Moderates United

Watch two tiger cubs playing.  Then watch two boys rough-housing.  It is the same behavior, and serves the same purpose: it sharpens their senses, forms mind-body connections, and increases emotional intimacy (although granted, of course, these get deployed differently).

Picture a Hungry God.  Picture Moloch, who was believed to consume children in fire.  Hunger is a human trait.  Why would it be a trait of gods?

The more I grow as a person, the more important I feel is the “gut brain” (the Vagus Nerve and Dorsal Vagal System, in my understanding of Peter Levine’s taxonomic description) in human life.

We are animals, are we not?  We share large segments of our DNA with mammals in particular, and we evolved from more primitive forms.  As I have often said, it is my STRONG contention that the overwhelming evidence favors a field theory of life, which clearly played a role in directing evolution, which is in important respects intelligent (this article, because it is able at least to guess at a materialistic solution, discusses the problems with the orthodox narratives), but the truth still remains that we are animals.

We evolved to eat, to survive, to enter into conflict, to bond.  And in my view, Moloch is a projection of a primal gut instinct to eat.  There is something insect-like in us, something worm-like, something dis-gusting (look again at that word) in us, which is in our gut.  It is almost like an intruder, if we choose to treat it that way.

And this is the problem with modern life, in my evolving view: we have taken the anger, the violence, the primal ENGAGEMENT with life out of it, and an important part of us, a primal, unthinking, unspeaking, completely unnuanced part of us misses it.

One could perhaps think of sacrifice, particularly human sacrifice, as war waged within a civil order, a managed, staged, ritualized war, but a war nonetheless.  Lives are lost.  Carthage was an advanced civilization for the time, but they seem to have immolated children, in what most today would view as a sort of Satanism.

And speaking of war itself, do we not constantly invoke SACRIFICE (which I note periodically means “act of the sacred”)?  Can we perhaps speak of those thrown into battle as human sacrifices of a sort?

I tend to believe America tends to wage wars not based in primal anger, primal violence, but I know from firsthand accounts that many of our soldiers develop a taste for it.  They like it.  I remember talking with a couple of West Point graduates at my bar, and they kept volunteering to go back.  They said it got in their blood.

I would argue this tingling of anticipation, this sense of not knowing where some large emotionally charged event is going to go, FEEDS our gut brain.  Combat is in some respects exhilarating for some.  It is a rush they can’t get any other way. And many of these people are otherwise psychologically normal.  They are not sociopaths, who would get off more on the death and destruction part of it, that they can feed by torturing small animals or serially seducing and abusing women.

War plays an important role in the human psyche.  We (most Americans) have not seen war on our soil in well over 100 years.  Not in the lifetime of anyone.  And how have we reacted?  Go look at your local Red Box, and see what people are watching.

Horror movies feed this beast, just like sacrifice does, just like war can.

I was in Napa a month or two ago, St. Helena to be specific, and there was a giant poster of a demon king of sorts posted in the window of one of the Main Street businesses, a design firm if I’m not mistaken.  It was the sort of thing you would expect on the wall of a Satanic temple.

And I thought: this is logical.  I am in a Sybaritic Paradise, the place where pleasure and congeniality reign.  Why wouldn’t dark, deep spirits come to be needed?  We NEED to feed this beast.  It will not be ignored.

And to get to the purported topic of this post, I woke up yesterday thinking about all the apocalyptic thinking and imagining going on: Mad Max, Hunger Games, Divergent.

Add to this Biblical imaginings: an End Time, a reign of fear for the unbelievers, chaos on the face of the Earth: Left Behind.

And I think this myth, too (we need not fall into chaos; death and destruction need not be our collective fate), serves to feed this beast.  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF TIME, the pious, the calm, the bored, the sybaritic will face demons worth fighting.  They will activate their core, abusive, indefensible, violent, protean selves and fight to live or die trying (add hip-hop to the drama of war, and the gangster mythos).

This, I am convinced, is Freud’s Thanatos.  It is deeply biological.

