If ONLY Obama had spent 5x what he did, imagine the wealth that could have been produced!!!! But he didn’t listen to old Paul, did he?
So sorry, America, but Houston is getting the full Krugman red carpet. Don’t be haters because they are so lucky.
No, Socialism would have been, among other things, to make sure that every boat in the “Cajun Navy” first got an inspection and a safety certificate before they were allowed to conduct rescues. Committees would have been formed to make sure that they went into all neighborhoods evenly, such that no one neighborhood got a disproportionate number of boats.
There would have needed to have been an enormous number of bureaucrats to oversee this operation, and they themselves would have needed to be fed and housed, out of the money which might otherwise have gone to survivors. They would have maintained an aura of moral hauteur, at the good they were doing in the world.
And, of course, as has been seen the world over, no small number of them would not have been averse to receiving bribes and favors to make sure certain people were exempted from equality, and they certainly would have taken care of their own family and friends first.
As things happened, though, the free energy of free people was mobilized, to great effect. This is an excellent analogy of free markets. There is no need for top down management. People are not fucking idiots, and in general and in aggregate if they are decent human beings, everything works out. Houston is a formally complex system, and using anything but local knowledge would have been imbecilic; as indeed it is with regard to all economic issues.
At the same time, they need to hear YES too. Life says no often, but it also says yes, and if you never hear it, you miss much.
If I might summarize my difficulties, it is that I never heard yes. There was no one there to do that. I do think in the past and around much of the world today that role is often played, when the parents fail, by an aunt, or grandmother, or cousin, or some other member of an extended network of people. It doesn’t have to be much or often. It just has to be sincere and timely.
There was no path forward or backwards, and no way to remain in place. This is how you create dissociation. Impossible becomes out.
I continue to land slowly in my body, though. All wounds can be managed and transformed. I do believe this.
If Trump wants to strike a decisive blow at his enemies, he should provide massive funding for after-life research, and research into the broad category of “God”, which we might define as the infinite energy which connects all of us, and gives us life.
The templates are there. For example, the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, at the University of Arizona.
Or the Institute for Noetic Sciences.
What if we funded research into the most important question any human can ask–what is the nature of and point of human life–to the same extent we fund this farce of Global Warming?
It can be frustrating being significantly more intelligent than most people–and I do believe that to be the case with me–because it makes the stupidity of the world much more obvious.
Why not focus as a nation and a society on what is most important? Is this an unreasonable question?
I was at our State Fair yesterday, watching among other things a pig judging contest. I was watching kids of no more than 6 years old in some cases in a ring with a bunch of others, wearing cowboy shirts, Levi’s, and large belt buckles, using switches to guide their pigs around the the enclosure, while being watched carefully by a judge–a slightly hunched man who I knew was quite capable of working hard 20 days many days in a row–and watching the spectators, who came in families, and who slept in groups on cots with their animals, sometimes with the family dog in a cage, and thinking that these little boys and girls will in all likelihood be proud to grow up like their mamas and daddies.
There are of course many temptations–boredom with living in a small town being the main one–which draw people away, but there are many country songs about coming home, too. Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj9b3QqTOtY&index=4&list=PL4-T2yIoXjcWmyA51sB8tAf8E2gBMJd79
“I ran off when it came to blows with my old man, but I came home, and this is where they’ll bury me.”
What they have is a template for life. They don’t have to reject their parents. They might argue for a time, but there is peace where people largely think the same. This is the fact with multiculturalism which nobody wants to talk about: everyone, all groups, of all beliefs and backgrounds, are happiest with their own kind. This is a sociological fact. What one makes of it politically is determined by what mania, or what compassion, motivates one.
I would distinguish this from the City, broadly understood. In the city you get nothing but motion. Your parents are not nested anywhere, and there is a good chance they are divorced or never married in the first place. There is no “way of life” worth speaking of, other than continual, largely random and anxiety driven motion.
I look at bumper stickers from movies, like the “Abide” ones referencing “The Big Lebowski”, and it occurs to me that all the shared referents for people in both suburbs and the city are not just mutable, but highly mutable. There are no Great Stories, no Great Myths (in Joseph Campbell’s sense). This makes all social connections tenuous, easily severed, and life emotionally precarious.
This, in my view, is the root of the effectiveness of the propaganda which our media perpetrates. If you find yourself out of lockstep with others–and I have commented on this before–you risk losing inclusion. To find yourself fully alone with nothing is unthinkable. I think most people ingest the lies our media tells without even pausing a moment to question it, because they KNOW that everyone around them is doing the same.
