Author: White Whale

I own the first three X-Men movies (the last one was a bit too violent for me), and probably watch one of them quarterly or so. I watched X-Men 3 Sunday night.

Anyway, I got to thinking about it, and what if you had a mutant whose power was supreme and unconditional love? I experienced it in a dream once, from a man I knew from books, and who I believe had just passed on. He was just there, and there was this amazing radiance coming from him of unconditional acceptance. No matter who I was or had been, the energy would have found a way to connect with me, and comfort me. There were no strings. He had no need to do anything but shine. You cannot help but be strengthened by such an experience.

Given a strong enough radiance, I think you could heal any emotional wound. You could erase the needs for hate. Hate has survival value. It is tactically useful, given deficient strategy. However, if the need for it is erased, then it, too, ought to fall away.

So our hero shows up, and suddenly everyone just wants to celebrate. Nobody wants to fight. This would make for an awful comic book, but it’s an interesting idea.

An interesting addendum to the basic idea is to ask why, if Jesus was the nuclear bomb equivalent of love, he was hated by so many. You can hate people who talk about love, but you cannot hate someone who gives it out in reality, freely, and completely. Love is home. That is where we all want to live. It is the answer to that clinging doubt about who we are and where we really ought to be. It is peace, and we all want peace, whether we admit it or not.

In my view this is perhaps the most compelling argument against the unique divinity of Christ. I have no reason to doubt he taught roughly what has come down to us (with a few strategic imbellishments along the way that helped the Church), or any reason to doubt he rose from the dead. People have been “resurrected” on many accounts even in the modern day. There is a medium out there, David Thompson, who many claim can do it even in our own day and time. I am a skeptic, which means I simply don’t know, but admit it is both possible, and may not be true.

I will add too a rant that I have approached at times, but I don’t think ever actually typed publicly. In my view it is sheer lunacy to believe that God–who created the universe–would have the need to get people to sacrifice his “son” so he could forgive them. Yes, you can call it a mystery. I call it bullshit, though. Please forgive me, but I find this idea deeply offensive both to the spirit of God in which I believe, and in the man Jesus Christ, who died and was reborn two millenia ago, and whose main teaching was Love.

Since all other sacrifices took place on the altars of the Temple, why would Jesus not have had his throat slit there? God could have told people to do that. Jesus could have told people that was what was supposed to be done.

What happened in my view was that the being and teachings of Jesus were so astonishingly original that when he was gone, his followers simply did not know how to classify them. So they fit them into a mold with which they were familiar, that of the sacrificial order. He was already dead (gone), so they didn’t actually have to kill him to make it work.

It is a source of consistent amazement to me, too, in the rare cases when I go to church that the priest holds up the wafer and says “This is the Body of Christ”. He holds up the cup and says “This is the blood of Christ”. Then everybody goes up there and eats the wafer and drinks the wine. Wars have been fought over whether or not Christ’s actual body enters into the wafer–if it is literal cannibalism–or if it is merely there in spirit.

In my view, and I’m just a wandering spirit with ideas I don’t try to tame, this is stupid, stupid, stupid. It misses the damn point. My two cents.

Communism is when that one group of sons of bitches is in charge. Fascism is when the other one is.

Capitalism is where you quit working for the son of a bitch and go into business for yourself.

I used to carry a pocket version of Sun Tzu’s Art of War with me everywhere. I’d open it at random places when I had a spare moment, and probably read it cover to cover ten to fifteen times.

It is considered a subtle insight that you can attack the will of your opponent. This is considered high level strategy. It was the essence of Ho Chi Minh’s carefully orchestrated sermons, consisting of lies about who he was, what his intentions were, and what the fate of the Vietnamese people would actually be if he and his seized the draconian control they so desperately longed for.

We LOST the Vietnam War when it was our to win. The Vietnamese did not win it, except to the extent their off-battlefield efforts softened up the will of the American people; and that of Communists generally softened up our minds.

Be that as it may, I would like to suggest the following continuum.

At bottom is physical conflict. The worst type of conflict is fixed positional warfare, perhaps best exemplified in prolonged seiges. Sun Tzu said he had seen poor commanders do things quickly, but never good ones slowly.

