Moderates United

It really should be asked why, as our society has gotten more peaceful, that our media has gotten exponentially more violent.  The Shining was scary in the 1970’s.  Now I think most kids would laugh at it.  You have an axe murder, yes, but you don’t see it.  Other than that, some spooky kids, and creepy old lady, and what, at least until Jack Nicholson finally goes crazy completely?

Are we rats with a water bottle with no cocaine in it, and a bottle WITH cocaine in it, and are we consistently choosing the one with the drug of violence in it, no matter the consequences?  Why?  What would underlie this? 

I will comment, without offering this as an explanation, but rather an idea that should be folded into the mix, that sacrifice was my particular interest in graduate school.  What social role (God has nothing to do with it) did sacrifice play in primitive societies?

I investigated many ideas.  One is that the taking of life at the center of a social scene represents a concrete expulsion and creation of difference, at least where human sacrifice–which was very widely practiced–is concerned.  There are the living and the living one moment, and then the living and the dead in the next.

And I think the recognition of difference is essential for human tribal instincts.  There was an article I might have posted the other day talking about how sacrifice seems to help cement social orders in societies of a certain size, but not once something large like a city has been built.

Difference precedes hierarchy, logically.  A hierarchy is merely one type of order.

Oh, this is a bit too deep for me at the moment.  I do think that we need to recognize that deep social order is much fuller than the mere absence of conflict, and that we all need to feel like we belong to orders.  This need is hard to meet in the modern world, and is made HARDER to meet by the people who call themselves egalitarians, but who seem to have evolved an impulse to throw themselves at the feet of anyone who asks them to, in a sort of will to power that is really a will to victimhood.

I need some tea.

I just decided to get rid of all my violent movies and video games, even including my Lord of the Rings special editions.  I no longer want to make space in my emotional world for enduring extreme violence, and I already feel a sense of relief.

There is a part of yourself you have to close off to watch scenes of people being hurt.  Sympathy is a natural sentiment.  It is built into us, and it never goes away, but we can teach ourselves to ignore it.  But why do that? 

Here is the thing: you do not really make yourself harder by watching movies.  You make yourself emotionally stupider, more isolated, and more paranoid.  And being paranoid might occasionally mean that you notice something other people don’t, but the difference between paranoia and alertness is the difference between continual arousal–which I can say from personal experience is exhausting–and appropriate situational arousal, and it can be argued that continual arousal actually blunts your intuition and survival instincts.  Most of the best soldiers I have known are very relaxed most of the time.  You can go farther that way.  Much farther. 

This is all good.  I don’t need violence in my life.  And I am usually always Condition Yellow anyway.  But in all my life, there have only been a handful of times where I was in actual physical danger, and I was able to get through those without actual violence.  And I may go get my CCP as a bookend.  It’s rare, but I do occasionally go places where it might help to be able to legally bring a friend.  One the one hand I stop adding unreal fantasies to my unconscious, and on the other I prepare for the unlikely event of actual violence.  This makes sense to me.

So I finished watching the second season of Stranger Things.  I just knew that with all the happiness and emotional release they would pattern interrupt it, and I wasn’t wrong.

It is commented in many other parts of the world, I think, how superficial Americans are, how banal our culture is.  I think this is true and not true.  I think a generation ago we were like everyone else, and in fact happier, more open, and more spontaneous than most other countries.  We lived in peace and prosperity, with a society that was more just than, arguably, any in human history.  All of which is the human dream.

It might be that we were not creating great art–great poetry, great literature, great painting–but we had, and to the point continue to have, substantially EVERYTHING most humans have dreamed of for much of human history, including the freedom to suffer as much as we want to, in the pursuit of great art, if that is how we feel it is to be pursued.

We have warm comfortable beds, safe homes (mostly), effective policing in most cases, a strong national defense, good roads, stocked grocery stores, etc.

But the media we consume is sickening us.  I feel this.  Commercials are intended to make us feel that things make us happy.  Our media makes us fear the world as very violent, when in most cases it isn’t.  What we lack is a capacity to wind down, to relax deeply, to breathe freely, and much of his loss comes from media, from the refusal, for likely sound business reasons, for the writers of a series like Stranger  Things to grant us peace.

