Author: White Whale

Dogmatism: answers without questions.

Dogmatism is the state of having no questions for your answers.

Whenever you find yourself reacting in an emotionally inappropriate way–and I will comment that all emotions are appropriate in some times and places, including anger, including even murderous rage–ask yourself what unmet emotional need is driving this reaction.  Is it loneliness and following depression?  Is it chronic frustration?

And for those of us with issues of trauma–and I suspect trauma exists in at least a muted, low grade form in nearly everyone, perfect childhoods being nearly impossible, with precisely the right ratio of stress and adaptation–we have the Unholy Triumvirate.

And with regard to that specifically, when you feel excessive anger, comment to yourself “I also feel excessive fear, and I also feel excessive shame.  Those are all within me.”  I haven’t decided yet if that helps–I just came up with it yesterday–but it is in any event the truth, and I suspect that toggling like that between three related but distinguishable emotions reduces the intensity of all of them.

And it just occurred to me that self defeating behaviors stem from an organismic effort at emotionally logical correlation.  What I mean by this is that if you have a chronic sense of shame, some part of your psyche has an overwhelming need to justify it, to make it logical, rather than simply an unanchored feeling floating out there.  As I’ve said before, if you feel like an asshole–to be clear, because of chronic amygdala overactivation, and other related brainwave dysregulation, all resulting from adverse and unprocessed experiences–the temptation to act like one is strong.

And it occurred to me as well that evil is really simply the ultimate in self defeating behavior.  It is taking the logic of the amygdala disregulation and building a life on it.  We all want to feel safe, to feel connected to other humans and our world and lives generally, and we want stimulating challenges.  These are the basic requirements of a happy life.  We want to exist calmly, to exist in a network of connections, and to have something interesting to do.

Evil is giving up on all that.  The hunger for power, for example, could and probably should be seen as a misguided quest for safety.  Acts of cruelty should be seen as misguided efforts at connection.  And dissipated hedonism should be seen as a misguided effort at the feeling of satisfaction which can only come from work well done.

I’m not an ascetic.  I’m not a Puritan, but I do think we are all built to want and need certain things, and so many of us cannot remember or figure out what those things are.  This is the source of so much confusion in this world.

There was a useful pas de deux between Republicans and Democrats in the late 19th and early 20th century.  Republican ideas support business, but businesses without rules tend to collude to abuse workers, so the counterpoint of Democrat labor organizing was useful, on balance.  You have to have growth to have wealth to fight over, but to my mind the government setting some basic rules is not such a horrible thing.  Government in the business space exists on a continuum, and if it is not too much, I am willing to call it a good thing.

It is not unreasonable, for example, to hold employers liable when they force employees to work in unsafe conditions.  It is in fact quite a good idea to prevent the formation of wage suppressing cartels. (I might note in this regard that it is safe to assume the Communist Party in China acts, effectively, as such a cartel, intended to abuse workers, and enrich what can only be called a Capitalist elite).

Democrats, in pointing to this history, are not wrong.  There are some good things in their past.  But those Democrats got what they wanted.  In 2019, they have nothing to offer the American worker but the mass importation of labor competition, which is, if you think about it, something ONLY Big Business would want.  They can’t form cartels, legally, but the Party of the Worker, supposedly, is allowing them to dilute wages by altering the quantity of the supply of labor permanently.

In an historical reversal, only Republicans are standing against this, and that largely to prevent what would amount to a national gerrymandering which would cause us to lose national elections in perpetuity.

But it is also the right thing to do by the American worker.  There can be no question of this.

And the comment I intended to make was this: without Democrats most labor laws would not exist as they do.  Without Republicans, slavery would not have ended until some time in the 20th Century.

In the 19th Century, the Democrat party was the States Rights, grumpy old men party.  The Republicans were the energized, pie eyed, often young, idealists.

We are still, in my view, the idealists.  The Democrats talk a good fight, but by and large they are the party of getting rich on the make, something which is made easier by making government larger and thus more corruptible.

