Month: November 2012

I was watching TV the other day, while waiting on my car to be repaired, and it struck me that many people spend all day every day in a state of suspended disbelief.  They think of the characters on their shows as more or less real, despite knowing that just off-camera there are all sorts of other people.

What is the cultural effect of being mesmerized daily by people whose job it is to pretend to be someone else, to assume the role of another human being?  Do we put on roles then more easily?  Do we become more likely to mistake falsehoods for reality?  Did this play a role in electing an empty suit (if we deduct political malignancy) twice?

Have to run, but wanted to put that out there.

I would like to nominate myself as the most influential blogger no one has heard of.  Once tabulated, the winners will not be announced on January 1st at 4pm. (It would be contradictory.)

That’s my version of humor.  Ridiculous and SMALL as that irony is, it made me laugh.  I remember this Simpson’s episode where they were making fun of Garrison Keillor, and Homer kept hitting the set saying “Stupid TV, be funny.”

On a more serious note, I have been playing with an idea that is very helpful: God is everywhere.  He is in the darkest tunnel.  He is in the worst nightmare.  There is no place in this universe, anywhere, that is not suffused with a near infinity of light.  I only get glimpses of it, but the notion is worthwhile.  Some day I may see more.

I was thinking about all the lonely people out there disconnected from the seas of people around them, Riesman’s “Lonely Crowd”.  What connects people?  Is it not culture?  In a final sense, is this not the DEFINITION of culture: that which enables people to join a common wavelength and feel connected with someone like themselves?  Let us insert the word “connection” in phrases in which we would normally use “culture”.

The first obvious one is “Cultural Revolution”, the Chinese version.  I saw some Chinese propaganda posted in a local library the other day, literal propaganda, written by professionals, from that period.

Call it the “Disconnection Revolution”.  Was that not what happened?  Did not a sizable minority, backed by the police power of the State, turn stark raving mad and start attacking people who had done nothing except, perhaps, not voice the idiotic slogans of the executioners loudly enough?

Or “Culture wars”.  This becomes “Connection Wars”.  How do we connect?  We don’t.  I personally have been evicted, banished, exiled numerous times from places on the “other side”, while trying to establish dialogue.  I believe and continue to believe that the issue of monetary reform, of the fact that banks are stealing our money legally, should be a bipartisan issue.  But once you admit to a side, your views are discarded, regardless of their merit and strength.

Is decadence not formally disconnection, dis-integration?

The more we become disconnected, the greater the manifest market need for constant connection. What else is Twitter?  It is a salve for empty people, who don’t know who they are in silence, and who feel more alone the more they try to reach out others.  This is the role that violence in media plays.  There is something in sacrificial culture that binds people together. That was my principle interest in graduate school, explaining what sacrifice–particularly human sacrifice–does that is culturally useful.

Or take High Culture.  High Connection.  It is a means of weeding out the undesirables, and a way of connecting with people who have similar training and thus similar tastes.

Think of culture as a standing wave in the air.  If you tune into it, as in a radio frequency, you get connected with everyone else on that channel.

This is what religion does, and what the leftist cult does.  There are numerous reasons cities breed Democrats.  One of them is that the very complexity of the cities, and the planning that is needed to make things work, fosters a belief in central planning, since their experience is that it works.  The trains run. The lights come on.  Water comes out of the faucet even on the 50th floor.

Another reason, though, is that in that ocean of diversity, you MUST, to keep your sanity, have SOMETHING you can rely on as at least a base common ground.  That something is politics.  I have said this before, but it’s worth saying again here.

American Culture: What connects “Americans”.

This is a useful heuristic, in my view. What one sees is that attacks on culture are attacks on connection, making it extremely ironic–and regrettably typical–that those most concerned with “alienation”–Entfremdung–are those most vigorously working to (not for,. to) create it.

I will add that the identity, the connection, Socialism/Leftism enables is not one that works to individual self fulfillment.  It does not make people happy.  It assuages an anxiety that is made necessary by their rejection of individualism.  It is a mutable creed.  The Big Idea of the month will differ from last month.  There is no rest.  There is no completion to the project, like, say, there is in Buddhism.  There may be different versions of Buddhism, but you can pick one and run with it.  If you are a leftist, you have to tune into the frequency every day to know who you are that day and what you believe.

