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Hail and welcome. This essay is part six of my series on ecumenical phenomenology, or ecumenicalism, my philosophical “theory of everything,” such as it is. I’m going to do my best to make this essay self-sufficient, but it will contain references to the ecumenicon and its related terms. This essay is also an expansion of two shorter ones I wrote and published on Medium. Those essays explored a model that I developed in order to analyze social systems in support of a broader project analyzing the dynamics of human civilizations, as I described in prior episodes. The general idea is to look at social systems in terms of their emerging from a distributed and public mind, which I refer to as the ecumenicon. If you’re not acquainted with that theory, the episode “The User’s Guide to the Ecumenicon” would be a good place to start; failing that, just understand for now that the ecumenicon is an ontology of abstract reality and describes our public experience of the world in terms of concepts.
So, to get us started, I’m once again going to offer a definition that probably isn’t going to make much sense and then spend the rest of our time together cleaning up the details: a cartel is the ecumenical substructure of normal order, relative to a given primary distributionary resource, which describes human participation in the distribution system of that resource. Alternatively, it is the collection of individuals and social systems working in collaborative competition to distribute a resource.
The basic situation is this: human society is made up of various social systems which we’ve named largely according to tradition, convention, and the interests of those who do the naming: governments, sports teams, businesses and corporations, social clubs, and so forth. The problem is, one, these names have functional implications. The names aren’t arbitrary but rather imply certain roles and functions. Calling a particular social system “the United States government” implies that that social system behaves a certain way. Two, the functional implications of the names don’t always match up with what those social systems are actually doing. In other words, we have a tendency to take the names of things as being a priori what they actually are; distinctions between things are predicated based on their names and titles rather than on their properties. The result of this is that we’re blinded—I believe intentionally—to the inner workings of society and to the use of power.
To get a sense of what I’m talking about, consider prostitution. Is prostitution legal in the United States? There are a few different ways of answering this question. One is to look at the law books and see what they have to say about prostitution. There we’ll find that prostitution is illegal in most parts of the United States. Another way of answering the question is to try to get a sense of what prostitution actually is and then see whether it is permitted by the state. Ideally this would involve some conceptual investigation but I think a dictionary definition will serve well enough for our purposes at the moment: prostitution is “the practice or occupation of engaging in sexual activity with someone for payment,” something which is perfectly legal throughout the United States so long as you film it. So, throughout most of the United States, “prostitution” is illegal, but actual prostitution is legal so long as certain framing conditions are met. These framing conditions don’t change what is actually occurring at the fundamental level, which is that people are being paid for sex, that sexual activity is being incentivized monetarily, but rather changes what we call it, and this changes our perceptions and attitudes towards it as well as how we treat it legally. At the same time, we have certain colloquial and legal definitions of the word “work” that arbitrarily exclude sex work such as prostitution and pornography, despite the fact that what’s really going on is just as much work as selling insurance or serving tables.
Now, to be clear, the framing conditions might change the context of the underlying action in such a way that different treatment actually is warranted, but the problem is that, often, we’re not making those sorts of decisions with a clear understanding of what’s really going on. We tend to assume things are what their names say they are. “Prostitution” and “pornography” are different words, and so we tend to assume that they are ontologically distinct—fundamentally different kinds of thing—when in fact it’s the same thing in two different contexts.
A few episodes back I mentioned the philosopher Walter Kaufmann, famous primarily as a translator and interpreter of Nietzsche, and his distaste for labels. Cartel systems analysis and the broader model of ecumenical phenomenology behind it catapult us over the deception of labels so that we can get a look at what is of far more concrete importance: behavior. We want to understand human behavior at the fundamental level. With regards to our example of prostitution and sex work, we want to know and understand the behavior of the social ecosystems surrounding these activities, and those questions are answered far better by the cartel model than by the technically true but nevertheless empty claim that “prostitution is illegal.” Such a claim certainly informs our broader investigation—values regarding things like law and money, combined with the knowledge that “prostitution is illegal” is written down in the right places, all contribute to behavior—but the legal assertion is just one piece in a very complex puzzle.
