Month: June 2021

What would it mean–or does it mean, since I just kind of asserted it–to say that personality is fractal?

Discuss amongst yourselves (yes, that is a nod to Mike Myers).

I just noticed a note a made myself.

The sense of the self is a fragile process.  I imagine it like a crystal forming in a liquid, slowly.  From formlessness, form.  Even the infant which comes from the mating of a sperm and an egg–a kamikaze explosion from which bursts new life–is likely fractal in its early stages, and always fractal at some scale.  We can all of us likely find fractals in our bodies even now.

Ah, here you go: http://www.fractal.org/Life-Science-Technology/Publications/Fractals-and-Human-Biology.pdf

I had not realized it, but I saw it in my mind.

Here is my point: you cannot grow a stable sense of self in a chaotic, constantly changing environment.  In the most obvious, gross physical sense this would be parents throwing things at each other, and one or the other moving in and moving out constantly; or moving around continually as a child; or having daily different care-givers with widely varying capacities for attunement.  Etc.

But more subtly, I think media colors us too.  I see parents give their babies phones and my gut sense has always been that child is going to grow up missing something.  And I think they do.

There is something about the continual noise in most American homes, this constant background hum, that prevents full crystallization, or in any event makes it less complete, less orderly, and less beautiful.

We have so much.  We have built so much.  All the physical ingredients are already made for building a utopia on Earth.  But we have failed to learn many needed lessons.

Take Critical Race Theory.  It is an atavistic holdout from the thought patterns of a CENTURY ago.  And if you want to look at it as primarily Tribalism, writ large, it is tens of thousands of years old.  Older: as old as human social systems themselves, and for that matter, even chimpanzees have their version of exclusionary practices, even if they are not rationalizing it with abstract and emotionally cold and callous words.

Think about the divisions and hate being taught through CRT and all the ideas which come with it, and compare that to the GOOD that would be done teaching kids about trauma, both complex and simple, and teaching them both how to heal it–or at least ameliorate it–and optimally to prevent it in the first place.

What stands in the way?  Stupidity, pride and greed, themselves the results of highly flawed personality formation.  Defective crystals, most of which KNOW they are defective and who are all the more abusive for it.

I had an image come to me the other day of background tension as a sort of canvas upon which I was painting my life.  All the color and shape and texture happens upon something which doesn’t really change, and are for that reason less lasting.  It is like the canvas reaches out and destroys what I painted during the day, and does so every night.

To build lasting forms, lasting color, you have to create a stable substrate of relaxation, the deeper the better.

Positive thinking, for me, is paint I color into my canvas.  But the canvas just erases it.  Positive thinking does not work for me, personally.

But at the same time, the paint DOES have an effect on the canvas.  Some ideas sink deep down and stay there.  The canvas becomes a sort of sponge.  So thinking DOES matter.

As one example, Reframing, for me, created a means of predicting the extent of my reactions in various situations, which in turn lessened some chronic anxiety within me.

Specifically, I found Martin Seligman’s ideas useful.  He spoke about not making everything personal, not making a failure in one part of your life color all parts of your life, and remembering that failure is not permanent.  Tomorrow is another day.  Hope springs eternal.

And in subtle ways, much of the thinking and writing I do here helps.  As I say, it is a PHYSICAL sense of my self that ultimately I need to learn to anchor in, to learn to inhabit for the first time.  I need to learn to tie my shoes in a new way, to walk, to drive, to shower.

But there is a give and take between thinking and practice.  Again: Bidirectionality.  It is a useful principle.  Motion is the universal, and all motion in this world is complex.  So if you have mostly stainless steel in your mind–if you are an ideologue of one stripe or another–you are wrong about much of what you think.  You are missing most of the world, and trust me when I say that the world would like you to learn to live in the dirt again, and swim in the rivers, and relate to the birds and their songs.

Resting in motion: this is the main aim of life.  All the good stuff flows from that.

I am a Pisces.  That is more biographical than I like to get, but I’ve likely shared that before in any event.  The sign is that of two fish swimming in opposite directions.  The idea is that we are always being pulled in two directions at once, but ideally are at some point able to reconcile them.

Stereotypically, we are idealistic, moody, inconstant, creative, colorful, entertaining, depressing, and not infrequently all in one day.  The meme “drinking styles by sign” says no one should try and hang with us.  We will drink you under the table.  In most respects, all this is true of me.

