Month: February 2012

I posted this some time ago, but only recently noted a typo which made my meaning unclear. Since I can’t find this in the Edit screen for some reason, I am simply reposting it.

For example, a trait of narcissists is that they expect their children to be exactly like them, little carbon copies. Yet, is this same demand not made in traditional cultures, where conformity ie expected, often to very rigidly enforced social codes of behavior? When there is no demand that a “self” be formed, is narcissism present or not? We assume that it must, because we believe in the power and importance of individual perspectives, but such value inheres in systems in motion, in which new accurate decisions must be made in complex situations. If your people has lived the same way for a 1,000 years and nothing changes, is there value in independent thinking? To argue otherwise one needs, I think, to begin to introduce notions of spiritual growth.

Many years ago, I read some conspiratorial large black book that suggested a link between Marxism and Satanism, the name of which I have forgotten. It was suggested to me by a friend whose family was politically connected. Well, I Googled those words today, and found this interesting link.

There are numerous interesting quotes from Marx here, but this will need to stand in for all of them:

With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the face of the world,
And see the collapse of this pygmy giant whose fall will not stifle my ardor.
Then will I wander godlike and victorious through the ruins of the world
And, giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.

In the intervening years I have developed this notion, that of Cultural Sadeism, in which the simple desire for pain, death and destruction is expressed politically and disguised–as indeed all Satanic naratives must be–in the rhetoric of compassion and community. No proper Sadeist tells the truth, unless in so doing he can hurt someone. That is just how it works.

When you add to this the frequent admiration that Saul Alinsky expressed for Lucifer, you see a common pattern. Now, I am not a Christian, per se, but it is manifestly obvious to anyone with eyes that there are evil people in this world, those who enjoy the power that comes with being able to hurt other people.

This is, I am increasingly convinced, the task which those who run the IMF in particular, and to a lesser extent the Federal Reserve, have set themselves.

In the end, I only perceive two primal motivational structures in this world: that of Love, and that of Power. In this, I agree with the Christians. Both are mixed in most people, and each expressed to varying extents during the course of their lives.

Yet, every Bell Curve has a beginning and an end: these are our saints, and our demons. Marx was a demon, as have been his followers ever since. No beliefs in non-material realities are needed to accept this view. One simply need term him an aggressively violent sociopath, who worked through his books–as did, by and large, Sade himself–to accomplish pain and destruction.

We see this metaphor of emotional “scars”, which more or less follows the idea that if you are cut, you can heal, but scar tissue is left.

I don’t believe this applies to emotional energies. I think that the process of “healing” is not that of returning to a condition of status quo ante, but rather of developing a qualitativelyi new gestalt.

Emotional healing is thus really emotional growth.

Pateience and time can break any watch.

I have a specific meaning, but will leave that as a cognitive Rorschach Test.

It has long been my contention that whenever mainstream science wakes up and considers the possibility that life is something more than material elements happening to fall together continually over millions of years, they will realize that there is something in life I have often called “non-statistical coherence”. There is a pattern and order to life that is broader and deeper than can be explained by purely materialistic models. OF COURSE we understand how DNA molecules replicate, how embryos grow, etc. What we do not understand is how the intelligence is added, by which undifferentiated stem cells become differentiated (red blood, bone, etc.) cells, and go to the right places, and build the right shapes.

The way I visualize life is that a spirit enters a prepared place, and builds the body around it. It brings with it a template, an order, and the material responds to it, with the mechanical tools provided by the DNA and various proteins.

The thought I had the other day I wanted to pass along, though–this is all more or less repetition–is that there are orders of life. The first aspect of life is awareness, by which I mean the capacity to react to environmental circumstances systemically. Plants, as an example, seem to have “feelings”. If you have never watched it, “The Secret Life of Plants” is worth the watch. (I have not watched this link, but assume it is OK.)

Now, the Jains have this idea that different sorts of life have different numbers of “senses”. If memory serves, plants have one (although it may be stones–since I think they believe everything is alive, making plants 2).

In my typology, then, plants have one grade of life. Animals have a second, the capacity for directed and thus purposive motion. They have the ability both to react and to make decisions.

Humans are capable of being conscious of being conscious, as individuals. I can think “I think”. This is a third level.

Extrapolating, though, I come up with a fourth level: that of being aware of OTHER consciousnesses, not just theoretically, but in actual union. This is the capacity for love, and the next stage of evolution.

Finally, logically, it seems to me that there is a superconsciousness, God, permeating everything, and that my consciousness can be conscious of this other grade of consciousness. This may or may not be the highest level.

