I don’t know if there is a need for this word, but it’s my blog and my playground, so fuck it.
I was listening to a BBC podcast on Alexis de Tocqueville, and they commented on how little he cared for the homogeneity of our culture, of how “democracy” precisely meant that there were no great men, as Europeans of his time would have understood it, and how most Americans were mainly interested in making money and joining clubs, and that was about all we cared about in life, beyond our religion. We did not produce “artists” worthy of the name, he felt (they critiqued this claim by pointing out that Poe, among others, was active at this time).
And it clicked with me that while he admired much of our democracy, much of our system, he still felt the need for a nobility, for a class of superior people, however defined, in order for our CULTURE to flourish. You have on the one hand “mere” money making, and on the other, generative, creative, better people who teach the commoners how to live, or at least demonstrate an alternative. A purely “bourgeois” culture he could not accept or embrace . There had to be great art, great music, great literature.
Then it hit me that intellectuals–particularly Continental intellectuals, and those influenced by them–never rejected the notion of nobility, of class, of social structure: they merely posited that post-religious thinkers and artists should occupy the position of nobility.
When you run the past 200 years of intellectual and political history through this Rosetta Stone–what I call a Tubaform–then EVERYTHING makes perfect sense. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is merely the “ancien regime” reinstalled per the specifications of the aspiring elite. They don’t reject the idea of rulership, merely the idea that people they consider their inferiors–hereditary nobility and clergy–should occupy any of those positions.
It makes sense why someone like Jean-Paul Sartre would hate engineers. I read this was a favorite insult of his. On the surface, this makes no sense, since social engineering is at the heart of the Communist project. It consists in little else. (and for my part, I am quite happy to think of myself as an engineer of ideas, which is why I invoke it in the first paragraph of my essay on Goodness).
But for Sartre, it meant “this person is not one of us. He exists purely in the practical domain, which means he is spiritually inferior.” Sartre literally thought of himself as an aristocrat of spirit. And he gave himself to the public as something like a prophet. Although I have not read much of the explanation he himself gave, it seems likely he refused the Nobel Prize not because he felt inferior to it, but SUPERIOR to it. It was a bourgeois–which is a synonym for “intellectual commoner”–prize, given by people he was better than.
And the logical conclusion is that the creed of egalitarianism is one proposed and pushed by elitists, by people who simply want to remove classes “out there”, but who never for a moment consider that they themselves are anything but morally nobler, and fit for nothing BUT rule.
So over the past 100 years, particularly, you have two sets of people competing for the affections of the poor: the intellectuals, and the actual middle class. The intellectuals don’t care about the relative poverty or wealth of the poor (this is obvious), but rather about the installation of an intellectual state which is satisfactory to their “spiritual” ambitions of being a ruling intelligentsia.
Against this, you have small business owners, and large factories, hiring the poor, paying them good wages, enabling them to move into increasingly large homes, and free to be as intellectually mediocre as they like. Catastrophe, from an elitist intellectuals perspective.
This explains the hatred of the bourgeosie: they are competitors, those who are feeding the hungering masses, when they should know that they don’t live by bread alone.
Paradoxically, the intellectuals here, then, become martyrs to the middle class, and hateful and resentful. In their own minds, they are the Christ figures, misunderstood, mistreated, maligned, but still worthy of worship.
Obama was their apotheosis. He was perfectly worthless. He knew nothing useful about anything. No one could accuse HIM of being an engineer. I doubt he ever even took any math classes. Reading scripted lines–and repeating cant and propaganda before that–was his main forte. But he BOUGHT INTO the notion of the inherent social superiority of intellectuals. That was quite sufficient.
And my God, could anyone be more opposite than Donald Trump? Bad hair, bad grammar, money obsessed, intellectually incurious: this stupid, destructive motherfucker just wants people to make money, to be prosperous, and to buy more TV’s and automobiles.
Gotterdammerung. Small wonder their small minds and smaller spirits are so obsessed with him, and with reversing history and the will of the people they actually hate.
