Moderates United

It did occur to me though that the tactic for me would not be presenting absolutely, categorically true and irrefutable proof.  They always have a way out.  What would however be easy would be pointing out that their views are not based upon empiricism.  Given that their belief system and self understanding rests FIRMLY on empiricism, this makes them hypocrites of the worst sort.  This would be easy enough to show.

As one example, take William Crookes .  He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, and one of the most prominent scientists of his generation.  Yet, when he carefully investigated medium Daniel Dunglas Home–who was the first person to be called “psychic”–and found his power genuine, he was vilified.

When a scientist does an experiment, do other scientists take his word for it?  Of course not.  They try to, what:? REPLICATE it.  How many scientists tried to replicate Crookes work prior to denouncing it?  None.  In what other field of science are apparently successful experiments done by qualified professionals not subjected to efforts at replication?  These scientists, at a minimum, could have attended a Home seance.  He took all comers, and did his work in well lit rooms he had not previously visited.  If you read about what he did, and ponder the sheer quantity of witnesses, you have to conclude that it nothing short of a scientific crime that so few investigated him.

That was not actually the main point I wanted to make, so after my foray into channeling Arlo Guthrie, let me move on to Part Two.

I have long felt that atheists have a different vibe to them, as well, a certain emotional detachment, a certain machine-like-ness, a certain feel of metal.  It is not a strong, but a subtle thing.  As William James pointed out right at the beginning of his Pragmatism lectures, your sense of the world and your place in it is by far the most important element of who you are, and such people at root have to admit they are dirt that exists in apparent consciousness for a short time, then disappears for all eternity.

This emotional aspect got me to thinking about how they handle emotions, then it hit me: I think dogmatists pick their stance, their form, their religion based upon what emotions it enables them to suppress.

Think about it: no dogmatist of any stripe can claim to be rational, since by definition they are unwilling to change their views in response to new evidence.  Consistently, of course, the strategy is to avoid new evidence, to make this fact less clear.

If you believe in God, you believe in your connection with the universe and your fellow humans.  If you do not, then you are alone.  Some people like that idea, that they have private chamber that is theirs alone, in which no spirit, no psychic, no transpersonal anything can penetrate.  Their mind may consist solely of electrical impulses and chemical reactions, but it is THEIRS.

As I see it, spiritual freedom consists in allowing a constant wind to blow out of you into the world.  It does not blow constantly, or always in the same direction.  At some level, we have to reject all fixity in order to follow and grow it.  Buddhist monks wandered, to facilitate this.  I would argue that if you don’t interfere with this flow, you can be anywhere and doing anything, and grow equally.

But some people don’t want that flow. They don’t want that connection.  They don’t want to grant certain emotions of pain deep within them access to light and air.  This is why they reject so violently people who are religious.  As I said, I have debated many atheists, and a great many of them border on the sadistic.  They know full well that the ONLY thing that gets some people through life is their religious beliefs, yet they DELIGHT it attacking them and their faith.  They invest enormous energy in it.  I wonder if they are attacking their own vulnerable selves, that lie buried beneath a facade of apparent rationality, one heavily conditioned by emotional attachments they cannot manage because they cannot recognize.

This idea of flow is key.  I am sure of it.  What stops the flow is bad, and what facilitates it is good.  Atheism stops it, so it is bad.  People like Sam Harris have caused a lot of suffering, not least among those who admire him.  What he has done for them is rationalize shelving unwanted pressures and failings, angers and sadnesses, into a package that purports to be perfectly tranquil, perfectly reasonable, and fully compatible with the best ideas of science.

It is a lie.

You cannot build common sense or self restraint when a kid is 15, and I think the mistake many people make is to wait until they start having problems to ask themselves what sort of person they are raising.  By then, there is nothing you can do about it.

As a general rule, if you have to apply force, you have already failed.  You have already fallen short of what was possible.  It applies in social life as much as in the military world.

As Sun Tzu said, it does not take good hearing to perceive thunder, or good eyesight to see lightning.  What is valuable is to see them far before they happen.  Very few people even attempt to live like this.

