Conflicting Realities; Immigrant versus 'Indigenous'

After Columbus ‘discovered’ America [formerly known as ‘Turtle Island’], waves of colonizing European immigrants moved westward from ‘the Old Country’ and began the process of constructing the New World.   There were many new things that they had to deal with including grizzly bears, poisonous snakes and the troublesome aboriginals that infested the forests and plains.  The knowledge and technology of the immigrants easily overwhelmed resistance from the indigenous ‘fauna’ including the indigenous aboriginal peoples.

In the historical narratives that have been written about this era, those written by the immigrants eulogized the ‘creation of a New World’ while those written by the indigenous peoples spoke of the contamination and degeneration of a superior world, by waves of destructive rodent-like Europeans.

Those opposing ‘realities’; the one, a story of ‘genesis’ and the other, a story of ‘degeneration’ were talking about ‘the same place/space’.

Since ‘there is just one consciousness’ as Erwin Schrödinger reminds us, even though the respective ‘realities’ of the ‘immigrants’ and the ‘indigenous peoples’ were in polar opposition, the experience of both factions, of inclusion in a common, transforming space, is in common.   That is, it is in common in an ahistorical, purely physical sense.

To the observer from space [from the astronaut’s-eye-view] the space of the biosphere is ‘more general’ than the notion of organisms moving within it.  That is, observed on a continuing basis, the biosphere is transforming and the flora and fauna within it, that regularly emerge and subduct, a dynamic explained by physics in terms that material forms are ‘ripple structures within an energy-charged spatial-plenum’.   That is, the group of material forms we say ‘emigrated’ to the Americas are, ‘schaumkommen’ (appearances) in Schrödinger’s words.  That is not to say that they are ‘nothing’ but that they are inclusions within in a bigger process; i.e. transformation of the biosphere and/or energy-charged medium/plenum.  For example, babies were born to the immigrants en route, and at some point the child might be designated ‘American’ rather than ‘immigrant’, that point being purely subjective and based on socially developed concepts.   Similarly, at some point the ‘immigrants’ consider themselves to be ‘indigenous peoples’ and they distinguish themselves from ‘immigrants’ often in the supercilious way that ‘reformed-smokers’ distinguish themselves from ‘smokers’.

As Howard Zinn pointed out in his introduction to ‘A People’s History of the United States’, there is polar opposition in the historical narratives written by the ‘colonizing immigrants’ (the self-styled ‘creators of a New World’) and the historical narratives written by the ‘colonized peoples’ (‘witnesses to the degeneration of an Established World reared with the blood sweat and tears of countless generations of ancestors’).

The point is that while there is a common consciousness of the common transforming space experienced by the immigrants and indigenous people, what they deem to be ‘reality’ is in rank polar opposition [genesis versus degeneration].   The immigrants may laugh and talk about ‘superstitious natives’ as they clearcut and plough up a space that the indigenous peoples claim is a ‘sacred space’ [their ‘Jerusalem’] though Crusades have been launched within their own culture over the issue of ‘desecration’ of sacred spaces;

“Do not come near,” says God to Moses; “put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5)

Psychologically, there is a huge difference in the values that one assigns to the diverse aspects of a shared living space, seen from the different perspectives of  the ‘immigrant’ and the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants of that space.  The ‘immigrant’ is often seen by the indigenous inhabitant as a ‘desecrator’ of ‘holy ground’ or ‘sacred tradition’.

There is ‘dysfunction’ in this elevating of personal/group ‘reality’ over conscious experience of sharing inclusion in a common, transforming space.  It ‘ties back’ to the imposing of absolute ‘identity’ on material forms and re-rendering dynamics in terms of these now notionally ‘independently existing things-in-themselves’ to invent a ‘doer-deed reality’ (Nietzsche).  The ‘doer-deed reality’ jumpstarts from the reified ‘material forms’.  This is convenient in that it allows us to play ‘language games’ as a means of sharing and discussion our observations and experiences.  We do it in the case of hurricanes where, while it is obvious that these material forms are ‘ripples in the energy-charged spatial-plenum’, we define and name them (e.g. Katrina) and in our language game, ‘pretend’ that they are ‘things-in-themselves’ [As John Stuart Mill observes; “every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined.”]

