Month: July 2012

Minimum Wage laws have been an unmitigated disaster in inner city ghettos, having tripled unemployment rates among black teens, making it harder for them to get the first job that leads to the second job.  In discussing this over at my favorite website,  it occurred to me that we could age-tier Minimum Wage laws.  I don’t agree in principle with them, but if we are to have them, we can do them more intelligently.  We can DROP the rate by say 50% for anyone under 21, but RAISE it for anyone over 21 who has at least a 3 year work history.  This would be better than what we have now.

Here is copy of the case I made:

I am at times dismayed at the quality of conservative intellectual discourse.  The problem, I think, is a social one.  To get invited to the table, you have to be groomed.  There is a certain wildness that has to be removed, a certain willingness to shout out “YOU’RE WRONG” that must be gotten past.

You write your essays, and send them in.  They get rejected, because, oh, something is just not on that person’s horizon or calendar, or they just don’t know you.  So if you are to succeed as a writer, you must figure out what that person wants, what makes them tick, then conform to that.  Over time, it seems to me, this self censorship becomes so habitual that you forget about the spontaneous obsession for truth and order.

This has been my experience.  I send things in, they get rejected, and I know quite well what I am supposed to do. I can see quite well how the game is played, and if I had a different temperament, I would play it.  But what I like about myself is inconsistent with that game.  If they don’t want my ideas as they exist–subject to reasonable stylistic changes–then fuck them.  That is how I view it, for better or worse.

Here is the thing: if one looks at HOW the game is being played, it is being played with profound and distressing mediocrity.  Virtually no segment of the mainstream conservative establishment has made auditing the Fed a priority.  Nobody is pointing out how banks steal money, or that their structure is inimical to free enterprise and Capitalism outright.  Very few are waging the culture war with vigor, other than the occasional lament at how far we have fallen.  NEWSFLASH: a return to antique religiosity is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.  Alternatives are needed.  I have proposed my versions, and would certainly love to see more.

But I want to be clear: being nice, never “criticizing, condemning or complaining” is not the path to excellence.  Anyone worth their salt WANTS to be criticized; they actively seek out alternative paradigms and TEST them.

Thinking is an agonistic enterprise.  It is not for the faint of heart.  It is not for people who take pleasure in other people agreeing with them.  In my own view, it is for people who take pleasure in facing any and all comers in contested environments and whose arguments–definitionally based on logic and verifiable or at least strongly plausible facts–fare well.  You must always be looking for hostile contact.  You must WANT to expose your ideas, over and over and over, to people who hate you and everything you stand for.  That is where progress is made.

It is not made over the coffee pot with friends– not paradigmatic growth, at any rate.  We do not need details: we need new big pictures.

Obama seems to be struggling with ideas.  The reality is he has a LOT of ideas, just not ones he can voice in public and stand a chance of getting reelected.  They are all horrible ideas which will hurt most all those who are already hurting most in this country–as indeed their lite versions already have–but he is not someone who accepts the verdicts of reality when the “principles” upon which he bases his ideas continue to bounce around his head.

What he wants to do is say and do anything to get reelected, then use the office of the President to IMPOSE, though executive fiat, everything he can get away with, and see if Congress has the balls to stop him through impeachment.  Congress has not arrested Eric Holder.  They did not demand of Obama that he prove he met the Constitutional requirement to be President.  So he may well be right in his assumption that this nation is run by unprincipled pussies who have been doing political calculations for so long that they have forgotten what they were elected for in the first place, and who are quite willing to sell this country–our children–down the river, as long as they get a Golden Parachute, and feel they can blame somebody else.

This nation was built by better men and women.  We deserve better.  This is no way to honor the legacy of their sacrifices.

I’m listening to the excellent “Born to Run” (Christopher Macdougal, if memory serves), about running, and in particular about the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico.  A case is made there that there is an intrinsic connection between a cheerful, generous disposition and athletic excellence.

Logically, nervous system efficiency is tied to relaxation, which is tied to non-violence.  You do not force yourself to do anything you don’t WANT to do. Elite athletes WANT to perform well, they enjoy the process, so they are efficient.

Logically, too, if we consider that the brain alone uses 20% of our daily calories, a relaxed, cheerful disposition ought to use less calories than a tense, constricted one.  This is likely the secret of people like the marathon monks of Mount Hiei, who eat much less than one would think they would need.

What is one to make of the fact that sadomasochistic literature is flying off the shelves at Target?  By this, of course I mean the three “Fifty Shades of Gray” books, but also I look even in the young adult section, and they are filled with vampires, werewolves, fallen angels and darkness.

Loneliness and trauma, is what I see.  Loneliness: the first task of a society is to figure out what to do with its pain.  If you cannot share pain–and a common solution is sharing it be inflicting it–then you lose the capacity to interact with others on a deep level.  S and M is just one way of replacing this function in an unhealthy way.

