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You have perhaps heard the old saw “for those who think life is a comedy, and for those who feel a tragedy.” This is fodder for the depressed, over-intellectualized-yet-angst-ridden college kid.

Think about what makes us laugh. Is it not ridiculousness? Vanity? Greed? People bumping into things, tripping unexpectedly. Consider Seinfeld. Were not most episodes not about nothing, but rather about neurotic, selfish people acting neurotic and selfish?

Comedy is dysfunction. It, also, consists in dramatic hamartias, but flaws expressed in unexpected ways which generate and release tension.

Here is a funny story, from one of the Darwin Awards books: two Marines developed a routine whereby they would drive in a truck, and on left turns, one would swing out on the door, then swing back in. Most of us have thought about doing that. It was amusing. Then one of them hit a lightpole, was flung into the cab, and knocked the other guy out his door. Fortunately the truck came to a halt, and neither was permanently wounded. That catapult image, though, I find amusing. My kids did too.

Why? They were both hurt. The accident was stupid and preventable. But don’t many of us see why someone would do that? Do we not see in them, perhaps, a bit of our own silliness, and laugh from relief that it WASN’T us?

What we find funny has a lot to do with how we set our default expectations for life. If we expect it to be easy, then every little bit of pain out there saps us, and drags us down. Nothing is funny, if funny consists in an ironic appreciate of the misery and stupidity of others. It’s all just a bore; it’s all just work.

If we expect life to be hard, then we realize that all of us are stupid, and we learn to appreciate and laugh at all the little things that happen to us. I managed to set my oven on fire last night. After I put it out, and got the smoke detector stopped, I thought it was funny. That’s not a bad story. Not just everyone is stupid enough to set their oven on fire. My kids thought it was funny too.

It seems to me, too, that you have to have multiple selves to analyze and process life properly. If you are analyzing humor, it isn’t funny. You have to be able to switch back and forth, here and there. This is the Tao, at least in part.

I have often objected to Scientism, which I define roughly as “that doctrine which believes that everything in the universe is in principle measurable empirically”, on the basis that it lacks what I tend to call a “qualitative place-holder” for the transcendental: for experiences which are real, but which cannot be fully described within the limits of a materialistic paradigm, wherein all apparent “experience” is simply an epiphenomenon of biochemical processes.

It just occurred to me that what I mean by place-holder is a conceptual basis for the elimination of the negative hallucination, which is when something is there, but invisible to you, as a result of effective hypnotic programming. We likely see signs of the divine daily, but lack the perceptive capacity to recognize them. We are much more likely to do so, though, if we accept in advance that such things are POSSIBLE. I have often debated dogmatic materialistic atheists, and it is quite obvious to me that were a spirit to materialize in front of them, and punch them in the nose, it would make no difference in their belief system. How much less could one expect them to feel or appreciate the subtle?

It is strange to think that all the skyscrapers in our largest cities were in no small measure created in response to the sexual instinct. Everything you see in front of you–the roads, homes, stores, telephone lines, your computer, the Internet–were created in some measure as a result of the sexual instinct.

For his part, Freud wanted to see us as swimming in an endless ocean of emotional energy ultimately deriving from the reproductive urge, which is to say our sexuality. The only events that matter in this lifelong swim are birth, reproduction, and death. Everything else is meaningless detail. Dawkins “love” of science is a sublimation of the instinct to put his penis in every hole which opens up to him, and plant his seed there. It “means” nothing. Meaning, itself, is an artifact of this process. It conduces to reproduction.

For my own part, as I have often said, I feel (and for which I can offer empirical evidence) that we are composed of both our instincts, and something higher, which I tend to term the capacity for non-statistical coherence, which is to say the ability of consciousness to affect what we term matter, which would include our brains, and behavior.

Yet, here we are.

Once, I dreamed of a beautiful purple crystal created by the Swiss over a long period of time, a structure that created itself, but with loving care by craftsmen, who directed it much like a bonsai tree, who created tendencies, but not precise outcomes.

