Author: White Whale

Just watched Free Solo.  Very interesting movie.

I’m going to do my armchair psychologist act.

Two data points:

1. Based on his own description of his activity, he seems to be driven by shame, which is to say a need to pursue perfection, to feel like he and his life have value.

2. His amygdala is clinically hypoactive.

Hypothesis: he has used chronic and intense fear to diminish the activity of his amygdala–he has forced it into a sort of accommodation or adaptation–which has had the cascading side effect of managing his sense of shame, probably stemming from primal attachment wounds.

To be clear, I admire the guy.  Outstanding grit and focus.  But I could not help but wonder, as many around him did, if he was not destined to go the John Bachar route over some time horizon.

Arrogance is a type of tension. It is a holding, of a specific self image, of a specific contextual understanding. It is the result of fear.

And if I invoke the Satanic Triumvirate, then it is s threefold expression of fear/hostility and shame. And of course, shame fits best, doesn’t it?

And if we apply math by invoking Edward de Bono’s dictum that “arrogance is a mistake in the future”, then tension also—contextually inappropriate tension, to be clear—is also a mistake in the future.

It is also always s mistake now, using my definition of appropriate.

There is s pearl or two in there.  As for me, I cast them everywhere, or try to. God will guide them.

I’ve done the Corporate America thing.  I still exist at its edges.  I watch people eke out their lives in cubicles, and timed breaks or long unpaid hours.  I’m doing a pretty good job using it to make a living, but staying at the periphery.

But I am looking, tonight, at all the times my ego fucked things up for me.  I’ve had doors close from time to time, without quite understanding why. I think I’m starting to figure it out.

My deal is that, on average, I am MUCH smarter than anyone else in the room, as measured by knowledge base and analytical capacity.  My problem has been that people-wise, the situation was often inverted.  People could and probably still can feel my impatience, even though I thought I was being good.  I don’t do it on purpose, but I have never hid it well.  I once literally had a boss ask the rest of the group, after I had answered what he had thought was a hard question correctly, if anyone else had an answer.  I tendered my resignation a week later.

Tonight I am pondering all of this.  I have clear values as a business person. I am an excellent problem solver, and my people skills, now, are on balance pretty solid.  But I don’t deal well even now with what I perceive to be stupidity.  It’s a major trigger for me.  Both of my kids have pointed this out to me as well.  This continues, even now, to create problems for me.

Everyone wants to feel smart.  Even people who are not smart want to feel smart.  And I think part of my unique problem is I don’t LOOK smart.  It drives suits crazy sometimes, I think.

I don’t know where I’m going with all this, other than some introspection.  I tried sleep once, and it had a bad outcome, so I’m having a couple, then heading back in there. I can’t fight the fight every night without booze.  And that, too, is something I will reference obliquely sometimes with people, but without watching what happens to me at night, I don’t think many people without severe PTSD will really get it.

You know, really I use this blog as a counselor for myself.  All most good counselors really do is listen, then say “this is what I heard”.  And people are EXCITED often by this process.  Nobody listens to them.  They don’t know what they are saying half the time, meaning they are saying things they did not know were hiding in there.  Writing things here means I am listening to myself.  It costs nothing, and it probably works as well or better than having a paid-by-the-fifty-minute-hour “mental health professional” opposite me.

All this banging my head on a wall, or to take an example from the book “Gates of Fire”, this tree-fucking, is doing something useful.

The inner cave is where your soul exists with your reality, at an emotional level.  It where, if you are bound, this image and this feeling resides.  It is where your pain, if you have chronic pain, lives.

It is hard to get to, and very hard to live in if you have primitive trauma.

I was sitting in the sauna last night pondering that the sum total of my work since I was in my late teens has not changed me in any truly substantive way.  All the words I’ve spilled here.  My other website, all my studies: they mean little.

What I have done is plant gardens outside my cave.  There are pretty pathways, and fountains, and ponds, and flowers, and all sorts of interesting geometric patterns, accompanied by pleasant music and beautiful animals.

But little has TRULY changed in the middle.  This is a hard work that most people who are not me find some good reason to avoid.  Going in there is like getting beaten with a baseball bat, and taking it until you are strong enough to break the bat.  This is my own reality, in any event.  I don’t think most people are as damaged as me, although it’s hard to know.  People like me can and do put on happy faces, and learn to act like everyone else.

This is my life’s work, though.  If you my life has a purpose, this is it: finding a way out.  If I can rescue myself, I can help others at an existential level.  But there has to be honesty.  I cannot declare this work done prematurely as, for example, nearly all psychotherapists do.

Thinking about it, they ought to lock anyone who wants to be a healer up in a cave for a month, to see if they can truly hack living with whats inside them.  As it is, damaged people are providing therapy to other damaged people, and–finding they are no more crazy than themselves–declaring them fit to be “Professionals” in Mental Health.

I hate this world sometimes.  I hate myself.  I hate my mother.  I hate the pain which was stupidly and completely unnecessarily inflicted on me.  The thoughtlessness, the carelessness, the callousness, the idiocy.

Oh, I will get by.  I always do.  This time, I do think I have reached the bottom of my experience.  I have exposed the entrance to my cave and gone in.  Direct progress is now possible.

Pray for me if you are so inclined.  I will fight through this and prevail, or die trying.

