Moderates United

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/05/jozef-czapski-painter-prisoner-proust-lost-time-inhuman-land-almost-nothing-review

My pedantic excerpt:

In March 1940, the head of the NKVD (later KGB) Lavrentiy Beria and three members of the Politburo signed a memorandum in which the Polish officers were condemned to execution. The operation, which was completed in eight weeks, began with the prisoners being transported to sites in and around Katyn, a forest near the Russian city of Smolensk. In all, around 22,000 soldiers – mostly officers who in civilian life had been lawyers, doctors, writers, artists, scientists, engineers and other professional people – were shot by a single bullet in the back of the head. Over a 28-day period a single individual, Vasily Blokhin (1895-1955), the chief executioner at Lubyanka prison in Moscow (where he killed the writer Isaac Babel and the avant-garde theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold), is said to have shot around 7,000 prisoners. He used German revolvers, which he brought with him in a suitcase, as he found the Soviet-made variety unreliable. For his services to the Soviet state Blokhin received the Order of the Red Banner.

This is Communism.  This is the same Soviet Union Bernie Sanders took his honeymoon in.

Thinking about Communism, and its many iterations which do not yet use that label, I think of the biggest assholes I’ve met, people who fuck up then lie about it, who don’t plan worth a shit then blame somebody else every time something goes wrong.  This is the heart, the core, the essence of the Socialist project: liars lying, and people suffering.  The people lying do not suffer.  Maduro in Venezuela does not suffer.  And apparently he makes sure his army is well fed and well paid.  The Roman Emperors did no less, and for the same reason.

But the whole things consists in a sociopathic, narcissistic Munchhausen Syndrome.  It is a curse on humanity, a disease, a plague, a fatal and horrible mistake.

And it is swirling all around us at this very moment.

When we speak of barriers conventionally, we speak of going over them, under them, through them.  I will submit, though, that most barriers are actually in our minds, and that the task there is to figure out how to make the barrier either disappear outright, or get easier to work with.  This might involve inviting, coercing, nudging, or removing one little bit at a time.  It might involve decreasing its density, or altering its texture.  But what you see, in your minds eye, need not remain there.

So often, we wear ourselves out–I wear myself out–in internal conflicts which cannot end until we own, understand, and dissolve them.

My own tidal wall broke last night.  My daylight self was invaded by a jail break, by countless individuals from my shadow side, and all intermingled.  This has been the goal I have seen seeking, but as with all things unconscious, it didn’t happen how I thought it would.  I’m not sure what I thought, but that was weird, and as countless times before, I thought I was losing my mind.

You know, we all have murderers within us.  If you think you don’t, you have not looked far enough.  And we have saints in us.  I don’t think the saint is as different from the murderer as you might think.  Both are obsessive.  I think health lies in the middle somewhere, where choices are choices, and are made freely and without manic energy of any sort.

And I will wonder about our national tidal wall, especially the one which separates self identifying “Liberals” of conscience from the open realization that they have slowly been led into a world which is nothing like what they signed up for.

Democrats become Democrats because they want to help people.  They want to use the power of government to oppose plutocrats, and racists, and bigots of all sorts.  But now plutocrats, racists, and bigots run the party.

To take one example: Democrats always claim their economic policies are better.  At the level of theory, this may or may not be true, as with all theories, but the underlying assumption is that they want to see Americans living in prosperity and plenty.

Under Trump, the economy is booming, and national Democrats leaders hate it.  They either credit Obama, farcically, or ignore it.  Mostly they ignore it.

What morally sane person, who genuinely wants what is best for America, would oppose economic growth–growth in jobs, in new jobs, in wages?

People who think this is good have to ask: where are the Democrats in all this?  They seem, if anything, to view this as a DISASTER, because it makes the reelection of Trump more likely. 

