Month: November 2017

I am struggling, at the moment, to understand in my own heart how people shift permanently into ugliness, into perennial and purposeful meanness.  It is not my sense that most non-psychopaths are cruel to everyone all the time.  Even the meanest spirits have moments, I think, of genuine generosity.

But many people are hostile to humanity most of the time.  They swim in different waters, or perhaps are held captive under the sea.

Babies are born with hope, I suppose.  By nature they suppose the best is possible, and for some, life–which is to say the people around them–teaches them to close themselves off, to suppress their human instincts towards sociality, towards caring, towards tenderness, and to both give and receive honest and heartfelt love.

What is the point of no return?  Is there no hope for some people? 

To be clear, I feel there is a great deal of hope for me, every reason for hope.  I am confronting the deepest realities within me, and although the process and the vistas are unpleasant, SEEING what was there but hidden is invaluable and liberating.

But I have some specific people in mind, people I am witnessing going through changes, struggling with things in their lives which, compounded with what they brought from childhood, might sink them.

How do we turn evil to good?  Perhaps this is the best way of putting this inchoate struggle I feel within me now.  I often feel motion deep in the water, and it sometimes takes me a very, very long time to see what it is, and what it means.

Can there be a more profound question, though?  Do we not all want to belong, to be in a shared humanity, and is it not those among us who cannot share this longing, because they don’t feel it is possible, who make it most hard to achieve this aim?

How do we save the lost?  How can we bring them back, or show them a path home?  These are important questions the modern world has done an exceptionally incompetent job of answering. 

As usual, these things wrack me with pain and make me cry, but I’m long used to it.  I can take much more than most people.  I have an “unnatural” emotional pain tolerance.  That comment by a therapist remains one of the best compliments I have ever received.

Paul Johnson, in his “History of the Jews”, uses the phrase “ethical monotheism” frequently.  Or so I recall.  I have no editor, nor a desire for one.

In any event, the intent is to point to a single law, a single standard of behavior, a single set of moral precepts, a very specific set of rules to live by which govern everyone who submits to their dominion, or who is born into it and does not openly rebel.

Necessarily, such a mindset creates clear chasms between those holding those views, and everyone else.  And as early as the Roman times, one sees anti-Semitism originating not in a rejection of the Jews moral code, but from their rejection of everyone else as inferior, and their corresponding cultural insularity.

Now, I proposed the term henomoralism some time ago.  I had meant that one could change one’s dominant value based on circumstances, but the Greek implies more closely that one has a relatively set value system, but is open to those of others.  Henomoralism–heck, perhaps I need another word, Henoculturalism–is the root of a truly Liberal order. 

It seems to me that based on our past, our religious beliefs, our DNA, and overall cultural system, we tend to adopt relatively fixed value systems.  For me, honesty, loyalty, courage and imagination are all very important values.  Other people will vary to differing extents, and this is OK.

How is this:  Ethical polymoralism?  The notion that we can have differing values, the same way some nations, like India, are quite happy to accept any number of other gods, with some Hindus adding Christ to their shrines without any contradiction or problem.

All this, as is often the case, is me meandering out loud to make one point: what if I asserted our primary ETHICAL duty is to learn how to relax our physical bodies in such a way that we also relax our minds and emotional chatter completely.  Our duty is to relax.  Have you heard this? 

But ponder this: in my own view, honest morality is situational.  True moral decisions are local, necessary, and imperfect.  This is my code, my way of viewing it.  A further stipulation is that higher morality requires higher wisdom.  You have to know yourself well enough to wish good for all people, including yourself, and you have to be smart enough to see what, working systemically and over time, will work best to produce the result you truly want, because you know yourself (as opposed to the result you say you want because it brings you attention and chicks).

Self knowledge proceeds most truly from deep relaxation.  In my own experience, things come to you.  Large patterns of frozen blindness dissolve, and you suddenly see things you have been doing and saying and thinking all your life in a completely new light.  You wake the fuck up.  And this process can happen over and over and over again.  This is Kun Zhi, as the Tibetans put it. 

I have discussed this before, but perhaps the language I use will be slightly different.  Within my own practice of Kum Nye, there are recognized three levels of relaxation.  The first is the superficial one you get with a good massage, or light meditation, or just a pleasant day and a couple good drinks with friends on the beach.

The second is where the turbulence begins.  It is where shit starts flying at you, where what was attached and frozen comes loose and knocks you in the head.  This is like a pattern of rough seas you have to transit to get to the calm on the other side.  Using this metaphor, I suppose the first level is staying in port, and never going anywhere but onto the ship.

