Moderates United

I was in a bookstore the other day with my kids.  I need more books, myself, like I need more holes in my head.  I already have one through which stability and intention leak with dismal regularity

And I saw a book: How to eliminate fear in 7 easy steps.  I thought: “How marvelous!!!  Just 7 EASY steps.  They are not even asking work from me.”

Well, in that spirit I will offer easy morality to you.  And you don’t even need to pay the price of a book.  All I ask is that you stop thinking for five minutes, then pretend I did what I said I was going to do.  Deal?

OK, I’m not bitter, but I do find myself unable to resist a little sarcasm.  You know, here and there, even though it is the lowest form of wit.  Particularly when I’m drinking egg nog much too early and smoking a good cigar.  My marathon is done.  All but the shouting.  Until the next one, which may come soon, and be followed quickly by another.

I’m at port, though.  No storms will get me today.

So anyway, before one part of me interrupted another part of me, this is what I wanted to say: the words Right and Wrong hold no interest for me.  Such words, in our current climate, are much too slippery to hold most people’s attention, or do anything useful in any part of our society, which in far to many cases has decided insipidity is the dominant virtue; and having no firm opinions about anything as an individual more or less the de facto equivalent of “right”, and being different in any way for any length of time the only real “wrong”.

Here is my proposed alternative, which may have longer legs: healthy and unhealthy.

How to define healthy?  Working in aggregate towards the Four Greats, Compassion, Love, Joy and Tranquility.

Unhealthy?  Working in aggregate to thick emotional skins, disconnection, solitude, misery and continual aggravation and disquiet.

Morality, then–itself a word which meant a lot in some places for many centuries in the Western world, and in many ways in all societies for most of conscious human history, even if, say, the Plains Indians never felt the need for a Socrates–becomes a question of emotional health.  Of psychology.  Of SCIENCE, in some ways, even if we admit first, at the philosophical level, that consciousness precedes experience and that ontologically we have no firm way of claiming that reality is real, that Berkeley was wrong, or that Elon Musk is completely wrong, even if socially inappropriate, in wondering aloud if we are not all in a giant multisensory Virtual Reality, while experiencing said reality as, at that moment, soaking in his hot tub, with people who seem to be listening, or seeming to ignore him as he goes at it again.

I seem to exist.  That is a reasonable first supposition.  And I need to make decisions to continue to exist.  That is a reasonable second supposition.  Given these two presuppositions, the logical question is how to organize my mind and action so as to lead to what seem to be the four attainable and worthwhile ideal states.

If we posit “As Above, so Below”, then what is practical in this world, is also desirable everywhere else.

I’ll leave it there for now.  I will need a nap soon.  I’m slowly undoing several months worth of semi-exhaustion.  That work, that physical work, though, was most useful.

Since I rarely shut up when I say I will, I will also comment as a general principle, that it is truly hard to say what is really good for us, and what bad, and that much of what becomes good only becomes so because we choose to USE it that way.

Experience, on this reading, is simply a tool the Cosmos hands us, to build what we like, or tear down what we like.  There is a beauty in this freedom.  There is a beauty in all freedom, even if this means that some people fuck it up completely, at least over the time horizons we can perceive.

If the movement of the universe is extension and then return–as I vaguely recall the Tao Te Ching teaching–then all the lost souls are scooped up in the end, and brought back to where they belong.  The Game completes, and then begins again.

For all I know, I have written this exact post an infinite number of times.

In life, it seems to me, it is good to both strong and loose.  The combination creates possibilities, and possibilities are good.

Perhaps I could add a 5th Infinite: the capacity for balance and duration.

I feel like I should comment that when I am feeling good, and not under intense stress from work, I laugh a lot, and really loud.  More than once my kids told me they located me in some store because they could hear me laughing four aisles over somewhere.

You would likely never guess that from this blog.  That’s not really a topic to discuss, but it is a reality.  I have my issues, but I am not fundamentally unhappy most of the time, which might also sound surprising.

