Month: April 2010

http://www.uoregon.edu/~kimball/Nqv.catechism.thm.htm

Check out this link. If anyone doubts that Communism (which I have defined in a prior post as different from both Socialism and Marxism) is a cult, read this.

I will add that we get the word Nihilist from the word used by the OPPONENTS of revolutionists in the latter half of 19th century Russia. (Side note: Both Tory and Whig, in the British tradition, were also terms used by their opponents, if memory serves).

The prototype of the brooding young man or women with tinted John Lennon glasses, long, unkempt hair and beard, and a complete disregard for fashion and cleanliness comes from this period.

What is most interesting about that period of history–at its height from very roughly 1850-1880–is that Nihilists succeeded in assassinating one of the most liberal Czars they had ever had. He either had or was on the verge of granting major concessions in terms of representative government. All of that was rolled back when he was blown up.

Violence never furthers social advancement. It is the outlet for the emotionally shallow, and morally weak.

4. “Make the enemy live up to his own rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

First off, note the definition of political “others” as “the enemy”. By definition, an enemy of a Communist is anyone who is not already a Communist. In this sense “revolution” is not all that different than jihad, which is perhaps why some Leftists see some commonalities with Islamic radicals. Both of them, in any event, are cultural outsiders.

The point I wanted to make, though, was this: Saul Alinksy was a nihilist. He did not believe in any immutable moral laws, and the only salvation he recognized was that of “revolution”, by which he knew in his heart he meant global tyranny. Psychologically, it is very easy to see why he saw Lucifer in such a sympathetic light, even though of course he was almost certainly an atheist.

Given that he was a nihilist–as are all committed Communists–what he was drawing tension not between what someone was doing, and what he believe to be right, but between what that person was doing, and what THAT PERSON believed to be right.

This means that the critique was solely rhetorical, not moral. Communists do not make moral critiques, since they don’t believe in morality. People miss this point.

You could add that they are trying to point to the crime of hypocrisy, which, one would think, even Communists could agree is wrong. Of course, that is not the case. Without blushing all Communist regimes have consistently accused the United States of crimes of inhumanity that were not with 3 orders of magnitude of what they practiced constantly.

At one time, there were more slaves in China at one time than were held in the United States in the whole history of slavery. One could, in any event, make that case. At the time of the Civil War there were roughly 3 million slaves. Let us say there were five generations of slaves, which is almost certainly excessive, since much of the slave growth happened after the cotton gin was invented somewhere in the first half of the 19th century. That’s 15 million. I would hazard a guess without looking it up that for substantial parts of the period 1948 (was it 49?) to roughly 1975 some 100 million Chinese were in reeducation camps of one sort or another. Many millions, of course were simply killed. Some 3,000 slaves were lynched in the entire history of slavery. The crimes simply aren’t comparable.

But unlike the Chinese Communists, we feel a sense of decency, and desire to do the right thing, so this rhetorical trick–and any time a Communist is talking about improving the world in any way it is a trick to get your support, or at least reduce you to silence and non-participation–works on us constantly. We are told we must sympathize with the “plight” of coddled mass murderers in Gitmo, but hear nothing at all about the system of political oppression that has characterized Cuba ever since the lies Castro told the New York Times enabled people like Saul Alinsky to seize power.

Push this further: how should one interpret the taunts of someone who believes nothing, directed to someone trying sincerely to do the right thing, and doing it imperfectly, since all of us are imperfect? In my view the word is sadism.

Go to a website patronized by committed leftists. Read the posts. Look at the schadenfreude, the incoherence, the hate, and the distance between their rhetoric and any possible notion of shared community norms.

The doctrine of Alinsky is evil. It is explicitly intended to subvert the moral basis of our civilization, and replace it with universal autocracy.

My definition of Cultural Sadeism is relevant: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Definitions.pdfhttp://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Definitions.pdf

It seems to me anger is only useful when you lack power. Phrased another way, it is the response that makes sense only when all other possibilities have been exhausted, or–more likely–overlooked.

