Month: May 2021

Nihilisism, in its emotional essence, is the FEELING that “success in life”—which can be variously defined but amounts to a FEELING of self acceptance and emotional peace—is impossible. You cannot belong. You cannot find rest. No cultural cave will have, no tribe bless you, even that, ultimately, of the cursed, even though there you will best approximate communion.

But sooner or later all members of such aggregations of chance and pain MUST be cast out. The emotional logic demands it.

This means failure is inevitable.

This means shame is inevitable.

This means there is no compelling reason not to reject any and all rules which increase the feeling of shame, even if for only a short time, and even if the long term cost, honestly reckoned, is HIGHER. You will obviously borrow in the future again from another future and in the long run—as likely nihilist Keynes put it—we are all dead.

Note though that the FEELING that nothing will or could ever work out, that the burden cannot be lifted by any human means except through altered states—like sex, intoxication (note the word toxic in there) and cruelty—STARTS with shame and works outward.

Shame is the water in which nihilistic fish swim. They cannot escape it, or so it seems.

Is it not easy enough from this perspective to derive Aleister Crowley, his “Do what thou will”, his sex, his drugs, his ultimate failure when he could no longer borrow from his future?

And it is worth noting that trauma itself amounts to a kind of brain damage. It is an electric shock that more or less literally places our nervous systems in a state of seizure, from which it is very difficult to escape.

And in thousands of years of human recorded civilization and some hundreds of years of modern science, we have only begun taking thus problem seriously—which to me means understanding it in scientific and not moral and religious terms—in perhaps the last thirty years.

Consider that altar boys were getting molested more or less with impunity as recently as the early 1980’s. Why would we not assume this sort of thing goes back forever?

Even though everything seems in decline—certainly I myself have claimed this often enough—it is also not wrong in my view to consider the idea that we are also on a high ledge—from which we can both see and fall—from which we can contemplate human history—human good and evil—from an historically unparalleled vantage point.

This is good.

There is ample cause both for love and hate; ample room for both despair and optimism.

Contemplate where your soul naturally goes snd ask why. You may get no answer, but asking is a start. It is opening a door, beyond which is something new.

Reasoning, if you think about it, is the process of providing reasons for what you think and do.

The opposite of reasoning is saying “JUST BECAUSE”.  Since this is not a good reason–we all want a REAL reason–it is nearly invariably attached to personal attack and an effort to change the subject.

Why do we wear masks?  We are told “to slow the virus”.

This begets two questions:

1. why do we want to slow the virus?  Our hospitals are half empty, and this disease is not dangerous for most people anyway.
2. How do we even know the masks “slow the virus”?  How much, if they do?

Obviously, this is the essence of the Socratic method.

Here is what I would suggest: people who do not REALLY have good reasons for things MUST keep the focus on anything and anyone other than themselves.

What I believe happens is that people who lack reasons they can articulate–or which would actually be accepted by people, the wills to power and privilege not being something we support others in winning at our expense–focus on doing things TO people.

If you look at Orwell’s 1984, a perennial war was needed.  Enemies.  O’Brian could easily have just said to Winston Smith that they were watching him and to behave himself.  That likely would have been enough.

But he trapped him, because they needed a steady supply of enemies to do TO.

The opposite of this, obviously, is doing FOR.  BLM in theory exists to do things FOR black folks, to win them rights, to protect them, to advance them.

But in reality, it is a con focused on doing TO white people and all persons, black and white, who oppose them in any way.  They keep all eyes on the alleged villains, while they are cashing million dollar checks and buying limos and mansions for all their friends and family.

Reason is the tool of the good person.  It is the method of making sure your motives are pure, and that your actions are effective.

Anyone who rejects the use of reason–who feels no need to reconcile their thoughts and behaviors to their claimed ends–must be assumed to be working in the realms of greed, attention and power nearly exclusively.

One of my favorite sayings, from Mary Poppins, but presumably according to a British maxim of a bygone (at least, too much, too much!!) era is “enough is as good as a feast.”
And if you “enough” well, then every day is a feast, isn’t it?

And if fasting is practicing enoughing, then fasting is feasting, isn’t it?

And to do without is to INCREASE, is it not, if enough is a feast?

Let me speak plainly, as an American: gratitude has cash value.

I’m playing.  I’m playing.  But I’m also completely serious.

I was reading in my Men’s Health that “Studies of both people and rodents have shown that it’s less stressful to know you’re about to receive an electric shock than to think you might get one.”

This is fascinating, isn’t it?  Is it not reasonable to derive most human dysfunction from a passionate desire to avoid fear and pain by CREATING pain, and thus putting fear into a box of sorts?

In my view it is useful to imagine the universe–God–raining down blessing and joy in rivers everywhere, for all of us, across our lives.  We are truly offered manna.

But all pleasures are fleeting, are they not?  Is this not our universal experience?  Have you not experienced moments of joy only to immediately realize how foolish such a thing was, in the face of so much THAT?

