Moderates United

In order to recognize cruelty, at least when expressed with subtlety, in others, you must first own it in yourself.  We all have this capacity and there is no use lying about it.

The problem with the people I call Sybaritic Leftists–the Swedes would be an excellent example–is that they do not own or recognize their capacity for anger and rage. Normal people you invite in as house-guests who shit in your kitchen you become angry with and kick them out of your home.  The Swedes are getting angry with those who object to the shit.  This is displacement, and very unhealthy psychologically.

Donald Trump is not the Anti-Christ, he is not a fascist, and I see no signs that he is any major respect a bad person.  The rage directed at him is derived from the astonishment among many people, journalists and political watchers alike, that all the usual tactics, all the usual attacks, have not reduced him into some form of degraded silence, or at least reduced his chutzpah.

If you are someone who is used to being able to use physical force–or in this case, the concentrated use of emotional abuse–then it can be intensely frustrating not to get the outcome you want.  If you are a long term bully and abuser, when you beat your woman, you want her to shut the fuck up.  They have beat him and beat him and beat him, and he won’t shut up.  This is what enrages people with major anger issues.

But none of them want to own the anger.  The same people say OM, do yoga, and post pictures of cats.

As I said, most people are liars.  Some of them I am willing to forgive, and some of them I am not. I am aware the ideal is that I should forgive everyone.  Well, one needs to set realistic goals, and forgiving these people right now, for me, is not realistic.  They should know better.

I think in the first phase you take people as they seem to be.  This is naivete. In the next, you realize most people lie just about all the time without knowing they do it, although some do.  In the end, and this is what I am working on, you see the lies, and forgive most of them anyway, and understand all of them.

I’ve been saying for many years that seeing what is in front of you is exceptionally hard, and I was gratified to read in the NARM book that this is in fact a primary developmental challenge for most of us.

I have no use for lies, or easy truths.  The two are quite often the same.  Things quite often are what they appear to be, but what have you really understood even about that?

What passes for learning and knowledge in this country is in all too many cases sad, weak, and even sick.  I personally have invested many people with reverence, only to find I erred.

I do think we can see in many traditional cultures, in the “guru”, an attempted recapitulation of a failed father-son relationship, complete with idealization.

Nobody is your superior.  Nobody is your inferior.  Be yourself, and let others be themselves.  We all bump into walls and fall down.  No use crying about it, or blaming the walls or the Earth.

It occurs to me that the term “double standard” is really a misnomer: it describes, in fact, a non-existent standard.  If it applies in one place, and not another, then it is not a “standard”–which must be the same everywhere by definition–at all.

The Left does not oppose rape, or rape culture.  It does not oppose sleazy men, sexual harassment, dishonesty, dishonor, or treachery.  It condones all these things in ISIS and in Hillary and Bill.

The point of a standard, of a principle, is that it mediates difference.  It allows one group to treat all other groups with the same respect and expectations that it treats its own.  Others, seeing that they are not treated differently, adapt and conform to this aspect of the culture, while feeling free to retain their own unique ideas about things.

The rejection of standards is perforce the rejection of mediated difference, and quite obviously that is what we see in our present political world.  The power elite just pick and choose what they care about and don’t care about, and in clinically Orwellian fashion, feel utterly free to decry one week what they were condoning the week before.  This is only made problematic by those who remember the past, and who expect consistent, principle based behavior.  If you can get people to reject the past, and to accept inconsistency, then you have a perfectly brewed propaganda soup, which again, is what most Democrats and pretty much all college students are immersed in.

Conservatives, even the best of them, have always had to carry the truth of harshness: that life is sometimes hard, but we make it harder, most of the time–as seen from a public policy perspective–by trying to make it easier.

But there is not a long distance from there to “fuck the poor: it’s their own damned fault”.  The historical role of the Democrats has been to counter this impulse.  Within my own world, there is room for give and take, and the historical Democrats are people I could find some common ground with, even if I could never agree with the extent of their pandering.

The modern Democrat party, though, has gone full Socialist, full self loathing, full ideological detachment from the cares and struggles of actual human beings.

So where does this leave working class Americans?  With nothing.  Nobody talks about or cares about them, except to the extent they patronize them with lies and/or platitudes.

I was reading this nasty article from National Review, which has most of the classic stereotypes Democrats, with some justice, threw at conservatives, with none of the palliating deeper humanitarianism that motivated people like Barry Goldwater or Calvin Coolidge.  Consider this finale to what purports to be serious analysis, by someone who wonders how so much of the world has missed his unique insights, rare genius, and goshdarned tough ability to “tell it like it is”.  He is speaking about small towns around America:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

On the one side you have Hillary and everyone but Trump wanting to add 15 million job-seekers to a discouraged existing pool of people who have worked too little, for too little, for many years now; and on the other you have this asshole.

Why not Trump? He’s used to seeing men in hard hats at work.  It’s what he’s always done.

It seems to me many of us bring a sense of strain to work, or a sense of need.  On the one hand we are pushed into working by forces outside of us, on the other we are pushed into work by forces within us.

Work, it seems to me, is at its best an interested participation in the unfolding of ones life.  If you dial the right combination, there is glitter, light, and beauty everywhere, even when you are doing the dishes.

