Moderates United

Mystical writers tell us this world is a sort of virtual reality, itself.  Thus playing video games within this world is a double virtuality.  Then I got to thinking, what if you played YOURSELF in a video game, what if you uploaded your picture?  The technology for this presumably already exists.  You would not be virtually someone else, but virtually you.  And none of it would be real.

There is some interesting seed to be culled from this image of play acting yourself, though. I don’t presently know what it is.

This is a long, rambling mess, but I think it has some good ideas.

My process of thinking remains greatly influenced by Edward de Bono.  I was actually at one time a certified teacher of the Six Thinking Hats method.  Never made a dime on it–well, a couple hundred dollars–but I think he is the one who really implanted within me the idea of heuristics, of which the Six Thinking Hats is an example.  So too is Plus, Minus, Interesting: what is good about this, at least potentially, what bad, and what interesting?

Imagine if all universities did PMI’s consistently on both Capitalism and Socialism.  Socialism–what I think I may start calling Anti-Individualism–would not stand a chance.  Not if enough history were added to the equation (White Hat, in the other heuristic).

What they do, in practice, is M on Capitalism,  and P and I on Socialism.  They focus on what doesn’t work here, and what COULD work in some planned future civilization, which they find very interesting.

It is baffling to an average intellect like mine why the focus would not be on figuring out what HAS worked–why our poor live better than the kings of old (who did not have cars, computers, telephones, reliable indoor plumbing with hot and cold water, air conditioning, and a host of other things, including penicillin)–and doing more of it.

Be all that as it may, I wanted to talk about virtual experience, which I think we need to recognize as a very important social experiment, one whose full consequences are very complex and still emerging.  I’m sure there is a huge literature on this, one I am unfamiliar with, but which has college level classes taught on it.  I read–and presumably completely misunderstood, since I now know I misunderstood nearly everything I read in my teens and twenties–Marshall McLuhon’s “The medium is the massage”.

What he might have said, and which I now WILL say, is that there is a fundamental difference between sitting around a campfire, listening to a story telling, reading that same story–now made permanent–in a book, seeing that story acted out on stage by actors, and seeing that story enacted by actors in your living room.  Both book and film lack interactivity and spontaneity.  They cannot evolve.  A story can be new to you once, but not twice (although of course if you wait long enough, much of the plot will seem new to you; I watched The Shining because I couldn’t remember most of it).

If you figure that the average American spends some obscene amount of time every day watching TV–I fear it is something like 8 hours–and that kids watch AT LEAST that much, and likely more, you have to grant that LARGE segments of our cultural and social experience are virtual.  They are not real, in the sense of being interactive.  I could spend the rest of my life in my man-cave interacting with virtual people, whose lines never change.

[I am wandering, which is sometimes useful.  Ideas come to me.  What if you filmed and acted out 15 different versions of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and the version that played was random?  What if sitcoms were filmed live and viewers sent in suggestions during commercial breaks?  What if the same setup were done 20 times, 20 days in a row, with a different result every time?]

[Squirrel]

In my game Assassin’s Creed, they have on-line events.  I don’t hook up to the internet, because that would be one more damn thing the NSA could look at.  I’m quite sure they have the money and know-how to develop predictive indexes and psychological profiles based on how people play these games.

But to return to the point, I could theoretically assault a fortress with my buddies, who are playing the same game at the same time.  All of us, virtually together.  What is good about this, what bad, what interesting?

Well, with all life questions, I guess you need a tool, a heuristic, to answer that question.  We must define good.

What is the purpose of life?  My personal answer is “to cultivate Goodness”, which I define as “a volitional character disposition in which you can live happily by yourself, and are capable of sharing the happiness of others.”  As I recall, I also defined it as “sharing happiness gladly”.  That is shorter.  Logically, to share, you must possess.

On the plus side, then, you are doing productive virtual work together, which creates a bond of shared purpose, and thus connection.

