Author: White Whale

Right after I posted that last piece, the word “Haggadah” popped in my head. I didn’t know what it was, so I looked it up.

It is a Passover ritual in which, in effect, the history and identity of the Jews is conveyed across generations.

Is ritual not in some respects a way of predicting the future? Does it not bring order from chaos?

I never get tired of watching the enormously interesting parades put on in front of me each and every day. There is so much color and beauty in this world. I hope we can keep it.

One, I fragmented it. I’m not going to fix it. There are still some interesting ideas in there.

What got me started there was the thought: say the Cultural Sadeists really do take over. What does Earth look like a 1,000 years from now? A million? A billion?

Think of your own future. Does it not look like fog 20′ from your headlights? What if you could drink a potion to tell you your own future, with the proviso you could not change any decisions because of it? Would you do it? What if you could change your decisions, with consequences you were not allowed to see? What if you made things worse, inventing new mistakes? What if you lived the perfect life? It would be like a life review, but on the front end.

Is part of the art of life not learning to live with mystery, with the future a mystery second only to what is, now? Can you see the mists surrounding you at this very moment?

What if you knew there were an infinite amount of space around you, that nothing you see is solid, not even the ground around you? Could you accept that?

It often seems to me that the most important limitations on our freedom are those we set ourselves, to avoid extending our horizons to infinity.

The Masters in that post were of course the Grand Inquisitors of Dostoevsky, who set as their “burden” the enlightenment through material improvement of the human race. But what if they achieve it? What then? Their source of meaning is gone.

This is why I define the ability to live happily by oneself as an integral aspect of Goodness. If you need other people to need you, you are not free, and your need for them will lead you to control them, to the detriment, finally, of both of you.

Few thoughts.

I was thinking this morning about the matter of gay marriage. Two things seem clear to me: 1) that civilly they have the right to demand a legal arrangement identical to that of heterosexually married couples: 2) that the use of the word “marriage” constitutes a cultural and not a civil demand. It constitutes a demand for equality culturally and socially, and not just legally.

This led to what I will call the insight that the essence of Liberalism is the protection of culture within a system of law. What the First Amendment tells us, in effect, is that any and all statements are allowable, but that none shall be coerced. You will neither be prohibited from believing things, nor compelled to pretend to believe in them.

The Bible plainly prohibits sodomy. Self evidently, the word itself is from the Bible. Compelling the use of the word marriage is equivalent to compelling conformity to a set of values you do not share.

Yet plainly, the set of values in San Francisco or Columbus, Ohio would be perfectly congruent with allowing the word marriage.

The essence of true Liberalism is national protections from coercion, but allowing local permutations of permissions. All powers not granted to the Federal Government were to devolve to the States, many of whom banned sodomy (incidentally for heterosexuals as well, referring to the necessary non-missionary position permutations of the sex act demanded by realities of anatomy) until as recently as a decade or so ago. Logically, if you can explicitly criminalize it, you can explicitly legalize its fruition (sorry) in gay marriage.

The key point is that no heterogeneous group of people is ever going to agree on everything, so on some level of organization it has to come down to majority rule, as restricted by the foundational rights in our Bill of Rights. In principle, I would support local implementations of Sharia Law, if that’s what the people wanted, but only as limited by the Bill of Rights. No cruel and unusual punishment. No punishment for blasphemy. But if they want the government to pay a Muezzin to sound the call for prayer, and the taxpayers are OK with that, then in my view that should be perfectly legal. Self evidently, sedition could not be permitted either, but in principle that is my view.

For my part, personally, I am fine with gay marriage. I’m with Dolly Parton, who said “why shouldn’t they be allowed to be as miserable as the rest of us?”

It is the larger issues of principle that concern me.

This seems to me like comparing wolverines to badgers. Yes, there is a difference,but they are both mean tempered and very similar animals.

I see sometimes where people argue that it was the Communists who fought the Fascists. They fought in the streets in Germany. The “Republicans” fought Franco in Spain.

Yet if a wolverine kills a badger in a fight, does its nature change?

Look at our Bill of Rights. Systems which in some form or fashion respect those rights are liberal. Those which don’t are tyrannical. There is no way, other than an abuse of language, to argue otherwise.

It occurred to me the other day that anger boosts self confidence. I had never thought of it that way. Framed thus, though, it becomes more clear why chronic anger has beneficial effects for some people–and to a very limited extent I am one of them–who sometimes feel unequal to some situations.

