Month: May 2012

The mind of the true moral relativist is the mind of a slave.  People who sincerely believe nothing have made themselves tabula rasa (pl., whatever that is in Latin), and will sooner rather than later not just find an ideology–which of course must necessary be expressed by concrete men–as master, but demand that they be forced to submit.

An interesting example is Michael Moore’s call for the rich–him–to pay more in taxes, without himself volunteering to do so.  From his perspective, it is not “moral” until compelled.

This is a subtle point, and the point of congruence between what I have termed Sybaritic Leftism and Cultural Sadeism.

I think this is best translated “All hail the God of Islam”.  There was no need for Major Hassan, in initiating his terrorist attack at Fort Hood, to yell this to himself: he was proclaiming the power of his God to the infidels he was about to kill.

People who translate this “God is great” miss the point that for Muslims God only has one name, and it is Allah, and Arabic is His language.

Really,
this sink is appalling:
sagging, hot and cold reversed.

It will soon be broken.

Who put it in?  Was he thinking of
Rosa’s, a plate of parillada, fresh tortillas from
a real mother,
big titted waitresses who move just a bit
slower
than their enormous heels and miniskirts
require?

Or was it “fuck, fuck, fuck this heat.”
It’s not so bad before lunch, but work must be done after,
too.
The cool is for those who made other decisions.

Whatever:
he has left his mark.

For some years, I will periodically dream I am battling Voldemort, from the Harry Potter films (I only read the last two, and only at the request of my oldest).  Sometimes I win, sometimes it is a game of evasion.  Usually I am being chased, but occasionally I am the pursuer.

Yesterday I watched two and a half movies.  I watched Iron Man 2, the Avengers, and half of a French film entitled “Sarah’s Key”.  That last was a sad but somewhat redemptive movie about one of ten million tragic stories from the Holocaust.  No doubt all of this affected my dreams.

When I woke up this morning, I realized that Voldemort is me, too.  This is in some respects a pretty basic psychological insight, in that people that assume the brain and mind are synonymous would postulate that any psychic conflict in dreams necessarily  involves split psychic “parts”.

Indeed.  As I look at this, I see that no process of psychological integration can fail to involve the understanding that we all have evil in us.  There is no point any free person can reach in which the capacity for resentment, self pity, bitterness, malice, anger, hatred, viciousness, spitefulness, grandiosity and all the other negative emotions drops away.  Their potential, their possibility, will always be there, even in the most advanced people.

You cannot not hate.  You cannot make it go away.  What you can do is recognize that you are NOT a saint, will never BE a saint, and that if you think you are all sunshine and love, you are probably a superficial person, who has simply split off the venom.  You see this in “Christians” who hate in the name of God.  You see this in “peacenik” left wingers, who hate in the name of peace and love.  What good was accomplished by losing the Vietnam War?  None: horrific, stomach turning violence was the outcome.

All of us need to own our violence.  We need to see it.

I have often quoted a line I love from the Tao Te Ching: “Renounce sainthood.  It will be 1,000 times better for everyone.”  There are many meanings which can be teased out of this, but I think this is the primary one.

I should probably end there, but hell, I have more to add, even if it affects the flow.

What people call sainthood is likely quite often simply compulsive behavior–psychological aberration–taken to an extreme in the external FORM of predetermined religiously desirable behaviors, within which of course I include the churches of political radicalism.

An obvious example is the Mahdi of the Sudan, who lived in a cave for some time, and did the sorts of things Sufi saints did (fasting, recitation, renunciation).  Given troops, he turned out to be a vicious, sadistic, sexually voracious pig.  But his status as a saint never disappeared, and he is idolized to this very day by some Islamists.

More generally, though, I agree with Moshe Feldenkrais that almost all forms of what is called “greatness” is to some greater or lesser extent psychological dysfunction.  Who is driven to “lead”?  People who are driven to lead.  Again, it is for this reason that the Tao Te Ching teaches that only those who do not want to be king are fit to be king.

Few thoughts on a rainy “Sun’s Day”.