In social situations, is anger superior to carefully thought out, strategic behavior? In a fight, is anger superior to a well honed, calm tactical system?

No doubt anger gives you energy. It gives you courage. These are good things. But it is hard to find any situations in life when you would not be able to respond more effectively without it, making it in most cases de facto incompetence.

This is why it is a “sin” in many cultures. It also, of course, leads frequently to violence.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of morality as a sort of technology. That is in perfect congruence of the Greek understanding of techne as knowledge about how to do something. Morality is the technology by which we can live happily as individuals and in groups. As technology, if it doesn’t work, then it isn’t true.

In my view, the hedonistic mindset, which rejects the necessity of pain, has done more to FACILIATE pain than the most severe Puritanisms did. One could, as a de facto ascetic, at least take pride in being self possessed, and in adhering to a coherent moral code.

The person who lives for themselves–picture here a stereotypical Californian in a Hawaiian shirt–is someone who doesn’t stand for anything. They are not willing to take a position that involves difficulty. The only value they hold is that no one should ever expect anything from them. They will go to protests to protect that right. No one should ever make them go to war. No one should demand that everyone pay their own way, if possible. No one should demand life-long fidelity, unless it met the whims of both people. No one should demand hard thought on complex issues.

And since it feels good feeling generous, no one should interfere with the process of taking money from people who have it, and giving to people who have less.

Seemingly benign, this mindset leads quickly to a loss of self respect, and constant frustration. You always seem to be on the verge of self discovery. You “fall in love”, and it feels forever, but then one or both of you flake out. You take your nice drives along the coast, and wonder what it’s all about, but it eludes you. You attend meditation conferences, and do yoga, and become a vegetarian, and it all seems like it should work. Everyone smiles and talks about how happy they are, but late at night something still doesn’t feel right.

You go to a therapist, and say you are depressed. Maybe you get meds, maybe she says it isn’t your fault, that your parents or ex-wife or ex-husband or someone did something that you haven’t processed yet.

Everywhere, there is this idea that happiness is simply an absence of pain. If you just do what you like, you will be fulfilled.

That simply isn’t how life works. It is unwise.

Meaning is a function of doing DIFFICULT things, of persevering across harrowing fields of battle, because it is the RIGHT THING TO DO.

It is a little reported fact, but the men and women who served in our military in Vietnam are actually much better adjusted and successful, on average, than those who didn’t go. This makes perfect sense.

Techne, then, consists in correct understandings of how life does and does not work. Buddha had his eightfold path http://buddhism.about.com/od/theeightfoldpath/a/eightfoldpath.htm

Christians have service. Muslims have their 5 Pillars. Hindus have dharma. All of these make a happy life possible. None of them, pursued correctly, are wrong in their practical effects.

The task I have set myself is to figure out what is common to them all. What I have come up with is that the absolute minimal requirements to live happily are to reject self pity, persevere through trouble, and treat each day as a new miracle. The last one I frame very broadly as perception, of which the key element is to not get stuck. Obviously, every religious order tends to foster dogmatism. Dogmatism is the death of the spontaneous order of genuine goodness.

In my own view, modern psychology does what traditional moral orders did, but far less well, and quite frequently–by fostering self pity–it actually makes people weaker and less able to persevere happily through lifes challenges.

The only exception to this is that modern anti-psychotic drugs are useful.

I have mixed feelings about anti-depressants. I do agree some types of depression reach the level of an organic disease. Yet, I feel most of the time that point is reached as a result of poorly structured cognition, and would thus be preventable if we were wiser as a culture. The rates of monopolar depression in pre-industrial civilizations is measurably something very close to zero, and when it happens, it is typically in response to a tragedy, which makes it closer to mourning than a disease.

I was looking at the mess in my kitchen this morning, and thinking “well, it will be gone in 20 minutes”. The battle for order is a daily one.

