Author: White Whale

Pateience and time can break any watch.

I have a specific meaning, but will leave that as a cognitive Rorschach Test.

It has long been my contention that whenever mainstream science wakes up and considers the possibility that life is something more than material elements happening to fall together continually over millions of years, they will realize that there is something in life I have often called “non-statistical coherence”. There is a pattern and order to life that is broader and deeper than can be explained by purely materialistic models. OF COURSE we understand how DNA molecules replicate, how embryos grow, etc. What we do not understand is how the intelligence is added, by which undifferentiated stem cells become differentiated (red blood, bone, etc.) cells, and go to the right places, and build the right shapes.

The way I visualize life is that a spirit enters a prepared place, and builds the body around it. It brings with it a template, an order, and the material responds to it, with the mechanical tools provided by the DNA and various proteins.

The thought I had the other day I wanted to pass along, though–this is all more or less repetition–is that there are orders of life. The first aspect of life is awareness, by which I mean the capacity to react to environmental circumstances systemically. Plants, as an example, seem to have “feelings”. If you have never watched it, “The Secret Life of Plants” is worth the watch. (I have not watched this link, but assume it is OK.)

Now, the Jains have this idea that different sorts of life have different numbers of “senses”. If memory serves, plants have one (although it may be stones–since I think they believe everything is alive, making plants 2).

In my typology, then, plants have one grade of life. Animals have a second, the capacity for directed and thus purposive motion. They have the ability both to react and to make decisions.

Humans are capable of being conscious of being conscious, as individuals. I can think “I think”. This is a third level.

Extrapolating, though, I come up with a fourth level: that of being aware of OTHER consciousnesses, not just theoretically, but in actual union. This is the capacity for love, and the next stage of evolution.

Finally, logically, it seems to me that there is a superconsciousness, God, permeating everything, and that my consciousness can be conscious of this other grade of consciousness. This may or may not be the highest level.

These are of course just words, but may lead somewhere for someone. Good luck!!!

The more I study the matter, the more obvious it seems to me that the root cause of totalitarianism–particularly that sponsored by intellectuals–is the prevalence amongst such people of clinical narcissism, the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Quite literally, such people are capable neither of conceiving that other points of view might be valid, or that their own conceptions other than perfectlyh correct. They are incapable of empathy, of feeling other people’s pain, other than in the abstract, which is useful to them in that they can then become, again in the abstract, the “saviors” of people who have not asked for their help, and who generally cry for them to cease and desist once they realize in what their “help” consists.

It is said (by Christopher Lasch, among others) that we live in the Age of Narcissism. If we posit that there is no such thing as a NONmalignant narcissist, perhaps it is easier to see why we are surrounded by oceans of self doubt, rage, intellectual incoherence, pervasive muttering by our so-called leaders, and are on a runaway train directed over the cliff of national bankruptcy. All of this is plain to a casual observer of our media.

It is perhaps ironic that what are arguably the two most pernicious influences on the American landscape–Leftism and Objectivism–were both brought into being by Russians, whose harsh world perhaps encourages the sort of inwardness that causes them to forget that Others exist at all.

Again, with regard to Objectivism, I will deal with it presently. For the time being, let me simply note that in her own lifetime, what she created was a Cult of Personality, one characterized by purges and even literal loyalty oaths. That is not freedom: it is, as some percipient observers even then noted, Fascism.

Here is Santorum’s position on cutting spending, plank one in his program: “Commit to cut $5 trillion of federal spending within 5 years.”

That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But you know what? It doesn’t mean a fucking thing, and it pisses me off.

Once you learn how these fucking clowns ruining our country do their math, you realize that what he is almost certainly talking about is cutting $5 trillion from planned INCREASES in spending, and that spread out over as many as a ten years or more. He may be talking less than the $20 billion–one sixth of what we borrow MONTHLY–Romney has planned to cut from the annual budget.

I want to be crystal clear: if we do not elect Ron Paul, it will not make one fucking bit of difference if we reelect Obama or any of the other three knuckleheaded cowards running for the Republican nomination.

WE ARE GOING BROKE. THIS IS ALL SERIOUS PEOPLE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT. Period. All of our power–political, economic, military–depends on being able to pay our bills. We will lose our liberty within 15-20 AT MOST if we keep electing crass cowards and fools. This is the simple and unavoidable truth.

For my part, I see no serious reason to object to a third party run by Paul, if he can’t get the nomination. There is so little substantive difference fiscally between Obama and the Bobsey Triplets that I really would prefer the chance of Obama to the certainty of futility; and in any event, Mitt Romney is the only who would even be able to beat Obama.

