earthmoss

• 11: A Relationship – How to Estimate One’s Relative Esteem
• 12: The Right Royal Magical Measure of Esteem – Money- the Magical Spirit of Power Manifest
• 13: The Grasshopper becomes the Locust and the Locust become the Dancing Pigeons – Pleasure and Pain for-itself
• 14: Prozac: It’s a kind of Magic- Bring on the Witch Doctors
• 15: The Dancing Pigeons of Authority
• 16: The Great Dance of Desire – Civilization
• 17: The Circle becomes a pyramid – Hierarchy – The Carrot, the Stick and the Drama Triangle
• 18: Punishment: The Carrot and the Stick

01: The Language of Babyl – The Emperor’s New Clothes, and The Dancing Pigeons, Being-Subject

“Language is a key part of how individuals and groups function culturally, socially, politically and ideologically, and this makes it a proper subject of historical enquiry. More than this, language can itself provide evidence for many historical processes which had effects far beyond the specifically linguistic domain, for example shifts in social patterns, political upheavals, technological developments, educational reform, mass migrations and colonial encounters between different peoples. A great deal of history, in other words, has left its mark on our language.” (Bull:2005:108)

In the previous chapters we have met the being-in-Being, the being-for-itself, and the being-for-Others. In this chapter we will meet the being-as-subject.

If we follow the thrown-ness of a little child in the village of the settlers, then as a baby its world experience is that of being-in-itself. All the world exists and is not separate from the babies existence, indeed psychology today recognises that the baby does not distinguish itself as separate from its mother for many months. Its world perception is one of being-in-Being, with its mother being that greater Being. Upon finding the ability to grab and hold things and move where it wills, the baby becomes aware of being-in-itself, that is to say, as a self-existent entity with desires towards personal empowerment. For the hunter-gatherer this babies psyche would then have been educated or more correctly, acculturated in the behaviours and consequent experiences of being-in-Being, taking these two perspectives and sowing them together into a universal garment of harmoniously being upon the urgrund of Being, where he would have discovered that indeed, in the inner world all is one- wakan, just as his forming years felt like, and that being-for-itself meant in practice being with this greater self, from the stars to the food he ate and the land he walked, etc.

But for the village child, his being-for-itself is housed upon the urgrund of family, where only a select few are the great Being of family and everyone else is either a friend, i.e. someone who can empower that Being, or an enemy, i.e. someone who can disempower that Being, or a stranger, i.e. someone who does not affect that Being. In this way being-for-itself, becomes educated into the perspective and experiences of being-for-Others and the child becomes an object, that is to say a son, a father, an uncle, a brother, an enemy, a stranger, a friend, etc, etcetera, based upon this urgrund of reciprocity rather than of generosity, of property that is mine rather than the universe which is His . Generous comes from the word Genus, meaning a race or kin, and as we have seen in language, the Adamic race becomes the race of kin. In a finite world of infinite desires, it this kin to whom we are generous, this circle to which we add in our work. To this ‘us’ we give, from ‘them’ we take.

Being as object then is the thrownness of the perspective that the child of a settler experiences, it is the limit to his freedom, both physically in existence, by his body being-tied-to-the-land, and spiritually by his essence, by that which is essential, to being-tied-to-his-family unit, ‘united’, ‘against’ the not-family, the ‘them’.

We know, by our thrownness of experience as modern man, that this cohesive story-line of the family unit, does not last as the singular and most powerful story of forming a group of people, but what we must find out is what was the greater story that allowed family people to choose this greater story over the story of the family. What we must also discover is whether that choice was based upon the idea of the truth of that story as being truer than that of the family story, or whether the story of the family is simply usurped because the greater story allows its adherence greater power for-itself, than that which the family could ever offer, and indeed, could in fact bring greater power to the family as well, and therefore can be allowed by the family united. Or whether the power of the necessity drove the story towards the necessity for a greater story, that is to say, just as we saw the life-style of the settler create desertification and hence the philosophy of ‘family’ in order to survive in a world of ever depleting resources, will this same necessity drive the story of civilization.

As we will see the answer is both, and, as we shall see, here-in lies the problem of all civilizations.

02: War and Progress

“Focusing here on developments in western Asia after the switch from food-gathering to food production, the next steps in the region’s accelerating evolution toward civilization were the emergence of villages, the rise of long-distance trade, and the onset of bitter warfare. Villages constituted the most advanced form of human organization in western Asia from about 6,500 to about 3,500/3,000 B.C. when some villages gradually became cities. Village organization inevitably brought about long-distance trade, and it just as inevitably provoked the growth of war. No doubt warfare has been the bane of human existence, with famine and disease, at least since the appearance of agricultural villages, but since the growth of warfare in ancient times stimulated the growth of economic and social complexity it nonetheless must be counted as a step toward the emergence of civilization…

Reference to the growing use of different rocks and copper inevitably introduces the subject of trade, for the sharp rocks and the copper early villagers desired were not found all over western Asia but had to be transported over long distances. Hunter-gatherers seldom, if ever, engaged in long-distance trade because they could not afford it- in other words, they produced no surpluses. Wandering from place to place such people kept their luggage to a minimum and hence were not at all oriented toward surplus production. Villagers, on the other hand, were natural storers, and not long after they started storing grain they came to realize that producing and storing more than they needed could serve as a hedge against famine and could provide goods for barter.

Although we will never know for certain how step followed step, it seems most likely that short-distance gift-offering and exchange based on kin-group relations preceded long-distance trade in more recognizably mercantile forms. For example, a family group in a prosperous village might have sent some grain to hungry kin in a nearby village may have arisen as a ceremonial means of acknowledging family ties. As exchange and accumulation of goods continued, however, certain parties inevitably became richer than others until they had the wherewithal to send an emissary over a long distance to trade for, say, a good sharp cutting stone in a location where such stones were plentiful. At any rate, there is no doubt that as early as about 6,500 B.C. trade in western Asia already extended over remarkably long distances…

But trade was not the only means of acquiring goods, for successful pillaging could serve the acquisitive even better. No one knows exactly when human warfare began, but more and more experts are coming to doubt that aggressiveness is biologically “programmed” into us. Rather, it seems that humans have no strictly biological propensity for either peace or war and that before the switch to sedentary agriculture bands of roving humans were peaceable. At the very least it is certain that there are no depictions of humans fighting humans in the Ice-Age cave paintings and that the earliest known representations of warfare appear together with settled village life. Even more dramatic is the fact that many of the earliest known villages in western Asia were fortified villages. Evidently, whatever humanity’s past had been, its future was to fight and kill.

Settled life would have inspired ongoing warfare for obvious reasons. Members of roving bands needed to cooperate with each other in hunting and gathering, and they seldom even saw members of other bands. Assuming that one band did occasionally run into another, there would have been little reason to fight since there was little or no loot to be gained. In contrast, there was loot in a village, and villagers under attack would have tended to stand and fight rather than cut and run, not only to protect their belongings, but to preserve their fields, which invariably had cost them great effort to clear and cultivate. Endemic fighting probably began during the period of transition between wandering and settlement when some bands of wanderers became bands of pillagers. Then, by the time there were many villages, one settlement definitely started fighting another to attain more property and wealth.

Ironically, the onset of warfare stimulated the progress of technology and trade

Whether for defensive or offensive reasons, early villagers in western Asia achieved great technological advances in weaponry, experimenting in the manufacture of daggers, battle-axes, spears, slings and maces. Moreover, an area-wide village “arms race” was probably what most stimulated the advance of metallurgy, since copper made better spear points and daggers than stone or bone, and bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, whose manufacture was perfected between 3,500 and 3,000 B.C., made vastly better weapons of all sorts than copper. Since metals had to be acquired by trade, villages caught in an arms race were forced to enhance their efficiency in producing surpluses of village products so that they could acquire metals. And so the search for the best weapons stimulated economic life even while causing death and destruction.” (Lerner et al:1993:12-24)

“The last major development in western Asia prehistory was the emergence of cities, a phenomenon datable to the period between about 3,500 and 3,200 B.C. Since some villages imperceptibly turned into cities over the course of about five hundred years, it is easier to describe the difference between a city and a village on the basis of how the city appeared at the end of its development. Unlike the village, the city housed people from a wide variety of occupations. All early cities housed farmers, for the fields around a city needed to be tilled just like any others; cities additionally housed small numbers of artisans and merchants, since cities began to take shape at a time when some handicraft skills had become very specialized and when trading was also becoming a specialty. But the predominant personalities in cities, whose presence really determined the difference between the city and the village, were full-time warriors, administrators, and priests.

In a nutshell, cities existed to exploit villages. The foremost city dwellers themselves of course would not have put things that way. Since they were professional warriors, administrators, and priests, they would have said that their callings were to protect their regions by military means, to enhance regional productivity by good management, and to conciliate the gods with prayers. But since none of these people worked in the fields, they surely could not have existed without the surpluses produced by those who did. Put another way, the leading city dwellers were rulers in their society, and the inhabitants of subordinated villages, as well as other city dwellers, were the ruled.

There is no doubt that the earliest western Asian cities arose in Mesopotamia, a region in modern-day Iraq lying between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and it is virtually certain that the ultimate cause for this lay in population pressure. … By a conservative estimate the population in the hilly area of western Iran, where settled agriculture had found one of its earliest homes, increased fiftyfold between 8,000 and 4,000 B.C. At a certain point excess populations needed to move on to new terrains in order to survive, and this was particularly true among early agriculturalists, who tended gradually to exhaust the fertility of their lands since they knew nothing of crop rotation or fertilizing techniques. In western Asia this point was reached around 4,000 B.C. when excess peoples in Iran and Iraq began to move in considerable numbers into the previously uninhabited valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Two requirements are necessary for successful agriculture: fertility and moisture. The earliest western Asian agricultural settlements were located in hilly regions where grain originally grew wild. These terrains were not particularly fertile, but at least they were fertile enough to support the beginnings of crop-growing, and they did not have abundant moisture from rainfall. The Mesopotamian valley, on the other hand, was extremely fertile but so lacking in moisture for long parts of the year that farming there was impossible without the introduction of artificial irrigation systems. Building and maintaining irrigation systems, however, called for a degree of planning and of intense, coordinated labor that was unprecedented in human societies until that time. The irrigation in question, initiated in the millennium between 4,000 and 3,000 B.C., had to be accomplished by means of leading canals and channels from the two big rivers in crisscrossing patterns over the dry lands, and the work was never completed because the canals and channels had constantly to be cleared when they began silting up. Such labours required that people be organized in force, that provisions be assembled to support them, that pots be mass-produced to serve as their food receptables, and so forth. Obviously, therefore, planners were needed to determine how, when, and where to work, overseers were needed to direct and coerce labourers, and governors were needed to plan and oversee the overseers. Accordingly under such circumstances society became divided into the rulers and the ruled.

As population pressure entailing the necessity for irrigation systems created a trend toward government and coercion in Mesopotamia between 4,000 and 3,200 B.C., the trend was reinforced by the advance of militarism. How did some people manage to emerge as rulers? Surely the main explanation lay in brute force, the strongest in society being those who were the most skilled in fighting. During the millennium in question military power would have led to governmental power and ever more military power by a continual spiral process: metal weapons were superior to stone ones but much more expensive, thus those who had acquired wealth from subduing and exploiting others were the only ones who could have afforded to acquire metal weapons with which to subdue and exploit still more people. It is particularly noteworthy that Mesopotamia has no natural supply of any metals of metallic ores, yet relatively large quantities of metal weaponry have been found there dating from between 3,500 and 3,000 B.C.; obviously the warrior-rules of Mesopotamia were becoming ever more dominant.

Given that dominant warriors needed trained administrators to help them govern and supervise the local irrigation works, the grouping together of these two classes in central locations might alone have created cities. But in fact there also emerged a full-time priesthood, which united with the first two groups in forming cities. Needless to say, religion was not invented in Mesopotamia. Belief in supernatural forces must have existed millennia earlier among the Neanderthals, who buried their dead with provisions, and among Ice-Age cave peoples, whose art apparently was meant to work magic. What was new in Mesopotamia was the emergence of a full-time priesthood– people attached to centres of ritual practice, temples- whose performance of incantations and rites was supported by the agricultural labours of others.

Why a priestly caste first arose in Mesopotamia is a speculative question, but it seems likely that by about 3,500 B.C. economic demands and social complexity there were becoming so great that people in effect needed priests. Wandering bands had no difficulty in maintaining social cohesiveness because there was little or no private property to fight over, because occupational functions were more or less equal, and because the bands were small enough in size- customarily numbering no more than 500 persons- for band members to feel united by mutual familiarity. But such conditions started changing in villages. There, communal labour and distribution were still the rule, but inequalities in possessions would have become more pronounced over time, especially with the development of trade, and the growth of village populations from the hundreds to the thousands would have made it harder for people to recognize each other on, so to speak, a first-name basis. Attacks from the outside probably provided the basis for sufficient social cohesiveness among villagers to keep them from fighting each other intensively, but during the stressful beginnings of irrigation in Mesopotamia still more cohesiveness would have been needed. On this admittedly speculative reconstruction, religion inspired people in large groups to feel loyal were serving the local gods. And religious dedication on this scale called for priests to propagate the faith and to preside over elaborate rituals in impressive temples.

Discussing origins of cities is really the same as discussing the origins of civilization, which may be defined as the stage in human organization when governmental, social, and economic institutions have developed sufficiently to manage (however imperfectly) the problems of order, security, and efficiency in a complex society. Around 3,200 B.C. Mesopotamia was “civilized”. That is, at least five cities existed, which all included among their inhabitants warrior-rulers, administrators, and priests, which all encompassed several monumental temples, and which all boasted in addition elaborate private residences, communal workshops, public storage facilities, and large marketplaces. Rudimentary forms of record-keeping were being mastered, and writing was on its way. Herewith the story of civilizations in the West begins, and herewith we may begin following a story that is based on interpreting written evidence as well as archaeological artefacts.” (Lerner et al:1993:12-24)

“It now seems firmly established, however, that urbanization developed independently in different regions, more or less in the wake of the local completion of the agricultural transition. Thus the first region of independent or ‘nuclear’ urbanism, from around 3000 BC, was in southwestern Asia, in the Mesopotaian valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates and the Nile Valley (together making the so-called Fertile Crescent). By 2500 BC had appeared in the Indus Valley, and by 1000 BC they were established in northern China….

Explanations of these first transitions to city-based economies have emphasized several factors. Boserup (1981), for instance, stressed the role of local concentrations of population; while Jacobs (1969) interpreted the emergence of cities mainly as a function of trade; and the classical archaeological interpretation rests on the availability of an agricultural surplus large enough to facilitate the emergence of specialized, non-agricultural workers (Childe, 1950; Woolley, 1963).

Another important factor was the emergence of ‘primitive accumulation’ through the exaction of tributes, the control of religious persuasion or despotic coercion. Once established, a parasitic elite provided the stimulus for urban development by investing its appropriated wealth in displays of power and status…

This kind of expansion, however, could only be sustained in the most fertile agricultural regions, where the peasant population could produce enough to support not only the parasitic elite but also the growing numbers of non-agricultural workers. In this context, the development of irrigation seems to have been a critical factor. It not only intensified cultivation and increased productivity; it also required the kind of large-scale cooperation that could only be organized effectively in a hierarchical, despotic society. Yet, even in the most fertile and intensively farmed regions, rank-redistributive economies could only expand beyond a certain point if over-all levels of productivity could be increased: through harder work, improvements in technology or improvements in agricultural practices. All three of these solutions will have required more non-agricultural specialists and so will have reinforced the incipient process of urbanization:

‘administrators and, perhaps, an army to oversee the harder work (their actions may have been accompanied by the elite taking to itself the ownership of land) in the first, craftsmen to create the tools in the second, and also, probably, miners and others to provide the raw materials; and ‘researchers’ to develop the new strains and the new technology (notably irrigation) in the third. Thus the demands for more production are reflected in the urban node as well as in the countryside, and continued growth of the society, to meet the never-satisfied demands of an expanding elite and its associates, leads to self-propelling urban growth.’ (Johnston, 1980:52)

Such developments are ultimately limited by the size of the society’s resource base, however

The obvious response- the enlargement of the resource base through territorial expansion- also tended to reinforce and extend the process of urbanization. Thus,

‘To enable successful colonial activity, the structure of the society would need to be reorganized and several new functions created. Among the latter, the most important in the new areas would be administration- both civil and military- probably accompanied by religious colonization of the new subject population; to ensure contact between the colonies and the ‘heartland’, and the movement of surplus production back to the elite centre, a transport infrastructure would have to be established and maintained, and the ability to move substantial quantities of goods created.’ (Johnston, 1980:53)…

As long as growth was maintained, therefore, the empire would have to be continually enlarged, with an increasing number of urban control centres….

It would be wrong, however, to draw a picture of the steady growth, expansion and succession of ancient and classical empires. Urbanized economies were a precarious phenomenon, and many lapsed into ruralism before being revived or recolonized. In a number of cases, this was a result of demographic setbacks (associated with wars and epidemics). Such setbacks left too few people to maintain the social and economic infrastructure necessary for urbanization. An early example of this kind of relapse occurred in the Indus Valley, where Aryan pastoralists displaced the urban economy in the middle of the second millennium BC. Elsewhere, it was changes in resource/population ratios that precipitated the breakdown and decay of urban economies. The demands of repair and upkeep of irrigation systems, for example, on top of the need for increasing productivity resulting from population growth, sometimes put overwhelming strains on the available peasant labour. After a while, investments were neglected, armies grew small, and the strength and cohesion of the empire was fatally undermined.

This kind of sequence seems to have been the root cause of the eventual collapse of the Mesopotamian empire and may also have contributed to the abandonment of much of the Mayan empire more than 500 years before the arrival of the Spanish..” (Knox et al:2003:121-4)

“Ea should have been more careful what he wished for. When Sir Leonard Woolley excavated in Sumer between the world wars, he wrote: “To those who have seen the Mesopotamian desert… the ancient world seem[s] well-nigh incredible, so complete is the contrast between past and present… Why, if Ur was an empire’s capital, if Sumer was once a vast granary, has the population dwindled to nothing, the very soil lost its virtue?”

His question had a one-word answer: salt. Rivers rinse salt from rocks and earth and carry it to the sea. But when people divert water onto arid land, much of it evaporates and the salt stays behind. Irrigation also causes waterlogging, allowing brackish groundwater to seep upward. Unless there is good drainage, long fallowing, and enough rainfall to flush the land, irrigation schemes are future salt pans.

Southern Iraq was one of the most inviting areas to begin irrigation, and one of the hardest in which to sustain it: one of the most seductive traps ever laid by progress. After a few centuries of bumper yields, the land began to turn against its tillers. The first sign of trouble was a decline in wheat, a crop that behaves like the coalminer’s canary. As time went by, the Sumerians had to replace wheat with barley, which has a higher tolerance for salt. By 2500 B.C. wheat was only 15 per cent of the crop, and by 2100 B.C.  Ur had given up wheat altogether….

…After the mid-third millennium, there was no new land to be had. Population was then at a peak, the ruling class top-heavy, and chronic warfare required support of standing armies- nearly always a sign, and a cause, of trouble. Like the Easter Islanders, the Sumerians failed to reform their society to reduce its environmental impact. On the contrary, they tried to intensify production, especially during the Akkadian empire (c.2350-2150 B.C.) and their swan song under the Third Dynasty of Ur, which fell in 2000 B.C.

The short-lived Empire of Ur exhibits the same behaviour as …on Easter Island: sticking to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory…The result was a few generations of prosperity (for the rulers), followed by a collapse from which southern Mesopotamia has never recovered.

By 2000 B.C., scribes were reporting that the earth had “turned white”. All crops, including barley, were failing. Yields fell to a third of their original levels….Today, fully half of Iraq’s irrigated land is saline- the highest proportion in the world, followed by the other two centres of floodplain civilization, Egypt and Pakistan.” (Wright:2006:77-9)

In the above quotes we find that the first gifts of civilization are: Warfare, Increased Labour, Inequality, Death and Destruction, that go to feed the infinite desires of an elite class that uses its stored objects- wealth- in order to pillage and trade- in order to increase its power to do so further. We also find that all of these gifts leaving Pandora’s box, are hopeless, because, ‘The result was a few generations of prosperity (for the rulers), followed by a collapse from which southern Mesopotamia has never recovered.’

Over-population, a direct result of settled life, necessitates the creation of a desert, the expansion of that desert, and warfare in order to expand. These things are necessary, but what we must look at in greater detail is that these motives of self-interest for survival, do not seem to be enough to cohere the group together. To do this they need a king who rules the army that controls the subject people in the outer world, but they also discover that they need a priesthood to control the subject people in the inner world.

How this effects the society, why it is necessary, and what are its effects are what we must look at now, in order to understand the roots of these institutions in our present thrownness, and see this same role that they continue to play. Not only that but to chart the ‘truth’ of these institutions claims to hold the ‘truth’ by the behaviour of the peoples in these institutions as we walk a mile in their shoes with them, rather than imagine that they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on how that serves us, to believe, to desire to be ‘true’.

03: I’m the King of the Circle​

The first mile that we must walk in this new civilized world is the one by which a ruler emerges, greater than a kin leader, to become a king, and how the subsequent inequalities of this arrangement, where the kings generosity touches some but never all within this circle of people, changes the ontological nature of that very circle into a new form- that of the pyramid. What was the shape those electrified mouse corpses naturally made?

“The idea of class is an instrument of thought which has obviously been constructed by men. But in constructing it, we have at least had need of a model; for how could this idea ever have been born, if there had been nothing either in us or around us which was capable of suggesting it to us? To reply that it was given to us a priori is not to reply at all; this lazy man’s solution is, as has been said, the death of analysis. But it is hard to see where we could have found this indispensable model except in the spectacle of the collective life. In fact, a class is not an ideal, but a clearly defined group of things between which internal relationships exist, similar to those of kindred.

Now the only groups of this sort known from experience are those formed by men in associating themselves. Material things may be able to form collections of units, or heaps, or mechanical assemblages with no internal unity, but not groups in the sense we have given the word. A heap of sand or a pile of rock is in no way comparable to that variety of definite and organized society which forms a class. In all probability, we would never have thought of uniting the beings of the universe into homogeneous groups, called classes, if we had not had the example of human societies before our eyes, if we had not even commenced by making things themselves members of men’s society, and also if human groups and logical groups had not been confused at first.

It is also to be borne in mind that a classification is a system whose parts are arranged according to a hierarchy. There are dominating members and others which are subordinate to the first; species and their distinctive properties depend upon classes and the attributes which characterize them; again, the different species of a single class are conceived then; again, the different species of a single class are conceived as all placed on the same level in regard to each other. Does someone prefer to regard them from the point of view of the understanding? Then he represents things to himself in an inverse order: he puts at the top the species that are the most particularized and the richest in reality, while the types that are most general and the poorest in qualities are at the bottom.

Nevertheless, all are represented in a hierarchic form. And we must be careful not to believe that the expression has only a metaphorical sense here: there are really relations of subordination and co-ordination, the establishment of which is the object of all classification, and men would never have thought of arranging their knowledge in this way if they had not known beforehand what a hierarchy was. But neither the spectacle of physical nature nor the mechanism of mental associations could furnish them with this knowledge. The hierarchy is exclusively a social affair. It is only in society that there are superiors, inferiors and equals.” (Durkheim:1982:147-8)

“Under a simple kind of economic organization, such as subsistence farming or household industry, there is little differentiation between economic roles and family roles, as all reside in the kinship structure. However, as an economy develops, several kinds of economic activity are removed from the family-community complex. In agriculture, for example, diversification of production involves a differentiation between consumption and community. Goods and services which may previously have been exchanged on a non-economic basis are pulled progressively into the market. One consequence of the removal of economic activities from the kinship nexus is the family’s loss of some of its previous functions (Smelser 1966: 31). Following from this change several related processes accompany the differentiation of the family from its other involvements. The direct control of elders and kinsmen over the family weakens and relationships within the family alter. When differentiation has begun the productive roles of family members are isolated ‘geographically, temporally and structurally from their distinctively familial roles’ (ibid: 35)

But Boehm’s research also suggests that humans will abandon their egalitarianism and adopt oppressive hierarchies, ‘insofar as they work for the common good’. And such a common good did emerge- that of killing and eating one’s neighbours. The fearsome tragedy of the commons of the last 40,000 or so years, as the different tribes of Eurasia and the Americas fought over ever-diminishing food, rewarded those people who forsook their easy-going egalitarian ways for fierce, disciplined warfare, culminating in the Bronze Age tyrannies where the development of agriculture rewarded the oppression of the hapless many by the armed few.” (Kealey:2008:70-72)

“Near the other end of the spectrum were the leading families of settled agricultural communities, particularly the more or less isolated communities of mountain valleys. They might be long established there, or else intruders from outside who had won their position by military incursion or religious prestige, or had been placed there by the government of a neighbouring city. The ties of tribal solidarity linking them with the local population might have grown weak, but in their stead they might possess some degree of coercive power, based on control of strong places and possession of armed forces. To the extent to which power was concentrated in their hands, the ‘asabiyya of a tribe was replaced by a different relationship, that of lord and dependants.” (Hourani:1991:108)

What we discover from the above quotes is that the village was usurped by the city, which existed merely to exploit the villages. This exploitation was that of tribute, pillage, and trade, all of which mean, gain for the victor- the ‘good’. However we also learn that with these new stories of gain- hubris, comes their nemesis, that is the requirement of war, of a militant mindset and peoples who begin to know the world through this hierarchical lens. This knowledge requires a new language to be made, a language of Babyl, where families themselves are now nominated- named-, farmers, potters, warriors, smiths, priests, kings, etc, etcetera. In other words families as well as individuals now become objects in a hierarchy of objects that work together to make a city of Ham- Babylon.

Under this story then, a being-for-Others within a kin group or family, now becomes the experience of being-subject-beings-in-, subjects of a king not a God as ‘the Being’.

What then was that greater story that allowed a king or priest to cohere groups together and exploit their consequent power, and why did people give their family power over to it?

04: The Art of Technique: Power and Esteem – Awe and Authority

Technique and its more familiar words today, technology and technical , does not mean simply a way of doing things and how to do them (a technical manual) as our more post-modern scientific thinking, education, and language use suggests. Technique comes from the Greek τεχυικος, meaning, belonging to the arts, and for those Christians who believe Christ was a carpenter it might be useful to learn that it was the Greeks who first translated the Bible from Hebrew and that the Greek word for technique is allied to τέκταν, meaning a carpenter.

The word technique itself comes from the word tactic, meaning, ‘the ‘art’ of manoeuvring forces’. It is therefore to this art that we must look in order to understand the change of language and experience that came from the perspective of the city as opposed to that of the village as it grew. What was the story that allowed the tactics of manoeuvring forces to exploit villages and invade other cities? And most importantly, did people come to believe that the promulgators of this new story were ‘right’ to use their might, or did they simply see that going along with the story allowed them to gain more power for themselves?

What we must first look at in order to answer the above questions is the idea of Power. Before civilization came along power was something that Nature (God) possessed alone, but with civilization comes the techniques, the manoeuvring of forces by human will, by which to gain power for ourselves, firstly in the techniques of agriculture and family. But in order to understand civilization we must tell a story that creates a greater cohesion of the people and hence a greater power for the leader of those people, the story-teller or τέκταν (carpenter) or tactician. What then is this power that the leader will gain by this story, which will come to take over the globe and defeat that of familism?

“it [a person- (authors note)] comes into a world peopled by ends. But if consequently the techniques and their ends arise in the look of the For-itself, we must necessarily recognize that it is by means of the free assumption of a position by the For-itself confronting the Other that they become techniques. The Other by himself alone can not cause these projects to be revealed to the For-itself as techniques; and due to this fact there exists for the Other in so far as he transcends himself toward his possibles, no technique but a concrete doing which is defined in terms of his individual end. The shoe-repairer who puts a new sole on a shoe does not experience himself as “in the process of applying a technique;” he apprehends the situation as demanding this or that action, that particular piece of leather, as requiring a hammer, etc. The For-itself as soon as it assumes a position with respect to the Other, causes techniques to arise in the world as the conduct of the Other as a transcendence-transcended. It is at this moment and at this moment only that there appear in the world- bourgeois and workers, French and Germans, in short, men.

Thus the For-itself is responsible for the fact that the Other’s conduct is revealed in the world as techniques. The for-itself can not cause the world in which it arises to be furrowed by this or that particular technique (it can not make itself appear in the world which is “capitalistic” or “governed by a natural economy” or in a parasitic civilization”), but it causes that which is lived by the Other as a free project to exist outside as technique; the for-itself achieves this precisely by making itself the one by whom an outside comes to the Other. Thus it is by choosing itself and by historicizing itself in the world that the For-itself historicizes the world itself and causes it to be dated by its techniques. Henceforth precisely because the techniques appear as objects, the For-itself can choose to appropriate them. By arising in a world in which Pierre and Paul speak in a certain way, stick to the right when driving a bicycle or a car, etc, and by constituting these free patterns of conduct into meaningful objects, the For-itself is responsible for the fact that there is a world in which they stick to the right, in which they speak French, etc.

It causes the internal laws of the Other’s act, which were originally founded and sustained by a freedom engaged in a project, to become now objective rules of the conduct-as-object; and these rules become universally valid for all analogous conduct, while the supporter of the conduct or the agent-as-object becomes simply anybody. This historization, which is the effect of the for-itself’s free choice, in no way restricts its freedom; quite the contrary, it is in this world and no other that its freedom comes into play; it is in connection with its existence in this world that it puts itself into question. For to be free is not to choose the historic world in which one arises—which would have no meaning—but to choose oneself in the world whatever this may be.

