Month: May 2013

Guilt is an odd emotion.  I have been talking about expressing emotions, but guilt feels almost like self attack, self flagellation, making the recriminations inside your head that could and perhaps were made by someone else.  How do you let emotions flow that feel like barbed wire?

Clearly, guilt has a purpose.  It is what distinguishes the psychologically normal from sociopaths.  But it can be abused in so many ways.  Overly done, dramatically done, flamboyantly done, it avoids the actual feeling.  Not felt at all, and the stasis of the system is assured.

But what is it?  I think in the end it is a call to qualitative change.  You made a mistake, were weak, were hasty, for reasons of a character flaw.  True expression of guilt is honest self assessment and CORRECTION of the flaw.  Since correction implies acceptance of imperfection, this is hard to do. 

And so we dance.

This name has been stuck in my head, too.  Again, I have no idea where it came from.  Father of Perikles, Admiral of the Navy in a sort of Joint Command led by a Spartan, which accomplished the final victory over the Persians.

I’ve found that if you just go with things, more things follow.  This makes life interesting.

Sometimes I get names stuck in my head.  Cleanthes was one of them.  To the extent of my recollection, he was not mentioned in the survey of Greek philosophy I surveyed; nor was Zeno.  The only place I likely would have encountered him was in Hume’s “Dialogues concerning natural religion”, which I read in graduate school, and which apparently contains him as a character.

Be that as it may, I looked him up, and some of what he says is quite interesting:

Cleanthes maintained that pleasure is not only not a good, but is “contrary to nature” and “worthless.”^[15] It was his opinion that the passions
(love, fear, grief) are weaknesses: they lack the strain or tension
which he persistently emphasized, and on which the strength of the soul,
no less than that of the body, depends, and which constitutes in human
beings self-control, and moral strength, and also conditions every
virtue.^[15]
He said in a striking passage: “People walk in wickedness all their
lives or, at any rate, for the greater part of it. If they ever attain
to virtue, it is late and at the very sunset of their days.”^[16]

Zeno had said that the goal of life was “to live consistently,” the
implication being that no life but the passionless life of reason could
ultimately be consistent with itself. Cleanthes is credited with having
added the words “with nature,” thus completing the well-known Stoic
formula that the goal is “to live consistently with nature.”^[17]
For Cleanthes, this meant, in the first place, living conformably to
the course of the universe; for the universe is under the governance of
reason, and everyone has it as their privilege to know or become
acquainted with the world-course, to recognize it as rational and
cheerfully to conform to it.^[18]
This, according to him, is true freedom of will not acting without
motive, or apart from set purpose, or capriciously, but humbly
acquiescing in the universal order, and, therefore, in everything that
befalls one.^[18] The direction to follow Universal Nature can be traced in his famous prayer:

Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny,
To wherever your decrees have assigned me.
I follow readily, but if I choose not,
Wretched though I am, I must follow still.
Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.

Is this not quite close to the Buddhist conception of abandoning desire?  I would say, though, that “logos” in my view should mean more than reason and intellectual order.  A forest has “logos” because it is ordered too, simply in a deeper way.  Chaos, per Chaos Theory, has a “logos” that can be approximated.

We do not live according to reason.  We live according to our spirits, of which reason and apparent logic is but one manifestation.  We have to have a place for “that”, as I have said.

That’s enough on that.  I am procrastinating.

I think I get it now: movies will keep bouncing around my head until I notice and articulate somewhere the lessons they are trying to teach me.  The Lord of the Rings–as an epic filled with, and almost entirely informed by–mythos, has a lot to teach.

More than once I have pondered the symbolism of the Ring.  It is not quite evil, outright.  It is more subtle than that.  What it feels like to me is compulsion, the spirit of compulsion.  It is a muscle that spasms and never releases, but to which you become addicted.

It is the spirit of monomania, of thinking one thought over and over and over.

It is sending on only one frequency.  We are meant to wander here and there, in spontaneous ways with deeper orders.  As I have said often, what is unnatural is a planned and unspontaneous order–the chopped down/groomed forest, in the Taoist idiom–which is ordered only in conditions of coercion, which has no staying power, no longevity.  It lasts only as long as the muscle spasm is in place.

