Month: January 2015

I truly believe my mission in this life was to dive into Hell and map a way out.

And I’m doing it.

This system is foolproof, meaning that it won’t work on fools, but any fool can use it.

Recent product of the American system of higher Indoctrination: It was wrong for the United States to drop (some large number) of bombs on North Vietnam.  They killed so many people.

You: Is killing wrong?

If so, is it always wrong, or only in certain circumstances?

If the latter, what circumstances and why?

You can run through this drill, I’m sure, on your own.  It is quite impossible to square stated Leftist ideals with actual realities.

I have used this method–which I know I’ve discussed before–and been literally told I was asking trick questions.  These people are literally so dumb that it has never occurred to them they lack any sense of  principle and proportion.

The more I think about it, humanity has both an evolutionary as well as–usually–a personal need for developing subject/object relations with other human beings.  We are tribal by nature, and you cannot have full inclusion without full exclusion.  It is something in our guts.

But Leftists reject, in principle, the rejection of others.  Excuse me, Others. The Other.  You know that hallucination that all the Imperialists that were not Communist had that their culture was fundamentally superior, because they did not UNDERSTAND The Other?

So all the South Vietnamese killed by the North Vietnamese were evil, because either they didn’t exist, or because they were complicit in imperialistic atrocities.  You know, the kids blown up on playgrounds by suicide bombers, or intentional mortar attacks on civilian populations: their lives are unimportant.

What MATTERS was that we dropped a lot of ordinance, and killed perfectly innocent, perfectly peaceful, loving gentle human beings and that makes me ANGRY.  I HATE what America did.  It was all so WRONG.

You see how that works?  You enter into a, say, 2nd graders mind, simply eliminate from discussion everything that detracts from the simplicity of the equation, and THEN, THEN, you get to feel the hate, feel the burn, feel the righteous anger billowing out of you.

Returning for the third time to this disgust experiment, it seems to me that one could argue that their cognitive psychopathology–specifically their inability to access, recognize and express their anger productively–causes a literal nervous system miswire in the systems of Leftists.

Their hate becomes directed in all the wrong places.  Ho Chi Minh became a Communist around 1919, and helped co-found the French  Communist Party.  He joined the Communist International–the group working the world over to subvert sovereign nations and deliver them to the tender mercies of Communism–shortly thereafter.  He spent much of the 1930’s in Stalin’s Russia.  His agents, rather than fighting the Japanese, spent most of the Japanese occupation killing actual Vietnamese nationalists.  When they beat the French in the mid-1950’s, they embarked nearly immediately on a campaign of class warfare, in which every tenth person, at least, in the North was killed or imprisoned.  They confiscated all private property they wanted, and instituted a totalitarian regime.  A vote would have been meaningless, since nobody in the North was free to do as they chose.  100% of North Vietnamese would have been reported as favoring reunification.

Then they started invading the South.  Oh, I could go on, but don’t feel like it.

The point I want to make is that NO ONE on the Left has learned what in my view is the only correct lesson, which is that we made a HUGE mistake handing the South over to the North.  It was wrong on every possible level.  Maybe we never should have been there–this is a separate discussion–but having lost so much, given so much, virtually NOTHING was needed to protect it.

But people who NEED hate cannot accept this.  Changing their minds would be exposing themselves to the raw viciousness they have allowed to fester within them, and force them to realize that far from being morally superior, they are actually nasty beasts who feed on human death and destruction, while lying to themselves and the world about it.

This is what I mean by Cultural  Sadeism.

Edit: For leftists, who are AOH’s? As a general rule, anybody who is opposed by anyone who would be their natural ally.  For example, they supported the North Vietnamese precisely because they opposed America.  If they are rich, they hate the rich.  If they are white, they hate whites for their alleged racism.  If they are black, they either become white like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, or are irrelevant.

The old saw is that the enemy of my enemy is my friends.  In Lefto-Land, the enemy of my friend is my friend.

It is not hard to see a profound self loathing of a psychological nature under all this.

