Month: September 2010

For unknown reasons, a message on this piece just vanished from my in-box, so I’m going to make a public admission here that for one of the first times ever, someone has read my work, and understood it well enough to offer substantive and valid criticism.

I want to admit, here, that the fourth piece in my five piece argument is by far the weakest. Frankly, it needs some work. It is the only one I don’t feel will necessarily hold up in a strong wind. I write so much I exhaust myself, but I think part of the reason is that my thinking is fuzzy.

Who DOES benefit from deflation? Is it accurate to say banks hate it? I think it would depend on what kind of bank. In the leadup to the Great Depression, the Fed made money easy for banks to get. Beginning in about 1928, it pulled back. Then it kept pulling back even after the Stock Market crash, then it kept pulling back even after unknown persons or nations began making a run on our gold. They said it was to protect the currency, but for all we know it was banks in the system buying up the gold. Nobody tracked that stuff. I don’t think they do even now.

What happened? Banks were faced with an asset portfolio based on loans that were increasing in value steadily, pari pasu with deflation, but which for that exact reason were going into default in record numbers. Those banks that were part of the Federal Reserve System–to be clear, the big banks, by and large–were able to get the on-going capital to stay afloat. Those who weren’t, went out of business. Less banks would seem a desirable goal for would-be “cartelists”.

Thus, all things need to be contextualized. I should add too that I think my differentiation of monetary and price deflation is worth underscoring. Monetary deflation is something that the Fed, the superrich, and banks do. They pull money out and warehouse it. Only those with huge surpluses can afford to simply sit on their cash. People who have hidden it in their mattress need to spend it sooner or later just to survive. By and large only those able to create money can afford to “hoard” it. Inflation and deflation are the evil twins which characterize what the Austrians call the business cycle, and what I term Monetary Mercantilism.

Price deflation, on the other hand, presumes a fixed amount of currency which increases in value as material goods become more widely available as a result of innovation. This type of deflation is seen, as an example, in the steadily increasing amount of computer power you can get for the same money. It should apply, more or less, to everything we buy; although for some things–like food–we may not want only efficiency.

Anyway, if that person sees this, this is my response. It’s the only one I’m able to make, without an email address.

Some of these posts come out, in my own self perception, like music on a radio station that is just slightly out of tune.

Walking up our local Main Street today, it occurred to me to contrast the colorfulness of Picasso–his radical whimsy, and, I’m told, genius–with his radical political views. Why is it that so many of the more creatively inclined people embrace a doctrine which would sideline or kill them if it ever came into power, if they did anything but toe the Party line?

I have said before that leftism represents a meaning system for those who lack one. At the same time, I think the progression is–in their self assessment–a positive one. If Capitalism is grey and banal, and utterly preoccupied with the unheroic, prosaic elements of human life, then SURELY ending it would cause the creation of something better. I think this is the logic.

Yet, to fail to plan is to plan to fail. They understand centralized economic planning, but they neglect the necessity of centralized cultural planning too, the propaganda and forced silences which attend the project. All logic and factual history to the contrary, they somehow keep the faith that from the overthrow of the existing social order something beneficial will come. Patently, the logic goes, since our system is so flawed ANYTHING must be better. Anyone who fails to understand that Regression and Progression are both versions of change needs to redo grammar school.

And we see this sort of criticism everywhere. We see aging radicals get all teary eyed when they talk about the brave civil rights marchers in Selma or wherever, then in the next breath praise the Cuban regime, which has inflicted and continues to inflict far worse tortures on its inhabitants than were ever dreamed of by the slave-holders. Self evidently, the curse of poverty lays across the Cuban landscape, unnecessarily.

It is in this spirit that we should take this comment, which is utterly out of character for Keynes in its candor: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many psuedo-moral principles which have hagridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.

By this he means the greed for money of the Capitalists, which is for them vastly inferior to their own greed for power. This argument is unassailable, for the simple reason that they jettion reason itself to reach this conclusion. Once adopted, it is beyond debate.

Only a willful fool could fail to see that Keynes was sympathetic to the Fabian Socialist aims of his life-long comrades, most notably his mentor George Bernard Shaw. To him we can attribute most of the decrease in personal savings that has progressed for the better part of 60 years, and which has made us, in our debt, so vulnerable in so many ways.

More generally, though, this is the template. Keynes and his Bloomsbury group had great fun mocking Victorian morality, which in their case is equivalent to saying “any coherentm non-ironic set of behavioral standards whatsoever”. Yet from this flowed nothing of social value, and much that has damaged and continues to damage our social fabric, and the enthusiasm with which we embrace life, and particularly our shared life together.

