Author: White Whale

I continue to pendulate and titrate my Developmental Trauma.  I contact a chthonic energy–existence level fear, hate, or helplessness–and allow it to be for a time.  Then I get drunk.  When I sober up, I try again to allow that energy some expression.  And so on.  As time goes on, I am gradually decreasing the need for alcohol, I think–and many a drunk has said this many times–for good.  It has been some weeks since I brought hard liquor into my home, although I have twice in the past two weeks closed down some local bars, which is saying something since they close at 4am.

And of course all the “deep” stuff comes up: what am I doing with my life, how will I feel when my parents die, how will I feel when I am facing death, where is this world going, have I done what I could for my kids in building a better world, what are the limits of the possibility of my responsibility, etc.  It’s hard facing these questions alone.  Most people don’t like going to these places, because most people instinctively avoid painful questions for which there are no ready and obvious answers outside of submission in some given order, most obviously a church, or bleak cynicism.  I suppose I can understand the anger with which dogmatic atheists hold their views:  the possibility of hope scares them more than their certainty of extinction.

On one level I am definitely a fuck up.  I am a highly intelligent person with no career.  I am not an engineer, or doctor, or scientist, or lawyer, or academic.  I don’t own the place where I live.  Many months I am hand to mouth, not least because my obsessions and poorly regulated grief often cause me to manage my money poorly.

But I ask myself: what was the criteria by which you intended to live your life?  What was the managing purpose, the theme, the goal?  And my answer is simple: life is about learning to know oneself, and about service to others.  And the one thing my lifestyle has in abundance is time–time for meditation, for contemplation, for reading, for writing.  My that standard, I am pretty much a genius.  I make outstanding money when I do work, leaving me lots of time to not work.  I don’t have a boss, don’t have to attend pointless meetings (which is most of them, at most companies), and don’t have a regular schedule.

And I look at all the work I did on Goodness Movement, and all the ideas I have developed here, and even if I have as yet received no recognition, even if it is unclear if I have yet affected any human lives for the better, I have tried.  God knows I have tried, and will try again.

I often feel abject horror, still: mainlined fear, the pure stuff, which drives you out of your mind, a bit.  But I’m used to it.  I know it doesn’t kill me.  I have on many occasions dreamed of being the Wolverine.  Everything is conspiring to kill me, and I have no home, but I don’t die.  I think the Wolverine appeals to many men particularly on a mythic level, because he represents in some respects a masculine ideal, or one at least that invokes something in many of us of a certain generation and before.

I did last night, after more episodes of shaking and attacks of terror than I can count.  I literally wear myself out after a while, then sleep well.   I often wake up “speaking in tongues”, which in my case amounts to babbling nonsense that sounds like a foreign language, but which I think is certainly nonsense.  I have looked it up, but seen no good explanation.  My best guess is that it is recalling a primitive trauma before I could actually speak, and the part of my brain responsible for language is experimenting with different ways to speak to communicate distress.  Sometimes I wake up and I am more or less lucid but it continues, and it becomes actually a bit interesting, in that I can kind of just observe it.

But here is the thing: the deeper I can get into the shit, the closer I am to being done with it.  This is my strong feeling.  But you can’t do it all at once.  This is the essence of one of Peter Levine’s most important insights.  But the willingness to “go there” is also important, and this is where I think I am wired differently than most people.

I see wounded people in bars all the time.  They are not hard to recognize, and as a general rule, it is most of them, if they are there regularly.  Most of the people who work in bars are also wounded.  What I have discovered, though, is that almost nobody wants to talk at a deep level about wounds.  They want to leave them alone.  That pain they felt, they have no desire to revisit, even if dealing with the lasting effects means smoking too much, drinking too much, weed and other drugs, or long term failure to thrive.  I know many college graduates who work in bars and show no signs of ever leaving.

This is not always true, and more than once I have had people tell me deep stories they said they had never told anyone else.  In those cases, I can tell it is therapeutic for them.  Freud was not wrong that talking about things can sometimes be therapeutic, but only if it is something very important that has remained a secret.  If you are the third therapist in a year they are sharing “their story” with, then they are simply practicing, and absent true trauma, most likely need something like this.

Where I’m going with all this, other than an inventory of where my thoughts are at the moment, I’m not sure.  Since I am lonely, and since most of the other people I see are lonely–even a great many people with multiple “friends” often seem to feel trapped in a realm of unreality, of superficiality, in a longing for something deeper without the ability to identify that longing, or even guess how to satisfy it–I am going to print cards with a web link to a site I created for my “group therapy” project, or what I call my “Bohannon” project.  I am going to pass them out at bars, until I get 20 people, then start.  I actually think this is a good plan.  I have realized plans get better as ones seriousness grows sharper.

