Author: White Whale

Kudos to both these kids, both Minnesotans.  Another biographical detail I will permit myself: I spent enough time in Minnesota growing up, that I still get an accent when I drink.

What’s sad is that the lunatics running anti-community media will most likely censor both of these.  In what meaningful respect are we not falling into Soviet levels of information control/censorship, and abject, unprincipled, hateful brainwashing?

Here is the point I would make: MOST PEOPLE ARE DECENT PEOPLE.  Decent people do not race bait.  Decent people judge people by who they are, and not by the accident of their birth.  Decent people do not INSTITUTIONALIZE RACISM.

What we are facing is a small minority of well organized, monomaniacal, and well funded lunatics, who have been scheming at least since the 1960’s to institute de facto Fascism in our country.

What they fear more than anything–I would suppose, although I cannot claim to be able to fully screw my brain into their little heads and smaller hearts–is a critical mass of citizens WAKING UP (note how they have reappropriated and perverted the word “woke” too, along with “justice” and “racism” and others, in what is a dull pattern completely concordant with Orwell’s observations 75 years ago) and realizing that all the processes taking place under the word “Progressivism” (another perverted word) are taking us back to Jim Crow, race based decision making, group hatred, and ultimately emotional and even physical violence based solely on skin color and other unchosen characteristics.

 

You’ve got to check out this 9 year old elementary school girl SMOKE THE SCHOOL BOARD😲! You know it’s bad when kids have morals and call you a lier, TO YOUR FACE😳. You go girl👊 pic.twitter.com/36Tl96h9s0

— Bobby D (@LateNightBobbyD) June 18, 2021

I would like you to picture a baby being scalded by steam, screaming in pain and fear, and a mother sitting next to it, knitting in a rocking chair, ignoring it completely, completely calm, completely detached.

This is Developmental Trauma.

The child can’t remember it, and what emerges from that is not a memory of pain, but a blankness, a nothingness.  The personality of that child will not develop normally, and the features of that failure will not show in positive pathologies, most of the time, but rather in pathologies of lack.  That child will lack a conscience, remorse, empathy.  It will be weak in impulse control, and incapable of thinking long term.

I myself felt that steam.  I am honestly not sure why I am not a much, much bigger mess than I am.  I am definitely weak in impulse control and long term action, but I very certainly have a conscience, feel remorse almost too much sometimes, and am extremely empathetic.

I will add, too, that “letting go” can only happen in conditions of relaxation.  If you want to “let go” of the past, you cannot think your way to accomplishing that goal.  You have to learn to relax deeply, to soften the spasms.

This image, by the way, came to me in a deep relaxation.

It has been some time since I have thought about it, but Johannes Schultz and Wolfgang Luthe developed a psychotherapy around Autogenic Training.  In the same way that, say, Stan Grof administered LSD to his clients, and used them to attain therapeutic goals in a therapeutic setting, Luthe taught his clients to achieve the altered state of deep relaxation, and proceed from there.

It was and remains my view that this particular type of therapy had and has a lot of potential.  I suppose the limiting factor is that most traumatized people need something stronger than Autogenics to get them to loosen up.  I use Neurofeedback, mostly.

But the two in tandem would be quite good, I think.

And I will repeat that for me personally the Autogenics works best if I do a series of static holds first (what I call Kum Nye 1), and do a full and leisurely body scan before starting the script.

I have been told more than once by vegetarians “I don’t eat anything that had a face.”  Some are sincere and kind.  Some mostly like feeling superior.  Both motives are most likely usually behind this phrase.

I remember thinking about living at the vegetarian co-op at Berkeley, called then Lothlorien.  One of the guys annoyed me enough that I wound up at Kingman–there’s a biographical detail–by pointing out he hated the “taste of blood and sinews and veins”.  Something close to that.

And as I have likely pointed out, the portrayal of pigs in barbeque places betrays enough psychological ambiguity that I have more than once contemplated a book of picture collected around the country.  The strangest I can recall, I think from North Carolina somewhere, was a smiling pig pouring barbeque sauce on itself.  The pigs are nearly always smiling.  Notice the next time you go out for barbeque.

