https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/what-if-the-sars-cov-2-virus-is-weaker
His concluding, as he calls them “troubling” questions:
Where are the adults in the room?
What the hell are we doing?
What is the endgame of pretending like we’re not living through an avalanche of deadly lies?
I’m reading a history of Bon in Tibet, which around 800 becomes mixed, as in a double helix, with Buddhism. As I think most know, “Tibetan Buddhism” is a hybrid religion.
Bon practiced animal and sometimes even human sacrifice. It is a vaguely Manichean faith, which sees both good and evil forces in the world, and which seeks in particular to minimize the evils caused by a variety of spirits. When possible, they turn them to the good, and in general the Buddhist aim was to turn them to the protection of the Dharma. I see in this a spirit not too different from that of the Catholic Saints, and the overstepping of the Saturnalia with Christmas, the spring festivals with Easter, etc. Halloween is connected to All Soul’s Day and All Saint’s Day, and I think those are layered onto something older.
Here is what I am going to wonder out loud: was the Buddha more concerned with the eating of meat, or with the sacrifice of animals as offerings to spirits? My gut instinct is that it was the latter, and vegetarianism evolved as an unnecessary, and perhaps not intended result. He was trying to stop the ceremonial killing of animals, and the only way to make sure he was not misunderstood was to stop all killing of animals, if possible.
Reading about the history of vegetarianism in India, it seems the Hindus followed the lead of the Buddhists, who possibly followed the lead of the Jains, who are by far the most strict sect in the world in regards to ahimsa.
We are born into this world, and asked to live in it. We are not born with a book. We are born into cultures, but all cultures, I would argue, consist in mostly arbitrary rules. If they are enforced viciously and aggressively, dissent becomes impossible, and those arbitrary rules come to look like rules of nature. They are iron clad. Sacrosanct.
But I look at trees around my house. Birds are eating insects, and each other. Fish in the seas are eating other fishes. Lions are devouring antelopes, bear fish.
Is this not a world where all are bound to die, and not infrequently at the hands of other inmates of this planet?
Personally, I have gone back and forth on vegetarianism. I was a vegetarian for two years, but never felt well. I was lacking something, and I don’t think it was just nutritional. So one day on impulse I just bought two cheeseburgers at Burger King, and have never been a full vegetarian since.
One of the key underpinnings of particularly the more ardent, more militant vegetarianism is the anthropomorphizing of animals. They see them as inarticulate humans. They are not that. They are animals, which feel, which hurt, which obviously bleed, but which do not feel resentment and injustice like humans do.
And I think in most cases such people not only see animals as human, but in important respects project onto those animals all the positive traits they are unable to find among their fellow humans. Animals become good, and people become bad.
And I think often this leads quickly to a fundamental hatred of humanity. I also think a love of animals STEMS from a hatred of humanity, which is to say a generalized sentiment rooted in personal experiences with nameable individuals.
So in my observation and belief, many, many vegetarians, particularly the more aggressive vegans, are misanthropes first, and animal lovers second. That is my feeling.
In my view, there is a certain cruelty in this world which is inescapable. If it is not expressed one way, it will come out in another. I think by all means we need to avoid unnecessary cruelty to animals. I have long paid extra for chicken and beef I had reason to think was treated at least a bit better than happens in the worst places.
But you have to find your darkness and own it. You have meanness and pettiness in you. Yes, you. No, you. We all do. We have bellies. We have to eat to survive.
Personally, I think the healthiest thing for me, the way that I actually become the best possible version of me in these circumstances, where I know I will die, know I will hurt, know that I don’t really understand all the rules, or why things work the way they do (or even if any of this should be treated as real), is for me to reject sainthood. To reject doing things which inconvenience me for reasons which are not a deep part of my emotional constitution.
There is apparently controversy over whether or not even the Buddha was a vegetarian. Some people believe that he ate meat if it was offered to him, if he did not believe that animal was killed specifically for him.
For me, I have decided not to decide. I am going to leave it open. I am going to eat meat because I feel emotionally and physically healthier and stronger. I don’t know if it is right or wrong, or if it is completely irrelevant to my spiritual progress. I tend to think it is the last though. I don’t think it matters one way or the other.
I wonder, most nights, when I go to bed, how I am doing in Life. By conventional standards, I am a bit of a failure. I have good kids, and I haven’t spent more than a night in jail, and I pay my bills, and no one can say I screwed them over, but I should probably be a professor somewhere.
