Author: White Whale

What would happen if ten men married ten women?  All the men, all the women.  They could do ten day rotations as to who they spend the night with.  What good would happen?  What bad?  What interesting?

What if they coparented, such that nobody knew or asked whose kids were whose?

I’m going some interesting places, and this popped in my head.  I’ve never seen it proposed, although I have of course heard of both polygamy and the lesser known polyandry.  Edward de Bono also proposed five year renewable marriage contracts

I ponder. That’s what I do.  I ingest some idea or feeling or image, and it percolates.

This notion that leftists do not react viscerally to images of death and ugliness still piques my curiosity.  I wonder if the violence that attends all leftist agitation–one sees hate even in something as mundane as the national campaign against the police, or against alleged racists, or against the “1%” (if there was ever a manufactured propaganda meme, that clearly qualifies; I can almost smell the espresso and the weed)–in fact secretly satisfies some unmet need in them.

I remember reading about a hurricane in Cuba, and the BBC or maybe NPR, or some other propaganda outlet was gushing about how the “Cubans do what they are told.  They don’t have any problems with people ignoring orders down there, unlike here”., and I could just feel this fascination with authoritarianism, this flush in the face of some 20-something girl with a degree in Political Science or English, thinking about people getting boots shoved up their asses.

In my view, we are wired, when wired properly, to react viscerally to the grotesque.  Being unable to do so implies a disconnection with the gut, with instinct, with primal, animal, REAL emotions.

And that disconnection creates a feeling of disconnection with life.  I posted some nice Peter Levine quotes a month or two ago. (or three or four or five: I live in an altered state of time).

I can almost see how this would work: you react viscerally to reacting viscerally, and learn to suppress it, and live only in your head.  But something is missing.  And violence–the right sort of violence, ostensibly justifiable violence, even the right sort of sexual violence–satisfies that urge.

Hence Che: not, to be clear, Che himself, who was a sociopath.  I mean outwardly normal people fetishizing him, despite his cruelty, incompetence, and very dull but very real evil.

I think this is very close to the truth.

People ask what are my intentions with my films — my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be. There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; ‘eternal values,’ ‘immortality’ and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.
The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.
We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts.
Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

I get very little validation for any of my work, and a considerable amount of indifference and even hostility. I am not complaining, but did want to put some positive feedback in the public domain, to feed some part of me that needs feeding.

I believe I can honestly describe myself as a Visionary.  I see things other people do not see.  I look at the same world others look at, and see how it can be made better, in ways which are uniquely my own.

I will periodically email economists at various universities, trying to get them to rethink our financial system.  The more I contemplate things, the more I think the MORAL argument is more important than the practical argument, which of course is that fractional reserve banking is INHERENTLY unstable.

I did a round Sunday, and of course have not heard back from anyone.  This was the crux of the email:

 I would like to encourage you to consider a simple, but currently
counter-paradigmatic proposition: money creation is inherently
theft, is unjust, and creates a functional class division between
those empowered by law to create money and those who would go to jail for it. To
the extent the rich get richer and the poor poorer, as an inherent element of
our system, this is the primary mechanism.

It is astonishing to me that I need to make this argument, that some moralizing evangelistic organizer has not come to the same conclusion.  


Actually, Googling “inflation is theft” does come up with some stuff, like this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/billflax/2011/03/03/you-call-it-inflation-i-call-it-theft/

I guess the question then becomes: why are not more people talking about this?  Again, the argument is a practical one, but also a moral one.

And I seem to be the only one with a solution, which, again, is obvious, or should be obvious: just reverse the path we took to get here.

Have to run, but wanted to do a brief post.

Just watched “My Fair Lady” for the first time in thirty years.

Higgins was plainly Shaw: an intelligent, abusive, emotionally detached survivor of some form of primal PTSD, with significant “mother issues” as they say, whose morality as it evolves in the play consists in a sort of effete estheticism of manners oriented around the abuse of lower classes in the name of redeeming them.

The essence of the Fabianism he and the Webbs created is a decadent formality oriented around saving people they hate and despise.