Maybe, in this world, perfection is not possible.  I have made my case for eating meat by saying I’m not going to make the case, because I can’t, other than that I feel better, healthier, and thus hopefully more likely to contribute positives because of it, which in the Great Accounting Sheet in the Sky might yet get me to a positive balance, my many demerits notwithstanding.

But I had the vaguely comical thought the other day–which is the eventual reason for this desultory (I don’t have many of any other kind) post–that maybe if we eat meat all our lives, the animals up in heaven just won’t talk to us for a long time.  Imagine meeting an animal you ate and getting a talking to.

This thought recollects the old joke that if women ran the world there would be no more wars, but there would be a lot of countries who were not talking to each other.

Oh, there is so much we don’t know.  I will continue to argue that we need to bring all this sort of thing–metaphysics I mean, in all possible aspects–into the realm of scientific inquiry.  We need Departments of Afterlife Studies.  We need colleges where you can major in Afterlife Research.  We need national, well televised conferences.  We need to bring it into the political realm.

And I will note that Gary Schwarz, at the University of Arizona, has come close.  The Windbridge Institute is, as far as I know, the most credible institution in this regard, and they are doing outstanding work, as far as I can tell.

IONS is another one.  Keep in mind it was founded by Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo astronaut, who had a Ph.D from MIT in Aeronautical Engineering, making him a literal rocket scientist with the highest possible degree from one of the best universities in the world.

Keep in mind too that he is on record as having been told by first hand witnesses that Roswell was in fact the “flying saucer” crash that Phillip Corso also said it was.

I just watched this interview.  It is interesting on a number of levels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8gLfcnr5Sg

He was a remarkable man, who should be much better known than he is.

He is another metaphor: think of our news as a curated shelf in a grocery store.  There might be a thousand varieties of ketchup vastly better than Heinz, but if you don’t see them there–or on Amazon–you won’t know they exist.

Most people blandly assume that reality is roughly what we are told it is, by the plethora of “professional” reporters, who in theory go out there, find interesting facts, and then tell their story.  This idea seems absurd to me.

I will often consider–without deciding whether I believe them or not–all sorts of alternative views.  As one example, I watched this video today: https://youtu.be/L1fcc6YaFlA

It might be, and most likely is, complete bullshit.  But maybe not.  Or perhaps–and here is where the mental agility of not having a compulsive need for THE truth comes in very useful–SOME of it is true, but most of it is not.  Phillip Corso said that he and people like him would often offer small snippets of hidden truths, but always with the objective of hiding a much larger, much more important truth.

Professionals call this a Limited Hangout.

I start, with Socrates, with an assumption of being completely ignorant.  This is the canvas on which I doodle.  It is the best possible canvas.  If you start from the assumption that you BASICALLY know all the big stuff, and are just filling in details, it blinds you. It not only blinds you in the present, but prevents you from making needed corrections, when the corrections are needed.

As Edward de Bono argued in Practical Thinking–which was on balance probably the most useful book of his that I read–arrogance is a “mistake in the future”.  I have loved that line since I first saw it, and it has influenced me greatly.

To use a kinesthetic metaphor, when you are walking, you need to be agile enough to not fall down when the landscape changes unexpectedly, when you step in a pothole, or trip over something you didn’t see.  The looser you are, the better.  The more rigid you are, physically, the more likely you are to fall.  And falling, of course, is persistent error that could and should have been prevented by better attention and greater flexibility, which in character traits are best exemplified by the word humility.

I really like Moshe Feldekrais idea of “reversibility” too, which I have also often thought about.  Here is one take on it: https://alacartespirit.com/2015/09/09/feldenkrais-prufrock-reversing-disturbing/

I will quote this at length, then shut up for a minute.  The best discussion of this happens in his best book, The Potent Self.  I actually probably need to reread it.  Without knowing it, much less knowing why, I was much too wound up when I read it many years ago to benefit properly from it.  I may start doing some of his exercises again, now that I think about it.

