Month: October 2019

When do something for someone who can and should do it for themselves, you assert your own power over them and implicitly their own relative powerlessness.

Solitude is like a screen upon which our unconscious will always eventually project everything we need to know.  For maximal effectiveness, we need a way of processing and integrating this experience, but once that process has initiated, solitude is essential for a time.

I was dreaming last night I was back in my home, and my brother had decided that pissing on the floor was OK when he really, really needed to go.  This is only a small extension beyond things I’ve personally seen him do.  Both my parents rationalized it.  He was one of them.  I hate to use that phrase, but I need to start going there for my own good.

And I woke up pondering a statistic I saw the other day, that the AVERAGE American is on their smart phones about 3 hours a day, and THEN watches about another 3 hours of TV.  Consider that most jobs involve sitting in front of a computer, and you have people who have completely lost touch with reality.  They live in a dream world, where they are addicting to stimuli.

This article was on InfoWars today: https://www.infowars.com/when-did-halloween-become-so-sick-twisted-and-gory/  I looked up the Sabrina video.  In the comments on YouTube one commenter said “‘ She annoyed me so I killed her’, LMAO.  That gets me every time”.

The change, obviously, has been the violence and popularity of our horror movies, where motifs of human sacrifice and cannibalism and dark cults have become staples.

Cultural atavism/regression, in other words.  These are not harmless images, and not harmless stories.  They have an effect.  They are seeds, planted in the unconscious of millions of people around the world, creating a longing for that precious violence which comes to seem necessary for health and flourishing.

This is the world we are building/moving into unconsciously.

I was looking at T-Shirts the other day.  Here is one of the Top Sellers: https://www.redbubble.com/people/stevenrhodes/works/29220924-lets-summon-demons?cat_context=u-tees&grid_pos=7&p=long-t-shirt&rbs=e2d273fc-a8f4-4755-9bc0-c005717d34cb&ref=shop_grid

“Let’s Summon Demons”.  Hilarious.  I’ve seen many demons.  There is nothing funny about them.  They are a distortion of everything good, like a reflecting pond in an earthquake.

All of these things have causes, antecedents.  And much of it MUST be related to the materialism taught in schools, and the socialism also taught in schools.  Playing with things like Ouija boards is, I read, something kids are into, or were a few years ago.  They are looking for SOMETHING, some sign that their lives are not pointless, even if it means going the wrong direction.

We have lost the ability to talk in public honestly and soberly about the things that matter.  Where are our leaders doing this?  Trump does this, to the best of his ability.  He is not a deep man, but he is in my view an honest man, and one capable of acting instantly on reasonable–really average, which makes him exceptional in this fallen age–moral instincts.  He is capable of saying “hey, this guy is a serial rapist torturer and murderer.  We should kill him.”.  So he kills him.

Patently, our media lacks the same average, BASIC, rudimentary moral compass.  It is appalling and baffling, even for a cynic like me.  Seemingly there is nothing left there, no residual sense of right and wrong, no lingering conscience.  It is unbelievable.

The more I grow, the more silly my plans to change the world seem.  I won’t give up, but I am losing that sense of urgency.  Most people are not ready to listen to me.  Most people don’t want to hear what I have to say, that you can grow as a person through long term, extended, and difficult effort, which you can undertake even when you are not suffering from immediate mental illness.

Most people want to live in a fantasy land, in video games, in music, in media.  They have superficial relationships where terrible pain can be felt and never expressed.  I was watching an SNL video the other day, with Chris Farley and David Spade.  Do you think Chris Farley ever felt like he could confide his inner pain with David Spade?  Spade has always struck me as a guy who looks around him in every direction prior to answering any question.  His first question is always how any decision he makes, anything he says, will be perceived by the people he things of as cool.  He is detached, ugly.

And if I might make the SNL cast an example, as much fun as they seem to have, do you think they were ever REALLY able to rely on one another?  No: it was all show.  They were in show business.  Creating illusions was and is their job.

And we valorize, idealize, the “image players”, if I might translate directly the German for actor.  And so many act their ways through life, and go home to misery which in tens of thousands of cases every year just in America winds up in their death.

I am losing my taste for participating in this system, in this silliness, this fraud, this vain illusion.  It has long seemed to me at some point I would need to take my metaphor of living in a cave more literally.  I’m obviously not going FULL literal–I sleep on a thin mattress on the floor, but I still like having a mattress and HVAC–but I may slowly stop going out as much, and start focusing more on my meditation.

I have a metaphor I will make my Bon Mot in my next post.

This may be a recycle, but as I mention from time to time, I hope my recycles change the details and add new features.

