Month: August 2016

Logically, breeding weakness brings about following dependence.  It discourages individuation, and creates a demand to be cared for.  Everything being done on college campuses, therefore, is seasoning for tyranny. Indeed, the expectation no doubt it is will create a DEMAND over time for tyranny.

A nation–let me say culture–can only be as good as it treats its children up to 18 months, and it can only be as good as what it demands of its youth.

I do believe in global elites, and for some time it has been my belief that how they condition their own young is by molesting them.  I have some slight, but personal, evidence for this.  This creates both a blank slate for inserting desired ambitions and passions, and a long term lust for power.  In all events, it protects dynasties, by ensuring that indifference is not an option.

Could not “maturing”–an increasingly antiquated concept–be viewed as the progressive development of self regulation?  Is it something other than being able to manage calmly increasingly difficult and heterogeneous situations and people?

Put another way, would maturing not consist in the ability to deal better with life without activating the “fight, flight, freeze” system?

The opposite, self evidently, of self regulation, is OTHER regulation, which is what we are seeing on college campuses.  The sense is that creating safe spaces will make them safer, but the reality is that by making them weaker and less resilient, less self regulating in a healthy way, it will make them more anxious, more violent, and less able to live happy lives.

A wise person once said “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken”.  This is a good motto.

The converse is “It’s a shitty life, if you are weak”.

The task of good people is to become strong themselves–to be able self regulate in highly heterogeneous and challenging situations–and to help others do likewise.

And those who seek to cultivate weakness in others, and to accept it in themselves, make everything worse.  We see this.  We feel this.  But I am trying to explain it more clearly.

What if there was an outbreak of serial murder in the country of Genovia, all the killers were red heads, and as a consequence of the violence, large numbers of people, many of them red headed themselves, wanted to immigrate to the United States?

We would not be able to say that all the red heads were killers, but that at a minimum if we did not let the red heads in, we would not be importing serial killers.  We could let in blondes and brunettes and blacks, and hispanics, and Asians.  Just no red heads.  Or if we did let in red heads, we would ask a lot more questions.

Would this not make sense?

What if, in your city, a red headed serial killer were operating?  The only description is “white male, aged 20-45, between 5’8″ and 6’2″, red hair”.  What do you think would happen to the dating prospects of red headed men who fit that profile in that city?  On Match, Tinder, or whatever else people use?  Women would KNOW that not all men were guilty, and in fact that only ONE was likely guilty.  But why chance it?

This is a logical sentiment.  It takes training to get around it.  I believe in Liberalism, but I don’t approve of the abuse of Liberal ideals in support of idiocy.

What if the motto of all politicans was “Above all else, do no harm.”?  What if the bias was in favor of conservatism and gradualism, and a firm insistence on reconciling policy outcome with intent, honestly?

Over and over in Obama’s early years we heard “we have to do SOMETHING”.  We have to pass the “stimulus”,  we have to pass Obamacare, we have to do this or that or the other, because it is a CRISIS.

Self evidently, the use of the word crisis, and the drumming up of hysteria generally, is a tactic cynical power mongers use to get and keep power.  Induce fear, and use it to do something with good “optics”, like “health care reform”.  Then for good measure accuse anyone who objects of “fear mongering”.

What if doctors took as their motto “Above all else, do SOMETHING”.  We can imagine conversations like “well, ma’am, I”m not sure what’s wrong, but I have these samples sitting around. Take them.  It might do something.  If it doesn’t work or makes things worse, I don’t want to know.  Not my problem.  I did something.”

They don’t have the word “interoception” yet in Dictionary.com .  It is relatively new, I think; certainly relatively new as something of clinical importance in optimized mental and emotional and physical health.  It is introspection, but at the physiological level.  It is feeling inward.  It is not seeing how you feel about how you feel–that is introspection–but rather FEELING how you feel, at a primary level.

In the lengthy quote I posted yesterday, they commented that what your mother does not mirror, becomes difficult for you to express in yourself.  What you are wanting is the feeling of being comforted, protected, nurtured, recognized as individual, rewarded for initiative and learning.  The process of growth for the wounded is remembering it is still possible to feel what they feel.  It is not too late.  There is a layer of muck and habit, but feelings never disappear, nor does the possibility of feelings, except of course in cases of gross organic defects, which do not afflict most of us.

