Author: White Whale

I was “debating” a Communist on Facebook, and reflecting on this particular psychopathology.  What emerged that was new for me is that they don’t care who rules them.  This is perhaps the salient distinction from fascism.  A Hitler, or Mussolini, or Franco is not so very different from a king or emperor of another era.  People look to a face, and want that face to lead them.

A similar dynamic was perhaps in play in Russia and China, with the difference was that the rulers emerged AFTER the Party was victorious, and an effort was made to create popular support.  That is likely an over-simplification, but the point as concerns current Communists remains.

They simply know they want to be ruled.  They simply know they want their Party in charge.  Psychologically, I cannot see any meaningful way in which they do not want to be subordinated, in effect, to a machine, to an apparatus of control, to nameless faces, far away.

Ponder that.

And rhetorically, it occurs to me that Communists win many debates because they simply trot out the atrocities of America, and American backed rulers, and the idiots they are speaking to have no ability to frame these actions in a historical context.  They simply know that “we” committed crimes, and the people doing the talking have no desire or intent of doing an actual moral comparison with the actions of Communists, even though they are essential to forming anything approximating a balanced picture.

I look at these peoples, and picture them in boats.  They throw reason–which is the balanced consideration of all factors, which are then integrated into a framework of principle–overboard.  They throw compassion–which is the ability to empathize with ALL human suffering–overboard.  The first is the rudder, the second is the oars or sails.  What is left is adrift.  Such people have no history, they have no people, they have no law.  They have only what they are told, and what they do.  It is very hard building bridges to people lost at sea.

You only think about the meaning of life when the feeling of meaning and purpose has slipped through your fingers, just as you only think about love when it is gone.

The true problem of philosophy–one it is singularly ill-equipped to solve–is how to create the feeling of tribal membership for all humanity, without the conflicts that have always attended, and perhaps even supported and facilitated, tribalisms.

Why not drop the labels fascist, communist, authoritarian and totalitarian, and simply call the disciples and apostles of these anti-humanisms what they are: aspiring bullies?

These Antifa kids are the ones who were likely bullied in school, and now, finally, they can have retributive wet dreams, score settling fantasies, not with the present, but with the past. Politics is merely a thin and bad pretext.

To state the obvious, ALL bullies were bullied, and all bullies in their own mind are just fucking with the world before it can fuck with them, or because it fucked with them.

Our political world at the moment is characterized by mental illness, and the reactions to it.

I was driving up a ramp in a parking garage, running a tad late for a deadline that in any event only existed in my mind, and this word popped in my head. Then henarchy.

To double check I understood the prefix heno, I did a Google search and found this: https://turmarion.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/theism-poly-mono-heno-and-other-options/

I think I have slightly misunderstood heno-. I thought it meant alternating, or something close to that. It means in reality, one but not exclusive, more or less. It might in fact be equated with religious pluralism of the sort that prevented most sectarian conflict in India until the Muslims and their radical monotheism.

But ponder the idea of polyarchy–rule of many sorts. What if absolute monarchs were elected to five year terms? What if some cities used rule by oligarchs (explicitly, in any event)? What if we resurrected literal popular votes held in city squares?

What if we made the concept of “best form of government” an open question?

As I ponder, I then wonder why we need ANY government, if we could more or less get along. War. War is the usual answer. It is why Israel first created a kingship. It is why our Founders wanted a strong Presidency. It is how many nations are formed: to get big enough to fight off some invading force.

In conditions of peace, though:why?

What about a king who is basically paid to sit around and occasionally unruffle some feathers? Who has a boring job, but occasionally proves useful?

Or, in a form I think the Vikings and others adopted, popular assemblies convened only when needed?

This is my brain. I find new words both lead new places, and permit new perspectives on the old.

Greed which is naked has limits.  Greed which is cloaked in the garb of humanitarianism has no limits.

Life hacking is currently a popular concept. This is what the smart people are doing, we are told by people selling both the ideas, and the idea of being smart.

It occurs to me that liberty is a necessary precondition for continual innovation and counter-paradigmatic thinking.

At a conceptual level, ideational freedom combined with relative freedom of action and complete freedom of expression, is a meta-hack: it is how you get smarter about getting smarter.

And necessarily, the LACK of ideational and speech freedoms on college campuses can ONLY work to make people stupider. In my view, no other outcome is possible.

If I might state the obvious, if you want innovation, you need to allow it.

I have learned not to trust people who are too nice, and companies which make an ostentatious show of how much “fun” they are.  If there are caricatures on the wall, or goofy posters, add 10%.