Perhaps we are like children on an endless river, forced to choose left or right, and given a tendency, but who with work can make a different choice, and at some point sever the alternative, travelling a unique canyon.

I watch my own sexuality, and it has often seemed a curse. Do men not often look at women as sexual objects, without meaning to? Do we not catch ourselves sneaking peaks of breasts, even of women we consider friends? Is there not this endless need, at least for the sexually healthy, to inseminate the world? There it is: driving, driving, driving.

So much misery comes from this, especially in our modern world. Historical cultures faced the same evolutionary biology we do. They solved the problem, in many cases, of sex by creating very strong, and very strongly enforced, social taboos, making the miseries of jealousy and resentment logistically difficult, since failure was so violently punished. Not in all cases: many American Indians shared their wives with early explorers, getting syphillis and gonorhea for their trouble.

You can’t have sex with everyone all the time: this creates, at least in this stage of our evolution, a lot of trouble.

And to the point, it is not sex we want: we want connection. If I have any readers, they may roll their eyes, but I was reading an interview with someone who had had many Out of Body Experiences (which, by the way, is a scientifically replicable procedure for most people, as far as I can tell), who was commenting that “sex” in other worlds is in effect a meeting of souls, in which you share who you ARE, in the most intimate sense, and so does someone else. This makes for the most perfect connection possible. It has nothing to do with the “exchange of body fluids”. That exchange is merely an inferior symbol for what is possible. In our own world, this exchange can be that of life itself, but the life of another. In other worlds, I believe, that exchange can be of OUR lives.

Consider this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHpJotjP2kM

Here are a few lyrics:

You left me here
Alone in my own world
From pain
A new light is born
Your perfect world’s
Evading
Sedating
Your perfect world’s
Evading
Sedating
I hate your face
Reminding
Despiting
I hate your life
You cast me down
You look at me with one glance
And turn your face
To watch you burn
You bury me alive

In your perfect world
I’d rather make peace with 3 rounds

Now, I was looking for a different song I just heard on the radio, with roughly the same theme, but this will do. I don’t expect most people will get far in that song.

Sex and love are connected with trust. To the extent we value sex, we value multiple partners, since reproductively all fertile men and all fertile women are roughly equal. If life is just about sensations, then why not have as many as possible?

Yet, this mindset leads necessarily to betrayals of intimacy, of love. I don’t think it is precisely accurate to say that the more sex, the less love, but it is close. I heard the Summer of Love summarized once by someone who was there as: “a lot of sex, but very little love”. Summer of betrayals may be perhaps more accurate, where jealousies were masked but not eliminated by drugs and alcohol, and a culture which demanded that anything go. In all such cultures, there will be winners and losers.

When I listen to this music, I can’t help but seeing it as the inverse of the Summer of Love. It is the ugly reality, stripped of its veneer of superficial joviality. It is the insanity of never being able to deeply trust anyone, since everyone is always looking for something, and someone, better.

These are a few thoughts. I think by thinking, and as I have said chose some time ago to think publicly, in the hope my musings may benefit someone.

I have come to the conclusion that the only way to counter the effects of the sea is to grow legs long enough to reach the bottom. We must become giants, and that cannot be done through reason and emotions alone.

The truth of that statement is in the spaces here. You will note that the possibility of the words emerges from that space. Nothing otherwise would have form, and no communication would be possible.

Happy Moonday!!! May your lunacy be less today, and your sanity more.

It occurred to me that it is symbolically significant that the major fashion centers of the world: Paris, Rome/Milan, and New York, tend to centers of political radicalism.

Burke commented 200 years ago that the Leftist revolutionary tradition tends to create an enchantment with novelty. They want lots of new things, particularly new things that do not arise from a traditional focus. They want lots of noise and fury; they want entertainment, and it can be the sort provided by the worst excesses of the Roman Coliseum.