Emotionally, I would never describe myself as depressed.  It is more like I stuck my finger in an electrical socket somehow, emotionally, and fried a lot of my wiring.  What remains is good, but I’m having to rebuild a lot of it, which is a long term and painstaking process.  I have gaps in my capacity I am working to remedy, and some circuits that cannot presently handle the loads they should be able to.

It appears that Kyle Rittenhouse was NOT defending his grandfather’s gas station.  I repeated a meme without fact checking it.  On his account, he was asked to defend a car dealership.  The owners deny it, but it is plausible.  It’s obvious why they would want to get out of this news cycle completely.

What makes me sad about all this, is that while it is possible that meme was created by some well meaning but misinformed conservative, it is AT LEAST as probable that meme was created by a Leftist at roughly the same time as somebody on their team was figuring out how to create the “fact check”.

The way the Left works, is if there is smallest possible objection to any story, that is all they focus on, then throw away the rest, no matter how unfair, and how impossible that is to square with an honest, human, humane, search for the truth.

It makes me sad that these people exist.  They wake up every day trying to rip shit apart, trying to erode trust between people, trying to inspire hatred for that days chose Other, and trying to prevent the palliative effects of undirected and sincere dialogue working for peace and understanding.

Now, I have no idea if this is what happened in this particular case, and it remains true that Rittenhouse CLEARLY acted in self defense, after being attacked by idiots who should have been intimidated by the rifle he was carrying–I suspect it never occurred to him that he would be attacked–but this is definitely a possibility.

It’s every day, and it is everywhere.  If moderates within the Democrat party don’t start putting out fires they started, it is hard to see how all this ends well.  Every week they try and push just a little farther.  Unhinged means unconnected, and unconnected means slippery ice and a steep slope.

You know, plants do not think to themselves “I am special”.  Neither do birds.  Dogs might, a little, but not too much.

One of the biggest impediments to life is protecting what you cannot, in the end, protect, which is your physical existence.  You can perhaps protect your comfort, but no matter how far you hide, up in the uppermost recesses of the best constructed castle, death will eventually find you.

And it seems to me that the feeling of life is thus often strongest among those with the least to lose.  They fear the least.  Why not be spontaneous?  Why not make bad decisions sometimes?  Life is a chessboard where your opponent always wins.

And paradoxically, those who fear the most, I feel, are those with the most to lose, those who have the most money, most power, most prestige, the most privileges.

These are the people driving the push to Transhumanism.  They cannot tolerate the idea of a world without them, without all their perks.  They cannot stand the idea of leaving behind their conception of life at the top of the food chain, at the top of Life, writ large.  When you are at the top, as my grandfather always said, you have only one direction left to go.

How much simpler life is when you have little to lose.  Bob Seger, hardly a philosopher, wrote about that.

Each of us, if we could enter the day with the spirit of a bird which is neither worried about yesterday, or in fear about today, would live better.  And obviously birds feel fear.  They feel fear when danger is present.  It is appropriate at that time, and they respond appropriately.

If gold, in the final analysis, is shit–and actually I think Freud found some metaphorical fertilizer here–then leaving it behind is a win, and clinging to it is a loss.  You need it, to be clear, but the Bible says the LOVE of money.

Much has been written about the Ego.  In general I have avoided that particular topic, but I really think it is really as simple as adopting the openness of every other form of life.  It is obviously not denying the sense that you have something like a personality, or the obvious fact that you have a body and mouth and hands with which to express yourself, to think, to feel, to ruminate, to plan, and all the rest.  It is simply being able to leave all that behind, sometimes, in the appreciation of All That Is.  It is singing one note in an infinite cosmic chorus, and feeling in tune with it.

I have some plants on my back porch.  I don’t really have a good place to put them inside where they would get enough sun, but it is getting cold, and it’s unclear any of them will survive.