With this in mind, consider arguments advocating for “small government.” Those making such arguments typically consider large governments to be bloated entities with too much power, making them wasteful and a threat to human liberty. But when those favorable to such arguments gain power, they tend not to shrink the government so much as reconfigure it in such a way that the same actions are taking place but the agents of those actions no longer nominally belong to the government. To take a specific example, we might ask whether it is legal for the government to track your location using your cell phone. “No, of course not!” one might respond. “That’s a clear violation of the right to privacy.” It is, however, legal for private corporations to do precisely the same thing, and to sell that information, and it is also legal for the government to buy that information. The fundamental situation is that the American government is tracking its citizens on a massive scale (Cox, 2020; Our New Suburban Surveillance State), but the involvement of certain agencies which are not nominally part of the government creates framing conditions which magically transform the forbidden into the permissible. The behavior is the same and the outcomes and problems associated with that behavior are the same, but it is permitted because of the labels attached to the agents of the behavior.
What this ultimately leads to—and I’ll be going into further detail on this in the essay—is that the government and the state are not identical, and that the state, as it actually is, is far more expansive and powerful than most of us realize. Now, this starts to sound a bit conspiratorial and I want to head that off at the pass: this essay will not be arguing that the state is some secret cabal of an elite few who control world events from behind the scenes. Quite the opposite, actually: because of this nominological confusion, the state is actually far more complex than most of us realize, and also more anarchical, more chaotic. President Biden, for example, is nominally the Head of State of the United States of America, but in fact, the state is headless, and the executive branch of the U.S. government is just one of numerous social subsystems operating in a state of collaborative competition to establish normal order within their territory: not a cabal, but a cartel.
We’ll start with an understanding of human activity centered around redistribution. Given an objective distribution of a resource (including informational resources)—say, the fact that rivers and lakes are here or there and that iron deposits are in this mountain but not that mountain—humans will shuffle it about in various ways in order to fulfill various individual and collective needs, and this shuffling about, in combination with end-point resource consumption (itself a transference of redistribution to the internal worlds of the human body and mind), encompasses all human activity, and indeed the activity of all life. Water, for example, is objectively in some places but not others, and we need to redistribute it so that we can drink it to stay alive, and the process of drinking and the biological processes which follow it are themselves processes of redistribution. Water molecules might be in a glass or in our stomachs, and they need to be redistributed to cells in order to effect hydrolysis reactions, which are themselves redistributions of other molecules. And the necessity of redistribution and its results are just natural consequences of the laws of thermodynamics: work (the redistribution of energy) is necessary because of entropy (which can be described as the homogeneity of energy distribution and which increases over time, as well as being the reason why things are distributed the way they are prior to any human work being done), and work also increases entropy. The entire course of the history of this planet can be summed up as the highly-concentrated energy of light being redistributed as heat, which is more diffuse. And all redistribution accomplished by life is so accomplished via an assortment of biological, technological, and social systems—distribution systems—which have certain features in common.
So we have these various resources that are in need of redistribution for whatever reason, and I’m defining cartels in terms of these individual resources and their distribution systems. A distribution system is defined by a primary distributionary resource, the resource which that system is distributing. Other resources may be involved but play different roles, and the same system components may be integrated into other distribution systems, working in the same or a different role to distribute those distribution systems’ primary distributionary resources. Let’s take, as an example, a retail outlet for sporting goods. We take sporting goods—baseball bats, frisbees, perhaps some camping gear—as being the primary distributionary resource and then analyze the distribution system in terms of its relationship to the distribution of that resource. So there is at least one sporting goods distribution system operating in the world and we analyze all social systems in terms of their relationship to the distribution of sporting goods. Banks are likely involved in sporting goods distribution systems, holding money and translating it into different formats, but also work as banks for other distribution systems. Governments necessarily are involved as well because governments are typically normative ordering cartels, distributing the normal order under which the sale of sporting goods can take place, but governments also provide normal order to other distribution systems, and I’ll be saying more about normal order a bit further on. Construction firms need to build the retail outlets, but also build buildings for other distribution systems. Product designers need to design the sporting goods themselves. Janitors need to clean the buildings designed by construction firms in order to provide a location in which sporting goods can be sold. There’s no limit to how far out this analysis can extend and to some limited degree everything in our world participates in every distribution system, but it serves for most purposes to cut the analysis off at some arbitrary degree of separation. We also see that the analysis is framed by our choice of primary distributionary resource. Depending on the problems we’re trying to solve or the questions we’re trying to answer, we may narrow our scope to the frisbee distribution system or broaden it to the retail goods distribution system or make a lateral move to the plastic goods distribution system.
