I believe this is a positive dream. It is now possible to cross from one zone to another without fear or shame.
I may choose to be happy one of these days. Happiness is after all the best revenge.
I posted this on someone’s Facebook, and realized I liked it.
As a system for rejecting individual moral growth, Socialism is therefore counter-Spiritual. It contains and diminishes souls. It does not exalt and expand them. Indeed, most Socialists are overt atheists. This is why they are Socialists in the first place: their meaning-makers are broken.
Now, I have many friends who I am very fond of who no doubt more or less conflate leftist economic policies with generosity of spirit and compassionate intercession. They feel that the people who want to feed and clothe and shelter the poor are intrinsically good for this reason alone.
In this regard, it is worth separating actual generosity from Socialism. Socialism is a moral philosophy based upon egalitarianism, whose first premise is that no people are better than any others, and whose necessary first correlate is that only societies can be good: individuals cannot, and the creed named for them is intrinsically to be rejected as selfish in a formal sense: it retains notions of self apart from its relation to the State.
The ESSENCE of the teaching of Christ, among others, is that people are different. They make different decisions, follow different paths. All the deep spiritual teachers taught that some paths are better than others, that the people who follow them become better than others–not in the sense that they increase their right to demand obedience or wealth from others, but on the contrary that such things become less important to them as they develop personal–intrinsically individual–relations with Spirit, or Dharma, or Christ, or God, or the Tao, or whatever words you want to use to describe the indescribable.
It is categorically good to feed the poor and provide them with the opportunities to better themselves. But that is not the task the modern Democrats have set themselves. They decided long ago that actual economic outcomes are far less important than political outcomes. It has been obvious for some time that what poor kids need are two parents, but that does not fit the socialist meme that all people–and implicitly all family forms–are instrinsically equal. So what do they do? Paper over their failures with indefensible excuses, hatred for anyone who still fails to agree with them, and on-going promises they still cannot keep, and which they never will be able to keep.
It is position that annoys people, but to my mind there can be no doubt that Christ would be a socially liberal but politically conservative Republican. He would feel deep compassion not just for the poor–and by the standards of his day, our poor are very rich–but much more for the people who are lost, who are despairing of God, of meaning, of hope for something better; who despair they will never be loved, understood, cared for, integrated into something meaningful and large.
He would love gays equally as straights, but I think he would ask the same questions I am asking: where is the mutual consideration? Where the mutual respect? Where the concern for the feelings and sensibilities of those who are profoundly torn and disturbed by being compelled by force of law to betray–as they see it–the very reason they have for living, the very purpose of their life, by people who have only inferior ideas and practices to suggest in its stead?
Where is all this going? Much is being taken away, but very little given. We are told what we cannot do, but no one is spending much time thinking about what we can do that is worth doing. Hedonism is a vacuous philosophy. People need to make sense of death, and need to know how the universe works so as to feel they are doing useful work while alive. Leftism cannot provide this.
People need challenges. They need hard work. War has often provided this, but so too do the radicals. This is one of the main methods of Communists: to demand not little of their accolytes, but an excessive amount. It provides what people need, and pulls them even closer to the cause, since everyone is naturally more fond of anything they have given much to.
Socialism, then, is a creed which inherently rejects individual moral growth. Rather than uplifting it, it replaces it. It is necessarily, then, an assault on the individual ego, sense of agency and choice in matters of importance, and an agent of infantilism, learned helplessness, and ultimately of despair. These facts are clothed over by two current processes: the sense of mission in implementing Socialism, with no capacity for reflecting on what that means; and pervasive distraction.
If all electronics crashed tomorrow, I think half of America would lapse instantly into overt mental illness. Erich Fromm said this of newspapers half a century ago. But nobody, then, read their papers all day and into the night.
I read Zuckerberg wants people to be able to convey their thoughts instantly: http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/01/zuckerberg-facebook-qna/
My thought is: who has anything worth saying anymore? What can people discuss? Other people–who themselves have nothing interesting to say–or current cultural productions of very questionable ultimate value.
But this sort of thing meets a very real need of CONSTANT CONTACT, constant reconciliation. If you don’t know who you are, if all inner direction has been eradicated through effective long term social propaganda and imbecilic lack of skill in structured thought on the part of our alleged thought leaders, then you MUST “refresh” yourself constantly. You must be told all day every day that you exist, that this person with your name is in fact known to others. Your thoughts are not your own. Your actions are not your own. But every time you ping the world, something comes back, so there must be something or someone they are responding to.
