We are the only ones, and it has been this way so long, I think it is reflected in our brains.
For those who seek power, of course, shame is an extraordinarily useful emotion to cultivate, and if I might comment, Original Sin is quite perfect for that purpose, particularly when those in power are dispensing the remedy.
What shame underlies those who seek such power, of course, must also be profound. No sane person seeks power over others. It may be that some one or two people in a group possess exceptional power of perception and action, and thus become logical leaders, but the people I am talking about seek power whether they are the most deserving or not.
Peace of mind is a precious thing, and no one who properly values it will disturb it except for the best of reasons. Odysseus was right to feign madness.
What I would submit is that most fear is related to our fellow humans, specifically the fear that they will hurt us. This, of course, is an eminently valid fear. Especially in recorded history, there have likely been 100 people killed by other people for every one killed by a shark, a bear, a tiger, or wolves. Other humans are the most fearsome predators we face.
Shame is bowing your head, like we see dogs do. Shame is telling other people you present no threat, because you submit to them. Shame is surrender. Thus: fight, flight, and surrender all originate in the same neurological place.
Surrender is not in my nature, most likely specifically because I always feel an underlying sense of unavoidable shame which I cannot get away from, which has no cause in my present behavior, and which causes me emotional distress.
I have speculated in the past that the best soldiers are most likely those who have endured humiliation and degradation, as is the pattern in our military indoctrination.
I will add to this the discovery that those who have suffered mild to moderate developmental trauma seem empirically to have much higher pain tolerances which, combined with greatly lowered emotional sensitivity, make for the qualities we value in those whose task is enduring hardship, and working hard to kill other human beings.
I was told once, by someone in a position to know, that most of our best soldiers are sociopaths. War is insane, and in an insane world, only the insane truly belong and thrive. We need these people, but as we saw in Africa with the murder of the Green Beret there–someone who evidently retained his moral compass, making his companions deeply fearful of what he was going to say–we need to keep them on a tight leash.
Fear really is THE essential consideration in all human life. It acts as a sort of dye which stains everything it touches.
As I likely mentioned, I continue to read Sebern Fisher’s excellent book, and she makes the argument that fear underlies all psychopathology. I believe this.
But it is never too late to begin the journey back home.
I continue to hope my life experience will see as a competent mid-wife and guide at some point. Lord knows, I have traveled the road!!!
But you need to arrive once to show the way. You need to be reborn at least once to be a mid-wife. The stones on the path need to have felt your feet.
As an example, I have mentioned the Hoffman Process I went through. That is not enough. What I think everyone needs to do, at a minimum, is go through an Adult Attachment Inventory, and perhaps a six month course of Kum Nye, Neurofeedback, and Pesso-Boyden Therapy.
Then it hit me: why not do that as a society? Why not have an emotional growth process for marriage? Why not do it at age 18, and do periodic ten year five week retreats? Why not demand of our political leaders that they submit themselves to an even higher standard of demonstrated emotional mastery?
When the world wants you to look to the left, it’s not bad policy to look to the right. The world is constantly playing magical tricks, and you have to not be fooled by the distractions. The world is people, and people lie. They don’t mean to lie. Quite often they don’t even know they are lying. Or if they know they are lying they rationalize it with a lie they don’t call a lie. It was just their fair share. What others don’t know won’t hurt them. They deserved it.
So the whole of our public landscape is infused with half truths, everywhere, and cannot be otherwise until people learn to listen deeply to their own hearts.
We have the technology to build a paradise, but our psyches are breaking down, we are becoming madmen and madwomen. Silicon Valley is a hotbed of out and out lunatics. China is run by amoral bastards. Have you seen this: http://www.visiontimes.com/2017/10/01/flight-mh370-disappeared-to-cover-up-organ-harvesting-crimes.html
Mao, whose picture is everywhere, including on the currency, starved to death 50 MILLION people. Why would such a government bat an eye at the murder, for political convenience, of a couple hundred? They wouldn’t. That story may or may not be true, but it does seem to clearly be true that the Falun Gong members have been having their organs ripped out for some time, and I suspect had their bodies sold for these gruesome “Bodies” exhibits.
None of this is necessary. All of this comes from severe developmental trauma. It comes from motherless worlds. The Party is a psychopath. It is a machine without a conscience, and animated solely by greed.
It is good to have utopian visions. This actually reminds me of the point I was starting to make before the soap box appeared magically under my feet. Socialism is a distraction. It is a psychologically rooted way of directing attention away from the personal psyche. If I spend all my time talking about US, I can avoid talking about ME.
Socialism is the exact opposite of the direction we would need to go to build an actual utopia. Rather than focus on social relations, class relations, and inequality, we need to focus on mother/child, and to a great but lesser extent father/child and extended family/child relationships. We need to develop security in the earliest infancy and childhood.
Happiness does not take much in the way of things. We could live in grass huts somewhere and be vastly happier than we are now, isolated as we are, and suffering from the love we did not get from a distracted, overworked, and stressed out mother.
Economic inequality is the preoccupation of fools.
And in point of fact if we look, say, at inner cities, the main reason that they are not thriving is that the mother/child relationship is consistently stressed. Girls get pregnant too early, with no good way of caring for the child financially, and without the emotional skills to parent well. The father is not there about 90% of the time, at least as a husband, and the overall environment is stressful because of the failures of the last generation, which breed crime, disorder, and anger.
Don’t look at the left hand, which promises a world where no one’s inner world matters that much, where all that matters are the physical circumstances of their birth. Look at the right hand, which asks you to remember who you are, and what really matters.
YOU MUST, they say, OR ELSE, they say.
