Moderates United

I am going to stop doing posts on politics for the time being.  I like to think I have a talent for analysis, but it comes from a place of emotional dissociation.  I cannot but put people in categories, cannot but separate myself emotionally from many of them; and what I need now is what most people need all the time, which is connection.

At root our problem is this: it is easy to separate naive idealists from their belief in a perfect America; it is easy to separate people who have been taught submission to authority from the notion that God is even a relevant conjecture; and having done both of these things, it is easy to create an irresistible impulse to join a new tribe, a new group, to obtain a new source of meaning, of belonging, of place, of home.

Until we can offer an alternative other than family, country, God and tradition, people of genuine good will will lose the cultural battle, and that battle in turn fuels what happens in Congress.

Consider that we are borrowing NOW almost half of a very large budget, and that the Baby Boomers have not even hit, and that we just massively expanded entitlements through Obamacare.

How is there even a debate?  How is there even a question as to what must be done?

There is a debate because the tribe members are coercive, powerful.  They are not happy.  This is not a good solution to the problem of generating human community and a sense of personal meaning; but until they have something else, they will cling to it with every ounce of their being.

I came up with a three symbol indictment of socialism.  I can’t find a “not equal to” symbol on my keyboard, but it can be drawn easily enough.

My intent is simple: improvement is not equal to leveling.  Improvement is not equal to making everyone the same.  Entropy being what it is, socialism always amounts to the project of tearing (most of) the high and mighty down.  Human nature being what it is, a class system is retained–one more rigid than the previous class system, and without any sense of noblesse oblige–and the whole thing justified through the very process of lies used to enact the system in the first place.

Consider this lyric: “tax the rich, feed the poor/ until there are no rich no more.”  Even within the logic of the lyric, the money runs out before the poor become able to feed themselves well.  Everyone knows this is how it REALLY works.  They just have no alternative meaning system to substitute for impulses which in some respects are no different from those which led previous generations into wars.

Here is another good phrase: More community; less socialism.  Socialism only builds meaningful solidarity within the ranks of the socialists themselves, who constitute a small elite.  What it does to the mass of society one can readily see in Britain and France: it builds a sense of helplessness, despair, anger, depression, and self destructive rage.

That is because it is not founded on actual empathy, on actual caring.  

I felt like I was going to crack up yesterday.  I haven’t had a full day off in at least three weeks, and a two day weekend in some months.  I drove at least 30 hours by myself last week, and spent most of my time working alone, doing difficult physical labor, at least in the case of what I did Saturday.

To this I add my inner activation work, and Saturday I got “flooded”, to use the term psychotherapists use.  It’s not where you want to be.  It’s where a shitload of stuff comes up at once and you feel like you are going crazy. Driving for some reason seems to be a sort of trance state conducive to allowing feelings up.

Anyway, I activated my social support network on Facebook, and they came through.  That made me feel good, or at least as good as I am capable of feeling deep inside.

Whatever the horror was that I went through, I have now touched it.  The thing about being capable of dissociation, though, is that you can let it go back into its cave, and bring it out when you want to.  It takes balls to do this–you are knowingly activating awful, awful feelings, knowing they will come through, knowing they will hurt; but also knowing they have a finite extent.  The lesson does not last forever.

I can do this.  Sometimes I use a technique my last therapist taught me, which is to look in one direction, and imagine safety, calm, love, beauty; and then put all the ugly stuff in another direction, say looking to the left in the one case and the right in the other.  I can pull up feelings so deep that I involuntarily scream.  The word is horror, absolute, abject horror.  Then I pendulate back, and it goes away.  Over time you dip your feet in there enough, and the feeling fades.

I can’t do this today. I am too spent.  But I will be at it again soon.

I really, really want to live a life of purpose, where I choose what I am going to do and why; and where I am able to take deep meaning and pleasure from my work, and all my relationships with everyone I know and value and love.  I want to build more structure both for my work and for my social web.

And the only way out is through.  This is why this work must be done.  I refuse to accept anything less than a life of excellence and beauty.

You cannot direct unconscious processes with the rational mind. It’s use is limited to finding or creating ways for unconscious work to proceed.

