Moderates United

The argument is quite short, although it is explained at length:

Given this, there is no way to know how much good YOU can do in the world: who you can influence, what you can do, what you can start.

Always do your best, given this, even if all your work–all OUR work–appears futile.  Appearances can be deceiving, and the overwhelming Left may one day evaporate almost overnight.  That is certainly the fate they deserve, and the one that would most contribute to generalized human health, wealth, dignity, happiness, and freedom.

First off, both terms have clearly been altered.

“Homophobia” in a traditional sense would be “fear of the same”, and has been altered to mean “homosexualphobia”, which would be a fear of homosexuals.  There is ZERO evidence that Christians (and others) are actually afraid of homosexuals.  What they believe is that, in their reading of the Bible, homosexuality is wrong, and to be good Christians they must condemn the sin and love the person.

Now, the main response on the part of the Left is simply to assert that they are wrong.  That the Bible can’t say that, and if it does, then their religion is wrong.  One can readily see close readings of Leviticus in public court, with State lawyers striking out everything they don’ t like.  This is anti-Liberal, even if I agree on the overall theological point (that God doesn’t care what we do with our privates, as long as there is actual love.)

This response reminds me of Hoffer’s observation that freedom is often what you are free NOT to do, in this case bake a cake or perform a wedding for people whose lifestyles you believe you must condemn.  I readily grant Jews the right not to bake Nazi cakes, and gays not to bake Christian cakes. I grant Muslims the right not to cook foods with pork in it, but not to deny others that right.  The principle of equality remains the principle of equality, with the “more equal than you” principle being that of tyranny.

What the “aha” was that hit me though this morning is that what Scott Page called both Groupthink and “Dominant Logic” is both a method of tyranny, and a more or less systematic method for generating large errors of perception.  What is the error?

Simple: gayness is often the result of psychopathology, and only so-called homophobes remain willing to admit this or even consider it.  Take so-called “transgenderism”: the likelihood is that Bruce Jenner endured some major emotional insults/traumas at some point in his life, causing or largely contributing to his sexual confusion.

Here is a career psychiatrist from a very respectable major university:

Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder. . .

He also reported on a new study showing that the suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people. Dr. McHugh further noted studies from Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of children who had expressed transgender feelings but for whom, over time, 70%-80% “spontaneously lost those feelings.” 

“This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken – it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”

 The transgendered person’s disorder, said Dr. McHugh, is in the person’s “assumption” that they are different than the physical reality of their body, their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature. It is a disorder similar to a “dangerously thin” person suffering anorexia who looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight,” said McHugh. 

It is a commonplace that the elite in most fields are dealing with or have dealt with demons.  Greg LeMond was sexually molested.  Lance Armstrong had a lot of issues in his early life.  There is no reason not to assume the same of Bruce Jenner.

This is my point: the Groupthink with regard to transgenderism, and gayness, and race, make it impossible to perform the sorts of judgments which alone render it possible to improve their situations.

I have dealt with gayness several times.  I do think some people are born that way, but I also think most people are made that way, typically by a sexual trauma of some sort–which may not be perceived that way, admittedly–before age 14 or so.  This trauma affects–at least theoretically–both their sexuality and their overall emotional well-being.

Remember Rupert Everett, who committed career suicide three years ago?

For my part, I think of the movie “Bird Cage”, as I’ve mentioned at least once and likely multiple times.  I started watching that movie with my youngest daughter–who is quite tolerant of gay people, and has a couple in her circle of good friends, and who condemns me routinely for the faintest whiff of anti-gay sentiment– and she couldn’t make it through the first ten minutes.  Seeing Nathan Lane dressed up like that just completely messed with her mind. Our instinct–our immediate, untrained instinct, unmediated by social indoctrination and/or getting used to that thing through exposure–is revulsion and confusion.

It may be that we should not privilege fully our instincts, but must we also ignore them fully as well?  Much of the comedy in that movie–which I once found profoundly funny, but have a hard time watching now–comes precisely from the fact that everyone in that home is nuts. And it does not improve things that Hackman is a  and judgmental cynical hypocrite.

