Things are going well for me, if also busy.
A key insight I had recently is that the notion of emotional maturity appears to me to be both necessary and sufficient to explain our present political world. I will explicate this at greater length when time and available emotional energy intersect, but will note broadly that immature people tend to see their problems originating outside themselves, tend to therefore blame others, to see the world in inflexible black and white (literally) ways, and are always on the verge of aggression when anyone questions them in any way. Is this in a nutshell not fully descriptive of left wing social, rhetorical, political and dare I say ritual practice? Yes. My answer is yes.
Mature people hold themselves accountable, try to be responsible, learn from their mistakes, are open to nuance and special circumstance, and are always happy to try and negotiate differences peacefully.
This is not politics speaking. This is orthodox developmental psychology.
This prism is, in my view, quite useful. It both explains our present and offers an articulable path forward that is non-violent and apt to lead to optimized outcomes for all concerned.
That is todays comment. Here are notes I’ve left myself in the past week or two:
Notes 2
What sort of world do I want to live in? One I don’t fear. Can I not choose to live in that world today? This very moment?
Righteous indignation easily shades into chronic indignation, them chronic anger, and eventually decontextualized chronic hate.
I think meditation is beginning when the pad feels spacious and time ample and generous.
Maybe I need to invent adulting or maturity classes.
Post on maturity. The primary political demand of the Left is that no one should ever have to learn to negotiate any difficulty of a sort or severity they did not choose, as regards both the people protesting themselves and those they are patronizing in both sense of the word. Their socialism is a fantasy world in which they are protected from the consequences of all their decisions and the world rendered fully safe.
Feeling is an abstraction of mixed sensations. It is perhaps the result of a catchmenf area that can and does go different ways.
Feeling and releasing emotions reduces their compulsive power, both by obvious pushing, if they are conscious, and subtle long term manipulation if repressed. Press is out; repress is in. Interesting.
Eating good quality, tasty food in moderation is a gesture of balance. Imbalance is driven by unmanaged compulsions, by winds, by pushing.
Working smarter IS working harder for most of us, but amounts to multiplying outcomes with the same effort.
If you grow up rejecting adult authority this is functionally a rejection of adulthood itself. The counter-culture has itself become a de facto movement of infantilism and refusing to mature and individuate, because adulthood and adult resppnsibility in large measure is what was rebelled against. Children want both a perfectly safe world—one made safe for them by others—and freedom from personal accountability. Government obviously has come to serve, both conceptually and practically, in loco parentis. But government does not have a body or soul. It cannot teach empathy or compassion, dignity or courage. There can be no true bonds of mutual affection and loyalty. Choosing an abstraction as a parent cannot but dilute and bleach people into flat superficiality, banality, and insipid harmlessness outside of a mob. The mob then becomes a means to personal existence. And mobs do not need to be physical. Most of them arent. A mob is participation in a mass formation, most of which are expressed and lived now on social media.
Any group of people motivated by fear and shame will sooner or later commit atrocities.
In the Tao Te Ching he does not counsel to “pay as much attention to the end as the beginning” just because it is good advice, but because to do otherwise implies impatience, which is rejecting Now. It is necessarily an Unacceptance, a desire to transit stonelike and senseless through moments in time.
Would I not be happiest if I was as happy at work as at rest? Lessening that resistance would be smart.
You cannot cross a river until you come to the river. Likewise, you cannot dispel feelings and tensions until you become aware of them.
I was a pallbearer at my own funeral.
Emotional strength is very related to tension and anxiety in terms of what I can express in the world. A highly sensitive or anxious (not nevessarily the same thing) person may feel more fear driving a car than s good soldier in war. Both may express the same will. But the OUTCOMES are very different.
All work and play, stillness and noise, all experience, is Kum Nye if we enter into it and flow with it. Kun Zhi is all our energetic habits that blind us, that tell us there is only one way to do things, and that rote repetition is our friend. The thirst for stasis is an alliance with death.
