Moderates United

I’ve spent all day playing Batman on my X-Box, which is a complete waste of time.  But I am getting this perverse pleasure from the sheer uselessness of it.  It is MY chosen uselessness.

And I got in a flash why Dostoevsky’s Underground Man would rather be miserable in his way, than happy in the manner of everyone else.

This, you see, is the outcome of long term exposure to narcissism, particularly in parents.  They take your emotions from you.  You no longer own your sadness, and certainly not your happiness.  Everything belongs to them.  Nothing is yours.

And if you are properly indoctrinated, you more or less do the right things: go to school, then work, then live sensibly and die at a sensible age in a sensible way.  But all of this is foreign to you.  You are not emotionally connected to it.  You do not belong.  You were flattened, and no matter where you go or what you do, it feels foreign.  And true emotion feels like a sickness..

I would like to argue this: narcissism is THE modern illness.  It is, perhaps, a necessary cultural transition from no sense of self, as seen in traditional communities–in which one is assigned at birth a sense of place and duty–to a distributed sense of self, which is the Liberal ideal we have for now stopped pursuing.

No totalitarianism can be understood without recourse to narcissism, to the inability to separate one’s own ideas, ideals, and feelings, from those of others.  Every person sent to the gas chamber or gulag WOULD HAVE UNDERSTOOD, if they could only see things from the correct perspective of the narcissist, or so they would argue.

And violence is a form of connection for those who lack it otherwise.  I have realized that as a child I vastly preferred being punished, and the sense of being hated, to the sense of being completely alone and disconnected from emotionally distant parents.

In recent days I have been getting very, very close to core feelings, at the root of which is the ability to feel openly and honestly itself.

And I get microseconds of absolute happiness, unreasonable happiness, happiness of the sort you read about but never see; flashes that tell me it is possible, if I can just unlock this combination safe.

I feel strongly–and I say feel, but this is an intellectual/intutive sense–that I will one day be able to see in the darkness.  At that point I will become truly useful.

I am drawing a weekly Tarot card, as I think I mentioned.  My goal is to connect with time, and specifically the future, but also to provide a flavor, an aroma, to the week.  Whether there is anything to it or not, I can MAKE something from it, by imaginative interaction.

And I have drawn the Fool again.  1 in 72 chance.  I think there is something in that.

As I think I have shared, I am a big Andrei Tarkovsky fan.  I watched a documentary on him, where he talked about Robert Bresson and Michaelangelo Antonioni as formative influences, and have been watching their films.  The influence of Antonioni is particularly obvious, now that I’ve watched a couple of his movies–Blow Up and L’Aventtura.

I don’t have the time and inclination to do deeply into either, but wanted to make some comments.

Was Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice” in part a response to this line:

Sandro: I have no desire to sacrifice myself… why? It’s idiotic to sacrifice oneself… why? For Whom?

Antonioni was an atheist.  The two movies of his I’ve watched really had no point or purpose, just people wandering aimlessly.

Contrast this with, say, Nostalghia, where our hero dies carrying a candle from one side of an empty pool to another.  This was an act of meaning, of purpose.

It is difficult, in my view, to overestimate the latent psychological damage done by the idea that life is meaningless, and that we are merely puppets of hormones, genetics and environmental programming.

We have invented science, have we not?  Why not use science to combat these ideas?  It is hardly a radical idea asking people to be honest, to pursue their own method with actual integrity.

I was chanting my Om Ah Hum this morning, and thinking of the countless Buddhists who have chanted this over the past several millenia.  Do not all Buddhists who think of themselves as Buddhists suffer the Duhkha of conditioned existence?

Where the randomness?  Where the chance? Where the openness to “all that”?

I doubt Buddha ever had a church in mind.  He was much too wise to believe it could exist in sincerity more than a lifetime or two after his death.

Buddhism is a useful creed.  I believe this.  But we need to look beyond it.  There is no doubt of this, either, in my mind.

This is a post I did a while back.  I would likely write it a bit differently today, but my question remains the same: what is the POINT of human life?  What is its MEANING?  Can anyone unable to answer these questions for themselves, adequately, answer them for anyone else?  What is the point of survival if meaning does not survive also?  


