The Beast & The Whore of Babylon

Identity:
Individual and the State versus the

Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven
Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson
Identity:
Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of
Heaven
Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson
The Question of Identity

The ques�on of iden�ty haunts us, we inhabitants of the 20th and 21st centuries, underlying all our
poli�cal excesses and extremes, playing a central role in the culture war tearing us once again asunder.
We are adri� in chaos and longing, in the absence of a firm iden�ty, no founda�on underfoot, nothing
to strive toward, prone in our lacking conscious and unconscious to decomposi�on and strife.
Something must unite our aten�on and our ac�on, so that we are integrated, psychologically.
Something must unite our interests and endeavours, collec�vely, so that we can cooperate and compete
peacefully, produc�vely, reciprocally, and sustainably. How then should our iden�ty be conceptualised
and embodied, prac�cally and ideally? What opportuni�es beckon, if that ques�on is answered, in an
op�mal fashion? What pi�alls lurk if we err?
A Dichotomous Scheme – Individual vs the State

The modern and postmodern ages alike were and are characterised by an increasingly simplified and
starkly dichotomous no�on of human existence and development. The simplest overarching
conceptualisation of human identity separates and divides the person into the opposing poles of
sovereign individual and faceless automaton of the state.
In doing so, the complex internal hierarchy of the person—all the intrapsychic elements warring within,
different motivations, emotions, drives, and impulses; different subordinate physiological, physical,
biological, and chemical subsystems; the host of fractious psychological complexes and spirits—are
collapsed to the singularity of autonomous liberal man, imbued mysteriously with intrinsic rights, and
segregated in essence from any broader social context.
That broader social context is then, likewise, collapsed: couple, family, neighbourhood, workplace, city,
province and nation are subsumed into society, or collective, or the state, separate from, antithetical
to, or even superordinate above the individual. Those who worship power trumpet the former; those
who worship whim elevate the latter. The individual, thus collapsed, is all-too-easily viewed in
opposition to the collective, leading those who favour self to view all social bonds as contrary to the
call of freedom or even indistinguishable from oppression, while those who favour society view
individual existence itself as naught but impediment to the establishment of the utopian collective.
Variations on the Dichotomous Scheme

Narrative and philosophical variations on this dichotomous scheme abound, permeating our culture:
we read about, view, and imitate the dramatised individual crushed by the state, the rebel fighting
against a tyrannical order, the sacrifice of the personal world for the hypothetically-paradisal collective.
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The Subsidiary Hierarchy
The hapless protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, caught and tortured by a cold bureaucracy, contrasts
starkly with Ayn Rand’s John Galt, triumphing over the fascist collective in Atlas Shrugged. Bertolt
Brecht’s famous play The Mother features a woman divorcing and isolating herself from private life,
marriage, and maternal role for revolution in the service of a communist Eden. Modern though such
themes may be, and seem, they are also simultaneously extensions of a similarly patterned literary past,
stretching far back into the pre-history of self-conscious conceptualisation.
The guardians of the city in Book V of Plato’s Republic are, for example, made subordinate to the city
from the time of their birth, bred first from the best parents, but handed thereafter to the state. All
intermediary allegiances, from private ownership to family ties, are abolished, in the service of the
singular collective.
The main actors and authors of the European Enlightenment continue developing this story of the war
of mutually reinforcing opposites. Thomas Hobbes portrays the individual as a war of competing and
fundamentally antisocial and narrowly self-serving drives and desires, made necessarily subordinate to
repressive state control. John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fleshing out the opposite pole, portray
the individual as rational, autonomous self-governing actor (Locke)—all good, except insofar as he is
corrupted by the state (Rousseau).
Our current metaphysical battles are drawn along similar lines: we are either stalwart, sovereign liberal
heroes, sufficient unto ourselves, or hapless victims, parented by the totalising state, aiming for utopia,
justifying all means in pursuit of that ultimately glorious end.
The Struggle between Opposing Forces

Even if those terms “individual” and “state” are not well-defined—when the former applies to each
person in all contexts at all stages of development and maturity; when the latter is applied without
discrimination to any and all levels of organisation transcending the individual—a deep dialectic
remains at work. It moves forward in time like a powerful motor, pistons cycling back and forth, driving
the machine of modern identity toward ever-greater extremes.
In principle, in the war between the individual and the collective, the duality between state and
individual must be bridged or overcome, so that one side or the other emerges triumphant—but this
end is illusory. The consequence of the struggle between such opposing forces is not the final victory
of either. There is simply no possibility of finally eradicating social being, in consequence of the triumph
of an extreme individualism, Ayn Rand notwithstanding. Likewise, there is no reduction of the fact of
the individual to a homogenous, idealised state. What transpires instead in consequence of their
conflict is not the conquest of one, but the exacerbation of the worst tendencies of both.
How do the opposites feed, nourish, and magnify one another? Any higher identity can be caricatured
as nothing but the tyranny of a higher power, from the point of view of the individual—a tyranny which
must be overthrown in the service of true liberation. This is true of marriage, family, private enterprise,
and religious endeavour; indeed, of any imaginable collective. This is “self-actualisation” in the absence
of any true self, a concept sullied by two illusions: first, that anarchy is freedom; second, that the desire
for anarchical freedom is something separate from the desperate and self-defeating wish to sacrifice
all responsibility for an impulsive, hedonistic, and immature irresponsibility.
From the collectivist standpoint, alternatively, all higher identities can be represented as nothing more
than partial and corrupt versions of the ultimate homogenous collective—and, therefore, as
impediments to that end, to be suppressed, fragmented, demonised, and otherwise destroyed. The
collectivist can tempt the anarchists with the eradication of marriage, offering free love; of family,
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offering freedom from mature, adult responsibilities; of work, offering distributed wealth, without
effort; of religion, offering freedom from restrictive superstition.
As all the meaning and purpose once contained in those intermediary identities is thus destroyed,
allegiance to the state becomes both overwhelmingly tempting and increasingly all-consuming.
Untrammelled, irresponsible, narcissistic pleasure-seeking as a precursor to state slavery; shades of
Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island. Force applied too brutally and rigidly on one side of the dialect produces a
countervailing and compensatory response on the other. Paradoxically, therefore, a too-extreme
insistence on the independence and self-contained autonomy of the individual, freeing himself from
religion, family, nation, and other forms of social unity, means that the totalitarian state becomes more,
rather than less, likely, as the state expands to occupy all the intermediary roles and responsibilities
abandoned by the too-self-concerned individual. In the same way, from the point of view of the state,
individuals isolated from each other as much as possible—all allegiance to intermediary identity
eradicated—become the welcoming targets of attempts to universalise the collective.
Revelation and Trajectories of Civilisation

The Biblical book of Revelation contains several images, relevant in this regard—difficult to understand,
as is inevitably the case with dream-like insight—but worth the analytic effort. Many have interpreted
that book as a prophetic map of the future, giving rise with such analyses to extreme millennial
movements, losing both themselves and their erstwhile followers hopelessly within its mysteries. It is
better understood as the representation of a universal pattern, psychological and collective alike: a
pattern characterising past and present as much as future.
The Beast and the Whore of Babylon

Two prominent images in the visionary work portray the two possible trajectories of civilisation. The
first is a hybrid: a great, seven-headed scarlet beast, with the mother of all prostitutes seated on its
back. The beast is civilisation and its leaders, the colour of earth and blood. The false princess or queen
is the licentiousness offered by the would-be totalising state to its once-citizens. The beast is a
representation of false hierarchy, a living Tower of Babel, the arrogant state/king and its vassals, hell-
bent on total subordination, marking everyone witting or unwitting with the mark or the number of the
beast.
The great prostitute—the Whore of Babylon—riding on the back of the beast, is the denizen and
temptress of the dark alleys, byways, and brothels of the “big city”, the embodiment of the
licentiousness of Rome. She is the dissolution of constraint that accompanies atomized individuality,
the dissociation of sex from the constraints and guides of tradition. She is the freedom of anonymity in
the “universal city”, a whore embodying all the desires, mixtures, deviations, and fetishes characterising
those hypothetically freed from all higher-level identities and obligations. She is the total temptation
offered by the totalitarian state. Ultimately—ironically and inevitably—the scarlet beast kills the
prostitute: the totalising state promises freedom, but kills even desire, let alone its satiation.
The State of Absolute Control

