Revealing the Negative Cult (Part I)

Society may be the most complex thing in existence.

The human mind itself is something that we don’t understand fully.

Universities have traditionally spent huge sums of money in research funding, that is often government subsidized, to find the effect of ever smaller packets of neurons, under the hope that someday we will put together all these microcosmic interpretations of the brain’s function into a picture that explains what it does. Advanced equipment, like the fMRI and EEG allow us to look at increasingly smaller parts of the brain and to see how they activate under a given stimulus, but doesn’t tell us why particular areas of the brain activate when they do. And so a complex method of mapping the brain begins to take place, with no conceivable end in sight.

Upton Sinclair once wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” To come to a cohesive ‘answer’ about the nature of our brains, is due to a greater degree admittedly to the difficulty of the task at hand, but there is always the all too human reflex to leave more work undone than done in the attempt to allow for job security. This is nominally accomplished either through piecemeal work or through going to further specific domains of study, typically through the use of technology, which form an interminable way that the social need to maintain one’s status conflicts with the purity of the stated goal of intellectual pursuit. The forbearance of this portion of inevitable corruption lies in every human endeavor which relies upon profit as an incentive, because merely by definition if not all the effort is placed towards getting it right without intrinsic reward, it is incrementally diverted from its purpose.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from earning a degree in Psychology, it is that there are few attempts to understand the field in a rigorously cross departmental manner; most researchers establish niches in their particular discipline and bare down. If nothing else, many scientists’ seemingly benevolent bias towards scrupulous specificity may be there to conceal and ritualize this unnecessary rigidity.

This means that even on the most superficial layer of our process of collective sense making, as regards the human mind, our understanding is fragmented on a gross social level, a priori to collective digestion. Afterwards, after that whole thing is taken in consideration to society as it functions as a whole, it seems uncontroversial to say that we still don’t know how the brain works very well, we use top down statistical models to determine probabilities, but we don’t understand the structure, and that reticence is in some part caused by the social intervention in the intellectual process.

If a single mind is unknowably complex, what, then, does that say about billions of interacting minds?

Society is a massive collection of these mysteriously functioning minds all working together. It is no wonder that we have difficulty in trying to tease out the functioning of it in a calculative and empirical manner. Society is so extremely complex that we as individuals cannot give a full-abiding picture of society because the focus on incorporating all these aspects into our ‘societal sketch’ will inevitably cause us to overgeneralize on things that need to remain as clear as we can keep them for greatest survival benefit. In fact, as the function of the social cognitive biases like cognitive dissonance and ‘fundamental attribution error’ would tell us, we can completely change our self perceived societal context when and where it is fit to do so, and we can interpret distal or universal elements of society in the context of this construal.

This way of thinking has many possible consequences on our map of reality if we take its implications seriously. The first metaphysical lens we could adopt is to realize that social process takes place outside the domain of a given single human consciousness. Whatever society is to the individual, we only see a small, increasingly bespoke, portion of it.

Another lens we could adopt is that societal process to an individual is revelatory. Most of the process is unknown to a single person, and the developmental social track of an individual is akin the having to ‘dig’ your way out of a purely perceptual/emotional existence as a child, to having the ability to construct meaning in an individually relevant way and to have a grasp of common sources of media such that your are ‘culturally fluent’ at a minimum.

In my work, I have come to the conclusion that the incomprehensibility of society doesn’t only come from its highly complex nature, but also because there are systemics in society that come to mask these processes in order to benefit those who gain from the selective implementation of this information. However, the mere scope of the interaction of many incomprehensible minds working in concert, raises the relative complexity exponentially.

The Manifestation of Society

Society is necessarily composed of many people acting in concert with each other, however, like every other creature in existence, we must first consider our physical survival before all else; if we die, any argument or change we might have imposed becomes a moot point. This appeal to survival on a solipsistic, individual scale reverberates throughout societal structure and which is why history has rewarded developments which maximally respect the individual; i.e. democratic, economic (via the ‘market’), and religious, particularly the Christian ethic which came to exemplify the individual and form the grand culture now enigmatically known as ‘the West’.

