Author: White Whale

I was contemplating forgiveness just now. I often wake up feeling the need to ask for forgiveness.  It is impulsive.  It arises and comes out.  I do often sleep in, but that is not the root problem: my destiny is to do something connected with this sort of work in the long run, once I get my own shit figured out.

From what does the need to ask forgiveness come from?  It comes from social disconnection.  A rupture has occurred, and needs to be repaired.  Some rule has been violated, some feeling of tenderness or propriety crossed.  There was connection, now there is not.

Childhood trauma, of course, will generate the continual sense of shame, of alienation, and the futile asking for, but never receiving, forgiveness. I myself compensate with arrogance.  It is a shield of sorts, or has been.  It is an interesting thing to contemplate that somewhere in the hardest human beings there is the capacity for tenderness and softness which they have forgotten.

And being me, I started contemplating the dynamics of asking forgiveness from GOD.  We cannot see God.  Is asking for forgiveness the same as asking for connection?

And being me, I started thinking about T’shuvah, repentance, which at one time consisted in offering animal sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem.  What is this dynamic?  I will need to feel about this for a while longer.

But the point I wanted to make here is that it is quite possible, and in my view desirable, to treat religion BOTH as a cultural artifact intended to enable social cohesion and the maintenance of meaning, AND as a set of objective claims about the physical universe which can be investigated in a scientific manner. A study can be made as to what works and why culturally, and as to what is true empirically.

As I’ve no doubt mentioned repeatedly, Religion (Religions, if you want to be more politically conformist) was my own academic field of interest, and sacrifice–“acts of the sacred”–my main interest there.  But the question “is this true?” was not an important question.  I think it should be.

The process of growing is making contact with what I visualize–and feel–as tight balls of energy, and allowing them to rise up and expand, and melt into the universe.  Some are prickly and painful.  Some ache.  Some bleed.  At some point I expect them to be pleasant and connecting.  That is the energy behind it all.

I will often lay in bed in the mornings and just feel.  I will interocept–I just made it a verb–and see where I am guided.

I have been lonely all my life.  Part of my problem, of course, is that few people can understand me at the level where I like to operate.  To a great extent, uniqueness and loneliness go together.

But as I’ve come to know, and as I’ve described here, I seem “have”–I’m not sure what the best word is–Developmental Trauma Disorder.

And I went this morning to a primal place, that of being a small child, looking into my mothers eyes, and feeling the terror and confusion of not seeing her looking back.  She could only see herself.

I touched this feeling.  It is oceanic, overwhelming.  But I have developed enough skill in this sort of thing–in pendulation, in titration–that I was able to work with this high voltage safely.  It is painful, of course, but my day will go on.

And I realize that is feeling myself, I am making up for that primitive lack. I am my own mirror.  And I feel that to SEE this is narcissism, but to feel it is healing. It matters how one does it.  Narcissists only see themselves, but they do not see that they only see themselves.  Narcissism is simply how the world is for them.  It, too, is the result of a primitive trauma.

And I feel this not being seen is what makes the world go mad.  It explains wars and cruelty and obsessions.  It is invisible for nearly everyone.

And I was pondering child rearing in this country, especially in light of a question a Democrat asked me in a bar.  We were talking politics and I said I was a conservative, and his first question was “what do we do with the old people?”  I first asked him “what did we do with old people before?”–to which he really had no response, being a bit drunk–and then I pointed out that in countries with socialized medicine they keep old people alive far less aggressively, and several leaders–such as in Japan–have openly wished for the old to die, as they were “unproductive” members of society.  In an allegedly morally superior social order, the old are seen solely in terms of their economic utility.  There is a huge push to get people on government run medical plans, then resentment at the cost.  The whole thing is ludicrous and contradictory.

But here is the relevant point: in the old days, aging parents lived with their children.  Grandmothers were there for their grandbabies.  In the old days, numerous women were around in an extended family, such that the babies looked in many eyes, had many opportunities for connection and union.  And because this was the norm, the parents themselves would have been more commonly available to their children emotionally.  There would have been much less Developmental Trauma Disorder.