I often wonder what I did all day.  A lot of the time, it is this.  I have structured my life in such a way that this is possible for me.  I don’t know where it is going, but I suppose I am leaving tracks on my life’s journey, both internal, and on the internet.  If I lost all this, though, I would be fine.

Anyway, here it is:

https://alacartespirit.com/2015/09/09/feldenkrais-prufrock-reversing-disturbing/

We do not say at the start what the final stage will be” – Moshe Feldenkrais

“Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” – T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

An important component of the Feldenkrais Method and martial arts is reversibility, being able to change positions or directions without reconfiguring oneself to do so. For example, when you are about to sit down, can you pause just before your derriere touches the chair, reverse the movement, and stand or turn? Or are you moving in such a way that you plunk or plop into the seat and have to reposition yourself to rise?

There is something elegant about reversible movement; in the case of Moshe Feldenkrais, who as a teenager walked from Europe to what was then called Palestine and, among other hardships, survived hand to hand combat as an early settler, being able to quickly reverse one’s movement can also save one’s life. Reversibility of thought is also a life skill: not continuous flip-flopping, but recognizing when one needs to change course rather than living out a decision that no longer serves.

I tend to do a lot of things for reasons which are unclear to me, but which become clear in time.

There is, in my view, a profound difference between seeing dichotomies in your mind as structures–as for example “power structures” or “structural racism”–and directions.

In the first case, they are static.  One knows that, in theory, the people involved in these structures, who operate them, who turn the lights on in the morning and turn them off at night after setting the alarm, are actual physical human beings, who piss, shit, get sick and die eventually.  They also fart and stub their toes sometimes.  We know this, but it is not latent in the vision we get.

No, the picture is something unmoving:  a brick building perhaps, or a skyscraper.  Whatever it is, it can’t move sideways one inch in either direction.  Because of this, it has to be torn down.

This is literally the logic of much of the Left at the moment.  This is the imagery which leads to the thoughts which lead to the actions which are so ludicrous they should not be possible.  But they happen, so they are obviously possible.

When speaking of direction, one can speak of movement patterns, dominant tendencies, recurring themes, and the like.  You can think of them as swirling patterns of water or air, which recreate approximately the same “structure” continually, but never exactly the same from one moment to the next.

And in my own mind, of course, I can see figure eights, and three dimensional systems of all sorts.

Here is the thing: when you step into a moving stream, it instantly reacts to you.  The pattern evolves instantly.

Likewise, if you want to alter a “power structure” what you need to do is change it in small steps such that it naturally evolves in the direction you want it to go.  If I have a hose, and water coming out of it, I put my thumb on there to create the spray pattern I want.  The flow of water was never fixed.  It was merely stable when not acted on by an outside force.  Rivers are stable, but you can’t get in the same river once, can you?

So much of what is wrong with the worlds of various intellectuals is that their fear and pain–which they were running from when they retreated into their heads in the first place–want to impose on reality a stability and firmness IT DOES NOT HAVE.  They want an art museum, where we can look at a variety of ideas, and choose to see them as WINDOWS INTO THE WORLD, when in reality they are pictures taken with varying degrees of accuracy, and always long ago.

Here is an idea: imagine you were an Amish farmer who never goes into town, and never interacts with anyone outside his small circle.  Imagine he gets a TV somehow, and somehow gets power to it–maybe it is battery powered and his friend smuggled a bunch in with it–but for reasons of this analogy, all the programming is from 40 years ago.  Imagine him worrying about the Cold War, and the nuclear Arms race, and the Iranian hostage crisis, as if they were happening NOW.

Much of the political Left, which is to say inter alia nearly all academics in good standing at most universities in most of the world, are watching TV much like this.  They are seeing things that are not there, trying to solve problems which by and large THEY CREATED and which they then chose, over and over and over, not to learn from.

Ideas have long had feeling tones associated with them for me.  Synesthesia is definitely something I have felt.  Sounds have kinesthetic elements for me, and colors, and tastes and smells.  For me, it usually defaults back to feeling, to texture, and to shapes.  Sounds have shapes too, though.

