Moderates United

Now, by and large this is harmful.  It creates problems where none exist.  At the same time, of all of the things one figures out one can fear, some of them are real.  As they said in the 60’s, just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

I read yesterday that Google–the most powerful, effective, successful search engine in the world by a large margin–was returning for the search result “Presidential candidates” (or something close to that), the names of Hillary, Bernie, and the Green candidate.  Maybe even Gary Johnson.  But it was not returning Trump’s name.  They said this was a “technical glitch”.  I won’t even attempt sarcasm: if you believe that, you are a fucking idiot.

Today I read that Twitter is flushing Trump’s fundraising Tweets down the Memory Hole.  It is “disappearing” them the way people disappear in Fascist regimes of the leftist and rightist variety.

Many years ago I recall reading that a San Francisco newspaper was covertly hiding conservative commentators, but in such a way that the poster could see his or her own post, but nobody else could.  They didn’t know they were being censored.

Many years ago, when many more people valued principle, honesty, and true civic engagement, debates might happen in the editorial pages of papers everyone read.  They might happen on Public Access TV, as in Firing Line.  Watch as much of this, for example, as you have time for:https://youtu.be/Y021WAdUlW8
They are trying to do it right, to ask hard questions, and trying to find answers.

Our public dialogue in the past 20 years has been channeled into digital form, and into ideological ghettos. It is quite possible to receive an education up to the Doctoral level and NEVER encounter in a pristine form true Conservatism, to never understand economics from a conservative perspective, to never really GET the point of the Constitution, and for that matter, to EVER truly understand the real problems besetting blacks in this country.  You read about people who speak on their behalf, or claim to, and who in most cases benefit politically from so doing. 

As far as the Left is concerned. every conservative website could drop of the face of the Earth tomorrow, and it would take them some time to notice, and then they would be HAPPY.

Here is the thing: bigotry is assuming the worst of people who are different than you.  Our educational and media system have evolved to present a wall of noise demonizing conservatives without ever explaining them, without ever understanding them.  Our educational system and media–virtually all of them–are HIGHLY bigoted, highly prejudiced, highly colored by hatred and mistrust of people do not think like them.

As a cultural form, Leftism removes people from their historical cultural context, one of whose features is a GENUINE Liberalism, of the sort seen on the Firing Line.  Buckley grants a voice to dissent, in order to further understanding.  When we engage in dialogue, we humanize one another.

Where we have arrived at–and this has been the entirety of the intent of the moral pessimism and more or less overt practical nihilism which I have called Cultural Sadeism–is that a large section of our country has been separated from its history, and been reintroduced into a de facto cult.  They are told daily that they are moral ones, the honest ones, the good ones, and everyone else evil.

And we are seeing practically what this has made possible in recent days.  The DNC Chair is forced to step down for gross ethical violations, and immediately put back on the payroll of the woman on whose behalf she was cheating, and the media accepts this.  Many Democrats accept this.  Indeed, they have accepted as their candidate a woman who is clearly corrupt.

Logically, then, if Hillary wins, why would she not break the law to get Drudge off the internet?  Infowars, Breitbart, Front Page Magazine.  We are already seeing private corporations using their power to silence people solely on the basis of their opinions.  All that has to happen for mass censorship–the consequence of which will of course be an open path to tyranny and the final vitiation of our Constitution, and everything good about our noble experiment–is to label non-conforming sites “hateful”, and to make “hate speech” a crime.

I really believe that if Hillary wins, the last wall will fall.  She will appoint activist left wing judges who will rubber stamp her tyranny, believing themselves principled and moral in the process, and that result will be immediately supported by all the information outlets who are presently doing so much to erode free speech on their own.

I do wonder how Google justifies such behavior.  How Twitter does it.  How all the complicit media do it.

Leftism is a mental illness which seeks in its early stages, rhetorically, the rectification of wrongs, but which in the process eradicates all capacity for true moral reasoning.

As they say on the Firing Line, Sowell’s research, published 35 years ago, was greeted with universal hostility by the Left, even though it should have been empowering.  It said to blacks: you can fix this situation.  It is in your control.  That was not what their white handlers wanted to hear.  That is not what racial demogogues like Jesse Jackson wanted to hear.

Whatever else Donald Trump is, he is not a part of this process.  He is not someone who is going to shut down public debate.  He is not someone who is going to impose tyranny on the American people.  As a general rule, and this certainly applies here, you can easily see what the Left plans by what they accuse genuine Liberals of wanting.

