Oligarchical collectivism and the four steps to learning politics

The status quo of Oligarchical Collectivism, Arthur Young’s Learning Process and application of Lord Acton’s Rule.

Ethan Indigo Smith
Activist Post

It’s a mad world. It’s a world immersed in oligarchical collectivism. George Orwell coined the term which describes exactly the state of the world today. An oligarchy is an institution by the few. Collectivism occurs when like systems or beings or in this case institutions link together. The world functions on oligarchical collectivism. Oligarchical collectivism can be abstractly depicted as a pyramid made up of many blocks, with fewer and fewer controlling aspects above.

The linking of institutions in the form of oligarchical collectivism, as George Orwell so accurately called it, is the predicament of the status quo. Oligarchical collectivism is at the root of all the world’s problems. Abstractly, the collective of oligarchies becomes concerned with the institutions that the pyramid is made of and not the individuals the pyramid is supposedly built for.

Concretely the problem can be seen in a healthcare system which props up insurance and pharmaceutical industries. And in a martial and war practices which run the planet. And even in the austerity measures where the concern for individuals is second to the concern for institutions.

One of the biggest problems humanity faces today, a problem of our own design, is the energy conundrum. Energy is arguably only a problem at all because of the oligarchical collectivism of the status quo. Every form of energy costs something, but the current energy infrastructure is costing us everything. Energy extraction, facilitation and production caused the environmental destruction the world now faces. The burning of petrol and nuclear fires is causing environmental destruction. And yet are these the most optimal energy sources? No. They are the best and most secure energy sources for oligarchical collectivism, the pyramidal status quo of the few over the many.

The oligarchical collectivism of the energy industry can be seen in the subsidization of the most oligarchical formats and the elimination of systems which benefit the many as opposed to those that benefit the few. Coal, petrol, natural gas as well as the minerals required to run nuclear power generation experiments are all extracted, refined and controlled by the few and all endanger the many. They all require oligarchical collectivism to work. Whereas, other sources of energy, be they biofuel or solar power, would work best if it were in control of the many. That is if there was not just one solar station, but many little ones.

The same goes with corporate agriculture. Ecosystems and economical systems would thrive more if there were not a few big agricultural corporations, but many smaller operations.

The world is based on and operates by way of oligarchical collectivism. All politics is oligarchical collectivism, designed to reward the few at the cost of the many. Whenever there is some sort of strife within a nation, you can guarantee it’s because the majority are weary of the burden of oligarchical collectivism, for the system is highly corruptible, no matter if in China or Chicago. The world is controlled by the few over the many in an arrangement akin to a huge pyramid. This institutionalization, compartmentalization or oligarchical collectivism is not necessarily determinative of corruption only highly likely to be corrupt. The corrupt status quo requires a change in the global paradigm. It is everywhere, local and global, oligarchical collectivism, the corrupt pyramid status quo is what needs to be changed. Lord Acton’s Rule:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. — Lord Acton

Only when you know what the problem is can a solution be extrapolated. Only when you know of fire can you utilize it or put it out. The word pyramid means fire in the middle. Only when one understands the history of the pyramid system can one understand the present status quo and do something about it. We didn’t start the fire, but we can do something about it.

Arthur Young presented a four-part theory to the learning process in his ideas. He penned The Reflexive Universe. He noted a fourfold structure or basis throughout the entire universe. The idea of a fourfold structure to the universe, as well as in consciousness, is not so wild and in fact was and is shared by many as I explore in The Matrix of Four, the Philosophy of the Duality of Polarity. As far as learning to understand the fire of oligarchical collectivism we were all born into, Arthur Young extrapolated and said it best:

This becomes apparent if we think of a cycle of action as a learning cycle. The learning cycle has four phases. It begins with (1) a spontaneous or unconscious action, such as a child reaching out and touching a hot stove. The pain causes (2) immediate withdrawal, or unconscious reaction, followed by (3) an awareness that the stove caused pain, a conscious reaction, followed by (4) future avoidance of hot stoves, a conscious action or control. Thus the child learns. If the experience is not learned, the cycle repeats until it is, after which the child moves to a higher level involving more complex or longer-term cycles, always incorporating what he or she has learned and building a hierarchy of automatic reactions controlled by the brain. 

Consciousness is always at the leading edge of that growth process, always pressing on. This lays the basis for higher consciousness. There is a consciousness appropriate for each level of interaction, from that of nuclear particles to that of the higher organisms, and there is no reason to suppose that it stops there. 

It is important to point out that the learning cycle includes consciousness and action. No matter how expert we become, we still have something to learn, and that learning or consciousness comes only after an exploratory action has exposed some error. We can then rectify the action and get on with it. The physicist may not be good at philosophy, but he or she can at least make mistakes and possibly learn from them. The philosopher has no way to recognize whether a mistake has been made. The vocabulary of science has shown us that intention has a proper place in the formalism of physics, and by emphasizing the cycle of action it becomes possible to obtain a model for the growth of consciousness, and with it the evolution of life. — From the essay “Science, Spirit and the Soul,” by Arthur Young

We, as a global collective of individuals have got to start putting the importance of individuals above the institutions. Otherwise institutions will roll right over us all. Otherwise oligarchical collectivism will continue.

Refuse. Resist. Relax. Take conscious action and discontinue support of corrupt oligarchical collectivism as much as possible. Conscious action in politics is peaceful and even compassionate resistance to oligarchical collectivism.

Ethan Indigo Smith is the author of The Terraist Letters and The Matrix of Four.