Author: White Whale

In silence, lines extend.

PSALM OF THE DAY.

A something in a summer’s day,
As sIow her flambeaux burn away,
Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer’s noon, —
An azure depth, a wordless tune,
Transcending ecstasy.

And still within a summer’s night
A something so transporting bright,
I clap my hands to see;

Then veil my too inspecting face,
Lest such a subtle, shimmering grace
Flutter too far for me.

The wizard-fingers never rest,
The purple brook within the breast
Still chafes its narrow bed;

Still rears the East her amber flag,
Guides still the sun along the crag
His caravan of red,

Like flowers that heard the tale of dews,
But never deemed the dripping prize
Awaited their low brows;

Or bees, that thought the summer’s name
Some rumor of delirium
No summer could for them;

Or Arctic creature, dimly stirred
By tropic hint, — some travelled bird
Imported to the wood;

Or wind’s bright signal to the ear,
Making that homely and severe,
Contented, known, before

The heaven unexpected came,
To lives that thought their worshipping
A too presumptuous psalm.

——————————————————————————–
Emily Dickinson

What if you knew it was your destiny to spend your next 1,000 lifetimes fighting like a son of a bitch for what is just and right in whatever world you land on?

It’s always one hill at a time, isn’t it? Me: I like the idea.

I posted the following on this website.

This is a topic I have given a lot of thought to. As I see it, the core problem that faces all human beings is the problem of pain. Why should we live at all, as Camus, asked, particularly if there is no larger world around this one? Atheism makes this a very hard question to answer.

Now, the existence or non-existence of God is an empirical question which I won’t examine here. (I do on my website cursorily).

But all of us have to figure out some means of transmuting pain into something higher, or we WILL kill ourselves.

Look at this video, from one of the rougher parts of the training of American Air Force Special Operations troops http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X07-xQ_YajI&feature=relatedIs this not a type of torture? But it has a purpose, that of making them stronger. Their motto is “voluntary suffering is weakness leaving the body”.

But what if you are unable, within the constraints of your perceptual abilities–as expressed in the latent or explicit philosophies we all use to guide our lives–to find any good reason to live?

Do you then not enter into a direct, unmediated relationship with pain, almost as a protective reaction? If you are seeking shelter from the maladies of bitterness, self pity, resentment and unrelenting hostility to the world, can you do better than to make of submission a creed, a religion, and is it not the hope of all the faithful to be martyred for their faith?

My preoccupation is with Goodness, but I see no way to pursue the idea properly without seeing life on this planet as it really is. Plainly, these sorts of things help some people. As I imagine it, it makes them feel more alive, more tingly, and releases some latent energy in them.

The question, though, is: is this the only way, and if not, is it the best way? Many of us look at these practices and see mental illness. I look at them and see defective solutions, but to real problems, and solutions which are better than the alternative in most cases, which for many would likely include suicide.

Foucault spent a career talking about power, and yet he liked to be whipped.

I could go on, but I have things to do. There are parts of these things that are mildly erotic for me, for moments, but mostly they are gross, and the awaken empathy in me for the women who are so desperately sad and lonely–don’t call this love–that they endure these things just to stay with the man who abuses them. “I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all”.

I have called BDSM “ersatz sacred”. True sacrality is something which converts pain into meaning. It is the reason we suffer voluntarily. People obviously suffer voluntarily in BDSM, but they don’t BUILD anything from it. There is no more complex structure there afterwards than before. There is perhaps release, but not expansion, at least over the longer term.

Free markets less price derangement=generalized wealth.

The question arises from time to time about monopolies and cartels. There are exceptions to all rules, but in my view, over the long haul, this problem can be solved in two ways. First, the development of cultural habits that demand enough, but not too much. Second, if the value of money is allowed to rise through a policy of monetary stasis, then wealth will be generalized and spread broadly enough that there will be no NEED for monopolies.

