Author: White Whale

One sees devotees of Ayn Rand from time to time who more or less seem to have appropriated from the philosophy the idea they don’t need to be polite if they don’t want to, or feel gratitude towards people who helped them. Economically, this makes some sense, in that people will not associate voluntarily with people whose company they don’t like, or do work for someone without recompense. Fair enough. They don’t owe anybody anything unless they entered into a contract with them, and vice versa.

But no man is an island. Take the famous skyscraper scene at the end of “The Fountainhead”. Howard Roark designed the building, but as the architect he would have done something close to nothing of the actual construction. Yes, every workman there was getting paid a wage, but can the building itself really be called the work alone of Roark? Would there not be good cause for him to locate himself within a social order, a team, a–God forbid–voluntary “Collective”?

Thoughts have, in my mind, textures. The vision I get from Ayn Rand is that all individuals are like little steel widgets. We can plug into one machine, or another. As we call combine in endless spontaneous forms, the capacity for large scale work emerges. One could homologize, I suppose, the building of a skyscraper with the system of planetary motion. Both are rule-governed, and the expression of an order which is latent, but quite real. But

In the end, though, everyone is alone, being the sole judges of merit (although such judgements can of course combine in the marketplace), and sole sources of creativity.

What is interesting about this to me is that Rand (real name Alisa Rosenbaum) grew up under the Soviets. As such, she was subjected to the alienation and moral atrophy that such regimes breed. They breed apathy, contempt for human life, conformity, and brutishness.

In my own conception, Leftism is like a permanent wave function. In physics, you have particles and waves. Matter can possess either attribute, depending on the question you ask it. Where Rand seems stuck in the particularizing, Leftists (who include of course “Fascists” and National Socialist) have a blanket mass narrative that applies to all people and all times. You “are” who you were born to be. If you are German under the Nazis, and you are not Jewish, gypsy, slavic, homosexual or handicapped in any way, that is from their perspective wonderful. If you are Jewish, your best destiny is death. People are fit into boxes without regard to their individual differences.

I saw a bumper sticker today which read: “Drive a Liberal crazy: work hard and be happy”. This is what sparked this train of thought. By what process of mind does one repeatedly impose policies which have never worked towards their stated end?

The simple fact is that these retards exists within a mass myth, withing a LARGE narrative that admits no details, and into which all counternarratives can be sunk, like so many safes in quicksand (with the bodies, as in “the Lovely Bones”).

By permitting details, and individual perception, Rand/Rosenbaum is of course much, much more useful than any conceivable leftist narrative.

At the same time, I feel there is a possibility of a balance. Neither side is balanced, although one is clearly superior to the other. You have to be able to go back and forth between being “atomic” and being general. This is what I have called Perceptual Breathing, and is the reason that concept exists.

That’s enough for today. That concept is discussed in the first essay, and the piece defining terms.

I congratulate my children when tney hurt themselves. I tell them that if they aren’t skinning a knee or bumping their head or something from time to time, they are not doing their job as children. Once I’ve verified they are OK, I also laugh at them.

Today I went for a hike, and my oldest said that if I fell down the hill, as long as I was alright, they would laugh at me. I said that was fine.

A story I’ve told often to them is when I was a plumber’s assistant a long time ago, there was a beam in the attic where we kept some supplies that was large and low. It was too hard to duck under it, but it was at just that height where you forget about it. Someone had written “Watch Out”, and someone “seriously, you will hit your head on this.” I made a mental note for that not to be me. How could anyone be that stupid?

Well, when I did, it was one of those things where your head stops instantly, but your feet keep going, and you literally land on your ass. I literally saw the stars people talk about (not for the first time). They think this story is hilarious, because once I picked myself up, I myself thought it was funny.

Pain is a fact of life. That is a given. How we choose to deal with it, and how much risk we incur, are up to us. That is the domain of our freedom. You can live a very safe life with little injury, little anxiety, and from my point of view little growth.

This isn’t what I want for my children. I want them to fall on their asses from time to time, cry their eyes out, get back up, and go again without worrying about it.

When someone falls in front of you, sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do it watch them struggle, doing nothing, until they realize on their own they have the power to manage the situation. I literally did this with kids when they were younger. I would only help them once I was satisfied they had made a serious effort.

