One further thought on The Plague: criminals of all sorts are safe in wartime, aren’t they? They are also safe when criminals run the government.
We are presently plague-stricken, are we not? One can only guess when and if the disease will pass.
The task of healers is to do what little we can, where we can, and not ask or expect too much. That is unheroic, but a truly good heroism may not be possible. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Most of what I post amounts to a nervous tick. It is fidgeting that I do in lieu of some other needed task. I long ago decided most of my fidgeting was likely on balance more useful than harmful, so I indulge myself in posting it. But it does not necessarily come from a healthy place, even if it may seem–and indeed be–intelligent or even at times brilliant.
This post feels a bit different. It is a resolution of sorts, which may last in me. It promises to.
I was watching the movie Troy last night, and despite my intellectual and emotional preference for Hector, the character of Achilles–the arrogant but highly capable man who just wants to fight, fight, fight–kept coming through in my dreams last night.
I woke up, and was wondering what it is with human beings and conflict, and it hit me: we are BORN craving conflict. We are born that way. We are born to seek out struggle the way that tigers are born to hunt, and cows to eat grass.
And it hit me that if this planet, at this time, with this way of living, had a name in the cosmos it would be the “World of churning oceans”, not in reference to physical events but of emotional ones.
And I do believe there are many other worlds, both in other dimensions we don’t really understand yet, as well as on other alien planets. Many people have spoken on this, and even if they are all full of shit, nothing in the nature of things precludes it, and it would seem that in an infinite universe, the infinitely unlikely will happen often.
This inverts things, though. The question becomes not “why is there war”, but “why is there ever peace?” Is it that we just wear one another out? War is the answer to depression, lack of focus, sense of loneliness, sense of meaninglessness. It solves, particularly for men, nearly all our problems.
And I will remind you that when World War 1 broke out, there was celebration in nearly all the combatant nations. The national dullness and ennui promised to be dissolved in feat of heroism.
And, again: Nazism appealed first and foremost to the youth of that era since it too promised war, which was the logical evolution from the mountain climbers of the Bergfilme, to the next step. They were going to go out and do great things, commit acts of valor, and above all break up their tedium, monotony, and listlessness.
And I think most women, at heart, want to be with men who are at least capable of craving war. And to be clear, this need not be literal war. Most of the “wars” being fought in America right now are not (yet, at least, and in the main) physically violent. They are wars of words. They are wars of personal attack and rhetorical submission. They are wars of expulsion, of banishment. They are wars of control: of media, of academia, of the government, of the military.
Even the Femboys often are militant vegans. This is of a cloth with the whole. They were passionate Bernie Boys. The men women can’t stand, over the long haul–since many for a period of time want without realizing it to mother grown ass men, until they weary of it (unless they are severely codependent)–are the ones laying around with no driving passions.
What does it mean to be “bourgeois”? Is it not precisely the rejection of political war in favor of personal comfort? Is this not why the Communists–who have long waged wars of aggressive conquest in all sorts of ways, in as many places as they could–have long hated those they could not count on being foot soldiers, really, on EITHER side, and thus in their way?
No, I think the moment we hit Earth we are wired for conflict. If we can’t find literal conflict, we crave and find other forms of difficulties: in work, in sports, in religious enthusiasms and the like.
We crave difficulty. We can’t help it. If we stop seeking it, we feel less alive.
So why have we not achieved a stable world peace in conditions of prosperity and freedom? Well, we have not tamed human nature, have we, not least because some of us fight hard to prevent anyone from talking about such a thing, precisely because there IS such a thing. They fight because they were born to fight, and they fight in the name of a peace they don’t really understand.
So everywhere there are people who are troubled. Everywhere people in conflict, with themselves, and with others. This is the BASE STATE of Humanity. I think there are many advantages to looking at it like this, not least that we cease judging people for being born as people.
So what is the solution? First off, we accept there may not BE a good solution, that all proposed solutions, if they themselves come from a place of violence–as they tend to do–are cures worse than the disease.