This strange, surreal, and endlessly compelling tale is a vision of warning: the ultimate state, promising
the freedom to pursue every conceivable whim, accrues to itself all the power that remains on the table
as responsible conduct is abandoned, using that power not to free, but to enslave. The worship of
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impulsive idiosyncrasy, and the accompanying destruction of subsidiary structure, invites, enables, and
even necessitates the “State of Absolute Control”. Someone, after all, has to pick up the pieces.
This pattern reveals itself when the pendulum swings, and the hedonism of Weimar is transformed into
the totalitarian Reich; when the Anarchism of the French Revolution transmutes into centralised
Napoleonic empire. This same dynamism ruled during the Covid-19 pandemic, which was, most truly,
a plague of authoritarianism. Our individualistic and hypothetically free societies re-organised
themselves in a heartbeat into a rigid and comprehensive totalitarianism, with all those who objected
demonised, punished, castigated, and excluded. The majority participated with enthusiasm, offered as
they were the tantalising opportunity to inform oh-so-moralistically on a neighbour.
It is in such moments that we can see the relationship between the Whore of Babylon in Revelation,
with all her idiosyncrasy, her easy desire, and the increasingly all-promising state, which can and does
all-too-easily metamorphose into its jack-booted and uniformed opposite. The punk rocker or the furry
with his loud and pathological impulsive idiosyncrasy and anti-authority individualism could not exist
for a moment in the Amazonian jungle. He is the eternal child of the atomised techno-society, the
beneficiary and infant of the state as Great Mother and Father—devouring parents, enabling, however
temporarily, his narrowly self-serving desires.
The New Jerusalem

The second image of civilisation in the book of Revelation is also the final Biblical vision. The manner in
which the problem of individual and society finds its resolution in this image is possibly the finest literary
example of sophisticated, multi-level identity. The readers of Revelation find themselves presented with
a great city, the new Jerusalem, a city of peace, descending from Heaven, aligned toward the greatest
good, God Himself. The city is established on a mountain, tree and river in the centre, hierarchy of
culture and natural world in proper balance. The sun is no longer necessary, for the light of the divine
fills the city. There is no competition or conflict there, as all reality is subsumed harmoniously into its
roads, alleys, and byways.
It is said of the city: “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory
into it.” The nations are in no way abolished when the heavenly Jerusalem emerges. They find their
proper place, instead, in hierarchical relation to what is by necessity and ideal highest; they serve and
make offering or sacrifice to the unquestionable transcendent good, the light by which they most truly
see—the light of God above. This may seem obscurely mythological to some, but the image of the
heavenly city is in fact the ultimate representation of structured harmony, a vision of the reality that
might obtain if the entirety of existence properly found its place, served what is highest, and integrated
itself into a transcendent whole.
As the irresponsible and narcissistic individual abandons his allegiance to his intermediary and
superordinate identities, and those are undermined and destroyed, level by level, the state grows ever-
more powerful. Eventually, even the comprehensive nation-state itself is no longer sufficient to satisfy
the appetite of those who worship the collective. Just as Napoleon eliminated provincial dialects and
customs so that the all-encompassing French Nation could be imposed, so too today the very notion of
France—the very idea of the nation-state itself—is portrayed as something anachronistic, patriarchal,
restrictive, and counterproductive; as something that must be overcome and transcended to render
the globe stable and sustainable.
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Rampant Individualism Drives Collectivist Totalitarianism

This dialectic of rampant individualism driving collectivist totalitarianism occurs most precisely and
subtly even where the opposite appears to be both strived for and occurring. Individuals might, for
example, attempt to defend their intermediary identities against the impositions of the state.
Thus, people fight to maintain their private clubs, enterprises, and religious institutions and beliefs
against higher-order collective strictures by referring to individual rights, such as “freedom of
association,” “freedom of conscience,” “freedom of religion,” or “freedom of speech,” not noticing that
reference to their autonomous individuality as grounds for validating the existence of those other levels
of identity removes any claim such institutions might have to valid existence in their own right,
increasing the fragmentation of society, and adding more power to the state (particularly if the state
simultaneously claims that those very rights are something merely granted to the individual, by the
collective, and possessed of no intrinsic “metaphysical” reality).
Perhaps it was inevitable, in the wake of the Enlightenment vision and the centuries following Hobbes,
Locke, and Rousseau that we would watch the dialectic intensify and see the slow but persistent erosion
of intermediary structures of identity, accompanied by the compensatory expansion of larger and more
encompassing bureaucracies, promising to manage the great sea of falsely free individuals, drowning
in anonymity, anxiety, and lonely hopelessness.
Technology Accelerates the Atomisation of Individuals

Technology is speeding up this development. More and more, online social media platforms are
accessed not by families, or by voluntary associations of any kind, but by atomised individuals,
increasingly at the mercy of the top-down dictates of giant corporations, promising originally to
democratise the public space and provide everyone with a voice, but soon gathering all manners of
highly personal data, encroaching upon the confines of the distributed digital self, and imposing
arbitrary and often invisible restrictions on communication that far exceed in their danger anything
dreamed up by optimistic pessimists such as Huxley and Orwell.
The government stepped in, with dreadful instantaneity, to regulate whatever the corporations
wittingly or unwittingly left free. The consequent authoritarian collusion between private enterprise
and state threatening freedom realised itself in a manner simultaneously novel, extensive, and
ominous. We saw this possibility on full display during the Covid psychogenic epidemic, when the Global
Village predicted by Marshall McLuhan made itself present much more truly in the guise of Global
Leviathan.
Censorship, of course, is nothing new. There has always been pressure, marital, familial, and more
broadly social, to attend to one thing and not another; pressure to align thoughts, spoken words, and
actions alike within the strictures of conventional social acceptability—a pressure which is not self-
evidently distinguishable from appropriate socialised conduct itself. Interventions mounting in severity
from the odd look or false smile of a friend or family member, through to the withdrawal of the hand
of friendship, to public shunning and excommunication, have always been at hand, played their role in
guiding people into the middle from the extremes, and have also been misused to compel untruth and
force false action.
With the erosion of intermediary social structures, that regulatory role passed to what are in the
techno-world often shadowy, collectivist bureaucrats censoring equally anonymous fragmented and
sometimes even entirely artificial individual participants. The online platforms and the government
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believe it is their role to reign in people’s excesses, in the absence of differentiated collective identities,
often joining forces (again, invisibly) to do so. This propensity is worsened when such joining and
censoring occurs in service of a particular political ideology, as has been the case in the last decades.
That is particularly dangerous when that very ideology is also one explicitly aimed at furthering exactly
the fragmentation, atomisation, and anonymisation enabled by the technology in question. 1
The Absolute State Subsumes Individual Identity

To say it again: As the Leviathan becomes more and more encompassing—when state-like structures
are increasingly understood as the only counterpoint to the individual—the relationships between the
two poles will radicalise. The individual will tend towards increasingly idiosyncratic fragmentation, while
the state and its corollaries will formulate ways to explicitly envelop everything within it. This
“everything” will encompass not only the individuals, and their idiosyncrasies, but the totality of the
environment within which those individuals exist. This will of course be justified by the necessity to
protect and secure, now and in the future—and to develop “sustainably.”
The ultimate extension of this expansion—the notion that the state could monitor, track, legislate, and
control not only the social systems that regulate and govern individual attention and action but the
natural systems within which those social systems operate—would have been unthinkable only a
generation or two ago. Such ideas are now commonplace to the point of being mandatory.
In a way that seems almost paradoxical at first, it is only in this context of an all-encompassing state
that we can understand the politician’s declaration of absolute diversity and openness. Recently we
have seen statesmen such as Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, insist that his very nation is
“post-national.” 2
Such a statement is the logical consequence of the proclivity of such leaders to proclaim that inclusivity,
diversity, and equity is the replacement social identity. What portrays itself as a universalist compassion
at the outset, is in fact the jaws of the Leviathan stretching wide enough to devour everything. To
reduce the existence of a nation to diversity and openness is to in time destroy that nation, as diversity
without unity can only be decomposition. But our interpretation of the tune changes when we realise
we are moving towards a system, a kind of meta-state, where everything is included and where all
competing identities, including nations, must be swallowed up.
The globalist struggle is ultimately presented as a fight against intermediary identities such as nation,
gender, family, and religion because they present an obstacle to the free individual, but in the final
analysis, the “sovereignty of the individual” will be subsumed into the body of the Leviathan by the very
processes by which this sovereignty arose, and radical freedom will be transformed into totalitarian
control.
Identity Can and Should Be Fractally Interpreted

