Month: March 2022

I have been hesitating to make this post.  It’s vaguely horrifying, but I think true.

I recently listened to Jordan Peterson’s excellent course on personality. I bought it at a discount, but it would likely be worth full price for most working professionals.

He referenced a study.  I think this is the one: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062275

Here is the core thesis: “According to a “parasite stress” hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens.”

Paper was published in 2013. You connect the dots.  Done?  I hope that didn’t take long.

I will offer further commentary.

Politically, Conservatism–which I don’t think he really defined, but which functionally might be defined as clinging to the old and known–is particularly correlated with Orderliness, which is one facet of the personality trait of Conscientiousness.  Orderliness, in turn, seems to be correlated with Disgust.  This research was done by Jonathan Haidt.

Conservatism, then, broadly speaking, is correlated with an elevated capacity for Disgust.

Pathogens breed disgust, which brings about a passion for order, which leads naturally to authoritarian regimes that are relatively fixed and closed in all ways.

Liberalism, which I think he used broadly speaking as synonymous with the way self identified “liberals” see themselves, and as they used to be, are characterized by Openness.  Openness in turn splits into two categories which are, roughly (I may not be using his precise terms), intelligence and creativity.  Intelligence is of course broadly understanding and capacity for abstract work.  Creativity is artistry of all sorts, including entrepreneurial activity.

On this reading, it is natural that most academics and much of Silicon Valley are “liberal”.  “Liberalism” suits their personalities.

Here is the point I would make on this score, though: for many years propagandists of various sorts have been seeding disgust into what has become the Left.  They have been telling them that ideological Others are disgusting, which has been triggering in them a latent and previously deprioritized need for Order.

In other words, true Liberals have been becoming Conservative, while retaining the outer veneer of “liberalism”.  Conservatism, on this reading, is more or less just stasis, just doing things a certain way because that is how they have always been done.

Now add COVID, an actual disease, to this mix.  Obviously, the disease itself enabled the triggering of Authoritarianism around the world, which was GROSSLY excessive to the dangers of the actual disease.  We know now that the lockdowns killed or will kill 3 or more people for every one saved from COVID.  They will die of suicide, missed cancer or other disease diagnosis, drug or alcohol abuse, or just stress, construed broadly.

I was citing the Big Short in 2020 about how every 1% increase in unemployment leads to 30,000 or more deaths annually.  Well, unemployment went up a lot, and Johns Hopkins ran the numbers.  I’m sure I’ve posted that link.

So no possible rational, scientific, or humanitarian justification motivated the lockdowns.  Mass Formation Psychosis was offered as a justification.  That may have played a role.  But the obvious hypothesis is that the DISEASE WAS INTRODUCED TO SUPPORT AUTHORITARIANISM, AS A PRIMARY GOAL.

And here is what happened: the Left–again, a group made sick with disgust, and becoming unconsciously conservative in the ways that matter–was induced to yet further disgust in response an ACTUAL pathogen.  It wasn’t just conservatives themselves that were polluting their society, but actual GERMS.

What does this do?  Induce an obsession with cleanliness, which is to say ORDER.  Wear your fucking mask or else.  Get your fucking shot or you are UNCLEAN.  Do what you are fucking told or you are an ILLNESS in the body politic.  You are an unwanted worm, vermin, a rat, an infestation.

Do you see how all this ties up the loose ends nicely?  How someone like Bill Gates could have read this thesis not quite ten years ago and had an “AHA” moment?

Just put the germ out there and the PEOPLE will virtually demand authoritarian rule.

All this is very sick.  The illness is in the minds of the people pushing all this.

Humanity has problems.  Less people on the planet would be good.  Better energy solutions would be good. But we have no true emergencies, and no true problems that could not be solved rationally, honestly, and directly.

What is dangerous is emotionally undeveloped and even insane people thinking they not just can, but have a positive moral obligation to, manipulate the world into directions which have only been discussed among a very homogeneous group of people, all of whom have the same blind spots, all of whom are genuinely insane in the same ways,, and none of whom will suffer in any way from their criminal plans.

I would define this as seeking emotion for its own sake.

I may have said this before.  This is an important topic, since most of our public discourse is motivated by sentimentalism.

Sean Penn is perhaps emblematic of this.  I’ve probably said this too.  He wants not just to strike a stance, and adopt a pose, but suffer heroically, empathize heroically, and above all FEEL feel feel.  All the feelz.

Now, feeling is better than not feeling.  That is why sentimentalism is such a value in our culture: most of us are numb.  We are shell shocked and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of inputs, particularly as combined with their banality and often mendacity.  It’s a hard world to be awake in, to any extent at all.  It fractures most of us into alternating numbness and sentimentalism.

