Month: October 2018

There are no useful sheepdogs who are not part wolf.

It simply revolves around the question: do you feed a hunger for justice, or a hunger for the expression of rage?

1. The Western project, at its root, relies on a focus of what we don’t know.  Historically, all other cultures of which I am aware focused on what they thought they knew, and on the accurate recitation of those “facts”.  This applies equally to tribal cultures, as to Islamic cultures–in which the capture of all relevant knowledge is an article of faith–as to the Chinese, whose world view related to an understanding of how Heaven and Earth interacted, and who were remarkably incurious technologically.

Now, given that moral understandings are not knowable the same way that the laws of physics are, this has created problems which are at the root of the insanity we are seeing right now, and have been seeing for over a century.

But the solution, in my view, is as simple as invoking a simple principle, like “provisional understandings with respect to human life, provisional but testable understandings with respect to the physical universe.”

We don’t want psychotic killers in our midst.  We want peace and relative safety.  We like having things and relative plenty.  We want our children to live in a good or better world.  These are not complicated moral premises which warrant excessive examination.  There is plenty we agree on.

2.  Communism does not abolish property rights–it merely reassigns them from individuals and groups to the State.  Since the State is an abstraction, practically it does not do anything differently than what Kings of old did in asserting their claim, in principle, to everything.  It grants ownership of everything to an elite, to an oligarchy, and does so without any moral restrictions on their use of that property.  Marx was no ethicist.  He had nothing to say about moral virtue other than that he rejected the “virtues” of the bourgeoisie.   Given this, how to build, much less reliably build, people in whom any extent of trust whatever could or should be placed? 

China, now, is run by the inheritors of all this.  They are not Marxists.  They are merely very rich, and in charge.  It is simply a new Emperor, for a people which has had emperors for well over 2,000 years, depending on how you define the term.  The Communist conceit and deceit is gone.  It was a means to power for the same sorts of people who always run things.  Meet the new boss.  Same as the old boss.

Without principled thinking, without the clarity which reason and the clean use of language enable, there is NOTHING which can be done to label and describe all this, much less prevent it.

Pull out your phone and video them.  Then post it on the internet to show the world how fucking nuts, evil, and hateful they are.

Jobs or mobs.  Simple choice.

It will be interesting to see how Trump deals with the Fed over the next few years.  With strong economic growth, the Fed will be tempted to raise interest rates.  Trump opposes this, since there are no signs (that I have seen) of inflation.  Most inflation happens when the banks release large sums of cash.  They seem to still be sitting on trillions, literally.  They could flood the market tomorrow, but the math with Trump in charge is different than it would be with nearly anyone else.

Trump, uniquely among Presidents in at least the last half century, would be willing to bring the Fed under control.  It is extraordinarily irrational that it does not answer directly to the Treasury, as it did for the first decade or two of its existence.  It is absurd that the single entity most responsible for our currency is not under the direct control of the government, but rather is under the control of banks whose names we are not even allowed to know for certain.

It is an insult to reason.  It is something which continues because most Americans are fucking imbeciles who are taught to be confident in the platitudes and propaganda which they are taught.  The most “educated” are those who can reliably throw out the phrases and explanations they were taught quickly and without error.

I look at the world through my own eyes. And everywhere I look, I see stupid people.  That no doubt sounds arrogant.  What is your point?

The Greeks thought everyone who was not Greek spoke nonsense.  They thought it sounded like “bar bar”, so barbarians were defined as the ones who said bar bar.  We might call them “Blahblahians.”

Be all that as it may, Western culture, everything which binds us together, which unites us in actually good ideas like political Liberalism, free markets, tolerance, the rule of law as an absolute principle, and the use of reason to negotiate and reconcile difference, is under attack, or perhaps more accurately, being subjected to targeted sapping by determined opponents.

I was dreaming last night of hordes attacking a museum of Western culture.  I was guarding and protecting it, and succeeded for the moment, but the feeling was that of a Horde, such as that of Genghiz Khan, or Timur.  Within our society, within our gates, within the halls of our best universities, people with hive-minds like those of any gang which has ever preyed upon any society with the simple goals of rape and pillage, proliferate.

Communism is really just the spirit of Timur, run through a rationalizing machine, a lie machine, and then generalized.  It is antithetical to life, to human flourishing in all but the In-Group, and horrifically abusive.

I’ve been interacting off and on on Facebook with some undergrads at some elite schools, and even they literally assume that anyone who did not love Obama is an ignorant troll.  They have no words for it, no category for someone who is both erudite and dissident.

It is hard to be optimistic about the future, when so many minds have fallen into darkness.

Still, we did elect Trump, as a last gap measure, and it does seem that people are waking up.  That Jordan Peterson, to take one obvious example, is attracting so much positive attention among the young is encouraging.

And they NEED something like what he is teaching to thrive.  This is the thing: this whole mob mentality, this herd instinct, IS antithetical to flourishing.  It promotes continuous agitation, likely some social phobias–such as interacting with people who disagree with you–and a thirst for violence which even many of them recognize as unhealthy.

Many emotional wounds cannot be healed, but all wounds can be transformed.

True Liberals, who are nearly all Republicans in the present era, believe in liberty.  A belief in liberty makes political violence illogical.  There is no reason to attack someone for believing differently than you, when allowing alternative beliefs is the basis of your whole worldview.

Socialists are different.  They have ONE worldview, and want to coerce everyone else into it.  This makes political violence extremely logical and easy.  You can easily recognize who your enemies are, and, having a simple goal of 100% compliance, all tools are on the table to get them on board.  This was the basic point that Saul Alinsky made.

