Moderates United

So I’m in a parking garage downtown, in a medical complex, and the way this works is all the spots except on the very top are usually taken by 10am at the latest.  I get stuck behind this old lady that is going walking speed through the garage.  I don’t know if we can speak of a parking garage etiquette, but if we can, going as fast as you can without missing spots would be part of it.  She was also veering on every turn into oncoming traffic, I watched several vehicles on their way out roll their eyes.  She was doing it wrong, and was not learning.

Me, I am an impatient driver. I am trying to work on it, and believe I am making progress, but I’m not there yet.

Anyway, we go around about 5 times, and I decide to pass her.  Right as I pass her, a car pulls out at the end of the row, and I pull in.  She honks at me.  I cuss her out under my breath.  At the moment, I was feeling both anger and relief.

Now, this is textbook, dictionary definition asshole behavior.  I get that.  She was likely old, a little slow, and likely there because someone she knew was sick, or because she was sick.  My brain tells me this.

But I looked at my feelings, and I was happy, at least for a time.

Now, I have been processing some deep things.  There are other unpleasant things going on I don’t feel like talking about, but suffice it to say a lot of very deep GAPS–that is the word–in my development are coming out.

I looked at my happiness at besting some little old lady.  It was pathetic.  That is what my brain said. Now, my father bullied me, bested me, all the time, and I am likely repeating this behavior.  But what lies at the root?  Tracking it is quite different than understanding and disposing of it.  I want to be spontaneously good, but that is going to mean at times spontaneously bad.  My task, my responsibility, is to USE those times for self purification.  It starts with seeing honestly.

Now, as I have said, my upbringing left me with a feeling of self hatred.  Self hatred is the result when you do not get the love you need, and particularly when you are subjected to emotional or physical violence, as I was.  Self hatred is a means of resolving the tension between what was done, and normal social standards.  It is very difficult to view your care-giver as an awful person–you are after all fully dependent on them at least until your early teen years–so what you do is internalize a sense of unworthiness and self loathing.

But it is never fully justified, UNTIL you do bad things.  When you ACT like an asshole, well then the emotional dissonance, the split, is healed for a moment.  And it is hard for me to describe what a heavy burden all these feelings are.  Whatever you do, wherever you go, there is this voice telling you to fail, that you can’t do it, that you aren’t worthy.

Obviously, you can combat that voice, you can use positive self talk, but if I ask you to hold up a wet mattress, say, something heavy and unwieldy (and by the way incontinence was not an issue for me, so I don’t think there is a deeper meaning here, although there may be), who wins: you or gravity?  As long as that thing keeps driving you down, and you have no means of dropping it, it will win every time, without fail.

Being a bad person, I think, may in some ways help to make that load feel lighter.  This is just a guess, but it feels right.

Then I got to thinking of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man–or really any number of anti-heroes, or neurotic nuts, from that rough era of literature (latter 19th century through today)–and they seem to think that being honest about being mean and miserable is somehow profound.  It isn’t.  It never was.  These things, awareness of these states, is simply a waypoint.  You enter into awareness of evil in order to do something with it, to transcend it.

What stops this process is a rejection of morality.  At its root, Socialism is a rejection of individual morality.  It is a rejection of individual meaning.

I don’t like hospitals.  I have had one outpatient surgery in my life, and that was enough.  I don’t like watching all the fat, decrepit sick people wander through there.  This, probably, is an ugly sentiment too, with one perhaps redeeming feature: I don’t like people who do not value their health and well being enough to do even the BASICS as far as maintaining health.  We Americans age SO poorly, not least because we have this enormous complex built up around keeping people who have never given a shit about their health alive, with expensive pills and treatments.

Then I got to thinking how we treat old people.  Ponder this: how could an old person be valued for wisdom, when wisdom is rejected in principle?  Put another way: if morality is social and not personal, how could an old person have more of it?

