Month: July 2015

Arrogance reduces, formally, the complexity of an intra-psychic system, and thus intrinsically reduces its systemic capacity for accurate perception.

It is, as de Bono argued, a “mistake in the future”.  That is why.

In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called “Heretics” Mr. Chesterton writes these words: ‘There are some people–and I am one of them–who think that the most important and practical thing about a man is still his view of the universe.  We think that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his philosophy.  We think that for a general about to fight an enemy it is important to know the enemey’s numbers, but still more important to know enemy’s philosophy.  We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run anything else affects them.'”

This is the first paragraph to his excellent series of lectures packaged as “Pragmatism”.  I adore and admire James on many levels, but first and foremost because he is sincerely trying to solve real problems, and is thus able to offer clarity of exposition and thought.

Our enemies are those of civilization.  Our enemies are those who want a complete break from the cultural history–and in some cases the very existence–of the human race; who want to reject all the solutions which have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to the problems of existence: who we are, what to do and why, and how to understand our universe.

Evolutionarily, it seems obvious that we need and crave answers to these questions.  Existentially–introspectively–it is even more obvious.

We are told, by the dominant culture in the Academy–I am here reifying, with in my view regrettably little deviation from the actual reality, the sum output of both the Arts and Sciences of universities the world over–that we are unimportant animals who somehow achieved consciousness through a process of random change, combined with random environmental circumstances favoring that adaptation, across many millions or billions of years.

We are told our consciousness has no inherent value, that it ends with the cessation of those electrochemical reactions we call “life”, and that as we gaze out into a universe with stars cast about like grains of sand on a beach, there is really no reason not to feel an endless aloneness and sadness (which of course are instincts arising from our hereditary social instinct, itself conducive to survival: nothing more.)

These “facts”, as they are called, create in many individuals substantial psychological reactions away from the “self”–which cannot well contemplate its final destruction absent mediating and ameliorating considerations–to a “society”, which insensibly acquires a sort of ontological firmness that quiets such minds.

“I survive”, it can tell itself, in the “life” of society.  If I improve society, I survive in that improvement.

Then some wonder about the survival of humanity itself. Logically, self evolved, self sustaining chemical processes which need food, shelter, and society to survive are vastly inferior in their capacity for life than, say, virus colonies, or better yet, Earth–Gaia–herself.  If “I” am equal to dirt, if I came from and will return to dirt, then why not see my–secure my–future in the future of Earth?  No humanity at all is needed in this vision, and in fact detracts from it somewhat.

These people exist, and I think there are some in high positions in the Obama Administration.

Roughly, this worldview, based upon conflating life on this planet, in this dimension, with existence outright, which sees and feels no connection with the notions of our forebears of heavens and hells, and transmigration (a belief found the world over), is what is fucking everything up.

Concretely, who are these people?  I will offer what can only be a guess, but one which makes sense, and seems not to conflict with any observable reality:

1) The Power Elite.  I will differentiate two types:

A) the merely greedy.  Here I would include JP Morgan Chase, the people who run the Fed, the people who run the European Central Bank, and the Bank of International Settlements, which few have heard of, but which is the place all the money-creators sit down to discuss what they–perhaps 100 people–are going to do with the global economy (and who do so in secret, with ZERO accountability to any government or–God forbid–the people who are affected by their decisions.)  Compared to a pure hunger for power, mere greed is practically a virtue.

B) The political and greedy. This would include George Soros, the Rockefellers, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and most of the people who we think would be part of the Bilderbergs.  Paranoia aside, the so-called Bilderburg group clearly 1) exists; 2) consists in the power elite; and 3) meets in complete secrecy.

Does George Soros continue to amass wealth?  Of course.  Is he an atheist?  Duh.  I sincerely doubt one person of genuine religious commitment of any sort can be found among the 500 most powerful people in the world, and honestly I think I would include the Pope in that assessment.  No honest Christian could sit comfortably on a throne, with hundreds or thousands of tons of stolen gold under it.  Christ himself would probably kick him in the balls, even before contemplating the role of the Church in massive pedophilia.

