Author: White Whale

I was thinking about Christ’s teaching that “if you have but the faith of a mustard seed, you can move mountains.” I had two thoughts.

First, it occurred to me some time ago that he himself moved literal mountains. Cities have been created, and civilizations dedicated to teachings which owed their existence to him. For all we know, he may have faltered throughout his life, been uncertain, and sometimes wrong, but in the end what he created has endured, and changed the landscape of the planet. You cannot understand modern culture without Western Civilization, which itself cannot be understood without reference–for both good and bad–to Christianity.

Second, I was visualizing myself as the mustard seed, pushing out of the ground. That seed cannot in some respects be said to have “faith”, but rather a way of being such that it either produces its natural fruit (please bear with the awkward metaphor), or perishes. It must have water. It must have nutrients in the soil. It must be planted neither too deep, nor too shallow. At some point, it must have sun. Many factors have to be in place for that seed to become a mustard plant; but unless it dies, become a mustard plant it will. It has no chance of becoming an apple or potato. It has a destiny. It has an internal structure. To complete the metaphor, it has an identity.

It would be pointless to compare mustard plants with apple trees. Both are what they are. They are useful to human beings, and for our part we do much better in conditions of ecological diversity. We also, in my view, do much better in conditions of cultural diversity.

For my part, I post things like what I just posted–about a possible global conspiracy worthy of some action film starring some action hero, except that he keeps it from happening–and wonder how things will end up for me. What if I’m right? What if people will start disappearing? What then?

As I view it, whether there are global conspiracies or not, whether we die from a solar flare, or nuclear war, or global warming or cooling, or by a global plague of sparrows, die we must. We all die, somehow, somewhere. Given this, do the details really matter all that much? I can certainly picture better and worse ways to go, but in the end I do what I do because that is who I am. I MUST give voice to what I think and feel, and the consequences are beyond my control, in large part.

It seems to me when you have attained that level of identity, you have become a mustard seed. Given a good environment, you can go far.

Apparently using this word will locate me on the far-left or far-right, which is normally about the same. Be that as it may, I found this link interesting. It is alleged that a technology exists which can cause earthquakes, and that both China and Japan were threatened with it. Massive earthquakes have happened in both nations.

Now, to posit something like this as possible, one must posit a “them”. One of the chief defects of conspiracy theorists is failing to see that while small cabals can clearly cause decisive effects, this does not imply that everyone in any given “them”–the White House, the intelligence community, the military, Wall Street, Communists, or whoever–is in cahoots with them.

Specifically, it is my hope that someone in the intelligence community reads this–you guys read substantially everything, don’t you?–and initiates an investigation. Self evidently, the Japanese have an interest in figuring out what happened here, as does the rest of the world.

From what I read, the Fed is using this as a pretext for yet more money printing for those initiated into the club, weakening the rest of us, and giving them a means for owning yet more of the world.

This is scary stuff. A life lived in fear is a life half lived; but a life lived in willful ignorance is a life half dead.

Edit: To be clear, I’m not saying this is what happened. I’m not saying HAARP can control the weather, or that it can cause earthquakes. I don’t know, and I’m not sure this is important enough for me at this point to devote the time to forming a firmer position. All I want to do is point out that this is a possibility. Sometimes things are just coincidences, but it just seemed strange to me that this happened at exactly the moment Obama was dealt the most decisive reverse of his Presidency, unless you count the elections themselves.

You have to keep your options open. As .38 Special put it, hold on loosely, but don’t let go.

I’m wearing out tonight.

First, my thought was to see if Reggae and the word for King were related, since as I understand it the Rastafarians had a special attachment to Haile Salassi (however you spell it). Looks to be wrong. Worth a shot. I enjoy philology, because that’s just how I roll, yo. (I’m never afraid to be ridiculous; we are all ridiculous every day, but most of us never have the liberating experience of realizing it.)

Historically, ceramic jars were mouse-proof containers. Prior to them, there was no good way to store grains. This is not a big point, but I found it interesting.

