Moderates United

We need some way to legally protect whistle-blowers, and people who have been engaged in illegal activities, but under orders.

My first thought was that Congress could offer immunity from prosecution, but as I think about it, that would likely have to go through Eric Holder, and he is by far the most corrupt and unethical AG we have ever had.

My second was that Congress could grant pardons, but only the President can do that.

It would seem that some law should be on the books which protects people who expose wrong-doing.  If there is a law, we need to enforce it–by arresting Eric Holder if necessary for contempt of Congress; and if there is not, we need to create a law.  Obama used the word transparency often, presumably because it tested well in focus groups, and because he has never felt the slightest need to make his rhetoric and actions congruent.  He was lying, of course, but even so it will be difficult for him to oppose such a law, particularly given the revelations of the past six months, and the coming midterm elections.

Food for thought. 

I will add, that in the longer term amending the Constitution to grant Congress the right to pardon people would likely help to weaken the power of the Presidency, which in this late hour is desperately needed.

Oprah, perhaps, is the one who popularized this phrase.  It has always seemed to me a way of rationalizing a certain fatigue with life.  Yes, “old souls” are deep.  They understand things.

But it is my unshakeable belief that the end of wisdom is spontaneity, vigor, and vitality.  It is fun.  Of course life is serious, but does that not make play all the more important?  For my part, the older I get, the more childlike I want to become (while paying my bills, of course!).

Well, I dug down long enough to hit a nerve.  I found the springs of fear and pain that motivate my intellectualism.  And I have come to realize the profound value of numbness.  Without the ability to numb my feelings, I could not have survived.  It would have been quite impossible.  What I found was a fear that fills the sky, that permeates my being from top to bottom: a fear I have been swimming in my entire life to such an extent I could not see it; a fear that absent some at least temporary stability in my life would have crushed me.   I will get through this: it is all to the good.  This has been my goal.

Psychoanalytically, I can see where it comes from.  The details do not matter.  But I will offer two points as a justification for this post:

1) Unless you have learned to relax absolutely and completely, to let your mind go silent, you likely have knots in you that are pushing you in directions you would not otherwise choose.  In my view, the therapeutic value of Autogenics will become clear in the next ten years, if we survive.

2) I wonder if much of our modern culture does not exist to numb feelings of anxiety.  Is it possible that Horror movies are so popular BECAUSE they desensitive people?  Do we as a society have the emotional maturity to love properly and well in large numbers?  Do our children not all too often feel alienated from an early age because of the pervasive selfishness surrounding us–which in many cases is manifested as excessive paternalism?

Few thoughts.

I will add that I have no idea who reads this blog.  I assume I am on a CIA/NSA watch list, since they read everything.  I know at least a few people follow me.

And what I have just posted is extremely personal.  Somehow, though, it makes me feel better to share some things in public.  I don’t know if it is a form of self absorption, or if sharing is a perfectly valid form of self therapy.  I suppose the following feeling is the measure, and in this case I have obviously chosen to hit “post”.

Progress is being made.

You cannot run from fear.  You can only confront it.  There is no other way to deal effectively with it.  And when it comes to internal traumas, they manifest psychologically as fear, and specifically a fear of pain.

What I have come to realize is that you can suppress fear, but only at the cost of suppressing substantially all OTHER emotions as well.  It is a blanket cure, that carries with it both the suppression of unwanted emotions, but also WANTED emotions.

No person whose life is largely characterized by fear can be loving, or compassionate, or caring, or in any way emotionally available to others.  They can be inventive intellectually, however.  This may be what drives evil in some cases: the need to avoid fear, combined with a need for perceptual motion.  Deep traumas, avoided, push repetition, intellectualized.  Is this Lenin or Hitler: rationalized hatred of chosen Others?

At a deep level we have to open ourselves to pain.  The happy life is one in which sorrow is always “digested” as it happens, in which mourning is sincere and effective, and ideally shared.

This may seem trite–I don’t know–but for me at any rate his feels like one of the more important truths of my own experience that I have uncovered in some time.

We do not need politicians who promise to build things with our own money.  We can build things on our own.  What we most need, what we DESPERATELY need, are politicians who do not break things.

People ask why Republicans are not “doing something” about jobs.  The answer is simple: any more of Obama’s doing–the Democrats and RINO’s doing–and we will be in a decade-long Depression.

