Moderates United

So, I sold all my violent movies and video games, with the exception of Battle: Los Angeles, which remains one of my favorite films, because it’s about perseverance in the face of impossible odds, perseverance because perseverance is what Marines do.  That, and Thin Red Line, which hardly romanticizes violence, and which deals with most of the harsh realities of war, at least as it seems to me from the outside.  You have incompetent commanders, physical pain and misery, cheating women, stupid mistakes, the randomness of death and much more.  That is also one of my favorite movies.

But with the money I just bought a book on porn, titled Pornified.  It’s some ten years old, but it seems likely what we needed to know, we knew then. I know my book “Viewing Violence” was written some twenty years ago.  The findings it reported have never been invalidated or, for that matter, systematically studied in the way you would think something threatening to radically alter our social order permanently would be by “experts”.

So: sex and violence.  Are you old enough to remember when people worried about those?  What was it, perhaps back in the 1980’s?  When Alan Alda types fretted, at least with regard to violence, that it might lead to violence?  We were told by the Alan Alda types, back then, that PBS was civilized, and much of the rest, not. I remember this.

Is it not astonishing that all this disappeared?  It’s gone, by and large, is it not?  If I want to watch porn–and I do on occasion, although certainly not daily–I don’t even have to put in my age.  ALL the barriers to pretty much anyone, of any age, watching it any time, have vanished.

Who, anymore, has time for cultural criticism?  Is this not the POINT of the Fed and its allied bankers vitiating the value of our labor by destroying the value of our money?  And where the fuck is the Left on this issue?  Absent.  If it requires brains, judgement, and the capacity for historical contextualizing, they are “away on business”, like Churchill’s God and father in “The Darkest Hour”. (or Tom Wait’s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9mhsW5aWJM )

But where the fuck is most of the right?  Yes, free markets, contract law, and property rights build prosperity, but is it really so damn hard to understand that a stable currency helps everyone?  If we are at 50% of what is possible, why not chase 100%?

Well, I have no good answer there, but here is my thing: I’m going to remove violent movies from my life for a time. I’m going to read more, things like Pornified, but also things like Walt Whitman’s novel (which one of my kids got me for Christmas), poetry, and other stuff.

Who would we all be if we did not swim in this sea of depersonalizing sex, alienating violence, and solitude supporting media? It’s a Satanic soup.

And–and I forgot this point chasing squirrels–I think porn will turn out, in the end, to be very much like violence in media.  It doesn’t make people addicts, inherently.  It doesn’t turn them into sex fiends.

What I think it does, ALSO, is decrease levels of trust.  Here is the thing: if you are thinking, as a man, with every women you meet and make love to, “somebody out there is better”, then you have inhibited the amount of intimacy possible with whoever you are with.  If you know you might leave her, you have to pull back or, if you are sociopath, tell her what she wants to hear without conscience.

In the first case, she will feel it, if she is not committed to lying to herself, and in the second case you will fuck her up for a very long time.   I once went on one date with a It’s Just Lunch date who had a man insinuate himself into her life, and that of her child.  This man had a kid who became friends with her child.  He asked her to marry him and she accepted.  Then one day he and his kid just disappeared.  Turned out he was already married to someone else, somewhere else.  I have heard a lot of fucked up stories in my life.  That is one of them.  That’s actually not the worst.

In any event, the point before–SQUIRREL!!!!–was that subtle effects matter.  If the light in your eyes dims even a little, that matters.  If your joy in life diminishes even a little, that matters.  In the social realm, if people start thinking “people suck” even a little more, that matters.  If you start looking at other people as objects even a little bit, that matters.

I think most of us–certainly this applies to me in spades–find it difficult or impossible to remember or imagine a world before all of “this”.  It is given, now.  It is there, now.  There are very few pay per view porn movies in hotels now, since it is all free on the internet.  Everything is there, all the time, no matter the cost to our sense of integrity, capacity for trust, and even our capacity for authentically enjoyable sex and cuddling.