Ponder this. It is a slightly new angle on an old theme, but sometimes getting just the right angle allows you to look far down the tunnel, or in this case, the hole where the wild and sick things go and grow.
But ponder a baby who is yelled at for crying, for wanting attention, for craving some sense of connection between how it feels, and how the world reacts. A baby who has been shouted into silence, by a mother who is tired of being a mother, and vastly prefers chatting with her friends on the telephone? Imagine this child is sensitive, and highly intelligent.
I got to that feeling today. And it is like a wall which rises to the sky. I cannot imagine a way around, under or over, or through it.
What I have learned though, is that such feelings are not walls at all. They are knots. And some part of our unconscious knows how to untie them. It is not something which does, or could, happen in the conscious domain. So I’m feeling this terror that perhaps I am going crazy. My rational mind says: you have been here before. You have endured this before. What you feel, now, you will not feel in twenty minutes.
And so it was. The monster has to get close enough to you for you to feel its breath, before it finally loses interest, and begins to wander away.
And what I felt is that evil is the result when the sense of self is tied to a tension which never eases. When, to let go of the tension, you have to lose your sense of self for a moment, without having any way of knowing if “you” will ever come back, or who you might be.
Evil is this, and it is a habit, a habit of violence. You get them before they can get you, but they are only getting you before you can get them. I watched this video on stress last night, and found it interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYG0ZuTv5rs
About two thirds of the way through, they tell the story of a pack of baboons who underwent a period of death from disease. They went from being typical baboons, which is to say a set of assholes bullying and torturing everyone with less status around them, to being what we might in some respects describe as a peaceful, Christian community, all within a short period of time of perhaps less than a year. They lost one habit, and gained another.
Identity is such a mutable and odd thing. In some respects it is the habit of “being” who you think you have always been. But I am finding that faith in something we might call the Inner Healer, as they do in Holotropic breathwork, and perhaps other places, is useful. You have to let go, fall, and let something else take over.
You may find it interesting, or something else, to know that I put some mustard seeds on my little altar.
And the mountains Christ referred to: those are within us. Sometimes mountains need to be moved. This is the hard work, the long term work, the backbreaking, terrifying work.
But it is THE work, and no less.
And it hit me: logically, if there is no divine justice, then there is only human justice. And if there is no human justice, then there is no justice at all. The world has no moral form at all.
Would this sentiment not be quite sufficient to motivate many to make a God of “social justice”, even if they make of that God an idol?
I really think there is wisdom, especially now, in our crazy world, in a Day of Rest. And the more I contemplate it, the more Saturday makes sense.
Here is the thing: do you pay the world first, or pay yourself? Do you give your best to the world first, or to the people and things and activities you love? Work is not life, or in any event, it should not be. Work should be important. It should be done competently and ideally with passion.
But most of us are working for someone else. Do they deserve, should they get, the very best part of our selves, of our capacities, our efforts? I don’t think so.
The week starts with Sunday. This is when you pay yourself. This is when you do the things you always said you were going to do. This is when you start or work on the novel, plant the garden, listen to beautiful music, paint the house a color that makes you happy, spend time with your family (which you also do on Saturday). This time is for you.
Nearly all of us, even if it takes some long days, can get done in five days what truly needs to get done. A friend of mine who knew someone who had been through both Norwegian Jaeger School, and American Army Ranger School, said the former was significantly harder, DESPITE the fact that they got every weekend off. It was, as I understand it, Monday through Friday, roughly four weeks.
Most of us underestimate how much we can truly get done in a day if we focus. I think it is much, much smarter to work HARD as needed, for a defined period of time, them to take a determined, serious, break. To lay around and do something close to nothing for 24 hours. Then, to get up, and do something creative and fun. Amble towards your work week in this way, THEN on Monday, set off at whatever speed you need to to keep the whole thing working.
This makes emotional sense to me. Sunday, you work, but you do work you want to do, which is important TO YOU. It is not for “The Man”. It is for you and your family and your friends.
