Month: June 2021

The more I think about this, the more I think kids need to be indoctrinated with small and planned amounts of shame to build basic socially desirable habits, like refusing to lie, refusing to steal, refusing to cheat, standing their ground when society for some reason needs them to, etc.

We are experimenting with children with no shame, and it is ugly.

But what I would suggest is that this shame should also have an end.  The brain is a pattern building organism, and ingrained patterns become habitual.  Once socially positive patterns become habitual–genuine tolerance would be another desirable end–then that person needs to have explained to them that all moral rules are relative, and they should, by some process, have their innate shame removed from them, as a sort of mark of full membership in society.

In other words, when you are a child, you should be taught habits, as reinforced by rewards and punishments.

When you become an adult, you should be taught to think and feel clearly, and your training wheels should be taken off.

Here is the thing: we have done it both ways.  Obviously, the more important of the two for the survival of society is bringing up kids who are not little psychopathic narcissistic, dishonest, cheating monsters.  I would hope the need for this is obvious.  And it seems obvious that this is what we–in far too many cases–are IN FACT DOING in the United States and elsewhere right now.  These kids have not only not been spanked, they haven’t even been yelled at or disciplined in any way.  In far too many cases, their parents have even kowtowed to them.  Let’s call these little shits Ryan’s.

Most traditional societies, as Peters points out, do not fail to socialize their children.

But at the same time, this shame also bleeds out in all sorts of bad ways.  It is not best in the LONG run.  And perhaps in important respects a large part of many spiritual traditions is undoing the socializing of the kids.  You beat them to prevent a societal train wreck, then they spend the rest of their lives trying to get unstuck.  Not an optimal system.

To my mind, trauma is really THE psychological topic.  Everything relates to it.  Everything returns to it.  It affects all aspects of “society” (a non-existent entity it still makes sense to talk about).  It informs our politics.  It informs our science.  It informs our universities.

And I will actually comment too that parents who beat their kids are still connected to them.  They are showing them a way forward.  Do this, and you will be fine; do that, and you will regret it.  But in traditional societies, if you perform your role, all is well and in relative balance.

So many kids in the computerized West spend ages maybe as young as five through their teenage years locked in their rooms, being socialized by images on flickering electric screens.  The parents are locked out, emotionally and almost physically.  This breeds, in my view, the trauma of inattention.  We all need emotional attunement.  We need people in our lives to recognize and react to what we are feeling.  Without that mirroring some part of the psyche fails to develop.  And we see this with these psychopathic kids, who, in any image that occurs to me over and over, are like bread that was baked before it had fully risen.  It is a doughy mess in the middle.  There is density where there should be light and air.

This makes them angry, frustrated, and searching, without knowing they are searching.  And it makes it VERY easy for them to form and find enemies, especially those given to them by people not as different from Emperor Palatine as they should be, in an open and formerly broadminded democracy.

Think about this phrase “molding character”.  You optimally put a kid into a certain shape, to begin with; and what they do with it after that is what makes it interesting watching their life unfold.  You give them a basic shape, then permission to alter it as they see fit.

It can’t be said too often that all our problems have solutions, but we need to be open in our discussions of them.

And all large problems start as small problems.  Global problems of consumption and greed and pollution all started in homes somewhere, with specific parents and care-givers, or care-withholders, as the case may be.  We all start as a sperm and an egg.  We are all helpless for the first 5-10 years of our lives.  All complexity begins as simplicity.  If you want to fix the complexity, then fix the simplicity.

I have from time to time pursued lists of “great movies” some way down.  I’m a bit of a cinephile–I rewatched Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” yesterday–but it takes me so long to digest movies, I’m also slow.  I’m a slow reader, too.  But I like to think that when I am done, I have taken more from the experience, doing it once, than most will in several passes through.

A movie whose fascination for Roger Ebert took me a minute to understand is Gates of Heaven.  It is one of those movies where certain images and commentaries reappear in my awareness years later.  I have the ability to remember little things from little movies twenty years later sometimes; and of course I’m good enough remembering plots that there is little use watching any movies twice that depend on plot twists.  The DVD’s on my shelf are by and large “rewatchers”, although I have also recently discovered that I can in most cases buy DVD’s for little more than it would cost to rent them from Amazon (who I–no doubt to Jeff Bezos’ considerable consternation–am trying to avoid as much as possible, while recognizing that he actually doesn’t care, and they are damned convenient sometimes).

