Moderates United

Other than that psychopaths control most of our universities, the entirety of the Democrat Party and large segments of the Republican Party, why could we not use as a political tool a global ranking of nations by how Liberal they are economically–sound currency (oh, and by the way, END the IMF and World Bank), property rights, free markets–and use this as a political tool to pressure the oppressive, stupid ones?  Why not start checking nations off, or moving them up, as they improve? 

Why not take the poverty of most of the world as seriously as the jackasses in the dumb factories in New Haven and Cambridge and elsewhere claim they have been taking it all these many, many, long years?

You know, do what they say they’ve been doing, but for real this time.

Why not? 

The Roman Empire was built gradually.  They first conquered themselves some Lebensraum, and sat down to dinner.  Then their neighbors rudely intruded.  So they conquered them, “civilized” them, made them wealthier and more advanced than they were, then sat down to dinner again.  Again, rudeness.  More conquering.  More wealth and aquaduct and road and bath building.  Dinner.  Rudeness.  Legions and flags, wine cultivation, dinner, rudeness, etc.  Eventually dinner started to be sat down to in different languages, and started consisting in somewhat different food.  Dinner had to be served in Constantinople for a thousand years or so.

We live in a world peopled by similar barbarians.  In the post-Industrial West–I won’t say East since this is not a problem in Japan or Korea–there are vast disparities in standards of living.  This causes people to invade.  In the old days, we would invade back, spank them, school them, and add them to the boundaries of the Empire.  Eventually, in the Roman model, they would out-Roman us as we got decadent, and have to let them in.

In our modern world, though, it is scarcely cause for wonder that so many Mexicans (and Central Americans, but the Mexicans very aggressively prevent citizens of other nations from transiting Mexico to get here) want to be in America, and so many people from the Middle East and South Asia want to be in Europe.

What is the solution?  Has anybody proposed global prosperity?  Can we not put that on the table?  Peter Bauer and others very accurately diagnosed the causes of developmental failure, and they have nothing to do with us, other than that the things we do to help usually make things worse, sometimes much worse.

In Mexico and much of Latin America you have grotesque and long term economic disparities.  The ruling elites run in families, and those families like their power and privilege.  They don’t like working for a living, and somebody has to, so the poor stay poor, and they have large villas with fountains, gates, and heavily armed guards.  Part of the reason the rulers of Mexico seemingly LIKE having people tell them Mexico sucks and we are getting the hell out of here, is that chronic poverty with no safety valve might easily lead to a justified uprising.  And in the modern era, the bullets would be televised.

But if we were able to end apartheid in South Africa, why would we not be able to put pressure on the oligarchies of Latin America?  Why could we not put pressure on the Middle East to get out of the 7th century?

The simple fact is that if you put too many people on a boat, it collapses.  We saw that in the Mediterranean.  And national economies are no different.  Too many piglets sucking at the teats and momma dies or dries up.  That is the way the world works.  That is the way the world has always worked.  Anyone trying to claim otherwise is stupid or selling something.

In all affairs of life clear thinking helps.  The task is not to get attention focused away from the problem, but to SOLVE the problem.  Most Mexicans don’t want to live here.  They want to live in Mexico.  This is obvious because so many of them thought to bring Mexican flags with them.  If they wanted to live in the United States, they would wave American flags like proud immigrants always have.

So over the coming decades, if we don’t have a nuclear “workplace violence” (Iran, North Korea) incident, if the robots don’t take over, if we don’t have a plague which kills all of us, then we need to focus on global development using INTELLIGENT strategies, like microloans on the model of Kiva.  We could have national Kiva “adopt a country” months.  We can use economic pressure to support liberalization.

And we can expand the idea of local control.  We can reverse empire.  What the Romans spread was a system of law, of discipline, of science.  Those are available everywhere now.  There is nothing that could be gained through colonialism that has not been exported.  Most of Africa now at least mouths support for self rule and democracy.  Most of the world has at least been exposed to the idea of the toleration of difference, and the importance of equality before the law.  The Muslims of course reject this idea, but all we need to do with them is stop kowtowing, and start asking them to act like civilized human beings.  Many of them will respond to this idea.  The radicals are mainly responding, now, to craven weakness, and the very real possibility that Europe will simply lay down and say Allahu Akbar.

