Month: January 2013

Passing through Cleveland yesterday, I stopped for a short while at the Rock and Roll Museum.  My short take is that the Birchers were right: rock has on balance been a pernicious influence.

What maintains cultures is continuity.  To maintain continuity you have to VALUE continuity, and the essence of rock is breaking with the old, rebeling, destroying in some iterations.

There was a room of photos of 80’s era bands.  None of them looked happy. 

The posters in the gift shop consisted in either horror show bands like “Five Finger Death Punch”, and “Bullet for my Valentine”–none of them smiled, either, of course–or vapid pop to appeal to teenage girls.

Once you lose control, how do you regain it?  If you regain it in a position of not having access to open, plentiful, sincere love, then you regain it in power.  What else can one make of an album titled “Kill ’em all”, Metallica’s first?

All this anger makes sense to people.  It is not just Other-destructive: it is SELF destructive.  All power mongering is, since the root of malady is a loss of a self not dependent fully on context.

I’ll have more to say, but as usual I’ve overslept a bit.  I never fuck up completely.  I just don’t adhere to the highest standards of what is possible professionally.  This work, in any event, is much more important to me.

It’s worth saying from time to time–as I’m well aware I do–that this blog is my public note space.  For a long time–years–I kept all my notes private.  What I found is that it is a pain in the ass editing and publishing them, so what I decided to do is just post my musings here. 

I don’t agree with everything I say here, reserve the right to contradict myself and be stupid, and some of what I post will not make sense, or be fragmentary.

A quote I wrote down long ago from Thoreau went something like “It need not be long, but it takes so very long to make it short.”

For me, at least, verbosity is the spring of concision.

I would submit that sentimentality is always a bit narcissistic.  You look at yourself weeping over the kids in Africa, and weep because you are weeping.   What a lovely person you are.

This is quite a different emotion than empathy, or the commitment to help which follows it.

Meaning is that which minimizes qualitative pain, and maximizes qualitative joy.

An optimal truth system is one which focuses on the qualitative growth in knowledge, and secondarily the quantitative growth.  It is far more important to know what life IS, than what insects reside in the Amazon rain forest.  It is far more important to recognize and integrate the idea that our souls and bodies separate at death than to cure cancer or heart disease (and in any event, little progress other than early detection and early intervention has happened over the last half century).

An optimal political system is one which maximizes the number of meaning systems.

An optimal economic system minimizes quantitative pain (cold, hunger, illness) and, by the same stroke, maximizes access to plenty.

Self evidently, you cannot maximize generalized wealth by decreasing it.

I’m sure I’ve been through a few iterations of this, and will go through more, but will offer the following as something that makes sense to me at this moment:

Meaning is that which justifies both suffering and deep joy.  The stronger the meaning system, the more pain you can suffer without complaint, and the greater the joy you can feel.

Countless shreds and shards, and streams and rays of meaning can be created in this world, where creation is vision.

I was in what I will call a transgressive museum yesterday, one well funded by the State and Local governments, and no doubt a few spent dissolute rich people.

Wandering around in this morass of meaninglessness–can I stipulate that when someone wants to “contextualize” something they are admitting being lost?–it occurred to me what a RELIEF anger is in such an environment.  It was welling up in me.  I was getting images of being a KKK Night Rider, as a vastly preferable alternative to living in that horrible world.

We need to recall that the artistic climate leading up to Bolshevism was Futurism, which extolled meaninglessness.

We need to recall that the artistic climate of Berlin in the period leading up to National Socialism was one of Dada and horror.  “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920 )might be viewed as one of the first–perhaps the first–Horror film.  Or M, perhaps the first film about a serial killer.

Or Bauhaus, which was a de facto rejection of historical culture, where “culture” within my terms is “that which facilitates meaning.”  It rejected historical means of generating meaning, while offering nothing new other than a purported “rationality”.

The artistic world was out of creative ideas for benevolent, desirable social and personal growth and transformation.  It rejected the old, without having understood what functions it performed, without grasping what actually matters in a social order.   I have argued that art should be INTEGRATIVE.  I have offered specifical moral values it should foster: the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and enhanced capacity to see, in all the possible sense of that word.

