Moderates United

We are continually faced in life with the question of whether to “fix” something, or accept it.  Most of what we call “creative problem solving” is oriented around fixing things.  You don’t like your job, find another one.  Your problem is how.  Don’t like your wife?  Find another one.  The problem is how.  Don’t like who you are?  Change.  Figure out how.

But it occurs to me that there is ample room for creative responses WITHIN acceptance.  Let us say that you will always have the job you have, always have the wife you have, and always, in large measure, be who you “are” today.  Some things just won’t change, for reasons which are unclear.  All of us, to be sure, have certain genetic (and, if you believe in something like Fate, karmic) tendencies.  This is not a curse: this is what you were given.

You can raise your game in how you relate to your job, your wife, and the stupid shit you sometimes still do.  You can accept, yes, but you can also find responses which make you happier than the responses which are happening now.

We tend to view acceptance as passive, as a stoic acceptance that what must be, must be.  Acceptance of necessity is clearly a good thing, when contrasted with non-acceptance, whining, pretending, and resentment.  But why stop there?  Why stop with simply saying “what must be, must be”?

Why not ALWAYS be scoping out what control you do have, realistically?  Creativity is nothing more or less than seeing what is possible, but not yet manifest.  Every art work ever created was possible, in potentio, until actually created.  And there are an infinite number of things which remain possible.

I may have told this story, but I was talking with someone who had gone to SERE school once.  In the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda’s allies were fond of locking captured prisoners in small cages for very long periods of time.  Many Americans wound up in such cages, and it seems quite possible some of the POW’s we abandoned died in them while the hippies were celebrating their “victory” by snorting coke and dancing in discos.

Be that as it may, being locked in what amounts to a dog cage is a part of the training.  You have to spend 24 hours in there without having a nervous breakdown, which some people do.  Usually that sort of thing is weeded out before they get there, but not always.  I remember talking with a woman in a bar whose brother had a panic attack in there, and failed the training.  I forget what service he was with.  Basically all combat pilots and all commandos have to go through it.

Anyway, I was talking with him about that specific thing (after talking about the feeling of forgetting to kill bugs before eating them, and feeling them squirm all the way down his throat), and he said it wasn’t so bad.  He stuck his butt out and tensed his body, so that when they put down the back slat, which was designed to make his fit as tight as possible, he wound up with an extra 4-5″. He sounded both proud and matter of fact.

And it recently occurred to me that the training must include the importance of winning small battles, of taking back small–infinitesimal, but real–amounts of control.  It might be as simple as saying “fuck you” every time you see your guards, but you need something, anything, which keeps you from fully identifying with your situation, your victimhood, and your objective helplessness physically.

And to the point here, creativity may be needed.  It may take some experimenting to find something which really helps.  Even in abject, true helplessness, small amounts of power can be found.

From a sociopsychological perspective, I think most of the pathologies one finds in the ghetto relate to this need.  People feel the need to feel important.  Their homes, their society, their schools: they don’t give this to them, except as victims.  Nobody who is psychologically healthy wants to be a victim.  This is where the guns come in.  A gun is power, especially if you aren’t allowed to own one. A gun is power, especially when those around you are unarmed.

It is likely not overstating the case that much violence is avoided by allowing people to own sources of power.  We have all met people with what I would view as odd and obsessive interests in guns and knives, and all the other stuff that goes around inflicting and protecting oneself from violence.  If you own 50 guns, that is obsessive.

But for such people, this is an actually, objectively, non-violent source of the feelings of power and safety.  For whatever reason, they feel unusual and unhealthy amounts of fear.  Trauma–likely Developmental Trauma–is a likely source, but regardless, they calm themselves down through hobbies which, in the overwhelming, 99.999 percent of cases, never result in harm to anyone else.

Most murders are committed, I suspect, by people who own 1 or 2 guns.  As a tool, you only need one.

That’s enough for now.  Thought I’d spout off a bit.  I am trying to make my peace with some emotions going on in me this morning.  Writing often helps.  It is, perhaps, a way I find my way back to some of my own power.  I am intelligent: I have this going for me.  I am also often attacked by powerful emotions which make it hard to stay any course I might set.  I have developed strong willpower over the years, of necessity, but it is fully occupied most days performing what could and should be habitual actions, in behaviors I have to reinvent over and over again. It is tiring, but I am making progress.  I am sleeping most nights without alcohol, even if I still get shaken awake 2-3 times.

