Month: September 2015

The first trauma is like a rupture, like a membrane of some sort–a protective barrier of some sort–has been penetrated.  Every trauma after that aggregates around it, but the same techniques–principally dissociation and continuous activity–which work to manage one trauma will work for all of them.  As I have said, I suspect many soldiers ENTER the military with PTSD.  It is one place where their hypervigilence and emotional disconnection become virtues.

You cannot retraumatize someone who has already been traumatized.  You can merely push them farther into their defenses.

But what I am realizing is that you only need to undergo the process of healing once as well.  Once you know the way out, you cannot be trapped again.

Healing is a very odd thing.  You must have the intrepidity to enter an unknown land alone.  No one can go with you, at least no one who has not traveled that exact road themselves, which is very few people.  Most traumas go unhealed.  Healing is not returning to a place previously known.  It is not a reset.  It is a transformation.  That is the only way forward.  You have to sacrifice everything you are to become who you are meant to be. It takes balls.

But God fucking dammit I am going to do it.  I am doing it.  Soon I will be able to say I have done it.

You cannot imagine what a sunrise or sunset looks like to a newly freed captive.

Just watched this movie.  Expected it to be painful, but unexpectedly I found it amazingly inspirational.  I realized that the best kind of courage is exactly equal to calm, faith, trust, and acceptance.

She dies, of course, but she dies well.  It’s worth the watch, in my view.

We need to be able to use these terms to describe both people and cultures.  They do not disappear when they are banned from public speech: they merely become disfigured, ugly and wrongly used.

Can we perhaps compare a man who works hard, is scrupulously honest, a wonderful father and husband, to a man who gets drunk every day, lies constantly, borrow money he never pays back, has a fondness for 12 year old boys, who beats prostitutes, and–to add something genuinely objectionable–calls Obama “that nigger”.

If we cannot call one a better person than the other, then moral order is impossible.

My entire system is oriented around approximate orders, general orders, ones both subject to change, and recognized as in constant motion.

But the human mind works by creating distinctions.  If we do not create coherent ones, it will create incoherent ones.  Communists, for example, reject “bourgeois” morality, but substitute instead a morality based upon purely abstract and generally non-existent class distinctions.  Within their system, the latter man above would be vastly superior to the first man, if the drunk were labeled Proletarian, and the honest man bourgeois or Capitalist.  And in practice, many good people had their heads chopped off in the inauguration of the Communist era, the French Revolution, and many evil people made fortunes.

Ponder the smallness of the division now between those who commit microaggressions and those whose lives seemingly orient around punishing them.  This is an anti-morality, whose whole goal is to prevent honest speech, honest communication, honest CONNECTION between differing human beings.  No gap is bridged with histrionic shouting. Nothing is negotiated.  No empathic skills are actually learned.  No emotional intelligence is cultivated.

Ultimately, the core of morality is understanding. It is not external behavior, but what motivates that behavior.  This cannot be seen or reliably diagnosed.  Our drunk, above, may have secret virtues, and our saint may have secret lusts and angers and vices. These are both possibilities.  It is not appropriate to judge people as people.  But it is absolutely necessary to have ideals, and to recognize who is moving toward them and who away.  Some systems in motion are in fact inherently superior to others.  This must be admitted in principle, even if we choose not to spend time labeling people.

I am increasingly inclined to make of my third virtue two levels.  Level 1 is simple curiosity.  Level 2 is the regular use of the OODA loop.

What is the enemy?  Stupidity and following ineffectiveness, or even unintentional damage.

We express our true moral beliefs not just through what we say and do, but in what we pass over in silence.  It is one thing to secretly abhor adultery, but not say anything to an adulterous friend, but another entirely to ignore massive horrors, such as those inflicted on the Dalits in India.  If there is a widespread campus campaign to alleviate these tortures, I have not seen it.  They seem preoccupied with the “horrors” of drunk sex without a contract, and minor social faux pas’s, the extent of which they seemingly seek to extend daily.

Morality, per se, is not taught in colleges.  Moral reasoning is not taught.  Anger is taught.  That is all.

It is not necessary to share all of your beliefs with everyone.  That is annoying, and likely counter productive.  But it is necessary, to be a good person, to HAVE beliefs.