Finally, historically, Rome was an enormous source of wealth to the world, as it consumed a lot of material. This created economic growth everywhere. Indirect trade with Rome more or less germinated the Viking Age.

By extension, the growth of a great “consuming” power, leads to wealth for others. The United States is a huge source of wealth for other nations, whether we do “Fair” Trade or not. Any time you create a market, you create a reason to expand production. Any time you expand production, you create wealth.

We have created middle classes in Japan and Indonesia and South Korea and many other places. That we get no credit for this in some quarters is due to the fact that you can’t simultaneously understand economics and be a leftist. Some degree of imbecility is required to WANT to join the club.

OK: sitrep: I am drinking and taking off some meandering voicemails I left myself, which I am going to leave largely unedited because there are so damn many voicemails and I have other things to do, and just don’t want these epiphanies or meandering imbecilities–however they get scored eventually–unuttered.

I wonder if our confessional culture is not in some measure a predictable response to the demand for the renunciation of individuality. What I am contrasting is the behavior of game show contestants who are expected to be perky and self revelatory, and the Maoist practice of group confession.

When you go to a psychologist, it involves telling a complete stranger details of your personal life. The analogy is with physical medicine, in that the parts and pieces of your internal life are assumed to be thing-like, such that they can be put without psychological effect out into a relatively committment-free environment. You can depend on the shrink as long as you pay them. Fail to do that, you are on your own.

Add to this the TSA intervention, which is seemingly intended to eradicate the physical barriers between our bodies and the State. I have talked about this repeatedly, and want to be clear that the symbolic importance of the TSA’s warrantless strip searches cannot be overstated.

I wonder to what extent the people who embrace “confessional culture”, in which all personal boundaries are eradicated, and the private made public, are in league to some extent or other with more generalized efforts to remove the locus of moral order from the individual to a police state. The ideas are congruent.

One need not view this through the prism of conspiracy theory. Ideas with legs will permeate all aspects of life over time, especially when propagated by people in pulpits of various sorts. What I think orients this social system is moral imbecility, which is to say an inability to articulate and follow codes of conduct that are not constantly reconciled with external Others.

It is the triumph of what Riesman called, if memory serves, “other-directedness”, as opposed to internal directedness. One might visualize the latter as a compass that always points North. The other points in whatever direction the wind is blowing, and if everyone changes at the same time, it approximates moral order, but requires the cessation of individuality, and the links with the past needed for a sense of stable identity.

A rolling stone gathers no moss. In the Japanese idiom, as I understand it, unrolled stones are fascinating objects, which gather moss in individually interesting and unique ways. What some want for us–many, as an escape from a freedom they can’t use and don’t want–is a giant polishing machine, such that we are all moss and defect free, and perfectly alike.

One giant step in that direction is eradicating all sense of personal boundaries, as seen on Facebook and other places. To be clear, I myself offer up personal feelings at times, but I am not offering them to the group: I am offering them to God, and to spirits from whom nothing can be hidden anyway. I am offering them both directly, and as they may be used by you for your own improvement.

My ship is my own, though, and I am the Captain.

If you are panicking at every bump in the night, and every shadow, you are too worried. If you realize, on a cognitive level, that bad things CAN happen, that is appropriate.

Anyone who said a disaster of the scale now facing Japan was impossible, has been proven wrong. Countless thousands of people now dead were wrong when they thought “this person really can’t be that creepy; they can’t be thinking THAT”.

Churchill was right in taking Hitler at his word; Chamberlain and most of Britain were wrong. Those who said Lenin then Stalin then others had built a slave state based on forced labor, mass imprisonment, torture, and murder were right; those who denied it were wrong.

The proper use of perception is determining first what is possible, which is a VERY large category for people with any imaginative capacity at all, then what is LIKELY. Anyone who uses their perception properly will regularly find themselves in error, and make corrections making similar mistakes less likely in the future, if not impossible.

To imagine the worst possible is not at all the same as EXPECTING it. In my view all Americans should have at least one week’s worth of food and water, multiple flashlights, first aid supplies, and some means of defending themselves, preferably a gun. This is a basic list, to which much can be added.

