Author: White Whale

Again, posted on the “right wingers are murderers/Leopold and Loeb” blog post.

I will add that the “essentialization of the Other” is very much alive among the most robust, most strident, most self satisfied cultural nihilists/comfortably ensconced Humanities professors.  They simply consider anyone who views our cultural heritage with fondness, or the egalitarian project with scepticism, as being  a very appropriate object of hate.  Hate, per se, is not rejected, merely rationalized.

You have not even made a token effort to consider the benefits of free markets on actually living, actually laboring, actually suffering human beings.  You have posited them as evil, and made of anyone who supports them a psychophilosophical riddle, when the reality is that we are simply more knowledgeable, more decent human beings than your elitist cabal.

What if you could somehow know that your purpose in life was to travel ten years through thick jungle, and endure great difficulties in so doing, only in order to get to a complex machine, find one small screw, and turn it one quarter turn?  What if you then had to travel another ten years out of the jungle?

What if your purpose in life were to wait in place for a ball to come bouncing down a chute, and to stand where there is a gap in that chute, lean over, and allow it to roll over you.  If you were not there, it would fall.  You can’t know where the ball comes from, or what its end goal is, but you do know that if you do not stand your turn in place, that life will be worse for many.

It is impossible to know what our purposes are in life, of course, but I would submit that there are countless inflection points, “butterfly effect” points, and that the purpose for many may come and go unnoticed, but none the less critical for it.  One can never know what small effort, what seemingly insignificant act may make a large difference.  You can’t live life sweating every last detail, but at the same time, don’t ignore them either.  Do what you can.  Then do it again.  Eventually they will lay you in the ground, or send you into the sky, and your assignment will change. But the process will not, in my view.  How we live today, in this world, is how we will live in the next world.  We just know more there, and get a LOT more support.

That, in any event, is my orienting belief.

In response to this article: http://www.thenation.com/article/174219/nietzsches-marginal-children-friedrich-hayek?page=full


I will admit in advance I only scanned it.  I have read in full many pieces like this.  Their point is to so overwhelm the reader with seeming erudition that basic questions are missed, like “does socialism work?”  This is such a common tactic with the left that I would submit their propaganda would be impossible without it.

I have one simple question: what is the point of economic activity, if not to liberate the capacity for moral development?  And if that is the point, is not the question of how to do this an empirical and not a moral question?  Is it not obvious beyond any possibility of discussion that free markets create both wealth and the possibility of leisure–at least in a post-tribal society, and certainly in a crowded world–far better than any possible alternative?

The salient malignancy of socialism is that the egalitarian creed rejects morality outright.  Morality depends upon the notion of progress, and progress in turn depends upon the notion that some people have developed more than others.  This does not mean they were born that way, but that the very concept of a meritocracy depends upon the notion of people who are morally qualitatively different, even if equal before the law.

Unless you can answer my first question–again, “what is the point of economic activity, if not to liberate the capacity for moral development?”–then I will assume based on long experience that, despite your capacity to produce seemingly useful words, that your project is one of destruction, not creation; death, not life.

All apparent logical contradictions between contextually valid statements are resolved in motion.

I’ve never read Logico-Tractatus Philosophicus, but I’ve always liked the geometric conceit of it.  I’ve also of course spoken of my fondness for Descartes and Spinoza’s use of the concept of geometric proof.  I’m slowly working my way there.  I think this would be worth including.

I will add, that we need not “pass over in silence” (schweigen) such statements.  They are arrows.  We need to look at where they are pointing, the “that”.  The “moon” is not the moon, but that doesn’t mean there is not a bright orb that brightens the sky on a  regular basis.  The only difference is in the materiality of the perceptual domain.

Confused?  Ah, my work here is done.

Perfection is the goal; and perfection is not the goal.

I think I get where the humor is in Zen Buddhism.  If you are laughing, you’re in touch with your inner One Hand.  Clapping.

I would not say I am a classic “artistic” type: by and large I pay my bills on time; I show up where I am supposed to on time; I have no weird fashion quirks; I don’t owe anybody any money.

But I am a bit disorganized.  This is in part an inevitable result of having large quantities of ideas on dozens of topics every day.  Well, I’m fixing that.  I am implementing David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system, which I like in no small measure because of the lack of focus on technology.

Anyway, I dug into a container literally filled with ideas–something like a 1,000 sheets of paper–and this was on the top:

“What I want to do is bring to the task of thinking the mindset of a serious craftsman, and create objects both functional and esthetically pleasing.”

I like that. 

I SAID that, you say?  Ah, but sometimes I think I’m either stupid or a dick, so my agreement with my own ideas is in no way a foregone conclusion.

I am going to permit myself a public bit of self expression wrapped in being cryptic.  Let’s call it the Yin and the Yang, because the Passive and the Aggressive just doesn’t sound right.  Open and Closed doesn’t quite work either.  How about “one foot moving forward, one foot moving backward, with Me suspended in the middle”? I am, after all, an ueber-Pisces.  There’s one thing you didn’t know about me.

In the early days of CrossFit, which is seemingly almost a household name now, I experienced what I would now call a death and rebirth experience. It was an odd thing, brought about in no small measure both because of my psychological strengths, and my quite profound and sundry short-comings/stupidity.  The outcome of that experience, arguably, is what put CrossFit on the path to the success it now enjoys.  It was never certain it would grow as large as it has; that was certainly far beyond the wildest hopes of the founders.  I know this.  This story has been so thoroughly buried that it is now known by few.