Thus, when you are feeling what you feel, when you are undergoing conscious interoception as a growth process, you are self parenting.  You are doing for yourself–I am doing for myself–what my mother failed to do.

And it seems to me that trying to do this in a clinical setting is almost inherently problematic and unhealthy.  The idea is that as a physiologically mature adult you enter into a different relationship with your parent using the therapist as a substitute, and that you do this without touch, without constant contact, without leaving, at the end of the day, the relationship as other than pay for service.  This seems absurd to me.  Parents don’t charge by the hour, and they are not forbidden from touching you, or at least forced to undergo lengthy classes on the ethics of touch.

And the therapist IS NOT YOUR PARENT.  I can’t see how it could even be healthy on their side either.  Personally, I have regressed in therapy, but there was nothing the therapist could really do with it.  It was needed–I had to know this was there, in order to deal with it intelligently–but it would be easy to spend a small fortune and be barely better, even with a good, well trained, sincere therapist.

To my mind, quiet interoception is the only way forward.  This is the essence of Kum Nye.  And what is interesting about Kum Nye relative to similar practices presented by trauma therapists, is that it explicitly incorporates both physical nervous energy, and more subtle, spiritual energy.  The two are clearly related.

I visualize it as a series of locks you coax into opening, to allow new energies to flow.

Actually, I would add that group celebrations of all sorts are likely useful as well.  In America, we don’t celebrate very well.  At least white Americans.  Large groups dancing, drumming, singing: all that is very healing.

Feelings want crystallization.  We want to have a reason to feel the way we do, and as social animals innately wired for connection and mirroring, we want ways to conform.  We all have these needs.

Leftism crystallizes the need for social connection among those who cannot accept traditional ways, such as nationalism, or religion.  As a principle form of social belonging, it becomes vitally important in and of itself.  The ideas are not what matter, but their uniformity: their reliable uniformity among otherwise differing groups.

This is the main reason that such stupidity endures.  Certainly, it is reinforced by cynical psychopaths.  But they are tapping into a latent psychological need, one which is expanded greatly by continual attacks on all other potential sources of belonging.

The human race is in an odd place.  It is quite true that tribalisms of various sorts can and often have led to violence.  But the problem has not been solved.  Leftism is more violent than most traditional forms of tribalism.  It didn’t fix anything, and made many things worse.

I was sitting in a bar yesterday, pondering trauma, pondering the need to fight, to attack, to interact with others through aggression, and I saw armies forming.  That is where people always went: to war.  You start with a need to connect through violence, and then you find a reason, and you say the reason created the violence, when it was the other way around.

Self evidently, I am no pacifist, and not willing to say violence is never justified, or that we do not need our soldiers.  But I do think it worth recognizing on a macro level how these things work.

And on a related, but very tangential note, I was pondering an episode in Fallout 3.  You get locked into  a Virtual Reality device, which mimics a typical American suburb, with psychotically happy music playing continually, and everyone nice, except for this mean little girl in the middle playground, on a street with houses on all sides.  You tell her you want out, and she starts giving you tasks.  The first task is to make a kid cry.  They give you speech options, and the most obvious one is to tell him that his parents are getting divorced and it is his fault.

This was to me what I might call a Milgram moment.  What reaction could and should a normal person have?  It is “only” a video game, but as David Grossman pointed out, such games can and do teach real behaviors.  I balked.  I got on the walk through, and found out there was an alternative way out.  What I read was that after you bully little Billy, or whatever his name was, you have to kill each of the adults in the space, none of whom are mean or aggressive in any way.  You then find out the little girl is really a German scientist who finds sadism amusing, you find your father, who was a dog, and the game progresses.

Here is the thing: most of these games are on the internet.  It would be a simple task to build an algorithm to gather data on the decision patterns of the kids (and adults like me) playing these games.  You could build a good psychological template for their suitability as little Nazis,. or their willingness to submit to tyranny, and do so across large populations, as meta-data.

It is of course impossible for people on the outside to know what decisions are being made by who and why; to know who is planning what.  But I do think it worth fearing extremely wealthy people pursuing radical agendas.

If it wasn’t clear, my post before last explains most of what we call “evil”.  It is not a metaphysical question, or need not be.  With evil we are dealing with an organism pushed past its breaking point, nothing more, nothing less.

This is a powerful idea, in my view.