What is the point of doing anything?  Can anyone unable to provide good answers to this claim to have a workable, a functional morality, or even a sense of self?








The logical end of leftism is the machine. Let’s run with this.

Leftists take over the world. The goal is a “perfect” society, in which there is no poverty, no wealth, no prejudice, and in which everyone is EXACTLY equal.

{Edit}: I want to add some intermediate steps I skipped in my first post.

If the goal is the creation of happiness through the eradication of the supposed impediments to happiness of inequality of wealth and status, then our overlords will be disappointed. First, they create Cuba around the world, where people lounge around as shadows waiting for the night. They then decide more wealth is needed, so they automate production, and slaughter a third of the human race so as to decrease scarcity. Everyone has enough now. But they still aren’t happy. So they find someone who appears happy, map what he does all day, what he says, what his cognitive strategies are; then do brain scans on him, test his blood chemistry, then kill him, dissect him, and try to figure out what the chemical status of his brain was.

From these results they calibrate how to create happiness. This process, which involves brainwashing, genetic manipulation, and direct chemical interventions, is deployed across the human race. It works. People appear happy.

Then. . .{end edit}

First, they need to standardize behavior. This is done by developing an effective brainwashing technology, amounting to software downloads. This is done around the world, such that all people do and say the same things. At precisely 2pm every day, everyone takes a coffee break. They say the same things to one another. They talk about the weather, and the sports game in which both teams, as always, got exactly the same score. They discuss their kids, who all got exactly the same grades, play the same sports, have the same hobbies, and have the same goals: to work for the State.

Everything is perfect.

Then it is realized that there cannot be racial differences, so breeding programs are developed to eradicate them. Differences in physical capability and intelligence are also bred out. After 100 generations, everyone looks the same, has the same intelligence, and the same physical capabilities. Self evidently, Huxley’s “Brave New World” consisted in an unequal caste system. Self evidently, as well, the rulers of this world exempt themselves from the need for equality. They are more equal than the rest.

Throughout this process, there is anxiety about sexual differences. Men are different than women. Efforts are made to create life asexually, but they fail, since creating life requires life force. Humans are NOT machines.

After 200 generations of perfection, it is decided that a more perfect world would be if human beings were actually machines. Machines can be made EXACTLY equal. So everyone is slaughtered and robots which look like them are deployed in the same places. They live in the same homes, watch the same TV, work the same jobs, and even drink virtual coffee, which consists in downloading the memory of drinking the coffee.

Then it is realized that there is no need to actually have robots: they can just create a software routine which plays out life around the world. So the robots are destroyed, and a vast computer instituted.

By this time, the rulers are thoroughly tired of life. During all this process, they have created genetically perfect sex slaves and servants. They want for no material comfort. They can program companions, who will say anything they want. Their food is perfect, their homes are perfect. They have no need to work, can travel anywhere they want, any time. They have even conquered biological death, such that they can live 10,000, 100,000 years. But they create nothing, and they are horrible people, so after thousands of years of relentless ennui they download their personalities to the computer as well, and commit suicide. (actually, I don’t think most would last more than a decade or two).

This is a really well made computer, that lasts billions of years. But eventually the Sun begins to expand, in its preparation for death, and the computer, realizing this, has a decision to make. It has a duty to protect perfection, but its existence is in jeopardy. It is a really smart computer, though, so it realizes that it can run perfection much faster. There is no need to conform to the normal pace of life. Thus, it is able to run through a trillion more years of life for humans before it is snuffed out in the red fire.

As it flickers out, it feels satisfaction in the role it played in the perfection of the human race.

I am going to try and consistently refer to my “Being” as my “Becoming”.  It is impossible to speak of a human being–now, a human “becoming”–as other than a system in motion.

This is the reason I invented the word “Motology” a few years ago.  Thought is liberated if we are no longer trying to defend something changeless, if we are no longer invoking an Order of Being, but, perhaps, an Order of Becoming.

It is the middle of the night, and perhaps I am foggy, but I think perhaps one could argue that this small change makes all of us Buddhists.  Becoming is neither Being nor Not Being.  The Becoming Self neither “is” nor “is” not.