We are on a precipice.  Liberty, historically, is always abolished.  There are always greedy, hateful, lying, power mongers who destroy it.

To vote for anyone but Trump in this election is, in my view, lunacy, even for those who think they will benefit in the short term from Hillary.  Tyrants cannot be loyal to all.  Heads always roll, usually for not thinking exactly like you are told to think, which most people cannot do.

And it hit me that we are the Capital in the Hunger Games.  The metaphor does not extend to the fact that we took anything from anyone (which of course is the core argument the Left wants to make for why our society and cultural order should be destroyed), and we do in fact work hard to help other nations develop, but the fact remains that even ordinary people in this country live like kings compared to most of the world.

We have roofs that don’t leak.  Astonishingly, we have machines to heat and cool our homes.  We have clean running water.  We have indoor plumbing and reliable sewers (in much of the world they shit in the street or in holes somewhere without toilet paper, which can cause disease).  If we have insect or rodent infestations, we can call somebody to get them out.

We have shoes.  Most of us have multiple pairs of shoes, and socks.  We have clothes, many clothes, and miraculous machines to clean them.

A great many of us have cars, and in cities there are buses and trains for those who don’t.

Our world is safe, by and large.  There are no marauding gangs shooting and killing people.

Our grocery stores are FILLED with food.  We worry a great deal about eating too much, and hardly at all about too little.  You have to be pretty stupid and lazy to go hungry in this country.

Anyone born in this country has already won the lottery of life.  Even if they are born poor, they can work hard and become wealthy.  This is still true.

It is astonishing how the Democrats have been able to brainwash so many people into thinking they have it hard, when half the world lives in huts, surrounded by shit, at the mercy of the heat and cold, and is forced to drink bad water, and endure hunger and disease.

Whining is undignified in all cases, and entirely inappropriate in the face of all the misery in this world.

Brazililan shantytown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXDg-ejjFBI

Start at 22 minutes, although it is all good.

This guy (Larry Elder)–who happens to be black, but who more importantly is very articulate and intelligent–is awesome.

Here is the thing: dissociation numbs pain.  This is good. But it also numbs pleasure and positive connection.  The two come from the same place: heartache and terror; and a healthy connection with life and the emotions and sensations that attend it.

So pain connects people with the place where pain is felt, which is also the place where pleasure is felt.  This is confusing to some.  You must first REMEMBER that some other place exists before you can hope to live in a happy place which exists as one possibility in that universe.

I get so many people I see walking around, and stopping in bars and drinking.  My gut tells me I need to try again my “church”.  Something will likely be forthcoming soon.

Great thoughts are great thoughts.  But they don’t matter any more than great works of art hanging in galleries.  Until they affect and infect people in a position to make a difference, they are inanimate and useless practically.

We have a great infection within our Body Politic, a cancer of sorts.  That is a body composed at full strength of 9 people, who collectively have been allowed to wield more power than the Executive and Legislative Branches put together.  Their JOB is supposedly to protect the Constitution.  It was in the name of this outwardly noble cause that they were allowed to usurp the power of Judicial Review, which is nowhere contained in the Constitution.

But power, once assumed, is never relinquished, and always eventually abused.  The Four Horsemen held off a complete fascistic take-over–and that is the correct word–under FDR, but they were unable to hold off massive corruptions of our national life in the form of patently unConstitutional abuses and enlargements of Federal authority.

At the present moment, we are at the edge of a deep precipice.  If Hillary is elected, the final corruption of the Court is inevitable.  All reasonable, all legal, all principled blocks on the final arrogation of ultimate power by the Federal government will be removed, likely in short order, and that under the most corrupt human being ever to stand in striking distance of the White House, at least as far as I can recall.  Regardless of his countless abuses of power, FDR at least thought he was trying to help people. Hillary is and always has been solely concerned with herself.

We cannot risk Hillary’s victory.  Even if we game this out, and even if we privilege feeling as an acceptable motive for a given strategy, it is in my view impossible to overlook the FACT that whatever momentary feelings may be gratified by voting for “the best man”, the allegedly honest man, the one who at least understands the importance of Constitutionality, that bad feelings will follow soon enough in the continuing encroachment of an unimaginably large, impossibly powerful leviathan, which like all such monsters kills freedom simply by its existence, even when not directed to do so by power mongering lunatics, which is who we put into the White House with Hillary.

Look at what they did to the DNC.  Imagine what is possible with an activist left wing Court.