Next we have various feed resources, which fuel the distribution system itself. Our sporting goods distribution system, for example, requires feed resource flows of raw materials which are to be converted into sporting goods, as well as money to be used to pay employees and fund construction and so forth. These feed resource flows are simultaneously the primary distributionary resource flows belonging to other distribution systems. A feed resource flow of critical importance is ordering communication, which supplies the feed resource of normal order, and, again, I’ll be saying more about that shortly.
The next component common to distribution systems is infrastructure. Infrastructure includes all static resources which are used to effect or facilitate the distribution of the primary distributionary resource. So, for our sporting goods distribution system, the infrastructure includes warehouses, retail outlets, and public roads, as well as people such as sales clerks, managers, and janitors. The cartel model treats knowledge as a form of infrastructure as well. Infrastructure is converted from feed resources via secondary processes, and also includes normal order in its final, implemented form.
Then there’s the territory in which the infrastructure exists, over which the primary distributionary resource is distributed, and from which feed resources are drawn. Different distribution systems can share territory but it is impossible that the same primary resource be distributed by two different distribution systems within the same territory unless their cartels are in a state of war, about which more later. If two ostensibly different distribution systems for the same resource share territory, they are in fact one distribution system and that arrangement is the singular cartel for that resource in that territory.
I’ve mentioned normal order a few times now and thank you for bearing with me through the preliminaries. Normal order is the ecumenical heart of the cartel model and, I think, it’s most powerful feature, but its understanding has to be situated relative to a distribution system, so I had to get that of the way first. Normal order is abstract infrastructure: it is the sum total of norms and expectations under which distribution takes place. Normal order arrives via the feed resource of ordering communication, and the substructure of normal order, relative to a given primary distributionary resource, which describes human participation in the distribution system, is the cartel itself. One might think of the normal order as being, at least in part, a conceptual map onto physical infrastructure: this person is my boss; this bridge belongs to us. Normal order is ecumenical, a collective understanding distributed across minds; it is the total consensus reality exploited by the cartel in any way.
Laws can encode normal order as concrete infrastructure—as writing in certain official books or records—but it’s important not to conflate the two, and in fact that’s exactly the kind of conflation we’re trying to avoid by implementing the cartel model in the first place. The writing and promulgating of laws can serve as ordering communication, but normal order itself is far too complex and dynamic to be faithfully represented in any symbolic form.
Returning yet again to our sporting goods distribution system, we’ve already described money as a feed resource for that system, but the fact that money can be exchanged for sporting goods at certain rates in the first place is part of the normal order of that system. And the normal order which describes what infrastructure (i.e. which people) controls the distribution system—though this control is typically very diffuse and indirect—is the cartel itself. While we may colloquially speak of individuals as belonging to a cartel or being members of a cartel, it is of central importance that we recognize that the cartel is not identified with the group of people who meet that description. People, in terms of their physical bodies, are infrastructure (or resources, depending on whether they are static components of the system or something being distributed). A cartel is conceptual.
Now we get into the important question of who’s really in charge? The answer is simultaneously no one and everyone. No one person is ever completely in charge; rather every person or social system which participates as infrastructure relative to a given primary distributionary resource and which operates within its normal order in collaborative competition with all other such people or social systems is part of the cartel.