And God forbid they ever lose Conservatives.  They will have to invent a new enemy, or begin the process of cultural–connective–catabolism, as their souls dissolve.

The following is more or less out loud musing.  Do not expect coherence.

In traditional societies, children are expected to adopt and internalize social roles.  They are expected to do what their fathers and mothers did.  This idea is horrifying to many moderns, but I want to explore it.

Asking someone to adopt a role is not the same as asking them to be EXACTLY like you.  Two different people can wear the same coat in entirely different ways.  If you read the Bible, the characters of the Old Testament were all Jews, but had very different personalities.  And this was and is OK.

What they had were duties.  But they also existed within a framework where everyone else had adopted the same duties.  To the extent everyone behaved as expected, they knew what to expect from others and from life more generally.  This might seem confining, and no doubt was for some, but particularly if you know no different, it seems to me to have been a recipe for peace in most cases.

This whole system, though, depends on a larger context, on a belief in something larger.  There are no cultures of which I am aware which were both stable over a long term, and atheistic.  One sees, obviously, traces of atheism throughout history. 

The Indians [on an unrelated note, it is hard from me to use this term for such a diverse group, although this just occurred to me; if I expand it, and increase my historical knowledge, perhaps such antipathy to national abstractions will become more common] had the Carvakas.  Their creed?  Live for the moment. Go chase that big breasted babe and drink your fill of wine (Smodee odee).  Such creeds can’t last.  The Rock and Roll lifestyle is a Carvaka creed. 

Functionally, our national hedonism can only be characterized as lacking roots in something larger.  We are beyond the point where fixed traditions can be watered in the earth of something larger for most people. That is why so many have chosen to stop thinking and seeing.  They see destruction and punishment, but think that some “time warp” will save them, so they can do it again.  Stopping the fun is just too daunting a thought.

But what I wanted to do–channeling “Alice’s Restaurant” as I tend to do–is compare a narcisssistic family with a traditional family.  In both cases, you are expected to play roles, but in the former case, the role is MUTABLE.  Who you need to be, how you need to be, depends on the whims and moods of the narcissist.  When you “graduate” from such a family, you have no internal compass, no moorings.  Without that other person, you are lost.  You were lost, of course, before, too, because there was no “you” at all.

In a traditional family, within the constraints of that tradition, it is understood that many different personalities are possible.  If you look at the supposedly conformist culture of Japan, there are still ways to arrange flowers, do caligraphy, perform the tea ceremony.  Their culture is one of nuances that are missed by most outsiders.  That is my outside opinion, at any rate.

I was thinking today, though, about the strange intersection of past and fluidity we are at now.  In a culture which is changing–dis-integrating in a formal sense–what is the role of parents in raising their children?  What cultural habits remain needed?  Do you need to teach your kids to be just like you?  Is it desirable in any way that they feel entitled, unempathetic, and individualistic?

I don’t think so, but the question is worth asking.  As I ponder it, it seems to me that in chaos, the task is to provide order not by imposing it directly through stasis, but through orienting principles.  That way, both motion and relative order are possible.  If this is a useful idea, then I would submit that my Goodness system is as good as anything out there at teaching the negotiation of the mutable seas we face, without losing things worth keeping.

Imagine how different our country would look today if only those who paid income tax were allowed to vote.  This would eliminate most students–whose experience of the world is purely theoretical, and thus prone to large distortions.  This would eliminate unemployed people who sit home every day and watch TV.  The people who the Montel Williams ads target, black and white.  This would eliminate the working poor.

Does it not make sense that the people who FUND our nation, through their taxes, should be the ones to decide how we spend that money, through their decisions on who represents them in Congress?

We look back on our Founding Fathers, and the elitism implicit in only giving the vote to land-owning men. Yet, we need to remember that education, then, took both time and money, both of which were in short supply back then.  A great many Americans could not even read (although then I do think we were one of the more literate nations, since one must read to read the Bible).