That wasn’t what I logged on to say, but sometimes I like to talk about myself.  The internet will listen when no one else will.  And if no one is listening, it doesn’t matter: I can still pretend they are.

What I wanted to talk about is these dreams I’ve been having, and their context within my overall work, and then the general principles that can and should in my view be drawn from my example.  Then I wanted to discuss two metaphors I have come up with, that I will argue are useful.

How’s that for a setup?  Organized.  That’s what it is.

For several years now I have had dreams where I was with a baby or small child, and found myself comforting it.  This happened last night with a little girl, who I was hugging and showing tenderness to.

Some time around the 1990’s this notion of the “Inner Child” came into wide circulation.  For myself, I would argue this is clearly a reality.  Logically, Developmental Traumas of all sorts lead to the formation of multiple selves, some of which are often quite primitive emotionally.

For me, I had to leave home, so I threw myself out there, completely unprepared for anything.  I had been overprotected.  [I suppose from a certain perspective you could say that prison guards also exist to protect the prisoners from outside assault, and to keep them safe.  We never think of it that way, but that might be a useful and interesting new vantage point.]

So I dissociated.  I just did what needed doing, but never felt at home “out here”.

Logically, then, healing will involve making contact with this primitive self and integrating it.  This I believe I am in the process of doing.  This is useful, necessary work.  The goal is to always be one person, albeit one with many possibilities.  What you do not want is a child sitting in the shadows.  It will be heard, in ways which will be generally unhappy, even if their precise source is unclear.

But the flip side of this is that whininess and creepy infantilism are clearly on the rise in our culture, and those of others.  I think even the  Chinese are winding up with many stereotypically American problems.  Xi seems to want, with his shopping malls and social credit scores, to make China a giant prosperous suburb, and the government a giant Home Owners Association (with an in-house slave workforce.)

I think specifically of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LErwHI18JTg

A couple lyrics:

It’s like going to confession every time I hear you speak
You’re makin’ the most of your losin’ streak
Some call it sick, but I call it weak

 

Bitch about the present and blame it on the past
I’d like to find your inner child and kick its little ass

Which perspective is true?  Can they not both be true?

I would like to call this the Principle of Bidirectionality.  What I want to argue is that in most human situations there are contrasting principles at work, and that BALANCE is the goal.

As another example, I saw a quote yesterday that “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”

Adam Smith said that, some centuries ago.  And it is not directly apposite today?  Are not soft minded idiots (still or again, take your pick) putting violent people back on the streets, to terrorize again?  Yes, yes they are.  Why?  “Compassion”.  But it’s not compassion, is it?

In my own case I have often had to kick my own ass.  I’ve had to use emotional violence to keep myself moving.  That was, in the end, compassion.  I would not still be alive if I had not, and where there is life there is hope.  With the life I added on, I continue to make a better and better account of myself, and that would not have been possible if my bones were decaying in a grave somewhere.

I have in the past stipulated that proper moral judgments need to be local, imperfect, and necessary.

Local means you do not make one “judgement” and forever after treat all remotely similar situations exactly the same.  Every situation has its own nuances, and even the same approximate situation involving the same people may and most likely will evolve over time.  Pay attention.  That is my point.

Imperfect: my intent here is to rob rigid people of their dogmatism, and to disabuse them of the notion that there are perfect and obvious right and wrong answers.  All of life is compromise, trade-offs.

To return to the jail question, I won’t say that no violent prisoner should ever be released without serving a full and justified term.  Sometimes you might have a feeling.  I don’t know.  You take a guess, take a chance, knowing it might not work out.  You are taking a risk with other people’s lives, yes, but also taking a risk leaving a man or woman in jail who might do just fine on the outside.  Neither option is free of risk, of ambiguity, of the possibility of reasonable doubt.

What I am saying is that all possibilities need to be SEEN and weighed.  Do not use a fixed rule and apply it in a Procrustean fashion to all questions.

Necessary: do I really need to have an opinion about everything?  Everyone?  Do I need to keep a running tally of where everyone stands in all respects?  Of course not.  If the way someone else is living their life does not affect me, it’s none of my business.  I wish them well.  If they are fucking up, and it’s only themselves they are hurting, so be it.  If they are hurting the innocent and defenseless, well then I need to form a judgement.

