Tag Archives: value

Metaphysics Dawns on the Edge of Creation

14 Sunday Dec 2025

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 218, word count: 213.

Tags: metaphysics, caring, ideality, existence, creation, freedom, personality, empathy, expression, value, philosophy, spirituality, time.

The foundational distinction for metaphysics is between the world that doesn’t matter, (which is the vast material world of strict actuality, essentially complete but energetically rearranging in a sort of ceaseless falling) over against the existence of caring, shaped as the never-finished personal dramas of any embodied ideality sensing total and desperate vulnerability to a somewhat malleable and entirely suppositional future. The metaphysical presence is caring with its context of a future sensed as open for certain improvisations, for creative expression. Entities of caring-ideality matter because they care and have cares and their caring makes things matter. Nothing else does that. Only caring is suppositional, orienting in terms of non-actualities of its own creation. The experience of embodiment grounds the emphatically monadic existence of beings of ideality as individuals. To identify and become acquainted with the metaphysical dimension of existence is to construct a sharp focus on the starkly anomalous existence of individual ideality, some indefinite number of distinct “I”s, vectoring future-ward in our effortful self-improvising, drama-clouds intervening at the coming-into-being edge of existence. Individual subjective existence is the experience of spiritual intervention, intentional freedom via creative ideation of personal and non-personal futurity-as-opening in the strictly subjective context of the particular importance of this expressive agency, without forgetting empathy and aesthetic appeal.

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.

War, Hive-Minds, & Dystopia

19 Thursday Jun 2025

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday June 19, 2025

Fragment 214. word count: 1,561.

Tags: community, culture, value, hierarchy, non-linguistic ideation, personality, innocence, self-possession, philosophy, nature, metaphysics.

It may seem that people generally must take their given social surroundings, their community’s cultural edifice of norms, values, treasures, and respectable achievements, as their whole personal range of expectation and opportunity, embracing styles of life, pathways through the institutionally structured life-cycle, that offer some degree of prosperity, reputation, and dignity within available practices. Since the hive-mind form of social organization (structured by common identity definitions and broadly shared dramas featuring emotional triggers spread by public media) has been plausibly ubiquitous in human history, there has always been a community-based cultural and mental framework that encloses individuals by external authority within a larger, purportedly immortal, abstract person. There has always been a culture-derived mental framework internalized by individuals involving personal confinement within hierarchies of prestige, strata of personal value, freedom, and power. Not all hive-minds have a formal hierarchy with a dominant leader, a chain of command, and a legally compulsory code of good and evil. Some hive-minds (for example, sport team fan groups) have only common heroes and saints, a common orientation toward select events and goings-on, and something like orthodox attitudes and triggers of approval and disapproval. There is still a sense of belonging and of some degree of closeness to an inner-circle with exceptional knowledge and style who speak to and for this cultural niche.

Partisan culture-war movements, common on social media, are also significant hive-minds, as are organizations insisting on a strong “corporate culture”. Military forces, their constituent units and divisions, and similar organizations such as police and sport teams themselves are all examples of very tight hive-minds. Embracing a culturally stipulated category as a personal identity definition is joining a herd, also a form of hive-mind. This includes gender identity, class identity, racial, ethnic, religious, demographic niche, geographical origin, social presentation style, or any hierarchical sub-category.

Polity-defining hive-minds are structured by dramas which are deadly serious communal pageantry, all requiring dedication and acquisition of skills and knowledge, and they rest on myths that happen to have gained cultural currency. There are national dramas in the competitions among nations for power, prestige, and wealth, involving evil enemy nations and virtuous friendly nations, with always the possibility and often the actuality of war. There are religious dramas involving personal and collective merit and guilt in relation to fictitious supernatural persons with ultimate power, unrestrained by embodiment, threats and promises of eternal reward or punishment in an afterlife, and the teasing possibility of miraculous divine interventions. There are gender dramas in which every individual must closely orbit some ideal type of male or female. There are social class dramas involving pressures to accumulate wealth and trophies, as well as to perfect performances of certain manners, tastes, and appearances, a certain accent in speaking. There are civic sports dramas delivering ecstasy from victory and misery from defeat. These are socially staged emotional engagements with stakes and consequences for interpersonal bonding and approval, for self-esteem, status, and avoidance (or not) of a range of indignities and miseries. Together they make a framework of social meaning.

Hive-minds structure their group orientation on assumptions held as certainties, as unquestionable knowledge and definitive categories of everything: essentialism. This cultural certainty follows from embracing either divine decree or fundamental laws of nature as imposing a discernible necessity in all things. Of course, different hive-minds have their own certainties, so immersion in any of them is a limitation on encountering reality.