Cartels are rarely constituted by a single social system but rather by multiple social systems acting within an environment of collaborative competition defined by the distribution system’s normal order. The sources of normal order for all distribution systems are normative ordering cartels, whose primary distributionary resource is normal order. Normal order is established through the feed resource flow of ordering communication, which always ends in agreement, acceptance of the new normal order. Ordering communication is predicated on and takes place within the context of the existing normal order. Normative ordering cartels are typically governments, but in the context of global corporate capitalism, it’s easy to see how corporations can form cartels with governments in order to establish a normal order which is favorable to their interests.
Collaborative competition might be likened to a ball game. Which particular game isn’t important; what’s important is that the two teams agree to the rules by which the game is played (the game’s normal order) and collaborate within those rules to play the game. The specific form of that collaboration is competitive: each team is trying to play out the rules in such a way that they win and the other team loses. But it is a collaborative environment regardless because both teams agree on and adhere to the normal order and work with each other to play the game within those rules. Why compete? Why not just collaborate? Because the distribution conditions allow differential access to feed resources. Two sporting goods outlets will collaboratively compete with each other to sell more sporting goods because that means more access to the feed resource of money. Alright then; why collaborate? Because collaboration yields a larger pool of feed resources to which everyone has access, and because it’s rationally preferable to the alternative, which I’ll be getting to presently.
Collaborative competition is the context in which most of us carry out the general activities of our lives. The global capitalist economic system is predicated on it, but I wonder whether it may be to at least a certain degree unavoidable. To clarify what collaborative competition is, it’s almost easier to ask, what isn’t collaborative competition?
The answer to that question is the state of war. In the absence of immediate agreement as to the normal order, a state of war results and ordering communication continues (possibly including threats of force or the use of force) until agreement is reached. Under the state of war, the various social systems in play disagree as to the normal order itself, and vie for control of ordering communication flows. Imagine, for example, that one of the teams in our earlier example lost a game but declared victory regardless, saying that the rules of the game are invalid for whatever reason or for no reason, and that, according to their rules, they won. What happens now? Either the rest of the cartel concedes to their assertions or the state of war continues. Perhaps there is some social system in which the other social systems involved have invested some sort of determinate authority, an ability to adjudicate these sorts of matters. This system may rule that the team’s challenging the fundamental rules of the game was inappropriate and eject them. Perhaps the team still refuses to concede and attempts a violent coup. At this point likely another cartel will step in, because now the rogue system threatens not only the normal order of the game but the normal order of the state. Whoever prevails can then dictate the normal order of that particular entertainment cartel.
States of war necessarily escalate towards violence but are not defined by violence, and normal order is that state under which all violence is averted. Normal order is in this way predicated upon either the threat of violence or rational agreement to a non-violent alternative. Bear in mind that “rational agreement to a non-violent alternative” does not necessarily correlate with any particular social contract theory or with the concept of a social contract in general. Collaborative competition is not a contract of any sort and is not necessarily concordant or even consensual. Collaborative competition can be quite brutal: if a bank forecloses on someone’s home and the homeowner non-violently fights the foreclosure within the rules of the system, loses, and ends up unhoused, that’s still just collaborative competition within the context of the normal order. Only if the homeowner attempts to overturn the normal order has a state of war emerged.
Let’s review. The objective distribution of resources necessary for life necessitates distribution systems to get those resources to where they need to be. Each such resource in terms of its being redistributed by such a system is a primary distributionary resource, and distribution systems are delineated from one another along the lines of these different resources and the territory over which distribution takes place. Additionally, each distribution system also consumes other resources—feed resources—fed into the system by feed resource flows, which are the primary distributionary resources of other distribution systems, and which are converted by the receiving system via secondary processes into infrastructure. A particular resource, normal order, is supplied by normative ordering cartels via the feed resource flows of ordering communication, and the resulting abstract infrastructure of normal order dictates the shared understanding and agreements by which individuals and social systems collaboratively compete to distribute the resource.
The cartel model provides us with good answers to questions that, under other analyses, get tangled up with our assumptions, bewildering us with language and leading to confusion about what’s really going on. What’s more, it grounds our analysis in the fundamental activities and motives of human life.
