Moderates United

I like to start my morning by doing my EmWave2, while listening to Gregorian Chants.  Then I roll myself out with a lacrosse ball and foam roller, 3 minutes or so per body part. It can be quite peaceful.

This morning I got up and read my Facebook, Lucianne, Drudge.  And I found myself linking an article describing the terrors of Brussels on my Facebook, and pointing out the obvious, that these people want Sharia Law in Europe, which means the abrogation of women’s rights, racial rights, homosexual rights, the freedom of speech, and the very ability to not agree with them about anything without being physically attacked and hurt.

I posted the obvious.  Then I did my routine.  And somewhere in there–I usually find rolling my shoulders very relaxing–it hit me that the obvious is indeed obvious.  What is not obvious is why so many people have such a hard time telling and accepting the truth, or at least what appears to me to clearly be the truth.  I deleted my post.  I realized I was planting seeds which could not be received precisely by the people who most needed them.  The seeds were unnecessary for people with intact perceptual capacities, and invisible to everyone else.

A great many people in our time have a hard time just existing.  Large numbers of us are killing themselves.  If memory serves, more people now die in the United States of suicide than in car accidents.  If not, then the numbers are knocking on that door.

And I think to European history over the past century.  Even before the first World War, people were saying life was meaningless.  Even before that war the intelligentsia was repeating “God is dead”.  After that war, they were filled with fatigue and horror.  Most of them turned to one Fascism or another, such as Bolshevism, although no doubt Scientism–which interacted with both–also played a role.  Nazism was “scientific” based on biological evolution.  Communism was “scientific”, based on economic evolution.

Both had no use for the individual, and perhaps this is precisely why they were so valued.

I look at Brussels today, and what do the white people–the people who founded that nation, built it, and who have maintained it–have to live for?  Most of them are atheists, and most of them can be assumed to be what I call Sybaritic Leftists, which is to say people who reject the necessity of pain in life, and view a life of relative comfort and ease as the highest good.

They are decadent, in other words.  How can one speak hard truths to decadent people?  I do not see a way.

I love to preach. Preaching is my way to feel like I am making a difference.  But the truth, of course, is that I make very little difference.  You cannot make the deaf hear.

And I find a place in myself which is still capable of viewing them with kindness.  We may all be on a bus to hell, but I do not need to be so angry.  My life does not make the Pacific any larger, and my eventual passing will not diminish it.

I do of course worry about my children.  But my belief is that we choose our lives.  They chose their lives.  They chose what they would experience.  I have no control over that, and even though I will never cease from my striving, this world does not exist to meet my needs, to be kind, or even to be comprehensible.  This is still no reason to feel sorry for myself, or be less happy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/18/why-smart-people-are-better-off-with-fewer-friends/

Here is my proposal: large segments of my emotional life are tied up in ideas which are intellectually incomprehensible to most people, and when I am seeking emotional intimacy, this is an important part of it.  Since it is beyond most people, I can’t share it, and since I can’t share it, I find trying to interact with people on that level frustrating and it generally makes me feel worse. I would rather be greeted with a blank stare than 50% comprehension.  That 50% just makes the failure feel worse, and it’s always 50% or less.  I have emailed most of the Economics professors at most of the major universities in America and Ireland, and not received one answer I deemed intelligent.  Granted, I have not received many answers at all, but those that I did receive confirmed my suspicion as to how the thought process went for whatever percentage of recipients actually read what I had to say.

This is why I do construction for a living.  Nobody asks me any hard questions, and whatever interacting I do is on a basic level.  It is a decent modus vivendi with my particular ontological joke.

Well, that and I love working with my hands, the free time it gets me, the self employment, and the travel.  And if sitting is the new smoking, then I can do my regular smoking and feel less guilty. I’m not smoking twice.

Even when I was in my teens I fantasized about doing construction.  I just had to figure out how to make way more than the Union guys without doing my time, and without joining a Union.

I haven’t posted this in a while: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page11.html

The “money” piece referenced became my Econ Fix.  I moved away from a gold standard, but the ideas are otherwise the same.

Garp I watched a few weeks ago, and just didn’t feel like commenting on.  I may have in passing.  I can’t remember.

