Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Fragment 226 (word count: 1,110)

Tags: romanticism, pessimism, subordination, personal identity, hierarchy, hive-mind, unknowing, creativity, time, metaphysics, ideality.

Legacy Pessimism

There is a foundational pessimism in human experience as a legacy of the fear that dominated people of our past. Embodied/ teleological existence as lived by individuals is ephemeral, fragile, and vulnerable in an often unhelpful and sometimes apparently hostile environment. In our vast unknowing of fundamental principles of nature and existence, there is a strong temptation to over-personify environmental occurrences, to interpret them as messages and expressions of judgment by disembodied caring powers who, like mysterious and unreliable parents, need to be appeased, placated, obeyed, and given gifts and tokens of adulation and acknowledgements of our inferiority, in hope of kindlier treatment in life and possibly after death. This has often been the best we can think of to understand and control the conditions upon which we depend for life. In this context, pessimism is based on a disparaging conception of what is essential to existence as an embodied/ teleological individual, starting with vast inferiority to unfathomable spirits moving nature, coupled with our apparent predisposition to displease and disappoint those same definitive judges of what is good and worthy in our actions, desires, and inquisitive subjectivity.

Within this ancestral background of pessimism and fearful unknowing, certain assertions of guiding heights, of supreme forces imposing shape on the caring and strivings of human life, came to be broadly accepted and culturally enshrined across many different communities: masculine supremacy, disembodied supremacy, communal supremacy, and trophy supremacy. Although every one of these imposing forces was questionable, sometimes disputed, and always mysterious in its ultimate justification, the general experience of vast and fearful unknowing made acceptance of them practical as aids to survival. They formed a framework of personal orientation that was culturally distributed enough to establish a stable and predictable communal life. One main reason for the questionability of these particular guiding heights has always been that the supremacy of something means the subordination of something else, in this case the subordination of certain individuals by those asserting their own superiority as embodiments of natural and supernatural supremacies. Personal superiority becomes family superiority which in turn becomes elaborately stratified as a hierarchy of social classes on a descending scale of privilege and dignity. What was for a long time the sovereignty of a violent aristocratic class expressing masculine supremacy in alliance with patriarchs of religious life claiming knowledge of disembodied supremacy, developed, with the increased importance of markets and long-distance travel, into an ethos that could be called the romanticism of an aristo-commercial hive-mind. It is a founding feature of the informal ethos of romanticism to celebrate superiority and the freedom, power, pleasure, and deep sadness that come with it, sadness from the practical necessity of setting aside the question of ultimate justice. In the setting aside of certain questions of justice and injustice, romanticism is the willing embrace of dramatically engaging illusions as a shelter from the nihilism that its adherents believe follows from an unfiltered gaze upon human existence, which is to say, from philosophy. At its core, romanticism is a principled pessimism coupled with a consolation prize, with emphasis always on the thrill of the prize for those who win it.

It is not surprising to find the romantic ethos expressed, informally, in the central illusions of the aristo-commercial cultural hive-mind. The force of ‘supremacy’ in these illusions is an assertion of particular dimensions of subordination inherent in the existence of individuals. So, it is asserted, individuals have a need to accept some place of subordination in the most-masculine-first hierarchies of strength and force. Likewise, in this discourse, individuals need subordination to collective practices, judgments, norms, expectations, and assignments of personal identity. Further on the matter of personal identity, and in particular of personal value, worth, or dignity, individuals are subordinate to the value of trophies culturally stipulated as the uniquely legitimate objects of desire, competitive striving, satisfaction in possession, and definers of personal quality. Most of all, in many cultures, individuals are taught that they need subordination to the disembodied First and Greatest Teleology whose whim and limitless power is the source and engine of all existence, of meaning, purpose, and drama in existence, and in particular of what is good or bad behaviour and thinking, as declared by moral and religious patriarchs. Such assertions of individual subordination, when they are structural features of a developed communal culture, soon exist within the interior orientation lens of individuals as what Freud called a superego, the cultural mechanism that stipulates in every individual the particular shape of subordination demanded by the long legacy of community wisdom, as well as the shape of any particular individual’s legitimate aspirations, hopes, and dreams.

What makes such cultural assertions of supremacy and subordination illusions is that individuals have no inherent need of any of them. What is inherent to the sociability of individual caring-ideality does not include subordination or any essential needs for subordination. All forces of subordination originate outside an individual and are imposed on individuals because they provide asymmetrical benefits to a hegemonic faction. Nothing inherent to individual ideality opposes engaging with others always as equals. This is because what is really supreme is the inherent and individually sufficient creativity of embodied caring-ideality, the power of positing an ephemeral existence as future-existence in ceaselessly opening time, as a personally opening drama to be shaped from the interior of the individual in effortful engagement with exterior forces and structures including a surroundings of embodied caring idealities. Embodied ideality lives in the future, in the non-actuality that is the anomalous reality of subjectivity. Individuals are fundamentally self-defining in this way as a matter of anomalous metaphysical existence prior to external markers or the declarations of judges (natural or supernatural), and so also prior to markers of gender, whether cultural or biological.

Metaphysical creativity occurs entirely at the level of the embodied individual. There is no communal version, and so no inherently superior category of creativity with a possible claim to override individuals. The assertion of communal supremacy is based on fear, in the context of vast unknowing within a fragile and unreliable environment, and in the false hope of safety in numbers, in a dissolving into the herd. The costs to individuals of communal supremacy far exceed the benefits. The culturally implanted superego which shapes this subordination is the mechanism of hive-mind, and cultural hive-minds are a debilitating prison for human individuals. Hive-mind superegos always block awareness of the metaphysically anomalous creativity of individuals by broadly imposing a disparaging and false depiction of what is interior and inherent to human existence as embodied ideality. That is the foundational illusion of any hive-mind superego at all levels of the bonding of individuals into collective identities.

Related Fragments:

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Fragment 219, December 23, 2025, The Veil of Illusions (word Count: 2,841)

Fragment 220, February 21, 2026, De-Constituting Power (word count: 525)

Copyright © 2026 Sandy MacDonald.