There is another vision, broadly characteristic of Western thinking, independent of the dichotomous
dialectic of individual versus the state, and echoed in many other traditional societies: that of the micro-
and macrocosm. This perspective is offered by the early Hermetic and the Neo-Platonic writings. It
permeates the Christian mysticism running from St. Paul to Meister Eckhart. Within this tradition, the
individual is understood as the active embodiment of and participant in the patterns of the cosmos
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itself—even of the God who created that cosmos—instead of a unity in contrast to or competition with
the superordinate social order.
When a great mystic like St. Isaac the Syrian declares: “Be zealous to enter the treasury within you; then
you will see that which is in heaven. For the former and the latter are one, and, entering, you will see
both”, 3 he offers more than vague, “spiritual” advice. St. Isaac envisions the individual not as a unity
opposed to or in competition with or even regulated, socialised, or constrained by the larger order, but
as a mirror, reflecting that higher order, and organised in the same manner.
“As above, so below,” as the hermetic Emerald Tablet has it: identity is fractal, self-similar, organised in
many levels, each a reflection of the levels both sub- and super-ordinate. When St. Paul describes the
Church as the Body of Christ, he is similarly stepping into this domain of fractal conceptualisation,
journeying between macrocosm and microcosm in a manner that is no mere literary trope. When we
speak of the head of a city or a company, or of a body of laws, a body politic, or a corporate body we
are, like St. Paul, employing this vision of a fractal identity or reality, attempting in that way to describe
the very nature of our participation in reality.
Fractal Vision of Identity

Although the ancients spoke dualistically, in a sense, of microcosm and macrocosm, their vision is
extended, such that all objects and systems are conceptualised and understood in this manner. All
identities are microcosms participating in larger macrocosms, which are, in themselves, microcosms of
their own higher participations.
This fractal vision of identity is one not only true of people and their higher-order groups, but of all
identities and levels of identity. Everything which can be recognised inevitably consists of subsidiary
parts or, at least, multiple characteristics, united in function and goal. Even ordinary “objects” are
defined as much by their context, which includes their function, as they are by the sum of their parts.
A drinking glass sitting on a table partakes of the meal of which it is a part, the family sitting down for
the meal, the broader concept of hospitality, the more fundamental biological reality that is the human
sharing of food (a truly singular rarity in the natural world), and the fact that such sharing is part of a
much broader, necessary, and fundamental ethos of reciprocity. The glass is most truly therefore
“perceived” in the same manner as the meaning of an essay, chapter, or book: the reader attends,
simultaneously to the letters, the words, the phrases, the sentences, the paragraphs, and the entire
text, as well as to the relationship between all of those levels and all other forms of knowledge
previously integrated and thereby present.
Unity and Multiplicity

This is the case for all perception, which is never of the valueless object. Unity—purposeful essence—
and multiplicity define each other. The parts of wholes are building blocks for what they participate in
at a higher level, while simultaneously possessing a reality, specific to the level of the part, defined in
the same way.
Such nested identity is a cardinal feature of corporate hierarchies, for example. The multiple vice
presidents making up such an organisation are all heads of their various departments, reporting and
representing them to the superordinate head of the entire enterprise, the CEO. Even the word
“corporate,” derived from the Latin corpus or corpor (body), directly reflects that fractal
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conceptualisation: the corporation is a collective body, and is even treated as such by the laws that
governs the relationship between individuals, corporations, and the higher-order social structures such
as governments within which even the corporations are in principle contained. The inner order of the
individual is reflected and mirrored in the surrounding social structures.
Cascade of Fractal Relationships

Such a cascade of fractal relationships is a constant constituent element of our experience. We are all
bound into friendships, families, clubs, churches, sports teams, projects, and companies while we
participate, simultaneously, in cities, states, and countries. We encounter united multiplicities at every
recognisable level of being, all constituting their own united multiplicities.
Unity or identity is not something that happens accidentally within this dynamism of relationship
between parts and wholes. It is not a bureaucratic affair, mandated arbitrarily as power from the top
down, by fiat, by simple declaration of rules and laws. Nor does it come about by establishing arbitrary
borders, or by the mere fact of shared space. Two people in the same territory can be seeing to their
private and independent affairs and ignoring each other—even fighting an all-out war against each
other. The joint habitation of a given space is not sufficient to confer identity.
Unity comes from sharing a common point of attention, establishing common purpose or goals, sharing
a common origin, or embodying a common story. These are vectors of identity. To participate in unity
is to sacrifice some aspect of multiplicity to its purpose. It is an exchange of direct, deliberate will and
attention between the individual and any collective.
Marking the Collective Identity

Any collective identity must be marked, as well, so that we become capable of attending to its directives
and embodying its call to action. This marking is the point of the collective, the direction to which
attention is devoted, the destination of the journey, the purpose of effort, the target to which sacrifice
is offered, and the moral of the story.
That higher-order purpose—all the superordinate levels of a fractal hierarchy—also serves as judge of
the lower levels, as the suitability of those levels is adjudicated in reference to that subsuming goal.
Even in our personal experience, it is always necessary, for example, to discriminate a thought or action
that allies with and serves the current purpose toward which attention and action is devoted from a
temptation or distraction that misleads, diverts, or corrupts.
If I try to organise my stamp collection while I am painting my house, I will do neither properly. A child
who wants to play tag is not playing chess. A person playing football will cause chaos if dropped into a
basketball game. For similar reasons, a violent criminal must be incarcerated to exclude and marginalise
him so that his narrow selfishness ceases to disrupt the broader social harmony of aim, purpose, and
function.
Unity as a Common Good

We should understand this unifying point of attention—the identity uniting the multiplicity—as a
common good toward which the multiplicity is directed, transforming it into a unity. This Good is not a
matter of simply abiding by or conforming to bordering and restricting rules (morality as obedience). It
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is instead something more akin to desirable and, optimally, voluntary purpose. This Good, this telos, is
both a vector of commonality and the arbiter of each participant’s inclusion in that commonality.
Thus, the identity of basketball, with its rules, its specific manner of marking a team’s progress,
performance, and victory, is the reason why a team is a basketball rather than a football team.
Simultaneously—and this pertains to the inevitability alignment and accompaniment of judgement with
purpose—the same identity will necessarily exclude or marginalise behaviours and people out of line
with that game. This will mean that intrinsically less skilled or simply careless or uncommitted players,
whose performance in relation to the uniting goal is sub-optimal, will not be allowed to occupy the
centre. The same will be true of those whose attention and actions are simply and even necessarily
directed elsewhere—toward another game, or entirely chaotically, as it may be. The uniting identity
will also necessarily engage its participants in various forms of implicit or explicit ritual: it will share
images, and stories, and history, and a name.
The ritual, from the point of the view of the participant, will be the volunteering, agreeing, committing,
promising, the swearing of allegiance, the signing of a contract. It can also manifest itself as something
initiated by the group: the ritual is then to choose, select, hire, mark, initiate, draft, or name. This is as
true for the creation of a team as for a marriage or a business deal. It is also true for birth into a family,
a country, or a religious tradition.
Hierarchies and Tracks of Identity

When the process of fractal identities plays itself out, individuals fit into families, and networks of
friendships, extant within teams, communities, churches, cultural groups, cities, states, and nations.
Some of these identities are state-like and form strict hierarchies (boroughs, for example, existing
within cities). Some of them run on parallel tracks, such as sports teams, whether local or national,
alongside companies, small and large. These different hierarchies and tracks of identity exist within
even larger moral and religious hierarchies of joint attention and communion, which aim at the very
highest of human goals.
It is of course possible for subordinate identities to compete with the superior, subsuming structures.
If a would-be team member is too undisciplined to participate properly, his false priorities can make it
difficult for the team to function. If a team captain is too tyrannical in his demands, likewise, then those
who play for him might see that their membership interferes with their roles as friends, husbands,
fathers or even moral agents.
Under optimal circumstances, however—with participation voluntary at each level, and the niceties of
competition and cooperation properly managed—all the levels at which a given person might maintain
and pursue his or her identity can find a desirable balance, minimising anxiety, and maximising hope
and its attendant forward-striving motivation.
The Harmony of All Levels of Identity