Nothing stays the same, so everything happens differently every time.  This is interesting, and, again, a very suitable subject for the virtue of curiosity.

I wish more people were genuinely curious.  I wish, in particular, those who claim to value diversity actually did so.  People are interesting, but not when they are made objects, not when they are reduced to known ciphers, not when they are considered in the aggregate.  Those are dull games for even duller people, and nothing but pain comes from them.

It seems to me that I personally, as a parent, will take the most pride in how my children are NOT like me.  I have tried hard to instill curiosity in them as a principal virtue, and curiosity can go many places.  We are all exposed to different things, different people, and take different paths.  To the extent they depart from me and my path, that means they have found their own.  That is what I want for them, and what I would argue all parents should want for their children.

Such, in any event, is my own view.  You are free to differ.  I do actually value diversity.  The same logic, as I think about it, would apply to everyone you meet.

How banal, if you think about it, must be a teacher who insists on his own way, his own words, his own routines.  The task of a thinker who would be a teacher is to get to the principles which matter, then watch in wonderment at the endlessly inventive ways in which they can be expressed by open and happy people.

My children are not mine.  You are not mine.  Confusions about this account for most of the unnecessary suffering in the world, I think.

I was contemplating today, as I do, why I do some of the stupid things I do.  Some of us more than others set out to do one thing, and find ourselves, as if a magic spell had been cast on us, doing something else.  Surfing the internet is just the latest iteration of daydreaming, or cleaning, or calling people on the phone, or going for a walk.

On a deeper level, how many excuses are there for not painting a wall which needs it, for doing our taxes, for reconnecting with an old friend, for doing that project you have dreamed about for years?

And what I saw was that I really have two parts of myself which both wish me well, but have differing myths about the world, differing felt senses about the world.

People we call evil have identified with the appetitive self, with the animal self, which states that a full belly is the same as goodness, that the world is hostile and dedicated to their destruction, and that an aggressive and cruel way of interacting with the world is the only possible response consistent with safety and survival.

Within the shadow, there is a perceived light.  And light is perceived as shadow.  And, to the point, both parts perceive themselves as furthering the interests of our self.   Both view themselves as relative paladins, fighting the good and necessary fight.

Within myself, I am saying there are two brothers within me.  Two comrades in arms, both dedicated to my well being, in their own ways, but with radically different, and outwardly opposed agendas.  This is why I cycle from one set of behaviors and affect, to another, and back.

Going “into the shadow” is another world entirely, but one which makes complete sense from its own perspective.

Put another way, a more Hindu or Buddhist way, there is no darkness: only ignorance, typically ignorance made possible by a failure of communication.  And I would go all hippy and say that all conflict is a failure of communication, but would add that where actual people are concerned, listening is not always present, and if violence is, violence is sometimes the appropriate answer in response.

Feeding the good in everyone can be the only truly humane impulse for a good person, but we always need to start where we are.

As far as I know, there is only one country in the world with a socialist slogan–Order and Progress–on its flag.

What, I wonder, just WHAT are we to make of the fact that 19 of the world’s most dangerous cities are in Brazil?  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24778720.html

So I’m sitting in a wal-mart parking lot on a beautiful spring day, eating chocolate after a few hours of moderate physical labor, listening to some magnificent violin and piano music (the song of the nightingale” by Pablo de Sarasate: I looked it up) and I watch some dirt baggy looking guy walking along. He doesn’t like his job, and they probably have their doubts about him.

And I go to that old song LIFE WHAT A TRAGEDY. Then I think shit I’m pitying him and feeling sorry for myself. I actually feel good and it’s quite possible he does too.

And then it hit me that you cannot pity a person without denigrating them, and you cannot ask for pity without, in many if not most cases, denigrating yourself. Feeling pity is inherently a form of feeling superior. If other people do not feel sorry for themselves, then our pity is s sort of violence, of attack.

As I grow as a person I am slowly realizing that with most of us none of the emotions are where they are supposed to be. Goddammit.

It does seem to be too that the core issue with self help is that none of us are located on the map where we think we are. You can only begin at the beginning, but most us have no idea where that is.

One seachange I think we are seeing is that ordinary rank and file working class, blue collar Democrats are finally beginning to realize that their Party has abandoned them.  They are not concerned with wages, with protecting jobs, and certainly not with any issues that might concern white voters, especially men.

Donald Trump gets this.  It is stupid to say that he can’t win.  He has 50% of the Republican Party, and Hillary is not just personally odious on every level, she has absolutely no credibility when it comes to protecting working class jobs.  She would just as soon give them to Mexicans, as long as they vote for her.  She figures, based on past history, that everybody else is just too fucking stupid to understand the game being played on them.  She may be right, but objectively, she is clearly wrong.

I think I’ve said this before, but I have a sense that Trump can readily imagine himself at a Yankees or Mets game, eating a hot dog, drinking a beer, and saying “isn’t this country great?”  Yes, he may have been in a private suite with an expensive hooker, but I don’t think there was any coke or booze, and he probably tipped her well.

Nobody can call him a sexist pig without referencing the many transgressions–almost certainly worse transgressions, likely extending into overt rape–of Bill Clinton.  Trump is just honest about being a healthy heterosexual man.  He is a bit of a pig, but I suspect he treats his women much better than the Clintons–both of them–treated Monica Lewinsky.