Contemplate the phrase and image of an Endless Square.

This might resonate with someone.  It just came to me.  I can explain it, but I won’t.

I pulled out my old Bob Anderson stretching book, the one that has Jim Fixx–are you old enough to remember him?–as a reference, and actually followed his instructions.  He talks about the stretch reflex in there.  And I did it so gently it was more like the idea of a stretch, and a means for focusing on that part of my body, of becoming aware of it, of letting it release its knowledge, which is a very Kum Nye approach.

And lo and behold old feelings and the memories associated with those feelings started coming out. I have repressed–held back, hidden–so much, out of necessity.  It is odd, making contact with my 6 year old self, what I was feeling.  I stopped asking myself what I was feeling around then, and was not old enough to do it any earlier, although I am sure I expressed myself, as young kids do.

And it hit me that this sort of healing activity is the MAIN activity of spirituality.  I was reading my Kum Nye reading earlier, and it is all about relaxation and well being.  A spiritual person feels everything anyone else feels.  They react the same way in the same situations.  But having taught themselves to process emotions, the recover vastly more quickly.  They get back to a high baseline, where many people start bogged down in unprocessed emotion, then stay there, and in some cases get dragged down further by circumstances, or perhaps more accurately, their understanding of the circumstances which their unprocessed emotions compel on them without their awareness.

And then it hit me that much of the Big Three (as seen from the chair I am sitting in) is focused on sin and an invisible God, on rules, obeying the rules, breaking the rules, and an invisible hereafter.  It is not at all about feeling good, and in fact, all three to some greater or lesser extent want people to feel ashamed, unworthy, and generally like shit because of sins someone else committed, or because of their inability to fully repress healthy instincts like sex, a desire for a comfortable life, and for objects of beauty.

This is absurd.  Goodness–real Goodness–flows from a sense of abundance.  Generosity of self is the natural consequence of feeling good, just as material generosity is a natural outcome of abundance.  It requires no special virtue, no special compulsion.

Here is the thing: if you seek goodness directly, you cannot find it.  It is, as Chuang Tzu said over 2,000 years ago, crooked.  It is not found in a straight line.  It is not found in a simple prescription like “be nice”.  It is not found, in my view, in any religious frameworks oriented around ritual behavior.  It is found by valuing one’s self, one’s own well being.  At some point, perceptive people find that helping others be happy makes them happy, but this point is not reached in a condition of personal emptiness.  You can dedicate your life to helping others, and die empty, if you do it from the wrong place.  This is my opinion.  Some measure of selfishness is required of all honest spirituality.  To say otherwise is to adopt a spirit of compulsion in my view.

And I will share two other posts here for my own convenience. 

Compulsion is equating 90% with 0%.  A healthy person sees 90% as 90%.  It is not 100%, but it is not nothing either.  Partial measures are always better than no measures, and not everything in life is worth 100%.  Most things are not.  You save the 100% for the things that are.  If you try to treat everything as a matter of life and death, you wind up shutting down much of the world out of necessity.  If you have to give 100% everywhere, you have to shrink your world.  There is no other choice.  You have to shrink your domain of action and thought.

If, conversely, it is acceptable to give 10% to some things, then many more things emerge from the darkness for your consideration.

The other point I wanted to make is that frequently lesser goodness is greater goodness.  I have, in my own life, often made things worse for people in the process of trying to make them better.  As one example, I see people’s pain when they do not, and have at times spoken of it.  Almost always, this is a mistake.  They hide their pain from themselves for a reason.  Bringing it out increases their suffering.  It does not decrease it.  They have to find their pain, and process their pain, in their own time.

I think most of the time–and this is a provisional hypothesis, since I don’t have this figured out–it is best simply to mirror what people give you voluntarily.  Show them that you hear them, nothing more.  Sometimes this is a small consolation in the midst of a vast suffering, but something is better than nothing, and trying to be greedy with your “goodness” can undo everything.

I would actually, to complete the circle, equate trying to do too much with stretching too hard.  You activate their impulse towards contraction, and they wind up smaller because they met you.  This is incompetence, period.

Don’t be incompetent.  This is not a bad rule.  And if you figure it out completely, feel free to comment.  I’m still looking for ideas.

We are all fools in our own ways.  The best we can hope is that we live long lives in which we become a little less stupid each day, which is perhaps close to the Taoist idea of doing more by doing less.  Remove what is unnecessary, and the path becomes brighter and simpler.

No one can drink water for anyone else.