Author: White Whale

That would be a better book title for the present era.

I was reading that Kant apparently suffered from depression: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/kants-depression/

It would seem to me the author, like Kant himself, draws the wrong conclusion.  Kant’s philosophizing–his obsession with reason and with transcending and separating from his body and its sensations–was likely the RESULT of unprocessed emotions.

When I study Western history, it is in large measure the history of IDEAS, when ideas are only a part of the human experience.  There is no history of practice, so much.  Yes, various churches had various practices.  The Romans practiced sacrifice.  They kept altars.  Christians began singing early on, and took the Eucharist and wine and practiced baptism.

But these are all outer, social rites.  Only in things like the practices of St. Ignatius does one find something possibly useful for personal growth.  In the modern era, even most psychology has been useless or even harmful.  Only perhaps in the past 30-40 years have useful things like cognitive psychology and positive psychology, and trauma therapies come into being.

To this I would oppose the many spiritual practices of the East, like yoga, and various meditations, and my favorite, Kum Nye.

I wonder if one could summarize modernity as the collective realization that ideas do not provide spiritual food.

And I wonder if we could view the advent of Christianity as the substitution of orthodoxy for orthopraxy.  How often does one see the latter word in the history of the West?  Virtually never.

It feels to me like the feeling we call shame is biological, instinctual, and an inherent part of trauma.  The fact of shame is a flattened ego, a sense that one cannot take part in human affairs as a full equal.  You cannot exist.

Guilt can lead to shame, but what is the fact of shame?  Social isolation,  Withdrawal.  The rejection of others, in shame based social orders.  I think shame is the thing that makes your dog put its tail between its legs and hide.  It is fear, but also a profound sense of withdrawal.

Clinically, I feel, the two manifested elements of trauma are dissociation and shame.  The first detaches you from your instinctual emotions, which is to say from yourself; and the second detaches you from the rest of society.

The two combine to lead to the presenting symptoms of depression, anger, paranoia, intrusions, and the like.  When you detach from the world, it becomes out there, and out there is not controllable or predictable.  It becomes foreign ground, occupied by strangers.  Everyone is a stranger, even the person looking at you in the mirror.

I think this is close to the truth.  My work continues.

Edit: to be clear, I think most of tend to think people feel shame because of something.  The most obvious example is incest, which transgresses rules we can be aware of consciously.  But I don’t think this gets at the root of it, where there is no “because”. It is because it is. It is because it is built into us as animals.  It is a direct nervous system level disruption of the social instinct.

When you first look at this majestic house, it is impossible to suppress feeling like you are seeing the home of an aristocrat, someone wealthy beyond the imagining of most of us.

And I well know that many see that house and see abuses, see crime, see theft, see injustice and unfairness. I think it might serve as the basis of an interesting thought experiment comparing Capitalism–to the extent we have it–and Socialism.

When it was built, from 1890 to 1895, it employed hundreds of skilled workmen, the talents and energies of two of the best architectural minds of that era, and bought, from near and far, large quantities of materials which were sold for profit by those providing them.

It spread wealth, in other words.

Once occupied, it employed hundreds of domestics, paying, as they noted, New York wages in rural North Carolina, making employment there a highly sought after opportunity.

And I suspect that today it employs even more people than it did back then.  You have a ticket office.  You have the same numbers of groundskeepers.  You have someone standing in nearly every room.

And outside the gates, there is an entire village devoted to cashing in on the tourist traffic.  You have nice cafes and steak houses, and gift shops and art galleries.

That home, in other words, was from its inception to the present moment an engine of economic opportunity, of wealth, of employment.  It was and is productive of all the material comforts which attend prosperity, for every layer of the community. Someone owns the cafe where I had an excellent Florentine and eclair.  They will be called Capitalist.  But people work there, and work there only because that cafe exists.

Let us run this experiment in reverse.  Let us say that Socialists had seized power and confiscated the allegedly ill gotten wealth of George Vanderbilt, and handed it out on the streets in tens and twenties until it was all gone.

The home disappears.  Those construction workers are never employed.  The architects lose their contracts.  The domestics remain impoverished in homes with dirt floors.  The village is never built, the jobs of people working there are never created.

In short, a system of wealth production and sharing is never conjured into being.  It is killed before it can sprout and bloom.

The precise defect of Socialism is that it kills things before they can come into being.  Since most people are stupid, since most people do not see what COULD have been, but never was, they continue to fail to see how destructive it is.  Their energies are engaged in tearing down, not seeing that they hurt themselves and their posterity in that very process.

Capitalism is the goose that lays golden eggs.  Unfettered trade and innovation create more of the same, generalizing wealth.  Fettered trade, and the punishment of new ideas, create poverty.  If you look at most of the world, most of the poverty you see is, at root, the result of some combination of resentment, greed for gain without corresponding effort, and simple sloth.