In this sense it would be absurd to suppose that a certain state of techniques is restrictive to human possibilities

Of course a contemporary of Duns Scotus is ignorant of the use of the automobile or the airplane; but he appears as ignorant to us, and only from our point of view because we privately apprehend him in terms of a world where the automobile and the airplane exist. For him, who has no relation of any kind with these objects and the techniques which refer to them, there exists a kind of absolute, unthinkable, and undecipherable nothingness. Such a nothingness can in no way limit the For-itself which is choosing itself; it can not be apprehended as a lack, no matter how we consider it. The For-itself which historicizes itself in the time of Duns Scotus therefore nihilates itself in the heart of a fullness of being—that is, of a world which like ours is everything which it can be. It would be absurd to declare that the Albigenses lacked heavy artillery to use in resisting Simon de Montfort; for the Seigneur de Trencavel or the Comte de Toulouse chose themselves such as they were in a world in which artillery had no place: they conceived politics in that world; they made plans for military resistance in that world; they chose themselves as sympathizers with the Cathari in that world; and as they were only what they chose to be, they were absolutely in a world as absolutely full as that of the Panzer-divisionen or of the R.A.F….

The feudal world offered to the vassal lord of Raymond VI infinite possibilities of choice; we do not possess more.” (Sartre:2003:542-3)

“Feudalism as a technical relation between man and man does not exist; it is only a pure abstract, sustained and surpassed by the thousands of individuals’ projects of a particular man who is a liege in relation to his lord. By this we do by no means intend to arrive at a sort of historical nominalism. We do not mean that feudalism is the sum of the relations of vassals and suzerains. On the contrary, we hold that it is the abstract structure of these relations; every project of a man of this time must be realized as a surpassing toward the concrete of this abstract moment. It is therefore not necessary to generalize in terms of numerous detailed experiences in order to establish the principles of the feudal technique; this technique exists necessarily and completely in each individual conduct, and it can be brought to light in each case. But it is there only to be surpassed. In the same way the For-itself can not be a person—i.e., choose the ends which it is—without being a man or woman, a member of a national collectivity, of a class, of family, etc. But these are abstract structures which the For-itself sustains and surpasses by its project.

It makes itself French, a man of a southern province, a workman to order to be itself at the horizon of these determinations. Similarly the world which is revealed to the For-itself appears as provided with certain meanings correlative with the techniques adopted. It appears as a world-for-the-Frenchman, a world-for-the-worker, etc., with all the characteristics which would be expected. But these characteristics do not possess Selbstandigkeit. The world which allows itself to be revealed as French, proletarian, etc., is before all else a world which is illuminated by the For-itself’s own ends, its own world.

Nevertheless the Other’s existence brings a factual limit to my freedom. This is because of the fact that by means of the upsurge of the Other there appear certain determinations which I am without having chosen them. Here I am—Jew, or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one-armed, etc. All this I am for the Other with no hope of apprehending this meaning which I have outside and, still more important, with no hope of changing it. Speech alone will inform me of what I am; again this will never be except as the object of an empty intention; any intuition of it is forever denied me. If my race or my physical appearance were only an image in the Other or the Other’s opinion of me, we should soon have done with it; but we have seen that we are dealing with a freedom other than mine arises confronting me, I begin to exist in a new dimension of being; and this time it is not a question of my conferring a meaning on brute existents or of accepting responsibility of my own account for the meaning which Others have conferred on certain objects. It is I myself who see a meaning conferred upon me, and I do not have the recourse of accepting the responsibility for this meaning which I have since it can not be given to my except in the form of an empty indication.

Thus something of myself—according to this new dimension—exists in the manner of the given; at least for me, since this being which I am is suffered, it is without being existed. I learn of it and suffer it in and through the relations which I enter into with others, in and through their conduct with regard to me. I encounter this being at the origin of a thousand prohibitions and a thousand resistances which I bump up against at each instant: Because I am a minor I shall not have this or that privilege. Because I am a Jew I shall be deprived—in certain societies—of certain possibilities, etc. Yet I am unable in any way to feel myself as a Jew or as a minor or as a Pariah. It is at this point that I can react against these interdictions by declaring that race, for example, is purely and simply a collective fiction, that only individuals exist. Thus here I suddenly encounter the total alienation of my person: I am something which I have not chosen to be. What is going to be the result of this for the situation?

We must recognize that we have just encountered a real limit to our freedom—that is, a way of being which is imposed on us without our freedom being its foundation. Still it is necessary to understand this: the limit imposed does not come from the action of others.” (Sartre:2003:544-45)

“Thus the bourgeois makes himself a bourgeois by denying that there are any classes, just as the worker makes himself a worker by asserting that classes exist and by realizing through his revolutionary activity his “being-in-a-class”. But these external limits of freedom, precisely because they are external and are interiorized only as unrealizables, will never be either a real obstacle for freedom or a limit suffered. Freedom is total and infinite, which does not mean that it has no limits but that it never encounters them. The only limits which freedom bumps against at each moment are those which it imposes on itself and of which we have spoken in connection with the past, with the environment, and with techniques.” (Sartre:2003:552)

In other words, what Sartre is telling us is that an entire world is created through techniques.

But it is by necessity a world of us and them, which consequently demands a world of freedom and lack of freedom, a world of fight and flight, and consequently a historic world as urgrund, from which one tacks, attaches these powers and rights subsequent from these techniques. This urgrund of history is however ‘unselbstandigkeit’ it ‘does not stand-up by itself’ as it is not a truth, it is a story that conceals the truth (it is not aleithea), and so requires separation from the greater-being of firstly, all-nature and secondly, all-humanity.

Foucault tells us how this story of truth is called an ‘ideology’ that serves to empower the society that adopts it, but which, whilst providing power is also unable to defend its rights to them:

“The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. For these three reasons, I think that this is a notion that cannot be used without circumspection….

But it seems to me now that the notion of repression is quite inadequate for capturing what is precisely the productive aspect of power. In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carrying the force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception of power, one which has been curiously widespread. If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.” (Foucault:1980:118-9)

In other words, ideologies, no matter what they consist of necessarily lie in the idea of being-for-itself, for all of its members, or ad-herents, and that is the truth- an ‘unselbstandigkeit’, a ‘truth that has no true grounds to stand upon in-itself’. A circle (an ideology)  that the centre has no right with which to hold the power. As we saw previously with the ideology of the family. A truth that, as we saw with the electrified mice, requires, inequality in enactment- the reality that separates the truth of the ideology, the separates the meaning of the language used expressing it and the reality (the language-less) of what is really going on i.e. the empowerment of the individual being-for-itself within the story that empowers it the most. In other words, liberty, equality, and fraternity become ideas against a back-ground of being-for-itself, i.e. dreams- unrealisable.

Given that, as we have been told by Mithen, ‘85 per cent of the existing mtDNA lineages were already present in the Mesolithic, having originated during the preceding ice age..” (Mithen:2003:194) and that the rest of humanity over the whole 20,000 years represents only a 15% change of variance of the race meaning that, ‘The wave of advance had been nothing but a tiny ripple’ (ibid), it is undoubtable how fragile this idea of ‘a peoples’ is in regards to ‘races’ and their subsequent ‘truth’ is. Whilst ideologies greater than that of blood or colour or ‘DNA type’ are based upon one root idea, the self as centre. As we will see, even religion is based upon this idea, when the priest becomes the centre as a sacred Object, and not Nature and all things sacred.

In other words as the World loses its sacredness by our worlding, so the World becomes profane. Fane means temple, and is derived from fari, meaning to speak. Pro means before and so profane means before-the-temple, or outside of the temple, outside of the fane, the sacred centre. Therefore outside of the sacred speech Logos, the World of Nature (the word of God) as temple comes the word of the world uninhabited by the priest- the profane, and the priest becomes the Object representing the Word of God, and subsequently of his power on Earth, in this World, through him, by which to say, a distance bridged through his ideology, his words alone.

“Language is not a phenomenon added on to being-for-others. It is originally being-for-others; that is, it is the fact that a subjectivity experiences itself as an object for the Other. In a universe of pure objects language could under no circumstances have been “invented” since it presupposes an original relation to another subject. In the intersubjectivity of the for-others, it is not necessary to invent language because it is already given in the recognition of the Other. I am language. By the sole fact that whatever I may do, my acts freely conceived and executed, my projects launched toward my possibilities have outside of them a meaning which escapes me and which I experience. It is in this sense—and in this sense only—that Heidedgger is right in declaring that I am what I say. Language is not an instinct of the constituted human creature, nor is it an invention of our subjectivity. But neither does it need to be referred to the pure “being-outside-of-self” of the Dasein. It forms part of the human condition; it is originally the proof which a for-itself can make of its being-for-others, and finally it is the surpassing of this proof and the utilization of it toward possibilities which are my possibilities; that is, toward my possibilities of being this or that for the Other. Language is therefore not distinct from the recognition of the Other’s existence.

The Other’s upsurge conforming me as a look makes language is not necessarily seduction; we shall see other forms of it. Moreover we have noted that there is no primitive attitude facing the Other and that the two succeed each other in a circle, each implying the other. But conversely seduction does not presuppose any earlier form of language; it is the complete realization of language. This means that language can be revealed entirely and at one stroke by seduction as a primitive mode of being of expression…

For lack of knowing what I actually express for the Other, I constitute my language as an incomplete phenomenon of flight outside myself. As soon as I express myself, I can only guess at the meaning of what I express—i.e., the meaning of what I am—since in this perspective to express and to be are one. The Other is always there, present and experienced as the one who gives to language its meaning. Each expression, each gesture, each word is on my side a concrete proof of the alienating reality of the Other…The very fact of expression is a stealing of thought since thought needs the cooperation of an alienating freedom in order to be constituted as an object. That is why this first aspect of language—in so far as it is I who employ it for the Other—is sacred. The sacred object is an object which is in the world and which points to a transcendence beyond the world. Language reveals to me the freedom (the transcendence) of the one who listens to me in silence.

But at the same moment I remain for the Other a meaningful object—as I have always been. There is no path which departing from my object-state can lead the Other to my transcendence. Attitudes, expressions, and words can only indicate to him other attitudes, other expressions, and other words. Thus language remains for him a simple property of a magical object—and this magical object itself. It is an action at a distance whose effect the Other exactly knows. Thus the word is sacred when I employ it and magic when the Other hears it. Thus I do not know my language any more than I know my body for the Other. I can not hear myself speak nor see myself smile. The problem of language is exactly parallel to the problem of bodies, and the description which is valid in one case is valid in the other.” (Sartre:2003:394-96)

It seems then, upon the discussion of Power we have found that the creation of the idea of power is one of ontology in the form of the desire for power creating the individual consciousness, but we have also seen that this power conjured, magically from this consciousness itself, a language by which to conveying the idea of power as a right (first as ‘family’ and ‘ancestors’ on the same land as history- i.e. a story) from the repercussions of this thought, this idea. Language therefore also had to change in regards to the truth ‘aleithea’ as now the World was sacred and profane, that is to say for the individuals use before Gods. The language that was created in order to possess the power to defend this story and its subsequent rights is the language of Babylon. It is a language, that as we have seen above, is based upon untruth, and another way of putting all this is to say that once the language of your story, your untruth, has been spoken, then no other peoples can understand it. In other words people outside of that story cannot use it to stand upon, cannot use it as their urgrund of power, of rights, etc.

“Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other…. The Lord confused the language of the whole world.” Genesis 11: vs 4-9

Just as we saw with Original Sin and its punishment of being banished from the Garden of Eden as nothing more than the consequences of domesticating grain, just as we saw The Flood and its punishment to settlers as being nothing more than the Natural melt waters of glaciers warmed by the amount of these crops and their effect of warming the global environment, just as we saw Zeus release the curses from Pandora’s Object as being nothing more than the repercussions of settled life and its techniques’ consequences, so we see with God’s punishment of confusing our language to be nothing more than the change of language from the perspective of being-in-Being, to that of being-for-itself and being-for-Others. ‘The Other is always there, present and experienced as the one who gives to language its meaning. Each expression, each gesture, each word is on my side a concrete proof of the alienating reality of the Other’ (ibid)

In the above quotes we can see that indeed the power of divide and conquer is maintained by the idea of the individual

We have seen this power become the power of others by becoming the story of family, but what we now need to look at it the idea of power of others by becoming the story of civilization.

As has been intimated above these first language words that came into use were that of the king and the priest. These two words represent the two stories that will be used throughout civilization to show us the power of the sacred and the profane in relationship both, to each other and, in relation to ourselves.

King is derived directly from the word kin, and means the ruler of said kin, i.e. the capital or head of the power base of individuals housed within a story of blood-line, role for Others (surname meaning a name above or over (sur) your individual name, i.e. as a family object of power over your own individual power) and history.

Priest comes from the word Presbyter meaning, elder, and means the possessor of the story of the truth, gained by the nature of possessing that truth for the longest (being the oldest), i.e. they have become through this possession, that truth possessed, and hence when they speak ‘they’ are the words as truth of that society, they are the closest to God who is housed within the word and its history, lived through the elders, since it began through their words, they are conduits of God, through the word itself.

Whilst all of this may make sense and be under-stand-able. What we haven’t understood yet is how a king or priest comes to power and then maintains the right to pass that power on to the next king or priest. It is not enough to say that it is a big family that gets the power to take over the village or uses its capital because this firstly does not explain the priest coming to rule over the king, but more importantly it does not answer the fundamental flaw that if one family is powerful then why don’t other families conjoin to other throw their power and then revert back to a family basis of power within the village. What stops a family to be out-trumped by the head of the village as King in times of peace. In other words what stops their being a state of perpetual war between competing families?

As we have seen the answer is some kind of story that maintains the truth and consequent rights and powers that the king or elder possesses by possessing that story, but as we have seen this story cannot contain aleitheia, as it is always ungrounded in the state of being-for-itself really, it must contain something therefore that acknowledges this obvious glitch to said right, and since, as we have seen, necessity is the mother of invention and the philosophy you can afford is the necessity of the scarcity of resources that settling creates, i.e. that causes this new philosophy to be invented of kingship or priesthood, what is the technique used to convey this right upon one and not another and how is it spoken in regards to language and sociology?

“A third methodological precaution relates to the fact that power is not to be taken to be a phenomenon of one individual’s consolidated and homogeneous domination over others, or that of one group or class over others. What, by contrast, should always be kept in mind is that power, if we do not take too distant a view of it, is not that which makes the difference between those who exclusively possess and retain it, and those who do not have it and submit to it. Power must by analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.

The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects. The individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle…..

That is to say, it seems to me- and this then would be the fourth methodological precaution- that the important thing is not to attempt some kind of deduction of power starting from its centre and aimed at the discovery of the extent to which it permeates into the base, of the degree to which it reproduces itself down to and including the most molecular elements of society. One must rather conduct an ascending analysis of power, starting, that is, from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been- and continue to be- invested, colonised, utilised, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc.,… I believe that the manner in which the phenomena, the techniques and the procedures of power enter into play at the most basic levels must be analysed, that the way in which these procedures are displaced, extended and altered must certainly be demonstrated; but above all what must be shown is the manner in which they are invested and annexed by more global phenomena and the subtle fashion in which more general powers or economic interests are able to engage with these technologies that are at once both relatively autonomous of power and act as its infinitesimal elements.” (Foucault:1980:98-99)

“I would suggest rather (but these are hypotheses which will need exploring ) : (i) that power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network; (ii) that relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations (production, kinship, family, sexuality) for which they play at once a conditioning and a conditioned role; (iii) that these relations don’t take the sole form of prohibition and punishment, but are of multiple forms; (iv) that their interconnections delineate general conditions of domination, and this domination is organised into a more-or-less coherent and unitary strategic form; that dispersed, heteromorphous, localised procedures of power are adapted, re-inforced and transformed by these global strategies, all this being accompanied by numerous phenomena of inertia, displacement and resistance; hence one should not assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with ‘dominators’ on one side and ‘dominated’ on the other, but rather a multiform production of relations of domination which are partially susceptible of integration into overall strategies; (v) that power relations do indeed ‘serve’, but not at all because they are ‘in the service of’ an economic interest taken as primary, rather because they are capable of being utilised in strategies; (vi) that there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real, nor is it inexorably frustrated through being the compatriot of power. It exists all the more by being in the same place as power; hence, like power, resistance is multiple and can be integrated in global strategies.” (Foucault:1980:142)

“FOUCAULT: Power in the substantive sense, ‘le’pouvoir, doesn’t exist. What I mean is this. The idea that there is either located at- or emanating from- a given point something which is a ‘power’ seems to me to be based on a misguided analysis, one which at all events fails to account for a considerable number of phenomena. In reality power means relations, a more-or-less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations. So the problem is not that of constituting a theory of power which would be a remake of Boulainvilliers on the one hand and Rousseau on the other. Both these authors start off from an original state in which all men are equal, and then, what happens? With one of them, a historical invasion, with the other a mythico-juridical event, but either way it turns out that from a given moment people no longer have rights, and power is constituted. If one tries to erect a theory of power one will always be obliged to view it as emerging at a given place and time and hence to deduce it, to reconstruct its genesis. But if power is in reality an open, more-or-less coordinated (in the event, no doubt, ill-coordinated) cluster of relations, then the only problem is to provide oneself with a grid of analysis which makes possible an analytic of relations of power.” (Foucault:1980:198-9)

“ ‘Power  in the substantive sense, ‘le pouvoir, doesn’t exist’. (p.198) ‘Clearly it is necessary to be a nominalist: power is not an institution, a structure, or a certain force with which certain people are endowed; it is the name given to a complex strategic relation in a given society.’” (Foucault:1980:235-6)

Foucault tells us then that power itself gave birth to the individual itself, that is to say individual totemism as we saw previously

Michel Foucault, French philosopher (1926–1984)

This desire for power coming from the perspective of the being-for-itself, is a contagion, which as we saw is derived from the word tangent, and was spoken of in this regard earlier. What we can now learn is that the word tangent comes from the word Tack/Take/Tactics. Tack means to fasten together to attach, in order to take power through the tactics of story, and with this power now attached one can at-tack another group fastened together by their story.

The history of the hunter-gatherer up to the present day is therefore one of a perspective change, a tangent, from being-in-Being- naturally- to being-for-itself individually, (the epitome being the entrepreneur or capitalist in modern day language), and was born from the abundance of the environment given by God (Nature) and chosen by Cain to empower his own self. A process of human consciousness that began after the Last Glacial Maximum and continues to this day and on into the future, if we will it.

This walking away from being-in-Being towards being-for-itself and the subsequent elements of human-nature that will be discovered by doing so is what we call progress. That is to say, if one looks backwards as did Epimetheus, the distance between us and God- Nemesis, us and harmony, experienced as old age, labour, hope, suffering and most importantly here- war. As seen through the eyes of Prometheus this distance is called progress. Progress comes from the word Grade, meaning a degree or a step, walk, go. From this we create the language, aggress, meaning to attack, congress, meaning to meet together, and progress meaning to go forward. In other words from this degree, this tangent of experience (pathein) we step, through time (history), we progress, towards individuality, being-for-itself, as a perspective ever more real. i.e. from beings-in-Being, we become human-beings with human-nature over Nature and now on to civilized man- a subject-being, who will cry out for freedom, liberty and equality in a landscape of infinite desires necessarily throughout all civilization, unless we change the way we imagine that civilization, and behave in such a manner.

We become our own projects, our own ventures in the world, and in order to achieve these we require power over an-Other, and the more power we can acquire over Others then the more individual we become in our conscious experience and in our actions within the world. We become sympathetic and not empathetic. Sympathy means, according to Websters dictionary: ‘a sharing in emotions of others but it also means, a mutual liking resulting from an affinity of feeling’. Empathy means: ‘the power to enter into emotional harmony with a work of art and so derive aesthetic satisfaction but it also means the power to enter into the feeling or spirit of others.’.

That is to say therefore, that sympathy allows an-other to feel one way for those suffering, and an-other way for those who has an affinity with. This affinity, is another word for our circle. For those outside of the circle there is no sympathy like the sympathy for those within-it. ‘Today twelve people died in a plane accident, two of them were British’. Empathy, on the other hand, is a power by which to enter into harmony with an-other and to derive satisfaction from doing so. In other words, empathy is hanging up the egoic question, ‘what can you do for me’, and instead being-in-that-being with whom you are empathising, whether that being be an individual, a family, a nation, a religion. Sympathy in its original Greek meant fellow-feeling, that is to a feeling of fellowship. The fellowship of the ring or circle. In civilized worldings this circle has now become a spiral of ever-decreasing circles climbing up a pyramid of power, and each circle from now on will sympathise more with those it has a mutual affinity with than with those outside of it, whilst all of those circles will come together as one pyramid in a circle in order to fight another hierarchical group. Empathy is a hunter-gatherer emotion, now named by the creation of sympathy of fellow-feeling that requires no harmony and gains only individual satisfaction.

This invisible power is therefore only a reality to the inner world of the individual who ‘names’ this desire of being-for-itself as his urgrund from which he progresses, steps forward into the World to world it for his purpose, project or venture.

This hubris gives birth to tactics by which to cohere this power to it-self (to himself) over others, and as we have seen above this results in its Nemesis as the great war of the electrified mice- War and Peace- as civilizations’ Karma. In other words, praying for peace, when you have property rights is a waste of time and has got nothing to do with God, it is our own creation, our own progression, from being-for-itself ontologically as settlers with property rights. People who believe that they have the right to a bit of the World (God) and therefore the right to use power as force, to enforce it, in order to keep that right and its consequent gain cannot afford peace, they cannot afford to be that generous (open to the genus of mankind as one). For example People will never fight for ‘the-right-to-be’ tortured, only to-not-be tortured, because it is through the perspective of being-for-itself that rights and the necessity for them are created. War creates the necessity of torture but rights, create the necessity for war and being-for-others creates the necessity of rights, and being-for-itself creates the necessity of being-for-others.

Abundance was a necessity for creating a being-for-itself, but a being-for-itself was not a necessity. Peace is an unnecessary word necessarily created by War. Indeed being-for-itself, created the word necessity by creating a world where abundance died and necessity began. People will never pray for War until they see these same ‘rights’ ‘that they and their forefathers fought for’, being taken from them, as they were taken from someone else by ‘might’. As Yithzak Rabin said, ‘Peace is something you have to make with your enemies’.

Rights are something that one objects to or is subjected to, they are the right to ‘subject or object’ to that power and whether you do so depends on necessity before morality, upon survival before the ethical. You may have the right to your rights, but have you the power to use them, is more often the decider of whether you are subject or object, rather than any choice you might wish you have. I sympathise but I do not have the power to empathise, as then I will have to lose the power to ‘my’ rights by redressing the balance- harmony of spirit. I have the right to go to London but I do not have the power to do so, I have the right to take my landlord to court, but I do not have the power to do so, I have the right to an attorney but if you do not have the power to do so, then those to whom you are subject will appoint an attorney for you, at their expense, and so you can be sure that the billion dollars companies twenty attorneys from Harvard will make it a just trial, I have the right to a piece of property only as long as my pyramid has the power to keep that land, I have the right to freedom only as long as I am a subject within this pyramid structure that we are worlding, etc, etcetera., from the bottom up to the top of the hierarchy we go and yet we are yet to see an actual right that does not require the collective power of the group in its intimate relations in order for it to become a right.

Freedom, equalitie and libertie, become something you have to fight for, warfare, sympathy lies only with your fallen and not theirs, and freedom, equalitie, and libertie will never be achieved anyway, only desertification, domination, death and disease. All we will see over the next 5,000 years after Babylon’s tautological fate.

05: When Women Ruled the World as was their Right

Who therefore, has the right to power?

Well, paradoxically, power is a right bestowed upon the one ‘rightly’ in power. In the tactic of family this was the head of the family, the capital of the family, as leader, as chief, when it all came to a head.

Before we move on to look at these stories in particular and how, (the techniques their tellers used) they became predominant let us hear from Sartre in relation to the word technique and how it came into existence solely through the perspective of being-for-Others and how it affected our freedom in a world of Others.

Well it seems that the first ruler-priests were not men who ruled by force at all, as common sense today might at first suggest, it was women. In this original story of ruler-ship they claimed the right to rule by their very nature as females of the species.

Why was there nature closer to the truth i.e. to Natures than mans? Simple- because the force of Nature is the force of life- wakan. All things were given life by the female Nature. Hence we see the meaning of Pandora the ‘all-giver’, linked to all things living in the World as Rhea and, especially linked to crops as Demeter the barley-mother.

In other words it was the life-force that came through woman and was given form in Nature the all-giver. Therefore in a social life of human-beings above nature, surpassing nature, it was the woman who possessed this force. This was even possessed visibly by the menstruation cycle of women. Women menstruate in accordance with the cycles of the moon and therefore were seen to possess this life-giving force. For just as the moon harmonises with the nature of woman so also does it harmonise with all domesticated life. For the settler began to carve up the world through his perspective of ‘mine’ and so the year and the seasons became possessed through knowledge of them.

Through this knowledge the solar year was witnessed as a primal force, that was transformed into life by the Nature of creation, which is dictated by the moon. It is the moon which dictates the fertile periods of this power in both animals and plants. Corn must planted at the right month, (month meaning, the moon cycles of the solar year) and by impregnating the Earth, Rhea, with the seed she would possess the life force for many moons and create life. In like manner so animals mating habits (karma) are dictated, are ruled, by the moon, as is the tide of the coastal villages of the sons of the way of life of Japheth, i.e. the moon rules both settled ways of life and therefore we are ruled by it, and therefore a human-nature close to this power is most ‘right’ to get power.

Women then first claimed the right to name the world and they did so by dividing the year into the life cycle of their bodies as defined by the 28 day cycle of the moons phases from visible to invisible, of seen force and unseen force between the two worlds of inner and outer, now known in different language-games as sacred and profane, subject and object, nomina and numina..

This way of perceiving the world empowered the settler’s agriculture and understanding of nature and techniques to gain further power

It told them when the river would flood as it did each year, when to plant, when to harvest, etc. In other words it ruled them, as it ruled their very lives by its force of truth in experience.*

*It is this division of the year to the month that creates the tangents, the degrees of astrology, or splitting the very heavens, into the twelve houses or degrees of the zodiac. (Graves:1992:15) It may be remembered that Noah’s animals were stated earlier to be this said zodiac going into the ark of a new covenant with God i.e. in harmony with nature again against our animal nature of being-for-itself. Well this is substantiated by the seemingly lengthy lives of Adam, and Noah and his sons. If one is thinking of the world i.e. in language framing the world, by the moon and not the sun as mankind will move on to do so, then one year could well mean one month, in which case Adam, living 930 years, and Noah lived 950 years, would mean that they lived to 77 years and 79 years old respectively. Indeed the 24 hours of the day are based upon the division of the circle into twelve (as did the Aborigines and as do the Jews under Moses) creating 60 minutes in an hour and this division is based upon the movement of the moon through the zodiacal circle in one day and night, and the zodiacal animals are linked to these hours, therefore two by two represents day and night, but also represents all space and time, i.e. in aleithea.

It would seem therefore that in the dark unrecorded world of prehistory, in the few thousand years before civilization began to take on a patriarchal perspective (which we shall see take place) it was the female who was the ruler and who conjured the language of the world.

As we do not have a written language yet invented we must look to art to reveal this, what would have to be, global perspective produced by the linking of the power of Nature in the form of the moon to that of the power of woman in the form of ruler as the power of Nature, and therefore of the right, the legitimacy to that power.

The oldest ‘art’ that exists to record is found in the Cave of Chauvet in France. It is 35,000 years old, twice the age of any other cave discovered. The only human form painted there is that of a woman merging with a bull. This bull will remain throughout our history of civilization but will be replaced by a man in all hierarchical cultures, and will end up becoming a physical objective man killing an actual bull in our modern world, yet its roots lie here 35,000 years ago. In case you think that this is not possible another discovery was also made at Chauvet, it was a flute made from vulture bone the holes of which formed the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale is the root of every form of music that every civilization has ever used throughout time, because it is naturally harmonious to our ear, to our nature, and so came into existence in that form by the Nature of our nature.

Julian Monney an Archaeologist at Chauvet Cave who dreamt of real lions after visiting the part of the cave where lions are depicted, tells a story about the art of painting to an aborigine who was asked why he was touching up the ancient paintings of his people and he replied, ‘I am not painting, it is only the hand of the spirit that is painting now.’ “Because man is a part of the spirit.”. In other words the aborigine was empathising to such a great degree that he him-self had been lost as he entered into that greater spirit. (Cave of Forgotten Dreams – Herzog).

