Month: March 2014

I felt clearly today that there is no path to spirit but through the senses, through the body.  If there is value in asceticism, it can only lie in sharpening and refining the senses, and specifically in eliminating barriers to experience.

On this topic I will add that an interesting thing about contraction and release–of various sorts–is that the expansion following a contraction need not stop with the previous form and boundaries.  The contraction creates the possibility of growth, which may seem paradoxical, but isn’t.  You change form in one way, making a following change easier.

I felt too that most of what is done in the name of religion is in almost all cases social and not spiritual technology.  Group ritual is no doubt comforting in many ways–people who go to church, for example, live considerably longer, making widespread failure to “prescribe” church all the more conspicuous–but it does not further inner growth.

It seems to me as well that you cannot do exactly the same thing for many years, and expect to continue growing.  Just as you have to vary your routine in physical training, so too must you in psychospiritual training.

I will add, that it is very hard to see where emotional growth ends and spiritual growth begins.  They are closely related.  Neither has anything to do with intellectual growth, whose sole purpose is to create structures within which psychospiritual growth is made possible and/or more likely.

May you fail better today.  May you find and travel a path which goes nowhere and remember those paths which do.  May you feel misery and pain, and remember with gratitude the possibilities of joy and contentment.  May you see ugliness and remember the importance of beauty.  May you hear noise and dissonance and realize, perhaps for the first time, the value of harmony.  May you smell something which disgusts you, and by contrast enter into the vital and omnipresent world of scent.  May you taste something which offends you, and recall with satisfaction the countless good meals you have received, and appreciate more those you have yet to receive.

May you realize that the world is open, and that only we are closed.

Simple question: what is the potential scope of the effect of the decision of any single person or body within a system? If it could affect everyone in a system, then that system is formally Anti-Liberal.

If it affects at most a handful of people–or if it must be combined with the decisions of dozens or hundreds of others–then that system is Liberal.

I will note that this includes within it the tyrannical potential of direct Democracy of the Athenian or French Revolutionary sort, in which a group of people, but ONE body, has the power over life and death for anyone it chooses.

Within our system, there are many bodies–two houses of Congress, 3 branches of government, 50 state governments, countless local governments, and a system of law which by design restricts Federal control of any number of things, including gun ownership, criminal justice, and speech. There are firewalls to block the effect of a decision, in answer to which relative unity of view must prevail for large scale policies.

In places where people are peaceful, gun ownership has no effect on crime.

In places where people are violent, banning guns works to increase violence.  This applies even when guns themselves are not used in the crimes.  This was the experience both of Britain and Australia. If the goal is a better quality of life, people control with respect to gun ownership is retrogressive.  It makes things worse, life worse.

And logically, if people are not to be reformed from their violence via coherent moralities–none of which are on display in the dialogues of our power elites, whose sole focus is soulless egalitarianism–then at some point the solution they will inevitably propose will be the centralization and monopolization of violence in the body of the State.  Drones and cameras will surround everyone; everything will be seen, and police omnipresent.  This is no way to live.

Thus, LOGICALLY, the only way to decrease violent crime without recourse to violent totalitarianism, is through CULTURE, through better ideas, through better economic policy.  Where are the people proposing these?  We cannot go backwards, but we can clearly go forwards better than we are doing now.

One of the persistent criticisms of “Capitalism” [can we not define Capitalism as “that which opposes socialism?”  It would come quite close.  Marx had an enemy, one that he created in his work, and one which was needed to rationalize the totalitarian impulses latent in his writing, which were later made concrete by Lenin] is that it is “dehumanizing”, that it objectifies people, that their only value is their labor cost.

This is patent bullshit of course.  Only stupid people even consider this proposition, but regrettably our universities are filled with stupid people, and they have preaching podiums.

Think about this: in a free society, one relatively undominated by pervasive government interference, you can choose your education, your work, and how hard you work. If you want to get ahead, you work hard, and get more.  If you don’t want to work hard, if your free time is valuable to you, then you will always have less things, but more time.

You don’t get these choices in the “utopias” these amoral assholes STILL want to create, even after so much death and dying, even in the present day.  You are a thing, a number, and you go where you are told, and do what you are told, or awful things happen to you.

Further, this argument conflates the economic system with the social system.  What you do for work need have NO connection with the network of social relations you have.  For everyone who is in your family, or a friend, your value is that of an individual.

Only when the State mediates social relations, only when families are broken into pieces, as happens in most Communist coups, can your value as a unique individual be eradicated.  Only Socialists do that.  No one else.

Leftism is a moral sickness, a mental illness, a passion for death and pain.  Its apostles are people of the lie.  Quite literally every propaganda theme they use can be inverted.  If they talk about freedom they mean tyranny.  As an example, George Soros’ “Open Society” is one which is closed and unfree–and unsocial as well, since it will no doubt have ubiquitous government agents controlling all social interactions that matter.  If they talk about justice they mean injustice.  They mean treating people differently depending on their race, class, or gender.  If they talk about economic progress, they mean programs which will lower the standard of living for just about everyone but them.

