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It’s strange to think about, but so much of the quality of our lives depends on how we approach our work. Do we do it with violence, or care? Are our days characterized by haste, followed by indolence, or by persistently taking that extra second or minute needed to actually interact fully with a task? When doing pullups–to take an example from my morning–you can just struggle through them, then move on; or you can feel them all the way through, and watch and feel yourself moving. You can even detach emotionally from struggle, and achieve aesthetic pleasure in ANYTHING.

When I deadlift I always relax completely before doing the movement. I don’t tighten up until the moment I apply pressure. And even though it IS a struggle, I don’t process it that way. My BODY is struggling. I’m just the one who gave the orders.

Surely living well is some combination of detaching from unpleasantness, and giving in fully to the pleasureable? And would not, then, work well done be full engagement with the task, focusing both on the abstraction of work well done, and the present reality of details which can be unfolded in infinite and pleasingly unexpected ways, in even the most mundane of chores?

These are, at least, Buddhist ideas. The more I grow as a person, the more I realize the Buddha did nothing more or less than state the obvious. That it wasn’t obvious to people then, or people now, is simply due to Mara, the demon of stupidity, who you can believe in, since he has got you too. Yes, you.

One other thing: William James made the point that no two perceptions can ever be precisely the same, since our brain is in constant flux, and collecting countless (i.e. we can’t count them, even now) impressions, so that the brain which sees someone or something one day, is not the same brain that saw them yesterday, or will see them tomorrow.

Why should we be humble? Let me continue to count the ways.

Our existence is our perception. Who we are, ultimately, is defined by how we choose to process the world: what we pay attention to, in particular. I don’t believe in “will”, per se. What there is is focus. You can be said to have “will”–and manifestly many people do–when you focus on one course of action, and are able to discard all other courses of action, as for example quitting.

I wonder, though, about everyday perception. When you are with your lover, is that different than when you are standing next to the coffeepot, talking about the last American Idol? If you an ambulance driver, is your experience picking up victims of fatal car crashes necessarily different than the experience of a clerk processing, say, accident claims?

If we posit that the brain is some sort of wondrous machine (it is, clearly: the open question is in how much more “Mind” may consist, if anything), then all emotions are open to you all the time. They are just neurochemical transactions.

On the level of pure awareness, can it not be that jaded ambulance drivers lose any qualitative reaction to dead bodies? Can it not be that some clerks find filing exciting? Why is that impossible, other than that most people resent it?

I’m listening to Enigma’s 1990 (if my Roman numeral translation is right) cd. Tape, actually. I’m always a bit behind the times. This RECORD–can I say that?–has long seemed to me to stand well for what I have termed Sybaritic Leftism, and even Cultural Sadeism. They start with monastic hymns, which are rendered quickly ironic by modernistic beats, and hedonistic (onanistic, as Bloom would likely view it) beats, which quickly explicitly acknowledge Sade, as the Godfather of the loss of self restraint. Then you get the end of the world, then a desire to return to belief.

Anyway, that is what got me thinking about qualitative gestalts/paradigms. They tried to create something DIFFERENT than what everyone else was making. Not just new lyrics, or rhthyms, but a blending of mythic themes, with modernism. Of the sacred, with confusion.

And I heard something like that on the radio yesterday, while traveling. They included the gongs of a church, an Islamic muezzin, and several other types of music from around the world, with what were actually very banal lyrics, repeated over and over. Something like “love is deeper than death; jealousy comes from the grave”. Not quite right, but close. It felt like poetry, but it wasn’t. It was a riff.

How do we return to the “rivers of belief”? These musicians seem to sense a loss, while they are speeding it along.

Life is interesting. I never get bored with the irony in which we bathe daily.

I should add I’ve answered that question often, so I’ll leave it be for now.

Where did this idea come from that a good life is one in which you spend 8-10 hours a day half-assing something, then the rest of your waking moments drinking and/or watching TV? It may be that few would consciously argue that is a good life, but people complain about work, and when they are done, they vegetate, all too often for 3-4 hours, in front of inane programming. This is, I think, reasonably typical.

I don’t get TV in any form. I have an antenna, but never bought the converter box. And I forget that I don’t have it. Sometimes when I am travelling and stuck in a hotel room I will watch it, and there is no doubt some programs are worth watching. I saw an excellent one on Buddhism a couple weeks ago.