There are people in this world who enjoy fighting and winning zero sum contests. But they are not the majority, and the goal is not perfection. If we have a reactive surface of educated, motivated and diligent citizens, problems can be dealt with as they come up, within the larger context of free markets less price derangement.

I will add that one problem with futurists, as I see it, is projecting what will HAPPEN, rather than who we will be. The first flows naturally from the second, making cultural contuity and improvement infinitely more important than technological improvement.

If I’ve used that tagline before, then the “really real” core of Keynes. . .

is Signal Distortion. If prices act as a signalling system, and if a system of prices forms an Extended Order which efficiently orders the production, delivery and consumption of wanted goods, then anything which deranges prices deranges the system. The signalling system doesn’t operate properly.

I would use the analogy of my own understanding of cancer: if parts of the economy are made external to the larger free flow of goods as facilitated by the price system, then not just those parts, but the economy as a whole becomes deranged. Massive government spending is a sort of cancer which wears a hole in a weblike fabric.

As an example I have used, much IMF and World Bank aid has been spent on things like dams in third world countries, that did not have remotely enough money or industrial capacity to warrant those investments. The money comes in, gets spent on construction–which employs for some years local people–then the money is gone.

What has happened in the meantime is that the wages paid those workers deranged all the other local wages. Supply and demand, free market forces were not at work. This hurts EVERYONE outside the system, which is to say all private small businesses in that market area. Further, it only helps non-independent entities–which in general is to say government elites–and damages all private enterprise that could be viable independently and sustainably. This is a disaster for any economy. It does HARM, on balance. And this is more or less what FDR did with the New Deal, which beyond question extended rather than shortened the Great Depression.

Keynes knew this. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing.

It is baffling to me to behold people actually arguing, in this day and age, that Keynesian ideas COULD benefit anyone, much less that they do.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: semi-autonomous entities along Keynesian lines. During the time they did their damage, they wee “Government Sponsored Entities” (if memory serves), but they did not have to report to anyone. Moreover, they were largely unregulated. The result? Complete price deviancy and malignancy. Homes were allowed to inflate at far greater rates than free markets would have allowed, prices were deranged, and the fix–which we are still in–can only consist in reattaching the housing sector to the larger economy as a whole, absent–let me coin a phrase: “Price Derangement Entities”, or PDE’s.

As I think about it, such entities could be counted on to roll around as virtual wrecking balls, leaving economic damage wherever they go. This would apply EVEN IF they were not trying to do that, and even if they were not fundamentally socialists of the Keynesian stripe. This would include any agency associated with the misnamed War on Poverty, and quite obviously the entirety of the so-called Stimulus. TARP would apply.

Keynes was unquesionable a first-order economic genius, and as such an idiot savant. He was as stupid in the moral arena as he was brilliant in the realm of economic subversion.

The last century has been filled with much stupidity and much evil. I of course can’t say if it’s too late to turn it back, but perseverance and not giving a shit if you succeed or fail because there is no fucking way you are quitting is a fundamental part of Goodness, as I have defined it. So the possibility of success is entirely irrelevant.

Go to it, and do or die.

It occurred to me today that Keynes latter career can be summarized as creating a body of thought that, when implemented, would in Hayek’s terms Act For prosperity, but in reality Act To poverty and increased governmental control. You create a plausible pretext, all while knowing that to the extent people followed your ideas, they would get the opposite.

He further immunized his system from criticism by making it tautological: if you spend money to boost the economy and the economy improves, then it was your doing. If you spend money and it fails, then you didn’t spend enough. Add to this the fundamental insight that politicians never balance budgets, and you have debt accumulating day-in, day-out for decades.

This is the result that has in fact been achieved. He also has in place his “semi-autonomous bodies”, like Fannie Mae, the IMF, the World Bank, and of course the Federal Reserve. To this I would add semi-autonomous AGENCIES, like the FDA, the EPA, the Dept. of Homeland Security, etc. Practically, many of these agencies can escape the scrutiny of Congress. They enable Obama to execute policies by fiat, rather than by legislation.