So the most ancient piece of art we have depicts a female form over that of the male. But that is not all of the artistic evidence at all. Indeed the first art-work that was reproduced over thousands of years and can be found across the entirety of civilizations early map is a sculpture of the fecund mother goddess. Its archaeological history can be traced from the Turanian plains and mountains across into China, Mesopotamia, India, and Europe;

“Clay had also been used to mould female figurines, others of which were carved from stone. Although these were schematic in character, with diminutive arms and lacking facial detail, they were more realistic than the almost completely abstract human forms found at Netiv Hagdud. On the basis of these figurines, Cauvin proposed that a cult of the ‘mother goddess’ had existed not only at Mureybet but throughout the Neolithic world. This deity had- according to Cauvin- been joined by another: the bull. Although no bull figurines or depictions were found at Mureybet, Cauvin had excavated skulls and horns of wild cattle buried below floors and within its walls… Few archaeologists today subscribe to the notion of a Neolithic mother goddess’ but the view that ideological change came before economic change has found support from two further Neolithic sites, Jerf el Ahmar and Göbekli Tepe.” (Mithen:2003:63-4)

It may seem remarkable that this matriarchal order could have produced the same figurine to appear around the world, for thousands of years, without their being some over-arching perspective that allowed it to fit in to all human-settled experience, and we now know that experience was the behaviour of settling itself. This does not however mean that their was not an original centre from whence this story emerged and spread with its agricultural behaviours and beliefs. There is however such a place, and time, whereupon a certain peoples, who held the oral traditions of the hunter-gatherers began to precipitate them into a settled superstitious way of life. These peoples came from the same place as the finest and oldest ‘mother goddess’ figurines are to be found, and they still exist in their sedentary-hunter lifestyle harvesting reindeer. Many of them today are millionaires due to the high price of reindeer antler for Chinese medicines, but they still choose to live an equal, free and fraternal lifestyle. They are called the Altai meaning, the ‘Golden Mountain’ and they live where they have for the last 35,000 years upon the Turanian plains. It is these people that gave birth to the religions of all civilizations and it is there natural ‘golden mountain’ becoming a man-made ‘golden mountain’ that this chapter is all about:

“Devils, demons, and supernatural powers described by the various peoples of Assyria and Babylonia form the archetype of much of the demonology which the West- and parts of the East itself have inherited. As has been mentioned in an earlier part of this book, many of these spirits were brought by the Accadians (who really established the Babylonian culture) from the far steppes of High Asia. Thus we find that many of the rituals and spells carried westwards by the Aryans, the Greeks and Romans, the Arabs and the Jews were derived from supernatural activities which originated in what is now Asiatic Russia. The same rites and beliefs, in some measure, linger on in their primitive state among communities of arrested cultural development throughout the world: principally Siberian, Eskimo and other Mongoloid peoples. Other civilizations (like the Chinese and Japanese, the Assyrians and Egyptians) adopted and adapted the cults to their own brand of thinking….

The pure Accadian (Mongoloid) forms of this magic are still preserved in the bilingual tablets of such collections as Assurbani-Pal’s Library, while other tablets show the fusion of Semitic and other beliefs with those of the highland conquerors….Although Assur-bani-Pal’s tablets were not collected until the seventh century BC, they date back almost to the earliest days of the Turanian (Mongoloid) arrival in the Eastern Mediterranean.” (Shah:1973:34-5)

“A study of Greek mythology should begin with a consideration of what political and religious systems existed in Europe before the arrival of Aryan invaders from the distant North and East. The whole of Neolithic Europe, to judge from surviving artefacts and myths, had a remarkably homogeneous system of religious ideas, based in worship of the many-titled Mother-goddess, who was also known in Syria and Libya.

Ancient Europe had no gods

The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored and obeyed the matriarch; the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery….Not only the moon but the sun, were the goddess’s celestial symbols. In earlier Greek myth, however, the sun yields precedence to the moon- which inspires the greater superstitious fear , does is not grow dimmer as the year wanes, and is credited with the power to grant or deny water to the fields.

The moon’s three phases of new, full and old recalled the matriarch’s three phases of maiden, nymph (nubile woman), and crone. Then, since the sun’s annual course similarly recalled the rise and decline of her physical powers- spring a maiden, summer a nymph, winter a crone- the goddess became identified with seasonal changes in animal and plant life…

Once the relevance of coition to child-bearing had been officially admitted- an account of this turning-point in religion appears in the Hittite myth of simple-minded Appu…man’s religious status gradually improved, and winds or rivers were no longer given credit for impregnating women. The tribal Nymph, it seems, chose an annual lover from her entourage of young men, a king to be sacrificed when the year ended; making him a symbol of fertility, rather than the object of her erotic pleasure. His sprinkled blood served to fructify trees, crops, and flocks…Next, in amendment to this practice, the king died as soon as the power of the sun, with which he was identified, began to decline in the summer; and another young man, his twin, or supposed twin… then became the Queen’s lover, to be duly sacrificed at mid-winter, and as a reward, reincarnated in an oracular serpent. These consorts acquired executive power only when permitted to deputize for the Queen by wearing her magical robes. Thus kingship developed, and though the Sun became a symbol of male fertility once the king’s life had been identified with its seasonal course, it still remained under the Moon’s tutelage; as the king remained under the Queen’s tutelage…” (Graves:1992:13-15)

“Greek is part of the Indo-European language family that stretched from Ireland to remote valleys in the deserts of western China, from Sweden to India, from Spain to Lithuania. It has been known since the late eighteenth century that the languages in this family are each other’s siblings. In every one of them, common roots can be found in both vocabulary and grammar. Those connections can only mean that each of the daughter-languages has descended from a mother-language spoken somewhere in the distant past before its speakers moved off into the many corners of the continent. So a man who I my brathair in old Irish is my frater in Latin, my brodor in Old English, my broterèlis in Lithuanian, my bratrū in Old Church Slavonic, my phrater in Greek, my bhrátar in Sanskrit and my procer in a dead language called Tocharian B, once spoken in the dessicated valley of Chinese Turkestan, eight thousand miles from the Irish monks and their brethren on the shores of the Atlantic. Languages that can have had no chance of having borrowed words directly from each other nevertheless demonstrate intimate family connections. They carry the marks of their own inheritance; like verbal tumuli, these words enshrine their own history.

Linguists have long realised that if they could establish the words that were shared across these vast distances- particularly by now well-separate languages- they might be able to reconstruct the world in which the original Proto-Indo-European language was spoken. This is the great paradox of language: words are the least substantial medium in which meaning can be formed, but they can preserve hints and suggestions of the ancient past when material remains scarcely can. Of course languages evolve, but words that have been transmitted only in speech can nevertheless retain something in their core which is resistant to the erosions of time.

Working over two centuries, linguists have been able to create an astonishingly detailed shared word-picture of the Proto-Indo-European world of about five thousand years ago, the world from which Achilles came. It sounds, first, lie a dream environment, teeming with life: wolves, lynxes, elk and red deer, hares, hedgehogs, geese and cranes, eagles, and bees, beavers and otters….have cognates in all of the Indo-European languages. There are no shared words for laurel, cypress or olive: this cannot have been a Meditarranean place. But cattle and sheep are both there. This is a milky, yoghurty existence, with words for butter, cheese, meat, marrow and manure, for steer, calf, ox, cow and bull. These people were lactose-tolerant, feeding off the all-important transfer of nutrients (via hay and cheese) from summer grass to winter food. A verb for the driving of cattle, and a word for a large cow-sacrifice, are spread across the whole Indo-European language-world. The original word for a dog is closely bond up with the word for sheep: the first Indo-European dogs look as if they were sheepdogs, and the word for sheep, with the root pec- (as in pecorino, the Italian sheep cheese), is related to the word for wealth (as in pecuniary). It seems as if the riches of these people might have been in the animals they kept.

The language does not describe a completely mobile world. They had pig, which are no good for nomadic pastoralists (both ‘swine’ and ‘pork’ are Proto-Indo-European words), because pigs refuse to be driven in the way sheep and cattle happily will be, and so the Proto-Indo-European people must have been at least partly settled, with places in which the words for grain, sowing, quern, plough, sickle, yoke and oxen all had a part to play. So their world oscillates between the mobile and the fixed, the rooted and the rootless, the raid or the drive away from home, and the companion sense of home and hearth.

The language family to the north of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, spoken by the hunter-gatherers in the forests of northern Eurasia, has no words for any buildings beyond their tents. But Proto-Indo-European is not quite like that. They had words for house, hearth, post, door, doorpost, hurdle, wattle, wall, and clay. Their buildings were clearly substantial, wooden, closable. They also had a word for ‘refuge’ or ‘fort’, but no word for city. Nor is there any hint in the language of anything resembling public architecture: no temple, no palace, no public square.

Their villages were clusters of houses, and the word for a village was the same as the word for a clan. The language makes the point clearly enough: what mattered about these places was not the buildings but the people within them. This is not a monumental world, but one centred on the lives of clannish groups of families. They had metals. They spun thread, wove cloth and sewed. And they had wheeled vehicles, and boats for crossing rivers and lakes, with oars but no sails.

This re-imagining of a distant world is one of the triumphs of linguistics. None of these claims about the Proto-Indo-European way of life is a guess; all are founded on a careful analysis of the inherited languages. And the reconstruction has penetrated beyond the physical. It is clear that the culture was male-dominated, that individuals considered themselves heirs of their fathers and that girls left their native homes to live in the houses of their husbands and their husbands’ families. The word for ‘to marry’- when applied to men- is intimately connected with the word for ‘to lead’. Men ‘led’ women to the marriage bed.

It seems likely that young men in the Proto-Indo-European world were organised into warrior bands, perhaps raiding parties, and they used bows, arrows, clubs, cudgels and swords. Society may have been organised into three ranks: farmers, priests and a warrior elite, out of which the chieftains and even kings emerged. The word for king embodies the principle of order, a meaning still implicit in the English word ‘rule’, with a connection between ‘rex’ and ‘right’, between ordaining the world and possessing it, but there is also evidence in the inherited languages of a powerful sense of hospitality and its duties. … The mutual giving of gifts, the swearing of oaths and the expectations of loyalty from that behaviour are all evident in the descendant language. Trust was part of the Proto-Indo-European moral consciousness.

It is possible to push further in, beyond their external lives. Linguists can reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European word for belief, kred-dhehl, whose descendants have reached us in the form of ‘creed’ and ‘credo’. That original compound word seems to have meant ‘heart-put/place’, so that belief is the place where you put what matters most to you. There is, in other words, clear linguistic evidence of a commitment to otherness, a mental life beyond the self. But not much of a pantheon can be re-established. Nearly all gods of Olympus in Homer are Mediterranean borrowings; the only undoubted exception is Zeus, the male sky god, whose name means ‘the sky’, with a further derivation buried within that, as the word for sky comes from a root which means ‘the shining’. God is the shining father, life is lived in his light, and when the great heroes are described in Homer either as ‘brilliant’ or as ‘godlike’, the connection is the same: they are glowing in a light derived from the power of that shining sky. The sky is the great permanence. In its divine brilliance, there is no change.

Beneath that steppe-sense of the governing sky there is a parallel and contradictory aspect of the Indo-European mind. In every daughter-language from Iranian to Hindi, Greek and Roman, all the Romance, Slavic, and Germanic languages, Irish and the other Celtic languages, finite verbs are forced into a precise tense. Nothing in Indo-European can escape being located in the time at which it occurred. In other languages, such as the Chinese language family, there are no tenses, and it is possible to blur those distinctions, for actions to be described without it being clear when they happened. Not in the Indo-European languages: this particular form of consciousness is trapped in an awareness of time passing. Homer’s and Achilles’s agonies over the transience of glory; they very fact of epic poetry as a way of denying the effects of time; even the creation of the tens of thousands of Bronze Age tumuli marking the landscapes of Eurasia from Bahrain to Country Clare: all are products of that time-dominated frame of mind, the awareness of the passing of things which lies at the deepest levels of the way we think. It is the governing polarity: the sky persists in a way that is outside time; nothing that is done on earth shares that eternity. Homer is framed around that recognition, and it is one which, for example, the idea of a Messiah could never have originated.

There is no closing the gap between the eternal and the transitory

Gods and goddesses might sleep with men and women, and have children with them, but those heroic children can only ever be mortal.

Grief and triumph; a sense of irony and even tragedy; an overwhelming and dominant masculinity, thick with competitive violence; a small but hierarchical society, strung between a semi-nomadic way of life and one that was setlled in small wooden houses; a vivid background in the natural world; a valuing of cattle and meat; in love with horses; no understanding of the city or of any relationship to the sea: all of that is implicit in the shape of this reconstructed language, and all of it looks very like the background to the world of the Greeks in their camp on the Trojan shore.

But where and when can this world be located? That question is still far from being answered. There is plenty of evidence, but none of it adds up. Language cannot be attached to pre-literate archaeological remains, and modern genetic evidence is still too confused for any clear outline to be derived from it.

Nevertheless, it seems clear from the memories embedded in the daughter-languages that the Proto-Indo-Europeans came from a place where they could grow crops (or at least harvest wild ones) and maintain herds of grazing animals on extensive pastures. They did not live in the arid south or the frozen north. There is a word in the original language which might mean beech tree, birch tree or oak tree. And another which might mean salmon, or maybe sea-trout, or maybe trout. This looks like a temperate, river-valley existence. But the grazing animals would have required expansive grasslands too. They have a word for bee, but there are no bees east of the Urals, so they can only have been on the western, European side of those mountains. The presence of many farming words means that they must have been farming before about 2500 BC, which is thought to be the last possible moment before the original group broke up and scattered across Europe and north Asia.

These clues scarcely pinpoint a region, and people’s idea of the ancient homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, their Urheimat, has wandered all over Eurasia. Originally it was thought to be in Afghanistan, but it has migrated from Bactria to the Baltic, to the Pripiat marshes in Poland, to Hungary and the Carpathians in general. The Nazis, identifying their race-vision with this linguistic category, and preferring the term ‘Aryan’ (the name of an Indo-European people in Iran) to ‘Indo-European’, located the homeland in Germany. Some still favour Armenia in north-west Anatolia, but a modern consensus has for the time being settled on the steppes between the Black and Caspian Seas.” (Nicolson:2014:152-7)

In the above quotes we not only see proof of the mother-goddess- Rhea being seen even by doubters of this mother goddess cult as a change of ideology, as discussed above, but that it was also replaced by males with bull figurines, and by sun worship, as the male population began to link their nature to that of the suns, as the golden spirit that fecunds the Earth and creates the golden seed, the sperm of life itself, etc, etcetera. The bull is now the fecunder of the cow, it is no longer that the cow possesses the power of fecundity and it is her Nature that turns it towards creation by her will. The further the group goes towards hierarchy then the more the idea of power becomes aligned with destruction more than creation. The great provider of the settler is mother Nature, but the most powerful domesticated beast that empowers agriculture is the bull and that possesses the power to destroy, not to create. Ritualistically then this is the beginning of the story of modern day bull-fighting.

A further proof of this change from female to male possession of power lies in the etymology of the word crescent. Crescent means, ‘the increasing moon’ from the Latin ‘cre-are’, to make, to Create, from where we derive the word creature and creation itself. Therefore the crescent shaped horns of the cow, become those of the bull. The creation of life by the cow becomes the fecunder of life as the bull. The fertile land, becomes increased by the power of the Sun, not the power of the Sun becomes increased by the fruits of its creation. The fittest are created to survive, not the harmony of this power is embodied through creation- and it was good.

What we witness in the changing mythography of the settlers, who begin by sculpting female goddesses in a female viewed world, become involved over thousands of years into a warfare of new partiarchal language that changed the myths and sexuality of the gods and even of God ‘herself’ (from the unsexed God- wakan) so that the female, ruler of Nature by her empathic spirit and hence natural behaviour, became seen as the female, subject to the power of nature in the form of man. “A large part of Greek myth is politico-religious history.” (Graves:1992:17)

Unfortunately we cannot view this history in detail here as it is beyond the remit of the book, but we must at least glance at the story of the male king coming into power.

“At first the male king was a weak consort to the female goddess/queen. He was acquired from the queens blood-line and was sacrificed every year at the time of planting, so that his spirit, like the spirit of wakan, could enter the Earth possessed by the Queen in her role as Rhea or Pandora. Hence the kings reign was pretty powerless and short. The sociological perspective of men was that they were not allowed to own land but were allowed to hunt, fish, and gather certain foods, look after herds, and defend territory, so long as they did not get in the way of matriarchal law.” (Graves:1992:15)

“When the shortness of the king’s reign proved irksome, it was agreed to prolong the thirteen-month year to a Great Year of one hundred lunations, in the last of which occurs a near-coincidence of solar and lunar time. But since the fields and crops still needed to be fructified, the king agreed to suffer an annual mock death and yield his sovereignty for one day- the intercalcated one,…to the surrogate boy-king, or interrex, who died at its close, and whose blood was used for the sprinkling ceremony. Now the sacred king either reigned for the entire period of a Great Year, with a tanist as his lieutenant; or the two reigned for alternate years; or the Queen let them divide the queendom into halves and reign concurrently. The king deputized for the Queen at many sacred functions, dressed in her robes, wore false breasts, borrowed her lunar axe as a symbol of power, and even took over from her the magical-art of rain-making.”(Graves:1992:18)

“A new stage was reached when animals came to be substituted for boys at the sacrificial altar, and the king refused death after his lengthened reign ended. Dividing the realm into three parts, and awarding one part to each of his successors, he would reign for another term; his excuse being that a closer approximation of solar and lunar time had now been found, namely nineteen years, or 325 lunations. The Great Year had become a Greater Year….

The throne remained matrilineal, as it theoretically did even in Egypt, and the sacred king and his tanist were therefore always chosen from outside the royal female house; until some daring king at last decided to commit incest with the heiress, who ranked as his daughter, and thus gain a new title to the throne when his reign needed renewal.

Achaen invasions of the thirteenth century B.C. seriously weakened the matrilineal tradition. It seems that the king now contrived to reign for the term of his natural life; and when the Dorians arrived, towards the close of the second millennium, patrilineal succession became the rule…Moreover, though the system of gathering all the women of royal blood under the king’s control, and thus discouraging outsiders from attempts on a matrilineal throne, was adopted at Rome when the Vestal College was founded, and in Palestine when King David formed his royal harem, it never reached Greece. Patrilineal descent, succession, and inheritance discourage further myth-making; historical legend then begins and fades into the light of common history.”(Graves:1992:19-20)

In the above quotes then we see the demise of the female as ruler also spells the demise of myth-making

In other words it marks the demise of an experience of being with the gods of Nature that has become corrupt, ‘a metaphor for mental modification, a twisting and folding of the pristine imagination as it experiences more and more fear’ (ibid), firstly into politico-religious usage and finally into legend as the form of story telling. Legends are basically myths with a male hero placed slap bang in the middle of it, and that hero is very often that of a legendary king who actually ruled a peoples. For example, the Epic of Gilgamesh is the first story that was ever written down, and was done so in Babylon. Gilgamesh was a king that actually existed but the myth of the epic is thousands of years older than the existence of the legend of Gilgamesh.

Obviously, what we are seeing happening here is that the idea of the being-for-itself, over time has become more and more prevalent. At first the matrilineal ruler may well have believed her sacred connection to Nature itself, as may the king as he was slain. Over time however, power corrupted the system and the king became ever more powerful until he could frame the world by the yearly movement of the sun as the force of the universe that he, as seed provider provided, and could become a conduit for Nature himself. This was not a conscious change but was instead the result of an increase in the invisible force (god) of power that became apparent in the experience of ever more complex relations of force- civilization- Daksha becomes Praja-pati- master of the people.

From the perspective change that occurred myths became contorted and twisted as they were written down for the first time until the meaning of a myth became political and religious in regards to being merely a story to convey the right of the king to his throne and power. From there it is but a small step for a grovelling administrator at court to write down great myths as legend placing the king in the role of hero, once again proclaiming his divine connection and consequent rights to power. One of these consequences was that the female had to be denigrated to a level beneath the male line, and consequently so did God also have to become male as we indeed see happen.

“Hesiod’s account of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora is not a genuine myth, but an antifeminist fable, probably of his own invention, though based on the story of Demophon and Phyllis” (Graves:1992:148)

 “In Babylonian literature the great god Marduk has two heads, much like some of the plaster statues and similar to two-headed figures in the art of the later prehistoric and historic communities in western Asia. The plaster statue exposing her breasts recalls a Babylonian goddess who adopts a similar pose. So the possibility arises that the roots of Babylonian religion lie in the Neolithic culture of the Jordan valley around 6500 BC.” (Mithen:2003:86)

Marduk is better known from his title Bel or Baal. In Sumerian, the ancient language of Babylon Bel means ‘young calf of the Sun’. Yet in the above sculpture described by Mithen we clearly see that this bull of the sun used to have breasts recalling this transformation from matrilineal to patrilineal perceptions of power. Bel became the god of War under this patriarchal society, reflecting the nature of it. Darshan and Darpan. Hubris and Nemesis- Karma.

06: The Emperor’s New Clothes

We have now discovered the elements of the story that the kings of civilization are about to tell, but what I want to look at in further detail is the tactics that the kings adopt in order to firstly increase and then to maintain their power.

Before we move on to look at the this golden mountain in its sociological form as the tower of Babyl therefore I would like to return us to our naked form, as we found Adam and Noah, as beings-in-Being, in order to explore this idea further through a fairy-tale. That is to say a story about the subjective inner world of our ontological experience. One of my favourite fairy tales is that of the Emperor and his New Clothes.

In the story two conmen tell the king that they are tailors of the finest cloth, a cloth so fine that only a man of wisdom, intelligence, justice, and honour, can see it. The King is struck by the idea of having just such a suit made ready for his own birthday celebration where he will process amongst his very own peoples, and show his worthiness to rule by this very garment of wisdom!

‘How impressive I shall be’, he prated, ‘how worthy of my worship, the people will see I am by my new fine outfit.’

‘Yes indeed, your majesty, but may we have some more gold thread with which to embellish your garment?’, replied the conmen.

‘Indeed you may, as much as is necessary to regale my fine-ness.’

As the garment was being made, the King asked his royal courtiers to inspect the work in progress. Each of them in turn stood in the presence of the robbers, who mimicked the drape of the cloak and the weight of the cloth with their hands, whilst in reality holding nothing, and stroking the thin air. But each courtier knew that only a wise, intelligent, just, and honourable man could see it, and so whilst they saw nothing of substance, they spewed forth great wonders about the shimmer, the grace, the elegance, and the artistry of this invisible garment being woven before their very eyes. Fearful that if they should speak the truth, that they could see no cloak, no shoes, nothing of substance, the King would know that they were not wise or intelligent or just or honourable and they would lose their position in society, they lied and went along with the story of the conmen.

When the King heard their reports he marvelled at the descriptions but it began to dawn upon him, the dread, that he might not be able to see the new garment himself.

Sure enough the great day dawned, and the robbers were led into the royal chamber where the King, surrounded by his courtiers and servants, was presented with his new garment.

‘Here, your majesty, pray try them on and tell us of their fit and splendour.’, incited the robbers, whilst amongst themselves the courtiers and servants, spoke in hurried tones about their awe of this new garments worth, and of its reflective splendour that the King shall give it.

The King could not see the clothes, but now under the power of his own traditional position in that civilization, he was forced to appear wise, and intelligent, and just and honourable, but he could not see the clothes.

Prance and strut did the King upon being dressed by his servants, who themselves kept silent as they buttoned invisible buttons and asked the King to lift this leg then that, this arm then the other. Genuflection and praise did the courtiers verbose.

And so the King stood naked, (in the being-in-Being) as the day he was born, upon a great open stage-coach decorated in the grandeur of golden filigreed petals of the fleur-de-lis, and of the rose.

His great retinue, preceded by two hundred trumpets, each blowing hot air, set forth to the city centre where the celebration of the King would begin.

All of the people had been told of the wondrous material from which the King’s new clothes had been made, and so as he entered their presence, they too, stared at a naked man and yet behaved in such a manner as to hail the wonder of that which they could neither experience or perceive.

Only one boy was unaffected, despite such an overwhelming cause of promulgated truth and propaganda.

‘Ha Ha!’, he laughed and pointed, ‘The King is naked, the King has no clothes on.’

Upon exposing the truth, (the unconcealedness of being, that the king had no true garment of words woven for his right to power) the rest of the crowd began to denounce their own hypocrisy and to laugh at each other for their foolishness.  Even the King, had to accept that his authority lay in the awe he presented, but not any actual power. But then he used that unreal power to smote the village with many a soldiers spear. ‘Ha Ha’, he chuckled. ‘I am still King.’ The naked birthday procession, did not become a tradition, in fact it became taboo to even mention it. It had been discovered that the sword and the swanky coach and the palace, was a far better totem than the naked truth.

I don’t think the fairy tale actually ends how I ended it, but it does make the point quite well. The boy is our aborigine- still laughing. Power works, not because, of the person who holds the power but because of the relationship of ‘the people’ who give their power over and become objects of power, i.e. each individual who decides to either:  believe the story, despite the reasonable evidence to the contrary; or who pretends to do so, as they will gain in power for-itself with this tactic; or who fights the story of power and makes up his own in order to gain power for-itself.

Only the boy, innocent of punishment, and of reward, and of status, had nothing to lose, in the speaking of the truth.

In other words, power, once its nature is no longer within Nature, but is placed within a society as culture and tradition becomes a relationship of belief, by which one may attain power.

It is to the forms of this power, as they become visible in the world of experience by the behaviour of those people under that power, that we must now look in order to understand the basic techniques that invisibly cohere a group of people together: The resultant manifestation of each technique depends upon the perspective of each individual within the pyramid as defined above. These resultant behaviours are: Punishment for the individual who doesn’t believe; Esteem for the individual who believes or pretends to believe in the story, and Status as also sought for by the individual who doesn’t believe but pretends to, as it serves him to do so.

It is these three new words Punishment, Esteem, and Status, that we are now going to explore through the umbrella technique that brings these possible forces together in the first place- Authority.

07: The Subject of the State of Awe-thority

As we saw above when we tried to find the techniques by which the story of family was usurped we found that it was not force as physical power that won out but instead force as Nature, as being a conduit or son of God, a priest or a king/queen, that brought people together. The truth of this story, however was symbolised by the conmen who made the garment for the king, they represent the takers of the gold, the price, that they keep asking of the king in order to make his garment. This gold is not financial wealth- capital, but instead social capital, the truth as represented by aleithea, it is the real light reflecting nature of the ontological consciousness of the being-in-Being. Each stitch of this new garment for the king requires a loss of this truth, a distance from this truth, returning us to the notion of sin, as the tearing of a garment in the mourning of our separation.Each stitch of awe given takes this social capital from the people equally and begins to impoverish the experience of this social capital, taking us further and further away from each-other, as well as from God the highest gold.

The new garment with the king as its centre does not really exist, as we have seen, by watching the story of myth of the right to power being manipulated firstly from His right into only a woman’s right and then from a womans right to that of a man’s; by watching firstly a non-sexed or even embodied God as wakan, change into a female embodied Goddess, and then into a male embodied God, in order to justify the story of the queen and then of the king, over the people of wakan.

It seems that what we are talking about then when it comes to the rulers of civilizations, is not that any ruler has an actual right to the power they wield but that they have discovered the techniques required to attain and retain that power. A power that as we have seen is actually given by each individual as they become aware of their power as individuals, a process of awakening to the perspective of being-for-itself. These techniques are just as true for democracy as for any other form of rule, because they lie upon the urgrund perception of the being-for-itself as the source of power and its effect, and do not see the Invisible forces of Nature that lies beneath this perspective and runs through the democratic system, its rituals, practices, and behaviours, consequently.

To elucidate these invisible forces we must look at the inner and outer world meanings of the word State. An inner state is a subjective realm of magic where from the imagination, thoughts, and then  words are born, that have power over others when taken into the outer world as a state-ment, a state made visible which shows our inner state, standing or position, i.e. being-in-Being or being-for-itself or being-subject or being-object or being-abject or being-reject, etc. As we have seen above become experienced and hence necessarily created and stated, in the creation of language for Babylons worlding.

The inner state therefore of the settler and the city folk is that of being-for-itself ontologically

A state is a place, a station, and in regards to the inner world, we can see that our state has shifted from one of the urgrund, the first state of man, as being-in-Being, to another state, that of being-for-itself. We are therefore dealing with the shift from, ‘I dwell in Being as a human-being’, as described by Heidegger, to one of, ‘I dwell here in this city, with these people, as an Object-for-myself. I am a farmer object, an administrator object, a warrior object whose actions are in reality for my subjective-self’s desires, despite the rhetoric.

This state of existence changes ones essence, ones spirit, from that of being close to God to being distant from God, which as we have seen is called original sin, and caused a change in the state of Adams, Cains, and Noahs existence.

With Babylon, the house of Ham, the most accursed of Noah’s sons, who turned his back on the naked truth of Noah’s garmentless garment we witness then the state of the emperor’s new clothes, a groundless lack of meaning whose purpose is being-for-itself disguised by this new garment of esteem, awe, and status (state-us).

“Some have believed that the act by which our will brings a deliberation to a close, restrains our impulses and commands our organism, might have served as the model of this construction. In willing, it is said, we perceive ourselves directly as a power in action. So when this idea had once occurred to men, it seems that they only had to extend it to things to establish the conception of force.” (Durkheim:1982:364)

“Moreover, the idea of force bears the mark of its origin in an apparent way. In fact, it implies the idea of power which, in its turn, does not come without those of ascendancy, mastership and domination, and their corollaries, dependence and subordination; now the relations expressed by all these ideas are eminently social. It is society which classifies beings into superiors and inferiors, into commanding masters and obeying servants; it is society which confers upon the former the singular property which makes the command efficacious and which makes power. So everything tends to prove that the first powers of which the human mind had any idea were those which societies have established in organizing themselves: it is in their image that the powers of the physical world have been conceived….