We moderns tend to believe that such optimality of function is a consequence of freedom from
constraint—some individualistic self-actualisation, some “mental health”—conceptualised in an
intrinsic liberal manner. But it is much more truly and completely the harmony of all the levels of
identity functioning jointly, in mutual support; something much more akin to the music that emerges
when all the various levels of an orchestra play together, merging all of their disparate identities
towards the uniting commonality of the musical score.
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It should be noted, as well, that this way of describing identity is not “the fact of the matter,” either—
it is not the same as the physicalist’s cold description of the world, in a flat objective reality, or the
clambering over it, like an insect making its way through gravel. It is a set of scaled relationships,
culminating in a superordinate covenant. Life is a deal, all the way to the uppermost heights of Jacob’s
Ladder; a set of sacrifices, to put it another way, a sequence of if/then propositions, negotiated
between the different aspects of the present self, as well as the future self, other people (at all the
levels of society), common identities, and the spirit that both governs and permeates the whole.
The “Heavenly Hierarchy” of Goods

Identities and the goods they embody scale down toward oblivion, but upwards, as well, toward higher
and higher and more comprehensively optimised modes of being—the pinnacles of attentional
hierarchies and priorities of action. It is observation of this “great chain of being,” as it has been called,
that has driven philosophers, theologians, and mystics to recognise the commonality and unity of the
good itself, and to posit God as the very Summum Bonum, the pinnacle or unity of all goods, the
Greatest Good and, simultaneously, the ground of being and source of becoming.
It is through such a “heavenly hierarchy” of goods and virtues that Dante ascended in The Divine
Comedy, rising upward to discover the infinite source of all goods. The Christian Trinity can be
formulated in fractal terms, as well: one God, both Eternally One and Eternally Three; the infinite source
of the One and the Many. Fractal identity scales from bottom to top; the eternal tree of life, with its
roots sunk into the deepest and most invisible microcosmic places and branches extending up into the
cosmic heights above. The source of the great tree is by definition God—the source of all patterns, of
all attentional prioritisation and of directed action, the standard against which all subsidiary forms of
identity are (necessarily) to be judged.
Identities at Every Level Have a Centre and a Margin

All identities have strangers, occupying the margins. Ambiguous spaces exist on the borders of all
groups, so that which does not quite fit can still exist and have its place and even its function. A stranger
walks into town in a Spaghetti Western: Who is he? What is he doing here? How does he fit into our
current story? What identity will he adopt, or be attributed? The stranger is the exception, the
unknown, the unusual, even the monstrous.
A properly functioning category comprises an ideal and a surrounding penumbra of increasing

deviation. Everything can then find its place, without destroying the category, the ideal—or the
exception. It is said that the exception proves—meaning tests—the rule. The world is overflowing with
multiplicity and variation; filled with incalculably numerous levels of cascading identities, weaving
themselves into the tapestry of experience. Within that woven structure, invisibly maintaining its
purpose, identity, and predictability, it is the exception that often announces proof of a heretofore
undiscovered pattern.
When what does not fit jumps to our attention, we notice the predictability, previously taken for
granted, against which that exception now stands. Noticing that which does not fit can reveal to us the
manner in which we had been previously participating in a coherent pattern. It could also show us that
this pattern is not absolute or perfect, but something appropriate and well-placed in its context, without
but striving toward the perfection we expect of the uppermost, God or the Infinite.
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In simpler terms, made popular by the logician, mathematician, and philosopher, Kurt Friedrich Gödel,
things cannot be coherent and complete at the same time. Coherence and pattern must always build
hierarchies of participations and leave remainders and exceptions. Completeness must contain some
examples very uncharacteristic of the ideal, proving or testing the pattern, even undermining the
identity itself, particularly when inappropriately centred.
The Ebb and Flow of Identities

In a world of fractal identities, identities have borders of gradual dilution, mixture, and hybridity, but
the fact of this strangeness—the existence of that which does not fit—is no necessary impediment to
either the existence or the desirability of the category itself or of categorisation as such. The world is
very complex. No single category can hope to contain all, particularly in the absence of hierarchical
conceptualisation. Thus, the border where categories meet is a place of uncertainty and vagueness, a
fringe, a margin, a land of perverse forms.
This looseness is necessary, so that the category itself can survive, and it is no proof of its lack of
applicability, utility, or necessity. The same applies to the ideal at the centre of the category. Even when
that crucial perfection seems impossible to attain, it can and does still serve as a focal point for
attention, singly and jointly, and as a goal for action, even while it remains tantalisingly out of reach.
We all inhabit a world of untruth, to a lesser or greater degree, but that does not mean that we should
dispense with the idea of the truth, or with the requirement that truth be pursued. This is something
realised by the inhabitants of most traditional worlds: recognition of the ideal and establishment of
peace with the margins, accompanied by understanding that the pinnacle is never fully attained or
embodied but is nonetheless inevitable and desirable.
Attempts to Eliminate Margins

Instead of such ebb and flow of identities towards its ambiguity, we saw many attempts to define the
categories more precisely and exactly in the modern era. That happened, for example, with the
appearance of the nation-state, with its fixed borders, as well as in the scientific realm, where the
categories known as proper sets, with carefully delineated rules for inclusion and exclusion, became
the ideal toward which perception and conceptualisation strive. The ancient world had fewer clean
lines of that sort, and their introduction elicited a radicalisation of identity, making itself simultaneously
manifest in many fields.
The notion of a rigid ethne became extremely prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in
concordance with the encyclopaedic thrust of scientific taxonomy. The description and definition of
different human identities, individual and group alike—in the same manner that the breeds of dogs or
the variety of flowering plants might be categorised—brought in its wake a great problem of separation
and purity.
A devastating solution emerged—first, in the form of great population transfers; later in annihilation of
allegedly deviant individuals and peoples, with the same purity held as the aim. The Greeks were
separated from the Turks; the Muslims in India from the Hindus. The Armenians and the Jews were led
down the genocidal path, as nations without countries.
The same type of radical fixing occurred in relation to sexual deviance. Behaviours and identities such
as homosexuality—which would, in the past, have been viewed as perverse and marginal, but also
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inevitable, in the margins—now came to seen as scientifically pathological (a contradiction in terms),

medicalised, and treatable, not least through internment and chemical castration.
We are so accustomed now to living in the reverse swing of the pendulum, in the hypothetically-free-
love world left to us in the 1960s, that we forget how in the first part of the 20th century, alcohol had
been banned in the United States, chemical castration was practiced on men involved in homosexual
behaviour, and racial segregation was enforced as physical separation of two distinct races. The margin
became something to be eliminated, rather than tolerated. Mixture had to be avoided, at nearly all
cost—a consequence of a failure to understand the inevitability of ambiguity in the aftermath of the
imposition of structure.
Centring the Minority

We are now at the opposite end of the pole. We are constantly enjoined, in this postmodern world, to
view exceptions as a form of heroic resistance to pattern; to view the anti-pattern itself as ideal, and
the pattern as nothing more than oppression, in the service of a counter-productive hierarchy of
arbitrary power.
This perverse reversal of conceptualisation itself is accompanied by an all-out assault, at every level of
conceptualisation, on the vectors of identity, by which individuals and groups recognise their unity and
purpose. This is happening through the so-called centring of the minority, the fringe, the strange—the
showcasing of deviant appetites and actions or exceptional hypothetically “creative” personalities, even
those traditionally regarded as criminal.
This inversion is creating (and purposefully so) a havoc whose breadth and depth is difficult to
overestimate, and which makes itself present in the form of a pronounced demoralisation—the
“meaning crisis” that accompanies “the mental health epidemic,” as well as the rise of a profound
distrust in all institutions and a dangerous polarisation of political view. The identities destroyed by this
tactic are always the intermediary patterns—sexual identity, family, nationality, and religious affiliation.
Furthermore, in the demand that the marginal and strange be deemed primary, a growing, implicit
power is at work, capable of and willing to enforce that otherwise unsustainable demand, necessary
both to enforce the dominance of the anti-pattern, and defend the idiosyncratic identities against one
another, as their lack of unity produces its inevitably conflict-laden chaos.
Challenges with the Deconstructionist Approach

