Month: April 2016

I am really feeling this morning the role of instincts, specifically social instincts, in shaping human behavior.  We are like dogs, or monkeys, or territorial birds.

We have reached a point where our reason will not allow us to consciously separate into tribes, where judgement of the Other is considered wrong.

But judgement of those who judge transexuals or gays, or even MEXICANS–who speak another language, act according to foreign cultural rules they frequently refuse to adapt to integrate here, and who are not even in this country legally–is considered wrong.  So you get the same judgement.  You activate that same social instinct.  You still separate into tribes.  The social instinct is served.  Nothing is transcended.

We need to exist within social orders.  The  Chinese and Hindus and others, in making absolute rules about family orders, and the relationship of families to the King and State and community and village and overall culture, were following natural human tendencies, the same that cause chimpanzees to have de facto kings, de facto “nobles”, and plebians, and to place all females in a low category.

The effort, of course, is to critique allegedly artificial and arbitrary social orders.  Why should women be inferior?  Why should some men be superior?  These are valid questions, and the conclusion that these emergent behaviors constitute injustices is reasonable.

But at the same time an actually excessive and utterly unfulfilled need FOR social order of precisely this sort, which is unrecognized in the frontal cortex, unprocessed, and thus unconscious, leads to behaviors like the grunting and groaning, ritual violence, throwing of sticks and that sort of thing, which has attended the North Carolina decision to honor and protect traumatized women who were terrified and triggered by the thought of men in their bathrooms.  You have tribal warfare, with one group claiming territory, and the other defending the territory, and particularly vulnerable female members of their social order.

Leftists in general are what they condemn.  I am decreasingly sympathetic to most conservative propaganda memes too, but appeals to tradition are always inherently appeals to systems that at some point in time, and for some period of time, have sufficiently met the needs of all involved that they were stable.

I don’t think anyone who has paid careful attention to women’s behavior over any period of time can fully forget or condemn Freud’s conclusion that women have a masochistic streak.  50 Shades certainly did nothing to dispel that.  Countless women are and have been happy in positions of overtly unequal authority.  Any man, obviously, who says he calls all the shots is either stupid or lying, but it has been common for women publicly to hide their influence and power.

From my own perspective, the question that most interests me is what creative energies–genuinely creative, not tearing down, breaking, expressions of rage and social exclusion, with most of Leftism being a de facto emanation of social exclusion–lie dormant in all of us.  What can women contribute that they are not contributing?  What can men and children contribute that they are not presently?

Creation and curiosity are the tools and pathways for growth.  Time and patience are the soil.

I look around me and see so much futility.  So much waste. So many people running around trying to save the world, and shitting on everything and everyone they touch without seeing it, without being able to care, since they are animated by manic energies they cannot touch consciously, cannot own, cannot see, and which laugh at them, like the demons in bad movies.

http://hijackingofhappiness.com/

He talks about the manufacture of consent dating back to the Wilson era.  About 2/3rds of it is quite interesting.  Then you realize that he, too, is selling something.

But I am seeing with increasing clarity how the American Dream, as we have inherited it, is a chimera.  It is an economically useful myth; it is propaganda, formulated for the purpose of training people to be useful drones.

I think of the movie “They Live” and have to say it does sometimes feel like this whole world is a big inside joke, played on most of us, by a very small number.

But the joke isn’t very funny.  I think of Chekhov’s story “A doctor’s visit”

“Fifteen hundred or two thousand workpeople are working without rest in
unhealthy surroundings, making bad cotton goods, living on the verge of
starvation, and only waking from this nightmare at rare intervals in
the tavern; a hundred people act as overseers, and the whole life of
that hundred is spent in imposing fines, in abuse, in injustice, and
only two or three so-called owners enjoy the profits, though they don’t
work at all, and despise the wretched cotton. But what are the profits,
and how do they enjoy them? Madame Lyalikov and her daughter are
unhappy — it makes one wretched to look at them; the only one who
enjoys her life is Christina Dmitryevna, a stupid, middle-aged maiden
lady in pince-nez. And so it appears that all these five blocks of
buildings are at work, and inferior cotton is sold in the Eastern
markets, simply that Christina Dmitryevna may eat sterlet and drink
Madeira.”

It is always better to be on the inside, I suppose, but at what cost?  We can assume there are power elites, obviously.  The only question is how unified they are, and what purpose or purposes they pursue, other than more of everything: money, power, influence, pleasure.

