So I think I am wrestling with my own ego in considering whether to actually post the various posts that I occasionally write here. I am a naturally cautious person and I have no real sense of the effect of just broadcasting my feelings, thoughts and understanding to an anonymous "public". There is always going to be something false and phony about anything that enters the prevalant the stream of "collective unconsciousness", especially via expected channels....
I feel a bit isolated and helpless but in a mild way...it feels that writing a blog is naive and useless and I don't really know how I could have thought that anything would come of it (if I did think anything would come of it).
... its also sort of weird and dissociated to see certain strangers on the street look at me in what seems to be a knowing way and not be sure whether or not it is because they have visited a page of yours...
....basically anyone professing or promoting healthy culture in the context of our normal media of communication has to begin with a lot of disclaimers since the very media being used is generally conveying a message very different than the one intended (as though one were to write "I Love you" on the baseball bat and then hit someone with it!).
My real message both to you and myself is that what we call civilization and its media (including the printed word) obscure our common sense (or sense of coexistence), cater to a kind of dualistic either/or "panic"- logic, through shaming and blaming among other things, inhibit coinference, conscience and communion, and generally foster and support the kind of alienated-phoniness and factional identity politics that are ubiquitous in a sick culture.
Moreover since I am a recovering "alienated-phony", myself I don't always feel up to successfully dealing with the results of my contact with public/private culture....
None of this is necessarily any reason not to take that risk and try to use our media in a way that overcomes of subverts such tendencies, but evidently I don't have much confidence in the way I am going about doing that..
So why am I writing this? purely as a kind of therapy I guess...trying to clarify things to myself and practice communicating from the heart. And there is also still a lingering sense of responsibility, as a citizen-of-the-world and an adult, to try get some of these ideas across...I mean the world needs these Ideas; people need a kind of compass, a way to properly coordinate their problems so that the solution to one problem doesn't end up reinforcing or even creating, other problems that were not being considered when they were "solving" the first one. They need a way of orienting themselves so that they may help themselves and each other to find the path of recovery from this culture and to be able to continue on that path. Most of all they need the example of someone who is actually doing (or even genuinely trying to do) that. So far as I know I am the only one with anything close to something that fills this bill....
So here we go again. below is the table describing individual-personhood that your will find elsewhere in this blog.
What I mean to say now is that the this concept of Individual-Personhood is in some ways a kind of "Ideal Type", at least its not the case that Individual-Personhood actually is consciously realized by anybody in a healthy way these days. I mean, both the Individual and and Personal (inner and outer) relationships actually pertain for everybody, but the conditions of our present sick culture are such that it is basically impossible to be in a consistently Healthy Inclusive and coordinated relationship either within ourselves or with others. For the time being I will refer to the imbalanced, dissociated and unhealthy state of affairs of both our inner and outer relationships as Dysmutuality and say that Inner or Individual dysmutuality ("vertical dysmutuality") is another name for what I call Alienation, and Outer or Personal dysmutualtiy ("horizontal") is marked by what I call Phoniness, so that, though we each have the intrinsic relationships and responsibilities of Individual-Persons, we are all basically failing to live up to this and instead show up basically as various kinds of Alienated-Phony. This is also true of myself I must confess, so that the only difference between me and everybody else is that most of the time I am a "Recovering Alienated Phony" (at least I believe I have found the path of recovery) and not one in Denial like everybody else I know anything about. (Perhaps even this sounds arrogant, but this is my honest experience so there it is....)
But more about alienated phonies. Alienated Phoniness, like Individual-Personhood, is a kind of Yin Yang concept so its pointless to try to differentiate Alienation and Phoniness absolutely since they mutually define, support, and even contain each other, such that wherever you find one you'll find the other. Nevertheless It might be useful (or just necessary) get at the idea by treating them separately at first (at least to some extent).
People tend to be more alienated in private and more phony in public. You could even say that both the public and private venues of our culture are intrinsically unhealthy and engender phoniness and alienation respectively. You could say that the public venue is anti-individual in the sense that it seems to inhibit authentic individuation by obliging everyone to accept phony factional identity "uniforms" of race, gender, nationality, and in general to act as though complicated things were simple. In the same way you could say that the private venue is anti-personhood because it keeps people isolated from each other (the rationalizations here usually amount to making simple things seem complicated) so that all feeling of familial, local, civil, or spiritual conviviality is basically thwarted.
As an example of public phoniness I will use the Idea of Gender.
Consider this analogy: If the masculine is Yang and the feminine is Yin then the relation of Yin/Yang (in which there is a some masculine in the feminine and some feminine in the masculine) makes it true that there is and can be no pure masculine or feminine. More importantly, to the extent that these relative genders correspond to certain pairs of Yang and Yin qualities, (for example "activity" for yang/male and "passivity" for Yin/female), it seems clear that it would be good to be able to be active or passive as an intelligent response to what a given situation requires and that any such intelligent response is going to be inhibited by Identifying as either Yang (Male) or Yin (Female). It would be like trying to ride a bike by Identifying not as the rider primarily but with say, the right side of the bike, so that, no matter what the terrain or the needs of the journey one feels that need always to tilt and turn to the right since one has Identified with that side. Wouldn't it be better to actually identify as the rider of the bike and cultivate the ability to go left or right as it seems appropriate? Likewise wouldn't it be wise to actually Identify as something that transcends masculine or feminine so as to be able to cultivate the facility of being "Yinlike" or "feminine" or "Yanglike (masculine)--or some appropriate combination--as the situation requires? You will object that psychophyiology is naturally asymmetrical in human beings unlike in a bicycle, but to this I argue that brain chemistry function and hormones follow behavior as much as they engender it (no pun intended). See for example the various books about neuroplasticity (for example "The Brain That Changes Itself"). Moreover, even if your bike was "naturally" lobesided, wouldn't the thing to do be to learn to specifically tilt more to the lighter side so as to be able to still maintain balance?
The real reason we do not act as Individual-Persons who are free to spontaneously express masculine or feminine qualities as seems appropriate to the situation, but rather choose to identify in an "either/or" manner as Men or Women" is Phoniness, engendered by the Trauma of formal and informal education into this sick culture. In the absence of support for, or even understanding of, individual-personal development in particular and the principle of Coidentity (about which more later) in general, the child is basically forced to identify with the side of their nature thought to correspond with the kind of genitalia they possess. Being a creature of Attachment, the child is thus forced into a kind of self betrayal and self censorship in exchange for at least the semblance of being accepted and loved. Over time they become so inwardly alienated from their whole selves that their gender role does not even feel phony to them anymore. This inner alienation from and denial of the "inner-other" can even take the form of surgery in which an attempt is made to completely extirpate any sign of the offending gender from the body. Some of this is perhaps an over simplification for the sake of clarity but I think you get the picture.