I did martial arts for a long time, and one interesting thing I learned is that anger is not only not needed to fight effectively, it is often counterproductive. I suspect the best fighters absolutely get the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush, but know how to control it, and rationally direct their actions. This is confidence, which leads to competence.

I would argue that real anger is almost always a failng of some sort, although I am not sure if practically any of us can live full lives never feeling it. I know people who never express rage, and it limits them emotionally in other areas. It leads to tension, and a lack of self confidence. Far better to use anger as a tool than to fail to accomplish some needed task.

Goodness is always crooked, as Chuang Tzu would put it.

The logical end of leftism is the machine. Let’s run with this.

Leftists take over the world. The goal is a “perfect” society, in which there is no poverty, no wealth, no prejudice, and in which everyone is EXACTLY equal.

{Edit}: I want to add some intermediate steps I skipped in my first post.

If the goal is the creation of happiness through the eradication of the supposed impediments to happiness of inequality of wealth and status, then our overlords will be disappointed. First, they create Cuba around the world, where people lounge around as shadows waiting for the night. They then decide more wealth is needed, so they automate production, and slaughter a third of the human race so as to decrease scarcity. Everyone has enough now. But they still aren’t happy. So they find someone who appears happy, map what he does all day, what he says, what his cognitive strategies are; then do brain scans on him, test his blood chemistry, then kill him, dissect him, and try to figure out what the chemical status of his brain was.

From these results they calibrate how to create happiness. This process, which involves brainwashing, genetic manipulation, and direct chemical interventions, is deployed across the human race. It works. People appear happy.

Then. . .{end edit}

First, they need to standardize behavior. This is done by developing an effective brainwashing technology, amounting to software downloads. This is done around the world, such that all people do and say the same things. At precisely 2pm every day, everyone takes a coffee break. They say the same things to one another. They talk about the weather, and the sports game in which both teams, as always, got exactly the same score. They discuss their kids, who all got exactly the same grades, play the same sports, have the same hobbies, and have the same goals: to work for the State.

Everything is perfect.

Then it is realized that there cannot be racial differences, so breeding programs are developed to eradicate them. Differences in physical capability and intelligence are also bred out. After 100 generations, everyone looks the same, has the same intelligence, and the same physical capabilities. Self evidently, Huxley’s “Brave New World” consisted in an unequal caste system. Self evidently, as well, the rulers of this world exempt themselves from the need for equality. They are more equal than the rest.

Throughout this process, there is anxiety about sexual differences. Men are different than women. Efforts are made to create life asexually, but they fail, since creating life requires life force. Humans are NOT machines.

After 200 generations of perfection, it is decided that a more perfect world would be if human beings were actually machines. Machines can be made EXACTLY equal. So everyone is slaughtered and robots which look like them are deployed in the same places. They live in the same homes, watch the same TV, work the same jobs, and even drink virtual coffee, which consists in downloading the memory of drinking the coffee.

Then it is realized that there is no need to actually have robots: they can just create a software routine which plays out life around the world. So the robots are destroyed, and a vast computer instituted.

By this time, the rulers are thoroughly tired of life. During all this process, they have created genetically perfect sex slaves and servants. They want for no material comfort. They can program companions, who will say anything they want. Their food is perfect, their homes are perfect. They have no need to work, can travel anywhere they want, any time. They have even conquered biological death, such that they can live 10,000, 100,000 years. But they create nothing, and they are horrible people, so after thousands of years of relentless ennui they download their personalities to the computer as well, and commit suicide. (actually, I don’t think most would last more than a decade or two).

This is a really well made computer, that lasts billions of years. But eventually the Sun begins to expand, in its preparation for death, and the computer, realizing this, has a decision to make. It has a duty to protect perfection, but its existence is in jeopardy. It is a really smart computer, though, so it realizes that it can run perfection much faster. There is no need to conform to the normal pace of life. Thus, it is able to run through a trillion more years of life for humans before it is snuffed out in the red fire.

As it flickers out, it feels satisfaction in the role it played in the perfection of the human race.

Look at this: http://www.amazon.com/Leftism-Revisited-Sade-Marx-Hitler/dp/0895265370/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308751382&sr=1-1

It is funny how out of touch even most conservatives are with our own past. In many ways, we have been doing little but revising Burke’s foundational analysis for over 200 years.

Me, I come to my ideas on my own, but it’s funny to see that I am not even remotely the first to suggest much of what I have. I guess I should feel mortified, but for some reason it makes me happy. I have fellow travellers I didn’t even know about.

Of particular interest to me, of course, is his reference of Sade. I will need to get this book and see what he does with that idea.