And the thought is reasonable: what benefit accrues from lowering the intelligence of the discussion?  What benefit accrues from moving the amount of understanding of the average voter to the left on a Bell Curve?  We want good decisions, and good decisions in turn flow from intelligence.  Logically, the more intelligent the electorate, the better off we will be.

But what if the elite uses its power to PERMANENTLY keep everyone else down?  This is a valid question, and the reason we have continually expanded the voting franchise.

But as things stand, people who do NOT contribute are in a position to vote themselves money and goods from those who DO.  It would literally be no different than if we granted the right to vote, in America, to Guatamalans, who could be expected to support candidates who promised foreign aid to Guatamala.  Economically, the money is wasted.  The Obamaphones will accomplish no economic good; nor does any serious person really expect them to.

This problem would be eradicated with my solution.  If you want to vote, get a job, then make enough money to pay income taxes.  If you want that group to be larger, then we can expand the pool and bring the taxes down to your level.  You may quickly wish for less taxes, like the rest of us.

If the top 50% of the country ran things, everything would be better for all.  We could still have social welfare programs.  No one would go hungry or homeless involutarily.  But we would get a rational public dialogue oriented around our actual problems, and a responsible concern both with the well being of ALL Americans, as well as our posterity.

And for those who would scream at me: I ask again, do you or do you not understand that our true annual debt increase is something on the order of $5 trillion a YEAR, and that that cannot go on much longer?  If you do understand this, why are you not discussing it?  The economic crash that is a CERTAINTY will hurt the poor the first and most.

Can you remember when you became emotionally numb?  I don’t think it is possible.  It would require remembering an extinction of something–feelings–that you no longer recognize.  Were you able to feel what you felt before, you would still not be able to pinpoint a moment–although perhaps a period, perhaps one triggered by an event.

We are surrounded by references to numbness.  I have posted many of them.  Here is another, from Linkin Park, in which I think they are wrestling creatively with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXYiU_JCYtU

What I would submit, is that the pervasive anger and emotional stunting we see around us is a direct result of the Baby Boomers trying to “find” themselves.  Put another way, of their historically unprecedented selfishness and vanity.  These things have consequences.  If you spend all your time looking in one mirror or another, you are not emotionally available to those around you.

In this song, I think they are making reference to that.  I don’t have time for a more complete analysis.

Here are the lyrics:
I’m tired of being what you want me to be
Feeling so faithless, lost under the surface
Don’t know what you’re expecting of me
Put under the pressure of walking in your shoes
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)

[Chorus:]
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there
Become so tired, so much more aware
I’m becoming this, all I want to do
Is be more like me and be less like you

Can’t you see that you’re smothering me,
Holding too tightly, afraid to lose control?
‘Cause everything that you thought I would be
Has fallen apart right in front of you.
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
Every step that I take is another mistake to you.
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
And every second I waste is more than I can take.

[Chorus:]
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there,
Become so tired, so much more aware
I’m becoming this, all I want to do
Is be more like me and be less like you.

And I know
I may end up failing too.
But I know
You were just like me with someone disappointed in you.

[Chorus:]
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there,
Become so tired, so much more aware.
I’m becoming this, all I want to do
Is be more like me and be less like you.

[Chorus:]
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there.
(I’m tired of being what you want me to be)
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there.
(I’m tired of being what you want me to be)

In the simplest possible sense, Goodness is for me emotional maturity, which includes the ability to grow and ripen in understanding across a lifetime. It is a progressive increase in the capacity for emotionally engaged work, the expression of empathy, and a capacity for emotional fulfillment.

I posit no strict rules.  In fact, I have defined proper moral judgements as “local, imperfect, and necessary”.  That needs to go into my essay, but I keep forgetting, and I stay busy.

This is, in my view, a globally adaptable paradigm.  I personally might question a decision, say, to have orgies in the town square, but the Taoists apparently did it in China, and it may well have been a source of personal and communal well being that was consistent with emotional growth.  I wasn’t there, and I don’t know.  And to the point of my system, it is not necessary for me to render judgment.

