Author: White Whale

Where you are is always a good starting place.

In response, I myself, if asked what I think about this theory, could simply say “I am an American.”  That means that I value the rights of ALL people, that I view all people as worthy of dignity, hope, a chance in life, and that the lowest among us should have no less access to a dispassionate and fair Law than the highest among us.  We are all equal before the law, and the Law exceeds all of us.

We are a  Constitutional Republic, which means our State is a Public Thing based upon a set of laws not quite but nearly written in stone, which can be changed only with the greatest of difficulty, and for the reason that they are sound, well considered, wise, fair, and prudent.  The Law is what governs us, through fallible human beings whose power is carefully constrained so that no one or group of them can easily arrogate all power to themselves. 

I come from a place of possibility, where a low birth means nothing, and a high birth little.

Compare America even now to most of the world.  Most of humanity is ruled by oligarchs and dictatorships, by powered elites, by gangsters, by one tribe relative another, and even, even now, by kings.

It is one of the truly astonishing, and truly evil, feats of the forces of regression–the Left–that they have managed not just to sap our confidence in our actual history, but in our ideals themselves.  They have corrupted words like justice and tolerance to where they mean nothing any more.  They have corrupted the word democracy, and the meaning behind the word “people”.  They have infused the ideals which animated our forebears with lies, with smoke, with hatred, with self revulsion, with everything but the just pride which all of us should feel in them.

Communism is a very old idea.  It is Kingship, masked in lies.  It is Kingship, which pretends it is purely benevolent, purely beholden to the “People”, who are in theory the kings, but who never get within a thousand miles of the Capital City, much less any chance of offering opinions which will be listened to. 

True Kingship is vastly preferable, and vastly more honest, than Communism.  The worst despots are no worse than average Communists, and even if in all cases such despots mask their actions in the language of one sort of necessity or another, no one is fooled, least of all those who help them, who are motivated by greed and power lust, and confused by neither.

I will say again: I am proud of America’s intellectual tradition, of the philosophical and idealistic underpinnings of this great nation, which have suffered so much from a century of lies.

And I will add: this was the INTENT.  The Communists attacked us at the level of philosophy in order to make us weak, uncertain, and unable to respond to their global imperial ambitions.

Why so many sap headed academics went along, and continue to go along, maybe I will one day figure out, but I have not yet.  It takes great stupidity, great cowardice, and an utter abjuration of the most basic loyalty and fellow feeling, to reach such a state.

I was being lectured last night by an Arab Sheikh on his theory of governance.  It was pressing a thumb print into a date, and adding ground pistachio.  He was quite sincere, that this was the best way, the way of wisdom, the way of Allah.  It was impressing one’s will on a soft substrate.  There was a very distinct feeling tone, one which cannot be communicated with words

And they were showing me Arabic letters showing up in random places, like electrical wiring.  When they happen by accident, it is considered God speaking.

Within humanity, there are many spaces.  These spaces can be entered, and learned from.

All my life, I have only been operating at a small fraction of my actual capacity.  I may one day soon be able to see much more.  Inshallah.

“When we are partners with ourselves, we can make our life into a beautiful work of art that we can enjoy and present to others.”  Tarthang Tulku, in Love of Beauty

I am beginning to feel this.  I am beginning to feel like my life is mine. It has never felt that way before.

Edit: I will add, that he goes on to describe a few pages later how the fucking Chinese tortured his aunt and mother.  One of the tortures was making his aunt stand on ice in her bare feet while they screamed Communist bullshit at her.

Evil.  Pure evil. 

It is a stark contrast, the vision of a teacher of goodness like Tarthang Tulku, as compared to lunatic sadists animated by an ideology of cruelty, ugliness, and war.

These people cannot be fought fiercely enough.

It is impossible to speak large truths to yourself when your survival depends on self deception.

In an abusive family system, if you “wake up” and realize everything is wrong, that system will no longer have a place for you.  You will react in ways which show that you’ve changed, and that will be unacceptable.  Unless you have another place, this is an unmitigated disaster, or in event, as a child, it seems as such.  It feels like a tidal wave which will overcome the world.

And this is how we learn to lie.

And one of the reasons I focus on Communism so much–in addition to the fact that these ideas represent clear and present existential threats to everything good we have built in this world–is that they so remind me of my own home. I recognize, from my own experience, the lies that Communists tell themselves, about their benevolence, their peacefulness, their tolerance.  And I see that Communism consists almost precisely in turning your whole actual emotional world over to your Shadow, while learning to label it Light and Goodness. You dissociate spirit and mind, and focus on words only.  Words, mere words, and lots of them.  Countless words, all self serving and habitual lies.

But when you are trapped, the very terror and irrationality of the system can, if you can’t escape it, push you INTO it.  This is the essence of brainwashing.  You create an unbearable situation, and only one way out, which the nervous system has to take, or break completely.