Can we not wonder how Val is as sane as he is–while inferring some major covert neuroses–while granting to him the emotional need to get married young to confirm for himself his own heterosexuality?  Can we not grant that denying him a two sex home has likely left significant psychological scars that are not papered over in reality by their political correctness?

And race.  Who says that you can starve a black man by hiding his welfare card under his work boots?  Racists.  People who truly believe that black people in this society are inferior.

But, then, who challenges black people?  Who does in fact judge them and tell them, socially, when they are fucking up?

Let’s make this a social situation.  Let us say that I get drunk one night and show up hazy for work, as I’ve done many times.  What got me into work at all was the fear I would lose my job.  And even short of that, a fear being called unprofessional, undisciplined, or in general a fuck up.  I have my dignity.  I may come in not fully ready for work, but I come in, even if I only slept 2 hours.

Let us say that no matter what I do or say, my job is never threatened, that nobody will ever condemn me or even say anything, and that I can do whatever I like as long as I like, and instead of having to be judged, I MYSELF can judge anyone who judges me?  Is this system of incentives–and life is a complex system, and all complex systems depend on incentives–going to bring out the best in me?  Fuck no: it will bring out the WORST in me.

And this is PRECISELY what has happened.  Black people in this country have been subjected not only to all sorts of perverse economic incentives which have served to further break apart families, but even worse to SOCIAL incentives of a sort which were INTENDED to build them up psychologically, but which in fact have served to support and rationalize all of their own worst impulses, impulses which exist in all of us, but which are largely fed only in them, in this country.  Everyone else has to measure up to the standards of hard work, education, consistency, and social responsibility.

Helping people consists BOTH in empathy AND in challenge. If I accept a mediocre you as the best you, then I am failing you.

And by focusing on eliminating perceptual and verbal diversity, Leftists hurt the very people they claim to want to help.  Our nation has thrived in large measure precisely because it has fostered ACTUAL diversity of belief and practice, and universal conformity can only mean stupidity and violence of a sort we have never, yet, seen.

He pointed out that when it comes to the actual value of diversity, the diversities that matter are those of belief and behavior.  For every practical intent and purpose white and black and brown people, gay and straight and confused people, male and female and other people, who believe the same things, are homogeneous. They add nothing the complexity, and thus overall robustness of the system.

This is why the beliefs and values of all people must both be respected and promoted.  Promoting ACTUAL diversity of thought is the first and best protection against idiocy, and curtailing actual diversity is a surefire way into the hellfire of sustained mediocrity and eventual generalized failure.

He had a good quote from Eric Hoffer, which goes roughly: “When people are free to behave as they choose, most of them choose to imitate each other.”

This got me looking up Hoffer quotes, and many of them are really very good:

This one jumped out at me:

The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

What better way to ensure generalized failures of thought than to make it both harder to earn a living, and to raise expectations?  Jacques Ellul pointed out in the early 1960’s that Americans have succumbed to a propaganda of work.  We view it as intrinsically virtuous.  Indolence is certainly a vice, but so too is what we have come to call workaholism.

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

and:

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. 

and:

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. 

If you do not see the parallels here with the stuff I’ve been blogging about the past few weeks, I doubt I can explain it to you.

Here are some more good ones:

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Amen brother.  And I say this with the understanding he was a leftist, although I clearly need to learn more about him.

It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities. 

But so too has the ability of the European Central Bank to create money from nothing been the drug with which they addicted the foolish Greeks.  You float them, then wreck them.

It has long been my sense that something like this was the original intent both of the International Monetary Fund–which has been wrecking economies virtually since its inception with imbecilic Keynesian economics–and World Bank.

Centralization pours cold water on individual development.  It fosters corruption, and enables a power elite to buy off the poor with other people’s money. That can of course only last so long.

To this day, the Greeks seem to think that governments can have money which they have not first taken in taxes, borrowed, or printed.  But they can’t.  They have those three methods only, with confiscation outright in a Communistic fashion merely being the logical end game of taxes.  It is a total, rather than a partial, seizure of assets.  The principle is the same; it is merely any sense of proportion which has been exhausted.

