When I have ideas, most of the time since January I have been noting them on my phone if I didn’t feel like blogging them. Here are those notes, which I have edited for typos, but otherwise do not feel like expanding on further.
Joe Biden will be much more vulnerable than Obama since they cannot call his critics racist. Harris soon for that reason
Life is about learning to amplify light.
Left Wing politics is the Noblesse Oblige of our own traitor class
In few societies in history has the reckless pursuit of wealth been such a cultural linchpin, and so freed from distracting entanglements like the church and perceivied need for dignity and nobility.
Focus on State governments, good votes, and rallying honest resistance.
Cool Hand Luke: the People of the Mask would be rooting for the guy with the sunglasses.
Spontaneity and the possibility of bad judgement are inseparable. And spontaneity and play and happiness are likewise nearly inseparable. And good judgement is learned by the free exercise of bad judgement.
Logically, if D deficiency makes COVID worse and you ask people to stay inside then you get more deaths, since lockdowns do not work.
Americans are like Germans: hard working and obedient
There is a part of the spiritual path that involves coldness and selfishness.
How bored our aspiring overlords must be!!
Kum Nye is healing space.
All addictions tend to suicide, which begins with moral suicide. Conscience is our connection with our world, with others. To lack it is to be alone, and to be alone is a path to a suicide which is only prevented by protective manias, like Communism. Collectivism is ultimately a creed of isolation and walled solitude.
Psychodynamic uncertainty principle: you can live in your story and in the moment but never both simultaneously. Talk therapy is almost always story telling, although pattern interrupts are useful. But substituting a new story for an old story is still story telling.
Circling around tasks. Procrastination.
Communism fascism lonely crowds, cannot be still. No being or deep meditating. motion requires external enemy as in 1984. True Liberalism political order most consistent with emotional health.
Post on time stoppage—Iran etc COVID. Nothing has evolved.
The Big Tech censors were likely religious zealots in another life who burnt heretics—people who disagreed with their poorly considered dogmatic authoritarianism—at the stake.
The essence of the Communist project is the betrayal of, and destruction of, openness and trust, which are prerequisites of a genuinely open society. Their projects tend to succeed because they are monomaniacal, cultish, and because tearing down is vastly easier than building.
The likelihood of the most disgusting thing.
Maybe the forces of evil have been given a 5,000 year “arc” to repeat endlessly in a time loop, where they are captured. Maybe souls from all over the universe come here. Maybe they have tried to destroy life many times and been prevented, and also unable to prevent periodic appearances of Goodness. They do not ultimately control this world, but are like prisoners given wide range.
Me hating people for being stupid is every agitator ever, from Christians to Communists to Union organizers. It is an old sentiment.
Sociopathy is the art of avoiding the pain of connection and following conscience. It inherently lacks a true aesthetic sense. I think this is why outward refinement is a common disguise of the evil: they know they lack something, and seek to pretend otherwise. Sade, likewise, tried to make art out his madness, and is admired and “loved” for it. He went farther than nearly anyone to escaping the cage, but the rules of the game prevent success.
If you give people rules they can’t follow, in very short order they will be breaking rules they CAN follow.
The proper amount of dignity for a human is that of an animal: aware, not unnecessarily circumspect, neither self important nor self doubting. Megalomania is uniquely human, even if “abjection” is not. I think Tarthang Tulkus notion is good that individuation is good, but that an excessive focus on uniqueness and specialness and one-of-a-kindness is ultimately something that contributes to unhappiness. We all need to be able to merge with the dust.
Notion of emotional marketplace, where status quo upset, altered and ultimately upgraded. Arab Souk.
Homo Docilus
Whatever triggers you—your resentment and anger—is your Shugyo. It can be thwarted self importance, irrational expectations (that people be smart) and simple fatigue and frustration.
Sufi in Candide. Perhaps excessive ease would be the worst thing for America. Life of Buddha and really EVERYONE ELSE. Fitted silk sheets spirituality is not a thing.
