I visited a Zen Monastery, and in the pursuit of Beginner’s mind, they all follow very precise routes of behavior every day, doing the same things at the same times in the same ways, every day. They meditate the same way, at the same times, and I could not resist the sense that the content and quality of the meditations varies little as well.
This is one thing I love about Kum Nye, is that there are hundreds of movements and patterns, and you are encouraged to never repeat ANY of them in exactly the same way, if possible. How can you feel the waves around you, when you insist you must remain perfectly still? We live in an endless ocean. Perfect quiet is impossible, even if we can perhaps float like sea otters sometimes on its endless swells, quite content.
But we need all need this feeling of reinforcement, of reward. In my own home–and there are many like me–I was early on often punished for doing the wrong thing, but rarely rewarded for doing the right thing. Both parents were emotionally detached, as long as I was not blatantly misbehaving. They were in their own worlds. They still are. I can’t bridge this gap, not in this lifetime.
But I can’t help but feel, at this moment, that a root cause of the many variants of fascism, with Communistic Fascism being ascendant at the moment, is that people need to be complimented, rewarded, made to feel good, as a result of some action they can control. And Communism is all about rewarding compliance and conformity. Do what they say, and you are guaranteed an attaboy and a pat on the back.
Likewise with the Nazis. If you were standing there, in that mass of people on the parade ground at Nuremburg, I think it was, you felt proud. You were told to feel proud. You were told you had made exactly the right decision for the right reasons. You belonged. You were valued. You were important.
This is the dopamine feeling, as I understand it. We all secrete it, but only when the organism feels the need to reward a behavior, and this, in turn, is learned. If we do not learn it in childhood, if we are not given a set of behaviors about which we are taught we can reliably feel good–such as being law abiding, pious, and hard working–then we seek them out in other places, or find ourselves in any of the countless addictions, which do the same job, poorly. It is like, say, a sex addict, gets one tenth of a hit of dopamine every time he or she scores, and this is never enough. This is what drives the addiction. Someone in a satisfied relationship, in contrast, might get 2 hits of dopamine every time they have sex, making frequent sex unnecessary.
But perhaps we could view the Communistic Fascism, the conformity, the painted shields and uniforms, the pride in “standing up” to people who, in general, are puzzled as to what the problem is, and who certainly have not been violent, can be viewed as the failure of our culture to provide templates to these kids–and the kids who biologically grow to be adults–for how to feel self esteem and pride in healthy ways. It is, perhaps, that simple, at least in America, at this time.
A story: I was on an airplane a week or two ago that was seriously late. I was never quite clear what the exact problem was. Anyway, we were about an hour late into our major connecting airport, and the pilot asked that anyone who did not need to make a quick connecting flight stay seated to allow those in a hurry to get off. The guy sitting next to me was telling everyone that he had ten minutes to catch his flight, but nobody was listening. We were in the middle of the plane, he wasn’t speaking very loudly, and I think most people, like me, figured anything less than half an hour in a large airport was close enough to warrant standing up and getting off. So 40 people crowded the aisle in front of us.
While we were standing there, some 20-ish guy, who looked very Portland or Seattle, although of course he could have been from anywhere, was standing facing backwards. He first asked two Filipino looking guys if they had a quick flight to catch. They said yes. One looked at me, then looked back, like “who the fuck is this guy?” Then, apparently having decided not to hassle the non-whites when he has a white male clearly at hand, he looks at me, and asks me if I had a flight to catch. I said yes, it’s in about 25 minutes, and I have no idea where it is. Then he says, “this guy only has ten minutes” or something like that, and I tell him I am not the problem. The problem is the 40 people in front of us. Then he makes some sort of snide comment I did not quite catch about the tshirt I was wearing, and I look at him, and he looks at me with this haughty smirk on his face. Then I say to him: “Look, I’m not slowing anyone down. We are all tired. There is no need to be a dick”. He replies “exactly”, which I am quite sure he thought was quite clever.
As expected, when the aisle cleared we moved very quickly. It was literally no more than two seconds between me and the guy behind me. I made no difference.
But a minute later, as I am looking for the Departures screen, he walks by me and says “see, you could have caught your flight”. I can’t resist commenting “you are a Democrat, aren’t you?”. Unbelievably, he replies “I am a kind soul”, then flips me off, which he undoubtedly took to be a mike drop.
Here is the thing: he got off right after me. He had no way of knowing if there not more people in the back half of the plane who were in a similar–or now worse–predicament. This did not occur to him, seemingly. And I am very sure it was very important to him to be close enough to me to point out to me his moral superiority, for waiting two seconds longer, but not five minutes longer, to be sure all the truly close connecting flights got off.
What he did is make a meaningless gesture which brought him dopamine, which brought him a feeling of “job well done”, which brought him a feeling of moral superiority and self esteem, all bought at the feeling of contempt and anger he directed pointlessly at me. Nobody really won in that situation except him.
And of course he was able to tell all his friends about this evil conservative he met, how we are all dicks, all while again trumpeting his seriously superior compassion, despite the fact that he almost certainly delayed someone else farther back as much as I did.
This sense of superiority is really, truly, ugly. I won’t say I find it intolerable–I have been dealing with these sorts of assholes for many years–but it makes me fear for the future. What I saw, looking in his smug face, was indifference to real suffering, an absolute rejection of moral autonomy and true personal responsibility, and a complacency to all the real crimes people like him have committed and continue to commit the world over.
He didn’t need results. He didn’t need to know he accomplished meaningful good. All he needed was the ability to contrast himself with someone he asserted did not “care” the way he did. This act alone sufficed for his purposes.
And this suffices for the Democrats as a whole. They don’t need results. They reject accountability. It is sufficient for them to hate us.