Moderates United

Many emotional wounds cannot be healed, but all wounds can be transformed.

True Liberals, who are nearly all Republicans in the present era, believe in liberty.  A belief in liberty makes political violence illogical.  There is no reason to attack someone for believing differently than you, when allowing alternative beliefs is the basis of your whole worldview.

Socialists are different.  They have ONE worldview, and want to coerce everyone else into it.  This makes political violence extremely logical and easy.  You can easily recognize who your enemies are, and, having a simple goal of 100% compliance, all tools are on the table to get them on board.  This was the basic point that Saul Alinsky made.

“There was no doubt she was overjoyed to see me, her eyes said so.  It was as though the gesture of self destruction had, in her mind, equalized all the guilt.  The courage of committing the act seemed to have justified herself to herself.  This action on her conviction, no matter how neurotic, had called for all her strength and she was now released.  Free from the urge, since the will-for-death needs a strong concentration of pressure to fulfill itself and once accomplished via attempt, is defeated until another period of buildup is gone through; unless, of course, one succeeds in reaching death the first shot, or is really mad.  Gazing down on her, with a grin of artificial buoyancy, I sensed this and felt an instant flood of envy.  She had escaped, at least for some time, and I knew I had yet to make my move.  Being a coward I had postponed too long and I realized I was further away from commitment than ever.  Would hesitancy never end?”

Neal Cassady, in a letter to Jack Kerouac

The woman in question had been a girlfriend of Cassady’s, who had tried to kill herself, apparently by slitting her wrists and losing quite a bit of blood.  He had abused her emotionally, and was–after briefly promising to be faithful, and after a generous working class couple offered them free lodging for a time–to abandon her again and finally for the flimsiest of reasons.

He is speaking here about his own desire to end his own life.  This underlies everything he does, and he is arguably the single most important influence on the work of Allan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, themselves sort of the progenitors of the counter-culture, with of course a number of others.

Beat means beat.  Done.  Finished.  Kaput.  There is nothing to admire there, nothing to emulate.

And Cassady died, really, an ugly and pointless death.  He wandered off in the cold–and I think the rain–after a party down in Mexico, having taken a large quantity of some drug, and seems to have died of some combination of exposure and the drugs.  They found his body some time the next day.

This is a pointless and stupid way to die.  But he had been rehearsing his own death for some time, and based on Kerouac’s account, drove somewhat suicidally every day.

The leaves turn many brilliant colors in Autumn, but this does not mean they are more alive.  Burning leads to extinction.  We should not admire it. We should admire those able to walk long distances with patience, skill, and grace.

https://mises.org/wire/cultural-marxism-americas-new-mainline-ideology

I will emphasize that, while Salgado was presumably some hard or soft version of a Leftist most of his life–he was apparently declared an enemy of the State in the late 1960’s in Brazil–that the very real problems he documented were, in almost all cases, the result of groups of people attempting to put Communist ideas into practice.

The Ethiopian famine, for example, was nearly entirely the result of Communist efforts to remake the economic order, as executed by worthless and amoral intellectuals who knew nothing about anything.  But they had guns, and power comes from the barrel of a gun.  So too does mass death.

All this misery, all this death: the sources can be traced and tracked.  Their roots can be known.  Their causes can be addressed and extinguished.  But only if we dedicate ourselves to the task of thinking clearly and practically.

And rereading Peter Bauer, Friedrich Hayek and others, and fighting left wing intellectuals everywhere they creep into the room.

Wow, what an amazing movie. I would encourage everyone to watch it. It’s heartbreaking at times.  I found myself crying several times.  His coverage of Africa, particularly, is brutal and unflinching.  Very little is held back.

But I will not give away too much, or reduce the value of this movie, by telling you it ends on a strongly positive note.

His fathers cattle ranch was destroyed by drought, and by what amounted to poor land management.  And in a fit of despair after his coverage of the regional conflict around Rwanda, he takes up his wife’s suggestion to replant it, to regenerate life there, to make of the dry earth a sheltering forest.