At the same time, I view we are animal spirits.  We are mired in the mud of unfreedom, of instinct, of emotions based on biological heritage.  At the same time, we are SPIRITS here.  We have free will, a little bit.  What our freedom is, is to choose within a range of options what direction we want to evolve.  We hve perhaps 10%, perhaps 1%, perhaps 99% freedom.  Who can know?  But we counter the gravity of heritage with what I like to call “Non-Statistical Coherence”, which is to say, we have the power to negate our programming, to some extent.  We can defy expectations, and go in new directions.  And it is likely the more we exercise our free will, the more of it we get.  It is like building flexibility in your body.  You may not start with much, but change happens gradually over time.

And how do we tame this restless spirit?  How do we tame this primal pit into which we have always thrown unwilling sacrifices violently?

I feel the answer is engagement.  Ponder the image of the Wind-Horse, the Tibetan symbol for Goodness.  It is a racing horse with a radiant jewel on its back.  Become this horse.  Feel the wind blowing by you as you race across a high plain.  Feel the thrill of motion, the engagement, being fully in the moment.

Or put yourself on a catamaran, at full speed, racing on the ocean.  Every sense is engaged, every emotional pore is open.  You are excited, thrilled, successful, and finally rested.  You feed the beast, then you  rest.

This is living well.

The sense of flow, of excitement, of engagement: these feed the beast, in my view.  It can’t be just intellectualism.  It can’t be thought alone.  This in fact suppressed the beast, which will then come out in ugly ways.  You become a Communist.  You become a Nazi, like a famous and ugly director recently admitted.

You cannot not feel.  Our bodies see to that.  If we remove some part of our body–our SELF, to be clear–from conscious awareness, it intrudes in disturbances in our thought.  It is like a rock in a stream.  It disrupts the flow of water.  The water still flows, so you may not notice.  But what might have been–the beauty or clarity that might have been–is not, and you neither notice it nor correct it, if your destiny is to be in the thrall of ugly emotions, as for example von Trier seems to be.

These are in my view deep thoughts, that are getting close to the root of the human condition.

If everyone is included, no one is included.

If everyone is inside, then outside has no meaning.

As always, the emotionally detached narrative of egalitarianism, works to, in a Hayekian sense, and in my personal opinion, alienation, precisely because it does not recognize the biological imperative of tribalism.

It argues it is an anti-tribalism, but in my assessment and experience, they would be unable to cohere in any way without constant violence directed at the supposed “haters”.

It is a little known fact, but in my recollection a quite true one, that Hitler intended to build a museum detailing Jewish culture: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/hitlers-proposed-museum-of-an-extinct-race/

Even if he had succeeded in killing all Jews, there still would have been a place to come to hate their memory, and commemorate, together, the victory of the National Socialists in their eugenic success.

Dogs are friendly animals, but not to strangers.  There are a couple dogs that bark at me and my dogs every morning when I walk them.  Those same dogs are no doubt very friendly inside the house.  Dogs are territorial animals.  You can train it out of them, but they are born that way.  My dog, every time that dog barks at us, pees on the ground, then does a ritual claw dig, throwing grass behind her, every time.  She is marking her territory, saying “you get that; I get this.  You claim that for your master: I claim this for my master.”  She was born that way.  I did not teach her to do this obviously, although I could in theory train it out of her.

I would consider these observations facts, and worth treating as such.  Any successful purposive activity must, in my view, begin with important truths.

I truly believe my mission in this life was to dive into Hell and map a way out.

And I’m doing it.

This system is foolproof, meaning that it won’t work on fools, but any fool can use it.

Recent product of the American system of higher Indoctrination: It was wrong for the United States to drop (some large number) of bombs on North Vietnam.  They killed so many people.

You: Is killing wrong?

If so, is it always wrong, or only in certain circumstances?

If the latter, what circumstances and why?

You can run through this drill, I’m sure, on your own.  It is quite impossible to square stated Leftist ideals with actual realities.