So this Principle of Bidirectionality would obviously apply to parenting.  You love your kids, hopefully, and want all the good stuff for them, but if you don’t kick their asses in one way or another from time to time, they will grow up weak, and the LIFE will kick their asses.

This is really all these Safe Spaces (or Brave Spaces, in an Orwellian redirection) are: an effort to extend the womb as far into Life as possible, by children who never heard no, are terrified of everything, and who have NO CHANCE OF SUSTAINABLE HAPPINESS.

You are robbing them of their lives by being too kind.  This point needs to be made clearly.  As I have said often, the two core Buddhist virtues are Compassion AND Wisdom.  The Dalai Lama likes to only talk about the first, from what I can tell.  He has a ready audience.  Being nice is an easy virtue.  You can default to being nice by simply never saying no to anyone for any reason.  You also lose your soul and all personality, wit, charm and sentience in the process.

The world needs assholes.  Some of us are a bit too ready sometimes to say “pick me, pick me”, but the principle remains.  To the principle of niceness must be contrasted the principle of harshness or austerity.  Both are needed.  Imagine a world where you ONLY ate desserts, where everything was sweet all the time.  Awful.  Treacly, to use a word which may add to your SAT score (although I doubt anyone under 30 is reading this, if anyone is reading at all).

OK, that was part one.  [I will recollect for you that some wit once remarked of me that if I ever chose to commit suicide, I could do it by jumping off my suicide note.  That is genuinely funny.]

I was thinking about this whole Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis of I think Hegel, and which was the basis, as I understand it, of Marx’s Dialectical Materialism (note that the formally scientific notion of “materialism”, which has been falsified by science, is integral to the project intellectually; his economic theories have in any event also been falsified, so no one should be reading Marx as anything other than a slovenly hack who was proven wrong in everything).

Setting up oppositions in your mind HAS to make conflict more likely.  Marx said the conflicts were inevitable, and that processes of History (which amounted to a kind of God) were analogous perhaps to those of tectonic plates.  They operated according to fixed laws that were unalterable and inevitable.

This is why, according to Marx, Lenin should not have been necessary.  Lenin was part of a political elite who engineered what I will persist in calling, not a revolution, but a coup d’etat, one enacted in many respects against the wishes, and certainly contrary to the interests, of the working and serf classes they claimed they were “liberating”.

But ideas have consequences.  The consequence of the Dialectic is that groups of political agitators tend to naturally and organically define themselves in opposition to some other group, whether real or imagined.  Obviously, in our present day, the necessity of conjuring up some hated Other has rendered the word racist completely meaningless.  White Supremacy might succinctly and accurately be rendered as “people who are not us.”  It has nothing to do with the actual ideas on display.

Here is another quote I saw yesterday on Sowell’s website, from Dinesh D’Souza: “Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem privately terrified that it has abated.”

Racism just isn’t a major problem any more.  Yet, white people are being attacked with more vigor, and by higher political elites, than they were the first time segregation existed.  It’s absurd.

On one hand, obviously, it is simply a propaganda technique to keep us divided, to keep their troops loyal, and to create a background for tyrannical and abusive policy which has no basis in common sense, or the law.

But on the other, some people GENUINELY SEEM TO BELIEVE THIS BULLSHIT.  The logic, as I have said before, is simple: they are not us, we are the Summum Bonum, ERGO they must be bad.  It simply remains to be determined how they are bad.  Logically, it must be all the ways we are good, since they are the opposite.

This literally happens.  No one should be that stupid.  BUT THEY ARE.  This sort of thing is made vastly easier and more likely by notions like the Dialectic.  It is also of course hard wired into our tribal minds.  Getting past such idiocy was the main effort and main achievement of European civilization, from which emerged Liberalism, which I will recollect for you shares a root with Liberty.

Here is an alternative image for you.  People are rarely at perfect odds with each other, which would be two vector arrows pointing at each other and making contact; or the opposite, going in diametrically opposite directions, in a push/pull.  They are often going in vaguely differing directions.  Imagine two vector lines going up, one a bit to the right, the other a bit to the left.

