Month: June 2016

Just sayin’.

I do think it would be useful to call Democrats, as they exist today, the Party of Cultural Incoherence.  Culture is the main barrier to violence, and where it is not present, animal instincts take its place.

Stanislav Grof talks about what he calls the CoEx, or Condensed Experience, which one website defines as

‘a specific constellation of memories (and related fantasies) from different life periods of the individual. The memories belonging to a particular COEX system have a similar basic theme or contain similar elements and are associated with a strong emotional charge of the same quality’. 

For my own purposes I have come to call this the Mark.  There is something which draws a line through my experience, which divides it.  Something was caged long ago, and it does not long to be free.  It does not understand the concept, yet.  There are the zones of Great Fear, and Known Fear.  There is a circle of dim light, and beyond it, the fully unknown.

It is only in the process of making this INTERESTING, of invoking curiosity, that it can be healed.  This is a gradual process, an elicitative (yes, spellcheck, I made it a damn word) process.

And what I see is that there is a primitive rough spot, on which some sorts of subsequent experience get “hung”, or stuck.  They go one way rather than another way.  They go dark, rather than stay conscious.  This rough spot, this Mark, gives them that option.

The Mark lives in deep murky water, but for every emotion or primitive sensation–and this is a HUGELY interesting process, pulling up sensations you had as a child, at a primary process level–which emerges from this deep darkness, the water becomes more clear, and a bit of light enters.  At some point, it is clear, and you can see yourself as you truly are.

And perhaps the barrier–the great Opposition–becomes a gateway to something new and better.  I believe this.  I feel this.

I am slowly calming down.  This is a good thing.  A very good thing.

Cynicism and idealism are two sides of the same coin.  Cynics are not normal people who evolved that way, but tend rather to be frustrated idealists.  In both cases, they are not seeing the world as it is.  Both are errors, in their own way.

It seems to me a core problem Sybaritic (I am almost tempted to say Decadent) Leftists have is that they feel that life is supposed to be easy, that violence and horror are supposed to always be far away, and that some simple “fix” will make everything OK.  All it takes is a little policy tweak, some government program, and everything will be the way it was always supposed to be.

If, for example, we ban “AR-15’s” (which is a stand in for every scary looking weapon, since the weapon used in Orlando was not an AR-15), then violence will cease.  At least, we will have “done something”.  But if I first cut my finger trimming vegetables, then react by cutting it off entirely, that too meets the standard of “doing something”.  Doing nothing is self evidently always better than doing the wrong thing.  Doing the right thing, of course, is better yet.  But the difference is one of perception, of wisdom, of discrimination between good and bad ideas, which are in continual circulation and competition.

Realists, among whom I would class myself (and of course the term is entirely dependent on the idea that these ideas are accurate, but defensible because it inherently involves a practical impulse which looks, always and carefully, to the RESULTS of different ideas, making it a world view capable of evolving positively), see that the history of humanity has been a long, hard struggles to emerge from the primordial ooze, that life has been filled with violence, poverty, disease, and injustice since before the beginning of history (which itself began as a record of war), and that what we have built is AMAZING, but perishable.  Everything good which has been built, at such great effort, can be destroyed, and destroyed quickly and almost entirely.

Thus people who recognize the value of what has been achieved must at the same time recognize all the many very human impulses which seek to destroy it, which have always sought to destroy it, and which have been countered and defeated only at great cost of life and human misery.

Evil is not some immanent and unknowable force “out there” (although it may be that too): it is, rather, the result of conscious policies, enacted by people with names and histories and addresses, who in most cases believe in what they are doing deeply, and who in almost all cases openly proclaim their intentions.  The Communists did.  The Nazis did. And the Islamists are.  They are saying: we want to conquer the world.  We want Europe to come under the yoke of Islamism and Sharia.  We want America to come under the yoke of Islamism and Sharia.

The reason Cultural Decadents refuse to see this is that admitting this would require altering a fundamental tenet of their universe, which is that people are supposed to be happy by nature, and that only small factors, only temporary and easily overcome misunderstandings, prevent this from happening.  This is myth, both in the sense of being false, but more importantly of being an organizing force in lives lived flippantly, sybaritically, and uncritically.

They resent those who intrude on their happy dreams with reports of violence and famine and death. And they blame those people, because it is EASY.  It is the indignation of an over-indulged child at the responsibilities of life.

