Castles in the air, a high dudgeon

Sociology, anthropology et al

Socius based studies go off the rails when they forget they were given the go ahead by their betters, or, by peeps deciding to better their betters.

I’ll use socius to abstract away from the form/usage "society", as such it refers to those ‘structures’ used to explain or change the world (control it perhaps), and where the world studied is limited to the structure of society as an object in itself.

Janus and the world are holding hands, but are interrupted by the orphan ©2023 meika loofs samorzewski

Broadly, studies of the socius began looking at society as if it were an object in itself. And it may have parts but “for simplicity’s sake we’ll ignore the itsy-bitsy" of the molecular and sub-atomic levels. Economics at least has a micro/macro divergence from early on.

My own exposure to a break-down of the socius hegemony was via Mary Douglas, a somewhat conservative by temperament Catholic anthropologist, whose Durkheimian-ish work I discovered in-my late 20s. It looked at the biases we each have and how they inform our choices in relation to concepts like “nature” or “morality”, in terms of what we make in fashion, or in arbitrarily linking fashion to an inclination. This is in regard to how ‘nature’ or ‘morality’ is perceived : fragile, robust, robust within limits, or chaotic/unknowable, and what style of thing do when we dress these up as values in relation to risk.

There was a structure but one made of bitsy choices in some sort of contrast or contest.

I took that idea and ran with it in terms of complexity-chaos-butterfly theories, where iterations of choices, repeated by each of us alone and in togetherness, and all with a nod to strange attractors. Societies might be better seen as emergent phenomena with histories. Not an object, but a thing. A thing of things. A meeting of meetings. Emergent things have structures, but do the structure make the thing emerge. Obviously within cybernetic and complexity frameworks that Systems Theory grew up to use as an adult, feedback is important, and ideas we have about society go on to in-form it, but I would argue more as world-building than worlding.

I have only been calling it world for the last year, or less.

Worlding is not a pure form, to be romantically recovered out from under our world-building, but to be understood as a possible history. (see the linkpost Posts on the world & worlding)

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Socius based works, where society is a object to study, have often totally ignored the individual’s own story, their idiosyncratic agency, and does so much like a narcissistic emperor does, because to a monarch all the parts need to be controlled at all times, because all parts are a threat just by existing. Agency is reserved to the sovereign and to which all others a subjects/slaves/animals, even if they do not know it yet when an empire is expanding.

According to recent work by Steinmetz sociology and anthropology are an arm of an imperial (French) government first and science but an instrumental second, however scientific it might appear or tries to be now. Empire-building is very bad, very often because this type of world-building denies agency to individuals who are not the Emperor. Sciences that ignore individual agency, even if it is just to keep things simple for the mathematics that we understand, and can compute, or now get computed and understand, and despite it being the basis of what they study, are likely not very scientific, or at least badly incomplete. (They refuse to dance.)

Empires, like their instruments, anthropologies and sociologies, reduce individual agencies, but in the case of empire, individual agents are reduced to nothing but obedience. And here, ‘loyalty’ is a mere commodity, (a commodity if a pile or heap of something, where each grain of sand is uncounted, unnumbered, un-named) and the sins of the non-obedient are a pathway for control by a hierarchy’s boundary riders, as useful examples to other grains of sand. (See Fideism the Heresy & Obedience, or To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church, or Sister Wendy on love as an obedient art.)

This can be seen in the Roman Catholic church which is a Roman government department gone rogue (Rüpke argues that the imperial institutionalisation by Roman authorities (e.g. St Augustine of Hippo City of God) occurs at the same time individual conscience was being granted liberty and enfranchisement (e.g. St Paul). (See Inappropriation or Piranesi, the shepherd worlding their selves.) Theology is a type of worldbuilding originally developed as a government policy manual to cope Imperially with new ideas of the person as a soul, while cribbing from Zoroastrian cosmology.

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In socius based work, often, a particular/discovered/invented structure is given a determining explanatory power.

Usually fairly straight structuralism would say something like the "infrastructure" is what is really there (e.g. capitalism processes as uncovered by Marx, or some motherfuckery by Freud if talking about a single human’s unconscious as an object) and “ideology” as the lies we tell ourselves that everything is alright and good under heaven (what is repressed).

The “real” structure is unconscious to the members of society because of a false consciousness AKA ideology. The word ideology is then scattered like mud over our souls because depended on your preferences one man’s meat is another man’s poison. This is unhelpful, it is bad worlding.

I won’t say all world-building is bad bad… just-look-at-imperial-theology-bad, but… these days theology mostly does not even know it is a governmental policy manual for an empire whose language is no longer among the living. A pope may speak of papal history but do they have this frame?

Now, here we must be careful, for some, uncovered secret knowledge is true knowledge and for others it is just mere ideology or conspiracy feelings, where inadequacy is mutated into theorising, which in itself can be seen as agency-repressed then become-released in a pathological form (bad worlding). (At this point I often talk about gnosticism and animism, but apparently the peeps described by those terms have a had a bad rap).

The ideology/true knowledge polarisation, this “thing” removes/hides agency from both the discoverers and the the protectors (protectors being the producers doing the social work of making and meeting each other) who must then ---in the name of the good --- fight each others' lies of __the lie__ like ancient Zoroastrian emperors, the original emperors, the originary narcissists of sovereign power) for the glory of god/truth/light etc. Ideology/true-knowledge provides a binary stage for bad behaviour.

This is the bad worlding I am trying to talk about. Without claiming any true knowledge. This is very difficult, I can only keep pointing at the worlding we do and suggest we fail to see it because we are so immersed in it. It being the world we world/make/build. A fish in water.

