Author: White Whale

It seems to me that I personally, as a parent, will take the most pride in how my children are NOT like me.  I have tried hard to instill curiosity in them as a principal virtue, and curiosity can go many places.  We are all exposed to different things, different people, and take different paths.  To the extent they depart from me and my path, that means they have found their own.  That is what I want for them, and what I would argue all parents should want for their children.

Such, in any event, is my own view.  You are free to differ.  I do actually value diversity.  The same logic, as I think about it, would apply to everyone you meet.

How banal, if you think about it, must be a teacher who insists on his own way, his own words, his own routines.  The task of a thinker who would be a teacher is to get to the principles which matter, then watch in wonderment at the endlessly inventive ways in which they can be expressed by open and happy people.

My children are not mine.  You are not mine.  Confusions about this account for most of the unnecessary suffering in the world, I think.

I was contemplating today, as I do, why I do some of the stupid things I do.  Some of us more than others set out to do one thing, and find ourselves, as if a magic spell had been cast on us, doing something else.  Surfing the internet is just the latest iteration of daydreaming, or cleaning, or calling people on the phone, or going for a walk.

On a deeper level, how many excuses are there for not painting a wall which needs it, for doing our taxes, for reconnecting with an old friend, for doing that project you have dreamed about for years?

And what I saw was that I really have two parts of myself which both wish me well, but have differing myths about the world, differing felt senses about the world.

People we call evil have identified with the appetitive self, with the animal self, which states that a full belly is the same as goodness, that the world is hostile and dedicated to their destruction, and that an aggressive and cruel way of interacting with the world is the only possible response consistent with safety and survival.

Within the shadow, there is a perceived light.  And light is perceived as shadow.  And, to the point, both parts perceive themselves as furthering the interests of our self.   Both view themselves as relative paladins, fighting the good and necessary fight.

Within myself, I am saying there are two brothers within me.  Two comrades in arms, both dedicated to my well being, in their own ways, but with radically different, and outwardly opposed agendas.  This is why I cycle from one set of behaviors and affect, to another, and back.

Going “into the shadow” is another world entirely, but one which makes complete sense from its own perspective.

Put another way, a more Hindu or Buddhist way, there is no darkness: only ignorance, typically ignorance made possible by a failure of communication.  And I would go all hippy and say that all conflict is a failure of communication, but would add that where actual people are concerned, listening is not always present, and if violence is, violence is sometimes the appropriate answer in response.

Feeding the good in everyone can be the only truly humane impulse for a good person, but we always need to start where we are.

As far as I know, there is only one country in the world with a socialist slogan–Order and Progress–on its flag.

What, I wonder, just WHAT are we to make of the fact that 19 of the world’s most dangerous cities are in Brazil?  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24778720.html

So I’m sitting in a wal-mart parking lot on a beautiful spring day, eating chocolate after a few hours of moderate physical labor, listening to some magnificent violin and piano music (the song of the nightingale” by Pablo de Sarasate: I looked it up) and I watch some dirt baggy looking guy walking along. He doesn’t like his job, and they probably have their doubts about him.

And I go to that old song LIFE WHAT A TRAGEDY. Then I think shit I’m pitying him and feeling sorry for myself. I actually feel good and it’s quite possible he does too.

And then it hit me that you cannot pity a person without denigrating them, and you cannot ask for pity without, in many if not most cases, denigrating yourself. Feeling pity is inherently a form of feeling superior. If other people do not feel sorry for themselves, then our pity is s sort of violence, of attack.

As I grow as a person I am slowly realizing that with most of us none of the emotions are where they are supposed to be. Goddammit.

It does seem to be too that the core issue with self help is that none of us are located on the map where we think we are. You can only begin at the beginning, but most us have no idea where that is.

One seachange I think we are seeing is that ordinary rank and file working class, blue collar Democrats are finally beginning to realize that their Party has abandoned them.  They are not concerned with wages, with protecting jobs, and certainly not with any issues that might concern white voters, especially men.

Donald Trump gets this.  It is stupid to say that he can’t win.  He has 50% of the Republican Party, and Hillary is not just personally odious on every level, she has absolutely no credibility when it comes to protecting working class jobs.  She would just as soon give them to Mexicans, as long as they vote for her.  She figures, based on past history, that everybody else is just too fucking stupid to understand the game being played on them.  She may be right, but objectively, she is clearly wrong.

I think I’ve said this before, but I have a sense that Trump can readily imagine himself at a Yankees or Mets game, eating a hot dog, drinking a beer, and saying “isn’t this country great?”  Yes, he may have been in a private suite with an expensive hooker, but I don’t think there was any coke or booze, and he probably tipped her well.

