Category: Uncategorized

I was thinking today about the frequent banality of Capitalism. It’s all about the pursuit of the almighty dollar. It is a near perfect system for the creation and distribution of material goods, but a poor means for distributing cultural goods. By this I mean a sense of meaning, of purpose. Making money, alone, is a terrible reason for living. Once you have met your basic needs, it’s not hedonism, it’s not principled, it’s just a type of collecting, no different in principle than collecting model airplanes, with the caveat that what is normally desired is the power that money buys.

Now, an intact cultural system, when subjected to determined attack, will of necessity respond through change. Free markets have been attacked by socialists. What this does is cause a reaction such that where things were relatively unquestioned before, an elaborate “theology” has to be created to defend against such attacks. This has the effect of causing people to become dogmatic and inflexible.

This is what religious fundamentalism is. Where people in antiquity no doubt tolerated any number of aberrations (you don’t read about them, because they weren’t noted down)–imperfect replication being a symptom of a creative, organic social order–once the theology is created to counter the heretics, the stage is set for an unyielding rigidity of thought and action.

There is a clear homology, in my mind, between the socialist goal of abolishing both wealth and poverty, and the cultural totalitarian’s goal of abolishing behavioral difference.

This led to the question: what cultural system DOES best allocate cultural resources? The answer is Liberalism, of the John Stuart Mill variety, in which people are free to speak their mind, to engage in debate, and to vote their opinions as far as governance. Just as people can meet freely to engage in trade, so too can individuals meet to express their views. And just as wealth increases as trade increases, so too does understanding as debate increases, given people with the character to hew to the truth.

Leftist counter-debate narratives–their efforts to shut the process of free inquiry down–are thus simply the cultural counterpart to their efforts to shut down trade.

Socialism is pure destruction, in its pure form. In its most benign manifestations the damage is delayed across generations, and in its most destructive forms it has caused more death than any set of ideas in human history.

There are those in Washington who, for all practical purposes, want us to sell our souls to them.

The Israelis need to demand, as a preconditino to talks, that the descendants of the refugees of the 1948 War which the Arabs lost reject their so-called “right” of return. They left their land voluntarily–admittedly in a condition of war, but one which was not started by the Israelis–and have since been calling for the destruction not just of the Jewish nation, but of the Jews IN it for at least 50 years.

They can’t get it. Even if somehow the logistics could be worked out, that would be national suicide for the Israelis. The situation is analogous to that which would obtain if the Cherokees suddenly started demanding the return of their ancestral homelands. Actually, the Cherokee have the better case, as they were driven from their lands by force. The refugees of the 1948 War, by and large, were not. And certainly there was no concerted effort on the part of the Jews to ethnically cleanse their land. Many Arabs remained, and they are part and parcel of Jewish society. They are practicing Muslims in a Jewish nation. As such, they are afforded more legal rights and freedom of conscience than Arabs in any other land, with the possible exception of Iraq.

I have been watching this theatrical farce for as long as I can remember, when some Secretary of State, in the interests of “peace”, will convene a conference, in which both sides feel the need to pretend they can reach accomodations, and which invariably ends either in failure, or Israeli concessions which are promptly abused by the refugees.

It is my sincere opinion that if Western media had a shred of honor, and the capacity for the use of intelligence in their assessments, that we could have seen whatever peace is possible emerge 30 years ago.

As things stand, no one wants to call a spade a spade and admit that the core sticking point is the “right” of return, and that it can never be granted, and that therefore any conference which does not admit this in advance, will ALWAYS be doomed to failure.

Only an idiot would claim otherwise. Manifestly, we have many idiots, though–particularly in the US and Europe–and many in high places.

It seems to me that many conservatives are happy about the Tea Party wins. They should be, but they need to have this image in their mind: our foe is tough, experienced, well financed, and THEY HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO GO.

Leftists–the people we really oppose–have been tricking moderates and ordinary, well meaning people into voting their agenda since at least Johnson, and I would argue we need to send it at least to FDR.

