Moderates United

As the religion of the slave, it is obvious that modern Leftists would find in this infantile fantasy refuge; that they would identify on a deep psychological level with it, and see in it a historical expression of what they themselves want.

Compare, for sake of illustration, the admonition that you must do and believe as others or face death; and the Christian admonition to love others as yourself, regardless of their beliefs.  In the one case you reduce people, you lessen them.  In the other, you raise yourself and others UP.  You grow.

I think Churchill was right: other than Leftism, no more powerful retrogressive force exists in the modern world than Islam, at least as practiced by those conforming to the Sunnah.  As I have said often, I am very fond of many of the Sufis, who in their own way were trying to introduce the possibility of spiritual growth to a religion which more or less explicitly rejected it.

I believe in God and have no problem with monotheism.  I explicitly reject, though, the idea that ANY modern religion fully encapsulates everything that can be known, and more importantly, everything that we NEED, today, in our modern world, to survive and prosper.  We must build a new religion, or, preferably, new religions.

Last night I was dreaming of a “primitive” culture which had just cremated one of their own in a pit.  It was still smoking, and children were digging bone fragments out of the ashes.  Their attitude was between play and reverence.  They were learning, from a very early age, that death is a part of life.  They were living within a realm which we could call mythic, but which was dealing on a very direct, empirical level with the facts of life.  Nothing was hidden or concealed, and in important respects, no explanation was necessary.  The bones were what they were.

True, organic myths are emergent properties of direct human interaction of life as it is lived.  We could look at, say, Aboriginal Australian culture and see things we consider ridiculous, such as the idea that the first didgeridoo blew the stars into the sky.  But true myths are merely place holders, they are merely doorways.  They are banners, behind which stand important, organic human realities.  They enable access to important truths. [I will note that I “accidentally” spelled organic “organize” twice.  Consider the deep relation between the two words]

To this I would contrast what might be termed the Modern Myth, which is an artificial creation YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE.  Rather than granting you unfettered access to the transcendant, it limits you, it confines you.  It places you on a metaphysical procrustean bed, and shapes you to its demands.  Think Huxley’s Brave New World.  Nothing is real there, nothing organic, nothing larger than the survival of insects is attempted.  It is an efficient system, a “scientific” system.  But we look at it in horror.  It is a world without meaning, without organic myth.

Communism is a retrogressive myth.  It confines the  human spirit.  It is the creed of narcissists.

It is funny, because I see clear parallels between what my mother attempted with me, and what modern leftists are attempting with the world.  Obviously, I have to consider whether or not I am projecting, but I don’t think I am.  I feel my birth and life have uniquely qualified me for the sort of social commentary I have been doing.

I like to think this was my plan.

But both are disruptive.  Change inheres within them.  “Reality”, within the scientific method, is mutable (in theory, of course: in practice, it is filled with unreflective dogmatism).

And there is something childish and primitive within us that craves the stability of myth.  Myths, held sincerely, are INHERENTLY true.  They cannot be questioned.  They establish the very foundation of reality, and the social groupings founded upon it.

Here is our very interesting and disturbing present reality: roughly one third of Americans exist within a propaganda bubble that is so hermetically sealed that fact and reality of the scientific sort, of the observable, empirical sort, cannot enter in.  And this bubble has been achieved within an ostensible “Information Age”, which has in their case done little more than grease the rails of propagandistic trains, whose origin points and desired destinations never change.  They can’t.  They are built fully on myth.

People long for continuity, and this is what leftist propaganda gives them.  It is the same thing Hitler’s propaganda provided: a place, a home, a freedom from decision, conscience, from anxiety, from dignity, from a sense of alienation.

They need this.  It feels nurturing to them.  It comforts them.  Their propaganda is their mother, in an absolutely primal, thumb sucking, sense.

“Bailout” Bevin (which admittedly sounds better than “I kind of like Obamacare McConnell) may or may not be a better politician, but his presence will mean that someone else gets the shot at Majority Leader.  I don’t know who that is.  He or she may be worse, but the very fact that someone like Bevin was able to knock off someone like McConnell would show clearly that the smart money is on conservatism.

I will add as well the definition of politics as the art of the possible can be read in two ways.  Conventionally, it means, effectively, that compromise is inevitable.  You can’t get everything you want.  You have to play the cards you are dealt.

But I would submit that sometimes it can also mean PROBING the limits of the possible.  Sometimes it is the job of the leader to push out into the unknown and find out how far things actually can be pushed.

In poker, playing the cards you are dealt sometimes means winning without even having a single pair, if you are brash enough.

McConnell has more or less been held hostage by terrorists most of his career.  The method of the Left is to seek always to hurt, to maim, to weaken, to intimidate.  And they are good at it.  A minor error on the part of a Republican can hurt far far more than an egregious error on the part of a Democrat.  Having a complicit media allows that, having a well honed propaganda apparatus allows that.

McConnell knows what he knows.  He has made mistakes in his career and regretted them.  He has inadvertently thrown bones to his enemies.  He plays safe, and that is how he has survived.

But we are on a path to destruction.  Only a fool would deny it.  It is time for risk taking.

