Moderates United

Someone who doesn’t care at all about anyone but his or herself, who nonetheless firmly believes everyone else should be compelled to care about whatever allegedly marginalized group is most politically useful to them at the moment.

That they don’t actually care is shown clearly by their unwillingness to ask honestly “what happened?” every time they fail. That they think we should be compelled to care is shown daily in their rhetoric, which changes the target of coerced “compassion” regularly, but never the drumbeat of moral hauteur, arrogance, derision, and social violence.

If we are not like them, we are bad, they say, when the truth is that if we ARE like them, we have announced a surrender of our conscience to the pursuit of power, money, wealth, and privilege, all in the false name of justice.

It really is a disgusting mindset. There is nothing there but arrogance, lies, and failure.

I read this today : https://www.infowars.com/chase-bank-abruptly-bans-proud-boys-leader/

If I happened to have s Chase account this sort of thing would make me want to close it. These bastards don’t want truth or discussion: they want blunt force trauma and economic violence.

What if someone created a website listing the political acts of major corporations—like Nike, like P&G— and provided alternatives? You don’t want Nike, here are her paid companies with good records whobwill be happy to have your business.

Companies can be scored politically, potentially with s high degree of specificity, and they can be scored by his divergent they are from the ideal of free speech and solution oriented dialogue.

This patent violence by Chase could be met by five banks EAGER to get that business.

Such s thing might well make companies less inclined to indulge in patronizing and intellectually vacuous political posturing.

Most psychotherapists are socialists. They may not call themselves that, but they share, it seems to me, an unspoken belief that the State can and should be “compassionate”.

Governments cannot be compassionate. They can and do, however, take charge of people’s lives and tell them how to live.

This is the equivalent of a psychologically enmeshed system, a codependent system, wherein one set of people generates their sense of purpose by first making it impossible for people to thrive, and then “rescuing” them.  To meet the needs of the State though, which is to say those people whose unmet emotional needs propelled them to power, this “rescue” must be on-going.  No policy can be considered which completes this rescue.

I am left to wonder what unmet need exists in most psychotherapists which would enable them to nurture these delusions. I think it is safe to say most of them are codependent too. Providing therapy enables them to thrive, relatively, on the misery of others, provided their own defenses protect them from realizing the profound importance of this power dynamic in the maintenance of stability within their own psyches.

1) Bokononisn is a placebo religion which extols the virtues of placebos.

2) Small quantities of nihilism can have a positive effect, as solvents acting on rigid and wrong certainties. But there is a part of us which is continually planting new seeds, and if one is compelled to stamp those out too, then it has become what it replaced. I suppose the nihilism of nihilism is belief.

I am not as far gone as Vonnegut, but I think we share (you know he is out there somewhere) a profound love of absurdity.

1) There is an inherent creativity in some acts of profound stupidity.

2) Life is s chess game you play with yourself.

Given human instability and confusion, the goal of politics should not be a system which is perfect, but perfectible.  The goal should not be a static system capable of giving all people everything they are believed by the governing elite to want–or which they WOULD want, if they were not feckless, ungrateful wretches–but rather a system in which people decide, on as local a level as possible, what they want, and are allowed to do so.

Manifestly, the American system has shown itself to be perfectible, and this is its chief virtue.  It cannot be said that we rejected slavery 200 years ago, because we didn’t.  But we were one of the first nations in human history–going back over 2,000 years–to banish it, and perhaps the only nation ever to fight a bloody war over it, or at least largely over it.

All nations, all tribes, all confederations and leagues and city-states and fiefdoms and monarchic orders and every other form of government have been discriminatory for all of human history.  The Romans, for example, were quite fair by historical standards, but they always made Roman citizens legally better in all important respects.  They had rights which others did not.

Discrimination is the rule of history.  What is unique is fighting against it.  This is a feature which has evolved within our perfectible system.

What we should pursue is freedom, which is to say the protection by the government of what will ideally evolve into a pervasive pursuit of individual perfection, which is to say growth.

What we should reject with every ounce of strength and courage and resolution we have is the freezing of our government with ice nine into a static, unresponsive, unperfectible structure of death, desolation, and misery, which is what all Utopian projects–projects of perfection–devolve into invariably.

Utopianism, by definition I would argue, focuses on perfection OUT THERE.  It focuses on social arrangements, not on the content of that individual’s–that person spouting Utopian rhetoric–heart.  Utopianism is ice nine-ism is the pursuit of shared death by people unable to live on their own.

We preach what we cannot do.  We seek what we cannot find.  And we find what never needed to be sought.

Perhaps Taoism might be summarized as reliably finding what is there, and valuing it properly.  It is completing the circle without taking a step.  Just watch: here it comes again.  What fun!!!

OK: I will deopaque this slightly: If you can anticipate 20 steps in the future, and you are going to wind up where you already are, you can skip those twenty steps.  I could do on with this, but I just got lost myself.

Look out your window.  This is always a good rule of thumb.

The Absurdism of Cat’s Cradle is echoing in me a bit.  Every book I read, every movie I watch, bounces around for a while.  This is no different.

Here is a principle: once everything which is contingent, tragic, comical, absurd, stupid, ridiculous, and utterly human is subtracted, what remains is neither the Truth nor a lie, but the Tao.  And the Tao is in fact a Way, a way beyond all the suicides of self, of mind, of compassion, of joy, of sadness, of love, of everything else we sacrifice to keep our sanity. Rather, what we are pleased to call our sanity, which is itself always a bit absurd.

We sacrifice to keep going,but in some respects, most of us find ourselves frozen in place, frozen in time, rigid.  This is perhaps the metaphor Vonnegut intended with Ice Nine (ice nine?): not the death of death, but the death of solidity and stasis, of becoming immune to absurdity, of becoming convinced you are utterly right about everything.

