Author: White Whale

I’ve been reading some books filled with accounts of the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese/Vietcong perspective, and a very common theme is that the revolution was “betrayed”. Somehow the revolution for which they gave so much wound up in the hands of incompetent bureaucrats. Somehow the People were forgotten.

Ignoring the obvious naivete which this betrays, one can with justice understand some people who follow the Communist way as motivated by what they view as sincere motives. These people exist. Yet, the fact is that such people are tools, pawns, nothing more, and their responsibility is to realize this.

Communism is a system which concentrates power in the hands of an elite. This is purportedly to keep power out of the hands of “Capitalists”, but the reality–to offer one very real example–is that Party members don’t have to pay membership dues at exclusive golf resorts in Vietnam. They get preferred seating in restaurants. They can and do demand kick-backs to authorize legitimate business activity, and work out all sorts of sweetheart deals for themselves and their friends and family.

It amounts, quite literally, to putting the Mafia in charge of the government, and expecting something good to happen.

To be clear, the system is one in which the people at the top are those who have proven the most adept at political in-fighting, which is to say those who are the most aggressive, amoral, skilled in deception, and opportunistic.

If you combine these facts–rule by the few, and a system which selects through the law of the jungle who these people will be–no positive outcome is POSSIBLE. Ho Chi Minh had hundreds of opponents executed outright. He had hundreds more jailed and exiled. So have all the eventual Communist dictators.

One will from time to time see primitive Christianity offered as a type of Communism. This argument is not wrong: but look who their leader was.

Socialism is possible. Communism is possible. But only for a fundamentally moral people who CHOOSE to live that way. And nobody flying the Communist banner in public or deep in the depths of their souls wants the average person they want to rule to have ANY choice in the matter.

An essential element of my method is contextualization. People want to proclaim things right or wrong in and of themselves, for example murder and abortion. What I want to do, always, is look at claims in their specifics, and try and determine what is best for all in the long term.

Imperfection is necessarily an aspect of this system. Perhaps paradoxically, I think an intolerance for imperfection drives many people into nihilism. If perfect clarity cannot be achieved in moral claims, they believe, then NO clarity is possible. Yet, this is patently stupid. There IS a difference between a man executed for commiting a brutal murder, and a man executed for being a dissident or heretic. There is a difference between stealing because you are hungry, and stealing because you are simply greedy.

This is perhaps obvious, but it just occurred to me it might be worth pointing out in public that no true happiness is possible unless you tell yourself the truth about who you are and what you want. It is possible–as for example Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life”–to live happily not getting what you want, but it is a fool’s game simply lying to yourself.

Authentic community, in turn, depends on people showing their real selves by being open to the point of vulnerability. It is, I think, a source of profound happiness to discover that having opened yourself, you have been understood and not judged. We are all flawed. It’s in the nature of true friendship to persevere anyway.

A core motto of mine for many, many years has been that I don’t want to live someone else’s life. I want to live my life, make my mistakes, be stupid and intelligent my own way. If I fall on my ass or soar in the heavens, I want it to be because of conscious decisions I made, based on my own perceptions, not second hand opinion or knowledge.

I think it would be accurate to describe me as a non-conformist, but I want to be clear: I don’t object to getting along with others, adhering to social norms and convention, and certainly don’t favor willfully ignoring or flouting them. It is simply that I am always asking the question “why does this rule exist?” in a spirit of scepticism.

As an example of the sort of analysis I do, I think it is obvious that clothing fashion is almost entirely arbitrary. What is high fashion in say, Dakkar, is not going to go over well in Boise. Yet from this observation does not flow any need to demonstrate what is possible by consciously flouting norms, for example by getting a mohawk, or going Goth, or any other of many variants.

In the same spirit, clearly lightning bolts do not rain down on us if we commit evil acts. This does not mean that we should, simply to show what is possible, as is seemingly demanded by many modern artists and radicals.

Always, I look to my organizational criterion: what works for the good in this world? My fashion sense makes little difference either way. My capacity to think might, and in that realm I am quite willing and able to tear down any and all idols.

My difference is on the inside. In the end, in my view, we all must judge ourselves, and as Albert Camus said, judgement day is every day. Choose wisely.

The following is a bit redundant, but I am sort of like an intellectual Roomba, trying to explore a large, dark room. Sometimes I cover the same ground, but usually from another angle, and often it leads to new places.

As I have said often, Socialism is a meaning system for the person who embraces it. As such, by my definition, it provides a reason to suffer–to work, beyond mere survival–and a paradigm by which to organize decision making behavior.

Given that the actual history of Socialism has been a sordid one, filled with horrific inhumanities, one must ask how people who embrace this doctrine reconcile its history with their own purported humanitarianism.

Here is a thesis I have not yet offered, I don’t think: they understand, on some level, that a sustainable world must include suffering, but don’t want to draw the conclusion that it is necessary for them. What they form, then is a sort of pain aggregation, that parallels in the cultural realm the centralization of resources in the economic realm. A whole new class of people whose induced slavery causes them pain is created, and in some inchoate way these “humanitarian” theoreticians believe they have solved some aspect of the human condition/problem.

This is what I have termed “Cultural Sadeism”, but one which is unconscious. They know there must be pain, and the “pain math” adds up.

Yet, a true Liberal would understand that in a truly just society, we would all pick up crosses of our own choosing, and work and suffer for ends we choose as individuals.

As I have argued in the previous post, true happiness requires a bit of misery, just as a varied diet requires some bitter foods, so we can read “pursuit of happiness” not just as “pursuit of virtue”, as I have said many times, but also “pursuit of voluntary deprivation and misery.” This is the necessary flip side of the coin.