It is right and proper for someone, after engaging in thoughtless wrong-doing for a long time, to do some soul searching, to question one’s conscience, to wonder about right and wrong.  But no one who permanently renounces the duty of moral choice can be said to be benefiting the world, and given that the world is in constant change, and entropy the tendency of all things, when unopposed, such people are actually contributing the downfall of everything good.

The Western world, after committing abuses of colonialism and war which were unexceptional by global historical standards, has somehow fallen into a miasma of extended self reproach, which helps no one.  It hurts.  It is hurting, and will continue to hurt, until everything genuinely good about our system has been ended by inferior cultural orders.

Otherwise decent people, who drink coffee, and like to go out to eat, and enjoy vacations skiing or at the beach, are contributing to our decline through the myopic focus on our small sins, while ignoring the massive ones occurring around the world, and which have occurred throughout history.

Wake up. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/sunday-review/are-western-values-losing-their-sway.html?_r=0

I read this, and wondered when or if he was going to render an opinion.  He never did.  He merely surveyed the landscape.

Here are some basic questions: Is slavery wrong?  We argue it is, we make movie after movie after movie showing how evil white America was for countenancing it, but we are unable to denounce it in Muslim and African nations.  Western Leftists are unable to denounce it in Communist nations, instead inventing a new word “chattel slavery” to differentiate the kind they are prepared to overlook from the kind they supposedly care about.

If slavery is not always wrong, then it is sometimes acceptable.  How and when, then, is it acceptable?  Practically, when denouncing it means renouncing Soviet era propaganda intended to undermine Western beliefs in their own Liberal system.  Practically, when it means turning the rejection of slavery into an absolute value. Practically, when it means acting and speaking in a morally coherent and defensibly consistent way.

Is beating and raping women wrong?  Is fucking 9 year old girls?  Not trying to give anybody trouble, but these things clearly happen, and they are clearly condoned in some cultures.  In other cultures, drunken consensual sex equates to rape, and we are told rape is wrong.  It is wrong here, but I remain unclear what the Left feels about the rape of boys and girls and infidel women by Muslims.  Is rape wrong in China when it is done by high Party officials and the police refuse to investigate, much less punish it?  This, too, happens.  It happens in Cuba and North Korea, guaranteed.

Here is the problem we have: nobody frames these questions with this degree of clarity.  They use weasel word, big words, ambiguous words, ultimately, meaningless words, useless words.

The task of improving human life is a practical one.  The task of spreading democracy is not that of spreading a system of government, but rather spreading Enlightened, better, values, and gradually building a more genuinely moral world, one which is ABLE to embrace and use democracy.  You cannot impose democracy on morally and intellectually inferior people, and for our part we cannot protect our democracy as moral and intellectual cretins.

But academics, particularly, need to ask themselves what they believe.  Do they REALLY oppose slavery?  Do they REALLY support the right of women to be equal in their status to men?  Do they REALLY support the right of children–both male and female–not to be raped?

If you support it through silence in some cases, and condemn it only when convenient, the proper word for that is unprincipled coward.  Ah, but you can dispute whether or not being brave is a universal value, too, no?  Yes, you can.  And I can call you a fucking pussy.  You and I live in different worlds.  Mine has right and wrong and the possibility of useful moral judgement.  Yours is that of a leaf blowing in the wind, if the leaf was also filled with self contempt, unexpressable and unquenchable anger, and an absolutely vapid and unstable sense of self, purpose, and place.

Do we really believe that Liberal values are absolute?  Do we think free speech, and the freedom of conscience should be universal?  Most of our professors who call themselves Liberals do not believe this.  They want a coercive power to tell all of us what to do.

Freedom has been such a thirst for most of humanity for most of history.  We have it, and a great many of us do not value it.  We do not know what is worth, because we have not known anything else.

Me, I have experienced totalitarianism.  It is a tonic for the weak and the dead, but poison to anyone with a heart, with dreams, and with a conscience.

We see the claim made continually, implicitly and explicitly, that the failure to thrive of the majority of blacks in this country must relate to factors external to their own choices.  Specifically, “racism” is blamed, which in turn amounts to the claim that white people to this very day have the absolute power to make or break all blacks in this country by our acceptance or rejection. If we accept them en masse, the argument goes, they will thrive, and the fact that they haven’t means we must not have accepted them sufficiently, that somehow this pernicious bugaboo “racism” must still be with us, even if we cannot find examples of it which would even remotely compare with, say, the racism of a Woodrow Wilson or FDR.