And the old days continue in much of the world.  It is likely that the average child in an African village feels more love from its mother than the average child in America, even when the mother is playing Mozart and making sure there are lots of colors and shapes for the child to interact with.  Her mother is in California  Her sister is in Idaho.  The fathers mother is in New York.  They all come to visit, of course, but are not in and out of the home daily, as happens in more traditional communities with tighter family ties.

Healthy children become healthy adults, and they are not mass produced.  There are not techniques for thriving, other than those of connection, and providing a good continuum of both safety and opportunity to explore.  They need to feel safe, and they need to be allowed to express their natural curiosity, and to fail sometimes.  Failure is not death: it is, on the contrary, the essence of life.  Fail better, fail harder, fail forward.

Historical Fascism and Communism both rely on Utopian fantasies, of building a world which has never been but which may be.  The locus of power is the government, the locus of power in the government is a Party, and the locus of power in the Party is either one person, or a very small oligarchy.

http://www.infowars.com/hillary-vows-to-shut-down-breitbartinfowars-if-elected/

We have a major candidate for President openly talking about the coercive shut down of political opposition. This is categorically anti-American, categorically a blatant example of the sort of authoritarianism our Constitution was explicitly written to prevent.

Who are the lunatics who make this sort of thing possible?  Who are the imbeciles and lunatics who support them?  Where is the decency in this world?  It is surrounding us, I suppose: most people are good, but my God it continues to astonish me how craven, how intellectually corrupt, how STUPID even the graduates of our best colleges and universities are.

Leftist policies cannot be defended.  They cannot be defended on moral, practical, or any grounds whatever.  They corrupt culture, alienate people from one another, breed poverty and resentment, and place in power psychopaths who eventually generate misery directly.  There is nothing good in any of this.

In October I am going to join a Trump phone bank.  I would encourage any readers I may have to do likewise.  If Hillary wins, our democracy is cooked.  We will be fortunate Barack Obama is so lazy, stupid, and cowardly, and that he spent so much time golfing.  Hillary will get right down to work ending everything good in this country, and promoting cronies, crooks and thieves.

I actually don’t think this is hyperbole.  Propagandistic control of the media, and public gullability, indifference, and out right stupidity, have reached a point where she can commit crimes in the light of day, crimes which cannot be denied, and GET AWAY WITH THEM.  If she is President, she will attack journalistic pluralism–the few remaining honest human beings in the profession–immediately, and then we will have NO IDEA what is actually happening.

Jesus Christ people: wake the fuck up.

It is possible to feel numb.  I did it tonight.  I felt it tonight.

Here is the thing most people don’t think about: if you can’t feel something, it doesn’t feel NUMB: it doesn’t feel at all.  There is no sensation there.  The sensation is that there is no sensation, and if you’re not expecting a sensation, there is no way to know it is missing.

And I felt tonight a thousand possibilities, like every pore in me COULD open, could participate in life, but is currently choosing not to.  This is a negotiation which will need to happen with my body.

But in the same sense that you cannot see censorship, politically, emotionally you cannot feel what you are not feeling.  You cannot know what is missing until it becomes possible, and what happens at that moment is you feel a lack which was not present before; you create a hole–perhaps “pregnable, or “open space” might work better–into which the new might possibly enter.

Ignorance is invisible.  This is an important point.  It takes LEARNING to see ignorance.  You must be searching, and seeing what should be there, but isn’t.  This is task undertaken by very few.  Those who do, do so out of pain they cannot avoid.  That is certainly my own case.

Eventually, I hope that this process will become playful, fun, entertaining, the only worthy game in town.

Does a lion feel a pang of conscience when it kills and eats a gazelle?  It doesn’t seem likely.  It sees the gazelle, feels hunger, and acts instinctively.  This is how is survives, reproduces, and how the lion species continues.

Lions may fight over mates, but they do not see each other as food.  This is genetic, inherent.

