logicp_writings/Book/Chapters/Modern_Woke.md

Introduction

A book on collectivism? Is this just a capitalist grift to squeeze some blood from unsuspecting consumers? Wouldn't it be easier to fall in line with those who are on the right side of history and simply trying to make the world marginally more fair so that it works better for everyone?

I've always been a stickler for definitions, and when it comes to matters of ethics, morality and social prescriptions, the definitions are everything. In fact, the entire process of human life and social interaction is one of defining, both through the action of what we are, what we do, and what this realm of existence is.

For many years I've been a bit perturbed by the supposing that moving towards more collective and "fair" solutions is put forward as the obvious way forward, not because I don't want fair solutions, but because of the language employed when discussing these solutions and their moral implication. What I found was that collectivist solutions are put forward but the language used to explain why they are needed, how they will work, and why it's the best path forward had always left me dissatisfied and distrustful of those advocating for them. Was this because I don't want fair solutions? Do I simply not understand how difficult it is to manage complexity? Am I not culturally sensitive enough, or harbouring a secret death wish for myself and all of mankind?

Somehow, whenever attempting to push back on the rationale of a collectivist solution, it's always responded to as though there is bad faith on my part and that if I don't recognize it, it's because I'm somehow blind with my cognitive biases, which have made me mindlessly controllable by only the worst interests out there, and there's no other possible explanation for my position because, even if I am able to express something, the fact that I'm already not advocating for the collectivist solution means that I'm not a person who's able to intelligently determine what a good solution is and, worse, I somehow despise solutions and am lashing out or making determinations on the basis of a very primitive mind.

I spent a long time trying to understand whether those who allege such things truly believe the things they say, are speaking in good faith, and are somehow correct in supposing that along every partisan divide there is one side which is more intelligent and morally robust, with the other side being somehow its opposite, and though many have worked through these sorts of problems before, one thing that stood out to me most of all was that the qualities associated with each side of the partisan divide didn't really make sense to me, given that, for example, all of those around me who proclaimed themselves as the most progressive tended to have very conservative personalities. This just didn't jive with everything I'd heard about partisan differences and the corresponding personalities which go along with them.

Though I spend time trying to work out a better understanding of people's political dispositions and what it meant for the world we live in, I eventually came to try and do my best to ignore the political divide and simply focus on my work in the tech industry. We can, after all, make life better through technology and eventually yield conditions that are more favourable. Surely if we improve outcomes for people with technology, they'll be less politically radical and eventually relinquish their political concerns in favour of living good lives and providing good lives to their children.

But then the "Covid era" began, and I found myself feeling guilty. Guilty that I was now seeing a move towards a more totalitarian system, with behaviours and messaging whose implications are utterly dehumanizing. Guilty that some terribly consequences are very realistic, and that if we were to incur them they would be my own damn fault.

For this reason, I set out to lay down my definitions, describe the partisan divide to the best of my understanding, and examine the conflict of collectivist initiatives with principles of individualism which I had always found to be more representative of what it means to be of a liberal disposition.

Left/Right Paradigm

In considering the idea of conservatism and the conservation of things, what do we understand about it as a concept? Is it something which can be understood perfectly in the abstract, or is it something contingent on personality?

There are theories about left/right disposition as per someone's personality, and a few of these that are most well-known are the following:

1. The Big Five Personality Traits and Political Orientation
2. Mondak, J. J. (2010). Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior. Cambridge University Press.
3. Authoritarianism and Right-Wing
4. Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-Wing Authoritarianism.
5. Moral Foundations Theory
6. Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98-116.
7. System Justification Theory
8. Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25(6), 881-919.
9. Genetics, Personality, and Political Ideology
10. Alford, J. R., Funk, C. L., & Hibbing, J. R. (2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99(2), 153-167.
11. Psychological Needs and Ideological Differences
12. Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375.
13. The Myth of Left-Wing Authoritarianism
14. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3790998

Big Five

This is the best known, the most utilized, and probably the most reliable, not necessarily in terms of understanding people's political affiliations (though there is a lot of good research there), but at least in terms of understanding some emotional dimensions of people and how these might be recognized in personality.

Authoritarianism and Right-Wing

A bit hard to stomach, actually, considering that this research came from a well known Marxist, Theodor Adorno, who planted the seeds for postmodernism. No doubt, authoritarians who claim to be on the left will always rationalize any passing authoritarian regime which appears to celebrate philosophies most commonly understood as being to the left will happily claim that they were transformed in the wrong way because of reactionary elements and post-revolutionary thinking, leading to the right wing, all the while demanding changes in their world today which are necessarily authoritarian and totalitarian, lest they ever be implementable or achievable.

Moral Foundations Theory

The work of Jonathan Haidt, which has been interesting to me, in spite of some of his ridiculous TDS tendencies, because he touches upon group behaviours which we recognize, especially people who may have been the right age to have lived through both supposedly differing examples of race-based othering, that old school racism is a form of call-out behaviour which has been replaced with the assigning of the "racist" moniker in a new form of call-out behaviour in which those who perform the othering are still manifesting the same behaviour and likely still have the same racist dispositions.

Systemic Justification Theory

An interesting take which claims that people justify the system/status quo or are better able to challenge it.

It's particularly interesting because it's relevant to my work and my claims about how our understanding of the left-right paradigm. That is, this theory, which is that we wrongly assume that someone's political disposition is the party to which they align at least to the extent that they can claim some sort of affiliation. From this point (TODO: look into this), they're observing what sort of personality differences people have with respect to their justification and support of status quo, or the degree to which they will fight against social hierarchies.

There's a few issues here, one of which being that it overlooks the degree to which the concept of a status quo can vary between something popularly understood as a traditional position in discourse, as opposed to the intuition and perspective that a human has about what the social norms happen to be in their immediate environment. It is precisely one's aversion to representing themselves against what is otherwise considered as being the social norm which would provide a more pertinent measure of one's disposition towards the right or right wing thinking and personality. The ideals and pragmatisms of a particular party, and its represented aesthetic vis-a-vis its stated alignment to a political ideology, are an unreliable combination. It's not just about the career politicians whose targets and opinions seem to change in conflicting ways, or their tendency to change parties at opportune times, or even career politicians at all. It's about how we recognize objects capable of affecting and operating on the social environment and how that influences our embodied experience of perceiving. This can mean simply the change in one's mood without any hard focus on the facts, details and logical conclusions of the contribution of that object to the environment, or it can be focusing on what one believes as being the most reasonably comprehensible meaning which can be logically deduced through deep and hopefully unbiased contemplation about the object and its corresponding potential to affect.

How these introduce the potential for either chaos or organization at different levels of scope and whether for particular or universal parties further complicates our situation. It's not even that we can't find people who are willing to give an honest attempt at being open about their beliefs and motivations, but we simply cannot rationally assert that we are ever able to experience what another human has experienced, or model, quantify, serialize, parse, interpret, and reconstruct valid data about human experience sufficient to veritably capture an essence of the occurrence of a human experience, much less understand whether such a thing has an essence. We need to be real about these limitations, and stop playing sophistic games of manipulation (ok, we'll keep doing those, but let's hope we can become less inclined to do that over subjects where it's increasingly absurd).

The status quo can very well be progressive wokeism, and has been quite commonly for many periods in many places. Whether that's a progressive re-imagination of some traditionally understood school of thought, or any established methodology, there comes to be a disconnect in permitting that one's cognizance of a method or domain can be relied upon, or whether it is to be conceptualized as a point on a path which still has not yet composed the core of what the method is based upon. As soon as this becomes a popular view, the inclination to treat the ideas, parlance and constructs pertaining to that domain or methodology can be dismissed through an act of aspirational rectitude towards historically derivable endpoints that have yet to be reached. Nevertheless, this becomes a status quo position so long as it dominates the discourse of a given arena.

With the establishing of a status quo, ones proximity to it, or the manner in which one operates in life such as can be bearing an effect on one's proximity to it, can be fueled by the type of emotion and intuition one has when conceiving of or observing it, as though we understand that these events are cumulative and paint a picture about one's social sphere. If one is going along with what they believe is the default perspective, and the default interest, then they are in fact not operating in a manner which is what we consider as being traditionally left. They're playing it safe, being very conservative, and doing it for the purpose of converting something an their placement against that something in question.

Genetics, Personality and Political Ideology

It's a bit ridiculous to think that it's even a question as to whether political orientation is something that can be inherited. As though the party itself comes to be inherited through a type of evolved ape which finally achieves the level of understanding that the conditions of the many affect the conditions of the one, and that choosing a particular political party comes down to one's inherited intellect bestowed upon them by the Gods that wish to see mankind attain some status of deity.

• Twin studies
• Disadvantaged children studies

There's definitely good reason to assume that genetics influence something like personality, as the development of the human being and its capacity for neurocognition is not a one-and-done process. It's not the difference between having a neuron or not, and obviously we can observe impediments to development and the consequences thereof. The idea that openness is tied to intelligence and that this is influenced by one's neurocognitive capacity doesn't take many research battles to at least consider that it makes sense, as we can observe all sorts of differences of intelligence, and the resource requirements for endeavouring to follow one's curiosity is costly and must follow a requisite baseline of both development and resource availability.

Woke initiates to collectivist cults, however, who put forward a claim that following their line of reasoning, philosophy, ideology (as a lack of ideology, of course), and so forth is an indication of intelligence and that it, in a sense, delineates a new evolution in the human being (towards the liberation of mankind) are making quite the jump, however. We don't need to sift through examples of people who don't fit the bill of a highly intelligent woke initiate, nor do we even have to go the other route and claim that those who go down this path are unintelligent, or that those who are embracing conservatism or any philosophies or ideologies that are incompatible with woke-ism are doing so because they, in fact, have the upper hand in intelligence. Having intelligence has more to do with following curiosity and having more interest in understanding why and how even when it's costly to one's immediate social environment to do so. If you are surrounded by other woke cult initiates, then agreeing with them, even while espousing a belief about the world wherein one's views are unpopular or contrary to hegemony, is not a sign of intelligence. Perhaps there's a minimal intelligence required to be adamantly stating one's claim and actually believing in it, but that's the same threshold of intelligence required for any number of mundane proclamations regardless of the degree of authenticity present in one's conviction.

It is, again, not the same thing as following curiosity in spite of the social cost it my have.

Yes, a claim can be made that there is a resource cost involved in anything which doesn't necessarily translate to resource acquisition, but we would still need to rid ourselves of the confounders brought on by social environment and, even if we did that, we'd have to deal with the elephant in the room: social justice activism and critical praxis has resulted in a complete overhaul of institutions, especially related to education which most affects young persons who are the height of their potential for setting up their interests and intellectual pursuits and capabilities, and so just to state that a resource cost proves intelligence in the face of one's undertakings is a non-starter. If anything, even in those cases where resources are unavailable, and where the decision to pursue social justice advocacy with a critical theory bent places one in a situation wherein their income acquisition is little to non-existent, all of it is perfectly in line with the belief that the system is set-up as part of a grand, unconsciously sought and insidiously expounded array of hegemonic structures which monopolize all forms of capital (be it the direct monetary components which yield productive capacity, or culture itself) to corrupt resource distribution and which makes the pursuit of resource acquisition a harmful act which prevents everyone, including oneself, from living a good life. There's something to be said about the fact of there being reduced personality differences observed between both fraternal and identical twins, even when they develop in different environments. But we must also consider the environmentally-mediated effects which influence personality development:

Psychological Needs and Ideological Differences

This originally looked at the needs associated with certain "ideologies" or political orientations and stated that conservatives tend to want to have more certainty, organization and less cognitive ambiguity or lack of cognitive resolve, while liberals tend to be more open to chaos, complexity and the ambiguous.

There's obviously a huge problem with this body of research, however, in that we can't even really understand how the terms conservative and liberal, as utilized in its related studies (such as "Political conservatism as motivated social cognition" in 2003) translate to terms today, or how the same terms would be defined.

Though this research does stand atop previous work by such critical theorists as Theodor Adorno, when brought into a more temporally-current focus, we need to understand that the notion of not only liberal has changed, in the sense that most far-left ideologies lay the claim that liberalism and liberal humanism are paths leading to "fascism", but that even the domains of what is considered "far-left" and "radicals" (which should be considered synonymous with revolutionaries or those who have concluded that revolution for transformative change is necessary for any sort of progress that they are concerned with) are occupied by a different set of people after decades of activists seeking to capture institutions and popularize the concepts through all ranges of media, entertainment, education and public service. That is to say, there are all sorts of popular entry-points to this way of thinking and they quite often state outrightly that theirs is the majority view, making it a bit of a paradox in claiming that revolutionary change is necessarily to be sought by an interested group which already constitutes a majority in order to change the majority of society. This is not a case of someone thinking outside the box, but a case of many believing they have to conform to the box in order to maintain social salience.

The other aspect of this is that there was a time when the far-left disposition was anti-authoritarian and anti-state in the immediate sense. This alone already has to be consolidated against an understanding of revolutionary thought, stemming from Marx, where a revolution must occur to impose a proletarian dictatorship (though that can be somewhat explained by positing that there is an acceptance of the upheaval which would ensue) and that this new political entity, finally representing the interest of the people and of the evolution of humanity, would assert itself as a ruthless authority until such time that all are liberated from oppression. There were the anti-war perspectives, often associated with punk rock and counter-culture at a time when counter cultures were crafted from outside of institutions and industries, like that of media and entertainment. There was an effort to reject all imperialism and all of the state processes associated with collecting money from people and protecting bloated, monopolistic corporations, such as those which relate to a "military-industrial complex"

But now, instead, we see those advocating for what concepts that are traditionally thought of as "far-left" and "revolutionary" but whose direct implements of concern are all driving for more state authority, less freedom of speech, stronger institutional presence, reinforced requirement for credentialism, uniform public adoption of pharmaceutical products, single conduits for political procedure (vote blue no matter who), and so on. These are authoritarian predilections which are completely committed to enforcing certainty and demanding that, in spite of a dissolution of the processes and behaviours which are foundational to civilizational development (such as open inquiry, challenging status quo, invoking healthy skepticism for the establishment, and so on), are doing so on the basis of argumentation which asserts that the consequence of not doing so will lead to chaos and disorder.

A Necessary Revelation

I believe we've reached a point in our speculation of political philosophy and human psychology where we can consider that the certainty of conserving the known world as a means to subdue the potential for chaos is replaced with the certainty of what an individual perceives as the centralized point of origin within the social environment, or a collective of humans, and one's proximity to it. This might also be conceived of as the point of origin of an entity commissioned with exerting force on those who deviate from behaving in accordance with its regulations.

We may have an inherent disposition, perhaps inherited genetically, or formed through the environment (and as this can be argued as being a different understanding of what we normally assume to be a hereditary, we would then consider it as being formed by occurrences which have a decreasing effect along the continued period of one's life, thus being another way of saying that it is formed in the earliest stages of life), but one's cognition of the world informs the scope and target of how one associates the perception of their environment with neurological, psychological, and emotional state.

And should we even be surprised with this description of human behaviour? Isn't it something which comes more intuitively to us as we experience our upbringing, particularly for those of us which developed while going through public schooling? We sometimes see how some of the children whom we were accustomed to seeing as being less inclined towards embracing chaos and the unknown, growing up to associate themselves as very progressive and left-leaning in context of popular political discourse and world events, but whose personality and behaviour itself doesn't appear to be much different from what it has already been. Sure, some people can change in their disposition dramatically, but not only is this the minority, but it tends to be that those who mature and gain experience become more confident, or that they only become more "conservative" in the sense of conscientiousness, which is to say that they become more accountable to themselves and feel liberated by their own sense of agency.

Again, this is highly speculative, but I think it's an important conversation which has long been missing from our political discourse, and it's something which I urge others to consider as something which is not a mere indulgence, but which an approach to analyzing political discourse and philosophy which has become necessary in the face of societies which have evolved technologically and socio-politically to the point that authoritarianism with totalitarian aspirations (or a necessary direction of totalitarianism, should the stated goals of the society ever be seriously approached) isn't just a real possibility, but is something which can be advocated for on the basis of making appeals for freedom and liberty, and traditional left-leaning framings, in a manner which is adopted and repeated in ever more popular scopes and by ever younger citizens.

Stuck on Definitions

I've always been stuck on the definitions of just about everything, and I believe you should be too. What's the point in having a discussion about anything at all if we aren't assuming we're to be discussing the same things? Even if we disagree, shouldn't we be curious enough to discuss the topics about which we are so passionate? Coming to a clear understanding about what it is that we're speaking about, and even the range of interpretations that exist for that thing in question, should be the absolute most basic motivation for any discussion unless we are looking to take advantage of someone. The counterargument to that is to say that something about the situation, as it stands, involves one of the two parties involved in the discussion already taking advantage of the other, and that the discussion itself is just an opportunity for the disadvantaged party to reclaim some lost ground and relinquish themselves from their oppressor. And in such a case, it's clear that the potential interlocutor positing such an argument is a Marxist.

But there are no interlocutors here, there is just the content of this book as I'm presenting it, thus I beg you to indulge me as I invite you to take a step back with me and grant me the opportunity to talk about definitions.

In most discussions, and in political discourse in general, we tend not to use the term Marxist or Marxism much at all, but instead focus on the terms Communism or Socialism. No, those aren't synonymous - or, rather, they shouldn't be synonyms if we're speaking about them dispassionately and are driven by a veritable curiosity about them, but in essence most discussions which do involve any one of those terms can actually be addressed through just understanding one of these terms.

And, unfortunately, if one were concerned about these topics and were to find themselves in an argument about them with someone, it'd likely be that the other participant in that discussion would be making the case that he whomsoever is concerned is not simply employing the wrong definition, but is actually unable to define it.

You Can't Define Anything

For the past several years, but especially in the past 2, we've enjoyed the incessant occurrence of social justice advocates, gender queer he-hims, associate professors and much more lament about how "rightoids", "fascists", "peasants" and conservatives in general are making criticisms on topics about which they know nothing.

Most commonly, this has been the assertion that they "don't know what woke is", but it has quite commonly arisen as "you can't even define communism". How, are woke and communism the same thing? Well, no, not necessarily, though I'd suggest that we wouldn't really have conversations about "woke" in 2025 if we didn't also have the topic of communism to contend with, and as the latter is much more historically significant, and remains, in my opinion, evergreen to this day, we're going to delve into this abyss of definitions by focusing on communism for a while.

It's not just that people can't define communism, but that they are told they are unable to define communism by the very people who, in a healthy society, they should be having debates with about whether or not things like communism can be considered either possible or beneficial.

The other aspect of this is that those who assert the "rightoids" aren't able to define communism (or woke, or socialism, or Marxism) don't actually want for any of these things to be defined, be it from the conservatives, themselves or even from any "historical figure" from which they themselves derive their aspirations.

What the critical social justice warriors, or collectivist cult initiates simply want is for you to be in a stupor so you can't be in a position to criticize anything that they advocate for, and in some cases this is because they know that the things they do want would be worthy of criticism by anyone with a thinking mind.

That being said, a true endpoint yielding communism wouldn't even be possible if there were also thinking minds. You wouldn't attain a true commonality if, in fact, everyone was thinking differently from themselves beyond whose turn it is to give the communal handjobs to the scant few comrades whose erectile dysfunction isn't yet too advanced from the lack of nutrition and healthy activity in their collectivist utopia.

It doesn't take a genius to define communism, but it's worth noting that people can provide varying definitions of communism derived from different contexts and, similar to how a woke comrade performs their praxis (in the sense of performing advocacy where they equivocate between esoteric and exoteric definitions of whatever concept they're trying to proliferate), which will all sound believable and can be passable to anyone of any political orientation, including themselves, just so long as its effect on the immediate context is to their satisfaction

This includes composing a definition on the basis of:

• what political regimes have already existed
• what those political regimes would have been should some undesirable aspect have been negated
• the eschatological god-object as described by Marx
• communal living at a large enough scale
• the absence of oppression
• the absence of a state because of there being no conflict between men (sorry, he/hims)
• a suggested description of what the sociopolitical environment would be if everyone were a "good person"

The only definition of communism which is worthy of discussion is the one which Marx described as being an eventual endpoint at the end of history, and though we can critique what would necessarily be involved in actually achieving that (an existence void of contradiction, oppression and domination - in spite of some very real and unavoidable aspects to the universe which include atomic forces).

