Month: March 2018

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-amartya-sen-remains-the-centurys-great-critic-of-capitalism

I read this, and would have commented there, but of course they did not offer a place to make comments.

In broad stroke, most modern intellectual call “Capitalism” literally everything they don’t like about the world.  Every visionary fantasy they can concoct from their places of muted emotional capacity, substandard social integration, profound moral stuntedness, and functional irresponsibility they claim is made impossible by our “economic system.”

This basic, obvious fact is largely made invisible by their unwillingness–indeed, inability, from several generations or more of lost practice–to speak clearly, and in ways amenable to concrete, gradualistic policy.

India was socialist from its independence to the early 1990’s.  During that time it stagnated. Starvation was common.  Horrific poverty was endemic. 

Then they got smart, and India has one of the fastest growing economies in the world.  Its people are hungry now for innovation, scientific prowess, and earned national pride.

Inequality is a moral issue only for imbeciles.  Resentment, yes, is a moral problem, best dealt with on the moral plain.  Trying to make the world fit your notions of how it should be–when done with no sense of empathy, connection, or sense of what it means to be human–is inherently vicious, violent, and the progenitor of horrors, pain, and mass death.  We have seen this over and over and over.  But the keepers of history refuse to learn the lesson.

Free markets, the right to private property, and enforceable contract law are merely economic innovations which make mass wealth and technological development possible.  They say nothing about what makes life worthwhile, nor should they.  You cannot make moral critiques of an economic system without having something intelligent to say about what we should DO with the money, and to do that, you need some sound point to human life.  These idiots never provide that.  They circle around, assume it, ignore it, but never get to it.

It is odd that this character would have been connected to Tagore.  I have been reading Gitanjali daily.  Tagore speaks of God, of the inherent value and wisdom of hard work, of grace.  He speaks of a world where the poor and rich are equal, and can both live in dignity and peace.  His is a world very far from the Procrustean bed of orthodox socialism which, valuing nothing, demands we all be equally debased and defrauded of any chance of realizing our soul’s destiny.

It is a truism in Spiritualistic thinking that people–more precisely, the spirits which animate them, and which survive the cessation of their bodily functions–exist at different levels of “vibration”, which is to say energy.  More pure spirits exist at a finer level, and bad human beings at a very low level.

It would seem reasonable to infer from this that one could say that there exist many simultaneous worlds, within our own world.  If you were to place a filter over the planet, showing only persons of low vibration, or high vibration, many of us would disappear.  The bad people exist in their own world, in some respects, even though they interact outwardly with everyone.  So, too, the good ones.

This is the value of this world: it is the great meeting of the worlds, which otherwise exist separately.  Hell exists, in many forms, in this world.  So too does Heaven.

I was thinking of the scene in the final episode of “Stranger Things”, where 11 is calling for God, asking “him” (I’m not politically correct, but I think it is reasonable to assume God has neither a penis nor a vagina) where He is.  This is Hell: that place without God, where He cannot be found.  It is, to reference what I think is more or less orthodox Christianity, separation from God.

We might think of 11 as an angelic being who gave the scientists what they really wanted: access to Hell.  She channeled who they really were, in their hearts.  She reflected, in what she created, the spiritual level of that place.

I continue to wonder how we can be so mad, so crazy.  We are happy to spend $200 million on a movie, millions of dollars on political candidates, yet places like the Windbridge Institute have trouble keeping their doors open, and remain largely unknown to everyone.

There are some of us who know we are crazy.  Most of us are completely blind, though, in what I might term the insanity of false sanity.

I think one of the important roles of culture is that of creating a larger sense of self, of being able to see something which will endure when one is gone, which is vastly less subject to the ravages of at least immediate time.

As thinkers have both been commenting, and helping, in turn, to ensure, we live not just in the contingent world which has always been the human condition, but a world as well where our assumptions about tomorrow are necessarily guesswork.  Who, other than greedy psychopaths, really WANT self driving cars?  Robots to do our work, leaving us free–for what, exactly?  Sex, sex, and more sex?  I have never had the sense any of these Silicon Valley moguls was seeking to create the space for Americans to write great novels, or paint the next Sistine Chapel.  The very manic energy with which we pursue our work precludes nearly all forms of greatness outside of formal scientific, and perhaps business, innovation.

It is an insane ludetic system, where everyone is looking at everyone else, trying to “win”, without asking basic questions about the nature of, and value of, the game itself.

I feel strongly it will one day bear fruit, that it will have been worth it, but for right now I feel myself plugged into our Zeitgeist, and all I feel in unpleasant electrical current, that flows through me, that feels unstoppable, unquenchable, like mad horses racing to the horizon for no reason other than a mania for movement.  They can’t stand still.  There is no peace.  LSD and meditation serve to further the “success” of the mania, rather than calming and enlightening and quieting. You microdose to beat the bastards before they beat you.  There is nothing larger.

I finished “Stranger Things”, and will comment that it could quite easily be seen as a splitting of the American psyche.  The demonic lives in a parallel dark world which continues to prey on this world, which is a threat to this world, but which cannot be seen.

