Author: White Whale

Many women have one identity with make-up and another without. And this identity can be mutable.

Humans, like all animals, are naturally relaxed when not in immediate danger.  But because there is no limit to the potential dangers we can create in our minds–or which our minds create in the face of the active resistance of some other part of our selves–continuous tension is not just possible, but in modern society almost ubiquitous.

Tensions arise from present fears and worries, from psychological conflicts, and as the residue of a systemic charge created in trauma which has never been denuded through awareness of its on-going potency.

And most of what most people strive for, every day, is the reduction of tension. In important respects, this is the ACTUAL intention behind nearly everything everyone does.  Obviously, people conform even when they would otherwise be disinclined to do so because of the fear of being rejected, which is painful, which is to say, creates emotional tension, which we process as painful.

But even serial killers, pedophiles, and monsters of other sorts ALSO seek to reduce tension.  It is simply the case that their particular maladies are so severe that only extremely anti-social means will allow to actually accomplish their goal.  I think of the killer in “The Lovely Bones” relaxing in his bathtub.  The tension he lived with daily, of the pain he could not see much less process, of the fear of being caught he was very much aware of, was gone for a brief moment.  That is why he did it.  The anger and rage had to be put out into the world and someone or something had to die.

I have said this before, but if we make this very obvious–but rarely made (actually, I don’t think I am copying anyone, as I have not seen this claim made elsewhere that I can recall)–observation that tension and the means to reduce it fuel nearly everything everyone does, we can readily affirm that learning to reduce tension is a principle purpose in living. So much of what drives us would not drive us, would not be necessary, if we could simply DIRECTLY address the tension fueling our manias and ambitions.

And I suppose I could mention sex, but is sexual tension really the main one?  It does not seem so to me.  I felt sexual tension earlier today, but I made it go away.  This is not the root of the problem.  If it were Mick Jagger would have been the picture of mental health.  Sex is a part of tension overall, sometimes admittedly an important one, often a secondary or even absent one.

But what philosophers talk about the existential importance of physical and emotional tension, and the logically following importance of learning to release them?  None that I know of, although I am hardly a serious student of philosophy (although I’m also not ignorant, having read a lot of books, and listened to a lot of lectures).  Picture Sartre, sitting at his coffee table, high on meth, chain smoking, drinking glass after glass of wine, writing 10-15 pages or more across much of a fairly long life.  What if he had learned to enjoy the simple pleasures of pleasant days, the songs of birds, and the joy of being?  What if he were that exquisitely happy man in the corner, friend to the world?

I have felt nauseated by the world.  I can get this sentiment.  But I did not see any need to attach ontological status to it.  I knew it was not “life”.  It was the relic of a disease I did not choose, and have long sought to tame and master.

Go sideways.  None of us live in true hierarchies.  We live in a giant cloud, where relationships and directions are what matter.

If we stipulate, as appears scientifically well grounded, that the mind by nature seeks to create order, then we can define culture as the Emergent Property of this effort, with regard to the following domains:

The creation of meaning, purpose, and human connection, all of which are biological needs.

The formation of clear ideas about what is true, and methods for determining it.

The proper way for people to relate to one another, from the family to the entire planet.

The proper means of ensuring physical survival, comfort, and perhaps even prosperity.

Cultures are in a constant process of formation, destruction, and alteration, and we all of necessity live within them, and are shaped by them.

The Self, society and culture are all self similar.  This does not mean, obviously, that a person from one culture can be fit within another, but that we all exist within cultures, and it cannot be otherwise.

What is absent in the modern era is compulsion to FORCE people to adopt specific behaviors which we also used to call culture.  In America, arranged marriage is uncommon, but very common in India.  Young men and women both have to accept it to remain a part of their native culture. If they do not, the link of self similarity is broken, but since cultures evolve continuously, the meaning and extent of this break can evolve continually, as perhaps new understandings are created.

The desire to avoid violence and war is also a cultural attribute, one of modern Liberal culture.  It is not a rejection of culture per se.

Cultures cannot be created.  This is the core error of Rouseau in his concept of Legislator, and the countless gallons of blood which people attempting to enact his ideas have spilled uselessly.

Cultures–like a bacteria culture–can be planted and watered and fed, and may or may not take root.  But they have a fundamentall chthonic character.  When deep, they arise from unconscious roots.

We are all continuous cocreators both of our sense of self, and of our culture.  Every wink, nod, shaking of the head, widening of the eyes, choice of words, participation or boycott, every social decision we make, has an effect on this thing which is not a thing, but which is also not not a thing.