I’ve had a few, and have some long serious posts to make, but am choosing to postpone them. For now: “To fear the new is to fear personal growth; and to do this is to choose death.”

It’s not bad. I have been playing a lot lately with the notion of qualitative growth. We develop selves that are a cluster of habits, but often those selves are constructed to solve problems which no longer exist once we leave our homes. They solve the wrong problems, and quite often prevent the solution of new problems, or even create problems in and of themselves.

It is in my view a useful and often true belief that we are enabled by birth to solve emotional difficulties, and that the challenge is less to create solutions, as to not PREVENT the emergence of solutions. To some greater or lesser extent, I think all of us regularly kill our better, higher selves, out of fear.

Again, I’ll have more to say. Tonight I am going to watch some mindless TV. It’s like drinking a Coke: what you do rarely will not hurt you too much. My mind has been very, very active today, and I think I have some good ideas to ponder, develop, and eventually deploy.

We borrow $120 billion a MONTH, and this will continue if we reelect Obama, OR if we elect Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, or Newt Gingrich. NONE of them have plans to cut spending other than cosmetically. To the extent they address it, it is to use tax cuts to stimulate the economy, which does nothing to affect the size of government.

There is only one credible fiscal conservative in the race: Ron Paul. He plans to abolish multiple Cabinet level departments, cut spending by a trillion his first year, balance the annual budget in three years, and cut taxes to stimulate the economy.

If out of control government is your concern, do not look to anyone but Ron Paul to address it.

As importantly, please consider that only Ron Paul and Mitt Romney poll well enough to beat Obama. People forget that the battle to win the Republican Primary and that to win the General Election are two different beasts. Paul attracts support across the political spectrum. There are MANY Democrats who will vote for Paul over Obama, but not Romney.

Here is a poll that bears this out: http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/09/Who-Would-You-Vote-For-in-November-if-the-Candidates-Were.gif

If this basic logic makes sense to you, please repost this link, or cut and paste it an email it to your friends and relatives.

Morality is movement. If the moral sense is not vital, it is dead. Persisting absolutism in specifics is death. I say this in particular with regard to people like Ayn Rand, who I now realize qualified on all 9 diagnostic criteria as having a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. One trait of such people is that you are either with them or against them. There is no gray.

This trait in her appealed to many people, drifting as they were (and are) in a world of moral relativism. You are confused, and you want someone to cry out “this is wrong, and this is right”.

This is, however, the social basis of Fascism, whether of the nationalistic, racist, or classist (Communistic) variety. The cry for Absolutism is the cry to be submerged into a uniform and very dull mass of people all saying the same thing. If they are all saying: we are unique and elite individuals–as Objectivists under Rand’s direct influence did, and as many seemingly even now do–they are still chanting in unison.

As I see, there are two principle meaningful sources of happiness: effective work, characterized by “Flow”; and effective love, characterized by taking pleasure in the happiness of others.

Now, we see this demand from time to time that our role in life is to “serve others”. I don’t accept that this is our primary task. It is rejection of this idea that Objectivists find so appealing in Rand’s philosophy. What if you don’t WANT to serve others? What if it pisses you off? What if the people you are supposed to serve are whiny, self indulgent jackasses?

I have an answer for this, in motion. As I often do, I will use the analogy of the particle and the wave: you must be both, and be able to transition back and forth. To be interesting, to be someone whose entire sense of personal value does not depend on others, you must have the capacity for de facto narcissism, in the self absorption of hard creative work. When you are a creative INDIVIDUAL, you are particulate, you are separate.

Even clinical narcissists, in the throes of real creativity, are intensely interesting, and pull people in. That is what Rand did.

But the monad is alone; it can never be fully satisfied without regular absorption in something larger: hence the wave, the satisfaction of helping other people also learn how to do effective work, which includes the “work” of being happy with you, and the work you do being happy with them: being empathetic, supportive, comforting when it is needed, and cajoling when that is needed.

Above all, one must remember the principle that growth is the task–growth as individuals, growth as members of a social group, and eventually growth by default as a global community. This in my view is the nature of Goodness, which I view as the most USEFUL purpose of life.

I will reiterate that I do have absolute values, but that these values can get deployed in such various ways, that they should enable people to keep their eyes on the goal, and not get stuck in dogmatism. Those values, again, are: the rejection of self pity; perseverance (whose most basic element is not killing yourself); and perceptual breathing/perceptual movement, which in its most basic form is the persistent and habitual rereconciliation of abstractions with observable reality, and in particular of the connection (or not) between intention and outcome.

