Author: White Whale

As should be obvious, a consistent intention of mine is to “go deep”, to focus on an emotion or idea with concentration long enough to penetrate far past the surface, to where I can get to the root, the basement, the bottom, and see how things actually work.

So often we are concerned with the evanescent, the surface.  An important reason for this, in my view, is that the depths are where the dragons are.  It is not only possible, but increasingly common, for people to enter physiological maturity never having had to truly face the truly important tasks of life, most notably the process of individuation, of forming some standing sense of self which is not blown about easily.

People hide in their electronics.  When face with stresses they don’t know how to handle, they start playing video games, or texting, or surfing social media.  They don’t build actual emotional intelligence. They don’t learn to process their own emotions, and don’t build true empathy for the emotions of others.

This is a root cause of the increasing effectiveness of propaganda in our current day.  People, especially young people, do not know who they are, and have no plan or path for figuring it out.  They feel existential angst and don’t know why.  And this makes them excellent targets for propaganda, because what it feeds on is a need to belong, to feel a sense of moral certainty, to know what to do, and through all these to feel a sense of self and purpose, to feel like one is “living”.  That one is a dupe never occurs to someone who NEEDS these emotions.  How could it?

As I have said often, I have a deep sense of connection to what I would describe as the twin processes of Breathwork and Kum Nye.  Both work to build a sense of connection with one’s self, to go deep.

One certainly does find dragons in the deep, but one also finds joy.  You cannot learn to love life without facing the terrors of life, the horrors of life, the untold suffering on this planet.  You cannot learn to love life without courage and depth.

if predators have all the same responses to traumatic stress that prey animals do.  Is there a “lion in the headlights” look? Or are they wired differently?  The interesting evolutionary thing about humans is that we have been both prey and predator.  We existed somewhere in the middle of the food chain for a long time, and still do, with some 200 people killed by lions in Africa every year, some number killed by tigers in India, Bangladesh and elsewhere, etc.

Is there a biological/physiological/neurological adaptation which deals with “prey animal” trauma, which is to say incompleted fight or flight responses, by adapting the methods and instincts of predators?

Interesting thought, at least to me.  This is a neurological question, and with regard to specific animals, an empirically testable idea.

Edit: I have the Tibetan Four Dignities on the walls of my room.  All four are carnivores: a tiger, a snow lion, a dragon, and a giant bird, the Garuda, with a snake in its mouth.  The centerpiece of all of them, though, is the Windhorse.  It alone is not a carnivore, and it alone contains both light and motion intrinsically in its image.

I was meditating on a picture of a tiger yesterday, and I really felt the violent energy in it.  When we think of big cats, we think of strength and power and grace and speed.  What those traits are used for is catching animals like gazelles and deer and goats and others, and killing them, ripping them to pieces, and eating them.
Then satiation, for a time.

It seems to me this is what sacrifice provides.  And sacrifice was nearly universal in the ancient world, and is still practiced even today in most Muslim nations (Id al Adha), and in places like Haiti, Nepal, and India.  For their part, the Romans offered sacrifices to all their gods.  Gibbon makes that clear, and the main reason they differentiated between the Jews and the  Christians–despite both rejecting polytheism–was that the former at least practiced an ancestral religion and offered recognizable animal sacrifices on altars prepared for the purpose.

We are not physically hungry, but there remains some primal energy in us which, unprocessed, brings out this cyclic need for aggression. I do think sociologically some wars are forms of mass sacrifice.  Aggression arises which seeks release in killing.  All that need happen for a war is for this energy to arise on both sides.

In some respects sacrifice checks this need, which is good, but it remains a bestial impulse, one unsuited to any higher spirituality.

Our physical bodies, with all their atavistic instincts and needs and drives, interact with our spirits–which recognize a different home–in ways we really don’t understand, but which are best approached from the side of traditional religious practices, through Humanistic psychology.

I’ve had dreams about most of recent Presidents, certainly from Clinton on, dreams which made sense to me.  I dreamed about Donald Trump last night, and my impression is that his mind is actually preoccupied with solving problems.  Real problems.  He really does think like a CEO. That does not make him perfect–obviously–but it does make it concerned with measurable results, and quite capable of demanding accountability and performance from people.

