Author: White Whale

Most men, it seems to me, occasionally covet other women, no matter how loving their wives or girlfriends might be. We are presented–in movies, particularly–with bright shining images of beautiful, emotionally engaged women who seem to possess something that we lack. Or we are presented, in pornography, with sexually available women who will do anything we want.

Everywhere there is this bright shining lie–if I may borrow a term from a liar–that over the hill, happiness awaits. In contrast, what we have comes to seem dull and dreary. This is the myth that leads many middle-aged men into what can become the crisis of infidelity.

It seems to me, though, that all of these images subtract from the particularity of the women. They have needs, they have desires, they have bad days, they get grouchy. And at an increasingly early point in their lives, many women become cynics. Subjected to objectification from a very early age, it seems to me most women fall in love once in their teens, and a second time, if they are lucky, some time in their twenties. After that, they are spent. They have risked, and lost, to men who had been conditioned by a relentless media advocacy campaign to view sex as an object, not a type of emotionally involved relationship.

Clearly, the biological imperatives of men differ from those of women, but we both need love. This doesn’t change. And one of the principle arguments against the sexual revolution in the 60’s was that it would lower women to the standards of men, which seems to have happened.

So quite often what we have is objects interacting with objects. This is what you have when there is no genuine affection. This is the logic of oral sex, for men at least, in that you have a power relationship, and are freed from the need to look in anyone’s eyes with affection.

Women, it seems to me, come into their relationships with men in their teens with very glowing hopes. They feel love, and think that love is being given back to them, and so readily surrender their bodies. And most of the time, they are betrayed.

What is lacking in this whole process is creation. In order to love, you must exist as a person first. You must understand that you must be able to resist your own most primal impulses, so that you can connect on higher levels with other people. A lover is just a friend with whom you have consummated the deepest level–not of physical–but emotional intimacy. Women think they can get love with sex, but in general they don’t. They get used, then abandoned when they become “clingy”. This drives some women crazy. You see them in middle age, in constant pain, unable to understand why no one wants them, and becoming steadily less attractive as this frustration eats them. This is the “crazy bitch” that men can’t comprehend. What they are seeing is 20 years of emotional abandonment, and emotional silence, tempered only by the companionship of their female friends.

Creation, here, is adding energy to the system. It is deciding to give first, then receive later. Women do this easily when young, and very poorly after getting stung repeatedly. Men, in our society, do this very poorly.

I do not think I am misstating the facts when I say that there was a time in the not too distant past when men would court women. When they would offer up effort to win them, and offer unconditional loyalty, having done so. When they would serenade them, figuratively or literally. When poetry evoked deep sentiment, and when women were considered special, and their tenderness and sensitivity valued.

So often, now, women are seen simply as sexual objects, and on this view there is no major difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality. One orifice, by and large, is as good as another. The emotional quality is the same: that of two animals in heat, bound only by desire, and who for that reason only stay together until that particular passion is spent.

And when emotions do enter into it, when people “fall in love”, what is happening is that one person is asking another to “complete” them, as in Jerry McGuire. If you don’t know who you are, and find someone who can tell you, that is the person you love. But this, too, is compulsive. If you need that other person, in order that you can exist as a person, then you can never see them as they are. You never complete them.

Many women will settle for being needed, but this is far short of love, and will lead to chronic levels of emotional malnourishment. This has been the lot of countless women over the ages.

By and large, though, what I see on our cultural scene as it exists today is everyone searching for someone to complete them, and never quite finding it. They search and search. Momentarily they may find someone, but wind up rejecting them as not enough.

People want someone to tell them who they are. No one is creating. There is leveling process where no one is creating anything. Practically, this gets expressed as women want money, men want good sex with attractive women. Marriage becomes a de facto business proposition, particularly after the “starter marriage” in their twenties.

Yet, there is nowhere to run when no one is adding anything. Everybody is looking for soemething and not finding it. Dissatisfaction is everywhere.

You can’t find yourself if you don’t exist, and you won’t exist until you create yourself, by determining what you stand for, and what you are willing to suffer for; what your unique brand of Goodness will be.

Expressed poltically, this is the problem of socialism: it reallocates wealth, it doesn’t create it. This is the point Ayn Rand wanted to make. Everything, in the end, depends on people who put out more energy than they consume, who take nothing and make something.