I am not sanguine about the future. I wish I could be. I wish I could be all sunshine and rainbows. But I have spent most of my life depressed, and the one clear positive of this is that it improves reality testing (although one could of course dispute that this is a positive here).
We all must do our work. Doing work without a reasonable hope of success is harder. But I have always persevered, and I always will, and history–while filled with preventable and idiotic tragedy–does also furnish occasional examples of triumphs against all odds, and a rebirth of good things via good people.
The latter consists in a focus on inner reality, and where and how that reality meets the external world, and continually working to refine it so as to have transformative, paradigmatic, qualitative experiences, ones which do not add to previous experiences, but supplant them.
I would submit that both Consumerism and Socialism are variants of the first objective, where Socialism is preoccupied not with adding things or experiences, but in theory with deducting them, with eliminating the possibility of negative experiences of racism, sexism, greed, and inequality. It is assumed that purely by deducting the alleged negatives, happiness will blossom. In the long term, and particularly where the alleged grievances were not actually that severe, this is very rarely the case.
An active meaning system=Living=transformation.
Collecting=dying=stasis.
I thought this thoughtful. Anyone who has watched this non-debate must, regardless of their views on the actual topic, be impressed and discomfited by the sheer weight of conformist violence which has been levied against anyone still articulating views which were commonplace 10 years ago.
And we must wonder where this abstract war against the very real existence of penises and vaginas is leading. As I have asked repeatedly: what virtue inheres in denigrating the obvious fact that women and men differ in their biology and social expressions, even if the range of possibilities on both sides is wide?
It is my view that we are born wired with a “difference maker”, a tribal instinct. And this instinct, far from being extinguished in egalitarian projects, is in fact inflamed and made all the more vicious for its very intellectual and moral vacuousness.
Leftism results in extreme violence precisely BECAUSE of the intellectual sophistry underlying its claims. People become MORE violent the weaker their claims to injustice.
One must always, in the end at least, and preferably in the beginning, ask what the purpose is. What is the purpose of life? Where do we want to go as a nation, and as a people?
I would argue that the real oppression of gays is not the existence of laws regulating the words they can use to describe their relationships, but rather in their very existence in a society which has renounced the use of reason, capitulated in its quest to find enduring meaning in life, and all but abandoned the conforming masses to the beliefs that human souls are a fantasy, that human life ends in biological decay, and that all our work means nothing.
As I have often said, the colors of autumn signal not new life, but new decay, and all the supposed efflorescence of this new reality–that of using the Bill of Rights to confer a right which appears nowhere within it–is in fact a signal of cultural loss and decline.
As has become customary for those seeking to avoid the censure of the reflexive, I will admit candidly I don’t care whether or not gays can marry, because it doesn’t affect me. Every gay within ten miles of me could be married and I wouldn’t know it. It is the larger realities which alone concern me. It is the tone, and the lack of intellectual principle–of genuine Liberality–which concerns me.
And at the end of the day, I think my principal concern even with gays is that this whole project is making it HARDER to answer the question “who am I”?, not easier. If everyone and everything is equal to everyone and everything else, the loss of the ego is assured. As they say implicitly in this interesting article, it is in important respects better to be “oppressed” that fully integrated: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/scotus-same-sex-marriage-gay-culture.html?_r=0
What I want more than anything is a return to–or first general use of, depending on your reading of history–the use of negotiation to resolve difference. There is a profound difference between eradicating alterity, and accepting it. The first is the egalitarian impulse, and it leads to existential angst and unhappiness. The latter is the basis of genuine Liberalism and the persistence of meaning.
Constant vigilance is not fearlessness. Constant preparedness is not fearlessness. What is needed is to step into the ether, and stay there as well as you can, floating on whatever emerges to meet you. This is the path forward.
Then I was given a clear message: a feeling of happy verbalizing, the punch, then shaking. It was literally a phased message in body code, as crystal clear as it could be. Words that were better than words, because it included the demonstration of “that”.
This is a great thing. I think having pulled that out, it will take my solar plexus out of the loop in terms of generating tension.