Once we have subjectively defined and named ‘ripples in the spatial-plenum’ (‘material forms’), we ‘lose track’ of the fact that their actions do not, as they seem, imply their possession of internal powers of self-animation; i.e. we forget that they are transient ripples in transforming spatial plenum that persists while ‘its ripples’ come and go (gather are regather).

Nevertheless, the impression of the ‘reality’ of a personal or group ‘thing-in-itself’ identity is very strong.  The impression of indigenous peoples, that their ‘civilization’ is threatened with desecration/degeneration by immigrant peoples, is a prevalent current-day source of socio-political conflict.   While the resistance of the colonized aboriginals of North America was no match for the technologically advanced military power of the colonizing Europeans, and thus the European civilization largely crushed the aboriginal civilization under foot, the tables are more often turned so that ‘immigrants’ are seen as ‘imported labour’, to perform the menial tasks now that slavery, as a blunt and outright practice, is no longer politically correct.   For example, in 1880-1920, over 4 million Italian immigrants arrived in the United States, and the indigenous citizens [descendents of immigrants] felt their civilization being threatened with degeneration by these lowly, dirty and disgusting peasants.  This racial animosity sourced one of the largest mob lynchings in U.S. history when 11 Italian-Americans were hung in a single skirmish in New Orleans on March 14, 1891.

A modern example of the fear of indigenous people, of their civilization being desecrated by immigrant influx/influence is the following;

“In 2004, France banned head scarves [burqas and niqabs] from schools and public buildings. “In our country,” said Sarkozy on June 22, “we cannot accept that women are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of an identity … This is not the French republic’s idea of dignity … When we meet women who wear it, we try to educate them, and explain to them that moderation is a better choice.”  … Trying to rescue Muslim women is a French tradition dating back to the colonization of Algeria in the 1830s. Saving Algeria’s veiled population was central to France’s mission civilisatrice to bring the Enlightenment to Arabs.”  … “In The Politics of the Veil (2007), historian Joan Wallach Scott writes that banning the veil has been “a way of insisting on the timeless superiority of French ‘civilization’ in the face of a changing world.”

The philosophical roots of this issue can be traced back to our concept of evolution.  As Nietzsche contended [in his ‘anti-Darwinist’ writings], “evolution is a process of diffusion in which outside-inward influx predominates over inside-outward outflux.”   Meanwhile, our popular way of thinking is ‘Darwinist’; i.e. it is to assume the predominance of inside-outward creative drive.  Sarkozy would like to believe that French civilization has been ‘made in heaven’ (is a local, inside-outward creation) perfected through competition with other civilizations and proving itself, always, to be superior to them.   As Nietzsche pointed out, our experience contradicts this view of ‘evolution’ and suggests instead that ‘outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward influence [outflux]’.

That is, the sense of ‘contamination’ or ‘desecration’ of a civilization goes back to the ‘language game simplification’ we impose, which synthetically converts ‘ripples in the plenum’ (material forms) into ‘local, independently-existing things-in-themselves’.   If we were to understand emergent communities in a mutually supportive ecosystemic sense, as the new physics demands, then we would be unable to claim an inside-outward sourcing of our civilization.   ‘Mach’s principle’ would constrain our notional ‘independence’, bringing it down from ‘absolute independence’ (which implies absolute internal ‘first cause’ powers of behavioural sourcing) to a ‘conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation’ corresponding to ‘ripple structures in the energy-charged spatial-plenum’.  In this case, the evolutionary dynamic follows the principle that; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

In this view, French civilization cannot be seen as a ‘thing-in-itself’ with its own inside-outward driving origins/evolution but must be understood as deriving from the world dynamic it is included in; i.e. “the dynamics of the world are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants [including the French] at the same time as the inhabitants [including, but not limited to, the French] are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

