Moderates United

It is obvious to the point of being tautological, but all long term errors are the result of failed perception.

And speaking broadly, all long term perceptual errors relate to cognitive rigidity of some sort.  The corrections which would come naturally and easily in a connected perceptual system, in an emotionally healthy person, simply do not happen.  What you get is repetition.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make: Leftism, in its core, is a dysfunction of abstraction.  Abstraction, per se, can be both useful and harmful.  It is needed to build cars, and even to count when the numbers are not present.

But it occurs to me to comment that there is a reason I came up with the idea of Perceptual Breathing so early on.  The fact is that, while abstraction is essential in dealing with complex systems like a human society and culture, it can easily acquire a life of its own, and veer very, very far from any actual thing, any actual process, any actual person, any actual reality outright.

Marx, to take an obvious example, was an economic failure.  Only 3 of his seven children survived to adulthood, and all seem to have been malnourished–again, because he was a self absorbed, combative fuckup.  His ideas have to be seen as an imaginative alternative to his sordid personal reality, most of which he brought on himself.  He was not preaching from a position of possibility, but rather of bitterness, anger, and temper.

As I have said many times, human culture is in my view most usefully broken down into four basic tasks: 1) the production and distribution of meaning; 2) of Truth; 3) of Power; and 4) of wealth.

The first and second are obviously related, as are 3 and 4, but all of them are logically distinct, in my view.

Leftism is an attempt to find, through politics (the creation and distribution of power), answers to both the meaning of life, and the nature of truth.  Made simple, it aims to force everyone to conform to the same system, same ideas, and to stamp out all alternatives.  This, for the pious obsessive, is supposed to allow personal peace.

But the whole project is insane.  It uses words like justice, and truth, and compassion, but all of them are made to mean everything but what they mean in common sense usage.  All are coopted into this lunatic cult because they have to be.  It is the only way the thirst for blood and death can be even superficially rationalized.

In recent days I am really FEELING the insanity of this whole thing.  It is like trying to talk sense into Moonies or the Manson cult.  The fellow feelings, the sense of propriety and restraint, the understanding of boundaries, the tolerance of difference: all completely eradicated, destroyed, killed and buried.

That such a thing should happen in a free land, where information, even now, is available on nearly all topics, is really quite astonishing.

One thing I was thinking the other day is that social alienation has the effect of increasing vulnerability to cultish sentiments.  People whose social connections are weak fear greatly being cast out still further.  They are quite prepared to believe the most outlandish things merely to fit in a little bit, merely to get to participate now and then in GroupHate against some out-group.  This was the psychosocial framework that enabled the Nazis, and which animates Antifa–the modern Brown/Black Shirts–even now.

It’s been a longish week or two for me, and I find myself swearing sometimes when something won’t work, and particularly  when some part of my body—usually my shoulders—is aching terribly.

Swearing represents an activation of some primitive, even childish, aspect of ourselves. It is sort of a magical incantation or perhaps mantra, whose role is to channel and dispel aggression pain and frustration.

But I was looking at my plans just now and working out my strategy to completion and it got me that FINISH also had an effect on me. This word had the opposite effect of swearing. It channeled calm focus and control. It was the opposite of helpless.

So there is an opposite of curse words. Until I come up with something better, I’ll call them bless words.

Finish.

The only obvious referent for Trump’s tweet was Ilhan Omar.  The other three just kind of piled on.  They apparently thought “Anti-American?  He must mean me.”  And they were, and are, obviously, quite happy to wear that mantle.

And they are now the face of the Democrats.  This has been the de facto reality for some time, but it has now become obvious, thanks to a clever trick by Trump, which should have and would have been seen as a trick by mainstream Democrats in any era before now.  But they couldn’t help themselves.  Their passions are too strong, their lunacy too embedded.

Trump will win easily in 2020, if we can avoid massive fraud, and prevent the media monopolies from the successful use of mass propaganda.

I woke up happy.

You know, the great spiritual power that matters is feeling life flowing through you and around you.  It is the power to say you feel relaxed and connected, and that everything makes sense, and you feel hope, serenity, and excitement.  This is all possible.  I know it is, because I get moments of it.  Your current physical circumstances don’t matter.

I have moments where I think of a relationship with God as like a wonderful relationship with a woman, but 1000 times better.  This is certainly consistent with Sufi imaginings, as well as writers like St. John of the Cross.

In romance, there is this longing, this felt need for completion, to close the loop, to stop the endless dissipation into the horizon.  This RELIEF, and this excitement.

Oh, I hope I see more clearly someday, and before God takes me.

OMG, what do the people in that place think about that thing?