If you pick a man up, you teach him to remain on the ground unless he is helped. If you teach him to get up–which in large measure consists in forcing him to figure it out for himself–then you teach him to walk as a free man.

We see so many people rejecting freedom. I will make some of my commentary on that my next post.

A man walked into a hardward store to buy some nails. When he went to the counter and offered to pay for the $2 nails with a $100 bill, the clerk told him they could not change that large a bill. At first, he was angry, reflecting that their lack of preparation had cost them the money. Then he realized that his lack of preparation had cost him his nails. He left the store a wiser man.

One interesting thing to point out about the Steven Lerner story (SEIU official plans to crash economy on purpose, creating generalized poverty to help the poor be less lonely) is that that tape had to have come from a spy. I am surely not revealing secrets here, since the first question Lerner would have asked is who the leaker was.

The spy presumably was invited, and may well have been a former leftists. This is the interesting part. Leftism appeals to the morally high-minded since it excels at creating morally high-minded rhetoric. They are going to end racism, or poverty, or the use of the American military to bully other nations so “corporations” can make more money. They are going to save the environment, and have a damn good time smoking weed and grooving out in drum circles doing it.

As I have said, though, Socialism is at root a moral narrative. It is not a viable economic plan. It is not a social system, except to the extent of some murky utopian images of people getting along since money is no longer around. It is not even scientific, since if it were formatted as a hypothesis, it has been falsified by repeated experimentation.

This means that the only coherent part of it is a claim of how the world should be, and this claim is that all people should be alike materially and culturally. This latter part is obscured by an obsession with cultural others, but the only point of that is to blunt America’s cultural cohesion, and that of Western civilization more generally. You talk up others, and in so doing talk down yourself. You don’t say “they are great and we are great”. You say “they are great, and we are sinners: repent for your very existence, and we probably won’t hate you”.

But bubbles are popping everywhere. Previously deluded people are waking up and realizing what is actually being planned, what socialism actually means in practice. And they don’t like it. It does not make the world a better place. It does not increase justice of any sort. It does not improve the environment (China is a centrally planned economy in many respects), and it doesn’t make anyone HAPPIER, if they were not already capable of happiness.

The Danish model is not awful. It is just decadent. It is a system incapable of sustaining itself. The population is falling across Europe. The only people increasing in population are people who do not believe in either democracy or Socialism.

And to the point, Obama and his cohort are not planning a Danish model. Every indication is that his heroes are Mao and Lenin. Their ideas led to mass death, much suffering, tyranny, and no relief whatever from the human condition, except to the extent the vodka factories met their quotas.

Obama is no Lenin. Lenin sat in jail for many years, lived the furtive life of an exile, and was very intelligent, very persuasive, and very strong-willed. Obama is a boy in a man’s suit.

He surrounds himself with some dangerous people though.

The point of this thread, which admittedly wanders around–it was a long day–is that all of the leftists in this nation will from now on have to wonder about their Operational Security. Who can they trust?

In order to create a high degree of security, they will both have to severely limit their communications, and betray to the periphery just how ruthless they actually are, by process of an exclusion that did not heretofore obtain.

The Vietcong were very good at internal subversion, but they were able to rely on hatred both for the Chinese, and the Catholic Presidents, particularly Diem. This mobilized people, because they promised–falsely–something better.

Here, though, the stakes are a generalized collapse of our nation, with all the terror, poverty, violence, and suffering that will involve. To be on the side of the Left, now, is to hate this nation, and the people in it, all of them.

It is my belief that thoughtful people are realizing this en masse, and that the cruel and hateful sadists at the core are going to have great difficulty integrating this reality into general plans, even with a sympathizer in the Oval Office.

Couple quick points. First the spirit of “revolution” always has been, from a Leftist perspective, one of violence, and not creation. They want to tear down, destroy, desecrate what is, because they hate the world we live int passionately. They hate the suburbs, and plastic toys, churches, two parent homes, and “bourgeois” morality. When I say “nihilist”, I being precise. That term was leveled at them by their opponents, but if you read Nechaev, you see a lot of cleverness attached to the task of destroying economic and institutional orders, but more or less a shrug of the shoulder when asked with what they intend to replace it. That isn’t his problem. He will create a pile of rubble, then YOU, future generations figure out what to do with. What, one might ask, if we rebuild the same thing, since it worked for people quite well. Well, he would say, then I will destroy it again.