But, again, ponder the minds, and the ideology, which would be CAPABLE of performing the science of turning human beings into trained, whipped dogs.  This is pure evil, pure madness.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/05/jozef-czapski-painter-prisoner-proust-lost-time-inhuman-land-almost-nothing-review

My pedantic excerpt:

In March 1940, the head of the NKVD (later KGB) Lavrentiy Beria and three members of the Politburo signed a memorandum in which the Polish officers were condemned to execution. The operation, which was completed in eight weeks, began with the prisoners being transported to sites in and around Katyn, a forest near the Russian city of Smolensk. In all, around 22,000 soldiers – mostly officers who in civilian life had been lawyers, doctors, writers, artists, scientists, engineers and other professional people – were shot by a single bullet in the back of the head. Over a 28-day period a single individual, Vasily Blokhin (1895-1955), the chief executioner at Lubyanka prison in Moscow (where he killed the writer Isaac Babel and the avant-garde theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold), is said to have shot around 7,000 prisoners. He used German revolvers, which he brought with him in a suitcase, as he found the Soviet-made variety unreliable. For his services to the Soviet state Blokhin received the Order of the Red Banner.

This is Communism.  This is the same Soviet Union Bernie Sanders took his honeymoon in.

Thinking about Communism, and its many iterations which do not yet use that label, I think of the biggest assholes I’ve met, people who fuck up then lie about it, who don’t plan worth a shit then blame somebody else every time something goes wrong.  This is the heart, the core, the essence of the Socialist project: liars lying, and people suffering.  The people lying do not suffer.  Maduro in Venezuela does not suffer.  And apparently he makes sure his army is well fed and well paid.  The Roman Emperors did no less, and for the same reason.

But the whole things consists in a sociopathic, narcissistic Munchhausen Syndrome.  It is a curse on humanity, a disease, a plague, a fatal and horrible mistake.

And it is swirling all around us at this very moment.

When we speak of barriers conventionally, we speak of going over them, under them, through them.  I will submit, though, that most barriers are actually in our minds, and that the task there is to figure out how to make the barrier either disappear outright, or get easier to work with.  This might involve inviting, coercing, nudging, or removing one little bit at a time.  It might involve decreasing its density, or altering its texture.  But what you see, in your minds eye, need not remain there.

So often, we wear ourselves out–I wear myself out–in internal conflicts which cannot end until we own, understand, and dissolve them.

My own tidal wall broke last night.  My daylight self was invaded by a jail break, by countless individuals from my shadow side, and all intermingled.  This has been the goal I have seen seeking, but as with all things unconscious, it didn’t happen how I thought it would.  I’m not sure what I thought, but that was weird, and as countless times before, I thought I was losing my mind.

You know, we all have murderers within us.  If you think you don’t, you have not looked far enough.  And we have saints in us.  I don’t think the saint is as different from the murderer as you might think.  Both are obsessive.  I think health lies in the middle somewhere, where choices are choices, and are made freely and without manic energy of any sort.

And I will wonder about our national tidal wall, especially the one which separates self identifying “Liberals” of conscience from the open realization that they have slowly been led into a world which is nothing like what they signed up for.

Democrats become Democrats because they want to help people.  They want to use the power of government to oppose plutocrats, and racists, and bigots of all sorts.  But now plutocrats, racists, and bigots run the party.

To take one example: Democrats always claim their economic policies are better.  At the level of theory, this may or may not be true, as with all theories, but the underlying assumption is that they want to see Americans living in prosperity and plenty.

Under Trump, the economy is booming, and national Democrats leaders hate it.  They either credit Obama, farcically, or ignore it.  Mostly they ignore it.

What morally sane person, who genuinely wants what is best for America, would oppose economic growth–growth in jobs, in new jobs, in wages?

People who think this is good have to ask: where are the Democrats in all this?  They seem, if anything, to view this as a DISASTER, because it makes the reelection of Trump more likely. 

But here is the question: what possible principle can animate them, other than power, if this is in fact the case?  They don’t want prosperity: they want problems, to which they can offer theoretical solutions which never pan out, and which can then be used for reelection, by claiming that if not for the nasty Republicans, their idiotic plan A or plan B would have worked.  The only solution is reelection.

And they do this across DECADES.  They’ve been saying the same things for 40-50 years nationally, and even longer at the local and State levels.

I have to ask, when do the graduates of Oberlin, and Stanford, and Williams, and Swarthmore and even Harvard ask: “what is it I actually believe?”, and find that their party deserted them long ago.

Obviously, many if not most of them are so far in they literally can’t imagine leaving the Matrix, but not all of them.  Not all of them.

Most people in America grow up comfortable.  They have TV, air conditioning, running water, toilets connected to a functioning sewer system, the presumption of education, public libraries, well constructed roads, access to cars or at least public transportation, and a host of other things.

So when people like Alex Jones say “there are people in this world who want to take much of this away from us”, there is a strong disconnect between experienced reality and this statement.  America has not known war within our borders since 1865 (Pearl Harbor being a minor and short exception).  We have not arrested people for speaking unpopular opinions, by and large, even though many Communists (mostly real, some mislabeled) were affected for a short period of time in the 1950’s, after the Soviets occupied most of Eastern Europe and North Korea invaded South Korea.