The aim was for wealth to be less important, as Keynes himself said, and his hope–pathetic and ungrounded as it may have been–that people without money would find better sources of meaning that he achieved in his own life.

If, as I have posited, the principle task of meaning formation (one of four tasks which “culture” performs, and by far the most important one) is contextualizing and reducing psychological pain–as exemplified chiefly by resentment and self pity–then any social order which does not accept the necessity of pain in life, has in fact rejected any and all possible cultural forms. It has castrated itself, and will in short order be taken over by another culture which actually provides solutions to that problem.

I have in mind at the moment Sweden, and stories like this. Even from a strictly materialistic standpoint, girls and boys are put together differntly. Their hormonal landscapes are different. Their bodies are different. Their brains are different.

From what moral principle does the need for reducing and eventually eradicating all cultural markers arise? From where, specifically, are these children to get the raw building blocks of “identity”, and how exactly are small children to decide who they “want to be”? The logical end of giving this freedom would be to stop nurturing and guiding them altogether, and let them stew in silence for ten years, and see what happens. Self evidently, that would be child abuse. As I see it, though, even this abdication of direction amounts to child abuse.

Presumably, of coruse, there will be tacit and unconscious reinforcement for boys to act like girls, and vice versa. The question is: will this make them happier in life? Will this teach them to face the challenges of life–such that remain in a cradle to grave welfare state–with dignity, poise, and perseverance?

I doubt it. All of the Scandinavian countries are committing slow cultural suicide, by reproducing at half the rate needed to maintain their populations. This is happening at the same time as massive increases in birth rates among Muslim immigrants. Unless something changes, Mark Steyn is right is assuming that all the cultures which allows this to happen will be submerged eventually in Sharia.

To my mind, this is an abdication of responsibility on the part of the Swedes and others. They want to live in this make-believe, fairy-tale world, where everyone is always nice, and hard men and hard women are never needed; where suffering is always accidental, and sybaritic pleasures the norm.

That is not the world we live in. We may be able to build it someday, but only by marginalizing and converting or destroying all the anti-liberal elements in it.

As I say from time to time, I definitely repeat themes, but what I intend are what amount to sketches, in which I try to flesh out ideas in new ways, and thereby find new pathways to new places. The treatment of women in our culture is a principle consideration of mine, and I am exploring that theme here in slightly new ways.

It seems to me that women retain and transmit 2/3rds of most cultures, if not more. Men may do most of the talking and most of the walking, but they feel keenly the women around them.

Women feel more deeply and more often than most men, in my view. They are more sensitive socially. They reach, in my view, states of connectedness and spirituality more readily than men. They enter into mythic worlds, in my view, more easily than men. I will grant to the reductionists one item on this: their brains are physically wired differently, such that they can use their entire brains with greater facililty. There are more connections between the hemispheres, and their hormonal cycles necessitate learning to manage and recognize mood changes. Emotional circulation is more or less necessitated by their biological reality, when that is much less the case with men.

Maternalistic cultures tend to lose in competitions with paternalistic cultures. Sensitivity will lose out to naked and structured aggression every time. Lao Tzu counseled “understanding the masculine but keeping to the feminine”. According to the legend, he said this on the way to an unknown fate out in the mists beyond the boundaries of the kingdom he was leaving for good.

As a sort of romantic ideal (and I use the word romantic in all sorts of senses; in this case what I intend is an outcome that would be emotionally fulfulling, in the sense that most of us are happy when the good guys win), I would like to see the triumph of Liberalism in the sense of much greater cultural diversity, and I cannot see how it can be retained psychosocially unless we empower women to BE women. Unless we respect them for what they can do BETTER than men, rather than demand of them that they BE men culturally, and only differ in their capacity for the physical reproduction of the species.

