Author: White Whale

In places where people are peaceful, gun ownership has no effect on crime.

In places where people are violent, banning guns works to increase violence.  This applies even when guns themselves are not used in the crimes.  This was the experience both of Britain and Australia. If the goal is a better quality of life, people control with respect to gun ownership is retrogressive.  It makes things worse, life worse.

And logically, if people are not to be reformed from their violence via coherent moralities–none of which are on display in the dialogues of our power elites, whose sole focus is soulless egalitarianism–then at some point the solution they will inevitably propose will be the centralization and monopolization of violence in the body of the State.  Drones and cameras will surround everyone; everything will be seen, and police omnipresent.  This is no way to live.

Thus, LOGICALLY, the only way to decrease violent crime without recourse to violent totalitarianism, is through CULTURE, through better ideas, through better economic policy.  Where are the people proposing these?  We cannot go backwards, but we can clearly go forwards better than we are doing now.

One of the persistent criticisms of “Capitalism” [can we not define Capitalism as “that which opposes socialism?”  It would come quite close.  Marx had an enemy, one that he created in his work, and one which was needed to rationalize the totalitarian impulses latent in his writing, which were later made concrete by Lenin] is that it is “dehumanizing”, that it objectifies people, that their only value is their labor cost.

This is patent bullshit of course.  Only stupid people even consider this proposition, but regrettably our universities are filled with stupid people, and they have preaching podiums.

Think about this: in a free society, one relatively undominated by pervasive government interference, you can choose your education, your work, and how hard you work. If you want to get ahead, you work hard, and get more.  If you don’t want to work hard, if your free time is valuable to you, then you will always have less things, but more time.

You don’t get these choices in the “utopias” these amoral assholes STILL want to create, even after so much death and dying, even in the present day.  You are a thing, a number, and you go where you are told, and do what you are told, or awful things happen to you.

Further, this argument conflates the economic system with the social system.  What you do for work need have NO connection with the network of social relations you have.  For everyone who is in your family, or a friend, your value is that of an individual.

Only when the State mediates social relations, only when families are broken into pieces, as happens in most Communist coups, can your value as a unique individual be eradicated.  Only Socialists do that.  No one else.

Leftism is a moral sickness, a mental illness, a passion for death and pain.  Its apostles are people of the lie.  Quite literally every propaganda theme they use can be inverted.  If they talk about freedom they mean tyranny.  As an example, George Soros’ “Open Society” is one which is closed and unfree–and unsocial as well, since it will no doubt have ubiquitous government agents controlling all social interactions that matter.  If they talk about justice they mean injustice.  They mean treating people differently depending on their race, class, or gender.  If they talk about economic progress, they mean programs which will lower the standard of living for just about everyone but them.

The list is endless, and as long as their rhetoric.

I will add, I saw the word Disinformation today, and think it is time to bring it back.

I’ve toyed with putting that on my bumper for years.

My new idea, borrowed from somewhere: put your stickers on a magnet, so you can take them off or rotate them.  You just buy magnetic sheets at Hobby Lobby (nowhere else), glue it on, and cut around.

I think what characterizes trauma is emotion NOT felt.  I think what happens is that something comes along that is so emotionally powerful that it overwhelms the emotional wiring, that you literally cannot feel the whole thing, the horror, the grief, the shame and guilt, the anger.  What lingers then, is the emotional equivalent of an incomplete chemical reaction.  Over and over, through psychic intrusions, through a life constrained in many ways, your unconscious tries to complete the process, but we fear it.  The damn thing keeps coming back.  It won’t let you go.  Maybe it even gets worse.

The only way out is through.  This phrase was apparently coined by Fritz Perls, and it is unquestionably true, in my view.  You have to finish the work, the reaction, and with large things perhaps this has to be done in small doses over an extended period of time.  No, it isn’t fair, but this isn’t grade school, either, is it?  If that sounds harsh, it is perhaps because I am speaking to myself as well.  I am processing–successfully–some really awful shit.

