Month: April 2015

In the same sense that arrogance is a mistake in the future, as Edward de Bono put it, I would argue so too is fear.

In general, fear constricts our perceptual field, and colors what we see and hear and think.  It can in some cases facilitate perception, as Gavin de Becker argues in “The Gift of Fear”, but ambient, decontextualized, non-threat specific fear does the opposite.  It makes you stupider.

And I was pondering that I was raised to equate religion with fear: good Christians fear Hell.  It is eternal, and once there, you can’t get out.  This is self evidently something to be concerned about.  I am a theist, obviously, but I can understand Ricky Gervais, I think it was, when he quipped that God loved us so much he created heaven for us, and that he created hell just in case we didn’t love him back enough.  This is roughly the ideology of this version of religion, one which is even worse in Islam.

I think it possible to stipulate that no authentic spirituality can be built on persisting fear.  If fear is everywhere, you are dealing with a sociopsychological illness that has nothing to do with God.

I read this piece by Terry Eagleton: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Slow-Death-of-the/228991/ and got to thinking.

I look at blueprints all the time, and I have never seen one, ever, which specified in detail what it DIDN’T want: no use of structural steel, not too many doors, no red paint, no blue in the carpet.

Eagleton, as some may know, is a Marx-biased fascist, and thus when he bemoans the lack of critical studies, what he is really complaining about is insufficient government funding for incompetent dilettantes to occupy all their time taking strong stands on issues–like economics–they really don’t understand. If English teachers confined themselves to teaching English literature, that may be one thing, but he himself invokes Foucault, and implicitly many others, going back to Plato through Marx.  This has nothing to do with English, and everything to do with cultural subversion through English.  One could even argue that most English professors in fact view their own field–the underlying assumption that English, per se, is worth studying–with contempt, outside of the aesthetic merits they take in well crafted prose, which is not different in its nature or ultimate usefulness from the same appreciation applied to fine wine.

Personally, I took advantage of state underwritten education, majored in the humanities, and STILL have learned vastly more since I graduated than I ever did in college.  As I have likely mentioned, I often listen to Teaching Company lecture series.

To return to the topic, though, Marx was a critic.  He was not an architect.

Let us think as architects, though.

We want a political system which allows groups of differing visions of life to resolve their differences peacefully.

We want a society which values creativity, expressed both in the artistic domain, as well as the economic domain.

We want a society which protects individual rights, both in the freedom from (the violence of others or the government) and freedom to (to do anything which harms no one) senses.

We want a high general standard of living, and a close correspondence between an individuals willingness to work hard, and their following income.  We want to be free of those who can take from others without contributing anything.  We want all wealth to be earned, at some point. (it is worth noting that Oxbridge could easily be seen as having been purchased on the backs of peasants; and attended in large measure by the descendants of successful thieves).

We want everyone to be equal before the law.

These are a few desiderata.  None of these are valued in Communo-fascist regimes.  In all such states, violence of the government against the people is the norm; oligarchs earn rich livings at the expense of the populace as a whole; creativity is only valued when it enriches the elite; and diversity of opinion is squelched.  This is the condition in Cuba.  It is the condition in North Korea.  It is the condition in China, which in my understanding STILL operates labor camps of the sort Hitler used.

The way that imbeciles like Eagleton rationalize their bad ideas is–and I’m going to guess, talking out loud here:

1) They are divorced from consequence.  He does not think a Communist coup is likely, so he will not have to explain to the suffering masses why he supported it.

2) They surround themselves with the ideologically like-minded, making their horrific ideas, filled with death as they are, seem palatable.

3) Being divorced from consequence, they are divorced from the necessity of planning.  It is one the ironies of this whole thing that those who most value central planning are themselves incapable of planning at all.  They aren’t interested in it.  It comes dressed in overalls and looks like work, and even though he pokes fun at himself, it seems likely Eagleton really is as effete as he appears.  He is not going to take on the cares of someone concerned with making important things happen correctly and harmoniously.

Marx himself, in my understanding–I have his biography on my shelf, but like many other such books, have not made the time to read it–was a slob.  He didn’t work regularly or at all.  Like Rousseau, he was a chronic debtor, and unreliable in nearly everything.

I do not think it would be taking things too far to view the entirety of his economic and philosophical views as extended rationalizations of his personal failings.  When you fuck up, what is the first thing you do, if you are intelligent?  You do abstract.  This is a great way to avoid emotions that are unpleasant.  You fuck up a lot, and you spend all your life thinking.  Once you are thinking, what do you think about?  Why it ISN’T YOUR FAULT.  Make it large enough and complicated enough, and nobody will see that you felt unloved at age 3.