“There was no doubt she was overjoyed to see me, her eyes said so.  It was as though the gesture of self destruction had, in her mind, equalized all the guilt.  The courage of committing the act seemed to have justified herself to herself.  This action on her conviction, no matter how neurotic, had called for all her strength and she was now released.  Free from the urge, since the will-for-death needs a strong concentration of pressure to fulfill itself and once accomplished via attempt, is defeated until another period of buildup is gone through; unless, of course, one succeeds in reaching death the first shot, or is really mad.  Gazing down on her, with a grin of artificial buoyancy, I sensed this and felt an instant flood of envy.  She had escaped, at least for some time, and I knew I had yet to make my move.  Being a coward I had postponed too long and I realized I was further away from commitment than ever.  Would hesitancy never end?”

Neal Cassady, in a letter to Jack Kerouac

The woman in question had been a girlfriend of Cassady’s, who had tried to kill herself, apparently by slitting her wrists and losing quite a bit of blood.  He had abused her emotionally, and was–after briefly promising to be faithful, and after a generous working class couple offered them free lodging for a time–to abandon her again and finally for the flimsiest of reasons.

He is speaking here about his own desire to end his own life.  This underlies everything he does, and he is arguably the single most important influence on the work of Allan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, themselves sort of the progenitors of the counter-culture, with of course a number of others.

Beat means beat.  Done.  Finished.  Kaput.  There is nothing to admire there, nothing to emulate.

And Cassady died, really, an ugly and pointless death.  He wandered off in the cold–and I think the rain–after a party down in Mexico, having taken a large quantity of some drug, and seems to have died of some combination of exposure and the drugs.  They found his body some time the next day.

This is a pointless and stupid way to die.  But he had been rehearsing his own death for some time, and based on Kerouac’s account, drove somewhat suicidally every day.

The leaves turn many brilliant colors in Autumn, but this does not mean they are more alive.  Burning leads to extinction.  We should not admire it. We should admire those able to walk long distances with patience, skill, and grace.

https://mises.org/wire/cultural-marxism-americas-new-mainline-ideology

I will emphasize that, while Salgado was presumably some hard or soft version of a Leftist most of his life–he was apparently declared an enemy of the State in the late 1960’s in Brazil–that the very real problems he documented were, in almost all cases, the result of groups of people attempting to put Communist ideas into practice.

The Ethiopian famine, for example, was nearly entirely the result of Communist efforts to remake the economic order, as executed by worthless and amoral intellectuals who knew nothing about anything.  But they had guns, and power comes from the barrel of a gun.  So too does mass death.

All this misery, all this death: the sources can be traced and tracked.  Their roots can be known.  Their causes can be addressed and extinguished.  But only if we dedicate ourselves to the task of thinking clearly and practically.

And rereading Peter Bauer, Friedrich Hayek and others, and fighting left wing intellectuals everywhere they creep into the room.

Wow, what an amazing movie. I would encourage everyone to watch it. It’s heartbreaking at times.  I found myself crying several times.  His coverage of Africa, particularly, is brutal and unflinching.  Very little is held back.

But I will not give away too much, or reduce the value of this movie, by telling you it ends on a strongly positive note.

His fathers cattle ranch was destroyed by drought, and by what amounted to poor land management.  And in a fit of despair after his coverage of the regional conflict around Rwanda, he takes up his wife’s suggestion to replant it, to regenerate life there, to make of the dry earth a sheltering forest.

And so they planted over 2 million trees.  And they grew.  This could be done in much of Brazil, and of course for that matter anywhere else.

They say at the end that this is a lesson.

I would take this lesson a step further: the fires which have been burning our souls, turning us into dust, into monsters, can be quenched, and something new planted.

It is, I believe,  Turkish proverb which states “no matter how far up the wrong road you have gone, turn around.”

I don’t share everything, as I comment from time to time, but I will share this, which I don’t think I have yet.

When I was at a recent rock concert, I got in tune with the very positive vibe this particularly band (Mondo Cozmo) was putting out.  The whole audience felt it (at its best, this is what music does, and should do)–I am always in the flux, which is part of the reason I have to spend so much time alone–and this feeling of overwhelming grief and loss overcame me.

I felt as if a fire, a scorching, engulfing inferno, has been blazing through me all my life.  And I teared up when I asked myself: who can I share this with?  Who, who has not been there, deeply, completely, can possibly communicate with me?  How can they see me?  The flames are dying down, and in their place is a vast empty space.  Everything is gone.  The flame is gone, and so is everything else.  Everything was consumed.  It took no prisoners.

And I pondered this for a day or so, and it occurred to me that what is left is space for new growth.  For small seedlings.  For green.  For new life.  For recreation and spontaneity, after so long.  And this comforted me.

On the rare occasions when I show my real eyes, people retreat.  They don’t want to know what I have to tell them.  And even though I know there are many people like me, very many severely wounded people, they don’t want to walk back into the fire by remembering.  I am a very unusual soul.  Not unique, by any means, but rare.

But I speak this from the heart: all of us can rebuild.  We can build something better than what came before.  All this ash in the air will pass one day, if we simply remember our dignity as human beings.

I of course forget my dignity too, perhaps often.  I have many security measures in place, ways of hiding, ways of deflecting, ways of avoiding. Still, still, still: sometimes I remember, and those are the seeds which cry out in delight when given water and sun and attention.  Those are the children of the soul, and the spirit of renewal.  Those are the beginning of what good is possible for all of us, lost here in this confusing place.