Moderates United

I get the feeling with some people strongly that they are playing roles.  They are actors, trying to react the way the character they want to play would act.  They are not interacting with reality, but through their imagined sense of how they would react if they felt everything appropriate to their character, which self evidently they don’t, to the precise extent I am right about this.

We are starved of authentic, deep emotion in this country.  I don’t know why, although of course I have reams of related commentary.  I am simply going to leave this here for now.

The ability to BE who you are is essentially the same as the ability to feel who you are.  Being able to describe, in however much detail, who you are–which is the chief virtue taught in most forms of psychotherapy–is quite distant from this ideal, and tends away from, not towards it.

In my own case, I have consumed countless books telling me what to do.  But what has always been missing is a sense of who it was who might consent to do these things.  Until you are one, you are two or many.  This is a complexity which is impossible to make sense of.  One can walk on two feet.  Many cannot walk at all.

Connecting the ache with a past real self.

This is the short version.

It seems to me there are two real prerequisites for emotional growth.  First, you must be aware of what you are feeling, and the pain it causes you.  Second, you must see an alternative.

Lacking the first, you will never seek or see the second.  Lacking the second, some part of you will prevent you, at a preconscious level, from becoming aware of the first.  To do otherwise is to admit functional helplessness.  Some can, but most can’t or won’t.

This is of course the rough outline of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths.  It is as important to convince people their houses are on fire as to convince them there is a way out of it.  And that first argument is hard to make with people who have been living a certain way for a very long time, and getting along just fine, thank you.

What I see is that many of our obsessive, rigid patterns, originate in antiquated but once useful adaptations to real situations.  The problem is that they exist in a space beyond time, and bringing them into time–the present, specifically–is the only way to show them that circumstances have changed, and that something new is desirable, that they have a path either to extinction or improvement.

In some cases, these relics make us tired and old beyond our years.  In such cases, allowing them to sleep is quite welcome.  It is setting down an unwanted burden.

In others, they are thwarted life energy, and what is needed is an infusion of new energy, of new passions, and new directions.

Most of us enjoy the idea and prospect of travel in the outer world easily enough.  We naturally want to go places we have not been, in most cases provided we can then return home to a familiar place and way of being.

Where I–and I think many others–have often erred, is in thinking that changing means going somewhere new and staying there.  What I think it really means is learning how to build a much larger, and much safer home.  It means expanding the domain of comfort, of surveying new land, finding it congenial, and expanding emotionally and psychologically, such that there is no need of return, because you are already there.  You are already welcome.  You are already at ease, and feeling safe and known, in a world you in turn know well.

In the past five or six years, I could easily have traveled the physical world with all the money I have spent on personal growth–money, indeed, I continue to spend.  But my feeling has been “why go anywhere else, when I don’t know how to be where I already am?”

I have filled by bookshelf with some old Buddhist texts, but my sense is that the path forward for all of us, as it evolves, assuming it does evolve, and evolves in a way consistent with freedom and dignity, will not lie through any historical creed or teacher.  It will be an Emergent Property of science, which has done so much in so many realms, but as yet offered us so little in terms of culture and reasons for metaphysical optimism, despite the fact that its methods lead inexorably in that direction, when applied–and this of course has been the problem–with diligence and true scientific integrity and dispassion.

Diogenes would search in vain in most universities the world over, when searching for those who are truly honest when it comes to the nature of reality, and as-yet unintegrated empirical research in domains like the survival of death, and the energetic fields which seemingly connect life with life, humans with humans, and past with present and future.

A piece of cloth with a hole in it cannot be considered whole, in the same way that a gap in the ocean’s depths is inconceivable.

The cheesemongering of the Marcès and other Spaniards went underground in reaction to the policies of Spain’s military dictator, Francisco Franco, who ruled the country from 1939 until his death in 1975. The country’s economy was depleted by civil war, World War II, and Spain’s exclusion from the Marshall Plan. So, he initiated a grand economic plan designed to achieve self-sufficiency: Spain would pool its resources and centralize production.
As part of this policy, quotas were enacted that outlawed milk production under 10,000 liters a day. This made small dairies and cheesemaking productions (such as the Marcès’) illegal. To comply with the law, they had to sell their milk to larger companies.

I will note simply that centralized control of the means of production, whether actually implemented, or merely implied, is a key aspect of Fascism.  It is what Keynes described both in “The End of Laissez-Faire”, and at the end of his “General Theory”.

Liberalism is free markets, political diversity, the right to private property, and the ability to achieve political change peacefully.  Everything else might as well be called Fascism, wherever the polemicists and propagandists choose to put it on the political spectrum.  Certainly, for the Spanish, whoever won the Civil War, they were going to be told what to do.  The victory of the Stalinists (who in typically deceptive fashion called themselves “Republicans”) would likely have meant something close to what they have in Cuba, though, whereas the reign of Franco merely lasted as long as he did.

And Franco did not hate his country and his people.  This also put him one up on those he defeated.

