Author: White Whale

I think more of our thought workers need to take on the mindset of soldiers in the figurative and literal trenches. They fight, and they die. When they die, most of them are missed by only a few family members and members of their units. They die in unspectacular ways, often, including simple traffic accidents. Yet, they die serving their country, and I don’t think it is over-idealizing most of them to say they do it without complaint. Not by design, of course, not eagerly, but because they accept that possible outcome as part of their job. I was once told that explicitly by a man who did in fact later die in an IED explosion.

For my part, the writing I do is not intended to reflect on me in the slightest. I prefer to be in ths shadows, and let the words spark ideas in others. Nothing pleases me more than to be copied, and if I were to see something lifted verbatim from here or my other site, I would likely delete the original to prevent controversy.

My intent is to get ideas out there, and hopefully ones that are better than the ones currently in circulation. This means that if other people are mouthing them, then I am succeeding. That is the point and plan.

A motto of mine is Benjamin Franklin’s “There is no end to what you can accomplish, if you don’t care who gets credit.”

We are in a war, and a war in which many Americans have literally died. Surely the chattering class can content itself with getting useful work done, without self aggrandizement, and image-consciousness?

I got to thinking the other day, as I often do. I was thinking about this idea that God has a plan for our lives, that everything is unfolding the way it is supposed to. Me, my gut tends to reject this basic idea. I think the afterlife is highly ordered and just, but what happens here is a bit like going down a mogul slope. If you keep your balance and your strength, you can have a lot of fun, but most of us get knocked on our asses, and the main virtue of this is that you can grow from it. A random universe and this one, though, would look quite similar.

Anyway, though, there was at one time the “music of the spheres”. There was Thomas Aquinas explaining to us that science and religion are perfectly compatible, since all forms of order uncovered are simply manifest evidence of God’s presence. (I think that was Aquinas: I listen to Teaching Company stuff a lot, but I was not and never could have been a philosophy student formally).

Coincident with this order was a teaching, Christianity, that saw in life the possibility of transcendence, if lived correctly. To submit to Church teaching was not only to understand how the universe worked, but also the purpose of life.

If you deduct God–or any sort of transcendental order beyond mere physical “laws”–from this, though, you get order without meaning. You get math describing gravity, predicting chemical reactions, and creating smart machines. You do not get a reason to live.

Is it better to feel you understand the universe, and find life devoid of intrinsic meaning; or to fail to understand the universe, but feel empowered and vital? This is, I will note, a different question than “is it better to be sad and wise, or dumb and happy?” Ultimately, we all find ourselves submitting in the end to some version of the scientific myth and method, so the first question depends upon premises which can be questioned. For example, is any doctrine which rejects ANY, of many, possible explanations for any visible phenomena scientific? Of course not. Scientists are agnostice. They are not in the business of proving anything. They are in the business of describing and predicting.

What got me on this line of thought is that I think many people need, emotionally, answers, even bad answers, as to how things work. Free markets are intrinsically fear-inducing to a certain class of people, most particularly those who have spent their whole lives in the comfortable knowledge that the answer to Question 8 was C, and that it could not have been otherwise, for anyone who read the textbook, and did Exercise 17.1. Duh.

I was told the other day that the purpose of the Federal Reserve was to maintain the value of our money, to avoid inflation and deflation, and to create full employment. Something like that. The details don’t matter, since it is a patent lie. My thought was: and how does it actually work? You just regurgitated what you were carefully spoon fed by someone with an agenda–an “expert”–but have done so without a shred of understanding.

Socialism, for these people, serves the need for order. They want tyrants to be in charge, since that way, they think, the economic system will be orderly. They value order over freedom. They value order over meaning.

But even here, is that an accurate statement? Based on the historical record, it is virtually impossible to call any socialist experiment a success. They do not foster an engagement with life, but a disengagement. They do not foster hope, but rather a dull and dismal existence that shades into a welcome death after a shortened life.

What is order? How is it defined?