Society, and life in general, has both a positive side and a negative side. Semantically, even if the terms ‘evil’ and ‘good’ are culturally and individually relative, they have to have some meaning in their use that has to be common enough for people who use the term interchangeably to be understood. Modernity has produced some of the greatest and most profound extensions of reality that make our epoch incomprehensible from those that came before, yet it has also produced some of the most extreme corruption and horrors the likes of which our ancestors could only dimly fear.

The hardest part about this, beside the paradoxical, heartbreaking nature of the banality of existence, is that bad people are not like those in myths, novels or comic books; they don’t typically admit of their own evil. Those who commit acts of evil still have to position themselves as the heroes of their own narrative, and the plastic nature of our social realities can seemingly support some mind-breaking contradictions in this regard. This means that those powers wrought from the ‘worst devils of our nature’ have an amazing capacity to eschew and divert the attention and awareness of others, and to even mask their effects such that the people being exploited don’t react. Though this may seem an esoteric concept, I feel it is pertinent to our times because we have some heavy siloing of our particularized social narrative which adds resistance to the social structure and slows things down as surely as cholesterol clogs arteries and subsequently puts more stress on the heart, and intrinsic organ for the functioning of the organism.

The Negative Cult (An Introduction)

I am here to speak about what is called the negative cult. This is a term that I take from Emile Durkheim, from his book Elementary Forms of Religious Life, which I have made reference to so often that it feels trite at this point, but, to me the sheer frequency of mentions is a hint as to how central this is to my thinking and how important I think it is for people to hear. I will attempt to extend the metaphor that Durkheim uses to apply to those forces beyond those merely ‘religious’, because I believe in the author’s ultimate conclusion; that the religious impulse is the incipient formation of society.

The ‘positive cult’ is determined by the central societal structure, traditionally represented by the religious sentiments of that particular culture and the ‘priests’ that form its plenipotentiary class. The reason why it is positive is because it can be discussed within the auspices of ‘good societal functioning’, in that the actions done are in keeping with moral sentiment on a granular social level, through every intermediate level of social concern.

The negative cult, naturally, is its polar opposite expressly because the power structures that form the structure of the negative cult are done by things that cannot be discussed publicly, and must be done, so to speak, ‘in the dark’. The actions of the positive cult form a ‘shadow’ in the form of ascetic affordances which are profaned and yet have an inbuilt biological incentive. Actions which come to exploit this dissonance are regulated collectively by:

• Moving down the status hierarchy structure of society (from elite to the public) ; this plays itself out as acting in the public’s ‘best interests’ by keeping them out of the loop, such as in covert actions and the ‘black budget’.
• Moving up in the status hierarchy (from the public to elite); this plays itself out as essentially criminal activity (expressly forbidden, whether punitive or by convention).

The reason why covert action from the power players in society is disingenuous is because it plays itself out as a double standard against the people who don’t have power, i.e., you will allow yourself to break the rules but hold everyone else to account as part of a ‘moral civic duty’. This is an important orthogonal point because the ‘hiddenness’ comes not only from the downward pressure to exploit while maintaining image, but also the upward pressure given from the central tenet of civic ideology that states that one acts for the ‘greater good’.

The presence of this cult should be unsurprising and uncontroversial; we know that despite our moral conventions that people are incentivized to act in immoral ways for given biological, material benefits. We’ve structured society such that these immoral actions are hard to do openly, and the criminal justice system is set up to make sure that these benefits are at best short term. However, it would be naive to assume that structures wouldn’t come into place to take advantage of the regularity of this aspect of humanity, which is the justification for criminal justice as a civic public expenditure, and this is the modern equivocation of the nascent ideological form of the negative cult.

And yet, it is surprising in that it is controversial, and that people cannot seem to separate the earthy, chthonic self from the idealized self, the social emanation from that material exemplification. This is critically relevant, because it is these two which stand in contradiction where one states ‘I matter’, the other that ‘we matter’; the homage to William James here is that for psychology we have an ‘I’ and ‘me’, the mirror image of this sociologically is the ‘I’ and ‘we’. We get stuck in rationalizing from a given perspective, the perspective of the world in the mode of thinking that we’ve come to accept as correct, and this becomes another node in our self conceptions that we forget are corrupted, erroneous, not well thought out, or purposely misleading. We can fortify ourselves against attacks against our ego by adjusting the aperture of social emanation and claim to be working in a particular group’s benefit, including taking the ‘moral high road’ by working for the perceived benefit of a higher level, more inclusive collective.

