Author: White Whale

To become Good, you have to become human, and to become human, you have to understand evil.

And by understand, you need  know intimately what it feels like, why and how it makes sense, what problems it solves, and where those problems exist within you.

So much evil is done in the name of Good that Goodness itself has largely come under attack as a meaningless word.

This is, of course, ludicrous, and the product of inferior minds.

But it is worth remembering that all of us have the capacities of all of us.  All of us have both Ted Bundy and Albert Schweitzer in us.

An enabler is someone who has tuned into your self hate and who feeds it regularly, without either of you realizing it.

I will add, I am not sure this is true.  I don’t have any enablers in my life, but this feels right to me.

I woke up this morning with the keen sense that feelings are great blessings.  They constitute an extensive network of receiving stations which expand our capacity for perception immensely.  We are provided with a security and monitoring network that will tell us everything we need to know, and do so automatically.

The issue is with recurring emotions, emotions which properly belong in another time.  We get those when we are absent when they are trying to tell us something.  We also get those when they are imprinted on our nervous system in trauma.

I have for most of my life viewed feelings as a curse, because they torment me, and almost never give me anything good to feed on.

But, again, to get to a better emotional reality, often it helps–and often it is necessary–to plant the seed of a better idea.

http://www.menshealth.com/guy-wisdom/chris-cornell-death-depression-suicide-interview

“Most of the guys I grew up with ended up with the same struggles that I’ve had, which is you have every desire to communicate with your friends, family, with anyone, and absolutely no skill as to how to do it. And male-female relationships require that so much.”

I do not preach from a void, or, I hope, to a void.

I see the pain around me.  I feel it.  It tears me apart.  But I reassemble.  That is my superpower.

I will be fine.  And I will come for you one day, after I finish my map of Hell, and all the ways out of it.  It is a porous place, and the security is horrible.  In fact, it is designed with escape in mind.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of the previous sentence.  I have some booze in me, because I continue to wrestle with awful feelings, but I am slowly, slowly winning.

I don’t quit.  I have that going for me.  I made persistence a primary value for a reason.

Hang in there, if you can.  And you can.

It seems to me most socialists dream of a return to the “music of the spheres” which animated the social orders of the middle ages.  They dream of planets describing fixed orbits, and lives which revolve around clearly defined social roles.  They dream of fixity, of an end to existential angst, to what they see as an overabundance of freedom.

But complexity is how the world actually works.  It is how nature works.  Even if we cannot see it within our very short lives, everything is in flux in ways which are in principle and reality very different than the machines built by those who modeled Ptolemaic models of the universe.  Everything is in a continual process of change in ways not best described as linear, but only approximately linear.  In an infinite universe, we can in principle never know enough.  God does play dice.

The paradigm of Complexity says that things tend to work out over time, given good organizing principles, within human social systems, and without top-down efforts and control and ordering.

It takes some faith, as one example, to believe in our economic system.  But it manifestly works so well that the concern is not feeding people, but that we might grow to consume all the planets resources, which we have learned to use and exploit efficiently.

But even there, there are inherent limits in the system.  Even now, ones sees a market which brings to the table “sustainably sourced fish”.  One sees drives to recyling, and the reduction of waste.  Because there is an expressed need for this, our system brought it into being.  All it takes is awareness and time and economic freedom.

The faith required to believe in our system is vastly less than that required to believe in the individuals who claim they can do better.  No one has ever done better, and in the modern era those who have tried have not just failed, but created mass horrors.

The obsession with abstraction which is BEST, not least, seen in Socialism, cannot by its nature return us to stable social relations, and qualitatively better emotional connection with one another.  Economics, as I have said often, needs to be seen as a separate preoccupation from the system of meaning formation, truth formation, and political relations.  All are logically distinct, even if connected in formally complex ways.

I was listening yesterday as long as I could to some silly person pointing out that direct exchange is more socially meaningful.  This may be true, but in the eras and places where it predominated, so too did war, rapine, and plunder.  War has happened everywhere and always, in a great many cases because somebody somewhere had something that somebody else wanted, and had no other means of acquiring.

Human relations exist within an economic system.  We can choose to value people over things, but this choice must be made and expressed on an individual level.  There is no return to Eden if we try and mandate people get along in a certain way.

