Author: White Whale

I think it might be useful to differentiate these three terms. Marxism was an economic theory. I saw WAS, since Marx offered a scientifically formated prediction–a hypothesis–which was falsified by history. He was wrong.

Specifically, he predicted that wealth, being finite, would continue to concentrate in the hands of a few, impoverishing thereby the many, who of course could not be expected to put up with it forever. Revolution, according to this hypothesis, would NECESSARILY occur in the nations where this wide gap first emerged, namely the already industrialized nations.

Yet, in Russia, 85% of the population lived on farms. Only perhaps 10% of the population, on the high side, was even remotely in the “proletariat”. Everyone else fed themselves and their families–and feudal lords–with no interference from anyone. Lenin tricked them into supporting him by promising them land. Mao did the same thing, while contradicting Marxist ideas even more dramatically by STARTING in the countryside. He was helped greatly by leading an effective anti-Japanese guerilla war, and, again, by promising the peasants the sun, moon, and stars.

What needs, therefore, to be added to this mix is Lenin’s notion of the “professional” revolutionary. Marxist doctrine held that the revolution was inevitable, and could not be hastened or forced. Lenin taught that a small cadre of people dedicated to cynical deceptiveness, ruthlessness, and above all a PLAN, could take power, in the NAME–not the reality–of Marxism. Hence the frequent use of Marxist-Leninism, which is an oxymoron.

Leninism=Communism, which is a POLITICAL form, not an economic one. It is one which uses POWER backed by and often signified by intentional terror to cow the masses into silent compliance.

Socialism is a CULTURAL form. It is a moral claim that inequality is wrong, and that the MEANS of centralized power–there is a continuum here, but the intent remains the same–is how you fix it. It deduces from the Mercantilist fantasy that wealth is limited, that wealth concentrated is necessarily wealth stolen, from which it rationalizes the theft of property by the State. It provides the rhetorical cover for totalitarianism, which is why socialists are utterly unable to condemn the abuses of Cuba, China, and North Korea. As long as the only crime is inequality, then anything that addresses it is moral.

It seems to me important to distinguish these two terms. The first is a description of a CULTURAL phenomenon, and the second of an ECONOMIC system. Consumerism is effectively a doctrine of Physical Hedonism, in which happiness is the goal of life, and is to be found in the acquisition of external objects, where human beings, more or less, are to be understood as well as objects, with prices.

Me, I will never have a trophy bride, since I can’t foot the bill. Nor will my own self esteem climb as a result of driving to work in an expensive car, and driving home to a “castle” situated with other “persons of quality”. I refuse to put a value on myself, based on my material success. I’m not opposed to money–I would like a lot of it–but if I were rich, it would simply enable me to pursue more aggressively the projects I pursue now part-time, and some of which–like some experiments in biology I have in mind–that I simply can’t afford the parts and pieces for.

I went to see “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” yesterday. It was morally appalling, and I found myself in vague discomfort start to finish–with only a few laughs to punctuate it–but found myself pondering one of the characters, a 7th grade girl we first see reading Ginsberg’s Howl. She was the prototypical outsider. You see them in every school. They are of above average intelligence, and when they reach a certain age, they realize our world is in large measure mad. We have rejected the sacred demands of traditional culture, and worked feverishly to insulate ourselves from all material discomforts, and have in general seemingly chosen willful superficiality over the dignified struggles of yesteryear: in war; in fighting for your family; in sincere and deep religious devotion; in dedication to your community.

Those who notice this almost invariably gravitate to the counter-culture, and leftist politics. Why? Socialists claim they oppose the vapidity of Consumerism. And people like Ginsberg are qualitatively different. They seem deep. Suffering seems deep.

Yet, this is only partially true. Suffering in the pursuit of a difficult end, based on self chosen principles, creates depth. Pain, by itself, does nothing. It breaks you down into a nullity, then you do drugs, and lose your mind, as did the “best minds” of Ginsbergs generation.

Once you accept the basic notion of Quality–which I define as richly textured latent information–then you can accept the idea of movement towards or away from quality. To this, though, I would add that you can have qualitatively positive movement, and negative movement. Your personality, in my own terms, is an emergent property of the self organizing nature of human consciousness, oriented around principles you choose.

You can move towards Evil, which is to say, towards self pity, resentment, anger, hate, pleasure in causing others pain; and you can move towards Goodness, which is to say towards the rejection of self pity, persistence in the face of difficulty, and growing awareness of light and the possibility of joy, which leads to love, and a genuine desire to alleviate the pain of others, and to take pleasure in so doing.