Alphaville, by Jean-Luc Godard, I watched tonight.  It was pretty bad, but the ideas were somewhat interesting. I won’t comment long, as I have some Sleepy Time tea brewing and a nightly routine to perform, but I did want to say that I really feel that the computer, the reification of “reason”, so-called, is really a reification of our animal, bestial, MECHANICAL instincts.

What we share with ants: this is what we share with machines. This is why machines would, in turn, want to reduce us to ants.

But what makes us human, makes us beings with souls, is precisely where we differ from machines.  Consciousness is typified by what I tend to call non-statistical coherence.  Animals are typified by statistical coherence particularly the lower you go in complexity.

There is a scene where they have managed to combine executions with water ballet, and I was struck by the continuity with actual history, with actual public executions, which were attended by and enjoyed by thousands, in plazas you can still visit in Paris, to this day.  Paris itself is marked by two exhibits dedicated to that same “revolution”, the Arc De Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower.

That time, too, was marked by the rhetorical appeal to reason, and the actual submission to violence, savagery, and anti-humanistic cruelty.

Insanity leaves markers. If you know how to read them, you see them everywhere.  Most human societies, for most of time, have been two thirds insane.  Those who did not build large cities and armies roamed the wilds largely devoid of compassion for anyone outside their tribe.

This was one of the first R-rated movies I saw, and the first major picture, if memory serves, with Robin Williams in it.  I got to thinking about it one day, then by sheer coincidence one of the women I work with told me it was her favorite movie, so I thought hell I’ll watch it again.

For the early 1980’s I thought it weirdly percipient.  Or, perhaps more accurately, it described those times–roughly the late Sixties to mid-Seventies–well, and we have circled back around.

You have John Lithgow as Bruce Jenner. And you have radical identity politics.

Several points I wanted to make.

Garp came in as a baby, and he left as a baby.  He came in wanting and fantasizing about his father, and he left fantasizing about his father.  Moral: he needed his father, no matter what psychological accommodations he reached with his actual life.

Glenn Close was exceptionally emotionally detached.  She had not the slightest bit of fellow feeling, or felt empathy.  Nothing fazed her. Her beliefs–her eyes, which one can readily imagine foreshadowing her much more famous role in Fatal Attaction–were abstract and purely intellectual.  She didn’t bat an eye when the women who cut out their tongues in sympathy for a rape victim chose to continue their weird cult even after the actual victim explicitly told them to stop.  Everyone to her was a symbol, and no one, even her own son, was truly to her a person.  She was obsessed with her role, with her nursing outfit, but only as a role, only as an expression of inner ideology.

She also over-identified with Garp.  She moved to New York with him.  She started writing when he did.  She procured a hooker for him, after using her herself first for her own purposes.  They both wrote books that got them hate mail.  They both even died the same way.

The whole thing was extremely unhealthy, even if I got that I was supposed to get that as odd as the whole thing was, there was still love.

And the women she surrounded herself with viewed the world through the logic of collective guilt.  They did not want to allow her own son to attend her funeral, because ALL men were guilty if one was.  This is the worst sort of tribalism, but it is on display, today, on every college campus in the country (or nearly, at any rate.).

You saw, of course, the rabid hate that we see today, which was fringe then, but mainstream now.

And I could not help but see in that book John Irving wrestling with his own fatherless childhood, and perhaps allowing himself to bring out and express some of the pent up rage he felt. He killed his son, then he killed his mother, then he killed himself.

This movie is due for a come-back.  You heard it here first.

I have read several pieces in the past few days I regarded as genuinely thoughtful.  This makes me happy, since I see it so little.  One of the traits of thoughtfulness is accepting your own limits–recognizing who you are, what you believe, and that other possibilities exist–and being willing to go outside them, to talk out loud for a while, and to settle down without a sound bite, or ideologically actionable verdict.  Sometimes the straight path can only be found by rambling.

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Safe-Spaces-Stifle-Ideas/235634

I particularly liked this paragraph:

Our educated classes regard the university chiefly as an instrument of our collective purpose and an efficient engine for transmitting anxiety about ideas felt to be dangerous or out of bounds. Bizarre that a culture officially committed to diversity and openness should be essentially conformist, and that the hostility to the clash of incommensurable ideas and even to elementary difference should be promoted with the sort of clear conscience that can belong only to people who don’t know what they’re doing.