The fact that all these people buy into the world view I described above is of enormous consequence.  These are the people whose psychopathologies push them into de facto sociopathy, and who I term Cultural Sadeists.  They are few in number, but enormously important because they have large quantities of money, and an obsession with a global government, and global power.  They do not recognize our common culture as any sort of restraint on their behavior, and do not consider decency to be an important consideration in their quest to “save the world”, either from disaster, or from humanity itself.

Lenin and Stalin (and all their offspring the world over), of course, considered their work of utmost intrinsic importance: they were forging a new world order, the next age of humanity, a golden age, the perfection of science as applied to human social organization and individual human behavior.

That hundreds of millions died painful deaths for nothing seems lost on those who have nothing else to live for.

2) The foot soldiers.  These are the academics and those working in the media who were influenced by academics.  Most of these people, in my personal experience. are somewhat neurotic, and in constant search of experiences. They want to “live life”, because they believe this is all they get.  They (in most cases) truly believe that their views are consistent with compassion and decency.  They love the same animal rescue stories, and stories of profound compassion that the rest of us do.

They love their puppies, do their best to raise good kids (if they take the momentous political decision of choosing to reproduce), but are constrained by their lack of a genuinely positive vision of the future.  They don’t see this, of course, because it, again, is all they have.

They work hard to further what they view as the cause of human progress, but are forced to reject on an unconscious level all those who tell them they truly are working for nothing, and that the end result of all their efforts will be famine and misery, and the empowerment of the very sorts of people they thought they were opposing.

3) The compliant.  This is your neighbor who has been taught to view those who oppose Obama as racist, who genuinely believes we can spend our way into prosperity, and who genuinely believes you can have something for nothing.  These are the kids who believe Bernie Sanders when he says that we can have free healthcare, free universities, much higher minimum wages, and all without any consequences of importance.  These are the people who think the Greeks have done anything but bring ruin on themselves for acting like self important, self indulgent children.  These are the people who do not remember that Chavez promised the Venezuelans the same things.  These are the people who do not know that these promises have been made many times, that many nations have listened to this siren call, and all eventually either fallen into ruin, or changed paths.

So what to do?  Me, I dream of a revolution of sorts, but not a violent one.  I dream particularly of our university level kids starting to ask fundamental questions about the dominant metaphysics.

Example 1: I would like to see Biology students replicate the long term successes of Cleve Backster, and then start to ask honest, SCIENTIFIC questions about what it all means.  To be clear, he was a man of impeccable professional integrity, who demonstrated his results for anyone who asked over the course of decades.

This might actually be a good case study of the power of negative hallucination–which we might call the triumph of prejudice over empiricism–at work.

We read in his obituary: “Scientists, however, were less convinced. No one could reproduce Backster’s results.”

We read in the Wikipedia article:

 Backster’s “Primary Perception” theory was a subject of the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters.^[18] After all human and environmental stimuli that could alter the results were removed, they reproduced Backster’s experiments with the dracaena plant, yoghurt, saliva and eggs. After getting negative results, they performed a final experiment using an EEGinstrument, which is more sensitive than a polygraph, connected it to a plant to check whether it would “see” eggs being catapulted randomly into boiling water. The instrument registered no change in the plant and the myth was considered as busted in that episode. 

Here is the actual episode.  Forward, if you are in a hurry, to roughly 3:45.  Keep in mind, that plants have no nervous systems, therefore it is simply POSTULATED that they cannot react systemically.

First, they spray it with a fire extinguisher.  HUGE reaction.  Not what would be anticipated in an orthodox scientific model, which cannot easily explain that result.

Much more telling, one of the researchers, after establishing a good baseline, just THINKS about hurting the plant: again, HUGE reaction.

In their words: “I’m not saying I believe this, but it’s hard to dispute the ink”, and “It boggles the mind”.

To recover their world view, they then successfully fail to replicate a set of experiments where he himself often failed, and call it a day.  They call the whole series of experiments a failure, despite the fact that it clearly wasn’t.  They produced results inexplicable within current biophysical paradigms.

You can WATCH it.  You can see it.  This is EXACTLY what Backster–who if you read his book was clearly a meticulous, very careful researcher, who was not contracted by top law enforcement agencies for continuous training because he was flighty or in the least unreliable (his actual field was lie detection)–reported across decades and thousands of experiments.

If you take this one example as illustrative, this is what has been done both with ALL his work, and all that challenging dominant paradigms generally.