When we feel PATHOS for the Ukrainians that is good, but this whole narrative comes with an emotive movie soundtrack, readily identifiable good guys and bad guys, erasure of nuance, and large swings which would not happen naturally in most of us.

I might put it this way: sentimentality is an orchard planted in clear rows, in clear patterns, and which is weeded of complications.  True perception is a natural, uncut wood.  There is nothing clearly delineated, but what is seen is what is there.  The world only separates into clean categories when we impose violence on it, in our minds, or in the actual world.

What I might contrast with sentimentality is mature perception.  Perception necessarily involves an emotional aspect.  But I think in an optimized consciousness emotion serves as a signaling system.  It provides information you can act on.

Emotion, for a mature person, is a MEANS to an end, not an end in itself.  You certainly don’t reject emotion, but neither do you make it the be all and end all of existence in the way, say, that was preached in The Titanic.

If you make emotion an end, you are destined to endless ups and downs.  Thrills and spills.  At the essence of every spiritual tradition I know of is the sense that behind all this is something so much better it is foolish to even try and compare the two.

The sentimentalist is a child.  Growth involves giving up the childish.

Just finished listening to it. I did not see any interpretation in a quick search which points to the, in my view, OBVIOUS interpretation that this is a story about the sexual abuse of children. Both formed angelic alters which were compelling because they were wholly insincere. They were fully disconnected from both childrens true core experiences, which split them, because they could not be processed.

What Miles did in school is, in effect, ask to “play doctor” with other boys. He told his teacher that he knew a bit about boys but wanted to know more, Those are the words and ideas his Headmaster too vulgar and shocking to repeat. Even if that sort of thing was common in Public Schools back then, it certainly was not in 10 year old boys.

The ghosts, in effect, were a distraction and a camoflauge.  James, I suspect, must have known somethinv on the topic he could not relate.

And I will note that “premature sexual experience” was Freuds first, and best, explanation for “The Aetiology of Hysteria”.  But he proposed it to an audience filled with guilty men, presumably, and he nearly lost his career at the outset.

Our world would probably make more srnse if he had been silenced. He set the recognition of, and treatment for, trauma back some 70-80 years.

William James, his brother, was a vastly more competent, honest, and diligent psychologist than Freud.

And although the ghosts were obviously real enough in the stories, they stand in well for the figurative ghosts that haunt the worlds of those who survive such abuse. They click from one world to another.

Altogether I think this is shrewd psychology and in effect a symbolic telling of a story that in that time could not be told any other way,

Those who heard, heard. Most would have been utterly unequal to it.

There is a sense in which every act of cruelty is a natural outgrowth of every other act of cruelty in human history.  Meanness and pettiness seem a part of the human spirit, and certainly most people encounter cruelty in their own lives, and shit flows downhill.

But there is another sense in which every act of cruelty, of sadism, is unique, to that person and that moment.

We all feel unhappy sometimes.  We all have our own variety of the need to kick a dog, at least if we have experienced enough insults to our sense of self in our lives.

But the task is to resist these impulses, to name them, to understand them, and to stop them.

And this is PARTICULARLY true when the way to cruelty, to violence to others, is paved by some sort of social commandment, such as the purported duty to hate haters, even if the haters don’t actually hate.

We all are and should be responsible for our own perceptions, with perceptions being actions in themselves.  And we are then also logically responsible for what we DO and say.

I am speaking from a personal place.  I am not trying to create the space to judge others.  Far from it.  I am speaking to individuals and asking you to do better.  That is what I am asking from myself.

And I will add that my little brain has not been idle.  I have a lot to post.  But I am processing some grief.  Nothing specific, just something that was always there, which is what always pushed me to write.

So we just locked our elderly up for several years, failed to tell any of them to take Vitamin D, killed many from loneliness and despair, and now the inflation that is the result of our lunatic and corrupt COVID policy is going to quickly outpace their fixed incomes.

Is inflation not a destruction of the “security” in “social srcurity”?

Here is what happened:

Anthony Fauci, Frances Collins and others funded Gain of Function research in China after it was banned in the US, likely in collaboration with the Chinese Army of Imperial Occupation and Tyranny.

This virus got out somehow, perhaps as early as the summer of 2019.

This virus was never dangerous for any healthy person under the age of 60-70, and it was known early on that Vitamin D insuffficiency was a huge risk factor and that HCQ reduced death considerably.

Knowledge of both was suppressed, in the case of HCQ through a literally fraudulent and concocted study presumably paid for by a cutout created by Big Pharma and perhaps others.

A bad flu year was turned by relentless and centrally orchestrated propaganda, led by the same guy who illegally created the virus and lied to Congress about it, into a global disaster.

