Author: White Whale

In my view, perhaps the simplest definition of psychological well-being is the ability to consistently accomplish chosen goals with enjoyment. This is really pretty simple. Do you exercise the way you want to? Do you eat the way you want to? Do you interact with others, and with your job, and pursue your career the way you want to?

Most of us, and I clearly belong in this category, are some combination of well and ill. We go to work every day, we more or less get our work done, albeit often without enthusiasm. We sort of stick to our diets, but not completely, and not without some resentment. We more or less do our fitness programs, but without excitement.

Higher level self organization, though, would enable each of us, over time, to do superior work in all areas of our lives, and enjoy it. This is the obvious path forward, that can be pursued independent of religious or spiritual beliefs. It is quite adequate even for atheists.

What I wanted to say, though, is that failing to pursue the goals we choose, is in some measure to fail to be who we are. My own goals are ridiculously ambitious, but even so, I do not pursue them with the diligence with which I know I am capable. If you are going to climb a mountain, it makes sense to keep going up, and not to circle it. One sees this terms self sabotage. I like the term self mutilation better, as the habit of paralysis has lasting consequences.

And I would draw a parallel with cutting as well, which most people–certainly all kids–are familiar with now. How does cutting ease pain?

In answering this question, I think one must look not just at psychological data, but to our broader culture, which most psychologists seem loathe to do. It may be that if it is not in a lab it is not science. At the same time, you have to look for the truth where it is. To do otherwise is to be like the drunk Irishman, who when asked why he was looking for his keys under the lamp, when he had dropped them a dozen yards back outside the pub, replied “because the bloody light is better.”

Our modern world lacks rules. Our children, by and large, are only reliably taught that you can’t judge people based on race, and that their chief task in life is to consume. To put it bluntly, this is a really shitty identity, and more or less a form of child abuse. We can’t ask them to do our damn job, which is to give them some sense of moral compass, and some reason to persist in the face of difficulty.

It seems to me that to relate to others deeply, you have to be able to feel deeply, and to feel deeply you have to have some means by which to contextualize suffering. It can be as simple as “life is like that”. It must involve the rejection of self pity, however it is accomplished.

And it must involve pain. I think any child that is too comfortable throughout childhood will be lacking in empathetic capacity. I think of sterotypical Valley girls, whose entire lives involve nearly perfect weather, malls, beauty salons and cosmetic surgery, and sex at an early age.

Sex: what a hopelessly lifeless word. A penis and a vagina or some other orifice coming together rhyhmically for some period of time, until some degree of biological tension is released, temporarily. No emotional connection need be implied.

I don’t like sex–well, actually I enjoy it like everyone else–but what I really WANT is to do it with someone I can see sitting on the front porch with 40 years from now, long after I have the need, or possibly even physical capacity, to do it.

Most kids nowadays, certainly not the boys, don’t think this way. They watch hard and softcore pornography, and come to view women–girls, initially–as existing in some sort of parallel world devoid of emotional committment. For their part, girls come to view themselves in much the same way. They give of themselves, but always think in the back of their minds that the boy will appreciate them much more than he ever does.

The best model for depression I have seen is that of the dog on the electrified plate. It has, I think, been some time since I’ve talked about this, so I’ll run through that quickly. I think the following is correct, but I may have slightly altered some detail.

Experiments were done, in another time and age when ethical concerns were not so prevalent, in which dogs were placed in a cage with an electrical plate. It would be turned on, and initially the dogs were given a pathway out, so they could avoid the pain. Then the door was locked, and there was literally nothing they could do. After having endured this for some time, the door was reopened; yet, the dogs would remain where they were, enduring the shock. This phenomenon is called Learned Helplessness.

What I think many kids nowadays learn is that our common culture is so weak that what deep feelings they have can nowhere be communicated. Nobody seems to want to listen. Nobody wants to hear about feelings of rage–say, at some boy–or confusion as to what to do in life, or fear about the future, when there are so many ways the world could end in a nasty way.