And what were the advantages that the Vanderbilts enjoyed?  They had indoor plumbing, but now we all do.  They had people to cook their meals, but are we not in effect employing the labors of servants whenever we go out to eat, which was rare in that age, but ubiquitous now?  We can pay people to do our laundry, to clean our homes, to mow our lawns, and these are very affordable services, even if most choose to do their own work.

In short, as a result of the very imperfect operation of free markets–wealth creation being undermined by those who create and debase our currency and the public wealth–most of us enjoy comforts only afforded the elites of bygone eras.

Even the Roman emperors used chamber pots.  Ponder that.

First of all, I am going to comment that the place I blog from seems to have had its foundations eroded.  I was out in a glorious day yesterday–for me a glorious day is one with rain and sun, fantastic clouds, and nature–and it really hit me that my Kum Nye work is yielding results.  

Specifically, it hit me that thoughts are like branches floating down a river, and that my experience is the river.  The river is the PRIMARY reality, and thoughts merely a periodic interruption.  Joy and happiness are found in the flow, and thoughts interrupt this flow, even if they are necessary.

And it hit me too that thoughts are a type of perception.  Thinking is a sense like sight.  We don’t think of it that way, but it is.  It is a way, for example, of “seeing” the future, or possible futures.  It is a way of seeing things far away in time and distance. It is a sort of magical power which can allow us to exist everywhere BUT the present moment.  But since the present moment is the only place we actually can exist, thought and existence are incompatible in some respects, even if this magical power is enormously useful, and represents the primary difference between us and animals.

I am in an odd, unfamiliar territory.  And whether I like it or not, my brain tells me that cautious optimism is in order.

To my point, I was listening to the history of the conflicts between the Arians and the Niceans, and was forced into the conclusion that Christianity may well have caused more specifically religious death and violence than any religion which came before, and if we consider that Islam merely takes the worst elements of Christianity–dogmatic absolutism based on a terror of eternal damnation, coupled with physical violence to impose conformity to that dogma–then we are forced to conclude that no more violent religion has ever existed on Earth.

Both great cultural imperialisms–Islamic conquests, and Christian conquests–arose from the atmosphere of early Christianity.  Western languages and Arabic are spoken across most of the globe because of the early theological conflicts within Christianity, and, importantly, how they were resolved.

In pagan religions, by and large there is great tolerance.  If you believe in a multiplicity of gods, there is no reason to fear new ones.  There were cases of statues of Moses and even, if memory serves, Jesus, simply being added to temples as added objects of veneration and worship.

What Christianity adds, uniquely, is the idea of eternal damnation which, combined with the doctrine of Original Sin, makes nervous wrecks of everyone. I drive around the country a lot, and it is not at all uncommon to see giant billboards saying things like “Hell is eternal”, and “If you die tomorrow, where will you go?” (with the words Heaven in white, and Hell in red superimposed).

Do you think the people putting up these signs are uncommonly kind, uncommonly charitable in a spontaneous, open way?  How would they react if they found out their child was gay?  How do they raise their children?  If they raise them anything like I was raised, they raise them to FEAR God.  They raise them to fear disobedience.  They raise them, in other words, in a loveless, oppressive environment which teaches them to embrace the psychological tortures inflicted on them gladly, to feel they deserved it, to feel what I might term Original Shame, and to find emotional release ONLY in the compulsive worship of a God who loved them so much he had to inflict the fear–and potential reality–of eternal damnation on them.

Only scholars remember the conflict between the Arians and Niceans.  They differed, as Gibbon points out repeatedly in his inimitable and brilliantly witty and subtle way, more or less in the exact pronunciation of one Greek word, that for consubstantiation.  The entire conflict rested on the exact interpretation of the notion of the divine Trinity.

And in the course of this conflict many people were slain.  Literal rivers of blood–which filled the rain ditches–were spilled.  Men and women had their mouths forced open by wooden devices that a Holy Wafer might be forced down their unwilling throats.  Vestal virgins were whipped and raped, and had their breasts pressed between wooden plates.

All over nothing.  Literally nothing.  The difference between PotAEto and Potahto.  Words.  Empty words.  And I know enough of the history of the Church to know a great deal more blood is coming, well over a thousand years of blood and rapine, all in the name of a man who preached Love.

It is inconceivable to me that if Christ was in fact a holy man, a deeply spiritual man, that he could have looked at what was done in his name and do other than weep at the vanity, folly, avarice, violence and stupidity of men.

All of this mania is driven by the profound fear, the horror and terror, of eternal damnation.  It is an odd fact that we are required by this theology to love a God whose bloodlust, whose eagerness to condemn us to unending and unimaginable tortures, is without comparison in other world religions.  The Chinese had nothing like this, or the Indians–Asian or American.  The Greeks and Romans had nothing like this.  I don’t know much about African religions, but I doubt they did either.