Then it popped in my head that we interact with our objects with pride and anger, and I got thinking about it. Do we not all have things we own we are proud of? I really like my gun. I don’t obsess about it, but it is a well engineered tool, and I’m glad I own it.

And when you look at, say, your car, you might be proud of it, or mad at it for being so old, or small, or whatever.

This, in turn, got me to thinking about what a PROPER relationship might be. I don’t think pride is necessarily a useful emotion, except to the extent it keeps you on the straight and narrow, and I think that would be better defined as self respect. Nor is anger, in general, a useful emotion, especially at objects which you control, and which have done nothing to you. They are just there. Any emotive content is a projection from you.

It seems to me a proper relationship is pleasure in presence. If you live a dirt-floored hut, you can still sweep the floor and keep it neat, and you can be happy in that. You can interact with all you own with contentment and enjoyment. You can enjoy cleaning.

This led to the thought that that is not a bad way to think of interacting with people. Pleasure in presence. Finding what is worthwhile and enjoyable in them, and directing your attention to that. Most everyone has something worthwhile.

The Hindus use as their greeting Namaste, which literally means “I bow to you”. You are not bowing to the person, per se, but rather to the spirit of God which is in every person. This is, I think, a worthy idea.

Musings for the AM.

William James has a nice quote in his introductory lecture on Pragmatism, again from Chesterton, in this case his work “Heretics”: “There are some people–and I am one of them–who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them.”

One has to ask: how did the horrors of the 20th century happen, and why are there hordes of seemingly intelligent people who have still not learned the lesson that Statism is tyranny, and that “social justice” in almost all forms is the precise opposite: INjustice by any rational criteria.

We had so many smart people at the end of the 19th century, and beginning of the 20th, especially in England and America, such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Sumner, William James, G.K. Chesterton.

How do such basic philosophical errors as holding to Statist ideologies, and rejecting all the evidence that favors an anti-materialist bias persist in our academic world?

I was watching a waterboarding video last night. The guy thought he could go 15 seconds, but he only lasted 5-6. What this technique does is induce panic that cannot be calmed with reason. It is absolutely primal. It has nothing to do with how you think.

In my view, if one follows the ideational train of modern Communists, what you see is something like this: God does not exist; death is final; morality is an artifact of evolutionary necessity; free will is an illusion; personal autonomy is an illusion; and everything we do and build and think will in the end perish without a trace. This is, in my view, a depressing worldview. Many people, I think, react with the same primal fear and anxiety that our waterboarding victim did.

I myself found it exceedingly depressing, and remember getting dizzy thinking about a world without meaning, where death was final. Darwin started it, by removing God as a necessary “hypothesis”, and of course much of “modern”–by which I would intend to connote Regressive–philosophy is oriented around the creation of meaning in a world denuded of permanent immanent order. That was the work, among others, of Nietzche, Sartre, Foucault, Camus, Heidegger (approximately), and their countless descendents and fellow travellers.

None of these “philosophers” (if you define Truth as what is useful, in the spirit of philosophical Pragmatism, none of these people offered it–with the partial exception in my view of Camus, who did seem to me in the end to be a decent human being–so they were not truly “lovers of wisdom”) really succeeded in creating actionable systems.

Ayn Rand did, and is for that reason still widely read.

Yet, I have issues with all thinkers who begin with the proposition that the world is composed of matter which is necessarily separated from us; really, of which we are composed. It is not necessary to link what I term Physical Materialism with Moral Materialism, but it is a tendency of the system.

What I mean by this is that if you understand the universe as basically a complicated machine, and human beings as small complicated machines, it tends to create a focus on those factors in human life which are material–which are visible. For those who accept the doctrine of Physical Materialism, science is the only means of making any useful truth claims. If everything is composed of matter that invariably obeys knowable laws, and which is separate from our consciousness, then only that is real that can be measured, and measuring is what scientists and scientists alone do. Morality, then, belongs to scientists.