Be that as it may, there is an awkward scene in the movie where a guy who runs a glue factory talks about how he helps the zoo dispose of dead zebras and elephants, and lions and tigers and bears.  Think about the logistics: what do you DO with a dead elephant?  Bury it?  How?  Does it get a coffin?  Is it a good idea just putting a giant animal in the hole that will decompose?  Actually, it just occurred to me one of the benefits of a coffin is the ground collapses less or at least more slowly.

In any event, the zoo in this case decided to let him have the dead animals, or have them at a reduced price, to render into glue.  Everything, presumably, from giraffes to anteaters wound up–unknown to the public–at the glue factory.

Is this not a metaphor for ideological leveling?  Universities are glue factories.  No matter how great a talent you may have possessed, certain elements of your mind will be seized, liquified, and rendered permanently sticky.  You will stick to everything that they put on you.  You can’t help it.  You are rendered emotionally and intellectually inert.  You are amorphous.  There is no clear line between you and your goose stepping neighbor.

The obvious corollary image is from the third season of Stranger Things, where all the “infected” people simply dissolve to become the larger monster.

Now, is this fundamentally different from what is done in the military?  No.  And think about the military from the standpoint of fight, flight or shame.  The point is to engage the amygdala strongly, then offer conformity as the only way out.  That is what basic training does.

What I would argue, though, is that in the military this conformity serves a purpose, at least ideally, and by and large most people who have served seem to carry with them both pride, and an improved self discipline that serves them well in the specific and idiosyncratic, individual purposes to which they put it.  You dissolve for a minute, but come back.

It is apparently a commonplace in the Marines particularly that for a few months after basic training you are considered a bit insane even by much longer serving Marines.  You have the zeal of the cult member.  But it fades over time with most, even if the basic structure does not.

But in universities the POINT of going is to build liberality of mind and character.  It is to cultivate openness, diversity, the ability to disagree without violence, the ability to entertain multiple ideas simultaneously without feeling compelled to embrace any of them.  It is to build curiosity, inquisitiveness, and ideally a spirit of play with ideas and concepts that is a source of delight for the newly minted public intellectual.

None of this is happening in most universities.  Prager U–which in my view has done yeoman work in the Guerilla War for Public Sanity (if they ever give campaign ribbons, I think that should be the name of the conflict)–had a student call the POLICE on them.  His complaint?  That by their PRESENCE they were–this is a quote, and a word he said multiple times–“terrorizing” the students.  Watch this video, and tell me this student does not have a mind boiled down to glue.  The COPS–not a profession known terribly well for liberality of mind and spirit–are vastly more principled and understanding than he is: https://www.prageru.com/video/student-calls-cops-on-prageru/

Again, should the professors not feel shame, that this student is apparently even unaware that the First Amendment applies PARTICULARLY on university campuses?  And, again, is this not where it becomes obvious that THEY DON’T FEEL SHAME.

I actually have another post on that.

Bukowski called this poem “Law”.

“Look,” he told me,
“all those little children dying in the trees.”
And I said, “What?”
He said, “look.”
And I went to the window and sure enough, there they were hanging in the trees,
dead and dying.
And I said, “What does it mean?”
He said, “I don’t know it’s authorized.”
The next day I got up and they had dogs in the trees,
hanging, dead, and dying.

I turned to my friend and I said, “What does it mean?”
And he said,
“Don’t worry about it, it’s the way of things. They took a vote. It was decided.”
The next day it was cats.
I don’t see how they caught all those cats so fast and hung them in the trees, but they did.
The next day it was horses,
and that wasn’t so good because many bad branches broke.
And after bacon and eggs the next day,
my friend pulled his pistol on me across the coffee
and said,

and we went outside.
And here were all these men and women in the trees,
most of them dead or dying.
And he got the rope ready and I said,
“What does it mean?”
And he said, “It’s authorized, constitutional, it passed the majority,”
And he tied my hands behind my back then opened the noose.
“I don’t know who’s going to hang me,” he said,
“When I get done with you.
I suppose when it finally works down
there will be just one left and he’ll have to hang himself.”
“Suppose he doesn’t,” I ask.
“He has to,” he said,
“It’s authorized.”
“Oh,” I said, “Well,
let’s get on with it.”

I was watching this video the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWSg1z0hzjs

(why did they call him a “class poet”?  The version I watched didn’t have that).

At some point he says he got into poetry because most of the poets he read who were contemporaries were “sissies”.  He asked, in effect–I forget the exact verbiage–how they would write about nasty fist fight?

And obviously, the guy is an asshole sometimes.  He is also sometimes brilliant.

I am going to say I try to do philosophy in roughly the same way he wrote poetry: straight forward, clear, in your face sometimes, and unapologetic.  And yes, I am definitely an asshole sometimes.  I’m working on it.  Seriously.

