Moderates United

But from a pragmatic perspective–and I certainly identify with the tradition of philosophical pragmatism–there is clear utility to thinking through the consequences of differing patterns of behavior, on the self, on the society, and on the world.

Can I posit that post-modernism/”multi-culturalism” (a misnomer, since monoculturalism is the tacit assumption and goal)/the fetishization of “tolerance” (again a misnomer, since such people are quite willing to judge the ideological tardy and overly non-compliant) is a psychologically poor adaptation to the ubiquity of the primal shame most of us come into adulthood with?  As I have said often, intellectuals become such, in my view, in almost all cases due to unresolved emotional conflicts.  They seek shelter from their emotions in the illusion of reason.

Can we not speak of the fetishization of the book–of the text–as pseudo-transcendent reality, and then usefully speak of this practice as psychodynamic dysfunction?  Certainly one can see this in the modern French and Germans and their proselytes.

When I look at my hand, I see my hand.  In what respect is it not useful to see this as a small truth?

Whenever I attempt to enter a circle, I always seem to begin with a line.

What I started to say is that symbols have their own logic.  The body has its own logic.  Emotions have their own logic.

We speak of reason. All educated people will know about syllogisms, and most will have encountered geometric proofs, and the practices of mathematicians.

But in life, most such “proofs” begin at the END of a long series of “logical” assumptions that begin in the body, in myth, in emotion. All life begins with life, and life is in the felt sense of the body.  Only in the body can true truths begin.  Only in the body can we encounter our own existences, our own agency, to use a term preferred by the NARM theorists and practitioners.

We want people to behave in our worlds.  All of us have our own version of evil, and all of us want to pursue the good, however we conceive it.  Cultural Sadeists merely invert conventional norms, but they, too, have a good and a bad.  They have a free and a contained.

This is all very abstract, and I am using multiple logical types here.  My hope is that there is deep structure which will become more clear to me as I try to clear my head, and listen over some period of time to my body, both my physical body, and to that more real emergence in spacetime which both exists, and unwinds in an infinity far beyond my mind.

Christianity and Islam, you are either heaven bound or hell bound, with some slight modifications and ameliorations available to Catholics.

I am reading Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre’s excellent book “Healing Developmental Trauma” and I cannot but be struck by the enormous cultural implications of early childhood trauma, which must have affected countless children over all ages of humankind.  Nothing more complicated than a childhood illness can leave lifelong effects, and obviously not all parents have always been emotionally available to all children.

It would seem that the historically early separation of children from their mothers, and lack of access to grandmothers and aunts and the like made common by our constantly moving society, must have some effect on bonding and relative sense of primal safety.  We are only now seeing the effects of this.

But the point I wanted to make is that it seems that quite often we feel an emotion first–shame is what I have in mind here–and only then act out in such a way as to justify it.  This may well be a root of “evil”: you feel like shit, then you do something to justify it, and it actually releases anxiety for a time.  Does cruelty ameliorate primal shame? I simply ask the question, and am not able at the moment to feel my way through to an answer which satisfies me.

Pride and evil are often identified together.  Lucifer’s supposed sin was that of pride.  Pride is a counter-identification to shame.  Shame and price are two sides of the same coin, arising from the same place: developmental trauma, typically what Heller and LaPierre call a “Connection Survival Style”.

In our modern world we are in a position, a historically unique position, to build up in our culture all the positive values of religion, while rejecting after identifying the causes of, all the negatives.  We can build tolerance without accepting primitive and barbarous behaviors.  We can posit the scientific validity of what we might term the “God Hypothesis” without needing to assign a culturally unique name to this being, without positing attibutes, and without using it as totem or fetish for biologically rooted tribalistic behavior.

We can speak of a larger reality, one in which we survive death regardless of our beliefs, and one in which our task is simply learning, and in which the most important task is learning to love ourselves and others (as if the two could be separated).

I try not to be stupid.  I try to see both the many negative trends in our world, but to also see what could be, but is not yet.  It does not take much effort to see what is, but even that effort overwhelms most people, seemingly (and of course there is an implicit assumption that I myself have succeeded; I do have confidence in my beliefs, while retaining an understanding that I am often an idiot, and that it is useful and likely accurate to believe that at all times I am being stupid in some regard.)

But seeing possibility: this is what is useful.  I see a world in which the Larry Summers and George Soros’s and Hillary Clintons of the world fail in their grandiose and ultimately infantile project of reducing all of us to vassals of a mania dependent on their own inaccurate assumption of their capacity for rationality and reason, and based on entirely wrong notions of the nature of human life, and its place in the universe.

This is all I can do for now.  I continue to hope that the life sciences in particular will at some point take seriously the blatant and glaring problems with their notions of undirected, purely random evolution, and use them as a springboard to a better, more accurate, and more hopeful vision of what life actually is.

I continue to hope that scientists of all sorts will take seriously the long term research into the survival of death.  These things are in the empirical domain now, and merely await integration into the Academies of people who should recognize that anything which can be documented is by definition scientific; and that good scientists look for and welcome interesting new ideas, and reject vigorously the notion that their job is to defend a status quo for no reasons other than vanity, habit, and laziness.