But what is wrong with not only accepting but being happy in the idea that you can spend 8-10 hours doing good, useful work somewhere, then another 4-6 developing your body, mind and spirit? People used to work 12-16 hour days all the time. Were they less happy than us? Research seems to be clear that most people are actually happier at work than they are at home, even though the crappy ideas about work most of us have been fed frequently blind people to that fact.

Work is dignified. It is honorable. It is creative. Ultimately, the type and quality of work you do is illustrative of who you are choosing to become. It shows your character, or lack thereof.

I don’t doubt that when we die, some of our lazy days come to mind, but I don’t think you can ever fully appreciate a lazy day without earning it with a lot of hard days.

And as far as that goes, work need not be unpleasant. If you take an approach to it of walking steadily, rather than running in bursts, then pausing to catch your breath, you can cover many, many enjoyable miles.

It seems to me that intelligence is best defined by your capacity to efficiently obtain the results you desire. In school, of course, this is a high test score. In life, it varies widely.

If two people desire love, that person who seeks and maintains it best, is smartest. If you are building a shed, that person is smartest who does it best and quickest. If you want a beautiful painting, that person who produces the best one is smartest. If we are dealing with music, it is the person most capable of playing it well, writing it well, or even appreciating it, if that is the task.

Clearly, IQ matters. You can’t be a doctor with a low IQ. (although that may change, with smart people choosing to pursue other careers). At the same time, there are so many realms of human endeavor where factors along the lines of “emotional intelligence” make the difference that it is foolish for ANYONE to grant themselves the “ontological status” of smart.

In fact, I reject the term genius for anyone. Perhaps genius at times, or genius in a subject at their best, but no one is smart in everything all the time, and to the extent we believe this myth, we reject the scepticism which should attend what I term the “Cult of the Expert”.

I think it might be useful to differentiate these three terms. Marxism was an economic theory. I saw WAS, since Marx offered a scientifically formated prediction–a hypothesis–which was falsified by history. He was wrong.

Specifically, he predicted that wealth, being finite, would continue to concentrate in the hands of a few, impoverishing thereby the many, who of course could not be expected to put up with it forever. Revolution, according to this hypothesis, would NECESSARILY occur in the nations where this wide gap first emerged, namely the already industrialized nations.

Yet, in Russia, 85% of the population lived on farms. Only perhaps 10% of the population, on the high side, was even remotely in the “proletariat”. Everyone else fed themselves and their families–and feudal lords–with no interference from anyone. Lenin tricked them into supporting him by promising them land. Mao did the same thing, while contradicting Marxist ideas even more dramatically by STARTING in the countryside. He was helped greatly by leading an effective anti-Japanese guerilla war, and, again, by promising the peasants the sun, moon, and stars.

What needs, therefore, to be added to this mix is Lenin’s notion of the “professional” revolutionary. Marxist doctrine held that the revolution was inevitable, and could not be hastened or forced. Lenin taught that a small cadre of people dedicated to cynical deceptiveness, ruthlessness, and above all a PLAN, could take power, in the NAME–not the reality–of Marxism. Hence the frequent use of Marxist-Leninism, which is an oxymoron.

Leninism=Communism, which is a POLITICAL form, not an economic one. It is one which uses POWER backed by and often signified by intentional terror to cow the masses into silent compliance.

Socialism is a CULTURAL form. It is a moral claim that inequality is wrong, and that the MEANS of centralized power–there is a continuum here, but the intent remains the same–is how you fix it. It deduces from the Mercantilist fantasy that wealth is limited, that wealth concentrated is necessarily wealth stolen, from which it rationalizes the theft of property by the State. It provides the rhetorical cover for totalitarianism, which is why socialists are utterly unable to condemn the abuses of Cuba, China, and North Korea. As long as the only crime is inequality, then anything that addresses it is moral.

It seems to me important to distinguish these two terms. The first is a description of a CULTURAL phenomenon, and the second of an ECONOMIC system. Consumerism is effectively a doctrine of Physical Hedonism, in which happiness is the goal of life, and is to be found in the acquisition of external objects, where human beings, more or less, are to be understood as well as objects, with prices.

Me, I will never have a trophy bride, since I can’t foot the bill. Nor will my own self esteem climb as a result of driving to work in an expensive car, and driving home to a “castle” situated with other “persons of quality”. I refuse to put a value on myself, based on my material success. I’m not opposed to money–I would like a lot of it–but if I were rich, it would simply enable me to pursue more aggressively the projects I pursue now part-time, and some of which–like some experiments in biology I have in mind–that I simply can’t afford the parts and pieces for.