Many stories have been written about ‘the fall from grace’ which occurs when we try to reproduce an aesthetic trait to a deliberate inside-outward action that tries to replicate it (reducing a dynamic conjugate relation wherein the outside-inward predominates over inside-outward, to one-side-inside-outward driving replica.).  [e.g. see ‘The Marionette Theatre’ by Heinrich von Kleist http://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm ]

As with the hurricane and the fluid-medium it is included in, the ‘habitat dynamic’ is like an ‘invisible glove’ that includes and orchestrates the dynamics of the inhabitants that share inclusion within it.  What is visible to us are the local material forms and ‘their’ dynamics.  Our globally dominating (currently) ‘materialist’ culture takes the language-game influenced ‘shortcut’ of starting with what is visible and forcibly ‘makes sense out of it’ (as well as it can, since the most essential aspect, the outside-inward orchestrating influence of the habitat-dynamic, is missing).   In order to ‘make sense’ of the development of material form, behaviour and organization (within and amongst forms), one invents the notion of inside-outward driving processes, … as needed (to make logical sense in a self-consistent-within-this-model manner).  This is the source of the biological sciences’ definition of ‘organism’ and ‘gene’ (‘doer-of-deeds’ concepts openly mocked by Nietzsche).

‘Genes’ were invented prior to the discovery of DNA structures and were needed by the model to explain the development of material form in an exclusively inside-outward locally jumpstarted fashion.   The biological sciences also invented ‘biochemistry’ to explain the sourcing of behavioural actions, also in an exclusively inside-outwards locally jumpstarted fashion.  The third invention on the part of the biological sciences was the ‘central nervous system’ which was needed to explain the source of steerage of the organism, also in an exclusively inside-outwards locally jumpstarting fashion.

As in the startup foundations of this model, where the material form was synthetically split out from the engendering medium (the energy-charged spatial medium), the ‘gene’, the ‘biochemical drive’ and the ‘central nervous system’ are imputed to have within them, God-like internal jumpstarting powers, to source the development of form of the material form [seen as a ‘local-thing-in-itself’ organism]; to source the power-drive of the ‘local-thing-in-itself’ organism; and to source the steerage that directs the behaviour of the ‘local-thing-in-itself’ organism.

These invented components satisfy the re-rendering of the material form, entirely out of the context of the energy-charged spatial medium in which it is a ‘ripple structure’ that belongs to the medium in the manner that a hurricane belongs to the spatial flow of the atmosphere.

Like the material form itself, these components can be affirmed by ‘visual inspection’.  That is, if one can find a visible form that looks as if it plays the role of the ‘gene’, then this is sufficient confirmation of its ‘independent existence’, as was the case in reducing the material form [ripple in the medium] to an ‘independently-existing material object/organism’.  Of course there have been ‘dissenters’ within the biological sciences, but ‘materialism’ permeates the fabric of our society/civilization and it is resistant to the challenges it continues to be buffeted by; e.g. the following comment by a biological cell research scientist whose research affirms that DNA is not the ‘jumpstarter’ that it has been given credit for;

“Advances from science’s frontier offer new insights that provide a bright light at the end of this dark tunnel. Firstly, in contrast to the emphasis on the Newtonian material realm, the newer science of quantum mechanics reveals that the Universe and all of its physical matter are actually made out of immaterial energy. Atoms are not physical particles; they are made of energy vortices resembling nano-tornadoes.

Quantum physics stresses that the invisible energy realm, collectively referred to as the field, is the primary governing force of the material realm. It is more than interesting that the term field is defined as “invisible moving forces that influence the physical realm,” for the same definition is used to describe spirit. The new physics provides a modern version of ancient spirituality. In a Universe made out of energy, everything is entangled, everything is one.”

Biomedical research has recently toppled the widespread belief that organisms are genetically controlled robots and that evolution is driven by a random, survival-of-the-fittest mechanism. … The exciting new science of epigenetics emphasizes that genes are controlled by the environment…” – Bruce Lipton

In general, the materialist paradigm shortstops the sourcing of the development of material form, behaviour and organization by jumpstarting it [the sourcing] from within the visible material forms, while the invisible substrate of an energy-charged spatial medium [field] lies there [everywhere] in readiness to take the sourcing one layer deeper, for those scientists that are willing to risk their professional careers by taking it there.