Everyone in power needs to do less, so the rest of us have a reason to do more.  The question is not action versus inaction.  The only question is whether or not the action will be on the part of the American people, or on the part of elected officials who understand nothing of the American people, and whose power depends on this misunderstanding.

I’ve often railed against Horror movies, but as I’ve said, a book I read encouraged me to watch “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and to begin the Saw series.  I have thus far watched the first three (of 7, I believe).

Unexpectedly, these movies have proved salutary.  For some reason the Saw movies comfort me.  They provide a needed processing space for some emotional truths I have been avoiding.

This is more personal information than I would normally share, but scenes from the TCM kept running through my head the last time I saw my family.  The hurt was subterranean, as were the attacks.  I don’t know what sustained physical abuse is like–I was often spanked, sometimes slapped, but never endured the sorts of things one reads about–but it has long seemed to me that in physical abuse there is at least clarity about the nature of the assault.  Being hit often in the dark leaves one both in pain and confused.

Be all that as it may, let me offer a short truth:

The lesson of Horror movies is that in a just world there is cruelty.

Now, this may make no sense to you.  The “problem of pain” has been around since there have been theologians and philosophers.

Let me define “just” as: conducive to needed learning.  Let me define cruelty as: “unwanted and seemingly excessive pain”.

I am tempted to keep talking, but I think I am walking past something, so I will leave it here.

With regard to the previous post, I did want to note that I have long been conscious that my intellectualism is a protective barrier.  What would have been most obvious for me to have done is find a job thinking somewhere, so that my weakness became a strength.  I could easily have done this as a lawyer, an engineer, or academic of some sort.  I did in fact start down the path of academia, but even then I could see that in some way I was retreating, and I didn’t like it.

I earn my income now to some extent using my intellect–being intelligent is beneficial just about everywhere–but what is more important is my people skills, which are still at times lumpy, but by and large reasonably good.  This has taken a lot of development on my part.  I more or less consciously chose a career path doing things I was NOT congenitally suited for.  I don’t like the idea of having weaknesses, even though I continue to have many.

This all is my long way of saying I likely repeat myself.  I am at times like that old joke about the two men drinking at a bar, discovering they have an amazing amount in common, the punchline to which is “Oh, that’s the O’Malley brothers.  They’ve been drinking again.”

I “rediscover” things about myself and the world.  This is an interesting process, the most important part of which is, I think, seeing the old in slightly new ways.  We evolve and change every day, and what you thought you saw once and finally many years ago can always shine again in new ways.

My most personal stuff I write in a non-NSA compliant format–with pen and paper–but it doesn’t seem too inappropriate to lapse on occasion into the “Daily Me” mode which is the default for so many bloggers.

Looks like it’s been about two weeks since my last post.  My brain has of course been active, and at some point I have 4-5 posts to make, but I’ve been focusing more on WHY I post, why my brain is so active, why I feel a need to insert my opinions on everything.

Obviously, I am intelligent.  Where I stand on a curve will depend on where you are standing, but I think I have proven that in a battle of minds I can at a minimum hold my own.  I have degrees from good schools, high test scores, and above average children (I am not a big fan of Garrison Keillor because of his politics, but I won’t deny he is witty).

But what drives me to post?  I get anxious when I haven’t written anything in a while.  I am not using by brain for useful, planned work.  Were this the case, I would long ago have completed a more comprehensive economics text, and rewritten by treatise on Goodness.  I would take projects one at a time, and focus carefully and creatively on that subject, on that work, and do it thoroughly and well, then move on to the next project.

What I have concluded is what may have long been obvious to the more careful reader, which is that I use my brain as camouflage, as a means of diverting my own attention from the gaps in my own focus, from emotional weaknesses.  When I write, it looks to all the world like work.  It looks like creative output, useful effort.  And it is that.

But it is not fully what I am actually capable of.  In all too many cases, it is a diversion from needed work, in particular from planned, organized work. This works in large measure because I am good at what I do, at least in my own estimation.

This needs to change: not the posting, but the metastructure within which it happens.  Seeing this–seeing this emotional reality, FEELING this emotional reality–has caused me to realize this change is needed.

Generalizing this, though, it occurred to me that camouflage is all around us.  Consider a cop or soldier who worries daily about violence even when it is not present or remotely likely.  There is a t-shirt some soldiers wear that says “I may look normal, but I’ve already killed you twice in my mind”.  I worked with cops, and they are some of the most fearful people you will meet, not in the sense that they are unwilling to engage in dangerous work, or are paralyzed with anxiety, but rather in the sense that they are very closed to all people they do not know well.  There is a great deal of what might be called social xenophobia.

