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All authentic moral judgements are local, necessary, and imperfect.

In my view, no permanent moral principles are possible, as applied socially. Individually, my core values are the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and perception.

The task in determining what is right and wrong begins with understanding. Specifically, we must ask ourselves why things we believe are wrong, are wrong. Why is murder wrong? What is the value to us as individuals and a society in considering it this way? Why is adultery wrong? Why is abortion wrong (or is it?) Why is torture wrong?

What would be the consequences if murder was socially acceptable? Would it not lead to more murders? Would it not make them more likely, since we all feel anger, and control it because we fear the consequences?

In war, is murder not necessary, since by definition it is the effort to resolve different goals by naked force?

Silly people look at things like the Golden Rule, and conclude that if we don’t want people to murder us, we should not murder them. But what if they are trying to murder us, despite our having done nothing to them? They have already violated the Golden Rule, by acting in a way they would not want directed back at them.

Is homosexuality wrong? As I see it, there are three principle types of homosexuality: some people are born with it; some are molested, and placed thereby on a permanently different path; and some embrace it for the political purpose of subverting our social order. The first two are beyond the control of those practicing it, and I cannot see any just reaction but acceptance.

The last, though, often leads not just to indulgence, but proselytizing, and in no few cases to seductions of younger men by older men (which itself leads to my second type). This in my view is wrong, because it is not trying to make the world a better place. On the contrary, it generally betrays a need for power and control, and the pursuit of power is the essence of how evil is formed.

In the end, what is needed for judgement is understanding. What we want, always, is to contexualize judgements such that we view people as individuals, and not as abstractions. When rules are dogmatic and hidebound, then we look at people as objects, and “deviancy” as analogous to a machine which has malfunctioned. Dogmatism and hate go hand in glove.

Thus decisions need to be local, such that we know the facts of THIS case. We bring general principles to bear, but we have derived those principles in advance, and can thus tailor them to the case. We have reasoned through why rape is wrong, and theft, and vandalism, etc.

Such decisions are necessary, since if you don’t HAVE to render a judgement, then don’t. It is silly wandering around thinking bad thoughts about people, if they don’t affect you at all. It is best to spend your time improving yourself. No doubt we often learn how to grow by observing how others have failed, but what I want to do is avoid slipping people into categories, when the reality is that most people are good and bad, and which they are varies on the day and place.

For the same reason, all judgments are imperfect. Human personalities are chaotic systems. They vary from day to day. The organizing principles are the criteria according to which that person bases his or her actions, but behavior is always approximate. Nobody is perfect, not least because what is right varies from day to day, and we can’t see in just what perfection would consist. If someone conforms to a behavior pattern precisely, I would argue they are compulsive, not perfect, even if they are Good.

Since it is impossible to identify the “essence” of a person, judgements will necessarily be imperfect. Yet, you have to make decisions, and I have already stated that no judgement need be rendered unless it is necessary.

This sort of approach adds information to our cultural order. So often one sees patent contradictions passed over with ease. For example, leftists will groan in horror at the institution of slavery in the United States, but ignore entirely the long history of slavery in Communist nations, and by and large the slavery which exists in many Islamic nations, particularly in Africa.

It is not enough simply to have the principle “slavery is wrong”–although that would be a good start. WHY is it wrong? This is the question. It may seem self evident that it is wrong, but that should make the question that much easier to answer.

For example, if one accepts my definition of Goodness as taking pleasure in the happiness of others, and being able to live happily on your own, then knowingly causing long term pain to others is simply incompatible with that. If our aim is Goodness, then we must reject slavery, in all the forms it takes.

I should add on this issue that I have at times seen the term “chattel” slavery, by which was connoted slavery where slaves had a price, presumably versus leftist slavery, where you were simply under the complete control of a totalitarian state.

No person seeking what is Good in this world could possibly make this argument. But such arguments are possible when one is failing to contextualize them, failing, for example, to look at what was actually done in Cuba or the Soviet Union: the rapes, torture, cruel work schedules and loads, the hunger, the deceptiveness and backstabbing required to survive.

My system works, and it is amenable to change and amendment.

Republicans will gain an unknown number of seats in Congress this year. The Party that is opposite the President gains in almost every mid-term election. This has been the pattern for many years.

This year, though, I believe we are seeing a qualitative change. Let us suppose that some 30% of the people will always vote Republican, and 30% always Democrat. This leaves 40% that until this year had some trust for both parties.

What I think independents are increasingly realizing is the size and scope of the deception that has been perpetrated on them. How is it even CONCEIVABLE that we could swear in a United States President with lifelong associations with Communists, and not ask even the most rudimentary questions about his background. How is that a photocopy of an incomplete birth certificate posted on a website and the word of a Democratic functionary in his home state counts as proof of eligibility? I very literally could not get a passport or driver’s license with what he has provided, and he has actively OPPOSED the People getting access to what information we are told the State of Hawaii possesses. To be clear, when he was born, the State of Hawaii would take the word of the parents for where the child was born. You just had to let them know you had had a child within the first YEAR of the childs life. A notice of live birth in the newspaper, for example, would have been quite sufficient. Who placed that ad? Presumably his parents.

