A man walked into an Italian restaurant and asked for a clock. “We’re sorry”, he was told, “we don’t sell those here.”
He then walked into a clock store and asked for a pizza, and again failed.
“Life is so hard”, he was heard to mutter on his way home.
“I”: let me discuss this word before continuting to my primary thought. I realize many of my introspective posts begin with I. This is my starting point. It is not that I am egoistic, so much as that I cannot see from anyone else’s eyes, or introspect from within any mind but my own. As William James percipiently (and with typical thoroughness of analysis) pointed out 100 years ago, the discipline of psychology can really only be pursued in three ways: introspection which we hope is generally applicable; empirical research involving our physical bodies, such as our neurological systems and statistical analysis (rats in mazes; psychological tests); and a combination of the two.
Quite obviously, I often use the first. I is an appropriate and descriptive word in that case. I will add that the word in Sanskrit for ego is “Ahamkara”, which literally means “I-Maker”. It describes not an immutable self, but a field within which the effect of an I is created. It can be neither said to exist–since it is in constant flux–nor not to exist, since it is plainly there.
Anyway, having circumnavigated the topic three times in conformity with Tibetan Buddhist tradition–but backwards, with a whiskey bottle (Very Old Barton) in my hand and singing George Jones, as per my tradition–I would like to move to what prompted this post, this story
I figured somebody else had typed out the story, and dang if I wasn’t right. Multiple people. More than one person had the same thought, didn’t they? Take a few minutes and read the story. It is a strange story, from Idries Shah’s “Wisdom of the Idiots”.
Read it? No? Well, either way, here is my mind game I would like to present to you: what if you knew that there were not just hundreds of perfect copies of you scattered around the universe, but that you were just a copy of some perfect you who is always already up in heaven?
The point of this story is that this singer of songs thought that he had a unique voice. He was singular. And by extension everyone who knew him was singular. There was no one else like them. They were special. Upon learning they were not in fact special, and in fact a bit inferior, they vanished. Their selves were identical to their vanities.
At a deep level, it seems to me that spiritual growth requires the capacity to imagine our own annihilation, the humility to imagine a happy universe without us; the ability to live in the world and at times so fully merge with experience that we disappear, and let go of our clinging.
The experience of learning there were more you’s would for some people amount to an annihilation of an undesirable sort, since they were fully stuck: they existed like butterflies pinned to a board, content to consider their selves to have been fully described by the label affixed at the base of the pin holding them there. When the label is torn off, they are unable to move, and thus disappear.
What if you met yourself? Me, I visualize myself telling myself I’m ugly, then going out and drinking some beer, chasing some women, then coming home and having a blog-off. What if we both type exactly the same thing? Well, then we are damn geniuses. And idiots.
There is this famous scene in E.M. Forrester’s book “Passage to India” in which a British women has what amounts to a panic attack in caves modelled on the caves of Barabar. As I visualize it, it seems to me the task of the ascetics who lived there would have been to be transparent to the echo, or have been pleasurably tickled by it. Given sufficient vanity, however, it would amount to an attack.
So much of “life” consists in the interaction of events with the qualitative gestalt we call our self. Not for nothing have many of the best minds of human history asked probing questions about the nature of the self; and not for nothing, in my view, have they located the answers not just here and now, but in a world which can be felt but not seen in our present condition.
These are for me just thoughts. They are thoughts arising from feelings, but still just thoughts. They seem to offer a pathway to liberation from worry, emotional strain, and curtailed happiness. This may seem counter-intuitive, but that is only because much of our Western tradition has taught us to view ourselves as machines.
Descartes famously pointed to an animatronic sculpture in a French garden as a model for our physical selves. To that was appended a soul, in his view. We have kept the sculpture, but for all too many, the soul–being introspective, and thus in some respects merely amenable to James first method–has disappeared.
And now I have gone and mucked up even that.
