Moderates United

Why is conformity so critical for totalitarians?  It is not just about command and control.  No one ever doubted the Romans were in charge, but they allowed considerable diversity.  No, it goes much deeper.  The totalitarian wants to generalized themselves, wants to see themselves reflected in every face and every window.

They do this because they have no sense of having souls.  They are clinically mad, and the mountains of bodies–how high would a 100 million body pile go?–serve as clear testament to that.

There is a sentimentality that seems to mesh well with the political left, particularly Sybaritic Leftism, which finds in passion a meaning of life.  So many people, I feel, want to be the sort of people moved by Michaelangelo’s Madonna, or the alter piece from Ghent.  They want to feel moved by poetry, passionate about life.  We see these people in movies, and we do our best to live vicariously through them.

But are not most of us stolid, unmoving dolts?  Yes, sentimentality is rampant.  We have that.  But at what level are most Westerners still able to partake in the sacred?  To what extent can we get at really deep feelings, really deep places, the places which alone distinguish good from great art?

If every original art piece in the world disappeared tomorrow, and it was not reported in the media, how long would it take most people to notice?  If their posters and generic art on their walls was unaffected, I don’t think most people would EVER notice.  Not one person in 100 would really, truly care.  That is my feeling.

And I have to say that multiple people groaned in the theater when they saw that a Picasso was burnt.  A term came to me for the work Picasso was mostly known for (I’m not counting the Blue Period): Ceremonial Ugliness.

Art is pageantry, too, is it not?

We look to it to unify our culture, but if we wanted to, could we not accuse all of the Monument’s Men of racism, since it was exclusively WHITE art they were looking for?  That is about the level most left wingers operate at nowadays.  Reason, decency, truth, fact finding: all gone.

And Picasso’s work is a big FUCK YOU.  I have always felt that way about him in particular.  He was a Communist.  He was cruel.  He is trying to stick a knife through the canvas into the capacities for empathy and reason of the viewer.

I’m a little irritable for some reason.  I may not mean that tomorrow.

But I probably will.

Rotating cogitation.

It is an odd fact of human physiology that we will often crave things we are allergic to, which damage us.  The narcissist, lacking a sense of self, seeks it everywhere.  They seek to see themselves in the eyes of everyone they meet, to be important.

And narcissistic parents seek to see in their children fragments of themselves.  Like the myth of the Horcrux in the Harry Potter books, narcissistic parents leave a part of themselves in their children, and that is the part of their children they most enjoy looking at.  Large segments of the child’s identity and sense of self are invisible to the narcissist.  Conversely, the child can only get its parents attention by fitting into the bounds established by their need to see themselves.

I was watching “Catching Fire” today, and thought the interview part the most interesting.  It seems to me the sacrificial dynamic is one that arises from a generalized inability to differentiate oneself, to individuate; it arises from a group characterized by a wave pattern without particulates and particulars.

One can identify in a voyeuristic, vicarious way with the sacrificial victims; can connect it with some latent sense of self.  Now the precise problem with the narcissist is that some trauma has caused them to be afraid to exist.  Identification with something or someone who is to be destroyed is, though, without danger, perhaps because being gone the victim becomes a memory, and as unchanging as the person wants.  They can always have been what that person needed them to be.  There are countless ways to lie, and this is one of them.

The foregoing may make sense; it may not.  You decide.

The net is that it was apparently circulating throughout the media that Tower 7 was “unstable”.

Here is a perfectly simple explanation that does not require ALL the media to have been in on this: United 93 was supposed to hit Tower 7 around the same time Towers 1 and 2 got hit.  Whatever happened, it wound up in a field in Pennsylvania.  As I have discussed, though, it took off from Newark, right across the river, right around the time all the planes were hitting.

The plan was to have three planes hit, 1, 2, 3, then blow all three buildings one after the other, with a thousand cameras watching.

United 93 never showed up.  The building was still rigged, and in fact a few bombs had already been blown to make it look damaged and to get people out of there.  Whoever planted the explosives also set fires throughout the building.  They knew they had to blow the building, as they had no time to remove all the charges.  But you can’t just blow up a perfectly good, well constructed modern skyscraper.  You have to set the mood, the context.  You have to prep people, get the word out.  And you would not need more than a couple well placed people.

Those people, potentially, could be identified.  We could, perhaps, reconstruct who was first told, by whom, that Tower 7 was “unstable”, when in fact it was not.

These people have names, faces, histories, addresses.  They can be put in jail, even if it may never happen.

They can be shot as traitors.

I have been saying since 2010 that the conspiracy on 9/11 was MUCH bigger than the 19 (or whatever) hijackers.  If Tower 7 was blown, then the logistical demands were enormous, which means that both the funding and skill levels must have been high.

And as I have argued, if it was solely Arab terrorists, then they should have blown the buildings while they were full.  They could have killed ten times as many people.  Anyone with that level of skill would also have been able to strike again with little trouble.

No: it seems to me this whole thing was theatrical by design, as I have said before.  They were just missing one plane, and that fact makes the WHOLE story untenable, because 47 story skyscrapers do not fall at the rate of gravity because burning paper towels and curtains caused the collapse of an anchored I-Beam.