Have a happy Tuesday!!!  I have set as a goal accumulating statues of the various gods and goddesses represented by our days.  Tuesday is for Tyr, the Norse God of War.  Iconographically, he is best known for helping bind the giant wolf Fenrir.  The wolf would not let anyone close enough to tie him up, until Tyr offered to place his hand in the wolves mouth as a promise of safety.  The wolf was then bound, and Tyr lost his hand.  This is sacrifice and courage.  Today is the day remembering Tyr and Fenrir.  May you be brave, and may you be blessed with sight!!

Now I really need another cup of coffee and a shower.

People who think they are helping you will never stop hurting you.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/03/chicago-40-people-shot-warm-weather/577876002/

It’s of course ludicrous to suggest that black people who are affected by violence don’t care, or to suggest there are not many genuinely civic minded blacks working to decrease crime and violence.  I have never said this, as far as I can recall, and if I’ve said anything that could be construed that way, I apologize.  It’s not something I’ve ever believed, because it is ridiculous.

No, the point I’ve tried to make is that the WHITE people who arrogate to themselves the right to speak on behalf of black people (think Dr. Phil saying Kanye is “empowering racists”, or some such nonsense) don’t care about the plight of black people living in black neighborhoods.  To them this is all a game which doesn’t affect them in any way.  They live far from the places where you can’t find a bank and the fast food places have bullet proof glass.

They like to talk about how bad “racism” is because that abstraction is more real to them–more present to them in their imagination, and certainly in their moral posturing–than the real suffering of children growing up with one overwhelmed parent, poor, on crime infested streets, and condemned to go to horrible schools they will be lucky to graduate from able to read.  There are the REAL problems facing most inner city blacks.  They face hopelessness which is amplified by those who tell them on continual loop that the game is stacked against them, and that they are helpless without the aid of people they will never meet, and who have no interest in meeting them for more than the shortest, most stage-managed blips of time in election season.

Think about the effects of telling people: the world is against you.  The world was against everyone who came before you.  Unless the world makes major changes, you have no hope.  Unless the world makes major changes, your life is outside of your control.

Who REALLY benefits from all this?  Seriously: is this complicated?

I’m a bit achey-er than usual today, emotionally, so I’m not going to go through a full post here, but I am going to say that acculturation consists in telling people when to feel good about themselves.  It is telling men and women what their roles are, rewarding them when they perform and punishing them when they don’t, either actively or, in most cultures, through some form of shunning and even exile.

Even shunning within your group, though, has got to wreak havoc with your neurochemistry.  I’m quite sure there are shame hormones, which may be expressed negatively, as I think I have suggested, by the withholding of dopamine.

But here is the point: when you are dealing with a blank mass of people, who are shouting and acting in unison, they have been trained to secrete dopamine on those occasions.  People who “virtue signal” always get a dopamine hit when they do.  This reinforces it.

To the extent parents default to letting mass media acculturate their children, this is what you get.  The JOB of parents is to teach their children 1) how to feel good, how to feel pride, how to feel worthy of inclusion; 2) WHEN to feel good.  If they do this, and if surrounding parents do the same, you have a distributed set of reinforcing habits, which we call a culture.

As I have pointed out, the internet and mass media generally are more or less engineered to deliver “hits” of various emotions and the neurotransmitters that go with them.  But we all crave the DEEP hit, which we call a sense of meaning, and social participation.

Who owns this domain, in this country, more than any other?  Who has convinced tens of millions of people to engage in categorically contradictory and nonsensical behavior?  There are multiple correct answers, but the Left is the answer I am going for at the moment.

Do you want to feel good about yourself?  Can it get any easier than doing what all the other people who seem to feel good are doing?  Does it take thought?  Introspection?  Of course not.

I will return to this, I’m sure.  That will do for today.

Inhabit your decisions.  That is where life is.  That is where whatever home you might find that you can depend on will be found.

If you think about it, much of our evolutionary perceptual apparatus is dedicated to narrowing focus, to eliminating distractions, so as to pay most attention to what matters most.  If you can’t tell the different between grass rustling in the wind, and rustling because there is a predator in it, you won’t live long.

So we live in this world with an evolutionary disposition to narrow focus, but we also live, objectively, in a world where we can focus on an limitless number of things, most of which need to be ignored to do anything.

And this applies not just perceptually but in terms of chosen actions.  Most of us can choose from a very, very wide array of options.  We can live here, we can live there.  We can eat this, we can eat that.  We can do this for money, or that for money.  We can fall in love, or always hover at the edge.  We can care, we can not care.

