Moderates United

“A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings” Ludwig von Mises– from “Human Action: A Treatise on Economics” (1966 edition)


The salient intellectual question of our time is how contemporary intellectuals–the thought leaders, the primary creators and consumers of propaganda–can be made to realize the nullity of their socialist project, as seen morally, psychologically, spiritually, and economically.


The purpose of economics is not to provide a meaning to life.  The purpose of economics is to provide food and shelter, leisure, and peaceful spaces.  Conflating the two is merely the most obvious intellectual sin of the socialists.


Life is interesting.  Seeking to make everyone the same, because this radicalism makes you different, for the time being, is not. It is quite dull.  It is the play of fools, the strategy of cowards, and the creativity of the utterly insipid.

It is always growth when you see evil in yourself.  It did not suddenly come into being: it was always there.  It is your awareness which has evolved.
 
And we are moved to anger when we see the evil in others.  This is appropriate.  But at the same time, I feel this anger stems from a fear we have that it lies in us too.

I think it is appropriate at this primitive level of existence to punish evil, because fear remains an important source of social order, but it is never necessary for good people to hate evil.

This is a subtle point.  It is EASY to say that being nice is a solution to everything.  This is delusional.  Evil in others spreads, takes hold, and creates fear, pain, sorrow, and death.  It must sometimes be fought body to body, death to death.  Wars can have a moral purpose.

The goal is to transcend this need, not to ignore it, not to fail to feed the good because of fear of our own evil, which we cloak in an abysmal “niceness”.  Fuck niceness: do what is right.

It’s an odd paradox, to me, that a fulfilling life seemingly requires us both to take time seriously, and to be able to act as if we had all the time in the world.  If you measure every second, you will be outwardly effective.  Bear Bryant supposedly carried in his wallet these great stories about time. They are about cultivating the pleasures of flow and accomplishment.

But there  are larger, slower energies, too, that take time to manifest, and disperse quickly if you are in a hurry all the time.

I found myself saying to myself today, even though I have things to do (none of which are however truly urgent), that I have all the time in the world.  I can take all the time that I need.

How often do you say that to yourself?  For me, I think the need to hurry all the time is related to primal injuries.

On a related note, I was in Best Buy today, and it hit me that one major reason people fail to individuate, fail to mature emotionally, is not just that our lives are easy, but that the countless distractions we have prevent facing the silence of ourselves.  We turn the TV on in the morning, and listen to it before we go to bed.  You are never alone with yourself, and the things which demand attention, the emotional house-keeping that needs to be done.  You can kick all that down the road for a lifetime, and die barely wiser than when you were born.

It takes courage to face the pain of inner growth.  I can well see why people avoid it.  But each pain only truly hurts once, or for a period of time, and then it is out of you.  It is gone.  It is done.  The alternative is leaving a thorn in you for a lifetime, which interrupts you when you are sleeping, and speaks in your ear when you are awake.

I had a lot of strong emotions hit me today, and it occurred to me that you can only really feel self-compassion when you can feel fully what you have been through.  For people who have been through the ringer, getting to that point is very hard.  Numbness is hard to set aside.

And pain is not the point, but rather feeling how disconnected from your own feelings and those of other people you became at some point.  How disconnected I became.

And THAT process is painful.  It is like thawing a frostbitten limb.  Nobody would argue that the fact that frostbite makes you numb means it is positive, or that there is any easy way back to normalcy, or semi-normalcy, without going through the reacquisition of feeling.

It does seem helpful to titrate, to use Levine’s analogy, and to pendulate between the difficult feelings, and remembered or conjured positive ones.  Still, the process is not precise, and some flooding is inevitable.  You just have to deal with it, and accept it.

And I will say with respect to my last post that I don’t deny that sometimes I am an asshole.  But what I would argue is that sometimes being confronted bluntly and unapologetically is what people need.  What the outcome is depends largely on how they choose to take it, which means that I can’t know in advance if being nice or being a dick is going to be more useful.  It is really out of my hands, and up to them.

As for me, I have my own shit currently to deal with, and have a pretty simple choice: have a pity party, or man up and deal with it.  There is no way out of a pity party, so I’m going with option B, even though I don’t like it.  The world doesn’t give a flying fuck if I like it.

The world as I see it is so much more complex than the simplistic creed of “being nice”.  People need to be pushed sometimes, and “allowed” sometimes (given space and time), and they need to be loved, sometimes all at the same time. There is no perfect one answer that can ever be divorced from the process of perceiving dynamically, and adjusting regularly.

I had a somewhat enlightening experience today.  I’m gassing up, and I hear a woman say “I’ve never had this much trouble getting four bucks in my life”.  Sure enough, a black man–around here, they are almost always black–comes up to me and says in that tone of voice some of us know well “Sir, can I. . .?”  And I tell him NO.