If we imbue these lines with force, there is a bit of tension between them.  How do we release the tension?  Well, in two ways.  One, if it does not affect us, we grant freedom.  You do your thing and I do mine.  Both lines are then parallel, and at rest relative to each other.

The second peaceful way is compromise and negotiation.  I come closer to you and you come closer to me.  Liberalism and social and personal maturity go together.  A nation of infants will not keep freedom intact.

The third way, of course, is force.  I use physical or emotional violence to pull you into parallel with me.  If I am going up and to the right, I pull your line over to where it, too, is going up and to the right.  This is what was done for most of history, and not just by Great Powers like the Catholic Church.  It was done by the Plains Indians.  With respect to the things they cared about, you did things their way, or you risked expulsion.  Obviously, negotiation and laissez-faire happened to, but it is worth pointing out even small social groupings can be utterly tyrannical.

That was the first metaphor.  I am going to make the second a separate post.  I’m tired of reading this.

The originator denies it, but I’m pretty sure I inspired an online group called the FRAT, which stood for “Fuck reading all that.”

I’m not denigrating my work.  I think I sometimes alternate genius with my genuine idiocy, although this is less common in my personal life than you may suppose.  But this sort of thing is tiring.  If I were not driven, I don’t think I would do it.

Still, better ideas do have an effect.  That is actually the point I will make here in a moment.

Stable positive feeling.  That is what we are all chasing.  It drives greed in all forms.  Thwarted, it produces anger and hate.  Fear arises from the contemplation of losing any such feeling which might be ours for the moment.  It drives thrill seeking, which is the quest for continual new thrills, but which is the same in that.

Spirituality is about finding something–God, the Buddha Nature, the Tao–underneath all this, which is constant in some meaningful way.

I watch myself.  I am radically inconstant.  I have lists, and I do reasonably well getting through them, but not without lots of twists and turns.

I never know what is next, because I ALLOW what is next.  There is a part of me which is always trying to force feeling on all situations, but I think just about every part of me has figured out that makes me miserable.

But it is so hard to jump that chasm, to take that leap into the wind–  Hard, not impossible, and not without immediate and clear benefits.

And it’s not a one time thing.  It is a learned habit, done continually daily when mastered.

Edit: I know it is stunningly obvious that, by and large, most of us want to be happy and to avoid pain.  Still, it helps to rephrase things in various ways, as it amounts to a variety of perspectives, and sometimes you see things you did not expect.

 

I was doing my Autogenics this morning (it’s damn near afternoon, but I have little that has to be done today; I’m usually either too busy or not busy enough), and it hit me that Covetousness is really about having but not being able to enjoy.

I think the myth of Tantalus is relevant.  Everything he tried to grasp fled from him.

Here is a question: why do people become super wealthy?  Answer: they are unable to enjoy what they have and who they are.

Now, you might say, say, Jeff Bezos, LOVES competition, loves competence, and has a large private yacht waiting for him with full crew in each of the 7 seas.  He’s engaging in Flow, and has plenty of moments for authentic pleasure.

Maybe.  I don’t know the guy.  But my GUESS is that to get where he is you need insane focus, a LOT of 100 hour weeks, and a pronounced willingness to compromise ethically in all sorts of ways.  To fuck people over, in other words.  This is a trait virtually all Survivors in that world have.  Competition is too intense not to be cutthroat, at least in some places and some times.  There can be little doubt he has intentionally put people out of business in a variety of ways.

So what is most likely really going on?  Well, for one, most likely a powerful sense of shame and inadequacy.  He likely had, at least, and still often has, a terrible time relaxing and doing nothing.  He had something to prove, to himself and the world.  And has he proved it?  Only he can answer that, but I very much doubt it.

And here is my first point: we call greed “a sin”.  If you want your neighbors stuff, or wife, or more generally, we call that a sin.

Here is what I will suggest: a “sin” is ALWAYS downriver from emotional maladjustments of various sorts.  Sins are the Emergent Properties of underlying disorders of concordance and symmetry.

Lust is healthy.  It is normal to want to touch and feel and huff and puff, and then smoke a cigarette afterwards with a smile on your face and a glow on your cheeks.

But obviously there is unhealthy lust, too, isn’t there?  The one that pushes you into “sin”.

