Author: White Whale

Love is not an action. If it were, it could be willed.

Rather, it is a spontaneous emergence within a relationship.

I would say that when love is made a virtue, it becomes virtually impossible.

Please ascribe a precise life value to this performance:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClrBiMp7_Uk

You are allowed plus or minus 2 points, so please do not stress.  I just want you to measure what should be measured, and surely musical performances should all generate numbers.  We are a precise society after all, and number everything that should be numbered, which is everything.

Added this to my “watched” list tonight.

I am a Pisces.  I am an Ueber-Pisces.  This means that if I make it to breakfast without believing two contradictory things at the same time my day is wasted.

I am very sympathetic to the hippy lifestyle.  I am very understanding of the rebellions made necessary by the cultural poverty of much of this country.  We are profoundly stupid in some important ways.

At the same time, I am a defender of traditional culture, but–and here is the important point–not so much in the specific as in the general.

I did some work last week in a redneck town in the South somewhere.  The thing is, I live in a city where most people are not fucking idiots, at least compared to most of the rest of the world.  But I FORGET that there really are inbred imbeciles out there, who really are indefensibly stupid.

Today, in fact, I was listening to this guy trying to invoke the Civil War, but he kept saying the Silver War.  I don’t get this.  This is not remotely where I live, obviously.

I defend Christianity in general, forgetting often that much of what these people believe is farcical and harmful, at least in some cases.  Certainly, I am no fan of the Catholic church, even if I do my best to protect faith in general from its many critics.

I want to have my cake and to eat it too.  I want to support the dominant culture and at the same time to support rebellions against it.  I want to support culture as an idea, knowing that quite often stupidity is an inexorable concomitant.

The reconciliation of contradiction is perhaps the most important human task.  My sense is that it is not best done with thoughts, but with perceptions without names, that pass through once, leaving no form to remember, but which change everything.

My work will continue.  I recognize many, if not all, the problems.  Carry on is my motto.

What is the cultural effect of universal sanitation and cleanliness?

To this day, much of the world wipes its ass with its left hand and a bowl of hopefully but not necessarily clean water. Women are still sequestered on their periods (at least in Nepal: NatGeo recently did a piece on this) and for their part often do not have access to tampons. The opposite of sanitary napkins is unsanitary napkins.

Does the importance of the sacred–that which represents sanctity–become greater when people are confronted daily with filth?

Does it, in contrast, become less when our shit is invisible, and separated from us by toilet paper? How many Americans have EVER defecated without toilet paper?

Again: we are spiritual  animals. We can with justice look to the heavens and connect with our angelic nature. But we are also not so different than we imagine from dogs, who will not shit in their cage, instinctually.

I was in a very nice building yesterday, taking a dump in a restroom that smelled nice, with luxurious tile and wall covering and beautiful sinks, and I was thinking; this would be the nicest bathroom in the entire country in many nations. This would be how the rich live. And it was a generic building, and me a construction worker who happened to be passing through.

I had some dreams last night I won’t share that showed me clearly that the path to managing anger is accepting it, and recognizing its importance for mental health.  It is as unhealthy to never feel righteous anger as it is to continually be angry.  All emotions serve purposes, and pretending otherwise is a recipe for self deception and for the same emotions to come out anyway, but in all the wrong places and at all the wrong times.  They have innate wisdom, but when you push them down, they become profoundly stupid.

And it occurs to me that anger, too, is a profoundly social emotion.  It tells us when someone is transgressing community standards.  We feel anxiety when we ourselves break the rules, and anger when others do.  The two go together.

And what I feel is that unexpressed anger leads to emotional and thus perceptual rigidity.  As I have commented from time to time, conservatives by at least one standard of measurement are more complete, and thus arguably more healthy, human beings than leftists.

Jonathan Haidt posits five moral foundations for all human societies, which like musical notes and colors can be combined and recombined endlessly: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation.


Conservatives tend to have some concern for each of these, whereas Leftists focus only on the first two.


What I would submit is that, in making of “Compassion” a rigid ideology, the proper role of spontaneous anger is completely destroyed.  The way markers which would be offered automatically disappear.  The very capacity for non-ironic social inclusion is eradicated.  They become a society unto themselves, and at that one based only rhetorically on actual compassion, and actually based on the expression of the anger they do not know how to allow themselves to express in the right places.


As one obvious example, when you invite someone into your country, and care for them, and they attack, degrade, and very literally shit on your streets, anger is the appropriate response.  That is the worst imaginable affront to hospitality and kindness.  This has been utterly unacceptable behavior in substantially all human societies for recorded history.  But the Left makes of their complicity in such assaults on decency–here, sanctity and loyalty–a virtue.


As I have said often, you cannot make of any one virtue a god.  Or, if you choose, an idol.  At least, not in historical senses.  I have made of persistence, the rejection of self pity, and perceptual movement gods, but there is no content in this, inherently.  Persistence and movement and time will allow what was stuck to fix itself, and not feeling sorry for yourself prevents self obsession and all the delusions which follow.