And all you need to create a fully sustainable propaganda bubble is vast anxiety and alienation, and synchronizing signals whose channel–which in this case can be taken literally–is known to everyone you know. All you have to do to belong is repeat what everyone else is belonging.
But the cost of this belonging is the capacity for independent judgement, and for genuine individuation. When everyone’s primary emotion is loneliness, they grasp at straws. Provide them the straws, and you have a leash on them.
And it occurs to me further that the dominant emotion of any authoritarian regime has to be shame. Christianity is rooted in shame because it is a powerful tool for controlling people. And this is the reason that the very first trick the lunatics who occupy the core of the Left employ is teaching Americans, particularly, to be ashamed of their history, of who they ARE. This makes them clay, which is malleable, and can be shaped and fitted to any form deemed suitable.
For myself, of course, I see the limitations of both world views, but the “country” worldview is at least stable, and the simple fact is that pride enables independence, and independence enables individual judgement. It is possible to be genuinely tolerant when one has no shame in who one is. And whatever the defects of Christianity otherwise, tolerance is something it preaches, and which in my experience most Christians try to practice. America is uniquely tolerant, at a genuine, gut level.
But large numbers have ingested this poison that we are wicked, that we should bear the sins of our fathers, and this leads to grief, shame, alienation, and violence.
This is what we see on the streets today. Oh, if only one could bottle sanity, could bottle the idea that we are all sufficient in ourselves, that joy is our natural condition, and acceptance the gift of and from God.
There is an old Zen saying: at first I was just chopping wood. Then I was not chopping wood. Then I was chopping wood again. Something like that.
When are you not chopping wood? When you are chopping someone’s face.
Look at the violence in our world. Look at our media, at Game of Thrones, the Walking Dead, one of the top three movies at all times.
When I look at traditional societies, they all beat their children. They want them to grow in specific ways, to inhabit and incorporate specific behavior patterns based on specific templates based upon specific values.
Because these specific values are not compatible with those of other groups and tribes, conflicts of all sorts tend to emerge. War has been a continual fact for all of recorded history. “Only the dead have seen the end of war” is an old saying.
Now, trade, and commerce work to mediate tendencies towards conflict, and among intelligent people, the goal of wealth alone works to keep the peace, but what tends to happen is that if any one civilization becomes wealthy through trade, they are conquered by an inferior civilization with greater bloodlust. A good example is the conquest of Canaan by the the proto-Israelites.
What I am feeling within myself as I calm down is warring factions within my psyche. It is all, or largely, unconscious. There are two paths I have always been trying to take simultaneously. One is conformity to my parents wishes, which was reinforced through physical and emotional punishment, and buttressed with intellectual structures which I have since cast aside. The other is a path towards personal growth and back to God. The two are incompatible, and they both exist at a root level. And I cannot find peace until they have made peace.
Long ago, whenever I created my other website, Goodnessmovement.com, I noted that Freud, in writing of “Civilization and its discontents”, spoke only of the repression of negative emotions. To counterbalance this I created the notion of Qualitative Repression .
That was not quite ten years ago. Here is what I would say today: TRUE individualism is also unacceptable in most social contexts. A genuine aspiring mystic, following a path which unfolds only one step at a time, is also unwelcome. Why? Because it activates latent energies within people which are exactly analogous to those I find troubling me every night.
As I calm, though, I am contacting these energies with greater and greater specificity. It is astonishing and very interesting how much I feel every day. Every moment contains revelations which I cannot speak when I am able to remain open for any amount of time. And to be clear, I am not speaking of God or the future: I am simply speaking of available affective possibilities, of very specific sensations and qualities of internal imagery.
But all of these things take time. I have structured my life in such a way–and sacrificed the outer trappings of success in this country to do so–so that I can support all of this. But most people can’t. Their emergences just look weird, if they happen in public.
Most people are operating at the social level equivalent of the hive mind. They are not insects, obviously, because they can think and reason up to a point. They can explain what they are doing and why, but they can’t REALLY explain what they are doing, why, or who they really are, or who they might be if they did not have all this programming with them. This is what people speak of when they say people are asleep. Gurdjieff, as one example, used this term often.