Its worth noting in the above how inner alienation (alienation from ones own inner yin if "male" or yang if "female", and from recourse to an intragendered grey area or continuum for both) results in a phony public gender identity; a kind of factional-identity-uniform which collectively and individually takes the place of the individual poise and strength of character needed to actually be oneself; to be in touch with and manifest ones own individual-personhood without fear of loss of acceptance. Of course when what is being accepted is not ones real selfnature but ones Phony self-image, perpetual dissatisfaction and insecurity (whether conscious or unconscious) will be the necessary result.
There are of course forms of Feminism that rail against the effects of gender and its phoniness proffering some version of "humanism" in its stead. I think however that the identity of a "Human" is also factional alienated and phony (at least in practice). I think that if our inner animal (the body) is to be fully included and a personal relationship with the nonhuman beings fostered, some thing like Individual-Personhood, rather than "Humanism" is more appropriate. Humanism also seems to exclude, (because of its materialist "enlightenment" origins, the idea of the "Inner Elder" or Intuiition, along with its corresponding soulful/spiritual/religous social venue and this will also not do. I also feel that the relationships and responcibilies implicit in Individual-Personhood are more clear and valuable then those implied in the identity politics of Humanism...
As an example of Private Alienation i will use the idea of Property, or Ownership in the sense of belonging-to and contrast it with an Individual-Personal conception of property as "belonging-with".
This idea of "belonging-with" is a reference to a conception of property based on ones implicit Personal responsibilities to ones familial, local, civil and "spiritual" venues which of course one cannot fulfill unless one has a healthy relationship inwardly, that is with oneself as an individual. Something (or someone) belongs-with me (and me with it) to the extent that we mutually and progressively facilitate a shared healthy culture. Belonging-With is a kind of shared belonging which works sort of like the dabs of color on a beautiful painting; each color belongs-with, sets-off, ornaments each of the others as well as the picture as a whole and this can be so even though two given dabs may not be in proximal relationship on the canvas. In the same way the check list for Individual-Personal belonging-with is not only whether a given association facilitates healing/recovery in a proximal Familial social venue, but also if it can be seen to help the Neighborhood, the larger Civil community and facilitate a life that is meaningful and progressive in terms of ultimate things ("Spiritual" venue) . Of course belonging-with must also be justified in terms of a given associations facilitation of ones own progressive Individuation, of ones own progressive recovery from the sick culture of alienated phoniness. This means that the association must not only nourish my Mind, but also my heart, body, and intuition/conscience in some way. This may seem a tall order but the wholeness of the individual-person --and the nature of true health itself--makes it likely or even necessary that what truly belongs with me in one respect will (while this is the case) be justifiable in all of the others as well due to the fact the none of the facets of individual-personhood are fundamentally separate from each other.
It remains to be said that a state of belonging-with is never perpetual but is both achieved and modified by ongoing inner and outer conference which is the fundamental social hygiene upon which a healthy culture is based. You may say, for example, that a contract or agreement as to a given state of "Belonging-with", in such a culture is itself a living thing which must be periodically "fed" with a kind of fair and inclusive conference (which might result in the consensual alteration of the state of affairs in the light of changed circumstances). If such an agreement is not regularly "fed" in this way, it would ultimately be pronounced legally "Dead" from starvation in a healthy culture. Of course the conferential process that secures belonging-with must also be of good quality as well as good frequency (that is; the conferential process must be really inclusive, fair and non-coerced) or else the same contract or agreement may be again pronounced dead or terminally ill and so void, in this case because of "malnutrition".
In contrast to all of this, Belonging-To (that is, the normal conception of property in a sick culture), is a unilateral (and so dysmutual) relationship that in general is both established and maintained through inner and outer coercion, dissociation, exclusion and alienation.
Inwardly, the prevalent "Rational Actor Theory" of modern economics privileges not only mind, but a certain dissociated kind of mind, over Heart, Body, and Intuiton.These latter three aspects of the individual are not expected to confer with the "rational mind" as equals, but rather to defer to it as to a tryrant. Thus we already have a kind of inner Dysmutuality and alienation that can only inhibit individuation.
This tyranny of the mind happens in large part because the mind in question--the so called "rational" mind or the rational actor is really a mind distorted by a Logic of Identity rather than a Logic of Coindentity. I will say much more about this latter kind of Logic in a future post, but suffice it here to say that a logic of identity is a logic of exclusion which supports an economics of exclusion while the logic of Coidentity is a logic of inclusion with supports an economics and general culture of inclusion. I think that Logic is more or less like the DNA of a culture and when that logic is damaged (usually by inter and intragenerational violence in the form of child abuse and war respectively) then a kind of cultural mutation takes place in the direction of malignacy. But more on this later.
While it is true that people do not always, or even usually act as rational actors, even in a capitalist economy they do usually act in terms of some kind of logic of exclusion even though the groups being excluded vary in size and composition.
All of this leads to irresponsible and alienated behavior in which our intrinsic relationships and responsibilities as family-members, neighbors, citizens-of-the-world, and souls are denied, excluded, externalized, betrayed owning to our insistence on considering ourselves "Individuals" without "Personhood" that is, as essentially separate and atomized beings (or even groups of beings) relating to the world and each other only unilaterally through relationships of control or of property in the sense of Belonging-To. Economic activities such as exchange, renting, trade, and even barter and "giving" all presuppose some degree of such inner and outer alienation on the part of all involved because they propose to change only one form of alienated and phony "belonging-to" into another.
Moreover this feeling of being a totally or primarily separate individual, which amounts to alienation, is also Phony in the sense of being, like gender, a social pose inculcated by traumatic and manipulative aspects of education (by education I mean both the informal and formal transmission of culture across the generations). Emotionally a sense of a primarily isolated and separate self is provoked by rewards and punishments as well as competition (see Alfie Kohn's many books). While inwardly, "Common sense" as the sense that is the common ground of the 5 senses (this is an ancient meaning of that phrase), and which I describe as the sense of Coexistence, is thwarted in many ways by diet and environments and practices. Of course nothing could be so antagonistic to (or healing for) a sense of alienation and primary separateness of self then a visceral and primary sense of Coexistence.