George Lakoff famously proposed that “liberals” (his word) operate more from a maternal, nurturing, caring sense of things, and conservatives from a paternal, rule-governed, obedience based model.

Jonathan Haidt provides, perhaps, more nuance, arguing

there are (at least) six innate moral foundations, upon which cultures develop their various moralities, just as there are five innate taste receptors on the tongue, which cultures have used to create many different cuisines. The six are Care/harm, Fairness (equality)/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. The theory was developed to explain cross-cultural differences in morality, but Haidt and his collaborators at YourMorals.org^[21] have found that the theory works well to explain political differences as well. Liberals (leftists) tend to endorse primarily the Care and Equality foundations, whereas conservatives (rightists) tend to endorse all six foundations more equally.

What I would suggest is that while both writers have solid points in my view, what they are REALLY referring to is what sorts of propaganda both groups respond best to.

One can be empathic and care about others, and be led to support policies which actually work to achieve the opposite of the outcome you wanted.  This is the case with most Democrats.

One can be callous and cruel, seeking ones own interest, and in the process of building up a large company–say, Microsoft–in actual fact enrich the lives of millions of people.

What I can say with some firmness is that the Left chooses to focus on the discussion, and conservatives–to the extent we actually exist any more, having been largely pushed in fact if not name from the national and international stages–choose to look at history, and particularly political and economic history, as models to predict the future.  And we are rarely wrong.  Human nature has not changed since the time of the Romans and Greeks.  Nor is it likely to any time soon.

Simply because someone says they want something, does not mean that their means are not counter-productive.  And if you criticize people who oppose those means as inherently mean-spirited and evil, then you have eradicated the capacity of that system to learn, adapt, and grow, which is where we are at today.  All of our problems have solutions, but none of the problems can be named, and thus all of the solutions look abusive and wrong.

The goal of free markets and the protection of property rights is generalized wealth and well being.  But because it LOOKS like self seeking and greed, stupid people can, have, and continue to misunderstand this, even though the data is absolutely, categorically clear, beyond any possibility of rational dispute.

An appeal to prejudice is inherently an appeal to ignorance.  There is no other way to look at it, in my view. 

I think it is long past time to recognize, to acknowledge, to speak the truth about, the fact that paranoia is primarily the province of the Left.  They see–or in the case of the more disingenuous claim to see–racists under every rock, Capitalistic exploiters behind every tree, injustice every time the wind blows.

What a rubber mallet is to the knee, the claim of malfeasance is to the relationship of the Left to their enemies.  If anyone disagrees with them for any reason, they are talking before they are thinking, and then doing without thinking.  This is the purpose and outcome of Agitation Propaganda: training people to react with all the nuance, poise, class, and substance of dogs salivating for their next steak.

Were Communists seeking to subvert our cultural order, and did they deploy considerable treasure, countless hours of effort, and countless agents of influence to do so?  Unquestionably.  With the fall of the Iron Curtain, we know this to be true.  Most of the North Vietnamese Generals have written memoirs.  And I think we can reasonably assume those written from exile speak the most truth.  We know the KGB spent 4x as much money influencing opinion as it did intelligence gathering.

Was it paranoid to suspect this?  No.  It was in fact what was happening, and was the logical and largely inevitable consequence of the ideology which drove–and continues to drive–the Communists.

These people lie as easily as they breathe, and so one cannot say that because most Communists do not use that word, that they have ceased with their pathological anti-Humanism.

Bill Ayers has not changed one core belief since the 1970’s.  There is no reason to suppose those who surrounded and supported him have either.  Some cults are a one way trip.  Once in, you never get out.

Thus when I read a supposed conservative citing this propaganda piece, which gave us that phrase, I can conclude they are part of the problem.

I am going to post this without comment.  From this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment

The experiment has its roots in an earlier one performed in Trinidad, where Mischel noticed that the different ethnic groups living on the island had contrasting stereotypes about one another, specifically the other’s perceived recklessness, self-control, and ability to have fun.^[6] This small (n= 53) study focused on male and female children aged 7 to 9 (35 Black and 18 East Indian) in a rural Trinidad school. The children were required to indicate a choice between receiving a 1¢ candy immediately, or having a (preferable) 10¢ candy given to them in one week’s time. Mischel reported a significant ethnic difference, with Indian children showing far more ability to delay gratification as compared to African students, as well as large age differences, and that “Comparison of the “high” versus “low” socioeconomic groups on the experimental choice did not yield a significant difference”.^[6] Absence of the father was prevalent in the African-descent group (occurring only once in the East Indian group), and this variable showed the strongest link to delay of gratification, with children from intact families showing superior ability to delay.