And so they planted over 2 million trees.  And they grew.  This could be done in much of Brazil, and of course for that matter anywhere else.

They say at the end that this is a lesson.

I would take this lesson a step further: the fires which have been burning our souls, turning us into dust, into monsters, can be quenched, and something new planted.

It is, I believe,  Turkish proverb which states “no matter how far up the wrong road you have gone, turn around.”

I don’t share everything, as I comment from time to time, but I will share this, which I don’t think I have yet.

When I was at a recent rock concert, I got in tune with the very positive vibe this particularly band (Mondo Cozmo) was putting out.  The whole audience felt it (at its best, this is what music does, and should do)–I am always in the flux, which is part of the reason I have to spend so much time alone–and this feeling of overwhelming grief and loss overcame me.

I felt as if a fire, a scorching, engulfing inferno, has been blazing through me all my life.  And I teared up when I asked myself: who can I share this with?  Who, who has not been there, deeply, completely, can possibly communicate with me?  How can they see me?  The flames are dying down, and in their place is a vast empty space.  Everything is gone.  The flame is gone, and so is everything else.  Everything was consumed.  It took no prisoners.

And I pondered this for a day or so, and it occurred to me that what is left is space for new growth.  For small seedlings.  For green.  For new life.  For recreation and spontaneity, after so long.  And this comforted me.

On the rare occasions when I show my real eyes, people retreat.  They don’t want to know what I have to tell them.  And even though I know there are many people like me, very many severely wounded people, they don’t want to walk back into the fire by remembering.  I am a very unusual soul.  Not unique, by any means, but rare.

But I speak this from the heart: all of us can rebuild.  We can build something better than what came before.  All this ash in the air will pass one day, if we simply remember our dignity as human beings.

I of course forget my dignity too, perhaps often.  I have many security measures in place, ways of hiding, ways of deflecting, ways of avoiding. Still, still, still: sometimes I remember, and those are the seeds which cry out in delight when given water and sun and attention.  Those are the children of the soul, and the spirit of renewal.  Those are the beginning of what good is possible for all of us, lost here in this confusing place.

If you are going to be greedy, be greedy for understanding.

Understanding leads to compassion, but this is only a start.  Compassion, as I can’t emphasize enough, is merely a posture for fools, but only a beginning for the wise.  It must lead somewhere.  It must lead to efforts at either alleviating actual, concrete human suffering, and/or to a thirst to build in others a desire to heal themselves, and a belief that this is possible.  You must show them a way.  This is what I continue to strive to do.

But I have not healed myself yet.  I continue to pay in blood, tears, and terror, and I will continue to do so as long as it takes.  I do not want the easy road.  I want the correct road.

Right here, with wider eyes, and a keener nose.

The miracle is everywhere.  What is possible with me, is possible everywhere.  Here being a part of everywhere, what I need to move is my ability to perceive.  You can place roots in existence itself.

I am watching the very interesting documentary “The Salt of the Earth”, which is a play on the name of Brazilian born photographer Sebastiao Salgado, with “Salgado” meaning “salty” or “salted”.

I cannot resist, at this moment, the sense that what I try to do here is also to take photographs, but with my mind.  I attempt to use language to convey pieces of ideas, bits, flashes of a deeper reality.

A photographer shows what exists, what can be seen, with the eyes.  A thought workers shows what exists, what can be seen, with the mind.  This, at any rate, is the ideal.  Sometimes, of course, we are blind and simply lack the perspicacity to realize it.  This is why all perceptions must be seen as contingent, and never final.  We must always strive to open as many channels as possible, to allow the water of life to flow through.

Speaking of our seemingly kind old hippy.  I can hear younger kids whispering from the sidelines: “he’s the real deal, man, he was at Woodstock.”

Placing myself imaginatively there, I have to wonder if there were not thousands of semi-rapes of semi-conscious women at Woodstock.

