Month: November 2012

Leftists love to mock conservatives when they talk about mind control.  Yet, historically, mind control, thought control, was a MAJOR component in particularly Maoist iterations of Communism.

I will feel better about humanity, about the future, when the full horror of these projects is common knowledge.  People were made to work 10,15,20 hours a day, intentionally malnourished, beaten often, the women (and probably in some cases men) raped (or given reduced labor in exchange for sexual favors), forced to repeat mindless slogans for hours on end, and forced to “confess” to crimes they had not committed in group sessions. 

The whole process was intended to break people.  I don’t think most people, in this overly comfortable country, can truly grasp how awful this was.  People think it is bad having a mean boss.  Imagine the worst, most sadistic boss you have ever had being given a billy club to beat you with, license to use it, and literal control over your life and death.

In Vietnam, as most people know, they would not infrequently lock people in small bamboo cages that were not big enough to stand up or sit down in.  To this day, Special Operations soldiers and combat pilots have to endure a day or so in these things.  Some people, not unnaturally, have panic attacks, and fail to complete the training.  But imagine spending YEARS in these things, in the heat and bugs, in your own filth, shitting and pissing on yourself, being fed rice with maggots or sand in it.

This is Communism.  This is the creed that many academics to THIS DAY will not disown, will not denounce.

The simple, ineluctable fact is that small differences matter, and that in what is called Marxism (as I have said often, Marx himself offered an economic hypothesis that was falsified by history, which means he should be irrelevant) the unit of measurement is the society.  The reason for this is that economic conditions can be MEASURED, whereas individual qualities like love, compassion, and the like cannot, and our academics to THIS DAY retain a passion for pretending that there is a single correct answer; or alternatively, join the leftist cult because they have failed utterly to develop their own morality, and want to be submerged in a conformitarian creed, a desire they signal by dealing daily in meaningless gobbledy-gook.

Basically, we have the narcissistic power mongers, and the would-be slaves.  This is what I’ve seen in our houses of power.  This is the state of the state when it comes to our “best” universities.  Genuine Liberalism is almost nowhere to be seen.  This is why the crimes of the Communists STILL are not widely known.  Nobody wants to talk about them.  They want to eat their meat and not ask its history.

I will submit here a personal detail.  I have always wanted this blog to not be a “Daily Me’.  I want it to deal with issues of instrinsic importance and to do so in what I hope is a qualitatively unique and substantive way, thus differentiating it from much of what is out there.

At the same time, any long term readers I may have will have seen that I struggle daily with ghosts of my past.  I am making progress, and what follows is intended to help facilitate my own healing by publicly announcing some personal truths I have only recently uncovered.

I know what it is like to lose your self, to live in a totalitarian regime which has no respect for the individual, because both of my parents were (and of course are: a particular nature of the malady is that that those who have it worst recognize it least) clinical narcissists.  They would both of course deny this, and both of course have learned over the years to do a passable impression of empathy.

But this fact, in tandem with frequent moves when I was a child, severing me from enduring friendships, the ability to form meaningful relations with other family members, teachers, or others, caused me to fail to develop any useful sense of self, and more importantly a capacity to feel like I controled my own destiny.  This led, in turn, to decades of deep depression, and difficulty thinking.

In my view, the reason I am capable of analyzing things on a deep level is that these facts of my experience forced me to deal with first principles, for myself.  They forced me, in effect, to create my own social and moral world to inhabit, since everything was taken from me.  Depression is like weight training for the cognitive faculty.  Because everything is hard, you have to learn to focus.  You have to develop a strong will, and you have to develop independence of thought, since assaults on your person are constant and usually hidden.  That is why the arrows in my dream of a few weeks ago were so small.  Assaults on self are subtle, and missed by many.

Ayn Rand’s mother was in my view plainly a narcissist, as was Ayn herself.  Her obsessive thinking, thinking which proved useful for many, was a protective emotional reaction to her mother’s declaration to her, in that hidden tunnel of real communication that happens when all outward words are lies, was that she didn’t exist.  Her entire life’s work was dedicated to the proving that she did, in fact, exist, and had the right and even duty to exist. 

