gbejm | Sobornost, Tamanous, and Ipsissimus (Reply)

Ipsissimus -- an esoteric term for being most completely oneself -- is a concept that has been stuck in my mind lately. It led me somewhere interesting on a personal level, and later I realized it might also help make sense of a particular prediction about the future. To unpack it, though, we need an extremely abbreviated summary of Oswald Spengler's work and of the specific prediction in question.

Spengler's view of history sees great cultures rise and fall in cycles. Great cultures also retain an echo (a pseudomorphosis, in Spengler's jargon) of prior great cultures they have interacted with. John Michael Greer has speculated that two of the next ones will arise in western Russia and then later in the interior of the United States. Whereas Magian culture looked toward a central prophetic figure (e.g., Jesus, Muhammad) and the current Faustian culture looks toward infinity, the Russian culture would look toward a collective identity, a tendency Greer linked to the Russian term sobornost. Communism, then, tapped into that underlying tendency, but rendered it into a form that did not endure. The later American culture would focus on following personal paths, which Greer terms tamanous, borrowed from a native language of the northwest. That tamanous-oriented culture, though, could still retain echoes of the sobornost-oriented culture that preceeded it. Thus, the twist here is that folks are following individual paths, but doing so together. Greer describes witnessing a ceremony where participants dance individually to a shared musical performance -- a phenomenon already easily seen in contemporary non-religious settings such as clubs and raves. Our analog of communism would be the hyper-atomizing individualism we're suffering under as a dysfunctional version of tamanous. Modern American culture has dissolved so many of the interpersonal relationships that helped provide meaning in the past: extended families, neighborhoods, churches, voluntary organizations. We also have a cultural view that the interests of the individual and the group are in perpetual tension.

Enter ipsissimus. My argument is simple: I can be a fantastic me, or I can be a mediocre someone else. These days, the default choice for that someone else often ends up being a generic consumer with a few idiosyncratic tastes as a veneer of personalization. For the vast majority of people, though, the group is better off if individuals can contribute the full force of their talents and being. (Granted, if you're familiar with history or listen to true crime podcasts, you can easily think of specific examples of people who are exceptions to this general rule.) Thus, ipsissimus resolves the apparent binary of the group versus the individual. Furthermore, the full development of oneself seems like a natural goal for a culture based on pursuing one's unique path.

However, there is one part of this argument that does require a bit of a leap. In theory, America's second pseudomorphosis could come from a culture other than the emerging Russian one, but I find that unlikely for two reasons. First, a culture inclined toward individualism seems especially plausible after a period of heightened emphasis on the group, as with a pendulum that swings out to one extreme only to reverse course. Second, Greer's specific example is telling. It's not an individual posting a video online of themselves dancing alone, it's a gathering of people sharing a collective experience in their own unique ways -- a blend of the group (at the cultural level, reflecting the influence of sobornost pseudomorphosis) and the individual.