All of our problems can be solved, solved peacefully–or largely peacefully, and where violence is necessary, we are well positioned to deliver it–and solved finally.

I really don’t know why more people don’t talk like I do.  So many of our leading intellectuals simply want to give up, to give in.  They are cowards.  But most of us are not. It is simply the case that the people who do most of the talking have never done anything in their lives.  Nor do they plan to start, ever.  That’s what the proles are for.

According to Robin Dunbar most of us can only handle knowing about 150 people.  I suspect many of us are in active relation with a much smaller number than that.

In reading history, much of it consists in one social grouping seizing control over some larger set of groupings.  Families dominate history in many parts of the world.

To take a largely random but still relevant example, Iraq has never really been a nation.  It has been a conglomeration of tribes and clans and families which were contained within borders set, if memory serves, by the British.  Much of the Middle East is like this.

Saddam Hussein took very good care of his tribe and people, and more or less wanted everyone else just to be loyal to him as the national leader.  In the course of time, it may have happened that he was overthrown by some other group and their leader, which punished his group, and again took care of their own.

Nation states are historically and likely evolutionarily unnatural.  We are meant to live in much smaller groupings, and within those groupings, it has often been the case that the leader who emerged–or leaders–were welcome and valued. 

Two movies I have used often as examples of the romantic sense of the past and the possibilities of the future which the Socialists have tried to seize mythically are “The Last Samuri” and “Dances with wolves”.  In both cases, 19th century refugees from large, impersonal military orders found themselves belonging in a more primitive, more natural, more comfortable, more abundant social groupings.  These groupings were small enough that everyone knew everyone, and felt personal allegiance both to their tribe and its leaders.  They knew them.  They trusted them.

And self evidently the physical lives were more “primitive”, which no doubt fed the sense of romance, but this obscures what to me is the more important notion of belonging, of personal loyalty to people you know.

I was watching a Ted talk by Sebastian Junger a few days ago where he was arguing that a big part of what we call PTSD is really a social maladjustment to being back in a world without loyalty, where not much is won or lost (at such a cost, to quite Jaggers/Richards), where they feel they don’t BELONG.

Fascist leaders–and I include all Communist dictators in this designation–draw upon this need for order, for belonging, for loyalty, but given the size of the enterprises, true belonging is not possible.  What is found instead is a mental and physical slavery justified by the “greater good”, an abstraction which acquires meaning only because of the overall sense of meaninglessness, of pointlessness. 

Both Hitler and Lenin’s coups and reigns were preceded by social decay and dislocation.

We need to be much smaller.  This is my vision for the future.  And it does not need to be in conditions of much lower population.  We simply need more local control, more freedom, and less coercion, mind control, and thoughtlessness.

Much of our psychological apparatus is oriented around impulse control and expression.  Being me, I have noticed some part of me resisting when I play my Lumosity games.  I will know what to do, but some part of me will resist.  I find this interesting.  Much of the task of psychological growth is finding, naming and exploring limits.  I take information wherever it presents itself.

All those posts were a bit of emotional house-cleaning for me, and although I caught myself sabotaging myself once, mostly it went well.  I’m now in the 98.8th percentile for my age group, and 99 is now close at hand.  A bit more physical conditioning, and a bit more house-clearing, and I am there.

I will say too that it has been a long time since I could call myself depressed.  What I realize now is that many unconscious forces were sucking away my psychic energy, and the net result was a slowness and dullness that manifested as what gets called depression.  Life was just hard.  Things are getting much, much easier.

I still have many miles to go, but progress is being made.

I think I have arrived at my original post. I would like to assert that human beings have an instinctual need both for tribal groupings, and to exist within some sort of relative power structure.

