The Nature of Post Industrial Society,

Barren Plants from Utopian Seed-Myths

“Those machines whose output was so great that all men might be clothed; those new methods of agriculture
and new agricultural implements, which promised crops so big that all men might be fed—the very
instruments that were to give the whole community the physical basis of a good life turned out, for the vast
majority of people who possessed neither capital nor land, to be nothing short of instruments of
torture .” (Mumford 1922, pp. 115-116, emphasis added )

We grew corn at the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm gardens this year, and while the corn stalks grew to be
over eight feet high they were barren. The corn grew tall, but it was unable to bear fruit
because of the northerly environment it grew in. Similarly, we grew a strain of tobacco that
was gifted to the gardens by a company from the US, and while the tobacco grew tall, had
big, beautiful leaves, and even began to flower, it did not mature to the point of bearing its
seed pods. The tobacco grew tall, but it was unable to bear fruit because of the northerly
environment in which it grew.
Post-Industrial society can be likened to such a plant, which grew tall from the
seed—from the utopian myth—of industrial society but failed to bear the fruits portended by
these myths because of the environment (the Paternalist Worldview [Barnesmoore 2017a;
Barnesmoore 2017b; Barnesmoore 2017c]) in which it grew. The utopian myth of
industrial modernity, as we shall see below, purported that the lower rungs of the
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hierarchies produced by the Paternalist Worldview would be liberated from slavery, food
insecurity and the like by increased technological power. The plant of this utopian seed
grew tall, more food was produced on a global scale, human powered labor has (and soon
will likely be all but completely) replaced by labor via technological power, and yet the
lower rungs of the social hierarchies produced by cultures born from the seed of the
Paternalist Worldview and its myth of the solar twin’s conquest and colonization of the
lunar twin are still languishing in the oppressive rays of Paternal dominion. The plant that
grew from the seeds of the utopian myths of Industrial Modernity grew tall as our
technological power has increased over the past few centuries, but it failed to bear the fruits
of liberation for the lower rungs of the hierarchy portended by this utopian myth because
of the Paternalist Worldview and the associated Myth of Deliverance through Conquest
(Warrior 1989) in which this utopian seed grew to maturity.
My grandfather Richard E. Moore, like so many before and after his time, argued
that myth should be understood as the stories through which we create meaning out of our
existence in the world. (Moore 1972) Putting the argument into Foucaultian (2003; 2010)
language, we argue that human potentials for thought, behavior and being are expanded
and constrained by the myths through which we narrate our existence in the world. “The
power of myth is the power of metaphor and poetry to capture the imagination of
individuals and society. Myth supplies a sense of meaning and direction that transcends

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The Paternalist Worldview can, as we shall explore below, be understood in this context as being founded upon the ontological
assumption that order must be manufactured through hierarchical domination of the moon by the sun, of the heart by the mind, of
nature by man, of the feminine by the masculine, etc.

mundane existence while giving it significance.” (Coomaraswamy 1997, p. xii) In the words
of Geddes (1915), “Idealism and matter of fact are… not sundered, but inseparable, as our
daily steps are guided by ideals of direction,” (p. vii) and it is from our myths that we derive
these ideals of direction. The utopian myth of industrial modernity, the myth of liberation
through increased technological power, directed our daily steps towards increased
technological power under the delusion that increased power of conquest and colonization
of nature would allow society to provide deliverance to the lower rungs of the social
hierarchies. Post-Industrial society failed to bear the fruits portended by these utopian
ideals, for though our technological power and capacity to conquer and colonize the
natural world have indeed increased total food production and decreased the need for
physical labor, the lower rungs of the social hierarchies of our now Global, Paternalist
society have not been delivered.
In what follows we will explore the utopian myths of Modernity from which
Industrial Modernity was birthed including ‘The Myth of Liberation through Increased
Technological Power’, ‘The Myth of Deliverance through Conquest’, ‘The Myth of Order
through Domination’, ‘The Myth of Man’s Dominion over Earth’ and ‘The Myth of
Evolution as Control of Nature’ using Barnesmoore’s (2016b; 2017e) Nomadic
Explorations Method. In exploring these myths we will also seek to problematize them,
and through this process of problematization we will isolate the ways in which these myths,
while portending liberation, actually ensure the continued subjugation of the lower rungs of
the social hierarchy. We conclude by discussing how the utopian seed-myths of Industrial
Modernity, while portending the fruits of liberation, actually, in their assumptions
concerning the relationship between order and domination and between humanity and
nature, ensured that Post-Industrial society would fail to beget these portended fruits.

Utopian vs. Social Myths
“Up to the present the idola which have exercised the most considerable influence upon the actual life of the
community are such as have been partly expressed in a hundred works and never perhaps fully expressed in
one. In order to distinguish these idola from those that have occupied us till now, we should perhaps call
them collective Utopias or social myths.” (Mumford 1922, p. 193)

“The type of myth that concerns us here is not the pure action myth which M. Sorel has analyzed; we are
rather interested in those myths which are, as it were, the ideal content of the existing order of things, myths
which, by being consciously formulated and worked out in thought, tend to perpetuate and perfect that order.
This type of social myth approaches very closely to the classic utopia, and we could divide it, similarly, into
myths of escape and myths of reconstruction. Thus the myth of political freedom, for example, as formulated
by the writers of the American revolution, frequently serves as an excellent refuge for disturbed consciences
when the Department of Justice or the Immigration Bureau has been a little too assiduous in its harassment
of political agitators.
Unfortunately, it has become a habit to look upon our idola as particularly fine and exalted, and as
representing the better side of human nature. As a matter of fact, the myths which are created in a community
under religious, political, or economic influences cannot be characterized as either good or bad: their nature
is defined by their capacity to help men to react creatively upon their environment and to develop a humane
life.” (Mumford 1922, p. 194)

Before we journey into the most important sphere of social myth there is a need for ethical
clarification. In as much as there is no such thing as good and evil, only good and its
privation, Mumford is in a sense (though accidentally it seems) correct in his ascertain that
myths cannot be characterize as either good or bad. They can, however, be characterized as
good or as deprived of good, and it is beyond question that the myths of Paternalism and
Paternalist-Modernity are the archetype for good’s deprivation (as in their attempts to
manufacture artificial order through hierarchical domination they deprive the world of the
natural order from which goodness rises). Myth is indeed defined by its capacity to help
people interact with their environment and develop a virtuous (let us not take the absurdly
anthropocentric step of reducing virtue to humanity given the clear deficit of virtue
humanity possesses and the relatively perfect virtue to be found in so many of our non-
human kin by using the term humane) life, and the myths of Paternalism and Paternalist-
Modernity have clearly demonstrated that they ‘help us’ to deprive reality of its natural
order (of its goodness). Myths, like anything else, cannot be characterized as good or ‘bad’,
but they can indeed be characterized as either contributing to the sympathy of
manifestation with the natural order of the Nothing-Infinite Eternal (as facilitating
goodness) or as contributing to the antipathy of manifestation with the natural order (as
facilitating a privation of goodness) and the myths of Paternalism and Paternalist-Modernity
clearly fall into the latter category in assuming that order must be produced through
hierarchical domination and thus depriving manifestation of its natural order (of its
goodness, of its sympathy with the Nothing-Infinite Eternal).

“…Myths which are, as it were, the ideal content of the existing order of things, myths which, by being
consciously formulated and worked out in thought, tend to perpetuate and perfect that order.” (Mumford
1922, p. 194)


Mumford, at least in one sense, actually seems to have hit the hegemonic nature of social
myth right upon its head. Social myths present idyllic representation of the existing order of
things that, in the context of the Paternalist conception of the order of things (of order
through hierarchical domination), serves to obfuscate and obviate (from the conscious
mind) the actual dis-order of things produced by the decay of natural order that is caused
by attempts to manufacture order through hierarchical domination. The social myths of
modernity, for example the myth of deliverance through technological conquest and
colonization of nature (Barnesmoore 2017f), surely perpetuate the order of things that has
undergirded the entire history of Paternalism. Perfection, however, is impossible for that
which by its nature deprives manifestation of the natural order from which ‘degree of
perfection’ (absolute perfection is dimensionally incommensurable with the change,
motion, difference, etc. of manifestation and can only be conceptualized in the dimensional
quality of the Nothing-Infinite Eternal) can be judged. Perfection comes in sympathy with
the natural order, and attempts to create order though hierarchical domination cause a
decay of natural order, which is to say that ‘perfecting’ the Paternalist order of things comes
in the degree of imperfection rather than the degree of perfection it attains…
Let us, then (in the context of a society in which order must be produced
through hierarchical domination from which Mumford wrote), juxtapose social myth as
described by Mumford with emancipatory myth (which recalls the natural order of things
rather than perpetuating the perverse, deprived order of things that has been established by
the Paternalist, Paternalist-Modernist Worldview). Social myths rise from the hegemonic
order of things. In our context, they color inside the lines that have been imposed upon
our coloring book by the printing press of Paternalism, Paternalist-Modernity. If utopian
myths that have been raised to canonical status by the elite class establish the order of
things, then social myths can be understood as seeking to perpetuate the order of things. If
the utopian myths of order through the solar twin’s conquest and colonization of the lunar
twin have established the order of things for Paternalism, Paternalist-Modernity, then the
social myth of deliverance through technological conquest and colonization (domination)
of nature can be understood as the social myth that has perpetuated the utopian solar
myths of Paternalism into the context of Paternalist-Modernity. Social Myths color inside
the lines established by the order of things set out in Utopian Myths using the colors of
contemporary contexts. Utopian Myths, then, can be understood as establishing the
cosmology-theology of society where as Social Myths can be understood as establishing the
philosophy of society. Utopian Myths establish the order of things (the image of the ideal),
and Social Myths articulate the order of things in a given contextual environment (the
image, oft obfuscating and otherwise fallacious, of the actual). The myth of order through
domination (of deliverance through conquest and colonization) is a Utopian Myth as it
establishes the order of things, where as the myth of deliverance through technological
conquest and colonization of nature is a Social Myth that brings the Utopian Myth of order
through domination into harmony with the context of industrial society. In this sense, then,
most of Mumford’s journey could be more aptly explained as the history of Social Myth
that has risen from the unitary Utopian Myth of order through domination (which remains
banally invisible through Mumford’s story due to the stark impossibility of Mumford

thinking the that of order beyond the Utopian Myth of order through domination) that
spans the whole of Paternalist history. Mumford’s Story of Utopia is actually a story of
Social Myth, and the true story of utopia, of the original myth that established the existing
order of things in Paternalism and Paternalist-Modernity (i.e. that established the
assumption that order must be manufactured through hierarchical domination), has
seemingly been lost (though authors from Plato through Bacon point to the antediluvian,
Atlantian society and the lines drawn from Atlantis through Sumer, Babylon, Egypt,
Greece, Rome, etc. if they do not actually provide the original story). Luckily for us, we
need not remember this original Utopian Myth of order through domination to know that
hierarchical domination actually causes a decay of natural order (which is to say chaos) and
thus realize that we must escape from this Utopian Myth and the many Social Myths it has
produced through the many historical contexts of Paternalist civilization. Moving from an
understanding of Utopian Myth a myth which establishes the order of things and Social
Myth as a myth which perpetuates and attempts to 'perfect' the order of things, and
accepting that the order of things through paternalist history is rooted in the notion that
order must be produced through hierarchical domination, then we can say that all of the
canonical 'utopian myths' of Paternalist history, from Plato to More to H. G. Wells, are
actually Social Myths rather than Utopian Myths as they have perpetuated (and attempted
the impossible of perfecting that which causes imperfection) the same order of things
throughout. If we, like Mumford (1922), begin our story of Utopian Myth with Plato and
cohere with the canonical progression of utopian thought through the history of western
civilization, then we ensure that we will never actually touch upon a Utopian Myth (for
there has not been a new conception of the order of things, a conception that transgresses
the assumption that order must be manufactured through hierarchical domination, in the
canonical story of western utopia).
What, then, is there to say of the story of Utopian Myth? In this definition
there are only two utopian stories that I have heard: 1. the Indigenous, Shamanic utopian
myth that order is natural; 2. the utopian myth that order must be created through
hierarchical domination of the natural; the myth of the real and the myth of the unreal; the
myth of the good and the myth of its privation. All else is the story of Social Myth, where
these two Utopian Myths (the form of the order of things and of the disorder of things
respectively) have been articulated in relationship to the context of their manifestation.
Mumford said that it was beyond his capacity (indeed that it would have taken another
Leibniz [Mumford 1922, p. 195]) to tell the story of Social Myth, this is exactly, all be it
unbeknownst to him, what he did.

The Myth of Technological Liberation
“The people of the City of the Sun have wagons that are driven by the wind, and boats ‘which go over the
waters without rowers or the force of the wind, but by a marvelous contrivance.’ There is a very clear
anticipation of the mechanical improvements which began to multiply so rapidly in the eighteenth century. At
the tale end of the sea-captain's recital, the Grand Master exclaims: ‘Oh, if you knew what our astrologers say
of the coming age, that has in it more history within a hundred years than all the world had in four thousand
years before! Of the wonderful invention of printing and guns, and the use of the magnet….’ With the
mechanical arts in full development, labor in the City of the Sun has become dignified: it is not the custom to
keep slaves. Since everyone takes his part in the common work, there is not more than four hours' work to be
done per day. ‘They are rich because they want nothing; poor because they possess nothing; and
consequently they are not slaves to circumstances, but circumstances serve them.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 104)

“The Utopians ‘breed an infinite multitude of chickens in a very curious manner for the hens do not sit and
hatch them, but vast numbers of eggs are laid in a gentle and equal heat, in order to be hatched"—in short,
they have discovered the incubator!” (Mumford 1922, p. 65)

From the chicken egg incubators of More’s dystopia to the wagons and boats of
Campanella’s dystopia, the birth of the great Modernist fallacy that the woes of Paternalist
culture, society, politics, economics, etc., especially as they pertained to the impoverished
classes could be ameliorated by technology alone. Starvation of the impoverished classes
was to be overcome by the over abundant production of food made possible by
technologies like More’s incubator. The poor working conditions of the impoverished
classes were to become dignified and the slaves were to be set free by ‘the mechanical arts.’
The woes of life in the dominated classes of Paternalist ‘Civilization’ were rationalized as a
product of the lack of power humanity had to overcome scarcity of food, the necessity of
physical labor, etc. (rather than the Worldview, associated Philosophy, subsequent norms
of thought, behavior and being, etc. with which Paternalist civilization and its subjects
respond to environmental contexts like scarcity of food or the need for physical labor), and
in writing off these problems as a simple lack of power it became possible to ‘think the that’
of problems like starvation, undignified working conditions and slavery being solved
through increased technological power.
As we have seen, however, the power to grow more food has not given rise to the
amelioration of food insecurity (roughly one in three people in our world suffer from some
form of malnutrition [WFP 2017] and roughly one in nine people “do not have enough
food to lead a healthy active life” [FAF 2017]). Indeed, roughly one third of the food
produced on earth is either lost or wasted. (FAO 2017) Atomization of labor has in many
cases lead to even more undignified labor and living conditions for the working classes of
the world. There are more slaves today than in any other period of presently recorded
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history (40 million? [Free the Slaves 2017]. I am usually rather wary about such global
statistics given the difficulty of measuring such things on a global scale, but the numbers are
so astronomical that the exact numbers are not relevant to this argument. Technology has
provided us with the potential for a post-food insecurity and relatively (speeding at an
exponential rate towards completely) post-labor world, and yet food insecurity and the

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This statistic is obviously qualified by the fact that the population is also much larger than it has been during any period of history.

most denigrating form of physical labor (slavery) are still prominent features of human
existence on earth.
Increased technological power, it turns out, is not enough to ameliorate the woes of
Paternalist ‘Civilization’ because the root of our problems is metaphysical. The power to
control the physical world (the visible world) cannot ameliorate a problem whose roots lie
in the metaphysical realms of heart, mind and soul (the invisible world).