Since the development of organization, in the materialist modeling paradigm is also exclusively inside-outward [in denial of our everyday experience which informs us that the habitat dynamic orchestrates/organizes the dynamics of the inhabitants], we have taken the model of the ‘central nervous system’ and emulated it on the macro-scale of people collectives to ‘drive the system of nature in an upside-down manner’.  That is, in the evolution of organization, the natural order is where ‘outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward influence’.

For example, as Stephen Jay Gould says in ‘Full House’, using the metaphor of baseball, you can conceive of ‘hitting’ without at the same time comprehending ‘fielding’.  The two are in ‘conjugate relation’ and an exact splitting apart is impossible.  An increase in hitting averages could be due to a decline in fielding competency and vice versa.  The two go together like a horse and carriage; ‘you can’t have one without the other’.

When the big flood comes, humans are not the only ones heading for high ground; i.e. they are not the only ones whose individual and collective behaviours [not to mention ‘engenderings’] are orchestrated by the dynamics of habitat.  Snakes, rabbits, bears, deer and coyotes are included in the list and deer and coyotes have been spotted together on the same levees together during a flood, their behaviours orienting more to the transforming habitat than to predator-prey engaging.

Of course, the materialist will argue that the human’s behaviour is exclusively inside-outward driven and that the human used his brain/central nervous system to ‘sense’, ‘interpret’, develop alternative responses, ‘decide’ and ‘act’.  Such an explanation manages to deprive the energy-charged spatial plenum (the habitat-dynamic) of any sourcing role in the behaviour of the human organism, but it starts sounding a bit silly when applied to the snake.  Why not accept that there is an energy-charged substrate that not only orchestrates and organizes the behaviour of material forms (the inhabitants) but engenders them?  Ralph Waldo Emerson (a contemporary of Lamarck, Nietzsche, Mach), for one, does accept this and elaborates on it in ‘The Method of Nature’.

The organization used in ‘governance’ in our globally dominating materialist culture does, as one might expect, use this same upside-down, exclusively inside-outward model of organization.  ‘Authoritarian hierarchies’ emulate the ‘brain/central nervous system’ as the absolute local jumpstarted source of direction which is seen in the materialist paradigm as the ‘source of organization’.

Currently, all around the globe, there is growing contention between those who would like to ‘take direction from the land’ [as was the way of the Amerindians] and those who want to ‘take control of the land’.  ‘Control of the land’ is jumpstarted from the brain/central nervous system of materialist organization; i.e. from the central authority of the sovereign state government.  The land is seen as a commodity that can be bought, sold and traded, … such a view being radically at odds with the notion that the habitat-dynamic is the predominant orchestrating source of inhabitant dynamics.

Evidently, the notion of inside-outward sourcing of organization, as operationalized via central authority, has usurped the source of organization that resides naturally within the land.  The historical development of this ‘hi-jacking’ is easily seen.  People who were deprived of access to the land in Europe were promised land in the Americas by Europe’s imperialist powers who needed ‘settlers/colonizers’ in order to maintain ‘control’ over the ‘new found’ lands of the Americas.  The deal [a kind of ‘deal with the devil’] was that the colonizers would be given a stake in the ‘new found lands’ in exchange for committing to bear arms and give their lives, if necessary, to maintain control over the lands [by maintaining belief in, and loyalty to, the newly invented, imaginary-line-bounded sovereign state or colony].   This ‘maintaining control’ over the land included maintaining control over the indigenous peoples who insisted that ‘people belonged to the land’ rather than vice versa, and that land was sacred (the mother of all inhabitants) and could not be made into a commodity that was bought and sold.

Usurping the role of the land as the developer of organization, and re-inventing organization as something that was exclusively inside-outward driven from a centre of authority, was thus facilitated by reducing land to a commodity and seizing control of it.  Instead of a civilization that ‘took its direction’ from the land, a civilization was substituted that ‘directed what went on in the land’.  While many people, oppressed by central authorities that direct what goes on in the land, would like to return to the inverted source of direction (to liberate themselves from the deal-with-the-devil), backtracking is proving to be a non-trivial exercise.

