Moderates United

I would not say I am a classic “artistic” type: by and large I pay my bills on time; I show up where I am supposed to on time; I have no weird fashion quirks; I don’t owe anybody any money.

But I am a bit disorganized.  This is in part an inevitable result of having large quantities of ideas on dozens of topics every day.  Well, I’m fixing that.  I am implementing David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system, which I like in no small measure because of the lack of focus on technology.

Anyway, I dug into a container literally filled with ideas–something like a 1,000 sheets of paper–and this was on the top:

“What I want to do is bring to the task of thinking the mindset of a serious craftsman, and create objects both functional and esthetically pleasing.”

I like that. 

I SAID that, you say?  Ah, but sometimes I think I’m either stupid or a dick, so my agreement with my own ideas is in no way a foregone conclusion.

I am going to permit myself a public bit of self expression wrapped in being cryptic.  Let’s call it the Yin and the Yang, because the Passive and the Aggressive just doesn’t sound right.  Open and Closed doesn’t quite work either.  How about “one foot moving forward, one foot moving backward, with Me suspended in the middle”? I am, after all, an ueber-Pisces.  There’s one thing you didn’t know about me.

In the early days of CrossFit, which is seemingly almost a household name now, I experienced what I would now call a death and rebirth experience. It was an odd thing, brought about in no small measure both because of my psychological strengths, and my quite profound and sundry short-comings/stupidity.  The outcome of that experience, arguably, is what put CrossFit on the path to the success it now enjoys.  It was never certain it would grow as large as it has; that was certainly far beyond the wildest hopes of the founders.  I know this.  This story has been so thoroughly buried that it is now known by few.

I experienced something like this with Holotropic Breathwork.  I nearly got booted from the training, and was definitely in limbo there for some hours.

Which of course brings me to Achilles (perhaps on my gravestone–which I won’t  have, since I plan cremation; oh, maybe it could be written on a piece of paper and burned–they should put the proper Latin for what I intend by Pater Non Sequiturum.)

I have not read the actual Iliad, other than simplified versions that were not direct translations, but I did listen to an excellent series on it from someone (I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name: she teaches at Northwestern) from the Teaching Company.  Even without reading the prose, I was absolutely fascinated by the story.  I had always thought it was a retelling of the Trojan War story, soup to nuts.  It is not.  It is about a period of the war in which the greatest warrior first rejects all Greek conceptions of war–first by isolating himself and rejecting the traditional enticements of booty and fame, and then by going too far in his violence, becoming almost the embodiment of violence itself, remorseless, pitiless, tireless.

He dies three times: first, by rejecting his role in society as a fighter and leader; second, by violating rules of conduct of war; and third, most importantly, by accepting the inevitability of his own death.  He had been given a choice, and had chosen being forgotten and living a long life, until stirred back into action by Patroclus’ death.  He had literally shed his skin in the form of armor, and taken on another skin.

Please do not laugh immediately when I say I am no Achilles.  Yes, this is obvious.  But in a deeper sense, i would argue that we are ALL Achilles.  We are all here to fight battles.  We have the choice to stick to the tried and true, to emulate and follow the models society sets before us; and we have the choice to feel and fail and die trying to win our own worlds, our own sense of self.

For my part, I have no desire to consciously and consistently violate the rules of others, but I would submit that being willing to do so while chasing something else–to stray onto someone else’s sacred land chasing a deer or following a cloud–is an inevitable and ineluctable element in trying to learn how to cross over into death and rebirth.

Take this for what it is worth.  I felt this needed to be said. I  do not share much of what I say to myself here–it is probably half and half–but some things I feel may have or grow wings, and are only able to do so with traction–earth–water, and the light of other spirits.

Guilt is an odd emotion.  I have been talking about expressing emotions, but guilt feels almost like self attack, self flagellation, making the recriminations inside your head that could and perhaps were made by someone else.  How do you let emotions flow that feel like barbed wire?