At the abstract level there is a lot of room for negotiation as to what constitutes healthy sexuality.  Men and women are wired a bit differently, and for obvious evolutionary reasons.  But we all crave stability, and I would argue over the long term that is what is most important.

[Has anyone ever suggested polyandrous polygamy, in which 5 men marry 5 women they share in both directions?]

However we discuss the nuts and bolts of this, so to speak, most of the time we all have an innate sense of what is healthy and good for us, and what is not.  If you pursue this sense, if you pursue calm and emotional honesty, your specific moral code is irrelevant.  On balance, you will tend to do the best thing–to in most cases reach the best compromise–without tedious ethical theory.

This was, as I read him, Lao Tzu’s view.  People and societies are formally Complex Orders.  If you organize them according to flexible and healthy principles, good things will tend to happen organically and without much effort.

Prayer: we tend to ask God (or Goddess: if you posit that what is really actually THERE is an energy without gender–within which swim many spiritual beings of all sorts, then it’s really up to you) for help of various sorts.  I tend to ask for help in understanding and having the strength to face my fears and challenges.

It occurred to me this morning–and a short prayer is part of my morning ritual–that I could equally announce what I was going to do TODAY to further the ends to which all spiritual teachers point.

I could pray “God, today I am going to meditate, and do Neurofeedback, and go for a long walk, etc. Please shine your light on me.”

I am always looking for homologies, patterns of similarity. If you can square your prayer with concrete physical action, that is the best of both worlds.

As I mentioned, I am reading The Plague, and as I understand it, Camus is making the point that, while God is a mystery, there is a certain value which is really indisputable–the opposite of a mystery–to providing palliative care to the dying, and working to rid the world, at least for a time, of disease.

I have a few more chapters, and may or may not comment on it when I finish.

But I might put it this way: you can’t go wrong with a prayer that would make sense to an atheist also.

Is that true?  Not true?  Ponder it.  Reach your own conclusion, then change it if further considerations muddy your initial certainty.  It’s OK to not know.  Most of us don’t really know anything, so most of our ‘knowing’ is really habit buttressed by laziness, pride, and ignorance we choose to leave intact.  His ignorance was apparently Socrates’ most cherished accomplishment, one which arguably provided the basis for modern science.

Live in the middle.  Nothing heroic in that, except when everyone around you is trying to pull you into one vortex or another.

I might actually say that diligent and principled moderation is perhaps the most effective form of radicalism at the moment.

I was thinking of someone I know who I’m pretty sure was raped repeatedly as a child.  He became a homosexual, and I was thinking that I think I can feel how getting fucked up the ass could become something you get used to, and then how you get positive attention.  It goes from an involuntary horror, to something pursued actively.  It becomes how you connect with others.  It becomes, not love, but something KNOWN, and the known in a world of chaotic confusion is undeniably something.  The familiar is calming.  The familiar is relaxing.

And I wondered: how many people like him go on to do the same thing to other children?  Let’s say that 1 in 20 victims of that sort of thing inflict it on others, but have 20 victims.  R=1.  I think the math is something like this.  Most victims merely spend their lives wounded.  But some repeat, and the ones who do, do an enormous amount of damage.

And to be clear, I’m not associating homosexuality with this.  I am very aware that many pedophiles are ostensibly heterosexual–many are married with kids–and that most gay men have no interest in children.

Then I got to thinking generally about traumatic spread.  Trauma is spread by trauma, but not necessarily in the same form.  Some people form fire stops.  Some people become super spreaders.

And of course there are superspreader “events” like wars, natural disasters, economic calamity, etc.

But I really think if we think of it as a disease, then we can begin to wrap our minds around how we STOP it, reduce it, and get R less than 1.

Reducing trauma and expanding consciousness are more or less the same thing, in my view.

A vaccination against evil would consist in dealing effectively with Developmental Trauma in particular.  We need to identify it, and provide effective remedies.  To build a genuinely better, happier society, this is in the end the ONLY way it can happen.

As I have said before, what about getting ACE scores as early, perhaps, as Grade School, and/or training teachers to recognize signs of emotional trauma?

To be sure, we can build walls, and add police dogs and robots, guns, torture, and coercion.  But that is not BETTER.  Qualitatively, we were probably better off living in trees and caves.  Some growth was possible then.