But one of the great problems of the moment is that nobody wants to ruffle feathers.  Nobody wants to risk offending anyone, much less being openly pugnacious and aggressive.  Here is the thing: THOUSANDS of qualified academics, the world over, HAVE KEPT THEIR MOUTHS SHUT EVEN THOUGH THEY KNOW THIS PANDEMIC RESPONSE IS AN ABSOLUTE CLUSTER FUCK AND COMPLETELY INDEFENSIBLE SCIENTIFICALLY.

It’s far better to go too far, especially when principles and human lives are concerned, than to hide in fear.  I would sooner forgive someone who goes too far in an honest cause than someone who chickens out and fails to do their job when their job needs doing.

This poem was written by a pugilist who DID NOT GIVE A FUCK.

If you’re going to try, go all the way.

Otherwise, don’t even start.

If you’re going to try, go all the way.

This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe even your mind.

It could mean not eating for three or four days.

It could mean freezing on a park bench.

It could mean jail.

It could mean derision, mockery, isolation.

Isolation is the gift.

All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.

And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds.

And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.

If you’re going to try, go all the way.

There is no other feeling like that.

You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.

DO IT. DO IT. DO IT. All the way

You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

 

I have said this before, but I am watching an old film of Tarkovsky’s (There will be no leave today), and it occurred to me, not as a direct result, but as a trigger of the sort I look for in viewing both good and bad art, that conformity is a way out of inner conflict.  It is a path to peace, of a sort.

I have spoken of fight, flight and shame.  Most people only think of two.  Freeze is one qualitative level down, that of the reptilian brain.  But shame is an eminently mammalian response.  When we are trapped, and cannot escape, shame pushes us into either dissociation, or conformity.  That, or retaining a sense of fight or flight, which manifests as non-compliance and rebellion.

Anxiety, of the sort which people have been arguing since at least the 1950’s is a perhaps defining trait of modern humans, can be eradicated by conformity.

This is the emotional bulwark against which all truth tellers have to contend, in this moment, in this world.  Endless motion, endless noise, endless opinions, endless information that is overwhelming to the senses of nearly everyone, creates anxiety.  The Simple Answer alleviates this.  This is why masks were so important to certain sorts of people, even though they never made any logical or scientific sense whatsoever.

I’ve said this approximate thing many ways.  Here is one more.  And obviously it explains Stockholm Syndrome easily.

The thing about freedom is people have to be trained both to value it and to use it.  And when I say “trained” I mean parents and communities who have read deep wisdom, learned from it, and done their past to transmit it.

But this process is made more or less literal by Islam.  Islam means “submission”, and Muslims live within “the abode of peace”.  This, even though internecine and sectarian conflict has been nearly continuous since nearly the beginning.

Human cultures have reached countless ways to achieve relative stability, often at considerable cost to the spiritual growth of their members.  Our task, in this time, is to figure out how to evolve past all of this.  Where in the past we have had relative static peace, we all need to grow up, and able to endure and ultimately benefit from dynamic peace, or what I have tended to call Active Peace.

All of it, in my view, begins with state management, which BEGINS with the ability to achieve deep relaxation voluntarily and regularly.  No one who cannot do that will, in the end, be able to travel very far, or add much to useful human knowledge.

And this is the ultimate motivation, most likely, behind our present atavistic urges, to return to conformity enforced by unescapable power.  The power elites, themselves, are not free.  They are anxious, angry, fear ridden people.  They are greedy, depressed, and have the arrogance born of actual helplessness and uselessness.

This blog itself is an account of my own spiritual journeys, and consists, I think and hope and believe, in countless acts of small progress.  I might call this perceptual walking.

I wasn’t going to blog any more today, even though my mind is filled with ideas, but this one felt like I needed to write it immediately.

Quick post.  Read this, sent by a friend: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-vivek-ramaswamy-put-wokeism-out-of-business-11624649588

I’ve been realizing for a few months now that the anti-corporate Left has more or less been purchased by the same corporations they think they are working against, and cheaply.  All they had to pay was some cheap rhetoric, a few symbolic gestures, and small amounts of throwaway money.

This is where principle is vital: it helps you understand and know when you are on track, and when you are off track.

The Left, as a giant swarm of sea faring fish, who all change when any of them change, has no means of identifying and noticing how completely they have sold out on their own alleged principles.  All you have to do is capture the lead fish and everything else is DONE.  One and done, and you have a ring in their noses, and a rope to lead them by.