I did the logical analysis on all this some time ago in my post “Perfection”.  What is interesting, or might be interesting, to aspiring tyrants is the process of seduction.  Chasing women is something I’ve always found interesting myself.  But I find that once I catch one, quite usually I no longer want her. This is why I have done little chasing for some years.  I was once good at it, but no more.

Is Fidel Castro a Christina Dmitryevna, able to enjoy his food and wine because he is a moral imbecile, incapable of seeing much less caring about the suffering all around him?  Is he a clinical sadist, and if so, how often does he get the sorts of pleasures such people enjoy?  Does he go to his political prisons often?

But even that must be tiring after a time.  Both Castro’s must often be bored.  There is little to do.  What energy they may expend must be devoted to corrupting and ruining other nations.  I know they have agents of influence in the United States.  Again: chasing, not catching, is the pleasure.

I’m rambling.  I just wonder how worth it the lust for power and wealth is for the power elite.  I cannot believe it satisfies well, and to the extent it does, it is due to their mental and emotional sickness, both of which make true satisfaction and pleasure quite impossible.

http://www.infowars.com/saudi-arabia-is-a-cancer-on-the-world/

I think we can with reason ask if the “Syrian”–in quotes, because the actual people seem to come from all over the Middle East and Asia, and many of them seem not to have been touched by war at all–diaspora was not a planned outcome of the civil war Saudi Arabia did so much to fund and foment.  Why WOULD they take refugees when the goal is exporting misogynistic, theocratic homophobia to a decadent, sybaritic, unprincipled West?

You want to put an average leftist in a state of paralysis?  Point out to them brown people commit all the same crimes white people do, and they are STILL WRONG.  They don’t have a category for this.  It’s not something Howard Zinn ever mentioned.

How is it that people are boycotting North Carolina, and condoning the Middle East?  Cirque du Soleil cancels NC, but goes to Dubai or somewhere like that, where women can be beaten with impunity, nine years old is the marrying age, at least legally, and where gays are terrified.

Is rape wrong, or isn’t it?  If so, then ISIS must be condemned in CLEAR terms by the people who claim to value the lives and rights, and feelings of women.

And I was pondering this, and it occurred to me that the world is complex.  This complexity is scary to childish minds, who find the need to provide themselves and others simplifying narratives.  To provide simple Good Guys and Bad Guys.  To put white hats or black hats on everyone.  To enjoy, in other words, the emotional privileges of routine and unreflective prejudice that they cannot stomach in others.

Wringing debate from the hands of dictators–to dictate is to say what is and isn’t so, with no threat or fear of contra-diction–was the principal step in the direction of liberalizing human societies.  Wringing silence from those who would debate is a move in the opposite direction.  It is counter-Liberal.  Anti-Liberal.  The antithesis of everything they SAY they stand for.

But children will be children.  Life is complex.  It is hard taking into account varying stories, varying perspectives, differing agendas, competing selfishnesses, lies, cheating, and the confusion of ambiguity.  But this is what mature, genuinely good minds and spirits MUST do.  Everything else is a fucking lie.

It occurs to me most of us spend all day every day running from or TO anxiety.  That latter surprised me. 

I was sitting at my favorite Mexican place, where I have eaten hundreds of times, and he has hired somebody new, who is not quite as good as the other folks he normally uses.  And I was sitting there, and it wasn’t bothering me.  I was sitting there, remembering all the different conditions I had eaten there, with girlfriends, with my “Lonely Hearts Club”–all of us divorced–with my boss, and the many, many times I had eaten there hungover.

Usually I use food as a drug.  Usually I gorge myself.  And I was watching her move slowly, and I realized I wasn’t feeling anything.  Not in a good way or bad way.  There was neither eagerness nor irritation.  It just was.  Time was just present.  And the food was good like always, but it was nourishment.

And I thought: flow requires a certain amount of stress.  Loving your job requires needing a certain amount of stress.  Athletic highs depend on the anxiety of the possibility of failure.  Climbing to the top of your professional, if it proves rewarding, will often feel good precisely because failure was possible, and the anxiety of contemplating that failure was a driving force.

Because this is how I rolled today, I had lunch at Taco Bell.  I sat opposite a Marine in his dress uniform.  And I was thinking: what drives Marines, more than anything, is fear–fear of failure, fear of letting their comrades down.  Men kill and die from this fear in every war any nation fights.  This fear of not meeting expectations is the essence of their indoctrination in boot camp.  It is followed, reasonably enough, with pride–the carrot–in being the best.

