Corollary: if you want justice, deduct the mob, and the threat of the mob. In a sane society eliminating the threat of terrorism would be the job of law enforcement.
How we eliminate what might be called social terrorism, or Leftist McCarthyism (McCarthy was not a good person, but also not wrong, or as abusive as the image created by Leftist historians, but if the word was given power, lets use it) is another question.
Mob behavior should be called Bloodlust, or perhaps Mob Vampirism.
It seems likely most health insurance companies are encouraging their customers to get the jab. Most large corporations engage in GroupThink, and the Official Narrative is that the jabs reduce illness, and where illness occurs, reduces its severity.
From their angle, less illness, and less severe illness, is less money paid out. Less money paid out is more profit, given a steady premium stream.
But what if the jabs make people MORE sick? What if they start showing up in ER’s–as may indeed already be happening, with the current flood remaining unexplained by data to my satisfaction–with all manner of apparently unrelated illnesses? A liver problem here, a kidney problem there, an aneurism in a third place.
Obviously, if you put blood clots nearly anywhere in the body, you create all manner of possibility for mischief. I am no medical professional, or even a competent biologist, but it seems to me one outcome of clots is clogged veins and arteries, and that means loss of blood flow for a period of time, which I would assume would mean areas of what I will call micronecrotic tissue since I don’t know a better word. Lesions. Dead spots in organs.
And say they happen in the liver. It might take a long time for symptoms to manifest, but it could be that many microscopic parts of the liver are rotting within the body.
That speculation may be dumb. As I say, I am not even remotely clever enough to even suspect what I don’t know, but it seems plausible on the face of it to me.
Here is a link on Phlebitis: https://www.healthline.com/health/phlebitis
From the link:
Phlebitis is the inflammation of a vein. Veins are blood vessels in your body that carry blood from your organs and limbs back to your heart.
If a blood clot is causing the inflammation, it’s called thrombophlebitis. When the blood clot is in a deep vein, it’s called deep vein thrombophlebitis, or deep vein thrombosis (DVT).
What if these jabs are creating microphlebotic inflammation in most of the circulatory system? Why would any sane person want to release spike proteins everywhere in the body, much less spike proteins the body generated itself as a result of an exogenous instruction set created in a lab?
Again, I am probably not sufficiently respecting my ignorance–you will by now have noted this is a recurring fault, not least because this is my own damn blog and fuck it–but these are all possibilities as far as I can see.
And the point I logged on to make remains this: there are bean counters poring over spreadsheets showing vaccinations rates among their enrollees and purring the way bean counters do when the trends are good, who may be having an Oh FUCK moment a few months from now.
And it will be up to the CDC and NIH to lie about the genesis of these problems. But Big Insurance will be paying the actual costs. Those bills will not be theoretical. Nor will the deaths and illnesses.
THEY WERE ALSO UNTREATED.
Why would any sane person think that anyone who is sick and gets no help from a doctor would not fare worse than one who DID receive competent medical care?
My understanding of the statistics is that almost EVERYTHING helps. Zinc helps. Vitamin C helps. Vitamin D helps. Aspirin helps. HCQ helps. Antibiotics help. Monoclonal antibodies help. Almost any treatment any doctor might prescribe will help less people die. Millions of people around the world are dead because Anthony Fauci, in so many words, told doctors to let them fight the disease on their own, and recover or die, he didn’t really care which.
In most nations since roughly March of last year, doctors have been TOLD, under threat of losing their licenses and/or jobs, not to do ANYTHING.
And people who HAVE spoken out, like Peter McCullough, HAVE lost their jobs. And now the fact that he was fired for nakedly political reasons is being used as evidence by the lunatics of his incompetence. It is utterly shameless. It is the sort of thing that happened in the Soviet Union, where people were attacked personally and professionally for saying things which were politically unacceptable. This is literally Gulag style treatment, even if we don’t yet–to my knowledge, other than the Jan. 6th folks–have formal political prisoners or prisons.
How is that sane? If 2 people in a thousand die without treatment, why could we not suppose that with treatment that number could be cut in half? People are still dying, and still dying from this disease, but we are SAVING LIVES, which has ostensibly always been the goal. If you do that math on billions of people, you get at least tens of millions of lives saved through nothing more complicated than ALLOWING DOCTORS TO DO THEIR JOBS.