In the most unscientific fashion imaginable, his work is either “debunked” at a theoretical level, which simply asserts his results are impossible; or, when replication is attempted, positive results are ignored–as here–or his own experimental framework is not followed, which is categorically antithetical to the spirit and methods of actual replication.

He details at length all the games people played with his work, and shows exactly where the people who claimed to be unable to replicated his work did not follow his protocols.  And replication was only attempted in one series of experiments, in my understanding, by the Establishment, prior to his entire universe of discovery being swept under the rug (with a huge sigh of relief: those tasked with refuting his heresy did a superficially acceptable job; had he been an academic, they simply could have found a pretext to fire him.)

Why?  That is not science.  That is not truth-seeking.

Field concepts have never been refuted.  They have merely been found unnecessary, and ignored.

Here is an interesting article: http://www.marcobischof.com/media/art/art_3d141900af22a/Holistic%20Biophysics.doc

I would encourage any readers I may have who are working in the fields of physics, biochemistry, or biology to read it.

This, to me, is high reality.  Regrettably, mundane reality–the one within which I pay my bills and meet my responsibilities–calls.

Net: what we need truly is a “revolution in consciousness”, a phrase which, if I could get a nickel every time it is used would made me rich in short order.  What I mean is not that we need to start dropping acid (or its modern day analogue, Ayuahuasca ), but that we need to start taking science SERIOUSLY.

You don’t need to be hippy-dippy to be curious.  You don’t have to smell of patchouli and like the Grateful Dead (I don’t, but I did dream I met Jerry Garcia the other day, as well as Robin Williams) to do HONEST, SERIOUS, scientifically rigorous research.

I make token efforts from time to time to get Marco Bischoff’s Biophotonen translated to English.  It is quite expensive, and he won’t answer any of my emails.  That would be a nice project for some forward-thinking, genuinely ideologically diverse university press.

I meant to say more.  And I will.  But not at this moment.  I must live for the time being in the world of Time.

Last word: I have been feeling that we need to rekindle the exploratory spirit of the 1960’s.  We–this is my feeling, and I am a psychic sponge–assume we live in a stale period where the best you can hope for is a great idea and a great start-up, and the leisure to spend your life learning Japanese archery, or going on tours of places like Armenia or Nepal.

No: DREAM BIG.  Dream of changing the world, not by helping orphans somewhere, typically ones created by bad public policy, or wars in which one or more parties are either radical Islamists or some variant of Communist.

Dream of a peaceful world, one in which we KNOW that we are connected on an energetic level with all of creation.  Dream of a world where you don’t die, where everything you do and see and experience and feel and accomplish aggregates, where you stay with you, where you can look forward to unending growth and security.

Everything that can be said about the political failings of Socialism has been said, and most of it was said well 70 years ago.  There is no lack of verbiage. There is no lack of books. What is lacking is receptivity, and the core problem there is that Socialism is a good answer to the problems of dis-individuation created by inaccurate, scientifically impeachable, and just plain WRONG accounts of the nature of reality.

Correcting these manifest, indefensible errors is where the emphasis must be placed.  And they must be corrected WITHIN the “Academy”.  We need bold, original, fearless spirits to risk ridicule and being ostracised.  We need “menschen” (which self evidently includes women, in whom I actually place slightly more trust).

And to be clear, I see no return to orthodox Christianity, or any other religion.  There are many positives embedded in the practices, and symbology, and social forms created by religions, but what I am preaching is liberation, not confinement.  What I am preaching is the merger of the best insights of our past, with our present technological capabilities.

I may be preaching to the wind.  If so: wind, please carry my words as far as you can, in whatever form you can.

And I wondered how much courage it must have taken to be in that space alone with a child, and then how much courage it must have taken to be a blind person, bringing a new life for whom she was responsible, into the world.  Nowadays, many woman with all their faculties intact fear to do so.

What fears must have come to her?  Must she not have thought at times “this will never work”, or “what business do I have bringing this child to me?”  or “how CAN this ever work out?”.  Then I thought she must just be taking it one day at a time, and sometimes, sometimes, entire lifetimes can be lived one day at a time, and disaster never visits.  No calamity comes calling.  Everything that is feared stays outside the door, and leaves you in peace.

