Month: February 2019

I had a dream last night where I felt keenly how the habit of conformity, if it is allowed to go too deep, is a sort of soul suicide.

Over and above the overwork, excessive taxation, and crazy pace of our lives, I think a reason so many Americans feel anger–why shows like “The Walking Dead” and CSI do so well–is that despite our supposed individualism, most people watch and model the same shows, get their social signalling from the same networks, and overall exist as virtual ideational and ideological clones.  It is this trained need for conformity which allows rapid social engineering, such as when it was decreed from on high that boys can be girls if they choose to, and the rest of us can’t say shit without being bigots.

I think a very large number of Americans leave many important things unsaid.  I think a very large number of us don’t know how to go deep, to be deep, to have truly meaningful conversations about issues of genuinely intrinsic importance.  We have lost that habit, and the things which would more or less force such conversations, such as genuine want, closeness to death, and misery of various sorts, are largely foreign to most of us.  We watch them on TV, but this of course is not the same.

It breeds a sort of numbness, a distance from Present Reality.  We are always looking at the world outside through a screen.  It filters out the worst, but also prevents the best, absolutely and necessarily.

For my part, I am always happy to run into people with unusual and weird ideas.  It is so rare.  So many people, if you know what news channel they watch, you can predict with uncanny precision not just what they will believe tomorrow, but to a great extent the exact words they will use to describe “their” beliefs.  Its sad.

To take one example, I was having a conversation with a guy in a bar the other day, who seemed to know a bit more about geopolitics than I did.  He said China was in up to its eyeballs with Venezuela.  I ask you: have you read anything about this anywhere?  I hadn’t.  I see Russia’s name, but never China.

Simple DuckDuckGo search: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/06/venezuelas-road-to-disaster-is-littered-with-chinese-cash/

I recently finished listening to the book “The Metaphysical Club”.  It reinforced my commitment in principle to a broadly “pragmatic” philosophy.

To this topic, though, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., a genuine Liberal, argued that the freedom of speech is essential for public flourishing, because only with the most diverse marketplace of ideas can we be reasonably sure the best idea will be produced, and that it will, over time and in aggregate, win.

When you suppress ideas, you run the massive risk of eradicating before it can be heard the winning idea on any topic.  When everyone can be heard, certainly many need to be ignored, but sometimes, highly heterodox ideas actually make the most sense.

Again, this is why people like Alex Jones and Natural News are essential.  They represent qualitatively different and potentially interesting viewpoints, from which intelligent people might sometimes infer or discover important truths not discussed or covered anywhere else.

Where ideas are concerned, 85 kinds of ketchup may be confusing and overwhelming, and one or two may predominate, but our long term prosperity and social wealth depend on allowing them all a place on the shelf.

It also makes life much more interesting.  I feel sorry for the people who look to the news to tell them what they believe, and who are naive enough to honestly feel they are not being manipulated.

And to be clear, there is no compelling reason for me to believe I too am not being manipulated, OTHER THAN my willingness to consider and remain aware of  as many perspectives as I can find, on a variety of topics.  They compete in my head, and the best ones, or so I hope, win.

One of the more unpleasant aspects of personal growth, for me, is being shown in very clear light how stupid I have frequently been in the past.

I say something that makes someone wince, simply because I’m being stupid.  I don’t see the wince at the time.  I see the wince now, and I cringe inside.  Etc.

And I’m still being stupid.  I have not yet figured out how to stop, at least this phase, and this level and this type of stupidity.  I think the loop of time in which I am blissfully ignorant is shortening, but I am still doing what I’ve always done.

Wonder is the perfection of curiosity.

I may or may not mentioned this, but I’ve been listening to a lecture series on particle physics.  I am a sponge: I soak in and incorporate whatever I am around.  Being around this guy, I find myself seeking math for supersymetries and to reconcile the Weak and Electrimagnetic forces.

The thing with emotions though is that describing their interrelations more accurately helps in many ways. It helps us decide what to do, and to be able to understand more deeply just what it is we are feeling.

