Author: White Whale

Given human instability and confusion, the goal of politics should not be a system which is perfect, but perfectible.  The goal should not be a static system capable of giving all people everything they are believed by the governing elite to want–or which they WOULD want, if they were not feckless, ungrateful wretches–but rather a system in which people decide, on as local a level as possible, what they want, and are allowed to do so.

Manifestly, the American system has shown itself to be perfectible, and this is its chief virtue.  It cannot be said that we rejected slavery 200 years ago, because we didn’t.  But we were one of the first nations in human history–going back over 2,000 years–to banish it, and perhaps the only nation ever to fight a bloody war over it, or at least largely over it.

All nations, all tribes, all confederations and leagues and city-states and fiefdoms and monarchic orders and every other form of government have been discriminatory for all of human history.  The Romans, for example, were quite fair by historical standards, but they always made Roman citizens legally better in all important respects.  They had rights which others did not.

Discrimination is the rule of history.  What is unique is fighting against it.  This is a feature which has evolved within our perfectible system.

What we should pursue is freedom, which is to say the protection by the government of what will ideally evolve into a pervasive pursuit of individual perfection, which is to say growth.

What we should reject with every ounce of strength and courage and resolution we have is the freezing of our government with ice nine into a static, unresponsive, unperfectible structure of death, desolation, and misery, which is what all Utopian projects–projects of perfection–devolve into invariably.

Utopianism, by definition I would argue, focuses on perfection OUT THERE.  It focuses on social arrangements, not on the content of that individual’s–that person spouting Utopian rhetoric–heart.  Utopianism is ice nine-ism is the pursuit of shared death by people unable to live on their own.

We preach what we cannot do.  We seek what we cannot find.  And we find what never needed to be sought.

Perhaps Taoism might be summarized as reliably finding what is there, and valuing it properly.  It is completing the circle without taking a step.  Just watch: here it comes again.  What fun!!!

OK: I will deopaque this slightly: If you can anticipate 20 steps in the future, and you are going to wind up where you already are, you can skip those twenty steps.  I could do on with this, but I just got lost myself.

Look out your window.  This is always a good rule of thumb.

The Absurdism of Cat’s Cradle is echoing in me a bit.  Every book I read, every movie I watch, bounces around for a while.  This is no different.

Here is a principle: once everything which is contingent, tragic, comical, absurd, stupid, ridiculous, and utterly human is subtracted, what remains is neither the Truth nor a lie, but the Tao.  And the Tao is in fact a Way, a way beyond all the suicides of self, of mind, of compassion, of joy, of sadness, of love, of everything else we sacrifice to keep our sanity. Rather, what we are pleased to call our sanity, which is itself always a bit absurd.

We sacrifice to keep going,but in some respects, most of us find ourselves frozen in place, frozen in time, rigid.  This is perhaps the metaphor Vonnegut intended with Ice Nine (ice nine?): not the death of death, but the death of solidity and stasis, of becoming immune to absurdity, of becoming convinced you are utterly right about everything.

I have spoken often about perceptual movement, or Perceptual Breathing.  It is quite possible to create a continuum where one end is anchored in futility and the utter incoherence and unknowability of everything (and the other, of course, anchored in Absolute Truth).  This is a conclusion of despair, but also of observation.  War is always already an abomination which, as Lao Tzu commented some 2,600 years ago, should be celebrated as a funeral even when successful.  Nationalism is ersatz community, Gesellschaft masquerading as Gemeinschaft.  Worse: Gesellschaft masquerading as “karass“.  You can’t love everyone, and they can’t love you.  And love is in any event not always what you need.  You don’t know what you need.  This, too, is absurd.

I will share autobiography I shouldn’t, but I continue to believe all is revealed in the end, so we may as well practice.

I saw my mother recently after a long period, and I was struck that her emotional tone reminds me of three very different people singing three different tunes all at the same time, all slightly off key.  It keeps her occupied, but there is no room for anyone else.  I am certainly not there, I am not present to her consciousness, nor will I ever be.

This is Verworfenheit.  In important respects, I had no mother.  She did not try to hurt me.  She was not consciously cruel.  But the wounds remain, and there is no reconciling them.  There is nothing I can say to her to bridge this gap, even now, after all these long years.  This is a lonely prospect.

