Author: White Whale

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/06/24/a-cultural-revolution-in-slow-motion/

This article is great.  Please read it, and ponder it.

The soil has been prepared for mass death and destruction.  One sees this clearly in the abuse of words by the Left–I will note, perhaps unnecessarily, that Orwell pointed out that the abuse of language always precedes tyranny– and their physical and emotional abuse of all who dare challenge them on even the most ludicrous claims.

Large segments of our country–indeed the world–lives in this swampy miasma of bad ideas, continual rage, radical intolerance, self congratulation, and deep, deep, deep ignorance.

We all need to speak the truth to as many people as we can.  I think I am going to start responding consistently to my left wing Facebook friends until they unfriend me.  It is not worth buying the peace when so much is at stake.

What, indeed, could any competent psychologist make of people who see “fascists” everywhere, under every bush, behind every tree, but refuse to speak to them, refuse to engage with them, refuse to understand them, and who counsel violence as the only course?  What is the consistent element?  Their own minds, and their own fabrications and projections.

The “Red Menace” was quite real.  Evidence of this is seen, obviously, in the intellectual acid planted a half century by Communists and now filling the veins of our academics, our media, and far too much of the political class.

If there is a “Paranoid Style” in American politics, it is in the Fascists wearing masks and attacking Trump supporters in the streets.

You know, I often find myself weeping.  I weep for myself, for the weak, for the suffering in the world.  I welcome it, in general.  It means emotions are flowing, that I am alive.  I cried at Wonder Woman, at her quest to change the world for the better.  This is my own quest, too, and it seems so daunting.  There is so much fire and death, so much hatred, reflexive, willful, and willed ignorance, so many species of disgust and rejection, even of the better angels within us all.

And I have flows of energy hit me sometimes.  One did today, and I was trying to ride it to an answer to the question of why we should pursue heaven, despite all our pain.  Pain is so addictive.  Look in your own heart: you will see it to be true, or so I suppose.

What would it be like to live for thousands of years on the Wonder Woman isle (I did not quite catch the name), a place where “nothing ever happens”?  David Byrne, with his usual neurotic cynicism, captures the problem: would it not be BORING?  You know everyone.  You are perfectly safe.  You eat the same food, do the same things.

I have not read extensively on it, but in my limited understanding L. Ron Hubbard preached that all of us are spirits who once lived in perfect harmony and who got bored, so we created problems, we created hell, we created conflict and difficulty, knowing it would all sort itself out across eternity.

What is Duhkha, really?  A deep understanding of it, and Nirvana, go hand in hand.  You cannot separate the one from the other.  You can stipulate Duhkha, you can believe in Duhkha and the Path out of it, but you cannot REALLY “grok” it until you pass beyond it, and look at it from the outside.

So much of life depends on so much faith.  We must climb hills which we hope have been honest in their promises, but we can never know anything but that climbing makes us better climbers, and that if the truth lies on high, whatever we do searching for it conditions us to eventually find it.

I have been holding a post on Socrates, and the Western intellectual tradition, and will do so some more.  It doesn’t feel right posting it yet.  But I will note that after a lifetime of searching Socrates took with him to the grave, apparently with some satisfaction, the truth that he knew nothing at all.

Fire destroys.  But it also purifies, does it not?  Is anything in the world just what it is, and not also something else too?

The metaphor which presently works best for me is life as dance, living as dancing, as moving gracefully, as both leading and reacting, as interacting and separating, one within a whole, a whole within one, the universe as a self similar dance floor, filled with light, and the possibility for the benighted ones to see and feel something else.

You know, this blog often serves as my scratch pad.  I’ve posted drunk on here more times than I could hope to count, and not infrequently I have said stupid things.  I am not writing for money.  This is simply a hobby place, where I think out loud, and hope somebody reads it, and when I actually do have something useful or interesting to say, I hope I have an effect.

