There is an old Zen saying: at first I was just chopping wood. Then I was not chopping wood. Then I was chopping wood again. Something like that.
When are you not chopping wood? When you are chopping someone’s face.
Look at the violence in our world. Look at our media, at Game of Thrones, the Walking Dead, one of the top three movies at all times.
When I look at traditional societies, they all beat their children. They want them to grow in specific ways, to inhabit and incorporate specific behavior patterns based on specific templates based upon specific values.
Because these specific values are not compatible with those of other groups and tribes, conflicts of all sorts tend to emerge. War has been a continual fact for all of recorded history. “Only the dead have seen the end of war” is an old saying.
Now, trade, and commerce work to mediate tendencies towards conflict, and among intelligent people, the goal of wealth alone works to keep the peace, but what tends to happen is that if any one civilization becomes wealthy through trade, they are conquered by an inferior civilization with greater bloodlust. A good example is the conquest of Canaan by the the proto-Israelites.
What I am feeling within myself as I calm down is warring factions within my psyche. It is all, or largely, unconscious. There are two paths I have always been trying to take simultaneously. One is conformity to my parents wishes, which was reinforced through physical and emotional punishment, and buttressed with intellectual structures which I have since cast aside. The other is a path towards personal growth and back to God. The two are incompatible, and they both exist at a root level. And I cannot find peace until they have made peace.
Long ago, whenever I created my other website, Goodnessmovement.com, I noted that Freud, in writing of “Civilization and its discontents”, spoke only of the repression of negative emotions. To counterbalance this I created the notion of Qualitative Repression .
That was not quite ten years ago. Here is what I would say today: TRUE individualism is also unacceptable in most social contexts. A genuine aspiring mystic, following a path which unfolds only one step at a time, is also unwelcome. Why? Because it activates latent energies within people which are exactly analogous to those I find troubling me every night.
As I calm, though, I am contacting these energies with greater and greater specificity. It is astonishing and very interesting how much I feel every day. Every moment contains revelations which I cannot speak when I am able to remain open for any amount of time. And to be clear, I am not speaking of God or the future: I am simply speaking of available affective possibilities, of very specific sensations and qualities of internal imagery.
But all of these things take time. I have structured my life in such a way–and sacrificed the outer trappings of success in this country to do so–so that I can support all of this. But most people can’t. Their emergences just look weird, if they happen in public.
Most people are operating at the social level equivalent of the hive mind. They are not insects, obviously, because they can think and reason up to a point. They can explain what they are doing and why, but they can’t REALLY explain what they are doing, why, or who they really are, or who they might be if they did not have all this programming with them. This is what people speak of when they say people are asleep. Gurdjieff, as one example, used this term often.
Sometimes when I am out in public, wandering around, I think of Lao Tzu’s comment that he is different, that he is nourished by a different mother. And I ask myself: should I try to be more like other people, or should I do my own thing, and wait for them to come to me? What do you think makes more sense? I think the latter. What I see on display, among people who follow the orthodox marching orders, is confusion, anxiety, emotional superficiality, greed as compensation, sexual pleasure with–I suspect–very little sexual satisfaction (if Mick Jagger couldn’t get there, who can?), and the sadness of feeling alone and forgotten, even among people. This is not everyone, obviously. Many people are satisfied with their lives, and these people make civilization continue well. But where are they going? In our current world, if we do not build something new, everything is going to come falling down. That is what I feel, and that is the root aim of those doing their level best to topple our civilization and its contents down like an old statue.
What I feel, is that–in the presence of unprecedented freedom and opportunity–many of our youth are becoming atavistic, and longing for a time and place where there was, as they conceive the thing, order and where their emotional confusion was answered with the discipline they never received at home, with the clear structure they never received at home. They want fascism, to deal with their moral and emotional confusion, and for the same reason the original fascists wanted it.
And actually, that opens an interesting question. I have not read the several propagandists for Communism who looked for and found sexual repression in fascism–to which they wanted to provide as an antithesis their own countless and emotionally empty couplings of various sorts–but I do wonder what the sexual lives of these Antifa fascists looks like. What is it like, not knowing in advance if the woman you are courting has a penis, and who expects it not to matter in the least? What is it like, feeling seething anger coupled with functional helplessness–as I have noted, many of them seem to live with their parents–when it comes to what is at its root an act of joy and cocreation? I suspect sex is not very important at all to many of these people. Gender is, obviously, and gender identity, and all these unnatural abstractions, but not the physical act of intimacy, much less the emotional act of being vulnerable. This is where the anger comes from.
So as usual I am making a short story long. Here is what I feel: to go to the next level as a human being, you have to cast off the webbing of sociality, and to do so you must privilege your own perception relative to that of anyone else. And we must grant this privilege to everyone. This is the essence of the creed of Individualism.
Our curse, of course, is that in the middle of this bounty of freedom, we lack both the tools for authentic personal exploration, and more importantly, the social sanction for it.
I FEEL, I feel, the anxiety that underlies the nervous energy which underlies our social order. I feel the compulsions to go shopping, to eat out, to fuck, to drink, to work hard, to dream of more and more stuff, and vacations which are mainly of use as forms of conspicuous consumption.
I will leave it there for now. I am wandering again. I have been having very odd–but aren’t they all?–dreams lately, but highly useful ones. I am on the scent of something good.