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 value and potential (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 a good life, and how those things match up with personal abilities and performances.

It has been widely accepted that such cultural multi-mind collectives are good for individuals and possibly necessary. Immersion within a hive-mind culture does include a “sense of belonging” along with other benefits. However, people with influence and control within a hive-minded collective conventionally interpret “belonging” as “being owned by” the collective, granting the collective power to confer individual freedom or repression, sometimes life or death. The flip side of belonging is being owned, being the collective’s property. Serious hive-minds make war in which killing and dying are glorified and individuals are dehumanized and sacrificed as expendable.

Human communities have generally been dystopian, repressive and randomly cruel, overly controlled by a competitive and acquisitive male-strength-glorifying culture, and as such, profoundly questionable at the level of most individuals. The dogmatic essentialism of hive-minds always ignores and strives to exclude from attention a great swath of individual experience. The sense of self or personal identity is at play in this positioning of an individual within or only partly within a cultural meaning system. This is not merely about a variable sense of self-worth, but of the metaphysical status of personally existing as a particular “I”. Personal being-in-the-world can be defined as a rank in the hierarchies of culture: manners, norms, appearances, possessions, ways of presentation and performing socially, but these are traps in the shallowness of sophistication. To get to richer levels of human existence it is necessary to get beyond cultural pre-digestion through a personal cultivation of innocence.

Language is a crucial cultural system that provides a complex structure of pathways for thinking. However, in thinking about the inner processes of an individual’s acts of learning and creating intentions and acts of personal agency, it isn’t helpful to focus too strictly on the acts called “thinking”, which are always deeply associated with language. There is a vast swath of non-linguistic ideation that includes the whole context of personal orientation in space, time, and embodiment, orientation to culture and to relationships with other people, the personal cloud of dramas that express and specify any individual’s caring in their making a world that matters personally. Caring is not perceived but rather initiates, directs, and colours the spiritual reach or search that is the first personal movement of perception. The individual fountain of creative caring and curiosity is the spiritual force of individual existence as an “I”, and is never convincingly honoured or expressed in collective life. It silently looms as a discordant context surrounding the accidental certainties of cultured life, and beckons as the richer freedom of self-possession. Each of unorthodox religious speculation, philosophical questioning, and mind-altering drugs, sometimes combined, have been techniques used in different societies by individuals to explore that spiritual context as an exit from the confinement of a personal identity stipulated by hive-mind culture.

Ideality is willfully improvised becoming, building a future while questioning, learning, and working, the exact opposite of either being or a simple becoming. As just noted about caring, subjective ideation is not entirely receptive, reactive, or perceptual. A whole fundamental swirl of experience is a personal exertion to make something of felt existence, and to make something relevant to personal caring from received stimulations. Projecting the personal drama of interest and curiosity is a spiritual power of agency. This is creative world building in the medium of ideality, developing a sense of place-and-heading in a world shaped by external objects and forms internalized as relevant in personal dramas. Each fountain of caring, curiosity, questioning, attachment, and personal construction of orientation is an anomalous presence in the world of otherwise inescapable conservation, inertia, and entropy. The force of personality is not a thing of that nature, but, as point and arc of spontaneous creation, stands outside nature and transcends it. The creative power of ideality is not in Platonic heaven or in gods and demons, but only in ordinary personalities, in the embodied existence of dramatically vulnerable agents. There is no equivalent to this genius at a collective or community level.

By using the separation of people into niches of dignity, power, opportunity, status, value, and esteem, by using that separation as the structuring principle of a community, hive-minds alienate people from one another, block the reach of anyone’s empathy, and normalize a relative disrespect/ contempt for so many. Being held in contempt is dystopian. This way of categorizing people severs everyone from recognizing the stark metaphysical anomaly of subjective ideality as such. In restricting an individual’s grounds for self-evaluation and definition so much, hive-minds create a need and opportunity for philosophical questioning as a spiritual enlargement.

Thoughtful, cultivated innocence is the core of philosophy as an original consideration of the situation of a perceptive and reflective “I”. Philosophical work is a self-guided change in the way the world as a presence and the reflecting agent as a presence are perceived, conceived, and experienced; an achievement, by private questioning, of as perfect an innocence as can be dared. This cultivation involves effective de-culturing, with inherited prejudices made irrelevant. The state of de-cultured unknowing isn’t merely a void. It remains in the vicinity of questioning and caring as special states of a particular spirituality, a unsatisfied readiness for discovery.

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.

