Author: White Whale

I would like to define this as anti-mourning.  It is constant activity, while one is pursued by unwanted emotions.  I read articles like this one: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Case-for-Breaking-Up-With/131760/ , and see that our elites seemingly feel no need for down time.  Moreover, their parents seem to be narcissistically involved in every last detail of their lives.  These people will find themselves believing that such activity is normal, and that their natural position is that of ruler.  That is my guess, at any rate.

A scene in a movie that left a lasting impression on me was in Kurasawa’s Kagemusha, in which it is revealed that the great Lord has concealed his own death for some years–it was 3 or 5, if memory serves–and one of his arch rivals breaks out a fan, and spontaneously performs what I assume is a piece of No theater.

This is spontaneous mourning, and a sign of integrated emotions.  Yet, this was the warring states period, and all these people were fighing one another constantly.  This is a poor state of emotional integration too.

We need more mental health the world over.  It is neither being nice nor being cruel.  It is being appropriate.  War is a short path to a sense of meaning, and a short path to building aggregated groups.  Yet, it is also a horror that leaves lasting traumas both in terms of pain, and in the inability to process it.

The only possible utopia on Earth will be one in which people are universally mentally healthy.  This will mean that they process their emotions, that they are capable of genuine and deep feeling, that they are empathic without being needy, that they are capable both of self assertion and altruism, and that in general they are oriented around the Good, and around becoming better.

Much traditional religion facilitates mental illness.  I think Islam is particularly guilty of this, in that I don’t believe ANY social order which is so hostile to woman can EVER fully mature.  The men who rule have far too many unprocessed psychological issues with their mothers.  I would add that black culture in this country has turned somewhat in the direction of generalized misogyny as well, to its great detriment.

Some religions, like Buddhism, do seem to have some capacity to at least contribute to mental well being, and I think all religions offer some solace for the tragedies and uncertainties of life.  The question is how accurate they are.  I believe science can and should investigate how our universe actually works.  As I have said often, I believe the preponderance of evidence is that our souls survive death, and that we are connected in ways we cannot quite see.

Some random musings on Frey’s Day.

Some unwanted changes/experiences are inevitable in every life.  You have to integrate them, mourn the loss of what was, and move on.  What I think complicates this process in modern life is that since everything is in a constant state of flux, there is no status quo ante to which you can return.

As Turner (if memory serves, and I think it does) described the ritual process, it consists more or less in a three stage sequence: place/other place/place understood differently.  As an example, to become an adult you go out in the desert and fend for yourself for a day.  You leave as a child, and come back a man. 

The key point, though, is that you return to the SAME PLACE, the same set of rules, the same group of people, the same beliefs, the same daily rituals, the same food and space.  It is hard to do that in the modern world.  When you get hit by some experience or other, this added distress and disturbance gets added to a pervasive underlying sense of stress with regard to the permanance of change in our world. 

Why do we feel some comfort from 50’s memorabilia?  Why does Elvis get invoked so often?  Why does the character of Captain America apparently resonate with so many?  It evokes a world that was NOT in constant flux.  We forget that the 50’s was an era of the Cold War, Korea, bomb drills, segregation, but we remember that at least from this distance things seem to us to have been less in motion.  That was the last period before the turmoil of the 60’s that is clearly still with us.

How do you mourn in such a world?  How do you find a space which is not moving around you to process emotions?  You can do it in the wild, I suppose.  In a home that feels comfortable.  But increasingly, I think people simply choose NOT to mourn; they choose superficiality and constant activity/stimulation, over facing unwanted emotions that must be faced to live fully.

I mentioned a week or two or three ago (my life is very busy, and time flies for me) that I had read “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior”.  What I do not recall anywhere in there is him crying, mourning.  He feels empty, he feels anger and fear and determination.  He learns calm, focus.  He sees at one point the sufferings of EVERYONE ELSE, but I can’t recall him ever grieving anything in his own life.

Unless I am mistaken, his childhood was one of relentless pressure to perform, to live up to expectations of his parents.  He had little down time, little time to just be, at least until his motorcycle injury.  I suspect on the beach there is when he took his first hit of acid, and smoked his first joint.  That is when he first took seriously all the metaphysical stuff going on around him.

And I look at the New Age movement, and have been saying for years that what it is missing is a sense of the tragic, of grief.  We read how one can develop an insuperable serenity just meditating, just latching on to the correct guru.  I think this is bullshit.  I think that ALL OF US have got to learn the psychological process of grieving, of feeling pain while we CONSCIOUSLY detach from some person or situation, or habit of which we were very fond.  It is like breaking through scar tissue: I think once it is done a few times properly, it becomes something that we can control; it becomes an emotional process over which we can exercise control, and this is spiritual growth.

But it cannot be avoided.  You cannot just make yourself stiff, learn to smile knowingly, distract yourself with all sorts of metaphysical books, and run into meditation and other sundry trash for which you are not ready.

I feel this: I do not think it.  I see it, increasingly, as I rip open my own scar tissue for the first time, properly.