Next is logistical warfare, in which you try to deny your enemy what he needs physically to fight.

Next is diplomatic warfare, in which you try to prevent your enemy from strengthening himself through alliance. The Cold War was in large measure diplomatic warfare, which had to reduce to physical warfare at times so that the diplomats had credibility. You can hardly ask someone to ally themselves with you if you never come to the rescue of any of your current allies. They get all of the bad, and none of the good.

Next is psychological warfare. This is warfare by prevention. Deterrance through strength is psychological. People don’t even want to start with you. What the Vietnamese were able to do is convince the American people that a war they had already won was in fact lost, and that they were superhuman, never quit, and that we could only expect more death and destruction in what was after all just a civil war half a world away that had nothing to do with America or American interests.

One also reads at times of prolonged campaigns of strategic movement, in which two superior generals never see quite the right time to strike. I would argue this is psychological when it is strategic.

Finally, though, I would add two more levels, which are not discussed in texts on war. This is the point of this post.

The next level is eliminating the reasons the other person would have wanted to attack you in the first place. No more powerful tool for world peace has ever been invented than free trade and free market capitalism. We need to understand that European colonialism–and every form of imperialism going back to prehistory–had as its aim getting stuff through violence. You take over a country, enslave the workers, and suddenly you don’t have to pay for things. It seems like a good deal, until you get the bill for the “police”.

In Capitalism, everyone wins. You never sell a thing if it is not in your interest. Others do not have to compel you to hand it over (obviously this has been done, but that is not Capitalism) because you WANT to. You get something back. The system fosters innovation, economic growth, and rising middle classes.

Trade, then, is an extension of military strategy, and aims not at managing conflict, but at elevating it to a non-physical, and mutually beneficial sphere.

The final level is actively seeking peace through love. I have spoken often of love as an aggression, and this is what I mean. It is one thing for someone to not hate you, another to benefit economically from you, but another entirely for them to value you for who you are, and you them.

In the lowest levels, the world is filled with sharp knives, and slicing, hacking, and death. In the highest levels, it is filled with golden clouds, singing, and trust.

We are always moving. We cannot help this, and it only makes sense to choose our motion. Since you have to do something on this Earth, why not work to improve it? That is the role I envision for my conception of Goodness. It is aggressive. It is strategic. It is real, and I for one like it.

I will append that I talk about love sometimes, but do not want to leave the impression I am always a nice person. I’m a curmudgeonly misanthrope at times; a butthead in the vernacular. I get irritable, particularly with large burocracies and robots used to answer telephones.

Thus: please understand I have many miles to go myself, but I do have a direction, and hope I can influence you in a beneficial direction as well. Read what I have to say, think it over, and reinterpret it as you see fit. If you copy me you haven’t understood me at all. You can do better. I’m a jackass too. Let’s just be jackasses together.

This is an interesting topic. After what–60 years or so?–of “Fascist” equalling evil, it is worth noting that Fascism in its day had its advocates, as indeed Communism/Leninism does to this very day. To the point, the two are hard to distinguish, both in the intellectual mediocrity of their exponents, and the practical effects of the implementation of their ideas.

Look at this link. Hugh S. Johnson, Time Magazine Man of the Year for 1933. The reason I looked this up is that I read Benito Mussollini was under serious consideration for this “honor” that year.

In 1933 Roosevelt appointed Johnson to administer the National Recovery Administration (NRA). One author claims Johnson looked on Italian Fascist corporativism as a kind of model.[15] He distributed copies of a fascist tract called “The Corporate State” by one of Mussolini’s favorite economists, including giving one to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and asking her give copies to her cabinet

Here is the link, which won’t post right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Samuel_Johnson

Or consider this, from the book “The Philosophy of Fascism”, by Marco Palmieri (1936):

Economic initiatives cannot be left to the arbitrary decisions of private, individual interests. Open competition, if not wisely [!] directed and restricted, actually destroys wealth instead of creating it. . . The proper function of the State in the Fascist system is that of supervising, regulating and arbitrating the relationships of capital and labor, employers and employees, individuals and associations, private interests and national interests . . .More important than the production of wealth is its right distribution, distribution which must benefit in the best possible way all the classes of the nation, hence the nation itself. Private wealth belongs not only to the individual, but, in a symbolic sense, to the State as well.