Now go watch a puppy video.  I’m serious.  That sort of thing is not without merit.

There is obviously some relief claiming helplessness.  It relieve you of the task of planning your work, and of doing the work.

But this is the thing: all the problems you claim you cannot be held responsible for become, in that moment, merely random accidents for which you can never claim any control.  They are beyond your control.  They will merely happen or not happen, with you as a hog-tied bystander.

As uncongenial as taking responsibility for your life may be at times, it is still a vastly more optimistic vision than sitting around waiting for things to happen to you.  Things happen to trees and old buildings.  They should not happen to people possessing intelligence and power.

I say this, but of course the process of becoming personally effective can be a long one.  In principle, though, we choose to empower or disempower ourselves with how we think.  And self evidently, claiming to be a victim is a form of chosen helplessness.  It is a call for the world to take care of you.  The world may answer.  More likely, it will claim to care, then do nothing, or something close to it.   And until you wake up, nothing will change.

This, in my view, is the problem with much of the black community.  They have been cursed with white leftists who tell them, year after year after year, that nothing they do is their fault, and that salvation can be had just by continuing to vote Democrat.  It has become farcical.  They even got a black President.  What did he do for them, what did it mean for them?  Nothing.   Absolutely nothing.  Obama spent, as far as I can tell, zero time worrying about blacks, since he already had their votes, and their votes were all he cared about.

Trump, by implementing sane policies not even targeted particularly at the black community, has already done more for them than Obama.  He didn’t pander to them.  But he helped them nonetheless.

With friends like white “liberals”, blacks don’t need any more enemies. In their own subtle way, by denigrating their agency and power, white “liberals” have done vastly more harm than the KKK–which was an open enemy–ever could have.

I wonder regularly how I am still alive.  Last night was terrible.  I so easily could have been a small obituary, with two very sad children, and that was it, for this life.  I don’t think I ever could have been a suicide–I steeled my mind against that long ago–but as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out there are many small ways of committing suicide slowly over time.  I didn’t take care of myself very well.

But I get signs here and there, or what I take to be signs, that this life will be worthwhile, that it is worth the pain, that I have been kept alive for a reason.  I am, however, going to have to fight through the hedgerows of Normandy, and make it through the winter in Bastogne.

Sometimes I am a bastard.  But I do fight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lxD-gikpMs

School vouchers, a sane national pension system they have politician-proofed, and a firm belief in free markets.

This was unexpected, but a welcome validation that conservative ideas work in all contexts.

It is impossible to bring the truly new while fully protecting the old.  Even men of peace need a sword.

Pondering this a bit more, and leaving out large amounts of contextualizing history, one result of the Christianization first of the Roman Empire, then of Europe, then much of the world, is that sacrifice, both animal and human, disappeared from most of the world.  This applies particularly when one factors in Islam, which in my view could not have existed without Christianity.

The only area where sacrifice remains common in my understanding is South Asia.  From what I have read, it is still practiced enthusiastically at least in Bengal and Nepal.  Perhaps in parts of Africa not under Islamic control, and of course Haiti and other places which practice voodoo.  In the feast of Eid, I believe, it plays some small role in the Islamic faith, when it is combined the Hajj.

I suppose it can be asked if this is a net benefit, when our current system slaughters millions of animals a day, probably, using industrial techniques.  But there is, I think, a qualitative difference between ritual killing, and killing for food, even if our particular system alienates us from the process of food production.

And will wonder aloud why the land of vegetarians is also the land which has kept this practice.  I will wonder aloud as well, as I have before, why the land which rejects eating meat has by far the largest number of people formally rejected from society, and denied basic human rights, the Dalits.

As I have said before, the situation of most Dalits is actually arguably worse than that of blacks in the Jim Crow South.  And there are two hundred MILLION of them.

Personally, I tend to reject Large Stories.  Most of us are vastly better off trying to learn deep relaxation, the process of digesting experience, and of living peaceful productive lives and, where necessary, fighting productive lives.

If God is in me, I do not need to abase myself again before any other God, much less any human being.  Abasement is for humans, not God–and not Buddha either, for that matter.

It is perhaps a mild exaggeration to say that the civil religion of political Liberalism worships the innate dignity of all humans, but only a mild one.  We need to keep what is good in this creed, and that necessarily means opposing with all means necessary the lunatics who would bring this progress to a halt, and throw us all back a thousand years or more.

What if there does exist a spiritual realm, and agents from that realm have regularly appeared on Earth, in order form religions they themselves viewed as more or less useful jokes?  That the outer forms are ridiculous, but that they lead over time to actual, measurable improvements?

Much of true contemporary Liberalism is rooted in Christianity.  Even when actual belief falls away, the forms of love, tolerance, charity, peace, and kindness remain.  The religion was a means to this end, even if many of us cannot fathom just why an infinite God would choose to manifest his only Son in a specific place, at a specific time, to teach something, and be sacrificed on an altar by people committed to sacrifice, so that sins God alone specifies as sins could be atoned?  I think this notion is silly.

But on a deeper level, it contains sacrifice as a chosen individual act.  It includes committing oneself at a soul level to something foundationally important beyond ones tribe and ones family.  You cannot separate these images from Christian dogma as a whole or, of course, Christ’s teachings as we have received them so many centuries later.