And in my little mind I’ve been thinking about them struggling to survive out there, but then it hit me that is really not what plants do.  They have a life force within them which expresses itself naturally.  When they have enough light, water, soil nutrients, and a congenial temperature, within a broad range, they grow naturally, daily.  They are neither trying to grow nor–and this differentiates them from many humans–resisting growth.  The seed becomes the mature plant, naturally, at the perfect pace for it, given its conditions.

There is no straining, no resistance, no resentment, and obviously no self pity. Life works to life, and when that becomes it impossible, it dies.  Every winter countless individual plants die.  But they have left seeds, which will renew their species in the spring.

Jesus called this faith, but I would simply call it not putting up artificial barriers based on fear.  Faith in some respects is the antithesis to fear, and it need not even be a positive emotion, so much as the lack of a negative one, of relentless dark imaginings.

Faith is what is left when you subtract fear.

I had a really good neurofeedback session the other day, and when I came out I said to myself “I am ready to die”.  It was as if I were on a sick bed, giving up after a long struggle.

But why not give yourself that gift now?  Approach every day ready to die, and ready to undergo difficulties, always one step at a time, always allowing life to do the work?

In important respects the Nye of Kum Nye is nothing but Life, moving as it ought to, moving without resistance, moving because that is what it does, carrying us to whatever is next, and never objecting in advance to what is next.  Life ready to die.  Life reaching, knowing that some day there will be no next step, at least in this world.

You know, there are many shades of love, too.  As they taught us in Bible School, the Greeks had many words for love.  I will let you look them up, if this idea is unfamiliar to you.

I was thinking of my two kids.  I love both of them, but in what respect does it even make any sense to say I love them equally?  I love them differently.  We have slightly different relationships, both strongly positive, both nurturing.  They have different personalities.  They are different people.  They both have their own distinctive beauty.

It makes some sense to have hierarchies in some things.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, for example, is likely useful.

But is Beef Stroganoff superior to Lasagna?  Would your view change if you had to eat one of them daily for a year?

I think when it comes to feelings hierarchies make no sense, not least because emotions are continually shifting, if we let them. And even the so called negative emotions have their own charms.  Sadness.  Anger.  Even despair.  You cannot end a long dark night of the soul without going through it, and you cannot get the feeling of having ended it without having begun it.  Even despair has its purpose, its place in a good life.

And I think much unhappiness in this world comes from trying to regulate feelings, to impose feelings, to saying “I want to feel this, but not feel that”.  Well, the feeling that you are pushing away comes back as a ninja in the night and finds ways to get expressed anyway.  If you make it, which is unwise.  Far better to give it a place at the table, and the light of day, and full recognition and acceptance.

Feelings are the shifting ocean.  Rest, and stable peace, lie far below.

I think of my dreams.  I never know what I’m going to dream at night.  I have no control over it.  I have had lucid dreams on a number of occasions–awake in a dream with full body sensation, aware I am dreaming–but decided that that was not what was most useful for me.  Far better to listen to what something larger than any self I can conceive has to say to me, and try and hear what it is saying, and learn from it, and make useful adjustments in my awareness and following behavior.

Perhaps enlightenment, so called, is the gradual falling away of useful things your emotional intelligence has to say to you, such that you are fully paying as you go, through full presence.  No debts.  Nothing left behind.  Free.

There are many shades of silence.

Another: in silence what he hear is what could not be spoken anywhere else.

It seems to me that most people in our culture have lost the capacity for interacting deeply with the symbolic.  This is the result, in my view, of having become overly abstract, and disconnected from our bodies and our physical worlds.  Someone who cannot feel the rain or wind, or sunshine, or moon, or hear the grass rustling, cannot really connect with something which exists in a precognitive realm, at least without recourse to group ritual, within which they can submerge themselves.

And I have often spoken of the Sensation/Image, and Emotion/Thought dyads.  What I would speculate here is that symbols are images, and as such connected to sensations, not emotions.  Emotions can come from them, but that is not where their primary reality lives.