Oh, I forgot what I wanted to say. If you are unable to undergo what I decided to call a “primary” annihilation, if you lack the humility to “disappear” at times, then you must at some point seek a secondary annihilation, which is to say the imposition of your power on the world, which causes and diminuation of the selves of others. You either destroy your own self, or those of others. The first is the path of Goodness; the second of course that of evil.
All of this exists on a continuum of course. Agonistic careerism, for example, consists often in winning relative to others. Now, forcing others to work harder is not intrinsically bad for them, but it is bad for the person who focuses on winning rather than growth, who focuses on the relative diminuation of others rather than self perfection.
It is the NCAA season. Let me offer what I view as the best model for success: “Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” John Wooden.
This model will actually cause general growth, and is thus completely compatible both with material success and primary annihilation.
I saw one other quote there that made me laugh: “Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.”
Few thoughts for your Monday morning.
I was thinking about this conception of living forever. If we are going to live forever, I see no objections to the doctrine of reincarnation. In fact, for those who examine the actual evidence, there are hundreds of amazing stories of children of 1 and 2 years old telling stories of previous lives as soon as they can speak, which when tested prove accurate down to the names of their siblings, the map of their homes, and the way they died.
I decided to take it to a logical extreme, though: what if you could plan your next 10,000 lives? It seemed to me that you could put a musical pattern to it, like Mozart. You could have high points and low points, qualitatively rich lives and boring lives. Perhaps you are even cruel in some lives, since in an eternal order it all works out.
One sees this idea that once you get there, you should stay in heaven. Buddhists desire Nirvana. Hindus “moksha”, which amounts to the same thing. But if everything everywhere is equal, can we really say that heaven is superior? I am not trying to lower heaven to Earth, but rather to elevate Earth to Heaven, such that happiness and satisfaction are possible everywhere.
My children play this game with artillery. At some point they got me into it. Despite my objections to his morality and politics, I still sometimes fancy myself Napoleon. We are all silly sometimes. I am no different.
Anyway, I figured out how to win all the levels quite some time ago, but still find it amusing to win different ways, to change the permutations.
Why would it be impossible to posit, within the context of endless life, and endless iterations of life, that we spirits could not do the same thing? Solve the same problems repeatedly in different ways, just to see if we could?
It seems to me this whole particle/wave thing applies here too. To be clear, “particulation” is what Socialists would refer to as “individualism”, which in the moral chaos within which they choose to live amounts to “pernicious”, “dangerous”, and “hertical”.
To individuate properly, though, you need have been loved, I think. I have more or less defined love as seeing people as they are, and helping them become who they want to be. It has nothing to do with you, and your aims and goals.
As I visualize it, children that are loved emerge from a sea of ennestedness, from a sense of belonging. In another day and age, this was also an identity tied to time and place and economic identity. When the Socialists finally admit that they want a return to Feudalism, the lie of their anti-classist rhetoric will perhaps be admitted even by the stupid.
Be that as it may, the task of the child is to live on land. They must emerge from the sea, on their own, but waves of love and belonging can guide them in. If they live in a very traditional order, they never get far from this oceanic sense of belonging.
In our social order, people are expected to individuate, but very few do. For most people this amounts to managing their own affairs economically, living apart from their parents (whose destiny is a cubby hole from which they periodically squeak), and some combination of sports affiliations and hobbies.
True individuals, though, can go back and forth from the ocean–when they need comfort–and deep inland, when they are exploring, learning, risking.
Some people find the water has dried up. They are in an arid land, with no shelter in sight. This sparks an obsession with sex, and a persistent tendency to use other people to satisfy their own needs, rather than asking first what they have to offer.
I had mentioned two posts ago some ideas on why so many people seem so eager to reject freedom. I had come up with this concept of Maternalism, by which I mean the following: it seems to me many women in our society are jaded by the time they are twenty; they have had sex with multiple partners, fallen in love and had their hearts broken, and been exposed to endless repeats of movies and music portraying women as more or less inanimate sex objects; this must affect their capacity to love deeply, which creates a dearth of genuine maternal love in our society.
