Month: March 2016

I think it is long past time to recognize, to acknowledge, to speak the truth about, the fact that paranoia is primarily the province of the Left.  They see–or in the case of the more disingenuous claim to see–racists under every rock, Capitalistic exploiters behind every tree, injustice every time the wind blows.

What a rubber mallet is to the knee, the claim of malfeasance is to the relationship of the Left to their enemies.  If anyone disagrees with them for any reason, they are talking before they are thinking, and then doing without thinking.  This is the purpose and outcome of Agitation Propaganda: training people to react with all the nuance, poise, class, and substance of dogs salivating for their next steak.

Were Communists seeking to subvert our cultural order, and did they deploy considerable treasure, countless hours of effort, and countless agents of influence to do so?  Unquestionably.  With the fall of the Iron Curtain, we know this to be true.  Most of the North Vietnamese Generals have written memoirs.  And I think we can reasonably assume those written from exile speak the most truth.  We know the KGB spent 4x as much money influencing opinion as it did intelligence gathering.

Was it paranoid to suspect this?  No.  It was in fact what was happening, and was the logical and largely inevitable consequence of the ideology which drove–and continues to drive–the Communists.

These people lie as easily as they breathe, and so one cannot say that because most Communists do not use that word, that they have ceased with their pathological anti-Humanism.

Bill Ayers has not changed one core belief since the 1970’s.  There is no reason to suppose those who surrounded and supported him have either.  Some cults are a one way trip.  Once in, you never get out.

Thus when I read a supposed conservative citing this propaganda piece, which gave us that phrase, I can conclude they are part of the problem.

I am going to post this without comment.  From this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment

The experiment has its roots in an earlier one performed in Trinidad, where Mischel noticed that the different ethnic groups living on the island had contrasting stereotypes about one another, specifically the other’s perceived recklessness, self-control, and ability to have fun.^[6] This small (n= 53) study focused on male and female children aged 7 to 9 (35 Black and 18 East Indian) in a rural Trinidad school. The children were required to indicate a choice between receiving a 1¢ candy immediately, or having a (preferable) 10¢ candy given to them in one week’s time. Mischel reported a significant ethnic difference, with Indian children showing far more ability to delay gratification as compared to African students, as well as large age differences, and that “Comparison of the “high” versus “low” socioeconomic groups on the experimental choice did not yield a significant difference”.^[6] Absence of the father was prevalent in the African-descent group (occurring only once in the East Indian group), and this variable showed the strongest link to delay of gratification, with children from intact families showing superior ability to delay.

Leftists like to style themselves as the “true” thinkers, and conservatives as ignorant political luddites, who oppose either from financial interest, or congenital intellectual deformity–typically with more than a touch of racism, homophobia (so-called), and misogyny–all the profound, brave, and beautiful ideas which they propose.

I would like to propose the opposite: given that the purpose of thinking is at some point achieving, given that the abstract, if it can be called useful, must at some point actually BE useful, and since the only possible place for usefulness is the real world, conservatives are in fact the real thinkers.

It takes a level of abstraction to grasp that one cannot always get what one wants immediately.  Most people who are going to, figure this out by age 6 or so (there is a very interesting paragraph in there I am going to make the topic of a separate post).

It takes a level of abstraction to realize that a complex order is vastly more robust and intelligent than an apparent order.  A row of trees–satisfying as it may be aesthetically–will never equal the vigor of a truly natural forest, allowed to grow by chance and time.

It takes an abstract grasp of history to see that power aggregated is always maintained and expanded.

If we are to associate a music with conservatism, I would pick something like what I am listening to at the moment.  Conservatism appears emotional on the outside, but is pure reason at its heart.

If we are to pick honest music for the true Left, for the Cultural Sadeists, this seems to me appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbmWs6Jf5dc  They appear rational, but are pure emotion–most of it rage–at heart.

Now, I picked up a book by Herbert Marcuse last night, and perused it.  He was talking about private property, seemingly the history of it, and lack of justification for it.  His ideas were not of interest to me, so much as the feeling they gave me.  When I allowed myself, they recalled a warm feeling of safety, of insulation from reality.  They recalled the sense most highly intelligent people have had from time to time of superiority, and the pride that gave them.   They recalled being invited to this smart kids thing, and that smart young adults thing.

The words presented to me a world where I was welcome, where I could kick off my shoes and make myself comfortable, where I would never be truly contradicted among my fellow travellers, although of course we would argue just enough to make it fun, and then congratulate ourselves at our cleverness, and wonder together at the dullness of the rest of the world.

Put simply, it was a world where I was insulated from my daily life, from the “slings and arrows” of a life lived honestly, and where I had a secret password to be accepted in any group which recognized that password, along with a map on how to find them, how to live among them, how to breed among them, how to die among them.  It offered a guide to life, and a shelter from uncertainty.  I never had to feel unpleasant feelings.