The world is so large and its problems so complicated that it is almost inherently productive of fear and confusion. Left wing propaganda uses the fact that people are confused and afraid to offer a simple way out by saying Trust Us and it will all be fine. If that burden is ever placed once on them it will require an almost superhuman effort to reshoulder that burden. You have traded anxiety—usually INTENSE anxiety—for relative peace. And obviously you will easily hate anyone who questions or threatens that peace. This explains a lot. A mass formation happens easily when there is a lot to fear, and obviously the organizers of all this learned to push relentless fear long ago. This has been going on for decades, and in cases like nuclear war, the objective danger cannot easily be dismissed. It is in some respects a propaganda triumph that the valid fear of nuclear war has seemingly been largely eradicated among those being led around by the nose.
Emotions are timeless, are they not? And they have a non-linear—which is to say non-spatial—logic.
The empty vessel of Taoism is not just empty of distracting and misleading conceptions and biases, but also unnecessary anxieties and EMOTIONAL predispositions: no superfluous thoughts, images and feelings, with only raw sensations remaining, from which everything else is built. “Beginners Mind” is thus not mind per se at all.
I think practically most “Progressives” define progress ex post hoc as “what we did, what we do”, and in advance as “what we will do”. The conceit and obviously delusion is that they are intrinsically good, so no matter what they do and who they harm, if they touched it, it was and is good, with all evil residing solely in those who critique and question them. I cannot imagine a more carefully constructed anti-Rationality, or a better means to thwart all spontaneous amd accurate perception, or to more completely prevent mature reality testing
Democrats—and to sure many Republicans—are not interested in solving problems but in USING problems. The moral hazard of needing problems is obvious and the root cause of most of our social and political dysfunction.
When physical or strong emotional conditioning is used at anearly age, it becomes background, not conscious psychology. It is instinct rather than choice. And some of this is necessary. The 3 year old ego cannot remain in charge. It must be limited, if also ideally not broken. But these emotional patterns run so deep they virtually constitute the felt sense of self and its possibilities.
My life internally has been much more Scorsese than Tarkovsky.
Post on maturity.
To say you hate everyone—or people—is to say you fear everyone. People obviously can be and often are thoughtless, rude and stupid, but this is not the general rule, particularly when not under stress and not acting as part of a herd.
Logically, if avoiding talk or even awareness of deep emotion is a facet of immaturity, then social media is both supporting and breeding it like a pestilential swamp.
It is one thing to withdraw from emotionally abusive parents but another entirely to invent and see what was possible, and in so doing finally see them in their true light.
Often, I think, negative emotions are like attached parasites. If you keep moving they will often fall away.
Pain and loss—or the never-present—are stories, and stories are excuses, and excuses are stumbling blocks we place in our own paths, those which lead to work we know we need to do. But forgetting those who hurt us is losing a part of who we are, which is to say what fragments remain, which survived in spite of All That. Spiritually, perhaps loss is always our friend. But psychologically it is definitely not, and I truly think the path to the AUTHENTICALLY spiritual lies through the psychological.
The 3 Refuges were intended to provide itinerant monks with a traveling home, and thus calm place/port in the storm. We all need an emotional home, especially if we renounce our physical one.
There are roughly three ways to deal with chronic fear. One is to untangle the knots giving rise to it. This is best. Second is becoming stronger. Strength weakens fear, and ironically some of the strongest men were most fearful. Third is to deny it and weave it into narratives of moral outrage and shame based enmeshment with a mob of mutually calibrating fish. You can pivot on a dime on any issue, but if everyone does it THE WORLD LOOKS THE SAME. And ideas can change constantly because it is the EMOTION that remains the same.
Communism is really just thr politics of the emotionally immature.
Whenever an idea about things is born, it is born in two: yin and yang, good and bad. Faith in the future is born with pessimism, hope with despair. Love with hate, kindness with coldness. It is better to connect directly with the totality than indirectly through what amounts to a narrowing filter. An idea is a constriction point and polarizing filter. Or can be, in any event.