Kids nowadays want to project their present values backwards.  But this is impossible, and it is impossible for me to believe hippy men were any less slimy than men generally.  Granted a “free love” ethos, what could be wrong with as much fucking as possible? 

Here, I found this:

And Woodstock was not all peace and love anyway. There was at least one rape reported following the event in 1969 and probably a great deal more that went unreported, given the approach to dealing with rape at the time. And rape could be a very challenging area when intersected with the “free love” movement. It is notable that, by the 1980s, some women viewed their experiences with “free love” and the sexual revolution somewhat skeptically. While there was an undoubted change in the way women dealt with sex during the Sixties, the perspective that many women took by the 1980s was far from a total endorsement their sexual lives from the time. For example, Lillian Rubin interviewed one woman who argued that the revolution, which had freed them to say yes, also disabled them from saying no. “It was weird; it was so hard to say no,” said 38-year-old Paula…“The guys just took it for granted that you’d go to bed with them, and you felt like you had to explain it if you didn’t want to. Then if you tried, you couldn’t think of a good reason why not to, so you did it.” A number of other women interviewed by Rubin repeat this theme. Rubin herself notes that “it was the coercive force of a movement that, in fact, had wide appeal to women, while it also rested on a deeply entrenched structure of roles and relationships that was bound to corrupt the ideals on which it was founded.” Thus free love without sexual equality could lead to coercive expectations on women around sex.

So, as a stoned hippy man, you stumble across a stoned hippy female, and you say “let’s fuck”, and she doesn’t actively say no, so you lay her down, pull down her pants, and do your thing, then say “Groovy” and move on to watch more of the show. 

Can you doubt this happened thousands of times?

That link actually has some other good points:

Paul Lyons writes about how he sends his undergraduates out each year to interview people who lived during the Sixties. 

He describes the reaction of students who are sent to interview baby boomers about their experiences during the decade. Inevitably these students complain that they are “not finding the right people” and that those they interviewed “weren’t really part of the Sixties.” This is because their subjects do not confirm to the tropic understanding of the Sixties held by these students: that the Sixties involved Woodstock, hippies, civil rights and the Vietnam War.  

So, in the case of Lyons’ students, they are so fixated on the tropes of the Sixties – the sex, drugs, protest and rock and roll aspect of it – that they are unable to understand that in fact, that isn’t what constituted the experience of most people during the period. And by then denying the voice of the non-tropic recollections of history, the idea that those things constituted the decade becomes further reinforced.

You will probably find that, if you asked, most baby boomers have been to a hell of a lot less protest marches, taken less drugs, had sex with fewer people than most people 20 years younger than them. But not in all cases of course. Someone the other day was saying it would have been exciting to be young in the Sixties. Maybe – if you came from the socio-economic class where you could afford a higher education, where you might, maybe, at university have engaged with political movements. For the majority of young people growing up at the time, it was nothing like that. There is as much excitement and change and pioneering going on nowadays.

Most kids now do not realize that the Vietnam War enjoyed popular support for a very long time.  Our country was conservative enough to elect Richard Nixon in 1968, and again in 1972.  It took what amounted to a legislative coup to remove him from office. That coup, in turn, revolved around efforts Nixon was making–with the wrong men, to be sure, as became subsequently obvious–to reduce the amount of treason taking place within his government, oriented around ending the Vietnam War on a note of failure, rather than the victory on the ground our troops achieved at great cost, and with unimaginable sacrifice.

As I will never tire of pointing out, until it becomes general knowledge, as it should be, we won the war on the ground.  We decimated the VC and NVA in the South Vietnam.  They had no bases of operations.  They were militarily defeated.   That is why they signed the Peace Treaty everyone has forgotten.   In 1972 South Vietnam was as safe as America.  It fell to successive conventional invasions, not different in kind from the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslavakia by the Soviets, or for that matter, the invasion of Poland by the Nazis.  They led with tanks and conventional arms and tactics.  They won in the precise domain where America excelled.  But we were gone, and we were gone because a small cadre of lunatics, backed by the media, convinced Congress that the war was lost, or ignoble.  John Kerry played a large role in that latter narrative.  The media, of course, has since always played Vietnam as a hopeless, lost war.  This is a naked and demonstrable lie.