What do I mean by this? As it seems to me, women by far have the best aptitude for emotional and sexual satisfaction, IF, and ONLY IF, they are given the affection and safety they need to truly open up emotionally and spiritually. This, in turn, can only happen in a relationship in which sex is one of the factors, but not the primary one. This, in turn, leads to the creation of women who dominate their worlds qualitatively, who raise good kids, and empower their men to be men; and who in turn preserve our culture, as transmitted and influenced disproportionately by those women.

I feel, too, that most women do not want to be dominated (clearly, some categorilly do, as do some fewer number of men), but do want to be led in matters pertaining to the real world. They want men who are stable, reliable, mostly sensitive, and who know who they are and what they want. This is the field within which the optimal blossoming happens.

One needs to look, therefore, with great consternation to the widespread eradication of the notion of the woman as feminine. What was bought in the sexual revolution was greater social acceptance of women detaching themselves emotionally from their need to nurture, and instead pursuing pleasure as its own end, regardless of the emotional cost. Such women need never get married or have kids. They can pursue men solely based upon pleasure considerations, and not with regard to their characters, or with an aim to develop a deep and trusting relationship. They can abandon all pretense of pursuing love, in other words, and settle instead for physical relationships that are not qualitatively better than really good masturbation. I have seen women post on-line that they preferred dancing to sex. It’s easy enough to see why that would be the case.

And our culture is increasingly filled with anger at women. The black culture is particularly guilty of this. I have personally heard ten year old black kids refer to ten year old black girls as “hoes”. You could google almost any random hip-hop song and find aggressive and sexually brutal lyrics when it comes to women. They seem to view women as objects.

Most of them, statistically speaking, grow up in single parent homes, in which the father plays little to no role. This means they have to get all of their emotional nourishment from their mother, who was often emotionally underdeveloped when she had them. They have both an exaggerated need for her, and likely an underlying anger for putting them into that situation. Psychosocially, this leads to chronic and generally oppressive denigration of the feminine.

But this phenomenon is not confined there. I went to see the “X-Men: First Class” movie, and saw a number of somewhat disturbing scenes I wanted to point out as supportive of misogyny. First, the CIA agent has to pretend to be stripper/prostitute. One could say, I suppose, that our culture is becoming “stripperized”, in that normal housewives are taking stripping classes; it is a common way for college girls to earn tuition money; and it is talked about in the mainstream media all the time. When I was growing up, such clubs were for dirty old men. Tattoo parlors were for bikers, sailors, truckers, and convicts. Much has changed.

Then you get the image of a girl kissing a man while he is taking her blood, which Eric Lenscher says is “kinky”. Pain for the woman and pleasure for the man. One could almost, I suppose, see an echo of the vampirism that surrounds our kids nowadays. If you have kids or an interest, go check out the “teen fiction” section of your local bookstore. All the books whose colors are mostly red and black deal with images of what I would argue symbolize morally and emotionally defective human beings, projected onto fictional creatures like vampires or werewolves.

And Havoc does target practice with the forms of women. That is what he is destroying. They could have used bales of hay or anything else. They used female mannikins.

Emma Frost is tied up and briefly strangled, an image which follows shortly on that of her copulating with the Russian General. This is S & M.

Finally, we have the image of the sex-worker turning to hate and murder. One wonders if those balls she shoots out do not symbolize the internalization of the rage she felt performing oral sex, that is then thrown back out into the world as explosions.

All of these themes happen mythically, or if you prefer unconsciously, or semi-consciously. But they feed into the understandings of both men and women of what our proper relationship should be.

Actually, I will add that Charles Xavier had an absent mother. I wonder if the sensation of that is not increasingly common even among those who grow up in two parent homes, whose mothers are unfeminine and unnurturing.

I would think that is a common experience of children of single parent homes, whose mothers work a lot of hours, are tired when they are home, and all too many of whom are not up to the task of feeding their little ones emotionally.