Now, clearly in some respects this is an adaptive behavior.  They need to some extent to be able to treat people as objects.  They need to distance themselves emotionally from what can be very stressful, and occasionally fatal work.

But is this not also an ideal place for people who are already socially isolated, somewhat paranoid?  I felt very comfortable being in the police department because I did not have to deal in emotions.  I could just be in my head, and that was OK.

Or to take the opposite end of the spectrum, what about people who lack a stable sense of self, of boundaries, of personal initiative?  Would they not be drawn to “helping” professions?  Would they not blend in, would they not camouflage their basic weaknesses as strengths?  Would someone who does not know who they are or what they want not potentially be a very good care-giver?

I have told the truth here, and then I have operated upon that truth analytically.  This post is an example of what I am talking about, but as I have said tends to be the case, it is hopefully nonetheless useful for someone.

First off, I’m going to post a link to a short video from Arnaud Maitlin, who is more or less the official face of Kum Nye: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjQ6lZu8I

I’m doing a program called “e-Kum Nye”, in which they email me a “class” with comments, notes and added instructions.  This is the 9th class introduction in the first series.  I can’t now find it on their website.

But dealing with change is the point.

Anyway, he says in this video that the point of Kum Nye is dissolving duality, and I have really been trying to enter into this realm.

We are all fragmented, and the quieter I get, the more I realize I fear stillness.  I was actually doing the meditation for the 10th class, and finished thinking I needed to look up videos on UFO’s, or conspiracies or something.  I wanted to refresh my fear.

This was before today’s practice.  I went into this feeling, and realized that to “be” is to find and identify with our deepest emotional roots, our most primal emotions.  For the large percentage of people who were not well nurtured when young, this is going to lead to a fear of abandonment.

But it goes deeper than this.  Even for those who WERE nurtured well, there is I think generally a desire to hold on to something primal, such that was not a fear of being, per se, becomes a fear of becoming.  This fear of becoming is, as one example, at the root of all fundamentalisms.  I think Islamic fundamentalism is only particularly violent because their entire creed rests upon the ability to compel social conformity, and upon violence as a means of proselytizing.  But Baptists Fundamentalists are quite capable of the hate that blind fear gives rise to.  The history of religion is in no small measure that of competing fears, competing attachments, and competing manias arising from an inability to adapt.

Within my own world, I look back to a fear I had of the country when I was small.  What I feared was the lack of structure–really the lack of plastic.  I was raised as a typical American suburban kid, protected from most of the real problems of life.  I spent an enormous amount of time watching very insipid TV, collecting comic books, and not thinking much about anything.  My breakfast was normally coffee creamer consisting almost entirely in artificial ingredients (I was and am somewhat lactose intolerant) with Captain Crunch, or Life, or Cocoa Pebbles, or Rice Krispies with lots of sugar. 

Lunch was whatever they served at the cafeteria.  I remember in high school my favorite lunch was a fried beef and bean burrito, a Snickers and a Mountain Dew.  When I got home from school I made toast with butter, sugar and cinnamon, and turned on Gilligan’s Island, or the Rockford Files.

My parents would eventually get home, but nothing real was exchanged; nothing truly nurturing for me.  I just existed.  We all had slots to fill in life, and went about it without enthusiasm.

Where in any of this is there a place to feel anchored, solid?  Is something like this not the life of millions of American kids even now?  I remember talking with a couple of skateboard kids, one of whom I had coached in soccer but not recognized because he had grown long hair.  They were complaining that none of their teachers made ANY demands on them. They were craving order, structure.  They complained that they came home and had NOTHING to do, no homework.  Their teachers were preoccupied just trying to keep order, presumably because expelling kids has been made hard to do by do-gooder assholes whose own kids go to elite private academies, like Obama and Jesse Jackson’s kids.

When I look at the dominant feeling from those years it was like I had cotton in my brain.  Nothing felt real, meaningful, worth the trouble.

This in my view is the root of the angry music we see.  Kids want SOMETHING, fucking ANYTHING, to hang their hats on, to believe in.  They want something with gravity, to get away from what Kundera called the “unbearable lightness of being”.  Kids, at heart, WANT to be kicked in the ass from time to time.