But the third level is where interesting things happen, or so I read.  I would assert it is our ethical duty to seek this third level, because then it becomes possible to be truly intelligent.  This is where meditation–which I believe is better translated “concentration” in most relevant languages–begins, in my understanding of this tradition.

I have from time to time said something like “Culture is the Emergent Property of historical and shared solutions to the problems of how to create and distribute meaning, power, wealth, and truth.”

Most socialists, to make a blindingly obvious point, which nonetheless remains completely invisible to them, conflate the economic and meaning realms, such that they assume with no justification that changing the economic system will inherently change the meaning system for the better.  This is stupid.  It has always been stupid, and will always be stupid, because the systems are logically separate, and require individual attention.

When impossible, socialism has often come to be seen as an attractive alternative to everything anyone doesn’t like about the world.  It is a solution, they feel–no thinking is involved here–to the problems of human cruelty, poverty, and disillusionment.

As a word, culture has come under attack by the Gramscians as an “instrument of power”.  That their own claim to power rests on nothing but a markedly inferior version of the institutions they want to attack is, again, invisible to them.  The whole thing is lunacy, top to bottom.  Because it does not withstand even rudimentary critical scrutiny, their solution is to simply call the process of coherent thinking racist.  As I have said often, this is a snake eating its own tail.  It cannot end well, and certainly not in any lasting amelioration of any true human suffering.

But here is the point I wanted to make, the rest being prelude: culture as an emergent property of human interactions represents the possibility of reliable human connection.  When western intellectuals are discussing ideas, those ideas are their connection.  The process of discussion is their connection.  When Africans are dancing in the streets, the joys they feel in old rhythms, and old songs, is their connection.  Things we all know, processes we all know–and know that everyone around us knows–are culture. If you can predict how someone will behave based on cultural conditioning, you have a culture.  When you cannot, you do not.

The creed of Individualism has led to nearly everything generally good about the world.  It depends on the notion–the empirically obvious notion–that there can be no locus of ideas or understanding but the individual, and that any one individual can be smarter than any swarm of human insects who want to scream the contrary.

At root, this is perhaps the most obvious point that Ayn Rand wanted to make, and frankly needed to make.  All our progress–at least materially, with the spiritual still being up in the air, and this post itself intended as a contribution–has depended on bold people being empowered to discover new things, using a method which in principle allows dissent and negation.

One of the few lasting impressions David Hume made on me was his suggestion that for all we know, the universe was designed by a committee.  It is both humorous, and provocative in an interesting way.  No committee can ever be smarter than the smartest person in it, which might be stated as a general rule, and most committees bring the smartest person in the room down to their level, rather than the contrary.  This might be stipulated as a corollary.  Thus, a committee is equal to the average intelligence in the room, and in most cases will not rise higher. 

The globalist want a world of committees.  They are anti-Individualists.  They rightly view all independent thinkers as enemies of a system which will abhor and punish them.

In the past, I have proposed as an alternative to a global technocratic uni-culture the development with time of countless subcultures, rooted in local circumstances, with many places needing nothing more or less than a new appreciation of where they come from, and the value of what they have been given.

The nihilists tell us nothing matters.  If this is true, then one culture is as good as any other, including American suburban culture from the 1950’s.  They have no principled basis for opposing this idea.  It is merely a CULTURAL fixation among them, one rooted on habitual opposition to everything coherent, reasonable, good, and capable of evolving into something even better.

We are not who we were in the 1950’s.  This says something about us.  Many Muslims very much ARE who they were 1,000 years ago, and want the world to join them.  That says something too.

https://www.infowars.com/eu-committed-to-opening-borders-to-75-million-turkish-citizens-as-soon-as-possible/

I was dreaming last night of being a modern German, watching your culture and way of life end, and end not by conquest by a superior power, but by simply ceasing, as a nation, to care for the work of existence; to cease doing even the work of maintenance, much less creation.

To be sure, many German scientist are doing interesting things.  But are their best thinkers TRULY envisioning a better future, or even a future that looks like the present?

I was talking with an Italian woman the other day, whose brother is still in Italy, and he is telling her she would not recognize her old home.  The immigrants keep coming in waves in boats, and nobody really stops them, and the first things they want are a phone, a paycheck, and government housing.

What part of “you can’t do everything for everybody forever” ever stopped being obvious, common sense?