The world runs on ideas.  If you feed it bad ideas, it gets ugly.  Feed it good ideas, it brightens up.  Eagleton is complaining that his campaign to paint England grey (and call it a rainbow) is underfunded.  To that, I say: marvelous.

There is nothing beautiful about war, and the only beautiful thing about warriors is they don’t quit.  That is it.  A true warrior is mean, constantly vigilant, and has sacrificed some part of his or her life to the protection of their community.  They have learned to live with horror, and if they learn to love battle, it is only because that is the only place where their inner hatred can meet an outer reality that makes sense.

I get in touch with my inner warrior sometimes, and he is a very strong, very capable self that is angry, calculating, and covered head to toe with battle scars.  He should be dead, but he wasn’t ready.

But all warriors know their destiny is to die, and so is the destiny of everyone around them.  Nothing lasts.  You cannot depend, ultimately, on anyone but yourself.  Everything else will be cut away, and so one day will you be, too.

We idealize warriors, I think, because our culture has become much too effeminate, having cast aside masculine virtues like risk-taking, valuing physical privation and difficulty, and seeking out difficult challenges.  These are all to the good.  These are needed and good virtues.  But they are not war.  War is learning to kill our fellow men (and women: do not forget that the bombs we drop do not discriminate) effectively.  It is learning to suppress normal human impulses of empathy, connection, and revulsion at the thought of violence.

As a friend of mine once put it, who had seen enough of it, “war is as romantic as a meat grinder.”

I have PTSD and spent last night being reminded of it nearly hourly.

I do have a battle plan, though, to deal with it, and I am executing it.

Can we not call the Democrats the party of political codependence?

I offer from time to time the analogy of these 800 pound people we read about every so often–the story has become less interesting, having been told many times–who are confined to their beds.  No one who cannot get out of bed survives alone, and the person who facilitates this–their co-conspirator in their own effective avoidance of life–is criminal.  They are depriving someone of a life; and of a responsibility which, alone, can buy them true happiness.

My youngest confessed to me the other day to cutting a class.  After she revealed her method–the simple plan executed audaciously–I felt some pride, and gave her a high five. I told her I wanted a little–just a little–larceny in her soul.

And I got to thinking about why.  You would think someone who reasons everything through like me would have reasons for doing things.  I don’t, at least not always.  I very often go by gut instinct and feel.

What I told her was that organizations, human systems, can become corrupt.  Just because someone is in charge does not mean you should listen to them.  It does not mean you should not resist them, in large things and small.  I do not want to build habitual obedience, and a good test for flexibility on this score is precisely the ability to break rules without excess guilt, and without getting caught.

I don’t reflexively admire people who do X religiously for a long period of time.  Somewhere in that period of time, an adjustment was needed, and this fact was missed because they were attached to the outward form, and not the inner purpose.  Sometimes you have to cheat on yourself, and take a look around to see if you are missing anything.

And law and morality are very often quite different.  Our leaders break both laws and moral codes constantly, but they remain our leaders, at least politically.  I have long taught my kids that just because something is legal, that does not make it just; and just because something is illegal, that does not make it wrong.

I also teach them it is OK to break a rule, if you know why it exists; and I teach them to regularly take calculated risks.  Taking risks is how you build judgement, and calculating teaches you to think.

We would not be better off if everyone were a pirate, but I also question those who reflexively follow authority.  Even the so-called counter-culture has leaders who are not questioned.  Obama is doing virtually all the same things they criticized Bush for, but the criticisms were propaganda, not principle-based, and so they cannot judge him for the many things he has done they would have crucified a Republican for.

Having a small black flag somewhere in you means you are alive.  You are not reflexive, and you will not easily be taken for a machine.

I think I said at some point my motto is “Neither Kings nor Commissars”.  When I say Commissar, I mean low level bureaucratic apparatchniks who have the power to interfere with your life directly.  And if they are all around you, it is the rule of the Commissariat, understood broadly.

I was pondering all the SWAT teams proliferating under Obama.  The FDA has one.  The Consumer Safety and Product whatever has one.  The Department of Agriculture has one.

What does a SWAT team give you?  The power to scare people.

And I got to thinking too, that once you have a Commissariat of some sort–let us say the Food and Drug Administration–it can be counted on to justify its existence by finding problems even where they don’t exist.  And what do the SWAT teams do?  They rehearse scenarios in which they are needed, in which SWAT really is an appropriate response.  Since such scenarios are far-fetched, they define down what constitutes a need for Special Weapons and Tactics, as opposed to an unarmed official knocking on the door with a clipboard.

