The Wrong Reality. VIII:51c Contrary Concepts continued

She believes that with the expansion of knowledge in all directions there is an accute need on the part of the individual to widen his or her personal knowledge base. I see accumulation of knowledge as binding us to the Machine. The prior need is to become supraconscious, and then to confine knowledge to necessity, in the capacity of helpful informant rather than master, and subject to reason.

According to Cohen, an abstracted life-system would be entirely meaningless. We can only describe human culture, she says, in terms of what has evolved, not what should have evolved, and systems theory that is relevant to human cultural behaviour must be closely tied to the empirical data. This false view is foundational to the generally held human concept of reality, and the basis of my difficulty with Chomsky. The opposite is true - the chief thing to have evolved is the potential human intellect, and the framework of life which has otherwise diversely evolved must be meaningless to fulfilled intellect. To tie the concepts and facts of reality to the empirical data is to imprison oneself in a system from which truth, in all its meanings other than fact alone, is excluded. Of coursewe should make models of reality as it humantruly ought to be, however naive the automated realists may think us.

This is the crux of the matter. Cohen is demonstrating the realistic case, favoured because it can be supported by facts that have been empirically verified, or by logic that cannot be denied by limited conscious reason. This comes of unwillingness to recognise the pure truth of the postconscious because the only verification of that truth is internal recognition of the utterly reasoned knowing of the postconscious itself. This unwillingness is the great mistake of practically all of our accepted thinking, governed, as it is, by the Philosophical discipline, requiring evidence and argument that is accessible but which is no more than half-true because its fact is confined to present reality and its reasoning limited to the lesser capacity of the conscious mind.

The rest of Cohen's work, being based on this false premise, is irrelevant if one accepts that intellect is unique. Further comment is necessary, however, because her overall views are commonly, though often almost unthinkingly, the views of automated humans.

She refers to a suggestion, made by Adam Smith more than two centuries ago, that the uncoordinated actions of innumerable individuals pursuing their own interests could, in sum, serve the common interest of them all. I understand the reasoning on which this suggestion is based, but it is very far from complete. The only way in which humanity can serve the common interest is by way of supraconscious awareness of each individual's equal humantrue responsibility. Uncoordinated activity of self-interested individuals produces local squabbling and general disruption. Coordinated activity of the Machine served by humanity for material rewards produces dangerous conflict and organised chaos. When we defend the freedom to choose our separate culture or religion, we should remember the Palestinian conflict, the IRA, the Azerbaijani massacre of Armenians, and numerous more recent horrors. People who are not bound to morality by supraconsciousness are capable of anything. Humanity controlled by culture dynamics in order to survive indefinitely would be a meaningless relic, misusing its means of discovering and realising truth and so falling short of (and in any case being forbidden) its true ends. I see the application of systems theory to culture dynamics as the last resort of a society which has missed its vocation by failing to achieve the purpose for which it evolved.

Bernice Cohen goes on to claim that the long-term steady state is an illusion, in nature, the cosmos, and in the affairs of man. This is true of ourselves only insofar as humanity has not yet fulfilled its true purpose. Before man appeared it could have been said, had there been anybody to make the observation, that the concept of individual intellect - of the development of a faculty of ultimate knowing and reasoning in humans - was an illusion because no such faculty appeared to exist in nature or the cosmos. We return to Cohen's assertion that an abstracted life-system would be entirely meaningless, and to Chomsky's assertion that an idea which is not supportable by conscious evidence and argument must be groundless speculation. This is the reasoning of minds which (though it may be for the best of motives) dare not let go of the apparent certainty of conscious thinking because of the seeming uncertainty of supraconscious intellation and postconscious inner true knowing (inasfar as they recognise that phenomenon for what it is), and which therefore fall short of that visionary leap that is required to make us truly human. This shows prevalent human thinking to be stubbornly blind to the evident probability that the steady-state, or true equilibrium, is the ultimate objectof life.

