I am a Pisces. That is more biographical than I like to get, but I’ve likely shared that before in any event. The sign is that of two fish swimming in opposite directions. The idea is that we are always being pulled in two directions at once, but ideally are at some point able to reconcile them.
Stereotypically, we are idealistic, moody, inconstant, creative, colorful, entertaining, depressing, and not infrequently all in one day. The meme “drinking styles by sign” says no one should try and hang with us. We will drink you under the table. In most respects, all this is true of me.
That wasn’t what I logged on to say, but sometimes I like to talk about myself. The internet will listen when no one else will. And if no one is listening, it doesn’t matter: I can still pretend they are.
What I wanted to talk about is these dreams I’ve been having, and their context within my overall work, and then the general principles that can and should in my view be drawn from my example. Then I wanted to discuss two metaphors I have come up with, that I will argue are useful.
How’s that for a setup? Organized. That’s what it is.
For several years now I have had dreams where I was with a baby or small child, and found myself comforting it. This happened last night with a little girl, who I was hugging and showing tenderness to.
Some time around the 1990’s this notion of the “Inner Child” came into wide circulation. For myself, I would argue this is clearly a reality. Logically, Developmental Traumas of all sorts lead to the formation of multiple selves, some of which are often quite primitive emotionally.
For me, I had to leave home, so I threw myself out there, completely unprepared for anything. I had been overprotected. [I suppose from a certain perspective you could say that prison guards also exist to protect the prisoners from outside assault, and to keep them safe. We never think of it that way, but that might be a useful and interesting new vantage point.]
So I dissociated. I just did what needed doing, but never felt at home “out here”.
Logically, then, healing will involve making contact with this primitive self and integrating it. This I believe I am in the process of doing. This is useful, necessary work. The goal is to always be one person, albeit one with many possibilities. What you do not want is a child sitting in the shadows. It will be heard, in ways which will be generally unhappy, even if their precise source is unclear.
But the flip side of this is that whininess and creepy infantilism are clearly on the rise in our culture, and those of others. I think even the Chinese are winding up with many stereotypically American problems. Xi seems to want, with his shopping malls and social credit scores, to make China a giant prosperous suburb, and the government a giant Home Owners Association (with an in-house slave workforce.)
I think specifically of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LErwHI18JTg
A couple lyrics:
It’s like going to confession every time I hear you speak
You’re makin’ the most of your losin’ streak
Some call it sick, but I call it weak
Bitch about the present and blame it on the past
I’d like to find your inner child and kick its little ass
Which perspective is true? Can they not both be true?
I would like to call this the Principle of Bidirectionality. What I want to argue is that in most human situations there are contrasting principles at work, and that BALANCE is the goal.
As another example, I saw a quote yesterday that “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
Adam Smith said that, some centuries ago. And it is not directly apposite today? Are not soft minded idiots (still or again, take your pick) putting violent people back on the streets, to terrorize again? Yes, yes they are. Why? “Compassion”. But it’s not compassion, is it?
In my own case I have often had to kick my own ass. I’ve had to use emotional violence to keep myself moving. That was, in the end, compassion. I would not still be alive if I had not, and where there is life there is hope. With the life I added on, I continue to make a better and better account of myself, and that would not have been possible if my bones were decaying in a grave somewhere.
I have in the past stipulated that proper moral judgments need to be local, imperfect, and necessary.
Local means you do not make one “judgement” and forever after treat all remotely similar situations exactly the same. Every situation has its own nuances, and even the same approximate situation involving the same people may and most likely will evolve over time. Pay attention. That is my point.
Imperfect: my intent here is to rob rigid people of their dogmatism, and to disabuse them of the notion that there are perfect and obvious right and wrong answers. All of life is compromise, trade-offs.
To return to the jail question, I won’t say that no violent prisoner should ever be released without serving a full and justified term. Sometimes you might have a feeling. I don’t know. You take a guess, take a chance, knowing it might not work out. You are taking a risk with other people’s lives, yes, but also taking a risk leaving a man or woman in jail who might do just fine on the outside. Neither option is free of risk, of ambiguity, of the possibility of reasonable doubt.
What I am saying is that all possibilities need to be SEEN and weighed. Do not use a fixed rule and apply it in a Procrustean fashion to all questions.
Necessary: do I really need to have an opinion about everything? Everyone? Do I need to keep a running tally of where everyone stands in all respects? Of course not. If the way someone else is living their life does not affect me, it’s none of my business. I wish them well. If they are fucking up, and it’s only themselves they are hurting, so be it. If they are hurting the innocent and defenseless, well then I need to form a judgement.
So this Principle of Bidirectionality would obviously apply to parenting. You love your kids, hopefully, and want all the good stuff for them, but if you don’t kick their asses in one way or another from time to time, they will grow up weak, and the LIFE will kick their asses.