Clearly, guilt has a purpose.  It is what distinguishes the psychologically normal from sociopaths.  But it can be abused in so many ways.  Overly done, dramatically done, flamboyantly done, it avoids the actual feeling.  Not felt at all, and the stasis of the system is assured.

But what is it?  I think in the end it is a call to qualitative change.  You made a mistake, were weak, were hasty, for reasons of a character flaw.  True expression of guilt is honest self assessment and CORRECTION of the flaw.  Since correction implies acceptance of imperfection, this is hard to do. 

And so we dance.

This name has been stuck in my head, too.  Again, I have no idea where it came from.  Father of Perikles, Admiral of the Navy in a sort of Joint Command led by a Spartan, which accomplished the final victory over the Persians.

I’ve found that if you just go with things, more things follow.  This makes life interesting.

Sometimes I get names stuck in my head.  Cleanthes was one of them.  To the extent of my recollection, he was not mentioned in the survey of Greek philosophy I surveyed; nor was Zeno.  The only place I likely would have encountered him was in Hume’s “Dialogues concerning natural religion”, which I read in graduate school, and which apparently contains him as a character.

Be that as it may, I looked him up, and some of what he says is quite interesting:

Cleanthes maintained that pleasure is not only not a good, but is “contrary to nature” and “worthless.”^[15] It was his opinion that the passions
(love, fear, grief) are weaknesses: they lack the strain or tension
which he persistently emphasized, and on which the strength of the soul,
no less than that of the body, depends, and which constitutes in human
beings self-control, and moral strength, and also conditions every
virtue.^[15]
He said in a striking passage: “People walk in wickedness all their
lives or, at any rate, for the greater part of it. If they ever attain
to virtue, it is late and at the very sunset of their days.”^[16]

Zeno had said that the goal of life was “to live consistently,” the
implication being that no life but the passionless life of reason could
ultimately be consistent with itself. Cleanthes is credited with having
added the words “with nature,” thus completing the well-known Stoic
formula that the goal is “to live consistently with nature.”^[17]
For Cleanthes, this meant, in the first place, living conformably to
the course of the universe; for the universe is under the governance of
reason, and everyone has it as their privilege to know or become
acquainted with the world-course, to recognize it as rational and
cheerfully to conform to it.^[18]
This, according to him, is true freedom of will not acting without
motive, or apart from set purpose, or capriciously, but humbly
acquiescing in the universal order, and, therefore, in everything that
befalls one.^[18] The direction to follow Universal Nature can be traced in his famous prayer:

Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny,
To wherever your decrees have assigned me.
I follow readily, but if I choose not,
Wretched though I am, I must follow still.
Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.

Is this not quite close to the Buddhist conception of abandoning desire?  I would say, though, that “logos” in my view should mean more than reason and intellectual order.  A forest has “logos” because it is ordered too, simply in a deeper way.  Chaos, per Chaos Theory, has a “logos” that can be approximated.

We do not live according to reason.  We live according to our spirits, of which reason and apparent logic is but one manifestation.  We have to have a place for “that”, as I have said.

That’s enough on that.  I am procrastinating.

I think I get it now: movies will keep bouncing around my head until I notice and articulate somewhere the lessons they are trying to teach me.  The Lord of the Rings–as an epic filled with, and almost entirely informed by–mythos, has a lot to teach.

More than once I have pondered the symbolism of the Ring.  It is not quite evil, outright.  It is more subtle than that.  What it feels like to me is compulsion, the spirit of compulsion.  It is a muscle that spasms and never releases, but to which you become addicted.

It is the spirit of monomania, of thinking one thought over and over and over.

It is sending on only one frequency.  We are meant to wander here and there, in spontaneous ways with deeper orders.  As I have said often, what is unnatural is a planned and unspontaneous order–the chopped down/groomed forest, in the Taoist idiom–which is ordered only in conditions of coercion, which has no staying power, no longevity.  It lasts only as long as the muscle spasm is in place.

Now, I have been making good progress over the last month or two in personal growth. I have reached a point where I am willing and able to let some part of me fall away, as a sort of snake skin, or covering, that I no longer need. 