“The area that I come from has a lot to do with what I’m going to talk about. It is one of the only areas in
Canada that is considered to be a desert. It means we have very little rainfall. This is because of the two
mountain systems on both sides of our valley. The ecology is very harsh and dry in the summertime, and
therefore the learning that our people have had to accomplish and achieve over many generations, in order to
survive, has a lot to do with scarcity. In a land where there is not a lot of abundance, where the fragility of the
eco-system requires absolute knowledge and understanding that there must be care not to overextend our use
of it because it can impact on how much we have to eat the following year, or years after in terms of your
coming generations, we have developed a practice, a philosophy and a governance systems are based on our
understanding that we need to be always vigilant and aware of not over-using, not over-consuming the
resources of our land, and that we must always be mindful of the importance of sharing and giving.”
(Armstrong 2007, p. 41)

The greed and wastefulness that give rise to contemporary food insecurity do not rise from
a lack of power, technological or otherwise, but from the Worldview and associated
Philosophies with which Paternalist-Modernist ‘Civilization’ responds to the need for food.
We have the ability to produce and distribute enough food to liberate everyone on earth
from food insecurity, but this liberation has not occurred because of the hierarchical-
domineering manner in which the Paternalist-Modernist worldview and its associated
Philosophies impel us to approach the production and distribution of food. For example,
the High Modernist, ‘Factory Farm’ agricultural model—described in Scott’s (1998) Seeing
Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed—failed
to provide food security because of its Paternalist predilections. The High Modernist
agricultural model sought to develop purely theoretical (and thus of a unitary order)
agricultural models which were then applied without regard to the context of the place in
which it was being applied.

“M. L. Wilson, Harold Ware (who had extensive experience in the Soviet Union), and Guy Riggin were
invited to plan a huge mechanized wheat farm of some 500,000 acres of virgin land. It would be, Wilson
wrote to a friend, the largest mechanized wheat farm in the world. They planned the entire farm layout, labor
force, machinery needs, crop rotations, and lockstep work schedule in a Chicago hotel room in two weeks in
December 1928. The fact that they imagined that such a farm could be planned in a Chicago hotel room
underlines their presumption that the key issues were abstract, technical interrelationships that were context-
free. As Fitzgerald perceptively explains: ‘Even in the U.S., those plans would have been optimistic, actually,
because they were based on an unrealistic idealization of nature and human behavior. And insofar as the
plans represented what the Americans would do if they had millions of acres of flat land, lots of laborers, and
a government commitment to spare no expense in meeting production goals, the plans were designed for an
abstract, theoretical kind of place. This agricultural place, which did not correspond to America, Russia, or
any other actual location, obeyed the laws of physics and chemistry, recognized no political or ideological
stance.’
The giant sovkhoz, named Verblud, which they established near Rostov-on-Don, one thousand
miles south of Moscow, comprised 375,000 acres that were to be sown to wheat. As an economic

proposition, it was an abject failure, although in the early years it did produce large quantities of wheat. The
detailed reasons for the failure are of less interest for our purposes than the fact that most of them could be
summarized under the rubric of context. It was the specific context of this specific farm that defeated them.
The farm, unlike the plan, was not a hypothecated, generic, abstract farm but an unpredictable, complex, and
particular farm, with its own unique combination of soils, social structure, administrative culture, weather,
political strictures, machinery, roads, and the work skills and habits of its employees.”(Scott 1998, p. 200-201)

Scott’s story, of attempts to bring the power of Modern technology to bear in increasing
agricultural output, begs the question of how it was possible to ‘think the that’ of a purely
theoretical agricultural model developed without regard to the context of application. The
answer, it seems clear, lies in the Paternalist mythos of manufacturing the unitary order of
the Nothing-Infinite in manifestation through hierarchical domination of difference. Rather
than accounting for difference (for context), the Paternalist attempts to destroy difference
(context) through hierarchical domination. Rather than adjusting to context, to the
difference that provides for manifest functionality, the Paternalist Worldview impels us to
attempt to dominate context and to thus create a unitary, artificial context that fits the
abstract, artificial, unitary order of our theoretical models. “We are Borg…. You will be
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assimilated…. Resistance is futile….” Borgishness (and the assimilationist qualities of
colonialist democratic societies) aside, what is clear from Scott’s story is that, as we already
noted, problems like food insecurity, which are rooted in the Paternalist Worldview and its
presumption that order must be created through hierarchical domination, cannot be solved
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through technological power alone. If we are to use our technological power in a manner
that will actually serve to ameliorate problems like food security and undignified working
conditions like slavery we must first escape our subjugation by the Paternalist-Modernist
Worldview that lies at the root of phenomena like starvation that is not impelled by purely
environmental contexts like drought and slavery.

“Before the Industrial Revolution upset the balance of social power, there were little villages in England
where, on a limited scale and to no very grand purpose, a quiet and placid and fairly jolly existence must have
been the rule of things. These villages were those in which the land was either held in freehold by small
proprietors, or where there still remained for the use of each inhabitant certain common pastures and
wastes….
When the mediaeval order broke down the great proprietors began to seize this common land; and
during the eighteenth century, under the incentive of big-scale scientific agriculture, the seizure went on at a
merry pace. The peasant without land was forced to migrate to the new towns, as the Hammonds have
pictured in their graphic work on the Town Laborer; and the labor of the peasant and his family fed the
machines which the Watts and Arkwrights were developing in the eighteenth century. Industrial progress and
social poverty went hand in hand.” (Mumford 1922, p. 133)

Attempts to manufacture a new, scientific order of agricultural plenty and improved labor
conditions through technological domination, to deliver the people through conquest and
colonization of nature via increased technological power, served only to produce social
poverty, a decay of the natural order. Deliverance can never be attained through conquest

3
Star Trek…
4
Obviously other variables like weather can cause food shortages, but it is our lack of love, unity, compassion, generosity, etc. that
allowed all but the most severe of food shortages to become mass starvation prior to Modernization and which allows any sort of food
shortage to beget mass starvation in our own, globalized, interconnected day…

and colonization because conquest and colonization beget precisely the decay of natural
order that necessitates deliverance.

The Myth of Deliverance Through Conquest
“The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and those of the later men of the Renascence, arose, as I have pointed
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out, from the contrast between the possibilities that lay open beyond the sea and the dismal conditions that
attended the breakdown of the town economy of the Middle Age. Like Plato's Republic, it attempted to face
the difficult problem of transition.” (Mumford 1922, p. 114)

To understand the utopian myth of liberation through increased technological power from
which industrial society was birthed we must first understand the myth of deliverance
through conquest that undergirds the overall evolutionary trajectory of western ‘civilization’.
Warrior’s (1989) “Canaanites, cowboys and Indians: Deliverance, conquest and liberation
theology today” explicates the origins of this myth of deliverance through conquest in the
Old Testament of the Abrahamic tradition.

“Israel’s new dream became the land of Canaan. And Yahweh was still with them: Yahweh promised to go
before the people and given them Canaan, with its flowing milk and honey. The land, Yahweh decided,
belonged to these former slaves from Egypt and Yahweh planned on giving it to them—using the same power
used against the enslaving Egyptians to defeat the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan. Yahweh the deliverer
became Yahweh the conqueror.
The obvious characters in the story for Native Americans to identify with are the Canaanites, the
people who already lived in the promised land. As a member of the Osage Nation of American Indians who
stands in solidarity with other tribal people around the world, I read the Exodus stories with Canaanite eyes.
And, it is the Canaanite side of the story that has been overlooked by those seeking to articulate theologies of
liberation. Especially ignored are those parts of the story that describe Yahweh’s command to mercilessly
annihilate the indigenous population.” (Warrior 1989, p. 262)

“The covenant… has two parts: deliverance and conquest.” (Warrior 1989, p. 262)

“No matter what we do, the conquest narratives will remain. As long as people believe in the Yahweh of
deliverance, the world will not be safe from Yahweh the conqueror.” (Warrior 1989, p. 264)

This myth of deliverance through conquest can be understood as an iteration of the more
general myth of the solar twin’s conquest of the lunar twin (where the solar twin is
represented by the liberated slaves and the lunar twin is represented by the Canaanites in
their status as the colonized other). Dr. Four Arrows (Don Jacobs) has written extensively
about this myth of the solar twin’s deliverance through conquest of the lunar twin in
Paternalist culture and its incommensurability with the myth of the solar and lunar twins in
Indigenous cultures (where the twins work together in a harmonious, reciprocal manner).

“…Consider the phenomenon of twin motifs throughout mythology. Every culture has stories of twin heroes,
with the twins reflecting the complementarity of body and spirit; of solar and lunar; of male and female
principles. For example, the Navajo stories about the twins Monster Slayer and Child Born of the Water
show how important it is for these opposing energies to work together in harmony. In fact, most American
Indian cultures have similar stories about twins; one is direct and ‘solar’ and the other is indirect and ‘lunar’,
and they work together to fight the monsters that reside within. However, many of the twin stories from
Western cultural myths have evolved in such a way as to have the twins fighting one another with the solar

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In conquest and colonization of the ‘new world’ beyond the sea and the indigenous people who lived therein…

twin dominating. For example, Cain slew Abel, Romulus overshadowed Remus; Hercules became more
honored than his half brother, Iphicles.
Thus, playing out the myths of the separated twins, Christianity has emerged primarily as the ‘solar’
twin: active, heroic, intent on mastery.” (Four Arrows 2010)

“In essence, I offer that Western myths have split the metaphorical twins, making dominant the solar one
who either kills or diminishes the lunar twin. In Indigenous twin hero stories, the two work in complementary
harmony. I suggest that Christianity has emerged as the “solar” twin- active, heroic, intent on mastery and
physical, materialistic outcomes.” (Four Arrows 2014, p. 5)

The implicit flaw in this myth, however, comes in the fact that the need for deliverance is
caused precisely by the decay of natural order impelled by conquest and colonization.
(Barnesmoore 2016a; Barnesmoore 2017a; Barnesmoore 2017b; Barnesmoore 2017c;
Barnesmoore 2017d) As Meng Zi’s (2016, 2A2) Farmer from Song tried to help his plants
to grow by pulling on the sprouts and actually caused the plants to die, so do attempts at
attaining deliverance through conquest actually beget a need for subsequent deliverance
because conquest and colonization causes precisely the decay of natural order (of truth,
goodness, beauty, love, etc.) that begets the need for deliverance. This form of deliverance
(deliverance via conquest) will always necessitate a subsequent deliverance, for in the
conquest (hierarchical domination) by which deliverance is attained in the sun-cult myth we
initiate a new decay of natural order from which we must be delivered. Conquest begets
‘deliverance’, which begets the need for deliverance, which in this myth begets the need for
conquest, and the maelstrom of chaos begins to swirl inwards towards a singularity of utter
chaos. What we need, then, in order to truly find deliverance from the woes of existence in
an environment whose order is manufactured by hierarchical domination, in the privation
of natural order compelled and impelled by this existence, is to develop (or, more aptly,
return to) a myth of deliverance that does not serve to perpetuate the root cause of our
need for deliverance. Deliverance must be severed from conquest if we are to actually be
delivered from the decay of natural order that is caused by conquest.
Brought to bear in the context of the utopian myths of Industrial Modernity and the
failure of Post-Industrial Society to bear the fruits portended by these utopian myths, the
myth of liberation through increased technological power stated that we would be delivered
from food insecurity, slavery, undignified working conditions and the like through the
conquest and colonization of the world (of nature and of humanity itself) made possible by
technological innovation. What we have seen, however, is that our conquest of the world
through use of technology has not only failed to liberate the lower rungs of the social
hierarchy from slavery, undignified working conditions and food insecurity but indeed has
created the need for deliverance from new dangers like climate change and lack of work in
a neoliberal capitalist society. Not only was class hierarchy sustained and indeed
strengthened through the process of Industrial Modern conquest and colonization of the
world, of everything from agricultural production to human labor but those who exist on
the bottom rungs of the hierarchy are now in even greater need of deliverance (from rising
sea levels, from the increased ferocity of storms, from being rendered as obsolete by
artificially intelligent robots, from food insecurity, etc.) than before. The stalk of Industrial
Modernity grew tall as our technological power increased over the past centuries, but it has

failed to bear the fruits of liberation in its maturation to a Post-Industrial society because it
has sought to deliver the people from subjugation through conquest and colonization
(which beget a decay of natural order that necessarily leads to further subjugation).
Returning to the myth of deliverance through increased technological power, it is
clear that it can be understood within this Abrahamic framework of deliverance through
conquest. We are to be delivered from slavery by technological conquest of physical labor.
We are to be delivered from food insecurity by technological conquest of agricultural
production. And yet, in our conquest of physical labor and agricultural production we
initiate further decay of the natural order and thus ensure that we will again be in need
deliverance.
th th
“In the course of the next three centuries [from the 17 to the late 19 century] the adventure of exploring and
ransacking strange countries loses its hold upon men's imagination; and a new type of activity becomes the
center of interest. The conquest of alien countries and the lure of gold do not indeed die out with this new
interest; but they are subordinated to another type of conquest—that which man seeks to effect over nature.
Here and there, particularly in Great Britain, untrained men ‘with a practical turn’ begin to busy themselves
with improving the mechanical appartus by which the day's labor is done. A retired barber, named Arkwright,
invents a spinning frame, a Scotchman named MacAdam discovers a new method of laying roads; and out of
a hundred such inventions during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a new world comes into
existence—a world in which energy derived from coal and running water takes the place of human energy; in
which goods manipulated by machinery take the place of goods woven or sawed or hammered by hand.
Within a hundred years the actual world and the idola were transformed.
In this new world of falling water, burning coal, and whirring machinery, utopia was born again. It is
easy to see why this should have happened, and why about two-thirds of our Utopias should have been
written in the nineteenth century. The world was being visibly made over; and it was possible to conceive of a
different order of things without escaping to the other side of the earth.” (Mumford 1922, p. 115)

Nature, like the colonial other, is associated with the feminine-moon-yin polarity in the
Paternalist Worldview. As such, they are both to be brought into order via hierarchical
domination by the masculine-sun-yang polarity with which men and Paternalist civilization
are associated in the Paternalist Worldview. To provide a mythological example of this
shift, the search for the Holy Grail lived on into Paternalist-Modernity, but the ultimate
deliverance of the sun-cult—deliverance from death—was no longer to be found in escape
from time and space but instead in time and space through conquest of terrestrial nature
and her natural order. (Barnesmoore 2016c) Rather than a utopia of escape providing
deliverance through conquest of ‘new lands’ and the people therein, a utopia of
reconstruction was to be built through conquest of nature itself. Rather than returning
(escaping) to the Garden of Eden (which exists prior to and beyond time and space), the
Paternalist-Modernists set out to escape the Primordial Garden (now conceptualized as our
chaotic ‘state of nature’) by building a new, static, manufactured order of Paradise through
conquest and colonization of our mother earth’s natural order of unity and difference in
unity (the unity of difference and unity). (Barnesmoore 2016c) As noted above, such
attempts to attain deliverance through conquest only serve to necessitate further deliverance
as is so clearly illustrated by the ways in which the Paternalist-Modernist attempt to
manufacture a new order of nature through use of technological power has caused precisely
the decay of the natural order which begot the many and varied forms of environmental

degradation that we now need deliverance from. Shall we again attempt to attain
deliverance through conquest and again necessitate our future deliverance? Shall we
remain beholden to the illusion that increased technological power will somehow allow us
to transcend the inherent paradox of the mutually constitutive conception of deliverance
and conquest in the Paternalist Worldview, or will we realize that increased technological
power, when used to attain deliverance through conquest, only serves to increase the decay
of natural order and subsequent need for deliverance that we cause through our Paternalist
conquests?

“Those machines whose output was so great that all men might be clothed; those new methods of agriculture
and new agricultural implements, which promised crops so big that all men might be fed—the very
instruments that were to give the whole community the physical basis of a good life turned out, for the vast
majority of people who possessed neither capital nor land, to be nothing short of instruments of
torture .” (Mumford 1922, pp. 115-116, emphasis added )

The Myth of Utopian Order through Domination
The myth of deliverance through conquest (and colonization) can be understood as an
iteration of the more general Paternalist utopian myth of order through domination that
has given birth to both Industrial Modernity and its antecedents throughout western
history.