A few meanderings.

I had a long ass day today.  Most of the muscles in my body hurt.  It happens, to some of us.  Fuck it: this is life.

But I’m sitting here drinking beer and watching videos which are mostly U2 at the moment, and thinking: maybe I will be the guy, one day, sitting at a bureaucratic desk, who will discuss Proust and Camus, Vedanta, and Madhyamaka Buddism with some stranger at 3am, who is getting from here to there, for reason they themselves don’t understand.

I will always be a strange person to touch.  Most people will never see me.  Those that do, will enter my own confusion.  That would be fantastic.

The thing is, once you become a Headless One, you immediately start committing crimes against truth and your own nature.  Everyone is doing it, and you are reinforced in it daily, hourly, and if you need it minute by minute.

To wake up, to grow beyond this haze, you have to reverse course by calling these crimes crimes.  You have to recognize the monster you were, that you became.

And your unconscious knows this.  It goes along, because from a physiological perspective this change, this alteration into cult member, delivers a steady state nervous system.  It is in constant mild around, and periodic high arousal, but gone are the petty anxieties, the worries, the doubts.  You can forget you don’t have the money to pay the rent, that you are a middle aged fuckup, that you are an unlikable asshole (I can relate to some of these, by the way, and mention them because I too would like an easy way to forget).   You no longer have to worry what to believe. 

Waking from this haze requires returning to confusion, to not-knowing, to petty anxieties and doubts, all piled on top of a massive hangover of moral conscience.  If you lack a moral conscience, by the way, you will NEVER wake up, because you have found your home, if you were not already a serial killer or rapist.

Individual mental health, and spiritual growth are inherently anti-Collectivist.  When I speak of my own struggles, my own breakthroughs, my own development, this is political, too, in this respect.

For Communists, everything is political.  This means that to oppose them, we need to do so in all domains. 

Teaching someone how to sleep soundly at night, with an earned clear conscience, is thus inherently anti-Communistic. 

Teaching someone to respect themselves is anti-Communistic. 

Teaching someone to speak the truth is anti-Communistic.

Yes, they are good at what they do, and get around these barriers with lies they have learned to propagate far and wide at the drop of a pin, but they are still responding to steps in the correct, healthy, spiritual direction.

And actually, with respect to that last word, I would suggest that no one who is spiritual will ever try and control you, and if they do, they are not spiritual.  A spiritual person is available, and willing to share what they think they know, but they will never tell you what to do.  Your path is your path, and they know that.

You know, in the Vietnam era the Vietcong and NVA shelled and attacked civilian targets daily, as a matter of high level policy.  There was a Montagnard village, as one example, where they took flame throwers to everything.  Torched everyone and everything they could find.  Any living children, they kidnapped and took back to North Vietnam for brain washing in Communist lunacy.

They shelled hospitals, medical convoys.  They shelled civilian areas without any targeting whatsoever.  They put, in one case, a bomb on a young girl of about 9, placed her on a bicycle, had her drive among her friends, and then blew her up remotely.  They assassinated everyone who disagreed with them.  They would sometimes first rape their wives and daughters while they were tied to a post helplessly.

That was the enemy we faced.  They committed a “Lt.  Calley” daily for the duration of the war.  It was standard policy.

But somehow–and really it was not a somehow, was it?–our troops are remembered for atrocities.  We are remembered for “aggression” in trying to prevent the overthrow of what was eventually–by the late 1960’s–an elected and reasonably popular government, by Communist dictators who routinely engaged in political murder, political torture, political imprisonment, political corruption, and campaigns of deception.

“Truth is the first casualty in war.”  I believe that goes back to the Greeks, probably Thucydides.

But it needs to be said that in a culture war, truth is a key target.  It is a stronghold, a rallying point, a key defensive element.  Communist do not target primarily armies and social systems: they target minds.  Their goal is mass madness.  Their goal is the cessation of the very IDEA of individuation, of individual psychological health and maturation.  Everything is the State.  They call the State Society, but it is, and necessarily always will be, a system of force and power run by individuals with names, personal histories, and personal agendas.