The problem with the essentially deconstructionist approach is threefold. First, the marginal, which is
multiplicity, cannot be brought to the centre, as the centre is by definition unitary, as well as
participating in all other levels, subordinate and superordinate. Thus, prioritising the marginal in
opposition to the centre means the destruction of category itself—the very category that not only
defines the centre but protects and allows space for the marginal as well. This destruction undermines
not only cognitive function and emotional regulation, but the shared perceptions that harmony and
peace depend upon most fundamentally.
Second, and consequentially: Marginal identities cannot be made central because the pathways they
constitute are ill-specified, complex, and multi-valent. For example, the variety of sexual proclivities
possible in the human spectrum cannot be made central in relation to, for example, the universal
structure of marriage and family (not least because most of these various sexual proclivities do not
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easily lead to reproduction). In the same way, a kind of flat multi-culturalism cannot be a centre because
it is indefinitely variable—and that is the very opposite of a centre.
Thus, the elevation of the margin to the pinnacle inevitably produces confusion, anxiety, and
hopelessness, as the intrinsic impossibility of an explosively multi-valent identity makes itself known
across time and circumstance. This is evident, for example, in the continual and increasingly surreal
proliferation of the alphabetic representation of the so-called Pride community. Every year, more
letters have to be added, to specify the margin. This is not least because the margin is legion, and the
fringe of the fringe will demand its recognition by the fringe in the same way and for the same reasons
and with the same justification that the fringe itself demanded recognition from the centre.
Thirdly, and finally: because of this multiplicity and pragmatic impracticality, the very existence of the
marginal, once inappropriately universalised, can paradoxically only be guaranteed by the intervention
of an increasingly totalising state. The organic norms and the ideals of the traditionally unified identities
must be held in suspicion, and the support, which should flow to them in their voluntary and self-
sustainable unity, is channelled instead to those whose deviance makes independent existence in the
absence of such state support impossible.
That Which Divides Cannot Unite

In 2023, to the surprise of many, the “Progress Pride” flag was adopted universally by almost all nations,
especially within international organisations such as the United Nations. It was flown simultaneously all
over the Western world during so-called “Pride Month.” This flag and its international use celebrate all
that which is a challenge to the types of normative identity which were enforced and radicalised in the
early modern period. The rainbow flag, a hypothetical symbol of diversity, has already transformed
itself into the very image of a totalising globalism.
By celebrating only the exception, the normative micro-allegiances that bind people together,
psychologically and socially, are being undermined—with only the Global Leviathan remaining as
collective structure. Pride celebrates the absolutely autonomous and purely hedonistically motivated
atomised individual, transformed simultaneously into a cog within the wheels of an increasingly
globalised consumerist financial, industrial, and political system.
We have become obsessively consumed with fragmented self-referential identity, predicated most
fundamentally on individual motivational whim. In 2023—to take a single example—the Prime Minister
of Canada declared that Pride Month (up already in no time from day and week) was now Pride Season,
May through September, almost half the year, followed by an October which is now deemed LGBT
History Month.
Pride has become more than simply a place for homosexuals to celebrate their lifestyles, as it styled
itself in previous decades. It has become the enforced celebration of diversity and multiplicity for its
own sake, accompanied by the impossible demand that this very diversity become the new maypole
around which all the happy children of present and future are now and forevermore to dance.
The more recent Pride flags, furthermore, have expanded to represent not only sexual proclivity and
the relatively novel “gender identity,” but also skin colour. What possible relations might skin colour
have to marginal sexual identities? Nothing but opposition to a perceived centre. It is a sign of the
celebration and centring of difference and marginalisation itself. Such flags are the very image of the
idea of “intersectionality,” a concept that brings together the margins in a unity of perceived
persecution—a union which is and can be nothing more than “not the centre,” and a union which is
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therefore by no means a unity. Such a move multiplies the vectors of diversity ad infinitum, and
unsustainably. This is truly a celebration of the anti-pattern, and an attempt to undermine order and
its requisite sacrificial responsibility, as such.
We Celebrate Our Commonalities

And so, as it is unity that unites, and diversity that divides—by definition—the insistence that
multiplicity must rule will ultimately devour even the order that maintains the marginal.
Usually, we celebrate and elevate that which marks what we pursue jointly; what we value communally;
and what we set our shoulders against together. In celebrating anything—in the pursuit of a family
meal; while we are watching a sporting event; when we participate in a holiday or a religious ritual—
we put our inevitable idiosyncrasies of temperament, habit, and desire aside, so to join together in
common attention. We come together to celebrate the ways we connect with one another, not that
which divides.
We simply cannot be united by what divides us. Whether this commonality be our union as a family,
our accomplishments as an organisation, or our devotion to a cause or goal, it is the nature of attention
and celebration to move towards unity.
Diversity as Unity Necessitates Absolute State Control

Instead of something emerging from the hierarchical structuring of family, communities, and nations,
the celebration of idiosyncrasy and difference itself is a consequence of radically dichotomised identity,
both embodied and conceptualised by a self-identified, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent
inner experience, which is then represented as oppressed by external forces of control. This is the
ultimate and self-devouring endpoint of liberal individualism.
Such an endpoint is inevitably, even though somewhat surprisingly, allied with the endpoint of state
control, for only state-like institutions can defend all our idiosyncrasies from each other. In the final
analysis, of course, the state-imposed defence of all our idiosyncrasies and exceptions is impossible, no
matter how comprehensive the state becomes, particularly as those identities multiply indefinitely, and
the existence of one contradicts the flourishing of another.
We can see this multiplication in the infinite regress of the alphabet identity, as LG transforms first into
LGB, and then adds T, and then explodes into the 2SLGBTQQIA+ absurdity that is currently insisted
upon—a development precisely paralleled by the ever-expanding colours and sections of the Pride Flag.
As we demand state recognition for this ever-expanding panoply of hypothetical identities, we fail to
notice that we are simultaneously granting the exclusive right of the state to do so, cementing in place
the totalising power of the most distant and abstracted possible social order.
The strange and otherwise incomprehensible alliance between the diversity, inclusivity, and equity
enterprise and the so-called environmental movement can be best understood in this manner. At first
glance, the consumerist hedonism of Pride—its aesthetic of overflowing variety, abundance, and
inclusive generosity—appears to exist in direct conflict with the sobriety and top-down centralising
restraint characteristic of environmentalism, with its demands that the earth itself be protected against
its inhabitants, who do nothing but damage it in their requirement for ever-increasing freedom and
standard of living. How can these two ways of thinking co-exist, much less regard each other as obvious
political allies?
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The same might be asked in relation to the recent planet-wide outbreak of medical totalitarianism that
enveloped the earth during the Covid pandemic. How can the “anything goes” of Pride co-habit so
comfortably with mandates isolating people from one another, and ending all possibility of contact,
intimate and otherwise?
The development of total statist control over even the minutiae of our private lives (forbidding
everything from non-elite flights, private automobiles, and natural gas stoves and furnaces on the
macro side, and functional toilets and showers, wood-fired ovens, and plastic bags and drinking straws
at the micro-level) is nothing but the reverse side of the coin of infinite diversity and difference, the
exacerbation of the duality of individual versus the state, which is now reaching its surreal crescendo.
The reason why we were allowed, encouraged, and mandated to identify with, give our attention and
especially our sacrifices to the environment and a pandemic, is precisely because they are global and
all encompassing, portrayed as transcending all intermediary identities, from individuals, to families
and even nations. In that way, the global identity of such crises is the mirror image and dance partner
of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ explosion of idiosyncrasy and exception.
Subsidiarity: A Better Vision of Identity

In his famous encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII re-established the vision long understood as
subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity is twofold. Identity is first conceptualised as hierarchical, in the
fractal manner previously described, with identity manifesting itself at multiple levels, simultaneously,
somewhat like a mountain or an ancient ziggurat. Then, responsibility is deemed properly devolved and
distributed when it is taken up or handed down to the most proximal and local level possible.
In a properly structured subsidiary system, the individual voluntarily adopts responsibility for his or her
conduct and caretaking, but the couple has its domain and duty, as does the family, the neighbourhood,
the corporate enterprise, the city, and the state. The more encompassing levels are restricted in their
domain of purview to those actions and directions of attention that cannot be taken up by lower and
more proximal levels of the hierarchical structure.
This means that decision-making is undertaken by those closest to the consequences of the decisions,
as well as made by those who have access to the most detailed possible local information. Since a
parent understands his or her child better, in the main, than might be possible in the case of even the
most conscientious and caring state administrator, the parent should and must be charged with and
adopt primary responsibility for that child. The same applies, say, to regulation of sexual behaviour, as
it pertains to the couple. Taken to its logical conclusion, it follows that the nation should not legislate
the activity of its citizens’ bedrooms.
Something similar can be said of economic activity: there are simply too many productive concerns for
them to be well regulated by a centralised authority. There is no possible way for that centre to gather
enough accurate information to manage the complex processes and systems of production and
distribution characteristic of modern society on such a large variety of fronts simultaneously.
The principle of subsidiarity is the backbone of Catholic social doctrine. Pope Leo XIII was reacting to
the modern political excesses and revolutionary class-conflicts characteristic of his day, but his
emphasis on subsidiary organisation is not, in the main, political. It is a theory of proper identity and
appropriate participation.
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The Fabric of Identity is a Hierarchy of Levels

