Moderates United

I am contemplating defensiveness, and it seems to me that the task of psychological growth, for most of us, is learning to defend not in the past, not in the future–which is often exactly the same thing–but in the present.  In terms of physical safety, preparing for real dangers in the future would still on the reading count as defending in the present.  Since life can be uncertain, and since human life has always been filled with violence, I personally would grant quite a wide latitude to such activities and still call them healthy.

What is not healthy, though, is obsession which takes you constantly out of the present moment.  Even if you build a huge stockpile of weapons and food, if you continue to obsess about possible dangers, you are not healthy.  Which life are you defending, if you live in continual fear?  We all die.  Your family will die.  Defending the present life consists mainly in living in peace, happily, and with contentment.  This sort of defense few talk about.

It seems to me that many people who carry psychological and more particularly developmental wounds into adulthood–which is just about everyone–feel an exaggerated need both to be protected and to protect.  It may seem paradoxical, but I think many people in dangerous professions feel more fear than the population as a whole, and are pushed into professions like the military, law enforcement, and fire fighting because in those places fear is a valid emotion, and taking aggressive precautions for ones safety are not seen as unwarranted or excessive.

But even beyond this, I think people who feel the need to “stick up” for people who have not asked for their help are enacting the same impulse.  Think of the people who feel the need to “stand up” for blacks and other minorities, and who feel not just the right but the DUTY to get angry on their behalf.  This is dysfunctional protective impulse.  We cannot save the slaves, now.  We cannot undo the wounds and horrors of history.  For that matter, we cannot resurrect the Union or Confederate dead.  We cannot undo the horrific wounds and violent deaths of the soldiers who suffered in their own ways every bit as much as any slave who was ever flogged or hung or burnt alive, and about whom no one talks.

We cannot LIVE in any place but the present, even if our imaginations may give us the illusion of life in other times and places, even if it may anoint us as guardians of some sort, even if it may soften the tensions and uncertainties of the present by presenting us what appear to be the certainties of the future or past.

It is an interesting seeming fact, presented in my NARM book, that while hypervigilence is a common and expected outcome of certain types of trauma, so too is HYPOvigilence, which is an exaggerated and unrealistic sense of ones own safety.  It seems to me this trait is on display among all those who seemingly have a compulsive need to believe the best of people, when we all know the truth is usually in the middle somewhere.

Enough is enough. The right amount is the right amount.  Since none of us are omniscient–even if the psychological defenses of some cause them to compulsively assume they know more or less than they do–we all must guess where things stand, what is appropriate.

These things can and should be discussed.  A multiplicity of views should be welcomed, not hated.  The whole point of a pluralistic society, one dedicated to the gradual improvement of human individuals, and the improvements in society which such improvement enables, is to allow ideas to compete, and the best ones to win.

One cannot speak of Socialism without speaking of the suppression of dissent.  There is a fundamental homology between the government picking winners and losers in the economic realm, and that of the ideational realm.  There is a fundamental homology between the notion that no people are better than others, and that no ideas are better than others, even if one idea–that of egalitarianism uber alles–reigns both supreme and unquestioned.

I feel cool breezes on pleasant days, and watch the clouds drift by.  I am thankful for my modest home, a pantry filled with whatever I choose to put in it, and the ability to dictate the actions of my day.  I do not blindly assume that this situation must continue forever, and I do not look at the past and assume that all of the cruelty, emotional detachment, vain attachment to ones people and ones cause, and all of the violence associated with them cannot return, and do so quickly.

It seems to me many Democrats have vivid visions of Trump supporters burning in fire, all while nourishing their own sense of their own righteousness, their own compassion, their own empathy, and their own vision for a peaceful and just world.

What if, in an infinite number of lives, all of us have done everything which it is possible to do?

I was sitting in the gym the other day–sweat and increased airflow seem to be congenial to me–thinking, that one of the primary manifestations of anger is rigidity.  You refuse to move, no matter the cause, no matter the benefit.  Stubbornness is a type of anger.

Now, the nature of the life force, as they term it in NARM, is growth, expansion.  Anger is the outcome when the impulse to grow is met with opposition.  This is a primal response, one seen in earliest infancy.