Bonfire of Vanities

Featured

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 207, word count: 696.

tags: Savonarola, spirituality, self-possession, value, hierarchy, culture, class, time, dystopia, hive-mind, Spinoza, metaphysics.

There is a perennial conflict, including culture wars, between two tendencies of human motivation. The overwhelmingly popular tendency is based on acquisition, competition, display, and quests for approval and admiration. The other tendency derives from a personal experience of transcendent spirituality. From the spiritual point of view, many objects that are popularly valued seem like mere vanities. Vanities display a dependence on external validation, and an absence of acquaintance with the force of personally autonomous creativity as authentic spirituality. The term “bonfire of the vanities” is typically associated with the fifteenth century Dominican friar Savonarola who preached a fundamentalist Christian theology that emphasized the value of personal spirituality over wealth, status, and public displays of virtue and accomplishment. He famously organized a Shrove Tuesday bonfire in Renaissance Florence on February 7, 1497 into which were thrown all sorts of prideful distractions from his idea of a properly spiritual life. Items burned included, among other things, books, musical instruments, and works of art, all precious to the hearts of the envied, propertied, and highly cultured classes. Savonarola’s specific justification for his bonfire, namely a certain type of Christian theology, was certainly misconceived and, as itself an ostentatious display, its own forum for vanity. It had a warped and malevolent conception of spirituality and transcendence in the human situation. Savonarola was not completely wrong though. He was keenly aware of the perennial conflict noted above.

It is true that everybody needs some stuff and there is such a thing as innocent pleasure, sometimes aesthetic pleasure in the particulars that help make a livable environment and an interesting life. Even so, the capitalist valuables list really does contain a hefty portion of vanities, and not harmless ones either, but vanities which are laying waste to Planet Earth. The legitimacy of hierarchy and of the cultural markers of status must be disputed on the basis of spirituality. There is something more important than nature’s food chain interpreted as a Great Chain of Being decreed by divine or cosmic fiat, and the more important reality is the metaphysically anomalous existence of individual creative spirit, not the religious conception of an external almighty to whom mere humanity is vastly inferior and utterly in debt, but instead a conception which recognizes individual human time-creation as the radiant transcendence.

The World-Lens of Personal Ideality

There is a kind of experience that invites comparison with Spinoza’s “under the aspect of eternity” as a personal encounter with transcendence, but Spinoza’s emphasis on eternity is all wrong. The idea of eternity is a false transcendence. Actual transcendence is the personally crafted sense of the ceaseless opening and passing of time, deliverance from the deadening weight of the Eternal Now via the anticipating living will, the context-bearing gaze that picks out value and novelty by perceiving and acting through a construct of inward ideality, a personally gathered, interpreted, and organized lens-world in living action to understand and inhabit the public world. As storms of ideality, we plunge into a future which is unknowable and malleable, expecting certain features of geography with enough probability as a frame of reference for now. We manage a balance between energy sources and costs in effort, between anxiety and pleasure. It is possible to face full acquaintance with ourselves as human without being overwhelmed by dread, anguish, and complete absurdity.

There is nothing wrong in itself with pursuing delights, and possessions can be authentic resources, tools, and guides in the desperate spiritual adventure. However, the enjoyment of life should be approached with full awareness of the transcendence of spirit over things, even things that are excellent works of spirit, and with recognition of the deceptions of hive-mind constructs meant to normalize for everybody that there is nothing better than to ape people with the most or most stylish possessions, and that nothing can be done about the resulting dystopian society. If, respecting the dignity of persons and understanding the reality-distorting effects of dystopian cultural legacies, a person takes delight in some possessions or cultural products, there is room for this, so long as the enjoyment isn’t the foundation for an affectation of serious personal or group superiority.

See also: 

Fragment 202, August 13, 2023, Between Spirit and Dystopia (word count: 1,379)

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

Fragment 206, March 15, 2024, Philosophy as Knowledge (word count: 1,076)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Philosophy as Knowledge

Featured

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 206, word count: 1,076.

tags: writing, history of philosophy, spirituality, culture, hive-mind, self-possession, value.

It is very common in philosophical work to find critiques of any account of reality that comes as a cultural package, as widely shared culturally orthodox conceptions of reality. Such cultural packages include justifications for the existing social hierarchies and forms of exchange, of inequalities of property, status, knowledge, and coercive power. The canonical values of such an orthodoxy will be the values and treasures declared and embraced by factions which are most esteemed at the top of the hierarchy. The carriers of a culturally packaged reality typically form a collective with a sense of unity and identity, held together by competition for and imitation of certain styles of living, by a shared superego abstracted from exemplars of the life-best-lived, groups with most power, property, public attention and approval, awards, celebrated talents, and evident good fortune. The collective drama of inequality is rooted in orthodox conceptions of weaknesses and dangerous powers in the individual human spirit. Such culturally orthodox conceptions of reality are fetishistic in the sense that it is considered transgressive to doubt or question them.