Ponder: for every actual school shooter, how many kids are contemplating it?  The pool from which we would draw such kids would include, I would suspect, about half the boys in every high school who play first person shooter games ten hours or more a week.  And half might be low.   As far as I can tell, EVERYONE plays these games.  This includes, of course, girls, but we have never had a girl shooter that I can recall.

Are the aspiring shooters now to be redirected into hatred for the NRA and the 2nd Amendment?  Rene Girard had this phrase “violent unanimity” I always liked.  A crowd has a hive-mind, but a hive, of course, is a place to live and belong.  A group mind is not your mind particularly, but you are also a co-owner.

We need to be clear that the primary concern should not be school shootings.  This is merely the last manifestation of a sickness which is endemic.  It is the crystalization of something in the water, something in the air.

It is this sickness, this anti-social, alienated sickness, which should be our concern.  This sickness will inform these kids as they age.  It will suck life from their days, and joy from their hearts.  It will twist their minds, making truly Liberal thought difficult when not outright impossible.

We live in an era with simply competing propagandas.  This is, in large measure, what the long term effort by the Left to eradicate open dialogue and genuinely critical thinking has bought us.  Video games feed into social isolation and alienation, and alienation in turn makes integrative propaganda more effective, but the whole things stems from psychotic intellectuals, who continue to inhabit our universities sending out messages of darkness, violence and death, all in the name of justice, peace, and prosperity.

I think a valid comparison CAN be made between the mass protests, the intolerance of dissent (I saw one principal threaten to arrest a kid for having a sign saying “guns don’t kill people; people kill people), and the sheer mass CONFORMITY and lack of independent thought, and the mass movements of both the Nazis and the Maoist Cultural Revolutionaries.  You see in all these cases lots of kids, utterly and absolutely convinced of the absolute correctness of their ideas (despite having been fed those ideas only recently, and despite the fact that had they been fed the opposite ideas they would be shouting them just as enthusiastically), marching about in lockstep, and ready and willing to scream down all dissent.

And it occurs to me that what we might call the failure of integration and failure of empathy which drives all school shooters is now on wider display.  These students are not so very different from the kids who take up arms against the slings and arrows of a world which comes to feel like it hates them.  They are not unwilling to tell the “world” to go fuck itself.  They are not unwilling to use powerful social violence against anyone who dares stand against them.  I would not want to be a kid in any of these schools with known NRA parents, at least in the bluer areas of the country.

This video game world is pervasive.  This violent movie world is pervasive.  They are all marinated in the same ritual experiences, which teach them to denigrate others, to depersonalize them, and at the same time to fail to properly individuate and acculturate to a world where they are not just allowed but required to think for themselves, and form their own opinions.  The facts are that they are not taught to think critically–in far too many cases–and that they face social violence if and when they form unpopular conclusions.

I can’t know what we are building as a society, but I think the achievement of generalized mental health is a vastly more important project than flying or self driving cars, better computers, or a trip to Mars.

I think truly deep relaxation might be defined as “having forgotten fear”.

I got “attacked” by what I am calling a “demon” again last night.  As always seems to happen, it had a different energetic quality than the others.  This one felt like a chicken, with me as the meal worm.  It pecked at me for a long time.  It was a long time, because I no longer feel the need to escape. I  won’t say I wasn’t scared, but it is something I am trying to figure out, and I know by now they can’t–or in any event have not, yet–hurt me.

But it does seem to me that as you go down the rabbit hole of your deepest fears, both as an individual and as a member of a species with a collective unconscious, many of them will get magnified.  As you focus, what you had been able to keep in the periphery inserts itself into the middle, and looms large.  This is all to the good, even if it is also unpleasant to some extent (but also interesting).

And obviously some of us just have a lot more to process than others.

My work continues.  That is a useful definition of deep relaxation though, in my opinion.

It was hard to miss the picture of Drew Barrymore, her mouth dripping with blood, on the back of my Men’s Health.  I assumed rightly the topic was cannibalism, and the “humor” the juxtaposition of fake friendliness, fake happiness, with authentic emotional hunger and inexhaustible rage.

