Epilogue:

All four men realize they have nothing to live for, and simultaneously realize that their theatrical run–conducted for a  God in whom they do not believe–is not yet complete.

They arrange to meet in a remote glade with their servants, and drink hemlock, as symbolically appropriate.  As they toast one another, they all proclaim “To Truth and Honor”.  They have asked that their servants hang them on crosses facing one another when they are dead, place clown’s masks on their faces, and plant a hedge around the place to conceal their bodies, but they simply leave them where they die.  Five years later nothing is left of them but the scars they inflicted on the world, and souls suffering in ways none of us can imagine.

This article is interesting.

As it is being described, the process from the perspective of State is that an internal report is generated, and the Secy. views her job solely as providing her interpretation of the report.  They claim they do not need to release the report to Congress, or even that Hillary has to testify at all.  In other words, they can hide everything.

I say Bullshit. This thing is a fucking freight train they are trying to hide in the dark.  They are trying to get Benghazi out of everyone’s memory and Connecticut in their minds today, and if the foregoing analyst (last post) was correct, chemical weapons into rebel villages, launched by American trained de facto Al Quedists, and blamed on Assad.

I want to be clear: any intentional policy of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in any way shape or fashion cannot be called anything but treason.  Their interests are contrary to our own.  They want global sharia.  They want total power in the nations unfortunate enough to have these sadistic savages inflicted on them.  They want to destroy Israel.

The House in particular needs to light a slow, but powerful fire under her, and keep adding kindling until the whole thing explodes in a way even MSNBPRAVDA can’t spin for all but the usual idiots.  Correction: it will still be possible for them to spin or ignore it (since only idiots watch it in  the first place), but what we can do is push things to a point where a formal, long term committee is formed, a lot of tough questions asked, and maybe some people impeached and removed from office. Maybe not Obama, but people under him.

Our troops have deserved better than Obama for some time.  Let’s get some justice for at least a few of them.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/51346

I haven’t yet finished it, as I am crazy busy, but took ten minutes to get the gist of it.  This thing looks like Iran-Contra meets Watergate time 10.  The “video” lie is the least of it.

Read that, then add the fact that the survivors are being sequestered by the State Dept. 

This thing is a powder keg.

Start to pay attention to how often the beautiful and the horrific are combined in modern cinema and TV.  I was watching The Avengers again, and noticed, again, how in the most horrific scene of the movie–when Loki drills out someone’s eyeball–very beautiful music was playing, and the scene was one of luxuriant splendor.  I remember similarly an ad for one of the Saw movies, in which wonderful, soothing music came on, and an image in the distance slowly came forward.  It was a man with a box on his head, with something bad, like spiders, in it.  If memory serves he was screaming.

Or take the intersection of sex and horror.  I helped a friend move, and she likes to watch horror movies, so we watched an episode of “American Horror Story”, I think it was called, with some relatively well known actors, including Jessica Lange, Joseph Fiennes, and James Cromwell (best known to me from “Babe”.)

Story line one: Adam Levine and some other babe sneak into an abandoned sanitorium, do some vaguely kinky things, like tie her down, then he sticks his arm through a hole while she goes down on him.  His arm is ripped off.  Hilarity ensues.

Story line two: an amiable car mechanic is secretly living with and in love with a black woman in the pre-Civil Rights Movement South.  They make love.  He is very happy.  Then aliens descend, do twisted things to him that are only vaguely hinted at, and he ultimately winds up in an insane asylum.

Story line three: A woman is doing a story on the asylum.  She goes in.  Everyone is weird, it’s run by Catholics, and the head nun is cruel.  Later, we find out she is a lesbian, and she makes love to her woman.  She later sneaks into the asylum, is caught, and slotted for “treatment’ for her sinful ways.  The lover is blackmailed with threat of exposure as a lesbian, and keeps her silence, lest she lose her job,  and social position.

Story line four: James Cromwell more or less tortures people at will, allegedly in the pursuit of “science”.

What one finds here is powerful cultural propaganda.  We are taught to hate people who disagree with interracial couples, or lesbianism.  We are taught to hate Catholics.  We are exposed, again, to acts of sadistic brutality, conditioning us to expect and tolerate them.

Most importantly, though, and this point is crucial: we are taught not to relax, to be wound up.  Right after the mechanic makes love to his woman, when he is utterly at peace, the aliens descend.  Right as Adam Levine is feeling pleasure, he is dealt a mortal wound.  Very shortly after the lesbians copulate (is that the word?), one of them is in effect attacked and tied down on a bed.  All of this is tied with organized religion.