But it has created in me an unusual perspective.  I should have cracked apart and broken, but somehow I didn’t.  Something coherent within me is stronger than the forces which should tear me apart.  I have, not a mother, but a Fate which I am living.

This is something.

So I read Vonnegut’s absurd novel “Cat’s Cradle” (no cat, no cradle), and actually found it therapeutic.  If you adopt a pessimistic attitude that everyone is a fucking idiot and there is nothing you can do about it, it’s vastly easier to avoid a judgmental attitude, as well as much mental turmoil.

I am reminded of the habit of some Sufi sects of labeling people by their particular form of idiocy.  And I then think, though, that only an idiot would try to explain this convention.

Russia Times keeps posting pro-Maduro articles. Putin evidently ordered Russian troops of some sort down to Venezuela.

Here is a good treatment of the subject: https://www.prageru.com/videos/hows-socialism-doing-venezuela

What gets me about all this is the number of people who even now are prepared to overlook Maduro’s crimes, those of Chavez before him, and the Big Picture failure of EVERYTHING they have done in Venezuela.  As far as I can tell there are only two classes of people in Venezuela: a small elite who benefit from the ability to rob from the People in the name of “Social Justice”–social justice rendered in rich meals, expensive cigars, and large mansions protected by heavily armed guards–and the masses who are suffering terribly from what at best is described as food insecurity, and in many cases as outright starvation.  Everything that worked no longer worked.  There are no jobs.  Inflation has reached the point where it is safe to assume barter is the primary medium of exchange.

Who defends this?  Fine, if you want to say America interfered in many nations, we did.  We prevented the Soviets from making Iran a puppet state.  We prevented Communists from taking over El Salvador and Guatamala.  The list could be extended, but to my mind the point is that we prevented regimes exactly like that of Hugo Chavez.  They don’t seem to value principle or long disciplined political building projects in Latin America, so a case can be made that we made things worse, or at least did not help, and hurt a lot of people in the process.

But the Soviets, invariably, everywhere they went, every country their agents of influence went into, suffered terribly, and never got better, or only got better once the Communists were out of power.  Look at Zimbabwe.  Mugabe, on most accounts, did damage that will take 20-30 years to fix.  The Soviets were behind the birth of Islamic terrorism, which ironically enough has come back to haunt Russia itself. Cuba is a wax museum stuck in the pre-Castro era, with tired air, tired people, and no hope.

And nearly all wars America took part in were started by the Soviets.  Absent the Soviets and Red Chinese, the Korean and Vietnam Wars would not have happened.  Would not have been started.

And even over and above all that, even if I grant that the picture of American interventions is complex, the situation in Venezuela is not.  There is nothing there that is good that can or should be defended by any sane person.  It is dictatorship which has destroyed economic opportunity, created mass poverty, and which rules at the point of a gun.  This is the sort of thing which, if America supported it, the Commies would be up in arms about.  FASCISM!!  They would scream.  They would call Maduro a right wing strong man, and demand his ouster.

The thing which is lost when you dissolve your emotional sensitivity in abstraction is a capacity for nuance, proportion, and consistency.  If you call a regime with one set of attributes a horror in one context, that exact same sort of regime should not become good if they make the sole modification of rationalizing themselves in a different way.  Whether they use national honor as a rationalizing pretext, or social justice, if there are guns pointed at everyone who dissents, it is fascist.  If the freedom of the press is suppressed, it is fascist.  If people marching in the streets are met with troops whose sole purpose is to disperse them and make them disappear, it is fascist.

I am astonished at the degree of mental illness I see on the internet, people with degrees, even advanced degrees, saying the most palpably silly and inexcusable things.  Israel is another place where this form of lunacy clusters, and all sense of reason, consistency, and proportion vanish.

I walk along
the path
of Roses.
I see the petals
fallen.
they speak to me
and tell me of
when they were in
full bloom
of the intoxicating
beauty of the fragrance
they exuded effortlessly, exultantly.

I think of my own blossoms
so many years ago
the fragrance of me, of my passion,
of my love.
I think that I too am a rose petal,
but that it is never too late
to bloom again
To perfume a world.

