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An interesting question in approaching racial differences is to ask, not how they differ in terms of intelligence or other physical factors, but how they are spiritually different? Do races–and I am here conflating cultural patterns with ethnicity–differ in how they become Good, or how they approach God?

What is the best path to Goodness for African Americans? For Asians? For Caucasians?

This might make for a useful dialogue. Obviously some people would object to positing ANY difference, good or bad, but my thought here is that I VALUE cultural differences. I have no desire at all for African Americans to change who they are. I have no desire for Asian-Americans to change who they are. I like who I am.

What I want is MORE cultural diversity, not less, and within the context of that aim, this discussion MIGHT make sense. I am talking out loud, but thought there was sufficient potential for something useful to come from my post, that I am hitting the button.

I was sitting in a Jewish deli called Noshville, in Nashville, some weeks ago. Sitting there, drinking coffee, looking around, watching people, several thoughts occurred to me.

When you are in a big city, you are monad-itized. You are a singular unit. You are isolated. You have people you can connect with, but the enmeshment is disrupted just by the scale of movement, and the cultural diversity. In that sort of cultural context you hvae to be able to make some assumptions about people. This is the value of uniform political beliefs. No matter what else he may believe, you can say “Well, at least this guy understand how the world works, and why we need strong unions.” This is an outcome of the anxiety that attends never knowing what to expect from others. You see thousands of people very day, so you need to be able to make some assumptions.

I read once of a woman in New York claiming she did not know one person who voted for Nixon. Of course she didn’t. In the face of all the diversity, at least some things remained stable for her.

Second thought: This restaurant was filled with pictures of people I didn’t recognize, but who were presumably local heroes, or at least Jewish heroes. This place has kind of a Swing-era theme, so they were old. Some pictures were almost reminiscent of shrines to me, to someone was important to someone.

This led me to the conclusion that local heroes are very important. George Washington: great man, but he lived somewhere else. The people that really make you feel good are local kids who made good. Maybe not President, but they played pro ball somewhere, or started some company everyone knows. That sort of thing is useful because you can RELATE to it.

The homogenization of our culture that mass media has enabled has impoverished us in many ways.

I wonder if one of the reasons black people are so focused on prostitution in this country (please find yourself virtually any rap album out there today if you doubt this) is that many black leaders have made deals, saying we will work with you if we get our cut.

Jesse Jackson is a pimp, who has prostituted the communities he claims to serve. He was there when MLK was shot. He has been around since then. Let us call that 40 years or more. What good has he done for his community? Where are the jobs? Where is the wealth? Why are crime rates high? Why do 40% or more of inner city kids drop out of school? Who has won? He has.

Jackson himself has made a killing, and has taught his son the family business as well. He has made a career out of it. So have Louis Farrkhan and Jerry Wright, who drive nice cars, live in nice homes, and can look forward to very comfortable retirements some day. None of them have done a damn bit of good for their constituents, but do pimps really care about the working girls who keep them in the green? They just need to convince them they need them, that they can’t do without them.

You have to wonder if becoming a pimp–or talking in strongly positive terms about that or being a gangster–is not in some way reacting against that reality. This would not be conscious, but in the air in areas where everyone lives on public assistance of one form or another. If you have been subordinated in some way, you feel a compensating need for being in control.

We can and should fix our inner cities. Plainly, though, it is not getting done by current methods, even though the money flowing to it is making some people very, very rich.

I feel for these kids. This situation is intolerable. But the solution is clearly not more public assistance. My financial overhaul would help: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

I also presented some ideas here, in my piece on the future: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page8.html

I do not have the data–which would involve talking with specific people over an area–to do better for now. I will content myself with pointing out the naked immorality of most supposed black leaders.

I may have posted something like this before. If so, my apologies. I write so much, I can’t remember the details. I am continuing to take off voice memos to myself. Good God I am talkative. I am editing the content down.

To live in love is to live in chaos. I visualize being attacked by darkness. What the dark wants is routinization, and a pattern that never changes. That pattern may be outwardly helpful, it may serve the cause of Goodness for some period of time. But the world changes around us, and to fail to see that, is to fall off the Path. As Lao Tzu wrote the Way that can be told–the Way that can be defined statically, and without alteration forever–is not the Eternal Path. For that, you have to dance with the stars.

Sometimes the easy path is the hard one. Sometimes you have to skip the bridge and walk through the marsh. You can complain about it all you want, but in my view that’s the way it works.

Goodness is wildness. It is being untamed, never quite sure what the next step is. That’s the way to live, in my view. I could be wrong–but I make new decisions every day.

Tony Robbins, or one of the motivational gurus, used the example of a plane flying from California to Hawaii. It is off course something like 90% of the time, but the pilots make constant corrections to accomodate the wind or whatever. If you are making regular decisions, based on core principles, you can never stray too far off course, if you allow yourself to see. Only by saying, once, “this is the line that will never change” can you wind up in Japan.

If you really think about it, the efforts of Communists to drive people mad, the assaults on their minds, are the more vicious of the crimes they commited when compared to the actual murders, and famines.

You look at histories, say CIA mind control, a lot of it was designed to counter the techniques that had already been developed by the Soviets, and which the CIA had to fear might be used on their own agents, if captured.

Look at brainwashed soldiers from Korea. People born into normal American families, who came home believing that the most oppressive political system ever invented was desirable.

This was done to millions of people. This is as evil an act as can be imagined. Simply inflicting pain on someone is much less evil than stealing their souls. You are creating beings who are not autonomous yet who still possess independent awareness.

I think I posted on this a while back, but I rarely repeat myself, since I can’t remember what I said.