Precisely because life offers them nothing heavy (obviously, there is constant family drama, divorces, abusive parents and what not; but none of this truly creates anything but annoyance compared to the overarching sense that life FEELS meaningless), they become resistant to the idea of deep relaxation, of entering into deep, meditative states.  They, on the contrary, stay constantly busy, texting, playing video games, watching TV.  My oldest reports that it is common from groups of teenagers to get together and sit in a circle, texting other kids who are not there.  There is never any actual Presence, any actual being-with-others. Sex becomes a drug because it comes CLOSEST to Presence, but if any actual Presence does enter it, at least one partner is bound to run, usually the boy.

And this drives people mad.

I keep threatening to do a series of posts on Propaganda.  In some measure what has stopped me is laziness–I will need to type large sections of a fairly recondite book.  What also gets in my way, though, is the emotional burden of recognizing just how far what Jacques Ellul calls Integration Propagandas have progressed, such that substantially all the gravitas of a truly Liberal tradition has been sapped in favor of the intellectual equivalent of Kool-Aid.

Yes, of course there is the Jim Jones metaphor.  But consider further why they were there.  He founded a church based upon the idea of people being isolated, lonely, directionless monads.  He promised them an end to their freedom, an end to their lonely need to make their own decisions, and the overwhelming bulk of them followed him to their literal deaths.

Obama’s core followers are no different.  He has rescued them from freedom, and they have not forgotten it.

And to be clear, obviously any conformist group demands as a condition of membership certain behavioral standards.  If you want to be in a Frat, you need to do certain things.  If you want to be a member of Christian congregation, you need to do certain things.

What I would submit, though, is that for a cult the principle element is membership itself.  Cults protect from the fear of becoming because, in absolute subjugation to an external authority, you are not really becoming at all.  The fundamental of doing what you are told never changes, even if one week you are told to support X and the next to oppose it. 

Voluntary associations, on the other hand, rely upon principles.  You come together because you believe certain things, which within certain ranges are non-negotiable.  Jews are not Christians, or vice versa.  There is room for both, but they are not the same.

That will have to do for now.  I needed to vent a bit.

 Posted here: http://chronicle.com/article/Against-Environmental-Panic/139733/

The salient reality, to my mind, is that Western thought has failed to
provide our most intelligent and most educated with a functioning
meaning system.  Life must contain some pain, but we have been taught
the contrary: that somehow through social engineering we can end the
difficulties of life.  This clearly has not worked.  Pain remains.  What
a meaning system does is justify pain, and what this brand of
anti-humanism does is rationalize self abnegation.

But the
massive and ineluctable defect in this worldview is that it depends
entirely on a manufactured reality.  Global warming is not real.  We are
not running out of resources.  Capitalism works, and uses the price
signal to ration scarce resources.  The mass starvation that Ehrlich and
others predicted has only materialized in nations which were
unfortunate enough to become subject to utopians: Ethiopia, as one
obvious example.

From within my own reality, your piece is
eminently reasonable, but I suspect required some courage within the
world where you exist, and I commend you for writing it.  I particularly
liked this phrase: “To sound the alarm is to re-enchant the routine
under the sign of danger.”

Reenchantment: is this not what people
really want?  Their war is purely abstract, unemotional (outside of
primal emotions like self righteousness and panic), but waged in the
name of what we are all called on to value by our Romantic heritage.  In
theory, they can value a vision of the ocean or the moon, even if their
daily dose of hatred biases them against it.

What I would submit
the world ACTUALLY needs is better ideas, and better praxis.  I offer
many ideas of the sort I (of course) believe helpful here:
http://www.goodnessmovement.com

With regard to praxis, in my own
experience, the daily practice of actually feeling emotions, touching
them, expanding them, and liberating very pleasant experiences is quite
useful.  The system which has worked best for me is Kum Nye.  Dharma
Publishing has something called e-Kum Nye I recommend every chance I
get.

I also think anyone who is trying to get in touch with
wildness ought to look into Stan Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork, at
holotropic.com .

I have watched people twist and turn, stuck like
impaled bugs on the needles of bad ideas, for many years now.  I try
daily to develop alternatives.  Our very real, very pressing problem is
that many have abandoned the hope of finding a good reason for
existence.  That is the true secret of anti-Humanism, aka in its current
iteration Ecologism.