Columbia University was a hotbed of radicalism. It was the seat of both the Students for a Democratic [read fascist Socialist; if their lips are moving, they are lying] Society, and its offshoot, the Weather Underground. During the years he attended, 1981-1983, it seems not just possible but likely that he took classes from Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who were both socialists who developed a plan to bankrupt the nation so as to facilitate what would have amounted to a “revolution” away from Constitutional democracy.

He likely took classes with Edward Said, a prominent “Palestinian” activist, and member of that ritualistic academic cult called “post-structuralism”, which I prefer to call Postrationalism. They use incense wine and candles to create the elaborate illusion that some sort of useful thinking is going on.

And this is just a smattering of the possibilities. Columbia, in the immediate aftermath of the student radicalism of the 60’s and early 70’s would have been utterly uncongenial to all but the ideologically sympathetic. Literally every teacher he would have had would have been far to the left of the general population.

In a more general sense, Columbia and Harvard between them produced in the Cold War virtually every Soviet agent we had. Our President, obviously, has degrees from both schools. If you add UC-Berkeley, you have a high percentage of the student radicals of the period when we were trying to save South Vietnam from the imposition of fascist tyranny.

One can go on and on. The grandfather who raised him was apparently good friends with Frank Davis, who was a known member of the Communist Party. Allegedly, he and Davis did drugs together. It is even possible that Davis and Obama’s mother were lovers. This is the internet, and it’s impossible from here to rule out photoshopping, but that very definitely looks like his mother.

Add to that the following two facts, and these are facts: 1) Davis wrote a book called “Sex Rebel” under the pseudonym Bob Greene, in which he described all sorts of what most of us would call perversions. Let me offer up a summary:

“Under certain circumstances I am bisexual. In addition to cunnilingus at times I enjoy anilingus. I am interested in urolagnia. I’m also a voyeur and exhibitionist. Occasionally I am mildly interested in sadomasochism.”

He was also utterly uninterested in the sanctity of marriage, and often cheated with other men’s wives.

2) Bob Greene/Frank Marshall Davis was a mentor to our President. He mentions having talked to him just prior to heading off to California for college, which Davis called “an advanced degree in compromise” (Obama quoting Davis).

I could go on and on. Obama himself cites Saul Alinsky as his biggest political influence.

The point I had intended to make, before I once again did some research, and once again had to shake my head at the LUNACY we committed in electing this man: when ordinary, reasoning people see the GAP between reality and the sanitized, redacted, ILLUSION that our media–in general, Fox and especially Glenn Beck excepted–portray, they are forced away from complacenty and into the realization “I HAVE TO THINK”. We can’t just blindly trust that the Fourth Estate is doing its job. We have to gather the facts. We have to render judgement.

We have to care. We have to be active. We have to fight not just against the seizure of power by evil human beings, but against the cultural malaise and anomie which they have done so much to create by teaching graduates of our institutions of higher learning to reject all values but political conformity to their agenda.

Every person who reaches this realization will be permanently radicalized as an anti-Leftist, pro-democracy American. Every person who sees the congruity between Democratic leadership and the Obama agenda will likewise realize that until they get the radicals out of the drivers seat, they very simply cannot vote for a Democrat. This does not make the Republicans saints, but at a minimum they are not openly supporting the wholesale conquest of our private lives, and the conscious pursuit of economically ruinous policies.

First, a nice bon mot from George Bernard Shaw–vicious, but clever human being: “All retrogressions and blunders, like all genuine reforms, are lucrative to somebody, and so never lack plausible advocates.”

It is an ironic comment, since he intended to benefit from the implementation of his own retrogressions.

What I had intended to say, though, is the following: human life is movement. We are never still, even when we appear to be still. What we are doing is RECREATING ourselves. Conservatism is the process of recreating yourself according to a template.

Many indoctrinated college students have joined what amounts to a death cult (read history, if this sounds excessive. Start with what happened in South Vietnam after we withdrew and then cut off all military and financial support.) This sort of advocacy becomes particularly venal when combined with the sort of flippancy you see on the left. They go to “the demonstration” during the day, then smoke weed at night and spend all their waking hours trying to “find themselves”. It’s really quite ugly, once you really grasp the humanity that has been deducted, as if surgically. Horrible, horrible things happen to men, women and children BECAUSE of the positions they take, which are poorly thought through, sloppy, and almost actively hostile to the actual process of sincere understanding.

Be that as it may, you can’t just say “stop”. Part of their indoctrination has been the removal of all moral “props” that could be available as alternatives. Their meaning system and their politics are one and the same.

There must always be an escape valve. As Sun Tzu said thousands of years ago, an army that can’t retreat will fight the more fiercely for it, to the end. They have no choice. In our own case, what we want is for them to relax, and then recreate themselves–self organize themselves–in personally and socially beneficial ways. This is an attack on delusion, not people, and the means is adding information to their environment such that they can reach new conclusions on their own.

The means by which this happens is dialogue. What dialogue does is force you either to reimagine the political “Other” as an actual human being, with whom you can talk, or reject them with extreme prejudice. The more times we–well meaning people–try to facilitate dialogue, with sincerity, and the more times they reject it, with prejudice, the more likely we will see an erosion of the violent certainty and dogmatism that successful propaganda enables. It’s a question of waves rolling away solid rock, with enough time.

The two ideologies which most threaten what is good in this world are radicalized Islam and what we may as well call Communism, or fascist Socialism. (note that Shaw himself noted that fascism was a trait BOTH of the far right and far left.)