Fuck John Kerry.  And Fuck the hippies.

Most of the time, my trauma manifests in my body.  I do have, though, quite a few dreams of being stuck in a totalitarian world, and trying to escape, often with a companion.

Last night, I was dreaming of some super secret, invitation only conference of Democrats where people were giving speeches and there was a general air of desperation.

Some avuncular old man–the old hippy type with kind eyes, gray hair, and brown sports jacket, who you will find is quite capable of instantaneous rage if you cross him by being a conservative, a type I have met and tested in this way more than once–checked my ID, and it didn’t match the database, so they sent me off to get one.  I tricked the Asian woman who was vetting the ID’s–I wonder if that is a reference to Chinese involvement in all this–and managed to con her into granting me one, although I knew she would double check it after I left, so I needed to leave soon.

It devolved, as it always does.  I was spotted and denounced, and ran.  I was eventually shot.  The last scene is I was hiding and they sent in my dog to identify me.  My DOG recognized me instantly, but hesitated, because it loved me.  It, unlike the people, did not want to do the dirty work of evil people.

This is why dogs could not do the work of totalitarians, of the Democrats as they exist today: they are specifically loyal.  Each dog on every block has a specific master, and while they may be friendly to others, they have one set of owners, one set of human persons to whom they feel loyal, people who have individual scents, who can be instantly and perfectly identified.

People, in contradistinction, can be made to feel loyal to an IDEA, an idea which can survive any number of masters, and which can cause them to reject any number of actual human persons, including their families, friends, country, community, and their own history.

You will see, in Communist history, periods of nationalism.  Stalin called World War 2–for which he left the Soviet Union completely unprepared and which he personally and unmistakable bungled in the early days because of his love for and fondness for Adolph Hitler–“The Great Patriotic War”.  The Chinese, too, after destroying countless relics of Chinese culture in the “Cultural Revolution”, have returned, I think, to valuing some aspects of Chinese history and culture.

But this is just propaganda.  There is no love for anything but obedience in such political orders, and the patriotism can be turned off just like it is turned on.

Interpreting this dream, first of all, I think such meetings are happening.  The old hippies NEED to believe it was not all for nothing, that they have not lived their lives on a lie, that getting the US to withdraw from Vietnam was a good thing, that doing their best to destroy our traditional cultural order was a good thing.  They need this, like all of us need oxygen.  They cannot end their frivolous and self absorbed lives in a repentance and reckoning they have been avoiding like the plague since their youths.

The costs are lower for those they have seduced, but high nonetheless.  What was presented was a coherent and colorful alternative to a life of work, duty, sacrifice, piety, patriotism, eventual old age, and death.  What was promised was a world which never arrrives for most, but one filled with excitement, passion, compassion, goodness, decency, love, and deep spirituality.  To learn this world is based largely on lies and self congratulation would be a shock to them too.  So they want, with all the ardor of young hearts, to BELIEVE in all of it.

For myself, I am split.  This is what dissociation is.  And the thing with numbness is you can’t feel numbness, so the process of waking up actually feels like falling asleep.  It feels like becoming a different person, which in important respects you are. It feels like being a stranger.  This of course is what Camus was writing about.  He had been through a great trauma, World War 2, but as I have said often, I think adult traumas linger often because of deep, childhood traumas.  Perhaps his mother secretly hated and resented his father.  Why not covertly take it out on the son?  No one would see this, and he would not remember it.  But “life” would feel empty to him.

So, seemingly paradoxically, I think entering these dream worlds of terror and flight and evasion is healthy for me.  If I can raise the feelings in my body up to the dream world, that is  progress.  That way I can see them, and seeing is always distancing from feeling.