I think I am right in deducing that Ms Cohen subscribes to the view, held by Capra, Roszak and others, that just as sub-atomic particle behaviour provides a link between cosmic purpose and the behaviour of matter, so should the human mind be used to convert cosmic purpose into human behaviour (taking the purpose of the cosmos to be to continue the manner and motive of all past and present activity into the future). I have to say that this is backward reasoning which makes the assumption that 'there is nothing new under the sun', and which turns intellect in on itself to serve the meaningless objective of life simply to live, and the universe simply to exist, by the blind process of cause and effect.

She also remarks that our ignorance is vastly greater than our knowledge. As I have said already, our true reasoning is far smaller, and our practical knowledge already much greater, than required to deduce humantruth. We hardly need more such knowledge, but the conscious and utilised postconscious, applied to instinctive drives, impel us to discover every physical possibility, which is one part of truth. The independent postconscious is capable of perceiving the superior humantruth, including the truth that, in the past, pursuit of every physical possibility was essential for the achievement of intellect. But once an intellectual species has perceived this, it will also recognise that in order to realise humantruth it no longer needs to autoprogress, but physically to stabilise itself, then to develop dramatically but only in the abstract (by which means stagnation will be avoided).

Ms.Cohen makes many other sweeping statements. Her book is an example of conscious thought, within the conscious arena, which offers a mass of evidence and argument but cannot comprehend the truth of the postconscious because that faculty's superior reason does not appeal to consciousness. The usefulness of all this lies in reminding the reader how easy it is to fall into the normal fault of being drawn, by realities which are false but consciously satisfying, into denying postconscious truths. SinceCohen's thinking is thus revealed as faulty, I will refrain from commenting further except on the most outstanding of her statements.

The Cultural Science of Man, making little or no mention of morality, or of the strengths and delicacies of human feeling, fails to face up to a problem of which the following is perhaps an appropriate example. Smoking tobacco is generally accepted, at least in the Western world, as morally wrong in that it is a most unhealthy practice. In a humantrue society, to smoke would be impossible because tobacco would not be grown or supplied for the reason that smoking was recognised as immoral by every individual, and because nobody's living depended upon selling it. In our present contradictory society we acknowledge that smoking is unhealthy and have warnings printed on cigarette packets, but companies continue profitably to market tobacco, and people to smoke it to compensate for a largely empty life. I imagine that a systems-based dynamic culture such as Cohen proposes, having to assume responsibility for a presumed irresponsible public, would have to outlaw the production and smoking of tobacco because the task of world government, it must be supposed, would be to bring responsible and health-cost-wise order to the presently chaotic system. As a result there would be a black market in tobacco (as there now is in drugs) because there would still be a demand to be profitably supplied. As a result there would be public resentment of government interference, and underground warfare between police and tobacco racketeers. This would threaten even more chaos than presently exists, chaos which is inevitable where life is a struggle between our humanity and our false reality, and one is bound to conclude that, to bring order to that reality without reform, a much more oppressive regime would be required.

Cohen further demonstrates her misunderstanding of the human mind when she describes thinking as a system to be used by humans, subservient to their will. This raises the question - what advises or directs will? Upbringing, education, the Machine, instinct? Is it her belief that these things influence thinking, which then advises will, which then uses thinking? If these and other such questions are persevered with, the inevitable conclusion is that to be truly human is to be supraconscious, whereby the agreed humantruth is to be followed by the individual, with a will, and served by society.

In Cohen's opinion culture is a human device to ensure survival, and the rate at which we have risen to dominate the Earth is a measure of our incredible success. But given that intellect is so powerful, as a weapon, that we could hardly fail to dominate; given the relatively short span of time that we havedominated; given that we have reduced Earth to a sorry state approaching exhaustion; and given the marvellous potential of intellect cooperatively to flourish, rather than dominate - a potential which we have almost totally failed to realise - this can hardly be termed success.

Ms Cohen claims that just as we do not need to know or understand the scientific basis of computers or the internal combustion engine to use a word processor or drive a car, so we should accept her theoretical base for the study of humanity. It continues to amaze me that the majority, including the authors of the selected few books I have reviewed, look outward from their consciousness and not in all conceivable directions from their inner postconscious. In the case of the motor car, though ignorant of its nuts and bolts we do understand its function. In the case of the mind we do not yet understand that its only possible ultimate function is to arrive at truth, therefore that to fulfil truth is our ultimate function. Cohen shares the prevalent view of the mind as a means of the personality reacting, in its preferred way, with its existing, supposedly inescapable, reality. Even to those who do not believe intellect to be the culmination of life's evolution, it must be obvious that our present mental processes and practices, arising from this common view, result from misapplication,not true fulfilment, of intellect.