In theory and to a great extent practice, any democracy is a self organizing system, and what it creates as Emergences depends nearly entirely on the ideas in play.  Bad ideas will INHERENTLY and ineluctably lead to bad things.  The quality of thought in a democracy is vastly more important than in any other possible system, and as I think has become obvious, we have been trending stupid for a very long time, and I will again submit that this rests on a dogmatic rejection of spontaneous social feeling,and particularly righteous anger.


Hell, we see some on the Left trying even now to justify crimes against children, and a resolute desire to ignore Islamic crimes against women and gays, even though these are groups they have invested enormous effort claiming they care about.


There are no actual principles in play.  I cannot say this enough.  There is a smoke screen, and uncontrolled, completely unconscious anger which seethes through everything they do.

Anxiety is a quintessentially social emotion.  When you look at a school of fish or birds in a swarm that turns on a dime, whatever it is that does that is an analogue for anxiety.  Anxiety tells us, in a social context, when we are out of tune or out of step–or it prevents this from happening in the first place. It is a way of orienting oneself within a social world.  You instinctively avoid what makes you feel anxious, although of course your frontal cortex can override what your gut is telling you.

As I said the other day, the culture where an individual belongs is one where he or she is self similar to the macro, and the macro is an expression of who and what they believe.  There is an up and down motion.  There is change, of course, and decisions that need to be made, but all within a known range, using known principles, ideas, traditions, and prejudices.

The tragedy of our contemporary age–and people often speak of this world as in decline, as if we were not perfectly free to make of the world what we want, and thus free to build something better–is that “culture” per se has in fact changed to the point where most of what we have in common is movies, TV shows, and if we are lucky a religious community.  It is very shallow.  Very little can be assumed.

It is not common to talk about views of death, and differing views of death are not considered sufficient reason to form a negative opinion of someone, in what are supposed to be conditions of universal tolerance.  Simply because one of is an atheist, and the rest of us are functional agnostics, that matters not at all.  It’s a quirk.  What used to be matters of life and death have been reduced to individual ideosyncrasies.

I am of course in part channeling Bloom here.

But what I would submit is that what I would argue is an intermediate period between global conflict and global peace–at least potentially–is characterized by a great difficulty in calming that anxiety which oriented people traditionally in cultures where they were embedded, nested.

This anxiety–this social need, and the biological imperative as an animal to reduce chronic tension–is an important factor in the splintering of our society along countless lines, into immoderate and largely intolerant pseudo-communities.  To question that community is to risk bringing back the worry, or what amounts to a disease of self, which belongs nowhere, to no one, to no purpose.

So much of life is just hanging on, just continuing to move in the hope of insight, or revelation.  Our world is miraculous–it does speak to us–but far too few of us listen.

I continue to view with trepidation and no small amount of horror how eagerly so many people want to become Dr. Frankensteins and create mechanical monsters which will one day have the capacity to kill us all.  This is not creativity: this is purging.  It is driven by fear, by dissociation, by confusion, and by power lust. 

I was in a bar last night trying to remember the Johnny Depp movie where he played Whitey Bulgher (or however you spell it) and I was saying “Devil’s picnic?”  “Devils Dinner”?

The name of course is Black Mass.  But it his me this morning that in some respects my unconscious was telling me an important truth. Is not the height of a traditional Catholic Mass the offering and consuming of the Eucharist?  Is this not where Jesus is symbolically cannibalized?  It is where the spirit of God becomes material, and is ingested by the faithful for their purification and improvement.  Jesus died willingly–this is pointed out in the Mass–and was innocent.  But he is often compared to a lamb, and lambs at that time were sacrificed and eaten.

Logically, a black mass would include the consuming of a victim which did not give its life willingly.

And both could be said to have aspects of feasts to them.  Food is a vitally important part of lives.  As I have said, arguably the digestive “drive” is more important than the sexual one, although of course both can be and often are combined.

What soothes the wild beast within us is one question.  How do we tame it?

But the second question, and the reason there are two masses, is “how can I use the animal within me to feel more alive?”

Neither mass is quite satisfactory from an individual pursuing optimal mental, emotional, and physical health.  We do not want to be animals or pretend to be angels.  We do need food, after all, and killing is a necessary element of that even for vegetarians.  The only alternative is the logical one of the Jains who fast themselves to death.

I am meandering a bit, but perhaps there is something useful here, for you, or for a future me.

My work, of course, continues.  I found the other day that I could contact conflicting elements within myself–effective solutions to real problems at different times which have outlived their usefulness–and hold them in a shared space.  I did not try to reconcile them: they must do this organically.  Intrapsychic force never works.

Perhaps I could stipulate a principle: the coming together of the components of psychic conflicts can be allowed, but never compelled.  Not, in any event, if true organic integration is the goal.  Again: there is a self similarity between this fact, and social integration, which also cannot be compelled, if the goal is true integration.  We tried to compel it: it didn’t work.  And what progress has been made has been made in spite of the spokespeople for integration and “progress” of all sorts, not because of them.  When they understand one another, people tend to get along.  It is that simple.  And the same process applies intrapsychically, in that you in effect have to “introduce” disparate elements to one another.

