Author: White Whale

I have long felt that conventional psychotherapies are between barely useful and harmful. The problem, as I see it, is that people focus on discussing emotions, rather than processing emotions. You can discuss the feeling you had when your mother or father did x, y, or z to you, and what you felt, until it’s your turn to die, and increase your emotional well being little or at all.

Everything you have done and felt is encoded in your body, both in your “static” posture (there of course is no such thing, which is why Moshe Feldenkrais invented the work “acture”), and in your decision making and sentimentation (if that is not a word, well now it is) throughout the day; in your movement, in other words.

Logically, if the problem is encoded somatically, there is where the solution arises, and no conventional psychotherapeutic schools incorporate it, other than in the form of Autogenics, which to my mind is missing some key components.

I will have more to say, but an analogy I would draw to close this post is in the use of lacrosse balls to soften hardened, unresponsive muscle tissues. You lay on them and consciously seek out areas of pain, then FOCUS on those. The end result is greater responsiveness, and a DECREASE in pain.

If I were a member of the power elite, I would be putting big money on Rick Santorum right now. It’s a can’t lose proposition. If he fails in the General Election, as appears overwhelmingly likely, you get Obama again, who is deep in their pockets, and more or less reliable, provided one can ignore his lack of intelligence (he probably genuinely thinks he won the election on his merits).

But if Santorum by some miracle wins, his mandate will revolve around social issues, which are highly energizing for many conservatives, and which have NOTHING to do with addressing the on-going attacks on our liberties–particularly the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights–and which ignore entirely the increasing consolidation of power and money (related, obviously) in fewer and fewer hands.

Since he will make no cuts in spending, the Fabian “miracle” will continue to progress apace, and he will be irrelevent to the continued implementation of a global system of government. He is no conservative: this is obvious. He’s a Catholic school boy whose moment may well have come as a result of conscious manipulation of the political process. If one is unwilling to grant that, it is abundantly clear that he has made the most of opportunities handed him with peculiarly auspicious timing.

Look around you. Look at your freeways, your Taco Bells, your post office, your grocery store. Look at the choices on your cable television, the gun in your closet, the freedom to pick up and move any time you want, to marry who you want, to raise your children as you choose. Ponder upon the fact that, today, you can go anywhere and do anything within reason you like.

All of this is perishable. None of it will endure forever. This is a historically immutable fact. Forget it at your peril.

Here is a simple idea which is guaranteed to work: people who start companies pay no corporate taxes for their first two years. They pay income tax on their personal earnings, as of course do their employees, but the organization itself pays nothing.

The more companies that get started, the more jobs get created, and the more taxes get paid. This is simple enough. It is complicated by the fact that most scum sucking bureaucrats are unintelligent, unimaginative cowards who simply cannot grasp the balls needed to plunge your savings into a risky venture.

I will add that government bureaucracies are literally the mirror image of productive private ventures. Where private ventures can only grow by creating added benefit for society, bureaucracies grow precisely by expanding the domain of their control, and by sucking money out of the private sector in so doing. They exist at the expense of the actually productive members of society. Ayn Rand had that part right enough.

This should be clear, but I have no desire to make money from any of my writing. Scratch that: of course I want to make money. Everybody wants more money.

HOWEVER, it also pleases me to think that people might appropriate some of my ideas into their own work, and push it out into the world that way. Effectively, if I let people “steal” my ideas, they get out more efficiently. Therefore, I renounce all rights to anything I’ve published on the internet.

It would actually make me happy to see something literally cut and pasted from my website in some philosophical magazine, or political website, or wherever. I see traces of such, I think, already, but can’t remember if I have posted on this, and wanted to make my intent, and the legal status from my perspective of my work, completely clear.

If we visualize the world as a sort of undifferentiated gray cloud, then a tubaform is a lens which, when we look through it, causes patterns to emerge. They may or may not of course be accurate, but particularly if the pattern remains over time–over motion–then provisional truth claims can be reasonably reliably made.

Have to run, but thought I might clarify that. I may not have, but it is a small effort in that direction.

I have recently begun reading about Narcisstic Personality Disorder, and am finding that this particular prism–Tubaform, I have called this sort of thing–can be used to create order in many places.

Consider that a primary trait of narcissists is the need for attention and power. Logically, these traits–the need for these outcomes–will lead to greater efforts at attaining professional recognition and political power than would be the case for people without the disorder.

Logically, in a free society, this will lead over time to narcissists occupying much of the top strata of society.

