Month: July 2018

A friend of mine pointed out the other day that a common feature of narcissists is grandiosity, which can manifest as a feeling both of being a unique genius and of always being right.  She was saying this in response to a particular political discussion I was having with someone, which was ridiculous and useless.

God knows there has been no shortage of commentary on this blog about narcissism, but that still struck me strangely, with regard to this particular person we both know but who I had never considered a narcissist.

And pondering all this, along with some other things going on, it HIT ME that every idiot you meet and interact with is giving you a huge opportunity to disinfect yourself of stupidity.  When you see someone do something stupid, ask yourself: is that in me too?  If their thinking is confused, ask yourself, HOW is it confused?  Why?  How can I take this thing apart and look at the engine, and see things the way they see them?  How can I replicate this belief system?

Obviously, some humility is always warranted, even if sometimes you still need to assume you are right for practical reasons.  But this would apply even to things like the older woman yesterday I was yelling at in the road, who I was giving a huge amount of space to merge, and even hitting my brakes, but who seemingly couldn’t even see me. (Especially when driving, it really is true sometimes that no good deeds go unpunished).

But if I replicate her, I’m not in a hurry.  And if I’m not in a hurry, then I’m not yelling.  And if I’m not yelling, then the day is better.  If I can get my pride out of the way–and where does this assumption come from that people should be smart, and drive exactly like I do?–then she actually has something to teach me.  To be clear, it was very bad driving, but she never knew she pissed me off.  I am the only one who suffered.  It may not be that she was the smart one, but it sure as hell wasn’t me either.

This is an interesting idea: use every annoying, emotionally shallow or stupid person you meet to examine yourself, and ask how much of them is in you.  What logical errors are they committing which you have committed too?  If they are simply being lazy, can you honestly say you are always diligent? 

Ask always: what can I learn here?  I think this will help make one aspect of life less unpleasant, and help anyone who commits to it grow smarter and wiser.

I think this is a useful juxtaposition.  A hunter/gatherer participates in his or her environment.  A farmer does too, I think, to a lesser extent.  They consume some section of land, then reseed it, literally, but then want to make it sustainable in perpetuity, ideally, through crop rotation, erosion prevention measures and the like.

A consumer looks at what he consumes as something separate which, being consumed, becomes a part of him, and somehow improves his life for a moment.

A participant is sometimes consuming, sometimes giving.  Sometimes creating, sometimes destroying.  It is more of a dance.

What I feel is the consuming part of me is sitting and eating.  The participant part of me is up and dancing.

Is the world “out there” or is it already here and moving with you?

These are subtle points I’m not quite sure I myself have “captured”, but perhaps that too is an interesting point.  What ideas SHOULD be captured?

I am sympathetic to those who say we are ravaging and destroying this planet.  But these same people offer environmentalism as a religion in itself.  It is not a religion in itself.  It is common sense.  The moral foundations of the whole thing, the cultural foundations, they have not expressed well, I don’t think.  I’m sure there are many abstruse books out there talking about some New Tomorrow, but practically, how do we get there?  Not by voting in Left Wingers.

I think we need to let things run for 30-40 years, if we can otherwise survive or prevent all the catastrophes which are quite possible, and focus that whole time on ratcheting back.  That, in turn, I think needs to rely upon a scientific understanding about the survival of death, of the existence of psi, and the reality of something we can call God.  Let the world develop, let technology develop, and then let us reduce the global population through attrition, and all live in homes that, as in Frank Lloyd Wright’s ideal, blend with their surroundings harmoniously.  You know, his homes are pretty small, and were supposed to be affordable.  That remains possible.

So I’m thinking about culture again this morning.  American culture, I feel, in no small measure involves a large “do not enter” zone around most of us.  We need and like our space.  It also makes us lonely and sad.

And as so often, I’m wondering how we build a “space age” culture, or really cultures.  I don’t want a global culture.   I want many rivers.  I want to retain as much genuine diversity as possible.

We are of course wearing the world down, for good and bad.  Our movies travel everywhere and spread both our good and our bad ideas.  Commercialism is bad, but it is not bad when compared to war and rapine. Tolerance of diversity is good, I think, in general.  People forget how bigoted most of the world is even today.  Much of the world would laugh at political correctness.