I have not read all the pieces, but two updates I will add: NIST, until the final report, resisted the claim that the building fell at the rate of gravity, because this was impossible in all scenarios other than controlled demolition.  In the final version, after have been decisively refuted and utterly unable to claim with a straight face anything else, they simply ignored the blatant and inescapable conclusion of their own finding.

Second, their ENTIRE reconstruction depends upon a key I-beam having been unanchored.  They claimed it was unanchored in their final report.  Their whole computer modeled collapse (which by the way looked NOTHING like the actual, filmed collapse) starts from that beam. But a FOIA request found that according to THEIR OWN DATA, the data they used for their findings, that beam was in fact secured.  So they LIED.  That is the word.  There is no other word.  Why, remains unseen.  I prefer the cowardice hypothesis, but it may not be the best one.

Actually, I will add one more thing.  The body of a man killed on 9/11 (has it ever occurred to you that this exact date was chosen consciously, to make it as easy to remember, as impactful, as possible?) was recovered, and it showed evidence of having been exposed both to percussive force and extreme heat.  In other words, to an explosion.  Buildings crashing made you flat, but they don’t expose you to explosions.  There were no explosions in those collapses that we were told of.

And this was in either Tower 1 or 2.  I will come out and say it: in my view Tower 7 was categorically blown, and in my view the overwhelming certainty is that so too were the other two towers.  The case is not as strong, but that is my gut instinct.

But it seems to me that Burroughs–Robinson–still has a lot of unprocessed experience.  He has chosen not to live in the past consciously–and certainly time spent in chronic anger, bitterness, and regret is wasted– but the nature of trauma is that until it is lanced and processed, it comes back, in the form of what Trauma and Recovery author Judith Herman calls “intrusions”.

And what I think needs to be clear is that intrusions can be very, very subtle.  They can consist in a latent impulse to feel a positive, happy emotion, and the sudden snatching of it by a sort of vigilant darkness.  This can happen dozens of times a day.

If we are beings of light, which is what I believe, the nature of light is to celebrate, to move, to glow.  What stops us?  Intrusions.  Only be processing all the places within us where we stop light from glowing can we allow all the expression of which it is capable on this level of existence.

Psychopathology, trauma, deep unconscious grief and hurt: these are not the province solely of modernity.  Indeed, by any objective standard, our opportunities for well being are vastly greater in the modern age than they have ever been.  Most of us have never been exposed to war, hunger, thirst, slavery, and all the cruelties that follow in their wake.

There were narcissistic mothers, and cruel fathers in the Buddha’s time.  Perhaps they were much more common.  Imagine the level of existence of people who could not read, and who could not imagine any need to be able to do so.

So I will say again that “spirituality” consists first in the opening up of one’s psychological being, of healing all wounds, and learning to live happily in the here and now.  Only afterwards does whatever we call “God” enter in to it.  I have not seen God, and may never in this life.  But I have seen a long succession of days which I have traveled clumsily, and which I would like to learn to travel with more skill.

My own parents principle concern was behavior control/modification, and towards that end they hit me until I consistently sat quietly in a corner and said and did nothing unusual.  They broke me.  I think most Christian families do this, but most, I hope, instinctively balance punishment with emotional nourishing.  Carrot and the stick.  They did this, because I was annoying: all little children are, if their neediness and constant confusions are not met with love and empathy and affection.  They justified it as saving me from Hell.  Good little boys do not go to hell, especially not if they are baptized.

All I got was the stick, because the goal was avoiding something, not building something.  I say this not to complain, so much as to continue to explore these things in public.  Everything I do takes effort, because every move I make has to be initiated in the face of a global and overpowering fear, one bred into me very early.

A great deal of what is done in the name of Christ he would repudiate entirely.  I am quite sure of this.

And ponder the awfulness of a conception of the universe in which an infinite God has to have his son slaughtered like a goat–bled–so that He can forgive the people he created.  As I have said before, if we are to take the metaphor literally, perhaps Christ should have had his throat slit at an altar on Temple Mount.  I am fully with the proselytizing atheists in finding this repugnant, even if I derive no pleasure from attacking the beliefs of others.  For my part, most of my work is generative.  Far easier to build on an existing foundation–to improve what exists–than to tear down and actually rebuild.  In practice, of course, those who tear down build nearly nothing, and almost always make the world worse.

As I have said often, this is the difference between true Liberalism and the Leftisms.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.  Everywhere I look I see stupidity. I see it in me, too, of course but I at least can see most of the areas, I think, covered in fog.  I have some sense of what I do not know, and am always willing to question what I think I know.  Every day.  All the time.  Perceptual motion.  This is absolutely necessary, and why it is one of my three core values.

I can’t resist sharing some history on Easter.  I am in an odd, somewhat savage mood.  It will pass, but I am going to let it roll for now.

Easter comes from a pagan festival, a celebration of the goddess Eastre.  She was the goddess of spring, and dawn, in my understanding.  When early Christian missionaries were traveling northern Europe, they realized that if they celebrated Christ’s death and resurrection at the same time, early Christians would not stand out as much for persecution.  Easter is, roughly, to Eastre, what Christmas was to the Saturnalia.  It is, in a sense, a coopted ritual based upon a coopted myth.