The point of the spiritual path, in my view, is to get from the fleeting to the lasting, to finally SEE the manna, which can only be seen when you let go of all the cords tying you down, when you tear down the bars of the prison cell you built to protect yourself, and keep the world out.

Every spiritual tradition tells you that food and sex and power and wealth and all the trappings of Earthly life are inferior to the manna, the Buddha Nature, the Samadhi’s, Mokshas, and Nirvanas of the spirit.  There is nothing wrong with food and sex and even within limits power and wealth.

But they are DISTRACTIONS.  That is all.  I would even propose that “sin” could be equated with distraction, with losing focus.  Certainly, it is often called falling off the path, but I would suggest that path is not virtue per se, but perception understood broadly.  You stop looking when you find something, even if there are much, much better things possible.

I forget the field, but somewhere they speak of Exploring and Exploiting.  In Exploring you find out what there is.  In Exploiting you take advantage of it.  You might explore your town for the best restaurants.  You might date many women or men to see who is out there.  But sooner or later you need to make a choice.  For restaurants, you will have a few you go to often.  For relationships, you may need to “settle”.

In fact, as one comedian I was watching commented, ALL women, or most women, are settling when it comes to us men.

And spiritually, you are trying to find what is NOT manna, and cast it aside.  Neti, Neti, as the Upanishads put it.

Put another way, the issue of Theodicy might be readily settled by supposing God set us a perfect table we are just too stupid to perceive.

But notice when you create trouble that is quite real, to avoid trouble that is only theoretical.  Notice when you lasso and confine momentary pleasure by noting it cannot last.

None of us can eat one meal and be satiated for a lifetime.  Likewise, the pleasures of life, while fleeting, are as numerous as our perceptual genius allows. One leads to the next, and connecting them is a learnable skill, one which presumes non-attachment, and non-aversion, within broad limits.

Buddhism, Stoicism, Hinduism, and Christianity all teach these things.

What if every time we tested someone for COVID we tested them for Vitamin D and zinc deficiency?  Better yet, what if these tests were made available at government expense (which is to say if we add them to our childrens already astronomical bar tab), proactively?

I don’t get why Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem and Jay Bhattacharya and the other authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have not specifically focused on what I have been calling Nutritional Immunodeficiency.  It is so easily corrected.

There may be some ethical or professional guidelines that would violate, but given that people’s lives are at stake, those guidelines would have to be really fucking stupid.

We know about what safe doses are for most people, and even if we erred on the safe side, we could still boost the overall immunity of the world by making people AWARE that this is an issue.

I was talking the other day with an overweight African American man.  He and his wife both had COVID.  He basically just had no energy for a week, but his wife, who is asthmatic, had serious breathing issues.  They almost took her to the hospital, but not quite.  Both recovered fine.  And we were talking at close distance face to face with no masks, by the way.

I asked him if he took Vitamin D.  He said no.  He took a lot of zinc–LOTS of zinc he emphasized–and elderberry and some other something.

But as an African American, he already has one major risk factor for D deficiency.  Weighing I would guess 50-60 pounds more than he should is a second risk factor.  He didn’t seem to want to hear my spiel, so I didn’t give it to him.  But AFTER A YEAR should he not know about Vitamin D?  There is ZERO evidence for masks or vaccines, but ample and plentiful evidence for D, not just for COVID, but all infectious diseases (as well as mental health and bone density).

But here is my point: EVEN IF, say, Jay Bhattacharya–whose candor I find wonderful–does not want to “practice medicine” by “prescribing” zinc and D, he could STILL tell people:

1. you are at higher risk of serious problems if you are deficient in either.
2. You can get tested to get PRESCRIBED a dose by a qualified doctor or nutritional consultant.

This whole thing is madness.  I know I am Johnny One note, but shit, this is awful.

Here is one backwater website that you could and should take a look at and possibly share:  https://vitamindforall.org/letter.html

I ask myself daily: where are the fucking SCIENTISTS?  Where are the honest men and women without whom civilization cannot survive?  Where are the brave individuals of the sort which enabled us to build this once great nation?  I am disgusted and angered by all the putrid cowards I see in every direction.  It is shameful, inexcusable.

And I will add that my email from 2008 has been repurposed to say Joe Biden.  The points remain.  How do we build UP–and I mean morally, which in the main is in my view 100x more important than our technology, even if that very technology makes our moral and intellectual mediocrity vastly more dangerous–when the average citizen swims daily in unconscious ignorance, as buttressed by the certitudes of effective indoctrination and the bullish confidence that they are entitled to vastly more than they have earned, or even tried to earn?

It’s a tough question to answer.  All I can say is that persistence prevails when all else fails.  That is the most useful motto in the universe.  Even if you are trying to love your neighbor, you will need persistence, because he is probably a self important vegan dick who sleeps with his fucking mask on, and who has a chihuahua named Vic.