But here is the question: what possible principle can animate them, other than power, if this is in fact the case?  They don’t want prosperity: they want problems, to which they can offer theoretical solutions which never pan out, and which can then be used for reelection, by claiming that if not for the nasty Republicans, their idiotic plan A or plan B would have worked.  The only solution is reelection.

And they do this across DECADES.  They’ve been saying the same things for 40-50 years nationally, and even longer at the local and State levels.

I have to ask, when do the graduates of Oberlin, and Stanford, and Williams, and Swarthmore and even Harvard ask: “what is it I actually believe?”, and find that their party deserted them long ago.

Obviously, many if not most of them are so far in they literally can’t imagine leaving the Matrix, but not all of them.  Not all of them.

Most people in America grow up comfortable.  They have TV, air conditioning, running water, toilets connected to a functioning sewer system, the presumption of education, public libraries, well constructed roads, access to cars or at least public transportation, and a host of other things.

So when people like Alex Jones say “there are people in this world who want to take much of this away from us”, there is a strong disconnect between experienced reality and this statement.  America has not known war within our borders since 1865 (Pearl Harbor being a minor and short exception).  We have not arrested people for speaking unpopular opinions, by and large, even though many Communists (mostly real, some mislabeled) were affected for a short period of time in the 1950’s, after the Soviets occupied most of Eastern Europe and North Korea invaded South Korea.

I would submit, though, that when people ask “how is that even possible, that that could happen here?”, that they simply look at RECENT history.  The Germans didn’t think Nazism could happen there.  Guess what?  It DID.

What you need to look at is the level of public dialogue.  Are mature adults using serious language to debate issues of primary importance?  Or has some sizeable section of the populace dropped off the radar, culturally and socially, such that they have created a separate and solipsistic world? 

Do I need to say out loud that that is precisely what has happened in this country?  Large number of Americans who be nice to one another, generous to one another, kind in any other context, become rabid maniacs the moment politics comes up.  It’s not the Trump people.  I infiltrate all sorts of Leftist events, knowing that if I am outed that is by and large the reaction I will get.  I do it because I do very much possess the quality of Openness, which they claim to prize, but don’t.

Openness is not where you invite the Peruvian pipe players to your community picnic.  That is trivial and obvious.  It is where you invite the Southern Baptists or the NRA and give them a chance to speak their piece.

By and large, if it is easy, you are not doing any useful work at all.

I’m involved somewhere on the interwebs with one of the sorts of mouth frothing, demonic, chronically enraged Leftists whose absence I was commenting on a couple weeks ago.  That energy does not evaporate, and these people do not learn.  They are far beyond the capacity for learning.  That is what I wanted to comment on here. 

But I wanted to make a brief comment on my own mental health, my own self assessment.  I seem to have formed a robust habit of weighing myself daily, and I am going to discontinue posting results here.  I hit 279 Sunday, got drunk Sunday night and gained a bit back, but I think the overwhelming bulk of momentum is going in the right direction.

In my own view, my reality testing is outstanding.  It is better than most people, better than most pundits, better than most professionals.  The reason for this is that I grew up in a home where everyone lied about everything continually, without even realizing they were lying.  You can lie with your being.  This caused me to grow up with a passionate commitment to truth telling, at least to myself.  It caused me to be able to recognize the presence even of unwelcome truths, of awful truths, of things I did not want to be true, but which I could not avoid.

On this score, I would count myself on the opposite pole from schizophrenia.

My core problem is self regulation.  It is impulse control, and more importantly, the inability to consistently calm myself down without alcohol.  This is residual trauma, which you cannot wish or will away.  It takes time, it takes patience, it takes strategy, and it takes tools, all of which I am applying with progressively better results.

I am, if anything, excessively aware of the feelings of others.  When I go to the mall, I have a pretty good idea what sort of state nearly everyone I see is in.

Now, having said that, I would like to compare and contrast myself with the Ideal Type of a dedicated Leftist.