As I argue constantly, the order that matters is that of the formally chaotic system, from which order flows as an emergent property of a system in motion.

Consider Lao Tzu’s famous “uncarved block”. As I pointed out in my Goodness Sutra (on the other site) the language can probably be better translated as “unchopped forest”. This is a metaphor for a chaotic system.

Consider the difference between 100 trees planted in rows, ten by ten, and the same 100 trees allowed to plant themselves. What is the difference in order? Visibly, obviously, to the human eye the block is more orderly. But surely this looks like idiocy from the perspective of the plants? At a minimum, can we not assume that it is not necessary to assume that simply because that pattern appears orderly, that order is in fact present? Some of the sites may be unsuitable.

I’ve been debating this with myself all day, and it’s one of those things like Scandinavia. I can see both sides, and arguments for both sides.

I’m tired. This post is not finished, but it will have to do for now. I’m sure I’ll have more to say after a while.

It seems to me one of the hardest challenges to overcome in personal growth is seeing what could have been, and wasn’t–specifically, in accepting it.

As we grow as children and emerge into adulthood, we develop approximate set points, behavioral and cognitive tendencies, that tend to persist for long periods of time, often lifetimes. We reconcile ourselves, contextualize ourselves, with those around us. If we more or less fit the pattern, then absent major trauma, we never see any reason to change drastically.

Yet, there is always a gap between what is and what could be. I can’t say how large that gap is, since I can’t see that far into the darkness. I do think I can say, though, provisionally, that that is what the Buddha meant with the term Duhkha, generally translated as suffering. He meant that we are all falling so far short of what is possible that what we term happiness might as well be regarded suffering. Moreover, even happy lives end in old age and death.

As I think even an average mind could readily infer from reading this blog, I have my issues. We all have our crosses to bear, and one thing I’ve noticed is that carrying heavy weights for long distances makes you strong.

At the same time, what I am seeking is efficiency, and that is found traveling light, not weighted down. How do you release that weight?

What I have been seeing more clearly than ever in recent days is that to grow you have to see the gap between what was and what could (if you want to be morose about it, should) have been. There is a mourning process you have to go through, for a possible present that died long ago. To some greater or lesser extent, we are all victimized throughout our lives by human stupidity and greed, including our own. This is not how it should be: it is just how it is.

When we feel pain, I think often the tendency is to disown it, to push it away. You then create a new world, a new way of being, in which that pain is not present to your conscious awareness. But it is still there, and affecting you in ways not immediately obvious, but certainly including self sabotage and lessened effectiveness. The New You has wrapped a protective coating around that pain, but it is there in all your movements, everything you do. The longer you take to process it, the more effect it has over time.

To make it go away, you have to remember who you were, and who you should have been. When you do this, the coating comes off: this is what I think most people fear, and why so many countless hundreds of millions of people live lives of lessened joy.

On a related note, I will add that I saw yesterday something interesting. I was thinking about the process of sin, of breaking your own acknowledged rules. I think it is important, when you sin, to acknowledge it as sin. That way, you retain an uncorrupted primary ethical sense. The alternative is rationalization. If you rationalize, you change who you are and what you believe. I think this is why Lao Tzu counseled against trying to become a saint. Some of the most awful people out there profess themselves to be Christians. They are able to reconcile their professed creed with their actual behavior through rationalization. Once that process starts, there is no necessary end short of utter and complete depravity, as seen for example in the pedophile Catholic priests, or the rape and stoning of women in countries like Pakistan.

When I heard about this apparently attempted rape of a chamber-maid–can I call her that?–by the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, my first thought was that he was trying to exercise something like the Droit Du Seigneur, the right of the Lord of the estate to take anything he wanted. In our country, one can readily tell the difference between most American-born blacks and those from Africa. The difference results, largely, from affairs in the night between two people of very unequal power.

The hotel room was $3,000/night. This man is a Socialist. He claims to represent the interests of the poor and downtrodden. Yet, it is important to realize that the IMF was conceived as an agent of tyranny by a Fabian and a Communist agent, and that the people running it are no one’s friend but members of their own class. Their class status will not weaken as they take power: it will be the source of all power that matters.

