The Theory of Hermeneutic Perpetualism
https://shadowofleaves.substack.com/p/the-theory-of-hermeneutic-perpetualism
Before we can try to understand the phrase itself, we have to consider its nesting conceptualizations, namely, the question of hegemony. The term hegemony is used in order to explain a particular system of control by which the nature of the power is recycled and continued such that it gains internally motivated staying power, and that certainly can apply to very specific domains, but I would generally like to speak in terms of the idea of a ‘generalized’ hegemony.
‘The’ hegemony is a generalized system which parasitizes our individualized existences and transforms them into collective beliefs and actions, particularly as it applies to solidifying the axioms which surround the division of labor and the resultant status hierarchy which forms the basis of human society. The half of society that benefits from this arrangement have no need to rationalize the need to maintain it, and as you move up the hierarchy, this pressure just increases so that those who have the most to lose are those who defend it the most vociferously. These people have only to convince a significant portion of the remainder in order for the hegemonic pressure to be sufficient to perpetuate itself, and so, coincidentally enough, all systems of social control are designed to create this pressure and then to justify itself tautologically.
A giant factor of this dissonance between those who support the system and those who are excluded in some way, is that it doesn’t need to be an overwhelming proportion in the majority to still become effective. The ‘hermeneuticism’ is that which creates an air-tight system when it gets to its ‘terminal velocity’. The system gets to a certain staying power within the fabric of society that the cost to challenge it is greater than the cost to maintain it, and thus it becomes recursively reinforced; the ‘outward’ pressure begins to equalize with the ‘inward’ pressure of maintaining. The ‘inward’ pressure is the pressure of the system as it creates friction on the people who are tasked to maintain it, and without the self-justifying narrative, historically the structure will collapse in revolution and then a new structure becomes created. These collapses are costly and the system seeks the holding pattern which creates the pattern of generational power and the pooling of resources in the ecology/economy, such that outward cost of maintenance is minimized and the power structure becomes self-justified. The ‘outward’ pressure is the rationalizations which get perpetuated, which contradict these revolutionary tendencies. The ‘American dream’ being the most effective such narrative ever conceived, which effectively allows the illusion of upward social mobility in order to quell the nascent revolutionary tendency; this was the greatest genius of the founding fathers in that they allow for the conditions to create revolution in order to circumvent it by giving it as an option.
Capitalist hegemony is a key feature of the system, not a bug; the system of enclosures creates the hermeneutic nature necessary to force all ends into fungible tokens, and the collection of these tokens is self-rationalizing because the value is in their quantitative possession. This demands the question of whether other types of hegemony are present, relevant, or have even existed, but given that those things which are outside the domain of money that are of great consequence, such as matters of sex and politics, yet still become hegemonic (particularly the heteronormative hegemony), we can see that cedes the premise of our inquiry. However, the capitalist mechanism becomes greater and it seeks to monetize increasingly diffuse objects (as from gross examples such as in early capitalist systems to the derivatives of modernity) as the relative frontier of conflict becomes asymptotically minute. The capitalist hegemony starts to account for increasingly esoteric aspects of human nature as people come to rationalize everything in terms of dollars and market share, and subsequently people’s moral sentiments become locked into this mentality such that it becomes their own lucidly self-professed attitude.
This is where we finally get to the entire phrase and its semantic consequences; ‘hermeneutic perpetualism’, the perpetuation of the continuation of the outward pressure of a system of control through the reification of the system. This is most thoroughly borne out and utterly anachronistic when it manifests in people who are the victims of these processes yet feel the need to defend them in some show of obsequious self-sacrifice in order to gain some cryptic karmic favor. As long as these become touchstones of common morality, then it will effectively become entrenched deeply in the axioms of human interaction. It isn’t a function of it being instilled so that it perpetuates the system, it is that the system becomes so ubiquitous that the dictates of its limitations become the rules of engagement within the system. This is most evident through the capitalist model, in which people become fully bamboozled by the thought that some genuine efforts will end to greater positions within the status hierarchy, such that it is a system that seems on the surface to be meritocratic.
The illusion of a meritocracy is a founding ethic of our hegemony, because it is that sense that gives the dual sided feeling that: anything is possible with the correct application of effort, and that your position is rationalized by your ‘capabilities’ (or lack thereof). If you are a person who succeeded, than your lack of effort just increases the optics of your power in relation to its benefits, so it actually becomes an integral part of a person’s reputation for power and, predictably, most people in power come to fetishize a relative lack of effort and the relative outsized seeming value of a person’s increasingly fractionalized time. If you are a person who is a failure, the idea that you can’t achieve a given outcome is always compared to the possibility of being able to execute your discipline in a greater way, which each person necessarily falls short of. It then becomes a guilty conscience situation, where that person, despite possibly ‘trying’ harder than people who have ostensibly greater status and remuneration, think of the amount that they could possibly increase their efforts, and we completely underplay the structural reality on both sides; it high-stakes fiduciary gas-lighting. This is inline with the fundamental attribution error, but actually cuts against the usual interpretation that these limitations are strictly self-effacing, but that this proves that it can be used in situations where it might be better to do the opposite and accept the structural limitations of certain situations.
This may be the basis of the attribution error, and perhaps why it is culturally relative and flip-flops in more interdependent cultures rather than individualistic cultures, because it is established in the underlying logic of the western ethos. The exemplification of the individuation of the western ethic in modernity means, in the application of the fundamental attribution error. My function definition for that phrase here is that for successful actions of an ingroup member, those actions will be attributed to intrinsic capabilities of the person, and conversely for failures, those actions will be distanced from others while other ingroup members will focus on the structural elements which had a greater power over the outcome than a person’s intrinsic capabilities, thus relieving them of culpability. However, this isn’t broached in the attribution of the negative status of failing to succeed in capitalist systems; the logic, overwhelmingly, is that the structural elements have to be completely discounted and so the full onus falls on the intrinsic capabilities of the person, and thus is the underlying logic of a system which is meritocratic.
Why does it seem to be the case that when applied to the proletariat, it challenges the logic of a statistically significant element of human cognition? Could it be that in doing so, and creating the unimpeachable aspect of this as an element of the western ethos necessary for perpetuation of our capitalistic hegemony, for which we owe all the mind breaking pleasures and reality shredding horrors of modernity, will create the upward momentum required to innovate at the cost of the dehumanization of a certain proportion of the population. Is it possible that in keeping this axiom of capitalist culture constant, as our Archimedean anchor, that we have reversed the attribution error, and thus view the poor people who reveal our innate cultural contradiction and we therefore put immense leverage against portraying those people as the ‘outgroup’ to thus balance the ledger? My position would be that, naturally, this would be the case.