And I have to ACCEPT the anomie of this modern world, its insanity, its disconnection from everything real.

And the “world”, of course, results from the operation of countless individual consciences and patterns of behavior.  What I feel is in me, but it is also generalized.

At root, I feel totalitarian behavior rests upon the unconscious impulse to avoid the darkness in the soul.  People who want to avoid what is bad and dark in them avoid it, and thus feed it.  If you refuse to name it, it can grow and attach itself to anything, including the rhetorics of compassion and justice.

Christianity, in important respects, provides an excellent cover for evil, in marrying itself to the concept of Love.  This means that anything it does is “For Love”, even if it is evil.  This is made particularly easy when the Church and the religion are conflated, as in Catholicism.  If a priest does it, he does it for the Church, which is for Christianity, which is for love.  This, even if he is anally fucking a terrified young boy. This thought world exists, somewhere in our sometimes terrifying universe.  And it exists now.  The Pope certainly seems to value the Church over protecting the innocent, or revealing and punishing the crimes of the guilty.  This, because the Church, overall, “represents” love.

I have said before that true morality rests upon decisions which are local, necessary, and imperfect. True morality rests on fuzzy logic, itself rooted in emotional maturity, which implies mature perception and following emotionally logical compassion.

I might supplement it to call it the “dog test”.  Are you close enough that you can smell the other person?  Is the stimulus sufficiently strong that some active behavior is required?  And will love and devotion still be in your heart at the end?

No Leftist politics meet these criteria.  As I keep saying, rhetorics of compassion and justice can be EASILY  subverted merely by making the group claiming those as values synonymous with the work itself.  Simple.  Poof.  You have Goodness in a bottle, a “get out of the necessity of thinking for free” card. You have Boolean Logic.  You one side and the other, and logically, if one side is completely right, the other side must be completely wrong.

At the end of the day, we cannot solve our political problems without emotional growth among all the members of our society, without, specifically, people recognizing that life can be inherently and unavoidably hard, and that all of us have darkness in our hearts, and need to do the work of processing it.  Being “nice” is not good enough.  Being politically active for “the good guys” is not enough.  Feeling anger at injustice, both real and imagined, is not enough.

You have to see what is in front of you, feel it, hear it, taste it, smell it, touch it.  You have to be in connection with it.


And it CHANGES.  Perceptions are not objects.  They are dance moves.  What was good enough yesterday has lost its freshness today, and will be wilted in two weeks.  People want to create perceptions, frame them, hang them on their walls, and be forever after forgiven the necessity of forming new ones.

Life, and perception, are coterminous.  They are the same thing.  To be alive is to be open to new experience.  Living is not trying to see the same things in the same ways, but to see old things in new ways.  This is growth.  This process makes emotional and spiritual growth inevitable, unstoppable.

Well, this will do for this morning.  I need some coffee, and I’m out, so I need to go get some.

Edit: this is not a metaphor: I really am out of coffee.  I’m a Peets partisan, and use the pour over method, because it is a fantastically easy way of making one (large) cup of coffee.  When I used to make pots, I would drink the whole damn thing, and that’s no good.

I’ve been feeling the past few days like I am almost ready to being learning.  I’ve been stuck for so long, but I feel like something in me is like a monk ready to begin honest training.

And I will add, perhaps pretentiously–I don’t know how I come across, since I have no feedback–that I think many people who claim they are “spiritually accomplished” have not hit first base yet.  The world is simply filled with imbeciles.

No: the world is filled with confused people, con artists, and psychopaths.  And we’re all lonely, even those who pretend otherwise.

I may just wake up one day.  That’s the goal. 

I have said for years that I am capable of 12 cylinder performance, but limited to 4.  I think I’m up to six.  That means I can do twice as well as I’m doing.  That sounds about right.  I believe that.

I FEEL my stupidity.  That is not false humility.  I have no one to impress.  That is what I feel.  I am limited, dampened, stupidified.