Author: White Whale

Some days I can only attest to the craziness of others.

I prefer the first.

I was watching the British last night.  It has devolved into something like a feudal system which lacks the dignity of work.  Many, many lower class Brits sit around all day, waiting, helpless.  The initiative is gone, the gladness in work is gone.

And guns are fundamentally empowering.  I wonder if some do not seek out ISIS just to put a gun in their hands, to feel that power, that authority.  Access to them is hugely psychologically important.  They are agents of goodness and responsibility in the hands of decent people, and a CRITICAL element in a healthy democracy.

Finally: in hard times, commandments are much more useful than suggestions.  Keep the Ten Commandments is much easier than “love thy neighbor”.  True Christianity is much more advanced in some ways than the Mitzvot diet of the Jews, but it also requires a much more refined sensibility, which is why most Christians are not particularly loving, and in the case for example of the religious wars and witchcraft trials, have committed quite grievous sins in the name of “love”.

Why does everybody have to be so fucking stupid? 

the dragons have fled from
    my plastic sword
and my tiny arms

the lizards have fled, with
  their flickering menacing tongues

and a rainbow. . .

Every day is a season.  This  hit me.  Every day is a flavor, a color, an opportunity, a chance, a soon-to-be-gone.

This is a healthy thought.  Mental health is in part looking forward to each and every day as an opportunity to experience, to grow, to learn, to enjoy.  You know that challenges are a part of it, but you also know even the very worst ones can’t last past this lifetime, and very few last even a fraction that long.  Most are forgotten in a week or two.

I have been living in hell.  As best I can determine, I have been in a more or less clinical state of depression since before I could speak, but it is healing.  I am getting flashes of hope and engagement, and cessation of those relentless attacks of self disgust, pessimism, and sense of impending doom and helplessness.

Doom may be impending–there are lunatics in this world even now trying to bring it about–but I think learning to face that possibility with the best attitude possible is the way to roll.

And I will be far more effective in creating and propagating creative alternatives as someone who is engaged with the world on all levels.

As for myself, I am an UeberPisces.  I go all in, knowing I will be destroyed.  We are enthusiasts.  We can’t help it.  I am a moth driven to a flame which transforms me.

Death is a certainty, and should be welcomed.  Whoever you were, you cannot forever be.  Whatever you did, is undone.  So why not jump in with both feet, and say Fuck It?

You see where I am going, if you read this blog often.  I circle.

Again: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26481-left-or-rightwing-brains-disgust-response-tells-all.html

Dis-gust=inedible=unclean=dirty=wrong. What they have measured is the extent to which conservatives and leftists differ in their gut level responses to various stimuli.

If I find the spectacle of two men kissing disgusting, is that wrong?  Well, we are told it is.  We are told we have to learn to suppress that natural response–I would argue it is a natural response, as it is hard to see how evolution could have selected for at least exclusive homosexuality, although I suppose I could see some adaptive advantages to bisexuality–and instead express acceptance.  What do we do?  We SUPPRESS.

Killing babies.  Well, I think we are wired to protect our own kind, at least our close kin, and to protect the most helpless in our group.  Babies are nearly completely helpless, and embryos ARE completely helpless.  It is small wonder that many would find the idea of reaching in, pulling out, and killing–if the shock of removal was not enough–that little proto-baby.  What do we have to do to toe the orthodox leftist line that it is not a baby but a de facto removable organ of a woman’s body she can choose to want or not want?  We have to SUPPRESS that natural protective instinct.

This is how you get things like this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/08/emily_letts_filmed_her_abortion_to_inspire_women_but_can_the_procedure_really.html

Letts tells us, “I talk to women all the time, and they’re like, ‘Of course everyone feels bad about this. Of course everyone’s going to feel guilty,’ as if it’s a given.” She says, “I don’t feel sad. I feel in awe of the fact that I can make a life.”

And, of course, facilitate and film the TAKING of a life.

Personally, I am not a hard core anti-abortionist.  I support education and access to birth control.  Above all, though, I support children growing into responsible adults who are both capable of preventing pregnancy, and retaining a sense of horror at the idea of killing a baby.  Our current President supported an Illinois bill in which full term babies could be born, and then simply left in the cold to die, and then be discarded as medical waste.  There is something fundamentally disconnected about that.

This is my point.  I think one possible measurement would be something adumbrated in the movie “The Parallax View”, and attempted in a preliminary fashion by those measuring political brains, which would be to measure reactions to images which we could reasonably assume would be dis-gusting for most people.  Dead bodies, feces, etc.

And of course this sort of thing was PRECISELY what Sade was interested in.  120 Days of Sodom is filled with little sketches, little ideas, static images (partially forced by the fact that Sade was in prison and forced to hide his manuscript).  One of them was taking a bath in blood, feces, semen, urine and menstrual blood (I think that is the right inventory), and calling it good.

The leaves on trees turn color in the fall because they are dying.  Can we not imagine that the fascination with the dis-gusting arises precisely when access to that sense is gone or dying?  That a fascination with death is tied precisely to a sense one is dying or dead?  Could we not find brain-eating zombies in here somewhere?