Recap:

In this essay entitled ‘Conflicting Realities: Immigrant and Indigenous’, … the point has been argued that ‘the biosphere is one thing’ and that ‘material forms’  gather and regather within it, sourced by an invisible, nonlocal energy-charged medium that physicists call ‘field’.  The material forms are in no way ‘independent’ of the field dynamics, but for reasons of convenience (e.g. to fit the noun-verb architecture of language so that the inherently ‘ineffable’ experience of inclusion in the ‘continual becoming’ of the biosphere can captured within a language game and shared and discussed in this manner), the material forms are defined and named and categorized.

This abstract ‘splitting the material forms out of the flow’ and jumpstarting a logical explanation of dynamics, starting from the material forms (notionally conceived of as local, independently existing things-in-themselves), has required the invention of supportive concepts to allow the re-rendering of dynamics starting from local material objects/organisms/systems to be logically consistent within itself.

This overall, logically self-consistent system is known as ‘materialism’.  It has become a basic ‘belief system’.  In other words, common and popular understandings and actions are derived from this system and no longer refer back to the deeper level of sourcing; i.e. the invisible, nonlocal field-dynamic of the energy-charged spatial-plenum.

The salient feature of ‘materialism’ is that all sourcing of dynamics, whether we are speaking of the development of form, behaviour and/or organization, are construed to be exclusively inside-outward sourced.  The notion of a conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation, of early [uncivilized?] peoples or ‘aboriginals’, has been discarded, even though it has returned in ‘the new physics’.  That is, the notion that evolution as it pervades the universe, is as Nietzsche says, “a process in which outside-inward influence [endosmosis] predominates over inside-outward outflux [exosmosis]”, has been reduced to one-sided inside-outward sourcing of dynamics, a reduction that ‘inverts’ the precedence of outside-inward over inside-outward and has us understand that inside-outward sourcing of dynamics predominates, PERIOD.

This one-sidedness has been shown to equate to the imposing of an absolute [Euclidian] space reference frame in mentally capturing our visual/tactile sensory experience.  The absolute reference framing not only removes any sourcing power from ‘space’, it enables us to endow ‘material forms-as-ripples-in-energy-charged-space’ with absolute local ‘material being’.  That is, Euclidian space has the property that where it is occupied, there is something that exists absolutely in that location, and where it is not occupied, there is absolute nothing existing there.  Thus everything ‘that is’ and everything ‘that happens’ must, in Euclidian space, derive from ‘what is’ (absolute material being).  Even though Euclidian space has become the foundation for our globally dominating culture’s ‘thinking’, it is pure abstraction and bears no relation to the space we experience.

Much has been said about this ‘problem’ of confusing our understanding of dynamics that we base on Euclidian space-framing with the very different understanding of dynamics when we base it instead on, for example, ‘non-Euclidian geometries of space’.  Meanwhile, the Amerindians have a much better handle on ‘thinking in non-Euclidian space’ than most of us [conditioned to thinking in terms of Euclidian space] can quickly muster up, as is a key point in F. David Peat’s ‘Blackfoot Physics’.

If one suspends imposing an absolute [Euclidian] reference space framing, one restores the natural primacy of field in which case our understanding of ‘material forms’ returns to ‘ripples in the energy-charged spatial-plenum’ wherein ‘outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward outflux’,…  and to compliance with the findings of the new physics; e.g;

‘Space is not Euclidian’ … “Space is a participant in physical phenomena” … “Space not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.”, … “the recognition of the fact that ‘empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials g(μ,ν), has, I think finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty.”…”Relativity forces us to analyze the role played by geometry in the description of the physical world.” . . . “A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone” —Einstein.

“Space is another framework we impose upon the world” . . . ” . . . here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature.” . . . “Euclidian geometry is . . . the simplest, . . . just as the polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polynomial of the second degree.” . . . “the space revealed to us by our senses is absolutely different from the space of geometry.” . . . Henri Poincaré,  ’Science and Hypothesis’.”