I am really evaluating right now the media I consume, the movies I watch.  Viewing Violence–which was the name of a book I read some years ago and commented on at that time–changes us.  It makes the world worse.  It makes the world worse.  This point cannot be overstated.  We are marinated, saturated, in violence.  I saw kids so small watching the Black Panther movie in the movie theater that they had to be carried in.  Literally before kids can talk they are watching murders, and violence. It’s a rare day when I watch TV I don’t see an image of someone tied down, and someone abusing them.  It’s standard fare now.  It’s ubiquitous.  Most cop shows will have it at least once in damn near every episode.

All of this, cumulatively, has an effect.  It makes us pessimistic.  It fosters a sense of helplessness.  It does make people emotionally shallow.  It stunts dreams.  It makes us less trusting of one another, and thus more lonely.  It pushes us apart, all to our separate TV’s.  If you could look at the world in the Upside Down of Stranger Things, you would see a hundred million people every night huddled in front of TV’s, largely disconnected even from the people on the couch with them, largely disconnected from their own intuitions, own feelings–their own life, in important respects.

All of this matters.  All of this should be discussed.  It is the absolute opposite of a partisan issue.  I’m not asking anyone to ban anything, or endorse anything.  I am asking YOU to think about the choices you make daily, and to ponder, carefully consider, in silence, what effect they are having.

Trump has good instincts, usually, with regard to people.  And it seems to be his opinion that Oprah lacks the courage to run for President.  But add this qualification: if she did, the media would be falling all over itself to praise her, to build her up, to tell her and the world how wonderful she is, which is precisely what she has always craved and thrived on, and obviously withered and saddened her when it diminished.

Consider that if she knew she would have to endure round the clock insults, continuous harassment and threats, and a national campaign involving even American secret police and trained subversive agents working closely with most national media, THERE IS NO CHANCE SHE WOULD EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.  Oprah is not Trump.  Trump became who he is because he loves winning.  He loves entered tough playing fields, and outworking and outsmarting tough opponents.  He thrives on it.  Oprah became who she became because she needs to feel loved and adored.  I have never felt that she held any beliefs so strongly that she would not change them on a dime if she thought her audience was demanding it.

And I will remind you that, at least as I recollect the thing, her endorsement of Barack Obama was a very important early victory for him.  She lives in that world, and has for a long time.

Our political choices have become, on the one hand, continuing everything that has worked for America throughout its history, including promoting and supporting the best and brightest; or, on the other, abdicating all sense of responsibility to our children, and to those of anyone born here, and pursuing aggressively policies which breed, and have always bred, political tyranny, mass poverty, violence, the diminishment of the human spirit, gross injustices, and long term oligarchies.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oprah-winfrey-childhood-trauma-ptsd-60-minutes-report/

I have of course written about all of this quite a bit.  The point I would make is that the question is not just “what happened to that child”.  I’m not even convinced that is the most important question.  The better question is “what did NOT happen to that child?”  What affection was withheld or absent throughout the child’s life?  What moral clarity was absent?  What early nurturing did not happen?

What we call PTSD is what, in my understanding, the professionals now call “Simple Trauma”.  It is simple because it stems from a series of events, or even a single event which, as horrific as it was, was time delimited, and known to the survivor.  Car accidents, medical emergencies, combat: these can all produce PTSD.

What in my own terms I will also call Complex Trauma, but which I might be defining in my own way (I have been diagnosed with it, so I do have some insight), consists in my view in traumas both of presence and absence.  Bad things happened, at an age when the brain was still developing, but the resources to deal with them were also absent.  Most kids, I suspect, endure multiple things in an average childhood which COULD, but don’t, produce traumatic after-shocks.  This is because in a loving, nurturing, emotionally aware environment, they are given the space and sense of safety to develop inner resources to deal with “bad” things.

Overall, though, and even though she does not say it directly here, and I very much doubt she has the courage (she is not actually, in my view, a genuinely brave woman, but one who has always had an instinct for what people want to hear, and a talent for making everyone feel special) to say it in the interview, which I don’t plan to watch, but in my own estimation traumatic stress is the principle factor “holding” the black community down.

We know that stress can be passed from parent to child epigenetically. as well as, of course, through the personality structures doing the parenting.  This was shown with regard to survivors of the Holocaust and their children.  And we know that, at least since roughly 1970, the average child in a black neighborhood has existed in a world largely denuded of healthy, nurturing two parent homes, has grown up in a world filled with violence and poverty, and has been faced with a schooling which was utterly inadequate to the task of preparing them for most jobs.  That such a system should be self perpetuating should surprise no one.  That throwing money at it is not the solution should be obvious.

