I was laying in bed this morning and wondering if virtually all the social maladies afflicting us could, from a certain perspective, be laid at the feet of the Bomb and unsound money.
The Bomb of course terrified multiple generations of Americans, and indeed most other developed nations; certainly the old First and Second Worlds both.
We lived in its “shadow”, did we not? The darkness of knowing you could get up any random sunny morning and be blasted into small particles by noon, or die a slow painful death from radiation poisoning and starvation? All with little or no warning? Everything and everyone gone. Cockroaches and Keith Richards.
And I think the cultural effects of unsound money, of inflation–which is to say free money, counterfeit money, to banks–are not properly understood.
Why not live for the moment where your life savings will do nothing but dwindle? This was the message of the 1970’s, which dovetailed perfectly (or infernally) with the Feel Good and Take No Responsibility ethos of that period.
These were my thoughts. As I have articulated often, complex systems are often radically disrupted and redirected by new organizing principles, a new gravity of sorts, which I have termed Tumblers. It’s in my dictionary post on my other site, on the first page with the pigs.
Then it hit me that I myself feel a double disordered attachment, and then it hit me that we need to attach to our CULTURE as well as to our parents (particularly our mother).
This is a BIG THOUGHT. It is important.
I’ve been chasing SOMETHING since I was about 16. Clarity. Peace. Belonging. Brother and Sisterhood. A place and a purpose.
Can you not relate? Of course you can, if you are reasonably thoughtful. As I have said often, the Left really needs to be seen as a Cultural Home. Conservatives, therefore, by definition MUST either have an alternative, or be so disgusted with the hypocrisy and destructiveness of the Left that they exist to oppose it, which amounts to working to prevent–realistically, slow–the continual making-things-worse.
But for what? To what? Any comprehensive political strategy MUST be a cultural strategy, first and foremost. If I quote the dictum (from Andrew Breitbart I think) that “politics is downstream from culture”, then to get new politics you need new culture, don’t you? Yes, of course left wing ideas arise naturally from a corrupted culture.
But what do you want to replace it with? Is this not the salient question?
What I might call Primary Attachment (and these are such obvious terms I may be putting terms which already exist and mean something different to new uses; simply be aware that I am doing this) is that of the child with its parents, particularly feminine care-givers, in a perfect world not just a mother, but an aunt or two, older cousin, and grandmothers on both sides.
We do this poorly in this country, not least because the families are split and atomized. We view having single family homes as a boon, and in many ways it is, but there is also wisdom and benefit to three or four generations remaining under the same roof. It is more stable, more thoughtful and caring in aggregate (in healthy homes at any rate), and more likely to produce happy children, even if perhaps not overly creative and driven ones.
The gaps in our attachment, of course, drive much of the speed, anxiety, haste, churlishness, monomanias, and greed for money and power in our culture. If you want to conquer the world, create unhappy children. It worked for the British. And I wonder about the Mongols. Culturally and psychologically I don’t know enough about them to know why they kept killing, looting, and raping their way around Asia and Europe.
[Cue John Cleese, sitting at the desk where he is at in so many of his best sketches, in a field. With cow farts. That is the next thing in TV, you heard it here first. Smell-O-Vision, which is ONE THOUSAND D. (my mind is a circus).
And I think about Sheol, in the Hebrew Bible (Bible, Biblos, Book: perhaps I should say Talmud or Pentatuch), in the Old Testament (that term is a bit like Hinayana, isn’t it?), it basically amounts to sitting forever doing nothing, in a stuffy undertemperature sauna.
Here is an idea: since they were mostly rotten people back then–the details, say, of Leviticus are not nice–maybe when they died something like that DID happen. But if we create our own realities in the after-life (our true life, of which this life is a short interruption? Always interesting to reframe things), then perhaps our outcomes change.
The evolutions of hell and heaven. That is an interesting thought.]
Alright, so that was my dissociation there. I pivot away when it hurts a bit. I’ve leaving it here, and will point out to you that when you forget why you got up and went to your bedroom to get something, it is that same part of your brain working. I have historically been like this all day every day. That is why working with my hands is therapeutic for me. I’m getting better, though. I am getting longer and longer stretches of being present.
So anyway, my apologies for that mess.
