Month: May 2014

I’m trying to depoliticize my Facebook page.  It’s so so easy for me to get into little snits, and really it is a variety of pig wrestling.  Dumb people and dogmatists (same disease, only dumb people are more capable of learning) only learn they don’t like you when they run out of things to say.  As I say from time to time, insult is the sincerest form of flattery: it means they can no longer debate ideas.

Still, I can’t and won’t disengage fully from political discourse.  It’s one thing that I do.

Watch this 28 second video: http://madworldnews.com/jihadi-workplace-accident-suicide-belt-detonates-terrorist-pre-party/

I assume it is not a fraud.

Here is the point I wanted to make: most Islamists are stupid, and would not have been capable of organizing something as sophisticated as the World Trade Center bombings.  Yes, they have engineers, physicists, and the like, but the rank and file are stupid.  They are rednecks.  They are the people who at one time would have joined the KKK here.

The World Trade Center bombing–and for simplicity I am simply going to assume all three Towers went down the same way, with nanothermite planted in advance of the plane hijackings–required a huge amount of logistical complexity.  This is often used as an argument against the hypothesis, but the fact remains and will always remain that curtains do not burn for 8 hours, do not burn hot enough to cause flame treated I-beams to collapse, and that single column failures do not create free-fall or even, according to most engineers, ANY collapse of any sort, outside the immediate area.  We also are not even sure how the fires started.

I see no reason to doubt Osama bin Laden played a role in all this.  But I think much of the plan was outside his knowledge.  It would have been compartmentalized.  But the amount of sophistication needed, and the fact that there have been NO leaks of information by the people involved, indicates that some group other than Islamists was involved.

As I have noted several times as well, the goal of Al Queda is to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible.  If they had planted the explosives, they could have detonated them WITHOUT the airplanes.  It would have been much more terrifying, much more effective.  The loss of life would have been ten times what it was, at least.

No, I think those involved were white men, likely raised as nominal Christians, whose fanaticism and fear enabled them to justify this atrocity as somehow necessary for the future of humanity.

As I note on my other website, Carlyle had Malthus in mind when he called economics “the dismal science”.  I would append that bon mot to note that those who follow Malthus are dismal people, anti-humanitarians, anti-humanists, anti-moralists.

It is quite possible to develop considerable certainty in the abstract, and quite possible to be horribly wrong across a lifetime about issues of fundamental importance.

It happens often, every day, and in perhaps every other set of eyes you look into.  The errors of those with power and money, though, affect far more people.

As I have likely mentioned, I often find myself listening to people’s life stories.  I think countless people the world over feel abandoned and alienated.  They interact with people all day every day, but no one really listens.  I listen.  I don’t judge, and I am actually interested in what people have to say.  I view this as a form of useful service.

I was listening to this guy tell me his life story the other day–the infidelities, the four marriages, the financial troubles, etc.–and it occurred to me when he told me his father beat his mother, regularly, that at 60 years of age he is still carrying scars he can’t see or name from 50 or 55 or even 59 years ago. He is making do as well as he can, but unseen forces are pushing him all day every day in directions that on balance tend not to be helpful.  To his credit, he is pushing back.

Look at an average street or average mall.  It is filled with people like that.

Ponder this.

The next time you take your dogs for a walk, or go for a walk–Sundays are most excellent for this–imagine you have been locked up in a prison cell for 20 years, and will be locked up for the rest of your life afterwards.  How much more can you see?  How much more can you feel?  Smell? Taste?  Hear?

Life is large.  We reduce it for our sanity, but it will always expand again whenever we ask it to.

I’m continuing my deep inner exploration.  I have reached a deep, unhappy, sucking phase; a small infant, comforted by a pacifier, but only barely.

I have always assumed that the verb “to suck”, as a synonym for incompetence and stupidity, was a reference to the implied power inequality in oral sex, when it is the woman performing it on the man.

It feels to me now, that our ordinary daily discourse is filled with psychologically deep insights, coded in words we use reflexively.

Can we not perhaps posit that it actually references an incompletely developed persona, someone who is still in the sucking phase?

Freud, of course, had what I recall as his four phases: oral, anal expressive [I forget the word he used], anal retentive, and phallic.  My grounding in Freud was done in German as an exchange student, many many years ago.  It made no sense to me then, nor does it now.

Here is the thing: in my own life, in my own deep contemplation, I see no role for the anal at all.  What I feel, what feels real to me, is that there are happy babies and unhappy babies.  Unhappy babies enter life missing something, something so deep they cannot put words on it, or even name the emotion, other than to say they are missing something.

Stan Grof expanded the cartography of the psyche to include Jungian ideas, his own experience as an honest psychiatrist watching the importance of the birth experience, and of course orthodox biographical inputs.

