Life is large. We reduce it for our sanity, but it will always expand again whenever we ask it to.
I have always assumed that the verb “to suck”, as a synonym for incompetence and stupidity, was a reference to the implied power inequality in oral sex, when it is the woman performing it on the man.
It feels to me now, that our ordinary daily discourse is filled with psychologically deep insights, coded in words we use reflexively.
Can we not perhaps posit that it actually references an incompletely developed persona, someone who is still in the sucking phase?
Freud, of course, had what I recall as his four phases: oral, anal expressive [I forget the word he used], anal retentive, and phallic. My grounding in Freud was done in German as an exchange student, many many years ago. It made no sense to me then, nor does it now.
Here is the thing: in my own life, in my own deep contemplation, I see no role for the anal at all. What I feel, what feels real to me, is that there are happy babies and unhappy babies. Unhappy babies enter life missing something, something so deep they cannot put words on it, or even name the emotion, other than to say they are missing something.
Stan Grof expanded the cartography of the psyche to include Jungian ideas, his own experience as an honest psychiatrist watching the importance of the birth experience, and of course orthodox biographical inputs.
What I would submit is that orthodox psychiatry really has no place-holder for Jung; none for Rank and Grof’s major contributions furthering Rank’s ideas; and none for traumas, particularly of omission, in the birth to roughly five years of age range.
As I said some time ago, my feeling is that they ignore these factors because they have no effective means of dealing with them. Abreaction was killed a century ago, in orthodox methods at least.
My dream, my ongoing dream, is that we become intelligent as a species, that we learn how to deal with traumas, that we learn how to digest experience, and that we all learn how to learn, how to be Good, how to be fulfilled, how to develop sacred rituals and places that fulfill the deepest needs we have, and do so consistently, reliably, as a matter of generalized deep wisdom.
This is my dream. This is my hope, and this is the organizing basis of my work, as chaotic and undisciplined as it is.
Life is ebb and flow. Sometimes you need more of something–say, compassion–and sometimes, as now, less.
Most of us, I suppose, can readily imagine lying to liars, and cheating cheaters, even if in principle we value honesty.
Having a code is better than not having a code, but I think humanity can only fully mature when we come to express ourselves through thoughtful awareness based upon spontaneous and genuine empathy.
I will add, that I just realized the value of courtesy today. I can at times be rude. I was raised that way, and have worked, not always successfully, to overcome it.
But I felt the marrow of it this morning, the meaning of it, the importance of it, how essential even apparently small details are to the process of increasing ones Goodness.
I have always thought of awful British people with impeccable manners, and thought that an excessive infatuation with courtesy implied artificiality. It can certainly be that. But at its optimal, it is nothing more or less than practically expressed empathy and concern for others.
If and when Hillary runs, of course, her detractors will by misogynists.
Leftists can never have ideological unity while they are still striving for absolute power. There must be an object of hate.
Yet, the word has disappeared. Or has it?
I would like to propose a typology that might make it easier to understand the intellectual convolutions that necessarily accompany this mental deformity, and possible some of the emotional imbalances and psychopathologies.
There are four basic classes in Leftist mythos: the metaphysical enemy, the Leftist/intellectual class, the Victim, and the practical enemy.
Within orthodox Marxism, these classes are of course the Capitalist, the “revolutionary” (which is always a lie: they carry out coups, usually in small numbers, and then sell them based on lies), the proletariat, and of course the bourgeoisie.
But what MATTERS is that the intellectual is at the center of the universe, that they have an excuse for being at the center of the universe, that they have a cause which can never be won, and that they have a practical object of hatred.
Roughly speaking, the “capitalist” has transformed into the “Corporation”. Now, leftists have nothing against corporations, per se. Harry Reid no doubt, like everyone else, gets most of his money from people who run or own corporations. But the concept is so vague, so vacuous, so MUTABLE, that it comes to connote the emotional equivalent of the Bogeyman. Those corporations, they sneak up on you in the dark. . . .
The practical object of hatred, the people who can be demonized in the particular, were the middle class. This was possible when large numbers of people, particularly in the very class driven and class conscious Britain, actually belonged to the lower classes.
But the average worker at Ford today has a better standard of living than most of the richest Britons of a century ago. He is middle class. The proletariat can no longer be argued to exist, and is thus no longer a suitable Victim.
Here is the thing, though: precisely because they intend no Good, precisely because the sole point of the exercise is getting power, Leftists can never formulate a positive campaign for anything. They must sow hatred, and use that as a means of building the sort of consensus that can be leveraged for power.
Who, now, has replaced the bourgeoisie? The Racist. Think about it: blacks aren’t going anywhere. They have been taught for half a century to wait for a boat that will never come in, and to BLAME the lack of a boat on targets selected for them by the professional propagandists.
And in the same sense that the bourgeoisie was always largely a rhetorical construct, so too is the racist. Our country is virtually devoid of actual racists of the old school variety. No doubt we have many people who have had first hand negative interactions with black people, but that is quite a different thing than the blanket consensus of Left wing retrogressives that anyone who opposes them can be assigned a class and hated for it. I would hazard a guess that even people who threw racial epithets at Obama did so simply because it was easy. CLEARLY, Obama has nothing in common with most blacks in this country. As I have said several times, I literally find myself unable to think of him as black. I literally forget he is black, and cannot fathom people who consider it a success that someone with darker skin pigmentation won the race for the White House twice. Why should skin color matter, in itself, ever?
All of this is subtle. It only appears with reflection and time, and that is precisely why the task of left wing propagandists is create so much noise and motion that nobody ever stops and thinks at all.
As the religion of the slave, it is obvious that modern Leftists would find in this infantile fantasy refuge; that they would identify on a deep psychological level with it, and see in it a historical expression of what they themselves want.