To be intelligent, you have to always see all your options.  To get anything done, you have to narrow your options.

To take a mundane, but concrete and real, example, I get Men’s Health every month.  They always have lots of workout ideas, and food ideas. If I changed up my workout routine every time I saw something new, I couldn’t make progress in anything.  But at the same time, it is useful to know what is out there, so that if something REALLY better comes along, like Contrast training, I will know about it.

And I feel this is one of life’s tricks: knowing what you CAN do, but teaching yourself to be content with whatever choice you make.  It is always contingent.  It is always a guess. 

And there will always be an INFINITY of things we can’t and don’t do.  You might be able to fall in love with a redhead in Paris at a particular restaurant.  But you won’t fall in love, then, with another redhead in Barcelona, at least in quite the same way.  Some people make a habit of falling in love, but they then lose the experience of being in love for a long time.  You can bang a 1,000 women, but lose the feeling of sustained tenderness and emotional openness with one.  And if you stay with one, you never know what else might have been, if she was TRULY the best possible answer for you.  Who did you miss? 

It is maddening, in a way.  No matter what you do, some other path is foreclosed.  I can recall talking about this before, because it is a daily struggle for me, and I suspect many, in our affluent world.

Logically, emotionally, the task is separating emotionally from all that might have been. You do not need to ignore it.  That takes energy, and requires cutting off perception.  No, just don’t feed it, and DO feel your sense of satisfaction and accomplishment with whatever you do choose.  Everything we do is imperfect, but what we CAN do is bring perfect contentment to it.  This is the task of life.

If you cultivate the capacity for pleasure, for fullness, for inner peace, then it fills whatever decisions you make.

This is the thing: so much of our current YOLO culture views experiences as one-off’s, that you either have or don’t.  You either hit all your “bucket list” items or you don’t, and are diminished proportionately as you fail.

This is absurd.  If you cultivate inner harmony, every lottery ticket is a winner.  I wonder sometimes if I will end my life in a jail cell somewhere, as a political prisoner.  What sort of life would that be?  How do I make that great?  The same way.

Being present to your blessings is a skill like making free throws, or running fast on a track.  This is the ENORMOUS value of technologies like Kum Nye, and spiritual philosophies like Buddhism.  This is one choice that is easy.  It is, if you will, a metachoice, that both makes you wiser in the concrete decisions you do make, and better able to enjoy the results, however they turn out.

This is not quite as clear as it was in my head, but I don’t always think in words.  I have these little forms with feeling and color.  I think this is close, though.

Ponder this.

And ponder, too, the political and economic benefits of inner peace.  We call dial the consumer culture way back, if we all learn to be content and happy with much less.  We are in a phase of insanity.  But it need not last, and there is no need to replace it with a period of much deeper, demented and psychotic insanity that lasts a very long time.

If you think about it, the vast bulk of the intellectual energy of the Left over the past century has been devoted not to discovering the new, but protecting the old. Their minds are bent to affirming orthodoxy, in roughly the same way the best minds in the Catholic world were bent to the defense of the faith, the Church, and its dictator.

And this orthodoxy tells us to believe in the benign nature of an absolute despotism organized to reduce (or elevate, in some cases) all of us to the same economic and social status. It is an orthodoxy, on other words, fervently and violently dedicated to making the world and its inhabitants as deathly dull and indistinguishable from one another as possible.

And to add insult  to injury, it is all to be done for our own good.

Small wonder these people found the need to start talking nonsense 50 years ago. Clear thinking and the clear speech which follows it, can only be inimical to such wicked stupidity.

And to be clear, Marx, writing and prognosticating in the middle of the 19th century, WAS original. He was also wrong. That is why it is stupid to defend his ideas, and all the downstream ideas that follow and flow from his misanthropic logic.

Whether or not they are interesting is a not bad way to judge ideas and people.   It is of course ideosyncratic, and unique to a particular perspective, but what the label “interesting” implies is that there is something unknown, but potentially knowable about someone or something, and it bespeaks curiosity.

And as a general rule, interesting people are curious.  They are interested.

And interesting ideas are not the same old, hackneyed ones you have seen your whole life.  The fact is, the tried and true ideas may be the best ones.  I think they are, in general, and certainly as it relates to economics and Liberal political theory.

But obviously what we have been doing has not worked as well as it should have.  New ideas are needed, to be layered on to, and added to, what has been known.  These are what interest me.

