Moderates United

It really hit me that ideology is just repackaged tribalism.  It is me and mine against you and yours, and it is this very conflict which makes it appealing.  It tells you who you belong to, and it fosters group solidarity.

The Left, in its present iteration as a culture destroying virus, has taken the added step of using the superstructure, the imprint, of an ideology, but removing all the content.  They have created moving targets, where the mob marches first one way, then another.  They go up, and they go down, and are forced to, and required to, use continual back and forth signalling as a means of confirming they are still in the pack.  This, obviously, requires repeating publicly the continual drip of nonsense being put out by the synchronizing organs, principally the media.

An ideology without fixed ideas.

Here is the thing: to remain in such a state of continual change, you have to become emotionally and intellectually incurious and superficial.  I’ve of course said this many times, and in my own world, the image of the Headless Ones I described from a dream in the leadup to the 2012 election remains the most salient.

To stay in lockstep, you have to be taught, little by little, to surrender some important part of your humanity.  You have to surrender the right to say “I believe this, but not that”, or “This is OK, but that is not.”  You surrender the right to ask for consistency from your leaders. You cannot say “but I thought we believed in ALL human rights”, when they, for example, bury completely the abuse of Mexican children, when they find out it happened during the Obama years; or when they refuse to discuss the profound misogyny and abuse of women in cultures they are wanting to protect.  You can’t say “you are saying rape is wrong here, but then saying it is perfectly OK when done by cultural others.  This cannot mean you believe rape is wrong.  Why?”

It’s maddening.  Clinically.  I have been watching some things over the past few days, and people who are college educated, who should know better, are offering and getting angry over arguments that would earn a “C’mon, man” from an average high school teacher.

When we speak of rationalism, I, in any event, get an image of Immanuel Kant taking his walk at the same time every day.  Rationalism as a sort of cognitive windup clock, where you always know what you are going to get.

But in its best form, in the form invented and in the process of perfection in the Western world (if our many demons do not destroy us, as indeed they are trying very hard to do), rationalism is an effort to integrate emotions into our perceptual worlds.  In its first phase it is an emotional pause, in which you consciously try to step back, and look at the world analytically, and empathetically. You ask “what am I missing in this situation?  In what respect is this person making valid arguments?”

It begins, perhaps, with the principle that no one person knows everything, that we are all prone to failure, and that negotiated understandings are a vast improvement on the use of violence, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual.

And I think it can be stated accurately and succinctly that thinking rationally requires a calm spirit.  It is precisely the demonic restlessness of the Leftist mob which prevents any use of reason at all.

And calmness is a function of mental health.  Rational thought is an Emergent Property of emotional health.  It is not a substitute for courage, for seeing things the way they are, but rather that desirable process purified and perfected.

Emotionally mature people are rational proportionate to their health.  Conversely, emotionally immature people are irrational to the extent they are lacking.

None of this should be controversial, but it is.  These are all ideas I grew up with, but which the kids today are NOT growing up with.  These are not obvious to them at all, or so it seems to me.  And far too many people who grew up learning all this have forgotten it.  Life got to them, and they picked a stale alleyway of a “philosophy” to avoid the work of thinking, feeling, and learning.

One image: an anemone, anchored to the ocean floor, living on whatever the currents bring.

Another image: a dolphin, wandering the waters, looking for fish.

I feel accepting what comes, and accepting what you encounter in life, are two sides of the same coin.

When you are truly going new places, you can’t know what is coming.  This is the charm, the adventure, and sometimes the danger of it.

Relativistically, we are all in some combination of reacting and finding, of staying still and moving.  But it seems to me the habit of wandering helps develop the skill of staying.

Perhaps I am talking nonsense.  This is a perennial hazard of thinking out loud.  But my gut tells me where is something important here.

You know, I live in pretty deep solitude.  I am not a monk–you can find me out drinking beer somewhere pretty regularly–but I am certainly alone with my ideas, my feelings, my perceptions.  Those I don’t really share other than here.

And I feel sometimes like I am laying on a river bank, and images are floating by me.  Some of them wave and say hello as they drift by.

