Month: August 2019

Let it come
Let it be
Let it go.

If you figure out how to do this, please comment below.

It occurs to me that now, as in the 1850’s, there are large numbers of white people discussing what to “do” with “the blacks”.  On the one side, you have the Democrats, who insist that they are the only path to salvation for ordinary blacks, and that this fact is so obvious that to disagree with them with respect to ANY policy (no matter how disconnected) constitutes not just racism, but actual white supremacy.

This is obviously a propagandistic tactic designed, specifically, as Agitation Propaganda, in order to rile up rank and file Democrats against the Great Evil they are opposing, and to continue to place fear in the hearts of rank and file blacks that they are not good enough to survive on their own.

Republicans, in turn–and I will reiterate most of the people in this discussion are white on both sides–are saying, in effect: blacks have their own voices, their own souls, their own consciences.  Blacks are people just like us.  Just like the Irish.  Just like the Jews.  Just like the Italians and Polish.  They deserve equal rights and equal privileges.  And you cannot reason backwards from the fact that someone is more successful, that they must have done something wrong, or enjoyed some unique benefit.

In fact, I think most more thoughtful Republicans would argue that the single worst thing that ever happened to the black folks in this country, outside of slavery itself, was being talked into handing over their personal power, and sense of purpose and control, to the Democrat Party.  Why do the ghettoes remain ghettoes?  Because rank and file blacks continue to assume that the Democrats will fix everything, because they promise to every two years.

As I’ve said before, my own racism, such that it is, consists in looking at the stupidity inherent in continuing to believe liars across many decades.  It’s always easier to let someone else take care of you.  But if they aren’t DOING IT, at what point do you call bullshit and start picking yourself up by your own bootstraps? 

It seems likely that as internet access becomes more widely available, more and more blacks will reach this same conclusion.  I think a great many didn’t even realize how much time white people were spending talking about what to do with them.

But as in 1850, I would frame the divide thus: on the one side–then as now, the Democrat side–you have people arguing in effect that black people cannot be expected to care for themselves without help from white people.  On the other side, you have–then as now–Republicans saying the opposite, by and large.   I will just quote Frederick Douglass here:

What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. [Applause.] The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. Gen. Banks was distressed with solicitude as to what he should do with the Negro. Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot- box, let him alone, don’t disturb him! [Applause.] If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone,–your interference is doing him a positive injury. Gen. Banks’ “preparation” is of a piece with this attempt to prop up the Negro. Let him fall if he cannot stand alone! If the Negro cannot live by the line of eternal justice, so beautifully pictured to you in the illustration used by Mr. Phillips, the fault will not be yours, it will be his who made the Negro, and established that line for his government. [Applause.] Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live.

Do black people need the government to survive?  This is the question.  I would ask: did the Irish?  The Italians?  The Jews?  Most of those people came from places where they were themselves for all intents and purposes enslaved.  It’s arguable, in fact, that even in the modern era more Irish were subjected to slavery than African blacks.

How, put another way, is the question “are blacks genuinely more needy than every other race and ethnic group”, not racist to its core?

This is why Leftists abuse language.  It allows them to abuse logic, and the abuse of logic enables the most ludicrous things to come to seem obvious to the point that violence is allowable to enforce them.  This describes every totalitarian regime in the 20th century, with the possible exception of Franco’s Spain, which did, as it seems to me, look backward to a past that actually existed, although I cannot claim to have studied it in depth.  It certainly describes Fascism, National Socialism, and all the variants of the Communist disease, from Lenin to Pol Pot and Fidel Castro.

 

My mother, as I’ve no doubt noted at some point, was psychologically split.  Some part of her continued to try and act her biological age, and some part was stuck at about age 17, which was the time in her life when she felt the most important and most valued.  I think most people get stuck at a certain age.  Remaining present to your life into old age is an uncommon quasi-miracle.

Children–at least sensitive children of the sort I was–have to evolve their own split to cope with the contradiction.  You shift seamlessly from one to the other, or superimpose the two frequencies on one another. (All totalitarian brain-washing depends on creating this split, between core personality, and assumed self, and on forcing, through threat of various forms of violence and pain, the person to forget their original self entirely.)

Anyway, last night, dreaming, I found myself first looking at a magnificent mountain range in Japan, then watching two crazy samurai ride a powerful mountain river, with countless twists and turns and jagged rocks.

