Author: White Whale

The place of your mother within your consciousness, how the thought of her makes you feel, what images come to mind, what you associate with her memory and her presence–if she is still alive, or even her “relics” if she is not–define much of who you are.

It occurred to me that throughout history not all homes have been happy.  Not all wives have been glad to be with their husbands, or happy to bear their children.  Not all children have been loved, and many resented silently and even hated.  I see no reason not to believe this has always been so.

Here, though, is a to-me-interesting-thought (TMIT): what if the role of archetypal feminine, of the compassionate goddess, the female angel, the Virgin Mary, serves to complement and improve the images and feelings which came with childhood for the individuals within that society?

Can we not posit that honest myth, used properly, completes pictures which are incomplete, in addition to presenting ideals, and expressing unpleasantness otherwise not subject to public examination?

I have my own issues, obviously–which I have discussed too much, almost certainly, although if it does me good, and it has, it obviously isn’t too much–but I’m not the only one.  This is an interesting thought, which springs from a very specific set of intrapsychic events I choose not to discuss here.

I think announcement will simply bring into the foreground, into the light, the massive underlying anti-Semitism–the racism, to be clear, the real, old school fertile ground from which mass murders and judicial injustice have long proceeded–which causes people to hate Israel so much.

I am just going to throw this idea out here.  I don’t know how to evaluate it.

What if Leftwing ideology has its deep psychodynamic roots in poor maternal bonding? 

Here is my logic.  At its root, and since at least the French Revolution, and following succession of tyrannies, the idea has been to overthrow everything that is, and replace it with something new.

Psychodynamically, what–or here, who–connects you with your past and culture in the deepest sense?  Your mother. Your father might teach you concepts like patriotism and honor and courage, if you are a man, but your mother teaches you who you are.  She tells you, through her behavior and bonding, whether or not you belong.

And if you can find no means to belong, revolution as an abstraction to replace failed emotional attachment would or could come to be very emotionally logical, even life-saving, which would explain the fanaticism which often–usually or even always might be more accurate–accompanies this form of psychopathology.

And I want to be clear: differing, true statements can be made about the management of human affairs.  Differing political forms can “work”, depending on how we define that term. I do not want to critique dogmatism in a dogmatic spirit.

What I am targeting is delusional politics, which seeks a utopia which is made impossible by the very blindness which occasions the quest.

I posted this somewhere on the internet, and thought it worth sharing here. 


I would simply submit, in an effort to help you understand “the other side” (which is of course as heterogeneous as your own), that there are vital differences between CORPORATE tax rates, and INDIVIDUAL income tax rates. 


My personal belief is that corporate rates should be zero, because everyone working there is already taxed. Even the CEO’s can’t shelter ordinary income in the places where they do business, but it makes vastly more sense for corporations to do business where they keep more of their profit. 


Profit is the motive for doing, and substantially everything you see or use every day was built for profit. This would include your car, your computer, your cell phone, the medical devices your doctor uses, the coffee you drink, and even the roads you drive and bridges you use were paid for with taxes paid by people seeking profit. 


The second point I would make is that from my perspective, Single Payer equals Zero Choice healthcare. I get assigned the doctor some bureaucrat chooses for me. I know the literature says that I will get lots of choices, but we were also told on the front end of Obamacare that “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor”, despite the fact that the bill itself, in the small print, said otherwise. And in point of fact, many people lost health insurance outright. 


Regardless, much of this comes down to trust. Do you trust government more than the free market? You obviously trust government. In my own case, I don’t trust either, but I see free markets as a quick and easy way to fix problems–market demand creates business response–which are not present with government bureaucracies, which have not inherent incentive to be efficient, competent, or caring. Businesses are not caring either, but they want our money, and the only way they keep getting it is by providing good service.


And I will note, finally, that the monopolies so often feared are rarely seen. In fact, they are usually only achieved, and certainly only maintained, when government supports them. In my view, the reason the biggest health insurers supported Obamacare was to squeeze their competition out of the market, something which has happened, although regulators have prevented some of the largest proposed consolidations from happening. And I will end by asking: are you aware that most Medicare plans are administered, for profit, by the largest health insurance providers, like United Health Group?