A global police state would be one–as envisioned by cold, calculating, developmentally traumatized walking dead people like Klaus Schwab (who I will say again could well be an ACTUAL Nazi)–in which growth stops.  Nothing but death and horror remain.

The fruit you bring forth will depend on the seed you plant.  The end begins in the beginning. Or to borrow from I think Wordsworth, the seed is the father of the fruit.  Obviously.  And no seed planted by people who have not done their own inner work, who have not befriended and enlisted their demons (I don’t think you can conquer them) in their work, will ever yield long term, genuinely good results.

What place does your culture have for you, as an individual?  What use can it make of your particular talents?  Do you belong somewhere, and FEEL like you belong?

These are important questions.

And, again, laying blame at “Capitalism” is merely a cognitive displacement.  Marx said “Capitalism” to indicate all he thought was bad with the world, which was mostly that it refused to feed him when he refused to do useful work, and refused to worship his unshaven and unwashed narcissistic genius.

You don’t create anything when you assign blame.  Put forward a plan, or ideas.  Separate out what is good–wealth and the leisure and security longer lives it brings–from what is bad–unchecked greed.

And I will continue to insist that our system would look vastly different if we had stable money.  The rat race would slow down.  Much less work would be required to survive, and far more people could dedicate themselves to becoming convivial and erudite thought workers, with interesting things to say, and the time and space to say them.  More people could become artists, or spend their days digging the Earth.

This insane greed comes from competitiveness, and the competition is driven by the wealth lost through theft committed by banks and governments.  That competition would be much less brutal if we had not lost 90% or more of our created wealth over the past century.

Most people should own their houses.  They should be able to pay cash for cars.  They should be able to get by on thirty hours of work a week.

For myself, I can’t decide if the bankers are simply themselves insanely greedy, or if a small elite within their community is dedicated to genuinely evil and lunatic notions of global control, driven by their own traumas and sociopathic urges.  Certainly, the means are the same, and no doubt both motives are present–and like most motives, none purely.

Anyway, if the Left can speak of Society, we can do the same of Culture, while at the same clearly demarcating the limits of the usefulness of this reification.

But it is there.  We dream of our social worlds, do we not?  We have dreams of showing up unprepared to class, or naked, or in our underwear.  We are all affected by the expectations of others, and those expectations are the railway which runs through our individual consciousness, and takes us other places.

This is the post I was going to make the other day, and kept avoiding.

What I am realizing is that anyone who has been hypervigilant all their lives, or even for long periods of time, there is a sort of State Dependent Learning that takes place.  When I drive, when I type, when I do ANYTHING (I noticed this doing Lumosity), there is this feeling I associate with it.

For one really good example of State Dependent Learning I once knew a guy who flew a helicopter in the Vietnam War.  He was drunk every time he flew.  At some point, though, he gave it up, and he had to reteach himself to fly sober.  It was a new sensation for him.

There are probably a lot of musicians out there who have trouble playing when they are not drinking.

The State, in any event, in my case, is a large amount of background tension.  I am used to tension.  Lacking that tension feels weird to me.  Losing it genuinely DOES feel like a loss.  I feel naked.  Driving feels different.  Taking a shower feels different.

So even over and above learning to relax, part of destressing from trauma is learning a new way of feeling EVERYTHING.  Because the moment you put your hands on the steering wheel (and driving is a good example since so much of it is automatic) you will want to relapse.  That’s what I feel.

And to be sure, a certain amount of worry SHOULD go with driving.  But not all of it.  Not all of it.

So to get to a new normal I am going to have to start identifying a whole lot of triggers, and then consciously learning to do old things in new ways.

None of this is easy.  But I am getting flashes of genuine fearlessness.  I think that is my destiny.  Fearlessness, to be clear, is not bravado.  It is relaxation and focus no matter what is going on.  Zero fucks given, no matter what.  That’s a desirable place to be.  That is where Life opens up.

I was laying in bed this morning and wondering if virtually all the social maladies afflicting us could, from a certain perspective, be laid at the feet of the Bomb and unsound money.

The Bomb of course terrified multiple generations of Americans, and indeed most other developed nations; certainly the old First and Second Worlds both.

