Author: White Whale

 I think this period of time could be called “Operation How Fucking Stupid are the People of the World?”

The answer remains to be determined, but if my neck of the woods is any indicator, very.  Very, very.  Masks alone in cars.  Masks walking alone in parks, and to and from cars.

Joe Biden remains viable, it seems.  How?  How is that possible?  

This whole thing makes a few core observations quite reasonable.

1) There IS a shadow elite.

2) They DO want to control the world.

3) They recognize no moral boundaries, and no amount of pain and suffering is the least barrier to any course of action they determine to be in their interest.

4) Anthony Fauci and the WHO are in cahoots with them, as are at least Bill Gates, the Chinese (to some extent or other), and much of our media complex and Hollywood.

5) Donald Trump is an existential threat to them, and they are pulling out all the stops to prevent his reelection, knowing that they can’t easily undo all the damage they are doing by making their existence and agenda nearly public.

Are we sane?  I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  It’s been so long since most of what I saw on the  news made sense to me that I find it hard to imagine a world not run by idiots, assholes, and psychopaths.

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

 It occurs to me that literally and figuratively virtual communities serve much the same role, socially, that things like the Lion’s Club, and Rotary, and the Masons, and Fraternal Order of Eagle’s, and bowling and softball leagues did for the previous several generations.

But virtual is a step back.  There is no physical presence.  You can’t smell people.  You can’t touch them.  And such communities can be easily “curated” and watched, controlled and manipulated.  It’s not the same thing at all, and it would not be hard to argue that part of the longer term purpose of this induced panic over a not-very-dangerous disease is to push our young, especially, away from each other, and towards on-line and inferior ersatz communities–Gesellschafts, if I might reference de Tonnies–which the State can watch, and which work in tandem to push them farther from their own individual consciences, individual perceptions, and individual moral choices.

Conform or be cast out.

I will add, Rush is not that deep, except for a rock band.  There, they stand nearly alone.

I myself certainly was and continue to be a misfit.  When I look back on my life, though, on my death bed, it will have been spent trying to be honest, to take risks, to face my shadow, and to grow to the best of my ability.  What other people do with their lives is their business, but that is my choice.

 I can hear in my mind’s eye young folks, particularly, saying “but being a Democrat  is the only way I can belong”.

The Communist tactic is to destroy what somebody called “intermediate institutions”, of family, of community, of church, of social organization, and create a situation where they are the only rallying point, the only commonality, the only community, the only social resource, the only game in town for tribalistic descendants (perhaps) of primates.

Where can you go, out in that hot sun, alone?  Especially if you are not that clever, not particularly individuated, not mature, not sure of yourself?  Nowhere.  

AND THAT IS THE GOAL.

Logically, and I think I saw this without seeing it, the way to reverse all this is to rebuild intermediate institutions, places people can belong, can learn to be themselves, to inhabit their own lives, without guilt or shame or judgement.

This is and has been my plan.  It works intellectually, but I am not yet the person I need to be to pull it off practically.

 The longer these ridiculous lockdowns–which by the way seem to WORSEN the death counts, not reduce them–the more angry and petty and vindictive and mean most people will get.  Husbands will abuse their wives; wives, their husbands.  Parents children, children parents.

The Democrats have allied themselves with every form of meanness imaginable.

And I was pondering this yesterday.  It literally seems to me that for a good 30-40 years most big city politicians, at least, seem to have been lying to the people they were asking to vote for them.  They told inner city blacks, particularly, that they would take care of them, but never took care of them.  Every election, the same lies.

Consider what sort of person is CAPABLE of doing such a thing, which involves hurting people for very selfish reasons of money and power.  The allure of being the Top Dog is not hard to understand, nor is the enticement of all the money–licit and illicit–that comes from time in office.  Most politicians of both parties quickly get rich in Congress.  Bribes are illegal, but grossly overpaid speeches are not.  Maybe they become board members of various corporations.  Maybe they use their inside knowledge to get ahead of outside investors, and normally get away with it.  

But all this depends, particularly for the Democrats, on lies.  On the willingness to hurt ordinary people for purely personal gain.  It really is a sort of gangsterism, and anyone who knows anything about REAL gangsters knows there is no honor among thieves.  It’s Jimmy the Gent murdering his partners for money.

 Love is the lubricant that keeps our perceptual apparatus functional.  In its absence, everything freezes eventually and we get “stuck in a moment”, to use a phrase from U2 that I like.

The love of others is good, but in the end the only thing you can rely on is the love you learn to bring consciously to yourself.

I have on my wall some famous Tibetan mystic.  I think it is Padmasambhava.  I really should know, but I don’t recall.  But he has within his heart a man and a woman copulating.  What I take this to mean is that we need to learn to carry within us the capacity for that sense of connection we associate with romantic love, and the completion of our sexual energy, without a partner.  What we need is the completeness we feel with someone we love deeply, but that feeling without the need for that person.

Imagine being able to get to that point, without the manias we see portrayed and mocked and emulated so often in our movies, where people are desperate to find the right person, their “soul mate”.  This seems to happen on occasion, but not for most people, not in most lifetimes.

Introjecting and expanding this energy is how so many Tibetans, back in the day, lived lifetimes of solitude, happily, I will surmise.  They were not suffering, and for most of them it was not much of a renunciation, at least the way Alexandra David Neel perceived it and told it.

 It feels to me like anyone who grew up with narcissistic parents already knows what it feels like to live in a Panopticon.  Your boundaries are shredded to the point of non-existence, and your most intimate emotional states, even if you learn to succeed in hiding them, as I did, still feel open to the world.  You spend your life feeling naked, even when you are not.

