With Obama the converse applies. He uses a faux gravitas–what I have called being a soap opera President– to cover an insubstantial tempersment and mind, and is the worst con man we ever elected bar none.
But many, when they get to college, or even high school, are exposed to much easier ideas, ones which taste good going down, which are addictive, but which are not ultimately nourishing, a fact which is concealed in the mania of consuming more and more of them.
People know in their guts that there is no sustainable path forward, collectively, other than all of us tending our own gardens, as Voltaire put it. If everyone manages their own affairs, there is no need for any of what the Left peddles to the poor and stupid.
They teach, though, that everything is easy, that life is supposed to be easy, and that if there is a problem, all that is needed is more government. If there are conflicts between cultures, all that is needed is to BE NICE. And having been taught that being nice is the main virtue in life, they learn to let other people walk all over them, continually, because it makes them feel VIRTUOUS.
We might indeed call apologists for Islamic Supremacism practitioners of “Doormat virtue”.
The solution is REMEMBERING, for most of us, REMEMBERING all those truths we were taught that did not taste as good as the candy they were giving away at school, at the universities, on the news media, in the newspapers.
I will sometimes walk through the frozen food section, and marvel at all the tasty foods found there, all the things I grew up eating, the TV dinners you warm up in the microwave. God, I had forgotten about those. We had those folding mini-tables you use to set up your food in front of the TV. TV trays. That’s what they were called. I had until this moment managed to erase those from my mind. I have not owned a microwave in 15 years, and never will again. There is nothing the stove top and oven cannot do better, if only slightly slower.
It seems to me that the 1950’s was the last time there was any true civic mindedness, and real connection with the real realities of life, on the part of the Left. That was when LSD and other drugs were used by honest intellectuals like Alduous Huxley. The 60’s was just Fruit Loops and meals fit for imbeciles and invalids, suitable for regurgitation, but not the maintenance of anything approaching an honest life.
There is no poetry in conformity, and the Left has nothing else, in the end, to offer. As with Muslims, the only good Leftists are bad Leftists.
And obviously some people might lose coverage, but many people have already lost coverage BECAUSE of Obamacare. If we need to take care of anyone, it is the people who do all the working and tax paying in this country. There is obviously a place for compassion, but that place is not in a world wrecked by legislative incompetence. Other people’s money always runs out.
My two cents on the proposal: there needs to be something in there about preexisting conditions, but it needs to be confined to a VERY SHORT window, something like 2 months, and certainly something which expires long, long before the mid-term elections. That is the only way to keep a temporary measure from becoming perennial, like all government tends to do unless undone aggressively and decisively.
As I’ve said many times, requiring insurers to cover the healthcare costs of people who are already sick is not insurance at all, but mandated charity, one which is financed by the healthy and prudent in the form of vastly higher insurance premiums than they would otherwise pay. It is nothing more or less than a sneaky tax. I would rather see this turned over to Medicaid or Medicare–which are at least obviously taxpayer funded programs–than the charade maintained in the private sector.
And of course I have always felt this. Doing ordinary, simple, daily tasks like doing the dishes or cooking a meal requires effort and focus. Everything I do from the moment I get up until I go to bed, or get drunk prior to passing out and going to bed is a struggle, and always has been.
But there are two positives to this. One, if everything requires effort, you get good at applying effort. I am really good, I think, at breaking down large topics and saying intelligent things about them, and the reason for this is that when I apply myself, I have POWER. If everything hurts all the time, if everything is frightening all the time, then doing “hard” things is not really that much harder than doing “easy” things. It amounts to the same for me, and always has. If I have courage, it comes from having accustomed myself to being afraid and doing what needed to be done anyway. I do it every day, and have since childhood.
And secondly, I always have images whirring around in my mind. Everything is in motion all the time. But this means that I have access to more flexibility than many people, and access to vastly greater content. Ideas and phrases and images are popping in and out continually. It gives me a lot to select from.
And of course I like being creative, as I think I am well warranted in believing I am. And I could not help but conjure Rilke’s often repeated comment about the prospect of psychoanalysis that if he loses his demons he might lose his angels too.
And it seems to me that there are three main motivations for creation: 1) for survival; 2) in the service of others, which can include figuring out how to fix oneself, which is my present task, since screwed up people are invariably on balance at least partially a burden to others; and 3) the sheer joy of it.