I feel I would be a conservative wherever I happened to be.  If I were a Hindu, I would be a conservative Hindu.  If I were Muslim, I would be a conservative Muslim.  I would see the change on the horizon, and not precisely fear it, but not not fear it either. I would dive deeply into my own tradition.

But of course, as an American mutt, I have no tradition.  My tradition is distraction.  I have nothing to cling to, other than our political traditions.  Those are, however, quite important.

And I will recall to your mind my heuristic that “culture” as I define it, is a collective and shared solution within a specific social domain of the problems of what is true, what is valuable and meaningful, how to manage and distribute power, and how to create and distribute resources.  Roughly: religion/philosophy, science, politics, economics.  All are blended of course in pretty much all traditions, but this heuristic allows you to see that different problems are being solved in most cases with the same solutions.  Your religion might tell you who should rule, what is true about the world, and how your economic world should be organized.

Historically, of course, religion controlled “science”, which never really existed in its modern form until perhaps 400 years ago in the West.  Now science is trying to control religion.  But they remain discrete problems.  Science cannot tell us what is necessarily intrinsically worth doing.  It CAN tell us how we are most likely to feel in different scenarios, and it CAN measure what happens, in gross form, but it will never replicate human consciousness in a lab.  Such is my belief.  Our brains and minds are severable.  That itself, is a scientific claim I would like to see validated more carefully than has been done heretofore.

Be all that as it may, I got to thinking about de Tocqueville’s complaint that we don’t create “Great Artists.”  When someone from the cultural modern West makes such a complaint, it occurs to me what he intends is “someone who describes conflict”.  This is especially true in modern literature, which consists in little but drama.

What would we think of art which says nothing more or less than “I am Happy”  and “My world is at peace” and “I love my neighbors”?  I think sometimes we create drama so we can be dramatic, so we can generate tension that we then resolve.  This is a loop with unnecessary steps.  It is a sort of emotional contract/release, but if we start from a place of balance it is not needed.

I am rambling here as I do.  There are no ready answers to these questions.  Culture tends to evolve from many inputs.  There are Manu’s, and Mose’s, and Lycurgas’s here and there in history, but there is no reason to suspect such a thing is even possible in such a large interconnected world.

I guess I need to resurrect for my own use the metaphor of surfing.  I don’t know where it is all going, but it’s quite interesting, and it may be someplace fantastic.  

Obviously, I probably overshare regularly.  I don’t know who reads this, if anyone.  My intuition tells me it does some good, but I have no firm evidence.

It is easier for me to type than to write, so it is easier to blog than to write in my journal, so that is often what I do.  My sense is that this way it might also do more good.

I can’t remember if I’ve broken these numbers down to the last logical conclusion.  I mentioned that 45,000 people kill themselves in this country each year.  For every success there are 25 attempts, I read.  That is over a million people.  But the last logical step is that there are, what, 10-20 people THINKING about it for every person who actually tries?  This makes, as a very rough guess,  10 to 20 million people who are so unhappy the thought of dying has some appeal to it, at least some days and in some contexts.

That’s a lot of misery in a land of plenty.  But we don’t have bountiful purpose, sense of belonging, or love, do we?  No.  No we do not.

So I work on myself, but I do it in public in the hope it may help someone else.  And what occasioned my post is this sense I have at the moment–I don’t know where it comes from–that I may, with all my sharing, all my misery, come across sometimes as fragile. 

I am not the least bit fragile.  If I were, I would be dead.  If I had not killed myself directly, I would have found some other less obvious means, or simply died unexpectedly for no obvious reason.  People keel over every day.

I like myself, I like my work, and I really feel like at some point I can make a difference.  It’s been waist deep mud for a while, but the haze is lifting, and the mud is thinning. I am getting moments of calm.

Don’t ever worry about me.  I can handle myself.  You have no idea how much shit I have been through, completely alone.  It’s ridiculous.

And when I am with other people, and I allow myself to tune to that frequency–my Garuda–it scares people.  So I don’t do it often. I’m a dog, most of the time, and a whale here sometimes.

It’s not all good.  But it is all good.

I am now wondering if sixty years of work might evaporate in six months.

Here is the thing: the salient fact with regard to left wing propaganda–and the Left consists in nothing else, since its core hatred of humanity is disgusting to all normal people–is not that they have taught people to believe lies.  Everyone lies.  Bush, I have come to believe, lied about important things, and perhaps even knew what really happened on 9/11.  He certainly did not govern as a conservative.  That is how we got the Democrats in 2006.