Your pain? 

It lies on the ground.

Your enchantment? 

It rises with the morning fog, always
and forever.  There are smiles

In everything you forget.

A gay man with Downs Syndrome. Or someone with Downs Syndrome who is gay. Or Autism.

You’re welcome.

Please add John Ishmael Smith to your list of people who are sufficiently small in number that you CAN mention them. 

Sand is constantly shifting, and fog obscures everything. The suicide in that film transfers, not to two, but to three.  What was a moment ago is no more.  Perhaps its opposite has taken its place.

I hated this movie, but I found it useful.  I figured they would kill the kid, but did not see the rest coming.

Stay alert. Remain alert. Sleep when you must, but know when you are sleeping.

Someday, you may help someone if you do.  You may be the only one in the room who has the slightest clue what the fuck is happening.  Thinking for yourself, and seeing and hearing and perceiving generally for yourself, are lost arts.

I will remind you of the movie “The Angel of Death”.  The perception and action flowed in a circle, and the circle became stuck.

Be an arrow in a world of circles.  I say that somewhat, but mostly not, facetiously.  Stand erect in a world of grovelers.  Your neighbor?  He’s looking at you.  If you look back at him, both of you will look at the TV.  This is how Trump was engineered in the public mind to be perceived as everything he isn’t.

It would actually not be hard to read that movie as a commentary on the potential of the government to fuck people’s lives up.  The County should have filed a tax lien preventing the sale of the house without payment.  They can put themselves in first position, and given overall sales volume in California it would not be long before they had their money.  I wonder if the film reflected how things actually work, although there is little that is beyond the pale in Socialist utopias like California and New York.

And absent an entitled law enforcement officer, who broke the law, everything would have worked out. 

I suppose I was supposed to let my heart bleed at how immigrants are treated, but Kingsley was actually treated very fairly, and likely much more fairly than an American in Iran in a similar position would have been, even in the days of the Shah (and before the “People’s Revolution” created an dictatorship whose abuses made the Shah look like a model of tolerance and restraint.)

I could go the next step and blame Jimmy Carter for pushing Kingsley’s character out of Iran in the first place.  Nothing good came of it, and a very great deal of suffering.  The Shah was repressive, yes, but perhaps only to one one hundredth the extent the Mullahs are.  They kill people.  They torture people. They operate the same political prisons the Shah did.

As always with regimes Leftists support, a man who only wanted to stay in power was replaced by people who not only wanted power over every last detail of people’s lives–something the Shah never sought–but over their very minds and souls.

Leftism, and everything it touches and supports, is pure evil.

It seems to me true compassion can only proceed from what I have called a tragic sense of life, from an understanding that we are all lost, that we are all confused, that we are all taking our best guess, that life always ends in death.

None of us really know, for sure, how to play this game.  Certain things lead to better states than others, but we don’t really know how this world is put together.  Embracing this leads to a way of seeing everything everyone does as a result, an outcome, of taking a best guess, or of evading the guessing game entirely.

Intellectuals love to denigrate popular culture, but in the next breath they tell us we should all be miserable.  Popular culture is a drug which serves as a tranquilizer.  No one who can feel this world clearly can fail to understand why this would attractive.  It is most likely the covert attraction of most intellectuals (and no doubt I’m guilty here too) to pop culture which causes them to engage with it at all, much less judge it.

The Kardashians mean nothing.  Their lives are superficial and silly.  But they are something to focus on.  They are a place to direct your attention.  And they seem to generate a new train wreck every week, or at least that is the impression I get.  Train wrecks are interesting.  The misery and death of others is interesting, because even though we know we are all going there, we can take solace that it is not our turn, yet.  And perhaps we are practicing.

This form of compassion undercuts everything.  It excludes no one.  And it need not feel hate for those who judge.  It need not feel hate for those who abide by absolute moral codes. Such codes have much to be said for them, whereas the creed of “being nice” is really an American thing made economically possible by our advanced wealth.  Niceness evaporates under stress.  It is in many respects a lazy morality and little more.