This is really all these Safe Spaces (or Brave Spaces, in an Orwellian redirection) are: an effort to extend the womb as far into Life as possible, by children who never heard no, are terrified of everything, and who have NO CHANCE OF SUSTAINABLE HAPPINESS.
You are robbing them of their lives by being too kind. This point needs to be made clearly. As I have said often, the two core Buddhist virtues are Compassion AND Wisdom. The Dalai Lama likes to only talk about the first, from what I can tell. He has a ready audience. Being nice is an easy virtue. You can default to being nice by simply never saying no to anyone for any reason. You also lose your soul and all personality, wit, charm and sentience in the process.
The world needs assholes. Some of us are a bit too ready sometimes to say “pick me, pick me”, but the principle remains. To the principle of niceness must be contrasted the principle of harshness or austerity. Both are needed. Imagine a world where you ONLY ate desserts, where everything was sweet all the time. Awful. Treacly, to use a word which may add to your SAT score (although I doubt anyone under 30 is reading this, if anyone is reading at all).
OK, that was part one. [I will recollect for you that some wit once remarked of me that if I ever chose to commit suicide, I could do it by jumping off my suicide note. That is genuinely funny.]
I was thinking about this whole Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis of I think Hegel, and which was the basis, as I understand it, of Marx’s Dialectical Materialism (note that the formally scientific notion of “materialism”, which has been falsified by science, is integral to the project intellectually; his economic theories have in any event also been falsified, so no one should be reading Marx as anything other than a slovenly hack who was proven wrong in everything).
Setting up oppositions in your mind HAS to make conflict more likely. Marx said the conflicts were inevitable, and that processes of History (which amounted to a kind of God) were analogous perhaps to those of tectonic plates. They operated according to fixed laws that were unalterable and inevitable.
This is why, according to Marx, Lenin should not have been necessary. Lenin was part of a political elite who engineered what I will persist in calling, not a revolution, but a coup d’etat, one enacted in many respects against the wishes, and certainly contrary to the interests, of the working and serf classes they claimed they were “liberating”.
But ideas have consequences. The consequence of the Dialectic is that groups of political agitators tend to naturally and organically define themselves in opposition to some other group, whether real or imagined. Obviously, in our present day, the necessity of conjuring up some hated Other has rendered the word racist completely meaningless. White Supremacy might succinctly and accurately be rendered as “people who are not us.” It has nothing to do with the actual ideas on display.
Here is another quote I saw yesterday on Sowell’s website, from Dinesh D’Souza: “Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem privately terrified that it has abated.”
Racism just isn’t a major problem any more. Yet, white people are being attacked with more vigor, and by higher political elites, than they were the first time segregation existed. It’s absurd.
On one hand, obviously, it is simply a propaganda technique to keep us divided, to keep their troops loyal, and to create a background for tyrannical and abusive policy which has no basis in common sense, or the law.
But on the other, some people GENUINELY SEEM TO BELIEVE THIS BULLSHIT. The logic, as I have said before, is simple: they are not us, we are the Summum Bonum, ERGO they must be bad. It simply remains to be determined how they are bad. Logically, it must be all the ways we are good, since they are the opposite.
This literally happens. No one should be that stupid. BUT THEY ARE. This sort of thing is made vastly easier and more likely by notions like the Dialectic. It is also of course hard wired into our tribal minds. Getting past such idiocy was the main effort and main achievement of European civilization, from which emerged Liberalism, which I will recollect for you shares a root with Liberty.
Here is an alternative image for you. People are rarely at perfect odds with each other, which would be two vector arrows pointing at each other and making contact; or the opposite, going in diametrically opposite directions, in a push/pull. They are often going in vaguely differing directions. Imagine two vector lines going up, one a bit to the right, the other a bit to the left.
If we imbue these lines with force, there is a bit of tension between them. How do we release the tension? Well, in two ways. One, if it does not affect us, we grant freedom. You do your thing and I do mine. Both lines are then parallel, and at rest relative to each other.
The second peaceful way is compromise and negotiation. I come closer to you and you come closer to me. Liberalism and social and personal maturity go together. A nation of infants will not keep freedom intact.
The third way, of course, is force. I use physical or emotional violence to pull you into parallel with me. If I am going up and to the right, I pull your line over to where it, too, is going up and to the right. This is what was done for most of history, and not just by Great Powers like the Catholic Church. It was done by the Plains Indians. With respect to the things they cared about, you did things their way, or you risked expulsion. Obviously, negotiation and laissez-faire happened to, but it is worth pointing out even small social groupings can be utterly tyrannical.
That was the first metaphor. I am going to make the second a separate post. I’m tired of reading this.
The originator denies it, but I’m pretty sure I inspired an online group called the FRAT, which stood for “Fuck reading all that.”
I’m not denigrating my work. I think I sometimes alternate genius with my genuine idiocy, although this is less common in my personal life than you may suppose. But this sort of thing is tiring. If I were not driven, I don’t think I would do it.
Still, better ideas do have an effect. That is actually the point I will make here in a moment.