Month: March 2010

I feel many of the psychological problems–so-called ADHD, depression, anxiety–which produce so many pill-popping Americans are best understood as cultural problems. Specifically, how do we interface with one another? How do we support one another?

To use a computer analogy it’s like we don’t “synch” properly, lacking, as we do, shared understandings of life.

Obviously, any number of sub-communities exist which perform this function in part. If you dress as a Goth, or obsess over NASCAR, or collect butterflies, or whatever, other people do it too.

Churches obviously serve as one source of community. So do the unexamined political habits of Leftism.

Quite often, I think people just need to feel valued, and understood. When men don’t get this, they get angry. When women don’t get this, they get sad. (in general).

But what you often get is the presenting complaint, which is of course related to how that person interacts with others, but also, I would argue, to the fundamental atomization of our modern society.

I will have more to say on this, but wanted to make a quick note.

After all the rain is done falling, after all the wrongs of the world have been righted, after everyone has healthcare funded by someone else, the right to never be offended, the right to force others into silence, and after all the money is gone: what then?

What is left? What will be retained of our social institutions after the radical programs of the Socialists have been implemented? What do they have in Cuba? Their religion is largely gone. Their cultural traditions have been assaulted–likely effectively–for 50 years, and they have learned to live in fear, and alone, not knowing who they can trust in a police state with informers everywhere.

What is left in Britain? The shell of habit, the outer dress of a once important nation, reduced to shambling mediocrity because they know longer know what they believe and why?

Conservatism is based upon the idea of evolution, of taking existing practices and improving them. Leftism is based upon destruction: kill them all (figuratively, as institutions, and literally in the case of complete socialism), and let the State sort them out. If the State doesn’t approve–say, of the Russian Orthodox Church, or the Catholic Church–then it will not be replaced. What remnants remain have to be furtive and cautious.

And even in purportedly moderate socialists, one sees this impatience, as with religion in particular. They simply want to do away with it. There is no hint in them of a genuine desire for co-existence. They view themselves as right, and want to wage their wars of cultural imperialism for the purported good of mankind.

Yet, again, what in the end is left? Empty shells. That’s what I see.

Henry Hazlitt, in his excellent book “Economics in one lesson”, says that the two principle economic errors from which all other derive is failing to take the long term into account, and failing to account for the effects of a given policy on all groups. For example, you can spread the wealth in the short term, and go bankrupt in the long term. You can help one group, but hurt another.

Generalized, these two traits constitute wisdom, or foresight. These words seem antique, because we are surrounded by fools who think only in the short term, and only of themselves.

And many of these fools think anyone who doesn’t think like them is foolish. The way you sort this out is by asking them to articulate for you what the effects of their ideas and policies will be on all people, over the long haul. The genuine fools will think you impudent for asking the question, try to change the subject, insult you, then finally lapse into petulant silence.

As much as I hate to admit it, quite often the most lucid, compelling case you can make for your positions is silence. The simple fact is, many people have NO intention of changing their views, and anything you say can and will be construed in a negative way.

Some of these people will never wake up, ever, in their entire lives. This happens often, although it takes a great deal of determination to keep out all contrary inputs when you are defending the indefensible.

Others, it takes time and events that are unforeseeable, and certainly uncontrollable. There may, some day, come a time when they will listen.

You become a leftist when you mistake the words you and your leaders are using for reality. When you believe wholeheartedly that to talk about improving the world necessarily means that the policies you implement will in fact achieve that end.

I would compare it to the scene in “The Nuremburg Trials” when Spencer Tracy’s character is speaking with an old judge, who had been complicit in the Nazi regime, and long supported them in the abuse of the judicial system for the eradication of political opponents.

The judge, played by Gregory Peck, if memory serves, asks Tracy: “How could I have known it would lead to this? To all this slaughter and destruction?” To which Tracy replies: “you knew the first time you sentenced an innocent man”.

Likewise, the first time you fail to consider the effects of your policy on all people, and across time–the first time you fail to learn from the mistakes of the past–you show your LACK of genuine humanity and compassion, and your consuming desire to surrender your freedom to the automatism of a cult.

That is when liberals become leftists; and most self declared “liberals” are in fact leftists. That is my default presumption, and most of the time prolonged dialogues prove me right. They can’t defend themselves, which means they rejected the need for understanding long ago.

One feature of thought I encounter everywhere on the internet is the childlike mind. This is the mind that is incapable of wrestling with serious problems seriously. What I have found is it is quite literally impossible to communicate with such minds until they are ready. You can’t say “you have a childlike mind”, since they literally have no means by which to understand that statement. You have used words which they literally don’t understand.