If your understanding of communism isn't based on utterances that were made by Marx himself, or compatible with them, then you're just here to cry and jerk off, and no one should feel obligated to help with either of those things. And, certainly, that isn't to say that no one else has espoused the idea of communism, or that such an idea had not been considered prior to Marx's "contributions" to metaphysical and sociopolitical discourse, but he formalized it in a way which specified the precise of ontology of human beings and ontology of the world as a whole which, according to his arguments, makes it the necessary end-goal for every human. Prior to him, the concept already existed as an understanding of common usage of resources, but that remained ambiguous with respect to how to understand just how this is to be implemented, at what scale, and why. Marx took the idea and essentially claimed that no human being could attain the expression of their nature except under the condition of a true communist existence.

Yet another aspect of this is that Marx said that the conditions create man, and that man must become his own creator, thus man can't actually be a communist until he has self-created (and created nature which, in the words of Marx, is his inorganic nature) to the point where the conditions allow for him to be creating the world free of oppression.

Therefore even the self-proclaimed communists, should they believe in Marx's descriptions about the world, not only can't be real communism but themselves can't be capable of defining communism until man has created the world capable of yielding the first true communist.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and it'll take some background in order to make these statements relevant and their interpretation more clear, thus we should take even another step back and approach the topic with more rigor.

What Are We Working Towards?

It might seem like a waste of time to be trying to define something for which when the vast majority are presented with will agree that it's undesirable and immoral, even if most of those would make a hierarchical judgment in saying that there are some things worse than it but that they're against it nevertheless, but I think that this manner of thinking misses the point and isn't yet considering that these ideas and their corresponding potential constructs don't necessarily need to be brought into existence in an unequivocal form before they're actually generating a problem.

I would like to suggest that the concept of communism, when defined properly, and when understood as per the Marxist metaphysic, is actually the logical conclusion of a manner of thought for which we are all susceptible and that it would actually make sense for any human to consider it plausible and desirable under the right circumstances.

I can't speak for everyone, but when I look back at various stages of my life and try to speculate as to how I conceived the concept of communism, I come up with a few abstract, intuitive presentations in my mind which may or may not even be compatible with the vision of communism as Karl Marx would likely have himself envisioned, but I believe they are nevertheless reasonable representations of what a human might think insofar as imagination is concerned.

1. A safe community free of need and conflict
   • That isn't necessarily to say that a human being, as a living organism, would be completely free of any need to sustain itself as per the temporal and environmental requirements which, when fulfilled, allow for the organism to remain alive.
   • Simply put, some form of environment which includes multiple persons where there is no dimension by which anyone is compelled to do anything in particular, but that the environment maintains itself in spite of this.
2. Some type of red abstraction which sort of relates to the flags and symbolism that we have seen. It might represent a grace from reality or an entrypoint to another way of living and being where there is some potential for fulfillment or destruction. This is something which is cannot be adequately described, but I know that in my experience the consideration of the word communism leads to some sort of image being presented in my mind's eye which may very well be nothing more than a distorted or some presentation of a communist flag with ambiguous acuity.
3. A brutal, totalitarian dictatorship with menacing officers distributed ubiquitously and an ever-present threat of death, abuse or other application of force incurred if for no other reason than as an acknowledging of the unquestionably supreme status of the state or the state apparatus.
4. An agrarian society where everyone is spontaneously performing activity which, on the whole, constitutes some form of organized society wherein everyone is provided for and there is no clear aspect of crime or war.

That's probably enough for now, as I can't even really know for sure if these envisioned presentations which spontaneously occur upon my being presented with the notion of communism can actually be properly described, whether they are discrete from one another, or whether they all sort of meld into the same thing in the brief moment of speculation from which I contemplate their manifestation.

The point isn't to say that these are the true interpretations of communism which occur in very human, or that I have an intuitive interpretation of the idea of communism which should be championed, but simply to say that, regardless of whether an instantiation of communism has, will or can exist, the understanding that a human mind has about ideas, concepts and, in this case, system states or political entities is something which is presented as an intuition or a vision, and that it's worth considering that this is what's happening neurocognitively through the experiences of our friends, foes and interlocutors of any sort in between.

Defining

Should we be using the term "Communist" and what is a "Communist"? [Furthermore, who gets to define it? Why are instances of attempts valid? Socialism is to achieve Communism. Eternally ephemeral as it cannot be achieved]

In all honesty, there shouldn't be any word or concept for which it's forbidden or even inappropriate for anyone to be able to define it. Whether the definition is correct or not is a different matter, but there should be no reason why we shouldn't expect that anyone can define something if it's also to be communicable in society. We're all sick of the example of Ketanji Brown Jackson deferring to an "expert" biologist (instead of Critical Theorist or Queer Theorist) when asked to define what a woman is, and though there's utility and legitimacy in offering to bring in an expert to help with definitions, it's absurd to think that we should take a default position of not allowing anyone to define anything at all except for the terms and concepts within the taxonomy of their expertise, and nothing more. If that were the case, then we'd be well on our way to a totalitarian society void of interesting, meaningful discourse between humans other than in a corporate-controlled manner.

Indeed, just about anyone should be able to define "communist" and there probably was a time when most people in western culture would have been able to do so, although not to the extent of providing a technical definition as we're seeking to do in this book. What's the difference, you might ask? You'd be right to ask such a question, as it's not at all obvious that there needs to be a technical definition for communist or communism simply in order for us to take the definition seriously or to be able to make use of it in our own discourse or casual conversations.

There are two ways to approach this, and they should be used for the appropriate context:

• They're all just commies and those are all just communism.
• There has not yet been a true communist and there can only be one truly authentic conception of communism.

Both of these are perfectly valid, depending on the circumstance, so let's go through them briefly so we understand why there should be both a casual and more specialized understanding of what communism is. The trick here is that, in fact, even the casual conception of a "commie" or of something being "commie" does actually lend itself to the more specialized understanding of communism, but only by virtue of considering that the casual understanding would be meaningless if we couldn't also consider it as pertaining to something that could be taken to a logical conclusion, given enough time and if it were allowed to blossom to completion.

Casual Commie

An acquaintance of mine, and someone whom I'd hope to get an opportunity to get to know as a friend some day, had a habit of rubbing the people the wrong way when discussing things of a political nature because he was quick to invoke the term "commie" in what might come across as a brutish, vulgar and ham-fisted manner, but I think that interpreting it as such is the actual premature component of such a dynamic. That is to say, it isn't the fact of him simplifying what seems to be a wide range of terms, behaviours and issues which is premature, but actually the reaction to believe they are incorrect which is itself premature.

Does that sound unreasonable? Well, it should be, because in most cases we have discussions which lack nuance or which present things at a high-enough level where we can conceive of them as they pertain to systems where we aren't having to focus on all of the details all of the time, meaning that there is always more nuance and detail to delve into and, knowing that, we can move forward in having a productive discussion about the thing in question without getting hung up on the details which might cause us to lose scope of the actual discussion at hand.

The problem is that, when discussing politics, we're already talking about things that are affecting everyone personally, and everyone is getting used to having their own affairs or the issues which affect them spoken about in a way which fails to represent the issue as they themselves have been thinking about it.

That's where principles come in. You see, with principles, we have to adhere to the representations of things affected by them such that the principles themselves aren't thrown to the wind simply to maintain the perceived dynamics in how we deal with them.

Why? Because it's the principles themselves which indicate where things should head, given enough time. Given the nature of what's being discussed in this book, which includes a fair bit on the topic of "historicism", I myself might be accused of summoning-up historicism myself by saying things like "given enough time" or "to their logical conclusions", but that isn't what I'm saying at all. I'm not saying that these things will happen; what I'm saying is that, if we are to talk about some phenomenon or idea in particular, it won't make much sense unless we have an understanding of what the essence of the matter is. If not, and we are leaving it ambiguous to account for some imagined spectrum of all the ways it might be considered by other people, or all the different presentations it might take and how each of those have their own aesthetic which might allow for it to be better referred to using completely different terminology, then we're actually not ever discussing the subject at hand, but are providing an opportunity for people to be mystified and for the negative aspects of the issue to wreak their worst effects before we, or whomsoever is affected, have had their opportunity to understand and control the factors surrounding it.

These Are All Just Communisms

The progressive political science major would be appalled to see someone like my same aforementioned buddy, who we'll call Mr. K, referring to socialism, democratic socialism, the labour party, public ownership, communism, fascism, and so on as simply "communism" and the related participants as mere "commies" (and those polisci majors would do well to read this book).

Socialism, for one, or especially something like "democratic socialism", serves as a good example because many would say "look at all the progress we're having where we can consider a better life for those people in society who are worst-off, and here you go derailing it by erasing that a concept for socialism that is actually feasible and which could actually go a long way to make life better", as if that's not something which could be said about the simply adherence to foundational principles (of which, if you have none, it would explain why you need a top-down control system to redistribute things).

What is socialism? It is control of the means of production and enforcement through a central authority under a declaration that the coordination is for the public good. It is nothing more and nothing less than this. That people describe all state redistribution as a sliding scale of socialism actually proves this point, and the fact that so many are who support and align themselves with authoritative redistribution without openly stating that they are also in favour of the logical conclusion of the completion of such a reconfiguration demonstrates that humans will never be willing to be accountable to any negative consequences of empowering a totalitarian state.

It is based entirely on the metaphysical question of what it is to be a human and what the nature of the human experience truly is, which is the entire basis for Marx's argument for the necessary endpoint of his historical materialism:

"This is why the debate between the individualist and the collectivist is at heart a metaphysical debate: What is the nature of the human being?)" - Tibor Machan - Individuals and Their Rights, 1989, Open Court Books, p. 47

Try speaking to any "normie" championing socialism as a moral good, and you'll find that they're completely unable to articulate any of the fundamental concepts, related metaphysical principles, definitions or logical endpoints for these ideas, but will instead refer to the same social programs that have been financed through taxation that could have only been made possible through the free enterprise which preceded it. They are not serious people, but their banter and the manner in which they influence their peers in society can have serious consequences.

Whether those consequences lead to one form of authoritarian rule or another is of little consequence, as the continued support of such social transformation will always be vouched for by describing some type of social deliverance which could only ever be defined in non-ambiguous terms by describing a communistic result.

So, yes, these are "commie" ideas, and the open advocates for such idea are mere "commies" for all intents and purposes.

Specialized (Technical) Communism

For the curious thinker, however, and for the theoretician who wants to compare models of possibilities as an intellectual pursuit, we can choose a more technical approach. In some cases that might be the thinker who is composing the means of evoking tyranny upon all of humanity, but fortunately such things don't need to be limited to such grotesque individuals; on the contrary, those persons who are willing to be accountable to their individual lives, and who have the aptitude and concern which would drive them to help other potential champions of individualism and true liberal principles better understand the dynamics of the political processes utilized for social change, will be well-served by having a clear understanding of what the endpoint of these ideas is and a repertoire for describing them in a fluent manner which provides an accessible suite of cognitive interfaces by which to proliferate the understanding to their corresponding entourages.

I wish to contend that we can talk about defining the parent of these terms based on what it mean as a concept, but that it's also worth thinking about the definitions used when we refer to people as being instances of an idea, and whether they are this because of them having identified in this way, we run into unresolvable problems.

TODO: We must resolve the fact that there are those who champion communism, who call themselves communists, but that Marx also claims there can be no true communist until we live in the state of reality characterized by communism:

• Communist as definition: the { concept, idea, model and theory }
  • Theory described as a model of what could be
  • The theoretical concept of what a human being may be -> described fundamentally as an ontology and:
  • The species Being -> Marxist definition/description
  • People advocating for a political system / political party
• Communist as self-described: { identification, declaration, and social culture }
  • What one might claim themselves to be
• Communist as deciphered by the onlooker: { observation, allegation, categorization }
  • What one asserts others to be

First Principles Investigation of Communism

1. The Species Being

"Man is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."

• lives for the species, cannot exist of its own accord
• conscious state is only sensible in context of greater species
• Thinks of own actions in context of species
  • what if everyone did this
  • being of the species means wanting to do this
  • if everyone did X, then the conditions would differ and then:
  • impact of my action would be different
  • I would have chosen a different action

Live for Species

In this description we can see that man's life is for species being, as it is unavoidably of a form that is species being, thus that it should be purposed as such. Man cannot exist of its own accord, as the fact of there being a plurality of humans means that relations exist, as well as their shared need of resources. One might conceive of an individual human surviving on their own, but a Marxist would likely indicate that this is not a realistic example, that life is hard already, but that by working together we know life is easier, as evidenced by the fact that we always live in environments with multiple humans; we always seek out a pack, a troupe, a group, a collective or what have you in order to improve survival, and this is description is echoed by every practicing evolutionary biologist.

Rational Consciousness

In considering the reality of our collective condition, it must come to be understood that to pursue the development and expression of a rational consciousness, even as an individual, is to look at the world in full knowledge that you and your actions exist in the context of the greater species. If your thoughts and actions do not take that into account, then you are living in a manner which does not acknowledge reality, and in leveraging the collectivity and your capacity insofar as you relate to other humans in a world where human history transforms the conditions of your lives, you are beginning from a more rational standpoint from which your perception of the world can be better aligned with reality.

In thinking of your actions in the context of species, you will choose to allow and compose them in the way which most affects your being, in a cycle of species which, as it spirals through world changing and world making effects, will provide the most cogent vehicle for allowing for greater forms of being.

Imagine

Imagine what the world would look like if everyone were making an effort to realize that their social reality is more visible and its effects are more intelligently perceptible while affirming a context which includes others. There's a reason we have great aspirations and that we enjoy sharing our triumphs and miseries with one another - it's because you are being of the species that you are, and not of the many which come together for procreation and not much else.

Furthermore, if more people were living with the intention of recognizing the effects of their actions through their relations, it would mean that your own actions would be taken in and responded to in a way which enhances the effect of your actions. The more we experience this, the more we internalize an improved ability to detect when we've felt we've chosen the best actions.

What's Missing

If there's something about the concept of Species Being which many people don't get (though, I would say that professors of philosophy who happen to lean towards agreeing with many of Marx's arguments (and perhaps even subscribing to, if not his solutions, or his projections, at least his desired endpoint), it's that people seem to believe there are many conceptions of collectivism and that the socialist utopia described by Marx is the one with which to associate Species Being. As though it's only in Marxism, its derivatives or the system of organization espoused by Marx (implied through negation, of course) that a participant would be doing so because they think the collective is legitimate by virtue of some idea that organizing life through the collective will permit people to live as they should.

The fact is, if you're compelling others to join up a system of organization which specifies the manner in which they are committed and accountable to the well-being of themselves and others, and binding this by enforcement through a legal punitive system, then nothing short of Species Being would stand as a reason beyond brute authoritarianism.

2. Self-Proclamation

• My social surroundings expect this of me
• Social surroundings will be affected by this
• Stand in for other identifiers
  • Furries, trans, feminist, queer, decolonialist

There is an array of initiates who might choose to identify, but this is simply the adoption of initiate language in order to demonstrate salience and congruence necessary to be acknowledged as a candidate to receive the perks and rewards associated with the corresponding social milieu.

The unfortunate reality is that most initiates are not purposely pursuing a system of governance or social organization beyond just wishing to participate in society or the social environment in some manner as a natural inclination to avoid loneliness. It isn't necessarily the case that they're even doing that purposely, but that they're just responding to what is in their environment and this is, in most cases, just a sensible way of reacting and is in line with what they've been brought up to do in polite society.

One might say that this is naive and innocent, and that the fact of this possibly leading to a collectivist type of philosophy is simply happenstance and that it needn't necessarily be the case that they go off in that direction. That whether they decide to interpret things in this way is actually something that speaks more as to the inclinations of their personality and that anyone could go off in this direction on their own without any prompting and without any specific subject matter or activity; some people are just more socially-oriented, or have a particular value structure and set of moral aspirations which makes them more altruistic and more concerned about those around them who also inhabit the same social environment because we're all affected by the environment therefore it's sensible, intelligent and insightful to have the foresight to understand that improving the conditions for those around them improves the conditions for themselves and improves the odds that they will succeed or benefit from the activities of others.

This is always the type of argument that we encounter by those who seem to naively push collectivist ideals, but what is the source of this rhetoric? Is it just spontaneous for any one of us to suddenly, without prompt, start to consider that redistribution and an altruistic sense extends from their human nature?

In still other cases, though related, but semantically different in terms of how the material came to be introduced. The initiate is simply adopting the language which demonstrates fluency and familiarity with their subject of interest. This could be a form of hobby or it can even be professional. They are demonstrating competence, commitment, availability, and so forth. In essence, this can easily become an existential or prerequisite for viability and mobility within a particular domain.

Paradoxical Declaration

It should bother anyone with one iota of sense to see people who call themselves communists and who somehow want to present themselves as though they have some insight into where the world would be headed or where it would end up in their search for ever more pathways by which to proliferate the notion of communism in every facility, in every institution, in every social environment they enter (and make less enjoyable and tolerable for absolutely everyone else) because in endorsing the ideas of Marx and, often enough, even the words of Marx, they are embracing the contradiction of claiming that something which cannot yet manifest already has manifested or that which is yet to become is already here.

The communist isn't something which simply happens because you decide you want to have communism, or the liberation from the order of being, but it's something which is supposed to be as spontaneous and natural as the condition of communism itself, which is only supposed to have truly been breathed into the world once all contradictions and oppressive aspects about life as a human being have been universally lifted.

If the state only exists because there remain conflicts between men, then there should not yet be even an understanding of what it is to be a communist, and the fact of the conditions not yet permitting the realizations and the behaviours which the so-called communists crave is actually supposed to be the very thing which is fueling their resentment and discontent with the world as it exists today.

Here are a selection of quotes from Marx on the fact of his self-estrangement preventing him from attaining his true nature as a social being:

Best Quote Candidate

• "We have seen how on the assumption of positively annulled private property man produces man –himself and the other man; how the object, being the direct manifestation of his individuality, is simultaneously his own existence for the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence for him. Likewise, however, both the material of labor and man as the subject, are the point of departure as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact, that they must constitute the point of departure, lies the historical necessity of private property). Thus the social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him. Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social [This word is crossed out in the manuscript. – Ed.] activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him – and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature – the true resurrection of nature – the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature."

Other Quote Candidates

• "Communism is the positive expression of annulled private property—as human self-estrangement, and hence the real appropriation of the human essence through and for man; communism therefore as the complete and conscious return of man, of his entire substantial being, to himself as a social, i.e., human being."

• "The existence of private property is, therefore, the existence of alienated labor...and thus the existence of the estrangement of man from man."

• Actual quote: Estranged labor turns thus: (3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect. (4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

• Important to note that "Estranged Labour" is the name for labour in political economy, which "starts with the fact of private property"

• "In the relation of estranged labor, each man regards the other according to the standard and the position in which he finds himself as a worker."

• "The community of men, or the manifestation of the nature of men, their mutual complementing the result of which is species-life, truly human life—this community is conceived by political economy in the form of exchange and trade."

• "The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [himself] is active, is alienated from himself and his own species-being."

• "Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., in short, when it is used by us."

• "Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man."

• "The positive transcendence of private property, as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social existence."

• "Nature is man’s inorganic body – that is to say, nature insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives from nature – i.e., nature is his body – and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die."

• "In his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind."

• "The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates."

3. Political System

This is the normie's informal qualifier which allows the masses to believe they have some workable form of understanding, and this further embeds the fact of their complete lack of education on this subject behind a mute and dumb wall of ignorance (ok I'm being hyperbolic, because they never really had a reason to be mute and dumb about it - there just was nothing on the radar and no common discourse which really took it into consideration)

A political system might seem to make sense, given that particular infamous governments have been formed along political parties who name and describe themselves as communist, and who get referred to continuously by all sorts of demographics, cultures, professions (polisci), political affiliations, and so on, but there are a few good reasons to disregard this and to take a different approach to defining the communist term.

In spite of which instance of a supposedly communist system comes under the lense of analysis, there will always be a large proportion of self-professed communists today who will reject it, claim that it is not communist, and even claim that the party or, more commonly, the system was actually an example of the exact system Communism is intended to obliterate.

Gyorg Lukács speaks to this and explains that all revolutions either fall to reactionary counter-revolutionary forces and opportunism and that, even if those elements are veritably present, it will still require commitment of one's entire existence.