Now, sexual relations are complicated. In what I believe is the world’s oldest extant epic, Gilgamesh, the hero starts the poem out by in effect making a habit of raping the wives of all the men in the kingdom. If memory serves, he was always the first one to have sex with a woman when she got married. He was big and strong, so no one could stop him. How they end this is the subject of the poem.

I know so many women–an amazing number of women–who seem to be somewhat masochistic. I hear stories, and wonder why they react the way they do. Women, in general, really do seem to want to be led/mildly dominated–even though of course they complain about it–and they will put up with a lot of crap from men to protect fundamentally unhealthy relationships. They talk endlessly about problems they never fix. It is relatively easy to conclude from this that they don’t mind the basic situation, provided they can talk about it enough.

It does seems to me our culture in some ways is getting meaner, at least in terms of the media presented to us, which is presumably indicative of larger fluctuations in taste. Part of this is directed at women.

Sartre had some sort of idea where he set up the relation between the sexes as fundamentally antagonistic. Clearly, this is the case sometimes. At the same time, there are cycles back and forth–even and perhaps particularly in healthy relationships-where power swings back and forth, love swings back and forth, attention swings back and forth, vulnerability swings back and forth. A healthy relationship is alive and evolving. At a minimum it is a reality that is fulfilling for both parties most days, in most ways.

This requires, though, respect for and appreciation of the feminine.

As I feel it worth pointing out from time to time, I use Liberalism in its historical form, of desiring as much liberty for people as is possible. Liberty, liberal, and, in my view, the word for life are all related. Self evidently, what goes by that name currently is anything but liberating. Those under the thrall of this doctrine believe in using the regulatory power of the government to engineer society, which necessarily results in unwarranted restrictions in economic and political liberty.

Anyway, that was just a clarification.

The point I wanted to make is that liberty can in some respects be treated as a commodity. Specifically, one can posit that the demand for liberty goes up as cultural diversity increases. Many of the little wars around the world amount to one group of people wanting to live their own way, who have taken up arms to free themselves from some other group.

The more liberty you want, the higher the price (the higher the demand, the more costly the supply). If you are content to let others make most of your decisions, then you don’t have to work much. If you want you and your community to make most fundamental decisions, then you have to get it done.

The cost of absolute liberty is death, since if you want the freedom to kill others, you shall be killed yourself. Note, too, that this death can be moral–I have often spoken of hard-core leftists as “moral suicides”–in that moral death some people pay for the “liberty” of being enslaved. This is a psychological malady of the sort Rousseau talked about. It is the outcome of being so ungenerative as to be unable to form a coherent code for governing oneself, and therefore seeking release from freedom.

The cost of to liberty of order within a political system rises with the immorality of the people, and falls with their capacity to rationally govern themselves.

Liberalism, then, is a political implementation of basic economics as applied to the mass forces which govern behavior. As I have often said, the operative metaphors are Smith’s Invisible Hand, and Hayek’s Extended Order.

The essence of Liberalism is breaking things down to localized orders to the extent practical. Some look back romantically on the countless diverse Medieval towns–around the world–which has so many local customs, festivals, ways of dressing, etc. I want a return to this much more interesting way of living, consisting in genuine diversity.

As a general rule, you can look up the antonym of any word a leftist uses, and from that discern their true intent. George Soros wants a closed society. Those who agitate for diversity want absolute cultural conformity, and hide this by pretending that race and sexual “Identity” alone constitutes culture. In reality, the most important cultural differences historically have always been religious. They want to end religion. They want to end moral distinctions of all sorts, more generally, in favor of political correctness, which is in fact nothing more or less than the demand for conformity to doctrines originating with elites.

They want to clone ideas, and propagate them flawlessly, eventually across the entire planet. This is anti-Liberal, anti-humanistic, and by my definition anti-moral, since as I have argued proper moral decisions are always LOCAL, imperfect, and necessary.