1) You can have sex with whomever you like but will only ever love one other person.
2) You can only have sex with one person, but you can live as many people as you like.
How might this even work?
Ponder, and see what pops out at you.
In essence, as I read this, what happened was Paris was taken over by terrorists, who declared themselves liberators, and all of their actions as thus inherently just. Marx used this event to formulate his infamous doctrine of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
What this meant forever after was that the least able, least competent, most inflexible, most violent people among a group of armed insurrectionists were empowered in theory, at the level of ideology, to pronounce the most insane ideas to be truth, and to treat anyone who disagreed as an enemy of progress and everything good.
Ponder the fact that the bourgeoisie has ever been the enemy of Communists. Why? Why is this so? Is it not a good thing to be middle class? Has it not been a goal for most people for most of human history to be physically comfortable, well fed, and safe? Why, then, do Communists hate them so much?
Because they are “inauthentic”? This is the core of their lunacy. These intellectuals literally conflate disagreeing with them with a sort of mental illness, with “false consciousness”. Thus, somebody who just wants enough to eat, a comfortable bed, and a roof with no leaks becomes an “enemy of the people”.
I don’t have time to delve more deeply into this right now. I will read this article in full tonight, and likely a few others, not from Wikipedia.
But these intellectual “ticks”, these preposterous leaps of unwarranted faith in their own goodness, wisdom and ability, are perennial among a certain sort of ludicrous people. And these people remain among us. They are common. They are outspoken. And they are in positions, even now, as absurd as it should be, of political power.
The final corruption of a political system happens pari pasu with the corruption of the judicial system, when a system of laws becomes nothing more than a system of suppression. The people who are favored can break any law they want, and those on the outside can be arrested and punished without breaking any law at all.
It is worth noting that totalitarian states don’t lie simply as a matter of policy. They lie because what they claim to be doing–protecting the freedom and dignity of the people, ensuring social justice, doing good things generally–is never what they are actually doing. They spout words like justice, but mean none of it. They protect their own asses, while amassing power and wealth.
These rape gangs in Britain are really quite awful. Nothing like them has ever emerged, to my knowledge, in Western society, at least not with the openness and pervasive acceptability which these groups seemingly have among Muslims in Britain. It is, I read, not uncommon to have 3 generations of men–the grandson, the father, and the grandfather–in the room raping these 15 year old girls in a single session. Hundreds of people might be–and seemingly have been–involved in these sorts of things. It is like a Kiwanis club, but for rapists.
Feeling an obsessive need to lie about failure is a mental illness. It is a Character Disorder, and in this case tantamount to sociopathy. This mental illness has, seemingly, taken hold of the British elites. One can only wonder where all their goodness has gone, if indeed it ever took hold at all.
But I’m sitting on my couch tonight, drinking, watching Captain America: Winter Soldier (and remembering that violent movies are not in general good for me), and it is all on the table. Maybe the atheists are right. I suppose I can accept all that.
But, logically, based on every piece of empirical evidence I have considered, or at least most of them, atheism, itself, is illogical.
But where does that leave us? Small children who hear voices may be right. African (and other) Shamans who claim schizophrenia and other psychoses are usually the result of malignant spirits are right.
We are, on this reading, surrounded with other spirits. We are, on this reading, spirits in a material world. We are approximately existing, existing out of habit, we are easily pulled out of our forms, and are, once this happens, glad in most cases to see a brighter, easier, happier world.
It is all so confusing. But I feel this confusion, in its own way, is beautiful, even intoxicating. Do you want to be one of these people who has a clear world, with everything fully explained, and all surprises mathematically eliminated? If so, our paths will never meet. I live, perhaps, in the mud. I live with the stupid, the mundane, the ridiculous.
So be it. My decision is made, even if I remember the possibility of other decisions.
Longing is a focus on what lies beyond reach. It can go one of two ways. The first, mature way, is to develop a plan to get what is so far away, by creating stages of possibility–concrete steps–each of which offers the possibility of gratitude and fulfillment. Longing is thus brought under control and turned into gratitude by concrete and purposive, incremental action.
But there is a second way, in which longing becomes an end in itself, when you learn to love the feeling of lack. I think the valorization of victimhood arises from this feeling. It is a longing you cannot possibly meet. It is a feeling of incompleteness, no matter where you go, or what you do. It is the Portuguese “Saudade”, which might for my purposes here be translated as “a gap”. It is, perhaps, a happiness in sadness. I can’t explain it, but I have felt it.
So much of true spirituality consists in the attainment of realistic objectives, actionable plans, concrete goals, purposive activity.
Particularly for those of us with primal wounds, it is easy to get caught up in dreams and fantasies. This is a detour from life. You can never get enough, if you have a hole in the middle, but perhaps the size of the hole shrinks with time, if you focus on getting and valuing what you can, in all the senses of getting.
All of our problems are easily solved. It simply requires the honest and unfettered work of men and women of good will.
Our chief problem is that we are not evolving morally with our technology. We seem to be becoming nicer, but harder, more tolerant, but less understanding. More free with our bodies, but increasingly chained in our minds.
The decisive shift we need to take to build a genuinely better world is to generalize mental and emotional health, to make it the default, to value it, to build it, and to PLAN to build it. We don’t need more things. We don’t seem some chimerical “equality”. We need to believe life has a purpose, that we can share in this purpose, that we belong, and the universe is interactive at its most basic level.
I think this is the truth.
My particular way is not easy. I don’t know if there are other, easier ways, but I haven’t found them yet.
I do seem to have a capacity to enter into hard places, and survive. I don’t know why I don’t die. I don’t know why I am still alive. But I am, and my work continues.
I fought, and I lost.
I stopped fighting, and I won.
Most human conflict begins with internal conflict, and internal conflict cannot be resolved externally. No amount of external violence–physical or emotional–can heal anyone.
How is it possible for someone to hate themselves? It can only happen through splitting, because presumably some other part does not want to be hated, if it is allowed to be honest.
What happens, I feel, is there is a pain which cannot be resolved, and which can only be externalized through violence (with emotional disconnection, as I have said, being a form of violence).
The resolution of the pain happens when you stop trying to fight it, when you throw up the white flag.
There is wisdom here somewhere, even if I am not expressing myself clearly, because these are intuitions I have not fully brought into my brain yet.