Idiotism and the Liminal Self: Reclaiming Personhood Beyond the Western Inheritance
One of the most quietly radical aspects of the Communitarium Project is its rethinking of personhood. This is not just a matter of identity politics, nor merely a shift in psychological theory. It is a decisive move away from a long-standing civilizational inheritance—what we have elsewhere called Western idiotism.
What Is Idiotism?
The term idiotism, as adapted in the Communitarium context, does not refer to foolishness or lack of intelligence. It refers to a particular model of the individual that has dominated Western philosophy and political thought since at least the Enlightenment:
- The individual as self-contained, self-interested, and self-justifying
- The individual as the primary unit of reason, property, rights, and decision-making
- The individual as a private self, fundamentally prior to society
This figure is what ancient Greek democracy called the idiōtēs: one who declines public, common life and retreats into private affairs. In this deeper sense, idiotism is not an insult but a diagnosis: a condition of ontological enclosure, where the self is imagined as its own foundation.
Even Marxism, despite its collectivist ambitions, retains residues of idiotism. The classed subject may be socially situated, but it is still often conceived as a container of ideology, awaiting correct alignment with historical necessity. The revolutionary agent is still an individual made legible by structure.
The Communitarium Project takes a different path.
The Liminal Self
To understand the liminal self fully, we must begin not with consciousness or identity, but with enrollment. In the Communitarium model, persons are best understood as beings adapted for ad hoc participation in schmooze-level Kantian wholes—ensembles that maintain their own identity by reference to the coordinated activity of their parts.
From this perspective, the self is not a monad, not an atomistic unit, not a stable substrate onto which roles or identities are layered. Rather, it is a relational organ—a dynamic interface shaped for compatibility with emergent forms of coordination.
In the language of the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework (SIF) or General Theory of Interpretive Systems (GTIS), the self is both a locus of interpretation and an agent of interpretation. It is where interpretive frameworks converge, overlap, and sometimes clash—and it is also capable of carrying those frameworks across contexts, transforming them, recomposing them, or making them available for new forms of prehension.
This makes persons less isolable than the Western tradition has imagined. The very idea of an individual as a unit separable from their ensembles is itself an artifact of enclosure: a misreading born of abstraction, not observation.
Philosophy, social science, and even Marxism have all tended to treat individuals as basic units of analysis—either to celebrate their freedom or to diagnose their conditioning. But in doing so, they often miss what the Communitarium seeks to foreground: that persons come into being not before the ensemble, but through it.
This also helps explain why consciousness is so elusive. In the Communitarium view, consciousness is not the possession of a bounded subject but a liminal process—a flickering, recursive function at the interface between selves and their ensembles. It emerges at the thresholds of coordination, where portable sociality must be negotiated, re-voiced, or carried across contexts. Consciousness is not what an individual has, but what arises at the seams of ensemble intelligibility—where it is most vulnerable to unraveling, and where it is most actively reinforced.
In this sense, the Communitarium Project runs directly counter to traditions of possessive individualism, which treat consciousness, agency, and identity as properties of discrete, self-owning entities. We propose instead that selves are real but relational, emergent but embodied, meaningful only within the recursive weave of shared interpretation.
The liminal self is defined not by what it is, but by what it carries: – Portable sociality – Contextual attunement – Fragments of shared meaning
This is the self as a kind of carrier wave—capable of sustaining ensemble coherence across contexts, while also allowing for divergence, reflection, and repair.
Hence, the liminal self is not merely in-between identities or collectives. It is structurally pre-adapted for passage, resonance, and co-constitution within dynamic ensembles. This is not fluidity for its own sake, but a kind of semiotic permeability shaped by evolutionary and cultural selection for adaptive participation in shared meaning-making.
Implications for Mutual Aid, Justice, and Governance
This reconfiguration of the self has wide-ranging consequences:
- Mutual aid is no longer merely resource exchange but an interpretive, prehensive labor of recognition.
- Justice becomes not adjudication between fixed selves, but the repair of damaged relational fabrics.
- Governance shifts from law and command to viscous coordination, grounded in the recursive intelligibility of those involved.
This is not individualism. Nor is it collectivism. It is symbiotic subjectivity: a way of being that emerges from and supports the semiotic health of the ensemble.
Why It Matters Now
In a world saturated with spectacle, algorithmic identity, and weaponized individualism, idiotism has become not just a philosophical legacy but an infrastructural default. It underwrites surveillance, monetization, and disembedded politics.
To build communitaria is to challenge this default. Not with a better blueprint for the individual, but with a new mode of inhabiting interdependence.
This is why the Communitarium Project must be rooted in the rehabilitation of personhood: not through self-assertion or self-sacrifice, but through the stepwise weaving of selves into shared meaning. Through the prefigurative acts of schmoozing, co-presence, gesture, and ensemble memory.
It is not enough to change institutions. We must change the conditions under which selves become visible, legible, and capable of sustaining mutual life.
That work begins not in theory, but in every moment of prehensive recognition.
Let’s meet there.