Author: White Whale

It is possible to be nice without the gut, but not to be a complete human being.  The gut provides the impetus to evil, yes–evil in the main is regressing to being a wild beast while being a human being–but it also provides the energy for good.

All children have unique personalities, but my feeling is that in our world of abstraction, of obsession with work and status, with our manifold creature comforts and distractions, very often the child assumes a place at the table, but not recognition as an individual.

In previous times, as I have said, this was perhaps not a problem, because the child was given a ROLE to play.  There was a script.

But there is no script in our world for most children in most families.  They are expected to be successful, but in most cases that means making money.  It says nothing about developing the soul, or becoming wiser as a human being.

The psychological skill needed for contemporary parenting is immense, and I really feel a great many parents simply lack the patience for it.  They are interested in work, and only occasionally in their children.

To be sure, they may obsess over parenting books, and “building” the perfect child, but this still treats the child as an inert object.  The important thing is knowing your childs essence, what makes them who they are, and both feeling it deeply, and connecting with them in such a way that they know they are felt deeply.

In my own case–and this chain of thought is what occasioned this somewhat incoherent post–I literally feel like my mother would be much, much happier with me if I were replaced by a lifelike facsimile of me which complimented her often, laughed at her jokes, and which was obedient to her will.  This facsimile would be NOTHING like how I really am, but she has never seen me as I am, because she is not able to see past her own reflection in my eyes.  She has often pretended to try–and in her own mind I have no doubt she feels she did try–but something large and important is simply missing: there is no genuine empathy, even for her own child.

The emotional tone of this whole image is very, very cold, very plastic, very unpleasant.

I am no doubt sharing too much again, but I continue to hope these musings may be useful for someone out there.

To some extent, I am wrestling with what Allan Bloom, pace Nietzche, called the “Last Man Problem.”

How can we remember value in a world of price?  To point to the value of free markets is not equal to supporting Consumerism.  To point to alienation is not to point to a coercive economic and political system as the solution.

The Negempath–if I might coin a term–is perfectly suited for commercial success in our society.  Most all of us are perfectly conditioned to living–sometimes across a life–at a superficial level.

And how do I deal emotionally with a mother who can look me in the eyes and fail entirely to see me, even now?  Who is for all intents and purposes a complete stranger, and always has been?

And how, more generally, do we find one another?  This is not uniquely my problem.  I see it everywhere.

I am going to go do some Kum Nye.  I have come up with one solution I will share eventually.

I think it can be accurately stipulated that no person voluntarily does evil on a sustained basis who understands the alternative at an emotional and spiritual level.

The people who do evil no doubt rationalize it somehow–perhaps something as simple as “I enjoy it”, but they see no good alternative.

My standing claim is that Goodness is by far the most interesting, most fascinating, most creative game in town. Everything else is repetition, and in most cases compulsive repetition.  As I have said, quantitative variation is obviously possible, but reimagining the self and the world in new colors and with new music is not.

Evil is the despair of the blind.

What better symbol for the decadent modernism the French did so much to inflict on our world than a young man married to his mother who does not believe in French “culture”?

Accepting yourself “as you are” is a uniquely modern concept.  In previous eras, I suppose (not having lived in them), one simply found oneself within a complex social landscape defined by tradition and habit.  One could inhabit ones place with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm, but the question of “self” acceptance did not evolve, could not evolve, until the notion of the “self” as a quasi-anti-social being came into vogue.

On some level, the question being asked is: how do I feel about myself as divorced from concrete social contexts, as a “Sein an sich”?

In a world where there is no givenness, there must be continual creation of the self, and of course since we evolved to be social animals, there is inherently some anxiety–the social emotion–created.  This is what I understand the Existentialists to have largely been saying, although I am not well read in their work.

We are up in the air.  The question is how we keep the freedom, but provide grounding, safety, and less arduous means of feeling a sense of self, belonging, and rootedness.

These are psychological and spiritual and sociological questions that are most usefully assumed to have good answers.  It is the second assumption, the one made after assuming we can survive our Scientism and the next 100 years as something close to spiritually alive beings.

Self Discipline is really nothing more or less, on one level, than being able to predict your own behavior.  In a world where people are not reliable, where the future is uncertain and certainly largely beyond our control, it is creating a small idyll of predictability.

The cost is occasional discomfort.  The reward is a sense of safety.

There is never any loss, only gain.

I have offered this phrase before, but am only slowly realizing the life changing potential of treating EVERYTHING that happens as an opportunity for growth and following happiness and effectiveness.

We cannot control loss, outside of exercise of common sense and prudence, nor can we directly control our reactions.  You cannot force yourself to feel anything.  You feel what you feel.

But what you can do is add a cognitive filter which looks at situations in one way, and not another, and which is primed not to wail and moan only, but to see what is there that is positive and has been missed.  This applies both to the situation itself, and to emotions which are latent and possible, but suppressed.

I really do think many people make themselves much weaker by assuming what they are capable of, rather than allowing their actions to do themselves.  Not sure that’s the best way to put it, but allowing is a big part of my current focus for myself.  I had no idea I could feel good in the morning, feel good at work, and feel good in the evening.  This is not my habit, but I see it is only possible by suppressing natural corrective energies which emerge spontaneously if allowed.

https://www.infowars.com/ex-banker-claims-he-was-invited-to-take-part-in-child-sacrifice-rituals/

Think this through: imagine he goes to these orgies, and they film everything.  That is already a basis for some blackmail.  He is more or less describing Eyes Wide Shut.