As an interesting exercise of that last, one might I think productively ask what Ayn Rand’s philosophy has “acted to”, in Hayek’s sense. It is clearly not all bad, but much of it is. Plainly it acts to build narcissists, since that is her ideal.

She warrants treatment on my other website, by which I mean I intend to write an essay on her life, philosophy, and use both as an entry way to a discussion of my own views on the nature and purpose of Individualism.

For now, I did want to offer several cursory observations. First, she was almost certainly a clinical narcissist. She seems never to have actually loved her husband, Frank O’Connor, hurt him often, and yet needed him desperately.

I think she had a “Rosebud” moment in her early childhood, which can actually likely be identified. I will pull the story.

No John Galt would need Ayn Rand. Nor would he need sycophants of the sort with which she chose to surround herself most of her life.

John Galt, for her, was God. He was the reification of her desire to live a life free of conflict, suffering, and mental uncertainty. This desire, in turn, was created by an inability to process the horrible sufferings of her life, in terms of loneliness, being misunderstood, having a narcissistic mother, and of course the physical privations of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. The reality, of course, is that John Galt was a sociopath. This freed him from some conflicts, but created a lack of emotional depth and in particular the capacity for empathy.

Altruism, for Rand, is used as a synonym for “hypocrisy”. She herself benefited often from the genuine generosity of others, and very simply could have not have written her books without large supplies of it. For her part, she offered it at times as well, although in general she was quite vindictive, and selfish in ways she would not have tolerated in others.

Corollary: Behind every “self made” man or woman stand many people he or she has simply chosen to forget. That was plainly the case with Rand.

I made copious notes while listening to her autobiography. When time permits, I am going to read John Galt’s speech, Roark’s courtroom speech, and Francisco something’s disquisition on money. Then I will collate it, post it on the other site, and mention it here.

Abstraction is violence. I have recently realized this. It is a way I personally process anger. It is confining. I read a Sherlock Holmes story once where Holmes commented that the mind becomes channelized and “freed” with confinement. Logically, he said, he ought to lock himself in a box.

Feelings expand, like wind and light. Abstractions, though, are hard. They have firm places and times and shapes, at least to me.

One wonders–I wonder–about how people like George Bernard Shaw could discuss with such apparent equinimity the mass murder of social misfits. The reason is that, as I believe Oscar Wilde commented of him, that he was incapable of poetry. He was hard, despite his mechanical virtuosity with wit.

Secondly, I was watching in my mind the progress, as on a graph, of the mathematical interaction of different “channels” within a personality. As I have said earlier, I think the most useful way to think of the “unconscious” is that we have multiple personalities. Most of them just sit there, mute, dumb, until a specific circumstance–normally an affective circumstance–calls them into action. They sit there like statues, then come to life.

Channel A is our conscious life. For people who are largely integrated, who do not have long term unprocessed negative emotions like anger, lust, resentment, sadness, and the like, if we posit say four channels, they all more or less progress in tandem, pari passu.

But when you have a negative unprocessed–unaccepted, I think is the word–emotion, then the lines get curved and distorted. They start to circle around the actual center of gravity, the emotion that won’t go away, the personality that won’t untie its own knot and go away.

Finally, I think the foundational problem of “modernity”–that problem simultaneously created by and diagnosed by our imbecilic thought leaders–is that of retaining form. We all need tribes. We need groups. We need certainties. But we are told we can’t have any. And the people who tell us this fail to see that they themselves have formed a tribe consisting of those who oppose tribes.

The problem is not how to create: the problem is how to prevent what might be termed uncreation, dissolution, and even destruction.

This is intended to be emailed. Please copy it and email it to your usual suspects.

Please put aside your preconceptions for a moment.

The following statement is both simple and true, even if you haven’t yet thought of him in this way: Ron Paul is the most politically conservative Republican to have had a serious shot at the nomination since Calvin Coolidge declined to run, and chose to return to Vermont, nearly a 100 years ago.. And RON PAUL CAN WIN. National polls consistently point to his support extending across the spectrum. Romney doesn’t have this, and neither does Obama. Both CNN and CBS have found this, recently. Here is the CBS poll: http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/09/Who-Would-You-Vote-For-in-November-if-the-Candidates-Were.gif

Here is a poll from the Des Moines Register showing Paul winning over Obama decisively in the Buckeye State, something of a national bellweather: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120218/NEWS09/120218015?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150568275387677_21286437_10150569344772677

In my view, the situation is not complicated. According to recent budget projections, in 2011 we are projected to take in $1.9 trillion, and spend $3.3 trillion. This is a gap of $1.4 trillion, or about $116 BILLION a MONTH. There are various ways of doing the accounting, but this is the rough reality, and we all know it. Our national debt already exceeds $15 trillion, and is equal to the entirety of our annual economic output. Debt loads this size have historically inevitably led to economic catastrophes. Obamacare and the entry of the Baby Boomers into our Social Security and Medicare rolls will only accelerate this process, which is already unsustainable.