We lived in its “shadow”, did we not?  The darkness of knowing you could get up any random sunny morning and be blasted into small particles by noon, or die a slow painful death from radiation poisoning and starvation?  All with little or no warning?  Everything and everyone gone.  Cockroaches and Keith Richards.

And I think the cultural effects of unsound money, of inflation–which is to say free money, counterfeit money, to banks–are not properly understood.

Why not live for the moment where your life savings will do nothing but dwindle?  This was the message of the 1970’s, which dovetailed perfectly (or infernally) with the Feel Good and Take No Responsibility ethos of that period.

These were my thoughts. As I have articulated often, complex systems are often radically disrupted and redirected by new organizing principles, a new gravity of sorts, which I have termed Tumblers.  It’s in my dictionary post on my other site, on the first page with the pigs.

Then it hit me that I myself feel a double disordered attachment, and then it hit me that we need to attach to our CULTURE as well as to our parents (particularly our mother).

This is a BIG THOUGHT.  It is important.

I’ve been chasing SOMETHING since I was about 16.  Clarity.  Peace.  Belonging.  Brother and Sisterhood.  A place and a purpose.

Can you not relate?  Of course you can, if you are reasonably thoughtful.  As I have said often, the Left really needs to be seen as a Cultural Home.  Conservatives, therefore, by definition MUST either have an alternative, or be so disgusted with the hypocrisy and destructiveness of the Left that they exist to oppose it, which amounts to working to prevent–realistically, slow–the continual making-things-worse.

But for what?  To what?  Any comprehensive political strategy MUST be a cultural strategy, first and foremost.  If I quote the dictum (from Andrew Breitbart I think) that “politics is downstream from culture”, then to get new politics you need new culture, don’t you?  Yes, of course left wing ideas arise naturally from a corrupted culture.

But what do you want to replace it with?  Is this not the salient question?

What I might call Primary Attachment (and these are such obvious terms I may be putting terms which already exist and mean something different to new uses; simply be aware that I am doing this) is that of the child with its parents, particularly feminine care-givers, in a perfect world not just a mother, but an aunt or two, older cousin, and grandmothers on both sides.

We do this poorly in this country, not least because the families are split and atomized.  We view having single family homes as a boon, and in many ways it is, but there is also wisdom and benefit to three or four generations remaining under the same roof.  It is more stable, more thoughtful and caring in aggregate (in healthy homes at any rate), and more likely to produce happy children, even if perhaps not overly creative and driven ones.

The gaps in our attachment, of course, drive much of the speed, anxiety, haste, churlishness, monomanias, and greed for money and power in our culture.  If you want to conquer the world, create unhappy children.  It worked for the British.  And I wonder about the Mongols.  Culturally and psychologically I don’t know enough about them to know why they kept killing, looting, and raping their way around Asia and Europe.

[Cue John Cleese, sitting at the desk where he is at in so many of his best sketches, in a field.  With cow farts.  That is the next thing in TV, you heard it here first.  Smell-O-Vision, which is ONE THOUSAND D. (my mind is a circus).

And I think about Sheol, in the Hebrew Bible (Bible, Biblos, Book: perhaps I should say Talmud or Pentatuch), in the Old Testament (that term is a bit like Hinayana, isn’t it?), it basically amounts to sitting forever doing nothing, in a stuffy undertemperature sauna.

Here is an idea: since they were mostly rotten people back then–the details, say, of Leviticus are not nice–maybe when they died something like that DID happen.  But if we create our own realities in the after-life (our true life, of which this life is a short interruption?  Always interesting to reframe things), then perhaps our outcomes change.

The evolutions of hell and heaven.  That is an interesting thought.]

Alright, so that was my dissociation there.  I pivot away when it hurts a bit. I’ve leaving it here, and will point out to you that when you forget why you got up and went to your bedroom to get something, it is that same part of your brain working.  I have historically been like this all day every day.  That is why working with my hands is therapeutic for me.  I’m getting better, though.  I am getting longer and longer stretches of being present.

So anyway, my apologies for that mess.

Primary Attachment, then, happens from birth to perhaps age 3, and probably no later than 4.  It changes qualitatively as far as what is being taught and reinforced, but the difference between, say, a sociopath, a narcissist, a manic depressive, and a neurotic may depend on where the attunement in their lives dried up.  The farther along you go, the more human you are.