“Utopia has long been another name for the unreal and the impossible. We have set utopia over against the
world. As a matter of fact, it is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and the mansions
that people dream of are those in which they finally live. The more that men react upon their environment
and make it over after a human pattern, the more continuously do they live in utopia; but when there is a
breach between the world of affairs and the overworld of utopia, we become conscious of the part that the
will-to-utopia has played in our lives, and we see our utopia has a separate reality.” (Mumford 1922, p. 11)

“The more completely man is in control of physical nature, the more urgently we must ask ourselves what
under the heavens is to move and guide and keep in hand the controller. The problem of an ideal, a goal,
and end—even if the aim persist in shifting as much as the magnetic north pole—is a fundamental one to the
utopian.” (Mumford 1922, p. 23)

Mumford (1922) conceptualizes utopia as ‘man’s’ control over ‘his’ environment (i.e. man’s
transformation of the environment that God gave to his dominion towards ‘a more human
pattern’) in the same way that Geddes (1915) conceptualizes human evolution as ‘man’s’
control over ‘his’ environment. (Barnesmoore 2017a) Indeed, the will-to-utopia can be
understood as synonymous with the will-to-domination in this context. To build utopia is to
impose artificial human orders upon the natural world through hierarchical domination; it
is to learn how to be the master of our nonhuman kin (which is to say to awaken the civic
6
consciousness of Plato, Aristotle and Geddes):

“…In the Laws the Athenian remarks that education should be designed to produce the desire to become
“perfect citizens” who know, preceding Aristotle, “how to rule and be ruled” ([Plato, Laws,] 643e4–6)…. In
The Politics, Aristotle asks whether there is any case “in which the excellence of the good citizen and the
excellence of the good man coincide” (1277a13–15). The answer for him is a politea or a mixed constitution
in which persons must know both how to rule and how to obey. In such regimes, the excellence and virtues
of the good man and the good citizen coincide. Democratic societies have an interest in preparing citizens to
rule and to be ruled.” (Aristotle 1988; Plato 1997; Crittenden and Levine 2016)

“Nor is civics a mere vague discourse of edification, for the citizen, for his servants and rulers.” (Geddes
1915, p. 299)

As we can easily observe through the lens of Meng Zi’s (2016, 2A2) story of the Farmer
from Song, attempts to create order through the hierarchical domination of seemingly
benevolent paternalism (through pulling the sprouts to ‘help’ them grow) actually give rise
to death and destruction of the natural order of life—if we build our utopia through

6
Barnesmoore 2016a, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social
Psychology 1(2) and Barnesmoore 2017a “The Two Images of Sir Patrick Geddes, Liberal and Mystic”, Vancouver: University of
British Columbia, both moving from Ouspensky’s (1951) conception of Conscious Evolution in his book The Psychology of Man's
Possible Evolution, illustrate the actual incommensurability of humanity’s Conscious Evolution with the hierarchical domination,
competition, struggle for survival, scarcity, etc. of the process of Biomechanical Evolution that produced humanity and upon which the
notion of social order through hierarchical domination is predicated.

imposing a ‘human order’ upon our natural environment then we cannot but build our
utopia on the banks of the River Styx.
Looking to the potential for complementarity with Mumford (and Geddes), it can
be agreed that the multiverse consists of both our manifest reality and the unmanifest
utopian reality that guides our steps in everyday life. Indeed,

“Each main advance [in cities and society] has arisen with outcry or protest against the prevalent state of
things; and has developed from dreams and schemes which have invariably aroused counter-protest and
outcry, those of ‘unpractical’ and ‘Utopian.’ Yet these ‘unpractical dreams’ have none the less become resolve
and effort, and those ‘Utopian schemes’ have developed with the toil and sacrifices of some one or two or
more, but at first few individuals…. …There are, and always must be, idealists at the front, with little or
nothing beyond their trouble for material reward; but what they have sown, others already reap.” (Geddes
1915, pp. 379-382)

In the truth of such statements lies the great (potential) danger of idealism. Ideals do
indeed guide our steps in everyday life as Geddes (1915) so eloquently stated, but as they
can guide us to emancipatory, truly utopian outcomes, so to can they lead us to oppressive,
dystopian outcomes. What farce, then, that humanity—so near to the brink of mass
extinction as a function of our everyday steps having for so long been guided by the
perverse, domineering ideals of the Paternalist tradition and its search for utopia through
hierarchical domination—turns its anti-intellectualist back on theory and philosophy, what
we might aptly understand as the arts of idealism, and thus (though we may of course hope
for a more utopian outcome [Barnesmoore 2016c]) dooms itself to a sorrowful end on the
banks of the River Styx.

“Plato said that ‘the city may increase to any size which is consistent with its unity; that is the limit.’ The
modern political scientist, who lives within a national state of millions of people, and who thinks of the
greatness of states largely in terms of their population, has scoffed without mercy at the fact that Plato limited
his community to an arbitrary number, 5,040, about the number that can be conveniently addressed by a
single orator. As a matter of fact there is nothing ridiculous in Plato’s definition: he was laying down the
foundations for an active polity of citizens: and it is plain enough that all conscience that when you increase
the number of people in a community you decrease the number of things that they can share in common….
They become genuine citizens to the extent that they share certain institutions and ways of life with similarly
educated people.” (Mumford 1922, pp. 39-40)

One of the central fixations of Paternalism is the project of creating unity in manifestation
through domination of difference. Rather than recognizing the incommensurability of the
motion, change, difference, etc. of the manifest world with the infinite, eternal unity of the
Nothing-Infinite Eternal and its emanations Force, Form and Consciousness (NIE-FFC)
and thus realizing that a true, holistic conception of unity includes the difference of
manifestation, the Paternalist seeks to impose the unity of the infinite, unmanifest upon the
difference of the finite, manifest through domination of difference to create artificial
unities. Instead we ought to conceptualize unity as the Unity of Difference and Unity
(UDU), or as Unity and Difference in Unity (UDU).
In more practical terms, the number of things that people share in common is far
less important than what people share in common in the context of creating a community.

There is one thing alone which all things share (NIE-FFC). In our essence, in the core of
our being, we are all the same Infinite Substance, the same Force, the same Form and the
same Consciousness, and it is only from this shared foundation that a true community (i.e.
a community whose order is rooted in love rather than privation-survival) can be created.
Beyond this inherent unity—beyond the actual order which binds all manifest things
together—it is our differences that allow a community to function in manifestation. Look,
for example, to the many different kinds of cells that form the human body; while in
essence the cells are unified as a conscious, living being, they are only able to fulfill the
many functions that must occur together to allow the body to live through their difference
(if we only had brain cells there would be no skull to protect the brain). Human
communities are (or at least ought to be) quite the same. We are bound together by our
consciousness-love, but we are able to function collaboratively in manifestation because we
are different (we have different skills, different proclivities, different archetypes, etc., which
when brought together allow us to do things that are beyond the capacity of any individual).
All this is to say that the number of people who form a community is not
necessarily relevant (and surely should not be directed through hierarchical domination) to
the ability of the community to function harmoniously. We all share the one thing that can
truly bind humans together with each other and with our nonhuman kin, and if we could
but remember our inherent unity the proliferation of difference could be understood as the
boon to the human community that it is. Instead of seeing difference as a barrier to unity,
we could instead begin to see difference as expansion of our potential to more perfectly
reflect unity in to the motion, change, difference, etc. that typifies the dimensional quality
of manifestation. Difference is the key to perfecting manifestations reflection of the infinite,
eternal unity that binds all that which is together, not a barrier. Citizenship is, in this sense,
clearly devolutionary in being rooted in shared ‘institutions,’ ‘ways of life’ and ‘forms of
education’, for it is precisely our ability to express the consciousness-love that unifies us in a
7
multiplicity of ways (as many institutions, many ways of life, many forms of education, etc.)
that allows us to harmonize the unity of the infinite, eternal unmanifest origin of being with
the motion, change and difference of the finite, temporal manifest world.
I will leave it to the reader to determine whether this final point comes as a function
of nefarious intent or is simply an unintended irony, but it should be noted that attempts at
creating artificial unity in manifestation through hierarchical domination of difference
actually serve to destroy (or at least cause the decay of) an individual’s connection with the
conscious-loving unity that actually binds us together. As Meng Zi’s (2A2) Farmer from
Song’s attempts to help his sprouts grow through hierarchical domination actually begot
death, so do attempts at creating artificially unified social order in manifestation through
hierarchical domination actually beget the death of society. Utopias of artificial unity
through hierarchical domination cannot but be built upon the banks of the River Styx.

“Plato believed that goodness and happiness—for he would scarcely admit that there was any distinct line of
cleavage between these qualities—consisted in living according to nature; that is to say, in knowing one’s self,
in finding one’s bent, and in fulfilling the particular work which one had the capacity to perform. The secret

7
Dao.

of good community, therefore, if we may translate Plato’s language into modern political slang, is the
principle of function.” (Mumford 1922, p. 41)

Plato was misguided, deluded by the hierarchical perversions of the Paternalist Worldview,
but a fool he was not. The secret to a good community is indeed its ability to fulfill the
human function of harmonizing the manifest and unmanifest worlds, but this functionality
is rooted as much in difference as it is in unity and is thus belied by attempts to create an
artificial order of social unity through hierarchical domination.

“Every kind of work, says Plato, requires a particular kind of aptitude and training. If we wish to have good
shoes, our shoes must be made by a shoe maker and not by a weaver; and in like manner, every man has
some particular calling to which his genius leads him, and he finds a happiness for himself and usefulness to
his fellows when he is employed in that calling. The good life must result when each man has a function to
perform, and when all the necessary functions are adjusted happily to each other. The state is like the
physical body. ‘Health is the creation of a natural order and government in the parts of the body, and the
creation of disease is the creation of a state of things in which they are at variance with the natural order.’”
(Mumford 1922, p. 41)

This quote may be a bit repetitive, but in it we find the essence of the problem in Platonic
thought (or at least in the version of Platonic thought that was translated by and received
within Modernity). ‘Health is the creation of a natural order’. Natural order does not need
to be created—it IS! Health does not need to be created—it IS! Chaos is best understood as
the privation of order rather than something in and of itself, as sickness is best understood
as the privation of health. There is no good and evil, no order and chaos, no love and hate,
only good and its privation, order and its privation, love and its privation, and privation is
not real in that privation is defined by a lack of the eternal, infinite (the Real). It is only
when the delusion that privation holds the same ontological status (the same reality) as that
which is deprived takes hold of us that we presume the necessity of creating order, and it is
from this deluded presumption that we fall into the folly of the Farmer from Song (Meng
Zi 2A2) and attempt to create order through hierarchical domination. Order IS, and our
function is not to create order but to Consciously Evolve to the point that we can act as a
vessel for the eternal, infinite, conscious-loving order that is the essence of manifestation
8
like our nonhuman kin.
More’s colonial Utopia of Reconstruction provides another apt illustration of the
myth of order through domination. In describing the protagonist Raphael Hythloday as an
archetypal expression of the ‘sunburnt European sailor’ of the late fifteenth century,
Mumford notes:

“He has abandoned Aristotle, whom the schoolmen had butchered and had made pemmican of, and through
his conquest of Greek has come into possession of that new learning which stems back to Plato…. Conceive
of the world of ideas which Greek literature had just opened up coming headlong against the new lands which

8
Something about the human condition, which is shared by other highly evolved beings, leads to a layer of complexity in acting as an
unencumbered vessel for uncreated order that is not faced (at least to the same degree) by nonhuman kin like rocks, rivers and trees.
This condition is at least in part related to our ego, to our sense of discrete biological individuality, and is surely experienced in some
form by other beings, but this is one of the great mysteries of human existence and I have yet to be gifted with a concise way of expressing
this mystery.

the magnetic compass had given men the courage to explore, and utopia, as a fresh conception of the good
life, becomes a throbbing possibility.” (Mumford 1922, p. 61)

“…The new world of exploration brings us within sight of a new world of ideas, and the beloved community,
whose seed Plato had sought to implant in men’s minds, springs up again, after a fallow period of almost two
thousand years.” (Mumford 1922, p. 64)

‘A throbbing possibility’ indeed; the throbbing of the rapist’s phallus… Conquest of the
Greek language, in Mumford’s eyes, begets the utopian ideal from which conquest of the
‘new world’ would derive its steps. Void begets attempts to manufacture order, which
begets void, which begets attempts to manufacture order, and so the maelstrom of
Paternalism (whose polarities are nothingness and domination) from which Modernism
was birthed is formed. Rather than the spatially bound utopia envisioned by Plato as
constrained by the conditions of nature (by, in Geddesian terms, the valley section in which
it was built), More’s utopia was to be a relatively spatially unbound utopia ‘discovered’
through conquest and colonization on the frontiers of the world (as known by white
men…). Following from this spatial conception of utopia: Plato’s utopia was to be
manufactured through reconstruction of man to fit his place; Rome’s utopia was to be
found in the escape of man from his place; More’s utopia, which is at least in some sense a
synthesis of the Platonic and Roman utopia (reconstructing man through escape from his
place through conquest and colonization of other men’s places), was to be discovered in
the reconstruction of man made possible by the conquest and colonization of other men’s
9
places. Put more concisely, Plato sought to manufacture utopia through reconstructing
man to fit with the order of his place, Rome sought to return to utopia through escaping
place, and More sought to manufacture utopia through the reconstruction of man made
possible by conquest and colonization of new places. In each and every case, however, the
utopian order (be it of escape or reconstruction) was to be manufactured through
hierarchical domination.
More proposes a sharing economy that is markedly different from the currency
based economy of Plato’s Republic (and of Modernity, which has sadly followed the
Platonic model…). In the countryside, “…the Utopians sow and breed more abundantly
than they need, in order that their neighbors may have the overplus.” (Mumford 1922, p
65)

“Between the city and country there is a monthly exchange of goods. This occasion is made a festival, and the
country people come into town and take back for themselves the goods which the townspeople have made’
and the magistrates ‘take care to see it given to them.’” (Mumford 1922, pp. 66-67)

“…The family is the unit of distribution; and the city is composed of these units, rather than of a multitude of
isolated individuals. ‘Every city is divided into four equal parts, and in the middle of each there is a market-
place; what is brought hither, and manufactured by the several families, is carried from thence to houses
appointed for that purpose, in which all things of a sort are laid by themselves; and thither every father goes
and takes whatever he or his family stand in need of, without either paying for it or leaving anything in
exchange. There is no reason for giving denial to any person, since there is such plenty of everything among

9
If it is not already obvious, the term man/men is used because utopia was clearly for men in these three conceptualizations.

them; and there is no danger of a man’s asking for more than he needs’ they have no inducements to do this,
since they are sure they shall always be supplied.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 67)

“More goes on to explain this direct system of exchange, and to justify it. ‘It is the fear of want that makes any
of the whole race of animals either greedy or ravenous, but besides fear, there is in man a pride that makes
him fancy it a particular glory to excel others in pomp and excess. But by the laws of the Utopians there is no
room for this….’” (Mumford 1922, p. 67)

“In addition to the monthly apportionment of goods by the local magistrates the great council which meets at
Amaurot once a year undertakes to examine the production of each region, and those regions that suffer
from a scarcity of goods are supplied out of the surplus of other regions, ‘so that indeed the whole island is, as
it were, one family.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 68)

This economic system seeks reciprocity and general wellbeing rather than individual profit
and is founded upon the principal of plenty (innate to nature) rather that the principle of
scarcity that guides Modernist society, and does so through kinship networks that are in
part akin (though lacking as it comes to our nonhuman kin) to the gift-economy of the
Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (Mann In Press). That being said, More’s economic
system still presumes that an archon (magistrates and the ‘great council’) must manufacture
order in the sharing economy ‘by the laws of the Utopians’ that the order beyond fear of
want is to be manufactured. Rather we should say that it is ‘the laws of the Utopians’ (and
other such attempts to create order through hierarchical domination) that deprives humans
of their natural, conscious, loving order and subsequent response to the fear of want with
sharing and giving. It is ‘by the laws of the Utopians’ that the laws of the Utopians become
necessary. Laws, like other such models of hierarchical domination, are, then, a self-
fulfilling prophecy—laws produce precisely the privation they purport to constrain, which is
to say that their attempts at filling the void only serve to feed it!

