Moderates United

As is likely obvious, I like to think of myself as a general, commanding ideas instead of troops, even though I identify emotionally much more closely with NCO’s.  In the real world, even though it would likely be a waste of talent, I would emotionally rather be an excellent Sergeant Major than an excellent General.  The NCO is the conduit through which idea is made manifest.  He is where the rubber meets the road. He is the source of order.  He is what enables an Army to be a self organizing system, particularly in the face of the chaos of the battlefield.

Be that as it may, I would like to make some predictions, and suggest some tactics and strategy.

Obama is going to lose badly, really badly.  He is trending badly now, and as he gets hammered on Benghazi (not optimal?  What do you think Romney is going to do with that, combined with his patent lie at the last debate, and his decision to fly to Las Vegas rather than actually act like he cared)), and the expansion of the Welfare State, and the enormity of his increase in our national debt, etc, etc., even many Democrats are going to turn on him.

Here is where it gets interesting.  The lunatic radicals that have taken over the Democrat Party, and who thought they had found the winning combination by putting suits and congenial smiles on some of their members (pretty much the whole inner circle, certainly including Obama and Holder) and talking in generic platitudes, are going to get unmasked.  They only constitute perhaps 10% of Americans, and the really nutty ones are only perhaps 1% (the Bill Ayers, the Jeremiah Wrights, the Saul Alinskys, the Frank Marshall Davises, the Anita Dunns), but through the sheer force of will and tenacity that lunacy gets you, they have achieved much broader power.  That is, in my view, about to end.  I think this will be their Gettysburg, where their insurgency, and invasion of normal, non-lunatic America will end.

What did Candy Crowley do?  She tipped her hand.  She openly supported Obama.  She supported his lie.  She interrupted Romney more often, and gave him fewer turns at bat.  Moderates noticed this.  The hard core Obama partisans of course didn’t care, since they are increasingly a maddened shrieking mob.  And this is important: when Obama loses, they are going to take to the streets and internet in droves, screaming bloody murder, and I think large segments of the middle will notice this, and realize that their support for Obama was never rational in the first place. This will be sobering for them.

And this creates an opportunity for conservatives (or as I like to say, genuine Liberals) to educate.  I was talking last night with someone in bar about talking points.  I have said this before, but talking points are propaganda, and propaganda damages our public dialogue, our capacity for rational thought, completely.  Even if your side wins the election, the cause of truth has lost.  The cause of GENUINE national debate about anything has lost. The willingness to study issues and reach emotionally unbiased conclusions atrophies.  That is how we elected Barack Obama in the first place.

But in my view there is NO OTHER WAY to get our nation back on track but by recreating–or more likely creating for the first time–an actually educated electorate.  The elitism among our Founding Fathers was based on deep historical knowledge.  They knew most people are driven by vanity and self interest, and that such people, granted access to other peoples money, would take it, even though in the long run it would plainly hurt them as well, and probably most of all.

But everyone has the vote now–and I am not saying this is intrinsically  bad thing, merely that it HAS been a bad thing.  Our task is to make voting an expression of social coherence based upon factually accurate information.  We need to generalize economic knowledge.  We need to generalize political knowledge.  That is why I spend so much time writing my pieces.  I don’t know who if anyone reads them, but I have increased MY OWN knowledge, my own internal qualitative richness, and prepared myself for a time when such material may be useful.

I think the Left is right in its argument that George W. Bush was elected on talking points.  Karl Rove appropriated the Alinsky method by channeling widespread conservative hatred of Clinton to get Bush elected.  And conservatives were happy, for a very long time, even though Bush acted like anything but a conservative.  He didn’t just start two wars: he expanded social spending as well.  And people forgave him because he wasn’t Bill Clinton.

Mitt Romney is not George Bush.  He is much smarter, and I think more capable, at least potentially.  What our task will be on the first day he takes office is to begin putting steady pressure on him to stick behaviorally behind all the excellent rhetoric we have been hearing in debates.  The Mitt Romney of the debates is who the people will be voting for, and so there is NO REASON to back down once he gets there.  We need to keep him honest.

OF COURSE the attacks from the Left will be relentless, but we have been learning over the last four years how to refute their arguments in depth.  Grandma’s Medicare is ALREADY insolvent.  Adults understand that you can’t get everything you want for nothing.  Social Security is ALREADY insolvent.  Between the two of them, our actual increase in national indebtedness is something on the order of $5 trillion a YEAR.  The most important stuff they keep off the books. Neither the private sector nor State and Local governments are allowed, by law, to do accounting the way the Federal government does.  To actually pay for the bills coming due, we would have to hand over ALL of our income, today, and IT’S GETTING WORSE.  Unaddressed, Medicare alone may soak up the entirety of our tax base within 10-15 years.  Annual interest on our national debt will be more than the current Dept. of Defense budget within ten years, assuming no more debt downgrades.