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel
faces down frost, green thrives, the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people will sometimes step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we were meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Sheenagh Pugh

I would like to define this as anti-mourning.  It is constant activity, while one is pursued by unwanted emotions.  I read articles like this one: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Case-for-Breaking-Up-With/131760/ , and see that our elites seemingly feel no need for down time.  Moreover, their parents seem to be narcissistically involved in every last detail of their lives.  These people will find themselves believing that such activity is normal, and that their natural position is that of ruler.  That is my guess, at any rate.

A scene in a movie that left a lasting impression on me was in Kurasawa’s Kagemusha, in which it is revealed that the great Lord has concealed his own death for some years–it was 3 or 5, if memory serves–and one of his arch rivals breaks out a fan, and spontaneously performs what I assume is a piece of No theater.

This is spontaneous mourning, and a sign of integrated emotions.  Yet, this was the warring states period, and all these people were fighing one another constantly.  This is a poor state of emotional integration too.

We need more mental health the world over.  It is neither being nice nor being cruel.  It is being appropriate.  War is a short path to a sense of meaning, and a short path to building aggregated groups.  Yet, it is also a horror that leaves lasting traumas both in terms of pain, and in the inability to process it.

The only possible utopia on Earth will be one in which people are universally mentally healthy.  This will mean that they process their emotions, that they are capable of genuine and deep feeling, that they are empathic without being needy, that they are capable both of self assertion and altruism, and that in general they are oriented around the Good, and around becoming better.

Much traditional religion facilitates mental illness.  I think Islam is particularly guilty of this, in that I don’t believe ANY social order which is so hostile to woman can EVER fully mature.  The men who rule have far too many unprocessed psychological issues with their mothers.  I would add that black culture in this country has turned somewhat in the direction of generalized misogyny as well, to its great detriment.

Some religions, like Buddhism, do seem to have some capacity to at least contribute to mental well being, and I think all religions offer some solace for the tragedies and uncertainties of life.  The question is how accurate they are.  I believe science can and should investigate how our universe actually works.  As I have said often, I believe the preponderance of evidence is that our souls survive death, and that we are connected in ways we cannot quite see.

Some random musings on Frey’s Day.

Some unwanted changes/experiences are inevitable in every life.  You have to integrate them, mourn the loss of what was, and move on.  What I think complicates this process in modern life is that since everything is in a constant state of flux, there is no status quo ante to which you can return.

As Turner (if memory serves, and I think it does) described the ritual process, it consists more or less in a three stage sequence: place/other place/place understood differently.  As an example, to become an adult you go out in the desert and fend for yourself for a day.  You leave as a child, and come back a man. 

The key point, though, is that you return to the SAME PLACE, the same set of rules, the same group of people, the same beliefs, the same daily rituals, the same food and space.  It is hard to do that in the modern world.  When you get hit by some experience or other, this added distress and disturbance gets added to a pervasive underlying sense of stress with regard to the permanance of change in our world. 

Why do we feel some comfort from 50’s memorabilia?  Why does Elvis get invoked so often?  Why does the character of Captain America apparently resonate with so many?  It evokes a world that was NOT in constant flux.  We forget that the 50’s was an era of the Cold War, Korea, bomb drills, segregation, but we remember that at least from this distance things seem to us to have been less in motion.  That was the last period before the turmoil of the 60’s that is clearly still with us.

How do you mourn in such a world?  How do you find a space which is not moving around you to process emotions?  You can do it in the wild, I suppose.  In a home that feels comfortable.  But increasingly, I think people simply choose NOT to mourn; they choose superficiality and constant activity/stimulation, over facing unwanted emotions that must be faced to live fully.

I mentioned a week or two or three ago (my life is very busy, and time flies for me) that I had read “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior”.  What I do not recall anywhere in there is him crying, mourning.  He feels empty, he feels anger and fear and determination.  He learns calm, focus.  He sees at one point the sufferings of EVERYONE ELSE, but I can’t recall him ever grieving anything in his own life.