Life is complex.  I mean this in both senses of the term, which is to say “hard to understand”, and formally “complex”.  You cannot necessarily build stronger bonds of human understanding by prohibiting judgement and that expressed sense of pre-rational revulsion we call bigotry.  As I say to the point of being monomaniacal and profoundly dull, leftism does not renounce judgement or violence.  It does not renounce hate or bigotry.  It simply reserves it for those ACCUSED of those crimes, who in most cases are completely innocent.  Does any sane human being really think opposition to Obama is race-based, or that racism is a major problem for more than a very small fraction of our populace?  Of course not: lunacy is common on the left.  It is the only thing which propagates it.

I was reading the other day both about how the Irish competed with blacks in the numbers in which they were brought to the Americas as slaves, and in the discrimination they faced. Most Irish slaves seem to have wound up in the Caribbean, but they were slaves, no question.  They were “bred”–and I think this is the term that was used–to create higher value slaves.  They were esteemed lower than blacks, who were considered hardier.

Then after the potato famine, they came to America voluntarily, but were faced with pervasive discrimination, as in the short, because common and commonly understood, acronym NINA: No Irish Need Apply.

No civil rights activists intervened.  No pro-Irish campaigns were ever waged by the government.  But they integrated.  Most major cities now have Saint Patrick’s Day parades.


The same thing would have happened with African-Americans, if they had been left alone, left to negotiate their own way as countless individuals.  But they had the profound misfortune to have Jesse Jackson and Al sharpton and Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama inflicted on them.  And that’s before I get to the vastly larger number of whites who USED them both to advance their careers, and to create a sufficient illusion of a conscience for themselves that they could sleep at night in their large mansions, “knowing” they were the good guys and gals.


Enough for now. 

Here is what I think is an important hypothesis: Evil is mainly constituted by learned helplessness with respect to full nervous system integration, aka the sense of emotional individuation.  For those who exhibit what we call sociopathy or psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder, existence is a transgression.

Think of the experiments that could not be done today, in which dogs were put in one cage, and allowed into another, which had an electrical plate that shocked them.  After a time, they would not venture out, even if the floor was not electrified, because the pain of even anticipating the shock was too much.

Children who are beaten cannot feel anger.  You are not allowed to yell back at the parent.  You are not allowed to express justified rage.  You are not allowed access, in other words, to normal systemic responses, to instinctual responses, to natural reactions to troubling times.

This creates dissociation, which is a textbook clinical response to trauma.  Dissociation is a disconnection between the sense of self and emotions most would consider appropriate at some given time.  Traumatized men, for example, in my view make excellent soldiers, because they lack the sense of fear that would paralyze others.  They simply shut it off.

And think about this: conscience consists mainly in ANXIETY, in the sense that doing x, y, or z makes you uncomfortable.  You imagine cheating on your spouse, or robbing or killing someone, and some part of you becomes profoundly discomfited.  It doesn’t like it.  It says “I don’t WANT to be the sort of person who does that”.

It may be that you don’t want to be SEEN to be that sort of person, that you value your honor, which is to say your social standing.

It may be that your conversation is solely internal, such that your “social standing” is related to your internal sense of worth, your internal and fully honest sense that if you commit this transgression, you will no longer DESERVE to be integrated into a social space.  You should be homeless.  You should be exiled.  You would feel guilt, which is to say anxiety and emotional pain tied to your sense of self.

This is what the voice in your head tells you.  But here is my thesis: that “voice” is an emergent property of a gut sense, of signalling originating in the gut, which perhaps at a very primitive level is concerned with clean/unclean, itself a distinction related to edible/inedible, which at one time had enormous survival implications.

The A-10 is a plane built around a gun; the human being, in some sense, is a machine built around the gut, serving it.  Figuring out what it tells us constantly is thus a matter of considerable importance.

Sociopaths, in this rendering, have lost–through socializing, in all likelihood, with infant trauma largely being absent from the psychotherapeutic arsenal of diagnoses, but certainly possibly having been born this way, or a predisposition to it–the connection between their rational, social brain and their gut brain.  The gut sense that something is inedible/unclean/wrong is simply not there.  The gut either is not telling them, or they do not have the capacity to process it.  Either way, the conscience is absent.  Lying, cheating, stealing: these evoke no emotional response other than a concern with getting caught and punished.

And such people typically have an exaggerated need for thrills, for living on the edge.  Some, with some other factors in place, become serial killers or rapists; others ride their motorcycles much too fast, and tell so many lies and cheat so much it’s almost like they want to get caught, when in reality it’s the thrill of the possibility-and the sense of victory when they get away with it–that makes their engines run.

On this rendering the distinction of sacred and profane, seen nearly everywhere in religions around the world, would be one arising in the gut.

And the preponderance of fascination with horror movies, particularly among young people, could be seen as arising from the felt gut sense that the distinction between sacred and profane has been eradicated.  Leveling is the fundamental notion of Socialism–moral leveling, to be clear, since politically an oligarchy always emerges on top–and that eradicates primitive emotion-based distinctions.

As rational beings, of course, we can say that such distinctions should be erased.  Homosexuals should not be beaten and killed.  We can allow Irish to apply.  Women are pretty damn smart.  All of this makes sense.