They are alone. Maybe you the reader feel alone. Nobody wants to hear the thoughts you think may be silly, but which are yours. Maybe you are a poet, but afraid to share it with anyone. Or maybe you share it with everyone, and nobody reads it; or maybe they think you are stupid.

How do we connect with one another? Who are we? Have we not all been through this synchronizing mechanism in which we compare tastes in movies, or sports, or music? You listen to the Killers? Cool, I think they are the best. You a Packers fan? Me, too. Somebody was doing the dialogue to Caddy Shack the other day. I only saw that movie once, 25 years ago. I don’t remember anything but Bill Murray and the gopher. I was left out of that conversation.

This is the root of cutting. Pain is real, is it not? It is not ambiguous. And I think all the piercing and tattooing we see going on is just a thinly veiled extension of cutting. Eyebrow piercings? Ear gauges? We are all looking at one another, lonely at the core of our being. We can all be cool with each other, but who will get up in the middle of the night to save you? Who will run into a burning building for you?

The Portuguese have this word “saudade”. I may have mentioned this, but if so it’s been a while. It is the feeling an ocean faring people get, that is sort of a longing for what is in the distance. As I understand it, it can be both a longing for home, when you are far away, and a longing for far away, when you are home. It is a sad restlessness, a lack of contentedness, a need to move.

This is what the Buddhists and Taoists called desire. To be happy, is to be happy where you are.

I have things to do. As I note on the side there, this blog is for open thoughts, and random musings. Thoughts can be like paintings or scultures. The Goodness Movement blog is sort of my museum, and this is my workshop. You have to play with the materials, you have to hit things roughly the same way, but from many different angles. These are all sketches. Some I complete, some I don’t.

Always, I am trying to learn, though: to see what I should see, if my eyes were clear.

This is an interesting graph. Just click on it, and it will expand. You will note a substantial decline in relative Defense expenditures over the years. It definitely went down to its lowest amount at the end of the Cold War, but does not even approach what it was in the 50’s, relatively speaking.

The point I wanted to make is we have spent some $16 trillion in todays dollars on the War on Poverty, and poverty is winning.

Let us use the analogy of an actual war. We have been fighting this one for 45 years, and we can list as casualties most of the people killed in poor areas, due to destroyed cultural institutions, most notably the family and church.

The War in Iraq will in the end have cost us about $2.4 trillion or so. That is one sixth what we have spent on the War on Poverty, and in the end we will (or should have) a democratic Arab nation in the Middle East. The War on Poverty has made things WORSE.

Food for thought–unless you are a leftist, in which case your only decision is what combination of fool, corporate apologist and racist I am. Whatever you do, don’t think about the ghettoes of Detroit and your role in their creation.

For once, he has not said anything I find objectionable. I only read this column once, and I had a Guinness for St. Patrick’s Day, but he makes sense.

Banks need to be held accountable for hurting people. It is one thing to knowingly enter a loan you can’t pay–and even there, the bank should not make the loan if this is the case. It is another entirely to willfully mislead people.

Once you truly grasp how the fractional reserve system works, particularly as it combines with central banking, you just want to tell many of these banks to shut up and fly right. Not many of us can imagine million dollar bonuses, but they are not uncommon, I don’t think, in the banking world.

If Krugman wants to attack our banking system as parasitical, I would be prepared to support him, at least up to a point.

The “rich” are not the enemy. Bill Gates, for example, earned his money. He has created some ten thousand millionaires-something on that order–and ten’s of thousands of well paying jobs. This is a useful activity.

What is not useful is creating money from scratch. All banks do this. Money that should be in the proverbial vault is instead cloned and given to other people. This is money that would not be in the economy otherwise, and is thus intrinsically inflationary.

Moreover, this Quantitative Easing the Fed is doing is nothing but printing money and giving it to a small elite that is already very, very, very rich, so they can lay ownership claims on more of the world’s property. Yes, we lose the purchasing value of our money through inflation, but only if that money is spent HERE. What I expect to happen, now, is that a lot of $600 Billion or whatever it is–how would we know, when we can’t audit the Fed?–will be spent buying up Japan. That won’t cause inflation here, but it WILL cause a net transfer of wealth from Japan to here.

