It occurs to me you can ground yourself in fear and anxiety, as well as in calm confidence. The key element, psychologically, is constancy, and constant fear can become a trusted companion. Fear has survival value, and no one can deny it. It simply kills emotional and spiritual life.
I felt clearly yesterday how life would be so much better if I were much braver. But I felt the bravery, and I think it is coming. All of us, in some respects, have to live all the time knowing we might be sucker punched at any moment–in recent years sometimes literally–but to live well, calmly, and confidently, ANYWAY. This is the first good trick you can play on life, and the first useful and interesting rebellion against the ridiculousness of our condition.
As I have said often, I believe the preponderance of scientific evidence militates for the belief that we have souls–that we ARE souls, spiritual butterflies–and that something essential in us survives the collapse and failure of our biological machines.
Having said that, we are–most of us, most of the time–blind to anything, blind to anything but hunger, the possibility of physical and emotional pain, to stress, to the needs of our lives. You cannot step away from any of this and see it clearly without balls. It takes courage to slow down, to relax, to contemplate honestly, and to FEEL. Feeling clearly and sincerely is what is most missing in our society, in our time. Abstraction we have mastered, although even there as I have often argued logic still depends on emotional clarity and the absence of compulsion. Logic, in some respects, remains an aesthetic act, whose proportionality is in important respects equal to its useful truth.
I look at Jack Dorsey, say. He may well be dropping small hits of acid all day long. Much of Silicon Valley is. He has his logic, but it is not a proportional logic. It is not a truly Liberal logic, as the word would have been understood back when people had or took the time to think clearly using principles they could articulate and defend.
No, Dorsey is feeling his way to a conclusion. He is on a slippery slope, but it feels flat and stable to him. He is a logical guy, he tells himself, and there is NO WAY they can let Trump get a second term.
And what I think most of these people are kind of pushing is the notion of the “nudge” as articulated by Cass Sunstein, who does not really seem like that bad a guy, until you really start to think about not just where his ideas lead immediately, but where they are likely to wind up not far down the road.
The idea is that people can and should be manipulated, like cattle, in the direction of their “own good”, as understood by the cattle herders. They are not compelled, so much as tricked, and ideally at a level below the level of consciousness. Again, for their own good, as understood by the cattle herders.
But perfected, is this not a method of teaching people to be cattle? Is this not what we are seeing, in a world where tens of millions of people are capable of voting for a man who has taken bribes from many governments whose agenda is at odds with our own? Who is senile, and very unlikely to last four years, and who will be replaced by an open and proud Marxist? How is this possible? Nobody in 1965, or 1975, or 1985, or 1995 would have been equal to this. Biden would not have had a shot at the nomination–and indeed this is his third try, after two miserable failures.
Propaganda changes people. They evolve to comply, to react reflexively. The use of propaganda for herd management is anti-Liberal in the extreme. Honest, good people would be trying to change society by making people SMARTER, not dumber, more INFORMED, not more ignorant.
In the end, the captains of Silicon Valley really could not defend their positions and decisions in a truly principled way. They exist in an emotional sickness, one which cannot easily be healed. Looking up an old quote, which has apparently been misquoted and misattributed, I find this:
Hemingway: I am getting to know the rich. Colum: I think you’ll find the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.
Jack Dorsey is an above average IQ guy, but he is not moral or intellectual genius. He is just a guy, in effect, who took some gambles on some good ideas, worked his ass off, and struck gold. That is it. He is not that much smarter than most of the people in the coffee shop he goes to, for his Bulletproof Coffee.
None of these Silicon Valley people were elected, and none of them feel accountable in any way to the truth, to this country, or to moral decency, which is likely a term they laugh at, associating it with 1950’s prudery of a sort which is still the rule on most of the planet.
And on that note I can’t resist commenting that if memory serves, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded by a guy who came to this country in the 1950’s and found the practice of men and women who were not married or related dancing with each other utterly repugnant.
There are no discussions where added context does not make them richer. Context is the primary deletion in all fanaticism.
Oh, that is my digression for today. I need to go do my Kum Nye practice. I am trying to learn to ground in calm. That is new for me.