Month: June 2016

I am going to give you a stream of consciousness.  Today I was making myself a green shake for breakfast–or 1st breakfast anyway (small handful parsley, half a lemon, third each of a cucumber and avocado, half a Granny Smith apple, 1/2″ slice of ginger, 2 leaves romaine lettuce, and one cup coconut water kefir)–and thought I’d listen to some Bach organ music.

The second selection on Spotify is the one that makes everyone associate horror with organ music: Toccato and Fugue in D minor .  I had not known the name of this piece, nor was I even clear it was Bach, although of course that was always a good guess.

Then I wondered why it goes with horror so much, and figured it must be the Phantom of the Opera, and this brought images to mind of the revolutions of the late 18th and 19th century in France.

And I looked at both sides in my mind, and I could find value in both views.  The Royalists–the true reactionaries and thus “rightists”–no doubt felt that their social order, whatever its flaws, was vastly better than chaos and mass death, the possibility of which was quite obvious after Robepierre’s Terror, but of course which was latent in the air long before.  Such people would be either Christians, or people who used Christianity to pursue personal power goals which were rational at least within their own world views, meaning that they pursued intelligently some concrete goal.

The people opposing them were also rational, in that the system was plainly rigged, geared for the pleasure and well being of an elite at the expense of a mass of people who were poor, insecure, and held in contempt for their very place of birth, and birth parents.  Since there were no elections (for varying lengths of time throughout this era), violent uprising seemed the only possible solution.

On both sides of the barricades one could find reasonable people who were able to explain what they wanted and why. I’ve never really put it this way to myself, but it makes sense.  The conflict was rational, even if we now would have a much harder time sympathizing with aristocrats than aspiring republicans.

But I look at today, and wonder “what are these fools rebelling against?”  The revolutions of the past two centuries have bought, in America at least, all the advantages and possibilities that any reasonable person could demand.  And all the efforts to overturn and break it–the actions called for by Bernie and his fellow pinkos (we can and should bring that word back)–will only damage beyond repair something which is WORKING.

Venezuela WAS working.  Argentina WAS working.  Europe, for now, is working, but it is not trending in the direction of continuing that way much longer.

Our age is one of lunacy.  People fail to value what is important, and pursue relentlessly idiotic dreams consisting in pipe smoke.

Imagine waking up every day feeling “something good will happen today that has never happened before”.  Imagine feeling this, even though you know this day, like every day, will have its frustrations, its embarrassments, its anxieties.

It popped in my head the other day, waiting in line at the grocery store, that “the love of life is the beginning of wisdom”.

Ponder for a moment the cultural significance of the Christian admonition to hold this life in contempt, to risk all now, for a better life to come.  William James has convinced me, in some of the stories he relates in “Varieties of Religious Experience” that some people genuinely do become filled with light, but those people become happy NOW as a result.  They become good people, pleasant people, loving people.

But I feel many, many people use religion to hide from life, and that their “devotions” make them mean and even cruel.  It may seem odd that so many Catholic priests are pedophiles–obviously as a pedophile anything that gets you close to children works–but it seems to me they already live in a world of abstraction, one made concrete for them by their crimes.  Abstraction is the realm of the traumatized, and no one commits acts of willful cruelty who has not themselves in some way been pushed out of their natural bodies and selves.

The love of life, though, becomes naturally the love of others–and starts with love of one’s self–and love itself is the essence of wisdom, or so I believe.

I was discussing the other day with my youngest a story related by Jean Houston about meeting Helen Keller.  She was struck by how radiantly joyous she was.  My youngest, naturally, said that it would be great to be really happy, but she would hate to be blind and deaf.

I pondered it for a moment, and said that maybe there is another sense, one which seeks out happiness, and that most of us are blind in that direction, but Helen Keller was not.

We both thought this was deep, and I share it with you.

