Moderates United

Mediocrity is a form of selfishness.

A problem I have had for some years is I don’t know where to go to find groups of people interested in asking fundamental questions about our culture who are not unrepentant, reflexive Leftists.  Why does it seem to be either/or?  Either you are artistic or you are a conservative.  Either you accept things just the way they are, or you have to join this fucking cult filled with willfully ignorant, and–they claim–unintentionally destructive, self important assholes?

Again, Trump has brought all this to the surface.  Where are the creative types willing to openly embrace Trump?  There are a few, like James Wood and Jon Voight and Clint Eastwood, but they continue to have careers (if they do: Wood’s career seems to be over) only in spite of and not because of their political beliefs.  They exist as atoms in places otherwise hostile to them and their beliefs.

Where is the awakening?  Where are the smart people of good will willing to ask hard questions about their core assumptions?  I can’t go to New York, or back to Chicago, or the Bay Area.  As near as I can tell, I am going to need to be the attracting particle in something new.

Avant-Garde, in our current cultural context, consists neither in privileging the past, nor trying to destroy it.  There is a Third Way, a somewhat overused but still numerically accurate phrase.  It is still possible to bring humility and goodwill to the problems of humanity.

And it seems to me doing something other than shout through a megaphone, in our current situation, would be a big part of doing something actually different and new.

https://kartemquin.vhx.tv/products/inquiring-nuns

I really enjoyed this, and found it thought provoking.  It even features a soundtrack by Phillip Glass, who I had forgotten went to the University of Chicago (he entered an accelerated program at age 15).

Here is my take: taking global civilization to the next step, sustainable peace, requires a solution to dogmatism.  Dogmatism, in turn, as a result of fear and following rigidity, requires a solution to emotionally impoverished childhoods.  We need, as humans, to develop a way to give people who grew up miserable to in effect recreate on a more positive footing their foundational sense of life and its possibilities.

Nothing else will work, in my view.  All rigid people–myself included–deal in ideas.  But our attraction to one set of ideas relative to another depends entirely on the water in which we swim, which is to say our core emotional reality, our “presets”, our hidden emotional assumptions which color invisibly, often if not usually if not invariably, our reality.

What we take to be true, in other words, about “life”, has much to do with how safe we felt when we were two years old.  No amount of talking can alter this reality.  No talk therapy has a hope of liberating a truly liberal, truly open spirit, and within talk therapy I would include the work of all philosophers of the human condition.

With one exception: perhaps religion, and perhaps uniquely a religion based on love, like Christianity, MAY allow this frozen energy release.  This is perhaps the most important contribution of Christianity, particularly.  It is not a religion you are born into, when it is taken seriously, but one you are born AGAIN into.  This is a powerful metaphor, and seemingly one which feels quite literal to many people.

Religion, in this sense, is a sort of EFFECTIVE psychotherapy, and has served as such in countless cases across the past several thousand years.

But for this transformation to work, one needs to be much more open, and much less cynical than most of us are.  Very few people trained in the scientific method, bred to share the core assumptions which animate most professional scientists, are going to be ABLE to adopt a belief system like that of Christianity.

What remains, then, is slow steady progress, of the sort which I have been working at for many years.

I continue to believe Neurofeedback is our best hope.  It is helping me.  It is a slow, slow process.  I am recreating myself from the foundation up.  I am letting my manias slowly diminish and fade.

And I do think psychedelics may well play a role for many too.  I would like to see a world where most people take them at an appropriate time.  For me, that time is not yet.

And I continue to dream of my church.  It will take charisma, patience, and long persistence, but there is a strong need.  I simply have to emerge more fully into my own personhood and sense of agency.

I do feel agony sometimes, but it doesn’t break me.  And one day I hope that it will be of immense value.  There is very little anyone can suffer which I cannot relate to on some level.  Every suffering is personal, but much of it simply has to do with being human, with our nervous systems, being subject to the countless shocks and betrayals which are occasioned by being social beings, by existing in networks which are often hostile in ways which are silly and logical at the same time.  Everyone is protecting themselves.  Everyone is doing what makes sense to them, even if it is also true that if everyone on the planet stopped at the same time being mean and stupid at the same time, we would all instantly be sustainably happier.

A few thoughts.  I am continuing my emerging habit of fasting from 6pm Friday to some time after 6am Sunday.  It’s a nice practice, not just physically, but emotionally.

I am trying to burrow into and feel safe with my core self.  I am using all the tools I have been able to gather thus far, and making slow progress.