Asymptomatic, healthy and presymptomatic
What to watch for as full consequences covered up: 5 year cancer rate, suicide rate, overall mortality, childrens mental health.
Politically masks serve as a mass distraction. People are encouraged to blame all natural spread on the non-compliant. This hardens the base of the Left, frustrates and further alienated the sane, and serves in lieu of an honest and public spirited discussion.
Mask wearing for children amounts to child abuse.
You have not seen live music or theater for a year and counting because this was mismanaged. Restaurants closing, suicides, overdoses, traumatized children. Congressional inquiry, also all State Assemblies and Attorney Generals.
Business unions: what do you have to lose?
Deconstruction is prophets without prophecy
Viral load like concentration of poison gas. but one virus is enough. 1becomes 2 etc.
Sneeze: ah is in choo is out.
Size of gap around mask: if it were smoke could you still smell it? Virus is exactly like a smell.
No masks exist which are medically certified to halt or slow viral transmission.
If you are not sneezing or coughing you are breathing. There are three conditions: well, asymp, or presympt. Most of us are in the first two all the time. Presympt cannot last more than a few days.
Dignity is a right, and masks are clearly psychologically damaging, especially to kids.
Kindness exists on a continuum from excessive tolerance and boundarylessness—the incapacity for righteous and warranted anger—and in two different spectrums, cruelty and indifference.
In order to remain honest in a world filled with lies, it is necessary to learn to lie.
Poets, actors and comedians all lie for a living, but in different ways.
Popped in my head: fear is the best teacher. Ponder.
I think a lot if self deception originates in the felt emotional need to avoid in advance the fear and anger honesty would seem to necessitate. Paradoxically, though, calming both consciously can be a pathway to greater insight and wisdom. You no longer have to reject unwanted truths.
Everyone who has lost a child to suicide or a mother to loneliness and grief should sue their government for gross incompetence.
Pay attention to your breath. Breathe in then breathe out once slowly then once quickly. Do you feel fine? You are being told to act, indefinitely, as if you are sick. Put a hand in front of your mouth. Do you feel “globules”? Do you think they exist, apart from sneezed and coughs?
Do you want to doubt me? We KNOW, and have long known, that a D deficiency equates to compromised immune function. We KNOW this.
How did people survive the plague? Ebola? Smallpox? Their immune systems fought them off.
You can choose science and you can follow the CDC and NIH, but not both, with exception that CDC recommends kids in school.
This whole Anti-nazi, anti-fascist thing is anodyne and safe feeling Cosplay.
Some peoples words are worth listening to but not their being. Some, their being but not their words. Those who combine both are the truly wise.
Western culture consists in the main in solutions to problems we created, particularly the loss of connection with land and spirit.
Kindness is not a virtue so much as a spontaneous emanation of a well organized psyche/spirit. When made a value it leads to virtue signalling and excessive indulgence. No one is made better of happier on a sustained basis by feeding their childish impulses.
moral decisions spark qualitative growth.
animal health as happiness
hope equals openness I think
left is witch of the month
Perhaps the most significant symptom of functional decadence is the confusion of symbolic action with substantive action.
Difficulty is opportunity. Fear is a great teacher, if you listen and learn.
People are stupid. Culture exists to inculcate desirable habits before fatal mistakes are made. The Left targets culture—and the history upon which it in part depends—to enable mistakes to be repeated. And they want the mistakes repeated because of the FEELING power gives them. It is one source of “ground” in an endless and confusing universe.
Anyone capable of following all the details of a religion, down to the last detail, without asking questions, is unlikely to ever truly understand that religion.
Robots solve a lot of the problems of Communism. They can just kill most of us and declare the world liberated, as in my play.
The gut is a sponge where s lot of emotional energies are stored. It is richly textured and very deep.