I went to bed last night–and I was not drunk last night by the way–and realized it was Gadot.  The Godot pun likely would have worked nonetheless, but ah, I myself have to groan at my poor attempts at humor.  I have always liked puns, and I read they are usually a sign of psychological health, so I will admit I do throw them out there a lot.  Most of the time they go over people’s heads.  It’s not something most people are waiting or looking for, so they exist mainly for my pleasure, but do also kind of serve as a test to see who’s awake.  I will occasionally watch a slow light dawn in people’s faces as they realize what I did.  My attempts at wit are sometimes rewarded with a smile.

On a related topic, and serving once again to demonstrate that there is no topic I cannot politicize–something which drives my children crazy–I wanted to mention that I watched the film adaptation of Tristram Shandy the other day with Steve Coogan.  I have nearly read this novel several times, but never quite gotten around to it.

Part of my learning difficulty, as I contemplate it a bit, is that everything I do, I do a bit obsessively.  When I read a book, I obsess about it.  On the positive side, I tend to have excellent recall of books I read many years ago.  I remember a very high percentage of what I read, and try to only read important books, so that is useful.

The down side is that whatever film or book I am currently consuming gets seared into my brain’s retina.  I see this now, although I have never said this, or perhaps even felt this consciously, although I have always known that any movie I watch will play in my mind and in my sleep for days, and so too do fictional novels.  I will often dream about the characters I am reading about, feel their conflicts, feel their pain.

So, making a circuitous route around what is a very simple premise–as I tend to do, but which is apparently richly warranted in this particular case–I read that Tristram Shandy is both the “first postmodern novel”, and a, on its own account, “Cock and Bull Story”.  Logically, why not make this a persistent and obvious connection for ALL Postmodernism?

Why could we not call the willful pursuit of incoherence of thought and language for its own sake what it is: BULLSHIT?  It might be entertaining bullshit, a sort of faux intellectual Ludetic system, but endless recursive circles will never make a line.

And the HABIT of consuming and enjoying the consumption of bullshit can only act as fertilizer for imbecility, uselessness, and–where that person chooses to still form strong opinions about the physical world and how it works–harmful.

Gal Godot gives me hope, because I could see a happy relationship with her.  Now, that line stands at about, oh, 25 million, all after her husband.   I, too, am waiting for Godot. (I would probably benefit from an editor to say DEAR GOD NO at some of my jokes.  To which I would reply: No, Dear God OT.  See what I mean?)

She does seem to have some honest depth.  If there is one nation on Earth that knows about war, it is Israel.  If there is one nation that knows about pointless destruction and endless hatred, it is Israel, which suffers it, to be clear, and would gladly grant considerable concession, if their enemies could be trusted in any way at all, which they can’t.

Just to overshare as I tend to do, I was rereading my EEG today, and apparently I have “learning difficulties”.  Today.  The EEG was taken a couple weeks ago.  So I am presently performing at some lesser fraction of what I would be capable of if my brain were not in continual turmoil.

It is like there is this huge seed within me which is slowly growing out of the shell of who I had to become to survive.  It is much, much larger than what I have been.  I have been in many respects a mediocrity and I admit it.  I can and will soon do so much better. I am doing the work. I am quite capable of making decisions and suffering for long periods consciously and willingly in the pursuit of inner knowledge.  No one picks me up when I fall, but nothing has killed me so far, and if I am not dead, I am getting back up.

For some reason I feel I may never marry again, but I do think there will be loves, and lifelong intimacies.  I just have to get this weight off my back.

Trump says substantial things in an insubstantial way. He appears to be a con man, but he isn’t.

With Obama the converse applies. He uses a faux gravitas–what I have called being a soap opera President– to cover an insubstantial tempersment and mind, and is the worst con man we ever elected bar none.

Most people who grow up in Christian homes, at least, are exposed to traditional values, like family, hard work, honesty, diligence, civic mindedness and the like.

But many, when they get to college, or even high school, are exposed to much easier ideas, ones which taste good going down, which are addictive, but which are not ultimately nourishing, a fact which is concealed in the mania of consuming more and more of them.

People know in their guts that there is no sustainable path forward, collectively, other than all of us tending our own gardens, as Voltaire put it.  If everyone manages their own affairs, there is no need for any of what the Left peddles to the poor and stupid.

