Month: May 2020

What if viruses have a sort of hive mind, and simply “decide” somehow when to spread, and when to stop?  What if the Spanish flu was influenced in some karmic way by the Great War?

I am thinking of organisms like termites, whose ability to coordinate their activities we don’t really understand.  Specifically, I’m thinking of Rupert Sheldrakes idea of “morphic resonance”.

As I’ve been noting everywhere, the flu ends about now every year.  It runs all winter, then stops.  Good ideas exist as to why, like increased Vitamin D levels and overall health improvements in those who are getting sunlight and fresh air.  Sun also seems to act as a disinfectant, and coughs and sneezes, empirically, simply don’t travel as far on warm and moist air.

But there could be more.  I feel like there is.  It is only a feeling.

Everything is interconnected, according to modern physics, or at least most interpretations of it.  This is something worth remembering, particularly for those who want to speak of “science” as if science were something other than the total output of everyone using a particular method of inquiry, or as if experts did not disagree on everything under the sun, continually and often angrily.

I really think Catcher in the Rye is about sexual abuse.  Throughout the book, Holden is either trying to protect women, or he is treating them with contempt. He literally has a whore in his room and finds he has no desire to have sex with her. A teenage boy.

The guy in the bar he met, where he was talking about how “flitty” the place was, felt ambiguously gay to me, and Holden finds himself talking in crude ways about sex with him.

And there is the “20 times” comment.

The whole thing felt very autobiographical, with the most important elements more or less hidden in open view.

Here is Salinger on it:  “My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book … [I]t was a great relief telling people about it.”

Note, that the “relief” came many years after the fact.

I will note also, simply because it was interesting, that Salinger was with an infantry unit in WW2, where he saw action, possibly, on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.  He got PTSD and was hospitalized for it for a few weeks.  They called it “Combat Stress Reaction” back then.

But of course you don’t really get over true PTSD, although I think the community support for ex-soldiers was much better back then, not least because so many went.

But that the guy was, to use the term used then, “neurotic”, seems obvious.  And unwanted premature sexual experience seems like the obvious candidate for cause.  That book was in some senses a “cri de coeur” for someone to hear him, but I doubt anyone really did.

The maladjustment, alienation, confusion: THAT they got.  But that respected and well known men were doing awful things at times to boys: not so much.

It’s like with Freud.  Freud GOT what the women were telling him.  He simply convinced himself to lie about it.  He made a career and became famous for his lies.

And in that context, through that prism, one can easily see how Caulfield would view everyone reflexively as phony, find himself unable to trust anyone but his sister, and be so charged with nervous energy that he couldn’t function.

This book, in important ways, is really a tragedy.  It is about a boy destroyed by a system which lied about it.

I don’t see how Holden will ever have a truly healthy relationship with a woman.  As apparently others have commented, it would not have been surprising if he wound up a homosexual.  It would not surprise me, as a reader, if he was headed towards becoming a pedophile himself.

As far as Mr. Antolini (I think it is): I could spin that both ways.  He was drunk and feeling affection for Holden like a son.  I could see it that way.  He could also have been drunk and having fantasies about Holden.  I could also see it that way.  Either way, it was utterly and completely inappropriate, and Holden’s confusion understandable.

It seems obvious something in that neighborhood must have happened to Salinger himself.  And as he got older, he famously retired from the world, much like his deaf mute gas station attendant.

Some things are just too much to bear.

This triggered a few things for me.  I was not molested, but I was–as I think most boys are–subjected to queer and inappropriate energies on a number of occasions.

I’m sure this whole thing will continue to unfold in me in interesting and I hope useful ways.

I just finished reading “The Catcher in the Rye”.  I had a specific personal reason for reading it I won’t get into.

First off, I can relate to this kid.  He’s a dick, but only because he is absolutely fucking miserable.

Here is the thing: he doesn’t feel loved, other than by his little sister.  And he apparently loved his brother who died.  His father and mother live in distant worlds, and it seems likely his mother was not an attentive mother and that his bonding is ambivalent or avoidant.

Here is the solution: love.  Kids like that need to feel loved, valued and understood.

But standard therapy does not have that as a goal, does it?  It’s rejected in principle and at the ethical level, as inappropriate to a therapist/patient relationship.  So both are reduced, in the end, to dancing around the real issue, aren’t they? 

And the patient learns all these stories about “why” they are the way they are, which are really untrue.  They just need to feel loved. They don’t need to undo something that happened 25 years ago.

And the therapists get to keep their own emotional content at arms length.  Here is another thing: many therapists are themselves “catchers in the rye”.  They deal with their own insufferable emotions by acting like they are saving others.  The whole analogy is a good one for the emotional basis of virtue signalling and what I recently saw called moral narcissism.  The things they do for “good” are really stage acting intended to convince themselves and ideally others that they are the sorts of people they really aren’t.