It is for this reason that I have tried to propose a version of Islam that does not require the murder of non-Muslims, and yet which does not require the rejection of any part of their core beliefs; which is scripturally faithful. As I have framed it, I think the doctrine that could be built would in fact be an immensely powerful force for Good in the world.

Likewise, Goodness is my proposed alternative to Leftism. Note I am unwilling to reject in principle social welfare programs, or the use of the government for social improvements. What we have to do is contextualize things. We have to look at the situation as a whole, and observe changing circumstances.

You always start from where you are, not where you ought to be. What should be true is nothing more or less than a prospective template of where we should move FROM HERE.

Conservatives can at times be a bit silly. My car won’t start: Socialism. I pay taxes: Socialism. The guy at the coffee shop has long hair and moves a bit slow: Socialism.

One gets the sense with some people that if other people treat them as anything other than a solipsistic monad with no communal (socialist word, there) responsibilities whatever, then they are living in a tyranny.

Here is my own view. Goodness is a process of organizing information such that all benefit. It is a process of organizing individual consciousness such that YOU benefit. Deployed generally, it operates best in conditions both of freedom, and principle. The principle is the belief that wanting what is best for others and yourself will lead over time to the best emotional, mental, and physical state available, and that the path to that outcome is ever changing, but can be ascertained if we are willing to accept what is without whining, keep trying, and do our best at all times to tell the truth to ourselves and others about what is true and real–physically, emotionally, and mentally.

I won’t go through the process here, but introspection can yield–“derive”–something like the Golden Rule as the best means of organizing individual and social systems.

Liberalism is the doctrine that maximal freedom of movement generates the maximal capacity for personal and social growth and fulfullment. In the economic realm, free trade is nothing other than harnessing local information such that maximal efficiency in matching supply with demand is achieved. As Hayek demonstrated with overwhelming intellectual force, Socialism is nothing other than DEDUCTING information from the system, both in terms of price, but also in terms of what we might term moral information, which here would be motivation to produce.

True Capitalism is the use of innovation for the generation of wealth. We have never had a truly Capitalist system, since banking and financial interests–facilitated by central banks–have stolen large segments of our productivity, and hence our leisure. Ironically enough, this process has been facilitated by Socialist ideas, which purported have as their intent the democratization of leisure.

To get anything done, you have to have three components: motivation, information, and the physical resources. You have to want to do something, you have to know or figure out how to do it, and you have to be able to express it physically. Even books need paper, or computers.

Socialism reduces all three. By taking from them without compensation the fruits of their labor, it reduces the motivation of those who would be innovating on their own. Instead, it compels innovation by force, which reduces the total available. The Soviets were not uninventive. They were superior to us in some ways. But the bulk of their people did not want to work, and they were not encouraged to think, on balance. Quite often, people intentionally worked slow, and ignored ideas that could have been offered, because they hated the people running the nation. Sabotage was a long term, persistent problem.

Socialism is one of the ideas in the air today. What I would suggest is that when self organization happens, it happens from available components. When children 100 years ago were deciding who they wanted to be, and how to live their lives, they were greatly influenced by the Bible, the hard work they grew up doing, and somewhat naive but nonetheless sincere notions of national and local pride.

I was watching kids at the pool on Labor Day. They had hired a deejay, who was playing contemporary music. This music, to be blunt, is stupid. It is entertaining, has a good beat, etc., but it teaches a blind hedonism. 5 year old girls were shaking their hips to Justin Bieber, and being indoctrinated into the “cult of fun”, which is a dominant theme–meme?–in our lives.

To this is added the theme of niceness. You have to always be nice, or else you are a bad person. Self evidently many bad people have mastered this theme, and are able to say horrible things when they format it correctly. Academics would be a good example. They are often allowed to say horrible hateful things, but if they are “Nice”, then they are OK. We are told the lead singers of death metal bands are “Nice”, even if they sing songs like “I cum blood”, and pour fake blood over themselves in their concerts. They are “cool”. What else do you need to know? They smile a lot, when they aren’t shouting out satanic anthems.

Go to the Young Adult section of your local bookstore. Seriously, do it, especially if you have kids. Don’t take my word for it, but you will find HUNDREDS of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies, and other dark creatures. The heroes are always “cool”, but they are dead, or warped in fundamental ways. They are not right. They combine what a previous generation would have readily recognized as evil traits with being “cool”. This is subtle brainwashing.

Doris Lessing wrote in one of her books–I believe the book was “The Five Gated City”, but don’t quote me on that–about the process of turning a girl into a whore, of breaking her. You can’t do it overnight. You have to do it gradually. Perhaps every third time you screw her, you take her just a little past where she is comfortable. You take her past her comfort zone, let her adopt self protective rationalizations (that didn’t hurt so much; he really is nice most of the time; he says he loves me), then repeat the process. Soon enough, she has no boundaries at all. She has lost herself. This will lead, for most, to self desctructive behaviors, like drug use, but economic usefulness. Completing this process is the role of the pimp.

Many in our culture admire pimps. He “pimped out his ride”, and other such sayings are common enough.

When the Fabian Socialists undertook to destroy Western culture, they adopted three symbols: Fabius Maximus himself, a Roman general who strung out his enemy (Hannibal, if memory serves) such that he never allowed a decisive battle to be fought; the turtle, which does win the race with the Hare; and the wolf in sheeps clothing. The intent was the long term combination of deception and gradualness.