I would like to assert that the ideal of Socialism works psychologically to meet the deep mythic need for belonging, but this is a false God.  It works to alienate people from one another, from their true emotional and instinctual needs, and makes life uglier, baser, less worthwhile, and ultimately the people in such societies more self destructive, lethargic, disempowered, and detached.

Witness what is happening among the beautiful people of northern Europe.  They are importing savages in large numbers who are raping them, robbing them, and shitting–sometimes literally–on everything they touch with impunity.  And in places like Germany and Sweden they are blaming THEMSELVES.  I was reading an interview with, I believe, a Norwegian man who was anally raped, and he said he felt sympathy for the poor beast who did that to him.  This was his version of virtue, of compassion.

And what is obvious to me is that THIS IS ALL HE HAS.  This is what constitutes virtue for these people.  The ability to set boundaries, to ask other people to exist within them, has been collapsed in his society.  The possibility of individual assertion is disappearing radically.  All they have is “everything is equal to everything, and if you disagree you are no longer a member of our social order”.  Such an “order” is not an order at all.  It is a system in the throes of internal collapse.

One must suspect that on some level these people, who have achieved an astonishing comfort in their lives, an astonishing security and following complacency, WANT to be conquered and dominated.  Their egalitarianism has failed them.  It is not a moral creed at all.  It is the ABSENCE of a moral creed.  It is the ABSENCE of a tribe, of a community, of genuine peers, of belonging.  When you have nothing, it is tempting to want something, and the Muslims are only too happy to offer that.  Submit or die is a simple enough proposition.

When you take an impulse like the need for hierarchy, and divorce it from its local contexts. the same instincts come to the fore in unannounced, invisible ways.  They come to the fore in dreams of a global dominion, of a global order of power. Many of the best minds of the 20th Century spent their lives in the service of impulses eminently familiar to chimpanzees in the jungle.

The Soviet Union was a chimpanzee project. So was Maoist China.  So is Cuba.  So is Venezuela. They are papered over with lies, of course, but the underlying psychopathology screams for recognition and explanation.

So if I am right, what do we do?  This was the most important point I wanted to make.  The issue is simple: everything must be local.  We see this recognition, too, across our culture.  People are not stupid. They adapt to forces they don’t understand in ways which are natural to them, if they are allowed to, if more powerful primates do not stop them.

“Keep Austin Weird”–and its many off-shoots–stems from this.  In a world of mass media, of virtually instantaneous travel, and literally instantaneous communication, one must feel different somehow.  One must feel I am this and not that, one of us and not them.

One cannot be a member of an abstract order and get ones emotional needs met.  There have to be concrete people, that you can name, that you recognize on the street, with whom you have some sort of relationship.

And the whole benefit of truly Liberal society is that there can be COUNTLESS simultaneous orders.  There can be countless power relationships which work to meet this need.  Somebody is in charge at the local Kiwanis Club, and the Rotary.  Somebody runs the Chess club, and the beer drinking society.  Or if nobody feels a need to have a boss, then that is fine too.  That expresses a reduced need for power.

It seems to me that the more powerfully individuated a person is–and I would say that this is a function of a person’s relationship to that Spirit which pervades everything–the less control their instincts have, the less animal-like they are, the less need they have to belong to a hierarchy.

The goal of human equality is an enlightened goal.  But it can only be met by people who are capable of assuming the mantle of personal power, of truly and deeply being who they are–not someone’s robot, not a hypnotized drone, but a real human being.

The task of the spiritual is both that of eliminating the need for other people, to be who you are, and the elimination of the impulse to shape other people to be more like you.  We are all CREATED different.  And what creates savor in life–true savor–is in seeing and appreciating these differences.

Everything in our public domain is corrupted, or nearly all of it. We see “diversity” called out as a virtue everywhere, but how different are these people really?  I can predict the beliefs of most people on most topics given a small smattering of information.  Not invariably, of course, but I think we all must admit that very few people do their own thinking.  They repeat what they have been told as their own ideas, in the same way the recipient of a post-hypnotic suggestion repeats the behavior they had implanted.

We have relationships with Big Brother in the media.  Large figures on the glowing shrines in our homes act as if they care.  Tens of millions of Americans thought Obama cared about them.