When did we last engage in rational dialogue?  When could we last meet together as unapologetic American patriots who disagreed on means, but not ends?  When could we last love one another, while disagreeing strenuously on the nature and role of government? It was not later than the early 1980’s, I don’t think, although the whole process has been so gradualistic that it is hard to place an exact moment on the continuum of sliding clearly separating one moment from another.

I see people blame Newt Gingrich.  This is likely not entirely wrong, but it seems to me all he did was point out and crystallize a large gap which had been evolving and growing for a long time. He made publicly real what had been latent but still real, for a very long time.

I have to say that finding peace of mind while remaining fully conscious is a miracle of sorts.  But miracles do happen.  This is the value of the notion and history of saints.

Often, the small things ARE the big things.

I have said this many times, in many ways.  Here is one more.

I will add, this applies on many levels.

You know, in the early 1980’s, we were reeling from a number of things.  Another, which is more or less specifically referenced, is the Church hearings, when we learned that most of our major Federal agencies had been, to greater and lesser extents, corrupted.  This included the FBI, the IRS, and most importantly, perhaps, the CIA.

They explicitly reference MK-Ultra in the series.  Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

I want to be clear: nobody denies that these programs existed.  Nobody says they did not torture, give drugs to, and otherwise abuse many people with the stated aim of breaking their minds.  All that is claimed is that the program stopped in the mid-seventies.

But why assume this to be true?  Can you imagine what they must be capable of now?  They can “drive” mice NOW through implanted electrodes.  And the Pentagon can’t–or won’t–account for at least 8 trillion dollars.

A trillion here and a trillion there, and the money–and capabilities–start to add up.  Our government is completely out of control.

Stranger Things is in fact based on an actual US military base, about which very odd allegations have been made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montauk_Project 

Culturally, the relocation to the Midwest made sense, but they apparently considered keeping the name Montauk.

And I continue to wonder why Jeff Sessions–who in my mind I have taken to comparing to Elmer Fudd–remains in his job.  Most of what Trump was elected to do, Sessions is in charge of, and Sessions might as well have been hired by Hillary to take the wind out of everyone’s sails long enough to get Trump out of office.  His behavior would be indistinguishable from what it is now. He failed to block Mueller’s appointment, he won’t fire Rod Rosenstein, and a year and change into Trump’s Presidency he seems to have done jack shit about Hillary and the Clinton Foundation.

And can’t SOMEBODY be held accountable for losing a sum of money larger than the GDP of much of the rest of the world combined?  It is unbelievable.

People are in shock.  This is the explanation.  Rather, they were in shock 30 years ago, and have not healed or reconciled the cognitive dissonance we have been asked to live with, the trust we are supposed to have in our government, compared to its actual performance and history.

Edit: imagine if this money had been spent on human good, on mastering meditation, on documenting and making public psi experiments, on figuring out how to cultivate happiness and emotional well being, on documenting life after death.

Why is there so much evil?  It is an old question, but it is a perennial one.

I have done my first binge watching: I watched the first three episodes of “Stranger Things” back to back.  They make it easy, it turns out, by setting up the next one automatically.  I missed the whole Game of Thrones thing–I haven’t watched one of them yet, although I might when the last season comes out–but I had heard Stranger Things is another highly popular show.  And of course, I want to be hip.  Just kidding: if I have found it, it means the cool kids have already moved on.

I wanted to make a couple comments.  I can’t help it, or at least I choose not to.  The words and thoughts flow automatically, and they hurt me less if I put them down somewhere.

If you boil this show down, as it exists at the end of Episode 3, you have a kidnapped kid, and a severely traumatized kid.  If we deduct the magic and the monsters, what you have is a pedophile ring, and, in the case of the missing friend, a rapist/serial killer.

The timing of this show is significant.  I was very roughly the age of the main kids in the early 1980’s.  Back then, we didn’t know about child kidnappings.  Parents were not terrified the moment their kid was late for dinner.  We didn’t know about serial killers.  It was a much more innocent time.

And in this show, you can kind of feel the shadow falling on this idyllic, middle American town, which we can easily enough see as a stand-in for the nation as a whole, which we might say lost its virginity in the 1970’s, and was in the 1980’s trying to come to grips with it, and failing.  I don’t think I can say our confidence was shattered, but I think we both realized that monsters lurked among us, causing everyone, but particularly parents, to feel unsafe; and I think the seeds were being planted for the wholesale revulsion with regard to America and its ideals that we see on the streets, in the colleges, and even among senior, powerful politicians today.  It was very small then.

And whatever this growth is in the secret lab, I expect it, too, to grow.  A bit was found in the shed where Will disappeared.  I suspect that will grow too. The cancer escaped.  It walked in middle America and it bred.

There is a lot of reason to look backwards, to the 60’s, the 80’s, the 50’s.  To the Wild West and its clear and inexorable laws of survival.