It is beyond stupid to hope that giving power to those who promise “social justice” will result in anything but misery for most of those dumb enough to believe them. That is the unambiguous historical record. This event is merely an unfortunately accurate metaphor brought into literal being.

As I think about it, if we posit that inflation is wealth transfer, that it is gradual, and that it is in theory measurable, then the best logical analogy for it is compound interest.

As my money sits, in a condition of inflation (which can only truly be brought about by someone leveraging a privileged position to create money from nothing), it loses value. I see this called a hidden tax, but that only take into account the government. Most inflation does not benefit the government, except to the extent that it enables continued borrowing, and continued pursuit of nakedly opportunistic policies which win the votes of short-sighted, selfish, and stupid people.

In this country, on the contrary, we have a truly Alice in Wonderland system, in which the government has no control over our money supply, which has instead been entrusted to unelected, unaccountable bankers who operate in complete secrecy, even though their decisions affect all of us. This is lunacy.

The notion of inflation as interest income works, I think, to help make this more clear. Sometimes these bankers are charging us interest openly, and sometimes they are writing themselves checks that make the rest of our money worth less. Either way, in aggregate they win, always.

I tend to think in images–well, gestalts, of which images are a part. I try to use all my senses in processing things. It is challenging for me to think of any culture without feeling the food they eat, and what their homes must smell like.

Anyway, it came to me that the way through the desert has been blocked. For the better part of a century very motivated people have been making progress through an unmarked space, generally devoid of life. Imagine an armored army flanking an enemy which can’t see them. They travel where no one is, so that when they arrive opposing them will be hard.

This is the essence of the Fabian strategy. Fabius Maximus never actually kicked the Carthaginians out of Italy. He just kept them from winning.

What we must understand, here, is that Shaw and his co-conspirators did fully plan to win, but what they saw is that movement which is invisible can easily be forward, if unchecked. It is hard to measure economic subversion. It is hard to measure political subversion.

Moreover, most people simply do not have the capacity to recognize that there are people capable of evil who are nonetheless genteel, and even jovial, as in Shaw’s case. The prospect of the mass murder of social undesirables made him chuckle, apparently. This means that horrible people, who plan millions of acts of violence which would them a death sentences if done without government sanction, can make progress in open view.

Let’s take one simple example: Bill Ayers and his crowd of cowardly sociopaths wanted to kill some 10% of Americans. Mao said that roughly 10% of the population can’t be “reeducated” (morally murdered, and emotionally gang raped), so they figured they would have to organize death camps of the Nazi sort somewhere in the Southwest.

Bill Ayers is a free man, and he has been teaching our children for 30 years or so. Consider that.

At the same time, this path requires generalized complacency. The complacency is gone. The Left may not want to admit it, but a very segment of the United States population is now permanently radicalized against the Fabian agenda. Their days of slow, steady progress are at an end.

The way is blocked. From now on, they will have to offer justifications of their actual agendas, which is much harder than lying about it.

Intuitions can be wrong, but that is what I see clearly.

I will sometimes have to wait for something somewhere. If I have nothing to read or do, I like to pretend I am Sherlock Holmes and try to see everything in my space, and make as many inferences as I possibly can. Everywhere you could possibly be this will work.

Why are there water stains on the wall? Which way does that vent blow air? Why is the dirt unevenly distributed? Why is that cover on the wall? What did that do? Why are there two plugs into one TV? Why are there two colors of brick? What does that chimney do? Why are the ceiling tiles different colors? Why are they bowing?

Why do leaves on trees have different shapes? Is the bark the same color on both sides? How many leaves to a group? Do some seeds have better shapes for sprouting? Why is this rail here and not there? How else could this room be arranged? What would be the benefits and negatives? What is missing from this room? What did it used to be? Can I infer anything about previous owners?