The overall scheme seems to be clear enough.  Most of the world is poor.  If they do nothing but move somewhere like America they will improve their living standard considerably.  But if there are not enough jobs, they go on welfare.  Wherever they come from, they have typically voted for socialism in some form all their lives.  If you are poor, you vote for the people who promise you free shit, even if they can’t deliver it.  You vote every election like you are buying a lottery  ticket, hoping one day it will be true.  And like the Venezuelans, you keep doing this even as things start to fall apart, even when the modest existence you had ceases to be possible, and you fall from poverty to outright hunger and then starvation.  The lesson is never learned, not least because far too people are speaking of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and far too few people are listening in any event.

But the morally and intellectually bankrupt elites of the West–almost certainly in collusion with the Communist Chinese and their ilk around the world–think they have found in the idea of the CONTROL a global government can obtain a purpose for their otherwise useless existences.

To get a global government all you have to do is change the voting patterns of perhaps 20 industrialized nations by overwhelming them with parasites, who will reenact the voting patterns of their home countries, and invariably default to those who promise them free shit.  In other words, you import and subsidize mediocrity, all while watching gleefully as they reproduce like rabbits, while those who hold any residual attachment to the values which made Western civilization the default model the world over disappear.

In Europe, you use the EXCUSE of a war to import millions, many of whom are just looking for free shit, and European tits to squeeze.  In America, of course, you just pretend we don’t have a southern border, that we have no poverty and unemployment at all, and that the rights of people who came here illegally are exactly the same as those who have lived and worked and died here for generations.

Obviously, the sense that there is a WE in contrast to a THEY is inimical to this project, which is why they have to condemn “nationalism” so much.

In America, our nationalism is not racial.  It is rooted in a sense of a shared attachment to a LAW, which in this sense makes us a bit like the Jews, who found some union in extreme diversity.  Our law is the best ever created to govern a nation.  I can and would defend this notion at length.

Hence the need to attack our law.  The need to attack what few residual holidays we have and care about, like Christmas and Thanksgiving.

The whole thing is founded in darkness, in nihilism.  Globalism is a religion for those who believe nothing.  It is not a force for good, or even for survival, if by survival we include the provision for something approaching dignity and freedom.

This is a slow motion trainwreck, which all the nations and peoples affected can still do something about.  It is not too late.  But paralysis and wishful thinking will undoubtedly prove fatal to all of us.

Do you know why Mark Zuckerberg wants a universal living wage?  Because he is doing is level best to eradicate most of the jobs in this and every other developed country with robots and artificial intelligence.

Why?  I don’t know.  I can’t speak to the minds of delusional sociopaths.  He has plenty of money, and on some level he has to know his plan can’t but work cultural and psychological mass destruction.

I have very few positive memories of my childhood, but there are a few things.  One was reading comic books.  I have toyed now and again with the idea of revisiting them, to see if the feeling can be rekindled.  It is a bit childish, of course, but lord knows I would have plenty of company.

And I was looking at some in the bookstore the other day, then it hit me: what I want is a feeling, and that feeling can be had without comics.  It is the feeling of the transcendent, of the possible.

And it hit me that this feeling is, in a very small way, related to that of religious awe.

I have on several occasions read of Hindus who think of their gods like super heroes.  I think he said this in Life of Pi.  And it hit me that it goes both ways: in some respects, comics provide an ersatz, or weakened spirituality for those who read them.  They provide amazement, ideals, the attainment of the impossible.

Humans are meaning making creatures.  We have deep seated instincts, of which sex is perhaps the most vulgar, even if it can be made powerful and good.

I will note my notion of Qualitative Repression, which is the process not of suppressing what is ugly because it is socially unacceptable, but what is beautiful and also socially unacceptable.

Some rebellions are necessary for beauty, even if some rebellions breed nothing but ugliness.

Who are you, and what are you doing, are two questions which must be answered prior to any and all attempts at “moral judgement”.  Those who see tend to do good, and those who are blind tend to render ill to all.

I watched Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” today, and could not escape the sense that what I was witnessing was, in some measure, the drama of the 20th century.

Not only does he never, as the movie notes state, “judge” the perpetrators of really what amount to stupid crimes, but he seems, through the music and overall tone, almost to admire them, almost to wish to be them, almost to wish he, too, could run amok, and leave this pedestrian, predictable, world behind.

It is worth noting that the most important and emphatic early support the Nazis got was among German students, who were studying at what were at the time the best universities in the world.  Our Ph.D system is based on German models, and as Allan Bloom discusses at length in his magnum opus, much of the angst and confusion we see even today is Germanic in origin.

These students wanted lives of meaning and excitement.  They wanted to reject the bourgeois mindset, and set out upon adventures, upon world conquering, upon great risk and great reward, and this is what Hitler promised them.