None of these tasks are in danger. I feel Rilke, without reading more about him or that comment (which by the way I have not verified was actually said by him), feared losing his status as a creative poet. This is ignoble in my opinion. Being admired by others is not a suitable aim for creation. It is a de facto omission of actual impotence in some aspect of ones emotional life.
I am told 60 sessions is a good goal. I have done 5, but I am already getting top scores, because I can maintain focus in the face of pain and fear. I do feel good things are on the way. Everything I have done has been done dragging a 100 pound weight behind me. I can’t imagine what it will feel like to let that weight go, but I am quite sure I can get used to it!!! I read 10-15 point jumps in IQ are not uncommon. That would be fun.
Po: What if governments had to compete for our tax business?
This leads then to the following obvious question: how much of what governments do could be privatized? There is competition among trash collectors. Competition for mail service developed. What about police? What about environmental regulation and enforcement, something like a stronger Underwriters Laboratories? It does seem obvious we should get rid of the FDA.
What if we had not A military, but militaries? If you go to any Civil War battlefield, you will see that the soldiers on both sides fought as States, and units within those States. A professional soldier is already inherently a mercenary–even if ideally a highly motivated and patriotic one–so could we have private militaries? Or what if we returned the locus of the military to the States, under a central Federal command? Obviously, there are upsides and potential downsides to that idea, but I am simply talking out loud.
What if traffic enforcement were made a completely separate item from ordinary policing? What if you had multiple options for 911 when you had an emergency, all of which you paid for as as service, and if you did not pay the fee, nobody came? Adults are capable of making rational decisions and accepting even negative consequences they bring on themselves. Same with fire fighting.
What if “government” were broken down into a long series of a la carte service, with people paying for what they want?
If you look at Social Security, as I have, it is abundantly obvious that it really only benefits the government, and politicians who use to get elected despite having otherwise idiotic ideas about everything. Well, them, and those who got into the Ponzi scheme early enough that they got paid out a LOT more than they put in.
As a rational investment, though, as a means of saving for retirement, it is asinine. It is a negative return investment. If you put your FICA into gold coins and buried them you would have a better return than sending money to the government which is immediately paid back out to support current recipients.
Chile privatized retirement accounts, and it worked very well. This is one of the reasons Communists still hate Chile, and Pinochet, who merely did what the Communists would have done in creating their dictatorship, and after he did it, held the elections the Communists never would have held, and stepped aside voluntarily to watch Chile jump ahead of the rest of Latin America.
Few thoughts. So many people benefit from the groveling before government which its current size and power make necessary for the mass of people for whose benefit it supposedly exists.
“Progress” does not and never has consisted in increasing the size and power of those who seek to control us. True progress can ONLY come in moral and spiritual elevation. There is no other kind. “Progressivism” is a lie, inherently, and all the way to its core. It conceals this lie by making society the measure of morality, which inherently is reifying an abstraction, and once the words of abstractions have replaced concrete experience and individual judgement, no true benchmark remains. This is how societies and nations are destroyed in the names of “Justice” and “Compassion”.
The service provided is the service of government, which includes protecting our nation, providing regulations which in theory protect the peace and prosperity of the American people, and punishing people who are violent, foreign and domestic.
In practice, though, the feedback loop between what the people actually want and believe they will benefit from, and what government actually provides, is quite long, and highly distorted by the fact that some people can use government to benefit themselves at the expense of others. People who pay no taxes are still allowed to vote for people who promise them the money of the people who DO pay taxes. Corporations are able to create government run monopolies of various sorts, and various differential treatments that give them big advantages, which they then use to make sure the politicians who help them stay in office. Self evidently, this is not the business of government, but given sufficient power granted to the government, such abuses are nearly inevitable.
In an orthodox education, it is easy to imbibe the assumption in the air that government exists for itself, that there is no alternative to massive government, and that the steady metastasis of government year after year, decade after decade, century after century, is inevitable, and constitutes “progress”.
I will assert, again, that the proper alternative to government is moral education. People who are naturally respectful of others do not need restraint, and do not need hordes of laws telling them what to do, and do not need to pay for hordes of bureaucrats and police to enforce those laws. Only bad people need laws.