The skeleton of a culture, what holds it together, is ideas.  This is true even if it is a tribal or traditional culture based on ancestral stories.  There is still the idea that these stories are true and relevant, and that the ritual activities associated with them are important.

Our culture currently rests on bad ideas.  The formation of meaning in important respects is inseparable from the formation of truth concepts, and it is difficult to overstate the importance of the notion of materialism, that we are machines made of meat, destined to be hurled into blackness after a short period of pointless activity and in many cases no small amount of emotional and physical pain.

The idea of materialism–now apparently called Physicalism–matters.  It matters a great deal.

Cultures, like selves, change over time, and like a rain shower are never replicated even day to day in exactly the same way.

An idea I would like to stipulate is that we can work slowly and gradualistically to shape our own culture, both by internalizing notions of the possibility and desireability and path to personal spiritual growth, and the idea that we are immortal beings, which is what the best, most honest science indicates.

It is logical to seek endless distraction from an endless void one cannot escape.  But it is not logical to ignore paths forward to greater happiness, physical well-being, and social harmony and connection.

A continuum can be drawn between a very specific cultural type where all details of life are more or less choreographed in full–let us say among traditional Vedic Indians–and a condition in which the physical body is COMPLETELY relaxed.  All of us are the same in relaxation.  Our cultures arise, I think I can argue, from our thoughts, and our tensions, which are related.  What thoughts make you tense?  This will vary from culture to culture.  What should one pay attention to?  This varies culture to culture.

But body awareness, human biology when healthy, is the same everywhere.  There is no language when there are no thoughts, and without language–including imagistic language, which is to say the pictures in our heads–there is no difference among humans.  We are all the same.  We can call this nature.

Rousseau apparently used to do a primitive form of Kum Nye by lying on a raft on a lake and just feeling his being.  Would that he had known about Kum Nye.  Perhaps we might have avoided the 100 million or more deaths in the 20th Century that attended the efforts to legislate and change human nature.

The one thing Allan Bloom makes very clear is that bad ideas produce shitty cultures, and that the idea that there are no shitty cultures is an example of a bad idea.  Well, he perhaps did not quite say that–he is keeping a very high level and honestly professorial attitude–but that is what I in any event will say.

And I would say that the point of culture is for all of us to become gods ourselves.  We all have sparks of the Divine in us, and our job in this life is to fan those sparks into flames, and become as self similar to the Creator as humanly possible. Our political path is to meet Madison’s criteria for ending governments: making of all men and women angels.

I continue to listen to Bloom, and am really enjoying his lucidity and willingness to use clear language to express clear ideas, but I would object to what I understand him to be saying, which is that the American project, in its reliance on a theoretical and abstract individualism, is inherently monadic, which is to say atomizing and reducable in the end to economic values.

America was founded as a nation where private pieties, in the plural, could be shared openly.  It was founded as a place where thousands of churches could form congregations and masses of the faithful which worshipped God as they saw fit, and where they pursued their own understanding of virtue.  It was to be a place of countless small communities which tamed the wild beast without caging him.

This notion of the bourgeois keeps coming up over and over in his treatment of European thought, and I am going to need to put some thought to it.  Since I am listening to this, I also may need to read some of the passages several times, since his summations are extraordinarily useful, but warrant close reading and likely rereading.

But I would stipulate that from my own perspective I have not seen Chaos/Complexity Theory incorporated into the fields of morality and philosophy, and that this addition in my view helps solve many of the tensions and polarities.  With concepts like Emergent Properties, one can speak of things both existing and not existing, and not solely as a feature of language.  In my perhaps overly limited understanding, it seems to enable the solution of important problems, a project which seems, again in my view, to have been abandoned much too prematurely.

It would perhaps be more true to say not so much that the project was abandoned, as the incompetents operating the system painted themselves into a corner, and have been justifying their folly theoretically since.

And I would stipulate as a general rule as well that reason can help us get what we want, but cannot tell us what we DO want.

Axiom: If it has to do with machines, consult science; if it has to do with humans, your heart.

Definition: machine: any fixed or definable complex system which exhibits regularities in nature such that general principles can be stipulated, as well as the creations of the human mind expressed within the field of matter intended to be of practical use.

Not sure if I agree with all that, but I am tired so it will have to do.

It came to me today that a good life is continually throwing off sparks: sparks of happiness, of creative insight, of originality of mood and behavior.

And I was sitting, contemplating loneliness and its alternative, emotional satiety, and it hit me that a happy spirit, one who has contacted the roots of life, is like a fountain, continually flowing outward in all directions.