And my gut and what I read makes me strongly suspect that most vaccine deaths are being reported as unvaccinated COVID deaths if the person dies within fourteen days of the jab. You are technically “unvaccinated” until your two weeks have passed, and if you die suddenly, why not blame COVID? That is the sort of BizarroWorld which has been engineered on the one side by ruthless amoral criminal cynics, and on the other by a cravenly compliant populace driven into more or less clinically psychotic delusions by effective media driven propaganda.
And self evidently ALL the deaths before these jabs were rolled out were unvaccinated.
Unvaccinated or untreated: you tell me which is more criminal on both sides. And this is a valid comparison even if these jabs are perfectly safe, which they manifestly are not, making the whole moral logic entirely one sided.
I was dreaming last night I was Wolverine from the X-men (this has happened often). Magneto (Ian McKellen) somehow got control of me, and was going to use me to infiltrate somewhere.
Here is an addition to thoughts I’ve shared in recent days. If you are inside a group, then outsiders look like villains. They are different, incomprehensible. The sort of connection you assume with your family and village is impossible. They don’t even speak Greek. They just say bar bar bar. (I have said before, I think, that the best English translation of barbarian would be blahblahian, as I understand it.)
I’m rambling. There’s something here some part of me does not want to understand.
I’m going to allow some undirected musing.
The “villain” is the person apart. They are the ones who do not respect social conventions, and who thus earn the condemnation on the one side of the community, and who, if they are emotionally normal, would feel shame and repentance for their part.
The real world, obviously, includes unrepentant villains. Thieves, murderers, frauds of all sorts. Can we not assume these people, for their part, feel the impossibility of social connection even if they do everything correctly? That they have the trauma Klaxon going all the time, such that it gets no worse then do actually objectively violate social norms, and gets no better when they do behave themselves? Would this not amount to a deranged conscience, which has lost the ability to reward the good and punish the bad? Remorse is only possible, maybe, if return is possible. If return is not possible, then justifying rationalizations work equally well.
There were a couple of things I used to wonder about as a kid. One, was why governments had to tax people and not just print money. That one I figured out: inflation. And it has been done. It is being done in Venezuela right now. And the United States.
The other was how bad people stayed together. If they are all rotten, they can all count on being stabbed in the back by their compatriots. There is no ideal they are rallying around, and no flag they can trust.
Here is what I will say today: what people who lack the capacity for social connection share in common is precisely the status of being outsiders, of belonging nowhere, and to no one. They don’t belong to each other, but they all hate humanity, which is to say the communities from which their psychic damage causes them to feel excluded.
And its not hard to imagine that if that feeling is already there, that there would be a strong temptation to earn it, so that it does not feel like such a perversion and intrusion. Such a person would more or less be compelled into criminality.
This is the root of much or most crime in this and every other country, at least where genuine poverty is not present as an excuse. It is well known that single parent homes generate kids more likely to engage in everything bad, from drug and alcohol abuse, criminality, prostitution, premature and unintended pregnancies, dropping out of school, being unemployed (and unemployable), etc.
I think most single parent homes have attachement disorders. I think particularly young, single mothers lack the capacity to provide the attunement young babies need. They are scared. They don’t feel secure themselves, so how can their child feel secure?
And I think in many homes this feeling of insecurity continues all the way through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.
OK. That’s something. Back to Magneto. What he represents for me, I think, is my anger/shame/fear complex, my chronically triggered limbic system/unmyelinated vagus nerve, my alienation and distance from humanity.
So in this dream, I am being shown using a hero to channel the designs of a villain. This would be the Righteous Idea arising from a bad place. This would cruelty in the name of goodness. This would be the emotional background of rationalization.
And I’ve spoken in recent days of fear and shame a lot, but anger is the other aspect of this. Can you think of some part of our society where anger is continual? Maybe?
If you look at some of these triggered Wokers, who are a whole lot like tweakers, what you see is chronic anger fed by continual anxiety.
Are all these people suffering from clinical trauma? Here is an interesting (to me) idea: social alienation induces shame, which TRIGGERS fear and anger.
A society which does not reliably provide people with a place and purpose will in effect traumatize them, leading to all the effects of trauma, which could be summarized using other words as restlessness and inability to relax, pessimism, frustration, pettiness, and a lack of joy and true compassion.
Pace the Tao Te Ching, when you lose compassion and kindness, you talk about little else. That is what I see. I see people who seem nice, who speak of kindness, who turn into murderous werewolves the moment you mention Donald Trump.