Ok, there is plenty of repetition here [in these quotes by Einstein and Poincaré], which hopes to nail down this point, … THAT OUTSIDE-INWARD INFLUENCE PREDOMINATES OVER INSIDE-OUTWARD OUTFLUX  in the world dynamic, for the purposes of this discussion on ‘Conflicting Realities: Immigrant and Indigenous’.

Conclusion/Wrap-Up

Materialism is a mental modeling paradigm in which the sourcing of dynamics is exclusively inside-outwards [space is a non-participant].  In the materialist way of thinking, the aesthetics of form, behaviour and organization must derive from the inside of the body or collective that is manifesting the form, behaviour or organization.   When it comes to people and people collectives, therefore, the aesthetic must be authored by the particular person and/or by the particular group of people.    Thus French president Nicolas Sarkozy would claim that the French people are the authors of the aesthetic French culture, in which case, it would be possible to ‘protect the culture’ from contamination, by ‘immigrants’.

If one suspends imposing the materialist view, the aesthetics of any dynamic derive from the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation (i.e. from the hitter-fielding relation or outside-inward-inside-outward engaging as dynamics are understood in relativity and quantum physics).  The aesthetics are thus like a ‘leprechaun’ that one can see but can never ‘grasp in one’s fist’ because these natural, aesthetic dynamics are not ‘locally sourced’ [not ‘locally authored’ as materialism implies].  This is the point that Von Kleist makes in ‘The Marionette Theatre’, and it applies to the aesthetics of motion in general; i.e. to the aesthetics of French civilization.

To believe you can take over control and administration of French civilization is to believe that you can seize a leprechaun in your fist.

The evolution of one member of an ecosystem depends on the full house of brother members that it develops within.  While we an describe it as a ‘thing-in-itself’ and break it down into ‘its components’, as the materialist paradigm is wont to do, … it does not exist ‘on its own’ and, moreover, the development of its form, behaviour and organization derives from dynamic wherein the outside-inward influence predominates over the inside-outward asserting outflux.

When a beautiful woman is radiant and graceful, it is not deliberately self-authored; i.e. she is in open engagement with the world, as von Kleist would doubtless affirm.  If her ego takes over and she becomes self-conscious and tries to deliberately replicate her aesthetic form, she will fail miserably and people will get the sense that ‘she is putting it on’.  The same pitfall is open to a culture such as the French culture.  If the ego takes hold and they say ‘here, I will show you what a Frenchman is’, what will manifest will instead be an egotist poseur.  The spirited leprechaun of French cultural aesthetics will be long gone, and only a hollow shadow of its real self, an inside-outward attempt at replication, will haunt the space it left behind.

The political division of the world into land-based ‘sovereign states’ where ‘nationalism’ serves as the collective ego which claims inside-outward asserting authorship of the national culture, … is the globalizing of this materialist ‘de-spiriting’.   Whatever is natural and aesthetic in the American culture, which owes itself predominately to the outside-inward orchestrating influence of the world dynamic, when it is claimed to be authored in an exclusively inside-outward driven manner, loses its ‘essential aesthetic spirit’ and is reduced to egotist swagger, a poor attempt at replication in the restricted terms of inside-outward driving behaviour.

While the colonized indigenous peoples of North America [the ‘aboriginals’] respected the outside-inward sourcing of authorship of ‘who they were’ [as ‘people of the land’ are wont to], subsequent generations of immigrants-cum-indigenous peoples have come to believe that the authorship of ‘who they are’ derives exclusively, inside-outwardly, from ‘themselves’.  This is particularly true in strongly religious (Christian) people who, instead of crediting outside-inward authorship influence for their ‘success’, believe that God has chosen them, perhaps because of their commitment to ‘belief in God’.