Trump is the only possible vote for sane people.  I see no possible valid counter-argument to this position.

Intellectualism is thus a very congenial solution, at least for the intelligent, to the problem of trauma.  It creates an illusion of life–the “life of the mind”–without forcing awareness of what lies hidden.  What lies hidden must always lie hidden.

And it seems to me too–what I am seeing in myself–is that psychological defenses become internal aggressors as I grow and change.  Your “core self”–which in fact is highly mutable, and usually observable in pieces–interacts with “defenses” for some time in tandem, to keep at bay emotional charges which are painful and which cannot be processed by that person at that time.

This alliance can last a lifetime.  What becomes clear to the contemplative, though, is that the defenses, themselves, exist to keep one in a condition of stupidity, of ignorance, of a lack of awareness.  The exist to prevent expansion, and are thus simultaneously prisons.  And as I grow, as one grows, their walls become apparent as anxieties, as a desire to return to the status quo, as an energy that in one moment is homey and calm and comfortable fires in the living room; and in the next as strident attacks on you as a traitor and betrayer.

Growing isn’t easy.

One last thing: I notice in myself that work often makes me much more anxious than it ought to.  And I think what I do is overemphasize the relative difficulty and importance of each piece, because my dissociative tendencies tend to want to make me deemphasize everything.  I have, in other words, to more or less yell at myself to get anything done.  Otherwise, I tend to “dope” out.  I get stupid.

And this blogging has historically been a form of such stupidity, which may seem ironic.  But that is changing.

Ever since humans have been inflicting violence on other humans, they
have been devising techniques to deal with its aftereffects. The French
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes of “the lived body”—the
body as a receptacle of past experiences, of a knowing that bypasses
knowledge. Think of a culture as a collective lived body, the scars of
its experiences accumulated over generations and fixed into rituals and
mores. A less elegant way of putting this is in the language of therapy:
culture as coping mechanism.

I would speak of culture as metapsychological support.  I don’t think that is stupid, and I hope it is intelligent.  There must be a mediating intelligence not just between a person and his friends, but between him and the “crowd”.  This is what we call culture, and what has been under attack for some time, arguably due to unprocessed trauma.

I look at the European intellectual scene in Post World War Europe–both of them, as you may recall I trace perhaps some of the collective breakdown as having first been expressed by the Dadaists while the first world war was still being fought–and think they might profitably be viewed as sustained cultural efforts to DISSOCIATE, through intellectualism, from the horrors that just happened. 

Sartre, my favorite target, was clearly severely dissociated, as was de Beauvoir.  It would be interesting to analyzie the Existential movement and their ideas through the prison–I meant to say prism, but will leave my slip as also appropriate–of clinical trauma. 

The unrealistic and largely useless idea of radical freedom, for example, might easily be seen as a counter-reaction (in psychology, most all strong expressed sentiments seem to come from the converse) to a sense of helplessness, of hypo-agency.

And it hit me this morning that the movie “The Others” is an interesting metaphor for trauma.  It is like there is a completely separate, parallel, disconnected world moving in a timeless space next to the outward one.

Connecting them is is the key, and until then, ghosts live among us.

Trauma resides in genes, too.  It is easy to focus on the survivors of labor camps, but ordinary civilians enduring bombing and shelling quite easily get it too.  Here, they say nearly 15% percent of Cambodians nationally seem to have it.

One good quote:

The children of the traumatized have always carried their parents’
suffering under their skin. “For years it lay in an iron box buried so
deep inside me that I was never sure just what it was,” is how Helen
Epstein, the American daughter of survivors of Auschwitz and
Theresienstadt, began her book Children of the Holocaust,
which launched something of a children-of-survivors movement when it
came out in 1979. “I knew I carried slippery, combustible things more
secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost.”

More:

Traditionally, psychiatrists have cited
family dynamics to explain the vicarious traumatization of the second
generation. Children may absorb parents’ psychic burdens as much by
osmosis as from stories. They infer unspeakable abuse and losses from
parental anxiety or harshness of tone or clinginess—parents whose own
families have been destroyed may be unwilling to let their children grow
up and leave them. Parents may tell children that their problems amount
to nothing compared with what they went
through, which has a certain truth to it, but is crushing nonetheless.
“Transgenerational transmission is when an older person unconsciously
externalizes his traumatized self onto a developing child’s
personality,” in the words of psychiatrist and psychohistorian Vamik
Volkan. “A child then becomes a reservoir for the unwanted, troublesome
parts of an older generation.” This, for decades, was the classic
psychoanalytic formulation of the child-of-survivors syndrome.

