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This is a response I wrote elsewhere in response to the common objection you see when raising the issue of media violence–in this case in particular case of Jerod Loughner–that violent media plainly does not MAKE people go out and commit murders. No, in general, it doesn’t, although this does happen. Every decade several murders can be attributed directly to media, such as the “Dexter” killing in Indiana, in which one brother strangled his other brother, so he could “be like Dexter”.

More generally, though, it amounts to social malnutrition. As I have stated often, violent media decreases empathy, increases pessimissm, and increases lifelong rates of depression. It alters worldviews.

Anyway, here is what I wrote:

In his case, what I think we are looking at is a “Perfect Storm” of negative factors. There are thousands of kids like him around the country, who will never shoot anyone. He made the decision, and needs to face the consequnces, clearly. “Society” can never be measured in any way other than the aggregate of movement that is initiated on a personal, individual level.

At the same time, we do all live with other people, and it is worth asking the question from time to time if our common “culture”–the frequency upon which we send and receive–is beneficial.

One of the most common analytical errors is failing to see what COULD have been. People are always ready to point to cause and effect in things that DID happen. FDR was elected, the Depression eventually ended, ergo he facilitated it. That sort of thing.

Yet this is always imconplete. With regard to this question, we can ask if the media we consume makes us as mentally healthy–as happy, as functional as social begins–as possible. It is not a question of banning books or movies or films. It is a question of asking what is HEALTHY, and trying to teach people about it.

I would draw an exact parallel with nutrition. The solution to people eating Twinkies daily is not to ban them. It is to teach them that they cause net energy drains, unnecessary weight gain, and less strength than that person would otherwise possess.

The media you consume is food for your mind. It affects it. Americans consume some $86 billion in anti-depressants annually. Clinical studies have been done showing enormous increases in rates of depression in the last century. Monopolar depression was almost unknown bck then, absent some major tragedy.

Clearly, many factors play into this, some possibly diet related. But the evidence is clear that watching a lot of violence TENDS to increase rates of depression. It does not do it every time, with every person. It does not induce clinical depression in a linear way.

What it does do is affect your worldview. You see all the time the worst of what people are capable of. You become less trusting and emotionally open. You tend to fear more violence than actually happens. You tend to be more likely to imagine violent solutions to problems than negotiated ones. I personally think this effect is quite clear in our society today.

Loughner was a loser. He couldn’t get a date, had probably never been with a woman, couldn’t get a job, got kicked out of school, and in the end had scared away all of the friends he had. Bad tends to feed bad, and worse tends to go to worse. Many people like him kill themselves. Had he done that, we never would have heard about him. A few people would have gone to his funeral, then he would have been forgotten by all but his family. You may not know this, but there are many dozens of suicides in every State every year. The media does not report them since it has been found that reports of suicides tend to spark MORE suicides, the so-called copycat effect.

As things stand, what he seems to have done is chosen to stoke the hatred and resentment that the self pity that often marks failure causes in weak minds. He fed it with music, like that song by Drowning Pool. And in the end, he walked up to a very attractive young woman, his Representative, and put a bullet in her head. Then he shot and killed her assistant at the same point blank range, a 9 year old girl, an elderly man, and 3 little old ladies.

Clinically, I would describe this as evil.

When I speak of psychosis, I am referring to an acute psychosis, of the sort that makes speed freaks do absolutely incomprehensible things after being up for three days. They commit the most horrific crimes imaginable. When they come down, though, they are psychologically normal, relatively speaking.

I believe we need to be concerned with the sub-acute manifestations of the same evil we see all around us: the glorification of violence, the demonization of enemies, and the desensitization–the drain of empathy and compassion–that all this leads to.

What you put in your head has an effect. I have no doubt of this. It may be subtle, but is nonetheless as real as the effect of a Twinkie. Not eveyone who eats Twinkies is fat, but that does not make them healthy.

Most of us have seen this term, sociopath, for someone who is utterly lacking in compassion, empathy, or conscience. They are not clinically insane, and can act quite normal for entire lifetimes. They are just missing something, in some situations. When other people cry, they have to pretend. If you want an example of the sociopath as hero, just watch the hugely popular Dexter, currently the most popular show among Democrats, but no doubt also very popular with Republicans. I would suspect it’s a few point swing.

Can sociopathy be created through ideology or conditioning? I am thinking, specifically, of Jerod Loughner, assassin of a nine year old girl, 3 little old ladies, one judge, and someone I believe in their thirties. He does not appear to feel remorse.