If you wanted a captive population, one of the things you would do is create incessant and inescapable anxiety, and the surest way to do that is to fragment in subtle psychological ways the historic means of relaxing and unwinding, which would clearly include sex.  What fragmented sex looks like is mutual masturbation, not losing a part of your sense of self, your identity, in another.  It is reduced to sensation only, with emotional connection disbanded and cast away.

Propagandists want lonely people.  I posted on Ellul a week or two ago, and have decided it might after all be worth posting some 2-5 paragraph excerpts, since I see NO indication in any of the media I read that the Right actually gets how this stuff works.

Now I really have to run.  I had a day and a half of work, slotted two days, and am now back to a day and a half.  Should all be fine, though.

I will paraphrase, I believe, Eliot: the end of all our psychological journeying is to become who we always were, consciously.  I may well have stolen that from someone, but can’t remember who at the moment.

The Sanskrit word for ego is ahamkara, which literally means “I maker”.  I would submit that the first, inherent task of such a thing, such a process, is the creation of difference.  There can be no “I” if there is not a “not I”, an out there.  The ahamkara is also a “difference maker”.

I would submit that the principle function of consciousness is precisely differentiation. There is a difference between a bird and the sun, between dog shit and roses.

And there are differences between people.  There is a difference between a pedophile and a sincere philanthropist.  If we extend the “I maker” to groups of people the unit of society would be the “Us maker”. It would be what creates the differences that define that group, which NECESSARILY would include internal consistencies, such as rejecting in principle and gut pedophilia, and praising sincere philanthropy.

Hate is a dysfunction in this system.  It is a failure in either the I maker or Us maker, probably both.  A person who hates is someone who is not full, who is not fully individuated, who is not yet engaged on a creative personal adventure, who does not enjoy life, who is not complete in some way, who is half baked and half risen. Likewise, a society which hates is one which is insufficiently integrated, in which people do not feel part of a flow of life, of larger creative energies, who do not feel wanted and valued and esteemed for who they REALLY are; who in many cases do not KNOW who they are, since that society does not encourage self exploration.

Who are the two groups who do most of the hating in the modern world?  Muslims and Leftists. In the first case, what you have is a system which largely rejects the individual, which is manifested in the rejection of the desirability or even POSSIBILITY of individual moral judgment, of communication with God unmediated by the Koran and Hadith.  You cannot grow as a person in such a system, unless it is softened by non-dogmatists, as in practice has happened around the world.  Gurdjieff, if memory serves, found the heart of true Islam in Bukhara.

Fanatical, fundamentalist Islam must be seen as a response to the perception of marginalization of tradition, and religion in the modern world.  It must be seen as a response to the perception of an attack on the “Us maker” and the “I makers” of their world.  Precisely to the extent they feel uncertain about themselves, they hate.

It some respects I am mouthing truisms here, but I often find that even when I am covering familiar ground, I will notice some side alley that leads somewhere new, even if only in a small way.

Leftism I deal with daily.  The headless people.

I will say that Sunday I was on a longish like, and your mind wanders at times when you’re in steady motion for several hours.  Voldemort popped up in my mind, life-size.  I shrank him, and confined him in a cocoon of webs.  His form altered, such that he had many heads and legs and arms. He became less a human than a force composed of pure anger.  That image lingered for a while, and I wondered what to do with it.  And it occurred to me to pull it back in.  I did, and felt an anger in me that I realized had been there a long, long time, but that I had rejected and suppressed.

Anger serves a purpose.  It is a sort of guard dog, protecting us at all times, and will attack what is hurting us until we call it off. And I think that while all of us are familiar with the concept of “psychological conflict”, I don’t think we quite realize how acccurate this term is.  Many of us, with certain histories, have what might be termed an emotional “shadow budget”.  We consciously allocate energy to our chosen and necessary tasks daily, but we also have to allocate emotional “money” to feed antagonists within us, the guard dog and the unwanted intruder.

We become less than we ought to be, and never know it.

Few thoughts.  It is fortunate for me–and I thank God (truthfully, I pray to “spirits of light”, in whom I do believe)–daily for having granted me the gift of time.  I was supposed to be on the job site an hour ago, but have no clock to punch.  This extra time has been useful.  Sometimes doing nothing is achieving maximal productivity.  As I have said, you can’t do paradigmatic work while in relentless motion.  Better three purposive and new steps than a thousand as a machine.

Edit: I will add that the simple point I wanted to make is that hate is the shadow aspect of the very real human need to judge, which is to say to contextualize, which is an essential process in individuation and self actualization.  A stable society–a GOOD society–will combine judgement with GENUINE tolerance.

The need to judge cannot be eradicated, and if the effort is made–as has been done in modern Sybaritic Leftism–all that happens is a part of your self disappears from conscious awareness, meaning that hate and following anger will appear in strange and unpredictable ways, typically in response to people for whom moral indifference is NOT a principle ethical ideal.