The outcome of a lack of individuation is a lack of love, which leads to alienation, which leads to frustration, which leads to anger and violence. Any loveless sex for a women is a type of cruelty. Men need love as much as women, perhaps more. Everyone is losing.

These musings are not yet as tight as I would like them to be, but will have to do for now. More on this later. When I understand something, I can be concise. I’m not there yet.

Fashion is really a type of art. It’s a way of interacting with your environment in a creative and engaged way. Obviously, most people don’t create their own clothes, but there are so many options to choose from, you have the ability to assemble something that is uniquely you and yours.

The use of your personal space in this way is an external reflection of inner realities. To echo a similar point Theodore Dalrymple made in one of his essays, the extent of your congruence with social conventions is reflected in how you present yourself.

Everyone wants to be an individual, but no one wants to be alone, and when you see people flouting social conventions–as in the ironic use of military clothing by rumpled hippies–you generally see them doing it in groups.

Read through the lyrics to these two songs, then return to look at my analysis:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnnycash/aboynamedsue.html

http://www.rhapsody.com/everclear/rolling-stone-original/father-of-mine/lyrics.html

The two cases are roughly the same. In both you have young boys who grow up without a father, who have to struggle to survive, and who bear psychological scars.

In the first, you hear of a drifter who goes from town to town, often getting in fights, never settling down. He doesn’t whine about it, but clearly he is psychologically damaged.

In the second, you get the confession: “I will never be safe/ I will never be sane/ I will always be weird inside/ I will always be lame.”

Now, my own temperamental inclination, as should be obvious, is to side with Johnny Cash. Shit happens: deal with it. But as you ponder it, you realize he really isn’t dealing with it. He is running and hiding from his “shame”. He is acting out constantly in an aggressive way.

In our pre-Confessional culture–prior to our mass conversion to the idea that talking about psychological problems somehow helps us “process” them–people like Cash’s Sue were common. They were drunks, and losers. Some got religion, or found a good woman, and made their peace with their world; others never did. This world has always been filled with much suffering.

Freudianism, with the notion of the Unconcious, tells us that who we are now, is the product of who we were, then. The logic of this is that if we are suffering now, we should blame the past. Freud may today have no claims that pass even rudimentary scrutiny scientifically, but the basic notion of the retained experience, the permanent moulding of self at some time before our maturation, is everywhere.

Thus, when the claim is made “I will never be sane”, the singer is simultaneously attacking his father for his cruelty by claiming irreparable damage, and surrendering his creative capacity for regeneration and growth.

Now, the lyricist has obviously done something with his life–he is no doubt wealthy, as someone who created at least one major hit–and has commited himself to not doing the same thing to his kid. These are positive, and bely the fundamental helplessness he is invoking.

But he is still offering us an idea that is fundamentally pessimistic. Are we in fact pressed into molds at an early age, and forever after helpless in their face? Are the combinations of genetics and early experience fully and completely determinative of our future experience?

Johnny Cash’s Sue is insufficiently self reflective to make claims like that. He doesn’t think about it. And it does seem to me that as we evolve as sovereign individuals, we do so as whole qualitative Gestalts. Quite often, you can do things that are “impossible”, if you don’t know they are impossible. And it seems to me that someone who simply wants a better life will be more likely to get it than someone who has already determined in advance that the battle is already lost.

So, in the end, I have to come down somewhere in the middle. Clearly, whining is not generative. As a general rule, it makes you more depressed, and lessens your capacity for transcendance.

The optimal therapeutic approach would be one where you reject self pity, but also realize you have to process hurt. People are often blind and cruel, but that is for now simply the reality, and you can’t unwrite the past by accurately pointing to real wrongs done to you.

Our task in life is creation. This is what I believe, and any and all beliefs that subtract from your capacity for creation are for that reason to be avoided. Experience is primary. Explanation is secondary. This is the order. My operative optimism consists in the belief that if we truly understand how to live, everything can be clear and bright, pleasing and satisfying. We should never settle for anything that falls short of that.

It seems to me that art is the expression of the sacred myth. It is understandable that it became a cult in and of itself in the late 19th century among people who had otherwise rejected all faith and creed. The best art simultaneously ennobles us and binds us, one to another.

Regrettably, it also expresses who we are, and who we are becoming. On that score, modern art–as a rejection of form, meaning and beauty–represents the increasing formlessness and incoherence of our culture.