I don’t know why I’ve never put this together before, but left wing media, by creating a false sense of reality, creates a following sense of what is “normal” and what is fringe.  In my own view, most of the whole fucking country is crazy.  9/11 was a vast conspiracy.  We elected twice a man who is likely the illegitimate child of a Communist pornographer, and whose books were ghost-written.  This seems to be the truth.  I am well educated, well read, intelligent, and even if I have major emotional issues, I have learned to manage them when I am doing thought work.  All they do is predispose me to paranoia.  As I keep saying, that doesn’t mean those ideas are wrong. I think a great deal of paranoia is in order.  Hillary should have been indicted, and everyone knows it.  At a minimum her Security Clearance should have been permanently revoked, and they couldn’t even manage that.

Here is the thing: by shaping reality, they create an incentive system in favor of their reality.  Corporations will not put their dollars on anything controversial, because they risk getting branded with it, and losing customers.  This is likely part of the reason Glenn Beck lost his job.  He landed quite nicely, but the dirty tricks campaign likely did work.

Alex Jones at Infowars (btw check out this great rant by Paul Joseph Watson: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCittVh8imKanO_5KohzDbpg ) has to sell Male Vitality, and coffee, and other products he more or less just remarkets under his brand.  Why?  You think Proctor and Gamble is going to let any of their names get seen with him?

So if you toe the left wing line, you can get money.  You stay in business.  If you don’t, then your business, if it is a traditional media business, does not.  Absent the internet, I truly believe we would be living in a dictatorship now.  They haven’t stopped Drudge and Infowars, and Breitbart, yet.

But people have to go to these places, places they are told are “hate filled”.  They do not show up on the TV.

I am not saying all this particularly well, but hopefully you get the point.

There is this saying, “you’re not alone”.  I read in the comments of “Rock and Roll Suicide” that that song has saved lives.  I believe this.

The truth is that many people are lost and alone in many respects.  Primitive trauma isolates them from their own emotions, and makes connection very hard.  That is my issue.

But what I want to communicate, like Bowie did, is that people like me, and perhaps like you, exist in large numbers, and this thought is comforting, to me at least.  None of us are alone in the sense that we can learn to take care of ourselves, to open slowly, and eventually walk in the sunlight with others.  There is firm reason for hope.

Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress but also their emerging selves–their interests, preferences, and goals.  Receiving a sympathetic response cushions infants (and adults) against extreme levels of frightened arousal.  But if your caregiver ignores your needs, or resents your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal.  You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother’s hostility or neglect and act as if it doesn’t matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment.  Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing. 

Bowlby wrote: ‘What cannot be communicated to the [m]other [both mother and other] cannot be communicated to the self.’  If you cannot tolerate what you know or feel what you feel, the only option is denial and dissociation.” [page 123]

Another lengthy and perhaps useful quote/story:

In the early 1980’s my colleague Karlen Lyons-Ruth, a Harvard attachment researcher, began to videotape face-to-face interactions between mothers and their infants at six months, twelve months and eighteen months.  She taped them again when the children were five years old and once more when they were seven or eight.  All were from high risk families: 100 percent met federal poverty guidelines, and almost half the mothers were single parents. 

Disorganized attachment showed up in two different ways. One group of mothers seemed to be too preoccupied with their own issues to attend to their infants.  They were often intrusive and hostile; they alternated between rejecting their infants and acting as if they expected them to respond to their needs.  Another group of mothers seemed helpless and fearful. They often came across as sweet or fragile, but they didn’t how to be the adult in the relationship and seemed to want their children to comfort them.  They failed to greet their children after having been away and did not pick them up when the children were distressed.  The mothers didn’t seem to be doing these things deliberately–they simply didn’t know how to be attuned to their kids and respond to their cues and thus failed to comfort and reassure them.  The hostile/intrusive mothers were more likely to have childhood histories of physical abuse and/or witnessing domestic violence, while the withdrawn/dependent mothers were more likely to have histories of sexual abuse or parental loss (but not physical abuse). 

I have often wondered how parents come to abuse their kids.  After all, raising healthy offspring is at the very core of our human sense of purpose and meaning.  What could drive parents to deliberately hurt or neglect their children?  Karlen’s research provided me with one answer: watching her videos, I could see the children becoming more and more inconsolable, sullen, or resistant to their misattuned mothers.  At the same time, the mothers became increasingly frustrated, defeated, and helpless in their interactions.  Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse. 