I can’t resist commenting–or most likely repeating a theme which occurs often with me–that the Nazis and Italian Fascists, and Spanish Fascists, and perhaps Pinochet and others, all existed in a clear continuum with repressive regimes as seen throughout human history.  Mass murder is not something the Nazis invented, although wedding it to bad science was unique.  But even there, the concept of defining, stigmatizing, and to a great extent deleting entire groups of people was something the Soviets really invented.  They destroyed the “kulaks” before Hitler.  They defined and killed or imprisoned in remote places large numbers of political non-conformists before Hitler.  Hitler got the IDEA of a concentration camp from Lenin.  Goebbels got many of his best ideas on propaganda from Lenin, Stalin, and ironically enough Woodrow Wilson.

What is unique in Communism is the deletion of the soul, the deletion of the self as something capable of existing outside membership in a mutable collective.  What is unique is how little it gives a spirit to hang onto, and how much it asks him or her to give over in the process.  You have to surrender your capacity for moral judgment.  You have to surrender your history. You have to surrender your family, if asked to do so.  It is assumed you will surrender any residual religious belief you may have.  You might need to surrender your friends.  You might have to surrender your lifestyle.

And at this moment in history, you have to do all this to join a cult which has been unmasked as inhuman, brutal, dishonest to its core, and constituted by the very worst human beings possible.

I’m rambling.  I look at the gobbledy-gook Leftists keep spewing, and I continue to wonder how they are so unreflective, so uninterested in helping real human beings, so contemptuous of reason and the clear use of language.  So much good is possible, and they shit on it every day, to the extent of their ability, and call their work noble.

I am struggling, at the moment, to understand in my own heart how people shift permanently into ugliness, into perennial and purposeful meanness.  It is not my sense that most non-psychopaths are cruel to everyone all the time.  Even the meanest spirits have moments, I think, of genuine generosity.

But many people are hostile to humanity most of the time.  They swim in different waters, or perhaps are held captive under the sea.

Babies are born with hope, I suppose.  By nature they suppose the best is possible, and for some, life–which is to say the people around them–teaches them to close themselves off, to suppress their human instincts towards sociality, towards caring, towards tenderness, and to both give and receive honest and heartfelt love.

What is the point of no return?  Is there no hope for some people? 

To be clear, I feel there is a great deal of hope for me, every reason for hope.  I am confronting the deepest realities within me, and although the process and the vistas are unpleasant, SEEING what was there but hidden is invaluable and liberating.

But I have some specific people in mind, people I am witnessing going through changes, struggling with things in their lives which, compounded with what they brought from childhood, might sink them.

How do we turn evil to good?  Perhaps this is the best way of putting this inchoate struggle I feel within me now.  I often feel motion deep in the water, and it sometimes takes me a very, very long time to see what it is, and what it means.

Can there be a more profound question, though?  Do we not all want to belong, to be in a shared humanity, and is it not those among us who cannot share this longing, because they don’t feel it is possible, who make it most hard to achieve this aim?

How do we save the lost?  How can we bring them back, or show them a path home?  These are important questions the modern world has done an exceptionally incompetent job of answering. 

As usual, these things wrack me with pain and make me cry, but I’m long used to it.  I can take much more than most people.  I have an “unnatural” emotional pain tolerance.  That comment by a therapist remains one of the best compliments I have ever received.

Paul Johnson, in his “History of the Jews”, uses the phrase “ethical monotheism” frequently.  Or so I recall.  I have no editor, nor a desire for one.

In any event, the intent is to point to a single law, a single standard of behavior, a single set of moral precepts, a very specific set of rules to live by which govern everyone who submits to their dominion, or who is born into it and does not openly rebel.

Necessarily, such a mindset creates clear chasms between those holding those views, and everyone else.  And as early as the Roman times, one sees anti-Semitism originating not in a rejection of the Jews moral code, but from their rejection of everyone else as inferior, and their corresponding cultural insularity.

Now, I proposed the term henomoralism some time ago.  I had meant that one could change one’s dominant value based on circumstances, but the Greek implies more closely that one has a relatively set value system, but is open to those of others.  Henomoralism–heck, perhaps I need another word, Henoculturalism–is the root of a truly Liberal order. 

It seems to me that based on our past, our religious beliefs, our DNA, and overall cultural system, we tend to adopt relatively fixed value systems.  For me, honesty, loyalty, courage and imagination are all very important values.  Other people will vary to differing extents, and this is OK.

How is this:  Ethical polymoralism?  The notion that we can have differing values, the same way some nations, like India, are quite happy to accept any number of other gods, with some Hindus adding Christ to their shrines without any contradiction or problem.

All this, as is often the case, is me meandering out loud to make one point: what if I asserted our primary ETHICAL duty is to learn how to relax our physical bodies in such a way that we also relax our minds and emotional chatter completely.  Our duty is to relax.  Have you heard this? 