This gets us into an intersection of personal psychology and sociology and even anthropology (is sociology the word we use for our own society, and anthropology what we use for everyone else? I ask as someone who has read a lot of both.)
Macrofactors, like the space of our cities, the pace of our lives, the ubiquity of technology, the size of our houses (kids have their own rooms in many places); and cultural factors like an obsession with work, a rejection of tradition, the loss of religious grounding, the loss of place caused by frequent moves; and habits that evolve in this milieu, like those of thoughtless conformity and reflexive superficiality: all of these play into this.
Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics is downstream from culture. In my own way, of course, I had even then been making that same argument for many years.
To take one example, your stance on abortion will in many respects depend on your religious beliefs. The Left, of course, does not want religious beliefs consulted in any way in the public domain, but OBVIOUSLY the views of any given person on any moral question will depend on their metaphysics. I’ve quoted William James on this, to the effect that little matters BUT your metaphysics. As he said, you would do well, in determining whether or not to rent a room to someone, to find out if they have a sincere faith in God, or not.
In many respects our system was CREATED to reconcile differing religious beliefs. It just happens to also be able to incorporate secular ones, but for most of our history, EVERYONE on every side of every issue was at least publicly a religious believer of one stripe or another. No matter what you believed or why, you were granted a voice, and the right to live your life as you chose, within broad limits. If you were a Christian, self evidently your voice would be informed by your Christianity, as you interpreted it.
In grad school I read a number of books on “Modernity”. This is the basic condition I am speculating leads to literal trauma embodied in the nervous systems of countless particular individuals, which in turn affects their political beliefs, which in the present particularly are OBVIOUSLY fear and anger based.
As an hypothesis, this does much to explain Trump Derangement Syndrome. Everyone has always been free to dislike the guy. He’s arrogant, self promoting, and of course his hair and fake tan.
But the sheer VOLUME of emotion is vastly vastly out of proportion to all that. And the Left even now finds itself repeating the lie that his Presidency was bad for the country. It wasn’t. He did great, even if at many moments things were made to seem by the media as if they were about to spin out of control. They never did. We got nearly full employment, better trade deals, renewed respect for our willingness to protect our own interests internationally, energy sufficiency leading to low gas prices, no new wars, and he was nominated for TWO Nobel Peace Prizes. That’s not shabby, and vastly better than anything Obama did. And of course FJB is pushing things in the other direction.
I will withhold comment on all that for the time being.
But what will fix our politics is renewed personal social connections between individuals. Less alienation will lead to less frustration, less anxiety, less anger, and by definition less shame.
My idea of social groups is a good one. I just feel strongly that if I am going to start this thing, I myself need to be in the right place. I work fucking hard every day, but it’s been very, very difficult.
It’s possible, though, that I may turn a corner in the next few months. I am getting more and more moments where I feel connected to my life, relative to the dissociation and depersonalization (which in my understanding are really what Sartre was describing in Nausea) that have been the invisible water in which I have been swimming so many years.
If you are so inclined, pray for me. Who knows? It may help.
But this is always the end point of my logic. No candidate can fix any of this. There is no political solution to problems which begin in homes, which is, ultimately, in human hearts.
The Wolverine is a great metaphor for me. I love my children, and I can and do show affection in small ways here and there to my few friends. Loyalty is a big value for me. But I am distant much of the time, and irritable more than I would like. I am grouchy. Prickly.
But all this, all this writing, all this thinking: it is my way of showing I care.
So many of us do so little with so much.
I myself am guilty of this, but vastly less than most. But I too can do better.
Imagine the billions of people out there right now, at this very moment, struggling every day for food and shelter.
Imagine the hundreds of billions, cumulatively, who have lived and died without ever being able to read great literature, great spiritual works, or spend even a couple hours a day meditating.
We are so blessed, and we do so little with it.
Someone accused me of being from the 1800’s the other day. I took it as a compliment. I told him that back then they wrote in complete sentences and had attention spans longer than 20 seconds.
The thing is that even most conservatives are infected with this disease. Hurry hurry hurry, noise, noise, noise.
When was the last time you heard a cowbell? Have you ever seen the Milky Way, properly?
One: It seems to me that Conservatism–which I will continue to insist represents the truly Liberal middle between monarchy and the Collectivisms–recognizes that life contains pain, but that this pain can be transcended, learned from, and is salutary in many ways when integrated with a larger, coherent, and healthy philosophical or religious world view.
