Moderates United

What I never do is think about getting credit for any ideas I may propose.  It delights me to think some of my best ideas may be taken wholesale–even verbatim–and used elsewhere.  That is influence.

I think of Musashi and his dictum that the focus always be cutting. You focus on each stroke, and maximum effectiveness: here, in creating and conveying coherent, communicable, and useful ideas. We can safely assume that in none of his contests did Musashi think about his reputation.  Nor was he focused on winning.  Winning is an abstraction that takes you out of the moment.

No, he focused on his breath, his body, and how next to inflict a potent wound upon his opponent.

This mindset is useful everywhere.  Virtually everything else is confusion.

Here is the thing: freedom is an escape from certainty.  It is an escape from finality, necessity.  You can CHOOSE what you want, what to pursue, who you want to become.  But it is not a foregone conclusion that you will achieve it.  But you CAN.  It is possible.

I read that Gunther Grass was an admirer of the Castro regime, but a harsh critic of the Soviet Union.  One wonders why.  I don’t want to make the time to investigate, but I think it reasonable that as someone who CHOSE to join the Waffen-SS, he was someone unsure what the proper use of freedom was.

Cuba never had a mass famine.  They only killed thousands of people, and what torture they did was mostly the “advanced” Soviet variety of soft torture, like locking people in small boxes for long periods of time.  This, to some, makes it seem almost palatable that an entire nation is sitting around in the heat, underfed, underemployed, under constant surveillance, and in large numbers willing to risk death to live in poverty here.

But I think the very lack of freedom is appealing to certain class of lost human being.  Life is simple in Cuba.  We must grant that.  Do what you are told and keep your mouth shut.  Who is unable to understand those instructions?

Thus, inflicting freedom on a certain class of these lost human beings would be a de facto torture, even if one that is only made so by THEIR refusal to individuate, to assume personal responsibility, personal agency, to make imperfect choices in an imperfect world.

I get in mind the many Saw scenes of alleged freedom.  I have within me a capacity for cruelty.  I was more or less psychologically tortured as an infant.  Much of it is coming up: terror, fear, coiling up in a ball helplessly.

But I see beyond this.  It does not limit me. In Saw everyone was not free. They were given two choices: live or die.

In my scenario I imagine advanced forms of self torture.  What if I made one “colony” composed ONLY of profoundly narcissistic, self absorbed, intellectual blow-hards?  What if I furnished them with a library of precisely the texts I knew they would fight about?  Marcuse, Gramsci, Marx, Lenin, Feuerbach, Hegel, Foucault, Heidegger, etc.  I am not familiar enough with the intra-idiot debates to say at this moment what would be there, but I would figure it out.

So many people, granted freedom, choose confinement.  The ability to value, to savor, freedom is an advanced life skill.

Even in America much of our “freedom” was merely a freedom to choose the form of ones confinement, which is to say one’s exact religion (religio, again, meaning “to bind”).

I see clearly how it is possible to perform operant conditioning on children, like small animals. You reward what you want, and punish what you don’t.  Through physical abuse, you can associate trauma with disobedience, making the only possible relatively anxiety-free place the state of absolute obedience.

This is the condition in which many religious people live today. I would say, in fact, that much of the world is like this.  Between zero and few societies raise their children for freedom, for autonomy.  Rather, they condition them to live as their parents did, who were conditioned to live as their parents did, etc.  Errors in the system come from wars and calamities, with the systems then adapting and again self replicating.

What if our grand global vision were actually raising children for freedom, the world over?  I think it is a much better vision than the global fascism and commissars the global elites want for us (but not for them: although of course they already live in gilded cages.  No free person could wish coerced unfreedom on others).

There is of course considerable diversity in the latter group: being founded on the notion of difference, this is obviously necessary.  There is little difference within the first group, at least qualitatively.  They can be counted on to moo on cue.

Given power, the first group seeks to level everyone on Procrustean beds.  The superior are to be broken.  The inferior are to be excused and even extolled.  They take the logic of concentration camps one step further: the goal is not just torture, but getting people to “admit” that this torture is good for their souls, in much the same way the Spanish Inquisition once did (I suppose one could draw an interesting analogy there somewhere; it would be best to put it in the mouth of a Russian).

The latter group has two basic approaches: violence, and Liberalism.  The Iranians obviously think they are God’s chosen people, even though they are lazy, corrupt, ignorant, misogynistic, and very, very violent.  Without commenting on the merits of their self perception, we can grant that they very much think they are not like other people, and that other people should therefore be killed.  Given the power, they would take over the world.  And they would not torture people, they would merely give them the choice of converting or dying.

Only within Liberalism is difference negotiated. Only within a system like America are people NOT treated as ignorant cattle–at least in principle, since self evidently the media has shown that most people can in fact be manipulated in any direction chosen–but rather encouraged to form their own views, and to DEMONSTRATE them.  If you think your cultural system is better, you are given the chance to show it, by bringing up happy, successful, emotionally well adjusted children.  Smart people will imitate you.  Inferior people will resent you.