I won’t defend this. This is not a matter of patriotism. Theft by any of us is the responsibility of all of us, and theft is what this is.

We need to end the Fed, and end fractional reserve banking. The latter idea makes peoples heads want to explode, but in my view it is quite doable. I will link my series again: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

I have said this often, but what I propose is fully congruent with the spirit in which Marxists approach economic matters, except that I care about getting the damn thing right. There are fundamental inequities n our system, but they will not be fixed by “revolution”, or the empowerment of an unaccountable elite. On the contrary, such an outcome would likely work to the BENEFIT of those who already hold most of the wealth and power in this nation.

I recommend this book from time to time. That was where I pulled the Stuart Chase quote from, and where he quotes Mussollini calling Keynes ideas “pure fascism”.

I was unable to validate all the personal crimes he catalogues in the chapter on moral depravity, except the note Keynes wrote to Strachey about “bed and boy” being cheap in Tunis. One wonders how any positive spin can be put on that; that he was referring to pedophilia and child prostitution seems almost inescapable.

One last comment I will add is that it is interesting to me to note how much people assume of our world. Things happen in a certain way, in a certain order, day after day after day, so they complacently believe that they must always remain that way.

I was on a 12′ ladder the other day, working over peoples desks with them at them, with two pairs of pliers, removing 3# speakers. Some of the people were alert enough to realize that pliers do not always remain in hands. Most of them were not. They were at their desks, that was their place, and I was just going to have to deal with it. That is perhaps understandable, but I was not the one risking something dropping on my head from 15′.

There is a book called Deep Survival, which is uneven, but which makes some good points. He goes through some tragic accidents, and points out that quite often they happen because people blindly ASSUME that things do not change. A group of snowmobilers was killed in what I believe was an avalanche, after going up a hill they had gone up dozens of times. They knew that conditions were right for disaster, but it was THAT HILL, they knew it, it was their friend. Nothing had ever happened before. How could it happen now?

Many of the people out there today are the same. They blithely assume that since America has been free for 200 years (to varying degrees, depending on who you are or were), that it will always remain free. This is mouth-breathing complacency at its worst. So is trusting “governemnt” to fix anything. History is quite clear that if you are going to get some large-scale disaster–like war or tyranny–then it starts with the government. There are no examples of corporations exercising direct power (outside of, perhaps, the British East India Company, which however itself was a Crown-granted monopoly), but history is little BUT the naked abuse of power by governments. That is not the exception, it is the rule.

No one living today should be so stupid as not to realize that.

As I hopefully made clear in the post where I discussed Hugh S. Johnson, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1933, point man for the New Deal, and admirer of Fascism, our government has had people in high office for many decades who held free markets in contempt, and thought they knew better how to do EVERYTHING.

The role of Fannie Mae–a New Deal agency–in the meltdown of 2008 has not been made as obvious to all concerned as it ought to have been, but it has not been fully ignored either. The short version is that when it failed, its backing of something on the order of a trillion dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities became suspect, the Credit Ratings Agencies downgraded their ratings, and sales dried up, forcing massive cashflow problems for very, very, very large banks, like Lehman Brothers.

What has been little remarked upon is that the government holds most of the mortgages in this country. The number is something like 80%. Ponder that. The Federal Government, either through direct ownership (you write a monthly check to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac), or through final backing of securities consisting of packaged mortgages, has the title to 80% of the homes built in America. I am not talking public housing. I am not talking urban renewal projects. I am talking ordinary homes, “owned” by ordinary people. That is phenomenally important. We are using our own tax dollars to buy ourselves homes, and in the process ceding ownership to one monolithic entity, the Federal Government. This is a MASSIVE transfer of power, even if the consequencs of this are not obvious, yet.

Keynes was a Fascist. Mussollini himself said so, and presumably if anyone knew what Fascist economics looked like, the founder of Fascism did. Certainly, Keynes mentor–George Bernard Shaw–looked at Mussollini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Lenin’s Soviet Union with the same enthusiasm.