On the minus side, you are sitting in your underwear in your parents basement, eating Doritos, and no actually useful work is being done.  You are not helping anyone do anything real.

Interesting: how effective is this at building and supporting actual, real world friendships?  You don’t stay in the basement forever.  You have coffee or something together.

Overall, though, and I am well aware I am meandering, how much do we mistake the virtual world for the real world?  What part of our brain sees real people as virtual, and virtual people as real?  Do the two get confused on some deep psychological level, and does this denigrate the purpose of developing deep satisfaction with life, and an enveloping web of beneficial social relationships?  Does virtuality foster and support alienation?

I must say, I feel a vague sense of dread when I see little babies playing with iPhones.  I have seen kids still in strollers twice in the past few days playing video games on (I hope) their parents telephones.

Do you not feel that this is a social experiment whose long term effects are completely unknowable?  My gut sense is that it will affect their empathy; their capacity for emotional self regulation, absent these devices they have become addicted to; and their overall capacity for happiness, understood in a deep sense.  They are born addicted to crack, and will only give it up with great reluctance and effort.

And of course there are several qualitative leaps being proposed in virtuality.  Step one is just a linear progression of the present.  Microsoft already has these things you stand on, and you put virtual reality goggles on, and you “walk” and move in a 360 degree range of motion.  When you kill someone, you are actually moving your hands, making the neurological match even more precise between reality and imagined reality.  What does this program?  Other than correcting the ennui of the uncreative, what concrete social good does this serve?  I am open to persuasion, but I wonder how such a person could be happy in a log cabin on a pleasant spring morning in a beautiful valley, sipping coffee, without an electronic device for a hundred miles.  And that capacity, in my view, is central to what is important in being human.

And I wonder, too, what thousands of hours spent playing video games looks like in a life review, when we die.  I think I’ve commented on this before, but do the moral decisions made in video games affect our actual characters?  On the one hand, I think if we can achieve catharsis of some sort, get in contact with and heal some energy that needs healing . . .

[this is my own goal in playing these games, in addition to what I read are some mild neurological benefits.   Actually, for me, personally, also doing something just because I want to.  I am a very compulsive person, and have always had great difficulty doing things just because I wanted to.  I don’t play.  In a formal sense, play that is useful is a socially connected integration of our frontal cortex and our fight or flight response, and this is not that, but if we define play as “undirected activity”, or better yet “autotelic activity”, pace Csikszentmilyi (?), then it would still apply]

[Sorry]. . . then this is good.  But most people get addicted to these things, and roll right by whatever cathartic effect there may have been, and may in fact wind up reinforcing negative patterns, particularly of avoidance.

Then there are those who preach of The Singularity, the atheists Great Hope.  Imagine you can be anywhere and do anything.  You can be Ultron, and exist virtually everywhere. You can know anything, be anything.

Is this good?  Is this empowering?  To the fans, of course, self evidently, how can I ask this question?  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  And I suppose if did in fact view the body as a machine, this would make sense to me too.  What else do they have?

But I would say this: multiplicity of experience is no match for QUALITY of experience.  It may be that the best possible human experience would be sitting on a front porch in a mountain valley with people you love, feeling connected with God and all of creation. Because we ARE connected.  This is science, even if most mainstream scientists lack the balls and vision to realize this and do the research needed to map out the hows.

But could a machine reproduce this?  It seems to me that as we begin piecing together the actually mechanical components of our experience–how various hormones, neurotransmitters, and status of our nervous system affects our experience–that we can develop drugs that mimic the physical component of certain experiences.  You can create an out of body experience, for example, with ketamine. It is my understanding that stimulating certain parts of the brain creates a “God Experience”.  And of course taking LSD and mushrooms and peyote–which are physical substances, composed of knowable chemical elements interacting in ways we will eventually understand with our neurochemical functioning–create and have always created “mystical experiences”.