Here are eleven examples of such philosophical critiques.

Socrates went to the Athenian marketplace to question people, and his intent was to show that ordinary assumptions about justice and virtue were far from well founded and often incoherent.

Plato extended Socrates’ identification of popular illusions to include all change and the experience of time itself. From the metaphor of the cultural community as a cave fixated on shadows, we learn that Plato thought that perceiving reality as it truly is would be a vision of the eternal.

Diogenes of Sinope, arguably the original Cynic, lived according to ‘nature’ in contrast to normal people, whose culturally formed style of living he declared an oppressive fantasy imposed on human nature.

Martin Luther is an example of profound self-possession and alienation from orthodox assumptions about fundamental reality as represented in Roman Christian orthodoxy.

Descartes carried through a rigorous inventory of everything that can be doubted about normal assumptions, but that people usually avoid thinking about.

Spinoza, like Plato, thought that properly perceived reality would be “under the aspect of eternity”. Since this is far from the norm, then normal perceiving involves some profound illusions about reality.

David Hume found rational grounds for scepticism about material substance, cause-effect, and the continuity of objects and of the subjective person. He concluded that, because of our psychological nature we soon forget our philosophical rationality and revert to ‘common sense’ habits of assuming we know what we really don’t know.

J.J. Rousseau did a critique of his contemporary culture, a critique of up-to-date arts and sciences in the tradition of “the bonfire of the vanities” and in the tradition of Diogenes the Cynic. Rousseau’s critique was launched in opposition to the ‘man of the world’ style of living promoted by Voltaire, the life of wealth, privilege, consciousness of social superiority and exclusive group membership, consumption and patronage of the arts and sciences.

Kant figured out that individuals are self-legislating, and so not fundamentally in need of any exterior sovereign. That was a peculiarly philosophical discovery with profound political and social implications firmly rooted in the Lutheran tradition. Just as Luther conceived the individual as independent of the mediation of the Church, so Kant followed by showing the individual independent of the state or any other externally imposed superego.

Nietzsche wrote explicitly about common human herd mentality and the necessity of breaking out of it to do anything creative.

Wittgenstein saw his philosophical work as a way of “getting the fly out of the fly-bottle”. For Wittgenstein, the fly in the fly bottle was people caught in philosophical problems, snared by “language on holiday”. However, it isn’t just the vanishingly small population of philosophers who get themselves caught in the fly bottle. Culturally orthodox ways of conceiving reality also can do the same for all users of a common discourse.

A Graphically Projected Language Model of Thinking

Something that emphatically enables an exceptional perspective outside collective orthodoxy  is the personal use of writing in the process of developing and expressing judgements and ways of understanding reality. Of the examples listed, only Socrates seems not to have been a writer, although he was likely literate. The graphic representation of language is a technology by which an individual’s thinking can become untethered from the particular conversations available with familiar and available people, untethered from the common discourse. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that engages with contemporary relationships and pre-occupations. The independent voice enabled by the privacy of written expression is the portal out of immersion in the talk going around, including the religious and political talk that reinforces an assumption of inevitability about the way things are.

The experience of breaking free from common discourse itself involves the acquisition of some uncommon knowledge, such as knowledge of the power of community discourse to impose collectively shared conceptions of what is thinkable and what is unquestionable in community orientation, as well as knowledge that the community orientation is capable of hiding reality, including the reality of human existence itself. Philosophers often speak from knowing that the sense of reality which is normal and normative for speakers of any given language is largely supplied by ambient culture and carried in the meaning structure of the language as used in ordinary conversations. This is knowing that there are cultural hives of false reality, and that human collectives construct themselves as such hives in part to shelter from the potential terror of not knowing the most profound truths of existence, in part to fabricate a human unit larger and stronger than the embodied individual in the face of the cosmic vastness, but also to preserve certain dystopian injustices from which powerful factions benefit.

As the examples show, a philosophical sensibility often includes recognition of a personal discordance with the orientation stipulated by a culture-hive, and a sense of curiosity about encountering existence in a way beyond cultural influences. This is acquaintance with an individual spiritual power that is completely at odds with a top-down centralized hierarchy typical of religions and traditional military-based sovereignty. It is an experience of profound self-possession and creative power, and as such discovery of a human spirit not confined as cultural orthodoxy stipulates. Such knowledge is transcendently important, bringing gratification that is non-competitive, non-imitative, and adventuresome.