When I was in graduate school one of the professors lost his wife after a long illness, and he was back to work within a day or two.  He was back where those sorts of things didn’t matter, where he could counter the pain of his loss with abstraction, with effort, with a ritual order created by and maintained by people like him. I very much doubt he ever went through anything like a true mourning process. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.  You cannot fit true mourning onto a calendar, and schedule it for summer recess.

If you watch the arc of intellectual life in the 20th century, which created what we now have to live with in the 21st, you can see a retreat from an honest interaction with the world, and which culminates in the elevation of the text to a God of sorts.  These people were pushed by events into a place which was beyond assault, which was beyond honest emotional reactions to life, which was in fact perfectly safe.  These are the people teaching our kids, at least in most Humanities departments infected by this virus.

What one finds in Leftist texts–which is substantially all of them in modern universities–is a simultaneous indulgence in primal emotion, and the rejection of it. The rage which they feel as residual emergences from primitive places in their lives before they discovered books becomes solidified and reified in ideas which serve the purpose of calming them, of allowing some expression of what they feel, but which are, for all that, inhuman, destitute of genuine fellow feeling, empty of genuine compassion, caring, love.

This is Herbert Marcuse, and his extended family.

As I have said often, a thought worker is concerned with results in the actual world.  Conservatives are thought workers.  They operate at a useful and true level of abstraction, in the same sense that scientists do.  They have hypotheses, which they test by reading both ancient and contemporary history.  And they validate their hypotheses by these means.

Intellectuals are interested in the effects of their ideas and those of others on their emotions.  Ideas which they find congenial and beautiful they call good and right, and ideas–like the necessity of suffering–which they do not find congenial, they reject as ugly and flawed.  All this, with no reference to the actual world.

As a matter of FACT–such a thing does still exist, as do all the stoplights, and baseball fields in America–blacks and the poor generally have gotten more poor under Obama, and the rich, very much richer.  Yes, Republicans are blamed reflexively, but what policy has Obama proposed which would have altered any of this in the slightest?  American businesses have not wanted to invest money, and the very simple reason is they don’t trust Obama, and because Obamacare has made business life vastly more complex and expensive, with no compensatory positive, even for the workers, many of whom have been let go, or lost their policies.

All this brings me to my point.  Any long term readers I may have will be familiar with my fondness for extended preambles, which often exceed in length the actual point.

Donald Trump represents the Shadow, both for the political Left, and for the complicit Right. This is the reason he evokes such powerful emotions.


The way I have come to think of the Shadow is two complementary selves, on each side of a corner, fearing the worst of what is around the corner.  de Chirico represents this beautifully here .  We do not know our own selves, and fear the Other one around the corner, which we see only fragments of.

For the Left, he represents rage, prejudice, crassness, and abusiveness.  No one who has interacted on an extended basis with these people can fail to see that their culture–and it is a culture, an insular one–is infected with all these flaws.  They are PROJECTING onto Trump.

They call him racist for wanting a wall  But Mexico has a wall.  Are they racist?  He wants to limit Islamic immigrants, but the Gulf States who would be the most obvious destinations, with their resources, oil wealth, and cultural connection, have taken precisely NONE of them.  Are they racist?  Who talks about this?

Trump represents in sum all the abhorrent practices the Left wants to hide from itself, which it is and has long been continually guilty of. He does not ACTUALLY represent them, of course, but he is the subject of their obsessive displacement of their own unowned emotions.

For the right, Trump symbolizes their long term failure to engage in a substantive way with Leftist domination of all narratives which interest them.  I see alleged conservatives calling Trump xenophobic.  Why?  Are they simultaneously condemning, as they should, Saudi Arabia and Mexico (and for that matter, every other nation which takes illegal immigration seriously, which is most of them)?

The National Review has been losing the ideological battle for 60 years.  If the goal was to “stop history”, they failed.  They write their very erudite, internally consistent editorials, for other conservatives.  Nobody else gives a shit.  They are useless.  Irrelevant.  When it comes time to stand their ground, they pussy out.  They are cowards.

Trump is the first national figure in my lifetime to toe the line and tell these bastards to shut the fuck up.  And he has gotten away with it.

Here is the thing: our public life is FILLED to overflowing with blatant and inexcusable lies.  Most of us know it.  But there is so much shouting in the public domain, such a ready SA just waiting to pounce, that most have been pummeled into submission to ideas and practices they KNOW are pernicious, know are wrong.

If someone on a national stage speaks the truth too much too long, all these delusions and illusions, both on the right and the left, are threatened.  Congenial, comforting pipe dreams may all go up in smoke.  What people LIVED for, what gave them a sense of meaning and purpose, is at risk.

