Author: White Whale

I’ll angle my way into this.

Two points I wanted to make immediately:

1) All I felt in Fear and Loathing was rage, rage they suppressed by using every drug they knew of, rage which they likely claimed was in response to something or other–Nixon of course being a prime candidate–but which was much deeper than that.

His attorney was almost certainly a rapist, and I wonder what stories he left out of his account. Moralizing seems not to have been something he did much of.  His problems were always practical, viz how to get away with it.  I counted three women they seriously abused: Lucy, Alice, and the waitress, who had a knife pulled on her.  All three started with his attorney, but they all included him, and he never seemed to care.

Remind me: what do you call someone with superficial charm, an innate and prodigious capacity for self and other deception, an inordinate appetite for thrills, and a seeming lack of conscience?  That’s more or less a textbook definition, isn’t it?

2) “Gonzo” journalism isn’t journalism at all.

What he craved, but which had not yet been created, was a reality show, of which he was the star.  He would have enjoyed watching himself on TV.  He would have worked hard to out-Ozzy Ozzy.

The deeper point, of course, is his relationship with “the Sixties”.  I will get to that eventually, but will note simply in passing that just about every treatment of him calls him either a counter-cultural icon or hero.

Here is what I think is the root of self sabotage, at least for me: it is a clinging to the past, in a childish hope that all the needs that were not met then will somehow, miraculously, magically, be met now, if only one does not transition fully from that emotional state one was in then.  It is a sort of unconsciously chosen anti-adulthood which, within its own logic, is very rational.  You did not get what you needed.  Those needs were quite real, and quite appropriate.  Therefore the world owes us this, and the way to get it is to wait.  Just wait.  It will come.  It’s always coming. Perhaps Samuel Beckett felt something like this.

The way out is through death.  One must accept the death of that self, the death of those dreams, the death of those hopes.  The world is not on its way.  Those needs cannot be met, now, in the way you needed them to be, then.  Something new can be invented; there are pathways forward.  But only after a bonfire–a cremation–of a past life that needs to die.

I saw a flag–a pennant really–for myself in one of my visualizations.  It consists in a green background, covered with skulls, and the number 9 on it.  9, in many Asian cultures, is considered sacred.  This pennant represents, roughly, “Life and perfection through death.”

I am literally going to make it–I have the materials and simply have not made the time–and literally going to put it on a flagpole in my room.  I am going to bring death into my room, and to the extent of my courage and capacity, embrace it.

“International Coalition of Emotionally Disaffected and Alienated Individuals finding solace and comfort in shared daily anger, directed at whatever target presents itself.”

I think we could also shorten this to “Wolf Pack”.  Those who hunt together, stay together.  And why hunt?  The pack is formed in the chase, and of course one must eat.   The sense of gnawing on tasty bones and emotional satiety is something we all crave, no?  It is simply the case that better and worse solutions exist.

Given the primitive emotional need upon which such politics rest, it is small wonder they break everything they touch, and consistently empower precisely those they claim to hate.  No intellectual candor or rigor can survive such grotesque emotional need.

I was talking with a friend I met at one of my inner work sessions, who related that “I don’t like things”.  I don’t have “I like”.  This person had previously confided to me that when they were young they also had colic, and their mother chose to hold them underwater to make them shut up.  Trauma.

I will wonder again how much undiagnosed trauma is floating around out there from before age 2.  Nobody can remember it, except in their bodies.   Somebody has to tell you, or you have to do primitive archeological work on yourself, never knowing for sure exactly what you are getting and where it actually came from.

But here is where I wound up: enthusiasm is something animals also have.  My dogs get very enthusiastic every time I crinkle plastic poop bags or put my shoes on in the morning.  This means it exists at a lower level than the social level, than the frontal cortex, than language.

Why not place it, too, in the gut?  If curiosity is the opposite of trauma, then I would suggest enthusiasm is the opposite of depression.  We need positive poles.  It is not enough to say “I don’t want to be depressed.”  What is needed is what EXCITES you, what gets you going, what . . .gets your juices flowing. . .your blood pumping. . . what makes you salivate at the thought of it.

And why not place the conditioned response in the gut as well?  All this neuroanatomy is in its infancy.  They just discovered the “gut brain” within the last 20 years or so, or at least its significance.