Religious influence thus adds to the belief that authorship of success is exclusively inside-outward (the conjugate hitting-fielding relation is nowhere to be seen).  Thus those who become the movers and shakers in our top-down central control political and economic organizations come to believe that the source of their having attained positions of privilege and power is exclusively inside-outward, that they are made of superior stuff, superior genes, superior biochemistry and/or superior brain/central nervous system, and they begin to walk with an egotist swagger that takes over from their earlier innocent open engagement with the world.

Socio-politically, then, we are hit, globally, with a double whammy; not only do those who rise to the apex of power by their open engaging with the world forget that ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence predominates over inside-outward asserting outflux’ when they move into positions of privilege and power, and thus lose their aesthetic that derives from the conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation, … they become self-conscious and, with egotist swagger, try to replicate from the inside-outward those natural and aesthetic behaviours which got them there.  Top-down organizational structures thus have a built-in ‘Peter Principle’;

“in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”.  – Laurence J Peter, Raymond Hull in ‘The Peter Principle’.

The success of comedy shows like ‘Yes Minister’ and ‘The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin’ affirm that this is what actually happens, that people believe that their success is exclusively inside-outward authored and rise within the narrowing apex of hierarchical authority to the point where the diversity of outside-inward influence thins to the point that they lose their outside-inward orchestrating nurturance which was an essential source of their behaviour direction.  In the comedic representation of this ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ situation, ‘managing upward’ is seen as the saving grace, wherein subordinates find subtle ways to ‘manage’ superiors in order to limit the damage that they end up doing.

Wherever one finds political division, one can find this archetypeal geometry involving the egotistical belief that authorship of form, behaviour and organization is exclusively inside-outward driven.  The implication is that those who rise to positions of privilege and power believe that they have superior internal equipment (genes, intellect, strength of purpose) that got them there.   If one is born into privilege and power (born ‘with a silver spoon in one’s mouth’), one is inclined to believe that ‘superiority is in one’s genes’, rather than in the privileges and power one inherits.  At the same time, in a materialist culture, one is taught to respect power and privilege hierarchies [though not so in the Amerindian culture where chiefs are often ‘appointed and fired’ by the women], as in ‘royalty’, thus perpetuating the lock-in on power enjoyed by those that manage to find their way into the thin heights of the pyramid of privilege and power.

The materialist paradigm, with its belief in the exclusive inside-outward sourcing of dynamics, is thus an ‘incubator’ for self-centred egotists, at the same time as it provides the logic that promotes top-down control based systems of organization and governance.

The title of this essay, ‘Conflicting Realities: Immigrant and Indigenous’, provides the entrée for discussing the ‘materialist’ belief system in which the authorship of material form, behaviour and organization is construed to be exclusively inside-outward (sourced from material dynamics within a non-participating operating space).  Meanwhile, it applies equally to hierarchical systems of according privilege and power.  The incumbents can be thought of as ‘indigenous’ and the ‘immigrants’ can be thought of as the aspiring newbies threaten to contaminate what has been put together ‘by the indigenous’ incumbents.

What to do?

Clearly, freedom [being free to let one’s behaviour be orchestrated by the habitat-dynamic] is dying under hierarchically governed sovereigntism which has bonded with hierarchically governed corporatism, and when/as we are visited by the ghost of what we once enjoyed, we can smell, as Hamlet did, that ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’.  Do we ‘suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?

In this case, the ‘target’ is the materialist belief system which infects the minds of many of those who rise into positions of privilege and power.  There are various budding initiatives to (a) eliminate authoritarian governing structures, (b) overthrow the current privileged and powerful classes, (c) destroy the current edition of civilization etc. etc., … however, these approaches are themselves ‘materialist’ in that they impute authorship of the problem to material structures and collectives, and the materialist paradigm has a nasty way of restoring itself through the very people who seek to eliminate its material manifestation.

One is forced to conclude that the remedy must come from within the collective psyche.  Meanwhile, what is currently defending against it is ‘the ego’, the belief in local self initiated authorship of material form, behaviour and organization, the ‘doer-deed’ Fiktional reality inhabited by Fiktional ‘Dinge-an-sich’ as described by Nietzsche.  As long as the ego is the driving force behind remedial initiatives, it is ‘not going to happen’.

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