In the Cultural Sadeism of the 21st century humanity itself has become the Kulaks and bourgeoisie, and the environment the class to be liberated. Global warming and plastic are the oppression. The logic of this is not reeducation but death camps. Not for the Believers, obviously, who will get sexually excited watching mass death from chairs on high.
I think in modern history abstraction evolved from a means of knowing God and planning bridges, to an end in itself. It is soothing to sensitive people whose guts are writhing. As an end in itself however it detaches from any possibility of grounding and reality testing, and given this basic process an idiotic religion or religions, was inevitable. Said religion had, however, to touch their gut, their fear, their animality, the Beast within.
In what ways would we be better off if the internet and PC and iPhone had never been invented?
Transgender ideology makes two distinct claims, one that we allow them to live their lives as they choose. The second is that they have the right, which they want enforced by government, shaming and social exclusion, to dictate to others how they are perceived. No one has the tight to tell others what and how to see.
The issue with anti male rhetoric is it denigrates courage, and we need courage. Rather than say women can be men but men cannot be men, which is constrictive, why not say that men can and should be men AND women, good men and OK women, and vice versa, such that people GROW rather than shrink in fear.
If I am honest, a high degree of conformity is a feature of all traditional culture. What standards give you is an inside and outside, a relaxed and tense. High levels of anxiety are inevitable for any culture in qualitative flux, and conformity even to a mutable and unstable ethos can be an overwhelmingly tempting alternative to existential anxiety. It was Sartres cure for the illness he induced in himself.
Global warming is an academic business and a profitable one.
The thirst for power is rooted in the desire to draw attention and respect not for WHO you are but WHERE.
Nutritionally immunocompromised.
Principle: the more you have to lose the more you WILL lose.
Power is something you can’t take with you.
The planned and induced microinsurrection was intended to create the pretext for a preemptive purge. It was supposed to be worse. Q among others was intended as a blood libel—possibly one with a basis in truth—to drive people insane. They largely failed.
This transfer of wealth using printed money is the REVERSE of my plan.
As Christ pointed out, there are clear parallels between faith in government and faith in Providence/God
Why no studies on mask efficacy? Why are we not seeing regular studies on everything? Why is there no debate? Why are views from qualified experts being marginalized, denigrated, censored and even deplatformed?
Compare Left concerning ARENA in El Salvador and ISIS
All COVID protocols purport to be scientific. What is the EVIDENCE for this? Where the studies, the double checks, the debate? The opportunity for dissent?
The GOAL is ostensibly a return to prosperity. If the acutal goal were prolonging this thing it definitely would look like this.
Why are kids not in school?
If this were science masks would come with ratings.
Could and should the Hippocratic Oath mitigate against highly intrusive and damaging, untested measures?
Vitamins are like food itself: too little your health suffers, just right you are healthy and too much and you are unhealthy again.
Should there not be a POLITICAL Hippocratic Oath, with conservatives committing to Primere non nocere and Leftists to “above all else do SOMETHING.” It is a difference between recognizing motion as a property of the world and motion as originating with the State and narcissistic Statists specifically.
By and large we have been told to put up and shut up but why? What if we are drinking saltwater for thirst? What if nothing makes any difference?
I am selling ideas for the cost of a few minutes attention and the effort to create a brief space in which multiple possible answers to our problems are possible. This cost may be higher or lower depending on how used to pausing and considering you are. For many, there is no gap between reading something and repeating it. And if there is something new to repeat daily, and the intervening time spent in noise, then a full lifetime can be passed without a moments honest reflection. Seeing this, itself, requires reflective introspection.
Science is a process which never discards doubt and skepticism. All progress, particularly qualitative, paradigmatic progress, requires the regular questioning and reevaluation of first principles. Science is never “settled” and no one familiar with the history of science would ever be so bold as to suggest that. Radical, unexpected evolutions have happened too many times. What science has is habits of belief, based on ideas which appear true.
If masks and lockdowns were scientific you would think scientists would be glad to have control groups and would be evaluating differences continually and CONFIDENT their approaches were best.