In “The End of Laissez-Faire”, which was not a well-thought out body of thought, but rather an erudite expression of the most cartoonish thinking, Keynes makes a case for what he called “semi-autonomous” bodies, which support the power of the State, but not in an obvious way. He used the example of the Bank of England, and if memory serves the London Port Authority. What he wanted were agencies ultimately accountable to no one, which could be subverted in a political direction he desired. Some years you make progress in the government; in other years, you have people doing things in the dark that nobody can see. Somewhere, every year, you are moving your plan for autocracy forward.

It is within this context that the patent Fannie Mae filed for a system to turn off power remotely to any home in the nation must be viewed. This is not the best link, but it will do for now.

What were they doing? They were thinking ahead to when the government actually flexed its muscle, and under the guise of preventing global warming exercised the right to determine how much power people could use, directly. They literally want a line into your home, such that they can kill your power whenever they choose to.

We are told the lie that the role of Fannie Mae is increasing home ownership. What has in fact happened is that, yes, people were approved for homes who would not otherwise have qualified. Those people, being unqualified, have in very large numbers defaulted on mortgages that never should have been written in the first place, at ENORMOUS cost to American taxpayers.

To be clear, what happened was that local banks wrote mortgages they NEVER would have kept for themselves, but which they wrote simply because Fannnie Mae buys everything. Even though everything they did put the American taxpayers on the hook, nothing they did was regulated, at the insistence of Democrats, with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd being the most egregious defenders of this terrible system.

I will note as well in conclusion that the man who wrote the book “A New Deal” was an open admirer of Soviet Communism. He went there, liked what he saw, and wrote “why should they have all the fun”. By fun, he seems to have had in mind mass murder:

Best of all, the new regime would have the clearest idea of what an economic system was for. The sixteen methods of becoming wealthy would be proscribed—by firing squad if necessary—ceasing to plague and disrupt the orderly process of production and distribution. Money would no longer be an end, but would be thrust back where it belongs as a labor-saving means. The whole vicious pecuniary complex would collapse as it has in Russia. Money making as a career would no more occur to a respectable young man than burglary, forgery or embezzlement. “Everyone,” says Keynes, “will work for the community and, if he does his duty, the community will uphold him.” Money making and money accumulating cannot enter into the life calculations of a rational man in Russia. A society of which this is even partially true is a tremendous innovation

We underestimate the extent to which our order has ALREADY been subverted at our peril.

An interesting question in approaching racial differences is to ask, not how they differ in terms of intelligence or other physical factors, but how they are spiritually different? Do races–and I am here conflating cultural patterns with ethnicity–differ in how they become Good, or how they approach God?

What is the best path to Goodness for African Americans? For Asians? For Caucasians?

This might make for a useful dialogue. Obviously some people would object to positing ANY difference, good or bad, but my thought here is that I VALUE cultural differences. I have no desire at all for African Americans to change who they are. I have no desire for Asian-Americans to change who they are. I like who I am.

What I want is MORE cultural diversity, not less, and within the context of that aim, this discussion MIGHT make sense. I am talking out loud, but thought there was sufficient potential for something useful to come from my post, that I am hitting the button.

I was sitting in a Jewish deli called Noshville, in Nashville, some weeks ago. Sitting there, drinking coffee, looking around, watching people, several thoughts occurred to me.

When you are in a big city, you are monad-itized. You are a singular unit. You are isolated. You have people you can connect with, but the enmeshment is disrupted just by the scale of movement, and the cultural diversity. In that sort of cultural context you hvae to be able to make some assumptions about people. This is the value of uniform political beliefs. No matter what else he may believe, you can say “Well, at least this guy understand how the world works, and why we need strong unions.” This is an outcome of the anxiety that attends never knowing what to expect from others. You see thousands of people very day, so you need to be able to make some assumptions.

I read once of a woman in New York claiming she did not know one person who voted for Nixon. Of course she didn’t. In the face of all the diversity, at least some things remained stable for her.

