Author: White Whale

One of the things Trump has brought into sharp contrast is that many people of many different specific views have been hiding in one of two camps, and assuming that everyone around them shared roughly the same world view.  This has been shown to be completely wrong.  There are many sorts of Democrats, and many sorts of Republicans.

For my part, I wonder what any Republican could possibly claim to stand for who thinks voting for Hillary will help anything.  I at one time threatened to vote for Hillary if John Kasich got the nomination.  But that threat was made based on the condition that Trump got the most votes, and got outmaneuvered at the convention.  Now that the Republican base has spoken, and it HAS spoken, what refuge could there possibly be in someone who wants to ban guns, who lies nearly as often as she speaks, who views the American people with contempt, and who is likely suffering from a debilitating illness?  The Supreme Court?  We KNOW what Hillary will do.  How could that possibly be better for anyone over any time horizon than Trump, who is a moderate in all respects?

I am realizing that the main reason Republicans cannot stand up to Obama effectively, cannot withstand even mild propaganda attacks, is that they AGREE with much of what is being said.  That being so, who becomes principled standing alongside them?  In what respect is Never Trump something other than an effort to vindicate the broken status quo?  All these Never Trump people would have been FINE with John Kasich or Jeb Bush, who in their own ways are vastly less principled, vastly less concerned with American exceptionalism and well being than Trump.

No: we are dealing with mass idiocy.  It has taken this odd and unexpected, but welcome, development to make this obvious.

I would start running ads with persons of color. I would enlist black supporters to talk in paid ads about how and why they support Trump, about how and why they feel abandoned and let down by Democrats.

I would enlist legal Mexican immigrants to talk about why the people coming here illegally make them mad.  I would reference and quote Cesar Chavez on the same topic.

I would keep the faces of persons of color in my ads for several months.  Trump is not a racist.  This term is used by both conservatives and leftists for the same reason: demonizing his moderation and common sense.  His most important task is skewering the inaccurate perception that his nomination represents something other than fury at the abandonment of genuine love of the American people by both parties.

In my view, this work would pay huge dividends.  Hitting Hillary is going to be easy.  That is not the task.  The task is showing how the Democrats have been lying to people for half a century, using them, abusing them, and throwing them out.  Why are so many Mexicans being brought in?  Because the Democrats are increasingly feeling they don’t even need blacks any more.

Sitting atop a ladder today thinking, as I do, I was pondering about the transition from being monkeys to being humans.  As I have said on numerous occasions, I very simply do not believe Darwinian accounts of speciation through natural selection can possibly be true.  At the same time, I see no compelling reason, whatever our actual ancestry, and whatever the actual mechanism, to discount the obvious fact that we are animals, that we have animal parts, animal instincts, and that it is in fact useful to compare ourselves to animals.  It has the potential to be useful as what I call a Tubaform.

We know, or seem to know, now, that we have multiple nervous systems, effectively.  I got to comparing and contrasting my foggy recall of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, which I read many years ago, in what was never quite a Freudian phase–I have always been partial to Jung–but one in which I took his work seriously.

And I got to thinking about his concept of Sublimation.  I continue to believe that the fascinating thing about Freud is that he was always right on the verge of something true, but never quite got there.  Part of the problem was that he lacked our current knowledge.  Part of the problem is that he was never able to return to his quite accurate child molestation thesis of hysteria, for reasons of vanity, cowardice, and careerism.

What if we call Sublimation “contingent dissociation”?  From a materialistic perspective, from that of assuming that our bodies “speak”, that all of us are affected in primal and often obscure ways by our genetic heritage, personal experience, and animal responses, this makes perfect sense.

What if we also follow William James and take religious experience at face value, and posit that non-animalistic experiences are also possible, that a sense of the transcendent is not a lie, but an important insight into higher truth?

There is something very useful here.  I was thinking about what is needed to herd people into a city.  It is contrary to our natural instincts, in my view.  Everyone in a city has to suppress–dissociate from–primal impulses.  But these impulses do not go away.  We retain the urge to hunt and kill.  We feel anxiety when we are confined.

And I think of Carthage and Moloch, and the sacrifice of children, thrown into enormous fires.  You have huge, highly organized civil orders, and that in the middle of it all.  The Aztecs were the same.  The Romans often practiced sacrifice, and occasionally even human sacrifice, although mostly it was animals.

And I think most human societies have been based on what I would call animal orders, ones which were able to impose discipline by channeling and controlling animal urges.  Those who were what I might call the “Keepers of the Hate” were the priests, and were exalted because of the vital importance of their “work”.

I was thinking, too, that perhaps the most energetic exponents of “Goodness”–like me–are those simultaneously most afflicted with unprocessed anger, hurt, shame, and violence.  One can certainly make this case with regard to Christianity, if one studies the ACTUAL history.  The genius of Islam, of course, is that it channels those energies outward, into aggressive warfare.  Once the wars stopped, decadence quickly set in.