And I feel pride in having pulled a Houdini. Born to narcissistic parents, traumatized before I could walk, hit regularly from age 1 to 4, moved around regularly–preventing the formation of stable, long term friendships–and disconnected from regular contact with any family: I am still growing. Fuck the odds. I am still alive.
And after this I had all sorts of paranoid dreams. An omnipotent security state tracking down the last remnants of humanity. Dreams of course can have multiple levels. For me, of course, what I was seeing represented was my fear, the fear soup I have lived in all these years, of being chased and pursued. Actually, another one of the boxes contained me crawling, desperate to escape, and being unable to, since of course I was just a small baby.
But we of course do need to fear this. There are, in my view, a considerable number of well organized and well funded people who want to build a planetary government, which will be run by emotionally immature people with crap ethical systems, no empathy, and no true long term vision other than universalization of control. They want to rule the world because they can’t figure out how to live actually useful lives.
In my case, fear is disappearing outright. It is simply dropping away. I will resist these people–and try to talk to them, through this blog–by pointing out better way, more human ways, less evil ways, of building a global civilization. This is what we want: civilization. Culture. Global government is merely a system of control. Laws exist where men are bad. We should want less laws, not more, because men (and of course women) are growing steadily morally. No plan exists among the globalists, that I can see, to do more than indoctrinate kids in egalitarianism, where radical environmentalism adds the postulate that we are all equal to the earth, and it us. Socialism as mass death, despite the scientific feasibility of continuing with the present population, and letting it naturally decline as standards of living get higher.
The alternative is what I once called the Turtle Approach, which is to nurture, to feed, to shine light on, all the things I want, and do it daily, and for a long period of time. Never take anything to the limit, but always show up. Be consistent. And most importantly, enjoy the process of nurturing. Enjoy the current, very small result, and look forward to the long term result, but not too much. If you take enough care in the now, the future will take care of itself.
And one of the things I am thinking is that for people who like to fight, there is no end. You can win every contest across a lifetime, and not run out of opponents. Musashi was never defeated (actually, I think he was once, by a bo practitioner), but I wonder how well he slept at night.
The way I think it works is fights come to you. And if you build every day, when they come, you will be ready. And if they don’t come, you have not wasted your time in useless tension.
We all die. It is not a great failure if your sin is taking a walk in the park rather than fortifying your windows. To fear greatly, is to live poorly.
This has been one of my issues: I don’t want to die stupidly. I have not wanted to fail to investigate that weird noise. I have wanted my perceptions to be perfect. Let nothing happen to me or my loved ones simply because I was not paranoid enough, not prepared enough.
But you can live a life looking constantly over your shoulder, worried about everything. This is not living. This is not confronting the inevitability of death directly. This is not confronting the EVITABILTY of living directly.
I read a warrior is prepared for everything. This may well be true. If so, I do not want to be a warrior. I want to be a simple man, perhaps a foolish man, but a free one: free from fear, and free to live openly with confidence, courage, and optimism. Let them take me when they will: I surrender to fate, and what will be.
Or imagine using essential oils to pull out latent aromas in food, cigars and wine? What if you drank cherry wine while diffusing cherry essential oil (or something complimentary)? I may actually need to try that. Kijafa is quite good.
But of course I meant to say something else entirely. Here is the thing about Tarot: ALL the cards are good. There are no bad cards. There are no cards that are gloom and doom. I have pulled the Death card. I have pulled a card where a dead body lies bleeding, pierced by many swords.
Living is transforming. Not transforming, not changing, is mere existence. It is dull, and not at all the point of life. To transform, parts of you must die. You must leave things and people and ideas and old emotions behind. You must live light.
So all the cards, essentially, are either amplifications, or indications something is falling away. Either something bad is ending, or something good is beginning or getting stronger.
You cannot do better for a philosophy of life than by assuming you can handle everything Life throws at you and make good of it somehow. Tarot, to me, embodies this.
Edit: I will share a dream I had a few weeks ago. I was in a many wheeled off-road vehicle with my kids, and everything was falling apart. I wound up driving on a series of telephone poles many feet off the ground, all of which were collapsing as I was driving, but I stayed the course. I kept above it all, in a constant dance of power and balance, and in the dream I thought to myself “This engine is damn strong.”. It all ended well. We covered the contested ground.