“…The Utopians take care that the bride and the bridegroom are introduced to each other, in their
nakedness, before the ceremony; and the grounds for divorce are adultery and insufferable perverseness.
When two people cannot agree they are permitted to escape the bond by mutual agreement under approval
granted by the Senate after strict inquiry. On the other hand, unchastity is sternly punished, and those who
commit adultery are condemned to slavery and not given the privilege of a second marriage.” (Mumford
1922, pp. 73-74)

The record is broken… Order in sexual relations—reduced by the dogmas of the church to
those between men and women—is to be manufactured through hierarchical domination.
Monogamy, a boldfaced example of Paternalist attempts to manufacture the unity of the
uncreated in manifestation through hierarchical domination of difference, is upheld by the
fear of punishment (which is to say the fear of slavery). Either you discipline yourself to the
strictures of the Utopian’s hierarchical system of domination, which is to say you enslave
yourself, or you are forced into slavery and wrapped in golden chains. In either case you
are to be a slave, and the only distinction is whether you will impose this slavery upon
yourself (dominate yourself) by following the law or be enslaved (be dominated) as a
function of transgressing the law. Order is, in short, to be created by domination, be it of
the self or, if one fails to properly dominate the self, by the system.
“In religion there is complete toleration for all creeds, with this exception: that

those who dispute violently about religion or attempt to use any force other than that of
mild persuasion are punished for breaking the public peace.” (Mumford 1922, p. 74) The
record is still broken… Order in religious life is to be manufactured via self-discipline
enforced by fear of punishment. At the root of such narratives concerning the relationship
between order and fear of punishment rests the notion that human nature is evil. The
relationship between domination and ‘fallen human nature’ in the western-Abrahamic
tradition is well known, and so we take up the example of the birth of Legalism in Chinese
Philosophy. Xun Zi was the third great Confucian Philosopher (following Kong Zi and
Meng Zi), and his great innovation came in the notion that human nature is bad and good
order must be created through the external influence of ritual practice.

“Xunzi is known for his belief that ritual is crucial for reforming humanity’s original nature. Human nature
lacks an innate moral compass, and left to itself falls into contention and disorder, which is why Xunzi
characterizes human nature as bad. Ritual is thus an integral part of a stable society. He focused on
humanity's part in creating the roles and practices of an orderly society, and gave a much smaller role to
Heaven or Nature as a source of order or morality than most other thinkers of the time.” (Elstein 2017)

Xun Zi had two famous students, Li Si and Han Feizi. Li Si was the first prime minister of
the Qin Empire. Han Feizi is the founder of the Legalist School of Chinese Philosophy.
Legalism accepts the notion that the order of human nature is bad (self-interested and
covetous) and, dismissing Xun Zi’s notion that a good order can be manufactured through
ritual, subsequently argues that fear of punishment is the only way of ensuring that the
presumed natural, unchangeably bad order of self-interest can be aptly dominated and
controlled. In short, instead of trying to manufacture a good order of human nature (one
with a moral compass that transcends the limitations of self-interestedness), Legalism
accepts that the order of human nature can only be bad (self-interested) and seeks to
manufacture social order through manipulation of this presumed innate order of human
nature through fear of punishment. People must remain bad (self-interested), but that self-
interest will be hierarchically dominated by fear of punishment and a good social order will
10
thus be manufactured.

“The people covet wealth and fame; they are afraid of punishments: this is their basic disposition (qing 情).
This disposition is not to be altered but to be properly understood and then manipulated…. Moreover, to
overawe the people, the text advocates inflicting heavy punishments for even petty offenses, as only then will
the people be sufficiently scared as to behave properly.” (Pines 2017)

This Legalist model for manufacturing order through domination, we should note, can be
understood as a perverse fusion of the excessive revenge of the Prince and the
standardized, regulated punishment of the enlightenment described by Foucault (1995)

10
Yes, these are Confucian and Legalist Chinese Philosophers from the 3rd Century B.C. rather than members of the 19th Century’s
Freiburg School and Chicago School of Economics, but the coherence between Neoliberalism, its theoretical foundations like Rational
Choice Theory (which presumes that human nature impels people to make all decisions based on material self-interest) and the
authoritarian techniques of power it levies to dominate this presumed order of human nature and the Legalist model of manufacturing
order through domination that was developed over two thousand years before the birth of Neoliberalism at the University of Freiburg
and the University of Chicago should not be overlooked…
 11

though it be well over a thousand years older… In any case, through this comparison with
Legalist Philosophy we begin to see the ways in which Worldview (in this case conception
of the real order of human nature as either good or bad) articulates the potential for
Philosophy and norms of thought, behavior and conception of being as expressed in social-
political-religious systems. It is only when we accept the absurd notion that the order of
human nature is evil and human expressions like materially reductive self-interest are
natural expressions of this evil order of human nature—which is starkly opposed to the
notion that human nature is good and that human expressions like materially reductive self-
interests come as a function of a privation (a void) of the order of human nature rather than
as a function of the order of human nature itself—that it becomes possible to ‘think the
that’ (Foucault 1994) of manufacturing a good order of human nature through hierarchical
domination (and the fear of punishment produced therein). As the reader should by this
point understand, the result of this perversely false conception of the order of human
nature and subsequent attempts to create an artificially ‘good’ order of human nature
through hierarchical domination and fear of punishment is that the void by which manifest
human expression is deprived of its innately good (loving as opposed to materially self-
interested) order is fed rather than filled. In short, attempts to manufacture a ‘good’ order
of human nature through techniques of power rooted in hierarchical domination and fear
of punishment actually serve to sustain the deprived, materially self-interested order of
human nature they purport to treat by feeding the void by which the innately good order of
human nature is deprived.
In this light we can argue that systems which seek to manufacture order through
hierarchical domination and fear of punishment actually serve to create the problem they
purport to control and treat. In so doing, these systems of domination create an artificial
order of human nature (rooted in the privation of the innate order of human nature) that
appears to necessitate the very systems of domination that created the artificial order.
Hierarchical domination and fear of punishment beget subjects who are indeed confined
(by the privation of their innate order via the void which is fed by hierarchical domination
and fear) to making decisions based on material self-interest, and these deprived subjects
beget the appearance that human nature is actually bad and that systems of hierarchical
domination and fear of punishment are actually necessary for manufacturing a good social
order. Systems of domination and fear, in short, establish a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein
techniques of power that purport to control and treat the materially self-interested order of
human nature actually serve to manufacture the materially self-interested order of human
nature they purport to control and treat by feeding the void which deprives humans of their
innately good order and thus reduces them to the perverse, unnatural order of materially
self-interested human existence.

“The Utopians ‘define virtue thus: that it is living according to Nature, and think that we are made by God for
that end; they believe that a man follows Nature when he pursues or avoids thing according to the direction of
reason. . . . Reason directs us to keep our minds as free from passion and cheerful as we can, and that we

11
How are we to account for these stark similarities between Ancient Chinese and Modern Western models for manufacturing order
through domination and conceptions of human nature as evil? What influence lead to the death of Indigenous-Shamanic Philosophies
(like Daoism) and the rise of hierarchical, domineering Philosophies like Legalism in the era when the first dynasty of Imperial China
was born?

should consider ourselves bound by the ties of good-nature and humanity to use our utmost endeavors to
help forward the happiness of all other persons…’” (Mumford 1922, p. 74)

Like Plato, More’s conception of virtue is bound by the mythos of the Paternalist Twin
Motif (Four Arrows 2010), to the conquest and colonization of passion by reason, of the
feminine by the masculine, of the moon by the sun. A good order of human nature, More
assumes, must be manufactured by reason through its conquest and colonization of
passion. Order is to be manufactured through hierarchical domination and fear of
domination, which feeds the void by which the natural, goodly order of human nature is
deprived, and as a result the actual, truly natural order of harmonious, reciprocal, mutually
constructive relationship (i.e. relations enlivened by love rather than the will-to-domination)
between the moon and the sun (the feminine and the masculine, the latent and the active,
the infinite potential and the infinite actual, which is to say the primordial void and the
infinite-eternal that filled it, etc.) is thus decayed and deprived from manifestation. More,
like Plato, may use the term Natural, but the conquest-colonization order of relations
between sun and moon is about as natural as plastic (and has similarly destructive
implications for the actual, truly natural order of things).
Mumford continues his quotation of More:

“‘Thus as they define Virtue to be living according to Nature, so they imagine that Nature prompts all people
to seek after pleasure, as the end o fall they do. They also observe that in order to further our supporting the
pleasures of life, Nature inclines us to enter into society; for there is no man so much raised above the rest of
mankind as to be the only favorite of Nature, who, on the contrary, seems to have placed on a level all those
that belong to the same species. Upon this they infer that no man ought to seek his own conveniences so
eagerly as to prejudice others; and therefore they think that all agreements between private persons ought to
be kept, which either a good prince has published in due form, to which a people that is neither oppressed
with tyranny nor circumvented by fraud, has consented, for distributing these conveniences of life which
afford us all our pleasures.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 75)

“They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his own advantages, as far
as the laws allow it.” (Mumford 1922, pp. 75-76) The record is broken, but I can’t turn it
off… Imagine living life through this lens, where you have not been deafened by the
banality of your socially constructed existence and thus actually hear the sickeningly
repetitive notes of domination and fear emanating from all directions on the streets of the
carceral concrete jungle humanity has constructed for itself… Reciprocal relations wherein
the pursuit of pleasure is mediated by concern for the pleasure of other people (just men?)
in a society are to be manufactured through hierarchical domination by law and fear of
punishment. Domination and fear are to provide the force by which order is
manufactured. Beyond the maddening repetition of the screeching notes of domination
and fear that emanate from the broken record of Paternalist history, the ironic doublespeak
that forms the foundation for Modern models of sustainable domination again rears its ugly
head. Law must be consented to by ‘a people that is neither oppressed with tyranny nor
circumvented by fraud’, and yet the act of consent to laws lain out by the archon (by the
Prince who sits atop the hierarchies of domination that form the social structure of a
Paternalist society) marks the birth of self-disciplined ‘oppressive tyranny’, and the illusion
of free consent in a context where a lack of consent condemns an individual to slavery

marks the fruition of ‘circumvention by fraud’. Law must be consented to without tyranny
and fraud, and yet there can be no illusion of freedom within a hierarchical legal order
without both tyranny and fraud. “Freedom is Slavery” (Orwell 1983, p. 5), and Slavery is
Freedom.

“…They recon that all our actions, and even our virtues, terminate in pleasure, as in our chief end and
greatest happiness; and they call every motion or state, either of body or mind, in which Nature teaches us to
delight, a pleasure. They cautiously limit pleasure only to those appetites to which Nature leads us; for they
say that Nature leads us only to those delights to which reason as well as sense carries us, and by which we
neither injure any other person no lose the possession of greater pleasures, and of such a draw no troubles
after them.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 76)

This system of following Nature’s dictates would be laudable if it were not stated in an
environment where, through the domination (conquest and colonization) of heart by mind
(of the feminine by the masculine, of the potential by the actual, of the moon by the sun),
humans can no longer feel the dictates of the Natural order. Reason alone cannot tell us
the truth carried by the wind in the trees and the waters in the river, for it is with the heart
that we feel their beauty and thus know their truth. Paternalism burns out your eyes with
hot irons and then instructs you to find your way through the woods by reading a map. It
fills your ears with hot wax and then tells you to find your way by listening to the crack of
branches under the feet of your traveling companions. It slits your throat and then tells you
to breathe. Nature (the Mother) leads us by the heart, for she speaks with a voice of
feelings, and we cannot be lead by the sweet caress of Nature’s emotive voice if our heart
has been conquered and colonized by reason.

“Mencius said: “All people possess within them a moral sense that cannot bear the suffering of others….’
‘Why do I say that all people possess within them a moral sense that cannot bear the suffering of others?
Well, imagine now a person who, all of a sudden, sees a small child on the verge of falling down into a well.
Any such person would experience a sudden sense of fright and dismay. This feeling would not be something
he summoned up in order to establish good relations with the child’s parents. He would not purposefully feel
this way in order to win the praise of their friends and neighbors. Nor would he feel this way because the
screams of the child would be unpleasant.’” (Meng Zi [2A6] 2016, p. 43)

“‘There was a man of Song who was concerned that the sprouts in his field were not growing well, so he went
and tugged at each one. He went home utterly exhausted and said, ‘Oh, I’ve made myself ill today! I’ve been
out helping the sprouts to grow.’ His sons rushed out to look and found the stalks all shriveled up. There are
few in the world who do not ‘help their sprouts grow.’ There are those who do not ‘weed’ – they have simply
given the whole task up as useless. But the ones who tug on the sprouts to help them grow, they are worse
than useless, for they do harm!’” (Meng [2A2] 2016, p. 40)

Through the lens of these two stories we can understand two things. First, the heart-mind
(Xin, 心) allows us to know the truth (i.e. emotion, in its natural state, has epistemic
function by which we come to know truth) in a manner that is dimensionally
incommensurable with the rational mind. Second, the ways in which the conquest and
colonization of heart by mind (of moon by sun, of feminine by masculine, yin by yang, etc.)
that lies at the heart of the Paternalist mythos prevents the heart-mind from speaking its
truth.

To the first understanding, that heart-mind speaks to us of the truth, we can argue
that, as a function of the natural order of the heart-mind, the emotive response to suffering
(aversion to suffering and the will-to-fill-the-void causing said suffering) leads us to
understand the truth of suffering (its antipathy with the Nothing-Infinite) and our proper
relation to suffering (filling the void that makes suffering possible to bring manifestation
into better harmony with the Nothing-Infinite). We know that suffering is wrong and that
morality requires that we do our part to fill the void from which suffering emanates because
of the way that suffering makes us feel. We know that the potential suffering of the child if
they fall into the well is wrong and that the right thing to do is to ensure that the child does
not suffer as a function of falling into the well (by filling the void of loving care that led the
child to stand alone next to the well) because of the way the natural order of the heart-mind
makes us feel.
To the second understanding, that heart cannot speak its truth when it has been
colonized by the mind, Meng Zi’s (2A2) story of the farmer from Song illustrates the truth
that attempts to manufacture artificial order through domination begets a decay of natural
order. By attempting to manufacture an artificial order of life in the sprouts through
dominating them (through pulling on them), the farmer ensures that the natural order of
life will decay and that the sprouts will thus die. The same is true in the context of the
relationship between heart and mind. When mind attempts to create a new (subjugated)
order of heart through hierarchical domination, which is to say when the mind attempts to
pull on the heart-sprout to make it grow, the mind ensures a decay of the natural order of
the heart. It is this natural order of the heart, however, that allows it to respond to
manifestation in a truthful manner. Let us take up a banal example. Imagine a Paternalist
white person whose heart has been wholly colonized by their mind and its racist ideology
observing a black child standing next to a well; rather than distress at the potential of the
child suffering and the urge to fill the void from which this suffering is made potential that
would be spoken by the natural order of the heart, the Paternalist heart colonized by racist
ideology might instead speak the language of the fear of other and the will-to-domination
and thus draw the Paternalist, not to fill the void from which suffering becomes potential,
but to feed the void by pushing the child into the well. ‘If the child falls in the well that’s
natural selection.’
The heart speaks to us as a function of form responding to form in a manner akin
to Cook Ting’s relationship with the Ox:

“Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder,
every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all
was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the
Ching-shou music.

‘Ah, this is marvelous!’ said Lord Wen-hui. ‘Imagine skill reaching such heights!’

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, ‘What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I
first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox.
And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to
a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the

knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or
tendon, much less a main joint.’

‘A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a
month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen
with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between
the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such
spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after
nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.’

‘However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be
careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until
— flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the
knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife
and put it away.’
‘Excellent!’ said Lord Wen-hui. ‘I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!’”