About eighteen years later, when these kids were around twenty years old, Lyons-Ruth did a follow-up study to see how they were coping.  Infants with seriously disrupted emotional communication patterns with these mothers at eighteen months grew up to become young adults with an unstable sense of self, self-damaging impulsivity (including excessive spending, promiscuous sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating), inappropriate and intense anger, and recurrent suicidal behavior. 

Karlen and her colleagues had expected that hostile/instrusive behavior on the part of the mothers would be the most poweful predictor of mental instability in their adult children, but they discovered otherwise.  Emotional withdrawal hd the most profound and long lasting impact.   Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults.

In other words, it seems to be human nature to prefer to be hated than to be ignored. It may literally be the case–in fact I would say it IS the case–that Hitler and the Third Reich, and Lenin and the global catastrophe of Communism, were the results of too many mothers ignoring their infants.  Lenin and Hitler, certainly, but all their followers as well.

And I cannot but think of the ghettos.  This is a continual theme with me, because in the midst of prosperity we have many people living in hell.  They create it themselves, in large measure, but this is not best regarded as a moral failing.  It should be regarded as what it is: the natural result of unnatural conditions.

Teenage mothers, who themselves grew up in emotionally unstable homes, are not able to attune with their infants, and they have many life stresses on top of simply dealing with a child.  The boy children tend to grow up angry and confused, and the girls grow both angry and docile, and confused.

Rap music, much of which feels demonic to me, is the natural music for a people where this sort of thing is common.  It both expresses rage, and counters depression and helplessness.  But it is not healthy.  It is not calming.  It is not harmonious.

From a public policy perspective it is hard to know what to do.  I don’t know what to do.  I will meditate on it.  But it does seem obvious that we need to hold the politicians to account who USE empty promises to secure and keep power accountable for their treachery to the cause of human betterment, and genuine progress.

We suspected but did not know much of this until the past couple decades.  The study referenced could not have been published earlier than about 2000.  The book I am referencing did not come out until 2014.

What we are truly getting to is an understanding of human nature.  In my own view, all the philosophies in the world cannot equate the knowledge one can find in ones own body about how to live.

And it does seem to me that many of the most demonic ideas–Communism, Fascism, religious fanaticism–come from people who learned to hate before they could speak, and who never in their lives realized it.

And a discussion of Feminism is relevant too.  It used to be a common phrase to say “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”. One has to ask how attachment patterns changed when women in large numbers started working outside the home, when careerism and their sense of self became conflated, when mothering became denigrated.

Again, the people who advance the radical ideas are not humanitarians.  They are anti-Humanist, because they hate themselves and bring the world along with it.  The nature of mind and self is that you first feel, then explain.  What I have called “Rosebud” moments always have, and will continue to determine the course of human history.

What we call morality is simply an ex post facto explanation of emotional health.  No amount of explaining can reorder a disorganized self, and no explaining is needed where order is present.

Primitive simplicity is animals acting like animals.  Wolves do not eat their own, and they care for one another.  Our current global task is becoming spiritual, thinking, animals.

There is this saying, “you’re not alone”.  I read in the comments of “Rock and Roll Suicide” that that song has saved lives.  I believe this.

The truth is that many people are lost and alone in many respects.  Primitive trauma isolates them from their own emotions, and makes connection very hard.  That is my issue.

But what I want to communicate, like Bowie did, is that people like me, and perhaps like you, exist in large numbers, and this thought is comforting, to me at least.  None of us are alone in the sense that we can learn to take care of ourselves, to open slowly, and eventually walk in the sunlight with others.  There is firm reason for hope.

Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress but also their emerging selves–their interests, preferences, and goals.  Receiving a sympathetic response cushions infants (and adults) against extreme levels of frightened arousal.  But if your caregiver ignores your needs, or resents your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal.  You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother’s hostility or neglect and act as if it doesn’t matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment.  Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing. 

Bowlby wrote: ‘What cannot be communicated to the [m]other [both mother and other] cannot be communicated to the self.’  If you cannot tolerate what you know or feel what you feel, the only option is denial and dissociation.” [page 123]

Another lengthy and perhaps useful quote/story:

In the early 1980’s my colleague Karlen Lyons-Ruth, a Harvard attachment researcher, began to videotape face-to-face interactions between mothers and their infants at six months, twelve months and eighteen months.  She taped them again when the children were five years old and once more when they were seven or eight.  All were from high risk families: 100 percent met federal poverty guidelines, and almost half the mothers were single parents. 

