Now, difference has happened everywhere, I am sure. Within Native American tribes boys would become convinced they were girls. I am sure there was homosexuality. I am sure there were schizophrenics, and perhaps even manic-depressives, although that may be a disease of modern society. Garden variety neuroses were likely uncommon, but as a tribe, I’m sure they worked out ways of integrating, to varying degrees, all manners of difference which did not threaten violence to the tribe itself. If you simply have to accept a person, and not a principle–which is the core problem with mass society–then that is much easier. You just adjust your perceptual frame to include them, and figure out how they can be made to belong.
The thing with mass society is there are no tribes any more. Look at your neighborhood. View every dwelling in there as a cave. The people who live there–if you live in a city, in any event–leave in the morning, work somewhere, come home, and lock the door. They lock the door because they don’t trust the people around them. They don’t know who may just happen along. There are far, far too many people to keep track of, and all but the friendliest of them don’t even know their neighbors. After all, the neighbors will likely only be there until their property value swells and they cash out to move to the next step up. They are not committed to you or that place. Not in America, in any event.
And the value of big cities for “fuck ups”–I am not judging them, but I think this is a reasonable approximation of how they think society views them–is not that they belong, per se, so much as that their differences can be made to disappear. They vanish. Everything that made them stick out no longer matters.
But to the point, they have not integrated into a culture. They have not come to belong anywhere. The culture, therefore, becomes “culture without culture”. It becomes belonging with no standards. But, as I have pointed out before, if there are no standards, the sense of belonging, itself, must become suspect. And people sense this. They sense questionably personal loyalty.
All in all, I continue to believe that the best solution to our cultural problems is to make everything much smaller, to find ways to create small tribes which truly value loyalty and sincerity. I have proposed ways of doing this. It makes me dizzy thinking of the challenge, but I still think of it anyway.
City Lights, having been made a “historic landmark” by the city, is now Establishment, to some extent.
And I speculate that today, they are discussing Trump’s “treason” by meeting with Vladimir Putin. They are preaching about the patriotic duty of all citizens to accept at face value the stories told by our intelligence agencies. They support former CIA Director Brennan in his calls for a coup.
How far we have come.
To me, I thought many good things were starting in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. It was not unreasonable to want to be a non-conformist. It was not unreasonable for homosexuals to demand the right to fuck each other however they chose to, and to write about it.
But something went wrong somewhere. The people who were preaching freedom from censorship are now demanding it. The people who shouted out “Question Authority” are now demanding rote submission to it. The people who wanted everyone to have the right to think for themselves, and to live their lives as they saw fit are now lecturing us unceasingly about EVERYTHING. MY GOD IS THAT A FUCKING STRAW!!!! HOW DARE YOU!!!
The people who were fun, who wanted to live open and expressive lives, have now shrunk into small holes, and are doing their level best to pull the rest of us in there. No thank you.
I remain a conservative hippy. I see things my own way. Freedom is a necessity to realize our purpose here on earth. Some order and common sense is necessary to live in freedom.
And if you are shrieking at me, and telling me how to live my life, you have nothing in common with the best of the counter-culture, which was actually once a thing, before becoming monolithic, gray, and really really fucking boring, when not violent in roughly the same way, and with the same degree of prejudice, the KKK was with regard to blacks. Then, they are scary, but still boring. Do not look there for anything original, generative, or life affirming.
Here is one: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/clintons-emails-fbi-foreign-entity-gohmert/
Summary: “So, in short, one of the lead investigators in the Clinton email case apparently learned that a foreign entity was getting all Clinton’s emails — including many that contained classified information — and … did nothing.”
I will comment that within the laws of our nation, as they exist clearly and unambiguously, Hillary Clinton on Comey’s own admission committed at least 8 or so prosecutable felonies, even before we get to obstruction of justice and evidence tampering and contempt of Congress.
I have even seen the claim that Hillary NEVER used a State Department email address. Imagine what, then, must have passed through her private and illegal server, patently built to avoid Federal information disclosure guidelines.
Some of us refuse to listen. Let the rest of us listen more.
What I feel this morning is that with two narcissistic parents, logic alone dictates that I MUST have narcissistic tendencies myself. I was not taught nurturing and true kindness. And what I feel this morning is that the core FEELING at the center of a not-quite-malignant narcissism is the sense of no-self. I am not quite there. I do not quite have power over my actions. There is not a person quite there who would make any decision. I whip and beat myself, to survive, but it makes life unpleasant, and I would like life to be pleasant. True generosity flows from a feeling of abundance. It can come from no other place. God does not demand of us true self sacrifice, and most people who do sacrifice themselves, I think, do so out of habit, out of the feeling of shame that would overwhelm them if they did not. I think this is true of most soldiers, and no few wives of selfish men.
What I feel, now, is that this whole political conflict needs a new energy. We do need Trump going toe to toe with his countless critics, but for the rest of us internet warriors, and those among us who retain some ability to discuss politics around the dinner table, we need to adopt a spirit of non-violence. When they are violent, we need to be kind back. This is the only way. The actual physical violence has not broken out yet, but something needs to break the spell. Using the tactics and spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi before him, seems to me at this moment the most likely candidate.
So if you are arguing with someone, feel the spirit of Gandhi infuse you. When you get angry, when they provoke you, respond always with kindness, and–and I’ve never said this before–an optimism that one day soon they will see the light. Present facts as possible. Present arguments as possible, knowing in advance they will twist them, ignore them, and respond mainly with lies they have been told somewhere.