That was been my own project as well.  To the point here, I know what existing as a working member of a totalitarian regime is like.  You do your work daily, don’t ask questions, and feel a bit sad, but don’t know why, and don’t know how even to ask the question, or even assign a name to what you feel.  People like that are what the State wants: good soldiers who just do what they are told.  That such conformity breeds sadness and emotional ill health–and certainly a lack of creativity and initiative–is to them unimportant.

And the assault on the self is virtually invisible.  As I have said often, the trickiest task is often not explaining what is there, but seeing what is NOT there, and wondering about that.  Bad economists don’t see the jobs NOT created as a result of their policies.  Many will see the Obama layoffs, but fail to account in their thinking for all the jobs that WOULD have been created, but weren’t, because Obama and Obamacare scare the crap out of them.

For me, it was not that I was told I didn’t exist.  I was simply never told that I DID exist.  Obviously, I was praised for this and that.  I was good at taking tests.  But there is this quality  of attention that says to people “You exist, you matter”, that is the essence as I see of love–it is what I definitely do give my own children–but not something I got.  My value was as a reflector of someone who themselves did not really exist either.  I lived in a house of mirrors that reflected nothing.

I say this not out of maudlin self pity, or even to engage in our confessional culture.  I say this because it is true, and the truth sometimes needs to be broadcast.  I think putting it out there, in this concrete form, will be useful for me, healing for me, and quite possibly useful to someone else as well.

I will add, that I have at times wondered if being too open would create at some future point greater access to my psyche for some future torturer.  People forget, but torture chambers exist in dozens of countries even now, and I suspect the likely actual author of Obama’s books–Bill Ayers–has a place in that stone he calls his heart for them even now.

But MY GOD, if what I have already posted isn’t sufficient to develop a plan, I am dealing in any event with amateurs.  I have already undergone a minimalist version of brainwashing and reeducation.  I have already spent far too many hours with my body racked with pain and my mind filled with confusion, to fear much.  I know it can be much worse, but I have no phobias, and see no reason to suppose I would not react like everyone else to everything else.

This is a bit of an odd post, and I actually have some positive things to say about our political climate later today, but my feeling–and how can one ever justify or need to rationalize feelings?–is that this needed to be said.

I derived 1984 from first principles in my paper on Cultural Sadeism.  I think it is possible to see from first principles where things tend to lead.

There is an enormous difference in eventual outcome between focusing on what builds generalized wealth and what builds EQUAL wealth.  In the former, you water all plants, knowing that some will bloom larger and more beautiful than others, but that all will grow.  In the latter, you tear out the plants that are larger, so that the plants that are smaller seem more equal.  It results in gardens that as they say only a mother (or Big Brother) could love.

I was fiddling with my cultural analysis tools today, and wanted to posit the following. I will insert, parenthetically without the parentheses, that I continue to like the formal use of geometric proof formats by Descartes and Spinoza in their philosophies.

The following is me screwing around after four margaritas.  There is, though–I think–a basis for something interesting.  This will one day be a fun project.[It is not true that the University of Chicago is “where fun goes to die”.  It is where fun goes for a major makeover].

Axioms/Definitions

The meaning system controls the creation of and distribution of emotional pain and, where relevant, pleasure/joy.

The truth system controls the creation of and distribution of perception.

The political system controls the creation of and distribution of power.

The economic system controls the creation of and distribution of physical comfort and physical pain.

Postulate:  The universe is uneven.

Correlate: Successful work must be contextualized.

Correllate: all systems should be contexualized for maximal efficiency.

Correllate: all systems work best when interacting with local feedback.

Correllate: all systems work best when focused on individuals.

Correllate: Individualism is the most life affirming doctrine.

We need to invent this profession.

How many of you remember Alberto Gonzalez, our first Hispanic American Attorney General?  He was drummed from office after the Left launched a successful propaganda offensive oriented around the claim that when he fired some District Attorneys, he had “politicized” the office, even though substantially EVERY Attorney General before him had done the same thing.  We were led by people like Hillary Clinton–then a Senator–to believe that some sort of conspiracy was in the works to hide some vague something.  None of these claims were ever substantiated in the SLIGHTEST.