But researchers are increasingly painting a picture of a psychopathology so fundamental, so, well, biological, that efforts to talk it away can seem like trying to shoot guns into a continent, in Joseph Conrad’s unforgettable image from Heart of Darkness.
By far the most remarkable recent finding about this transmogrification
of the body is that some proportion of it can be reproduced in the next
generation. The children of survivors—a surprising number of them,
anyway—may be born less able to metabolize stress. They may be born more
susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules,
neurons, cells, and genes.

After a
century of brutalization and slaughter of millions, the corporeal
dimension of trauma gives a startling twist to the maxim that history
repeats itself.

I am well read, but I am not aware of any theorist dealing in depth with the idea of traumatized societies, and what effects may linger.  That does not mean they don’t exist–the questions, for example, are obviously being raised here, without taking the to me now obvious step of looking back at our own history, extended beyond Holocaust survivors–but this seems like a very potentially productive avenue of inquiry.

And as I have noted before, the issue of Islamic child rearing, which does likely have at least some commonalities across cultures, might for many be an intrinsically traumatizing process.  It may be that male children never bond properly with their mothers.  It may be that the fathers beat their sons so much that they enter the world already disembodied in some ways.  I don’t know.

I was reading about Bataclan.  What was not reported at the time was that a number of people were taken to the second floor while the police were organizing a response, tortured, and presumably the tortures filmed and sent off on the internet, as recruiting propaganda.  Eyes were gouged out, male testicles were cut off and placed in the victims mouths, females were stabbed repeatedly in the vagina.

The psychopathic dissociation necessary for this sort of thing, especially in people raised in Western civilization, in France, even if my Muslim parents, can in my view only come from trauma of some sort.  Perhaps I am naive: perhaps indoctrination is sufficient to develop psycho killers.

Certainly, I think that when we spontaneously call such people “animals” that is quite accurate.  Lions, in killing and eating raw zebras on the savannah, feel no moral compunction.  They do not have internalized senses of the zebra other than that it is food for them.  They are not human, and we do not expect them to be human.  They worship no God, and make no vows before that God.

Likewise, those capable of such crimes worship no God, and make no claims before that God.  They act from utterly inhuman, primitive, atavistic instincts far behind the capacities we have developed for moral reasoning, and basic empathy.

If you were 20 in 1918, and had kids at 21, then they were 21 in 1940.  Traumatized fathers (and mothers, since the war was hard on the home front too) raised kids who were likewise traumatized.  Such fathers do not process emotions correctly.  They fly into rages over the smallest things.  They are often emotionally absent.  The one thing they are not, in most cases, is nurturing.  The collective trauma in Germany–and I mean clinical trauma–was likely a key factor in the rise of Nazism. 

Totalitarianism is a system well suited to people unable to form an independent sense of agency, of personal control.

And post World War 2 everybody emerged from the aftermath, from the bombings the atrocities, the famines, the mass death, with MORE trauma.  Germany did not recover emotionally overnight.  France did not recover emotionally overnight.

And these people had children, and these are the people now running Europe.  Angela Merkel was born in 1954, as was Francois Hollande.  They were born into a world which had recently been filled with smoke, the smell of gunpowder, screams, terror, death and ruin.  Everywhere ruin.

Trauma tends to push people into one of two directions: absolute slavishness and obsessive compliance, or into hypervigilence and continual fear and bouts of rage.

Here is my conjecture (I am not sure how to elevate it to an hypothesis): Europe, as a result of its scars, has become hypovigilent.  They are not scared enough.  They have not retained a healthy sense of boundaries, of national sanctity.  They are complacent.  This is perhaps the root psychology behind what I have termed Sybaritic Leftism.

It is an odd thing: nations go to war, but how do the members of those nations heal their wounds? I am increasingly persuaded that while personal healing is obviously extremely important, there is a meta-level in which nations, or groupings which are culturally uniform enough to be bonded together somehow, also need to process shared grief and shame and rage, and horror.

We are old enough as a species to begin speaking intelligently about these things, to begin acting in healthy and non-compulsive ways.  We do not need to simply watch the Iranians build ballistic missiles with only one possible purpose.  We do not need to pretend that “radical” Islam is always the exception, and pretend that the masses of military aged men that have been allowed in do not present an existential threat to the congenial ways of life the Europeans have evolved after millenia of development.