But (I contain multitudes, many of them contradicting the last) we are also energetic beings.  We are light beings.  What I would submit is that what neurochemical reactions do is merely open up to conscious awareness existing realities.  It may be that the role of the part of the brain which opens us up to the God experience actually works in general to BLOCK the God experience.  It is a step-down transformer, whose function can be temporarily suspended.

In my current Kum Nye block, we are trying to open up to space.  One of the exercises was to do certain movements, and then feel the connection of my body with surrounding space, then expand my “body” into space.  You can do this.  You can feel this. And I felt this strong sense of the improbability of my body existing in a stable form.  Every atom in your body is filled with space.  Every atom in your body is in constant motion.  Everything in our bodies is in constant motion, is in a constant process of creation and recreation.  I feel this.

And space itself is full.  It is filled with energy, oceans of energy.  This is a BASIC postulate of Quantum Physics, one of the most successful physical theories ever developed. The space in our bodies exists in a much larger space.  They talk in the lectures of feeling “space meeting space”.  I think this is what they mean.

I will offer a story I read long ago, in my teens, titled “With Friends like these”, by Allan Dean Foster, which I will offer as a model, before contradicting myself.  In that story, the gist is that everybody on Earth lives in scattered, bucolic communities.   They use oxen and metal plows, and make most everything by hand.  They live simple lives.  But we come to find out that they possess immense power.  A small child points a stick at threatening aliens and their ship and they disappear in ash.  The entire center of the planet is filled with machines.  The whole planet is connected telepathically, lives in harmony, and has no government.

Here is the short story: http://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/2b79sa/text_with_friends_like_these_alan_dean_foster/

I was impressed then, and remain impressed with this model.  All unplanned physical difficulty is removed, but the dignity and beauty of simple physical work is retained.  Peace becomes an active process (although at some point one does say “It’s been so long since we had a decent war”).

This is where I would contradict this.  Do we need the machines?  If we can find conclusive evidence of the survival of death–and it would in my view only take a few years of dedicated research to provide all the proof needed, which indeed largely exists NOW–and we are not threatened by aliens, why not create a global simple life, viewing this world, as we should, as an inferior version of what we are all destined for?  It is a stopping place, a training ground, nothing more.  Why not make it more efficient?

If you are going to dream, why not go all the way?  I can be accused of many things, but thinking small is not one of them.

Trauma brings with it a special sort of misery.  It is like a wild beast living within you that periodically attacks you.  It is like fear could be distilled into an injection, which is periodically shot into you.

I was fiddling with this this morning, to see where my shaking attacks originate from, and how they differ in quality.  I found there is a spot just above my heart which, when I focused on it, would reliably induce shaking.  This is presumably both some sort of nerve center plexus, and a place where subtle energy is blocked or held.  Same with both kidneys, which I have always heard are repositories of fear.   The heart center created the most powerful shaking; the kidneys mainly caused shaking on my back.

This is actually a useful discovery.  I can do regular release work, and hopefully the analogy of a wound up spring is a good one: eventually the energy dissipates.  I will try and do this for a period of up to half an hour before I go to bed.  Some day I will sleep through the night like what I assume is a normal person.

But I got to thinking.  What is the only condition in which you do not need to fear an attack of fear?  When you are already afraid.  That is the only safe place.  If you relax–if I relax–that wild beast is bound to pounce on me unexpectedly, and that is always very unpleasant.  So some part of me keeps the anxiety wound up, makes me hurry here and there even when there is no hurry.  It likely creates problems where none needed exist.

I watched The Shining last night and was pondering for the umpteenth time the psychological role of horror films.  It seems to me they grant us access to occulted psychological processes which are normally barred from view.  They grant us access to these senses of awe and fear that are absent from our normal lives, which are largely devoid of real risk and real reward.

