Inside and outside of the prevalent cultural matrix

Further to this, my earlier post concerning ways of thinking influenced by a capitalist-patriarchal ideological matrix, I wish to add something that is perhaps, at least on the surface of it, on a more personal note.

The point I wish to take up is what I have sensed to be true in terms of the ways of thinking produced by this matrix -- that is, that one has an identity on the basis of self-assertion. A slight variation on this idea is that one has an identity on the basis of asserting one. The first principle implies that one is charged with expressing one's power, and by this means, one obtains others' recognition about who one is. The second principle suggests that there is logically an element of fabrication to the aspect of having an identity within this ideological matrix; that the identity that one expresses may not have existed prior to the act of self-assertion. Rather, it is the act of self-assertion that brings it into being.

These are ways of thinking that I take to be pervasive in terms of how people come to think about the nature of identity within the patriarchal-capitalist matrix. To dissect the logic of this approach even further, it is as if the holder of these ideas about identity desires to leave a visceral impact upon the psyches of other people, which will consolidate and reinforce his sense of being a person of importance. (To be "important", at least to oneself, can be understood as a basic human need. If one is not at least a little bit "important" then one's life is meaningless.)

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For some reason, perhaps linked to my different mode of upbringing, I have never been convinced by attempts to establish self-identity on the basis of self-assertion. The expectation that one can obtain recognition of one's value, in this way, seems to be based largely on the assumption that human beings respond viscerally to threats, without undertaking to analyse or understand them. This is true only in situations where the one making such a threat has a captive audience -- such as, for instance, in the hierarchy of a corporation, where the one asserting himself is a manager. Within the military, as well, one is trained to respond viscerally to the barking of an order. Yet, to mistake for "human nature" as such the kind of visceral response of those whose training socialised them to accept hierarchy, is an error.

Outside of the context of hierarchal power relationships, (which is to say, in contexts where one has no need to accept them due to contracts and issues of survival), attempts to assert identity on through visceral impact have no place. The logic of power relations that circumscribes "human nature" in one context does not reach into another situation, where such power relationships have been transcended, or were never in place.

In such situations as these in the second instance, where dominance has not been established on the basis of contractural or financial coercion, responses to attempts to obtain recognition via self-assertion will be more more variable. The material conditions that guaranteed a predictable response in the former situation do not pertain to the latter. Rather, argument by assertion makes the patriarch seem ungrounded and unguarded. Should he persist to assert himself in this way nonetheless, he seems to be spinning out of control, into narrower and more intense whirlpools of madness.

In the final analysis, it is the patriarch's crude disregard for the intellect of others than will undo him.