These are of course just words, but may lead somewhere for someone. Good luck!!!

The more I study the matter, the more obvious it seems to me that the root cause of totalitarianism–particularly that sponsored by intellectuals–is the prevalence amongst such people of clinical narcissism, the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Quite literally, such people are capable neither of conceiving that other points of view might be valid, or that their own conceptions other than perfectlyh correct. They are incapable of empathy, of feeling other people’s pain, other than in the abstract, which is useful to them in that they can then become, again in the abstract, the “saviors” of people who have not asked for their help, and who generally cry for them to cease and desist once they realize in what their “help” consists.

It is said (by Christopher Lasch, among others) that we live in the Age of Narcissism. If we posit that there is no such thing as a NONmalignant narcissist, perhaps it is easier to see why we are surrounded by oceans of self doubt, rage, intellectual incoherence, pervasive muttering by our so-called leaders, and are on a runaway train directed over the cliff of national bankruptcy. All of this is plain to a casual observer of our media.

It is perhaps ironic that what are arguably the two most pernicious influences on the American landscape–Leftism and Objectivism–were both brought into being by Russians, whose harsh world perhaps encourages the sort of inwardness that causes them to forget that Others exist at all.

Again, with regard to Objectivism, I will deal with it presently. For the time being, let me simply note that in her own lifetime, what she created was a Cult of Personality, one characterized by purges and even literal loyalty oaths. That is not freedom: it is, as some percipient observers even then noted, Fascism.

Here is Santorum’s position on cutting spending, plank one in his program: “Commit to cut $5 trillion of federal spending within 5 years.”

That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But you know what? It doesn’t mean a fucking thing, and it pisses me off.

Once you learn how these fucking clowns ruining our country do their math, you realize that what he is almost certainly talking about is cutting $5 trillion from planned INCREASES in spending, and that spread out over as many as a ten years or more. He may be talking less than the $20 billion–one sixth of what we borrow MONTHLY–Romney has planned to cut from the annual budget.

I want to be crystal clear: if we do not elect Ron Paul, it will not make one fucking bit of difference if we reelect Obama or any of the other three knuckleheaded cowards running for the Republican nomination.

WE ARE GOING BROKE. THIS IS ALL SERIOUS PEOPLE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT. Period. All of our power–political, economic, military–depends on being able to pay our bills. We will lose our liberty within 15-20 AT MOST if we keep electing crass cowards and fools. This is the simple and unavoidable truth.

For my part, I see no serious reason to object to a third party run by Paul, if he can’t get the nomination. There is so little substantive difference fiscally between Obama and the Bobsey Triplets that I really would prefer the chance of Obama to the certainty of futility; and in any event, Mitt Romney is the only who would even be able to beat Obama.

I’ve had a few, and have some long serious posts to make, but am choosing to postpone them. For now: “To fear the new is to fear personal growth; and to do this is to choose death.”

It’s not bad. I have been playing a lot lately with the notion of qualitative growth. We develop selves that are a cluster of habits, but often those selves are constructed to solve problems which no longer exist once we leave our homes. They solve the wrong problems, and quite often prevent the solution of new problems, or even create problems in and of themselves.

It is in my view a useful and often true belief that we are enabled by birth to solve emotional difficulties, and that the challenge is less to create solutions, as to not PREVENT the emergence of solutions. To some greater or lesser extent, I think all of us regularly kill our better, higher selves, out of fear.

Again, I’ll have more to say. Tonight I am going to watch some mindless TV. It’s like drinking a Coke: what you do rarely will not hurt you too much. My mind has been very, very active today, and I think I have some good ideas to ponder, develop, and eventually deploy.

We borrow $120 billion a MONTH, and this will continue if we reelect Obama, OR if we elect Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, or Newt Gingrich. NONE of them have plans to cut spending other than cosmetically. To the extent they address it, it is to use tax cuts to stimulate the economy, which does nothing to affect the size of government.

There is only one credible fiscal conservative in the race: Ron Paul. He plans to abolish multiple Cabinet level departments, cut spending by a trillion his first year, balance the annual budget in three years, and cut taxes to stimulate the economy.

If out of control government is your concern, do not look to anyone but Ron Paul to address it.

As importantly, please consider that only Ron Paul and Mitt Romney poll well enough to beat Obama. People forget that the battle to win the Republican Primary and that to win the General Election are two different beasts. Paul attracts support across the political spectrum. There are MANY Democrats who will vote for Paul over Obama, but not Romney.

