Deep Structure: What Makes the Present

How ontology may/may explain what's going on - and offer a route to change it

I am fascinated by how structures create outcomes, particularly political outcomes - events. Indeed the exploration of this connection is one of the primary purposes of this blog (though as readers also know, I reject any simplistic linearity of input A leading to output B; connections are altogether messier, more complex and sometimes indeterminate). You will see an example of this kind of analysis in my systems analysis of Trump (and, in due course, a systems-based prescription of what to do about Trump).

Sometimes I wonder if this obsession with deep structure is because I find it so difficult to confront contemporary events, a difficulty that today many are experiencing. In fact, on the contrary, I think my interest flows from that very and often painful confrontation. The pain is unavoidable but in its discomfort triggers action as a way to escape that discomfort, for me expressed through such exploration. How do we deal with the rise of neo-fascism, climate disaster, international instability (China’s extraordinary nuclear weapons build-up being just one of so many examples) or the rank lunacy and cruelty of Trump’s cabinet appointments and early executive orders?

That contemplation of current events leads me to interrogate the evident patterns, the subterranean deeper forces which sometimes surface like breaching whales but which most often lie beneath, mobile and powerful but concealed.

One of these forces, which I talk about in the systems analysis of Trump, is ontology. This might seem a pretentious term but it is crucial: the metaphysics of being, what is the essence of existence. Inevitably, the term is a bit amorphous and contested and its definitions a bit diffuse, because what it is tackling is amorphous, contested and diffuse. For my part, I understand ontology as what we take to be real: our understanding of existence itself.

I don’t want to dive too deep here. One can get lost in philosophy and I want to maintain the focus on the political. But one of the founding premises of my current thought is the profound and destructive limits of the ontologies that dominate society, thought and politics today. All philosophy is ultimately and intrinsically political in its implications and effects. Underneath all politics and economics (and indeed systems of power) lie fundamental philosophical and ontological assumptions.

One fundamental assumption that underpins and shapes the ideas that dominate our society is that of positivism, that only what is empirically detectable or measurable matters, or can usefully be talked about. Positivism forms the language and terminology, and thus claims, of contemporary orthodox economics - neo-classical economics - despite the Nobel prizes for new ideas that question these assumptions (like Elinor Ostrom’s brilliant and politically vital reconceptualisation of the commons).

You only have to examine your own mind or conception of the world to realise the limits of positivism, as Wittgenstein did in his Tractatus, to which I have also earlier referred. Of course, known and measurable facts are not the only things that matter and that should comprise our philosophy: many other things without measure, without terms themselves, arguably (and I would claim undoubtedly) matter more. Things like meaning, reason or love (or fear, anxiety or hate). Things that can only be expressed, and even then inadequately, by practices such as music or poetry (or even silence)…or found within the inexpressible intensity of human connection.

But this richer understanding is not what shapes the dominant and postivist political-economic orthodoxy today. Neo-classical economics is a discourse of things: money, goods, services, even the units of labour or consumers otherwise known as people. The usefulness of things is determined by their contribution to our ‘utility’, a grotesquely impoverished yet ubiquitous index for what we seek in life. Notably, this particular meaning of utility (not the word itself) was invented for the sake of the theory, demonstrating the theory’s utter circularity, depending on its own manufactured terms to make any sense.

Why does a deficient ontology dominate our world? Here is where things get political. It is about power. Those who perpetuate this view of existence are those who benefit most from it. They are the most materialist and they therefore promote an economics that prioritises materialism by ignoring everything else that matters. And of course in contemporary political systems it is those who have accumulated the most material wealth who dominate. Trump’s cabinet appointments, the hedge fund billionaires who now run the US Treasury, or friendship with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, are but the most brazen examples (never before have we witnessed so demonstrably the usually better camouflaged devil’s marriage between capital and the state).

In Britain it is more subtle, but not much. Behold the donors’ clubs where a hefty fee will guarantee you access to ministers and policymakers. The new Labour government even gave an office pass to Number Ten to one of its largest donors. In any system where the few govern the many, it is money that will buy you access and influence one way or another, overtly or covertly (this is one reason why I believe that the many should have decision-making power: it would erase corruption¹).

This corruption is not only about favours or helpful policy in return for cash. It is also about ontological reinforcement - the idea that reality and indeed humanity are about a limited set of terms, indices, what have you; the perpetuation of a theory of the human (a materialist, utility seeking consumer) and the positivist ontology that underpins that theory. The destructive obsession with economic growth is one consequence of this phenomenon.

You will almost never hear this ontology questioned. Those who comprise the dominant media ‘discourse’ help enforce its perpetuation too. Senior editors, journalists, commentators etc.. This is a class which has deep interests in maintenance of the status quo, for within it lies the security of their social and economic status which would otherwise be highly fragile (I shall explore this class phenomenon in due course). Somehow intuitively they know that it is not just the overt political/economic ‘system’ (of putative democracy and capitalism) that they must maintain, but also its ontological foundations. Perhaps they know no better. Yes, they sometimes provide space for the unworded, the immaterial or irrational but it is always segregated away from the rationalist, scientistic (because it is not true science) arguments that support a very limited positivist view of reality and its political/economic manifestations.

So we can see that the political problem we face is not just about ‘capitalism’ for this is only a politico-economic system that lies within the ontology. It is also the ontology itself - the broader environment or eco-system within which all other elements of the system exist, down to the microcosmic behaviour of the individual within that system - or the emission of a molecule of carbon.

I believe that as long as an inadequate - grotesquely inadequate - ontology shapes our world and the systems that control society (for neo-classical economics is a philosophy and method of control, by forcing us into reductive and ultimately inhuman boxes and behaviours), we will be in trouble, whether psychically or politically (both are linked of course). I have come to suspect that this ontological deficiency is one factor behind the rise of fascism: the failure to recognise and allow expression of fundamental aspects of what it is to be human, fostering a political system for instance that denies our basic need for autonomy and agency, which in turn provokes the intense anger which the Far Right is now busy exploiting. It is not the only factor, and nothing is determinative on its own, even a system of knowledge, but it matters, and perhaps it matters above all else.

Of course plenty of philosophers have come to this conclusion about ontology and knowledge systems - epistemology. Indeed the rational-irrational, empiricists vs non-empiricist arguments have played out for centuries if not millenia. Most recently, Iain McGhilcrist has written at length about the destructive dominance of rationalism in the way we think and organise ourselves (his most recent book is published by Perspectiva Press, also my publisher!). Others are also exploring this ‘liminal’ terrain, like the excellent substacks of Daniel Pinchbeck or Jonathan Rowson. I’m sure there are plenty of others (recommendations welcome).

And of course all religions, pretty much, claim to understand and reserve to themselves the right to interpret this realm of the spiritual and immaterial. Religious totalitarians of past and present pretend that they alone can attend to this more comprehensive understanding of existence and humanity, and with that interpretation they assert authoritarian control. But in more secular iterations of contemporary political philosophy, I have come to believe that anarchism, and only anarchism, can express and allow for this broader, more holistic ontology, that embraces the irrational as much as the rational (though for Anglophones, ‘irrational’ has unhelpfully negative overtones - perhaps ‘non-rational’ would be a better term). Why I believe this, and how this works, will be the subject of future posts here - and indeed my book.

Ontology can be altered, enriched, transformed both within ourselves and society. Merely changing our understanding, or indeed realising the importance of ontology, becomes a profound political act. This offers some grounds for hope for the possibility of fundamental change.

I look forward to your comments.

1. This was one clear result of the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre’s project of mass democracy