Sometimes when I am out in public, wandering around, I think of Lao Tzu’s comment that he is different, that he is nourished by a different mother. And I ask myself: should I try to be more like other people, or should I do my own thing, and wait for them to come to me? What do you think makes more sense? I think the latter. What I see on display, among people who follow the orthodox marching orders, is confusion, anxiety, emotional superficiality, greed as compensation, sexual pleasure with–I suspect–very little sexual satisfaction (if Mick Jagger couldn’t get there, who can?), and the sadness of feeling alone and forgotten, even among people. This is not everyone, obviously. Many people are satisfied with their lives, and these people make civilization continue well. But where are they going? In our current world, if we do not build something new, everything is going to come falling down. That is what I feel, and that is the root aim of those doing their level best to topple our civilization and its contents down like an old statue.
What I feel, is that–in the presence of unprecedented freedom and opportunity–many of our youth are becoming atavistic, and longing for a time and place where there was, as they conceive the thing, order and where their emotional confusion was answered with the discipline they never received at home, with the clear structure they never received at home. They want fascism, to deal with their moral and emotional confusion, and for the same reason the original fascists wanted it.
And actually, that opens an interesting question. I have not read the several propagandists for Communism who looked for and found sexual repression in fascism–to which they wanted to provide as an antithesis their own countless and emotionally empty couplings of various sorts–but I do wonder what the sexual lives of these Antifa fascists looks like. What is it like, not knowing in advance if the woman you are courting has a penis, and who expects it not to matter in the least? What is it like, feeling seething anger coupled with functional helplessness–as I have noted, many of them seem to live with their parents–when it comes to what is at its root an act of joy and cocreation? I suspect sex is not very important at all to many of these people. Gender is, obviously, and gender identity, and all these unnatural abstractions, but not the physical act of intimacy, much less the emotional act of being vulnerable. This is where the anger comes from.
So as usual I am making a short story long. Here is what I feel: to go to the next level as a human being, you have to cast off the webbing of sociality, and to do so you must privilege your own perception relative to that of anyone else. And we must grant this privilege to everyone. This is the essence of the creed of Individualism.
Our curse, of course, is that in the middle of this bounty of freedom, we lack both the tools for authentic personal exploration, and more importantly, the social sanction for it.
I FEEL, I feel, the anxiety that underlies the nervous energy which underlies our social order. I feel the compulsions to go shopping, to eat out, to fuck, to drink, to work hard, to dream of more and more stuff, and vacations which are mainly of use as forms of conspicuous consumption.
I will leave it there for now. I am wandering again. I have been having very odd–but aren’t they all?–dreams lately, but highly useful ones. I am on the scent of something good.
More ocean, then something else. You will know when you get there.
It doesn’t hurt to have a daily plan, and goals of all lengths, but much of life consists in just continuing to show up in various ways, and much of what happens, we didn’t see coming at all. Be open to change. Look for it. Welcome it. That is how exploring is done.
Thought: substance “abuse” supports the pretending made necessary by the inability to relate to others authentically. When you get tired, you can always find comfort. It is an authentic friend, even if one which does not love back, and which poisons you.
This is the real crime of substance abuse, that you medicate the hurting, and make building nearly impossible.
But for many of us, what building is possible on thin air?
I say this as someone who maybe, possibly–I’ve threatened this before–may have gotten drunk for the last time. I seem to be melding the selves. It is difficult work. As I’ve said before, my average night would scare the shit out of most people, and certainly make keeping a girlfriend quite difficult, unless she was extraordinary.
I do feel I made a heart connection last night though. I allowed energy to flow out through my heart. This is a new thing for me, which is a little scary, but which I recognize as important and good.
I am not feeling like philosophizing. I feel the emptiness of talk far more than I have before. God knows I will never shut up, but for now I am just trying to be present to my work and the people I encounter.
Politics, what can I say? Trump continues to be attacked on all sides. ANYBODY but him would have folded by now, and many continue to hope he will. But why would he? I think he LIKES good fights, and this is a GREAT fight. You risk big, you win big. That’s how he’s always played.
The dreams of true, deep change might be fading a bit as he gets corralled by everyone, but here is the thing: he continues to appoint judges, continues to reduce regulations, he pulled us out of Paris, continues to work to improve trade deals, is taking North Korea seriously, and basically will continue to kick ass in all sorts of ways that will never be reported or seen in this country, but which matter.
Nothing will change my views on Trump, in all likelihood, short of him starting to act like a pussy. He has done his level best to keep all his promises, but the fucking Congress refuses to cooperate, and with all the leaks he has had, it has been hard to conduct coherent policy of any sort.
We got three more years folks. Sooner or later, he will get the range and start firing for effect.