Nothing admirable there.  And there is no doubt that Higgins does, in the end, hit Eliza, just as she expects, and as she became “accustomed” to in her childhood.  Her father makes many references to hitting her.

This is basic psychology: she marries an abusive and emotionally absent father.

Can you see the sickness in these ideas?  Can you see the role authoritarianisms played for Shaw, who admired Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin equally?

Can you see the connection between the decadence of the British ruling class and purported efforts to “save” people they don’t understand and don’t care for?

Brilliant musical, but shitty ending. You can put wit into the mouth of a savage, but you cannot make him into a decent human being.  Cannibalism is at the heart of all of this.  It is plainly implied by the moral logic of the situations.  It is profoundly ugly.

I have posted this before, but it is worth watching again (if you have), and once if you have not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgpaKkrZex4

Only a genteel beast, one capable of thinking of people as “cabbage leaves” and “baggage” could refer to a “humane” poison gas.

And I will actually add one more thing: at several points in the play everyone freezes.  In Liza’s neighborhood, and at the track. I  don’t know what the claimed purpose of this was, but I would submit again that this is the wax museum quality of frozen notions like “class”, which exempt individuals from being treated as individuals, which is capable of abstracting “middle class” (aka bourgeois) morality from actual morality, which is capable of extreme violence with a genteel and innocent face, which is characterized, in short, by what I continue to call Cultural Sadeism.

This is a deep notion. It does not exist on the surface.  It is an emergent property of a system of thinking and feeling and behaving.  It is rarely openly claimed, but it can be seen manifested everywhere, in sloppy thinking, denialism, rationalized abuses, and glorifications of horrors like Cuba.

Edit: Higgins also at one point argues that if he treats a Duchess as a flower girl, or a flower girl as a Duchess, it is all the same, since equality, not quality, of treatment is what is what matters.

This is a socialist argument.  Logically, if I kill everyone I meet, then I meet this criterion, and some, like Che Guevera, come quite close.

As I say again and again, socialistm is an ANTI-morality and an anti-humanism.  All the jokes in My Fair Lady?  Shaw meant them.  He was not joking.  He was merely so far out from acceptable social norms that people took it as exaggeration and wit, and he KNEW this to be the case, that he could argue for the monstrous right in front of people, and still be accepted in society.

One could view the entirety of the British preoccupation with manners and protocol as an elaborate charade, whose principle goal is to eviscerate fully the capacity for honesty, genuine kindness, and society of a nurturing sort.

Socialism is what you get when society is ruined.

I posted a bit back this article, about how leftists and conservatives react differently to disgusting images, with the former showing little reaction in their brains–even if they self reported feeling disgust–and the latter showing robust instinctive reactions.

Here is a proposal for a followup trial: put WORDS in front of the leftists.  Put the word “injustice” in front of them.  My hypothesis is that they will react to ABSTRACTIONS in the same way conservatives react to images.

This is the principle difference between so-called conservatives–most of whom I would label actual Liberals–and Leftists: their connection to the real world, the one which actually exists, and to which words ideally refer, but to which they need NOT refer.

There is nothing which prevents me from calling a watermelon a cucumber, as Leftists do, particularly if I am robustly supported by choruses of people nurturing the same delusion: that injustice and violence constitute justice and peace.

I just ran into a person incapable of distinguishing the two.  He was also characterized by a noticeable lack of empathy.  I suspect him of sociopathy. One can certainly be a law following sociopath.  Most of the Nazis were.

And I got to thinking: legalism is an anti-morality and authoritarian.  Inherently, it places the locus of decision making as to appropriate behavior not upon the individual, but upon a small group of people empowered to create and enforce laws.

And if such a body arises from a society itself characterized by legalism, upon what can they base their decisions?  What principle?

This is the role egalitarianism plays in the modern world.  It stipulates, fundamentally, that NO moral decisions are possible, and that the sole guiding principle be that all be equal in all respects.

I described this person as unable to effectively differentiate people and objects.  I have spoken often of the wax museum, static quality of the work of Sade, and it seems to me these things are related.  A Legalist renders homage to the object of a law.  One could make this concrete by referring the literal use of stone tablets in ancient civilizations, like the Roman Republic.