To prepare for natural or “man-made” (that euphemism continues to astonish me in its brazen contempt for the reality of the situation) catastrophes does not require you to dedicate time each and every day to worrying about them. Worry is wasted energy. Thoughtful preparation is not.

If that guy across the street creeps you out, then listen to that instinct. That does not mean that all people walking the street at night are potential criminals.

I have recommended often the book “The Gift of Fear”. I think all women, in particular, should read it.

Perfect perception would consist in always doing just the right thing, just when it is needed, in furtherance of long, medium, and short range goals, which in our perfect formulation, will line up like the rings Odysseus shot through in the Odyssey. Self evidently, the smartest of us have our heads up our asses half the time (please note that to fail to perceive something you should see is a species of idiocy), so doing pretty good is the best most of us will get. Even Sherlock Holmes made mistakes, if you read the actual stories.

When he put out Shutter Island and Inception back to back, it got me thinking. Then I read where former KGB Commander Vladimir Putin called him a “real man”, for some extra effort to get to a “Save the Tigers” conference.

So I read through his filmography, and it is pretty obvious that he has committed himself romantically to radical politics, and social subversion. A credible case could be made that he is a Communist sympathizer.

All film is propaganda, to some extent. All art is intended to influence you in some way. Much of it is banal, some of it is profound; when profound, it can be so because it operates on you at a deep, unconscious level, for good and evil.

The point of Shutter Island was that your sense of sanity is precarious. You can be a lunatic and not know it. More insidiously, that you can be called out as a lunatic by authorities, and be forced, more or less, to comply with their diagnosis.
One thinks of the abuse of the Soviet and other psychiatric systems for the “treatment” of political dissidents, whose mental defect was pointing out self-evidently true facts about the monstrous systems within which they were imprisoned.

You identify with his character, then you learn that you are mad. I only saw the movie once, and my first reading was that a credible case could be made that his character was not in fact mad, but was made so by a carefully contrived set of circumstances and drugs. The author claims no, but to my way of thinking if he was trying to mess with peoples minds, why stop once he got out of the book and off the screen? I’d have to watch it again to make a confident diagnosis.

The point of Inception is that your dreams are not your own. The State–or anyone–can come into your mind, into the most private parts of your self, and control or at least influence them.

Both of these movies are thrillers, on the surface, but particularly in a theater, when you are deeply absorbed in them, they will also have effects that linger, that introduce ideas and doubts about who you are, and a following increased tendency towards decreased trust, increased alienation, and openness to the influence of others.

This case can be made with regard to virtually every movie DiCaprio has made in his whole career, which I am not going to take the time to do. No wonder Putin admires him.

This article from a few months ago caught my eye. I don’t know how reliable the inference is–“beware the single study”–but it got me thinking.

Meat, when it is meat, is dead. The animal or enemy has already been killed. For this reason, it would seem logical that we have something hard wired in us to recognize that, to react on a bioloogical, mechanical level. You have on the one sided the capability of arousal in combat, then the following relaxation upon victory. No doubt an addiction to this basic process has fueled and even caused many wars. Churchill said, echoing many others, that “nothing is as exhilirating as to be shot at without effect.” He himself had killed at least five men, and likely quite a few more, particularly once you factor in his stint in the trenches in WW1.

Anyway, me being me, that made me think of the Tibetan Chod tradition, and Tantrism more generally. As I understand the matter–and I am no expert, and one would expect much of this to be orally tranmitted–the intent is to combine morbid settings with unconditional love. You sit yourself in a graveyard, with bodies, and offer the spirits your own love and self. Tibetans use human bones for many of their instruments and in amulets and other things.

There is a conflict in all of us between the self that in many respects is like a dog seeing meat, and our potentially higher spiritual selves. I do not deny much of who we are is the result of our biological–which is to say evolutionary–heritage. This is the machine-like part of us. This is the part that responds to meat.