I think Holden is obsessed with phonies because he is clever enough to have seen how often people play act their own lives, but he is not able to create something of his own.  He’s lost, utterly and completely.  And I think he became famous because he was an early form of a type which later became very common, the dropout. In his own way, it would not be overstating the case, probably, to see him as a proto-hippy.

I’ve pondered this whole thing.  This book created quite a stir in 1952.  It was not long before the time of the Beatniks (as Herb Cain eventually termed them).  “On the Road” came out in 1957.  Howl was first howled in 1955.  But already in 1952 Ginsberg, Kerouc, and Burroughs knew each other, and were preparing the foundations.

I’m not the historian I would like to be, but I’m not ignorant.  Here are a few elements I will introduce as potentially relevant.

Firstly, the success of “capitalism” created degrees of freedom, education, and opportunity which were really quite new to middle class Americans.  Freedom can bring with it both fear and hope.

Fear, if you do not love yourself, and are filled with self loathing, as Holden plainly is.  He is afraid of the future. 

And I wonder to what extent various attempted molestations affected him.  He said it must have happened to him 20 times.  Scared kids lacking in confidence are the standard targets of these horrific and emotionally abusive men.

Secondly, anyone who was 40 in 1952–a good guess as to the age of his father in the novel–would have been 30 in 1942.  They would have lived through both the Great Depression and the Second World War.  There is a good chance they would have served.

What hard living, hard experience, difficult, traumatic experience does, is it makes you emotionally unavailable.  You are not as kind as you otherwise might have been, at least most people.  You become hard.

Holden is obviously very sensitive, and he must have picked up on all this.

Oh, I’ll leave all this there.  I’ve had a long day.  No doubt a lot of ink has been spilled on all this.  I’ll need to read some tomorrow or the next day.

True wealth is always an emotional state.  So is poverty.

Bill Gates is a very poor man.

And I would comment that money doesn’t make people bad, but that bad people are often driven in the direction of wealth.

I say bad: really, the world is simply filled with people unable to process traumas that they often can’t remember.  And the worst trauma is not being loved.  If you are never loved, then you don’t miss it.  But you can’t be a complete human being without love.

Based on his behavior, I doubt very much that Bill Gates has ever felt loved, and I don’t think he knows it, not on a deep level.

I think one of the most generous things you can do is be openly and authentically happy.  I think this is close to the essence of genuine spirituality, because you can’t be happy if you are not living a good and honest life.

I think there is, or may evolve into, a market for old fashioned books, and an old fashioned card catalogue.  Nothing you do on the internet is private.  You can’t look up the capital of Moldova without it being recorded and logged.  Algorithms track your very thought process, I suspect, if anyone has an interest in you.  I assume I am tracked, to some extent, although I would assume it is automated (I was talking with an NSA contractor once, and he told me if you are a “person of interest” they assign someone to “watch” you 24/7; I will add this blog is banned from Facebook, for unspecified “policy violations”.  I can’t link it.)

What if you could go somewhere, like a library, but not a library, and pull out an old World Book encyclopedia and look up the capital of Moldova?  Then spend an hour just browsing through the thing, like I did often when I was  a kid?  $10/month, new books added weekly.

You could read books there.  There could be a magazine section, like there used to be.

It sounds retro, and it is, but who would have thought records would make a comeback?  I think in the right market, with the right marketing, this would work, and perhaps work really well.  You could ask everyone to check their phones at the door.  I think even the kids are starting to understand their addiction is unhealthy. 

Free coffee–how about an espresso machine people could operate themselves, with training?–meeting areas for people to hang out and talk.  Bean bag chairs.  Place to do old school homework, with unconnected computers running word processing software.  Maybe even old software, barely better than the Atari games which might also be present.  Maybe even a typewriter or two.

A working pay phone.  Etc.  

Please, just do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsi9csLNb-Y&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR11yafSWmghYK1WerNk_q1cuMxHeB3LhnpVnpRj8jX8tYekMMtsWJrjTck

I think a useful analogy could be made between an internally rigid set of mental structures–ideas, and the stable, rigid emotions which underlie them–and a physical building.

In a physical building–take any building at the college or high school you attended–you have hallways and classrooms.  The hallways would symbolize the pathways of thoughts, and the class rooms sets of ideas, say about “evolution” or life after “death”, or about politics.

It may so happen that the hallways need to be jagged sometimes.  It may so happen that the walls of the classroom need to be moved in 6″ or out 6″, or to become curved.  The ceiling may need to go up, and the floor allowed to form craters and ridges, all to match and mirror new perceptions.

And you need to be able to remove walls, or sometimes, to walk through them.  They need to be permeable, even if also self contained, like a cell.