The term for a system in motion without qualitative attributes is a machine. That is what Socialism really wants. When the Chinese brainwash people, what they are really trying to do is reprogram them. Socialism is an effort to turn everyone into machines, and where the ability to download ideas on command would be desireable.

The whole thing is about power, which is the only theme that matters. Why there are still fools who believe otherwise is beyond me.

I will add, more or less parenthetically, that I have precise definitions for Socialism, Communism and the like, but am not always as careful as I could be in applying them. Practically, though, I view it as one tangled, interconnected mess. The actual city of Los Angeles ends somewhere, and some other town starts, but I’ll be damned if I could ever tell where it was.

When I used to go out and engage people regularly who hated me, I got insulted a lot. It doesn’t bother me. I still have a friend on Facebook who told me to “go fuck myself”. Whatever. I get hot on occasion too, although I don’t think I’ve ever said that to anyone. I say the same thing in 30 words.

Anyway, my favorite insult ever was from either a grad student or professor at Vanderbilt University (which is a good school), who called me a “conserveretard toon”.

It made me think about cartoonish thinking. So often what we see floating around in people’s brains seems two-dimensional. Further: the obvious thing about cartoons is that they are coherent in their broad outlines, but lacking in detail. They are big on emotion, and movement, but short on the little stuff. They don’t move like real objects move. Anything is possible. A safe can land on your head, and you just get flattened.

I don’t want to make a long post of this, but it seems to me this is a trait of people like Van Jones who have very simplistic, Manichean views of the world, and solutions which amount to jumping over a building in a single bound. To say they are unrealistic is to claim that the people holding such views even WANT to live in the real world. They don’t. Everything is simple and neat and tidy where they live. This is the faculty lounge, where all the ghettoes need is more money, and where all our problems can be fixed just by asking for more money from the “rich people”–other rich people, to be clear, if we are talking Hollywood folks, or really fat, gross people who wear ballcaps.

But cartoons have consequences. Take any Communist nation shortly after the coup which put the Party in power. If you disagree with ANYTHING, you are a class traitor, or a Trotskyite, or bourgeois cockroach. It can be the silliest thing. Maybe you suggest that the Party could bring water to town in buckets rather than teacups. Concentration camp for you, insect.

People are viewed as these little cartoon sketches, whose whole beings can be reduced to a few lines drawn by a not-very-skillful artist.

Rich thinking has a robust structure, but permits for ENDLESS detail and concrete contextual variation. If I reject racism, do I perforce have to believe that all members of other races are virtuous? Of course not. I just have to judge them as individuals.

There is no structural difference between the cartoon pictures the Nazis created of the Jews (presumably this included literal cartoons), and those created by Communists of the bourgeoisie and Capitalists. There have been times and places where if you owned 2 cattle, or a nice teapot, or a small mill, then you were branded evil and shot.

This is ludicrous in the extreme, particularly when exhibited in people, academics, who are more or less professional thinkers. It is malpractice.

I started with another thesis, but it didn’t pan out. Googling around, though, I came across this book. In it, he argues there is a correllation between national GDP and IQ. This would seem to make sense, although I did not even read the whole article, much less either book.

What to do about it, I will leave for another day.

Actually, I will make one comment. Africa is a continent that has many of the lowest IQ’s, as well as the many of the most corrupt governments. Moral integrity in my view is in most cases the result of enlightened self interest. You have to be able to see beyond your immediate circumstances to the longer term results of behaviors that would seem only to affect you. If you cheat others, but then they cheat you, nobody wins in the end, except the very few at the top, and they are prone to getting shot.

Moral order leads to political and then economic order, and it, in turn, depends on the imaginative capacity to visualize an operating whole, in which denying short term gratification enables long term success. Both nations and individuals which fail tend to be populated by people unable to do this. This is the part which matters. The ability to program computers or design them is secondary to this basic truth.

An early observer of Churchill said he would go far because he had “genius and plod.” I love that.

I posted a couple posts ago about the long extinct town of Durrestad, which was in effect driven into bankruptcy and dissolution due to the fact that everything they had kept getting stolen by the Vikings. One year they came, and nobody was home.

The extension of this is that they also took people. The Vikings were one of the most energetic slaving peoples ever. The word Slave itself derives from Slav, since they took so many of them, and literally sold them down-river, to the Arabs and Byzantine Empire.

Communists, likewise, take people, and force them to do work they do not choose; nor do they retain any rights to the fruits of their labor.

There is a continuum in this, though. If we work half the year for a State which does not represent our interests, then we are half-enslaved. Progressive taxation, when not used according to the will of the people paying it, is progressive enslavement.

With respect to individualism, and I have combined in this post two divergent but related ideas, it’s easy to say the invididual does not matter, to just accept the world as it is. Most people for most of history had to accept conditions which were not optimal for them. There is a value in this in rejecting self pity.

Yet to the extent that you say to people that they do matter, when you give people the right to see things in their own way, they do. Both economic and cultural creativity follow. Look at the Gothic Cathedral movement. It was creative because free.

Individualism is nothing more or less than the creed which recognizes that there are as many potential realities and creative accomplishments as there are sets of eyes–figurative or literal–surveying a situation. It empowers countless solutions to problems. It increases the perceptual capacities of a social order by an amount equal to the number of people involved, multiplied by their motivational involvement.

Socialists empower only a select elite. This lessens the intelligence of the whole system. Socialism only rewards a select elite, which demotivates people. Individualism is necessary for both moral and economic progress. Far from being immoral, it is the only doctrine capable of generating human progress.

And as I have said before, nothing in it presupposes selfishness. Mother Teresa was an individualist, as was Gandhi. Selfishness is selfishness. Individualism is simply a recognition of moral autonomy. What people do with that freedom is dependent upon their personal development.

You serve no long term good forcing people to do what is right, without their cooperative involvement.