But the notion of force is not all of the principle of causality. This consists in a judgement stating that every force develops in a definite manner, and that the state in which it is at each particular moment of its existence predetermines the next state. The former is called cause, the latter, effect, and the causal judgement affirms the existence of a necessary connection between these two moments for every force. The mind posits this, a sort of constraint from which it cannot free itself; it postulates it, as they say, a priori.” (Durkheim:1982:366)

This new force, this garment of power then is the cloth of the city-state of Babylon, a woven story to hide the nudity of the being-for-itself, into a social cohesiveness, a single garment, from the singular thread of thought or state of being-for-itself. We now need to see its techniques, i.e. how it was magically sown together in language, to make the head of families, the kings of their kin, bow to the greater head of the King of kings, i.e. as the head of all the families within this city-state chosen by God, the King of Kings of kings.

Well, remember when we saw Kant and Wittgenstein telling us that there is no truth discoverable (aleithea- uncovered) in logic or reason because, ‘belief in the causal nexus is superstition’ (ibid), and how super-stition meant actually, a ‘super-state’, i.e. an inner magical world that doesn’t really exist (unless God actually does), well let us see how Foucault describes the super-state of a kings power, whereupon we will see the answer to the king of kings:

“I don’t want to say that the State isn’t important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the State. In two senses: first of all because the State, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the State can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. The State is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth. True, these networks stand in a conditioning-conditioned relationship to a kind of ‘meta-power’ which is structured essentially round a certain number of great prohibitions can only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations that supply the necessary basis for the great negative forms of power.” (Foucault:1980:122)

“This is the problem I now find myself confronting. As soon as one endeavours to detach power with its techniques and procedures from the form of law within which it has been theoretically confined up until now, one is driven to ask this basic question: isn’t power simply a form of warlike domination? Shouldn’t one therefore conceive all problems of power in terms of relations of war? Isn’t power a sort of generalised war which assumes at particular moments the forms of peace and the State? Peace would then be a form of war, and the State a means of waging it.” (Foucault:1980:123)

What Foucault tells us above is that the State is not one story but a super story, told on top of the stories that already existed. The family under this story can still retain its powers, but by accepting this super-story, this super-state, the being-for-itself can also gain more power for that family. Just as we saw the kings begin to use incest to retain the super-states power within his family power. A situation that kings and queens have continued since history literally began through their pure blood-line- the Habsburg dynasty and their deformed progeny being a prime example.

The second quote of Foucault also tells us of another role of the king and his super-state

Before there was this king, what was the limit of taking for any family? It was merely that imposed by the freedom to take from another family, so there was no limit if you had a large family. Obviously as we have seen above this warfare led to a greater paced desertification of the villages territory, and an arms race, that plundered the land still further.

As we saw in the previous chapter, this turned the worlding of the world into asuras and devas, the metals of the earth being forged into weapons of egoic will, in order to gain further wealth and hence power, in a fish pond that would lead to self-determined death, destruction and desertification for those who came afterwards. These behaviours caused the very gods to become split into good and evil, higher and lower, and caused the urgrund of Babylon, an experience of being no longer in heaven on earth but on earth beneath heaven and above hell, the underworld.

What was therefore now needed in this world of necessity and hence warfare was a reliever of the tensions that this perspective  and behaviour caused. In other words, this tension came to a head, a capital, a leader, a someone who could embody this state and be its capital, who had the right to power, by which to arbitrate and unite these familist forces, in a manner that empowered those families whilst also easing the tensions between them, and constructing some way of apportioning the powers that then accrued from working together within this super-state, so as to slow up the natural process of desertification by dealing out the gains and limiting the losses, by organising the pleasure and the pain, that this worlding is all about. In other words, the State is a means of waging war, in a worlding of war, that has resulted from the settler way of life and perspective, and the head of state is the necessity created by it.

This necessity for controlling the power of families, in order to better control the environment is therefore a new mode of power, and therefore, instead of the spirit of ‘the name’ and its combined power by which the story of family has flowed between its individuals, naming them not only the race of Ham but also Objects, as father, son, brother, uncle, mother, daughter, sister, aunt, etc, must acquire another magical liquid or spirit to flow around the people by which to show their power as Objects within this higher state, or super-state, or civilization.  By creating this magical liquid or spirit we will see people as Object now become people as Subject. That is subjected to this new powerful spirit, this new draft of life in which we dwell.

“The notion of ‘love of the master’ poses other problems, I think. It is a certain way of not posing the problem of power, or rather of posing it in such a way that it cannot be analysed. This is due to the insubstantiality of the notion of the master, an empty form haunted only by the various phantoms of the master and his slave, the master and his disciple, the master and his workman, the master who pronounces law and speaks the truth, the master who censors and forbids. The key point is that of this reduction of power to the figure of the master there is linked another reduction, that of procedures of power to the law of prohibition. This reduction of power to law has three main roles: (i) It underwrites a schema of power which is homogeneous for every level and domain- family or State, relations of education or production. (ii) It enables power never to be thought of in other than negative terms: refusal, limitation, obstruction, censorship. Power is what says no. And the challenging of power as thus conceived can appear only as transgression. (iii) It allows the fundamental operation of power to be through of as that of a speech-act: enunciation of law, discourse of prohibition. The manifestation of power takes on the pure form of ‘Thou shalt not.’

Such a conception has a certain number of epistemological advantages because of the possibility of linking it with an ethnology centred on the analysis of the great kinship-prohibitions and with a psychoanalysis centred on the mechanisms of repression. Thus one single and identical ‘formula’ of power (the interdict) comes to be applied to all forms of society and all levels of subjection. And so through treating power as the instance of negation one is led to a double ‘subjectivisation’. In the aspect of its exercise, power is conceived as a sort of great absolute Subject which pronounces the interdict (no matter whether this Subject is taken as real, imaginary, or purely juridical): the Sovereignty of the Father, the Monarch or the general will. In the aspect of subjectivisation to power, there is an equal tendency to ‘subjectivise’ it by specifying the point at which the interdict is accepted, the point where one says yes or no to power. This is how, in order to account for the exercise of Sovereignty, there is assumed either a renunciation of natural rights, a Social Contract, or a love of the master. It seems to me that the problem is always posed in the same terms, from the edifice constructed by the classical jurists down to current conceptions: an essentially negative power, presupposing on the one hand a sovereign whose role is to forbid and on the other a subject who must somehow effectively say yes to this prohibition.” (Foucault:1980:139-40)

“Its minimum thesis is that the historical matrix of conditions of possibility for the modern human sciences must be understood in relation to the elaboration of a whole range of techniques and practices for the discipline, surveillance, administration and formation of populations of human individuals. These forms of knowledge and these apparatuses of power are linked in a constitutive interdependence. In order for a genealogy of this relationship to be possible, two complementary shifts of philosophical perspectives are necessary: firstly, the discarding of that ethical polarisation of the subject-object relationship which privileges subjectivity as the form of moral autonomy, in favour of a conception of domination as able to take the form of a subjectification as well as of an objectification; and secondly, the rejection of the assumption that domination falsifies the essence of human subjectivity, and the assertion of power regularly promotes and utilises a ‘true’ knowledge of subjects and indeed in a certain manner constitutes the very field of that truth. The whole of Foucault’s work from Madness and Civilisation to The Will to Know can be read as an exposition of these two theses; it is possible to think that their significance may be commensurate with the influences and assumptions which have hitherto rendered them inadmissible. It must be pointed out that the ‘subject’ here is thought of by Foucault as a fictive or constructed entity (as are certain objects) though this does not mean that it is false or imaginary.

Power does not itself give birth to actual people, but neither does it dream subjects into existence

The key here to Foucault’s position is his methodological scepticism about both the ontological claims and the ethical values which humanist systems of thought invest in the notion of subjectivity. To repeat: the point is not to judge or to subvert these values, only to investigate how they become possible and not to content oneself with ascribing them to the teleology of progress.” (Foucault:1980:239)

“It is in this sense that Foucault characterises his enterprise as the ‘history of the present’. Not a history for which the present means the real terminal point of explanatory narratives, nor a history for which the present functions as the given existential site determining the questions that the historian addresses to a past, but a history of the present as ‘modernity’: the present as the form of a particular kind of domain of rationality, constituted by its place on a diachronic gradient; a ‘regime of truth’ composed of a field of problems, questions and responses determined by the continuity or discontinuity, clarity or obscurity of the administered ensemble of relations which constitute the partition between present and past, ‘new’ and ‘old’…The present is a fundamental figure or power/knowledge, the correlate of a form of social practice within which historiography is only one aspect or component. Here again one has a certain kind of nominalism. If Foucault poses a philosophical challenge to history, it is not to question the reality of ‘the past’ but to interrogate the rationality of the ‘present’.” (Foucault:1980:241-2)

“Power: is the capacity to bring about intended effects. Thus, the term is often used as a synonym for influence, to denote the impact (however exercised) of one actor on another. But the word is also used more specifically to refer to the more forceful modes of influence: for example, threats.” (Hague&Harrop:2007:10)

“Power is the currency of politics. Just as money permits the efficient flow of goods and services through an economy, so power enables collective decisions to be made and enforced. Without power, a government would be as useless as a car without an engine. Power is the key political resource that enables rulers both to serve and to exploit their subjects….In defining power as ‘not just the ability to act but the ability to act in concert’. The German born political theorist Hannah Arendt (1960-75) adopted a similar perspective (1966, p.44). A group whose members are willing to act together possesses more horsepower- an enhanced capacity to achieve its goals- than does a group dominated by suspicion and conflict. For Arendt, as for Parsons, to be in power is to be empowered by a group’s members to pursue joint objectives. Thus Arendt viewed power and violence as enemies rather than siblings: ‘power and violence are opposites; where the one rules, the other is absent. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it’ (1966, p.56). For Arendt, a regime built on terror was prone to impotence rather than omnipotence….Power is not just a technical task of implementing a vision shared by a whole society. It is also a struggle over what goals to pursue. The question of whose vision triumphs is surely relevant to any assessment of power….By contrast, if B obeys A from intrinsic commitment, rather than from the inequality in their resources, we would be more reluctant to refer to a power relationship (Haugaard, 2002)” (Hague&Harrop:2007:10-11)

“The notion of power as the ability to alter what people do is clear and cogent. What though of manipulation: the power to mislead (Shapiro, 2006) Power can consist not in changing how people behave but in denying them information which, if known, would have led them to act in a different way. Lukes (1986) gives the example of the manager of a nuclear power station who fails to inform local residents that his plant has discharged radioactivity into the surrounding community. Surely, he says, this is a case of power even though the residents continue with their ordinary lives, unaware of what happened? Developing this point led Lukes to a broader if less tangible interpretation of power: ‘A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interest’, even if B is unaware of the damage caused (1986, p.37).” (Hague&Harrop:2007:11)

The power of the State, or the kingly-state, then, from its very conception, is a necessary lie of authority, a garment of power, required to be told by people who cannot control themselves from living a life for-itself, where people become objects. The gold that it takes to make this garment, to pay the makers of this lie, the being-for-itself (the ontological tailors) is taken from the ground, and then forged into the capital of that state- as the crown upon the head of state- of a collective will of being-for-itself. The consequence of family life thus far has been desertification and so the necessity of controlling the behaviour of family groups, and their villages is better controlled with a story of authority that than of violence. Violence destroys the power of the family group, but story allows the family group to coalesce into the higher state, that this story offers. It offers protection, in a world of warfare. It offers food in a world of famine. It offers wealth and power over Others as Objects. The only price is that people become not just beings-for-Others but also beings-as-Subjects.

That is to say, to subject themselves to a greater power than their own in order to curtail that power, and hence increase the power of the State, thereby circuitously increasing ones own through restraint of activity, rather than activity. That is to say, to be willingly using ones force of will in the inner world against the individual-ego-desire (belief), rather than using this willed force in the outer world as warfare or trade or pillaging or cheating. The reason is the same- self-interest- the behaviour is different, and the experience is that of being subject to this greater power, that you believe in because it serves you to do so, more than it would to not do so. The right to hold this power used to be Gods in the form of Nature, and so in order for the story to be valid to kings of families it had to be linked to that God once again. Not only because people required a story of this perspective but also because the ineffectuality of violence to harness power necessitated a peaceable solution to the problem.

“Seeing all men by nature had right to all things, they had tight every one to reign over all the rest. But because this right could not be obtained by force, it concerned the safety of every one, laying by that right, to set up men, with sovereign authority, by common consent, to rule and defend them: whereas if there had been any man of power irresistible, there had been no reason, why he should not by that power have ruled and defended both himself, and them, according to his own discretion. To those therefore whose power is irresistible, the dominion of all men adhereth naturally by their excellence or power; and consequently it is from that power, that the kingdom over men, and the right of afflicting men at his pleasure, belongeth naturally to God Almighty; not as Creator, and gracious; but as omnipotent. And though punishment be due for sin only, because by that word is understood affliction for sin; yet the right of afflicting, is not always derived from men’s sin, but from God’s power.” (Hobbes:1651:234)

In this regard then we are talking about a legitimacy to this power given by God himself by the Nature embodied in the King’s nature- garment. Upon the acceptance of this story of the right by the king to this power then a new word is invented, in a word- ‘authority’.

“The State: is a political community formed by a territorial population subject to one government. … The state is a unique institution, standing above all other organizations in society. It alone claims not just the capacity but also the right to employ force. As Weber noted, the exclusive feature of the state is precisely this integration of force with authority: ‘A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Gerth and Mills, 1948, p.78)” (Hague&Harrop:2007:13-16)

“Authority: is the right to rule. Authority creates its own power so long as people accept that the person in authority has the right to make decisions.” (Hague&Harrop:2007:11)

“Authority is a broader notion than power. Where power is the capacity to act, authority is the acknowledged right to do so. It exists when subordinates acknowledge the capacity of superiors to give legitimate orders. Thus, a general may exercise power over enemy soldiers but his authority is restricted to his own forces…The German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) suggested that in a relationship of authority the ruled implement the command as if they had adopted it spontaneously, for its own sake (1922, p.29).” (Hague&Harrop:2007:11)

The word sake, comes from the Middle English sake, meaning purpose, cause. But this comes from the Anglo-Saxon word sacu, meaning, strife, dispute, crime, law-suit; orig. ‘contention’. This contention is nothing more than the constant contention of the being-for-itself against another being-for-itself, that is the urgrund of this state.

In emergence therefore from the human state of  ‘being-in-Being’ each civilization set up its own State of beings-for-itself’ using, as we have seen, the organisational technology of Kings, Warrior, Priests and Administrators, who controlled the Workers and Slaves. With authority, comes the delegation of power over Others-as-Objects, i.e. Subjects of that power and divine kingly will who give away some of their power to will the worlding of the world how they would like it in order to gain greater power to world the world as they would like it. It is rational, understandable, and doomed to failure for all by the same rational, understandable, and historically proven worlding of the world from Babylon until today.

08: The Great Tradition of Crime and Punishment: God Knows Why?

In other words, the priest can have authority from God in lawful commandments and the King from God as his servant, through his Laws. It is not the Law that has the power but the authority that has the power to make the laws, and it is not the authority that has the power unless it has the ‘right to do so’ by having the nature of Nature. We begin to see clearly how civilization is linked to our previous hunter-gatherer way of life as truth, as aleithea, as urgrund, as wakan.

If one can then place this authority within the civilization itself, as a totemic king, or as a taboo of going against the king’s will, then one has the beginnings of tradition as truth, handed on from son to son (the meaning of tradition). Or, in regards to the priest, not tradition, (as it is not their sons that inherit the power, but His sons), but divine commandment, unquestionable due to the distance that the priest himself creates from God, in the words created by this distance of existing in, ‘Faith’, ‘Hope’ and ‘Belief’ of God, rather than existing in the language of Experience, Life and Knowledge of God. Or under kingly stateship- state-ments- we exist under the hope, faith and belief of equality, liberty, and fraternity, rather than being-in-Being, without the necessity for these words to be invented to name their distance from reality, and existence only in the magical inner world of words, thoughts, dreams and ideologies.

Tradition then is one of the bloods of civilization, but it does not answer the question of how it became tradition in the first place. We have seen, tradition being set up by the alignment of woman’s and then man’s nature being associated with God or the gods, but to assign the word tradition to this process is not correct, something deeper, a truer essence or spirit of these societies of peoples flowed through this years, and it is this word which I wish to discover and discuss in order to see how the king used this new force to create the language above of Punishment, Esteem, and Status

“[Shils argues]: ‘The substantive content of traditions has been much studied but not their traditionalilty.’ The modes and mechanisms of the traditional reproduction of beliefs require close examination: ‘traditions are beliefs with a particular social structure; they are consensus through time’ (Shils 1975: 183-86). He maintains that the ‘sequential structure of traditional beliefs and actions can itself become a symbolized component of the belief and its legitimization or the grounds of its acceptance.’ In other words, he explains, the past becomes a model: ‘We should do as we have done before’ or ‘We should do now what we did previously because that is the way in which it has always been done’ (ibid:186). For the past to have continual relevance in the present, a process of ‘handing down’ or ‘filiation’ must occur. This process permits the transmission of beliefs that were previously accepted by others. In their most elemental form, traditionally transmitted beliefs are recommended and received ‘unthinkingly’, they are ‘there’:

‘no alternatives are conceived; there is nothing to do but to accept them. Traditional beliefs are those which contain an attachment to the past, to some particular time in the past, or to a whole social system, or to particular institutions which allegedly existed in the past.’

Beliefs which assert the moral rightness or superiority of a past society and which assert that what is done now or in the future should be modelled on past patterns of belief or conduct are traditional beliefs (ibid: 196). Equally, Shils argued, they ‘express an attitude of piety not only toward earthly authorities, toward elders and ancestors’ but also to the invisible powers which control earthly life.’” (Deegan:2009:11-12)

According to Weber, ‘collective self-help is for the kin group the most typical means of reacting to infringements upon its interests’ (Roth and Wittich 1968:366).

The structural changes associated with modernization are disruptive to the social order

Differentiation demands the creation of new activities, norms, rewards and sanctions, for example money, political position, prestige based on occupation. These often conflict with old modes of social action, which are frequently dominated by traditional, religious, tribal and kinship systems. As traditional beliefs are deferential, communities have a tendency to express attitudes of piety towards earthly authorities as well as otherworldly spheres. Therefore, ‘holy men and priests are prized by traditional attitudes, as is sacred learning: the learning of sacred texts.’ Shils believed a sense of ‘awe’ occurred in respect of these sacred beliefs, for they represented that which was considered to be ‘the most vital and most basic to existence.’…

The two categories of religious phenomena, beliefs and rituals, were fundamental, the former being concerned with thought and the latter with action or practices. Durkheim’s emphasis on the importance of ritual in religion was necessary in identifying social unity: society was to Durkheim ‘the reality underlying the symbols of religious ritual’ because it was the only ‘empirical reality which, as of a moral nature, could serve as the source of the ritual attitude’. Talcott Parsons interpreted this behaviour as ‘an expression of the common ultimate-value attitudes which constitute the specifically “social” element in society’ (ibid.:433). He regarded Durkheim’s proposition as one of ‘profound insight’. Certainly, it represented an important strand in his analysis of the social importance of religion in providing a common value system that underpinned the foundation of society: ‘for without a system of common values, of which religion is in part a manifestation, a system adhered to in a significant degree, there can be no such thing as society’ (ibid 434). The primary sense of moral obligation created a sense of social constraint based on the observance and maintenance of a system of rules that rested on a set of common values. For Durkheim, the object of religious life, in all its forms, was ‘to raise man above himself and to make him lead a life superior to that which he would lead if he followed only his spontaneous desires’.” (Deegan:2009:12-13)

“The simple deference inspired by men invested with high social functions is not different in nature from religious respect. It is expressed by the same movements: a man keeps at a distance from a high personage; he approaches him only with precautions; in conversing with him, he uses other gestures and language than those used with ordinary mortals. The sentiment felt on these occasions is so closely related to the religious sentiment that many peoples have confounded the two. In order to explain the consideration accorded to princes, nobles and political chiefs, a sacred character has been attributed to them. In Melanesia and Polynesia, for example, it is said that an influential man has mana, and that his influence is due to this mana. However, it is evident that his situation is due solely to the importance attributed to him by public opinion. Thus the moral power conferred by opinion and that with which sacred beings are invested are at bottom of a single origin and made up of the same elements. That is why a single word is able to designate the two.” (Durkheim:1982:213)

“Ninthly, they assure the same, by the power they ascribe to every priest, of making Christ; and by the power of ordaining penance; and of remitting, and retaining of sins.

Tenthly, by the doctrine of purgatory, of justification by external works, and of indulgences, the clergy is enriched.

Eleventhly, by their demonology, and the use of exorcism, and other things appertaining thereto, they keep, or think they keep, the people more in awe of their power.” (Hobbes:1651:454)

“For Max Weber, however, it was the issue of authority and how it came to be maintained in different societies that was of significance. Authority, he claimed, ‘will be called traditional if legitimacy is claimed for it and believed in by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules and powers’ (Roth and Wittich 1968: 226). He regarded this type of organized rule as the simplest, with the commands of the ruler being legitimized in two ways:

Partly in terms of traditions which themselves directly determine the content of the command and are believed to be valid

Partly in terms of the traditional prerogative which rests primarily on the fact that the obligations of personal obedience tend to be unlimited.

(ibid).” (Deegan:2009:12)

So tradition begins, as we see above, from a state of awe. Awe of Nature and its power at the very first but then the author of the story that connects his powers to it as queen, king or priest gains the right to wield power awe-thority, or more correctly, it is from this story that its author gains his author-ity. The etymology of these two words is dishearteningly revealing. Author comes from the word Auction, meaning an increase, because the sale is to the highest bidder, from the latin, augere, ‘to increase’. But Awe comes from the Greek ӓχος, meaning fear, anguish, affliction, derived from the Sanksrit word agha, meaning choking or most importantly for all of this… Sin! So a king’s author-ity is a story that causes fear, anguish, terror, and an increase in sin. As we shall constantly see this is the truth, but not aletheia. As we have already seen the truth goes to the highest bidder, who promises the most increase.

We have named then the power of the king as awe, this is the fluid-like blood that must now be given out to the kings subjects, as objects under His will. He must therefore speak (state) his power by stating the power of ‘us’. He must hand out his power to people and create some with more power and others with less and still others with none. In other words he must divide and conquer in accord with the demands and relevant supply of his power. He must allocate the varying degrees of pleasure and pain, experienced by the mice in their self-electrified cage of suffering with sympathy to those within his circle. This technique is known as status, that is to say to be told your amount of power within the state. In other words by increasing ones status one increases ones stature, and if one is a very successful individual then one may even be depicted as an Object of the State in the form of a statue, to convey for all time the state of you.

09: Status – Am I so much better than You: the God Daksha knows?

“What are the principles by which status is distributed? Why are military men applauded in one society, landed gentlemen in another?

At least four answers suggest themselves. A group may acquire status by being able to harm others physically, bullying and threatening a population to offer its respect. Or it may win status by being able to defend others, through strength, patronage or the command of foodstuffs. When safety is in short supply (ancient Sparta, Europe in the twelfth century), courageous fighters and knights on horseback will be celebrated. When a community craves nutrients only available from elusive animal flesh (the Amazon), it is the killers of jaguars who will earn respect and its symbol, the armadillo girdle. In countries where the livelihood of the majority depends on trade and high technology, entrepreneurs and scientists will be the targets of admiration (modern Europe and North America). The converse also holds true: a group which cannot provide a service to others will end up without status- the fate of muscular men in societies with secure borders or jaguar hunters in settled agricultural societies. …

As the determinants of high status keep altering, so too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety. In one group we may worry about our capacity to launch a spear into the flank of an animal, in another about our strength on the battlefield, in a third about our capacity for devotion to God, and in a fourth about our ability to wrest a profit from the capital markets.” (Botton:2004:190-1)

“For those left most anxious or embittered by the ideals of their own societies, the history of status, even when crudely sketched, cannot but reveal a basic and inspiring point: that ideals are not cast of stone. Status ideals have long been, and may again in the future be, subject to alteration. And the word we might use to describe this process of change is politics.

Through political battles, different groups will attempt to shape the honour system of their communities in order to win dignity for themselves in the face of opposition from those with a stake in a prior arrangement. Through a ballot box, a gun, a strike or sometimes a book, these different groups will strive to redirect their community’s notions of who is rightfully owed the privileges of a high-status position.” (Botton:2004:191-2)

“Among human beings, the quest for status is similarly built into the emotional system. The desire for recognition- of one’s own status and the status of one’s gods, country, ethnicity, nationality, ideas, and so forth- is the central driving force behind political life. The feeling of pride occurs when one is recognized as having the appropriate status, while anger results from inadequate recognition. These emotions are inherently social: when one feels anger at a lack of recognition, one does not want a material object outside the body; rather, one wants evidence of a mental state-recognition- on the part of another subjective consciousness. It is frequently the case that the passion of anger will lead human beings to do things that are manifestly not in their national or religious identity, getting into duels, engaging in retaliatory spirals of violence, or sitting in court for months on end until the murderer of one’s wife or son is brought to justice.” (Fukayama:1999:228)

Status then is a technique by which to distribute power in regards to the project, the venture, that the king wishes to increase in, ultimately of course to increase his power for his state.

With status then as an artery of power and authority, comes the necessity of showing the right to that authority. For example a police badge, or a judges wig. In ancient times this was done, and was continued up until just a few hundred years ago, by the allotment of colours. Purple was the highest of all the colours and could hence only been worn by the King and his closest family. Purple was unable to be obtained in the natural environment of many peoples, and so could only be acquired by trade with peoples whose land contained the seashells that made the dye. These people are known as the purple-people, and it is unknown what they actually called themselves because they are only recorded by the Greeks who named them the Phoenicians, meaning the ‘purple people’.

Therefore if ones garment was coloured purple then one was of very high status. But also purple conveyed the idea of kingship itself in relation to being-in-Being for purple comes from the word porpoise or dolphin (they were undifferentiated in the ancient world) i.e. literally a purple-fish of the Great Sea, of the Great Brown river of God. If we remember the story of the magic horse and the iron fish, then we can see just why it was a symbolic fish that was used in the story where its power was used for the people. The horse, as you will remember took us to the inner world of love of the Kingdom itself, and we see this today in our language. The warrior who fights most bravely for his country receives the purple heart to symbolise his high status at the centre of the State, and the prince of the French King is known as the Dauphin, meaning dolphin, as the next embodiment of this Great Spirit.

Status then and the subsequent status anxiety that comes with it results from the awe given to the King of kings

But status is the description of a place within the state it does not describe the experiencing of being-in-that-state-itself, of being Subject. At the bottom of the status pile of electrified mice lies a very anxious mouse who has given up and is pulling out its own fur rather than fight, he is the loser. But what are the words created to describe the inner world magically controlled by this story of status and this garment of purple?

10: Value: Come on Up the Price is Right

A status is a value given to an object framed by the purpose of the status-giver, in our case, a king or priest of a state of beings, a polis, who are all beings-for-itself. An individuals value then, and consequently ones status, flows from ones skills and their worth to that state and its surrounding environment. The more valued one is, the greater ones status increases, and hence power, and hence perspective of being an individual due to this importance or value. Importance means easy to bear in contrast to importune which means difficult to bear. In other words, one is valued and important if ones beliefs and behaviour increase the authority and power of the story-giver that names your value as subject, your relative importance in his state.

In a world of war and progress, or pillage and tribute, the value was given to the most valorous, a word meaning value, yet connoted with the idea of the warrior more than the merchant and his idea of value- capital as power for his will in worlding the world for his increase in pleasure and decrease in pain.

Value then underpins status, status is ‘under-stood’ by the value of the object to the state in regards to increasing its power. So the king must ‘redirect their community’s notions of who is rightfully owed the privileges of a high-status position.’, according to the state of the State. If a state is ‘at’ war in its progress, then value even changes its word to valour, but if it is ‘at’ peace in its progress and wishes to increase its power then trade by the merchant and the entrepreneur will be valued, and the word changes back to value or capital gains. What we are in fact witnessing is the change from social capital as valour to that of capital as value. Underlying these stories ‘truths’ is that of being-for-itself in either state as the ‘truer’ capital and underlying this is the urgrund of aletheia  and wakan.

Yet throughout the story of value comes the entire moral and ethical stance of that state, which the polis accept due to awe on the one hand and the power for-itself that this allows over an-other on the other, and the tradition that makes up its body. An-other who is Subject to this Object of power, the king, whose power you are apart of and possess a part of. An individual state within a higher State a super-state that values and its own gods, and invokes them through this Daksha as asuras and devas, whilst Daksha Himself becomes the protector of these values- that really are techniques of maintaining increase for all in the circle in a world of necessity, created by these values- Remember the story of the snake-charmer and the snake.

“Ontology itself can not formulate ethical precepts. It is concerned solely with what is, and we can not possibly derive imperatives from ontology’s indicatives. It does, however, allow us to catch a glimpse of what sort of ethics will assume its responsibilities when confronted with a human reality in situation. Ontology has revealed to us, in fact, the origin and the nature of value; we have seen that value is the lack in relation to which the for-itself determines its being as a lack. By the very fact that the for-itself exists, as we have seen, value arises to haunt its being-for-itself…Thus existential psychoanalysis is moral description, for it releases to us the ethical meaning of various human projects. It indicates to us the necessity of abandoning the psychology of interest along with any utilitarian interpretation of human conduct—by revealing to us the ideal meaning of all human attitudes. These meanings are beyond egoism and altruism, beyond also any behaviour which is called disinterested. Man makes himself man in order to be God, and selfness considered from this point of view can appear to be an egoism; but precisely because there is no common measure between human reality and the self-cause which it wants to be, one could just as well say that man loses himself in order that the self-cause may exist. We will consider then that all human existence is a passion, the famous self-interest being only one way freely chosen among others to realize this passion….

