Moderates United

I once described myself as an aspiring curmudgeon.  Well, as my kids point out from time to time–with justice–I seem long since to have tapped my inner Walter Matthau, and even if I like kids, I do like sometimes yelling at adults.  And I continue quibbling on the internet.

[although I will say that it is becoming increasingly emotionally clear to me how traumatized many segments of the right have been by the relentless lying and bullying that has been the Left’s most successful method.  I’m not putting up with it any more.  Truth attacks: I am going to still call that acceptable.]

I wanted to say “dance of the curmudgeon”, but they don’t dance.  We don’t have wings.  We throw stones at low flying pigeons.

OK, I exaggerate a bit.  A bit.

Here is what I wanted to write, a nice quote from Peter Levine’s “In an Unspoken Voice.”

In a situation of inescapable and mortal threat, the brain stem, or reptilian brain, sends intense signals to the viscera, causing some of them to go into hyperdrive (as with the gastrointestinal system) and others to constrict and close down, as with the bronchioles of the lungs or the beating of the heart. In the first instance (hyperdrive), we get symptoms like butterflies, knots in the gut or rumbling, uncontrollable diarrhea.  With the lungs, we have feelings of tightness and suffocation, which, when chronic, can lead to symptoms of asthma.  Likewise, the effect of the primitive vagus on the heart is to decrease the beat to a level so low that it can actually lead to (voodoo) death.  Because these sensations feel so dreadful, they themselves become a source of threat [and you suppress them from consciousness]. So rather than coming from outside, the threat now emanates from deep within one’s bowels, lungs, heart, and other organs and can cause the exact same effect upon the viscera that the original threat evoked.  This situation is the unfortunate setup for a positive feedback loop with disastrous negative consequences.  In addition, because traumatized individuals are experiencing (intense) threat signals, the PROJECT this inner turmoil outward, and thus perceive the world as being responsible for their inner distress–and so remove themselves from both the real source of the problem and its potential solution [again, they dissociate and fail to recognize that they even have these feelings]. This dynamic also wreaks havoc not only on the body but also on relationships.

If I can paraphrase this, it seems to be literally the case that small sensations in your viscera, that remain unconscious to you, can cause you to view the world as a dangerous place, and to be constantly on your guard, which is one of the symptoms of PTSD.

Conversely, as I have tried to copy Levine in saying, when your viscera are not normally worked up, and you are allowing the free flow of feeling, the so-called “gut instinct” actually works quite well.  That is what it is intended for: all our senses are antennas scanning for feedback.

Hopefully this makes some sense.

Oh, and I was thinking about being grumpy, because I am grumpy.  If it was my birthday, I would take my piece of cake and go eat it in the bathroom.  Bah humbug.

This too shall pass, but I am allowing it while it does.  I need to get it out/get through it. 

I have twice now had odd dreams, in which the intelligences in my gut–which feel to me like symbiotic, but separate animals (and I am talking the nervous system, not the bacteria)–were showing me they were reorganizing.  Implicitly, something has been off in that system. My relationship with food, and the way I interact with the world through food, has been deranged.  This is not a hormonal thing, or problem with allergies, or any of the foods I’ve been eating.  It is the WAY I have been eating, a way out of connection–of intrinsic, sympathetic connection–with my gut, with my instincts, with that part of me that when working well works as a superlative early warning system and bullshit detector, and general systemic monitor.

It manifests in my solar plexus, but the whole thing is involved.  I am trying to be gentle and to listen openly to the messages I am receiving.  This is “information”, formatted somatically, that I need.

Being me, let me go off to something completely different, but related.

So I was reading that Newtown was a Satanist hub, and decided to Google it, since when I am in this particular mood, I look at EVERYTHING, however far fetched, and came up with this: http://www.satanservice.org/theory/coscm.txt

Now, I noticed a long time ago that BDSM afficionados are quite good at verbalizing and rationalizing what they do.  There is a very good reason for this: trauma detaches you from body, forcing intellectualization.  This, in turn, is an unnatural situation, which means you need to return to the body, but in a contorted, unnatural way.  That is what BDSM does, and in my view Satanism is an ideological form, an intellectual form. of self and other abuse.