What I would submit is that orthodox psychiatry really has no place-holder for Jung; none for Rank and Grof’s major contributions furthering Rank’s ideas; and none for traumas, particularly of omission, in the birth to roughly five years of age range.

As I said some time ago, my feeling is that they ignore these factors because they have no effective means of dealing with them.  Abreaction was killed a century ago, in orthodox methods at least.

My dream, my ongoing dream, is that we become intelligent as a species, that we learn how to deal with traumas, that we learn how to digest experience, and that we all learn how to learn, how to be Good, how to be fulfilled, how to develop sacred rituals and places that fulfill the deepest needs we have, and do so consistently, reliably, as a matter of generalized deep wisdom.

This is my dream.  This is my hope, and this is the organizing basis of my work, as chaotic and undisciplined as it is.

I can see clearly how having an absolute code would be comforting.  But what happens is you interact with the world through the code; you do not interact with the world itself.

Life is ebb and flow.  Sometimes you need more of something–say, compassion–and sometimes, as now, less.

Most of us, I suppose, can readily imagine lying to liars, and cheating cheaters, even if in principle we value honesty.

Having a code is better than not having a code, but I think humanity can only fully mature when we come to express ourselves through thoughtful awareness based upon spontaneous and genuine empathy.

I will add, that I just realized the value of courtesy today.  I can at times be rude.  I was raised that way, and have worked, not always successfully, to overcome it.

But I felt the marrow of it this morning, the meaning of it, the importance of it, how essential even apparently small details are to the process of increasing ones Goodness.

I have always thought of awful British people with impeccable manners, and thought that an excessive infatuation with courtesy implied artificiality.  It can certainly be that.  But at its optimal, it is nothing more or less than practically expressed empathy and concern for others.

Of course, denier, Tea Bagger, and other such terms can be used to focus hate.  I was wrong to limit it to racism, although at the moment that appears the most important direction that hate is flowing.

If and when Hillary runs, of course, her detractors will by misogynists.

Leftists can never have ideological unity while they are still striving for absolute power.  There must be an object of hate.

At one time, this was a considerable insult.  Jean Paul Sartre considered engineers bourgeois, if memory serves.  All good leftists were expected to direct at least their daily five minutes of hate towards them.

Yet, the word has disappeared.  Or has it?

I would like to propose a typology that might make it easier to understand the intellectual convolutions that necessarily accompany this mental deformity, and possible some of the emotional imbalances and psychopathologies.

There are four basic classes in Leftist mythos: the metaphysical enemy, the Leftist/intellectual class, the Victim, and the practical enemy.

Within orthodox Marxism, these classes are of course the Capitalist, the “revolutionary” (which is always a lie: they carry out coups, usually in small numbers, and then sell them based on lies), the proletariat, and of course the bourgeoisie.

But what MATTERS is that the intellectual is at the center of the universe, that they have an excuse for being at the center of the universe, that they have a cause which can never be won, and that they have a practical object of hatred.

Roughly speaking, the “capitalist” has transformed into the “Corporation”.  Now, leftists have nothing against corporations, per se.  Harry Reid no doubt, like everyone else, gets most of his money from people who run or own corporations.  But the concept is so vague, so vacuous, so MUTABLE, that it comes to connote the emotional equivalent of the Bogeyman.  Those corporations, they sneak up on you in the dark. . . .

The practical object of hatred, the people who can be demonized in the particular, were the middle class.  This was possible when large numbers of people, particularly in the very class driven and class conscious Britain, actually belonged to the lower classes.

But the average worker at Ford today has a better standard of living than most of the richest Britons of a century ago.  He is middle class.  The proletariat can no longer be argued to exist, and is thus no longer a suitable Victim.

Here is the thing, though: precisely because they intend no Good, precisely because the sole point of the exercise is getting power, Leftists can never formulate a positive campaign for anything.  They must sow hatred, and use that as a means of building the sort of consensus that can be leveraged for power.

Who, now, has replaced the bourgeoisie?  The Racist.  Think about it: blacks aren’t going anywhere.  They have been taught for half a century to wait for a boat that will never come in, and to BLAME the lack of a boat on targets selected for them by the professional propagandists.

And in the same sense that the bourgeoisie was always largely a rhetorical construct, so too is the racist.  Our country is virtually devoid of actual racists of the old school variety.  No doubt we have many people who have had first hand negative interactions with black people, but that is quite a different thing than the blanket consensus of Left wing retrogressives that anyone who opposes them can be assigned a class and hated for it.  I would hazard a guess that even people who threw racial epithets at Obama did so simply because it was easy.  CLEARLY, Obama has nothing in common with most blacks in this country.  As I have said several times, I literally find myself unable to think of him as black.  I literally forget he is black, and cannot fathom people who consider it a success that someone with darker skin pigmentation won the race for the White House twice.  Why should skin color matter, in itself, ever?