And of course, unexamined, this sense of nakedness easily shades itself into a repetition of the narcissism.  Narcissism is not about an over-abundance of self.  It is about a LACK of self.  There is a hole in the middle, which is why that person tried and fails across a lifetime to fill it with attention.

The Panopticon–standing broadly here for the totalitarian temperament and emotional gestalt–represents a demand made by people who don’t exist that attention be paid to them.  The best way to do this is to make themselves omnipresent, unignorable, and a severe and present factor in every element of their chosen victims life.  

And self evidently, gaslighting is an important part of this.  What greater victory than taking from someone their very capacity for sanity?  That now belongs to you.

And to be clear, most of this happens below the level of conscious awareness.  It is papered over with frauds of various sorts, and words like justice, compassion, empathy, decency, and fairness.

If the future is my past, then I have already seen it.  I have already felt it.  It is an inhuman spectacle, whose emotional violence should chill the hearts of all humans still capable of honest emotion.

This year, the choice is ruin and faith; destruction and reconstruction; evil and humanism.  It could not be more stark.

I don’t know, even now, why so many millions of people around the world are so fucking stupid.  That deep, deep fear underlies it, though, is obvious.

 As I have commented a number of times, I HOPE people will take ideas they read here and riff on them.  Let me lay down a beat or a melody, and you improvise on top of it.

The only people really still allowed to be creative, whose culture still values originality, are those of us who have not had our heads ritually chopped off by left wing Commissars.

What our universities are breeding are Borg.  And the way they confuse the kids about it, is they call US the Borg.  They pretend that “right wingers” all think alike and work solely off of talking points, when it is obvious that someone like Donald Trump ENJOYS figuring out what he thinks as he does along.  

Joe Biden recently read “end of quote” from his teleprompter.  That is very Borg-ish.

It’s astonishing, isn’t it, that the Left wants to elevate to our highest office a man a few months away from needing to be spoon fed?  And who was a corrupt, stupid asshole before his brain started shutting down?

The growth of QAnon should not be a source of wonder.  Some sort of conspiracy theory is needed to explain this madness.

The true enemy is always fear, and the greatest fear most of us have is uncertainty, of living in or entering a world whose rules we don’t understand.  The great offering that the Left makes is that you don’t need to worry because you don’t need to think: you will be told what to think.

I am of course paraphrasing a Pink Floyd line there, and in their own time, they were speaking from a hippy, acid-dropping place, about Richard Nixon sorts of conservatives, who even then were by and large unjustly maligned, but who were certainly more straight laced and right flying than the hippies.

But all the hippies have become control freaks.  They have bred neurotic, fearful, OCD children.

My task–and it is a considerable task–is to see all this clearly, and still figure out how to remain calm and confident about my own future and that of my children.

As a Coda, I will add that I am really enjoying reading Alexandra David Neel’s account of her trip into Tibet, sneaking in when no foreigners were allowed.  Every day contains hardships, and not a few brushes with death.  In one case, they trekked 19 straight hours through knee deep snow, on a meal that can’t have had more than 2,000 calories total for the two of them, so that they could get over a pass before the sun set and they froze to death at that high altitude.  They had to guess where the path was, and she guessed right.  When it came time to start their fire, their fire starter was wet and would not work, and if they could not get it to work, they were both going to die.  At least, her companion was going to die.  She had studied gTummo, so she put it under her shirt, and dried it out.  When her companion came back with wood, they were able to get a fire going.

Having stories like this in my mind is useful.  Our lives are so easy, that our minds have plenty of time to invent problems.  Yes, the future of humanity may lie in the election.  Yes, madness is stalking the land.  Yes, these problems are deep and complex and seemingly insoluble.

But sufficient unto itself is each days march, and following rest.

 It seems to me that many if not most parents–at least in our culture, but this is probably common around the world, at least now–feel the same anxieties their children do.  They worry, just as children worry, but they learn to hide it, at least from their children, as well as they can.

True maturity, it seems to me, is stable acceptance of both life and death as they are presented to us, with death being merely the last and most puzzling aspect of life.

This means accepting that the NATURE of life is imperfect information, which results in confusion and doubt among sane people.  We don’t know the future.  We don’t even really know the present or past, as they truly happened and are happening.

The psychological value of manias and unwarranted certitudes is obvious.  It builds a stable place for the mind, one which–while disconnected from the world as it is–allows cessation of doubt and confusion for a time, sometimes a long time, and not infrequently a life.

Religion does that for people.  But I think most religions constitute in some ways a shelter from life as it exists.  All religions, I think, teach some form of living in the moment, and being present to experience, but it is the laws and rules and orders and commandments and stable ontologies which most people focus on and remember.

Every morning all of us get on a train whose destination we don’t really know.  Most days it seems to travel an arc and bring us back to the same station.  But if you look, it is not really the same station.  It changes.  The people we meet there change too, and if we were to look in a mirror, we too would find subtle alterations.  Every day.

All I can say is that for myself I am trying to learn to lean into the sun, to lean into experience, to not avoid or shy away from it.  Some of it will enrapture me, some hurt me, but all of it can be worked into growth.

And the end aim of growth is a stable peace, a stable sense of wonder, and an ability to negotiate lifes ups and downs without undue anxiety.  If you hide, you have to live in fear and doubt forever.

 Anyone who knows how to be cruel knows how to love.  It is the same pathway in.