Month: April 2011

I’m the guy who is trying to throw his arms around the world when I’m out drinking. I hear stories, and want to offer “good advice”. What I often realize the day after is that I am not sure if what I said was helpful or not.

The desire to help others is affective, it is a blessing. At the same time, ACTUALLY helping others requires perception. You have to work hard at it, and you have to understand that you will at times be stupid. What you cannot do is blissfully leave a trail of wrecks behind you and congratulate yourself for your generosity.

As an example, I’m not a fan of most forms of talk therapy. I think it encourages moral weakness and whining.

The “sexual revolution” did not make most people happier. I think it diminished actual emotional intimacy, which is necessary for actually good–satisfying beyond the purely physical–sexual relations.

As I often say, Leftism “works to”, in Hayekian terms, moral and economic collapse.

You can’t absolve yourself from responsibility for consequences simply because you wander around sowing, as you see it, flowers, if they in fact come up weeds.

Put as simply as I can, if you don’t care about the consequences of your actions, you are not a good person, regardless of your affective state. I have in mind in particular people who smell of patchouli and who talk about compassion, but who to this very day have not realized the role they played in the horrors that followed the Vietnam War; and who to this day are not willing to see the horrors which fill this world, the potential role of military force in ending them, or the strongly pernicious effects of the economic and politically implemented social strategies they embrace.

Put another way: stupid people are not good people. You have to be willing to tell hard truths to yourself, and if you aren’t, you are a useless–generally counter-productive–child. To be clear on this, simple and stupid are two different things. Common sense is in fact common, and only corrupted by most contemporary forms of “higher” education, which we might more properly call “intellectual dehabilitation”. IQ and the capacity to do the right thing are quite distinct.

I have a picture of Albert Camus on my wall. For a non-atheist, this might seem incongruous, but my attachment to him is that he struggled to rationalize doing the right thing, even when everything and everyone around him was falling apart. He was, in the latter phase of his career, a sincere moralist, even if he struggled to justify it.

Perhaps the word most associated with him is Absurdity. Life is absurd, if we know we are going to die, and if we know it is final. I well remember one character from his novel “The Plague”, who spent his life moving a pile of beans (or something similar) from one side of the table to another, one at a time, then back again. Qualitatively, was that worse than a life of selfless service to others? Intellectually, I think Camus thought no. Affectively, he was unable to accept this, though, and didn’t. He broke with Sartre when the latter insisted in his Communism, when the extent of the brutality of the Soviet regime became clear.

It occurred to me this morning, though, that life is just as absurd when we believe in God. Intellectually, how do we justify anything? My entire project is oriented around the generation of feeling. Feeling cannot be justified. It is simply awesome when good, and horrible when bad. It is the root of experience. If we must experience, and if rationally experience is extended beyond this world, the only rational path forward is figuring out how to generate positive experience. The experience itself is still ridiculous. We are not machines, and as such are messy. There is nothing wrong with this, but it is silly. You have to laugh at us.

An analogy I have used in the past, and used in my “Goodness Sutra”, linked on my other site, is that of bubbles. I once had this image of each of us isolated as bubbles in an endless ocean, unsure of where the sun was, and unsure even what direction up was. What to do? Can we not relate to one another, with love? Certainly, we can use hate, but does that decrease our sense of isolation? I think it enables temporary groupings relative to other groupings, but it is forced, and not natural: it is not comfortable.

We have a word for prejudging. Why not a word for judgments rendered with all the facts? It is one thing to say someone looks like a lazy moocher, and another to KNOW they are lazy moochers.

Judging preemptively and failing to judge once the facts are known are both abuses of the moral sentiment.

I went to a rock show last night–some noisy folks, all of whom had good voices. I had earlier in the day said to a friend that all love is ridiculous, but that it is even more ridiculous never to feel it.

As I watched the show with my PBR, it occurred to me that it is a species of insanity to give yourself fully over to the music, but equally insane to approach it with a stance of ironic detachment.

How can one swim perfectly in the ocean? Are you not always just muddling along, going up and down with the waves?

It occurred to me too that there is a ritualistic quality to rock. One of the bands reminded my of the Smiths, and I was thinking about all these bands that attract–what do we call it?–cult followers. It seems to me that this is a ritual where all the members of the group are bound in a shared mania that is strengthened with the power of the music. It is what I at times call Ersatz Sacred. I think that is my phrase any way.

In a fundamental way, is God less present at a rock concert–if we by “God” we mean an oceanic feeling of belonging–than in a church? Is God more in churches, in any way? If He exists, then he is everywhere.

My feeling is that God is the web which connects us all. God is not sentient: God IS sentience. God underlies the possibility of consciousness. God is the formed when it is unformed. God represents the possibility of form.

Anyway, I think it is worth breaking “religion” into components. One part of its role, in my view, is served equally well by all group functions, including musical events. I’m not at all sure, as far as that goes, that church going fosters closeness to God, absent what might be termed “technologies” like Yogic meditation.

The central tenet of what I tend to call either economics or Counter-demand-side economics–where the negation of a negation logically equals a positive–is that investors invest and employers employ. This is really a stretch for some, but that is the case in its nutshell.