I suppose in important respect your “building” needs to become a living, breathing, reactive animal or organism.  It needs to live in the ecosystem of the world of constantly changing and evolving ideas and associated emotional states.

It’s obvious the electron could not have been discovered in a yurt.  But I wonder if our thought leaders would be as rigid as they are if they lived in yurts.

I’ve lived in Oxford.  I’ve spent time with friends in at least a couple of the colleges, mainly Christ Church and Magdalen.  There is a physicality and architectural presence which I suspect is reassuring even to the most ardent atheists and nihilists.  There is at least something tangible which FEELS nearly eternal, and certainly lasting.

People like Richard Dawkins live, emotionally, in spaces like that.  They provide them with continuity, structure, purpose, and a means of life and living.

They also make them dogmatic, because to lose any of it is to lose all of it, and all of it is all they have.

It seems lately I am processing feelings from many years ago.  They are being released from ice.  I won’t share any specifics, but will share some abstractions, perhaps deflections, and stories I am telling that make sense to me.

The thing, I think, with kids who emerge into kidhood with shame is they become targets.  If you are already lacking confidence, you will, in many cases, wind up being mocked and bullied, UNLESS you become a mocker and bullier, which I never did.  At least, I never did as a kid, that I can remember.  There were likely episodes my unconscious snuck by me, which is, I think, how these things tend to work.

And of course on the internet I certainly DO mock people.  I claim they deserve it, which most but not all of them do, but of course I cannot claim that mocking people helps my cause.  So that makes all this something worth processing if I want to be able to honestly raise my self estimation.

I would submit, though, that I almost became an academic.  Had I done so, I would have labored, largely in obscurity, on abstruse, complex, not really very interesting for most people topics, and much of my inner life would have been spent screaming to no one “what about ME?”

I really, really think this is the emotional soil in which left wing politics take root.  Collectivism, in all its form, really needs to be seen as an emotional punishment which is inflicted on its victims in a spirit of rage, not compassion, in a spirit of vindictiveness, not justice.

And of course we all lie to ourselves.  It’s not hard, once you develop the habit.  And at some point, your very awareness that you ARE lying makes you even angrier at everyone else.  This is really what I see on the internet.

Recently, I’ve been interacting on the Facebook page of a lot of smart people. Individually I’m sure all would do well on IQ tests, averaging somewhere, most likely, between 140-160.

But they interact with dissidents on the internet like children, like bullying children.  No longer do they attempt to weigh and integrate all available facts.  No longer do they seek dispassion and honest intellectual work.  It’s all reflexive, dogmatic, inflexible, stupid.

As I’ve said for years, it’s really a question of social psychology, not political wisdom.  In my view, what is intelligent politically is really not that hard to determine.  Most of the time, the choices are between doing something that always fails, for reasons we can describe, or something that always works, again for reasons we can describe. 

The difference is not in honest consideration of economic and political history, but rather between what one group of people WANTS to be true, and what IS true.  This is the fight we are having right now.  And the specific fight over the virus literally consists, at this moment, in a fight over whether we use the data we had 6-8 weeks ago, or the data we had 2 weeks ago, and continue to gather now, which mitigates STRONGLY against the response we undertook 6-8 weeks ago.

As I pointed out to someone, the history of Leftism really consists in three phases 1) the phase when the ideas seemed tenable; 2) the phase when the ideas failed, repeatedly, all around the world, and with all manner of leaders; and 3) the present, when all Leftists REFUSE TO LEARN THE LESSONS OF HISTORY.

There was also, in recent months, 1) a time when it seemed the virus was overwhelming and devastating.  Policy was enacted based on that assumption.  That policy 2) failed, because the wave of new cases we were told to expect WITH the quarantine–which was just supposed to mitigate the severity of the overload–never appeared.  On the contrary, we have many hospitals on the verge of bankruptcy, and many, many cases of doctors telling us they are being pressured to list nearly all deaths as COVID related because it helps reimbursement and.  So 3) everyone insisting that we have to continue these quarantines almost indefinitely has not–because they refuse to–LEARNED THE LESSON.

All those people are saying “WHAT ABOUT ME?”  They are not done punishing the human race for itself being a virus.  They are not done punishing America for electing Trump.  They are not done with their self important lies about how everyone who wants to go back to work is a “right wing extremist” and even “brown shirt”.

The whole thing is based on hate and resentment.  I have called Left wing politics a morality which demands an economic policy which in turn demands a political system.

But that morality, itself, depends on the emotions of greed, resentment, envy, and vindictiveness.  It is no morality at all.

A tradition is something that is intrinsically arbitrary but which makes you feel good.

Put another way, it is a means of hanging some predictability on a world which intrinsically lacks it.