They own our universities. They own our high schools. They do not own our churches, business leadership (with the exception of some very large, very powerful corporations, mostly on the left coast), and ordinary adult citizenry.

What we have to do is look at this–for this season–as a two stage conflict. Let us imagine ourselves as Greek Warriors, who have just thrown back our enemy. We have them on their heels. Yet, they are going to counterattack, and we need to meet them with everything we have. It is not enough just to “not get complacent”. It is not enough to coast. We need to go balls out and get as much mileage from this historical opportunity as we can, and then KEEP GOING.

Whether we pick up a bunch of seats in Congress or not in November, we still have to deal with a populace that by and large has been brainwashed its entire life, that thinks that if something is desirable, you can just charge it to your credit card, as if the bill will never come due. They want to act as if nice people always finish first just because they are nice. They don’t want to think about their childrens future, or their grandchildrens future. The baby boomers, arguably, are the most selfish generation in American history, and quite possibly in human history. They are pathological narcissists, utterly unwilling to admit that the world does not revolve around them, and their pet illusions of how the world is.

Yet, in some ten years, the interest on the national debt will exceed the Defense Department budget. In some 15 years, we will be paying the equivalent of the national GDP just to fund Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in their current forms.

Is it intelligent to wait until problems have ripened into catastrophes to deal with them? Obama has already cut Medicare. But he increased taxes elsewhere, not least in the hidden form of increasing the costs of insurance companies, such that they have to pass them along, or go bankrupt. If anyone is unclear with respect to the plan, he does in fact want them to go bankrupt, so we can adopt a plan in which we lose virtually all the choice we currently have, penalize doctors for going into the field, lose a high percentage of our specialists, bring innovation to a halt, and shrink the amount of healthcare available, which would include hospitals, doctors offices, and all forms of medical testing.

We get a worse outcome, and we pay more for it. This is pretty close to a definition of stupidity.

Yet, what we have to realize–and this is the core point of this post–is that leftists ARE NOT INTERESTED IN OUTCOMES. They don’t CARE if they help the world. They don’t CARE if they make things worse. It all has to do with the maintenance of a personal meaning system, of a reason to believe, of a reason to live. Their political creed is a religion.

In actual religion, faith is necessary because we can’t perceive God directly. In their creed, faith is necessary because everything they touch turns–visibly–to shit, yet they keep doing it.

They NEED their religion. They will fight hard for it. We need to fight harder back. We have the high ground–we are defending the defensible–but countless battles that were “won” have been lost in the end.

Push with facts. Push with reason. We can’t let up until the collective enchantment that has fallen over so many lands lifts.

It occurred to me after I hit post yesterday that I didn’t explain the title. Most people are familiar with the term from Hindu mysticism, which posits that we have energy “centers” at key points in our body. I’m an agnostic on that, although I do often feel what feels like energy going through my forehead. There is no need, in my view, to make a firm decision either way, so I don’t.

The root, though, as I understand it, is the Sanskritic word for discus, or wheel. It is intended to connote something round which spins.

I think this is a useful metaphor for all human social systems. I view the individual personality, for example, as a sort of smoke or water “chakra”. It is a system in motion with attributes. “Joe”, for example, is a system in motion that is mostly “brown”, with flecks both of grey and white. One can imagine standing in the stream of this “smoke” or water–something that spreads and contracts imprecisely–and feeling, seeing, smelling, and hearing differing sounds, but in patterns. Certain combinations recur regularly, certain tendencies and systemic habits recur not quite at regular intervals, but regularly. This is the “essence” of Joe.

This is a metaphor for the chaotic system, in which the system is non-linear, and formally complex, but nonetheless when someone says “you know how Joe IS”, we generally know what they are talking about. There may be things about Joe we don’t know, which would radically alter our opinion about him, but in his interactions with us, we see what things he tends to like doing, his opinions about sports and politics and religion, his work ethic, how he treats the opposite sex, and children, and the elderly, and minorities. We create really a set of data points, such as a comment he made many years ago, and insert it into our narrative about who Joe “is”.