The problem with Socialists–in a relatively free market at any rate–is that they want “rich” people to create new businesses and new jobs, and then they want to take their money. They want people to want to make money, then they want to be sure they don’t. They want the economic benefits of business expansion, but they don’t want anyone to benefit from it. This is quite literally the mindset of the child, but that is the level they operate at. You can’t not be stupid and ignorant of human nature, and still support these policies.

For their part, businesspeople are understandably reluctant to settle in for the night in a henhouse run by a pack of wolves.

This is the underlying purpose of the Keynseian “stimulus”: when you can’t get the people spending money who should be spending money–because you want to take it, and they know you want to take it–then you get government “investing” the money. You know, the “investor of last resort”, when all the actually competent businesspeople have headed for the hills, with justification.

This is where they get sneaky. They think that if they borrow the money, and if they enact “tax cuts”, that the economy will get moving, the businesspeople will jump back in and POOF, they have them caught. This is a bit like a six year old thinking that because he can catch his father in hide and seek that his father couldn’t escape him if he wanted to. It is infantile.

Sooner or later they realize this, and that is when they start arguing for a command economy, so the money will stay put for them to steal. If they get their way, as in Cuba and North Korea, the money gets spent, once, and after that the golden goose is dead. Maybe the bourgeoisie and capitalists are dead or in prison: they sure as hell are not creating jobs and economic growth. Mass poverty ensues.

Short of this, they put the jitters in everybody, and the nation as a consequence suffers.

There is literally nothing good in the doctrine of Leftism–except rhetorically–and much, much evil.

It is the doctrine of fools and the wicked.

If I borrow money for war, or for social programs, does it matter to the people who lend the money, if they can create as much money as they want, whenever they want?

A loan is always a claim of ownership, and if that loan is created from nothing, then that claim of ownership is likewise created from nothing. From this basic mechanism, those who control it can eventually own everything. They can’t lose, provided they keep their legal protection.

I am speaking, of course, of the central banks, including the Federal Reserve, the IMF they largely control, and their cartelization agency, the Bank for International Settlement [who by the way have planned deflation for us in the coming decade, which will be quite onerous given the amount of money that was just put into the system by the same people. Inflation/deflation is a basic method of generating depression, and all the wealth transfer which it enables.]

The point I wanted to make here is that they are equally well served by the rhetoric of “capitalism” and “socialism”. Obama is serving them–who leftists would generally inaccurately identify as capitalists–just as Bush did. Wars and social spending: they all generate debt, interest on the debt, industrial and financial weakness, fire sales, and a dependent populace.

It is a source of on-going frustration to me that leftists lack the mental agility to recognize that corporations are employers who create jobs, and that when they inaccurately conflate Wall Street with free market economics, they serve the interests of no one but the politicians who use them to get elected, and the actual powers behind Wall Street, who of course benefit from the policies they enact.

It is equally frustrating that conservatives, who otherwise understand how things work, fail to see how the Federal Reserve banks leach wealth from the most powerful economic system ever developed.

Here, again, is my treatment of the topic: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

I had initially conceived the previous post on Homosexuality as a meditation on why we–some people–view it as a sin in the first place. Getting some feedback, however, this sparked further thinking. I cannot overemphasize how valuable criticism is for me.

The task of geniune Liberalism–which is to say the doctrine of people like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill of maximal freedom for and emphasis on the individual–is to built a society composed of countless strands of personal relationships, in a complex web of meaning and personal satisfaction without any real center, and very rich with information and connection.

A Liberal response to a claim like “Homosexuality is wrong” might look something like the following:

I understand that at first glance it might seem unnatural for men to be with men, and women with women, but the first thing I need to point out is that sex is actually a small part of who we are. We have jobs, bills to pay, and responsibilities that fill most of our days. When we are together we have the same arguments; we worry about the same things. We wonder if love is real, and what our futures will hold.

True, we cannot physically procreate, but we can adopt. In any event, we tend to be more educated than average, and if you compare us to comparable heterosexual demographics–particularly in Europe–most of them aren’t having kids either. The survival of the race isn’t really at issue, is it?

What I would like you to understand is that while I respect your right to your opinion, in my case at least it is injurious to be labelled as somehow defective or wounded, just because of the sexual drives within me. I endured a lot of teasing as a child, which frankly have left me very sensitive.

Please keep these things in mind as you are typing. As you say, we both have our rights, but you need not exercise them all the time, if it does little good, and might be emotionally painful to someone who has done you no harm.

Now, that would be quite good. That would be effective in my case, and frankly does cause me to rethink what I wrote. I will leave the original post there for instructive purposes, even though I would tend to want to take it down, especially if I actually got a response like that.

A leftist response would look like this:

You have no right to talk about homosexuals. You are a bigot and homophobe and should be ashamed of yourself. If I knew where you were, I would set up a picket tomorrow to denounce tools like yourself for your viciousness and hate. Fuck you, you piece of shit.

In the one case a connection is established, a relationship of rapport and mutual consideration built, and our social order strengthened. In the latter case, a divide has emerged, which will only be bridged with violence; historically, in the form of laws repressing the spontaneous expression of non-conforming sentiments, such that no genuine bridge building and development of human empathy can happen.