First off, note the reflexive reaction which may have happened in you, seeing that tagline.  Seriously, stop for a moment.

Anxiety?  Dear God where is this going?

I KNEW IT: HE’S A HATER?

As a metacomment, prior to making my point, I will submit that we have been taught to hate hate.  If I call someone a hater, and direct hate at them, I am rewarded.  That this is a fundamentally contradictory stance would require the sort of insight and introspection which is PRECISELY  denied by the process.

Here is my claim: nobody is capable of pure evil, and to deal with this fact, in a world filled with violence and conflict, we learn to hate people so as to be able to maintain a consistent opinion of our enemies.

What led me to this logic was the realization that I had to fight, in my youth, literally every member of my family.  I recall sort of rotating, thinking “these two are bad, but I can trust this one”.  This is how you deal: you don’t tell yourself the truth of the whole thing.

But all of them wanted to reduce me in some way, belittle me, make me more like them: miserable, ineffective, lazy.  I stood out in a house of slobs as someone who at least made an EFFORT at picking up, cleaning up, organizing. My children used to tease me when I told them I was the neatest one, saying: if this is organized, what was your house like?  My answer: worse.  Much worse.

Here is the thing: all of them had good moments.  All of them would from time to time, as if awakening from a sleep, treat with something resembling respect.  I never felt love, but I guess it would be most reasonable to say the conflict would sometimes cease.  I would stop feeling attacked at an existential level.  When this happens, some part of you says “why can’t it be like this all the time?”, and you trust that it is possible.  Then they fuck you over again.  And so it goes.

The benefit of hate–and I will note I don’t hate any of them, but it likely would be more useful for me if I did, although less honest–is that it allows you to feel all the time the worst in the cycle, rather than the best.

Think of the Christmas Armistice in WW1.  All of those soldiers were basically the same.  All of them–or most of them–would have gotten along fine if they had met in bars.  There was nothing to hate about the other side, EXCEPT that they had orders to try and kill you.

But that’s a big BUT.  You can’t effectively defend yourself if you think: this guy is basically like me, he likely has a wife and kids and house and job, and life he was trying to create before the war.

No: psychologically, you have to act as if that guy is evil incarnate.  It makes everything easier.  If you do kill people, it makes dealing with it much easier.  It’s much less like murdering your neighbor.

So if I apply this analysis to our current political predicament, I would say that psychologically most Leftists KNOW on some level that we are basically like them.  We are, let us say, ordinary Germans, caught in a war we don’t want to fight, arrayed against ordinary Frenchmen, who are also arrayed in a war we don’t want to fight.  Actually, I would flip that.  I was trying to be generous, but the reality is that the “invasion” was initiated by the Left, and conservatives are defending our homes and way of life.

Either way, though, what the Left is REALLY defending is membership in what has gradually evolved into a cult of sorts.  It is what gives them meaning in life.  It is their family.  They have cast away all their anchors, all the traditional points of grounding which their culture of birth gave them (weak as many of them may have been, in America at least).  They are all embarked on a ship they can’t steer, and which they cannot easily get off of without paying a psychological cost.

They are trapped, in other words, without consciously realizing it.  All of this happens at the unconscious, or semi-conscious level.

They HAVE to fight us, then, and do so KNOWING we are not monsters.  Shit, they see us at work and even church and in the grocery store and everywhere else, at least in sane States.

So what is the answer?  They need to MAKE US INTO MONSTERS  to protect their own way of life, their own church, their own religion.  They NEED us to be racists.  They NEED us to hate homosexuals.  They NEED us to denigrate women.

And so out of sheer psychological necessity, if we don’t play into their fantasies of us, they simply make things up.  They fabricate assaults.  They simply assume the worst, then refuse dialogue because of who we supposedly “are”.

I think this contains much of the truth.

Trump, of course, was an existential threat to their religion.  Their religious leaders had TOLD them he could not be elected.  When he was, it was like a prophesied Second Coming failing to appear.  It cast into doubt all they had been told.  This is why they cling so furiously to meager threads of thoughtfully prepared deceits left by Obama and his cronies.

Life makes sense.  It has rules.  People invariably act rationally, based on their emotional needs and the beliefs which they lead to.  The only sense in which life is irrational is that in which people claim they want one thing, but then invariably pursue actions which lead to something else entirely.

One example: claiming to value justice, then lying cheating and stealing every chance you get.

A respect for the rule of law is completely inconsistent with attempting to remove Trump based on lies, all while ignoring completely large, egregious, and well documented crimes by Democrats.  They can’t be logically squared.  This is purely emotional logic.