Think about that, then watch this Michael Moore video.

Moore–and his fellow travellers–are in my view formally and with no exaggeration Fascists.

I will add that Mussollini was previously a Communist, in my understanding. He seems to have abandoned that not out of some principled sympathy for human rights, but rather because mythically it is hard to live without a nation or identity.

Fascism is simply Communism which retains a national sense of self. Both glorify imperialism (Communists call it “liberation”, since lying is what they do best); both see the role of the State as managing all interpersonal relations, economically and socially; and both see an autocratic leader or elite–who are “enlightened”–running the show forever.

This may be a bit fractured, but I’ll try and circle in the dark until it is likely mostly clear. Two parts, then a connection.

Part one, vegetarianism. I have had, if memory serves, 5 dreams at least in which it was more or less directly suggested to me that I become a vegetarian. I have had very lucid conversations with both a turkey and a fish, a pig for a friend, and been shown meat as death twice.

Yet, I am not a vegetarian. I was for two years many years ago, and I never felt healthy. I lack the discipline to do it right this time. In my considered, mildly erudite view, our bodies ARE in some respects machines, and they are machines programmed to eat meat. This is their natural condition. One can plainly see that when agriculture became the norm, people got shorter, less healthy, and seem to have lived shorter lives.

I don’t want to get into a discussion on diet though. Right or wrong, this is my belief. Now, I have a choice to make: do I heed the dreams, or do I heed my reason? My dreams tell me to abandon meat, and my reason tells me that I will be stronger, healthier and likely live longer with meat. I can justify either action. If I choose the former, I may be more spiritual. If I choose the latter I will be more vigorous and feel stronger, emotionally and physically.

Can we not posit that both options are partially wrong and partially right? If that is the case, I will be a “sinner” no matter what I do.

Here is a larger context: the only large scale, intentional experiment in long term vegetarianism I know of is in India. Specifically, it is integral to the doctrine of ahimsa, or non-violence, which is part and parcel of most Hindu belief systems (and there are quite a few). As one goes up in caste, the more is one expected to abstain from all meat, and even spices thought to cloud the mind. The Brahmin caste–varna–is of course at the top of the pecking order.

Here is the interesting thing: this caste has presided over the subjugation through culture of countless billions of people over the last 2,500 years or more. There are formally four castes–varnas (colors, if I’m not mistaken)–but there have apparently always been people who did not even fit into that system, who were by design and tradition OUTSIDE the social system, who could not be members of the community. Such people were held in contempt, and higher caste people could, did, and probably still do abuse them when the spirit takes them.

Is this just and right? Has vegetarianism solved the problem of violence, actually, or does it exist simultaneously with violence expressed in an unjust social order? One story that made an impression on me was of a very talented archer, who could hit anything from anywhere, having his thumb cut off because only the Warrior caste was allowed to shoot bows. If I recall, this was a teaching story, in which he of course realized that he had been wrong to be so bold in the first place, and only got what he deserved.

What of cows who live their entire lives in comfortable pastures, protected from wolves, and who are slaughtered humanely? They were going to die sooner or later anyway, and they would not have lived at all if not for their ability to provide good quality protein to humans. We all die: they will have their revenge in the end. None of us endure forever, at least on Earth.

George Bernard Shaw, who came up with the idea of Zyklon B, and Adolph Hitler, who put it to use, were both vegetarians, as I understand it. Which is greater, the sin of eating meat; or the sin of dreaming of mass murder of humans? Are cows equal to people? I don’t know and I don’t care. For my purposes, they are stupid animals that taste good when they are roasted. I may learn differently someday.

My point here is that I am a sinner. I was going to be a sinner one way or the other, and in my view I am slightly less a sinner if I pursue what I view as the pathway towards health and vigor. I may be wrong. In my view, there is no perfect answer to this question, but a decision nonetheless has to be made.