Because of the ‘hidden’ nature of such considerations, it becomes extremely hard to critique or to even make comprehensible to someone who is stuck from having their self-conceptions shaped by these monumental forces in society, which is eventually all of us to some degree whether we want it to or not. Much of the concern is asymmetric because financial benefits get tied in with the effective maintenance of these behaviors, the downward pressure is in keeping with effective concealment of these effects, so the trajectory of victimization tends to be from those of high SES to those of low. Often, there is an element in modernity, which is that appeal to base urges even beyond someone’s expressed intent; this can scale from the lowly drug dealer offering illicit substances that form addictive tendencies in the user, all the way to the tech companies that design applications to maximize the pull on our attention and to weaponize our own heuristic, reactive tendencies against us, even in contradiction to our regularly stated intentions.

In my belief, I feel like this explains why sociology, the field which is in theory supposed to be dealing with these problems and exposing and examining these problems within society, is somewhat insubstantial (to put it lightly). Sociology tends to focus on problems that ‘punch up’, but those that it targets usually are those with all the power and money, and so even when the problem is morally incontrovertible, it still fails to make a lasting and forceful impact. These modalities get subsumed, again, and washed by the positive cult, but the power of the negative still maintains supremacy while paying superficial lip service to the moral qualms of the proletariat.

Sociology has a moral element to it, and so what we get is ‘positive’ sociology; my continuing explorations here could be termed as the search for a ‘negative’ sociology’. As such, there are hardly any sociological examinations of how to gain power, because this is a near tautological anachronism. I’ve seen more than a few sociology professors who make appeal to their living in conspicuously lesser means to signal their adherence to this principle, as well as the fact that conflict theory has such an outsized effect on the field, and it is here that we can see something close to what would be considered a ‘negative’ sociology because it is a self-designation that comes with social deregulatory mechanisms.

Because of this, the academic grasp of these factors are minimal at best. This formulates the intellectual ‘negative’ space of the phenomena, and this creates continually changing opportunities because the landscape is changing and is vicious and purely meritocratic. This is a continual frontier, one which creates opportunity through shrewd action and full-measure operation; one of the most conspicuous aspects of many negative cult actions in modernity are purposely held away from the positive in the sense that you cannot ask the police to help you defend something illicit. If you are a drug dealer, and you get robbed, there is no recourse to go to the police and get them to execute justice for your stolen drugs while not holding you accountable for selling the drugs in the first place (an example of the vicious consequences of this in pop culture would be Omar from ‘The Wire’).

Violence, then, is the meeting grounds between the negative and positive cult. This makes sense if we consider that governmental institutions, those that have a ‘monopoly over violence’, are the modern day arbiter of the positive cult apparatus. These governments form the meeting place between the tectonic plates of the greatest human institutions colliding, the violence that occurs of an international flavor is done by militaries. However, there is another form of violence that is allowable by this monopoly on violence. and that is policing. If inter-state violence is militaristic, intra-state violence is regulated by policing. The negative cult, then, concerns itself with the basis of physical protection, because generally the most extreme forms are combatted with violence. If you are doing something against state interests, they have reason to spy on you and presumably to kill you, if the act is ‘warranted’ by proof of your sin. This makes it harder still to effectively track, or give examples for, because violence in such situations is self-condoned and the ‘cover up’ of damning details is the regular practices in the organizations.

This can give us a rough outline of the shape of the hole that the negative cult leaves, and also makes it clear that even those systems put in place to hamper the negative cult’s action are always under the auspices of compromise. Policing can only be as effective as the municipality is able to fund it, and that means that the scope of the ‘dragnet’ is necessarily limited by real world constraints. It is the use of sly criminal minds to realize the limitations of these systems and to put measures into place to circumvent them and use them for the criminal’s advantage, these are which policing sees are immutable limits of its scope. Yet the world is such that pressure is put increasingly on those of low SES to make decisions that will break convention or the law in order to compete on the same level of those with access to exclusionary social privilege.