I’ve lived in a number of big cities for long periods of time, and I’ve seen quite a bit.  When I was at Berkeley I used to get hit up by panhandlers several times daily.  I took to ignoring them, and if they persisted, looking them in the eye and saying NO clearly and unambiguously.  It was the same people, in the same places, nearly every day.  I got compassion fatigue within two days.  I was broke myself.

So his woman–wife, girlfriend, who knows?–comes up and says “leave him alone, he is rude”.  And I said to her “I’m not the one begging”.  She gets indignant: “I’m not begging.  I’m a Christian woman and I have a job.  I’m a manager at Taco Bell.  I have two kids back in the car.”  I looked at her and said “you are begging”.

She starts walking away, and says something about my “white ass”.  I tell her “I’ve never asked anyone for money in my life”, which is true.  I’ve been so  broke I donated blood for money twice a week for a period of time, and that is fucking broke.  You get needle marks on your arms, and have to wear long sleeve shirts, and even though it seems virtually never to happen, they tell you that on rare occasions the procedure will kill you, so you get to sit there thinking about that.

She looks at me and tells me to watch my mouth or she’s going to  bust it open.  I tell her “classy”, finish gassing up, and leave.  I’m not small, weak, or stupid, so threats like that don’t bother me.

But I understand the anger.  She is in a position where she is begging.  This means she has taken on the role of Victim, and once you take on that role everyone becomes either a Protector or a Villain.  I of course was a villain, and we are taught to be angry with villains.

And I thought about this some more.  To be response-able means that you have the ability to react to  circumstances, to choose your reaction, and in fact to proactively create the circumstances you want.

To be a victim is necessarily to feel self pity, since you are helpless. If no one helps you, then you don’t get helped.

And I thought about the old way of being, where people would rather die than take assistance, would rather do anything than be reduced to the indignity of begging.

It is my understanding that in the beginning of the Orwellian “Great Society” the government hired people to canvass poor neighborhoods and convince people to take public assistance, because the resistance was so strong.

And in our modern age, it is easy to say “Just take the money”, but what is missed in this is that in the process we all become prostitutes.  Anyone who places himself in a condition of dependence on another, where he cannot raise him or herself, where individual initiative is forbidden, unnecessary, or discouraged, is sacrificing their dignity, their self respect.

All the inner qualities are invisible to socialists.  All the things that make life bearable are invisible.  They only see things, and it is inevitable in the process that people would become things too, which is a fairly short description of the condition of slavery.  We assume slaves are USED for something, like building fences.  What are the slaves on this plantation used for?  Electing Democrats, obviously.

And I kept at this, and it seems to me the reason unhappiness is so common in our affluent and largely peaceful society is that in the old days the societal practice of judging people who did not take care of themselves, of judging those who failed in their duties, provided, paradoxically, a sort of comfort.  Everyone was subjected to the same standard, which meant that no matter how severe your penury, there were people around you sharing it with the same dignity, the same necessary acceptance.

Society was organized so as to reject self pity.  It was organized around the idea that life is tough, and we all need to be tough too.

This seems harsh, but if everyone accepts it, they avoid the burden of self pity.  Do you not think poor kids in the ghettos of New York had more self respect in 1900 than they do today?

Virtually the entire program of the socialists–and I am conflating them here with the Democrats–is oriented around stoking resentment, stoking self pity, stoking self righteous anger, and using those energies to get and keep power.

This woman was a racist.  There was no need to invoke race.  But she doubt sees that white people in general are more successful, and has been taught to believe her decisions, how she chooses to live her life, plays little role in her outcome.  She is helpless.

And ponder the recklessness which would land her in a supermarket parking lot with two kids, begging.

Do I think she donates blood?  No.  Do I think she works two jobs?  No.  I at one point was working three jobs.  I have been unemployed one month in my entire adult life, and that was because I got laid off immediately before Christmas, and nobody is hiring between Dec. 23 and Jan. 2.  I had a new job by Jan. 15th.

Most of the time, what appears to be the case is in fact the case.  What I was seeing is that she assumes white people have money and they should be sharing it with her, since she is only asking for $4.  She likely spent her money on cigarettes or lottery tickets, and begging to fill her tank with gas was part of a plan she has executed many times.

Being too compassionate is a kind of cruelty, because it enables people to live lives filled with resentment, unfilled potential, and self loathing they mask with chronic outward-directed anger.  None of us need to feed this.

And I think far too many people think that exercising their right to demand boundaries, to demand  respect, is cold and wrong.

The truth is you help no one by not being yourself, and you can’t be yourself if you think you have no rights, cannot make demands on others, cannot judge others, and have to be nice in all times and places.  Bullshit.