But in my view we are also capable of what I call non-statistical coherence, which is to say we are capable of choice, since our minds and brains are not the same thing. We can present to ourselves images that once evoked one pathway–meat satisfies a lust to kill–and consciously overlay that pathway with another, in which we ourselves become the meat, for spirits. This, at any rate, appears to be what is intended with this practice.

I have read other treatments of it elsewherer–as usual Wikipedia is both available and not very good–in which it was emphasized that unless you had the power to love deeply and without reservation all beings, then this practice could destroy you. You must have the inner light to avoid being taken by the darkness you consciously embrace.

This is a bit out there, but hell I have fun. Do with this what you will.

I have likely said this before, but I can’t remember where.

Psychology doesn’t really have a term for a good person. They have labels for what in moral terms would be labelled evil–antisocial personality disorder, or sociopath–but nothing comparable on the side of Goodness. It was contemplating this fact which got me interested in the concept of Goodness.

You have well-adjusted. You have psychologically normal. You even have a pyramid of self-actualization. But we can see readily enough how to be more evil; nothing comparable exists, as far as I know, on the plus side.

As an example, I was reading the back cover of some book about a serial killer. Profilers recognized 12 levels of evil. This guy was 13. Some badass stuff. [“What did he do?”, people who bought the book asked. “How did he torture people? Did he eat them? Did he make other people eat them? What was his favorite tool?” This is the cultural world we live in].

Anyway, how would we create 13 levels of love? I have defined evil as taking pleasure in the pain of others. I have defined Goodness as taking pleasure in the happiness of others.

You cannot achieve a goal you do not have, and it seems to me we NEED something like this, and the “science” of psychology has not to my knowledge created it; nor, given the materialistic and evolutionary paradigm within which most of them operate, is it in my view likely any time soon.

Martin Seligman does good work, but when I read his books something is always missing. I know he is an agnostic tending towards atheism, because he said so, but that basic trait also comes out in some intangible trait of his thinking that I feel rather than deduce.

I like Mihaly Csikscentmihalyi [close], too. Perhaps one could combine the experience of Flow with loving-kindness. That would be getting close.

A whole bunch of posts are going to show up quickly, since I am taking off voice memos. Some of them I will admit up front I’m not going to be happy with, but something decent today is better than something great tomorrow, and much, much better than something that never comes into existence because someone is being a perfectionist.

The two greatest personality traits you can possess are an enjoyment of work of all sorts; and empathy, which combined with the spirit of not avoiding work, will lead naturally to generosity in most cases.

Two people like this, married, will stay married and be happy. If there was a secret to our grandparents happy marriages, this was likely most of it. They expected life to be work, they suffered enough to be empathetic, and they combined the two when they committed to their spouses.

I read this article, about how little looting there has been in Japan. Does it not say something rather unflattering about us that we would find this noteworthy?

It is often remarked upon that the need to belong to a group causes conflict. There is always, in academic terms, an existential Other, upon which violence can and always has been visited. Western Colonialism–but not, I might add, Eastern and Islamic and many other colonialisms–has been deconstructed along this pathway.

It should be noted, though, that even if the us/them template enables violence (a good example would be the Islamic distinction between the House of Peace and the House of War), it REDUCES it within the group. Both outcomes follow upon a closely followed, reasonably well thought-out cultural identity. Even if you hate and want to kill the proverbial people on the other side (of the border, the street, the river, the fence), you trust and support those within your group.

Violence is very common in Mexico, but not, I suspect, within families.

The interesting outcome, then, of multiculturalism–which we might usefully define as “Anti-Western culturism”–is that violence, rather than being channellized and directed, becomes generalized. If there is no Other out there, then he is now your neighbor. You think sometimes of killing him, don’t you? If not him, then some person in a movie who has been plausibly painted as deserving it.

I have approached this rough insight many ways. Normally I come at it sociologically and psychologically, but I think it would not be unwarranted to call this approach anthropological.

I will append this by commenting that Leftism is a tribalism. It creates, ex nihilo, a group, a faction, a cult, within which you can take your part, and with the decoder ring and membership card you get permission to HATE as much as you like, as long as–what?–as long as that hatred is Channellized and Directed at the right people.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme merde, non?