Author: White Whale

In my understanding, the consensus view among quantum physicists is that “reality” is a meaningless concept.  Practically, “it” seems to come into being when it encounters consciousness.  Since we are by definition conscious, most professional physicists simply bracket the question of what is really real and focus on applied science.

Yet, if consciousness creates reality, then what we observe in the apparently “outside” world can quite plausibly, even within the more or less consensus model, originate within our own psyches.

Given this, it is interesting to wonder if the apparent discovery of the Higgs boson is not the result of the universe crying uncle after 30 years of thousands of physicists praying devoutly, even if not consciously, for just this miracle.

For my part, I think that the concept of intrinsic mass will at some point need to be abandoned, and the Quantum Vacuum/ Zero Point Field taken seriously, which to this point very few paid physicists have been willing to do.

Two thoughts.  First, the idea that being “saved” is sufficient acts, in my view, as a barrier to moral progress.  Salvation is not principally a moral deed with any content outside of accepting the paradigmatic moral deed of Christ himself: acknowledging it, and pledging allegiance to the author of this uebermoral act.  Certainly, Christ taught us to love one another,but from a theological perspective in most sects, being “born again”, or observing the rites of the  Church, is sufficient.  This is in my view an ironic outcome.

Secondly, what if hell is nothing more than suffering all the pain you inflicted on others?  Even for the most evil–Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Mao, Hitler–this would still be a finite amount of pain, even if quite large.  I have seen the case made that the Biblical word for eternity is closer to “one thousand years”.  That is a significant difference, that between the finite and the non-finite.

Or take Lincoln.  I have wondered about him.  I visited his grave and it had a strange energy to it.  He caused a war to be fought which caused an ENORMOUS amount of suffering.  Yet, arguably, he caused a great deal of good to be done as well, although it is of course impossible to know what would have happened if he had let South Carolina and the rest of the South go.  Does he feel the pain of one Confederate soldier, then the jubilation of at least one slave?  I have no idea.  It’s an interesting topic, though.

I am reading a very interesting book, Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, and am struck by the similarities between leftist politics and psychoanalysis done incompetently and even malignantly.

For one thing, she notes that if the therapist, in the false  hope of shortening the recovery process, becomes a “rescuer”, that that actually impedes and slows–or even prevents–the recovery of that patient.  “Victims” need two things: empowerment, which can only come from a realistic appraisal of their actual control over themselves and events; and reconnection with the larger social world, which can only happen in a desirable way following the development of a sense of autonomy, which itself of course is related to empowerment.

Leftist politics, by their very nature, don’t even ASK the question: “how can we help people without undermining their sense of autonomy?”  It is PRESUMED that if politically correct people are on the task, that by definition their work is immaculate, and only capable of being corrupted by ideological others, which is why there is so much hate directed by the left at the right.  It is literally the case that one could make a strong case that as a group leftist politics are DEFINED by clinical cognitive dissociation.  Their left hand, which can do no wrong, has no conversations with their own right hands, which see very clearly the pain and misery their policies routinely cause.

Consider in this context this very interesting quote which does so much to explain Detroit, the massive unrecognized failures of poverty politics, both domestically and abroad (in purported economic aid and development packages), and idiocies like this treatment of Obamacare (which assumes among other things that you can add tens of millions of people to Medicaid–a fact I don’t see mentioned–keep everything else the same, and yet somehow decrease overall costs):

The three most common narcissistic snares are the aspirations to heal all, know all, and love all.  Since such gifts are no more accessible to the contemporary psychotherapist [in my use: self proclaimed do-gooder] than they were to Faust, unless such trends are worked out. . .[the therapist/leftist] will be subjected to a sense of  Faustian helplessness and discouragement, and tempted to solve his dilemma by resort to magical and destructive action.

Does one not see this tendency, repeated incessantly, to proclaim that the problem is SO URGENT that SOMETHING must be done, and not by the people affected, but by their self appointed representatives?

Obamacare is a prime example.  I will be writing a refutation of it that goes farther than I have in the past soon, but the net is that the situation is unambiguous: this policy will lead to greatly increased costs for the middle class in the form of insurance cost increases (somebody has to pay for the already-sick who can no longer be denied, and whose coverage cannot be subjected to ANY lifetime limits); healthcare rationing; a bloated Federal bureaucracy that will cost 2-3 times the bullshit numbers we are being fed; and VASTLY decreased choice.  Where we have no waits now, we will.  Where we have ready access to experts now, we won’t.  None of this is the slightest bit ambiguous economically.