But some part of us still needs these distinctions.  The Hindus built peace (for most) and stability for thousands of years based upon pervasive and permanent and complex graded systems of difference, of sacred and profane.  To this very day, tens or hundreds of millions exist outside the social system, and are routinely abused in horrible ways.

To abuse is to exist.  This is the logic of some part of our evolutionary wiring.  It is countered, of course, by more recent developments, by our social brains.  But when the two exist in conflict, the sense of home is prevented.  Rest is disrupted.

This is the issue of our modern age.  One can easily see the totalitarianisms (Communism, primarily, with Nazism arising in reaction to it) as arising from this felt sense of displacedness, of disconnection, of homelessness.  Verworfenheit.  One can readily grasp Heidegger’s initial embrace of Nazism simply by noting the importance he placed on Heimat: me and mine, if necessary against all others.

And I think it necessary and useful to derive a sort of Sociopathy Light (Lite?), which is to say the evisceration of the conscience brought on by disconnecting the gut from abstraction.  In order to socialize ourselves, we must employ abstract reasoning, rules.  Fairness, for example, is an abstraction.  It says “I must make sure (the gut adds–in order to prevent violence and to foster intra-group solidarity) to make sure all the children get equally large slices of chocolate cake.”  As an abstraction, this works.

But our social mind can easily be disconnected from its concrete milieu, from the actual, real world.  It can perform the same symbolic operations, which make sense in the abstract, but which do not apply to anything in the real world.  “Social Justice”, for example, is in almost all cases encouraging one group not to embrace the principles of hard work, self restraint, long term thinking, and patience; and of punishing another group for doing so.  It rewards those who should not be rewarded, and punishes those who have in fact been rewarded.

More importantly, it discourages morality.  Virtue remains a type of sacred; and its contrary a type of profane.  These are still usable categories, and will in my view still satisfy the gut.

But contemporary “virtue” consists precisely in undermining all other sorts of virtues, at least on the left.  They do not say “the rich are rich because they busted their asses over the long haul, took large risks, endured many sleepless nights and endless frustration, and in the process created many jobs and wealth for others.”  No, they mimic a bygone era when aristocrats existed, and could be assumed to be the beneficiaries of an ancestors rapacity and capacity for successful theft in the near or distant past.

So what you get, practically, is a combination of inaccurate abstraction–really, I would call it in nearly all cases rationalization–and a very real felt sense of hatred and anger and violence which come from an otherwise disconnected gut.

And this basic phenomenon is common.  On the Religious Right you have people who spend all week reading about the importance of love and kindness, and who spit out hatred and anger at all who disagree with them.

And everywhere you will find self righteous people who claim to be for the “Good” who are angry, spiteful, and emotionally disconnected.

All abstract tribes are prone to this, although it is not a necessary element.

I think it is perhaps in the Dionysian that we reconcile these opposing tendencies.  Apollo has never fully run the show.  Wine has its place.  The gut must have its say and its day.

And I think this is also the role played by many authentic spiritual practices.  As I have mentioned, I do a Tibetan practice called Kum Nye, and they talk about the nastiness of gut energy, which they locate in an energy center below the navel, but also speak of how to release and integrate it.  (In my own case, I have what amount to attacks of shaking nearly every night, which originate in almost all cases in my solar plexus; my view is that both the orthodox physiologists and the “energy” interpretations are correct, on different levels).

And this is the point: existing methods can be researched and refined, and new methods can be developed and deployed to deal with this energy in socially useful ways, such that we can exist as being who FEEL whole without being subject to attacks of violence and a need for ritually defined social distinctions.

Turner explored Arnold van Gennep‘s threefold structure of rites of passage and expanding theories on the liminal phase. Van Gennep’s structure consisted of a pre-liminal phase (separation), a liminal phase (transition), and a post-liminal phase (reincorporation). Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were “betwixt and between”: they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and communitas.

Here is the point I want to make here: I think it would be possible and likely useful to theorize that what is happening in both actual religious ritual and serial killing/ritual killing is that we are transitioning from our social brain–our frontal cortex–to our more primitive nervous systems, and specifically the gut brain.  The gut brain WANTS blood and guts and to tear things to shreds.  Do you think big cats, stalking their prey, do not go through something like what serial killers do, stalking THEIR prey?

And evil and traumatic disruption of normal gut function are integrally related.  I am convinced of this.

If this is true, then ritual and ritual killing are perhaps means of REMEMBERING a part of ourselves that has gone lost in civilized life.

I think there are some deep, dark, and potentially transformative ideas here.

And I will add the idea, too, that psychiatric drugs are targeted at our rational minds, with things that happen in the brain.  We do not yet have anything which can work to calm down, directly, grotesque alterations of nervous system function in the gut.  That would be an enormously productive field of research, in my considered view.  I have no clue how one would go about it, but I would start by trying to determine if I could find a way to tell the difference between the guts (and this is a large term covering a lot of neuroanatomy I don’t know in detail) of healthy, relaxed people, and those with PTSD.

Perhaps there is a way of interrupting the signals they send to the brain?