The opposite of this is someone who is always leaning, leaning on people, on ideas, on distractions, on jokes, on drugs, on alcohol, on cruelty, on work, on a fixed identity which is absolutely rigid.

People who need each other can never see each other as they are.  There is no distance possible when both are leaning into each other for support.  Someone who says to another “I can’t imagine life without you” is, perhaps, really saying “I will never fully understand you.”

I have flickers of really interesting emotions cross my field of awareness sometimes, and I had a lot of them today.  It’s becoming a better and better thing to be me.  God knows its been pretty shitty for a very long time.

I had something happen the other day which convinced me that Fate is a real thing.  We all have destinies.  What this means, who chooses them, I don’t know.

But I have decided that the way soldiers make peace with horror is wise and what I want to pursue.  When it is your time, it is your time.  You can’t escape it.  And when it is not your time, then all your worry is wasted.  Practically, this means almost all worry is wasted.  No need to duck when you hear the bullet whistle by your head: it is far beyond you now.

Expand what is beautiful.  Expand hope.  Expand generosity and kindness, at least to your self.  None of it is wasted.  You become, slowly, what you dream.

As a sort of way of sewing myself to the path of persistence, I had “Don’t whine/Don’t complain/Don’t make excuses/Never quit” tattoed on my arm, or at least the abbreviations, some ten years ago.  It is 3/4’s John Wooden’s father, whose name I really should find out.  John Wooden did not spring like Athena from the forehead of the God of Basketball.

In reality, these were always distant targets I shot for not enough, and missed regularly when I did.

But slowly I am rounding a corner, and have determined that I need to define these terms for myself.  What do I mean?  This is part of my creed, one I chose freely from many possibilities.

This will be a project over the next week or two.  What I mean is in part who I am.

Do you wonder who you are?  Pick a direction, travel it, and see how you feel.  Repeat until your heart meets your will, and there you will likely find peace and success.

In any way, especially in the modern era, there are more variables than can be accounted for by even the best mind.  It is always best to avoid war, but at the same time I cannot see us standing by idly watching as a man who has nuclear weapons works continually to develop the means to deliver them, all while threatening nuclear war.

It seems to me one major barrier to peace is Kim Jung Un’s complete ignorance as to our ACTUAL military capability.  Perhaps we should invite one of his senior officers on a tour of our battle fleet, of our actual supplies of weapons and munitions, and allow him to film significant portions of them.

Perhaps we could bring them to the United States to see how we ACTUALLY live, versus what their propaganda teaches them.

And I continue to believe that Kim Jung Un has ZERO idea how much luxury and pleasantness we would be willing to shower on him for abdicating what amounts to his throne and opening North Korea to foreign goods and investment.  People could operate sweatshops paying close to nothing there and their people would be still be MUCH better off than they are now.  Hunger is a regular feature of their lives, as is sudden death from political activism, which could amount to no more than saying publicly “I’m hungry”.

I have said this before, but building a Disneyland for Kim Jung Un on some uninhabited island in the South Pacific–in paradise–would still be cheaper than war.  It may have been his father obsessed with Disneyland, but he likely has his equivalent.  There is likely something he craves that he simply can’t get where he is.

South Korea, which is our ally, is prosperous.  North Korea could be too, if only he would relent and allow his people their freedom.

It occurs to me that two dead people are more equal than any two living people can be made, if we do not ask what the  POINT of equality is.  Free to what?  Why?

Even if we get everybody at the same spot on the same line, some are naturally faster than others.  If the goal is to tear them down, to thwart them, to prevent them from demonstrating natural or social superiorities in talent and/or drive, then, again, what is the point?  Of what value a life where nothing matters but life, and equality?

Since the people articulating these lunatic creeds are not speaking from places of humanity, from their hearts, from any felt connection to the human condition, from any real sense of compassion, or even capacity for empathy, they have no answers, because these are simply not questions that interest them.

When one looks at the Fascists who claim to be fighting Fascists, the degree of disconnection from the whole of humanity and from obvious social realities, is such that they really become not people who think differently, but an example of psychosocial pathology which warrants explanation.

How, we can ask, in conditions of freedom, have Soviet Union levels of absolute brainwashing been achieved?  My personal opinion is that the long term Communist strategy of dehumanizing all of us, of tearing us from our roots, from groundedness, from belongingness not connected to economic factors, has had the effect of creating a whole generation of radically Other Directed people, who by the nature of their predicament MUST seek out and imbibe propaganda.  They need it like junkies need drugs.