It is possible to walk through a door with the abstract goal to save the world, or with an authentic self, but not both: they won’t fit. Grandiosity is lying. Sincerity is more realistic.
The authentically Liberal ideal is a self organizing dynamic personality interacting relatively stably and fearlessly and happily within a mutable matrix of various self organizing systems which multiply individual effort and talent both physically and spiritually. People help one another accomplish physical tasks and to grow. This is a normative ideal, one opposed to the whole human and animal history of collectivism and the primacy of primitive instrinct and violence in the service of conformity.
If I look at the past thirty years as my career and my career as growing personally, then I am about in life where I want to be, on the verge of beginning to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Oddly, I think a very good case can be made that this is really the only “career” that matters, at least if we take survival seriously.
It may be useful to use the words emotion and information interchangeably.
The connection between book people and masks is simple: they are almost invariably physically weak and timid and fearful. The Cult grants them solace and the Cult demanded masks, which it said would make them safer. The Cult, remember, exists to create a stable shelter from fear and confusion. To leave is to shoulder all the fear and confusion of our time alone, which few can even stomach contemplating.
Using other peoples money to make yourself feel good, as Democrats do, is really USING them, isn’t it? Its even worse when they steal freedoms from some and give them to others.
A “church” in which people pursue a wide variety of spiritual practices but still get together once or twice a week would be a lot like a Tibetan monastery. And the periodic meetings would serve as reinforcing and comforting social contact.
Forgiveness, as a mature act of letting go of the pain associated with a betrayal of trust, is healthy. But often what people call forgiving is really forgetting, and part of that persons self is renounced along with the right to righteous anger, self defense, boundary protection, and effective emotional autonomy.
Maturity/immaturity is a better continuum than healthy to sociopath. Extension is easier on the positive side.
Satan is a symbol of fear, of power—a palliative for fear, but no cure—and of belonging without intimacy or individuation. It is the creed of externalizers taken to an extreme.
Leftism provides a place and an assigned playacting role. As such it is effectively extended emotional enmeshment. Human history consists almost entirely in enmeshed groups of people externalizing against each other. People are comforted in groups, but absent individuation, each grouping, each tribe, becomes a separate competing animal species. There is no humanity: there are a million species, all fighting with one another like wild animals. Only principles bridge this gap.
Perceptually, the relevant cultural continuum is between nuance and black/white thinking; between large, moving, complex perceptions on the one side, and simplistic yes/no operators on the other.
I saw a vegan place with a nod to Satan. Its an odd combo, but not really: militant veganism is not really about loving animals who, unlike people, cannot protest that your love is fake. It is about using the pretext of caring about animals to be angry all the time and to hate most if not all people, most likely as a severely immature psychological externalizer. And if Satan is an enemy of the System and people (normies) you hate, then he is a logical ally. Its a great way of pulling in—but not TOO far—a few allies and telling the rest of the world to fuck itself.
What we did to multiple groups of Indians after defeating them militarily was not that different from what the Japanese did to us in Bataan.
I wonder if it would be accurate to say our global cultural task is to make the world safe for psychology.
The possibility and usually the reality of hypocrisy no more invalidates an ideal than the possibility of cowardice negates the value of courage. You cannot judge a value in its failure, but only in its success. And to reject values outright is to institutionalize failure and pernicious chaos as values.
It would be interesting, in an electronic book, to block reading at a song, say “first fall of snow”, then ask: “did it make you cry?”, if yes, then you go one place; if no, another. This was one of my original ideas, to create a multisensory and mutable book. I can even change things once it is published.
Blaming Republicans for everything is textbook externalizing.
Other peoples stupidity is no more my fault than the weather or where a bird builds a nest. And the hostility of the stupid is also no more personal than a mother bear thinking she needs to defend her cub. Countless things happen in this world that would not happen if it were rational. But it isn’t.