Within each of us, if we look deeply enough, there is also this primitive drive towards satiation, which does not make moral distinctions.  We do not attack our own tribe, but even humans far enough away from us biologically may become targets.

I think in what I will call my amoral dream I contacted this energy.  It is primal, and I contacted it at the root, and before it ran through any filter, the filters of justification and restraint.

At root, this is the sadistic impulse–which I have in me too–which regresses to the animal, to the pre-moral, where morality is not a term possible or comprehensible on any level.  This is what Sade wanted: freedom from the possibility of being human.  Living as he did in a cage of traumatic experience, he could not connect to human kind, and the mere possibility drove him mad.  It tortured him.  So he tortured back, in his mind, in his soul.

This is the root of evil.

Goodness, genuine goodness, is clarity.  It is having opened all these channels, understood them, accepted what is useful in them, and dedicated oneself to cultivating connection, empathy, union.  It is, ideally, vision everywhere and blindness nowhere.

It is not necessary to reject or hate a latent possibility.  It is in fact even possible to welcome it as having a possible role to play in some situations, like survival.

Alimentation and morality: food for thought.

It is the simplest thing in the world to teach a naive child who has found themselves physiologically mature enough to be in college, that America has killed innocent people, and this makes us bad.  We are the bad guys.  And what have you done?  You have simply switched one simplistic narrative for another.  Instead of being perfect and all-knowing, we are uniformly evil, and the very pit of darkness.

And while it is true in theory that growth would consist in greater nuance, and a redoubled effort at dispassionate understanding, which is then compared to moral ideals in an honest way, the reality of what passes for “nuance” in our Academies, and “non-reductive” research is in the main destroying traditional narratives of what constitutes the morally ideal, in favor of very specific propagandas which demonize one party–us–and angelicize–if I may be permitted the term–all Others.

A logical and honest question might be “what do we want, and what did we get?”  The actual question asked is “how did we fuck up, and why are they so wonderful?”

Through this very disingenuous exercise, massive crimes can be excused, and minute crimes expanded to Himalayan proportions.  Everyone knows Lieutenant Calley.  But have you heard of Dak Son?  Let me quote a pamphlet circulated in Congress before we decided to abandon Southeast Asia to mass death, torture, and soul searing pain which constituted a hell on Earth for tens of millions of innocent people (all so the fucking hippies and Leftist assassins could be self satisfied in their moral superiority):

Organized terror–of a ruthlessness and on a scale that defies civilized comprehension–has been a cardinal aspect of Communist policy from the very first days of the Vietcong insurgency.  By and large the Western world only knows of a few of the more massive and gruesome terrorist incidents–like the massacre that took place in the Montagnard village of Dak Son in December 1967, when the Vietcong, attacking with flame throwers, moved from hut to hut, incinerating alive more than 250 villagers, two thirds of them women and children.  In addition 200 Dak Son villagers were kidnapped, never to be heard of again.  But the thousands of small incidents of terror–equally merciless, equally gruesome, and which account for far more victims than the big incidents–with exceedingly rare exceptions, go unreported. 

It did not make the press, for example, when on October 27, 1969, the  Communists booby-trapped the body of a People’s Self Defense Force member whom they had killed–so that when relatives came to retrieve the body, four of them were killed in the explosion.  Nor did it make the press in May 1967, when Dr. Tran Van Lu-y told the World Health Organization in Geneva that over the previous 10 years Communist terrorists had destroyed 174 dispensaries, maternity homes and hospitals; had mined or machine gunned 40 ambulances; and had killed or kidnapped 211 members of his staff. 

If the Free World knew little or nothing of this day-to-day terror despite the presence of hundreds of correspondents in South Vietnam, what chance is there that the Free World would know anything at all about the bloodletting that would inevitably take place in South Vietnam if the Communists came to power, expelled the Western press corps, and then proceeded to deal with their enemies!