But it does seem to me that each of us can and should begin to establish beachheads of peace on the shores of War. In your normal, average day, find twenty minutes of true peace, if you can. It’s not easy, and will not happen quickly. But it conditions everything before and after, your memory and your expectations, in subtle and vitally important ways.
As mentioned, I recently read Camus’ The Plague. It was a worthy book, one worth contemplating for a moment. With regard to this specific thought, I would offer up the evening when Rieux and Tarrou went swimming in the ocean. In the midst of the plague of being human, they found peace for a moment, which Camus argued through Tarrou may be the best we can hope for.
And in a moment of perhaps unintentional comedy (comedy being in large measure an unexpected mismatch between our expectations and the event), Camus ranked being human over being a saint.
I have contemplated this, and here is what I will propose: aspiring to sainthood is still a battle, a battle between our mortal bodies and our spirits, but such battles are still something we crave and which come naturally to us. What does not come naturally is being at peace, of not seeking out the Grand Conflict, and of simply seeking to offer small things out of genuine sympathy and kindness.
Indeed, as I have said, we might speak of a Battle of Kindness, in which one group of people who rally around the Kindness flag execrate and attack those they believe don’t.. And their chief “evidence” of course is that since they believe themselves the unique possessors of the Kindness flag, all who do not rally around it must oppose it.
This of course is the Plague, as Camus used it, in at least one sense. I think he used the metaphor in several ways, but clearly one was Ideology writ large, which justified murder. Camus declares himself a de facto pacifist and Conscientious Objector to ANYONE who might believe him or herself worthy of determining who should live and who should die.
And again Rieux rejects sainthood. He is not trying to stamp out the Plague once and for all. If he tried to do that, he would BECOME the plague, would he not? No, his aim is much more modest and much more realistic: to do what little he can, where he can, knowing that it will always return, but not for a while; and in the meantime, he can do his best to be neither carrier nor recipient of it. You will note the three main characters who came out unscathed are Rieux himself, Grand–who he asserted was the hero of the story–and the asthmatic old Spaniard who spent all day shuffling peas from one pot to the other. Presumably Camus was saying of the last that this was indeed vastly preferable to any Grand Passion which induced someone to the Plague.
So, in the course of our lives moments of peace may happen. We may fall in love and have truly happy, peaceful moments. We may go on a walk or bike ride or horse ride on a moon-lit night, and find ourselves feeling GOOD, for reasons we don’t understand. I have had moments like that. Small ones. Not long ones. But such things make us better humans.
But such things can be cultivated, too. This is the point of the habits of yoga and meditation, and perhaps slow walks in parks and the forests. And it is funny: so often with people we find ourselves attuned only on superficial levels. But even there, moments can be created in which some genuine fellow feeling and kindness and flow back and forth. I have experienced this doing breathwork. As I have said, in my view the actually most useful part is how much that work opens people up to one another, for small moments, before they remember their homes, their misery, the pain of the world, and close up like flowers that blossomed briefly in the morning.
Love, I think, is best thought of as a small, occasional flower. Don’t seek the Grand Passion, not even in a lover. What the best lovers do is have, for some period of time, small moments that are better than most. For some period of time they look in each others eyes, for a moment, and see recognition, and in this recognition they find peace, and this peace is the meaning of it all.
And in relationships that last happily–many relationships last unhappily, or mostly, or often unhappily, since time changes everything continually–couples find ways to recreate moments of recognition. They don’t close up.
And the enemy of this–remember we live for conflict, so there is always a bear waiting outside the cave–is our pain. When we open and are seen, we heal and we feel good. But as long as there is unresolved pain, we will sooner or later close up and protect it. And so we go, back and forth, in cycles.
And what kills love, I think, is mismatched cycles. All it takes is for one lover to look in the others eyes when their pain predominates, and see nothing, and they will be hurt, and lose trust. And trust betrayed is of course worse than never trusting at all. And so lovers quarrel.