I will add on a tangent to that last comment, that I realized yesterday that everybody is serious on some level.  All human beings have something that matters to them deeply; there is some inner reality they may never show which is in absolute earnest.  Some part of our psyche ALWAYS touches the survival instinct.

I say this in regard to some meditating I was doing about my father, who in important respects is really quite a clownish figure.  He is ridiculous, even when he doesn’t realize it.  But that is not how he sees himself.  It is always tempting to take people as they present themselves, but this is quite often a mistake.

I’m trying to fix something on my credit report, and finding the process–remembering the year of a truck I sold 25 years ago, the address of an employer I had for a month 20 years ago–infuriating.  You fuck up the on-line application, you call the number, you get a robot.  The robot is scarcely better.  I don’t like talking to robots, and it occurs to me I actually prefer the drunk Swedes to the friendly Midwesterners, who I find vaguely horrifying.

And it occurs to me that if the banks get control of the world, completely, hell will have been fully transferred to Earth.  No moral progress will be possible.  Every last detail of every last life will be micromanaged by passive sadistic, number driven demons, so that human life will no longer be an opportunity, but a curse, a damnation, repeated as the wheel of dharma, but without the dharma: without wisdom, without freedom, without escape.  Hell.

I do fear for our future, particularly since the cruelest among us consider themselves the wisest and most humane.

I discovered something by accident last night: I both have the capacity for, and the need to express, pure, unadulterated hatred.  We read, of course, daily, that hatred is bad.  This is no doubt true.  But it is in my view equally true that suppressed hatred, suppressed rage, suppressed outrage and disgust, does not go away.  There is no magical drain which makes crimes which infuriate psychologically normal people simply disappear.

It is wrong, obviously, and unhealthy, to get STUCK in hatred, but it is equally wrong, and psychologically imbecilic, to PRETEND–to make up little games like you play with children–that you are so superior that you are beyond that.  Fuck that.  All of us have images of smashing someone’s skull in from time to time.  This is OK. It is normal.  What is not normal is forcing this anger so far inside that you are ALWAYS nice to a fault.  And what is not normal is feeling rage ALL THE TIME, like they do on the Left.

It’s good.  And fuck these mother fuckers, once again. I hope they drink Drano, crack their heads open on slick sidewalks, and have aneurysms by the thousands the day Trump takes the oath of office, and all their tricks come to an end, for the time being at least.  I mean it.  I really do.

And ponder what any psychologist would make of someone who sees images of hateful racists in literally every image in the Rorschach deck.  These are the same people attacking Trump supporters, burning cars, and calling everyone who disagrees with them “white supremacists”.  They see people everywhere who want to impose their will on others–against the will and choice of those others–using violence, threats of violence, legal coercion, and social shaming.  Who else might that apply to?  And how did these images wind up on EVERY CARD?   Did white supremacists create the deck possibly?  Time for another violent protest.

Ponder the nightmare of going through each and every election cycle for the rest of the life of the United States wondering if the Electors are going to go AWOL on their duties as citizens and human beings.  Ponder if large numbers of unqualified fools–like this ambulance driver, citing Left wing propaganda, half truths, overt lies, and examples of his own clouded and poor thinking–can simply go any route they choose, even AFTER the American people have spoken, loudly and clearly.

This stupid son of a bitch called Steve Bannon a LENINIST.  Jesus fucking Christ.  I hope he gets run over by a car on the side of a freeway.  I don’t know how the hell this imbecile got this job in the first place.  Don’t you just KNOW that this whole process, for the first time in history, as far as I know, is going to have to be looked at carefully, because the FUCKING DEMOCRATS DON’T WANT TO ACCEPT THE RESULTS OF AN ELECTION THEY LOST BADLY, BECAUSE THEY ARE OUT OF TOUCH, ARROGANT, ELITIST ASSHOLES?

Assuming we get through this without putting a candidate of the global elites in, like Kasich–who would be HATED and despised by a large segment of our population, with justice, and which would cause widespread, unnecessary violence and chaos–we need to take advantage of the little commented on fact that the States are more Red than they have been in nearly a century, since by my math around the time of Harding.  The Democrats suffered a landslide loss nationally.  They not only lost the Presidency, but failed to make much progress in the House or the Senate.  More importantly, the number of governorship, and State Houses and Senates that are now controlled entirely by Republicans increased vastly.