For example, is the United States at war? We might look to see whether there are active declarations of war or authorizations of military engagements by congress, but we’re probably asking the question in the first place to understand the behavior of the state and the state might be incentivized to present a deceptive front on that account. So let’s ask the question a bit more precisely: is the American state cartel at war with any other cartel? Consider the case of Donald Trump and his followers in the U.S. government and among the general American populace. In 2020, Donald Trump and Joe Biden participated in a contest under the normal order of the American territory. The contest proceeded in collaborative competition under the methodocratic rules of American normal order. When Donald Trump lost, he contested the normal order itself. A violent coup followed, apparently with his direct involvement. This is definitively a state of war. Ordering communication has taken place in the form of the January 6th Commission hearings (which have concluded) and continue in the form of legal investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and other violations of the normal order (as encoded in law). It becomes clear under this analysis that the state response to Trump and his followers is absurd. Trump’s followers remain in powerful government positions and are allowed to dictate terms. This means that, to a certain degree, the American state has already conceded defeat, having bound itself by a methodocratic normal order which does not permit decisive human action. In order to avoid tyranny, the state concedes to tyranny. It concedes to lies, as it must, because the methodocracy excuses the state’s own lies, its own tyrannies.
The cartel model uncovers an ugly truth: not only is the state too weak to protect itself, it gives up without a fight, hoping to prevail on terms in whose construction the enemy participates. This is a dangerous, unstable situation, as everybody already knows, and given that the state has already entrenched the normal order in methodocracy, we know that it must ultimately succumb. Even if the methodocracy itself is subverted, the state remains, by choice, bound to its rules, and so the enemy will prevail via salami tactics, carving off one tiny slice at a time, bringing more and more under their control, knowing that a lost battle can always be fought again without cost, knowing that the state will always yield after their own defeats, even those resulting from violations of the normal order.
Imagine a game with two players, who each start out with ten points. There are different rules for each player. Given an iteration of the game, Player A will either remain at their current point total or lose points. Player B will either remain at their current total or gain points. Whomever hits 0 points first loses. Obviously the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
We see the central role of the ecumenical structure of normal order in all this. All behavior attributable to social systems is predicated on its norms and expectations. Suppose that the order is given and Donald Trump is arrested and jailed. That police and other federal agents will act in obedience to this order is part of the normal order. This hierarchy is encoded in law but as Donald Trump himself has already proved, laws only have teeth if human behavior accords with them; they do not compel behavior in and of themselves, and even to the degree that they incentivize behavior, they do so only insofar as they reflect the normal order. We can analyze as well the structure of this order: a police officer, for example, will act based on their expectations of how their fellow officers will act, and as this is true for each police officer in relationship to their co-conspirators, the relationship is reciprocal and recursive.
Wrapping up, what does all this mean for Satanists?
This project is concerned with understanding religion, and the cartel model and ecumenical phenomenology provide us with the clearest picture of what religion is and how it operates in the world, as well as who controls it and how and why they do so. Religious organizations are often key participants in normative ordering cartels. We can look at religion itself as being a resource, either a particular kind of normal order or a substructure of the broader normal order, or as being a bundle of other resources that we might describe in terms of words like “meaning,” “purpose,” or “community,” all of which are similarly structured into the normal order.
The specific religious implications of ecumenical phenomenology will be covered in future essays, but I take it as axiomatic that Satanists have a religious interest in understanding the conditions of their existence. We can look to Paradise Lost if we need scriptural support for this claim: once cast out of Heaven, Satan surveyed both Hell and the broader cosmos and got a sense of the various players involved, seeking allies and defining enemies, before he moved forward with the plan to corrupt God’s creation. We don’t want to wander blindly in the dark, subject to forces we don’t understand and whose sources are unknown to us, bewildered by illusions and phantasms. However much we might be “free” to choose to wander this way or that, we are not truly free unless we’re making rational choices about where it is we’re going and why, and this requires knowledge of our environment and its conditions.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Cox, J. (2020, November 16). How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqm5x/us-military-location-data-xmode-locate-x
Our New Suburban Surveillance State. (2022, May 26). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xh8fgEntYo