Now, I have been making good progress over the last month or two in personal growth. I have reached a point where I am willing and able to let some part of me fall away, as a sort of snake skin, or covering, that I no longer need. 

And some part of me I would identify with the ring keeps feeding me news of death and disaster.  There’s no point.  Go back now.  Live in a permanently curtailed, small world, and wait for direction there.  Thoughts that, in short, make me tense, make me worried.  Heart attack, heart attack.  Business failure, business failure.

Why are the Shirelings so resistant to the power of the Ring?  Because they lead relaxed, natural lives, surrounded by and tending to life, and are thus as opposite of the power of the Ring as they could be.

To my way of thinking, what is natural is an open meadow.  What is unnatural is a skyscraper built upon it. Why should it matter 1,000 years from now if people remember what we built?

The “I” of Ayn Rand is in my view a sort of nervous tick, a momentary disruption.  I mention her specifically since the skyscraper represented everything manly she wanted, including her own penis (OK: that’s going a bit far, but my kids, having seen a picture of her, refer to her as “the woman who looks like a man”.)

What she wanted was hard and enduring, and difficult to craft and build.  The ascent up the skyscraper represented the literal and figurative high point of “The Fountainhead”.

But is it natural for a flower to desire to blossom alone, so that its glory can be greater?  Paradoxically, Ayn Rand wanted the admiration of others for not wanting the admiration of others.  She wanted recognition, but only for doing it her way.  She wanted to be seen as an absolutely unique genius, but did not tolerate any dissent from this view among her admirers.

Can we not ask: is the pleasure of feeling above others really superior to the feeling of connecting with others, and having the ability both to generate spontaneous joy and to receive it?  Do we not in the end want our feet in earth, and not concrete and glass?

Few wandering thoughts.  If it doesn’t make the images go away, I’ll have another go after a while.

I’m trying to watch more movies.  I’ve liked Aaron Eckhart since “Battle: Los Angeles”, so I thought I’d give it a go.  I am going to speak as if you have seen the movie.  I’m not paid for this.

First, when it became obvious both that the North Koreans were behind it, AND that they were actively trying to dismantle America’s nuclear deterrent–as well as, of course, having engaged in what by any standard is an act of war by attacking and killing many Americans, and taking its two top officials prisoner–why not phone the head nutcase, and give him a simple ultimatum: release the President and all hostages in the next 10 minutes, or your nation goes up in flames.

What does Morgan Freeman do?  Agree to the terms, to “save” the President.  Now, I have likely quoted Jack Nicholson’s famous line from “As good as it gets before”, but will again.  How does one write of a typical leftist?  You write a conservative, then remove all sense of reason and accountability.

I have told my kids already: if somebody ever threatens to kill me unless you do something they can’t do by themselves, understand they are going to kill me anyway, and kill you, once they get what they want.  You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.  Period. This is common sense.

But what has Morgan Freeman done?  In order to win some minute chance of saving the President, he virtually ensures war between North and South Korea, and then the destruction outright of the United States.

Yes, it is just a movie, but they make movies like this because people are too stupid to think things through (another personal favorite non sequitur: in Eraser, after Arnie gets to the roof of a highly secure building, how does he get off?  We are not told).

To be clear, it is likely millions will die in any war on the Korean Peninsula, since somebody is likely to use nukes, most likely the North.

And compare Obama to Eckhart’s President.  Does it not make you want to weep?  Could you imagine Obama in a situation like that reacting with even a SHRED of moral courage?  What challenges has he surmounted in his life?  Running a campaign which mainly consisted in reading speeches from teleprompters someone else wrote?  He is to a real President what Ben Kingley’s drug addled Mandarin would have been to a real, serious, terrorist. He is an actor, and not even a particularly good one.  No one believes him when he says he feels “compassion”.  He was unable even to fake credible tears after the murder of over 20 kids in Newtown.

Otherwise, the movie was the umpteenth knockoff of Die Hard.  Worth the $4 I spent.

Edit, two other thoughts.

1.  Did we not just go through the scenario described, roughly, of a North Korea taking provocative action, and threatening missile tests?   Think about this: Obama’s silence, in the face of a semi-credible threat of nuclear attack, was deafening, at least for those with sense.