The Communists promise no less.  They had to compete for the affection of Germans, and largely lost since the concept of Kultur was deeply favorable to the Nazis.  But the underlying emotional longing is the same.

I do not think it overstating the case to say that much of the idiocy that happens in our universities is an intellectual reaction to an emotional problem, which is the sanitary, safe, predictable nature of the world we have built.  This applies even to the cause of safe spaces, which for the time being are anathema to most traditional Americans, and thus revolutionary.

Anything that pushed the buttons of “ordinary” people must be good, these people reason.  Martin Sheen, obviously, is a paradigmatic Leftist. He also starred in a sympathetic movie about a mass murderer.

The problem, the deep problem, is how to soften the tough, leathery hides of our sensory and emotional perception, how to learn to see the world as beautiful, how to feel kinship with the natural world, how to leave behind complete safety, and to feel the excitement of the wild animal.  Nothing in our educational system teaches this.  Nothing in our churches teaches this. 

So I say again: Kum Nye, in my view, really is the missing piece in Western culture.  I am an enthusiast by nature, and prone to making exaggerated claims.  Perhaps I am here, too.

But I am conversant with the currents of philosophy, have degrees in religion, am widely read in psychology, and watch and interact with people from all walks of life every week.  Nothing better–with the exception of combining it with Neurofeedback–has yet crossed my path.

What makes the tiger feel alive is not the kill, but the heightened sensations which attend it, the need for vigilance, alertness, and following connection with all the senses.

On a related note, I was pondering the other day that calling someone a “lion” is really not a particularly large compliment.  Lions hunt creatures weaker than themselves.  The true animal heroes are the smaller ones, like mongooses, which pick and win more fair fights.

But then I started reading up on the Tibetan notion of this whole thing, and they make an interesting point: as the apex (in most cases, although hippoes and others can sometimes best them in some cases in my understanding) of the food chain, lions are RELAXED.  They are not afraid.  This, indeed, is valuable, which makes the symbol valuable, when interpreted correctly.

I have a little ceremony I do each morning.  I find it congenial, and improved it spontaneously in a small way this morning.

I had read some time ago of some Tibetan who like to put a pinch of tea in a pot, and pour it out into a cup, to the point of overflowing.  These are blessings.

I thank God for all that I have, and I try to see it as I do so.  Running water, heat, air conditioning, sufficient food, varieties of food, clean water, health, a bed, a blanket, a sense of physical safety: the possible list is long. 

Today I added: and I thank you for what good may come my way today.  I like this.  It sets a tone of expectation, of looking, of anticipatory gratitude.

Then I take a small piece of a flower from a flowering plant I keep, which has purple blossoms, and has done a fantastic job of staying in bloom for at least 4 months, and float it on the water, and ask for the wisdom and perception to see and appreciate the beauty that floats by me in this life.

Finally, I light a small tea candle, and ask for the wisdom and courage to be a light in this world.

It is congenial.  It is my approach, but something like it, I think most people will find useful in the remembrance of the good, which cannot but drive out, or at least reduce, the terrors and anxieties of the present and past.

Uniquely among emotional pains–or so it seems to me at this moment before I drink my first coffee–confusion is avoidable through a simple expedient: unwarranted assumptions and unwarranted confidence in those assumptions.

Don’t want to feel confused?  Just assume you are always right, or at least right, here, 100%, beyond any possibility of doubt.

It is perhaps the case that much of human misery comes from the simplicity of this exercise.

I am feeling confusion in my dreams.  Where most of my dreams before were running, fighting, or enduring, now no one is attacking me. I am on journeys, with people I have known, in places which are unfamiliar, and which change spontaneously in strange ways.

If I have not said this before, though, let me say it now: the path to wisdom leads straight through confusion.

If it is completely comfortable, completely easy, it is not the right path.

https://youtu.be/SF6I5VSZVqc

I agree with this guy 100%.

There is a popular t-shirt with a picture of Christ saying “I never said that”.  Much of Christianity, in my view, falls under that heading.

No sane person, studying the history of Christianity, can be anything but nauseated at much of its history.  Obviously, I am not and never have been one to also overlook the good it has done, but my goodness, I have images floating in my mind of churches filled with women and children being burnt to the ground over minor points of theology, and well constructed rain gutters literally flowing with human blood.

This before we even get to the Inquisition, the Reformation, the burning of “witches”, and everything else.

This guy puts it great, though: the goal is to become human, to find your spark, to find what connects you to God, what attracts you to the light, what enables goodness to shine, what makes you happy to work for everything beautiful.  These are all worth dying for repeatedly.