Now, no formally complex system can ever be reduced to a box. They don’t fit in boxes, unless the box is so large that individual nuance is lost. Joe is an American. That can mean a lot of things.

The difference between judgement and prejudice is “have you tried to stand in that stream?” Have you tried to proverbially walk in his shoes? Formally chaotic systems have points of recurrence, called “strange attractors”. When you look at a visual plot of some them–here are some examples–what I am intending so say is that if you understood “Joe” perfectly, that is what he would look like. He would be a form which was multi-dimensional and–what they can’t capture here–in motion, such that the lines in movement–really, the gases, since there are no lines involved–would drift towards and away from their supposed bounds regularly, but not so much that you couldn’t discern the basic structure.

In my view, your qualitative structure–your “strange attractor” self–is a function of the principles by which you choose to live your life. Everyone chooses something. Some choose self indulgence, or self importance, or power, or love, or friendship, or duty. Everyone chooses a combination of values, which are valued differently at different times. Normally there is a relative hierarchy–such as country above family above self. Such hierarchies, with respect to who people “really” are, are only expressed through action, not words.

As has been said by some wit, most people have two reasons for what they do: the stated one, and the real one.

Chakras exist on all qualitative levels. They vary is size. There are family dynamics–the Smiths are happy, the Jones are dysfunctional (another favorite quote of mine is that the only normal family is the one you don’t know very well)–church dynamics, corporate dynamics, sports team dynamics, communist dynamics, State dynamics, national dynamics, regional dynamics, and perhaps even global dynamics. Western philosophical ideas have permeated most of the world. All African nations that are not working towards Sharia are targeting roughly Western forms of government. The Chinese have based their nation on a combination of what most would call Marxism, and free enterprise. As a practice, of course, trade is scarcely Western, but as an economic ideology, it is. Most all nations previously practiced something like what I call Mercantilism, where insiders get the sweetheart deals, and competition outside the literal market is forbidden.

Chakra is thus a descriptive term. I also use it in the sense of what I have elsewhere called a Qualitative Tumbler, as something projected “out there” (Captain quotation mark today) that provokes qualitative change in the system so “attacked”. A friend of mine was telling me about a drill they did in, I think, Scuba School, where two men got one snorkel, and were only allowed to breathe one at a time, which meant they had to cooperate, and keep their cool. They held on to one another via a Roman handshake, such that this theoretically would have worked in the dark. Once they got it down, they were attacked my instructers, who tried both to tear them apart, and to make them panic. Not pleasant, but panicking in a surf zone in enemy territory would be yet more ugly.

Whether we realize it or not, most of us progress alone in intermittent conditions of understanding and confusion. The world is in constant change, and one scarcely needs to look far to find people interpreting the world through outdated lenses, as seen, for example, in those for whom FDR is a hero, and the Vietnam War a tragic mistake (more on that in a moment).

Two men together are more sturdy than each would be alone. Let me posit symbolically, then, that your “partner” is a deep seated, principled committment to learning the real truth of a situation, to the extent you can. As you are attacked, you will fare better over time, than someone who is overwhelmed, and lets go.

Let us posit that your committment, instead, is to another actual person. Let us say that person wants you to go somewhere else, and uses the tumbling of the tides or instructors to gradually ease both of you far, far away. In what we call a trackless ocean, for the sake of clear symbolism, you have no means of fighting this.

Let us further say that your goal is to reach the shore, where the shore is meaningful personal growth. If you attach yourself to a principle, then despite the pummelling of the sea, you can gradually make your way to the shore. If you attach yourself to a person, then if they are loving, and care about you, then they, too will stabilize and guide you (guru literally means “heavy”, and I have often thought the image to be conveyed was something like a ballast in a boat, or an anchor in a storm). If they have other ideas, you will find yourself far at sea.

In the end, you have to decide, and in the end even the decision as to who to trust has to be a peronal one. Perception, always, is personal, even if people choose to walk in lockstep with others.