Collectivists, in contrast, take umbrage with the fact that this world contains pain, reject the notion that it is unavoidable, and rather than seeking as individuals and small groups to process and integrate difficulty, dream of a world in which pain is eliminated.
This is of course one obvious reason why, when life in the United States is so fucking easy, by either historical or global standards, so many of these willful children continue to see “oppression”–which might be defined as Other Generated Pain–everywhere.
Here is the thing: what you reject clings to you like a fog. It fills you, and gradually pushes you and pulls you in its own direction. It acquires a gravity. Thus, in rejecting pain these people come to SEEK it. They engineer failure in their own lives with what amounts to masochistic failures of courage, discipline and maturity, and wind up seeking to inflict retribution on the world at large. To rationalize it, they need only seek out people who accept that life is hard sometimes, and blame them for everything.
Two: in the same respect that the suppression of early treatment has cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States alone, as among others Harvey Risch and Peter McCullough have argued, with respect to COVID, what about the suppression of Vitamin D with respect to the flu and pneumonia?
If Zev Zelenko was able to develop an easy and cheap regimen for immune system support for COVID, why was the same fucking thing not done for colds and the flu YEARS AGO?
As I understand it, the flu has essentially disappeared. What I would expect is that as more and more people starting taking more zinc and more Vitamin D, particularly, is that flu death rates will plummet, even if it reappears.
What this assault by our government is effectively doing is IMPROVING our public health system on a grassroots, peer to peer level, in ways which will in the long run most likely have strongly positive effects on an array of illnesses for years to come.
I really believe the AMA exists to serve Big Pharma, which is controlled by Big Money. The story I read, which I will take with a grain of salt, is that John D. Rockefeller more or less created both Big Pharma–at least as it exists in this country–and the AMA, with the aim of control, monopolization of methods and ideas, and following huge profits for him and his stockholders.
Here is a link from a segment of the movie Plandemic (1 or 2 I’m not sure): https://sagaciousnewsnetwork.net/john-d-rockefeller-the-founder-of-the-pharmaceutical-industry/
Certainly it is OBVIOUSLY true that when people speak of public health, they are speaking of doctors and hospitals and drugs, not obvious and easy methods by which normal people can take control of their own health, or any of the thousands of known effective herbal and otherwise natural remedies for a host of illnesses.
As one example, Charles Dickens has a passing comment in Oliver Twist that oysters reduce fever. Why? They amount to zinc supplements. Now, we can just take the zinc. But that was known back then.
But this awakening is clearly an unintended consequence of all of this. The political goal seems certainly to have been vaccine passports, at least, and what else remains unknowable. It is very unclear that will be possible now, at least in this country. The tide is clearly going out on the lunatics. Biden remains the figurehead, the mannequin they manipulate from time to time this way and that, but even with the putative reins of power in the hands of authoritarians, there remains much they cannot do without more support from the People, writ large, than they presently have, or can plausibly claim to have.
The shaking comes and goes. I am working very hard currently–six days a week, while protecting Saturday very carefully–and what had been working was roughly 3 hours daily of meditation, yoga, autogenics, stretching, AVE and Neurofeedback. It was a lot, and I have not had the energy to do all that lately.
But what I have noticed when I don’t shake, is that my dreams seem to channel shame. I will find myself in some social situation, and suddenly someone will realize I don’t belong there, that I am a fake. And I will look at how the Other Half [remember how it used to be the other half until some dude up in Canada invented, then pushed, then got complicit media support for his 1% talking point during the Occupy Wall Street nonsense? Those people are still getting rich, and I’m pretty sure they are the ones who cheated Bernie out of his nomination, and put Joe Biden in the White House. Hillary would have been better, but even the super rich don’t always get exactly what they want. And while on the topic, pace Jordan Peterson, do you think Bernie cleans his own room? He looks like a slob, so he probably is a slob.] lives, and feel excluded.
This is a shame dream, of course. Shame is feeling like you don’t and can’t belong. Gabor Mate and Jonathan Hari have put out good talks on how addiction and social disconnection are related. But to my knowledge neither has put out good TREATMENTS. In my own view, the best book I have read is Sebern Fisher’s one. Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk have some good ideas too, but my own treatment plan is essentially Kum Nye, Autogenics, Neurofeedback, and AVE.