But ontology and existential psychoanalysis (or the spontaneous and empirical application which men have always made of these disciplines) must reveal to the moral agent that he is the being by whom values exist. It is then that his freedom will become conscious of itself and will reveal itself in anguish as the unique source of value and nothingness by which the world exists.” (Sartre:2003:645-7)

“Now we can ascertain more exactly what is the being of the self: it is value. Value is affected with the double character, which moralists have very inadequately explained, of both being, but this normative existent has no being precisely as reality. Its being is to be value; that is, not-to-be-being. Thus the being of value qua value is the being of what does not have being. Value then appears inapprehensible. To take it as being is to risk totally misunderstanding its unreality and to make of it, as sociologists do, a requirement of fact among other facts. In this case the contingency of being destroys value. But conversely if we look only at the ideality of values, we tend to deprive them of being, and then for lack of being, they dissolve. Of course, as Scheler has shown, I can achieve an intuition of values in terms of concrete exemplifications; I can grasp nobility in a noble act. But value thus apprehended is not given as existing on the same level of being as the act on which it confers value- in the way, for example, that the essence “red” is in relation to a particular red. Value is given as a beyond the acts confronted, as the limit, for example, of the infinite progression of noble acts. Value is beyond being. Yet if we are not to be taken in by fine words, we must recognize that this being which is beyond being possesses being in some way at least.

These considerations suffice to make us admit that human reality is that by which value comes to the world. But the meaning of the value lies in being that toward which a being surpasses its being; every value-oriented act is a wrenching away from its own being toward -. Since value is always and everywhere the beyond all surpassings of being. Thereby it makes a dyad with the reality which originally surpasses its being and by which surpassing comes into being- i.e., with human reality. We see also that since value is the unconditioned beyond of all surpassings, it must be originally the beyond of the very being which surpasses, for that is the only way in which value can be the original beyond of all possible surpassings. If every surpassing must be able to be surpassed, it is necessary that the being which surpasses should be a priori surpassed in so far, as it is the very source of surpassings. Thus value taken in its origin, or the supreme value, is the beyond and the for of transcendence. It is the beyond which surpasses and which provides the foundation for all my surpassings but toward which I can never surpass myself, precisely because my surpassings presuppose it.

In all cases of lack value is “the lacked”; it is not “the lacking.” Value is the self in so far as the self haunts the heart of the for-itself as that for which the for-itself is. The supreme value toward which consciousness at every instant surpasses itself by its very being is the absolute being of the self with its characteristics of identity, of purity, of permanence, etc., and as its own foundation. This is what enables us to conceive why value can simultaneously be and not be. It is as the meaning and the beyond of all surpassing of this being-in-itself, since value gives being to itself. It is beyond its own being since with the type of being of coincidence with self, it immediately surpasses this being, its permanence, its purity, its consistency, its identity, its silence, by reclaiming these qualities by virtue of presence to itself. And conversely if we start by considering it as presence to itself, this presence immediately is solidified, fixed in the in-itself. Moreover it is in its being the missing totality toward which a being makes itself be. It arises for a being, not as this being is what it is in full contingency, but as it is the foundation of its own nihilation. In this sense value haunts being as being founds itself but not as being is. Value haunts freedom. This means that the relation of value to the for-itself is very particular: it is the being which has to be in so far as it is the foundation of its nothingness of being. Yet while it has to be this being, this is not because it is under the pressure of an external constraint, nor because value, like the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, exercises over it an attraction of fact, nor is it because its being has been received; but it is because in its being it makes itself be as having to be this being. In a word the self, the for-itself, and their interrelation stand within the limits of an unconditioned freedom- in the sense that nothing makes value exist- unless it is that freedom which by the same stroke makes me myself exist- and also within the limits of concrete facticity- since as the foundation of its nothingness, the for-itself can not be the foundation of its being. There is then a total contingency of being-for-value (which will come up again in connection with morality to paralyze and relativize it) and at the same time a free and absolute necessity.

Value in its original upsurge is not posited by the for-itself; it is consubstantial with it- to such a degree that there is no consciousness which is not haunted by its value and that human-reality in the broad sense includes both the for-itself and value.” (Sartre:2003:117-19)

Value then is a measure of desire and desire is a lack of having that desire, that manifests as a project or venture by which this lack can be fulfilled and experienced as pleasure, rather than as the pain of lack. The thing decided upon to fill this lack, the object desired or nominated, then invents the project by which to do so within the being-for-itself, it becomes valued, and hence the whole World is valued in regards solely to its ability in achieving this venture and filling that lack, and ending pain and beginning a transitory pleasure, before lack once again is forced upon the being-for-itself by another object that it desires and hence lacks.

Fundamentally within a super-state of consciousness, whether they be a civilization or wakan, one must place oneself in that super-state in order to acquire any of the power needed in order to gain this desired state, and hence power itself becomes a thing desired, a valuable thing in-itself. Hence power becomes the urgrund of the for-itself. It becomes the place where he dwells, his state, represented by his status. Today we have States that are referred to in this light, as super-powers. Kindly also not that the word state has had to acquire a capital letter by necessity, just as being does, in order to describe this super-state of consciousness, of the ‘causal nexus’ or traditions of that belief system and its experiences through behaviour from this perspective.

In the outer world this status is shown by a badge, a garment colour, or a named object such as doctor, king, priest, magistrate, etc, but in the inner world of the heart where emotions rule this is not called status or value as it is not experienced in this way. The language term for this outer experience is that of Esteem.

11: A Relationship – How to Estimate One’s Relative Esteem

Value and esteem, just like space and time, are, like all things that don’t really exist, relative. That is to say they only come into existence by their opposite, by which we obtain a measure of them, in the form of a balance or harmony. Freedom is a relative term to unfreedom, equality to inequality, value to valueless, time to timelessness, inner to outer. Only God has no opposite and therefore cannot be perceived in a world of duality that value creates, or that creates value, which every way you would like to put it in a linear form of thought called language created by this same perspective.

“Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other…. The Lord confused the language of the whole world.” Genesis 11: vs 4-9

The state you are in then, the place you dwell from as your centre relates to this balance of opposites by which we create words to define them and their gradients or degrees to the whole which they delimit by their relative opposition to each other.

In physics space can be infinite or limited as can time, depending on its perceived state. For example, in a black-hole time and space cease to exist as separate experiences, and so if I exist in a black-hole then my state requires no language of space and time.

In like manner if I exist in being-in-Being then I require no language of value, worth, status, power, etc, as they do no exist in my experience, just as fraternity, equality and liberty do not need to be named as we have not experienced their opposites as family, status, and subjection.

When these experiences are named then their opposite comes to light, Epimetheus and Prometheus are brothers of the same conscious reality (housed in the body (the truth garment of Karma) as war and progress, supply and demand, hubris and nemesis, foresight and hindsight, etc. All of which have been created by the ideology of being-for-itself, that a World of abundance enabled humans to freely choose over being-in-Being in the Garden of Eden. Oh the Anguish! I mean, Oh the Awe!- of civilization.

What we have seen is that this inner world experience of value becomes manifest, that is to say becomes ‘done by the hand’ (manually from where we derive manifest) by creating garments of value in the form of status symbols such as purple robes and purple medals, crowns and ritual coronations, etc, etcetera.

Now status is not very good at being divided, and it only has a certain reasonable supply of positions to hand out to the people of the state. This is because status is a position of capital it is related to the chief, the capital, the head of the state as king, and so it has only so many limbs, by which it can manoeuvre (again from the word manual). You can only exist in one state, in one place, and there is a limit to the height of status one can achieve. There can be only so many chiefs before there are too few Indians. The State of Daksha of Ham is the state of finity of limit, and hence of lack.

Esteem however is social capital and hence is infinite. One can be esteemed above ones status, one can be esteemed despite of one’s status, and one can even be esteemed by denying an increase in status. This is because esteem relates to ones own purpose being achieved regardless of its relationship to the state. Esteem means to value, but it is also linked to aisos the Sabine word for prayer, and the Sanskrit word ish, meaning to desire. The Hebraic names for Adam, Eve and the Apple were respectively, Ish, Ishah and Ishon, denoting this desire for knowledge from the tree of Good and Evil, the tree of value for the being-for-itself, that we saw them become in their garments of skin.

One can be esteemed in a society therefore by achieving ones own individual aim without achieving a status within that societies esteemed aims. Peoples projects coming from their inner worlds into the worlds are therefore infinite and so therefore is esteem. One is esteemed when your knowledge corresponds to that of an-others value system. Power is not hierarchisized i.e. given a status by the super-state, it is individually given. We will see that kings don’t like this but priests do for this exact same reason.

However what is true of esteem as with status is that people like to show in a physical way to others that they are esteemed, especially when it comes to status, and directly this means power. In other words they become vain. Vanity comes from the Latin, uanitas, meaning emptiness, and here refers us back to the feeling of lack that value has its urgrund. Esteem fills the emptiness, and that experience is called vanity. If we remember Sartre’s commentary on ‘The Look’ and how it limited ones freedom then we must now imagine a look given to someone not wearing purple to someone who is. How is the freedom of each empowered and disempowered relatively? Who becomes subject and who object? Who has more power to attain their objective and who becomes subjected to those aims? Who therefore is likely to gain the esteem from having gained the object of possession and hence possessed by the esteem it brings?

Therefore power, status, esteem and awe became a part of the physical signs of civilized life in the outer world, through language and also through manifestation, that is to say through, ‘works of the hand’- manually by Others-subject to the will of the rulers, i.e. ‘Oy! Make me a purple garment or one of many colours as a technique by which to show my status, power, esteem, etc.’. In the bible Joseph wears a coat of many colours (a rainbow) to denote his State of Being, a super-state that allows him to understand dreamtime!

In the next chapter we will look at this same idea manifesting itself in the form of art and the Greeks, but for now I wish to look at another manifestation, or incarnation of this inner world of value and its relationship to esteem, and that is money.

12: The Right Royal Magical Measure of Esteem – Money- the Magical Spirit of Power Manifest

Money did not begin as bits of shiny metal, but instead as shells. What was special about the shells, as was special about the shiny bits of metal that came to replace them was that the shells used, ‘dentalium shells’, were not found within the local territory and so were not easily attainable. Therefore they could be controlled in regards to their quantity, and this total quantity could then be used as a measuring system of the value of an Object. Obviously, in trade this would mean how many shells a pot was worth or a goat in comparison to this whole collection of shells, but in terms of status it would mean how much tribute one must pay to the State.

In other words shells became a physical way of measuring social capital as well as capital and of making these two inner and outer worlds relate to each other visibly, i.e. to reveal the amount of power one possessed through ones behaviour depending upon what each being may have. With this simple manifestation of the invisible power of value and lack, now perceived as shells, the ontological consciousness of the being-for-itself created ways of revealing this power by wearing it as jewellery, in the same way as people of status wore purple robes:

“Whether such jewellery was worn in life as well as in death remains unclear. The most elaborate jewellery adorned young adults, both men and women- although rather more men than women were buried. It may have denoted social identity, perhaps indicating wealth and power. Much of the jewellery was made from dentalium shells, which could have been gathered from the Mediterranean coast by the Natufian people themselves. But Donald Henry, an archaeologist from the University of Tulsa, USA, who has undertaken extensive studies in southern Jordan, suggests another possibility. He thinks that the shells may have been acquired from hunter-gatherers living in the open steppe of today’s Negev desert in return for cereals, nuts and meat.

For the Natufians, it may well have been control of this trading relationship that provided individuals with wealth and power- and the key to maintaining these may have been to ensure that limited shells were in circulation within their village. The most effective way of doing that was the regular removal of large quantities by burying them with the dead. Those graves were like our gold-filled bank vaults today, designed to ensure that the small amount remaining in circulation- whether of gold or seashells- maintains its value so that it confers status or prestige on the few that have some to own.” (Mithen:2003:33)

What therefore is money, whether in shells or in shiny metal or paper notes?

Money is ‘a Measure of Value in Exchange’ without any further meaning. It is a finite Capital that can be used to employ infinite social capital towards that which it values, by being exchanged for another persons handi-work, to manifest what you will (desire- value) over what it is they will and would have manifested themselves if they had the power to do so. In other words, a goat is property because it has value to its owner in milk, skin, meat, companionship perhaps, etc., it depends on the desires and hence will of the owner. But a goat becomes capital when the owner sees more value in exchanging it for something that he values more, whatever that may be.

But one goat can only be exchanged for two thousand ears of corn from the farmer, or fifty pots from the potter, or a quarter of a horse from the stables. When what you desire is five hundred ears of corn from the farmer, one pot from the potter, and a horse for a quarter of the year from the stables, in order to plough your field and then help harvest your crop.

In like manner, what the farmer, potter, and stable owner wanted was not a goat but a whole host of other things, so they didn’t really want to trade anyway because then they would have to go through the time wasted in haggling for those things with a goat as the ‘measure of value in exchange’, which they would have to have fed in the meantime, rather than just make more pots or tend the horses or fields, hence constantly deflating its exchange value.

To answer this quandary then, money was invented as a means of holding the value of your capital- your goat- so that it could be saved without feeding it and then exchanged later on.  A goat becomes twenty dentalium shells, five of which go to the farmer, two to the potter, three to the stables, and I am still left with two dentalium shells to exchange at another time.

Money then, enabled the techniques of desire, that is to say, of trade and tribute, of war and settling more villages to become greatly empowered by the new found ability to store power itself and possess it. This could be stored as finite capital in the form of money, or in social capital in the form of a standing army of physical power manifest. Or it could be used in exchange for a position of status in the state, and hence converted into another form of capital, or into objects of general esteem such as jewellery that are infinite in their social capital when seen by ‘the look’ of others who then becomes subject-others immediately in their dance.

The reason for gold and silver, usurping dentalium shells over time are three fold. The first is that gold is rarer than dentalium shells and so it cannot be as easily introduced into the whole (the Urgrund of money as a value system), and change the ‘balance of power’ and this therefore increased the power of control of this man-made harmony of rule to the ruler. Any change to the whole collection of gold that measured the value of each coin to the power it had in exchange meant that goods became more expensive, reflecting this increase in the overall stock of gold. We call this inflation, as more gold chases the same amount of goods. Therefore the increase of gold for the State is greater power outside of it, but no increase of power within-it. Whilst for the individuals within it, literally ‘pay the price’ for inflation, by losing power to exchange in the gold that they possess, whether or not they exchange that value or not. An increase in gold for the State therefore means a decrease in the power of the being-for-itself to create desertification so quickly, and is a useful power to have when that is your true ontological necessary role.

The second reason for gold being used as coinage is that it is not only rare, as with shells or stones, but that even when it is discovered it is very hard to obtain, as you have to dig it out of a lot of stone just to get your hands on a tiny piece. The only person who could therefore manoeuvre such a group of peoples to mine for gold, rather than trade for shells, was someone with a lot of peoples under their will, the kings and priests. By telling their peoples to mine gold they were in effect storing the labour power used in the mining of the gold in order to exchange this power at a later date in order to increase their power further still or maintain their power in times of hardship. Gold does not increase but dentalium shells, made by living dentalium do and so each year of storing dentalium shells would mean you were losing power as there would be ever greater shells for other kings to gather, but gold remains constant in its value as the world only has so much from the start, it is therefore a constant, though unknown, measure. Yes more may be discovered, but it is always, in reality a finite amount. It requires the explosion of a massive star to create gold in its dying moments, and so is impossible to produce rather than farming dentalium as no doubt we would be doing if shells were still the nomina to the numina of ‘value in exchange’ or ‘desire’ or ‘money’ as we may truly call it from different perspectives.

The third reason is esteem, power, and awe-thority.  Gold is a garment, just like a flag, that can be stamped with the Kings head (capital). A state-ment that possesses moneys very power as ‘value in exchange’ can therefore be possessed by the king in a super-state above that of its physical power to whoever possesses it. It is already possessed in spirit by the king. Its power in your hand, its power manifest is in fact possessed by the king not its owner.*

*Today we see this in the dollar bill whose power is possessed by God above a golden mountain manifest by human hands- the pyramid of power that produced and stored this value in the mining of the gold by the labour of its people. Above this are the words, ‘In God we Trust’, but that God is that God Daksha, the God of civilization, not the God of Being. In self-interest we trust is in fact what America is founded on, as we shall see in more detail later.

Gold therefore represents not only a set value system but can convert labour into pure value without any other immediate use

Value can be exchanged for power but that power does not have to be exchanged for value it can remain indefinitely as power, until such a time as something of value to its possessor comes along. In other words, power can be saved, it can be protected, and hence so can ones esteem and usually status. Money is the next ‘small insurance policy’ necessitated by the worlding of the being-for-itself settler, as his desires increase and his gods become ever more powerful. Mammon, the god of money, therefore enters as yet another trap enticingly named as safety, protection, but in reality a physical manifestation of the settlers inner world of desire and lack.

It can also however employ labour without having to have any social capital or the lack of freedom that comes from social capital. A person, or indeed family can be simply used for their skills and labour, without any further social reciprocity than payment of money. You do not expect someone to ask you to fight for them simply because you bought some of their bread last week, but you would expect a family member to do so no matter the amount of bread they had or hadn’t eaten.

On top of this however, now that value has magically become separate from a natural object, such as a goat, people could be paid for their value as a name, i.e., as an administrator or warrior, or farmer, or priest, etc, etcetera, depending upon the techniques used to increase the cohesive power of the group that increased the power base.  Therefore skills that were valued became commodities themselves, the inner world of esteem became the outer world of value in exchange. One could sell ones inner wealth in exchange for outer wealth, and social capital had nothing to do with it. You could divide peoples talents from their inner landscape as you divide labour in the outer landscape. You could measure the value of an-others inner world towards increasing your value in the outer world by their capital.  If they were talented an wealthy then they obviously were increasing the whole for the circle, and so being within that circle you must gain. This is why entrepreneurs are worshipped as they pull up to five star hotels in their Ferrari. This truth is so explicit in the ancient world that the word for money was a ‘talent’. Talent means ‘ability’ but also means, to be weighed and lifted or balanced. In other words, in the outer world, the metal coin called the talent weighed the value in exchange of your inner world talent against the power to lift the state towards a greater power in the  world by which to venture its worlding upon. It was weighed in that balance. You are judged by Daksha, and subjected to his value system.

The ‘value in exchange’ of the peoples labour used in extracting the gold was, by the Nature of its rarity and difficulty of acquisition, held in time, without depleting in value and power. This system of value was in fact, so efficient and stable that it remained the urgrund of civilization and economics up until 1971 when we America finally abandoned the gold standard, as we shall see. That’s nearly 5,000 years of a stable system of value that controlled inflation naturally. I wonder how man will do it- manifest it- by necessity- once this system is dropped? We will see… and It’s horrendous.

Money, therefore, is not the root of all evil, it is simply a measure of value in exchange, that evil or good may use to increase its-self, and have the power to name it good or evil relatively to that perspective.  It is a measuring tape upon the river of civilization that starts at 0, meaning losing the  fight for survival and being thrown in,  and proceeds ever forward into charting the heights of self-esteem, and it’s consequent self-assertion of will, whether that be, of a nations or of an individuals, or of a families, etc.

Money today, no longer containing the actual gold upon which this value is measured is no longer worth anything

In this context money is a covenant of trust, based upon the aletheia of ‘self-interest’ that has a tradition of reciprocity behind it backed by the authority of those who wish to maintain that belief. I’m one of them because I don’t want a goat, and I don’t want to drag it around my local town and beyond in order to find someone who does.

Money, being so exchangeable can be exchanged both for status (power in the worlding of the state) and for esteem (power in ones own worlding) and therefore serves as a bridge of power between the inner and outer world of the being-for-itself, and so we display it not just in objects that we possess (and hence are the source of our esteem and hence possess us) but also in practices such as gambling, or charity, luxury, opulence, holidays, exclusive memberships, luxuries, etc, etcetera.

“Humans, too, advertise their sexual fitness. They do it by competing for esteem. Businesspeople, for example, advertise their fitness by making money, not for its own sake but as a route to esteem. Aristotle Onasis said, ‘if women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning’. The evidence that money is actually only a route to esteem has been shown by testing people in psychology laboratories. The Harvard scientist Terence Burnham reported that when subjects are offered small sums of money, they accept them- unless they see others being offered more. Then they reject the original small sums. People are not formally rational Homo economocii, they are not interested in absolute wealth, they are interested only in relative wealth- esteem.” (Kealey:2008:308)

“Perhaps the most convincing evidence that what economic life is all about concerns status rather than wealth is the fact that pollsters have found in repeated surveys that people judge themselves to be happier the richer they are in relation to other people. That is, people in the top 20 percent of the income distribution consider themselves to be happier than those in the next quintile, and so on down to the bottom fifth, who judge themselves the least happy. While this might appear to prove that money buys happiness, Frank points out that this has always been true, going back to the first surveys in the 1940s, when the richest fifth were no better off in terms of absolute wealth than, say, the middle fifth in the 1990s. Moreover, people at the top of the income distribution in very poor countries, who might barely qualify as middle class in the United States, also consider themselves the happiest. All of this suggests that happiness is linked not to absolute but to relative income, and that the satisfaction that money brings is related, as Smith indicates, to the degree that the rich can “glory” in their riches.

Once human beings seek status rather than ordinary goods, they become engaged in a zero-sum rather than a positive-sum game. That is, high status is achievable only at the expense of someone else. In zero-sum competitions, many of the traditional remedies of neoclassical economics like unregulated market competition no longer work. Status competitions frequently lead to deadweight losses in social utility, as the competing parties seek to outbid each other. To keep up with the Joneses next door, you buy a fancy BMW; they retaliate by buying a Rolls Royce. Your relative position has not changed, but two luxury car companies have captured a significant part of your wealth and that of the Joneses. In such situations, it is often better either to agree not to compete (as in an arms control agreement, which seeks to resolve a similar zero-sum game) or to have a third-party arbiter limit the degree of competition.

Imagining a flat, networked, non-hierarchical world of the future is tantamount to imagining, a world without politics. This particular libertarian dream- shared, incidentally, by many human rights activists in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall- is no more realistic than the socialist dream in which politics becomes everything, or the radical feminist dream in which men somehow cease being men. Each generation may seek to redefine the line that separates politics from civil society and the market. In our generation, the line has been shifted away from government. Functions that were earlier defined as political have been given back to civil society or the market through privatization and deregulation. Similarly, on a corporate level, power and authority have been devolved, decentralized, outsourced, and divided. But the line itself separating the political from the social will never disappear: social order, whether on a society-wide or an organization-wide level, will always derive from a mixture of hierarchical and spontaneous sources.” (Fukayama:1999:229-30)

From the above quotes we can see that money is linked to esteem once the basic necessities of life have been accrued, and that esteem is infinite in potential but finite in regards to capital goods. We also see that it is a zero-sum game of relative esteem being played out throughout history, meaning that it brings no actual progress to any state, only further competition, it brings no actual happiness to any individual consciousness only comparative happiness relative to the Others within the collective consciousness. It is to receive pleasure from many-others relative and comparable pain. Lovely Lovely Civilization.

13: The Grasshopper becomes the Locust and the Locust become the Dancing Pigeons – Pleasure and Pain for-itself

What I wish to do now is to show how esteem, power, and status, become transformed into a hierarchical system of civilization, by necessity before reason can rear its unreasonable head, and explain it all reasonably, as we have just done in the last few chapters. I wish to show in greater detail that the abundance provided by God in the garden of Eden allowed the nature of the being-for-itself to arise and claim predominance. Not that the being-in-Being was some pure God spirit, but that it contained the nature of being-for-itself, innately, and intimately throughout all of the existence of homo sapien sapien- the scientific name of our cave-man. It was only when abundance came into being that this survival mechanism for the body, or eating enough for oneself, and keeping warm and safe from predation, became the centre upon which the self acted from, because it could for the first time in its history. The previous 40,000 years being an ice age.

This perspective is one that is experienced, as we have seen, in regards to pleasure and pain, framed by the words, ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘have’ and ‘have not’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

That is to say that I wish to prove that without any kind of reason or planning by the ruler or the peoples, our nature actually physically changed in such a manner that it became impossible for the settler to be in the Garden of Eden and to see through the veil that he created in order to see God walking with him. Could it be that Nature has created other creatures that undergo such a physical transformation, and that this changes there nature in the same way that we have seen it change ours? Could this aletheia be a deeper truth than that which reason could have supplied, but that experience shows us to be true and that reason once understood still deny us the experience that we will reasonably see it denies us?

To answer this we must firstly look at the Locust. The Locust is an usual insect as it is not given birth to by Nature but is created by itself. The Locust is in fact born as a grasshopper but under certain conditions it metamorphoses into a Locust, just as a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly. Unlike the caterpillar however, this transformation is not triggered by an inner trigger but by the outer world itself, just as we have seen the outer world change from that of an ice age to that of abundance and how that changed us. What therefore are those outer situations that change the grasshopper into a locust and how does it change that nature and the subsequent behaviour of the creature.

The grasshopper, is a not very social insect, and likes to hunt and gather its food alone, but when food becomes scarce then all the grasshoppers find themselves, by necessity, clustering together in the last few pockets of grass. This causes them to rub their bodies together as they feed, and it is this rubbing of their bodies together, that changes the grasshopper from a solitary creature into the social one, the locust.

The actual cause of this change has been isolated by scientists who have discovered that, upon stroking a grasshoppers back legs for around two hours regardless of the amount of other grasshoppers or food around it, will instigate the same metamorphoses. This rubbing behaviour produces a change in just one single cell of the brain of the grasshopper, but this single cell is responsible for producing the drug serotonin.

Serotonin is a neuro-transmitter that changes the chemical balance in the brain, and from its production the entire cellular make-up of the grasshopper harmoniously changes it to that of the locust in its physiology, and changes its behaviour into a social animal ontologically.

Humans produce serotonin also naturally. So what exactly is the experience that we have most attributed to serotonin and what do doctors use it to treat today? Well serotonin is the drug that science uses today to help people who have low self-esteem, are depressed, or anxious. In other words people who have no power, no status and no money, or who have these but are anxious of losing them (in awe of their power to provide their urgrund of happiness). It is also the drug used in making ecstasy in order to feel ‘ecstasy’, particularly when we swarm together at raves and rub bodies together in a dance. So it is serotonin that balances our inner world experience of pleasure and pain, of lack and fulfilment, of loss and gain, or powerful or powerless, that in the outer world are stimulated by our social behaviour in how they denote the relative balance of status, wealth, and esteem in a group.

“Today, Prozac and its relatives have been taken by some 28 million Americans, or 10 percent of the entire population. Because more women than men suffer from depression and low self-esteem, it has also become something of a feminist icon.” (Fukuyama:2002:43)

“Ginger Ross Breggin’s Talking Back to Prozac and Joseph Glenmullen’s Prozac Backlash, which argue that Prozac has a host of side effects that is manufacturer has tried to cover up. These critics have argued that Prozac is responsible for weight gain, disfiguring tics, memory loss, sexual dysfunction, suicide, violence, and brain damage*.

It may well be that in time, Prozac will go the way of the antipsychotic Thorazine and will no longer be regarded as a wonder drug because of long-term side effects that were poorly understood when it was first introduced. But the more difficult political and moral problem will occur if Prozac is found to be completely safe and if it, or similar drugs yet to be discovered, work just as advertised. For Prozac is said to affect that most central of political emotions, the feeling of self-worth, or self-esteem….

Most political theorists have recognised the centrality of recognition and the way that it is particularly crucial to politics. A prince fighting another prince doesn’t need the land or money; he usually has more than he knows what to do with. What he wants is recognition of his dominion or sovereignty, the acknowledgement that he is king of kings. The demand for recognition frequently trumps economic interest: new nations like Ukraine and Slovakia might have been better off remaining parts of larger countries, but what they sought was not economic welfare but their own flag and seat at the United Nations. It is for this reason that the philosopher Hegel believed that the historical process was fundamentally driven by the struggle for recognition, beginning with a primordial “bloody battle” between two contestants for who would be master and who would be slave, and ending in the emergence of modern democracy, in which all citizens were recognized as being free and worthy of equal recognition….

The human struggle for recognition is, of course, infinitely more complex than what takes place among animals. Human beings, with their memory, learning, and enormous capacity for abstract reasoning, are able to direct the struggle for recognition to ideologies, religious beliefs, tenure at universities, Nobel Prizes, and myriad other honours. What is significant, however, is that the desire for recognition has a biological basis and that that basis is related to levels of serotonin in the brain. It has been shown that monkeys at the low end of the dominance hierarchy have low levels of serotonin and that, conversely, when a monkey wins alpha male status, he feels a “serotonin high”.

It is for this reason that a drug like Prozac looks so politically consequential. Hegel argues, with some justice, that the entire human historical process has been driven by a series of repeated struggles for recognition. Virtually all human progress has been the by-product of the fact that people were never satisfied with the recognition they received; it was through struggle and work alone that people could achieve it. Status, in other words, had to be earned, whether by kings and princes, or by your cousin Mel, seeking to rise to the rank of shop-foreman. The normal, and morally acceptable, way of overcoming low self-esteem was to struggle with oneself and with others, to work hard, to endure sometimes painful sacrifices, and finally to rise and be seen as having done so. The problem with self-esteem as it is understood in American pop psychology is that it becomes an entitlement, something everyone needs to have whether it is deserved or not. This devalues self-esteem and makes the quest for it self-defeating.

