... is that people are not monadic subjects. Your average human being consists of:
- a physical body;
- a consciousness (or awareness);
- various instinctual drives arising from the intersection of that body and consciousness;
- various subconscious "programmes" arising from the intersection of the instinctual drives and the Real World of Physical Laws and Other Humans;
- a rational mind;
- a self-image (created by the rational mind from on the basis of the subconscious processes - the purpose of this is to allow the individual to survive in the World-As-Is, and is the ego or at least what the individual thinks he or she is);
- and, in potential but only if worked on, a will capable of independent action, produced by the rational mind by the application of consciousness, which is capable of standing apart from all the above mental processes and making decisions based on principle.
Above that there's probably a Higher Self / True Will / Soul / God, accessible if all the above are working in co-operation, but about this it is not permissible to speak (because anything I could say would be asinine at best).
The essential crime of capitalism is that its ideology is based on the idea that the individual is nothing but a rational mind and instinctual drives (ignoring the deep interface between the two); and keeping the individual docile by deliberately trying to induce a gap between them. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, indeed.
The essential failure of leftist ideology is to believe that you can change this solely by an appeal to the rational mind. When rationality comes up against tasty treats offered to the animal brain, in all but those cases where an independent will has been developed, the rational mind loses every time.
Political radicalism must truly understand cultural theory, psychology, memetics, magick and mysticism if it has a chance of defeating the status quo this side of a total collapse of human civilisation. Because our enemies get it. They've turned it into an art, if not quite a science.
I read your post today and had this idea.
ReplyDeleteThere´s not "they". Our culture is derivative of a monkey culture whith the alpha and beta thing, so our brains have been modelled to work in and create a social enviroment where there are higher status people and low status people.
During our development as a species our brains (just a neurocientificist way of saying "we") acquired the possibility of plasticity, yet the culture that made it possible is based on ancient primal societies.
That makes it possible for us to think of utopias yet we have this ancient culture based on the way chimps relate. Democracies, empires, they are all built based in this social heritage: the fact that we as people are biologic projected to care for our lives above of others, and the possibility of programming ourselves to work in way other than the biologic project.
This is a inversion of the biological determinism. I think we are biologically capable of overcoming our social structure. The culture that we have today is more biologically determined to work in this particular way than our physical bodies and our brain. This seems to be a contradiction, but I think the contradiction is accurate.
That means that the culture the way it´s built today "talks" more nicely to ancient parts of our brains, and the logic that guides it is older than our hability to question it.