This leads me to what I will call “The Teacher’s Dilemna”. I don’t have the faintest idea if anyone will read this; for me, it doesn’t matter, since the point of writing is to figure things out that were latent by making them manifest. I have broad ideas, but don’t sort out the details–really the details don’t pop out–until I start typing.

But let us say that somebody out there thinks I’m smart. If I say it, they listen to me. I want this and I don’t want it. I want it, if what I said was actually smart; but I realize full well that I am stupid, intemperate, impatient, and probably just plain childish sometimes, and I don’t want anybody mimicking that.

How to tell the difference? This is the question. Practically, what happens is that a teacher will emerge who teaches a system. Somehow, somewhere, the Ten Commandments appeared in the Jewish people. This is a system. There are dozens or hundreds of additional commandments in the Torah.

So the Jewish people have this outline, this behavioral and cognitive template, and now they can say valid teachers teach this template, and invalid teachers don’t. This is a sustainable system, that can be replicated across many generations, and which can only be changed gradually, such that very few people see the changes that are happening, and which are normally forced by circumstance. It’s hard to say, but it seems likely that if the Romans had not conquered Israel and destroyed the (2nd, I think?) Temple, then priests might still be slitting the throats of goats on altars. They got kicked out, though.

To be clear, as I understand the matter, the method of repentance, T’Shuvah, which had literally previously involved sacrifice, had to be internalized, since they no longer had a place to ceremonially kill goats. They evolved, but not by choice.

But in a system which only recognizes congruence with the past, how is progress possible? It isn’t. It really isn’t. Conservatism is only progressive when one considers that the ideas of leftists and social radicals make things worse by contrast. This makes staying still effectively forward progress, but it is still not optimal. I discussed this in the last month or two on a post called, I think, “The Turtle, the Rabbit, and Sleepy the Dwarf”.

Useful teachers innovate. They have large dreams, which they work to implement in practical plans. But the process of creation requires a certain “distance”, shall we say, from the rules. It requires you to be able to imagine existence outside of what has always been. It is a chaotic system. It is unstable. It requires you to be able to make jokes about the system, to tease, to ruffle the feathers of others. It requires irony, and the ability to laugh.

In a system which is too tight–and I have several books on the engineering consequences of what are called “tightly bound systems”–you can’t do this. You get shut up. You get shot.

When you think of Muslims, or certain types of Jews and Christians, do you see laughter? Do you see any capacity for irony? They have a belief system in which they MUST do certain things, and not do others, or they face Hell for all eternity. That is a large burden. Failure is not an option, so fear must rule every day. Is that not true? Is fear not the inevitable, and unavoidable consequence of making failure utterly and completely an end of everything, which cannot be corrected in any way?

Is fear not the consequence of believing that your every last act is measured, and weighed, and counted? That there is a ledger counting every last thought, every last action, every last little, bitty thing you did in a long life?

Do you believe successes are few, and failures many? I don’t. That is not my metaphysics. If you can get some space in a religion, step back from it, and ask questions like: “what patterns can we get from actually observable things today”, then you can slowly integrate the scientific method into religious belief. None of this requires renouncing your identity, but I think just from a psychological perspective it is obvious that fearful people make lousy human beings, and one would think that the point of religion is to help people become better people, to progress and grow.

Oh, that should do. Hopefully this makes sense. I’m going to read a bit then go to bed.

I woke up this morning tired. The way I process the world is like I’m trying to get a firehose worth of water through a garden hose.

Why do the right thing? Why persist in principled stands, if they bring you mainly heartache and sorrow? I watch people in my minds getting movies like “Wolf Creek”, in which the sociopaths win, and the heroes lose. How do you acclimate yourself to seeking out fear and corresponding pain?

Do people not get tired? Do they not sometimes want to see the villain win, because on some level it justifies their own moral fatigue? Would it not be easier just to tell strategic lies, in the right places, to unsuspecting people, just to make your life easier? Wouldn’t it feel good sometimes to just express your pent up anger in some strategic cruelty? Just call it a prank. Or cheat on someone who loves you, and lie about it. Tell yourself it means nothing.