But I am at the rough edge of calm.  Outwardly, it feels textured in a not particularly pleasant way, let us say a pine cone.  But I can feel, or sense, or suspect intellectually, or something, that underneath it is something interesting.  This is where the real water is, the real ocean.

That will do for now.  I’m not sure how to say what I’m saying.

I watched Tracks on Friday night, about Robyn Davidson’s mostly solo trek across western Australia, and Maiden Trip just now, about Laura Dekker’s solo trip around the world in a sailboat.

I think I felt a need to engage with my own loneliness.  It is impossible to be honest with others, or yourself, until you can develop comfort with solitude.

I’ve been reading Pema Chodron today as well.  She says that in the Tibetan tradition the spiritual path begins with hopelessness.  I really like this.  She suggests “Abandon all hope” as a useful motto.  I’m going to put it on my wall.

Here is the thing: we look for comfort in the world, and fear we may not find it.  We look for the good, but fear the bad. We hope for what may be, but fear what may not.

Abandoning that hope clears the space for genuine new growth, for opportunity.

For both of these women early grief clearly played a role in their quests.  I could feel the pain in Dekker about her parents divorce, and Davidson lost her mother to suicide, and her dog to circumstances.

Here is my question: what was the value of these losses?  Is it good that their grief led them to do extraordinary things?  Clearly, both seem to have found some solace, some reconciliation.

What is the value in being broken? Should we all wish to remain pristine? How do we best embrace what wounds us, makes us bleed, rips us into pieces?

These are rambles as I try to sort out my own feelings, my own thoughts, my own Lebensgestaltung.

I am coming to realize that until one accepts impermanence that all new joys are daggers in the heart.  Those of us who feel deeply can feel the end at the beginning. We can feel the death in the life, the loss in the gain.

Ultimately, though, impermanence is a hopeful creed: it says joy is possible and ubiquitous, if we do not ask more of life than it can offer.

I have been trying to make Sunday an actual day of rest lately.  I made an similar effort some years ago, but it didn’t take for some reason.  It’s been working much better this time.  I am ready, I think. 

The logical necessity is making the rest of the week a six day work week.  I work Monday through Friday day job, and Saturday catching up, cleaning, planning, organizing, etc.  Vacuum, laundry, bathrooms, shopping etc.

And I light a candle whenever I get up after sleeping in, and do my best not to worry about anything, not to think about politics, taxes, bills, global hunger, or whatever.

And what is funny or interesting or sad, according to your inclination, is that a worry-free time space feels odd.  So much of the sense of being, of existing, is tied up in thoughts and worries, at least for me, and I suspect I am not alone in this.

It will take time for me to anchor in this sense of sacred time but it seems to me worth the effort.  It is possible to go a lifetime and never really relax.  Why not learn to do it, and practice regularly?  Work harder six days, and not at all one day.  Take a true vacation every week.  Be present for yourself, and your family and friends.

it seems to me the number of Springs in your life–and there may be many of them–depends on the number of winters you have completed.

Summer can perpetuate, but it cannot initiate.

http://www.infowars.com/what-pisses-me-off-about-transgender-bathrooms/

I will add a short commentary: the way principles work, is you care about them all the time.  If you think rape is wrong, then there are not exceptions. If you think hate crimes are wrong, there are not exceptions.  There may be times when pursuing the eradication of something odious requires an interaction with people and behaviors with whom we do not agree.  Economic intercourse with China was supposed to liberalize it.  This might have been a possible outcome, but China spends as much or more suppressing the hundreds of thousands of riots demanding basic rights it sees annually as it does on its military budget.  Very little concrete good has come.  The power elite, the dictators, the oppressors, the imperialists: they are still in control, and still obscenely wealthy, wealth gotten as a result of their parasitic relationship with the people they “rescused” from Capitalistic oppression.  This is not even irony: it is obscenity, and cannot and should not be tolerated through the complicity of elision.

Likewise, companies who care about gay rights should boycott nations like Saudi Arabia which MURDER them, publicly, after a trial, by beheading.

They should boycott Russia, Egypt, and frankly most of the Middle East, and large segments of Africa.  They are in a position to raise consciousness about these and other issues.  As I have said, I think the issue of the rights of Dalit men and women and children in India should be made a front page issue.  It is every bit as awful as what the South Africans did to the blacks in Apartheid.

But these assholes make MONEY in these places.  The hypocrisy is indescribable.  The incapacity for human decency masked by token, irrelevant, and largely HURTFUL gestures like boycotting North Carolina is absolutely revolting.