Last night I said to myself, well, I’ve lived a life of courage. I haven’t given up. I have done my best to decide what is important and what is not, and pursue the important. What I think is important is personal growth, emotional soundness, peace of mind, the ability to love easily and openly, resilience, wisdom and depth.
And like a typical American, I want those things NOW. I wonder why I am not farther yet. But I think most people never honestly START on this path. I have been stumbling, crawling–sometimes on my belly–falling off the path and getting back on, sometimes laying for a night or a week or a month flat on my back thinking I can’t go on but getting back up eventually, all of this, for a long, long time. Failure is when you quit. It is not when you hurt so much you can’t focus.
And it hit me that there is a relative 100% you can give. It is like Relative Humidity. The amount of moisture air can hold is relative to its temperature. The warmer it gets, the more moisture it will hold. When it is very cold, it does not hold very much. Very cold days up north in the winter have a feel and a sound to them. It gets quiet, to where the air itself always felt to me like it was crackling. It feels like you could hear a bird chirp 100 yards away like it was next to you. This is moisture free air.
And emotionally, if you are giving until it hurts sometimes, and giving at least a bit past your comfort zone regularly, daily, then that is your relative 100%.
And I look at kids nowadays, and their 100% is not very much. But it is what it is. And they themselves are keenly conscious of their own unhappiness, their own weakness, and so I would suggest that for most of them working daily to build a better 100% would be a salutary practice.
But you can’t ask from anyone more than they have. There is no 110% if you define relative 100% accurately. If you ask more, they will dissociate. They will disconnect. They will stop trying. This is human nature, wired into all of us.
If you are imprisoned, and you can’t find a way out, you will either go in circles or give up. Going in circles, in my view, is better than giving up, because you are retaining the idea of freedom.
And I think in important ways what Jack Kerouac, his generation, and those who emulated them, did, was go in circles. The implicit assumption–one stated in various ways by various authors–was that this whole country–maybe even Western culture generally–is one big prison, that emotional freedom is difficult or impossible to achieve, and “running from” without a “running to” was the best antidote to despair.
So Jack and Neil went in circles. Then they died. Young.
It is an odd thing that people can have actual political freedom–as seen from any sane and informed historical perspective–and still feel unfree.
Actual freedom, in some ways, is a sort of torture. For a lot of people, I think it is like Red, in Shawshank Redemption, who had been imprisoned so long the World seemed impossibly large, and impossible to manage.
American culture until the 1950’s was pretty much like all cultures the world over, for all of history: we had expectations, and we had sacred institutions, and if you stepped over the line, you could expect violent consequences. This is how culture is enforced. And it applied to the Plains Indians, Zulu Warriors, Australian Aborigines, Swiss Burghers in the Middle Ages, Egyptian nobility in 1,000 B.C., and the Shakyas in Buddha’s time.
This is the meaning of Rousseau’s idea of being “forced to be free”. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. The most useful commentary (on Rousseau–and also on Nietzsche, who many read, but few have anything intelligent to say about) on this is Alan Bloom’s truly outstanding book “The Closing of the American Mind”, which of course foretold the era we are in. As he says, Nietzsche himself foretold cancel culture and the sacrality of victimhood. They are logical developments of intellectual evolution based on bad foundations. Ideas have consequences. Obviously.
But what Rousseau was perceiving, without in my view really understanding (something he had in common with Freud, who was nearly always almost right), was that most people are actually happier in cages. They are happier with limits which cannot be negotiated. They are happier forgetting there is an outside, and an Alternative. They are like trained dogs. Most people don’t train their dogs to Sit, and Stay any more, because it feels mean, but I think dogs actually like that. They want to have clear ideas about how to behave.
And our aspiring Overlords are not on completely irrational ground when they assert that most people WANT to be controlled, WANT to be told what to do, WANT to have their freedom limited to Coke and Pepsi and Mountain Dew.
What about water and wine and whiskey? Oh, we don’t sell that here.
I think the bisexuality of Kerouac and Cassady (and homosexuality of Ginsberg, and likely pedophilia and certain hard drug use of Burroughs, etc.) was an important element in their lives. Men having sex with men was culturally taboo, and back then men were beaten to death for doing it sometimes. But a small culture was emerging in New York, and perhaps San Francisco and elsewhere, where it was ALMOST open. Where such men could find each other, not in the light of the day, but in rooms with the door partially ajar, and the windows not fully shuttered. In the right place, you know, and at the right time.