I propose that it is only the magical thinking that attends profound boundary violations of the supposedly down-trodden that enables stupidities like this to pass unnoticed.  Self evidently, when what I say will happen happens–if Obamacare is allowed to continue as the cancer that it is–NOBODY on the left will admit it, despite the fact that they deny these things are possible now.

The saying “Liberalism is a mental illness” has been with us some time.  I literally, clinically, think that specific terms and psychodynamic verdicts oriented around narcissismic overreach can be applied as generally useful.

I have pondered off and on for some time in trying to explain the metastasis of higher education bureaucracies, particularly given that we do not seem to be making many people smarter by going to college.  “Liberal Arts” teaches de facto fascism.  Only the hard sciences and perhaps business and the like do anything of social value.

My conclusion is this: the salient fact on this issue is that student loans cannot be defaulted on, by law.  This is the one thing that has made an enormous difference.  The analogy with the housing bubble is strong, but not exact.

The problem in the 2008 bubble was not so much the Community Refinancing Act, which mandated risky loans to people with little credit history.  The problem was that all of the securities issued by Wall Street had the backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, meaning effectively that if for some reason the loans were not repaid, the Federal Government would step in to take care of it, AS INDEED IT HAS, costing hundreds of billions of dollars.  This created the manifest moral hazard that profits were privatized, and risks passed on to saps, in this case the American people, who in general still do not understand what happened.

With regard to student loans, authorized agencies like Sallie Mae could make loans to ANYONE, regardless of credit history (and 18 year olds don’t of course normally have a credit history), and in nearly any amount, because they KNEW that, legally, that loan would be repaid, even if it took 30 years to do so.  You can’t discharge student loans in bankruptcies.  You can’t walk away from them the way you can a house.

This, in turn, enabled massive cost increases by the universities, who–like all bureaucracies–exist principally to expand.  In this regard, they might be profitably compared to cancers.  Untreated, cancers will nearly always grow until they kill the host, here, the American people.  Given the cultural presupposition that you need a college degree, they were able to count on economically ignorant young people taking on more and more debt, with little to no net increase in BENEFIT to them.

The whole thing is really quite cynical.  University Administrators make very good money, yet deliver very little of value to their students, and by extension to the American economy and people.  Yes, engineers are helpful, but they are number eight in the top ten of college degrees.  Look at this: http://www.collegespot.com/top-10-lists/top-10-most-common-college-degrees/

I count only four degrees that are in useful fields: Biology, Computer Science, Engineering, and Nursing.  The rest of them are throwaway.  I don’t count business degrees for the simple reason that I have been in business myself for some time, and in my experienced view there is no substitute for just doing the job.  As a general rule, the top salespeople in non-technical fields don’t have college degrees at all.  My two former brothers-in-law are both way into six figures, and neither even did well in high school; yet, both know WAY more than even a graduate of the best business program in the country.  In fact, much of what seems to be taught in business school is short term profit at the expense of long term value.  This is bullshit.  Nobody in business for themselves thinks like that.  Graduates of such programs get hired on by large corporations, and move on before the consequences of their policies really hit.

With regard to psychology, political science, history, philosophy, literature, and the like, I have learned way more since I left college than I ever learned there.

Bottom line: the government, once again, has been used by Socialists to support a very simple goal: getting more people into indoctrination factories, and increasing the relative power and money of those factories in such a way as to build support for leftwing policies.

Again, Fannie Mae was intended as a means of distrupting the private market in housing, and for facilitating a government take-over of the housing sector.  Between them, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hold the mortgages to some 2/3rds of American homes.  Consider that.  Ponder that.  If it had been called a housing takeover people would have been up in arms.  Call it “making housing affordable”, and you are a big fat meany head if you oppose it.

There is no point in denying that leftists lie well.  Generally they lie both to themselves and everyone else. But not all.  Some are power-mongering sons of bitches, who in a just world would be readily recognized for what they are and reviled.  But we do not live in a lucid, much less just world.  We live in an Alice in  Wonderland world, carefully crafted by the sadists among us, and very few people seem able to navigate it.

No amount of destruction can ever be cathartic.  Although we are all tempted to avoid and paradoxically express our wounds in cruelty, thoughtlessness and tearing down, it can never, in the end, bring peace for more than an excruciating moment.  Had Hitler burnt down the entire world, it would not have been enough.  Tens of millions of dead Chinese were not enough for Chairman Mao.

