Moderates United

 I was dreaming in darkness last night.  It was not bad.  It felt like I am finally getting to see the reality of my own experience clearly.  Most all of us tell lies to ourselves all our lives; some of us more than others, and I would be in the some of us.

I think to see darkness clearly is to sense light.  I think of Lao Tzu’s “darkness within darkness: the gateway to all mystery.”

And I have been feeling light periodically over the past week or two.  I will feel ribbons of purple and orange coursing through the world.

And I feel that our planet–and all matter–floats, like the thinnest foam, within an infinite space.  Someone who knew how light it was could lift the whole universe overhead easily.

And energies flow through it like it has no mass at all.  Continually.  Some energies lift us up, and some push us down.  Gravity is the effect of us forgetting how light we really are.  Gravity is a state of being, not a law of any sort, at least where we are concerned.  We are consciously living matter, in this world.

This is a Turning Point on our planet.  As goes America, so goes most of the world.  We all know this.  We are by far the most powerful nation to ever exist, and when you consider that, it is all the more remarkable that we are so abominably stupid.  Could people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been nominated to be President even in this country until this very year?  It is astonishing.

I feel back on my own history.  I was dreaming, for the manyeth time, of being an academic and of being a soldier.  I have long regretted failing to be either.  But I felt then, and continue to believe logically now, that both pathways would have led to me abandoning the path I am on.  

I live a humble life now.  Nothing special.  But I am able to focus my energy on figuring out who I am, what life is about, and how we can all make it better.  I have no prism or lens I need to use other than what feels intuitively right to me.  I have nothing really distracting me.  Even the physical labor I do leaves ample mental energy for continual reflection.

I was very proud to be accepted into the University of Chicago, and very proud to have done fine there.  Nothing exceptional–there were definitely smarter people there–but I did fine.

My whole life I have been saying “not that, not that”.  I have not known the way forward, but have done my best to say no to pathways that I knew were dead ends for me.

This is a surreal time.  You have to be dead spiritually not to feel the electricity and dread in the air.  There is fear, yes, but hope too.  There is change, one way or the other.  All of this is medicine for the soul.  All of this is energy that, if you internalize it, breathe it in, will change you, will permit you to take your next step in the direction of That.

 “2020” is a creation of Democrats.  In my view, there is a power elite that is quite literally willing to throw billions of people–and yes I mean billions–of people back into extreme poverty, cause the deaths by starvation of millions, perhaps tens of millions, of people, and completely ruin Main Street and the small business sector, in order to resecure their control of the reins of power.

They politicized this thing early.  They prevented rational dialogue.  They prevented the emergence of effective treatments.  They demonized a drug that has been used with no conspicuous problems in half the world since 1955.  They mobilized and paid for riots which, in the main, destroyed black businesses, black neighborhoods, and black jobs.

And I truly believe that they wanted people to vote early because they are in a race against time.  At some point, the sheer volume of the devastation they have wrought is going to become clear.  At some point, the STUPIDITY of what we have been doing is going to become clear.  Masks make things worse.  I am 75% convinced of this, and 100% convinced they are not necessary.  Early treatment is the key to reducing death, but none of our senior people are recommending it.  Lockdowns INCREASE the death rate, in the short, middle, and long terms.

The whole thing is manufactured madness.  The “experts” have been bought, and the media has suppressed all the experts who remain dedicated to truth telling.  The Frontline Doctors continue to be censored, even we all know they are doctors and that what they are saying makes sense.

All of this because they fear Donald Trump.  He is the first honest President we have had in I can’t begin to guess how long.  Maybe it was Jack Kennedy who, despite his continual infidelities, did actually love this country in his heart.  He did risk his life for it.

All of the things the Left claims to hate about this country, about the rich, about injustice, are embodied in today’s Democrats.  They hate impartial justice, wealth they don’t control, free speech, and in my own view, happiness outright.  It is a party of nastiness, venom, sadism, and control.  And they are empowered beyond belief by the support of the tyrants of social media, all of who are nasty, awful people.

That is what I really think.  I will do the best I can to live in this country as we move towards an Orwellian future if we elect Joe Biden, but it will be in a spirit of sadness, in a spirit of loss, and a sense of how close we came to building something truly good and lasting.

 I think the nature of Developmental Trauma is that some small children develop, very early, what amount to “alters”–alternative personalities, sub-personalities–whose job is to feel the pain and misery going on in them.

Narcissism and Sociopathy exist on a continuum.  This much has always seemed intuitively obvious to me, and what I will suggest is that these alters are the hidden triggers behind the behavior of those who grow up to have full blown Personality Disorders.

Narcissists believe that they can only exist at the cost of those around them.

Sociopaths believe–and this is at a deep, unconscious level–that they can’t exist at all.  This is why moral codes don’t apply to them.  There is no stable sense of self possible for them.  Sensations become the only reality for them, and since they are evanescent, they must be sought continually.  Stimulation is the only permanent reality.

And I would argue the opposite: that continual stimulation regresses the sense of self, and that people who grow up with it never develop strong senses of self.

Without a sense of self, no moral or social contextualizing is possible.  

I think I want to argue this is the root problem in America–and indeed much of the world–today.  It doesn’t matter your politics but it seems to me those who are set on destroying the world do so because they are like children torturing small animals because it is stimulating, and they feel no connection, no remorse, and no context.  It is all about the sensations, those of rage, of anger, of an assumed righteousness, of a grief at the “crimes of the world” whose superficiality they would need context to understand and realize.

Functionally, I think I want to claim, continual overstimulation from an early age prevents the development of adult sociality, and in effect induces de facto sociopathy.