It is quite a feat that has been achieved.  But for what?  It is no secret of history that murderous lunatics can be operationally and socially clever.  Should one admire the serial torturer, rapist, and killer who is never caught?  Research seems to show they all eventually commit suicide anyway, because they live their lives in hell.  There is not, and never can be, anything beautiful in violence.  It is sometimes needed, but far too many people, in denying this, bring it out anyway in the wrong ways and wrong places, and have no principled means for self correction or moderation.

I find myself alone today, which is not surprising, since I am alone most days.  But what I found this morning, which was unexpected and new, is a newly functioning capacity for positive thinking, for ACTUALLY believing myself when I say things will get better.

Loneliness is never a lack of people.  There are people all around us.  In my own case, I push people away often, in irritability and mistrust.  Even though my adult experience has been fine, primitive parts of me continue to enact survival scripts from my early childhood.  I try to catch myself, to pattern interrupt, and sometimes succeed, but it is like facing a steady and strong wind.

So I do my practice, and recently I have been allowing up the most painful feelings I have ever known.  And what I am finding is that when they are allowed to speak, to expand as much as they want to, they diminish, and I find myself slightly more present to my own experience, and this, over time, will make me more present to others, and them, in turn, more present to me.  I have to be there, after all, for them to notice and care about me, or at least for me to be able to accept what they offer.

And it occurred to me that this skill–that of being present to experience, of enjoying life, of enjoying the company of others who are in turn attracted to my own lust for and embrace of life–is a skill which can be gradually improved across a lifetime.

What I am wrestling with in my Kum Nye practice is the tacit truth that what matters most is who you ARE, not what you can do, or what you have done.  Being–how you interact with the world through your senses and what underlies the senses–can be improved; or, perhaps, awareness of what was already there can be improved.  The two amount to the same practically.

It is an odd fact of Socialism is that it takes the same economic logic of Marx’s version of “Capitalism” and makes them worse.  People have concrete and very specific values.  Life is about material comfort and progress, with nothing said about the more subtle aspects of life which make it genuinely worthwhile.

Socialism, if I might put it clearly and bluntly, has no means of placing high value on old people.  Their economic use is gone, and they are now net burdens on a system which simultaneously insists everyone must be within it, and also insists that it can decide which lives matter.  There is nothing moral or beautiful about this.  It takes the bottom line of Capitalism–which only there applies to business profit/loss statements–and applies it generally as a morality based upon naked utility.  Hence Shaw’s poison–but humane–gas.  Hence some senior Japanese some years ago wishing out loud that old people would just get on with the business of dying.

This vision is anti-Humanist.  It sees no inherent worth in ANY human life.  It takes the logic of valuing people according to their economic productivity to the final possible extent, that of making of men machines in a massive assembly line, and denying them all other dignities and possibilities, something which cannot be said of what is called “Capitalism”.

What is the point of life?  What is the VALUE of life, and how, philosophically, do we even begin to answer this question?

Economics only speaks in principle to how to get more stuff produced and distributed.  The most efficient, the best, economic system ever developed is free markets, free trade, enforceable contract law, and enforceable property rights.

Socialism, as I keep saying, is not an economic system at all.  It is a poorly constructed, utterly imbecilic system of MORALITY.  But because within its value system only material things matter, and since economics is historically what deals with things, it finds itself obsessed with HOW goods are produced and distributed, with the only real things in life being those which can be counted and weighed.

I am feeling a bit sad, and abstraction of course is how I deal with these things sometimes.  I would not change what I wrote if I were happy, but it’s quite possible I might not have written it at all.

But I also feel cautiously optimistic, genuinely.  I am feeling the capacity to generate and maintain for increasing lengths of time positive feelings.  I do feel this will be a good day.  It is beautiful weather, and I will go for a long walk after doing my Kum Nye practice, and possibly smoking a cigar and reading for a couple hours.

Here is the thing: I cannot directly affect world events.  I cannot even affect the emotions of people close to me, at least directly.  How could I, when they themselves can’t control them ? Most of what you see in the world is utterly beyond your control.  It will happen or not happen according to many factors, many of which cannot be foreseen by the actors themselves.

But connecting ones happiness and sense of well being to a massive world like this is a surefire recipe for unhappiness.  Something will always be wrong somewhere.  And being overwhelmed takes away what power we DO have.  There are many occasions to make small impacts here and there, and the Big Picture in many respects is an Emergent Property of countless small acts.

It is undoubtedly more useful to make oneself an excellent meal than to worry about anything.

I requoted Corrie Ten Boom somewhere, but I don’t think here: “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows.  It empties today of its strengths.”