Put accurate facts in people’s hands, coherent arguments.  There is no need for stentorian yelling.  There is no need for fighting.

Our decline has been gradual, and our ascent back up into usefulness will be gradual as well.  But we can all thank Barack Obama and his fellow radicals for enabling the organization of a long term and vital conservative resurgence.

I believe an effective psychotherapy will consist in four elements: holotropic breathwork conducted in multiple sessions with the same people; mastery of autogenic and progressive relaxation; Kum Nye; the capacity for intense physical exertion, of which CrossFit is in my view the paradigmatic example; and a simple cognitive strategy, of which for me personally the best example has been my own triad of 1) never feel sorry for yourself; 2) Keep moving, internally and as needed externally 3) a commitment to lifelong learning and growth in all aspects of my life.

The most important element is the Holotropic Breathwork–and I think a long term supportive group should be a part of this–but I would submit that it would benefit hugely with a partnership with CrossFit, since CrossFit builds courage and pain tolerance, and both are needed for optimal outcomes with the breathwork.

I was driving down the highway yesterday, listening to that Midnight Oil song about giving the land back to the Abo’s, looking at the size and pace of our modern civilization, pondering both the ridiculousness of the idea, and also what was lost in the destruction of their culture, and it hit me: we can build a spiritualized tomorrow.  There is hope.  We can make all these walls and towers and highways talk in ways which are meaningful.  What was lost can be built again.  I see how.  It can be done.

I want to go on record as saying that I do not support the proposals of the Positive Money movement in Britain, which I feel are being reported on and supported by some of their local press ONLY because they serve Fabian/Keynesian goals of complete government control of the monetary system.

Their proposal for gradual deflation will cause widespread economic harm, since the actual costs of all extant loans will go up steadily, which was more or less the mechanism that initiated our own Great Depression.

Their idea that ANY amount of money printing, particularly by the government, is desirable, flies in the face of my often-repeated contention that all inflation is theft, which I dealt with extensively in my financial treatise.

They are of course correct that banks steal when they print money, and I do support that educational work; but I feel strongly that their proposals, if accepted, would only further undermine a nation that once had the largest Empire the world has ever seen, but which has been in steady decline for nearly a century.

I think the essence of healing is emotional openness and motion.  You have to get, somehow, to places where you are hurt, then add motion.

As we move through life, many of us have our flow of action blocked, or constricted, or redirected, as an unconscious means of going around and avoiding emotional knots tied to traumas, large and small, which forced at some point a reaction of avoidance and forgetting (what I have called forgession, which is a more or less intentional forgetting).  The image I would use is a flow of water constricted by many partial dams and turns in the river.  Action is tied to emotion, which you will note has the word motion in it.  Less blocks, fewer bends, and you get more effective expressions of energy, of emotion, of action.

As an example, I would submit that anxiety is simple a very small dose of anger, directed at people who hurt us long ago.  It is both precautionary–a mild, highly diluted fight or flight response–and reactive to certain eternal moments that exist in us, certain places which NEVER CHANGE, certain situations that you can’t get over, not least because you can’t remember them, or remember them in a way which subtracts the honest emotions you felt.

The task is to feel those feelings, which we have done many times, but to add motion.  What Holotropic breathwork does, as an example, is first induce a state in which suppressed emotions are allowed to come up, but then through gradual changes in the music, adds motion.  You don’t know where the music is going, what is next, and you have to accept this.  This adds motion.

Or another example would be Barry McDonough’s 20 second response for panic attacks.  First, you accept the anxiety.  Second, you ask for MORE.  Finally, you add a 20 second countdown.  You ask it to do its worst, but in 20 seconds, no more.  The countdown, I realize, adds motion.  Where a panic attack is more or less falling into what feels like a never-ending spasm of terror and sense of incipient insanity, you break that spasm by adding motion, by adding time, by putting in on a line which you move along, one which has an end.  It’s a very clever system.

I think I’m getting close to figuring these things out.  One of my goals is to create an actually, consistently effective psychotherapy.  The Holotropic Breathwork is already invented, and already effective. What I feel, rightly or wrongly, is that I may be able to better systematize it, and better able to frame it cognitively such that it sees much wider use, which I feel could only benefit our society in pervasive and desirable ways.

I did actually watch the debate.  I like to deal, here, with deeper issues, but will allow myself a short break into the very temporal.  The following I posted on Yahoo, in response to this very partisan and in my view disingenuous editorial.

Obama is worth $10 million. He has NEVER been an average American. He
went to a high end prep school, and was educated at two elite
universities. He doesn’t care about ordinary Americans. His Energy
Secretary wants gas prices to be $10 a gallon. His pension fund invests
in the same companies Romney’s does.

The salient fact of the debate was that Obama has kept NONE of his major
promises. He did not get unemployment down. He did not cut the
deficit. He did not enact or even propose an immigration solution,
despite having majorities in both houses of Congress.