Yet, we remain a system in motion. We are still free. Our task, I think, is to evolve from the eternal verities which the ancients and medieval painters sought to convey, to a constant effort to reconcile stability with motion, through balance.

Thinking about art. I want it to be constructive without being didactic. The fractal pictures are a good example, showing beauty in disorder. Didacticism is a sort of linear, imposed order, that I oppose. The best art, it seems to me, induces in the viewer (listener) latent sympathies with what is good in life. It helps us find pleasure and companionship in difficulty, and helps us manage our tendencies to lapse into self pity, and move towards a creative, fulfilling engagement with life. I can’t say what exact forms this might take.

I do like the idea of layered pictures, with very rich information in them, more than we can process. Currently, I think much art ALSO has more information than we can process, but what is being signalled on the channels which elude our conscious awareness is gloom, pessimism, and latent sympathy for evil. Is the proverbial blank canvas not a rejection of all values, and of creative engagement, regardless of what excuse may be offered for it? Is it not a rejection of society, and effort?

I have thought often about architecture. Broad stroke, I think it would be useful to have interactive homes, which react to changing conditions. We tend to stagnate, and moving homes would work to counteract that. That is the implicit myth in the Harry Potter novels, at Hogwarts. The stairs move, and the pictures are alive. In their world, nothing remains static, and life is never understood as being even potentially without risk. We need that, and Rowlings very insightful use of these principles–which she may or may not have even expressed consciously to herself–is why so many people have taken such pleasure in her creation. Actually, she offers a good example of the sort of art I like.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to develop homes that react to the weather. You could, for example, have very complex glass pathways in a wall that carried water when it was raining. You could invent patterns; you could add flywheels; you could make the tubes move as the volume of water changes.

In the ceiling you could have an area filled with smoke that moved with the wind, or flywheels inside that turned the speed of the wind. The smoke could change color as the temperature changed.

You could have rotating homes, or homes that tilted a bit this way and that.

You could put in optical pathways for the sun, so that you could direct light wherever you wanted, or run it through filters that changed depending on the time of day. You could pipe in moonlight, and have a moving mirror that followed it all night long.

A paint could be developed that changed color regularly. You could have roofs that altered their shape.

All of these, of course, would be expensive, and many would recoil in horror at movement in the one place they can rest. Yet, can any of us REALLY rest, finally, on this Earth? Is the task not much more to be up and exploring every day, and would it really be so traumatic to have a dwelling that supported our efforts not to get stuck somewhere?

The best meal I ever had was at the Oak Room, in Louisville. At the end of a fine dinner, they brought us out 6 fine chocolates, each one not only delicious, but prepared as a unique work of art. All of them were visually appealing, in different ways.

I have dreamed of a world where we all live in little houses, in the middle of large expanses of grass and trees. What matters most about the houses is not their size, but their quality, how interesting and innovate they are.

If we are to contain our relentless thirst for more, more, more, the way to do it is in Quality. We must remember beauty, and in my view copying the ordered chaos of nature is the best way to do it.

The Taoist speak of the Uncarved Block. As I understand the issue, what this term in Chinese actually means is an uncut forest. If you look at a forest, it is not ordered, but it is harmonious. That is the metaphor I like.

Socialism is lines of trees in neat rows, labeled and confined. That, of course, I don’t like. A blank canvas serves this cause well, since it agitates for individual creative nullity, and passive submersion in a vast heap of undifferentiated things, to be moved and ordered like so much clay, by those who control us.

It would be interesting to compare and contrast the arguments the Fascists used against Democracy with those used by Communists, and compare both with the arguments being advanced today by the environmentalists. I think what one would find, laying one piece of rhetoric next to another, is that the claim is being made “we–or I–know better. Since the people are stupid, their sovereignty over their own lives should be sacrificed and ceded to their betters, against their will, if necessary, since they don’t understand their own interest.”

Ultimately, you have only two directions: voluntary compliance with laws you believe in, and forced compliance with laws you oppose. In the first case, very little government is needed. In the second, a great deal of government. In Cuba, for example, as many as one in three people may be informers. No one really knows. That’s the point.