This is an analogy that needs some work, but the main image I want to convey is a system in motion, being impacted by a stream of different motion, which sets it off course, at least briefly, and sometimes permanently.

I was thinking this morning about the first encounter of school children with what we might term American “Imperfectionism”, which is the doctrine that since some people seem to be claiming we are perfect, and we aren’t (slavery, Jim Crow, slaughter of Indians, etc.), then we are bad. This is a stupid doctrine, taught by stupid people, but a casual reading of history readily shows that stupidity has wings.

The first time kids watch “Roots”, for example, they are permanently molded in ways which some players in our current political landscape are careful to use. And at that moment, a sort of qualitative horizon opens up, which says that if we are capable of that, what else are we capable of? Maybe it’s Americans that are the bad ones, and everyone else the good ones. Particularly if just kids remain ignorant of the history of everyone else, this is a standpoint which can be lasting. This is a result of a qualitative tumbler, or Chakra.

As I have said often, if we judge ourselves by our own stated standards, we fall far short. If we judge ourselves in comparison to the objective history of every other nation on the Earth, we fare exceedingly well. We truly are exceptional.

I’ll stop with the morbid stuff for a while. I just sort of watch breezes blow through me, one direction, then another. I’ve tried to stop it, but it takes a lot of effort, and it doesn’t work. So I roll with it.

Thoughts, it seems to me, are like little machines. They operate on the level of computation, of concrete structures, of things that are, to each individual consciousness, there, and not somewhere else. This is perhaps a bit confusing, since this thought, itself, it coming from somewhere else. It is intuition.

What I try to do is throw thoughts out there. I visualize them, when they hit–when they are read and digested–as little self organizing machines, like Transformers. They affect everyone differently. Some might steel people against me. Others, win them over. Others, lead in a new or old pathway of thought.

Always, we stay in motion. As long as thoughts are moving around, and as long as people are trying to make sense of the world, progress is always possible.

On that score, I think most of us can easily enough visualize one cataclysm or another. Yet, if we can do that, why not a Euclysm, if that works from the Greek? Why not a renewal? Why not a miracle? They do happen.

Random musings, after a workout, listening to “California Stars”.

It’s interesting: I came up with this idea on my own, of clothes which never needed to be washed, and which never wore out, and Doris Lessing dealt with the same topic in Mara and Dann. There, her protagonist Mara found your singlet inhuman, and horrible, since it was the same year after year, and apparently century after century, in apparent contradiction to the way of the world. The same people built indestructible metal houses, and cans and other implements that likewise never wore out.

In a morbid segue that just popped in my head, what about human bodies that never decay? As most will have seen in some ad in some magazine, human bodies can now be made into “art” through a plasticizing process that halts the normal process of material decay. I find it revolting. Based on a conversation I had with a woman in a plane, these displays also feature babies, from the fetus stage, up to fully developed babies.

Is this wrong? First off, I wonder where they get the bodies. All of these people had names, and lives. The woman I talked with commented they all looked Asian. Is North Korea selling bodies, I wonder? With as much death as has happened there, I see no ethical objection to it which would arise within their particular cultural milieu.

It then occurred to me: how far does this go? Do we place bodies as permanent fixtures in art museums? They have them in the Museum of Science and Industry, as anatomical displays. Could we have “Human head in blue, number 7?” Can collectors install them in their living rooms? Does a trade develop, as it apparently has, in body parts, the provenance of which no one knows?

There is something sick about this, reminiscent of that scene in Brave New World, where they run the bodies by the children, to inoculate them from the fear of death.

What is it these “artists” are trying to accomplish? What positive good?

It would seem at a minimum if we are to allow these displays–and they are hugely sucessful wherever they go–we should know who the people on display are, and that they granted the use of their bodies as “art”.

It has long seemed to me that many of our most creative artistic minds have been deranged by ethical relativism, and moral pessimism and nihilism. This was what Ginsburg was “Howl”-ing about in his poem.

How do we make this turn back towards decency and purpose? This is a critical question. Science cannot speak to cultural formations. It can describe, but not prescribe. That is what our reason and our passions are for.