If we value old people, what do we value them for?  Practical knowledge.  Some old men, like Warren Buffet, are exceptionally good at doing what most people actually care about, which is making large sums of money.  But would you trust the future of your soul, the future of your happiness in this present life, to a shark whose early fortunes were made in ways most of us would reject handily?

No, we put old people behind curtains, on the other side of the hill, over THERE, where we don’t think about them much.  It was a Socialist, and not a Japanese ethos being expressed when a Japanese Prime Minister said he wished all the old people would just die.  If they could not contribute to the economy, if they had no MATERIAL value, to him they had no value at all.  Their life experience meant nothing to him. (Note here too, as I have commented somewhere, the rush to put everyone on the public dole, then complain about the expense.  This is one more lunatic aspect of the whole thing.)

And if you think about it, what DOES an average person really learn in the course of a lifetime if their constant focus is material in nature?  If their lives revolve around promotions, new houses, weekends, and vacations?  They can talk about these things, but little else.

How much wisdom is there, really, in an average nursing home?  I don’t know, but I wonder.  Contrast that with, say, an old Tibetan, who has chanted and meditated and sung religious/spiritual works all his life.  To the extent we would find wisdom in nursing homes, I think it would be among the deeply and sincerely pious.

Returning to Good and Evil, I think it needs to be said that there is a vast moral difference between playing a role, and understanding a situation.  You can beat pacifism into people, and some cultures do.  You can beat courtesy, filial piety, a work ethic, and cleanliness into people.

But do they then own those virtues?  I would say no.

Goodness, to me, is expressed spontaneously.  It simply comes out. Love comes out; compassion; generosity; kindness; beauty; warmth.  That is why the Windhorse metaphor is so apt: you have the power and motion of a horse, and the brilliance of a jewel.

If you cannot express things spontaneously, you are an artifact, a remnant.  You are not you, but somebody else’s idea of who you needed to be.  Habits can be very strong and useful.  But until you reach bottom, until you know all of your self, all of who you are, all of what you are capable of, you are not free.

For my part, I am starting to try and focus on positive energies, but I’m sure I will have relapses.  These old habits run strong.  I watched them and was subjected to them for many, important, years.  That sounds like an excuse, and perhaps it is, but no plan based on wishful thinking is reliable.  My explanation may be wrong, but I am certainly describing my present reality.

Few thoughts, from my asshole moment.

I had an odd dream last night.  It was one of those–and I don’t how many people have these–where I was in a sleep paralysis, but felt like I was awake.  I wasn’t awake, obviously, because I felt I was on the couch, when I was actually in my bed, but in any event a demon came up to me, hissing, and stood about 6″ from my face, trying to scare me.  I felt fear, but some part of me was thinking “fuck this”, so I reached my arm out and said “bite it off”.  It retreated.  Then I reached my other arm.  Same reaction.  Then I said “BOO” while opening my eyes, and there was nothing there.

Here is a phrase which sounds meaningful, and which may actually be meaningful: Fear fears us.

I think some deep part of us hides our innermost fears, because it feels like confronting them directly will kill us; we won’t survive.  But I feel, increasingly strongly, that no negative emotion you give yourself up to openly and willingly can but retreat.  Your power lies precisely in your acceptance, in your openness to experience.

And how beneficial, to develop the habit of opening to ALL experience, because that will let in the good ones too.   This is getting close, I think, to what the Buddha taught.  The negatives pass away, but what is good remains, and we call this the nature of true reality.

 Posted here: http://www.democracyjournal.org/32/the-dismal-art.php?page=all


I will note, with regard to the word “democracy”, that its use is ubiquitous among those who mean the precise opposite, as in Students for a Democratic Society, or German Democratic Republic, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  It is a propaganda meme, nothing more.  I post here, of course, because I’d put my odds at making it through the censors at less than 1 in 2.

 
Let me ask you a basic question: how is it that few, on the right or the left, question who gets the money the Fed is “printing”?  It enters “the economy”, but how? 

Here is how: it is given to enormous banks, and used to increase their already considerable fortunes.