Here is a factor to consider: as a billionaire, capable of spending less than a third of his fortune and still outspending the Clintons, he is positioned, uniquely, to do without Wall Street.  For their part, they must view his present ascendancy with dismay, because he doesn’t need to be bought.

If we want a true qualitative outlier in the White House I think Trump may be our best bet.  My gut tells me that despite the honesty and capability of other candidates–I would be fine with Rand Paul, my favorite, Ben Carson or Ted Cruz, or Scott Walker–that the finances of Jeb Bush will finally decide the nomination.  The most money tends to win.

Our country is fucked up.  It can be brought down any time a power elite decides to do it.  We don’t need those beholden to, or members of, the power elite in the White House.  Barring sanity, we need chaos, in the sense of shattering all the old illusions and imbecilic consensuses about how to run a government.

I am curious whether or not it would be useful and practical to posit that all mental illness–from the very minor, such as pettiness, jealousy and irritability, up to major depression and even psychotic episodes–stems ultimately either from a lack of love and social connection, and/or organic nervous system defects, particularly in the brain.

I think so.

What makes this not obvious is that quite often the love needed was needed at a certain point, perhaps when that child was born, or when it was 2 or when it was 4.  Some children emerge into physical adulthood never having felt loved by anyone at all.  This has consequences, obviously, but they are cloaked in a myriad of ways, through manias, addictions, narcissism, physical illness, and others.

The question becomes, logistically, how can we allow the part or parts which are so thirsty to identify themselves in a social way, and how can we then provide the love which was missing?  This is a simple, but enormously important question, and one which cannot be answered easily.

It seems to me that honest compassion requires a high pain tolerance, or perhaps a well developed ability to transmute pain.  Yes, the latter.  And with the latter in place compassion becomes a sort of wind under your wings, which nonetheless must hold their shape and carry you up.

Compassion is vitally important to me, even though I am frequently irritable and judgmental.  In my view compassion is understanding combined with an intent to act, to help alleviate suffering.  If people are fucking up, then you do not help them by understanding and then excusing them.  Compassion is also challenging people who need it, in ways which are appropriate, and which can get through.

Most people are weak, and cannot stand to be criticized without blaming the criticizer, so as a practical matter being very soft, very indirect and very subtle are the best approaches.  I don’t deny this.

What I deny is that people can and should be spared the work of judging, of truth telling, of being as objective as possible even when surrounded by self serving lies.  How can I help you if I accept at face value the lies you are telling yourself?

There is in my view an edginess to honest, deep compassion. Christ did bring a sword.

Personally, I feel deeply the pain of the human condition.  It is at the very root of my sense of self.  I cannot begin to describe the pain which flows through me sometimes.  The best analogy is a whole body electric shock.  But I am figuring out how to add movement to it, how to harness and use it.  This is a good thing.

Given that Uber cannot but disrupt the employment of those cab drivers who are unwilling or unable to migrate over, I got to wondering what they will do for work.  Then it occurred to me that I have not had a non-Muslim cab driver, as far as I can recall, in at least 5 years, and I have never, that I can recall, not once, seen an Arab on a construction site.

Given that they theoretically have all the same opportunities Mexicans have, I wonder why it is they migrate to cab driving, and this in turn makes me wonder if cultural factors might not be on display.

As a group, Muslims are taught the doctrine of supremacy, that their faith and culture are better in an objective an ontological sense than all other creeds, and are destined to rule the world; or at least, that is the task given the faithful.  I wonder if the idea of working for an infidel is simply something they cannot countenance.  They work for someone as taxi drivers of course, but are largely on their own.

And I think too to some acquaintances I’ve known who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I remember one Ranger I knew saying something close to “The Will of Allah and the will to work seem to be at odds”.  I remember someone posting about how the plumbers were completely indifferent to getting the hot and cold consistently on the same sides, or even matching up the red and blue, and wondering how such a sloppy and indifferent people could ever be made into a coherent and peaceful nation.

I wonder, to put it briefly, if they simply detest physical labor.  As conquerors who took copious slaves, the default mindset of all Muslims, in my outside looking in view, is to want to be a part of a ruling and privileged elite, who by definition do not defile their hands with manual labor.

These are of course generalities based on my individual experience, which at that I cannot claim to be comprehensive.  I cannot say I have researched this. I merely offer possibilities, of the sort most people are unwilling to offer.