Here is what they need to do: pass strongly worded laws making it a felony for any Elector to fail to vote for the candidate chosen by their State.  10 years in jail minimum, and forfeiture of all possessions would be my personal vote.  Our system is at stake, because of the fucking Democrats, because of their unwillingness to even attempt for five minutes to care about principles they themselves claimed were sacred and inviolate.

We are dying as a system, as a people.  This is obvious.  We have zombies walking every street of every city, who understand nothing, who believe lies, who value nothing we have created, and who seek to destroy and feed on everything good in this nation.  The death of sanctity, of principle, of reason, of learning from history, haunts us.  All people of good sense and learning can do is try to stave off the darkness as long as we can, and hope that God’s light somehow shines down in ways we cannot now imagine.

After all the fucking tricks the retarded, lunatic, hateful, venom-dripping Left has played and continues to play, I have to say my patience is at an end.  I want hateful things to happen to them, often.  I want every person at Standing Rock to be put in jail, and the fucking pipeline rammed right through exactly where it was supposed to.  I sincerely hope so-called gay “rights” are rolled back, that all Executive orders pertaining to men using women’s bathrooms are reversed completely and totally, that women are pulled from ground combat jobs, and that all the lunacy these assholes have perpetrated on this great nation are rolled back and that they are left screaming like the petulant children they are, and thereby revealed to more and more eyes as uncreative, unproductive, and ultimately unwanted and unneeded by the people who run this country, who created it, and who have continued to make it work despite continual efforts across decades by these organized criminals to run everything good we have created into a ditch.

What is going on is not moderation.  It is not thoughtful.  It is not temperate.  Quite the opposite.  Nobody has ever tried to extort the Electors before into changing the votes their duty requires them to render.  Nobody has tried to reverse a State where the vote was not close.  Certainly, nobody has had the unmitigated chutzpah to make accepting the Election result a campaign issue–claiming not accepting the results is an “assault on our Democracy”– then commit every possible crime against the smooth transition of power.

What seems to be happening is a two pronged approach.  On the one hand, they may flip 15-20 Electors (and not have principled Hillary Electors flip in the other direction and vote for Trump, which is what the fuck I would do if I were reading the news and feeling profound shame at the antics and loss of direction and principle of my party), which is not enough, but if they can flip Michigan or Wisconsin, it gets close.

All of this still seems unlikely, but even though the American people have short attention spans, I do feel that many, many, many people are watching this farce and concluding–many of them reluctantly–that whatever claim the Democrats once had to being the party of the working man, the minority, the poor, they have lost, and show no sign whatever of regaining.  They are liars, thieves, cheats.  This much is clear.  No hyperbole is needed: these are factual statements.  Remember Debbie Wasserman Schultz was Hillary’s honorary campaign chairman.  Remember that the Clinton Foundation is still under FBI investigation, and that the new Attorney General can be expected to do his fucking job, unlike the political hacks Obama has appointed who have ignored law breaking at the highest levels, and even now are not raining down justice on the those threatening the integrity of our electoral process.

Remember Hillary’s oft-repeated promise to honor the results of the election.

Oi.  The stupid.  It hurts.  I don’t know how people get that dumb.  Yes, I suppose I do, but I don’t know how they STAY that dumb.  It takes effort.  It takes will.  It takes determination, all of which merit the contempt of decent human beings everywhere.  Fuck all of them. I wish them disaster, failure, disease, and death.  I curse them.

This morning I felt keenly the loss of myth in our society.  Comic books serve some of this role; radical politics–comic-like in their oversimplifications, their simple dichotomies of good and evil even while they reject traditional virtues, and traditional notions of good and evil–more.

I asserted that true Leftism inherently requires the sacrifice of a core self, in a way even the military–which offers an unchanging code it takes seriously–does not.  A soldier can say “this mission does not accord with our core values; or with the law”, as the drone operators did a few months ago in asserting that our policies in Yemen were CREATING, not destroying terrorists, and who were punished by our government for it.

Superficially, though, Leftists are granted the “identity” of identity politics.  I read, in what seems too farcical to be made up, that Tinder lists some 37 “genders”.  Each of these is an identity, are they not?  They are shallow identities, but they are labels one can use.

But who are you?  Is this really a question anyone can or should be able to answer in anything approaching a serious fashion with mere words?  You are THAT.  You are what you are, and limiting your description to what you do with your penis or vagina or mouth is absurdly reductive.

But people have been conditioned to accept this.  You are black.  You are white.  You are gay.  You are straight.  All have political consequences.

Our future, if we are to have a future, requires reconnecting with what is deep within us, and becoming multidimensional in awareness, as we clearly are in reality.

German Sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies proposed about a century ago that the distinction between “Gemainschaft” and “Gesellschaft” was a useful heuristic tool.  Both are untranslatable, but roughly Gemainschaft is a community of like-minded people who feel, ideally, a sense of mutual loyalty, who share beliefs and customs, and who feel a sense of belonging and home (Heim).

Gesellshaft would be more like the people you interact with on a business or professional basis.  It is the people at work, your clients, your suppliers, the Rotary, your country club, the people on the bus, train, or subway.

Modern academics have in some cases used these terms to describe what appears to be a gradual shift from being “nested” somewhere, from belonging somewhere, from there being something important that can be gleaned from where you are from, to a “thrownness”, to feeling like a bob going up and down on an endless and unpredictable tide.

I was dreaming last night about being lost somewhere in a generic southern California town.  There were tourist shops and cheap watches, hot dogs, traffic problems, and a continual hustle and bustle.  I felt the unanchored quality of my own life.

By and large, this is not a problem in the small towns of America, the ones who elected Trump.  They are born, live–sometimes leave and come back–and die in the same small place.  They inherit beliefs and habits they pass on to their children.  This is Gemeinschaft.

Southern California–really all of California, which I know well and grew not to care for–is Gesellschaft.  Everybody is hustling for something.  They want money, thrills, fame.  It is not a place for nesting. Your home is an investment, your job a vehicle to wealth.  Everything and everyone has a price.  It is a truism that they are superficial, plastic.  This is because they have nothing else.  Everything else was drowned in the flood of people coming there wanting to forget their past lives and who they once were.

Leftism, as it exists in this country, is an answer to “Verworfenheit”.  It is not a system for rectifying wrongs, or for ameliorating poverty and pain.  What it provides is a sense of certainty, a culture that is transferable across widely diverging groups.  It provides stability in a sea of change.  It soothes those aching with confusion about the future, about what is right and wrong, and about who they should be.  It asks of its votaries their core self, but in exchange it offers simple answers which have merely to be downloaded at regular intervals.  Each day, it will tell you who you are and what you believe, and this is a huge relief to people who have no other reference points, who are lost in the flood.

I do not think it overstating the case that this election was a resounding rejection by those who “cling” to traditional moralities based on principles and outcomes, of a creed based on nothing but mutable daily political tasks, ones quite often motivated simply by the need to mobilize hate in order to energize their base and keep them loyal. 

One paradox was a runner, who ran halfway to the finish line, then halfway again, then halfway again, such that while in continual motion he never actually reached the finish line. He approached it asymptotically.

Morally, in Europe, you have one group of formally decadent people, who believe that the “truth is always in the middle”, and another group of traditional, tribal people, who believe that the truth is absolute, knowable, and known with no defects by all adherents of the one true faith.

Inevitably, absent a moral renaissance–a rebirth, or reawakening–the center of gravity is Islam.  They give their first halving, by saying they will accept swimming pools and trains segregated by gender.  They give their second halving by telling their women not to “provoke” the wild beasts.  They give their third halving by allowing Sharia in some places.

At some point, they stand one foot from the finish line, and only self delusion and recollections of past glories prevents them from realizing they have lost all claim to virtue–to true Liberalism–they once possessed, and have instead sunk into the pit of a brutal creed hatched in the unforgiving deserts of 7th century Saudi Arabia, one which hates gays, hates women, hates diversity, hates “progress”, and which demands of its votaries complete submission in all aspects of their lives.

We truly live in an extraordinary period.  The Islamists are TELLING us what they want to do, and nobody–or few–have the balls to stop them.

What if someone were blessed with the power to make everyone else around them more intelligent?  What if this person, themselves, were of very average intelligence, but that if they sat in a room with a group of people everyone’s IQ went up 50 or 100 points?

Creativity is nothing more or less than seeing what was already possible.  Everything we have built in the modern world was physically possible 5,000 years ago.  It was the ideas and knowledge we lacked.  Everything we will have built 100 years from now, if we survive, is possible now.

So much human misery depends entirely on human stupidity, and emotional dysfunctions of various sorts.

And actually, this raises the question: how much better would thinking actually become, once we consider that emotional blocks of various sorts have long impelled highly intelligent people into functional stupidity?  Keynes was a genius, but he was also a fucking imbecile.  He sought to create a plausible veneer for the establishment of Fascist economics, and that in turn because he did not grasp the value of political freedom for the masses, in turn because he did not recognize the possibility of individual moral development, this in turn because on some profound inner level he was completely stuck in a primitive state emotionally, all his life.