Which brings me to the point of the post.  There is no question in my mind that Obama and Hillary would like to slowly put a strangling noose around the neck of our freedoms, and grow in time to govern as czars, with legions, hordes, of commissars evaluating every last thing done and said by everyone, with the compliant and brown-tongued to be congratulated, and the rest punished in ways which are “regrettably necessary.”

But if one looks at the history of Communist coups, they are always backed by a compliant and supportive military force, typically one with a long history of combat in support of the mother nation.  Lenin had those who fought in WW1 and opposed the Czar.  Mao, those who fought the Japanese.  Ho, the Japanese and French.  Castro, Battista.

The frog analogy of course remains a factor, one which implies necessarily the complacency and stupidity of the American people, one they have demonstrated repeatedly, and which is hardly unique in the world.  Who  could have seen the shortages in Venezuela coming?  Everyone.  Everyone.

But one does have to wonder about the loyalty of the American military to an agenda that is fundamentally in conflict with their oath of duty.  They swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign AND domestic.  And one can scarcely plausibly accuse those who are citing the Constitution of opposing it.

Thus I will wonder again out loud about the possibility of a coup, should the American people once again demonstrate a profound inability for self governance.  Another financial crisis is a foregone conclusion.  We cannot sustain this level of debt and spending.  I cannot say when it will happen, but we are bound for another major financial catastrophe.

This in my view is the Leftist plan of attack.  But they will need all these people being trained in crowd control and riot suppression to beat back the very reasonable shrieks of the American people at being led like fattened cattle to the slaughter. Part of me feels this is what we deserve.

But not all of us deserve this.  A great many of us have in fact become active, vocal, and have opposed with every legal means at our disposal these abuses.

Thus I wonder if a coup may not in the long run be in the best interests of the American people.  It worked in Chile. To be clear, I am not calling for the overthrow of the American government in the way, say, Van Jones did daily for years on the streets of LA; or that Frank Marshall Davis or Saul Alinsky did. I am merely speculating that it is possible, and may be more positive than negative.

Finally, my vision, if I were in charge.

I would arrest all the radical professors and teachers and politicians, and globalists and union leaders who brought about this mess, and do an experiment.

I would put them in walled enclosures of considerable size, perhaps 200 square miles, filled with arable farm land, with all the tools and books and supplies needed to build a new society.  They would have sheep, and cattle and chickens, and fish farms. They would have wheat and corn and cotton.  They would have tractors, and lumber and hammers and nails (and sickles, of course).

They would also have all the tools they needed for failure. They would have drugs in large quantities, booze, and guns and ammunition.

I would build maybe 20 of these things, depending on the numbers involved and just watch. I would reintegrate any group which proved capable of survival.  I think they would have learned their lesson. Those who chose violence and/or failure, would be transplanted into the same enclosures and abandoned.

The fact that people of similar physical capabilities and exactly the same resources could go in many directions shows clearly, in my view, as a pure thought experiment, that there are differences that matter between people.  They differ in their resilience, empathy, ability to persuade, ability to resist self pity, imagination, etc.

That these differences would become apparent in a free society–and note nobody outside the groups would be dictating anything, so they have complete functional freedom–is to my mind a virtually axiomatic feature of true Liberalism. The task is not to tear down the better, but to raise the lesser.  It always has been, and always will be in any society wanting to claim to be good.

We are told, often and both directly and indirectly, that our lives need romance.  They need adventures.  They need great passions, great sorrows, great joys. We must treat our relationship with the other sex as this sort of interdependent game in which both of us seek to maximize sentiment as long as possible, with the inevitable consequence–sentiment being mutable, and prone to go in all directions given a long enough time horizon–of the eventual dissolution of the game, and of course more sentiment and another game.  I see this weekly at the grocery store, reading the tabloid headlines.

The lesson I have learned from Kum Nye in particular, though, is that there is a very interesting layer UNDERNEATH all the great surface passions.  It is a realm in which calm and healing and fascinating energies grow and expand.  Let us say that curiosity is a buoy, floating anchored in the ocean.  You can grab the anchor line and follow it to its root, which of course is beyond words.  It is THAT.

All our emotions are like that.  Once you get to that layer, the explosions and fireworks and drama all seem kind of pointless.  I would not trade my trauma–and the transcending of my trauma–for anything.  It has been enormously valuable.

At the same time, I think much of our popular imagination is based on ghosts, on grand facades concealing nothing.  We lack spiritual skill.  This is a truism, but still worth saying, in my view.  We are so profoundly stupid, when intelligence is and remains possible.

Qualitative diversity on a college campus would be someone who was home schooled, believes absolutely in Biblical inerrancy, and believes sex should be saved for marriage.  Such people are abhorred by the very people who use Diversity in every other sentence.  What they mean is superficial diversity, not diversity of ideas and world view.

Edmund Burke talked about the powerful influence of fashion in the French Revolutionary period.  Entertainment, clothes, food, gossip: all in constant motion.

This is the thing, and I am repeating myself, but I hope in a slightly different way: there are types of change which are not really change at all.  It may be that the song at the top of the Pop chart varies weekly, but does the TYPE of song vary?  Not really.

It may be that clothes fashions change continually, but does the nature and purpose of clothes really change?