I was talking to a guy last night in a bar who is a hard charger one minute, and a nervous wreck the other.  When he is a hard charger, he is putting important elements of his emotional self on hold, suppressing them.  But you cannot suppress things forever, or at least not without considerable cost.  Most alcoholics and drug abusers fit this profile.  “Functional” alcoholics, like me, fit this profile, although in my own case I see the problem and work daily–nearly continuously–to solve it.  This idea here, for example, is new to me.

I had some interesting dreams last night, that brought some ideas to mind, which I wanted to share.

Looking at my mother, she never loved me, because she does not know how, but she loved the reflection of herself she saw in me.  I am her.  I am a part of her.

And I started looking more deeply at what is called Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and I feel it really ought to be recategorized as a form of Developmental Trauma.  In fact, I would agree with Bessel van der Kolk that much of the DSM should be restructured to reflect the pervasive effects in later life of very similar traumas that happen early in life.  Depression, anxiety, phobias, compulsions: all have the same roots, and it is stupid–and in the case of the psychiatrists who receive so much remuneration from their moral equivalents in the pharmaceutical industry–venal to pretend otherwise.

Narcissists lack the mirroring necessary to develop a core sense of self, so they seek to force mirroring on the world.  They force the world to look at them, to pay attention to them.  Their every moment is a struggle between psychological disintegration, and revivification through being seen.  Everywhere they look they want reconfirmation that they exist and are recognized.  This is a continuation of a basic process which every infant goes through, where they look to the world, and ask it to see it, to recognize them as human beings, to recognize their needs.  But in a narcissist this world exists at such a primitive level that they cannot get to the root feelings, which are horror and complete confusion, to the point where psychotic breakdown is perhaps a real possibility in some of them.  This is why it is so hard to treat.

In effect, you have psychological infants out in the world, continually consuming what some theorists call “Narcissistic Supply”, because they need it like vampires–who are perhaps one mythic emanation of this basic dynamic–need blood.  They need the life of others, their attention, their generosity, their openness, their giving.

I have to be honest: I don’t know why I am still alive, other than that I seem to have been born with an enormous capacity for endurance and suffering.  The last therapist I saw was asking me where I got emotional support in my childhood from, and it was a very short list.  It amounted to, “well, I had a dog, and there were a couple teachers who were nice to me, and my grandfather who I saw once a year I always liked.”

But all this is also extraordinarily interesting.  It is like a gave myself, in planning my life, a scavenger hunt, and intentionally hid some of the prizes in the deepest darkest places so I knew I would have to go there, would have to do deep introspection as a condition of survival.

I am gradually integrating.  In some respects the only fact that matters is that I DID survive, and did so with the capacity for internal focus.  I am gradually learning how to learn.  This is by far the toughest task any of us undertake.

Given that the Constitution declares that Congress shall have the power to declare war, I have been wondering what options Trump might have in dealing with North Korea.  To some extent, the original Korean War never ended; this is why we have stationed troops there for over 60 years.

Obviously, it would seem stupid to put declaring war to a vote publicly in Congress, since North Korea would then likely launch a nuclear strike against at least South Korea. They have no hope of winning a war, of course, but they very much have the power to create a lot of pointless destruction, which is to say, to export what they produce internally as a matter of long term policy.

I had wondered if Trump could call each Congressperson and record their response as a de facto vote for war, so that he could prove he had “Congressional Authorization” without putting the whole thing to a public debate.  For that exercise, he would only need to involve enough people to get a majority.  Obviously, we have many traitors in Congress who have never met an American enemy or tyrant of their sort they didn’t like, so leaks would be inevitable if too many people were involved.

But inviting the Senate to the White House?  Perhaps this is brilliance.  He could get a vote taken there, and claim that he upheld the Constitution while also making sure there were not leaks which would get people killed.  Hell, he could order the attack before they left the building.  The Senate is not the entire Congress, but it is by general legal and historic consensus the most important legislative body in the country.  The House was to be the home of rabble-rousers and lunatics like Maxine Waters.  She belongs there.  But the Senate, which in its name implies age, experience, and wisdom, was to be the most consequential body.

We have no obvious good options with North Korea.  Kim Jung Un is young, bellicose, utterly convinced by the sycophants around him that he is invincible, and apparently fully dedicated to building nuclear missiles which can deliver the nuclear warheads he keeps threatening surrounding nations–most recently Australia–with.

I have proposed building a Disneyland or whores paradise, or Shangri-La or whatever floats his boat, but it seems likely he is a grandiose sociopath who is utterly convinced of his military superiority.  I have proposed inviting some of his commanders to see the full array of weaponry arrayed against them.  He obviously could decline this offer, and our own commanders, for understandable reasons, could refuse to cooperate, or at least strongly advise against it.

The core truth about North Korea, though, is that every indication is that at some point he likely will launch a nuclear weapon at an innocent nation, and perhaps do so with no warning or provocation.  This is the height of recklessness, but a clear and very present danger to the United States, Japan, and many other nations.

I will do a post soon on some thoughts on the notion and cultural history of the notion of bourgeois, but I want to offer s brief comment from s strip mall somewhere in America.