But this is not a relationship.  For many, it is all they have, but it is not enough.  That is why so many of us are depressed, why so many are turning to heroin, why I read yesterday Raves are making a come-back.

Our culture does not meet our needs, but people feel powerless to create something new.

And this is the root attraction of the Left, of Socialism, of Bernie “I pissed off the people in my Commune because I always talked and never worked” Sanders.  It feels like an alternative.  The rhetoric is hopeful.  It seems to promise a brighter future (as of course did Bolshevism, which drew a lot of energy from the “Futurists”).

But this tribe is an abstraction.  It requires a firm commitment to believe whatever you are told to believe, to be emotional about the things you are supposed to be emotional about, and to ignore the many sins of the Party Elders.

The worst punishment is excommunication.  For the millions of True Believers to be cast out of the tribe would be a death, and this they seek to avoid at all costs.  To stay in the tribe they reject the use of individuated reason.  They reject debate.  They repeat what they are told to repeat and call it their own.

But people need difference to survive, and their tribe consists wholly in conformity.  Yes, they mark themselves outwardly with tattoos, or oddities, or sexual peculiarities (as if such a thing still existed), but at root they think they same.  Their views on dozens of topics can reliably be predicted.  They are not diverse in the slightest.  The men who founded our nation were vastly more diverse, despite being all white, all men, and all (at least relatively) rich.

Diversity is on the inside, not the outside.  That is why I personally have never marked myself outwardly in any way, and continue to look like a dumb construction worker.

Here is the thing though: I have long argued that the hate directed at conservatives is the result of agitprop oriented around group solidarity.  It is that, clearly.

But I also now realize that they have an emotional need to believe that there is an outside to their inside, that their “compassion” is different from the hate which other people must feel.

They need to believe that hate is an active force in the world, for their mission–and thus sense of self–to make any sense at all.


Thus, much of their hate is not the result of what they have been told, but what they must psychologically ASSUME of those who oppose them.  They feel, for conservatives, what most of us would feel with respect to the KKK.  They think they understand us, because they have a NEED to think this.  A true mutual understanding would expose them to the needed knowledge that they have renounced their identities for nothing, that everything they stand for is marching towards tyranny, evil, and the eradication of freedom.

OK.  That was what I needed to say.

On a personal psychodynamic note, I will add that part of my passion for all this stems from a recurring sense that the world is moving in the direction of the pathology of my family of origin, where nothing was ever what it seemed, where everyone was angry all the time but wouldn’t admit it, where ego boundaries were confused and under constant attack, and where true lasting happiness was absolutely impossible.

I do not want that for me, for my children, or for any human being.  It is impossible to know where the point of no return is, but one can and should fight for what one believes as long as one can.  That is my personal creed, and I think it is a good one.  You never know when one last effort, one unexpected miracle, some unexpected intercession of Grace, might make all the difference.

Somebody posted on my Facebook today about how some Muslim, I think in Canada, said that some women like being beaten.  One respondent agreed, and my immediate reaction was to reject this idea.

Then I got thinking about it.  What is 50 Shades of Grey (gray?) but a chronicle of one mans quest to secure a woman’s permission to beat her?  It is impossible to listen to women’s stories about their problems with men and not think at some point that some part of them LIKES abuse.  I have listened to countless stories over the years.  Thousands of hours.  As I say from time to time, I am a good listener.

Now, we are supposed on the one hand to decry men who beat their women, but on the other to support those same women when they want to be tied up and hit, controlled and abused.  I don’t know what to make of this.  The abuse of women is likely as old as humanity, and we assume that it serves no purpose, that no sane woman would seek it out, but then you have the sales for 50 Shades.

One woman I was talking to who had read it 2-3 times, who obviously related to it in important ways, said that she liked how Christian (can this name be a mistake?) would give the girl unlimited funds to go shopping, and then when he would abuse her, she had his undivided, complete attention.  This was what she liked: how much attention he lavished on her.  This was her fantasy: to be the absolute center of attention, to be his whole world for a time.  It was not about the pain, but his focus on her.