I went to see “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” yesterday. It was morally appalling, and I found myself in vague discomfort start to finish–with only a few laughs to punctuate it–but found myself pondering one of the characters, a 7th grade girl we first see reading Ginsberg’s Howl. She was the prototypical outsider. You see them in every school. They are of above average intelligence, and when they reach a certain age, they realize our world is in large measure mad. We have rejected the sacred demands of traditional culture, and worked feverishly to insulate ourselves from all material discomforts, and have in general seemingly chosen willful superficiality over the dignified struggles of yesteryear: in war; in fighting for your family; in sincere and deep religious devotion; in dedication to your community.

Those who notice this almost invariably gravitate to the counter-culture, and leftist politics. Why? Socialists claim they oppose the vapidity of Consumerism. And people like Ginsberg are qualitatively different. They seem deep. Suffering seems deep.

Yet, this is only partially true. Suffering in the pursuit of a difficult end, based on self chosen principles, creates depth. Pain, by itself, does nothing. It breaks you down into a nullity, then you do drugs, and lose your mind, as did the “best minds” of Ginsbergs generation.

Once you accept the basic notion of Quality–which I define as richly textured latent information–then you can accept the idea of movement towards or away from quality. To this, though, I would add that you can have qualitatively positive movement, and negative movement. Your personality, in my own terms, is an emergent property of the self organizing nature of human consciousness, oriented around principles you choose.

You can move towards Evil, which is to say, towards self pity, resentment, anger, hate, pleasure in causing others pain; and you can move towards Goodness, which is to say towards the rejection of self pity, persistence in the face of difficulty, and growing awareness of light and the possibility of joy, which leads to love, and a genuine desire to alleviate the pain of others, and to take pleasure in so doing.

Ginsburg moves you towards self pity, and the rejection of transcendance, and he is the rough direction most people go who want to reject Consumerism. This is unnecessary.

Capitalism is simply a method. Its means are defined by what people want. If people want local businesses, and genuinely rich diversity of options, they will get them. Capitalism will FOLLOW wherever the people lead. If you reject a life based on consumption, then Capitalism will adapt.

To claim that the homogenizing, maternalistic Nanny State will correct the maladjustments of suburbia is stupid. It is a fundamental misundertanding of what is being proposed.

I am a conservative Liberal. This is absolutely different from social conservatism. I want for all people the capacity for them to lead the lives they want to lead. I think the evidence is clear that most groups are happiest living with their own kind. Black people are happier living with other black people. They understand one another. They know what to expect. Mexicans are happiest living with other Mexicans. White Lutherans are happier with white Lutherans. Etc.

I see a future in which we accept gay cities–where everyone is gay. And Christian cities, where everyone walks to the same church. We have room for Muslim towns, with prayer towers, and a Muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. They simply need to accept, in writing, word and deed, the primacy of our Constitution and laws. They cannot exact “cruel and unusual punishments”; they cannot ban “blasphemy”. If they want to priviledge Allah above our national government, they join in that most Christians. As long as they follow our laws, and do not encourage anyone to break them, this is acceptable to me.

This pattern can be continued. My own vision for a post-consumeristic future is one in which we decouple the currently overweaning Federal Government from the States to a great extent, and sort of atomize into countless groups, living in small communities, how they want to live. Drugs should be able to be legalized; and prostitution; and abortion should be able to be banned: all in some places, not others, depending on local tastes and mores.

What ties us together? Goodness, as I have defined it, and as someone smarter than me may redefine it in the future.

Currently, we suffer so much from loneliness and social isolation. This is the clear, empirically verifiable result of multiculturalism, which aims not to protect and reconcile difference, but to eradicate it outright, regardless of what the fools pushing this agenda claim.

None of this pain is necessary. None of it.

In my own terms, the proper purposes of art are to help foster the rejection of self pity, to sponsor and model persistence, and to cultivate perception, particularly the ever present possibility of joy and trascendance. The materials that interest me personally most are light, color, and movement, particularly the movement of water.