So how do you get chronic anger?  You internalize actually non-existent opposition.  You literally argue with yourself, on a physiological level.  Expressing the anger–flipping off any of the sundry jackasses off who populate every freeway in every city every day–does not, I don’t think, release it, so much as create an opportunity for it to come to consciousness, and awareness is something we seek instinctually.

So on this reading dogmatism, ideology, and congenital conservatism are species of congealed anger, which consists in a bound up impulse towards growth, and an introjected obstacle which cannot be undone by any means that person can see at the unconscious level at which this process happens.

It is to my mind obvious that dogmatism and life expression are antithetical, but this process is working me in the direction of making this distinction more formal.

I wonder if one day we will root all logic in somatic states, if that will be the end and beginning of all our reasoning.  I think this would be a good, useful thing.  If you do not incorporate the body, you have lost nearly everything.  Nothing becomes impossible, and no lunacy cannot be founded in emotional trauma, need, obsession, mania, and the like first, then made to seem obvious, natural, and part of that generations version of Natural Law.

How did Communism happen?  Well, look at the bodies of those who founded and perpetuate it.  They will quite certainly be disordered.

It just hit me that a principal factor in the divisiveness and extreme rancor within the Republican Party has to do with the fact that many have not yet come to grips yet with the fact that the Republican Party has become largely irrelevant.  Whatever it once stood for, it stands for weakly, allows itself to be pushed on its heels continually, and has to lie to maintain the illusion that it presents a meaningful contrast with the apocalyptic spirit of the totalitarians on the Left.

I am seeing over and over “If Trump wins this nation is through”, as if electing Obama twice were not two nails in our coffin already, as if putting a Republican Congress in place 2 years ago only to be betrayed nearly immediately was not a third.

Many people do not want to accept this fact.  They want Republicans to be the good guys, who stand up to the Democrats, and giving up this illusion–as I would view it–will cost them dearly.  THAT is why they are so hateful to, to use George Will’s term, “Trumpkins”.

It is not that people like me have given up conservatism.  It is that the Republican Party has given up conservatism, which means that their guy is already by definition on his way to continuing to be part of the problem.  If they hate Trump, well that’s a start.

And who has effectively defended common sense in the past 50 years?  Reagan was not devoid of skill, but who else on a national level?  Certainly not McCain or Romney.  And I can’t see Rubio, Cruz or Kasich doing so.  I can’t see them pushing back with spirit and balls at the relentless attacks, the relentless hate.

To accept Trump, I think many Republicans believe, is to accept that the ghouls have won, and they just can’t do that.  Yet.  Me?  I don’t deal in optimism.  As Yogi Berra said, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.  I do what I can, and my metaphysics leads me to believe that everything will work out in the end, at least for me, if I keep my faith, and try to do what is right.

I like this quote.  Anger is obviously one of my issues, as indeed I think it is for most of us.  I spoke of others seeming dysfunction, but I am if anything TOO aware of my own flaws.

Anger becomes integrated on a psychological level by recognizing and owning it as one’s own, rather than splitting it off and turning it against the self or projecting it.  Physiologically, anger becomes integrated not by acting it out, as in beating pillows and screaming, but by identifying, containing, and tracking the energetic experience in the body.

From “Healing Developmental Trauma”, by Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre, both of whom would likely be scandalized by my politics (“don’t quote me, don’t quote me”).

I walk my own way.  What can I say?  I am not sure what this says about me, but certainly some part of me is working on learning to live my own life unapologetically, which is healthy.

I am strongly tempted, though, to see in much of the political disconnections of the past 50 years not just the operation of Soviet propaganda–which remains strongly present to this day–but deeper emotional disconnections brought about by the disruptions in the very notions of normal families.  Women going to work is an issue, but so too is the simple busyness of life, the loss of free time, which stresses adults, who pass that stress on to children, who use TV and video games as anxiolytics and ersatz parents.

Generation upon generation of disconnection from a broader, honestly conveyed cultural tradition makes identity formation more difficult.  Indeed, I would suggest that the current obsession with identity is a sign not of growth, but of infantile regression.  It matters far less whether you “feel” black, or feel like a woman in a man’s body, or whatever, but what your felt sense of being a human being living within a social field is.

I have no objections to opening up our ideas to differing notions of how to live, but my belief is that these are poor solutions to misdiagnosed problems, which are being used propagandistically by cynical lunatics to drive narratives which lead to general cultural destruction; and which are leading to the impossibility of true love, since that requires emotional maturation and healthy individuation, both of which are antithetical to the goals and methods of the Nanny State. 