We are immersed in worlding, as much as we are ‘embodied’ in the phenotype of our bodies, which will provide pain when we mal-attend to it. Whereas the world does not provide pain except where we world-build it into our society. The sovereign’s right to kill or enslave you. People moralise as to how this is to be done.

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Recently, in the more polarising moments of stupidity in our politics of the last 150 years or so, we argue about whose agencies are true consciousness and whose are false. With narcissists the overall winners of this binary win-lose race. And they don't even care about the sides as long as they can surf the chaos.

This is why looking at idiosyncratic (neuro)diversity and psychological pathologies is very, very important to becoming more aware of the worlding we do. Skipping this phase does not help, unless you want to squash human agency into a commodity like belief or loyalty or both. Do you want to live or what?

Just remember that labelling us puts us back in our place as a commodity (bad worlding).

Catch-phrases and slogans for and used in this stupidity include “control the narrative”, “preferred pronoun” and “there is no alternative” or “there is no such thing as society”. Identitarianism is among the worst forms of world-building, even in the name of truth like inclusiveness or egalitarianism or liberty or… some other contemporary value gaining hero status. Are you really only a football hooligan?

All such phrases are world-building, written with a certain branding in mind, a certain kind of team mean-spirited moralising. And if others do not do that with the right colour or fashion, then they are loyal to the lie, and so these certain folks should not be allowed to world. Currently this includes Ukrainians who don’t even exist, but who display more agency than the mothers of Mobiks.

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In recent decades there has been an attempt on one side to broaden studies of the Socius by looking at the experience of disaffected/exploited/oppressed groups (often boxed as cross-stitched identities created by the controllers of the narrative in false/true consciousneseseseseseeess) in intersectionality of lived experience, yes, but it still does not look at actual individual biases and choices, i.e. it broadens the number of structures from one structure uncovered by a powerful new narrative, to many, but doesn’t use them any differently from when there was only the one. It just gets more complicated and thus fudge-able into making a better world. Inclusive and personable, but if all it does is multiply the number of castes or classes down to the atomic sovereign citizen, then it does not get rid of either castes or classes, or any other cross-stitched box or forced grammatical identitarianism like pronoun moralising. Transgessive-ness as emperor. The orphan child regains the throne.

Structuralism, emperors and narcissism have a lot in common.

If not a common purpose, then the same urge. This urge is not badness itself, but arises in the urges’ outcomes going on to world… —badly.

Evolution does not care what we urge, nor even how we each urge, or together, but that we do so. Those who do not get urged to world, those populations of individuals do not do as well. (This is why group selection can look attractive, but cannot deliver unquestionable results.)

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There have also been many attempts at inter-disciplinary hybrids and fields of study, so the reality is nowhere as polar as I am indicating for the sake of simplicity. There is certainly no conspiracy, except of dunces, here.

However like intersectional studies (which multiply perspectives into order to create an interference pattern through which to study the world, without considering this worlding itself – feedback is always an issue, even when not utilised) interdisciplinary studies tend to use some joined-up thinking without, I would argue, attending to the world. To the worlding we do. They wave their hands about while hand-wringing and move on.

There is a spectrum of interdisciplinary cousin-kissing studies like social psychology or social ecology or human geography or political economy (I know) or evolutionary psychology or sociobiology or even more leap-frog disciplines like bio-physics. All are of value, even as they re-group into factions they try to marry-off. (See my later writing: The reader as a trade : the job of the generalist.)

Worlding may only be apparent in the interference patterns of interference patterns all produced by strange attracters unhindered by world-building frameworks. But this is not a romantic recovery project.

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At the other extreme, away from the socius which ignores the each of us in favour of the sovereign, we have studies of the persona. I.E. psychology which describes molecular and even sub-atomic graduations of each of us, but rarely step out of the focus given by therapeutic individualism, and do so for good reasons of professionalism with regard to what helps the patient.

However, patient-centred therapy is not helpful to the rest of us in the “socius” if a pscyhopathic sociopath is on the loose with an army of automatic weapons and a sense of destiny induced by conspiracy feelings they can crowd surf to total power.

Narcissism is the key example here.

For some reason the experts, our experts on narcissism, cannot step up and out of the individual help they do do, and go up onto public platforms and help the rest of us on how we should police narcissists. They restrict their professional platforms to the considerations of the patient, which may mean survivors, but the rest of us just go… yeah, the best we can do is run away, we are told, just run away… —

But that is the best we can do? Morally speaking that seems completely wrong.

Surely it would be better to inform all our practices and levels of agency with a notice at the very least of red flags, while we move on to at least begin discussing what to do more generally about narcissists (for example)?

My own idea of social ecology is one that takes the sub-atomic (neuro-diversity), the molecular pathologies of individuals in their worlds, as well as the emergent “structures” that arise from those interactions and things, not in order to explain, nor change the world, but to live in the world as a safe nurturing healthy place.

To world well is to self well.

I.E. to know the dance we live, and to know we live the dance, and to dance that knowledge as we live, all requiring acknowledgement of agency, mis-agency and the responsibilities that then descend, rather than rights we have lost as identical orphans. Orphans have rights in a world that creates and allows orphans to exist, that is the stupidity of structuralisms in their narcissistic frames.

Generally orphans do not exist in the world, they exist in our worlds of effort that eschew agency, where we have failed to take up the challenge of being adults together, and fail to ask, “And this, or that, is it good worlding?”

“Why are people alone in their selves?” is, perhaps, the question, not how should we do it (being me) better?

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Re-written from a raw comment at Peter Turchin and Jean Twenge: Climatology, the Periodic Table, and Those Damn Millennials

Crossposted, & updated, at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com in May 2025.