From Picasso’s bold yellows emerge wraiths of grey, enfolding everything they touch in the smoke of intellectual loathsomeness and moral tranquility even in the face of monstrous atrocities.

I was thinking today about the frequent banality of Capitalism. It’s all about the pursuit of the almighty dollar. It is a near perfect system for the creation and distribution of material goods, but a poor means for distributing cultural goods. By this I mean a sense of meaning, of purpose. Making money, alone, is a terrible reason for living. Once you have met your basic needs, it’s not hedonism, it’s not principled, it’s just a type of collecting, no different in principle than collecting model airplanes, with the caveat that what is normally desired is the power that money buys.

Now, an intact cultural system, when subjected to determined attack, will of necessity respond through change. Free markets have been attacked by socialists. What this does is cause a reaction such that where things were relatively unquestioned before, an elaborate “theology” has to be created to defend against such attacks. This has the effect of causing people to become dogmatic and inflexible.

This is what religious fundamentalism is. Where people in antiquity no doubt tolerated any number of aberrations (you don’t read about them, because they weren’t noted down)–imperfect replication being a symptom of a creative, organic social order–once the theology is created to counter the heretics, the stage is set for an unyielding rigidity of thought and action.

There is a clear homology, in my mind, between the socialist goal of abolishing both wealth and poverty, and the cultural totalitarian’s goal of abolishing behavioral difference.

This led to the question: what cultural system DOES best allocate cultural resources? The answer is Liberalism, of the John Stuart Mill variety, in which people are free to speak their mind, to engage in debate, and to vote their opinions as far as governance. Just as people can meet freely to engage in trade, so too can individuals meet to express their views. And just as wealth increases as trade increases, so too does understanding as debate increases, given people with the character to hew to the truth.

Leftist counter-debate narratives–their efforts to shut the process of free inquiry down–are thus simply the cultural counterpart to their efforts to shut down trade.

Socialism is pure destruction, in its pure form. In its most benign manifestations the damage is delayed across generations, and in its most destructive forms it has caused more death than any set of ideas in human history.

There are those in Washington who, for all practical purposes, want us to sell our souls to them.

The Israelis need to demand, as a preconditino to talks, that the descendants of the refugees of the 1948 War which the Arabs lost reject their so-called “right” of return. They left their land voluntarily–admittedly in a condition of war, but one which was not started by the Israelis–and have since been calling for the destruction not just of the Jewish nation, but of the Jews IN it for at least 50 years.

They can’t get it. Even if somehow the logistics could be worked out, that would be national suicide for the Israelis. The situation is analogous to that which would obtain if the Cherokees suddenly started demanding the return of their ancestral homelands. Actually, the Cherokee have the better case, as they were driven from their lands by force. The refugees of the 1948 War, by and large, were not. And certainly there was no concerted effort on the part of the Jews to ethnically cleanse their land. Many Arabs remained, and they are part and parcel of Jewish society. They are practicing Muslims in a Jewish nation. As such, they are afforded more legal rights and freedom of conscience than Arabs in any other land, with the possible exception of Iraq.

I have been watching this theatrical farce for as long as I can remember, when some Secretary of State, in the interests of “peace”, will convene a conference, in which both sides feel the need to pretend they can reach accomodations, and which invariably ends either in failure, or Israeli concessions which are promptly abused by the refugees.

It is my sincere opinion that if Western media had a shred of honor, and the capacity for the use of intelligence in their assessments, that we could have seen whatever peace is possible emerge 30 years ago.

As things stand, no one wants to call a spade a spade and admit that the core sticking point is the “right” of return, and that it can never be granted, and that therefore any conference which does not admit this in advance, will ALWAYS be doomed to failure.

Only an idiot would claim otherwise. Manifestly, we have many idiots, though–particularly in the US and Europe–and many in high places.

It seems to me that many conservatives are happy about the Tea Party wins. They should be, but they need to have this image in their mind: our foe is tough, experienced, well financed, and THEY HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO GO.

Leftists–the people we really oppose–have been tricking moderates and ordinary, well meaning people into voting their agenda since at least Johnson, and I would argue we need to send it at least to FDR.

They own our universities. They own our high schools. They do not own our churches, business leadership (with the exception of some very large, very powerful corporations, mostly on the left coast), and ordinary adult citizenry.

