The Ultra-Orthodox would be those who carry out killings in the name of Islam, and the Orthodox those who cannot find it within themselves to say it is wrong.
This morning I woke up feeling something was different yesterday, and it hit me: I was more emotionally present than I used to be. Most people, everywhere, in all circumstances, approach other people with some sort of need. They might need to feel understood, or validated, or sexually desirable. They might want to use someone for something–for short term companionship, for sex, for money, for a favor of some sort. Many people are simply in the habit of being around people and being with nearly anyone makes the feeling of solitude–the one that calls up a host of unwanted and “exiled” emotions–go away.
So two people start talking. Both have latent agendas, even if they don’t process it that way. Both know that to talk you have to listen, but their listening becomes a hiatus in their talking. They are secretly focusing on that one cool story or point that they just have to make in response.
Most people, when they are interacting, are doing so selfishly. I don’t say this as an intrinsically bad thing. It is inevitable in some respects.
In past posts I have spoken to our animal nature, our instinctual similarities to primates. What I want to be clear is that we are not BOUND by our past, and our present biology. What we need to recognize is what is THERE, so we can grow beyond it. We are not chimpanzees. They lack the ability to grow beyond their own nature, at least as a matter of conscious planning born in abstract thought. We have this ability, especially over time.
Who are two people who approach a relationship of any length playfully, without an agenda? They are cocreators of something new and interesting. Rather than think of what you want, or even what the other person wants, you just see what happens.
It seems to me that both need and compassion–if compassion is a need, as I have argued it can be and often is, where people NEED to be needed–make us blind. We do not SEE the person in front of this. At a deep level, I have in mind Martin Bubers I and Thou, “Ich und du”.
It seems to me that many of us are habituated to approaching others with some sort of purpose in mind, with some sort of pulling or pushing in mind. But what if you are two balloons who touch in the wind?
I have gotten through and reached the primal texture of my pain. I am not depressed, or anxious. I am in pain. It is the pain of a decisive disconnection from my mother and the possibility of nurturance that happened many years ago.
This is the sequence: intellectualism, then behind that numbness (which can and does lead periodically to depression), then behind that anxiety and anger (with the expression of anger an excellent way to disperse anxiety, with of course many negatives in train), then behind that the main show: pain.
Being able to confront and feel this pain is a major step. It is the only way to dissolve it.
The point I wanted to make though is that I think the capacity for nuance is the most important marker of social and emotional health. Either/or is driven by a primitive part of the brain. Our social brains are capable of so much more.
And specifically I was contemplating a notion I will call “social distance”, which is the idea that your human relations, the people you know, should exist on a continuum for you, consciously. Immediate family should be closest, followed by close friends, followed by long term acquaintances, followed by people who think and act like you, followed by your community, followed by your fellow countrymen and women, followed by everyone else.
And within all these categories degrees of connection are possible.
The point I would make is that if all social connections must first be run through an abstract filter of political correctness, then the possibility of spontaneous and open intimacy is lost or greatly reduced. It is affected, certainly. And the original political correctness was Christianity itself, which classified everyone into saved and sinner.
The Germans kept Du and Sie. The French, tu and vous. The English did not. They use the formal You for everyone.
To a great extent, I think human beings are wired for chimpanzee like social connections, with instinctual capacities for understanding relations on an extended basis: family, friends, rival clans, etc.
The singular contribution of the English (I am no student of philosophical history, nor do I want to be, but I have in mind the English Parliamentary system and Locke’s “life, liberty and property”) was to make human beings abstractions, and to grant them all the same rights in principle. This is logical, and I think salutary, but I think it also is a root of that academic condition they like to call modernity.
I look out my window and I see homes and apartments with TV’s, with nuclear families, with nothing like the connection to extended family that most humans have experiences for most of our history. There are many exceptions of course, but most American families are very split up: husband and wife, and children and parents and grandparents.
I think abstraction has conquered the landscape. The ostensible rallying cries are freedom and economic prosperity, but I wonder what we have lost. I say this as someone who often feels lonely, but who carries the maddening burden of being unable to imagine connection the way other people do. This is something I will figure out–AM figuring out–with my body, with my instincts, with what arises naturally and spontaneously, but I cannot resist the comfort of framing it intellectually.
Again, this is a sort of pendulation for me. Now, time to go back into silence.
Best line: “Despite her unshakable reputation for being dishonest and untrustworthy. . .”
“the evidence points overwhelmingly
to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed
by controlled demolition. Given the far-reaching implications,
it is morally imperative that this hypothesis be
the subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation
by responsible authorities.”
http://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2016/04/epn2016474p21.pdf
I will comment that over the years, many military professionals, architects, firefighters, pilots, and others have come forward and called bullshit on the dominant narrative.