And it seems to me that viewed in GROUPS, as horror films often are, they serve as a sort of sacrificial ritual.  Even though you may cringe on some level every time some innocent person dies, you KNOW that that is how these movies are constructed.  The innocent always die, usually in awful ways, and there is no reason to count on the murderers being punished.

As I look this up, I see that there are Elite Hunting T-shirts on the web, quite a few: http://www.zazzle.com/hostels_elite_hunting_logo_type_print_t_shirt-235741646291879273  There are also tattoos, which were portrayed in the movies.

Here is a brief description of what this means: http://horror.wikia.com/wiki/Elite_Hunting_Club

Thus, you have a virtual cult of human sacrifice.  One does not have to go too far down this path to see that there are people who wear these t-shirts who literally wish to be able to commit these acts.  The movies, like an actual sacrificial ritual, act as mediums of what I will call “traumatic bonding”.  To the extent that this emotional need is met without actual violence, that is good, but I would argue that this sort of bonding only reinforces flight from authenticity.  It enhances and fosters evil, which is being unable to live happily on ones own, and deriving pleasure from the pain–real or simulated–of others.

Looking further, I see at some point Roth recreated briefly the movie sets of the Hostel films: http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/25789/universal-studios-hollywood-dares-you-to-wander-into-eli-roth-s-hostel-hunting-season-maze/

People paid to be terrified.

Again, I think this dynamic plays out on many levels.  The sickest people pay to see fear and pain in others. Whatever trauma they have in them is much too large to be integrated into their bodies–or at least the faintest hint of this never occurs to them–and they like seeing others hurt so they can feel.  They “out-source” the pain function, as I have said before.

The less sick people pay to feel fear and pain in themselves, as a way of entering altered states of consciousness that allow them to at least briefly integrate the parts of themselves absent from awareness, from traumas they can’t consciously contact on an emotional level, even if they remember them.

Then there are likely a lot of people who are just bored, which is to say their animal instincts are fully unengaged in our ridiculously safe modern world, and who feel it, and sense that absence, and are unable to figure out more healthy ways to integrate them with ordinary awareness.

These of course are speculations.  I will say this, though: problems have solutions.  It is absolutely possible for human beings to learn how to live happy, engaged, creative, interesting lives filled with love and healthy social connection, the world over.  The horrors of the past need not be the horrors of the future.  Without having any way to gauge the actual possibility of success, my life’s mission is to do my part to help lead the way into that future.

It seems the farther along I get, the worse it gets.  I have been having flashes of being able to imagine sleeping through the night without alcohol, and without being awoken many times shaking and quite often yelling.

Last night, I gave the no-booze a whirl, and I woke up at least 20 times during the night.  The shaking has nothing to do with booze.  I have given it up twice for a month in the past six months, and it continued unabated.  I just dealt with it.  Most of the startles are early in the night, and by 3am or so, they reduce greatly.

Last night I woke up as a baby, completely helpless, completely paralyzed with fear, wide-eyed, and terrified.  Then I fell asleep and did it again.  And again.  I literally cannot count the times it felt like I was going to die in the past 4 years or so.  It’s in the hundreds.

And I woke up this morning and functioned fine.  And it occurred to me that in some respects I am being inoculated.  I am looking into terror, into horror, and doing it repeatedly.  Some part of me remembers, some part of me sees it as no big deal.

What I have felt several times in the past few days is that there is a way to incorporate fear, incorporate horror, into everyday possibility, and make it USEFUL.  Use it to make me strong.  Very strong.

Here is the thing: animals lack the memory of humans.  Deer can run and get away and shake and reset.  Human beings who have been traumatized will NEVER forget that this is a possibility. Ever.

This means that you have to accept it.  You have to learn to process it.  You have to welcome it, and bring it in.  You have to be able to say “Hello, Horror.  Have a seat.  I will pour you a drink.  But I won’t feed you.”