Can there be any doubt what our media would prioritize?  As far as that goes, can there be any doubt what it IS prioritizing?  This story won’t see national media coverage, but a blatant and public racial epithet would.

Here is the problem with what passes for morality in our present day: it views all “crimes” through the prism of ideology, and not through empathy and compassion.  Racist epithets are class crimes.  They matter more. Merely inflicting physical violence on someone who is defined as a member of the oppressive class, even if they have never committed a crime, never will commit a crime, and cannot even be conceived of as guilty of anything beyond mere existence, is not noteworthy.  Nobody cares.

Ideology is psychopathology; it is perceptual psychopathy.

It occurs to me that by invoking context and perceptual motion, one of my principle goals is to invent a morality that goes beyond all ideologies, so as to get at the root of true goodness, which is based on empathy and perceptual awareness and fluidity.

I don’t think this is true.  I think hate is giving a part of yourself to someone else as a means of avoiding personal responsibility for your emotions and life.  And I think you come to NEED that person (that group, that idea, whatever the focus of your hate is) because they orient your world, they give you a sense of meaning.

What if Hitler had killed all the Jews?  Would he not have found a new target?  Would the violence have stopped?  I don’t think so.

One sees relative peace in some Communist nations, like Cuba and North Korea, because everyone has been so abused and beaten that they live in constant fear, and this fear creates compliance.  But this is a sort of violence as well.  It is a hatred as well, one which never ends because it never CAN end.  If it ended, the raison d’etre of the haters would be gone.  That it doesn’t end is what makes Communism so attractive an ideology for people who are lost and alone.  You never need fear an end to the violence.  The war will never end, even if people stop fighting back.

I have felt hated all my life, and it occurs to me that hate is a RELATIONSHIP.  It is a connection between in here and out there, between one person and another.  But it is a compulsive, needy, driven connection, one filled with constant tension, fear and pain.

I see this now, and I see it fading, as it should.

Like many Americans, I sometimes buy things when I don’t know what else to do.  Today, though, it occurred to me that I should give money to charity, which I did.  I gave $25 to Operation 300 (please check it out), and bought a T-shirt.  Then I put $50 more into Kiva, which remains my favorite cause.  You can’t call it a charity, because all they are doing is brokering no-interest loans to people working hard to improve their own lives.  They are doing the job predatory banks will not.

This is a better way to go.  Particularly if you look at all the people on Kiva, you see how absurdly easy your life is.  I won’t tell you to HTFU, but I would say that with attention and time it becomes easier to realize gratitude on a regular basis, and this is a worthwhile goal.  I am pursuing it, and would encourage you to as well.

It is quite possible the first black slave in America was enslaved by another black.  Certainly, most of the Greek slaves were other Greeks.

Kiev was likely a Viking slave trading center.  Russ is a Scandinavian word, brought by the Vikings whose trade in Slavs gave us the word slave.

Nearly every major city in Ireland, including Dublin, were founded as Viking slave trading ports.  The tribes of Ireland were constantly at war with one another, and whenever one prevailed, they would sell off the losers as slaves.

And keep in mind the Jews were slaves at one time.  They never forget it, and this memory perhaps in part explains their cultural resiliency.

Most of what we know about the Roman Republic comes to us from a Greek slave, Polybius.

Blacks have no monopoly on having been slaves.  We need to treat people as individuals.  There is no such thing as a “group”.  There is no such thing as a “class”.  These are linguistic fictions created by and for short sighted and stupid intellectuals.  They are not without use, but like anything else quickly become pernicious when taken too far.

And I was feeling today this constant tug and pull I used to go through–still go through on occasion–with my mother in particular. She would define reality in some way that was fundamentally skewed and wrong, and I would have to fight not to be sucked into her delusion.  It was a tug of war, and very tiring.

I would describe this, though, as a sort of assault, of emotional abuse, even if it was not consciously intended as such.

When you fail to see someone as they are, to accept them as they are, to impose your world view by simply refusing to see theirs, you are attacking them, and it should in my view be processed as an attack.  Anger is a very acceptable and healthy response, even if the other person simply cannot grasp why you are angry.  To back off on your anger is to accede to their world view which does not have any room for you in it.

When white Southerners in the Jim Crow era forced blacks to use different water fountains and swimming pools, and forced them to sit at the back of the bus, they were not looking at blacks as people just like them.  They were viewing them through a narcissistic lens of alleged intellectual and moral superiority.

It is this failure of humanity, of communion, which is what makes racism wrong.  It is a perceptual distortion, an error.

And Political Correctness is simply one more iteration of this prejudgement, this disconnection from the currents of human social and emotional life.  It is racism without the race.

As I keep saying, until we can define why things are wrong, we cannot be sure we are not making the bad worse.  The only argument the Left has against racism is that it is anti-egalitarian.  But they cannot say why egalitarianism should be the sole moral value.  They simply stipulate it, since it is all that is left once individual moral autonomy and possibility of growth is rejected.

And in point of fact they are quite willing to accept slavery in the name of egalitarianism.  They have even developed a term “chattel slavery” to denote the kind they oppose, and by extension the forms they are quite willing to accept.  Anyone who uses the term chattel slavery needs to be kicked vigorously in the ‘nads.

No one capable of clear thought can accept any part of this monstrous project.