Ginsburg moves you towards self pity, and the rejection of transcendance, and he is the rough direction most people go who want to reject Consumerism. This is unnecessary.

Capitalism is simply a method. Its means are defined by what people want. If people want local businesses, and genuinely rich diversity of options, they will get them. Capitalism will FOLLOW wherever the people lead. If you reject a life based on consumption, then Capitalism will adapt.

To claim that the homogenizing, maternalistic Nanny State will correct the maladjustments of suburbia is stupid. It is a fundamental misundertanding of what is being proposed.

I am a conservative Liberal. This is absolutely different from social conservatism. I want for all people the capacity for them to lead the lives they want to lead. I think the evidence is clear that most groups are happiest living with their own kind. Black people are happier living with other black people. They understand one another. They know what to expect. Mexicans are happiest living with other Mexicans. White Lutherans are happier with white Lutherans. Etc.

I see a future in which we accept gay cities–where everyone is gay. And Christian cities, where everyone walks to the same church. We have room for Muslim towns, with prayer towers, and a Muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. They simply need to accept, in writing, word and deed, the primacy of our Constitution and laws. They cannot exact “cruel and unusual punishments”; they cannot ban “blasphemy”. If they want to priviledge Allah above our national government, they join in that most Christians. As long as they follow our laws, and do not encourage anyone to break them, this is acceptable to me.

This pattern can be continued. My own vision for a post-consumeristic future is one in which we decouple the currently overweaning Federal Government from the States to a great extent, and sort of atomize into countless groups, living in small communities, how they want to live. Drugs should be able to be legalized; and prostitution; and abortion should be able to be banned: all in some places, not others, depending on local tastes and mores.

What ties us together? Goodness, as I have defined it, and as someone smarter than me may redefine it in the future.

Currently, we suffer so much from loneliness and social isolation. This is the clear, empirically verifiable result of multiculturalism, which aims not to protect and reconcile difference, but to eradicate it outright, regardless of what the fools pushing this agenda claim.

None of this pain is necessary. None of it.

In my own terms, the proper purposes of art are to help foster the rejection of self pity, to sponsor and model persistence, and to cultivate perception, particularly the ever present possibility of joy and trascendance. The materials that interest me personally most are light, color, and movement, particularly the movement of water.

Many different visions came to me this morning. For example, you could have a clear walled building situated in an advantageous position relative to the sun, filled with glass tubes, through which water is running. What makes water interesting when it moves is not smooth motion, but interrupted motion. This creates all sorts of interesting patterns and shadows, which could be emphasized with the proper type of floor, and perhaps strategically placed walls. You could introduce, in an elaborate cascade of sequenced pipes, different colors. Suddenly the water could turn purple, in a wave; later, yellow; then 5 colors could be introduced in different parts of the room, perhaps coupled with lights at the bottom or tops of the tubes.

I like days when the weather is “moody”, when the clouds are on the move, and the sun is popping in and out. To this arrangement you could add, in addition to natural wind–I see this being open to the elements–bursts of artificial wind, perhaps filled with alternating, interesting odors, like vanilla. In the spirit of Harry Potter, perhaps every so often you could have an unpleasant smell, like cow manure, which would disappear soon enough. Learning to accept the occasional unpleasantness is an essential element in living well. After warning people, you could make the floor purposely uneven, so that some care must be paid to your footing.

I also saw a pyramid of bottles, with water being sprayed on them from above, in which various rainbows would appear often. Perhaps you could have hoses for attendees, so they could spray one another. You could have bright full spectrum lights shining from the floor, so they could create their own rainbows. People could purchase colored waters, and you could have smaller fountains, with narrow tops, on an angle, so they run downhill at say 45 degrees, with many interruptions, and you could pour the colored water on it, and watch it flow. You could make the fountain surface clear, with light underneath, to enhance the effect. Again, the water could have an odor. Every so often it could simply rain, so that everyone got soaked. You would of course warn them of this first.

Mild risk and mild invasions of “abnormality” into your space are cathartic. Consider the act of Gallagher, who would always smash a bunch of watermelons in his act, such that the first few rows got wet. Or the Blue Man group, which as I understand it, has the audience pull a fabric over their heads.

We see often in museums the self destructive rage of the “epater la bourgeoisie”–the desire to “shock the middle class”–that acts out of nothing more creative than self loathing, which leads to resentment of others who are content, anger at them, and ultimately hatred. This is counterproductive. This sort of thing is NOT generative of anything but decline, even if the decline often cloaks itself in the mantle of outwardly progressive rhetoric. The real intent of Communists, always, is to destroy what exists, in favor of something they cannot create. This makes it a nihilistic doctrine, from which no beauty can be expected.