There will be more of Coexistence (more of what I am calling "Coexistentialism") in a future post as well.
Anyway so much for my examples of Phoniness and Alienation. I am tired of writing or I would go on to try to show how to be functioning in the present sick culture is basically to be an Alienated-Phony so that the only real difference between people is the extent to which they are in Recovery at any given moment or in denial. I am not aware that this specific concept of alienated phoniness exists anywhere else. If it is generally valid then it means that conscious recovery of individual-personhood (conscious recovery as recovering alienated phonies) is possible now for the first time (in history at least).
I will try to share my experiment is such a project of recovery in future posts...
All for now...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Postscript
It makes sense, in the light what I have said of of the inseparability of alienation and phoniness, to try to show the interrelatedness of Phony Gender and Alienated Property/Ownership in the above two examples, so I will try to do a little bit of that now.
Of course The communist Idea (via Engles and others) is (as I remember it) that the property relationship of belonging-to is a function of Patriarchy and the patriarchal Familial structure in which men claimed exclusive ownership of women as a way, among other things, of ascertaining and claiming similar ownership of children (especially of a male heir to property).
There is no critique of the idea of gender perse in this, and the form of property suggested by this communist approach in general seems only to prescribe a replacement of "Private" belonging-to with of "Public" or Collective belonging-to rather than a transcendent replacement of the Public and Private Belonging-To relation itself with Individual-Personal Belonging-With.
I think that these two facts; that neither Gender itself nor the unilateral relation of "Belonging-To" of property are challenged in the communist model, are related, and I think the relationship has to to with, among other things, the issue of Sexuality as it relates to that of gender and to that of property.
In a previous post I outlined (or at least alluded to) a form of sexuality consistent with Individual-Personhood and so capable of healing/transcending both the phoniness of Gender and the Alienation of Private Property. I will go into this further here in order to shed light on the present issue.
Some people might not even be able to conceive of sexuality without gender, but it seems obvious to me that two Individual-Persons might encounter each other and be attracted to each other as such. Or rather, its probably better to say that two Recovering Alienated Phonies could encounter each other and be attracted to each other in ways that include sexual interest. However, this mutual attraction, in the case of those in recovery will be between to whole individuals (mind to mind, heart to heart, body to body and intuition to intuition and the "imaginative surmise" that is comprised in the attraction will involve an intention of using sexuality for mutual and inner and outer healing as whole persons rather than the kind attraction based on"possession". "conquest", and "exploit" that comes about in the normal, more or less dissociated experience of lust.
In normal "orgasm seeking" sex, the other tends to be more or less just a means to the end of the dopamine high produced by this experience (addiction to which is, like all forms of addiction, a kind of temporary anesthetic relief to an essentially painful and meaningless life that usually amounts a kind of slavery). Orgasm is a kind of dissociation in the same way that identity (rather than coidentity) is a dissociation and this is evinced by the fact that the actual individual-person in front of you (on top of you, beneath you, whatever) is not even usually necessary for the experience and can often even get in the way of it with their ontologically stubborn insistence on being a real "intergendered" person suffering from sick culture and not some fantasy of absolute masculinity or femininity. Of course faking and lying (both to oneself and to the other) is more or less essential to such alienated-phony sex by definition since lying to, censoring ,or consciously or unconsciously excluding of parts of oneself is more or less the same as self alienation and lying etc to and for the other is more or less the same as phoniness...
Thus the familiar ritual of mutual faking and mutual insecurity in which phony Manhood Meets phony Womanhood for an experience of phony Intimacy and (when it happens) phony transcendence (and my claim here is that orgasm is phony transcendence even when it is not faked and even on the rare cases that it is mutual--or rather-simultaneous. (I call real transcendence "Cotranscendence", about which more in another post...)
But it is still not clear what "Property" or belonging-to has to do with this sort of thing, although the words "conquest" and "possession" already mentioned are highly suggestive. I think this can be better explained by sharing more of the alternative model of Individual-Personal sexuality.
Individual-Personal sexuality is really "healing sexuality" or "recovery sexuality" and is motivated by the ("cointegrative") intention of both inner and outer healing. Thus one is motivated to be with the other intimately because ones intuition, mind, heart, and body concur that such consensual healing intimacy can/will be part of that recovery. That is, one has something approaching "inner consensus" that one "Belongs-With" the other individual-person (and visa versa) in such a practice of mutual healing and recovery, or at least that this possibility is worth investigating. And this kind of belonging-with, once established, is, like every other kind, something that needs to be updated regularly through outer as well as inner conference. Of course the kind of inner/outer "consensuality" that I am talking about is itself an intimate conspiracy against gender and the unilateral control and use implied in possession and conquest (and every other kind of phoniness and ego-alienation), rather then a celebration of them. Thus those involved (because they really are fully involved) treat each other as both incipiently individuated and whole beings that are ends in themselves as well as in a way that is mindful of the relationships and responsibilities of Personhood. The goal here is the cultivation of common sense (the sense of coexistence), conscience and compassion, awakening, and inclusive unconditional love and the transcendence and healing of the ego in all its forms...
What is important here so far as property goes, is that in neither motivation nor execution are we involved in any kind of self or other commodification/objectification. When we are not primarily alienated from ourselves and phony with others we are cultivating "belong-with" ourselves and others, that is we are authentically involved the recovery of our distinctive mutuality, and shared SelfNature as Individual-Persons. Commodities are essentially alienated and phony entities produced to satisfy with "possession-of" that which can only be satisfied by belonging-with. The situation is the same as with the rest of capitalism; "Demand" is Addiction (to a kind of anesthesia) because "Supply" (the labour involved in filling the demand) is misery (a kind pain). The phoniness and self alienation that people go through to fulfill the demands of the gendered and image-based "relationship-market" involves an anxiety and pain that can only be (however temporarily) repressed by a "success" or "profit" in that market though the pains are actually augmented by such "success" perhaps even more than by failure or loss. Thus the social market equally runs on such alienation, phoniness (including the phoniness of denial) and the perpetual insecurity that results from them. Its all kind of social and erotic ponzi-scheme that just goes along with the economic ponzi scheme that is capitalism itself. The only thing wrong with that analogy is that it doesn't make clear the fact that the joke (both economically and erotically) is equally on everybody in on the scheme, including the original schemers...