What exactly do Homeland Security agents do?  They are apparently agents who are not TSA, not Secret Service, not Coast Guard.  Well, among other things, they justify their existence.  They create problems where none existed.  They dumb down the situations in which they are needed; they expand the scope of their operations.

The thing about bureaucracies is that they metastasize always and everywhere unless they are carefully regulated.  Anyone wanting to squelch American liberties has only to create enough of them, and overfund the rest, and simply wait.

We are reaching a point where everybody feels the need to keep a look over their shoulder, at least in the most Regressive States, lest they violate some norm they didn’t even know they were being held to.

This post was provoked by this article: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/19/what_a_horrible_mother_moms_arrested_for_leaving_their_kids_in_the_car/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Edit: Here is another example:

 http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/exclusive-new-fed-rules-nypd-training-101-article-1.2192488

When they call Peter Zimroth a “monitor”, they should use the word “Commissar”.  When there is some fucking asshole telling you every fucking minute about what you need to do and how, you are living in a Commissariat.  I am mildly–only mildly–redefining it.

And I would add as well that the closer the center of decision making is to the individual, the more complex the social order, because they more decisions that get made.  The farther that decision moves from the individual, the less decision making they do, and it makes them stupider, because they don’t learn from experience.  It also, in a formal sense, reduces complexity.

Socialism is rows of trees–the same trees–all planted in a row.  They call this order. Liberalism and Free Markets are forests, which is a complex order.  The latter is vastly more resilient, and interesting.

I think it is a truism that power attracts precisely those least likely to bring wisdom and an altruistic mindset to it, but I think we could speak more generally that the world is run by people who are unable to relax, whose success depends in large measure on a long term monomaniacal, obsessive focus on each next step in self aggrandizement, regardless of the field.

Freedom, then, over time places power of all sorts in the hands of those who are unwise.  Freedom contains, too, though, the power of reform, and this rule obviously is not absolute.  It merely describes what I feel is a tendency.

I would stipulate this: no person who is unable to relax fully, to let EVERYTHING go, can be said to be fully psychologically healthy; and I would guess this is most people on the planet, certainly in the supposedly “developed” world; it is likely less true for those who have less to hold on to, although I don’t presume to speak for the poor, who in almost all cases would certainly prefer not to be poor.

Autogenic Therapy rests on this premise.  How it works, effectively, is that as the patient learns deep relaxation, more and more unconscious content, held in reservoirs of sorts, comes flowing out.

It has been my own experience that there are qualitative levels, approximately, and that as you process one, you gain access to another.  The end will find me capable of letting go of everything that binds me, which is the goal of most spiritual traditions, all of which, in my view, would benefit from incorporating the insights particularly of modern trauma psychology.

Virtually everyone you see on every street is “walking wounded” in some way.  Given the chance, they will not be able to fully let go in a deep relaxation session.  This is my guess, although of course my opinion may be skewed by me being, I think, a bit more wounded than most.

But I got to thinking.  I remember being screened for scoliosis in grade school (I have it).  What if we screened kids for trauma?  What if, for example, we taught every school kid in America both Progressive Relaxation and Autogenics from grade 4 through 6?  Sooner or later, all traumas would likely come out.

Look at our prisons: could you not hang a sign on the neck of virtually everyone there, even those in for drug and alcohol related offenses, and say “untreated trauma victim”?

I suspect you could hang such a sign on every other person, at least, in a typical ghetto.

What a wonderful society we could build, though, if everyone got the help they needed, and which in most cases they didn’t even know they needed.  This holds particularly true if as many people suffer from pre-3 trauma as I suspect do.  What emotionally immature mother is not capable of scaring the shit out of a rambunctious 2 year old?

Food for thought.

Ponder that last phrase.

Did you see more than a fraction of what happened in front of you?  No, of course not.  Don’t be stupid.

Did you learn more than a fraction of what was presented to you?  No, of course not, don’t be arrogant.

Ah, did you greet the day with some acceptance, and do your work with something approaching pleasure and engagement?  Here: give yourself a grade between C- and A.

Did you learn SOMETHING?  Pass/fail.  Grade yourself.

There will be another quiz tomorrow.  You can thank me then.

In my view, “modernity” is acadamese for sloppy thinking, laziness, and grotesquely unwarranted moral and intellectual hauteur.