Second thought: This restaurant was filled with pictures of people I didn’t recognize, but who were presumably local heroes, or at least Jewish heroes. This place has kind of a Swing-era theme, so they were old. Some pictures were almost reminiscent of shrines to me, to someone was important to someone.

This led me to the conclusion that local heroes are very important. George Washington: great man, but he lived somewhere else. The people that really make you feel good are local kids who made good. Maybe not President, but they played pro ball somewhere, or started some company everyone knows. That sort of thing is useful because you can RELATE to it.

The homogenization of our culture that mass media has enabled has impoverished us in many ways.

I wonder if one of the reasons black people are so focused on prostitution in this country (please find yourself virtually any rap album out there today if you doubt this) is that many black leaders have made deals, saying we will work with you if we get our cut.

Jesse Jackson is a pimp, who has prostituted the communities he claims to serve. He was there when MLK was shot. He has been around since then. Let us call that 40 years or more. What good has he done for his community? Where are the jobs? Where is the wealth? Why are crime rates high? Why do 40% or more of inner city kids drop out of school? Who has won? He has.

Jackson himself has made a killing, and has taught his son the family business as well. He has made a career out of it. So have Louis Farrkhan and Jerry Wright, who drive nice cars, live in nice homes, and can look forward to very comfortable retirements some day. None of them have done a damn bit of good for their constituents, but do pimps really care about the working girls who keep them in the green? They just need to convince them they need them, that they can’t do without them.

You have to wonder if becoming a pimp–or talking in strongly positive terms about that or being a gangster–is not in some way reacting against that reality. This would not be conscious, but in the air in areas where everyone lives on public assistance of one form or another. If you have been subordinated in some way, you feel a compensating need for being in control.

We can and should fix our inner cities. Plainly, though, it is not getting done by current methods, even though the money flowing to it is making some people very, very rich.

I feel for these kids. This situation is intolerable. But the solution is clearly not more public assistance. My financial overhaul would help: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

I also presented some ideas here, in my piece on the future: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page8.html

I do not have the data–which would involve talking with specific people over an area–to do better for now. I will content myself with pointing out the naked immorality of most supposed black leaders.

If you really think about it, the efforts of Communists to drive people mad, the assaults on their minds, are the more vicious of the crimes they commited when compared to the actual murders, and famines.

You look at histories, say CIA mind control, a lot of it was designed to counter the techniques that had already been developed by the Soviets, and which the CIA had to fear might be used on their own agents, if captured.

Look at brainwashed soldiers from Korea. People born into normal American families, who came home believing that the most oppressive political system ever invented was desirable.

This was done to millions of people. This is as evil an act as can be imagined. Simply inflicting pain on someone is much less evil than stealing their souls. You are creating beings who are not autonomous yet who still possess independent awareness.

I think I posted on this a while back, but I rarely repeat myself, since I can’t remember what I said.

I may have posted something like this before. If so, my apologies. I write so much, I can’t remember the details. I am continuing to take off voice memos to myself. Good God I am talkative. I am editing the content down.

To live in love is to live in chaos. I visualize being attacked by darkness. What the dark wants is routinization, and a pattern that never changes. That pattern may be outwardly helpful, it may serve the cause of Goodness for some period of time. But the world changes around us, and to fail to see that, is to fall off the Path. As Lao Tzu wrote the Way that can be told–the Way that can be defined statically, and without alteration forever–is not the Eternal Path. For that, you have to dance with the stars.

Sometimes the easy path is the hard one. Sometimes you have to skip the bridge and walk through the marsh. You can complain about it all you want, but in my view that’s the way it works.

Goodness is wildness. It is being untamed, never quite sure what the next step is. That’s the way to live, in my view. I could be wrong–but I make new decisions every day.

Tony Robbins, or one of the motivational gurus, used the example of a plane flying from California to Hawaii. It is off course something like 90% of the time, but the pilots make constant corrections to accomodate the wind or whatever. If you are making regular decisions, based on core principles, you can never stray too far off course, if you allow yourself to see. Only by saying, once, “this is the line that will never change” can you wind up in Japan.