Author: White Whale

As I posted a few days ago, I think the stages of mourning concept can be applied to life, to the proposition that ALL lives will contain pain and that this is inevitable, and even desirable.  Sadness and difficulty make us wiser and more GENUINELY compassionate.

I would submit that Sybaritic Socialists are stuck in the Bargaining stage. They don’t want to deal with anger or sadness, but can’t use denial (which in part is what the Hippy movement was about, using drugs to become functionally dead, as in Grateful Dead, and thus numb to the actual question they were being asked to answer) since they need some purpose for their lives.  They want to cut a deal with life.  They want to use self delusion as a means of avoiding the sadness and anger that attend actual emotional growth.  They want to remain morally and emotionally as “innocents”, as if that were possible absent more or less conscious choice.  They want to pretend this world is safe, or would be if we just did what everyone said.  They want to pretend hard choices are never needed, and that we can postpone all griefs and pains indefinitely.  All you have to do to get this deal is submit,  Merge into the herd.  Listen and do as you are told, and all will be well.  They are EAGER to sell their freedom, if the alternative is any quantity of suffering.

It is a truism that family businesses fail in the third generation.  The grandfather is serious and starts the business.  The son, being the father’s son, and having watched the business be built, is also serious, but not quite as much.  The grandson is flippant, since all he has ever known is success.

The Baby Boomers are grandchildren.  They are infantile, and they are actively ruining everything good in this country.

Cultural Sadeists, those who express and intend only evil in their politics, recognize the pain in life but they refuse to accept it.  They refuse to feel it.  Since they recognize a need for pain, they seek it in others.  This is the root of cruelty.

You have to be emotionally strong to live well.  You MUST be willing to allow unpleasant emotions to wash through you.  You can’t feel sorry for yourself, and you have to keep going.  This is the only path to Goodness.

I just edited the piece so the hyperlinks can be accessed, and altered the Guaranteed issue a bit.

I deleted all the other posts–I’m not completely sure why I posted them, since I don’t know how many readers I have–but in any event this is short.

Here is the link: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page25.html

It is 30 some-odd pages, but I have to say I think it is good work.  

I wonder how many recognize that view.  It played an important role in American history.

I watched “The Avengers” for the fourth time today, and had a thought: it really is a pity that Captain America was put to sleep during the Communist era.  Obviously, the Left did and continues to do a good job of lying about the INTRINSIC evil of coerced egalitarianism.  That is what they do: they lie.  Long practice makes expert.

But interestingly, as I pointed out somewhere, the very first Iron Man was located in Vietnam, at the beginning of the war.  In it, Iron Man defeats a model of an NVA terrorist leader. 

Marvel knew then what was subsequently forgotten as a result of the diligent efforts of leftist “scrubber”: that the war consisted in vicious men infiltrating from the North, terrorizing small villages until they agreed to support them with food and troops, and a systematic expansion from these bases of assassination and terror directed nearly ENTIRELY against civilian targets.  Women were raped and killed in front of their husbands.  Young girls were tied to trees to die of thirst and exposure. Flame throwers were used against grass and wood huts.  Village and government leaders were shot in the streets.

All of the evils that Captain America fought in World War Two, mythically, were amply present in the two shooting wars we fought with the Communists in Korea and Vietnam, but TO THIS VERY DAY people do not understand how awful Communism was and is.  It is really shocking.  Obviously, I deal with the whys and hows of this nearly daily, but even now it shocks me how complacent those who should know better are in countenancing and even defending evil.

Even today, the Left is trying to portray the take-over of the Middle East by Fascist thugs as somehow good.  Men are being crucified.  Little girls are being beaten, or, alternately, married off to 50 year old men when they are 10, in the tradition of the “Prophet”.  Women accused of adultery are stoned.  None of this is good.  It is “unholy” in a very formal sense.  These people WILL be punished when they die, because they KNOW on some level they are committing evil acts.

I believe in God, and I believe that He put within us an innate sense of right and wrong.  What undermines that sense is EFFORT.  You have to work at it.  You have to adopt an ideology which allows you to turn off your intuition, your own judgement, in favor of a rigid behavioral code.  Prepubescent girls should not be forced to have old men humping them.  No one can defend this.

But the Left does, typically by turning a blind eye. 

