Moderates United

As I shared a couple posts ago, I am trying to depoliticize my Facebook page, and focus on sharing more positive content.  At the same time, I am realizing how much I enjoy sharing the political stuff.  It feels like it at least COULD do some good, could further efforts to recover sanity on the part of our thought leaders.

So it occurred to me I could just share articles I like here, in more of a traditional bloggy sort of way.

Here is a good treatment of the Democrats use of the word racist that I endorse fully: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-why-democrats-call-you-racist/

I have been going into some profoundly painful places, and what I am finding is that I don’t break, and that I have a seemingly endless capacity to keep going, particularly if I get enough sleep.

One thing that has appeared to me is the pain of being overlooked, particularly by a primary care-giver.  There is a sensation, an emotional sensation, similar to being hit with a stick, when someone looks at you, and looks through you; when they ought to recognize another sentient, emoting, needing human being out there, but fail to do so.

I will offer one obvious example.  My mother has a consistent habit of projecting her own feelings and needs onto others.  If she is hungry she will assume everyone else is hungry and act on it.  She does this to this very day.  My children have noticed it.  Even though, of course, she would claim to care about the feelings of others, something just isn’t wired right.  There is no there there.

This process is obviously not limited to childhood, but it is particularly damaging in childhood.  Obviously, this is the outcome of interacting with narcissists.  They create on-going, daily, minor electrical shocks, that I am calling Ontic Shocks, because they attack your very being, your sense of self, your sense of being of value and important.

And I did, in my dreaming period every morning before I get up, see what might be called Narcissistic Current.  The role of the Other, for the Narcissist, is to provide a polarity that induces current, from the narcissist, to you, and then back to the narcissist.  You in essence form an energetic mirror, allowing them to see themselves more clearly, allowing them to exist.  As I think I have noted, narcissism is very much a disease of non-existence.  The Other allows them to exist, even if they are unable to grant the Other any ontic validity, and independent sense of self.

Those who spent too much money for a largely useless degree in the humanities will readily recognize my capitalized Other.  It is used often in leftist political discourse, more or less to denote a presumed Western hostility to cultural difference; to denote our presumed tribalism.

It is an interesting fact, though, that the British empire in particular accomplished a great deal of what we would call good, if in our public discourse we still recognized such a thing applying globally.  No nation in history has ever undertaken the eradication of slavery, but Britain did (read this very interesting article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-point-of-an-honest-discussion-of-race/ ).  They put an end to suttee in India, which was the practice of more or less requiring widows to jump onto their husbands funeral pyre and be incinerated alive.  They ended the Thuggee cult.  They generalized the ideas, practices and cultural habits–such as the notion of expecting to be granted rights–of democracy.

They did all this not out of not understanding the Other, but out of fully understanding them and not accepting some aspects of their behavior.  You can fully understand someone, and still reject them.  This is allowed.

The problem with narcissists is precisely a lack of understanding, of the capacity for interactive empathy.  As I keep saying, the true tribalists remaining are the fanatical Muslims and the Leftists–the Cultural Sadeists, as I call them.  Sybaritic Leftists are capable of empathy, but not of forceful expression; not of consistently expressed, coherent morality that they are willing to defend in the face of antagonism.  They do not fully exist, which makes them easy prey, over time, for the Cultural Sadeists, whose narcissistic sense of perfection makes them magnets for the weak.

One final point: love is expansion.  If narcissism–selfishness, self-absorbed-ness, egoism–is using others to see yourself, then love is using yourself to see others.  It is wanting to see them as they are, to interact with them as they are, to build them, help them, comfort them, hold them, help them use themselves to help themselves.  All of this work activates latent potentialities within us; it builds us;  their joy becomes are own joy amplified.

Look out world!!!!!

Oh, I’ll leave it at that.  Alcohol may still be a factor in my life, but it has decided I am no longer congenial company.

Here is a nice piece.  It’s what I’m listening to at the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TReKgCLUqqU

Who will we be, if we grow out of childhood as a species? If we grow beyond our childish imbecility, stubbornness, ignorance, resistance to change?

Who will we be when most of us figure out what actually matters?

I would be quite happy to be fed through a meat grinder to help that happen.  You can’t kill me.  Or anyone else.

Peace.

I’m trying to depoliticize my Facebook page.  It’s so so easy for me to get into little snits, and really it is a variety of pig wrestling.  Dumb people and dogmatists (same disease, only dumb people are more capable of learning) only learn they don’t like you when they run out of things to say.  As I say from time to time, insult is the sincerest form of flattery: it means they can no longer debate ideas.

Still, I can’t and won’t disengage fully from political discourse.  It’s one thing that I do.