And then the man I assume is her husband came back.  And he TOO had a cane. He had a smile on his face, and seemed confident.  He said something to her, then something to the bagger, and then walked off tapping his cane, seemingly knowing exactly where he was going.  The bagger followed him, and I assume he must have been the one pulling things off the shelf.

And I pondered the faith necessary for this blind couple to do something as simple as go to the grocery store with their baby.  They can’t see anything.  They depend solely on their ears, their canes, and the goodwill of those around them.

Amazing, to me, and it shamed me, honestly.  What business do I have being such a coward?  What soldier enters the field of battle assuming defeat?  It is undignified. Unbecoming. It is, in a word, wrong.

So I started allowing myself positive thoughts.

I will try and post that in my next post, but thought I’d share in this vein an amazing story about Helen Keller.  I will editorialize in advance that what tragedy does is FORCE A CHOICE.  Left to our own devices, most of us will never delve too hard, or ponder too long, the mysteries, beauties, and terrors of life.

When we are confronted with existential difficulties, ones which challenge our very sense of self, and habitual mode of making our way through this world–of living–then we go up or down.  For those who go up, they rise much higher than they otherwise may have.  For those who go down, there always remains the possibility of going up, even if they fight this idea, and the people proposing it, tooth and nail with all the fury they possess.

Anyway, those who know me well realize I am a conservative hippy.  My mind compels me to read history and economics and learn from them.  My heart compels me to dream new ways of being.  So why not Jean Houston?

Today is the 47th anniversary of the death of Helen Keller. As some of you know that as a child, I met Miss Keller. One day in our school in NYC, P.S. 6, our teacher informed us that we were going to meet Helen Keller, the great woman who had become deaf, blind, and mute before the age of two. In preparation for meeting Miss Keller, Miss O’Reilly read to us the powerful passage from Helen Keller’s autobiography that tells of how until she was six years old, Helen had no concepts whatsoever. There was little that could break through the imprisoned flesh to the potential mind within. Her teacher Annie Sullivan tried in vain to help her understand words through hand tappings. Finally, in desperation, Annie pulled Helen out to the ivy- covered pumphouse and held her hand under the water while she tapped out repeatedly into the other hand W-A-T-E-R, W-A-T-E-R, W-A-T-E-R. 

Helen writes that her whole body became still. Suddenly she understood what Annie was communicating to her. That word water broke into her sealed mind like the sun into a frozen winter world. It was her mental awakening, and she learned the names for thirty things by the end of that day. Before that supreme event there had been little in her life but body functions and rage. Helen Keller, of course had gone on to become the great educator, champion of the disabled and disadvantaged, and friend and inspiration to so many people the world over. 

After this preparation, Miss O’Reilly took us to the Cosmopolitan Club in the east 60’s where Miss Keller would be meeting us. Miss Keller was led out by her associate and companion, Polly Thompson. She was in her late sixties at the time, a large handsome women, quite tall, I remember, and utterly radiant. Her eyes saw nothing and yet were seeing everything. Her smile was a beneficence welcoming the world. I had never seen anybody so full of presence and joy in my life, even though I had been exposed throughout childhood to professional comedians who were always laughing. Helen Keller’s joy was of another order entirely. 

When she began to speak, I heard the voice of a prophet, a pythoness, whose strange inflections and pronunciations were those of someone who had never heard speech. After she had finished, I was so deeply moved that I knew I had to speak to her. Mind you, I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but I knew I had to speak to her nonetheless. When Miss Thompson asked if anyone had a question, my classmates squirmed and looked sheepishly at each other. But I found myself raising my hand and going up to her. Miss Keller placed her entire hand on my face in order to read my question. Her fingers read my expression, while the center of her palm read my lips. Still I did not know what I was going to ask. Her hand did not move from my face. Finally I blurted out what was in my heart, “Why are you so happy?”

She laughed and laughed, laughter rising from another dimension of sound–the laughter of a sequoia or of a whale.