How many of you know that Nixon negotiated a comprehensive cease-fire and peace treaty with North Vietnam?  How many?  We had peace.  Then Nixon was more or less pushed out of office, and Communist radicals masquerading as liberal Democrats cut off aid to the region, North Vietnam violated the peace treaty, tentatively at first, then decisively as they realized we would not respond.  It was a tank led invasion. of the sort we have always excelled at countering.  The cuts to Cambodia also led in short order to fall of Phnom Pen and the atrocities that happened under the never-punished Pol Pot.

The root of this post is a dream I had last night.  I was a comic book character, but I found myself killing Captain America. I found myself fighting an Avengers-like group, with a partner.  And I woke up wondering if I was the Bad Guy.  You’re not supposed to sympathize with the Bad Guy, are you?

And I reflected on the dreams I had following watching the Suicide Squad.  They were pleasant, even peaceful. (although they clearly should have killed that evil psychopathic black woman, who had murdered her own people for no good reason–really, to protect herself and her illicit project–and escaped), and it hit me that we all have an inner Joker or Harley Quinn.  That part is there.  We don’t let it out, don’t allow it consciousness, because we are afraid it will take over.

But I will submit that until you can own your connection to evil, can sympathize with it, you cannot KNOW when you are operating under its influence.  Evil people always find reasons to do what they do.  They may call themselves evil, consciously, but what they do makes psychological sense to them.  Only when you can feel evil as evil and as good–at the same time–are you beginning to deal effectively with your Shadow, which in most cases is to say your unconscious traumatic memories and feelings.

Only in open space do dualities disappear.

And here is the thing with Leftists: they cannot claim or see their innate viciousness. It is absolutely true that jingoism and national bigotry have belonged to every national sense of self, every tribal sense of self.  But the categorical, simplistic rejection of such narratives, without any effort at deep understanding, is merely the same impulse, from which the virtues of loyalty and sanctity have been subtracted.

I might go so far as to call Leftism a “lonely tribalism”.

The alternative is genuine Liberalism, which is asking yourself what you are doing, why, and if it is working.

Actually, I forgot the most important thing I wanted to say.  I keep reading stories about demons, and hauntings and possessions.  Somebody thought it would be terribly funny to stage a mock human sacrifice at CERN (the people who some physicists are concerned might be able to destroy the world).  The professional left decided it would use its media outlets to demonize Trump as “dark“.

But I would suggest that emergent darkness is not new: it is merely now visible.  And that is progress.  There was a time when the Catholic Church successfully suppressed knowledge about priests molesting young children.  There is no reason to suppose this was unique to the modern era, and no reason not to suppose it has been happening for a thousand years or more.

There was a time when fathers in Vienna could molest their daughters without fear of consequences.  Freud inadvertently documented some of this.  That situation can be expanded around the world, and back through recorded time.  Charlemagne was supposedly openly guilty of it, if memory serves; and Muhammad of course had Aisha.

Wife beating, overt racism, rape, droit du seigneur, the imprisonment and torture of the imprudent, witch burnings, wars of all sorts, the Belgian Congo: all of these have existed through all human history.

Darkness hides in the cracks: in societies, and in people.  When it comes out, this means something is flushing it out.  This is a good thing.

Seen evil is vastly preferable to invisible evil.  Invisible evil can and usually does hide within the “good”.  Very few crimes in human history have not been subsequently rationalized by their perpetrators as virtuous in some way.

Trump: “Look at what the Democratic Party has done to the city of Detroit. Forty percent of Detroit’s residents live in poverty.  Half of all Detroit residents do not work. Detroit tops the list of Most Dangerous Cities in terms of violent crime. This is the legacy of the Democrat politicians who have run this city.  This is the result of the policy agenda embraced by Hillary Clinton…. The one thing every item in Hillary Clinton’s agenda has in common is that it takes jobs and opportunities from African-American workers.  Her support for open borders.  Her fierce opposition to school choice.  Her plan to massively raise taxes on small businesses.  Her opposition to American energy.  And her record of giving our jobs away to other countries.”