And Almost Freedom is almost worse than open captivity, of the literal sort that Oscar Wilde faced. Almost Freedom is a prison door cracked enough that you can imagine it open, but which won’t open enough to let you out. I think that is what drove much of their madness and their crazy pounding on the doors of our collective culture.
As I have argued, the nervous breakdown in our culture started in the arts, and in my view started with the Beats, which I will recollect for you originally meant beat down, or beat up. “Beat”, as in tired. It was only later that Kerouac tried to spruce it up and turn it into something it was not. In spirit, in fact, it is a lot like “punk”. Punks, in my understanding, were the guys who got anally raped in prison. It was not a positive thing to be a punk. Certainly, though, such people would have good reason to be angry.
[I was reading last night, incidentally, that Clyde Barrow was apparently repeated raped in prison. He killed his attacker eventually with a pipe, and got away with it when a lifer claimed responsibility. In his early marauding days, though, he planned a retributive attack on that prison, and I’m sure his experiences had a lot to do with how many people he killed, some pointlessly.]
Learning to live with freedom is both a personal and a cultural task. Imagine how hard it would be to navigate our social worlds if we shared no holidays, if we all used different calendars, if none of us read the same history, if none of us had common reference points, like George Washington, and Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus.
You would feel lost, daily. So we all need a bit of Givenness, in the midst of this Thrownness. This amounts to a freedom from one form and source of anxiety. This is the extent to which Rousseau was right.
But our true Home is in the Moment. Rules and institutions are our training wheels, or our crutches, while we learn to walk. Prison bars keep us from falling down while we are finding our feet and our voices. They are not meant to last, in my view. There is something inevitable about them falling away, in this life or the next.
Do you think they celebrate Halloween or Christmas in the next life? For us, these are special days, but what if every day is special, and so much better than our best days that it is literally vastly beyond our ability to imagine?
Oh, I am Stream of Consciousness-ing again. It seems to do me good. I let things out, sometimes invisibly to myself at the time, through this process. Imagine it as a brief flood down a stream, intended to liberate stuck logs, and help them continue their path down the river. Too much water and you overflow the banks, but just enough, and everything is moving that should be.
I just had a really nice Kum Nye session, and the phrase came in “it’s earlier than you think”.
Now I have quite often engaged in very apocalyptic doom and gloom. An underlying level of tension translates easily into the perception of negative possibilities. People of my sort–and here I would suggest reasonably intelligent and reasonably sensitive, bookish sorts–tend that way.
But maybe it will all work out, somehow. That is certainly among the possibilities, isn’t it?
I get angry sometimes. I allow abusive trolls to get under my skin. At the same time, though, my reason and my gut both tell me we all need to work AS IF this can all be sorted out. Our demonic children can be brought back to the light. Pervasive terrible and imbecilic ideas can be corrected, over some time horizon.
This sort of positive thinking creates possibilities which would otherwise be invisible. We do not necessarily need to brace for the worst, but work and prepare for the best.
I don’t have a crystal ball. I am confused and angry and sad and bitter, and disappointed, and sometimes even vengeful. I’ve got the whole array. But I speak truth when I say good things COULD and perhaps even WILL happen, all of THIS notwithstanding.
I was listening to the Guess Who singing “No Sugar Tonight”, and thinking about how long ago that era was, when this “classic rock” was made, and about “Hippyism” generally. What happened to them? What happened to the rebellion, the experimentation, the curiosity?
And then I got to thinking about consumer culture generally. Did that vibe not in effect become a commodity? Rather than a spirit, you have specific bands. Rather than trying things out and seeing what works you got tie-dies and drugs used for kicks.
The dominant ethos in this country is that you can buy happiness. That everything and everyone has a price. That if you just work harder and then get what you want, you will finally get a bite of that carrot.
Hippy versus Conservative is almost like Coke versus Pepsi. You pick a brand and stick with it. And you will be given everything you need. You will be handed self importance and a sense of your own rectitude, a mass of people who think like you, and you will be given the ideas to think and the words to say.
Is it perhaps more true than false to say that the Left generally is basically a bunch of intellectual fat fucks who resent being asked to get off the couch and change the channel?
The same is certainly true with most conservatives, but in general we just want to be left alone. In general we are not telling people how to live their lives. We are not virtue signaling in the same way, and our goal is more, not less, freedom, within broad limits of actual common sense.
This is just an intellectual doodle. Ponder it however you like.
