Month: May 2017

I continue marveling at Blooms book. Here is an spproximate quote: “Nietzche said that the Last Man would consider mistrust of ones neighbor as mental illness, and would willingly go to the madhouse as a result.”

The 2017 version of course would read “and would willingly submit to social censure and teeducation”.

Do you not see Macron and Metkel in this?  Does this make Le Pen and Trump supporters “Penultimate Men”?

I love this metaphor, which we might also call the Problem of the bourgeoisie, and will have more to say. I am listening to the book, but need to get a hard copy to quote at length where he anticipated the non-debates on gay marriage and transgenderism.

The gluten free diet is the final perfection of the Last Man, and in an unexpected twist it turns out the last Last Man is in fact Gwyneth Paltrow.

In connection with my previous post.

http://www.dailywire.com/news/16171/progress-harvard-hold-blacks-only-graduation-amanda-prestigiacomo

The headline might well have read: “Harvard Graduate School plans separate but equal graduation for blacks.”

The KKK itself could ask for no more.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/norman-lear-n-word-chant-carmichael-1001209

The path forward is not considering black people to be an alien race we only speak about in certain ways–from whom, to be clear, we can distill the feeling of personal virtue without interacting with them or helping them in any way–but actual human beings capable both of emotional pain and resilience, who we want to integrate in an authentic and honest way into the waters of the larger society.

Virtually everything done by the Left is intended to separate and isolate them.  This is because their manias make them anti-Humanistic, blind, and profoundly savage.  They think that directing their hateful energies against whites–rather than in support of blacks–is somehow different than the emotional underpinning of any other authoritarian regime.  It isn’t.

There is an often-quoted saying of Nieztche that “if you gaze into the abyss long enough, it gazes back into you.”

What if this is translated as “modern cultural conditions destroyed my mother”?  This, of course, would be an odd phrase upon which to project, but my intuitive sense is that, if I might continue, I am on solid ground here.

All of us contain within us what I tend to call “moments”.  If there were a wax museum of our lives, there are scenes which never completed, which we never processed, which conjured overwhelming emotion which was simply passed through and never fully seen, never imbibed.  Which persist over time, until we find the doors and open them and walk through with open eyes.

It is interesting, to me at least, to note that it is quite impossible to know the inner conditions of earliest childhood for nearly anyone. One can assume that a mother who is cold later was cold earlier, but this is not necessarily the case.

I was reading an article yesterday that Ted Bundy’s house, which was recently renovated, is reportedly haunted.  Odd things happen.  But to the point, he himself said his parents were great, and all the neighbors said they were a “nice family”.

What I would submit is that he was the victim of a double bind, a dual communication at least from his mother which he was unable to ever consciously process.  One can receive “niceness” on one level, and literally unspeakable rage and violence on another.  Sometimes the communication happens not directly, but tacitly, in terms of what is NOT said, and NOT done.

I am getting into and healing the deepest places within myself, and these are interesting caves. I am trying to record some of my explorations, and what I am finding written not just on my walls, but those of humanity.  We are all, after all, connected, as the cliche would have it.  I do believe in a collective unconscious, and something beyond it.  If I go deep enough, I will find a path back to you.

It is possible to be nice without the gut, but not to be a complete human being.  The gut provides the impetus to evil, yes–evil in the main is regressing to being a wild beast while being a human being–but it also provides the energy for good.

All children have unique personalities, but my feeling is that in our world of abstraction, of obsession with work and status, with our manifold creature comforts and distractions, very often the child assumes a place at the table, but not recognition as an individual.

In previous times, as I have said, this was perhaps not a problem, because the child was given a ROLE to play.  There was a script.

But there is no script in our world for most children in most families.  They are expected to be successful, but in most cases that means making money.  It says nothing about developing the soul, or becoming wiser as a human being.

The psychological skill needed for contemporary parenting is immense, and I really feel a great many parents simply lack the patience for it.  They are interested in work, and only occasionally in their children.

To be sure, they may obsess over parenting books, and “building” the perfect child, but this still treats the child as an inert object.  The important thing is knowing your childs essence, what makes them who they are, and both feeling it deeply, and connecting with them in such a way that they know they are felt deeply.

In my own case–and this chain of thought is what occasioned this somewhat incoherent post–I literally feel like my mother would be much, much happier with me if I were replaced by a lifelike facsimile of me which complimented her often, laughed at her jokes, and which was obedient to her will.  This facsimile would be NOTHING like how I really am, but she has never seen me as I am, because she is not able to see past her own reflection in my eyes.  She has often pretended to try–and in her own mind I have no doubt she feels she did try–but something large and important is simply missing: there is no genuine empathy, even for her own child.

The emotional tone of this whole image is very, very cold, very plastic, very unpleasant.

I am no doubt sharing too much again, but I continue to hope these musings may be useful for someone out there.

To some extent, I am wrestling with what Allan Bloom, pace Nietzche, called the “Last Man Problem.”

How can we remember value in a world of price?  To point to the value of free markets is not equal to supporting Consumerism.  To point to alienation is not to point to a coercive economic and political system as the solution.

The Negempath–if I might coin a term–is perfectly suited for commercial success in our society.  Most all of us are perfectly conditioned to living–sometimes across a life–at a superficial level.

And how do I deal emotionally with a mother who can look me in the eyes and fail entirely to see me, even now?  Who is for all intents and purposes a complete stranger, and always has been?

And how, more generally, do we find one another?  This is not uniquely my problem.  I see it everywhere.

I am going to go do some Kum Nye.  I have come up with one solution I will share eventually.

I think it can be accurately stipulated that no person voluntarily does evil on a sustained basis who understands the alternative at an emotional and spiritual level.

The people who do evil no doubt rationalize it somehow–perhaps something as simple as “I enjoy it”, but they see no good alternative.

My standing claim is that Goodness is by far the most interesting, most fascinating, most creative game in town. Everything else is repetition, and in most cases compulsive repetition.  As I have said, quantitative variation is obviously possible, but reimagining the self and the world in new colors and with new music is not.

Evil is the despair of the blind.

What better symbol for the decadent modernism the French did so much to inflict on our world than a young man married to his mother who does not believe in French “culture”?

Accepting yourself “as you are” is a uniquely modern concept.  In previous eras, I suppose (not having lived in them), one simply found oneself within a complex social landscape defined by tradition and habit.  One could inhabit ones place with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm, but the question of “self” acceptance did not evolve, could not evolve, until the notion of the “self” as a quasi-anti-social being came into vogue.

On some level, the question being asked is: how do I feel about myself as divorced from concrete social contexts, as a “Sein an sich”?

In a world where there is no givenness, there must be continual creation of the self, and of course since we evolved to be social animals, there is inherently some anxiety–the social emotion–created.  This is what I understand the Existentialists to have largely been saying, although I am not well read in their work.

We are up in the air.  The question is how we keep the freedom, but provide grounding, safety, and less arduous means of feeling a sense of self, belonging, and rootedness.

These are psychological and spiritual and sociological questions that are most usefully assumed to have good answers.  It is the second assumption, the one made after assuming we can survive our Scientism and the next 100 years as something close to spiritually alive beings.

Self Discipline is really nothing more or less, on one level, than being able to predict your own behavior.  In a world where people are not reliable, where the future is uncertain and certainly largely beyond our control, it is creating a small idyll of predictability.

The cost is occasional discomfort.  The reward is a sense of safety.