And returning to the main point, the EU is currently more or less a Confederation.  Most policies are still set at the local–which is to say the national level–and not in Brussels.  They do have a Central Bank (why again are people blind to groups in our midst empowered by law to create money, sometimes in unlimited amounts and with little or no accountability?), but not final authority on most issues.

With regard to Greece, it may soon be the case that their folly has destroyed their democracy and again redirected their national sovereignty northward–much farther north, this time, than Macedonia.

For some reason I keep getting calls from the National Republican Senatorial Committee.  I swear at them until they hang up.

We cannot and should not absorb an endless train of illegal Mexicans when we already have enormous pockets of poverty, overwhelmed social welfare systems, chronic systemic unemployment, and are only staying afloat by borrowing–on a national level, to the tune of something like 40% of all money spent.

It is not generosity or compassion or decency or humaneness to fail to take account of the future, to fail to consider our children and their children in our present political calculations.

When and if the system crashes–and it may last indefinitely, but it is also primed for a crash tomorrow if certain people decided to make it happen–EVERYONE but the already rich will suffer.  All the poor who the Left claims to care for will suffer greatly.  Everyone who has been bamboozled onto the government teat will suffer.  The middle class will suffer.  The old will suffer.  The young will suffer.  Marriages will suffer.

As I say over and over and over and over: you do not get credit for how you feel.  You get credit for connecting a feeling to your rational sense and reconciling them.  If you want to help, and in fact develop plans that, based on current fact and past history, in fact appear to help, then you are doing the right thing.  If you claim to want to help, though, and push hard to continue failed policies, and push hard to short circuit and prevent rational debate as to the propriety and utility of those policies, you are part of the problem.  Period.  

It is a foolish, ridiculous belief that something should only be attempted once everyone around you is singing in unison “you can do it.” Had that been the standard in America, very little would have been attempted, and even less built.

Racism is when you show up for a job completely prepared, ready and willing to do a job, and you are told “we can’t hire you because you are black”.  This was the case, as one example, with substantially ALL unions, North and South, from the period of Wilson until perhaps the 1970’s.  Democrats knew this, and did nothing to curtail it. FDR made it worse, by only awarding contracts to unions, who he knew refused to hire blacks.

What racism is NOT is you showing up in baggy pants speaking broken English demanding a high paying job and not getting it.  It is NOT you getting fired for showing up late 3 times in 3 days.

Racism does not force young men to impregnate young ladies when they are 16.

Racism does not force 40% of urban American blacks to drop out of school.

Racism does not force black men to murder black men in large numbers.

The problem is that the concept of equality has been hijacked.  It was forced onto a plane at gunpoint, and flown to some unknown location, and an impostor placed into service.  This impostor does not want to improve the lot of actual black people, but rather to change the DIALOGUE, so that rather than being forced into a position of judging people not willing to judge themselves, we can create a congenial illusion that all the real problems of the world can be solved by TALKING, and that the only real sin is not talking in the right way.

Stupidity is no longer a vice.  Laziness is no longer a vice.  Greed is no longer a vice.

No: the only true vice is incorrect speech.  Such speech is obvious, and it can be judged instantly and harshly.  And that is exactly what the college trained imbeciles behind all this nonsense view themselves as best qualified to do.

It is exactly like they think they can solve world hunger by improving global grammar.  It cannot even be called illogical, since no attempt is being made at logic.  It is the sort of interpersonal game played in bad relationships by emotionally shallow and profoundly disturbed people.  Nothing is what it seems.

Next time, same thing.  The Greek wants to party hard, but can’t pay for it.  But all his friends have come to expect largesse from him, and his ego prevents him from saying no.  He again asks the German for money.  The German pays his bill, then takes him by the shoulders and says: “Dimitris, seriously–this is the last time.  You can’t do this any more.  And you still owe me.”  Dmitris promises no more, and absolutely he’s good for the money.