Embedded link:

Fragment 104, April 6, 2017, In Plato’s Cave (word count: 926)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Democracy, Violence, Culture War

Featured

Posted by in Culture, Equality

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 204, word count: 157.

tags: humanism, dignity, property, equality, empathy, value, culture, politics

There is a necessary connection between democracy and the de-valuing of violence. More democracy, less violence. Violence offends the dignity of persons, and empathic recognition and demonstration of universal dignity is the direction of democracy. Universality of dignity, which means general equality, is the authenticating test of democracy. Less equality of dignity, less authentic democracy. This means that the privileged value of property, as compared to the value of dignified personhood, is progressively reduced in democracy. A deep culture war rages here: partisans of property against partisans of inherent personal dignity. Property as elite value always requires protection by imminent violence, and is often the justification or inspiration for an elaborate culture of violence. Property possession is sometimes asserted as the marker and exclusive revelation of dignity. That view is anti-democratic and anti-humanist since a humanist recognition of universal dignity requires the decoupling of dignity from any property that involves a threat of violence.

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Gratification

15 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 152, word count: 296.

Any politically left view must express a recognition that the most important human gratifications are not from things gained in competitions, so not property, and especially not scarce types of property, not trophies of any kind. Since the normal and traditional concept of sovereign government is a set of institutions for the preservation and protection of property ownership and the rights of property ownership, there is a discord between leftist politics and normal government. Truly leftist politics is inherently antagonistic to traditional sovereignty’s structural focus on protecting property possession. There is a politically crucial division between the class of people in possession of sufficient property to provide them with significant income and the class of people without income-providing property who must sell their work, skills, or knowledge to support themselves. The propertied class always imagines that the unpropertied seek to take possession of their property for themselves, to replace them as the propertied class. That is the interpretation of “revolution” in the propertied hive mind, but it is not a truly leftist aspiration. Competitive hierarchies need stark “us against them” conceptual constructs: master/ slave, predator/ prey, victor/ vanquished, but those dichotomies are foreign to the leftist outlook, just as envy is. The desperate force of envy and avarice is seen in eagerness for competitions and trophies. The leftist aspiration is to delight in gratifications which fountain up from the interior of personal intelligence, creative impulses of all kinds, often expressed in an interplay among different voices, and to celebrate impulses to nurture, to become skillful, and to expand knowledge and understanding. Progress for the left is a reformation of attitudes and experiences of gratification at the level of every individual, a disengagement from the cultured hive mind of dominance, and a discovery of self-possession.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

The Freedom of Ideality

28 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Embodiment, Equality, Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 144, word count: 442.

Freedom is a fundamental function of teleological ideality, which is to say, of personality. Personality is the spontaneous creation of freedom in a poise toward an indefinite variety of possible actions in alternative futures. Personality experiences its ideality as freedom because it encompasses in advance, from within its own creativity, personally invented alternative possibilities for agency, the creation of novel alternatives and possibilities in the construction of a life. Personality lives and orients itself among mostly non-actualities in a playing field of non-actual time. These non-actualities are features of the orientation and bearing of some particular embodied ideality. Personality depends on sensitivity, on a gaze beyond itself, but it is not a strictly sensory gaze. The gaze of any teleological ideality goes through and beyond sensed actuality to an undetermined futurity where different actions and courses of development are conceived as possibilities among variously judged probabilities. Ideality experiences freedom in its gaze (and its bearing) into a non-actual dimension of possible futures, pathways, and plans with always room for the invention of more. The supra-sensory gaze is always expressive of at least curiosity, and curiosity is already an agency. The gaze is an agency, a projection, a searching and a judging, but is also the matrix of creation for new actualities, interventions into the world of things, and so of agency that is specifically expressive of knowledge, intent, decision, and caring. Consciousness is this gaze of ideality, the anticipatory ideation of agency in the moments to come, full of ideas, a fountain of teleological possibilities in a creative arc of developmental continuity that is a personality in the living of an embodied life.

The human nature we recognize here is a fountain of ideas and inventions, goods to be expressed and projected in the making of lived actuality. Value, experience of gratification, is not something that comes from outside the individual, as is assumed in the concept of ‘economic man’, the blank slate or sucking void vision of human nature. Neither freedom nor value depend on access to competitions for properties, consumables, sparkles, or titles, and so is not a product of commerce, the retail, design, or manufacturing industries, for example. Value experience is in expressing the interior creative fountain. Freedom does not require abandonment or suppression of empathy (Kant’s universal maxims are formal expressions of empathy), getting beyond the rule of (Kantian) law, or taking up weapons to become the most effective force for looting trophies. Freedom is ideality, the existence of individual embodied personality. Subsequent to Freud, the scientific imperative is to create a psychology without ideality, but freedom is indiscernible to any such psychology.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

Frontier Freedom

21 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Class War, Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Political Power

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fragment 143, word count: 447.