Maybe it’s just me, but I can virtually instantly make my brain very active anywhere, if I so choose. Now, I have plenty going through my brain normally anyway, so this is often not the best idea, but I do think it warrants consideration. Periodically changing your perceptual focal point is an integral component of my moral philosophy.

I was talking with my oldest tonight about the ancient Greeks, and how they were always fighting one another. One city-state would take another, then the next generation it would reverse. Some peoples stayed enslaved; some people were always strangers in that strange land.

Further: this is the history of humankind: stupid, counterproductive theft. You can’t live on what you have, so you go take the stuff someone else created. You don’t want to work, so you take their people, because you can. You kill because you enjoy it, and it’s just the fighters bill come due when you finally fall. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Italians, the Germans, the English, the French: anywhere you look in history you see this pattern. Who killed Ali, the third (if I’m not mistaken) Caliph? Other Muslims. Who killed Caesar? His rivals.

I saw today where the Dalai Lama supposedly reduced his creed to kindness. If this is true, I disagree strongly. The strong have to protect the weak, and that requires being very UNkind at times. To attempt to be nice all the time is to need to live alone in the jungles or a mountain cave. For those trying to accomplish actual, sloppy, useful Good in this world, your hands will get dirty.

It occurred to me too that the Greeks are still at it. They are still waging internecine warfare with one another. Rather than identifying themselves with polei (polises? Something else?) they identify with their group, normally a union, and the Socialists more generally. They then wage literal, violent warfare against all who would stand in the way of their vision of more for them and theirs, and less for everyone else. Screw the long term. Screw everyone else: if they win their battle, they are so stupid they fail to understand the war is not over, and never will be as long as, in aggregate, they are pursuing economically ruinous policies.

While they squabble among themselves, the IMF is carving them up. That is what it was designed to do, and it has been effective. Keynes was very certainly a brilliant man; he simply put his intellect to the service of evil.

Selfishness leads to vanity. and vanity leads to folly. It is not too hard to tempt stupid, morally weak people into self destruction.

What is 11% of a lie?

Koanish, but not really. Popped in my head, and looked like an appropriate, if perhaps unclear to some, definition.

George Lakoff, in some book or other, argued that people could be defined with metaphors. No, wait: he argued that OTHER people use metaphors to define people. Those are the people he called THEM. They are definitionally wicked because they tend to use terms like “them” in spooky ways.

Anyway, Republicans were supposedly operating on a metaphor of government-as-father. The idea was that fathers–in Republican gender constructions, which is to say in terms so insufficiently ambiguous that they still possess meaning–were the disciplinarians, who valued structure and order over nurturing. The figurative breasts, of course, were what he presumably called “liberals”. His people, whatever word he used.

At the present moment, I have been fermenting for several weeks in the dank stink of overprotective regulation. I have been reading the OSHA site, getting drug tested, filling out form after form, and wondering how anything gets done at large corporations, when you have to develop a Quality Control process for crapping, sneezing, and masturbation (allowed during lunch and after 5pm, but only is the door is secured properly, you use an approved lotion, you use your non-dominant hand on occasion to prevent repetitive movement injury, you indicate your status on your calendar, and that you report the out-come of your efforts to management within one hour using the proper form).

I look at this, and if we are going to call this Maternalism, then it is the protection of a psychotic mother who never wants her child to leave the house. Freedom is when you get to do what you want, when you want, within reasonable limitations.

To my mind, the Department of Labor is an affront to the notion of the Constitutional restriction of the powers of the Federal Government. Governing commerce is little more than making sure no States implement tariffs, and arbitrating any disputes that may arise between sovereign governments. It is inconceivable to me that any rational mind can look at the massive bureaucratic apparatus that has been created to “protect” us, and not see it as having the power to limit us to the little black cages Max Weber saw as the ultimate outcome of a process he termed (ironically, in my view) Rationalization.