I tend to go to Whole Foods when I need hippy things–in general I like the people that work there, and the CEO wrote one of the few intelligent things I saw about Obamacare when it was being “debated”–but the other day I needed something they didn’t have, and went to my locally owned health food store.  As I was walking in, I was thinking about what I had recently read about peoples eyes being detached due to trauma, about anger being displaced, about reason and intellect being used in lieu of honest emotion.

And I thought: what do all the peace and love people do with their anger?  What do they do when anger and outrage are genuinely warranted, as they sometimes are?  I think of the pale and unsmiling faces I have seen so often in such places.  I think of the obsessions with abstractions with regard to food and supplements.

And it hit me that hippies first suppress their anger by pushing it down into the inner depths of their being, so they can put stickers about love on their cars, so that they can share in the glory of the Dalai Lama, and read all those very nice books talking about how we just have to be nice and everything will work out; and they allow it out at socially appropriate occasions, at preapproved targets, like Pro-Lifers, like alleged racists, like Donald Trump.  At such points, the anger exceeds what is necessary, because it was not allowed out before, and since most of them have never learned mature ways of processing and feeling emotions they want to reject in total, as part of a violent world they do not want to admit exists, they have no effective restraints.

Being nice is not a suitable goal for someone seeking psychological maturation.  It is an OUTCOME of developed emotional control and social skill, but it is not compulsive when someone has options for setting mature boundaries, for feeling anger when genuine emotional or physical threats are present, and for then NOT being nice.

To suppress your rage because you want to believe the world is nice is a child’s game.  They were called the Flower Children, and clearly remaining in contact with a childlike joy and connection with life is good, but avoiding adult responsibilities–the development of personal AGENCY–is not.  You do not avoid all the bad things: you empower them.

Radical Muslims, to take the most obvious examples, are ghouls who rape and kill without remorse because they ENJOY it, and their religion teaches them to enjoy it.  We do not become better people by ignoring this patent fact.  We do not alleviate human suffering–we increase it.  We do not increase human wisdom–we degrade it.  We do not serve the cause of justice–we violate and abdicate it.

All of this comes from failing to integrate the necessary and useful power of anger in healthy and mature ways.

I am censored virtually everywhere I go.  At least, I post comments which appear, then disappear within minutes, or which never appear at all, not only on left wing websites like the Daily Cause (where my IP is blocked and I see no reason to do a workaround), but even on sites like Front Page Magazine and Town Hall.

I am often blunt, but I never even approach the vitriol which is the norm on the Left, and largely never have.  On Town Hall, last night, I was censored for pointing out the censorship.

Here is the problem we have: most people are unimaginative drones–and I am speaking here of the small minority who even attempt to attain that state of “being informed”, which has been shrinking for some time–who assume that all the information they need to make an informed decision is available to them if they spend time reading.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  All propagandists across the internet are able, through the ability to suppress information they don’t like, to simply present non-dichotomous views as if they were the fabled “two sides” of the debate, and create the illusion of knowledge.

I see people who should know better say they can’t vote for Trump because they are “fiscal conservatives”.  And as I think about it, this delusion is tenable since very few people on the right are talking often or seriously enough about our national debt. They are too busy criticizing Obama, and if they were Bush supporters, they can’t avoid criticizing him too in that same breath.  He was no conservative, but so many Republicans like to act as if he was, as if putting a new Bush in the White House would do something other than continue our slide only very slightly slower than if we put in another Obama.

Calvin Coolidge was the last fiscal conservative to occupy the White House.  Reagan certainly was not. Yes, he had Tip O’Neill and a Democrat Congress to deal with, but we need to call a spade a spade.  Both defense and social spending mushroomed in the 1980’s.

Call it Stockholm Syndrome (which actually can be read more than one way), call it intellectual fatigue, call it cowardice: whatever word you use, virtually no one who uses the Republican name takes the future of America seriously.  If we had elected McCain or Romney nothing major would have been done to our budget, and the relentless left wing attacks would have put another leftist in the White House soon enough.

This nation–indeed, this world–is suffused with lunatics.  All I can do, obviously, is try as often as I can to speak needed truths and hope, quite unreasonably, that someone who matters listens.

