Author: White Whale

The “joy” of cruelty, as described by Sade and others, comes from the temporary cessation of shame it enables.  I feel sure this is true.  It is a relief, a burden lifted, and thus a huge source of satisfaction.  It is, of course, drinking saltwater to slake thirst, since cruelty breeds more shame, even if that fact is denied and suppressed, with psychopathy perhaps  most directly consisting in the ability to do so effectively and quickly.  I don’t think anyone is purely cold all the time, although many come close.  I think even serial killers have short moments when they wake from their trance and feel momentary regret, which they immediately suppress with drugs, alcohol, and perhaps more cruelty.

I seem to be growing, and growing, for me, is consisting in feeling a lot of pain I had suppressed, which kept me moving all the time emotionally, from here to there and back again.  The movement was the method, and the method was running in circles without calling them circles.

Both of my parents poisoned me in their own ways.  My mother by withholding love she did not know how to provide, while often losing her temper with me, and my father through more or less conscious cruelty of the sort described above.  He was a bully.  He liked cutting people emotionally, while proclaiming his innocence and good heart.

But neither provided so much poison that it destroyed me.  I lived.  And looking at it now, with eyes slowly opening, I see countless small rebellions, countless darings, and facings of the dark, that enabled me to live.  With my past, it would be easily understood if I was a middle aged suicide.  If I had not taken the risks I did, then I would be hopeless right now.  Helpless.

But I did take those risks.  I did rebel.  I did take chance after chance after chance.  Some worked, many didn’t, but I never allowed myself to be fully boxed in by my past.

In contrast to most of the history of this blog, I am feeling some satisfaction NOT posting things.  I have a long list of ideas I keep, but I’m just not feeling the need or desire to post them.  This is good.  This means the squeeze, as I call it, is lessening, which is a key goal in my inner work.

They will show up eventually.  This may even be the year I take another stab at a book.  I think I have some useful things to say.

The root of grasping is wanted to directly control experience.  You eat a chocolate chip cookie because you associate a feeling with it.  That feeling, when you get it, feels like control.  The one led to the other, and that reliable connection is grasping in some ways.  Because it may not work every time, or work the same way, and that feels like pain, since something is now missing or gone, which was never promised to you in the first place.

So much of life is spent trying to stop time, and trying to create constancy.  Several comment on this occurred to me that I will share.

A bunker is a cage you chose.  We hate cages since we want to move, but if we don’t want to move, then cages don’t matter.  As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “those who do not move do not notice their chains”.  She also said “Freedom is for those who think differently”, which also implicitly says that Freedom is unnecessary for conformists.

Grasping is a bunker we create that becomes a cage.  In all the pain of the world, the demands, the distractions, we all forget that something good and better underlies all appearances.  Remembering this in one way or another is the primary task of all spiritualities.  In my own view, there is no difference between Allah, the Great Spirit of most American Indian tribes (maybe all: I wonder if any were atheists?  It’s not impossible.  There was much cultural diversity), and Buddha Nature and the Tao.  It’s the That.  If you feel it it needs no name.  If you don’t, then no name suffices or matters.

I think it is childish to NEED someone else.  One hears so many songs more or less equating needing someone with loving them.  Here is the thing: children NEED parents, particularly a mother or mother surrogate.  Adults should not need another person any more than a grown adult needs a pacifier or to be put to bed at night.

Love is building.  A beautiful marriage builds both partners.  And of course it is natural that you would miss your building partner when they are gone.  But that is not need.  That is affection given out, and perhaps the greatest loss is someone to whom you can readily GIVE.  This need is what motivates so many parents to elongate their children’s adolescence indefinitely.  They need their kids, more than their kids need them.  This is childish, immature, undignified, socially dangerous, and in my view morally wrong.

And it occurs to me to comment that we all need Yeses to balance lifes many No’s.  One way of getting them easily is deciding halfway to do something, like giving up donuts, then TREATING yourself to them.  Indulging yourself.  You set up the No so you can set up the Yes, which is otherwise empty.  I think a lot of behavioral circles have this component in them.

I have a lot of notes I’ve taken over the past while.  I’ve been working quite hard in the money world, and not posting them here.  I’ve also been enjoying the rest.  It’s likely true that words that can be said are not usually the words that really matter.  That won’t stop me from doing it anyway, but one day, if I grow up myself, I will talk myself silent.