Much of what I suffered as a child was a direct result of these beliefs. I think my parents were driven largely by vanity, by fear that I would misbehave and make them look bad, but on to all of this was layered on weekly sermons teaching love through hate.

Fear and love are opposites.  They cannot coexist.  And it takes an enormously well developed spirit to overcome the fear of the lakes of hell in favor of genuine, real, spontaneous love.

The British conquered in no small measure in the name of love.  So too did the Spanish, who tortured eagerly those who were too slow to embrace their new God. The gods of the Aztecs merely consumed the blood of their victims.  The Christian God consumes the very souls of those who He deems unworthy.

As I grow as a person, I increasingly realize that most of humanity is crazy.  There is no correspondence  between what they do, and their own true interest.

 I visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville yesterday, and it struck me amid all the opulence that the only true and lasting pleasure it could have brought its inhabitants came from the pleasure of entertaining, and that the true and fulfilling root of that is simply the comfort and joy of human companionship, of love, of community, of connection. The quality of their lives was not determined by their wealth, but by the possibility of giving and receiving the affections of others with sincerity and depth.

George Vanderbilt seems to have been a decent human being.  Certainly, one can expect the story to be skewed in his favor in his own home, but I believed what I heard.

But so much more is possible.  There are METHODS of developing deep feelings which are incomprehensibly valuable.

I looked at those high ceilings, and it struck me that all the civil wars in the Roman world which I have been hearing about revolved around buildings of that sort, around petty vanity, around petty avarice, around the gratification of base feelings which were a curse on those feeling them.  They did not really want or need fame and power. What they wanted was to feel less alone, to feel loved, accepted, valued, cherished, and to be part of a family of humankind.  We all need that.  I need that, perhaps more than most.

As I have often shared, I have ideas in this regard.  I am very close to going operational, as I put it.  I am going to do a trial run, then open my doors to everyone with what I am likely going to initially call a social experiment, but which I fully intend to become a Church of Goodness, which will accept everyone who is lonely, lost and hurt, which is most of humanity.

I have had an extraordinarily difficult time getting to this, but my hope is that I am on the verge of creating something great.  My faults are sundry and on some days regrettably obvious to all, but thinking small cannot be numbered among them.

I was forced to watch CNN today in a restaurant, and they were, of course, talking about how Trump might be alienating the Hispanic vote.  What if this gets him the WHITE vote?  There are still a lot of white people in this country, and a lot of them have seen their real wages go down as a result of the competition with Mexicans.  As far as that goes, so too have blacks, in all likelihood.  Would it make a Leftists head explode to contemplate that there can be differences that matter other than white heterosexual Christian men, and everyone else?  

Trump’s plan is bold, and I literally cannot recall a viable candidate in my lifetime who proposed ANYTHING bold.

And here is something I’ve wondered about: we can expect Democrats to try and rig this election.  There is no doubt there was cheating in the last one, although it remains unclear if it swung the election.  Do you think Donald Trump is going to accept that like the very amiable loser Mitt Romney did?

Political Correctness is oppressive.  It is anti-Humanist.  It is anti-Liberal.  It is intended not to help people but to lump them into groups to build power for an elite that will allow them to TREAT them as groups.  It is anti-individualistic.

Trump is the only candidate I can remember, other than the Paul’s, who I honestly think consistently speaks the truth as he sees it.

Now, he is of course an egotist and opportunist, and he is clearly not deeply principled.  But the problem of illegal immigration is a big problem.  It is hugely costly in terms of money, lost opportunities for American citizens, and crime.  And he is the only one who might actually do something about it.

To get anything done that matters in this current climate, you have to not give a shit, and it certainly helps to be rich.

We may have to get used to looking at that hair for a long time. If he does nothing other than address border security, it would be worth electing him.

I find myself insensibly adopting the written affectations–indeed the very manners–of that very assiduous and unaffectedly zealous scholar, who filled his volumes with the most erudite, unprepossessing, and noble sentiments, such that the unconcerned reader cannot but find his mind bent towards an eager and even enthusiastic pursuit of, uh, the purple.

I needed to work specious in there somewhere.

Sorry.  I really do find myself listening to phrases from his book running through my head as I go to sleep.  I think on balance it is a good thing.  He is a master of snark.  One phrase I remembered was “if we are to believe the accounts of antiquity, chastity was far from being her most conspicuous virtue”, on Severus Septimius’s wife.

I am getting a lot more of his subtle humor because the reader is quite astute at turning phrases.

I started a post on Athanasius, and the persecution of the Christians by the Christians, but I think I am going to defer until tomorrow.  Long day.

I do feel, though, that the influence of this book on my own prose will be permanent.  That was the entire reason I started it, although I am unexpectedly learning a LOT about Christianity that I had not known.

And I will say again that there really is a qualitative difference between reading a book and listening to it.  You process them differently.