The Franks, Goths, Angles, and Saxons and a number of other groups came overland into western Europe around the fourth century, colonizing and displacing indigenous peoples there who had previously been colonized and were now abandoned by the imperial Romans. Somewhat over a thousand years later, from the sixteenth century, descendants of those Goths, Franks, Angles, and Saxons, now fully Christianized European imperialists, subjected the indigenous peoples of America and many other places to the same assaults with new weapons. Deja vu all over again. There is an essential racism at the core of such violence, an idea of superiority which licenses any brutality. That idea of hierarchy derived from the macro-parasitism of herding culture on the Great Eurasian Steppe. Subjected people were perceived as livestock. In both colonizations there was a profound contempt for empathy which defined a (Kantian) lawlessness and ensured that the supreme value would be personal fighting ability and a culture of organized fighting which came to define masculinity. In that situation, it is the strongest who claim rights to anything that might count as a trophy, not just property but lives. Without empathy, rights (and everything else) belong to the strongest, and frontier freedom is the assertion of the superiority of the strongest and the unlimited rights of superior beings. Theirs is a parasitic freedom that creates and depends on slavery and murder. The American idea of freedom grounded in the freedom of the old western frontier is identical to a romantic idea of medieval feudalism in western Europe and expresses a cultural memory of that experience *. Frontier freedom (no taxes, no regulations, private guns) is the freedom of the marauder. This idea of freedom in which strength in combat and competition defines rights is still a living force in cultures of value and wealth based on consumption and trophy property, conspicuous in normal operations of corporations and generally in investor supremacist capitalism.

These cultural experiences have inspired a certain idea of human nature as a blank slate, an inherent problem (of non-existence craving existence) overcome more or less successfully by projection of a self-image using external consumables, properties, and the conflicts to possess such things. The strongest or fittest are revealed by the quantity and sparkle of the properties they conquer. This is the metaphysics of patriarchy, propaganda for the romantic idea that the strongest are legitimate sovereigns. However, human nature and freedom are really quite different. Human nature is the spontaneous creation of freedom at the level of the embodied individual, a creation that is interior to the individual as ideality. This universally inherent freedom of the individual is invisible to anyone conceiving psychology without conceiving ideality.

* Compare Chapter 8, ‘The Frontier’, pp. 103-117, in: A Vanished World : Medieval Spain’s Golden Age of Enlightenment, written by Christopher Lowney, Published by Free Press (2005), ISBN: 0743243595.

Copyright © 2019 Sandy MacDonald.

 

Life after Hive-Mind

15 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Why thinking?

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posting 132, Word Count: 1,454.

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 liberal 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 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; theatrical ceremonies of remembrance and renewal of devotion invoking the sacred and obscure “us against them” mission of the hive, synchronized movements in processions, special word formulas to be spoken in mass unison. Such things are not intended to encourage creative or rational thinking but rather to replace thinking with passive embrace of an orthodox official story line, a standardized hive-mind. The supposed necessity of hive-mind belonging is used routinely to justify nationalist propaganda and censorship.

The Enlightenment idea of human nature as having no intrinsic need for sovereign authority is now an old idea, the real core of liberalism, and it always went against the conservative dogma, from religion, that everyone needs supervision structured within the symbols, pageantry, and authoritative superego of collective solidarity and belonging. The historical endurance of the state as sovereign authority shows that the enrichment of the idea of human nature from the Enlightenment was effectively smothered by that pre-existing culture. That pre-existing culture of authoritative supervision was an entrenchment in institutions of the traditional rights of the father, an overt expression of the principle that the strongest has sovereign rights over everyone else, rights to the property of the weaker, rights to the lives of the weaker, generally the right to be parasitic on the weaker. These cultural assumptions grow from the traditional patriarchal family in which the father is the strongest and women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. The Enlightenment and liberal conception of human nature was murdered in the crib by traditional patriarchal practices, and that is what accounts for the hive-mind efforts of modern states.