You know, we have a global interface capable of sharing essentially limitless amounts of information, and it is used as a place to gossip, and a simultaneous extension of, and weakening of, community.

I wonder how many of you remember desks with phones and typewriters.  Turns out life was still worth living back then, and perhaps more worth living, based on increasing rates of suicide and related depression.

Maybe we should blame reduced rates of smoking.  I am 36% serious.

Maybe we should blame the dilution of social bonds through their replacement with virtual equivalents.  I am 86% serious there.

has anyone called them that yet?  I think it appropriate.  I am perhaps overestimating American historical literacy by saying 98% of people will not get this, but someone out there likely will.

And fuck you China.  You sure as fuck get it.

Tear down your dictatorship. Let the People be free.

https://www.infowars.com/elon-musks-brain-interface-company-neuralink-to-make-big-announcement/

Knowledge is not facts and wisdom is not the same as calculating things accurately and quickly.

AI is a quick path to merging human minds with all the worst aspects of it, all the things that don’t really matter.  I will go so far as to call it Satanic, in chaining minds to the most base, most material, most fallen aspects of our lives.  There is nothing expansive about owning an enormous library in your mind, or in putting the calculator in your brain.

Feelings are what matter, and I see no one trying to learn how to amplify, clarify, and unconfuse those.

Every day I see headlines like this, and wonder how true reason and decency can survive.  Then I look around my room, and think: this is pretty fantastic.  I may live in a one bedroom apartment, but I like it.  I am a king by the standards of most of the world.  Nobody is fucking with me yet.  I have my health, my freedom, and enough money to not worry most of the time.

Our minds conjure 10 disasters, at least, for every one which actually happens.  “Sufficient unto the day is the evil therein.”

I had a dream last night where I was interacting with someone I know.  I have several people who show up from time to time, and who seem to mean specific things to my unconscious, to symbolize for me specific sorts of energies.  Some of these puzzles I have deciphered, but not all.

In any event, in the dream I put my arm around this person and said “you and I are nothing alike at all.  That means we have a GREAT DEAL to teach one another.”

I share this (and not the rest of a really wild [like all dreams aren’t wild] dream) because I thought that was an interesting idea: we learn the most from people unlike us. 

Diversity–GENUINE diversity–is a worthy ideal.  It is simply another example of what I might call the soupification of the American mind that HiveMind is claimed to be diverse simply because the faces within it differ, as does what they do with their genitals.

But intellectual diversity, emotional diversity, diversity of thought, opinion and practice: that is enormously useful in building larger, not smaller, minds.

And the goal of a UNIVERSE-ity is, in fact, to build larger minds.  When it builds smaller minds, when people contract as a result of their exposure, this is a patent and really inexcusable failure.

I fucking hate managing people. Whenever it happens, I’ve either screwed up, or someone else’s screw-up got dropped in my lap.

Here is the thing about intelligence. The first conclusion smart people reach when dealing pragmatically with clearly defined problems is that clear thinking is WORK. Even for smart people.

So many of the people walking the street today think that thinking is someone else’s problem. This makes those willing and able to do this work pure gold. Most rich people are rich mainly because, among much other hard work, they did the work of THINKING.

You are not truly stupid until you decide that it’s other people’s jobs to tell you what to do. Particularly if you reached this conclusion from a low starting IQ—meaning you are unwilling to do the work of self improvement—you can with justice be called an idiot. I don’t judge incapacity, but I do judge the habit of not even trying.

Edit: I’m lying. I do judge stupid people, as I see it, for being stupid. My kids get after me all the time for this, because in point of fact I AM sometimes stupid myself.

I try to take this into consideration, but often fail. The type of stupidity that drives me up the fucking wall is the one which doesn’t even realize it is stupid. The stupid people who think they are smart because they have misread life’s countless signs, and retained a farcically high self regard. I am in the  very highest echelon of intelligence, and I CONTINUALLY inspect my self and my actions to see if I am inadvertently being stupid. Because often I am. It is the lack of that that irritates the hell out of me.

First off: I was drunk last night when I made that other post.  I’ve decided to leave it.

Main point: it seems to me that there are three stages of traumatic expression, when it comes to the amygdala.

The outer, least healed layer is anger.  It is pushing out against the world, and nearly entirely unreflective.

The middle is fear.  Terror.  Unnameable, formless fears.

The inner is shame.  Shame has a form and a texture.  It is highly unpleasant, but it is the path to healing.

I seem to be at the shame level.  I keep having dreams of people telling me all the ways I’m fucking up, and who make me feel inferior.  Both of my parents did that, in their own ways, but none of this has been truly accessible to my emotional, primary awareness until now.