It occurs to me that chronic anxiety and low grade anger are extremely fertile soil on which to plant any seed of Agitation, and those emotions are fed exceedingly well in our modern age. An addiction to your iPhone alone will ensure they are present.
There is no benefit to feeding this. Let us all try and remember who we are. We are not primitive beasts locked in a primal struggle. We are noble by birth, and should act the part. This does not mean surrender. It means, rather, continual effort, but patient effort, and effort founded on a confidence of eventual victory.
We may not win. I’m not one to speak empty optimism, But if we ARE to win, this is, I feel strongly, how it will happen.
Who are these people who want us at war with one another? Besides things, besides gold and silver, what do they get? And why do they want it?
Man’s misery lasts a long time. The old adage was “all that glitters is not gold.” The new adage is “all that glitters IS gold.”
We know how to build happiness and lasting peace. Why can’t we? Why can’t we?
Johnson played a major role in the New Deal. In 1933 Roosevelt appointed Johnson to administer the National Recovery Administration (NRA). One author claims Johnson looked on Italian Fascist corporativism as a kind of model.[16] He distributed copies of a fascist tract called “The Corporate State” by one of Mussolini’s favorite economists, including giving one to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and asking her give copies to her cabinet.[17] The NRA involved organizing thousands of businesses under codes drawn up by trade associations and industries. He was recognized for his efforts when Time named him Man of the Year of 1933—choosing him instead of FDR.
What occurs to me today is to connect John Maynard Keynes, who was also a Fascist, with contemporary Democrats. No one who reads “An End to Laissez-Faire”, or the final chapter of this General Theory, can fail to recognize his Fascist ideas.
Here is Mussolini himself--and I may note that Fascist was a creed which was actually practiced by someone, somewhere, and has not always existed as a synonym for “someone who doubts me for reasons I cannot refute”–on Keynes;
Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.
All of these ideas are explored at much greater length at the end of the General Theory, to the extent that I have been arguing for some years (my piece is pages 28-46 here) that the entirety of his work was aimed at generating Fascism by stealth, by steadily increasing the government, by steadily providing more needed services, such as jobs, medical care, housing, and then making it impossible to get them any other way.
Here, though, is a new idea: LOGICALLY, if Keynes was a Fascist, and if prominent Democrats, such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich are championing his Demand Side economics, then it is a necessary conclusion that in the field of economics, the Democrats have become literally Fascist. And why not? Take away Hitler, and most of what is left they already agree with. They agree with a merger of the private sector and the State. They believe the State should provide everything, that the economy should depend on it, and that this arrangement, by minimizing any possibility of human error (outside the State, self evidently) makes life much happier, even if much, much less free. They are already Fascists without realizing it.
And even though the Democrats have historically been the anti-war party, my god look at all the saber rattling where Russia was concerned. The media said jump, and they said how high, how often, and do you need anything else, Sir? Some seem to have literally been contemplating a nuclear war over some Facebook ads. Craziness takes on its own energy after a while, I suppose.
But the opposite of Demand Side is Supply Side. Supply side is ECONOMICS, PERIOD. It is what people believed before Keynes, and what everyone after him with a shred of sense has also. Hazlitt described in the mid-40’s why it didn’t and couldn’t work, and history has borne him out again and again.
So the entire economic program of the Democrats consists in some malignant melding of socialism and Fascism, and this is no exaggeration. This is stating the case clearly.
But even though I admire the principled stands both Paul’s take on most issues–even when I disagree with them, as happens much more often with Ron–it takes a ego the size of Jupiter to even think about taking on EVERYONE, which is the task of being a non-conforming President as it has evolved.
Ponder that our last two candidates–Mitt Romney and John McCain–have rolled over and THEY ARE NOT EVEN PRESIDENT. Nobody was putting pressure on them. They rolled over just in case. It probably took hours of convincing and getting hit with 10-15 advisers, telling him how badly he was hurting himself politically, to talk Trump into his “double negative” recantation.
It takes someone with both balls and media savvy to even think about taking on this monster. And we are seeing this monster. It has revealed its enormous eyes and enormous teeth. It is not hiding, not for anyone who still retains the capacity to even begin to see what is in front of them.
I think Tucker Carlson’s take on this is spot-on:
It is easy to be seduced over time into a new one, perhaps. Our shadow rulers know enough to always give people a choice of propagandas. But this one, right now, is omnipresent, unavoidable, and so blatantly full of bullshit that I wonder how people who call themselves sane fall for it.
Trump just needs to keep being Trump. There was no misstep, no error of judgment (unless it is true he approved Rosenstein’s timing, but everybody fucks up sometimes), and meeting with Putin was the right thing to do.
And if it is true that $400 million of illicit money was money laundered into this country by our intelligence agencies, as Putin alleges, then a swift and devastating counterattack should be launched at the earliest possible moment.
I continue to indulge in likely pointless political posts, because the future matters to me. I continue to nourish the hope I have influence somewhere, to some extent. So many good things are possible, but so many evil and just thoughtless, stupid human beings, continue to seek to destroy it. That is how I see it, and my reasons I share.
In important respects, it is an idolatry, where the idol is the mind in place of perception. It is a cruel and loveless world, precisely because in the only terms it cares about, it defines itself as kind and caring.
I see far too many psychopaths wandering our streets, speaking loudly on the internet, preaching from positions of power. I fear the future, when there is so much insanity.