Author: Anarchist Tranny Against CivilizationTitle: Killing The Cop In Your HeadSubtitle: Essentialism, phenomenology and liberation.Date: 02/03/2025 There is a war being waged on our minds. Not just the propaganda war intended to win our support for subjugation of ourselves or others, not just the war to augment or replace our minds usefulness with technological tricks; there is a war on and its aim is to warp your ways of thinking so much as to offer no alternative. With our myopia towards the present moment, it would be easy to assume I mean to speak of something new, but this war on thought and on our own relationships to our bodies minds, is a fundamental mechanism of domestication, of civilization. It has been adapted to serve the related, but newer, ends of white supremacy, or patriarchy, or colonialism, but it is a war still, not because it hasn’t been won and lost by either the side many times over, but because it must be fought anew every generation. Every great cultural turning comes along with the opening of a new front in the war for the autonomy of our minds. All political movements talk about consciousness raising, hearts and minds, red pill moments, epiphanies, radicalization. It is no secret that the contents of our political beliefs (e.g. our values but operationalized) is the first front of any campaign of public awareness and the first target of any social movement. Sometimes this mind-changing or awakening is centered on deep fears and pre-existing prejudices masquerading as common sense, sometimes it centers on “Great Men”, “great ideas” and “great goals”, and sometimes it comes from a deep unquenchable desire for liberation. The shape of the influence for better or worse, looks similar regardless of the intended value direction of an awakening. So if we wish to understand the seed of political and social change, our priority and inquiry is the minds of the intended audience and one’s own mind. While I do know a great deal about psychology, and a fair amount about neuroscience (and this knowledge does influence my thinking), I want to talk about this through a lens that is less focused on either a mechanistic approach to explaining and modifying our behavior and cognition, or a biologically essentialist quest to describe the emergent property that is our minds, via our bodies alone. Instead I want to talk about the phenomenology of belief, and the ways that we constrain our liberatory imagination by questioning our thoughts, our world, the facts, but move forward into a parody of repetition because of a failure to challenge the very workings of our own minds. Thinking, evaluating, coming to conclusions without simply following your gut, is a skill, and a skill which can be taught. More often, in order to further the march of control via belief, we are taught only how to challenge the surface of our thinking, never the root. The phenomenology of belief, and the pitfalls of epiphany. For those of you uncomfortable with the intentionally obtuse and precise terminology of philosophy, what I mean by phenomenology is, the examination of or study of human experience, of experiential phenomenon. All threads of human thought begin here, in our subjective lived experience of the world. This is important to distinguish, from ones place in the world, or the facts of our world. Phenomenology, though interested in the relationship between the world and our experience of it, is primarily focused on the internalized immediate experiential phenomenon. So when I am asking us to think about the phenomenology of belief, in simpler terms I am asking, what does belief feel like, how does belief work, and how does our experience of belief differ from a sense of knowledge, if it all. Belief and knowledge. One way to describe belief would be certainty without regards to evidence; for instance, when we know something, contradictory information can inform or challenge our knowledge, or become integrated with it, when we believe however, we are significantly inclined towards filtering new information with deference to our beliefs. Of course the line between knowledge and belief as experienced is so fuzzy as to sometimes appear a dialectical unity between binary oppositions. When the believer learns something which challenges their faith they look on it as either a targeted assault to be rejected immediately, or as a misunderstanding promulgated by someone who doesn’t know whichever truth they believe. This is not to say there is no doubt in the believer, but that the mechanisms of belief furnish many different methods for the dismissal, modification, or minimization of doubt. The godless among you are thinking first of how belief in a religious order warps one’s perception and information processing; the environmentalists are thinking about climate change denial, the trans people are thinking of TERFs; But I am not thinking about some ideological other, I am here to ask about you, and about myself. All humans believe things; there may be exceptions to this rule though I know of none; And those beliefs shape every aspect of our lived experience. In some ways the phenomenology of belief is a less obtuse way to ask about the phenomenology of spirit or a more liberatory way to ask about the phenomenology of being. ...
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