One such image was the water pools the Mayans I think it was built in front of their main pyramids.  It has been speculated they were used to detect seismic activity.  Water is a very sensitive surface, and it shows any changes in its environment easily.

I am like that.  It is a good metaphor.  I have perhaps commented on this, but if someone snaps a picture of a group of people in the room, more often than not I’m the one person who felt and saw and is looking at the camera. I don’t like having my picture taken.  I don’t know why.  My youngest takes great pleasure when we go out to eat snapping my picture with my hand over my face.

And the other comment I wanted to make is that we all have to deal in some way with the unpredictability of life.  We never know what the currents may bring in, or take from us.

The Stoic approach is, more or less, to feel as little as possible.  So, in any event, was the traditional teaching by people like Marcus Aurelius.  It is a soldiers philosophy, one of embracing difficulty with no whining, no self pity, and with a masculine energy and zeal.  It is not emotionless, but not flowery either.  It is spartan and simple.  The Japanese, in general, are, I think, good Stoics, although they get to it by a different path.

But I think with more skill, you can extend yourself, and the range of your deep affective pleasures, much farther.  It is not just a question of accepting the necessary, but interacting with it, transforming it, and transforming yourself with it.  It is a dance, a play. Stoics are never off balance.  What I want to be is someone who is always off balance, but able to roll with it, to float with the currents, and keep my bearings anyway.

I did martial arts for many years, the Bujinkan and Jinenkan. And the classical styles are very, very clever, and very subtle.  I spent many hours just slightly stepping off line from a kick or a punch, or a thrust with a knife or sword.  If a miss is as good as a mile, an inch is more than you need.

But this is not disengagement.  You come as close to getting hit as possible, without actually getting hit, because it means you are also close to your opponent, and the kata of course taught you how to take advantage of that in a variety of situations.

There were and remain for me countless useful metaphors, and feelings, I derived from that training.  At some point, I got tired of learning ways to kill and disable people.  If you really think about what you are doing, it is tiring and sad.  The only thing sadder than having to kill someone is being killed yourself, and allowing or watching harm come to someone you care about.  But in the real world, in my view, being armed and alert is practically more germane than learning hand to hand, sword to sword and knife to knife combat.

Be all that as it may, this feeling of being engaged without taking the full force of an emotional blow is extremely relevant to this process of learning to live skillfully.

That is what I wanted to say.

I am an empath by nature.  I feel what is going on around me.  For many years, I retreated.  I lived in my head, and smashed down with as much force as I could muster everything going on below my neck, trying to rise into awareness, all the waves of energy and feeling which were continually lapping around me.

Here is the core truth: I can accept it or reject it, but this fact of who and how I am is, in this life at least, immutable.  It is what it is, and will never, ever be anything else.  I have a nature I can embrace or reject, but it is like the blue sky above and earth below us.

I can put the picture of a person in my head, focus on them, and start to feel what is going on in them.  Everyone cannot but be honest in their person.  No one can truly hide themselves.  I feel when people are hiding things, and I can often make what I suspect are very accurate guesses about what it is they are hiding.  At some level, it is always pain of some sort, and the reaction to pain, which might be cruelty, or might be a feeling of inferiority, or helplessness.  All three, not uncommonly, all mixed together.

But the logical conclusion to be drawn from all this is that my world is not my own.  I cannot control what comes and goes.  I am a SEEING fish, aware of all the currents, all the creatures and their natures around me.  I can put a bag over my head, but I will still hear everything.

So who I am, if I can neither control fully what I myself feel, or control what comes and goes into and out of my house?

This makes “I” an unstable formation, does it not?  But is not the stable “I” an illusion for all of us?  Are we not merely in the habit of being who we “are”?  I would be someone else if I lost my leg tomorrow, at least in some ways, or if I sustained a major brain injury.  This contemplation is a sort of death, an egocide.

But I feel if I embrace the rhythms of my nature, and of the world, there is a sort of release.  Energy comes and energy goes, people come and people go, but something of me also still remains.  This is the important part.  It is a big mystery, but it, also, seems to be a fact.  This is life, living, within that death.