Now, I don’t know if he was serious or not, but one of the respondents to the post I mentioned at the top said that in his travels through Africa a common editorial question from women was “how do I know my man loves me if he doesn’t beat me?”  Obviously, men run the papers in a lot of these countries, and this is no doubt a question they would love in the public domain, but is it impossible that this was something on women’s minds?  I introduce, again, the sales of 50 Shades.  100 million copies.  A movie.  The series is on par with Harry Potter and Twilight, with virtually all sales made to women, and the author a woman.

Again, all this relates to the idea of hierarchy, dominance and submission.  All of these posts started as another post I still haven’t gotten to, but will at some point.  Do women need to feel their man is in charge, and is this need driven from instinct? Is Feminism in some respects angry and aggressive not because this is false, but precisely because it is TRUE?

Are things like BDSM emerging into the public domain precisely because egalitarianism, the ethic that everyone is equal to everyone, is unnatural?  Clearly, historically, all attempted egalitarian projects have ended in radical inequalities.  Did human nature simply take over?  Is this one idea we can and should add to the mix?  Do we simply displace one inequality with another?  Is this need always satisfied over some time horizon, in some way, and simply changed from blatant to obscure?  Are our true motives occulted in self delusion and deception?

Can we see in rising interest in Satanism not just emotionally clouded reactions to religious hypocrisy-and of course the equally emotionally clouded desire to attack religion itself–but also a powerful symbol of inequality itself?  Is Satan not a powerful symbol of power–of dominance and submission–itself?  Does this interest meet the need which is thwarted by our daylight preoccupations, with our allegedly innocent and dispassionate concerns for erasing power relationships?  I think so.

And for what are we erasing them?  What is the purpose of life which is best served by this obsession?  What do the people in an absolutely equal industrial/post-industrial society do all day?  What passions stir them?  Who are they when they are alone?  What fills their minds?  What constitutes beauty, and how can beauty exist when the concept of ugliness has been destroyed?

On another tangent, I was pondering the movie “The Children of Men”, which I think I can safely assume was intended as a “socialist” critique of emerging patterns in British society of reaction to the unlimited importation by the Labor Party of a reliable voting bloc which rejects British society.  We are shown in that movie Fascist abuses of good people, of concentration camps of the sort we are told Trump wants to build (which is of course pure propaganda, since he has not even hinted at anything of the sort), and a vast divide between the Haves and the Have Nots.  Clive Owen ‘s brother, I think it was, in the movie, lives in this enormous mansion overlooking the Thames, and has put up Picasso’s Guernica and Michaelangelo’s David in his large flat or mansion, all while protected by walls, and armies of police. The people are left to fight with one another over scraps.

Is this not an accurate picture of Maduro’s Venezuela as it exists today?  Do you not think there are secure areas, guarded by hordes of well paid police?  Do you not think there are even today pockets of vast wealth, all connected to and controlled by the government, which was installed, supposedly, precisely to eliminate such unearned wealth?

As things are trending now in Britain, it appears that the power elite are quite willing to countenance, if they can control, an Islamic take-over of the entire nation.  They don’t care about the ordinary British people.  They do not care about ordinary decency.  They do not care about what is fair, or right, or good.  Their self loathing, which informs their policy, does not extend far enough to share in the burdens and travails they nonetheless intend to inflict, through inaction, through delay, through obfuscation and lies, on the proletarians they allegedly care about.

Here is an interesting piece of research, from “The Body keeps the Score” by Bessel van Kolk (Page 33-34).

“. . .dominant male monkeys had a much higher levels of brain serotonin than lower-ranking animals, but that their serotonin levels dropped once they were prevented from maintaining eye contact with the monkeys they had once lorded over.  In contrast, low-ranking monkeys who were given serotonin supplements emerged from the pack to assume leadership.  The social environment interacts with brain chemistry.  Manipulating a monkey into a lower position in the dominance hierarchy made his serotonin drop, while chemically enhancing serotonin elevated the rank of former subordinates.