Is heartless cruelty not much easier than sensitive warmth and vulnerability? Is it not ridiculous to be soft, so soft, in a tough world?

I think these things to myself. I can understand why short-sighted people lose their moral compass. Most of them, to only a small degree. They lie a little, and lose a little. Increasingly, though, we do seem to be alienated from one another, on a deep level. Our shared myths–mainly movies, sports, and music–are increasingly superficial and crass. How do you connect on a deep emotional level, when you are incapable of feeling deep emotions? You don’t. You wander through the world with a vague sense of ennui and dissatisfaction, never sure why you are so restless, and why you feel the need to be mean sometimes, to express violence to the world. But you see others feel the same impulse, and feel reinforced in it.

What I do from time to time is imagine myself at a crossroads, a point of choice. Down one road, I follow the logical consequences of the decision to pursue amorality consciously. On the other, I see the path of what I term Goodness, which is a decision to do the work of improving the world and the lives of people in it, without more regard for personal comfort than needed to survive emotionally.

The first path leads, in the end, to the need for destruction. Sade, in “120 Days of Sodom”, pictured many hundreds of crimes he could commit. I do not recommend reading him, but if you do, he still has, as one reviewer put it, the “power to shock”. He is, in my view, the logical choice as the primary expositor of the doctrine of Evil. It can be more or less coherently expressed, and consists in a vicious rage against the world, all life in it, and against oneself. Nothing is spared.

I look at this path. If one could rule the world, it would end in wanting to destroy it, finally. And if one could destroy it, one would then want to destroy the universe, the possibility of life. There is no possibility of rest. The task can never be completed. “Beauty” must always arise in outer circumstances, those of pain and guilt: yes, guilt. I wonder if a true sociopath would be capable of proper evil as a doctrine. Can one choose evil, if one lacks a sense of compassion or guilt?

We all like to pretend that people are naturally nice. This has been the life experience of most of us in America, who have not fought in foreign wars, or been victimized by crime. Yet, the most superficial reading of history tells us this is not the case. People have ENJOYED fighting wars for most of history. The victors get the thrill of slaughtering their enemies, and the pleasures of stealing their stuff and despoiling their women. This is history.

Doctrines of love are rare enough. Even in Christianity one would have been hard pressed to find the spirit of Christ in the “universal” church for most of its history. Just 50 years ago men who should have known better were in effect aiding and abetting pedophiles.

We always have a choice between good and evil. We can choose evil. Clearing the path for this realization has seemingly been the task which modern philosophers have set for themselves. If common sense goodness is “bourgeois morality”, as the Leninists–the Nihilists–put it, then evil is the converse. And that is what they chose: pain without redemption; violence without cause or effect; and the effort to metastasize their monstrosities around the world.

In the end, though, I think we all crave light. On a dark rainy day, we can sit down with a glass of peppermint tea, and think of happy days, and listen to the birds. We can think with affection of others, and pet our dogs.

It’s funny, when I am visualizing evil, everything becomes hard and plastic. De Beauvoir herself pointed out that Sade’s writing was more like a pictorial tour of a wax museum. There was little movement, just static images. This is, I think, the inner world of evil: stasis. That person is trapped in a day that never, ever ends.

When I visualize Goodness, everything because light and airy, and pleasant. One can smell flower blossoms wafting on a restless breeze on a spring day, and basil cooking in the kitchen in a tomato sauce. I feel connection with others, the capacity for joy, and satisfaction: yes, satisfaction. Not sex, not clinginess, but self supporting, self sustaining satisfaction.

We can all do the right thing. We can all fight the fights we need to to survive emotionally. It is hard sometimes, very hard. But the consequences of failure are inner death.

And no matter how far anyone has walked down the path of unpleasantness, there is always time to come around. I really believe that is the nature of the universe.

Few thoughts for a Sunday. May you find yourself blessed.

I will add that writing this was therapeutic for me.

I have two degrees in the Humanities, both from top notch schools. As I think about it, very little of what I learned then has proven the least bit useful, either practically, or in terms of helping me be a better person.