What we have to do is look at this–for this season–as a two stage conflict. Let us imagine ourselves as Greek Warriors, who have just thrown back our enemy. We have them on their heels. Yet, they are going to counterattack, and we need to meet them with everything we have. It is not enough just to “not get complacent”. It is not enough to coast. We need to go balls out and get as much mileage from this historical opportunity as we can, and then KEEP GOING.

Whether we pick up a bunch of seats in Congress or not in November, we still have to deal with a populace that by and large has been brainwashed its entire life, that thinks that if something is desirable, you can just charge it to your credit card, as if the bill will never come due. They want to act as if nice people always finish first just because they are nice. They don’t want to think about their childrens future, or their grandchildrens future. The baby boomers, arguably, are the most selfish generation in American history, and quite possibly in human history. They are pathological narcissists, utterly unwilling to admit that the world does not revolve around them, and their pet illusions of how the world is.

Yet, in some ten years, the interest on the national debt will exceed the Defense Department budget. In some 15 years, we will be paying the equivalent of the national GDP just to fund Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in their current forms.

Is it intelligent to wait until problems have ripened into catastrophes to deal with them? Obama has already cut Medicare. But he increased taxes elsewhere, not least in the hidden form of increasing the costs of insurance companies, such that they have to pass them along, or go bankrupt. If anyone is unclear with respect to the plan, he does in fact want them to go bankrupt, so we can adopt a plan in which we lose virtually all the choice we currently have, penalize doctors for going into the field, lose a high percentage of our specialists, bring innovation to a halt, and shrink the amount of healthcare available, which would include hospitals, doctors offices, and all forms of medical testing.

We get a worse outcome, and we pay more for it. This is pretty close to a definition of stupidity.

Yet, what we have to realize–and this is the core point of this post–is that leftists ARE NOT INTERESTED IN OUTCOMES. They don’t CARE if they help the world. They don’t CARE if they make things worse. It all has to do with the maintenance of a personal meaning system, of a reason to believe, of a reason to live. Their political creed is a religion.

In actual religion, faith is necessary because we can’t perceive God directly. In their creed, faith is necessary because everything they touch turns–visibly–to shit, yet they keep doing it.

They NEED their religion. They will fight hard for it. We need to fight harder back. We have the high ground–we are defending the defensible–but countless battles that were “won” have been lost in the end.

Push with facts. Push with reason. We can’t let up until the collective enchantment that has fallen over so many lands lifts.

It occurred to me after I hit post yesterday that I didn’t explain the title. Most people are familiar with the term from Hindu mysticism, which posits that we have energy “centers” at key points in our body. I’m an agnostic on that, although I do often feel what feels like energy going through my forehead. There is no need, in my view, to make a firm decision either way, so I don’t.

The root, though, as I understand it, is the Sanskritic word for discus, or wheel. It is intended to connote something round which spins.

I think this is a useful metaphor for all human social systems. I view the individual personality, for example, as a sort of smoke or water “chakra”. It is a system in motion with attributes. “Joe”, for example, is a system in motion that is mostly “brown”, with flecks both of grey and white. One can imagine standing in the stream of this “smoke” or water–something that spreads and contracts imprecisely–and feeling, seeing, smelling, and hearing differing sounds, but in patterns. Certain combinations recur regularly, certain tendencies and systemic habits recur not quite at regular intervals, but regularly. This is the “essence” of Joe.

This is a metaphor for the chaotic system, in which the system is non-linear, and formally complex, but nonetheless when someone says “you know how Joe IS”, we generally know what they are talking about. There may be things about Joe we don’t know, which would radically alter our opinion about him, but in his interactions with us, we see what things he tends to like doing, his opinions about sports and politics and religion, his work ethic, how he treats the opposite sex, and children, and the elderly, and minorities. We create really a set of data points, such as a comment he made many years ago, and insert it into our narrative about who Joe “is”.

Now, no formally complex system can ever be reduced to a box. They don’t fit in boxes, unless the box is so large that individual nuance is lost. Joe is an American. That can mean a lot of things.

The difference between judgement and prejudice is “have you tried to stand in that stream?” Have you tried to proverbially walk in his shoes? Formally chaotic systems have points of recurrence, called “strange attractors”. When you look at a visual plot of some them–here are some examples–what I am intending so say is that if you understood “Joe” perfectly, that is what he would look like. He would be a form which was multi-dimensional and–what they can’t capture here–in motion, such that the lines in movement–really, the gases, since there are no lines involved–would drift towards and away from their supposed bounds regularly, but not so much that you couldn’t discern the basic structure.