Donald Trump is really bringing out the latent self satisfaction and seemingly congenital arrogance of many Republican theorists.

Conservatism is not social conservatism: where does the Constitution render an opinion either way?  It doesn’t.

Republicanism as it has been practiced since Hoover is not fiscal conservatism.  No one can credibly make that claim.  Hoover spent too much.  Eisenhower spent too much.  Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush.  You can’t claim to believe one thing and act in another way.  Tax cuts stimulate economic growth, but increases in spending are increases in spending.  Period.  This point cannot be debated in my view.

The only net reduction we have seen was with a centrist Democrat, and an aggressive Republican congress, of the sort we have not seen since the late 90’s, and certainly not from 2001 to 2007. when the Democrats were able to reclaim Congress by credibly claiming to be more fiscally conservative.

There is a lot of useless vanity, unwarranted self congratulation, and detachment from reality in the Republican Party.  Virtually everyone at every level who has an R behind their name deserves to lose their job.

This is why Trump.  He may not be a conservative, but he is what he is, and there is at least a chance he may make some very needed changes in the direction of this country.  I am sick of liars and cowards.  I donated heavily in 2014 relative to my means, and since about six months after that election I have been literally swearing at every Republican operative who has called me.  With friends like that, who needs enemies?

We are seeing how fucking arrogant many of these people are.  They are saying that if they don’t get their way, they will sit out.  They will vote for Hillary.  Such people believe nothing. They stand for nothing.  And it is good that they are finally showing their true colors.

I am very conservative, but I will be the first to admit that many conservatives are fucking assholes.  They don’t speak for me.

I call myself a Liberal, and that is what I am.  I know my history.  I have thought through my views.  I have educated myself on economics. I have no desire to tell anyone else what to do, and ask for the same courtesy in return.  That is all.

As I think about it, Donald Trump is merely a more honest, more conservative version of the Clintons.

Fucking around?  He’s done it.  So has Bill.  So has Hillary.  All three with other women.  I say this not because Hillary is a strong woman, but because the accumulated evidence is overwhelming.  She and Huma Abedin seem to share more than email accounts on her “Computers ‘R Us” server.

Donald Trump, presumably, married for love several times.

Bill and Hillary?  Political alliance.  Whenever Bill was accused, credibly, of rape and unwanted sexual advances, she defended him.

Trump, he watched supermodels fuck in the middle of the room, and admitted it. He enjoyed it.  He loves being Donald Trump, and wanted the world to share the glory of that magnificent state.

Bill and Hillary: sex is one thing; politics is another.  In both domains, you say what you need to say to get what you want, take it, then never look back.

Scandal: Trump has Trump University.

The Clintons had Whitewater, the unaired spectacle of giving classified dual use technology to the Chinese, and of course Hillary’s clearly criminal activity of more or less putting our national secrets on a billboard, then lying about it.

But Bill Clinton was a centrist.  Hillary is not.  Trump is a centrist, too.

It is odd to me to watch conservatives do the work of the Left for them by tearing into every little foible of Trump, while ignoring the same flaws–but much larger–in the Clinton duo.  Remember: if Hillary gets back in the White House, so too does Bill.  Maybe he can find a new intern, or if his pecker isn’t working any more, he can find one for Hillary and watch. That is the sort of people they are.  Although I haven’t watched it, I have been told by several people that House of Cards may as well be their life story.

We get what we deserve.  I have been saying since at least 2005 that it is unclear to me that America deserves freedom.  We don’t value it.  We don’t educate ourselves.  We allow 24/7 propaganda to play nearly unchallenged.  We are addicted to football and basketball, shopping, and nearly everything but a sober sense of responsible citizenship.

When we conceive freedom we have a thought.  That is a tautology.

In the felt sense, we often want to escape from something, into what feels like a new space. I myself often want to escape from a sense of dread.

But this sort of freedom is a sort of squeezing out.  You escape from one room to another.  You are being chased.  You can build walls, but the walls become your prison.  Walls by definition confine space.  They can never open it back up.

True freedom begins with a felt sense of control, of possibility, of agency.  It begins with a felt sense of the possibility of expansion.

This is perhaps obvious to you, but it has not been obvious to me, even if I have been exposed to this idea often.