So I think, in any event. I have not had a lover like that. No one ever sees me. I am a deep, deep mist on a cool Autumnal day. I cannot blame anyone for not seeing me. It is not easy. I am faint, and far in the distance.
But returning to Camus, a point my eldest made–we have formed a sort of book club, which is fun–was that the author himself was Rieux, and he himself noted that he was just “reporting the facts”. He was as objective as possible, and as “abstract”.
But Camus may well have quoted Lao Tze, who said “renounce sainthood; it will be a thousand times better for everyone”. Rieux himself made Grand the “hero”, but of course Camus intended Rieux to be the hero, in a nice irony I nearly missed. And he intended Rieux to be the ACTUAL saint, the one who neither sought nor would have accepted the term “saint”. He was just a man doing his job.
And here is the thing: Camus more or less says that most morality comes from a very simple instinct, to do your job, even in difficult circumstances. No one is praised for seeking food when they are hungry.
And as he says, most people are basically decent, most of the time. Most are willing to roll up their sleeves and help, if the situation calls for it. Indeed, as I have said, most are primed from birth for difficulty, hardship, and conflict–in this case with death itself, more or less.
I had a specific personal reason for watching Troy I won’t go into, but I would suggest that everything is medicine, if you pay attention.
But if we equate deep, true relaxation with peace, and peace, along with sympathy, as the highest you can aspire to in this conflicted world, I would suggest you learn to seek both, in your own way.
And actually, I would say this too: Tarrou–who by the way may have been EITHER a Communist or a Nazi or something else (although Communist is most likely, since he opposed the French regime)–claimed that the world was divided into the plague stricken and the victims, by and large (other than the healers, who were his saints).
What is missing in this commentary, that no doubt was latent, was that while the relative roles may vary from time to time and place to place, that most people can be BOTH plague stricken AND victim. The victim is simply someone who had the plague and died from it.
We all have the plague sleeping in us. It is a task of continual awareness not to allow it to awaken and infect others, or to kill our own sense of decency.
You have to stay awake. There is no other remedy. How you do this is up to you, but I would suggest we all need periods of silence and solitude. We need beauty of all sorts. We need the company of profound minds and spirits, which are best found in works of great philosophy and literature. I read a couple pages of Marcus Aurelius most mornings, and when I finish Meditations will read Epictetus. We need nature. And yes, we all need love, but no one can, in the end, give you what you lack. You are no longer a child and you cannot ask the world to be a mother to you.
No: allowing your shame to abate–from time to time, and perhaps for not very long–is a skill we all need to learn, and like all skills, it must be practiced, perhaps for a very long time. After shame comes self acceptance, and with self acceptance comes the peace that I think is indistinguishable from self love. That is how it works, or so I hypothesize.
I am just speaking as objectively as I can.
And yes, of course, I aspire to being a healer. It is just a word, but it’s a good word. We all need a point and direction to our struggle, and this one seems the best to me.
I honestly think I have been a soldier in many lives, and probably at times a very good one. And think for a moment about how easily we value and admire the talent for killing. That stink is in all of us, or at least most of us. I have no memories at all, but it has long seemed interesting to me that my favorite book when I was three years old was an encyclopedia of weapons used in World War 2. Maybe I fought in that war somewhere. Maybe some part of me just wanted to get up to date.
But I have bad eyes. Even though I tried several times to become a soldier, the path was barred for me, which I think was the plan. My energy had to go elsewhere, as indeed it has. I fight my own wars, in my own way. My war is the war of peace. “Conquest” is calmness. “Aggression” is sympathy and empathy. Territory held is what is stable and good within me, which becomes daily reliable over time.
It’s maybe six months old. I watched it when it first came out, but I was drunk and don’t remember most of it. Practically, it fills in the details I had in any event already intuited.
And it can be added to. As I say, China, among others, could be a coconspirator. I think this represents a good start, though, at assigning blame.
