Moderates United

Somewhere out there,
In the center of the night
on the edge of the dark ocean
Thunders a train,
A giant serpent winding
through our world
meaning no harm
but reminding me
that much is awake while
we sleep
and much happens out there
in the black distance
where we can’t look
while slumbering.

We can’t keep vigil all night
every night,
but we can keep watch
under the sun.

This is not much. But it’s something.  I would encourage you to write bad poetry too.  It’s the bridge between words and music, and something we all need.

Most people are fearful, lazy, unimaginative and reflexively selfish, even when they go out of their way to sometimes be generous for their own benefit.

To walk your own way, which is necessary, is to be radically alone, at least for a time.  There is no other way.

As in so many other things, our age tries to dumb down and make easy everything spiritual.  We are told it is about “being nice”.   Perhaps it is finding yourself genuflecting to monks somewhere, and saying “his Holiness the Dalai Lama”.

In many respects, when you boil it down, this is not a kind universe.  Survival of any sort is not given.  We are a miracle planet in the midst of endless nothing.

These thoughts may not be helpful for you, but they are medicine, at this moment at least, for me.

An optimal brain possesses, in its EEG, a degree both of connection and separation.  This property is called coherence.  If adjacent areas start firing in exactly the same way, this is called “kindling”, and it leads to seizure.  It is more or less like the parts of an engine freezing and locking up, such that things that were supposed to move relative to one another stop.

I would submit that societies are supposed to operate the same way.  You need a degree of connection, of shared values, of shared assumptions, which would begin with basics like driving on the right, in America, and extend to things like the value of our Constitution, and an informed respect for our history, while fully admitting our many failings.

But when you have tens of millions of people chanting “Orange Man Bad”, in their gray minds and gray bodies, with their gray arms writing their gray words, you have what amounts to a seizure.  You don’t have connection: you have binding.  It is no longer a chain, but a steel rod.  You have lost the ability to think, as a society, when this happens.

It may be the case that parts of the brain, returning to that metaphor, resist the seizure.  But that seizure still affects everything.  No part of the organism can ignore it, just as no part of our nation can really, truly, fully ignore the “Orange Man Bad” seizure we have been seeing with Trump Derangement Syndrome. 

The problem is not just that they are wrong in their portraying him as evil, but that the flow of logic and difference into that part of our social order is no longer possible.  It is comatose, with respect to all new information.  That part of the brain has lost the ability to register new perceptions, to think new thoughts.

Someone might copy this argument and apply it to conservatives, but that will not make it true.  It will merely be a new aspect of the “not thinking” which applies to their whole project, their whole conformitarian, totalitarian project.

I read articles like this, and it is hard to be sanguine.  So many of us locked into virtual caves, with only the glittering light and horrible food to feed us.  So much stupidity, so much superficiality, so much disconnections from the waters of a broader communal life.

It’s daunting.  What can anyone do?  I would say, all of us can do what we can do.  That is all. 

But I understand the SIMPLICITY of the Global warming idea (BTW, I am well aware the politically correct term is climate change.  That is why I use Global Warming, which remains the core hypothesis, inelucably): it gives people an easy idee fixe (there is a bilingual pun intended there), in a world dominated by complex problems, each demanding complex solutions.

Freedom, freedom, freedom: give me the one idea, and the one solution, and let me beat my drum.

I got some intelligence yesterday from someone in college at the moment, and most of these kids seem to believe not only that global warming is real, but that it might mean the end of humanity.

This issue is important, not because the science is science, not because the people doing it are honest, but precisely for the opposite reasons.  It is the largest swindle every attempted.  It is funded at high levels by governments all over the world, and million of people want the people behind it to be given power over our lives.

It is beyond obscene that the people entrusted with the education of our children are using that opportunity to fill their heads with idiot nonsense.

Here is one good video which discusses the topic: https://www.prageru.com/videos/climate-change-what-do-scientists-say

The essential point on this whole thing is that the propaganda has reached such peak saturation that they call anyone who disagrees with them dishonest, and use the asserted fact of their dishonesty as reason to discount their opinions.

It is circular: if you disagree with us, you are wrong, and because you are wrong, your opinion carries no weight.  It is a method for avoiding substantive discussion entirely.  It renders it impossible.

But for all these deluded souls who are merely repeating what they taught, this is an important reality, a vital fact about our contemporary life, and Trump for that reason a criminal for pulling us out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which was farcical even on its own even if one was otherwise inclined to believe the core hypothesis.

I began this blog to address this topic.  It won’t die, because too many people need it to get their bullshit ideologies, their psychopathological delusions and obsessions, moved forward.

Playing music activates your whole brain.  It seems reasonable to think this used to be a means by which people managed trauma and trouble.  It is particularly useful in bringing the right hemisphere on-line and integrating it.

What would you do if you felt good all the time?

As I calm down, I am realizing that I miss tension.  The whole thing about tension is that it feels so good when you release it.  Yes, you may be hitting your head against the wall, but there is no way to replicated that feeling when you stop.

Sex, of course, is mostly tension.  Have you thought about this?  Your dick gets hard and your pussy wet, when your sympathetic nervous system activates, when you react to something, when tension builds.

It is the contrast between that, and the activation of the parasympathetic system in orgasm, that makes it all feel so good.  The more tension, the more powerful the potential release, by contrast.  Maybe this is why some people like being tied up.