I don’t know what’s true of course, other than that I am quite certain based on close and long term observation, that fear makes people batshit insane. Truly fucked up shit never comes from anywhere else, at root, although some people do a passable job of burying their terrors deep down in the hole. I always have, at least until now. Now, I’m sometimes the bad guy in my own dreams. I joined the other side. Or did I just become aware of it?
Rumi once said that no one who does not have both good and evil in them belongs with the Sufis. He was not extolling evil, obviously, but rather the AWARENESS of it. Anyone who thinks they are pure good is fucking somebody over, guaranteed.
No saints need apply for sainthood, if I might paraphrase a Lao Tzu line I have quoted often.
2. And the phrase came to me earlier “there are no calculators in Heaven”. There is no invisible accountant keeping a list of merits and demerits in a heavenly (or in the case, infernal) Excel spreadsheet, and planning to do a summation at the end, such that positive scores go one way, and negative another.
Imagine yourself as a painting in space. How much gray is there? How much yellow? What colors do you show daily? How do they vary? What forms appear? How beautiful or ugly are they?
What sounds would surround you? Tinny, muffled thumps, harps, rocks rattling in a coffee can?
What smells? How would you feel–pointed and jagged, soft, stiff, curved, straight?
Imagine that where you go is perfectly suited for who you are, and that who you are is absolutely obvious. And that there are infinite gradations, adaptations, and that tides and waves sweep regularly through the whole thing. You bob up and you bob down, in this infinite ocean.
3. How hard would it be for AI to imitate you? How patterned are you? We all tend to do certain things at certain times. But do you say the same things? If someone watched you for a week, could they easily predict what you will say to Jim at the gym, Gladys at the front desk? If you were cloned, how hard would it be to fool people?
If information is the degree to which a given evolution is unexpected, how much information do you produce in a given week? I would tend to submit that spontaneity and rigidity are roughly what openness and fear are to one another. If you do exactly the same things day in and day out, does fear underlie it?
Were you born merely to replicate something, or to create new riffs on the old, and to discover the new?
God loves new dance steps. Nothing is new, but much can be new to us.
Outside of this blog, I keep my feelings to myself. This sort of thing scares the shit out of nearly everyone, with very few exceptions, and God knows I seem to feel more than many, and I think where I live most of the time would kill most people. Perhaps I am wrong, but I don’t think so, based on what I seem to see every day.
In traditional societies, mothers are the ones who convinced their children that the universe was smaller, closer, and more comprehensible than it is. Even the Catholic vision is vastly more comfortable than our present vision. It has a place in hell for the truly irredeemable, but a place for second chances for everyone else. And the universe looked to the Earth, not vice versa.
I have been feeling this coldness of complete exposure. It is very unpleasant. Maddening, if I were someone who fell apart easily.
And I have been feeling the evil which underlies most human culture. I have been feeling the evil in me which was latent when I started writing about goodness.
It is a fear, a powerful fear, an exigent fear, a primordial fear. It is the caged animal, the raging beast, the cheater, liar and thief. Only perfectly nurtured people lack this, and I don’t think those are more than, perhaps, 20% of the population. Everyone else carries forward, because they must, something from which evil can spring.
And I feel how human culture exists to provide rationalizations for these feelings, to put a positive spin on them, to make of conformity a virtue, because it papers over the evil within.
Is it not ODD, when you think about it, that in our popular culture tolerance is granted supreme value, that all the good people of our world spend all their time practicing “compassion”, as they see it, and yet that our media is filled with the most horrific violence? Shows about serial killers and the details and even reenactments or portrayals of their crimes? The knife they used, the sort of wound they inflicted, how they tortured their prisoner.
At a deep psychological level, of course, this all makes perfect sense. No one can be friend to the world, not really. We are not wired like that biologically, evolutionarily. How do you do it? You make it an abstract value to cover up the real anger and malice you feel in your being, and which lacks an outlet for expression.
Oh, my world and work involves countless deaths When I don’t drink, I feel like I am dying every night, multiple times. I wake up screaming. When I do drink, of course, that too is a death of sorts. I have seen much too much death, much too much dying.
But I am making slow, painstaking, ridiculously hard progress. This is the truth. And one day, I will get past the storm, and will see something much better. And it may be soon. One can hope. As always, though, I place my ultimate faith in persistence, and nothing else.
Might I coin the term Homo Persistens (or whatever the Latin is for persistence/perseverence)? We are that animal which keeps (and kept) going.
Profit is ethical. It is the only sane motive for economic activity, at least for masses of people. But every last ounce of profit at any cost: terrible.
Corporations are not families, but for a long time, in America, there was dual loyalty. Employees felt it towards the company, and the company towards them. That ended, again, some time in the late 1970’s to the 1980’s, largely as a result of what newly minted MBA’s from top schools were taught and went out into the world and practiced.
Virtually every problem in the modern world in the realms of economics and public policy is the direct result of academics. I will not overlook the vast progress in the sciences, but anything touched in any way by bad philosophy has been corrupted by academics and metastasized.
In the realm of culture, we would all be better off, I think, if all Humanities departments were abolished, as they exist in the main today.
That is perhaps going much too far, but perhaps it is not going far enough. What role should we allow in our society for ruinous ideas? To what extent should we publicly fund their propagation?
This post was occasioned by a trip someone was describing to me of a trip to Avery Island and the McinHenny Company, which makes Tabasco. Apparently they take care of their workers very well. Every company could do that.
And here is the thing: even if greed is good, what is it good for? More money flows through the system, landing preferentially among those at the top, and what do they use it for? Booze, women, and fancy trips and fancy cars. That is our society as it exists today. Our elite are self absorbed hedonists.