And it does seem a reasonable claim to make that virtually all large scale evil in the last hundred years was connected to the Rockefellers. Certainly the emergence of Big Oil and Big Pharma, the suppression of natural cures and lifestyle counseling by doctors, the support of both Communism AND Fascism, the Great Depression, hyperinflation (the devaluation of the dollar) and yes probably the past year of the semi-plague and full tyranny.
My brain tells me there is no hope. So I don’t listen to my brain. Miracles happen. They don’t happen on command, and they cannot be relied on. But we can always plan on doing our best to die on our feet, and awake. You don’t need hope for that.
I remember Edward de Bono once proposing that maybe the Middle East just needed more B vitamins.
In that vein, I would like to propose that rates of violent crime are higher in black communities–and they ARE higher, by the way–than most other ethnic groups–is that Vitamin D deficiency makes depression more likely, and depression often leads to irrational violence.
Here is a link on D and depression: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/vitamin-d-deficiency-and-depression-in-adults-systematic-review-and-metaanalysis/F4E7DFBE5A7B99C9E6430AF472286860
Now, one of my recurring themes is that you should NEVER look for The problem, or THE issue. This may play a role. It may not. But what do we have to lose by trying it?
I honestly think my proposal of government (taxpayer) funded nutritional supplementation among the black community is more likely to help on balance than any other proposal put on the table by the Left of which I am aware, certainly including “reparations”, which are money paid by the innocent, to those who have not been harmed, all in effect so that a power elite of Uncle and Aunt Tom’s and their white backers can create the illusion that they are doing something other than using their positions to get rich, and have the power to fuck with whomever they want, with impunity.
To my mind, if a deficiency of any sort is obviously present, and it is easily corrected, it SHOULD be corrected. No rocket science happening there.
In any social grouping, someone is going to wind up in charge. It may be the result of a vote, but the vote will go to the person most people think should be in charge.
In any human group, some people will be either actually more able, or perceived to be more able–which amounts to better ability at what we might call Projection or Image Management, so the point remains, even if bullshitting is the skill in question–and they will always tend to do better.
By accidents of genetics and birth, some people are more intelligent, more persistent, more resourceful, more social adept, more creative, or better at whatever it is we care about at that point. This point is indisputable.
And obviously if we punish elites we in effect reward average-ness, or what might reasonably be called relative mediocrity. No nation which does not empower its best to do their best is going to survive long, at least when other nations are not operating under the same constraint.
We can acknowledge openly that life is not fair and some people are just more apt to succeed in anything they do than others, or we can pretend that because we deem this unfair, that such people should be torn down, as in Harrison Bergeron.
Here is the irony or deal breaker: attacks on elites amount to efforts to mobilize resentment and hate to usher in a DIFFERENT elite, that lacks the capability and talent that the actual elite does. How does an utter mediocrity like Maxine Waters keep getting elected? She tells everyone how awful white Republicans are, and how she has to oppose them. She herself is dumb as a box of rocks. She herself does not live with the poor of her district: she lives, OBVIOUSLY, in a large mansion, presumably with a security detail and chauffeur.
So what has she done? Without possessing ability or intelligence, she has created a very successful career promising to do everything and actually accomplishing next to nothing. Her district is a mess. If she is bringing home the bacon, then only a few are benefitting. Year in, year out, she does not propose major initiatives that would ACTUALLY make a difference. No: she simply uses class and race hatred to deflect attention from the fact that she ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING. And why would she? She is a mediocrity.
There is always going to be an elite. This is a fact of human nature. The only question is whether the elite is those actually possessing ability or those whose main “talent”–whose main means to elite status and power–is moral vacuity and deceit.
Many years ago, as a part of a long story there is no need to relate, I was forced to resign from a sales job because I was going to get fired. There is nothing unusual in this, but the reality was that my Gross Profit numbers were on par with everyone else who was doing just fine. I was in the middle of the pack, doing something that was quite difficult, and in which most people would have failed completely. I am very stubborn, so I gutted it out.
The problem was that my REVENUE numbers were low. I was making more money on each sale than anyone else, because of the somewhat different nature of what I sold.