This, to me, represents the beginning of integration.  The number 2 is significant.  Both parts were riding the same wave, at the same time.  The water of course is raw emotion.

I was also fighting, and losing to, a giant in my dream, repeatedly.  But every time I lost, I was resurrected, and fought again.  And in every bout, I became a little more like the giant, more equal to him. I could tell, in the end, he could see where it was going and beginning to respect me.  That’s how I woke up this morning.

At root, the problem is that there is not enough love in the world.  It really is that simple.

Personally, I am maddened by the abuse of this word.  I have talked about it often.  But my root work is figuring this love thing out.  I did not feel loved as a child.  My parents, like most of their generation, I think, never used the word.  They never said they loved me.

That part I find very easily forgivable and forgettable.  “Love” was not a word they used to throw around much, outside of church.  But it was something expressed in action, in how parents looked at their children, in the care they took for them.

I would in fact assert as a general principle that if you have to tell someone you love them, you probably don’t.  This doesn’t mean that even where love is present, you shouldn’t say so often. I believe you should.  “I love you” is the last thing I tell my kids every time I see them or talk with them.  They have heard it very literally many thousands of times over the years.  But they feel it too, I am quite sure.

My challenge is that, to be loving, you need to feel safe to other people.  To feel safe to other people, you need to feel calm and safe yourself.  Paranoia, and chronic contextual overarousal, if not antithetical to love, is incompatible with it.  And I am paranoid and chronically overaroused.  I find it very hard to trust, to calm down.  This makes it hard to love me, and hard for me to love others.

So, although my long term goal is to become loving, I have a very large amount of work to do.  I get flashes here and there.  My potential is enormous.  I am extraordinarily perceptive when I am feeling good.

But in the long run, the only good plan for dealing with shooters is for all of us to become better human beings, better parents, better citizens, better friends and neighbors.  The shooters, as I have said before, are just canaries in a coal mine.  They are a symptom that far too many of us are not getting enough emotional nourishment, are failing to feel loved, are failing to thrive.

My work continues.  It’s lonely, but it is my work.  I am doing, as well as I am able, what I am on Earth to do.   My progress is glacial, but I feel that when it breaks open, it will do so relatively quickly.  Many processes are going on in the darkness, and when they see light, I will realize, I feel, I know things I did not even know I knew.

I want to found a new church, a new way of being socially, a new way of remembering God and appreciating the value of life.  But it will not work if I myself am not in the right place.  I pray every day for guidance and strength in this project, and if you are so inclined please pray for me too.  I can use and will welcome all the help I can get.  I don’t like being an island, but I can’t figure out an alternative.  People don’t listen to me, most of the time, and it seems certain that some part of me is pushing them away; although, I think often people hear “inner work”, and they sense the pain, without feeling the possibility of the pleasure of release from cages.

I’m listening to the song, and drinking strong beer (I asked my buddy at the local open til 11 every night liquor store which ones were 7% plus, after a long ass week), and it feels to me at this moment that all churches should have holes in them, and stains on the floor, and scratches on the pews.

How else to welcome the fuck-ups, the ones who really need redemption? 

Our national religion, Christianity, is not bad, and in many respects outstanding.  But contradictions remain.

I can’t resist adding Johnny Paycheck, because The End is boring me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQjRxdMEGds

Social cleansing means teaching a better way to live, and doing so through personal example.  It implies wisdom, and love.

I seem to find myself in the wrong place often, but hopefully that will not last forever.

I think spiritual growth, after a certain point, leaves first the paved road, and then the dirt road.  Where you are going, there are no roads.  There is no path.

To follow in the footsteps of the Buddha, truly, is to do this, to walk where you feel lost.  What do you do then?  What does ANY explorer do?  Keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep their eyes open, use their brains and experience, and discover new things.

I am in a place without roads.  It scares me, but sometimes it is vaguely exhilarating too.  I did not stop when it got hard, and I’m not stopping now.

And actually, I will wonder out loud: how does it affect our psychology that our physical space is almost always completely sculpted for us?  We have roads, and as U2 pointed out, they have names, here.  How different does it feel living in a forest, or jungle, or trackless mountain area? 

I think it can safely be postulated that the “natural” state of human awareness is relaxed engagement and happiness. This is to say, that physiological arousal exists within a range, and on the low side there is pleasure and contentment. This is physiologically possible and thus “natural”.