And some part of me I would identify with the ring keeps feeding me news of death and disaster.  There’s no point.  Go back now.  Live in a permanently curtailed, small world, and wait for direction there.  Thoughts that, in short, make me tense, make me worried.  Heart attack, heart attack.  Business failure, business failure.

Why are the Shirelings so resistant to the power of the Ring?  Because they lead relaxed, natural lives, surrounded by and tending to life, and are thus as opposite of the power of the Ring as they could be.

To my way of thinking, what is natural is an open meadow.  What is unnatural is a skyscraper built upon it. Why should it matter 1,000 years from now if people remember what we built?

The “I” of Ayn Rand is in my view a sort of nervous tick, a momentary disruption.  I mention her specifically since the skyscraper represented everything manly she wanted, including her own penis (OK: that’s going a bit far, but my kids, having seen a picture of her, refer to her as “the woman who looks like a man”.)

What she wanted was hard and enduring, and difficult to craft and build.  The ascent up the skyscraper represented the literal and figurative high point of “The Fountainhead”.

But is it natural for a flower to desire to blossom alone, so that its glory can be greater?  Paradoxically, Ayn Rand wanted the admiration of others for not wanting the admiration of others.  She wanted recognition, but only for doing it her way.  She wanted to be seen as an absolutely unique genius, but did not tolerate any dissent from this view among her admirers.

Can we not ask: is the pleasure of feeling above others really superior to the feeling of connecting with others, and having the ability both to generate spontaneous joy and to receive it?  Do we not in the end want our feet in earth, and not concrete and glass?

Few wandering thoughts.  If it doesn’t make the images go away, I’ll have another go after a while.

I’m trying to watch more movies.  I’ve liked Aaron Eckhart since “Battle: Los Angeles”, so I thought I’d give it a go.  I am going to speak as if you have seen the movie.  I’m not paid for this.

First, when it became obvious both that the North Koreans were behind it, AND that they were actively trying to dismantle America’s nuclear deterrent–as well as, of course, having engaged in what by any standard is an act of war by attacking and killing many Americans, and taking its two top officials prisoner–why not phone the head nutcase, and give him a simple ultimatum: release the President and all hostages in the next 10 minutes, or your nation goes up in flames.

What does Morgan Freeman do?  Agree to the terms, to “save” the President.  Now, I have likely quoted Jack Nicholson’s famous line from “As good as it gets before”, but will again.  How does one write of a typical leftist?  You write a conservative, then remove all sense of reason and accountability.

I have told my kids already: if somebody ever threatens to kill me unless you do something they can’t do by themselves, understand they are going to kill me anyway, and kill you, once they get what they want.  You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.  Period. This is common sense.

But what has Morgan Freeman done?  In order to win some minute chance of saving the President, he virtually ensures war between North and South Korea, and then the destruction outright of the United States.

Yes, it is just a movie, but they make movies like this because people are too stupid to think things through (another personal favorite non sequitur: in Eraser, after Arnie gets to the roof of a highly secure building, how does he get off?  We are not told).

To be clear, it is likely millions will die in any war on the Korean Peninsula, since somebody is likely to use nukes, most likely the North.

And compare Obama to Eckhart’s President.  Does it not make you want to weep?  Could you imagine Obama in a situation like that reacting with even a SHRED of moral courage?  What challenges has he surmounted in his life?  Running a campaign which mainly consisted in reading speeches from teleprompters someone else wrote?  He is to a real President what Ben Kingley’s drug addled Mandarin would have been to a real, serious, terrorist. He is an actor, and not even a particularly good one.  No one believes him when he says he feels “compassion”.  He was unable even to fake credible tears after the murder of over 20 kids in Newtown.

Otherwise, the movie was the umpteenth knockoff of Die Hard.  Worth the $4 I spent.

Edit, two other thoughts.

