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I think obedience and conformity are the outer forms of inner shame.  People who loathe themselves easily let other people tell them what to do.

But shame and violence go together, obviously.  Inner shame is easily channeled into aggressive violence.  If you look at what the Japanese did to the Chinese, or that the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs and Tibetans, that is people who have themselves been humiliated and crushed doing the same thing to people even weaker than themselves.

When you read about a “shame based” culture, you are almost inherently dealing with a nation which has a strong tendency to wage aggressive warfare, outwardly, or to protect rigid social hierarchies with real physical violence.

Banality is really just “only solid ground”, or only Kun Zhi.  What this means is frozen energy.

The reference of course is to Eichmann and Hannah Arendt.  What I would suggest is that dullness is really a lack of energy flow, and ANYTHING can be contained in frozen energy, just like frozen ice.

What I am finding for myself is that with Kum Nye chunks of energy will peel off, and go into dispersion as thawing nuggets; and what comes out eventually is very powerful, and sometimes vaguely nightmarish.  Those nuggets contain vast amounts of information and latent more or less emotionally holographic (what does that mean?  I don’t know) content. Big pictures.  Large expanses, seas of images and feelings.

Dull people are stuck people.  Dull people are emotionally constipated.  We are all born to be interesting and interested and curious and creative.

Evil is really emotional iciness.  We’ve always seen that imagistically.  Cold people are frozen, and frozen means that somewhere in their lives, many Rosebuds got locked up in places they now cannot get to, and have forgotten about.  Remember, Rosebud was his dying image.

Teaching anyone to think of themselves as helpless recipients of external circumstances–as victims–is a sort of soul theft.  You are leaching off vital energy, possibility, response-ability, freedom, dignity.

And there are people out there who are very eager to make others weak, so that they can enslave them, or at least make them reliably dependent, and thus reliably passive and compliant.

It’s a suckers game.  A con game.  A game played for fools by charlatans and hucksters.  As I have said before, the biggest strike in my book against black folks in this country is that they have let this game go on this long.  They keep hoping for the winning lottery ticket that never comes.  Next election, they are told, next election.  And they believe it.

What I see is an ocean of wasted potential talent.

You can’t argue with fear.

One of the Bigs from a couple centuries ago said something like “arguing with someone who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to a dead man.”

And of course nothing has changed . What has perhaps changed is the exposure of many of us to the fallacies and imbecilities which were formerly hidden from us, in most cases.  If two erudite men were debating in front of an audience, neither heard what was said in the homes of the audience members later that night.

Now, they show up in Comments sections.

As is obvious, I am deeply concerned with how things are going.  The questions remains: what to do about it?  Speaking the truth seems to be one clear response.  But to whom, and how often?  At what point am I tossing pearls to swine and feeding dogs?

You cannot reason with fear or stupidity.  You cannot correct them.  The only possible potentially useful thing is maintaining calm, and speaking clearly, and hoping the fearful learn to listen, and the stupid learn to listen to the now calm who are slowly seeing the light.  The stupid are followers, even if they generally claim not to be.  To guide them somewhere else, they need to be given new paths, new rules to follow.

But when you are speaking obvious truths–for example about COVID–and people CANNOT hear you, that is fear speaking, not reason, not a sovereign mind.  Until the fear is gone, rational dialogue is impossible.  Your voice is twisted and muted into incomprehensibility.

You know, making demands of the world, specifically other people, in order to be happy, is a lot like rolling dice every morning and being happy if you get a 1,2, or 3, and unhappy if you get a 4, 5, or 6.

Who would do that?

Me, for one.  You sometimes, too.

But awareness is a beginning.

I was feeling a bit sorry for myself this morning, so I looked at some George Zielezinski photos.

There is nothing wrong with vision, with hope, with working for more sanity, more order, more purpose in the world.  Whatever love is, it is worth seeking more of that too.

But putting the possibility of failure in dice is unintelligent.

More generally, my squeeze, as I call it, seems to be easing.  I’ve actually had some really good ideas, I think, but I’m just letting them sit on the shelf for now.  I’m enjoying watching me not compulsively needing to post them.

And I’m considering a podcast.  If it’s just me listening to it, well, that’s really all that happens here, but with spoken voice.  And I am very spontaneous, so something interesting could happen.

It will be another week or two before I finish this round of work perhaps better called an odyssey.  If it doesn’t kill you, it gives you a better idea of what it will take to kill you.  And it wasn’t that, apparently.  So that’s good.  As Bill Murray says, in a line you know, “I’ve got that going for me.”

I don’t share memes often, but this one is worth it.  With Trump we at least HAD a President.  What we have with Biden is someone who may well have crapped his pants–I feel reasonably sure he wears Depends everywhere–while in a room filled with foreign dignitaries, and who spends most of every day unsure where he is or what he is doing.

This guy was not that bright when he HAD his wits.  What he is now is just a bad joke.

I’m drinking wine, but I think there is a respect in which seeing symbols is already a loss.  You have lost presence.

You know, I will feel comments of various sorts welling up in me at regular intervals every day.  It is always a squeezing.  The pushing out of ideas is always a squeezing.  This is most likely a squeezing.

It seems likely that smarter people than me are reliably silent.  And when they speak, they know who is listening, and why they are talking.

https://www.ae911truth.org/news/791-it-took-me-a-long-time-to-face-what-i-knew-to-be-true-about-9-11

William Hurt, talking about 9/11.

Cis apparently means this side, and in the Latin is opposed to both trans- and ultra-.

The mere use of the word Cis- appears to be a propagandistic attempt at trans-normativity.

Here is the thing: heterosexuality is the norm in all of human history, and around the world.  There have been cultures–like Ancient Greece and 19th century English Public Schools–where homoeroticism was common, but it was never the default.  All the Athenians and Spartans who diggled each other out in the fields came home to wives.  And all the Public School boys eventually settled down to wives and parenthood, with maybe the occasional revisit to the Down Low.

The people pushing all of this abusive confusion are enormously wealthy, and using for distribution people who lack moral compasses.

And they are succeeding.  I read the other day something like 40% of kids under 25 or so identify as something other than sexually healthy heterosexuals.

And this of course all goes with the huge reduction in sexual activity itself.  They “identify” as something, but what they do with their genitalia is largely nothing.  So seems likely, not least because in the boys, who normally drive most sexual activity, testosterone is present in only very small amounts, for a variety of reasons.

Sexuality, on this reading, is about parading, about signaling, about getting attention, but not getting laid.  That is so last decade and last century.

What is the moral status of unconscious passive aggression?  Consistent destructiveness that is not directly volitional, but still stemming from correctable perceptual flaws?

And is the core moral question what is right and wrong, which is a philosophical question; or is it how to build up individual psyches such that they are capable of coherent and consistently constructive moral decisions, which is a practical and actionable question?

I lean towards the latter.  I don’t think it is useful to try and decide what will be right in the future, or what was right in the past, except as exercises in perceptual enlargement.  Nor is it particularly useful for me to have firm ideas about what is right for other people, except to the extent that their own decisions affect me directly in some way.

In a world of good people, we would need no rules at all.  We could work everything out as we go.

And I will never believe in Plato’s Philosopher King, except to the extent such a king is working hard to make himself unnecessary.