Self evidently, any creed which takes as its patron the Prince of Lies cannot be relied on to tell the truth about anything, but what he writes here looks reasonably honest, if only about the outside of what they do.

Here is the point that occurred to me: Satanism exists in the world of shit, literally.  In my own experience, the energies I get from my gut are trauma, fear, pain, horror.  These feelings reside, in my view, BOTH in the physical nervous system as artifacts of traumatic experiences that both stayed and never left, and which also get regularly retriggered by certain stimuli, and which are often not noticed by the person, particularly if they have been a neural firewall to keep those energies out; AND (yes, not the most felicitous sentence) within the subtle energy body described by the Chinese and others.

Freud talked about being anal, about either crapping all over other people–as in the Anal Expulsive–or more commonly being repressed, being Anal Retentive.

Now, he often was very right while being very wrong.  He often seems to have intuited important truths, then allowed his brain to take him on the wrong path entirely.

I would submit that these conditions, to the extent they exist, exist not just in relation to the anus itself, but to the whole system.  The anus, after all, is not the only thing which keeps shit from falling out.  The whole thing is involved.

And this system is VERY suited for receiving and holding all forms of tension and trauma.  We would not think it, but why would it not be sensitive to the environment, when the digestive tract, ultimately, is what converts food to continued life for us?

This is a bit out there, but if you’re used to this blog, you’re used to me speculating wildly.

As far as Newtown, who the hell knows?  Satanism is a cult, so it would seem that if there were one active member, there were likely more.  They only list two addresses, with the other being San Francisco.

I have met therapists who have worked with the victims of Satanic cults, and they are quite real.  Sadistic and horrific rites are in fact performed in this nation, allegedly in the service of and worship of Satan.

Here is a link that seems reasonably impartial, on the Satanisms we know of: http://www.religionfacts.com/satanism/index.htm

My interest in this was reawakened this week when it was revealed that according to official FBI statistics, no murders were committed in Newtown in 2012.

Digging in to it, it appears the consensus among those who think it was a conspiracy was that Adam Lanza did not exist, that his picture was photoshopped, that the mother had multiple aliases and is not only still alive, but gave an interview on camera, and that NO children were killed, and that whole thing was staged using actors and police and emergency personnel in on the “joke”.  The goal, self evidently, was creating an operative pretext to call all opponents of allowing a government monopoly on the effective use of force “baby killers.”  One can see the logic of this, cynical and absolutely awful as it is.

I have looked at a lot of videos, which I don’t like, since I prefer to read.  I can do it ten times faster, and filter for actually useful information.  I will save you the many links that were supposedly posted the day before, which seem to show preknowledge.  Here is one that is still active: http://nawlee.org/sandy-hook-press-release/ 

Note the date.  The Sandy Hook shooting supposedly took place on the 14th.  Why that has not been corrected, I do not know.  This being the internet, maybe a conspiracy theorist copied something.  The claim, which I don’t care to investigate further, has been made that MANY people did this.

The claim is now being made that Sandy Hook Elementary was not even OPEN when the shooting allegedly took place.  One person claims there was no internet use.  Another claims that if you look at hard copy public bulletins all references to Sandy Hook disappear about 2008, even though all the other schools in the area continue to post things like school plays, PTA meetings and the like.

I am tired of researching, so I am going to give you three points to evaluate, which I think in tandem are damning for those willing to see with fresh eyes.

One: watch the first ten minutes of this video (or however much you want, until what is not happening becomes obvious): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8150kYsWlcM

Let me reiterate a few facts: the school supposedly had over 600 children.  The claim was made that some people were wounded and not killed, both children and adults.

Where are the ambulances?  They are at the Fire House.  There was no shooting at the fire house.