It is worth noting from time to time that the so-called “Palestinians” are refugees from a war which happened in 1948, some 64 years ago.  Where else in the world can one find people so callous as to allow their own to languish for such a long time?  I find it difficult at times not to view Muslim Arabs as culturally inferior to substantially every other population on Earth.  They glory in death. One finds this in cultural alleys in other nations–the Thuggee cult, for example, in India–but not as the main theme.  I have spent some years studying varying religions, and I can think of no analogue to Islam as practiced in the Middle East.

Large numbers of Jews were cast out of Arab nations in 1948 as well.  We do not read about them because they were assimilated in Israel, the United States, or other nations, without undue fuss, and even though they, too, lost everything they had built and owned.  Unlike the Arabs living in the British Mandate, however, they were not given the option of staying.

If you want to control something, get the authority to tax it.  This is easy enough.  What is less obvious is that you also get control of something if you force it into borrowing, if you control the borrowing.  Education is an obvious example, but was it not the case that most homes 50 years ago were bought on 15 year notes held by the banks that made the loans?  It was only Fannie Mae that enabled the credit expansion that pushed prices–and the size of the houses–into the stratosphere.

Keep in mind, if you think we are  truly free country, that the Federal Government holds the title to roughly one third of the homes in the United States, and is currently trying to get full control of our healthcare and health insurance systems.

I don’t know why educations costs have skyrocketed to the point where normal middle class Americans can no longer afford a college education.  What I can say with certainty, though, is that the intervention of the Federal Government has played a major role in facilitating it, and probably the decisive role.

Companies which make loans to students–with $100,000 in loans for a four year degree even at mediocre colleges not being that uncommon–are GUARANTEED to get their money back.  This has been the case for many years.  You cannot make the loans go away in bankruptcy.  Other than repayment, there is no means of avoiding these costs.  This intervention in the private sector means that means testing is irrelevant: no matter how much someone overborrows, even if they will literally be in debt the rest of their lives–which means servicing the interest but failing to repay the principle–the loans will be made.

In the private sector, loans are made based upon the ability of people to repay them.  If the student loan business had stayed in the private sectors–with both losses and profits borne ONLY by the lenders–then much less money would have been lent.  With less money available, less money would have been borrowed, and the new outcome of this would have not been less students going to college, but less of the MASSIVE expansions we have seen in university infrastructure, size of the Administrative element, and the pay for the bureaucrats who run things.

Net: as with Fannie Mae–which was supposed to boost home ownership, but has instead contributed to a massive economic decline coupled with massive rates of foreclosure– a program intended to INCREASE college attendance has over time made it much more difficult, and forced most students either into de facto punitive loans, or foregoing college.

Now that the Federal Government owns the loans, things will not get any better.  The interest rates that students pay will not go down, as that “income” was intended to help mask the actual costs of the horrifically bad Obamacare legislation.

It is less than obvious, but it has become my firm conviction that those who hurt the most feel the least.  Pain beyond a certain point causes a sort of emotional swelling, which performs the same role for the psyche that actual swelling does for injured limbs: it immobilizes and protects you.  Inflexibility is the outcome of unprocessed emotions, and inflexibility, in turn, is the cause of most misery in this world; it is the rejection of what is, in favor of what was or what one feels should be.

Those who are cruel hurt the most.  This is not obvious, because they will have thoroughly buried their pain, and even appear outwardly in some cases happy.  Yet, we all to some greater or lesser extent built artificial selves, artifacts of experiences we often cannot remember, and in response to social needs.  Any self built upon the need to see pain in others cannot be real, cannot face the world as it is, cannot, in the end, be at peace or ever be fulfilled.

As I watch myself, look inwardly, what I see is that self is almost always tied to the introjection of some authority or principle.  Who you are is who your fathermother was, or what you saw written in some book, or decided at some point.  You are this out of habit.  You repeat patterns.  But is that you?  Is that even a useful question?  We want to be happy, do we not?  Does repetition best serve this end?  I don’t think so.

Increasingly, I feel that the highest attainment is to process the world with full consciousness of all the filters within one, and finally to process it as it is, without filter.  This is of course an old idea, but what I would suggest is that most of what gets called spiritual growth is nothing but the advance of personal emotional well being, and nearly fully encompassed by good psychology.

Few thoughts.

An important point I think many people miss is that for those seeking dominion over the world–despite this being a stock goal of cartoon supervillains, these people do in my view actually exist–it never matters if this goal is being pursued overtly, or consciously.  Those working to support them in their aim may in fact believe they are working for the exact opposite.  Reagan called for smaller government, rhetorically, and no doubt believed in it, but the OUTCOME of his Presidency, what actually happened, was that government expanded tremendously.

Many of the “New World Order” conspiracists think George W. Bush intended to create a police state.  I don’t believe this.  It is sufficient, for Fabian purposes, to have people whispering the right things in his ear, WHICH MAKE SENSE.  Given the supposed extent of the intelligence failure presupposed by the success of the 9/11 attacks, it made sense to create a Dept. of Homeland Security, and a TSA.  Now, the NSA’s Total Informational Awareness was shot down, but has now been quietly resurrected.  Its time was not then, but rather now.

