Moderates United

Imagine how different our country would look today if only those who paid income tax were allowed to vote.  This would eliminate most students–whose experience of the world is purely theoretical, and thus prone to large distortions.  This would eliminate unemployed people who sit home every day and watch TV.  The people who the Montel Williams ads target, black and white.  This would eliminate the working poor.

Does it not make sense that the people who FUND our nation, through their taxes, should be the ones to decide how we spend that money, through their decisions on who represents them in Congress?

We look back on our Founding Fathers, and the elitism implicit in only giving the vote to land-owning men. Yet, we need to remember that education, then, took both time and money, both of which were in short supply back then.  A great many Americans could not even read (although then I do think we were one of the more literate nations, since one must read to read the Bible).

And the thought is reasonable: what benefit accrues from lowering the intelligence of the discussion?  What benefit accrues from moving the amount of understanding of the average voter to the left on a Bell Curve?  We want good decisions, and good decisions in turn flow from intelligence.  Logically, the more intelligent the electorate, the better off we will be.

But what if the elite uses its power to PERMANENTLY keep everyone else down?  This is a valid question, and the reason we have continually expanded the voting franchise.

But as things stand, people who do NOT contribute are in a position to vote themselves money and goods from those who DO.  It would literally be no different than if we granted the right to vote, in America, to Guatamalans, who could be expected to support candidates who promised foreign aid to Guatamala.  Economically, the money is wasted.  The Obamaphones will accomplish no economic good; nor does any serious person really expect them to.

This problem would be eradicated with my solution.  If you want to vote, get a job, then make enough money to pay income taxes.  If you want that group to be larger, then we can expand the pool and bring the taxes down to your level.  You may quickly wish for less taxes, like the rest of us.

If the top 50% of the country ran things, everything would be better for all.  We could still have social welfare programs.  No one would go hungry or homeless involutarily.  But we would get a rational public dialogue oriented around our actual problems, and a responsible concern both with the well being of ALL Americans, as well as our posterity.

And for those who would scream at me: I ask again, do you or do you not understand that our true annual debt increase is something on the order of $5 trillion a YEAR, and that that cannot go on much longer?  If you do understand this, why are you not discussing it?  The economic crash that is a CERTAINTY will hurt the poor the first and most.

Can you remember when you became emotionally numb?  I don’t think it is possible.  It would require remembering an extinction of something–feelings–that you no longer recognize.  Were you able to feel what you felt before, you would still not be able to pinpoint a moment–although perhaps a period, perhaps one triggered by an event.

We are surrounded by references to numbness.  I have posted many of them.  Here is another, from Linkin Park, in which I think they are wrestling creatively with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXYiU_JCYtU

What I would submit, is that the pervasive anger and emotional stunting we see around us is a direct result of the Baby Boomers trying to “find” themselves.  Put another way, of their historically unprecedented selfishness and vanity.  These things have consequences.  If you spend all your time looking in one mirror or another, you are not emotionally available to those around you.

In this song, I think they are making reference to that.  I don’t have time for a more complete analysis.

Here are the lyrics:
I’m tired of being what you want me to be
Feeling so faithless, lost under the surface
Don’t know what you’re expecting of me
Put under the pressure of walking in your shoes
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)

[Chorus:]
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there
Become so tired, so much more aware
I’m becoming this, all I want to do
Is be more like me and be less like you

Can’t you see that you’re smothering me,
Holding too tightly, afraid to lose control?
‘Cause everything that you thought I would be
Has fallen apart right in front of you.
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
Every step that I take is another mistake to you.
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
And every second I waste is more than I can take.

[Chorus:]
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there,
Become so tired, so much more aware
I’m becoming this, all I want to do
Is be more like me and be less like you.

And I know
I may end up failing too.
But I know
You were just like me with someone disappointed in you.

[Chorus:]
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there,
Become so tired, so much more aware.
I’m becoming this, all I want to do
Is be more like me and be less like you.

[Chorus:]
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there.
(I’m tired of being what you want me to be)
I’ve become so numb, I can’t feel you there.
(I’m tired of being what you want me to be)

In the simplest possible sense, Goodness is for me emotional maturity, which includes the ability to grow and ripen in understanding across a lifetime. It is a progressive increase in the capacity for emotionally engaged work, the expression of empathy, and a capacity for emotional fulfillment.

I posit no strict rules.  In fact, I have defined proper moral judgements as “local, imperfect, and necessary”.  That needs to go into my essay, but I keep forgetting, and I stay busy.