One of the most important economics books I have read is “Economics in one lesson”, by Henry Hazlitt.  In it, he discusses two important notions:

1) that all economic changes have differing effects on differing groups, both immediately and over time.  Any intelligent analysis, therefore, must keep this in mind.

2) That, particularly, new technologies both destroy existing ways of doing things AND create new ways of doing things.

Uber unquestionably affects the income of traditional taxi drivers.  In that model, you have a brick and mortar building owned by a company which purchases and maintains a fleet of taxes, and which advertises its services, fields the calls placed to it, and passes those calls along to its contractors.  The drivers, in turn, are in my understanding in most cases simply leasing the cabs on a daily basis. Their daily profit is the amount of fares they take in less their cost to rent the cab.  The leasing agency–and this is really what a cab company is–may also take a cut of the fares.

This is somewhat abusive to the cab drivers, since they have a fixed cost, but no guarantee of income.  The cab company wins no matter what, except when they are unable to provide enough fares to the drivers to keep them coming back to a losing situation.  This may be because they don’t advertise enough, have ugly poorly maintained cars, hire the wrong people, or for some combination of factors simply present an unattractive image.

Cost, obviously, plays a role as well.  The higher the costs, the fewer the rides. This is basic economics.  Even when you are dealing with drunks on Saturday night, some percentage of them will choose to risk it when your cost is 2x rather than 1x.

For people traveling, rather than just call a cab on Monday morning, they will find a friend willing to drive them to the airport for $10 and an IOU.

For people in cities, their decision as to whether or not to drive themselves, take public transit, or take a cab, will be a feature of cost.  Whatever ones final opinion–and this is one of those major gray areas which seemingly can make some economists pompous pricks, due to the difficulty of the analysis, and fragility and uncertainty of the results, which makes people argue the most about the least–people TEND to make rational decisions in most cases.

Uber eliminates the brick and mortar entirely, except in its HQ and wherever computer programmers are doing their thing.  It does not own a fleet of cars.  It does not have a call center filled with dispatchers.  It also makes no promise of income, but in turn demands no cost OTHER than having a decent, well maintained car.  It may be that some people buy cars to drive Uber, but the costs they incur are up to them.  It would seem most drivers already have a car, and are simply diverting it to an alternative use.

Uber does not eliminate the boss, but rather automates it.  Drivers are scored by passengers, and if the gradual, collective verdict is persistently negative, they are fired.

So on the one hand Danny DeVito, and Flo the dispatcher, and John the mechanic who worked at Yellow Cab over time see the people working with them diminish, and maybe even disappear, and who perhaps lose their own jobs; and on the other hand, Uber provides de facto jobs for a roughly equivalent number of people, who are in much better control of their destinies in many respects.  It creates a room full of IT professionals working to keep the App working and making it better.

Costs are cut dramatically, due in large measure to costs cut on the supply side. No building has to be maintained, no cars need be bought and maintained, at least by Uber, and the connecting process is not only automated, but vastly improved such that service response times are reduced substantially, and in busy times with many drivers, to close to zero even in areas taxis would not normally be.

The logical effect of greatly reduced costs should be, and presumably has been, greatly increased use of hired drivers.  Where people walked, they now Uber.  Where they drove drunk, they now Uber.  Where, in a city, they thought they had to maintain a car, now they Uber.

How one finally sorts out who the ultimate winnners are is impossible, but it seems obvious at least that the end users, the consumers, the people spending their money to make the whole thing work, are getting an equivalent or better service at a lower price.  This makes their finances better, and frees them up to either save that money, or spend it somewhere else in the economy.

To side with taxi drivers, then, is to side against consumers.  Their gain is the consumers loss, and vice versa, even before one factors in all the opportunities for part time employment Uber affords.  It is impossible to predict exactly where any formally complex system will go, but in a free market, it will always tend to gravitate towards improving products, lowering prices, and creating new jobs for those destroyed.

Here is the issue, though, and as far as I know I’m the only one talking about this: as technology is automated, what it SHOULD be doing is increasing the value of all human labor, almost exponentially, to the point where a considerable amount of leisure is possible.  We have, as Oscar Wilde urged, made slaves of technology, which ought to have bought us the indolence, or passions, of the Greek and Roman ruling classes.