Here, for example, is Pilots for 9/11 Truth: http://pilotsfor911truth.org/
Here is Military Officers for 9/11 Truth: http://mo911truth.org/
Comments from 34 year Air Force veteran who retired as a full Colonel:
“In my first position paper, titled The Precautionary Principle, [see below] written shortly after the attacks on NYC and the Pentagon, I cautioned readers against a rush to judgment, although the immediate evidence suggested the crime had been an inside job. As the years went by, a virtual mountain of physical evidence was collected by hundreds of highly qualified investigators — evidence sufficient to convince any dedicated Grand Jury that the horrendous events of 9/11 were clearly an inside job. The Precautionary Principle no longer applies. It is time to positively conclude that a well-orchestrated and obviously pre-planned cover-up of the worst mass murder in our country’s history began immediately following the deaths of 3,000 innocent people on September 11, 2001. Nearly nine years later [this was written in 2010] the criminal cover-up continues. Fortunately for our country, our judicial system provides no statute of limitations for treason, first degree murder, and terrorism.”
As a general rule, Latin American countries have chosen for most of their history, since they’ve had the vote, to try and vote themselves other people’s money. This never works, so strongmen have been a part of the landscape off and on in most countries for most of the past 100-150 years.
Mexicans who come here illegally can be assumed to favor the same policies which destroyed their own country. And those policies are those espoused by the Democrats.
I agree with many observers that if this policy is ratified by law–and supported by a newly Left-wing stacked Supreme Court–the rule of law in this country will have been dealt a final blow.
And we need to be clear, clever Fascists–and Hillary and those around her are definitely clever–keep a surface sanity, and an outward appearance of fairness and gentility. But people start getting arrested, and the media does not report on it. Judges start sentencing people for fictitious crimes, and it all appears legitimate.
Even in Nazi Germany, even in fascistic Communist nations, trials were still held. The outward appearances of justice were maintained. All crimes were justified in the complicit, prostrate press.
Take something as simple as Hitler’s invasion of Poland. He had a number of prisoners executed, dressed in Polish Army uniforms, and dropped on the German side of the border. He then claimed the Polish had attacked Germany.
This is a dangerous time. It is foolish to deny it. I am going to start volunteering for the Trump campaign this week, and donating what money I have.
As animals, we are meant to live in relatively stable worlds where something new sometimes intrudes. Healthy people both welcome novelty and appreciate sameness and continuity.
But it is hard to overstate both the shock of going from a state of believing in God, and God’s messengers and representatives, to that of hating or disbelieving in God, and being therefore cast from the previous order. It is a form of trauma.
And if we take as exemplars the nihilists of the French Revolution, or the actual Nihilists, who give us that name, whose progeny facilitated the Bolshevik Coup, what we see is that their eyes were dulled by “not-belonging” and that destruction became their obsession.
The goal of the Soviets, and the French before them, and frankly since, has been to first attack belief in God and church, then family, then community, then nation, then culture. It has been to deny humans–who are connection-seeking creatures by nature, from finding anything available to attach to, at least once they have been indoctrinated.
Necessarily, on a biological level, this leads to obsession as an ersatz-order, and specifically a Leftist obsession. By design, it is all that is left, and because it is not a natural order,because the people inhabiting it are not emotionally or socially present–trauma is in the very DNA of the disease–there is nothing real to cling to. And so compulsion enters, and specifically the compulsion to repeat.
And it is not a compulsion to repeat the same things. When a Catholic says the Hail Mary, he or she typically finds comfort in it. It is a long tradition. They are thereby connected to the past and presumably the future, and a very wide present which extends over much of the world.
But Leftist compulsion is oriented, daily, around the expression of tribal solidarity through hatred. As I say, it is a simple order lacking in complexity.
To be clear, a modern factory has as its goal zero defects, no mistakes. But all factories are still formally complex systems, into which the new and strange can and does still intrude. So too with human life, but to the very great extent that the factory is the model for modern social life, with perfect safety, perfect replication, perfect reliability in all systems the goal, then we have to understand that the obsession of the Left is with banishing all inconsistency, all intrusions of the truly complex, into their maniacal world.
From this basic process, one can derive Soviet Russia, and Jacobin France, Pol Pot, and the artificial famine of Mao. One can derive the Daily Cause, and the corruption of people like Arianna Huffington who once likely with justice considered themselves Liberals.
Today during my Kum Nye practice I had that scene come up from The Shining, where the beautiful naked woman becomes a twisted and sickening hag. I felt the feelings of disgust and revulsion that came up, and I kept the two images in my mind, and asked: who were you before?
And it hit me I had a before too, that I have evil in me too, but that every psychopath on this planet has a before. Being good is natural, and it is pain that pushes us in other directions.
And it hit me that it is not our ego which suppresses our dark side. It is commonly supposed that our vanity keeps us from self knowledge. It isn’t: it is pain. You cannot know who you are without feeling how you became that way, and if it was overwhelming and happened when you were very young and vulnerable, these feelings are awful. I use booze to deal with them, but that is changing. I can feel, now, the part I am feeding with my drinking, which NEEDS it.
I don’t think most people who do not have horror in their lives realize how life saving the ability to sedate oneself reliably is or can be.
But something is changing in me. I can feel it. I am beginning to get back on the positive side of the ledger.