This truth emerges from the fundamentally crucial idea–paradigm/way of looking at the world–that social relations are Complex.  Love does not emerge at sword or gunpoint.  Connectedness cannot be coerced if it is to be valid and vital, real and lasting.

No, real change is gradual.  Seeds are planted, the soil is watered, and time is given.

Perhaps it would be most useful to speak of Social Gardening, not Social Engineering.  The topic is not machines: it is living beings, and the goal is growth and health and flourishing, not rounding up and managing.  That, we might with equal justice, call Human Husbandry.

Such an activity is the obsession of Leftists, who do not in any meaningful way connect with life as a whole, or with God, which we might call the Great Life.  They want to provide nothing more or less than the bookend to the process begun with the first emergence of self awareness in a biologically modern human.

This is what I see.

It seems to me that the bar can be set very high to feel like you belong.  Nothing is given in at least our suburban and urban worlds.  You have to conform to mutable trends of fashion.  You have to dress a certain way, act a certain way, be familiar with various types of media, have goals that align with the dominant–but mutable–group consensus.

This is the Gesellschaft/Gemeinschaft distinction Ferdinand de Tonnies drew.

Many critics of what they call “Capitalism” point to the transactional nature of our social relatedness, how people are seen for their values of various sorts.  Perhaps they offer a means to social climbing, which is to say, a means of bolstering a fragile and highly contingent ego through the means of attaining the envy and admiration of others.

Perhaps the people you meet on the golf course provide a means to making money.

Perhaps you are just lonely, and need someone to fill the slot “friend”, without really knowing what this could mean, or what could be built if you both only had more vision.

When one is “nested” in a Gemainschaft, you are to some extent unfree.  Belonging comes with commitments, with expectations of behavior which are NOT mutable, not negotiable.

But it does seem to me that in some respects stable, rooted social orders also provide more freedom.  Take as one example the treatment of “madness” in various societies.  Within many traditional societies behavioral forms which would get one imprisoned in a madhouse here, and heavily medicated, are treated as emergences of something qualitatively new, and potentially highly useful.  Most shamans go through periods of “madness” to earn their titles as wise men and women.

Where to go and what to do in a highly successful economic order are, or can be, very confusing questions.  There are so many possibilities.

I have things to say on this, and of course have said many things, but my introspection on our world continues.  I do believe a life philosophy built on first principles rooted in science is possible.

It seems to me that true kindness often says and does nothing, because it is not compulsive.  The drive to “help” people often hurts them, and to the extent this drive is unconscious this fact will be invisible to them.  They hurt and hurt, and manage to maintain a self image of being compassionate, thoughtful, and kind.

What I feel is that the deepest need most have is the need for connection, and even if you say or do nothing but see people as they are, and forgive them, this is always helpful.  We all need to “feel felt”.

I have lived in a harsh world all my life.  To use an analogy Bessel van der Kolk offered, alarm bells are going off in me 24/7, and have for my entire conscious life, even if I was able to suppress my awareness of them for a very long time. “Life” has always felt dangerous to me, and offered no right answers.  My main solace has been oblivion, both that offered by alcohol, and that offered by abstraction and emotional distancing.

I cannot say I have been a kind person.  I have, on the contrary, often been an asshole.  I have been rude, presumptuous, entitled, impatient, condescending, and sometimes outright mean.  I speak this merely as fact.  I can’t see how I could have been any different and survived.  And I am not done being an asshole.  I have many triggers.

But I can see how on some level I will be able to forgive, through a deep, heart level understanding, people who are mean. I’m not there yet.  It will take much more work.  But I can see a path, or at least the beginnings of a path, and it leads through a complete understanding of myself, who I am, and feeling my continuity with not just the rest of humanity, but of life itself.

Feeling the life all around you: this is how you begin to live.

It seems to me this morning that work is best understood as the expression of creative energy.  As such, we are all Creators–gods of a sort–when we sweep the floor, or do the dishes, or cook a meal.

I’ve seen often this Zen-ish call that “when you wash the dishes, wash the dishes.”  I’ve tried this, and all that happens to me personally is I feel the misery that walks with me every step of every day.  This is information, I supposed, worth knowing.  It is better to know who you are than to not know who you are, but I want something even from mundane tasks more than an absence of everything else.