Over time, the latter approach builds spiritless, unempathetic, robotic human beings. It levels all relationships to a flat plain, and erects on that plain a throne for the dictator, from whom all meaning and action is to emanate, but who climbs from that plain himself, and therefore has nothing valuable to offer.

I was thinking about this yesterday: which is the greater sin–two men or two women having sex with one another; or a father siring a son them abandoning him? In one case, the consequences are consensual, and negotiable; in the latter, lifelong pain is the result, and entirely beyond the control of the child.

Which is worse: homosexuality; or being married and betraying your spouse with infidelity?

Many, of course, would balk at linking homosexuality with sin at all. In my view, such people are simply unlucky. They are either born that way, or made that way through sexual and/or emotional trauma.

For some women, particularly, I think it may well be more emotionally satisfying, but seems not to be for men, who seem to retain their promiscuity in all too many cases, along with dramatically elevated levels, as a population, of drug and alcohol abuse.

Personally, I don’t care either way. They do what they do, and I do what I do.

I just thought it worth comparing some of the ways in which people hurt one another. Homosexuality does it not at all, at least in its basis. No one is hurt, and in general people are happier (at least than the alternative, which would involve suppressing some basic part of your identity), since sexual expression is a natural urge.

Edit: I will add to that that emotional expression is a natural urge, too, and probably more important. This ties in with my notion of “qualitative repression”, defined in my glossary of neologisms (and new uses of old words, which I propose to call neoarchaologism.)

Perhaps for now obvious reasons, my sexual activities would be roughly the same as they are now if were gay.

I will say I do in general stick to my principles, even if I do question them at times.

Rihanna:

Sticks and stones may break my bones
But chains and whips excite me

This is currently a big hit. I just heard it on the radio.

S&M makes sense to me in a world denuded of love. I was thinking about it today, that when you are in love, you are in this sort of trance state, where the world is altered somehow in strange but desirable ways. It is still a type of madness.

S&M aims to stimulate a qualitative risk of altered states, but one without the risk of actual emotional vulnerability. These people will go to all sorts of lengths both to approach one another, and to avoid genuine emotional intimacy.

Never having done it, this is my speculation. It does not interest me in the slightest. I will take my emotional wounds all day every day. They may hurt, but they tell me I am still alive.

S&M is a type of death, as the imagery associated with it plainly shows.

For those unfamiliar with my method, I am not calling it right or wrong: I am calling it an incompetent means of pursuing the emotional satisfaction we all want. Sex, likewise, is an incompetent means, and the connection of sex with willful and voluntary cruelty and masochism is obvious: is not emotionally detached sex already a sin against fulfillment, in many cases, particularly over the long term?

What we WANT is to hold hands and walk down country roads. By the age of 13 or so, though, nowadays, most kids have abandoned that fantasy for “maturity”, which seems to normally start with oral sex, and advance to hormonal driven coitus, all without the CAPACITY for lasting committment by the boy–and probably any more by the girl, although they are wired differently.

If you risk nothing, you get nothing. If you cannot trust, you will always be alone. If you cannot get hurt and go again, then life looks like a really scary ride. You get off by closing yourself emotionally, and having done that, not uncommonly by leaving altogether. In my view the only reason suicide rates are not skyrocketing is effective drugs that act on a physical level.

My two cents.

I am not seemingly meant to work within large corporations or other large human frameworks requiring me to be demure and willing to ignore blatant affronts to my cognitive or other sovereignty.

As you watch people climb the corporate ladder, there is this point where they stop protesting the injurious. They get crapped on, and figure they’ll just dish it out when they get higher up and in a position to do so.

Part of fitting in is always being willing to subordinate your opinion to others. Now, obviously, in any human system you can’t always get your way. To demand it is stupid. At the same time, there is a big difference between compromising because you have to, and forgetting what your principles and beliefs are in the first place.

Organization Men (and Women) forget who they are. They accept the unacceptable so many times without complaint that they forget they once had backbone.

This is the problem, too, with politicians, whose constraints are always public opinion. They get muted and chastened by the views of the electorate, and so water down their own beliefs that when it comes time to stand for something, they have forgotten how.

I have no idea if Donald Trump would make a good President, but it can be stated with no hope of contradiction that he is an individualist. He does things his own way, for his own reasons. Obviously, he always hopes to capture greater notoriety and/or business success, but what he is not trying to do is fit in. He is trying to create his own unique brand, and is obviously quite sincere in doing so.

That is why and how he brought up the issue of Obama’ identity, which has been so successfully suppressed by the propaganda machines in our airwaves.

People care about this issue. They know they are being lied to, about this, about the debt, about Obamacare, about Social Security, about Medicare, but are unable to find anyone willing to buck their pollsters.

Sometimes you have to lead, and wait for people to follow. I think that’s what he’s done. Again, I can’t say if he’s smart enough to be President, but I’m quite sure Obama isn’t, and he is occupying the office now.

What we want is people who are NOT organization men. What we have been doing has NOT been working.