Where are the children?  Even the helicopter reporter asks this.  They have at that point not been evacuated, but there are no buses.  No one ever films them leaving, throughout the REST of the day.  We have a PICTURE of kids that got circulated, but one which could quite easily have been taken months earlier during a fire drill, and it is perhaps a dozen out of the 600.  Where is MedEvac?  MedEvac was apparently never even CALLED, according to another one of these videos.  They were never put on stand-by.

And most telling, just watch the demeanor of the cops.  They are loitering. They don’t give a fuck.  There is  no urgency.  You know what it looks like?  Another fucking boring drill.  And that is what it looks like to me too.

Now watch this video of alleged father Robbie Parker, and alleged aunt something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sino1wwm3cs

I want you to watch the video through three lens.  Watch it multiple times, if need be.  Imagine these people are serious, and just lost a dear child.

Then when that doesn’t work (I don’t think it will),  look at them as emotionally detached, pathologically unemotional people.

Then watch it as bad acting.  Robbie Parker particularly.  It is OBVIOUS that he is smiling, then getting into his role.

Imagine this scenario: he has just been in the back with a bunch of fellow actors, hashing out his statement, working out the details of their story so there are no inconsistencies.  Imagine he sees himself as in the middle of what he sees as a massive practical joke, a massive–thus far successful–fraud of a scale rarely attempted in American history.  Does that smile not make sense?  Does his failure to start with an appropriate demeanor not square perfectly with the mental mediocrity needed to be complicit in a lie this crass and abominable?

Now, every day is Halloween on the internet, and if I were desperate or unprincipled enough, I could have any credentials I wanted to tomorrow, make any claim, and some people would believe me.  Thus, I think it wise to doubt much of what one reads.

However, this website claims not just to have identified Parker as an actor, but to have found out his actual name: Samual Travis Delaney.  Profession?  Among other things, actor.

Now watch as many minutes as you like of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meV0UYxhxeY

The coroner is odd, but what I want you do to is watch the two cops on the right side of the screen, to his left.  I have done a bit of work in microexpression recognition–Paul Ekman created a training program that I’ve spent perhaps two hours with–and it seems OBVIOUS to me that both of them are suppressing smirks.  The one with the mustache in particular seems to break out into an actual grin a couple of times.  Pause it at 1:48.  Look at the guy at the left at 2:44.  There are a number of occasions where he seems to be suppressing laughter.  The woman smiles too, behind him, about 2:58, then immediately tries to suppress it.

Watch the guy with the mustache at 3:04 again, after being asked about the nature of the wounds.  He has to look down, and both the other cops have a grin barely being suppressed, like kids getting away with something.  He comes back up with a grin about 3:10, and sneaks a conspiratorial glance at the cop on the left.

I suspect I could go on, but if you can’t see it by now, you’re not going to see it.

This video footage could easily run by somebody skilled in lie detection and microexpression analysis, and it is not going to be consistent with grief.

Simple question: does this make sense if they have just seen a tragedy they are greatly affected by?  No, of course not.

Does it make sense if they KNOW everything this guy is saying is complete bullshit, and that everybody is eating it up?  Fuck yes it does.

We can certainly question the Republican Party as to its commitment to fiscal sanity and the principle of limited government.  In general, though, it has been a STRONG supporter of the 2nd Amendment, and the balance of power between the people and their government it was intended to facilitate, and that alone is worth a lot.  An armed populace is much harder to deal with than an unarmed one, and Obama alone has put tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of firearms into circulation.

Even though a great lie–and I would argue a great evil–seems to have been committed here, there is reason for cautious optimism because the people who put this show on seem to view it as vital to disarm Americans–something  they failed horribly in, creating in fact a massive surge in gun and ammo buying–and that current political weather is strongly in their faces.

It is important to tell the truth.  I would like to see an actual investigation done, with actual interviews with alleged parents and confirmation of their identities, to the extent possible.  I would like some sort of investigator appointed who could operate outside the normal demands of politics.  I don’t know what options we have.  Perhaps an Independent Prosecutor, if we can find an honest one.