If every member of the party commits his whole personality and his whole existence to the party in this way, then the same centralising and disciplinary principle will preside over the living interaction between the will of the members and that of the party leadership, and will ensure that the will and the wishes, the proposals and the criticisms of the members are given due weight by the party leaders. - Gyorg Lukács (History and Class Consciousness)

This makes a lot of sense of you have spent sometime examining revolutionary theory as it is described by Marxists or those who follow one of the neo-Marxist subsets that work towards a revolution over time. Whether they explain ti as a distinct form of Neo-Marxism. And, even otherwise, many have no idea what any of those happen to be but simply have been describing themselves as something which doesn't fall victim to the hegemonic forces and ideologies which plagued all previous attempts / formulations that had been claiming to associate themselves with the ideas of communism. (That is to say, all attempts are themselves centered (or came to be centered) around a specific ideology (antithetical to communism), such as capitalism, normalcy, colonialism, etc).

These are, in my opinion, perfectly helping to reify the sense of historical progression which has been presented as confirmation that what we are ultimately dealing with is a metaphysic.

The Case for the Communist System

There still remains one good case for agreeing that the word communism refers to the political systems and state governments which have come into emerged to date that declared themselves as being an instance of this type of political formulation by name, or at least parties which espoused the principles and goals that are otherwise considered as being those of Marx or Neo-Marxist thinkers, even if they didn't specifically invoke the terminology which would make the association unequivocal. The reasoning behind it is precisely the same angle one should take in addressing those who like to claim "real communism" or "real socialism" hasn't been tried, bro. And that's because, given that the perfect instantiation has not yet taken place, and given that Marx's formulation essentially states that we cannot know what it is and it cannot be brought into being until such time that a spontaneous occurrence befalls a world in the sense of there being no conflict and no need to even advocate politically or participate in revolution: in absence of the perfect example which everyone reasonably agrees represents the thing in question, those who advocate for it need to concede that if any effort to bring it about has taken place, that whatever the result of that happens to be is, until present, the actual instantiation of that thing.

This means that, at bare minimum, we have some examples of what we would get and, in spite of their failures, or in spite of the atrocities which transpired as a result, those who brought them about would allow for it to occur again or perhaps even much worse, as they are not yet satisfied with either what took place or the costly failure of it not having taken place yet. They would unrelentingly push for atrocities if only for the chance to keep the continued pursuit of a different outcome open.

Psychological Dispositions

There are some interesting discussions re: the cause of adopting the communist perspective which contend that communism is principally a disposition borne out of existential despair. More specifically it is to say that those who are drawn into it, which we like to call the initiates, do so because of existential despair.

It is a viable hypothesis as we clearly see a correlation between those who identify as communist and such a personality - the highly neurotic, manipulative type who seeks constant acknowledgment while insisting that all must be in agreement to have any moral standing (cluster B personality).

But it is an incomplete view in that it is proven on the basis of diagnosing communists (and often an armchair diagnosis, though perhaps by those who know something about the matter), but not working out all the possible points of origin for the behaviour of these candidates.

Others might contend that they had particular traits which made them likely to choose to agree with the critiques put forth by communism, and thus it is their weakness of character which makes them communists, and that the main identifier is that communists put up promises attractive to young minds, but I am not convinced these are so distinct. That is to say, though we might observe these psychopathologies and though there may be genetically borne/mediated dispositions which facilitate or make more likely these outcomes, causation is unprovable, and even if we were to assume a fundamental factor present from onset or early life, it itself would be indistinguishable from early childhood influences such as reasoning and early challenges.

What can be more reasonably asserted is the following set of statements:

• all humans are capable of negative emotion
• an overbearing abundance of negative emotion can lead to despair
• all humans come to become familiar with the concept of time's finitude
• from a biological standpoint, beings with serotonergic systems balance reward and expectation through a relationship to their environment. In this way, it is not even relevant to have a discussion about this being a scientific analysis if we are not considering that the root cause can be applied to all the prospective persons (unless you are able to prove, unequivocally, that persons not genetically predisposed are notable to identify as "communist" and are not able to experience "existential despair").

Professional Bias

It's good to remember to read these dialogues as though the purveyor of the perspective, in this case about the "communist" being an adopted identifier of a politically-focused person who suffers from existential despair and has crafted and reinforced in themselves what can be evaluated as a cluster B personality type, is something for which one might be inclined to take with a grain of salt. This isn't a criticism of the professional utilizing their painstakingly cultivated skill-set, and it even isn't an attempt to declare something contrary to the analysis; it's quite possible that they themselves would implicitly need for there to be a grain of salt taken along with it, as a good professional knows that it's necessary to put forward an assumption in certain circumstances in order to construct a system to help understand especially complex phenomena such as human psychology, anthropology and political philosophy.

It's definitely a meaningful system of analysis, as you'll probably be hard-pressed to find any examples to the contrary - especially if you're focused on people who come into such a socio-political view through their own lives, and not as a consequence of radicalization through the universities, which is probably the most benign and reasonable method by which someone may have come to harbour such a position (while still being indefensible, in my strong opinion).

Nature vs Nurture

This is always divides us, even though most would feel that nurture takes precedence over just about everything for most people, even those who are trying to take back the control over nature and the institutions which are supposed to generate the most robust understanding of it.

Even in supposing that, in most cases, it's impossible to ascertain whether something is inherently present due to genetics or whether it was etched into the development of an organism early on, it's impossible to eliminate the perspective that nurture maintains precedence and that doesn't mean that the social constructivists are correct, because even they themselves will continuously refer back to the argument that there may be "ways of being" or "knowing" that are rooted in aspects life which are themselves being suppressed by hegemony.

There is an inherent and continuous challenge with interpreting and curbing delusion, even if such delusion is too incidental and inconsequential to be noticed. It appears to be universal in children to find them confirm their biases in the most ridiculous of ways; surely this must be acknowledged and remembered as being an ever-present natural characteristic in human thinking and we should, thus, assume that one maintains the potential to delude themselves even without realizing it, as the confirmation of one's biases can't necessarily be discovered without an incurred and clearly observed consequence that itself can be realized without too much bias.

The issue isn't so much that the mechanistic characteristics are present and able to be leveraged, or that the capacities which lend toward adopting ideological characteristics are also present (which they are and are being fervently promoted by person, state and corporation alike and which can by themselves cause one to become utterly blind to whatever might disrupt the serenity of the ideological stupor), but that one can even engage in a mode of perception which embraces delusion without any clear ideology whatsoever, but simply by a disposition to desiring a particular perception of themselves, or about the life one is living and what its future might hold.

And, furthermore, in having experienced delusion, in any capacity, one runs the risk of believing that all human perceptions are a form of delusion or are a component in the enablement of delusion. Why wouldn't anyone consider this, if even in a narrowly interpreted Kantian sense of noumenal and phenomenal.

If surely one has had even one moment wherein they recognize their own delusion, then they at least understand the ease by which one can participate in it, and if not all is well and good, surely one could imagine that things are as they are in spite of rampant and ubiquitous delusion. Such thinking, as well, lends itself to the communist, who believes that there is enough value being kept from them (enough opportunity, possibility) such that some can be wasted while still being sufficient to keep the current imperfect project going.

We should instead be considering that the fact that any sense can be made about anything at all works as a reminder that sense and an aspiration to represent everything in its most correct and universal light is something which must necessarily be present in whatever perfect formulation of human experience that could ever come to be.

Explaining Communist Psychopathology

Going back to the conflict of competing explications between psychopathology as explicit existential despair, and that of "character weakness" facilitating and potentiating one to adopt an incomplete metaphysic which leads them towards the former, one might make the case that the second is more likely, but I contend that this, though technically more robust, is overridden by my yet-to-be elaborated categorical description and accompanying model of action towards reification of the communist perception (which is itself a collectivist perception).

Moreover, we might say that there is a weakness of character which facilitates such choices and outcomes, but the susceptibility which fulfills the conditions is one common and universal, after all, and which will be made more clear in the following section. It also isn't necessarily the right idea to look for how an "other" is being fulfilled and how we can imagine it as something whose origin is different. Not simply an array of the other origins, but an example of what awaits any one of us who decides to enumerate a laundry list of all the reasons for believing our differences start with existence, or how we exist - the content of our existence.

We should in essence be looking for opportunities to see people not as having fallen victim to their disposition, but to having a disposition imposed upon themselves and their lives, but seeing it as something which they themselves have the power to break free from. And while this might also sound reminiscent of Marxist praxis where the base of the theory is well-maintained as the assumption for a proceeding activism which aims to cause people to attain a critical consciousness, this is not the same thing at all.

With the critical consciousness it is assumed both that the lines of separation and hierarchy has been etched out in society through a dimension of oppression that is rooted in identity, and that people attain critical consciousness through understanding their identity as it has been conferred through the oppression of that system. What we should be offering to people, instead, is the very idea that they can redefine themselves without that vulnerability, because the vulnerability needn't be understood through identity, but happens to be a vulnerability because we all have certain inherent vulnerabilities from the shared universal factor of experiencing life with a human body, and fears which extend from these vulnerabilities make us amenable to ideologies which promise some form of deliverance from vulnerability

Framing for Bias

Cult Initiation

Indeed, we are making the assertion that a lot of the habituation of collectivist thinking and, more formally, Marxist sociopolitical outlook, comes in the form of cult initiation and indoctrination, as opposed to individuals engaging the work through their own independent curiosity and having that study radicalize them. In fact, I would wager that, even though I found Marx's writings particularly compelling at a young age, it wasn't really something that radicalized me so much as it gave me some ideas to think about that I hadn't previously considered at that level of acuity. It didn't, for example, immediately cause me to begin using new language or instill a deep desire to begin doing the work of Marxist praxis.

It might sound far-fetched for cult initiation to be taking place anywhere in our society, especially on a large scale, but it's not so intuitive to think about because when we think about cult initiation, we think about a very formalized system that has been developed from the ground up and articulated into ever-more sophisticated and completed edifices, but that's not how this works. In essence, it simply takes a corruption of language, and previously-extant edifices within which to deploy the language.

In this way, only a small-scale logistical undertaking is necessary for an organization to become a purveyor of cult ideology amongst a group of its regular dwellers who may or may not know anything about the cult in question, even after having adopted the language. It may only take one facilitator or the mandating of some programming which, though taking up a small proportion of the organization's activities, is enough to start allowing ideological commitments to become logically slated to come to fruition.

For example, with a DEI commitment, an organization might begin requiring its employees to receive recurring instruction on how to adapt their perception of their fellow colleagues in order to evaluate one another's bodies as per the systems of classification the DEI practitioner espoused as being the correct ones for understanding one another. Perhaps I am getting a head of myself by mentioning that it is predicated on the evaluation of bodies, but that is always going to be a limiting factor; it will always be the case that the effort to achieve a perfected existence through collectivism will be a permutation of perfecting matter of or as it relates to the bodies of extant human beings.

The curse of human embodiment will remain key to the evoked forces which drive humans to participate in collectivist endeavours, be it from the survival standpoint or from the standpoint of wishing to believe delusion. No human can be resolved in solitary delusion, but most any human can come to suspect that they'll find resolution in spite of their faintly self-acknowledged delusions just so long as another embodied being can affect it.

There is a structure to cult initiation and participation, but regardless of whether some cults may be formalized and well-established, or whether the quality of cult is being asserted on the basis of behaviour and happenstance, the procedure of initiation, adoption of practices, and contribution in perpetuating the cult has less to do on whether the cult is a real organization and more to do with human behaviour and human belief. The mechanics of cult indoctrination, however, are such that there will necessarily be some degree of formalizing which results from cult praxis.

"Milieu Control: The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads and writes, experiences, and expresses), but also—in its penetration of his inner life—over what we may speak of as his communication with himself. It creates an atmosphere uncomfortably reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984; but with one important difference. Orwell, as a Westerner, envisioned milieu control accomplished by a mechanical device, the two-way “tele-screen.” The Chinese, although they utilize whatever mechanical means they have at their disposal, achieve control of greater psychological depth through a human recording and transmitting apparatus. It is probably fair to say that the Chinese Communist prison and revolutionary university produce about as thoroughly controlled a group environment as has ever existed." - Robert Jay Lifton (Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism)

TODO: More quotes from Robert Jay Lifton

Initiation to Despair

The initiates who are taken into organizations purposed for collectivist praxis through cult initiation might be doing so because their immediate circumstances already cause them great existential despair, thus having put them in a state where they are susceptible to desiring some sort of stability in their lives. It might simply be the case that they need to associate with some other people because that provides the modicum of stability; often enough, when people with ample negative emotion socialize, it's because it's hoped that, for them, it improves the moment and helps them move past their current level of angst.

It isn't necessarily the case that every participant has embraced the new cult-like practices that are brought into an organization under the guise of DEI, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy or similar frameworks, but that these present an appeal to someone prone to negative emotion who is still aiming to be social, and cultivate relations in an environment that is conducive to nurturing negative emotion by embedding thought patterns and points of reflection that are toxic. Now, there may very well be persons who don't have much negative emotion, but who participate for any number of reasons, be them out of naivety and an attitude of giving the benefit of the doubt, or focus on fulfilling professional obligations, and will fall victim to manipulation and exploitation.

For those who already rarely enjoy respite from a high level of negative emotion, it's not simply a case of them actively looking for environments or opportunities to join with politically focused or politically motivated organizations, but they may very well be looking for opportunities to socialize with others out of a need to subdue loneliness. Even in cases where one is deemed or considers themselves to be anti-social, they may engage other avenues for socialization, and this is especially true since the advent of gaming culture, social media, and communication over the internet in general, or even bulletin board systems (BBS) which were common enough before the internet became a widely accessed phenomenon (as an anecdote, I was much more anti-social than those of my age and surroundings as I grew up, and I gravitated very much towards bulletin board systems (BBS) before ever having a chance to use the internet, so this was an observation I noted very early on).

With my own experience, I find myself always empathizing and contemplating in detail what it must be like to be presented with a new social environment bearing a corresponding vernacular whose utilization has the power to sculpt and mould my perspective of the world, of other people and even myself, and that's just in consideration of a social environment that one enters into voluntarily, which is bad enough, but the reality is that children are also dealing with having to adopt what I continue to argue as being a problematic vernacular which is usually being presented to them as authoritative, morally justified, ethically necessary and logically or scientifically accurate.

And this circumstance is worthy of consideration for all those who consider that the threat to their children of such endeavours such as public schooling is based primarily upon curriculum, course instruction and what are considered as being the correct responses to questions which explicitly delve into subject matter that the parent is concerned about. It's far from the problem and is, in fact, probably much less of a risk than the other aspects of public schooling which condition and program children to think in a certain way.

It isn't the course material and the correct answers to questions, as it's far easier for children to be skeptical about what they are being "forced" to learn. It's also far easier for parents to see what is being taught through the course material and as per the performance of the student, the details of the answers given and the grading and commentary or feedback provided for those answers. What is far more difficult to sort through, identify and understand the effects of are simply the manner in which language is chosen for general communication in those environments, and the degree to which an educator has themselves been conditioned to harbour particular biases, especially when those biases have been programmed into them through a certification process as those perspectives are now intrinsically bound to their effort to have distinguished themselves professionally, meaning that it is connected to their pride of effort and duty, as well as to a representation of their capabilities as a developed individual.

This is because what appears as dispassionately presented, neutral information which takes place as a professional communication can yield different effects. Neutrally-presented, circumstantially present information affects the degree to which it is less scrutinized and the potential consequence of that is that it conditions a worldview without the subject having given it explicit thought which might have otherwise provided them with an opportunity to employ faculties of critical reasoning.

References to Framing and Bias

• Framing Bias sage
• Framing Bias wiki
• Framing Bias pubmed
• Framing Bias CBS
• Framing Bias pubmed
• Framing Bias pubmed
• Framing Bias Deib Dict
• Framing Bias U Pitts
• Framing Bias U Texas

Inducing vs Attracting Despair

Though it was touched on briefly, it's important to elaborate on a very concerning aspect of introducing cult-initiate language in social environments which is that it doesn't just attract vulnerable people who already suffer from existential despair, but that the fact of the language having many implications which challenge one's notions of reality can be an implement by which to induce existential despair in someone not already suffering from it, and that this serves the very praxis which has been used to embed the vernacular extending from the cult praxis in whatever respective domain for which the social environment in question is intended.

TODO: major editing for next part

Think about how it feels to be suddenly thrust into a situation where you are asked to consider yourself immoral and to have to second guess all your thoughts and actions as ideological expressions bearing significance in a moral framework. To increasingly consider the degree to which your existence is justified or the degree to which you make other people's existence intolerable, whether you believe this outright or are simply aware that you are being judged in this way.

To cause you to consider constantly, at least in that setting, that everything you've done throughout your life has been actually harmful to someone else because they have a different body than yours and that the true meaning of your bodies is found in a system which surrounds you that you weren't able to decode until now. In fact, that you are able to decode them at all is only possibly because you're being afforded the privilege of learning how to do it, out of the virtue of those with bodies whose significance makes them morally superior and deeply more insightful than you are. It simply has been something that you weren't able to pick up on, and that now from here on out you are in the company of those who can actually read those things and who will be scrutinizing you to make sure you're able to show progress in understanding this.

That base scenario is just one aspect of the struggle sessions which will need to become regular, and which may very well be so subtle that you aren't actively aware of the fact that you are being struggled. You have to demonstrate mastery of acknowledging these things without disclosing that you actually have insight because part of your demonstration needs to be the affirming that you don't have knowledge and insight and that you rely on those others, who are other to you, to give you insight. Their being "other" is, by the way, your moral failure and the moral failing of your ancestry which has set up the world such as to cause you to be developed in a way where you are lacking knowledge and insight.

You need to walk that sharp, jagged and treacherous line between having knowledge and not making mistakes while also letting on that you have no knowledge. You must be ready when met with a prompt of appropriate scrutiny to acknowledge that everything you do is a mistake in some form. And if you fall into an intersectional identity which produces a more oppressed looking matrix, you can only maintain the status conferred by that designation so long as your words and behaviour are emblematic of the model of your identity as determined in critical social justice. If something is noted or observed about you which deviates sufficiently from that model, you will be described as having fallen victim to false consciousness or, in the worst case, you will be accused of betraying all marginalized people and as having become lost in trying to adopt your oppressor's identity.

It's constantly demanding the impossible, constantly accepting that you are immoral, and constantly showing that you are capable of handling it while having to prove your humility by showing that you are incapable, but it only seems impossible when language is taken at face value under an assumption of a shared, universally-applicable epistemology grounded in logic and reason.

The logic of cult collectivism, however, is always sound: the goal is for the realm of human existence to be one absolute, totalizing expression. For the initiate, however, who has been lured on the basis of plain-speak language which demands fairness, freedom and humanity as common-sense terms which aren't considered to have dubious and contrived meanings, the environment is perfect to produce the anxiety needed by the cult to compel its participants to action.

Modern Woke Negation

Woke Requires The Elimination of Things

Woke functions through negating, but why can't it simply be the addition of something new?

Examples:

• Queer kids
• Gender identity
• Animal identity
• Racial identity
• Sustainability

Queer kids | New | Negated | |-----------|-----------| | Gay/Lesbian | Non-sexual child | | Non-binary | Biologically essential aspects / deductions of reality | | 2-Spirit | Universality of consciousness | | Trans | Boys and Girls |

Some would say that, since the advent of "woke", a continuous stream of wedges have been driven into the fabric of society such as to drive people away from one another. Others would say that this began with the advent of propaganda commonly associated with Fascism and Nazism. Yet others would specify Communism, Marxism, Socialism or even Positivism as the point of origin. What we label such a stream of events has likely long been our behaviour, and is simply more apparent based on the scale of social relations and information that can reach humanity, coupled with the evolution and availability of logical constructs that can be made use of in order to compel humans to take on a problematic view of each other and the world at large.

In modern times, we are stuck with this term "wokeness" which, as of late, has caused much division among those who previously believed themselves as belonging to one portion of a partisan divide seeking to address the issue of "Woke" after its identification as a threat to humanity and civilizational progress.

In essence, though the fraught term is attacked on the basis of its ambiguity and the tendency of so many to comment on it by association or analogy, it's actually quite simple to understand and though this book examines deeper explications, the primary motif always reigns supreme and so let's touch on it again:

Belief that systemic oppression is the primary mediator of society.

For those insisting on connecting the factor of being awoken, we can say that it is having been awoken to this belief, and that this is a phenomenon which constructs society and ourselves.

How do we know it's the primary mediator, and in what context is this relevant? It's relevant in political endeavours, as seen in what we indicate as the right method by which to structure and govern society and I posit that for one to believe it as being the primary mediator is intrinsic to believing in authoritarian solutions.

Let us now examine the modalities through which this is posited.

1. Gay/Lesbian

!TODO: Is this all with respect to children?

