Author: White Whale

The term for a system in motion without qualitative attributes is a machine. That is what Socialism really wants. When the Chinese brainwash people, what they are really trying to do is reprogram them. Socialism is an effort to turn everyone into machines, and where the ability to download ideas on command would be desireable.

The whole thing is about power, which is the only theme that matters. Why there are still fools who believe otherwise is beyond me.

I will add, more or less parenthetically, that I have precise definitions for Socialism, Communism and the like, but am not always as careful as I could be in applying them. Practically, though, I view it as one tangled, interconnected mess. The actual city of Los Angeles ends somewhere, and some other town starts, but I’ll be damned if I could ever tell where it was.

When I used to go out and engage people regularly who hated me, I got insulted a lot. It doesn’t bother me. I still have a friend on Facebook who told me to “go fuck myself”. Whatever. I get hot on occasion too, although I don’t think I’ve ever said that to anyone. I say the same thing in 30 words.

Anyway, my favorite insult ever was from either a grad student or professor at Vanderbilt University (which is a good school), who called me a “conserveretard toon”.

It made me think about cartoonish thinking. So often what we see floating around in people’s brains seems two-dimensional. Further: the obvious thing about cartoons is that they are coherent in their broad outlines, but lacking in detail. They are big on emotion, and movement, but short on the little stuff. They don’t move like real objects move. Anything is possible. A safe can land on your head, and you just get flattened.

I don’t want to make a long post of this, but it seems to me this is a trait of people like Van Jones who have very simplistic, Manichean views of the world, and solutions which amount to jumping over a building in a single bound. To say they are unrealistic is to claim that the people holding such views even WANT to live in the real world. They don’t. Everything is simple and neat and tidy where they live. This is the faculty lounge, where all the ghettoes need is more money, and where all our problems can be fixed just by asking for more money from the “rich people”–other rich people, to be clear, if we are talking Hollywood folks, or really fat, gross people who wear ballcaps.

But cartoons have consequences. Take any Communist nation shortly after the coup which put the Party in power. If you disagree with ANYTHING, you are a class traitor, or a Trotskyite, or bourgeois cockroach. It can be the silliest thing. Maybe you suggest that the Party could bring water to town in buckets rather than teacups. Concentration camp for you, insect.

People are viewed as these little cartoon sketches, whose whole beings can be reduced to a few lines drawn by a not-very-skillful artist.

Rich thinking has a robust structure, but permits for ENDLESS detail and concrete contextual variation. If I reject racism, do I perforce have to believe that all members of other races are virtuous? Of course not. I just have to judge them as individuals.

There is no structural difference between the cartoon pictures the Nazis created of the Jews (presumably this included literal cartoons), and those created by Communists of the bourgeoisie and Capitalists. There have been times and places where if you owned 2 cattle, or a nice teapot, or a small mill, then you were branded evil and shot.

This is ludicrous in the extreme, particularly when exhibited in people, academics, who are more or less professional thinkers. It is malpractice.

I started with another thesis, but it didn’t pan out. Googling around, though, I came across this book. In it, he argues there is a correllation between national GDP and IQ. This would seem to make sense, although I did not even read the whole article, much less either book.

What to do about it, I will leave for another day.

Actually, I will make one comment. Africa is a continent that has many of the lowest IQ’s, as well as the many of the most corrupt governments. Moral integrity in my view is in most cases the result of enlightened self interest. You have to be able to see beyond your immediate circumstances to the longer term results of behaviors that would seem only to affect you. If you cheat others, but then they cheat you, nobody wins in the end, except the very few at the top, and they are prone to getting shot.

Moral order leads to political and then economic order, and it, in turn, depends on the imaginative capacity to visualize an operating whole, in which denying short term gratification enables long term success. Both nations and individuals which fail tend to be populated by people unable to do this. This is the part which matters. The ability to program computers or design them is secondary to this basic truth.

