reason and imagination

Grooming the Loyal Bride

Explaining the Presence of On-Line Harm Groups

The recent phenomenon of adolescents urging their virtual peers to commit acts of self-harm and the harming of others constitutes the very crest of a wave of digital youth violence. Predators come from abusive homes, while their prey come from homes in which they feel isolated and alienated, lacking attention and affection. The majority of the former are male, of the latter, female. They are to be wed within our novel virtual church, with it fullest faux humanity in its digital pews. On-Line ‘communities’ are such in name only; they are quite loosely connected, and often involved in internecine competition and rivalry wherein members seek to enhance their status by the sheer numbers of victims they can claim. They cajole their prey into self-scarification, the results of which are mindful of nothing other than the ‘kill logos’ drawn on fighter planes during the world wars. The more enemy aircraft one had shot down, the greater one’s status as a pilot. Similarly, armor aces and their crews would often record numbers of enemy ‘kills’ on the chasses of their respective tanks. The torsos and limbs of young women are the chasses and fuselages of the predators who populate groups such as ‘764’ and ‘O9A’. There have been a number of suicides associated with these interactions, for the ultimate ask is to have one’s acolyte sacrifice their life, while of course recording it, for the vicarious pleasure of the predator. Exhorting the death of the other is the transcendental demand which validates one’s own continuing existence. It is the evidence necessary to convince a mortal that he is, in his own eyes, divine.

While disturbing in its practice, there is in fact nothing new in its principles. Seen anthropologically, self-sacrifice as a gift to a master, to an embodied deity, or to a political ruler, is an essential, if extreme, aspect of political organization in general. Those who are marginal to the contemporary polis, through the effect of abuse, mental illness, anomie or yet ressentiment, seek to contrive their own society, wherein they are themselves the masters and leaders. They work fervently to discover those from whom they may extract favors; sexual, emotional, psychological, and even mortal. Young women who lack the acknowledgement of others, and who report the affection and adoration they receive during the ‘grooming’ process undertaken by on-line predators makes them feel valued and thus gives them a novel sense of self-worth, are ultimately betrayed by their suitors. Yet it appears to take a great deal of suffering, manipulation, abuse and even torture, to overcome the set-up of adoration and fondness engendered by the predator. Some victims are able to shake themselves out of this tantalus, while others are not, perhaps going to the grave believing that their sacrifice was but the sternest test of authentic love.

It is vexing, to say the least, that the most noble principles which humanity has created for itself – 1. Self-sacrifice on behalf of a community in altruistic suicide; the chief vehicle of warfare amongst social contract cultures based upon mechanical solidarity; 2. Self-sacrifice to rescue and preserve the life of another individual: the duty of parent to child, for instance, or of the adult to the youth in general; 3. Self-sacrifice as the ultimate act of the lovers’ bond; a favorite in literature and opera, with Tristan und Isolde being perhaps its most far-reaching expression – can be debased and given an infernal twist. The ease of which cultural tropes can be represented within the shadows of social life speaks to their ubiquitous presence in our mental template. Of course, we do not here speak of ‘human nature’, for the essence of being human is to adapt to ever be a generalist; there is no singular human nature. But what is being connected in the fetid fake-lore and desperate disingenuities of on-line harm groups is the essential necessity for a human being to feel wanted, loved, and thus to become part of something larger than oneself.

This is the synchronicity of all such forms of deviant assemblies. Street gangs serve as surrogate families, just as do political groups such as those Neo-Nazi, White Supremacist, and the like. Religious cults serve the same needs, as do the more normative churches, gaming communities, and hobbyists. There is a spectrum, likely almost measurable, whereupon two variables chart their respective courses; rate of alienation over against rate of disaffectivity or ressentiment. The cult registers high on both counts, as do on-line harm groups and the like. The virtual thread of Jaguar owners or like hobbyists register correspondingly low on both counts, and one can easily fill in exemplifications of any ratio in between these extremes. The point is, however, that the seeking of community, of whatever sort, is an absolute prerequisite, not for personal improvement of yet the good life, but for personhood and human life itself.