That unrecognized hate becomes, then, a hidden but quite real pestilential swamp which is highly conducive to the breeding of full blown Cultural Sadeism.

It occurs to me tolerance is only a VIRTUE in conditions in which there is 1) genuine difference; and 2) the possibility of intolerance.

Otherwise the word is indifferent. What we see on the Left is not tolerance–they HATE anyone who doesn’t belong to their tribe–but indifference to all non-defined crimes, of which the only obvious example is ideological alterity (to use academic jargon for “otherness”).  Fucking goats?  Not a problem.  Pedophilia?  Well, are you claiming oppression and not a Catholic?  We can work our way around it.  Etc.

Tolerance is a virtue that makes the world more interesting, since it facilitates more actual diversity.  Our world is much too homogenized, at least the world in America.  Most people, you get two or three data points–music, TV, clothing, where they eat–and you can, I think (I have not conducted a scientific survey), guess many things about them accurately.

Me, I am a cipher.  I don’t follow any patterns or belong to any groups.  There is something in my thinking and acting to both attract and repel virtually every human being on the planet. I like that about me. 

Conversely, I do have some severe constrictions in my emotional flow, at least as expressed in front of actual people.  I am, honestly, not infrequently an asshole–certainly more than someone with a site called Goodness Movement would want to admit.  I am often Type A, or a DI on the DISC.  I grant and recognize that.

But I will channel Michael Savage and do some self promotion (of an ideosyncratic sort, to be consistently inconsistent): I am an intellectual (well, my preferred term is thought worker) who will spend all day tomorrow wearing a hard hat, safety glasses, steel toes, and possibly gloves (depending on the site super), and climbing a ladder and wiring things on a construction site.  I will be making far more per hour than anyone there, but I am certainly one of them.

I like construction workers.  I get along with them.  They are open and honest, in general.  And I would rather deal with people who have no chance of understanding any of the ideas I have had that make me special than with people who think they are smart but are really stupid.

The part of life that matters is not the part you can write down, and I think people who read and write too much can forget this far too easily.  I can say from personal experience that it is quite possible to sound brilliant at the same time you have your head up your ass, in the lamentable RCIS: rectal-cranial inversion syndrome.

One would hope this would be covered by Obamacare, but unfortunately that is the very illness that produced it.

Could one posit that pain is the root building block of joy?  That it is the atomic element from which all forms of life come? I said as much in my Goodness essay.

Could one define pain as “resistance to motion”?  Could one define joy as acceptance and amplification of motion?

Can there be any path to happiness other than learning to enjoy work?  I don’t think so.

Edit: let me expand on this.  Let us suppose that we begin as lumps of rock.  We are at rest.  If some vague life enters us, it compels us to move, but since we are rocks, moving is both unfamiliar to us, and seemingly difficult.  Our task is to learn to accept this new reality, then take pleasure in it.  Surely it is better being able to CHOOSE between repose and activity, if at various times one or the other appears more pleasurable to us?

Here is my take on the thing: we are all rocks.  Or cattle.  I had a dream once where angels were trying to instruct humans and it was literally like us talking to cows.  They hear wah wah, wah, with a VERY slight chance they know their name.

Our job is to move faster, and to move faster you must move faster than you ever have, and that is pain.  You resist it, or have an innate tendency to. 

Pain is the drag on your movement when you are growing. Or as the Marines have it “Pain is weakness leaving your body”.

The SEAL’s say “the only easy day is yesterday”.  This can only be true, though, when you are constantly pushing the envelope, constantly trying the new, constantly moving in new directions.  You can otherwise build your peace with nearly ANYTHING.

Serious minds know that this system, and Medicare, are broke.  They are running of an actual, large cliff, compared to which the current discussions are small change.  They really are.  The amounts in play on both sides are much less than a tenth of what SHOULD be in play in a rational polity.  The shit will hit the fan.  Granny will go over a cliff.

Given this, it is never too early to start trying to fail in a smarter rather than a stupider way.  Here is one proposal: tax credits or deductions for families who bring their aging parent(s) in to stay with them.  It may be the case that dependent parents can be deducted now, but I doubt it, since they would also be drawing Social Security.  We could incentivize what was considered basic decency in years past, in roughly all cultures the world over.

As I have said before, part of the reason many cultures focus on raising hard working, successful children, is that they will NEED them when they get older, to care for them.

Have you seen this new show, Killer Karaoke?  I’ve seen the trailers, and it looks like something along the lines of the Gong Show meets Jackass.  People are literally tortured while trying to sing, and we are supposed to find the whole thing funny.  Well, I guess if you think watching someone getting covered with shit while bouncing up and down on a bungy cord while in a Port-a-Potty is funny (a Jackass stunt), you might.