1.  Did we not just go through the scenario described, roughly, of a North Korea taking provocative action, and threatening missile tests?   Think about this: Obama’s silence, in the face of a semi-credible threat of nuclear attack, was deafening, at least for those with sense.

2. Gerard Butler’s character is the sort of person, I’m sure, that Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were: men with character, absolutely dedicated to their cause, and utterly undeserving of what happened to them.  They are people who make people like Obama and Hillary look like the midgets they are. They are what makes this country great.

I remember a story a SpecOps friend told me.  When Clinton authorized the release of dual use nuclear technology to the Chinese back in the 1990’s, he had just completed SERE school, which among other things involves being locked in what amounts to a dog cage for day or two, and in the advanced training getting waterboarded and beaten.  I didn’t ask the details of what happened, but I’m sure it was unpleasant.

What bothered him is that people like him have to undergo very severe, very difficult training to protect secrets that in most cases have a shelf life of no more than 48 hours.  Yet, Clinton, who like Obama never underwent any security clearance, was able to release strategic secrets that could affect the destiny of nations, at no cost to himself, and without even being coerced.

I well remember the militias that formed under Bill Clinton, and the sundry conspiracy theories floating around.  The Left, of course, began writing effective propaganda about right wing “paranoia” many years ago.  We were told there was no Red Menace, even after it was revealed that the principle architects of both the UN and the Bretton Woods agreement were Communist agents.  We were told the “domino theory” had no validity even after Communism brought its unique version of hell not just to South Vietnam, but to Cambodia, Laos, and many nations in Africa and Latin America following what the Soviets interpreted as America’s decision not to oppose them.

Even now, we have a man in the White House about whom we know almost nothing other than that he has been surrounded by anti-liberal radicals his entire life, and brought many of them to Washington with him.

Whenever I see people mock those who question the fundamentally Liberal character of modern left wing intellectuals and policy makers, I always like to link this piece here, as it puts their views in their own words: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1588/article_detail.asp

We were told just this week something to the effect that people who are asking for actual science from the global warming crowd are nuts.  Consider in that regard this quote, chosen more or less at random:

[l]iberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most
extreme case, the U.S.A., unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many
of the collective needs of the citizens…. There must be open minds to
look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption
of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties.

We have to understand that these academics and think tank leaders–and the people who bankroll them, like the Rockefeller Foundation and George Soros–have been wanting to more or less erode democracy in favor of something like the fascist economic and political system China has evolved for something more than 50 years.  None of this is new.

Thus, whose sanity should we question, when we have thousands of people in positions of influence openly advocating for an end to the primacy of Constitutional law in the governance of our republic, and who act consistently in support of that aim, as Obama has since the day he hit office?

Taking people at their word is not paranoia.  Ignoring them: THAT is lunacy.  Turns out Hitler was quite sincere, and so was Van Jones early in his career, before he learned the Fabian principles of gradualism, appearing respectable, and persistent conscious deception about their actual end goals.

As I’ve mentioned, I recently went through the whole thing again.  One thought that kept occurring to me this time is that it was economically invalid.  Where were the farms around Minas Tirith?  The riders of Rohan were presumably pastoralists, but if so, where were the cattle and sheep?

Now, obviously there exist substantial logistical difficulties in mounting to this level of detail, but on another level I would like to submit that in his prioritization of economics as a reflection of underlying power dynamics, and thus an issue of primary POLITICAL importance, Marx was quite astute.

We dealt, of course, with the kings in the movie, but there would have been serfs, since this was presumably a feudal system.  Did Tolkien and/or Peter Jackson not want to show these people, since they kept referring to the “free” kingdoms of Middle Earth?

And what did the orcs eat, in a land without sun?

Virtue can only take priority over hunger when hunger is largely and regularly sated.  This means anyone concerned with building virtue must take an interest in effective economics.  Life is logistics.  This is not speculation, but daily observation.

What if the Buddha had wandered into a strange land, attained Nirvana, but been unable to speak the local language to communicate it?  How many human wonders have been lost for the proverbial “want of a nail”?