Take the vaccines.  I read Moderna alone might make $200 billion from these vaccines, which were developed with government money, and which carry with them no liability risk.  They were not only empowered but more or less encouraged to cut corners and take risks.  So you have public cost and private profit, and that public cost is going to include many thousands of lives LOST, and some multiple of that ruined.

And the Left YELLS at anyone who questions any of this.  If Big Pharma had bought this–and they likely did–they could not ask for more.

 

To act is to do something, is it not?  An Actor, technically, is the one who does the action.  This meaning is preserved in the phrase “a bad actor”, which usually means not an incompetent thespian, but rather someone who DOES something bad.

Ponder for a moment, though, how INTERESTING it is that the meaning of this word has come to preponderate.  This is not an issue, as one example, in German, where “actors” are called Schauspieler–literally “appearance players”.  Doing is Machen.  Power is Macht–as in their name for the military Wehrmacht.  The Doer is called Macher.

Does it not seem reasonable to suppose that, while actors were not that big a deal until TV and movies, that in subtle and not-so-subtle ways since the appearance of these mediums we have, as a culture, come to mistake appearance from reality, the illusion for the real thing?  I think so.  When we are not working, we spend a huge chunk of our money and time consuming the “action” of the “actors”.

I have in recent months had this problem, particularly watching TV, of having difficulty suspending disbelief.  These people are PAID to act.  That scene may have taken five tries.  That “actor” could be anyone, from a saint to a serial killer, and if their talent–their groomed, practiced talent for dissimulation–were sufficient, I would never know.

We practice for some hours daily living in Make-Believe Land.  Small wonder we are so easy to lie to.  We are told Big Lies.  Insane Lies.  DAMAGING Lies, and still we take the medicine.  Still, we swallow without even noticing the moment of our consent.

And then I got to thinking about Karma.  Karma is more or less literally an equal to “action”.  I took Sanskrit and could at one point tell you all the declensions (Sanskrit has three genders, 7 cases, and–in my experience uniquely–different words for 1, 2 and Many) off the top of my head.  The root is kr-, which means to do.

So of course I got to wondering if Karma, what keeps us in Samsara, was somehow like “acting” in the actor sense.  Certainly, the Hindus and Buddhists both argue we are tied here by illusion, by delusion, by Maya.

Now, it has never made sense to me that there is a Great Balance Sheet in the Sky.  Life is about quality, not quantity.  If you murder one person or a hundred, what still matters is WHO YOU ARE, why you act, and what you can see spiritually.

Obviously, your actions flow easily from your assumptions, so it is reasonable to connect them, if not conflate them.  But your assumptions, in turn, are based on your perceptions, and those can become increasingly refined.  You can see more, better.

[I nearly commented, btw, yesterday, and will today, that thought–and the language we use to build it–is a poor from of knowing.  But it is the BEST means by which to transfer some form of knowing from one person to another, both across space, in terms of people you speak to, and in terms of time, in the form of words you leave behind.]

As I understand it, the main doctrinal difference between Chinese “Cha’an” Buddhism, and classical Indian Buddhism is that the latter insists that you have to “accumulate merit” over a very long time.  You have to steadily improve your balance sheet through meritorious action, and if you do this long enough, eventually you will have enough credits in the Cosmic Bank, that you can exchange them for Nirvana.  As you may suppose, I don’t come down on that side.

The Chinese argue (or argued: Buddhism is largely dead in China, as is nearly any other authentic living religion or spiritual practice; they seem to be wanting to make American style consumerism the State Religion, since it breeds superficially happy conformists.  I will note that this is not unknown to Taoism, but Lao Tzu repeatedly, in many passages, explicitly rejects tyranny, war, and overreach) that Enlightenment is all about perception, and perception is not bought one small grain of sand at a time.  It tends to come, in practice, in quantum leaps, in “aha” moments.  This means, logically, that while it is unlikely any given person will become Enlightened in one lifetime, it is not inconceivable.

Here is what I want to argue: Karma, properly speaking is “doing to” life, and its opposite is non-action, which is participation in life, which is rolling with life, which is surfing on the wave of life, and adapting as it changes.

Karma is wanting the world to be a certain way.  This comes from attachment, and attachment reflects desire, and desire is what keeps you locked up in this massive prison.

Yes, I think that is close to the truth.  I had a large breakfast (Ottolenghi recipe: he is rather a clever fellow, I think) and a plan to smoke a cigar and then maybe take a nap or watch a movie.  Get in touch with my inner cat, without the innate sense of style.