And it occurs to me an equivalent phrase to emotional logic is emotional need.  It is not only children who have emotional needs, and most “adults” retain most of the needs which were imperfectly met in their actual childhoods.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/oct/24/martin-scorsese-on-lou-reed-he-spoke-the-language-of-people-with-nothing

This clarifies things a bit: Scorsese likes telling specific kinds of stories.  It’s what he likes to do.  You can’t fault him for that.

He just didn’t need to call Marvel movies, what was it?  Despicable, I believe.  Perhaps he was caught in a bad moment.

It’s odd to note as well that Scorsese is very rooted in New York, even if not all his films happen there.

Marvel, too, was started by a New York Jew named Stan Lieber, and played a prominent role in some of his best comics, like Spiderman.  Marvel dreamed of what New York COULD be.  Scorsese focused on what it was.

It’s really an unnecessary argument, the whole thing. I’m not and never will be a fan of Martin Scorsese, but he’s got his thing, a lot of people like it, and they tell me he’s really good at it.  Nothing wrong with that.  Different strokes for different folks.  If he’s a Lou Reed fan, he should get that vibe.

Marvel movies make a lot of people happy.  This alone makes them worthwhile.  There’s plenty to be unhappy about, and empirically a whole lot of unhappy people. If it makes me laugh every time I remember how Nick Fury lost his eye–and the back story of that–that’s a good thing.

I kind of laughed when Communist in Name Only popped out, but it begs the question: what is a REAL Communist? 

Historically, the definition of people who feel empowered to do whatever the fuck they like to whoever they feel like doing it to, if they mouth false pieties from time to time about “The People”, is pretty accurate.

But I would submit that at root, in theory, all forms of Leftist ideology have as their conceit that they are working to ameliorate human suffering.  That they are the good guys.  That they are working to right wrongs.

Practically, so much evil happens so fast in the process of getting and consolidating power anyone who retains this notion of the thing will get flagged as an “enemy of the people” and eliminated in one way or another.

Put another way, historical Communism ALWAYS murders “real” Communism.  That’s why “real” Communism doesn’t exist and hasn’t existed, outside of perhaps church cloisters and Israeli kibbutzes. It is an idealistic creed which, to actually come into existence, has to be SOLD, not imposed.   Prophets of a better world need to learn to convince people to be kinder, more generous and less selfish.  This is a fundamentally spiritual task, and one that is made exponentially more difficult when the prospective proselytizers are hard core materialists and atheists.

There are many roadblocks inherent in these ideas, many contradictions, and I would argue many factual errors, both historical and scientific.

But I think it is safe to say any person in a “Communist” system who labels themselves a “Communist” made severe concessions long ago with respect to either their ideals, or their capacity to be honest.

I’m quite sure I should have achieved moral clarity on this years ago.  I used to joke with my kids about CCC: Cheap Chinese Crap.

But they have literally and figuratively raped Tibet, for no reason at all.  It is not a resource rich country as far as I know.  But they literally throw Tibetan women into men’s prisons for long term rape and humiliation.  They torture women.  They have a system for identifying people who reach their wits end and set themselves on fire as a last fatal protest against the dehumanization being inflicted on their nation.  Such people are “put out” and hustled off the street within five minutes, when the system operates properly.

They operate psychological torture camps, which they–in typical Communist fashion–lie about.  They call them job training camps.  Where are the people working who have “graduated” from these camps?

They more or less directly manifest the cultural ethos of Brazil (the Terry Gilliam movie, which I will note again is in my view the closest to the truth dystopian movie I have seen, at least in this stage of our possible decline into barbarous authoritarianism).  You have a plastic, pretty, cultural elite living on the backs of people made slaves BY Communist ideology.  All being a Communist REALLY means is that you can do whatever you want to whoever you want, provided you proclaim from time to time that it is “for the people”.  If the people riot in the streets, then you blame foreign agents, not your own regime.  It’s all a lie, and everyone knows it’s a lie, but it akin to a ritual peculiar to this particular form of mental and moral derangement.

And it will be like boycotting 19th and early 20th Century Britain and America, in the so-called Robber Baron era, when the worst abuses of the nascent industrial age were happening, and being mislabeled Capitalism by its enemies.  Chinese workers have no protections.  Chinese environmental regulations are non-existent.  People work themselves to death.  They die from preventable accidents.  They die from being poisoned by their environment.  All while an elite laughs and drinks champagne and complains about how horrible the rest of the world is.

And while it is bad enough that Planned Parenthood harvests organs from babies they kill in the process, the Chinese elite seemingly has the power to order, say, a Falun Gong member seized when their alcoholism causes them to need a new liver.  Falun Gong live healthy lives, so their livers are in good shape.  The troops pull them from the street, or their home, throw them into a mobile ambulance with the ability to perform operations, pull out what they want, then put the body where they put the last body.  Pure evil.  But this is how I understand it most likely works.