I have used this method–which I know I’ve discussed before–and been literally told I was asking trick questions.  These people are literally so dumb that it has never occurred to them they lack any sense of  principle and proportion.

The more I think about it, humanity has both an evolutionary as well as–usually–a personal need for developing subject/object relations with other human beings.  We are tribal by nature, and you cannot have full inclusion without full exclusion.  It is something in our guts.

But Leftists reject, in principle, the rejection of others.  Excuse me, Others. The Other.  You know that hallucination that all the Imperialists that were not Communist had that their culture was fundamentally superior, because they did not UNDERSTAND The Other?

So all the South Vietnamese killed by the North Vietnamese were evil, because either they didn’t exist, or because they were complicit in imperialistic atrocities.  You know, the kids blown up on playgrounds by suicide bombers, or intentional mortar attacks on civilian populations: their lives are unimportant.

What MATTERS was that we dropped a lot of ordinance, and killed perfectly innocent, perfectly peaceful, loving gentle human beings and that makes me ANGRY.  I HATE what America did.  It was all so WRONG.

You see how that works?  You enter into a, say, 2nd graders mind, simply eliminate from discussion everything that detracts from the simplicity of the equation, and THEN, THEN, you get to feel the hate, feel the burn, feel the righteous anger billowing out of you.

Returning for the third time to this disgust experiment, it seems to me that one could argue that their cognitive psychopathology–specifically their inability to access, recognize and express their anger productively–causes a literal nervous system miswire in the systems of Leftists.

Their hate becomes directed in all the wrong places.  Ho Chi Minh became a Communist around 1919, and helped co-found the French  Communist Party.  He joined the Communist International–the group working the world over to subvert sovereign nations and deliver them to the tender mercies of Communism–shortly thereafter.  He spent much of the 1930’s in Stalin’s Russia.  His agents, rather than fighting the Japanese, spent most of the Japanese occupation killing actual Vietnamese nationalists.  When they beat the French in the mid-1950’s, they embarked nearly immediately on a campaign of class warfare, in which every tenth person, at least, in the North was killed or imprisoned.  They confiscated all private property they wanted, and instituted a totalitarian regime.  A vote would have been meaningless, since nobody in the North was free to do as they chose.  100% of North Vietnamese would have been reported as favoring reunification.

Then they started invading the South.  Oh, I could go on, but don’t feel like it.

The point I want to make is that NO ONE on the Left has learned what in my view is the only correct lesson, which is that we made a HUGE mistake handing the South over to the North.  It was wrong on every possible level.  Maybe we never should have been there–this is a separate discussion–but having lost so much, given so much, virtually NOTHING was needed to protect it.

But people who NEED hate cannot accept this.  Changing their minds would be exposing themselves to the raw viciousness they have allowed to fester within them, and force them to realize that far from being morally superior, they are actually nasty beasts who feed on human death and destruction, while lying to themselves and the world about it.

This is what I mean by Cultural  Sadeism.

Edit: For leftists, who are AOH’s? As a general rule, anybody who is opposed by anyone who would be their natural ally.  For example, they supported the North Vietnamese precisely because they opposed America.  If they are rich, they hate the rich.  If they are white, they hate whites for their alleged racism.  If they are black, they either become white like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, or are irrelevant.

The old saw is that the enemy of my enemy is my friends.  In Lefto-Land, the enemy of my friend is my friend.

It is not hard to see a profound self loathing of a psychological nature under all this.

In psychologically healthy introspection, you balance the good with the bad.  You try to tell the truth as well as you can.  You freely admit mistakes and errors, but also grant strengths and good decisions.

There is no effort to do this on the part of the Left. It is all good/bad.  It is all Manichean, in precisely the way Western imperialistic thought is alleged to have operated.

And I must of course introspect and ask if I, too, am doing the same thing.  I don’t think I am.  Thought systems can be understood, even if one must grant they apply perfectly to no one.