Now, we have an Attorney General who has been held in contempt of Congress–this is a first–and yet still remains in office.  Our best evidence is that as a DIRECT RESULT of policies he engineered and supported, hundreds of people have died unnecessarily, including one of our own agents, Brian Terry.  And our best guess is that the aim was to create a climate favorable to gun control.

America: you suck. In a rational polity, one dedicated to the rule of law, Eric Holder would already have been arrested.  He is an accomplice to murder and he has obstructed the investigation, and HE is in CHARGE of our Federal Law Enforcement.  He’s not just some political schmuck: he is the guy who enforces the laws.

I had a post censored at the Huffington Post, which I will post at the bottom.  More importantly, though, I wanted to discuss what this, to me, symbolizes.  You will note in reading it that the closest I come to being abusive is referring to “lefties”.  Compared to what I am called dozens of times daily when I am actively blogging on the left wing sites, this is extremely mild.

At issue, I’m sure, is the fact that I challenge their world view.  The simple reality is that OF COURSE the demographics of this election show that Democrats have created a de facto coalition that is likely to continue to win them the White House.  They have promised stupid people stuff, and delivered enough of it to get them to the polls.

But this does not affect the TRUTH that we are accruing some $5 trillion in added debt annually, right now.  That is $42,000 PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR, RIGHT NOW.  Now, Democrats are exultant.  They are happy.  They see themselves winning forever, and are ecstatic that the Republicans might make a turn to the right.  That will get them even more votes.

But it won’t prevent an economic catastrophe.  The truth is the truth.

And to the point, I would submit that totalitarianism STARTS with simple but meaningful lies.  It starts with people like Arianna Huffington–intelligent, educated, capable of rational thought–LYING about the future.  She could put up stories about our debt.  She could deal responsibly with it if she wanted to. 

But she doesn’t want to.  She doesn’t want to hear it.  She wants to flush me down a memory hole.  She wants to make me an unperson.  I’m like the person on The Truman Show shouting out “it’s not read, Truman”, and being grabbed and removed.

Now, OF COURSE this is not how she thinks.  I don’t know how she rationalizes it–likely simply by labeling what I say fabrication without doing even rudimentary investigation–but the reality is that if we get something like 1984–and that appears the way we are headed–it will be because people like her claimed rhetorically that they feared totalitarian rule, that they feared Big Brother, that they wanted what was best for America, but DID THE OPPOSITE. 

Is government getting bigger or smaller?  This is a simple question.  If it is getting bigger, then we are getting closer to Big Brother. 

More importantly: are the LIES getting bigger or smaller?  Will Benghazi be successfully flushed down a memory hole?  Will Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glenn Doherty, and Tyrone Woods be made unpersons?  Will we lie in our public propaganda forums about the true extent of our problems until our only option is a plan like mine, and one which will likely not be proposed?

1984 is an ascent of the demonic.  It is demons ruling the world.  And the first step, the very first one, is when you CHOOSE to lie to yourself.  The cruelist sadist on the face of the planet had at some point to deny to him or herself that she felt emotional pain, and that it mattered.

The reelection of Barack Obama is in many respects symptomatic of the triumph of the lie.  America has told itself its first big lie.  That cannot be good.

I will add that, embarrassingly, I have never read 1984. I am reasonably erudite, so this is a large gap.  I just read the summary this morning, and realized that Orwell, also, concluded that sadism is the dominant element in totalitarianism.  Believe it or not, I had reached my conclusions without familiarity with his work.  I have only read his essay on the English language.

I do wonder sometimes what it would be like to be tortured.  In a totalitarian regime, the only honorable response is to be killed (although in some cases suicide might be acceptable).  Everyone has a breaking point in torture.  I don’t doubt that.  Where it is will vary, but once you exceed it, where it was becomes irrelevant.  And of course mind control techniques will have improved since Orwell’s time.