Lockdowns are giant medical experiment in which every effort has been made to eliminate a control group.
It is known that too much zinc and D are bad for health. It is also known that too much isolation is bad for people, that church attendance is positively correlated with longevity and that children need face to face contact regularly to develop interpersonal intelligence and to socialize properly.
It is a positive moral duty to regularly ask if what we are doing is necessary, if it is the least costly, least damaging way to achieve our desired end.
If we frame the desired end as a return to the old normal—the freedom America has enjoyed for several centuries, and a level of openness characteristic even of theocratic authoritarian regimes, which permit sports, schooling, live music and theater.—then masks and lockdowns have failed. They have not worked. The question is are they working. And if we are told we cant go back, why not? This too is a scientific claim. What is predicted? How can we test it?
The logic of school closings is not just that kids are physically safer—or at least their families—but EMOTIONALLY safer.
If I wanted to use one word to slowly drive people mad, diminish the quality of their thinking and imagination, and shatter the quality of their lives it would be “hurry”
Faith in yourself means that even if you have no idea how events will turn out that you have faith you will keep going and not lose your moral compass.
If something works, but we dont know why, the science is still in the correlation. Science is a type of observation. Likewise if it does NOT work and we do not know why, that is still a scientific observation.
Did masks lower infection rates? it certainlg does not appear so, and there is certainly no correlation between mask mandates and death.
Berkeley subvert the dominant paradigm
Science is not lets try X then see what happens. Science is “I believe the world works this way. If I am right then when we do X then Y will happen. If it doesn’t then my hypothesis was wrong in some small or large way.
Being in a hurry is claustrophobia in time.
Speak of orthodox COVID response paradigm. Ask “what do we get if 100% of people get their COVID shots? What is the hypothesis, which is to say the SCIENCE, which is to say the scientific prediction?
We had it really good last February. Attribute it to Obama if you like. Say Trump had to go. our democracy depended on it. Lets just put all that on the table and agree with it. Do we not still want to return to the good times we had a year ago, just under Biden and no doubt soon Harris? If not, should those who believe this not say so explicitly, along with their reasons?
At root science is asking intelligent questions, then looking for the best answers in a systematic and disciplined way. Pure science is about learning how things work. Engineering is about using that knowledge to improve human life, or at least to make it safer, less precarious, and easier, and thus hopefully happier. It is obvious that the policy responses could be described as social engineering. People are being operated like widgets and told to do this, and not do that. Desired and defined outcomes are the purported desired end result. Is this engineering working, and is the science behind it solid? What are the operative hypotheses, within what paradigm?
Anthony Fauci has said openly his only expertise and only concern is the disease. Does it not obviously follow that even if we accept as gospel everything he says, that “the science” needs to be expanded to include experts in economics, social psychology, and education?
All spirituality begins with peace, in the condition of mental, physical and emotional relaxation. You can easily hide in thought and moral duty, but not in being. All the positives begin with an end of neurosis and relentless reflexive striving.
Health might be 25% visual, 40% feeling, 30% hearing, and 5% taste and smell. Massage the percentages. Is not most of life for most Americans seeing and hearing? 50/40/the rest, say? Does a visual dominance not produce emotional stupidity?
Cure cant be worse than disease
smallest effective dose
Is there a difference between a king ruling “by the will of God” and a dictator ruling as the agent of history, or apotheosis of “The People”? It seems to me the best continuum is between free movement and controlled movement; between a horse galloping on the plains and one yoked to a plow or mill. Leftist “movement” consists in all eyes turning in various directions, but TOGETHER. True freedom us countless movements approximating a complex order.
My main task in life is finding a way from Gilligans Island back to the Vedanta and Great Spirit.
There is a shiny new patina on everything in America. Those who don’t have it want it. I think we identify with this emotionally and want it to be true. We cloak from ourselves deeper realities. I myself seem to want truth to be a chimichanga, eaten as fast as possible. I just hit this energy today, which was how I felt in Chicago and in high school.