An early observer of Churchill said he would go far because he had “genius and plod.” I love that.

I posted a couple posts ago about the long extinct town of Durrestad, which was in effect driven into bankruptcy and dissolution due to the fact that everything they had kept getting stolen by the Vikings. One year they came, and nobody was home.

The extension of this is that they also took people. The Vikings were one of the most energetic slaving peoples ever. The word Slave itself derives from Slav, since they took so many of them, and literally sold them down-river, to the Arabs and Byzantine Empire.

Communists, likewise, take people, and force them to do work they do not choose; nor do they retain any rights to the fruits of their labor.

There is a continuum in this, though. If we work half the year for a State which does not represent our interests, then we are half-enslaved. Progressive taxation, when not used according to the will of the people paying it, is progressive enslavement.

With respect to individualism, and I have combined in this post two divergent but related ideas, it’s easy to say the invididual does not matter, to just accept the world as it is. Most people for most of history had to accept conditions which were not optimal for them. There is a value in this in rejecting self pity.

Yet to the extent that you say to people that they do matter, when you give people the right to see things in their own way, they do. Both economic and cultural creativity follow. Look at the Gothic Cathedral movement. It was creative because free.

Individualism is nothing more or less than the creed which recognizes that there are as many potential realities and creative accomplishments as there are sets of eyes–figurative or literal–surveying a situation. It empowers countless solutions to problems. It increases the perceptual capacities of a social order by an amount equal to the number of people involved, multiplied by their motivational involvement.

Socialists empower only a select elite. This lessens the intelligence of the whole system. Socialism only rewards a select elite, which demotivates people. Individualism is necessary for both moral and economic progress. Far from being immoral, it is the only doctrine capable of generating human progress.

And as I have said before, nothing in it presupposes selfishness. Mother Teresa was an individualist, as was Gandhi. Selfishness is selfishness. Individualism is simply a recognition of moral autonomy. What people do with that freedom is dependent upon their personal development.

You serve no long term good forcing people to do what is right, without their cooperative involvement.

Everybody has a need for a certain amount of change and novelty. In traditional societies the novelty is provided within a ritual calendar. You have different sorts of times, as for example the Catholic Churches differentiation of Ordinary Time and what I believe is called Holy Time. If life is a language, you have emphasis on different syllables. You have different sorts of Holy-Days, and ordinary days.

Even within ordinary time, we have a cycle. We could in theory dispense with the notion of days, and use numbers. “I want to do something with you on Day 70”. You have to have some kind of cycle, but we don’t even really need months. We could number the days of the solar cycle, then repeat them. I don’t really know, but I suppose the 7 days of the week must come from Genesis. The Romans had ten months (December is literally the 10th month); I think we have twelve months because the Sumerian civilization (one of them in that area) had a Base-12 system, which is why there are 12 signs of the Zodiac, if memory serves. It was Pope Gregory, though, that made it happen. Don’t know the history, but I’m off track.

In revolutinary France, in their goal of creating a new society, they invented new names for the months and new holidays. Since they were not organic, but imposed, they never really took off.

To this day, leftist intellectuals reject most of our shared culture, so one wonders how, culturally, they satisfy this need. It seems to me that novelty fills this function, a tendency which Burke picked up on 200 years ago. They want new art, new food, new clothes. These things don’t have to be createive, or constitute progress in any coherent way. They just have to inject diversity into a monotone, and mythically impoverished culture.

It is in this way that Change, per se, in any direction, can be conflated with progress. It is precisely this tendency that cultural conservatives view with disdain, since if you lack any yardstick for measurement, then any divergence from the status quo is more than likely following the 2nd Law of thermodynamics, in the direction of entropy. It’s much easier to destroy than create, and if you are not trying to achieve anything specific, just difference, then the low road leads through decay.