Mass shootings in my view must be seen as being linked to, and on a continuum with, on-going increases in our national suicide rate.  It’s just a way of killing yourself and making damn sure everyone remembers you, even though you felt overlooked and useless all your life.

Mass shootings can be expected to increase when mental health decreases across the board.  Again, like addicts, they are just canaries in the coal mine, telling us some basic constituent parts of our social order are fucked up.

And I will add that greed is every bit as at home in socialism as capitalism.  This is not “late capitalism”, and in point of fact if we are going to tally bodies, “Capitalism” is not even CLOSE to being as murderous a system as socialism, its purported antidote.

No, these are complex problems which will not respond to sound bites, will not be fixed by idiots telling us they know a simple solution, and which demand of us sobriety, discussion, and soul searching.

In other words, I don’t expect things to get better any time soon.  Arming yourself is likely the best single step towards personal empowerment you can take.

My quest is to be fully authentic, not so much for other people, although this will be an outcome presumably, but to myself.  I want to stop lying to myself about anything.  If there is a sign above the gate to Hell that says “Abandon all Hope Ye who Enter”, there is one, perhaps, above the gate to Heaven which says “Abandon all False Hope, Ye who Enter”.

And what I realize is that if you have pain in you, learning to feel it is part and parcel of the path.  Some pains, like that of feeling unloved as a small child, cross the sky.  They are so vast that I don’t know how anyone copes with them without drugs or alcohol.  Most people don’t, of course.  Perhaps no people do, not the pain I am talking about.  Most people pull back.  They don’t walk into the thing undiluted.

It is the pain of contracting your whole being into a tall post, and feeling someone chopping at its base.  It is terror and pain and hopelessness all bound into one and amplified a hundredfold.

But this pain passes.  I think most pains you only have to feel fully once.

That’s my sunny two cents for today.

It occurs to me that tiny infants act as a kind of truth serum.  You cannot lie about who you are in the presence of children.  If you are impatient, it will be shown.  If you are callous, it will be shown.  If you are a fearful person, it will be shown.

And I can’t resist speculating that some parents react to these unconscious and completely innocent effects of children by refusing to claim them, by rejecting them, by blaming the children for their own deficiencies.

And since what I write about is me, here, mainly, I further cannot resist speculating that I was a very precocious child who saw and understood things far beyond my age, and it frightened and then angered my mother.  She told me some years ago–I think it was a confession of sorts, although she laughed and tried to make it a joke, and certainly did not seem to feel any genuine contrition–that they used to spank me sometimes for being too quiet.  I would just be sitting there, I guess, in a trance of sorts, and that scared them, so they hit me.

Worse things happen to kids, obviously, but effects are also proportionate to the sensitivity of a child.  Some kids seemingly can handle nearly anything–especially if they have at least one caregiver they bond with, which I didn’t have–and some of us just sort of spin in circles then crash.  I crashed.

This is an interesting thought, though, that children more or less compel self knowledge and personal development of parents–especially mothers–if they are sincere and trying to do it more or less right, and that much child abuse may come from parents unwilling to read the tea leaves being presented to them, which they interpret (no doubt in the main unconsciously) as reproaches and inappropriate accusations of deficiency.  That little shit, they say, I’ll teach him (about me, as I see me, and what I consider my role in this whole thing).

It occurs to me that the goal of personal development is that your emotional reactions are perfectly appropriate to and proportionate to present existing realities.  Not imagined realities, not past realities, not possible future realities (except of course to the extent it is prudent to feel emotions now about things which may happen in the future in respect to which concrete actions can be planned and executed.)

And when there is nothing to react to, there is contentment and satisfaction, as a default state.

Most of us, of course, are twisted into many times, and many imaginary spaces, nearly always in ways it is usually impossible to feel fully, and respond to appropriately.

It occurs to me this is one draw of adrenaline sports: you can’t be present anywhere else, so it is a drug to make everything else disappear for a time.

Drugs and every other addiction of course too, quiet that nest of unquiet.

But if emotions have logic–and they do–then the goal is for that logic to conform to present circumstances, and present circumstances only. If you are well integrated, no one ever need worry about or wonder why you are reacting the way you are.  It is the way any healthy person would react.

Any more, though, to be healthy is to be special.  My standard is very high, and I very certainly do not meet it.  Yet.

I won’t share everything I’m thinking here, but it occurred to me that, from a psychodynamic perspective, labeling myself with an old school Inferiority Complex might not be completely unreasonable.  When I was with my mother a bit ago, I really noticed how small she made me feel, how insignificant.  I dreamed one night about being Ant Man, and repeatedly growing and shrinking as needed.