I feel this.  I feel this deeply.  There is a HUGE lesson here.  Tonight, I chose to give myself a break, and have the drinks I needed.  But I’ll go back outside the wire in the next day or two, and pay the price again.  There is a feeling that underlies all the images that precipitate horror in us.  There is a precursor.  There is a bodily sensation.  There is a cause to the effect.

I have more to say, but am enjoying listening to Led Zeppelin.  This song is underrated:; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZgblTKscX0


Let’s all hope we die tomorrow, well, and do so again every day after until we have to leave.  There is a beauty in fearlessness.


Be beautiful.

Guilt is the emotion you feel when you are avoiding growth.  Use that.  See where it gets you.

Thought process: you fuck up.  You do X when you should have done Y.  Why didn’t you do Y?  You say “I don’t know”, and it’s possible you don’t, but the short answer is always that some part of you preferred X, or that it feared Y.  Either it’s not a standard that is authentically yours–you are pretending to yourself and others–or some part of you fears growth and the following capabilities and responsibilities that will go with it.

In both cases, you can mask these facts by beating yourself up.  This is true even before you add the social dynamic.  Let’s say you cheat on your wife, and she does not find out.  You choose to beat yourself up for a while to deal with the guilt.  After a while, you get tired of it, and cheat again.  One of two things are happening: either you don’t believe in marriage, or you are married to the wrong woman.  In my world it is OK both to remain a bachelor, and it OK to divorce a woman you don’t love.  What is not OK is lying, and guilt is what allows you to forestall hard choices.  Many people can avoid hard decisions across lifetimes, but it eats at some part of the noblest part of their souls.  Sometimes you just have to jump in the deep end.

I signed up for a John Assaraf seminar today, but I’m not going to attend.  First, I have the very important tasks of taking my kids to see the Avengers and going to eat some fried chicken.

Secondly, though, it occurs to me that no matter how excellent the content is, I am already NOT doing all the things that I know make a difference.  I am not consistent in checking in with my body for five minutes three times a day.  I am not listening to my deep relaxation programs (I like Barry McDonagh’s, but use others).  Etc.

And it occurs to me that you can be surrounded by good information each and every day, and not benefit from it.  You can read 3 self help books a week and not benefit from them.

The task is to find a few really good ideas, and work them diligently, to go fully into them, so that you know both their possibilities and their limits.

My personal view is that for most people, getting really good at Autogenic relaxation and the ability to visualize would be just about everything they need.  No more self help books (although of course learning about psychology has merits for a good while).

If you ONLY seek you shall never find.  The treasures are buried, and this means you have to dig for a while in one place.

As I ponder the matter, it seems to me I would be justified not only in calling myself a Liberal, which I do, but a leftist as well.  From a strictly historical perspective, the true liberals sat somewhere in the middle of the French Revolutionary Assembly, but the mythos is that those on the right wanted stagnation–a return to a simply reformed “ancien regime”–and those on the left radical change; they were, as they could come to call themselves, in aspiration “progressive”.  They wanted to leave the past behind and build something new. In practice, of course, they replaced a tyranny with a worse tyranny, state violence with worse state violence, repression with yet worse oppression, and in general committed all the crimes of Louis the 16th without his redeeming restraints.  General war was waged for many years in which millions died, solely because of the legacy of these fools.

What I would submit is that those on the “left” today want nothing more than global Pharaohism.  They want a permanent elite to govern a permanent abject mass of helpless subjects.  This is what I feel.  Perhaps I am wrong, but it is difficult to see anything but evil arising in the hearts of those unable to commit to any form of substantive goodness.  They speak their fascism often.  You simply have to learn to interpret intentionally misleading phrases like “open society”.  In general, you have merely to invert them, to see the perversion behind them.

When you look at the stone monuments in Egypt, what they wanted to convey was permanence, stasis, the pointlessness of trying to change the system, which lasted for many thousands of years.  Changelessness was what they wanted, and largely got.  I have seen these chasms of carved stone in my dreams and they filled me with dread.  Human beings were reduced to cattle, and governed by cruel and abusive tyrants.