It occurs to me that precisely those sorts of people–often men, but certainly not invariably–who fear emotion tend to be attracted to fields in which they can be productive without it, or in which apparent “objectivity” is even valued.  Sciences of various sorts, of course, are the paradigmatic examples.

Thus fields like biology and medicine become populated disproportionately with people congenitally disinclined to embrace the qualitative side of life–the inchoate, indefinable, mythic, constantly moving side– and THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE who get to decide what constitutes science, what data, what useful research and what frivolous.

I want to be clear: if you are not able to digest emotion habitually, with roughly the same diligence that you digest food, you are stupider than you would be if you had this trait; and this stupidity is made greater and greater the less value you place on feelings.

Feelings are not everything.  One must have reason, and one must have data.  But feelings drive the engine, and if you have not contacted them, processed them, they are driving you.  You only have the illusion of being a sovereign mind, uninfluenced by factors extraneous to the “equation”.

I opened a closet today that I haven’t opened in some time, and had forgotten what all was in there.  My plan over the next few weeks is to downsize my “stuff” to those things I want and need.

It occurs to me, though, what a potentially powerful symbol the closet is.  Do we not all have closets in our psyches?  Or drawers, or even rooms we seldom visit?

I think there is a homology between organization of personal, physical space, and optimal psychic well-being.  I am not talking Feng Shui, so much as recognizing that your space is an extension of you, and if what you see is muddled, that reflects some part of your emotional life.  This is OK.  This is not a judgement: it is an observation, and specifically one I am making with regard to myself.

I was thinking, too, of people who are prototypically a mess, like Albert Einstein.  I am tempted to say that such people–and I think he is an example–are so successful intellectually because hidden unprocessed emotional places have driven them into abstraction.  The effects of those undigested experiences can be plainly seen, though, in their spaces, and their personal appearance.  Some of it is clearly calculated, but some of it is clearly unconscious.

It is so hard to see what is in front of you.  I think I am improving, but I am not sure.

Capitalism is not an ideology.  It is an activity.  An Indian who save up enough pemmican for a two week journey–enough Capital–to go and trade with a tribe that distance away, and to come home and trade for good he wants back home, is a Capitalist.

A man who borrows his brother’s canoe–his capital–to go trade downriver, and who comes back and shares his profits with his brother, is a Capitalist, and so is his brother. 

An artist who works a second job to build up the money for supplies, paints, then sells them, is a Capitalist.

Socialism is an ideology.  Marx, I suspect, is the one whose propaganda made it possible to claim Capitalism, an activity which men and women had engaged in since before recorded history, was an ideology.

Specifically, what they wanted to claim is that Capitalism inherently is something like what has been created in modern day China: an abusive oligarchic order in which a very few get very rich on the backs of the very poor many.  In America, even in our worst days, we never had anything remotely as awful and morally wrong as what the Chinese have wrought in the name of “justice”.  They killed far more of their own people than America ever enslaved in its entire history; and if we want to talk about slavery in China, lets just start with the iPhone factories.  Let’s continue with a review of China’s history over the last 60 years, in which BILLIONS of people were treated with the same contempt for their innate dignity as characterized the worst slave drivers in the worst parts of America.

Capitalism is inherently liberating, since it is inherently that system which is precisely NOT oligarchic.  No long term business monopolies have ever been recorded that were not supported directly by the government.

Here is a bon mot: economics frees; politics enslaves.  I may decide I like that.  Not sure.

Yesterday, the day after my last post, I had to do work in a psychiatric office.  I was somewhat discomfited to see a brochure for Electroconvulsive Therapy, and looked–to the extent of my ability out of the corner of my eye–at the poor souls who were landing there, likely not happily, and perhaps not of their own choice.

I thought: how AWFUL to be remanded to these people for what in most cases is normal human suffering.  I saw several of the shrinks.  They wear sweaters, and smile in the fashion I have come to expect from back-stabbing, ladder climbing VP’s in large corporations.  Their sincerity has every appearance of being sincere.

Yes, I am a cynic, and I do realize that there are genuinely good people in the “mental health profession”, but what in the process builds this?  What builds genuine love, joy, happiness, generosity of spirit, openness, kindness?  Freudian analysis?  Are you fucking stupid?