Nobody can call him a sexist pig without referencing the many transgressions–almost certainly worse transgressions, likely extending into overt rape–of Bill Clinton.  Trump is just honest about being a healthy heterosexual man.  He is a bit of a pig, but I suspect he treats his women much better than the Clintons–both of them–treated Monica Lewinsky.

I am contemplating defensiveness, and it seems to me that the task of psychological growth, for most of us, is learning to defend not in the past, not in the future–which is often exactly the same thing–but in the present.  In terms of physical safety, preparing for real dangers in the future would still on the reading count as defending in the present.  Since life can be uncertain, and since human life has always been filled with violence, I personally would grant quite a wide latitude to such activities and still call them healthy.

What is not healthy, though, is obsession which takes you constantly out of the present moment.  Even if you build a huge stockpile of weapons and food, if you continue to obsess about possible dangers, you are not healthy.  Which life are you defending, if you live in continual fear?  We all die.  Your family will die.  Defending the present life consists mainly in living in peace, happily, and with contentment.  This sort of defense few talk about.

It seems to me that many people who carry psychological and more particularly developmental wounds into adulthood–which is just about everyone–feel an exaggerated need both to be protected and to protect.  It may seem paradoxical, but I think many people in dangerous professions feel more fear than the population as a whole, and are pushed into professions like the military, law enforcement, and fire fighting because in those places fear is a valid emotion, and taking aggressive precautions for ones safety are not seen as unwarranted or excessive.

But even beyond this, I think people who feel the need to “stick up” for people who have not asked for their help are enacting the same impulse.  Think of the people who feel the need to “stand up” for blacks and other minorities, and who feel not just the right but the DUTY to get angry on their behalf.  This is dysfunctional protective impulse.  We cannot save the slaves, now.  We cannot undo the wounds and horrors of history.  For that matter, we cannot resurrect the Union or Confederate dead.  We cannot undo the horrific wounds and violent deaths of the soldiers who suffered in their own ways every bit as much as any slave who was ever flogged or hung or burnt alive, and about whom no one talks.

We cannot LIVE in any place but the present, even if our imaginations may give us the illusion of life in other times and places, even if it may anoint us as guardians of some sort, even if it may soften the tensions and uncertainties of the present by presenting us what appear to be the certainties of the future or past.

It is an interesting seeming fact, presented in my NARM book, that while hypervigilence is a common and expected outcome of certain types of trauma, so too is HYPOvigilence, which is an exaggerated and unrealistic sense of ones own safety.  It seems to me this trait is on display among all those who seemingly have a compulsive need to believe the best of people, when we all know the truth is usually in the middle somewhere.

Enough is enough. The right amount is the right amount.  Since none of us are omniscient–even if the psychological defenses of some cause them to compulsively assume they know more or less than they do–we all must guess where things stand, what is appropriate.

These things can and should be discussed.  A multiplicity of views should be welcomed, not hated.  The whole point of a pluralistic society, one dedicated to the gradual improvement of human individuals, and the improvements in society which such improvement enables, is to allow ideas to compete, and the best ones to win.

One cannot speak of Socialism without speaking of the suppression of dissent.  There is a fundamental homology between the government picking winners and losers in the economic realm, and that of the ideational realm.  There is a fundamental homology between the notion that no people are better than others, and that no ideas are better than others, even if one idea–that of egalitarianism uber alles–reigns both supreme and unquestioned.

I feel cool breezes on pleasant days, and watch the clouds drift by.  I am thankful for my modest home, a pantry filled with whatever I choose to put in it, and the ability to dictate the actions of my day.  I do not blindly assume that this situation must continue forever, and I do not look at the past and assume that all of the cruelty, emotional detachment, vain attachment to ones people and ones cause, and all of the violence associated with them cannot return, and do so quickly.

It seems to me many Democrats have vivid visions of Trump supporters burning in fire, all while nourishing their own sense of their own righteousness, their own compassion, their own empathy, and their own vision for a peaceful and just world.

What if, in an infinite number of lives, all of us have done everything which it is possible to do?

I was sitting in the gym the other day–sweat and increased airflow seem to be congenial to me–thinking, that one of the primary manifestations of anger is rigidity.  You refuse to move, no matter the cause, no matter the benefit.  Stubbornness is a type of anger.

Now, the nature of the life force, as they term it in NARM, is growth, expansion.  Anger is the outcome when the impulse to grow is met with opposition.  This is a primal response, one seen in earliest infancy.