Leftists like to style themselves as the “true” thinkers, and conservatives as ignorant political luddites, who oppose either from financial interest, or congenital intellectual deformity–typically with more than a touch of racism, homophobia (so-called), and misogyny–all the profound, brave, and beautiful ideas which they propose.

I would like to propose the opposite: given that the purpose of thinking is at some point achieving, given that the abstract, if it can be called useful, must at some point actually BE useful, and since the only possible place for usefulness is the real world, conservatives are in fact the real thinkers.

It takes a level of abstraction to grasp that one cannot always get what one wants immediately.  Most people who are going to, figure this out by age 6 or so (there is a very interesting paragraph in there I am going to make the topic of a separate post).

It takes a level of abstraction to realize that a complex order is vastly more robust and intelligent than an apparent order.  A row of trees–satisfying as it may be aesthetically–will never equal the vigor of a truly natural forest, allowed to grow by chance and time.

It takes an abstract grasp of history to see that power aggregated is always maintained and expanded.

If we are to associate a music with conservatism, I would pick something like what I am listening to at the moment.  Conservatism appears emotional on the outside, but is pure reason at its heart.

If we are to pick honest music for the true Left, for the Cultural Sadeists, this seems to me appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbmWs6Jf5dc  They appear rational, but are pure emotion–most of it rage–at heart.

Now, I picked up a book by Herbert Marcuse last night, and perused it.  He was talking about private property, seemingly the history of it, and lack of justification for it.  His ideas were not of interest to me, so much as the feeling they gave me.  When I allowed myself, they recalled a warm feeling of safety, of insulation from reality.  They recalled the sense most highly intelligent people have had from time to time of superiority, and the pride that gave them.   They recalled being invited to this smart kids thing, and that smart young adults thing.

The words presented to me a world where I was welcome, where I could kick off my shoes and make myself comfortable, where I would never be truly contradicted among my fellow travellers, although of course we would argue just enough to make it fun, and then congratulate ourselves at our cleverness, and wonder together at the dullness of the rest of the world.

Put simply, it was a world where I was insulated from my daily life, from the “slings and arrows” of a life lived honestly, and where I had a secret password to be accepted in any group which recognized that password, along with a map on how to find them, how to live among them, how to breed among them, how to die among them.  It offered a guide to life, and a shelter from uncertainty.  I never had to feel unpleasant feelings.

When I was in graduate school one of the professors lost his wife after a long illness, and he was back to work within a day or two.  He was back where those sorts of things didn’t matter, where he could counter the pain of his loss with abstraction, with effort, with a ritual order created by and maintained by people like him. I very much doubt he ever went through anything like a true mourning process. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.  You cannot fit true mourning onto a calendar, and schedule it for summer recess.

If you watch the arc of intellectual life in the 20th century, which created what we now have to live with in the 21st, you can see a retreat from an honest interaction with the world, and which culminates in the elevation of the text to a God of sorts.  These people were pushed by events into a place which was beyond assault, which was beyond honest emotional reactions to life, which was in fact perfectly safe.  These are the people teaching our kids, at least in most Humanities departments infected by this virus.

What one finds in Leftist texts–which is substantially all of them in modern universities–is a simultaneous indulgence in primal emotion, and the rejection of it. The rage which they feel as residual emergences from primitive places in their lives before they discovered books becomes solidified and reified in ideas which serve the purpose of calming them, of allowing some expression of what they feel, but which are, for all that, inhuman, destitute of genuine fellow feeling, empty of genuine compassion, caring, love.

This is Herbert Marcuse, and his extended family.

As I have said often, a thought worker is concerned with results in the actual world.  Conservatives are thought workers.  They operate at a useful and true level of abstraction, in the same sense that scientists do.  They have hypotheses, which they test by reading both ancient and contemporary history.  And they validate their hypotheses by these means.

Intellectuals are interested in the effects of their ideas and those of others on their emotions.  Ideas which they find congenial and beautiful they call good and right, and ideas–like the necessity of suffering–which they do not find congenial, they reject as ugly and flawed.  All this, with no reference to the actual world.