I am willing to countenance any and all events in art, if they lead to growth of these virtues.  “The Cabinet” might–I have not seen it–but I see no credible reason to suppose most modern horror does.  How do you want away more generous, more open, more loving?  You don’t.  You want away traumatized, but addicted to that feeling.

Berlin saw constant street battles between Moscow-supporting Communists, and National Socialists, who believed no in the primacy of the worker, but of the GERMAN.  This was their only difference: Fascists are in general more honest.  Hitler did in fact advance the cause of most ordinary Germans, whereas Lenin and Stalin helped virtually no one outside a power elite.

But the point I want to make is that nihilism, a sense of helplessness in the fact of the task of meaning formation, leads to violence. 

The KKK thought it was defending a way of life, and the virtue of its women.  They were no more wrong in this than are Communists in claiming they defend the rights of the worker in the face of oppressors.  Communists tyrannize, with very few exception, EVERYONE in a society, including Party members who forget their special standing, and need to conform publicly in all cases to even the most idiotic Party lines.

I would actually go so far as to say that the violence of the KKK was more RATIONAL than the violence of the Communists.  The KKK killed perhaps 4,000 people over a span of a century.  There were WEEKSs when Communists killed that many people.  The KKK was trying to resurrect a social order that had been destroyed in war.  The Communists had nothing to point to, no creative activity.  No net positive for virtually anyone, but rather countless trails of tears, including the countless millions displaced by their policies, in an analogous fashion to our displacement of Indians, but multipled by a 100.

The KKK terrorized a small part of society–and to be clear, what they did was clearly evil; I am in no respect defending them, other than to say their terrorism was much more defensible than that of the  Communists–but Communists terrorized EVERYONE.  There was no reliable “us”.  There was no reliable group, no family, no place where trust was warranted.

As I say from time to time, my view of Communism is that it is as close to a purely evil creed as can be imagined.  One could say that literal Satanism would be worse, but if it were called by that name, it would still be more honest, and could scarcely be more sanguinary.

And this evil–this justification of a violence made psychologically necessary by artistic and intellectual failures–is facilitated by meaninglessness of the sort on display in hundreds of museums the world over.

Contemplate the state of a happy baby: it feels safe, surrounded, warm, and loved.  It’s physiological state is one of deep relaxation.  It does not have stress hormones in it, and if there are “feel good” hormones–like seratonin, if memory serves, or perhaps the much-touted endorphins you get with exercise, then it is filled with those.

What I would submit is that this reaction, being in large measure physiological, is potentially under our conscious control.  You can learn to secrete the hormones, to feel the feelings, to relax the muscles, that are similar to the feeling of a happy baby.

Consider the Buddhist practice of loving kindness (karuna, if memory serves).  It is a flow outward.  But to do it properly, it must first be directs INWARDLY, correct?  You cannot hate yourself and love others, truly.  That is not how it works.

In my own case, my mother may as well have been schizoid.  I have struggled with the term, but by all accounts I cried a lot, and got hit a lot when I was 2 and 3.  Like many, I missed that early experience with bonding.  According to traditional theory, I’m screwed.  But I don’t accept traditional theory.  Fuck limitations set by others, especially so-called “experts”.

Despite not having been nurtured myself, by my mother or wife, I was very loving with my children.  One of my kids once told me “you look like my father, but you’re really my mother” (I’m “practically a breast”: name the movie).

Where did that come from?  I don’t know.  But I can say that the practice of loving is comforting for the one doing it.  Empirically, in my own experience, love does not have to come first to you for you to offer it to others.

This means we control our own experience.

This is very important, because what I see, looking at our cultural landscape, is a lack of love.  See that kid with the “love” t-shirt on?  His mother is probably a clinical narcissist.  That is why he smokes pot and listens to escapist, vapid music.  Many if not most hippies were and remain functional narcissists.  As I once heard it put, “There was a lot of loving back then, but not much love.”

Consider these young women who go down to Florida on spring break and fuck 3 guys, probably in what most would consider undignified circumstances.  Do they become good mothers?  Some, yes.  Many, no.  Where did they get the love, and/or how did they decide to love anyway?  I think they marry some good looking rich kid, who cheats on them.  These are gross generalizations of course, but I think have some truth in them.