But now along comes the American pharmaceutical industry, which though drugs like Zoloft and Prozac can provide self-esteem in a bottle by elevating brain serotonin.” (Fukuyama:2002:44-46)

*Is it any wonder that the side-effects of Prozac, or creating an inbalance between the state of ones inner world to the reality of ones outer world are: weight gain, disfiguring tics, memory loss, sexual dysfunction, suicide, violence, and brain damage. When your talents are out weighed by your feeling of happiness about them in comparison to your experience, when your dance of joy becomes disfigured by its reflected reality, when you view of yourself becomes twisted and cannot be remembered with reality, when your desires feel fulfilled without being so, when hope is replaced by a pill, when the outer world will not conform to the inner world, and when the self cannot assimilate the truth, respectively to each of these above symptoms caused by this effect.

What happens to a grasshoppers nature then when it becomes full of serotonin?

Well two things are pertinent. The first is that the locust becomes a social animal and will cluster together into massive swarms. The second is that these social groups become swarms that then create deserts wherever they go, as they deplete the food source unto a scarcity, whereupon they then divide and become singular once again. Upon this division, and resumption of a solitary lifestyle their serotonin level falls and they moult their locust skin, and become grasshoppers once again, and Nature once again become abundant consequently.

In other words they are the perfect biological analogy of being-in-Being becoming being-for-itself and the exact consequences that we have seen in settler life- desertification caused by the rubbing together of people in a defined territory, i.e. a social group, a society.

Pleasure and pain then, or serotonin or not serotonin, as we may call it therefore produces a desire for more serotonin that is addictive, and painful when not produced. It is the energy of the Sun that produces serotonin in us naturally but it is our social life that produces it unnaturally in our garments of skin. By rubbing together, for whatever reason, or lack of reason, we produce serotonin, and change our selves. We then apply that feeling of happiness to the behaviour or object that stimulated it and desire it, and feel a lack without it, and value it, and esteem it, etc. From their we imagine how we can achieve this stimulation again and plan a venture of willed behaviour once we have reasoned out our plan.

In order to bridge the gap between the locust and ourselves further before we proceed I wish to address the differences between these two creatures of Nature, by looking at some creatures that share with humans what we do not share with locusts, namely intelligence.

Let us therefore look at other creatures that exist that have the power of imagination and see if their world reflects that of the locust and that of the human-being also. Chris Packham, a natural biologist, has made a wonderful three part series called ‘Inside the Animal Mind’, for the BBC that outlines all of this beautifully, and I invite you to view them, for further elucidation that can be given here.

In this series he looks at how the senses of animals help them to perceive the world differently and then how the cleverest animals that exist on the planet use these perceptions to form their world and their subsequent behaviour. How does ‘cleverness’ interact with this inner sense perception, and the outer world?

Cleverness or intelligence, holds the key to five types of thinking in time, that allow us to see the world as past, present, future. These are:1. Cause and Effect. 2. Flexible thinking. 3. Imagination. 4. Mental Time Travel. 5. Reason. This has been shown only in monkeys, humans, the parrots and the Corbyds the crow family, all who live in social groups, are hunters and are hunted, and eat a wide variety of foods. Crows have been shown to even have a culture, meaning that it passes on the skills of making different tools (‘the imposition of a three dimensional form on to a natural object’) humans have only been able to do for the last 100- 200,000 years, that it has invented. Inside the Animal Mind- BBC 2

By thinking of ourselves and how we can control the world towards that goal we give birth to reason

Chris Packham, “When we look at the worlds cleverest creatures, we see a group of very different animals, The Great Apes, the Corbyds, the Parrots, and yet they all think a little bit like we do. They have the ability to understand, cause and effect, and they can utilise this understanding in new and novel situations. They can also implement, imagination, and this allows them to think ahead, to plan in the future. Now together these abilities allow them something which is incredibly rare in the animal world. It’s the power to reason, the power to solve problems.

Now of course it is also raises another question. What’s so special about this group of animals, what could they possibly have in common?”

Intelligence is the key requirement that changed the ontological perspective and behaviour of the hunter-gatherer into the ontological perspective and behaviour of the settler. To return once more to ‘the small insurance policy’ that some hunter-gatherers began to take. It was this ability of intelligence that was able to perceive a world of 1. Cause and effect that perceived the seasons and their effect on the crops, 2. to use flexible thinking to. 3. Imagine a time of lack, in this .4. Future time and hence to 5. Reason a behaviour, that of ‘a small insurance policy’ by which to allay this reasonable fear. The ontological perspective of the individual as the centre of the world and not the world, caused a lack, a fear, an imagined necessity, that produced the ‘reason’ for the safe action of spreading a few seeds of grain. A being-for-itself by changing its perspective changed the use of its imagination towards reason. We are told, in Genesis, that we are made in God’s image, but with the being-for-itself it makes itself in its image- in its imagination and makes the world accordingly.

Let us hear from David Malone in his excellent film: ,Metamorphosis- the science of change,, and his thoughts from the lesson of the locust and the grasshopper in regards to how mankind is also changed by its own type of metamorphoses, a metamorphoses you will recognise as being that of the being-in-Being to the being-for-itself, one of unreasonable reason:

“Maybe evolution has found a way for complicated creatures like us to be able to pull of this trick [metamorphoses] of changing radically, perhaps we just don’t do it physically.

If a caterpillar wishes to fly, it must grow wings and become a butterfly. If we wish to fly we do not need to change our bodies, we invent an aircraft. I believe it is through our minds that we metamorphose, this is how we change our way of life.

You see to my mind, how we transform ourselves is a radical version of what the locust does. We both transform our behaviour. Of course the key difference is, ‘We are the authors’ of our transformation.

We invent technologies that force us to live in new ways. We have ideas that radically alter society. We dream a better version of ourselves. Change conceived in our mind that drives our history.

And once those changes are set in motion, they become bigger than any of us individually, they get a hold of us, they can overwhelm us, and surely that is metamorphoses.

And this is what Kafka was pointing to in his story. How collectively, we shape the society in which we live, but then that same society forces change back upon us as individuals.

I believe that we metamorphose not just metaphorically but in the truest, broadest, sense of the word. But I think that there will always be that part of us that fights against it. For in one fundamental way our metamorphosis remains very different to that of the caterpillar or the tadpole.

Think of a soldier, someone who’s been living in a world of killing and mayhem, who then comes back to a civilian life where nothing is the same. Now that to me is as profound a metamorphosis as a caterpillar into a butterfly. But of course, the critical difference is that there is no butterfly that looks back with remorse to the caterpillar it used to be, but we do, we remember, we can’t help but look back and remember the creature we used to be, and regret what we might have lost.

And this for us, is the great irony at the heart of metamorphoses. The same part of us in which metamorphoses is realised- our mind- is the same part of us that fears it most.”

BBC4 – Metamorphosis: The Science of Change (2013).

“So we’re really the only creatures who were gifted with metamorphoses but were the only ones who can see its darker side?”

“It seems to me that much of our change is self-driven and we seek out change actively, we don’t really suffer it, it doesn’t just happen. It isn’t enacted organically through our bodies. We are the one creature that can redefine the nature of life. We are not constrained by biological prescription. We are not like caterpillars that is, as it were, committed or fated or condemned to become butterflies, we could become anything.”

“I think one of the things that has come out of this film for me, is that when we started off with caterpillars and butterflies, tadpoles and frogs, metamorphosis seemed so clear cut. Nature had invented this very clear thing, where you were one thing and then you were an-other. It was very clear and very simple, and yet when you then apply it to us, it’s as if all that clarity disappears and we are so ambivalent about it. It’s the thing which we’ve argued is so important to who we are, both individually and as a species, and yet, we’re not happy with it. It’s as if a butterfly was afraid of flying! Here we are, the most changeable, the most metamorphical creatures and we’re so troubled by it, but maybe that’s, that’s what being human is about.”

(David Malone: BBC film: Metamorphoses – the science of change)

In the above thoughts of David Malone, we see the idea of Pandoras box once again, ‘We are the authors’ of our transformation. This is the fire that Prometheus stole, but we are chained in our progress by the past, by looking back at what we once were, by our thrownness, ‘How collectively, we shape the society in which we live, but then that same society forces change back upon us as individuals’.- Durkheims definition of God.

Unlike the grasshopper, it is ourselves, and not nature that transformed our nature. We are the authors of authority and will sell it to the highest bidder out of self-interest at an Auction once reason takes over from the true root of authority, as we shall see.

14: Prozac: It’s a kind of Magic – Bring on the Witch Doctors

Before we move on to look at how these locust metamorphose into dancing pigeons I wish to delve one step deeper into this ontological change as defined and  now proven scientifically by our chemical make-up in the form of the Object, ‘serotonin’.

What happens then in human-beings to cause the production of serotonin in the first place? Is it just the rubbing up against each other of a social sexual life, as the grasshoppers rubbed legs, or is it more than that? Is it in fact society itself, that causes this production of serotonin, and hence hooks us to society, and if it is then surely society can produce serotonin- magically i.e. through an invisible force- and we should have evidence of this happening in all societies?

To understand how society could produce serotonin without physical rubbing against each other but instead through status, esteem, and wealth, we must return once again to magic. That is to say, we must try and witness an invisible force that pervades our World, and changes us by its power. We have seen the visible force- rubbing- produce serotonin, and we have seen serotonin produce more rubbing, as the grasshopper becomes more social, but we have not yet seen the invisible super-state of society, being able to produce serotonin, as intelligence should allow.

As we saw in chapter one, such things as reincarnation, remote viewing and Out of Body invisible experiences, have been proven to exist by science, but are not yet accepted in our modern world view. These things are of course difficult to believe out-right without having some experience ones-self but what we are about to learn about is the fact that science can’t explain its own self when it comes to making a pill that produces serotonin in the consumer, or even explain how laser heart surgery works, or how it works just as well as not having laser surgery. I hasten to add that the information below, as with that of the reincarnation, etc, above, is the tip of an ice-berg of such facts, that the remit of this book does not allow us to go into, but that my next book will (i.e. I know way more than I can say right now, but believe me a bit more than the below will give you credence to do so):

“Surgeons who practise laser surgery don’t have to rely on their own experiences to support their confidence in it. By the late 1990s a number of large-scale trials had been carried out involving patients with serious heart conditions (the term often used is ‘end-stage’ conditions). The results were remarkable, with success rates in the range of seventy-five to ninety per cent, comparing very favourably with more established heart surgery procedures.

There is only one problem with this wonder treatment: no-one quite knows how it works

The theory behind it is plausible, and the results are undeniable. But the blood-lines close up within hours of being opened, and there is no evidence that the blood flow to the heart muscle actually increases.

Dr Martin Leon, a professor of medicine at Columbia University in New York, is one of the world’s leading cardiologists. He knew that laser heart surgery had performed well in tests versus other treatments. But it hadn’t he noted, been tested against no treatment at all. In 2005, Leon oversaw a study of three hundred patients, in their fifties and sixties, with heart conditions. They were very sick: most had previously undergone heart surgery at least once, and all were suffering from continuing problems. The patients were divided into three groups: high-dose (twenty to twenty-five laser punctures), low-dose (ten to fifteen), and a mock procedure that merely simulated laser treatment; the patients were shown the machine and had its workings explained. Then they were heavily sedated, blindfolded, and played music to create an effect of ‘sensory isolation’. When they awoke, those who had had the fictional surgery were told it had gone well.

Twelve months later, and most of the patients who had undergone actual laser surgery were in much better shape. They revelled in a rediscovered capacity for physical exercise. They reported that their heart pains had receded and that they were feeling healthier and fitter than they had done in years. A battery of objective tests showed they weren’t making this up. But the strange thing was that patients in the third group- the sham group- were also rejuvenated. Despite not having had any surgery, or any physical treatment at all, they too felt years younger and full of beans, and the frequency of their angina pains declined. In fact, in terms of the effects on patients, there was no significant difference between all three treatments.

It would appear that you can enjoy the amazing benefits of laser heart surgery without once coming into contact with a laser.” (Leslie:2011:241-2)

“Placebo is Latin for ‘I will please’….Today’s medical establishment was  founded on a hard-won separation between science and superstition, a distinction closely related to that between physical and mental phenomena, which the so-called placebo effect seems to resist. In the words of Edzard Ernst, a professor of medicine at Exeter University, placebo effects are the ‘ghosts that haunt the house of scientific objectivity.’” (Leslie:2011:242-3)

“Henry Beecher was among those who landed in Italy that day. Beecher wasn’t a soldier. He was a doctor and a Harvard professor of medicine who volunteered to join his country’s war effort. He specialised in the science of pain relief. In a makeshift hospital on the beach he tended to wounded American soldiers awaiting evacuation to the safety of Allied territory. Medical supplies were limited, however, and on days when casualties were particularly heavy, the demand for painkillers would outstrip supply. One day, a soldier with particularly horrific injuries arrived just as the morphine ran out. Beecher worried that without it the operation required would be so unbearably painful it might induce cardiovascular shock. But he could see no other option. In desperation, one of the nurses injected the soldier with diluted sea water, allowing him to think it was an anaesthetic.

What Beecher observed next changed his view of medicine forever

The patient, who had been in agony, settled down immediately following his injection, reacting in exactly the same way Beecher had observed previous patients respond to morphine. During the operation his patient seemed to feel very little pain, and displayed no symptoms of full-blown shock. Beecher was amazed. The nurse’s benign deception had worked as effectively as one of the most powerful painkillers in the medical arsenal. In the following months, as the battle raged on, Beecher and his team repeated the trick whenever morphine supplies were exhausted. It worked again and again….

Beecher forced the medical world to confront what it had long tacitly recognised but hadn’t, until then, attended to: the real benefits of imaginary medications. …

Beecher showed that placebo drugs had objectively measurable physiological effects, sometimes matching or exceeding those of powerful drugs. ..Medical researchers, confident as ever in their own vice-like grip on reality, speculated that ‘placebo reactors’ were unusually suggestible people- delusional, neurotic, or simply not that bright. A 1954 paper in the Lancet remarked that the placebo effect was useful in treating only ‘unintelligent or inadequate patients’. But no substantial evidence has ever been found to support the idea that certain individuals are more prone to placebo effects than others.

In the 1980s, advances in brain science started providing hard, ‘biochemical’ explanations for the power of placebos. A psychiatrist called Robert Ader administered saccharin-flavoured drinking water to rats, and at the same injected them with a chemical that suppressed their immune system and made them ill. When a group of the same mice were fed the same flavoured water but without the injections, they reacted the same way. The drink, because originally associated with the injections, now triggered the same illness as the poison. Ader had created a placebo with undeniable physiological effects (strictly speaking he had created a ‘nocebo’- an inert drug or otherwise benign event that triggers illness. Nocebo means ‘I shall harm’….

The pharmaceutical industry now treats placebo effects as significant, and the research of Bendetti and others has gone some way towards establishing that placebo effects involve real physiological actions.” (Leslie:2011:244-9)

“For two centuries, the medical profession failed to cultivate the seeds shown by Franklin and Lavoisier. In its struggle to distance itself from superstition, magic and quackery, it built a wall between science and everything intangible. As a result, the ‘influence of the spiritual over the physical’ became something of a taboo question, regarded by physicians and researchers alike as beneath or behind them. Doctors saw themselves as scientists of the physical world whose object of study happened to be the human body, a machine of nature that operated according to reliable laws. (This is also, of course, how Mesmer saw things.) As the medical historian David Morris puts it, if you conceive of the body as a machine, then believing in the power of lies to erase pain is ‘as irrational as filling the gas tank of a car with tea’.

Only in recent years has it begun to be accepted that sickness and health aren’t just biological affairs….Mesmer’s treatment worked more powerfully when his patient was surrounded by other patients sharing the same experience, and there’s now plenty of evidence to show that our behaviours and health are strongly influenced by those around us, including large-scale studies that track the spread of conditions like heart disease and obesity through social networks.

Our own health is bound up with our relationships to other people, particularly those who seek to cure us. Much depends on the signals the physician sends, consciously or unconsciously, about his confidence in the treatment; in the phrase of the medical anthropologist Daniel Moerman, the physician’s demeanour seems to ‘activate the medication’. Medical researchers who carried out a historical review of the literature on the treatment of angina found that drugs worked in the 1940s and 1950s dramatically decreased in effectiveness in the 1960s. This change was hard to explain in biochemical terms: the drugs hadn’t changed, and nor had the human body. The authors of the study concluded that it hinged on the rise of the double-blind trial, which revealed to the medical profession that some of the drugs they had been using worked no better than placebos.” (Leslie:2011:258-9)

“According to Anne Helm of the Oregon Health Sciences University, between thirty-five and forty-five per cent of all medical prescriptions are placebos. A 2003 study of eight hundred Danish clinicians found that almost half prescribed a placebo at least ten times a year.” (Leslie:2011:262)

“A 2009 study found that patients undergoing surgery to correct painful spinal tears reported greater improvement when, after the operation, they were shown fragments of the removed disc.)” (Leslie:2011:266)

“In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the failure rate of new drugs in trials against placebos was higher than it has been since such testing became standard. Expensively produced, highly effective anti-depressants consistently failed to prove themselves against placebos- as did new wonder treatments for schizophrenia, Crohn’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. It wasn’t just new drugs that were crossing the futility boundary. Drugs that had been around for decades, including some of the industry’s greatest hits, like Prozac, have faltered in recent tests against placebos. If they were to undergo testing by the regulatory authorities now, they might not pass. These medications aren’t any weaker than they used to be, and nor are new drugs becoming pharmacologically less sophisticated- quite the opposite.” (Leslie:2011:270)

“The reality of a produce is never quite as good as the dream- but then if it was, there would be no reason to dream again. The product itself is merely an excuse to experience the pleasures of anticipation, longing and pretending. We pay for the reflection, not just the dress; a reflection that advertising helps to create.” (Leslie:2011:277)

“In Chinese tradition, the five elements of wood, metal, fire, water and earth are though to shape the relationship between the body and the natural environment, and each year is assigned to one of them. The researchers found that Chinese-Americans were significantly more likely to die earlier than normal if they had a combination of disease with a birth-year which Chinese astrology and medicine consider ill-fated. For example, those born in earth years are deemed more susceptible to diseases involving lumps or tumours, and Chinese-Americans born in those years who died from cancer did so, on average, nearly four years earlier than those who were born in other years and who suffered from the same condition. Chinese medicine considers the lung to be an organ of metal, and Chinese-Americans who were born in metal years and who suffered from lung disease died, on average, five years earlier than lung cancer patients born in other years. The same was true of a range of other conditions. In all cases, the same did not apply to the control group. What’s more, within the Chinese-American group, the intensity of the effect was correlated with ‘strength and commitment to traditional Chinese culture.’ The more people believed in the story, the more likely they were to succumb to the death foretold by it.

People literally live and die by stories

Numerous other studies have found that religious belief is strongly associated with living longer. Even when you grasp the power of the belief effect, it’s still hard to comprehend that metaphors and symbols permeate the flesh as well as the spirit: that they can multiply blood cells, generate protein and disable nerve receptors.” (Leslie:2011:290-1)

“As the medical anthropologist Daniel Moerman has documented, one of the important determinants of a drug’s efficacy is the colour of the pill it comes in. When people suffering the symptoms of depression are given the same drug in different colours, they are most likely to get better when the pill is yellow. Sleeping pills, by contrast, tend to be more effective when they’re blue. This last is true of every country it’s been tested in, except Italy, where there is a puzzling difference between the genders. For women, blue sleeping pills are highly effective. For men, they’re much less likely to work than pills of other colours. Although it hasn’t been proven, Moerman’s explanation is that blue has a particular meaning for Italian men: it’s the colour of all Italian sports teams, including the national football team; instead of making them feel sleepy, blue makes Italian men think of Forza Azzuri.

Other studies have shown that green pills are better at reducing anxiety, and white pills are best for soothing ulcers. Patients who take four sugar pills a day clear their gastric ulcers faster than those who take two sugar pills a day. Large pills work better than medium-sized pills, and very small pills work best of all. Placebos that patients believe to be expensive work better than those they think cost less. Fake surgery involving impressive-looking, excitingly-named machines works extremely well indeed.” (Leslie:2011:291-2)

“The work of Robert Hodgson, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, places a large question mark over this assumption.

Hodgson is a retired professor of statistics who runs a small winery in Humboldt County, California, and got interested in the question of why a wine of his might win a gold in one competition and come nowhere in another. So he did something nobody had done before: he performed a large-scale quantitative analysis of the judgement of wine experts, running his own blind taste tests with judges from the California State Fair Wine Competition, and analysing the data from hundreds of wine competitions. He found that judges often gave the same wine very different scores, and that gold medals seemed to be spread around at random, rather than following the same wines consistently.

Hodgson’s findings would come as no surprise to Frederic Brochet, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bordeaux who, several years before, had served fifty-seven French wine experts from two bottles, one with a Grand Cru label, the other with the label of a cheap table wine. The experts greatly preferred the Grand Cru and explained why with great eloquence- though both bottles contained the same wine. According to Brochet, the lesson of his experiment is that the brain is incapable of sending us objective reports on the world; what we experience is always a mixture of raw data coming in and our expectations, which ‘can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself.’ These expectations, of course, inherited from others. Brochet’s subjects were wine critics; if they’d been from a culture where the name Grand Cru meant nothing, the wine would have tasted differently.” (Leslie:2011:278-9)

“One of our beliefs is that more expensive wine tastes better. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and Stanford organised a wine-tasting for members of the Stanford Wine Club, serving them five different cabernet sauvignons that were only distinguishable by price. What the subjects didn’t know was that there were only three wines- so sometimes they’d be tasting the same wine with a different price label. They consistently reported that the same wine tasted better when the label said it was more expensive. Similar experiments have been carried out before, but in this one the subjects sipped wine while lying supine inside an fMRI machine (the wine was pumped through tubes into the subjects’ mouths). When subjects thought they were drinking more expensive wines, the scans revealed more activity in the brain region that determines whether or not we find an experience pleasurable. Higher prices primed them for pleasure, and so pleasure is what they experienced.

When we take a sip of Grand Cru, (if we’re lucky enough to do so), we’re drinking a belief first and a liquid second….But our beliefs (preconceptions, assumptions, expectations and desires) determine our responses much more than we like to think. What’s more, we don’t even originate these beliefs; they are stories that come to us through the cultural ether- Picasso is a great artist, expensive wines taste better- and are written by other people, living and dead. Our conviction that we can escape these shared preconceptions and experience the world purely as individuals is just another of the stories we tell ourselves.” (Leslie:2011:280-1)

So we see from the above information that magic and medicine, are not separate from each other as science would have you believe, and that esteem can be produced by a wine bottle price tag as much as by a sugar-pill, or just a nicer doctor, better than the ‘real’ pill, that works due to reason, rather that the unreal pill that works due to unreason.

We also see that the rulers of society have no problem in handing out pills of esteem over actual esteem in order to cohere its peoples together under this magic spell of esteem, status and power, and that people like taking them, and that the result of all this serotonin production, as with the locust is desertification in a zero-sum game, that today we call global warming and the rich, many of whom are of course doctors.

We will look at the ‘Brave New World’ of drug usage by modern government and its place in structuring our society- its technique- later on, but for now I want to look at how the locust becomes the dancing pigeon.

15: The Dancing Pigeons of Authority

A locust is a very simple organism and cannot organise itself to stop itself creating the desert of its own destruction, but mankind has created rulers in order to control (or choke) this process hence increasing the period of time before creating this state of desertification. As we have seen, this was done by telling a story that granted queens and then kings, the right to power, the authority to take control and direct these invisible forces produced by a society of serotonin requiring beings-for-itself (junkies of happiness, power and esteem, who do not want to feel the withdrawal symptoms known as ‘the lack’). This ruler then had magic pills to give out to people in the form of magical names as Objects, that were associated with an amount of power as a reward for subjecting oneself to this ruler.

The magic was that by reciting this name to himself (upon naming himself as this subject) the recipient of it would become possessed with serotonin in his brain and feel esteem, what he would call, a part of his happiness. Upon reciting the name by someone under the power of this magical name and its subject (the person) an-Other would feel less esteem, and less happiness, and even awe and subject to this power. Money in like manner as a magical object of the inner world of value now produced the same magical pill quality of serotonin, and so the King would ‘reign’ down magical names and magical pills, creating the happy and consequently the unhappy, the haves and the have-nots, the esteemed, the ignored, and the hated (i.e. esteemed by some individuals, but not by his overall power to the group).

Those he praised with such magical serotonin producing Objects (names and coins) became loyal to the ruler in the belief that this show of faith by the subjection of their will to his would yield another and perhaps, he hoped, even greater reward.

This new game then using finite capital by which to purchase this social capital and the consequent power that it focused upon the ruler, soon resulted in the King trying to use his capital prudently, that is to say, ‘with practical reason’, in order to use his power to garner more power in the form of more capital. In like manner everyone within the circle (state), attempted to make up stories by which to profit and gain more capital, status, and esteem, than they currently had, such is the hydra headed monster of desire.

‘Umm…’, thought the king, I wonder how much work I can get for how little reward I can get away with in order to still command loyalty and respect and esteem from my subjects?

Now it just so happens that scientists have also conducted experiments on pigeons in order to find out the answer to this question. The answer is the same for pigeons as it is for humans but the ‘reason’ is not:

A doctor called Pavlov was once measuring the amount of saliva dogs produced whilst being fed, by inserting a pipe inside a dogs throat and then giving it food. By accident, he found out something more interesting than that. The food for the dogs would be sent up in a dumb-waiter when a bell was rung and what he discovered was that the dog learnt to associate the ringing of the bell with the fact that this meant that food was coming, and so it would begin to salivate at the sound of the bell ringing, rather than, as is natural, at the smell or sight of food. In other words the dogs learnt a simple cause and effect pattern in the world and reacted to it. The dog didn’t understand how this cause and effect worked, to him it was a magical process, but the scientist believed that he did and so it was science, and had no real power, other than cause and effect.

Now the dog was salivating for-itself not for the scientist, and so when the scientist attempted to get the dog to salivate by ringing the bell, but not supplying the effect, the dog food, then the dog quite quickly learnt to disassociate the bell from the effect of food, and stopped salivating, until the food showed up again.

Other scientists now began to think, “What if I gave them food on every third ringing of the bell? Would they salivate each time? Actually how many times can I get away with ringing the bell and not giving them food, but they will still salivate?”

They found that the best way to keep a dog salivating was not to give them food after a certain set amount of rings of the bell but to do it randomly. So sometimes it would be three rings, sometimes eighteen, sometimes twenty, etc.

They then trained mice to push a button and pigeons to peck a disc for food, again with a random reward pattern. A pigeon, they found, would peck a disc up to 12,000 times for 1 seed, as long as the reward was random!

In other words the pigeon was thinking, “I understand that there is a cause and effect event here where by pecking this disk I get a seed but I don’t know exactly when it might happen.” At 11,999 times he’s thinking, “I’m tired of this…but what if the next peck does it? I shall, have faith, raise my hopes, and believe that my actions have some control of worlding when the seed will drop by my actions, I’ll give it one last try.” At 12,001 pecks with still no reward he’s thinking, “I’ve been pecking this dish for ages, bollocks to it!, I have lost faith, I give up hope, and no longer believe” and walks away.

The cause and effect had become no longer worth the effort, in relation to its costs and benefits analyses of the being-for-itself, and hence a useless technique to get what he wanted. His new technique of no longer pecking the dish would have resulted in the effect that if you stop pecking then you get fed anyway- or, if you stop pecking then you get put down with a noxious gas and incinerated, making way for a more gullible pigeon. Another unreasonable reasoning.

Anyway, what this showed was that a reward will make an animal repeat its behaviour and that a random reward (such as a bonus at work or a lottery win) will make the animal peck longer than a regular reward will.

In humans we call this pecking the button, a fruit machine; ticking the lucky dip box on the National Lottery for our entire lives; kissing the bosses arse for a promotion; whining to Mum that you really want this, then that, then something else in the hope that eventually you get one of them.

So now that scientists could get their subjects to peck, how could they get them to dance?

The pigeons would peck a plate because they associated the cause of pecking the plate to the effect of receiving a seed. They, just as were the warring electrified mice, quite wrong, as it was the will of a lab technician each time, that ended the electrocution or caused the seed to drop.

There is another experiment with pigeons that reveals the depths of this understanding that the Scottish philosopher David Hume originally put forward in his philosophy of how we actually relate to the story of ‘cause and effect’ incorrectly in our world in order to give ourselves the impression that we are, in some way, in control of it. This is pertinent especially when one is trying to be in control as a Subject, i.e. for the pigeon as a scientific Subject, and for the human Object as the role that society gives you as Object-Subject-to-the-State, as we will see with the scientist conducting this experiment.

The experiment proved that behaviour does not rely upon truth, but on cause and effect in alignment with the desire of the subject. A scientist put 9 pigeons in separate boxes with little chutes at the top that entered each box. Through these chutes he dropped a seed and observed the behaviour of the pigeons upon receiving them. He found that each pigeon repeated the behaviour it had been exhibiting at the time of the delivery of the seed. The pigeon, evidently thought that the fact that it was grooming itself, turning round, standing up, remaining stationary, etc, when the seed had fallen had been the cause of the effect of the seed coming down the chute. In other words, the pigeons were performing a dance called grooming, or pecking, or turning round, or standing still, and this ‘technique’ of dancing, in their minds, caused the desired effect of a reward. The scientist performing this experiment then proclaimed pigeons that do what is required to get what they desire are stupid dumb creatures that would believe anything.

Afterwards this same scientist proceeded to come in at 9am and work until 5pm, five days a week, for a whole month, moving bits of paper from here to there, cleaning petri dishes and dirtying petri dishes, writing down results, filing documents, and other such random movements that he believed would cause his monthly wage to fall through a chute into his bank account.