Could we not speak of trauma as a conditioned response?  Isn’t it?  It is with me.  Certain thoughts, certain actions, and it is like a cloud descends and I get this feeling of impending doom.  I can and of course have walked right through the cloud and the fear countless times–pretty much every day of my life.  This is why I don’t fear the same way many people do. If you have to deal with fear all day every day, things that would normally frighten most people aren’t any harder for me at all.  Public speaking, risk of death, failure: I fear all of these.  I also fear shopping malls, cars, people, dogs, cats, birds, the sky, and grass.  It’s part of being me.  Nonetheless, I function normally to all outward appearances.  It just takes a lot more work for me to do apparently simple things.

But I really think there is some very interesting work that could be done on this topic.  I doubt I will ever wind up in an academic setting again (I’ll paraphrase Greg Glassman: the magic is in the discovery; only the explanation is in the science), but if I did, I think it would be a Ph.D in neuroscience/neuroanatomy.

I know seratonin is something many drugs target.  No doubt there are other neurotransmitters that get targeted too.  But what if you surgically altered the pathways from the gut to the brain?  I think what you would get would be people without instincts, and without enthusiasm.  What if you could find a way to alternately turn them on and off, so people could feel the difference, and learn to detect and process the input of the gut?  What if you could figure out a way to sedate only the gut, or to slow the quantity and speed of the transmissions?

Finally: I wonder if fasting is an ancestral way of dealing with the “gut problem”.  

May I find peace, that I may share it.

I cannot resist adding that so many people share invisible clothes.

I have finally learned how to be an adequate pirate captain.  I got the Elite Ram, after some difficulty, and have taken on some ships even the game told me not to. I’m pretty much a big deal.

And I had to laugh today when it hit me that I can’t self sabotage myself now.  Unlike life, The game only goes forward.  I would have to start a new game, and the whole deal with self sabotage is it has to be plausibly deniable.  No one says “OK, now I’m going to fuck things up royally.”  No, they just DO it, then either wonder what the fuck just happened, or KNOW what the fuck just happened, depending on their self awareness.

Then I got to thinking about Complexity Theory and Dancing landscapes.  Here is the thing with life: you have never “made it”.  You could be the blanking-est, blanking-est, and blanking-est (pick what you want: richest, most powerful, sexiest, most handsome, coolest) person in the world, and you will still die.  You will still lose, or at least undergo, to my understanding, a phase transition.

And of course most of us are never blanking-est anything.  And I look and see that the only way I can plan to avoid self sabotage is to develop the contrary habit of daily growth. It is not enough to try and avoid it.  I have to get at the roots of it, and the way to do that is to GO THROUGH all the things that stand in the way of planned growth; to learn to walk steadily and confidently in a direction I have actually consciously chosen.

More generally, it seems to me if you are not growing, you are being left behind.  That is the lesson of the Dancing Landscape.  And I don’t mean economically, or at least not only.  I simply mean that you are falling behind the learning that COULD have happened if you had chosen it as a daily activity.

If you are not growing, you are shrinking.  I think that is a useful principle.

The other deep lesson of Assassin’s Creed is this: as a pirate in the Caribbean in the early 18th century I deal with a lot of British and Spanish.  The game is quite violent, and most ships I take wind up being sunk, and all aboard, with few exceptions, implicitly killed.  Believe it or not, it sometimes makes me sad, watching all the carnage, because I know these things really happened.

But more generally it got me to thinking that there really was no moral difference between the pirates and the conquistadors and imperialists.  What does a pirate do?  He shows up, shoots everyone who resists, and steals your stuff.  What did the British do in their colonies?  They showed up with guns, shot everyone who resisted, and said they were in charge and you now owe us taxes.  They took slaves for a long time.  In 1710 or so (I think that’s where we are in the story) they were still shipping Irish slaves to the Caribbean and “breeding” them with African slaves to make the children more valuable.  I’m sure you can imagine what those scenes might have been like.  These were the British, the ones we like to think of as the good guys, who all have charming accents and a marvelous and droll sense of humor.

And I think that none of these people were innocent.  Very few, at any rate.  Pirates were perhaps the most honest ones.

I do feel as well, though, that one must be very careful with this whole hypocrisy argument.  I recently listened to Hunter Stockton Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, and felt strongly that what I was listening to was Cultural Sadeism, and it caused me to make some alterations to my theories.  I’m still processing and will post on that later.

For now, I wanted to point out that Thompson no doubt rationalized his sundry crimes as “at least not hypocritical”.  They were honest crimes, and he admits to them.  Sade, too, found the only crime to be hypocrisy.  What is the moral value of the charge of hypocrisy for such people?