Who shoots little girls, and feels no remorse? To call him schizophrenic does not seem right. His writings could quite easily be explained by being high. When you are high, things seem to make sense that really don’t. You can quite easily get to a clinically acute psychotic state through sleep deprivation, without actually being psychotic.

What I think most likely is that he absorbed in his environment an ethos of violence, specifically through music, but also through other media.

The question I want to ask is this: can ideas, in themselves, deprive people of conscience? Take the Communists in Vietnam. They committed all sorts of atrocities, for example taking flamethrowers to a village, killing hundreds, as very conscious policy. Who are these people who kill in cold blood simply because people are “class traitors”? How do you get to the state where torture is justified simply because someone has been accused of being an ideological other?

I see no practical difference between the rank and file soldiers who kept order in the “reeducation” camps of the Vietnamese “revolution”, and those who saw to order in the concentration camps of the Nazis. Who were these people? How did they justify to themselves what they did?

Effectively, it seems that the symptoms of sociopathy, of consciencelessness, can be achieved simply by creating a world view in which others are denuded of their humanity as a result of their belonging to some other group. For example, Leftists routinely blame Liberals for all sorts of things, in this particular case of complicity in murder.

Would it not be permissable to kill people who are complicit in murder?

I have been told explictly, on the Daily Cause, that it is acceptable to hate people who hate others. If you want to hate, then, all you have to do is find some group of cultural or ideological Others that you can paint as being “hating”. Then it’s on.

Clearly, some leftists are simply sociopaths searching for an outlet for their aggressive and often sadistic energies. Such seems to me to have been the case with Sergei Nechaev.

If you read that text, it advocates consciencelessness. It advocates destruction. It advocates the subversion of all social institutions, and essentially everything that is standing. It Nihilism, in a formal sense. That was the term used by opponents of this pattern of thought, which offered nothing but death, in pursuit of goals that were never defined.

How does ideology create hate? How does it enable people to stop feeling sorry for other people, where sympathy is a very natural human reaction?

These are of course old questions, but good ones, nonetheless. The reliable one inference I will make is that hatred is always wrong. It is clearly sometimes necessary to fight and even kill one’s enemies, but hating them is always wrong.

If you hate haters, you are a hater. This seems clear enough.

This is a bit rambling, but I wanted to think out loud on this for a few minutes.

I was in Half Price Books today, and for whatever reason every hipster in town seemed to be there. I am told those disks people put in their earlobes are called “gauges”, and there were a lot of them. I could certainly be mistaken, but in general I don’t think there would be much use asking people like that their politics. I’ve met pot smoking conservatives (who usually self identify as libertarians) but no true conservative hippies.

And I was thinking about it: in general, I associate bookstores with leftists (again, I reserve the word Liberal for people whose main aim is protecting liberty). Why is this, I wondered?

And as I thought about it, it occurred to me that conservatives know what they believe. They have a consistent worldview, that really doesn’t change with the latest study or poll. They tend to believe in the Bible, limited government, the importance of family and marriage, the right to keep and bear arms, etc. Most of them could write their core beliefs on a poster on the wall, and not find them significantly changed 50 years later.

For example, take the following from William Boetcker, first penned in 1916:

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Let me say I had posted that on my wall at age 16, and was now 94. Could I not still believe it? Would I have had to alter any of those beliefs in the interim?

Good principles are eternal, even though their time-delineated iteration may differ: this is foundational Conservatism.

Leftists do not think like this. Being “modern”, they depend for their worldviews on science, and “science” changes constantly both for valid and corrupt reasons. When someone says to eat soy, they eat soy. When someone says to stop eating soy, they stop. When someone says the Earth is warming, they vote to get rid of 100 watt lightbulbs. If and when those same people say they were wrong, we will get them back.

And they have to spend a lot of time reading since they are incomplete. They don’t know who they are. They “know” they are the good ones, who want to help the poor, minorities, the Earth, animals, women, and everyone else who is “oppressed”. They are just not always sure why and how. They need to be told. They have to spend a lot of time synchronizing amongst themselves.

I would suspect leftists DO read more books than conservatives. They have to. The reality is that core realities about the human condition really don’t change. The core elements of politics and economics don’t change.

Thus, they are the only ones who listen when someone “proves” that you CAN in fact strengthen the weak by weakening the strong; or that you CAN help small men by tearing down big men; or that you CAN help the poor by destroying the rich.

As I see it, conformity to the herd, and conformity to principle are the only two options, and only one of them is suitable for a free and dignified nation. Yes, conformity to principle is a conformity to tradition–that of Rationalism–but that is the only human tradition which has enabled sustainable self governance and freedom amidst a multiplicity of worldviews, and in radically changing circumstances.