All of this is subtle.  It only appears with reflection and time, and that is precisely why the task of left wing propagandists is create so much noise and motion that nobody ever stops and thinks at all.

In important respects, Islam might be called “The Creed of the Slave”.  Muslim means “one who has submitted”..  Allah is invoked as an omnipotent God who has given clear, very specific instructions on how to behave, and what to believe.  No individualism is wanted or needed.  No personal conscience, no personal development, no evolution of human relations beyond forcing unbelievers to believe as you do, and demanding that those around you conform.

As the religion of the slave, it is obvious that modern Leftists would find in this infantile fantasy refuge; that they would identify on a deep psychological level with it, and see in it a historical expression of what they themselves want.

Compare, for sake of illustration, the admonition that you must do and believe as others or face death; and the Christian admonition to love others as yourself, regardless of their beliefs.  In the one case you reduce people, you lessen them.  In the other, you raise yourself and others UP.  You grow.

I think Churchill was right: other than Leftism, no more powerful retrogressive force exists in the modern world than Islam, at least as practiced by those conforming to the Sunnah.  As I have said often, I am very fond of many of the Sufis, who in their own way were trying to introduce the possibility of spiritual growth to a religion which more or less explicitly rejected it.

I believe in God and have no problem with monotheism.  I explicitly reject, though, the idea that ANY modern religion fully encapsulates everything that can be known, and more importantly, everything that we NEED, today, in our modern world, to survive and prosper.  We must build a new religion, or, preferably, new religions.

I’ve been having interesting, healing dreams lately.  One would not think it possible, but I have made contact with my inner baby, and comforted it.  It is odd to think that very early traumas could have a lasting impact, but they do.  The clinical literature is clear on this, even if they have no good ways of rectifying these issues with the modalities–drugs and talk therapy–that they normally employ.

Last night I was dreaming of a “primitive” culture which had just cremated one of their own in a pit.  It was still smoking, and children were digging bone fragments out of the ashes.  Their attitude was between play and reverence.  They were learning, from a very early age, that death is a part of life.  They were living within a realm which we could call mythic, but which was dealing on a very direct, empirical level with the facts of life.  Nothing was hidden or concealed, and in important respects, no explanation was necessary.  The bones were what they were.

True, organic myths are emergent properties of direct human interaction of life as it is lived.  We could look at, say, Aboriginal Australian culture and see things we consider ridiculous, such as the idea that the first didgeridoo blew the stars into the sky.  But true myths are merely place holders, they are merely doorways.  They are banners, behind which stand important, organic human realities.  They enable access to important truths. [I will note that I “accidentally” spelled organic “organize” twice.  Consider the deep relation between the two words]

To this I would contrast what might be termed the Modern Myth, which is an artificial creation YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE.  Rather than granting you unfettered access to the transcendant, it limits you, it confines you.  It places you on a metaphysical procrustean bed, and shapes you to its demands.  Think Huxley’s Brave New World.  Nothing is real there, nothing organic, nothing larger than the survival of insects is attempted.  It is an efficient system, a “scientific” system.  But we look at it in horror.  It is a world without meaning, without organic myth.

Communism is a retrogressive myth.  It confines the  human spirit.  It is the creed of narcissists.

It is funny, because I see clear parallels between what my mother attempted with me, and what modern leftists are attempting with the world.  Obviously, I have to consider whether or not I am projecting, but I don’t think I am.  I feel my birth and life have uniquely qualified me for the sort of social commentary I have been doing.

I like to think this was my plan.

In the same sense that Capitalism is clearly, unequivocally, the best means for raising living standards, Science is clearly the best method for raising knowledge, for learning.

But both are disruptive.  Change inheres within them.  “Reality”, within the scientific method, is mutable (in theory, of course: in practice, it is filled with unreflective dogmatism).

And there is something childish and primitive within us that craves the stability of myth.  Myths, held sincerely, are INHERENTLY true.  They cannot be questioned.  They establish the very foundation of reality, and the social groupings founded upon it.

Here is our very interesting and disturbing present reality: roughly one third of Americans exist within a propaganda bubble that is so hermetically sealed that fact and reality of the scientific sort, of the observable, empirical sort, cannot enter in.  And this bubble has been achieved within an ostensible “Information Age”, which has in their case done little more than grease the rails of propagandistic trains, whose origin points and desired destinations never change.  They can’t.  They are built fully on myth.

People long for continuity, and this is what leftist propaganda gives them.  It is the same thing Hitler’s propaganda provided: a place, a home, a freedom from decision, conscience, from anxiety, from dignity, from a sense of alienation.

They need this.  It feels nurturing to them.  It comforts them.  Their propaganda is their mother, in an absolutely primal, thumb sucking, sense.