The pervasive point and result of the social propaganda within which are children are immersed from very young ages in this country is to reject traditional social norms of God, family and country. It is to reject, a priori, any suffering which you do not choose, which is not furthering your pleasure and sense of well-being, and particularly which appeals to tradition. It is to cultivate narcissists, while inculcating within them the firm conceit that they are idealists. All you have to, really, to be a narcissistic idealist is talk big ideas, and let other people handle the details; people like those who originated the propaganda in the first place.

To be serious, to be an adult, you have not just to look to your personal pleasure: you have to commit yourself to the well-being of all, and do so in such a way that you are not being led by the nose to the “slaughter” of uniform mediocrity, comfort in a cage, and passive acquiesence in the oppression of others, provided that the pro forma ritual is done of condemning them as “haters” first.

True Liberalism is based upon the concept of personal responsibility, which means response-ability not just for your own interests, but for those of your family, community, and nation.

I have argued often that scepticism is equidistance both from belief and disbelief. It is, in my view, the optimal “setting” by means of which to learn.

Vis a vis the question of the existence of God, I believe Agnosticism–literally, “I don’t know”–to be the most reasonable stance. To be an A-theist, one must be a positive believer in the doctrine of “No God”. The claim that, if there is no evidence for something, that it doesn’t exist, is simply intellectual incompetence. We had no evidence for quarks, prior to what I assume we can accurately label their “discovery”. (I have never seen one, so I have to take other peoples word for it, as is the case with most science). Yet, they existed.

The primary problem with the stance, the position of atheism is that it limits your perceptual horizons. It tends to limit you qualitatively, in my experience, in terms of your capacity to imbibe deeper qualitatively realities. I have said this often, but the hard edges of its knife seem often to sever the ties of poetry and the myths that bind us; both, after all, are on their rendering evolutionary artifacts whose only real “value” is that they facilitated survial and reproduction at some point in the distant past.

Reality is what we perceive, and what we perceive is seen through ideational filters. If our goal truly is to understand “reality”, then we would logically want filters as wide as we can make them. We would want to EXPERIENCE first, the EXPLAIN second. The alternative is to only experience what you already know you can explain, which is something very like a negative hallucination, which is where you DON’T see things that, by consensus among others, actually is there.

And of course when we speak of God, we mean many things. We mean some sort of non-physical connection between ourselves and the rest of the univese. We mean that our acts in this life matter in some way in a future life. We mean that there is some right way to live, and by contrast, ways in which we were not meant to live. It is forgotten now, but even the concept of natural “laws” partakes of a sort of assumption we get from the concept of God: that of an ordered and knowable universe.

And practically, when you look at the actual evidence in favor of things like the survival of death, or the existence of perceptual capacities beyond materialistic explanation, there are signs and hints of something larger.

Let me be clear: the Zeus knock-off we see so often mocked by dogmatic atheists is not the same as a belief in God. To the extent, actually, that the God concept has merit, it is beyond description. It is the field within which all matter and life exists, and which harmonizes and connects it; this is God’s intelligence–our forms, our consciousness.

A principle value of mine is perception, and it is, on my rendering and in my personal view, a sin to do less than we are able to understand the universe in which we live.

It seems to me good thoughts are simple, and relaxed. They are things like “I should go help Bill take in that crop, since his wife is sick”.

Evil thoughts are always filled with tension–latent or overt–and fear. Doing evil–inflicting pain–is the only real release from them, and is always temporary and short in extent.

In the first case, your actions start from a place of peace, and grow from there. In the second, your actions start from a place of fear, which you are trying to escape. But you never can, since the means used make you even more afraid and alone.

Goodness is what remains when everything else is taken from you. To return to an example from a few posts ago, if you wake up somewhere, with no memory, not knowing where you are, what will remain is what is important in you. And as I have argued, the Rejection of Self Pity, Perseverence, and the sincere desire to understand are the three values which always lead, over time, to Goodness.

Existential philosphers start from the same point I do: radical freedom. Verworfenheit. Either the absence or unknowability of God.

Where they err, though, is in not positing what the most basic, helpful decisions are that you can make. If you are free, then logically why not act in such a way as to maximize the BENEFITS of that freedom? Why dilate on the freedom itself, while rejecting all common sense solutions to the anxiety that freedom engenders? Why focus on problems and not solutions?

The obvious answer is that most “professional” thinkers were never engaged in trying to DO anything. Sartre made his peace quickly and effortlessly with the Nazis (after being interned for a time not for doing anything daring, but for getting drafted), then forever after criticized others for not doing more. He was a little shit in every possible way.

Most Existentialists wound up as political radicals, typically (and hypocritically) as Communists. Communism gave them a cult to belong to that did not require God. They were able to subordinate their freedom, while claiming to be authentic. This is A solution, just not a good solution. Quite the contrary. I have in mind in particular Sartre and de Beauvoir (who subordinated herself to Sartre as well), who did so much to advance the cause of Communist Imperialism.