It is now clear, however, that there are multitudes of people with very elastic and insubstantial attachments to collective entities. For example, the globalization of capital has fostered an internationally educated and mobile professional and business class. Academics, engineers, medical practitioners, business and financial professionals are all educated in an international context and trained to have a cosmopolitan outlook, quite detached from any specifically national or territorial master narrative which is the normal core of hive-mind. Additionally, the loyalty and national belonging of the investor class generally evaporates instantly upon election of a socialist government, so is always largely a pretence. Yet, these groups and individuals conduct lives they find meaningful. They are not without a cultural framework of orientation, but it is more a culture of trophy property as primary value. A focus on possession of property always includes fear for the security of possession, requires protection by at least the readiness of force, and so includes a culture of reverence for intimidating strength and power, control of taxes, laws, and war, the organization of violence, all still core features of patriarchy. Obviously this property-based cosmopolitan framework still has a stake in maintaining the institutions of nation-state sovereignty, especially police, military, and intelligence agencies, but strictly as service providers, supplemented or replaced by private suppliers when convenient.

The cosmopolitan perspective of these factions shows that there are experiences of gratification, identity, and meaning, which make identification with a national collective completely unnecessary. Gratification from symbols and pageantry of collective identity, embedded in the narrative of national peril and exceptionalism, is not necessary for a meaningful life, as demonstrated by the contented lives of the masses of people with scant engagement with such things. Gratification from property possession is still part of traditional patriarchal culture, inextricably invested in organized force, and by far the most culturally dominant and celebrated gratification experience, but there are others. Nurturing children (or nurturing animals, even plants), socializing them into the linguistic community and having ongoing conversations with them as they develop is inherently gratifying. This nurturing sociability is an independent non-property based source of profound value, meaning, and sense of identity, in fact the most important source for most people, although studiously unrecognized as such. Still another realm of gratification experience is thinking, often in the form of ‘scribal’ ideality. Philosophers have frequently asserted that the greatest human pleasure, the most fun, is thinking. A great deal of human fulfillment is derived from following personal curiosity, learning, reading, writing, and synthesizing ideas, interrogating history and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between subjectivity and subjectivity. This gratification is individually interior, the model of spiritual autonomy, although always with some important relationship with sociability, communication, and human interconnectedness. Yet again, craftsmanship is another source of value experience, expressing and performing creativity, knowledge, and skill in working with tools and materials, actualizing a previously conceived shape in observable objects. There can also be pleasure in experiencing any skillful power of the human body, but assigned donkey work is boring, dirty, sweaty, energy sucking, exhausting and that is why a ‘working’ class does not have an independent culture of value experience, whereas ‘homemakers’, certain kinds of scribes, and craftspeople certainly do.

The culture of property possession as primary value is part of a conception of human nature as a painful emptiness craving to be filled, a sucking pit of needs for definition and gratification from outside itself, a deficiency that grasps for acquisition, consumption, and competition; determined by biological and material laws. However, the importance of gratification from nurturing, from performance of creative craftsmanship, and from scribal ideality clearly refutes the claim that human nature is a consuming emptiness. The ubiquitous practice of nurture shows human nature as a fountain of empathy and compassionate caring. The intrinsic gratification in practicing craftsmanship shows creativity in projecting shapes from personally interior ideality into material actuality. Intellectual activity, a cultivation of ordinary thinking, is a fountain of personal curiosity, questions, directed impulses for relevant exploring, researching, learning, discovering, original conceptualizing, writing, reading, and synthesizing ideas. Every personality is a fountain of such goods, of spontaneous creation of curiosity, questioning, inspiration, and caring, a gusher of impulses to shape the environment and construct interconnections with others. These self-sourced experiences of value are profound enough to build lives upon, and many people do exactly that. In this light, each personality is a self-constructing idea of a life-in-progress actively opening the world by creatively thinking and working itself into the world. This recognition of human nature as self-creating from interior ideality eliminates the primacy of competition and conflict, as well as hierarchical rankings and trophy collections derived from competitions, crucial features of possession of property as primary value. It also means that individuals do not have any inherent dependence on experiences of belonging provided by hive-mind sovereign states or any similar collective entity.

The entire conservative conception of the human predicament, featuring an intrinsic grasping emptiness of human nature, property possession as essential identity definition, inevitable competition and conflict for scarce goods, celebration of strength and violence, the necessity of a sovereign authority to dampen the lethality of conflict (civilization), and the rights of the strongest to be sovereign and parasitic, all supposedly pre-determined by natural law, is a bogus and toxic cultural legacy, a mythical metaphysics to make the world exciting for aspiring heroes in their romantic dreams of a cosmically ordained struggle for dominance. This old mythology is a dystopian nightmare for most people. The way out is cultivating the gratifying activities which express personality as a fountain of ideas for interventions-in-actuality. That creates the alternative experience, acquaintance with a human nature that can trust itself in the complete absence of authority or any vestige of patriarchy, in the absence of any controlling hive-minds projecting sovereignty of the strongest, with no need for the kind of identity and meaning assigned by a controlling collective. There is a far better life after re-orienting outside nationalist hive-minds and also outside any other rat race for symbolic markers of self-worth and identity. Hive-minds make war and are made for war.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Politics is More than Nature

08 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in Culture, Freedom, Hierarchy, Narrative, Nature, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence, University, Why thinking?