The root of this word is “content”, which means to contain.  Happiness is what you are filled with.  It is an internal artifact, and one which need not be tied to outside world (although self evidently I do not dispute that some external circumstances are easier to find happy than others.)

I ran into Sam Harris’s profile on Facebook today, where he was more or less mocking a neurosurgeon who had a very powerful Near Death Experience. I offered to debate him, but of course the likelihood is close to zero.I know these people don’t REALLY debate, they don’t REALLY use reason, if by reason we include a willingness to evaluate impartially all data.  I know this from long experience.  They don’t bend.

It did occur to me though that the tactic for me would not be presenting absolutely, categorically true and irrefutable proof.  They always have a way out.  What would however be easy would be pointing out that their views are not based upon empiricism.  Given that their belief system and self understanding rests FIRMLY on empiricism, this makes them hypocrites of the worst sort.  This would be easy enough to show.

As one example, take William Crookes .  He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, and one of the most prominent scientists of his generation.  Yet, when he carefully investigated medium Daniel Dunglas Home–who was the first person to be called “psychic”–and found his power genuine, he was vilified.

When a scientist does an experiment, do other scientists take his word for it?  Of course not.  They try to, what:? REPLICATE it.  How many scientists tried to replicate Crookes work prior to denouncing it?  None.  In what other field of science are apparently successful experiments done by qualified professionals not subjected to efforts at replication?  These scientists, at a minimum, could have attended a Home seance.  He took all comers, and did his work in well lit rooms he had not previously visited.  If you read about what he did, and ponder the sheer quantity of witnesses, you have to conclude that it nothing short of a scientific crime that so few investigated him.

That was not actually the main point I wanted to make, so after my foray into channeling Arlo Guthrie, let me move on to Part Two.

I have long felt that atheists have a different vibe to them, as well, a certain emotional detachment, a certain machine-like-ness, a certain feel of metal.  It is not a strong, but a subtle thing.  As William James pointed out right at the beginning of his Pragmatism lectures, your sense of the world and your place in it is by far the most important element of who you are, and such people at root have to admit they are dirt that exists in apparent consciousness for a short time, then disappears for all eternity.

This emotional aspect got me to thinking about how they handle emotions, then it hit me: I think dogmatists pick their stance, their form, their religion based upon what emotions it enables them to suppress.

Think about it: no dogmatist of any stripe can claim to be rational, since by definition they are unwilling to change their views in response to new evidence.  Consistently, of course, the strategy is to avoid new evidence, to make this fact less clear.

If you believe in God, you believe in your connection with the universe and your fellow humans.  If you do not, then you are alone.  Some people like that idea, that they have private chamber that is theirs alone, in which no spirit, no psychic, no transpersonal anything can penetrate.  Their mind may consist solely of electrical impulses and chemical reactions, but it is THEIRS.

As I see it, spiritual freedom consists in allowing a constant wind to blow out of you into the world.  It does not blow constantly, or always in the same direction.  At some level, we have to reject all fixity in order to follow and grow it.  Buddhist monks wandered, to facilitate this.  I would argue that if you don’t interfere with this flow, you can be anywhere and doing anything, and grow equally.

But some people don’t want that flow. They don’t want that connection.  They don’t want to grant certain emotions of pain deep within them access to light and air.  This is why they reject so violently people who are religious.  As I said, I have debated many atheists, and a great many of them border on the sadistic.  They know full well that the ONLY thing that gets some people through life is their religious beliefs, yet they DELIGHT it attacking them and their faith.  They invest enormous energy in it.  I wonder if they are attacking their own vulnerable selves, that lie buried beneath a facade of apparent rationality, one heavily conditioned by emotional attachments they cannot manage because they cannot recognize.

This idea of flow is key.  I am sure of it.  What stops the flow is bad, and what facilitates it is good.  Atheism stops it, so it is bad.  People like Sam Harris have caused a lot of suffering, not least among those who admire him.  What he has done for them is rationalize shelving unwanted pressures and failings, angers and sadnesses, into a package that purports to be perfectly tranquil, perfectly reasonable, and fully compatible with the best ideas of science.

It is a lie.

My children are teenagers.  Thus far, no problems.  That may change, but I think my basic philosophy is working, which is that my work is largely done by age 13. I have created a rocket heading out into the world, with a trajectory and a momentum, and I am only there when asked for.  Otherwise, I will just let it go, and hopefully enjoy watching where it goes. 