In psychologically healthy introspection, you balance the good with the bad.  You try to tell the truth as well as you can.  You freely admit mistakes and errors, but also grant strengths and good decisions.

There is no effort to do this on the part of the Left. It is all good/bad.  It is all Manichean, in precisely the way Western imperialistic thought is alleged to have operated.

And I must of course introspect and ask if I, too, am doing the same thing.  I don’t think I am.  Thought systems can be understood, even if one must grant they apply perfectly to no one.

And in the particular case of Leftism one must see that it is DEFINED by conformity.  Any group which values being like all other members of the group can be spoken of in the aggregate without too much damage to the truth, in my view.

And when I speak of conformity, I don’t mean conformity of a tribal sort, seen the world over for most of history, where you do what your ancestors did.  I mean conformity of an emotionally craven sort, which is willing to change on a dime whenever the wind blows.

That’s enough venting for now.  

What would happen if ten men married ten women?  All the men, all the women.  They could do ten day rotations as to who they spend the night with.  What good would happen?  What bad?  What interesting?

What if they coparented, such that nobody knew or asked whose kids were whose?

I’m going some interesting places, and this popped in my head.  I’ve never seen it proposed, although I have of course heard of both polygamy and the lesser known polyandry.  Edward de Bono also proposed five year renewable marriage contracts

I ponder. That’s what I do.  I ingest some idea or feeling or image, and it percolates.

This notion that leftists do not react viscerally to images of death and ugliness still piques my curiosity.  I wonder if the violence that attends all leftist agitation–one sees hate even in something as mundane as the national campaign against the police, or against alleged racists, or against the “1%” (if there was ever a manufactured propaganda meme, that clearly qualifies; I can almost smell the espresso and the weed)–in fact secretly satisfies some unmet need in them.

I remember reading about a hurricane in Cuba, and the BBC or maybe NPR, or some other propaganda outlet was gushing about how the “Cubans do what they are told.  They don’t have any problems with people ignoring orders down there, unlike here”., and I could just feel this fascination with authoritarianism, this flush in the face of some 20-something girl with a degree in Political Science or English, thinking about people getting boots shoved up their asses.

In my view, we are wired, when wired properly, to react viscerally to the grotesque.  Being unable to do so implies a disconnection with the gut, with instinct, with primal, animal, REAL emotions.

And that disconnection creates a feeling of disconnection with life.  I posted some nice Peter Levine quotes a month or two ago. (or three or four or five: I live in an altered state of time).

I can almost see how this would work: you react viscerally to reacting viscerally, and learn to suppress it, and live only in your head.  But something is missing.  And violence–the right sort of violence, ostensibly justifiable violence, even the right sort of sexual violence–satisfies that urge.

Hence Che: not, to be clear, Che himself, who was a sociopath.  I mean outwardly normal people fetishizing him, despite his cruelty, incompetence, and very dull but very real evil.

I think this is very close to the truth.

People ask what are my intentions with my films — my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be. There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; ‘eternal values,’ ‘immortality’ and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.
The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.
We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts.
Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

I get very little validation for any of my work, and a considerable amount of indifference and even hostility. I am not complaining, but did want to put some positive feedback in the public domain, to feed some part of me that needs feeding.

I believe I can honestly describe myself as a Visionary.  I see things other people do not see.  I look at the same world others look at, and see how it can be made better, in ways which are uniquely my own.

I will periodically email economists at various universities, trying to get them to rethink our financial system.  The more I contemplate things, the more I think the MORAL argument is more important than the practical argument, which of course is that fractional reserve banking is INHERENTLY unstable.

I did a round Sunday, and of course have not heard back from anyone.  This was the crux of the email:

 I would like to encourage you to consider a simple, but currently
counter-paradigmatic proposition: money creation is inherently
theft, is unjust, and creates a functional class division between
those empowered by law to create money and those who would go to jail for it. To
the extent the rich get richer and the poor poorer, as an inherent element of
our system, this is the primary mechanism.

It is astonishing to me that I need to make this argument, that some moralizing evangelistic organizer has not come to the same conclusion.  