Intellectuals are people who start with cartoons, and buff them until they look like portraits. Serious thinkers–another animal entirely–are people who look for as many actual pictures as they can find, from as many angles as possible, and reach decisions only after having done so.

Intellectuals are people who want to believe certain things about the world. Serious thinkers are people who have a vision for the world, who care about outcomes, and who realize that the starting point is always what is, not what ought to be.

What led to these comments was pondering that Van Jones became a Communist–in his own words–after being jailed in the aftermath of the very defensible “Not Guilty” verdict with reference to the officers who arrested Rodney King and his friends. He has dedicated a lifetime to what he probably refers to as an ideal (and what I would refer to as a nihilistic cult), on the basis of a lie.

Did he ever bother to try and learn the facts of the case? Do any Communists? No: if they did, they would not be Communists. Self evidently, people who simply want power can and have used Communism, but I am referring to people who on some level are delusional enough to self identify themselves as trying to help the world.

They start with very simple-minded, muddy, confused ideas, then read and write long books based on those cartoonish premises, such as greed being unique to Capitalism, and autocracies based on a different rhetorical stance as being even possibly better in reality.

It seems to me that a short definition of mental health is the ability to achieve chosen tasks that take time. Mental health is goal achievement, and goal achievement is mental health.

Morality, in turn, is nothing but goal achievement applied to how our behavior correllates to our chosen principles. It is doing the things we think should be done (charity, fighting for what is right, being responsible), and not doing the things we think we ought not to do, even when they are more convenient than hewing to our moral beliefs. Example would include lying, cheating, and stealing.

In the spirit of openness, it is truly stunning to me how rapidly I personally get distracted from chosen tasks. If it involves writing of some sort, it will usually get done. If it is work-related or family-related, it will get done. My friends can rely on me.

But I can’t rely on myself. I am better than most, but how is it that someone–in some cases, this is me–could join a gym or Weight Watchers, or buy a set of motivational CD’s, or vow to take up a musical instrument and not even last a MONTH? Or even a WEEK?

Who are we when we are that disorganized? Who am I when I am that disorganized?

I had asked the question a week or something ago about where we rest. It seems to me we “rest”, seemingly paradoxically, in goal achievement. In creating and accomplishing goals, we determine for ourselves and others who we ARE. And Being, in what amounts to an existential ontology, is where we rest. Becoming approximates Essence. I came up with that a while ago, and think it is clever. Perhaps I am wrong.

Net, net: I can’t speak from personal experience of complete personal congruence of thought, word and action. They are often at odds with one another. Yet this seems to me the path forward.

I have been making some progress in this of late, which is encouraging.

As an economic system, Capitalism is nothing but the only economic system that has worked well throughout human history, added to the scientific method and industrialization. It has no moral component, other than the demand for honesty in business, diligence at work, and–for success–imagination.

It is as wrong to say greed has no part in it as to say greed has everything to do with it. All people, for all of history, have wanted more than they had, absent some comforting social narrative, like Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity. What they would normally do is invade other nations, and take their stuff. This was as creative as they got.

Socialism is simply a variant of this, in which the “invasion” is domestic, making the paradigmatic socialist war the civil war. Quite obviously, most deaths from Communism were caused by those in power, and inflicted on those whose welfare they purportedly cared about. Softer versions of this simply lead to economic impoverishment. Tax rates are a tool of war, too, and those enacting them forget that those able to amass wealth are generally much more skilled at keeping it than the State is at stealing it.

The point I wanted to make, though, is that at root much of the driving energy of our economy–at least when it is growing–is that same restless energy that led previous nations to war. Rather than fight with guns and bullets, we fight with aggressive ad campaigns, price cutting, innovation, and business structures.

This is a vast improvement over shooting wars. It is an enormously powerful engine for material prosperity. At the same time, it is not the energy of contentedness. It is not the energy of stability.

In my imagination, I look to a world in the future of villages. I look to a system of economic and social life that is relatively stable, and in which most people feel no need to venture that far from home. This can be brought about, I think, through social innovation, through increased skill at the cultivation of happiness, both as individuals and as communities.

What I would hope to see is a gradual reduction in the restlessness that leads us to fight one another so hard. A key component in this will be winning back the control of our money, and stabilizing it. Building wealth should be much easier than it is currently.

That’s all for now. Things to build.

I have observed this before, but it is interesting to me that the sadness that marks the growth of my children is not associated with their own development, but seeing it in their schoolmates and friends. I suppose I know I will always be around them–to some extent, who knows if they will leave town?–but will not be around their schoolmates. Those children, whose progress I only see in fits and starts, at awards or at sporting events, mark for me I guess times that are now gone. I remember them when they were little. I remember, then, who my own children were then.