Since at least the French Revolution, and in earnest since at least Woodrow Wilson and the rise of the Bolsheviks, the forces of collectivism–which is to say anti-individualistic forces which reject tacitly or explicitly the primacy of the individual conscience and personal agency–have been on the move.  They are supported strongly by the meaninglessness which arises naturally and spontaneously from the theory and practice of Scientism, which view human life as short, that of an animal, unfree, and ended with the cessation of brain activity.

William F. Buckley famously said that his goal was to stand athwart History and yell STOP.  All that conservatives–sane people in an insane world–have managed to do is slow the process of the installation of a new priesthood, a new Pharaohism, one ruling in the name of science, and through the delusion that human beings are objects, society a knowable machine, and manipulation of the objects the goal of the All Knowing.

The very process of inculcating the ideas necessary for submission to this practice makes life meaningless.  None of us are anything, in the eyes of the State.  We are numbers.  Autonomous machines, which it will one day be possible, and is certainly necessary, to control.

I continue writing and hoping that one day this powerful spell will pass, that this hypnotic delusion will fall away, and something like honest science with respect to the nature of life, of consciousness, of God, of the survival of death, will emerge.

Everything we do is only delay.  Until there is a general awakening to the horrors which have been and may yet again be unleashed on humanity in the name of “progress” all any of us are doing is treading water, and buying time.

I honestly do not know what it is possible to do to counter the headless ones, as I call them.  They have surrendered their humanity, their reason, their agency, their very souls.  How do they win them back?  What is the opposite of this process, and how does it begin?  I ask myself these questions continually, and the only answer that comes to me is to try to live my own life authentically, and to speak the truth as I see it as often as I can.  That is all that is left me.  There seems no chance it could be enough, but we all need to do what we can, where we are, with what we have, and hope that some day the right spark will be kindled in the right place.

Traumatic memories are like a room where you always go when you are quiet.  You can’t not go there.  You can’t not remember, even if the remembering has so many protective layers that you can’t even see what is under them.

But one day you may find yourself packing your bags, and realizing it is time to leave.  You may wonder why it took so long; more likely you will wonder how you were able to find the door at all.

And the memories are powerful.  They are of LIFE.  Whatever suffering there was, it was real.  It was authentic.  It involved the gut, the inner animal, the wide awake, the resilient.

I GET, I think, veterans whose task is made harder by the other people in the room with them, especially those they left on the battlefield oh so long ago.  Leaving is hard enough: leaving someone behind makes it exponentially harder.  This is called traumatic grief, or survivor’s guilt, but I’m not entirely sure that is the best way to put it.  I think fidelity to the person becomes entwined with fidelity to the grief and pain.

And the solution, I think, is to see those people not in your past, but your future.  Time is a circle.  They are not dead.  In some respects, this is all a giant game, made far too serious because we don’t know the rules.

Here is a good song for leaving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk2SNcpTNbs#!  32:05 is where it starts.

is to develop the capacity for deep relaxation.  This is the first purpose, at any rate.  All true virtue arises non-compulsively, and absent the capacity for relaxation, nothing ever arises spontaneously.  Only programming.  Only effort, obsession, conformity, and spiritual mediocrity.

Laying in bed this morning it popped in my head that the capacity to relax–really, to feed oneself, to recover from efforts large and small–means that you are neither hurting inside, nor hurting others.

I feel that all wounds are simultaneously aggressions.  All hurt carried inside is nascent or potential violence on the outside.  It is a seed with two paths of growth.  Ahimsa is only possible with complete individual healing.  Deep relationships with others are only possible when one can calmly know oneself.  Before you can sense yourself in your body, before you can embody your awareness, you are an abstraction to yourself, which in turn means all other people are also abstractions to some extent.  They are there because they are needed, rarely because they are valued for who they are intrinsically.

The question “Who am I?” can never be honestly answered with words, or absent an awareness of body, breath, and emotions (I am here repeating in my own words a Kum Nye teaching, or my understanding of it, at any rate.)

Likewise, any answer to the “meaning of life” which starts as an abstraction is doomed to final failure, since the answer can only be found in a felt sense, and thus exists at a level outside of the possibility of sharing, of discussion, of writing, of the intellect.