Superficial mothers will breed superficial children. They will drink their milk from a cup, but they will never feel truly and deeply loved. In fact, many mothers, lacking nurturing from their husband–whose training was similar to her own–will find in their children the reason to live and the source of love that has been heretofore denied them. This is, in my view, one of the reasons so many kids in the inner cities get pregnant so early: they need love. They just don’t realize that babies take a lot more than they give for many years. This in turn leads to anger and resentment, and more kids who are destined for failure.
Emotional dissatisfaction: this is the climate within which calls for a more “nurturing” State will resonate. These lonely people, who don’t know where to turn, will listen to calls for, oh, I don’t know, say “Hope and Change”?
You first crush peoples spirits. Then you claim you have the solution to alienation. This is a path to freedom for the intellectuals, and slavery for everyone else.
To the point here, the parents of children capable of running a free nation will necessarily be constantly providing a background of emotional support, but also pushing the child to develop an identity of its own. Sometimes the water has to disappear. Sometimes to love is to be cold and cruel. As long as they remember where they came from, they will always know that there is a way back, when they really, really need it.
My two cents.
One sees devotees of Ayn Rand from time to time who more or less seem to have appropriated from the philosophy the idea they don’t need to be polite if they don’t want to, or feel gratitude towards people who helped them. Economically, this makes some sense, in that people will not associate voluntarily with people whose company they don’t like, or do work for someone without recompense. Fair enough. They don’t owe anybody anything unless they entered into a contract with them, and vice versa.
But no man is an island. Take the famous skyscraper scene at the end of “The Fountainhead”. Howard Roark designed the building, but as the architect he would have done something close to nothing of the actual construction. Yes, every workman there was getting paid a wage, but can the building itself really be called the work alone of Roark? Would there not be good cause for him to locate himself within a social order, a team, a–God forbid–voluntary “Collective”?
Thoughts have, in my mind, textures. The vision I get from Ayn Rand is that all individuals are like little steel widgets. We can plug into one machine, or another. As we call combine in endless spontaneous forms, the capacity for large scale work emerges. One could homologize, I suppose, the building of a skyscraper with the system of planetary motion. Both are rule-governed, and the expression of an order which is latent, but quite real. But
In the end, though, everyone is alone, being the sole judges of merit (although such judgements can of course combine in the marketplace), and sole sources of creativity.
What is interesting about this to me is that Rand (real name Alisa Rosenbaum) grew up under the Soviets. As such, she was subjected to the alienation and moral atrophy that such regimes breed. They breed apathy, contempt for human life, conformity, and brutishness.
In my own conception, Leftism is like a permanent wave function. In physics, you have particles and waves. Matter can possess either attribute, depending on the question you ask it. Where Rand seems stuck in the particularizing, Leftists (who include of course “Fascists” and National Socialist) have a blanket mass narrative that applies to all people and all times. You “are” who you were born to be. If you are German under the Nazis, and you are not Jewish, gypsy, slavic, homosexual or handicapped in any way, that is from their perspective wonderful. If you are Jewish, your best destiny is death. People are fit into boxes without regard to their individual differences.
I saw a bumper sticker today which read: “Drive a Liberal crazy: work hard and be happy”. This is what sparked this train of thought. By what process of mind does one repeatedly impose policies which have never worked towards their stated end?
The simple fact is that these retards exists within a mass myth, withing a LARGE narrative that admits no details, and into which all counternarratives can be sunk, like so many safes in quicksand (with the bodies, as in “the Lovely Bones”).
By permitting details, and individual perception, Rand/Rosenbaum is of course much, much more useful than any conceivable leftist narrative.
At the same time, I feel there is a possibility of a balance. Neither side is balanced, although one is clearly superior to the other. You have to be able to go back and forth between being “atomic” and being general. This is what I have called Perceptual Breathing, and is the reason that concept exists.