What brings up this line of thought is the movie “The House of Sand and Fog”, which is a tragedy.  They come so close to working everything out, and at all points in the movie all people are acting rationally, from their perspective, based on their limited understanding.  Nobody sees the whole picture.  If any of them could see where it is all going, they would have acted differently, but no one does.  No one can.  That is how life is.  The wise see more, and fools see less, but few of us are wise, and none of our wise can see everything.  And in our culture at the moment, as it is expressed by most media (which is certainly divergent even now from a large swathe of America) wisdom is more or less conflated with being nice, and with assuming everything will work out if we just hope hard enough, and ignore or shout down everyone who says anything to the contrary.

Sometimes you do your best and your world falls apart.  Sometimes your world falls apart, and you can’t come even close to doing your best.  Most of us muddle along, in intermittent bouts of anger, happiness, sadness, confusion and doubt, love, fear, contentment, anxiety, and all the rest.

Compassion means “with-passion”.   No one who has not been through the gamut of emotions, both in quality and in amplitude, can really feel this emotion effectively.  It is not a quality to cultivate.  It is the outcome of understanding yourself, your own feelings, your own life, your own doubt and confusion, fear, pain and grief.

And as I have said–I have posted on this topic repeatedly, since I wrestle with it–what compassion emphatically is NOT is an excuse for establishing a relationship of superiority/inferiority.

It is right and proper for people to reject some forms of pity.  That pity says that person is pathetic, that they have fallen below the human norm.  You do not feel pity for people who you feel are suffering nobly.  You feel admiration.

Few thoughts.

What we need to be aiming for is a world where every infant feels perceived, loved, and protected.  Everything good, all morality, all social harmony, flows from this.

Morality which is difficult will often be abandoned.  Principles which require constant will will be enforced through fear, and this fear will always manifest in negative ways, typically war and violence of all sorts.

Why is there such income inequality now?  Well, first and foremost, because we have taken the last fucking limit off the power of banks to create money, and the Fed to pull them out of the hole when they go too far, as they invariably do.

But equally, and more saliently, because we have created a system where the sky is the limit as far as wealth, and we have filled it with men and women who feel fear continually, who are compelled to work as if someone were pointing a gun at their head, and for whom too much can never be even approximately enough.

The system, obviously, is not the problem.  Jeff Bezos hurts no one with his wealth, and his ambition and compulsions have created tens of thousands of jobs, which help a great deal.  Apparently Seattle was in the dumps economically around 2000.  Someone told me they had a sign on the outskirts of town on the outbound freeway “will the last person to leave please turn the lights off?”  That was before Amazon and some other similar companies.

But returning to my key point, if someone like Bezos was born to a tribe of 100, and if he was mothered the way he was apparently mothered, then he would HAVE to either be the chief, or be the foremost warrior in conflicts with other tribes.  He was born to stand out.  He was born to work obsessively until that happened.  This, because he is, or was, fundamentally unhappy, and thus emotionally unstable outside of his chosen solution of work.

Our world is filled with such people.  Those without talent become heroin, or sex addicts. Or alcoholics.  Far too many of them recently.

Progress, genuine progress, will consist in a close focus on how our children are raised, with particular focus on the first, usually forgotten, 4 years or so.  Having extended family is hugely useful.  Having an ersatz family in the form of a tribe would be perhaps equally useful.

These are the questions we should be asking.  This is where the focus needs to be on building a better society.  Laws are containers which sift out those whose traumas are too strong to stay within the lines, versus those whose fear conditioning is sufficient to keep them within those boundaries.  They are completely unnecessary for good people, those who respect others, and who know how to regulate their own behavior.

A perfect society has no government, or at least no police and no jails.  This is what we should be aiming for, and what all people who pretend to the label of “Progressive” should have in the front of their minds at all times.

These societies have existed.  I have seen them.  They do not last, because they do not need to remain on Earth.  Angels become angels.  But becoming angels is what life on this Earth is all about.

I continue to dream, and my dreaming hurts me.  It hurts me to feel what is possible, and not even know how to get there myself, much less lead others.  I am moving in the right direction.  The quality and character of my dreams are changing.  I am changing.  I am calmer now than I used to be.  But I still have many miles to go before it is my time to sleep.  So I feel.