In a way I can’t precisely define, I feel making Monday the first day offers all power to the Church, which instituted this idea.
Sometimes, though, if I go too long without doing any of those things it will spasm up while I am sleeping, and cause a sharp pain in my chest, which always feels like a heart attack. It is very unpleasant. I have spent many hundreds of nights hoping and praying I would not die in the dark. This is over and above all my other adventures when I go to sleep. Last night was such a night.
I woke up this morning and decided to light a cigar, sit on my couch, and go more deeply into this whole feeling. It is a trigger point, a place where feelings congregate and attack, but it is simply an aggregator of feelings which emerge everywhere in me every day. It is like being in a boat which is constantly filling with water, and constantly needing to bail it out to stay afloat. It’s an exercise I am well used to by now. Some days I do it better than others. Some days, as with last night, I don’t do it at all, and sometimes I pay a price for it. The work I do for a living is pretty focused on my rhomboids and trapezius muscles, and they were very sore last night.
And it felt to me like some inner part of me feels like a soldier trying to cross a battlefield where shells are landing continually. It is impossible to know where to run, what to do. These “shells” are traumatic emergences, and I can see my parents on a ridge, shooting at me. My father is happy every time he hits me. He wants me to fail. My mother is much more angry. She wanted me to be her slave.
And it occurs to me that in the real world, the soldiers who get PTSD are those who, like me, suppress their feelings, who simply do what has to be done, while emotionally numb. Who are unable to engage with their fear, unable to engage with and focus on the task to be done with something even approaching confidence. Who go in thinking “I am going to die”–or even nothing at all–and who then simply watch a body go through the motions while feeling, consciously, close to nothing other than the raw sensations the body cannot but go through.
Every day is like this for me. I have learned, through the exercise of will, to get done what needs to get done, but there is no place, no time, no way for me to ever feel at peace with the world. There are no times where I feel “all is well. I am safe.” There is no other side, when the battle is within. You carry it with you, wherever you go.
Most mornings I create a plan for the day, and most days, I deviate from the plan nearly immediately. What really, truly needs to get done, does get done, but the line I had wanted to follow always comes to seem impossibly frightening very quickly.
And this image which came to me this morning, of running zig-zag through a field filled with the holes caused by detonating artillery, with shells exploding all around me, makes all of this make more sense emotionally.
The will is a powerful instrument, but it has limits. It does fatigue. You cannot spend every moment using it to its limit and not at some point run out of steam. So what I have managed to do is figure out a way to regularly use it in spurts, where it is really needed, and allow my fear to redirect me the rest of the time. It is not a good solution, but it has kept me alive.
And as grim as this image is, when I contemplate it, it represents a victory in itself. I am seeing more clearly my own inner world, what really makes me tick, how I really work. This would not have been possible, had I not been in a position where I can now begin to alter this inner world, in a positive and healthier direction.
Given all that I have been through, when I get myself to a position where I am able to form and retain positive habits, when I am not having to dodge or deal with head-on traumas popping into and interfering with my emotional life, then I will be capable of a great deal. In important respects, I have not yet begun to fight my main battles, but I am slowly reaching a point where I will be able to begin, and I cannot begin to imagine how much energy will be liberated when I am free, or as close to free as I am destined to get in this life.
I am reminded of the adage, which I quote approximately: “what does it profit you to gain the world, if you lose your soul?”
Anthony Bourdain had the perfect life. He could set the terms of his shows, go wherever he wanted, get paid big money to eat fantastic meals. He had a beautiful girlfriend, and was getting headlines for how fit he was at his age.
In the end, none of those blessings were weightier than the pain he carried with him.
For my part, I GET in some ways how this happens.
Certainly, I understand the feeling that causes people to take their own lives. I have felt it. And if you have never felt it, then it is impossible to explain. It is a pain, a grey pain, which expands to the horizon. Every fiber and particle in your being hurts. You cannot escape, you cannot go anywhere, you cannot any longer distract yourself, you can’t hold on, and suicide feels like the most wonderful, soothing way to just make the pain stop.