All good, if I might oversimplify only slightly, comes from people capable of growing in prolonged solitude.  Such solitude relaxes the sense of compulsion most of us bring to human relationships, and which makes most of us selfish and self centered.

All evil comes from what I might call the unrisen self.  All evil, seen pictorially and symbolically, comes from loaves of bread which were never allowed enough time to rise, and which are compacted, hard and rock-like in the center.  It comes from people who are not people, who have not individuated, who have to be endlessly reinforced from outside to have any sense of existing at all.

And in the sense that a smart phone represents a constant companion, it would like not be overstating the case to call socialization with such a device training for Communism, which I could perhaps call “Power Elite dictated Other Direction”.  Such children, from early ages, are never, ever alone with who they really are.  Ever, even perhaps in sleep, where the phone is still next to them.

I have gotten a bit off track, but I think these are useful and interesting thoughts.

The larger point I initially intended is that, in the way that our bombs sometimes kill people we did not intend to kill–what we call euphemistically but perhaps necessarily “Collateral Damage”–the efforts even of well meaning combatants in the Culture war sometimes produce unhappy results.

On the one hand, we have amoral nihilists who are doing their best to carpet bomb everything we hold dear.  They want to destroy our faith in our country, our culture, our history, our ideals, and in one another.  They want to kill that little voice that says “everything is OK.  I am safe.  I feel good”, something which we all instinctively have, and which by all rights should thrive in a world of plenty, where most of us are truly safe in nearly all respects nearly all our lives.

And the central Communist lie, the one only seen by the absolute core, and even there probably not consciously (emotional deformation, malnourishment, and following stupidity being the defining attribute of these people), is that, while they want to tear everything down, THERE IS NOTHING TO REPLACE IT WITH.  There is no plan for plenty, and no plan for individual psychological thriving.  They have to destroy, to get what they want, all natural instincts towards the light.  They have to empower the worst sorts of human beings, who should be in jail, not in charge.

Again, this is what I call Cultural Sadeism.  It is a sort of church dedicated to destruction.  It is evil.  It is Satanic.

Ponder: if you did not know they were using children as suicide bombers in Vietnam, if you did not know they massacred entire villages, if you did not know they kidnapped from their parents tens of thousands of children, WHY did you not know this?  Can you REALLY believe the press was either trying to tell the full truth, or genuinely concerned about these horrors?  Of course not.  That is a fairy tale.

We have had Communists in positions of influence for at least 60 years.  Millions of people have died unnecessarily.  Tens of thousands of Americans have died pointlessly.  Hundreds of millions of people have lived miserable, shorter lives, because of these treasons.

It has for a long time been past time for all people of genuine goodwill and decency to finally grasp these facts.  The true bastards are no more than 1 in a hundred, but the idiots are all who fail to see what they are up to.

Edit: actually even that was not fully what I wanted to say.  Let me put it this way: McCarthy both went too far, and did not go far enough.  If it is true he used the faintest whiff of suspicion to accuse people, then he was imitating the Communist Commissars in all the benighted nations where they held sway.  He was conflating the suspicion of guilt with the reality of guilt.

But manifestly, there WERE and are many Communists among us.  They may not use that word, but no Communist does until they feel safe in doing so.  Ponder, for example–as I have asked you to do from time to time for several years–how the FUCK a guy who voted for the Communist in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War gets INTO the CIA, much less comes to run it?  Put that into your pipe, and smoke on that as long as it takes to do the math.  Most reasonably, you should not need a pipe, and you should not need time.

But Tailgunner Joe was a net benefit.  He was pointing to a real and pervasive problem.  Those he falsely accused might be viewed as Collateral Damage in a real war, being fought with real enemies.