It may be that this woman is still mad at me.  It may also be that hearing the word “begging” caused a bit of introspection.  That was certainly my intention.

Watch this video and feel what you are feeling as you watch it.  Be honest.  Most men seem to feel a sense of righteous pleasure, that the bad guys got what was coming to them.

I am going to reserve comment for the moment.  This was a very long day.

I woke up this morning feeling clearly that the path forward for humanity, the great Next Step, is a generalized focus on and cultivation of emotional growth, which at some point becomes what we call spiritual growth.

It is so ODD, so stupid, so short-sighted, so ignorant, to feel either that increasing knowledge–an understanding of Relativity, the capitals of the world, the mechanics of nuclear fusion–is somehow equivalent to growth, which is the de facto belief of the Singularitians, who have somehow convinced themselves that an internalized Google would be other than a quantitative leap, if it were even possible, which I do not believe; or that a society can be improved in any way other than through the emotional and spiritual growth of all its members.

Why do, among others, Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg focus on externals, on the superficial? Why are they atheists?  They are both smart enough to be smarter.  The physics of metaphysics–the Zero Point Field and the retention of information–seems reasonably clear.  The evidence in total is overwhelming for our energetic connection and survival of death, and evidence continues to flow in daily, all over the world, as it always has.

Why the unrepentant anger from people like Barbara Ehrenreich?  I read this article and was reminded once again how emotionally and spiritually superficial the animating outrage of these people is.

Does she not know it is possible to live a very happy life in conditions of objective poverty and physical difficulty?  She is the one stoking resentment, and denigrating dignity.  She is one who fails to see that the non-material aspects of life are what make it heavenly or hellish.  She is the emotionally callow one who fails to see that no one who does not have a good relationship with themselves–as she seems not to–can possible be loving to others.  For her, yelling about pay constitutes love.  But of course it is merely her vanity, her self importance, speaking.  And it seemingly has a lot to say, which says something about her.

The path forward is the path inward,for all of us.  It is the tragedy of our time that our idiotic and grossly unjust financial system has denied us the time and leisure to  live genuinely contemplative lives, and that the systemic indolence and torpor of our universities has failed to embrace and integrate the vast quantity of non-conforming data indicating we are in fact spiritual beings and that while no religion can claim to have fully described God, that that concept is useful, and empirical.

I was thinking about the notion that if God is dead–if God does not exist, and is not going to punish us–then all is permitted.

Only on a very primitive level of development does one only behave because of fear.  Morality, decency, goodness: all are their own rewards, rewards which multiply when expanded across a social order, and which deepen as they are understood.

God is not a parent.  God is the soil within which we are rooted, and in which we are free to flourish or fail.

The metaphor of God as parent, however, has proven very congenial to authoritarians.

When you realize the myth within which you have lived is wrong, there is no path forward but through darkness and confusion.  People see this and infer wrongly that there is no path forward.  They call this disillusionment, but it is merely the substitution of one illusion for another.

We are left to wish for better darkness and better confusion.  Life is not easy or simple, but it is one grand game.

Like everyone else, I went to see the new Star Wars.  I try not to be too much of an outsider.

On the way to the theater I couldn’t help but remember how disappointing Hayden Christenson’s (name is close if not exact) transformation into Darth Vader was in the first three (second three, because as a meme has it “in charge Yoda was”.)  As several reviewers I read noted, he didn’t get evil so much as pouty, peevish, and bratty.

Being me, what occurred to me is that it would have been much more intellectually satisfying if he had been corrupted by ideology more directly.  It is difficult to get people to do things they consider evil, but easy to get good people to do or at least countenance evil they have been trained to view as good.

That would be a script I would find it interesting to write.  How do you seduce a good person into views which conform with evil, all while calling them good?  They did if memory serves invoke “safety”, but I seem to recall the Dark Side was always the Dark Side.

To do the thing properly, you have to call it the Bright Light, the connection with God, the right way, the path of righteousness.

This is certainly what Muslims do, and certainly what most other religions have done throughout history, including notably Judaism and Christianity.

Seriously: by what process of imbecility do you get militancy and war particularly out of Christianity and Buddhism?

The id is not sex.  I don’t see this.  It is not violence per se.  It is unprocessed developmental trauma, to the extent it exists.

Annakin Skywalker would have had major developmental issues to work with, and buttons to be pushed, but the whole thing–and yes I admit I am a crotchety old (working on it) man who is reading too much into an escapist epic–was done poorly on a psychological level.

And the new bad guy just seems like an emotionally undeveloped brat.

I’ll have something to say about the psychopath Deadpool after a while.  He is exactly what people need and want right now.  I can say that with some confidence.  Whether or not that is healthy is another issue.

We are sick, are we not?  And do sick people not do what sick people do?

Yes, yes they do.