It is this: they can distract others from their crimes by accusing everyone else of them, without ever articulating a morality.  Saul Alinsky, of course, was a Cultural Sadeist and palled around with literal gangsters (remember Mackie Messer/Mack the Knife winds up allying with the protagonists in the Three Penny Opera).  Everyone else was awful, he said.  Why?  They were HYPOCRITES.

Bait and switch, that is all.  Look over there, he says, while he picks your pocket.  Nothing meaningful has been said, and awful things left unjustified because unjustifiable.

One more thing: I think the phrase “psychologically harmful” could be substituted usefully for “immoral”.  This is the crux of my argument.  And there is no need to add “socially harmful”.  If an individual knows something is socially harmful and does it anyway, this is psychologically harmful, even if that person is so far gone the added injury is invisible.

Someone has no doubt come up with this term, but it’s new to me.

I was reading about efforts to implement Sharia courts in, of all places, Irving, Texas.

Sharia is misogynistic.  Women are not treated equally, or even, to a great extent, decently.  Men can legally beat their wives.  They can marry and rape 9 year old girls.  They can rape any woman who is not a Muslim.  This is legal.  Not considered wrong.  Neither is slavery.

And I got to thinking about the psychodynamic roots of all this.  What is the psychological condition of Muslim women?  They are kept apart from men, not allowed (in most traditional societies) to be educated, not allowed to live independently, not allowed opinions, by and large, although I assume Muslim women, like all women, find ways to have their say.

There is something traumatizing about all this.  One can assume, I think, that most Muslim women know someone who has been beaten, and know it can happen to them too, and there will be nothing they can do about it.  Even in America we have had quite a few honor killings.

How do such women deal with the latent anger and rage, and fear, and humiliation?  Well, in part they likely internalize it, the same way that battered women refuse to put their batterers in jail, and stay with them, knowing it will happen again.  They rationalize the Hijab and restrictions on their movement and education as someone appropriate.

But they have access to little boys, and little boys can be punished.  They can be made to feel fear.  They can be humiliated.  They can be hurt.  Yes, these are their own children, but surely most of these mothers must feel some ambivalence, looking in the eyes of their men in their children?

Obviously, there are many happy homes, and many good mothers.  But I would argue that this outcome is made much, much less likely the more seriously the men take the fundamental contempt for women which pervades their holy text, and accounts of the deeds of its author.

Separate but equal, I think we can all agree, is not equal at all; and most Islamic apologists are being excessively generous even in granting equality in principle.  Women are a step below, maybe two.

I used the term Rosebud, or Rosebud moments from time to time.  The meaning should be clear enough to all who have seen Citizen Kane, but I thought I might clarify a tad.

All of us carry within us “moments” which are primitive, childish, and of vast, existential importance. I  was reading the other day that Sartre’s parents divorced, and if memory serves (the details don’t matter) his mother remarried when he was 12.  Somewhere in there was a childish need that was not met.  He was crying with every ounce of his being for something–for maternal love, for his father, for a return to how things used to be.  But his cries went unheard.  His needs went unmet.

And what do you do with such things?  What did our portrait of William Randolph Hearst do?  He carried on.  He put it behind him, so he thought.  He suppressed it.  What good does keeping fucking hurts in your fucking memory fucking do?  Fuck it.

But here is the thing: they don’t go away until we own them, not really.

Christ taught both that we should be as children, and as wise as serpents.  Both.

Here is my emerging view: anyone unable to access the spirit of a child likely has major unresolved Rosebud moments.  Anyone STUCK in childishness, likewise.  You have to be able to move back and forth.  You have to be capable of what I will call “appropriateness”.  This is a very Taoist term in the sense I am using it. It is mutable, and its exact meaning will vary constantly.

All stupidity, repeated long enough, must be regarded as intentional.

Those who want to learn, do.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/knights-templar-maps-plan-fight-130000317.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory&soc_trk=fb&fb_ref=Default

I read this article, and was reminded of an idea I had I will propose again: someone involved needs to create an organization funded by public donations–and governmental money too–to fund a mercenary/volunteer army to fight ISIS.  Hell, Blackwater could float a trial balloon by announcing a money-gathering venture to fund the fight.  They could put a Donate button on their website.  People could sponsor soldiers, like people used to sponsor kids in Africa.

Churches could get involved.  This is in no small measure an anti-anti-Christian campaign.  Christians are being slaughtered: crucified, raped, buried, beheaded.

And I think he’s right, too, that it might take a Non-Governmental Entity to fight one.