This is the level mental midgets like Lerner are operating on. To call them stupid is somewhat wrong, though. They are stupid in that they fail to see that their hatred makes them impervious to normal forms of happiness and satisfaction. They fail to grasp their agenda is fundamentally evil, and that it hurts most those it claims to care about. Death and destruction: that is all they want. That is the extent of their thinking, which they cloak when they think about it in pious rhetoric about some group that is supposedly going to benefit.

Anyway, let us suppose that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not just abuse the authority granted them to line the wallets of the executive committees. Let us suppose they had a secondary aim.

They knew they would go belly up at some point. They made too many bad loans. It was inevitable, and even though they were clearly morally stupid, I don’t think they were financially stupid.

What if, though, they had a long term plan to get WAll Street dependent on them as a customer and backer? They bought up huge tracts of the mortgage backed securities. Why would you not stop a couple months before the election? Why could you not time this with a call to your buddies over at the Credit Rating Agencies and tell them you would like them to reconsider the value of those securities, and that until they did, you weren’t buying any more.

It was that cash flow failure, that excessive inventory, that caused the big banks–Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns–to fail.

Why could socialist revolutionaires at FM and FM more or less precipitated it? The own, directly or indirectly, 75% of all housing in America.

Ponder that fact. OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OWNS most of the supposedly private housing in America. Why are we in effect not already considered to have socialized housing?

Why does not Fannie Mae’s decision to patent a device to regulate your power use remotely make sense? At some point, they presumably plan to make it obvious to everyone what has until now been happening in the dark.

Sometimes the best lies are the most flagrant and obvious. People think “surely that can’t be happening.”

I’m not sure I agree with my last post. I reserve the right to label myself an idiot. Please keep in mind that I am putting into a public realm what amount to open musings and ramblings, and that if I were driving a car, it would regularly be in the ditch, the other lane, 30′ above the ground, underwater, upside down, inside out, and rolling along on one wheel. Yes, there is a lane with my name on it, but what fun is that?

These are really the two emotions which consitute my sins. I really don’t feel jealousy, greed, lust which I satisfy by using people, pride beyond healthy self esteem, and I’m not lazy.

It seems to me, though, that there is a part of me which can sit behind my self, and watch how my emotions flow into the world. I watch, and somewhere in there my world, what I bring into the world, is polluted with these two emotions, which are sort of mixed in as the whole thing flows out.

I believe I have finally isolated the source of both. Now it is a task of understanding and dispelling them. Description is to cure roughly what a picture of aspirin is to ending a headache. As you might imagine, I’m no fan of talk therapy. I believe it encourages narcissism, abdication of personal responsibility, and moral weakness.

I had this dream last night, in which I was shown by a guide people sleeping, and malevolent spirits hovering over them, trying to scare them. When people awoke, they would shoot at them, but those around them thought they were mad, because they had not seen what they had seen.

What happens when we feel anger? Is it not an initiation of the mechanism by which we physically defend ourselves? Yet, normally there is no physical danger. The danger is to our self esteem, and our emotional independence.

The way I visualize this is that a ghost comes into being, one that is fighting us. We create another ghost, to counter it. We are never really seeing the person in front of us, who we would say has provoked this anger.

I’m thinking out loud, but let’s run through a concrete example, one in which anger is justified. You do some work for someone. They had promised you X per hour, but when the work is done, and it’s time to get paid, they offer you X-Y, and say that was the deal. You know they are lying, and they know that you know they are lying. But there it is.

Your task is to get paid what you are owed. Everything that furthers this aim is desirable, and everything which retards it is not desirable.

The first fact to be acknowledge is that you may not be able to accomplish this aim. If you had an oral contract that was witnessed by no one, you will have no enforceable claim in court.

You can get angry and threaten them. They may then threaten you back. A moral relationship may degenerate into a physical one, in which the stronger, more clever, more lucky man wins. Might will make right.

You can appeal to their sense of decency. Let us suppose, though, that they have none. Clearly, these people exist. You can threaten them with defamation. This may or may not work.

Let us say in the end you fail. You have been cheated. This sort of thing happens all the time. Now what?