What is conspicuous about such people is that they are never interacting with the you that you are putting in front of them with your words.  They are interacting with their idea of you, and that idea, in turn, is nearly entirely conditioned by an anger that you would dare disagree with them.  In important respects, it makes no difference to them if you are a real person, or merely an hallucination they have to talk themselves down from, to return to the Terra Firma of what they want to acknowledge as their core commitments, and the sense of Self they derive from those commitments.

Here is the thing: ideological commitments are foundationally different from religious and tribal commitments.  They derive from the same biological impulses, from the remembered need for sociality to survive, from a need for reinforcement in the patterns you have chosen, but there is ultimately no room for the actual individual in, say, a Communism or a Fascism.

If you live in a small Muslim community in, say, Jordan, you have a name and a place.  You are Ahmad son of Muhammad.  You are cousin to so and so, and friends with so and so.  People see you and recognize you as Ahmad.

To be clear, you are expected to abide by community standards, to go to the mosque on Fridays, to say your prayers (if that is a need in your particular community), but you can be both a person and a Muslim. You have the wave and the particle.

Ideologies, particularly Communism, discard with place and identity.  Your family is unimportant.  Your home is unimportant.  Where you come from is unimportant.  What you were raised to believe is unimportant, if it is other than Communist dogma.  Your city doesn’t matter.  Your country doesn’t matter.  YOU, in other words, don’t matter.  You are a donkey who carries the burden placed on its back.

There is no true belonging in Communism.  What there is, is a relaxation of the terror of being different.  You can feel safe that you will not be imprisoned or killed, because you are saying and doing the right things, but there is no festival which will make you truly feel like you belong as a person. 

Ideology of this sort is a sort of permanent spasm of the animal self.  It is an abstraction born of dissociation, itself born of trauma.  It is Satanic, because Satanism is that set of beliefs and practice which result if we give our selves over to our primitive nervous systems, to the unmyelinated vagus nerve, to the animal, to hunger.

In the wild, do you think animals think of their place of origin?  They have no culture.  They simply do every day what it takes to survive, and I think denizens of Leftist political systems are no different.  You are literally erasing everything that makes us human, that makes us different from animals, and calling it “progress”.

I think with this commentary I am getting close to the truth.  This feels correct to me.

I continue to look on with amazement, shock, and fear how fully and completely so much of our nation has fallen for horrible ideas, espoused by horrible people, ideas which should be readily recognizable as garbage by ANY educated person, and which should feel profane and wrong in the mouths of any sane person.

It occurs to there is a logical progression on this topic which is illuminating.

I think most of us would agree it is wrong and should be illegal to murder 2 year old children.  This, even though they are quite often very, very tiring, very annoying, and because we WANT to kill them.  I have long said that any parent who claims they have not thought about murdering their children is lying or saintly.

Same with one year old children.

Same with one day old children, children who have been born for 24 hours, who have been fed a couple of times, and presumably held a couple times.

But with a newborn, right out of the womb, it is OK, according to most Democrats today, who want to frame objecting to this as some form of radicalism, as some form of misogynistic, patriarchal control over women’s “bodies”, even though in this particular case the bodies have actually separated.

And ponder this possibility.  What if the mother doesn’t want her child, but wants to have it buried after it is killed?  What if the doctor tells her that would be illegal, because burying means it would have to be treated as a person, whereas if it is treated as medical waste, it is no longer a person?

What if the method of killing the baby is decapitating it on a little block with a meat cleaver?  Horrible?  Is that worse than drowning it or killing it through exposure in a cold room (as Obama voted to be legal in Illinois some 20 years ago, in what was then a radical and unpopular position even among Democrats)?  What if the baby is just fed into a grinder, to make it easier to deal with as medical waste?  Morally, if that is wrong, then all the other options are wrong.

Here is the thing; most European nations recognize that there have to be lines.  On this issue they draw them in approximately the right place (even if on most other issues they fail to do so).  They say “look, in three months you know if you want it or not.  Make up your mind in that time window, and if you change your mind, you have having the child then giving it up for adoption, barring major health problems”. 