My feeling is that minds are machines.  They can be broken.  But spirits do not inhere fully in our bodies.  I believe we are duplicates of something much more perfect up above, and as long as in our free will we adhere to good principles, what we are forced to do does no permanent harm.  That is my hope.  It is what we do with our whole being that is wrong that permanently harms us.

And even permanence is an invalid concept.  I posted some time ago a vision, a myth, of what would happen if the Fascists took over the earth, and implemented their sadistic regime.  It would be awful for 100, 200, 1,000, or perhaps 10,000 years.  But it would wane.  The world of the Hunger Games was destined for perhaps 200 years of existence (note: I have no idea what happens in the second two books, but let’s assume there was only one book), because the people of Panem had nothing to live for, other than their cruelty and sybaritic pursuits.  Some other social order would have taken over, that may have been as bad or worse; or better.

But man’s life has been brutish and short for most of our millions of years here, and brutish and short for most of recorded history, in ways related to famines, wars, pestilence, and the like.

It is courage that matters, heart (coeur).  We cannot directly control the future.

But FUCK YOU Arianna.

Speaking
as a principled conservative, I would say our biggest failing in this
election was picking a moderate for President. Still it may work out for the best.  After four more years of
Obama, after four more years of economic decline, substantial and
noticeable alterations in our healthcare system for the worse, rising
insurance premiums, skyrocketing debt (his first four years were just a
warmup), debt downgrades, and misery that is worst among Obama voters,
an actual conservative is either going to look like a tonic, or our
future is national bankruptcy and preventable and foolish economic
devastation.

Lefties are skilled at polling. I noticed that
long ago. Rather than ask “what is right”, they ask “what do our voters
want us to tell them”. If you do this long enough, you get good at it.

But the truth is the truth. Among the truths not told on this website,
and very few other places, our national deficit, if we used the
accounting methods in universal use everywhere else, including State and
Local governments, is something on the order of $5 trillion a YEAR. We
borrowed outright 1.2 trillion (again, a warmup), but we accrued
liabilities to Social Security and Medicare for which we have NO funding
reserved to the tune of another $4 trillion.

I literally could
not look myself in the mirror if my politics focused on winning
elections, and not on sober and coherent analysis of our actual
problems, and on a sense of responsible custodianship of this once-great
nation for my children.

I say let them expire.  The amount of money we are talking about, the amount of drag on the economy, is insignificant next to the twin facts of the pending implementation of Obamacare and the simply fact that Obama is President.  We must accept that things have to get much worse before they can get better, and we have to ensure that no Republican is standing anywhere close to the shitpot when it finally tips over.  There needs to be a crowd of Democrats, proclaiming their wisdom, and how they “just don’t understand it”.

We need to be clear: Obama is buying votes, and he is getting his money’s worth.  I saw a black couple in the grocery store tonight, in a fine mood, locating all the WIC products. They obviously voted for Obama, and will vote for his designated “continuer of the gravy train”.  But they looked to me like working poor.  Long term unemployed have a different look.  When these two lose their jobs–and people at the lowest level are usually the first to suffer–and the Bush tax cuts are ancient history, Obama is President and the Republicans haven’t done jack shit in two years, MAYBE, just MAYBE, they will listen to someone saying “taxes don’t create jobs in the private sector, they TAKE them.”

Self evidently, we need an informational, a truth telling, educational offensive to put this idea out there. It is being effectively disrupted now, but as I said suffering has a way of opening eyes, and Obama is not in FDR’s position.  Bush was no Hoover.  Unemployment under Bush was under 5% for virtually all of his time in office, whereas Hoover got his crash in his first year, leaving three years of increasing difficulty easy to blame on him, even though he did many of the same things FDR did, and started the New Deal in all but name.

We also need to get Obama on record, telling us what the “fair share” of the rich is.  He is slippery and dishonest, but if I were Boehner I would tell him “look, we’ve got the votes, but I have people asking basic questions.  Answer them and this is done.” 

We need smart people in the drivers seat.  I don’t think we have them, but maybe they will emerge over the next while.