I am having some good Kum Nye sessions lately.  It is really a very interesting process, which over time amounts to an inventory and processing of the past, as embodied in the present.  Things come up, are allowed, are expanded, are accepted, and slowly diminish.

The path of relaxing–and Kum Nye could easily be called the yoga of inner relaxation–is interesting too in that it consists not in adding, but subtracting, at least at my stage.  I will notice one day that, as an example, my stomach is not tied up in knots as much as it used to be.  Things that used to set me off don’t any more.  I am more free of obsessive thinking and worry.

At some point you wonder what do you do when all your constant companions are gone.  They have never been my friends, but they have been known.

Time will tell.  There are right and wrong ways to do things, and the right way here is to keep going no matter what.  I will see soon enough what is over the next hill.

Other than that psychopaths control most of our universities, the entirety of the Democrat Party and large segments of the Republican Party, why could we not use as a political tool a global ranking of nations by how Liberal they are economically–sound currency (oh, and by the way, END the IMF and World Bank), property rights, free markets–and use this as a political tool to pressure the oppressive, stupid ones?  Why not start checking nations off, or moving them up, as they improve? 

Why not take the poverty of most of the world as seriously as the jackasses in the dumb factories in New Haven and Cambridge and elsewhere claim they have been taking it all these many, many, long years?

You know, do what they say they’ve been doing, but for real this time.

Why not? 

The Roman Empire was built gradually.  They first conquered themselves some Lebensraum, and sat down to dinner.  Then their neighbors rudely intruded.  So they conquered them, “civilized” them, made them wealthier and more advanced than they were, then sat down to dinner again.  Again, rudeness.  More conquering.  More wealth and aquaduct and road and bath building.  Dinner.  Rudeness.  Legions and flags, wine cultivation, dinner, rudeness, etc.  Eventually dinner started to be sat down to in different languages, and started consisting in somewhat different food.  Dinner had to be served in Constantinople for a thousand years or so.

We live in a world peopled by similar barbarians.  In the post-Industrial West–I won’t say East since this is not a problem in Japan or Korea–there are vast disparities in standards of living.  This causes people to invade.  In the old days, we would invade back, spank them, school them, and add them to the boundaries of the Empire.  Eventually, in the Roman model, they would out-Roman us as we got decadent, and have to let them in.

In our modern world, though, it is scarcely cause for wonder that so many Mexicans (and Central Americans, but the Mexicans very aggressively prevent citizens of other nations from transiting Mexico to get here) want to be in America, and so many people from the Middle East and South Asia want to be in Europe.

What is the solution?  Has anybody proposed global prosperity?  Can we not put that on the table?  Peter Bauer and others very accurately diagnosed the causes of developmental failure, and they have nothing to do with us, other than that the things we do to help usually make things worse, sometimes much worse.

In Mexico and much of Latin America you have grotesque and long term economic disparities.  The ruling elites run in families, and those families like their power and privilege.  They don’t like working for a living, and somebody has to, so the poor stay poor, and they have large villas with fountains, gates, and heavily armed guards.  Part of the reason the rulers of Mexico seemingly LIKE having people tell them Mexico sucks and we are getting the hell out of here, is that chronic poverty with no safety valve might easily lead to a justified uprising.  And in the modern era, the bullets would be televised.

But if we were able to end apartheid in South Africa, why would we not be able to put pressure on the oligarchies of Latin America?  Why could we not put pressure on the Middle East to get out of the 7th century?

The simple fact is that if you put too many people on a boat, it collapses.  We saw that in the Mediterranean.  And national economies are no different.  Too many piglets sucking at the teats and momma dies or dries up.  That is the way the world works.  That is the way the world has always worked.  Anyone trying to claim otherwise is stupid or selling something.