And in the particular case of Leftism one must see that it is DEFINED by conformity.  Any group which values being like all other members of the group can be spoken of in the aggregate without too much damage to the truth, in my view.

And when I speak of conformity, I don’t mean conformity of a tribal sort, seen the world over for most of history, where you do what your ancestors did.  I mean conformity of an emotionally craven sort, which is willing to change on a dime whenever the wind blows.

That’s enough venting for now.  

What would happen if ten men married ten women?  All the men, all the women.  They could do ten day rotations as to who they spend the night with.  What good would happen?  What bad?  What interesting?

What if they coparented, such that nobody knew or asked whose kids were whose?

I’m going some interesting places, and this popped in my head.  I’ve never seen it proposed, although I have of course heard of both polygamy and the lesser known polyandry.  Edward de Bono also proposed five year renewable marriage contracts

I ponder. That’s what I do.  I ingest some idea or feeling or image, and it percolates.

This notion that leftists do not react viscerally to images of death and ugliness still piques my curiosity.  I wonder if the violence that attends all leftist agitation–one sees hate even in something as mundane as the national campaign against the police, or against alleged racists, or against the “1%” (if there was ever a manufactured propaganda meme, that clearly qualifies; I can almost smell the espresso and the weed)–in fact secretly satisfies some unmet need in them.

I remember reading about a hurricane in Cuba, and the BBC or maybe NPR, or some other propaganda outlet was gushing about how the “Cubans do what they are told.  They don’t have any problems with people ignoring orders down there, unlike here”., and I could just feel this fascination with authoritarianism, this flush in the face of some 20-something girl with a degree in Political Science or English, thinking about people getting boots shoved up their asses.

In my view, we are wired, when wired properly, to react viscerally to the grotesque.  Being unable to do so implies a disconnection with the gut, with instinct, with primal, animal, REAL emotions.

And that disconnection creates a feeling of disconnection with life.  I posted some nice Peter Levine quotes a month or two ago. (or three or four or five: I live in an altered state of time).

I can almost see how this would work: you react viscerally to reacting viscerally, and learn to suppress it, and live only in your head.  But something is missing.  And violence–the right sort of violence, ostensibly justifiable violence, even the right sort of sexual violence–satisfies that urge.

Hence Che: not, to be clear, Che himself, who was a sociopath.  I mean outwardly normal people fetishizing him, despite his cruelty, incompetence, and very dull but very real evil.

I think this is very close to the truth.

People ask what are my intentions with my films — my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be. There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; ‘eternal values,’ ‘immortality’ and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.
The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.
We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts.
Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

I get very little validation for any of my work, and a considerable amount of indifference and even hostility. I am not complaining, but did want to put some positive feedback in the public domain, to feed some part of me that needs feeding.

I believe I can honestly describe myself as a Visionary.  I see things other people do not see.  I look at the same world others look at, and see how it can be made better, in ways which are uniquely my own.

I will periodically email economists at various universities, trying to get them to rethink our financial system.  The more I contemplate things, the more I think the MORAL argument is more important than the practical argument, which of course is that fractional reserve banking is INHERENTLY unstable.

I did a round Sunday, and of course have not heard back from anyone.  This was the crux of the email:

 I would like to encourage you to consider a simple, but currently
counter-paradigmatic proposition: money creation is inherently
theft, is unjust, and creates a functional class division between
those empowered by law to create money and those who would go to jail for it. To
the extent the rich get richer and the poor poorer, as an inherent element of
our system, this is the primary mechanism.

It is astonishing to me that I need to make this argument, that some moralizing evangelistic organizer has not come to the same conclusion.  


Actually, Googling “inflation is theft” does come up with some stuff, like this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/billflax/2011/03/03/you-call-it-inflation-i-call-it-theft/

I guess the question then becomes: why are not more people talking about this?  Again, the argument is a practical one, but also a moral one.

And I seem to be the only one with a solution, which, again, is obvious, or should be obvious: just reverse the path we took to get here.

Have to run, but wanted to do a brief post.