Thus the project of the Left is nothing but a return to the past, a past which took us thousands of years to climb out of.  Communism is Pharoahism.  Nazism was Pharaohism, complete with monuments.

The people who want true progress are those who want freedom, true freedom, meaningful freedom.  If we look again at the French Revolutionary Assembly as a sort of bell curve, both sides are anchored by people who differed only in the past they wanted to return to.  Those in the middle were in fact the most truly progressive, most truly visionary.  People like them led our own Revolution and founded our nation.  In France, of course, they were by and large killed.

Thus a true Liberal is a true Progressive.  I want progress in the form of continued access to technological advancement and all the advantages free markets bring, coupled with a steadily shrinking government, a steadily diminishing Pharaohist project.  I want the power elite to be put out of business, and countless communities of common interest formed which meet the emotional and cultural needs of those involved.

This is a truly radical notion. I am a proud revolutionary.

I will admit to fantasizing sometimes about what I would do if were to become King of America for two years, besides working on my evil laugh.

I would implement my financial plan.

I would implement this IRS eradication plan.

I would make it so no one who doe not pay taxes has the right to vote.  My reasoning should be obvious: to contain the problems first seen by the Greeks well over 2,000 years ago, and which are equally obvious today.

I would require everyone over the age of 16 who wanted to vote to read certain books and pass tests demonstrating understanding of the content.  The first two would be “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and “The Black Book of Communism”, so as to teach the perils and methods of different types of Fascism.

They would read the passages in Keynes General Theory where he admits his aim is fascism, learn about his cultural milieu and close connection to the Fabian fascists, and read Henry Hazlitt’s refutation of Keynes in “Economics in one easy lesson”.

They would read “The Fatal Conceit”, Paul Johnson’s History of the American People, Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics”.

They would read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” followed by another text detailing the many factual errors, exaggerations, and omissions in that text.  Actually, it might work best if an annotated version were created, so that the truth and the errors are shown side by side.  To this we could perhaps add a Chomsky text, and an anti-Chomsky reader.   This would work to teach people that bullshit can appear to make perfect sense.

Anyone attending college would be required to read Jacques Ellul’s Propagandas to graduate.

They would be specifically taught the truth about our chosen abandonment of the Vietnamese people, and what it meant for them and the region in general.

They would read both the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers.

They would be required to demonstrate an understanding of the Constitution.

I would fund schools and teachers to do all this teaching.

We would IMMEDIATELY protect our energy grid from an EMP.  Why this has not been done is a mind-numbing mystery I prefer not to visit too often.

I would provide MASSIVE funding for research into psi, the survival of death, and all associated fields.  Atheism and materialism are counter-scientific belief systems, and their prevalence in the sciences is one of the reasons for the pervasive failures in the Humanities.

I would abolish most of the Federal government, gradually, giving States time to take up the slack and set up their own apparatus to retain what programs they saw fit.  I would get rid of most of Homeland Security nearly immediately.

I would retain most of our Navy carrier groups, and the Marine Corps, but otherwise downsize the standing military, while requiring the States to create the ability to provide trained units on demand.  I would strongly encourage them to create some form of compulsory service to grow kids the fuck up through difficulty, either military, or search and rescue.

I would reduce the NSA to two levels of connection.  No more open net spying.   I would massively increase the CIA’s HumInt capabilities (after a thorough audit of both agencies–and the FBI–to see how much bullshit they have been getting away with, and firing as many people as I needed to).

I would build an effective missile shield.

All of this would represent a very good start.  I have other ideas, too, but do not want to share them at the moment.

What would be left after two years would be a system again highly resistant to demagogues and tyranny.