What is the contrast?  What if you are completely relaxed?  Do you need sex?  I would say yes, but would the feeling not be different?  Would it not be more frontal cortex based, more relationship based, more connection based?  Something without a firm line moving in, where pleasurable feelings can happen without sexual arousal, and end pleasurably without orgasm, say in dancing?

If we posit that addiction exists to release tension, the amplitude of that release also needs to be factored into the rewards of addiction.

How, to put it another way, can I swim into and out of pleasure, all day every day?  This is logically the opposite of addiction.

I think this is a very good question.

Edit: I will add that thrill seeking is not about fear, but about fear and release.  It’s sex of a sort.

First off, I just read this for the first time.  It is utterly fantastic, and should be required reading in all high school Civics classes (if such a thing is still allowed, in that knowledge makes indoctrination more difficult): http://bastiat.org/en/government.html

If this, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Black Book of Communism, and perhaps something by Hayek, say the Fatal Conceit, were made mandatory, we would rid ourselves in short order of all the intellectual diseases currently besetting our nation.  This, even if we allow, as we should, the Left to require their own texts, whatever they might judge defensible in the face of fierce and clear logic, with the whole of ancient and contemporary history behind it.

Here is the thing: it is not that teachers of history and politics and literature and etc. have read these texts and rejected them.  It is the case that they are inbred, insular, ignorant, and possess the arrogance of grotesque “ideocentrism”, if I might coin a term, which I would intend to combine the negative valence of ethnocentrism, with the parochial rigidity and radical intolerance of possessing only one idea.

Ideocentrism is the central problem of the modern academy.  The solution was to make universities places of many ideas, of, shall we say, multiideationalism, of diverse thought, of diversity in the ways which matter.  But now it is the realm of the “idee fixe”.

Bastiat described all of this perfectly 150 or so years ago.  Read what he wrote.  I cannot improve on it.

I will add two thoughts using modern notions and words (perhaps).

One: if humans are, with respect to one another, the most dangerous predator, government is the apex predator, the top of the food chain, the force that is nearly unfuckwithable.  Our Founders knew this.  Paine described it well, and there can be no doubt Bastiat took Paine’s ideas into consideration.  Paine survived the American Revolution.  He did not survive the French one.

Why cede power to that animal most likely to consume us?

As he says:

For ourselves, we consider that Government is and ought to be nothing whatever but the united power of the people, organized, not to be an instrument of oppression and mutual plunder among citizens; but, on the the contrary, to secure to every one his own, and to cause justice and security to reign.

Two: “Government is that great lie by means of which morally dissolute human beings endeavor to rationalize their existences and actions.”

Government is used not just to take other people’s shit, but to serve as an ersatz religion for bad people.

Government is a deflection, psychologically.  It is a means of saying you favor a cause, without being willing to take ANY personal accountability for its achievement. It is a means of shifting blame.  It is a means of blaming everyone but the guilty, which can be the lazy poor, the incompetent and/or corrupt bureaucrats, or the intellectual social engineers who know nothing about anything, but still insist on being called “experts”.  Usually all three are guilty, but nobody cares.  The task has been accomplished: blame is shifted, consciences are cleared.

Precisely because the feedback loop exists at the level of rationalization, there can never be any reconciling of aim and objective.  In point of fact, ACHIEVING the supposed objective would be disastrous, as it would unbalance a psychological project predicated on long term and utterly selfish lies.

Read Bastiat.  It’s all there.  Nothing is missing.  I am simply offering foot notes.

There’s an old saying floating around “what would you do if you knew you could not fail?”  There are many things like this that show up as memes on my Facebook feed.

I would counter this with: what would happen if you got everything you ever wanted, and it wasn’t what you wanted (to quote a U2 lyric)?  What if you did the work to live your perfect life, and you were still unhappy?  What then?

I suppose practically, you would then need to introspect, and determine what was lacking.  But also practically, it would be terrifying and extremely disappointing.  Terrifying, because here you are in this life that none of us really understand, and you have taken your best guess, and it wasn’t good enough.

This background fear haunts many of us, I think.  Certainly, it haunts me, I realize this morning.  What happens if I do my actual best, and feel exactly the way I feel otherwise?  What then?

If you cannot find small pleasures where you are, now, then it is unlikely you will find them anywhere else.  Champions, the people who win, treasure the small victories of one good pass, one good route, one good block, a PR in the weight room.  That is how they endure the work to be the best.

The ones who are driven by other things routinely go into severe depressions when they win.  This is apparently quite common for Olympic athletes, especially the ones who win Gold.  What else is there left?  What if their drive comes from a primal shame, as was for example apparently the case with Greg LeMonde, who was molested as a child?

I am perhaps creating difficulties where none need exist, but I realize that this is a fear for me, at least.  This is most likely behind most or all of my inconsistencies.

It’s an odd thing with feelings: they cannot be predicted.  You have to do the work, then see what happens.  I have more than once been in despair one minute, then felt fine the next.  How does that work?  How does an emotional state change that seems impossible become possible?  How can a walk outdoors, or a piece of music, or a phone call from a friend completely change how we feel? 

Phrased another way, how DO we learn to deal with the mutability of our nervous systems?  Is the question not why people go and stay mad, and rather how and in what very limited circumstances people achieve and maintain sanity?

This speculation, itself, makes me feel better.  We are truly astonishing and strange creatures.  We are miracles, one after the other.