The Ladder

02

My thesis is fairly straightforward: we can examine it together and decide whether or not we find it has merit. It seems to me that something has happened in our lineage history in the process of becoming ‘modern’, or more specifically in the process of developing a modern notion of self, that we conceptualize in terms of a uniquely contemporary sense of identity or consciousness of what it means to be ‘human’, but that seems to me in actuality a byproduct of a physiological alteration in the individual and collective normative neurological baseline resulting from alienation.

I’ve been circling these thoughts for years, spiraling around them like a raptor rising on thermals, but I want to distill the pattern here so that we can make use of it. The contemporary emanation of this thoughtform was accidentally distilled by Descartes, whose utterance Je pense, donc je suis [I think, therefore I am] is among its simplest formulations. Descartes wrote this phrase in the Discourse on Method in 1637, 388 years ago. The legacy of this assertion locates identity firmly in thinking. One of its significant corollaries, which follows firmly in its wake, gives rise to the modern neuroscience with which we are familiar. Its broad contours would be as follows: I think, therefore I am. The organ in which thinking takes place in words and pictures, therefore, has pride of place in our neurology. This organ is the brain, therefore the brain is the centerpiece of our neurology, because it is where identity resides.

The Cartesian frame is, in my view, the consolidation of a trend that began to accelerate in earnest about 5,000 years ago, but whose acceleration has accelerated over the past 500 years exponentially, and is doing so again.¹ I would like to argue that it is co-equal and contemporaneous with another related thoughtform, which is distilled most notably in the papal bull Inter Caetara, of 1493, and which gave to the Catholic Kings of Castile and Leon, based on the asserted apostolic authority of the Catholic church, ownership of the entire earth. This assertion of absolute spiritual authority, which is the foundation then of legal authority, and the political expedience that gifted imperial domination rights to Catholic kings, is but the most current and present-world-order-informing example of an imperial logic of domination. What is implicit in this construction, which established both the spiritual and legal basis of colonialism, is the notion of ownership of the earth and its inhabitants. Relations of ownership are predicated on hierarchy. Hierarchy is organized on a vertical axis.

Empires require both an elite and an exploited class. If you are going to privilege one group of people, you have to extract the surplus you are giving them from someone else. Imperial mechanics are the extraction of life and labor from a group that is exploited, and its transference to a group that is elite. The emperor sits atop this hierarchy.

Emperors worship skygods, by definition. Since Jesus, whose religion became officialized in the Roman Empire in 380 AD when Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica, was not a skygod, the Romans had to turn him into one.