Author: White Whale

The problem with the honest pursuit of personal growth is that you come face to face with who you really are.  And what this is, in most cases, is not a profound evil–although unresolved violence is likely to be present in almost all cases–but really an insipid mediocrity of mind and spirit.  We are so little, and the possibility of being more only opens up once we recognize how small we are, and that is difficult for the vanity of at least some of us.

I tend to be Taoist in my skepticism of heroes and saints.  I think most of them were more compulsive than most, more passionately conformist, more heroic when it was easy, and less heroic when all that surrounded them was silence.  I think most saints were and are fanatics.

In the Taoist conception the most developed blend easily.  They move like water in water.  They are invisible.

Me, I think falling and flying relate to the primal fear of falling.  I think running without escape, and pursuing without mercy are aspects of our digestive system, risen to our consciousness.  I think sex is how we procreate and continue the species.

I also think we are spiritual beings in a material world.  I think that we exist at a primitive level of existence that is scarcely above that of rocks, but that growth is possible.  We can do and be more, but I think none of us will do well to look to the dominant mores of our current culture, including those of most established religions.

I remain lost, but it is my hope that in my personal wasteland and solitude some awakening will dawn.  In my waking hours this is an interesting game, and in my dreaming hours I remain vigilant for insight.

Could such a state not be thought of as a place where the possibility of the expression of curiosity has been suppressed?

This fact, as I would call it, is interesting when one contemplates that curiosity is neurologically the opposite of trauma.

I was also reading today that an effect of unregulated stress is narrowed and tightened vision.  This made me wonder if compulsive reading might not be a means some people use to deflect attention from the fact that they do not like to engage socially with others, which in turn made me wonder if academics and intellectuals are more or less self sorted from the pool of those most affected by early trauma, and least able to deal with it. If you add the consideration that a certain level of intelligence is still needed to succeed, then most of the modern world can be constructed from unprocessed primal and dysfunctional emotions, translated into ideological form, and then applied and amplified effectively across mass media.  Bad ideas have as much power as good ones, and little else can be expected from people hiding from themselves, from others, and from the world at large.

This seems likely to me.  The world is stupid.  People are stupid.  There obviously are reasons, and these reasons, I see reason to assume, can be known, or at least largely known.  We can do so much better.  Our best and brightest are dull and insipid.

So is the Dharma.

These are both logically necessary conclusions, and to my eye empirically obvious ones.

I am not going to explain further.  I am trying to abstain from this particular affective leak.

Reaching out to someone who is hurting in openness is hard, particularly if the pain is deep and intractable.

It is far easier to feel anger at those you want to blame for hurting that person.

But the only person this helps is you.

I was watching a middle aged black woman downtown today scream her anger at the world.  And I thought how hard it would be to meet her where she is at.  Whatever happened to her, I can’t imagine it.  Some things, you can’t process.  She was pushed out of her self, out of her body, into some other place where the pain was less.

And I was thinking: how hard it would be to ponder that black culture has been declining for 40 or more years, to where the sheer volume of pain and suffering is beyond comprehension.  Who wants to feel that?  Who wants to see that?

Far easier to find scapegoats, and feel rage.  Rage feels much better than sorrow, even if it is to perception what a forest fire is to a lighter.  You cannot tell it where to go, and it does not stop where it was supposed to, or should have.

100 or more young black men are killed by other young black men for every one killed by a cop, and the number is probably a thousand for every one truly unjustly killed.

But this number is a source of sorrow.  Who wants to live there?  Only decent, well meaning people would want to live there.

Where are they? 

Our worst critics choose to stay here.

Corollary: we can only be criticized using our own principles.

I woke up this morning with an idea I thought I would share, that has little to do directly with me: what is the relationship between monetary inflation–which is to say, making of savings and financial prudence fiscal sins which are punished–and sense of self?

Clearly, we have a massive problem with people knowing who they are.  This is the root cause of people so desperately using sexual selves, or ethnic selves, or class selves, to define themselves.  What is the inherent benefit of defining oneself as homosexual?  Or black?  Or “disadvantaged”?  We are all unique, mutable, hopefully growing people, who may well be someone else entirely a year from now.  This is the healthy approach.