(Zi Z 1968, pp. 50-51)

As the form of the Ox came to be inscribed upon Cook Ting (allowing form to respond to
form without mediation by the rational mind), so the order of the Nothing-Infinite is
innately inscribed in the natural order of the heart (allowing us to feel the sympathy-
antipathy of manifestation with the Nothing-Infinite, which is the basis of virtue, without
mediation by the rational mind). This statement requires some unpacking. Foucault’s
(2002) model of knowledge as resemblance (derived from Paracelsus), though describing
how reason may come to be founded upon the simplest and most universal things (force,
form and consciousness), is illuminating in providing us with the language necessary to
describe the process by which the heart speaks. Resemblance of convenience is derived
from a shared environment (force) of manifestation. Resemblance of emulation is derived
from being as an expression of the same infinite-eternal form. Analogy allows us to view
different forms manifest in the same environment to extract the essence of environment
and allows us to view the same form manifest in different environments to become intimate
with essence of force and form that is the simplest and most universal attribute of nature.
Sympathy and antipathy allow us to subsequently feel the harmony (or lack thereof) of
manifestation with the uncreated essence it reflects. Virtue comes in increasing the degree
of perfection to which manifestation is sympathetic with the Nothing-Infinite it reflects. The
moral sense described by Meng Zi, which is to say the natural order of the heart, allows us
to feel this sympathy-antipathy of manifestation with the Infinite-Nothing and thus to act
virtuously (in producing aversion to antipathetic relations between manifestation and the
Nothing-Infinite and the desire to fill the void from which this antipathy becomes possible).
If, however, the natural order of the heart has been decayed through conquest and
colonization of the heart by the mind, which is to say if the heart has been brought into
antipathy with the Nothing-Infinite through its conquest and colonization by mind, then we
can no longer hear the voice of truth it was meant to speak. The colonized heart cannot
speak truth.
St. Thomas provides a vision of morality that can aptly be understood within the
framework of the virtue ethics tradition (wherein goodness is defined as the actions of the

virtuous subject [McDowell 1979; Van Norden 2011]), which implies that there can be no
fixed laws of virtuous action and that a virtuous, conscious subject is required to harmonize
the eternal principles of the Nothing-Infinite Eternal and its emanations Force, Form and
Consciousness (NIE-FFC) with the motion, change, difference, etc. of manifestation:

“In the Summa Theologica we find St. Thomas propounding a contrary opinion: ‘The essence of virtue
consists in the good rather than in the difficult.’ …Kant’s compatriots and disciples—they held that virtue
meant: ‘mastering our natural bent’. No; that is what Kant would have said, and we all of us find it quite easy
to understand; what Aquinas says is that virtue makes us perfect by enabling us to follow our natural bent in
the right way. In fact, he says, the sublime achievements of moral goodness are characterized by
effortlessness—because it is of their essence to spring from love.” (Pieper 2009, p. 33)

Human nature is, in this framework, Good, and the pursuit of virtue comes in staving off
privation of this good (privatio boni) rather than in dominating some ‘essentially bad’
aspect of our nature. St. Thomas is still located in the Paternalist stream, and so there is
still an element of dominating the self that is presumed as necessary for actualizing the
potential to follow our natural bent, but when purified of Paternalist perversion St.
Thomas’ vision of virtue comes much closer to the truth than do the post-Kantian
perversions of Modernity. Virtue comes in emulation of the natural order, in the sprouts of
goodness that lead the untainted to feel the necessity of saving a child from falling into a
well (Meng Zi 2A6), and not through manufacturing order through hierarchical domination
(which actually begets a decay of the natural order upon which virtue rests [Meng Zi 2A2]).

Myth of Modernist Newness
Ogborn’s myopic definition of Modernism situates Modernity in temporal terms, as
‘newness’.

“What does it mean to call something ‘modern’? In part it simply means that it is new, up to date or of the
moment. This might relate to (modern) technology, art or life as a whole, and these descriptions are about
understanding how the world is changing. Sometimes this idea of ‘modernity’—the condition of being
modern—is used to celebrate newness, perhaps to encourage people to adopt and innovation or, in the case
of political parties (like the British Labour Party in the 1990s), to attract a wider range of voters to a new set of
policies. Sometimes it is part of complaints that the modern world is moving on and leaving much that is
valuable behind… Whichever point of view is taken, the idea of ‘modernity’ situates people in time. It
suggests that time is divided up into past, present and future. It gives a certain value or significance to the past
(positive or negative), and it make the present important as a time of change and of decisions about what the
future might be.” (Ogborn 2015, p. 1)

To begin, Ogborn’s argument seeks to trap people in the dialectical-hegemonic pincers of

‘two points of view’ that accept the same basic premise (that Modernism concerns
newness). You may choose to argue that the newness is good or bad, but your choices only
include those which accept that Modernism is typified by its newness. What is obfuscated
by this dialectical-hegemonic technique of power (which we will describe as the Myth of
Modernist Newness)? The answer, of course, is relatively obvious. The Myth of Modernist
Newness serves to obfuscate those dimensions of Modernism that are not new. What is old
about Modernism? Its conceptions of order.

“To begin with, the city is laid out by an engineer it is laid out with a mathematical correctness and with a
complete disregard for the amenities. If there are hills where Coketown ought to stand, the hills are leveled; if
there are swamps, the swamps are filled; if there are lakes, the lakes are drained away.” (Mumford 1922, p.
212)

Modernism, then, seems to clearly replicate the Paternalist conception of order through
domination that has been expressed, for example, in the Abrahamic tradition.

“Israel’s new dream became the land of Canaan. And Yahweh was still with them: Yahweh promised to go
before the people and given them Canaan, with its flowing milk and honey. The land, Yahweh decided,
belonged to these former slaves from Egypt and Yahweh planned on giving it to them—using the same power
used against the enslaving Egyptians to defeat the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan. Yahweh the deliverer
became Yahweh the conqueror.
The obvious characters in the story for Native Americans to identify with are the Canaanites, the
people who already lived in the promised land. As a member of the Osage Nation of American Indians who
stands in solidarity with other tribal people around the world, I read the Exodus stories with Canaanite eyes.
And, it is the Canaanite side of the story that has been overlooked by those seeking to articulate theologies of
liberation. Especially ignored are those parts of the story that describe Yahweh’s command to mercilessly
annihilate the indigenous population.” (Warrior 1989, p. 262)

“The covenant… has two parts: deliverance and conquest.” (Warrior 1989, p. 262)

“No matter what we do, the conquest narratives will remain. As long as people believe in the Yahweh of
deliverance, the world will not be safe from Yahweh the conqueror.” (Warrior 1989, p. 264)


Order, be it the order of deliverance in the Abrahamic context or the order of nature in the
Modernist context, is to be manufactured through conquest and colonization. In this sense,
Modernism is anything but new. It is a perfect fabrication of the Paternalist conception of
order through domination in the terms of the Modernist Worldview and its reduction of
reality to passing time and physical space. There are of course dimensions of Modernism
that are new—one needn’t look beyond the wide array of new technologies that it has
brought us—but the problems that have arisen from our use of technology in Modernity
rise not from the new technologies, in and of themselves, but in of the old conceptions of
order through domination that provide continuity between Modernism and its Paternalist
antecedents.

Myth of Liberation via Perpetual
Improvement
Beyond the myth of liberation through technological power we must also mention the myth
of liberation through perpetual improvement if we are to understand the political sterility of
Post-Industrial Modernity. The myth of perpetual improvement can be understood in
terms of a perpetual improvement of life for the lower rungs of a hierarchical structure.
Instead of transcending subjugation, the state of subjugation improves at a steady pace (in
functional relationship to the overall advancement of society) which creates the illusion that
things are changing for the better. If people believe that they are in the process of being
liberated from subjugation because they see a steady improvement of conditions they will
never revolt against their subjugation. I am reminded of a rather nasty conversation in a
seminar with ‘the Reverend’ Dr. David Ley. Ley was defending liberal democracy by
th
arguing that conditions have improved for the majority of the impoverished classes the 20
st
and early 21 century. A few students in the seminar, myself included, responded that these
improvements in the standard of living have not changed the hierarchical structure of the
system or where the majority of people exist in that hierarchical structure. For ‘the
Reverend’, the illusion that the people were being liberated, which had been manufactured
by the perpetual improvement of general living conditions (most of which have occurred
for all rungs of the hierarchy as a function of technological changes) in his lifetime, was
enough to produce dogmatic adherence to the hierarchical structures of liberal democracy
and the social inequities necessitated therein. The potential for revolution against the
system itself, in short, was negated by the myth of perpetual improvement and its equating
improved living conditions with liberation from subjugation. Just give slaves nicer clothes, a
12
bigger shelter and a little more food each generation so that they believe that things are
getting better and thus accept their subjugation to the lower rungs of the social hierarchy…
Obfuscate the fact that improvement of conditions for the slave classes has come as a
function of the overall development of society and instead masque this improvement as a
shift in relations between the top and the bottom of the hierarchy so that the slaves will
continue to submit to their subjugation… Conservation was a policy to preserve resources,
13
not only for industry, but also for moral formation, for the achievement of manhood.
(Haraway 1989, p. 55) The myth of perpetual improvement is but a trope of this the
conservationist model of hierarchical domination, where resources (i.e. the lower rungs of
14
the hierarchy) are preserved for industry (as labor ) and the achievement of manhood by
the elite class through domination of the lower rungs of the hierarchy who are, like nature,
equated with the moon in the sun cult myth of deliverance through conquest and

12
In direct proportion to the overall improvement of clothing, housing stock and food production begotten by increased technological
power.
13
To manufacture a ‘sustainable’ order of terrestrial nature that would it allow it to be dominated, both for the sake of extraction,
production and consumption and for the sake of self-mastery through conquest and colonization of terrestrial nature by man (which is to
say the conquest and colonization of the feminine by the masculine that underlies the sun-cult mythos of Paternalism and Paternalist-
Modernism).
14
One wonders whether the elite class will continue to conserve the lower rungs of the hierarchy as they have as they loose their identity
as a necessary resource for economic production or if these lower rungs will simply be excised through population control…

colonization of the moon by the sun).

“…The slum proletariat has been abolished; everyone belongs to the middle class and enjoys the felicities of a
high-grade clerk or an engineer or minor official. This is the peculiarity of our nineteenth century Utopians:
they do not so much criticize the goods of their times as demand more of them! Buckingham and Hertzka,
though they differ in details, wish to extend middle class values throughout society—comfort and security and
a plenitude of soap and sanitation. Even when the means they propose are revolutionary, the institutions they
would erect are conceived very much in the image of current use and wont, and are unspeakably tame.”
(Mumford 1922, p. 146)

Thanks for the soap massa (ill make sure not to drop it…)! I am sure you gave it to me out
of the warmness of your heart rather than out of your fear of the diseases that permeated
the slave classes prior to the rise of modern sanitation standards!!! … … … When have the
lives of the slave class been improved by the archons of western society for any reason
other than the wellbeing of said archons? Education was given so that the people would
dominate themselves and the archons would thus be safe from reprisals inspired by the
‘excessive revenge of the prince’ by which the people had previously been dominated.
(Foucault 1977) Soap was given to protect the archons from disease. Liberation from
slavery in the US was granted by the archons of the north so that the slaves could move
north to work for slave wages in industrial factories. (Wacquant 2009)

The Myth of Freedom and Agency
Beneath the myth of perpetual improvement lies the more general myth of freedom and
agency that forms the foundation for the sustainable model of domination that reigns in
both Industrial and Post-Industrial Modernity.

“All the Utopias that we have dealt with so far have been filtered through an individual mind, and whereas,
like any other piece of literature, they grew out of a certain age and tradition of thought, it is dangerous to
overrate their importance either as mirrors of the existing order or as projectors of a new order. While again
and again the dream of a Utopian in one age has become the reality of the next, as O'Shaughnessy sings in his
famous verses, the exact connection between the two can only be guessed at, and rarely, I suppose, can it be
traced. It would be a little foolish to attempt to prove that the inventor of the modern incubator was a student
of Sir Thomas More.” (Mumford 1922, p. 193)

It seems that Mumford’s desire to attain linear, discrete, rational knowledge leads him
astray in understanding the influence of utopian myths upon the banally invisible,
commonsensical ‘order of things’ in society. By seeking to trace discrete, cause and effect
relations between myth and the order of things from the perspective of a Worldview that
has rendered the underlying order of things that spans the entire history of Paternalist (and
indeed Maternalist) thought (i.e. the notion that order must be produced through
hierarchical domination), Mumford fails to see that myth is both a mirror of the existing
order of things and a projector of new orders of things. Let us take up the example
provided by Mumford above. More’s utopian vision both mirrored the existing order of
things and contributed to the production of a new order of things in his production of the
myth of deliverance through technological conquest and colonization. It mirrored the
existing, hegemonic order of things in replicating the age-old myth of deliverance through
conquest and colonization. (Warrior 1989) It contributed to the production of the
Modernist order of things by narrating the myth of deliverance through conquest and
colonization in terms of increased technological power (i.e. deliverance was to be made
possible by increased technological power to dominate nature and manufacture an artificial
order of things).
Did More’s utopian vision have a direct, linear, rationally knowable, causal, etc.
effect on the inventor of the incubator? Mumford is right that we cannot provide a
definitive answer to this question, but that is irrelevant. We can provide the definitive
answer that the utopian visions of elite class actors like More, which become the myths
through which the rest of the hegemonic public narrates their existence, establish the order
of things (both in mirroring the existing, banally invisible order of things and in establishing
a new narration of that banally invisible order of things). So, whether the inventor of the
incubator read More himself or was simply socialized in the Paternalist-Modernist culture
and its banally invisible conception of the order of things that rose out of the assemblage of
utopian myths in which More’s is embedded, whether the inventor was influenced by More
or another such utopian thinker or by an individual who was influenced by an individual
who was influenced by an individual etc. who was influenced by More or another such
utopian thinker, whether we can trace the influence directly or must understand it in non-
linear terms, it is clear that the inventor of the incubator existed with a culture, myth,

worldview, philosophy, etc. that was established by thinkers like More and the giants like
Plato upon whose shoulders they stood.
This all seems rather simple. The myths which have been written by members
of the elite class and raised to canonical status by members of the elite class form the
foundation for culture (be they the myths of deliverance through conquest and colonization
of the old testament, which were raised to canonical status by elite class members of the
Roman empire, or the myths of technological deliverance through increased technological
power to dominate [conquer and colonize] nature, which were raised to canonical status by
the elite class in Britain and beyond) form the foundation from which hegemonic culture
rises. Why, then, is Mumford so hesitant to draw these domineering connections between
myths produced and raised to canonical level by the elite class and the worldview,
philosophy, thoughts, feelings, behaviors and being of the dominant public (elite and
general)? Mumford is clearly trying to engage with the age-old fallacy of Democratic
Modernity, that popular culture and the myths, worldview, philosophy, etc. in which
popular culture is rooted comes as a reflection of the general public rather than as a
function of the desires of the elite class who produces the myths, worldview and philosophy
of hierarchical societies. I’m sure this will sound cynical to dogmatic adherents of the myths
of Paternalist-Modernity, but this game of pretending that the general public rather than the
elite class are the progenitors of dominant culture is just another farcical attempt to
manufacture the illusion of agency and freedom upon which the sustainable model of
hierarchical domination is built. Instead of attempting to draw linear, materially rational
cause and effect relations between an elite class myth progenitor like More and an inventor,
let us instead observe the non-linear relationship that surely exists between 1. myths
produced and raised to canonical status by the elite class and associated worldview-
philosophy and 2. the norms of thought, feeling, behavior, and being in a society’s
hegemonic culture. It is enough to know that the great myths of our society have been
produced by the elite, interpreted by the elite and and raised to canonical status by the
elite, to know that myth articulates worldview and philosophy and to know that worldview
and philosophy articulate the potentials for thought, feeling, behavior and being. The linear
relationship between a single myth and a single person is irrelevant if we understand the
non-linear relationship between myth and social power. This will be important in the
following section where Mumford, like so many in the camp of sustainable domination,
seeks to perpetuate the myth of public agency and freedom upon which the sustainable
model of domination is built.
On and on, my contemporaries whine that we must not understand the public
as an object of elite class domination. On and on, my contemporaries claim that framing
the public as an active participant and indeed agential actor in society is inherently
emancipatory. On and on, my contemporaries state that understanding the public as a
puppet of elite class interests is itself oppressive. On and on, my contemporaries (in an
admittedly good intentioned attempt to deliver the people from subjugation) unknowingly
contribute to our continued subjugation through supporting the myth of agency and
freedom upon which the sustainable model of hierarchical domination that is Democratic
Modernity is built. Obviously we must not presume that the general public cannot by their
nature have agency or freedom, that their subjugation by the elite class is natural or