And you see this history over the last several centuries of psychologists trying to decide just who they are, and what they should be doing. Are they scientists? How can you empirically measure the contents of a person’s consciousness? And if you can’t measure it, how can you claim you are a scientists? B.F Skinner, of course, tried to solve this problem by ignoring consciousness altogether, and focusing ONLY on what could be directly measured. This was a logical extrapolation from the basic problem.

Yet, manifestly, each and every one of us thinks. We feel. We make decisions using some combination of thought and gut instinct.

William James, in his excellent book “Principles of Psychology”, delineates three basic approaches to psychology: introspection, empirical measurement, and a combination of the two. In the first case, the psychologist can simply write about the contents of his own consciousness. He can compare his impressions with those of others, to see to what extent there is congruence, which is moving to a blended psychology.

As far as pure empiricism, you can test people’s perception, for example their ability to detect slight changes in weight, or light, or sound. You can measure how they process different stimuli. You can give people drugs, and measure the physiological results. Yet, the subjective results remain instrospective, and only approach empiricism across wide samples, which is an approximation of science, but not yet “hard” in the way measurements of accelleration are in physics.

Getting back to my main point, though, it seems to me that Moral Materialism leads to the rejection of softer notions such as beauty, love, kindness, refinement, and the like. You can’t measure them, so they are not suitable to be relied on in any kind of moral system. What you CAN measure is difference; and you can likewise formulate a “scientific” plan for the eradication of that difference.

The question, really, is “given presuppositions of meaninglessness, what can you hang your hat on”? For people who go through what I term (possibly following someone, I don’t know) “ontological shock” and react by becoming political Leftists, the answer is that you can rely on a visible system that creates visible results, that you define to yourself as beneficial.

The problem, though, is they now NEED this system. They NEED these beliefs. They can’t not have them. They can’t interact with them reflectively and with nuance. They can’t elevate them to some sort of qualitatively higher level, since they have already rejected notions of human perfectibility. We are all animals, after all, living for no purpose, and destined to die and be forgotten.

Yet, the question of how our universe is put together remains an empirical question. It is far from settled, and to the extent we can tell, our best guess is that the universe cannot be understood as existing apart from consciousness. It is NOT out there. It is connected with us.

This is not mumbo-jumbo New Age mysticism, but the reasoned conclusion of one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, John von Neumann, who literally wrote the book on quantum physics, and played a significant role in the development of usable computers.

We know, experimentally, that faster than light communication is possible across, in theory, infinite differences. Since this violates a principle theorem of General Relativity, it falsifies that theory. No one wants to admit this, since Relativity is such a great theory otherwise, that has worked empirically every time is has been put to the test. Yet, the fact remains that we only have two proven models of the universe: General Relativity, and quantum physics. Both work in their domains–big, and small, respectively. But General Relativity is not right about light being a univeral constant, and there are no experimental objections to quantum theory, which to my mind means of the two it should be regarded as the more correct one, pending some third theory that outdoes both (which will NOT be String theory, which to me appears to be a sort temper tantrum in reaction to Bell’s Theorem, which was the mathematical proof of non-locality).

Likewise, I think that Darwinian notions of Natural Selection will in the end need to be supplemented by appeal to some sort of biological field theory, where we posit some sort of information-containing aspect of the universe, which enables functional adaptations to be retained at much higher than random rates.

With respect to the survival of death there always has been and continues to be substantial evidence. We have apparent recording from people who have passed on. We have countless stories of apparitions. We have cases where mediums obtained information that they could not have known any other way.

One good example of this is an English medium who was imprisoned for divulging State secrets in WW2 for revealing the sinking of a British Navy ship before the Admiralty itself knew about it. All the details she provided turned out to be correct. This is one example of many 100’s of recorded examples of people possessing information no cold reader or skillful fraud could have possessed.