On the contrary, what happens in most Humanities departments in the country is the OPPOSITE: people are taught to be nasty to ideological Others–conservatives–and to believe ideas about foreign policy and economics that are diametrically WRONG. Our kids are literally taught to be stupider, and to be worse citizens, who are less responsible, less able to engage in rational debate, and less able to draw cause and effect lessons in arenas that actually matter.

Here, then, is my proposal: rate all academic subjects in terms of their economic usefulness, then pair the tuition with the return on investment.. Biology, Computer Science, Engineering: all of those rate really well. French, English, History, Political Science: not so much. Frankly, it is hard to see ANY usefulness. I don’t see it.

Most of our public universities are stressed, are they not? Taxpayer dollars are spent subsidizing students across the board, but we could make it so useful professional studies are HEAVILY subsidized–even making certain subjects free for qualified candidates; and students of less useful, useless, or counterproductive fields of study would either be asked to pay the full, actual cost of their “education”, or even to subsidize the people who won’t be working in coffee shops, complaining about rich people, and giving their money to Michael Moore to make more movies about the evils of making money.

This actually could be done. What would likely happen is that most Humanities Departments would be decimated, and those that survived would have to actually produce a useful product: graduates able to think well, express themselves well, and able to locate themselves contextually in the world the rest of us live in.

I will add that the most useful things for me in terms of learning to think have been aggressively going out and finding people who disagreed with me, to debate with; reading the work of Edward de Bono; and doing manual labor. There is something about having a concrete task to accomplish which is either done or not done, and physically there, that has been very useful to me.

Actually, here’s another idea: all new buildings have to be built by students. That would be interesting, if impractical.

This really needs to be appended to my post two down. Cultural Supply Lines, I think I called it.

It is a truism that not all people live out their allotted lives. Many quit trying, quit caring, quit risking, quit learning, and just trudge through their days. Leftism is a sparkling facade, covered in bright shiny colors, and rubies and diamonds and emeralds, that promises to solve that problem. Leftists flip–the flip happens when you stop caring about the results of your actions–then they flip others.

But engaging with an idea is not really the same as engaging with life, is it? You have created something fixed, stable, and unreactive. No real physical structure is like that in the universe; nor is any living mental structure. In the sense in which I believe Maimonides used it, it is an idol. It is meant to stand in for something real, but instead comes to worshipped in its own right.

The term moral suicide refers simply to a disengagement with life: with chance, with circumstance, with reason, with love, with pain. Where are the zombie parades the most popular? As far as I can tell, the places where the Left lives. It is a species of quantitatively diversity in a monocultural zone.

The obvious point I am trying to make is that yes, you can kill yourself physically. But you can also stop trying, and die inside, as measured by the reactive impulses generating from within you relative to actual stimuli outside yourself. If the only thing you react to originates within you, then you are dead; and if you choose to remain that way, you have killed yourself.

This is perhaps a subtle point. I don’t know. It seems obvious to me.

I will add that I myself am often lost and confused. The line I follow moves in the wind, and could never be drawn with ink. When that happens, though, I find myself again, in a new place.

And I never doubt that my task is to improve the world in whatever ways God has seen fit to enable me to, large or small.

I posted this in response to this article

As I think about it, it seems to me that demonstration shows more than what he intended: is there, in the end, any difference between sex with a machine, and sex with another human being from whom you are withholding yourself emotionally?

No amount of sex can equal love. And when you have sex in lieu of love, you cannot maintain an emotional equilibrium. If you are not moving forwards, you are moving backwards. If you are not moving towards emotional intimacy, you are protecting yourself from vulnerability, which creates emotional gaps at the precise moments when defensiveness ought to least warranted.

One sees these lost women, who have come to view their bodies not as an extension of their selves, their souls, but their sense of self as an extension of their bodies. Only in that world can being penetrated equal any form of love, which here is conflated with hormones and the evolutionarily dictated reproductive urge.

I have said this before, and will again: don’t bother with Freud. Read William James “Principles of Psychology”. It is by far the most clever work on the topic I have read.

It is a truism that “armchair generals discuss strategy; professionals discuss logistics.” All competent generals focus not just on tactical defeat of their enemies on the battlefield, but upon attacking their supply lines, and capacity to fight. An army without bullets or food cannot win on courage alone.

