Month: August 2019

I am 52.  I will share that.  And for some reason I am really feeling that keenly lately.  It’s middle age, by just about any standard.  I have my complete health, but I can’t really answer what I’ve done with my life.  Had I been a doctor or lawyer, I suppose I would be winding down a bit now.  I would have a big house, and a nice annual vacation somewhere, and a family I sort of know, but spent a lot of time away from, working.  I have been, in some sense, out living in the wild with wolves.

What I feel is how hard it is to enter into the right relationship with time.  If you feel too great a sense of urgency, it does not unfold.  You are never emotionally present for whatever and whoever is happening.  And if you have no plan and simply drift, you blink and 20 years has passed.

I feel the story of Rip van Winkle is about, in part, emotional dissociation.  When you shield yourself from emotional hurt, you also isolate yourself from emotional participation in what is happening around you.  Time passes, and you can’t feel it; it is like it is flowing over stainless steel, versus mud and sand.  In the one case there is no texture and in the latter there is.

There are many subtle pains in this world, but all of them need to be processed to be living as a proper human being.  What a confusing, strange place this world is!!!

I have certainly not been silent, and I have dedicated my days to understanding, so on an abstract level I have that, but I don’t feel that very well.  I feel how distant and cold I have been, through an incapacity to be any other way.

My children are wonderful–I do have that, and I suppose in this strange world raising genuinely good children is an accomplishment–but my life is far from over.  I think I am merely completing one phase, and entering another, hopefully better phase.

My father crossed a long life and seems to have learned nothing.  He spent much of his last 20-30 years watching television.  I think my mother will be the same.

My life is a reaction to that, but it has proven so hard to shake the protective numbness they bestowed on me by osmosis.

Even now, there are people falling all around us.  There are suicides every day in most large cities.  People found, perhaps after a few days, perhaps after a few weeks, and there are police who file reports, and people who gather up the bodies (I memorably shared a few drinks once with a guy who did that, and I could tell he was looking at me from the perspective of how he would move me if I was dead), and perhaps coroners who do the autopsies, and people who notify relatives, and people who have to figure out how to dispose of the bodies.

This world is magical, and it is horrible.  But my curiosity and wonder never flag.  I suppose I have that too.

I’ve argued that self defeating behavior stems from an overactivated amygdala, and the following effort of the organism to create emotional “logic”, an A=A sort of thing, though justifying ex post facto preexisting sensations.

Emotionally, what is dogmatism?  Is it anything but a permanent refuge from shame?  Is it not precisely the need to never apologize, to never feel bad, because you are absolutely right, and anyone who disagrees with you absolutely wrong?

How does dogmatism create an A=A relationship?  I think it does it by placing all the blame on someone, anyone, else.  You project your shame onto other people, by saying, “It’s not me, it’s YOU”.  What you do is create a rigid world view which creates inevitable conflict with other people who are not narrowly like you.  Dogmatism, in this sense, would be completely pointless in a uniform world, which would explain well why, as one obvious example, the lunatics in the Soviet Union turned on one another over very narrow atheological (theological style combined with actual atheism) disputes.  This was by Trotsky–who agreed with nearly all points of Communistic ideology–has to have an ice pick shoved in his head.  The followers of Zinoviev likewise.  They were too close to be ignored, but imprecisely affiliated. 

For the true ideologue, their enemies thus serve the precise purpose of Jewish sacrificial lambs.  And the point of the rigidity is to CREATE enemies, to create scapegoats.

And logically, the greater the rejection of actual shame, the higher the proportions of both fear and aggression remaining.  This is why the Headless Ones go into clinical hyperarousal every time someone disagrees with them.

I think is close to the truth.  What is the opposite of sacrificial culture, which is to say in the modern world, political identity politics and ideology?  Deep, deep, physical relaxation.  As the amygdala calms, all the insanity disappears.

I am increasingly convinced I have solutions which I will brazenly call the problems of humanity.

But I want to argue from the other side of the river, which I have not personally reached yet.  It is no good manipulating symbols.  It is, in my view, critically important to embody ideas, to be able to touch them, feel their texture, feed on them, be nourished by them.

I pray every day for help in this.  If you are inclined to say a prayer for me, please do.  I can use all the help I can get.

There is no real need to oppose atheistic explanations of religion with personal spiritual beliefs. There can be no doubt that psycho-social realities play out in all large human social systems.  There can be no doubt that some of the critiques of religion, and explanations of religion–such as, for example, those of Emile Durkheim–have some validity.  Much that happens while one happens while talking about God has nothing at all to do with God at all.  This does not mean something which is most usefully and easily called “God” does not exist.  They are separate question, to be separated by agile minds as needed to understand our world, and to solve concrete problems.