Finally (for now), they are one of the worst polluters of the ocean.  As I think I mentioned, I pointed out to my environmentally conscious youngest that China was one of the largest polluters, not America.  She replied that since much of that pollution was created making shit for US, that we were in fact indirectly, and almost directly, responsible.  This is a valid point.  Boycott China if you want to stop contributing to ocean pollution.

Don’t give them your money.  Stop buying from these creeps.  The people are not the problem, but until they allow Kiva money in, there is no way to help them directly without benefiting CINO (Communist in Name Only) fat guy assholes.

Life offers options, not certainties.

It is Duhkha to observe that for every decision I make, I foreclose all others, for that moment.  If I make carrot cake I cannot also make bakhlava.  If I become a Tibetan Buddhist I cannot also honestly be a Zen Buddhist.  I also cannot be an honest Sufi or Christian, or Jew, or Parsi.

If I chase and win that girl, I cannot then chase and win the other girl.  If I read this book I cannot properly also read that book.  If I choose to follow this career I cannot also follow that career.

These are pretty obvious observations, but I am trying to reason my way forward.

There is really no Givenness in life.  Perhaps that some things hurt and some things feel good, but there are grades of hurting and feeling good.  Some things that hurt at the time–like working out–feel good in the long run.  Some things that feel good at the time–like marital or relationship infidelity–hurt in the long run much more.

So it is hard to use primary feelings to navigate.

My reason tells me the only way to avoid complete confusion is to have some form of metaphysics, some belief–or educated, operative guess–about how the universe works, as it relates to us, and our souls, if we choose to include that belief.

Within my own metaphysics, the path is love, learning to love, deeply, completely and continually.  To love life, to feel wonder often, and to love people.

Towards this end I offer my body and my comfort.

But who am I if and when I start to achieve this goal?  What do I have for breakfast? If I do Paleo I can’t do Dean Ornish.  If I do intermittent fasting I can’t do the Zone.

I think for happiness there has to be a sort of functional nihilism on some topics, that it, as Bill Murray had it, JUST DOESN’T MATTER.

I think for me part of the issue is chronic overarousal.  No matter what I do, some little voice says “why did you do THAT?”  It doesn’t matter what I do.  There is no correct choice.  If I make a decision I hear criticism, and if I don’t make a decision I hear criticism.  It’s an internalized voice from my childhood.

On that score I might offer an update.  I have learned to sleep reasonably well without alcohol.  Nearly all my nighttime adventures have ended.  I can have one drink and still sleep, although I do sometimes still have more.  I had six beers last night.

And the past two nights have revealed some antique feelings.  Two nights ago, I felt the energy of being broken, completely.  My pride shattered, my feet shackled, and entering into shame.  I think this happened about age 3.  I had a strong will, my mother couldn’t stand it, and she broke me the way you break a horse.

I suppose some of this is needed in socializing.  You certainly don’t want to appease the 3 year old too much.  But proper acculturation–and here we might say indoctrination–teaches both what not to do, and what TO do.  That part I was never taught.  I was just taught to be silent in the corner, and for many, many years, some part of me has complied.  It was just shattered.  My core sense of self was shattered.  I felt that energy.  It has a feeling tone.  Feeling it is intrinsically healing.

Last night I felt my fathers profound paranoia.  He used to talk of what he called a “bunker mentality”.  He more or less locked himself into his home for his last 30 years.  He did very little other than watch TV.  I felt that energy, because of course to some degree he infected me.  I carry his genes.

It’s so hard to see who you are, honestly, deeply.

But my work continues, and it is bearing fruit.

Few ramblings.  They help me.  They really do.

I think a useful heuristic, in reading Leftist cant, is asking: whose position, whose interest, are they trying to advance?

The overwhelming bulk of the time it is that of A) someone else that B) they don’t really understand, and who C) may not know that person is trying to argue their side or D) WANT them to argue for them.

Advocating for Others.

TOS: Telling Others Stories

DVO: Demonstration of vicarious outrage.

BRWP: Being a rich white punk.

I think it is reasonable to say, witnessing hundreds of, as they like to be called, “journalists”, do everything they can to whip up an impeachment fever out of NOTHING, that the CIA controls nearly all our media. Rather, the people who control the CIA and the rest of their confederates in our government and around it, control our media.

They are all in to get Trump. They have stopped even PRETENDING to be news sources and have opened up the naked and Communo-Fascist propaganda. Old school stuff.

I say again: if you knew nothing else, this alone should cause you not just to support Trump but to pray daily for him, and for an eventual recovery of sanity in our country.