It seems to me like there is this pain floating around in the air–a virtual metaphysical entity, although I don’t literally envision it that way–and it doesn’t know where to land in our modern world.  We don’t invite it in in structured, shared ways.  We don’t REALLY suffer physically any more.  Our lives are soft, comforted, relatively risk free.  We have eliminated racism. People are nice to everyone but conservatives, which is to say those who refuse to renounce the right and duty to render moral and intellectual judgements outside the realm of leftist conformitarianism.

So where does it land?  In strange places.  Here, we have a literally sadomasochistic game show.  Dee Snider is the co-host. Here is one of his more charming lyrics:

A glint of steel, a flash of light
You know you’re not going home tonight
Be it jack or switch, doctor’s or mind
Nowhere to run, everywhere you’ll find
You can’t escape from the bed you’ve made
When your time has come, you’ll accept the blade!

You’re cornered in the alley way, you know you’re all alone
You know it’s gonna end this way, the chill goes to the bone
Now here it comes that glistening light, it goes into your side
Blackness comes, tonight’s the night, blade is gonna ride

[CHORUS:]

Cause you’re under the blade
Oh, you’re under the blade

It’s not another party head, this time you cannot rise
Your hands are tied, your legs are strapped, a light shines in your eye
You faintly see a razor’s edge, you open your mouth to cry
You know you can’t, it’s over now, blade is gonna ride

[REPEAT CHORUS]

[Solo – Jay Jay]

A glint of steel, a flash of light
You know you’re not going home tonight
Be it jack or switch, doctor’s or mind
There nowhere to run, everywhere you’ll find
You can’t escape from the bed you’ve made
When your time has come, you’ll accept the blade!

You’ve tried to make it to the front, now you’re pinned against the side
A monster stands before you now, its mouth is open wide
The lights go on, the night explodes, it tears into your mind
When the night does end, you’ll come again, the blade is gonna ride

[REPEAT CHORUS]

Here it comes, baby
Ow!

Now you’re under it
You’re going down, down, down, down, down, down
Down, down, down, down, down, down, down

Hey!
Ow!

Much was made back in the day about his ability to rationalize his impulses towards violence, towards graphic images of torture and murder.  I would suggest that it is a commonplace for sadomasochists to be able to intellectualize their activities.  At root, it represents a failure of the meaning system.  It  represents a failure to mature emotionally.  It represents a moral world that is to risen bread what a misshapen lump of water and flour is. You’ve likely all baked bread at least once without letting it rise properly.  The middle just isn’t right.

Formal sexual sadomasochism is theater.  It is role playing.  It is one person consenting to let another person do them things that are wrong for them emotionally, that feed something already broken in them.  I don’t doubt it brings relief, but at the cost of qualitative lowering.

And to the point, you can’t look at a Lenin or a Pol Pot, or a Castro, or a Che Guevera and see anything other than an intellectualized desire to do what Dee Snider is talking about.  It is the process of fitting a society to a Procrustean bed that they can vary in size at any time they like that animates them. There is no empathy there.  There is no concern for human suffering.  There is a deep joy in the idea of pounding others into nothingness, as in the Fabian window.

There is no one on the Daily Cause who, deep down, doesn’t want to inflict suffering on someone else,. who is not motivated more by hate than love. They simply justify themselves by figuring that if they hate the right people, that is tantamount to love.  But it isn’t.

I don’t know where the pain will land.  I am doing what I can to help in land where it works best–in individual moral judgments, and in self imposed creative challenges.

My creed could be summarized thus:

Reject destructive qualitative pain.

Facilitate quantitative growth through creative quantitative pain.

Facilitate qualitative growth and joy through chosen qualitative pain.

One must face the wind.  One must look into the future with a cold eye that becomes a warm eye in the accepting.

I have from time to time quoted Melville:

So soon as I hear that such and such a man gives
himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old
woman, he must have ‘broken his digester.’

I was talking with a guy in a bar tonight who described life as “a joke”, and self identified as an existentialist.  What I told him was that he needed a philosophical mechanic.  I asked him, approximately (beer was involved, as well as fatigue): would it not be better for you if you could be happy, have a sense of purpose, and do so without violating any of your principles or understanding of truth?

The answer of course was yes.  I referred him to my website since I was too tired for a detailed conversation, and would in any event have muddled it up.

But it seems to me that the net effect, the Action To, of much modern philosophy is breaking peoples digesters, their sense of life, their self organizing capacity they are born with.  They are born with all the tools they need to find meaning in life, and instead taught to throw them by the wayside and do the cognitive equivalent of praying to the actual Flying Spaghetti Monster. No wonder they get lost.  No wonder this world makes them feel alone.