As I have shared from time to time, my focus in graduate school was on sacrifice.  I had a particular affinity for Rene Girard, who made it his focus.

As I understand Jewish practice when the Temple still existed, one had to go there once a year with an unblemished animal, say a sheep, which in this context was understood to be innocent.  Without me studying all the details of the ritual practice, I believe that a penitent–no doubt a man, perhaps with his sons–would offer up a sheep to a priest, who would ceremonially place the sins of the man on the sheep, and ask God’s forgiveness.  That sheep would then be placed on a stone altar, and its throat cut.  In some cases the sheep would then be placed in a ritual fire and consumed entirely by the flames.  This was called a Holocaust.  In other cases, I suppose, the sheep was eaten.

Now, as I have argued, much that is evil in human life comes from resonance with the predatory elements of our nervous system, the stalking, attacking, killing and ripping to pieces of food, food which was necessary for physical survival.  Our world demands some life be shed that we may live.  Even vegetarians take the lives of plants.  Even worms live on organic materials of all sorts.

The animal nature in us lives, I believe, in the gut, in the unmyelinated vagus nerve, which touches many places, all of which can contain excessive traces of this urge to kill.

This, in turn, in my rudimentary psychophysiology, is connected to the amygdala.  Big cats, when stalking prey, are highly aroused.  All their nerves are awake.  Their muscles are ready to pounce and kill.  Once they kill, they become relaxed.  Most predators feel little anxiety.  They eat, then go to sleep, satiated.

And I have read that our best warriors are like this.  When not deployed on a mission, they are more relaxed than most of us.  They relax easily.  But when deployed, they are able to be more alert, and more aroused than most of us.  This was shown in Heart Rate Variability experimentation.  They have higher than average HRV most of the time, and much lower than average HRV when focused on a task.

What is being placed on the sheep is sin, which is to say the sense of guilt, which is to say shame.  Shame, in turn, is a complex also containing fear and aggression.

Ritual killing, like any other killing, satiates some latent predatory instinct, I would argue.  The higher the levels of arousal, the more violent it needs to be.

Nearly all cultures the world over practiced some form of sacrifice, and a great many of them seem to have started with human sacrifice.  In my own work in graduate school, in what amounted to my Master’s Thesis, I argued that key Vedic texts contain nearly unmistakable evidence that human sacrifice was once practiced by the Aryan ancestors of those who eventually became known as Hindus (after the river Sindhu).  For example, in one of the best studied Vedic ceremonies, the Agnicayana, a number of heads have to be buried under the alter, by memory goat heads, horse heads, sheet heads, and a human head.  It is not unreasonable to suppose, looking at cultural practices around the world, to suppose those were the result of sacrificial rituals.  My paper was actually on another Vedic Hymn, but I don’t want to go into too much detail, not least because I can’t remember now most of it.

But the point I would make is that shame is necessary as a means of social control and restraint.  It is what keeps people sociable, on the trodden track.  But it is also always a source of anger and fear, and thus latent and actual aggression.  It has to be regulated.  There have to be safety valves.  I would argue sacrifice is one of those.

Sacrifice, though, in turn, has to be seen as a necessary result of a social order in which people never rise to the level of maturity needed to control and express their own impulses in healthy and appropriate ways.  It has to be seen as a result of people being enmeshed with one another psychologically, and unable to fully differentiate themselves from each other.

The solitary sage, then, would be outside the sacrificial order.

I have more to say, but my brain just got tired.  I’m going to post on dogmatism, then do some Neurofeedback.

I wonder if you can “get” PTSD from things in your future.  What if some part of you knew your destiny was to be tortured to death, in front of a crowd of ghouls? PRE-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

How would you live your life?  How would this affect your spiritual journey? 

In some respects, life is a game.  Games have rules, and the goal is to play as well as possible, to engage spontaneous resourcefulness, careful planning and preparation, considerable but not continuous effort (no one can be on all the time, nor is it beneficial to try), and faith in the ultimate outcome.

Dogmatism allows the certainty of answers without the necessity of questions.

Dogmatism is grey with no possibility of blue.  It seeks to avoid grey, and generates nothing else.

On this theme, what, I wonder, is the connection between shame and emotional/intellectual rigidity?  For whom is a stable sense of absolute certainty a welcome boon?  What emotional pain does it soothe?

Put another way, in what emotional circumstances is the pain of confusion or uncertainty made unbearable?

I will ponder this today, maybe.  My brain has a mind of its own (yes), so it may wander in some other direction, but it is an interesting question, and obviously one highly relevant for those of wondering what to make of the Maoist cult (without a Mao) materializing before us.  The capacity for physical violence is plainly evident, as is of course the actual and continual use of political violence.