Actually, Googling “inflation is theft” does come up with some stuff, like this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/billflax/2011/03/03/you-call-it-inflation-i-call-it-theft/

I guess the question then becomes: why are not more people talking about this?  Again, the argument is a practical one, but also a moral one.

And I seem to be the only one with a solution, which, again, is obvious, or should be obvious: just reverse the path we took to get here.

Have to run, but wanted to do a brief post.

Just watched “My Fair Lady” for the first time in thirty years.

Higgins was plainly Shaw: an intelligent, abusive, emotionally detached survivor of some form of primal PTSD, with significant “mother issues” as they say, whose morality as it evolves in the play consists in a sort of effete estheticism of manners oriented around the abuse of lower classes in the name of redeeming them.

The essence of the Fabianism he and the Webbs created is a decadent formality oriented around saving people they hate and despise.

Nothing admirable there.  And there is no doubt that Higgins does, in the end, hit Eliza, just as she expects, and as she became “accustomed” to in her childhood.  Her father makes many references to hitting her.

This is basic psychology: she marries an abusive and emotionally absent father.

Can you see the sickness in these ideas?  Can you see the role authoritarianisms played for Shaw, who admired Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin equally?

Can you see the connection between the decadence of the British ruling class and purported efforts to “save” people they don’t understand and don’t care for?

Brilliant musical, but shitty ending. You can put wit into the mouth of a savage, but you cannot make him into a decent human being.  Cannibalism is at the heart of all of this.  It is plainly implied by the moral logic of the situations.  It is profoundly ugly.

I have posted this before, but it is worth watching again (if you have), and once if you have not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgpaKkrZex4

Only a genteel beast, one capable of thinking of people as “cabbage leaves” and “baggage” could refer to a “humane” poison gas.

And I will actually add one more thing: at several points in the play everyone freezes.  In Liza’s neighborhood, and at the track. I  don’t know what the claimed purpose of this was, but I would submit again that this is the wax museum quality of frozen notions like “class”, which exempt individuals from being treated as individuals, which is capable of abstracting “middle class” (aka bourgeois) morality from actual morality, which is capable of extreme violence with a genteel and innocent face, which is characterized, in short, by what I continue to call Cultural Sadeism.

This is a deep notion. It does not exist on the surface.  It is an emergent property of a system of thinking and feeling and behaving.  It is rarely openly claimed, but it can be seen manifested everywhere, in sloppy thinking, denialism, rationalized abuses, and glorifications of horrors like Cuba.

Edit: Higgins also at one point argues that if he treats a Duchess as a flower girl, or a flower girl as a Duchess, it is all the same, since equality, not quality, of treatment is what is what matters.

This is a socialist argument.  Logically, if I kill everyone I meet, then I meet this criterion, and some, like Che Guevera, come quite close.

As I say again and again, socialistm is an ANTI-morality and an anti-humanism.  All the jokes in My Fair Lady?  Shaw meant them.  He was not joking.  He was merely so far out from acceptable social norms that people took it as exaggeration and wit, and he KNEW this to be the case, that he could argue for the monstrous right in front of people, and still be accepted in society.

One could view the entirety of the British preoccupation with manners and protocol as an elaborate charade, whose principle goal is to eviscerate fully the capacity for honesty, genuine kindness, and society of a nurturing sort.

Socialism is what you get when society is ruined.

I posted a bit back this article, about how leftists and conservatives react differently to disgusting images, with the former showing little reaction in their brains–even if they self reported feeling disgust–and the latter showing robust instinctive reactions.

Here is a proposal for a followup trial: put WORDS in front of the leftists.  Put the word “injustice” in front of them.  My hypothesis is that they will react to ABSTRACTIONS in the same way conservatives react to images.

This is the principle difference between so-called conservatives–most of whom I would label actual Liberals–and Leftists: their connection to the real world, the one which actually exists, and to which words ideally refer, but to which they need NOT refer.

There is nothing which prevents me from calling a watermelon a cucumber, as Leftists do, particularly if I am robustly supported by choruses of people nurturing the same delusion: that injustice and violence constitute justice and peace.