This is, in my view, a globally adaptable paradigm.  I personally might question a decision, say, to have orgies in the town square, but the Taoists apparently did it in China, and it may well have been a source of personal and communal well being that was consistent with emotional growth.  I wasn’t there, and I don’t know.  And to the point of my system, it is not necessary for me to render judgment.

I have defined Goodness as an emergent property of a system in motion characterized by the rejection of self pity, persistence, and a desire to learn, in the broadest possible sense.  Self evidently, motion, per se, is the defining quality of freedom.  You are not free to the extent there are fences and barriers saying “go not here”.  You are make less free if you can’t allow smoking in your bar.  You are make less free if you can’t smoke pot legally.  You are made less free if you can’t opt out of social programs you want no part of.

Self evidently, Socialism–as the empowerment of a small oligarchy tasked with homogenizing culture–is antithetical to freedom, and hence goodness.

It is a strange fact of my own experience that as an inhabitant of a land still largely free that I know the feeling totalitarianism, coming as I did from a family in which the expression of individual emotion and initiative was banned, not explicitly, but in that dark place where all emotions one wants to hide live freely until they are seen.

As I struggle with freeing myself, my world is going darker.  The DESIRE for freedom is waning, and being supported tacitly by countless thought leaders who are exhausted.

With regard to academics, I want to point out how this works.  Every journalist, every doctor, every lawyer, substantially every politician, the teachers of our children, our psychologists, our ministers: they went to college, and were exposed to the ideas on display there.  It is not not that bricklayers care about what Antonio Gramsci had to say, but that his or her Grade School teacher may have been taught by someone whose learning came from a texbook written by someone who was.  It trickles down.

The phrase “Monster Fertilizer” came into my head this morning.  Often what happens is the phrase pops up–in the spirit of Freudian word association, but spontaneously–and then I analyze it.  If you watch, and if you practice, you can take nearly any initial input, and reach some conclusion your unconscious was looking to make conscious anyway.

Here, I have had the vision from time to time of monsters remembering themselves.  Joining the leftist cult is a sort of magical spell that people allow themselves to fall under.  It is a congenial cult.  It promises a bright future, no matter what present circumstances seem to contradict that possibility.  And it demands no original thought, no personal development: nothing but the willingness to yell what everyone else is yelling, when they are yelling it.

But spells can be broken.  A rose-colored or white mist can sweep through and cause everyone to take that breath of life they have been holding in their suspended animation, and remember who they once were, what they once loved, before the forgetting began.

And the masks of monsters they wore can be cast down and made into a root fertilizer for something new, some new society actually worth living in.

It is an infelicitous metaphor, but I think sometimes of Hitler dreaming endlessly of the cities he was going to build in the Russian Steppes, even as bombs fell on his bunker.  I think that perhaps my dreams are the same, and failure is inevitable.  But why?  Why not dream simply because it appears impossible?  Why not allow out ideas which are made at least more possible through expression?

I often sit in silence for hours, usually while drinking.  Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I just sat on my couch and listened to the breeze outside for a couple of hours.  There is a point where silence almost becomes a companion.

If I could pick ONE thing that is most wrong with America right now, it would be the fact that we are bombarded with idiocy and babble all day every day, in many cases literally from awaking to going asleep.  How can you think when the TV is on?  How can you settle into deeper thoughts when you never stop listening to music, checking your Facebook and Twitter, and texting?

I remember reading Erich Fromm some years ago, and I think it was in “The Art of Loving” that he opined that if they were simply denied their daily paper for a week, some percentage of the populace would lapse into acute MANIFEST psychosis. Sanity is taken for granted, but need not be.

What would happen to kids nowadays if they had to go a week with NO electronics of any sort?  It would certainly generate HUGE anxiety, and some percentage of them, likewise, would suffer some sort of MANIFEST breakdown.

Unstable systems can be propped up in motion, but fall over when asked to be quiet.

“Who can wait until the dirt settles in the water?” said Lao or Chuang Tzu approximately.  But that is what it takes for clarity.

The interesting question is why it became known in the first place.  What is the point of rope?  To tie things together, to connect them.  Was the rope in the knot able to do this?  Of course not.  It became revered for its uselessness, and the challenge it presented.  Time spent unraveling it was wasted.

This is a species of idolatry, which is what you get when you forget what is real, and what the purpose of your activity actually is. Swords have their uses.

I want to say again that the fight to avoid tax hikes is likely useless, and even if successful will lead to an effective propaganda campaign in which Republicans are blamed for an economy entirely the creation of Democrats and RINO’s.

Obama wants this economy.  I say give it to him.  Given the extent of our borrowing, the taxes won’t make a dent, but Obama can’t blame 10% joblessness in two years on anyone but himself IF we give him what he wants.