She next states that we need ways of healthy competition to mature, also a mature capitalist system; that the existing established processes are fundamentally totally relevant to everyday life. On the contrary, no form of competition or capitalism, however mature, can be healthy for humanity, for these are concepts appropriate to instinct. Is it not obvious that our everyday life is not relevant to our true potential?

She claims that mass democracy, human rights, the welfare state and social justice are brain children of industrialising nations. This is misleading. These things came about because the Machine, especially in industrialised nations, made them necessary to humanity as counterbalances to its automatic inhumanity, callousness, and social injustice. They arose out of the battle between our humanity and the Machine, from human protest against the Machine's indifference; protest from individuals at all levels of the hierarchies. Matters of right, welfare and justice were once natural features of developed primitive life, which civilisation eroded and ruthless industrialism brushed aside.

Cohen firmly believes that the nature or character of humanity which is presently apparent is fixed as it stands, ie represented by the conscious self. She does not recognise that we have yet to achieve our supraconscious potential; that we are an intellectual mutation yet to be completed. This is tantamount to judging human nature from the study of a child.

She brings extensive but necessarily limited conscious reasoning to bear in order to justify her view that the Machine is perfectly acceptable because it artificially satisfies the inner compulsions and desires, and fulfils the drives, of instinct. This is to ignore our true destiny, which is to rise above instinct and fulfil intellect. It ignores the fact that the Machine brings extremes of suffering as well as satisfaction, and goes to extremes of immorality, with nothing to hold it in check but that which it holds cheap - the inner moral sense of humanity.

Denying much superior reason and siding with the Machine, Cohen accepts the concept of competition, the keystone of the money-economy. She sees competition as 1. a basic human characteristic impulsion of which industrial capitalism is the expression, 2. a biological imperative, and 3. a basic urge to strive against each other for survival which is given outlet, though in 'civilised' form, by our culture (ie the Machine). But this whole concept, and the current factual reality and evident human nature that represents and supports it, is redundant. Its aim is impossible of achievement, like expecting to eliminate crime by means of law and policing. The advent of intellect requires that we replace the lores of instinct with humantrue concepts.

Ms Cohen points out that in 16th. and 17th. century England the towns-people, disregarding what we now see as common-sense hygiene, failed to make the connection between their filthy habits and the epidemics of plague which they repeatedly suffered. Their ignorance might amaze us now, but we ourselves are little better for we are guilty of causing pollution and of other ruinous practices that already plague us on a global scale and threaten our eventual extinction. Cohen blames this on blind progress without aware control, but we cannot have it both ways. Outside of the strict laws of instinct, the principles of competition and control are incompatible.

The original town-dwellers ignored hygiene because, as they shifted from country to town, they ceased to be members of tried-and-tested surviving communities and instead became separated family units in service to the Machine. Obliged to fend for themselves, independently of each other but all dependent on the Machine, they shrugged off communal responsibility from themselves and gave it to the town - to the Machine, and its institutions of central government. Eventually government discharged its responsibility as regards essentials such as hygiene, as these needs became obvious. This was its function as servant of the people, but people had to pay for this service with money paid to them as servants of the Machine. They were now more than ever units in a system in which humanity was losing in its struggle against the Machine. The town tempted people to give way to the biological urge to follow the Machine and compete for its rewards, against the strictures of conscience and intuitive reason, leaving overall responsibility to the institutions of government (themselves staffed, to some extent, by competitive and self-interested individuals) and the political method of contrived compromise.