I am a statistic.  I have been hung up on repeatedly, and spent many hours taking care of things that should have taken a few minutes.  You cannot convince me that the IRS has not chosen to pout about its budget cuts by making customer service much worse than it needed to be, even with the cuts.  They are doing a work slow-down to try and get their money back.  If their jobs depended on it, they could do better with less.  I have no doubt of this.  But nobodies job depends on it.  Lois Lerner told Congress to go fuck itself, and thus far has gotten away with it because they are, by and large, incompetent cowards (in that regard, did the Republican controlled House pass a budget and send it to the Republican controlled Senate?  If so, I didn’t read about it.  They need to make Obama veto fiscal sanity.)

Anyway, I got to thinking about privatizing the IRS.  Ted Cruz and others go around saying we need to “abolish the IRS”.  Well, no matter how much we cut the budget, the Federal government will still need money.  Somebody has to pay for the aircraft carriers and welfare cheats.  I have never called for the abolition of the Federal government, and have pointed out repeated that there is no point in a Constitution if there is no point in national government.  Thus, revenues need to be collected, but there is space within which to debate how and by whom.

My first thought was to allow private corporations–debt collectors, effectively–to bid for the right to collect taxes, something like the process in Jesus’ time under the Romans. On the plus side, you could collect data on efficiency and customer service, and factor them in whenever you periodically rebid the contract, with poorly performing companies losing the contract.

But there is an issue of scale.  The IRS has 95,000 employees, give or take, and no company can scale up and down that much with anything approaching speed or efficiency.  At least, I don’t think so.  This is a question of logistics I am not presently qualified to evaluate, or willing to investigate.  I suspect a transition would be a cluster fuck.

But here is an idea I like: what if the primary income collection were done by the States?  They have an existing tax apparatus and are already collecting money from their residents.  They would simply take more–usually nationally generalized percentages and procedures dictated by Congress–and remit them to the Federal government.

Some huge benefits would flow from this.

1) Most obviously, the money is ALREADY coming from the States, so we simply ratify and simplify the existing situation.  There are no Federal income taxes paid by people not living in a State or Washington DC.  What happens is the money is collected via a separate pathway, and then money used to bully and coerce the States into doing things the Federal government wants them to do.

How did they get a national speed limit of 55?  By threatening to withhold highway funds.

Medicaid in most cases is partially funded by Federal money, which again was simply taken first from the States, but in a great many cases this money is redistributive, since differing States have more or less generous Medicaid programs.  Roughly a third of the “Stimulus” (does anyone remember that?  Do you remember how passing it was “urgent”, and couldn’t wait for a thorough debate?  Do you remember it was supposed to keep unemployment under 8%?) went to bail out incompetently run Medicaid programs.  That money was taken from people in States who were responsible, and given to people who were profligate (to the extent the money was paid in taxes: obviously about half of it was borrowed outright).

So if the States collect the money it doesn’t flow the Federal Government, and then some of it trickle back.  No money flows from the Federal government to States at all.  They simply keep what they need.

2) If the Federal government is being abusive–as is clearly the case under Obama–then they can go on tax strikes.  They can refuse to pay.  This creates huge leverage, and redistributes in a major way the balance of power.

3) The taxing authority becomes more local, and thus more vulnerable to–and accountable to–the will of the voters.  Customer service gets better.

4) We are able to eliminate an entire agency.  Imagine the inefficiency of filing both State and Federal returns.  All we do is add some line items to the existing returns, and we could do the same or better with perhaps a third more people than already exist at the State level, and are able to give 95,000 people who exist at the expense of the tax-payers–who reduce by a vast amount the capital available for investment–their walking papers.

5) There will then be no agency at the Federal level which can be abused for political purposes.

6) This would directly support my contention that the locus of social welfare should be the States, each of which was always empowered in theory to be the principle center of decisions about morality, about issues which are intrinsically ambiguous and open to multiple solutions: abortion, prostitution, drugs, euthanasia, and to the point, the extent and form of using public monies to secure some form of basic protections against hunger, sickness, homelessness, and other ills.