You cannot build common sense or self restraint when a kid is 15, and I think the mistake many people make is to wait until they start having problems to ask themselves what sort of person they are raising.  By then, there is nothing you can do about it.

As a general rule, if you have to apply force, you have already failed.  You have already fallen short of what was possible.  It applies in social life as much as in the military world.

As Sun Tzu said, it does not take good hearing to perceive thunder, or good eyesight to see lightning.  What is valuable is to see them far before they happen.  Very few people even attempt to live like this.

Can you trust a field whose very name is a lie?

Life is pain.  This is what the Buddha posited.  Acceptance of this truth, and the following truth “and there is a solution”, constitutes the essence of his program.  What I think needs to be understood about this stipulation though is that he intended not just pain as pain, but the pain of knowing that better is possible, and wanting it.

The Germans have a proverb: “life is like a chicken coop ladder: shitty and short”.  Some lives are like that, particularly in very poor parts of the world today, and for most of the world’s history before that.  Disease, hunger, war, hard work: all of them daily experiences.

Modern Americans have eradicated most of the randomness of life, and some are trying to eliminate ALL of it, in the futile hope that this will bring about paradise.  What I feel it brings about is emotional emptiness, one that is currently filled for many through their politics and relatively hollow spiritual pursuits, but which is not satisfied fully through such activities, and which thus brings anger and sadness.

What I want to submit here is that Elizabeth Kuebler Ross’s stages of mourning can be applied to the basic proposition “you can’t have it all”, which is a paraphrase of “life is pain.”  You can’t EVER have it all.  You can’t climb every mountain if you also want to swim every sea, be a good parent, and be socially useful. We must all accept this. We must deflate our ambitions.

Everywhere you see these signs saying something like “follow your bliss”, pursue your dreams, be all you can be.  For some people, this is likely good advice.  For most, , though,I think it leaves them empty, not least because few are disciplined enough to consistently achieve hard goals.  Half the people you know are below average, but they have dreams too.

The first stage of grieving is denial.  When you are young, it seems the world is your oyster.  You can do and have it all, because you don’t yet know how to plan. 

Then you get frustrated–you feel anger–when you realize you CAN’T have it all, and view life as unfair.  Note that this can happen on many levels.  Poor people in the ghettos are looking to comfortable lives relatively free of violence and ugliness.  The rich may be looking for “true love”.  In my view, it doesn’t matter where you start or end up, the basic truth applies that you have to accept some circumstance of living if you are to be happy.

Then you alternate Bargaining and Sadness.  You hope for something, and sometimes get it, but never enough, if you are looking for happiness “out there”.  You alternate hope and despair.

Then resignation.  This can end in Sadness, if you don’t actively “refute” the sadness emotionally, by consciously accepting life on its own terms.

This is where the process I spoke of a few days ago under “The Finger” (perhaps a subauspicious title, but I’m leaving it) kicks in.  There are processes you can use to flush out the sadness, and anger, and anxiety, and denial, such that emotional states flow OUT of you, rather than in to you from the outside, such that you control your own weather simply by allowing the good to flow out naturally and in an unobstructed way.  This is the “doing nothing” of the Tao Te Ching, and the Windhorse of the Tibetans.  As I have said, I feel it sometimes.  I think it is getting stronger.

I rarely comment on real time issues, since it is done well enough by many other people.  I will make an exception here.  Do you remember Steve Kroft asking Obama if he was “punch drunk” in an interview (I’m sure the video is out there, but I’m not taking the time to find it) in 2009?  I said then that he was trying to channel FDR, who used laughter to great effect in very trying times.  He calmed people. In my view, he bamboozled them, but the net is that it got the job done.

Biden’s handlers know he is an idiot.  He is a glad hander, who knows how to read people well enough, and is smart enough to be loyal to the people who invite him to the party.  But with regard to substantive issues, they likely felt that he was absolutely in beyond his depth, and that to attempt to be serious next to the very serious, very policy detail oriented Ryan was way past his capability.  They likely told him to do the opposite, to more or less mock Ryan, in the hope that people would jump on the bandwagon: “Oh there you go AGAIN, Paul, you silly boy”.

It does not sound like it worked.  I can’t watch debates, or really even live coverage of anything.  All I consume, by and large, are facts.  My opinions are my own.