Thus Belonging-With is Inclusive Shared Belonging that is not private in its conception--or rather, the criteria for belonging-with each other in this specific practice is Personal as well as Individual. In other words, ones motive for doing this at all includes doing it in such a manner as to be a healthier and more complete, authentic and responsible family-member, neighbor, citizen-of-the-world, and soul; to bring healthy culture to world outside oneself as well as to each other. It is again like a painter putting a dab of color on a big canvas with an eye to not only its appropriateness vis-vis the colors adjacent; but to so that the colors ornament not only each other but those father away and indeed the entire painting considered as a whole. The "Belonging-with" of the two proximal colors can only be gauged or realized in the context of all the other colors and shapes in the painting as a whole both near and distant.The main difference here is that one must account for the fact that the whole "Painting" is really a "movie" that is always changing in different places and at different speeds though the essentials remain the same, so that the color will be often in need of "touching up" (I am not quite satisfied with this metaphor but will let it stand for now).
This is not an arbitrary or even essentially altruistic or idealistic motive; we all have within us an "inner animal" that is interested in healthy Familial environment in the present, an "inner-adult" that is motivated by civility and the future, and inner-child that is motivated ay adventurous delight in the beauty of the "village it takes" to raise it, and we all have an inner-elder that is interested in soulful connections with others that nourish spiritual growth and healing. Moreover, in the kind of "inner household" of child, adult, elder and animal, that I am describing as an "Individual", the unhappiness of one member of the household is going to effect the whole, so that, for example, a way of pleasing the inner adult that excludes or repress the interests the inner animal, child and elder is not really possible; the "pleasure" of the inner adult would be an inwardly alienated, then therefore, phony pleasure. What I am saying here is that this kind of inclusive inner wholeness and healing is not the stuff anyone is "supposed" to want; its the stuff everyone would realize they do want and need if they could just come off it with themselves and with each other...
At any rate, such healing sexuality as I am describing is therefore not an inwardly alienated and outwardly phony act but an "Individual" and Personal act, not only because it is not conceived and enacted in an inwardly exclusive spirit but because the inner inclusivity implies and outer inclusivity as well. What I hve call "Consensuality" can not be a private act because we are not essential private, and so alienated, individuals. However it is not a "public" act either, since it is being done in such a way as to challenge both the false "we" of public, shared phoniness as well as the false "I" of private alienation. This last statement is worth emphasizing since, at least in theory, its easy to confuse personal belonging-with (in which the "we" is inclusive) and public belonging-to in which the "we" is an alienated-phony and factional "we" and one ends up with a concept and practice of more widely shared, phoniness and alienation. To reverse a false binary is not to transcended it but just to strengthen it whether the binary is the male/female one or the pubic/private one.
But I think that the relation of gender to property still needs some more explaining. What does Belonging-To (whether public or private) have to do with the phoniness of gender? If it is the primacy of this mutually exclusive either/or binaries, whence does this come and what, besides orgasm, does sex have to do with it?
Catherine Mackinnon sources the power of and pathology of gender norms in the suppressed or unconscious experience of child abuse of a sexual kind. I agree with this to a large extent but think its necessary to clarify first the effect of violence (or even chronic stress) on a child and then go on from this to the effect of specifically sexual violence.
Violence provokes fear of course and fear puts one in the fright (reptilian) and fight-or -flight (lower mammalian), part of the brain and basically paralyzes the higher mammalian and distinctively human parts of the brain associated with free inquiry, real and undistorted relating, learning etc (all of which require the relative absence of fear to function properly). I think that in a developing child enough violence or stress could have the effect of stunting (at least in some areas) full maturity into human adult functioning so that the consciousness is still stuck in the "Fright" mode and more often in the Emotional binary of Fright or Flight.
My idea is that when this happens in our society, on top of this now dominant emotional fear-based binary is mapped, as the child grows up, various other binaries (Actually this emotional false binary is very closely related with an equally primitive pathological binary in the realm more of sensation than of emotion, namely the sense of of "self-or-other"; the felt-sense of alienated existence, which is really a kind of numbness to the felt-sense of "self-and-other"; that is, of essential coexistence" which would be the norm in a healthy culture) . A much later false binary overlay is our present alienated and trauma-induced either/or form of Logic (which I elsewhere call "Panic Logic" for this reason). A little thought will make clear that the relation of property in the from of belonging to is, also essentially binary in this exclusive way...
And of course another of these binaries is the gender binary of male Or female. One can now imagine a physically adult, but emotionally and sensually stunted, alienated-phony "individual" suffering especially greatly from these violence and trauma induced binaries, basically going crazy and , probably with the help of drink or other drugs, disowning, repressing and dominating "his" own inner feminine and "acting out" this self dissociation/alienation on others "weaker" and so more "feminine" then "himself". In these others ("wife", children etc) this trauma induced confusion and dichotomizing alienation is, in our imagined example, mixed with the experience of sex and sexual violation, resulting in the common dichotomy-contaminated and so gendered, sexual identity politics founded in trauma and based ultimately on fear and inner and outer alienation.
Of course not everyone is sexually abused as a child, but my point is that the dynamic is really founded on violence and undue stress, and so, once a society becomes based on a dynamic of violence (through the social traumas of war and dislocation) a selection pressure begins to favor the "success" of those whose imbalance in this emotionally dichotomous respect extended to gender, establishing a collective norm to which others will be socially intimidated to conform. In other words once society has mutated in this malignant way, the more intimately dissociated and insecure one is, the more likely one is to succeed in the context of the now alienated social, economic and legal norm and then contribute to helping intensify and extend those coercive, alienating, norms....
In short (and extremely oversimplified): violence and trauma lead to fight-or-flight dynamic and either/or sense of existence, which leads to either/or logic generally; which leads to either/or identity politics, which lead to either/or conceptions such as gender and property, which in turn are reinforced strengthened and sexualized, via correspondingly unhealthy conceptions and forms of sexuality, all as aspects of alienated phoniness and sick culture generally. But this "Leads to" thing is really much too linear; what is happening is really more of a synergistic (or better "synentropic") dynamic....
{I am not quite satisfied with this postscript. Its alright so far as it goes but I've missed something important about self/other-objectification and self/other-commodification as they relate to both gender and property as aspects of alienated phoniness. I could have also have made things more clear by introducing the concept of conscience (individual) as the inner aspect of the more personal or outer conference....And now various other ways to possibly make what I am saying clearer come belatedly to mind but, I think they will have to wait for future posts as this one seems long enough}
...