Here is the thing: trauma creates the Unholy Triad of fear, anger and shame. Anger gets you in trouble socially, and fear manifests as anxiety (not uncommonly diagnosed in my view as ADHD, because it prevents long term concentration), which is unpleasant. So as I have been arguing, trauma often results in what amounts to self harming, self destructive behaviors I am calling generally Masochism.
And the functional effect of shame–and perhaps its definition–is an INABILITY to feel like you belong. That you are a part of a coherent social whole which is safe for you.
In my particular case, I think this was largely the result of a primary bonding failure. My mother, even now, is emotionally unavailable. It is uncanny that, even now, I can tell her something important about my life, and a week later she has forgotten entirely. For that reason, I rarely share anything important, although I do talk with her somewhat regularly out of a sense of duty. I don’t want to participate in a world where even bad parents (up to a point) are abandoned permanently.
And I don’t doubt she was much worse when I was younger. She herself has some form of trauma in her whose genesis I’m not destined to know in this life, but she has ZERO attunement. Almost none. She is in her own world, even now.
But I wonder if roughly that same effect is not being inflicted on many children now by technology. If you bond with your iPad, that your parents gave you at age 3 to make you easier to manage, you have not learned to connect with other human beings, have you? If that bright blinking light becomes your emotional home, have you not become a stunted, lessened human being, for whom shame sooner or later will emerge as a natural function of an innate human neurological necessity?
I think so. We are raising a generation of kids who will need to be taught to be human, if indeed it is possible. I think it IS possible, but we need to state now that it is likely a needed task.
But returning to myself, this basic thesis explains some things. With regard to addiction, drugs and alcohol manage anxiety for those still trying to live some semblance of a connected life, one filled with shame. As I say, to push out from masochism engenders fear, and drugs and alcohol blunt fear.
But would not work addiction become a sort of Reaction Formation (some of Freud’s terms seem useful, even if he was a craven liar, and always almost right, but rarely actually right) to a feeling of inferiority? Adler, actually, was known for speaking of an Inferiority Complex. Would this not amount to overcompensation brought on by shame?
And sexual addiction would be a combination of the need for connection combined with a deeply seated emotional conviction that it remained impossible for that individual. So you go through, you use, people, knowing you can never get what you really want.
And you can derive–and I think I’ve made this comment before–both Sartre’s “L’infer c’est les Autre” and his Nausea.
In my view, shame can precede a social interaction, in the form of trauma–Developmental or Acute–but of course societies can also reject people. In the modern world, many people find themselves alone. Their extended families are extended and often emotionally distant as well.
And Americans, in particular, have gradually substituted, in my view, niceness for sincerity, and a superficial affability for deep seated connection. David Riesman, among others, wrote about this in the Lonely Crowd. I am not arguing for rudeness, but after being asked for the fifth time in five minutes “how are you doing today?” at Home Depot the other day I told this poor gal “tired and irritable”, which was the truth. They ask, they get.
I suppose there are times when sincerity is unappreciated!!! But the reality is that if you never answer honestly, if everything is good, good good, then some part of you forgets that there is a human being on the other end, because the whole process is so mechanical and ritualized. I don’t doubt that yesterday someone killed himself who had been answering good good good for many years.
But being unappreciated–not “feeling felt”, to use a great pair of words I think originated with Dan Siegel–can easily have the effect of making the world seem hostile, and if the world is hostile, then fuck it. Fuck them. Sour grapes. Hell is others. Corollary: What is left is me and what belongs to me.
Likewise the effort, from within shame and alienation, to reconnect to the world brings with it profound anxiety, and that anxiety often manifests in nausea. Sufficient fear will make us sick to our stomachs. This is the vagus nerve, we now know. Movement from shame to self affirmation is still an activity within a triggered Limbic system. Nothing has been subtracted neurologically.
I honestly think my main task on Earth is and remains to walk this path, to find the way from deep trauma into contentment and peace and joy–a task which involves cutting through thick jungles of bullshit, crossing rivers of doubt and confusion, and climbing mountains of sheer unrelenting effort.
Mass participation in this global medical experiment is neither NECESSARY nor SUFFICIENT to end the pandemic.
It is not necessary, since natural immunity has ended every pandemic in human history until the advent of vaccination around 1800. Always. In some cases, as in the Black Plague, it killed a whole lot of people first. But then it faded. The Bell Curve/Farr’s Law completed.