This cloud of Consumerism is really something which warrants discussion. If you look at, say, violence in media, which is clearly pernicious in many ways, as is pornography, it amounts to an effort to buy experiences cheap.
And if you visit any left wing town–take virtually any college town anywhere, from Kent to Berkeley–they have a lot of nice stuff. Fancy restaurants. Olive oil stores. Art museums.
All of this is pleasant. I like it. I like those sorts of places, even if those sorts of people would not like me if they knew my politics.
But is it something idealistic? Pure? Is it not just another way to consume, to find in objects what meaning is possible, like most Americans have been taught to do by Madison Avenue?
Consumerism and a sense of the sacred are actively antithetical, in my view. As I have said often, culture has to deliver four primary “goods” (understand it this way and not that way): a means for the creation and transmission of meaning, of truth, of power, and of wealth.
The cultism of the Left is perhaps an unconscious attempt by the post-religious to create a sort of sacred you can BUY, cheaply. You can get an absolute, unshakeable sense of belonging and righteousness for the tiny cost of not asking questions, or thinking too much. It’s a great deal, if the pleasures of life–of easy self-righteousness, and emotional and intellectual indolence combined with the sensual pleasures of food, drink, sex and thrills–are all you are concerned with.
It is really no wonder hedonists of all feathers flock to the Left. It has room for them. It ENABLES them, in many important respects. In another era, they would be hypocrites. They would be frauds and liars. But with this “church” you get all the good stuff, with none of the bad stuff, as seen from an emotionally superficial perspective. Within broad limits you cannot be judged for anything you WANT to do–weird sex, drugs, horrific irresponsibility–and on the contrary will be commended for no more arduous task than reading scripts written by others. What could be better for lazy narcissists?
And with regards to narcissists, it occurs to me it would be worthwhile for any honest intellectuals reading this to revisit Christopher Lasch.
Narcissism is not having a large ego. It is not loving attention and a high level of self confidence. Narcissism, at root, is an INCAPACITY for empathetic relating, to understanding others, and actually CARING about others.
I have been accused more times than I can count of being a narcissist and sociopath, BY patent narcissists and sociopaths. These are just words to them. Their incapacity is so severe they can’t see it. They literally have NO IDEA–no felt sense–of what genuine caring looks like. So they act it out. And they assume that since possess those traits–caring and compassion–anyone disagreeing with them must not. Simple logic: not me, ergo BAD.
The madness is everywhere. This is the only thing I know to do to combat it, which is try and describe it as accurately as I can, and to try and do a bit better every day.
I like rainy days when I don’t have to be anywhere, and large thunderstorms are even better. We get some good ones around here.
I was listening to this marvelous storm just now, and it hit me how sad it will be when it’s gone. I was hoping it would rain tomorrow, but no luck: sunshine.
And it hit me that this basic process is behind most misery in the world. EVEN WHEN THINGS ARE GOING WELL most of us, after a certain age, start waiting for the other shoe to drop. We don’t go too deeply into even positive experiences unless we are in the throes of some powerful passion that causes us to forget “normal” restraint.
And such passions are valued of course for that precise reason.
We look wistfully at children, who are so innocent, who do not yet know how quickly the best things can vanish, how friendships fade, stable situations disappear, and how often we find ourselves as adults doing things we dislike, and perhaps even resent and hate.
But is this not the precise POINT of non-attachment? Entering emotionally into each moment as it comes, taking what joy and light from it there is to be had, and then letting it go while embracing the next? Flow? Openness? Shunyatta, the place without fixed form or time?
I would suggest non-attachment, in important respects, amounts to Learned Innocence. You have to learn both to enjoy and to let go. You have to be fully present to change, to the Wheel of Change, but beyond it because not attached to it.
I would suggest the legislators–and if there are any honest ones, the members of various Gubernatorial staffs, as well as any honest law enforcement, if there is any–of at least Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada–should be making sure the ballots are being preserved, not touched, and not tampered with in any way.
If the Arizona audit is the real deal–and it appears to be, although I am lately used to nearly continual disappointment–it is going to show levels of fraud which are jaw dropping.
And the people–who are large in number, organized, and ideologically fanatical–who orchestrated this RICO worthy crime KNOW that the evidence is there. It is abundant. It is indisputable.
So no one should assume this is a static situation, in which simply waiting and seeing is the best play. All of those other folks need to start paying attention, asking questions, and protecting what amounts to criminal evidence.