otherwise unavoidable and indeed must posit the potential for agency and freedom in all
beings, but to frame the public as having agency and freedom when it does not, to pretend
that the public is an active participant in establishing the order of things from which
popular culture rises when they are actually thinking, feeling, acting, and being in a manner
whose potential is established by the order of things that has been provided to them by the
elite class, to, in short, perpetuate the myth of general public agency and freedom that
obfuscates the actual hierarchical subjugation of the general public is to be just another
soldier in Babylon Army. It is far worse to be complicit in manufacturing the myth that the
public is free than it is to observe the truth that the public generally lacks the capacity to
actualize their latent potential for freedom because they cannot think, feel, act or be the
that of an order of things beyond the one into which they have been socialized by the
dominant culture. It is far worse to perpetuate the myth that the sheep no longer have a
shepherd than it is to observe the truth that the people have, by and large, become their
own shepherd.
Obviously everyone has a varying degree of freedom and agency, and there are
some who are not completely ensnared by the conceptions of order produced by the elite
class of Paternalist civilization and their myths, worldview, philosophies, etc. and even
some who have all but liberated themselves from this subjugation. The point here is not to
generalize to the point of stupidity but to observe that the fashionable, post-modern trend
of saying that it is elitist or domineering to frame the general public as being enslaved (soul,
mind, heart and body) by the elite class actually serves to ensure that the general public is
enslaved by the elite class through manufacturing the illusion of freedom and agency upon
which the sustainable model of hierarchical domination has been built. Saying, thinking,
believing, wishing, hoping, etc. that people are free and have agency, that they can think,
feel, act and be beyond the limitations imposed upon them by the worldview, philosophy
and associated norms of thought, feeling, behavior and being into which they have been
socialized will not make them free, but perpetuating the myth that people are free and with
agency when they are not will surely ensure that they remain enslaved to the system of
sustainable hierarchical domination that is rooted in such myths of freedom and agency. In
short, and I hope you will forgive my rambling, it the political imperative must be to
observe the lack of freedom in the general public rather than to manufacture a false sense
of dignity, freedom, agency, etc. that serves to obfuscate the general public’s actual
enslavement. It is more important to observe the truth of domination than to manufacture
an artificial image that, in granting a false sense of dignity, freedom and agency and a false
legitimacy for the sustainable model of domination, ensures that the public will never know
the full extent of its enslavement (or, thus, be able to direct their attention towards escaping
that subjugation). Instead of pretending that the public is free to satisfy our dogmatic
political ideologies and absurd academic theories, instead of conflating the goodness of
human nature and the inherent inability of the elite class to ever completely subjugate this
goodness, we should observe the true lack of freedom that comes with the stark
impossibility of thinking the that which exists beyond the bounds established by the
worldview, philosophy and norms of thought, feeling, behavior and being that are received
by the general public through the process of socialization so that we can, both individually
and collectively, direct our attention towards actually liberating the people from the fetters

that negate their innate potential for freedom. Structure and the conception of the order of
things embedded therein never completely subsumes an individual, but most people are
not so free from this subjugation that it makes political sense to be complicit in the
production of the myth of freedom and agency that so often obfuscates the generally
subjugated nature of humanity in Paternalist-Modernity. We must retain the good
intentioned recognition that humanity has the power to transcend subjugation by social
structures that rise from conceptions of order produced by the elite class without slipping
into the myth of freedom and agency, which ignores and obfuscates the fact that most
people are subjugated (all be it to varying degrees) by hegemonic social structures and the
elite class conceptions of order from which they are birthed.
Let us dig a bit deeper into the myth of freedom and agency in which the
sustainable model of domination is rooted before embarking upon our exploration of
Mumford’s journey through the social myths of modernity. The public, of course, plays a
role in the production of culture, but public contributions to hegemonic culture are only
accepted as legitimate and included in dominant cultural myths when they rise from the
order of things that has been established by the elite class. Be it Gandhi or Martin Luther
King, the figures who have been immortalized by hegemonic culture as the mythological
th
representations of the 20 century’s civil rights movements all adhere to the hierarchical,
patriarchal order of things that begot the need for a civil rights movement in the first place.
The figures who are framed as ‘free’, as ‘possessing agency’, are without fail those who were
the least free from the banally invisible conceptions of the order of things (that order must
be produced through patriarchal domination) that form the foundation for the Paternalist,
Paternalist-Modernist social systems these figures are narrated as having fought against.
This trend can be understood in more general terms as a technique of power in which the
public is granted the ‘freedom’ to influence the evolution of culture only after they have
been properly socialized and thus commonsensically accept the hegemonic order of things.
The public has freedom and agency up to the limit that has been precisely established by
the hegemonic order of things. If an individual steps beyond these limits, they are
summarily executed (be it a literal or a figurative execution). You are free to participate in
politics as long as you do so within the hegemonic order of things (through voting, running
for office, writing a meaningless letter to your archon, through the legal system, etc.). You
are not free to participate in politics if your goal is to overthrow the hegemonic order of
things (if, for example, your goal is to destroy the legal system and its assumptions
concerning the necessity of manufacturing order through hierarchical domination or to
destroy the democratic system of sustainably manufactured acquiescence to hierarchical
subjugation). The public is free to tell the story as long as the story fits the hero’s tale
provided by the Paternalist-Modernist order of things. As long as you accept the order of
things, the assumption that there must be a protagonist and an antagonist, which is to say
the assumption that good and evil form an eternal binary from which an eternal struggle is
waged, then you are free to fill in the blanks with your own details. As long as you color
15
inside the lines you are free to use whatever color you like… This is why it is so very
dangerous to assert the freedom and agency of people for whom it is starkly impossible to

15 Yes, even the coloring books that you were given as a child have contributed to your self-imposed subjugation.

think the that of an order of things beyond that which has been imposed upon them by
social structures that are embedded with elite class produced conceptions of the order of
things; if we teach our children that freedom comes in choosing what color they will use to
‘color inside the lines’ or, even worse, deduct points from their elementary school projects
because they failed to color inside the lines, then we will prevent them from drawing lines
for themselves and ensure their continued subjugation to the coloring book model of
sustainable hierarchical domination. The public cannot be free if it does not have freedom
and agency in the process of coming to know the order of things, which is to say that if the
public simply receives their worldview and philosophy they cannot be said to have freedom
of thought, feeling, behavior or being. By saying that people are free and with agency
because they have chosen a new color with which to fill the lines of our coloring book
society’s order of things we help to ensure that they will never actually be free to draw their
own picture. By telling people they are free or describing people as free when their
thoughts, feelings, behaviors and being are actually subjugated by the Paternalist,
Paternalist-Modernist Worldview (the order of things embedded therein) and its associated
philosophies, we help to ensure that people will never recognize their own subjugation or,
thus, direct their attention and will towards liberation from the Paternalist, Paternalist-
Modernist Worldview (the order of things embedded therein and its associated
philosophies.

Governance in More’s Utopia

“The basis of the Utopian political state, as in the economic province, is the family. Every year thirty families
chose a magistrate, known as a Philarch; and over every ten Philarchs, with the families subject to them, there
is an Archphilarch. All the Philarchs, who are in number 200, chose the Prince out of a list of four, who are
named by the people of the four divisions of the city. The Prince is elected for life, unless he be removed on
suspicion of attempting to enslave the people.” (Mumford 1922, p. 71)

In the above structure of governance we are provided with a clear view into the
doublespeak of Paternalist-Modernism and its conservationist model of hierarchical
domination. The one constraint for those who rule over the enslaved people is that they
not be suspected of attempting to enslave the people. Slavery must, in the main, be self-
imposed, and self-regulated, must come as a function of self-discipline, which is to say as a
function of socialization within the worldview, philosophy and norms of thought, behavior
and conception of being perpetuated by the archon. Once this enslavement at the level of
worldview, philosophy and norms of thought, behavior and being has been achieved, the
sustainable model of domination seeks to manufacture the illusion of freedom through
techniques of power like voting. In this model of ‘sustainable hierarchical domination’, the
greatest threat to sustaining the system is the people suspecting that the archon is
attempting to enslave them, and so that is the only limit on the Prince’s power.

“In order to keep their rulers from conspiring to upset the government, no matter of great importance can be
set on foot without being sent to the Philarchs, ‘who, after they have communicated it to the families that
belong to their divisions, and have considered it among themselves, make report to the senate; and upon
great occasions the matter is referred to the council of the whole island.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 71)


Bringing the point home once again, the above presumes that hierarchical domination is
the only way of ensuring that rulers to not conspire to upset the government. Governmental
order, like economic order in ‘sharing economy’ of More’s utopia, must in this perverse
idolum be manufactured through hierarchical domination. Where the ‘laws of the
Utopians’ are presumed to create the economic order, the hierarchical power structure by
which archons (from local magistrates to the Prince and ‘the council of the whole island’)
relate to each other is presumed to create the governmental order.

The Sun-Cult of More’s Heartless Utopian Idolum

“The Utopians ‘define virtue thus: that it is living according to Nature, and think that we are made by God for
that end; they believe that a man follows Nature when he pursues or avoids thing according to the direction of
reason. . . . Reason directs us to keep our minds as free from passion and cheerful as we can, and that we
should consider ourselves bound by the ties of good-nature and humanity to use our utmost endeavors to
help forward the happiness of all other persons…’” (Mumford 1922, p. 74)

Like Plato, More’s conception of virtue is bound by the mythos of the Paternalist Twin
Motif (Four Arrows 2010), to the conquest and colonization of passion by reason, of the
feminine by the masculine, of the moon by the sun. A good order of human nature, More
assumes, must be manufactured by reason through its conquest and colonization of
passion. Order is to be manufactured through hierarchical domination and fear of
domination, which feeds the void by which the natural, goodly order of human nature is
deprived, and as a result the actual, truly natural order of harmonious, reciprocal, mutually
constructive relationship (i.e. relations enlivened by love rather than the will-to-domination)
between the moon and the sun (the feminine and the masculine, the latent and the active,
the infinite potential and the infinite actual, which is to say the primordial void and the
infinite-eternal that filled it, etc.) is thus decayed and deprived from manifestation. More,
like Plato, may use the term Natural, but the conquest-colonization order of relations
between sun and moon is about as natural as plastic (and has similarly destructive
implications for the actual, truly natural order of things).
Mumford continues his quotation of More:

“‘Thus as they define Virtue to be living according to Nature, so they imagine that Nature prompts all people
to seek after pleasure, as the end o fall they do. They also observe that in order to further our supporting the
pleasures of life, Nature inclines us to enter into society; for there is no man so much raised above the rest of
mankind as to be the only favorite of Nature, who, on the contrary, seems to have placed on a level all those
that belong to the same species. Upon this they infer that no man ought to seek his own conveniences so
eagerly as to prejudice others; and therefore they think that all agreements between private persons ought to
be kept, which either a good prince has published in due form, to which a people that is neither oppressed
with tyranny nor circumvented by fraud, has consented, for distributing these conveniences of life which
afford us all our pleasures.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 75)

“They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his own advantages, as far
as the laws allow it.” (Mumford 1922, pp. 75-76) The record is broken, but I can’t turn it
off… Imagine living life through this lens, where you have not been deafened by the

banality of your socially constructed existence and thus actually hear the sickeningly
repetitive notes of domination and fear emanating from all directions on the streets of the
carceral concrete jungle humanity has constructed for itself… Reciprocal relations wherein
the pursuit of pleasure is mediated by concern for the pleasure of other people (just men?)
in a society are to be manufactured through hierarchical domination by law and fear of
punishment. Domination and fear are to provide the force by which order is
manufactured. Beyond the maddening repetition of the screeching notes of domination
and fear that emanate from the broken record of Paternalist history, the ironic doublespeak
that forms the foundation for Modern models of sustainable domination again rears its ugly
head. Law must be consented to by ‘a people that is neither oppressed with tyranny nor
circumvented by fraud’, and yet the act of consent to laws lain out by the archon (by the
Prince who sits atop the hierarchies of domination that form the social structure of a
Paternalist society) marks the birth of self-disciplined ‘oppressive tyranny’, and the illusion
of free consent in a context where a lack of consent condemns an individual to slavery
marks the fruition of ‘circumvention by fraud’. Law must be consented to without tyranny
and fraud, and yet there can be no illusion of freedom within a hierarchical legal order
without both tyranny and fraud. “Freedom is Slavery” (Orwell 1983, p. 5), and Slavery is
Freedom.

“…They recon that all our actions, and even our virtues, terminate in pleasure, as in our chief end and
greatest happiness; and they call every motion or state, either of body or mind, in which Nature teaches us to
delight, a pleasure. They cautiously limit pleasure only to those appetites to which Nature leads us; for they
say that Nature leads us only to those delights to which reason as well as sense carries us, and by which we
neither injure any other person no lose the possession of greater pleasures, and of such a draw no troubles
after them.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 76)

This system of following Nature’s dictates would be laudable if it were not stated in an
environment where, through the domination (conquest and colonization) of heart by mind
(of the feminine by the masculine, of the potential by the actual, of the moon by the sun),
humans can no longer feel the dictates of the Natural order. Reason alone cannot tell us
the truth carried by the wind in the trees and the waters in the river, for it is with the heart
that we feel their beauty and thus know their truth. Paternalism burns out your eyes with
hot irons and then instructs you to find your way through the woods by reading a map. It
fills your ears with hot wax and then tells you to find your way by listening to the crack of
branches under the feet of your traveling companions. It slits your throat and then tells you
to breathe. Nature (the Mother) leads us by the heart, for she speaks with a voice of
feelings, and we cannot be lead by the sweet caress of Nature’s emotive voice if our heart
has been conquered and colonized by reason.

Sustainable Domination, Sheep without a Shepherd

“It is plain that these workers are not sheep led by wise shepherds, as in the Republic, but
the members of autonomous, self-regulating groups.” (Mumford 1922, p. 84) As we have
noted a few times above, it would be the height of folly to be fooled by the veneer of
freedom that forms the foundation for Modernism’s sustainable model of domination. The
sheep may no longer have a visible shepherd who exerts direct control over the steps of

their daily lives, but they are no less bound by the dominion of their metaphysical archon
(the Worldview, associated Philosophy and associated norms of thought, behavior and
conception of being established therein they receive from the relatively invisible [in relation
to the relatively visible archons of Plato’s Republic] archons of modernity). The sheep may
no longer be able to see their shepherd, and may thus be less likely to attempt to escape
the domination of the archon (for they no longer know that the archon exists), but they are
if anything all the more enslaved as a function of the invisibility of the archon (who exerts
control, first and foremost, through expanding and constraining potentials of thought,
16
behavior and conception of being [Foucault 2010] through control over the Worldview
and associated Philosophy into which the public is socialized). Once you have been
rendered as a sheep, as a subject whose potentials for thought, behavior and conception of
being have been expanded and constrained by the external influence of the Worldview and
17
Philosophy into which the subject is socialized, then you are free to ‘do as you please’ (for
you can no longer feel, think, be or, thus, act beyond the potentials established by the
Worldview and associated Philosophy you hold, in banal invisibility, to be true).