“My child,” she said, her voice wandering between octaves. “It is because I live my life each day as if it were my last. And life in all its moments is so full of glory.” [emphasis mine]

As her hand lingered on my face for a moment, I felt as if I were lifted into her radiance and that some kind of charge passed between us. When, years later, I lay on my back looking up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I understood the nature of that charge. For there on the ceiling was the famous painting by Michaelangelo of God reaching out his hand to touch the outstretched hand of Adam. In my case it had been the touch of the blind goddess to the little Eve.

Helen Keller was a Socialist, Big S, and quite open about it.  I will say that I may have been in that era too.  There manifestly WERE many, many horrible abuses, of the sort we see today in China.  You had a rich power elite whose sole concern was profit, and they worked people like slaves and cared not at all when they died or were permanently harmed.

Back then, it was not yet obvious that the French Revolution was not a one-off. It was not yet obvious that nothing good can be built from a foundation which rejects “bourgeois” virtue, common decency, and all ties with the past.

Put another way, Complexity always best serves the cause of truth.

I am speaking formally, of course.  From within the fold of ideas ALL OF US think some are stupid and some intelligent.  We cannot do otherwise.  But looked at in the abstract even apparently stupid ideas, even the ideas of people with missing teeth who live in broken down trailers CAN have value, if only in stimulating latent perceptions in the rest of us, in recalling to us, or summoning to our awareness, notions which otherwise would have gone missing.

You can never know what possible idea is missing from your current inventory.  This is an absolute principle, and applies particularly to–is most useful to–the most intelligent among us.

Money quote:

The War of 1861 settled the issue of secession through brute force that cost 600,000 American lives. We Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech: “It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said the soldiers sacrificed their lives “to the cause of self-determination — that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.” Mencken says: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.

I started to do a post on this topic the other day, but I was tired and I ultimately decided against posting what I had,  as some of my metaphors were unhelpful.

Here are a few facts, though.

1) There were four slave-holding States which fought on the Union side, and Lincoln made no concerted effort  to change this.  In fact, they were specifically EXEMPTED from the Emancipation Proclamation.

Further, that Proclamation–which he knew would infuriate the South and make them fight harder–was delayed as long as possible, and only issued to prevent Britain (and possibly France) from supporting the South, whose cotton was getting harder to obtain through the blockades.

2)  Lincoln, in my understanding, was on record often as saying that he was quite willing to tolerate the continuation of slavery in the South as a condition of preserving the Union.  As I recall the matter–and my memory is good, but far from perfect–it was the Radical Republicans who were elected around Lincoln who were feared, and whose ascension ultimately led to their decision to secede.

Underlying all this, of course, was the many decades old debate, at that time, about who should decide if newly admitted States would allow slavery, or not.  Lincoln took the position that no new slave-holding States should be admitted and that this was the purview of the Federal Government; in the famous debates, Stephen Douglas took the position that all moral questions–including that of slavery–ought to be decided by the States.

It was the de facto political victory of Lincoln and his Republicans which caused the South to despair that over time their ability to defend themselves in Congress would evaporate, and everybody was already beyond pissed anyway.  That’s what pushed the South Carolinians into their assault on Fort Sumter.  Even then Lincoln did not need to respond with a national call-up of troops, but he did.  On April 15, 1861,. if memory serves, which I count as the ACTUAL beginning of the Civil War.  Until then, other options were possible.

All of the bloodshed and tears and pain and hunger, the rapes, beatings, and premature deaths, inflicted on soldiers and civilians and slaves alike, provoke little or no reaction today.  But the first modern war was fought to suppress the rights of States which JOINED a Union, to LEAVE that Union the same way.

Of course one can echo Samuel Johnson in asking “Why is it the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves”, but one cannot easily miss the fact that that war was fought mainly for the right of secession, and that what was invoked on both sides was State’s Rights, with one side declaring them, and the other side calling them traitors.

Nowadays, it is easy and fashionable to project our present hypersensitive selves back to that era, and applaud Chamberlain (I have stood in that spot, and it provoked powerful emotions) for his spirited defense, which we assume was in defense of Kunta Kinte and the Underground Railroad.  But this is mistaken.  You cannot use todays mores to assume anything about those of yesteryear.

Here are his words:

I fear, this war, so costly of blood and treasure, will not cease until men of the North are willing to leave good positions, and sacrifice the dearest personal interests, to rescue our country from desolation, and defend the national existence against treachery.