Watch this 28 second video: http://madworldnews.com/jihadi-workplace-accident-suicide-belt-detonates-terrorist-pre-party/

I assume it is not a fraud.

Here is the point I wanted to make: most Islamists are stupid, and would not have been capable of organizing something as sophisticated as the World Trade Center bombings.  Yes, they have engineers, physicists, and the like, but the rank and file are stupid.  They are rednecks.  They are the people who at one time would have joined the KKK here.

The World Trade Center bombing–and for simplicity I am simply going to assume all three Towers went down the same way, with nanothermite planted in advance of the plane hijackings–required a huge amount of logistical complexity.  This is often used as an argument against the hypothesis, but the fact remains and will always remain that curtains do not burn for 8 hours, do not burn hot enough to cause flame treated I-beams to collapse, and that single column failures do not create free-fall or even, according to most engineers, ANY collapse of any sort, outside the immediate area.  We also are not even sure how the fires started.

I see no reason to doubt Osama bin Laden played a role in all this.  But I think much of the plan was outside his knowledge.  It would have been compartmentalized.  But the amount of sophistication needed, and the fact that there have been NO leaks of information by the people involved, indicates that some group other than Islamists was involved.

As I have noted several times as well, the goal of Al Queda is to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible.  If they had planted the explosives, they could have detonated them WITHOUT the airplanes.  It would have been much more terrifying, much more effective.  The loss of life would have been ten times what it was, at least.

No, I think those involved were white men, likely raised as nominal Christians, whose fanaticism and fear enabled them to justify this atrocity as somehow necessary for the future of humanity.

As I note on my other website, Carlyle had Malthus in mind when he called economics “the dismal science”.  I would append that bon mot to note that those who follow Malthus are dismal people, anti-humanitarians, anti-humanists, anti-moralists.

It is quite possible to develop considerable certainty in the abstract, and quite possible to be horribly wrong across a lifetime about issues of fundamental importance.

It happens often, every day, and in perhaps every other set of eyes you look into.  The errors of those with power and money, though, affect far more people.

As I have likely mentioned, I often find myself listening to people’s life stories.  I think countless people the world over feel abandoned and alienated.  They interact with people all day every day, but no one really listens.  I listen.  I don’t judge, and I am actually interested in what people have to say.  I view this as a form of useful service.

I was listening to this guy tell me his life story the other day–the infidelities, the four marriages, the financial troubles, etc.–and it occurred to me when he told me his father beat his mother, regularly, that at 60 years of age he is still carrying scars he can’t see or name from 50 or 55 or even 59 years ago. He is making do as well as he can, but unseen forces are pushing him all day every day in directions that on balance tend not to be helpful.  To his credit, he is pushing back.

Look at an average street or average mall.  It is filled with people like that.

Ponder this.

The next time you take your dogs for a walk, or go for a walk–Sundays are most excellent for this–imagine you have been locked up in a prison cell for 20 years, and will be locked up for the rest of your life afterwards.  How much more can you see?  How much more can you feel?  Smell? Taste?  Hear?

Life is large.  We reduce it for our sanity, but it will always expand again whenever we ask it to.

I’m continuing my deep inner exploration.  I have reached a deep, unhappy, sucking phase; a small infant, comforted by a pacifier, but only barely.

I have always assumed that the verb “to suck”, as a synonym for incompetence and stupidity, was a reference to the implied power inequality in oral sex, when it is the woman performing it on the man.

It feels to me now, that our ordinary daily discourse is filled with psychologically deep insights, coded in words we use reflexively.

Can we not perhaps posit that it actually references an incompletely developed persona, someone who is still in the sucking phase?

Freud, of course, had what I recall as his four phases: oral, anal expressive [I forget the word he used], anal retentive, and phallic.  My grounding in Freud was done in German as an exchange student, many many years ago.  It made no sense to me then, nor does it now.

Here is the thing: in my own life, in my own deep contemplation, I see no role for the anal at all.  What I feel, what feels real to me, is that there are happy babies and unhappy babies.  Unhappy babies enter life missing something, something so deep they cannot put words on it, or even name the emotion, other than to say they are missing something.

Stan Grof expanded the cartography of the psyche to include Jungian ideas, his own experience as an honest psychiatrist watching the importance of the birth experience, and of course orthodox biographical inputs.

What I would submit is that orthodox psychiatry really has no place-holder for Jung; none for Rank and Grof’s major contributions furthering Rank’s ideas; and none for traumas, particularly of omission, in the birth to roughly five years of age range.

As I said some time ago, my feeling is that they ignore these factors because they have no effective means of dealing with them.  Abreaction was killed a century ago, in orthodox methods at least.