There are a number of things that have occurred to me in connection with this.  I don’t remember half the ideas that float through my head, but I will pass along those that I recall.

First, it seems to me that we need to ponder the relationship of the police to black people in black ghettos from a position of dominance and power.  The police are like a super-gang: they dress alike, they act alike, they use the same words, observe the same culture, and back each other up no matter what, come thick and thin, and show loyalty to their own even when they know they are in the wrong.

It is of course as wrong to accuse all police of being criminals as it is to assume all of them are innocent.  My own experience, having worked for 3 years in a police department in college, having shared a locker room with cops, having attended their line-ups more times than I can count, and having shared a radio frequency with them for a thousand hours or more, is that most departments have a few bad apples, everyone knows who they are, and they tend to get away with what they get away with for long periods of time, if they don’t take it so far they force others to act.  If they are honest, I think most cops would admit this.

And on “the street” the whole game of being a cop is being dominant.  In most times and places, but particularly in rough neighborhoods, they are always at risk of being outnumbered and overwhelmed.  This is the root cause of being more aggressive than needed.

But if power is a literal drug, if you get a literal hit of serotonin every time you yank somebody’s chain, that can get addictive.  I think in most poor neighborhoods a lot of cops can justify acting arrogantly and with using force often.  And arresting someone is the most obvious use of force.  All sorts of laws seem to get enforced more in the places where the police spend more time, because there is more crime of all sorts.

And here is the question I would raise: what is the psychological cost of getting arrested?  What does it say to you as a person when your hands are cuffed behind your back, and you are locked in a cell, for any reason?  Blacks get arrested at very high rates for things like marijuana possession, petty theft, public drunkenness, etc. Does not every arrest breed some bitterness?  Is not every arrest, in its own way, a crime too?  You have more or less kidnapped someone and held them against their will.  Is this not directly disempowering?

I think in discussing the violence in the ghetto this is an often-overlooked factor.  Over and above police abuse of force, what about simple legal use of force?  When people say the so-called War on Drugs is a war on blacks by proxy, I cannot disagree with this notion.  The people at the bottom of the food chain will logically have the lowest serotonin levels, and thus the highest need to get high.  It is one of the tragic ironies of life–and this world is filled with this sort of thing–that the people with the most need to escape their reality are punished the most for it.  The people most likely to get kicked are those already on the ground.

What I would assert is that the process of policing, as it is practiced in most cities, actually exacerbates crime, by increasing the sense of impotence, the sense of worthlessness, of powerlessness, to which people react in predictable ways.  I think many cops view the ghetto as a playground.  I think many cops view a shift in which they don’t get to lock up a person or two as wasted.  It probably makes them mean, to the extent that in some homes the wife and children know instantly that they came up short that day.

And I”m talking average cops here.  Not the particularly bad ones.  I think the thrill of the hunt gets in their blood, and that even though most of them stay within the law, they enjoy what they do.  One of the cops where I worked had a Far Side cartoon in his locker where two people are pouring hot oil on some people besieging their castle, and one is saying to the other: “I have a confession to make–win or lose, I love doing this.”

Now take this logic to Ferguson.  I am not going to justify what Michael Brown tried to do, which is kill that cop.  I’m not going to blame the cop for shooting Brown.  He was alone in the ghetto, being attacked by a huge man, who was high, and extremely enraged.  Legally, practically, Brown was wrong and the cop was right.

Nor can I stomach for a moment the Soros-funded agitprop which followed, because it was infused with left wing radicals who didn’t care any more for Brown than they care for the people locked in cages in Cuba, or who were shot in the back of the neck in Lubyanka, or who were forced to eat their neighbor’s children in Mao’s completely arbitrary and unnecessary famines.  I dare say that sort of thing is likely happening even now in North Korea.