I assume that since you have “democracy” in your name, that you have strong anti-Capitalist commitments.  How is it you are not questioning the propriety of giving the already rich, more?

Keynes himself noted, when he was still writing honestly, that almost no one understands how inflation is theft.

Do any of you grasp that when you increase the supply of anything, its relative value diminishes, and that what the Fed is doing will certainly, over some time horizon, decrease the value of all wealth in America, but not before those who came into that money first can spend it undiluted?

It is a source of constant amazement to me that the political left spends so much time demonizing “corporations” in the abstract, and fails to grasp the truly, foundationally, predatory nature of our banking system.  Left and right could and should make common cause on this issue.  I have been arguing this for years, and seemingly no one understands me.

Here is a piece detailing how things work: www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

I watched a film by Robert Bressard tonight: Mouchette.  It is about a sad girl, whose very sadness makes her easier to victimize. This is the way the world works, in all too many cases.

The ending is unclear, but I took it that she drowned herself.  Given the events in the movie, that feeling clearly would have been present.

I was watching, though, and if she had lived, she would have been bitter and angry; mean.  I thought of the prep school matron of “The Little Princess”–which I have watched many times with my kids, not least because I think it is a great “Bildungsroman” sort of story–whose viciousness comes out in the end, whose own hells come back into the present in the course of moments in the movie.

I watched her in my mind, looked deeply into her soul, and a cascade of colored discs came flowing out, a rainbow.  The darkness collapsed into nothing.  And it made my cry.  To be clear, I always view this as a good thing.  I fear stasis, not mourning.

I watched someone in hell being led away in a police car, to spend more time in hell.

I believe in justice, but more than anything I believe that at roots all human beings have the capacity for Goodness, even if in some it is so deeply buried we may never find it in this life.  This is not to say crimes should not be punished, but how does punishment really serve the cause of moral elevation?  True contrition?

Here is an idea: what if we gave people convicted of serious crimes high doses of LSD in comfortable environments?  What if they were provided social support, even love?  What if our goal was helping them learn, at a gut level, why their crime was wrong, how it hurt THEM?  What if we told them they could get out when they stopped hurting?  What if we gave them gardens to wander in?  What if we–the people acting through vote and volition–gave everyone gardens?

Please understand, if anyone who reads this blog regularly needs to be told this, I am no bleeding heart.  But I look around me, and I see pain, and little else.  Why punish pain with pain?  Is this truly justice?

Oh, we do so many things wrong.  We are deeply unwise and stupid in so many ways.  I will ponder this, too, and may have something else to add after a while.  Again, I am an ueber-Pisces.  Our destinies are confusion, emotional hurt, wisdom and vision.

You know, if you want to make people hate someone, tell them he is a pedophile, or wife beater, or rapist.  Good people will react in predictable ways.

If you want to make good people hate other good people, accuse them of crimes they did not commit.  This is the essence of disinformation: sowing discord among natural allies, or at least between people who had been living in peace.

The essence of leftwing propaganda in this country–which is clearly a remnant or, better, continuation of Soviet propaganda–is designed to make decent human beings hate other decent human beings for no reason other than that the second group is accused of a crime it did not commit.

Take racism: the people in this country who believe and act on the belief that black people are inferior are Democrats, and particularly so-called black leaders.

Take sexism: the people who want war on traditional femininity, who wage war on women’s right to be whoever they choose, including dutiful mothers and wives, are leftists.  The abortion issue is about the lives of unborn children: the babies, when born, can obviously be taken elsewhere, which will make them irrelevant to the life of the mother, so HER life is not what is at issue.  SHE does not have to raise the child. That baby is not HER body: it is its own life.

I was reading today this very enlightening interview with a Rumanian intelligence officer sufficiently highly placed that he was in regular contact with then-KGB head (remember, he became dictator of the Soviet Union) Yuri Andropov.

Among things I learned were that there was a sustained effort to demonize Pope Pius at the end of WW2 because he was an ardent anti-Communists, and excommunicated all Catholic members of the Communist Party.  Because of this Soviet and other disinformation agents made him appear a Nazi sympathizer, when he was nothing of the sort.  He hated all totalitarianism.