In all affairs of life clear thinking helps.  The task is not to get attention focused away from the problem, but to SOLVE the problem.  Most Mexicans don’t want to live here.  They want to live in Mexico.  This is obvious because so many of them thought to bring Mexican flags with them.  If they wanted to live in the United States, they would wave American flags like proud immigrants always have.

So over the coming decades, if we don’t have a nuclear “workplace violence” (Iran, North Korea) incident, if the robots don’t take over, if we don’t have a plague which kills all of us, then we need to focus on global development using INTELLIGENT strategies, like microloans on the model of Kiva.  We could have national Kiva “adopt a country” months.  We can use economic pressure to support liberalization.

And we can expand the idea of local control.  We can reverse empire.  What the Romans spread was a system of law, of discipline, of science.  Those are available everywhere now.  There is nothing that could be gained through colonialism that has not been exported.  Most of Africa now at least mouths support for self rule and democracy.  Most of the world has at least been exposed to the idea of the toleration of difference, and the importance of equality before the law.  The Muslims of course reject this idea, but all we need to do with them is stop kowtowing, and start asking them to act like civilized human beings.  Many of them will respond to this idea.  The radicals are mainly responding, now, to craven weakness, and the very real possibility that Europe will simply lay down and say Allahu Akbar.

All of our problems can be solved, solved peacefully–or largely peacefully, and where violence is necessary, we are well positioned to deliver it–and solved finally.

I really don’t know why more people don’t talk like I do.  So many of our leading intellectuals simply want to give up, to give in.  They are cowards.  But most of us are not. It is simply the case that the people who do most of the talking have never done anything in their lives.  Nor do they plan to start, ever.  That’s what the proles are for.

According to Robin Dunbar most of us can only handle knowing about 150 people.  I suspect many of us are in active relation with a much smaller number than that.

In reading history, much of it consists in one social grouping seizing control over some larger set of groupings.  Families dominate history in many parts of the world.

To take a largely random but still relevant example, Iraq has never really been a nation.  It has been a conglomeration of tribes and clans and families which were contained within borders set, if memory serves, by the British.  Much of the Middle East is like this.

Saddam Hussein took very good care of his tribe and people, and more or less wanted everyone else just to be loyal to him as the national leader.  In the course of time, it may have happened that he was overthrown by some other group and their leader, which punished his group, and again took care of their own.

Nation states are historically and likely evolutionarily unnatural.  We are meant to live in much smaller groupings, and within those groupings, it has often been the case that the leader who emerged–or leaders–were welcome and valued. 

Two movies I have used often as examples of the romantic sense of the past and the possibilities of the future which the Socialists have tried to seize mythically are “The Last Samuri” and “Dances with wolves”.  In both cases, 19th century refugees from large, impersonal military orders found themselves belonging in a more primitive, more natural, more comfortable, more abundant social groupings.  These groupings were small enough that everyone knew everyone, and felt personal allegiance both to their tribe and its leaders.  They knew them.  They trusted them.

And self evidently the physical lives were more “primitive”, which no doubt fed the sense of romance, but this obscures what to me is the more important notion of belonging, of personal loyalty to people you know.

I was watching a Ted talk by Sebastian Junger a few days ago where he was arguing that a big part of what we call PTSD is really a social maladjustment to being back in a world without loyalty, where not much is won or lost (at such a cost, to quite Jaggers/Richards), where they feel they don’t BELONG.

Fascist leaders–and I include all Communist dictators in this designation–draw upon this need for order, for belonging, for loyalty, but given the size of the enterprises, true belonging is not possible.  What is found instead is a mental and physical slavery justified by the “greater good”, an abstraction which acquires meaning only because of the overall sense of meaninglessness, of pointlessness. 

Both Hitler and Lenin’s coups and reigns were preceded by social decay and dislocation.

We need to be much smaller.  This is my vision for the future.  And it does not need to be in conditions of much lower population.  We simply need more local control, more freedom, and less coercion, mind control, and thoughtlessness.