I feel a bit isolated and helpless but in a mild way...it feels that writing a blog is naive and useless and I don't really know how I could have thought that anything would come of it (if I did think anything would come of it).
... its also sort of weird and dissociated to see certain strangers on the street look at me in what seems to be a knowing way and not be sure whether or not it is because they have visited a page of yours...
....basically anyone professing or promoting healthy culture in the context of our normal media of communication has to begin with a lot of disclaimers since the very media being used is generally conveying a message very different than the one intended (as though one were to write "I Love you" on the baseball bat and then hit someone with it!).
My real message both to you and myself is that what we call civilization and its media (including the printed word) obscure our common sense (or sense of coexistence), cater to a kind of dualistic either/or "panic"- logic, through shaming and blaming among other things, inhibit coinference, conscience and communion, and generally foster and support the kind of alienated-phoniness and factional identity politics that are ubiquitous in a sick culture.
Moreover since I am a recovering "alienated-phony", myself I don't always feel up to successfully dealing with the results of my contact with public/private culture....
None of this is necessarily any reason not to take that risk and try to use our media in a way that overcomes of subverts such tendencies, but evidently I don't have much confidence in the way I am going about doing that..
So why am I writing this? purely as a kind of therapy I guess...trying to clarify things to myself and practice communicating from the heart. And there is also still a lingering sense of responsibility, as a citizen-of-the-world and an adult, to try get some of these ideas across...I mean the world needs these Ideas; people need a kind of compass, a way to properly coordinate their problems so that the solution to one problem doesn't end up reinforcing or even creating, other problems that were not being considered when they were "solving" the first one. They need a way of orienting themselves so that they may help themselves and each other to find the path of recovery from this culture and to be able to continue on that path. Most of all they need the example of someone who is actually doing (or even genuinely trying to do) that. So far as I know I am the only one with anything close to something that fills this bill....
So here we go again. below is the table describing individual-personhood that your will find elsewhere in this blog.
| Individual (Inner Relationship) | Person (Outer Relationship) | Time Orientation |
| Mind (Inner Adult) | Citizen-of-the-World | Future |
| Heart (Inner Child) | Neighbor | Past |
| Body (Inner Animal) | Family-Member | Present |
| Intuition (Inner Elder) | Soul/"Religious" venue | Eternity |
What I mean to say now is that the this concept of Individual-Personhood is in some ways a kind of "Ideal Type", at least its not the case that Individual-Personhood actually is consciously realized by anybody in a healthy way these days. I mean, both the Individual and and Personal (inner and outer) relationships actually pertain for everybody, but the conditions of our present sick culture are such that it is basically impossible to be in a consistently Healthy Inclusive and coordinated relationship either within ourselves or with others. For the time being I will refer to the imbalanced, dissociated and unhealthy state of affairs of both our inner and outer relationships as Dysmutuality and say that Inner or Individual dysmutuality ("vertical dysmutuality") is another name for what I call Alienation, and Outer or Personal dysmutualtiy ("horizontal") is marked by what I call Phoniness, so that, though we each have the intrinsic relationships and responsibilities of Individual-Persons, we are all basically failing to live up to this and instead show up basically as various kinds of Alienated-Phony. This is also true of myself I must confess, so that the only difference between me and everybody else is that most of the time I am a "Recovering Alienated Phony" (at least I believe I have found the path of recovery) and not one in Denial like everybody else I know anything about. (Perhaps even this sounds arrogant, but this is my honest experience so there it is....)
But more about alienated phonies. Alienated Phoniness, like Individual-Personhood, is a kind of Yin Yang concept so its pointless to try to differentiate Alienation and Phoniness absolutely since they mutually define, support, and even contain each other, such that wherever you find one you'll find the other. Nevertheless It might be useful (or just necessary) get at the idea by treating them separately at first (at least to some extent).
People tend to be more alienated in private and more phony in public. You could even say that both the public and private venues of our culture are intrinsically unhealthy and engender phoniness and alienation respectively. You could say that the public venue is anti-individual in the sense that it seems to inhibit authentic individuation by obliging everyone to accept phony factional identity "uniforms" of race, gender, nationality, and in general to act as though complicated things were simple. In the same way you could say that the private venue is anti-personhood because it keeps people isolated from each other (the rationalizations here usually amount to making simple things seem complicated) so that all feeling of familial, local, civil, or spiritual conviviality is basically thwarted.
As an example of public phoniness I will use the Idea of Gender.
Consider this analogy: If the masculine is Yang and the feminine is Yin then the relation of Yin/Yang (in which there is a some masculine in the feminine and some feminine in the masculine) makes it true that there is and can be no pure masculine or feminine. More importantly, to the extent that these relative genders correspond to certain pairs of Yang and Yin qualities, (for example "activity" for yang/male and "passivity" for Yin/female), it seems clear that it would be good to be able to be active or passive as an intelligent response to what a given situation requires and that any such intelligent response is going to be inhibited by Identifying as either Yang (Male) or Yin (Female). It would be like trying to ride a bike by Identifying not as the rider primarily but with say, the right side of the bike, so that, no matter what the terrain or the needs of the journey one feels that need always to tilt and turn to the right since one has Identified with that side. Wouldn't it be better to actually identify as the rider of the bike and cultivate the ability to go left or right as it seems appropriate? Likewise wouldn't it be wise to actually Identify as something that transcends masculine or feminine so as to be able to cultivate the facility of being "Yinlike" or "feminine" or "Yanglike (masculine)--or some appropriate combination--as the situation requires? You will object that psychophyiology is naturally asymmetrical in human beings unlike in a bicycle, but to this I argue that brain chemistry function and hormones follow behavior as much as they engender it (no pun intended). See for example the various books about neuroplasticity (for example "The Brain That Changes Itself"). Moreover, even if your bike was "naturally" lobesided, wouldn't the thing to do be to learn to specifically tilt more to the lighter side so as to be able to still maintain balance?
The real reason we do not act as Individual-Persons who are free to spontaneously express masculine or feminine qualities as seems appropriate to the situation, but rather choose to identify in an "either/or" manner as Men or Women" is Phoniness, engendered by the Trauma of formal and informal education into this sick culture. In the absence of support for, or even understanding of, individual-personal development in particular and the principle of Coidentity (about which more later) in general, the child is basically forced to identify with the side of their nature thought to correspond with the kind of genitalia they possess. Being a creature of Attachment, the child is thus forced into a kind of self betrayal and self censorship in exchange for at least the semblance of being accepted and loved. Over time they become so inwardly alienated from their whole selves that their gender role does not even feel phony to them anymore. This inner alienation from and denial of the "inner-other" can even take the form of surgery in which an attempt is made to completely extirpate any sign of the offending gender from the body. Some of this is perhaps an over simplification for the sake of clarity but I think you get the picture.