I am going to go watch the rain some more, but will wonder aloud how Jung used his body.  Or Freud.

It is reasonable to speculate that something like Feldenkrais, which also exists as a purely neurophysiological system devoid of any metaphysics, might be vastly more useful than any talk therapy in the long run for most people.  I think I called this Somaticism in the past.  Perhaps Somatocentric Therapy might be another addition to that, although I may have said that too.  That would have been 5-10 years ago I was wandering along those lines.

Our viscera have a word to add in every conversation, which cannot not be said, but is seemingly only rarely heard.

What creates relative resistance to the arsonists?  Education.  Historical knowledge.  The ability to separate good logic from bad logic.  Common sense.  The willingness to stand out from a herd by saying things contrary to what is being promulgated by the lunatics who captured the podium and the loudspeakers.

So what promotes arson?  The sort of indoctrination most of our kids have been getting for some decades now.

To take one obviously relevant example, when you teach kids to be nice and tolerant, what you are also teaching them is an inability to define and enforce boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable, the reasonable and unreasonable, the logical and the laughable.

The practical effect of teaching kids the creed of niceness uber alles is that you have disarmed them, intellectually and morally.  They have no ground to stand on.  You can say that men can become women simply by declaring themselves to be so, and they lack the words and the tools to say that is ridiculous, and we all know it.  We can’t absorb limitless illegal immigrants with no cost.  We cannot spend money we don’t have forever.

Nearly all of what Joe Biden is doing depends entirely, for its support–which thankfully is meager and growing smaller daily–on what amounts to the unilateral intellectual and moral disarmament of the West.

No society can be called a culture or even society in which the rules shift continually.  That is how you brainwash people.  That is how you create trained mice.  And such mice live in continual fear and anxiety THEY CANNOT EVEN COMMUNICATE TO THOSE AROUND THEM.  All the kids feel this, but very few–only the healthiest–feel able and empowered to talk about it.  So most of this unprocessed trauma–and that is what it is, with the gates to society having been closed by the a priori demand each of us renounce our individual perceptions and emotions–comes out as rage.

Anger, remember, I have defined as our emotional immune system.  It keeps out social toxins, or at least warns us of their possible presence.  Rage, in contrast, is a mixture of fear and anger that arises, in my view, from a place utterly disconnected from our actual environment.  It is a poison seeking avenues for expression, not a healthy reaction to a genuinely bad–or potentially bad–situation.

Boundaries equals anger at times.  Boundaries equals saying to people “that is not acceptable to me.”

And obviously, it is a tricky business.  As one obvious example, homosexuality used to generate feelings of revulsion, violence and anger in many people, men in particular relative to gay men, for whom there were any number of pejorative designations.

It is obvious to me that the Left is doing everything it can to generate as much sexual confusion as it can.  This works further to prevent any coherent “boundary moment” as a culture, despite the fact that much of their work is making otherwise healthy kids emotionally ill, in ways that are completely unnecessary and counter-productive.

At the same time, some percentage of people, for reasons we don’t really understand, since the research is politically Verboten, do genuinely seem to be “born that way”.  Not all.  I personally think many young men are imprinted as gay only after having been seduced by an older man some time in their adolescent years; and that many lesbians have been molested or raped.  Lesbianism also makes much more emotional sense for women, just as the promiscuity of gayness makes sense for men, who in their prime want to fuck everything and everyone they see, at least at some level.

The boundaries in all this consist, to me, in asking a simple question: what is healthy?  What will lead to relative emotional stability, satisfaction, social connection, and the capacity for effective work and at least occasional feelings of joy, peace, love and compassion?

What will work to facilitate any random grouping of members of our society feeling at home in a room together; or is such a thing even desirable?  Maybe we need countless small villages and tribes, even in our large cities, and just need the means to coexist peacefully.  That is probably closer to the truth.

Our core problem is that many members of our society have been persuaded it is their LIFE’S PURPOSE to tear down everything, even though they have nothing to replace it with.