Now, as always, governments are torn between aiding and abetting the Machine, in order to satisfy the instinctive desires and drives of people, and undertaking perceived human moral responsibilities. Any government operating within the Machine, including a world government unless it uses oppressive force, must come down chiefly on the side of satisfying instincts rather than intellectual morality, otherwise it will lose popularity and be voted out. So it is impossible, by definition, for such governments to be wholly intellectually moral. Intellect is the source of morality, and morality is not worthy of the name if not wholly observed. It follows that members of present governments, although the most automatically intelligent, are amongst the least truly intellectual of people (and therefore unfit to lead truly) and are leading us to disaser. If world government did resort to force, ostensibly for our own good (and there would then be nothing to stop it), it could easily proceed to the conclusion that the only way of solving its otherwise insoluble problems was to become a dictatorship, which could not be voted out, and I believe this to be the inevitable end to which world government would come.

Therefore it must be obvious that there is no future for a conscious/instinctive human race whose members, within the Machine, are largely irresponsible. Such a race would require both competitive freedom and precise and effective systems-government such as Cohen proposes, which is an impossibility. It is well to remember that stable and contented human societies prospered before the Machine came to dominate, because their simple ways were within the scope of conscious instinct to keep in balance autonomously. The only way that modern man may do the same is by enlarging his mental scope to the optimum (supraconscious) level. World government could succeed only if it were itself enlightened and with the cooperation of an enlightened people. But to be truly enlightened the whole people must be supraconscious, and if they were so they would see that both world government and the Machine were not only superfluous but dangerous, and that these should be replaced by a humantrue society.

Cohen maintains that evolution is not aiming for a long-term goal or long-distance target. Once again it amazes me that thinkers can say, at one moment, 'we can never know the truth', and then can make a sweeping statement such as this. Even should she happen to be right, myself wrong, how can she be so sure? There is no proof. But it is certain that the burden of reason weighs heavily on my side. Evolution, occupying hundreds of millions of years during which life advanced overall, progressed without knowing or being able to know the purpose, its various forms adapting or dying out all unawares. Then human intellect appeared, which doesnow question the meaning and purpose of life and its own threatened extinction, and is capable of comprehending the transcendental truth. Surely the truth must ultimately stand self-revealed as the obvious end of evolution, of which the universe is a means, because it explains, contains and outlives all things.

Ms. Cohen's approach to a world system is contradictory. On one hand she says that natural selection in nature and industrial capitalism in the Machine are not coincidental - that they follow laws of nature which are as applicable to man as to all Earth's life-forms. On the other hand she says that individual rampant self-interest will benefit society only if it rests on a moral code. In between she says that we are not special,but merely products of nature with the added gift of conscious thought and language; that we are still subject to the laws of nature because we do not yet perceive that nature will dominate us until we take control of our future destiny; but also that competitive pressures will remain compellingly valid in order still to dictate that future destiny just as they dictate to nature.

These are common but generally unnoticed contradictions which crop up everywhere, all the time, and are irreconcilable. They are indications of the unresolved struggle between our humanity and the Machine in which we vacillate between strong instinctive impulsions and weak but insistent moral inhibitions. I exactly understand the difficulty. Cohen's thinking has taken place in the conscious arena, in which strong evidence and argument can be found to support both the instinctive and the moral case.

Our concept of education helps to explain the existence of these contradictions. The education system is a matter of the self using the conscious mind, and relies upon examinations to determine the effectiveness of that usage. Examinations are concerned (1) with memorised facts laid down in words and pictures as the result of formal learning, and experience, to be recalled on demand, and (2) upon proving those facts with evidence and argument, and interrelating them, by means of consciousreason. Examinations, like the Machine world outside, do not invite intuitive and intellatively reasoned response to the postconscious in the pure intellectual pursuit of humantruth, which authority would call groundless speculation. Examinations pose questions, framed by authority, the answers to which are predetermined according to false reality. This results in lopsided misapplication of the mind which is mistaken for intellect. Consequently the foremost figures of the hierarchy, most writers of books and most acknowledged experts, whose basic qualification is their high level of education (ie their learned skill in manipulating the conscious while disregarding the postconscious), are firmly wedded to Machine-reality.

In attempting to reconcile the instinctive and moral cases Cohen suggests an impossible solution, as others have done before her, namely that in order to survive and prosper world humanity must pursue an amoral and a moral code at the same time. She should have resolved this anomaly before putting her case, for it is a fundamental matter. Had she waited for her postconscious to advise her she would surely have perceived that intellectual morality is the only true guide for humanity and her case would have been quite different. All the same, we have Ms.Cohen to thank for removing some of the mysteries of the Machine. When exposed to supraconscious reason her study serves to demonstrate just how persuasive can be the false arguments provided by the actual powerful existence of our present wrong reality.