This is bullshit. If I were to take an Ideal Type of the typical black kid, I would find he or she was raised by a single mother who existed in large part on public assistance, who only got a high school education, if that, and whose father was largely if not entirely absent during the entirety of their childhood.  I would find that they were exposed often on the street to danger and violence, and that fear was their constant companion throughout their youth and adolescence.  I would find that they listen to loud, angry, violent music which extols the virtues of power and the ability to command sex. I would find that they more educated they seem or seek to become, the more contempt they feel directed at them by people barely able to speak the English language.

I would find, in short, a system virtually scientifically calculated to breed failure.  This is not racism.  Racism is what people outside the system think.  No, this is social incompetence, ineptitude.  This is a system whose failings are obvious to anyone with eyes to see, and which needs to be labeled such.

Until running away from your children is held in contempt–or failing to take precautions not to get pregnant, either through birth control or abstinence–blacks will suffer.

Until education is held in high esteem, blacks will suffer.

Until they get away from that infernal music, whose frequencies and content corrupt both the minds and bodies of those listening to it, blacks will suffer.

Would Einstein have listened to hip-hop while contemplating the mysteries of the universe?  How could he?   How is any higher thought possible when one is confined in the bass and base frequencies?  Look at this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16201210 

What bass sounds do is increase a sense of power and aggression, while diminishing the capacity for abstract reasoning.  To state the obvious, you need abstract reasoning in this society to get ahead.

To return to the point of this post, what I would assert based on data is that black kids who grow up in two parent households do as well as white kids, on balance.  Certainly, starting in the ghetto is not ideal, but the only people who stay there are those without a plan to get out.

Likewise, white kids raised in single parent homes fare as poorly as black kids do, on balance.  They are at higher risk for everything.

Being raised in a single parent home is inferior to being raised in a two parent home.  Thus, if I am to be accused of any -ism, let it be Parent-ism.  Race is an excuse, not an important factor.  Only those who want it to be make it so.  If a black kid isn’t getting the job, it’s because he comes slouching in with baggy pants unable to speak intelligible English.  The person who does not hire is likely making the right decision, because that kid was only going to do half the work that the black kid who came in dressed nicely using proper English does.

Is there any hope that common sense and common decency will ever return?  I wonder.  Nobody is being helped by the relentless race baiting, certainly not blacks.  They are hurt by it, because it confuses them as to the nature of their duty, which is to take care of themselves, and their families.

I lived in an affective cage as a child, where literally nothing I did was right.  If I misbehaved I was punished, and if I did nothing I was punished.  When dealing with a violent narcissist, the only thing you can do is watch and try and anticipate what it is you need to be doing this moment.  This is of course a root of my hypervigilence, itself a source of my constant reflections on my own inner world, and what is going on in the outer world. I need to know what is going on.

But it hit me yesterday, with absolute crystal clarity, that a totalitarian regime GIVES you a list, a short list to be sure, but a list, of what you CAN do.  If you are a Muslim, you can pray 5x a day.  You can give alms.  You can travel to Mecca.

If you had been a Nazi, you were free to inform on dissenters, free to fight for the Reich, free to speak patriotic rhetoric.

If you were or are a Communist, you are free to lie cheat and steal if it serves the cause. You are free to do what your handlers, the upper echelons of the Party, want you to do.  You are free to hate any and all class enemies.

All of these things are huge reliefs for some people.  It gives them clarity.  It gives them a path forward, and the feeling, paradoxically, of freedom. I  felt this.

My task is to create my own list, and steadily expand it.  I have lived for a very long time in a very gray world.

Some simplification of complex abstract ideas is necessary, and I would assert that the appropriate degree is at least to the point where decision making and following action is possible.  If nothing you say can be used to make an actual decision, then you are useless in all practical respects, outside of the entertainment value you provide those who tune to your channel.

With regard to morality, greatly simplifying, I would stipulate 4 moralities:

1) Be moral because God will punish you, and society will exile you.

2) Be moral because it is rational.

3) There is no such thing as morality.

4) Be moral because experience teaches this brings about both the most individual happiness, and the greatest overall social harmony and well being.

You do not have to justify the statement that “when I push button X, a horn toots”.  It is a scientific claim, one which can be verified as often as anyone may care to.  You don’t have to know WHY it works, merely that it does.

I will call this the Morality of Experience.