Compare, for sake of illustration, the admonition that you must do and believe as others or face death; and the Christian admonition to love others as yourself, regardless of their beliefs. In the one case you reduce people, you lessen them. In the other, you raise yourself and others UP. You grow.
I think Churchill was right: other than Leftism, no more powerful retrogressive force exists in the modern world than Islam, at least as practiced by those conforming to the Sunnah. As I have said often, I am very fond of many of the Sufis, who in their own way were trying to introduce the possibility of spiritual growth to a religion which more or less explicitly rejected it.
I believe in God and have no problem with monotheism. I explicitly reject, though, the idea that ANY modern religion fully encapsulates everything that can be known, and more importantly, everything that we NEED, today, in our modern world, to survive and prosper. We must build a new religion, or, preferably, new religions.
Last night I was dreaming of a “primitive” culture which had just cremated one of their own in a pit. It was still smoking, and children were digging bone fragments out of the ashes. Their attitude was between play and reverence. They were learning, from a very early age, that death is a part of life. They were living within a realm which we could call mythic, but which was dealing on a very direct, empirical level with the facts of life. Nothing was hidden or concealed, and in important respects, no explanation was necessary. The bones were what they were.
True, organic myths are emergent properties of direct human interaction of life as it is lived. We could look at, say, Aboriginal Australian culture and see things we consider ridiculous, such as the idea that the first didgeridoo blew the stars into the sky. But true myths are merely place holders, they are merely doorways. They are banners, behind which stand important, organic human realities. They enable access to important truths. [I will note that I “accidentally” spelled organic “organize” twice. Consider the deep relation between the two words]
To this I would contrast what might be termed the Modern Myth, which is an artificial creation YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE. Rather than granting you unfettered access to the transcendant, it limits you, it confines you. It places you on a metaphysical procrustean bed, and shapes you to its demands. Think Huxley’s Brave New World. Nothing is real there, nothing organic, nothing larger than the survival of insects is attempted. It is an efficient system, a “scientific” system. But we look at it in horror. It is a world without meaning, without organic myth.
Communism is a retrogressive myth. It confines the human spirit. It is the creed of narcissists.
It is funny, because I see clear parallels between what my mother attempted with me, and what modern leftists are attempting with the world. Obviously, I have to consider whether or not I am projecting, but I don’t think I am. I feel my birth and life have uniquely qualified me for the sort of social commentary I have been doing.
I like to think this was my plan.
But both are disruptive. Change inheres within them. “Reality”, within the scientific method, is mutable (in theory, of course: in practice, it is filled with unreflective dogmatism).
And there is something childish and primitive within us that craves the stability of myth. Myths, held sincerely, are INHERENTLY true. They cannot be questioned. They establish the very foundation of reality, and the social groupings founded upon it.
Here is our very interesting and disturbing present reality: roughly one third of Americans exist within a propaganda bubble that is so hermetically sealed that fact and reality of the scientific sort, of the observable, empirical sort, cannot enter in. And this bubble has been achieved within an ostensible “Information Age”, which has in their case done little more than grease the rails of propagandistic trains, whose origin points and desired destinations never change. They can’t. They are built fully on myth.
People long for continuity, and this is what leftist propaganda gives them. It is the same thing Hitler’s propaganda provided: a place, a home, a freedom from decision, conscience, from anxiety, from dignity, from a sense of alienation.
They need this. It feels nurturing to them. It comforts them. Their propaganda is their mother, in an absolutely primal, thumb sucking, sense.
“Bailout” Bevin (which admittedly sounds better than “I kind of like Obamacare McConnell) may or may not be a better politician, but his presence will mean that someone else gets the shot at Majority Leader. I don’t know who that is. He or she may be worse, but the very fact that someone like Bevin was able to knock off someone like McConnell would show clearly that the smart money is on conservatism.
I will add as well the definition of politics as the art of the possible can be read in two ways. Conventionally, it means, effectively, that compromise is inevitable. You can’t get everything you want. You have to play the cards you are dealt.
But I would submit that sometimes it can also mean PROBING the limits of the possible. Sometimes it is the job of the leader to push out into the unknown and find out how far things actually can be pushed.
In poker, playing the cards you are dealt sometimes means winning without even having a single pair, if you are brash enough.
McConnell has more or less been held hostage by terrorists most of his career. The method of the Left is to seek always to hurt, to maim, to weaken, to intimidate. And they are good at it. A minor error on the part of a Republican can hurt far far more than an egregious error on the part of a Democrat. Having a complicit media allows that, having a well honed propaganda apparatus allows that.
McConnell knows what he knows. He has made mistakes in his career and regretted them. He has inadvertently thrown bones to his enemies. He plays safe, and that is how he has survived.
But we are on a path to destruction. Only a fool would deny it. It is time for risk taking.
Can there be any doubt what our media would prioritize? As far as that goes, can there be any doubt what it IS prioritizing? This story won’t see national media coverage, but a blatant and public racial epithet would.
Here is the problem with what passes for morality in our present day: it views all “crimes” through the prism of ideology, and not through empathy and compassion. Racist epithets are class crimes. They matter more. Merely inflicting physical violence on someone who is defined as a member of the oppressive class, even if they have never committed a crime, never will commit a crime, and cannot even be conceived of as guilty of anything beyond mere existence, is not noteworthy. Nobody cares.
Ideology is psychopathology; it is perceptual psychopathy.
It occurs to me that by invoking context and perceptual motion, one of my principle goals is to invent a morality that goes beyond all ideologies, so as to get at the root of true goodness, which is based on empathy and perceptual awareness and fluidity.