A recurring theme among people who claimed to be knowledgeable in this field is that this was not only a hoax, but that it wasn’t even a very good one.

But this lie reaches throughout Connecticut Police.  It reaches the Federal level.  In my view, it reaches the Oval Office, and those voices which intrude in on it that wish no Americans well.

We need to start facing as a nation the truth that at least some segments of our government have set the gross curtailment of our liberty as a vital goal, and have in fact acted on it, and perhaps even committed actual acts of murder.

I’m at this point willing to consider many possibilities.  I had seen the claim made prior to the war in Afghanistan that it was really about an oil or gas pipeline.  I had never read or seen anything about this, the leftists blamed everything on Big Oil anyway, so I saw that as something made up by the cynical for the stupid.

But lo and behold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Afghanistan_Pipeline

This fucking thing actually exists.  It was started in 1995, stopped in 1998 due to Taliban opposition, and started again in 2002 after our invasion.  Whether getting this thing done was a principle secret goal of the war or not, our war clearly enabled it to happen, and it otherwise likely would not have.  It opens next year.

We need to start asking bold and large questions about the last 30 years.  Now is the time.

No one who reads me can possibly accuse me of thinking small.  Saving the world?  I mean it literally. I mean putting into play–deploying–ideas which, if multiplied, will Act To stabilize global finances, cultural systems, and everything and everyone tied to them.

I have proposed the creation of ersatz, secondary, voluntary groups I propose calling Bohannons, which will act as extended families. [I don’t know where I got this name.  I had thought it was in Stranger in a Strange Land, but without rereading it, I can’t find it mentioned in the summary.  It does mean “victorious” in Gaelic.  I like that.]

It occurred to me that this idea is potentially much bigger than I realized.  It sprang from my first experience of Holotropic Breathwork, in which I was astonished how quickly groups of complete strangers achieved extremely high levels of emotional intimacy and openness.  My thought was obvious: why not create standing groups?  Why not grow old together?  This is beautiful solution to the problem of alienation and loneliness.  Groups of 20 or so are manageable.

Then I kept going.  Why not develop funerary rites?  I had in mind this scene from Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.  Every group could develop their own.  You could have regional variations.j

Members could help each other financially, as churches do.

You could support one anothers goals.  One idea I really like was from De La Salle High School football program, in which you pair up and give the other person your set of goals, and they hold you accountable.

But then I started into University of Chicago, cold stone building sorts of thinking.  Next stop: Abstraction.

The family as cultural unit is attacked by Marxists–which is to say just about all Professors of anything to do with the Humanities the world over–as patriarchal, unjust, predatory.  No doubt, in some cases it can be those things.

But what have I created?  A HORIZONTAL group, in which “leadership” can change hands in every meeting.  In my vision, the goal is not teaching or telling, but eliciting: giving people a space to tell their story in their way, and to expect to receive unconditional support.  They get advice only if they ask for it.  The world is not wanting for opinions.  It is wanting understanding.

In the Marxist world view–and this is the plain fact, even if the predatory rhetoric remains benign on the surface–there are two social positions: the isolated individual, and the State, or collective.  The goal is not to elicit from the in-dividual what is unique about them, but the exact opposite: to cause them to DENY everything that is unique about them, and to adopt a mindset and worldview that is dictated by a central elite.  Psychosocially, it consists in the emotional cloning of clinical narcissists and psychopaths, and the implantation of their ideas and manias in every member of the collective.  A hive mind, based on a lunatic queen.

I am offering, in conception, an intermediate, HUMAN position. Marxism clearly increases alienation, it facilitates it, even though it claims to oppose it.

Here is something that would work, something that is doable. I think I have more to say, but my brain is full.  I’m going to go climb a ladder and drill some holes in a wall.  It’s a great thing I do manual labor for a living.