The essence of spirituality–and I think I’ve said this–is first and foremost the ability to comfort yourself in difficult circumstances, and thus to have emotional reserves for others even in the most trying of circumstances.  It is not about mystical experiences, except to the extent they are USEFUL in this task.  What was miraculous about early Christians was the equinimity with which they met often very horrible fates.

Have to run.  Hopefully this is useful for someone.

Alexander Hamilton, if memory serves, proposed that Presidents be elected for life.  This proposal was thrown out, of course, but until he proposed it all iterations of the role of President were very weak.  The four year Presidency was, in my understanding, made possible in some measure by his throwing out a radical, benchmark destroying proposal.

Likewise, I would suggest that a proposal being thrown around to mint trillion dollar coins is radical.  It is stupid.  It does not address the underlying SYSTEMIC problems.  But the fact that such an idea is being discussed in public hints at a willingness to go farther in our thinking than we have hitherto.

As this article notes, “there have been 250 sovereign defaults since 1800″.  In all cases of which I am aware, what happened was a government spent more than it could raise in taxes, borrowed heavily, and eventually was unable to make its payments.  It said to the creditors some version of SORRY, then reset its ledgers.  Obviously, there are many ways in which this happens, many ways in which creditors get some of their money back (invasion was at one time considered an acceptable option, if memory serves), but the fact remains: you can at some point just say: you aren’t getting your money back.j

There were 1.3 million private and business Chapter 7–total liquidation–filings last year.  This means people and companies–like Solyndra–reached points where they could not hope to pay their bills, and simply walked away from their debts. 

My proposal (click on the first picture, with the mechanic, here) is a default that is utterly unique, unlike anything I’ve seen tried, and unlike almost all proposals I’ve seen.  It is most like the Chicago Plan, which called for 100% reserve banking.


The simple and ineluctable fact is that increasing productivity should be leading to increasing income per hour worked, and corresponding opportunity for leisure.  John Keynes 15 hour work week would have come into being, had he not lived to teach us to borrow and spend.


There is nothing wrong with the value of our money increasing steadily–as it would were new money and new claims on our new wealth constantly being created–IF there is no public or private debt, as there would not be, if we had true Capitalism and free markets in the banking sector.

My proposal will work.  I am convinced of it.  I am not an economist, but I have thought it through carefully, and often, and see no foundational flaws.  Defaults are common.  Mine is simply a democratic default, which erases the debt of EVERYONE, not just the government.

From here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/debt-ceiling-2013_n_2410622.html#slide=1476686


I will add, that it is persistently interesting to me how the Left systematically takes the truths–the documentable, factual, empirical truths–of conservatives, and simply appropriates the RHETORIC directly, without making even rudimentary efforts to show how it applies; how, for example, it is somehow “lunacy” to want to discontinue the road to national bankruptcy.

I just have one question: do you invert the truth 180 degrees intentionally, or simply out of the long standing delusion that your side is inherently and always rational, and can thus lay claim to the actual truth without delay or hesitation, regardless of the facts?

The simple reality is that spending was $2 trillion under Clinton.  It will be (we think: no budget has been passed or even seriously proposed under Obama, so it’s hard to be sure) roughly $3.2 trillion under Obama IN 2012, and trending sharply up.  That increase in SPENDING has nothing to do with ANYTHING except increases in the SIZE OF GOVERNMENT.

We are on a path to insolvency.  What merit, I ask, is there in pretending that if we postpone rational discussion for another day that some concrete good will have been done?  To be irresponsible is not the same as being responsible.  They are, in fact, the reverse of each other.  In the real, actual world. some ideas are better than others.  Some PEOPLE are better than others.  You, here, are betraying a mediocrity of spirit and intelligence that, if you could see it clearly, would give you ample cause to consider long bouts of silence.

The 86 trillion dollars in unfunded–UNFUNDABLE, to be clear, in any conceivable scenario–liabilities would give any rational person pause.  It does not give you pause.  Ergo. . .

In our current environmen–at least as most people process our current environment–it seems impossible to imagine that anyone would be so UNCIVIL as to attempt to impose tyranny on us, but the fact of the matter is that that is EXACTLY what has been proposed by mainstream professors, publicly, with seemingly no backlash.  Imagine what their discussions look like in private.

Please read this link, which I have posted from time to time: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1588/article_detail.asp