This sense of ocean currents is strong within me.  I feel streams of energy flowing through the world. I have not begun to tap my deepest perceptual capacities because I have not known how to integrate it.  But I feel that the integration happens in the forward movement, in the accepting of the knowing.

I am slowly healing.  There is a time to push, and a time to cease from pushing.  There is a time to lie in wait, and see what comes along, and sometimes there is a time to make music with it, to make love with it, to dance with it, and in so doing become more whole.

We are all giants.  But it takes so very long to remember.

I don’t know if all this makes any sense. I am musing out loud.  Perhaps it will do some good for somebody.  Perhaps it will do some good for me.  Much of the most important work happens in the dark.  We do get periodic progress reports, though!!!

It is sad to contemplate that most of the people we meet in life we will only know briefly, then they will be gone.  As parents, most of the time our grown children will be somewhere else.  As children, we are perhaps somewhere else, perhaps “ungrateful”, as I think I am usually described by my parents, and in any event needing to make our own way.

I meet hundreds of people in a typical year, perhaps thousands.  I travel a lot.  I work on construction sites with dozens to hundreds of people.  I eat out.  I hang out at bars.  I got a lap dance from a stripper named London somewhere in Appalachia a few weeks ago.  I liked her.

All in all, we can expect to say “hello/goodbye” a lot in our lives.  If I were to have a tombstone, I might put that on there (from Slaughterhouse 5, of course).

And I contemplate that the remedy is affection and goodness.  If you give them some part of your self, then you travel with them.  Your goodness can travel with them.  You can love them, and trust that things will work out, for them, exactly how they need to, whether that be what we call “trouble”–which is the lot of most of us–or profoundly good fortune.

It’s all a very interesting game, a fascinating game.  I don’t know where it comes from, or really where it goes to.  I have my beliefs, but we all find out as we go.

I like this idea, though: start with people knowing they will leave, start with the end, which is you alone,  and recollect there will come a day when you will never see them again. We are meeting for a time at a cafe at the end of the universe and the end of time, and are only sharing one meal together.

Even difficult people have a texture.  We are all works of art, in some ways.  I am trying to look at them “there but for the grace of God go I”, and, more often, “damn, I’ve BEEN that guy.  I was an asshole.  What made me like that, and how can I make more of it go away?”

I am a man of many moods.  Some of them are very charitable.  Have a pleasant day, fellow traveler!!!

Listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGX_WJLCxrA

Then this immediately after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR58vE6GYic

If you are like me, you get this sense of “what is out there, that I will never know?”  This is a very important feeling.  I will blog on it soon.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pjs7uoOkag&feature=share

You know, I call this blog “Moderates United” for a reason.  He and I may well disagree on some important issues.  But there is a huge difference between having an honest difference of opinion while respecting one another, and having sincere and truth oriented debate, and the process of shrieking and marginalizing which has come to constitute the primary activity of anyone who want to remain a member of the leftwing thug cult.

And I am very gratified to see the Republican Party evolve.  It has become very welcoming to gays, as he appears to be.  They are finally getting with the times on marijuana legalization, at least at the Federal level, which William F. Buckley was calling for 30 years ago.

I have been predicting a continual peeling away of people from this core monstrosity, and this sort of thing is, to me, evidence it is happening.

And the thing is, once you get REALLY woke, once you look at the world of lies and smoke and mirrors from the outside, you will never again, I hope, be so naive as to ingest your ideas uninspected and unconsidered.  This is all we can ask of any person or any people.  None of us can claim to be in full possession of THE truth, so a great plurality of opinions and ideas is desirable, even if something which also requires maturity and patience at times.  None of us like to be contradicted, but all of us benefit from it.

Kudos to this guy.

https://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/news/2018/06/12/u-s-steel-ceo-weve-been-in-a-trade-war-for-30.html?ana=e_abd&u=12080427584dadd9e16fdf5e1cf529&t=1528948795&j=82114531

I am going to make two comments, one specific, one general.