If we want to live as machines, then the ultimate in efficiency is for humans to create sentient machines, then die off. What the “Maternalists” want for us is perfect security, which can only occur in conditions of complete tyranny. They want to make it impossible for anyone to make a mistake. Always, always, always, though, it comes down to the judgement of individuals. If those individuals are competent and motivated, they will usually make the right decision. If not, the process involved won’t prevent stupidity.

I referenced psycholanalysis since in my view important things are happening. I’m circling around this issue since I am still working it out, but please just keep that word in mind as a code word for breaking through my deeper meaning here.

If we define mothering as the actual development of a sense of place, safety, and a feeling of being valued and loved, then socialism is the opposite. It is the substitution of rules for freedom, and command and control for individual judgement. It is, in a formal sense, Paternalism, and quite free of nurturing.

Witness, for example, the hue and cry that attended George Bush’s efforts to deploy social program spending through churches. His intent was to put a human face on the government, one which had an actually useful belief system meant to provide meaning to human life. Governments do not deploy meaning. They deploy money. Money does not make one happy.

Who raises our kids? Stay home moms seem often to view their kids as science projects, then they lapse into an evanescent world in which thoughts can be Twittered, and in which the actual mother is the media. Working mothers have kids who do this even quicker.

Our media world is cold. Computers do not talk. Television characters do not recognize you. Perhaps that is why social media is so popular: we are alone with our devices, and feel less alone when communicating through them with others who are also alone.

Where does the nurturing in our modern world come from? Where is the old fashioned connection, respect, and bond that was present everywhere until our lunatic modern world evolved?

We feel both connections that are there, and connections which SHOULD be there, but which aren’t. That latter induces anger, and we see hateful, vicious, evil anger expressed across our media complex. There is a Hello Kitty skull now, if I’m not mistaken.

Therapeutically, people do not suffer from Prozac (or whatever it is they use nowadays) deficiencies. Rarely do they suffer from not talking enough, or benefit from talking more. What we need is a common culture, or at least the permission to exercise the cultures we do have in public.

Socialism–the intellectuals doctrine and expression of the moral idea of egalitarianism–is a type of madness, and creates insane people.

I will add that I don’t view the countries of northern Europe as socialistic. If compliance is not compelled, that is still a type of Liberalism, although I still tend to label most versions “Sybaritic Leftism”, since there is almost always a component of moral relativism, which is to say cultural destruction.

One final note, not entirely related, but not entirely unrelated either. In classical Chinese culture, respect for one’s elders–filial piety–is very old, and very deeply rooted. Consider in that regard how much worse that made the Cultural Revolution, led by Anita Dunn’s hero, Chairman Mao, in which hordes of brainwashed and psychotic children–young kids, 10-12-14–would attack torture, and kill venerable old men, for no crime other than not being young, and not being ardently Communist. The children in a classroom, say a 6th grade classroom, would literally rise up against their teacher, take them outside, and beat them until they died. This is what that great leader Mao wanted, and no doubt something Obama’s former Propaganda Secretary admired.

But consider what a revolting, nauseating flip of the old system this was. It is evil in and of itself–self evidently, as if this is even worth saying, it accomplished nothing good anywhere–but even more horrific when one considers the esteem with which traditional Chinese society taught their children to view their elders.

What the intellectuals who run our universities and who surround our President want is nothing less–in the long run–than the sociopathy of children who never socialised, and never bonded with any mother.

In this regard, I will add one last thought: it is a strange contradiction that the entirety of Socialist theory is oriented around means, but not ends. They obsess about means of subversion, but literally cannot see that the long term outcome of their morality is to deny everyone else their right to live as they see fit. They want the death of moral agency, which I have said often. They want everyone to be forced to commit moral suicide, to renounce who they are–if they have any remaining “stains” of identity (male, female, professional/worker, Jewish/Hindu, Californian/Tennesseean, etc.)–and march in lockstep as ordered.

You can talk to nice people who espouse these ideas. The point I am making is that they don’ think through the logical and necessary outcomes of the policies they espouse, and that this in itself constitutes a major moral failure.