When people have difficult lives, and no spiritual tools to process them, then they get mean. Being mean makes you hurt less, at least consciously.
This is, I suppose, an old truth, but old truths need to be pulled off the shelves and dusted off from time to time.
To the extent I am right, I am presenting you with a mirror that is more honest than the one you use normally. We all put filters on our mirrors, don’t we?
The phrase “bitterness is an analgesic” popped into my head the other day. I did not understand it, but thought I might take this lazy day to ponder it a bit.
Dictionary.com defines it this way: a feeling of antagonism, hostility, or resentfulness.
Is anger not an analgesic? Do we not feel less when we are angry? You can get an adrenaline rush physically that mutes all physical pain. We are physiologically made that way.
Would this not make anger–chronic anger, anger you wake up with, anger you “exercise” daily–an analgesic too? Would it not be an attractive alternative to the entropy of dissolution, of confusion, of uncertainty, of anomie and alienation, of self loathing?
Anger is an emotion, but resentment is its cognitive framing, is it not? And bitterness is what you get when you think resentful thoughts. Things should not be this way, we say, they should be some other way, and that they are not fills me with anger. Then off you go to the races. You are filled with the thrill of the chase, and as long as your thinking fosters resentment and bitterness, then you will necessarily be filled with anger and hostility.
I think much of the anger, the lack of listening, the lack of openness, the hostility, begins with sadness. It begins with loneliness. It begins with a lack of fulfilling lives. Most Americans are not happy. We are not a singing and dancing, happy, spontaneous people. We are more or less chained like galley slaves to jobs most of us do not want to do.
Is it not an obvious extension of the “panem et circenses” to “grant” people the “right” to daily rage? Was the Two Minutes of Hate in 1984 in some sense not just a letting off of the “steam” of circumscribed lives, not just the teaching and measuring of obedience, but a pain killing drug?
It is so hard seeing any good end to all of this. It is very hard not seeing the Earth as a giant prison run by wardens who themselves cannot leave, and who resent those who try.
And yes, these are techniques of psychological manipulation, but it should never be forgotten those who want to rule over us, who view us as inferior cattle, are themselves if anything INFERIOR to us in their emotionality. They don’t exist on a higher plane spiritually or developmentally. They just have the money and the power. Most of them are worse than most of us. Most of us can be taught. Most of them cannot.
And being the kings of Hell is much like ruling over a fetid swamp where the very best are disgusting by any sane cosmic standard. It is being a small fish in a small pond, desperate to forget the ocean, and desperate to forget that there exist whales out there. It is a stupid game for small people.
But as Hannah Arendt pointed out, such people, their essential banality notwithstanding, can destroy lives when not opposed by those capable of dignity and honest clinging to truth.
The word Sophistry comes to mind. Historically, the Sophists are “received” as liars, as politicians. But the word means “truth”, and it could be repurposed to mean “Truthists”, or speakers of truth.
Gandhi’s Satyagraha would be relevant here too.
I was having a discussion the other day with a guy who is a Republican who just wants Trump to “move on”. His reasoning is simple: at the end of the day Joe Biden had more votes, and American history is characterized by smooth transitions of power. He kept saying “at the end of the day, it is the Constitution that matters.”
Here is the analogy I would offer. Imagine you have a high end cocktail party and the guest of honor, when he arrives, proceeds to take a giant shit in the middle of the room. Just drops his pants, squats, shits, then wipes his ass with his hand, then rinses it off in the punch bowl. Then he proceeds to act as if nothing happened. He tries to shake people’s hands. He makes jokes. He does, more or less, whatever you would expect Joe Biden to do.
Rather than an elephant in the room, you have a human shit in the room. What do you do? There is no etiquette rule for this. Nothing in Emily Post. It is the most egregious insult, nearly, that anyone could inflict. And by a guy in a tuxedo who showed up in a chaffeured limousine, who is by job and reputation the most important guy in the room. What to do?