As such, ironically those places where we can uncover the greatest depth of these forces are in fictional narrativization of these events because of the conscientious effort to conceal these effects in normative culture. These are where we try to make sense of how these things can possibly occur. We have a great thirst for accurate portrayals of criminals or even expressed with the obsession of many with ‘real crime’; we hope if we can come to understand the memetics of criminality, we can come to protect ourselves against its effects.

This is the same as the traditional ability of the positive cult to ‘deflect’ the evil magic of a witch or sorcerer through the use of ritual. These are inaccurate portrayals, in that they are washed for acceptance within the positive cult to the degree that they are, but they are close enough to give the idea of what is going on with people who live in this world. I would say that the interest in the ‘anti-hero’ trend is along these same lines, when looking at Walter White and imaging a man who went from a domesticated school teacher to a high level methamphetamine cook, we can still empathize with the character because we can see the entire decision triage that went into the process of making these hard decisions, and ultimately it causes us to be more pressed into identifying with them because we come to understand their idiosyncratic need for something not graspable within the positive cult within ourselves and we come to incrementally accept and respect the power exemplified from operationalizing the negative cult, as we come to realize that the reliability of its presence is inbuilt into the human condition.

In the next part, we are going to look at how that statements of Durkheim from his book show us how the religious, ‘magical’, aspects of the negative cult come to formulate the edges of contact with society at a granular level, as we tease out these connections and ultimately come to explain how some certain parties in modernity gets a benefit from using these inevitable forces that are hidden from accepted, normative society, yet can clearly effect reality as we know it.

https://shadowofleaves.substack.com/p/the-theory-of-hermeneutic-perpetualism

Before we can try to understand the phrase itself, we have to consider its nesting conceptualizations, namely, the question of hegemony. The term hegemony is used in order to explain a particular system of control by which the nature of the power is recycled and continued such that it gains internally motivated staying power, and that certainly can apply to very specific domains, but I would generally like to speak in terms of the idea of a ‘generalized’ hegemony.

‘The’ hegemony is a generalized system which parasitizes our individualized existences and transforms them into collective beliefs and actions, particularly as it applies to solidifying the axioms which surround the division of labor and the resultant status hierarchy which forms the basis of human society. The half of society that benefits from this arrangement have no need to rationalize the need to maintain it, and as you move up the hierarchy, this pressure just increases so that those who have the most to lose are those who defend it the most vociferously. These people have only to convince a significant portion of the remainder in order for the hegemonic pressure to be sufficient to perpetuate itself, and so, coincidentally enough, all systems of social control are designed to create this pressure and then to justify itself tautologically.

A giant factor of this dissonance between those who support the system and those who are excluded in some way, is that it doesn’t need to be an overwhelming proportion in the majority to still become effective. The ‘hermeneuticism’ is that which creates an air-tight system when it gets to its ‘terminal velocity’. The system gets to a certain staying power within the fabric of society that the cost to challenge it is greater than the cost to maintain it, and thus it becomes recursively reinforced; the ‘outward’ pressure begins to equalize with the ‘inward’ pressure of maintaining. The ‘inward’ pressure is the pressure of the system as it creates friction on the people who are tasked to maintain it, and without the self-justifying narrative, historically the structure will collapse in revolution and then a new structure becomes created. These collapses are costly and the system seeks the holding pattern which creates the pattern of generational power and the pooling of resources in the ecology/economy, such that outward cost of maintenance is minimized and the power structure becomes self-justified. The ‘outward’ pressure is the rationalizations which get perpetuated, which contradict these revolutionary tendencies. The ‘American dream’ being the most effective such narrative ever conceived, which effectively allows the illusion of upward social mobility in order to quell the nascent revolutionary tendency; this was the greatest genius of the founding fathers in that they allow for the conditions to create revolution in order to circumvent it by giving it as an option.