Common, of course, it is not.

While granting this is a large, enormously abstract question, I would stipulate that most societies I know of use shame as a method of social conditioning and compliance. You are shamed into behavior g a certain way. Put another way, breaking from an established pattern creates fear, and thus feels like aggression. And who wants to commit acts of aggression against those who are in our group, who are “our” people?

Original Sin refers mythically to the development of shame—of fear and pain—as a method of control. On this account, a “return to Eden” would consist in lowering the levels of arousal of the amygdala in response to social stimuli.

Here is s testable hypotheses: I would argue that a psychologically normal person, of nearly any nation or group-/will show amygdala activation in response to the idea of them breaking rules they hold dear, or seeing anyone else do it. You could hook someone up in a lab, and show them pictures, or ask them to imagine situations, or even as an experimenter deliberately transgress their expectations.

Now, I have a couple books on my shelf about neuroanatomy and neuropsychology, but I have not read them. In limiting myself to the amygdala I am nearly certainly oversimplifying. I do think it is a good place to start, though, and the essential point remains, of certain types of neural activation being used for control, and that this system, in turn, is not neurologically optimal.

In some respects I am reiterating, say, the core argument of “ Culture and its Discontents”, but as I say often, Freud was pretty much always wrong, but nearly right.

A better society, a happier healthier society, will come—can ONLY come—from a generalized return to what might be termed—egregiously but recognizably—our neurological presets. Wealth will not do it.  “Equality” will not do it.

Feeling good is something we are wired to be able to do.  It is symptomatic of the madness of our time that so much focus is placed on knowing more and thinking more clearly, and so little on the process of enriching feeling and following experience.

When everything is political, the truth–and following possibility of rational, purposive action–has already been lost.

Put another way, the truth is the first casualty in political warfare too.

Shamelessness is a disease stalking our landscape.  It is impossible for me at this moment not to agree with Jacques Barzun that our civilization is formally decadent.  Our leaders lie, and the people seek, without knowing it, people to tell them what to do.

It occurs to me that emotionally unavailable people probably induce feelings of shame too.

And I feel like I have met people like this.  Perhaps, almost certainly, I have been like that.  People who just aren’t quite there, and you feel this sense of anger because they are so distant.  We are wired to feel connection, at least with people we see every day.  When they can’t offer it, it feels like they are denying it, and that produces fearangershame.  That, in turn, produces social anxiety and withdrawal, or can in people whose foundations are weak.

There is an horror movie playing around here called Midsommar.  It is more or less about human sacrifice in contemporary Sweden.  Since it is well known some part of our brains does not differentiate movies from reality–if we could not enter into that world, then we would not have the experience–then this experience must be something some people want.  For whom is it intended?  Who is the audience?  What emotional traits are they likely to have?

It seems, reading the summary, that it is about a group of emotionally disconnected, largely dissociated people, all but one of whom are killed, and the last of whom finally feels some completion in watching their destruction.  She allows herself access to the anger and violence inside of herself, which she had most likely kept hidden in her shell of a self and face.

I really can’t escape the conclusion that we are breeding monsters, with all these iPhones, with all this screen time, which lacks all the nuance of actual human connection.  Anger and fear and shame are accumulating in people who lack the self awareness to realize it, and who find themselves expressing them vicariously by watching movies like Midsommar.

I watched the new Spider Man movie last night.  It was OK, but I found it vaguely disturbing that MJ was fascinated by the Black Dahlia murder, where a woman was, as I recall the story, tortured, cut in half, and then the blood drained from her body and the body more or less placed on display.  It’s a horrifying image.  Peter Parker got her a glass black Dahlia flower.

Quentin Tarrntino’s new movie is about the Manson murders.  Tarrentino, cinematically, consistently brings the “ultraviolence” of Anthony Burgess.  It’s hard not to see him as a talented psychopath.

How, in such a world, do we reconnect with goodness?  With true compassion, true empathy, true kindness, true understanding, true caring?  These are my life questions.  Asking them pays me no money, wins me no recognition, does not further my career in any way. 

But I do have logic.  I have always had logic.  And my logic tells me these are intrinsically important questions.  And my logic tells me that entering back into the flux of feeling will help me recover a very robust intuition which will take me much farther than logic ever could.