Consider further that most historical democracies only last perhaps 200 years. This was the case, roughly, with the Athenian democracy, and roughly the case with the Roman Republic.

What one would expect to see, and what one does see particularly in true democracies like that of Athens, is the rise of the demagogue. Who is the demogogue? That person who says WHATEVER he needs to say to keep the people behind him. His motto is “the voice of the people is the voice of ME” (vox populi, vox ecco? I am no Latin scholar), where he silently substitutes God for “me”. He is not thinking long term. He does not care where the antics forced on him by the need to stay in front of a mutable mass of ridiculous human beings leads him. He is led, but he is for his purposes the leader, which is to say the object of attention.

Look at our current political scene. We have hordes of people either crying out to be the ones to “save America” by pursuing short-sighted, failure-certain policies, and it is difficult not to believe that on some level they KNOW IT.

This is the core reason why there are so few principled politicians: principled people do not survive, and in most cases lack the drive of the narcissists to be in power.

When we look at most Republicans, what we mostly need to see are intelligent narcissists who crave power for its own sake, who like being in the limelight, and who may believe somewhat the bullshit they peddle about caring about the national debt, and blah, blah, blah, but who are quite willing to forget what they “believe” if it means risking losing out on continuing to walk in the halls of power.

On the Left, there is a double layer of narcissism. They have the same desire as Republicans to stay in power, but they also believe, truly believe, the counterfactual claim that socialism improves human lives. They can’t explain the failure of Detroit and other cities, who were targeted with their supposedly “best” policies, to thrive, but they don’t care. They inhabit a magical world–one of the traits of narcissists–in which failures need not be explained, and if they are, all one needs do is blame someone else. Narcissists never take responsibility for anything.

I truly believe that BOTH Obamas are clinical narcissists. So is Nancy Pelosi. So is Harry Reid. But so too, in all likelihood, is much of the Republican leadership.

Look at our cultural heroes: movie stars and rock stars. It is considered a great compliment to say someone is a “rock star”. What does this mean? He is universally loved. We are deifying on some level the people who are emotionally the most shallow, least principled, and least able to offer us positive examples of how to live our lives with internalized senses of meaning.

Reality TV panders to this dynamic. I have not watched the show, but it seems obvious to me that every major person on Jersey Shore is likely a clinical narcissist.

More generally, the phenomenon of reality TV has long seemed to me to be symptomatic of a generalized cultural failure. Standards of conduct are no longer self evident. Children in many cases acculturate themselves through osmosis, which include mimetic repetition of what they see on TV. Lacking an internalized inner direction and sense of self, they try to find their way by watching other people. This is what narcissists do: lacking empathy and a sense of self, they must depend on environmental cues to pretend to be incorporated into the social space, which in fact they are not and can never be.

When one considers that we are now two generations down the road from the “Me Generation”, it also becomes attractive to speculate that no previous generations of Americans has ever been exposed to such pervasive parental and social selfishness and self preoccupation, and that what one expects in particular from the children of narcissists has become generalized.

What one expects to see are latent and apparently inexplicable rage. This is quite obviously present in our culture.

One expects to see inexplicable but recurrent bouts of depression. Check.

One expects to see feelings of rootlessness, shallowness, and unreality, caused by lacking a core sense of self. This is much harder to measure, but I think one could reasonably look at our pop culture and infer the presence of these traits as well. For those who have traveled, it is hard not to feel on some level a greater sense of the gravity of life in other countries. That has been my own experience, at any rate.

We have not always been like this. We were serious, sober, generous and idealistic in a good way 50 years ago.

Solutions: as I see it, the only block to this dynamic is the firewalls intended by our Founders, which is to say constant and structural obstacles to the consolidation of power either locally or nationally. States had the right to make moral decisions, but within the limits set by the Bill of Rights. As Madison argued, correctly I believe, the only realistic block to what I would term the rise of the narcissist is to put the narcissists in competition with one another, and prevent any of them from ever winning finally.

Our Supreme Court has failed us badly. This much is clear. Having arrogated to themselves the right of judicial review–not granted in the Constitution–they finally used it to enact law, and thereby began what is to my mind what may in the end be the decisive wound to the walls intended to protect us.

Of course there are ways to rectify this. I have been arguing for years that we need a Constitutional Amendment granting either the Senate or Congress as a whole the right to overturn Supreme Court decisions by a two thirds majority.

We of course further need to return to the era before the New Deal, when States could and often did provide safety nets for their citizens, but without Federal Government support.