But the thing is Democrats don’t even want to admit a born baby is a baby.  They are pushing it as far as it will go, at least they were until I came along. 

Here is my hypothesis: in nearly all cases, Democrats will avoid answering the question as to whether or not two year old have a right to life, and will fail indefinitely to affirm that it is legal and moral to prosecute as criminals anyone who would hurt them.

They have already said babies, born crying, whining babies looking for their mothers tits, are not human, that they are not worthy of protection.  Why not extend that indefinitely? 

And they KNOW this.  That’s why they won’t answer such a fucking simple question.  It really is unbelievable.

And BTW, I read this the other day: https://www.infowars.com/sec-endorses-mastercards-idea-of-cutting-off-right-wingers-report/

When I was talking about the Left coming up with alternative, with off the wall shit, to counteract their on-going, necessary, and inevitable failures to defend their ideas or results, this is the sort of thing I was talking about.  Back office, whispering, secret cabals.  They can’t allow sunlight or air to touch them anymore.  It’s proving fatal.

I had an emotional impact hit me last night that was worse than anything I’ve weathered yet.  It was like losing the three people I loved most in  the world in an instant without warning.

And it didn’t kill me.  I woke up sane.  I am starting to have faith in my recuperative abilities, and in my sturdiness.  This thing will take faith, certainly.

Then I had a set of dreams where I was trying to convince myself I played pingpong with a friend and two Playboy playmates while I was in high school.  It was a vaguely happy dream, even if everyone was stoned, as was the case at most of the parties I went to in high school.  My unconscious seems to be trying to construct happy memories.  I applaud this effort.

My past is slowly presenting itself to me in full color.  I wasn’t there, so to process it it needs to come to me.

Finished “Slaughterhouse-5”, and am tempted to wonder out loud: how far should our caring extend?  I was looking at a woman this morning in my Facebook feed more or less snuggling with a cow, crying over how many animals are abused the world over.  Then later this morning I was reading about the carnivorous diet which has taken hold of some segment of the population, and whose most public exponent is Jordan Peterson.

The only time Billy Pilgrim cried was when he realized how much the horses were suffering.  Then he was arrested and it is likely the horses died or were slaughtered for food.

How much should we care about the world?  Large birds are eating smaller birds and rodents everywhere all the time.  Large fish, small fish.  Pumas deer.

By all rights, I should be a vegetarian.  But I was a vegetarian once, and it was one of the most unpleasant periods of my life.  A Tibetan Buddhist text I read screams that I will live in hell a long time for eating meat.  But is it not functionally equivalent to a Baptist preacher screaming I will go to hell for fornicating or homosexuality?  Do not even people who are exemplary in other ways not sometimes make mistakes?  Who, what, can we trust?

I’m reasonably sure I could accustom myself to killing cows and lamb and goats and skinning and eating them.  Certainly, if the health and well being of me and my family seemed to depend on it.

Would a just God make it so that, even though biologically we are in most cases healthier eating some meat, that we are not supposed to eat dead animals?

And how about people?  No, not eating them: although cannibalism is apparently a popular theme among some, with the Hannibal show apparently taking it about as far as it can be made to go.

How much should we care about people?  There is suffering everywhere.  In India, they have by and large seemed to learn to overlook it, particular when suffered by non-persons like the Dalits.  It took Mother Teresa, a Christian, to do anything about the people dying on the streets of Calcutta.  Everyone else was “me and mine and fuck everyone else.”  That’s how the government operated for a long time, too, which was why India remained poor.

There has to be a limit.  There has to be a stopping point.  There has to be a way of not suffering daily from a preoccupation with other human suffering, yet also not becoming blind to it.  Perhaps it is engaging only with what is in front of us, and no more.  Jettison the abstract caring.