It is impossible to predict what Trump will do if elected, but in my view the recovery of the possibility of speaking truth in the public domain is the most likely outcome, and that alone is worth electing him.  Nobody else can do that, and of course Hillary or Bernie will make it much, much worse.

At some point ideological dissent may at some point be actually criminalized.  We are already seeing inklings of this at the highest levels, as when Loretta Lynch apparently considered treating as thought criminals people who use common sense and independence of thought in evaluating the non-existent evidence supporting the claim of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

I have wondered many times if I would end my life in prison or, worse, be subjected to the torture sick people want to inflict on all who threaten their fragile egos by disagreeing with them.

I have believed for some years that the Nazis were vastly more merciful than the Communists.  Nazis just killed or worked to death the people who disagreed with them.  They might torture them for information, but nothing more.

The Communists wanted to break people’s minds, to drive them mad, to get them to confess a 6″ pencil was longer than a 7″ pencil, and that they had committed crimes they had not committed.  This is unique in history, with the possible exception of the Christian inquisitions.

I wonder, I will admit, if Communism would have been possible without Christianity and its radical intolerance, its evangelical zeal, and its historically radical insistence on exact conformity.  Dostoevsky was quite right in his analogy, and in his history.

In order to recognize cruelty, at least when expressed with subtlety, in others, you must first own it in yourself.  We all have this capacity and there is no use lying about it.

The problem with the people I call Sybaritic Leftists–the Swedes would be an excellent example–is that they do not own or recognize their capacity for anger and rage. Normal people you invite in as house-guests who shit in your kitchen you become angry with and kick them out of your home.  The Swedes are getting angry with those who object to the shit.  This is displacement, and very unhealthy psychologically.

Donald Trump is not the Anti-Christ, he is not a fascist, and I see no signs that he is any major respect a bad person.  The rage directed at him is derived from the astonishment among many people, journalists and political watchers alike, that all the usual tactics, all the usual attacks, have not reduced him into some form of degraded silence, or at least reduced his chutzpah.

If you are someone who is used to being able to use physical force–or in this case, the concentrated use of emotional abuse–then it can be intensely frustrating not to get the outcome you want.  If you are a long term bully and abuser, when you beat your woman, you want her to shut the fuck up.  They have beat him and beat him and beat him, and he won’t shut up.  This is what enrages people with major anger issues.

But none of them want to own the anger.  The same people say OM, do yoga, and post pictures of cats.

As I said, most people are liars.  Some of them I am willing to forgive, and some of them I am not. I am aware the ideal is that I should forgive everyone.  Well, one needs to set realistic goals, and forgiving these people right now, for me, is not realistic.  They should know better.

I think in the first phase you take people as they seem to be.  This is naivete. In the next, you realize most people lie just about all the time without knowing they do it, although some do.  In the end, and this is what I am working on, you see the lies, and forgive most of them anyway, and understand all of them.

I’ve been saying for many years that seeing what is in front of you is exceptionally hard, and I was gratified to read in the NARM book that this is in fact a primary developmental challenge for most of us.

I have no use for lies, or easy truths.  The two are quite often the same.  Things quite often are what they appear to be, but what have you really understood even about that?

What passes for learning and knowledge in this country is in all too many cases sad, weak, and even sick.  I personally have invested many people with reverence, only to find I erred.

I do think we can see in many traditional cultures, in the “guru”, an attempted recapitulation of a failed father-son relationship, complete with idealization.

Nobody is your superior.  Nobody is your inferior.  Be yourself, and let others be themselves.  We all bump into walls and fall down.  No use crying about it, or blaming the walls or the Earth.

It occurs to me that the term “double standard” is really a misnomer: it describes, in fact, a non-existent standard.  If it applies in one place, and not another, then it is not a “standard”–which must be the same everywhere by definition–at all.

The Left does not oppose rape, or rape culture.  It does not oppose sleazy men, sexual harassment, dishonesty, dishonor, or treachery.  It condones all these things in ISIS and in Hillary and Bill.

The point of a standard, of a principle, is that it mediates difference.  It allows one group to treat all other groups with the same respect and expectations that it treats its own.  Others, seeing that they are not treated differently, adapt and conform to this aspect of the culture, while feeling free to retain their own unique ideas about things.

The rejection of standards is perforce the rejection of mediated difference, and quite obviously that is what we see in our present political world.  The power elite just pick and choose what they care about and don’t care about, and in clinically Orwellian fashion, feel utterly free to decry one week what they were condoning the week before.  This is only made problematic by those who remember the past, and who expect consistent, principle based behavior.  If you can get people to reject the past, and to accept inconsistency, then you have a perfectly brewed propaganda soup, which again, is what most Democrats and pretty much all college students are immersed in.