And historically, what the Communists have really done is return us to Monarchy, Feudalism, and Mercantilism (whose core doctrine is that one man’s gain is necessarily another man’s loss), with none of the tempering virtues of those doctrines, such as noblesse oblige, faith in an eternal future in a better land, and honor.

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Look at use of word Reform. One could compare Healthcare Reform with Land Reform as used by the Soviet and Chinese Communists, which meant ceding all private land to that State, resulting in mass famine in both cases. Likewise, with so-called healthcare reform, we can expect the virtual famines of rationing down the road.

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The professor who taught the Teaching Company course on Chinese history really did a poor job of the Communist period. One particular theme I found very revealing.

Bit of background: like Lenin, Mao promised all the peasants “Land reform”. What they understood by this is that the land of the large land owners would be taken from them, and dispersed to them, the less well-off farmers. Where they had say 2 acres, they would now have 10 acres, and all they had to do was support Mao. Being short-sighted, they did.

In the short term, this is what happened. The land was taken from the “bourgeoisie”, and a great many of them were murdered after staged “trials”, where the “people” were expected to show no mercy, and express loud indignation at the supposed crimes of the rich for being rich.

Mao, though, was a liar, of course. All Communists are liars. They want absolute tyranny, and no matter what they say, they never stop until they get it. In this case, 10-15 years or so down the road, they took the land from the peasants, and placed it under the control of the State, which took everything they grew, then gave some of it back to them. Understandably, many of them were very upset. In the Soviet Union, many refused to grow food, and in retaliation Stalin condemned millions to starvation, by taking everything they did grow, and prohibiting all importation of food.

In the Chinese case, simple incompetence caused a similar result, with tens of millions dying of preventable hunger, after being “saved” by Communism. It is somewhat complex, so I won’t get into the details here.

(It is my sincere hope I can at some point induce in a previously commited Communist nausea at the extent of the horror they have sponsored).

In any event, relative moderate (read: incomplete psychopath) Deng Xiopeng forced Mao out as head of the Party (the ruling aristocracy), and implemented liberalization. One of the features of this was limited de facto land ownership.

On this point, our illustrious professor comments that whereas they had previously had to give up all of their food, now they had to surrender a certain amount, but were able to keep anything the raised over that amount. He viewed this as an improvement.

What is noteworthy about this, is that THIS IS FEUDALISM. You have the peasant and the Lord of the area. The peasant pays his taxes to the Lord, and keeps what is left. Tens of millions died to return to a system which was worse than what they had before the revolution.

It’s interesting that as a professional he couldn’t make that connection. All that has happened, when Communists take over, is you have deducted ideas of virtue and honor from what is otherwise a medieval system. Communists eradicated the “mandate of heaven”, which had been a key feature of Chinese political theory for nearly 3 millenia. That doctrine stated, in effect, the same thing our Declaration of Independence did, that when governments become abusive, the people have the right to overthrow them.

The Chinese Communists–like all Communists–have kept what was bad, and implemented it in such a way that all moral critiques have been disabled.

I have decided to call myself a conservative Liberal. Little c, big L. By this I mean I think the basic approach of the 18th century–of our Constitution, of Adam Smith–was correct, that of dispersing government as widely as possible, with a constant eye to balance. If you spread it too much, you get anarchy; and if you concentrate it too much you get tyranny. This is the doctrine of Liberalism. Little c because I use the older version of the term, and reject root and branch the newer ideas tied to that word, as Illiberal.

Because they favor less, not more freedom, all modern users of the word liberal are liars.

A word might be in order on what these musings are. What I like to do is the thought equivalent of experimental sketches. I like to build small parts of large ideas, and see how they fit, and what happens when I move them. As in drawing, sometimes if you move something just a little, one way or the other, the whole form changes.

And as in drawing, I am creating forms–rather, symbolic representations of what I believe to be external realities–which in general I try to formulate in such a way that predictions are possible. This roughly, if not exactly, hews to the scientific method, but as applied to the qualitative dimension of human experience (often, depending on the topic; sometimes things ARE directly measurable).

I do sketch after sketch after sketch, and periodically I “paint” something, which is a distilled argument on some topic or other which aims at both concision and thoroughness, which are two traits that are hard to combine.

In studying the issue, one hears often how Conservatives look to the past for inspiration, and “Progressives” to the future. On the one hand, on this stereotype, we hear the demand that everything should remain the way it was, or as close to it as possible. We see sentimental evocations of past eras that we have likely not understood at all.