Even though I oppose it in principle, I will not deny that from time to time I look at pornography, perhaps ten minutes once a month, and a few hours once a year when I am drinking.  Although even this amount is in my view too much, I think as a single man who spends a lot of time on the computer this is likely quite low.

In any event, last night I watched a free thirty second teaser video of sorority girls being hazed.  It amounted to low grade S&M, which is seemingly what most pornography consists in, whether this fact is obvious or admitted or not.  Most everything you see effectively eradicates and ignores the feelings of the women in question, reducing them to sexual objects.  This is why I oppose pornography.

I was tired and irritable, and I found it arousing.  This of course was the intent, and it worked.

Yet, my self therapy over the past year or so has consisted in regularly trying to remember and feel emotions.  I have spent most of my life in de facto emotional numbness, and as with all wounds, under the numbness is unremembered and unexpressed pain.  I was lying there last night, doing this process, and I got to the other side of that pain: I felt pain, and all the attraction of watching these poor girls in the process of losing their sense of dignity and self vanished.  Gone.

I have at times referred to cruelty as the outsourcing of pain.  I really believe this is the function.  All sadism, all destruction in this world, happens due to the inability of people to feel and process all the things that hurt them.

The cruelty we see in modern America–exhibits would include Horror movies, and as a random example the cover of the latest Nicki Minaj album cover–logically arise as a result of our shared inability to process tragedy, to feel deeply our own pain, and to become deeper human beings as a result.  We spend too much time consuming media, conforming to values chosen by media, and too little time wrestling with the genuine problems of life, those of purpose.  Our values are being nice, and pretending that voting to help people actually helps people.

Socialism, in the end, is sadism.  It is emotionally weak.  It is cannibalism.  This is the cultural reality.

Reasoning is what you do with what you perceive.  Perception is always primary.  Science is nothing more than a system for challenging assumptions, which means that it is not science any more when some assumptions–such as the certainty that Darwin was roughly correct–are not open to challenge.

As I think about it, all reason does is create the possibility for sustained perception.  When we speak of “natural laws”, what we are speaking about are consistent relationships observed over time–such as F=MA–from which we REASON that these relations obtain in all times and all places.  This is a pragmatic approach, but there is nothing in creation which necessarily makes it inevitable.  To say otherwise is to claim to understand creation in its entirety, which is hubris of the sort one would only expect from Oxbridge and Harvard dons.  Real schools, like the University of  Chicago, would know better.

We float in space.  It is best to always remember this.  It leads to less preventable error. 

I think many people who are raised Christian unconsciously conflate the “judgement” of Jesus with the psychological atmosphere surrounding those who spoke to them often and early about Jesus.  We read that all sins are forgiven, but we see, as children, that not all sins are forgiven by those who speak of Jesus, and assume in some preconscious, muddled way that Jesus forgives, but only if we are perfectly obedient.  Slip just a little, for any reason, and anger is the result.

This idea is ridiculous, even if readily comprehensible for those of us who went through this process.  We posit a being of infinite love, who is a part of God Himself, and yet understand Him to be hung up on petty things.  Surely, if Jesus is love, then the better part of love is understanding?  And surely understanding is the source of forgiveness?

To my mind, no great love is possible without great intelligence, where by intelligence I mean not book knowledge, but the capacity to grasp both what is readily visible, and that which is hidden, often very carefully, and to relate to it, to empathize, to “grok”.

If you pay attention, the Federal Government has been engaged in an aggressive anti-smoking campaign recently, which includes some graphic television and billboard ads.  One I drive past regularly has a cadaver which has the stitch marks in his chest which are apparently left following an autopsy.

Why do they care?  The point which has been obvious to me for some time, and which I recently saw made elsewhere, is that if all health costs will funnel through the Federal government–which of course is the end game for the leftists behind Obamacare–then the costs associated with all forms of risky behavior will also funnel through.  In order to protect us, then, they will have to direct us, first through persuasion, and then more directly by diktat.

What is more subtle and already missed, though, is that by prohibiting insurers from refusing to insure preexisting claims, the costs associated with the fat, lazy, and stupid are already being passed along, through the premium increases which NECESSARILY attend paying increased bills for people who are already sick.

