Author: White Whale

The essence of the American ideal is not the idea that we have always been perfect, but that our system is perfectable. If you look at, say, Medieval Europe, what you had was a static system, that mapped the social order onto the order of the universe, as something given, unchanging, and unchangeable. Obviously, this was wrong, but social reform is not something anyone could initiate without a severe risk of premature death or imprisonment.

Look at the civil rights movement. Who led it? Americans. Who opposed it? Also Americans. Who wanted us in Vietnam? Americans. Who opposed our involvement there? Americans.

The use of excessive abstraction when it comes to complex social and personality systems often leads to perceptual errors. Academics call this “essentializing”, as in “the essence of the American project is racist imperialism”, or “the essence of the American project is enlightened political and social liberalism.” Pointing out the contingency and potential fallibility of the “big story” was the reason I coined the perhaps infelicitous term “tubaforms”. You know, you need tubas in a marching band, but most people don’t find them beautiful.

The point to be made here, though, is that the question should never be who we “are”, but who we WANT to be, and how we plan to get there. Progress depends on a plan, and plans that will actually work in complex social systems have to be based on principles that people actually hold.

What I term Regressivism does not work because it does not have actual principles. They are quite often like the retarded mechanics in “Brazil”, the movie, who take a working system and completely destroy it, even after being told it was in perfect working order, since “things don’t just fix themselves.”

Here is the final scene of the plumbers, who present a nice metaphor for a system which is broken, but which cannot be fixed (normally: Gilliam allows us a nice fantasy here).

There was no person outside the central power authority in the Soviet Union who could fundamentally change anything. There is no one in China outside the few hundred men who rule it who can fundamentally change anything. The system was immune to reform, since it was presumed to be perfect, in exactly the same way that medieval Europe was presumed to be perfect; and it was held in check by the same combination of indoctrination and overt use of terror (torture) and power as that of the Catholic Church.

Cultures are always organized locally. They always consist in people doing things in ways that make sense to them. The people of northern England behave just a bit differently than those in the South, and this is the way it should be.

Culture, too, is internal. It is what you actually believe. It cannot be mandated, although those interested in mind control have no doubt spent much effort trying to make that happen. Behavior is external. Behavior, in large measure, CAN be compelled through the use of power.

Morality is culture. Legality is power.

No system can self organize in a condition of excessive legalism.

This–and the last couple posts–have been a bit meandering, but are hopefully helpful to someone.

Hell, since I’m already doing figure eights: I’ve always wanted to be an artist, but seem to lack talent in artsy things. I recently realized, though, that THIS–what I do here and on my other site–meets the goal I had set, which was the creation of new objects that were an expression not just of me, but which were connected in an interesting way with reality.

It is like I’ve created a download that adapts itself to the personality and tendencies of the person downloading it. “Culture”, per se, does not exist. It is a reification of the discernable patterns of masses of people in motion, which vary constantly, but in largely predictable ways. I like to think of myself as injecting little tumblers, or “chakras”–little spots of compressed, complex light–into this system, such that they expand and alter the proverbial flow of water and air.

This is what I enjoy doing, and I’m vain enough to think I’m good at it.

Core questions I always ask myself is: what are you trying to accomplish, and how will you know when you are there? As I have said often, there are four principle cultural tasks: the creation and distribution of meaning, truth, power, and wealth. Art, it seems to me, ought properly to be pursuing the first two tasks. It should inspire people, and teach them deep truths about life and humanity.

In the last century, under the thrall of complete failure in meaning formation, “truths” have been distributed which are anything but. We are told the permanent point of human existence is economic and political equality. Nothing more. This has led to the subordinatin of art to, what? Supporting change in the political and economic spheres.

The essence of the Fabian idea is slow internal subversion, not just by suggesting new ideas–I will note that Socialists do not HAVE any new cultural ideas, being in a formal sense nihilists–but much more by undermining old ideas, by attacking notions of God, and Goodness, and common sense morality; by undermining notions of beauty and transcendance, and by denigrating traditional ideas of social roles and responsibilities, as seen outside the direct control of an ubiquitous State.

This has not happened yet in Muslim (whose radicalism is both a reaction to and internalization of the Fabian project of moral subversion: reaction to, in that they hew to their traditions; internalization of in that they reject in their methods their own actual traditions, and adopt instead the amoral, unprincipled terroristic methods of Leftists) and other nations, to the extent they would like, but it is their goal to eradicate all difference whatever, the world over. We are to be interchangeable cogs, managed by ruthless lunatics.

I use the Franklin-Covey planner pages. Every day has a new quote. The quote for today is from Sidney Webb: “The inevitability of gradualness cannot fail to be appreciated”.