Here is another metaphor: imagine Consensus Reality as a big or small circle.

The claim made, by “fact checkers”, “professional opposers of Error and Mis/Dis/Dysinformation, and all left wingers generally, is that All Truth resides in this circle. We know this because of EXPERTS.

Does it seem plausible to you that no true claims exist outside this circle, or that ONLY true claims exist within?

Nonsense.

And the patent goal is to SHRINK “Consensus Reality” through censorship, which is to say by making the lines of the Truth (Pravda) Circle impervious. You are not to be ALLOWED to talk about non-allowed truths AND be forced, at least publicly, to accept EVERYTHING inside the circle.

Is it not self evident that absent discussion and a commerce of ideas, that soon the circle will only be filled lies?

This is in effect what was done and is STILL being done with COVID. A truth perimeter was set down, no one was allowed to question it, and no outside ideas were allowed in.

This is how you create perfect, and perfectly confident, imbeciles.

Its been done many times. It is being done now.

Bad ideas get weeded out through discussion. There is not now, and never was, any real risk of public harm from misinformation.

On the contrary, the onslaught of Commissars is intended to PROTECT disinformation, and keep unwanted truths out.

I write this while being locked out of somewhere again for sharing the Columbia vaccine study. They didnt want it in their neat, tidy, completely wrong circle.

 

We live in a world–I mean Americans specifically, but I think this is increasingly generalized–where emotional maturity or individuation is becoming much less common.

I don’t think most people ever truly grow up.  They don’t ever truly accept accountability for their lives.

Me, I’m a weird hybrid of immature and old beyond my years.  I can point to the spasms and terrors that pass through me each and every night, and honestly say I work daily, as patiently as I can, to make them go away. I can’t speak to other people’s experiences, but I can honestly say I work daily to try and learn more about the world, to understand it better, and to meet it with more honesty and integrity, which I suppose is mature.

What I seem to see in others, though, is a high degree of neuroticism, and a low degree of Extroversion.

I am, here, again referring to Jordan Peterson’s personality types.  I am perhaps abusing them, and cannot say I have read either of his books.  But in his course he speaks of Extroversion–which breaks down to Assertiveness and Enthusiasm–as the main source of positive emotions; and Neuroticism–which breaks down into Withdrawal and Volatility–as the repository/source of “negative” emotions.

What is maturity?  It would consist in the ability to take responsibility for your own life.  To not depend on others to care for you.  To be the parent, not the child; the care giver, not the care needer.  That doesn’t mean you never need affection–far from it.  It simply means that you don’t suck life out of most of your interactions with others.  You don’t suck money and trust out of others.

What makes maturity unlikely is a high degree of withdrawal–pulling out of the fight emotionally–and volatility, because consistency is really the bedrock of nearly all adult accomplishment, and volatile people are unreliable.

And positive maturity would involve at least a high degree of enthusiasm.  Adult people pursue adult goals which make them happy.  Things for which they feel enthusiasm.  Long term goals that, accomplished, enhance their lives.

The opposite is neurotic misery, in which you cannot account for your days, and feel no strong impulses to do or accomplish or even be anything.

Immaturity is unhappiness.  It is the opposite of flourishing.

It is ironic that in a time when human potential is so high–when we have ready access to nearly all human knowledge which ever hit the public domain from all of human history, much of which is fantastically useful–people are so miserable.

And here is the thing: people who cannot individuate, who cannot figure out how to thrive on their own, are BOUND to be attracted to Utopias.  Imaginary places where all their misery and woe is made to disappear by SOMEONE ELSE, with NO EFFORT ON THEIR PART.

You get money every month forever.  Your parents never disappear.  All the worries and problems of life are dealt with by someone else.  You can hide forever, from everyone.

That this vision is ludicrous is too much for most of these very fragile, naive, and weak souls to contemplate.  And that the people most likely to promise such a pipe dream are psychopaths and narcissists is also too much to bear.

But ultimately, for all of us, happiness means taking on the fights of life, and learning to enjoy and eventually master them.  Life in our world is easier than it ever has been, physically.  Getting the basics on the table has never been easier.  Surviving has never been easier.  If we lack anything, it might be the true difficulty that makes it NECESSARY to grow up.