Experientially, it is like an odor that just suddenly transports you into a completely different emotional gestalt, associated with another time and place. One marks, by contrast, the slow progress of time, the slow passage on a conveyor belt that ends for all of us sooner or later.

What do children give us? Why do we value the time when they are little so much? I think it is innocence. I think we are all born with the capacity for unreasoning cruelty, but not for intentional cruelty, knowing cruelty.

Deep requited love–and children respond marvelously to sincere love–is a sensation of RELAXATION. This hit me the other day. All of us keep, from necessity, psychological boundaries in place, to prevent emotional injury. Love is dropping those boundaries. It is a risk whose payoff is a profound sense of released tension.

We want to be with others. We want to be with them in an emotional room where you can’t be hurt. Yet that is not how things work.

I wonder, though, how things would be if there were no children, if we all lived as adults our whole lives. Would we not need to recreate or retain some of the innocence that children bring? And as I have wondered before, what if we had no gender, and could not have physical sex? How would we relate to one another? That sense of connection, love, is the real one. Everything else has the potential to include love, but need not. Quite obviously, sex can be loveless, and quite obviously many parents indulge their own need for affection by taking and using the love children offer so spontaneously, without repaying the debt.

Few thoughts, sparked by some dreams I had last night.

I’ve played Trivia in bars a few times. With a couple smart people, I can usually win.

At the same time, I don’t find it very entertaining, or useful. You either know facts or you don’t. Knowing a lot of facts is useful, but it is much more useful to know how to contextualize facts.

What would be interesting and useful to be would be not “name the four cities the Concord flew to”, but “what was the social and political significance, if any, of the Concord jet?”

Everyone could read their answers, and people could vote for the best one. That I would find entertaining.

As things stand, I was pondering the perhaps superficial and inaccurate observation I have that–based on the names of the groups that participate–that Trivia participants tend to be more to the left in their political tendencies.

I was thinking about it, and what I see is that leftists in general are quite educated. Virtually all academics and many professionals (albeit not business owners) are leftists, although many would not use that word. They know a lot of facts.

Yet as I see it, modern education is really not Liberal any more, in the sense that Scientism has coopted Rationalism, with the result that what is really taught is a uniform conformity to intellectual/knowledge Power Elites. Take global warming. We are expected to believe–because it comes from credentialed professionals–that global cooling is an outcome of global warming. Yet when I heat a pot of water, no cooling is generated thereby. Parts of the pot may heat faster–like the part directly over the burner–but it all evens out.

So who do I trust? The “experts”, or my own common sense? If I am properly “educated”, then I trust the experts.

This leads to a situation in which the educated are in possession of vast numbers of data points. Ask them about Vitamin E or the benefits of vegetarianism, or how CO2 acts as a Greenhouse Gas, and they are all over it.

What they don’t do is offer up narratives that rely firmly upon principles. For example, it can easily be shown that the net effect of their prescriptions for poverty actually increase poverty. If there were a principle in place, such as “we need to see to the care, feeding and shelter of the less fortunate among us”, then one could make a simple appeal to efficacy. That doesn’t happen. They just repeat themselves. They don’t adapt. They only adapt when someone TELLS them to adapt.

This is a cultural problem of the first order. We tend to think that if we were smarter the world would be just a bit better, but in my view the world should be RADICALLY different, and we have only just begun to plumb the depths of our collective stupidity.

End note: “tri-via” comes from the Latin word denoting the intersection of three roads. I looked it up, and thought I’d share it. Medieval educational curriculums were also called the Trivium, and consisted in three subjects, which I don’t have time to look up. I think they were Astronony, Rhetoric, and Math, but could be wrong.

I was thinking about Lady Gaga for some reason this morning. I had seen her “Fame Monster” cover the other day, with the mascara that looks like she had been crying. In effect, it looked to me like an invitation to consume her pain. She called her audience “little monsters” once, and I think the reason is that what seems to sell for her is a more or less overt masochism. “When it comes to love, it ain’t fun if there isn’t a gun”. Something close to that.

Unless I miss my guess, I suspect she has fantasies about committing suicide on stage. Who is she? Is she who she used to be–uncertain of herself, craving the approval of others–or this stage persona, this monster she has created? Should she love the people who have granted her fame and fortune, at the cost of what seems to be her soul? Who crave her public displays of more or less self inflicted grief and longing?

Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name we get “masochism”, had a thing for women in furs. One could perhaps generalize and say he had a thing for women dressed extravagantly. I think Lady Gaga qualifies.