Constructivist Project

It's difficult to unpack the ideas of comprehensive sex education and how they produce discursive dialectics in classrooms and regulatory institutions without taking them in the context of the Queer praxis through which academia and international organizations have come to demand their inclusion. It's especially important to think about this with more normal subjects, such as homosexuality, which by now almost everyone agrees is a natural phenomenon or not something that's worth groveling over - which is to say that, if adhering to liberal principles, we shouldn't have a say in who people choose as their romantic partners so long as they are adults making their own choices. Queer theory focuses on attacking normativity, but Queer praxis as common activism works through confusing normies and attempts to initiate them into a Queer worldview by pretending there is controversy over the completely normal, like homosexuality, and using that as an implement to defend something abhorrent, like pedophilia.

How do we know this? Because Queer scholars and activists attempt to sexualize children and criticize the notion that they should be regarded as innocent:

"It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions along which include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of “sexual orientation.” This is not a development that would have been foreseen from the viewpoint of the fin de siècle itself, where a rich stew of male algolagnia, child-love, and autoeroticism, to mention no more of its components, seemed to have as indicative a relation as did homosexuality to the whole, obsessively entertained problematic of sexual “perversion” or, more broadly, “decadence.”" - Eve Sedgwick (Epistemology of the Closet)

Eve Sedgwick's work, considered ground-breaking to some, insists that sexual orientation as a focus of the manner by which to describe the sexual content of one's life, personhood and character, is somehow unfairly imposed on culture to the exclusion of other aspects of sexuality that are equally relevant and that sexual orientation is highlighted because it offers a means of establishing dominance in power hierarchies. Of course, reading intentions and decrying hegemonic forces aside, the notion that sexual orientation is otherwise of similar significance to such things as child-love is an example of the sort of rubbish nonsense that this domain of "work" depends upon, as it can easily be dismissed either on the basis that one is a higher level scope of understanding (one's choice of partner based on a primary factor of their personhood) or the fact that one is necessarily a form of deviant behaviour, at least according to anyone with a fair degree of good sense and who is not a Queer activist.

"The experiences of art photographer Jacqueline Livingston exemplify the climate created by the child porn panic. An assistant professor of photography at Cornell University, Livingston was fired in 1978 after exhibiting pictures of male nudes which included photographs of her seven-year-old son masturbating. Ms. Magazine, Chrysalis, and Art News all refused to run ads for Livingston's posters of male nudes. At one point, Kodak confiscated some of her film, and for several months, Livingston lived with the threat of prosecution under the child pornography laws. The Tompkins County Department of Social Services investigated her fitness as a parent. Livingston's posters have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, and other major museums. But she has paid a high cost in harassment and anxiety for her efforts to capture on film the uncensored male body at different ages."

"It is easy to see someone like Livingston as a victim of the child porn wars. It is harder for most people to sympathize with actual boy-lovers. Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boy-lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt. A lot of people will be embarrassed by their collaboration with this persecution, but it will be too late to do much good for those men who have spent their lives in prison." - Gayle Rubin (Thinking Sex)

How fitting that the seminal work in the domain of Queer theory is well-known for declaring both that pedophiles constitute some form of unfairly oppressed group and that photographs of a young child masturbating can somehow be exempt in being construed as pornographic material.

"As Duschinsky (2013) notes, “Discourses of childhood innocence seem to have an unimpeachable moral status. Yet scrutiny of these discourses indicates that they may in fact be regarded as a potentially exclusionary form of social practice, linked to little-acknowledged and problematic social effects” (p. 764). While such social effects have not gone entirely unquestioned, most critical work on the topic of childhood innocence, much of which has been produced by Australian scholars, has focused on the regulation of children’s sexual agency (Egan and Hawkes, 2009; Faulkner, 2010; Robinson, 2013). Here, I take up the notion of childhood innocence to examine how, in the US context, it regulates race relations by producing a particular “childhood” that perpetuates White supremacy." - Julie Garlen (Interrogating innocence: “Childhood” as exclusionary social practice)

When everything is socially constructed, what's truly real is the oppression and the revolution to overcome it. This is why the dimensions of oppression can be transformed or manifested in new ways if the means by which a previous dimension occurred had come to be mitigated. The issue is always revolution, and therefore if enforcement along one dimension doesn't sufficiently feed the revolutionary process, we can begin compelling conformity and participation through threats made along other dimensions. If you resist the queering of childhood innocence then you are upholding the regulation of race relations in a system of White supremacy. This creates a targeted scheme of radicalization by taking children in social environments, imposing a struggle session upon them and recruiting them into specific roles for the revolution. Though enforced on a dimension of race, it leads to roles of queer allyship and gender non-conformity purposed to queer and antiracist activism.

Childhood Innocence

Why would they criticize innocence?

Innocence denotes some societal expectation and, given the assumed circumstance of an oppressive society which enforces structural norms to maintain the current permutation of social stratification, any expectation based on social norms is deemed liable to be an aspect of the oppressive structure reinforcing itself, leading to reification of beliefs which cause members of that society to become unable to discern the manner in which the oppression affects them and others. Put another way, even the well-intentioned expectation of childhood innocence induces false consciousness.

Thus, if the assumption is that children are innocent and non-sexual, then one must counter the potential that such an assumption produces oppression by bringing it into conflict with its opposite formulation: a child with a sexuality who is either not innocent, or the notion of a sexual child whereby there is no such concept of innocence on the basis that our very understanding of what it is to be innocent is itself an oppressive, socially constructed imposition.

How can a child have a sexual orientation? Well the Queer theory's assumption is that a child not expressly gay is heterosexual, but is that really the case? Sexuality suggests sexual attraction, but a child is not reaching states of sexual arousal, and far less a state of sexual arousal associated with reproduction. One might suggest that children may demonstrate fondness for one another that is wrongly differentiated from romantic feelings conjured between adults, as the related mechanisms and the experiential elements are intuitive, pure or primal. But romantic feelings or sexual preference are something more than excitement and vasodilation. They require the element of one's awareness to their capacity to practice discernment, and the awareness to such a capacity requires a knowledge of consequences which can't be conveyed by spoken word or written letter.

Indeed, romantic feelings requires a level of sophistication consequent to life experience and some understanding of the world. A child simply hasn't existed long enough to know real world ramifications of events on a human life, body, or on the broader relations of humans and society. A reasonable understanding or attitude would be to say that children are not yet developed in a manner and to a degree where sexual arousal manifests. Children may be fond of one another but the relation and dynamic of that fondness is not sexual and is, thus, more simply managed and yielding less impactful consequences.

"In 1991, Eve Sedgwick (1991) published an essay that may be said to have initiated contemporary queer theory’s consideration of childhood as a site of heteronormative - Hannah Dyer (Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development)

It's unfortunate that this needs to be stated, but perhaps this is the sort of cyclical issue in human evolution that needs to be touched on every so often to make sure we're not aiming toward the catastrophic, but it seems quite apparent that it is a common perspective among Queer theorists that childhood is an opportunity to intervene in the formation of various unconscious capacities for oppression which come to be seen as "normal", such as humans believing that heterosexuality, which is an aspect of sexual reproduction (and thus the reason why the human species has existed for more than one single generation) is a normal practice, and that this view of its normalcy leads to the oppression of homosexuals. Now, the focus on homosexuality as a domain of oppressive peoples has become antiquated, as the insistence on viewing gay and lesbian as the alternatives to heterosexual living have come to be labelled as a form of hegemonic oppression in its own rite. What rite is that, and how might it be referenced?

Queer theorists construe the acceptance of "vanilla" gay and lesbian relations as homonormativity, and though it might sound jarring to some, it's become a common enough concept which makes sense when you realize that all forms of collectivism are aiming at the same thing: removing limits from existence en route to a state of being where the human is not going to be denied their belief about the possible form existence has, can or will take. To flesh that out just a bit more, it might be best to describe homonormativity as the forced categorization and annulment of Queer liberatory potential through structurally enforced roles. That is to say, homosexual identity as a limited and assimilated role which mimics and adheres to cisheteronormative practices.

Agency and Accountability

"My argument begins with the premise that developmental theory and its attendant model of Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) can be destructive to some children’s imaginative and social capacities when not attuned to their possible queer presents and futures." "..." "There is a paradox that arises when the child’s rights to agency and participation in the world are secured while it is suggested that they are innocent and lacking complexity. I invoke this dilemma to highlight what is at stake when queer theory speaks about childhood as social construction but forecloses a consideration of actual children. In not thinking about children’s material rights, there are issues that get forgotten. As I write in Canada, I am considering, for example, the history of residential schools and their devastating effects on children’s lives as just one issue that may be elided or repressed when queer theory evades recognition of how the preservation of innocence (in the name of rights) has not protected all children equally." - Hannah Dyer (Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development)

The dialectical juxtaposition being presented here works to introduce children to comprehensive sexual discourse. Its function is to remove the idea that they are innocent because it keeps them from having true agency. But agency for what? For sex? That is the common criticism coming from those who associate themselves as "right-leaning", but I think that though its a concern, it may be misleading and that maybe that's just a side effect that the Queer theorist isn't too concerned about. I contend that the thrust of Critical praxis utilizing the dialectic is that the fact of any children having had a conceivable right violated predicates that the belief that any effort to protect the rights of children has only resulted in selective protection of some children, and any distribution of protection has been conferred as a form of privilege. These privileges and selective application of protected rights serve in the structure of oppression which allows for some children to be violated to the exclusion of others. In fact, the framing as to what constitutes a violation is also based on normative expectations and, by extension, the expectations around protection of children serve in the composition and enforcement of the matrix of hegemonic forces in which the children suffer..

How is the issue of the selective protection of children's rights, as evidenced by asymmetrical distribution in the violation of children's rights, addressed? By giving the children rights; identifying what rights are necessary for protecting and empowering those who are marginalized and taking action to educate the community to desire them while also championing changes in culture and institutions to enforce their recognition and administration. Not only has our practice of supposing children's right to innocence borne the effect of worsening marginalization and racism, we've also not permitted the deep and profound complexity of the more privileged subset of children to be revealed to society, hence causing harm to their agency. Children's true agentic nature corresponds with depth and sophistication and understanding this grants the imagination to envision them with greater faculties. Put another way, introducing children to idea that they are sexual beings early on help them address social justice issues and prevent the possible violation of rights that might otherwise be experienced by their more marginalized peers. As with most Critical praxis, contradictions are baked into the arguments, so their sexual agency can be referenced both as the feature of a more serious being while also being the element which reduces the degree of severity by which potential consequences will be construed, such as the consequences of pregnancy or promiscuity.

"Early childhood studies are based on the hegemony of what is scientifically known about children’s development without adequate attention being paid to how childhood is socially and culturally constructed. ... The work of Butler (1993) creates a space to challenge, shift, create discomfort, and make noise about the gendering of children in early childhood programs. In Bodies that Matter, Butler suggests:

To what extent, then, has the performative “queer” operated along side, as the sanction that performs the heterosexualization of the social bond, perhaps it also comes into play precisely as the shaming taboo which “queers” those who resist or opposed that social form as well as those who occupy it without hegemonic social sanction. (p. 226)

In essence, we do (perform) gender whether we want to or not and implicate children who may not fit normative expectations of what we expect as acceptable behavior. Kumashiro (2002) has argued that the norms of schooling and its manifestations can be perceived as oppressive, arguing, “changing oppression than requires constantly working against this norm” (p. 11). The propensity to focus on developmentally appropriate practice seems overbearing and indeed oppressive. Children’s identities would be better understood through a critical deconstruction of Western theories of child development and of the normative pedagogical frameworks that dominate early childhood practice." - Zeenat Janmohamed (Queering Early Childhood Studies: Challenging the Discourse of Developmentally Appropriate Practice)

A sensible understanding of a child's agency and the level of accountability imposed on them by their family, peers and society at large is well established in Developmentally Appropriate Practices for Early Childhood Education, but this has been the focus of criticism by Queer theorists who believe that Early Childhood Education should explicitly attempt to "queer" development by creating different norms, reifying Gender Identities and conceiving of a child's identity through critical deconstruction, which is to say, to view it through a lens of understanding how a child's development is an opportunity for applying Critical Theory to deconstruct the social environment. Through the energetic act of tearing something down, we hope to produce something different which, based on the goal and history of Critical Theory, means producing Socialism en route to a Communist Utopia.

Queer theorists may also talk about giving agency to children because of how it leads to accountability and this will often be interpreted by the uninitiated as though it leads to a more capable and responsible child, but this is manipulation by equivocation. Any accountability referred to by a Queer theorist is only insofar as we are able to potentiate collectivism. At the moment that a form of accountability is discerned as tacitly indicated through the overarching proposals of the Queer theorist, they will deny any form of individual accountability or commitment and move towards the reification of a group by claiming everyone is responsible for the goals of Queer theory, which is made interchangeable with the goals of the children. Furthermore, it will be stated that the domain, practice and corresponding institutionally-embedded initiatives of Queer theory are all accountable to the goal of transcending normative oppression, and that the educating of children to understand their sexual nature is a means of fulfilling this accountability.

In keeping with the Marxist view of the "real" as the direction to a better future, the "real" in the Queer context takes its actual form of collective accountability posited as what can be concretized, as opposed to an individual accountability which is a fallacy due to the contradiction in the outcomes of different children. In this way, we see again that the eschatological endpoint through a Hegelian process of becoming both removes accountability and makes the individual vulnerable to being discarded as a fuel cell consumed in the engine of history.

To summarize, though the norm is to understand children as bearing some form of inherent innocence, the collectivist, particularly one who is implementing a dialectical methodology descendant from Hegelian thought, will say that the innocence is an illusions which reinforce dominant positions in the social hierarchy. For example, it will be said that it's derived from placing children in proto-heteronormative roles because it reinforces capitalism, or that it was a side effect of having disseminated vilifying mythologies about people of colour and queer folk.

As we are simply used to engaging this concept as though some universal norm, we perpetually fall into fatalistic reasoning about the limits and simplicity of children, which negates our opportunity to grow and evolve as a society toward Utopian destinations previously identified by some of our greatest thinkers. The fatalistic expectation is imposed through conservative reactions to any attempt that tries to lift up our children from the endless cycle of capitalistic and normative conditioning and is furthermore a marker of privilege in the sense of not being able to see the need for change, such as would be otherwise be the case with a more marginalized perspective. They reify a false consciousness because reinforcing cisheteronormative structures through ascription of innocence is simply a natural intuition of their being held advantageously in the hierarchy of social strata. Our failure to recognize that acceptance of identities has been a lost opportunity for social justice and such intolerance, borne of the selfish dispositions, represses humanity and keep us from adopting the knowledge necessary for us to thrive.

2. Non-Binary Negation

• Biological essentialism
• Grounding of human reality
• Questioning evolution

Biological essentialism is instantly in the crosshair because whatever criteria was previously used and believed to be sufficient for identifying real, actual aspects of human biology are being made to seem unproven, inaccurate and insufficiently argued for. The reasons for this are of both conscious and unconscious origins, and is argued with the perspective that those in favour of a biologically essentialist view of the world are assumed to follow through in having been influenced by entities favouring those same things as well, such as a history of capitalistic exploitation to keep industry moving with increased demand, as well as the imposition of hierarchy as a consequence of Patriarchy.

One of the best representations of an argument which, though rather ambiguous to the uninitiated observer, has carried mighty weight in establishing the foundation of discourse in Gender and Queer studies, and their related activist endeavours, is a quote we already touched on earlier by Judith Butler from her seminal work Gender Trouble. Here's a quick breakdown of the primary points she puts forward in her problematization of sex:

"Originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation"

• It's one thing to say you're employing a radical premise to analyze something differently, but it's quite another to say that the thing you wish to analyze was itself a radical premise to begin with, making the claim dubious right off the bat. It would be much more sensible to say "gender was originally intended to describe the corresponding behaviours, social norms and expectations that we associate with people of a given sex", but hinting that the fact of biology places a limit without specifying in which way keeps it open for the theorist to state that our understanding of the world and the behaviours and roles we accept are rigidly constrained by biology.

"Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders... When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one."

• Here she is saying that the very fact humans came up with a concept of gender and gave it a name tells us that sex and gender should, in fact, eventually come to be seen as unrelated. She would push back on that and say that they are related and that the concept of gender worked as a good start towards freeing us from the imprisoning aspect of our attitude toward the sexed body, but that the fact of us having come up with this concept demonstrates that we are trying to break free of the limiting ideas about human sex.

"If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all."

• And here she goes all nutty and states, quite simply, that we came up with a sex/gender distinction contradicts the immutability of sex, and therefore the distinctions of sex are themselves contradictions.

Judy is somehow presupposing that anything we conceive of is revealing some great truth about ourselves and the world, but humans go down useless rabbit-holes all the time, and though there's something to be said for the pain and struggle of some of the hard lessons we teach ourselves, there's no good reason to assume that we have to learn every difficult or even stupid lesson that we possibly can put ourselves through, as there's always an infinite set of additional ones to undertake. While we can theorize as to what reasons we possibly might have had for coming up with concepts like gender, whether there are competing concepts referenced by the term, which ones are more legitimate, and so forth. It's obvious as to why we humans created the means by which to describe sex and the sex differences, and regardless of what psycho-social behaviours we can associate with either of them, the striking and unmistakably distinct physiological differences which correspond with completely different reproductive systems are themselves self-evident. As such, the whole reason we identified the concept of male and female, which definitely refer to sex, regardless of belief in the concept of "gender", is because we have to deal with our biology. We need an intelligent way of referencing the fact that there is a difference, a way of referring to the practice by which we find ourselves in the complicated circumstance of a pregnancy, and so forth.

We understand that reproduction is possible just as we know that there is only one particular modality which one would understand as being relevant to the reality of what impact sexual reproduction has on them and their lives. A set of effects is a real, non-subjective aspect of reality which every human is liable to deal with and, though we can perform actions which affect what those effects may be, such as those using contraceptives and abortions, and the dynamics of how they are expressed as they occur (which includes everything from nutrition and endocrinological treatments to composing a birthing environment), any intended destination sought through doing so is not something otherwise extant outside of human intervention and only as advanced technological exploit. Nature, with the constructs, formulations and behaviours which arise from its biologically mediated determinants, does not include any of these such endpoints, permutations and phenomena, so as much as we criticize the social constructions which we hope to be corrected, whether from the standpoint of the Queer theorist who takes offense through suspicion of meaning attributed to body, or the individualist of a classical Liberal disposition who declares their "anti-Wokeness", we must ask if the problem hoped to be corrected is not a folly of human concoction, be it social implements that are structurally oppressive, and not the post-naturalist mystical theorizing as are Queer and Trans activism, but one of nature itself.

Indeed, we fight against nature all the time, which is treacherous, brutal and unforgiving, simply to survive in comfortable enclaves while using the most unnatural technological advancements ever imagined. So rather than spending all our time fighting about whether the infinite genders are something legitimate, we could simply be having more intelligent discussions about the projects, targets and effects transhumanism will bring, sans the context of an unconscious conspiracy to socially transgress.

3. Two-Spirit Negation

• Universality of Consciousness
• Diversity
• Minorities

Two-Spirit as a term seems, particularly in Canada, like a broadly integrated term currently familiar and visible in general at the cultural level, but only through institutions, professional media, or privately as people for whom it pertains due to their interest or as a product of their social environment, which is to say that there are very many social environments wherein it would not be invoked or enumerated. As a concept, its philosophical and ideological domains include its use in Queer theory, Critical Colonial theory, anthropology in the wake of having been infused with Critical Theory, Critical Cultural studies, and so forth. Though it takes on the aesthetic of calm serenity and balanced forces of universal harmony, I've always found that curiosity or respect for what might be described as openness to phenomena that are correctly integrated with reality or nature is perhaps a lossless and authentic human sentiment with a tuned affinity to such an abstraction and that this is evoked in one's perception of tradition, culture, ecology, and astronomy among many other things. I believe this naturally includes respect for and interest in what we colloquially refer to as native or indigenous culture for a great many reasons, not the least of which is knowledge itself, though It bears mentioning that I'm referring to knowledge dispassionately, and not such as to allude that it is knowledge that can only be understood through some indigenous framework or, yet further, through an indigenous perception.

For me, however, the development and introduction of such a term, to the exception of a theoretically sincere and unprejudiced use in good faith and not as a tool by which to manipulate, is one the more infuriatingly unscrupulous vectors of anti-human negation. It presents as some sort of advanced, sensitive and evolved form of collectivist philosophy which, in making a more explicit contact with ideas of divinity, the sacred and direct cosmological substance, beckons a totalitarian sensibility and especially so when it as a concept is enumerated, championed and described by the state.

