But I wanted to make a brief comment on my own mental health, my own self assessment. I seem to have formed a robust habit of weighing myself daily, and I am going to discontinue posting results here. I hit 279 Sunday, got drunk Sunday night and gained a bit back, but I think the overwhelming bulk of momentum is going in the right direction.
In my own view, my reality testing is outstanding. It is better than most people, better than most pundits, better than most professionals. The reason for this is that I grew up in a home where everyone lied about everything continually, without even realizing they were lying. You can lie with your being. This caused me to grow up with a passionate commitment to truth telling, at least to myself. It caused me to be able to recognize the presence even of unwelcome truths, of awful truths, of things I did not want to be true, but which I could not avoid.
On this score, I would count myself on the opposite pole from schizophrenia.
My core problem is self regulation. It is impulse control, and more importantly, the inability to consistently calm myself down without alcohol. This is residual trauma, which you cannot wish or will away. It takes time, it takes patience, it takes strategy, and it takes tools, all of which I am applying with progressively better results.
I am, if anything, excessively aware of the feelings of others. When I go to the mall, I have a pretty good idea what sort of state nearly everyone I see is in.
Now, having said that, I would like to compare and contrast myself with the Ideal Type of a dedicated Leftist.
What is conspicuous about such people is that they are never interacting with the you that you are putting in front of them with your words. They are interacting with their idea of you, and that idea, in turn, is nearly entirely conditioned by an anger that you would dare disagree with them. In important respects, it makes no difference to them if you are a real person, or merely an hallucination they have to talk themselves down from, to return to the Terra Firma of what they want to acknowledge as their core commitments, and the sense of Self they derive from those commitments.
Here is the thing: ideological commitments are foundationally different from religious and tribal commitments. They derive from the same biological impulses, from the remembered need for sociality to survive, from a need for reinforcement in the patterns you have chosen, but there is ultimately no room for the actual individual in, say, a Communism or a Fascism.
If you live in a small Muslim community in, say, Jordan, you have a name and a place. You are Ahmad son of Muhammad. You are cousin to so and so, and friends with so and so. People see you and recognize you as Ahmad.
To be clear, you are expected to abide by community standards, to go to the mosque on Fridays, to say your prayers (if that is a need in your particular community), but you can be both a person and a Muslim. You have the wave and the particle.
Ideologies, particularly Communism, discard with place and identity. Your family is unimportant. Your home is unimportant. Where you come from is unimportant. What you were raised to believe is unimportant, if it is other than Communist dogma. Your city doesn’t matter. Your country doesn’t matter. YOU, in other words, don’t matter. You are a donkey who carries the burden placed on its back.
There is no true belonging in Communism. What there is, is a relaxation of the terror of being different. You can feel safe that you will not be imprisoned or killed, because you are saying and doing the right things, but there is no festival which will make you truly feel like you belong as a person.
Ideology of this sort is a sort of permanent spasm of the animal self. It is an abstraction born of dissociation, itself born of trauma. It is Satanic, because Satanism is that set of beliefs and practice which result if we give our selves over to our primitive nervous systems, to the unmyelinated vagus nerve, to the animal, to hunger.
In the wild, do you think animals think of their place of origin? They have no culture. They simply do every day what it takes to survive, and I think denizens of Leftist political systems are no different. You are literally erasing everything that makes us human, that makes us different from animals, and calling it “progress”.
I think with this commentary I am getting close to the truth. This feels correct to me.
I continue to look on with amazement, shock, and fear how fully and completely so much of our nation has fallen for horrible ideas, espoused by horrible people, ideas which should be readily recognizable as garbage by ANY educated person, and which should feel profane and wrong in the mouths of any sane person.