There is always some new direction possible.  Looking for it is a habit.  So too is that of trying to foreclose the new by assuming “pretty much” everything that we need to know, we already know.  That is deadly dull, and in my view, antithetical to discovery and needed innovation.

We innovate readily in technology.  Philosophically, socially: not so much.  Very little at all, actually.  Very little that is interesting at all is going on in those domains.  We are told to sit down and shut up by the Democrats, and Republicans, to the extent they are coherent, want to return to a time which never existed, and in so doing, pursue the impossible.

No, a social revolution is needed.  A philosophical revolution is needed.  And we need to finally take seriously the insights of physics and modern consciousness research.  All of them.  Few are even trying to do this, and no one in a position of influence, as far as I can tell.

Democrats are expending a lot of political capital in attacking Trump. It’s hasn’t seemingly hurt them that much yet, because a lot of people believe the lies they are being told, lies that, like all effective  propaganda, is disseminated daily, uniformly to the extent possible, and as widely as possible, which is most media outlets in this country.

But Trump is clearly innocent. He didn’t hire a dozen Russians to write things on Facebook, and in any event if you compare this to the seeming FACT that Hillary took $200 million from the Saudis ( one small fact among my many) it’s ludicrous to even care. Farcical. Nonsensical.  All thinking people see this immediately.

Here is the thing, though: there is an arc to controversies. If this one lands with s judge throwing everything Mueller has out of court and sends him packing, that may well Red Pill a lot of people, who have been naive enough to fall for this bullshit. Trump could then clear house without fear of a backlash.

And this eventuality is not out of the question. Mueller was appointed on the basis of claims that were KNOWN to be factitious, he himself has been ethically compromised from the start, as has Rod Rosenstein, and he has been proceeding as if there isn’t a 4th Amendment. That worked in New York, in front of a Hillary hyperpartisan, but in won’t work forever in all the places they would need to take cases. Not if the judges are honest.

Sometimes waiting is the smartest play. I can’t feel I can speak confidently when I lack many important facts.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-manafort/u-s-judge-questions-special-counsels-powers-in-manafort-case-idUSKBN1I51WE

I will note that Rosenstein’s name is everywhere even when, as noted, he is supposedly a material witness. 

Rosenstein, as an employee of the Justice Department, is trying to launch an illegal, but judicially executed, coup against his ultimate boss, Donald Trump.  Jeff Sessions is AWOL.

Can’t we put someone in charge of the Justice Department who 1) likes Donald Trump; 2) values the rule of the law; 3) possesses moral courage; and 4) is intelligent?

Is that REALLY asking too much, Mr. President?  Again, I don’t know what’s going on.  Maybe you are getting ready to issue arrest warrants for all the Clintons, their cronies, and their enablers.  I don’t know.  But if there is nothing going on but mumbling and fumbling, this is not what competent management looks like.  Trump can do better.  He knows it.  He also knows better than I do what has stayed his hand so far.

And I can’t resist the idea that Giuliani putting the idea out there that Trump lied about the payment to Stormy Daniels is a sort of trial close, a balloon lofted to see which way it goes.  Does anybody care?  Apparently no.  The usual screamers screamed, but they do that every day, no matter what.  One would think they would be tired by now, never shutting up.

Here is the thing: EVERYONE knows that Trump knew about the payment.  We knew it then, and it doesn’t surprise us now. 

And most of us can contextualize this as maneuvering in a severely hostile environment, filled with liars, thieves, and probably a few murderers.

We know that for every lie Trump might tell to cover his ass, the media and his enemies tell 100 trying to get his ass.  And a great many of us are on his side.  Fuck those people.  Fuck the people who lie as easily as breathing, yet are somehow surprised and disappointed that we don’t react the way they hoped when they show us some new alleged atrocity Trump has committed.  We get they are criminals themselves, covering for criminals, trying to get a man who is honest in the ways we care about.

If Trump fucked Stormy, then gave her some money to shut up for a while, so fucking what?  That’s between him and Melania.  North Korea is on the verge of ending a war which has lasted since the early 1950’s.  And I suspect Trump has an end game for the Israeli-Arab conflict too, and quite possibly even Iran.  Those are the major conflicts, or potential conflicts, we face. 

You have to ask: for whom would global peace be a disaster? 

Who are the people who are frightened and threatened by competence, honesty and sincere patriotism?

It’s partly a question of following the money, but also one of following the ideology.  I ask again: how did a man who voted for the Communist candidate in 1976 get to be head of the CIA?