Operation Ares was designed to convert people into blaming the violence of Communism on the United States government during the Vietnam War era.  If you recall the facts, “Ho Chi Minh”–the name Nguyen Ai Quoc, if memory serves, gave himself when he became a Communist–was a co-founder of the French Communist Party around 1920, just after the Bolshevik coup.  He was a lifelong Communist, and Communist International agent.  His agents spent World War 2 killing competing, non-radical, Vietnamese nationalists.  The Vietnam War was ALWAYS nothing more or less than a Communist invastion of the South by the North with the intent of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship, and using the tools of mass murder, mass torture, dissolution of families, forced relocations of precisely the sort we inflicted on the American Indians, except much more massive in scale, and much more brutal, and an extensive police network.

Clearly, they succeeded.  We won on the battlefield, and only lost in the war for accurate information.

The Soviets fielded more disinformation agents than soldiers during the Cold War.  If they had a million men at arms, they had that many or more being paid to warp minds, distribute false information, induce doubt in the minds of sensible people, install hate and fear, and pervert media.

Perhaps half of what the average person “knows” about this period is outright lie, and another quarter highly skewed.  Exhibit A is Joe McCarthy.  We KNOW, beyond any doubt, that our government and media complex were filled with Communist traitors.  They still are.  These people make rational dialogue, based upon actual concern for living, breathing human beings impossible.  Andropov would have been happy to put a Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid on his payroll.

The Soviets worked hard to direct suspicion about Kennedy’s assassination towards the American government.  He mentions that here: http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/  It was called Operation Dragon.  When I called  Alex Jones a Communist mole some time ago, this is what I had in mind.  I of course don’t literally believe that–I think he has done good work–but I think his reflexive blaming of George Bush for what was clearly a conspiracy on 9/11, was unhelpful.  Could it not have been Putin, as I have alleged, perhaps in tandem with ultra-wealthy internationalists?

The Soviets figured anti-Semitism equaled terrorism equaled anti-Americanism, and by and large they were right.  Much of the radicalization of the Islamic world likely dates back Soviet era agitprop.

He even in the original interview provides a history both of the genesis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (it was apparently based on a French satire), and their use by disinformation agents.

All in all, it seems clear most of us live in a dream world, a fantasy world, and that is exactly where a lot of people want to keep us.  All those of us who have any luck at all exiting the Matrix can do is speak the truth to the best of our ability, and as often as we can.

I have said often that our Constitution is a nearly perfect document, with the exception that it makes no provision to reign in abuses by the Supreme Court.  Now, judicial review was not a part of the Constitution to begin with.  Nothing in there gives the Court the right to strike down laws seen as unconstitutional.  That right was simply asserted by John Marshall, and has gone largely unchallenged since.

I have proposed that a Constitutional amendment be passed allowing Congress to overrule any ruling of the Supreme Court–to insist that its will, which by design most directly expresses the will of the people, be considered ultimately paramount–by two thirds majorities on both houses of Congress.

Here is another idea: Congress could remove individual justices by the same process.

I am reading, again, and expectedly, about anti-legal biases entering discussions in our allegedly most refined, most logical, most ethical, most systematic body.  Specifically, the female justices, apparently not having read the law, and acting as if they are unfamiliar with the difference between a law and a regulation, and in principle unfamiliar with the concept of religious freedom, are objecting to the Hobby Lobby case: http://www.nysun.com/national/startling-rift-on-supreme-court-brsprings-from/88646/

What you will note is that they want laws to be “uniform”.  Why?  At what point ever, in human history, have diversity and uniformity been compatible?  At what point have freedom and unity been conflatable?  The point of our system, the point of liberty, is behavioral and ideological diversity.  No one is arguing women should not have access to abortions, as far as this law is concerned.  At issue is whether or not people who believe abortion is murder can be made accessories to this murder.