That state bodies mention it and enforce its being referenced through infrastructure while suggesting that human cultural practices recognize it is utterly abhorrent. The state advises and legislates such that private companies modify their communication such as to incorporate it creates a new measure by which to affect their legitimacy, not simply to the end that they operate legally, but because of how such a thing is evaluated in an economic market.

This isn't simply the totalitarian potential of ideas that could yield different results, depending on certain conditions, but a concept whose recognition by anybody with legislative authority is incoherent except in the context of enforcement. There is no "meaningful" action that any government can take to ensure the corresponding society accommodates or "respects" this concept, except through policy concerning what expressions are permitted to take place.

If there are Two-Spirit people and non-Two-Spirit people, then it's necessarily the case that Two-Spirit people have a type of knowledge that cannot be attained by the "other". It's by no means necessary to tell someone that they shouldn't believe they have 2 spirits, or to question whether their substance, expression or essence is the product of 2 spirits, 3 spirits, an infinite set of spirits, or all spirit, or the pure spirit, or what have you. A human can choose to believe they are composed of energies, inhabited by demons, that their soul was formed because of the existence of a particular animal, that they themselves are reincarnated, that they're somehow the seed of the creator or even that they are the creator themselves. They are fine to believe all of it and it's not necessary or morally palatable to enforce what people believe in any capacity, especially individually, even when it comes to the obscene, particularly because it's not even reasonable to assume that enforced beliefs would manifest as intended. It is, however, quite a different sort of thing to have an authority responsible for the laws of the land to say there are 2 different types of people that are differentiated by something spiritual, because the state who has jurisdiction over the land and wields the legal and enforcement apparatus by which to arbitrate conflicts amongst men is now saying that there is a secret epistemology that some of those men can understand and be respected for and others not, thus obliterating the concept that humans each individually have consciousness that is equivalent in its capacity for reason, morality and viability.

"But isn't it just the same thing as saying people are religious, and referring to them by their religion or the name of their belief system?"

No, it's not the same thing at all. We can say that they are believers of such a thing, but to say that our own epistemology now needs to be presented as though it accords, or even to be modified to have it accord, with the belief system that they purport to follow is not the same as acknowledging that there are people who believe something. To consider it a civic duty or professional requirement to only communicate in a way which preserves the presumption of these disparate identity-mediated epistemologies, and even to make it a civic or criminal offense to fail refer to them by their religious title, whether broadly or just in certain circumstances, is not the same as enumerating the religions that people in a jurisdiction happen to follow. Having all citizens assist in their spiritual practice, when enforced by the state, becomes state religion, whether genuine or not. The implicitly instantiated state religion is not necessarily one for which others are directed to curate their words, thoughts and actions for (though even when not enforced through immediate physical violence, is something you get for free), but a tacitly indicated belief system through the state positing that its direction for language, action and belief in an endpoint representing a qualitative change in humanity delivered as a rule set to be followed as a moral directive, rather than to remain consistent in abstaining from infringing on laws that protect people's individual rights. Humans don't have a right to maintain their own beliefs in the face of a world which might present them with moments of experience which challenge their thinking.

In having the state acknowledge that its citizens inherently have access to different knowledge, and knowing the state is the legal authority, it follows not just that there are different types of people, but that the relevance and means of their differentiation is by virtue of the content of their knowledge, which corresponds by type. In doing so, the state has now formalized a declaration that knowledge, faculty and capability are contingent on the means by which the enumeration of their differentiated types is qualified. Since this is not necessarily qualified by individual experience, which would correspond with a universal capacity for logic and reason, the means is now set in theory of identity.

Since the employed models of identity are postulated as pertinent on the basis of their position in an oppressive structural hierarchy, drawing from Critical Race theory, Queer theory, Feminism and other formulations sharing in the lineage of Critical theory, and since their qualification is on systems of power wherein the power is derived through social relations, it becomes the case that the presentation of the body, as per the perception of others, constitutes the means of evaluating and designating an individual's knowledge and capabilities. This qualification is not genetics, skin colour, and certainly not the experience of the individual, but something completely externalized which itself cannot be verified, hence moving the expertise of the evaluation to the state authority who can conduct itself more arbitrarily in selecting what the theorist it wishes to recognize.

In having defined the limit and content of what can be known by people in this way, we eliminate the notion that there is shared capacity for knowledge, universal access to reason, and a means by which we can come to understand one another.

4. Trans Negation

• Boys and Girls
• Men and Women

Though one might prefer to consider the trans phenomenon as covered under the subject of non-binary, gender fluidity, gender non-conformity and gender divergence, there are some different issues that are easily addressed in speaking about one vs the other, in the sense that though non-binary negates a human being's perception of reality by problematizing biological essentialism, the notion of evolution and fundamental considerations as to what it means to be a human being, the trans phenomenon, though active in different facets of life and society, bears most of its relevance in its specificity of targeting man and a woman and, light of the focus of Queer praxis, male and female children.

The notion of the transgender, and especially the transgender child, constitutes the negation of boys and girls (and men and women) through supplanting the biological essence of sex with the fashioning of social expectations and the understanding that the relevance of a sex-related distinction is through the interest, attention and arousal that can be derived through gender as a domain of human relations, behaviours and discourses.

Though the trans activist would concede that these things called man and woman do, in fact, exist, they will not define them but leave them floating as though derived through social construction. And what is their basis for this? Because we have given them names.

In naming them, we sought to control, as the fact of the names having been perpetuated through a society wherein inequity exists means that those who succeeded in naming them benefited from the hierarchy of power and, as such, sought control over the meaning of bodies in such a way as to reinforce that hierarchy. For this reason, we must negate their meaning through reifying a meaning that gives control to the oppressed, and the best way to formulate that meaning is by choosing a meaning in line with an oppressed consciousness.

When there is no longer an inclination to think about performing a gender, people will be as they truly are, and this will constitute a double negation in that the process of reifying meaning to divert power and control will have been negated.

As the aforementioned describes a liberatory process, children have a role to play. Given that they are not free, with the controlled meaning of their bodies already rampant in society, taking on this role in pursuit of liberation is both a moral imperative and their best path to freedom in becoming who they truly are. As their peers and social environment, if conducive to liberation, are aware of the liberatory pursuit, the children will be struggled to demonstrate their consciousness.

State-Constructed Savage

As mentioned before, the grave injustice resulting from the state's enumeration of an identity type is largely on the grounds of the state's assertion that the identity in question suffers in the permutation of social relations found within the region over which it asserts authority.

What does the state know of the concept of Two-Spirit? What it knows is that it accepts certain categorization of people based on activism that has been influenced by academic papers on the subject, and that these papers are from disciplines that have been heavily influenced by Neo-Marxists interested in Critical Colonial / Postcolonial studies, and the concept of identity in the context of Conflict theory, Standpoint epistemology and similar ideas from a very similar set of related ideological frameworks which follow the same logic of Marxist critique, regardless of whether they explicitly associate as being a domain of Marxist thought (some might prefer the term Marxian, in that regard). Though "Two-Spirit" is often professed as a "third gender", the term itself seems formulated through a correspondence of various sources which draw inspiration from creation myths and put forward a term to replace more offensive terms, such as Berdache, which were commonly used in Colonial studies and Anthropology to describe homosexual or sex atypical behaviours observed by those who researched or commented on tribal communities in what we call the North American region of today.

Even when examining these papers, published in anthropology journals, Gay and Lesbian journals, Radical Feminist journals, Postcolonial journals, and so forth, it's clear that the term was being suggested for use in referring to homosexual men and women living in North American Indian communities. It's only through the Queer praxis of Queer activism that the lines have been "queered" such as to propose that this is now the secret non-dualistic gender which has always existed. This is usually qualified through comparing it to intersex persons and the notion of Native American "Gods" or mythological figures.

"institutionalized same sex intimacy was supported by religious beliefs that acknowledged the existence of people (and gods) who were neither entirely male nor entirely female. Because of this, Native American men today are likely to reject such labels as homosexual, gay, or berdache, in favor of two-spirit men." - Terry Tafoya (Native American Two-Spirit Men)

"the recent general sexual revolution in the United States and the gay liberation movement contributed greatly to the production of Williams’s wide-ranging and fully documented book. It will surprise some, shock some, but almost everyone can learn something new from it. Williams gave me a few surprises. First is the message that berdaches are nearly always homosexuals--with one male partner specializing as recipient of anal intercourse. Another one was the general practice of both male and female berdaches entering into extended, same-sex “marriages.”" - Omer C. Stewart (American Anthropology Volume 89, Issue 4, December 1987 - Commenting on Walter L. Williams (The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture 1986)

"But with the greater focus on gender and sexuality in anthropology and heightened sensitivity to Native American voices and categories, the term berdache has been criticized (e.g., Jacobs and Thomas 1994:7). As a result alternate terms and categories such as gay, alternate gender, and two-spirit have arisen." - Carolyn Epple (Coming to terms with Navajo nadleehi: a critique of berdache, "gay," "alternate gender," and "two-spirit")

Epple also comments on the notion of "multiple genders" as though there is something beyond what corresponds with two sexes, but the dualism remains:

"Thomas (1993) describes four Navajo genders: female-bodied women, male-bodied men, female-bodied nadleehi, and male-bodied nadleehi. In this system male nadleehi' same-sex sexual practices are not equivalent to many present-day Euro-American homosexual or gay practices, since nadleehi partners are of a different gender (usually male-bodied men) than nadleehi, while present-day Western gays and their partners are of the same gender (Thomas 1993:4-5)." - Carolyn Epple (Coming to terms with Navajo nadleehi: a critique of berdache, "gay," "alternate gender," and "two-spirit")

The term "Two-Spirit" is most attributed as having been first formalized by Albert McLeod, a gay Status-Indian from Manitoba who has done a lot of LGBTQ or 2SLGBTQ advocacy, at the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1990, where a term was specifically sought to replace "berdache". This event has been corroborated through many sources, and it stands to reason that the papers referenced above are in-line with what those attending the conference would have conceived as being the inspiration for the term.

If taking a reasonable and charitable stance on the subject, the term is best described as a religious term, and its use by politically conscious persons who are either politicians, or who are doing political advocacy in institutions are blurring the lines between Queer as a praxis of liberation from cisheteronormativity as a theoretical understanding of oppression derived from sexual identity, and a non-specific reference to the broad understanding that North American Indian communities, in some cases, have creation myths or mythologies involving gods and special beings who relate to this term. The idea that our government can compel its citizens to refer to these things as actual legitimate constructs that are to be tacitly acknowledged as both real and relevant in the context of Social Justice as a moral and legislative objective for its citizens is absurd. By taking this step, and many others similar to it, the state is demanding its citizens reify a specification of identity lest one be deemed hateful, immoral and even, in some cases, guilty of infractions which can escalate to civil offenses that could lead to jail time. That is to say, what may begin as a violation of the Canadian Human Rights Act can lead to monetary penalties which, if left unpaid, could theoretically lead to imprisonment.

Further to hate speech provisions of the Human Rights Act, one could also be argued as having imposed "conversion therapy" on someone by not respecting their proclaimed gender identity, which includes Two-Spirit identity.

Enslaved to Validate State Ideology

Intrinsic to the state's acknowledgment of the Two-Spirit concept is its authority to proclaim and maintain the technical specification for what that thing is; that the state deems Two-Spirit to be juridically-relevant necessitates an intelligible specification hence that thing will no longer exist except as per the model provided by the state authority and an individual's ability to arrange, express, present and be perceived adequately such as to pass continuous evaluation against such a model. Without meeting such a threshold, one becomes re-ascribed as something else, as chosen by the state or as per a defacto designation which occurs by virtue of entering into conflict with the state.

If the concept exists as even a subset of another larger category, then it and the implements which evaluate against it become the means by which all designations within the larger category are validated. This includes the category of "human". Put another way, as the state has indicated not only a historical injustice continuing through the citizenry which it governs today, but that there is a moral impetus for those citizens to acknowledge the special insight and abilities of a small subset of its citizens as but one method by which to address the injustice, then meeting this demand becomes a test of the citizen's humanity.

!TODO: make sure to clarify that the state is not proclaiming its own guilt, but the guilt of its citizens.

Drafted as State Enforcer

This isn't only one being evaluated as per the appearance of the body, through meeting rigid criteria for the expression of their form, and the manner in which its perception is interpreted. Now, at any junction with a proposal whose context includes a state-enumerated identity type, one's form serves in a capacity to reify and reinforce the state specification, one's role must specifically be to ensure the state's conception of the phenomenon is utilized, as failure to do so can be construed as a form of genocide and erasure both as cultural genocide, which as a term was legitimized by the Canadian Federal government, and even as an outright genocide as will be put forward by post modern activism which seeks ways to align with state authority as a means of power. By choosing to invoke identities dependent on a mythology of historical oppression which continues to this day, the state rationalizes prescriptions to the citizens and the need for their enforcement. The state cannot under any circumstance be made to acknowledge a false representation of its citizenry, or it admits to serving something other than its citizenry, such as its own pursuance of power, or an imagined or falsely interpreted citizenry. It is bound to the incentive of avoiding the perception that it is unable to correctly reference or perceive its own citizens.

Know Your Role

Think about it. If your conduct is contributing to the message that the state is incorrectly identifying its citizens, the relations between them, and the purpose of the institutions and initiatives of the country, then you can be intelligently evaluated as a threat state authority and social harmony.

Everyone's role in the matter, including those who are supposedly caught in the net cast by the specification, is to confirm and elaborate the truth as indicated by the state, and to do this correctly means not rejecting the reified identity being referenced. As the initiative to acknowledge such an identity is in service of potentiating, reinforcing and uplifting a supposed set of peoples who have been the victims of a cultural genocide, your conduct necessarily indicates whether you are participating in and contributing to genocide. If you are a native living in Canada who doesn't believe that other natives are Two-Spirit, or that the term doesn't really describe something legitimate, then you are succumbing to the influence of whiteness and colonialism and now possess a false consciousness. You can no longer speak on behalf of any peoples you would otherwise be ascribed as being a member of.

It is because of this that it becomes more important to demonstrate the logic and corresponding thinking surrounding the state specification than it does to be of a particular physical form, to have had particular experiences and history, to be of a certain family, or to have a particular genetic profile. If your communication does not facilitate belief in the state's specification, then your history, skin colour, family, genes, and experiences become inadmissible except as can be purposed as evidence of the state mythos, and only insofar as it will be interpreted by those the state deems its experts.

To be clear, it's not any specific, concrete attribute of the body, nor the genetic sequence that can be decoded from a sample of your DNA. It is the contextual interpretation toward social change of the perception and expectations of a body's presented phenotypic expressions as predicted by experts judging the relations of members in a stratified social environment. !TODO: not really clear

All your beliefs about your family and legacy of human activity are now irrelevant and tantamount to lies unless you correctly demonstrate the state's recommended sensibilities for someone with your body. The state owns the infrastructure to ascribe the viable reality of each and every being and, as such, the meaning to be scrutinized from your life. If seeking to truly represent your own person on your terms in a manner which defies the model of your body, you are have succumbed to ideology and are a disgraceful clump of matter that can never be intelligibly construed in this society except as an example of how a real, experienced existence is erased, disregarded and discredited. You will never be a real person.

Evading Mephistopheles

In the spirit of creating the perfect material reality which finally quells resentment and brings satisfaction and absolution to all, and the archetype which best reflects such a desire, let us visit one tale which sought to illustrate effort: Faust.

And so it is in Faust that the main character makes a deal with the devil on the basis of his desire for power, pleasure and intellectual formidability. He laments having studied and mastered all the great works and sources of knowledge and that he still stands "no wiser than before", and yearns for the satisfaction which has always evaded him:

"Then to the moment I might say: / Linger a while, thou art so fair!” - Faust

It would be the realization and admission of a moment that he would like to remain in for longer than its temporal expanse, such as it is, which proves that, should his promise have been made, the devil's part of the deal will have been fulfilled.

Obviously we're presented with a red flag in that a sensory rewards-based satisfaction is doomed to prove insufficient. Even if it is derived through intellectually-driven pursuit, it's still assured to be a moment that satisfies as mere feeling, which in spite of any level of sophistication is still the means of driving an animal. This is, in a sense, analogous to the collectivist desire, which believes there will be some satisfaction in the imminentization of the right conditions to finally curb the angst of existence, triumph in conquering one's enemies, attain the radical joy that follows the hope of victory, and be brought to the endpoint to which life's tension has been driving.

In the second act, however, after many would-be moments of bliss that just somehow missed the mark of truly being that moment of satisfaction for which he longs, he finds himself nearing the end of his life and is then confronted with moments which might help him reach a higher level of being. He imagines enhancing the world for the benefit of the many, and it leads him to an astonishing moment of revelation:

"Such a throng I’d like to see, / Standing on free soil with a people free! ... In the foretaste of such bliss, / I now enjoy the highest moment, this.” - Faust

On the hand, this is presented as something beyond his mere intellectual inclination and his pursuit of experiencing the greatest moment through his sensory apparatus, and I'd love to say that his former goal of achieving something with correlates with the inclination of the collectivist has been supplanted with a realization that there's something more than mere pleasure: the eternalizing satisfaction in conceiving that there can be a better world for all, or even having a hand in its materialization, and that, should it be realized, one needn't even be thanked for it, thus making it a selfless act. Goethe even makes it appear as such as, in spite of Faust uttering that which was previously tied him to the unlocking of the bargain through which the devil would now own his soul, he is still accepted into heaven for having been one who "strives with all his might" for something greater than himself, qualifying his redemption.

But is it not the same thing? Is it not still a moment of bliss which, though ostensibly presented as a focus on the good of all, rather than his own gratification, is still never going to be beyond his embodied experience? Whatever blissful sense of transcendence one aspires to, the notion that it's in service of a collective good separate from oneself is, at best unproven and in all likelihood tangled with one's state of embodiment and proclivities borne of the senses.

It's precisely this failure of distinction which enables one to rationalize what can lead to the absurd, atrocious, and even evil deeds as moral aspirations. This is quite in line with the banality of evil which, though some argue as being an illusion in the face of actual psychopathic minds who expertly seek out the opportunity for acting out evil, needn't present as a case of mutual exclusion. It's precisely our capacity to imagine we are good which provides opportunity for more tragedy and, yes, even evil.

For many, it might seem obvious that seeking bliss and fulfillment through intellect, lust, passion and triumph are things that, if perfectly quantified, would be evaluated and expressed in material terms. By perfectly quantified, I mean that we could theorize a system by which the pleasure of the nervous system could be expressed in a standard format, provided we agree that there can be pleasure in experience. We could even theorize as to how we would take into consideration the dynamics of human cognition and performance whereby the capabilities mature over time, are yielded and granted through disparate paths to mastery, and the manner in which long-lived impressions can change through experience, thus adding many layers of complexity to how perception is affected and personalized in complex ways, and that this contributes to a maturity of perspective that we sometimes refer to as wisdom. With better models, theories and quantification, we could theoretically develop an ever-improving capacity to evaluate the "bliss" of the moment as is experienced by a human being.

In contrast to this, it always seems common to assume that, even if one were not a theist, the idea of experiencing spiritual transcendence is difficult to quantify. That for some it might be connected to the divine, or an idea about divinity, and that for others it might simply be perceiving the world with a heightened sensibility where one aspires to express with grace and reduce their selfishness to find fulfillment and that, in even simply aspiring to meet the frame of perception differently, it becomes more complicated to ascertain whether one is driven through an incentive of satisfaction via the sense apparatus, or perhaps a diminished attention to the sense apparatus.

Further to that point I would argue that, in truth, it is hubristic nonsense to entertain the possibility of these things being separate insofar as one might experience, and that the very inclination to assume we can consider the possibility of this difference in informing what sort of undertakings should be sought collectively are liable to be at the root of many a vile catastrophe.

That we could seek some elegance possibly in the spirit of a counterpuntal quality of existence may very well be a better way of regarding reality, but that it may inform our moral prescriptions for another is inherently problematic in just the same way as prescribing another to the benefit of the many can be.

That isn't to say that I wouldn't hope to discern satisfaction from activities per an expectation of a lasting satisfaction that is well-supported and not fleeting, and perhaps something attained in a manner which restores, reinvigorates, and reinforces the most elegance-supporting phenomenological patterns. But, we can't ever discern something beyond an individualist pursuit of a resistance of the ego and the will which insists on demonstrating a supremacy or in receiving an experience that one might otherwise be missing.