Its worth noting in the above how inner alienation (alienation from ones own inner yin if "male" or yang if "female", and from recourse to an intragendered grey area or continuum for both) results in a phony public gender identity; a kind of factional-identity-uniform which collectively and individually takes the place of the individual poise and strength of character needed to actually be oneself; to be in touch with and manifest ones own individual-personhood without fear of loss of acceptance. Of course when what is being accepted is not ones real selfnature but ones Phony self-image, perpetual dissatisfaction and insecurity (whether conscious or unconscious) will be the necessary result.
There are of course forms of Feminism that rail against the effects of gender and its phoniness proffering some version of "humanism" in its stead. I think however that the identity of a "Human" is also factional alienated and phony (at least in practice). I think that if our inner animal (the body) is to be fully included and a personal relationship with the nonhuman beings fostered, some thing like Individual-Personhood, rather than "Humanism" is more appropriate. Humanism also seems to exclude, (because of its materialist "enlightenment" origins, the idea of the "Inner Elder" or Intuiition, along with its corresponding soulful/spiritual/religous social venue and this will also not do. I also feel that the relationships and responcibilies implicit in Individual-Personhood are more clear and valuable then those implied in the identity politics of Humanism...
As an example of Private Alienation i will use the idea of Property, or Ownership in the sense of belonging-to and contrast it with an Individual-Personal conception of property as "belonging-with".
This idea of "belonging-with" is a reference to a conception of property based on ones implicit Personal responsibilities to ones familial, local, civil and "spiritual" venues which of course one cannot fulfill unless one has a healthy relationship inwardly, that is with oneself as an individual. Something (or someone) belongs-with me (and me with it) to the extent that we mutually and progressively facilitate a shared healthy culture. Belonging-With is a kind of shared belonging which works sort of like the dabs of color on a beautiful painting; each color belongs-with, sets-off, ornaments each of the others as well as the picture as a whole and this can be so even though two given dabs may not be in proximal relationship on the canvas. In the same way the check list for Individual-Personal belonging-with is not only whether a given association facilitates healing/recovery in a proximal Familial social venue, but also if it can be seen to help the Neighborhood, the larger Civil community and facilitate a life that is meaningful and progressive in terms of ultimate things ("Spiritual" venue) . Of course belonging-with must also be justified in terms of a given associations facilitation of ones own progressive Individuation, of ones own progressive recovery from the sick culture of alienated phoniness. This means that the association must not only nourish my Mind, but also my heart, body, and intuition/conscience in some way. This may seem a tall order but the wholeness of the individual-person --and the nature of true health itself--makes it likely or even necessary that what truly belongs with me in one respect will (while this is the case) be justifiable in all of the others as well due to the fact the none of the facets of individual-personhood are fundamentally separate from each other.
It remains to be said that a state of belonging-with is never perpetual but is both achieved and modified by ongoing inner and outer conference which is the fundamental social hygiene upon which a healthy culture is based. You may say, for example, that a contract or agreement as to a given state of "Belonging-with", in such a culture is itself a living thing which must be periodically "fed" with a kind of fair and inclusive conference (which might result in the consensual alteration of the state of affairs in the light of changed circumstances). If such an agreement is not regularly "fed" in this way, it would ultimately be pronounced legally "Dead" from starvation in a healthy culture. Of course the conferential process that secures belonging-with must also be of good quality as well as good frequency (that is; the conferential process must be really inclusive, fair and non-coerced) or else the same contract or agreement may be again pronounced dead or terminally ill and so void, in this case because of "malnutrition".
In contrast to all of this, Belonging-To (that is, the normal conception of property in a sick culture), is a unilateral (and so dysmutual) relationship that in general is both established and maintained through inner and outer coercion, dissociation, exclusion and alienation.
Inwardly, the prevalent "Rational Actor Theory" of modern economics privileges not only mind, but a certain dissociated kind of mind, over Heart, Body, and Intuiton.These latter three aspects of the individual are not expected to confer with the "rational mind" as equals, but rather to defer to it as to a tryrant. Thus we already have a kind of inner Dysmutuality and alienation that can only inhibit individuation.
This tyranny of the mind happens in large part because the mind in question--the so called "rational" mind or the rational actor is really a mind distorted by a Logic of Identity rather than a Logic of Coindentity. I will say much more about this latter kind of Logic in a future post, but suffice it here to say that a logic of identity is a logic of exclusion which supports an economics of exclusion while the logic of Coidentity is a logic of inclusion with supports an economics and general culture of inclusion. I think that Logic is more or less like the DNA of a culture and when that logic is damaged (usually by inter and intragenerational violence in the form of child abuse and war respectively) then a kind of cultural mutation takes place in the direction of malignacy. But more on this later.
While it is true that people do not always, or even usually act as rational actors, even in a capitalist economy they do usually act in terms of some kind of logic of exclusion even though the groups being excluded vary in size and composition.
All of this leads to irresponsible and alienated behavior in which our intrinsic relationships and responsibilities as family-members, neighbors, citizens-of-the-world, and souls are denied, excluded, externalized, betrayed owning to our insistence on considering ourselves "Individuals" without "Personhood" that is, as essentially separate and atomized beings (or even groups of beings) relating to the world and each other only unilaterally through relationships of control or of property in the sense of Belonging-To. Economic activities such as exchange, renting, trade, and even barter and "giving" all presuppose some degree of such inner and outer alienation on the part of all involved because they propose to change only one form of alienated and phony "belonging-to" into another.
Moreover this feeling of being a totally or primarily separate individual, which amounts to alienation, is also Phony in the sense of being, like gender, a social pose inculcated by traumatic and manipulative aspects of education (by education I mean both the informal and formal transmission of culture across the generations). Emotionally a sense of a primarily isolated and separate self is provoked by rewards and punishments as well as competition (see Alfie Kohn's many books). While inwardly, "Common sense" as the sense that is the common ground of the 5 senses (this is an ancient meaning of that phrase), and which I describe as the sense of Coexistence, is thwarted in many ways by diet and environments and practices. Of course nothing could be so antagonistic to (or healing for) a sense of alienation and primary separateness of self then a visceral and primary sense of Coexistence.