Human beings are born with the capacity for violence.  It is bred in us.  We are by evolutionary ancestry omnivores, which means that almost all of us for the entirety of our history have gotten some of our food through violence towards animals.

We seem also to share a tribal instinct.  We become closer to one group, in part, in solidarity against another.  The very existence of a Group B makes Group A huddle just a bit closer together, and we also share a instinctual need for that sort of community.

During the so-called Age of Enlightenment, the claim was made, arising out of Christian theological doctrine, that the mind and body–the soul as expressed through a rational, purified mind, and the body, source of all evil–were both severable and at odds with one another.

Emotionally detached men came up with the idea that something like pure Reason was possible, that it was possible to separate a sovereign mind from entangling emotions.

And they produced what might be called Post-Tribal ideas like “All men are created equal”, and “And are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”, and “Among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness [Eudaimonia]”.  Obviously, it took some time to “live out the true meaning of [our] creed”.

Such ideas are in my understanding unique in world history.  I would contrast them, for example, with India’s ancient caste (varna and jati) system, in which you are more or less born into a trade union that exists at a certain social level.  You have duties (dharmas) and in somes cases privileges. Everyone has a tribe in an enormously complex system, and they never leave it.  They can’t.  That’s not how it works.  You live out your life, and hope to rise in the next life.

On the one hand we have nothing BUT tribes and on the other no tribes at all.  Everyone is equal in all ways, at least in principle, or at least equal in their RIGHTS as seen by the government and the people–the People–who constitute it, again in principle.

The whole thing has no content to it.  It does not positively tell you what to DO, what matters.  It presumes, though, as obvious, some sort of religious commitment centered in some way around Christianity, which could and did include Freemasonry, and many (almost entirely Protestant) sects of Christianity.

Add some time to this thing, and the belief in God starts to fade.  It has been attacked in the realm of “science” (I will use that word as shorthand to refer to the people who are employed doing science, without granting that all or even most of them adhere strictly to the METHODS of science;  they don’t, not in this domain), and attacked in the Humanities.

Moral confusion grows, but the biologically rooted need for tribes does not.

Which brings me to the present day, and very unabstract, very personal, somewhat ugly, but I think justified anger.  I got angry at someone on Facebook who posted a cartoon portraying conservatives cartoonishly, as, among other things, calling for dirty air and water so CEO’s could make more money, more jobs to go overseas, an end to taxpayer funded benefits, and a litany of other things.

And it just HIT ME that this cartoon was not different in any way, in intent or implied viciousness, from the cartoons the Nazis used to demonize the Jews.  You create a CARICATURE of your enemy, then repeat it over and over and over until people believe the lie, until they literally think that is how their ideological enemies think.

My oldest, just yesterday, was telling me that it was understood that Republicans are for Big Business and Democrats for racial minorities.  It is in the water, the food, air.  Our children imbibe this carefully concocted PROPAGANDA–and that is clearly, unmistakably what it is–from an early age.

And this should make us ANGRY.  We should always be angry when lies are told.  It seems to me many conservatives have been enduring this abuse for so long we simply tune it out.  Why?

The particular individual who posted was UTTERLY unable to understand why I was angry, why I would react passionately to Goebbelsian misrepresentations of people I identify with.  He stated repeatedly that he has been moderate in his responses to my anger, and more or less WTF was my problem.  I asked him repeatedly how he could possibly consider that cartoon anything but inflammatory, and of course he refused to answer.  There is no good answer, and he knew it.  That much he did know, even if he was unwilling to admit to the hate churning in his gut.

And it hit me: conservatives have literally been dehumanized to the point where we are literally having conversations like “I don’t know why you mind being called Nigger.  After all we let you walk our streets, and even shop in some of our stores.” or “I don’t know why you mind wearing the Star of David.  After all, your store is still open and we even let Echtdeutsche shop there.”