We knew slowing the spread was bad policy, but we did it anyway. We locked people down, knowing full well 3 or more people would die FROM the lockdowns for every one we could claim were saved.

The lockdowns, and to the extent they did anything the masks, turned a seasonal event into a two year disaster, and cost the lives of many more people than were saved.

This was always, and remains, a highly treatable disease. All of perhaps a dozen effective remedies have been suppressed.

Vitamin D sufficiency ALONE seems to do more good than these injections, with no side effects in reasonable doses.

Ivermectin, HCQ, and Quercetin all work well with zinc and Vitamin C to stop this virus, and amount to a cure.

The mail in bslloting made possible by the medically indefensible lockdowns enabled a senile and corrupt imbecile to become President of the United States.

The inflation we are seeingp is highly predatory, and is enabling connected entities like Vanguard and Blackrock and State Street to buy up an already distressed world cheap witn made up money.

The inflation is the result of the “Stimulus” packages passed to help deal with the economic effects of the medically indefensible lockdowns.

We can assume, with a high degree of probability, that hundreds of billions of dollars were stolen.

And all this is going to squeeze already depressed amd stressed seniors even more.

So FUCK YOU all you imbecilic assholes who supported all this.

A Facebook friend of mine posted a letter sent out by some government agency or other that literally said, in effect, that if there is a conflict between the data and official recommendations, that you should stick to the recommendations.

And  really, has this basic mindset not been present all along?  Has Anthony Fauci not in effect appointed himself the Lord of All Things Scientific, such that you should trust him rather than your stinking eyes?

God only knows how all this will pan out, but if JUSTICE and HUMANITY, and all the other higher human emotions win out, he will be excoriated and remembered with loathing as a criminal on par with the greatest mass murderers of history.

I think I have commented this before, but he is much like like Louis XIV, who proclaimed “L’etat, C’est Moi”.

For Fauci: Science?  That is ME.  And perhaps comically, perhaps tragically, he has more or less literally said that more than once.

And perhaps this is rational, since his recommendations contradicted themselves continually.  This only makes sense if Fauci IS science.

And of course, he isn’t.  Maybe someone needed to hear that.

Yes, that is my odd sense of humor.

Co-passion, passion together, really amounts to shared feeling.  Compassion is when you can honestly say “I’ve been there, man”, or “beautiful lady I feel what you are saying”.

And if this is true, how can you develop broad compassion except through pain, mistake, failure, and disgrace?  I don’t think you can.

Me, I’m fuckup a’plenty that I can relate to nearly everyone.  And as I have no doubt commented often, I find myself listening to people’s stories continually.  If I hire people for something, it is very rare I don’t spend 10 minutes twice a week listening to long stories from their past.

People need touch, physically.  I’m listening to Jordan Peterson’s excellent course on Personality, and he points out that hugs literally release pain relieving hormones in the body.  You are literally, in effect, offering a pain relieving drug when you touch someone.

But we need EMOTIONAL touch too, “feeling felt”–to use the excellent phrase I will continue to point out was seemingly coined by Dan Siegel (I hope that is right!!!)–and that is feeling HEARD.

And most Americans suffer from a lack both of physical and emotional touch.

And I think lacking both makes all of us stupid.  It makes life insipid, plastic, stainless cleanable steel.  Gray.  Sterile.  Safe and utterly lifeless.

So I suppose it is small wonder people who cannot touch THEMSELVES emotionally, who do not really know what they are feeling most of the time, not least because they were not helped in their youth by parents and other care givers willing to take the time to mirror emotions with them, cannot honestly feel others, which means they cannot feel honest compassion.

And they sense this lack, on some level.  This is how kindness–which can easily be enacted as a sentimental, external ritual filled with self satisfaction but no true understanding of the Other–becomes a blind value.  Compassion and “empathy” likewise.  They know they are missing something, and they very much want it, but they don’t really know what it is, so they hollow out the words and turn them into stakes they attempt to drive into the hearts of people unwilling to share their ritual with them.

I think this is close to the truth of our time.  How else to explain the seemingly nice people who grow fangs the moment you disagree with one of their assumptions?

I’ve commented on this from time to time.  I like hippy shops, the organic places, the quirky fun little stores.  But I KNOW most of them would frown intensely and never get warm if I wore a MAGA hat into their stores.  This is regrettable to me.  A large swathe of humanity with whom I would otherwise have much in common is lost to me.  This bothers me, and I continue to work to explain it.

Oh, I have a lot of thoughts on a lot of things.  I’ve been processing some really horrific, very dark, highly unpleasant things lately.  I will continue to feel gratitude that my constitution and mind are strong.

I may have some larger comments on Life to make soon; or maybe not.  I don’t know.  I do have a long list of “notes” on my phone I will likely post in the next week or two.