Month: June 2013

I was thinking of a certain person I know who has reached a degree of success in his life where he can choose his lifestyle.  He has done so, and looking at him in my mind, I see this calm, smug satisfaction that he chosen the perfect life, that reason and science would dictate that what he does is what is optimal, within small variations.

There is this calm in that attitude, and frankly I envy it a bit.  Everything is clear. There are few if any ambiguities.  The pains of confusion are gone, not present.  Life is a simple matter.

It seems to me we all want to live this way, and for my part I wish him well.  It is just that I can see myself traveling from place to place and group to group, seeing again and again and again an absolute certainty about how to live, and what to do, but each group disagreeing on many points, large and small.

I think we naturally seek certainty as a shelter from the wind.  It truly is a resting place in a restless world.  We seek both absolute truths, and to derive from them absolute duties and identities.  It is no wonder that Plato sought the unchanging in his highly chaotic world, and that Aristotle put it down in writing, or tried to.

But our shelters are also our cages.  As any long time readers I have may know, I am more or less a Buddhist.  What the Buddha wanted from us was movement in a concrete direction, AWAY from  a static self.  He wanted to break us all into small pieces.  I wrote in my journal the other day that that was the reason he posited–at least in my understanding–that both time and space are discontinuous.  They consist in pieces he called dharmas.  It is far easier to break things–or take them apart, if you will– if they are not in one piece to begin with.

And it is interesting that he used this word.  I don’t know the history, but is the Buddhadharma itself not a piece, a broken shard, of some truth beyond words, beyond form?  Did it not fall from somewhere, after being condemned to specificity?

As I believe I’ve mentioned, I’ve decided to work my way through the 7 Saw movies, as a result of reading the book Movie Yoga, and becoming interested in exploring my own resistance to horror movies.

I have a few comments, which assume you are familiar with the plot.

First, even though John/Jigsaw what’s-his-name comes across, now, as at least intelligible, he is still a sociopath.  One can reasonably ask if he valued every moment of his life before he got cancer, and of course the answer would have been no.  He did, after all, try to kill himself. Being possessed of the narcissism that afflicts all sociopaths, though, he now expects the world to view itself through his eyes, and he also sees no reason to differentiate his own pending death with those he callously–gleefully–inflicts on others.

Yet, as I said with regard to the last one, this is a drama, acted out on screen.  No one actually dies.  The point of the movie is not any of the characters, but the cumulative effect on we the viewers.  And this movie did actually cause me to look more carefully at my own respect for life, and how valuable the freedom, time, and health I have been given actually is.

Emotionally, I am realizing–as I have seen in some dreams over the last few days I am not going to share–that in my own life even though I have explored evil and darkness with some care, I have not truly CONFRONTED it where it matters.  I think we often find ourselves toying with ideas which skirt real issues.  They are close enough to feel we are doing something, but far enough away to avoid active pain.

I am going to make a broad statement: the OVERWHELMING amount of evil in the world is hidden.  It is latent in human interactions, and largely consists in life not lived, affection not granted, attention not given, ideas not conjured, positive experiences rejected.

Most evil is not living, then taking it out on others passively.  This sort of malignancy is hard to see.

There are so many confused people out there, who have emotional problems, who can’t make things work, but who can’t see why.  Evil, that is why.

I have often invoked the NLP notion of “channels”.  All human communication consists in multiple channels.  There is what you say, obviously.  There is the way you say it–tone, body language.  There is the TIMING of when you say it.  There is what you DON’T say.

In communications I am terming evil, there is a disconnect between words and actions, between what is said, and what is actually being felt and meant by the communicator.

Jigsaw got a big grin on his face when he said “there will be blood”.  But he spent the rest of the time more or less trying to act like a humanitarian, trying to convince Det. Matthews that he was somehow morally superior because he gave people choices, because Matthews himself has often been a dirty cop.

And I don’t doubt that many viewers of this series picked up the words, but missed the creepy bloodlust, pursued clearly in no small measure for its own sake.

It is so hard to see what is in front of you.  I expend so much effort every day, and unquestionably fall far short every day.

Localism.  Countless location iterations of “that”, framed within the context of very general but absolute human rights.  This is the true point of Liberalism, which is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more interesting intellectually than the entirety of Marxist and following dogma piled high.

I honestly don’t get why intellectuals are drawn to the left wing.  Actually, that’s not true.  They are drawn, not because of the integrity, coherence, and vitality of the ideas–the right has a monopoly those–but rather because there they are RELEVANT.  Intellectuals of the right exist solely to protect the freedom of non-intellectuals, which is to say ACTUALLY useful people.