Identity is not simply a question of the individual, or his or her rights, or even his or her responsibilities,
in relationship to a bureaucratic state. Identity scales, indefinitely—as thoughts, experiences, and sub-
personalities unify into individuals; then as individuals embed themselves in families; as families are
subsumed, in turn, into communities, cities, states, and moral ideals, rituals, and practices of religious
participation.
The fabric of identity is a hierarchy of levels, each with its own existence, none of which are fully self-
contained, each united in a commonality of goal, aim, direction, attention, and care; all playing
together, optimally, in a great symphony.
This is also a theory of “mental health,” although such health, conceived in the subsidiary model, is not
merely mental—a word that has hidden within it the same Enlightenment problem of individual versus
the state. “Mental health” is the state of harmony that obtains when all the various levels of a subsidiary
hierarchy are operating optimally, in relation to one another, and not merely the proper organisation
of the subordinate cognitive, emotional, and motivational elements within the “psyche” of a given
individual.
The same could be said, with equal accuracy, of the peace that obtains when the social world is properly
and fractally structured. In the absence of this joint vision of voluntary participation, purpose, and
structured cooperation and competition (as in a game), hierarchy can only be conceptualised as top-
down authority and arbitrary, involuntarily imposed compulsion and force: as power, in a word. That is
of course the accusation levelled at authority by the atomised, fragmented, demoralised modern and
postmodern “individual,” possessed unconsciously by the competing spirits of Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau.
Identity’s Uppermost Aim

The direction of our attention and our participation in loftier identities has been classically and
traditionally construed as something culminating in, say, “one nation under God,” reaching its pinnacle
in the transcendent and ultimate good, conceived as an active relationship, a covenant, an active state
of celebration or worship. Each level of identity takes its direction from the level above, with the final
guiding hand attributed to the divine itself, that which points to Eden, or the Promised Land, or the
Heavenly Jerusalem, or to the Eternal Heaven. That Divinity is “the love that moves the sun and the
stars”—that creates, for the purpose of love, with truth.
Such a “hypothesis” (and it is not in truth a proposition akin to a hypothesis, but a definition of the
uppermost level in a hierarchy of value) is a bridge too far for most, but the alternative is an identity
with no final unity, the cascade of fragmentation across time (that is the death of God), emergent
anxiety as a result of the beckoning of multiple forces, weakening of character, both individual and
social, and the hopelessness attendant upon lack of clear direction.
Misdirected Aims and False Idols

And that is not all: when what is uppermost is abandoned, what is properly subsidiary becomes
paramount: so the political, for example, or the economic, or the whim itself, becomes the Highest
Goal, and God devolves, at best, into Caesar—or worse.
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Without the final non-rational, ecstatic and transcendent move into that which cannot be contained,
some lesser aspect of identity will inevitably transform itself into a false idol. Hence the replacement of
theology with its shallow pretender, ideology, and rise of all the hell attendant on such degeneracy.
Differentiated, hierarchical identity, with its distributed responsibilities and rights, provides precisely
the meaning that renders ideology and its falsehoods unattractive, and the adventure sufficiently
compelling to justify the tragedy of life.
The Role of Individuals

The embodied man or woman is of course a level of particular and unique value, within this fractal
structure and conception of identity. They are the locus of focused consciousness, and the experience
of the pain and pleasures—the values—of being. In consequence, there is a still a clear role in a
subsidiary vision for the idea of individual rights and, equally, responsibilities, anchored deeply as they
are in our understanding of the superordinate levels of existence, including the religious. The individual
is the active centre-point of the subsidiary world, the locus of moral choice, the primary source of active
participation in all the other levels of being.
Nonetheless: that centre, for all its import, cannot exist in isolation—nor even desire such an existence,
confused though it may be with a desire for complete freedom. Even the worst of antisocial men
experience forced isolation as a punishment. We are social to the core, even as the most selfish and
power-focused individuals. We all exist through and for others, even though we differ greatly in the
sophistication, breadth, and depth of that social interaction. We find security and joy—meaning itself—
as a consequence of our participation in our higher identities, that Jacob’s Ladder that reaches upward
from our current incarnations to the stars above.
We can and should act as the moral guides, arbiters, judges, and promoters of the groups within which
we find our places, but we take direction downward, as well, falling into alignment with the needs and
wishes of our husbands and wives, our children, our friends, and our fellow citizens. Individuals,
families, and communities are building blocks of the more comprehensive state, but also bulwarks
against its too-insistent presence.
As individuals, we can shield those for whom we are responsible from the too-bright and hot light
shining from above, protecting our team members from the ire of their superiors, socialising our
children into respectable compliance with the body of laws so they do not fall afoul of its not-so-tender
mercies, standing by our wives, husbands, and friends against the incursion of the arbitrary corporation
or state. The best defence against power is the distribution of power—and when power is distributed
in the proper subsidiary manner, it is ordered freedom and just authority, and not “power” at all. There
is no difference, in the final analysis, between that distribution, responsibility, and sustaining meaning
itself.
Responsible Citizenship Serves the Higher Good

It is by playing our part as the best person, parent, player, or parish member—the best citizen of our
particular nation—that we serve the higher goods, even the Good itself. To the degree that our identity
descends from the top down, the group offers order, meaning, and purpose. Equally, however, it is in
serving, submitting, and sacrificing to and for that higher good that our acts of local participation
become, themselves, most meaningful and effective, both psychologically and socially.
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All the players on a given team strive to be the star, in the various ways stars might shine, but they are
still a team, and their striving for stardom is both constrained and made possible by that team
membership. All the teams in a league strive for the topmost place, as well, but they are themselves
competing within an overarching framework of higher-order cooperation. Even the league itself, when
optimally functional, operates according to the dictates of sportsmanship itself, the principle of
voluntary association, direction of attention, and action.
That is in turn an ethos nested in something at least near-religious—the spirit of reciprocity itself, the
ethos of treating the other as another self. It is the union of local affiliations in a higher unity that makes
them able to co-exist with others in the absence of factional conflict, and that makes us in all our
diversity able to work together, practically and toward existence “on a higher plane”. This is also a state
of being that can only be brought about in the subsidiary manner: any utopian vision imposed by force
immediately transforms into a dystopian nightmare.
If, by contrast, the requisite responsibility is adopted at each level of subsidiary identity, the Good
makes itself reliably manifest—and it is within the power of each individual to be an incrementally
better person, in a better relationship, in a stronger family, in a more robust community. It is in the
mutual accomplishment of such attainable and properly humble goals that true social order and
freedom is established, maintained, and even improved, and that the sustaining adventure of life is to
be found.
Compassion Enables Subsidiary Identity

Within the confines of a properly subsidiary identity—a voluntary, hierarchical psyche and society—the
excesses of too much top-down order or too much bottom-up variability must be carefully considered
and avoided. To participate properly, given our own shortcomings, much as those of others, the fact
that we all fall short of the glory of God—so to speak—must be kept firmly in mind.
This remains true even as we understand that upward direction of attention and action and the
judgement that is part and parcel of such activity is both requisite and necessary. Each of us is, after all,
permeated by what is marginal: our psyches are troubled, confused, and tempted; our marriages
fractious and imperfect; our friendships often strained; our businesses outdated and blind. We do not
fit the ideal pattern. This imperfection is inevitable, given our finite nature and the extreme demand
posed by a subsidiary identity stretching upward into the infinite.
This means that compassion is the necessary handmaiden of justice. We must leave room, forgive,
tolerate, and reach out to those which are marginal, broken, and forgotten by our identities. But this
does not mean that justice can or should be completely sacrificed on the altar of compassion. We must
judge not, lest we be judged; however, we all desire and need some judgement, to keep us on the strait
and narrow path, to orient us skyward, to give reliable and admirable purpose to our lives. We cannot
shirk the responsibility of judgement for ourselves or others (particularly by pretending that such
avoidance is merely the consequence of an admirable pity), but need to remember that we will be
assessed using the same measures we apply and that all of us fall short of the mark in one way or
another.
Immediacy Strengthens Allegiance