No, the core reality with regard to Leftist propaganda is that they have convinced a large segment of our populace not just that lies are truths, but THAT THERE ARE NO OTHER TRUTHS.  Why would anybody listen to a conservative when they must be wrong by definition?  Why would anyone visit and watch a video at Prager U when it MUST consist in lies?

This is, in reality, a very shaky foundation.  It rests upon perfect intellectual pliability and conformity, and what people are now being asked to accept–such as the idea that we should welcome a flood of millions of unskilled, poor people who hold our nation and its institutions in contempt–is getting crazier and crazier.  People are waking up. 

#walkaway has been viewed 5 million times, and that will no doubt continue to climb in coming months.  There is a Facebook page with video after video of people saying they just can’t take the bullshit anymore.

And as I think I said, walking away is not walking towards.  There is no mention of Trump, much less an endorsement of him.  But it is explicitly calling it quits with the lies, the hatred, the violence, and the ignorant STUPIDITY demanded of people who want to stay loyal members of the  club.

The true fallout from Hillary’s failure in 2016 continues to become more clear.  All of the propaganda apparatus from the Obama years was predicated upon support from the White House.  You can’t build millions of deluded ignorant souls from scratch, and as dutiful as they are in repeating the days screed, you can’t turn them on a dime.  It is a long term process and during Obama’s years, that process was based on the idea that the Left could finally reveal itself, that it was time for an unmasking, for it to finally reveal its goals and to begin building support–with the help of the White House and Google & Friends, not least in censoring all dissent by calling it “hate speech”–for a last push for the final end state of a fascistic state with a smiley face.  They might kill you with poison gas, but it will at least be humane poison gas.  Anything else would be bad manners.  Nothing so gauche as Zyklon B. 

And I can’t help but wonder of George Soros funded some combination of the election of this Mexican Socialist, and the murder of potential rivals.  I read 100 or more politicians were shot in the most recent election cycle; who and their importance, I can’t say.

But socialism equals totalitarianism in a corrupt state, and that is most likely ideal for drug cartels.

Seen from America, though, this would be a frontal assault on our borders, a violent push to destabilize the nation.  If this is true, if this was a plan, I can’t see how it will work.  Most likely, it will increase Trump’s support, and foster a political climate where a wall is not just possible, but demanded by everyone who wants to keep their seat in Congress.

We are winning.  Never take anything for granted.  Never forget there are many who will pay nearly any cost to make Trump fail.  But still: he IS winning.  And God bless him and this country.

So I had a typical me night last night.  Buzzing demon insect.  Continual motion.

It ended with me dreaming I was a grunt in WW2, absolutely generic. The Army fucked up my food ration so I was having to live on 700 calories a day.  I found myself in some giant rotating machine I wasn’t supposed to be on, but when they figured that out they said fuck it, we already started it.

You’re a ball, bouncing a around a pin ball machine, without even the ability to control the paddles.  Your own side is as likely to fuck you over as the enemy.  And this is of course a true story.  I’ve heard tales of woe and epic failure even in the modern era.  Never trust a large bureaucracy with anything, if you can help it.  This is not a complicated story or idea.

But there is a kind of fatalism which develops, which makes life less painful in the long run, if you survive. If you expect things to be FUBAR, then when they aren’t, you feel gratitude.  You expect the daily grind to be difficult, painful, and filled with idiots.  And much of the time, you are not wrong.

Perhaps the blessing of hopelessness is growing in me. 

And I will add that I was walking yesterday.  It was hot.  I saw a worm on the road, trying to make it to shade and the shelter of its soil.  And I thought about picking it up, and moving it to the side.

Then it hit me that tens of thousands of worms probably die daily within a mile or two of my home. I give no thought to them.  And the worm can’t thank me or feel gratitude.  And living a short life is what worms do.  That is why we call them worms, as in Churchill’s “We may all be worms, but I do believe I am a GLOW worm.”

When the Buddha preached compassion two thousand and change years ago, the world did not value it, I suspect.  The words obviously existed because he used them, but particularly in India, pity is not a daily virtue.  They have been abusing entire classes of people–those beneath the Shudras, who are not even granted fully human status–since their earliest history.  This continues to this day. Their vegetarianism is perhaps their rationalization for this.  Love the animals, hate the people.