There is a difference-maker embedded in our brains, and if it is not fed intelligently, it will be fed dysfunctionally.  And it occurs to me that the more difference is erased in the egalitarian project–the more all races, all creeds, all gender differences, all social markers of any sort are eradicated in principle–the greater the need to amplify the one remaining difference: that between egalitarians and true Liberals.  It becomes a mania, a semi- or fully unconscious need to amplify all hate, all anger, and direct it at one group, and one group only: the out-group, that one which still believes in the possibility of and need for moral judgement.

Watch this clip: http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/cnn-anchor-laughs-at-assault-on-bristol-palin-forced-to-apologize/

This attack sounds horrible, and Bristol was plainly very traumatized by it, and this anchor did not even see the need to APPEAR to care.  It was the daughter of a conservative woman–who was also viciously attacked AS a person, as an individual, even though Leftists supposedly stand for women–and that was all she needed to know.  She got beat down and dragged by her feet?  Fucking funny.  Best shit I’ve heard in years.

We conservatives need to wake up to the full extent of the awfulness that has been directed at us now for many years.  We need to fight back, never back down, not let any of the jackasses get away with their propaganda operations.  We need to underscore their innate viciousness and dehumanization of us at every turn.

It is a clear historical fact that dehumanization of PRECISELY the sort the Left has been directing at us now for at least 50 years has always preceded mass murders.  You portray your enemy as awful, as a parasite, as an insect, and this creates a CONDUIT for the channeling of all the rages anyone might have felt for anyone else, for all undirected anger, all undirected hurt, all unprocessed negative emotions, into one place.

We may have won Congress–to be clear, Republicans, which I do not conflate with conservatives, aka actual Liberals–but we have many miles to go to reclaim our humanity in the eyes of large segments of the nation.

Leftist economic and political ideas do not work for anything but entrenching small elites and enslaving the masses in poverty and what might be termed “rightlessness”.  Leftist propaganda, though, must be seen as very effective at creating enemies and directing hate toward them.  Tricking people, guiding people, is something they regrettably do all too well.

I have, from time to time, shared my thoughts/feelings about the after-life.  I believe there are differing levels, that all of us are born multiple times, and that there are both relative hells and heavens.  The Buddhists have something like 12 levels, with roughly the top 9 being substantially better than here.  Effectively, they are tiers of heaven.

The lower levels seem to be tied to this world. People stay here because they can’t let something go.  And there are worse places than here, which also seem to be tied to the planet, to this sort of convergence of solid energy which has been convulsed out of the pure energy of space.

Here is the thing: we are born and reborn until we learn needed lessons, and then we move on.  We  no longer have to come here.  But the existence of human life on this planet, of our species, is a prerequisite to coming back.  If we were to end life on Earth, human life, many spirits in the lower realms would be unable to reincarnate and complete their spiritual work.  They would be trapped in limbo.

Such an event would amount to a Judgement Day, one based not on one life, but on many, many lives, hundreds, perhaps thousands of chances. It would mean such spirits would be trapped until live reevolves on Earth, if it ever does.

This is of course a nightmare scenario, and one I hope is wrong.  Higher spirits, of course, would not be tied to this planet, and would suffer no difficulty.

This is an odd, weird, idea.  I have a lot of them.  But I thought I would put it out there.  It is possible to imagine something like a Christian Apocalypse, even taking into accounts much bigger visions of God and reality.

I spent perhaps 8 years arguing several hours a day on the internet.   I was attacked constantly as a child on all levels, and I guess I sought it out, and learned to dominate debates.  I have been often ugly, often aggressive.  I have, in my defense, also been consistently attacked as a PERSON, since personal demonization and character assassination have always been important tricks in the Leftist arsenal.  Alinsky discusses this process at length and very openly.

In recent days I have been releasing some negative energies–the equivalent, I suppose, of pus from emotionally insulated sores.  And of course I find myself arguing again on the internet.

But I’m trying to look beyond this, beyond this palliative activity, this thing which gives me something to DO.