That’s enough for today. That concept is discussed in the first essay, and the piece defining terms.
I congratulate my children when tney hurt themselves. I tell them that if they aren’t skinning a knee or bumping their head or something from time to time, they are not doing their job as children. Once I’ve verified they are OK, I also laugh at them.
Today I went for a hike, and my oldest said that if I fell down the hill, as long as I was alright, they would laugh at me. I said that was fine.
A story I’ve told often to them is when I was a plumber’s assistant a long time ago, there was a beam in the attic where we kept some supplies that was large and low. It was too hard to duck under it, but it was at just that height where you forget about it. Someone had written “Watch Out”, and someone “seriously, you will hit your head on this.” I made a mental note for that not to be me. How could anyone be that stupid?
Well, when I did, it was one of those things where your head stops instantly, but your feet keep going, and you literally land on your ass. I literally saw the stars people talk about (not for the first time). They think this story is hilarious, because once I picked myself up, I myself thought it was funny.
Pain is a fact of life. That is a given. How we choose to deal with it, and how much risk we incur, are up to us. That is the domain of our freedom. You can live a very safe life with little injury, little anxiety, and from my point of view little growth.
This isn’t what I want for my children. I want them to fall on their asses from time to time, cry their eyes out, get back up, and go again without worrying about it.
When someone falls in front of you, sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do it watch them struggle, doing nothing, until they realize on their own they have the power to manage the situation. I literally did this with kids when they were younger. I would only help them once I was satisfied they had made a serious effort.
If you pick a man up, you teach him to remain on the ground unless he is helped. If you teach him to get up–which in large measure consists in forcing him to figure it out for himself–then you teach him to walk as a free man.
We see so many people rejecting freedom. I will make some of my commentary on that my next post.
A man walked into a hardward store to buy some nails. When he went to the counter and offered to pay for the $2 nails with a $100 bill, the clerk told him they could not change that large a bill. At first, he was angry, reflecting that their lack of preparation had cost them the money. Then he realized that his lack of preparation had cost him his nails. He left the store a wiser man.
One interesting thing to point out about the Steven Lerner story (SEIU official plans to crash economy on purpose, creating generalized poverty to help the poor be less lonely) is that that tape had to have come from a spy. I am surely not revealing secrets here, since the first question Lerner would have asked is who the leaker was.
The spy presumably was invited, and may well have been a former leftists. This is the interesting part. Leftism appeals to the morally high-minded since it excels at creating morally high-minded rhetoric. They are going to end racism, or poverty, or the use of the American military to bully other nations so “corporations” can make more money. They are going to save the environment, and have a damn good time smoking weed and grooving out in drum circles doing it.
As I have said, though, Socialism is at root a moral narrative. It is not a viable economic plan. It is not a social system, except to the extent of some murky utopian images of people getting along since money is no longer around. It is not even scientific, since if it were formatted as a hypothesis, it has been falsified by repeated experimentation.
This means that the only coherent part of it is a claim of how the world should be, and this claim is that all people should be alike materially and culturally. This latter part is obscured by an obsession with cultural others, but the only point of that is to blunt America’s cultural cohesion, and that of Western civilization more generally. You talk up others, and in so doing talk down yourself. You don’t say “they are great and we are great”. You say “they are great, and we are sinners: repent for your very existence, and we probably won’t hate you”.
But bubbles are popping everywhere. Previously deluded people are waking up and realizing what is actually being planned, what socialism actually means in practice. And they don’t like it. It does not make the world a better place. It does not increase justice of any sort. It does not improve the environment (China is a centrally planned economy in many respects), and it doesn’t make anyone HAPPIER, if they were not already capable of happiness.
The Danish model is not awful. It is just decadent. It is a system incapable of sustaining itself. The population is falling across Europe. The only people increasing in population are people who do not believe in either democracy or Socialism.