Is the complexity which comes through a relaxed awareness lending toward unique, exploratory expression that is harmoniously and robustly reinforced with a seemingly infinite depth of the natural frictionless essence of reality a more veritable existence? A noiseless expression of a quality which trumps the barbaric ejaculation of egotistical desire? Perhaps I am biased, but I both hope and believe so.

I contend that the collectivist pursuit of supremacy over the order of being is precisely the Mephistophelean path, but that the belief that one is choosing a mode beyond it is liable to fool one into following that same path yet even further than before. It is the individualist whose attempt to find a more chaotic and ephemeral harmony with his free peers who embodies the wisdom gathered through our history and experience, and that this can only hope to be approached as a possibility. Perhaps through such a modality can humanity harness some infinite potential of our world and ourselves, but this can't be measured beyond adherence to our principles most readily observed before the advent of political society; the infinite regress forces us to ask questions of life in pure solitude and the lowest levels of social interaction.

Regardless of which path we may be on, we must always suppose that it's taking us toward this abomination: a monstrous, blind and archaic corporate entity calling itself the people, for the people and for the good. A freakish beast that purports to know minds, and threatens to replace real people and a legacy of beautiful culture with a decrepit and pathetic voodoo doll and childish taunts of a supreme infallibility.

Two-Spirit Negation Part II

How distastefully ironic that after the elaborate commentary on the 20th century's dehumanizing practices of categorizing humans to enact social, cultural and absolute control over people's supposed identities, and indeed their lives, the state, corporations, syndicates and oligarchs are finding an ostensibly true humanitarian calling in imbuing the entirety of what they do with reifying a specification of what people are, as denoted by their material classification; that is, the classification of the matter of their flesh as the source of applying meaning to the essence of their being. As we've commented on before, the irony is purposeful in that the system of critique which declares the need to categorize does so on the supposed need to counter the categories otherwise being wrongfully applied, and that it finds its way of doing this through the central authorities at every opportunity, which both empowers the psychopathological activist to wreak their manipulative tactics in their personal proclivity to reify their morally-elevated self-image.

People with native heritage are but one of the many casualties, which encompasses humanity as a whole, but are as a target quite exemplary of the pathological political climate in Canada. For years, Canadians have bemoaned that the higher poverty of native persons living on reserves is directly related to low expectations translating into a lack of agency and had sought initiatives to champion economic opportunity and skills development specifically because of the understanding that they are equally capable of using logic, reason and a motivated capacity for work to achieve a better life. The contrast of living in poor conditions, with little opportunity, among those who share an ethnic and cultural heritage and in a manner which exhibits the aesthetic of segregation against an integrated society where people are free to engage in their cultural practices as they please has been something that was always critiqued as a consequence of misplaced effort and poor central planning. Even while working for Northern and Indian Affairs Canada (INAC), in the early 2000s, it was a common opinion among policy analysts, at least as per my experiences there, that this circumstance was harmful to natives particularly because of the bigotry of low expectations combined with a circumstance whereby those in that environment never find themselves building interests and discovering what they are capable of.

In consideration of the state, to indicate that there is a need for rectifying historical oppression because of its relevance to identity, identity that it knows and enumerates as concrete, is synonymous with claiming the power necessary to curate and transform the conditions which were in any way a ground for that historical oppression. According to Marx, and many after him, the conditions include all human relations, all use, availability and ownership of resources, and even nature itself, which is ultimately not something to be distinguished from nature as an absolute ground of existence. With that historical oppression still extant, this project continues as the construction of the noble savage, at yet a newer iteration. As a construct which implements other known collectivist ideologies still floating around today, this is a project most mediated by those who, as already positioned in the upper echelons of the sociopolitical environment, are most enabled through wielding those implements to attain sociopolitical power.

Of course, this isn't just relegating a set of phenotypically observable expressions bound to a class of human to a form of beast, in the sense that their content and motivations are something modeled and prescriptive, but the assigning of a beast category to all humans as a whole through the historical mythos, as it confers content and motivations for them as well. That is, if simple desire, reflexivity and emotively-indicated dependencies are expected of even the most noble and uncorrupted among us, then such things are the best we can hope for from the oppressor classes, though it would be said that what actually drives them is the hate in their hearts.

Assuming that these simple beasts exist with no real thought of their own, but simply an awkward mess of reaction and desire, and that one classification of beast was temporally afforded a path to dominance over another, regardless of any other contextual consideration, is cause for eternally designating God and Devil, sacred and fallen, divine and mundane. Through state-acknowledged identity, the material formation of one type of flesh vs another becomes the principle driver of morality and knowledge; all other identity characteristics must operate as modalities given the declaration to indigenize, whether in call to struggle in a small real-time social environment, or pronounced as objective by the federal authority. Questioning this is evidence from which to deduce what ideology produced your mind. Unlike a sexual characteristic, such as what would refer to the mode of reproductive strategy to which one's physiological development is oriented (and which would become capable of said strategy except by disorder or injury), and which still doesn't warrant being treated as an identity, all other identities must be constructed and as such can only be experienced to exist through construction by social practice. That is to say, to behold the social interaction of its utterance.

In any administered social environment wherein a proposition to recognize such a state identity is made, any prompt to communicate must be responded to with a statements which are congruent with the state's ideology such that no word, phrase and deducible reasoning conflict with the rationale bound to the viability of the state identity. This might mean absconding from communicating, or composing utterances such as linguistically reinforce the alternate model of reality wherein that identity would be believed to exist. Indeed, it is forbidden to refute the state's proposed identities as the law dictates the capacity to prioritize reification of an identity category and thus any instance of beast to which it has been ascribed rests upon the capacity of the collective to assure that anyone whomsoever is assigned such an identity, when placed in some environment, will be actively facilitated into believing that they embodied, exist as and are described by that identity. They must be made to believe they "belong" in the social environment because of the ascription of that identity, with the chief evaluation in that environment being the content of utterances which occur within it.

In truth, the fact that questioning any aspect of the mythology of conflict between these classifications of material forms should be forbidden indicates that the classifications themselves should be something for which good sense should incline toward forbidding, as it makes one's concept of self and peer into something dead, unchanging and unresponsive. Imagine that living persons would want for their state of mind and view to be predicated not on curious observation and understanding of the things they say or do. In any case, even such an inhuman practice as labeling others as per one's limiting classification needs to be permitted, if only just to identify those who harbour actual bigoted points of view.

That simply isn't the extent of it, but it certainly is strong basis for its rejection and ridicule. Any ideological pursuit of imposing contradiction for historical rectification is necessarily a process for the discovery and construction of totalitarian, puritanical and eschatological characteristics; creating conflict to rectify historical conflict implies a need to control the state of reality until conflict does not occur, or dominance and supremacy is permanently achieved. That all humans must take up the work of transforming the world into a specification of acceptance criteria which, by any reasonable consideration (barring the most extreme technological solutions), consists of points that are each technically unattainable, and is not only presupposing a representation of every human, but is formulated with logic both congruent to and inspired by a Marxist critical philosophy.

Many would balk at such a suggestion, claiming that the classical and naively vulgar socio-economic classification, predicated on material management as resources bearing an effect of value, is a far cry from the nuanced understanding of cultures, races, psychologically-mediated gender expression, and so forth. But all of these domains of thought are fundamentally materialist and, as such, seek a perfection in the configuration of matter which necessarily includes a perfection of the flesh.

When it comes to producing rhetoric which supposes an oppressed status by people befitting a description of their bodies, such persons are put on the stage of this authoritative entity, described in a manner which presupposes that this entity has a deeper understanding of a particular type of human by virtue of the fact that it speaks of its weaknesses and vulnerability, as well as the following attributes of the oppressed:

• One's fallen state is reified uncritically: The suggestion of man's shortcomings is always welcome, as the state must validate its reason to enforce new controls to remedy the situation. When reinforced by theory presupposing malice and hate with identity itself as evidence, the tendency becomes irresistible.
• One's challenge in life is now defined and described by the state along with its purpose, intention, meaning and the nature and content of experience: The state understands both the nature of every human being's challenge and the role each citizen must play in overcoming it.
• It becomes the standard quantifier for determining one's quality on the dimension God or Devil: With its premises already fulfilled, it just becomes a matter of collecting the right information (in the age of data mining and computed prediction, this is necessarily going to be robustly calculated).
• In order to be spoken of as enumerated by the authority and considered as bearing a legitimate identity (performing it correctly), one must either perform their actions in line with the authority's description, or not offer up or express any contradiction, resistance, or hesitation to the description and the state's capacity to announce identity. Resistance to its descriptions is tantamount to erasing all members of an identity, destroying their "human rights", and participating in genocide, as "genocide" is now no longer the direct practice of systemic eradication, but is instead something which includes a any expression which does not provide full support of the effort to center a particular category's culture, as was seen with Canada's declaration of the historical occurrence of Genocide of Canada's Native Indian populations (prepare yourself -> death wish, assured death, misery & company, apocalyptic induction and so on).

As we carry on in our analysis, we will examine the ways in which the state has employed aesthetic determinants to appropriate the culture and representation of millions of people based on the material characteristics of their bodies or their proclaimed experiences (as evaluated by the state)

Rainbow Savage

The once unassuming, ever-inviting, child-friendly and uplifting archetype of the rainbow has become maximally appropriated in the past few decades. Some pre-existing motifs include:

• Brilliant, eternal light
• Transcendent completion
• The total range of being
• Infinite
• Timeless wisdom

There is something majestic about the rainbow and the prism of refraction inducing the display of superseding wisdom in its perfected, harmonious and balanced form, as though something beyond the crude offerings of fallen man. To take this up as an extension of oneself as though the essence of one's being is to be acknowledged as something revered with the perfection of the potential of expression - that things taken as humans understand them and as discrete will always yield incomplete, partial expressions of being, but that consolidating all things within one expression by purposely pursuing and empowering the expression of anything based on the suggestion that it should be limited in some way is the path of salvation and that resistance to this in any form is a failure in some universal sense, regardless of any particulars - that as soon as something is indicated through identity, it must be incorporated.

Modern Queer liberation is not the only philosophy or religion whereby the rainbow is invoked as a sign of transcendence or supreme mastery. From ancient Sumerian myth with hints of divine approval and possibly immortality, protection and power in Hinduism, a connection to the land of the gods in Norse mythology, aura in Theosophy, mastery of the body in Buddhism, and so on, we can see that it quite intuitively brings the human mind into considering the divine and the infinite, almost as a proxy for reaching something beyond the mortal and material human life and uncovering the true view of reality.

Unlike other supposed "races", which are enumerated through descriptions found in Critical Race Theory as people whose knowledges come about through structural oppression vis-a-vis "Whiteness" and colonialism (and whereby there isn't usually much rhetoric which acknowledges their identity as being related to the divine), Indigenous, Native, First Nations, Inuit, Metis and other means of referring to people whose relations to antecedent persons whose presence preceded that of Europeans are often portrayed as having some divine connection to land, with rhetoric even going so far as to the point of self-proclaimed atheists using terms like "Creator" or "Spirit" when explaining the history of said peoples. As such, it's no surprise that the archetype and its political practice of invoking the rainbow has come to include and appropriate the representation of persons deemed to belong to these categories.

The State as Man's Failure

Let's refresh ourselves on the collectivist role of the state, so we can better interpret what the incentives might be both for those employed within the structure of governance, as well as those who implore the state to have the system of governance implemented to accelerate progress in the collectivist mission. Put more specifically for parasitized western democratic political systems this is compelling the state to refer to its citizens by disparate identities rather than referring to them in a way which identifies them on the basis of their commonality.

• State exists to work out / resolve conflict between men
• Men without conflict don't need a state
• The existence of a state proves that class conflict exists

If the state exists as man's failure, which is equivalent to saying that we are unable to manage ourselves ad hoc or spontaneously, then it necessarily needs a story about the people for whom it is undertaking the great task of correcting. In the case of a political process, since we're dealing with species of men who, according to the mythos, cannot use logic and reason to resolve their affairs and create a better world, the state must alleviate man from being placed in situations where they are able to perform actions that are contrary to the interests of the people.

This also means that, when subjected to the conditions of a political system where the citizens assume they are afforded a democratic process, the state of the people must remain vigilant to ensure democracy is functioning correctly and not subverted such as through the extra-parliamentary affairs of the opposition. Ultimately, the purely democratic system of governance for the people is a state government which has successfully eliminated all political entities vying for parliamentary power that are not "for the people" and this is the first step. That might sound hyperbolic, but it's important to remember that, just as with the distinction of within and without the collective, any party other to the party purported to be for "the people" is a party for something other than "the people". So while it may seem like an extra manifestation of a democratic process, it seems reasonable to expect it to have happened, eventually./opt/corp/projects/patchmon/vsetools/vp2/vsepatch

"Dialectics of democracy: if democracy means self-government of free people, with justice for all, then the realization of democracy would presuppose abolition of the existing pseudo-democracy. In the dynamic of corporate capitalism, the fight for democracy thus tends to assume anti-democratic forms, and to the extent to which the democratic decisions are made in “parliaments” on all levels, the opposition will tend to become extra-parliamentary." - Herbert Marcuse (An Essay on Liberation)

What does it mean to be "for the people?". Well, that is evaluated in the sociopolitical discourse and if some perfectly-composed, semantically-complete structure representing a party "for the people" can be ascertained, then the parties can be compared against it in order to know how perfectly "for the people" they are. We could call that the second step, in that it should already be absurd to expect that any party could ever be "for the people". The incumbent party will always have the flex of easy access to a reasonable-sounding microphone to that end, in that they speak authoritatively, and were, in fact, chosen to be there. Indeed, the incentives are such that the incumbent party will discover ways to believe it is operating in our best interest and use that microphone to remind us of such.

In the meantime, so long as identity breeds intolerance of ideas, democracy becomes a mere fable, supplanted through convincing people to set the elimination of political choice into motion until incumbent or revolutionary party remains.

If that could ever be achieved, for a Marxist, as mentioned earlier, the state should wither away. For the Leninist, they would say that the state will continue to exist until there are no class antagonisms, and no lingering contradictions among the people (which would necessarily be itself the class distinction, if nothing else). The view from the other side, of course, is to take note that the party's continued existence is itself the indication that its work is incomplete, knowing the sentiments and attitudes of legislators, administrators and politicians, there will always be struggle and tension to be found so long as people remain classifiable through sociopolitical theory, including at the most primitive and barbaric level.

This is why it doesn't matter how blatant, egregious, or severe the party's mistakes are. Even if the errors of a party are undeniable and no more scapegoats exist, any error of the state, or party, if invested, is always revealed through its lower level mechanisms, which means that low level analysis, coming closer to the concrete aspects of an event of interest involving the party, must always simply place accountability at the only level of reality that a human mind intuits as real: that of a human being. There will always be a fall guy, and the party is itself never wholly responsible. It is ironic that this is the only time a human is considered to have individual agency, whereas almost all other decisions are made under the assumption that we need to counteract the "fact" that humans (except children subjected to Social Emotional Learning for whom comprehensive sex education must be provided) have no agency.

That is, there is always reason to assume that everything about you from your morals, values, ways of relating to others, and so on, must be taught to you, not in terms of ways of thinking about these things outright, but in terms of what the correct opinion should be on every matter of import, and especially so in the age of ever more miniscule gradations of experts. What's most insidious is how it is explicit here that these things are programmed into people while also utilizing and convincing them that in selecting a viewpoint, and by virtue of the content academically attributed to that viewpoint, they've somehow demonstrated a faculty of critical thinking. But, unfortunately, it's big "C" Critical, making it mean whether it is inline with their capacity to bring about proletarian revolution.

Great Spirit, Great Creator

When the state invokes the reference to and story about what it refers to as the original people of a land, it's implied that the relevance of the reference is by the assumption of their having been wronged and robbed. Of course, it doesn't mean by it (the state). No, the state is the only entity which is finally making the wronged, broken people whole again, whereas all other humans in the world who aren't enumerated as these unfortunates can only participate in demonstrating a desire for restoration (reconciliation) through supporting the state, proving the state correct, and participating in the work of whatever program it is undertaking. In fact, in Canada the process of reconciliation is referred to as "Truth and Reconciliation" and, in the words of many Indigenous activists, "reconciliation" begins with "truth". This is, of course, not a process of inquiry, discovery and deliberation, but an acceptance that truth is the product of identity, and that one's ability to benefit from truth depends on the positionality of one's identity. That is to say, if one is not bearing an identity of the oppressed which, in this case, is someone whose body will have them be structurally associated as Indigenous, then even though one cannot truly know truth, they can benefit by truth, and not act as a gatekeeper for the benefits of truth to be enjoyed, by accepting the truth as is told to them by those whom they are oppressing.

As has been discussed earlier, the ever-present factor of structurally-determined oppression has been interpreted by Queer theorists such as to assert that persons of native descent have a Queer identity. I am reminded of this quote:

"Native peoples have already been determined by settler colonialism to have no future” (p. 48):

If the goal of queerness is to challenge the reproduction of the social order, then the Native child may already by queered. For instance, Colonel John Chivington, the leader of the famous massacre Sand Creek, charged his followers to not only kill Native adults by to manipulate their reproductive organs and to kill their children because “nits make lice.” (p. 48)

In this circumstance, the Native child is not invested with assurance of futurity and cannot cohere in Edelman’s privileged portrayal of the cult of the Child. The Native child, for Smith, is queered because it “is not a guarantor of the reproductive future of white supremacy; it is the nit that undoes it” - Hannah Dyer (Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development)

"Futurity" refers to the reproduction of society, particularly through oppressive hegemonic structures. Hannah is quoting Andrea Smith's paper entitled "Queer theory and native studies", which investigates inadequate deconstructions of "futurity" and uses Smith's criticism of Lee Edelman to show us how the evolution of Queer theory has been such to consider both the expectation of innocence, as well as the notion that the semantic element of racial oppression revealed through exclusion from the biological reproduction, as oppressive positions imposed through settler colonialism and white supremacy. Essentially, Edelman is known for having problematized childhood innocence as an abstraction because innocence of childhood is made sacred as a symbol of heteropatriarchal order which ultimate positions childhood development such as to lead to heterosexual reproduction, hence yielding a need to "Queer" childhood innocence.

Smith's criticisms are great examples of the semantics by which Queer theory is the logic of cult collectivism and, hence, totalitarian, as there is no reprieve from problematization and those who do not keep up with the focused progression of discourse are struggled and, ironically, marginalized.

She posits that Edelman fails to understand, or at least acknowledge, that not all children are innocent. Though she finds that he does a good job of bringing into view the notion of a Queer childhood, it makes too many assumptions which keep marginalized identities from being made visible and, thus, becomes not only a missed opportunity, but re-enacts the form of oppression it purports to be addressing. She refers to the "vulgar constructionism" which, for those keeping score, is a nod to antiquated ways of thinking associated with classical Marxism which obscure a more richly nuanced reality of social relations by painting it with the fuzzy brush strokes that come from a classical critique of capitalism. For example, though he wishes to problematize the expectation of children being innocent, and hopes to do this through the "Queering" of childhood. Drawing on an example of the "Native child", Smith posits that Edelman doesn't realize that some children are already not innocent and, as such, already "queered".

Another point of her criticism stems from understanding that Edelman fails to provide an adequately materialist and intersectional implementation of analysis in that its praxis is grounded in the abstract, by utilizing language about children which describes the child's body as a concept, rather than speaking to the concrete bodies of children more directly. That is to say, she wishes to ground a site of contention and conflict in the bodies, which is something that has become more rampant in queering of Early Childhood Education:

"the child’s body, as we imagine it, is a battleground for our projections and fears" - Kathryn Bond Stockton (The Queer Child)

The last point to draw attention to from that quote is that Smith doesn't believe in addressing the need for social transformation on the basis of rhetoric and criticism alone. While Edelman seems to find that Queer activism negates and disturbs on its own, thus rejecting concrete political projects altogether with the belief that the praxis at the level of theory and living will evoke the changes sought, Smith envisions coalitions, provisional political organization, and collective material movement for confrontational action towards Queer liberation. In a sense, though this is the logical evolution of collectivism, it's also still going back to some of the fundamental staples of Marxist praxis, which indicated a need for a dictatorship of the proletariat.

This follows the same line of reasoning of collectivist thinking in that there is a moral impetus for viable human participants to be differentiated on the basis of agreeing to a process because of its purpose, and not being stuck on any other type of discernment. Curious scholarship on its own is not enough, and likely to be counterproductive, without political organizing. As a result, even though many thinkers within an area of collectivist thought may truly believe that they wish to preserve fundamental principles of freedom and liberty, it's only a matter of time before their ideas are supplanted by those who advocate for views which evolve with the domain of thought. The domain of thought will gravitate towards totalitarian solutions over time, unless it fizzles out and stops developing.