I have defined Goodness as an emergent property of a system in motion characterized by the rejection of self pity, persistence, and a desire to learn, in the broadest possible sense.  Self evidently, motion, per se, is the defining quality of freedom.  You are not free to the extent there are fences and barriers saying “go not here”.  You are make less free if you can’t allow smoking in your bar.  You are make less free if you can’t smoke pot legally.  You are made less free if you can’t opt out of social programs you want no part of.

Self evidently, Socialism–as the empowerment of a small oligarchy tasked with homogenizing culture–is antithetical to freedom, and hence goodness.

It is a strange fact of my own experience that as an inhabitant of a land still largely free that I know the feeling totalitarianism, coming as I did from a family in which the expression of individual emotion and initiative was banned, not explicitly, but in that dark place where all emotions one wants to hide live freely until they are seen.

As I struggle with freeing myself, my world is going darker.  The DESIRE for freedom is waning, and being supported tacitly by countless thought leaders who are exhausted.

With regard to academics, I want to point out how this works.  Every journalist, every doctor, every lawyer, substantially every politician, the teachers of our children, our psychologists, our ministers: they went to college, and were exposed to the ideas on display there.  It is not not that bricklayers care about what Antonio Gramsci had to say, but that his or her Grade School teacher may have been taught by someone whose learning came from a texbook written by someone who was.  It trickles down.

The phrase “Monster Fertilizer” came into my head this morning.  Often what happens is the phrase pops up–in the spirit of Freudian word association, but spontaneously–and then I analyze it.  If you watch, and if you practice, you can take nearly any initial input, and reach some conclusion your unconscious was looking to make conscious anyway.

Here, I have had the vision from time to time of monsters remembering themselves.  Joining the leftist cult is a sort of magical spell that people allow themselves to fall under.  It is a congenial cult.  It promises a bright future, no matter what present circumstances seem to contradict that possibility.  And it demands no original thought, no personal development: nothing but the willingness to yell what everyone else is yelling, when they are yelling it.

But spells can be broken.  A rose-colored or white mist can sweep through and cause everyone to take that breath of life they have been holding in their suspended animation, and remember who they once were, what they once loved, before the forgetting began.

And the masks of monsters they wore can be cast down and made into a root fertilizer for something new, some new society actually worth living in.

It is an infelicitous metaphor, but I think sometimes of Hitler dreaming endlessly of the cities he was going to build in the Russian Steppes, even as bombs fell on his bunker.  I think that perhaps my dreams are the same, and failure is inevitable.  But why?  Why not dream simply because it appears impossible?  Why not allow out ideas which are made at least more possible through expression?

I often sit in silence for hours, usually while drinking.  Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I just sat on my couch and listened to the breeze outside for a couple of hours.  There is a point where silence almost becomes a companion.

If I could pick ONE thing that is most wrong with America right now, it would be the fact that we are bombarded with idiocy and babble all day every day, in many cases literally from awaking to going asleep.  How can you think when the TV is on?  How can you settle into deeper thoughts when you never stop listening to music, checking your Facebook and Twitter, and texting?

I remember reading Erich Fromm some years ago, and I think it was in “The Art of Loving” that he opined that if they were simply denied their daily paper for a week, some percentage of the populace would lapse into acute MANIFEST psychosis. Sanity is taken for granted, but need not be.

What would happen to kids nowadays if they had to go a week with NO electronics of any sort?  It would certainly generate HUGE anxiety, and some percentage of them, likewise, would suffer some sort of MANIFEST breakdown.

Unstable systems can be propped up in motion, but fall over when asked to be quiet.

“Who can wait until the dirt settles in the water?” said Lao or Chuang Tzu approximately.  But that is what it takes for clarity.

The interesting question is why it became known in the first place.  What is the point of rope?  To tie things together, to connect them.  Was the rope in the knot able to do this?  Of course not.  It became revered for its uselessness, and the challenge it presented.  Time spent unraveling it was wasted.

This is a species of idolatry, which is what you get when you forget what is real, and what the purpose of your activity actually is. Swords have their uses.