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Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven
The question of identity haunts us, we inhabitants of the 20th and 21st centuries, underlying all our political excesses and extremes, playing a central role in the culture war tearing us once again asunder. We are adrift in chaos and longing, in the absence of a firm identity, no foundation underfoot, nothing to strive toward, prone in our lacking conscious and unconscious to decomposition and strife. Something must unite our atention and our action, so that we are integrated, psychologically.
Something must unite our interests and endeavours, collectively, so that we can cooperate and compete peacefully, productively, reciprocally, and sustainably. How then should our identity be conceptualised and embodied, practically and ideally? What opportunities beckon, if that question is answered, in an optimal fashion? What pitfalls lurk if we err?
Something must unite our interests and endeavours, collectively, so that we can cooperate and compete peacefully, productively, reciprocally, and sustainably. How then should our identity be conceptualised and embodied, practically and ideally? What opportunities beckon, if that question is answered, in an optimal fashion? What pitfalls lurk if we err?
- GenresPhilosophyPsychology
24 pages
Published October 1, 2023
95 people want to read
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December 26, 2024
The Beast and the Whore of Babylon
Two prominent images in the visionary work portray the two possible trajectories of civilisation. The first is a hybrid: a great, seven-headed scarlet beast, with the mother of all prostitutes seated on its back. The beast is civilisation and its leaders, the colour of earth and blood. The false princess or queen is the licentiousness offered by the would-be totalising state to its once-citizens. The beast is a representation of false hierarchy, a living Tower of Babel, the arrogant state/king and its vassals, hellbent on total subordination, marking everyone witting or unwitting with the mark or the number of the beast.
The great prostitute—the Whore of Babylon—riding on the back of the beast, is the denizen and temptress of the dark alleys, byways, and brothels of the "big city", the embodiment of the licentiousness of Rome. She is the dissolution of constraint that accompanies atomized individuality, the dissociation of sex from the constraints and guides of tradition. She is the freedom of anonymity in the "universal city", a whore embodying all the desires, mixtures, deviations, and fetishes characterising those hypothetically freed from all higher-level identities and obligations. She is the total temptation offered by the totalitarian state. Ultimately—ironically and inevitably—the scarlet beast kills the prostitute: the totalising state promises freedom, but kills even desire, let alone its satiation.
This strange, surreal, and endlessly compelling tale is a vision of warning: the ultimate state, promising the freedom to pursue every conceivable whim, accrues to itself all the power that remains on the table as responsible conduct is abandoned, using that power not to free, but to enslave. The worship of impulsive idiosyncrasy, and the accompanying destruction of subsidiary structure, invites, enables, and even necessitates the "State of Absolute Control". Someone, after all, has to pick up the pieces.
This pattern reveals itself when the pendulum swings, and the hedonism of Weimar is transformed into the totalitarian Reich; when the Anarchism of the French Revolution transmutes into centralised Napoleonic empire. This same dynamism ruled during the Covid-19 pandemic, which was, most truly, a plague of authoritarianism. Our individualistic and hypothetically free societies re-organised themselves in a heartbeat into a rigid and comprehensive totalitarianism, with all those who objected demonised, punished, castigated, and excluded. The majority participated with enthusiasm, offered as they were the tantalising opportunity to inform oh-so-moralistically on a neighbour.
…
As the irresponsible and narcissistic individual abandons his allegiance to his intermediary and superordinate identities, and those are undermined and destroyed, level by level, the state grows evermore powerful. Eventually, even the comprehensive nation-state itself is no longer sufficient to satisfy the appetite of those who worship the collective. Just as Napoleon eliminated provincial dialects and customs so that the all-encompassing French Nation could be imposed, so too today the very notion of France—the very idea of the nation-state itself—is portrayed as something anachronistic, patriarchal, restrictive, and counterproductive; as something that must be overcome and transcended to render the globe stable and sustainable.