What does not organize the flood of the new is any sort of goal or tradition-oriented principle. The New is assumed to be progress.

Politically, this leads to mass support for stupid ideas, which people do not think through. It leads to the subversion of reason. When you take a powerful car, put it into drive, put a brick on the accellerator, it will run into a wall, sooner or later.

The Conceit of the intellectuals who try and run the process is that they know what they are talking about. Most of them have NEVER accomplished any practical task–Lenin didn’t, Mao didn’t, Hitler didn’t, Ho Chi Minh didn’t (although he did wait tables and work as a cook, which is useful). What happens, practically, is that the torrent of images and novelty creates chaos. Chaos can only be tempered by the individuals in question, or by forcing everyone to fit into a Procrustean Bed that is the exact dimension of the intellectual in charge. This means that the exact energy unleashed by the elimination of reason will lead, in short order, to oppression.

This begins with the sacralization of the evanescent. Conservatism is the best block to this. It slows progress, but stops regress, which is positive. The Liberal ethos, based on Reason, leads to progress, slowly, but inevitably. Any rejection of Liberalism goes in the opposite direction. The question is: do we go 3 steps forward, 1 step back, or 5 steps back and stay there?

Traditional Chinese society was delineated into four classes (a common enough pattern around the world): the Jin Shi, which was a class of intellectuals who had passed the examinations; farmers; tradesmen and manufacturers; and merchants. Merchants were at the bottom since they did not make anything.

Modern Chinese society, it occurred to me yesterday, still has a Jin Shi: the Communist Party. The Party, like the traditional Jin Shi, is composed of many people who were born connected, but not necessarily. With sufficient brown-nosing and/or talent for helping subordinate the nation to the Party, anyone can rise to the top. It is clearly not a meritocracy, as in the old system, since there is no test. The test is ideological conformity, which is to say intellectual and moral mediocrity.

The important difference is that the old order–the “ancien regime“–placed moral blocks on the behavior of the elites, at least in theory. Heaven, in its governance of the Earth, was ruled by li. There were certain rules to be followed, and revolution was considered acceptable, if successful, since it, ipso facto, was considered the Will of Heaven.

Communists think the same way. They consider themselves to be just because they are in power. “History” is their version of “li”. History, being whatever happens, necessarily means that whoever wins, by whatever means, is correct. This is roughly the same doctrine, based more explicitly on Darwinian evolutionary theories, that motivated and justified the violence of Hitler.

Communist condemn racism, but they are racist. Look at how they treated the Tibetans. They condemn Guatanamo Bay, but practice torture regularly as a matter of State policy, and as a way of generating the only virtue they recognize: conformity.

So what has happened in China? After tens of millions of unnatural and unnecessary deaths, and the wholesale ruination of billions of lives; after widespread torture, civil wars, and mass suicide, moral assaults on tradition, and the utter corruption of the capacity for rational thought: we have the same class system.

We can argue that manufacturing has overtaken agriculture, as has, possibly, business activity. What has not changed is that an elite is still in power.

This is the progress of idiots and the wicked. They still have kings, dukes, and business oligarchs. The only progress has been out of the hole dug by the Communists, and would have been vastly faster had they not ruined their society in the first place.

How is it that TSA screeners can put their hands down our pants, touch the vaginas and penises of our children, expose women’s breasts in public, and take naked pictures of us, but we can’t demand of our President the most basic disclosure of his past?

In dysfunctional families, the setpoint of reality is recalibrated, such that the absurd becomes acceptable. I’ve known children of alcoholics and drug-users, women and men who were molested, and many people with de facto psychotic parents. Their boundaries are skewed. They do not have a clear cut sense of what is acceptable, and what goes beyond the bounds of acceptable. Obviously, this creates a lot of problems for them.