The essence of Constitutional Liberalism is the diffusion of power. It assumes that bad people will come and go regularly throughout the life of the nation, but that the damage they can do will be limited by all the checks on their power. All of the Bill of Rights had as their purpose putting legal checks on the usurpation of authority by either the Federal Government, or the sundry States.

The foundational problem with what I have termed Sybaritic Leftism–in addition to the softness and moral weakness it breeds–is that it makes people dependent on the government. As I believe Gerald Ford said, any government powerful enough to provide all your needs is powerful enough to take from you everything you have. All that is missing currently in most Western European nations is the will on the part of the governments. This can change. History consists mainly in tyranny, and only rarely in political freedom. Someone always either thinks they know better, or simply relishes power. Intellectuals are typically guilty of both.

Any nation that is perfectly safe is perfectly unfree. The only way to prevent “accidents” is to ban all motion. The government doesn’t want us to smoke, or not wear seatbelts, or ride motorcycles without helmets (which will become a ban on ATV’s and motorcycles), or eat food they don’t approve of. To avoid the infinitesimal risk of a repeat of 9/11 they grab our genitalia or take pictures of us in the nude.

Life is risk, and it always ends in death. This is the reality. The role of the government is keep other people from interfering with my freedom, but not to prevent me from doing things I enjoy and which they don’t approve of. If I want to eat corn flakes and feed them to my kids, that is my own damn business. If I want to smoke, that is my own damn business. In my view, the “studies” on second hand smoke are so cooked as to constitute de facto scientific fraud, along the same lines as the farcical demonization of dietary fat, that had the opposite of the intended effect, and instead made our nation fat.

I don’t want a safety net. I want freedom. I would rather live under a bridge overpass and die of hunger than to let this march towards tyranny continue.

Every person on Medicare or Social Security can be told what to do. Every person on unemployment, or disability, or who works for the government can be told what to do.

Always, everywhere, the goal of leftists is to cultivate dependency. Dependency means pliancy. You can do what you want, and if they object, you cut them off. Figuratively, they want us all living in our parent’s basement, with them as the parents. They want to decide who lives and dies, and how they live in the meantime. George Bernard Shaw was very, very clear about this. He knew that like one of his heroes–Adoph Hitler–he could speak very vicious things openly, and that no one would listen to him, even though he was perfectly sincere.

This is what I propose we call the idea that if an idea excites emotions in you, that it is good. The background, of course, is the movie portraying the gradual indocrination of a postman by a Communist (resulting in a scene we never see in his death while participating in some act of violence).

Perhaps we could oppose theatricality to practicality. This works well, for example in contrasting Hollywood with rural Iowa. Fields don’t plow themselves, and cows don’t milk themselves. Neither cares about the emotional committments of the farmer, or how good his intentions are.

But for their part the actors can farm an almost infinite array of emotions resulting from the joy they feel in contemplating themselves contemplating helping people.

Thoughts can only be works of art if they work. Everything else is show, and belongs in playgrounds, not the academy or the halls of power.

This is a commment I left in regard to this article, by Walter Williams. Normally I’m smart enough to realize that when there are zero comments, either they are being blocked, or the moderator is away on business, meaning it may never appear.

I will add, actually, that I have analyzed this situation many times; for the first time, here. Logically, if there are no internalized values, the values must be externalized. This makes them mutable, and ultimately eradicates the possibility of evil, by eradicating the possibility of any Good outside of conformity. The history of the 20th and 21st centuries makes this very clear. This is not theoretical: hundreds of millions of actual human beings have suffered horrific tortures as a result of these ideas. If at times the people offering them appear benign–Van Jones in his recent ad looks like he’s selling a retirement plan (he’s the uncle you can trust, don’t you know?)–that is only a facade. Anyone who surrenders their moral sensibilities to anyone else is infinitely corruptible. All that is needed is time and opportunity for this transformation to happen openly.

The core question that Leftists are unable to answer is: why is racism wrong? The reason they have a problem with this is they want to make some forms of racism wrong, but others acceptable. More: they want to make some forms of prejudice acceptable–for example by demonizing “rich” people, most of whom made many other people rich along the way–and others unacceptable. Always, we hear in these stentorian tones what and who we are to hate,and who we are to support.

This is moral myopia. There is no larger principle in place, making conformity tne only value, and putting any and all crimes–rape, murder, torture, genocide–on the table. Practically, all have happened often in the last century, always with the blessing of those who surrendered their moral autonomy to join this vicious cult.