Yet, I do see value in disrupting complacency. In fact, no complacent person can be fully Good, in my own terms. If they are not engaging creatively with life, then they are decaying. The value of art is in supporting this intelligently, and purposefully.

Bon (my view) mot: Morality imposed is morality denied.

It seems to me the principle purpose of morality is the definition of character, which is your identity. An identity is that part of you that persists in the face of storms, setbacks, inconveniences, and all sorts of troubles.

We can accept, with the Buddha, that life is suffering, by which he meant both pain and constant vague dissatisfaction. Meaning is the sense of transcending those things, and of fashioning from them joy and contentment. Morality is a tool in the service of the creation of meaning.

Extending this, all the Buddha really said was “look, you’re all vaguely unhappy, and you accept this because you don’t know any better. I have a better way that solves the problem.” That better way was his particular “technology”, but the whole project arises from the simple recognition of a problem–unnecessarily diminished quality of life–and the realization that solving this problem is possible.

The benefits of his technology–the 8 fold path, which in roughly the same form can be found in all religions–were realizable even for atheists. You did not need another life in an astral body to live better NOW using his ideas. This is the point of morality: it is the pathway to transmuting pain into pleasure. It is the reason we suffer voluntarily, and don’t complain about it.

One could perhaps even speak usefully of “Moral Hedonism”, which is the term one could use for the pleasure that follows living an honorable and ordered life. Even Buddhists readily admit the need for the desire to achieve Enlightenment.

To this, I would contrast “Physical Hedonism”, which rejects all non-physical forms of pleasure, and thereby rejects the possibility of moral transcendence, or the necessity of discomfort in this life. Since this is manifestly a counter-factual position, it leads necessarily to INCREASED suffering and discomfort. That our rates of depression and anxiety disorders have been steadily increasing in the last 100 years can be attributed directly to our general cultural embrace of Physical Hedonism, which of course is the dominant theme in what I term Sybaritic Leftism, or soft Socialism.

When you give your all, and find more, then you have grown.

This is what Niezsche was trying to say with his “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, but of course I like my version better. N. was someone, in my understanding, who hid from the world while constantly proclaiming his superiority to it.

A proposition which cannot be negated is to logic what a hypothesis which cannot be falsified is to science: a failure of the method.

A complaint we often see from the left is that “real wages” are not rising; that by exporting jobs to China and elsewhere we are causing people’s incomes here not to go up. The reality–well detailed by Henry Hazlitt in his indispensable “Economics in one lesson”–is that we ARE getting wealthier. What is happening is that at the same wage, you can BUY MORE. The average American household today has many things that were undreamt of 30 years ago. Microwaves used to be luxuries, and computers unheard of.

Now, at those same wages (if we even accept this analysis, which I am willing to do in principle since it doesn’t matter) we have MUCH more. We have more furniture, TV’s, stereos, iPods, cars, etc. We take these things for granted, but anyone over 40 remembers three TV stations, and one TV.

The way Capitalism works best is if you let people create. When one industry moves away, new ones are created. When leftist talk about wages, what they are mainly talking about are UNION wages, since they are the ones who help get them elected, and their complaint is that they are not making MORE money for the SAME amount of work. Why would such a thing be possible?

Leftists fear the loss of power of unions, since that is a big part of the money machine that funds them. This entire health insurance take-over cannot be understood without reference to the benefits it provides the UNIONS.

As Hazlitt says, you can always help one group at the expense of another, and always help everyone in the short run, at the expense of the long run. In this particular case, for every person helped by this bill 4 or more will be hurt; and whatever good it does in its first few years will be devastatingly counterbalanced by the debt it will cause, and by the massive disruptions in a system which until now has been the world’s best.

John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty” is an essential text in the Liberal tradition. In it, he defends the necessity of personal autonomy, and the value of individualism. One quote (which I stole from the internet, but which I believe to be in that work, although I cannot quickly find it) that I like is this:

“Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, courage, and mental vigor it has contained.”

One sees efforts by Leftists to paint conservatives as the enemies of originality. In my own town, we have a campaign to “Keep Louisville Weird”, by which they mean we should buy from locally owned, ideosyncratic businesses, rather than patronizing national chains which lack the eccentricity that local control and local relationships makes possible.

Flower children reveled in their “free spirited” rejection of conventional society, as do punk rockers, goths, and others today.