At the end of the month though, as pay-day approached he started to salivate, but no money appeared, and so he went to his pay role department and performed the usually efficacious ‘tantrum dance’, with much shouting, stomping, glaring, and gnashing of teeth. In return they performed the ‘you’re fired dance’ and so the scientist, confused and distraught, went to the ombudsman and repeated his tantrum dance, to which he was delighted to find, the ombudsman knew the moves and they virtually tangoed into the Law Courts. The ombudsman only getting the seed from this dance.

Now solicitors, receptionists, policemen, judges, administrators, all danced together in an attempt to make the seed fall from the chute, whilst their seeds fell in their chute effectually. In like manner, a savage who desired rain danced a rain dance on an open plain near his village to get it to rain; a boy desiring a toy danced stroppily in a toy store, to get his new lump of plastic with wheels and cool sounds; a Jew desiring communion with God nodded back and forth at a collection of bricks in Jerusalem; a Protestant desiring communion with God prayed to a lump of wood, a Buddhist desiring to find his true Nature (aleithea) prayed to a pretty picture of  that Nature, a Shintoist to a mirror, a Sikh to a collection of paper and ink, a Muslim to a geometric shape and a niche in the wall, etc, etcetera, and a doctor prescribed a sugar pill to his patient, and a surgeon pretended to use a laser on his patient.

Meanwhile a butterfly fluttered its wings in Peru, which caused a hurricane in Jerusalem, that collapsed the wailing-wall in front of Mr Levi, the owner of the company that the unpaid scientist worked at, cutting short his sabbatical, so that he came home early, heard about his employees lack of pay and dropped it down the chute into the scientists bank account himself, without the need of the other dancing pigeons in the law courts, who all got a seed down their own chute also and hence believed that without their dance the scientist would never have been paid and so neither would they, because from their perspective, that is what their dance reasonably achieves. They didn’t know that Mr.Levi was simply an honest man and required no dance of ‘cause and effect’ to over-power his will. The scientist then stopped this particular desire dance and in celebration bought flowers and chocolates for his wife, took her out for a lovely meal, later laying in his bed and hoping that the ‘romantic dinner dance’ would produce a congratulations dance of its own.

Armies perform the ‘My guns bigger than your gun’ dance, to over-power an-others will to subject an-others desire, that necessitates the dance.

Politicians perform the ‘My votes bigger than yours’ dance, to over-power an-others will to subject an-others desire, that necessitates the dance

Religions perform the ‘My God’s better than yours’ dance, to over-power an-others will to subject an-others desire, that necessitates the dance

Scientists perform the ‘My truth is truer than yours’ dance, to over-power an-others will to subject an-others desire, that necessitates the dance

Others perform the ‘My life is of more value than yours’ dance, to over-power an-others will to subject an-others desire, that necessitates the dance.

This is the ontological state, the urgrund, the place where all settlers dwell, think from, and see the world through. It is a dance of power, of status roles connected to a story of the right to power and reward. It is a dance that requires a music to harmonise the forces of the song of the State. The Anthem, the flag, the crown that symbolises the story of the right to power. The doctorate, the white coat, the snooty receptionist, the impressive technology. The beat, the constitutional requirement, that underpins the melody- the story of the king- resounds as the necessity of war and progress, of competition and petition, of us and them, of happy and unhappy, and ultimately still, of desertification.

‘A damaru is a rattle-drum that is used to distract and train a monkey. Siva rattles the drum to comfort Brahma’s mind. He hopes that, eventually, Brahma will realise that meaning will only come by moving towards atma (soul) rather than aham (ego), pursuing yoga (unity/alignment) instead of bhoga (pleasure), choosing Prakriti (nature) not Brahmanda (culture).’ (ibid)

16: The Great Dance of Desire – Civilization

If we are all dancing pigeons of desire, it is because we are within the box of civilization by choosing to be a being-for-itself, and so food is not produced by the cause and effect of being-in-Being and laid out before us on the land as it was for hunter-gatherers. Food in our settled world is now limited (by over-population) and must require a dance of each individual in order to achieve the reward. Obviously some dances are dances of survival, such as planting crops to create supply, or killing people to limit demand, but as we have seen, they only resulted from the shift to settling (being-for-itself) in scarcity of resources, and desertification. But these dances within the box of civilization cause other dances to be effected, all of which are produced by the greater dance of authority, of tradition, of bureaucracy, of law, of justice, of property-rights, of bonus-incentives, of punishment, of rewards, of promotion, of gain and of loss.

They all rest upon the urgrund dance of being-for-itself and its consequences, in regards to lack, desire, power and belief in our inner world. This dance is simply a zero-sum game for all, of eternal gain and loss, war and peace, as progress towards greater and greater individuality of the consciousness of the being-for-itself-as-subject to this authority. The only freedom in this box is to believe in the name you are given by this authority and the status allotted to it. By choosing to be this subject i.e. John the Director of a Bank, or John the research scientist, or John the street-sweeper, etc, then the being is free to use the dances of society and to occasionally object, whereupon the ‘truth’ of whether or not his objection will stand, depends on the state of the State and its consequent perception of whether or not that object-state-ment is ‘right’, or ‘wrong’, and a seed falls or not. Warriors are rewarded in times of war, and entrepreneurs in times of peace, is an ontologically necessary state of the State, by its nature, that our nature, through these invisible relations of power (dances of the being-for-itself) have produced, i.e. rituals and practices, in order to maintain the growth of the state, our collective desire and belief to be our ‘right’.

The reason Mr.Levi had the money to pay our scientist is not due to the value of the technique of the scientist learning to control pigeons, but the value  of taking the scientists findings and using them to control societies subjects through these techniques. That is truly why the scientist got paid, his dance fitted in with the great dance of the war of the electrified mice.

This zero-sum game then results in gain for some and a loss for others, both in esteem and in Objects and their relative value, and respective freedoms, health and happiness. Each civilization, made up of a demography of ever changing individuals and hence ever changing natures of desire, attempts to achieve a story of the right to power in order to produce Objects that will increase their power further, relative to its neighbours (its de facto enemies) so as to maintain or improve its reflective power against them.

In order to gain power the ruler must harness the power of the people (which is his only real power) and so he must create a new garment of esteem, status and power (serotonin production through a placebo dance- as we have seen he is nakedly powerless underneath it) in order for those he rewards to manifest that power as he wishes. A subject then is firstly controlled not by awe, but by his own desires. The ability of the ruler to grant that desire (under petition or attack) then defines the amount of awe given and the amount of esteem relative to that power, that the petitioner asks for in order to feel happy about being a subject of that power. If it is enough then he will become subject to it, and dance accordingly. True authority therefore lies in the ability to fulfil this desire and not in the story of awe, that surrounds it.

As we saw with the Emperor and his new clothes, the courtiers didn’t expose the naked truth (aleithea) because they did not want to lose the esteem of being thought of as possessing the social capital of wisdom and intelligence, and consequently lose their finite capital in the form of ‘status’ as object-subject that they had made for themselves. Authority is merely a technique necessitated by settling to curb these desires, and the only way to do this is to harness the power of those desires and then use that power to subject others to a will that will slow down the desertification that will result, anyway, but will take longer to do so.

This ‘gain’ desired may be simply one of wealth and power with no greater purpose, or it may be one of gaining knowledge of how the world works, wisdom. What is for certain is that the desire is always one of possession in order to fill a fundamental lack within the being-for-itself. As we see with drug addicts, their pleasure is in possessing the end of their desire, and their pain is the re-emergence of that desire by which they are possessed. Serotonin possession for 28 milllion Americans who live in a culture that worships the gain of individual power in order to ‘live the dream’, is enough cause to lower their status anxiety, and effect a technique to produce esteem as an object, not magical money, but magical Prozac.

When these people who believe in the state of esteem preached to them by society go to see societies answer to this problem, the doctor, they do the I’m unhappy dance in front of him and he, not understanding the dance prescribes the Prozac dance back, whereas, if he had understood that by simply dancing back in such a manner as to provide that esteem to his patient, rather than a Prozac and a huge medical bill that informs the patient that they are not esteemed by society, then he could have done the Placebo-dance and avoided the side-effects that his Prozac dance, and value-dance, produce- that is to say- 28 million Americans who require Prozac each day, as they also experience weight gain, disfiguring tics, memory loss, sexual dysfunction, suicide, violence, and brain damage.

So we see with all the behaviours of beings-for-itself, that there is always more knowledge to be possessed, more power to be taken, more hope to hand out. But no matter what it is that is possessed, its receipt may cause happiness as it ends this desire, but then an emptiness appears (a lack), and the next desire comes along, the next dance (project) begins and that any desire granted in a finite world will mean that whilst this dance of gain is going on for you, it is a dance of loss for an-other, and often many-others. A dance that they will eventually come and bite you back and cause lack, a dance that will leave the generations to come in a desert, a dance that fundamentally coheres society. Its spirit dance- desire.

All that the fruit of this dance can ever ‘be’ ‘will’ always be seen through the eyes of a fundamental desire to fill a consequent lack that those things that have been desired and then possessed before have always failed to fill, by our very nature, due to our urgrund and consequent perspective of the world and our worlding. All the world and all possessions are seen through this desire of possession and fear of lack. How can this knowledge that I possess improve my World of desires? How can this carbon that I possess be made into carbon-fibre, oil into petrol, sunlight into power, plants into medicines, social capital into capital, your desire possessed into my desire, your life possessed into a subject-life, all for me? The answers to these questions are the techniques that we have met thus far, and a few more yet to come.

To help us reveal these next techniques we must look to see what happens when two pyramids in circles with king/priests at their centre- civilizations- meet. Just as we saw with the being-for-itself meeting another being-for-itself automatically creating a ‘being-as-Object to the Other’, limiting its freedom, so the same happens with states of people as they meet, but the power is greater and the techniques more powerful than even before, and of course, so is the necessity for them. By belief in the ‘rightful’ power of our collective will- desire, their necessity will increase.

When two Story-book Worlds collide

When two circles with different centres come into contact with each other, they tell each other their story, and they do their dance of power to see who has the ‘right to power’ of these stories respectively and how they affect the power of the circle they rule. For example, if one circles story claims authority from the same universal God-wakan, then it is very difficult to take power from another circle because it claims the same authority to power and hence it is unreasonable to fight against it, and the people will feel less inclined to kill the people in this other circle. But if it is a different God then it is easy to cohere ones people and to claim the right to power, and to go to war with a people ‘sympathetic to the cause’. It doesn’t matter if this fundamental truth is your God, or your science, or your reason, or your religion, the story of awe does not defeat the ontological desire of possessing that truth, and worlding the world to it, against the ‘truth’ of an-Other. When there are two circles that meet, the communication between them cannot ameliorate the cohesive power of the spirit of authority- its God- as that is the cause for the circle existing, and so the only communication is this, ‘What can you do for me’?, if the answer is nothing then I will possess you, if the answer is destroy you, then I will subject myself to your truth, and if the answer is increase my power, then I will trade with you, and fight an-Other.

In other words when two circles collide it must be decided whether they are with us, or against us in regards to our project, our desire as our true God as settlers who possess objects separate from God and hence have the right to kill to protect them. We think necessarily therefore in terms of us and them, of mine not yours. That is the teleological purpose, the will, of the ruler and the ruled in the worlding of the World.

The purpose of the story may be the gain of getting many more souls into heaven; or of equality, fraternity, and liberty; or of everyone cracking their eggs from the top end and not the bottom, it doesn’t matter. The purpose of a civilization is still held within the great game of Civilization-desire, that results from the creation of beings-for-itself, the locust not the grass-hopper. The Ontological set up of Civilization creates the traditional psychology, the culture, the language, the sociology of the group, and as we have seen this group only comes about due to rubbing together and producing serotonin, a drug, that leads to esteem as happiness, a happiness that must be measured in relation to ‘the Other’ who is a part of the World, no matter where he is in your circle of peoples. A rich peoples means a poor peoples.  A happy peoples means an unhappy peoples, simply because these peoples both create desertification and hence finite capital in place of natural abundance.

When it is food on the line, resultant from this worlding of scarce resources and over-population, that is to make us salivate serotonin, then the consequence is obvious- competition. Petition means either to ask or to attack and so as a society creates its own power it asks for tribute or attacks for plunder and loot

 The civilization that wins is the one that works out the measure of wealth, the amount of seed that each pigeon requires in order to make it continue to dance the dance that drops what it itself values down the chute, that it then can exchange for its wills-power, most efficiently, and run away from fear of lack towards pleasure from possession.

As we have seen a pigeon will tap a plate 12,000 times before it stops its dance but a scientist will only dance for 30 days, before he gives up working and begins another dance whose effect he hopes will cause the seed to drop. He ceases doing the role of scientist even though he would say he is doing work for mankinds knowledge of the world, in esteem terms, and instead fights for survival of his own self in scientific terms. In like manner, before the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington had no army, only a group of soldiers who were unwilling to fight unless the gold they were promised turned up in time before the battle, which fortunately for one group of peoples (the English) and unfortunately for anothers’ (the French), it did. The result from the perspective of wakan was the same- many people were killed and so demand went down, easing the tensions of supply in a world of a scarcity of resources, created by these beings-for-itself, who existed in both circles, in both boxes with chutes going into them, who created those circles, those boxes with chutes, and the war between them, in the belief that the boxes were a part of themselves.

When two circles meet therefore there becomes an Us and Them of super-state proportions and this results in two new modes of behaviour within the state itself. With the hunter-gatherer group meeting a settler community than the solution was easy, simply move them on, but with another settler group this is not a solution. The first solution found from this overall state of mankind, as we find it at the dawn of civiliation is war and progress, the change without and within respectively to the karmic manifestations of the state. The second will be how the circle under the pressure of another circle, like a bubble attempting to find the least surface area by necessity of its existence, transmutes into a pyramid.

War and Progress – I Love to Hate You

What is the natural, necessary, result of creating a circle? As we have seen it is closed-ness to the truth of Being, and from this comes the requirement for protection from the others that have been created by this karmic action. From this unshieldedness comes the need for a shield. But what does it feel like to suddenly need to make a shield? The emotion would be fear. What does it therefore feel like to make a spear? The emotion would be hope. What does it feel like to stand next to others in your circle as you are just about to wage war with another circle? The emotion of relying on these others would be faith. Faith because underlying the truth of your seeming combining of strength, lies the unconcealed truth that you, just like them, are really all protecting your family, your land, not theirs but that on this day of battle you are together, but tomorrow when the spears have been laid aside, so will your fraternity, and the race will continue of using each other in order to gain your desires.

Was it therefore the ruler that created the army on that day or the circle that created the ruler that created the army? Well as we have seen above it is the individual being-for-itself, that creates the circle, that creates the ruler, that creates the army:

“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. We have argued that in the evolutionary process that leads from prehuman ancestor to human beings, there was a qualitative leap that transformed the prehuman precursors of language, reason, and emotion into a human whole that cannot be explained as a simple sum of its parts, and that remains an essentially mysterious process. Something similar happens with the development of every embryo into an infant, child, and adult human being: what starts out as a cluster of organic molecules comes to possess consciousness, reason, the capacity for moral choice, and subjective emotions, reason, the capacity for moral choice, and subjective emotions, in a manner that remains equally mysterious.” (Fukuyama:2002:176)

What Fukayama, a renowned sociologist, is referring to above is this same truth, both in our thrownness as human beings, but also in our education of our children. They do not start as beings-for-itself, they start, as we all did, as beings-in-Being, unaware of the circle that they have been magically born in to and of the ascribed status that they have automatically been given by the status of their parents within that circle.

Onto means being and geny (from the Greek genes) means ‘origin’

This refers to the Ontology, the study of being that we have been discussing, as underpinning (the urgrund of) our psychology and history (our life perspective and our thrownness) as being-in-Being or as being-for-itself. Phylogeny comes from the Greek Phūlē meaning tribe and phulon meaning race. Therefore what the above quote is telling us in sociological terms is that the origin of the human ‘race’ is the beginning of being-for-itself. That the being-for-itself, creates the circle, that creates the ruler, that creates the traditions, cultures, ritual dances and practices at the origin of the tribes that begin this human race.

But what happens therefore, in like manner, with a baby newly born, that they also end up in this race of humans competiting against each other? Well the answer is they are given the experience of this perspective karmically by the actions of their parents and social group and the language forms born to frame the perspective of the worlding of the world desired. I cannot tell you how many times I say to my one year old daughter Alia- no that’s mine, that’s Sidhuri’s, that’s Emily’s, because we, as settlers, have so many things. They are educated about the esteem that is associated with their ascribed (inherited not earned (achieved status)) status within the tribe and of that tribes status in comparison with those others that surround it, by the clothes they wear, the clothes other’s wear, the architecture they experience, the exclusion, the inclusion, the power to world of those around them, the behaviour of others that they experience, the amount of times they are told they are right and wrong, etc, etc. It is all around them. That is to say, they are told which state to be in awe of and which to be repulsed by, by our behaviour, which is always underpinned by the origin of our being-for-itself, the same origin that created all of these things that our children see- recapitulated.

When a parent tells a child of its thrownness in the tribe and its worlding as the urgrund reason for its existence in the World and in fact therefore of the World, and consequently of its own power within the World, it is being spoken to in the language of being-for-itself, and this language necessarily results in Us and Them, in love and hate, in freedom and unfreedom, in good and evil, in right and wrong, in mine and not mine and not yet mine. These are necessary words by which to frame the World the tribe is worlding. They are the framework (the Gestalt mindset) by which the World comes into being and through which the child then sees the World and acts accordingly (karma).

“The multitude sufficient to confide in for our security, is not determined by any certain number, but by comparison with the enemy we fear; and is then sufficient, when the odds of the enemy is not of so visible and conspicuous moment, to determine the event of war, as to move him to attempt…

For if we could suppose a great multitude of men to consent in the observation of justice, and other laws of nature, without a common power to keep them all in awe; we might as well suppose all mankind to do the same; and then there neither would be, nor need to be any civil government, or commonwealth at all; because there would be peace without subjection.

Nor is it enough for the security, which men desire should last all the time of their life, that they be governed, and directed by one judgement, for a limited time; as in one battle, or one war. For though they obtain a victory by their unanimous endeavour against a foreign enemy; yet afterwards, when either they have no common enemy, or he that by one part is held for an enemy, is by another part held for a friend, they must needs by the difference of their interests dissolve, and fall again into a war amongst themselves.

It is true, that certain living creatures, as bees, and ants, live sociably one with another, which are therefore by Aristotle numbered amongst political creatures; and yet have no other direction, than their particular judgements and appetites; nor speech, whereby one of them can signify to another, what he thinks expedient for the common benefit: and therefore some man may perhaps desire to know, why mankind cannot do the same. To which I answer,

First, that men are continually in competition for honour and dignity, which these creatures are not; and consequently amongst men there ariseth on that ground, envy and hatred, and finally war; but amongst these not so.

Secondly, that amongst these creatures, the common good differeth not from the private; and being by nature inclined to their private, they procure thereby the common benefit. But man, whose joy consisteth in comparing himself with other men, can relish nothing but what is eminent.

Thirdly, that these creatures, having not, as man, the use of reason, do not see, nor think they see any fault, in the administration of their common business; whereas amongst men, there are very many, that think themselves wiser, and abler to govern the public, better than the rest; and these strive to reform and innovate, one this way, another that way; and thereby bring it into distraction and civil war.” (Hobbes:1651:110-11)

“As for-itself which by historicizing itself has experienced these various avatars can determine with full knowledge of the futility of its former attempts, to pursue the death of the Other. This free determination is called hate. It implies a fundamental resignation; the for-itself abandons its claim to realize any union with the Other; it gives up using the Other as an instrument to recover its own being-in-itself. It wishes simply to rediscover a freedom without factual limits; that is, to get rid of its own inapprehensible being-as-object-for-the-Other and to abolish its dimension of alienation. This is equivalent to projecting the realization of a world in which the Other does not exist. The for-itself which hates consents to being only for-itself; instructed by its various experiences of the impossibility of making use of its being-for-others, it prefers to be again only a free nihilation of its being, a totality detotalized, a pursuit which assigns to itself its own ends.

The one who hates projects no longer being an object; hate presents itself as an absolute positing of the freedom of the for-itself before the Other. This is why hate does not abase the hated object, for it places the dispute on its true level. What I hate in the Other is not this appearance, this fault, this particular action. What I hate is his existence in general as a transcendence-transcended. This is why hate implies a recognition of the Other’s freedom. But this recognition is abstract and negative; hate knows only the Other-as-object and attaches itself to this object. It wishes to destroy this object in order by the same stroke to overcome the transcendence which haunts it….

This is why one hates right through the revealed psychic but not the psychic itself; this is why also it is indifferent whether we hate the Other’s transcendence through what we empirically call his vices or his virtues. What I hate is the whole psychic-totality in so far as it refers me to the Other’s transcendence. I do not lower myself to hate any particular objective detail. Here we find the distinction between hating and despising. And hate does not necessarily appear on the occasion of my being subjected to something evil. On the contrary, it can arise when one would theoretically expect gratitude—that is, on the occasion of a kindness. The occasion which arouses hate is simply an act by the Other which puts me in the state of being subject to his freedom.

This act is in itself humiliating; it is humiliating as the concrete revelation of my instrumental object-ness in the face of the Other’s freedom. This revelation is immediately obscured, is buried in the past and become opaque. But it leaves in me the feeling that there is “something” to be destroyed if I am to free myself. This is the reason, moreover, why gratitude is so close to hate; to be grateful for a kindness is to recognize that the Other was entirely free in acting as he has done. No compulsion, not even that of duty, has determined him in it. He is wholly responsible for his act and for the values which have presided over its accomplishment. I, myself, have been only the excuse for it, the matter on which his act has been exercised. In view of this recognition the for-itself can project love or hate as it chooses; it can no longer ignore the Other.

The second consequence of these observations is that hate is the hate of all Others in one Other

What I want to attain symbolically by pursuing the death of a particular Other is the general principle of the existence of others. The Other whom I hate actually represents all Others. My project of suppressing him is a project of suppressing others in general; that is, of recapturing my non-substantial freedom as for-itself. In hate there is given an understanding of the fact that my dimension of being-alienated is a real enslavement which comes to me through others. It is the suppression of this enslavement which is projected…

But hate too is in turn a failure. Its initial project is to suppress other consciousnesses. But even if it succeeded in this—i.e., if it could at this moment abolish the Other—it could not bring it about that the Other had not been. Better yet, if the abolition of the Other is to be lived as the triumph of hate, it implies the explicit recognition that the Other has existed. Immediately my being-for-others by slipping into the past becomes an irremediable dimension of myself. It is what I have to be as having-been-it. Therefore I can not free myself from it. At least, someone will say, I escape it for the present, I shall escape it in the future. But no. He who has once been for-others is contaminated in his being for the rest of his days even if the Other should be entirely suppressed; he will never cease to apprehend his dimension of being-for-others as a permanent possibility of his being. He can never recapture what he has alienated; he has even lost all hope of acting on this alienation and turning it to his own advantage since the destroyed Other has carried the key to this alienation along with him to the grave. What I was for the Other is fixed by the Other’s death, and I shall irremediably be it in the past.

I shall be it also and in the same way in the present If I persevere in the attitude, the projects, and the mode of life which have been judged by the Other. The Other’s death constitutes me as an irremediable object exactly as my own death would do. Thus the triumph of hate is in its very upsurge transformed into failure. Hate does not enable us to get out of the circle. It simply represents the final attempt, the attempt of despair. After the failure of this attempt nothing remains for the for-itself except to re-enter the circle and allow itself to be indefinitely tossed from one to the other of the two fundamental attitudes.” (Sartre:2003:429-34)

In the above quote we can clearly see that the freedom of the Other to take away your freedom so that they can transcend their current situation and progress towards their own project (away from lack) requires the emotion of hate to be born by this perspective. It is not the actions of the Other or the morality of the Other that we hate but this ontological denial of our freedom by their very existence as being-for-itself. However, even when this Other has been destroyed we find our state still defined by the Other and so are never able to be free of the Other. In other words, when Germany claimed itself to be superior genetically (in its origins of being- ontogeny) to other races (phylogeny) and that the race of the Jews was inferior to all other races, it found itself telling an ontological story that produced hate par excellence. Liebens Raum, the ‘name’ given to the  ‘rightful’ desire of the country (circle) for more ‘living room’, was simply the ‘name’ given to the ‘lack of transcendence’, the unfreedom, that that capital, in the form of land, would give to the German people (as we will see later) in order for them to able to transcend this lack of freedom.

The inferior race, surprise surprise, were the evil owners of this magical concept of freedom in their magical coins of value, money, which they had hoarded and used against the super-state of the Germanic race, of whom the Jews were now no longer a part and were no longer esteemed or given status. A possession of the Jews par excellence in pre-World War II Germany.

However upon defeat of these Others, the Jews, the Germans still found themselves defined by them, and became in their own reflective consciousnesses, evil and unjust as a race, it became part of their phylogeny and trapped them in it. That is what the German child sees when he looks in the mirror even today in accord with the ontology of his thrownness, that is to say, not only his history, but his position of power in the World as one of the richest countries of the World. A murderer state that claims justice for the power it has achieved by its injustice in acquiring it. Even in success it is through this hate, a failure.

This then is an ontological guilt that must be carried by the members of this super-state and acted on karmically by these members in order to justify its continued ‘right’ of its authority in possessing the ‘right’ to power.

What needs to be added on to this explanation is that all nations have this ontological guilt in their thrownness, and hence so do all of its members, but this is not taught by state schools from this perspective, as we shall see.

“Almost all governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people.” David Hume ‘Of the Original Contract’ 1741. (Thompson:2008:71)

This guilt then must be dealt with in order for the nation to feel something more empowering than guilt

It must feel that it had ‘the right to do so’, the right to take power in order to transform the god of guilt into the god of righteousness.

As we have seen above, with the requirement of this right to power for the King or Elder of the village, this right must be linked to God, in order for each individual to be able to transcend the story of family by this reasoning. Which as we have also seen contains at heart (urgrund) no actual reason other than a desire to believe because it increases one’s power.

This story of connection to God as a right to power, requires a language then to be invented to deal with the consequences of this right once enacted and the consequent guilt that manifests from the division of humanity into these separate groups of people within their story or circle.

The scarcity of resources created by the being-for-itself, created the necessity of the story of Us and Them, of divide and conquer, that evokes the magical feeling of hate (adrenalin), just as the story of status evoked the magical feeling of esteem (serotonin). But now that the hate has been evoked, how does one deal with the obvious injustice of the slaughter of people for the obvious actual purpose of doing so- desire of myself over yourself, as ‘to the victor of this story of hate goes the spoils’. How does one sit in a pile of treasure surrounded by dead bodies of them and of us and feel right about the gain for yourself that is the effect caused by this hate, when right means, to be-have in accordance with God, with Nature.

In particular, to isolate this questioning and refer it back to this transition in actual history, from hunter-gatherer to settler, how does a people who remember thousands upon thousands of years of living in wakan, as one, under one sacred symbol, as one people under one God, look at their actions as beings-for-itself and not feel boundlessly guilty for, -not their thrownness, as it will be for all who come after them-, but the brashness of the lie, that ‘they’ were ‘right’ to ‘act’ (karma) in such a manner (in a technique of hate) against other creations of God, and in His name.

The answer to not feeling boundless hate is simply to align God’s will with their own, through the invention of two new words- Good and Evil. What is Good for the state is Good for God. Why? Because the state is only in power because of its right to do so by the nature of its ruler who has been chosen by this nature to be the conduit of Gods power on Earth. Please notice the distance between God and Earth here.

Therefore any other state or persons that attempts to take away the freedom of the state to transcend itself, i.e. to progress how it wishes is hence forth aligned as confluent with the will of God, must be evil, whereas we with out rightful ruler must be right.

Evil comes from the word illness, and so, just as we saw contagion meant nothing more than a ‘tangent’ away from being-in-Being, evil is a word that describes the lack of power of the being-for-itself in the World to achieve their personal worlding. The ‘ease’ with which his/her desire can be achieved has become a ‘dis-ease’. What do we do with disease, we isolate the carriers (circle them) in order to purge it from them, we destroy it, so that it does not possess the infected or go on to infect others with its own willed cause and effect. 

It must be remembered though, that what is therefore Good in my eyes will necessarily be Evil in yours

 It must therefore be God that names those things that are good and evil and not our individual selves in order for the game of right and wrong, good and evil to be played out in phylogenic truths stated in place of the ontological truth of these beings-for-itself, lack and desire.

These statements of phylogeny, of love and hate therefore must come from the authors of power whose right to power comes from God. They must be the conduits of God who speak these names and give them their powers, just as Adam and Prometheus did with the rest of Nature, when they took the fire or the fruit of knowledge. Accordingly if I am doing this will, (the will of the state) then I cannot be evil, but must be Good. I must be loved (esteemed) and not hated (seen as evil).

The truth however is that the ontogeny of the being-for-itself cannot see himself/herself as evil and will only believe (desire) a story that tells him he is good. A being-for-itself cannot be conscious of ‘being’ evil by their actions, only of ‘being’ good, because their actions are defined ontologically as being for their own self as the ‘chosen’ way to live, and hence are always- good. Therefore any emotion or action that empowers their self is good, but through an-others eyes is always evil as it karmically disempowers them. Just as moving a weight from one scale unbalances the scale, without any further mechanism, so does good create evil and evil create good, upon the balance of justice that is the being-for-itself perspective there can be no balance, no harmony. It is therefore by the necessity of denying the guilt that results from being-for-itself and this taking from others that God becomes aligned to this story of right to power to name the object of hate in any circles phylogeny.