Corollary: you cannot be rational until you know how to be irrational.

This is a completely random post, of the sort any long term readers I may have have hopefully become accustomed to.

I can’t get the image out of my head of Robin Williams traveling around the world in spirit form looking for cocaine.  It is my understanding that those who pass on with severe addictions–which in my view should be viewed as severe unprocessed traumas which have been managed during life by recourse to chemicals which mask the underlying illness–keep those addictions, and that he has as well.  He never made it through the tunnel, or up the hill, however you want to frame it.  He did not surmount the challenges set before him in this life.

Here is an interesting account of a death and rebirth experience (NDE does not quite fit the data), in which he talks about the fate of addicts: http://www.amazon.com/Return-Tomorrow-George-C-Ritchie/dp/080078412X/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410961015&sr=8-1&keywords=return+from+tomorrow

The more times I review John Wooden’s philosophy of life, the more I  feel he really had things figured out.  Now, he was just a basketball coach, but I really feel that the emotional maturity needed to master ANYTHING goes far beyond any sport.

His father, who appears to have been a very wise man, gave him a card at a certain age–perhaps graduation from high school–with a number of sayings on it.

One of them was “Make each day your masterpiece”.

I have read this before, but am only now starting to understand it.

Wooden, in my understanding, figured he should take as long to PLAN a practice as it took his athletes to undertake it.  He would choreograph very complex drills in which conditioning was combined with very specific game day practice.

And he speaks on a number of occasions about the power of gentleness.  His aim, his accomplished aim, was gradualness.  His aim was to improve just a little every day, to plan ahead, to never reach a point where his lack of preparation required him to get agitated.  He looked far, far down the road, and never required “peak efforting”.  He never wanted his players to “rise to the occasion”, but rather be ready for it, to have reached a point in their preparation where the big game was something they looked forward to mastering.

Think about this concept of choreographing a day, to making your work and relaxation a work of art, an aesthetic statement about who you are and what you value.

You are not just planning to get X, Y, and Z done.  You are doing it with style, with a view to the long haul, with a view to self improvement, however you conceive this;  to, in important respects, master life, such that the major challenges can be taken in stride, because you were ready for them.

I don’t know if he is getting any support in the press–I can’t be accused of being a Fox or anything else viewer, as TV moves much too slow and in most cases is much too stupid; I just need the facts, and I can do my own analysis–but I want to say I am somewhat on Adrian Peterson’s side.

I’ve been spanked with a belt, quite a few times.  I’ve never been tagged in the nuts, but that was not his intent.  As any long time readers of this blog should readily grasp, I do a lot of inner work, and I don’t consider any of the spankings I got after age 5 to have had any significant negative impact on me at all, and some may have been beneficial.

Now, I don’t remember age 4, and it’s quite possible my first spanking at age 12 months may have left a mark, but according to my best architectural excavations, this does not appear to be the case.  You can be traumatized without being touched at all, which appears to have happened in my own case.

As should be blatantly obvious, Peterson did not consider his behavior aberrant or exceptional, or anything but being consistent with “spare the rod–note it says rod, not hand–and spoil the child.”  This is very old American received wisdom.  It is not stretching it too far, I don’t think, to say it has informed our history of being law abiding and able to work well with others.

Personally, I don’t think spanking works very well.  We tried it a couple times on my oldest when she was quite young, and it only made her behavior worse.  It was ineffective.

But Peterson himself is very successful, and he was raised that way.  There are any number of country songs which talk about being “cane switch raised”.  Here is one example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZNsPR6K1xo

So I cannot find myself horrified that Peterson would raise his kid the way he was raised.  I cannot join the chorus of those calling for Peterson’s social and professional excommunication for doing something he no doubt honestly thought–rightly or wrongly, we can certainly debate–was for his child’s own best good.

We have reached a time when children don’t know the phrase “Son, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”

Again, we can argue whether spanking works.  It does seem obvious to me that we are raising–have been raising–children who feel entitled to everything, who do not understand that pain is a part of life, and who in many important respects NEVER mature psychologically.

Does spanking help with this?  I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I do know that we will become weak as a society if we let frightened women dictate EVERYTHING.  Men and manliness have roles to play, and part of being a man is being tough.