Peace.

My emotional clouds seem to be clearing.  As I mentioned, I have invoked a Shugyo of consciously inviting and encouraging all forms of negative energy to manifest and feel at home.  What I am finding is that this is giving my unconscious permission to offer up access to formerly closed in pockets of emotion that have been affecting me, coloring my life, in subtle ways.

Your unconscious tries to protect you.  It will not release anything it does not feel you can take.  This is why consciously showing it that you can take nearly anything increases its range of motion, its flexibility, its openness.

I watched two very sad movies in two consecutive days: Robert Bresson’s “Balthazar”, and the Book Thief.  Both movies evoked strong emotions.  Both made my cry.

But I felt stronger in the end.  Here is the thing: we build up sadnesses in our daily life, just living.  We put them aside, to be filed later, but we never file them.  They linger.

Watching sad movies allows us to process all those things, to make us wiser.  We process not only our own sadness, but the sadness of the world.  We become more compassionate, in useful and not compulsive ways.

I would like to call this the “Old Yeller” principle.  People don’t watch that movie any more.  It makes them cry, and we don’t like to cry any more.  And this makes us weaker and more coarse.

Tonight, dreaming, I found myself locked in combat with Evil again.  It always seems to manifest as Voldemort, perhaps because Ralph Fiennes/Joanne Rowling achieved something mythic in those movies.  Connecting, committing: a sense of electricity fills me, like I’ve plugged my finger into a socket.  I can take a prodigious amount of pain, physical and emotional, but tonight it was primal: neither he nor I had any form.

And I thought: how can you out-hate Hate itself?  How can you be more violent than Violence itself?  You can’t.  It is impossible.  That is their element, their battleground, and always their victory.  So I set a table, and invited It to dinner.  After an initial increase in current, it faded.

I have had this rough dream before, with the same resolution, but it takes time to fully grasp. to fully enter, these realities.  On some level, I am reworking my Being (so-called: I am not invoking ontology in any sense, as life is more complicated than that) itself.

Christ, it seems to me, set a table for his enemies, and he sat at it all his friends, those he loved, and he dedicated himself to a simple meal, filled with the simple pleasures of satisfying hunger and thirst, and spending time in communion with his brothers.

When he offered up his blood, he was offering it to Evil itself.  When he offered up his body, he was offering it up to Evil itself.

And in this was his victory.  There is something quite deep here.  This myth happens every day in all of us.  Every day is the Last Supper, if we are wise and pay attention.

Your real name is who you are.

As I get older, I increasingly think that three quarters of life’s learning is realizing what you already knew.  Growth, then, is simply an increasing capacity to handle truth.  What appears to be perceptual learning is simply emotional toughening–and loosening.

I just watched a very well crafted documentary on PBS, the one narrated by Richard Gere.

Buddhism is a beautiful doctrine, but here is the thing: it, and all religions, are losing.  Buddhism is not the human future.

We must construct something that is both scientifically, empirically, grounded, and which speaks emotionally to people in the 21st century. That is the task.  That is the task I have set myself, and one which I would encourage you to set for yourself.

Morality: it occurs to me that morality should, in the modern era, best be seen as the intersection of structured thought–philosophy–and psychology.

Specifically, every moral “principle” I have ever articulated arises not from some religion, not from some appeal to the “nature of the universe”, not some arcane ontology amenable to linguistic deconstruction.  What I have done, and continue to try and do, is show how what we call moral behavior is in the best interest of all sentient beings.  And how evil is simply the loss of the capacity for the self understanding necessary to grasp this, and in particular the loss of the capacity to imagine being emotionally comforted, or freed from self hatred.

Logic dictates that if you want to be happy, you have to do the things that make you happy, and these, in turn, are the domains both of psychology and introspection.  And logically, if you want to be happier, then we have to admit grades of happiness, and admit qualitative grades of, and differences in, the type of work that needs to be done.

What I have termed qualitative pleasure is best pursued through the pursuit of meaning, of pain with a purpose, of qualitative growth.

Oh, we can do so much better.  I will leave it at that for now.