I was reading this piece: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/philosophy-returns-to-the-real-world/?_r=0

We start with a softball game, with Stanley Fish as umpire:

When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s, I played on the intramural softball team of the postmodern literary theorist Stanley Fish. I recall his umpiring at a practice once when the batter, my buddy Mike, now a distinguished professor at Yale, argued a call. Fish good-humoredly pointed out that what’s a ball and what’s a strike is not an objective, external, or natural fact, it’s an interpretive practice; and according to that practice, whatever the umpire calls is real: If he calls it a strike, it’s a strike.

What do we call this attitude everywhere else?  Fascism.  Or in another era, Monarchism, or at least Oligarchy.  It is “might makes right”. The entirety of the Western Liberal tradition of philosophy was intended to end it.  Everything our best minds did for several hundred years, which resulted in an unprecedented out-pouring of political freedom and vast material wealth, spread across all classes, was oriented precisely around avoiding assholes like this getting the upper hand.

Well, they got the upper hand.

Then we read about his interactions with Richard Rorty (PoMo, which means “intellectually impoverished Modernist”):

Rorty challenged me, over and over, to describe an undescribed object, to tell him about something outside language. He didn’t, according to himself, deny the existence of the world, he simply held that the assertion that there was stuff outside of language was itself a linguistic practice.

Jesus H. Christ.  How the fuck would you describe something without using words?  This is a fucking tautology.  If he had asked me to describe the feeling of being kicked in the shins without using words I would have kicked him in the shins.  Yes, plural.  Then I would have hoped he asked me to describe the feeling of a groin kick.

Can you name me any word which has no descriptive referent?  Cow?  Milk?  Even more complex words like “justice”, which can be defined in many ways, can still be defined.  I would define it as equality before the law, regardless of social class, race, or gender; and the diligent effort to punish the guilty.

As I have said many times “that” is a fully descriptive term.  Who is Bob?  HIM.  We do not form words and then match them with outer realities.  Our entire early life is wordless.  It is pure experience.  And everything that matters afterwards is also wordless. Love is wordless.  Joy is wordless.

This is the creed of people avoiding feelings.  I would suggest that is the psychological root of the whole thing.

And I would offer an alternative definition for philosophy I put forward earlier: Philosophy is the structured intellectual process of learning to effectively get from THIS to THAT.

Finally, he feels the need to defend those who would speak of “reality”:

Some of the motivation for the realist turn has been ecological: Climate change isn’t just in our heads or in our descriptions, but a real-world situation that requires real-world physical transformations. Others have been political: defenses of the urgent truth of justice, or of the importance of material economic conditions and the treatment of physical human bodies. And I think that, as our experience becomes in many ways increasingly mediated or virtual, we simply started yearning toward the old-fashioned physical environment, which was always available and still is, and on which whatever we see on a screen depends utterly. Ideas are always an index of longings.

People like this should be fired and forced to apprentice in practical trades like plumbing and carpentry.  Such idiocy would not long endure a daily engagement with real and practical problems.

I think the shortest description of PTSD is “internalized horror”.  I have gotten to some powerful energies, and staying with it, to allow it to process and dissipate, is very hard.  It is much easier to allow myself to slip into mere fear, which I can usually combine well with intellectualism.

There is a large qualitative difference between fear and horror.  Fear is a surface emotion, or so it feels to me.  Horror is many dimensional, complex, rich.  It is unpleasant, but still interesting–I suppose like a car accident.

And I feel horror very much represents the involvement of the gut, of very primal, very primitive nerve impulses.  What you do you feel, when you are “frozen” with fear?  What is that dream, where you try to run but you can’t?  I think horror is an activation of the unmyelinated vagus nerve system, which is suppressive, which works to slow things down, with the logical end state being complete immobility, complete paralysis.

And I will speculate again that the popularity of horror films must have something to do with a felt sense that something is missing, that some part of the process of living is going unexpressed.  We do not encounter primal terror in our ordinary lives, most of the time.

Think to farmers: they regularly slaughter animals.  Hunters kill because they enjoy it.  And in my experience, most of those people are very relaxed.

Being able to process horror and being able to process trauma are in my view the same thing.  It seems likely one could view some spiritual practices–especially Tantric practices–in this light.  I have in mind things like meditating in cremation grounds and smearing human ashes on yourself, and keeping human bones around as relics.

My task, I think, is to maintain contact with this energy while ;progressively diluting it by combining it with ordinary energies, with daily life, by staying with it and functioning, not allowing it to slow me down.  I think I can do this.  It’s not easy, but few things worth anything are.