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Posting 128, Word Count: 867.

On questions of politics and social order, there is always more involved than just nature, since there is always the involvement of the subjective ideality of individuals, human spirituality. Ideologues of the political right-wing make every effort to reduce political forces to a narrow concept of nature: predetermined, rigidly and unalterably ordered by eternal categories and hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being. The right-wing concept of nature includes the right of the strongest to use lethal force to exercise sovereignty over the less strong, and conceives a general flaw in human nature, much like original sin, which means that people deserve and even require subordination to sovereign supervision. Those assumptions grow out of the traditional patriarchal family in which the father is the strongest and the women and children are assumed to lack even a minimum competence. The appeal to the inevitability of nature serves the purpose of defending the advantages of those who already have the greatest advantages, mainly rights attached to possession of property. Property fits well within a narrow concept of nature. However, crucial points supposedly determined by nature on the right-wing view are really features of culture, and culture is mutable.

The Mission of the Interior Individual

The involvement of individual subjective ideality in all matters of politics and social order means, first, that the fabric of reality includes crucial forces which are very unlike the concept of nature as predetermined, unalterable, rigidly ordered by eternal categories and the great chain of being. Individual subjectivity has an important degree of creative freedom to conceptualize and re-conceptualize the structures of the world, and to intervene in forming and altering those structures by exploiting the fundamental instability of actuality, an instability represented by time. The conceptions of subjective ideality and their cultural expressions are tentative and mutable under the force of deliberation and creativity. Second, the spirituality of people means that we individually have an interior source of value, gratification, and original creation that is not connected to possession of property, that is a projecting fountain instead of a deficiency that craves consumption, acquisition, and competition. Every individual has an expressive mission that goes beyond competitions for scarce goods, struggles for survival, and acquiring trophies and knowledge of objective facts, beyond submission and obedience, beyond accumulating property, and beyond aligning with narratives spun by scribes of power and wealth in a patriarchal hive-mind. Individual subjectivities have a mission to conceive and actually make an authentically personal mark on the world, to bring goods from a spiritual interiority and inject them into the shape of the public world. Creating structures of mutually nurturing sociability is part of sustaining that mission. Social and political structures can be made to change under the force of ideas since ideas are openings into a mutable future.

The reading/ writing persona that is cultivated in literacy and education has a distinct kind of autonomy of thinking and authorship. Young people have little attachment to property, but much to their unique voice and spirituality. A great deal of human fulfillment can be derived from learning and thinking, reading and writing, interrogating history and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between subjectivity and subjectivity, but such a source of fulfillment goes far beyond top-down centralizing control. It is far too autonomous and individually interior for the political right-wing to endure. Right-wing interiority is meant to be dominated by a frightening superego to intimidate the supposed inherent vice. One reason the political right-wing is anti-intellectual and struggles to narrow eduction to vocational training (STEM etc.) is to limit a general encounter with Enlightenment era ideas which illuminate an empathic and non-property based autonomy of the individual.

Everyone’s personal state of orientation is always situated in and influenced by a historical, cultural, and political context which includes (prominently) efforts by hive-mind collectives to control the behaviour and thinking of every individual, to orient every individual within a certain story, a tragic drama asserting patriarchy as a metaphysical inevitability. There is no equivalence between the political left and the political right because forces of the right have exercised their dominance for millennia with extreme violence and they mean to keep it that way. The political left has always been an alternative vision of the individual struggling to express the mission of ideality against the great weight of patriarchy. The calling to account of patriarchal dystopia, its being exposed as such by the political left-wing, is a cultural earthquake, unavoidably a bitter and profound incompatibility of visions with little ground for compromise. Of course the messages of the left must disrupt traditional narratives that served as devices of patriarchal macro-parasitism to maintain submissive hive-minds.

An authentic idealist metaphysics is one in which brute nature participates in reality with the ideality of embodied and sociable individuals, in which the world of actuality is unfinished and constantly becoming something new, bits of originality created continuously at various separate localities through the efforts of the transcendent spirituality of individual intelligences. This is a metaphysics of intelligences questioning, caring, and learning through their inward pressing into a profoundly undetermined time to come, creating what comes next.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.