2. Gerard Butler’s character is the sort of person, I’m sure, that Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were: men with character, absolutely dedicated to their cause, and utterly undeserving of what happened to them.  They are people who make people like Obama and Hillary look like the midgets they are. They are what makes this country great.

I remember a story a SpecOps friend told me.  When Clinton authorized the release of dual use nuclear technology to the Chinese back in the 1990’s, he had just completed SERE school, which among other things involves being locked in what amounts to a dog cage for day or two, and in the advanced training getting waterboarded and beaten.  I didn’t ask the details of what happened, but I’m sure it was unpleasant.

What bothered him is that people like him have to undergo very severe, very difficult training to protect secrets that in most cases have a shelf life of no more than 48 hours.  Yet, Clinton, who like Obama never underwent any security clearance, was able to release strategic secrets that could affect the destiny of nations, at no cost to himself, and without even being coerced.

I well remember the militias that formed under Bill Clinton, and the sundry conspiracy theories floating around.  The Left, of course, began writing effective propaganda about right wing “paranoia” many years ago.  We were told there was no Red Menace, even after it was revealed that the principle architects of both the UN and the Bretton Woods agreement were Communist agents.  We were told the “domino theory” had no validity even after Communism brought its unique version of hell not just to South Vietnam, but to Cambodia, Laos, and many nations in Africa and Latin America following what the Soviets interpreted as America’s decision not to oppose them.

Even now, we have a man in the White House about whom we know almost nothing other than that he has been surrounded by anti-liberal radicals his entire life, and brought many of them to Washington with him.

Whenever I see people mock those who question the fundamentally Liberal character of modern left wing intellectuals and policy makers, I always like to link this piece here, as it puts their views in their own words: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1588/article_detail.asp

We were told just this week something to the effect that people who are asking for actual science from the global warming crowd are nuts.  Consider in that regard this quote, chosen more or less at random:

[l]iberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most
extreme case, the U.S.A., unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many
of the collective needs of the citizens…. There must be open minds to
look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption
of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties.

We have to understand that these academics and think tank leaders–and the people who bankroll them, like the Rockefeller Foundation and George Soros–have been wanting to more or less erode democracy in favor of something like the fascist economic and political system China has evolved for something more than 50 years.  None of this is new.

Thus, whose sanity should we question, when we have thousands of people in positions of influence openly advocating for an end to the primacy of Constitutional law in the governance of our republic, and who act consistently in support of that aim, as Obama has since the day he hit office?

Taking people at their word is not paranoia.  Ignoring them: THAT is lunacy.  Turns out Hitler was quite sincere, and so was Van Jones early in his career, before he learned the Fabian principles of gradualism, appearing respectable, and persistent conscious deception about their actual end goals.

As I’ve mentioned, I recently went through the whole thing again.  One thought that kept occurring to me this time is that it was economically invalid.  Where were the farms around Minas Tirith?  The riders of Rohan were presumably pastoralists, but if so, where were the cattle and sheep?

Now, obviously there exist substantial logistical difficulties in mounting to this level of detail, but on another level I would like to submit that in his prioritization of economics as a reflection of underlying power dynamics, and thus an issue of primary POLITICAL importance, Marx was quite astute.

We dealt, of course, with the kings in the movie, but there would have been serfs, since this was presumably a feudal system.  Did Tolkien and/or Peter Jackson not want to show these people, since they kept referring to the “free” kingdoms of Middle Earth?

And what did the orcs eat, in a land without sun?

Virtue can only take priority over hunger when hunger is largely and regularly sated.  This means anyone concerned with building virtue must take an interest in effective economics.  Life is logistics.  This is not speculation, but daily observation.

What if the Buddha had wandered into a strange land, attained Nirvana, but been unable to speak the local language to communicate it?  How many human wonders have been lost for the proverbial “want of a nail”?

I’m trying to take this idea of Movie Yoga seriously.  He makes the case that even the most horrific violence can actually be cathartic, if you lean in emotionally, rather than zone out; if you allow the scenes to affect you, see what rises from the depths of your unconscious, and then accept and integrate, affirm and bless, those contents.

