Author: White Whale

I don’t think this is true.  I think hate is giving a part of yourself to someone else as a means of avoiding personal responsibility for your emotions and life.  And I think you come to NEED that person (that group, that idea, whatever the focus of your hate is) because they orient your world, they give you a sense of meaning.

What if Hitler had killed all the Jews?  Would he not have found a new target?  Would the violence have stopped?  I don’t think so.

One sees relative peace in some Communist nations, like Cuba and North Korea, because everyone has been so abused and beaten that they live in constant fear, and this fear creates compliance.  But this is a sort of violence as well.  It is a hatred as well, one which never ends because it never CAN end.  If it ended, the raison d’etre of the haters would be gone.  That it doesn’t end is what makes Communism so attractive an ideology for people who are lost and alone.  You never need fear an end to the violence.  The war will never end, even if people stop fighting back.

I have felt hated all my life, and it occurs to me that hate is a RELATIONSHIP.  It is a connection between in here and out there, between one person and another.  But it is a compulsive, needy, driven connection, one filled with constant tension, fear and pain.

I see this now, and I see it fading, as it should.

Like many Americans, I sometimes buy things when I don’t know what else to do.  Today, though, it occurred to me that I should give money to charity, which I did.  I gave $25 to Operation 300 (please check it out), and bought a T-shirt.  Then I put $50 more into Kiva, which remains my favorite cause.  You can’t call it a charity, because all they are doing is brokering no-interest loans to people working hard to improve their own lives.  They are doing the job predatory banks will not.

This is a better way to go.  Particularly if you look at all the people on Kiva, you see how absurdly easy your life is.  I won’t tell you to HTFU, but I would say that with attention and time it becomes easier to realize gratitude on a regular basis, and this is a worthwhile goal.  I am pursuing it, and would encourage you to as well.

It is quite possible the first black slave in America was enslaved by another black.  Certainly, most of the Greek slaves were other Greeks.

Kiev was likely a Viking slave trading center.  Russ is a Scandinavian word, brought by the Vikings whose trade in Slavs gave us the word slave.

Nearly every major city in Ireland, including Dublin, were founded as Viking slave trading ports.  The tribes of Ireland were constantly at war with one another, and whenever one prevailed, they would sell off the losers as slaves.

And keep in mind the Jews were slaves at one time.  They never forget it, and this memory perhaps in part explains their cultural resiliency.

Most of what we know about the Roman Republic comes to us from a Greek slave, Polybius.

Blacks have no monopoly on having been slaves.  We need to treat people as individuals.  There is no such thing as a “group”.  There is no such thing as a “class”.  These are linguistic fictions created by and for short sighted and stupid intellectuals.  They are not without use, but like anything else quickly become pernicious when taken too far.

And I was feeling today this constant tug and pull I used to go through–still go through on occasion–with my mother in particular. She would define reality in some way that was fundamentally skewed and wrong, and I would have to fight not to be sucked into her delusion.  It was a tug of war, and very tiring.

I would describe this, though, as a sort of assault, of emotional abuse, even if it was not consciously intended as such.

When you fail to see someone as they are, to accept them as they are, to impose your world view by simply refusing to see theirs, you are attacking them, and it should in my view be processed as an attack.  Anger is a very acceptable and healthy response, even if the other person simply cannot grasp why you are angry.  To back off on your anger is to accede to their world view which does not have any room for you in it.

When white Southerners in the Jim Crow era forced blacks to use different water fountains and swimming pools, and forced them to sit at the back of the bus, they were not looking at blacks as people just like them.  They were viewing them through a narcissistic lens of alleged intellectual and moral superiority.

It is this failure of humanity, of communion, which is what makes racism wrong.  It is a perceptual distortion, an error.

And Political Correctness is simply one more iteration of this prejudgement, this disconnection from the currents of human social and emotional life.  It is racism without the race.

As I keep saying, until we can define why things are wrong, we cannot be sure we are not making the bad worse.  The only argument the Left has against racism is that it is anti-egalitarian.  But they cannot say why egalitarianism should be the sole moral value.  They simply stipulate it, since it is all that is left once individual moral autonomy and possibility of growth is rejected.

And in point of fact they are quite willing to accept slavery in the name of egalitarianism.  They have even developed a term “chattel slavery” to denote the kind they oppose, and by extension the forms they are quite willing to accept.  Anyone who uses the term chattel slavery needs to be kicked vigorously in the ‘nads.

No one capable of clear thought can accept any part of this monstrous project.

Clearly, machines are capable of vast quantitative work.  In theory, they can master oceans of quantitative information.  They can do prodigious amounts of physical work.

But they cannot do qualitative work.  They cannot be truly spontaneously creative in the way that someone exuding life force can.  Life exists, apart from the machines of our bodies.  What is best in us comes from that spirit.  What is worst, from the needs of our machine.

The task is to perfect spirit, not the machine.

As I have asked before, who really wants to live forever without purpose?  And I would argue that if you confine yourself to a machine, you are unable to fulfill the task of spiritual evolution which is the only purpose worth pursuing.

One can only hope that small glimmers of hope ones see here and there that knowledge of the spiritual world is breaking through are warranted.  There is so much compulsion, so much short-sightedness, narcissism, and viciousness in the circles of most of our elites.

Halo 4 came with the box, so I’ve been playing that.  My understanding is that moderate amounts of video game playing–perhaps an hour or two a week–is good for cognitive development.  I can certainly see how this would be, given the complexity of the interactions between the controller and the game.