There will be more of Coexistence (more of what I am calling "Coexistentialism") in a future post as well.
Anyway so much for my examples of Phoniness and Alienation. I am tired of writing or I would go on to try to show how to be functioning in the present sick culture is basically to be an Alienated-Phony so that the only real difference between people is the extent to which they are in Recovery at any given moment or in denial. I am not aware that this specific concept of alienated phoniness exists anywhere else. If it is generally valid then it means that conscious recovery of individual-personhood (conscious recovery as recovering alienated phonies) is possible now for the first time (in history at least).
I will try to share my experiment is such a project of recovery in future posts...
All for now...
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Postscript
It makes sense, in the light what I have said of of the inseparability of alienation and phoniness, to try to show the interrelatedness of Phony Gender and Alienated Property/Ownership in the above two examples, so I will try to do a little bit of that now.
Of course The communist Idea (via Engles and others) is (as I remember it) that the property relationship of belonging-to is a function of Patriarchy and the patriarchal Familial structure in which men claimed exclusive ownership of women as a way, among other things, of ascertaining and claiming similar ownership of children (especially of a male heir to property).
There is no critique of the idea of gender perse in this, and the form of property suggested by this communist approach in general seems only to prescribe a replacement of "Private" belonging-to with of "Public" or Collective belonging-to rather than a transcendent replacement of the Public and Private Belonging-To relation itself with Individual-Personal Belonging-With.
I think that these two facts; that neither Gender itself nor the unilateral relation of "Belonging-To" of property are challenged in the communist model, are related, and I think the relationship has to to with, among other things, the issue of Sexuality as it relates to that of gender and to that of property.
In a previous post I outlined (or at least alluded to) a form of sexuality consistent with Individual-Personhood and so capable of healing/transcending both the phoniness of Gender and the Alienation of Private Property. I will go into this further here in order to shed light on the present issue.
Some people might not even be able to conceive of sexuality without gender, but it seems obvious to me that two Individual-Persons might encounter each other and be attracted to each other as such. Or rather, its probably better to say that two Recovering Alienated Phonies could encounter each other and be attracted to each other in ways that include sexual interest. However, this mutual attraction, in the case of those in recovery will be between to whole individuals (mind to mind, heart to heart, body to body and intuition to intuition and the "imaginative surmise" that is comprised in the attraction will involve an intention of using sexuality for mutual and inner and outer healing as whole persons rather than the kind attraction based on"possession". "conquest", and "exploit" that comes about in the normal, more or less dissociated experience of lust.
In normal "orgasm seeking" sex, the other tends to be more or less just a means to the end of the dopamine high produced by this experience (addiction to which is, like all forms of addiction, a kind of temporary anesthetic relief to an essentially painful and meaningless life that usually amounts a kind of slavery). Orgasm is a kind of dissociation in the same way that identity (rather than coidentity) is a dissociation and this is evinced by the fact that the actual individual-person in front of you (on top of you, beneath you, whatever) is not even usually necessary for the experience and can often even get in the way of it with their ontologically stubborn insistence on being a real "intergendered" person suffering from sick culture and not some fantasy of absolute masculinity or femininity. Of course faking and lying (both to oneself and to the other) is more or less essential to such alienated-phony sex by definition since lying to, censoring ,or consciously or unconsciously excluding of parts of oneself is more or less the same as self alienation and lying etc to and for the other is more or less the same as phoniness...
Thus the familiar ritual of mutual faking and mutual insecurity in which phony Manhood Meets phony Womanhood for an experience of phony Intimacy and (when it happens) phony transcendence (and my claim here is that orgasm is phony transcendence even when it is not faked and even on the rare cases that it is mutual--or rather-simultaneous. (I call real transcendence "Cotranscendence", about which more in another post...)
But it is still not clear what "Property" or belonging-to has to do with this sort of thing, although the words "conquest" and "possession" already mentioned are highly suggestive. I think this can be better explained by sharing more of the alternative model of Individual-Personal sexuality.
Individual-Personal sexuality is really "healing sexuality" or "recovery sexuality" and is motivated by the ("cointegrative") intention of both inner and outer healing. Thus one is motivated to be with the other intimately because ones intuition, mind, heart, and body concur that such consensual healing intimacy can/will be part of that recovery. That is, one has something approaching "inner consensus" that one "Belongs-With" the other individual-person (and visa versa) in such a practice of mutual healing and recovery, or at least that this possibility is worth investigating. And this kind of belonging-with, once established, is, like every other kind, something that needs to be updated regularly through outer as well as inner conference. Of course the kind of inner/outer "consensuality" that I am talking about is itself an intimate conspiracy against gender and the unilateral control and use implied in possession and conquest (and every other kind of phoniness and ego-alienation), rather then a celebration of them. Thus those involved (because they really are fully involved) treat each other as both incipiently individuated and whole beings that are ends in themselves as well as in a way that is mindful of the relationships and responsibilities of Personhood. The goal here is the cultivation of common sense (the sense of coexistence), conscience and compassion, awakening, and inclusive unconditional love and the transcendence and healing of the ego in all its forms...
What is important here so far as property goes, is that in neither motivation nor execution are we involved in any kind of self or other commodification/objectification. When we are not primarily alienated from ourselves and phony with others we are cultivating "belong-with" ourselves and others, that is we are authentically involved the recovery of our distinctive mutuality, and shared SelfNature as Individual-Persons. Commodities are essentially alienated and phony entities produced to satisfy with "possession-of" that which can only be satisfied by belonging-with. The situation is the same as with the rest of capitalism; "Demand" is Addiction (to a kind of anesthesia) because "Supply" (the labour involved in filling the demand) is misery (a kind pain). The phoniness and self alienation that people go through to fulfill the demands of the gendered and image-based "relationship-market" involves an anxiety and pain that can only be (however temporarily) repressed by a "success" or "profit" in that market though the pains are actually augmented by such "success" perhaps even more than by failure or loss. Thus the social market equally runs on such alienation, phoniness (including the phoniness of denial) and the perpetual insecurity that results from them. Its all kind of social and erotic ponzi-scheme that just goes along with the economic ponzi scheme that is capitalism itself. The only thing wrong with that analogy is that it doesn't make clear the fact that the joke (both economically and erotically) is equally on everybody in on the scheme, including the original schemers...