So how do you get chronic anger?  You internalize actually non-existent opposition.  You literally argue with yourself, on a physiological level.  Expressing the anger–flipping off any of the sundry jackasses off who populate every freeway in every city every day–does not, I don’t think, release it, so much as create an opportunity for it to come to consciousness, and awareness is something we seek instinctually.

So on this reading dogmatism, ideology, and congenital conservatism are species of congealed anger, which consists in a bound up impulse towards growth, and an introjected obstacle which cannot be undone by any means that person can see at the unconscious level at which this process happens.

It is to my mind obvious that dogmatism and life expression are antithetical, but this process is working me in the direction of making this distinction more formal.

I wonder if one day we will root all logic in somatic states, if that will be the end and beginning of all our reasoning.  I think this would be a good, useful thing.  If you do not incorporate the body, you have lost nearly everything.  Nothing becomes impossible, and no lunacy cannot be founded in emotional trauma, need, obsession, mania, and the like first, then made to seem obvious, natural, and part of that generations version of Natural Law.

How did Communism happen?  Well, look at the bodies of those who founded and perpetuate it.  They will quite certainly be disordered.

It just hit me that a principal factor in the divisiveness and extreme rancor within the Republican Party has to do with the fact that many have not yet come to grips yet with the fact that the Republican Party has become largely irrelevant.  Whatever it once stood for, it stands for weakly, allows itself to be pushed on its heels continually, and has to lie to maintain the illusion that it presents a meaningful contrast with the apocalyptic spirit of the totalitarians on the Left.

I am seeing over and over “If Trump wins this nation is through”, as if electing Obama twice were not two nails in our coffin already, as if putting a Republican Congress in place 2 years ago only to be betrayed nearly immediately was not a third.

Many people do not want to accept this fact.  They want Republicans to be the good guys, who stand up to the Democrats, and giving up this illusion–as I would view it–will cost them dearly.  THAT is why they are so hateful to, to use George Will’s term, “Trumpkins”.

It is not that people like me have given up conservatism.  It is that the Republican Party has given up conservatism, which means that their guy is already by definition on his way to continuing to be part of the problem.  If they hate Trump, well that’s a start.

And who has effectively defended common sense in the past 50 years?  Reagan was not devoid of skill, but who else on a national level?  Certainly not McCain or Romney.  And I can’t see Rubio, Cruz or Kasich doing so.  I can’t see them pushing back with spirit and balls at the relentless attacks, the relentless hate.

To accept Trump, I think many Republicans believe, is to accept that the ghouls have won, and they just can’t do that.  Yet.  Me?  I don’t deal in optimism.  As Yogi Berra said, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.  I do what I can, and my metaphysics leads me to believe that everything will work out in the end, at least for me, if I keep my faith, and try to do what is right.

I like this quote.  Anger is obviously one of my issues, as indeed I think it is for most of us.  I spoke of others seeming dysfunction, but I am if anything TOO aware of my own flaws.

Anger becomes integrated on a psychological level by recognizing and owning it as one’s own, rather than splitting it off and turning it against the self or projecting it.  Physiologically, anger becomes integrated not by acting it out, as in beating pillows and screaming, but by identifying, containing, and tracking the energetic experience in the body.

From “Healing Developmental Trauma”, by Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre, both of whom would likely be scandalized by my politics (“don’t quote me, don’t quote me”).

I walk my own way.  What can I say?  I am not sure what this says about me, but certainly some part of me is working on learning to live my own life unapologetically, which is healthy.

I am strongly tempted, though, to see in much of the political disconnections of the past 50 years not just the operation of Soviet propaganda–which remains strongly present to this day–but deeper emotional disconnections brought about by the disruptions in the very notions of normal families.  Women going to work is an issue, but so too is the simple busyness of life, the loss of free time, which stresses adults, who pass that stress on to children, who use TV and video games as anxiolytics and ersatz parents.

Generation upon generation of disconnection from a broader, honestly conveyed cultural tradition makes identity formation more difficult.  Indeed, I would suggest that the current obsession with identity is a sign not of growth, but of infantile regression.  It matters far less whether you “feel” black, or feel like a woman in a man’s body, or whatever, but what your felt sense of being a human being living within a social field is.

I have no objections to opening up our ideas to differing notions of how to live, but my belief is that these are poor solutions to misdiagnosed problems, which are being used propagandistically by cynical lunatics to drive narratives which lead to general cultural destruction; and which are leading to the impossibility of true love, since that requires emotional maturation and healthy individuation, both of which are antithetical to the goals and methods of the Nanny State.