It’s interesting, some of the subtle changes I am noticing.

Today, getting ready to walk in the gym, it hit me that for the traumatized, what you need is an anesthetic to “speak” to your authentic self, and that is what a drug  or addictive behavior gives you.  You feel alive, because you can summon, albeit at a distance, your real self.  You can look at it on the next mountain top.  You can know that you are you, and if you can’t exactly say everything will be OK, at least you are not dissolving in a vat of acid.

I have long believed, and continue to believe, that a great many people would be better and more honest, if they let their pain out in ways which could only be dealt with through behavior they are otherwise at pains to condemn.

I was thinking about heroin addicts.  What an awful thing, to feel so much pain that you do that to yourself, that you traumatize people who love you, because you are so lost, and this effort to escape, itself, lands you in the relative hell of jail, perhaps for a long time.

Sugar coating is not my business.  At the same time, I understand people, I think, better than most.  I have most of the vices and virtues which are possible, and I see my self in many forms in the people around me. I see patterns and recognize them as something I possess, which is active within me, both good and bad.

I do think we should decriminalize all drugs, like the Portuguese, dismantle the oppressive, literal police state built around trying to stop people from killing their pain no matter the cost, let loose all the people unnecessarily in jail, and spend that money on helping those people find meaning in life.  Genuinely bad people, yes, we can leave them in jail.  But just doing drugs says nothing more than that they weren’t quite ready to kill themselves, but couldn’t handle life.  Compassion is not an inappropriate emotion for that, even if of course I recognize that we all need lines, and all need forms of judgement at times.

The drug war is a manifest failure in every respect except as a means to increase the size and power of government, and as a fantastic fund raising system for police departments in particular.

I wonder sometimes about the social and cultural effects of the Christian and to a lesser extent Jewish insistence that we are all worthless pieces of shit who can only claim to be worth anything through the intermediation of a third party, a party historically “represented”–certainly, spoken for–by a powerful political organization.

I tend to be Taoist in my skepticism of heroes and saints.  I think most of them were more compulsive than most, more passionately conformist, more heroic when it was easy, and less heroic when all that surrounded them was silence.  I think most saints were and are fanatics.

In the Taoist conception the most developed blend easily.  They move like water in water.  They are invisible.

Me, I think falling and flying relate to the primal fear of falling.  I think running without escape, and pursuing without mercy are aspects of our digestive system, risen to our consciousness.  I think sex is how we procreate and continue the species.

I also think we are spiritual beings in a material world.  I think that we exist at a primitive level of existence that is scarcely above that of rocks, but that growth is possible.  We can do and be more, but I think none of us will do well to look to the dominant mores of our current culture, including those of most established religions.

I remain lost, but it is my hope that in my personal wasteland and solitude some awakening will dawn.  In my waking hours this is an interesting game, and in my dreaming hours I remain vigilant for insight.

This fact, as I would call it, is interesting when one contemplates that curiosity is neurologically the opposite of trauma.

I was also reading today that an effect of unregulated stress is narrowed and tightened vision.  This made me wonder if compulsive reading might not be a means some people use to deflect attention from the fact that they do not like to engage socially with others, which in turn made me wonder if academics and intellectuals are more or less self sorted from the pool of those most affected by early trauma, and least able to deal with it. If you add the consideration that a certain level of intelligence is still needed to succeed, then most of the modern world can be constructed from unprocessed primal and dysfunctional emotions, translated into ideological form, and then applied and amplified effectively across mass media.  Bad ideas have as much power as good ones, and little else can be expected from people hiding from themselves, from others, and from the world at large.

This seems likely to me.  The world is stupid.  People are stupid.  There obviously are reasons, and these reasons, I see reason to assume, can be known, or at least largely known.  We can do so much better.  Our best and brightest are dull and insipid.

These are both logically necessary conclusions, and to my eye empirically obvious ones.

I am not going to explain further.  I am trying to abstain from this particular affective leak.

It is far easier to feel anger at those you want to blame for hurting that person.

But the only person this helps is you.

I was watching a middle aged black woman downtown today scream her anger at the world.  And I thought how hard it would be to meet her where she is at.  Whatever happened to her, I can’t imagine it.  Some things, you can’t process.  She was pushed out of her self, out of her body, into some other place where the pain was less.

And I was thinking: how hard it would be to ponder that black culture has been declining for 40 or more years, to where the sheer volume of pain and suffering is beyond comprehension.  Who wants to feel that?  Who wants to see that?

Far easier to find scapegoats, and feel rage.  Rage feels much better than sorrow, even if it is to perception what a forest fire is to a lighter.  You cannot tell it where to go, and it does not stop where it was supposed to, or should have.

100 or more young black men are killed by other young black men for every one killed by a cop, and the number is probably a thousand for every one truly unjustly killed.

But this number is a source of sorrow.  Who wants to live there?  Only decent, well meaning people would want to live there.

Where are they? 

Corollary: we can only be criticized using our own principles.