It is important, as well, to consider immediacy, in relation to allegiance. The closer the subsidiary level,
the more its demands should be felt as meaningful, morally requisite, and real. My wife, my children,
my family, my friends, my town, and so on, are most properly my concern, in contrast to those of others,
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not because of a difference in intrinsic value or “right,” but because my attention and resources are
limited and must be focused to be applied both appropriately and usefully. I pay for the privilege of that
unique immediacy with responsibility, and that applied responsibility, distributed across all players,
keeps the whole complex game going; makes for optimal play, in the system, as well as efficiency and
resilience.
A subsidiary hierarchical system is able to respond quickly and effectively to disruption, not least as a
consequence of the plethora of local decision-makers, each with their own domain of true authority
and ability. This is a much more realistic and compelling vision of attention than some false global
awareness. The proper way to worship God, at least initially, is to treat yourself, and your wife, husband,
friend, or child properly. This is not a reduction of the higher to the lower, but the manner in which the
higher most truly manifests itself in the lower.
Our Conscience Calls Us Higher

The fractal or subsidiary understanding of identity is predicated on the realisation that a person,
although the locus of consciousness, is nonetheless a multiplicity of thoughts and desires, which
themselves have to be gathered into unitary will and coherent narrative memory. I can say of one
thought in my own mind, “this is me, a valid partial image of my will and purpose,” but of another, in
some mysterious fashion, “this is, instead, a temptation, a desire I must reign in, a goal that is not
worthy of me—a deviation from a proper (and subsidiary) higher purpose.” The temptation is then the
straying or diversity of the local from the higher and more general.
Our conscience then, is the voice of the higher calling out the lower, separating wheat from chaff, calling
for the proper sacrifice. This conflict of internal push and pull is not merely the inappropriate
subordination of the would-be autonomous individual to the arbitrary dictates of the powers that be,
but the indication of a problem of play between levels that must still be worked out—and, therefore a
challenge, with the promise of a higher unity or harmony the reward.
The protagonist of James Joyce’s modernist novel, for example—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—
regards all higher-order fractal levels of identities as prisons to escape, or traps to avoid, or deviations
from his self-actualisation. He therefore attempts to free himself from family, nation, and religion.
Although it is true that there is little good in arbitrary or slavish subjugation to such higher-order
structures, those structures and participations, if accepted voluntarily, become the very arenas in which
the individual finds genuine meaning—the meaning that is both stabilising and sustaining,
psychologically and communally. Without those higher participations, the “freedom” sought by the
“artist” is nothing but a desert wasteland. It is within the relationship of care we establish with others
that our individual identity is instead most truly discovered, strengthened, and refined.
Love Actualises Our True Potential

It is in how I love and exist in truth with others that I can become myself in the truest manner and see
myself in the truest mirror. It is in how I enter into a dance with those around me that I become
something valuable and shine, even in my own eyes. This responsible higher-order work is one that no
authoritarian structure should or even can truly relieve us of—more accurately, steal from us.
The popular image of the free individual—he or she who “has the right” to do whatever strikes at the
moment, as long as that does not interfere with others’ right to do the same—is an insufficient vision
of what is most truly human, denying as it does the intrinsic desire and need to do right by others,
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implying as it does that social order is nothing but limitation. No society can hold together as a mere
consequence of abiding by that essentially liberal vision.
We need places where our individual identities can join with those of others in a unity of purpose, and
celebration of commonality. In the absence of such community, we will continue fracturing into
atomised selves, divorced from higher-order purpose—and the lack thereby produced will tempt us
toward a compensatory totalitarian identity.
Intermediary Identity and the Family

We have our individuality, more or less at hand, and we can start the understanding and development
of our identity there: “Know Thyself”, as the Apollonian maxim had it. Most of us are also born into
families, at least of mother and child—and still, most commonly, more than that. That intermediary
level is closest and intrinsically most valuable to us. It is within the confines of and opportunities
provided by the family that we learn to respect valid authority, step incrementally toward personal
responsibility, and learn to play well with others.
The world contains various types of intermediary identity, but the traditions in line with the Abrahamic
faith have explicitly recognised the model of father, mother, and child as the most proximal microcosm
of identity, and this is, as well, true of the other major civilisations of the world, Asian, European, and
African alike. We use that immediate level, closest to our heart, as a model for even the highest of
identities, considering ourselves in popular and extensively distributed metaphor as the children of
God, the Eternal Father.
Because we are born, necessarily, of fathers and mothers—because we require them to come together
in love to properly care for what their union produces—this image of nuclear family plays a central role
in our imagination and our longings, peopling our fantasies, our dreams, our novels, movies, fairy tales,
and myths.
Variations abound, and necessarily so, as people fall short of the ideal, or experiment with alternative
arrangements, but the central standard by which all those variations are judged and the target at which
they aim remain, at minimum, the nuclear family. Perhaps that arrangement can and even should be
elaborated into the extended family, but such an extension is impossible without the nuclear core
around which such extensions are grounded.
Exceptions to the Centre

What then of the exceptions—the reconstituted or partial relationships, the single parents, the
divorcees, the widowed; the families of the margin? These exceptions make themselves known
inevitably, as a consequence of our constant and universal deviation from the still-necessary ideal. Even
within the secure and abundant confines of well-constituted families, conflict abounds; we all fail as
ideal children and perhaps even more profoundly as perfect fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters.
Sacrifice of the ideal itself is no solution to the problem of deviation: all that produces is a universality
of failure. We must steel ourselves to maintain the tension that existence of the ideal produces, in all
its judgemental perfection, while extending a necessary compassion to the margins which we often
occupy as much as those we might like to exclude. This is the very balance of the judgement and mercy
that classically comprise the right and left hands of God Himself.
20
We must also remain wary, in the extreme, of any and all attempts by the state to circumvent or replace
the family, promising an irresponsible and false freedom as compensation. In giving up the
responsibilities of the family to the state, we appeal to the worst of the whim-ridden, immature, and
impulsive liberal sojourner, depriving him or her of the true adventure of life, by removing the
existential burden that most truly constitutes meaning.
Responsible individuals, nested inside responsible couples and families: that arrangement constitutes
the minimum requirement for a truly functional higher-order polity or state, as well as the most
effective defence against the over-reach of those who would be king.
Attention and Memory Create Unity of Being

The first step in community, or even the unity of our own being, is attention. Our attention can be
attracted by the whims within, by the subpersonalities, drives, emotions, and fragmented thoughts and
motivations that vie for supremacy in the psychological world.
Our own personal attention becomes organised in a more comprehensive and universally viable,
rewarding, and stabilising sense when it is related to others; when it is given or offered up to our
connection with our family, friends, and fellow citizens; when it is sacrificed to the social hierarchies we
participate in.
In time, memory represents that organisation of attention, both personal and historical, structured
most fundamentally in the form of narrative—in the stories we weave about our own lives, bringing to
them simplicity and coherence, structuring our understanding of the past, so that it can serve as an
accurate and comprehensive guide to the future.
This is as true for the individual, as it is for the stories we share collectively, detailing the adventures
and misadventures befalling the heroes and monsters that strode the earth in the time of our ancestors.
It is the story, and its behavioural precursor and accompaniment, the ritual, that unites us in self-
understanding, personal and mutual, as well as provides aim, emotion, and motivation.
Celebrating our Common Stories

In the most profound sense, the remembering of our common stories, the participation in our common
rituals will be a form of celebration, whether it is commemorations, birthdays, and anniversaries, or
whether it is the holidays which qualify our time, or the honour we bestow on our heroes, leaders, and
celebrities. If you want to know the shape of a world, examine what those who inhabit it are allowed
or encouraged to celebrate. Such celebration is the shared attention and proclivity for action that
unites, up a fractal hierarchy which leads up all the things we rejoice in, up to transcendent worship of
God Himself.
We join together in massive arenas to participate in the structured fractal harmony of a musical
performance. We rise to our feet in the same venues when watching a spectacularly skilled athlete, the
star of “our” team, reach beyond even his or her own abilities when aiming at the eternal goal and
hitting it in a way that makes us remember, at least for a moment, what it is for a disciplined and focused
human being to strive upward, and to do so with success.
Our religious holidays commend the founding of our states, the births of our redeemers, the death and
resurrection of the spirits that most properly move us. Our holidays mark, commemorate, celebrate,
21
and constitute our collective, voluntary games, and the joint actions we all undertake during those
reminders of the sacred world signify and reinforce our psychological integrity and mutual belonging.
False holidays, arbitrarily established—forced celebrations, imposed by propagandists and

ideologues—are the intrusion of the Tower of Babel into private and public space alike, part of the
attempt of the fractionated, hedonistic, atomised individual to declare his or her counterproductive
freedom and independence; part of the forceful imposition of the universalising, totalitarian statist
vision on the peasants, the serfs, and the slaves.
Although it has been difficult in our recent history to guiltlessly remember and celebrate our ancient
heroes because of their failures and sins, real and imagined, the traditional scriptural law (a veritable
commandment) provides us with the obligation and the opportunity to honour our mothers and
fathers. We are asked to do so, despite their sins; to practice gratitude for what the past has
bequeathed to us, despite its inadequacies; to reject the temptation to consider ourselves morally
improved, merely because we have gained by our forebears’ sacrifices.
Gratitude for Our Heritage