Leftism has, for me, oh, patterns with textures and colors that I can’t begin to describe.  So do the various Conservatisms–and there are a variety.  Much of the time, my ideas work backwards from sensations and images I cannot possibly hope to translate into words.  If I were an artist I could perhaps get closer, but nothing could ever match them.

Anyway, reframe Dialectical Materialism as two streams of blowing air, one hot and one less hot, one filled with red smoke and the other with yellow smoke.  There is never a pure opposition, never an inability to negotiate and compromise, and always a reasonably good synthesis happening naturally and organically.

It is the aspiring Utopians, themselves, who have done the most to push actual peace and prosperity, love and freedom, farther and farther down the road, to where it now risks utter destruction, for no good reason at all.  It is pure idiocy.  Nothing more.

Buddha nature is what is left after you develop the habit of Bidirectional Labelling ™.

Look at a painting.  Describe it as ugly and beautiful.

Just now, I was saying to myself “I am living in Time.  What the alternative is, I don’t know, but it is wonderful and terrifying.”

People are friendly and hostile.  Situations are lucky and unfortunate.  Everywhere you go you want to stay and you want to leave at the same time.

What is left?  What residual feelings could withstand all that?

If I ever figure it out, I will be sure and text you, with plenty of emojis, and maybe one of the sparkly fireworks or showers on your screen, if I can work out how to do it.

What would it mean–or does it mean, since I just kind of asserted it–to say that personality is fractal?

Discuss amongst yourselves (yes, that is a nod to Mike Myers).

I just noticed a note a made myself.

The sense of the self is a fragile process.  I imagine it like a crystal forming in a liquid, slowly.  From formlessness, form.  Even the infant which comes from the mating of a sperm and an egg–a kamikaze explosion from which bursts new life–is likely fractal in its early stages, and always fractal at some scale.  We can all of us likely find fractals in our bodies even now.

Ah, here you go: http://www.fractal.org/Life-Science-Technology/Publications/Fractals-and-Human-Biology.pdf

I had not realized it, but I saw it in my mind.

Here is my point: you cannot grow a stable sense of self in a chaotic, constantly changing environment.  In the most obvious, gross physical sense this would be parents throwing things at each other, and one or the other moving in and moving out constantly; or moving around continually as a child; or having daily different care-givers with widely varying capacities for attunement.  Etc.

But more subtly, I think media colors us too.  I see parents give their babies phones and my gut sense has always been that child is going to grow up missing something.  And I think they do.

There is something about the continual noise in most American homes, this constant background hum, that prevents full crystallization, or in any event makes it less complete, less orderly, and less beautiful.

We have so much.  We have built so much.  All the physical ingredients are already made for building a utopia on Earth.  But we have failed to learn many needed lessons.

Take Critical Race Theory.  It is an atavistic holdout from the thought patterns of a CENTURY ago.  And if you want to look at it as primarily Tribalism, writ large, it is tens of thousands of years old.  Older: as old as human social systems themselves, and for that matter, even chimpanzees have their version of exclusionary practices, even if they are not rationalizing it with abstract and emotionally cold and callous words.

Think about the divisions and hate being taught through CRT and all the ideas which come with it, and compare that to the GOOD that would be done teaching kids about trauma, both complex and simple, and teaching them both how to heal it–or at least ameliorate it–and optimally to prevent it in the first place.

What stands in the way?  Stupidity, pride and greed, themselves the results of highly flawed personality formation.  Defective crystals, most of which KNOW they are defective and who are all the more abusive for it.

I had an image come to me the other day of background tension as a sort of canvas upon which I was painting my life.  All the color and shape and texture happens upon something which doesn’t really change, and are for that reason less lasting.  It is like the canvas reaches out and destroys what I painted during the day, and does so every night.

To build lasting forms, lasting color, you have to create a stable substrate of relaxation, the deeper the better.

Positive thinking, for me, is paint I color into my canvas.  But the canvas just erases it.  Positive thinking does not work for me, personally.

But at the same time, the paint DOES have an effect on the canvas.  Some ideas sink deep down and stay there.  The canvas becomes a sort of sponge.  So thinking DOES matter.

As one example, Reframing, for me, created a means of predicting the extent of my reactions in various situations, which in turn lessened some chronic anxiety within me.