In many cases, this will likely fall on deaf ears, but that is my feeling.  The American people want to be lied to, and only suffering will make them listen to anyone but the Pied Piper.

This has been an emotionally productive week for me.  I got behind my waterfall of abstraction, and interestingly found ANGER.  Anger, in no small measure, drives me.  This may be obvious to readers, I don’t know, but it was surprising to me.  Obviously, I get angry.  It was the standing nature of it that surprised me.  It was SEEING it.

And I was standing on a ladder today, thinking of Woody Allen and George Bernard Shaw, both warped, awful human beings in their own ways, but also gifted with a talent for wit, and psychological insight.  We speak of Shavian Wit.  Allen has been a steady feature of our cultural landscape for, what, 40 years?  Both are intelligent.  Both understand people.

But both have (had) something deep inside of them that drives them, that is unnamed, unacknowledged, hidden.  When we see Woody Allen being neurotic, what we need to see is someone who goes through the motions of caring about others, who goes through the motions of emotions, but who in my view is really quite cold and calculating at the core of his being.  So, too, was Shaw, who called for the invention of a poison gas to kill undesirables, all while smiling genteelly.

Constant abstraction, perhaps, is often a smoke concealing a fire.

I will add, actually, that I had a dream some time ago, in which I climbed down a ladder, into an underground area, where Noam Chomsky was cajoling people to jump off a cliff into a pool far below, saying “the water’s fine”.  Many jumped.

My interpretation then was that he was convincing people to lower qualitative levels, to lower, less desirable emotional and intellectual states, which I certainly believe he did and does.  But now, when I apply the idea that ALL parts of every dream contain an element of me, I see that he symbolized for me the state of concealing abstraction.  He symbolized for me the power to avoid emoting through thinking, and in so doing reducing myself, lowering myself.

This is interesting to me, at least. If your existence is the thorn which pricks you, what do you become when it disappears?

I have never seen it put quite this way, but a core advantage socialists have is that they are preaching decadence.  They are preaching walking downhill because it is easy.

A coherent, non-decadent society depends first and foremost on duties, on everyone carrying their share.  The core contention of socialists is that no matter how lazy and stupid you are, you deserve to be cared for, and it is the DUTY of SOMEONE ELSE to do it.

Quite literally, the only duty they demand of those who support them is that they vote for them, and campaign for them.  That’s it.

Decadence, though, is when you think first and foremost about yourself, and only secondarily about others, the society as a whole.

And I want to reiterate that Capitalism–if we ignore the Monetary Mercantilists–is a system in which greed can ONLY be satisfied by providing something people want at a price they are willing to pay, and doing it earlier and/or better than anyone else.  The only exceptions are when government steps in to protect monopolies, when it uses taxpayer money to buy political support, and in cases of outright graft and fraud, which are both illegal, and which WOULD be prosecuted by a non-corrupt government.

“I have always fought for ideas–until I learned that it isn’t ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.” Margaret Anderson

I was looking at my bookshelves this morning.  I purge them from time to time, but I still have at least 500 books, many of which I have not read [this is off topic, but some are what I call “eternity” books, by which I mean that I would read them if time were endless, but which I can’t justify reading now, when I have so many projects that–rightly or wrongly–I feel warrant my attention and execution].

What I was thinking is that all of them are portals, gateways, to something else.  They have no meaning in themselves, except in terms of what they do to you, to how you think, how you feel, how you interact with OUT THERE.  Books are not and should not be an end to themselves.  They are meant to support action, doing, daring, feeling, discovering, failing, succeeding.

I think the failure to understand this is perhaps one of the root failures of our intelligentsia.  Far better the carpenter who reads to relax than the academic who does nothing else.  The latter quite literally sucks intelligence out of the room, since he has abandoned the project of improving the world, outside of the politics he attaches to himself as an ersatz conscience.

When you look at “writers” like Jacques Derrida, the text is literally and specifically made the end.  He reveled in his very uselessness.

A true Liberal Arts curriculum would support businessmen, politicians, and manual laborers in guiding our nation into the future.  What we have is systematic deception, intellectual corruption, and systematic failures in synchrony between thought and action.

I was dreaming yesterday of a time ten years from now, or so, when thousands of men and women would converge somewhere to build a literal old style stone cathedral to Goodness, to a renewed sense of national–global–identity, purpose, and wholeness (which again in my iteration includes countless room for individual expression).  We would have to relearn stonemasonry.  We could use doctors and lawyers, and academics.  It would be a grand adventure.

I am likely ridiculous, but so too was the  person who dreamt up Notre Dame.  Castles in the mind become castles in the sky become roofs and steeples that shelter one from the rain.