I spend a lot of time doing emotional processing.  The reason is that even the most intelligent people–and I have no reason to doubt all of our Supreme Court justices are intelligent–can be driven mad by what they don’t see.  I don’t want to be mad, which is why I am willing to enter into madness.  I need to know its limits, recognize it, acquaint myself with it, so that I can banish it.

I think any honest Supreme Court justice could only look back in horror at all the abuses their body has countenanced and enabled; how much it has diminished a great nation, and helped put us on  path to self ruin.  They were given all the tools they needed; they chose not to use them.

I must admit that at times I feel old and tired like Jean Valjean at the end of Les Miserable.  It is easy to imagine sitting in a comfortable chair in a warm room and just giving up the ghost.  I have done right by my children.

This is not to be maudlin, but at times that is how I feel.

Yet there is something which goes on, it always goes on. I can trust it to go on.    At some deep level I am simply congenitally, in my DNA, incapable of quitting.

And I look at my life thus far, and it seems obvious that it has consisted in reconnaissance, planning, and weapon building.  I have not yet begun to fight.

And to be clear, a “weapon” in the battle for clarity is a clear idea.  A weapon in the battle for emotional balance is a sound psychotherapy.  Weapons in the battle for a peaceful world are personal sanity and penetrating intelligence.

Perhaps six months to a year ago I downloaded a guided visualization meant to help me see my future.  I can’t remember who it was from, but we got to the end of the relaxation, and I saw a giant church, and that was it.  Nothing about career, relationships, where I’d be.  Nothing but a giant, gothic stone cathedral.

But as I imagine it, could we not one day reach a point where all the Christian churches are reappropriated, for a new type of spiritual work?  Could we not make them hum with activity, useful activity, joyful activity, communal activity?  Now, I have nothing against Christianity, but at this point all it can do is fight a defensive battle.  None of its claims can be entered into the empirical column in a scientific dialogue.  I have nothing against Christianity, but I also don’t think long term defensive battles can be won.  Offense is needed.  New ideas are needed.  Growth is needed.  My intent is not to stifle what is good in Christianity, but to augment it, expand it, beautify it, purity it.

As I think about it honestly, I think much of my hurt likely comes from other lives.  This one has certainly been a challenge, but I think there is other stuff piled in there too.  I think I have been killed many times, because–as in this life–I am willing to say the things that need to be said, and pay the price (hell, is it time for the lynching already?  I just got here.).  But I can always count on this whatever it is.  However much it hurts, I keep going, and I rebuild everything that has been broken, and then build something new.

I would like to incorporate more pleasure in my life, but my principle focus is and always will be learning how to do effective, useful, needed work.  Since our world is run by dunces, there is no shortage of such work.

I will say to anyone listening though that although success is far from certain, the battle for the future of Goodness in this world can be won.

I have a conflicted relationship with the work of Martin Seligman.  On the one had, Learned Optimism was one of the most useful books I ever read.  Learning to reframe things was and remains a very useful skill.  I use it with myself and my kids all the time.   If they say “I can’t do X”, I add “yet”.

Where I differ a bit, though, is that I think sometimes you need to tell the kid: you suck at that, and always will, but I still love you.

No, that’s not quite it either, because that, too, is a sort of framing. 

Here is the thing: in his so far very interesting and useful book “This is How” (I’m about a quarter through it), Augustan Burroughs points out that positive self talk only works for people who are already pretty positive.  Positive psychology describes what makes people happy, but it does not really seem to teach you how to become the sort of person who pursues those things organically, or who can pursue them consciously.

In my own evolving view of the therapeutic process–and I know my ideas have likely seemed a bit crazy, since they seem that way to me too, although I am fully 100% committed to seeing them through, since that’s the only way it works–virtually all emotional growth depends on developing the capacity for emotional motion, and for anyone with even a moderate degree of trauma, that is not a given.  It cannot be used as a starting point.  The trauma, or lack of emotional skill, has to be the starting point.

Being rational, in important respects, is an extremely advanced skill that only follows the ability to fully feel, understand, and process emotion.  Suppressed emotion, to borrow a great line from Edward de Bono, speaking of arrogance, is a “Mistake in the future.”