So I decided to watch two horror classics, Saw and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.  I watched Saw last night.

As I process it, several plot elements come to mind.  First the emotionlessness, the passionlessness of the doctor.  Even as time is ticking, he is acting as if he has all the time in the world.  6 o’clock comes around, and he is surprised by it.  ONLY when he can no longer act, does the full weight of urgency strike him.

For his part, the kid is hasty.  The movie is bookended by the key he lost in his haste to get the recorder.  Interestingly, had the doctor been on his side, his plodding approach might have won him the key.  But of course the murderer knew that.

It occurs to me that all the characters in the movie have classic hamartias, and that Horror in some cases might be viewed as a species of tragedy, complete with catharsis.

In Movie Yoga, he makes the case that life is characterized by constant death and rebirth cycles, which have four main components: complacency/safety; being forced from safety, but unable to move, being trapped; energetic motion away from the forces oppressing you, running from them, fighting them, and eventually moving towards something; and finally freedom, a completion of the journey.  There are of course numerous examples of this in the Lord of the Rings.  One he doesn’t mention is the womb-like pseudo-safety of Helm’s Deep, and the final need to press out, to forego defensive barriers, in order to win the day, which of course happens at dawn.

This series of steps echoes the physical birth process, which Stan Grof argues is a very important element in everyone’s psychosocial development.  Parts of ourselves can be stuck at each stage, with following life consequences.  The goal, of course, is to facilitate movement, with the idea being that sufficient movement will erode barriers preventing us from consistently being able to travel through to freedom and stay there.

But back to Saw.  I was watching myself, and when the movie started, I was acutely feeling their confusion, panic, anger at confinement, and an overall sense of anxiety.  I found myself standing while watching it.  What was going to happen?  And I identified with the doctor’s final panic attack, when he realized how his passionlessness has put his wife and daughter in grave danger.

And in the end, of course, he failed.  There was nothing he could do when he finally chose to do something.  But we the viewers did not fail.  We can learn from his lesson.  We can learn to value life more, and to live with more passion, more connection, more vitality.

In some respects Jigsaw acts as a deity in the Greek sense.  He even wears a pig’s head, and dresses as a priest.  He acts as a daemonic spirit, where daemon can mean god, demon, fortune or fate.

He is evil, of course, but the point of the movie is to interact creatively with it.  What do the events on the screen teach US, the viewers?

It is worth noting that Greek tragedy is quite violent.  Cannibalizing children, incest, rape, and of course murder feature prominently, particularly, I read, in tales concerning the House of Areus.

I have work to do, but will likely post something on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre after I view it.

 Posted here: http://prospect.org/article/sex-economics-and-austerity#comment-20506

It is as interesting that someone should try to defend Keynes via his homosexuality as that one should attack him.

Reality is simple: you cannot spend more money than you take in forever.  You cannot borrow money forever.  You cannot borrow or spend your way to prosperity.  We borrow over $1 trillion dollars a year, and interest ALONE on our national debt will soon exceed the Pentagon’s budget.  These are not “right wing” speculations.  They are facts,  Period.

Further, the more important aspect of Keynes personality we need to look at is his lifelong association with radicals like Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and most ominously George Bernard Shaw, who was one of the first people he wrote when completed his masterpiece of BS, the “General Theory”.

Read the last chapter of that book.  What is unmistakeable even for an average mind is that he was Fascist, and I mean that in a technical sense.  He wanted potential government control over all aspects of economic life, with large, supportive corporations to be left alone as long as they toed the line.  He praised in his lifetime the economic policies of Adolph Hitler.  He in turn was praised by Benito Mussollini–the former Communist who came up with the name “Fascism”, kids–who called Keynes ideas “pure fascism”.  Yes, that is a quote.

Why were he and his Russian wife allowed to travel the Soviet Union without supervision?  Because they were regarded as ideologically safe.  George Bernard Shaw praised both Nazism and Communism, and there is no reason to believe Keynes did not share his fundamentally elitist and amoral worldview.  Keynes simply thought Fascism was more intelligent.

People like you are ruining this world by stupidity, by allowing vicious and evil human beings to continue their quest to destroy all semblances of a truly Liberal political order, and all traces of anything approaching honest morality.