Globally, free markets and liberal governments work to remedy all the causes of violence between nations. They enrich everyone, enable feedback from the people to the governments, and allow people freedom to live as they see fit.
Only mentally ill people seek power over others, for any reason. Globally, if we were to focus on moral and psychological health, we could and would live in peace.
I am presently undertaking a course of Neurofeedback, and am increasingly inclined to believe that it constitutes something close to a scientific approach to mental health, at least within broad limits. What if it were made accessible universally? Assuming I get the results which seem likely, I am going to get the gadgets and start offering it for free to addicts and others. My sense is that in tandem with Kum Nye–a sophisticated method for achieving very deep calm and relaxation–it would be a fantastic combination for all of humanity.
This can be read on many levels.
I will use my Hoffman rules and use I here. What I have found, for myself, is that those of us blessed and cursed with a lot of emotional baggage, with unprocessed grief and trauma, confusion about what love is and how one finds it, who early in life start reading self help and psychology, and spiritual and even religious texts obsessively, quite often realize at a certain point that we have learned more catch phrases, bits of psychological “insight”, and the outer trappings of wisdom, that we can get away with lecturing others.
More: we–I–being gifted with a high degree of intelligence, developed the ability to seem wise, even while the concrete details of my life–financial, social, romantic–went poorly maintained or even completely unattended.
In my own case, I think I have been able to continue past this realm of self delusion, and am now confronting the facts, the actual facts, of who I really am. And it is hard.
It is far easier to put on a benevolent face, and be the voice in people’s lives that “get” them. It is far easier to use what in most cases really is at least some real insight, to offer “compassion”.
Here is the thing, though: for a great many people “compassion” is really an aggression. As even Rousseau recognized, in adding this word–to our great detriment, in aggregate and over time–to our political lexicon, compassion is inherently a claim of moral superiority. It is pity, more or less, and we only pity the helpless and our inferiors. And in pitying them, we unconsciously allow the expression of a latent sense of superiority, which in comforting conflicted egoes creates a sort of salve that makes life easier.
It is, in other words, easy to get addicted to compassion. It is an easy drug.
But what this does is distract from the continuation of honest inner work. An addiction to compassion per se is not my personal issue, but the idea of saving the world IS a problem for me. Me against the world. Heroic struggles, and uncomprehending masses. It is romantic and attractive, and I am not saying that I don’t have ideas which might help large numbers of people, but what I am saying is that my focus needs to be on healing myself, because right now I remain utterly compulsive, and that is not a position from which organic, flexible, useful thought usually proceeds.
And this morning I cannot help but think of Tamerlane, for some reason. I recently bought an inner Asian cookbook titled “Samarkand”. I have long felt a kinship with inner Asia for some reason. Perhaps I spent a life there too. In a meditation the other day, I felt this coldness of a tribal warlord, but of course that might have easily been the part of me which does not respond to compassion or warmth of any sort; which was crushed and killed, long ago, but within which a spark remained that I am in the process of reigniting.
But what is the relation of universal bloodlust and greed, and universal compassion, and thirst for the political power to “deliver” it? The Communists used the rhetoric of compassion, in my understanding. Certainly, the French Revolutionaries did, and in the case of the Communists this was the latent if perhaps unexpressed word behind calls for “justice”.
Compassion is an outgrowth of empathy in healthy people, but when used as a means of avoiding inner psychological conflict, and particularly when expressed as an ABSTRACTION, it can as easily become a means of violence and attack as the simple impulses of a Tamerlane–who I will note does need to be named as one of the most prolific murderers in human history, particularly as a lesson to those who think the West is somehow uniquely bad. He caused the deaths of some 17 million people, which was about 5% of the worlds population at the time. He eclipsed, in other words, Hitler.
Be that as it may, we might usefully describe the Left as it exists today as an organized band of bandits who want to conquer the world in the name of an idealized compassion, which they do not in fact feel. They do not care about what happens to the people who they are trying to help, and have demonstrated, in fact, that they are quite willing to INCREASE the suffering of the people they claim to want to help, if it furthers the cause of their own increase in power and authority, and political and social superiority to those they claim to feel sympathy and empathy for.
Doing inner work, honestly and over the long term, is difficult work, and the distractions are nearly infinite. This is merely one of the most obvious, at least to me.