That is our situation. Whatever is done will be unprecedented. On the one hand we could disrupt the coronation of Joe Biden by various means, which has not been done, or at least has not been done in a long time. On the other, is coronating a guy who has plainly taken bribes from China, Ukraine, and no doubt others, who was in fact seemingly directly aided in voter fraud by most of our enemies. The guy is a crook who has sold out America, someone who used HUGE fraud to appear to win the election, and who is a senile creep who gropes young girls and is plausibly alleged to have molested his daughter.
Habit is always a go-to, but what I would submit is that PRINCIPLE is the way out. Yes, it is EASIER to just have one of the wait staff clean up the shit, then replace the punch bowl, but at the same time you are not dealing with a lunatic. He knew what he was doing. It was conscious. It was planned. He was seeing what YOU would do.
Do you understand this? He knew it was wrong, but he did it any way, counting on your good manners and fundamental cowardice to let him get away with it. Even after he broke every possible rule of good taste, he expects YOU to adhere to them.
For all I know, more than one king has literally done this. That he got away with it was reinforcement that he was King and he could do anything he wanted, and no one could or would say anything.
This voter fraud is a shit placed on the podiums at the Senate and House. It is shit in the middle of the Oval Office. It is a shit placed in the mailbox of every American whose vote was stolen from them.
What are we going to do? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. But I continue to believe that President Trump needs to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to secure justice, which is to say the second term that he EARNED at the ballot box.
And I will add that, as I have commented from time to time, the world needs dicks. The world needs people who are basically good, but not so good that manners are more important to them than standing up to bullies. Somebody who matters needs to say to Joe Biden: hey asshole, you just shit on America. And if we can’t stop this, collectively, then most of our leaders literally deserve to be shot. Treason is giving aid and comfort to our enemies. And obviously allowing and even encouraging our enemies to get Joe Biden into the White House qualifies, as does rubber stamping it.
This is South Park humor, but at the small risk of diluting the message I am trying to convey–hell, who listens to me anyway?– I will suggest that I agree fully with this “philosophy”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2GwrR-4Q9E
This whole murderous madness of the responses the world over to COVID-19 is pure evil. None of this makes sense, and no doubt millions of people will die of starvation and of misery. We knew Vitamin D and zinc made a difference virtually from day one, but no one is speaking about them on the main platforms. Fauci has mentioned them, but made no point of them.
If they had emphasized Vitamin D and zinc the way they emphasized masks, this pandemic would have 75% or more less death, and we would be done with the lockdowns. Ponder that. Take as long as it takes.
I continue my process of trying to understand this sort of evil. It is not passive. It is aggressively anti-human.
And these vaccines may well attack women’s reproductive capacity. It is a stated risk in the literature. Snopes had a “debunking” article they removed, which is always a sure sign that there is both smoke and fire. They were debunking the claim that the vaccine WILL cause infertility, and their debunking consisted in a senior VP at I think Pfizer saying that it MAY cause infertility.
And keep in mind Big Pharma cannot be sued. They bear ZERO legal risk, no matter what happens.
Consider that any theoretical risk, deployed across hundreds of millions–no, BILLIONS, over the next year or so–WILL cause all possible damages in some people. Let us say it is 1 in 5. 20% of the population no longer able to bear children. Bill Gates handed out vaccines in Africa that caused infertility, without telling anyone, at least according to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The template, and indeed the RESEARCH, already exists.
How do we get to Children of Men? Well, this vaccine may be one way. What if the process winds up being 80-90% over a period of ten years? This is what the psychopaths running this world want. This is a key goal. Permanent sterilization. The human herd unable to reproduce without the aid of experts they control.
Here is the thing, and the point I started to make: no one who lives in a prison wants to be reminded of it. And all people whose inner emotional core is characterized by unprocessed and unacknowledged trauma live in cages. They are on leashes, tethers.
What is the most painful thing for such people to see? Happiness. Innocent joy. Why? It REMINDS THEM OF WHO THEY ARE.