What It Is

What It's Not

We've been especially bombarded for about a decade now that the notion that identity is something tangible and meaningful through the argument that people's unique identities are a product of a mishmash of component identities which, when inferred from someone or communicated to us by that person (within certain limits), the particular permutation constitutes something unique. This is an absurdity, because the very idea that these components are enumerable means that the expectations bound to them are something meaningful and true, and that they are designated to persons because they have knowledge and behaviour associated with them. To even suggest that people are unique because the identities allocated in their specific configuration constitute a unique set is ridiculous, because there is no ultimate means of evaluating which category is of greatest importance, at least not to any one person. To an organization or state entity, however, the order of importance is the degree to which it can assert control and threaten the application of force. That we can classify types of identities being spoken of and recognize features and artifacts in society to which they relate might mean that there are certain ones worthy of reference, though only insofar as they function as an interface to community-level operations, while any others which might number in an infinite set of possible identity types may carry no political weight, and are disregarded. For an individual who may have sacrificed all of their time, energy, health and potential for relations because of their undying devoting to mastering their capacity for piano performance, for example, they may very well feel that their essence and, if we are to indulge the concept, very identity is rooted in music, performance and the human experience of physics in the context of sound, spatial phenomena and the mathematical relationships which correspond across various senses, and yet still this may or may not constitute their own understanding of an overarching identity qualifier in the scope of their own life.

Are we to think that there exist disregarded identity categories that are somehow more important than the ones the state has chosen to recognize? What would it mean if the state were putting forward statements and legislation of moral and legal weight on the basis of identity categories that elide more significant categories that are not being used? Wouldn't that mean that the state doesn't know its own citizens, and that its efforts to resolve their social conflict are actually being done a somewhat blind and possibly counterproductive fashion? If the state were to suggest or admit that there exist possibly more important categories that it hasn't yet made use of in its communication to the public, then it would be admitting a gross and fundamental error about its approach and record of governance.

It would be ridiculous to assume that the state would even concede that there exist more important identity categories, therefore the ones it is using are those which it deems as being the most meaningful in terms of understanding the nature, knowledge and behaviour of its citizens. Based on this alone, it would be necessary to assume that, all things considered equal, persons bearing the same identity category, even as a composite of intersectional ones, are of the same nature, character and morality, that they exhibit the same behaviour, and that they enjoy the same knowledge. This is a completely repugnant idea and anyone with a shred of honesty, even if they agree with the use of such descriptions for some historical purpose, would understand that these proxy identities are not actually the substance of a person, but an implement by which to mediate social affairs in the context of a state which can apply force to its citizens.

If indeed the identity categories are to be held as significant as per the degree to which they affect human experience, and yet the concrete experience of a human is to be disregarded so that the state can impose prioritization of other ascribed conceptual identities, then the state's use of identity classification is the process of preventing any human from examining their authentic identity. To be clear, identity is an anti-human concept as one cannot conceive of an identity being ascribed to any other human without removing the potential for neutral observation and interpretation of the other human, if even as a goal for reducing one's own cognitive bias. There is no possibility of an authentic interpretation or even authentic expression of the human being without removal of bias, if even momentarily.

On the front of narrative and rhetoric, there are always challenges in getting humans to understand that there is an insidious and harmful practice of collectivist cult initiation occurring, and that initiatives which perform activism such as to draw persons into the cult are targeting people on the superficial basis of taking some aspect of their body's presentation, and then using some of the aforementioned theories to describe the meaning of the person in an environment which requires transformation into collectivist society to overcome the artificial expectations of the present.

Approaching the Naive

Over the past few years, I've been delighted to see a change in the attitude and initiative of people in spite of which social identifiers they've previously had an affinity to, from liberals and conservatives to academics and blue collar workers, private or public sector employees - no wait, not public sect... I kid, I kid!

In all seriousness, it had taken some time before the toll of collectivist cult ideology made its way into people's personal and professional lives, and left them with pain, estrangement, disillusionment, unemployment, lost loved ones and, in some cases, a desire for suicide (that some may have acted on). Many have strong opinions on the correct manner by which to present what it is that we're dealing with, how to comprehend it, and how to best address it. Though it's better that people are willing to stand up to propositions that they intuit or ascertain as being wrong, there can be many pitfalls resulting from the approach they take in addressing it.

Many choose to simply call it communist, based on quite a wide variety of interpretations as to what constitutes Communism or a communist. Obviously, based on the writing in this book, I've taken a moment to illuminate my understanding both of what it is, and what the most common understandings of it happen to be.

But why Communism? Aren't there plenty of other framings for collectivist cult ideology?

Because, even though it's my opinion that they're all religious pursuits neurocognitively engaged in a similar fashion, it's the classical view of Communism which avoids being construed as either a cult or a religion, and it thus serves as an eventual goal for advancement of any collectivism-entertaining political project.

!TODO: Re-summarize Communism: Communism is ultimately the ideal state of reality described by Marx's idealism. It's in this state where man is his true being. It's the description of things to be by Marx who gave us his worldview as an ontology of man and telos of history, best described by thinkers such as Stephen Coughlin and James Lindsay. It remains pertinent today as a generalized concept of what adherents of all collectivist ideologies perceive themselves as leading toward. It represents the environment wherein humanity exists as Species Being and the human beings are veritable species beings.

That humans seem to have developed an affinity to these ideas is not the consequence of their having been exposed to them through ideology, and thus Marxism is not the root of these ideas, per se. The root is human being. It's the capacity to use syntax, disseminate it and then behold the belief of its observed reflection as an embodied being seeking to transcend spacetime.

That people refer to Communism on the basis of political parties confuses people's understanding of it as a phenomenon and as a cognizable object by fellow humans but it is, alas, a complication in the effort to dissuade mankind from collectivism.

Now that we've re-visited some of those summaries, let's touch on some of the challenges most would have in calling out collectivist cult artifacts, practices and instigations by referring to them as "Communism".

Calling it Communism

When you refer to something as being Communist in order to criticize it, you will mostly be confronted by those who don't really know what Communism is in the first place, beyond either a pop-culture understanding derived from consumption of entertainment, having observed surface-level, political spats prompted by people's television consumption, or perhaps what one might have learned based on some introductory material given as a portion of curriculum in a middle school course (in my case, it was it was a "Canadian Studies" course in grade 7 where we learned some basics presented as a linear dimension of political orientation spanning the extremities of Fascism on the right and Communism on the left, and this has turned out to have formed almost everyone's cursory view of politics).

It doesn't mean you shouldn't call out things as they relate to Communism, whether by philosophical underpinning, or as a progression of what is being demanded, or whether a description of the world being enunciated before you matches the description of man's ontology, according to Marx. Regardless of how you do it, you should do it in a way which indicates that Communism was a conceptual endpoint which satisfied the requirements of Marx's liberation. That is to say, the thing you are identifying as relating to Communism probably shares the concept of Communism as its logical endpoint, and bases this logic on a declaration of a human being's reality in line with what Marx and his followers have described. If you're trying to make the claim that it's a secret Communist agenda or a Communist conspiracy by a Communist empire, then you're probably also a bit nutty and this book may be about you too.

Calling it a Cult

It has become increasingly common to accuse someone of belonging to a cult, engaging in cult-like behaviour and referring to an organization, ideology, political party or political orientation as simply being a cult.

This, of course, happens all across the political divide, with accusations of one being of the Gender cult, to the MAGA cult, to being taken in by the cult of personality of Monsieur l'Orange, to mindless statements like "all libtards are in a cult".

Almost anything can be made to sound like a cult in today's day an age. If someone feels uneasy that too many people appear to be paying attention to something, or if they hear something uttered that's politically relevant that they don't understand and find it to sound incomprehensible, then it seems to point to there being an inner-enclave of those who would be the only ones able to decipher the messaging. If there is a reiterated and perpetual aesthetic, a recognizable artifact, logo or colour scheme, or something memetic which appears to pervade certain subsets of society, then it is surely going to be labeled as a cult.

Nationalism becomes a cult; that people wish for something which is presupposed as being available or accessible within a closed system with restricted access and preferential treatment, then that is easily referred to as a cult as well.

This complicates things, because sometimes it's necessary to point out that something exhibits the properties of an actual cult, but this will now easily be met with denial and resistance. It's far too easy to take the term "cult" and use it to describe an absurd illustration of just about anything.

But why would one legitimately wish to refer to something as a cult? I'm guilty of using the term repeatedly throughout this book and, though it might sound excessive to some, I'm convinced that the behaviour we're seeing, the use of initiate language, and the resulting effect of the persons drawn into the ideas becoming incapable of having rational discussions with those who even modestly disagree with them are all expected consequences of an implemented cult structure having proliferated in our society.

That really is the difference between a cult and a philosophy or ideology. That is to say, the effect of making adherents unable to rationalize through consistent use of logic and reason to discuss their ideas with those whom they don't perceive as being part of the "in-group", in conjunction with continuous purity tests to qualify one's in-group status.

This in-group/out-group distinction, sometimes called the friend-enemy distinction, though often declared by an initiate or an adept as being a difference of those who are supportive and understanding (in-group) vs those who are ideologically possessed and harmful (out-group), is a difference in the use of language. That is to say, though one could investigate a subject's claim that another is harmful to them, it's besides the point and is, in effect, a subjective claim. Those persons whom they don't consider "in-group" aren't necessarily posing a specific and impending threat to them. That is, those whom they are now unable to rationally engage with could be friends or family members, and the initiate doesn't necessarily have a specific reason to suspect them of wishing to or being capable of harming them. The difference is that, at the level of language, they have now been made incapable of discussing the subjects relating to the point of contention because of the linguistic manipulations they have adopted through the in-group. That is, their incompatibility is the product of having adopted initiate language specific to the cult which causes the adherents to compose beliefs contingent on the new use of language, and this use of language is reinforced by those who are part of the in-group, leading to the initiate's world-view being made incompatible with those out-group persons, even if it includes those persons with whom they would otherwise share a close and familiar connection with, such as family members.

It's necessary to point out that I mentioned that it is a difference of language as a first-order feature over that of a difference of opinion or position, which though likely different as well, are a consequence of the first. That is to say, the difference in the use of language through equivocated terms, sometimes referred to as an exoteric (general and broadly-understood) vs esoteric (specialized and obscurely understood) understanding brings about a conflict simply through the use of the same terms with differing meanings which are more often than not in complete opposition to one another. A quick example of this might the use of the term "inclusive" which, for most, means that all are included, but for an initiate involved in critical praxis it means the sanitation of an environment to remove elements which, according to theory, cause friction and offense in regards to a particular identity.

Let's take as an example, first in the abstract, that through the use of initiate language, which makes one believe that they are part of a liberation movement and have an identity relevant to that movement, the premises of their actions and explanations are redefined to have a particular meaning which upholds the movement, and these carry implications contrary to the reasonable understanding they would otherwise have shared with familiar persons that are now out-group. Now, more specifically, if this were occurring as a Queer formulation, they might say "this is my true self", that they have a "gender identity", must be referred to with language which normally refers to the opposite sex, and that to maintain the understanding of their "true self", the persons with whom they associate will now have to make use of different terminology in order to address or refer to them.

Whether through the introduction of new terms, or through obscuring the use of one already extant, the supplanting of known terms takes place through dialectical negation. There is now an in-group language supported by its own rationalization predicated on in-group understanding of language made incompatible with general use of language and neutral use of logic, though while maintaining an air of aloofness so introduction to the new language can still take place among unsuspecting, naive normies (also referred to as the use of Motte-and-Bailey technique or fallacy).

If people are defensive of some idea or realm of thought, or even just primed to dismiss criticism of something popularly accepted as being the stuff of conspiracy theory, they will respond poorly upon hearing that the thing in question is a form of cult:

Mostly, they will think of a cult as being something which has been romanticized and exaggerated through a Hollywood production. Everything from high profile international conspiracy involving royalty, to monsters and space aliens. Perhaps something of a mask, cloaks, skull and bones variety with roots in every institution of the world where members carry daggers, perform blood rituals and must take part in extravagant initiation ceremonies as new recruits who endure gauntlets of tests involving everything from general debauchery to ddoutright murder.

As with anything, you need to stick to definitions and be clear that perversion of language isn't necessarily a secret cult, but that formal aspects of it are simply the parasitization of ideas, to borrow from the great Gad Saad, which has established itself in academic disciplines through collectivist praxis, and become well-represented in entertainment and pop culture first and foremost because of the effect of that parasitization. There is no conspiracy required for its instantiation and proliferation, and whether people conspire to achieve objectives for their own benefit is an independent matter which doesn't need to bear any relevance on the subject as we examine it.

Calling it Mental Illness

I've seen many people refer to the ongoing issue as being one related to, or caused by, mental illness. Whether it's due to the rise in mental illness diagnoses, the focus on mental illness in media and academic institutions, the swelling of mental health and wellness industries, the identification of new mental illnesses as part of professional diagnostic repertoires, mental healthism in education, or the fact that Critical Theory-based analyses, grievance and victimhood as a cultural practice have led to mental health conditions becoming a sort of identity by which people choose to associate themselves, often as a virtue, it's something for which there are many reasons and opportunities to come into thinking about people's mental health, especially as it presents in politically tumultuous affairs.

Though it's probably not accurate or even helpful to frame the societal challenges of our time as being the product of mental illness, it's still worth understanding the relationship of mental illness to our shared predicament as it's certainly the case that it has become not just a more visible element in society, but that it's commonly, if not specifically diagnosed, at least referred to among those who associate themselves as being part of a collectivist movement, or who identify themselves using terms common to these movements.

Mental Illness as Critical Consciousness

The fact is that those who advocate collectivist solutions are seeking evidence that those in their vicinity agree to their prescriptions. This means agreeing that the conditions themselves are not satisfactory and can only be overcome through such a degree of collective effort that the only indicator that things are being adequately addressed is a proxy of full participation. As per Marxist ontology, that one is inclined to criticize the environment is the collectivist undertaking.

For Freire, this would mean "Denounce to proclaim the world". For Marx, it's "Ruthless criticism of all that exists" ("rücksichtslose Kritik alles Bestehenden"). For Horkheimer, he described the whole purpose of the critical method as follows:

"Critical Theory...is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood in the present order, and refuses to take them as nonscientific presuppositions about which one can do nothing." - Max Horkheimer (Traditional and Critical Theory

It stands to reason that in order to recruit for a worldview requiring the destruction and replacement of the "present order", whether through "ruthless criticism", "denouncing" or the attitude of being suspicious to all that is "valuable", that one would necessarily take on a position which despairs about things such as they are and that, as a collective endeavour, one would seek out, identify, or induce in others a similar sentiment of finding the current world intolerable. A belief that existence is intolerable by itself would cause one difficulty in their everyday functioning. This is quite amenable to definitions of mental illness, which include it being described as a condition or behavioural pattern which "causes significant distress", "impairment of personal functioning", the "reduced ability for a person to function effectively", and so on. This is, for example, something commonly described of college or university level students in climate science when teachers detail the need to provide their students with additional exam time, or the ability to retake their exams, due to those students having being so personally affected by their understanding of the threats they are faced with by virtue of the insight afforded to them through their area of study.

Herbert Marcuse bemoaned the failure of the working class to realize the limitations of their circumstance of living in an unliberated environment, due to their having settled for trivial and mind-numbing pacifications which make them "one dimensional". His hope was that the negative experience of college students and ethnic minorities would be so severe such as to constitute a "biological" need for revolution:

"This new consciousness and the instinctual rebellion isolate such opposition from the masses and from the majority of organized labor, the integrated majority, and make for the concentration of radical politics in active minorities, mainly among the young middle-class intelligentsia, and among the ghetto populations. Here, prior to all political strategy and organization, liberation becomes a vital, “biological” need." - Herbert Marcuse (An Essay on Liberation)

For him, this is the basis by which to form what he referred to as a "New Sensibility":

"These causes are economic-political, but since they have shaped the very instincts and needs of men, no economic and political changes will bring this historical continuum to a stop unless they are carried through by men who are physiologically and psychologically able to experience things, and each other, outside the context of violence and exploitation. The new sensibility has become, by this very token, praxis: it emerges in the struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life: negation of the entire Establishment, its morality, culture; affirmation of the right to build a society in which the abolition of poverty and toil terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself." - Herbert Marcuse (An Essay on Liberation)

Across the board, whether represented in the formal offerings of specific collectivist philosophies, or as can be deduced through fleshing out the logical conclusion of collectivist thinking, those taking up the mantle are participating because they've become sufficiently agitated by the circumstances to become mentally ill. This is the same reason why Critical Pedagogy, which has embedded itself in all of our children's curricula, was formed under the assumption of helping children make realizations that place them in a state of crisis, and then using that mental state to guide them toward transformation, as was stated by Kevin Kumashiro when he said that "Educators have a responsibility to draw students into a possible crisis". Put another way, and has been pronounced in every other area of thought based on Critical Theory (Race, Gender/Sexuality, Marxist Liberation Theology, Cultural Marxism, Intersectionality, and so on), humans must wake up to Critical Consciousness, and it's important to understand the connection between mental illness and Critical Consciousness, be them synonymous or at least strongly-related qualities of one another.

Struggle Illness

Additionally, collectivist activism comes to be instantiated in institutions and activities involving several people. One on one discussion simply isn't an effective medium for inducing radicalization and effectively transmitting cult delusion. Praxis in an institution provides the means to struggle others and declare what their moods, behaviours, opinions and actions should be, thus we find an attractive opportunity for persons bearing psychopathological traits to leverage to their advantage. It might seem reasonable that some simply find themselves in an area of study or a field of work, be they a professional or someone making a "lateral" shift to fulfill some new position as a DEI instructor, for example, and that they may very well be well-intentioned and able to fulfill such a role in a capacity which actually makes their colleagues and themselves more thoughtful and attentive to ways of improving the social environment and, thus, there might be some portion of DEI work which is non-harmful and which manages to contribute in a positive way. I would respond by saying firstly that such a naive attitude would only have merit if the work were itself done incorrectly, as the praxis is intended to be undertaken as a purification struggle, and must separate people into self and other, which is psychologically impactful and not based on a corresponding yet individually perceived reality.

These are programs placed in professional settings by which to enforce adoption and adherence of collectivist ideals and their corresponding dictates, and these mechanistically confer a collective-level power, which is to say an executive and overriding power which can be used to discriminate against a person beyond their individual conduct. As such, in spite of it having attracted persons habituated into perpetrating psychological harm, or who were radicalized in Marxist-inspired programs and doctrine, it yields an environment of particular interest to those who are the most apathetic about leveraging mechanisms of enforcement to distinguish themselves in a corporate or academic environment and we should expect some quantity of such persons to adopt and master the practices most readily. That is to say, it's an interest as a factor of interest in such an environment which will be noticed by those who are particuarly sensitive to discovering implements by which to manipulate others.

When ethics and morality are no longer evaluated through sound, evenly-applied practices, but are now assigned through identity and politically-conformist struggle, those who may have been lacking can now be declared to have them due to their having learned how to circumvent a dispassionate analysis through instead maximally-focusing on the operationally-significant identity and linguistically verifiable ideological commitments, those so-inclined will find a new competitive advantage that may have previously been missing. For these reasons, we should expect a quicker and more sustainable path of ascension in professional settings by those bearing psychopathological traits, such as those referred to as cluster B (especially the varieties of grandiose and vulnerable narcissistic personality disorder).

Lastly, we should speak to the question of nature vs nurture in the context of psychopathology as mental illness. Though it's commonly asserted that there are inherent predispositions and that, at a certain point, it doesn't make much of a difference to ascertain precisely what moment of early life the instantiation of a disorder may have began, so long as it's early enough to be remarked as an inherent trait, there's something to be said for the acting out of identities in a group setting whereby the identity itself is expected to receive praise and glorification on the basis of its oppressed status, insight of consciousness, potency of imposed cultural dynamics, and bestowed ethical virtues. As the identity must be made visible, the practice of constructing the aesthetic is intrinsically superficial. This, in tandem with the expectation of receiving praise and status necessarily leads to the issue of acting out narcissistic behaviour, whether through the manner in which it affects the performer, or through simply having to go through the actions which will validate the assertion of the identity.