Treason. Traitor. These were the words the men of the North used against the rebels of the South.  They did not spite them their slave-holding.  They spited them their LEAVING.

When you really get that, and really get that slavery was never really an economically efficient system, and that without a Civil War would over some period of time–perhaps 50-75 years–have given way under social, political, and economic pressures to a gradual and authentic increase in the liberty and status of black people, one must conclude–this is my opinion–that the Civil War was not worth it.

And as I say often to those who say “but the slaves were FREED”: no, no they weren’t.  They were converted from actual property to serfs confined to small patches of dirt they worked on without rest for a pittance, all while under constant danger of attack from Southerners infuriated by the devastation of the war.

Removing the Confederate Flag will not bring the absent fathers of young black kids home.  It will not win their mothers high school educations, or the will to work hard where it has been indoctrinated out of them.  It will not make the scraps from the table that the Democrats throw from time to time equal to a dignified or comfortable existence. It will not win them self respect, or the respect of others.  Some people want to praise them no matter what they do.  Some want to condemn them no matter what they do.

The rest of us wait, and watch.

The argument is quite short, although it is explained at length:

Given this, there is no way to know how much good YOU can do in the world: who you can influence, what you can do, what you can start.

Always do your best, given this, even if all your work–all OUR work–appears futile.  Appearances can be deceiving, and the overwhelming Left may one day evaporate almost overnight.  That is certainly the fate they deserve, and the one that would most contribute to generalized human health, wealth, dignity, happiness, and freedom.

First off, both terms have clearly been altered.

“Homophobia” in a traditional sense would be “fear of the same”, and has been altered to mean “homosexualphobia”, which would be a fear of homosexuals.  There is ZERO evidence that Christians (and others) are actually afraid of homosexuals.  What they believe is that, in their reading of the Bible, homosexuality is wrong, and to be good Christians they must condemn the sin and love the person.

Now, the main response on the part of the Left is simply to assert that they are wrong.  That the Bible can’t say that, and if it does, then their religion is wrong.  One can readily see close readings of Leviticus in public court, with State lawyers striking out everything they don’ t like.  This is anti-Liberal, even if I agree on the overall theological point (that God doesn’t care what we do with our privates, as long as there is actual love.)

This response reminds me of Hoffer’s observation that freedom is often what you are free NOT to do, in this case bake a cake or perform a wedding for people whose lifestyles you believe you must condemn.  I readily grant Jews the right not to bake Nazi cakes, and gays not to bake Christian cakes. I grant Muslims the right not to cook foods with pork in it, but not to deny others that right.  The principle of equality remains the principle of equality, with the “more equal than you” principle being that of tyranny.

What the “aha” was that hit me though this morning is that what Scott Page called both Groupthink and “Dominant Logic” is both a method of tyranny, and a more or less systematic method for generating large errors of perception.  What is the error?

Simple: gayness is often the result of psychopathology, and only so-called homophobes remain willing to admit this or even consider it.  Take so-called “transgenderism”: the likelihood is that Bruce Jenner endured some major emotional insults/traumas at some point in his life, causing or largely contributing to his sexual confusion.

Here is a career psychiatrist from a very respectable major university:

Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder. . .

He also reported on a new study showing that the suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people. Dr. McHugh further noted studies from Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of children who had expressed transgender feelings but for whom, over time, 70%-80% “spontaneously lost those feelings.” 

“This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken – it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”

 The transgendered person’s disorder, said Dr. McHugh, is in the person’s “assumption” that they are different than the physical reality of their body, their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature. It is a disorder similar to a “dangerously thin” person suffering anorexia who looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight,” said McHugh. 

It is a commonplace that the elite in most fields are dealing with or have dealt with demons.  Greg LeMond was sexually molested.  Lance Armstrong had a lot of issues in his early life.  There is no reason not to assume the same of Bruce Jenner.

This is my point: the Groupthink with regard to transgenderism, and gayness, and race, make it impossible to perform the sorts of judgments which alone render it possible to improve their situations.

I have dealt with gayness several times.  I do think some people are born that way, but I also think most people are made that way, typically by a sexual trauma of some sort–which may not be perceived that way, admittedly–before age 14 or so.  This trauma affects–at least theoretically–both their sexuality and their overall emotional well-being.