Now, at the time I attributed this to the pigheadedness of the CEO, but as I thought about it, it seems more likely that, yes, he was and is pigheaded, but also that he was trying to sell the company, and you can massage numbers much more effectively if you start from a higher number.
Accounting magic is all about making costs higher, or lower, depending on what you are trying to do. If you are trying to sell a company, you want higher profits, so that means lower costs. If you are trying to reduce taxes, you do the opposite.
Here is the thing: costs can be moved around, but top line amounts–how much you deposit in the bank–cannot.
The relevance to this at the present is COVID-19 numbers. If only 600,000 people died in this country each year, and ALL OF THEM died last year from COVID-19, that would be huge.
But the background is 3 million or so. 600,000, which is where I think we are officially, is one fifth of that. 1 death in five, we are told, has been from COVID-19.
But with that background, could the real number not be 50,000? I am going to propose that it is. After all is said and done, I am going to go on record with what I admit is a guess that only about 50,000 Americans TRULY died of COVID-19, which is to say who would be alive today if they had not encountered this particular virus.
When you consider that, as I think was and is the case, that the average age of death for a long time was the average age of death from all causes, yes, you can of course infer that old people are more likely to die from it,
But you can ALSO infer that many of the deaths are misattributed. They were going to die anyway. They become free costs, floating around on the balance sheet. Why not CLAIM they died of COVID-19, when you don’t have a clue if that is true or not?
This whole thing amounts to an accounting fraud of truly staggering proportions, which has involved most hospitals in the country, most doctors who saw COVID patients, and ultimately most insurers, which particularly includes the Medicare and Medicaid systems, which is to say taxpayers and their children (who as future taxpayers will be left with much of the bill).
With a background of 3 million anything is possible. Any scam can be perpetrated. To be sure, I personally believe COVID-19 EXISTS, that it is a thing, but it would not even have to EXIST for a fraud like this to happen. Every respiratory case of any sort could be attributed to it, every accident, every diabetic coma: literally anything that kills anyone could be put into that ledger.
After all, WHO IS LOOKING? Are there auditors out there, asking how much of this is patent bullshit? Not that I know of. Everyone with a job to do has scampered out of the room like a cockroach when you turn the light on, or ants when you overturn a stump. It’s unbelievable, the sheer VOLUME–as in both loudness and amount–of cowardice and willful stupidity and incompetence and complicity that we have seen, and continue to see.
None of this should have been possible. Substantially ALL of our institutions failed us, top to bottom and side to side.
It his me the other day that the worst perpetrators of “blaxploitation” are black politicians. They pander to blacks rhetorically, but never make their lives better. But they use the PERCEPTION that they are the good people, the friends, the allies, to win elections and then use those offices to get rich. If you do two or three tours of the House, or 1 tour of the Senate, you will by some magical process be millions of dollars richer. We know this. But we tolerate it. Book deals for money losing books. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for $500 speeches. There are a hundred gimmicks. Low interest loans, shares in businesses, insider information, etc. etc.
But Clarence Thomas has never hurt any black people. He didn’t use them to get ahead. He didn’t use them to get himself noticed or rich.
No, Spike Lee and people like him did that. They are the real Uncle Tom’s who have forged close relationships with the white world to deliver access by rich white politicians to black audiences; to guarantee their loyalty; and who profit on the backs of the on-going problems which persist, generation after generation, uncorrected and largely unaltered, other than a table scrap of free iPhones or something like that every few years.
To my mind, faithless “friends” are vastly more dangerous than true enemies. And the indifferent are vastly preferable to both.
One: Poverty teaches you to emphasize what you have, ideally. Wealth teaches you to value what you don’t. Obviously, poverty often just makes people miserable, but very few Americans would know this, since almost none of us are going hungry, crapping in holes in the ground, unable to find safe water poor. But still, I think lowering expectations often works, and that children in very poor countries still laugh loudly, and their parents still love them very much.