Primary Attachment, then, happens from birth to perhaps age 3, and probably no later than 4. It changes qualitatively as far as what is being taught and reinforced, but the difference between, say, a sociopath, a narcissist, a manic depressive, and a neurotic may depend on where the attunement in their lives dried up. The farther along you go, the more human you are.
Secondary Attachment, as I want to use it, is CULTURAL attachment. This would happen from adolescence to perhaps age 20. This is when you internalize and accept or reject the mores of your society. This is where you decide to accept the life laid out for you, or reject it. This is where you accept sexual mores or not. Sexualizations really is a big part of most people’s lives, even if when it is well handled, as it is in most cultures, physical sex is not something most people spend much time thinking about, even if sexual differences color every part of every day in most cultures. Or if they do think a lot about sex, it is tolerated, as for example in Brazil.
Sex is a primal energy that can go many directions. My point is you need a strategy that is taught, and everyone who accepts that strategy is now a member of a group defined by like belief and like behavior.
Like belief and like behavior is what Rousseau called–in my understanding–freedom. It is of course the opposite of freedom in many respects, and certainly as we would define it, when we are supposed to be able to do whatever we want. There is not yet a “go to work in your underwear” movement, but it is only barely beyond what all of us can readily believe is possible; and of course those working from home often ARE in their underwear. Actually I am right now.
Life is filled with dichotomies. One things makes sense, but so too does another. You want sexual fulfillment, but you don’t want to want to fuck everyone you meet, and you definitely don’t want your partner thinking the same way. Not over the long haul. You want what you want when you want it, but you might easily want the opposite in short order. Passionate sex one day, and steady monogamy (monandry) the next.
Life is flow. It seesaws one way, then the other. Too much becomes too little and vice versa.
What I will propose, though, is this: too much looseness easily becomes rigidity.
Children who grow up without a sense of home and connection are measurable less emotionally flexible and resilient.
Adolescents who grow up without a sense of home and connection with their culture grow up dogmatic and angry.
Psychological health, remember, is FACES: Flexible, Adaptable, Coherent, Energized, and Stable.
Psychologically healthy people do not need dogma, and they don’t need to be right all the time. They are energized by thoughtful debate. They learn. They change. They adapt.
What would the anti-FACES look like? Rigid, Dismissive, Inconsistent, lethargic and lazy, and continually changing.
That looks familiar, doesn’t it?
So how do we evolve a new culture? A better culture?
I don’t think I am speaking an untruth when I say all the INGREDIENTS are there for something good. Most of us are sensitized to vastly greater extent to the sufferings of our fellow humans and the world generally than probably any large mass of humans in world history.
What we lack is PLAY. Play is where the good things happen, where new rituals emerge spontaneously. I had all sorts of rituals I used daily with my kids, which just happened because I enjoyed playing with them, and I am VERY creative when I am feeling good. Stuff just flows out of me in a continual stream.
And play involves openness and trust. Those of course are in short supply.
I give me hope when I speak the truth as I see it. That’s always a bright, good start.
And I have talked about a new cultural form I would like to create, which I have termed the Bohannon. I’m just still a neurotic mess. I don’t want to try and anchor anything like that on me just yet. As I told several people, getting to that place will involve getting in touch with my belly energy, and that in turn will allow me to release the fear I carry in my gut, and when I do that, losing weight will happen automatically. I’m not unhealthy, so there is no imperative to lose weight, but I would be a solid 240, which is my current goal. I’m a bit more than that.
Weight loss will be a sign. As I told someone “you can trust me when I hit 240”. Unspoken–this was in a bar–was that until then I will be that idiot who doesn’t want to go home. I’ve done stupid shit in the past two weeks. I wouldn’t trust me, not when I do what I do. Honestly. I’m smart, but I’m all over the place. The pain still pushes me around. Sometimes I make a stand, and sometimes I run like a frightened rabbit. I can’t stop the water; I have to dry up the river.
I do have a plan, though, and I am executing it, daily.
Long story short, though, when I hit that goal, I am going to try again. I don’t think it will be long now, although I’ve been saying that for some years. I get just a LITTLE better every day, then I relapse, then I make the distance back, see something new, and then integrate the gain. Three steps forward, 4 steps back, three steps forward again. Then two more. Something like that.
I figured out where I got that word by the way. It’s genuinely silly, so I’m not going to share. It still has a nice, round, feel to it, doesn’t it? It doesn’t matter all that much what wood you use for the peg on the wall you hang your hat on.