As a matter of FACT–such a thing does still exist, as do all the stoplights, and baseball fields in America–blacks and the poor generally have gotten more poor under Obama, and the rich, very much richer.  Yes, Republicans are blamed reflexively, but what policy has Obama proposed which would have altered any of this in the slightest?  American businesses have not wanted to invest money, and the very simple reason is they don’t trust Obama, and because Obamacare has made business life vastly more complex and expensive, with no compensatory positive, even for the workers, many of whom have been let go, or lost their policies.

All this brings me to my point.  Any long term readers I may have will be familiar with my fondness for extended preambles, which often exceed in length the actual point.

Donald Trump represents the Shadow, both for the political Left, and for the complicit Right. This is the reason he evokes such powerful emotions.


The way I have come to think of the Shadow is two complementary selves, on each side of a corner, fearing the worst of what is around the corner.  de Chirico represents this beautifully here .  We do not know our own selves, and fear the Other one around the corner, which we see only fragments of.

For the Left, he represents rage, prejudice, crassness, and abusiveness.  No one who has interacted on an extended basis with these people can fail to see that their culture–and it is a culture, an insular one–is infected with all these flaws.  They are PROJECTING onto Trump.

They call him racist for wanting a wall  But Mexico has a wall.  Are they racist?  He wants to limit Islamic immigrants, but the Gulf States who would be the most obvious destinations, with their resources, oil wealth, and cultural connection, have taken precisely NONE of them.  Are they racist?  Who talks about this?

Trump represents in sum all the abhorrent practices the Left wants to hide from itself, which it is and has long been continually guilty of. He does not ACTUALLY represent them, of course, but he is the subject of their obsessive displacement of their own unowned emotions.

For the right, Trump symbolizes their long term failure to engage in a substantive way with Leftist domination of all narratives which interest them.  I see alleged conservatives calling Trump xenophobic.  Why?  Are they simultaneously condemning, as they should, Saudi Arabia and Mexico (and for that matter, every other nation which takes illegal immigration seriously, which is most of them)?

The National Review has been losing the ideological battle for 60 years.  If the goal was to “stop history”, they failed.  They write their very erudite, internally consistent editorials, for other conservatives.  Nobody else gives a shit.  They are useless.  Irrelevant.  When it comes time to stand their ground, they pussy out.  They are cowards.

Trump is the first national figure in my lifetime to toe the line and tell these bastards to shut the fuck up.  And he has gotten away with it.

Here is the thing: our public life is FILLED to overflowing with blatant and inexcusable lies.  Most of us know it.  But there is so much shouting in the public domain, such a ready SA just waiting to pounce, that most have been pummeled into submission to ideas and practices they KNOW are pernicious, know are wrong.

If someone on a national stage speaks the truth too much too long, all these delusions and illusions, both on the right and the left, are threatened.  Congenial, comforting pipe dreams may all go up in smoke.  What people LIVED for, what gave them a sense of meaning and purpose, is at risk.

It is impossible to predict what Trump will do if elected, but in my view the recovery of the possibility of speaking truth in the public domain is the most likely outcome, and that alone is worth electing him.  Nobody else can do that, and of course Hillary or Bernie will make it much, much worse.

At some point ideological dissent may at some point be actually criminalized.  We are already seeing inklings of this at the highest levels, as when Loretta Lynch apparently considered treating as thought criminals people who use common sense and independence of thought in evaluating the non-existent evidence supporting the claim of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

I have wondered many times if I would end my life in prison or, worse, be subjected to the torture sick people want to inflict on all who threaten their fragile egos by disagreeing with them.

I have believed for some years that the Nazis were vastly more merciful than the Communists.  Nazis just killed or worked to death the people who disagreed with them.  They might torture them for information, but nothing more.

The Communists wanted to break people’s minds, to drive them mad, to get them to confess a 6″ pencil was longer than a 7″ pencil, and that they had committed crimes they had not committed.  This is unique in history, with the possible exception of the Christian inquisitions.

I wonder, I will admit, if Communism would have been possible without Christianity and its radical intolerance, its evangelical zeal, and its historically radical insistence on exact conformity.  Dostoevsky was quite right in his analogy, and in his history.