Id, Ego and Superego are all animalistic constructs.  There is a fundamental pessimism in Freud, made necessary by his atheism.  But what if we posit on the one hand, biology, and on the other spirit, and what makes sense of it all, what directs our attention and thus our actions, our self?

I have been watching “Sin City” over the past couple days, and just finished it, and it is triggering me in interesting and productive ways. It is helping me make contact with my own aggressive energies, and without owning and recognizing those energies, peace is impossible.

I have not reached the point I want to make.  Processing will continue.  I do think a bridge needs to be built between materialistic science and Spirit.  New Age people need to own their rage, and so too do the scientist who want to tear us–themselves–down to nothing but machines.

Progress remains possible.  We simply have to figure out how to survive long enough to allow it to happen.

We live in a supposed “information age”.  But we cannot reliably assume that facts which should be in the public domain ARE in fact in the public domain.  We in fact live in an age where propaganda has never been easier, where covering up inconvenient truths under both an avalanche of irrelevancies and outright suppression of speech is child’s play.  You can never assume that among the myriads of facts you are presented with daily are contained those which are most relevant.  In point of fact, I would bet against it.

I am banned from most sites.  I just had a long series of comments removed–all of which had previously been approved by the censors–after I posted this:

Segregation also worked fine in the South. Why did we stop? It’s almost like respecting the right of people to be different is important. Of course, that would be crazy talk, wouldn’t it? Segregation, as we all know, was wrong because we were TOLD it was wrong. How else can anyone decide anything of a moral nature?

Other than individual conscience, I mean, which is not something one sees on the Left. You are literally incapable of grasping the concept of difference of conscience. You are so wedded to the idea of forcing your ideas on others BECAUSE YOU FEEL YOU ARE RIGHT that you cannot see the abuse of power it is enabling, and has already often enabled.

My point, lost on the censor, as indeed most subtle points will ALWAYS be lost on censors, which is why free nations do not have them, and why the 1st Amendment is the 1st Amendment, was that many things have been legal over the ages.  Many criminal practices have been enshrined in law.

The conversation was over the right of the State to force bakeries into bankruptcy, or bakers into jail, for refusing to bake cakes for homosexuals who are very intentionally attempting to distress, anger, and exercise emotional violence against them.  The argument made is that “gays are a protected group”.  Well the Klan was at one time a protected group.  Did that make abusing the law in their favor right then?  Of course not.  It was odious in the Jim Crow/Dixiecrat South, and it is odious now.

As importantly, the Left–and seemingly increasingly large numbers of alleged conservatives–seems to only care about things when it is TOLD to care about things.  Rape is a major problem when it is in the news, and not when they have moved on to something else.  Me, I move much slower.  If something is wrong now, then it is wrong in the future, and was wrong in the past.  You cannot say it is a horrible, major, must fix thing that rapes happen on college campuses, and simultaneously ignore the mass practice of sexual slavery–which includes the buying and selling of women and girls, certainly, but likely also boys and young men–in the Middle East. Or, as I say often, the acceptance of violence of all sorts, including sexual violence and gang rape, conducted with legal impunity against the Dalits of India.

If you only think something is wrong when someone tells you it is wrong, you have no conscience. You are not a morally sovereign individual.  You have become, already, a subject of Oceania.  That you have no good excuse, that many options were still available, makes you all the more contemptible.

I think Target has perhaps another week to issue a strong statement and win people back.  I think they have certainly cost themselves an ENORMOUS amount of goodwill, and some of it they won’t get back.

I was thinking that if they ran an ad campaign that netted them a 5% increase in business, that would be a counted a huge success.  What about an ad campaign that COSTS them 5%, 10%, or more, permanently?

Target is a family store.  Moms take their kids there during the day.  They have done an excellent job marketing to this demographic.  We bought many of our baby clothes there, and at least one of our strollers.

But the thought of sick men being ALLOWED by policy into the women’s bathroom is going to trigger every last instinct of protection in most mothers, every last feeling of outrage in many men, and who is going to be happy in large enough groups to counterbalance this?  No one.  Mass layoffs and store closings are the most likely outcome of this poorly considered policy which at best will help .03% of the population, a number which is almost certainly much too high, since the true transgenders have been using the other bathroom for some time anyway.

As many people point out, the only people it really helps and enables, are sexual predators.  Unless they are a coveted demographic–and it’s hard to see how they would buy much, when what they want is in the bathrooms for free–this policy has to be seen as idiotic and anti-moral from every perspective I am able to wiggle my head into, other than that of pompous and unreflective political correctness, which is to say the repetition of the pronouncements, today, of the Commissars; and it is hard to see or say why a profitable business would be listening to  Communists in the first place.

Before posting this, I checked the Target website, and saw nothing.  They are making a HUGE mistake.