I would submit, though, that when people ask “how is that even possible, that that could happen here?”, that they simply look at RECENT history.  The Germans didn’t think Nazism could happen there.  Guess what?  It DID.

What you need to look at is the level of public dialogue.  Are mature adults using serious language to debate issues of primary importance?  Or has some sizeable section of the populace dropped off the radar, culturally and socially, such that they have created a separate and solipsistic world? 

Do I need to say out loud that that is precisely what has happened in this country?  Large number of Americans who be nice to one another, generous to one another, kind in any other context, become rabid maniacs the moment politics comes up.  It’s not the Trump people.  I infiltrate all sorts of Leftist events, knowing that if I am outed that is by and large the reaction I will get.  I do it because I do very much possess the quality of Openness, which they claim to prize, but don’t.

Openness is not where you invite the Peruvian pipe players to your community picnic.  That is trivial and obvious.  It is where you invite the Southern Baptists or the NRA and give them a chance to speak their piece.

By and large, if it is easy, you are not doing any useful work at all.

I’m involved somewhere on the interwebs with one of the sorts of mouth frothing, demonic, chronically enraged Leftists whose absence I was commenting on a couple weeks ago.  That energy does not evaporate, and these people do not learn.  They are far beyond the capacity for learning.  That is what I wanted to comment on here. 

But I wanted to make a brief comment on my own mental health, my own self assessment.  I seem to have formed a robust habit of weighing myself daily, and I am going to discontinue posting results here.  I hit 279 Sunday, got drunk Sunday night and gained a bit back, but I think the overwhelming bulk of momentum is going in the right direction.

In my own view, my reality testing is outstanding.  It is better than most people, better than most pundits, better than most professionals.  The reason for this is that I grew up in a home where everyone lied about everything continually, without even realizing they were lying.  You can lie with your being.  This caused me to grow up with a passionate commitment to truth telling, at least to myself.  It caused me to be able to recognize the presence even of unwelcome truths, of awful truths, of things I did not want to be true, but which I could not avoid.

On this score, I would count myself on the opposite pole from schizophrenia.

My core problem is self regulation.  It is impulse control, and more importantly, the inability to consistently calm myself down without alcohol.  This is residual trauma, which you cannot wish or will away.  It takes time, it takes patience, it takes strategy, and it takes tools, all of which I am applying with progressively better results.

I am, if anything, excessively aware of the feelings of others.  When I go to the mall, I have a pretty good idea what sort of state nearly everyone I see is in.

Now, having said that, I would like to compare and contrast myself with the Ideal Type of a dedicated Leftist.

What is conspicuous about such people is that they are never interacting with the you that you are putting in front of them with your words.  They are interacting with their idea of you, and that idea, in turn, is nearly entirely conditioned by an anger that you would dare disagree with them.  In important respects, it makes no difference to them if you are a real person, or merely an hallucination they have to talk themselves down from, to return to the Terra Firma of what they want to acknowledge as their core commitments, and the sense of Self they derive from those commitments.

Here is the thing: ideological commitments are foundationally different from religious and tribal commitments.  They derive from the same biological impulses, from the remembered need for sociality to survive, from a need for reinforcement in the patterns you have chosen, but there is ultimately no room for the actual individual in, say, a Communism or a Fascism.

If you live in a small Muslim community in, say, Jordan, you have a name and a place.  You are Ahmad son of Muhammad.  You are cousin to so and so, and friends with so and so.  People see you and recognize you as Ahmad.

To be clear, you are expected to abide by community standards, to go to the mosque on Fridays, to say your prayers (if that is a need in your particular community), but you can be both a person and a Muslim. You have the wave and the particle.

Ideologies, particularly Communism, discard with place and identity.  Your family is unimportant.  Your home is unimportant.  Where you come from is unimportant.  What you were raised to believe is unimportant, if it is other than Communist dogma.  Your city doesn’t matter.  Your country doesn’t matter.  YOU, in other words, don’t matter.  You are a donkey who carries the burden placed on its back.

There is no true belonging in Communism.  What there is, is a relaxation of the terror of being different.  You can feel safe that you will not be imprisoned or killed, because you are saying and doing the right things, but there is no festival which will make you truly feel like you belong as a person. 

Ideology of this sort is a sort of permanent spasm of the animal self.  It is an abstraction born of dissociation, itself born of trauma.  It is Satanic, because Satanism is that set of beliefs and practice which result if we give our selves over to our primitive nervous systems, to the unmyelinated vagus nerve, to the animal, to hunger.

In the wild, do you think animals think of their place of origin?  They have no culture.  They simply do every day what it takes to survive, and I think denizens of Leftist political systems are no different.  You are literally erasing everything that makes us human, that makes us different from animals, and calling it “progress”.

I think with this commentary I am getting close to the truth.  This feels correct to me.

I continue to look on with amazement, shock, and fear how fully and completely so much of our nation has fallen for horrible ideas, espoused by horrible people, ideas which should be readily recognizable as garbage by ANY educated person, and which should feel profane and wrong in the mouths of any sane person.