In “seducing” a health culture, the task is not just economic. They have to attack the moral basis of our culture as well, the self organizing system component, the capacity to do without government since we trust one another, and carry our own crosses without complaint.

Consider this comment from Keynes sexual partner, Lytton Strachey: he “sought to write in a way that would contribute to a change in our ethical and sexual mores–a change that couldn’t be done in a minute–but would unobtrusively permeate the more flexible minds of young people.”

Socialism does not just deduct local pricing information. It deducts local MORAL information, such that common sense moral decisions become difficult outside of the propagandistic social milieu which has been set up so diligently on our campuses.

Things to do. This will have to pass for now. I will have more to say later.

Muslims submit to the Will of Allah. This is the essence of their religion, the belief that there is but one God–not many–and that that God communicated His will to Muhammad via the angel Gabriel, and that that Word was transcribed exactly as intended, and not corrupted, as they believe the transmissions to the Jews and Christians were.

Yet, only the Quran is uncorrupted. Only the Quran is perfect. Nothing else. The Hadith may have been corrupted just as they believe the Jewish and Christian faiths were. The hadith is the product of man, even if inspired by God. To be clear, Moses and Abraham were Prophets too, but their faiths still had to be supplemented and corrected by the final revelation of the Quran. They were mortal and imperfect, as of course were their followers.

A few interesting facts:

The Hajj is not in the Quran.

The Quran does not specifically mention the times or the number of prayers or the manner in which we pray.

Ramadan IS in the Quran.

Charity is mentioned over 30 times, and there does not appear to be a distinction made between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Quite obviously, the central element is the belief in one God, but according to the Quran, they also believe in what was passed down to the Jews and Christians: according to Sura 2:136 “We believe in GOD, and in what was sent down to us, and in what was sent down to Abraham, Ismail, Isaac, Jacob, and the Patriarchs; and in what was given to Moses and Jesus, and all the prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction among any of them. To Him alone we are submitters.”

I, too, believe in God and that the universe is one. I believe in a difference between Good and Evil, and between submission to the laws which God put in this universe, and the laws of man. Here is the central point, though: Sharia and the Hadith are not the Quran. They are the work, even according to Muslim tradition, if looked at with sincerity and an open mind, of men. Muhammad was blessed–as Abraham and Jesus were blessed–but only the Quran itself came from God.

In my view, when verses contradict one another–such as verses calling for killing infidels, and verses calling for mercy, and charity–what has happened is that room has been created for the use of the judgment and conscience which has been implanted in you as a result of having an immortal soul. The call to submit to God is the call to do what is right and just.

If you believe that the Quran is perfect, then this would be a part of its perfection: it allows you to choose what is ultimately the Will of God, and what is merely the will of Man; between what is right, and what is wrong.

There is no reason to suppose God would ask us to be faithful to His Will and not give us the tools to ascertain it. There is no reason to suppose that a book filled with calls to charity would condone blind hatred and unreasoning violence.

Such are my views, at any rate. I believe they are tenable theologically.

I will add that Sharia law must be seen to benefit some members of Islamic society, at the expense of others. It helps men and hurts women. It helps the wealthy, who can afford their four wives, and hurts the poor, who may not marry at all. It entrenches Kings, and offers little recourse for the Many whose voices may not be heard.

If you look at the institution of Ramadan, it is a very positive thing. We Americans would benefit from it. If you look at the belief in one God, it what all Christians and Jews already believe. All believers pray, so there is no inconsistency there, and we all believe in the importance of helping those who are less fortunate, and who are in trouble for whatever reason.

In my view, one has to look at the unreasoning hatred and death that has flowed from certain interpretations of Islam as originating in the minds of men who benefit from cultivating that hate, and who are in many cases simply evil, and using the cover of religion, as has been done so many times in history, by members of all religions on the planet.

What is done in the name of religion says nothing about that religion, except to the extent members of that religion condone and do not oppose it.

I literally envision, someday, Goodness “churches”, with 3 dimensional crosses. My initial thought for the symbol of Goodness was a + sign, where the horizontal axis represented Quantity, which is to say the material components from which form is created, and the vertical line represented Quality, which is the actual form, the information as applied to matter. The Chinese recognized this distinction, which I think was chi and li. No time to look it up at the moment.

Then I realized you have to add change/time to it. What is Good one day can both decay and evolve. A good religion one day, can become a bad one the next, or alternatively it can evolve into a better one. Someone who never changes is on this formulation quite literally two dimensional, a cartoon. One recognizes them by their cartoonish thinking, which is incessant either/or, mine/yours. It is a lack of capacity to interact with people who don’t share your figurative size and shape with anything but force and deception.

In such churches, I imagine people of all creeds coming to together for the purposes of learning Goodness. This entails, in the end, the cultivation of perception. But let us say debate is one tool used. Debate is only as good as the people involved. They have to be able to set aside self importance, and the need to be right. People who can do that, can learn a lot in the process of discussion. People who cannot turn it into a counterproductive agonistic contest, which hardens lines, rather than blurring them.