The way it should work is that every insurance relationship should be between the insurer and the insured.  The insurer should face sufficient competition that it feels the need to offer reasonable pricing, and the insured should have adequate choices.  What will be necessary, though, is that if you are fat, smoke, or engage in other risky behaviors, you will pay more.  This is simple enough.  The point is that at that point IT IS YOUR CHOICE.  If you want to smoke, then smoke.  You are paying higher insurance costs.  If it is worth that much to you, then have at it.  It’s, in theory, a free country.

By pretending, though, that the healthy should pay the same as the willfully sickly, we all lose.  The healthy lose the benefits of making good choices, and the sickly are rewarded, in a sense, for their poor choices.  Everyone loses.

I want to be clear: other nations afford universal coverage by simply not providing the caliber of care we do.  People survive here who would die in other countries.  This incents the population of other nations not to be so self abusive, since the magic pill that will fix their illness will not be paid for.  Here, they get it.  Hell, it was developed here.

Yet, if those people had to pay OUT OF THEIR OWN POCKET for that miracle cure, they may hesitate just a bit longer before engaging in whatever risky behavior puts them at risk. What Obama and the left wing has proposed may–over some lengthy period of time rationing–reducing–both the quantity and quality of care here–reduce the moral hazard of complacency our system enables, but only at the cost of destroying the quality healthcare those who deserve it would otherwise have access to.

Hopefully this makes sense.  I am speaking generally, but I think sufficiently coherently to be of some use.

I think the entirety of my work can be viewed as oriented around one aim: enabling, for once, human culture not to revert back to sacrifice.  This is, of course, grandiose–I have recently diagnosed this as one of my traits–and yet, ideas DO matter.  They start somewhere, with someone who refuses to accept the tranquilizing commonplaces and platitudes at their face value, and in a qualitatively rich society, with MANY such someones, each from their own view, their own place, with their own method.

Most historical culture can only be viewed, in my estimation, as functionally psychotic.  It is based upon the elevation of power, of meaning based upon coercion, of conformity muted and routinized and vanished in vast seas of time and habit.  If the particular recapitulates the general, at any rate.  Certainly, this process can be seen in many homes the world over, and what I read of history seems to bear this basic idea out.

Sacrificial culture: the inability of some mass of individuals to learn to trust their own instincts while respecting those of others.  This leads to the build up of covert and generally undiagnosed, subterranean hostilities, which can only dealt with by expression.  This expression can take the form of ritual murders of various sorts, and it can take the form of ritual sadism in the form of requiring some set of the population to be “born” inferior.  I think one could take Pareto’s formula here and put it to rough use: either some 20% of the population controls 80%, as in most forms of authoritarian rule; or 80% rules a 20%, as for example in the Hindu caste system, which renders some inferior, and some not even worthy to be included in the system.  The inferior in the system are referred to, appropriately enough, as the “feet”.

So much of the life of every person is myth.  It is covert, hidden, subtle.  Only by revealing the hidden can we avoid the sacrifice, avoid covert sadism of our own.  Most sadism, you see, is not overt violence.  It is not overtly taking pleasure in the pain of others.  It is, rather, best seen in refusals to perceive, in manic repetitions, in failures of empathy and love.  We could all love one another, yet we don’t.  We don’t due in part to fear, but mainly because the root of love–understanding–is absent in those under the thrall of unrecognized sadistic compulsions.

Love, to be clear, is not a duty: it is an outcome, of a particular level of understanding.  To see oneself is to see others as they are; yet most of us refuse to see ourselves, and thus fail to see others.  And thus we create chasms when the world is otherwise filled with bridges.

This has been a strange week for me, and I will leave it at that.  There is ample to ponder here, particularly if you think you have already understood what I am saying to you.

Edit: I will add an obvious point, which seemed extraneous: the Hunger Games is quite obviously a description of a sacrificial order.  The children are human sacrifices, fed to appease the inability of the ruling elite to form independent identities.  They do not need their material comforts nearly as much as they need to be SUPERIOR to some other group, and sacrifice is a means of expressing this superiority and the following bloodthirst openly.  It tranquilizes them, calms them, eases their relations with one another.

This is perhaps gratuitous, but I do feel like I have been on Earth many times, and seen this dynamic countless times.  What is surprising is not that there is evil on Earth, but that at times and places Goodness blossoms, and decency fills the air. 

This is a feeling only, with no memories to back it up.

Stillness can only be found in constant motion.

My Yoda statue has been speaking to me again.  That or I am super tired, and feeling mischievous.  I do mean it, though.  It’s a thoroughly defensible and frankly unduly clear statement for a koan.

If you can’t figure out, ask someone to bop you on the head.