I always hear this seemingly logical comment “the plural of anecdote is not data”, but of course it is. When X number of scientist claim to have achieved a certain result, when X claim is made Y number of times in “respectable” journals, then that claim is considered a fact, even if none of the believers in this fact have done the experiment themselves.

Then the objection is raised about repeatability. Scientific results can be repeated. The people who make this claim do not typically follow the logical path of trying to repeat the results themselves, for example by consulting a medium, or experimenting in EVP (trying to capture voices on tape), or “ghost hunting”. Rather, they simply make the claim that it is not proven–meaing, to THEM–and dismissing the whole thing.

Yet, there are a number of cases of deeply commited skeptics doing the honest thing and investigating the evidence themselves, and becoming in the process converted.

I won’t dilate on this further. My core point, here, is that stupid ideas get people killed, and make them unhappy, and that if we are going to use science as the entirety of our truth system, let us at least do that honestly.

The chain of logic that led to so much horror in the 20th century was based, in my view, on erroneous postulates. The sooner that fact is acknowleged, the better off we will all be.

It is not too late to create a good world, one where we can live happily, and in peace.

John Stuart Mill, one of the greatest Liberal [which is to say generous but not insane] minds ever:

“I confess I am not charmed with an ideal of life held out by those who think the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each others heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of humankind, or anything but one of the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. . .[But] that the energies of mankind should be kept in employment by the struggle for riches as they were formerly by the struggle for war, until the better minds succeed in educating the others into better things, is undoubtedly better than that they should rust and stagnate. While minds are coarse, they require coarse stimuli, and let them have them.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Mill would today be a frustrated Republican, a frustrated Libertarian, or an ex-Democrat.

Allitt: “One of the most intriguing contributions to the debate as to whether Britain should become a democracy [note: as was the case in America, the British system explicitly excluded many citizens from participation it the political process, perhaps most obviously by denying them the vote] and what the relationship is between democracy and tradition was made by the journalist and controversialist G.K. Chesterton. I’d like to read you a passage from his book Orthodoxy, written in 1908, in which he makes the claim that you might think democracy is one option, and tradition another, but actually that’s not true. They really go together beautifully. Chesterton knew how to manipulate paradox in a beautiful way, and he never did it better than here. Here’s what he says:

“Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democracies object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I at any rate cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition.”

I like that. What tradition provides is a keel in the churning tides of change. It keeps us on track, even if we have the option of altering course. Cultural habits that are retained have, in general value, or at least did have value. What is new is untried, and science is unequal to the task of testing ideas for 100 years prior to granting them to us. What they do is think they have found something, then use us as lab rats. 100 years of Freud is too much. 2,000 years of Christianity was not too much.

When I first learned the details of Chamberlain’s Munich agreement, and started talking about appeasement, I somewhat stupidly thought I was advancing a novel argument. The reality is that the idea “let us not appease, or it will be just like 1938 again” has been in circulation since somewhere just after WW2, when the memory was fresh, and children were still taught history.

In particular, the Neocons used it often. Now, this is a word that gets used constantly. I just finished a course on the history of Conservatism, and the term used properly refers to a group of mostly Jewish former leftists–in the 30’s many of them were Trotskyists, and Communists of other stripes–who retained some affinity for social welfare sorts of programs, but were rabid anti-Communists, and consistently hawkish on almost every issue of foreign policy. Irving Krystal (sp?), David Novak, and Norman Podhoretz are the names I remember. They had a magazine back in the 50’s, whose name I’ve forgotten. Currently, the main magazine is Commentary, if I’m not losing my marbles.

In any event, the lecturer, Patrick Allitt, labelled Buchanon a “paleoconservative”, as someone who continues the long standing tradition in Conservatism of isolationism. Now, Buchanon has been in the game a long time–at least 40 years by my reckoning, and likely longer–and he has heard this theme of “the Germans are coming” many times.