Returning to the arson metaphor, it is vastly easier to tear down than build.  It might take ten years to build a building and ten minutes to gut it.  That is another asymmetry.

And Nihilism is rooted in Nothing.  You could not do better than to point out that where a something exists, these people are working to create nothing.  Where a positive value exists, they want to destroy it.  Where a physical building exists, they want to destroy it.

Destruction is truly “working for change”.  A burned out church is different than an intact church.  But it is the act of people who are themselves on fire, and leaving smoke everywhere they go, as they slowly burn down to shells of human beings, living spend shadows of lives.

And what is a shadow?  It is what is left when light is shined on something real.  It has no existence of its own.  It depends entirely on something else; or in this case someone else.  Without hate, these people are nothing.  All of them are slow suicides.

You know, there is a fundamental asymmetry between arsonists and fire fighters.  It is much easier to set a fire than to put one out.  One requires almost no training or equipment, and the other at least some training to do effectively, and a lot of equipment.

Likewise, it is much easier to lie than to dispel lies.  It is much easier to speak nonsense that sounds good than to think things through carefully and say useful and intelligent things.

PARTICULARLY if you add obsessive manias on the part of the liars, coupled with the rewards of effortlessly assuming the moral high ground AT THE VERY MOMENT THEY ARE ATTACKING THE FOUNDATIONS OF OUR CIVILIZATION, and you get a recipe for mass delusion and mass imbecility, which indeed is what we see today.

Despite strong conflicting impulses, I still find myself in the fetid bogs of comment pages sometimes.  It’s pack of ghouls, determined to twist everything I saw into wrong, no matter how carefully I say it, or how patently ludicrous their claims are.

The obvious goal is simply to make me, and people like me, disappear.  They want absolutely blemish-free message boards, where the illusion of unanimity is achieved by being so hellishly awful that all decent people get tired of the continual insults, and retreat into silence.  Then they claim they speak for the majority, when this is an obvious and egregious lie.  The goal is to silence the majority through threats and intimidation–a task they are now joined in by a politicized FBI and DoJ and DHS–then pretend they speak for most people, when they know perfectly well this isn’t true.

No totalitarian state ever speaks for more than a fraction of its citizens.  I would estimate it AT MOST at 30%, those who get at least small crumbs from the cable, and the connected elite is probably truly 1-5%.  They eat well, and more or less live as nobility in a land turned into a mob of equalized peasants.  No doubt in some parts of Cuba and China and North Korea they expect literal red carpets, and salutes to their motorcades.

And I would say that no evil regime ever ruled in the name of evil.  That’s not how it works. They rule in the name of justice and God, and the “proletariat”.

Liars, at the level of psychopaths, enjoy lying.  It’s a thrill.  They love the hypocrisy, and the fact that everyone knows they are lying, but no one can say anything.  It’s just another, more subtle, form of cruelty, just like that which Fidel Castro used to inflict on people by giving 6 hour pointless rants, in which no one felt safe enough to use the restroom, lest they miss two minutes of his idiotic rambling.

You just KNOW, don’t you, that Castro loved watching a crowd pretend to be listening to thoughts he was making up as he went?  And that he loved watching them getting more and more uncomfortable as he went on, knowing he had them under his control?  It was all a big sadistic thrill for him.  He probably got erections behind the podium.

And the appropriate punishment, in Hell, for him, would be to give him a tiny bladder, kidneys that blew up repeatedly, then healed, and make him listen to speeches lasting a thousand years.

Here is what I would suggest for comments sections, and contested public media: don’t subject yourself to the wolves, but leave crumbs of truth, so those reading understand they are not alone.  That is not hard.  Dealing with the packs is hard, and the thing is, victory is not possible.  There is no argument which exists in words sufficient to dispel terror in those whose personalities revolve around it.  When you comment, you are not feeding the dead.  You are hoping to send a message to the living.  That task, in my view, is important.