We can hypothesize about whether an individual not otherwise predisposed to such a psychopathology might come into reacting to cult initiation through the adoption of a "Critical identity" and having to perform in a manner which puts them through the motions of a narcissistic personality disorder. That the visibility of the identities must be superficially qualified, coupled with the insisted focus towards self, wound-collecting critical practices and navel-gazing complaints necessarily produce behaviour modeling the inflated self-importance becoming of a narcissist. I cannot say whether such a person would adopt the disorder or simply appear to be affected by it, nor could I furthermore comment as to whether such a person, if having been affected by it, would come to alleviate themselves from such effects after having changed interest or fallen out of favour with the collectivist cult and, furthermore, renounced the performance of the identity. One should hope for a full recovery, but it is nevertheless a complicating detail to consider.

Children are always going to be more susceptible to these malicious psychological assaults for many obvious reasons. Having less experience always leaves one with more plasticity of character and openness to suggestion. Receiving messaging enticing and advising the adoption of certain world-views, particularly from those in a role of authority, but also simply from peers who are lavished with attention from other cult members, and who appear confident and manically enthusiastic about the undertaking, can play a forcefully persuasive role in pressuring one to participate. Facilitating participation even further is that the means of adoption is simply going to be the use of language. This is not just the language composed within the social milieu by random happenstance, but the language of cult initiation which has refined itself through many iterations, and which is composed such as to be introduced through topics of interest, popular culture, professional and academic materials, and even simply the messaging which occurs in the environments where affairs of each of these occur.

The identities which correspond to various domains of cult collectivism are hierarchical in terms of their moral standing, access to power, notoriety, and, by extension, and in the view of young persons, the degree to which it corresponds with being cringey, or fashionable and cool. This provides the ingredients for the most powerful form of group struggle to date, which follows in the vein of Maoist ideological indoctrination and thought reform, as was best detailed by Robert Jay Lifton. Rather than struggling children about their commitment to the "People's Party" or their ability to recite the nation's tenets as related to a great endeavour of the nation, the struggle session now pervades all aspects of their learning environment. As mentioned before, when not explicitly in the curriculum, it's found in the messaging of the environment through the choice, title and description of the events taking place, the programs available to students as per their proclaimed or designated identities, and the degree to which punishment and accountability must now take into consideration, through Culturally Responsive Social Justice in education. That some children are considered more responsible in a conflict and others are punished less severely in order to address "historical inequity", in spite of what might have transpired, pushes a child to assume an identity which they believe will protect and serve them in asymmetrically mediated conflicts.

Mental Healthism

Preceding all of this, and something which I remember from my own public school experience of the late 80s through 90s (graduated OAC (equivalent to grade 13) in 2000) was an increased focus on the mental health of students and a desire to identify children which might be suffering from a mental disorder. I saw school mates all around me come to believe they had issues with mental health, with some of them being given counseling, and others ending up with a pharmaceutical regimen by which to "address" their issue. I even had a few instances of teachers or counsellors suggesting to me that I may have a disorder because of not appearing to exhibit the normal range of behaviours they expect from their students.

Of course, it could have been the bullying or the lack of a meaningful social connection with some of my peers, which would constitute good reason to exhibit signs of sadness and frustration, but that this is a mental health issue requiring professional examination is a ridiculous step to take, particularly if educators are being trained to take it as an indication of such. It's just as likely (or more so, in my opinion) the case that, ironically, the public school environment is conducive to inducing subdued human expression and social incongruency by forcing so be compared to a rigid set of expectations. Often times, flexibility with the child allows them to choose a focus and find delight in an educational undertaking and, failing such an option, it generally requires one-on-one interaction with a surgically precise focus and ample patience to successfully guide a child into being attentive to a specific lesson in a pre-allocated time slot.

I never forgot one such experience of tasting public education's feature of mental healthism, as it seemed to me that, in an isolated environment with a teacher who had no training as a psychologist (for whatever that's worth given that psychology has become so deeply tainted with critical praxis), who seemed to be dramatizing my situation to me in a manner that seemed inappropriate, even from my own perspective as a 12 year old child, and who seemed to want to suggest to me that I was not well.

Looking back on it, I think that all children have their challenges, and my personality and interests may have made me less suited to a typical classroom environment, at least insofar being optimal for a child's development, but that the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that I exhibited were perfectly within the range of normality, and particularly so when considering that my interests and areas of focus were perhaps not the same as those of my classmates.

The tendency to diagnose normal behaviour as a mental illness has been referred to as Mental Healthism by Dr. Bruce Scott and though I don't necessarily agree with his analysis (he blames it, much in the same way as Marcuse, as being a tool by which to force people to conform to capitalism), he's certainly correct in claiming that mental health diagnostics, classifications and the increased disposition to identify opportunities to people (particularly children) as suffering from a disorder, as evidenced by their not having conformed to typical expectations, is a phenomenon which, when coupled with the focus on the need to exhibit a Critical identity associated with having a deeper consciousness about the social forces of the world we live in, and one's special, unique or enhanced cognitive modality, creates pressure and opportunity for a child to adopt a designation of mental illness both to satisfy those interests which seek to place that designation, but also to satisfy the child's belief that they have a remarkable set of characteristics which includes qualities of character, knowledge, and a placement in a social hierarchy.

The light form of this is the temptation to claim that one is neuroatypical or neurodivergent. While it might sound perfectly reasonable for some who feel dissimilar from their peers, such as through their interests or the manner in which they believe themselves to approach or absorb information, it's worth considering what it would take for you yourself as a child in a group setting to think of yourself as not being typical, not having a typical mind, not being plain, not being average, and so on. Being neuroatypical could alleviate the need to be held to the same standard as your peers, such as any expectation that other people are able to verify whether or not you comprehend something. If you assume others aren't able to hold you to a standard, then you can assert anything about your capabilities without evidence, feeding your ego, believing that you may be able to circumvent evaluations that you are otherwise anxious about, and so forth. You might think that you are more evolved than the average, or part of a new evolution of the species. You could even think that it indicates you have special emotional faculties which confer special value, such as compensating for a worry that one isn't sufficiently intelligent in the "traditional" sense.

That isn't to say that none of those things are true, but consider whether these factors might cause you to choose to believe that you are "neuroatypical", and how this might relate to other designations, such as how it plays into "non-conforming" identities, placing you within the spectrum of oppressed peoples bearing an inherent Critical Consciousness. This is particularly important when considering how it contrasts with mere "allyship" if you happen to otherwise be someone who would be stereotyped as having a privileged or oppressor identity.

Beyond Allyship

Placing the suggestion of oppressor vs oppressed in the frame of the Master/Slave dialectic isn't just an amusing experiment, but is rather germane in light of the fact that many Critical theorists and their contemporaries, base their view on Marxist implementations of what we might call a Hegelian metaphysic (if we wish to park it there, as we could argue that it goes back further) and, as such, draw from the hypothesized framework of the Master/Slave dialectic:

"For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." - Audre Lorde

!TODO: refresher? In fact, the whole notion that different knowledge can be found among those of different identities is based on this very concept, which falsely misleads an otherwise common sense inclination of assuming that different people have different experience and thus different knowledge. I'd wager that the assumption of different identities yielding different knowledges is related to permitting oneself to entertain the possibility of an original knowledge that is somehow mystically available coupled with one's narcissistic inclination to believe that they are special, superior and somehow of a value to the exclusion of others. Without a Master-Slave analogous view of knowledge the Critical Theorist would relinquish their undertaking of praxis and understand that a realist endeavour of providing access to knowledge and development to be pursued universally, without any concept of class consciousness, would be the best path for resolving social conflict. Instead, the bottleneck for progress becomes the execution of transformative praxis predicated on the knowledge which has been hidden in the minds, and bodies of the oppressed. Experience that is verified upon their expression of the angst and turmoil to which they have been subjected.

"the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both." - Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

It's rather painful to see collectivist cult "prophets" who've had immense influence on society repeating such mundane and predictable mumbo jumbo which might sound poetic at first, or even profound to a teenager or young-adult, but, before long, quickly loses its luster and appears formulaic, undeveloped and hopelessly subjective. To make sense of it, understand that it has less to do with making an intelligent discovery or the most informed rationale, and everything to do with filling space so humans can't maintain proximity without being bombarded with the same messages over and over again as though they were chants from a spell book. With that in mind, we can look at the implications of what's being stated.

It's never enough to be an "ally". An ally can never be the one to liberate anyone at all - the oppressed, themselves, or the oppressor. Those privileged by whiteness can become allies by doing the work of learning about systemic oppression by centering and listening to the stories of minoritized peoples, but doing so is also an act of oppression which imposes demand of emotional labour on the oppressed while benefiting through becoming less ignorant and seeking a status of The Good White.

With this in mind, for a cisheteronormative, able-bodied and light-skinned settler who is seen as the beneficiary of whiteness and colonialism, the most modest step towards an identity which is not limited to the singular, narrow and dead consciousness of the oppressor, is to declare the experience of some form of mental anguish, psychological difficulty or emotional turmoil. It comes through showing that they are "strong" enough to be open about their "mental health" challenge, and the fact of them not merely being a plain and typical oppressor; these characteristics are, in fact, complementary attributes, which is to say that the pain of my experience is my superpower.

Getting Into The Substance

As a quick recap, we have examined some ways in which everyone is susceptible to ideological frameworks and how this incentivizes one's capacity for delusion through the perceived expectation of a collective process. This process alleviates the perception of limitation to one's organism and of the experience of embodiment. Furthermore, the insidious nature of idea parasites wreaks havoc as they become embedded in domains of thought, discussion, research and production. With all this in mind, the principal issue here is that these implements of collectivist initiation are set in place and advocated for by those in the higher echelons of society.

There is nothing new under the sun. At least, not fundamentally, though concepts and technologies develop and allow for the same forces to attain somewhat different results. The darker inclinations of human mind, allowing fear, lust for vengeance and retribution for the limitations of the order of being, set us on paths that ultimately lead to conflict where the worst forms include not just racism and othering, but desecration, defilement and genocide. As a continuation of the previous mentality which might be, at its root, something permitted because of the elevated faculties placed atop a beastly construct, we are now witnessing its unfoldment with society and infrastructure that are more complex and developed. This edified buffer permits us ever greater slack as we grow discordant with the blueprint of a resilient species and feed some more injurious possibilities.

Though it's easy to assume that the dehumanizing behaviours emerge from those whose actions exhibit the greatest barbarism, it's with a bit of irony that some aspects of the descriptions brought forth by Critical theorists have some truth to them in the sense that the dehumanizing ideas and behaviours come from some of those who are perceived as the most sensible, elite and refined among us. There is some of the following at play:

• Seeing fellow humans:
  • As lesser
  • As other and unlike
• Noble beast
• Controlling the unknown

It's somewhat unpalatable for those practicing some discernment, but those who are operating in roles of sociopolitical influence, particularly in a policy-directing capacity, who also take up these ideas must necessarily take on the very qualities that they accuse the normative, buffoonish underlings of when they employ the term "settler" in the sense that they take on a proclivity towards rigid categorization, dehumanization, and a failure to imagine beyond the more superficial scopes of analysis. They consequently are involved in taking on the work of constructing a plantation all the new, with themselves as the slave owners and directors of its production. It is on this plantation whereupon each noble savage must have a particular role to play in order to reinforce ideological descriptions and commitments.

Collectivist Thinking is Dehumanization

Through some combination of disgust, fear, pity and a need for self-aggrandizement, the true settler takes every opportunity to wield the wand which reifies some notion of critical identity. In designating the label of human types, proto-human types, subhuman types, and so forth, they paint a story which reinforces all their claims and places a weight of burden, in the form of promises, upon all of society. Promises which, when fulfilled, would finally make their claims true.

Proto-human might be the more charitable take, whereas they certainly attempt to illustrate others as sub-human, whether it's referring to roughly half of a nation's citizens as "deplorable", commenting on the vaccine hesitant, at the moment of the greatest social and political pressure to have everyone accept the injection, as being anti-science, racist and misogynist, or when referring to all those who vote for Trump as being Neanderthals:

"I know it’s not fair to Neanderthals, but by calling Trump one, we only insult ourselves, since we’re all a little bit Neanderthal – especially those who voted to put him back in office." - Peter Sahlins, Professor of History Emeritus, University of California (Counterpunch: Is Trump a Neanderthal?)

During the Covid-era, there were many examples of messaging which promoted the attitude of gloating and mocking someone's death if they had not received the mRNA vaccine, these included jokes from Jimmy Kimmel about how ICU beds shouldn't be given to the unvaccinated, and a statement from Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik that "Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary". But perhaps a better example of this messaging, which was effective in helping to popularize an attitude while employing a clinically chosen distance for plausible deniability, was the front page of the Toronto Star whose quotes, as captured in a photo with a collage of headlines, said the following:

"I have no empathy left for the wilfully unvaccinated. Let them die... I honestly don’t care if they die from COVID. Not even a little bit... Unvaccinated patients do not deserve ICU beds." - Toronto Star (August 29, 2021)

Dehumanizing statements uttered from a standpoint which promotes collectivism doesn't come exclusively from those who refer to themselves as "left" or "liberal" (terms which I hesitate to use, given the subject matter in this book), but also include those who outright identify themselves as right wing collectivists. Though such persons are not as prevalent, at least insofar as they themselves explicitly label themselves as such (given that most claims of someone being a "right-wing Fascist" are labels being declared as a pejorative), they still can be found, especially among those who are promoting a Neo-Fascist worldview. A good example of this is Stephen Wolfe, who authored "The Case for Christian Nationalism", and who referred to "liberals" as "parasites on Christian civilization".

It is worth mentioning, however, that it's more difficult to find clear, unambiguous and explicit quotes published in mainstream sources where a self-professed "conservative" or "right-wing" personality uttered a statement about their "liberals" or "left-wing" which was dehumanizing. There are some quotes from Ted Nugent and Rush Limbaugh, but it is difficult to use them as good examples because, for one, they don't identify themselves as collectivist, nor espouse collectivist principles, for another point, and particularly in the case of Rush Limbaugh, the statements are quite dated and mostly based on secondary sources commenting on his own statements as heard over a radio, and lastly because their statements, especially in the case of Ted Nugent, were also directed to people who plausibly claim themselves to be "conservative" or "right-wing".

Though there are many organizations, such as Media Matters, or the publicly funded "Anti-Hate Canada Network" which document cases of what they deem to be "hate", these often include lots of anonymous accounts that are unverified, or well-known political commentators who are accused of being hateful for expressing criticism which isn't clearly dehumanizing based on the language used, but as being "hateful" in the sense that the organization labeling it as hate considers it an act of hate to criticize the actions or statements of persons it considers as belonging to an oppressed minority.

This asymmetry in attempting to discover clearly dehumanizing statements which target people based on political orientation or physical characteristics from personalities or social media accounts that can be verified to be actual people is a sign of the times and though many would be tempted to interpret it such as to say "group A is hateful and group B is not", I would suggest that the entire purpose of this book is to help us in understanding that the inclination to delusion and dehumanization is universal and that these temporally visible asymmetries shouldn't be expected to last.

Again, though we might find good examples of individual psychopaths who are so caustic and resentful of humans that they would dehumanize others without the necessity of a collectivist mode of thinking (except, perhaps, in construing the "other" as a collective outside of themselves), the focus here is on combating collectivism itself which can bring absolutely anyone into viewing those outside of the collective as less human. After all, in all collectivist thought, unless one fashions oneself a non-human, the semantics of inclusion/exclusion serve as a proxy for defining who is truly human, or worthy of being a representative or propagator of humanity.

And this is the common theme because as soon as the argument has been made about the existence of an identity and a moral imperative arising from it as reality, you are now committed to that perception about an indefinite quantity of some form or another. The commitment is to a representation of the world which bears some meaning to the subject in question, yet it is also a commitment to swathes of humans, who are now constraints.

Cheap Erasers

The notion of identity is always a cheap conception, and always suggests a fragmented view of humanity where we are ultimately trapped in silos and liable to engage in conflict. Though humans can have infinite variety of experience and be developed in myriad ways, to suppose that their identities are bound to something which isn't universally available to all humans leads to the question of what makes someone truly human or that of what makes someone a better human.

We made good progress towards not falling so easily into the trap of assuming that certain sets of phenotypic presentations, ethnicities, cultures and classes of humans haven't any value to offer and are unworthy of dignity. If we are to play with this idea of separating ourselves such as to make our claim to knowledge implicit through collectivist mythology, then we essentially give up on our own endeavour to better understand the world and overcome its limitations.

The casualty is always our rich tapestry of different people with infinite variation and locally-tuned awareness, which is perhaps the richest aspect of life itself for a human being, and something which mostly all enjoy when conditions are prosperous and we have the capacity to examine the world and ourselves. This is being supplanted with a model which stands for the state and which imposes a life by rule, and rule by law.

When speaking to what I consider as being a cheap eraser, or the cheap erasure of actual people, what I find is a great example of this is the fact that the state has become engaged in declaring a few key identity categories for persons it refers to as "Indigenous". Specifically, that it refers to Indigenous people as an original people of the land and that it refers to "Two-spirit" as an identity associated with the LGBTQ umbrella of categories which is to say that it is a Queer identity. It does this without providing deep explications, but by positing that the identity is related to both LGBTQ and post colonial discourses. This means that it draws on the rationales from each of these areas of thought, without committing itself to the semantics of either. Of course, Queer theory has already drawn from post colonial discourse in order to validate its claims about "Two-spirit" identity, which even drew criticism from Critical theorists working in the field of sociology who consider themselves intersectional Feminists and Critical Race theorists:

"I argue academics and activists need to be mindful that, even with the best of intentions, misappropriation of cultural traditions of minority groups is dangerous. This perpetuates historical practices that have silenced Indigenous experiences." - Dr. Zuleyka Zevallos (Rethinking Gender and Sexuality: Case Study of the Native American “Two Spirit” People)

Though I don't agree with solutions put forward by this Critical theorist, who frames everything in modern Marxist interpretations and argues for their corresponding prescriptions, the fact that the state has gone forward with making broad, blurry and legally impactful classifications coded into their public messaging and policies of governance, and have supported the Human Rights Commission in updating their code to reference these classifications shows how the state cannot resist new strategies for classifying and controlling the world within its reach to ever greater degrees, and this is a good example of how it will take not just good ideas but, in this case, bad ideas and create initiatives which make them even worse, just as Dr. Zevallos has warned.

Any effort by the state to classify its citizens beyond equal citizens, by alleging difference among them based on history, race, sexuality, or otherwise, as though such things inform their knowledge, morality and spirituality, is nothing short of an abomination. It is obscene, tragic and evil that mankind develops concepts and systems with what's superficially presented as ever-greater sophistication to present, declare and elucidate its promise of a perfected human morality at the level of thought, which is to imply that humans are not capable of a morally robust manner of thought without intervention by the state, presenting as the appearance and opportunity to achieve justice. Declaring itself as being the entity which can achieve something otherwise so difficult for humans on their own, elucidating an explication of reality, experience, the substance of man, and the path to righteousness, and promising the fulfillment of our true needs and destiny shows us that this is a state-imposed cult religion.

Citizens Who Accept Labels

What can be said about citizens who accept the interoperable handles placed upon themselves and their neighbours? Is it something they really believe in? Are they just trying to get along to help with progress until such ways of thinking about their fellow countrymen are no longer necessary? What if they are to witness someone of a supposedly oppressed identity reject the label and the description of their knowledge and character?

To think that any sycophantic busybody would actually acquiesce to someone else judging such things about themselves as incorrect or not likely to happen so long as they are correctly radicalized, is something worthy of the most vehement opposition. If someone is invested in making use of the state's apparatus to elevate their moral status and attain power, there is likely nothing that will change their minds beyond a change in the means by which the power itself can be sought. That is, they will adhere to the state ideology as it changes, and at the speed at which its changes have affected their ability to manipulate their circumstances. Only the more passive, vulnerable, hapless peasants who follow through in giving their dignity, property and children's minds and bodies as fuel to the resentful flame of critical praxis, under a banner of justice, will entertain a non-conforming "oppressed" person's story in good faith. It will, however, cause cognitive dissonance and though that can help break some out of the cycle of continuously accepting a brittle mythos by which to derive a recipe for ethical life, many will simply look back toward the most popular and trusted sources to find a way to consolidate these deviating individuals.

When it comes to accepting the state's designation of who and what you are, we can't know for certain whether it's faith or fear, given that the proclamation bears significance on not just themselves but the entirety of mankind, but we can try to understand the plausible paths and mechanisms for each, and build our diagnostic tools to be employed whenever we detect the disregard for principles of freedom and liberty in exchange for the promise of us, or some collective representation of humanity, as somehow being made whole through the state.