It occurs to me that a big–perhaps key–reason Trump continues to lead the field is that it is a way for exasperated conservatives to tell the complicit media to go fuck itself.  We GET that they don’t like him.  We GET that the reason hit piece after hit piece shows up in our news feeds and as headlines everywhere is that they want him gone.


Their hate becomes a reason to support him, regardless.  And why not?  Despite all the negatives about Obama, his media stuck with him through thick, and now several years of thin.


And I ask you: what major public figure other than Joe Arpaio had the balls to call bullshit on Obama’s birth certificate?  Maybe Michael Savage.  But Glen Beck wouldn’t touch it, and Fox sure as hell wouldn’t, and of course all the rest simply laughed it off.  Birthers.  Crazies.  Neither Romney nor McCain touched it, despite the fact that the FACTS were plainly, clearly, unambiguously on their side.


And as far as him being a Democrat, the Democrats have not always been dominated by anti-American socialists.  There was a time they ACTUALLY gave a shit about the Little Guy.  There was a time they ACTUALLY loved America.


Here are some relevant quotes from Norman Lear, widely known as a “liberal” and lifelong Democrat: 


“Everybody knows me to be a progressive or a liberal or lefty or whatever,” the 93-year-old Lear said, according to Entertainment Weekly. “I think of myself as a bleeding-heart conservative. You will not fuck with my Bill of Rights, my Constitution, my guarantees of political justice for all.

I’ve never read this book, but I’ve always like the title.  In an important sense, ALL love is love in a time of cholera.  The thoughtful see that everything and everyone we love must pass away.

And it would seem that we only have two options: we either deny this, and are surprised when the inevitable happens; or we fail to love at all.  It seems to me the path of the Stoic is largely to suppress emotion, which helps avoid pain, but also suppresses joy.

As I heal, I feel faint whisps of hope, and I am very conscious how tender, how frail they are.  It is like a small breeze blowing into the future, open, unsure, unclear.  It is formless and changing.

And I feel how much more comforting in some respects are the certainties of despair.  If you hope for disappointment and heart break, you surely will not be disappointed.  You can make people hate you.  You can be certain of feeling fear, and pain and grief.

And I wonder if the lust–as we say–for power is not really an emergent property of the need–the decision–to avoid pain? Power is of no use to any of us.  What we really need is the presence of love, flowing in and out of us.  What we call power-seeking may merely be the psychological artifice covering a life-long retreat from grief and lack of love.  The logistics of power seeking occupy the mind, and the fact of power “outsources” as I have said the sense of pain.

I think this is close to the truth: Goodness is an emergent property of accepting and learning to process pain, and evil–power seeking–is an emergent property of avoiding pain.

But returning to the topic, I am increasingly conscious there is a much more interesting game: loving precisely BECAUSE it is evanescent, and deriving MORE joy from the fact that it will pass.  What we clearly get from time to time are moments, and it seems to me that as my grief digestion system improves, I will be able to string more and more of them together.  This is the task, the path, of wisdom.

This is the path of playing with Death, in the spirit of a child.

I never hang up the phone with either of my kids without saying “I love you”.  They never go to bed without hearing “I love you” twice from me.

And it occurred to me that if it is an organic, natural, appropriate thing to do, it is a useful idea to try and let them hear “I love you” 10,000 times before they are 20.  That is 500 times a year, which is less than 2 times a day.  That is doable.

You cannot give your kids a gift greater than a sense of their own worth and value, which is what love does.  My parents tried to beat rote conformity into me, and didn’t get it once I was able to leave.  What I am going to get is kids who listen to me because they love me and know I love them.  And they know I want for them what is best for them, and that in the end, that has to be their decision, and that I will support them no matter what.

My oldest asked me how I would feel about a nose ring.  I told her I don’t like nose rings, but that she is of an age where it is up to her, and that I would support her no matter what.  I think it is likely she will not get a nose ring, but it will be OK if she does.  The important thing is that she feels the freedom to become who she wants to be.  That is what I want for her, and she knows it.

And I would add, too, that “parenting” is not like an industrial process.  There are not steps you can follow.  This “I love you” idea only works if you mean it.  Otherwise, it will alienate your kids.

I truly believe that you cannot do anything more productive than working on yourself, on your own unprocessed and latent emotions, if you want to be a better parent.  All of your judgment, all of the vibes you give off–verbally and much more importantly non-verbally–stem from who you are and what you are feeling.  You cannot hide in an emotional space as small as a family, and there is no point trying.

And if you have unprocessed emotions, admit them.  Admit your flaws, in age appropriate ways, so that your kids do not blame themselves for your fits, and so they don’t grow up thinking their parents were perfect.  They will find out eventually anyway, but if you tried to set yourself up as an ideal, their eventual discovery will be quite damaging to your relationship.