I have felt, in times of extreme tension, the urge to bite someone.  I know the feeling.

And the Bay Area is fucking psychotic.  It was bad when I was there several decades ago, and I’m sure it has gotten worse.  You might have seen the picture of some home in Oakland with most of the roof missing that was for sale for $367,000 or something like that.

When you crowd rats into a cage, they get mean.  They get nasty.  Fights which would not happen with space become continual.

So mythically, they are expressing something real.

The question remains, though: how do we best build and support mental health in all circumstances?  More concretely, how do we build and support authentic, deep relaxation?  India is overcrowded to a much greater extent, but they deal with it.  They do not feel, I don’t think, the need to kill and eat each other most of the time in most places.  They have an intact–or largely intact–culture.  They have meaningful family relations.  Everyone has a place and a role, at least in theory.  They are not, yet, on this manic American quest for authenticity, permanent happiness, and material plenty.

Look around you.  Learn.  It is a start.

Edit: I seem to have confused Santa Clarita with Santa Clara. My point remains. LA is if anything worse. And all that mess is LA as far as I am concerned.

There is a vast difference between saying every concrete detail of every extant (and extinct, as far as that goes) religion is wrong, and that there is no God or afterlife.

It has long seemed odd to me that dogmatic atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris felt the need to address Christians within their own idiom.  This smacks to me more of psychology than principled science or philosophy.

God is a proper subject of scientific inquiry, an inquiry denuded of all religious belief, and a priori assumptions.  The existence and survival of a soul likewise.  These are scientific questions.  Religion is separate from science, but the most important core elements need not be.

This distinction is critical to make, because until it is made scientific work in these areas cannot begin from the middle of our intellectual world, and will remain consigned to the periphery.  Interesting work is indeed being done, but it is ignored by substantially everyone.

If someone could prove we survive death, would that not be worth a Nobel Prize?  Why are such important topics so ignored?  

I watched Black Panther again with one of my kids.  As happened the first time, I was struck by how much the scene where Killmonger vanquishes (but does not quite kill) T’Challa reminded me of half of Roman history.

I could not help but feeling, watching Stranger Things, that what humans felt when being stalked by the demon is roughly what a truckload of pigs feel when they wind up at the slaughterhouse.  Terror, helplessness, confusion.

What we call the demonic is closely tied to the survival instinct as expressed in hunger. 

For several reasons, at least one of which I won’t get into here, I am considering becoming a vegetarian again.  Spiritually, it’s what Buddhist creed requires.  Practically, though, for me, meat seems to anchor me, to keep me from floating away. 

I have not yet made up my mind.  And if I’m honest, even once I make up my mind I’m prone to change it.  I wish I were steadier, more steadfast, more consistent.  But my virtues and my flaws seem to come together.  What is best about me is the continual flow of energy through me, and I can’t control it. 

Not yet, at any rate.

Do we not idolize rock stars because of the FEELING that they emote?  Our emotional soil is largely depleted, but it seems to me that the path to lasting global peace is figuring out how to be more emotionally rich without recourse to the easy feelings of sex and violence.  In substance, this is perhaps the core teaching of most religions.

This is a bit rambling.  I am thinking and processing out loud.  Please forgive the non sequiturs.

I seem to be an intellectual cow.  I am a ruminant.  I have four intellectual stomachs, and ideas flow back and forth between them.  But I usually am done when I am done analyzing something, a process which can take years and years.  Most of the time, I’m chewing cud.

So my daughter tells me that the stars of Stranger Things are very trendy right now.  Millie Bobbie Brown (I’m guessing her mother is a bit eccentric) is talked about.  I looked at some of the gossip pages with pictures of everybody, and all the speculation about what might happen season three.

And I feel how the stars of shows like this come to seem like household companions. They literally become like people you know.  They are friends, and you feel you are a part of their world.  This is true of many people, in any event.