Consider, too, this phrase “mental health professional”.  It implies both that this person is as qualified as anyone on the planet can be to discuss the process of what we call mental health, AND that they themselves exemplify, that they DO mental health, better.  We all know, I think, that in most cases this is a lie.  Not all such “professionals” are full blown neurotics, but I suspect most pipe-fitters and electricians are more honest, and more genuine.

In some respects, of course, the burden of listening to litanies of failure and woe all day every day, knowing that your therapeutic arsenal is very weak, that you are fighting tanks with bows and arrows, must be tiring.  There can be no question that sedation of various sorts creates relief, but there is no skill in this.  You could train most nurses to do it easily.  Nor is there much skill in simply listening.

Any skill there may be consists in helping people feel heard, in inspiring confidence, in helping feel cared about genuinely, and in facilitating self healing in others.  It consists not in putting oneself on a pedestal, nor quite putting the patient on a pedestal, but sitting on a park bench, and having honest fruitful conversations, at the end of which your “patient” realizes for him or herself how the healing process must proceed.

I have been creating a sort of artificially induced spiritual emergency for myself, and it has been very productive.  And what I am increasingly seeing is the extent of the madness around me.

Can we not say that academics who refuse to even consider, much less accept, the existence of evidence that would force them to alter their paradigm, in whatever field, are effectively having negative hallucinations?  That they are NOT seeing what objectively is there?  Does not mainstream psychology posit all hallucinations as symptomatic of mental illness?

What safeguards are in place to vet the sanity of those who go into journalism?  If their goal is to see and report what is in front of them, but they suffer both from negative and positive hallucinations, how can they do this job?  What prevents intellectually gifted but emotionally grotesque human beings from going into the one field which, more than any other, creates our sense of shared reality?  Nothing.

Imagine on the other end a psychiatry which actually DID do a thorough job both of ensuring that all prospective therapists went through careful training which included abreaction, and the perinatal matrices?  What if they graduated, consistently and universally, as actually decent, humble, attentive, warm human beings?  A new priesthood might bring on a new social order.

Should we call it dreaming to see something which should be there but is not?  Is it dreaming to see how the world could live in peace and harmony and happiness?  I don’t think so.  I think it is those NOT capable of this that are dreaming.  They are engaging in negative hallucinations in which they do not see the possibilities which are objectively there.

I can find fault with virtually all of our political and social order.  To be sure, we do many things right.  We have crafted peace over very wide areas.  Through free trade and free markets, we have brought global prosperity unlike anything ever seen in human history.

But culturally we are losing precious resources, like the capacity for moral judgement, and the effective use of principle in both thought and behavior.  Both of these underlie, clearly and beyond any possibility of dispute, the on-going failures we see in generalizing wealth and well-being, and in generating and sustaining shared senses of meaning and purpose, hope and joy, privilege and pleasure.

I have long avoided the macabre.  I haven’t read Edgar Allen Poe, and have written, here and elsewhere, at length about my misgivings about horror movies, and violence in media in general. 

I continue to have those misgivings, to some extent–particularly for young minds and spirits–but I am growing.  I am expanding.

And what I am seeing is that you cannot find what you have hidden in the dark if you are afraid to go there.  Psychological growth, in the sense of finding and untying various covert and often deeply unconscious knots, is a bit like a scavenger hunt.  Our psyche is like a house where half the rooms are lit, and half are not.  The things that matter are scattered uniformly.  You can find the obvious easily enough, but it takes some patience and blind fumbling to find what is hidden in spaces you cannot see.

I am beginning to understand evil, and how to cast it out from myself.  We all have it; we are all capable of it.  We are all moral midgets in some respect.  We all not only fall short, but cast out the light, at many times and places in our lives.  You can only avoid this process by finding all of your evil, and digesting it.  I am tempted to say by accepting it, but that is not quite right.  You observe it, and after a time the light of attention causes it to become weaker and less dense, and eventually it dissolves and dissipates.

There is no actual darkness in this universe.  What we see as darkness are shades we draw across the windows in our souls, that keep the light from coming in.