Few thoughts. I think some Aikido is in order for the near and mid-term future.  Oppose nothing, but redirect it.

Perceiving the new is much like being in a completely dark room, where you can touch the wall, but in which you have gone around the perimeter many times, and now realize you must venture away from the relative clarity of having SOMETHING to orient you, into the unknown.  I have done this often, and as I have said several times, what I do is go in circles in this room, looking for new clues. 

That is my long way of saying I have said what I am about to say many times, but think this way is slightly different.

Morality, as a system for decision making, is inherently an individual attribute.  Even when diluted, as in committees, each individual must decide to consent to or reject any given proposal.

A coherent moral philosophy is one which, deployed generally, will work INEVITABLY to build a more prosperous, more harmonious society.  It will support a solid work ethic, honesty, sociability, empathy and warmth, tolerance, and goodwill.

The nature of Socialism is that moral activity consists in working to gain the power to force people other than you to relinquish what they have.  It breaks society into three components: producers, those who produce government, and those who consume the output of both.  None of these groups are improved morally by their work. 

Producers reliably resent the efforts of people to take from them the fruit of their labor.  There was a time when landed nobility was born into wealth that had been stolen a long time ago from someone else.  That time has long passed.  In our own nation, the OVERWHELMING bulk of millionaires are self made, and could not have succeeded without creating many jobs, and the ability of many families to pay their bills.

Those who want the stuff of others are taught to feel resentment at their superior success and position, to view private property as negotiable, to view government as the vehicle to personal economic advancement, to view hard work as ignoble and unnecessary and to feel strongly that they are ENTITLED, regardless of the content of their characters, to a certain standard of living, which is not something that entered any traditional tribal society ever in human history.  Old people and the sick did less, but able bodied people were out hunting, out on the farm, or making things, and who possessed all the self respect that came with their usefulness.

Finally, the socialists themselves reliably develop a sense of moral superiority that comes from the aggressiveness with which they are willing to take the stuff of the first group and give it to the second.  Necessarily, this involves the creation of a social gap between themselves and the other two groups.  They think they are better than BOTH.  This leads to arrogance, and it leads to HUGE decreases in actual empathy.  Their job is to give stuff to the poor, not to understand them.

I put forward above a list of moral virtues which would by definition be built by any useful moral philosophy.  To reiterate, that list (obviously partial) is a solid work ethic, honesty, sociability, empathy and warmth, tolerance, and goodwill.

Without exception, Socialism damages all of these.

As I ponder this, it seems to me that my whale dream, and synchronicities of a few weeks ago, was telling me something different than what I thought.  What it was telling me is that NO amount of factual dissemination will make a substantial dent in the willed ignorance with which we are increasingly surrounded.  People have grown to WANT to be lied to. I  see this in debates on the internet.  You can present the most closely reasoned, OBVIOUS facts (example: we can’t increase our national debt $5 trillion a year forever, which is what we are doing), and you get just silly responses, like “the rich aren’t paying their fair share”.  And until we face a generalized collapse, that will likely remain the case.

What it was telling me is that I have to focus on the deep, on the cultural, on living in very large, open spaces.  We can’t go backwards.  We can’t recreate the 1950’s (which we look to as the last relatively innocent period of our culture, but which of course was also filled with fears of nuclear war, Sputnik, the mass abuse of children by Catholic priests and others, and segregation, among other things).  We can’t recreate the honor and civility that characterized our culture at its best in the preceding years. We can’t forget that we fought a Civil War, in which 20-30 million lives were ruined permanently.

Death and destruction have been the lot of humanity for most of recorded history.  Most of history consists, in fact, in wars: in wars, with all the unthinkable things which attend war.  People assume the worst happens on the battlefield, and in some respects that is true, but so much more follows.  I was just reading the other day about how the Soviets raped millions of women when they reconquered Eastern Europe.  Such people are never put on trial.  They finish their service, then go home to their wives and children, and not infrequently abuse them too.