Perhaps masks in TRUE epidemic, 7% or more deaths, or 85% capacity. Like cooling rod. Do not stop but slow reaction.
Keeping both an openness to change and respect for the past and tradition allows better Integration. Poor integration leads to rigidity.
Rejecting all change—as a rule—is as bad as rejecting all tradition and vice versa.
What happened with the hippies is they lost the ability to continue processing endless questions without answers, and continual contradictions, so they contracted emotionally.
True goodness has mischievousness in it. Good people are willing and happy to break small stupid rules. Those unwilling to do so are fearful and no goodness exists in fear based behavior.
Everyone in a free society should be empowered to plead their own case, and in a non-codependent society should be discouraged from pleading that of anyone else. In important respects Critical Race Theory exists to keep white people the focus and to distract from the concrete lack of opportunity and destruction of the family the Left has wrought on the black community.
One of the best arguments against the gray world being created is precisely that: that it is gray, banal and dull. No good art and no fun happen when political Diktats, fear and rampant conformity constitute the rules of the system. Even the rich are bound to be bored quickly.
Most gold does not glitter.
Governor should need to DEFEND policies in public forums which allow doubting and skepticism. The POINT of freedom of speech and ideational pluralism is to approximate the best ideas and avoid long term adherence to bad policy. Over time, people who cannot be questioned get sloppy. Policies which cannot be questioned often wind up doing the OPPOSITE of the stated aim.
I think one would look in vain to find a historical empire filled with regret at its wrong doing, prior to the modern West of perhaps the last 100 years.
I feel like I am travelling sideways across life.
The “dance” of trauma is alternating between nausea and horror, and trivializing both by diminishing the self.
Nothing human can be created with zeroes and ones. Tools alone can be created. And living with zeroes and ones dissolves the fuzziness, the uncertainty and intuitive knowing that alone enables us to flourish.
Any system which makes atonement and return impossible builds evil, since those who are lost lose any desire to even try and find their way back home.
A key to happiness is making all pleasures the only pleasure for the moment and inhabiting them fully. We tend both to think of the end, and of all the other pleasures. Present moment focus alone allows enjoyment unmixed with sorrow, distraction, regret and loss. Addiction is using pleasures as a gateway to forgetfulness. A healthy pleasure is an end in itself. It does not need to last forever and can be enjoyed for a time then set aside.
Concentrated power will be abused as will stable power. No empowered person, accountable only to themselves, will ever easily or voluntarily relinquish control. Why would they? Their policies are perfect, their judgement sublime.
“Liberal” systems of government are based on certain core values. The “mission statement” of a liberal political order might be seen in the preamble. This is the US mission statement, which was radical at the time and in comparison would be radical in many nations today, from Venezuela to China to Zimbabwe to Saudi Arabia.
A legal opinion which takes a side in a policy dispute becomes a political opinion.
Is it necessary for any of our State governors to have stable concentrated power for a response to occur? Of course not. It is only needed to preclude alternative ideas and the necessity of consulting directly with the peoples representatives. If he can make his case, nothing changes. And if not his policy is likely abusive and misguided.
The question is not just who gets to decide what is right but HOW LONG.
Core values: life liberty, property, pursuit of happiness/conscience
Is it worth causing 10 30 year olds to kill themselves in the next two years to add two more years to the lives of 75 year olds? If we base math on years lost, obviously not. Many of our “leaders” would say yes. You need to be able to say no for all of us, and you need to SECURE that right now.
Moral comfort and ease can often only be bought through blindness. You simply take credit for what is good and ignore as though it did not exist when it is bad. The Breonna Taylor protests, arguably, have caused dozens of black deaths.
Have our State governors made every effort to govern with the consent of the governed?
With little exaggeration the core value of most previous governments was obedience and silence.
Clear thinking begins with clear questions in search of answers in clear forms.