So much of life is longing. We say “if only”, but when we get If Only—and of course most of us do, sooner or later, in many ways—and the itch is barely scratched.

If we apply my math here though, we see that the solution to longing is a robust and passionate engagement with everything that IS , to the point of fascination and wonder.

Wonder, if I might channel my inner fool, is wonderful.

Wonder is longing fulfilled.

There is math here. I’m sure of it.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it put this way explicitly, but it is blatantly obvious that a functioning corporation acts as a permanent stimulus which, rather than costing tax dollars, pays them in.

Keynesian “stimulus” packages can only be necessary even in ( demonstrably moronic) theory when there are an insufficient number of corporate stimulators.  When the private sector is suffering, for example, because FDR following Hoover (but without any of his native intelligence) tried to be smart and direct it.

Tax cuts stimulate the job creation process.  Jobs, in turn, stimulate the economy, which increases overall income, which increases the overall amount of tax collected.  This happened under Reagan, and again under George W.

Why do so many people not know this?  Because a sizable part of our public intelligentsia is batshit insane.  Insanity teaches little but mouth breathing, indignation, and dogma to be repeated verbatim.

It occurs to me to comment that the reason there is a close association between left wing politics and acting—besides the obvious connection of infantile sentimentality—is that LEFTISTS ARE ALWAYS ALREADY ACTORS.

Lenin was an actor, who pretended first he was s nationalist, then a moderate. Obama was an actor who pretended to care about black Americans and the undertrodden generally. He was an actor of the script reading variety. Little talent, less caring.

When it is always about power, and the rhetoric is nonetheless benign, they are lying, and an actor is someone who lies for a living. Perhaps we might term actors proto-politicians. The reasons Kevin Spacey took to his role in House of Cards seem obvious enough.

In his own way, I might add, he WAS Kaiser Soze. Life is filled with circles, and perhaps much acting leads back to basic truths.

What do you believe? Simple question. If the answer involves a posture, you are lying to someone.

To be a dissident is to be declared legally blind.

“You don’t see what we see”, they say, “therefore you are both blind and evil.”

In a very real sense, this whole boondoggle represents a highly organized campaign to weaponize weather and subordinate it to ideological ends.

I’m looking at this whole “global extinction” thing and EVEN IF I believed the IPCC this whole thing is several orders of magnitude beyond their current best guesses, which themselves have had ZERO predictive value once we make the simple observation that they can only be made to work using fudged numbers applied to woefully incomplete and unreliable land based measurements.

The warming has to start in the sky. It HAS to. This is the CORE hypothesis. It starts about a mile up and if this were REAL science that would be the focus.

It isn’t. Ergo and QED.

Wild but interesting night.

I am struck with the notion that it must be exceedingly rare for the notion of growth to occur to sentient organisms.  Growth is, in effect, a chosen disequilibrium, when biological systems–all physical systems, really–will always gravitate towards homeostasis naturally.

True growth, qualitative growth, is always towards the unknown.  There is, yes, the growth in skill, for example playing piano or throwing a football.  These are known pathways. 

Growth in the self, though: one cannot possibly predict what will happen, or precisely how it will feel.  Such a thing can only be motivated by pain, which is to say an existing disequilibrium.  Perhaps this is an induced disequilibrium, such as the tenet that life is pain, as exposited by the Buddha.

I will comment, though, that often growth, too, is pain.  The path, though, is towards a new equilibrium.  Or perhaps not.  I cannot know.  Perhaps the words are “higher participation.”

I saw my kids today, and it occurred to me that as they grow, it is necessary to regularly renegotiate your relationship with them.  I want to think of them as they were then, but that is not how they are now.  Their job is to individuate and grow off in their own direction.  My job is to recognize and support this, to remain in emotional touch, but nothing close to emotional control, or even a strong desire to influence, if they are not asking my advice.

Life is a dance, and you can’t dance if you never move your feet, or pay attention to the people you are dancing with.  It’s beautiful and sad, and although there is much wisdom most of us will never see, there is, if we wait and look and hope and prepare, much wisdom we WILL see.  This is the seasoning of aging, of separating, and of renewing.