Here is a poll that bears this out: http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/09/Who-Would-You-Vote-For-in-November-if-the-Candidates-Were.gif

If this basic logic makes sense to you, please repost this link, or cut and paste it an email it to your friends and relatives.

Morality is movement. If the moral sense is not vital, it is dead. Persisting absolutism in specifics is death. I say this in particular with regard to people like Ayn Rand, who I now realize qualified on all 9 diagnostic criteria as having a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. One trait of such people is that you are either with them or against them. There is no gray.

This trait in her appealed to many people, drifting as they were (and are) in a world of moral relativism. You are confused, and you want someone to cry out “this is wrong, and this is right”.

This is, however, the social basis of Fascism, whether of the nationalistic, racist, or classist (Communistic) variety. The cry for Absolutism is the cry to be submerged into a uniform and very dull mass of people all saying the same thing. If they are all saying: we are unique and elite individuals–as Objectivists under Rand’s direct influence did, and as many seemingly even now do–they are still chanting in unison.

As I see, there are two principle meaningful sources of happiness: effective work, characterized by “Flow”; and effective love, characterized by taking pleasure in the happiness of others.

Now, we see this demand from time to time that our role in life is to “serve others”. I don’t accept that this is our primary task. It is rejection of this idea that Objectivists find so appealing in Rand’s philosophy. What if you don’t WANT to serve others? What if it pisses you off? What if the people you are supposed to serve are whiny, self indulgent jackasses?

I have an answer for this, in motion. As I often do, I will use the analogy of the particle and the wave: you must be both, and be able to transition back and forth. To be interesting, to be someone whose entire sense of personal value does not depend on others, you must have the capacity for de facto narcissism, in the self absorption of hard creative work. When you are a creative INDIVIDUAL, you are particulate, you are separate.

Even clinical narcissists, in the throes of real creativity, are intensely interesting, and pull people in. That is what Rand did.

But the monad is alone; it can never be fully satisfied without regular absorption in something larger: hence the wave, the satisfaction of helping other people also learn how to do effective work, which includes the “work” of being happy with you, and the work you do being happy with them: being empathetic, supportive, comforting when it is needed, and cajoling when that is needed.

Above all, one must remember the principle that growth is the task–growth as individuals, growth as members of a social group, and eventually growth by default as a global community. This in my view is the nature of Goodness, which I view as the most USEFUL purpose of life.

I will reiterate that I do have absolute values, but that these values can get deployed in such various ways, that they should enable people to keep their eyes on the goal, and not get stuck in dogmatism. Those values, again, are: the rejection of self pity; perseverance (whose most basic element is not killing yourself); and perceptual breathing/perceptual movement, which in its most basic form is the persistent and habitual rereconciliation of abstractions with observable reality, and in particular of the connection (or not) between intention and outcome.

As an interesting exercise of that last, one might I think productively ask what Ayn Rand’s philosophy has “acted to”, in Hayek’s sense. It is clearly not all bad, but much of it is. Plainly it acts to build narcissists, since that is her ideal.

She warrants treatment on my other website, by which I mean I intend to write an essay on her life, philosophy, and use both as an entry way to a discussion of my own views on the nature and purpose of Individualism.

For now, I did want to offer several cursory observations. First, she was almost certainly a clinical narcissist. She seems never to have actually loved her husband, Frank O’Connor, hurt him often, and yet needed him desperately.

I think she had a “Rosebud” moment in her early childhood, which can actually likely be identified. I will pull the story.

No John Galt would need Ayn Rand. Nor would he need sycophants of the sort with which she chose to surround herself most of her life.

John Galt, for her, was God. He was the reification of her desire to live a life free of conflict, suffering, and mental uncertainty. This desire, in turn, was created by an inability to process the horrible sufferings of her life, in terms of loneliness, being misunderstood, having a narcissistic mother, and of course the physical privations of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. The reality, of course, is that John Galt was a sociopath. This freed him from some conflicts, but created a lack of emotional depth and in particular the capacity for empathy.

Altruism, for Rand, is used as a synonym for “hypocrisy”. She herself benefited often from the genuine generosity of others, and very simply could have not have written her books without large supplies of it. For her part, she offered it at times as well, although in general she was quite vindictive, and selfish in ways she would not have tolerated in others.

Corollary: Behind every “self made” man or woman stand many people he or she has simply chosen to forget. That was plainly the case with Rand.

I made copious notes while listening to her autobiography. When time permits, I am going to read John Galt’s speech, Roark’s courtroom speech, and Francisco something’s disquisition on money. Then I will collate it, post it on the other site, and mention it here.