As a trauma survivor myself, now that I think about it, if I might be permitted to add my voice to the chorus of whiners: why the FUCK do people abuse this word?  Triggering is a very specific thing, and it is quite real, but it is being USED to mean any word or phrase which annoys anyone in any way.  Worse yet: which MIGHT, in the judgement of people who are offended all day every day, offend someone.

This belittles the real suffering of people who, by and large, NEVER are the ones doing the whining and demonstrating.  It is insulting, inaccurate, and both bullying and hurtful.  

Another movie about solitude. I am actually feeling increasingly well.  I am getting moments of peace.  But I understand McCandless quite well.  I had similar stories when I was his age.  He was running from horror.  From unmediated terror.  From the feelings of small children who are placed in hopeless, helpless situations that completely overwhelm them.  Thinking takes the place of feeling.  Idealism takes the place of living.

He met many kind people, but he could never BE with them.  For people who have undergone great terror at an early age, there is always a place which does not reach out and connect, which CANNOT reach out and connect.  The loss of social identity and place is the defining feature of trauma.  The social sense, instinctual social sense, is displaced by the need for survival.  He thought that somehow if he could survive some great ordeal that the path back home would be opened.  That he would surmount his fundamental isolation, which he felt even with his sister.

For the attentive, it is not so hard to see why people are crazy, why most all of us are crazy.  The question is what to do with this knowledge.

For myself, it is a twofold question.  On the one hand, on an abstract level–the level where I find what peace I find, most of the time–it is how to help humanity.  This is where Tolstoy (and all intellectual “Humanitarians”) lived.  But this is an effort to achieve an end–reconnection–which cannot be achieved in the abstract.  Such people are mad, but appear saintly.  The two are often–likely usually–confused.  Saints are those who speak the right words while wrestling with–and failing to surmount–quite ordinary demons. This is why Lao Tzu counseled us to renounce sainthood.

The more important question is how to bring deep relaxation into these troubled place, how to find genuine peace.  I have learned to sleep at night, but I still often shake.  My journey will continue.

As far as McCandless, I feel he found peace in the end.  I agree with his sister, that he did what he felt he had to.  Where does one turn for genuine wisdom in this world?

For a start, I personally look to the work of Peter Levine, and Lawrence Heller and Aline LaPierre.

Most of modern literature: fucking useless.

Actually,  I would add Kum Nye.  It is a great practice. I cannot speak to why it has not been better propagated, why it languishes in obscurity compared to inferior practices we can find prominently displayed in every bookstore.

I finally finished the 127 hours of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire this week, and started William Jame’s “Varieties of Religious Experience”.  I have a major intellectual crush on James.  The clarity of his thought and exposition, the honesty and rigor of his approach, and his genuine humaneness and concern for the humanity of his subject, are all thoroughly entrancing for me.

To the point here, he quoted a Frenchman–Bernaud, I believe was his name–as saying “Good humor is that philosophical stance which seems to say to Nature that we take it no more seriously than it takes us.”

It is amazing how fast moods and emotions pass once they are entered into honestly. It FEELS like emotion has a logic and a terminus, that certain states are bound to last, that the next states can reliably be inferred, and that we “know where this is going”.  We know nothing of the sort.  Great exultations can come immediately out of great melancholies, and LAST.  For a time, at least.  Then we–I–can laugh at the foolishness of the whole thing. Storms, however intense, blow over.

Emotions do clearly have a logic, which is tied to thought–which can both amplify and diminish them–but one must always grasp that the logic can only be appreciated AFTER a change which was completely unexpected.  A leads to B, and B leads to F, which leads to 7, after which Hummus and the color orange.

The constant is a patient connection to them.  If we live in a “sea of mood and emotion” as some song puts it, the task is to learn to swim. I believe I have said this before.  Now I have said it again.  I forget myself.

I don’t know why I live in these places, at times.  It is so odd, so different.   But it is my path.  I have no idea where it is going, and this is OK.

From what is righteous anger a release, an escape?  From the peril of confusion, from living with dread and fear, from what is deepest and most true in us. We have all failed.  We have all “fallen short of the glory of God”, which is to say, we have all lied to that Spirit within us which speaks, which consists entirely in, truth.

This applies to everyone.  It is inevitable, in this world.  It is the nature of this world, which teaches not perfection, but return.

I have taken to granting my demons space on Sundays.  Demons are merely angels we fear. They speak what we dare not, express what we dare, exist how we dare not.  And from this I do not infer the obvious and imbecilic, that “freedom” consists in doing what we will, regardless of consequence.

No: the hatred and horror are already there.  Truth is in seeing them, recognizing the roles they play in our journey to something larger, and genuinely peaceful.  What final use can there be in self deception?

It is equally true that being shattered and broken has its time and place.  One must have the tools to pick up the pieces to build something new and more beautiful and useful.  Until that time, it is merely the pain of an abused dog, which cannot understand the rules which might have kept it safe.

All of us “exist” in many times and places.  Seeing what was that still is, in itself is a liberation of sorts.