Next time, same thing.  Dimistris approaches his friend and asks for more money, and Hans says “NO.”  Dimistris punches him in the nose and says “you BASTARD.  I thought we were friends.”

Commentary: it is one thing for a given person on a given night to act like a drunk.  It is quite an astonishing thing for an entire nation to on a sustained basis.  But America is doing the same damn thing.

And spare me the nonsense about how the Mexicans somehow are not the ancestors of Spanish conquistadors, or that the Mexica Aztecs were not themselves imperialistic.

America is what we–primarily English speaking ancestors of people born in the UK or Ireland–made it, and if it were still populated by sparse populations of Indians, the Mexicans would have invaded it a long time ago, to steal what they could.  They certainly would not be immigrating illegally to places where nothing had been built.

We know what happens when Mexicans are given the chance to build a nation.  They already built one, and large numbers of them prefer ours.  That is the plain and simple truth.  Remember this.  Truth is going the way of the cigarette machine and the dime store Indian.

Truth is simply not something whose existence can be tolerated much longer as an artifact independent of State propaganda.  We live in times where facts are tortured.  The history is pretty clear that at some point this will lead to the real thing. I wish I were exaggerating, but unless someone can convince me that Lenin, and Mao, and Ho, and Fidel, and all the others are figments of my imagination–or unless someone can convince me that the same words and ideas they peddled are not even now ubiquitous among people who should know better–then I see no reason to doubt it.

I hope it is not too late, but it is certainly becoming too late, and I don’t know what to do about it.  So much stupidity, so little time.

I have no objections to neuroscience.  Within my belief system–which I would like converted through science to a more comprehensively evidence based belief–our minds manifest through our brains, and this process does in fact leave measurable phenomena.

With respect to this article, ponder how churches are built. Can you not feel, imaginatively, how a space with a 50′ ceiling differs from one with an 8′ ceiling?  What is the effect of walking from a low ceiling to a high ceiling?  From a high ceiling to a low ceiling?

And what about light?  What about walking from light to darkness, and darkness to light?  And do not the colors themselves in a church have a psychological effect?

Here is an article dealing with color in marketing: http://www.helpscout.net/blog/psychology-of-color/

I am told by an advertising guy that the blue of Lowe’s and the orange of Home Depot are very intentional.  Lowe’s attempts to appeal to women, and Home Depot to men.  The aisles are or tend to be different widths, and they merchandise differently.  They use space differently.

Candles and torches are different from electric lights.

And is there not a difference walking in procession between walking single file and two or four abreast?

Do not the clothes we wear make a difference?

We are pattern forming animals, and much of the work of the sacred is to create an habituated distinction between normal and sacred space (and even normal and sacred time).  You can create a situation where every time you walk into a certain sort of space wearing a certain set of clothing, a range of conditioned reactions appear.

Scents have all sorts of effects the Aromatherapy people have described, but which I don’t think has been subjected to formal scientific analysis.

Music: can we really say what effect various cadences, and frequencies, and melodies have on people?  Group prayer, or group chanting: I suspect there would be a beneficial effect if a group recited the list of ingredients for Fig Newtons out loud and in unison.

Hypnosis tells us a lot about how key words can activate or pacify people.

What would be the psychological effect of allowing animals in what we call churches?  Dogs.  Cats.  I have never seen one in a church.

All of these things–and much more–can be put together by men and women of genius to create healing and elevating places and rituals.

And I would add on that last point that the word “healing” is overused.  Once scarred, you are never the same, so it is useless to speak of a baseline, having crossed which, you have completed the “healing process”.  What a wound does is force us to open up to the idea of growth, and growth never ends.  No matter how happy you are today, more is possible.  This should be a source of comfort.

And if you are miserable, well then: healing.  Nobody is supposed to be miserable.  There are always paths forward.

I suspect much of the most relevant CURRENT research exists in the applied persuasion/marketing world.  Their field is understanding and redirecting human behavior, and they measure success carefully.  The techniques of merchandising likely would be relevant.

Why not dream big?