…
…inclusivity, diversity, and equity is the replacement social identity. What portrays itself as a universalist compassion at the outset, is in fact the jaws of the Leviathan stretching wide enough to devour everything. To reduce the existence of a nation to diversity and openness is to in time destroy that nation, as diversity without unity can only be decomposition. But our interpretation of the tune changes when we realise we are moving towards a system, a kind of meta-state, where everything is included and where all competing identities, including nations, must be swallowed up.
The globalist struggle is ultimately presented as a fight against intermediary identities such as nation, gender, family, and religion because they present an obstacle to the free individual, but in the final analysis, the "sovereignty of the individual" will be subsumed into the body of the Leviathan by the very processes by which this sovereignty arose, and radical freedom will be transformed into totalitarian control.
…
[The Pride] flag and its international use celebrate all that which is a challenge to the types of normative identity which were enforced and radicalised in the early modern period. The rainbow flag, a hypothetical symbol of diversity, has already transformed itself into the very image of a totalising globalism.
By celebrating only the exception, the normative micro-allegiances that bind people together, psychologically and socially, are being undermined—with only the Global Leviathan remaining as collective structure. Pride celebrates the absolutely autonomous and purely hedonistically motivated atomised individual…
…as it is unity that unites, and diversity that divides—by definition—the insistence that multiplicity must rule will ultimately devour even the order that maintains the marginal.
Usually, we celebrate and elevate that which marks what we pursue jointly… we put our inevitable idiosyncrasies of temperament, habit, and desire aside, so to join together in common attention. We come together to celebrate the ways we connect with one another, not that which divides.
…
Instead of something emerging from the hierarchical structuring of family, communities, and nations, the celebration of idiosyncrasy and difference itself is a consequence of radically dichotomised identity, both embodied and conceptualised by a self-identified, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent inner experience, which is then represented as oppressed by external forces of control. This is the ultimate and self-devouring endpoint of liberal individualism.
…the state-imposed defence of all our idiosyncrasies and exceptions is impossible, no matter how comprehensive the state becomes, particularly as those identities multiply indefinitely, and the existence of one contradicts the flourishing of another.
…
The reason why we were allowed, encouraged, and mandated to identify with, give our attention and especially our sacrifices to the environment and a pandemic, is precisely because they are global and all encompassing, portrayed as transcending all intermediary identities, from individuals, to families and even nations. In that way, the global identity of such crises is the mirror image and dance partner of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ explosion of idiosyncrasy and exception.
…
In a properly structured subsidiary system, the individual voluntarily adopts responsibility for his or her conduct and caretaking, but the couple has its domain and duty, as does the family, the neighbourhood, the corporate enterprise, the city, and the state. The more encompassing levels are restricted in their domain of purview to those actions and directions of attention that cannot be taken up by lower and more proximal levels of the hierarchical structure.
In the absence of this joint vision of voluntary participation, purpose, and structured cooperation and competition (as in a game), hierarchy can only be conceptualised as topdown authority and arbitrary, involuntarily imposed compulsion and force: as power, in a word.
…
The direction of our attention and our participation in loftier identities has been classically and traditionally construed as something culminating in, say, “one nation under God,” reaching its pinnacle in the transcendent and ultimate good, conceived as an active relationship, a covenant, an active state of celebration or worship.
…the alternative is an identity with no final unity, the cascade of fragmentation across time (that is the death of God), emergent anxiety as a result of the beckoning of multiple forces, weakening of character, both individual and social, and the hopelessness attendant upon lack of clear direction.
…when what is uppermost is abandoned, what is properly subsidiary becomes paramount: so the political, for example, or the economic, or the whim itself, becomes the Highest Goal, and God devolves, at best, into Caesar—or worse.
Two prominent images in the visionary work portray the two possible trajectories of civilisation. The first is a hybrid: a great, seven-headed scarlet beast, with the mother of all prostitutes seated on its back. The beast is civilisation and its leaders, the colour of earth and blood. The false princess or queen is the licentiousness offered by the would-be totalising state to its once-citizens. The beast is a representation of false hierarchy, a living Tower of Babel, the arrogant state/king and its vassals, hellbent on total subordination, marking everyone witting or unwitting with the mark or the number of the beast.