They teach, though, that everything is easy, that life is supposed to be easy, and that if there is a problem, all that is needed is more government.  If there are conflicts between cultures, all that is needed is to BE NICE.  And having been taught that being nice is the main virtue in life, they learn to let other people walk all over them, continually, because it makes them feel VIRTUOUS.

We might indeed call apologists for Islamic Supremacism practitioners of “Doormat virtue”.

The solution is REMEMBERING, for most of us, REMEMBERING all those truths we were taught that did not taste as good as the candy they were giving away at school, at the universities, on the news media, in the newspapers.

I will sometimes walk through the frozen food section, and marvel at all the tasty foods found there, all the things I grew up eating, the TV dinners you warm up in the microwave.  God, I had forgotten about those.  We had those folding mini-tables you use to set up your food in front of the TV.  TV trays.  That’s what they were called.  I had until this moment managed to erase those from my mind.  I have not owned a microwave in 15 years, and never will again.  There is nothing the stove top and oven cannot do better, if only slightly slower.

It seems to me that the 1950’s was the last time there was any true civic mindedness, and real connection with the real realities of life, on the part of the Left.  That was when LSD and other drugs were used by honest intellectuals like Alduous Huxley.  The 60’s was just Fruit Loops and meals fit for imbeciles and invalids, suitable for regurgitation, but not the maintenance of anything approaching an honest life.

There is no poetry in conformity, and the Left has nothing else, in the end, to offer.  As with Muslims, the only good Leftists are bad Leftists.

It is more than a bit comical, even farcical, that the party of “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it” is protesting the Republican secrecy.  They locked Republicans out–perhaps literally in some cases–from all the key meetings, used the dodgy method of reconciliation to avoid full debate and discovery, and are now wondering why so many Americans hold them in contempt.  Obamacare did not do what it was advertised as doing, almost certainly because those who passed it never intended it to.  It was a lie based on lies from its inception.

And obviously some people might lose coverage, but many people have already lost coverage BECAUSE of Obamacare.  If we need to take care of anyone, it is the people who do all the working and tax paying in this country.  There is obviously a place for compassion, but that place is not in a world wrecked by legislative incompetence.  Other people’s money always runs out.

My two cents on the proposal: there needs to be something in there about preexisting conditions, but it needs to be confined to a VERY SHORT window, something like 2 months, and certainly something which expires long, long before the mid-term elections.  That is the only way to keep a temporary measure from becoming perennial, like all government tends to do unless undone aggressively and decisively.

As I’ve said many times, requiring insurers to cover the healthcare costs of people who are already sick is not insurance at all, but mandated charity, one which is financed by the healthy and prudent in the form of vastly higher insurance premiums than they would otherwise pay.  It is nothing more or less than a sneaky tax.  I would rather see this turned over to Medicaid or Medicare–which are at least obviously taxpayer funded programs–than the charade maintained in the private sector.

I might mention that my EEG turned up that clinically, from a neurological perspective, I have ADD.  Clinically, focusing on anything is much harder for me than for most people.  I have clear hyperarousal in the places you look when looking for trauma residue, and calming that down is my present task.

And of course I have always felt this.  Doing ordinary, simple, daily tasks like doing the dishes or cooking a meal requires effort and focus.  Everything I do from the moment I get up until I go to bed, or get drunk prior to passing out and going to bed is a struggle, and always has been.

But there are two positives to this.  One, if everything requires effort, you get good at applying effort.  I am really good, I think, at breaking down large topics and saying intelligent things about them, and the reason for this is that when I apply myself, I have POWER.  If everything hurts all the time, if everything is frightening all the time, then doing “hard” things is not really that much harder than doing “easy” things.  It amounts to the same for me, and always has.  If I have courage, it comes from having accustomed myself to being afraid and doing what needed to be done anyway.  I do it every day, and have since childhood.

And secondly, I always have images whirring around in my mind.  Everything is in motion all the time.  But this means that I have access to more flexibility than many people, and access to vastly greater content.  Ideas and phrases and images are popping in and out continually.  It gives me a lot to select from.