You have created this ghost, ready for a fight, and he doesn’t go away. As I visualize it, we have many selves, and this man gets a room in your house. Whenever you open that door and go into his room, there he is, fists up, face clenched, and amped up. He is like this all the time. He is there when you sleep, and he is there when you are awake. He is always standing at your shoulder when you meet people, and perform the business of your life.

How do you make him go away? You can cement off that room. You can lock him in there, and refuse to acknowledge his existence, but every time somebody brings up that deal, he pops right through, fists up, ready for a fight.

This is a burden.

I think the only way to make him go away is to refuse to consider anger as a response to ANY circumstance. This is not to relinquish your right to demand your rights, but rather the mechanism of creating a proxy to do it. All problems have solutions. Sometimes the solution is forgetting the problem. You do this by being present in the moment, and not living in the past or the future. You let everything go, as you go. If you travel light, you will travel far.

I find I laugh a lot more when I can’t remember who I “am”. What sort of person am I? I don’t know. I’m standing here, though. Would you like to go have lunch somewhere?

Is this a way to live? I don’t know. I coined a term for this a while back, though, called “forgession”. This is the process of actively forgetting, forget plus progression. I suppose it should be forgression, but I like the other one better.

To live otherwise, it seems to me, is to live in a wax museum, filled with all the ghosts you have created over the years. Sooner or later, they crowd you out, and you are left walking a narrow path that is mapped out for you. You are unfree.

Some people live in the past. They remember the affronts with which their grandparents were afflicted. Such is the case, for example, with the grandchildren of those Arabs who chose to leave Israel during the war in 1948. They can’t forget, because they want to be prisoners. Their rage is their identity. That is not a very good identity.

Sadness, it seems to me, is the consequence of that ghost feeling defeated. You have another room where someone sits, unvictorious, his head in his hands, moping. Often he drape himself on your back, and asks you to carry him everywhere, since he doesn’t have the energy. If you like, you can ask anger to kick his ass, reenergizing you, but you have just exchanged one problem for another. In neither case are you free. Your “home” is not your own. You have guests you invited in, but who now refuse to leave. Every time you want to go out for some fresh air, to enjoy the sun, they drag you back in. “Don’t leave us”, they tell you: we are afraid we might die.

And so we cling to outdated, unnecessary reactions to things that happened many years ago. We all do this, I think, to some greater or lesser extent, which in large measure depends on the extent of the affront, which becomes larger proportionately to who hurt you and how early.

We-I-carry burdens which are unnecessary.

I would add that bitterness is when the two get together, and decide to destroy your home, the place where you should be able to rest and seek shelter. The bitter person can never rest. They hate the world because they hate themselves. They hate who they have become, but refuse to see it.

When the early Buddhists set off across India, they did so as itinerant beggars, who rose early, and never ate after noon. This would seem a hard life, but it would seem to me what they were trying to build were palatial, airy, sunlit estates, completely free of permanent guests, and therefore open for companions whose company they found pleasurable, easy and free.

I don’t have all the answers. All I can say is that I trying to find them.

I was driving through the rural Midwest somewhere today. I always enjoy looking at the cars in the yards, the trailers, the lawn ornaments, the well manicured lawns, the tire shops, the little restaurants, the slaugherhouse signs, and those to the “boat”. People live and die in great numbers in such places. I love that some of them are a bit kooky, lazy, energetic in strange things, patriotic, church-going, gambling, drinking, and given to strange decoration. They have horses in their front yards, and a garden in the back, that they tend diligently in the summer, and eat a lot of tomatoes when they ripen, and watermelon too.

I was thinking: why do socialists hate this so much? Why do they want to turn everyone into grey robots, marching the same way, dressing the same, singing the same “happy” song in the happy tone they were taught?

What they want is the eradication of religion. They want no one to smoke. They want no one to eat foods they don’t approve of. They don’t like drinking. They don’t like guns. They don’t like cars in lawns and ugly litter. They don’t like dancing if it isn’t their kind, and they wonder why people would want to hold hands rather than do the nasty, just because they were taught otherwise by their parents and/or their church.

They don’t like bacon. They don’t like fertilizer. They don’t like people named Bubba who need to lose 100 pounds. They don’t like people sitting around in a cafe, discussing the weather and religion, politics (unless it is their politics) and local sports.