Niceness is not a creed.  It is a default suitable even for the most disconnected, the least emotionally aware, and for the most latently cruel and violent.  The logical culmination is sadism in the name of compassion, something which has been seen many times over the past several centuries.

In the time of the Bolshevik coup, and in the time of the French Revolution, there were real crimes being perpetrated by the governments, real hunger and misery.

And yet in the most safe, most comfortable, most affluent, most cozy and easy nation in the history of the world, large segments of our society have come to see themselves as oppressed, and believe that violence–emotional, verbal and physical–is the only answer. It beggars the imagination.  It should not be possible.  But here it is.

 Power, to me, is riding a horse full speed on the high plains of Central Asia.  Joy is doing it with friends and family.  Spirituality is feeling the sky above me, the ground beneath me, and the air moving by me.

The same image would work well with Native Americans too.  I personally feel more connection to Asia for some reason, perhaps past lives there.

If you think about it, jailors ALSO spend most of their lives in confinement.

The ocean is a metaphor.  It can be found everywhere.  At least until recently I suspect many  Tibetans felt closer to it than those who live on the beach in Malibu. I suspect for many Californians it comes over time to represent frustrated longings.  They have everything, but they don’t have everything, and in important respects, they have nothing.  They live in deserts.

 https://www.infowars.com/posts/marianne-williamson-justifies-philly-looting-by-claiming-bible-says-nothing-about-stealing-being-bad/

One way of defining decadence is “when your elites really aren’t that good.”

America is filled with highly competent technicians.  But very, very few of them ask themselves Life questions, and almost nobody working in the fields of Emotional Intelligence–Daniel Goleman certainly included–seem to be able to connect their own work to our national cultural decline, in which standards of rationality, accountability, self regulation, intellectual independence and a host of other virtues are in the toilet.

Do I need to look up who Daniel Goleman is voting for?  I don’t think so.

Do I need to look up who Marianne Williamson is voting for?  I don’t think so.

Our best and brightest are, in general, dim and dull.  They shine perhaps in their own narrow field, but lack entirely the emotional and intellectual capacity to ask broader questions and come up with interesting and useful answers.  They are talented ants, scurrying here and there, completely unable and unwilling to look at the Big Picture.

Culture, per se, has become a concern exclusively of conservatives, and conservatives do not own the culture.  The Left does.  And every year they make it more sadistic, less emotionally intelligent, more violent, more “grabby”, more conformist, and in all respects less interesting as other than a horror movie being played out in front of our eyes.

Are you old enough to remember when the Left opposed violence in movies, because they opposed John Wayne and the cowboys?  Dirty Harry and effective if violent law enforcement?  They were the ones creating the shows on PBS that were actually good.  My own kids watched almost nothing but PBS growing up, and it was absolutely the right decision.  

But I see these people posting with degrees from top tier schools, and they are ABYSMALLY stupid.  It is embarrassing.  How did this happen?  

This is decadence.  

Sweden:  https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/se

United States: https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/us

Switzerland: https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/ch

With Sweden you see a clean Bell Curve–Farr’s Law–that is what Herd Immunity, so called, looks like.  Even though cases are rising, deaths are not.

With the United States you get wave after wave after wave of death.  It is not hard to look at that graph and imagine it going on like that forever.  That is what incompetence looks like, even though it the inevitable result of the cries to “slow the spread”.

Finally, Switzerland: done in 45 days or so.

I feel no confidence predicting a Trump victory, but will submit a few data points: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ2VpfUqRoo

This is worth the watch.  It is an interview from I think 2003 of Ted Gunderson, who was high enough up in the FBI that at one point he was on a short list for consideration as FBI Director.  He ran regional offices in I think the LA area and Dallas.

 Most American movies have happy endings.  Since life frequently does NOT have happy endings–and since in the long run we are all dead, to quote Keynes, albeit to another purpose–this makes most movies “escapist”, as we say.  A pleasant alternative to reality.  Most American media exists to help people working jobs they don’t like, in places they don’t like, often with people they don’t like, to narcotize themselves enough that they stay on the conveyor belt of Life.

Here is my question: what if most of our movies had tragic, sad, “depressing” endings?  

On the one hand, with happy endings, we wind up wishing we were those people.  On the other, with tragic endings, we are glad we are NOT those people.  One fills you with longing and regret–within which self pity and resentment can find ready homes–and the other with gratitude.

It has been many, many moons–a year perhaps of full moons?–since I read Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy” (in German of course, because I am so special I would not even be my own friend), but in addition to the famous Apollonian/Dionysian opposition he drew, I recall one where he commented that the decline of the Greeks began when they started to prefer comedies to tragedies.

A comedy is a way of forgetting your cares.  A tragedy is a sort of tonic that after an initial wave of fear and pain and sadness, braces you to your life, with new energy.  As one cop I knew liked to say, what doesn’t kill you can still ruin your day, but I am sure Nietzsche’s famous similar dictum had its origin in something like the intended cathartic effect of tragedy.

Orwell was calling us decadent in the 30’s, I guess it was.  Jacques Barzun’s book “From Dawn to Decadence” was published twenty years ago.

Decadence is clearly a mutable, subjective idea, but that most Americans–and indeed most of the developed world–has lost its way, is pretty obvious.  For me, it was the election of Barack Obama, someone about whom we knew nothing, who had accomplished nothing, and whose main talent was and remains the ability to read a prewritten script with the gravitas of an acceptable soap opera actor.

So much can happen.  The show is not over.  The Greeks decayed, but the Romans replaced them.  Life is change.  Certainly, life could change for the worse the planet over for a very long time, but that has not happened.  It could also continue to change for the better, as indeed it has been for the past few centuries.  Either way, I will keep doing my thing until I can’t.  I see no other good option.