In my view, your qualitative structure–your “strange attractor” self–is a function of the principles by which you choose to live your life. Everyone chooses something. Some choose self indulgence, or self importance, or power, or love, or friendship, or duty. Everyone chooses a combination of values, which are valued differently at different times. Normally there is a relative hierarchy–such as country above family above self. Such hierarchies, with respect to who people “really” are, are only expressed through action, not words.

As has been said by some wit, most people have two reasons for what they do: the stated one, and the real one.

Chakras exist on all qualitative levels. They vary is size. There are family dynamics–the Smiths are happy, the Jones are dysfunctional (another favorite quote of mine is that the only normal family is the one you don’t know very well)–church dynamics, corporate dynamics, sports team dynamics, communist dynamics, State dynamics, national dynamics, regional dynamics, and perhaps even global dynamics. Western philosophical ideas have permeated most of the world. All African nations that are not working towards Sharia are targeting roughly Western forms of government. The Chinese have based their nation on a combination of what most would call Marxism, and free enterprise. As a practice, of course, trade is scarcely Western, but as an economic ideology, it is. Most all nations previously practiced something like what I call Mercantilism, where insiders get the sweetheart deals, and competition outside the literal market is forbidden.

Chakra is thus a descriptive term. I also use it in the sense of what I have elsewhere called a Qualitative Tumbler, as something projected “out there” (Captain quotation mark today) that provokes qualitative change in the system so “attacked”. A friend of mine was telling me about a drill they did in, I think, Scuba School, where two men got one snorkel, and were only allowed to breathe one at a time, which meant they had to cooperate, and keep their cool. They held on to one another via a Roman handshake, such that this theoretically would have worked in the dark. Once they got it down, they were attacked my instructers, who tried both to tear them apart, and to make them panic. Not pleasant, but panicking in a surf zone in enemy territory would be yet more ugly.

Whether we realize it or not, most of us progress alone in intermittent conditions of understanding and confusion. The world is in constant change, and one scarcely needs to look far to find people interpreting the world through outdated lenses, as seen, for example, in those for whom FDR is a hero, and the Vietnam War a tragic mistake (more on that in a moment).

Two men together are more sturdy than each would be alone. Let me posit symbolically, then, that your “partner” is a deep seated, principled committment to learning the real truth of a situation, to the extent you can. As you are attacked, you will fare better over time, than someone who is overwhelmed, and lets go.

Let us posit that your committment, instead, is to another actual person. Let us say that person wants you to go somewhere else, and uses the tumbling of the tides or instructors to gradually ease both of you far, far away. In what we call a trackless ocean, for the sake of clear symbolism, you have no means of fighting this.

Let us further say that your goal is to reach the shore, where the shore is meaningful personal growth. If you attach yourself to a principle, then despite the pummelling of the sea, you can gradually make your way to the shore. If you attach yourself to a person, then if they are loving, and care about you, then they, too will stabilize and guide you (guru literally means “heavy”, and I have often thought the image to be conveyed was something like a ballast in a boat, or an anchor in a storm). If they have other ideas, you will find yourself far at sea.

In the end, you have to decide, and in the end even the decision as to who to trust has to be a peronal one. Perception, always, is personal, even if people choose to walk in lockstep with others.

This is an analogy that needs some work, but the main image I want to convey is a system in motion, being impacted by a stream of different motion, which sets it off course, at least briefly, and sometimes permanently.

I was thinking this morning about the first encounter of school children with what we might term American “Imperfectionism”, which is the doctrine that since some people seem to be claiming we are perfect, and we aren’t (slavery, Jim Crow, slaughter of Indians, etc.), then we are bad. This is a stupid doctrine, taught by stupid people, but a casual reading of history readily shows that stupidity has wings.

The first time kids watch “Roots”, for example, they are permanently molded in ways which some players in our current political landscape are careful to use. And at that moment, a sort of qualitative horizon opens up, which says that if we are capable of that, what else are we capable of? Maybe it’s Americans that are the bad ones, and everyone else the good ones. Particularly if just kids remain ignorant of the history of everyone else, this is a standpoint which can be lasting. This is a result of a qualitative tumbler, or Chakra.

As I have said often, if we judge ourselves by our own stated standards, we fall far short. If we judge ourselves in comparison to the objective history of every other nation on the Earth, we fare exceedingly well. We truly are exceptional.

I’ll stop with the morbid stuff for a while. I just sort of watch breezes blow through me, one direction, then another. I’ve tried to stop it, but it takes a lot of effort, and it doesn’t work. So I roll with it.