The list is endless, and as long as their rhetoric.

I will add, I saw the word Disinformation today, and think it is time to bring it back.

I’ve toyed with putting that on my bumper for years.

My new idea, borrowed from somewhere: put your stickers on a magnet, so you can take them off or rotate them.  You just buy magnetic sheets at Hobby Lobby (nowhere else), glue it on, and cut around.

I think what characterizes trauma is emotion NOT felt.  I think what happens is that something comes along that is so emotionally powerful that it overwhelms the emotional wiring, that you literally cannot feel the whole thing, the horror, the grief, the shame and guilt, the anger.  What lingers then, is the emotional equivalent of an incomplete chemical reaction.  Over and over, through psychic intrusions, through a life constrained in many ways, your unconscious tries to complete the process, but we fear it.  The damn thing keeps coming back.  It won’t let you go.  Maybe it even gets worse.

The only way out is through.  This phrase was apparently coined by Fritz Perls, and it is unquestionably true, in my view.  You have to finish the work, the reaction, and with large things perhaps this has to be done in small doses over an extended period of time.  No, it isn’t fair, but this isn’t grade school, either, is it?  If that sounds harsh, it is perhaps because I am speaking to myself as well.  I am processing–successfully–some really awful shit.

It occurs to me that precisely those sorts of people–often men, but certainly not invariably–who fear emotion tend to be attracted to fields in which they can be productive without it, or in which apparent “objectivity” is even valued.  Sciences of various sorts, of course, are the paradigmatic examples.

Thus fields like biology and medicine become populated disproportionately with people congenitally disinclined to embrace the qualitative side of life–the inchoate, indefinable, mythic, constantly moving side– and THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE who get to decide what constitutes science, what data, what useful research and what frivolous.

I want to be clear: if you are not able to digest emotion habitually, with roughly the same diligence that you digest food, you are stupider than you would be if you had this trait; and this stupidity is made greater and greater the less value you place on feelings.

Feelings are not everything.  One must have reason, and one must have data.  But feelings drive the engine, and if you have not contacted them, processed them, they are driving you.  You only have the illusion of being a sovereign mind, uninfluenced by factors extraneous to the “equation”.

I opened a closet today that I haven’t opened in some time, and had forgotten what all was in there.  My plan over the next few weeks is to downsize my “stuff” to those things I want and need.

It occurs to me, though, what a potentially powerful symbol the closet is.  Do we not all have closets in our psyches?  Or drawers, or even rooms we seldom visit?

I think there is a homology between organization of personal, physical space, and optimal psychic well-being.  I am not talking Feng Shui, so much as recognizing that your space is an extension of you, and if what you see is muddled, that reflects some part of your emotional life.  This is OK.  This is not a judgement: it is an observation, and specifically one I am making with regard to myself.

I was thinking, too, of people who are prototypically a mess, like Albert Einstein.  I am tempted to say that such people–and I think he is an example–are so successful intellectually because hidden unprocessed emotional places have driven them into abstraction.  The effects of those undigested experiences can be plainly seen, though, in their spaces, and their personal appearance.  Some of it is clearly calculated, but some of it is clearly unconscious.

It is so hard to see what is in front of you.  I think I am improving, but I am not sure.

Capitalism is not an ideology.  It is an activity.  An Indian who save up enough pemmican for a two week journey–enough Capital–to go and trade with a tribe that distance away, and to come home and trade for good he wants back home, is a Capitalist.

A man who borrows his brother’s canoe–his capital–to go trade downriver, and who comes back and shares his profits with his brother, is a Capitalist, and so is his brother. 

An artist who works a second job to build up the money for supplies, paints, then sells them, is a Capitalist.

Socialism is an ideology.  Marx, I suspect, is the one whose propaganda made it possible to claim Capitalism, an activity which men and women had engaged in since before recorded history, was an ideology.

Specifically, what they wanted to claim is that Capitalism inherently is something like what has been created in modern day China: an abusive oligarchic order in which a very few get very rich on the backs of the very poor many.  In America, even in our worst days, we never had anything remotely as awful and morally wrong as what the Chinese have wrought in the name of “justice”.  They killed far more of their own people than America ever enslaved in its entire history; and if we want to talk about slavery in China, lets just start with the iPhone factories.  Let’s continue with a review of China’s history over the last 60 years, in which BILLIONS of people were treated with the same contempt for their innate dignity as characterized the worst slave drivers in the worst parts of America.

Capitalism is inherently liberating, since it is inherently that system which is precisely NOT oligarchic.  No long term business monopolies have ever been recorded that were not supported directly by the government.

Here is a bon mot: economics frees; politics enslaves.  I may decide I like that.  Not sure.