What we need are things that have never been tried before.  My Goodness Movement is a stab in that direction, but it needs a lot of work.  The only off-the-shelf available movement forward that I see currently is Spiritualism.  There are mediums out there, today, who can manifest dead spirits such that they can talk and even touch people, or so it is reported.  People like David Thompson and Kai Mugge and others, can reportedly literally make your grandfather come back and talk to you.  They are, of course, untested by scientists because most scientists are idiots.

If I have not mentioned his site before, I would encourage folks to visit the website of Victor Zammit: http://www.victorzammit.com/

If one were to SERIOUSLY want to evaluate the evidence of the after-life, he is a very good initial resource.  Of course, the people who most need to do so are least likely to do so.  They have perfected the fear of the unknown to such an extent that they think they are open-minded and scientific.  I see no fundamental difference between fundamentalist materialists and socialists who want to destroy the world to perfect it.  It is the same breed of mania.

In the end, though, we must come to a generalized understanding of the spiritual nature of our world.  Once we do that, all the pieces fall into place.  My work will be long term, likely difficult, and quite possibly unsuccessful.  I saw a good quote the other day, though: falling down is life; getting back up is living.

Ultimately, I think much of the darkness in our world begins with the moral pessimism that comes with assuming we are machines whose apparent consciousness is a lie.  Our “life” is a lie.

You can attack the senselessness that comes with internalizing this truth by, as one example, focusing on a supposed “Singularity” in which our machinery is perfected.  You can pretend that “society” exists, even if individuals don’t.  But none of these are good solutions.  They lead to unnecessary restrictions of spirit.

It occurred to me the other day that horror movies are likely tonics for many people.  Once you get used to the basic idea of people being tied down and tortured, having their arms ripped off, of monsters in the dark, I think people MUST get a taste for it, since there are now thousands and thousands of titles, when once–25 years ago–movies like Halloween were aberrational.  There were very few of them, at least as far as I could tell. They certainly were not culturally prominent in the way they are now.

I think people learn to manage anxiety by feeding it.  I think these sorts of movies become addictive, because it is how you calm yourself down.

And I think the blackness inherent in all these movies helps people forget what they are forgetting.  We are in the process of killing everything good about America, and these movies act to cover up that fact.

Barack Obama’s motto is “Backward” (his cipher is quite simple: just invert everything he says to get the truth): back to the bad old days of the commissars, economic malaise, and pervasive despair.  So be it.  It is up to those still alive to move forward, and work to build something new, a new home, where people can be enticed to live.  There is no easy or quick way to do this, but it is the only game in town worth playing.

Political Correctness is servility.  It is granting in principle and practice that you do not have the right to your own perceptions and following opinions.  You accept limits in both speech and behavior that you do not determine.

We are a horribly uninteresting society, in many ways.  We lack genuine eccentrics.  That is why people feel the need to dress in strange and ridiculous ways.  They lack any means of differentiating themselves on the inside, so they do it on the outside.

The problems were likely the result of garden variety incompetence, of excessively ambitious aims and too little time, but the possibility must be considered of sabotage, of infiltration of the Romney campaign by leftist agents.  None of the PIN’s worked.  Did somebody upload the wrong file on purpose?  Were computer hackers at work, having been granted system access by an insider?

I had a dream some time ago of leftists going through Navy SEAL training, in the long term pursuit of winning leadership roles, and the following possibility of supporting leftist aims in taking over America. What I think people fail to grasp is that once you have undergone the decapitation ceremony, you are cursed to conformity.  You can do nothing else.  It is your life.  This is why Whittaker Chambers–a name far too few people know–put his money in the long term on the Communists.

As Sergei Nechaev–perhaps the original Nihilist (it is a Russian term)–put it:

 The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no
business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name.
Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the
single passion for revolution.

They have not quit.  I see no reason to believe this.  They have nothing else.  If you go study philosophy at virtually any university, if you are not a devout Christian, Jew or the like, you will come out a leftist (if you are not an Objectivist).  That is the virtually invariant result: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Our shared Meaning System has been systematically broken by both stupid and malignant people. This has consequences.