It is worth noting that enshrining free speech as a fundamental human right is a MONUMENTAL achievement.  This right has not been formally respected in any human society large enough to formulate standing governments and formal laws, at least none that I know of.  Every major civilization has had kings, and those kings have always enjoyed the right to punish anyone who criticized them.  They have been, of course, overthrown many times, but the new kings retained that same right, even if the wiser among them chose to exercise it rarely.

What is great about America?  Why don’t we start with that?  We were the FIRST and still largely the ONLY nation on the planet which has free speech as a foundational right.  Certainly, other nations like Britain and Holland largely respect free speech, but they retain–and increasingly are using–the right to suppress speech they don’t like–for example the words of people who want to tell needed truths about Islam in public.

And ponder Islam. You can be KILLED for publicly criticizing Islam, or its leaders.  You can be KILLED for becoming a Christian, or even an atheist.  All the Arab and other Islam-influenced governments retain the right–the governmental right, which is inversely proportional to individual human rights–to suppress any speech they want.

You do not have free speech in Cuba.  You have “free” shitty education, “free” shitty healthcare.  But if you want to rail against the system, you go to jail, where torture is a very real possibility.

How do human beings who claim to be worthy of the name somehow find themselves on the sides of torturers, and opposing the radical and much needed advancements in human civilization which found expression in the American Constitution?

Look at this (from Wikipedia):

The organization supports limited government and opposes wealth redistribution and economic interventionism. It opposes collectivism, totalitarianism, and communism. It opposes socialism as well, which it asserts is infiltrating U.S. governmental administration. In a 1983 edition of Crossfire, Congressman Larry McDonald (D–Georgia), then its newly appointed president, characterized the society as belonging to the Old Right rather than the New Right.^[14]

The society opposed the 1960s civil rights movement
and claimed the movement had Communists in important positions. In the
latter half of 1965, the JBS produced a flyer titled “What’s Wrong With
Civil Rights?”, which was used as a newspaper advertisement.^[15][16]
In the piece, one of the answers was: “For the civil rights movement in
the United States, with all of its growing agitation and riots and
bitterness, and insidious steps towards the appearance of a civil war,
has not been infiltrated by the Communists, as you now frequently hear. It has been deliberately and almost wholly created by the Communists patiently building up to this present stage for more than forty years.”^[17] The society opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming it violated the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and overstepped individual states’ rights to enact laws regarding civil rights. The society opposes “one world government“, and it has an immigration reduction view on immigration reform. It opposes the United Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and other free trade agreements. They argue the U.S. Constitution has been devalued in favor of political and economic globalization, and that this alleged trend is not accidental. It cited the existence of the former Security and Prosperity Partnership as evidence of a push towards a North American Union.

I think there are 100% right.  I think Black Lives Matters is simply a new version of an old idea: use professional, paid radicals to stir up unhappiness and anger among unhappy and angry people, and use it to attack the system.  Use it to build tension, hatred, anger, violence, and then use the violence as a means to aggregating power in the government and police power. On the one hand, you create the crisis, and on the other, use it for cynical political purposes.  This is what Hitler did.  He controlled the mobs in the street, but was elected, in my recollection, in order to stop the rioting in the streets.

Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not technically accurate to call it Satanic, but it is clearly accurate to call it anti-Life, anti-Dignity, anti-Decency, anti-justice, and anti-Peace.

I know someone in a particular industry who has carved out a market niche for a particular product by creating multiple front companies, multiple names of companies, all of which sell the same product, and all of which populate the top 5 or so hits on Google searches, since he also does SEO.

There is an outward appearance of choice, but there really isn’t.  It is glitter and illusion.  Much of our political world has become like that.  If you aren’t paranoid, you are asleep.

I have hope for Trump.  He was not planned for, I don’t think, and if anybody we have nominated in the past 50 years would be capable of laying off half the government, he would.

He’s within a point of Hillary.  There is no question he can win this election.

And I want to be clear: in a sane, fair economic order, ALL people can take care of themselves.  A job is the only path to economic well being with dignity.  There is no other way.  What we are being shoveled into is mass unemployment and dependence on an omnipotent government.  That is not good for anyone: not for us, and not even for them.