And to the point, Obama and his cohort are not planning a Danish model. Every indication is that his heroes are Mao and Lenin. Their ideas led to mass death, much suffering, tyranny, and no relief whatever from the human condition, except to the extent the vodka factories met their quotas.
Obama is no Lenin. Lenin sat in jail for many years, lived the furtive life of an exile, and was very intelligent, very persuasive, and very strong-willed. Obama is a boy in a man’s suit.
He surrounds himself with some dangerous people though.
The point of this thread, which admittedly wanders around–it was a long day–is that all of the leftists in this nation will from now on have to wonder about their Operational Security. Who can they trust?
In order to create a high degree of security, they will both have to severely limit their communications, and betray to the periphery just how ruthless they actually are, by process of an exclusion that did not heretofore obtain.
The Vietcong were very good at internal subversion, but they were able to rely on hatred both for the Chinese, and the Catholic Presidents, particularly Diem. This mobilized people, because they promised–falsely–something better.
Here, though, the stakes are a generalized collapse of our nation, with all the terror, poverty, violence, and suffering that will involve. To be on the side of the Left, now, is to hate this nation, and the people in it, all of them.
It is my belief that thoughtful people are realizing this en masse, and that the cruel and hateful sadists at the core are going to have great difficulty integrating this reality into general plans, even with a sympathizer in the Oval Office.
Couple quick points. First the spirit of “revolution” always has been, from a Leftist perspective, one of violence, and not creation. They want to tear down, destroy, desecrate what is, because they hate the world we live int passionately. They hate the suburbs, and plastic toys, churches, two parent homes, and “bourgeois” morality. When I say “nihilist”, I being precise. That term was leveled at them by their opponents, but if you read Nechaev, you see a lot of cleverness attached to the task of destroying economic and institutional orders, but more or less a shrug of the shoulder when asked with what they intend to replace it. That isn’t his problem. He will create a pile of rubble, then YOU, future generations figure out what to do with. What, one might ask, if we rebuild the same thing, since it worked for people quite well. Well, he would say, then I will destroy it again.
This is the level mental midgets like Lerner are operating on. To call them stupid is somewhat wrong, though. They are stupid in that they fail to see that their hatred makes them impervious to normal forms of happiness and satisfaction. They fail to grasp their agenda is fundamentally evil, and that it hurts most those it claims to care about. Death and destruction: that is all they want. That is the extent of their thinking, which they cloak when they think about it in pious rhetoric about some group that is supposedly going to benefit.
Anyway, let us suppose that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not just abuse the authority granted them to line the wallets of the executive committees. Let us suppose they had a secondary aim.
They knew they would go belly up at some point. They made too many bad loans. It was inevitable, and even though they were clearly morally stupid, I don’t think they were financially stupid.
What if, though, they had a long term plan to get WAll Street dependent on them as a customer and backer? They bought up huge tracts of the mortgage backed securities. Why would you not stop a couple months before the election? Why could you not time this with a call to your buddies over at the Credit Rating Agencies and tell them you would like them to reconsider the value of those securities, and that until they did, you weren’t buying any more.
It was that cash flow failure, that excessive inventory, that caused the big banks–Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns–to fail.
Why could socialist revolutionaires at FM and FM more or less precipitated it? The own, directly or indirectly, 75% of all housing in America.
Ponder that fact. OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OWNS most of the supposedly private housing in America. Why are we in effect not already considered to have socialized housing?
Why does not Fannie Mae’s decision to patent a device to regulate your power use remotely make sense? At some point, they presumably plan to make it obvious to everyone what has until now been happening in the dark.
Sometimes the best lies are the most flagrant and obvious. People think “surely that can’t be happening.”
I’m not sure I agree with my last post. I reserve the right to label myself an idiot. Please keep in mind that I am putting into a public realm what amount to open musings and ramblings, and that if I were driving a car, it would regularly be in the ditch, the other lane, 30′ above the ground, underwater, upside down, inside out, and rolling along on one wheel. Yes, there is a lane with my name on it, but what fun is that?