As what I consider to be a genuine Liberal, I find nothing distasteful in diversity. I like it. I like it when people do things differently, and express themselves in their own voices.

What I find distressing is what I perceive to the general LACK of originality of thought that characterizes most of these people. Their non-conformity is external only, and the actual content of their thought is distressingly uniform. They reject traditional moral forms, notions of patriotism, and generally Capitalism generally, conflating it–as they do–with Consumerism.

On this reading, Socialism is a romantic escape from the drudgery of pedestrian conformity. Yet, nothing can be more drearily conformist than a State which tolerates only one set of ideas, which is economically incompetent, and which punishes ideological deviations. Cuba is a nation which should be happy, but which lives in constant fear of running afoul of the secret police and army of informers that are everywhere.

In my piece on Sybaritic Leftism, I did admit that the Scandinavian nations offer an attractive set of ideas, but the problem with them is that in their pursuit of simple hedonism, they leave no room for the persistence of principled difference, and in practice one sees them giving in to whatever group screams the loudest.

The true eccentric is a man or woman of sturdy principles, who hews to them even in the face of adversity. If no one is opposing you, it can hardly be an act of courage to be different. Rather, that type of non-conformity is little better than stylistic narcissism.

Americans in general have less of a commitment to one another than we might if we were in a tribe, but we have most of that sense. Most of us are willing to give our lives for this nation, which is to say for one another.

We have developed a generous attitude towards the world and one another. We need to remember how rare this is in human history, that a major power would be so tolerant, and so reluctant to use for our own immediate benefit the immense power we wield.

This is the direct result of the Enlightenment inspired enterprise that animated our Founding Fathers, which rested firmly on Christian charity.

Broadly speaking, our political arena offers us two options: doing what we’ve always done, respecting the Constitution, and free markets, and privileging religious commitment and our heritage; and implementing Socialism.

Now, we have been programmed since birth to believe in Progress, but you can’t progress if you keep doing what you have always done. Progress, as a theme, involves change. Logically, this is a powerful tool, then, in the arsenal of the Socialists, since they are the only ones saying they want to do something different.

Yet, regression is also change, and it seems to me that Socialism is actually a reversion to the aristocratic feudalism of the Middle Ages, without the palliative effect of the Church. Prices were fixed then, “just” wages were paid then, and the Kings would make sure everyone was fed, if they could.

We need a third way. Clearly, adherence to religious sentiment is declining, due particularly to the advent of Science as the preeminent and dominant source of Truth. Yet, regardless of what Leftist attacks on religion may claim, the reality is that our nation has always relied on religion to provide the moral compass that enabled us to be actually tolerant of diversity, and to do the right thing, even when it was hard and involved sacrifice. Self evidently, religion played a large role in Abolitionism, and in the Civil Rights movement, among other areas of social evolution.

The third way, in my view is a Liberalism denuded of a NECESSARY religious component. This is the political role that I foresee for the concept of Goodness. I have nowhere defined in detail what exactly it is we MUST do. Everything is up for discussion. My only absolutes are that self pity must be rejected; that we must persist in our efforts to improve the world; and that we must make strenuous efforts to be wise, to foresee the effects of our ideas, and to understand that sometimes NOTHING need be done. There is no pain that cannot be transmuted into understanding, and there is no point in creating a world in which pain is banished.

Our only choice is in how we choose to suffer. This sounds maudlin, but in reality for those who accept it, suffering isn’t. If you want to feel alive, take a risk. If you want to become tranquil in mind and spirit, voluntarily undertake a difficult task, and give it everything you have.

Socialists are willing to suffer for their Socialism, are they not? Are full time revolutionaries not passionately commited to their cause? Do we not see romantic evocations of the trials and travails of Reds everywhere, for example in the movie Reds?

Socialism serves this role–that of providing meaning–for revolutionaries. The problem is that this sense of purpose is not transferable. When they succeed, they have nothing left. The people on whose behalf they presume to speak, do not attain–in whatever material repose is enabled by their economic incompetence–a feeling of being alive. On the contrary, unless they themselves become revolutionaries, they find it oppressive and empty, because it is. It is a fire that burns, and if it ever engulfs our planet, it will consume to the last drop every hope of transcendance we might have had. At least, that will be its goal.

In that uses the method of stoking resentment, of rejecting traditional moral norms, and cultural forms, and in that it demands dogmatic conformity to ideas generated far, far away, Socialism is the antithesis of Goodness as I have defined it.

It is evil, in my view, and no quantity of lies can erase this fact.