Much of our psychological apparatus is oriented around impulse control and expression.  Being me, I have noticed some part of me resisting when I play my Lumosity games.  I will know what to do, but some part of me will resist.  I find this interesting.  Much of the task of psychological growth is finding, naming and exploring limits.  I take information wherever it presents itself.

All those posts were a bit of emotional house-cleaning for me, and although I caught myself sabotaging myself once, mostly it went well.  I’m now in the 98.8th percentile for my age group, and 99 is now close at hand.  A bit more physical conditioning, and a bit more house-clearing, and I am there.

I will say too that it has been a long time since I could call myself depressed.  What I realize now is that many unconscious forces were sucking away my psychic energy, and the net result was a slowness and dullness that manifested as what gets called depression.  Life was just hard.  Things are getting much, much easier.

I still have many miles to go, but progress is being made.

I think I have arrived at my original post. I would like to assert that human beings have an instinctual need both for tribal groupings, and to exist within some sort of relative power structure.

I would like to assert that the ideal of Socialism works psychologically to meet the deep mythic need for belonging, but this is a false God.  It works to alienate people from one another, from their true emotional and instinctual needs, and makes life uglier, baser, less worthwhile, and ultimately the people in such societies more self destructive, lethargic, disempowered, and detached.

Witness what is happening among the beautiful people of northern Europe.  They are importing savages in large numbers who are raping them, robbing them, and shitting–sometimes literally–on everything they touch with impunity.  And in places like Germany and Sweden they are blaming THEMSELVES.  I was reading an interview with, I believe, a Norwegian man who was anally raped, and he said he felt sympathy for the poor beast who did that to him.  This was his version of virtue, of compassion.

And what is obvious to me is that THIS IS ALL HE HAS.  This is what constitutes virtue for these people.  The ability to set boundaries, to ask other people to exist within them, has been collapsed in his society.  The possibility of individual assertion is disappearing radically.  All they have is “everything is equal to everything, and if you disagree you are no longer a member of our social order”.  Such an “order” is not an order at all.  It is a system in the throes of internal collapse.

One must suspect that on some level these people, who have achieved an astonishing comfort in their lives, an astonishing security and following complacency, WANT to be conquered and dominated.  Their egalitarianism has failed them.  It is not a moral creed at all.  It is the ABSENCE of a moral creed.  It is the ABSENCE of a tribe, of a community, of genuine peers, of belonging.  When you have nothing, it is tempting to want something, and the Muslims are only too happy to offer that.  Submit or die is a simple enough proposition.

When you take an impulse like the need for hierarchy, and divorce it from its local contexts. the same instincts come to the fore in unannounced, invisible ways.  They come to the fore in dreams of a global dominion, of a global order of power. Many of the best minds of the 20th Century spent their lives in the service of impulses eminently familiar to chimpanzees in the jungle.

The Soviet Union was a chimpanzee project. So was Maoist China.  So is Cuba.  So is Venezuela. They are papered over with lies, of course, but the underlying psychopathology screams for recognition and explanation.

So if I am right, what do we do?  This was the most important point I wanted to make.  The issue is simple: everything must be local.  We see this recognition, too, across our culture.  People are not stupid. They adapt to forces they don’t understand in ways which are natural to them, if they are allowed to, if more powerful primates do not stop them.

“Keep Austin Weird”–and its many off-shoots–stems from this.  In a world of mass media, of virtually instantaneous travel, and literally instantaneous communication, one must feel different somehow.  One must feel I am this and not that, one of us and not them.

One cannot be a member of an abstract order and get ones emotional needs met.  There have to be concrete people, that you can name, that you recognize on the street, with whom you have some sort of relationship.

And the whole benefit of truly Liberal society is that there can be COUNTLESS simultaneous orders.  There can be countless power relationships which work to meet this need.  Somebody is in charge at the local Kiwanis Club, and the Rotary.  Somebody runs the Chess club, and the beer drinking society.  Or if nobody feels a need to have a boss, then that is fine too.  That expresses a reduced need for power.