Rational Domination of Everyday Life in Andreæ’s Democracy

“What is the character of this artisan democracy?
The answer to this is summed up in one of those saying that Andreæ, in the midst of his
energetic exposition, drops by the way.
‘To be wise and to work are not incompatible, if there is moderation.’
So it follows that ‘their artisans are almost entirely educated men. For that which other people
think is the proper characteristic of a few (and yet if you consider the stuffing of inexperience by learning, the
characteristic of too many already) this, the inhabitants argue, should be attained by all individuals. They say
that neither the substance of letters is such, nor yet the difficulty of work, that one man, if given enough time,
cannot master both.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 86)

Let us not fall into the trap of mistaking sustainable domination for liberty… The citizens of
Andreæ’s democracy are not all to be educated so as to ensure their freedom, but so as to
ensure that they have been properly (completely) socialized within the Worldview and
associated Philosophy by which thought, behavior and conception of being are to be
controlled in the sustainable model of domination. They are not educated so as to think,
act and conceive of being freely, but so as to ensure that they blindly (banally) accept the
Worldview and associated Philosophy by which complete rational domination of everyday
life (the manufacturing of order in every day life through hierarchical domination of
everyday life by the dictates of material reason) in Andreæ’s utopia is rendered possible,
legitimate and ‘the only way’. Instead of making people easily dominated by denying them
education and then compelling them to think, act and conceive of being in the manner
desired by the archon, Sustainable Paternalism impels people to dominate themselves
through educating them into a Worldview and associated Philosophy that expands and
constrains their potentials for thought, behavior and conception of being in a manner that
ensures they will fulfill the desires of the archon. In short, rather than compelling an

16
Foucault 2010, The Government of Self and Others, trans. Burchell and Davidson, Palgrave MacMillan.
17
To ‘do as thou wilt’.

individual into slavery or serfdom through force, Sustainable Paternalism impels an
individual into slavery or serfdom through education (and, more generally, socialization
which also works through religious thought and practice, popular culture, news media
discourse, political discourse, normative conceptions of emotion, bodily experiences in
everyday life, etc.).
“‘Their work, or as they prefer to hear it called, ‘the employment of their
hands,’ is conducted in a certain [scientifically] prescribed way, and all things are brought
into a public booth. From here every workman receives out of the stock on hand whatever
is necessary for the work of the coming week. For the whole city is, as it were, one single
workshop, but of all different sorts and crafts. The ones in charge of these duties are
stationed in the small towers at the corners of the wall; they know ahead of time what is to
be made, in what quantity, and of what form, and they inform the mechanics of these
items.’” (Mumford 1922, p. 86) Andreæ’s dystopia, then, seems to promote a model of
economic production that is eerily similar to the Scientific Management of Taylorism…
More aptly, at least for heuristic purposes, we might call it a Scientifically Managed
Communist system of economic production. The workers haven’t been deskilled in the
sense that they only fulfill a small portion of the production process, but their creativity has
been crushed none the less by precise prescription of how things are to be produced (work
cards without deskilling to the point of single, repetitive tasks). In any case, their being as a
worker is to be wholly dominated by reason (sun) and their intuition (moon) is thus to be
conquered and colonized.
18
“‘…No one has any money, nor is there any use for any private money; yet the republic has its own treasury.
And in this respect the inhabitants are especially blessed, because no one can be superior to the other in the
amount of riches owned, since the advantage is rather one of power and genius, and the highest respect of
morals and piety. They have very few working hours, yet no less is accomplished than in other places, as it is
considered disgraceful by all that one should take more rest and leisure time than is allowed.’” (Mumford
1922, pp. 86-87)

Before entering into this notion of hierarchical dominion by power and genius (rather than
wealth) as a ‘blessing’, the last sentence of this quote provides a perfect illustration of the
way in which the sustainable model of domination works. The archons need not compel
workers to work long hours, for they have defined grace and disgrace in the public mind
and individuals thus dominate themselves according to these strictures. One need not
coerce someone to do a thing if they can but define the Worldview and associated
Philosophy (and thus, in this example, conceptions of grace and disgrace) in a manner that
impels the person to do said thing. Classical Paternalism compels people to do things,
while Sustainable Paternalism impels people to do things. In either case, order is
manufactured through hierarchical domination and a decay of natural order is thus
initiated.
On to the ‘blessing’ of establishing hierarchies of domination via power and
genius rather than wealth… The point here is pretty simple. Rather than transcending the

18
Which means, of course, that the archons who rule over the republic (be it through attaining a leadership role or, more importantly,
establishing the Worldview and associated Philosophy by which the sheep of the republic shepherd themselves…) have control over all
the wealth of the republic…

perverse Paternalist fallacy that order can be manufactured through hierarchical
domination, this model simply seeks select its archons as a function of an individual’s
power and genius rather than an individual’s wealth. Meritocratic hierarchies are still
hierarchies, and hierarchical domination still begets a decay of order… That being said, the
illusion of freedom that rests at the heart of Sustainable Paternalism is surely reinforced by
allowing people the freedom to become an archon if they have great power and genius, and
that seems likely to be the point of this shift.

The Distribution of Wealth in Andreæ’s Utopia

Like More’s utopia, Andreæ’s utopia is founded upon an economic system in which the
government owns property (for example houses in the city) and distributes it as per the
needs of the citizens. Coming from our present perspective this may sound like a positive
alternative in ensuring that a small number of individuals don't monopolize a society’s
resources in a manner that creates problems like unaffordable or unavailable housing, and
indeed there is some wisdom to be found in transcending private property and individually
oriented accumulation of wealth, but we must remember that this proposed economic
system comes in a context of the Paternalist will-to-domination. Property is managed by
‘those selected to attend to them’, (Mumford 1922, p. 88) and the selection process is
based on power and genius (which is to say the power-to-dominate and the intellect-to-
dominate).
19
“‘…No one has any money, nor is there any use for any private money; yet the republic has its own treasury.
And in this respect the inhabitants are especially blessed, because no one can be superior to the other in the
amount of riches owned, since the advantage is rather one of power and genius, and the highest respect of
morals and piety.” (Mumford 1922, p. 86-87)

As such, a proposal which on the surface seems likely improve the condition of the people
by ensuring that hierarchical domination does not lead to such an imbalance of wealth that
people cannot afford housing or food actually ensures that the archons (the powerful
geniuses who have the highest respect for dogmatic, Abrahamic [domineering] conceptions
of morals and piety) of a society… This is a perfect expression of Modernity’s sustainable
model of hierarchical domination, where a manufactured sense of freedom and agency
(here in ensuring that a small elite class do not hoard all of the wealth and exploit the
people therein) serves as a technique for ensuring the sustainability of the archon’s
dominion. Instead of actually treating the problem—the will-to-domination, hierarchy,
patriarchy, etc.—the sustainable model of domination seeks to ameliorate some of the worst
symptoms of hierarchical-patriarchal domination and to, in so doing, manufacture the
illusion of freedom and agency so as to ensure that Paternalist domination can be sustained
in the face of the decay of natural order (of life) ensured by Paternalist domination (as
illustrated by Meng Zi 2A2). The goal is not to transcend Paternalist domination or the

19
Which means, of course, that the archons who rule over the republic (be it through attaining a leadership role or, more importantly,
establishing the Worldview and associated Philosophy by which the sheep of the republic shepherd themselves…) have control over all
the wealth of the republic…

archon, but to prevent the inherently corrosive relationship Paternalist domination holds
with natural order from causing the system of Paternalist domination to destroy itself.
We still, however (despite the exceedingly effective quality of sustainable
domination in keeping the slaves from revolting against the slave master), retain our hope
for better days. The sustainable model of domination cannot be sustained in perpetuity,
for in the end it is rooted in the privation of reality (the artificial void) from which fear and
the will-to-domination were birthed and must end as it began in absolute nothingness. The
sustainable model of domination may prevent systems of domination from destroying
themselves as quickly as did the unsustainable model of the ‘Prince’s excessive revenge’
(Foucault 1995) through constraining the potential for revolution, but in the end its
inherently corrosive nature (in relation to natural order) ensures that it to will (no matter
how long it takes) cease to be.

Replacing ‘Self-Love’ with ‘Love of the State’

“The other point upon which Campanula's observation is remarkably keen is his explanation of the relation
of private property and the private household to the commonwealth. Thus:
‘They say that all private property is acquired and improved for the reason that each one of us by
himself has his own home and wife and children. From this self-love springs. For when we raise a son to
riches and dignities, and leave an heir to much wealth, we become either ready to grasp at the property of the
state, if in any case fear should be removed from the power which belongs to riches and rank; or avaricious,
crafty, and hypocritical, if any is of slender purse, little strength, and mean ancestry. But when we have taken
away self-love, there remains only love for the state.’” (Mumford 1922, pp. 104-105)

“‘…When we have taken away self-love, there remains only love for the state.’” (Mumford
1922, p. 105) This statement is synonymous with the statement ‘when we have taken away
self-love, there remains only love for the archon.’ Where to begin with such perverse
madness… Campanella begins his statement by equating self-love with ego, which presumes
that self-love is directed towards the illusory conception of self as a discrete, totalizing
individual rather than, as it out to be, directed towards the Nothing-Infinite Eternal aspect
of self (that is, Self, the discrete, totalizing individuality that subsumes all things within their
origin in the Nothing-Infinite Eternal). Having reduced self-love to the privations of the
illusion of discrete, totalizing individuality at the personal scale and thus perverting the true
nature of self-love (which is love for the self that is not divided by the illusion of ‘the
other’), the supposition that private property and the possession of women and children by
men beget self-love and that this egotistical form of self-love begets greed and covetousness
is not so far from the mark if incomplete in lacking reference to the fear of want posited by
More as the basis for the will-to-greed.
The most perverse aspect of Campanella’s statement, however, comes in the notion
that egotistical self-love should be replaced by love of the state (of the archon). It is hard for
me to formulate a rationalized critique of Campanella’s dystopian vision of ego being
replaced by love of the archon in this moment because my intuitive and otherwise emotive
epistemological processes are screaming their understanding of how horrifyingly depraved
this notion is. Let me take a moment to commune with my friend the tobacco spirit before

I attempt to provide a rationalized explanation of why Campanella’s words are so viscerally
sickening.
It is worth taking a moment to explore the meaning Campanella’s statement would
take on were he to have used the term self-love in its proper orient to the Nothing-Infinite
Eternal aspect of self as it tells the tale of Paternalist-Modernism’s sustainable model of
domination. If an individual is stripped of their self-love, of love for the aspect of self that is
all that which IS, then their roots become unmoored from the soil from which existence
was birthed and they must find a new soil in which to take root. The stability of the rock,
provided by its unitary order, is replaced with the instability of the atomized sands of time,
“and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and
it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7: 24-27) By unmooring humanity from the
Nothing-Infinite, by thus stripping them of the potential for true self-love, Paternalist-
Modernism ensures that self-love will be replaced by love of the archon who has
supplanted the Nothing-Infinite Eternal and its emanations Force, Form and
Consciousness (NIE-FFC) as the progenitor of order (now order manufactured through
hierarchical domination rather than the natural order of the NIE-FFC) in the Modernist
reduction of reality to passing time and physical space.
The introduction to the official trailer for the movie Ex Machina argues, “to
20
erase the line between man and machine is to obscure the line between men and gods.”
Richard Seed, most famous for his involvement in human cloning debates, argues “God
made man in his own image. God intended for man to become one with God. We are
going to become one with God. Cloning and the reprograming of DNA is the first serious
21
step to becoming one with God. Yes, we are going to become Gods, period.” Yuval Noah
Harari, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently noted

“God is extremely important because without religious myth you can’t create society. Religion is the most
important invention of humans. As long as humans believed they relied more and more on these gods they
were controllable”; “…What we see in the last few centuries is humans becoming more powerful and they no
longer need the crutches of the gods. Now we are saying we do not need God, just technology;” [RT
paraphrases Harari’s analysis of the implications of these changes in the relationship of humanity to
22
technology as follows:] “In the future the rich may be immortal while the poor would die out.” (Russia
Today 2015)

Anne Foerst—who was a theological advisor at MIT—provides us with an elucidating

23
ethnographic note:

“In that building over there, in the classical AI lab, I know at least four people who claim to be descendants
of Rabi Löw who is known as the first cabbalist to actually build a golem. Rabi Löw lived in Prague during the
th th
15 or 16 century and there are a couple different stories about his golem and one story is when the golem
died he put the dead golem in the attic of the Prague Synagogue and he created a sentence to revive the
golem at the end of all times and a couple of people in that building including Marvin Minsky have been told
that sentence on the day of their bar mitzvah. So they have been told by their fathers or grandfathers that they

20
Ex Machina, Movie Trailer, 29 September 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoQuVnKhxaM
21
Theys, F 2006, Technocalyps - Part II - Preparing for the Singularity.
22
Russia Today 2015, “Rich people will become immortal ‘god-like’ cyborgs in 200 years – Historian”, Russia Today.
23
Foerst 2015, Staff Profile, St. Bonaventure University, 30 September 2015, http://www.cs.sbu.edu/afoerst/

would be the ones to revive the golem. And of course then you can easily draw the parallel to AI… Two
people who actually claim to be descendants, one is Gerry Sussman a professor here ([at MIT]) and the other
one is Joel Moses who is right now provost of MIT were sitting together and they wrote the sentence they
have been told to revive the golem and it was exactly the same so this tradition has actually survived for over
400 years… There is one story where the golem comes to life and has on its forehead the terms ‘yahweh
elohim emet’ which means god the lord is truth and he comes to life and removes the aleph the first letter of
the term emet from his forhead so that the remaining sentence means god the lord is dead. And his builders
are of course totally horrified and said what’s going on, I mean how can you say god is dead? And he says
well we are created in god’s image and we adore god because god was able to build something so fantastic as
us, but if you are now able to rebuild yourself the people will adore you for building that and not god any
24
more. But as soon as god is not adored anymore he is as good as dead.”

Roots unmoored from the Nothing-Infinite Eternal, which had been perversely described
to the public as an angry, vengeful, petty, genocidal, colonialist, etc. old white man for
centuries in both the Greco-Roman and Abrahamic traditions (and in other such
Paternalist traditions), humanity begins to love the archons of society (who so aptly
resemble the absurd image of the divine promulgated by the Greco-Roman and Abrahamic
traditions) as it once loved itself (the Nothing-Infinite Eternal aspect of self). The archons
believe they are god, and the public is impelled to love the archon.

24
Theys, F 2006, Technocalypse, 8 August 2016, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0899298/, 30:57-33:05.

The Myth of Man’s Rightful Dominion of the
Earth
The myth of ‘man’s rightful dominion of earth’ is rooted in Books 1 and 2 of Genesis:

Genesis 1: “26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and
subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing
that moveth upon the earth.” (KJV, Genesis 1: 26, 28)

Genesis 2: “19 And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air;
and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living
creature, that was the name thereof.” (KJV, Genesis 2: 19)

The incommensurability of this domineering conception of human nature relations with a

harmonious relationship with nature is aptly captured by Meng Zi’s (2A2) story of the
Farmer from Song:

“‘There was a man of Song who was concerned that the sprouts in his field were not growing well, so he went
and tugged at each one. He went home utterly exhausted and said, ‘Oh, I’ve made myself ill today! I’ve been
out helping the sprouts to grow.’ His sons rushed out to look and found the stalks all shriveled up. There are
few in the world who do not ‘help their sprouts grow.’ There are those who do not ‘weed’ – they have simply
given the whole task up as useless. But the ones who tug on the sprouts to help them grow, they are worse
than useless, for they do harm!’” (Meng Zi, 2A2; Eno 2016, p. 44)

The mystical poetry of William Blake brings this man’s dominion over earth mythos of
human-nature relations into stark relief. Blake’s biographer Alexander Gilchrist aptly
captures the essence Blake in saying that “to walk with [Blake] in the country was to
perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter.” (Adams 1970, p. viii)

“Blake lived in a revolutionary age that brought about changes in many important phases of human life….
Post-Renaissance thought, mainly the development of materialist science, created the Deist myth of God as
the great designer, the machine-builder. One of Blake’s best-known paintings, “The Ancient of Days,” depicts
a bearded patriarchal god of the sky spreading a pair of compasses over the earth. For Blake, this god, the
idea that only the measurable is real, and the assumption that man and the universe are merely machines
were all manifestations of error. Blake’s religious views, vehemently anti-Deistic, were in the tradition of
individualistic Christianity… Rather than looking to the sky for an alien and distant lawgiver, Blake would
discover God in Man, in every man.” (Adams 1970, p. ix-x)

Blake, in short, was grappling with the same essential problems as Geddes faced in his age
and which we face in our own—the mechanistic worldview of total work (Pieper 2009),
Modernism, and the loss of intimacy with the spiritual-unmanifest world therein. Reality
was being reduced to the measureable dimensions of passing time and physical space. The
universe was being reduced to a machine that lacks reference to the unmanifest world. So

to were humans. Where Blake and his companions saw “the soul of beauty” in “the forms
of matter” (Adams 1970, p. viii) as they walked through nature, the mechanistic worldview
of Modernity was producing subjects who saw not but a dead, chaotic multiplicity whose
perfected order and teleological imperative could only be attained through subjugation by
man.
The ethos of the assumption that God had given man dominion over earth,
however, was to survive this reduction of reality to manifestation, and so the perfection of
nature was still thought to be found in subjugation by the will of man, but nature was being
disenchanted—the unmanifest essence was stripped from nature, the forms of matter were
thus stripped of their reference to infinite form and we thereby became blind to the soul of
beauty that expresses itself through the forms of nature. In the end we have been left with a
vision of nature as a dangerous, chaotic, feminine other that, like all such feminine (or
feminized) and objectified others, can only find order through subjugation by the active,
masculine, occidental, etc. principle in the Paternalist-Modernist Worldview. Obviously
Blake’s calls for a return to a worldview sensitive to the infinite, unmanifest dimensions of
reality (as they permeate both humans and nature) went unheeded and we have continued
down ‘the straight paths of [Modernist] improvement’ towards the decay of order that is
necessitated by domineering imposition of artificial order upon natural order. Blake’s was a
cry to leave the path of devolutionary development that is impelled by the materialist
worldview of Modernity.