On the other, we hear strident calls for the new and better; for the eliminations of the hatreds and prejudices that informed the past, and the implementation of a new and better human civilization, unchecked by the ignorance of the past.

To me, Liberalism–true Liberalism–is about the freedom to do what you want. In my own case, I recognize the need for shared cultural themes, understandings of what is Good, and symbols we can rally around. At the same time, I recognize that Fundamentalism–of which one could argue many Conservatisms represent types–usually creates a NEW myth, based simply on the structure of a time we have misremembered.

We remember our Founding Fathers as idealists and revolutionaries. They were that. They were also racists, on our own terms, sexists, and elitists.

To me, though, the point is to look at what they were trying to do, what the ideals were upon which they were acting. One can look, too, at their historical context, one in which slavery had until then been a universally accepted phenomenon–Polybius, a Greek slave in Rome, is one of our best resources on the structure of the Roman Republic, upon which our own Constitution is modelled–and in which most ignorant people were in fact deeply and profoundly ignorant.

There is nothing in Liberalism which rejects idealism. Quite the contrary. Conservatism, though, wedded to Liberalism–my own political position, if forced to choose one–is the idea that we need to proceed with caution. That we want to be careful to keep what needs keeping, and that as we move forward some things we have cherished, will be seen to have been actually detrimental.

The role of Goodness, as a concept, is what ties all of this together. I personally like the vision of moving “forward” to something like the Shire or Rivendell in Tolkien’s novels. I would like to see the best parts of living in harmony with nature, combined with the best parts of modern technology. I see all of us breaking apart the monolithic media outlets, and an ubiquitous Federal Government. I would like to see this basic model spread over the Earth, with technology used to raise everyone to safety, and the level of wealth they want, consistent with sustainability (which is clearly a propaganda theme, often, but hardly to be faulted in principle).

I do believe global peace is possible without global governance. For the time being, though, we need most to be sheltered from those who claim they can do us the greatest good.

It is impossible to set a political philosophy on a firm foundation without deciding first what the point of living is. If you don’t know, then you are worse than useless: you are dangerous. To be clear, politics is the art of government. How we are ruled can vary from one extreme–that of a single man or woman who holds us all in his or her power–to another, that of radical anarchy, where everyone governs themselves, which practically is only possible in conditions of very low population density or–theoretically–extremely developed moral sensibilities.

As I have set the problem down, the first existential problem is why you should continue living in the face of difficulty. It is possible to continue living out of habit, but I feel it is very difficult to live HAPPILY without an answer or answers to this that you find congenial. The second problem is, having determined to live, what you should do.

This first set of questions constitute what I call the Meaning system. Every culture has to have one, and for the culture to be coherent as such, the answers need to be shared generally, as interpreted in mildly different ways by different people. Religion, of course, is the paradigmatic Meaning system.

The second set of questions deals with what I call the Truth system. One need not have reasons for doing what one does–indeed, I would argue that virtually every way of living is largely contingent, and that the decision to assume an identity of any sort is more important than the reasoning–but it does help in social settings. How do we agree on what is worth doing, as a group? How do we agree on what is True? Science, of course, is the default answer in our modern world, where Religion was in the past.

Only then do we get to Politics, which deals with the acquisition and disposition of power. I perhaps need a better word than politics, since it comes to us from the Greek polis, and presumes relatively liberal conditions, which of course were not present in the time of the Pharoahs, nor in Maoist China.

Leftism, in many respects, is an answer to Atheism. Leftists seek to find in the collective what they find difficult or impossible to achieve on their own: shared meaning, purpose, shared truth. And it is in the SEEKING of a better world that they find these desirable shelters from what we might term the “Existential Wind”. This is important, since for them the Messianic zeal which their committment to a better world provides for them is soteriological: it constitutes their salvation, as good as they expect to get.

For this reason, the idea that other people–the workers, minorities, the environment, colonized nations–might not need them is too horrific to contemplate. They sense that some struggle is needed for happiness in this world, but they have rejected the notions of moral improvement, since all morality resides in biology, not spirit. There is no spirit. Therefore, “improvement” as an individual is impossible; one must look to the species, implicitly, although many would not take the metaphor this far, consciously.

Thus what one gets is the strenuous advocacy of abstractions that impinge on real human lives. From moral and emotional necessity, action is separated from effect.