But imagine a ritual where someone is killed, and all but ONE of them wear masks, and that, too, is filmed.  All you have to do is get someone to do something they had not even planned to do, document a serious crime, and you have them by the balls.

It would seem obvious that any serious secret society has to have the power to get you jailed for life before they will even begin to share anything serious with you.  This guy likely did not even scratch the surface.  He is merely making informed guesses about the nature of the whole thing, and cannot begin to know how far it goes.

I do feel there is a spirit of this Earth.  It is trapped here.

Samuel Johnson famously asked (approximately) “how is it the loudest yelps for freedom are coming from the drivers of slaves?”, and I thought I might render an answer (and then, if I am candid, wander around a bit trying to say I’m not quite sure what, but don’t have time to edit further.)

The Southern slave holders were the closest thing to a British style aristocracy we have ever had.  As such, they had ample time to read philosophy, law, and what we would now call political science.  They had time to contemplate it, and to reach reasoned conclusions.

In this, they were no different from Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, who also benefited from slavery.  They were no different from many Roman writers, who also benefited from slavery.  They were no different from medieval writers, who benefited from the feudal system, which amounted to slavery.  They were no different from the many Islamic writers, who also benefited from slavery.

Today, many think of Southerners as ignorant and stupid.  This is because their best and brightest–at least one, and in some cases two generations–were slaughtered in civil strife, and the survivors condemned to conditions in many cases only slightly better than the “freed” slaves.

People forget that wars leave invisible scars.  Those who survive often do so missing a leg, or arm, or eye, or with pieces of metal permanently stuck in them.  They survive with psychic wounds which make them permanently different than the person who left.  Particularly in defeat, it makes them mean, cold, and hostile.

Given the Union’s decision to humiliate the South in defeat, to boss them around with blacks uneducated to the task, and egged on in their hatred and aggression, all while using and abusing them every way possible, it is no wonder that a paramilitary force–the KKK–came into being as a means of the defense their governments could no longer provide them.

I can’t and won’t defend the KKK’s racist abuses.  But they were no different in kind or outcome than the mass slaughters and mass shames inflicted by the North on the South.  Shit rolls downhill.  There were multiple single battles in the Civil War where more Confederate troops were killed than were killed in all the lynchings in all the South in all of American history up to the present day.

We have been conditioned to view Lincoln as a great man.  But in my own view, based on my own reading, slavery was in any event on its way out.  It was not an efficient economic institution.  We could have tolerated two nations for a time, and it might well have been possible to negotiate the South’s reentry in the United States within a generation, and possibly with the simple alteration of a moderate in the White House.

We live in a Looney-Tune world.  Much of our chattering class really ought to adopt Porky Pig as their most articulate spokespig. You know, the pig who is more smarterer than the others, as well as being more articulater.  Stuttering is the least of the crimes when idiocy is being preached.

History in some respects is very simple.  The Civil War was not fought because the South seceded.  It was fought because Lincoln reacted with military force, and an invasion of the seceding States.  This decision was made on April 15th, 1861–or in any event announced–making it one more addition to the already awful history of this date (which, karmically, also includes Lincolns death, four years later).  [One wonders, should it not be 4/16, not 4/20?]

That Lincoln started the war proper is obvious.  Yes, South Carolina did fire on and storm Fort Sumpter, but mainly as a means of arming themselves for what they rightly perceived was going to be a full scale invasion.  That is how I remember the history, in any event.

One can argue about why they South seceded–in addition, obviously, to their never refuted claim that they had the right to do so in the face of what they perceived to be a tyrannical Federal government–and one can argue about the wisdom of Lincoln’s decision to end the lives of some 650,000 Americans, with a multiple that in casualties which radically altered lives, but one cannot dispute that if Lincoln had not responded as he did, that there would not have been a Civil War.  The South had no intention of invading the North.  They only did so after several years of war as a means of trying to get the North to cease its incursions.

Had Jackson, in other words, been in Lincoln’s position, there would have been no war.  Period.

And that it was possible to foresee the Civil War is obvious.  It was predicted when the Constitution was passed, and was only narrowly avoided several times in the decades leading up to the final split.  Jackson himself was categorically in the States Rights camp (as was Jefferson).

By nature, it seems to me most men become more rigid under stress, and most women more compliant.

Both tendencies, of course, can be pattern interrupted with mindfulness, but this seems to be the tendency.

And I would add, that  most men fail to see when women are being compliant.  They fail to see when they are going along to get along and assume that an equal bargain has been struck, when it hasn’t.

At the same time, I do think many American women expect too much of men.  Men naturally act like men, but they are now supposed to always know when they are supposed to be men and when they are supposed to be women.  They are supposed to change roles malleably and instantaneously, which is just not something that will ever be realistic.

Gender roles evolved–and I am am invoking both culture and biological evolution here–for reasons.  All of us can become better human beings.  This is our task.  But the start of all real progress is recognizing with honesty and wisdom the present realities, and not attempting to build on any other foundation.

I would add that all these gender confusions are in my view really attempts to escape from life itself, which is overwhelming for many.  Rather than take on a task in life, one takes on a role, in the same way an actor plays someone else.  This is ignoble.

Some men have always felt the need to dress as women, and some women, men.  This is very old.  And there is no reason to treat these people with the cruelty their alleged advocates devote to people who persist in traditional beliefs.  At the same time, they are also not special because of their particular obsessions, and even if they are harmless, they are also not role models for any of us who are not by nature driven in that direction.

No society thrives by making ideals of the peripheral and unhealthy.