I have to say, this is one of my better ideas in a while.  I think.  I am smoking on it–I have a lit cigar next to me–but other than the obvious fact that 95,000 people, AT LEAST–who are unionized at the tax-payer expense–will oppose it with every inch of their bureaucratic beings, I see no down side.

Researching this, we would likely need to abolish the 16th Amendment, which would require a Constitutional convention, but it was created, and could possibly be stricken down.  This would be the best and surest means of reigning in the Federal government.

I was laying in bed this morning, dreaming, as I do–as I remain very grateful I can do–and it occurred to me that what I need is a group of 10 sacred prostitutes to care for me for a couple of days.  Women who have processed all their own traumas, and dedicated themselves to giving, to healing–which itself can often be found in a certain sort of sexual contact, characterized by both physical and emotional intimacy.

Then I generalized: I suspect most men would benefit from this.  Most of us have never really made our peace with the feminine, with our own feminine sides, and of course with those of the women around us.  There is of course a role–an important role–for the masculine to play, but the feminine is larger.  It expands more.  There is more space in it.  It is intrinsically more spiritual. It goes farther.

Then I started thinking about hierarchies of belonging.  If we follow the Polyvagal Theory, then we really have three levels of nervous system functioning which can take over, depending on the circumstances and our reactions to them.  The lowest is the immobilization/trauma response.  Above this is the fight or flight response.  Above this is the social response, which would include reasoning, chosen self restraint, as well as higher emotions which are facilitated by existing at this level, which would include love and a sense of connection.

One can in fact rationally desire and pursue love, as the most rewarding pathway for human action to follow.  You can reason your way to it.  This is, I think, an important point.

But I got to thinking that you can coalesce groups of people around lower focal points too.  The bonding of men at war?  Persisting group experiences of shared fight or flight.  This bond exists at a primal level, because that is where it happened.  In other circumstances you may have nothing in common with–or even like–these men (and I am of course generalizing, since most people in combat are men, although the same would apply to shared stresses among woman or mixed gender groups), but when you face death together, you take something away.

And sacrificial rites would exist at the gut level, at the trauma level, at the unmyelinated vagus nerve level.  The bonding would exist at that level, that of fascination with death, that sense that compels you to look at a car wreck, wondering if you will see a dead body.

They are ritual horror, ritual death, done slowly and with great attention.  As I think I’ve mentioned, I wanted to do a paper in graduate school comparing the phases of a serial murder–there is an arc of psycho-physiological states–with those of a traditional ritual, particularly a sacrifice, using particularly Turner’s ideas.  I was turned down, but given that some of the first texts we were required to read–Durkheim and Freud–were written by atheists, I still no reason I could not have applied social psychology to the thing.

Be that as it may, in this regard I think we could see some parallelism between the Jewish practice of ceremonially slitting the throats of sheep and goats and other animals and calling it the praise of God; and those of Satanists, who use cruelty to build bonds among themselves.  These people do exist.  I’ve known  therapists who worked with their victims.  They seem particularly to enjoy hurting children.

There is obviously a continuum.  But I would recall to your memory–if it ever lived there–the story of God telling Abraham to “Take your son , your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you. ” 


God tells Abraham to make a holocaust–a burnt offering–of his son.  He winds up not doing it, but the story is there, and that in itself is telling.  How can we know what actual practices were excised from the Bible, which I would insist must be viewed as a human and cultural document?


Thus we would see here a human cultural evolution from one nervous system focal point to another.  From horror, to fighting, to reasoning, at least in principle.  We have departed from reasoning in our allegedly highest cultural centers, because they have tied themselves up in knots intellectually, because they lack the capacity to process life emotionally.  This state need not endure, although it remains to be seen if they will burn down–or allow to be burnt down–all the highest accomplishments to date of the human species; if, in fact, they will facilitate another and larger holocaust.