This probably does happen sometimes. But if you develop emotional agility, which is the practice of feeling, of anchoring emotions in prior sensations which you can tell are mutable, then you need not become stuck. You can allow deep shadows to infect you, and then pass over you. They have no claim on you.
What prompts this post specifically was a meme stating in effect that the problem is not Hillary or Bernie, but that Americans are willing to vote for someone promising free stuff to everyone, and someone who lies nearly as often as she talks, and who by all credible accounts belongs in the same jail cell any senior member of the military would have found themselves in had they done a fraction of what she did. Her crimes are many times more egregious than those of David Petraeus, and he is still paying for them.
This meme, of course, reminded me of my email that got attributed to Vaclav Klaus, in which in 2008 I said the same thing.
Maybe we are past the point of no return. This possibility has to be considered. We are stupid as a people, and propaganda has made open inroads in all our universities–most strongly in our allegedly best universities such as Harvard and Yale–making future growth of effective propaganda likely.
Then I read that technology is decreasing the social skills and particularly the capacity for empathy among our young, which makes them crave propaganda like they crave media, and that odd state between connection and isolation which never really changes or risks anything important.
Maybe all the work I have done, or thought I did, has been for naught. Maybe I have wasted my time. Maybe our destiny is nuclear war, or pestilence, or the triumph of the fascist globalists. Maybe I will end my days in a concentration camp, or worse. Maybe one day the unthinkable will happen, and we will all get pits in our stomachs as we wait for the missiles to hit, or the fall out from a nuclear attack 200 miles away to hit us, changing all of our lives irrevocably.
We will all die. This is a certainty. The Transhumanists do not understand the human part of their equation. They do not and never will reduce life to a mechanical process.
You have to have courage in life, and courage is the proper response to despair, to an honest appraisal of the situation. You have to look out there, see life as it is, realize that bad things have always happened and may well continue to happen, but still, with all this in mind, put on an honest smile and thank God for a good fight. What else can we ask for?
I continue my healing process. I think I’ve kicked my drinking habit, and of course some of the things I was hiding from with it are coming up, and I am having to face them. But I am doing it. It is working. It is not just that I am no longer regularly drinking to excess, but that I don’t feel that compulsion any more. That is huge.
You cannot read history like I do and realize that complacency tends to result in failure, in defeat, in outcomes which are unpleasant, and often irreversible. You cannot fail to realize that falls, when they come, are often rapid, and unexpected by the masses, even if there have been many Cassandras crying to the winds, who did not listen.
For my part, I have felt as much fear as I think it is possible for a human being to fear. Picture your worst fear–spiders, heights, psycho killers, confined spaces–then distill it to an essence, a black oozing essence, then inject it into your arm, or better yet your heart. This is what I have felt night after night for a very long time.
And what I have realized is that we instinctively keep fear at arms length. We don’t want it. We recoil from it. Certainly I did. It was out there, coming at me, infecting me, seeping through my pores, infiltrating every breath.
But there comes a point where you stop pushing it away. It is too tiring, and it always wins anyway. And when you let it come close, you realize it is not uniform. It has textures. It has a pulse. It ebbs and flows. It has an intelligence which can be communicated with. It is a sort of living thing, with which it is possible to develop a symbiotic relationship.
I don’t ever want to be without fear. It is my friend. It warns me when something isn’t safe. I would no more want to be without fear than to be one of these unfortunate souls who cannot feel heat, and who not infrequently burn themselves accidentally. Nothing warns them.
And when you accept it, it can flow through you, but what I am increasingly realizing is that this is the root of courage as well. Fear and courage are not opposites. They are brothers. Courage is the result of no longer pushing fear away. If you do not push it away, you accept it, and in accepting it it loses its power.