But if you are drowning, you grasp at straws, and clearly many people benefit politically–benefit in their own moral decay, hopelessness, and helplessness, as they seek power to counter-balance these unwanted emotions–from throwing straws.

Many, many things contribute to atomize people and deliver their daily quotient of anomie, but here is an idea which is new to me: what if the instability of money contributes to unstable senses of self?  There is something satisfying in controlling your own destiny by paying cash for everything, and owning what you own.  Most Americans, even though they had far less, were actually wealthier a generation or two ago, because their objects were not purchased on credit.  Those cars you see on the road: credit.  The houses you see: credit.  Most businesses depend on a line of credit.  Most Christmas shopping has considerable help from credit cards.  Whenever I go to Target it asks me if I want the whole purchase on one credit card.  It is apparently so common to use two, that every transaction offers it as an option.

Is there not a fundamental sense of who you are in the world when you own your house and car outright, and have cash in a coffee can to meet unexpected expenses, and enough money in the bank so that you don’t worry?  Is there not a different sense when you are a debtor, and exist in a web of people to whom you owe money, and likely will all or almost all of your life?

Here is an interesting article which argues that Gaddafi’s plan to reintroduce the idea of sound currency into the global marketplace was the real reason he was overthrown and killed (which made Hillary so unpleasantly and inappropriately happy): http://www.hangthebankers.com/hillary-emails-us-nato-libya-gold-backed-currency/

the great fear reported is that Libya might lead North Africa into a high degree of economic independence with a new pan-African currency. 

French intelligence “discovered” a Libyan initiative to freely compete with European currency through a local alternative, and this had to be subverted through military aggression.

I have been a voice in the wilderness with my ideas on monetary policy, and its quiet subversion of and destruction of private wealth in the United States and elsewhere.  I will post my piece again.  It is imperfect.  It has manifest flaws, and I need to change some ideas, but since few read it anyway, it is difficult to justify allocating that time.  Still, today is another try: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

Simply existing in the modern world means everything you have and worked for will decline steadily in value, very, very quickly, relative to historical standards.  All this money goes to banks, governments, and elites.

I continue to wonder why the Left is so fucking stupid that they can’t grasp this, since this is the sort of thing their anger is well suited for.  I wonder less about the Right, because they have their hands full simply protecting the free markets which allow the creation of wealth in the first place.  If we lose both sound currency AND free markets, we go the route of Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

I am going to go on a mild hiatus again, as I do from time to time.  I have realized that this blog is a way for me to externalize feelings by intellectualizing and “projecting” them out into space, rather than circling them back in and processing them.

An intellectual is someone who collects thoughts, the way a stamp collector might collect stamps.  The important thing about thoughts is that they become emotionally transformative, and if they fail in that, they are developmentally useless.  Certainly, they may allow you to build outer things–which indeed cannot be built without them–but never inside.

As collectors, intellectuals are neither the engineers nor prophets they both aspire and claim to be.   They are a sort of vocal virus, preying upon the insipidity and neediness of human beings, and sharing only, in the end, their inability to create, to process, to transform, and ultimately to be.

Even though I have many thoughts flowing through me which I could share, I am going to circle them back in, with I think the accurate hope that once I am complete, what needs to flow out will do so as needed, accurately and spontaneously.

Orwell was of course quite right that in an ostensibly Liberal–in the true sense of the word–society, the abuse of language always precedes the abuse of people and their rights.  It is quite unacceptable to pull John Smith off the street because you don’t like him, but we are getting to where it will be OK if you first call him a racist or “Climate Change Denier”.  The charges need not be truthful, obviously, as has been seen in every previous iteration of fascist mind control by deletion.

Like many, I am reading now that Twitter has gone overtly partisan, which is to say post-bipartisan, which is to say they have evolved beyond the willingness to pretend they are not congenitally intolerant, small-minded, bigoted, and very, very angry.  We see the claim they are protecting Political Correctness.

