actuality. It is the dimension of individual freedom or spirituality, and can only be comprehended in terms of what is interior to intelligences, the bearings of questions, curiosity, projects, and lessons learned in any human gaze.

Religions also have a metaphysical misconception of the fabric of the cosmos, from an insistence that ethical or moral standards are inherent in it, laws based on divine decree and divine enforcement, a universal mechanism of justice: commands and judgments, record keeping, and an ultimate moral reckoning removed to some indefinite remoteness (for example, the karmic progression of reincarnation, or the final day of judgment, heaven and hell). Although even the religious conception of personal spirituality has to emphasize freedom so that moral acts and enforcement have some foundation in individual responsibility, that conception is dominated by the individual’s subordination to the universal (divine) system of moral reckoning, making the religious conception of spirituality hopelessly political: top-down, punitive, and repressive. The supposed cosmic source of our ethical sense is proposed as the essence of our spirituality, immediately locking us into unalterable subordination. It is a misconception which expresses the political agenda of the power-hoarding human parasite faction, projecting a mythical personification onto cosmic nature. Only embodied spiritual beings, ordinary persons, (not cosmic nature) make ethical judgments, and ethics is, again, entirely interior to individual intelligences. The real basis of morality in spirituality is not an occult connection to a cosmic order of justice but rather an individual power of empathy. Empathy is the moral compass. The lack of empathy is the lack of a moral compass.

Not recognizing the transcendence in personal subjective interiority (living in time) sets us up to accept all kinds of absurd superstitions about various (romantic) hidden entities, powers, or forces which are used as mechanisms of psychological manipulation to legitimate injustices of the status quo. The philosophical insight is that ordinary subjectivity itself is the miracle, and that it can be recognized as such even though it is misrepresented by official culture.

Effective Liberation

What is called Liberation Theology was inspired by a recognition of the institutionalized exploitation of indigenous people in “Latin” America, (which was a fully intended consequence of modern European imperialism) and it attempts to provide support from New Testament scripture for grass roots activism in aid of social justice. The immediate project was to restructure economic arrangements to accomplish a more equitable distribution of wealth, power, and choice, and with them dignity, and respect. Freedom was conceived as equitable distribution in the nexus of human goods. In that context, the inspiring idea of freedom cannot be realized without large-scale organizational change because it is inseparable from social structures and economic operations.

The point of posting 88, Philosophical Liberation: Sociability, Embodiment, Spirituality (December 15, 2015) is that doing something consequential and decisive, achieving self-possession, does not depend on the overthrow of the economic order or on any other environmental change. Freedom doesn’t need to wait for historical or evolutionary change in economics, biology, or culture. It can be achieved individually at any time, but even though the philosophical reorientation is first, decisive, and indispensable, perhaps it is not the end of liberation. Since sociability is so crucial in our spirituality, a withering away of the human macro-parasite faction and its culture, and of human parasitism in general, would be the practical hope and the expected effect of a broad distribution of philosophical liberation.

Note: For a closer contemplation of embodiment see posting 11, November 10, 2011, Nature: Ground and Sky

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.