Is it not much safer to blame conservatives for all violence in the world, than to try to understand the ACTUAL root causes, particularly if they lead to the need for hard decisions, for the choice of violence over ease, for moral ambiguity and the errors which attend all wars?

We are in a culture war, one in which one side chooses to deny human history, and the other to protect humanity from the very forces the first denies.  Islamism is but one of our enemies.  Globalists–which is say aspiring tyrants who view the final conquest of the planet Earth as possible in our lifetime–are another.  They in fact are the larger enemy, since they support the first.  It is no accident that so many radicals are being spread like leavening among the masses of Europeans.

I am watching two parallel narratives emerge from the same set of events.  They are radically disconnected.  They have NOTHING in common.  They arise from completely differing world views, completely different assumptions about the nature of life, of violence, of virtue, of duty, of history.

For those with eyes to see, this is a truly astonishing time.  I suppose in some ways, all times have been astonishing, but it really does seem we have reached a point where we really must accept and value and improve upon the progress we have made–the REAL progress, in the recognition of universal human rights, political and social pluralism, of respect for actual difference, of effective and free economic systems–or in the end lose all of it.  Both are possible.  One or the other, seemingly, will happen in the next 20-30 years, with the major turning points being reached much sooner.

Calm–and the joy enabled by calm–are the opposite of fear.  Everything else is a mask.  Fear can wear every mask you can imagine.  It can wear the masks of love, of kindness, of generosity, of compassion, of courage, of honor, of decency.

I look around me, and most of what most people do all day every day is in large measure motivated by fear.  Soldiers charge into guns in no small measure because of fear: fear of shame, fear of dishonor, fear of censure, fear of failing in their own eyes and those of others.

Many good things arise because of fear.  Social order arises because of fear.  People stop at the red and go on the green because of fear–well founded fears of traffic accidents and tickets, but also fear of sticking out, of being different, of not following the rules, and of being known as a non-rule-follower.  In some countries people refuse to jaywalk even when it is the middle of the night and no one is around.  Why?  Fear.

Most of our automatic, reflexive behavior is based on fear.  Fear has survival value.  It keeps you alive.  And without it most social orders would collapse in short order.

But something beyond it is possible.  And the possibility of bringing that world into being begins with stating it is possible, with recognizing how we live, why we live the way we do, and contemplating how we can and should change.

People seem to be very upset about this shooting, and I suppose I should be too, but I’m not.  Pondering it, I think the reality I live in is very different from that of those who see this sort of violence as exceptional, or unexpected.

I was vastly more bothered by the murder of 19 Yazidi girls by ISIS last week, who were set on fire, and died a very unpleasant death, in a cage.  Most of them had likely been raped repeatedly beforehand.

It bothers me vastly more to know that Obama played an important role in the creation of ISIS, both by drawing down our Iraq troops much faster than planned, or recommended by senior commanders; and more importantly by providing arms and training to people who were even then obviously Islamic radicals when they were fighting Syria.  This bothers me a lot.  Our President, our Commander in Chief, more or less created the radical terrorist state so many Americans died to prevent, with all the death and destruction that entailed and continue to entail.  Even now, he is not allowing in honest refugees, preferring instead to let in countless thousands of Islamic persons, many of whom are absolutely without a doubt sympathetic to Islamism and mass murder.

What bothered me most when I saw this was that I knew my sense of reality would be assaulted for the umpteenth time.  That people would consciously and willfully lie to us about the reasons behind the shooting, the meaning of it, and what to do.  That they would try again to implement reductions in private gun ownership, to demonize gun owners and those who support them, and fail once again to recognize that the root problem is that we live in a violent world, one made more violent by the very people doing the talking.

Fast and Furious, plainly intended to support the gun confiscation agenda, caused the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans.  None of these psychopaths give a flying fuck.  And none of our fucking mass media wants to hold them accountable for it in the slightest.  On the contrary: they push their psychopathic agenda every fucking chance they get.

It is tiring, fighting for plain and obvious truths.  We live in a world where the mass of people can’t remember what was on the fucking news two days ago, much less 5 years ago.  There is no need for “memory holes”: all the media has to do is stop talking about something, and two weeks later nobody remembers it happened.

This is what I feel about this shooting.  And I hope that the gay community realizes that they are targets, and starts arming itself.  That remains legal.

A military guy on my Facebook pointed out that if there are over 100 casualties, there must have been at least a hundred bullets shot.  This means the shooter had to reload a number of times.  This means there were chances for people to overwhelm him.