Unless I am mistaken, his childhood was one of relentless pressure to perform, to live up to expectations of his parents.  He had little down time, little time to just be, at least until his motorcycle injury.  I suspect on the beach there is when he took his first hit of acid, and smoked his first joint.  That is when he first took seriously all the metaphysical stuff going on around him.

And I look at the New Age movement, and have been saying for years that what it is missing is a sense of the tragic, of grief.  We read how one can develop an insuperable serenity just meditating, just latching on to the correct guru.  I think this is bullshit.  I think that ALL OF US have got to learn the psychological process of grieving, of feeling pain while we CONSCIOUSLY detach from some person or situation, or habit of which we were very fond.  It is like breaking through scar tissue: I think once it is done a few times properly, it becomes something that we can control; it becomes an emotional process over which we can exercise control, and this is spiritual growth.

But it cannot be avoided.  You cannot just make yourself stiff, learn to smile knowingly, distract yourself with all sorts of metaphysical books, and run into meditation and other sundry trash for which you are not ready.

I feel this: I do not think it.  I see it, increasingly, as I rip open my own scar tissue for the first time, properly.

It is worth noting from time to time that the so-called “Palestinians” are refugees from a war which happened in 1948, some 64 years ago.  Where else in the world can one find people so callous as to allow their own to languish for such a long time?  I find it difficult at times not to view Muslim Arabs as culturally inferior to substantially every other population on Earth.  They glory in death. One finds this in cultural alleys in other nations–the Thuggee cult, for example, in India–but not as the main theme.  I have spent some years studying varying religions, and I can think of no analogue to Islam as practiced in the Middle East.

Large numbers of Jews were cast out of Arab nations in 1948 as well.  We do not read about them because they were assimilated in Israel, the United States, or other nations, without undue fuss, and even though they, too, lost everything they had built and owned.  Unlike the Arabs living in the British Mandate, however, they were not given the option of staying.

If you want to control something, get the authority to tax it.  This is easy enough.  What is less obvious is that you also get control of something if you force it into borrowing, if you control the borrowing.  Education is an obvious example, but was it not the case that most homes 50 years ago were bought on 15 year notes held by the banks that made the loans?  It was only Fannie Mae that enabled the credit expansion that pushed prices–and the size of the houses–into the stratosphere.

Keep in mind, if you think we are  truly free country, that the Federal Government holds the title to roughly one third of the homes in the United States, and is currently trying to get full control of our healthcare and health insurance systems.

I don’t know why educations costs have skyrocketed to the point where normal middle class Americans can no longer afford a college education.  What I can say with certainty, though, is that the intervention of the Federal Government has played a major role in facilitating it, and probably the decisive role.

Companies which make loans to students–with $100,000 in loans for a four year degree even at mediocre colleges not being that uncommon–are GUARANTEED to get their money back.  This has been the case for many years.  You cannot make the loans go away in bankruptcy.  Other than repayment, there is no means of avoiding these costs.  This intervention in the private sector means that means testing is irrelevant: no matter how much someone overborrows, even if they will literally be in debt the rest of their lives–which means servicing the interest but failing to repay the principle–the loans will be made.

In the private sector, loans are made based upon the ability of people to repay them.  If the student loan business had stayed in the private sectors–with both losses and profits borne ONLY by the lenders–then much less money would have been lent.  With less money available, less money would have been borrowed, and the new outcome of this would have not been less students going to college, but less of the MASSIVE expansions we have seen in university infrastructure, size of the Administrative element, and the pay for the bureaucrats who run things.

Net: as with Fannie Mae–which was supposed to boost home ownership, but has instead contributed to a massive economic decline coupled with massive rates of foreclosure– a program intended to INCREASE college attendance has over time made it much more difficult, and forced most students either into de facto punitive loans, or foregoing college.

Now that the Federal Government owns the loans, things will not get any better.  The interest rates that students pay will not go down, as that “income” was intended to help mask the actual costs of the horrifically bad Obamacare legislation.