A religion is a social institution that, in the root of the word, “binds” people together. As a creed without a creed–as the ideological equivalent of Lao Tzu’s empty vessel (you will note that a vessel still has form; I provide mine in the Rejection of Self Pity and cultivation of perseverance)–it can be adopted by Christians, Atheists, Muslims, Communists and anyone else willing to approach life with an open mind, with an openness to evolving as a person and thereby contributing to the evolution of our society.

Starting this is one of my many, many projects for which I never seem to have the time. I do think it’s a good idea, though, and I think there is a hunger for it.

Useful rituals would include shared CrossFit workouts, and maybe adventure racing, both useful in the cultivation of non-whininess, and persistance. People could sit around insulting one another to build tougher emotional armor. Tremendous innovation would be possible.

It hit me today that Liberalism is at root a doctrine for the democratization and decentralization of pain. It is a doctrine in which all members of a society are expected to bear their own crosses, but hopefully help one another do it.

As I discuss here (sorry about the Word file, I think the PDF wasn’t working for some reason), I recognize four types of cultural order: sacrificial, Sybaritic Leftism, Cultural Sadeism, and Liberalism.

In the first, pain is embodied and expressed in a ritual order which is unequal. As an example, I visited the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois this summer. We looked at the museum, and climbed the tallest mound. I read everything they had written, but they somehow neglected to mention they practiced human sacrifice.

It appears the ancestoers of the Hopi were cannibals.

I did a research paper on ancient Hindu rituals, this one called the Agnicayana, and ritual instructions called for the heads of a goat, sheep, chicken, and human to be placed under the altar. It does not seem unreasonable to suppose all were sacrificed. In researching another myth, I learned about an Asian Indian cult that made it into relatively modern times, in which victims were pressed to death under heavy stones. The word Thug comes from Thuggee, which was a group of highwaymen who appear to have viewed their murders in part as sacrifices to the goddess Kali.

Or look at Judaism. Until their Temple was destroyed the second time they routinely slaughted animals on altars, consecrated to God. The word “Holocaust”, by the way, is a Jewish ritual term that refers to a sacrifice in which the offering is entirely burnt.

In my view, these sorts of things stem from the same desire most people feel at some point or other to kick their dog after a hard day at work. Circumstances push and push and push, and these sorts of theater–really, that’s what religious ritual is, and as far as that goes theater is a sort of ritual, when used properly, as the Greeks did–relieve the stress and pressure. It was the equivalent, then, to watching movies today just to watch things get blown up and people shot. Most people stop to look at major car accidents, and there exists today a theater of death that we call Horror films.

This basic dynamic gets manifested over time in class structure, in which somebody is at the bottom. You don’t want to be there. Those are the people everyone else gets to kick. Take the Egyptians. They managed a relatively stable social order for thousands of years. You had the Pharoahs, some sort of administrative class, the soldiers, and the slaves. The last two were likely often largely the same people, except for the leadership and disciplinary function.

Psycholically, I think cruelty is–to use a somewhat crude but hopefully useful word–outsourcing pain. Rather than meet the vicissitudes of life with a tranquil, accepting heart and mind, some people prefer to defer their own pain, by generating the thrill of exacting it on other people and animals. Power is a refuge, to some extent, from pain. It means you do not have to accept to the laws that govern, control, and constrict others. This makes you more free, free from the pain THEY feel, and it makes you feel superior.

In the end, all cultural systems have to answer the questions of what to do, and why to do it. Typically, this entails an understanding of the nature of the universe that is layered on to an understanding of the “nature” of the social universe. The King is God. You are not.

I’m tired, and have to get up early. I’ll try and finish this train of thought soon.

For now, I will end with the thought that all the meaning systems we use make use of pain. Take the craft and calling of the Warrior. Why does he suffer? To win, and because it is his chosen creed. Why do athletes work so hard to play entirely artificial games? Because it provides a sense of meaning. It allows them to transmute work into pleasure, addicting pleasure, and helps them organize their lives.

For my own purposes, I believe the questions “what is objectively true in a metaphysical sense”, and “why do people do what they do” can often be treated separately. I don’t think any religion has a completely accurate take on the universe, but that many come close, and that all of them are at least potentially useful.

I have long intended to paint a bullseye on the ideas Paul Krugman puts out in the public area, and expose them as the retarded lies they are. Yes, I know he won the Nobel Prize. So did Al Gore and Yasser Arafat. What’s your point?

First off, the Keynesian economics which he promotes are fascist. Wait, wait, wait, violation of Godwin’s Law. Well, whose word could we take on what is and isn’t fascist? In my view, we could not do better than the words of Benito Mussollini. If I have any readers, I would hope they would agree.

Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a [purported] Liberal. In fact Mr. Keynes excellent little book, “The End of Laissez Faire” might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it, and there is much to applaud.

We need to remember that Fascism was not a bad word back then. Many of the people around FDR looked to it as a potential model for the use of government power to regulate the economy.

What is Mr. Krugman proposing? Spending some multiple of what Obama has already spent, to stimulate “growth”. In making this claim, he reverts to the myth of FDR as having ended, rather extended, the Recession of 1929.

What happened in the Great Depression? As I see it, the situation is far from complex. Throughout the 1920’s the Federal Reserve intentionally employed inflationary policies, which had the apparently planned effect of strengthening the British pound relative to the dollar, which was a necessary element for them to even pretend to afford their Socialism.