A moralist renders homage to PEOPLE, to concrete, actual, living breathing, suffering, hoping human beings.  It necessarily includes empathy and compassion.

Socialism, by this criterion, is not a morality.  Never forget that George Bernard Shaw called for the mass murder of all those he considered useless.

One can break ideational systems down in exactly the same way engines can be broken down.  It is of course necessary to employ abstraction, but this is quite acceptable when one grasps that one is dealing with ideas qua ideas, and not preaching about how to save the world, and acting on it.

Yesterday morning, lying in bed, as I often do, letting images and words come to me–it’s more or less a download–it came to me that “Evil is everything but Goodness”.  And Goodness is a condition of feeling happy, engaged, and completely unsure where you are going or what your next move will be.  It is absolute spontaneity.  Now, obviously your brain must be involved for you to do anything, and it’s best if your feelings and gut are too, but there is a WAY.  I have felt split seconds of it.

And if you think of it this way, Christ’s “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” acquires a slightly different meaning.  Not only has everyone sinned, but they sin most all of every day.

Sinning is falling short; that is all it is.  And seen this way, it is not something to be judged, but a situation to be rectified.  It is like teaching someone a flip turn in swimming.  Some people will get it sooner than others.

Morality is intrinsically the best way to live.  I define it that way.  It is what generates the most qualitative pleasure and happiness, and these are innately what our spirit craves.  Clearly, it craves adventure, excitement, discovery, danger and other such things, and I am not in the slightest diminishing these needs.  It craves sex and connection.  These are therefore intrinsically not sinful, until they cause immorality, which is hurting others.

This means that virtue is a skill not unlike riding a bike, or ballroom dancing.  And what creates skill is AWARENESS.  Lack of awareness is what causes a lack of skill.

It can be frustrating dealing with stupid people.  I have an IQ significantly above average, and not infrequently find myself angry at how short sighted, self interested, self absorbed and stupid people can be.  But is this reaction not a species of stupidity in me?  Should I take it personally when dogs bark at me, or birds shit on my car?

My point is that judgement exists on a continuum, and EVERYONE exists on that continuum, so our moral failings differ in scale, not the fact of their existence, and this means that judgement is inherently hypocritical, with one exception: those who encourage others to sin, and take pleasure in the pain it causes them.

This is how I define evil.  Evil is not cheating on your wife, or lying, cheating and stealing.  You do these because you are unwilling to consciously face the full consequences of your actions.  You are unwilling to feel the pain of those you have hurt.  You are unable, on the positive side, to access positive feelings of the sort which would have made you happy without doing those things.  You don’t know that happiness surrounds you, so you reach for small and dark things.

Evil is deciding finally that the Light is beyond your reach, and should therefore be beyond the reach of anyone else.  It is my feeling that this sort of evil should be dealt with through violence.

I wish I could say I advocated infinite tolerance, but infinite virtue is in my view impossible in this world, and the essence of spirituality is practicality, and practically this is the reality.  Love does not in the least in my view imply pacifism, or allowing others to abuse you.  Quite the contrary: virtue consists precisely in building the best, most resilient, happiest You that you can.

I have dealt with these issues before, and am not sure I’m not repeating myself, but I suppose it’s impossible to walk even the same road exactly the same way twice.

Edit: you know, in some respects I just described Avidya.  But it is always worth doing things in your own voice, in your own vernacular, because this word can mean, in subtle shades, an infinite number of things, even if they all approximate the same thing.  What I need is MY shade, and what you need is YOURS.  This is how life becomes and remains interesting, at least in the social sphere.

Being blessed with PTSD myself, this movie triggered me a bit, even though mine has nothing at all to do with combat.  I really felt like you did get some sense of what that sort of urban combat was like.

Now, it’s the middle of the night, and I’m a bit foggy, so what is likely to follow is not likely my best work, but a few preliminary thoughts are in order.