If this were truly a dangerous disease–like smallpox–then the cost of natural immunity, compared with an actually effective vaccine, would be too much. We ended smallpox globally with a vaccine, not natural immunity (although every actual Smallpox pandemic prior to that did end with Herd Immunity).
But the death rate is low–John Ionniddis estimates it at two people in a thousand who are exposed enough to develop antibodies–and concentrated nearly entirely in the sick and elderly; and we have effective prophylactic and early treatment measures our ruling Health Commissar–backed by a corrupt international cabal–has simply taken off the table.
If we put them back on the table, we are done in a few months. Simple.
And for the same reason these jabs are not NECESSARY. Early treatment, combined with the exotic idea of STAYING HOME WHEN YOU ARE SICK, is enough.
These things may even make COVID outbreaks WORSE. One writer I am following is doing a global data analysis, and the early data seems to be that mass “vaccination” correlates with HIGHER rates of COVID, of hospitalization, and possibly even death.
In any event, the data seems already to show clearly the shots don’t stop transmission much at all. This IN ITSELF should mean that those who want the shots should take them–in their own minds, based on the lies they have been told, to protect themselves–but leave the rest of us alone. Vaccinated or not, you will spread this thing if exposed. If you think your chances are better with these things, have at it.
But no matter what the claimed benefits from these jabs are, even if they are completely true and no side effects AT ALL are happening, they are still no better than, and likely worse than, effective early treatment and prophylaxis. You want to reduce your risk? Follow the Zelenko Protocol.
You want to reduce it still more? Source some HCQ or Ivermectin, and find a doctor willing to prescribe you doxycycline if you get sick, then follow his treatment protocol.
It’s insane that these shots are the ONLY OPTION our public health authorities are giving people to reduce their risks. Why not perfectly safe vitamins and minerals? What is the downside? I see none.
The downside, in my view, is political, and amounts to a premature end of all this insanity, and all the power grabs it is enabling, and all the money being made.
I really, truly, honestly think that the aim from the outset has been to PROLONG and deepen this thing, and the cynic in me says that these vaccines were INTENDED to make things worse. I think we are going to see a lot of death this winter blamed on COVID, but in reality caused by these damned injections.
Did you know that 75 European athletes have died suddenly in the last five months, all reportedly in the not too distant aftermath of full vaccination? Here is a link to a Twitter post, linking the original German language article: https://twitter.com/D_ogenius/status/1455320859753787396
I think with a liberated medical system, empowered to react as the intelligent organisms free markets and decentralized networks create, we could have been done, in toto, little to no death remaining, by roughly February of this year AT THE LATEST.
Here is the thing: this disease is HERE now. Fauci most likely helped create it, possibly helped release it, but it is not going anywhere. These jabs are only good for relatively short periods of time, and their effects likely get worse the more times you take them.
What we need, and have always needed, is INTELLIGENT TREATMENT. Then it doesn’t matter if it hangs around. It may continue killing the people some random seasonal flu has always killed, but have ZERO effect on most of us, ever.
I continue to wonder how many people will be up to the emotional challenge of realizing how rotten, how corrupt, how EVIL, and how UNNECESSARY all of this has been once all the cards are on the table, and the smoke and fog of induced fear and panic fade.
I’ve been down that rabbit hole, and it is no fun. But I survived, and did so as a much wiser man.
I would argue that it may make sense–I am still thinking about this–to broadly classify all self limiting, all voluntary constriction, as forms of masochism. Conformity which goes beyond the basic civility and courtesy needed to avoid conflict would then be a form of masochism.
And those who choose to indulge in that form of masochism–which is frustrating, since you are complicit in your own confinement–sooner or later take it out in cruelty.
If you are afraid to be yourself, sooner or later you will find yourself tormenting and limiting others. The converse would also be true, which is that open, honest people are always happy to see, and assist in, the growth of others.
Continually looking first and foremost to the opinions of others, without even attempting to consult ones own mind and feelings, would then be a form of this masochism, which leads to sadism.
In my own view, I think this explains the obsessions with violence and cruelty in our popular media.
I will from time to time go into stores in the mall, like Spencers, to see what kids are up to, what they are buying.
In my most recent trip this week, I saw dolls of the “minions”, I will call them, of the Squid Game. They were childrens toys. I can’t see any adult buying them. So I had to wonder how many adults were letting their kids watch that show. It is likely a lot. I was careful with my own kids, but most parents are too tired–and too brainwashed into never saying no to their perfect little angels–to stop it.