The Report from Iron Mountain is a staple in many conspiracy theories about a New World Order. It is taken by many to have been a seriously intended document, which in effect claimed that global peace was not desirable, that human societies function best in conditions of difference and violence.

Proposed enemies were aliens from outer space, and environmental problems, and there was also some support given for “blood sports”, which would presumably be something like football, but moving more towards Rollerball (whose author may have been influenced by this book, who knows?).

I don’t spend time worrying about things I can’t really research. Even if these ideas were real at one time, who is to say that whatever hidden movers and shakers there might be still hold to these ideas. Who is to say they can’t change their minds?

To the point, it occurred to me this morning that we seem to be born with a certain need for challenge and difficulty, particularly men. Our sense of self is born from making decisions, and confronting obstacles. We need, I think, a certain amount of pain and misery, and can only realize full happiness in the contrast. You need useful work to do, so that you can rest.

This fact can be internalized and accepted, or externalized through aggression. The identity dynamic of war is this: you cement your own identity as a member of group with specific attributes in the process of sharing pain fighting the other group. They do the same.

Sacrifice is much the same. Take the Aztec practice of ball games, following which the winning team was ritually–theatrically–killed in public. Those people become thereby a sort of Other; they become ritually different. Those outside their space become thereby defined in their acts of violence. The murders refresh and enable group solidarity.

In a much muted form, one sees this in sports fans, cheering their teams. Packers fans, or Steelers fans, or Vikings fans can all relate to one another, rooting for their team. Now, I have often argued for sports, the way we do it, as working to teach democracy. You have a rule defined system combined with open competition where the best team wins, but in the process of which everyone is made stronger.

Pro Wrestling gets closer to sacrifice. The more ardent fans really want to see their guy beat the snot out of the other guy.

I have to run, but I would like to propose is this: there are two types of order, the sacrificial and the post-sacrificial. To the extent the Report from Iron Mountain was ACCURATE–and we must consider that the conclusions may have had some validity–then they would apply to sacrificial systems.

For my own purposes I have discussed four types of political order: sacrificial, sybaritic leftism, cultural sadeism, and Liberalism. The first three could be conflated, where sybaritic leftism could be termed either Post-Liberalism, or a Pre-sacrificial order. Like the Eloi, sybarites lack the capacity to further their social order, so it must in the end collapse one way or another, as those in Europe will, if they are unable to embrace true Liberalism.

Liberalism is an order in which it is understood that not only is pain a part of this world, but that it is necessary for happiness, paradoxically. One must pursue difficult ends, master hard skills, take risks, and lose sometimes.

To truly love someone is to wish them a certain amount of misery and loneliness, because only in such conditions can they create themselves as the sort of person who can be happy. I have often prayed for my children difficulty and challenge, but only within a range they can handle and grow from. In no small measure, this is one roll that sports plays in our ritual order.

One sees in many tribal orders times when young men, particularly, must go out alone in the wild, to become men. We need something like this. Historically it has been service in the military, but if we think long term, we must think global peace.

When you look at history, long term stability normally comes with assigned social roles. Take the Indian caste system. It was in some respects a form of systematic cruelty. The bottom of the order was treated quite inequitably. Yet, since there was nothing to be done, they presumably dealt with it, and their beliefs allowed them to contemplate a better future life.

On one level, this system is acceptable, since it incorporates unhappiness and forces the rejection of self pity. On a higher level, though, I don’t think it is structurally conducive to moral development. It enables higher caste members to improperly think of themselves as better in an ontological way, and lower caste members to lower their qualitative horizons of what is possible for them.

Ultimately, what I want is as much freedom of movement as possible for all people. Towards that end, we all must be made accountable for forming our own identities. This can be a challenging process, so we need better means of doing it. The identity of “American” is a good start. Being connected to a place, family, and religious creed is good, but ultimately I see creating an identity as a lifelong process.

Again, this would be oriented around my notion of Goodness. Something like it is necessary to prove the Iron Mountain boys wrong, if they ever existed.

This air feels like something is going to happen, good or bad. I’ve been trying to diagnose it, and will say that from my perspective the mood around me–poor business conditions, dry air, dessicated plant life, vague restlessness–is well captured in this picture, by Giorgio de Chirico.

What is it that’s going? What is it that’s coming? Should we trust the silence? Open questions.

Drought is, to my mind, much more clearly a symptom of global cooling than warming. What we need to remember is that NASA does not have temperature gauges in the far North, and therefore uses statistical techniques to estimate the temperature. They don’t actually measure it.

Logically, a warmer planet is one with less ice and more water, both in the atmosphere and in the oceans. A warmer planet sees more rain everywhere, not less. As I understand the issue, it was when we had no polar icecaps that the Sahara was green. Global cooling is far, far more dangerous than global warming.

In my view, if we do face a risk of catastrophic climate change, it is in the direction of cooling.

As I look at my local skies, they remind me of the air in winter: very blue, very dry.

It just occurred to me this morning that Alinskyism is really nothing more or less than American Fabianism: a turtle, and a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Here’s a link on him, for anyone not familiar with program and ideas: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2314

Keep in mind reading it that our President was taught the method by two of Alinsky’s own students, and that he himself eventually taught courses on it. He also, of course, practiced it for quite a few years, and arguably still does, even if mainly through proxies.

Any time you look at a dog, you are looking at hundreds, maybe thousands, of years of careful pruning. They are like bonzai trees that take hundreds of years to mature. They are miracles of patience and persistence.

Somewhere, some time, people must have said of the domestication process: this will never work. That is worth remembering.

Keynesian economics is to an economic downturn what salt water is to thirst.

On my side, I have common sense and actual history. On their side the Keynesians have some very smart people, a very unclearly formulated economic incantation, and broad swathes of ideological conformity among people whose income does not depend on their results.