Here is one more point that occurred to me a while back that I may as well make now.  Many of the Gnostic writers seem to have argued that God is an asshole, and this realm of existence is a cosmic bad joke.  I think the word used is Demiurge.  Here is my question: does not the notion of Samsara–that this realm of existence is a place to escape from–not perfectly consistent with that?  Maybe the Demiurge is us.  Hell, maybe it is me, if I want to take a spin at solipsism (ouch, that hurt, let’s not do that again).

But the question remains: if this realm is so bad, who created it and why?  Is it not bad workmanship?

This video is beautiful.  I think if I had to pick a single favorite movie, it would be Thin Red Line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMaf_bpG6tI

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a499i_wC3FZ5rasK6-L61dyRCWlLHa6ZgmwSdpCe4WQ/edit

Share this on your social media everywhere you can, at least until the Fascistic death mongers at Google remove it.  It’s a hodge-podge, but this sort of thing is needed.

 

Why would we not want to apply to these experimental medical agents the SAME criteria that were applied to Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin?  We were told HCQ and Ivermectin were untested.  We didn’t know if they worked.  We need to do two year double blind trials.  OK, fine.

And the “vaccines”? Do we not need to do the SAME THING for them you wanted done for the early remedies out of the gate?  It’s relatively new technology, and absolutely new technology to this purpose.  We don’t and can’t know what we don’t know.  Only time and careful observation recorded honestly and consistently will do that.

We had DECADES of data on Ivermectin and HCQ (and for that matter Vitamin D and Zinc and Magnesium), but they still counseled “caution”.  The WHO specifically said that HCQ was dangerous and should not be used, when there existed ZERO evidence for that claim, at least for HCQ used by otherwise healthy people in reasonable doses for short periods of time.

And they threw shade on Ivermectin too.  Why would any reasonable person NOT conclude that they were bought by China and Big Pharma?  And for that matter, how do we know that  China doesn’t have huge investments in Big Pharma?  Maybe these injections are putting billions of dollars in the pockets of elitist and money grubbing “Communists” (no doubt that’s a very funny private joke at cocktail parties for the oligarchs).

I keep scratching my head.  VERY SMART PEOPLE are speaking absolute nonsense and complete bullshit.  Why?  It’s an open question, but that it is happening is really not open for debate in my view.

Most things sound better in French.  If my French is bad keep in mind I only had 1 week of French.

It occurred to me this morning that learning to live is actually a skill.  Learning to LIVE, to feel life, to feel creative and emotionally prosperous.

Art itself often of course flows out of manias of all sorts.  But it is always, I think, an outcome of trying to learn how to live.

Our ultimate creative act, though, is how we spend our days.  With what new emotions do we greet the day?  New colors?

Camus seemed to view happiness as a sort of rebellion against the order of things.  This is perhaps pushing things too far, but it does seem reasonable to suppose happiness, like painting a painting, writing music, or choreographing a dance, takes a bit of a plan, effort, and some time.

And learning how to create it is the real skill.  You have to feel it, then figure out how to replicate it regularly.  And as I said recently, happiness in you, when honest, is a gift to the world.  You provide the model.  You lead the way.

And I will append a metaphor that occurred to me a couple weeks ago that I just haven’t posted.  Some ideas come upon me so clearly that I know they will never disappear.

Learning how to learn is traveling across flat ground.  It may involve crossing marshes, may involve crossing rivers, may even involve crossing oceans, but you don’t go up or down.  Only once you have learned how to learn do you reach the foot of the mountain and begin climbing.

I think this is close to the truth, although I will admit I have offered other metaphors that contradict this one.  I am a man of many contradictions, as several clever fellows in the past have commented of themselves.  Say what you want to say, and don’t worry if you said the opposite yesterday, at least if you are playing, as I often am.  My more serious stuff is on the other website (goodnessmovement.com), although even much of that is provisional.

You only really owe the world a duty to be consistent when you are pushing people into something or other, or when you are CLAIMING to be the ONE and ONLY person who sees things clearly.  In that case, to quote Steve Martin “Always–no, never–no wait I’m pretty sure it’s always. . .” doesn’t work.

And since most people don’t remember much (as C.S. Lewis put it, the task is not to clear the jungle but irrigate the desert), I will offer the obvious Emerson quote: “Foolish consistencies are the hobgoblins of little minds.”

Pick what you like.  And then change it after a while if you feel like it.  Above all, don’t assume there IS one way, CAN be one way, or that any possible progress will not involve flexibility, perceptiveness, and adaptation.  You don’t get to be a tree.  You were born with feet (I hope).  Shuffle them.  To the left to the left to the left, and NOW to the right, to the right to the right.  Otherwise, you know, everybody runs into the wall.