But hey, good news: Joe Biden is going to fuck things up so badly that you will get that difficulty.  Most of you will immediately pine for Socialism, but that process will what creates true misery.  Who knows, Starbucks may go out of business.  In any event, a great many of you won’t be able to afford them.

The sort of shock inflation and high gas prices are sending across the economic landscape will split the world further into Haves and Have Not’s.  That many of the Haves will continue to support the politics making this happen is simply testament to their irresponsibility and stupidity, and yes, immaturity.  They may be lawyers and doctors, but they are emotional children.

ANYONE who is truly trying to be responsible has to privilege clear sightedness.  You cannot make good plans with clouded vision.  This much is obvious.

To my recollection, the phrase “turn of the screw” occurred twice in the book, once in the prologue and once in the text.  In both cases it meant “turning it up a notch”, or pushing something a bit further.

I would like to propose that the book itself was intended to disclose, as much as could be done in Victorian England, and for that matter, what amounted to Victorian America, the fact of child sexual abuse, and its attendant horrors.

You will recollect that none of this really started coming out in any significant way until roughly the 1980’s.  I don’t claim to know the history in any detail, but one of the early salvos was Jeffrey Masson’s “The Assault on Truth”, published in 1984.  Another major book was Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman, which I now see was only published in 1992.

It’s amazing to see how recent all this is, and how utterly incompetent mainstream psychology and psychiatry has been in dealing with trauma, which to my mind is the root cause of nearly all non-organic emotional maladies.  Most of that is Freud’s fault, as Herman outlines well, and the specifics of which are the topic of Masson’s book. He more or less created a Mass Distraction, a false trail leading nowhere.  There is no Oedipal or Electra Complex.  There are creepy old men and occasionally–as James hinted–women.

The Catholic sex abuse scandals really didn’t start picking up attention until the late 1980’s.  It’s astonishing to consider that, now.

For his part, Freud gave his paper on the Aetiology of Hysteria in 1896.  Turn of the Screw was published in 1998.

Aetiology of Hysteria had the truth in it: women were being sexually abused by family members.

And I will propose something specific: hysteria is a neurological manifestation of partial “freezing”, in a neurological sense.  It is the assertion of the reptilian brain into specific sets of nerves, caused by unprocessed emotional trauma, much of it sparked by unwanted and inappropriate sexual experience.  To be clear, it’s not the “sex” that is the problem.  It is the inability of a child to contextualize and process it.  It amounts to an attack by an authority figure, someone who should be trustworthy, which sets the childs whole sense of self and their place in the world into profound confusion, and does so long before they are rational enough to right themselves.  It creates a template of horror which is largely unconscious.

I will further propose that Henry James himself may have been a victim of it.  He was, in my understanding, a lifelong bachelor, or at least so seemingly uninterested in women that it was rumored, perhaps then, and certainly in modern times, that he might be gay.

Maybe he was just wounded, and speaking either to his own horror or that of someone very close to him.

It’s been obvious to me for some time that a key element in brainwashing people is getting them to accept contradictions in logic and behavior.  You say one thing, do something else, and act like it’s perfectly natural.  Once people fall into this pattern of allowing this without conscious comment–whether they vocalize it or not–then everything is possible.

For all intents and purposes the only real psychological accomplishment of the Nazis and Communists was getting people to prioritize what they were told over what they could see, hear and feel for themselves.  That’s all that’s needed.

And it feels to me like a rhetoric of kindness is being used for this hypnotic induction, for this mass trance formation.  You can’t tell people “I want to teach you to be evil”.  You tell them “I want to teach you to be GOOD, kind, loving, just, all the good stuff”, then you ACTUALLY teach them to be evil.

Do you see this?

Anymore in most corporate environments, I get the creeps.  I know NOW that most of these people can be turned on and off like faucets, that someone saying or doing the wrong thing is liable to be HATED.

The niceness is superficial.  The fear is very, very real.

And this is a complex process, but the most obvious step by which to teach someone to be evil in the name of the good is claim all goodness for your side, and all bad for the other.  It’s an old dynamic, but it obviously still works well.  You teach people to hate haters.  And you are hating in this process, aren’t you?  Of course.  Of course.