I experienced something like this with Holotropic Breathwork.  I nearly got booted from the training, and was definitely in limbo there for some hours.

Which of course brings me to Achilles (perhaps on my gravestone–which I won’t  have, since I plan cremation; oh, maybe it could be written on a piece of paper and burned–they should put the proper Latin for what I intend by Pater Non Sequiturum.)

I have not read the actual Iliad, other than simplified versions that were not direct translations, but I did listen to an excellent series on it from someone (I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name: she teaches at Northwestern) from the Teaching Company.  Even without reading the prose, I was absolutely fascinated by the story.  I had always thought it was a retelling of the Trojan War story, soup to nuts.  It is not.  It is about a period of the war in which the greatest warrior first rejects all Greek conceptions of war–first by isolating himself and rejecting the traditional enticements of booty and fame, and then by going too far in his violence, becoming almost the embodiment of violence itself, remorseless, pitiless, tireless.

He dies three times: first, by rejecting his role in society as a fighter and leader; second, by violating rules of conduct of war; and third, most importantly, by accepting the inevitability of his own death.  He had been given a choice, and had chosen being forgotten and living a long life, until stirred back into action by Patroclus’ death.  He had literally shed his skin in the form of armor, and taken on another skin.

Please do not laugh immediately when I say I am no Achilles.  Yes, this is obvious.  But in a deeper sense, i would argue that we are ALL Achilles.  We are all here to fight battles.  We have the choice to stick to the tried and true, to emulate and follow the models society sets before us; and we have the choice to feel and fail and die trying to win our own worlds, our own sense of self.

For my part, I have no desire to consciously and consistently violate the rules of others, but I would submit that being willing to do so while chasing something else–to stray onto someone else’s sacred land chasing a deer or following a cloud–is an inevitable and ineluctable element in trying to learn how to cross over into death and rebirth.

Take this for what it is worth.  I felt this needed to be said. I  do not share much of what I say to myself here–it is probably half and half–but some things I feel may have or grow wings, and are only able to do so with traction–earth–water, and the light of other spirits.

Guilt is an odd emotion.  I have been talking about expressing emotions, but guilt feels almost like self attack, self flagellation, making the recriminations inside your head that could and perhaps were made by someone else.  How do you let emotions flow that feel like barbed wire?

Clearly, guilt has a purpose.  It is what distinguishes the psychologically normal from sociopaths.  But it can be abused in so many ways.  Overly done, dramatically done, flamboyantly done, it avoids the actual feeling.  Not felt at all, and the stasis of the system is assured.

But what is it?  I think in the end it is a call to qualitative change.  You made a mistake, were weak, were hasty, for reasons of a character flaw.  True expression of guilt is honest self assessment and CORRECTION of the flaw.  Since correction implies acceptance of imperfection, this is hard to do. 

And so we dance.

This name has been stuck in my head, too.  Again, I have no idea where it came from.  Father of Perikles, Admiral of the Navy in a sort of Joint Command led by a Spartan, which accomplished the final victory over the Persians.

I’ve found that if you just go with things, more things follow.  This makes life interesting.

Sometimes I get names stuck in my head.  Cleanthes was one of them.  To the extent of my recollection, he was not mentioned in the survey of Greek philosophy I surveyed; nor was Zeno.  The only place I likely would have encountered him was in Hume’s “Dialogues concerning natural religion”, which I read in graduate school, and which apparently contains him as a character.

Be that as it may, I looked him up, and some of what he says is quite interesting:

Cleanthes maintained that pleasure is not only not a good, but is “contrary to nature” and “worthless.”^[15] It was his opinion that the passions
(love, fear, grief) are weaknesses: they lack the strain or tension
which he persistently emphasized, and on which the strength of the soul,
no less than that of the body, depends, and which constitutes in human
beings self-control, and moral strength, and also conditions every
virtue.^[15]
He said in a striking passage: “People walk in wickedness all their
lives or, at any rate, for the greater part of it. If they ever attain
to virtue, it is late and at the very sunset of their days.”^[16]

Zeno had said that the goal of life was “to live consistently,” the
implication being that no life but the passionless life of reason could
ultimately be consistent with itself. Cleanthes is credited with having
added the words “with nature,” thus completing the well-known Stoic
formula that the goal is “to live consistently with nature.”^[17]
For Cleanthes, this meant, in the first place, living conformably to
the course of the universe; for the universe is under the governance of
reason, and everyone has it as their privilege to know or become
acquainted with the world-course, to recognize it as rational and
cheerfully to conform to it.^[18]
This, according to him, is true freedom of will not acting without
motive, or apart from set purpose, or capriciously, but humbly
acquiescing in the universal order, and, therefore, in everything that
befalls one.^[18] The direction to follow Universal Nature can be traced in his famous prayer:

Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny,
To wherever your decrees have assigned me.
I follow readily, but if I choose not,
Wretched though I am, I must follow still.
Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.

Is this not quite close to the Buddhist conception of abandoning desire?  I would say, though, that “logos” in my view should mean more than reason and intellectual order.  A forest has “logos” because it is ordered too, simply in a deeper way.  Chaos, per Chaos Theory, has a “logos” that can be approximated.

We do not live according to reason.  We live according to our spirits, of which reason and apparent logic is but one manifestation.  We have to have a place for “that”, as I have said.

That’s enough on that.  I am procrastinating.