Given this, anthropological history runs into psychopathology. The works of Bataille, within the discourse of the former, and those of Minkowski, in the latter, contain more than enough analysis and explanation to counter any lightheaded accounts of what precisely is ‘going on’ with the seeming advent of on-line harm and hate groups, often connected as they are. In a word, anomie cannot be used as a failsafe against the accursed share; autism will be the result in each attempted case. The hobbyist manifests a generally benign and controlled form of autism. His is a semi-disconnected world within which only others of his marque and specialty reside. The key difference between the philatelist and the child predator is that the former regularly steps out of his bell-jar and rejoins the remainder of his fellowpersons as a self amongst selves. The latter only does so when compelled, sometimes through violence, and in turn learns that violence can be a most effective source of suasion. For sociopathy only hails from three origins:

1. A mental pathology that has created for the patient a separate world; those suffering from schizo-affective disorders or even schizophrenia – it should be noted that autism is itself originally a mere manifest of the schizophrenic condition – are thus highly suggestible to a knowing grooming but at once susceptible to developing for themselves a predatory prowl, seeking to bring others into their projection, which is for them already a form of self-torture.

2. A severely alienated self-consciousness that does not develop an internal rationale but rather accepts an external analytic which is betrayed by its paranoia and talent for making conspiratorial connections which do not exist in fact. One of the basic problems of historical consciousness, in which we are made aware that the past can always and again be rewritten by the present, allows a certain latitude for the conspiracist to reinterpret world events. This kind of personality also manifests as both predator and prey.

3. A sense of mastery and of destiny which can be summed as the messianic complex. Success in politics or in business can germinate a self conception that gives this person a self-promoted aura which in turn explains their dramatic rise to status and power. Lord Acton, in a letter, penned what has become a cliché, if yet a wise one, when he spoke of ‘absolute power corrupting absolutely’. Many of the oligarchs, plutocrats, and other political leaders of our time provide nothing other than role models for the on-line predator, as their mission is no different; the adoration of, and power over, others.

If we combine the subjective alienation of the anomic, the ressentiment felt by the marginalized, and the saturation of our popular sensibilities by the shiny success of the latter-day gods on earth, it is in fact not astonishing in the least to witness the phenomenon of guided self-harm. Though it could be said to lie at the polar opposite of health and wellness on-line guides, such as those of Calm and HeadSpace, the dynamics utilized by on-line harm and hate are not at all so dissimilar to preclude analysis. My own health and wellness company makes virtual self-help and self-improvement guides, and the graduated steps the client follows mimic the processes of any cult initiation, religious conversion, or sexual self-harm grooming, if assuredly none of these contents. The consistency and indeed essence of moving a human being from one frame of mind to another is psychologically old hat, and indeed, it is to ethnography that we must turn in order to understand its deepest language. For the Ursprache of consciousness-altering methods is also the well-spring of both our reason and our imagination. These two most human essences can be turned to the noble or the base, and thus the on-line harm promoter asks of us a challenging question: who of us is capable of distinguishing the dreams of reason from its equally attendant nightmares?

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of 63 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health, and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Refusing and Misusing Philosophy

Refusing and Misusing Philosophy (Sophia Resented but Re-presented)

There are a number of ways in which the history of consciousness is demeaned or misplaced. Some of these occur within the bonds of discursive thought itself, thereby taking their slatternly place within that same history, and less important, but still revealing of a wider antipathy and most often a willing ignorance of thinking, occurring outside of discourse entirely; in popular media or in casual conversation. Philosophy, the ‘love of wisdom’’, though ancient relative to known history, is yet very recent when compared with the tenure of an evolving human consciousness itself. It is quite likely that due to its own presentation of self – it must be studied formally by literate persons – and its own career – it has been both the privilege and purview of cultured elites more or less from the beginning – philosophy can be much more readily dismissed, not only by those deemed outside of its discursive circle, but the more so, those outside of discourse as a whole.