I’ll leave it at that.  I don’t have the answers, but the questions themselves seem to be getting overlooked too, and that I can rectify.

When is Congress going to ask Obama if he provided funding and training to what became ISIS?  Six months ago, they were “Syrian rebels”, and he wanted to support them.  Even then they were cutting the heads off of babies and raping their mothers, and even then he still wanted us in there to fight Assad, so why is it not only possible, but LIKELY that HE is the one who initiated this mess in his patent desire to topple Assad?

I will add the obvious: Assad has said he does not want us in there, and Obama has said if he fires his Russian anti-aircraft missiles at us he will be toppled.  This leads us to the utterly farcical and completely insane possibility that we may be at war with EVERYONE in Syria.  For what?

And all without Congressional authorization.

And to be clear, I support limited action in Iraq, which is nominally our ally, to keep ISIS from getting too comfortable.  I have in mind special operators sniping and ambushing, air strikes and the like.  Economic warfare would be acceptable as well.  If they are selling oil and reaping the profits, those rigs can be attacked.  The roads in their areas of operations can be destroyed.  Their leadership can be targeted.

But, again, how did we get here?  Did our President provide support to LITERAL baby killers, who never existed in Vietnam (at least on our side; the NVA regularly used children for suicide missions), but who definitely do exist now?  And again, for what?  What is our vital national interest in Syria?  I see none.

The best explanation I have seen is that the Gulf oil interests want to build a natural gas pipeline across Syria to compete with the Russians, and Assad–who presumably would reap huge benefits and money from this–is resisting them due to in effect being bought off by the Russians, who view this as economic warfare.

But that’s not our problem. It would be good to weaken the Russians, but war is not an acceptable means in my view to that end.

Like most men, I suppose, I have fantasies sometimes about running into a burning building to save someone, or into the line of fire.  And you get hit, you’re dying: what are your last words?  The cliched answer is “tell my wife and kids I love them.”

I’ve thought about this, and my kids hear “I love you” literally every time they talk to me on the telephone, and hear it twice from me every time I put them to bed, and have their entire lives.  When they were little we also had a very elaborate game that evolved over time that took 2-3 minutes, that they loved.  They are teenagers now, and we still have a routine, even though it has been shortened greatly.

So there is little informational content to this phrase.

Instead, my take is: tell my kids to be brave.  It’s OK to cry, but there will be a time to move on.  I’ll watch over you if I can.

If I only get out the first line, well that’s enough.

There is little enough love in this world as it is.  Surely families can manage it, if they merely make it a priority?  No one you love should ever not hear it from you constantly.  We are ships traveling in the fog; it doesn’t take long to drift apart.

I have an enormous tolerance for emotional pain. That is why I don’t really need a therapist.  Good therapists are like physical therapists, who not only show you what to do, but more or less make sure you do it.  If you are sufficiently motivated on your own, and can take the pain without someone watching you and yelling at you, AND if you understand the process, the therapist is not in my view needed.  I can and do do the work on my own.

I forget sometimes that most other people are not like this.  I am somewhat unusual in my capacity to stand solitude, insult, confusion, grief, anger, anxiety, and my latest, abject horror.  This recent addition is a nice addition to my collection, which I think will complete it.  I won’t say more at the moment.

But what happens with me is I can SEE how people are constrained, see the chains around, see how they are likely to live entire lives with massive amounts of potential positive emotions completely unrealized, and in the constant dismal presence of negative feelings.

On a vastly smaller scale, I see, I think, what the Buddha saw, when he saw how many human lives are lived with only a fraction of the pleasure, joy, and fulfillment that were possible.  This is Duhkha.

People get hurt, then hide or run.  But those emotions are a part of you.  They are clothing you cannot shed.  They are a part of your psychological being, and will always be such until confronted, recognized, processed and overcome.  They will always bend you away from what is best for you.  They will always lead you into preventable confusion and sorrow and fear.

As the saw goes, what you resist persists.

So I will sometimes go into people’s bubbles more than I ought to.  I intend well, but most people rarely venture into those places, and do not like to be reminded of what they think they have forgotten.