Now, in my particular case, holding on when there is no hope is kind of what I do. It is a character trait I thankfully developed long ago. I keep going when I can’t keep going, and it is a habit. And things are getting better. I am feeling feelings I have not felt in many years, feelings I had forgotten were possible.
But it is likely confusing to many how someone who outwardly has everything can feel such despair. It is not complicated, I don’t think.
When dealing with Developmental Trauma, with primitive feelings you felt and then forgot before you were 5 years old or so–feelings of betrayal, of chronic fear, of cruelty, of profound sadness and isolation–you are dealing with people who early on learned to lie to themselves about who they were, and what they wanted. Their own lies led to lies to everyone around them. They developed a personality, a persona, a presence which “worked” socially. Maybe people even liked them and found them charismatic, as with Bourdain.
[For my part, I have always felt a darkness in Bourdain, in what little of his shows I watched. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but if I’m honest, I felt a presence of evil in his vicinity.]
But this lie, this living of a lie, this inserting yourself into the social world in a way which prevents honest communication, and honest connection (they say the man who found Bourdain was his “good friend”), is tiring. You get tired, oh so tired, and the older you get, the more it wears on you, the heavier it feels. Add to this work stress, physical illness, and it’s not hard to go into a feeling of being overwhelmed. Add, finally, Robin Williams strangling himself with a belt, Kate Spade strangling herself with a scarf, and shit, all it takes is a couple minutes, one dyin’ and a buryin’.
[Take a moment and listen to this short song. Miller killed himself with alcohol (as I understand it), but as Kurt Vonnegut said of smoking, it’s a somewhat sociably acceptable form of suicide. If this song makes you cry, that is the point. It reminds us all of how sad life can sometimes be. But crying makes you stronger, and sadness is perhaps the only means to deep and reliable joy. Logically, if sadness is a part of life, and joy comes from embracing all of life, then one must go through sadness.]
In my own case, I have always been able to see the first whiffs of clouds on the horizon. I see things before other people do. I saw where my life was going literally in my teens, and have been working hard since then to figure it all out. That’s what I do all day, every day. I have work to do, and I do it reasonably well, but my mind is always on the big picture.
And it’s not just life itself, but we have so many unknowns in this world. I was laying in bed worrying about AI last night. It may be a Godsend. It may kill us all. As with most new things, the truth will likely be in the middle somewhere. It does seem obvious, though, and this is what bothers me, that most of the people who are most obsessed with this sort of thing are the least socially connected, least emotionally intelligent among us. They are, in other words, moral imbeciles.
My three Big Principles are a good survival code. I have discussed them many times, but to repeat, they are 1) Reject Self Pity; 2) Persevere in living, and eventually in what makes you happy and emotionally fulfilled; 3) Be curious. The world is filled with countless marvels, and so are you. It’s all quite interesting. Every moment and every street corner has things you have never seen before. Be like a child chasing a bird or a kitten chasing yarn.
Neurofeedback, if you can afford it or get it funded by your insurance, is in my view a worthwhile investment for most ailments, and certainly Developmental Trauma.
Beyond that, I can’t honestly say I know of any palliatives which are reliable. Booze isn’t bad, but you reach a point where it hurts as much as it helps. I haven’t done anti-depressants, but they are likely good for some.
For those of us who are really hurting, my principles are what I would submit are the best hope. Will yourself into survival. Your will will grow, and over time, if you start to open up to your feelings, the pain will ease. Kum Nye is a fantastic practice, and I am growing to like Jill Miller’s “Roll Model”.
Say a prayer for the dead, and thank God for your life. There is sadness in this world, heartache and pain, but there are also beauty, gratitude, wonderful human beings, the joy of growth, and a God which fills it all.
Here is something from Tecumseh which I read most days:
Clearly, some actions make this very hard, because they represent qualitative thresholds, but if evil is as evil does, then it is, indeed, a habit, and as such redeemable and replaceable.