Outward motion, in my view, can and often is used to mask inner stagnation.  You might know someone who is constantly embracing the latest thing, and think that their life varies often.  But if the rule is “embrace the latest thing”, then that rule itself is constant, isn’t it, and it implies a lack of personal freedom and choice, does it not?

You can look at constant motion and see constant change.  You can also look at constant motion, and see circles everywhere, repeating endless loops, in tired and boring fashions of fashion.  This is taking the same information and forming a different pattern.

Paradigmatic work is difficult, which is why so few do it.

And I can’t remember if I posted this or not, but within Complexity Theory they have this duality of explore/exploit.  If you want the best ham sandwich, you need to try a few places.  Once you find a really good one, it makes some sense to go there regularly, but if you never explore, you can’t be sure there isn’t a better one somewhere.  People spend careers optimizing these sorts of processes.

What I would say though with regard to inner work is that exploration is almost entirely the whole game.  You dig and dig and dig and dig.  And the more you learn, the more naturally becomes integrated into your life effortlessly.  “Exploiting” is simply greater skill in what you had to do anyway.

The only place there is a choice is in the Learn/Teach dichotomy.  The best teacher is someone who has spent the most and best quality time not teaching, but learning.  Teaching, of course, can be learning, but it is not the focal point.

There was a famous Tibetan teacher–I think it was Padmasambhava, but I don’t have time to look it up–who spent most of his time alone, came out a delivered a sermon or two, then headed out again, never to return.  He saw that teaching made him useless to himself.  He also saw the need to say something, even if it was damaging to his own practice.

This world is filled, potentially, with very interesting people and activities, and most of us avail ourselves of almost nothing given to us.

Equal?  Why?  To what end?  Where do you move after equality?  Leftists have no good answers to these questions since, again, their quest is fundamentally anti-rational, or as I sometimes call it, Post-Rational, which is a synonym for most of what has happened in the Humanities in the past 50 years or so.

What are you doing?

I don’t know.

Why?

I don’t know.

What is your goal?

I don’t know.

How will you know if you get there?

Don’t worry, I won’t.  THAT question I can answer.

This is how shit happens, has children, and rents up the block.  There is no spring in this world, no summer, winter, or fall.  Nothing really changes, because that is the goal.  That is the real goal.

Here is what I logged on to post: I was watching someone size me up at lunch today, I think because I was having lunch with an attractive woman.  He was with his buddies, his clique, and I could see the mental comparisons going on.  I’m not much to look at, especially when I’m working a job site.  I look like a construction worker.  I fit in perfectly, beer belly and all.  People ask me “what do you do?”  I say “construction”, and they nod and say that makes sense.

But I was thinking to myself, the real man is not the one who has the things, the toys, the women, who competes with everyone all the time.  I was looking at this guy with a bit of a smile, thankful I had not fallen into his trap, his cage. I like who I am and what I do, and I don’t give a rats ass what other people think of me, and I very definitely do not get jealous of them.

The real man, to MY thinking, is the one who just does not give a shit what people think of him, from the bottom of his toes to the top of his head.  That person is free.  That is the ONLY path to becoming free from fear, and free to live.  In all other directions, you have to consider the judgments of others, their opinions.  You have to fear not fitting in, sticking out, being the odd one out, the misfit.

To my way of thinking, a real man does whatever the fuck he does, consistent with mental health (I am not praising psychopathy, merely a healthy set of boundaries and sense of self, and a healthy engagement with life and living), and finds people around him who fit him, who are suitable for him, and for whom he is also suitable.

That is leadership, too.   I remember thinking in high school that most of the people who were called “leaders” were just figuring out which way the wind was blowing, and hustling to get out front.  That is not leading.  Leading takes balls, and it always implicitly implies the possibility of failure.  You may be the one shouting to the wind, that everyone thinks is nuts.

But only your opinion of yourself matters.  That in my view is the way to live.  If you world praises you, and you do not respect yourself, then that is what matters.  And if the world hates you, but you do respect yourself, that too is all that matters.

Would Europe have been conquered by this soulless doctrine?  It made major inroads despite the evils it enabled and defended.

Thinking always begins with feeling and returns to feeling.  This does not make it useless.  It is vitally important that what thinking needs to be done, be done competently.  I like to think of it as something amenable to the same care and precision that craftsmen use, and which is just as useful as any other built thing.

It means, among other things, that a thinker who has suppressed his or her tender feelings–love, appreciation, compassion, openness–cannot return home.  They are stuck in Sartre’s cage.

L’inferne, c’est moi. I think that is right.  I only took a week of French.

Then Ted Cruz steps in, and say, “Is there a problem here?”  “yes, this man is selling illegal milk”.  Illegal milk?  Do you have nothing better to do?  I banish you.  Leave this man alone.

Cut: The raid really happened (movie voice), but nobody stopped them.  The next time, somebody will.

Slogan: A better future is on the way.

And you know, too, no matter who wins, the winner could find places in their Adminstration for the other two (or whatever: the number is flexible, provided it includes NO RINO’s.)

You could have them at a tea party, and make fun of the fact that it has been declared dead repeatedly.

I could do this all day.  I have to take the kid somewhere.