Moderates United

If you invariably only see what you fear when you look out your window, you are looking in a mirror.

If you ain’t lyin’, you ain’t getting caught.

I keep having dreams about the two career paths I was considering when I was young: cop and academic.  I considered both seriously.

I see now that both would have allowed me to keep my shell.  Both would have rewarded me hiding behind an unemotional, inauthentic facade.  Both would have more or less demanded I hide all my emotional wounds permanently.

Some part of my unconscious seems to think I am still 20.  I have lost so much of my life to dissociation.  I just wasn’t there.  I participated, and looked like I was there, but some part of me was absent.

All I have been able to think clearly all my life is “I need to get well”.  I didn’t know what the problem was, but I knew there was a problem.  It took me many years to even be able to think about it accurately.  This is the problem with dissociation.  You could have a figurative broken arm or broken back, but you can’t feel it clearly.  Everything is numb.

And related, I think, is that I will sometimes find myself reliving video games I’ve played.  I’ve asked this before, but will ask again: what is the quality of a life spent playing video games?  What is the value of the lives spent in front of the TV?  Whose memories come to you when you die?

It sometimes seems to me–and I will suggest this as a possible accurate general hypothesis–that our whole world consists in means designed to desensitize us, and that desensitizing basically amounts to induced dissociation.  Dissociation, in turn, leads to depression, alienation, and all the signs our society is failing to accomplish the basic objectives of finding places for people, purposes for them, and emotional support for them.  Families are failing. 

Even many parents who do their best are competing with various dissociative events and competing counter-narratives.  Violence in media jades their kids prematurely and disconnects them emotionally, and there are always kids on the internet who seem to have more freedom, more stuff, more fun, and just more, more, more. 

I continue to believe it is a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE idea to allow kids to have their own TV’s and video games in their rooms.  I’m personally in the “no electronics before 12” camp.  Age appropriate movies, yes, but mostly books.  Lots of books.  That’s what my own kids did, and it’s worked out well.

And if you want your kids to read, then read yourself.  It’s no use telling any kid what to do, if you don’t do it yourself.  If you’re telling your kid not to smoke with a cigarette in your hand, they will be stealing smokes soon enough.

But returning to myself, it seems to be the case that our brains contain many places to project narratives and stories.  None of them, ultimately, are real.  The task is to get behind all that, to find the Wizard running the show.  This is all real spirituality is.  I think.  

https://www.fort-russ.com/2020/04/robert-f-kennedy-jr-exposes-bill-gates-vaccine-dictatorship-plan-cites-gates-twisted-messiah-complex/

Bill Gates is a sociopath.  I think that conclusion has become inescapable.

The real crime of “Capitalism”, from a Leftist perspective, is it deprives atheists of a raison d’etre.

Is it better to spend an hour a day reading good books, or listening to good music?

It’s not a necessary choice of course, but the priorities involved are interesting. To me.

In my understanding, based on a John Stossel (please work forever, sir) piece, the Swedish equivalent of Social Security is indexed to the GDP.  Logically, if the GDP took a huge hit, then so too would payments to retirees. 

If true, this has to have been a part of the (successful) calculus.

I am so glad they stuck to their guns.  They are giving the lie to all the fascist bullshit going on in the rest of the world.

No, I don’t want to be like China.  Fuck you for not asking, and fuck you for taking this a minute longer.

When people speak of “the problems of life”, they usually mean lacking a job, or having a bad job, or having an insecure job, or a bad boss, or being in a bad marriage, or illnesses of various sorts, or the various inconveniences we encounter every day, like traffic jams, bad weather, being unable to find a parking spot and the like.

Have you ever stopped to consider that feeling unloved is really the primary problem of life?  Followed, perhaps, by doubt about the purpose and point of your life?

How often do any of us say this truth out loud?  It only just occurred to me, even though it is obviously true.

Our society really does not exist to meet our true emotional needs.  It’s not built around that.  It is built around meeting our PHYSICAL needs, and it is superlatively good at that.  The best in history, many, many times over.

So I GET the people who are saying “oh, this Great Pause is really a spiritual opportunity.”  And it IS that, for some of us.  It’s been great for me.  But not for everyone. 

And here is the thing: the nature of this particular beast is that it combines economic dislocation and ruin with loneliness and alienation.  Our various governments have ensured that.  They have built alienation and social disconnection into their solution.  They have made existing problems much worse.

In my own case, I can honestly say I have never seriously considered suicide.  There were periods of time where my drinking certainly could have killed me, and periods of time where I was reckless in many ways.  But doing the thing on purpose, it was never really on the table, for any reason.

My father was a relentlessly negative man.  A determined Eeyore, who could find reasons to complain about a blue sky and perfect weather.  I once asked him why he didn’t just kill himself, and he told me “I don’t have the courage”.

I think that answer is part of my own emotional architecture.  It’s really a contemptible answer, in many ways, particularly directed at a young man–his son–just starting in life.

But returning to the main point, I wonder how we will all be when this is done.  Won’t we be glad to see our friends in the bars again?  To go to concerts, after the nation finally tells Fauci to go fuck himself?  Will we be closer, listen better?  I don’t know, but it seems likely.

If learning is climbing a steep hill, then sometimes you have the opportunity to reach some particular point where it makes sense to look back.  And in general a present self which knows better has to feel some regret looking at a past self which did not.  I think it was Maya Angelou who said something close to “when you know better, you do better.”  That’s close, but not quite right.

Here is the thing, though: there are no shortcuts.  And when you understand something, it can seem like it is obvious.  OF COURSE you say to yourself.  But you can only say this because you did the work.  There was no wand you–or anyone else–could have waved.

I look at my own life, and think of all the paths it might have taken if I was not carrying around a dozen wounds I couldn’t see for really all the time I can remember.

But this learning was the path.  There was no other way.  And the difficulty of the path made my learning richer.  If I might say so myself, at times I can be a pretty damned clever fellow.

Oh, I feel something about this.  Not quite the futility of words, but their occasional redundance where my own next step is concerned.

The push behind my words is melting.

A lot of the time learning is a creative act.  It involves milking the new out of the old.  It involves coming up with yet one more way to look at something you are very familiar with.

There is no moment of any day where it is not possible for some new insight to strike you.

I don’t think it is immodest–or in any event inaccurate–to view myself as fairly creative.  My main “talent” in this regard is that I am just very, very curious.  I’m always taking things apart in my brain and reassembling them.  I have a very powerful imagination.

And physically I literally spend time wondering about things as banal as why cracks are where they are, how the floor was built, why that wire is laying over there, why the clouds look the way they do, how and why that tree fell over, etc.  It’s endless.  I am never, ever bored.

What sparked this particular thought was buying two bean burritos at Taco Bell. I was thinking “dear God is there any more corporate thing I could do? And I got to thinking about how there was a Taco Bell near my high school but I never had any money to eat there.  Then what a dick I was back then.

Then: I’m changing.  This is good.  And this whole thought train started looking at the garish colors of the new Taco Bell branding, and wondering what was going through the mind of the drive through gal who opened every interaction with “How’s it going?”  I was wondering what that job is like and how I would make it fun if I had to do it.

Etc.

I’m doing more and more “moments”.  Those don’t get written about.  This idea of learning as a creative act, though, that is properly intellectual.  I have some more thoughts on all that, but I’m easing back into my moment for tonight.