As a matter of historical fact, it was FDR and the Democrats who did the most to get us in WW2. FDR started the rearmament process, the Lend-Lease program, and arguably exceeded his Constitutional authority by, if memory serves, offering up Navy escorts to transports crossing the Atlantic. Since they became thereby subject to U-boat attack, this was tantamount to getting us in the war, without Congressional authorization.

In any event, it is hard to argue that we did not have a vital national interest in helping defeat the Axis powers, particularly Germany. Thus, what Buchanon is doing in his book “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War” the same thing leftist Nicholas Baker does in Human Smoke: deny that Hitler needed to be fought at all.

This is not just an argument about WW2, but serves as a proxy argument for all American interventions overseas period, including most recently of course our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I assume Buchanan opposed.

Now, I could know one hell of a lot more about this than I do. I have read reviews of both books, but have not read the books. I could be wrong, but this feels right to me, based on the not inconsiderable number of facts I do possess.

A great many people are attracted to “socialism”, very loosely defined, since they see in it simple responsibility to our fellow human beings; they want to be nice, and socialists are nice.

This is not a fully incorrect view. One could certainly argue that some sort of basic “safety net” is not unreasonable, particularly in a wealthy nation.

The problem is that such people don’t understand the full logic of socialism, which is the logic of the eradication of difference. In homogeneous nations like Sweden, there is really no need for violence, since everyone basically belongs to the same group. In a strongly heterogeneous nation like the US, though, this is a problem, in that it necessarily leads to conflict between those who want to do the leveling, and those who are being confined to a smaller box, not of their choosing.

A paradigmatic example of this is the abortion issue. We have at least two strongly delineated lines of thought on this, but only one was victorious, and it achieved victory not through legislative action, but through the manifest abuse of the court system. The long term goal of all Socialists is the eradication of religion. In their own terms, the only reasonable system of knowledge is science, and anything not demonstrable is not scientific, and therefore doesn’t exist. This is the consequence of the abuse of the basic Vienna Circle protocol, which I won’t get into here.

Thus, the overarching goals are secularism, the eradication of historical cultural difference, and the leveling of incomes and social hierarchies. Now, even if these goals seem reasonable, the means are that of a hegemonic government, that can impose uniformity where difference is strenuously defended. This means that a system is necessarily put in place which can be abused, and abused thoroughly, as in the National Socialist regime.

In my own view, our Federalist system can tolerate the strains of localized tribalisms, but not the imposition of centralized cultural uniformity, which–the romantic dreams of silly people notwithstanding–is manifestly the aim of Socialism. If you understand Political Correctness, you have a passkey to an open cultural world anywhere in America, and damn near anywhere in the world, because they all think the same.

Our system, though, is broken into pieces. There was intended a very strong bias in favor of the States for EVERYTHING to do with day to day life. The Federal Government was for negotiating treaties with other nations, brokering disputes between States, and for providing for the national defense. Many considered even highway building to be beyond its proper reach, and if memory serves Andrew Jackson vetoed a plan to provide Federal funds for a road in Kentucky, to Maysville, if I am not mistaken.

Thus the proper place for the expression of what we might term Scandinavian sentiments is at the State level. I do not think that represents an overarching abuse of the system, even though I personally would not want to live in one of those States. Who knows, though, maybe it could work? Every State could adopt something similar.

But what we have today, with Social Security, Medicare, and the federal component of Medicaid (which, by the way, increased considerably, since much of the “Stimulus” money went to bail out bankrupt programs, such as that in California, and the Stimulus runs through 2014) are programs that we can’t opt out of, that provide money to the goverment that is promptly spent on many other things, and for which money is being borrowed on our behalf. It would be far, far better just to put the money in a bank than to trust the clowns in Washington with it.

Thus, if you want to be nice, and want to vote for nice people, make it at the State level, and let us get the Federal government out of the “nice” business, which it was never intended to take part in anyway.