Specifically, I found Martin Seligman’s ideas useful.  He spoke about not making everything personal, not making a failure in one part of your life color all parts of your life, and remembering that failure is not permanent.  Tomorrow is another day.  Hope springs eternal.

And in subtle ways, much of the thinking and writing I do here helps.  As I say, it is a PHYSICAL sense of my self that ultimately I need to learn to anchor in, to learn to inhabit for the first time.  I need to learn to tie my shoes in a new way, to walk, to drive, to shower.

But there is a give and take between thinking and practice.  Again: Bidirectionality.  It is a useful principle.  Motion is the universal, and all motion in this world is complex.  So if you have mostly stainless steel in your mind–if you are an ideologue of one stripe or another–you are wrong about much of what you think.  You are missing most of the world, and trust me when I say that the world would like you to learn to live in the dirt again, and swim in the rivers, and relate to the birds and their songs.

Resting in motion: this is the main aim of life.  All the good stuff flows from that.

I am a Pisces.  That is more biographical than I like to get, but I’ve likely shared that before in any event.  The sign is that of two fish swimming in opposite directions.  The idea is that we are always being pulled in two directions at once, but ideally are at some point able to reconcile them.

Stereotypically, we are idealistic, moody, inconstant, creative, colorful, entertaining, depressing, and not infrequently all in one day.  The meme “drinking styles by sign” says no one should try and hang with us.  We will drink you under the table.  In most respects, all this is true of me.

That wasn’t what I logged on to say, but sometimes I like to talk about myself.  The internet will listen when no one else will.  And if no one is listening, it doesn’t matter: I can still pretend they are.

What I wanted to talk about is these dreams I’ve been having, and their context within my overall work, and then the general principles that can and should in my view be drawn from my example.  Then I wanted to discuss two metaphors I have come up with, that I will argue are useful.

How’s that for a setup?  Organized.  That’s what it is.

For several years now I have had dreams where I was with a baby or small child, and found myself comforting it.  This happened last night with a little girl, who I was hugging and showing tenderness to.

Some time around the 1990’s this notion of the “Inner Child” came into wide circulation.  For myself, I would argue this is clearly a reality.  Logically, Developmental Traumas of all sorts lead to the formation of multiple selves, some of which are often quite primitive emotionally.

For me, I had to leave home, so I threw myself out there, completely unprepared for anything.  I had been overprotected.  [I suppose from a certain perspective you could say that prison guards also exist to protect the prisoners from outside assault, and to keep them safe.  We never think of it that way, but that might be a useful and interesting new vantage point.]

So I dissociated.  I just did what needed doing, but never felt at home “out here”.

Logically, then, healing will involve making contact with this primitive self and integrating it.  This I believe I am in the process of doing.  This is useful, necessary work.  The goal is to always be one person, albeit one with many possibilities.  What you do not want is a child sitting in the shadows.  It will be heard, in ways which will be generally unhappy, even if their precise source is unclear.

But the flip side of this is that whininess and creepy infantilism are clearly on the rise in our culture, and those of others.  I think even the  Chinese are winding up with many stereotypically American problems.  Xi seems to want, with his shopping malls and social credit scores, to make China a giant prosperous suburb, and the government a giant Home Owners Association (with an in-house slave workforce.)

I think specifically of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LErwHI18JTg

A couple lyrics:

It’s like going to confession every time I hear you speak
You’re makin’ the most of your losin’ streak
Some call it sick, but I call it weak

 

Bitch about the present and blame it on the past
I’d like to find your inner child and kick its little ass

Which perspective is true?  Can they not both be true?

I would like to call this the Principle of Bidirectionality.  What I want to argue is that in most human situations there are contrasting principles at work, and that BALANCE is the goal.

As another example, I saw a quote yesterday that “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”

Adam Smith said that, some centuries ago.  And it is not directly apposite today?  Are not soft minded idiots (still or again, take your pick) putting violent people back on the streets, to terrorize again?  Yes, yes they are.  Why?  “Compassion”.  But it’s not compassion, is it?