But if we are to use genuine empathy–and I do like to consider myself capable of empathy, even though I am often hot-headed, sometimes mean, and nearly always irritable–then we have to look at the root of the anger.  Of course people want the cops when bad things happen.  But when cops are the SOURCE of the bad things, the proposition is much more dicey.  I suspect in that neighborhood at least half the young men had been locked up at least once for something that was not that big a deal. And being handcuffed and locked in a cage leaves scars.  Eric Garner was killed through incompetence–and I will note again, with a black female officer on the scene as Officer in Charge–for the crime of selling cigarettes.  Why did he react with such rage?  Because he was tired of cops, tired of harassment, tired of being made to feel inferior, tired of having his chain yanked.  Is this so hard to understand?

I hate the Left.  I hate the people who hate humanity, who hate decency, who want power at any cost, for nothing.  This post is long enough and I will deal with my original topic in another, but I will say that real change for the better will come when reasonable people on both sides sit down and discuss how to improve the situation.  Such conversations are IMPOSSIBLE when radicals are in the mix.  I might perhaps begin calling Leftists anti-humanists.  That is what they are.  They support nothing good.  They help no people who matter.  They are not working for the common good.  They are not focused on decency and actual human lives.

In my view, some alternative to getting handcuffed and thrown into a cage needs to be on the table.  In my view, a whole lot of things which are illegal need to made legal, or made subject solely to a citation. The same people who support Black Lives Matter, and who reflexively vote Democrat are the ones who made selling cigarettes without a license illegal. Curtailing freedom is what government does.  Without that, it is useless.  Even in the pursuit of national defense, it acts solely to curtail the freedom of our enemies.  Some freedoms need to be curtailed, but selling cigarettes should not be among them.

And ponder the world people live in where they can only afford to buy a cigarette at a time.  Ponder the feelings that must arise when even THAT is punishable by incarceration or unnecessary death.  What hope is there?  Why NOT lapse into drug abuse, lethargy, alcoholism, and chronic irresponsibility?  Yes, I know that there people who rise above all this.  But what merit can there be in a system which must be endured to be transcended?  Why not make success the most common, most obvious, most available option?

Economics is a complex subject, and one filled with lunatics.  But everything we need to know, we know.  Free markets, the protection of property rights, and sound currency build generalized wealth.  The more these things exist and are protected, the better for all but the authoritarians.

We are all of course by now familiar with the Leninistic methods that left wing radicals are using to suppress free speech, which is to say, any speech they disagree with, and which competes with their monopolistic control of many public dialogues.

It is seemingly assumed by some for-profit entities, like Target, and now the PGA, that kowtowing to these radical agitators is somehow good business.  What I would submit is that an  at least equal and likely larger number of people are seeing Political Correctness for what it is–nascent and very ugly Fascism–and voting for the OTHER side.  This is the whole reason people love Donald Trump.  He sees no need to even pretend to play that game, unlike pretty much everyone else, and certainly the last two “moderate and thus electable” Republican Presidential candidates.

It seems obvious to me that the stakes are high for any business wanting to make political statements.  The potential negatives–like the Target boycott I personally continue to uphold (I bought a watch and a food scale from Walmart today, despite the fact that the Target is much closer)–are at least equal to any possible positives, like attracting new customers.

Particularly for mass market companies, the people who most need your services are likely already there, because your business fundamentals are solid. You can add a few with ad campaigns, lose a few with poor customer service, or more aggressive competitors, but making political statements is most likely to polarize people.  It may make some people more loyal, but cause you to lose entirely others.

Thus, I would submit that the second type of evolving political correctness is oriented around applauding and supporting those who consciously and consistently work to subvert the first.  That is a constituency which is growing, and it needs to be reckoned with by everyone.  We call it political incorrectness, but why cede them the word?  Why cede these people anything?  I don’t grant them liberal, compassion, or justice.  Why correct?

If one could “find” oneself, what then?  There you are.  No doubt about it.  Right there.

It seems to me what one can do is enter into a light, a dance, a movement, and call it home, knowing that its walls and floors are prone to disappearing, and everything known evolving into something else, somehow.

But if you are the opposite of a shadow, this is your natural condition.

It is possible to describe the tango, but can one truly capture the feeling of dancing, what dancing is?  It is that.  One can say, properly, no more.