Dogmatism: answers without questions.

Dogmatism is the state of having no questions for your answers.

Whenever you find yourself reacting in an emotionally inappropriate way–and I will comment that all emotions are appropriate in some times and places, including anger, including even murderous rage–ask yourself what unmet emotional need is driving this reaction.  Is it loneliness and following depression?  Is it chronic frustration?

And for those of us with issues of trauma–and I suspect trauma exists in at least a muted, low grade form in nearly everyone, perfect childhoods being nearly impossible, with precisely the right ratio of stress and adaptation–we have the Unholy Triumvirate.

And with regard to that specifically, when you feel excessive anger, comment to yourself “I also feel excessive fear, and I also feel excessive shame.  Those are all within me.”  I haven’t decided yet if that helps–I just came up with it yesterday–but it is in any event the truth, and I suspect that toggling like that between three related but distinguishable emotions reduces the intensity of all of them.

And it just occurred to me that self defeating behaviors stem from an organismic effort at emotionally logical correlation.  What I mean by this is that if you have a chronic sense of shame, some part of your psyche has an overwhelming need to justify it, to make it logical, rather than simply an unanchored feeling floating out there.  As I’ve said before, if you feel like an asshole–to be clear, because of chronic amygdala overactivation, and other related brainwave dysregulation, all resulting from adverse and unprocessed experiences–the temptation to act like one is strong.

And it occurred to me as well that evil is really simply the ultimate in self defeating behavior.  It is taking the logic of the amygdala disregulation and building a life on it.  We all want to feel safe, to feel connected to other humans and our world and lives generally, and we want stimulating challenges.  These are the basic requirements of a happy life.  We want to exist calmly, to exist in a network of connections, and to have something interesting to do.

Evil is giving up on all that.  The hunger for power, for example, could and probably should be seen as a misguided quest for safety.  Acts of cruelty should be seen as misguided efforts at connection.  And dissipated hedonism should be seen as a misguided effort at the feeling of satisfaction which can only come from work well done.

I’m not an ascetic.  I’m not a Puritan, but I do think we are all built to want and need certain things, and so many of us cannot remember or figure out what those things are.  This is the source of so much confusion in this world.

There was a useful pas de deux between Republicans and Democrats in the late 19th and early 20th century.  Republican ideas support business, but businesses without rules tend to collude to abuse workers, so the counterpoint of Democrat labor organizing was useful, on balance.  You have to have growth to have wealth to fight over, but to my mind the government setting some basic rules is not such a horrible thing.  Government in the business space exists on a continuum, and if it is not too much, I am willing to call it a good thing.

It is not unreasonable, for example, to hold employers liable when they force employees to work in unsafe conditions.  It is in fact quite a good idea to prevent the formation of wage suppressing cartels. (I might note in this regard that it is safe to assume the Communist Party in China acts, effectively, as such a cartel, intended to abuse workers, and enrich what can only be called a Capitalist elite).

Democrats, in pointing to this history, are not wrong.  There are some good things in their past.  But those Democrats got what they wanted.  In 2019, they have nothing to offer the American worker but the mass importation of labor competition, which is, if you think about it, something ONLY Big Business would want.  They can’t form cartels, legally, but the Party of the Worker, supposedly, is allowing them to dilute wages by altering the quantity of the supply of labor permanently.

In an historical reversal, only Republicans are standing against this, and that largely to prevent what would amount to a national gerrymandering which would cause us to lose national elections in perpetuity.

But it is also the right thing to do by the American worker.  There can be no question of this.

And the comment I intended to make was this: without Democrats most labor laws would not exist as they do.  Without Republicans, slavery would not have ended until some time in the 20th Century.

In the 19th Century, the Democrat party was the States Rights, grumpy old men party.  The Republicans were the energized, pie eyed, often young, idealists.

We are still, in my view, the idealists.  The Democrats talk a good fight, but by and large they are the party of getting rich on the make, something which is made easier by making government larger and thus more corruptible.

A few meanderings.

I had a long ass day today.  Most of the muscles in my body hurt.  It happens, to some of us.  Fuck it: this is life.

But I’m sitting here drinking beer and watching videos which are mostly U2 at the moment, and thinking: maybe I will be the guy, one day, sitting at a bureaucratic desk, who will discuss Proust and Camus, Vedanta, and Madhyamaka Buddism with some stranger at 3am, who is getting from here to there, for reason they themselves don’t understand.

I will always be a strange person to touch.  Most people will never see me.  Those that do, will enter my own confusion.  That would be fantastic.