And hatred among ourselves is a price those who have not joined the cult, who have not become Headless Ones, pay when we do not moderate our emotions properly.  This is a hard thing to do.  It is hard not to hate people who hate us.  It is hard to turn a cheek to someone who considers you, entirely unjustly, and entirely as the result of effective brainwashing, to be some sort of monster.

Wars are ugly things, and ugliness cannot but be an outcome even of a Culture war.  None of us become truly better.  The best most of us can hope for is not to become the monsters they truly want us to be, so they can justify their hatred of us.

How does one fight such a war?  Well, this blog is my effort at an answer.

If we were to take at face value (which no sane person will ever do, but which I will attempt here for rhetorical purposes) the claims of the Left that they want to get rid of racism, as a means of healing wound of the past, then we could make with equal validity the claim that the children of alcoholics will only be healed when alcoholism is ended.

This claim, of course, is ridiculous.  Adults know that, as Eleanor Roosevelt (who incidentally apparently carried a gun with her everywhere she went) said (approximately), “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

You don’t claim your own power by forcing the world to bow at your feet.  Not if you are psychologically healthy.  You claim your power by charting your own path through it, one where you are not bowled over every time some little thing happens to you, or some little person says some little thing to you.

Even in the time of the actual KKK and actual lynchings, black people found ways to self respect.  They found ways to honor one another, and to live with dignity and as a community.

Now that public racism has to be invented–because it no longer flourishes in the wild, and has to be grown, like hothouse plants, from the seeds of willful misrepresentation, the abuse of language, intentional misunderstanding, psychological projection and outright lies–the black psyche, seemingly, rather than becoming more resilient in the face of declining contempt, has become weaker, more needy, more helpless, and more depressed and angry.  This obviously has been the intent of Democrats all along.  They don’t want a black class that is predominantly middle class,  and thriving without them.  Where would they get their reliable votes?

Always question people who want to do for you things you can and should be doing for yourself.  In this country, it is almost like the mass of urban blacks are 33 year old boy-men, or girl-women, who never left home.  Their parents never encouraged independence, and on the contrary did their best to foster permanent dependence.  They made the world seem scary (Republicans want to KILL you), and provided all sorts of excuses not to take command of their own lives.  So the recipients of this “caring” and “generosity”–both figuratively and in many cases literally–spend their days watching TV and playing video games.

I am glad people like Candace Owens and, in another generation, Thomas Sowell, are out there.  Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Allen West in the news recently.  Or David Clarke.  I’m not much of a consumer of news, though.  Contrary to the knee-jerk first reaction–usually but not always before being called a racist–of most Leftists to encountering me, I don’t watch Fox News at all.  I cancelled my cable not long ago.  I got it for the 2018 Winter Olympics, and found myself wasting far too much time watching things I had not planned to watch.  I like Tucker Carlson, but have my doubts about many of the rest of them.

Be all that as it may, you don’t get ahead by waiting until the world becomes exactly the way you “need” it to be.  The charge of racism, obviously, is a form of political assault, intended, through barrage tactics, to force all dissenters from the Left Wing Shock Troop Goose Stepping Mob Agenda to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.  Fuck that.

If I might borrow from an old story Christians tell, if they ever start arresting people for believing in freedom, the perfectability of human kind through both individual and collective effort, and in common sense and common decency, I hope to have provided them a plethora of evidence of my guilt.

I like her.  It’s odd that she ditched her name and in some respects her culture, but what I’ve read of her seems authentic, unlike the only about 5-10 pages of Marianne Williamson I was able to get through before deciding something was really wrong.

I remember reading Erich Fromm’s book “The Art of Love” many years ago, and taking away from it that love is work.  Perhaps I got my idea of love as the summation of individuation (one thing becomes another) from him.  I don’t honestly remember.

Leo Buscaglia is another I tried to read, and failed, but he was just too perky for me.  I didn’t get the sense he was a fraud, just that he was far too distant in personality from me.  I need people much closer to being assholes.  I’m not implying Chodron is–she isn’t, as far as I can tell–but she does live in the frozen north, which makes her much less Italian. I’m not at all Italian.