And this denotation comes from both the philosopher and from the non-philosopher alike. We are apt to hear, from sports broadcasts to face-to-face shills, that the ‘philosophy of this coach’, or ‘our philosophy in making pizza is’, somehow how superior to all others. Today, however, there is far fewer excuses to be made, and correspondingly, far less rationales available for such, for philosophy to be treated as if it were a permanent resident of cloud cuckoo land, with its acolytes floating somewhere above the world and its more guttural realities. All the more so because the greatest of thinkers lived in that same world, the world of humans and our shared history, and the world which is both the origin and destination of Dasein as a ‘being-in-the-world’. There is no record of any figure in the canonical history of Western thought who turned away from that world, eschewing it in search of something other, better, higher, or deeper. Indeed, the insights of these persons, at once human like ourselves and as well, persons who pushed themselves to discover their fullest humanity and for some, even humaneness, came from their engagement with said world, and not at all from disengaging from it. It is of more than mere picaresque interest to read what can be known of the philosopher’s lives, from their encounters with other important figures, to their interactions with the polis and with rulers, both positive – Aristotle tutoring Alexander – and negative – Socrates being executed by the State – or yet their daily rounds – Kant providing Königsberg with a consistent timepiece on his way to the tavern. In our own times, these vignettes are generally more gentle, but not always. One need only compare Bourdieu or Derrida’s curricular work for the French department of education and Scruton’s writing of libretti and novels with Foucault’s reckless sexual misadventures and his ultimate AIDS diagnosis and Ricoeur’s wartime incarceration in a labour camp, to be reminded that the world contains every possibility, even for the thinker.

The first thing to recall to oneself, if one is feeling some resentment against thinking in general and philosophy in particular, is that these figures were and are human like ourselves. They live in the same world, are challenged by the same travails, endure many of the same hardships and feel the same fleeting joys. There is indeed no possibility of becoming a thinker at all if one abandons one’s own humanity. The chief difference between the thinker and the one who elects to avoid most of the confrontation between the present and the past and that between self and other, is that the former makes what is already his own, his ownmost. The apical leader of the guild, Socrates, in his defense against his coming execution, famously uttered that same guild’s motto: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. This examination can, it is true, take a number of forms, but all such roads lead to an awareness which is simply unavailable in day-to-day life. Without suggesting a morality of mundanity, one can at least say that this is how it must be. The social world runs on its rails, and needs to run on them if society is itself not to falter. This is also not to say that any reflection which becomes necessary from time to time when such rails no longer function as they once did should be the sole responsibility of a few august figures, to be consulted as did the ancients their oracles and haruspices. For the philosopher is no mystagogue; she is, more accessibly and much less mysteriously, a resource person. In this way, she is no different from the plumber; a professional who has learned a body of professionalized know-how. What the philosopher adds to this contractual availability is that her skill set is not oriented to a specific task-at-hand; philosophy is not about ‘fixing’ things.

Rather, the thinker performs a number of functions which are generally outside the daily expectations we have of ourselves and others:

1. The thinker opens up the questions of the day: the general rubric here is that if everyone appears to agree on something, whatever its cultural content or political fashion, the thinker deliberately steps away from this sensus communis and says ‘are you sure about this?’. Such agreements are all too easy to find in our contemporary world, for by way of them persons and well as governments can carry the day their way. Hence the role of the philosopher in this first sense is that of questioner, doubter, critic and analyst.

2. The thinker is as well tasked with querying our shared history. For general agreement upon this and that does not only occur with reference to the living present and the worldviews which remain extant for those who live in that present. It is for the historian to interrogate the contents of history, but the philosopher must ask, more penetratingly perhaps, what is history itself? Add to this the question concerning which history is the preferred one and why so, and what are the implications of viewing history in the rather Whiggish manner of vanilla verisimilitude. Instead of this, the thinker understands the presence of the past in our lives to be the thesis in an ongoing dialectic. It is what has been and what has been done, over against the new and the very concept of the future. So, secondly, the thinker’s vocation demands that she live that dialectic in search of a novel synthesis.