The simple fact is that if water is made steadily hotter by degrees–whether intentionally or not–then it will sooner or later boil.  This is a ridiculously obvious point, but one missed by most nonetheless.

Tried to post here: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/297488/occupy-s-totalitarian-temptation-charles-c-w-cooke#comment-561348

Page won’t open for some reason.  Internet working fine.  For whatever reason, I am often blocked from posting on blogs, left and right.  This is intended just as a basic catechism of my ideas.  Bit disconnected, but the basics are there.

Ideas have consequences. Seeing this, and articulating where things lead, is the proper role of what are typically called intellectuals, and what I prefer to dress in overalls and call “thought workers”. This class has not done its job in 50 years, by and large, with the exception of William F. Buckley, Brent Bozell and the like.

What instead is presented is a pretend game, an artificial world in which everything is possible, and ideas never lead to concrete outcomes other than protest and other ritually useful forms of social interaction.

Now, it is in my view imposslble to lie to yourself–to ALL parts of yourself–which means that sustained lies necessarily lead, for self described “nice” or “loving”, or “compassionate” people to cognitive splitting. What happens is that if internalized violence is projected “out there”, that the sense of responsibility for it disappears, limits on its use disappear, and that massive and intractable rationalizations become necessary. Psychologically, this is how people like Noam Chomsky or Bill Ayers justify their support of programs of mass torture–physical and mental–rape, capricious imprisonment, suppression of basic human rights, generalized poverty, and of course the implementation of insurmountable systems of class.

When I look at the landscape particularly of our supposedly best universities, what I see is pervasive psychopathology, and cognitive dissonance suppressed only with the power of the routinization of nonsense.

Moral abandonment leads necessarily to cruelty. Any person incapable of a non-ironic, non-contingent moral code will necessarily join a group which tells him or her what to do. If conformity is the only virtue, then power is the arbiter of right and wrong. Those who seek power, seek it to use it. Hence the first sentence in this paragraph.

I explore these issues at some length in this piece, which is nominally about the Vietnam War, but which really just uses that as a jumping off place: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page19.html

It is not perfect, but it is in my view solid, and gets to the meat of the matter.

It would be easy to forget that, looking at the complicit media–whose “conservative” side still shills in most cases for something far short of actual conservatism–Ron Paul is still in the race.  I’m not big on videos, but I think this one tells its story better than words: http://www.infowars.com/ron-pauls-delegates-deluge-minnesota-washington-state-louisiana/

We borrow $120 billion a month.  There are no plans by anyone but Ron Paul to seriously address this, and the plain fact is that the demographic wave of Baby Boomers is just starting to hit.  The bleeding on the “entitlement” front has just started, and this will be overwhelming even if Obamacare–which adds a HUGE increase in spending just when we are already tipping over–is overturned.  Romney is simply not serious as an adult or responsible leader.

Our NSA is implementing what will soon be the perfect surveillance state.  If you carry a cell phone, if you drive a car, if you use a credit card, they know where you are, how much money is in your bank, who you associate with, what you say to them, and no doubt have developed computer programs to develop quick and largely accurate psychological profiles of EVERYONE in the country.  People capable of dissidence can be spotted years before they express anything publicly.  A totalitarian state built on modern technology would quite simply be insurmountable in timeframes less than thousands of years, at least without internal dissidence that could be easily eliminated.

Ron Paul’s ideas need to be made mainstream.  The extent of the existential threats we face need to be broadcast far and wide.

I am going to give him another $100.  It is not much, but it will be worth it if he can make the fake conservatives squirm at the Republican National Convention.  I want less flag waving, and more substance.  To be honest, seeing the American flag does not bring out the emotions it used to, not when I contemplate the generalized mediocrity necessary to elect a Barack Obama ONCE, much less twice, or the stupidity expressed in the failure of most Americans to grasp what is actually going on.  Who can be proud of such a people?  Of course, there are many who are awake.  In them lies whatever hope we have of keeping our freedom and dignity.

Can we get back to discussing the Federal Reserve, and the role it plays in taking away our wealth?  Can we agree that it is PECULIAR that a private, invitation-only corporation run by and for certain very large banks has complete control, by law, of our banking system?  Do you realize that when you cash a check, it goes through the Federal Reserve?  It is my understanding that when you use a credit card, it ALSO goes through the Federal Reserve.  They charge for these services, and this is one of the ways that the people who work for them make FAT money, even though the enterprise as a whole–once the salaries and bonuses have been paid–shows no net profit at the end of the year.

Is it the case–do you want to try and argue–that the foxes best understand chickens and are therefore most to be trusted to watch the henhouse?  This seems, to put it mildly, quite dubious to me.

Why do you work so hard?  Because of fractional reserve banking, and the Federal Reserve system which keeps it from collapsing, quite literally daily.  These facts need to be known, and the Left and the Right need to come together in demanding an end to this inequitable system.  Corporations are not and never have been the problem.  They are a source of prosperity.  BANKS are the problem, and the reason all the productivity gains over the last century have translated into MORE hours and less net worth.