Specifically, it is very much the case that many nations–I think the exact number is most or all of the world–enact trade barriers to segments of US commerce.  We allow them to export to the US with no tariffs, but when we try to export to them, they tax us so we become either less competitive, or completely out of the market.  Japan and China are obvious examples, but I think most of Europe, presumably Canada (given Trump’s public spat with Eyebrows McGee), and even South America would need to be included in a full list.

How do you alter the status quo?  It would seem to me, the first step is altering the status quo.  You fuck up the cozy relationship in which one partner is getting fucked continually.  This would be threatening equivalent or maybe even higher tariffs.  This puts both sets of tariffs on the table: those which HAVE been in place in, say, China, and those which MAY go into place if nothing changes, which is those we will levy on foreign nations.

The point people seem to miss is that Trump wants free trade, but free trade on all sides, multilateral free trade.  We don’t have that, and haven’t had that for a long time.

The free trade purists, rightly, point out that every incremental increase in free trade helps all parties, so every incremental decrease hurts someone, and probably everyone.

HOWEVER, short term measures designed to increase free trade even further, in the long run, are CLEARLY the best choice, if the end aim is in fact achieved.  The proof is in the pudding.

But my God we don’t need to run around like Chicken Little crying the sky is falling in when Trump says: stop doing that shit, or I’ll do the same thing to you.

General Comment.  I was thinking today how both Trump and Reagan are very effective leaders, even though neither can be construed as intellectually curious, much less erudite.

And it occurs to me that Complex Systems, seem formally, can often ONLY be grappled with intuitively.  They are too complex for linear intelligence and linear logic.  This makes someone with good instincts superior to a person with superior book learning, but weak intuition.

Academics continually bemoan how much the rest of us fail to be as smart and superior as them.  This is because they are mostly useless,  but HATE that idea.  That is why they make shit, like Communism, up.

Please forgive me if I am being flippant.  I had a 15 hour day I am calming down from, and I’m a bit tipsy.

Looking at the spectacle the Professional Left–the politicians like Chuck Schumet, and their obedient press–made of Trumps historic meeting with Kim yesterday, I think I can callthis is a Learning Moment. A perceptual swivel point, if you will.

No sitting President has ever met with the ruler (I don’t know the formal title within which his power is cloaked) of North Korea. Given that this follows the also-unprecedented handshake at the border with the South Korean leader, we can safely say we are on new ground, figuratively and literally.

Yet when I listened to NPR yesterday–in my usual less-than-five-minute dose, which is all I can stand of their pseudo-pious informational charade–they were taking great pains to point out that all the promises made here are the same as before, with ZERO nod to what is actually, objectively new.

Add this to some discussions I’ve had over the past few days, and it occurs to me to submit that embracing ideology means renouncing at the level of principle all possibly competing ideas. You don’t have to hear the competing idea, much less comprehend it, to reject it. All you need to know is that it is different.  CONSIDERING the idea, of course, is anathema. Considerers are heretics, and heretics are unwelcome.

The notion that Trump may know what he is doing, that he may well be what he has emerged to be–a competent, well meaning leader working in the interests of the American people, which is his job–is such an idea.

All that binds Leftists together is conformity. This is what makes it sacred to them, and heresies like Kanyes so dangerous.

In my meditation this morning I saw an Indian (Native America, although the phrase probably should be native-er, or something like it, in better English) man looking at a lakebed filled with muddy red water which was undrinkable.  It was a nasty mix of clay and water.

He devised something like a still, in which water was boiled in a pot, with furs overhead, which caught the condensation, and dripped it back down, purified.

Now, this may have been a past life memory.  If my between-lives self is anything like my present self, I like to roam.  I’ve been everywhere, man.

But symbolically, it answered a question I had been asking myself: how do I heal wounds of lack?  How can something become present which has always been absent?  How do you set about doing this work consciously and directly?

Answer, you don’t.  What you do is enter into these knots–and everything which is not flowing is best understood as a knot, although an eddy on the side of the river may be a good metaphor too–and allow them through gentle focus, gentle interaction, to become vapor.  One moment they are knotted, solid, and tight, and slowly they melt.  The chemical definition of sublimation is transitioning directly from a solid to a gas.