How goddamn DULL is socialism? It is the creed of the boring, compelled on the unwilling, in the name of no one.

I want flowers in the spring, genuine diversity of thought and behavior, and no damn rules governing people’s own damn right to kill themselves in any way they see fit, whether it be booze, smokes, or ATV’s.

I want to preserve the places where they cling to guns, religion, hard work, and biscuits and gravy. Those are my people.

Well, actually I’m a Berkeley graduate who drinks Oolong tea and knows what Tempeh is. Maybe I should limit myself to saying I enjoy their company, and appreciate their lifestyle.

It may not seem obvious, but in many respects cities are culturally homogeneous. We need all types.

I have a few more thoughts, but they will wait until tomorrow.

In my essay on Goodness, I did not define any acts, per se, that were right or wrong, in an abstract way. What I did is orient myself within the only skin I have, and look at the world, and figure out what seemed to make me happier, and what more disturbed.

Evil is evil not because some absolute code is embedded in the universe: it is evil because to want to do it, you have to kill the parts of your self that are able to make you happy. It is completely congruent with unhappiness, understood in a deep way.

I was watching my emotions today–mindfulness is a basic Buddhist practice–and noticing the flow. I did something, then immediately said “that was a fuckup”, and got mad at myself. It probably wasn’t, but let’s say it was. We are shooting figurative missiles out into the world every time we make a decision. You can’t undo the past, and you can’t make things that flowed from your actions disappear from the world. Shit happens, but there is always a proximate cause, and sometimes it is you.

How much good does self-flagellation do? The task is to get it right the next time. We learn to be mad at ourselves so that we are impressed enough with the severity of the wrong to not repeat it. Otherwise, since most of us are dumbasses, we risk repeating it. This is an adaptive reaction, but only to someone who is fundamentally asleep at the wheel. If you are alert, there is no need for anger.

Or take jealousy. Is it not attachment to something someone else has? Is it not in effect giving some part of your self to your conception of some other person?

I studied martial arts for a fair while, perhaps six years. The useful part of it was learning to deal with complex flowing situations without losing my physical, emotional, or mental balance. I have no idea if I can fight, but the practice was invaluable just for this sensation of relaxed reaction without fear.

Emotions attack us, in some ways, do they not? Are most tragedies not about someone attacked by some emotion, who in the end is overwhelmed? King Lear, vanity perhaps. Hamlet, paralysis. Othello, jealousy. MacBeth, ambition and pride.

The tighter you are, the more profound the effect. Ideas like “no self” help to loosen you up. I was having fun playing with this whole antipodal Buddhist thing this morning. There is no fuckup, and there is no not fuckup. There is no being smart, and no being not-smart. It seems to give you play, and room to maneuver.

When reading some Asian (and other) philosophical texts, it is easy to misunderstand them. Take the doctrine of Sukhaduhkasamo, which translates as He for whom pleasure and pain are the same. Who would want to live like that? Emotionally numb, unable to enjoy anything to gain the satisfaction of not suffering.

On my rendering, what an exceptionally well-organized person is feel both positive and negative feelings deeply and often, but buffer them in such a way that homeostasis is quickly regained. I visualize a sort of slow motion film, where you see the assault, the impact, and the adjustment, and renormalization. It’s not that you don’t feel, it’s that you are not attached to grief, or joy. You let the world live, and the dominant sensation of that is still pleasure and enjoyment.

You could almost use an example of interest income on investments. Do you make more money on 3% return annually for 50 years on a given amount, or on a return that varies constantly from -10% to positive 20%? It’s hard to say. It depends how often you wind up in each place.

A sunny disposition is much more to be wished for and cultivated than the great strains and victories of continual agonistic conflict.

That will do for now. I had a few nascent things to say, and think I roughly said them.

I have defined socialism as a moral system, which implies an economic system, which in turn REQUIRES a political system. Everyone should be equal, which means they have equal amounts of stuff, which–given manifest inequalities of talent and position-requires an authoritarian regime, to some greater or lesser degree. The State–which is to say a self appointed Socialist elite that is just a bit more equal than everyone else–has to have the power to take what it wants, and give it to whomever it wants.

Logically, though, it would follow that if egalitarianism as a moral doctrine fails, then so too do the economic and political doctrines which flow in its wake.

An intelligent person could go far with that basic insight.