Be all that as it may–and I am indulging myself in some gratuitous commentary, particularly since I’ve made these points before–there is a continuum between feeling the pain of everything, and feeling it in nothing, in simply living your life, and letting everything and everyone else live theirs.

On one level, your life is no proper concern of mine, even if you ask me to make it my concern.  Randian selfishness has a place, even among the psychologically healthy.  It represents proper boundaries.  It represents the possibility of moral autonomy and dignity and self respect which follow taking ones own life seriously, and expecting others to do the same.  It is not my job to do the work you are unwilling to do.  It is not my job to feel your pain with you.  I have enough of my own.

As I have said before, I am reasonably sure at least Rand’s (real name Alisa Rosenbaum) mother was a clinical narcissist. The story from her childhood about her teddy bear, I think it was, I won’t repeat here, but it seems obvious that Rand suffered her whole life from an exaggerated psychological need to define herself vis a vis the world as a separate, independent, and individually valuable person.

I think she went too far, as did and do many of her followers.  But the basic point remains intact, and valuable.  On a continuum, you must place complete independence, complete separation from the problems, trials and tribulations of others.  Not my monkeys, not my circus, as the interwebs say in a popular meme. And of course on one level, it’s ALL monkeys and circuses.

For me, particularly, this is useful.  I grew up boundary-less.  I have been pondering this in recent days.  I am good at scaring people away, but not at keeping them at an appropriate distance once I have let them in my life.  I am not good at saying this, but not that.  It tends to be a package deal with me.  This has always been a problem.  As always, seeing it clearly is the first half of the solution, and what sets the second half in motion.

And this is a general problem too.  Too many children are growing up also lacking in boundaries–perhaps for different reasons–such that they think they can and should be all things for all people, which is of course physically and logistically and emotionally impossible.  They fail to see this because of a sort of learned narcissism, in which language and action are functionally conflated, such that virtue signalling equals virtue, and “the world” is delighted with them and their young passion, and it cannot be any other way.

Few thoughts.  I have some things to work through here, clearly.  But I will posit value to what I will call “Learned Indifference”.  We have swung much too far in the direction of “compassion”, such that we are breeding moral and intellectual children who will fail in developing personal autonomy, and want, in the process, to create a government apparatus which denies it to the rest of us as well.  They cannot imagine a world where people truly value their freedom more than their womb.

I keep getting this image in my mind of a sort of inverse circular pyramid, in steps.  What it would be would be rows of seats, like in an auditorium, but in a circle, so that there was no place for a lecturer or a performance.  Everywhere is equal.

If and when I ever find myself teaching–and I continue to hope to found a church of some sort, and am actively planning out how this might happen, with increasing, I hope, realism–I would want to teach in such a format.  I would be integrally connected to all.  And all can see all.  Everything is here, and distance and separation are erased.

I’ve never seen anything like this that I can recall, although I have been in a theater where the audience sits on all sides.  The focus is still the stage though.  This would be a sort of tiered hole in the ground, with perhaps 4 rows.

I will add that I went to bed at 9, but shook myself awake at 10, 11, and 12.  It’s tiring being me.  I still get attacked by demons, but I have largely lost my fear.  The other night one was pushing energy at me, and I pushed it back, and it ran away.  I don’t know if these are eddies of nervous, traumatic tension appearing and being reconciled.  I think they are at least that.  But perhaps something more, too.  I don’t know.  It’s been I suppose 15-20 or so now.

I am getting genuinely tougher though, too.  That is a good feeling.  I don’t think many people could do the work I do the way I do it.

Logically, what is unconscious cannot be processed consciously.  But it seems to me that intuition provides a bridge.  It is the voice of your unconscious, which is something none of us really understand.

This is perhaps an obvious truism, but I thought I would say it anyway.

And I would add that symbols and myths represent intuitions.  Those who create them can’t always know exactly what they mean.  They both come from deep places, and they take us to deep places.  The exact interaction of a spirit with a symbol will always be unique and individual.

If I do anything well, I think I listen to my inner voice, which presents itself in many ways.  Sometimes I find myself “looking” at an image, or a feeling, and wondering what it all means.  But I keep listening even when I don’t know.