Given the Mormonism of the owners of that company–as least Stephen Covey–it is highly ironic that they would include a quote from a man who very much wished to see the Soviet model duplicated around the world, and who dedicated his life to spreading the lies necessary to make that idea palatable to silly people.

The essence of their project is aggregating power. I see historical ignorants act from time to time as if there were any fundamental difference between Nazism and Bolshevism. Was there a complete abrogation of legal rights? Yes, in both cases. Mass terror? Yes in both cases. Mass murder? Yes in both cases. Did Webb approve of both systems? Of course.

One gets the sense reading about Webb, his wife, and his pal George Bernard Shaw, that in their ideal society a person could be sent to the gas chambers for failing to provide stimulating dinner conversation, or for wearing an unsuitable tie. They would of course laugh it off over tea the next day, and plan their next murder, all in very cultivated accents.

This facade of civility is what we see to this very day in large sections of our creative communities (note: business requires a lot of creativity, so I am here referring only to those who have arrogated to themselves the right to speak about general cultural issues in academic and creative works of art of all sorts), in which the most horrific crimes–real crimes, involving real people having the bones in their bodies broken, being raped, being burnt alive, being buried alive–are glossed over, in favor of focus on the minute and accidental crimes of the civilized West.

I drove by a “Starving Artists” cafe the other day, or something like that. I got to thinking: why does the stereotypical starving artist starve? Why not get a real job? What is the point?

As I see it, there are a few answers. One is vanity. These people want to be recognized as the geniuses they believe themselves to be. This is common enough the world over in all trades. Their need to feel important trumps their need to secure a secure living. Most people who major in English feel superior to those who major in business, in my observation. But they aren’t.

Changing the world for the better. This happens seldom enough in art, but it does happen.

A genuine belief that the talent will eventually pay. This is the mindset of the entrepreneur.

Pleasure. It seems to me that this is perhaps the best answer: you simply enjoy doing what you do so much that you prefer poverty to abandoning it.

Edit: two more I might add would a be an inability to be happy NOT doing art, which is probably a subcategory of pleasure; and an inability to do normal work due to mental defects, which seems to have been the case for many better known artists in the modern era.

It seems to me that a well constructed–which is to say accurate and complete–perception has an esthetic element to it. There is a dynamic to problem solving that in my view is fully comparable to that of perspective, and light and shadow in painting; to the careful choice of felicitous words in poetry and prose; to harmonies and melodies in music.

I had a vision the other day of using a “painting” approch to debate the other day. One person writes out their argument on a given topic on a sheet of paper mounted to the wall. Someone who disagrees with them does the same. Wherever the “opponent” wishes, the other person must expand or contract their perception. They must abstract complex prose, or defend on the level of detail apparently unanchored premises.

Difference can be bridged, if approached in this way. Most bad thinking is the result of mistaking abstractions for facts: a good example is “the rich become rich at the expense of the poor”. This CAN be true. It HAS been true in some times and places, but not over time within a free market economy in which legal rights are defended consistently and honestly.

As an example of this method, I would demand of someone making this statement that they define “free market”, and show to what extent our markets are actually free. Housing is not free. Banking is not free. We do not even control our money supply, even though all aspects of our economic well being depend on monetary policy. Construction is not free. Many manufacturers are forced to deal with labor cartels protected by the force of law.

Worth pondering.

Lamestream media, leftwing media, whatever: the reality is they are COMPLICIT in a lie, actually a series of lies. They work to further agendas with no actual moral content but habits of conformity.

One prime example is the legacy of the history of the war in Vietnam. How many people know that the North Vietnamese Communists routinely used children for suicide terrorism? Or that they routinely slaughtered entire villages, and engaged in very wide-spread campaigns of assassination and torture, only rarely of actual combatants, and usually merely as a means of compelling submission to lunacy?

Here is a listing of some of the atrocities. They go back to the 1930’s, long before Ho Chi Minh conquered North Vietnam for Communism. This listing only dates to the late 60’s, and is very partial. I will note that Diem’s brother was murdered by Communists by being buried alive.

I also wrote out a good speech from “The Green Berets.” Think, ponder.

Link is here.

I posted my Afghanistan strategy here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page20.html

Logically, if we can imagine an Emperor with no clothes on being imagined to be dressed, can we not imagine clothes with an invisible Emperor?

The clothes are what we can see; the Emperor we cannot.

God is not form: God is the possibility of form, and possibilities, while real, are not visible.

It is today. And yesterday, and tomorrow. A culture which forgets its history is dying, and an important part of every culture is its heroes.

To my mind, what needs to be remembered is not just that brave men and women fought and died for our country, but also that they fought and LIVED for this country.

More: we need to remember all of the heroes throughout history, who did what was right and good and just because it was right and good and just. We don’t have to sanctify any of them: we just need to remember them, and resurrect in our hearts as much as we can of the spirit that animated them.