The fact of the matter is that we,arespecial, meaning not that this entitles us to special reckless privileges but that it gives us special responsibilities - that it loads onto ourshoulders the cares previously carried by instinct, but at the same time gives us the capacity to get much more out of life than its practical provisions and animal satisfactions. It is clear that Cohen recognises some shortcomings of the Machine. She refers to our entire system as floating on a raft of exploitation which sweeps into every facet of society; to the competitive capitalistic forces pressing down on us all with compelling conformity. Nevertheless, she believes that 'wealth creation' counters the evils of corrupt centralised planning; that moral socialist reform blunts the edge of pure capital accumulation which itself might resolve the dilemma of gross inequality; that though the capitalist system is founded on the rude laws of nature, it thrives because it allows everyman to fulfil himself by personal endeavour.

Cohen's criticism is akin to my own condemnation of the Machine but the conclusions we draw are different. I understand the sentiments which underlie what seems to me to be a conservative American point of view. As I have said before she takes humanity as it is, not as it should be. She mentions the evils of corrupt centralised planning, but surely it is well known that 'wealth creation' which she sees as countering those evils, has its own corruptions and inhumanities. By proposing the most centralised authority of all - world government - together with competitive capitalism, she is envisaging a Super-Machine, but this, by yet further usurping responsibility which truly belongs to the moral individual would open the way to yet further evils of corruption. In suggesting that such a system mightremove gross inequality she must be imagining it as benignly covering the whole world, which is to ignore two things. Firstly, the money-economy dependsupon inequality - winners and losers, rich and poor, the pecking order - in order to work, for if all were equal there would be no point in competition. Secondly, every man would not be enabled to fulfil himself, even in this limited, automated way, only, at most, every otherman. And even if it were possible for every man to fulfil himself in the capitalist, materialist way, we now know that it is not truly permissable, for Earth is cracking under the strain of even the present grossly unequal levels of material fulfilment.

I regret having to say that even Ms Cohen's long and heavily-researched book, in asserting that we must build upon the past on the principle of cumulative cultural selection (like natural selection), resorts to wishful thinking, as is the common habit. The author does not understand that when we acquired the faculty of intellect we passed beyond the laws of instinct; that all our present troubles - oppression, rioting, starvation, torture, massacre, revolution, deprivation, surfeit - arise from the fact that humanity is imprisoned in consciousness, torn between sensuality and morality with the wilful power to carry either to extremes, and that no supreme system of finance and authority, only supraconsciousness, can make us truly human.

Supraconsciousness's way of making us truly human is to have all individuals bind themselves to personal awareness of collective morality. We cannot ignore the inhumanities of 1989/90, brought to violent expression in China, South America, Russia, South Africa, Ireland, Rumania, the Middle East, and in numerous other places since. As long as humanity remains confined to the conscious arena these inhumanities will always be present just below the surface, ready to be expressed when emotions become aroused at the extremes of instinct; ready to boil over into atrocity. No doubt these instinctive emotional drives can be diverted into competitive economics and material consumerism, but only the winners get full satisfaction from this, not the losers who are presently in the majority. The loser's frustration may eventually boil over into violence and the winners, if their privileges are threatened, will respond with violence. Let me reiterate - until we are supraconscious we are not fully human. Once the self has submitted to the postconscious mind, and has been encapsulated by postconscious will, its behaviour will be subject to its own inner humantrue moral compulsion; the self will be incapable of false or violent behaviour, and immune to the crowd-influence which can draw peaceable persons into violent action.

What I am saying, with perfect certainty that it is true but apparently contrary to present expert theory, is that deterministic forces do govern, or influence, human culture. Now and in the past these were the forces of instinct, recently formalised by the Machine and its institutions. It is her analysis of the Machine that substantiates Cohen's systems-theory, but in the light of humantruth this theory stands revealed as irrelevant. In the future, if we are to realise our true humanity, our culture will be determined by the force of supraconscious influence. To continue click here