A third possibility, though, is a stable social order not based on holydays, and a calendar, but on personal progress, on getting better at something, as in the Kaizen idea. With rituals of diligence, as embodied in flower-arranging, and poetry, and calligraphy, and the tea ceremony, the Japanese were able to end warfare and maintain what I would term a dynamic peace for several hundred years. Given world history, this is not bad: certainly much better than the Europeans were able to manage.

Structurally, this third way is needed, since our shared culture is largely kaput, but we retain this innate need. Eventually, something new can materialize organically.

I want a revolution, but a gradual one, led by individuals pursuing their own moralities, and combining in the end in a large-scale, complex, rich order.

I was thinking about violence in media, how it has an effect of increasing rates of depression, and social alienation and cynicism, and lack of empathy. These are all negatives, which are not balanced by any positives.

If there were something in our food supply that was doing that–say, making people depressed–the Left woudl be all over it, especially if they could blame the “corporations”, say Monsanto.

Given, then, the research that is available, why are so few people, particularly on the Left, saying anything? The answer is that objecting to it would require moral judgement. It would require speaking in a cultural voice, which has at its root a vision for a shared cultural order, over and above the political order. For people for whom everything is political, this is impossible. If it is not demonizing Republicans and corporations, then it has no use.

But we live in cultural orders, not political orders. Culture gives us meaning. Police can only give us physical order.

I’m not sure if I spelled this right, but it’s close.

An interesting analogy of Socialism is Durrestad. It was a market town at the mouth of the Rhine very roughly 1,200 years ago. The Vikings raided it annually for a number of years. Eventually there was nothing left to steal, so the town was abandoned, and eventually disappeared.

Sooner or later, someone has to produce something, and if you take everything they make, they stop making it, or they make it somewhere beyond your reach.

Some thoughts on the social democracies of northern Europe, especially Scandinavia.

One, it works to the extent that people are moral, carry their own burdens and are virtuous. People appear to be happy there, by and large, and as much as conservatives may hate that fact, there it is.

To my way of thinking, the desire to take care of fellow members of your social order is desirable. If we define that as “socialism”, then socialism is desirable AND achievable, given sufficient moral elevation.

The problem is in the sequencing. Scandinavians have a very homogeneous cultural order, by and large, and it is characterized by honesty, hard work, and attention to detail. If you took away these virtues, their experiment would fail tomorrow.

In large measure, that is why socialism has failed here. You have to have a receptive “surface”. If you give money to people, they need to value it, and use it creatively.

What has happened here is that large segments of our population have come to believe that the government has money, and that the job of government is to give it to them. They have a sense of entitlement, without balancing responsibility. And that responsibility is not just to those writing them checks, but to their communities as a whole.

Government, to be clear, is not and never can be the same as a cultural order. It is a legal order, instituted by the implied capacity for violence, in the forms of seizing property, and jailing you.

For government to help, there must be an underlying cultural order, and to the extent government tries to play that role, what little cultural order remains is undermined.

It is a truism that “if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime”; but a corollary is that if you give a man a life, he loses his own; if you expect him to live, he will generally do so.

I have called the Scandinavian system “sybaritic leftism”. My reasoning is that it is based upon the conception that life is supposed to be easy. People who grow up with that belief, atrophy. All of the Scandinavian countries have shrinking populations. All of the European countries do. The only fully industrialized nations that were continuing to grow, last I checked several years ago, were the United States, Israel, and South Africa.

It seems to me that excessive ease has a tendency to breed contempt for life.

These are a few scattered thoughts, not fully collated into a coherent pattern. I’ve read where some people want to die mid-sentence. Blog posts can end

The word Hell comes from a Scandinavian goddess, not of Hell as we conceive it, but a cold place. Women that died of old age or sickness went there. If they died in childbirth they went somewhere better, I believe the female equivalent of Valhalla. She was the daughter of Loki, and she is light blue.

You didn’t know you didn’t know that, did you? I didn’t. What else don’t you know you don’t know?