It might be interesting for someone to compare and contrast the crimes of western colonialism with that of Communist tyrannies, their own colonialism and imperialism, and to add to all this an examination of Islamic imperialism.

These are just three of the most obvious systems of violence in history, but we are being told one was uniquely evil, which is true, but the Left had not identified the CORRECT one.

I get the feeling with some people strongly that they are playing roles.  They are actors, trying to react the way the character they want to play would act.  They are not interacting with reality, but through their imagined sense of how they would react if they felt everything appropriate to their character, which self evidently they don’t, to the precise extent I am right about this.

We are starved of authentic, deep emotion in this country.  I don’t know why, although of course I have reams of related commentary.  I am simply going to leave this here for now.

The ability to BE who you are is essentially the same as the ability to feel who you are.  Being able to describe, in however much detail, who you are–which is the chief virtue taught in most forms of psychotherapy–is quite distant from this ideal, and tends away from, not towards it.

In my own case, I have consumed countless books telling me what to do.  But what has always been missing is a sense of who it was who might consent to do these things.  Until you are one, you are two or many.  This is a complexity which is impossible to make sense of.  One can walk on two feet.  Many cannot walk at all.

Connecting the ache with a past real self.

This is the short version.

It seems to me there are two real prerequisites for emotional growth.  First, you must be aware of what you are feeling, and the pain it causes you.  Second, you must see an alternative.

Lacking the first, you will never seek or see the second.  Lacking the second, some part of you will prevent you, at a preconscious level, from becoming aware of the first.  To do otherwise is to admit functional helplessness.  Some can, but most can’t or won’t.

This is of course the rough outline of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths.  It is as important to convince people their houses are on fire as to convince them there is a way out of it.  And that first argument is hard to make with people who have been living a certain way for a very long time, and getting along just fine, thank you.

What I see is that many of our obsessive, rigid patterns, originate in antiquated but once useful adaptations to real situations.  The problem is that they exist in a space beyond time, and bringing them into time–the present, specifically–is the only way to show them that circumstances have changed, and that something new is desirable, that they have a path either to extinction or improvement.

In some cases, these relics make us tired and old beyond our years.  In such cases, allowing them to sleep is quite welcome.  It is setting down an unwanted burden.

In others, they are thwarted life energy, and what is needed is an infusion of new energy, of new passions, and new directions.

Most of us enjoy the idea and prospect of travel in the outer world easily enough.  We naturally want to go places we have not been, in most cases provided we can then return home to a familiar place and way of being.

Where I–and I think many others–have often erred, is in thinking that changing means going somewhere new and staying there.  What I think it really means is learning how to build a much larger, and much safer home.  It means expanding the domain of comfort, of surveying new land, finding it congenial, and expanding emotionally and psychologically, such that there is no need of return, because you are already there.  You are already welcome.  You are already at ease, and feeling safe and known, in a world you in turn know well.

In the past five or six years, I could easily have traveled the physical world with all the money I have spent on personal growth–money, indeed, I continue to spend.  But my feeling has been “why go anywhere else, when I don’t know how to be where I already am?”

I have filled by bookshelf with some old Buddhist texts, but my sense is that the path forward for all of us, as it evolves, assuming it does evolve, and evolves in a way consistent with freedom and dignity, will not lie through any historical creed or teacher.  It will be an Emergent Property of science, which has done so much in so many realms, but as yet offered us so little in terms of culture and reasons for metaphysical optimism, despite the fact that its methods lead inexorably in that direction, when applied–and this of course has been the problem–with diligence and true scientific integrity and dispassion.

Diogenes would search in vain in most universities the world over, when searching for those who are truly honest when it comes to the nature of reality, and as-yet unintegrated empirical research in domains like the survival of death, and the energetic fields which seemingly connect life with life, humans with humans, and past with present and future.

A piece of cloth with a hole in it cannot be considered whole, in the same way that a gap in the ocean’s depths is inconceivable.