The great prostitute—the Whore of Babylon—riding on the back of the beast, is the denizen and temptress of the dark alleys, byways, and brothels of the "big city", the embodiment of the licentiousness of Rome. She is the dissolution of constraint that accompanies atomized individuality, the dissociation of sex from the constraints and guides of tradition. She is the freedom of anonymity in the "universal city", a whore embodying all the desires, mixtures, deviations, and fetishes characterising those hypothetically freed from all higher-level identities and obligations. She is the total temptation offered by the totalitarian state. Ultimately—ironically and inevitably—the scarlet beast kills the prostitute: the totalising state promises freedom, but kills even desire, let alone its satiation.
This strange, surreal, and endlessly compelling tale is a vision of warning: the ultimate state, promising the freedom to pursue every conceivable whim, accrues to itself all the power that remains on the table as responsible conduct is abandoned, using that power not to free, but to enslave. The worship of impulsive idiosyncrasy, and the accompanying destruction of subsidiary structure, invites, enables, and even necessitates the "State of Absolute Control". Someone, after all, has to pick up the pieces.
This pattern reveals itself when the pendulum swings, and the hedonism of Weimar is transformed into the totalitarian Reich; when the Anarchism of the French Revolution transmutes into centralised Napoleonic empire. This same dynamism ruled during the Covid-19 pandemic, which was, most truly, a plague of authoritarianism. Our individualistic and hypothetically free societies re-organised themselves in a heartbeat into a rigid and comprehensive totalitarianism, with all those who objected demonised, punished, castigated, and excluded. The majority participated with enthusiasm, offered as they were the tantalising opportunity to inform oh-so-moralistically on a neighbour.
…
As the irresponsible and narcissistic individual abandons his allegiance to his intermediary and superordinate identities, and those are undermined and destroyed, level by level, the state grows evermore powerful. Eventually, even the comprehensive nation-state itself is no longer sufficient to satisfy the appetite of those who worship the collective. Just as Napoleon eliminated provincial dialects and customs so that the all-encompassing French Nation could be imposed, so too today the very notion of France—the very idea of the nation-state itself—is portrayed as something anachronistic, patriarchal, restrictive, and counterproductive; as something that must be overcome and transcended to render the globe stable and sustainable.
…
…inclusivity, diversity, and equity is the replacement social identity. What portrays itself as a universalist compassion at the outset, is in fact the jaws of the Leviathan stretching wide enough to devour everything. To reduce the existence of a nation to diversity and openness is to in time destroy that nation, as diversity without unity can only be decomposition. But our interpretation of the tune changes when we realise we are moving towards a system, a kind of meta-state, where everything is included and where all competing identities, including nations, must be swallowed up.
The globalist struggle is ultimately presented as a fight against intermediary identities such as nation, gender, family, and religion because they present an obstacle to the free individual, but in the final analysis, the "sovereignty of the individual" will be subsumed into the body of the Leviathan by the very processes by which this sovereignty arose, and radical freedom will be transformed into totalitarian control.
…
[The Pride] flag and its international use celebrate all that which is a challenge to the types of normative identity which were enforced and radicalised in the early modern period. The rainbow flag, a hypothetical symbol of diversity, has already transformed itself into the very image of a totalising globalism.
By celebrating only the exception, the normative micro-allegiances that bind people together, psychologically and socially, are being undermined—with only the Global Leviathan remaining as collective structure. Pride celebrates the absolutely autonomous and purely hedonistically motivated atomised individual…
…as it is unity that unites, and diversity that divides—by definition—the insistence that multiplicity must rule will ultimately devour even the order that maintains the marginal.
Usually, we celebrate and elevate that which marks what we pursue jointly… we put our inevitable idiosyncrasies of temperament, habit, and desire aside, so to join together in common attention. We come together to celebrate the ways we connect with one another, not that which divides.
…
Instead of something emerging from the hierarchical structuring of family, communities, and nations, the celebration of idiosyncrasy and difference itself is a consequence of radically dichotomised identity, both embodied and conceptualised by a self-identified, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent inner experience, which is then represented as oppressed by external forces of control. This is the ultimate and self-devouring endpoint of liberal individualism.