It seems to me that the more powerfully individuated a person is–and I would say that this is a function of a person’s relationship to that Spirit which pervades everything–the less control their instincts have, the less animal-like they are, the less need they have to belong to a hierarchy.

The goal of human equality is an enlightened goal.  But it can only be met by people who are capable of assuming the mantle of personal power, of truly and deeply being who they are–not someone’s robot, not a hypnotized drone, but a real human being.

The task of the spiritual is both that of eliminating the need for other people, to be who you are, and the elimination of the impulse to shape other people to be more like you.  We are all CREATED different.  And what creates savor in life–true savor–is in seeing and appreciating these differences.

Everything in our public domain is corrupted, or nearly all of it. We see “diversity” called out as a virtue everywhere, but how different are these people really?  I can predict the beliefs of most people on most topics given a small smattering of information.  Not invariably, of course, but I think we all must admit that very few people do their own thinking.  They repeat what they have been told as their own ideas, in the same way the recipient of a post-hypnotic suggestion repeats the behavior they had implanted.

We have relationships with Big Brother in the media.  Large figures on the glowing shrines in our homes act as if they care.  Tens of millions of Americans thought Obama cared about them.

But this is not a relationship.  For many, it is all they have, but it is not enough.  That is why so many of us are depressed, why so many are turning to heroin, why I read yesterday Raves are making a come-back.

Our culture does not meet our needs, but people feel powerless to create something new.

And this is the root attraction of the Left, of Socialism, of Bernie “I pissed off the people in my Commune because I always talked and never worked” Sanders.  It feels like an alternative.  The rhetoric is hopeful.  It seems to promise a brighter future (as of course did Bolshevism, which drew a lot of energy from the “Futurists”).

But this tribe is an abstraction.  It requires a firm commitment to believe whatever you are told to believe, to be emotional about the things you are supposed to be emotional about, and to ignore the many sins of the Party Elders.

The worst punishment is excommunication.  For the millions of True Believers to be cast out of the tribe would be a death, and this they seek to avoid at all costs.  To stay in the tribe they reject the use of individuated reason.  They reject debate.  They repeat what they are told to repeat and call it their own.

But people need difference to survive, and their tribe consists wholly in conformity.  Yes, they mark themselves outwardly with tattoos, or oddities, or sexual peculiarities (as if such a thing still existed), but at root they think they same.  Their views on dozens of topics can reliably be predicted.  They are not diverse in the slightest.  The men who founded our nation were vastly more diverse, despite being all white, all men, and all (at least relatively) rich.

Diversity is on the inside, not the outside.  That is why I personally have never marked myself outwardly in any way, and continue to look like a dumb construction worker.

Here is the thing though: I have long argued that the hate directed at conservatives is the result of agitprop oriented around group solidarity.  It is that, clearly.

But I also now realize that they have an emotional need to believe that there is an outside to their inside, that their “compassion” is different from the hate which other people must feel.

They need to believe that hate is an active force in the world, for their mission–and thus sense of self–to make any sense at all.


Thus, much of their hate is not the result of what they have been told, but what they must psychologically ASSUME of those who oppose them.  They feel, for conservatives, what most of us would feel with respect to the KKK.  They think they understand us, because they have a NEED to think this.  A true mutual understanding would expose them to the needed knowledge that they have renounced their identities for nothing, that everything they stand for is marching towards tyranny, evil, and the eradication of freedom.

OK.  That was what I needed to say.

On a personal psychodynamic note, I will add that part of my passion for all this stems from a recurring sense that the world is moving in the direction of the pathology of my family of origin, where nothing was ever what it seemed, where everyone was angry all the time but wouldn’t admit it, where ego boundaries were confused and under constant attack, and where true lasting happiness was absolutely impossible.

I do not want that for me, for my children, or for any human being.  It is impossible to know where the point of no return is, but one can and should fight for what one believes as long as one can.  That is my personal creed, and I think it is a good one.  You never know when one last effort, one unexpected miracle, some unexpected intercession of Grace, might make all the difference.