My dream, my ongoing dream, is that we become intelligent as a species, that we learn how to deal with traumas, that we learn how to digest experience, and that we all learn how to learn, how to be Good, how to be fulfilled, how to develop sacred rituals and places that fulfill the deepest needs we have, and do so consistently, reliably, as a matter of generalized deep wisdom.

This is my dream.  This is my hope, and this is the organizing basis of my work, as chaotic and undisciplined as it is.

I can see clearly how having an absolute code would be comforting.  But what happens is you interact with the world through the code; you do not interact with the world itself.

Life is ebb and flow.  Sometimes you need more of something–say, compassion–and sometimes, as now, less.

Most of us, I suppose, can readily imagine lying to liars, and cheating cheaters, even if in principle we value honesty.

Having a code is better than not having a code, but I think humanity can only fully mature when we come to express ourselves through thoughtful awareness based upon spontaneous and genuine empathy.

I will add, that I just realized the value of courtesy today.  I can at times be rude.  I was raised that way, and have worked, not always successfully, to overcome it.

But I felt the marrow of it this morning, the meaning of it, the importance of it, how essential even apparently small details are to the process of increasing ones Goodness.

I have always thought of awful British people with impeccable manners, and thought that an excessive infatuation with courtesy implied artificiality.  It can certainly be that.  But at its optimal, it is nothing more or less than practically expressed empathy and concern for others.

Of course, denier, Tea Bagger, and other such terms can be used to focus hate.  I was wrong to limit it to racism, although at the moment that appears the most important direction that hate is flowing.

If and when Hillary runs, of course, her detractors will by misogynists.

Leftists can never have ideological unity while they are still striving for absolute power.  There must be an object of hate.

At one time, this was a considerable insult.  Jean Paul Sartre considered engineers bourgeois, if memory serves.  All good leftists were expected to direct at least their daily five minutes of hate towards them.

Yet, the word has disappeared.  Or has it?

I would like to propose a typology that might make it easier to understand the intellectual convolutions that necessarily accompany this mental deformity, and possible some of the emotional imbalances and psychopathologies.

There are four basic classes in Leftist mythos: the metaphysical enemy, the Leftist/intellectual class, the Victim, and the practical enemy.

Within orthodox Marxism, these classes are of course the Capitalist, the “revolutionary” (which is always a lie: they carry out coups, usually in small numbers, and then sell them based on lies), the proletariat, and of course the bourgeoisie.

But what MATTERS is that the intellectual is at the center of the universe, that they have an excuse for being at the center of the universe, that they have a cause which can never be won, and that they have a practical object of hatred.

Roughly speaking, the “capitalist” has transformed into the “Corporation”.  Now, leftists have nothing against corporations, per se.  Harry Reid no doubt, like everyone else, gets most of his money from people who run or own corporations.  But the concept is so vague, so vacuous, so MUTABLE, that it comes to connote the emotional equivalent of the Bogeyman.  Those corporations, they sneak up on you in the dark. . . .

The practical object of hatred, the people who can be demonized in the particular, were the middle class.  This was possible when large numbers of people, particularly in the very class driven and class conscious Britain, actually belonged to the lower classes.

But the average worker at Ford today has a better standard of living than most of the richest Britons of a century ago.  He is middle class.  The proletariat can no longer be argued to exist, and is thus no longer a suitable Victim.

Here is the thing, though: precisely because they intend no Good, precisely because the sole point of the exercise is getting power, Leftists can never formulate a positive campaign for anything.  They must sow hatred, and use that as a means of building the sort of consensus that can be leveraged for power.

Who, now, has replaced the bourgeoisie?  The Racist.  Think about it: blacks aren’t going anywhere.  They have been taught for half a century to wait for a boat that will never come in, and to BLAME the lack of a boat on targets selected for them by the professional propagandists.

And in the same sense that the bourgeoisie was always largely a rhetorical construct, so too is the racist.  Our country is virtually devoid of actual racists of the old school variety.  No doubt we have many people who have had first hand negative interactions with black people, but that is quite a different thing than the blanket consensus of Left wing retrogressives that anyone who opposes them can be assigned a class and hated for it.  I would hazard a guess that even people who threw racial epithets at Obama did so simply because it was easy.  CLEARLY, Obama has nothing in common with most blacks in this country.  As I have said several times, I literally find myself unable to think of him as black.  I literally forget he is black, and cannot fathom people who consider it a success that someone with darker skin pigmentation won the race for the White House twice.  Why should skin color matter, in itself, ever?

All of this is subtle.  It only appears with reflection and time, and that is precisely why the task of left wing propagandists is create so much noise and motion that nobody ever stops and thinks at all.