And there have to be times when we ourselves are ALL we worry about.  After all, if everyone else took care of themselves, then in short order most human misery would be gone.

As with anything else, perhaps cycles are the best answer.  Care some times.  Don’t care others.  Transit the middle.

If there are heavens and hells, as I believe, we are all in a continual project of negotiation, of reconciliation with what is really real within us, with what cannot be left behind.

It is not my job to make anyone do anything.  And it is particularly not my job if its something they could do for themselves.

But, I say to myself, people are ill.  I know this from my own experience.  You should care, I say to myself.

And so it goes.  I have no firm answer, and most likely there isn’t one.  Other than I don’t feel the need or the right to tell you how much you should care about anything, and feel the same should apply on your side.  Care all you want.  But don’t care about my caring.

If any of us base our peace of mind on the cessation of suffering, then we will never have peace of mind.  Not, in any event, for a very, very long time, and quite often the worst suffering comes from the inability to find peace.

Perhaps each of us is destined to do our best, most useful work, the moment we stop trying to do anything at all.  That would certainly be a Taoist sentiment.

I feel this voice, like a constant companion, which no matter what I’m doing–absolutely with no regard whatever to what I’m doing or how well or poorly I’m doing it–keeps telling me I’m doing it wrong.  Imagine a little person on your shoulder saying “you’re doing it wrong” at ten second intervals all day, all the time you are awake.

This is the “fire alarm” that Bessel van der Kolk talks about.

What can you do?  Some part of you learns to ignore it.  You have things to do, and this voice will never, ever contribute anything constructive.  But some other part of you can’t ignore it, since it is endogenous.  At the end of the day, the part that ignored it and the part that heard it have to reconcile.  That is when I get drunk. Or, if I don’t get drunk, the reconciliation is done through what I suppose I might term “night fighting”, where I get attacked by the part that absorbed all that negative energy, which is to say one part of me attacks another part of me, with the result that I shake, scream, and wake up thinking I am dying.

I feel this voice, now, which means it is slowly separating from me.  This is good news.  And I ponder all the years I have lost, being unable to make this voice go away or manifest in a way which I could deal consciously with.

The only thing that makes this loss seem reasonable is the thought that I can build a template for others to avoid my fate.

That, and that flowering bushes and trees, beauty, may be in my future.

Being dissociated is being split in two.  I am increasingly feeling it.

I am having dreams about things I should have had feelings about, but which I didn’t.  I was in largely loveless marriage for over ten years.  I didn’t know any better.  I had no reference point.  But when I feel it now, feel the dominant feeling-tone of our relationship, it hurts.

And I have dreams where I feel keenly that one side of me is on one side of the room, and the other on the other side.  I feel split in the dream, where I almost feel two simultaneous dreams.

But it’s all coming together.  You can’t think your way through that, but you can observe it, feel it, as it happens.

This morning I woke up, after a night of erecting defenses from invaders and failing, that perhaps I am playing an extended version of the joke most people will have heard in childhood, where someone–usually with a lot of personality and imagination, if it’s done well–will talk about a monster chasing them for a long time, through forests and deserts, and across rivers, and oceans, on boats, and trains, and planes, and automobiles.  Eventually you get stuck.  You can’t get away.  It looms up large, then touches you and says “Tag,  You’re it.”  Then runs away.

I felt that this morning.  Maybe life is a giant game.  One filled with horror and tragedy, to be sure, but which can be mastered, which can be digested, which can even be fun and regularly pleasurable.

I felt awful last night.  I was coming down with something and likely should not have worked.  This inner work is sucking something out of me which normally keeps me healthy.  But I’ll take today off and be fine tomorrow.

I forgot the teacup, I had I think beers, and I weigh 291.  I was munching last night on beef jerky (I make my own) dipped in this fantastic cashew dip I get at Costco.  No surprise.  I am slowly figuring all this out though.  I need my old supports still while I build or find new ones.