(And to be clear, all this arguing made my mind much sharper, allowed me to develop and test my ideas, and forced me to learn a whole lot of things I would not have otherwise.  It has been immensely useful, but compulsive, and compulsive is never good in the long term.)

And I realize that trauma is all I have known.  I can’t imagine a life without it.  I don’t know the way forward.  I truly don’t.  It is fog.  It is a road turning around a bend, or going over a hill.

And I realize this is OK, that this is how it works, that uncertainty does not make me a bad person, and that confusion is often a requirement for clarity.

I don’t know.  I don’t know.  I don’t know.  This would likely be a good mantra for me, at least for the time being.

Edit: Grant, these are not pointless abstractions.  Good thinking MUST underlie all good policy.  Our nation is dominated by crappy, sloppy, unprincipled thinking, papered over with Orwellian slogans and bright colors for the children.  You give me a topic, and I can in most cases point you to a 5-10 page, carefully considered essay.  Obamacare, immigration, Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, Social Security, Minimum Wage, the nature of morality, Global Warming, the NSA: it’s a very long list, one which would not exist without me having had my particular manias.

Once I’m done with the initial phase of my inner work, I don’t expect ANY of my political ideas to change.  They are anchored in reason, and reason does not change as emotions change.  What I expect to change is my capacity to present them in a persuasive rather than bombastic way.  My outer veneer needs a LOT of work, but the ideas don’t, in my considered view.

It is astonishing how quickly fear turns into violence.  It certainly leads to physical violence, but it can be as subtle as waiting for the other person to finish without listening, because you have something to say.  It can be impatience.  It can be rigidity.

I am on a lesson in my Kum Nye practice which is seemingly pulling the worst out of me.  I have been unable to refrain from arguing on the internet.  To my credit, I am persisting in it, despite the ugliness it is pulling up, because I believe there will be an end to it, and this is the only way; at the same time, I am watching all the ways fear deranges me.

I was talking last night with a guy in a bar about educational costs. He made the, to my mind correct, point that when you go, say, to MIT, what you are really buying is a piece of paper, which validates both that you were smart enough to get in, and smart and diligent enough to get out.

It immediately occurred to me that with all the explosion of internet based learning tools, why not create a company which validates knowledge?  Let’s say you want to be an Electrical Engineer.  Why not create a test for people to demonstrate what they know?  As appropriate, it could even include real world work, like putting together circuit assemblies, or whatever EE’s do.

People could study at home, at their own pace, pay very little tuition, and once companies get used to the idea, are sold on the idea, college would become vastly less important, and cost might well start returning to the realm of the reasonable.

You could have differing level tests, and differing levels of Pass.  If you want to study Humanities, you could do four years in two.  You could accumulate certificates of various sorts.

And to be clear, I am not talking just about on-line learning.  I am talking about getting rid of the notion of courses and credits completely, and simply testing what a person can demonstrate knowing, in aggregate, on a specific date.

I am thinking someone could become like the Underwriter’s Labs, but for validating knowledge.  Obviously, you charge for it.  A lot of work would go into figuring out what companies actually need for, say, graduating Chemical Engineers, Physicists, etc.  You could have differing focuses.  Obviously, content could be offered for a fee.

If anyone has proposed this, I have not seen it.  Even places like the University of Phoenix are still giving you a degree and using the Credit system.

I would like to assert a principle, that qualitatively new ideas–intelligence, in all the manners in which it expresses itself–can only initially flow horizontally or upwards.  From there, it CAN but does not invariably flow down.

What I mean by this is that if someone–and I have in mind at the moment me–has a radically new idea, it can only be understood and appreciated by people of equal or superior intelligence.  Since most of the people who have such ideas are very high up in their levels of intelligence, and since even most intelligent people suffer from varying emotional rigidities and capacities for negative hallucinations, we can with this principle easily derive most of the history of science, in which the new is treated as stupid, then malignant, then obvious.

I spend much of my time being treated as stupid or malignant, to the extent anyone even notices or cares about what I have to say.