In my own case I have often had to kick my own ass.  I’ve had to use emotional violence to keep myself moving.  That was, in the end, compassion.  I would not still be alive if I had not, and where there is life there is hope.  With the life I added on, I continue to make a better and better account of myself, and that would not have been possible if my bones were decaying in a grave somewhere.

I have in the past stipulated that proper moral judgments need to be local, imperfect, and necessary.

Local means you do not make one “judgement” and forever after treat all remotely similar situations exactly the same.  Every situation has its own nuances, and even the same approximate situation involving the same people may and most likely will evolve over time.  Pay attention.  That is my point.

Imperfect: my intent here is to rob rigid people of their dogmatism, and to disabuse them of the notion that there are perfect and obvious right and wrong answers.  All of life is compromise, trade-offs.

To return to the jail question, I won’t say that no violent prisoner should ever be released without serving a full and justified term.  Sometimes you might have a feeling.  I don’t know.  You take a guess, take a chance, knowing it might not work out.  You are taking a risk with other people’s lives, yes, but also taking a risk leaving a man or woman in jail who might do just fine on the outside.  Neither option is free of risk, of ambiguity, of the possibility of reasonable doubt.

What I am saying is that all possibilities need to be SEEN and weighed.  Do not use a fixed rule and apply it in a Procrustean fashion to all questions.

Necessary: do I really need to have an opinion about everything?  Everyone?  Do I need to keep a running tally of where everyone stands in all respects?  Of course not.  If the way someone else is living their life does not affect me, it’s none of my business.  I wish them well.  If they are fucking up, and it’s only themselves they are hurting, so be it.  If they are hurting the innocent and defenseless, well then I need to form a judgement.

So this Principle of Bidirectionality would obviously apply to parenting.  You love your kids, hopefully, and want all the good stuff for them, but if you don’t kick their asses in one way or another from time to time, they will grow up weak, and the LIFE will kick their asses.

This is really all these Safe Spaces (or Brave Spaces, in an Orwellian redirection) are: an effort to extend the womb as far into Life as possible, by children who never heard no, are terrified of everything, and who have NO CHANCE OF SUSTAINABLE HAPPINESS.

You are robbing them of their lives by being too kind.  This point needs to be made clearly.  As I have said often, the two core Buddhist virtues are Compassion AND Wisdom.  The Dalai Lama likes to only talk about the first, from what I can tell.  He has a ready audience.  Being nice is an easy virtue.  You can default to being nice by simply never saying no to anyone for any reason.  You also lose your soul and all personality, wit, charm and sentience in the process.

The world needs assholes.  Some of us are a bit too ready sometimes to say “pick me, pick me”, but the principle remains.  To the principle of niceness must be contrasted the principle of harshness or austerity.  Both are needed.  Imagine a world where you ONLY ate desserts, where everything was sweet all the time.  Awful.  Treacly, to use a word which may add to your SAT score (although I doubt anyone under 30 is reading this, if anyone is reading at all).

OK, that was part one.  [I will recollect for you that some wit once remarked of me that if I ever chose to commit suicide, I could do it by jumping off my suicide note.  That is genuinely funny.]

I was thinking about this whole Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis of I think Hegel, and which was the basis, as I understand it, of Marx’s Dialectical Materialism (note that the formally scientific notion of “materialism”, which has been falsified by science, is integral to the project intellectually; his economic theories have in any event also been falsified, so no one should be reading Marx as anything other than a slovenly hack who was proven wrong in everything).

Setting up oppositions in your mind HAS to make conflict more likely.  Marx said the conflicts were inevitable, and that processes of History (which amounted to a kind of God) were analogous perhaps to those of tectonic plates.  They operated according to fixed laws that were unalterable and inevitable.

This is why, according to Marx, Lenin should not have been necessary.  Lenin was part of a political elite who engineered what I will persist in calling, not a revolution, but a coup d’etat, one enacted in many respects against the wishes, and certainly contrary to the interests, of the working and serf classes they claimed they were “liberating”.