This is how totalitarianism is built. I want to be clear: Lenin was an actual human being. He got tired, he crapped, he collected mushrooms, he liked to play chess. His words, and the actions of others that flowed from his words, had very real effects on 100’s of millions of people, in his own time, and indirectly down to our own time.

We find it difficult to grasp the scope of the suffering that he wrought, but we need to be clear it is what he intended, and he personally oversaw much of it. When the farmers were hiding food, he authorized torture to find it. When they were purging rural communities, he told his Cheka thugs to “get tougher men”.

From small ideas are large ideas built. In the case of Leftism, the rejection of standing moral virtue entailed in the rejection of “bourgeois” tradition and morality means, practically, that you do what you are told, and it is right because you were told to do it. It is the logic of the “Vernichtungslagern”.

This bon mot is actually stolen from Catholicism, which as Dostoevsky saw did share at times much in common with the darkness of Communism: “error has no rights”.

Leftists never evolve their own beliefs systematically, but let me do it for them.

First, life has no inherent meaning. You are born as a biological being whose consciousness is an artifact of biochemical processes whose antecendants stretch back virtually to the beginning of the world. What you think, believe, do: all of these things are determined by your genetics. In large measure, you are a biological robot, programmed for procreation and survival.

You notice, though, as an individual, that the idea of helping others makes you feel good. In one moment you are depressed and listless, then you are on fire with enthusiasm to increase that feeling of being compassionate, and eager to join the fight.

You also feel good being surrounded by likeminded men and women, who are also fighting the good fight. All of you accept the primacy of science as the arbiter of truth, which means that you regard each and every reading of the oracle to be truth incarnate. If the truths vary, you hew to whichever one is most popular.

Politically, you see the power of numbers. You see the power of organization. You recognize, as an Initiate in the Cult of Science, that morality has no higher purpose than the preservation of the species, so morality can be adapted as needed to serve whatever purpose you have in mind.

Practically, as a part of a political group, you are told what to do, and the truths you are given are invariably offered by recognized Initiates, who are either popular experts, or Scientists.

And so you are set in motion. In the past, many such people were claimed as victims of various revolutions. Many rose high in the Parties, and won for themselves little feudal fiefdoms somewhere, complete with serfs and the ability to tax their crops.

But all of this is of a piece. It is a qualitative Gestalt, reached through a process of conscious or unconscious logic, operating on assumptions which for many are too painful to contemplate for too long.

Conservatism is simple. It looks to the past, and uses solutions of proven worth, such as Christianity. Individuals may want to improve the world, but they are not driven by any compulsive need to run from ideas they cannot abide, and cannot escape. Conservatism is stable for this reason. The individuals are stable, and conservative societies are stable.

Liberalism–true Liberalism–is based on the idea that since no final answer to the problems of meaning and truth can be found in this world, that all answers that do not trample on the rights of others are acceptable. It is a logical extension of the doctrine of Christian charity, and our success, as Liberals, has been in large measure due to the sincerity of our religiosity.

Leftists can tell you about every human tribe and race on the planet. They can describe to you all the marvellous and strange things they do. They can, in a situation requiring choice, describe to you with equinimity all the things you COULD do.

What they don’t have the capacity for, though, is moral DECISION. If all moral codes are right, how does one go about picking one? Simple: you don’t. You just try to be nice to everyone all the time and hope for the best.

This is yet another place where I really think the atheistic mindset–very prevalent on the Left–shortens perceptual phases, and prevents the emergence of perceptions that are very readily at hand for Conservatives, who in this country can generally be considered as Liberals, where Liberalism is the doctrine that “my business is my business and your business is your business; and the role of the State is to make sure it stays that way.”

Leftist are not Liberals because they want to use coercive power to remake society in the image of their personal biases, rather than let people be. Their own myths notwithstanding, most leftists support attacks on religion, absolutely refuse to negotiate on important issues to conservatives like abortion, and in general are only tolerant to the members of their own tribe, which has very uniform ideological beliefs, external, superficial differences notwithstanding.

The movement of people like Jonathan Haidt is that of adding butterflies to a box, without grasping them in any of the human ways which would otherwise be possible.

I myself am a Conservative Liberal. I don’t fit into his neat little typology. I address individual problems as they arise, on their merits.