Many different visions came to me this morning. For example, you could have a clear walled building situated in an advantageous position relative to the sun, filled with glass tubes, through which water is running. What makes water interesting when it moves is not smooth motion, but interrupted motion. This creates all sorts of interesting patterns and shadows, which could be emphasized with the proper type of floor, and perhaps strategically placed walls. You could introduce, in an elaborate cascade of sequenced pipes, different colors. Suddenly the water could turn purple, in a wave; later, yellow; then 5 colors could be introduced in different parts of the room, perhaps coupled with lights at the bottom or tops of the tubes.

I like days when the weather is “moody”, when the clouds are on the move, and the sun is popping in and out. To this arrangement you could add, in addition to natural wind–I see this being open to the elements–bursts of artificial wind, perhaps filled with alternating, interesting odors, like vanilla. In the spirit of Harry Potter, perhaps every so often you could have an unpleasant smell, like cow manure, which would disappear soon enough. Learning to accept the occasional unpleasantness is an essential element in living well. After warning people, you could make the floor purposely uneven, so that some care must be paid to your footing.

I also saw a pyramid of bottles, with water being sprayed on them from above, in which various rainbows would appear often. Perhaps you could have hoses for attendees, so they could spray one another. You could have bright full spectrum lights shining from the floor, so they could create their own rainbows. People could purchase colored waters, and you could have smaller fountains, with narrow tops, on an angle, so they run downhill at say 45 degrees, with many interruptions, and you could pour the colored water on it, and watch it flow. You could make the fountain surface clear, with light underneath, to enhance the effect. Again, the water could have an odor. Every so often it could simply rain, so that everyone got soaked. You would of course warn them of this first.

Mild risk and mild invasions of “abnormality” into your space are cathartic. Consider the act of Gallagher, who would always smash a bunch of watermelons in his act, such that the first few rows got wet. Or the Blue Man group, which as I understand it, has the audience pull a fabric over their heads.

We see often in museums the self destructive rage of the “epater la bourgeoisie”–the desire to “shock the middle class”–that acts out of nothing more creative than self loathing, which leads to resentment of others who are content, anger at them, and ultimately hatred. This is counterproductive. This sort of thing is NOT generative of anything but decline, even if the decline often cloaks itself in the mantle of outwardly progressive rhetoric. The real intent of Communists, always, is to destroy what exists, in favor of something they cannot create. This makes it a nihilistic doctrine, from which no beauty can be expected.

Yet, I do see value in disrupting complacency. In fact, no complacent person can be fully Good, in my own terms. If they are not engaging creatively with life, then they are decaying. The value of art is in supporting this intelligently, and purposefully.

Bon (my view) mot: Morality imposed is morality denied.

It seems to me the principle purpose of morality is the definition of character, which is your identity. An identity is that part of you that persists in the face of storms, setbacks, inconveniences, and all sorts of troubles.

We can accept, with the Buddha, that life is suffering, by which he meant both pain and constant vague dissatisfaction. Meaning is the sense of transcending those things, and of fashioning from them joy and contentment. Morality is a tool in the service of the creation of meaning.

Extending this, all the Buddha really said was “look, you’re all vaguely unhappy, and you accept this because you don’t know any better. I have a better way that solves the problem.” That better way was his particular “technology”, but the whole project arises from the simple recognition of a problem–unnecessarily diminished quality of life–and the realization that solving this problem is possible.

The benefits of his technology–the 8 fold path, which in roughly the same form can be found in all religions–were realizable even for atheists. You did not need another life in an astral body to live better NOW using his ideas. This is the point of morality: it is the pathway to transmuting pain into pleasure. It is the reason we suffer voluntarily, and don’t complain about it.

One could perhaps even speak usefully of “Moral Hedonism”, which is the term one could use for the pleasure that follows living an honorable and ordered life. Even Buddhists readily admit the need for the desire to achieve Enlightenment.

To this, I would contrast “Physical Hedonism”, which rejects all non-physical forms of pleasure, and thereby rejects the possibility of moral transcendence, or the necessity of discomfort in this life. Since this is manifestly a counter-factual position, it leads necessarily to INCREASED suffering and discomfort. That our rates of depression and anxiety disorders have been steadily increasing in the last 100 years can be attributed directly to our general cultural embrace of Physical Hedonism, which of course is the dominant theme in what I term Sybaritic Leftism, or soft Socialism.

When you give your all, and find more, then you have grown.

This is what Niezsche was trying to say with his “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, but of course I like my version better. N. was someone, in my understanding, who hid from the world while constantly proclaiming his superiority to it.