At a certain point, key investors realized that a house built on credit cannot long endure, so they pulled out. None of the J.P. Morgan, or Rockefeller types lost any money in the Crash. Arguably, they initiated it, although it was just a matter of time in any event.

The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, had begun tightening the money supply prior to the Crash, ostensibly to bring stock prices down, and continued it until we had a full blown Depression. The current Federal Reserve chairman shares this assessment.

In my view, though, this was no accident. The same investors who rode the stock up, and sold high, then were able to seize up the innumerable businesses and banks who went belly up in the aftermath. Bernanke, in that link, points to an attack on the dollar:

Central banks as well as private investors converted a substantial quantity of dollar assets to gold in September and October of 1931, reducing the Federal Reserve’s gold reserves. The speculative attack on the dollar also helped to create a panic in the U.S. banking system. Fearing imminent devaluation of the dollar, many foreign and domestic depositors withdrew their funds from U.S. banks in order to convert them into gold or other assets.

. This led to the banking panic we saw in “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

This is the sort of tactic George Soros has used to build up a massive fortune. Once you have enough money in pocket, you can literally affect national economies, especially if you work in tandem with like-minded people.

The set up for the Great Depression, then, was in my view a result of the manipulation of our financial system by Wall Street elites, and possibly foreign interests.

FDR, then, came into office with a Populist mandate. He was the guy who “understood that my boss really is a son of a bitch”. He was genial. He smiled a lot. And he was going to sock it to the fat cats, and take care of the little guy.

And the policies he pursued were deficit spending on projects with artificially high wages, and punitive taxation on the wealthy. The Davis-Bacon wages, put into place under Hoover, have the effect of making it harder for local private businesses to compete for labor. And once the project is done, the effects on the local business environment endure. Dams have no permanent positive effect on economies. Only money invested in BUSINESS infrastructure does.

And FDR combined these policies–future taxation in the form of deficits and current taxation on investor income–with constant denigration of Capitalists and business owners as a class. People did not trust him. Those able to do so moved their money out of the country or sat on it (as they are doing today, with a much more consciously Socialist President). This is why Keynes wanted governmental restrictions on international money movement, so that once the clamp closed, no one could escape.

All of these things put together made what should have been a recession into a national disaster. It didn’t help that we put tariffs on imports, which caused other nations to reciprocate, which killed our exports. This is the part that had the most direct effect on the global economy.

The reality, to the point here, is that the policies that Krugman is advocating not only will not generate permanent jobs, but that they will create an environment in which our currency can and will be attacked by speculators, and devalued. Keynes himself wanted a global currency. Such a thing, of course, is a very useful prelude to the imposition of global government.

It is significant that the two highest ranking Soviet agents of whom we know–Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White–presided over the creation of the two most important international bodies: the UN, for Hiss, and the IMF/World Bank for White. Keynes, of course, played a key role in getting us off the gold standard (making currency attacks easier, as well as inflation easier), and in setting up the World Bank.

Given that Keynes economic ideas were decisively refuted 65 years ago, it is difficult for me to believe Krugman is just stupid.

This means he is a willing tool of national and international Socialists. This is not a necessary conclusion, but a likely one. This further means he is knowingly advocating policies which cause an increase in human suffering, a decrease in liberty, generalized decreases in our standard of living, and in the end the imposition of tyranny around the globe.

I will leave the reader to judge what sort of human being that makes him.

I will have more to say later. I am currently reading a book by George Bernard Shaw where he explains his views. What I expect to see is one to one correspondence between Fabian Socialist objectives, and Keynesian proposals. These would include an abandonment of the gold standard, the progressive nationalization of key industries through the government taking over in measured phases, the denigration of personal savings, direct State control of personal assets, the encouragement of certain multinational corporations to develop monopolies, and bringing as many people as possible onto the government payroll (but only ideologically compatible ones).

Most every culture has this notion of stages of history. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is what I will hopefully be forgiven for calling the myth of Eden. The Greeks had it. The Hindus had it. The Chinese had it.

In some prehistoric, now inaccessible period, everyone was honest. People did good work, paid their debts, and lived tranquilly with one another from birth to death.

In my view, all modern Fundamentalisms derive from a similar myth, namely that back THEN, all the devotees of their faith were pure, nice, kind, devout: BETTER. To return to the Fundamentals is to return to this state. Yet all modern fundamentalisms, when analyzed, are at variance with what little we know about such periods. They are at odds with the universal patterns of history and human life. We see no perfection today, and it is hard to imagine it really existed back then. What we see ample evidence of, on the contrary, is relatively pedestrian exploits getting turned into myths. Rosa Parks becomes someone who INTENDED to spark a civil rights movement, when in fact she was just tired, stubborn, and wanted to stay just where she was, come hell or high water.

Socialism is a sort of inverted myth. It projects into the future the same sort of paradise, with the difference that it does not go to the trouble of learning about the past and facts of human life in building the myth. Somehow, the Marxist Fundamentalists believe, a brighter future can be brought into being simply by destroying everything that they think is bad. It’s been tried. As common sense would have predicted, it didn’t work. There is no Worker’s Paradise in Cuba, there wasn’t in the Soviet Union, and little but horror in China, until ideological deviants started them on the path from pure totalitarianism to a Fascist oligarchy. Since their government plays favorite with “private” enterprise, and pursues consciously national policies, we might even term their system Mercantilist. Their investment here is intended to get our “specie”–money–there. Then they want to knock us off our throne in the currency world.