Things don’t change all that much. People don’t change that much. There has always been good and evil. There have always been those who took what they wanted because they could; who hurt others because they wanted to. There have always been those who stood against them.

We are in a stage in our history when our cultural custodians are in large measure trying not just to destroy American or Western culture, but culture period.

We fight them through memory, through focussed remembrance of who we are, who we choose to be, who we want to be, and how much farther down the path of light we can and still must go.

This is going to be a bit more meandering than usual. It is my effort to patch together many discrete threads of thought that are related, but who don’t know it. This will be a seamed whole.

I developed the Telearchic Cross (described on my other website in the introductory essay) to sort of formalize what I do anyway, which is regularly expand and contract my awareness. At times I am watching ants, or watching clouds, or trying to develop multiple theories on the genesis of a particular mark on the wall . . . to be continued momentarily. . .

[related sidenote: I once took my kids for pizza, and there was a man sleeping in the car next to us. When we came out, he was gone. I spent months giving them explanations of what happened to him, from aliens kidnapping him, to his car flipping over and driving off by itself upside down, to the concrete being actually a giant trampoline that threw him over the building, etc. It is always a good practice to try and inventory possibilities, even wildly improbable ones, and this was a fun way to try and convey that lesson, which they greatly enjoyed]

At other times, I am abstracting as much as you possibly can about the nature of time and the universe. Back and forth.

In recent days, I have been feeling an expansive energy, a liberating energy, that I have in the past called Windhorse, after the Tibetan word for what I think is the same energy. This is the energy of Goodness.

Often, I think we fail to pursue Goodness–spirituality in some form–since we assume that if we aren’t “sinning”, that we are good people. If you pay your bills, are polite to people, get your kids to do their homework, be respectful, etc, then you are Good. But there is Good and Gooder (let it slide): what is the lifelong path you can walk, in which you continue to develop Goodness all along, so that you actually ARE very wise when you are gray and your teeth are falling out (short in the tooth)?

This energy is expansive. It is learning to love life, and learning to value all experience fully, such that objects, per se, cease to matter so much.

This is going to be really scattered. There is a nexus, and it is me, but I am not a line of words; nor is anyone else.

I think sometimes about ascetics going into the woods or caves for years on end. How do they not get lonely? I think some people assume they do, but I’m not sure. What if you could counter-act the FEELING of loneliness with emotional energy that was much more powerful? What if going back into the world were the actual let-down? I think that is how it works.

As I say, I feel this energy sometimes, and it works whether you are alone or with others, and no matter what difficulties you have in your life, although of course maintaining it is much harder in conditions of stress. I find it is helping me manage stress–which I have a lot of at the moment–and work more effectively.

This energy is best developed through Kum Nye, in my view, which I have discussed in the past. It was a revelation to me, though, that my whiskey drinking could be adapted to this purpose.

I have had a lot of pain in my life–whether it’s because of objective difficulty or my own weakness, I can’t say, although it’s likely some combination–and that analgesic seems to complement well the reveries I was already doing on my meditation cushion. Things just flow out, and the effect lasts several days. Things that used to bother me don’t.

Yesterday I was thinking about anger. Anger is externally directed contracting energy, which I saw symbolized by < , where you look at it from the right to left. I don't know why that is the direction, but likely right brain to left brain. Whatever. That's my iconography, because it popped in my head. The use of will is =, where energy is balanced. The use of enjoyment and expansion is > . If you really enjoy something, do you need will or anger to do it, even if it is hard?

Then of course I got to thinking about unions. Posit a fixed number of people willing and able to work, and a fixed amount of work to be done. What unions do is increase unemployment by increasing project costs, while increasing wages for those who belong. If you pay one person $40/hour for something, you can’t pay 2 people $20. Since labor hours are what they are–if you build a five story building, it takes as long as it takes–if you require union participation, you also see a decrease in work.

What happens, then, [I am thinking here of government protected union cartels; I have no objection to unions people are free to join and leave, and to government contracts that are negotiated at actually prevailing–as opposed to imposed and artificially high–wages] is employment shrinks, and the work to be done shrinks, while the pockets of the unions expand. This is exactly what happened in the Great Depression. Hoover instituted what amounted to Union Scale wages (the Davis-Bacon Act, which is by the way still in force, and still driving up costs on all Federal projects), and of course FDR more or less granted the Unions the right to form legally protected cartels. Effect: mass unemployment, and economic malaise.

The point I wanted to make here, though, was that these effects are cumulative. The longer you allow the processes of contraction and contraction to continue, the worse things get. The people who fail to see these things are operating as if time did not exist. They are acting as if there is always a pool of workers, and a pool of money they are just trying to get their share of. But look at Detroit. IF you have a Union job, you’re paid great. But unemployment is huge, and now they are sucking money out of other States, by the means of the Federal Government supporting their pensions and medical benefits through the bailouts. It’s a black hole, but the people involved, many of them, can’t see it, since they lack the capacity for seeing the consequences of their actions on everyone around them. But they are shrinking.