First off, I think viewing it as pro-war, or even as propaganda is stupid.  It did not explain or rationalize our involvement in Iraq in the slightest.  On the contrary, it showed us clearly as the invaders we were, driving tanks down Iraqi roads, and kicking down Iraqi doors, and handcuffing and sometimes shooting Iraqis who wanted to resist our presence violently.  This is the text of the movie.  That is what is shown.

And it shows the cost of ordinary Iraqis in trying to help Americans.  The boy who is power drilled to death, and the father who was shot, for collaboration: that sort of thing happened.

And I watch this and wonder how we could have been so foolish as to believe that the Iraqis would welcome an invading Army with open arms.  Yes, people like me repeated the atrocities of the Hussein’s often, the rape rooms, the violent suppression of the Shia in the south, cutting people into pieces and stuffing them into bags, the torture chambers, the gas attacks on the Kurds.

With regard to the Kurds, he killed perhaps 50,000 people.  With regard to the Shiite uprising, it is unclear.  Let us put that number also at 50,000, although it does not appear that high.

The lowest number I can find with regard to Iraqi deaths is 110,000.  Some put the number as high as a million.  You have to factor in both Iraqis who chose to oppose us, either as regular military or paramilitary, as well as the Al Quedists who caused so much death among those unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire.  They created a hell on Earth for a few years, and arguably won the war for us.

So does it make sense for us to have killed more Iraqis than Saddam did in order to protect them from him? I  can’t honestly say that it does.

And of course drilling elbows and knees is barbaric,  Cutting off body parts, decapitating children: these are horrific.  We shudder at this sort of thing.  But what do bombs do? If your limbs are leaving your body, and your soul this benighted world, the difference to the person affected is, I would submit, largely academic.  We do not INTENTIONALLY dismember people, but that is the outcome nonetheless.  Children too.

I was on the internet somewhere in 2003, arguing that America was attacked on 9/11 because even though we have BY FAR the most powerful military on the planet, no one takes us seriously because our halls of government have been so thoroughly infiltrated with people who fundamentally hate this country.  Lacking credibility is lacking the capacity for deterrence, which in turn makes it more likely that if someone like Saddam Hussein gets nukes, he is more likely to use them to blackmail us and our allies.  That is a justification for war, or so I saw it.

And I do think it worth resurrecting for the public record his open admission, when caught, that he fully intended to start up his nuclear program again.  The war obviously prevented that.

But was it worth the cost?

First off, my ENTIRE world view changed when I realized that 9/11 involved a much larger conspiracy, one not likely Al Queda affiliated.  As I have said repeatedly, the bombs could have been detonated without the planes, resulting in far higher casualties.  Also, any group with the sophistication to get those bombs in those buildings undetected would easily have been able to carry out more attacks.  Attacking Americans is child’s play, as the snipers shortly after 9/11 demonstrated.  We are an open society.

And as should be obvious, I am slowly coming around to the view that the most likely suspects are members of the Bush Administration, who mounted a false flag, in the belief that something like this was needed to get things like the Patriot Act passed that they viewed as critical for protecting America from even more deadly WMD’s.  I don’t like this idea, but the reality is that SOMEBODY put those explosives there, and must have done so with the more or less tacit approval and cooperation of those providing security for those buildings.

So I return to Chris Kyle, and I cannot say unambiguously that his work, his sacrifices, his unrelenting efforts did in fact protect American freedom.  Our enemies seem to be in the gates.  I have nothing but respect and affection for our nations warriors, but they are much better people than those “leading” us.

I don’t know what THE solution is, but I have resolved to actually start some work I have been postponing.  A truly free people, using their freedom, acts as a self organizing system far more powerful, in potential, than the authorities running the thing.  In China they have 180,000 protests and riots a year.  Imagine what they could do if they were armed.

There is reason for optimism, but we must work hard daily to remain alert and aware, and to speak as much truth to as many people as we can, every day.

I have often said that the way to remember fallen warriors is to dedicate ourselves to the freedom in whose name they gave their lives.  It does not matter if Iraq was in fact worth it.  What matters is that freedom was and is worth it.