Thoughts, it seems to me, are like little machines. They operate on the level of computation, of concrete structures, of things that are, to each individual consciousness, there, and not somewhere else. This is perhaps a bit confusing, since this thought, itself, it coming from somewhere else. It is intuition.

What I try to do is throw thoughts out there. I visualize them, when they hit–when they are read and digested–as little self organizing machines, like Transformers. They affect everyone differently. Some might steel people against me. Others, win them over. Others, lead in a new or old pathway of thought.

Always, we stay in motion. As long as thoughts are moving around, and as long as people are trying to make sense of the world, progress is always possible.

On that score, I think most of us can easily enough visualize one cataclysm or another. Yet, if we can do that, why not a Euclysm, if that works from the Greek? Why not a renewal? Why not a miracle? They do happen.

Random musings, after a workout, listening to “California Stars”.

It’s interesting: I came up with this idea on my own, of clothes which never needed to be washed, and which never wore out, and Doris Lessing dealt with the same topic in Mara and Dann. There, her protagonist Mara found your singlet inhuman, and horrible, since it was the same year after year, and apparently century after century, in apparent contradiction to the way of the world. The same people built indestructible metal houses, and cans and other implements that likewise never wore out.

In a morbid segue that just popped in my head, what about human bodies that never decay? As most will have seen in some ad in some magazine, human bodies can now be made into “art” through a plasticizing process that halts the normal process of material decay. I find it revolting. Based on a conversation I had with a woman in a plane, these displays also feature babies, from the fetus stage, up to fully developed babies.

Is this wrong? First off, I wonder where they get the bodies. All of these people had names, and lives. The woman I talked with commented they all looked Asian. Is North Korea selling bodies, I wonder? With as much death as has happened there, I see no ethical objection to it which would arise within their particular cultural milieu.

It then occurred to me: how far does this go? Do we place bodies as permanent fixtures in art museums? They have them in the Museum of Science and Industry, as anatomical displays. Could we have “Human head in blue, number 7?” Can collectors install them in their living rooms? Does a trade develop, as it apparently has, in body parts, the provenance of which no one knows?

There is something sick about this, reminiscent of that scene in Brave New World, where they run the bodies by the children, to inoculate them from the fear of death.

What is it these “artists” are trying to accomplish? What positive good?

It would seem at a minimum if we are to allow these displays–and they are hugely sucessful wherever they go–we should know who the people on display are, and that they granted the use of their bodies as “art”.

It has long seemed to me that many of our most creative artistic minds have been deranged by ethical relativism, and moral pessimism and nihilism. This was what Ginsburg was “Howl”-ing about in his poem.

How do we make this turn back towards decency and purpose? This is a critical question. Science cannot speak to cultural formations. It can describe, but not prescribe. That is what our reason and our passions are for.

What comes, goes. What was, will one day be no more. It was the violation of this truth that Lessing seems authentically, in her imagination, to have found so abominable. Plastic bodies seem, to me, to exist in the same space, to which we can add numerous other objections.

Evil is tame because there are only a certain number of emotional possibilities. Goodness is wild, in that you can wander wherever you want, as there are no boundaries. It is much more creative, and has a much greater possible experiential range. People miss this since evil people can do anything they want, but in their inner lives they are quite dull. They are “Rote-arian”. They are creatures of habit, and it is like poking someone in the same place over and over, or a record that gets stuck in one spot. It is anger expressed in countless ways, countless times. This is the root of Arendt’s “banality of evil”.

I read “Eichman in Jerusalem”, by the way, and found it vastly overrated. I think that’s where she coined the phrase. That was many years ago, though, so perhaps my memory is faulty.

Edit: I do have a job, for what it’s worth, which varies from few to too many hours a week. I’m currently in the few period, and taking some notes off my voicemail, which is why there are so many posts. I just figured out how to cut and paste them, too. You can’t normally do it in Compose, but you can in Edit HTML.

The first step in adding information to a system is adding the idea that information CAN be added. If I offer up a proposal for fixing something, it may be rejected in its entirety–it may in fact be stupid no matter how enthusiastic I am about it–but it could cause someone else to come up with a completely different, better proposal, but one which would not have existed had I not started the process. This is an important qualitative point.

Most speech has two components: the overt part, and the implications. If, for example, I say someone is intelligent, it necessarily implies that not all people are intelligent. It implies I am capable of recognizing intelligence. It implies there is in fact such a thing as intelligence, and so on.