Obama is an empty suit. He is a windbag. He is an unprincipled
charlatan whose reelection will cause massive layoffs, skyrocketing
energy costs, a complete breakdown in our healthcare system, continued
foreign policy failures, and an unnecessarily diminished America.

Since I’m on the topic, I think it worth posting as well a quite remarkable quote from a former aide and supporter who knew him well, and who was caught in an unguarded moment, defending the President, but in such a way as to be very revealing:

“People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is that it’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers.”

As I posted a few days ago, I think the stages of mourning concept can be applied to life, to the proposition that ALL lives will contain pain and that this is inevitable, and even desirable.  Sadness and difficulty make us wiser and more GENUINELY compassionate.

I would submit that Sybaritic Socialists are stuck in the Bargaining stage. They don’t want to deal with anger or sadness, but can’t use denial (which in part is what the Hippy movement was about, using drugs to become functionally dead, as in Grateful Dead, and thus numb to the actual question they were being asked to answer) since they need some purpose for their lives.  They want to cut a deal with life.  They want to use self delusion as a means of avoiding the sadness and anger that attend actual emotional growth.  They want to remain morally and emotionally as “innocents”, as if that were possible absent more or less conscious choice.  They want to pretend this world is safe, or would be if we just did what everyone said.  They want to pretend hard choices are never needed, and that we can postpone all griefs and pains indefinitely.  All you have to do to get this deal is submit,  Merge into the herd.  Listen and do as you are told, and all will be well.  They are EAGER to sell their freedom, if the alternative is any quantity of suffering.

It is a truism that family businesses fail in the third generation.  The grandfather is serious and starts the business.  The son, being the father’s son, and having watched the business be built, is also serious, but not quite as much.  The grandson is flippant, since all he has ever known is success.

The Baby Boomers are grandchildren.  They are infantile, and they are actively ruining everything good in this country.

Cultural Sadeists, those who express and intend only evil in their politics, recognize the pain in life but they refuse to accept it.  They refuse to feel it.  Since they recognize a need for pain, they seek it in others.  This is the root of cruelty.

You have to be emotionally strong to live well.  You MUST be willing to allow unpleasant emotions to wash through you.  You can’t feel sorry for yourself, and you have to keep going.  This is the only path to Goodness.

I just edited the piece so the hyperlinks can be accessed, and altered the Guaranteed issue a bit.

I deleted all the other posts–I’m not completely sure why I posted them, since I don’t know how many readers I have–but in any event this is short.

Here is the link: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page25.html

It is 30 some-odd pages, but I have to say I think it is good work.  

I wonder how many recognize that view.  It played an important role in American history.

I watched “The Avengers” for the fourth time today, and had a thought: it really is a pity that Captain America was put to sleep during the Communist era.  Obviously, the Left did and continues to do a good job of lying about the INTRINSIC evil of coerced egalitarianism.  That is what they do: they lie.  Long practice makes expert.

But interestingly, as I pointed out somewhere, the very first Iron Man was located in Vietnam, at the beginning of the war.  In it, Iron Man defeats a model of an NVA terrorist leader. 

Marvel knew then what was subsequently forgotten as a result of the diligent efforts of leftist “scrubber”: that the war consisted in vicious men infiltrating from the North, terrorizing small villages until they agreed to support them with food and troops, and a systematic expansion from these bases of assassination and terror directed nearly ENTIRELY against civilian targets.  Women were raped and killed in front of their husbands.  Young girls were tied to trees to die of thirst and exposure. Flame throwers were used against grass and wood huts.  Village and government leaders were shot in the streets.

All of the evils that Captain America fought in World War Two, mythically, were amply present in the two shooting wars we fought with the Communists in Korea and Vietnam, but TO THIS VERY DAY people do not understand how awful Communism was and is.  It is really shocking.  Obviously, I deal with the whys and hows of this nearly daily, but even now it shocks me how complacent those who should know better are in countenancing and even defending evil.

Even today, the Left is trying to portray the take-over of the Middle East by Fascist thugs as somehow good.  Men are being crucified.  Little girls are being beaten, or, alternately, married off to 50 year old men when they are 10, in the tradition of the “Prophet”.  Women accused of adultery are stoned.  None of this is good.  It is “unholy” in a very formal sense.  These people WILL be punished when they die, because they KNOW on some level they are committing evil acts.

I believe in God, and I believe that He put within us an innate sense of right and wrong.  What undermines that sense is EFFORT.  You have to work at it.  You have to adopt an ideology which allows you to turn off your intuition, your own judgement, in favor of a rigid behavioral code.  Prepubescent girls should not be forced to have old men humping them.  No one can defend this.

But the Left does, typically by turning a blind eye. 

The root of this word is “content”, which means to contain.  Happiness is what you are filled with.  It is an internal artifact, and one which need not be tied to outside world (although self evidently I do not dispute that some external circumstances are easier to find happy than others.)