Be that as it may, I wonder, though. Consider ancient China. They were not densely populated, and they seem largely to have worked their whole lives in the fields, with periodic ritual punctuations, and then died. Let us suppose that our souls are not in fact equivalent to that biological structure called the brain. Given available scientific evidence, this is an eminently tenable hypothesis.

They lived their lives, then died, then lived similar “lives” in the afterworld, making their religions congruent with reality. They did not know to be unhappy or to reject their lives, since they knew no different. “There is no greater curse than desire”, wrote Lao Tzu some 2,500 years ago. Could that be as good as it gets?

On one level yes, on another no. Yes, because we won’t change the facts of life and death any time soon, if ever, and the reality is that the contentments of good work, good rest, and good company is quite sufficient for most normal demands for happiness.

No, because it seems to me that globalization and the advent of science have enabled the possibility of collating the shared knowledges of not just cultures which exist today, but many past cultures, such that we can do better.

Now, Socialists talk about designing better societies. What they have in mind is scientists in lab coats, doing experiments on rats, which is to say “the People”. They do the thinking, then their ideas are imposed by force.

What I have in mind is GOOD IDEAS, that are ADOPTED willingly by people who see their value. This is how organic, qualitatively rich change comes about. And it is quite possible to see good things in our future, if we are able to hold off those demented souls who want to destroy us. First, they commit moral suicide, then like people who commit actual suicide, they want to bring others with them.

Nothing is certain but change, but one can always still hope for the best, expect the worst, and muddle on in that state of confusion and mystery which our lot here.

This is the German word for “alienation”, and the one Marx used to describe the social effects of industrialization. I am going to “riff” a bit, thinking out loud. This will be choppy, perhaps incoherent at times, but hopefully in the end thought provoking. [I just posted this, and will simply comment that I did deal with the stated topic, but so indirectly very few will follow me. So be it]

I’ve been feeling a bit of languor and listlessness lately, which is an odd combination, like when you simultaneously want to nap and fidget. What I do in my mind’s eye, is try to vision a path forward, using the entirety of my perceptual apparatus, my mind, my emotions, my intuition, and even my kinesthetic sense (I feel a sense of being a battering ram, going again and again against the gate of my own stupidity).

Our world is in constant flux. Everything is always moving, but it moves according to approximate patterns, in the social realm, and what seem to be relatively precise patterns in the physical realm, albeit unpredictable ones in the case of formally complex systems, like the weather.

In the social realm I had a vision this morning, just laying in bed before getting up, of our entire society as if in a corporate cubicle farm. Everyone is talking, talking talking. But there are barriers, like 8′ high cubicle walls, throughout the space. At times they get so dense that you can’t move if you are trapped in them. But still people are talking talking talking. Just imagine the proverbial conversation around the water cooler/coffee pot. Did you hear what so and so said? What do you think about x,y,z?

Everywhere islands, cut off from one another perceptually. They can’t see one another. They can’t hear one another. And they don’t notice or care. In my mind, I removed all the barriers, and you could just suddenly feel the air move again, and realize that everyone had been holding their collective breaths. You can ignore things consciously, but our animal nature is never fooled into thinking an unnatural situation is comfortable. As an emotion, an instinct, it just doesn’t have the capacity to plan. That is what our reason is for.

We are decadent. The Chinese are decadent. The Japanese are decadent. The United States is decadent. I say this not because we are lazy, or dishonest, or any of the other traits the reader may associate with that word (although plainly corruption is endemic in China, whether it is nominally legal or not).

What I mean is this: we have lost the Big Picture, our shared meaning systems. Now, self evidently the meaning system of the Chinese has never been quite like our own. They had Confucianism, some Buddhism, some Christianity, some Taoism, some Islam, and some “other”. They have, now, Communism, which is a dream that faded, that was never really more than a fuzzy image anyway. Their new religion, likely, is wealth, as has been America’s for some period of time.

Now, meaning systems layer on meaning systems. One can pursue wealth through the virtues of hard work and thrift. One can value family. One can value religion. One can value personal integrity and honor. All of these sorts of things are in constant flux. Our specific reasons for living and doing vary in importance day to day and hour to hour. I coined the term “Henomoralism” to describe a philosophical position in which different values can be weighted differently depending on circumstance. Pragmatically, I think we do this of necessity daily. I could be at work, trying to make money, but I decided it was better overall if I stayed home to get my feelings and thoughts out. This does not mean I don’t value work.

In using the word decadent, what I would like to point to is the fact that as far as I know ALL human societies have fallen far, far short of the optimal use of their physical and cultural resources. There will have been exceptions to this–perhaps a forgotten African or American Indian tribe–but in general this has been true.

No large human civilization has valued Goodness in an authentic way. They have not sought to maximize happiness tempered by a tragic sense of life as short, and necessariliy filled with struggle, for optimal personal growth.

I look at nations like Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and they are comfortable. By self report, they are happy. A Dane once told me some high percentage of Danes are literally paid to “test” beds. They lie in them for three hours. They get a year off when they have kids. Students don’t have to pay their way through college. All of these things are attractive, and I’m not sure at some point in our future that we Americans might evolve sufficiently morally to consider some of them. Right now, our Democratic Party is absolutely not to be trusted with anything approaching that sort of power. They will not use it wisely or with justice, since they are corrupt. Theirs is the politics of hatred, not integration.