What in your estimation constitutes a rational, proportional response to this situation?

Mitt Romney has pledged to cut $20 billion from our annual budget (5% of a very small part of the budget), and in effect appoint a committee to study the issue. Does this sound like a solution that is on par with the size of the problem?

Supposed “conservative” Newt Gingrich called Paul Ryan’s budget plan–which is at least trying to wrestle with the problems we face, “right wing social engineering”. Here is what is interesting about that statement: Ryan’s plan doesn’t even balance the ANNUAL budget until 2040 . During that period, our debt will continue to increase, year on year. Predictably, Gingrich makes no commitments at all with respect to budget cuts.

Ron Paul has pledged to cut annual expenditures by $1 trillion his first year. He is going to abolish the Departments of Education, HUD, Commerce, Energy, and Interior. He is going to abolish the TSA, which is strip searching everyone who flies that it wants to.

He is going to lower the corporate tax rate to 15%. This will have ENORMOUS and IMMEDIATE stimulating effects on our economy.

Self evidently, he will reverse Obamacare, and substantially every Executive Order Obama issued, along with implementing a legal framework removing the ability for the Executive Branch to impose laws without consulting Congress.

He is going to audit the Federal Reserve. For those who complacently assume that the Fed is benevolent, consider the following: our next generation aircraft carrier, the Ford Class, will cost some $10 billion each. Ben Bernanke, without asking any elected officials’ approval, created (just in the second round of so-called “Quantitative Easing”), from scratch, $600 BILLION–the equivalent of 60 state of the art aircraft carriers. And we don’t even know who got the money. We have no way of knowing. But we can assume it went to the already rich, and not to ordinary Americans, who will be hurt by the inflation that clearly will follow whenever the economy recovers. This is absurd.

With regard to foreign policy, talk with a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Ask them what good we are doing there. Ask them if they think we should be there. If you can find one who thinks that we are protecting America–now, after 10 years of war–then go buy a lottery ticket because it’s your day to defy the odds. Paul gets more donations from active duty military than all the other candidates combined. They are tired of fighting, and it is hard to blame them. It is impossible to measure progress. They sweep an area, destroy weapons caches and arrest some people, then three months later things are the same as before. Although only one percent of the population, veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars constitute 20% of the suicides.

Or if Iran is a concern, ask yourself: what exactly are we supposed to attack, and what will be the military benefit of it? Can we, with even the best of military strikes, one using ground penetrating bombs to enter deep down bunkers, PERMANENTLY prevent the Iranians from getting nukes? Of course not. To suggest we can, without a regime change–which no one is seriously pursuing–is ludicrous. What will happen is we will give the Iranian government vast increases in their domestic political support–pushing us further from our goal, which is not a nuke-free Iran but rather peace in the region, with the two not necessarily being contradictory–and simply DELAY them. We move one step forward and two back.

Again, ask any combat veterans you know how eager they are to attack Iran, and what difficulties they see. The only way to do it right is to conquer and occupy the nation, and I think most would agree that the threat at this point will not justify that enormous expenditure of American lives and wealth. The Iranian leadership may talk nuts, but most of them will prove in my view in the end attached to their own lives and positions.

With regard to electability, Ron Paul consistently places within a couple points of Romney when matched against Obama. He can count on everyone right of center to vote for him simply because they cannot stomach Obama. But he also appeals to large swathes of the Left, who share with the Right a fear of government power grabs, and who have a distaste for foreign wars.

To repeat, PAUL IS ELECTABLE.

Here is the question: do you want to sacrifice genuine conservatism–low taxes, huge decreases in the size and power of the Federal Government–for a one or two point advantage in the polls, and for a candidate NOBODY–except the banking community–is enthusiastic about?

Please ponder this carefully before you vote in your primary, and please pass this email along to everyone you think might have an interest in reading it.

A VOTE FOR ANYONE BUT PAUL IS A VOTE FOR THE STATUS QUO, WITH ONLY MINOR AND COSMETIC VARIATIONS.

End note: I have ignored Rick Santorum because his social conservatism–for example his deep opposition to homosexuality–will simply not play outside a small core demographic that doesn’t even comprise, in my view, the majority of the REPUBLICAN party, much less the national electorate.