Two: You cannot forgive on behalf of other people. People who were IN the Holocaust–who were interned or displaced or who lost friends and family, homes and places–can forgive the Nazis. People who were not, cannot. This in my view is why the Left is so unforgiving: almost NO ONE who is “fighting for” some cause or people, is fighting for their OWN cause. It is white people “fighting” for black people, rich people “fighting” for poor people.
Three: Juneteenth is not about empowering blacks. It is about attacking whites. It celebrates a day on which black people were released FROM white people, BY other white people. They did not contribute to their own liberation in any meaningful way, and were the more or less passive recipients of it. What this holiday does do is remind people that slavery was once practiced in this country, as it has been (and often still is) in much of the rest of the world.
Here is the thing: a great many current white Americans have ancestors on both sides of their family tree who came over after 1865. Moreover, slaves were only owned in the South, and only by the richest 1% or so. We also had 14 fewer States.
This makes the likelihood that ANY particular white person even has ANCESTORS that owned slaves vanishingly unlikely, and even then someone alive today cannot be expected to bear any moral responsibility for something that ended 150 years ago.
You know whose family owned slaves? Kamala Harris family, or so I read. But no one will ever care, will they?
And I will emphasize that these lockdowns and lockouts hurt the black community, of all groups, arguably the worse. About a third of all small businesses went under overall, but some 40% of black owned businesses went under.
What fucking good, in that world, does a new holiday do? None. It exists for propaganda and indoctrination purposes.
If you summarize this as the “American blacks are dumb” argument, you’ve captured it nicely and succinctly.
As far as I know, all African nations require voter id of some sort in their elections. Why? To prevent fraud. OBVIOUSLY.
What would save more black lives: a concerted effort to eliminate Vitamin D deficiency or getting rid of every police department in every majority black area?
We KNOW that persons of color suffer very disproportionately from Vitamin D deficiency. Their skin is calibrated to tropical sun. They get the right amount in Uganda and the Congo, presumably.
But if you live in Cleveland, and are black, you are most likely deficient from October through May.
And we KNOW that being D deficient leads to ALL SORTS of bad health outcomes. You are more likely to die from all infectious diseases, your bones are weaker, and you are most likely more depressed.
And obviously getting rid of law enforcement in places where laws are being broken leads to more laws being broken. It leads to innocent blacks being victimized at much higher rates by guilty blacks. If 97% of a community is honest, and 3% is not, you have a complete shit show without cops, as Minneapolis and other places are discovering.
So let me ask a slightly more difficult question: what would HELP black folks more, educating about Vitamin D and providing free or subsidized supplements (maybe with Magnesium), or increasing the size of the Juneteenth Celebration?
That’s not much harder, is it?
I will post on Juneteenth later.
I will actually post my train of thought, too. I will remind you that one of my “spirit animals” is a white dog which is very friendly, but very curious and with zero attention span (the attention is the whale).
I was thinking about my bar idea, and remembered meeting a black guy in a bar who told me he hung out at a bar in Alabama that both had illegal gambling and allowed drunk patrons to sleep in the parking lot, which was allowed since it was private property. I think the local cops were also on the take.
But I was like, THAT is kind of my idea. Not as good, but in the ballpark. It’s such an obvious idea somebody somewhere has thought of it and done it.
And then I remember he told me his doctor told him he was Vitamin D deficient. He had been feeling tired and lacking in energy, and the doctor told to take 50,000 iu once a week for a month. He had been find in south Florida, but even just moving to Alabama he got less sun.
Then: black people and Vitamin D.
And this is a de facto racial difference. Living the exact same lives, white and black people will suffer from deficiencies at different rates.
And think about this too: do you not just KNOW that, in the same way Democrats are preventing needed educational reforms from happening, that many would also find ways to oppose a Vitamin D campaign since the racial differences in health outcomes are something they use for their political goals? I feel certain of it. They won’t say it, obviously, but they don’t want improvement. They want reliable misery that can be funneled into power, prestige and private wealth.