As part of this process I checked a couple comic books–I will likely never stop calling them that, Peking Peking, Bombay Bombay, and the Koran the Koran–and have been reading one over the last day. It takes me back, because I used to read a lot of them, as well as science fiction and fantasy novels. It is, for any nerds out there, a graphic retelling of the stories of Fafrhd and the Gray Mouser, by Fritz Lieber. I read him, and Fred Saberhagen, and Roger Zelazny, Heinlein (of course), Asimov (of course), and many others.
And in the same spirit that I try to do Movie Yoga, I am watching what reading this thing is doing to me, and what I am seeing is that it is activating what I have proposed be called the Innocent Self. It is the part that feels, that reacts behind the defensive shield even when I don’t realize it.
What comic books do is give voice to this self, which is particularly needed in people who are awkward, socially sensitive, and thus unable to process experience, and especially social experience.
What are kids (and no small number of adults, apparently) doing when they play Dungeons and Dragons? Are they not creating a forum for the interaction of their Innocent Self with others, all while retaining the normal emotional walls outside of the games? Are they not creating the space for the feeling of emotional movement, without the risk? They are saying that part of their self is out there, not in here.
And here is what I wanted to say: Communism is nothing but Dungeons and Dragons for people who want to remain in the social sphere, but not be of it. It deals exclusively with fantasy, with abstraction, with things and processes and histories that are not real. It is a self contained, solipsistic system, which, again, permits the feeling of engagement and connection without the emotional risk of ACTUAL engagement and connection. There is no there, there. I have used that line often, because it is apposite. It is apposite for all narcissists–who are roughly the same people who used to be called ego maniacs.
And here is a vaguely interesting tidbit that may or may not be relevant: the God Fafrhd prays to is Kos. I know Markos Moulitsas got his nickname in the Army, but I wonder if he is not also secretly aware of this. I have always assumed the actual name of the blog was a play on Cause, and certainly I think giving emotionally empty people, whose heads are filled with precisely the sorts of fantasies I am describing here, something daily to obsess about, gripe about, or celebrate is both a primary purpose, and a reason for what success they have seen.
Again, the people there CLEARLY want to entertain fantasies. That is why they have to kick dissidents off: they risk shattering some very congenial, and very NEEDED, pipe dreams. I’m sure there is a fair amount of literal smoke hovering above many of those keyboards, but the rest are simply Dungeons and Dragons players who grew up just a little.
That these doctrines, these fantasies, have caused incalculable suffering is just one more thing it is hard for me to grasp, to truly get. How does insanity propagate? It seems clear it can only propagate in the absence of feedback, of connection with external ideas and influences.
True Liberalism is about ideological diversity. It is about different sorts of people, who believe different things, who behave in different ways, figuring out how to live in peace with one another.
That is not at all the project leftists set themselves. They want conformity.
I have more to say, but need to do things out there.
Actually, I will add one more thing: I think–because I am intelligent, have made a study of the process of organized and effective thinking, and because I have over a long period of time exposed my ideas to critical scrutiny–that my ideas are useful. At the same time, I am not as different emotionally from the denizens of the Daily Cause as I would like. I used to spend 3-4 hours every day debating/arguing on the internet.
Are ideas important? Of course. Everything we see and touch outside the natural world was once an idea.
But I also increasingly believe that this website, both my websites, and all the other voluminous writing I have put out there, or kept to myself, is simply symptom: that of an inability to process and reside in primary experience. In some respects, even when I post “deep” things, go deep places, this is STILL my version of Dungeons and Dragons.
Self evidently, I am working to change that, and frankly having some success.