We do not occupy a sane polity. Our nation–as embodied particularly in our so-called leaders and media–is not sane. We are the equivalent–many of us at any rate–of lotus eaters, lost in a perennial dream, a dream occasioned by the trauma of reconciling multiple conflicting truths, and lacking the perceptual tools to do so.

In a sane polity, the moment Barack Obama became the Democrats candidate for President, the Supreme Court would have demanded his long form birth certificate, and rendered a verdict, taking into account the British nationality of his father, his mother’s later apparent Indonesian citizenship, and his own registration as an Indonesian, and made a decision as to whether or not this unprecedented situation complied with “natural born”. Quite simply, this has never been a problem before, since no party has never had the temerity to put someone forward whose entire family rejected America and our traditional Liberalism. Neither of his biological parents chose to live in America; nor did his adoptive step-father. And his grandparents seem to have been Communists, having been good friends with Frank Davis, with at least the grandfather apparently smoking weed with him.

Keep in mind, too, that we now know we were lied to when the claim was made that Obama could not get a birth certificate released. He just did, in exactly the way common sense would have said it would be done. He paid $10, signed a form, and got a computer printout.

What does this mean? Assuming the birth certificate is valid–and I assume the people who have preoccupied themselves with this are poring over it–then this can only mean that the President cynically used this as a political tool, to help polarize people (pace Alinsky): on the one side, we had rational Americans, who understand that a photocopy is not a driver’s license, espcially if half of it is whited out; and on the other those who are really tired of thinking for themselves, and who therefore simply parrot as loudly as requested whatever their thought leaders, their den mothers, tell them to.

This ploy landed a man in prison who spent the last 18 years serving our nation with distinction: Lt. Col Terry Lakin.

Our President does not have a conscience, not when it comes to anyone outside his tribe; and his tribe does not include the bulk of the wealth producers in this nation, most white people, most Asians (unless they are unsuccessful), and–to be clear–most tax payers.

We forget at our peril that his most important influence, on his own account–Saul Alinsky–taught that morality is a vestige of another age, and that the revolutionary had as his task to do ANYTHING that furthered the revolution.

This is contemptible. Obama is what he is: a selfish, short-sighted, morally retarded prick (what word would you have me use, for someone who could have produced this certificate at any time, and who could have prevented Lakin from going to prison?). What bothers me is how many Americans are willing to accept this, are unwilling to see the evidence in front of their eyes.

How can any nation that desires so desperately to be lied to preserve a culture worth passing on? How can we avoid ruin?

My code is clear: quitting is never an option, for any reason. Death, insanity–a type of death–and victory are the only options. At the same time, seeing these things–looking for example with impartial eyes at the contemptible cowards in the Supreme Court, at least many of them–makes my blood boil.

Why didn’t they do their job? There is no good excuse, other than that they somehow think the view from Olympia severs them from the lifeblood of our nation, even though that lifeblood is and always has been a deep reverence for the rule of law, which they in theory protect, but which they have failed utterly to protect here.

I’m the guy who is trying to throw his arms around the world when I’m out drinking. I hear stories, and want to offer “good advice”. What I often realize the day after is that I am not sure if what I said was helpful or not.

The desire to help others is affective, it is a blessing. At the same time, ACTUALLY helping others requires perception. You have to work hard at it, and you have to understand that you will at times be stupid. What you cannot do is blissfully leave a trail of wrecks behind you and congratulate yourself for your generosity.

As an example, I’m not a fan of most forms of talk therapy. I think it encourages moral weakness and whining.

The “sexual revolution” did not make most people happier. I think it diminished actual emotional intimacy, which is necessary for actually good–satisfying beyond the purely physical–sexual relations.

As I often say, Leftism “works to”, in Hayekian terms, moral and economic collapse.

You can’t absolve yourself from responsibility for consequences simply because you wander around sowing, as you see it, flowers, if they in fact come up weeds.