“To apprehend myself as evil, for example, could not be to refer myself to what I am for myself, for I am not and can not be evil for myself for two reasons. In the first place, I am neither evil, for myself, nor a civil servant or a physician. In fact I am in the mode of being what I am and of being what I am not. The qualification “evil”, on the contrary, characterizes me as an in-itself. In the second place, if I were to be evil for myself, I should of necessity be so in the mode of having to be so and would have to apprehend myself and will myself as evil. But this would mean that I must discover myself as willing what appears to myself as the opposite of my Good and precisely because it is the Evil or the opposite of my Good. It is therefore expressly necessary that I will the contrary of what I desire at one and the same moment and in the same relation; that is, I would have to hate myself precisely as I am myself. If on the level of the for-itself I am to realize fully this essence of evil, it would be necessary for me to assume myself as evil; that is, I would have to approve myself by the same act which makes me blame myself. We can see that this notion of evil can in no way derive its origin from me in so far as I am Me.

It would be in vain for me to push the ekstasis to its extreme limits or to effect a detachment from self which would constitute me for myself; I shall never succeed in conferring evil on myself or even in conceiving it for myself if I am thrown on my own resources.

This is because I am my own detachment from myself, I am my own nothingness; simply because I am my own mediator between Me and Me, all objectivity disappears….

Furthermore the Other does not constitute me as an object for myself but for him. In other words he does not serve as a regulative or constitutive concept for the pieces of knowledge which I may have of myself. Therefore the Other’s presence does not cause me-as-object to “appear”. I apprehend nothing but an escape from myself toward–. Even when language has revealed that the Other considers me evil or jealous, I shall never have a concrete intuition of my evil or of my jealousy. These will never be more than fleeting notions whose very nature will be to escape me. I shall not apprehend my evil, but in relation to this or that particular act I shall escape myself, I shall feel my alienation or my flow towards… a being which I shall only be able to think emptily as evil and which nevertheless I shall feel that I am, which I shall live at a distance through shame or fear.

Thus myself-as-object is neither knowledge nor a unity of knowledge but an uneasiness, a lived wrenching away from the ekstatic unity of the for-itself, this Me comes to me is neither knowledge nor category but the fact of the presence of a strange freedom. In fact my wrenching away from myself and the upsurge of the Other’s freedom are one; I can feel them and live them only as an ensemble; I cannot even try to conceive of one without the other. The fact of the Other is incontestable and touches me to the heart. I realize him through uneasiness; through him I am perpetually in danger in a world which is this world and which nevertheless I can only glimpse.” (Sartre:2003:297-99)

The two circles of peoples that are going to meet in this new world of being-for-itself, in this city of Ham, are therefore both going to see themselves as peoples who are good and the Others as people who are evil. Not because they are or are not, but simply because the ontological perspective and consequent karmic actions of each of these circles has been aligned to the will of God in order to justify their perspective. A God who has obviously chosen Us above Them in order to manifest his will upon the World, as we are the rightful holders of power by our rulers very Nature, as a conduit of God. They will not chose a God that believes in Them and not Us, and indeed history confirms this. Therefore my status as a good subject, as an object of power, and as an individual with power is understood through this new urgrund of phylogeny upon which I as Object, believe I truly stand on, believe I dwell in, believe I am, and from which I build, I venture, I project myself, my peoples, my rights, my power, my Good against your evil into the world and find that, surprise surprise, the world I make is the world I desire and I call it good and I perceive that it is blessed by God.

In other words the circle’s story becomes a story that we bind our for-itself too because it empowers us to do so in some way that we value, we choose to become the Object that the phylogeny of the tribe assigns us, and become free and right and powerful, as Object-as-Subject.

As we have seen, violence is not a means of appropriating power only of destroying it, and so the power of the kings arms cannot rely upon violence as its urgrund for cohesiveness. What the king relies on, as we have seen, is a religious story where Gods nature reflects his own, where good, serves the being-for-itself, and where evil, that which is against God’s will, likewise still serves the being-for-itself only its not his being that it serves.

The word religion comes from the same word as the word law, religare meaning to tie or to bind and legere meaning ‘to abide’ or to ‘lie’ in that which is legal, or ‘judged right to do’, according to the story of the religion. We have already seen how the story of family becomes tied to the land magically through the powers of its ancestors who have possessed it with their spirit i.e. the religion or law of family blood, and we have seen how this religion still pervades the worlding today (check your legal will to confirm it, and societies legal will regarding inheritance rights also). With this super-state of the ruler, it is religion and law, as the language of the priest and the king respectively, that becomes their possessions upon which good and evil, freedom and power, equality and fraternity, are magically tied. It is these that we then abide in, just as families abide in their land, and become consequently unquestioningly, traditionally, possessed by it.

Underlying this story of the right to the possession of power and to possession therefore of Right-in-itself, lies the ontological necessity of war and progress. This is the Nature of the State. We call it War and Peace in order to stop identifying the fact that war is progress and peace is progress to be being-for-itself that drives them. Both are merely karmic actions of self-will over God’s will which result in the hubris of Peace and the nemesis of War, that result from the progress towards a desire by the being-for-itself through these behaviours. Peace and War do not exist they are a story. The aletheia is that being-for-itself is the state in which we exist as settlers and its effect is War and Peace enacted by people who ontologically wish (their inner will) to lie in inequality, unfreedom, and hated enemies, but who still wish to see themselves as right to do so, whilst they pray for peace, for mercy, for justice, for universal love, for themselves or their loved one to get the promotion (and not an un-named Other who is but an Object to them) and of forgiveness for their sins all in the same breathe.

Isn’t power a sort of generalised war which assumes at particular moments the forms of peace and the State?

Peace would then be a form of war, and the State a means of waging it.” (Foucault:1980:123)

We are going to look further at law later on and witness its changes throughout history, in order to reveal the ontological perspective and urgrund that it indicates about its peoples, but for the present let us see how religious life performs the role of that which binds us and allows the king to make laws in the first place.

What we have seen is that the settler world is now one of war and progress and that when two circles collide they must necessarily see the Other in these two terms. In peace this power-play is called trade or tribute, in war it is called, land and loot, in reality they are both mere plays of power for-itself.

What we have witnessed then is the religious beliefs of a group of people become transmuted into political power wielded by the priest/king. What the priest king must now do is to use that power to transcend the state of each being-for-itself within his circle, in order to stay in power. If he fails he will be removed from power by another circle or by those within the circle.

What he must do then is to change the power structure of the circle from one of family circles within his greater circle into a pyramid of power, that forces a greater coherence of power to himself alone at the top of the pyramid rather than at the centre of the circle. If he squared the circle, then all sides would be equal, but instead he is forced to create a shape where all of its tangents from the urgrund of the flat square of equality (being-in-Being, (the Greater Church) from where he derives his authority) to become centred upon himself, above his subjects, underneath.

“But wherever we observe the religious life, we find that it has a definite group as its foundation. Even the so-called private cults, such as the domestic cult or the cult of a corporation, satisfy this condition; for they are always celebrated by a group, the family or the corporation. Moreover, even these particular religions are ordinarily only special forms of a more general religion which embraces all; these restricted Churches are in reality only chapels of a vaster Church which, by reason of this very extent, merits this name still more.” (Durkheim:1982:44)

“The religious consciousness is articulated in terms of two interrelated ideas of transcendence and faith. It rests on the assumption that the empirical world, the world as we know it through observation and experiment, is not self-sufficient and depends for its origin, meaning, ground or principles of conduct on a source lying outside it. Although religions differ greatly in the way they define the transcendental principle of being and relate it to the world, they all share this assumption, which the secular world view rejects. Since the nature of the transcendental source and its relation to the world are not a matter of empirical evidence, religion involves faith.

By its very nature, every religion faces several challenges, of which two are of particular interest to us. First, although it involves faith it cannot be a matter of faith alone. It needs to establish a satisfactory relation between faith and reason, both because reason is an important human faculty, and because otherwise faith lacks a regulative principle, opens the door to all manner of absurd beliefs, and undermines the integrity of the religious faith itself. Second, every religion aims to guide the individual in the organization of his or her personal and collective life, and provides a set of moral and political principles. It needs to strike a balance between its worldly and transcendental concerns, and between the freedom of the individual and the power of the religious authority in achieving the desired form of personal and social life.

Not all religions get these two things right. And even when they do, their adherents might misinterpret them. Concerning the first, they might take the view that the divine will is exhaustively revealed in a particular scripture, that they have no right to sit in judgement on it, and that they have an absolute obligation to carry it out in its minutest detail. As for the second, they might use the religion to extract a moral and political programme and deploy its organised power to change their society in the light of it. In the first case, they suspend or marginalize reason and reduce religion to an uncritical faith. In the second, they turn it into the equivalent of a secular ideology, usually of the militant kind. In the political context, the former subordinates politics to religion, while the latter places shifting political considerations at the heart of religion and politicizes it. In their own different ways, religionization of politics and politicization of religion, which represent opposite ends of the religious spectrum, corrupt both religion and politics.” (Parekh:2008:130-1)

 “There is a moral problem as well. Ordinary morality is compatible with- indeed, is the precondition for- shocking immorality at higher levels of social organization. A disorganized, individualistic rabble cannot pull off a systematic genocide like the Soviet killing of the kulaks during collectivization in the 1930s. The southern soldiers of the Confederacy who died to preserve slavery, or the Germans who carried out the Holocaust, often displayed virtues or integrity, courage, and loyalty toward their own communities.

The Germans, in particular, are known as sticklers for order, unwilling to cross the street against a red light even as they marched prisoners off to concentration camps. But the kind of ordinary morality that makes an individual not want to disobey a traffic law contributes, at a higher level of community, to the most monstrous crimes. Our desire to be liked and esteemed and to conform leads individuals to carry out the most brutal orders when caught in an evil political system. Morality at the level of humanity as a whole dictates that we violate deeply felt norms of loyalty and reciprocity to our particular group. The great moral conflicts of our time have arisen not over the absence of ordinary morality, but rather over the tendency of human communities to define themselves narrowly on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, or other some other arbitrary characteristic, and to fight it out with other, differently defined communities.” (Fukayama:1999:233-4)

17: The Circle becomes a pyramid – Hierarchy – The Carrot, the Stick and the Drama Triangle

As we saw above the requirement of a king, before the requirement of a story for him, was that of controlling the desires of settlers in order to control the rate of the loss of resources. The techniques of doing this are what we are exploring in this chapter and they are represented by the language invented to name these techniques. We have already met the techniques of the story of authority, the magic of esteem value and money, and the consequent power of a being-for-itself to invent hatred, and name what is ‘good and evil’, ‘right and wrong’, in accordance with their will. What we are about to witness is the medium by which these phenomena, are conveyed. That is to say ‘how’ the ruler, enforces his ‘why’. His reason for being in power, his reason for saying what is good and evil, his reason for handing out status and money, his reason for hatred and war.

As we have seen these ‘reasons’ are primarily the necessity of controlling the desire of each individual within the group. Why? Firstly because of over-population and desertification and secondly because the invasion of other groups who have suffered the same problem, but unable to return to being-in-Being, as hunter-gatherers due to settlers, they must manifest war and its contra-opposite- peace must be named.

As we saw with the electrified mice, and with the Jews in concentration camps, this results naturally in the form of a pyramid of peoples.

But what we must remember as the urgrund of these pyramids is not only the electrification or gas but the cage or wall, itself. That is to say, not just the state of the circle (phylogeny) but the circle itself (ontogeny).

It is the physical wall that physically separates and imprisons, whereas a drawn circle cannot, as we saw with the man who kept jumping in and out of it to deny the power of the Other earlier. A wall has height and so does a pyramid.

What I am referring to is the sociological wall (of which you are but another brick within it) that turns our circular world of villages into a tower of Babylon, and how, not why, the rulers of cities came to increase their power over those villages in order to be able to construct a city in the first place.

In other words, when discussing how, we are looking at the real world, separated from the magical world of reason, why? Why is ontogeny as told through phylogeny i.e. the story of authority, esteem and status. How is physical actions resulting from this story.

Obviously such a physical worlding requires a physical mechanism of power, a physical technique, it must be manifest by the hand not the mind in order to be used by the user. The word ‘use’, comes from the Sanskrit úta, meaning, ‘to please’ yet again showing the our perspective as we created the language that describe how we interact with the world we possess. To abuse is to cause displeasure.

Now the interesting thing about beings-for-itself is that, whereas you might be thinking that I am going to name possession of the power of God to be greatest power a king can claim as a cohesive invisible force, which it was for the being-in-Being, it is another possession that coheres the being-for-itself, and we will see, as we proceed through history that this power becomes named as the reason for the state, as belief in authority from God dies.

One must imagine that you are a settler who is in this primitive world of settling, how doyou exercise your power for-itself, when those around you have just as much power, as individuals. You must cohere people to your cause, and the only way of doing that is to promise them empowerment of their own cause by following yours. By making their cause your cause you obtain power and coherence, but what is to stop another person from offering greater power to their cause and therefore creating division? Well having the greatest cause, effects the means to the greatest power and so no one else can possibly offer more empowerment to the individual, and this is precisely the first stage of what the village ruler offered.

“The power of such leaders and families varied across a wide spectrum. At one extreme stood leaders (shaykhs) of nomadic pastoral tribes, who had little effective power except that which was given them by their reputation in the public opinion of the group. Unless they could establish themselves in a town and become rulers of another kind they had no power of enforcement, only that of attraction, so that nomadic tribes could grow or diminish, depending on the success or failure of the leading family; followers might join or leave them, although this process might be concealed by the fabrication of genealogies, so that those who joined the group would appear as if they had always belonged to it.” (Hourani:1991:108)

So the first how of coherence to people who are being-for-itself is the power of attraction, not of enforcement, but of good opinion to empower the individual that chose to join that group, not the lack of freedom to leave it. But as nomadic people began to own things, those things began to own them, and so they could not leave without losing their land and their work. When a people are nomadic, then they can leave a ruler that they don’t like or doesn’t empower them, and no ruler has the power to stop them, but when a people become settled, then they cannot leave their land and their brick homes. So by the process of settling the individual becomes subject to the land, the land possesses him, as he possesses it. But when a ruler combines the power of many villages then the settler in the village loses his power to his land and subjects himself to the rulers reason, to his laws that give them their property rights.

It just so happens that a ruler will obey property rights due to the cohesive power that this gives him, and not because of any sacred right to a piece of land that magically falls from the heavens onto the person who puts a spade in it or plants a flag, that is phylogeny created by tradition, created by the ontogeny of being-for-itself. These possessions of the settler then are now not, in reality, secured by the fabric, the garment of the awe of the ruler and his laws, but of the reciprocal increase in power that this facilitates to both parties. One increases his feeling of the safety of his possessions because of the power of the army, whilst the other increases his feeling of safely possessing the arms of power.

But, because the settler cannot leave, and now owns land only by owing allegiance, the ruler finds that the villager has conjured within himself the power of punishment, purely because this type of being will not run away if mistreated or abused. The being-for-itself has the power to fight but not the power of flight, without the effect of losing that very power. The hunter-gatherer had the power of flight in order to gain power, but not of fight as their was no greater power to be gained, than by co-operation and equality, and fraternity, hence he had liberty as a possession. By having nothing to protect he was in need of no protection. So the ruler finds that the individual who settles requires protection because they require possessions and hence he can possess that protection. In other words the settler is now by his own cause in a constant effect of the state. The resultant reality is one of: fear of loss and hope of gain.

Hope and Fear = Paranoia

Paranoia literally means, ‘a mental disorder in which the sufferer believes that other people suspect, despise or persecute him or, less commonly, in which the sufferer has delusions of grandeur.’

Is there a better description of a settler who now believes in the Other, who is- not in a paranoid way- but literally, by default of being a settler, out to persecute him, to despise and to hate him, or in like manner of a settler who now believes in the grandeur conferred upon her by the story of her nature as ruler of these subjects.

Paranoia comes from the Greek para meaning above, and gnosis meaning knowledge. We have seen already that knowledge is power and esteem, so what is more natural for the settler than to live in the experience of hope and fear because the ruler has a knowledge of his power above that of his own, and has the power to enforce it because the settler by his nature will not leave.

Those who have any power over your therefore are of a higher status than you and so, in like manner, they also live in a state of hope and fear (paranoia) that they will lose their status, as there are those above them that could at any time have knowledge above their own that will strip them of their possessions, just as they have over you. In fact the closer one is to this realisation by the possession of this power and the experience one gains by using it, the more real it appears to be, and so this results in even greater paranoia, as we shall see.

The most paranoid of all therefore is the ruler, whose only threat is not only every individual under his subjection, but also any Other ‘ruler’ who can threaten her power.

Therefore the ruler must ensure a constant increase of the state in order to increase the power of those beneath them, in order to ensure the coherence of power, and must ensure an increase in power commensurate with the powers that surround her in the form of other circles, that will try and take his power from him.

This fate of the settler therefore brings about further techniques in order to facilitate this necessity of the maintaining a State of Paranoia. It is a state therefore that is able to exist by this reason, but it, will I’m sure be conceded, is not a very reasonable state by which to exist.

“The force of words, being, as I have formerly noted, too weak to hold men to the performance of their covenants; there are in man’s nature, but two imaginable helps to strengthen it. And those are either a fear of the consequence of breaking their word; or a glory, or pride in appearing not to need to break it. This latter is a generosity too rarely found to be presumed on especially in the pursuers of wealth, command, or sensual pleasure; which are the greatest part of mankind. The passion to be reckoned upon, is fear; whereof there be two very general objects: one, the power of spirits invisible; the other, the power of those men they shall therein offend. Of these two, though the former be the greater power, yet the fear of the latter is commonly the greater fear.” (Hobbes:1651:92)

The ‘power of spirits invisible’ described by Hobbes above are the forces of desire, lack, etc, that make up the individual and it is these that contain the greater power. However it is the power of those that will be offended when you increase yours and decrease theirs by cause and effect of a behaviour of self-centred desires, that contains the greatest fear. In other words a being-for-itself is torn between hope and fear as he acts in the World. Hope as we discovered with Pandora is the greatest power, the greatest curse of Zeus upon mankind, for it is this which drives him on to discover fear and its consequences of hate, dis-ease, war, inequality, etc.

Fear then, consequent to this hope for a desire, born from lack, is the new technique that the king may adopt, and we may remember the dual use of the word awe and awful, in regards to choking and anguish above.

To bring this back to the reality of the settler in prehistoric times. Hunter-gatherers had only one force of coherence and that was gain by co-operation. The consequence of this was that a groups ruler could only offer gain for the individual and gain for the group equally, and hence no ruler was needed, only the rule of nature, necessity. But Villagers having become dependent on property, a piece of land separate from the rest of the world by a magical circle (manifested as a fence or hedge to invoke its natural alignment to Nature) that they had worked and invested their social capital in, find that they need to defend that property against Others. In order to do this they must adopt better techniques than those adopted by these Others, in order to be able to will their power over them, and not vice versa. Gain in the form (name) of progress, therefore becomes a requirement of existence for the settler. Possession recapitulates protection, just as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, just as peace recapitulates war, by being named two parts of the same coin, rather one coin- desire. Possession as the project of desire throws into existence the necessary language of protection for a subject-being. Being-for-itself throws into existence the necessary language of race, genes, ethnicity, phylogeny. Going to war for the first time throws into existence the language of peace.

So the language of gain becomes the ability to protect that which is possessed, not just gain of some thing further but instead the increased of ‘not loss’ of that already possessed, an increase in safety and security, a form of power but to which you are subject. In other words gain becomes a magical word without substance, without a phenomenal object to prove its existence. One cannot show ones gain of the same field as you had yesterday by showing the corpses of those who would have taken it. Gain, and Protection are the Hubris perspective opposed by its Nemesis perspective, Loss and War. Gain and loss, experienced as the feelings of hope and fear therefore becomes paranoia no longer grounded upon the land- nature as urgrund, but forever ungrounded by the ever changing, recapitulating, desires of the rulers and his power. A succulent fruit from the Tree of good and evil, grown in the Garden of Eden, and ceded by the behaviour of settling.

Gain and loss are therefore manifestations not of Gods power but of the rulers power, they are never truly yours, and that is the truth, the urgrund upon which civilization always rests in Aletheia. That is the state of any State that ever existed or ever will exist for beings-for-itself, as they create it, just as the ‘small insurance policy’  of planting wild grains created the being-for-itself in the first place.

18: Punishment: The Carrot and the Stick

“On Hope and Fear- Being moved between hope and fear (the fear of God and the hope of His forgiveness) is the earliest state of Sufihood. Those who stay in this state are like the ball played from one part of the field to the other. After a time this experience has its benefit and after that is has its disadvantages. Following the Path without the lower qualities of hope and fear is the objective. A higher objective is when there is neither bribe nor stick. Some need hope and fear; they are those who have had it prescribed for them.– Pahlawan-i-Zaif.” (Shah:1979:254-5)

What the ruler has been handed then, by the desires of the settler is the power of gain and loss. In our inner subjective world of we refer to this in emotional language as hope and fear of that desired, and pleasure and pain when venturing towards possessing that desire. Upon possessing that desire, we call it lack. But in political language we refer to this as the carrot and the stick, the reward and the punishment. This is the how of power, the medium by which the will of Daksha is manifest: Punishment.

Imagine that you are a farmer and you wish to get your donkey to plough the field and not eat the grass. Well you can promise the donkey a carrot, or you can hit it with a stick. The only thing you need to be sure of is that the donkey can’t get to another field where the grass seems greener, because then the stick and the carrot are useless, as the donkey can run faster than you. What kind of a donkey comes up with an idea that builds its own wall? A donkey that has no further grass to eat because it has greedily eaten it all or a donkey that has no further grass to eat because another group of ever increasing donkeys is greedily eating it all, and is not moving on to pastures new.

The essential element in the new story of Ham’s authority then was, the new technology, allowed by the harnessing of the carrot of personal reward to the new stick of personal punishment that came into his possession by the nature of ‘the right to possession’ within the individual in the first place, and hence being able to organise a greater amount of people to enact his will and plough his field for-himself. Put quite simply by giving over our rights dictated by natural law to the ‘ruler’ of the Earth, then the ruler had the authority to tell us what bit of the Earth was or wasn’t ours- ‘property rights’. By giving the world a value, based upon our perspective, we created a ‘commonwealth’, but the very nature that bore the concept of wealth consequently bore the concept of power from it, and the necessity to wield that power coterminously. Coterminality means according to Websters: ‘alignmentof various civic, political or administrative jurisdictions, e.g., police, sanitation, education.’ i.e. instruments of state power.

‘In my domain I will protect you, and your property by extension is you, because you need it in order to live- to be, to dwell. It is your carrot and your stick, because I possess them physically by the physical power of my armies, and it is I that manifest and control them by my authority not yours.’ Just to get you thinking a bit, I wonder if it wouldn’t be prudent for the individual to take out ‘a small insurance policy’ against such reasonable hopes and fears, as we do in the modern world. What would be the effect of that insurance policy, when the repercussions of the our first insurance policy- grain- were so massive, and now the idea of protection, as a small insurance policy’ has already shown to bear the marks of war, desertification, inequality and punishment? We will see later on the answer and discover that we are currently experiencing it, by willing-it, and quite reasonably too.

That’s Just the Way I am Built and Nothing You Can Do Will Change It

“Do you at all recollect the interesting passage of Carlyle, in which he compares, in this country and at this day, the understood and commercial value of man and horse; and in which he wonders that the horse, with its inferior brains and its awkward hoofiness, instead of handiness, should be always worth so many tens or scores of pounds in the market, while the man, so far from always commanding his price in the market, would often be thought to confer a service on the community by simply killing himself out of their way? Well, Carlyle does not answer his own question, because he supposes we shall at once see the answer. The value of the horse consists simply in the fact of your being able to put a bridle on him. The value of man consists precisely in the same thing. If you can bridle him, or which is better, if he can bridle himself, he will be a valuable creature directly.” (Ruskin:1907:21)

 If power comes from the people then, as I think we’ve proved, and as these people all require power, as I think we’ve proved, and as this desire and hence necessity for  power keeps growing from the individual to family size in order to give their family more power, as I think we’ve proved, then by necessity the ruler must, require and acquire, greater power in order to increase these ever growing number of individuals’ desires for greater power, as I think we’ve proved, and all within a greater race of circles cohering under the same conditions or state of desire, that constitutes their nature.

This then is the constitutive state of all states, one of increase and it is the purpose of this book to prove to the reader that any State of peoples that has existed throughout history relies upon this state of affairs between its populace and itself in order to exist and survive- this is its ontogeny. The regulative rules, that is to say the way that this power and its demand for increase is dealt with, the phylogeny, are contained within the stories and consequently the cultures that we are going to visit, in the rest of the first half of this book, including our own, in order to discover our full thrownness.

To explain this analogy between constitutive rules and the regulative rules that play upon them more clearly, Wittgenstein used to explain it by comparing it to a game of chess. The constitutive rules of chess cannot be changed without the game of chess itself becoming purposeless, but the regulative rules can be. For example I can waive the rule that if you touch a piece you must move it (the regulative rule), but I cannot waive the rule that the bishop only moves diagonally and remains on its colour (the constitutive rule). In like manner the constitutive rule of all groups of beings-for-itself is the effect of desire due to the feeling of lack caused by being-for-itself that causes the techniques for acquiring it to become manifest through power. Therefore constitutively to any such circle lies, increase- in the form of war and peace (progress towards a desired state- hope) are the urgrund of civilization, and as we have seen above and will continue to see, is the state of all States of civilization no matter their regulative dance of religious toleration, of free-trade, of sectarianism, of tyranny, of democracy, etc, etcetera., because of this constitution.

 Babylon, is our starting place for this story known henceforth, not as myth or legend but as ‘his-story’ (i.e. Gods purpose told from the perspective of an individual when it became perceived through the body of the State and its organs, such as armies, and priests and administrators and farmers, etc) and no longer through his-Nature- as we have seen retold in a story form called myth). It is the first civilization that comes into this history and hence its language is the constitutional and ontological frame of reference by which we must view the world from this point on. An ontologically constituted language that we have now seen invented by necessity in order to think about, communicate and now constitute, the invisible forces that were born upon the eating of the forbidden fruit of self-knowledge of seeing the World as our possession to gain by- a world of Good and Evil, of Devas and Asuras, of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, of ‘carrot and stick’, of pain and pleasure, of hope and fear, and ultimately of paranoia.

This is the constitution of this Whore of Babylon, the race of Ham most cursed, ‘The lowest of slaves’, ‘a real enslavement which comes to me through others’.  It is a tower made by a carrot and a stick, and three dancing pigeons. But before we move on to meet these three pigeons and into the history that they create by their dance, I would like to just look at what the cave-man has left behind him and will never see again throughout the rest of this book. A world that one must unfortunately concede is most distant from seeming ‘true’ or even possible today, right now, rather than in any yesterday that we will look at, due to the global nature of our willed-power in worlding the world today towards our own desires and the imbalance this has created. The Nemesis of global warming, and the paranoia of nuclear war, in a willed-worlding that has never manifest such inequality or famine through its techniques, but never produced so much as a result of them. This is what today we call ‘the ‘right’ way to live’, and demand the ‘right’ to it, no matter the price or its effects. Sympathy but not empathy. Circle mentality, not universality.

We will witness from this point forth in fact nothing more than the proselytizing cries for these lost things throughout all civilizations that arise. They are the regulative stories of truth, equality, liberty, fraternity, peace, love, justice and abundance in a constitutive rule of the pyramid.

No longer is there the ability to roam the planet freely, unmolested by another group of peoples, who believe that they have a right over you. Today ‘if you are lucky’ (laconically) you have the right to pay for a passport in order to leave the nation-states territory that you have been told as Subject is yours and no other, and then in order to stay for any length of time in that different country where ever you choose to go, you have to convince the rulers of that territory that you are of sufficient use (pleasure) to them (rich, educated or related) to be wanted in their land, whereupon you then have to pay a small fortune to get and maintain a visa or apply to be- not nationalised, which is what they are doing by accepting you into their nation-state, but as they now term it- naturalised. 

The authority of the ‘being-in-Being’ of Nature will never return to its Native Home called the Universe or Universal, it has been divided and conquered through progress of desire, through war and peace. From now on God will be aligned to the state and it is still ringing through it today. ‘By the power vested in me by the President of the United States of America…. I Naturalise you’ (was I un-natural before), well according to their language stories words and meaning, yes, you were. In like manner, from now on, if you do not believe in the right God you are unnatural too unless converted or transmuted by their owned flame of progress.

The experience of community with the universe, with God, with others that were a part of this all, with equality, not as a right, but as a behaviour, and therefore not able to be lost by its unknown opposite, inequality, and hence feared. The belonging of simply being, rather than the use of existing that others would prefer you didn’t. The unnamed power of love unopposed by hate. The lack of desire, rather than the desire for that lacked. The peace and abundance without knowledge of war and famine. The gratitude of alimental communion, rather than the generosity of sacrifice. The surrendering of ones will to others in accordance with the phylogeny that came from this nature in order to be given water in order to survive and the ability of any one to become that conduit just be being against the ‘right’ to water if you can reciprocate the individual giving it.

In this chapter then we have seen the village become a place of war and progress under the dominion of a conduit of God. All of which are necessarily resultant from the settler way of life.

In the next chapter we will look at how the ability to punish as well as reward, becomes the force that drives this new leviathan into civilization itself.