We’ve mentioned writing a book about the Band's metaphysical insights. Here's a draft introduction...
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The planned metaphysics book - or more accurately a reality book - is finally underway. We don't plan on posting every chapter, but wanted to share the introduction with our readers. We'll probably post the first chapter of preliminary axioms when it's ready as well. It's lighter on pictures, but a book imposes different formal demands that our usual blog posts. Footnotes are in square brackets and placed at the end of the post because of formatting limitations. We hope you enjoy it. Comments are welcome.
The Ontological Hierarchy: Practical Metaphysics for a Return to Reality
By John Samson
Introduction
Start with an obvious question. What motivates someone write a book about metaphysics in 2023? Not an academic study of the subject as it sometimes appears in disciplines like philosophy or intellectual history. A practical consideration of metaphysical aspects of reality and their relationship to the physical universe as a fresh topic relevant to the present day.
The word seems curious, almost archaic, and definitely out of place. Certainly not a matter of concern to the commentariat who define “serious” analysis anywhere on the political spectrum. But it is this lack of place in contemporary thought that makes metaphysics so important.
We in the West live in collapsing societies within a fading, corrupted, de-moralized empire [1]. Presided over by self-parodic puppets and apparatchiks who inhabit the carcass of a once-great civilization like maggots. A carcass populated by vacuous masses of consumers so dependent on glowing screens to think for them that they are no longer able even to define their own self-interest. Existential crises abound on every level from the personal to the civilizational, with those nominally tasked with looking after society – the aforementioned maggots – ignoring and often actively encouraging them. We are not referring to drivel about the weather or whatever other social engineering fraud de jour is being used to rend the bonds of organic culture. We mean the real crises ravaging every aspect of society, like failure of the globalist economy, public moral bankruptcy, the transformation of every institution from media to education to science to health to religion into empirically false and logically nonsensical globalist propaganda, government that ignores the welfare of the people it rules, etc. Virtually any measure of a healthy functioning society turned upside down. BMIs rise and IQs decline while the masses consume media product in increasingly soulless and unaffordable dwellings. Meanwhile the parasitic elites responsible for it all blather about eating bugs and living in pods. Nicknames for this state of affairs like clown world or the beast system have become common for a reason.
Mass reactions to the twilight of the West tend to fall into a few broad and unproductive categories. Aging members of the baby boomer and silent generations enjoy the last fruits of an old system they did nothing to preserve or pass along. The cheap houses, reliable employment that can support a family, social cohesion, minimal regulation, and other fruits handed down from the countless generations before them that combined in the highest overall quality of life in human history. All of which was sacrificed in an orgy of greed, hedonism, and the once-in-a-civilization opportunity to destroy their posterity’s future prospects while virtue signaling to strangers who hate them.
Myles Birket Foster, An Afternoon in the Garden, 19th century
In a self-sustaining organic culture, older generations pass skills, property, values, and the capacity to join community life on to the younger.
The situation since the later decades of the 20th century is the opposite. Who cares if rising housing costs have been doubling the increase in real wages for decades when you got yours at three times the average salary for a high school grad?
Median household income and home prices from the U.S. Census Bureau; CPI data from U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, CPA calculations.
These locusts insulate themselves from the fruits of their custodial failure in dwindling bubbles of privilege where they can pretend nothing has changed societally since the ‘60s.
Their younger counterparts are the broken casualties of the system who shrill incoherent narratives from beneath mountains of debt while ignoring the dystopic future that same system has in store for them. Swelling numbers of hapless non-producers dependent on government payments and oblivious to the fragility of the structures providing those programs. Or the grisly cull that follows in the wake of their failure. Never have so many been so reliant on so little of substance simply to live.
This would be the opposite of a sustainable trend.
Public social spending as a share of GDP, 1880 to 2016
Finally there are those who live in reality and can see the wasteland of gig economies and million-dollar starter homes. Third world infrastructure and failed institutions. Globalist demons with their dyscivilizational media spewing ghoulish dreams of genocide from green new deals to viral gain of function. Those who can grasp what is happening and what horrors that lie ahead for too many. Who are trying to position themselves to survive the collapse of what was once “the West” in hope of rebuilding some sort of reality-facing organic community on the ashes. But one thing that those who promote, ignore, or reject the current socio-cultural state share is a disregard for metaphysics.
The closest thing to metaphysics for the first group is a Star Trek materialism derived from the optimistic prosperity and social cohesion they were raised in. A shabby fantasy where endless progress is not impossible and societal decline is simply ignored. The second seems to have internalized diminished living standards but shifted the false dream of perpetual progress to the social realm. An imaginary sociology where hollow platitudes uploaded from media and institutions replace the possibility of organic social cohesion. Where anarchy, atavism, and unchecked hedonism are expected to maintain advanced societies.
It is unclear which is more shocking - how completely these first two groups outsource their thinking to glowing screens, or the speed with which they drop the last most urgent cause for whatever new piffle is transmitted. This applies to either of them.
There is little point in engaging these groups. Neither demonstrate the perception, cognition, or working memory for a basic grasp of the physical world they inhabit, let alone the metaphysical. It is the third group that can benefit from an acquaintance with practical metaphysics since they can see that the promises of post-Enlightenment materialism have failed miserably. And perception of failure is the first step to considering alternatives. The obstacle for them is false consciousness, which is ironic given the Marxist misuse of the concept. Secular materialism is so engrained in every aspect of the contemporary West that even smart curious people struggle to set aside its false parameters. There is a reason we call our globalist, materialist, centralized pseudo-culture the house of lies.
Then there is Christianity, the historical Western entity where serious consideration of metaphysics would seem most at home. Yet a cursory examination is, for the most part, as disappointing as the rest of the modern West. Christianity, like the society it belongs to, is riven in different paths. On one side, corrupt and inverted “organized religion,” globalist puppets who replaced scripture and tradition with greed, feelings, and materialist virtue signaling. On the other, those who reject the wolves in sheep’s clothing and hew to Biblical truth, whether inside or outside the official denominations. But neither tend to think seriously about the metaphysical coherence of the world they inhabit, albeit for very different reasons. The former group is as ridiculous as they are fake. It should be self-evident that sacred scripture cannot be altered and still retain a claim to consistent ontological truth value. If the is Bible is divinely inspired, on what authority can it be changed? If it can be changed, why treat it as authoritative? If rudimentary logic exceeds their solipsistic posturing, it is foolish to expect a grasp of metaphysical relations.
This perversion of Christianity reverses the representation-reality relationship to be discussed in the next chapter. Church is transformed from a social-physical representation of Christian truths to an end-in-itself social grouping. Once the metaphysical reason for the existence of the church is displaced, there is no anchor to ensure consistency. Once that happens, the nominal congregation is free to introduce whatever they want.
Actual Christians do reject doctrines that contradict the Bible for metaphysical reasons, but those reasons are more implied than methodically worked through. For the legitimately faithful, appeal to scripture is sufficient because it is self-evidently True. There is no need to make the case for why this accepted representation of ontological foundations & ultimate reality supersedes human whims and fashions. The result is that even the pocket of the West that explicitly deals with metaphysical subjects does not explicate them in systematic ways.
The relative absence of practical Christian metaphysics is at least partly due to the absurd sacred/secular divide that was a strategic tentpole of post-Enlightenment materialist ideology. The word “absurd” is a deliberate choice. If applying it to the sacred/secular division seems shocking or off-putting, consider that a personal illustration of how pervasive the house of lies programming is. It is absurd because it pretends that truth and virtue can be institutionally compartmentalized, even contradictory, depending what building you currently occupy. Obviously, what is true is true, and while the physical and metaphysical are distinguishable, they are not disconnected. Morality orients towards truth and virtue – it is a material application of metaphysical realities. The premise that “religious beliefs” can or should be detached from your other societal choices is insane. It makes Christianity – a set of fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality - something you do, not something you live, and positions secular materialism the default state of mind. There is a lot more wrong with the state of contemporary Christianity then one false dichotomy, but the basic outcome is the same. Wherever you go, thoughts are not likely to turn to metaphysics.
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Heavenly and Earthly Trinities, 1681, National Gallery, London
Christianity is profoundly metaphysical, being based on interactions between the spiritual and material worlds. This painting shows this with a vertical and horizontal axis. Modern Christianity is more likely to back away from the interplay of real ontological levels to focus on worldly behavior. Despite the worldly behavior being downstream from and meaningless without the ontological structure.
So why a book on something as out of place as metaphysics seems to be? Because it is out of place. All the afflictions of the dying West derive from the same root pattern of error, one based on total disregard of what is or is not metaphysically possible. History shows that such a state of affairs is temporarily sustainable with enouh prosperity or cultural momentum to smooth over the contradictions. But given sufficient time, reality will invariable prove real. Systems built on lies and empty wishes face the same inexorable fate as any foundation made of sand. And the default secular materialist ideology that the entirety of mainstream modern Western society is built on is far worse than sand. It is a monstrous inversive category error that gets harder to deny as the momentum and prosperity dissipate.
The term “inversive” is deliberately chosen because the basic pattern of error underlying the modern West can be summed up as inversion. Acting towards or accepting things as if they were their opposite of what they actually are. Calling down up or treating evil as good are examples. Inversion is an extreme form of lying or perversion where the misrepresentation or degeneration is diametrically oppositional to the original in a definitive way. Calling a blue shirt a red shirt is a lie. Calling the clothed man nude is an inversion. In the realm of morality, going from somewhat greedy to very greedy is perversion. Going from selfless to greedy is inversion. The importance of this distinction will become clear later in the book, once the metaphysical conditions are understood.
William Blake, Good and Evil Angels Struggling for the Possession of a Child, 1793-94, The Higgins Bedford
“But good and evil are relative!” bleats the inverted victim of a great modern lie. Once again, inverted because the truth is precisely the opposite. Good and evil are an objective moral distinction. Their material applications may be assessed contextually, but their relative directions are not situationally dependent. Moral relativity inverts the simple truth when properly viewed metaphysically. The West was able to ignore this temporarily for the same reasons as metaphysics in general: cultural momentum and prosperity. Shared default historical moral assumptions such as the Western nations enjoyed until into the twentieth century can pick up the slack for as long as they hold sway. But once those are fully replaced with materialism and moral relativism, there is no check on self-interested predation. To be fair, there have always been predators. The question is whether they act in opposition to or are an extension of mainstream morality. Whether they are considered aberrations or logical outcomes of the contemporary socio-cultural system. The former offers pathways for social renewal and restoration when the tyrant is gone. The latter is the modern West, where inverted relativistic morality has the idiot masses cheering on the depopulation and ethno-cultural genocide games of a globalist elite.
Even many of those who can see this fall for other traps. Consider the clown show in Washington called Republicans and Democrats. Ignore the rhetoric – media rhetoric is how inversive states are presented as real. The reality is that oligarchic plunderers and destroyers of national culture are presented as oppositional representatives of the will of the people. Neither “side” delivers the sort of substantive alternative that would be needed to even attempt a socio-cultural revitalization. Because both serve the same inversive globalist agenda like two moldering wings on a rotting eagle carcass. These two groups of parasites are an example of the false choice that the house of lies relies on to further its real agenda. The true problem is the system that they perpetuate and profit from and whichever is chosen, the system wins. False choices are hard to see through without grasping the metaphysical underpinnings that make truth objective and discernment possible. The ability to judge what actually is real and what is smoke from a pipe of lies.
The false choice game is easier to see graphically. The public is presented with options that do not reflect their best interests, or, in most cases, what they even want.
The choice is made based on hollow rhetoric that does not actually represent what each false choice will actually do.
The real opposition is between the cast of corrupt puppets serving unanswerable globalist financial power and governance that prioritized the overall prosperity and well-being of the nation and its inhabitants.
Being enmeshed in the former blocks the latter from registering at all.
When the bedrock foundation of culture and civilization is diametrically opposed to the metaphysical possibility of truth, any offshoot or symptom is also terminally false. Even if it can shamble along on cultural momentum and prosperity for a while. In the case of the modern West, this inverted construct/foundation is offered up as a great triumph of human virtue and capacity. It is inverted, remember. The bedrock here is the Enlightenment with its absurd legacies of progress, materialism – or secular materialism for extra redundancy – and “rationalism”. The premise that reality in its fullness, including timeless moral foundations, is completely knowable and determinable by finite, contextualized, subjective, temporalized human minds. That our wills and intellects can either perfect - or infinitely approach perfection within - the world we find ourselves in, despite our inherent finitude. That morality just shakes out of secular interests or sanctimonious proclamation without timeless standards or intrinsic compulsion. And that bizarre, expensive, and frequently irreproducible numerological rituals offer pure, conclusive, objective knowledge of the ultimate nature of the reality that the numerologists and their “science” are contained within. Sounds ridiculous when simply laid out. But ridiculous or not, it is the quicksand that generations have taken as axiomatic and even flourished in. Until now, when the inherent systemic falsehood finally overcame the unacknowledged cultural assumptions that Western civilizational success actually ran on.
We understand that this may seem radical to those still enmeshed within the system. If Enlightenment secular materialism is so toxic, why has this gone unnoticed over countless books, articles, speeches, movements? Who are we to contradict several centuries of smart people whose names have passed into common knowledge? Statesmen, philosophers, scientists, commentators, clergy, educators, journalists… all trumpeting the same utopian dogmas on rights, freedoms, progress, etc. The answer is that metaphysics has been out of place for a long, long time. As an ideology, materialism is predicated on banishing the non-material to the realm of superstition and ignorance, which arguably allowed it to colonize the world of ideas. That and the pretense that it is responsible for and not orthogonal to improving material comfort. It was not, but the same prosperity that allowed for the rejection of metaphysics made buying into materialism profitable. There is a long history of denigrating the technological and sociological backwardness of “the past”, as if impermanent material achievement were… well… metaphysical affirmation.
John J. Bartlett, America Guided by Wisdom: An Allegorical Representation of the United States Depicting their Independence and Prosperity, 1815, Library of Congress.
Fake gods, random props, and melodramatic lighting are not strong correlates with truth.
Banishing the immaterial from rational consideration forced material reality to account for things that are outside of it. This begat the cascade of modern irrationalities that progressively vertically integrated into our current all-encompassing house of lies, where each false plank rests on and justifies the others. Denying the possibility that there is more to reality than the material became a requirement of “higher education”, learned society, modern life, any path to getting ahead in post-Enlightenment cultural terms at all. Science transformed from systematic empiricism into an arbiter of absolute truth that it was never designed to be. Until we reach the full inversion of the present where vacuous frauds in labcoats promulgate empirical untruth through compliant digital and legacy media channels. The modern system – the house of lies – even subverts its own history by pretending its inverted versions of institutions retain their original credibility. We are conditioned from childhood to trust the labcoats because smart people in the past did things that proved objectively true. Why not trust “scientists”? Look how advanced modern society is!
The productive nature of Western culture preceded the widespread institutional capture by atavistic globalist elites. Modern history can be seen as a progressive leveraging of global financial power for socio-cultural control. It is during our late stage that the pillars of healthy society become so corrupted that they are unable to function. At which point, the house of lies replaces the carcass of the older civilization while retaining its names.
There are practical advantages to being able to trust authorities. The sheer volume of information in the world today makes it impossible for anyone to have a clear picture of all human knowledge to any useful extent. And every accredited source of expertise, every official organ, every form of school, every arm of culture promulgates the same materialist dogma. Why would someone spare much thought over what is universally accepted as true, forms the principles society seems to run on, flatters human ingenuity, and brings lifestyles that are unprecedented in human history? Lifestyles where even the poor can have hot clean running water.
The reality is that you cannot consider what you do not accept. Plenty of people have pointed out these core problems in one way or another but were drowned out in the noise. Who cares if endless progress is mathematically impossible in a finite world when there are real prospects for material gain and the dopamine hits that come with them. Meanwhile, increasing centralization brought ever more immersive media bubbles from the printing press to the internet reinforcing the same hollow materialist world view of progress and consumption. This is the vertical integration that makes the house of lies so compelling – parts and levels reinforce each other while blocking potential pathways to truth.
Credentialism is a major symptom of the institutional capture and socio-cultural inversion of the house of lies. Corrupted schools produce degree holders who lack any productive alignment with reality, let alone disciplinary mastery. Some of these unwitting ideologues are declared experts for command of globalist lies and ability to work the system. A select few appear on the glowing screens to upload the current false narratives to the masses who internalize them as if they were their own thoughts and observations. Until the next batch of lies.
The system further defends itself by channeling potential threats into fake choices where both options perpetuate the same false foundations. Modern intellectual history is a series of “critical” movements that appear to attack certain materialist and positivistic Enlightenment values while reaffirming secular materialist dogma. The most recent would be postmodernism – no doubt the academy has fantasized new categories, but current mainstream ideology nominally descends from that false framework [2]. Postmodernism has been such an effective tool because it essentially denies objective reality at all. The argument is that what we see as the real world is just the play of arbitrary signs, themselves ultimately meaningless. We create our own realities and speak our own truths, people and their signs being products of the world they supposedly create notwithstanding. From existentialism to discourse theory, a conga line of pomposities offer variations on the same painfully obvious tautology: a purely materialist account of the human condition lacks higher meaning. A string of sociopathic Jack Horners sitting in their darkened corners, pulling out the same plum, and proclaiming what smart boys they are.
René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
It is early, but surrealist Magritte's painting became a postmodern icon for pointing out that a sign is not the same thing as what it depicts.
Of course materialism is meaningless. The lack of higher meaning is implicit in the name. Any overarching purpose or objective moral character is outside of or beyond the natural forces of generation and destruction postulated by materialists. Likewise any human imperative beyond survival, reproduction, and perhaps resource hoarding. Outside of or beyond the natural is literally supernatural, or in this sense, metaphysical. The logic is painfully simple. Define reality as the workings of material properties and you exclude any consideration other than material properties. Any values beyond brute survival are reduced to human preference, arbitrary and without deeper meaning [3]. But for all its lofty proclamations and socio-political success, Enlightenment thought is infantile and solipsistic. Its proponents wanted a meaningful moral reality without having to acknowledging higher order or power to anchor extra-material meaning and morality, so they just declared it so. It is what we call secular transcendence – the impossible claim that abstract absolutes that are not material, temporal, and finite somehow inhere in a material world that is. Ironically, it was this secular transcendent foundation of modernity that gave postmodernism and its metastases a whole population of false idols to topple.
It should have been obvious with a moment’s thought that there is no place for transcendent objective morality in a purely materialist ontology. No capacity for endless progress either. It's simple math.
Industrial Revolution efficiency and other technical innovations can improve aggregate wealth for a while. Arbitraging international labor costs can keep the illusory party going a little longer. Institutional capture and message control provide increasing cover. Until the wheels come off completely and hard choices can no longer be handwaved away.
The mass acceptance of this house of lies even today tempers optimistic forecasting. The observable reality is that most people are functional idiots, incapable of even identifying their own best interests. Note how few seem capable of observing the world around them, noting changes, recalling previous beliefs and claims, and thinking through implications. They live in a perpetual present, toggling between mindless entertainment and hollow worries while relying on glowing screens to tell them what nonsense they believe today. If they were not like this, they would never have allowed their society and culture to degrade to a terminal point. Expecting the masses to “get it” is a fool’s game – just consider how many choose to live in degrading urban areas with three days or less food supply, fragile JIT logistics, and fraying supply chains. How many choose mass media and social media a valuable use of their time let alone source of information. How many shot themselves full of experimental genetic toxins for reasons that could not be true, send their children to knowledge and culture hating schools, are obese… Expecting anything more from them than consuming product with debt-based currency until the system collapses is pointless. Not a pleasant image or one to look forward to, but absurdly easy to project. Just look at the trajectory of the last fifty years then extrapolate for the next fifty.
But the collapse is not going to take everyone. It never does. Whole areas will be reasonably ok. Parts of the world will retain advanced technology. Other areas will come through hell and rebuild organic cultures on the ashes of the lies. Many of those who see past the decaying remains of once-vital nations are already preparing for the future. This is the audience for a practical discussion of metaphysics in 2023.
Materialist ideologies cannot even perceive the metaphysical errors underlying the unfolding collapse, let alone propose solutions. The best they can offer are different, equally unsatisfactory, materialisms. Postmodernism, where there is no meaning, but we are expected to understand that through written arguments. Simulation theory, where the material world is defined as far larger without any further insight into ontological questions at all. Epicycles, where the numerologists add increasingly preposterous dark matters and energies to their numerological failures. We could continue but there is no need. It is well past time to put aside solipsistic fantasy and seriously consider the empirical and logical necessity that there is more to reality than the material. Something obvious through most of human history until some people decided it wasn’t because they did not want it to be so. Which resonated because of greed and fashionability and eventually condensed into the house of lies.
Proponents of reform within this dying system will point to the ghastly globalist elites as the problem. Simply rotating leaders is another false choice. It is the underlying system that is the problem, and that is a symbiotic fusion of perverse elites and idiot masses. Take the teetering financial system, where the money the elites write into existence that allowed their institutional capture across the West also slakes the desire of the masses to consume more than they produce. It is unravelling now, but metaphysical awareness could have prevented it from ever starting.
It seems like a top-down puppet show, and in some ways, it is. But the elites who engineer the false narratives rely on the acceptance, support, and complicity of the narrative-huffing masses that accept the lies as reality. It is a closed interactive loop with no access to actual reality.
That is why a metaphysics book makes sense now. A word that was out of place stops being when the place changes. Post-Enlightenment materialism has objectively and demonstrably failed the Western culture that spawned it. Failed to preserve organic society, nation, family, morality, individual sovereignty. The purpose of this book is to sweep away the benighted detritus of the whole fake Enlightenment project. Not to replace it with more materialism, but to show why metaphysics offers objective truth to counter the self-serving falsehood of the house of lies. To lay a foundation for organic societies and cultures that can recognize and resist inversion and the short-sighted appetites it serves. It is time put aside luciferian fantasies of will over reality and infantile greed and consider the alternative.
It is time to ask what can we know and how can we know it?
This is not is an “academic” take on metaphysics. There is no deference to discourse, no need to dutifully summarize a history of past names by recapping what X said in response to Y, no endless notes to prove discursive mastery. Academic philosophy is part of the problem – a huge Jenga tower of bloviation resting on false materialist dogmas like the rest of the house of lies. One that pretends a crabbed hermetic dialog between names could be anything more than a crabbed hermetic dialog. There are thinkers who have generated real insight, and we will acknowledge those who have influenced our thoughts. But pretending a theorist conveys some truth value external to how effectively he theorizes reality is inverted. No wonder postmodernists carved through the sclerotic blather like a lightsaber.
There are so many fundamental problems with the modern academy that another book would be needed to make a dent in the list. Regarding academic philosophy, two structural deficiencies are relevant to our purposes. The first is the transformation of pre-modern rational inquiry into a modern “discipline”, where thinkers become subjects treated as chapters in reductive textbooks. What possible contribution to human being-in-the-world can be made by yet another thesis on Kant [4]? Conversely, the representational mediation between our thought and communication and the world-in-itself is should be obvious without first paraphrasing the First Critique. The academy is itself a representational mediation made up of narrow discursive channels that have somehow become ends in themselves. This would be tolerable if the discursive channels pointed towards some apprehension of the truth. But they do not. Their adherence to post-Enlightenment materialism proves it.
This project considers foundational ontology. The nature of being – or Being, origins of existence in toto, foundations of truth and morality and related issues long abandoned by philosophical mouthpieces. Ontological objective absolutes that observably do not exist in an entropic, temporal, subjectively apprehended material reality. That cannot be reached through materialist means because they precede and supersede the material but must exist for reasons that will be made clear. Ourselves and our context, our being-in-the-world derives from “something”, even if the idea of “things” doesn’t really apply to ontological conditions outside of material reality. Conditions that rule out the possibility of direct human apprehension. Hence our decision to start with a most basic question. What can we know and how can we know it rejects long-running assumptions for the essential foundations of what is possible. And that is a platform we can start to build from while remaining in truth.
If there is a central observation running through this book it is that ontology and epistemology are connected. Different modes of knowledge production correspond to different levels of reality, and the idea of levels of reality points directly to metaphysics. Materialism and its secular transcendence guarantees that onto-epistemological symbiosis is missed. Just consider the cavalcade of false formations that surround us. “Faith” in objectively falsifiable material facts. Acceptance of material claims that are logically contradictory. Wild inconsistencies in supposedly constant abstractions like ethics or justice. Accusations that the operations of symbolic logic are subjectively biased. Unitary fake “explanations” for complex polyvalent phenomena that are dropped and replaced without a ripple. An overall assumption that will – whether expressed as self-interest, feelings, desire, perceived fairness – takes precedence over objective reality. That symbolic mediation of an external creates the external… It goes on and on. Physical matter and energy, observation, logic, faith, desire, abstraction, and whatever else all jumbled together in a single material realm that is somehow fully knowable to reason and semiotically opaque at the same time. A web of interlocking category errors.
Materialism precludes awareness of ontological levels or domains and the epistemological modes appropriate to each. Our premise is that what we can know and how we can know it lead to a metaphysical continuum. This is where we will begin.
Montague Dawson, The Crescent Moon, 20th century, Private Collection
PRELIMINARY NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
There are some preliminary matters to establish before getting underway. This book proposes a practically applicable model of the structure of reality in its fullness, including physical and metaphysical components, called the Ontological Hierarchy. It is concerned with general patterns rather than specific details, and does not ground itself in the methods or nomenclature of any particular discipline. The arguments it makes and connections it draws build logically from basic observations. It may seem unusual for those preconditioned by academic languages like philosophy or physics. It is a different way of thinking, and one facilitated by a starting foundation that eliminates the need for distracting explanatory digressions along the way.
Reality. This may be the term with the greatest potential for confusion due to the materialist assumptions around it. This book uses reality to mean reality in its fullness. Not only the physical universe we occupy and the mental worlds that we experience it through, but all the abstract structures and relations that can be known conceptually and the ontological foundations that transcend perception or cognition. This definition of reality is at odds with the materialist pathology of associating it with the physical universe. Materialist reality is only a subset of reality as understood here.
If reality encompasses the physical universe and more abstract ontological states or levels, qualifiers are needed to distinguish the different subsets. Some of these will be introduce later in the book, but those of initial importance are included below.
Material reality. Matter and energy. The universe of the physical sciences. What most readily comes to mind from a mainstream secular materialist perspective. Our physical bodies belong to material reality despite our perceiving it subjectively because material reality precedes and contains our perceiving brain.
Apprehensible reality. Reality as we can apprehend it either through direct sensory perception (perceptual reality) or rational comprehension. Material reality as it appears empirically and the aspects of immaterial or metaphysical reality that we can grasp intellectually belong here.
Metaphysics. The non-material aspects of reality are literally metaphysical – above or beyond the physical – and will be elaborated as this book progresses. Metaphysical reality refers to levels of reality outside of material reality, some of which are apprehensible and some of which are not. Reality is the sum of physical and metaphysical realities, meaning we can describe something as “real” even if it lacks material existence. A negative number is a simple enough example of something that is real, in that it can be logically demonstrated to be true but has no material form. Existence is another word complicated by the discrepancy between materialist and full views of reality. Something metaphysically real “exists” metaphysically regardless of its lack of physical existence.
Truth. This is simply what is true, meaning that which is real or in alignment with the nature of reality physically or metaphysically. False refers to something that is not real or contradicts the nature of reality. Specific measures of truth vary depending on the level of reality they apply to. Something materially true exists as material fact, while something abstractly true does not. This will be further elaborated in later chapters.
For the sake of clarity, terms such as reality, truth, and existence assume the full understanding of reality defined above. Qualifying adjectives like materially real or metaphysical truth will be added to indicate narrower usages.
Chapter One: Preliminary Axioms
The unusual nature of this subject makes it wise to begin with some initial assumptions. This is especially prudent in a society where proliferating discursive viewpoints - from quantum physics to critical theory to New Age occultism - have fragmented understanding of our relationship with reality. Starting everyone on the same page also is a way to familiarize readers with the clarifying power of basic observations and logic. The following points feel like they ought to be self-evident, but clarity is a casualty when intellectual culture toggles between false post-Enlightenment rationalist certainty and false postmodern deconstructive nihilism. There is value, then, in working through these basic foundations before moving into metaphysical inferences. The guiding question, what can we know and how can we know it, will remain the same, but answers get more abstract. Best to start on a firm footing.
1. Understanding is Cumulative
Footnotes
1. We use the hyphenated “de-moralized” to refer to the absence of morality in modern culture and distinguish it from absence of morale. Although that applies as well.
2. The qualifier nominally is included because it is our metaphysically-informed opinion that contemporary globalism/liberalism/whatever is driven by evil instead of a good-faith application of any philosophy or ideology. Evil meaning willful opposition to the truth, to the nature of reality as it is, metaphysically or physically. We recognize that this may be difficult for those still shaped by the house of lies false consciousness, so we are leaving it in a footnote until developing the argument later in the book. It should also be noted that this refers to whoever or whatever is driving these dyscivilizational movements. There is no shortage of true believers larding institutional halls to add sincerity and amplify the faux radicalism. For now it is sufficient to point out that the motivation behind these critical theories is perpetual cultural destruction and not the creation of viable alternatives. This must be the case since false dogmas offer no path to build anything.
3. Obviously the house of lies claims a materialist ontology and that traditional culture and morality are merely arbitrary. But it also asserts a slate of new values that are not uniformly applied or even rationally justified. The materialist ontology means that the values cannot exist as values, because there is nothing external to the material. And from a purely material perspective, abandoning self-interest is profoundly unnatural. Incoherence and inversion identifies globalist morality as nothing more than expedient whims.
4. The term “being-in-the-world” actually is derived from an academic name - philosopher Martin Heidegger. But an academic study would now go into a brief, or not so brief, explanation of how he derives and uses this term that probably extends into his antecedents. The goal is less a practical, metaphysical understanding than to position the author in the huge Jenga tower of disciplinary discourse or show he is a smart boy who gets Heidegger. We are simply interested in a useful term. Heidegger saw human “being”, or essential ontological nature, as unfolding temporally. This distinguishes human being-in-the-world from Being, the essential ontological nature of everything. We like being-in-the-world because it captures the finite temporal nature of humans while also recognizing that temporal finitude connects with something metaphysically more fundamental. We want to acknowledge that we did not coin the term, but if the concept holds, it doesn’t need extensive appeals to the Philosopher’s Name to do so. Conversely, if it doesn’t, all the Names in the world won’t change that.