Disorganized attachment showed up in two different ways. One group of mothers seemed to be too preoccupied with their own issues to attend to their infants.  They were often intrusive and hostile; they alternated between rejecting their infants and acting as if they expected them to respond to their needs.  Another group of mothers seemed helpless and fearful. They often came across as sweet or fragile, but they didn’t how to be the adult in the relationship and seemed to want their children to comfort them.  They failed to greet their children after having been away and did not pick them up when the children were distressed.  The mothers didn’t seem to be doing these things deliberately–they simply didn’t know how to be attuned to their kids and respond to their cues and thus failed to comfort and reassure them.  The hostile/intrusive mothers were more likely to have childhood histories of physical abuse and/or witnessing domestic violence, while the withdrawn/dependent mothers were more likely to have histories of sexual abuse or parental loss (but not physical abuse). 

I have often wondered how parents come to abuse their kids.  After all, raising healthy offspring is at the very core of our human sense of purpose and meaning.  What could drive parents to deliberately hurt or neglect their children?  Karlen’s research provided me with one answer: watching her videos, I could see the children becoming more and more inconsolable, sullen, or resistant to their misattuned mothers.  At the same time, the mothers became increasingly frustrated, defeated, and helpless in their interactions.  Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse. 

About eighteen years later, when these kids were around twenty years old, Lyons-Ruth did a follow-up study to see how they were coping.  Infants with seriously disrupted emotional communication patterns with these mothers at eighteen months grew up to become young adults with an unstable sense of self, self-damaging impulsivity (including excessive spending, promiscuous sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating), inappropriate and intense anger, and recurrent suicidal behavior. 

Karlen and her colleagues had expected that hostile/instrusive behavior on the part of the mothers would be the most poweful predictor of mental instability in their adult children, but they discovered otherwise.  Emotional withdrawal hd the most profound and long lasting impact.   Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults.

In other words, it seems to be human nature to prefer to be hated than to be ignored. It may literally be the case–in fact I would say it IS the case–that Hitler and the Third Reich, and Lenin and the global catastrophe of Communism, were the results of too many mothers ignoring their infants.  Lenin and Hitler, certainly, but all their followers as well.

And I cannot but think of the ghettos.  This is a continual theme with me, because in the midst of prosperity we have many people living in hell.  They create it themselves, in large measure, but this is not best regarded as a moral failing.  It should be regarded as what it is: the natural result of unnatural conditions.

Teenage mothers, who themselves grew up in emotionally unstable homes, are not able to attune with their infants, and they have many life stresses on top of simply dealing with a child.  The boy children tend to grow up angry and confused, and the girls grow both angry and docile, and confused.

Rap music, much of which feels demonic to me, is the natural music for a people where this sort of thing is common.  It both expresses rage, and counters depression and helplessness.  But it is not healthy.  It is not calming.  It is not harmonious.

From a public policy perspective it is hard to know what to do.  I don’t know what to do.  I will meditate on it.  But it does seem obvious that we need to hold the politicians who USE empty promises to secure and keep power accountable for their treachery to the cause of human betterment, and genuine progress.

We suspected but did not know much of this until the past couple decades.  The study referenced could not have been published earlier than about 2000.  The book I am referencing did not come out until 2014.

What we are truly getting to is an understanding of human nature.  In my own view, all the philosophies in the world cannot equal the knowledge one can find in ones own body about how to live.

And it does seem to me that many of the most demonic ideas–Communism, Fascism, religious fanaticism–come from people who learned to hate before they could speak, and who never in their lives realized it.

And a discussion of Feminism is relevant too.  It used to be a common phrase to say “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”. One has to ask how attachment patterns changed when women in large numbers started working outside the home, when careerism and their sense of self became conflated, when mothering became denigrated.

Again, the people who advance the radical ideas are not humanitarians.  They are anti-Humanist, because they hate themselves and bring the world along with it.  The nature of mind and self is that you first feel, then explain.  What I have called “Rosebud” moments always have, and will continue to determine the course of human history.

What we call morality is simply an ex post facto explanation of emotional health.  No amount of explaining can reorder a disorganized self, and no explaining is needed where order is present.

Primitive simplicity is animals acting like animals.  Wolves do not eat their own, and they care for one another.  Our current global task is becoming spiritual, thinking, animals.