But ideas have consequences.  The consequence of the Dialectic is that groups of political agitators tend to naturally and organically define themselves in opposition to some other group, whether real or imagined.  Obviously, in our present day, the necessity of conjuring up some hated Other has rendered the word racist completely meaningless.  White Supremacy might succinctly and accurately be rendered as “people who are not us.”  It has nothing to do with the actual ideas on display.

Here is another quote I saw yesterday on Sowell’s website, from Dinesh D’Souza: “Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem privately terrified that it has abated.”

Racism just isn’t a major problem any more.  Yet, white people are being attacked with more vigor, and by higher political elites, than they were the first time segregation existed.  It’s absurd.

On one hand, obviously, it is simply a propaganda technique to keep us divided, to keep their troops loyal, and to create a background for tyrannical and abusive policy which has no basis in common sense, or the law.

But on the other, some people GENUINELY SEEM TO BELIEVE THIS BULLSHIT.  The logic, as I have said before, is simple: they are not us, we are the Summum Bonum, ERGO they must be bad.  It simply remains to be determined how they are bad.  Logically, it must be all the ways we are good, since they are the opposite.

This literally happens.  No one should be that stupid.  BUT THEY ARE.  This sort of thing is made vastly easier and more likely by notions like the Dialectic.  It is also of course hard wired into our tribal minds.  Getting past such idiocy was the main effort and main achievement of European civilization, from which emerged Liberalism, which I will recollect for you shares a root with Liberty.

Here is an alternative image for you.  People are rarely at perfect odds with each other, which would be two vector arrows pointing at each other and making contact; or the opposite, going in diametrically opposite directions, in a push/pull.  They are often going in vaguely differing directions.  Imagine two vector lines going up, one a bit to the right, the other a bit to the left.

If we imbue these lines with force, there is a bit of tension between them.  How do we release the tension?  Well, in two ways.  One, if it does not affect us, we grant freedom.  You do your thing and I do mine.  Both lines are then parallel, and at rest relative to each other.

The second peaceful way is compromise and negotiation.  I come closer to you and you come closer to me.  Liberalism and social and personal maturity go together.  A nation of infants will not keep freedom intact.

The third way, of course, is force.  I use physical or emotional violence to pull you into parallel with me.  If I am going up and to the right, I pull your line over to where it, too, is going up and to the right.  This is what was done for most of history, and not just by Great Powers like the Catholic Church.  It was done by the Plains Indians.  With respect to the things they cared about, you did things their way, or you risked expulsion.  Obviously, negotiation and laissez-faire happened to, but it is worth pointing out even small social groupings can be utterly tyrannical.

That was the first metaphor.  I am going to make the second a separate post.  I’m tired of reading this.

The originator denies it, but I’m pretty sure I inspired an online group called the FRAT, which stood for “Fuck reading all that.”

I’m not denigrating my work.  I think I sometimes alternate genius with my genuine idiocy, although this is less common in my personal life than you may suppose.  But this sort of thing is tiring.  If I were not driven, I don’t think I would do it.

Still, better ideas do have an effect.  That is actually the point I will make here in a moment.

Stable positive feeling.  That is what we are all chasing.  It drives greed in all forms.  Thwarted, it produces anger and hate.  Fear arises from the contemplation of losing any such feeling which might be ours for the moment.  It drives thrill seeking, which is the quest for continual new thrills, but which is the same in that.

Spirituality is about finding something–God, the Buddha Nature, the Tao–underneath all this, which is constant in some meaningful way.

I watch myself.  I am radically inconstant.  I have lists, and I do reasonably well getting through them, but not without lots of twists and turns.

I never know what is next, because I ALLOW what is next.  There is a part of me which is always trying to force feeling on all situations, but I think just about every part of me has figured out that makes me miserable.

But it is so hard to jump that chasm, to take that leap into the wind–  Hard, not impossible, and not without immediate and clear benefits.

And it’s not a one time thing.  It is a learned habit, done continually daily when mastered.

Edit: I know it is stunningly obvious that, by and large, most of us want to be happy and to avoid pain.  Still, it helps to rephrase things in various ways, as it amounts to a variety of perspectives, and sometimes you see things you did not expect.