Most of these games come with stories.  For those who have not played them, they are in some respects literally presented as movies.  You get credits at the beginning and a literal rolling of the credits complete with music at the end of major story lines.

Halo 4 begins with a discussion between a doctor who apparently took children at an early age to modify them mentally and physically, so as to create the perfect storm troopers to suppress an apparently incipient rebellion.  Her interrogator is questioning the morality of this, but within the story line these storm troopers intended for one purpose were retasked to fight aliens, and were successful.  The main character, apparently, in all the Halo iterations is Master Chief.

The interrogator asks if Master Chief is a sociopath, and his “creator” responds that he is calibrated to succeed and even thrive in the most hostile environments.  The interrogator asks again: but would you not agree that in some important respect he is not right?

We then get a cut scene, and fade to a space battleship under attack, and we wake up from suspended animation as Master Chief.

Would it be too much to call this brain washing?  Perhaps.

But as I have from time to time, I would suggest that the emerging figure best adapted to modern life is the sociopath, who is devoid of the emotions of mourning the past, who lacks all sensitivity to what is being lost in terms of interpersonal connection, who is in important respects a machine who can be plugged as a gear into a massive colossus which, the faster it moves, the less it cares about any deep purpose in human life, other than conformity to a role within the machine.

Take an aspiring CEO.  That person, in Stanley Bing’s infamous formulation in “What would Machiavelli do”, cares about three things: work, weird sex, and golf.  Self evidently, none of these are intrinsically meaningful, even if this person might be enormously economically productive, may see his or her picture on the covers of magazines, may be lauded as a pillar of the community for making politically motivated charitable donations.

We do, in my view, need to worry about the emotional disconnections of many of today’s youth, their callowness, hollowness, unreflective cruelty.  Perhaps it has always been like this.  For recorded history, violence–actual violence–has been a constant.

Still, emotionally detached and alienated kids are fertile ground for cultural nihilists, and never before in human history (other than the past century or so) have there been so many people who long so desperately to betray and destroy their own culture, their own people, their own countries.  The Mongols left literal mountains of bodies, but they never despised themselves, even if they fought among each other.  There was always a tribe which was connected to the past.

The tribe we need fear today consists in precisely those who want to destroy the past, and in so doing destroy the future.  They want an eternal moment, where no freedom need be feared. 

I don’t know why I titled this strategy.

Who are we, really?  If you woke up, as Hari (surely that name is not unintentional?) did, not knowing who you were, how would you deal with it?  Could you stand the notion that many “you’s” exist across the universe?

I stood in this emotional flood, and I was able to breath.  I count this a good thing.  My quasi-Choed practice seems to have helped.  This movie was a type of Shugyo, one that was needed and useful.

Second point: I was also reminded of my Bubble image/dream, which I shared in my “Goodness Sutra”, which so help me God was the best I could do at the time (that was an apology).  Here is a cut and paste:

Years ago, while pondering the depths of the decay in our philosophical
certainties, I happened in my mind upon an image, which has remained with me.

For most college graduates, you will have been exposed to ideas which state in
effect that there is no up and down. We float, as individuals, like tiny bubbles in
an endless dark ocean, unable to see where the surface is, or even if there is
one. Am I upside down, or is that person over there? We cannot know.

Some people curse the darkness, and out of sheer frustration curse their
neighbors. If they cannot know what is true, then all is lost, all is futile.

Others, with more wisdom, see a lot of others like them, and realize that we are
all alone together. We may not be able to know which way is up, but we know
in what way we relate to one another. By giving to one another, by using one
another as reference points, we can feel less alone.

And then the darkness is not so bad. It is warmer, and a little light intrudes.

Our task is to expand that light. We can’t know what will happen, but love feels
good, and that much is real. 

We have Sartorius, who embodies the idea that “truth” is what science conjures, and that only that truth matters, and that only pursuing that truth matters.  Morality, decency, humanity: all expendable.

For his part, Dr. Kelvin finds in love–a new love, one he was unable to express on Earth–the only useful meaning of life.  He does not care which way is up, and which way is down.

His madness: ah, I will need to ponder that.  Who was who, where?

You know I wander, if you read this blog (do I get pretension points for spelling it Blogue?) regularly.  Look in a mirror: who are you?  Who were you yesterday?  Will you be the same person tomorrow?  Can you finish this paragraph as the same person?

I will add (perhaps I missed my calling as a Baptist preacher) that I watched “The Abyss” the other night.  It is a paradigmatic Movie Yoga movie.  I was watching Ed Harris get ready to jump into the abyss, the darkness, and it came to me that the Buddha had surmounted that darkness too, the infinite abyss, the infinite unknown.

We want spirituality cheap.  We want it “to go”.  We want to hire smiling apostles of the New Age to tell us something easy, something simple, that will enable all our existential angst to disappear.

I have little good to say about the Existentialists.  Almost to a person they were bullies, totalitarians, fools.  But to the extent that they said you have to pay your dues, I would agree with them.

Oh, there is a bigger picture here, but I will leave it at that.

I will say that I sincerely hope that someone reading this benefits in some real, perhaps even measurable way.  It is in some respects an exercise in narcissism that I post my thoughts and emotions, but not fully.  I sense, I feel, the hopelessness, despair, hate, loneliness, and disconnection out there.

It is not only me.  And it is not only you.

Look: there is an ocean.