What comes, goes. What was, will one day be no more. It was the violation of this truth that Lessing seems authentically, in her imagination, to have found so abominable. Plastic bodies seem, to me, to exist in the same space, to which we can add numerous other objections.

Evil is tame because there are only a certain number of emotional possibilities. Goodness is wild, in that you can wander wherever you want, as there are no boundaries. It is much more creative, and has a much greater possible experiential range. People miss this since evil people can do anything they want, but in their inner lives they are quite dull. They are “Rote-arian”. They are creatures of habit, and it is like poking someone in the same place over and over, or a record that gets stuck in one spot. It is anger expressed in countless ways, countless times. This is the root of Arendt’s “banality of evil”.

I read “Eichman in Jerusalem”, by the way, and found it vastly overrated. I think that’s where she coined the phrase. That was many years ago, though, so perhaps my memory is faulty.

Edit: I do have a job, for what it’s worth, which varies from few to too many hours a week. I’m currently in the few period, and taking some notes off my voicemail, which is why there are so many posts. I just figured out how to cut and paste them, too. You can’t normally do it in Compose, but you can in Edit HTML.

The first step in adding information to a system is adding the idea that information CAN be added. If I offer up a proposal for fixing something, it may be rejected in its entirety–it may in fact be stupid no matter how enthusiastic I am about it–but it could cause someone else to come up with a completely different, better proposal, but one which would not have existed had I not started the process. This is an important qualitative point.

Most speech has two components: the overt part, and the implications. If, for example, I say someone is intelligent, it necessarily implies that not all people are intelligent. It implies I am capable of recognizing intelligence. It implies there is in fact such a thing as intelligence, and so on.

Anyone who saves and invests their money is a Capitalist. This would be hairstylists who buy and sell their own haircare products on the side, or mechanics who save up enough to open their own garage, or of course industrialists who open a second or third or fourth factory.

Capital is savings. Given this, the extent to which we are a Capitalist society is the extent to which we operate on savings, to which we self finance. On that score, we do quite poorly, currently. How do we finance things? We borrow money.

I can’t overemphasize this: by creating money, banks create unearned ownership in private enterprise, and move us away from actual savings–through inflation and easy credit–and thus away from true Capitalism, as they exist today.

As I repeat often, I have proposed an overhaul of the system, which retains banks, but as Capitalist institutions, which build wealth for all, rather than takea share of it, in effect, for free.

The foundational element of wealth building is creation. It is creating new things, new processes, new distribution systems. Our system does foster these things, but we don’t see as much of the benefits as we ought to, since they are siphoned off.

Marx was not fully wrong, but he grossly misunderstood the nature of what he termed Capital, which in many of the cases was nothing of the sort. Borrowed money is not Capital, if it was created by the institution lending it. It is a leak in the system, which depressurizes it.

The point of the sort of thing our current President did in Chicago is to cultivate anger and a sense of grievance, such that you can assemble people at a certain place and time, get them to think the same things, say the same things, and do the same things. This is called “community organizing”, but in reality, the intent is to create a homogeneous and responsive group that responds to the commands of the organizer. There is nothing organic about it. It is, frankly, a version of Leninism, and is only a thin shade of grey away from Marxist “consciousness building”, if it is even that.

To that I would contrast what might be called Cultural Organizing. This is a non-manipulative effort to put information and ideas in front of people, such that they react to them. What you do is create the possibility of creative reorganizations in individuals and groups, without directing it. You put information out there, and wait to see what happens.

The path to a good future lies in the pursuit of generalized virtue. We can’t know, specifically, what twists and turns our nation and the world will take, but if people build on sound basic principles, in aggregate the outcome will be good.

As the deduction of information–of local, individual opinion, doubt, perception, and decision–so called Community Organizing is the opposite of this. Where Cultural Organizing is spontaneous, Community Organizing is planned. Where Cultural Organizing seeks to distribute power as widely as possible, Community Organizing seeks to focus it.