I see this traumatized girl and I feel that pain.  Deduct her magic powers, and she was abused beyond her capacity for endurance.  That is why she can’t talk.  There exist people in this world capable of such evil, capable not just of doing it, but enjoying it.  That is why they do it.  Sadism is the act of planting your pain in others, watching it grow, then killing it.  And the physical murder of the “host” for your pain is not necessary: enough that the light disappear from their eyes.

I feel this voice in my head (not literally!!!  My reality testing is dismally good) saying I need therapy.  What I need is love.  This is what we all need.  And therapists are, more or less, trained NOT to give love.  It is an abuse of transference.  Our mental health profession considers it a matter of the utmost importance that therapists not give patients what they most desperately need.  It is a part of their ethical code.  And so elaborate games evolve, dribs and drabs of something mostly like love escape anyway, with good therapists, who cannot help but feel compassion and genuine concern.

And so I look at my crushed self, and I look at this world, and I cannot find a place where I can safely rest.

But it has always been so, in some ways.  What is new in me? 

And I feel that deep within us is an instinct which says that you have to give in order to get.  If you need love, give love.  This is good strategy.  If you need safety, give safety.  Worry about the world.  Fix the world.  Create a safe world, then you will be given safety.

But the evil out there is so deep, and so dark, who can feel sanguine about such a project?  All that is possible is to lie to oneself, and/or make a list of the long number of good things in the world, and the days where everything was fine.  Most days are fine for most of us.  No evil visits us.  No monster is lurking in the dark.

But for those who NEED TO KNOW the world is safe, for the traumatized who more than anything want to avoid that horror again, it is very difficult to escape remembering the evil out there.

This is the root of bringing it in.  This is the root of horror movies.  It can’t get to you if it is already there.  It is an adaptive strategy, in some ways, which works to reduce some anxiety.  But it also darkens everything, and permanently limits how high you can rise.

Today I was cleaning my kitchen, vacuuming my floor. I  am trying to cook more, to improve my diet, to eat more vegetables, to better control the exact ingredients I put in my body, and some part of me feels it is useless to do such things, with evil in the world.  The evil always wins, it seems.  There is no point fighting it.

But this logic makes self care an act of rebellion, of self assertion, of self evolution.  All the little things are not little things. I feel this now.

Many of my days feel like waves are sweeping over me.  I cannot control them, and I do feel much of what I feel truly is outside of me, in the air, in the water, in the light, and in the darkness.  We all exist in fields, and some of us are much more sensitive to them than others.

Do what you can, though, and forget the rest, remains good advice.  I cannot fight all the battles of the world.  It is battles all the way to the horizon and beyond.  Better to keep a clean home, sip tea sometimes, perhaps tend a wounded bird from time to time, and do my best to smile at strangers.

That is the state of my mind today, March 3, 2018, a day which is flowing as I type, and which will never come again.  I will never see it again, and neither will you.  There is something important in this thought.

I finally watched Katyn, the movie about the massacre most people have never heard of.  It starts in a very evocative place, with two groups of refugees meeting on a bridge, one side saying the Germans are coming, the other side saying the Communists are coming.  It is impossible to know what to do.  And there was no right answer, likely even for Jews.

What they make clear is that Poland was never liberated.  World War 2 never really ended for them, until 1990, or thereabouts.  One fascistic regime was replaced by another, and as I have often said, I consider Communism vastly more evil than Nazism.  Nazis just wanted your body.  The Communists want your soul.

And you UNDERSTAND, watching this, that the whole enterprise is like a nation being run by one of those sociopaths you have met at one time or another, who does whatever they want, then lies about it, convincingly, and never shows the slightest sign of even caring what the truth is.

 I think this should be required viewing for high school age kids. It balances the overabundance of anti-Nazi movies–not that there is not a lot to hate there–relative to the much larger, much longer term, and much nastier crimes of Communists the world over.

I think we are wired to be present to the past, always.  We are in the moment, to be sure, but our sense of self, our grounding, our “given-ness” stems from our connection to, our open connectedness and presence to, the past.

And I am hard pressed to find in my mind a time when such a sustained attack was waged, not on specific cultures, which of course is more or less the continual story of history and presumably prehistory, but on culture itself, on the notion that shared thoughts and behaviors can and should be passed down and accepted by all of us in such a way that we find non-ironic, non-contingent connections with one another.

It is an odd fact of our time that the people talking about modernity are in the main the ones creating it.  Those who indulge in “cultural criticism”, in the Western spirit of self-improvement, are doing so in such a way that the destroy the very basis of their activity.  As I have said, it is the snake eating itself, all in the name of a progress which disappeared with the tail.

When the past is too strong, the present becomes a ghost.  But without the past, everything stretches into ocean.  We live in a world–perhaps have always lived in a world, I don’t know–with ghouls everywhere.  And most of them are promising to save us.

Please forgive me this seriousness, though.  I had a bad night last night.  I may or may not talk about it.

My daily prayer is that I hold my place in the line, that I do my job.  Let them overwhelm me, kill me, destroy me, while I face them.  I ask for no more.

It is simple enough.