I had more to say, but find I have no more to say.

I drove by the headquarters of Eli Lilly yesterday.  It is an impressive structure.  I have done some limited business with them, but enough to have been through the doors a few times in some of their buildings.

Yesterday, though, I found myself thinking: You bastards.  The entire pharmaceutical complex exists to CREATE problems which can be addressed through their drugs.

Think this through: we KNOW how to prevent almost all diseases.  We know how to prevent, in particular, almost all degenerative diseases, through diet and exercise.  Fresh air, good food, regular exercise, social network (church adds ten years to your life or so: do you see anyone talking about that?).

Big Pharma spends HUGE money developing drugs because they can be PATENTED.  They are not trying to cure anything.  People who want to actually heal disease have almost no voice in this country.  Anyone proposing anything simple, which does not require an advanced degree, and which is inexpensive, will always be outspent and outshouted by those whose incomes depend upon complexity, informational superiority, and high costs and high profits.

With regard to ADHD, sales keep climbing steadily.  Do you not think this is at least in part because an army of pharmaceutical sales reps–the stereotype, of course, is an attractive woman between 25 and 35, driving a nice company car, although I don’t think this is quite as true as it used to be–are out encouraging doctors to write scrips?

Today, I was watching myself.  My work today was alone in a large room.  And I was watching unpleasant feelings coming up, and me getting distracted and wanting to shift focus.  Because I have, I think, convinced some latent part of myself that I can now handle more of these “bad” emotions, it is giving me more of them.  And I am staying in them longer, letting the waves crest a bit more; relaxing a bit more into it, accepting it, accepting Life, in important respects.

And I got to thinking about kids nowadays.  I have talked about this before, but I can’t remember exactly how.  We assume that because kids CAN distract themselves constantly, that they are simply forming this habit.  And this is, I think, part of the truth.

But think of the pervasive lack of authentic, open communication among people, and in this case, among families.  Do not many families watch TV during dinner?  Do kids early on not leave the common areas and hibernate with their electronics in their rooms?  Precisely because they never have to live with silence, I think many kids become alienated from their own inner feelings.  But as I have said, they don’t go away.  They intrude.  They pop up.  They let us know they are there.

And I am not even particularly or necessarily referring to unprocessed traumas.  Can we not speak, perhaps, of uncompleted connections?  Of warmth not given, and not consciously missed?

And would this, too, not cause kids to act out, and particularly boys since boys tend to express emotions through activity?

There are many factors in so-called ADHD.  Bad parenting is clearly one of them.  At root, we could perhaps call it cultural laziness and apathy.

Few thoughts.

http://www.malaysia-chronicle.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=252892%3Ais-this-proof-that-a-blow-torch-fire-struck-mh370-in-the-cockpit%3F&Itemid=2#axzz2xIlN8cMs

What if the fire both caused decompression AND cut oxygen to the pilots, or greatly reduced it? You go “Oh shit”, accidentally go up, then think about it, and go “oh shit”, and drop altitude as fast as you can, while turning back to land.  You die from lack of oxygen.  Your door is locked.  After thirty minutes, everyone else’s oxygen runs out and they die too.  The plane keeps flying and eventually crashes somewhere deep.

Now, I have no idea what the situation is as far as cell phone service.  If they could, presumably passengers would have called people.  Technically, and this is a question someone somewhere knows the answer to, could cell phones have shown active while people were unable to make calls?  I ask this as there is no reason to discount the many reports that cell phones were showing active long after they lost contact with the plane.  Depending on the fuel load, the plane could have flown for another 20 hours.

Or what if the fire cut oxygen to the WHOLE plane?  Everyone would have died quickly.

I continue to believe my first hunch–the ghost ship–best explains the available data.

Here’s another pilot saying more or less the same thing: http://www.hellou.com/2014/03/veteran-pilot-explains-theory-flight-mh370-makes-perfect-sense-3147/