What I will say is that there is in my opinion real beauty in her, that is plainly expressed in at least the song “Poker Face”. That song derives it’s somewhat cruel power from the contrast between her potential for beauty–when she lets her voice go–and the continual return to a compulsive masochism.

What I would like to see is her either reinvent this Lady Gaga persona–which is likely impossible–or give it up, and write songs that make her happy. They are in her. I can feel it. At this point, she’s made enough money. If she wants to really not care what people think, that would be the route to take.

I’m not sure why I think about her. I think there is something in her that is common to many of us. That is perhaps part of the reason why she is so popular.

How many of us, I wonder, erect public faces to hide private griefs or aggressions? How many of us are who we appear to be?

As I think I have said before, the process of personal growth, of Goodness, is in my view the progressive reduction in the number of our personalities until we are perfectly congruent in our thoughts/emotions, words, and actions.

It seems to me to be emotionally healthy we need to balance activity with stillness. You have to take chances, do work, get bumped around, and generally mix it up in the world. Then you also have to have time “off” to learn from your mistakes, process things emotionally, and recalibrate/recreate yourself, such that the newer you is better equipped.

On a very deep level, I am not sure that process is as simple in our world as it used to be. One must always be careful, though, about romanticizing the world of yesteryear–we did after all have separate drinking fountains in the South for black people just 50 or so years ago. Go back another twenty, and Europeans were killing one another in great numbers, and samurai swords were getting used in decapitation contests.

Let me put it this way: we exist in a surge of energy, change, emotion and constant activity. We “recreate” with TV and movies and media, among other things. It is a nearly ubiquitous pattern among most Americans to work all day, get dinner, then sit down in front of the TV.

It seems to me you optimally will have a contrast between the change that is a part of life, and other parts of your life that stay the same, that are constant. Things like the Bible, and Shakespeare, that go back at least far beyond the memory of anyone living. The content of this constancy will vary from society to society, and of course the interpretation of those constant themes will vary, but such changes are quite slow, usually, taking centuries.

Stable social narratives are calming. They are a place of rest, so to speak, in that they do not need to be reinvented. Individuals, in all times and places, will need to reinvent themselves vis a vis the social narratives which define their culture: change is inevitable, and will either be somewhat conscious, and somewhat positive, or somewhat unconscious, and either positive or negative.

Yet, what is the backdrop against which we reinvent ourselves? What stable social narratives do we have? The Socialists among us–who are Nihilists in fact if not self understanding–do everything they can to undermine all stable stories, like those of the Bible, patriotism, traditional social forms, and individual autonomy. For these things they want to substitute an as-yet uncreated social order, one which I frankly cannot imagine. Science is not morality. Consciousness will always precede the supposedly empirical conclusions of the post-moralists.

The question I am asking, in effect, is: where do we rest? Upon what can we rely? This is the malady of our modern age. It cannot just be my problem. This is the problem of the goths, and emo’s, and punk rockers, and even the hippies. We see one youth culture after another, each more dysfunctional than the last, all of whom fail to advance our understandings, since they start from the standpoint that silence and stillness are impossible, and all cultural claims are negotiable.

OF COURSE they are negotiable–manifestly the Earth is home to vast amounts of diversity–but can we not let them be until we come up with something better? Can we not slow the destructive energy until we can engage our creative energy?

Destruction is the life of death. It is the energy of a failed effort at individuation. This is what we confront.

I once dreamed of Lucifer. He was very bright, very shiny, so much so that you could barely see him. Yet upon close observation, he was composed of dead bodies, all tangled together. He was Death, disguised as light.

These are a few thoughts on a Tuesday morning. By the way, were you aware that Tuesday, in its end root, means “Day of Mars”? Did you know that Wednesday comes from Woden’s Day, Woden being the god of war also (cognate with Odin), and that some branches of the Vikings practiced human sacrifice in his honor, hanging victims from trees?

As I thought about it, that Joseph of Arimethea tree that was cut down in Britain was almost certainly a sacred tree in the Scandinavian faith that was Christianized. Christmas was a conscious co-opting of Saturnalia, and the tree in the home in winter was Druidic.

I look at these early missionaries, salespeople for a faith, making concessions to close the deal. Sure, you can keep your tree: we’ll just rename it.

I am religious, but it seems to me true religion is a precious flower that blooms briefly in all too few places. The odor remains for some time, then eventually becomes corrupt. I am not at all certain that what Christ taught is what has been passed down to us. I do not think he had symbolic cannibalism in mind when he conducted the Last Supper, complete with cups of blood.

My thinking on this is evolving. I’ll have a post on that topic before long.