Now, all knots can be assumed to be admixtures of the good and the “bad”, the fresh and the rotten, the wholesome and the unhealthy.  By “melting” these knots, the good floats up, and the rest disappears.

Freud, of course, used this metaphor too, for the process of converting socially unconscious impulses into more appropriate ones.  The sexually repressed person becomes a great pianist.

But returning to my oft-repeated claim that Freud was nearly always ALMOST right, but prodigiously wrong in important respects, what we can say is that if the sexual impulse gets tied into a knot through an inability to express sexuality healthily, then yes, it creates social dysfunction.  But the opposite is not leaving it as-is–primitive, needy, continual–but rather INTEGRATING it.  You release ALL energy when you release ANY held energy.  You can look at your sex, when you are healthy, feel it, find ways to express it, and make it a daily part of your life. You are not repressing it, but EXpressing it.

So too, say, with violence.  Inner rage does not get sublimated to, say, an obsession with peace.  When you untie this knot you find that a part of you has an innate need to set boundaries, and to feel safe expressing a core sense of self.  Once you do this, the capacity for violence does not vanish, but it is possible to limit it to appropriate times and places, where it is genuinely warranted.

It is obvious to me the Left has not processed its rage and frustration.  They call for peace, but not intelligent peace, not peace based on a principled adherence to common sense notions of human rights and human dignity.

And obviously when I speak of “The Left”, the concrete referent is people who adopt and push this Weltanschauung.  You cannot not be bitter and angry, and still want Europe to fall to people who think it quite acceptable to beat their wives and rape kaffir women.

This last lecture is not necessary, but today, particularly, I am left contemplating the spectacle of masses of people so blinded by hatred that NOTHING Trump has done or could do would suffice to satiate their rage.

“HE IS NOT US”, I hear them scream.  “No”, is the answer, “no he is not”.  And thank God for that!!!

I was wondering just now if the back to back suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain would cause a jump in the suicide rate, then I recalled that suicide was one of the first topics ever undertaken by sociologists.  I think of Emile Durkheim, specifically: https://www.thoughtco.com/study-of-suicide-by-emile-durkheim-3026758

I am not a sociologist, but I don’t think it is greatly overstating the case to say that Durkheim is to sociology roughly what Freud is to psychiatry.  He did not have Freud’s passion for control.  He was not sneaky like Freud.  But he did seminal work at the very beginning of the field.

And it is interesting that suicide was the first topic he chose.  It would seem, intrinsically, to be a social “crime”.

And I recall, to the point, that one of his first findings was that publishing acts of suicide causes copycat suicides.  Thus, for over 100 years you will rarely read in the papers of suicides.  Yet forty five THOUSAND people kill themselves every year.  That is a staggering number.  And for every one who succeeds, 25 TRY.  That is over one million suicide attempts each year.

And this presents the interesting point, at the moment: we have a major problem, but it is a problem that gets worse the more we talk about it, at least within certain forums.

For my part, I tend to view it simply.  We have one large segment of our society that killed God to their satisfaction long ago, and which seeks to destroy every relic of common culture outside of its political tentacles.  Life for nearly all of us is difficult at times, and nearly insufferable for long stretches of time.  Culture evolved to protects us from our confusion.  Less culture, more confusion, more people jumping off buildings.

And as I indicated in the last post, a belief, or rejection, of God makes a big difference.  The data is clear, for example from POW’s, that the survival rate in all circumstances for the religious is significantly higher than for those who are atheists.

In my thought, and in my action, I am always looking for what I tend to call flanking paths, which is to say non-obvious ways to influence what we can see.  When dealing with complex systems, most of the time there is no other way.  You cannot impose a simple order on a complex order without destroying it.  And simple orders are actually vastly less ordered, formally, than complex ones.

But to the topic here, I continue to insist that we need to bring the spiritual into the scientific domain.  The work of Cleve Backster may be a way.  The work of Gary Schwartz, or Dean Radin may be a way.  There are many people doing fascinating, scientifically rigorous and disciplined work in these domains.  They need to be funded, supported, encouraged, lauded.

To my mind, this is obvious and simple.  But people love their confusion.