3. The philosopher also clarifies what people already know and seeks to communicate this ideally limpid vision to the world. Gadamer specifically notes this third aspect of what philosophy is supposed to be doing, in view of the many sources of obscurity and obscurantism which reign mostly unchallenged; the State, media, schools, families, the church, and even what used to be referred to simply as gossip; misinformation and yet disinformation, much of it in our own time purveyed through digital media. In order to confront such deliberate obfuscation, the main challenge for the thinker is to not present more of the same! It is often a fair cop to suggest that the philosopher gets carried away by his own insights, to the detriment of being able to be both clear and indeed insightful, in a manner almost all could comprehend.

4. Given that obscurity and the deliberate narrowing of discourse also happens within the history of thought, a fourth task for the philosopher is to be constantly vigilant against the tendency of intellectuals to flaunt their apparently superior historical abilities. What she finds, in doing so, is that those who have closed off access to the history of consciousness have done so by themselves ignoring or refusing that very history. ‘Academic’ examples unfortunately abound, from the mathematically inclined thinkers and logicians declaring that ‘anything before Frege’ is irrelevant, to the ‘third-wave’ feminists who declare the same thing for male authorship as a whole, to the Marxists for whom Hobbes is the true beginning of thought, or yet the ‘modernist’ who dismisses anything written before Hume and Vico. If thinking was strictly an ivory tower pursuit, a disconnected discourse would be its result, with its practitioners overly and overtly specialized to the extent of becoming ignorant of thought both human and historical alike.

This is indeed what we see, in the majority, in the university today, where the students of even their own disciplines are often unaware of that specific discourse’s history. Psychology is particularly at fault here, but the other social sciences are close behind in their own self-willing ignorance. The humanities fare somewhat better simply due to their being understood as in themselves historical disciplines, and thus more closely related to philosophy. When Ricoeur states that ‘the history of philosophy is itself a philosophical endeavor’, this is a testament to, and an acknowledgment of, for one, Dilthey’s enduring contribution to thinking; that we must include ourselves in our studies, that the human being is not merely the vehicle for an otherwise transcendent consciousness but in fact is its home and hearth: we are philosophy embodied. The only thing that separates the human species from its animal cousins is our distinct duo of reason and imagination, the two essential aspects of thought. It matters not a whit how this uniqueness came about, only how it has enabled us to become what we are and how we utilize this astonishing ability in our own time, with a view to a collective future. In light of this, one might be tempted to add a fifth point to the philosophical star: could it also be said that the thinker’s duty is encapsulated in his reminder that each and all of us must orient ourselves only towards what may come in our shared futurity?

It may at first seem a contradiction to be so concerned about history, and about coming to know the history of thought, and yet at once state that our entire goal must be about the future. But in fact, the whole function of having a past is to allow us the perspective necessary to walk forward; the past does not welcome us back within it, for this defeats its elemental purpose as resource and as the beginning of wisdom. Philosophy is not about the past, even if, necessarily and by definition, the vast bulk of its wisdom hails from another time to our own. The philosopher reaches into the history of consciousness with her mind, on our behalf, and thereby brings back to us its enduring self-understanding. By acting at once as an historian, a critic, a voice of clarity and elocution, and as a discursive dialogician, the thinker serves his culture in the most adept manner imaginable. No other figure in the human career has had such demands, but no other has brought to them such abilities. In the end, however, philosophy is not about philosophers, and it is Merleau-Ponty who has stated its case perhaps most pointedly: “Philosophy is not a body of knowledge; it is the vigilance that does not let us forget the source of all knowledge.”

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He is a social philosopher and ethicist in the traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.