But ponder this: in my own view, honest morality is situational.  True moral decisions are local, necessary, and imperfect.  This is my code, my way of viewing it.  A further stipulation is that higher morality requires higher wisdom.  You have to know yourself well enough to wish good for all people, including yourself, and you have to be smart enough to see what, working systemically and over time, will work best to produce the result you truly want, because you know yourself (as opposed to the result you say you want because it brings you attention and chicks).

Self knowledge proceeds most truly from deep relaxation.  In my own experience, things come to you.  Large patterns of frozen blindness dissolve, and you suddenly see things you have been doing and saying and thinking all your life in a completely new light.  You wake the fuck up.  And this process can happen over and over and over again.  This is Kun Zhi, as the Tibetans put it. 

I have discussed this before, but perhaps the language I use will be slightly different.  Within my own practice of Kum Nye, there are recognized three levels of relaxation.  The first is the superficial one you get with a good massage, or light meditation, or just a pleasant day and a couple good drinks with friends on the beach.

The second is where the turbulence begins.  It is where shit starts flying at you, where what was attached and frozen comes loose and knocks you in the head.  This is like a pattern of rough seas you have to transit to get to the calm on the other side.  Using this metaphor, I suppose the first level is staying in port, and never going anywhere but onto the ship.

But the third level is where interesting things happen, or so I read.  I would assert it is our ethical duty to seek this third level, because then it becomes possible to be truly intelligent.  This is where meditation–which I believe is better translated “concentration” in most relevant languages–begins, in my understanding of this tradition.

I have from time to time said something like “Culture is the Emergent Property of historical and shared solutions to the problems of how to create and distribute meaning, power, wealth, and truth.”

Most socialists, to make a blindingly obvious point, which nonetheless remains completely invisible to them, conflate the economic and meaning realms, such that they assume with no justification that changing the economic system will inherently change the meaning system for the better.  This is stupid.  It has always been stupid, and will always be stupid, because the systems are logically separate, and require individual attention.

When impossible, socialism has often come to be seen as an attractive alternative to everything anyone doesn’t like about the world.  It is a solution, they feel–no thinking is involved here–to the problems of human cruelty, poverty, and disillusionment.

As a word, culture has come under attack by the Gramscians as an “instrument of power”.  That their own claim to power rests on nothing but a markedly inferior version of the institutions they want to attack is, again, invisible to them.  The whole thing is lunacy, top to bottom.  Because it does not withstand even rudimentary critical scrutiny, their solution is to simply call the process of coherent thinking racist.  As I have said often, this is a snake eating its own tail.  It cannot end well, and certainly not in any lasting amelioration of any true human suffering.

But here is the point I wanted to make, the rest being prelude: culture as an emergent property of human interactions represents the possibility of reliable human connection.  When western intellectuals are discussing ideas, those ideas are their connection.  The process of discussion is their connection.  When Africans are dancing in the streets, the joys they feel in old rhythms, and old songs, is their connection.  Things we all know, processes we all know–and know that everyone around us knows–are culture. If you can predict how someone will behave based on cultural conditioning, you have a culture.  When you cannot, you do not.

The creed of Individualism has led to nearly everything generally good about the world.  It depends on the notion–the empirically obvious notion–that there can be no locus of ideas or understanding but the individual, and that any one individual can be smarter than any swarm of human insects who want to scream the contrary.

At root, this is perhaps the most obvious point that Ayn Rand wanted to make, and frankly needed to make.  All our progress–at least materially, with the spiritual still being up in the air, and this post itself intended as a contribution–has depended on bold people being empowered to discover new things, using a method which in principle allows dissent and negation.

One of the few lasting impressions David Hume made on me was his suggestion that for all we know, the universe was designed by a committee.  It is both humorous, and provocative in an interesting way.  No committee can ever be smarter than the smartest person in it, which might be stated as a general rule, and most committees bring the smartest person in the room down to their level, rather than the contrary.  This might be stipulated as a corollary.  Thus, a committee is equal to the average intelligence in the room, and in most cases will not rise higher. 

The globalist want a world of committees.  They are anti-Individualists.  They rightly view all independent thinkers as enemies of a system which will abhor and punish them.

In the past, I have proposed as an alternative to a global technocratic uni-culture the development with time of countless subcultures, rooted in local circumstances, with many places needing nothing more or less than a new appreciation of where they come from, and the value of what they have been given.

The nihilists tell us nothing matters.  If this is true, then one culture is as good as any other, including American suburban culture from the 1950’s.  They have no principled basis for opposing this idea.  It is merely a CULTURAL fixation among them, one rooted on habitual opposition to everything coherent, reasonable, good, and capable of evolving into something even better.

We are not who we were in the 1950’s.  This says something about us.  Many Muslims very much ARE who they were 1,000 years ago, and want the world to join them.  That says something too.

https://www.infowars.com/eu-committed-to-opening-borders-to-75-million-turkish-citizens-as-soon-as-possible/