Capitalist hegemony is a key feature of the system, not a bug; the system of enclosures creates the hermeneutic nature necessary to force all ends into fungible tokens, and the collection of these tokens is self-rationalizing because the value is in their quantitative possession. This demands the question of whether other types of hegemony are present, relevant, or have even existed, but given that those things which are outside the domain of money that are of great consequence, such as matters of sex and politics, yet still become hegemonic (particularly the heteronormative hegemony), we can see that cedes the premise of our inquiry. However, the capitalist mechanism becomes greater and it seeks to monetize increasingly diffuse objects (as from gross examples such as in early capitalist systems to the derivatives of modernity) as the relative frontier of conflict becomes asymptotically minute. The capitalist hegemony starts to account for increasingly esoteric aspects of human nature as people come to rationalize everything in terms of dollars and market share, and subsequently people’s moral sentiments become locked into this mentality such that it becomes their own lucidly self-professed attitude.

This is where we finally get to the entire phrase and its semantic consequences; ‘hermeneutic perpetualism’, the perpetuation of the continuation of the outward pressure of a system of control through the reification of the system. This is most thoroughly borne out and utterly anachronistic when it manifests in people who are the victims of these processes yet feel the need to defend them in some show of obsequious self-sacrifice in order to gain some cryptic karmic favor. As long as these become touchstones of common morality, then it will effectively become entrenched deeply in the axioms of human interaction. It isn’t a function of it being instilled so that it perpetuates the system, it is that the system becomes so ubiquitous that the dictates of its limitations become the rules of engagement within the system. This is most evident through the capitalist model, in which people become fully bamboozled by the thought that some genuine efforts will end to greater positions within the status hierarchy, such that it is a system that seems on the surface to be meritocratic.

The illusion of a meritocracy is a founding ethic of our hegemony, because it is that sense that gives the dual sided feeling that: anything is possible with the correct application of effort, and that your position is rationalized by your ‘capabilities’ (or lack thereof). If you are a person who succeeded, than your lack of effort just increases the optics of your power in relation to its benefits, so it actually becomes an integral part of a person’s reputation for power and, predictably, most people in power come to fetishize a relative lack of effort and the relative outsized seeming value of a person’s increasingly fractionalized time. If you are a person who is a failure, the idea that you can’t achieve a given outcome is always compared to the possibility of being able to execute your discipline in a greater way, which each person necessarily falls short of. It then becomes a guilty conscience situation, where that person, despite possibly ‘trying’ harder than people who have ostensibly greater status and remuneration, think of the amount that they could possibly increase their efforts, and we completely underplay the structural reality on both sides; it high-stakes fiduciary gas-lighting. This is inline with the fundamental attribution error, but actually cuts against the usual interpretation that these limitations are strictly self-effacing, but that this proves that it can be used in situations where it might be better to do the opposite and accept the structural limitations of certain situations.

This may be the basis of the attribution error, and perhaps why it is culturally relative and flip-flops in more interdependent cultures rather than individualistic cultures, because it is established in the underlying logic of the western ethos. The exemplification of the individuation of the western ethic in modernity means, in the application of the fundamental attribution error. My function definition for that phrase here is that for successful actions of an ingroup member, those actions will be attributed to intrinsic capabilities of the person, and conversely for failures, those actions will be distanced from others while other ingroup members will focus on the structural elements which had a greater power over the outcome than a person’s intrinsic capabilities, thus relieving them of culpability. However, this isn’t broached in the attribution of the negative status of failing to succeed in capitalist systems; the logic, overwhelmingly, is that the structural elements have to be completely discounted and so the full onus falls on the intrinsic capabilities of the person, and thus is the underlying logic of a system which is meritocratic.

Why does it seem to be the case that when applied to the proletariat, it challenges the logic of a statistically significant element of human cognition? Could it be that in doing so, and creating the unimpeachable aspect of this as an element of the western ethos necessary for perpetuation of our capitalistic hegemony, for which we owe all the mind breaking pleasures and reality shredding horrors of modernity, will create the upward momentum required to innovate at the cost of the dehumanization of a certain proportion of the population. Is it possible that in keeping this axiom of capitalist culture constant, as our Archimedean anchor, that we have reversed the attribution error, and thus view the poor people who reveal our innate cultural contradiction and we therefore put immense leverage against portraying those people as the ‘outgroup’ to thus balance the ledger? My position would be that, naturally, this would be the case.