Put as simply as I can, if you don’t care about the consequences of your actions, you are not a good person, regardless of your affective state. I have in mind in particular people who smell of patchouli and who talk about compassion, but who to this very day have not realized the role they played in the horrors that followed the Vietnam War; and who to this day are not willing to see the horrors which fill this world, the potential role of military force in ending them, or the strongly pernicious effects of the economic and politically implemented social strategies they embrace.

Put another way: stupid people are not good people. You have to be willing to tell hard truths to yourself, and if you aren’t, you are a useless–generally counter-productive–child. To be clear on this, simple and stupid are two different things. Common sense is in fact common, and only corrupted by most contemporary forms of “higher” education, which we might more properly call “intellectual dehabilitation”. IQ and the capacity to do the right thing are quite distinct.

I have a picture of Albert Camus on my wall. For a non-atheist, this might seem incongruous, but my attachment to him is that he struggled to rationalize doing the right thing, even when everything and everyone around him was falling apart. He was, in the latter phase of his career, a sincere moralist, even if he struggled to justify it.

Perhaps the word most associated with him is Absurdity. Life is absurd, if we know we are going to die, and if we know it is final. I well remember one character from his novel “The Plague”, who spent his life moving a pile of beans (or something similar) from one side of the table to another, one at a time, then back again. Qualitatively, was that worse than a life of selfless service to others? Intellectually, I think Camus thought no. Affectively, he was unable to accept this, though, and didn’t. He broke with Sartre when the latter insisted in his Communism, when the extent of the brutality of the Soviet regime became clear.

It occurred to me this morning, though, that life is just as absurd when we believe in God. Intellectually, how do we justify anything? My entire project is oriented around the generation of feeling. Feeling cannot be justified. It is simply awesome when good, and horrible when bad. It is the root of experience. If we must experience, and if rationally experience is extended beyond this world, the only rational path forward is figuring out how to generate positive experience. The experience itself is still ridiculous. We are not machines, and as such are messy. There is nothing wrong with this, but it is silly. You have to laugh at us.

An analogy I have used in the past, and used in my “Goodness Sutra”, linked on my other site, is that of bubbles. I once had this image of each of us isolated as bubbles in an endless ocean, unsure of where the sun was, and unsure even what direction up was. What to do? Can we not relate to one another, with love? Certainly, we can use hate, but does that decrease our sense of isolation? I think it enables temporary groupings relative to other groupings, but it is forced, and not natural: it is not comfortable.

We have a word for prejudging. Why not a word for judgments rendered with all the facts? It is one thing to say someone looks like a lazy moocher, and another to KNOW they are lazy moochers.

Judging preemptively and failing to judge once the facts are known are both abuses of the moral sentiment.

I went to a rock show last night–some noisy folks, all of whom had good voices. I had earlier in the day said to a friend that all love is ridiculous, but that it is even more ridiculous never to feel it.

As I watched the show with my PBR, it occurred to me that it is a species of insanity to give yourself fully over to the music, but equally insane to approach it with a stance of ironic detachment.

How can one swim perfectly in the ocean? Are you not always just muddling along, going up and down with the waves?

It occurred to me too that there is a ritualistic quality to rock. One of the bands reminded my of the Smiths, and I was thinking about all these bands that attract–what do we call it?–cult followers. It seems to me that this is a ritual where all the members of the group are bound in a shared mania that is strengthened with the power of the music. It is what I at times call Ersatz Sacred. I think that is my phrase any way.

In a fundamental way, is God less present at a rock concert–if we by “God” we mean an oceanic feeling of belonging–than in a church? Is God more in churches, in any way? If He exists, then he is everywhere.

My feeling is that God is the web which connects us all. God is not sentient: God IS sentience. God underlies the possibility of consciousness. God is the formed when it is unformed. God represents the possibility of form.

Anyway, I think it is worth breaking “religion” into components. One part of its role, in my view, is served equally well by all group functions, including musical events. I’m not at all sure, as far as that goes, that church going fosters closeness to God, absent what might be termed “technologies” like Yogic meditation.