There was a time when I was much younger when I would like at these things and feel jealousy.  They are living the dream.  It is a vast fantasy, one where most consumers of these fantasies do not readily or fully differentiate the actors from their characters, their real lives from their screen lives.

And it seems to me that many Hollywood actors really have four lives.  They have the characters they play, who they pretend to be, and–at least in method acting–whose emotions they try to feel.  Since their stories are rich and passionate, their characters lives are rich and passionate.

Then there are the lives of the actors and actresses themselves.  There is, for many of them, seemingly a feedback loop between who they think they ought to be, as one form of rock star, and who they pretend to be.  They pretend to be who they think they ought to be seen to be.  In other words, they go on acting, even once the cameras stop rolling.  And I think this is particularly true if, as seems to be the case, the most famous actors are really once ordinary people–kids at some point–who wanted to get rich and famous and live “the lifestyle”.  They inhabit their vision of what was supposed to happen, outwardly.

Then there is who they pretend to be with intimates, with friends, with lovers.  This is when they become like the rest of us.

Finally, there is who they REALLY are, and, again like the rest of us, this is often quite different from what they pretend to be even with intimates, even within the quiet confines of their own inner voices.  But finding the true inner voice is made much more complicated with all the other layers, and the HABIT of being good at pretending.

Part of what got me thinking about all this was that I was talking with someone the other night about my brief non-career as an actor, where I was told by a casting professional that I was likely good enough to do commercials, but I never sent her a picture–the “head shot” I think they call it, which is a lot like an acting resume in a world where looks are vitally important.  For my part, I look like a construction worker, or maybe a cop.

Anyway, this person said that it sounded like fun, and I then tried to remember why I never pursued it.  Then I remembered: I have enough trouble being me.  I certainly do not want to grant myself easy access to other public personas.  Now, practically, I may in any event never have gotten any work.  Most actors do very little.  But even in principle I did not like the feeling of putting on the mood, the body language, the vocal tone, the gestalt of someone else.

But where we are as a culture is that everybody wants to be a rock star, or at least many of us.  They want to be movie stars.  They want to be rich and famous and beautiful and glamorous.  And failing all that, they want the excitement of movies they watch, the TV shows they watch.  This is pernicious.

Part of the reason Stranger Things works is that the period of adolescence remains somewhat unresolved for a great many people.  It is traumatizing for many, and elements of this lurk in the unconscious for long periods of time.  Add to this the mythos of Death–which is really what the Upside Down is, with the Hans Holzer book added in one scene to eliminate doubt–and you are incorporating most of the existential anxieties of most modern Americans in an interesting way that allows movement.

I myself vastly prefer an authoritative voice.  I like to say “it” is “this” or “that”.  I am going to start trying to change this habit though.  I submit these thoughts to perhaps enrich your own, and enable new perceptions.

Here is the question: at the deepest level, what is the mythic meaning of Hollywood within the American psyche?  And how is it changing, if it is?

I will add that the editorializing and politicking of the stars flows from their believing their own press.  They convince themselves they are important, and going from there to a self assurance that they know everything they need to know on whatever topic they choose to weigh in on is quite easy.

This is layer 2 of my analysis, which is to say the second type of acting they do.

And I also can’t resist commenting that the archetypal rock star, Elvis, died on his toilet, more or less from severe constipation brought on by a long term abuse of mood altering drugs.  And he was in his early 40’s.  He was miserable, absolutely miserable.  Are we really so stupid and superficial that this seems desirable?  Rock star and out of control are more or less synonymous.  But then ask: why are they out of control?  Because they are fucking miserable.  That is why.  Yes, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are still alive, but they did try for a long time to drug and fuck their way to a happiness and contentment they never found when they were younger.  Perhaps one or both of them are there now.  But if so, would that fact not mean that felicity and being a “rock star” are largely incompatible?  Fucking only goes so far.  And drugs are a way of escaping, not enhancing, life; at least, most drugs, for most people.

Ah, that is enough for now.  I’m sure I’m not done, but that will do.