And Jason, from Halloween, was everywhere. Not as a villain: more or less as an icon, as in t-shirts with his picture, saying Happy Halloween. Or one that had him on a bridge with a bloody knife, and someone dying below, with the caption “just the tip”.
You know all this is sick. It’s obvious. Average Americans from half a century ago would be horrified to see all this, particularly being foisted on the minds of children. The Left used to oppose violence in the 70’s and 80’s. Tipper Gore opposed violence and misogyny in the media. You remember that? Back then, I suppose they (I will exempt Tipper from this, since I think she was reacting as a thoughtful adult to truly vile things) thought violence supported militarism, which supported American wars. There may well be some truth to that idea. But all that is gone, isn’t it? Any notion of restraint, or boundaries, or “this is too much”. Gone. It’s gone.
A guy I know in a bar was telling me a few weeks that he is obsessed with the Halloween franchise. He said he goes to bed watching the most violent movies he can find. He talked about how some movies have “good kills”.
Now, I don’t think in the slightest that he is violent, or likely to become violent. But he also unlikely to become a beautiful person. He is unlikely to become open and kind and creating acts and works of beauty. In his particular case, I think he had a really horrible childhood, with all the usual things like emotionally unavailable parents, continual moves, constantly shifting emotional landscapes, and no security anywhere. If you are fucked with continually by “humanity”–before that is even a concept you can understand–then you learn to hate people, and I could see how he could learn to enjoy seeing humanity beaten, murdered, and abused. It resonates with the damage in his own soul.
I am good at what I do, but I doubt I will ever tease any of those stories out of him. I’m interested, but there is much he has worked really, really hard to forget. I understand that.
In all honesty, more than once, in trying to help people, I think I have hurt them. In general, I think I do more good keeping my damn mouth shut. It’s hard to say.
And I have trauma too. It seems likely that sometimes I myself am cruel, after going through long enough rationalizing iterations to fool even myself. Until it is healed, it finds ways of leaking out. Always. In all of us.
And when you consider that there are millions like him, how much would it take to weaponize people like him, politically, if you could convince them they were in the right? He himself is a conservative, but the problem is across the board. I see daily how CHILDISH the Left has become. Infantile. Utterly unwilling and unable to do even BASIC acts of thinking for themselves. It all amounts to “I’m going to TELL on you.”
This is the basic emotional dynamic of authoritarian regimes. As I have said, the children’s island Milan Kundera described in “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” was, I think, consciously intended as a metaphor for a reality he had seen and suffered from.
Here is the thing: few of us are born to do advanced mathematics, or write great poetry, or do any number of difficult things. Your IQ, and your innate aptitudes, will limit you. You can always improve, but only within a range. History has seen very few Einsteins, Bohrs (I can’t resist noting that in the main dispute of their lives, Bohr won), or Teslas.
But all of us have a mind, a heart, and a body. And all of them are continually receiving a wide variety of information, and there are many, many people out there who lack conventional intelligence who nonetheless reliably reach good conclusions by consulting their intuition, their gut, and their feelings.
Most people fail to use a large portion of this natural intelligence, with which I think all of us are amply endowed. Most of us may not be able to design a computer, but most of us can live happy lives in congruence with those around us, and pick up on the large things happening around us. But “education” removes much of this natural intelligence, such that certain things are so stupid only educated people believe them.
To take one obvious and current example, it is apparently a demonstrated demographic fact that so-called “vaccine resistance”–which as a term I hope you will readily see is already propagandistic, and intended to constrict the Hassle Free Zone, by working an Us and a Them into a truly complex issue–is highest among the MOST and the LEAST educated. I would qualify, I think, in the most category, but I interact continually with the least, and their mistrust is gut level, but I think it is perfectly on the money.
And it IS the money, isn’t it, driving all this? They feel that. And blacks, in particular, are in many cases getting this sick feeling that “here we go again”–again, with reason, in my view.
The creed of Individualism, which is unique to Western culture, at least as an articulated philosophy (with many culture having practiced it in effect, like the Tibetans as far as I can tell), is really about giving individuals this SPACE to develop AS individuals.
[With regard to Tibet, Alexandra David-Neel, who spent a lot of time in Tibetan monasteries before the Chinese fucked everything up, noted that we call them “monasteries”, but that other than periodic public gatherings, they were NOTHING at all like Western monasteries. Each acolyte has his own practice, given to him by his own teacher. You might have 300 monks, all doing slightly different practices in solitude. The monks were gathered together physically, but most of them lived alone, and followed their own path. This, in my view, is one reason why so many interesting things developed in Tibet.]