And the more you teach people to feel these strong emotions the worse it will or would feel to be cast out.  To be cast out is necessarily to now be the recipient of all that hate, and to now feel the shame of being one of “them”.  People will die painful deaths before they allow that to happen.

This is all scary.  I get that.  But I will never stop seeing the world as well as I can, and speaking about it as honestly as I can, because I myself do not ever want to become one of the pod people.  That, to me, would be worse than death.

Jordan Peterson talked about this very interesting phenomenon of defensive aggression as a part of neurotic withdrawal.

I realized this morning that intellectualism, for me, and likely for many others, is a form of pushing people away, and in effect withdrawing from the moment.

This would instantly create an obvious correlate that most academics are high in neuroticism.

And I realize that my daily going to bad news–if it’s news, it’s pretty much always bad news of one sort or another–is a steadying of, and reaffirmation of the fear I use to keep the world at arm’s length.

This realization, in turn, can only represent a sort of thawing of frozen energy.  You don’t see things when you are in them, so if you see them, you have to at least some small extent passed out of them.

I would dedicate my intelligence resources to figuring out who my REAL enemies were.  He may broadly still be under the delusion that it is nation states like the USA, or even “Capitalism”, whatever the fuck that means or has ever meant.

He may well be duped, like most American patriots, into thinking that truly competing agenda are on the table, when it is between possible and likely that the same people funded both sides of the Cold War–and of course profited from it–as they have done for nearly every war on record, including World War 2.

We don’t know the names of the real enemies of human progress and civilization.  But every time I visit a small town with boarded up storefronts in the downtown, I cannot help but thinking we have all been severely swindled by invisible crooks.  That is, in fact, what I believe.

It’s likely the names of Rockefeller and Rothschild belong on that list.  Certainly Soros and Gates.  But there are no doubt some–perhaps the most important even–whose very existence most of us don’t suspect.

Putin need to figure out these peoples names.  Neither the USA nor Ukraine nor Europe are his real enemies, or his worst threats.

It’s hard to say how all this will end, but every end is a new beginning of some sort.

Here is another idea: the point of Russia invading Ukraine is to DESTROY RUSSIA.

What if our Deep State fed Russia disinformation both about our biological warfare labs and INTENTIONS, as well as with respect to Ukrainian capabilities?

Specifically, what if they led Putin to believe a large scale biowarfare attack was on the horizon, on the one hand, and that the Ukrainians would give up immediately on the the other?

You KNOW we have been feeding a steady stream of SigInt to the Ukrainians, but we have also presumably been buying air time for them everywhere.

The Russians cannot communicate a move using any form of electronic anything without us, and then the Ukrainians, knowing about it immediately.  The NSA and allied agencies can be assumed to be all in.  We are the best in the world at that sort of thing.

What labs may have existed could EASILY have been  cleared out and cleansed long before they were occupied.  This was the opposite of Blitzkrieg.

What if tricking Putin into destroying the ruble and the Russian economy was a more clever alternative to waging war directly with him?

The people running all this don’t give a flying fuck about anyone’s life anywhere, other than their own, and perhaps those of a few individual allies.

I am going to assert that the feeling which pulls you away from something you are concentrating on amounts to a sort of somnambulism.  Some part of you demands of your consciousness that you walk away, just walk away.

Come here.

Why are we here?

It has nothing to say.  It just wanted you to move.  This is more or less equal to the activation, deep within your nervous system, of some very primitive part of your brain stem, of reflexes which would likely work even if most of your brain was missing.  It is very unconscious, very primitive.

I continue to like the three basic “spiritual”/emotional growth steps of the Kum Nye system of Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche: relaxation/ mindfulness/concentration.

Relaxation opens you to what is there.  It creates the POSSIBILITY of awareness, since many of us live with as little authentic awareness of our inner states as any animal.

Mindfulness is learning about and mapping and taming or managing, or perhaps best, learning to live with and accept the flow of, your rich inner landscape.

Concentration is identifying those elements of your landscape you want to grow and blossom.  It is perhaps a pruning of awareness.  This is true meditation, which in the Sanskrit is called “giving attention”.