“[Blake emphasized] individual emancipation from dying forms of belief and social behavior. But with
emancipation came the man trapped in the cave, Blake’s tragic figure, Urizen, isolated in a brutalizing
mechanistic philosophy of nature and man, seeking frantically to impose abstract moral codes upon apparent
chaos. The man in the cave is man driven to a rejection of his own humanity. Blake’s art is by his own
admission an effort to restore, or, better, to create a mythical golden age or visionary frame of mind in the
individual man, so that he can again discover that other men are a part of him.” (Adams 1970, p. x)

Blake’s critiques of Wordsworth are indicative of our critique of Geddes:

“In The Recluse, Wordsworth wrote the following lines about the relation of mind to nature or the world
around the mind:

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted: — & how exquisitely, too,
Theme this is but little heart among Men,
The external World is fitted to the Mind.

Blake’s annotation to this reads: “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted.”
Philosophers and poets of the age were deeply concerned with this matter of the relation or
disrelation between mind and nature, subject and object. One attempted resolution of this dualism was to
assert that the mind knows nature by rational means but feels nature by poetic intuition. But in the face of the
Lockean principle that the world is divided into primary measureable qualities of experience, which are
objective and ‘real’, and the secondary qualities of existence (taste, smell, texture, and so on), which are
subjective and differ from individual to individual, the mind is apparently turned back upon itself and ends up
as solipsistic and merely expressive of its own isolation.

The romantic poets sought to deal with this problem by raising questions about the objectivity of
objectivity. Do not the tools of ‘objective’ reason—analysis and generalization—distance, deaden, and dissect
reality into parts, isolating the mind from its objects? Can the mind, in some intuitive act, put the world back
together, synthesize rather than analyze? Synthesis and communion seem to be the aim of Wordsworth’s
Prelude, of Shelly’s Prometheus Unbound. Blake’s objection to Wordsworth’s vision of nature as somehow
‘fitted’ to the mind, aside from his dislike of its implied materialism and mechanism, is that two things fitted
together are not really synthesized. The shoe surrounds the foot but never becomes part of the foot.” (Adams
1970, p. xi)

Are we to be fitted with nature, to fit nature to our foot via subjugation through imposition
of artificial order, to fulfill our ‘God given right’ of dominion over earth, or are we to
synthesize with nature (with ‘all our relations’), to see the world through a lens that
transcends the illusion of discrete, biological individuality, to transcend the privation of
consciousness through manifestation by which we know the world in terms of self and
other. Will we fit nature onto humanity, wear nature like a shoe (and thereby wear a hole
in its sole, in its inherent order), or will we transcend the illusion of separation from nature
through seeing the infinite perspective through use of intuition (the silent epistemological
potential that works beyond the limitations of the linear, materially rational mind).
Returning to the issue at hand, Post-Industrial society failed to bear the fruits portended by
the utopian seed-myths of Industrial Modernism in part because the myth of man’s
dominion over earth lead the archons of Modernity to try and manufacture the deliverance
of the lower rungs through conquest and colonization of the natural world and thus begot
the need for further deliverance (this time from environmental degradation, from climate
change to rising sea levels to decaying ecosystems). Deliverance requires a return to the
natural order of things and transcendence of the will-to-domination (and the associated fear
of ceasing to be) and the will-to-greed (and the associated fear of want) therein, through
filling the void that has caused our need for deliverance, and deliverance cannot thus be
attained if our steps in daily life are guided by the myth of man’s dominion over earth
(which leads us to try and manufacture order through hierarchical domination and thus
causes a decay of natural order).

The Myth of Evolution as Control of Nature
Following from the Myth of Man’s Dominion Over Earth it only seems natural that
Paternalist-Modernist utopians would conceptualize human evolution in terms of our
th
increased control over nature during the rise of Scientific Modernism in the late 19 and
th
20 centuries.

“M. Boucher de Perthes was a true student of the past; no mere antiquary and collector, but a thoughtful
inquirer into the progressive control by man of his environment, and thus interested in all that the advance of
his appliances might signify in that remote past, or again in his own scarcely less marvellously evolving
present. Here in fact he had reached a true, a central, a continuous epic of humanity—‘Tools and the man I
sing!’” (Geddes 1915, p. 247)

“‘Man’s curiosity and desire to control his world impel him to study living things’. With that banal but crucial
assertion about the foundation of human rationality in the will to power, Yerkes opened his book. For him
the tap root of science is the aim to control. The full consequences of that teleology become apparent only in
the sciences of mind and behavior, where natural objet and designed product reflect each other in the infinite
regress of face-to-face mirrors, ground by the law of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic….
…. Since the first and final object of Yerkes’s interest was the human being, the pinnacle of
evolutionary processes, where the structure of domination of brain over body was most complete, greatest
curiosity and utility were centered on natural objects yielding greatest self-knowledge and self-control.”
(Haraway 1989, pp. 61-62)

These two quotes aptly illustrate the connection between Paternalist conceptions of human
evolution and the ‘man’s dominion over earth’ myth of human-nature relations. Geddes
and Yerkes assume that human evolution, in short, is rooted in and measured by man’s
ability to dominate and thus control his natural environment.

“Perhaps one of the most remarkable characteristics of… [Fourier’s] utopia is its utilization of a moral
equivalent for war, long before Professor William James invented the phrase. One of the great functions of
the phalanx is the assemblage of productive armies even as ‘civilization’ assembles destructive ones. There is
a fine passage in which Fourier pictures an industrial army of golden youths and maidens, "instead of
devastating thirty provinces in a campaign, these armies will have spanned thirty rivers with bridges, re-
wooded thirty barren mountains, dug thirty trenches for irrigation, and drained thirty marshes." It is for lack
of such industrial armies, says Fourier, that civilization is unable to produce anything great.” (Mumford 1922,
p. 122)

War, which Fourier again accepts as a dimension of the natural order of human nature
rather than a privation and perversion of human nature impelled by the Paternalist
Worldview and its assumption that order must be manufactured through hierarchical
domination, is to be redirected from being waged against other human communities to
being waged against nature. Order is still to be manufactured through hierarchical
domination, through war, but this war is to be waged through digging trenches, draining
marshes and reforesting clear-cut mountains (at least this final act of war on nature serves to
fill some of the void the rest of Paternalist, Paternal-Modernist humanity’s war on nature
has created…). Nuance aside, this vision of human-nature relations in terms of a war on
nature is a rather perfect expression of the sun cult’s mythos of order through domination
of the moon by the sun, of nature by man, of the other by the self, etc.

“It is nothing more than a hint, this New Atlantis; but a word to the wise is enough; and as we look about the
modern world we see that, in its material affairs at any rate, the great scientific institutes and foundations—the
United States Bureau of Standards, for one—play a part not a little like that of the College of the Six Days'
Works.
Campanella with his dream of powerful mechanical inventions, in which he had been anticipated by
Leonardo, and Bacon with his sketch of scientific institutes—with these two Utopians we stand at the entrance
to the utopia of means; that is to say, the place in which all that materially contributes to the good life has
been perfected. The utopias of the later Renascence took these aims for granted and discussed how man's
scope of action might be broadened. In this the Utopians only reflected the temper of their time; and did not
attempt to remold it. As a result of our preoccupation with the means, we in the Western World live in an
inventor's paradise. Scientific knowledge and mechanical power we have to burn; more knowledge and more
power than Bacon or Campanella could possibly have dreamed of. But today we face again the riddle that
Plato, More, and Andreas sought to answer: what are men to do with their knowledge and power?”
(Mumford 1922, pp. 108-109)

Again we see that human evolution is to be understood in the terms of increased power-
knowledge (which are to be equated in the Paternalist-Modernist Worldview) to control
our natural environment. Again we are faced with the fallacy of a utopia that overcomes the
woes of Paternalist society faced by people who live on the lower rungs of the hierarchy by
which Paternalist society attempts to manufacture order through increased technological
power. Problems that rise precisely from the fear of ceasing to be and of want, from
Paternalist Worldview, from the will-to-domination and the will-to-power produced therein,
from existence on the lower rungs of the hierarchy produced therein, are conceptualized as
being ameliorated by increased technological power. Instead of treating the causes of the
problem, the Paternalist-Modernist utopians seek to render the symptoms as sustainable
through increased power. It seems clear that, for men who see increased power and
knowledge and the increased dominion over our natural environments and our selves
derived therein as the life blood of human evolution, who study the Mysteries of the
invisible world for the sake of “‘…enlarging… the bounds of human empire, to the effecting
of all things possible’” (Mumford 1922, pp. 106-107), that the answer to the question of
what men will do with their knowledge and power is predetermined by the Paternalist and
Paternalist-Modernist Worldview in which the question has been answered by Mumford
and the utopian authors of his tale. Power and knowledge are, in this perverse worldview,
to be used to facilitate the Paternalist conception of ‘human evolution’, to attain dominion
over all things (self and other), to manufacture order through hierarchical domination, to—
in mythological summary—facilitate the conquest and colonization of the sun by the
moon… Technological power surely has the potential to expand the potential heights to
which a society may reach with its utopian dreams, but without a truly Utopian Worldview
that transcends the domineering perversions of the Paternalist-Modernist Worldview
technological power will only serve to amplify the decay of natural order caused by
attempts to manufacture order through hierarchical domination by granting increased
power to these attempts at manufacturing order.
I am reminded of a young group of mad scientists who were sitting at a nearby table
in a local burger joint on UBC campus a few nights ago (November 2017). One of the
young scientists began fervently describing some research he had been engaging with

concerning the relationship between genetics and norms of thought, behavior and being.
Genetics, the young white male claimed, articulate the potentials for human thought,
behavior and being, and there is an algorithm that can precisely measure the relationship
between genes these norms of thought, behavior and being. Setting aside the role of culture
in expanding and constraining potentials for the expression of the traits this student posited
as rising functionally from genetic makeup, the young white man ignored the muted
critiques of his colleagues concerning the difference between causation and correlation and
boisterously cheered that it will now be possible to transform human culture by
transforming our genetic makeup. In short, instead of transforming the culture (the
worldview, associated philosophy and associated norms of thought, behavior and being)
that at the very least expands and constrains the potential for the expression of genetic traits
as norms of thought, behavior and being, the solution to humanity’s problems is
understood as being found in the technological power to domineeringly manufacture a
new, artificial order of human genetics. I dare not imagine how the sun-cult’s mythos of
order through the conquest and colonization of moon by sun, of heart by mind, would lead
the steps of these mad scientists into the use of reason to remove all genes they have
associated (rightly or not) with emotion…

The Myth of Usurpation
“The usurpation by a powerful elite, and their instruments such as mass media, of concepts
like democracy, sustainability, sustainable development and resilience have all taken place
25
within my lifetime (62 years).” (Albright 2015) This analysis falls short in talking about the
'usurpation' of concepts like democracy and sustainability (which have always been rooted
in attempts to render hierarchical domination as sustainable). If Democracy is 'failing', it is
because the illusion of freedom it attempted to manufacture has been pierced by the
inevitable decay of natural order (of liberty) caused by its hierarchical, domineering
attempts to create order. Sustainability is 'failing' because sustainable has always been
understood by the elite as making hierarchical domination sustainable rather than as
transcending hierarchical domination of the earth and our nonhuman kin (which is the
only way to have a truly sustainable existence). What we have seen is not co-optation of
democracy and sustainability by the elite (an inherently ironic notion given that the elite
produced both the concepts democracy and sustainability...), but the necessary fruition of
the impossible attempt to render hierarchical domination (of humanity in the case of
democracy and the earth and our nonhuman kin in terms of sustainability) and the decay
of order caused therein as 'sustainable'. The elite produced ‘Democracy’ as an attempt to
render their domination of the general public as more sustainable than the overtly
domineering regime of the prince's excessive revenge. (Foucault, D&P) The elite produced
‘Sustainability’ in an attempt to allow future generations to continue dominating the earth
and our nonhuman kin. (Haraway, Primate Visions) The issue is not co-optation, but the
natural fruition of attempts at manufacturing order through hierarchical domination.

25
Albright 2015, The Anthropocene and Entering The Symbiocene, https://glennaalbrecht.wordpress.com/2015/12/17/exiting-the-
anthropocene-and-entering-the-symbiocene/

Conclusions:
“‘There was a man of Song who was concerned that the sprouts in his field were not growing well, so he went
and tugged at each one. He went home utterly exhausted and said, ‘Oh, I’ve made myself ill today! I’ve been
out helping the sprouts to grow.’ His sons rushed out to look and found the stalks all shriveled up. There are
few in the world who do not ‘help their sprouts grow.’ There are those who do not ‘weed’ – they have simply
given the whole task up as useless. But the ones who tug on the sprouts to help them grow, they are worse
than useless, for they do harm!’” (Meng Zi, 2A2; Eno 2016, p. 44)

The utopian myths of Industrial Modernity presumed that humanity would be liberated
from the privations of existence in systems of hierarchical domination through increased
technological power. It presumed that deliverance of humanity would be attained through
technological conquest and colonization of the natural world. What we have seen, however,
is that while the natural order of our earth has been deprived and perverted by these
attempts at deliverance through technological conquest and colonization those people who
live on the bottom rungs of the social hierarchies that have been manufactured by
Paternalist society have not been delivered from the suffering of existence therein. The
Industrial plant that was born from the utopian seed-myths of Industrial Modernity grew
tall, but it remained barren because it grew in an environment typified by Paternalist
attempts to manufacture artificial order through hierarchical domination. Deliverance is
synonymous with a return to natural order, to the goodness, truth and beauty of human
nature, the bounty of our mother earth, the harmony of the infinite forms from which
natural order rises, and deliverance cannot thus be attained through attempts to
manufacture order through conquest and colonization as such acts of hierarchical
domination by their nature cause a decay of natural order. Conquest and colonization
beget precisely the decay of natural order (of truth, beauty, virtue, love, etc.) that
necessitates deliverance, and so deliverance can never be attained through conquest and
colonization in that such acts naturally necessitate the need for further deliverance. Like
Meng Zi’s Farmer from Song, who pulled on his sprouts to help them grow and actually
killed them, the attempts of Industrial Modernity to deliver those humans who have been
relegated to the lower rungs of the artificial social hierarchies produced by Paternalist
society through techno-hierarchical domination of nature and human labor actually served
to cause an even greater decay of natural order from which humanity must now be
delivered. If we are ever to truly find deliverance from the woes of hierarchical domination,
from social inequity to environmental degradation, we must first develop a myth of
deliverance that does not render deliverance dependent upon precisely the hierarchical
conquest and colonization and associated decay of natural order from which we must be
delivered. If we are to find deliverance, we need to reject myths of deliverance through
conquest and colonization and take up a myth of deliverance through love, harmony,
reciprocity, reunification, etc., which is to say a myth of deliverance through a return to
natural order rather than a myth of deliverance through manufacturing artificial order via
hierarchical domination.

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