Another example: sex. I think most people can agree that sex is best with someone you love deeply. Love is an intangible, but it is a flow that you can perceive readily enough. Good sex is expansive; there is much more involved than just physical friction. At its best–and I’ve never gotten there, but I can imagine this–it is mythic, IF you are relaxed and willing to let your consciousness go. It can enable you to tap deep into the very springs of primal consciousness, which in my view includes a vision of God.

This led to the thought that contracting sex is bad, and it is what is preached 24/7 by our media, which is confined to physical attraction, and physical friction, and devoid of a larger sense of wonder and purpose, and of course committment (which is the same as a larger context). It seems to me that prostitutes are honest about what they are doing, but women who allow themselves to be used are not. Most cannot REALLY endure that physical intimacy devoid of open compassion and love without losing some part of themselves. Many DO lose some part of themselves, in my view, as do the men.

An interesting corrollary to this is that the contraction is when women are treated as objects. Structurally, then, prostitutes and the kept women of the Middle East and Southeast Asia are the same: both have been turned from themselves into objects serving the interests of those with contracting minds, hearts, and energies.

I look at women, and most of them are up and down all day, feeling feelings all the time. Most men are like you take that basic process, and hit the Mute button. It’s still sort of going on, but inaudibly, and with much less range. Yet, if we value perceptual movement, women do more of it, in general. This makes them more spiritual, in general.

Socialism formally distances itself from what I have called in the Telearchic Cross the Systemic Dimension. This is the connection across time between purpose and outcome. It creates instead an Eternal Present. This is the system in Cuba, and that in North Korea. Nothing changes. Nobody moves. Nobody lives or dies. They are shadow-lit lands, living underwater for unendurable eternities (I let the poetic streak in me out from time to time). Think a fish tank, except the fish can’t move.

This is contraction. Broad-ly (yes, if you were wondering) speaking, expansiveness is a female trait, and contraction a male trait. Socialism is a masculine system, then, Liberalism a feminine system. Liberalism is nurturing not because the government can nurture, but rather because it does not STOP the processes of self liberation that occur constantly in all of us, absent restraint (contraction).

Think of very masculine systems. Take the Marine Corps. Everything is regimented. Or, as I’ve said, take Fascism: it is nothing but the extension of the Central Planning ethos of the military to the culture as a whole. Morality is produced centrally. The economy is planned centrally. Truth is distributed from a central point, and all power ends in one person. Communism is the same, but the person pretends to be a committee, and it pretends to care about you. Contraction.

Religions (religio means “to bind”) likewise contract. Now, you need some rules. You need boundaries. But as Lao Tzu said, you should “know the masculine, but keep to the feminine”.

Sometimes you need to nail people’s asses, but you also have to have tools other than a hammer, and you need to want to put that thing down as soon as you can. Violence and weapons are merely–sometimes–tools for building peace, which is the end goal.

We need to generalize this notion of Goodness, and people need to understand that there are practical, proven, effective methods for doing it, such that happiness becomes more likely for everyone.

What we’re doing sure as hell isn’t working. We are tightening into little balls of grief, envy, self destructive rage, and greed.

That’s enough wondering and wandering for now.

Watch this video “Doing the Continental”.
It almost made me want to cry with how innocent and yet fun it was. There is so much information in there, so much quality, such an open, expansive set of feelings, that complement in a wonderful way the hormones that were no doubt present as well.

Does this spirit still exist in this country? What are they playing in dance clubs, mainly? Hip hop. Music that is heavy, hard, aggressive, and focused purely on physical pleasure and domination. As I commented several weeks ago, we have had at least two big hits that dealt more or less openly with S & M. That is actually the name of Rihanna’s song.

Listen to this song for a few moments–Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back“

This is the sexuality of machines. It is contracting, compulsive, and utterly devoid of pleasure.

Returning to the theme of a few posts ago, I think sadomasochism is best understood as an effort to get into the open a covert reality: that of being assaulted qualitatively. In regard to modern sexuality, I think most women are in effect assaulted the first time they have sex by doing it WITHOUT LOVE. Boys say what they need to to get in their mouth and pants, and then abandon them. This hurts.

Consciously choosing pain is perhaps a way of managing it. Consciously inflicting pain is a way of expressing anger.

This is all very sad. Socialism, as a doctrine which effectively requires women to act like men in matters of sexuality, and which requires men to act like women everywhere else, is not just unnatural and perverse, but very indicative of cultural decimation, and the impossibility of an innocent existence in an intact cultural space.

Socialism makes “home” impossible.