…the state-imposed defence of all our idiosyncrasies and exceptions is impossible, no matter how comprehensive the state becomes, particularly as those identities multiply indefinitely, and the existence of one contradicts the flourishing of another.
…
The reason why we were allowed, encouraged, and mandated to identify with, give our attention and especially our sacrifices to the environment and a pandemic, is precisely because they are global and all encompassing, portrayed as transcending all intermediary identities, from individuals, to families and even nations. In that way, the global identity of such crises is the mirror image and dance partner of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ explosion of idiosyncrasy and exception.
…
In a properly structured subsidiary system, the individual voluntarily adopts responsibility for his or her conduct and caretaking, but the couple has its domain and duty, as does the family, the neighbourhood, the corporate enterprise, the city, and the state. The more encompassing levels are restricted in their domain of purview to those actions and directions of attention that cannot be taken up by lower and more proximal levels of the hierarchical structure.
In the absence of this joint vision of voluntary participation, purpose, and structured cooperation and competition (as in a game), hierarchy can only be conceptualised as topdown authority and arbitrary, involuntarily imposed compulsion and force: as power, in a word.
…
The direction of our attention and our participation in loftier identities has been classically and traditionally construed as something culminating in, say, “one nation under God,” reaching its pinnacle in the transcendent and ultimate good, conceived as an active relationship, a covenant, an active state of celebration or worship.
…the alternative is an identity with no final unity, the cascade of fragmentation across time (that is the death of God), emergent anxiety as a result of the beckoning of multiple forces, weakening of character, both individual and social, and the hopelessness attendant upon lack of clear direction.
…when what is uppermost is abandoned, what is properly subsidiary becomes paramount: so the political, for example, or the economic, or the whim itself, becomes the Highest Goal, and God devolves, at best, into Caesar—or worse.
March 25, 2024
unfortunately, i did not like this, full of logical flaws (the "fractal" chapter was so bad, i wanted to start a full rant). i expected more from the author, considering his reputation. very pompous as well. true philosophers bring more rigour in any logical argument. i did not find this adequate.
a few other things on top:
“The Whore” (symbolically speaking) “is the total temptation offered by the totalitarian state.”…so Man (no comma on purpose), don’t rush to ever blame yourself, the state made you cheat on the wife you promised to be faithful to…
“the Covid-19 pandemic, which was, most truly, a plague of authoritarianism.” - so absurd and showing lack of empathy to claim something like this.
“fractal identity” - i, for the love of me, can’t see how identity can be defined, to logically make sense, as recursive: because the property of JUST being made up of other things, no matter the type/number/relationships, is not sufficient to INSIST on defining it using that word. “questioning” just for the sake of theorising and theorising to do more questioning is not well intentioned, or necessarily valid, philosophy.
...but an interesting quote:
“two illusions: first, that anarchy is freedom; second, that the desire for anarchical freedom is something separate from the desperate and self-defeating wish to sacrifice all responsibility for an impulsive, hedonistic, and immature irresponsibility.”
a few other things on top:
“The Whore” (symbolically speaking) “is the total temptation offered by the totalitarian state.”…so Man (no comma on purpose), don’t rush to ever blame yourself, the state made you cheat on the wife you promised to be faithful to…
“the Covid-19 pandemic, which was, most truly, a plague of authoritarianism.” - so absurd and showing lack of empathy to claim something like this.
“fractal identity” - i, for the love of me, can’t see how identity can be defined, to logically make sense, as recursive: because the property of JUST being made up of other things, no matter the type/number/relationships, is not sufficient to INSIST on defining it using that word. “questioning” just for the sake of theorising and theorising to do more questioning is not well intentioned, or necessarily valid, philosophy.
...but an interesting quote:
“two illusions: first, that anarchy is freedom; second, that the desire for anarchical freedom is something separate from the desperate and self-defeating wish to sacrifice all responsibility for an impulsive, hedonistic, and immature irresponsibility.”
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews