The Age of Plenty and Leisure: Essays for a New Principle of Organization in Human Society v3

The Age of Plenty & Leisure:
Essays for a New Principle of Organization in Human Society
Luke R. Barnesmoore
UBC Urban Studies Lab
Department of Geography
University of British Columbia
Abstract: This working collection of essays problematizes biocentrist conceptions of
humanity and looks past the competitive, dominating mechanical evolution of humanity in
the Age of Scarcity and Labor to examine the potential for conscious evolution in an Age
of Plenty and Leisure. The collection interrogates issues of 'world view' along the
interrelated axes of scarcity vs. plenty, labor vs. leisure, mechanical vs. conscious evolution,
order as created in nature vs. order as implicit in nature, nature as a consumable other vs.
nature as a part of self to commune with, and, more generally, a vision of human nature
relations beyond the bio-materialist reductionism of the Modernist ‘world view’.

Contextualizing the Study
“Idealism and matter of fact are… not sundered, but inseparable, as our daily steps are guided by ideals of
direction.”1
This text is the utopian dream and dystopian nightmare of a California boy who grew up in
the Redwoods that lie on the fringe of the San Francisco Bay Area and its Silicon Valley.
The Redwoods are a dynamic borderland populated by both C-level corporate executives
and the milieu of hippies, mystics and ‘earth people’ who formed the lifeblood of social
movements in the 1960s. Utopian visions abound, from dreams of a hi-tech, post-labor
society that blurs the border between human and machine to produce immortal cyborg
demigods through dreams of a return to a simple and harmonious relationship with the
order of nature and the soul. The Redwoods are the abode of dreams for a new tomorrow.
In the urban sprawl of the Bay Area that lies beyond the borders of the Redwoods
and a few wealthy urban enclaves in cities like San Francisco, where the plenty of the forest
gives way to the scarcity, competition and desire for hierarchical domination of the
concrete jungle and the poor and disenfranchised toil their lives away in a perpetual
struggle for survival, we come face to face with the dystopian underbelly of life beyond the
forest of dreams.2
The utopian lives and dreams of the Redwoods reflect a coming age,
The Age of Plenty, Leisure and Conscious Evolution, where plenty-cooperation
will replace scarcity-competition as the organizing principle of our society’s ‘economic’3
systems, the shackles of mechanical evolution will be thrown off and humanity will
complete its entrance into the process of conscious evolution where ideas, experiences and
philosophy4
will replace scarcity, competition and the concomitant desire for hierarchical
domination as the driving force of society.
“Mainstream academic philosophy has for a long time tried to answer these fundamental questions with that
part of the mind we call intellect. Frequently the difficulties encountered were so great, the logical tangles so
confusing, that many philosophers decided such questions were meaningless, and some even began to
ridicule anyone who dared ask "What is reality?" "What is the meaning of life?" "Is there life after death?"
"What is the soul?" "Does God exist?" Yet these are the questions of the heart. These are the questions that
matter most to people--not whether the syntax and deep structures of our language can ever truly represent
real knowledge. The meaningful questions, these " questions of the heart", rise up in human beings because of
something intrinsic to our nature, an innate striving which Plato called Eros.”5
Eros will replace the desire survival and domination as the driving force of human
existence in the coming age.

1
Geddes SP 1915, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics, London, Williams
2
While we make this seemingly binary divide between the forest and the urban sprawl for heuristic purposes that will become clear
through this text we do not mean to impose a totalizing binary and imply that there are no utopian dreams to be found in the urban
sprawl. There are fringes within the urban sprawl that are akin to the fringe formed by the forest in that the nomads who wander these
inter-urban fringes also dream of a better tomorrow for humanity.
3
By economics we mean the dimension of society that addresses the provision of food, water, shelter and other ‘material goods’.
4
Philo Sophia, the love of and desire for wisdom.
5
Jacob Needleman, “Questions of the Heart: Inner Empiricism as a Way to a Science of Consciousness” Noetic Sciences Review,
Summer 1993.

The world beyond the Redwoods, however, remains organized based on the
principles of the falling Age of Scarcity-Competition, Labor and Mechanical Evolution.
Society organized by these principles—scarcity, competition and the desire for hierarchical
domination—give way to dystopian scenes of mass homelessness, mental illness,
excruciating poverty, concomitant substance abuse and violence and, more generally, a
sometimes-hopeless sorrow. Those individuals, families and institutions whose power6
has
been derived from organization of society upon the principles of this falling age fight to
sustain this order of society through the production of scarcity-competition7
and repressive,
oppressive techniques of hierarchical domination8
—Donald Trump, with his ‘law and
order’ ethos, his strongman, ‘winner’ persona, his patriarchy, his white Christian nationalist
authoritarianism, etc., is the archetypal expression of this last, gasping attempt to stave off
humanity’s escape from a society organized by the principles of scarcity, competition and
domination.
The principles of the falling age have infected the dreams of a hi-tech utopia to
produce dystopian visions of a small elite class of cyborg-demigods who rule over (or purge
the world of…) the poor mass of humanity who cannot afford to pay for ‘deification’… In
response to this dystopian taint in mainstream hi-tech utopian visions, the utopian dreams
of the hippies, mystics and ‘earth people’ have increasingly turned to a vision in which
technology is by and large abandoned for a more simple, harmonious life in communion
with nature. Having grown up on the borders between the hi-tech utopian visions of Silicon
Valley and its forest colonizing executives and the no-tech or low-tech utopian dreams of
the forest people, this utopian dream attempts to synthesize the two worlds in a manner
that staves off the dystopian consequences of a hi-tech utopia conceived within the
Modernist ‘world view’. Technology, if utilized in a society organized upon the principle of
plenty-leisure-conscious evolution and a conception of nature as the expression of an
eternal order9
, provides a clear path towards staving off scarcity and the need for physical
labor. Simple, harmonious and leisure communion with (rather than the laborious
consumption of) nature provides us with a mirror in which to contemplate the Self and
catalyze the process of conscious evolution. The two prongs of this utopian vision are
mutually constitutive in that if we are to utilize technology appropriately, we must first come
to know the principles of the coming age through contemplating Self in the mirror of
nature and in that high technology ought to be developed with the telos of cultivating,
accentuating and directing the existing order of nature towards fulfilling our goals rather
than the Modernist telos of dominating nature to produce an order that fulfills our goals.
Methodological Notes
These essays come as an attempt to create a living network of writing from which the
theoretical underpinnings of our inquiry into order, human-nature relations and the future
of human civilization will rise as an ‘emergent property'. The banal Google definition of
‘emergent property’:

6
Power in this context implies the capacity to dominate.
7
The root of the divide and conquer strategy is to create scarcity and impel competition over that which has been rendered scarce.
8
Think the power of the executioner-prince in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.
9
Rather than nature as a chaotic other that must be brought into order through hierarchical domination.

"An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate
in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate
size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales."
As a simple example, consciousness is often understood as an emergent property (i.e. the
simple agents of the brain, its cells and the electro chemical reactions therein, are capable
of manifesting the higher orders of rational consciousness when they function at a collective
scale). Each essay will stand as an individual 'agent', but the overall theory that underpins
empirical research will rise as an emergent property when the many agents are taken at
their collective scale. Each essay forms a new string in the web, a new connection between
two of the related ideas, metaphors and, or empirical illustrations. Each string is, on its
own, rather fragile, and yet taken as a whole solidity emerges from the relative frailty of
each string.
The Iroquois Gift Economy is illustrative of the model in which I want to pursue
the research (where, in rough terms that need to be developed into harmony with the
multi-dimensional nature of thought, each of the diamonds are an essay and each of the
arrows in which the diamonds collect is an idea like 'evolution', 'social order' or 'human-
nature relations').
10

10
Barbara Alice Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”.

11
This method is very similar to the nomad explorations method expounded by
Barnesmoore (2016)12
, but pursues conceptualization of the methodology using living
natural symbolism rather than the symbolism of a journey across the plateaus of a
mountain range (i.e. inanimate natural symbolism). The goal of this method is to allow an
emergent understanding of ‘world view’, humanity, nature, evolution, the meaning of life,
the potentials for social order, etc. (i.e. the emergence of a new state in the process of
conscious evolution) that rises from the living network of agent-essays when engaged at
their collective scale.

11
Barbara Alice Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”.
12
Barnesmoore 2016, Nomad Explorations V 2.1: Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity.

Nomad Explorations
“Nomad Exploration (NE) aims to broaden understandings and deepen questions rather than to provide
static answers that end the journey for deeper understanding. Indeed,
“An answer is valuable only in so far as it stimulates further inquiry. This holds true even in the exact sciences
where the hypothesis serves as a springboard for the searching mind. In a still higher degree it holds true in
the realm of philosophy where answers are merely fertile formulations of problems. “Let us know in order to
search,” says St. Augustine. The favorite answer of an age, however, is often one in which only a minimum of
problems is preserved and which has been promoted to its place as favorite because it seems to render
superfluous all further questioning. It closes all doors, blocks all ways, and just because of this permits the
agreeable feeling that the goal has been reached and that the rest is granted.”13
Foucault argues “one of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique.”14
In NE,
then, we eschew discipline by the presumed need for thesis, hypothesis, introduction, conclusion, peripatetic
argumentation and the plethora of other practices by which contemporary academic writing is constrained
(though we are not so dogmatic in this dismissal that we do not use such tools when they are deemed useful).
NE also involves approaching research without a static question or objective; for example, given that the ideas
presented in this text fit together in nonlinear fashion and thus elude linear presentation, we eschew structures
of writing that constrain nonlinear potentials for the sake of creating a cohesive linear narrative and instead
allow each section to exist on its own.”15
“….Gradually, as we move above the timberline [and start to see the world from a new plateau of perspective],
the reader will find himself beset by difficulties which are not of our making. They are the inherent difficulties
of a science which was fundamentally reserved, beyond our conception. Most frustrating, we could not use
our good old simple catenary logic, in which principles come first and deduction follows. This was not the
way of the archaic thinkers. They thought rather in terms of what we might call a fugue, in which all notes
cannot be constrained into a single melodic scale, in which one is plunged directly into the midst of things
and must follow the temporal order created by their thought. It is, after all, in the nature of music that the
notes cannot all be played at once. The order and sequence, the very meaning, of the composition will reveal
themselves—with patience—in due time. The reader, I suggest, will have to place [themself] in the ancient
“Order of Time.”16
Geography?
These essays are, in practical terms, designed to act as an ideational network from which
the theoretical underpinnings of a dissertation for a PHD in Geography will emerge, but as
these theoretical underpinnings have emerged so to have questions concerning whether
Geography and Geographical Thought hold relevance in the utopian future imagined by
this nomadic exploration:
“Geography (n.) "the science of description of the earth's surface in its present condition," 1540s, from Middle
French géographie (15c.), from Latin geographia, from Greek geographia "description of the earth's surface,"
from geo- "earth" + -graphia "description" (see -graphy).”17

13
Foss, M 1949, Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience, Princeton University Press, p. 1.
14
Foucault M 1977, Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, Vintage Books, p. 218.
15
Barnesmoore 2016, Nomad Explorations V 2.1: Genesis Eden and the Grail in Modernity p. 11.
16
De Santillana, G & Von Dechend, H 2007, ‘Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time’, Nonpareli Books, p. xii.
17
Harper, Douglas. "Online Etymology Dictionary". Etymonline.com. Online Etymology Dictionary
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=geography

First, the obvious issue, Geography is implicitly oriented towards the surface of earth and,
in the case of Human Geography, the potential for social, cultural, political, ecological, etc.
relations therein. The basic logics, assumptions, metaphors, language, etc. of the
Geographical tradition are oriented towards the realities of human civilization as contained
to the finite physical spaces on earth. The Age of Conscious Evolution will see humanity
escape the boundaries of earth to explore the cosmos. More importantly, the new age will
see humanity escape the boundaries of visible, bio-mechanical evolution (which can be
observed on the surface of earth) into the invisible space of conscious evolution (which
cannot be observed, in and of themselves, on the surface of earth). Geography in the age of
Conscious Evolution, then, will have to transform itself into a study of physical spaces
beyond the earth’s surface (stellar cartography and the study of other planet surfaces) and,
more important and more difficult, into the study of the invisible spaces in which
consciousness exists.
There is also the problem that Geography is, in essence, a descriptive science.
Geography’s great fascination with Bruno Latour and other such a-ontological approaches18
provides an archetypal reflection of this overall descriptive impetus.
“By ‘rules of method’ I mean what a priori decisions should be made in order to consider all of the empirical
facts provided by the specialized disciplines as being part of the domain of ‘science, technology and society’.
By ‘principles’ I mean what is my personal summary of the empirical facts at hand after a decade of work in
this area. Thus, I expect these principles to be debated, falsified, replaced by other summaries. On the other
hand, the rules of method are a package that do not seem to be easily negotiable without loosing sight of the
common ground I want to sketch. With them it is more of a question of all or nothing, and I think they
should be judged only on this ground: do they link more elements than others? Do they allow outsiders to
follow science and technology further, longer and more independently? This will be the only rule of the
game, that is, the only ‘meta’ rule that we will need to get on with our work.”19
Latour’s method also includes moving forward without epistemological assumptions,20
only
tracking the rhetorical surface of discourse (to avoid ‘psychologizing’),21
focusing on the
process of science rather than focusing on the power dynamics that articulate the potential

18
Harman, G 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, re.press.
Morton, T 2013, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, Open Humanities Press, p. 234.
Morton, T 2011, ‘Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social
Sciences, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 163-190.
Bennett, Jane 2009, ‘Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things’, Duke University Press.
Bennett, J, Cheah, P, Orlie, MA & Grosz, E 2010, ‘New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics’ in D. Coole & S. Frost, eds.,
Duke University Press.
Bennett, J 2004, ‘The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter’, Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 347-372.
Brown, B 2003, ‘A Sense of Things: the Object Matter of American Literature’, University of Chicago Press.
Daston, L 2000, Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press.
19
Latour, Science in Action, p. 17
20
Ibid. 13-15
21
Latour, The Pasteurization of France .

for scientific process and “offering no a-priori definition of what is strong and what is weak.
…[Starting] with the assumption that everything is involved in a relation of forces but that
[he] has no idea at all of precisely what force is”,22
and a plethora of other practices that, in
emphasizing horizontality across time and space (history, rhetoric and practice) over
verticality in time and space (meaning, intention, psychology, consciousness, etc.), strip
human thought of the capacity for discernment (of Jupiter). As we see in The Order of
Things (Foucault, 1970), it is exactly this capacity for discernment (Jupiter) that transforms
words into language (the verb ‘to be’), transforms description into analysis, transforms
telematic subjects into subjects with agency, distinguishes an algorithm from a human, etc.
In short, discernment is an essential epistemological faculty in the process of conscious
evolution and so eschewing discernment is eschewing the potential for conscious evolution.
Bruno Latour (1988) asks the reader to study the world as though there is no distinction
between force and reason.23
This suggestion, along with the notion that we should move
forward without epistemological assumptions24
, has spawned a wide range of studies that
move without discernment (of phenomena like scale) and the distinction between force and
reason (and a focus on ‘non-human actors’).25
This encyclopedic methodology confines
human epistemological potential to the boundaries of the peripatetic mind by extinguishing
the distinction between force and reason and reducing all phenomena to an unconscious
(and thus unintentional) play of quantifiable forces.26
Nigel Thrift is one of the most recognized ‘ontological theorists’ in contemporary
Geographical literature. He is best known for arguing that, following Latour’s Actor
Network Theory, Geographical theory should simply eschew notions of scale (local,
regional, global, etc.) and instead view society in terms of ‘the durability of social relations’

22
Latour, Pasteurization of France, p. 7.
23
Latour, “The Pasteurization of France” 1988.
Robert Nola , Rescuing Reason: A Critique of Anti-Rationalist Views of Science and Knowledge 2012, Springer.
24
Ibid. 13-15
25
Morton, T 2013, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, Open Humanities Press, p. 234.
Morton, T 2011, ‘Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social
Sciences, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 163-190.
Bennett, Jane 2009, ‘Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things’, Duke University Press.
Bennett, J, Cheah, P, Orlie, MA & Grosz, E 2010, ‘New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics’ in D. Coole & S. Frost, eds.,
Duke University Press.
Bennett, J 2004, ‘The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter’, Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 347-372.
Brown, B 2003, ‘A Sense of Things: the Object Matter of American Literature’, University of Chicago Press.
Daston, L 2000, Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press.
Jessop, B 2004, ‘Hollowing out the 'Nation-State' and Multilevel Governance’, in Kennett, P, eds., A Handbook Of Comparative Social
Policy, Edward Elgar Publishing.
26
Infinite Substance emanates as force, form and consciousness (see Spinoza’s Emendation of the Intellect for a detailed discussion of
this point). By the nature of that distinction, force and form are in the sense relevant for this study devoid of consciousness (which
includes reason). To reduce all things to force is to remove consciousness from the discussion and thus to necessitate the interpretation
of all sociopolitical outcomes as unintentional (for without consciousness there can be no intention).

(as Latour views Truth in terms of the ‘durability’ of subjective opinion…).27
In a similar
vein of thought, and in a move that echoes Latour’s move to eschew the distinction
between force and reason (i.e. discernment), Sally Marston proposed a ‘flat ontology’ that
eschews horizontal and vertical ‘predetermination’ (which has most tellingly been described
as “an impetus for providing more modest accounts that attend to new forms of connection
as well as disconnection” (rather than discernment and critique?).28
In short, as with much
of the post-modern work on ‘object oriented ontologies’ and the like,29
“reality was
ransacked in search of theory”30
as all distinction (a product of discernment…) is replaced
by simple description. In the words of Benjamin Noys “I am concerned with Latour as
merely one symptomatic instance of ‘anti-critique’; the turn from critical analysis to the
descriptive, and the loss of confidence in the very gesture of critique.”31
In the Age of Conscious Evolution envisioned by this text, models of inquiry that
eschew discernment for description will be rendered obsolete as they cannot facilitate
conscious evolution—there will be a need for description, for what we might call
‘cartography of invisible spaces’ and for the traditional study of physical space, but there
will also be a need to develop new theoretical models and methods of inquiry to study
invisible space (consciousness) and its co-substantive relationship with physical space. The
‘mind>matter’ and ‘matter>mind’ hierarchical-binary we observe in the relationship
between authors like Leopold, Geddes and Mumford and the Chicago Schools of
Sociology and Economics must be replaced with the ‘mind=matter’ of a co-substantive,
non-hierarchical ‘world view’.32
Mind and matter ought to be taken as mutually constructive,
as both a single reality and as two, co-substantive realities.
Anarco-Geography and Non-Hierarchical Geographical Thought
Simon Springer roots his non-hierarchical vision of Geographical thought within the
rhizomal mythos of A Thousand Plateaus:
“In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduced the concept of the ‘arbores-cent’ to
describe a vertical, tree-like ontology of totalizing principles and binary thought. They contrasted this with the
notion of the ‘rhizome’, which is marked by a horizontal ontology, wherein things, ideas, and politics are able
to link up in non-hierarchical patterns of association.”33
The devil is, as they say, in the details, and there are some important differences in the
cosmological, ontological, epistemological, teleological, etc. axioms (the ‘world view’) from
which we conceive of non-hierarchical social relations, but in essence the distinction
between rhizomal (‘tree of life’) and arboreal (‘tree of good and evil’) relations is illustrative

27
Agnew, John A., and James S. Duncan, eds. The Wiley-Blackwell companion to human geography. Vol. 16. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
p. 301
28
Agnew, John A., and James S. Duncan, eds. The Wiley-Blackwell companion to human geography. Vol. 16. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
p. 301
29
Barnesmoore, “Latour’s Nihilist Madness: Robotic Subjectivities & The Death of Discernment”
30
Smith N (1979). “Geography, science, and post-positivist modes of explanation.” Progress in Human Geography 3: 356–383. P. 356
31
Noys, B 2011, “The Discrete Charm of Bruno Latour, or the Critique of Anti-Critique”, Presented at the Centre for Critical Theory,
University of Nottingham.
32
Simon Springer 2014, “Human Geography without Hierarchy” Progress in Human Geography 38(3) makes a similar argument about
the necessity for non-hierarchical geographical thought for revolution against Neoliberal Modernity.
33
Simon Springer 2014, “Human Geography without Hierarchy” Progress in Human Geography 38(3), p. 402.

of the distinction between this text and a normative social science inquiry. Rather than
imposing a an arboreal theoretical order upon facts to produce a concise, linear
presentation of a sufficiently atomized idea or phenomenon this text allows its rhizomal
collection of essays to form a living theoretical network from which theoretical order rises
as an emergent phenomenon.
Turning to more practical political problems, Springer argues that the leftwing of
the western political binary is anti-revolutionary in seeking to perpetuate the hierarchies
(the scarcity, competition and desire for hierarchical domination) of state capitalism.
“‘Much of the socialist left appears bereft of ideas beyond a state-regulated capitalism’, and
indeed the reconstitution of hierarchy represents a step backwards, not ‘a new burst of
colour’ that sings for the possibilities of tomorrow.”34
In short, the left’s desire to centralize
power in the state forms a dialectical hegemonic relationship with Modernism through
accepting its central tenant that social order is to be created through hierarchical
domination.
Though the work of Italian Social Philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1971) 35
popularized the term in western academic literature, our understanding of hegemony is
derived first and foremost from the work of British Social Theorist Stuart Hall (1988).36
Hall (1988) eschews definite, static-definitional conceptions of hegemony for conceptions
of hegemony as a dynamic process that includes breaches and techniques (in the
Foucaultian sense of techniques of power) for sealing said breaches. Our understanding of
hegemony as process has been influenced by debates on the nature of neoliberalism waged
between authors like Jamie Peck and Aihwa Ong. In short, Peck’s (2010; 2016; Brenner et.
al., 2010)37
camp (also moving from inspiration by Stuart Hall) argues that conjunctural
analysis of neoliberalism’s contingent, contextual manifestations begins to bring an image of
neoliberal hegemony into focus. Ong’s (2008; Ong et. al., 2008)38
camp argues that the
contingent, contextual manifestation of neoliberalism belies classification as a hegemonic
project. We conceive of hegemony (Barnesmoore et. al., Accepted), in a move more
coherent with Peck’s camp, as a process where the essence (axioms and logics) of a
hegemonic regime manifests in a contingent, contextual relationship with the environment
(cultural, historical, physical, etc.) of manifestation. Revolution against a hegemonic regime,
then, must be conceived of in terms of revolution against hegemonic essence (against the
axioms and logics that form the core of a hegemonic regime’s many contextually contingent

34
Simon Springer 2014, “Human Geography without Hierarchy” Progress in Human Geography 38(3), p. 404.
35
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci: Ed. and Transl. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith. G. Nowell-Smith, & Q. Hoare (Eds.). International Publishers.
36
Hall, S. (1988). the Toad in the Garden: Thatcher among the Theorists ‘in C. Nelson and L.(Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1988, p. 55.
37
Brenner, N., Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2010). Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways. Global networks, 10(2),
182-222.
Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of neoliberal reason. OUP Oxford.
Peck, J. (2016) “The Urban Studies Journal Annual Lecture: Transatlantic City,” Association of American Geographers Annual
Convention 2016, San Francisco.
38
Ong, A. (2007). Neoliberalism as a mobile technology. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1), 3-8.
Ong, A., & Collier, S. J. (Eds.). (2008). Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. John Wiley &
Sons.

manifestations) rather than in terms of practices that rise from the hegemonic essence of
the hegemonic regime revolutionaries purport to fight.
The term ‘dialectical hegemony’ elucidates the dangers posed by ‘revolution’
against hegemonic regimes via practices derived from (rationalized by) the hegemonic
essence of said hegemonic regime. Dialectical hegemony refers to a mode of social control
wherein two (or more) ‘sides’ of a conflict are created so that the conflict can be controlled
to produce a desired outcome. We argue dialectical hegemony is facilitated by ‘creating’ (or
simply empowering and appropriating existent) seemingly oppositional-autonomous groups
whose thoughts, behaviors and conceptions of being rise from the same hegemonic essence
(from the same axioms and logics); this ensures that the outcome of the staged conflict
necessarily includes the hegemonic essence (which is rendered banally invisible
(commonsensical) by ubiquity through the seeming conflict between the two sides in being
shared by seemingly autonomous actors). In normative US military and political practice
this strategy was derived from Carl von Clausewitz work on dialectical military strategies
and Sun Zi’s The Art of War (Burnet, 2016).39
Philip Abrams (1988)40
theorized the state as ‘a mask’ for elite power. The State,
argues Abrams, is effective in achieving the interests of the elite class precisely because it
seems to be autonomous from the elite class. We have subsequently theorized the news
media, when conceived as a seemingly autonomous ‘fourth branch of government’, as a
second mask for elite power. The news media is seemingly autonomous from the state and
from the elite class (or at least the ‘other side’ of the face of the elite class that is visible to
the public mind…) allowing it to reinforce the basic axioms and logics (hegemonic essence)
by which the elite class epistemologically subjugates the general public from a seemingly
autonomous perspective. From this point of departure we can see any regime of thought or
practice that purports autonomy from the hegemonic core of a society while rising from the
hegemonic essence of said society as, for practical purposes, masks for elite power. The
left’s acceptance of hierarchy as the organizing principle of society is a perfect example of a
seemingly autonomous mask for elite power in accepting the root of elite class power
(social order through hierarchy) as the root of their political project while simultaneously
purporting autonomy from said elite class.
Hierarchy and Domination
Returning to our divergence from Springer’s Anarco-Geography, there are to illustrative
questions: Can you have hierarchy without domination? Is hierarchy or hierarchical
domination the essence of the problem in Modernity? In short, the answer seems to be
that the problem lies in domination and that hierarchies are a natural, constituent aspect of
reality. We are inclined to observe the proper relations between a student and a teacher or
a parent and a child, which reflect the proper relations between a gardener and a seed—the
teacher provides the student with ideas (which represents a form of hierarchy) but does not
attempt to force the student to understand or accept the ideas (i.e. hierarchy without

39
Burnett R E 2016, "Remotely Piloted Airborne Systems (RPAS), Ubiquitous Networks, and New Forms of Command and Control in
National Security and Civilian Operational Spaces." ISA Annual Conference 2016, Atlanta,
http://web.isanet.org/Web/Conferences/Atlanta%202016/Archive/34a88835-6cfb-4761-8663-824e878a3a11.pdf
40
Philip Abrams 1988, Notes on the Difficulties of Studying the State (1977) Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1) pp. 58-89.

domination) as the gardener provides the seeds with water, soil and sunlight but does not
try to force the plants to grow like the simpleton from song41
who attempted to force his
plants to grow by tugging the sprouts and only succeeded in killing the plants.

41
Meng Zi, The Meng Zi, 2A2.

Death to the Age of Labor,
a Mythos for the Age of Leisure
Introduction
Our society stands at the end of an age. As the shadow of the Age of Scarcity-Competition,
Labor and Bio-Mechanical Evolution fades away in the rising light of the potential for a
conscious society organized around the principle of plenty the last bastions of power from
the passing age struggle to stay above water through the age old tactics of a crumbling
empire. Thought and speech are repressed. Minorities are oppressed. The simple minded
are impressed. Fear of the other and fear of self are perpetuated through the manufacturing
centers of the hegemonic culture like the academy, press and political establishment.
Dogmatic perversions of the principles upon which the empire was originally founded are
imposed upon the people as divine law.
Yet for all of this suffering, for all the perversion and privation of those who reigned
in the falling age, we stand on the cusp of a profound and blissful transformation. We are
set to leave the age of scarcity-competition and the desire for hierarchical domination
produced therein for an age of plenty where evolution is unchained from the biological and
temporal constraints of bio-mechanical evolution (which is propelled by the desire for
domination produced by scarcity and competition) and enters into a conscious mode of
evolution that can be described as essentially epistemological—the desire for survival, sated,
will be replaced by the desire for Self-improvement as the driving force of human
existence. The physical labor necessary for survival (farming, construction, water collection,
etc.) will be fulfilled by robots and other forms of technology, leisure will replace this
physical labor, and evolution will become tied to ideas and the evolution of ‘mind’ rather
than the natural selection of bio-mechanical evolution. We can evolve more in one
moment of conscious evolution than we have through the history of bio-mechanical
evolution as changes in ones ‘state of mind’ occur in an instant as the flash of lightning.
At the risk of sounding cliché, it truly is ‘the best and the worst of times’. On the one hand
we stand at the brink of a new age in which the vulgarities of scarcity, competition and the
desire for hierarchical domination are shed for a blissful and contemplative quest for
conscious evolution. On the other hand there is an insane doomsday cult of pseudo-
religious zealots who have been corrupted by the desire for hierarchical domination and
socialization within the culture of domination said desire has produced over the millennia
who are hell bent on brining about their prophesied apocalypse. If our society is to be
reborn into this new Age of Plenty, Leisure and Conscious Evolution its incarnation in the
Age of Scarcity-Competition, Labor and Bio-Mechanical Evolution must die.
Labor in the Contemporary Academy
The contemporary academic discussion and debate concerning the nature of human
existence revolves to a great extent on the axis of ‘labor’. Assuming that, as reality has been
reduced to passing time and physical space, order must be created through hierarchical
domination (Foucault, 1970; Barnesmoore, 2016a; Barnesmoore, 2016b; Barnesmoore,

2017)42
, social philosophers and social scientists (as well as private and government sources
of funding for academic inquiry…) focus their attention on questions concerning the
optimal means for creating a materially productive social order. How can we create social
structures, cultures, regimes of thought, conceptions of being, etc. that will facilitate a mode
of production that optimizes material production and consumption? What is the best way
to organize (socio-political structures like ‘states and ‘courts’) and cultivate (educational and
cultural structures that structure public emotional and intellectual potential) a mode of
human society that best produces, distributes and consumes goods that allow for survival
and ‘progress’.
At the heart of this image of humanity as a laboring being lies the notion of scarcity.
“Trees and Algorithms provide us with useful metaphors for understanding true relationship between scarcity
and the desire for hierarchical domination and competition in ‘beings’ that lack reason. Trees grow straight
up when there is direct sunlight. It is only when sunlight becomes scarce that plants begin to grow (via an
internal impetus reflexively-instinctually actualized by external environment) over each other in order to
compete for sunlight (i.e. scarcity brings on the desire for hierarchical domination and competition).
Interestingly, the only other context in which Trees don't grow straight up and down is when form is imposed
upon them by external forces like wind (which can be likened to Modernist social systems that seek to
produce social order through external domination by military and police ‘forces’). Plants only seek to
dominate each other in environments of scarcity.
For an algorithmic example of the above metaphor, a computer program designed by Karl Sims
(1994a; 1994b) to replicate the process of Mechanical Evolution in the digital sphere demonstrates the ways
in which scarcity works to produce the desire for hierarchical domination and competition. In the digital
simulation, a being is ‘selected’ for survival and continued evolution by capturing and possessing a green cube
located between the being and its ‘opponent’. At a certain point, beings in the simulation stopped evolving in
a manner that allowed them to simply move to the cube quickly and instead began to evolve in a manner that
allowed beings to prevent the competitor from getting to the cube that allowed beings putting the cube in a
place where the competitor can not reach it.43
Again, however, we see that scarcity and discrete individuality
are the causal factors in producing the desire for hierarchical domination and competition. In this light, we
argue that social systems like Capitalism (especially Neoliberal Capitalism) that were designed (based on
biomaterialist, discrete conceptions of humanity and subsequent conceptions of human evolution as purely
mechanical) to produce social evolution through scarcity, competition and hierarchical domination actually
work to socialize humans in (and thus constrain human thought, behavior and conception of being to) a
mode that negates the potential for conscious evolution, self-mediation of the biological desires and the
animal passions and thus causes ‘devolution’ or a ‘decay of conscious social order’ (which is to say decay of
intimacy with Infinite Substance and thus reason).” (Barnesmoore, 2016a)
Mythos for the Age of Leisure
As noted above, we stand at the brink of a new age. If classified in the terms of
contemporary social science, we would call it ‘the AI-Robotic Age’ and see it as a next step
in the progressive technological trajectory from early periods like the Bronze and Iron Age

42
Foucault, The Order of Things.
Barnesmoore 2016, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”, Environment and Social
Psychology.
Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice”, Environment and Social Psychology.
43
http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
and
https://archive.org/details/sims_evolved_virtual_creatures_1994
Sims, K. “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition”. http://www.karlsims.com/papers/alife94.pdf

through the Industrial Age and into a utopian Silicon Age. The coming age, however,
cannot be understood in the linear-progressive terms with which we presently understand
the evolution of presently recorded history as there are multiple ages coming to a close—the
technological age of human labor based industrial production is coming to a close, which
would fit well with the linear technological view of human history, but with the close of the
human labor based industrial production age we will also see the end of the much longer
Age of Labor and the rise of the Age of Leisure as mass-physical human labor (i.e. labor to
produce food and industrial goods) will no longer be required for the evolution and
survival of humanity.
To elucidate our point we must make a short excursion into our conception of ages
and aeons. ‘Ages’ (aeons) manifest as what we might call a fractal pattern. The pattern is
formed as a function of ‘eternal forms’ (aeons)44
expressing themselves in the many scales
of manifestation. As a tangible example, whether liquid is traveling in a river, your veins or
a tree (different scales), it will always take on the same branching and meandering form (the
same aeon). For the purposes of this discussion, we can say that multiple ‘ages’ manifest on
a range of temporal scales. From the ages of a human life (child, adult, elder) through the
ages of the seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) to the ages of the celestial host (a lunar
year, a solar year, the precession of the equinox, the Yugas, etc.), many ages of different
scales (many aeons manifesting on different scales) are occurring in unison. Turning
towards our discussion of the coming age, the end of the Low-Technological Age (physical
labor based industrial production) also marks the end of the Age of Labor, which has
lasted throughout presently recorded history. While the move from the Pre-Industrial Age
to our contemporary Industrial Age marked a change akin to learning a new physical ability
(the move from crawling to walking), the shift from the Age of Labor to the Age of Leisure
is akin to a child shifting their attention from the cultivation of physical skills to the
cultivation of mental and emotional skills.
This shift from the Age of Labor to the Age of Leisure represents a moment that
has been described by many traditions: a Singularity, the Eschaton, the Apocalypse, the
death of the Phoenix, etc. In the same way that one cannot model the behavior of
biological matter using inanimate matter, cannot model a tree using only the seed, cannot
model the behavior of rational beings on irrational beings, cannot model the future of post-
Trump US politics based on the past of pre-Trump US politics,45
we cannot predict the
future based on the past when a singularity moment occurs. The dimensional quality of the
object of study (in this case the history of society) has undergone a state change, and so we
can no longer model the future based on the past. A singularity moment ‘changes the
game’. Given this change in the state of human society, a shift from mastery of the physical
world to mastery of our mental and emotional world, we must envision a new world view in
which we can plan our society in a manner oriented towards conscious evolution.

44
See the Chapter ‘Aeon’ in Maurice Nicoll’s Living Time for an in depth discussion of aeons.
45
https://www.academia.edu/30223234/Trump_as_a_Heterotopic_or_Singularity_Moment_A_September_2015_Prediction-
Nightmare_Come_to_Pass_

The distinction between Bio-Mechanical and Conscious Evolution is illustrative of
the difference between the Age of Labor and the Age of Leisure. 46
Bio-Mechanical
evolution functions through natural (‘irrational’) selection, scarcity, competition, etc.
Conscious Evolution functions through the direction of will towards the cultivation of our
emotional, mental, intuitive, etc. faculties, towards engagement with transformative ideas,
towards communion with beauty, truth and goodness. In the Age of Labor society was, for
the general public, organized with the intention of cultivating a public that would bring its
physical labor to bear in the production of material goods—survival meant staving of
scarcity through the use of physical labor and so our social structures mirrored the form
(aeon) of Bio-Mechanical Evolution. Survival in the Age of Leisure (in technological terms
the AI-Robotic Age) will no longer be tied to our direction of physical labor towards
material production (AI-Robots will replace biological labor) and will instead be tied to
wisdom and mastery of our emotional and intellectual existence as the greatest threat to our
survival (given the power afforded by high technology in the AI-Robotic Age) is ourselves.
Be it through weapons and war, pollution of our natural environment or some other
extinction level catastrophe we might bring on with our technology, humanity’s existence
will no longer be threatened by starvation and a lack of shelter but by a lack of wisdom,
intuition, emotional maturity, intellect, etc. to properly design and use our technology.
Without physical labor to occupy the majority of humanity, and with a deficit in cultural
evolution that requires a great number of teachers, artists, organizers, planners, thinkers,
poets, caretakers, etc. we must conceptualize society in terms of Conscious Leisure.
Conscious Leisure, defined generally as communion with beauty, goodness and truth (be it
through reading a moving poem or watching a beautiful sunset), will organize society with a
telos of conscious evolution rather than material production.
Time in the Age of Labor and Leisure
Where in Modernity human existence is, in its reduction to material labor (and the
fulfillment of material desire…), reduced to a linear temporal phenomena, a society
designed around the notion of Conscious Leisure as the teleological imperative of human
existence would catalyze the potential for actualization of a mode of human existence that
transcends reflexive articulation by the linear-temporal world (by passing time and physical
space). The flash of lightning in the antediluvian mythological tradition, movements of the
mind—inspirations, revelations, a change in state of mind—occur in a moment. Conscious
Evolution, which occurs through movements of the mind, does not occur in a functional
relationship with linear time like the bio-mechanical evolution of our previous stage of
evolution; Conscious Evolution comes through the direction of will towards the cultivation
of our invisible self (through self-observation, through contact with energies like
transformative ideas, beautiful experiences and emotions like love and joy, etc.) and
happens in the instant that our state of mind is changed (in which we see the world in a new
light, as illuminated by the flash of lightning). Conscious Evolution (be it a big or a small
change), in short, is not a function of duration in time.

46
Barnesmoore 2016, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”, Environment and Social
Psychology.
Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice”, Environment and Social Psychology.

We can evolve more in a single generation than we have through all of presently
recorded history because the evolution of consciousness occurs in a moment; we are not
forced to wait for time and natural selection to grace us with change, as we have been freed
from the cold chains of time by the fiery light of our soul-mind. If we can learn to see the
world in a new light, to resonate at a new frequency, then we can leave behind the tyranny
of bio-mechanical evolution imposed upon rational (consciously evolving) beings by social
systems that were designed to produce scarcity, competition and a bio-reductive state of
being (a state of being that is fully oriented towards material survival and the fulfillment of
material desires and in which conscious evolution becomes impossible) and consciously
evolve past the absurd madness of the Age of Labor.

World View,
the Foundation of an Organizing Principle
“The environmental crisis [of Modernism] requires not simply rhetoric or cosmetic solutions but a death and
rebirth of modern man and his worldview. Man need not be and in fact cannot be “reinvented” as some have
claimed, but he must be reborn as traditional or pontifical man, a bridge between Heaven and Earth, and the
world of nature must once again be conceived as it has always been—a sacred realm reflecting the divine
creative energies.”47
-S. H. Nasr
“Now I would say that all ideas that have the power of altering us and letting new meaning into our lives are
about the invisible side of things and cannot be demonstrated directly or reached by reasoning alone. Because
they relate to the invisible side of things they are not approached by reasoning according to the evidence of
the senses. Before coming to the idea of Time with which this book is chiefly concerned and which can only
be understood by getting away from appearances and by thinking about the ‘invisible world’ from the
standpoint of dimensions, we must make some effort the grasp the invisibility of ourselves. For I believe that
we never understand anything about the ‘invisible’ world if we do not grasp our own invisibility first.
This demands a certain kind of effort, the nature of which is similar to the effort required to get
some realization of the essential invisibility and unknowableness of another person. In this connection I
believe that we can never realise the existence of another person in any real way unless we realise our own
existence. The realization of one’s own existence, as a real experience, is the realization of one’s essential
invisibility.”48
“Into this inner space may come ideas. They may visit the mind. What we see through the power of an idea
cannot be seen when we are no longer in contact with it. We know the experience of suddenly seeing the
truth of something for the first time. At such moments we are altered and if they persisted we would be
permanently changed. But they come as flashes with traces of direct knowledge, direct cognition.
The description of an idea is quite different from the direct cognition of it. The one takes time, the
other is instantaneous. The description of the idea that we are invisible from the realization of it: only in
thinking in different ways about this invisibility of everybody and ourselves may we attract
the idea so that it illuminates us directly.
Such ideas act directly on the substance of our lives as by a chemical combination, and the shock of
contact may be sometimes so great as to actually change the [person’s] life and not merely alter [their]
understanding for the moment. The preparation of ourselves for the possibilities of new meaning, which is
more desirable than anything else, since meaninglessness is a disease, cannot be separated from
contact with ideas that have transforming power.”49
-Maurice Nicoll
Questions of ‘world view’ have found an increasingly prominent role in critical western
scholarship. Our first deep reflections on the role of ‘world view’ in the human experience
were inspired by the ways in which Plato’s Cave allegory (read in a distinctly Foucaultian,
power-knowledge light) spoke to our own process of conscious evolution—born in the US
and socialized within the dialectical hegemony of American thought (where materialism

47
Nasr (1996) Religion and the Order of Nature p. 6
48
Nicoll, Living Time p. 7-8
49
Ibid. p. 6 Bold Emphasis Added.

and imperialism span the illusionary divide between right wing Christianity and left wing
secularism and their associated socio-cultural manifestations), awakening to the world of
thought beyond the shackles of that false binary was indeed akin to realizing that the
shadows on the wall of the ‘world view’ I had received through socialization were simply an
illusion meant to divert my attention from the chains that bound me to my chair. Foucault’s
(1970) discussion of ‘the stark impossibility of thinking the that’ of a world view whose
order50
we do not understand brought the importance of political questions concerning
world view into focus; if you can control an individual or society’s ‘world view’ you can
control their potential for thought and thus behavior and conception of being.51
S. H.
Nasr’s (52
1996) work brought the role of the Modernist ‘world view’—and its divergence
from the sacred-spiritual—in perpetuating environmental degradation into focus. In recent
years writings on the politics of ‘world view’—in particular the relationship of ‘world view’ to
environmental politics—and the dimensional incommensurability 53
of the Modernist-
European ‘world view’ and the Indigenous American World view have inspired our
understandings of and reflections on the role of ‘world view’ in human socio-political
phenomena.54
What, however, is a 'world view’, and how do ‘world views’ relate to political
power and environmental politics?
If we may take a crack at providing a definition of ‘world view’ (the influence of
Foucault’s work shows itself again55
), ‘world view’ is the web of cosmological, teleological,
ontological, epistemological, moral-ethical and aesthetic assumptions by which an
individual’s potential for thought, behavior and being are expanded and constrained. In the
sense that ontology is an inquiry into the nature of being, ‘world view’ can be described first
and foremost as an ontological in that it describes assemblage of assumptions concerning
the nature of ‘things’56
. ‘World view’ is epistemological in the sense that it is the web of
assumptions concerning the origin and development of being, the nature of being, the
purpose of being, the nature of thought (and Truth therein), the nature of Goodness and
the nature of Beauty by which our potential for knowing is articulated.
The American Scientific Affiliation provides a similar definition that hi-lights the
ontological and epistemological definitions of ‘world view’:
“A worldview is a theory of the world, used for living in the world. A world view is a mental model of reality
— a framework of ideas & attitudes about the world, ourselves, and life, a comprehensive system of beliefs —
with answers for a wide range of questions: What are humans, why we are here, and what is our purpose in
life? What are your goals for life? When you make decisions about using time — it's the stuff life is made of

50
Order which takes on two poles that can be described as material and ideational where the ideational represents the world view and the
material represents the symbols and ‘things’ with which we express said ‘world view’.
51
52
S. H. Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature.
53
See (Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum) and (Barnesmoore, “Datascopes and Dimensional Incommensurability in the History of
Assemblage” Association of American Geographers National Convention 2015) for a discussion of dimensional incommensurability.
54
Four Arrows, Point of Departure.
M. Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples In Spite of Europe: Towards a conversation on political ontology” Current
Anthropology 54(5).
55
Foucault, M. (2010). The Government of Self and Others, trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
56
We might replace things with ‘that which is’ as there are parts of reality that are not, per se, ‘things’.

— what are your values and priorities? What can we know, and how? and with how much certainty? Does
reality include only matter/energy, or is there more?”57
Beyond hi-lighting the ontological and epistemological qualities of ‘world view’ the above
definition drives to the core political importance of ‘world views’ in noting that they are a
theory “used for living in the world”. Theory precedes and articulates the potential of
practice58
, meaning that our theories expand and constrain our potential for thought,
behavior and being—human liberty and free will are constrained to the limits of our ‘world
view’. As an example, we can only develop practices for environmental sustainability within
the boundaries established by our ‘world view’, and indeed both the need for
environmental sustainability (i.e. environmental degradation) and our inability to effectively
implement environmentally sustainable social practices are rooted in the very peculiar,
dogmatically materialist ‘world view’ of Modernity (which has infected everything from the
authoritarian materialism of literally interpreted Abrahamic religion through the smug
arrogance of liberal atheism).
“…Precisely because there exists such a world [in which humanity “has chosen to neglect the significance of
religious [spiritual] understanding of the cosmos”]—namely the modern world, …which bears the primary
responsibility for the global destruction of the environment—we have sought to delve into a historical study of
both philosophy and science in the West that, beginning with views similar to the philosophies and sciences
of other civilizations, developed in what can only be called an anomalous manner from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries onward [as Modernism]. It moved away from the almost universally held view of the
sacredness of nature to one that sees man as alienated from nature and nature itself as no longer the
progenitor of life (the very root of nature being from the Latin nascitura, meaning to give birth), but rather as
a lifeless mass, a machine to be dominated and manipulated by a purely earthly man. It also divorced, in a
manner not to be seen in any other civilization, the laws of nature from moral laws and human ethics from
the workings of the cosmos.” (Nasr, 1996, p. 4)
In a world view where order is to be created through hierarchical domination
(Barnesmoore 2016b “Nomad Explorations V 2.1”; Foucault 1970 “The Order of
Things”) and nature is understood as a chaotic, feminine other to be brought into order
through hierarchical, technological domination, our potentials for thought, behavior and
being are restricted to the folly of the Simpleton from Song (Meng Zi 2A.2):
“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!”59
Our attempts at ‘creating’ an environmentally sustainable order through hierarchical,
technological domination is worse than useless, for we do great harm to our mother earth’s
natural order. In attempting to sew life with a linear dominating force we reap only death.

57
http://asa3.org/ASA/education/views/index.html
58
Barnesmoore, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice” Environment and Social Psychology.
59
Meng Zi, 2A2, p. 40 http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Mengzi.pdf

The Indigenous Gift Economy & Conscious Evolution
1. Introduction
“Indigenous matriarchies eschew centralized, hierarchical control. Far from thus demonstrating the
“primitive” condition of their societies, the refusal to belong to a state in preference to a community of
mutually known, but not mutually chained down, constituents is a conscious and collective choice.”60
Mann’s distinction between a mode of exchange in which participants are forced to
participate by scarcity, competition and the biological desire for survival via hierarchical
domination produced by an environment of scarcity and competition and a mode of
exchange that participants make a conscious, collective choice to participate in perfectly
reflects the two distinct modes of humanity’s possible evolution—Bio-mechanical Evolution
and Conscious Evolution.61
Bio-Mechanical Evolution is the evolution of contemporary
textbooks where natural selection, cooperation, scarcity, competition, adaptation, etc.
facilitate a process by which the complexity and capacity of biological life increases through
time; Bio-Mechanical Evolution is the process by unreasoning biological matter develops.
Conscious Evolution, on the other hand, is a mode of development that is only
possible for reasoned beings. Conscious Evolution is an ‘epistemological’ process wherein
the intentional direction of attention towards certain ideas, experiences, feelings, etc.
facilitates changes in the ‘state of mind’.62
Barnesmoore (2016) addresses the nature of
Conscious Evolution:
“In his The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, P.D. Ouspensky (1951) argues that we must distinguish
between mechanical and Conscious Evolution.
“As regards ordinary modern views on the origin of man and his previous evolution I must say at once that
they cannot be accepted. ….We must deny any possibility of future Mechanical Evolution of man; that is,
evolution happening by itself according to laws of heredity and selection, and without man's conscious efforts
[toward] and understanding of his possible evolution.”
“Our fundamental idea shall be that man as we know him is not a completed being; that nature develops him
only up to a certain point and then leaves him, either to develop further, by his own efforts and devices, or to
live and die such as he was born, or to degenerate and lose capacity for development.
Evolution of man in this case will mean the development of certain inner qualities and features
which usually remain undeveloped, and cannot develop by themselves.” (Ouspensky, 1951, pp. 7-8)
In short, Ouspensky is arguing that the potential for epistemological evolution divorces humanity from the
inevitable, temporal, biological process of Mechanical Evolution. We argue that this also divorces humanity
from necessary, reflexive articulation by the form of Mechanical Evolution (by material scarcity and the
subsequent desire for competition and hierarchical domination). Following a Platonic line of epistemological
reasoning, we take ‘the development of inner qualities and features’ as a process of remembrance (of Self and

60
Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”, p. 10
61
Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social Psychology.
Ouspensky, Man’s Possible Evolution.
62
State is used here as in ‘states of matter’.

our implicit intimacy with Infinite Substance—‘ascension to a dimension where self is only Self’, the Infinite
Substance).”63
2. Scarcity vs. Plenty, Mechanical vs. Conscious
While mechanical evolution in the Age of Labor was predicated upon scarcity, competition
and hierarchical domination (Barnesmoore 201764
), “Plenty, not scarcity, is and was the
organizing principle” of Indigenous gift economies. 65
“Trees and Algorithms provide us with useful metaphors for understanding true relationship between scarcity
and the desire for hierarchical domination and competition in ‘beings’ that lack reason. Trees grow straight
up when there is direct sunlight. It is only when sunlight becomes scarce that plants begin to grow (via an
internal impetus reflexively-instinctually actualized by external environment) over each other in order to
compete for sunlight (i.e. scarcity brings on the desire for hierarchical domination and competition).
Interestingly, the only other context in which Trees don't grow straight up and down is when form is imposed
upon them by external forces like wind (which can be likened to Modernist social systems that seek to
produce social order through external domination by military and police ‘forces’). Plants only seek to
dominate each other in environments of scarcity.
For an algorithmic example of the above metaphor, a computer program designed by Karl Sims
(1994a; 1994b) to replicate the process of Mechanical Evolution in the digital sphere demonstrates the ways
in which scarcity works to produce the desire for hierarchical domination and competition. In the digital
simulation, a being is ‘selected’ for survival and continued evolution by capturing and possessing a green cube
located between the being and its ‘opponent’. At a certain point, beings in the simulation stopped evolving in
a manner that allowed them to simply move to the cube quickly and instead began to evolve in a manner that
allowed beings to prevent the competitor from getting to the cube that allowed beings putting the cube in a
place where the competitor can not reach it.66
Again, however, we see that scarcity and discrete individuality
are the causal factors in producing the desire for hierarchical domination and competition. In this light, we
argue that social systems like Capitalism (especially Neoliberal Capitalism) that were designed (based on
biomaterialist, discrete conceptions of humanity and subsequent conceptions of human evolution as purely
mechanical) to produce social evolution through scarcity, competition and hierarchical domination actually
work to socialize humans in (and thus constrain human thought, behavior and conception of being to) a
mode that negates the potential for conscious evolution, self-mediation of the biological desires and the
animal passions and thus causes ‘devolution’ or a ‘decay of conscious social order’ (which is to say decay of
intimacy with Infinite Substance and thus reason).” (Barnesmoore 2016)
Scarcity fuels competition, and competition fuels the desire for hierarchical domination.
Without scarcity, competition and the desire for hierarchical domination fall away and we
are left with the need for a new driving force for human evolution. This new driving force s
consciousness, attention, will, etc. As human survival and evolution are no longer
reflexively (and thus irrationally) articulated by an ‘external stimuli’ (by scarcity), we are free
to turn our attention away from competition and the concomitant desire for hierarchical
domination and towards conscious (‘epistemological’) evolution through communion with
beauty, truth, goodness, etc. In a society that enters the Age of Leisure by organizing itself
on the principle of plenty—an organizing principle whose reality we are sure to find whether
we return to low-tech harmony with the natural environment (which is by nature plentiful)

63
Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social Psychology.
64
https://www.academia.edu/30672509/Death_to_the_Age_of_Labor_a_Mythos_for_the_Age_of_Leisure
65
66
http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
and
https://archive.org/details/sims_evolved_virtual_creatures_1994
Sims, K. “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition”. http://www.karlsims.com/papers/alife94.pdf

or continue our drive towards a hi-tech society in which artificially intelligent robots fulfill
the physical labor by which scarcity is abrogated—people will ‘work’ not because they are
required to compete in order to survive but because their desire for evolution draws them
to push the limits of science and mathematics, to cultivate a deeper relationship with the
natural world (which is to say with the Self), to become an educator who assists others in
the process of conscious evolution, etc. We will do things because we love to do them, and
we shall love to do things because they improve manifestations capacity to reflect the
infinite substance. We will do because we love beauty, truth and goodness, and not because
we desire the power to dominate others that we might win the ‘competition of life’ and
stave off death.
“Woodlands crops are planted in what Europeans called “planting mounds,” but these conical mounds are
traditionally viewed as the Breasts of Mother Earth, upon which her children suckle.67
She nourishes her
children at these breasts, not as an act of scarcity-based rationing, but as an act of plenty-based renewability. In
the Plenty Way, all the children are equally fed, with no thought of demanding anything in return, much less
of taking advantage of the child through an “exchange,” in which She greedily and deceptively grasps for more
than she has given, as in the European raiding system of capitalism.68
Instead, in a mirroring of the mother’s
generosity, the child takes only what s/he needs.”69
The biological man of Modernity, stripped of soul and the potential for conscious
evolution, has come to be known as an evil, self-serving being.70
Love and community are
reduced to a self-centered desire for biological survival.71
Desire is evil, and order is to be
created through the domination of desire by peripatetic reason; social order, civilization,
progress and the many fantasies of Liberal Modernity, which is to say our escape from the
Modernist Garden of Eden, is to be created through domination of our biologically derived
desire for survival.72
As Nature is conceived as evil, a chaotic feminine other to be brought
into order through forceful domination, so to is human nature reduced to the ‘chaotic evil’
of competitive biological desire. This article endeavors to transcend the biocentrist social
ontology (world view) of Modernity and its ravenous biological Man in order to rediscover
(to remember) the goodness of Human Nature, of Terrestrial Nature, the implicit order of
the uncreated (i.e. Infinite Substance and its Emanations) therein and the road to its
actualization—we seek to remember and actualize rather than to create order.
Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a dance between reason and desire.
Shedding the paternalist desire to dominate desire with reason, to ‘create order’ through
hierarchical domination, Blake turns to a unified vision of desire as the fire of reason—
desire as what Meng Zi called ‘sprouts of goodness’. 73
In Blake’s words,
“Those who Restrain Desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or

67
Arthur Caswell Parker, Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Plants (Albany, N.Y: University of the State of New York, 1910) pps. 36‒37.
68
I first proposed the “Plenty Way” in 2000, in Ibid, Mann, Iroquoian Women, pps. 204, 211.
69
Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”, p. 15-16
70
Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”.
71
Haraway, Primate Visions.
Barnesmoore, Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity.
72
Barnesmoore, Genesis, Eden and the Grail in Modernity.
73
Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Meng Zi, The Meng Zi,

Reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrained it by degrees becomes passive till by
degrees it becomes only the shadow of desire.”74
“It indeed appeared to reason that desire had been cast out, but the Devil’s account is that Messiah fell &
formed a heaven with what he stole from the Abyss. This is strewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the father
to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have ideas to build on…”75
In the words of Meng Zi
““What I mean by saying it is good is that there is that in our nature which is spontaneously part of us and can
become good. The fact that we can become bad is not a defect in our natural endowment. All men possess a
sense of commiseration; all men possess a sense of shame; all men possess a sense of respect; all men possess
a sense of right and wrong. The sense of commiseration is the seed of humanity; the sense of shame is the
seed of righteousness; the sense of respect is the seed of ritual; the sense of right and wrong is the seed of
wisdom. Thus humanity, righteousness, ritual, and wisdom are not welded to us from outside. We possess
them inherently; it is simply that we do not focus our minds on them. This is the meaning of the saying, ‘Seek
for it and you will get it; let it go and you will lose it.’ The reason why some men are twice as good as others –
or five or countless times better – is simply that some men do not exhaust their endowment to the full. The
Poetry says:
Tian gave birth to the teeming people,
For every thing there is a norm.
The constant for people, within their grasp,
Is love of beautiful virtue’s form.
Confucius said, ‘The man who wrote this poem certainly understood the Dao!’ Thus for every type of thing
there is a norm; that is why the constant that lies within people’s grasp is inherently a love of beautiful
virtue.”” 76
We come to know the constants of Tian, of heaven, which is to say the infinite substance
and its emanations, through desire (through silence and the climax of motion to be found
therein—through feeling from nothingness). In the Foucaultian rendition of knowledge as
resemblance, we feel the sympathy of manifestation with this uncreated order.77
Indeed, the
as the climax of motion is desire, so to is the climax of silence motion. We find light in the
darkness through the flame of reason as it shines through the lamp of reason.
The Way of the Golden Flower reminds us
“Everyone already has the lamp of mind, but it is necessary to light it so that it shines; then this is
immortality…. Cognition is a function of mind, empty silence is the substance of mind…. Radiant light is the
function of mind, empty silence is the substance of mind. If there is empty silence without radiant light, the
silence is not true silence, the emptiness is not true emptiness-it is just a ghost cave.”78
Returning to children feeding from the planting mound, we see that socialization within a
system organized upon the principles of sharing and plenty socializes humans to express a
higher potential of human nature in which the greed and desire for domination that rise

74
Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 5.
75
Ibid. p. 5-6.
76
Meng Zi, The Meng Zi, 6A.6
77
78
Thomas Cleary, The Secret of the Golden Flower, 66.

from socialization within a society organized upon the principles of scarcity and
competition are rendered as null—greed, the desire for domination and competition are all
functions of privation, of scarcity, and so without scarcity the potential for these deprived,
perverted expressions of human nature is negated.

Psycho-Linguistic Politics of the term Matriarchy
in the Western Public Mind
1. Introduction: Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy?
While we are in full agreement with Mann’s79
notion that solutions to ‘statism’ (and to
Modernism more generally) must include revitalizing the role of the sacred feminine, and
while we are not sure that the term ‘matriarchy’ means the same thing in the North
American Indigenous context as it does within a western world view, we do fear that the
term matriarchy may be received problematically by the western public mind. The root of
these problems can be found in the etymological root of the term matriarchy:
“Matriarchy (n.) formed in English 1881 from matriarch + -y (4).”80
“Matriarch (n.) "mother who heads a family or tribe," c. 1600, from matri- + -arch, abstracted from
patriarch.”81
“Patriarch (n.) late 12c., from Old French patriarche "one of the Old Testament fathers" (11c.) and directly
from Late Latin patriarcha (Tertullian), from Greek patriarkhes "chief or head of a family," from patria
"family, clan," from pater "father" (see father (n.)) + arkhein "to rule" (see archon). Also used as an honorific
title of certain bishops in the early Church, notably those of Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome.”82
“Archon (n.) one of the nine chief magistrates of ancient Athens, 1650s, from Greek arkhon "ruler,
commander, chief, captain," noun use of present participle of arkhein "be the first," thence "to begin, begin
from or with, make preparation for;" also "to rule, lead the way, govern, rule over, be leader of," a word of
uncertain origin.”83
As we see above, the term ‘matriarchy’ was abstracted from the Greek term ‘archon’ and
the Abrahamic term ‘patriarch’ (which fittingly reflects the Exoteric Abrahamic conception
of the feminine as an ‘abstraction’ of the masculine that is most clearly illustrated in the
notion that Eve was created using one of Adam’s ribs).
2. A Problem of Order
The term archon illustrates the first problem—a problem of order—that is likely to rise in
the reception of the term matriarchy by the western public mind. ‘Archy’ implies a
hierarchical mode of domination. The synthesis of ‘to begin’ and ‘the first’ with ‘to rule’
and ‘rule over’ implies that the archon is to society as ‘the word’ is to creation—it is the first,
active, and in the Indo-Aryan imagination masculine, energy (the cosmological ‘big bang’)
from which creation proceeds.
“1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in
the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was

79
Mann, “Rematriating Economics: The Gift Economy of Woodlands Matriarchies”
80
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=matriarchy
81
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=matriarch&allowed_in_frame=0
82
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=patriarch&allowed_in_frame=0
83
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=archon&allowed_in_frame=0

made. 4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the
darkness comprehended it not.”84
Matriarchy, then, would imply to the western public mind that the feminine had replaced
the masculine as the causal, dominating force from which order was imposed upon the
prima materia to form the created world. Rather than the masculine representing light and
the feminine representing darkness as in the patriarchal mythos, matriarchy would imply
that the feminine represents the light and the masculine represents the darkness. Instead of
problematizing the notion that order rises in manifestation through one half of a binary
dominating the other (what we might call the ‘tree of good and evil’ conception of order,
where the order of goodness is created85
via ‘good’ dominating ‘bad’) and asserting the truth
that order comes in the unity that rises from the co-creative, harmonious interaction of the
masculine and the feminine (what we might call the ‘tree of life’ conception of order, where
what we know as ‘bad’ from the perspective of the ‘tree of good and evil’ is understood not
as a self-subsistent truth but instead as privation of the self-subsistent truth that is
‘goodness’), the term matriarchy allows the basic form (that of the ‘tree of good and evil’) of
the western public mind to remain undisturbed. Instead of reviving the sacred feminine in
the western public mind, the term ‘matriarchy’ is likely to facilitate the rise of a
hierarchically-dominating feminine that is akin to the perverse, hierarchically-dominating
masculinity of Western (more generally Indo-Aryan) culture that typifies statist and raid
cultures.86
In short, it seems important to search for a term that does not imply to the
western public mind that the solution to the socio-spiritual woes of patriarchy lies in
rendering masculinity as subservient to (as dominated by) femininity—we must develop and,
or remember a term that facilitates our escape from the ‘tree of good and evil’ and our
rediscovery of salvation in ‘the tree of life’.
“Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads
of Genius.”87
3. Dialectical Control
“It was Proust who said "masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language." That is the same as
stammering, making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a foreigner, but in one's own
tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one's own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and
the same language, without even a dialect or patois.”88
[Revolution is impossible if the language of revolution
does not evolve faster than it can be appropriated by the powers at be...]

84
John: 1: 1-5 KJV
85
We emphasize the term ‘create’ in light of the fact that Modernity sees order as something that must be created through hierarchical
modes of domination rather than as a selfsubsistent truth whose reflection into manifestation must be cultivated and accentuated. See:
Foucault, The Order of Things and Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”.
86
We can already see this hierarchically-dominating conception of the feminine in some of the more extremist strains of feminism that
fail to problematize the binary, hierarchical quality of sexual and gender relations in their admittedly righteous goal of ‘smashing the
patriarchy’.
87
Ibid. p. 116
88
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press.

The second problem that is likely to rise from use of the term matriarchy lies in the
prevalence of dialectical-hegemonic techniques of power in western society. Though the
work of Italian Social Philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1971) popularized the term in
western academic literature, our understanding of hegemony is derived first and foremost
from the work of British Social Theorist Stuart Hall (1988). Hall (1988) eschews definite,
static-definitional conceptions of hegemony for conceptions of hegemony as a dynamic
process that includes breaches and techniques (in the Foucaultian sense of techniques of
power) for sealing said breaches. Our understanding of hegemony as process has been
influenced by debates on the nature of neoliberalism waged between authors like Jamie
Peck and Aihwa Ong. In short, Peck’s (2010; 2016; Brenner et. al., 2010) camp (also
moving from inspiration by Stuart Hall) argues that conjunctural analysis of neoliberalism’s
contingent, contextual manifestations begins to bring an image of neoliberal hegemony into
focus. Ong’s (2008; Ong et. al., 2008) camp argues that the contingent, contextual
manifestation of neoliberalism belies classification as a hegemonic project. We conceive of
hegemony (Barnesmoore et. al., Accepted), in a move more coherent with Peck’s camp, as
a process where the essence (axioms and logics) of a hegemonic regime manifests in a
contingent, contextual relationship with the environment (cultural, historical, physical, etc.)
of manifestation. Revolution against a hegemonic regime, then, must be conceived of in
terms of revolution against hegemonic essence (against the axioms and logics that form the
core of a hegemonic regime’s many contextually contingent manifestations) rather than in
terms of practices that rise from the hegemonic essence of the hegemonic regime
revolutionaries purport to fight.
Dialectical Hegemony refers to a technique of social control wherein two (or more)
‘sides’ of a conflict are created so that the conflict can be controlled to produce a desired
outcome. We argue dialectical hegemony is facilitated by ‘creating’ (or simply empowering
and appropriating existent) seemingly oppositional-autonomous groups whose thoughts,
behaviors and conceptions of being rise from the same hegemonic essence (from the same
axioms and logics); this ensures that the outcome of the staged conflict necessarily includes
the hegemonic essence (which is rendered banally invisible (commonsensical) by ubiquity
through the seeming conflict between the two sides in being shared by seemingly
autonomous actors). In normative US military and political practice this strategy was
derived from Carl von Clausewitz work on dialectical military strategies.89
The hegemonic
essence of a conflict between ‘patriarchy’ and ‘matriarchy’ is the assumptions and logics
implicit in the root ‘archy’ (i.e. the assumption and logic that one side of a binary must
dominate the other to create order).
Philip Abrams (1988) theorized the state as ‘a mask’ for elite power. The State,
argues Abrams, is effective in achieving the interests of the elite class precisely because it
seems to be autonomous from the elite class. We (Barnesmoore et. al., Accepted) have
subsequently theorized the news media, when conceived as a seemingly autonomous
‘fourth branch of government’, as a second mask for elite power. The news media is
seemingly autonomous from the state and from the elite class (or at least the ‘other side’ of

89
Burnett R E 2016, "Remotely Piloted Airborne Systems (RPAS), Ubiquitous Networks, and New Forms of Command and Control in
National Security and Civilian Operational Spaces." ISA Annual Conference 2016, Atlanta,
http://web.isanet.org/Web/Conferences/Atlanta%202016/Archive/34a88835-6cfb-4761-8663-824e878a3a11.pdf

the face of the elite class that is visible to the public mind…) allowing it to reinforce the
basic axioms and logics (hegemonic essence) by which the elite class epistemologically
subjugates the general public from a seemingly autonomous perspective. From this point of
departure we can see any regime of thought or practice that purports autonomy from the
hegemonic core of a society while rising from the hegemonic essence of said society as, for
practical purposes, masks for elite power.
The western public mind is so deeply entrenched in the hegemonic essence of the
‘tree of good and evil’ that, whether we intend it or no, use of the term matriarchy will
produce a political environment that is easily appropriated and manipulated by the
psychological warriors who brought us patriarchal modernity. The root of elite class
domination of public psychology in the West (and Indo-Aryan culture more generally) lies
in the banality of the basic logics and axioms from which the public mind works, and so use
of terms like matriarchy that are embedded with the logics and axioms of the ‘tree of good
and evil’ must be avoided (or, if not avoided, qualified) if we are to challenge the elite class
power-domination embedded in patriarchy, statism and the raid culture. We must revive
the sacred feminine, but the sacred feminine cannot be understood by a public that
remains trapped within the illusions of the ‘tree of good and evil’ and we must therefore
avoid the use of terms like ‘matriarchy’ that—from the perspective of the western public
mind—rise from the same hegemonic essence as the patriarchal regime we wish to destroy.
If we do not, it seems inevitable that the elite class interests who have perpetuated
patriarchal statism via dialectical hegemonic techniques of power will appropriate the noble
quest to revitalize the role of the sacred feminine and render it as another seemingly
autonomous outcropping of the ‘tree of good and evil’ from which the fruits of their power
are born.
4. Is North American Indigenous Matriarchy an ‘Archy’?
“Indigenous matriarchies eschew centralized, hierarchical control. Far from thus demonstrating the
“primitive” condition of their societies, the refusal to belong to a state in preference to a community of
mutually known, but not mutually chained down, constituents is a conscious and collective choice….
Under Indigenous matriarchal systems, power is either decentralized or completely distributive,
empowering group consensus over top-down hegemony.”90
The simple answer to the question that forms the section header is no, North American
Indigenous Matriarchy is not an ‘archy’. Indeed, as Mann notes, “Indingious matriarchies
eschew [the] centralized, hierarchical control” (the notion of ‘the beginning’ and ‘the first’
as synthesized with ‘to rule over’) that puts the ‘archy’ in patriarchy. Without centralized,
hierarchical control there can be no Archon.
We seem to be left with the need for a new term. The term Matriarchy implies the
centralized, hierarchical control by which the Indigenous gift economy is distinguished
from the raiding, colonialism, imperialism, etc. of the statist model, and if we do not find a
new word we risk falling into a dialectical-hegemonic relationship with paternalism in which
the presumption of centralized-hierarchical control as the only, natural model for creating

90

order in human society will remain banally invisible (commonsensical) in the western
public mind. Mann does a good job of distinguishing her use of the term matriarchy from
the term’s implicit meaning, but if we are to turn this academic argument into a political
project we must assume that the average person will not actually read articles like Mann’s
(especially when first coming into contact with the phrase ‘matriarchal gift economy’) and
that the term matriarchy will therefore be perceived from the ‘common sense’ perspective
of our society—we ought to select a term whose root does not belie our use.

Illusions of Freedom in the American Psyche:
Free Market Theology and the Myth of Capitalist Freedom
‘They must not like freedom or the market.’
The details needed for a proper citation escape me, but the above statement from Rand
Paul defending his views on healthcare in an interview on one or another of the
mainstream news networks like CNN or MSNBC echoed a prominent line of
propagandistic reasoning in the ‘Libertarian’ movement that is particularly egregious. Free
Market Capitalism (i.e. neoliberalism) is assumed to be the only means for providing
individual freedom, and so if you do not like Free Market Capitalism (and the associated
removal of all state functions beyond ‘optimizing competition’91
) it is assumed that you
dislike ‘freedom’ and ‘individual choice’ (i.e. if you don't think like us you must not like
freedom…). Moving past the absurd irony that a group of supposed individualists are
repeating the same (and if I may say rather basic) line of reasoning, this argument that being
opposed to Free Market Capitalism (or to any form of Capitalism in the eyes of the average
American) some how makes you an opponent of freedom is especially irksome because
the basic ‘world view’ that underlies the Capitalist system of scarcity, competition and
hierarchical domination is antithetical to freedom for conscious, reasoning beings who
possess the potential for freewill.
Capitalism is an outgrowth of the mechanical evolutionary process through which
biology developed.92
In nature, scarcity impels competition and the subsequent desire for
hierarchical domination. Capitalism, reflecting the form of mechanical evolution, impels
scarcity to produce passing time oriented competition and the desire for hierarchical
domination. Natural selection, through passing time, leads to ‘evolution’.
Conscious, reasoning beings with the potential for free will do not, however, evolve
in the same form as unreasoning beings.93
Humans evolve in what we might understand as
an epistemological process—by directing our attention towards different ideas and
experiences our ‘state’94
mind (our ‘world view’) is transformed. Our culture, the ideas,
philosophies, stories, images, symbols, myths, principles, etc. that we pass down from
generation to generation, form what we might for heuristic purposes think of as the body of
our conscious evolution. An individual’s state of mind changes in an instant (however long
that instant may take to occur in passing time), and so, unlike the process of mechanical
evolution, conscious evolution is not bound to passing time. More change can happen in
an instant than has happened for centuries or millennia. At a more ‘practical’ level, we can
create technology to transform our biology faster than our biology can adapt to external
stimuli. Again ironically, even purportedly Libertarian philosophers like John Stuart Mill
understood the widely agreed upon definition of free will as the capacity to, through the use

91
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures trans. Burchell.
92
Barnesmoore, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies” Environment and Social Psychology
1(2).
93
Ouspensky, Tertium Organum.
94
States of matter are an apt metaphor.

of reason, direct one’s will in a manner that is free from determination of external stimuli.
Freedom requires reason, and reason requires conscious evolution; if a person does not
direct their will towards the cultivation of reason (and other such epistemological faculties
like emotion and intuition) they cannot be free.
With freedom comes responsibility. Conscious evolution, freed from
determination by passing time, is not a necessary function of passing time and devolution
becomes possible. If a being that is capable of conscious evolution does not direct their will
towards ideas and experiences that elevate their state of mind (that broaden their
intelligence, deepen their wisdom, enhance their emotional sensitivity, etc.) they will
devolve towards the unreasoning maelstrom of mechanical evolution. If a society does not
direct its collective will towards such ideas and experiences the potential for individuals to
do so is diminished (though thankfully not extinguished).
Capitalism as we know it is the outgrowth of an obsolete form of evolution. A
society developed from the principle of scarcity and the passing time regimented
competition and hierarchical domination it impels socializes its people in a manner that
traps them within the form of mechanical evolution and thus negates their potential for
conscious evolution and the quest for freewill therein. Capitalism, by the very essence of its
underlying mechanics and the assumptions concerning human nature implicit therein, is
anathema to freedom. Scarcity, competition and the desire for hierarchical domination
actively negate the potential for conscious evolution and, thus, for the cultivation of reason
and the actualization of the human potential for freewill therein. So no, we do not dislike
capitalism (free market or otherwise) because we have some secret or unconscious aversion
to ‘individual choice’ and ‘freedom’, we despise capitalism because it actively negates the
potential for humans to attain a state of being in which freedom is truly possible.

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