And it occurs to me to posit, likely accurately, as may some day be discovered, that there is an intimate and necessary connection between what are called Complexes, and the unmyelinated vagus system, including all the viscera.  The stomach plexus almost certainly plays a role.  The Complex feels like something outside, or inside but autonomous.  The gut nervous system and reptilian brain would certainly fit this description.  In some circumstances, they more or less run most of the show emotionally.

For me, I think I learned to toggle between shame and normality, or perhaps between shame and freeze/invisibility.  The latter is more likely.  I never felt free of fear, so normality was never really anything but a relative option.  Played out in any other context this would be alternating between dissociation, and anger/violence/fear/inferiority.

On this rendering, the Inferiority Complex would be a residual traumatic residue where most of the holding happens in the shame mechanism, even if the other members of the Unholy Triumvirate–fear (the urge to run) and rage (the urge to fight and destroy)–are not absent.

It’s not too late for psychology to become intelligent.  There are many near misses, but where wholistic approaches are concerned, as far as I am concerned, there are no bullseyes yet, no methods where reliably positive results can be expected among all trained practitioners, regardless of their own personal ideosyncrasies and (presence of or lack of) emotional intelligence. 

There is no penicillin yet, although in my view Neurofeedback has that potential.

My work continues.  Last night was interesting, both in good and really unpleasant ways.  I’m used to that shit by now.  I still get scared, but my recovery is getting faster and faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel

In 1968, Merkel joined the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official communist youth movement sponsored by the ruling Marxist–Leninist Socialist Unity Party of Germany.^[34][35][36] Membership was nominally voluntary, but those who did not join found it difficult to gain admission to higher education.^[37] She did not participate in the secular coming of age ceremony Jugendweihe, however, which was common in East Germany. Instead, she was confirmed.^[38] During this time, she participated in several compulsory courses on Marxism-Leninism with her grades only being regarded as “sufficient”.

Later, at the Academy of Sciences, she became a member of its FDJ secretariat. According to her former colleagues, she openly propagated Marxism as the secretary for “Agitation and Propaganda”.^[40] However, Merkel has denied this claim and stated that she was secretary for culture, which involved activities like obtaining theatre tickets and organising talks by visiting Soviet authors.^[41] She stated “I can only rely on my memory, if something turns out to be different, I can live with that.”

Here is another thing we forget at our peril: not only was Germany Nazi in the not too distant past, a good section of it was COMMUNIST in the more recent past.  Germany’s current Prime Minister–I think is her title, or Chancellor–was a Communist.  She was raised as a Communist. 

She was raised, other words, to hate Capitalism, liberal Democracy, Constitutional curbs on the power of government, and to believe that the State should be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.  She may, for obvious reasons, want to distance herself from all that, but all Communists lie.  This does not mean that she is lying, but if she is a Communist, there is no reason she would not.

I look at the history of the past 100 years, and I see fields littered with corpses, and people still, even now, trying to deal with the aftermath of all that death and destruction.  The divorces, the addictions, the psychological pain.

Without intense inner work, it is nearly impossible for most of us to even know what diseases we are carrying, and this is important, since many of them are contagious, particularly and most egregiously to our children, which I will remind everyone Angela Merkel never had.  She does not speak for future generations of any personal significance to her.  It is all an abstraction, which is all any politics ever is for a Communist, or any other sort of ideologue.

We read about World War 2 nowadays as what seems like another era, another time, but it is still very much present.

The EU was conceived as a way to repeat the sorts of disasters which happened in the two World Wars.

And what I just sort of grokked is that the “Swinging London” very much has to be seen as an extension of the trauma of World War 2.

Specifically, I watched a documentary more or less on the Who, but focused on their managers, Kit Lambert, and Chris Stamp (Lambert and Stamp), and realized Pete Townshend was born right around VE day, in May of 1945.  Roger Daltry was born March 1, 1944, not long before D-Day.  Keith Moon was born the 23rd of August, 1946.

All of them, in other words, were born into an atmosphere of fear, pain, want and privation.  This is not specifically mentioned in their autobiographies, but it was there.  Eric Clapton, to take another example, was born of a Canadian soldier there for the war, who impregnated his mother when she was very young, and who was raised thinking his grandparents were his parents.  Another war story.

Wars ripple down the generations.  They do not ever end when they end.  Today’s soldiers will be leaving traces for 2-3 generations, both good and bad.  They bring home both nobility and inner chaos and pain, not infrequently in the same mind and body which they keep together however they can.