Remember Rupert Everett, who committed career suicide three years ago?

For my part, I think of the movie “Bird Cage”, as I’ve mentioned at least once and likely multiple times.  I started watching that movie with my youngest daughter–who is quite tolerant of gay people, and has a couple in her circle of good friends, and who condemns me routinely for the faintest whiff of anti-gay sentiment– and she couldn’t make it through the first ten minutes.  Seeing Nathan Lane dressed up like that just completely messed with her mind. Our instinct–our immediate, untrained instinct, unmediated by social indoctrination and/or getting used to that thing through exposure–is revulsion and confusion.

It may be that we should not privilege fully our instincts, but must we also ignore them fully as well?  Much of the comedy in that movie–which I once found profoundly funny, but have a hard time watching now–comes precisely from the fact that everyone in that home is nuts. And it does not improve things that Hackman is a  and judgmental cynical hypocrite.

Can we not wonder how Val is as sane as he is–while inferring some major covert neuroses–while granting to him the emotional need to get married young to confirm for himself his own heterosexuality?  Can we not grant that denying him a two sex home has likely left significant psychological scars that are not papered over in reality by their political correctness?

And race.  Who says that you can starve a black man by hiding his welfare card under his work boots?  Racists.  People who truly believe that black people in this society are inferior.

But, then, who challenges black people?  Who does in fact judge them and tell them, socially, when they are fucking up?

Let’s make this a social situation.  Let us say that I get drunk one night and show up hazy for work, as I’ve done many times.  What got me into work at all was the fear I would lose my job.  And even short of that, a fear being called unprofessional, undisciplined, or in general a fuck up.  I have my dignity.  I may come in not fully ready for work, but I come in, even if I only slept 2 hours.

Let us say that no matter what I do or say, my job is never threatened, that nobody will ever condemn me or even say anything, and that I can do whatever I like as long as I like, and instead of having to be judged, I MYSELF can judge anyone who judges me?  Is this system of incentives–and life is a complex system, and all complex systems depend on incentives–going to bring out the best in me?  Fuck no: it will bring out the WORST in me.

And this is PRECISELY what has happened.  Black people in this country have been subjected not only to all sorts of perverse economic incentives which have served to further break apart families, but even worse to SOCIAL incentives of a sort which were INTENDED to build them up psychologically, but which in fact have served to support and rationalize all of their own worst impulses, impulses which exist in all of us, but which are largely fed only in them, in this country.  Everyone else has to measure up to the standards of hard work, education, consistency, and social responsibility.

Helping people consists BOTH in empathy AND in challenge. If I accept a mediocre you as the best you, then I am failing you.

And by focusing on eliminating perceptual and verbal diversity, Leftists hurt the very people they claim to want to help.  Our nation has thrived in large measure precisely because it has fostered ACTUAL diversity of belief and practice, and universal conformity can only mean stupidity and violence of a sort we have never, yet, seen.

He pointed out that when it comes to the actual value of diversity, the diversities that matter are those of belief and behavior.  For every practical intent and purpose white and black and brown people, gay and straight and confused people, male and female and other people, who believe the same things, are homogeneous. They add nothing the complexity, and thus overall robustness of the system.

This is why the beliefs and values of all people must both be respected and promoted.  Promoting ACTUAL diversity of thought is the first and best protection against idiocy, and curtailing actual diversity is a surefire way into the hellfire of sustained mediocrity and eventual generalized failure.

He had a good quote from Eric Hoffer, which goes roughly: “When people are free to behave as they choose, most of them choose to imitate each other.”

This got me looking up Hoffer quotes, and many of them are really very good:

This one jumped out at me:

The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

What better way to ensure generalized failures of thought than to make it both harder to earn a living, and to raise expectations?  Jacques Ellul pointed out in the early 1960’s that Americans have succumbed to a propaganda of work.  We view it as intrinsically virtuous.  Indolence is certainly a vice, but so too is what we have come to call workaholism.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

and:

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. 

and:

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. 

If you do not see the parallels here with the stuff I’ve been blogging about the past few weeks, I doubt I can explain it to you.

Here are some more good ones:

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Amen brother.  And I say this with the understanding he was a leftist, although I clearly need to learn more about him.

It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.