Last night, I was dreaming of some super secret, invitation only conference of Democrats where people were giving speeches and there was a general air of desperation.
Some avuncular old man–the old hippy type with kind eyes, gray hair, and brown sports jacket, who you will find is quite capable of instantaneous rage if you cross him by being a conservative, a type I have met and tested in this way more than once–checked my ID, and it didn’t match the database, so they sent me off to get one. I tricked the Asian woman who was vetting the ID’s–I wonder if that is a reference to Chinese involvement in all this–and managed to con her into granting me one, although I knew she would double check it after I left, so I needed to leave soon.
It devolved, as it always does. I was spotted and denounced, and ran. I was eventually shot. The last scene is I was hiding and they sent in my dog to identify me. My DOG recognized me instantly, but hesitated, because it loved me. It, unlike the people, did not want to do the dirty work of evil people.
This is why dogs could not do the work of totalitarians, of the Democrats as they exist today: they are specifically loyal. Each dog on every block has a specific master, and while they may be friendly to others, they have one set of owners, one set of human persons to whom they feel loyal, people who have individual scents, who can be instantly and perfectly identified.
People, in contradistinction, can be made to feel loyal to an IDEA, an idea which can survive any number of masters, and which can cause them to reject any number of actual human persons, including their families, friends, country, community, and their own history.
You will see, in Communist history, periods of nationalism. Stalin called World War 2–for which he left the Soviet Union completely unprepared and which he personally and unmistakable bungled in the early days because of his love for and fondness for Adolph Hitler–“The Great Patriotic War”. The Chinese, too, after destroying countless relics of Chinese culture in the “Cultural Revolution”, have returned, I think, to valuing some aspects of Chinese history and culture.
But this is just propaganda. There is no love for anything but obedience in such political orders, and the patriotism can be turned off just like it is turned on.
Interpreting this dream, first of all, I think such meetings are happening. The old hippies NEED to believe it was not all for nothing, that they have not lived their lives on a lie, that getting the US to withdraw from Vietnam was a good thing, that doing their best to destroy our traditional cultural order was a good thing. They need this, like all of us need oxygen. They cannot end their frivolous and self absorbed lives in a repentance and reckoning they have been avoiding like the plague since their youths.
The costs are lower for those they have seduced, but high nonetheless. What was presented was a coherent and colorful alternative to a life of work, duty, sacrifice, piety, patriotism, eventual old age, and death. What was promised was a world which never arrrives for most, but one filled with excitement, passion, compassion, goodness, decency, love, and deep spirituality. To learn this world is based largely on lies and self congratulation would be a shock to them too. So they want, with all the ardor of young hearts, to BELIEVE in all of it.
For myself, I am split. This is what dissociation is. And the thing with numbness is you can’t feel numbness, so the process of waking up actually feels like falling asleep. It feels like becoming a different person, which in important respects you are. It feels like being a stranger. This of course is what Camus was writing about. He had been through a great trauma, World War 2, but as I have said often, I think adult traumas linger often because of deep, childhood traumas. Perhaps his mother secretly hated and resented his father. Why not covertly take it out on the son? No one would see this, and he would not remember it. But “life” would feel empty to him.
So, seemingly paradoxically, I think entering these dream worlds of terror and flight and evasion is healthy for me. If I can raise the feelings in my body up to the dream world, that is progress. That way I can see them, and seeing is always distancing from feeling.
And I have to ACCEPT the anomie of this modern world, its insanity, its disconnection from everything real.
And the “world”, of course, results from the operation of countless individual consciences and patterns of behavior. What I feel is in me, but it is also generalized.
At root, I feel totalitarian behavior rests upon the unconscious impulse to avoid the darkness in the soul. People who want to avoid what is bad and dark in them avoid it, and thus feed it. If you refuse to name it, it can grow and attach itself to anything, including the rhetorics of compassion and justice.
Christianity, in important respects, provides an excellent cover for evil, in marrying itself to the concept of Love. This means that anything it does is “For Love”, even if it is evil. This is made particularly easy when the Church and the religion are conflated, as in Catholicism. If a priest does it, he does it for the Church, which is for Christianity, which is for love. This, even if he is anally fucking a terrified young boy. This thought world exists, somewhere in our sometimes terrifying universe. And it exists now. The Pope certainly seems to value the Church over protecting the innocent, or revealing and punishing the crimes of the guilty. This, because the Church, overall, “represents” love.
I have said before that true morality rests upon decisions which are local, necessary, and imperfect. True morality rests on fuzzy logic, itself rooted in emotional maturity, which implies mature perception and following emotionally logical compassion.
I might supplement it to call it the “dog test”. Are you close enough that you can smell the other person? Is the stimulus sufficiently strong that some active behavior is required? And will love and devotion still be in your heart at the end?
No Leftist politics meet these criteria. As I keep saying, rhetorics of compassion and justice can be EASILY subverted merely by making the group claiming those as values synonymous with the work itself. Simple. Poof. You have Goodness in a bottle, a “get out of the necessity of thinking for free” card. You have Boolean Logic. You one side and the other, and logically, if one side is completely right, the other side must be completely wrong.
At the end of the day, we cannot solve our political problems without emotional growth among all the members of our society, without, specifically, people recognizing that life can be inherently and unavoidably hard, and that all of us have darkness in our hearts, and need to do the work of processing it. Being “nice” is not good enough. Being politically active for “the good guys” is not enough. Feeling anger at injustice, both real and imagined, is not enough.
You have to see what is in front of you, feel it, hear it, taste it, smell it, touch it. You have to be in connection with it.
And it CHANGES. Perceptions are not objects. They are dance moves. What was good enough yesterday has lost its freshness today, and will be wilted in two weeks. People want to create perceptions, frame them, hang them on their walls, and be forever after forgiven the necessity of forming new ones.
Life, and perception, are coterminous. They are the same thing. To be alive is to be open to new experience. Living is not trying to see the same things in the same ways, but to see old things in new ways. This is growth. This process makes emotional and spiritual growth inevitable, unstoppable.
Well, this will do for this morning. I need some coffee, and I’m out, so I need to go get some.
Edit: this is not a metaphor: I really am out of coffee. I’m a Peets partisan, and use the pour over method, because it is a fantastically easy way of making one (large) cup of coffee. When I used to make pots, I would drink the whole damn thing, and that’s no good.