Obviously, all of us value caring and sharing and compassion, if we are morally sane. All of that is a part of Individualism, which seeks nothing less than the continual personal growth of all members of a given social order.
Collectivism, as the opposite, seeks nothing less than the submission and domination of the individual, and a cessation to whatever growth was possible for them in this life. I think fairly regularly of Cuba, where in effect time stopped some time in the early 1960’s. Spontaneity stopped. Experimenting stopped. Personal openness stopped, since openness invited oppression.
Fear and Collectivism cannot be separated. Shame and collectivism cannot be separated. Trauma and collectivism cannot be separated.
And most of human history has consisted in Collectivisms of various sorts. Think of the medieval Church. You were in, or you were incinerated. There was no room for the individual. This basic template has played out regularly on the world stage, nearly everywhere. The people white Europeans found in the Americas when we invaded, because they had vast amounts of space, were most likely vastly more open to personal experience.
Knowledge is always local, isn’t it? It is seeing through your own eyes. This is vastly easier when you are not a member of an authoritarian empire of one sort or another, telling you who to be, and what to believe, and punishing you if you fail.
I have commented on this before, but I think the life path of young Alisa Rosenbaum was set before age 5. I listened to her biography, and when she was 3-4, her mother offered her one prize immediately, or a much bigger one if she waited a year. She chose the latter. When the time came to get the prize, her mother–who I suspect was a narcissist–had forgotten about it completely, and gave her nothing. I don’t think she ever forgot that. I think her whole life was in effect dedicated to preventing other people from making that same mistake. Get what you can, she said, when you can, and through effort of your own. Never let people take things from you, and most particularly your mind and soul.
And of course she had a front row seat for the events in Saint Petersburg. If memory serves, her fathers pharmacy was seized by the Bolsheviks. She watched the chaos from the middle.
Intellectually, none of this is really that complicated. But people with emotional problems–particularly unrecognized and thus unacknowledged ones–choose on some level to make the simple complicated, because within the complicated all manner of lies are made vastly easier.
And lies, of course, become the mortar of personality formations which are destructive, but which are protected because, if liberated, they lead to pain. That pain can be dealt with, processed, grown through, but most people lack the passion to do that work. It is hard, but it is the only worthwhile game on this planet.
As I continue to say, there are many reasons for pessimism, but at root, where we are going is not what people REALLY want. They feel the lack, but they don’t know how to fix it. They are not happy, and our current path will make them even more miserable. These are powerful arguments for a sea change.
At some point, I think I could evolve into a teacher, but I am not there yet. As I said, I think I see cruelty leaking out of me, too. Until then, speaking the truth as clearly as I can will remain my highest and best use of my time and talent, as I see it.
As I think about it, another way of framing this is that our system was built to be agile. Doctors, broadly speaking, are granted a lot of freedom in our country to respond to illnesses, particularly new illnesses. They try things, document what happens, then write about it somewhere. Information is shared and spread. Various people try different things, and gradually best practices evolve.
With respect to COVID substantially the entire Medical Establishment– which would include State Medical Boards, the AMA, the people who run university medical departments and hospitals, and various State and Federal health agencies of all sorts–kowtowed to Emperor Fauci. Even Robert Redfield eventually said some reasonable things, but never Fauci.
In effect, we implemented Central Planning with respect to this pandemic. We allowed one solution, and one solution only, one which saw countless doctors in effect watch their patients turn blue without lifting a fucking finger. It’s shameful. It’s horrendous. For most of those put on ventilators particularly, it amounted to medical murder. None of those people got a fucking thing, other than maybe Remdesivir. They weren’t even allowed oxygen in most cases, which is standard practice for respiratory illness, or so I read.
And ALL OF IT is antithetical to the American spirit, to medical freedom, and to EFFICIENCY, which depends on trying everything, and settling as quickly as possible on what works. That requires networks, all moving in their own ways, all communicating to each other, all learning, all watching, and all focused on a common outcome, which in this case is an end to this fucking thing, so we can end the fucking tyranny.
The tyranny, OBVIOUSLY, WANTS ALL THIS TO CONTINUE. They made a mountain out of the molehill of an unusual flu, and now they want to build their castle on it, high above the rest of us.