I am a fan of Albert Camus for the simple reason that he outgrew this, since in my view he genuinely wanted to be a good person. Over time, my strong feeling is that his politics would have moved in a genuinely liberal direction, had he had not died prematurely.

It seems to me a fundamental aspect of the conditioning that surrounds school-grown leftists is teaching that the world is a dangerous place, and that Democrats or Socialists have the solutions. You cultivate generalized anxiety, first, then say you have the solution.

Now this anxiety is first about the idea that someone, somewhere, may be imperfectly clothed or fed. This is, of course, always the case. You talk about nuclear weapons in ways which ignore their role in preventing war, and only discuss the fact that if they were used, terrible things would happen. You talk about how some people are rich, and others are poor. You ignore how this comes to be, or what the historical consequences of trying to change this have been, or what the process has been by which they won the time to worry about things like that.

You have Pollution, of which the Global Warming fraud is just the most obvious example. You can even add the idea that other countries don’t like us. We aren’t hip.

Through pervasive generalities like this, you cultivate a climate of dissatisfaction, of discontentment, that you are careful never to counter-balance with positive narratives about the accomplishments of America, our history of at least trying to guide our behavior with principles, and of course proposed, concrete solutions to the problems.

Solutions, that is to say, which are not implemented by the government. What you will be taught is that those who say they want to solve these problems are to be trusted; and those who say they will resolve themselves, don’t exist in the first place (global warming), or can best be solved at the State and local level, are not to be trusted.

Democrats, then, are the ones who are trying to fix the world. Anyone who opposes them (Republicans) is of course evil for that reason. This is the propaganda meme in place.

That this argument is fallacious would only become obvious to someone who evolved past being a generic person, which in our Nanny State is decreasingly common.

I was watching a little kid at the playground yesterday. His dad was smoking and reading quite a ways away, and he was climbing a sort of enclosed tube of plastic sleeve covered chains. He was only about 3 or so.

He slipped and fell some 4′, landing flat on his back on the wood chip playground floor. I thought he would cry, but he got right back up, mumbling to himself something that no doubt would been something like “THAT wasn’t what I was trying to do” if I could have understood him, and went right back up, very slowly since he was barely able to walk.

Now, my first impulse was to run over there and see if he was OK. But I wasn’t his parent, and he got right back up in any event. HAD I run over there, I wonder if he would have started crying. I have noticed that when they get hurt, little kids often only start crying in earnest when they see the reactions of the parents around them. It is the social context that tells them what to do.

Moving forward in time, two kids got into a fight today at my kids school. One of them, still in primary school, has already learned that he has “Anger Management Issues”, which we will label the disease of AMI. His parents, apparently, are getting divorced–so he has more excuses than some kids–but he has apparently always had this problem. He sees the school social worker regularly for talks. If he isn’t already, he will no doubt be on meds of some sort soon.

I think it is worth comparing what seems to have been the mindset 100 years ago, with now. With the moralistic culture, and the psychotherapeutic culture.

100 years ago, you had a soul. You had a destiny as a Christian. When you encountered trouble, you were expected to deal with it. You had, in most cases, a stronger supportive culture, both in terms of regularly receiving moral advice, and in terms of supportive people, particularly in the church and local family; but combined with those were clear expectations that as both a man and a woman that you live with courage, loyalty, and persistence.

Manifestly, organic brain disturbances do happen. Back then, people no doubt sometimes broke and lost their sanity, or capacity to cope. Apparently locking the proverbial crazy uncle in the basement did happen. No doubt things like child molestation, wife beating, and simple cruelty were more common as well, simply because they had nothing like the social system we have now, in which many more options exist for escape than existed then.

The default, though, was a hard life, and the expectation you grow a thick enough skin to deal with it.

Today, the default is mothering. When something bad happens to you, half a dozen people will ask you if you are alright. We have made a thing out of difficulty by psychologizing it. Facing and overcoming pain has become not a necessary and inevitable part of life, but an aberration, a mistake somehow in what is trying to be an all-encompassing system of safety, and nurturing.

I don’t think it is possible to become a complete human being without difficulty. Many people see this, and that is the motivation of things like Adventure Racing, sky-diving, rock climbing, motocross, and even snowboarding. Pain is what makes you grow. A child that is nursed perfectly by those around it all its life will never become an adult. You need pain.

Thus, while not romantizing the past, I would say that my grandparents were better positioned to live happily than we are, despite the manifestly much larger physical and financial struggles which they regularly faced. Empirically, rates of clinical depression have risen steadily AS WE BECOME SAFER AND MORE PROSPEROUS. This would be the opposite of what we would expect, if Nanny States generated happier people.

Clearly, I don’t want to go back to the past. What I want to do is think about how we make more demands on our kids, such that they react in creative and personally fulfilling ways.

This little kids next trick, by the way, was to climb a much more difficult, open structure. I stood close to him, in case he fell, but he didn’t. He made it to the top.