But why not call it what it is?  Politically inconvenient.  Political Correctness, as much as we might vilify it, still has the word correct in it, just as “progressive” still sounds good.  You will not hear me use the word progressive, and as of this moment, I am going to call partisans of PC either anti-free speech zealots, or people attempting to suppress the politically inconvenient.

The whole point of free speech is that it becomes possible for good ideas, in a large mass of competing ideas, to achieve ascendancy because they are superior.  This does not always happen, obviously, but typically the principle obstacles are not human stupidity and obstinacy, but the suppression of competing ideas.  So-called conservative ideas–which I would argue are the actually Progressive, Liberal, ones, which work to build actual Social Justice–are better than those of the Left.  This is why they suppress them.  No sane person can long defend the abuses of the past, those of the present, and those clearly planned for the future.  You cannot defend them morally, politically, socially, philosophically, or practically.  Everything they touch, speaking nearly generally, they darken, worsen, stain, and degrade.

Me, I have taken pains over long periods of time to enter into these worlds, to interact with these people, to debate them, to compare world views, to compete with them intellectually.  And it always ends in my getting banned, censored, banished, suppressed, silenced.  Some of these people would no doubt be gratified to hear I had been dragged off and shot.  I am evil because I disagree with them, and they have self appointed themselves the Apostles of Everything Good.

So: PC no more. It is regrettable, but I cannot use Twitter less.

http://pilotsfor911truth.org/core.html

Somehow I fell into the 9/11 rabbit hole again this morning.

I will say for the umpteenth time: no sane investigator, who honestly seeks truth, can fail to conclude that this conspiracy was much bigger than a bunch of Saudis being directed by Bin Laden.  Clearly, top officials at the Federal Government failed flamboyantly to ask and answer basic questions, and this failure continues.

The smoking guns, I assume, are largely gone, but the FACT of the cover-up and conspiracy continues to be obvious, and can and should be addressed by those who claim to value America, American freedom and well being, and common decency.

I died several times this week.  Not really, obviously, but I was pushed past limits I was trying to hold on to.  What I find is on the other side is what I might call hopelessness, but it is a different sort of hopelessness.  It is the resignation that recognizes that you can expostulate, shout, scream, worry, fret, get angry etc. about how the world is, and in the end, your opinion, my opinion, really don’t matter that much.  This is not to say we should not try to change things for the better, but that we need to be clear that all worthwhile change takes time, and that if you tie your peace of mind to ridiculous, hopeless fantasies, you will be unhappy, and you will miss what opportunities for happiness DO come your way.  Above all, you will be ineffective.

Me, I fight this world.  I do not accept it as it is.  But I have to also accept it as it is.  You have to carry both ideas at the same time.

Particularly in the present day, it seems that a great many college students are shocked that the fantasy world they have imagined has not yet come into being.  They dream of a world which has never been, then get frustrated that it is not already here.  This is infantile.

I say the present day.  Were not the projects of the Communists similar?  Did they not dream of worlds that had never been, social orders that have never existed, then commit acts of mass murder, torture, mass imprisonment, and put countless secret police on the corners to coerce this new world?

Without altering its fundamental nature, can you make a tomato plant grow in one tenth of the time?  Can you make human infants become adults in two years?  Nature has its schedule.  Human social change is the same.  Impatience is not only not a virtue, it is in general responsible for failure, which is what the “War on Poverty” has been, which is what the efforts to integrate blacks have been, which is what the war on drugs has been, and which in large measure is what the War on Terror has been .  There was no ISIS when Bush invaded Iraq.  That happened under the watch of someone whose election was in large measure engineered in opposition to that war; someone who seems to view the legitimate national security interests of the United States as inherently wrong, and who seemingly views our enemies as white hatted cavalry, for the simple reason that they oppose us.

Returning to my point, I was thinking about the phoenix.  It is reborn young.  All legitimate deaths result in new births, and renewed youth.  This is my operative hypothesis.