At the same time, I think many Americans would gladly give up the prospect of “making a million” in exchange for the elimination of the petty worries of life, such as unemployment, deep poverty, and paying for their education. What would be the harm in this, if the people running the government were actually benign, thoughtful, and honest?

The traditional conservative argument is that economic growth cannot happen if risk is not rewarded. Risk is not rewarded if the incentive of wealth is eliminated through taxation. Creation happens in Capitalism because it pays well.

Moving past this, though, it seems to me that you only need so much to be happy. Does life really change when you transition from being worth $1 billion to $2 billion. You have twice as much money, are you twice as happy? I do believe that greed, when directed along the channel of honest competition through effort and innovation, is economically beneficial. This is quite clear. This is the root of America’s success. Yet, how much is enough?

The task, it seems to me, is how to build a global human civilization that will endure happily indefinitely. Socialists have in mind the imposition of global tyranny, and economic rationing directed by, well, them. It is the task of Liberals to imagine an alternative. A true Liberal, in my view, is someone who believes that no final, general, unchanging answer to the meaning of life is possible, or desirable.

In my own view, pain is a necessary component of life. The task is not to eradicate it–as the Danes have tried to do–but transcend it. I picture them lying in comfortable beds, having time for a regular “nooner”, sitting around drinking coffee discussing sports and the weather, and yes doing good work when they make it in the office. This is an attractive image, and the question as to whether or not it is economically sustainable is an empirical one. With a reform of our financial system, such as I have proposed, I think it could be implemented globally eventually.

Perhaps this is the next step. I am so used to struggle it is hard from me to imagine another way.

At the same time, something is missing: a spiritual component. Perhaps the best analogy of this I can think of is from Doris Lessing’s book “The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five”. In that book, there are three different dimensions, as I recall, although they may have been formatted as different lands. Zone Three is the Zone of the women. It is the zone of peace and comfort, and beauty. It is the land of the Danes. Zone Four is the Zone of war, of men. It is an ugly world, whose only real beauty is the magnificent discipline and martial valor of the men. We might perhaps there think of the Prussians. A race of enlightened beings called the Canopeans rules both realms, and they give the order for the Queen of Zone Three to move to Zone Four and marry the King there, the General.

Once there, in their first meeting, if memory serves, he rapes her. Over time, they accomodate to one another, and even feel affection for one another (if that sounds implausible, consider the case of Napoleon and Marie Walewska; we forget the sheer difficulty and horror with which our history is filled, and how tough people used to be, and still are in some places). Then one day the word comes that the Queen is to return, and the King instead married to a warrior princess of Zone Five, a wild place I believe modeled on Afghanistan, which Lessing had visited.

There, they were wild. Unlike in Zone Four, where everything was patterned and regimented, and replicated exactly with precision, the inhabitants of Zone 5 were a bit insane. They would make up songs. They would ride places for no reason. They had a song which went in part: “Teach me to love my hunger/Send me hard winds off the sands.”

The Queen, in the meantime, had tried to visit Zone Two, a much more advanced region, and been unable to breath the air. She lacked what Zone Five provided, which was a certain austerity, harshness, wildness, and yet freedom. She had lived in the order of beauty her entire life.

To live a stable, comfortable, ordered life is to stagnate. The realization of this fundamental truth is in my view one of the reasons for the prodigious success of the Harry Potter novels. They have the freedom there to fail. Their social order incorporates the regular risk of death. It expects its members to think, and does not molly-coddle them, which is the opposite of the nanny culture of contemporary Britain.

There is no straight path forward. There is no simple answer. For many Leftists, the thought of revolution meets for them this need for voluntary sacrifice. It gives them a reason to live. That is the point of Leftism: it is not a political system at all, but a very poorly thought out answer to the meaning of life. This is why I label the malignant, Communistic portion of it “Cultural Sadeism”. Note Cultural includes the word cult. It is a way of life oriented around assuming power over other human beings, such that those people lose their freedom and with it the possibility of making their own way to their own version of happiness. They intend, quite literally, to inflict suffering on others, as a way of avoiding in their own lives the reality that pain cannot be eliminated in this world, finally.

Let us posit that man and machine can be welded together, in what I think futurists call the “Singularity”. Does this solve the problem of what to do? If you can do anything you want, does that make your life better or worse? Does it necessarily mean we all get along? Does it eliminate the possibility of ennui and restlessness? Does it, in short, eliminate pain? I don’t think so.

Again: the task is not to eliminate pain, but transcend it, and that is the point and purpose of what we might term spiritual “technology”. Yoga. Meditation. Ascetic practices. Fasting. Serving others.

To build a non-decadent future we need both comfortable beds, and the risk of sudden death, failure, and emotional, physical, and mental pain. This appears contradictory, but I see no way around it.

Musings for this morning. I feel better. I would recommend to anyone who might be reading this that they pick up Lessings “Canopus in Argos” series. I read them over a Christmas break in college, with some rum. They made a lasting impression. The only quality I value which Lessing seems to lack is a sense of humor. I readily forgive her that fault though. George Bernard Shaw had an excellent sense of humor, and yet he wanted to plunge the Earth into a global tyranny. To seek perfection is to not seek sincerely at all.