What I think we will find, if anyone tells this story, is that virtually everyone was so stricken by terror and incomprehension that they literally hid in corners waiting for him.

Having spent so much time dealing with it, and now beginning slowly to step away from it, I felt today I have not put the right words on what I see when I deal with Leftists.  Their rhetoric is characterized by arrogance, violence, and emotional superficiality.

For them, outrage at conservatives is emotionally equal to compassion for the victims.  It isn’t.  Those are two different things.  Anger is not compassion.  They are two different things.

I often feel like I am dealing with people who have renounced their humanity, their ability to recognize as fellow humans those who do not agree with them ideologically.

Arrogance, violence, emotional superficiality.  What personality profile do those remind me of?

Edit: you know, in family arguments, in somewhat healthy ones there comes a time where you mutually recognize that you are all in it together, and some calmness and forgiveness and regret enter the picture.  This never happens in the political realm.  It is pure obsession.

I see people comparing Christians to Muslims, because there was that one time a Christian, acting alone, and plainly a bit crazy, attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic; and on the other there are thousands of centrally coordinated suicide attacks, bombings, and mass homicides committed by Muslims.  The two do not compare, not to any rational mind.  They exist on different scales.  The crimes are jaywalking versus rape and murder.

And it occurs to me that this is not really a rational decision.  It is possible to argue that if any crime originates in the category “Christians”, it is possible to compare it to any crime which originates in the category “Muslim”.  And if one crime equals another crime, then they are logically equal.  Quantities do not matter.  This is the emotionally detached approach.

But as I have argued–and I think most neurophysiologists would agree with me–you MUST involve instinct in the perceptual process, or you lose much of what makes us human, and indeed much of what allows our perceptions to be broader and more useful than those of animals.

I will invoke Jonathan Haidt, who I have followed a bit, and who has become in my view more useful.  His work is presently called “Moral Foundation Theory”:

Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. At present, the theory proposes six such foundations: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity

Here is the part I wanted to focus on:

Various scholars have offered moral foundations theory as an explanation of differences among political progressives (liberals in the American sense),conservatives, and libertarians, and have suggested that it can explain variation in opinion on politically charged issues such as gay marriage and abortion. In particular, Haidt and fellow researchers have argued that progressives stress only two of the moral foundations (Care and Fairness) in their reasoning, and libertarians stress only two (Liberty and Fairness), while conservatives stress all six more equally.

What is missing from both the Libertarian and Leftist psychosocial approaches is Sanctity.  Sanctity is an instinctual attraction or repulsion, based upon certain in-built senses about what is right and wrong.  Some of it is clearly socially conditioned, but the process itself is instinctual.  Part of what makes us human is finding some things–the details will matter according to culture, but in my view the process should be universal–repugnant.

The essence of the Compassion Ideology is eliminating the sense of sanctity, which is to say the sense of moral repugnance.  Clearly, they keep hatred and anger, but these are reactions to their ideas about Ideological Others; they are not inbuilt and instinctual.  They have deconditioned these senses, such that whatever is natural is rejected.

As I noted several years ago, it is literally possible to measure differences in the automatic responses of leftists and conservatives to disgusting images.  This is a difference in conditioning, and it matters politically because it is one of the things which makes them so fucking stupid.

Edit: I will note as well that Donald Trump has a very robust sense of the disgusting.  It is one of his favorite words.  I doubt very much he hired PR people to study the rhetorical uses of Haidt’s theory–that is one of the things Democrats do, and do well, and must do well, since their ideas are bad in nearly all cases–but that rather it comes to him instinctively.  People speak of political instincts.  Bill Clinton had them, Hillary does not.  Trump does, clearly.  [Bernie did not either, btw: his appeal is oriented around the childish need for endless Christmas’s.  And he always struck me as someone who didn’t brush his teeth enough and always had bad breath.]

And I will say that on contemplation, this is my issue with all the gay and trans issues.  I find those behaviors disgusting, particularly after looking at the Mapplethorpe exhibit some 25 years ago.  Some things I wish I could unsee.  I do. I am liberal enough to grant anyone the right to do what they want.  It’s a free country, and that is enormously important to me.  I will fight for the right of those people to be free.  But don’t ask me to suppress my feelings, to pretend they don’t exist.  Don’t tell me who and how I can be.  That, too, is an abrogation of my freedom, of my rights as the citizen of a free nation.  Live and let live has always been and continues to be a good policy.