Of this I am certain: given the capacity for collecting power, the narcissists who seek and win power will continue to aggregate it until they have it all. Every step in that direction is bad for psychologically normal people who just want to live and let live. Narcissists cannot do that. They do not live, and therefore need victims, or what is termed “narcissistic supply”.

Actually, one last note: one can see in vampires, werewolves, and zombies another expression of this dynamic. Vampires are not alive, but they need the blood–here, the attention–of others.

Werewolves are the concrete expression of rage which appears without warning, and in otherwise normal people.

Zombies are people who have lost a sense of self, of self direction, of purpose. They are the result of being exposed to narcissism as children. They have not stopped moving, but they lack a sense of unity as in-dividuals.

All thoughts worth pondering, in my view.

All of us can be broken, over some period of time. There is no doubt of this. The question is: do you stay broken? Life, to me is that aggregating bit of energy, that pulling together towards order, and its opposite is not pulling apart, but disorder at its basic, primitive level.

I could put it this way as well: if the Darwinians were right, then there could be no life. It is a self contradicting system, in that it rejects at the outset the possibility of intelligence within life; and yet it needs it to explain it.

Superficial people will misunderstand this. I retain hopes for a new “life science” actually worthy of the name.

I posted this some time ago, but only recently noted a typo which made my meaning unclear. Since I can’t find this in the Edit screen for some reason, I am simply reposting it.

While I am at, though, I will the following “prescript”. As I see it, there is no meaningful difference culturally between the Thuggees of India, who killed and stole in the service of their goddess Kali, and Communists. In both cases the GROUP is empowered to abandon all moral restraints against ALL other groups. The people within the group gain not just material benefits, but a larger whole in which to drown their individual soul, to commit what amounts to a sacrifice of the self, for the good of the whole. Yet, who can truly grant their “self”, without rage?

Recently I have been reading about the systemic affects of narcissism, and am figuring ou some very interesting–to me–things, and asking what I think are interesting questions.

For example, a trait of narcissists is that they expect their children to be exactly like them, little carbon copies. Yet, is this same demand not made in traditional cultures, where conformity ie expected, often to very rigidly enforced social codes of behavior? When there is no demand that a “self” be formed, is narcissism present or not? We assume that it must, because we believe in the power and importance of individual perspectives, but such value inheres in systems in motion, in which new accurate decisions must be made in complex situations. If your people has lived the same way for a 1,000 years and nothing changes, is there value in independent thinking? To argue otherwise one needs, I think, to begin to introduce notions of spiritual growth.

Many years ago, I read some conspiratorial large black book that suggested a link between Marxism and Satanism, the name of which I have forgotten. It was suggested to me by a friend whose family was politically connected. Well, I Googled those words today, and found this interesting link.

There are numerous interesting quotes from Marx here, but this will need to stand in for all of them:

With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the face of the world,
And see the collapse of this pygmy giant whose fall will not stifle my ardor.
Then will I wander godlike and victorious through the ruins of the world
And, giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.

In the intervening years I have developed this notion, that of Cultural Sadeism, in which the simple desire for pain, death and destruction is expressed politically and disguised–as indeed all Satanic naratives must be–in the rhetoric of compassion and community. No proper Sadeist tells the truth, unless in so doing he can hurt someone. That is just how it works.

When you add to this the frequent admiration that Saul Alinsky expressed for Lucifer, you see a common pattern. Now, I am not a Christian, per se, but it is manifestly obvious to anyone with eyes that there are evil people in this world, those who enjoy the power that comes with being able to hurt other people.

This is, I am increasingly convinced, the task which those who run the IMF in particular, and to a lesser extent the Federal Reserve, have set themselves.

In the end, I only perceive two primal motivational structures in this world: that of Love, and that of Power. In this, I agree with the Christians. Both are mixed in most people, and each expressed to varying extents during the course of their lives.

Yet, every Bell Curve has a beginning and an end: these are our saints, and our demons. Marx was a demon, as have been his followers ever since. No beliefs in non-material realities are needed to accept this view. One simply need term him an aggressively violent sociopath, who worked through his books–as did, by and large, Sade himself–to accomplish pain and destruction.

We see this metaphor of emotional “scars”, which more or less follows the idea that if you are cut, you can heal, but scar tissue is left.

I don’t believe this applies to emotional energies. I think that the process of “healing” is not that of returning to a condition of status quo ante, but rather of developing a qualitativelyi new gestalt.

Emotional healing is thus really emotional growth.