And, if we refuse that requirement? It is Noah’s son Ham who sees his father, sprawled out before him,
nakedness fully exposed, in the aftermath of too much wine—who then laughs, in derision, before
calling his brothers, to join in the fun. On their arrival, the more virtuous brothers carefully cover their
father, instead, averting their eyes in respect. It is by tradition Ham and his descendants who are in
consequence destined to be servants of those humbly respectful brothers; doomed to be slaves
forevermore.
Those who reject gratitude for the past in favour of a resentful judgement; those who arrogantly deem
themselves morally superior to their parents, merely in consequence of the fortunate time and place
of their birth—it is those who will develop the slave-like habits of the people lost in the desert, and who
will render themselves defenceless in the face of the blandishments of the tyrants. The destruction and
replacement of the past—that ever-present revolutionary ideal—destroys the memory of the
commonality of error and sin we share with our fathers and delivers those foolish enough to risk it into
the jaws of the authoritarian dragon. For such reasons it is necessary to recover, preserve, embody,
and understand our collective past.
Standing on the Shoulders of the Giants of the Past

If we in the present have managed at least the appearance of moral advance—a dubious proposition,
at best—it is in no small part because the peace and the luxuries we enjoy, and which exist because of
the social structures and technologies the past produced, shield us in our infantile comfort from the
worst of the impulses within us. What then should we make of the indisputable sins of the past, the
patriarchal oppression, the war, even the genocide?
Perhaps we should strive to practice gratitude for our heritage, in the same manner we strive to be
grateful to the natural world and the gift of life itself, despite its tragedies. Perhaps we should as well
look to ourselves, first and foremost, to ensure that we conduct ourselves so that the recurrence of
such things is less possible. Perhaps we should note, finally, that the same wise traditions insisting upon
respect for the past also detail the shortcomings of its inhabitants in the most forthright and brutal
manner possible. This is particularly true of the Biblical scriptures, which portray even the Israelites who
22
hypothetically author the text as falling far short of fulfilling the most basic moral obligations, let alone
embodying the glory of YHWH.
We cannot have respect for ourselves, security, or hope for the future while denigrating the past,
because those who dwelled in the past are no different in essence from those who live now and who
will live later. That does not mean we have no responsibility to redress the sins of those who came
before us: deviations once made and then followed require course correction, but that atonement and
repair should be in a spirit of humility, rather than pride.
A Higher, Better, Upward Aim Makes Progress Possible

Our identity is fractal, hierarchical, subsidiary. Proper responsible participation in all its levels provides
life with purpose, meaning, security, hope, and adventure. It is the very act of proper direction of
attention and action that makes progress itself possible—progress, as further harmonious integration,
further upward aim, and movement. That identity is accountability, at every level. It is sacrificial, in its
essence. Everything less is properly and rightly offered to what is higher.
That mature offering establishes the very definition of higher, better, upward, motivating the delays of
gratification and the integrations of otherwise impulsive desire that make a more comprehensive,
mature, and integrated personal and collective life possible.
It is a relationship, too, rather than a set of facts, or even compliance or guidance by a set of facts: the
relationship of man with woman, couple with children, family with community, town or city with
country; the entire ziggurat under God, the Summum Bonum, the essence of good, the spirit that
inhabits the entire pyramid, when that spirit is welcomed with open arms, humbly and gratefully.
It is the harmony of the spheres, the meaning of music, the joy in collective celebration, the standing
ovation of the crowd, and the eternal liana connecting the denizens of earth with the angels of Heaven.
It is the father who can be rescued from the belly of the beast, the treasure guarded by the eternal
dragon, the king who resides within, the voice of conscience itself, the subordination of the apprentice,
the point of the masterpiece, the ordered freedom of proper worship in the desert that would then no
longer be a desert, but a blooming place of abundance. Its instantiation requires wisdom, the
willingness to shoulder the burdens of life, abide by the truth, and aim, upward, at the best, standing
on the shoulders of the giants of the past.
Subsidiary Identity and the Adventure of Life

Subsidiary identity is true identity. Adoption of the responsibility that constitutes the price of
membership is the adventure of life. It is the medication for existential angst, the source of the hope
that abides. It is the shining star, beckoning in the distance, the true sustainability, the well-tended
garden, the eternal banquet, and the heavenly city. It is the only true alternative to lonely wandering in
the desert and slave-like subjection to the king and tyrant. It is the ultimate sacrificial gesture, the
offering of what is personally unworthy to the harmony of the whole. It is the embodiment of the
eternal Logos, who speaks the truth, in the service of love; who takes the weight of the world onto his
shoulders and finds in that awful weight the redeeming meaning of life.
23
1
Here again, Covid acted as an accelerator where those objecting, even in speech, to Covid measures
were sanctioned by governments. The freezing of bank accounts and arrest of political activists in
Canada were a glimmer of the growing state authoritarianism.
2
Guy Lawson, “Trudeau’s Canada, Again,” The New York Times Magazine, December 8, 2015,
htps://www.ny�mes.com/2015/12/13/magazine/trudeaus-canada-again.html.
3
Isaac the Syrian (c. 630-c. 700), Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh: Translated from Bedjan’s Syriac
Text with an Introduction and Registers, trans. A. J. Wensinck (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2011), p.8.
24
This research has been produced and published by ARC
Research, a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee
registered at Companies House with number 14739317,
which exists to advance educa�on and promote
research.
ISBN: 978-1-916948-27-3
www.arc-research.org
October 2023
25

The Beast & The Whore of Babylon

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Identity:

Individual and the State versus the

Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson

The Question of Identity

A Dichotomous Scheme – Individual vs the State

Variations on the Dichotomous Scheme

The Struggle between Opposing Forces

Revelation and Trajectories of Civilisation

The Beast and the Whore of Babylon

The State of Absolute Control

The New Jerusalem

Rampant Individualism Drives Collectivist Totalitarianism

Technology Accelerates the Atomisation of Individuals

The Absolute State Subsumes Individual Identity

Identity Can and Should Be Fractally Interpreted

Fractal Vision of Identity

Unity and Multiplicity

Cascade of Fractal Relationships

Marking the Collective Identity

Unity as a Common Good

Hierarchies and Tracks of Identity

The Harmony of All Levels of Identity

The “Heavenly Hierarchy” of Goods

Identities at Every Level Have a Centre and a Margin

A properly functioning category comprises an ideal and a surrounding penumbra of increasing

The Ebb and Flow of Identities

Attempts to Eliminate Margins

inevitable, in the margins—now came to seen as scientifically pathological (a contradiction in terms),

Centring the Minority

Challenges with the Deconstructionist Approach

That Which Divides Cannot Unite

We Celebrate Our Commonalities

Diversity as Unity Necessitates Absolute State Control

Subsidiarity: A Better Vision of Identity

The Fabric of Identity is a Hierarchy of Levels

Identity’s Uppermost Aim

Misdirected Aims and False Idols

The Role of Individuals

Responsible Citizenship Serves the Higher Good

Compassion Enables Subsidiary Identity

Immediacy Strengthens Allegiance

Our Conscience Calls Us Higher

Love Actualises Our True Potential

Intermediary Identity and the Family

Exceptions to the Centre

Attention and Memory Create Unity of Being

Celebrating our Common Stories

False holidays, arbitrarily established—forced celebrations, imposed by propagandists and

Gratitude for Our Heritage

Standing on the Shoulders of the Giants of the Past

A Higher, Better, Upward Aim Makes Progress Possible

Subsidiary Identity and the Adventure of Life

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