We are, it is often said, in a cultural war. Depending on where one stands on that field of battle, it might be religion against atheism, or reaction against progression, or tradition versus flippancy.

In my own view, it is a battle between whether to be or not to be. Read the soliloquy, again, with new eyes.

What is he asking? Why live at all, when you can your “quietus make” with a simple knife? You can slit your wrists, bleed out, and end the oppressions in your life. But what is death? We don’t really know. Thus “conscience doth make cowards of us all”. Brilliant. The human condition in a nutshell.

The war we are fighting is whether we human beings want to continue existing, or not. Do we want to make plans for the future, as if the human race will still be alive 100 years from now, and free; or is it best to let the natural human tendencies towards conformity and authoritarianism run their course?

I have said often that no man can tell a lie to any woman and get away with it, unless she chooses to ignore her own instincts–unless she wants to be lied to.

One does not have to look long or hard to see leftists of apparent capability, good nature, and good will. Yes, confronted they will get nasty, but in their own natural settings–coffee houses, playhouses, nice restaurants, kitchens–they are quite amiable and congenial. They are nice. They are friendly.

But in my view, on some level they know they are embracing a lie. Deep in their hearts, they see that the policies they pursue will damage our freedom in the long run, damage our moral fiber, ruin our economy, and prevent an amicable future from emerging from our present difficulties. This is what they want. They want to run from the responsibility of creating meaning from nothing. Confronting the primal wind, they seek shelter. They give up.

And one can do this articulately. Dashing young professors, and serious young women can go about giving speeches on social responsibility, and social justice, and global peace, and environmental crises and the like. Earnest, engaged, knowledgeable, articulate: they are still wrong, and they should know they are wrong.

To fight an army, one need not hate the soldiers. One need merely point and fire one’s weapon accurately.

To the point here, what are the weapons in a cultural war? What are the analogies with conventional war? Self evidently, not actual weapons. It was frankly nauseating to me to see the immediate political use to which the assassination of a conservative 9th District judge–and attempted assassination of a House Rep.–was put. None of us are calling for violence. Violence is not the answer. Reform is the answer, and that is done within a political and legal structure.

Herein lies the answer: the battlefield is in the realm of ideas. The essence of conservatism is continuity. Conservatism is not opposed to change. It is simply opposed to radical change done quickly and without the time to see if it is prudent. It takes time to make a proper soup. You have to let the ingredients blend and mellow. You can’t do it in one minute simply because you are impatient.

Reform in our modern world will be a move back towards meaning derived outside of radical leftist politics. Religious people are of no concern. Their cultural system provides continuity. The people whose system does not are those who want to overthrow our system and implement a tyranny which will deliver them from their own failed meaning formation, their own moral gaps and failings–their lack of faith in the future, lack of stolidity, lack of courage; their pusillanimity.

This is the aggression. This is the forward movement. From whence, though, are our opponents resupplied? The answer can only be in the acculturation process itself, in the environments in which new Americans grow up. This means TV and Radio, internet, and our educational system.

How do we attack these supply lines? Our opponents, of course, are as brilliant in their tactics as they are defective in their strategy. They have long sought after the cultural distribution centers, and won many of them. These are the thought leaders out there, the figurative lights on the hill.

Retaking our society, redirecting it towards a sustainable future, will then involve the persuasion of centrally placed people to reconsider their views. Towards this end what are needed are coherent, intelligent ideas as to how they might accomplish the aims they claim to want, differently.

At root, this will involve attacking moral pessimism, in favor of what I suppose could and should be called moral optimism. Meaning can be formed. It can be stable. Homes can be built that can be lived in across lifetimes.

This is the project I have set myself, and which I would encourage any readers I may have to pursue as well. Victory is possible. Human civilization the world over 100 years from now can be peaceful, vibrantly happy, and sustainable.

But we have to want to make that happen, and we have to be intelligent about it. This will require everyone to get smarter, not smart people to rule over us. People get smarter when they are free, and when they are given challenges they have reason to expect they can meet.

This is the task. Go to it.