And of course I like being creative, as I think I am well warranted in believing I am.  And I could not help but conjure Rilke’s often repeated comment about the prospect of psychoanalysis that if he loses his demons he might lose his angels too.

And it seems to me that there are three main motivations for creation: 1) for survival; 2) in the service of others, which can include figuring out how to fix oneself, which is my present task, since screwed up people are invariably on balance at least partially a burden to others; and 3) the sheer joy of it.

None of these tasks are in danger.  I feel Rilke, without reading more about him or that comment (which by the way I have not verified was actually said by him), feared losing his status as a creative poet.  This is ignoble in my opinion.  Being admired by others is not a suitable aim for creation.  It is a de facto omission of actual impotence in some aspect of ones emotional life.

I am told 60 sessions is a good goal.  I have done 5, but I am already getting top scores, because I can maintain focus in the face of pain and fear.  I do feel good things are on the way.  Everything I have done has been done dragging a 100 pound weight behind me.  I can’t imagine what it will feel like to let that weight go, but I am quite sure I can get used to it!!!   I read 10-15 point jumps in IQ are not uncommon.  That would be fun.

Be a lion in a wolves world.

Edward de Bono coined the term “Po”, which is partly a nonsense word, but which he rationalized as “Provocative Operation”.  It is the ideas of putting crazy ideas out, to see where they lead.  In the initial days of the debates on the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton proposed electing the President for life, like a king–which was rejected quickly and thoroughly–but prior to that proposal everyone was thinking very short terms, like a year or so.  His idea, by stretching minds, enabled the four year Presidency.  Think how clever, by the way, it is that we have 2 year terms in the House, 4 for the President, and 6 for the Senate, which was to be the home of the “grays”, the senior statesmen, the wisest among us, collected en masse.

Po: What if governments had to compete for our tax business?

This leads then to the following obvious question: how much of what governments do could be privatized?  There is competition among trash collectors.  Competition for mail service developed.  What about police?  What about environmental regulation and enforcement, something like a stronger Underwriters Laboratories?  It does seem obvious we should get rid of the FDA.

What if we had not A military, but militaries?  If you go to any Civil War battlefield, you will see that the soldiers on both sides fought as States, and units within those States.  A professional soldier is already inherently a mercenary–even if ideally a highly motivated and patriotic one–so could we have private militaries?  Or what if we returned the locus of the military to the States, under a central Federal command?  Obviously, there are upsides and potential downsides to that idea, but I am simply talking out loud.

What if traffic enforcement were made a completely separate item from ordinary policing?  What if you had multiple options for 911 when you had an emergency, all of which you paid for as as service, and if you did not pay the fee, nobody came?  Adults are capable of making rational decisions and accepting even negative consequences they bring on themselves.  Same with fire fighting.

What if “government” were broken down into a long series of a la carte service, with people paying for what they want?

If you look at Social Security, as I have, it is abundantly obvious that it really only benefits the government, and politicians who use to get elected despite having otherwise idiotic ideas about everything.  Well, them, and those who got into the Ponzi scheme early enough that they got paid out a LOT more than they put in.

As a rational investment, though, as a means of saving for retirement, it is asinine.  It is a negative return investment.  If you put your FICA into gold coins and buried them you would have a better return than sending money to the government which is immediately paid back out to support current recipients.

Chile privatized retirement accounts, and it worked very well.  This is one of the reasons Communists still hate Chile, and Pinochet, who merely did what the Communists would have done in creating their dictatorship, and after he did it, held the elections the Communists never would have held, and stepped aside voluntarily to watch Chile jump ahead of the rest of Latin America.

Few thoughts.  So many people benefit from the groveling before government which its current size and power make necessary for the mass of people for whose benefit it supposedly exists.

“Progress” does not and never has consisted in increasing the size and power of those who seek to control us.  True progress can ONLY come in moral and spiritual elevation.  There is no other kind.  “Progressivism” is a lie, inherently, and all the way to its core.  It conceals this lie by making society the measure of morality, which inherently is reifying an abstraction, and once the words of abstractions have replaced concrete experience and individual judgement, no true benchmark remains.  This is how societies and nations are destroyed in the names of “Justice” and “Compassion”.