Trauma: I think we need to understand prolonging failure to connect with other people on a deep, spiritual level not just as a symptom of trauma, but constitutive of it.  In itself, it can build a self perpetuating of pain, withdrawal, pain, and withdrawal.  This is the great merit and critical social weakness of computers and video games, and media in general: it dulls aches of this sort, without providing any real solution.

As is obvious to anyone who knows me well, I have so many ideas on so many topics, it is quite literally impossible to chase them all down all the time.  I have to prioritize, and even then I do not get as much done as I would like.  In theory, I have been working on a book on our financial system, but my treatise is as far as I have gotten.  In recent months, I have been trying to work down to the core of what has been my mental illness.  I feel it may be a widely shared mental illness, but want to see.  I am making progress.

That all is by way of prologue to setting an idea out in the public space that occurred to me some time ago.  That of creating groups of ten people, who in effect as as small tribes, as extended social groups.  The concept is similar to a support group, but you vow to support one another, and you do much more than support groups do.  You learn as a group.  You cope as a group.

This group would be the fundamental unit of what I have been calling the Church of Goodness.  Since my creed is very non-specific–my only core principles are rejection of self pity, perseverance, and perceptual movement/breathing–then endless specific, local iterations are possible.

This group I propose to call a Bohannon, after Heinlein’s term.  Bohannon’s, of course, can congregate in  what would look more like a church, to sing, drink, run, dance, sing some more, discuss abstract philosophy, paint, sun themselves by the pool: whatever appears suited to the task of pursuing qualitative joy.

Edit: that term I remember from long ago as being used in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land to describe an organic, real, “Family”, which needed not be a physical family at all.  I may be misremembering–as the term is not popping up on Google–and don’t have time to look it up right now.

As far as that goes, if I invented a word, no harm in that.  I just wanted to borrow the word Heinlein used.

Anything hard worth doing is worth doing easy.

Some will get that, and some will not.

I am likely aping some philosopher in saying this–I would have no clue, since I’ve long thought any thought worth thinking can be thought without prior training, and thus read very little philosophy–but it seems to me the essence of what I call the qualitative is judgement.

If there are five stones on a table, there is no judgement needed to count them.  If you have a measuring stick, there is no need for judgement to determine their width, height and depth.

But some things in life, like how you feel about something or someone, or how beautiful a sunrise or sunset is, or even how much salt or pepper to put on your food, are sentimental, in the sense that they rely upon mutable, unfixed, unmeasurable judgements.  In judgement, you can be relatively right or wrong, as measured by the progress of your feelings.  If you feel something makes you happy, and that feeling continues to grow, then you were likely “right”.

No scientific process can bring this process into the measurable.  Complexes of feelings are composed of hormones, neurotransmitters, nervous excitation or relaxation and the like.  All of these things can be measured.  But the feeling is the essence of being human, and even TRYING to bring this into the measurable is in my view fundamentally misanthropic.  It is short sighted, reductive (by definition), and unnecessary.

Why can we not admit, in principle, that some things are best “known” through poetry and song?  It is a species of savage narcissism and profound discomfort with the facts of life that refuses this very REASONable request.

Yet, we see it every day.  Wherever the sun is shining on the Earth, it countenances stupidity.

What I think trauma does is create a boundary beyond which spontaneous emotion will not transmit.  As I visualize it, it is like a circle surrounded by fog.  You can hear the noises and feel the presence of others out there, but you cannot make direct contact.  There is a marker on the line where the circle is, which says “Beyond this and you die”.

It is well attested that emotional dissociation is a symptom/outcome of trauma.  Effectively, dissociation creates two “you’s”: there is the hidden, timeless, fog enmeshed secret place, and the social you that has to go on and appear normal.  You get the outward appearance of emotional movement, but there remains some part of you that knows that if you cross that line into the fog, all the pain you have hidden will come back at you like a pack of ravenous animals.

The task is to acknowledge, then disempower the emotional images, to disconnect from them.  But you must go outside this circle.

I think some people choose to forget about the self that lives in the fog.  I think they choose to conflate their self image with what is practical socially.  This doesn’t work, of course.  This is where cruelty comes in.  They know they need to face pain, but they have so disconnected themselves that the part asking for reintegration through emotional processing comes to be seen first as outside them, then as the enemy.

They punish this enemy in the outside world, where they see it as existing.  This is the root of sadism.  I truly believe this is very close to the reality of the thing.

Rosebud never disappears.

If I could grant my children one thing, it would be the qualitative capacity to enjoy work.  If granted a second wish, it would be actually finding work they loved.  If granted a third, love.

Love, though, depends upon a capacity to work, doesn’t it? Imagine two people with no passions but that for each other.  Does that love not fade?  Work you can rely on–and I am not thinking compulsive workaholism, but rather the capacity to love in motion, the capacity to extend, to grow, to connect, to discover, to BE in relation to some cherished task.

The most lucky get paid for this; most of us just do it after we meet all the other demands on us.  Still, there is pleasure even in thankless, difficult work, IF YOU CHOOSE TO DO IT WELL.

We have so many freedoms we never even see, much less take advantage of.