Instead, the steady sucking of actual wealth out of our economy–of the actual ownership of real goods, versus a lease or mortgage on them created by fiat money, and satisfied in blood and sweat–has made it harder and harder to earn a living.  In part, this is because the advertising age and easy money have amplified our wants.  We want bigger cars and bigger houses which necessarily cost more money, even with more effective means of production.

But even given this, ALL wages, for all professions, ought to have been going up rapidly, and are instead stagnant or even falling.  Democrats blame Republicans, and Republicans blame Democrats, but NEITHER party has even begun to discuss, much less grasp, the final centrality of the problem of money creation.  Nobody, that I can see.

One sees people like Murray Rothbard and the Austrians talking about the instability of fractional reserve banking, but this point is obvious.  One has only to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” to get the problems.  We know about business cycles, and in my view only the corrupt and foolish deny their causation.

No, the case is MORAL, and moral in an important teleological way, in that small elites are gathering all our wealth to themselves, in an orgy of greed regrettably often precendented in world history.  They have, I feel, created the 1% meme to amuse themselves, and to divert and divide the masses.  And people are too fucking stupid to understand this.

There is another consolidation worth mentioning as well, which is the movement of well paying jobs to the more intelligent.  Logically, if someone who is simply answering the phone is replaced by a computer programmer, the relative demands of the job have gone up with the pay, but one higher paid person might replace 100 of the lower paid, relatively unskilled people, who are then thrown out to compete for the same jobs, and who thereby lower their wages yet further.

This is likely a second dynamic behind wage stagnation.  The best paying jobs are getting better paying, but the less skilled jobs are decreasing in value as more people (now including Obama’s proposed permanent Spanish speaking Democrat base) compete for them.  As efficiency increases, the skill level and intelligence needed to cash in on the new jobs replacing the old jobs increases.  This has been a fear since the beginning of the Information Age–can we equally call it the Age of the Intellectual Ghetto?  Or the Age of Vacuous Information?–and a valid one in my opinion.

That genie is out of the bag, though.  We cannot uninvent the robot–and both the automated attendant–especially IVR and the Uber app are robots–without massive disruption.  And to the point, we don’t need to.  Our largest, most substantial fault in our system, and therefore the one area most productive of effectual improvements, remains our financial system.

Rand Paul continues to be my favorite for the Presidency, and he is doing the best he can.  It is hard to win the Presidency, though, without the active support of the Wall Street king makers that Democrats and Republican elites likewise kowtow to.

One wonders, though, what excuse Mitch McConnell COULD offer for not pushing through the Audit the Fed bill.  With transparency, and public knowledge, perhaps a discussion could at least begin.

And one wonders, too, why the best and brightest and most public economists are too stupid or too pusillanimous or too enmeshed with this system to first understand, and then to take this issue on.

I think much of our sense of life can be seen in how we view children, as miracles or nuisances, as wanted or superfluous.

A meditation which I likely read about somewhere, but which certainly occurred to me, is looking at children, feeling that spontaneous desire for their health and happiness, and taking that feeling and applying it to all people.

And on that note, it occurs to me that a useful reflection is that the biggest asshole and the biggest bitch you know would be admirable human beings, if they only knew how to get the love that they need, that we all need.  Everyone needs love.  There are no exceptions, even if countless people learn largely without it.  No one can learn to live fully without it, even if this urge gets perverted, for example into the love of cruelty.

And you cannot look at the Baphomet statue in Detroit and not see an anger at living children, and a latent anger at the hurt children who live within the people who created this demonic work.

It seems to be my destiny to be able to imagine goodness, and to see evil.  With regard to those Satanists, they are just the tip of the iceberg, in my view.  You know what they say about the one cockroach you can see.

But Heaven is still near.  This world is an odd, crazily interesting place.  Most of us cannot even imagine how little we perceive of what we could have perceived, had we merely been more awake.

240 years or so after the first completed work of one of the most erudite, passionate, principled and brilliant assemblies ever created by humankind, we deserve Donald Trump versus Joe fucking Biden.

Two terms of Obama make this clear.

I am tempted to buy a farm somewhere, and buy a bunch of goats and milk them daily.  But my self appointed job is to stay in the ring, to the extent I can find one.

And I continue to be tempted to buy a “I see Stupid People” T-shirt.

You got to play the game.  You got to play the game.  I have to keep repeating that to myself.