The question of whether or not any given Governor’s response is the correct one is logically separate from the question of whether or not our law permits him or her to unilaterally declare themselves above accountability until such time as they see fit to descend again from their castles.
Idea: pass law that you will reconvene for 2 days every 30 days until all limits lifted.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
The best argument against this vaccine is that it is superfluous. It is unnecessary medicine.
Prisons are stable places. The thirst for stability, in a relative sense, is not unreasonable, but absolute stability is retrogressive and unnatural.
Hug dispensary.
On the masses, a line of poetry:
I have seen their names and died their unknowns.
All Christians participate unconsciously in the crucifixion of Christ.
We live in and on infinite lines. The first step of Buddhism is to say suffering has a beginning and end, unlike life itself.
A big part of mustard seeding is getting unstuck continually so you keep floating down the river.
All possible specific useful moralities are contained in the Way.
The point of culture is that you are not born naked. You are gifted something useful, ideally and usually, at birth. The lack of this gift, and the efforts to reduce it yet further, is Americans worst curse in the midst of plenty.
Perhaps amnesia is a way to enjoy more experience, and acts like a purgative at a banquet, enabling one to continue eating.
A key task in life is to avoid all entangling attachments, even those of love, and particularly those of food, drink, sex, and comfort/sloth.
In complex times the emotional need for simple explanations becomes overwhelming. And division is an obvious, necessary and immediate consequence of simplistic ideas held tightly for emotional security.
And magical thinking is an obvious tendency for those who feel helpless. Q was magical thinking. So too are the ideas that Joe Biden will improve ANYTHING, or that COVID is anything more than a global disaster. People cling. That is what we do. And the scared we are the tighter the grip.
Tribes tend to be centered on simple but accidental, essentially arbitrary ideas. They are useful and good but also rooted in error.
I think the most meaningful measurement of emotional strength is the ability to remain open and flexible while under stress.
Tribal morality is in some respects arbitrary but this does not mean that children should not be taught black and white rules. The rejection of firm morality should be a part of every persons life, but saved for a time when they matured and built core selves able to flex but not dissolve. The most USEFUL truth often depends on the listener, not the “ Truth”. Many truths are true sometimes but not always; and some are damaging for those not ready and instantly perverted to falsehoods, like the idea that if there is no absolute inflexible morality then all is permitted.
The Tribal Problem: I have an I as an individual. I have an I as a member of tribes of increasing size, from perhaps me and my siblings, to my nuclear family, to my extended family, to my community of faith or habit or social connections, to my political community/tribe, State, nation, linguistic group/culture, to humanity itself, ultimately to God.
Inevitably, with all groupings, which diverge in many ways at every level, there will be disagreement. We are “thrown” and no script is invariably useful. All answers are best guesses. All of us want to be free but not too much. We want to be free and to “belong”, which is to say to offer others claims on our actions and sympathies.
The task of the totalitarian is to reduce multiplicity, in ideal, to singularity. One will, one viewpoint, one answer rules them all. Individual perspective is grafted by force onto that of the “common will”, which is to say the ideosyncratic whims of one or a few people.
In principle this reduces conflict, but it also prevents human growth and maturation. And it blocks off God, who can only be approached individually.
It is a mania born, I think, from an inferior sense of self and place and purpose. Where there is not enough self in the person they want to project it generally, and to avoid self recrimination they call it good.
Growth only happens in a space of consent.
Our personalities are dust which clouds God’s light.
Home is where the calm is.
When you are living in shadows and begin to doubt there is nothing solid to break your fall. You lean, but nothing supports. You reach but there is nothing to grab. The new level is much lower.
I feel keenly how money is what is truly sacred in our society. It is greed without even the faux sanctity of ostensible nobility and holiness.
The idea of masks is that we are all to fear indefinitely that we are the unknowing carriers of a terrible contagion, even though to all outward appearances we are fine.
Sybaritic Leftists choose the right principle and wrong side.