Conservatives, even the best of them, have always had to carry the truth of harshness: that life is sometimes hard, but we make it harder, most of the time–as seen from a public policy perspective–by trying to make it easier.

But there is not a long distance from there to “fuck the poor: it’s their own damned fault”.  The historical role of the Democrats has been to counter this impulse.  Within my own world, there is room for give and take, and the historical Democrats are people I could find some common ground with, even if I could never agree with the extent of their pandering.

The modern Democrat party, though, has gone full Socialist, full self loathing, full ideological detachment from the cares and struggles of actual human beings.

So where does this leave working class Americans?  With nothing.  Nobody talks about or cares about them, except to the extent they patronize them with lies and/or platitudes.

I was reading this nasty article from National Review, which has most of the classic stereotypes Democrats, with some justice, threw at conservatives, with none of the palliating deeper humanitarianism that motivated people like Barry Goldwater or Calvin Coolidge.  Consider this finale to what purports to be serious analysis, by someone who wonders how so much of the world has missed his unique insights, rare genius, and goshdarned tough ability to “tell it like it is”.  He is speaking about small towns around America:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

On the one side you have Hillary and everyone but Trump wanting to add 15 million job-seekers to a discouraged existing pool of people who have worked too little, for too little, for many years now; and on the other you have this asshole.

Why not Trump? He’s used to seeing men in hard hats at work.  It’s what he’s always done.

It seems to me many of us bring a sense of strain to work, or a sense of need.  On the one hand we are pushed into working by forces outside of us, on the other we are pushed into work by forces within us.

Work, it seems to me, is at its best an interested participation in the unfolding of ones life.  If you dial the right combination, there is glitter, light, and beauty everywhere, even when you are doing the dishes.

Nothing stays the same, so everything happens differently every time.  This is interesting, and, again, a very suitable subject for the virtue of curiosity.

I wish more people were genuinely curious.  I wish, in particular, those who claim to value diversity actually did so.  People are interesting, but not when they are made objects, not when they are reduced to known ciphers, not when they are considered in the aggregate.  Those are dull games for even duller people, and nothing but pain comes from them.

It seems to me that I personally, as a parent, will take the most pride in how my children are NOT like me.  I have tried hard to instill curiosity in them as a principal virtue, and curiosity can go many places.  We are all exposed to different things, different people, and take different paths.  To the extent they depart from me and my path, that means they have found their own.  That is what I want for them, and what I would argue all parents should want for their children.

Such, in any event, is my own view.  You are free to differ.  I do actually value diversity.  The same logic, as I think about it, would apply to everyone you meet.

How banal, if you think about it, must be a teacher who insists on his own way, his own words, his own routines.  The task of a thinker who would be a teacher is to get to the principles which matter, then watch in wonderment at the endlessly inventive ways in which they can be expressed by open and happy people.

My children are not mine.  You are not mine.  Confusions about this account for most of the unnecessary suffering in the world, I think.

I was contemplating today, as I do, why I do some of the stupid things I do.  Some of us more than others set out to do one thing, and find ourselves, as if a magic spell had been cast on us, doing something else.  Surfing the internet is just the latest iteration of daydreaming, or cleaning, or calling people on the phone, or going for a walk.

On a deeper level, how many excuses are there for not painting a wall which needs it, for doing our taxes, for reconnecting with an old friend, for doing that project you have dreamed about for years?

And what I saw was that I really have two parts of myself which both wish me well, but have differing myths about the world, differing felt senses about the world.

People we call evil have identified with the appetitive self, with the animal self, which states that a full belly is the same as goodness, that the world is hostile and dedicated to their destruction, and that an aggressive and cruel way of interacting with the world is the only possible response consistent with safety and survival.

Within the shadow, there is a perceived light.  And light is perceived as shadow.  And, to the point, both parts perceive themselves as furthering the interests of our self.   Both view themselves as relative paladins, fighting the good and necessary fight.

Within myself, I am saying there are two brothers within me.  Two comrades in arms, both dedicated to my well being, in their own ways, but with radically different, and outwardly opposed agendas.  This is why I cycle from one set of behaviors and affect, to another, and back.

Going “into the shadow” is another world entirely, but one which makes complete sense from its own perspective.

Put another way, a more Hindu or Buddhist way, there is no darkness: only ignorance, typically ignorance made possible by a failure of communication.  And I would go all hippy and say that all conflict is a failure of communication, but would add that where actual people are concerned, listening is not always present, and if violence is, violence is sometimes the appropriate answer in response.

Feeding the good in everyone can be the only truly humane impulse for a good person, but we always need to start where we are.