Thus Belonging-With is Inclusive Shared Belonging that is not private in its conception--or rather, the criteria for belonging-with each other in this specific practice is Personal as well as Individual. In other words, ones motive for doing this at all includes doing it in such a manner as to be a healthier and more complete, authentic and responsible family-member, neighbor, citizen-of-the-world, and soul; to bring healthy culture to world outside oneself as well as to each other. It is again like a painter putting a dab of color on a big canvas with an eye to not only its appropriateness vis-vis the colors adjacent; but to so that the colors ornament not only each other but those father away and indeed the entire painting considered as a whole. The "Belonging-with" of the two proximal colors can only be gauged or realized in the context of all the other colors and shapes in the painting as a whole both near and distant.The main difference here is that one must account for the fact that the whole "Painting" is really a "movie" that is always changing in different places and at different speeds though the essentials remain the same, so that the color will be often in need of "touching up" (I am not quite satisfied with this metaphor but will let it stand for now).
This is not an arbitrary or even essentially altruistic or idealistic motive; we all have within us an "inner animal" that is interested in healthy Familial environment in the present, an "inner-adult" that is motivated by civility and the future, and inner-child that is motivated ay adventurous delight in the beauty of the "village it takes" to raise it, and we all have an inner-elder that is interested in soulful connections with others that nourish spiritual growth and healing. Moreover, in the kind of "inner household" of child, adult, elder and animal, that I am describing as an "Individual", the unhappiness of one member of the household is going to effect the whole, so that, for example, a way of pleasing the inner adult that excludes or repress the interests the inner animal, child and elder is not really possible; the "pleasure" of the inner adult would be an inwardly alienated, then therefore, phony pleasure. What I am saying here is that this kind of inclusive inner wholeness and healing is not the stuff anyone is "supposed" to want; its the stuff everyone would realize they do want and need if they could just come off it with themselves and with each other...
At any rate, such healing sexuality as I am describing is therefore not an inwardly alienated and outwardly phony act but an "Individual" and Personal act, not only because it is not conceived and enacted in an inwardly exclusive spirit but because the inner inclusivity implies and outer inclusivity as well. What I hve call "Consensuality" can not be a private act because we are not essential private, and so alienated, individuals. However it is not a "public" act either, since it is being done in such a way as to challenge both the false "we" of public, shared phoniness as well as the false "I" of private alienation. This last statement is worth emphasizing since, at least in theory, its easy to confuse personal belonging-with (in which the "we" is inclusive) and public belonging-to in which the "we" is an alienated-phony and factional "we" and one ends up with a concept and practice of more widely shared, phoniness and alienation. To reverse a false binary is not to transcended it but just to strengthen it whether the binary is the male/female one or the pubic/private one.
But I think that the relation of gender to property still needs some more explaining. What does Belonging-To (whether public or private) have to do with the phoniness of gender? If it is the primacy of this mutually exclusive either/or binaries, whence does this come and what, besides orgasm, does sex have to do with it?
Catherine Mackinnon sources the power of and pathology of gender norms in the suppressed or unconscious experience of child abuse of a sexual kind. I agree with this to a large extent but think its necessary to clarify first the effect of violence (or even chronic stress) on a child and then go on from this to the effect of specifically sexual violence.
Violence provokes fear of course and fear puts one in the fright (reptilian) and fight-or -flight (lower mammalian), part of the brain and basically paralyzes the higher mammalian and distinctively human parts of the brain associated with free inquiry, real and undistorted relating, learning etc (all of which require the relative absence of fear to function properly). I think that in a developing child enough violence or stress could have the effect of stunting (at least in some areas) full maturity into human adult functioning so that the consciousness is still stuck in the "Fright" mode and more often in the Emotional binary of Fright or Flight.
My idea is that when this happens in our society, on top of this now dominant emotional fear-based binary is mapped, as the child grows up, various other binaries (Actually this emotional false binary is very closely related with an equally primitive pathological binary in the realm more of sensation than of emotion, namely the sense of of "self-or-other"; the felt-sense of alienated existence, which is really a kind of numbness to the felt-sense of "self-and-other"; that is, of essential coexistence" which would be the norm in a healthy culture) . A much later false binary overlay is our present alienated and trauma-induced either/or form of Logic (which I elsewhere call "Panic Logic" for this reason). A little thought will make clear that the relation of property in the from of belonging to is, also essentially binary in this exclusive way...
And of course another of these binaries is the gender binary of male Or female. One can now imagine a physically adult, but emotionally and sensually stunted, alienated-phony "individual" suffering especially greatly from these violence and trauma induced binaries, basically going crazy and , probably with the help of drink or other drugs, disowning, repressing and dominating "his" own inner feminine and "acting out" this self dissociation/alienation on others "weaker" and so more "feminine" then "himself". In these others ("wife", children etc) this trauma induced confusion and dichotomizing alienation is, in our imagined example, mixed with the experience of sex and sexual violation, resulting in the common dichotomy-contaminated and so gendered, sexual identity politics founded in trauma and based ultimately on fear and inner and outer alienation.
Of course not everyone is sexually abused as a child, but my point is that the dynamic is really founded on violence and undue stress, and so, once a society becomes based on a dynamic of violence (through the social traumas of war and dislocation) a selection pressure begins to favor the "success" of those whose imbalance in this emotionally dichotomous respect extended to gender, establishing a collective norm to which others will be socially intimidated to conform. In other words once society has mutated in this malignant way, the more intimately dissociated and insecure one is, the more likely one is to succeed in the context of the now alienated social, economic and legal norm and then contribute to helping intensify and extend those coercive, alienating, norms....
In short (and extremely oversimplified): violence and trauma lead to fight-or-flight dynamic and either/or sense of existence, which leads to either/or logic generally; which leads to either/or identity politics, which lead to either/or conceptions such as gender and property, which in turn are reinforced strengthened and sexualized, via correspondingly unhealthy conceptions and forms of sexuality, all as aspects of alienated phoniness and sick culture generally. But this "Leads to" thing is really much too linear; what is happening is really more of a synergistic (or better "synentropic") dynamic....
{I am not quite satisfied with this postscript. Its alright so far as it goes but I've missed something important about self/other-objectification and self/other-commodification as they relate to both gender and property as aspects of alienated phoniness. I could have also have made things more clear by introducing the concept of conscience (individual) as the inner aspect of the more personal or outer conference....And now various other ways to possibly make what I am saying clearer come belatedly to mind but, I think they will have to wait for future posts as this one seems long enough}
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