I had this sense just of the internet and my controversies (many of which I start) and all that is on “the other end” of my phone (ponder that) generally as a sort of basket I gather to myself and hold tight to like a mother hen. Scattering, perhaps, is the path of growth and enlightenment and I have spent a lifetime gathering: gathering wounds, ideas, experiences. It is a full plate that cannot receive any more food.
Freedom: for what? To what? Equality: for what? To what?
Im having the most recent day of my whole life.
Communism is a propaganda of exploitation, a hegemonic narrative.
Principle: there is no sane group not composed of sane individuals. And sane individuals participating in insane groups will not remain sane long.
I think perhaps the most important ability to develop is that of making a decision and sticking to it. That alone creates sufficient coherence for the freedom to choose to mean anything.
Hitler did not end German democracy: he just declared a state of emergency which only ended with the military defeat of Germany.
Definition of tyranny is kings making laws
Judicial pocket veto is wrong twice.
Concept of hybrid reality versus “monoreality”
Place and routine/ritual are psychologically roughly equal to purpose. You can carry on across a life with solely a sense of place, or good repetitive habits.
The goal is awareness without tension. Readiness but not priming.
It is possible there are no skills more to be prized than that of consciously accepting things. For me, I do not accept, often, so much as tune out. And I think often I fear if I am too accommodating I will be abused, misled tricked. It has happened often enough. But a middle ground is possible where I make DECISIONS, where I perceive, ponder, then CHOOSE to accept something fully, which means to relax within it.
Conscious acceptance is obviously the opposite of aversion, but it is also the conquest of desire in that in accepting you also accept the loss of all other possibilities for the present.
Acceptance is about mastering the process of emotional resistance. Resistance has a purpose: it is what defines is as individuals, at least potentially, and protects the smarter from the dumber. But we are born with a predisposition to go along with the herd, so this muscle, that of non-conformity, takes practice to build. But without learned acceptance, it easily becomes simple contrarianism, which amounts to bring pushed rather than pulled, but still to a loss of choice, which is to say adaptibility and the capacity to learn and grow.
Website: woke companies we hope go broke.
There is no alternative reality, no true hybrid or virtual reality: there are merely degrees of delusion. And a delusion within a delusion is worse, I think, than a simple delusion. However, COULD hybrid reality, used properly, have value? Movies? Intelligently designed video games, for example with love and connection?
Circle of sanity. Perhaps base groups initially on shared interests like Harry Potter.
Saw a dead cat by a road. Cats are smart animals, relatively speaking, but do not really understand highways. I wonder—I think the word is assume—if most people are not also blind to realities which would be obvious to higher forms of life.
Excitement and pleasure are the results and symptoms of digesting experience, which is to say allowing energy flow.
Anger is a cohering emotion that prevents dissolution. It makes everything tighter. Goals also help coherence but create lasting qualitative structure, which anger dissipates it.
Masks as disease vector
A tribe is a sort of cultural species. It only works as long as everyone complies with what are always essentially arbitrary decisions. Rousseau’s being forced to be free amounts to a freedom from moral decision making and ambiguity. The benefit is a much less cluttered mind and the simplicity of a rail car. The cost is blindness, violence, and often the loss of an unintermediated relationship with God and spirit.
The Left is no more irrational than any other cult. Lenin made no less sense than the British monarchy. They never spoke for God and Lenin never spoke for the people. The issue arises with science, which never stops changing and which bleaches away myth. Lysenkoism and other scientific fallacies make logical sense when seen as an effort to create stable myth.
Practically, lacking stable myth, and yet still possessed of a need for emotional coherence which myth brings, anger and violence are substituted. They must be perennial outsiders or at least crusaders, and thus where enemies are not available they must create them. The whole tribe threatens at every moment to spin apart, but continual reinforcement by media is a strong ritual reinforcement.
Ritual must be seen as the socialization of myth, and could it not be argued that denunciation is the quintessential leftist ritual?