Secondary Attachment, as I want to use it, is CULTURAL attachment.  This would happen from adolescence to perhaps age 20.  This is when you internalize and accept or reject the mores of your society.  This is where you decide to accept the life laid out for you, or reject it.  This is where you accept sexual mores or not.  Sexualizations really is a big part of most people’s lives, even if when it is well handled, as it is in most cultures, physical sex is not something most people spend much time thinking about, even if sexual differences color every part of every day in most cultures.  Or if they do think a lot about sex, it is tolerated, as for example in Brazil.

Sex is a primal energy that can go many directions.  My point is you need a strategy that is taught, and everyone who accepts that strategy is now a member of a group defined by like belief and like behavior.

Like belief and like behavior is what Rousseau called–in my understanding–freedom.  It is of course the opposite of freedom in many respects, and certainly as we would define it, when we are supposed to be able to do whatever we want.  There is not yet a “go to work in your underwear” movement, but it is only barely beyond what all of us can readily believe is possible; and of course those working from home often ARE in their underwear.  Actually I am right now.

Life is filled with dichotomies.  One things makes sense, but so too does another.  You want sexual fulfillment, but you don’t want to want to fuck everyone you meet, and you definitely don’t want your partner thinking the same way.  Not over the long haul.  You want what you want when you want it, but you might easily want the opposite in short order.  Passionate sex one day, and steady monogamy (monandry) the next.

Life is flow.  It seesaws one way, then the other.  Too much becomes too little and vice versa.

What I will propose, though, is this: too much looseness easily becomes rigidity.

Children who grow up without a sense of home and connection are measurable less emotionally flexible and resilient.

Adolescents who grow up without a sense of home and connection with their culture grow up dogmatic and angry.

Psychological health, remember, is FACES: Flexible, Adaptable, Coherent, Energized, and Stable.

Psychologically healthy people do not need dogma, and they don’t need to be right all the time.  They are energized by thoughtful debate.  They learn.  They change.  They adapt.

What would the anti-FACES look like?  Rigid, Dismissive, Inconsistent, lethargic and lazy, and continually changing.

That looks familiar, doesn’t it?

So how do we evolve a new culture?  A better culture?

I don’t think I am speaking an untruth when I say all the INGREDIENTS are there for something good.  Most of us are sensitized to vastly greater extent to the sufferings of our fellow humans and the world generally than probably any large mass of humans in world history.

What we lack is PLAY.  Play is where the good things happen, where new rituals emerge spontaneously.  I had all sorts of rituals I used daily with my kids, which just happened because I enjoyed playing with them, and I am VERY creative when I am feeling good.  Stuff just flows out of me in a continual stream.

And play involves openness and trust.  Those of course are in short supply.

I give me hope when I speak the truth as I see it.  That’s always a bright, good start.

And I have talked about a new cultural form I would like to create, which I have termed the Bohannon.  I’m just still a neurotic mess.  I don’t want to try and anchor anything like that on me just yet.  As I told several people, getting to that place will involve getting in touch with my belly energy,  and that in turn will allow me to release the fear I carry in my gut, and when I do that, losing weight will happen automatically.  I’m not unhealthy, so there is no imperative to lose weight, but I would be a solid 240, which is my current goal.  I’m a bit more than that.

Weight loss will be a sign.  As I told someone “you can trust me when I hit 240”.  Unspoken–this was in a bar–was that until then I will be that idiot who doesn’t want to go home.  I’ve done stupid shit in the past two weeks.  I wouldn’t trust me, not when I do what I do.  Honestly.  I’m smart, but I’m all over the place.  The pain still pushes me around.  Sometimes I make a stand, and sometimes I run like a frightened rabbit.  I can’t stop the water; I have to dry up the river.

I do have a plan, though, and I am executing it, daily.

Long story short, though, when I hit that goal, I am going to try again.  I don’t think it will be long now, although I’ve been saying that for some years.  I get just a LITTLE better every day, then I relapse, then I make the distance back, see something new, and then integrate the gain.  Three steps forward, 4 steps back, three steps forward again. Then two more. Something like that.

I figured out where I got that word by the way.  It’s genuinely silly, so I’m not going to share.  It still has a nice, round, feel to it, doesn’t it?  It doesn’t matter all that much what wood you use for the peg on the wall you hang your hat on.