I have spoken often about perceptual movement, or Perceptual Breathing.  It is quite possible to create a continuum where one end is anchored in futility and the utter incoherence and unknowability of everything (and the other, of course, anchored in Absolute Truth).  This is a conclusion of despair, but also of observation.  War is always already an abomination which, as Lao Tzu commented some 2,600 years ago, should be celebrated as a funeral even when successful.  Nationalism is ersatz community, Gesellschaft masquerading as Gemeinschaft.  Worse: Gesellschaft masquerading as “karass“.  You can’t love everyone, and they can’t love you.  And love is in any event not always what you need.  You don’t know what you need.  This, too, is absurd.

I will share autobiography I shouldn’t, but I continue to believe all is revealed in the end, so we may as well practice.

I saw my mother recently after a long period, and I was struck that her emotional tone reminds me of three very different people singing three different tunes all at the same time, all slightly off key.  It keeps her occupied, but there is no room for anyone else.  I am certainly not there, I am not present to her consciousness, nor will I ever be.

This is Verworfenheit.  In important respects, I had no mother.  She did not try to hurt me.  She was not consciously cruel.  But the wounds remain, and there is no reconciling them.  There is nothing I can say to her to bridge this gap, even now, after all these long years.  This is a lonely prospect.

But it has created in me an unusual perspective.  I should have cracked apart and broken, but somehow I didn’t.  Something coherent within me is stronger than the forces which should tear me apart.  I have, not a mother, but a Fate which I am living.

This is something.

So I read Vonnegut’s absurd novel “Cat’s Cradle” (no cat, no cradle), and actually found it therapeutic.  If you adopt a pessimistic attitude that everyone is a fucking idiot and there is nothing you can do about it, it’s vastly easier to avoid a judgmental attitude, as well as much mental turmoil.

I am reminded of the habit of some Sufi sects of labeling people by their particular form of idiocy.  And I then think, though, that only an idiot would try to explain this convention.

Russia Times keeps posting pro-Maduro articles. Putin evidently ordered Russian troops of some sort down to Venezuela.

Here is a good treatment of the subject: https://www.prageru.com/videos/hows-socialism-doing-venezuela

What gets me about all this is the number of people who even now are prepared to overlook Maduro’s crimes, those of Chavez before him, and the Big Picture failure of EVERYTHING they have done in Venezuela.  As far as I can tell there are only two classes of people in Venezuela: a small elite who benefit from the ability to rob from the People in the name of “Social Justice”–social justice rendered in rich meals, expensive cigars, and large mansions protected by heavily armed guards–and the masses who are suffering terribly from what at best is described as food insecurity, and in many cases as outright starvation.  Everything that worked no longer worked.  There are no jobs.  Inflation has reached the point where it is safe to assume barter is the primary medium of exchange.

Who defends this?  Fine, if you want to say America interfered in many nations, we did.  We prevented the Soviets from making Iran a puppet state.  We prevented Communists from taking over El Salvador and Guatamala.  The list could be extended, but to my mind the point is that we prevented regimes exactly like that of Hugo Chavez.  They don’t seem to value principle or long disciplined political building projects in Latin America, so a case can be made that we made things worse, or at least did not help, and hurt a lot of people in the process.

But the Soviets, invariably, everywhere they went, every country their agents of influence went into, suffered terribly, and never got better, or only got better once the Communists were out of power.  Look at Zimbabwe.  Mugabe, on most accounts, did damage that will take 20-30 years to fix.  The Soviets were behind the birth of Islamic terrorism, which ironically enough has come back to haunt Russia itself. Cuba is a wax museum stuck in the pre-Castro era, with tired air, tired people, and no hope.

And nearly all wars America took part in were started by the Soviets.  Absent the Soviets and Red Chinese, the Korean and Vietnam Wars would not have happened.  Would not have been started.

And even over and above all that, even if I grant that the picture of American interventions is complex, the situation in Venezuela is not.  There is nothing there that is good that can or should be defended by any sane person.  It is dictatorship which has destroyed economic opportunity, created mass poverty, and which rules at the point of a gun.  This is the sort of thing which, if America supported it, the Commies would be up in arms about.  FASCISM!!  They would scream.  They would call Maduro a right wing strong man, and demand his ouster.

The thing which is lost when you dissolve your emotional sensitivity in abstraction is a capacity for nuance, proportion, and consistency.  If you call a regime with one set of attributes a horror in one context, that exact same sort of regime should not become good if they make the sole modification of rationalizing themselves in a different way.  Whether they use national honor as a rationalizing pretext, or social justice, if there are guns pointed at everyone who dissents, it is fascist.  If the freedom of the press is suppressed, it is fascist.  If people marching in the streets are met with troops whose sole purpose is to disperse them and make them disappear, it is fascist.

I am astonished at the degree of mental illness I see on the internet, people with degrees, even advanced degrees, saying the most palpably silly and inexcusable things.  Israel is another place where this form of lunacy clusters, and all sense of reason, consistency, and proportion vanish.

I walk along
the path
of Roses.
I see the petals
fallen.
they speak to me
and tell me of
when they were in
full bloom
of the intoxicating
beauty of the fragrance
they exuded effortlessly, exultantly.

I think of my own blossoms
so many years ago
the fragrance of me, of my passion,
of my love.
I think that I too am a rose petal,
but that it is never too late
to bloom again
To perfume a world.

Your pain? 

It lies on the ground.

Your enchantment? 

It rises with the morning fog, always
and forever.  There are smiles

In everything you forget.