All of us, all day every day, have happy thoughts, joyful thoughts, connecting, compassionate and loving thoughts, popping up all day every day. It is in the nature of being human, of living in this endless sea of light. If nothing more complicated happens than allowing them regular expression–subject of course to the fits and defensiveness all of us are prone to–then all will be well. Let the mustard seed do what mustard seeds do. It will work out in time.
But there exist people in whom seeing this provokes first the image of their own cage, then rage at their confinement, then rage at those who reminded them. The first two flit through so quickly they don’t see them. They just find themselves wanting to hit something, to punish something, to cause pain and misery.
This is the ultimate root of evil. It is a resistance to natural progress. It is damming up a river because you cannot stand the water. It is attacking life itself out of a sense of futility born of confinement that cannot–they believe and feel at the most basic root of their being–escape.
Evil is a facade consisting in lies they tell themselves, then a second set of lies they tell others. They delight in lies since they are familiar, since their lives depend on them.
And mockery has bitterness as a source, does it not? Happy people do not mock others. They are not mean.
I will say this, to any such people who remain torn in two, and conscious of it: I will find a way out. Every day I make progress. I know the feelings of helpless rage, of being crushed, of being hopeless, of the desire to inflict harm on others. The problem in me, and in people like me, is that it exists at the most primitive emotional levels. I was broken before I was able to form memories. I don’t remember a time before the pain started.
But I am on the path to finding the way out. I just need time. Every day I pray, and every day I work as hard and as intelligently as I can manage, and with ups and downs the average continues to rise slowly. Don’t close the door yet. Some of you do not know you are trapped, but some of you do. I feel this.
It feels vaguely foolish to me talking about “life” when everything in our lives may be on the verge of being overturned by lunatics and truly evil human beings, but until that happens, I guess we all need to do the best we can, and even if and when it happens, that remains true. We need to seek out wisdom, comfort, kindness and what joy and gratitude we can create or find.
I was dreaming the other day about someone who used to be in my life. He is an ambitious man who through relentless focus and hard work has done very well financially. He is on all accounts great at his job, and paid very well for it. His wife had a child from a previous marriage, and that child is a neurotic mess, from what I can tell, and is in turn raising a child that is also a neurotic mess. His focus was always on his job. That always came first.
So we are there in dream space and he tells me that I have to come stand in a line, because a terrific, not-to-be-missed sale on stuff is coming up, and if we don’t hurry we will miss it. So I’m standing there with him, and people start cutting in line in front of me. One of them I knew, another guy who did very well for himself.
This goes on for a while, then suddenly a have a small girl over my shoulder who seems lost, and my focus shifts to her, to helping her, to helping her find her family and her way. The line sort of disappears into a sort of mist.
Now, I had been talking with my oldest the other day, about a time when she was little and had to be hauled out of a mall over my shoulder because she did not want to stop watching a dancing Santa Clause. She has become a healthy, well adjusted, successful person. She is a good person.
And it hit me that most Americans live their lives waiting for the Next Big Thing. We work and wait, work and wait. The next house, the next car, the next promotion, the next vacation: that will do it, for sure. And if not, well there’s always the line to the Next Big Thing.
If I might paraphrase and in my classify-it-how-you-will opinion improve on, a quote by John Lennon “life is what happens while you are waiting for it.”
You know what is at the end of the line? A cliff. You fall off. That is it. You wait and wait and wait, and then your time is up. Poof.
One of my jobs in this life was to interrupt the pattern of abuse and trauma from which I emerged. I have done that. That is an intrinsically valuable use of time and life energy.
And as far as YOLO I would ask this: how much time in a life can you spend skydiving, Rocky Mountain Climbing, going 3.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu?
There is a place for all that. I am not saying any of that is wrong, particularly the process of learning to embrace fear.
But I would suggest that all of us, if and when we make it to old age, will value vastly more loving deeper, speaking sweeter, and giving forgiveness we’ve been denying.
https://www.infowars.com/posts/attorney-lin-wood-claims-jeffrey-epstein-still-alive/