What I want is a feeling of connection, of value even in the trivial, but I have not yet figured out how to do this, although I do have a current hypothesis: what I see clearing the blockages is the flow of energy through me, from God to God.

One of the most important Kum Nye exercises is called the Gold Heart Thread, and consists in nothing more than standing with your arms straight out to your sides, slightly bent, with your head straight or perhaps pointing slightly upward.  You do this for 10 minutes.

If you try this, most will find that your shoulders start hurting rapidly.  10 minutes is a long time.  But reportedly people work up to an hour or more, not as a feat of muscular endurance, but by enabling a specific type of energy flow.

The key, I am realizing, is that energy flows out from the heart through the arms.  But most people have many blocks.  They stop the energy unconsciously.  We oppose work.  We oppose difficulty.  We have in America today this notion that work is either a bad word, or something to be done simply to survive, or something to be done obsessively, so we can “get ahead” in the “rat race”, so we can “succeed”, and everybody look at us in envy.

But most people work for the work  for the weekend.  Most people are waiting on retirement, so this thing they dislike will be done, and they can do something close to nothing, and quite frequently the same as the day before.

What happens when you embrace difficulty, take it into your heart, not in a spirit of resentment, but as a wind beneath your wings, without which you could never fly?

And I will add that there are intermediate positions possible between the idea that God is all loving and that everything always works out no matter what decisions we make; and the idea that God either does not exist at all, or is completely indifferent or even malevolent.

It is possible we live in what I might call an Adult universe, in which our decisions count, and in which relative failure is always possible.  It is possible God is a sort of parent who gravitates to those who try, and distances himself from those who do not.  Our decisions may matter, as the Bible teaches.

And this may be true even when our decisions are very difficult.

Particularly when you add reincarnation to the mix, it may be that all of us have ample time to get things right, although it may be that people also suffer the consequences of their decisions for hundreds of thousands of years.

This is all a little hippy-dippy, but what I am searching in my own self for is the next step I need to take.  What I have found is that important change is gradual, and often happens before we realize it, but most of the time the ground has to be set with IDEAS, which, when seeded in an unconscious which has been prepared, bear fruit almost automatically over some time horizon.  Thoughts matter.  They are not all that matter, or even the most important thing, but they cannot be divorced from primary experience.  There are no real advantages to stupidity or naivete, except in contradistinction with truly bad ideas.

That, in my world, is my form of optimism.

We can’t know if it is our destiny to succeed, but we can know it is our destiny to give everything in the effort.

What is seemingly not obvious is that once you have a Special Prosecutor in place, they have very wide authority.  Kenneth Starr wound up far afield of Whitewater.

I read Mueller is Ranger qualified, served as a Marine officer in Vietnam, and was initially appointed by George W. Bush.

It seems to me that he can not just put to rest the propagandistic memes created by the Hillary camp, and spread by a hysterical media taking its cues from Goebbels and Lenin, which seems to have taken the Big Lie not as a possibility, but a real idea to be tested, again, in the United States of America, in the 21st century.

No: he can go the places Trey Gowdy could not.  He can go the places Comey dared not.  This could very easily wind up being an investigation of the Clinton Foundation.  After all, the nominal idea is that our elections should be sacrosanct, and that nobody should be selling influence to anyone.

This will of course depend on his character, his understanding of his proper role, and to a very great extent his courage.

But there has never been any evidence of the alleged crimes.  On the contrary, it seems not just that Seth Rich was the “hacker”, but that he was murdered (“made an example of”) and those responsible for his murder covered up by a D.C. police force seemingly corrupted by persons as yet unknown, although we can make some very good guesses.

It will be interesting to see where this goes, but one thing seems clear: Trump is not going to be impeached, much less removed from office, which has never happened.  The temper of the American people, what it wants, was made clear in the last election.  The tide is clearly in the direction of mistrust of our national politicians, Democrats in general, and contempt of our complicit and completely venal media.

I will add that although I continue to be filled daily with many ideas–many of them likely useful–that I need for a time to deny myself this access to emotional distancing from my issues, which I am trying to take on directly, and seeing success in so doing.

I will ultimately be more useful as someone living in the world, rather than floating somewhere above it.