No academic can be routinely expected to find a world interesting which does not find them interesting.  That would require far more honesty and humility than most of them possess.

As I think I mentioned, I recently listened to a series on Greek philosophy from the Teaching Company.  I was filled often with an anger, a sense that the entirety of our “Western” civilization is founded on errors which have finally reached a point of folding in upon themselves, a point where our best and brightest have become stupid and violent (with shining facades of sincere humanistic interests, and deep erudition).

Socrates asked “What is Goodness?” (roughly: work with me here, and yes I have some understanding of the Dialogues and the abstractions actually discussed).  Plato told us it had an existence, since abstract ideas could not exist without some referent beyond the awareness of those who had not traveled out of the cave.

Aristotle defined it.  He created treatises showing us in what Goodness consisted.  Plants have an optimal form, and so too does the human animal, existing in a polis.  Some plants shrivel and do poorly in bad soil, but that does not change their nature and telos.  It merely makes them inferior, relative to what we can define clearly as the ideal, as what reflects “reality”.

2,500 or so years later, we have realized that what Aristotle posited as the ideal, or what Plato posited as actually existing in some weird other world, was actually culturally defined, and sculpted with words.  Given other words, other “realities” open up.

OK, here is my take: it’s all in the questions.  Bad questions lead to bad answers.  And even very intelligent people ask bad questions.  We are all limited by our experience–our culture, and the path we have traveled through it–and by our imagination.

Here is the correct question, which we are NOW in a position to ask: “what is the goal of the concept of Goodness”?

This question does not presuppose some world beyond the senses where “Goodness” exists in some way.  It does not presume to tell us in what Goodness consists.

Rather, it asks an eminently practical question: what the fuck do you want, grasshopper?

Is it not obvious that abstraction exists in support of concrete emotional realities?  Do we not think to further emotional ends?

Logic is all about ends and means.  A mean which leads demonstrably to a desired end is rational.  A mean which does not is irrational.  This basic thought process connects abstraction with reality, with the real world as it is lived, with our lives.

The concept of Goodness is very simple.  It is a heuristic device to guide decision making in the service of furthering qualitative growth, both for individuals and cultural/social orders.

We can create words to describe what we mean by qualitative growth, but we need to grasp–GROK, to borrow an invented, useful word–that what we truly want is the equivalent of “one hand clapping”; or, as I have put it elsewhere, of “THAT”.

Dialogue can collapse.  Words can fail us.  But we do not live through words, do we?  Watch the clouds fading in the sunset.  Go out on a muggy, close night, and watch the moon, and feel the life around you.  Can we integrate that to a Platonic dialogue?  No.

Look your lover in the eyes and tell her you love her without a word.

My recollection is that Wittgenstein said “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, muss man darueber schweigen.”

Ponder a room full of emotion.  Ponder a man and a women, just after an argument, or perhaps just after love making.  What can they say, now?  What is left?

Can we not see a room FULL of things that a poet might render, but which cannot be reduced to “reason”, and which are nonetheless quite real, quite relevant?

Oh, when I see THAT, it doesn’t get posted here; only perhaps a small shade, on occasion, and through translation.

But the Greeks–and here is my point, and by which I mainly mean Plato and Aristotle–did not leave room for “that”.  Their world was one of definitions, of words.  Socrates himself, I think, seems to have well understood that words do not a life make–which is why he left none.

But for my part, I would like to reiterate my question: “what is the goal of the concept of Goodness”?

We can obviously continue this: what is the goal of the concept of Justice?  What is the goal of the concept of Arete?


We can define what the goal is, and then apply EMPIRICAL means to reconcile our goal and means.


It is precisely the great crime of Leftist practice and ritual to have abandoned this basic relationship, and to have embarked on a profoundly anti-rationalist, anti-humanist agenda.


All of the errors on display relate, I think, to the idea of “Is-ness”.  “Goodness”, as a concept, is not a thing.  It does not “exist”.  The concept, itself, is mutable–meaning whatever any given speaker chooses–but it becomes useful when we ask for what it is intended, and how we might best pursue that end.  In some important sense this makes ethics “scientific”.

As I suppose I should say from time to time, I have no opposition to science, per se.  I oppose, rather, people who ABUSE the scientific method for personal gain.  Such gain can of course include research grants, but more generally it includes the protection of scientifically indefensible biases.


Hell, I’ve been drinking a tad, but hopefully this is useful to someone.  Certainly, it has been useful to me.


Edit: when I say a tad, read at a minimum 8 ounces of 100 proof.  I’m actually on the mend.  I am making my peace with what I need to make peace with, but for now I am continuing old habits.