What if we offered no or low cost Neurofeedback to all low income children whose parents wanted it?  What if we offered it to the kids who misbehave and act out?  What if we offered it to JAIL INMATES, most of whom, I strongly suspect, have been REPEATEDLY traumatized, not least by the prison system itself.

What if we state unambiguously that there is such a thing as sound emotional health, that it matters in all areas of life, including economically, and that supporting and increasing it should be a national priority?   What if we stop saying racism is the problem, and start saying that fucked up kids from fucked up homes are the problem, and that it is not a moral question, but a practical one, one amenable to solutions more effective than continued pontification, bloviation, objuscation, and predation being practiced by the purported allies of those suffering distress?

So many people, whose lives depend on this status quo, would hate the idea.

But, and this thinking underlies my work, the bastards don’t always win.  Sometimes the good guys and gals do.  Look at the world as it is.  But what it is is always also something possible, waiting to be born.  The first step on the path of the possible, if it is in fact possible, already exists.

For reasons I won’t get into, from a thought process the source of which I won’t get into, I saw tonight the importance of NO for children.  When you say no to a child, on something important, it is like a tattoo on their soul.  It is the foundation, the building block, from which they will eventually create their selves, either in acceptance or rebellion. I think many children come quickly to appreciate parents who genuinely want to teach them useful life lessons.  My own children are proud of how tough their mother was.  And she was.  They were lucky, in her, and in me.  Both of them have said they will raise their own children the way they were raised. 

When you only say yes. there is no end.  There is no cessation.  The outward impulses go on forever.  Never saying no is a form of child abuse, for most children.

Consider that we all need no’s, but far too many children do not get them, or not in sufficient quantities.  Consider that the tattoo, the mark, SHOULD be on the inside.

What do you see?

Communism: the belief that if we give final and complete power to the bastards, they will immediately stop being bastards.

I will comment as well that Killmonger, from the Black Panther movie, might well be seen as the avatar of Communism.  He “invades” a nation he is connected to but does not understand, immediately foments an internecine civil war, and makes the principle aim of his regime the exportation of undirected but severe violence, all in the name of a “justice” whose main precept is that Might Makes Right, which in turn vitiates all possibility of claiming moral superiority.

As I have said, one bastard replacing another is not progress, even if it is your bastard.

I think we notice people saying no to us readily enough, but few of us notice the absence of people saying yes.

There are plenty of people to remind you of what they don’t think you can do, but not enough people reminding people of what their possibilities are.  The latter, in general, are vastly more useful.

I think gayness is really sadness, and that the outward exuberance one often sees conceals this.

I am not judging: merely trying to speak truth.  I find many heterosexualities nearly as weird as homosexuality, and that many gay couples are emotionally healthier and happier than many heterosexual couples I don’t doubt for a moment.

It does seem to me, though, that on some level it feels like a loss, and if we consider the idea that in many cases it is a sexuality redirected by premature sexual experience, sexual experience perhaps originating in the abuse of adolescent loneliness and already existing sense of loss, then this claim seems credible.

If I might speak autobiographically, I grew up in a home where we always lied.  Whatever we were feeling, we pretended that we were feeling what we assumed was appropriate.  This basic mindset seems to define the leftists world view, and I think I can speak psychologically when I say that this is one of the primary reasons it bothers me so much, why I react emotionally to it so much.  They want to tell all of us who we should be, how we should think, and are quite willing to use violence to get outer compliance.  Gays, it seems to me, as long term non-compliers, non-conformists, as victims of this mindset, ought to be particularly sensitive to it, not practicing it from a new pulpit of political power.

As things stand, the gay lobby (and many others) also likes to pretend that things are what they think they ought to be, that gayness is exactly equal in all ways to heterosexuality, that gay couples are exactly equal to man and wife, but I continue to believe this to be an unfounded claim, and an apparently quite inaccurate one in a great many cases.

The task is to evaluate things as they ARE, to see the individual nuances, to feel the differences and the similarities across populations, and to see individual variations.

What is great about gayness, and what is in some respects worse?  Above all, what is INTERESTING about it?  These are all fabulous questions.

Yes, fabulous.

And for those curious about my own sexuality, I feel not the slightest interest in men.  I just don’t.  My dick is utterly indifferent.  My concerns are ethical, both the very valid claims gays make that they want to be integrated fully, and the also valid claims that, particularly where children are concerned, there might in fact be differences that matter. 

The gateway out of the prison can only be found within the prison.  It never exists in the air.