The Germans have a proverb: “life is like a chicken coop ladder: shitty and short”.  Some lives are like that, particularly in very poor parts of the world today, and for most of the world’s history before that.  Disease, hunger, war, hard work: all of them daily experiences.

Modern Americans have eradicated most of the randomness of life, and some are trying to eliminate ALL of it, in the futile hope that this will bring about paradise.  What I feel it brings about is emotional emptiness, one that is currently filled for many through their politics and relatively hollow spiritual pursuits, but which is not satisfied fully through such activities, and which thus brings anger and sadness.

What I want to submit here is that Elizabeth Kuebler Ross’s stages of mourning can be applied to the basic proposition “you can’t have it all”, which is a paraphrase of “life is pain.”  You can’t EVER have it all.  You can’t climb every mountain if you also want to swim every sea, be a good parent, and be socially useful. We must all accept this. We must deflate our ambitions.

Everywhere you see these signs saying something like “follow your bliss”, pursue your dreams, be all you can be.  For some people, this is likely good advice.  For most, , though,I think it leaves them empty, not least because few are disciplined enough to consistently achieve hard goals.  Half the people you know are below average, but they have dreams too.

The first stage of grieving is denial.  When you are young, it seems the world is your oyster.  You can do and have it all, because you don’t yet know how to plan. 

Then you get frustrated–you feel anger–when you realize you CAN’T have it all, and view life as unfair.  Note that this can happen on many levels.  Poor people in the ghettos are looking to comfortable lives relatively free of violence and ugliness.  The rich may be looking for “true love”.  In my view, it doesn’t matter where you start or end up, the basic truth applies that you have to accept some circumstance of living if you are to be happy.

Then you alternate Bargaining and Sadness.  You hope for something, and sometimes get it, but never enough, if you are looking for happiness “out there”.  You alternate hope and despair.

Then resignation.  This can end in Sadness, if you don’t actively “refute” the sadness emotionally, by consciously accepting life on its own terms.

This is where the process I spoke of a few days ago under “The Finger” (perhaps a subauspicious title, but I’m leaving it) kicks in.  There are processes you can use to flush out the sadness, and anger, and anxiety, and denial, such that emotional states flow OUT of you, rather than in to you from the outside, such that you control your own weather simply by allowing the good to flow out naturally and in an unobstructed way.  This is the “doing nothing” of the Tao Te Ching, and the Windhorse of the Tibetans.  As I have said, I feel it sometimes.  I think it is getting stronger.

Biden’s handlers know he is an idiot.  He is a glad hander, who knows how to read people well enough, and is smart enough to be loyal to the people who invite him to the party.  But with regard to substantive issues, they likely felt that he was absolutely in beyond his depth, and that to attempt to be serious next to the very serious, very policy detail oriented Ryan was way past his capability.  They likely told him to do the opposite, to more or less mock Ryan, in the hope that people would jump on the bandwagon: “Oh there you go AGAIN, Paul, you silly boy”.

It does not sound like it worked.  I can’t watch debates, or really even live coverage of anything.  All I consume, by and large, are facts.  My opinions are my own.

I am like most American men: I like to watch war movies from time to time, of which one is the account of the Battle of Ia Drang portrayed in “We were Soldiers Once”.  I read the book as well, long ago.  Sam Elliot as Plumley is hands down my favorite character.  He’s the kind of guy that gets things done right, and quickly.

I have invested a lot of time and energy researching the Vietnam War, and will take this moment to share them in a form I don’t think I have quite put out there with the clarity I am hoping to here.

As any long term readers I have may have know, I believe not only that we won the Vietnam War, then retreated unnecessarily, but that that is the only honest way to look at it, if you know the facts.  I discuss many details in my paper on Cultural Sadeism, and wanted to add here just a bit.

What happened in the Battle of Ia Drang (which a friend of mine who was a combat historian claimed means “Shit River”, which I have been unable to verify) is that we subjected our troops to fire, brought a massive number of North Vietnamese regulars (who had infiltrated into South Vietnam in patent defiance of treaty conditions and international law) into contact with American troops, and in particular American artillery, air power, and helicopter gunships. The result was that a LOT of NVA died, roughly 10 times as many as we lost.

This was in my view the origin of Westmoreland’s obsession with body counts and “search and destroy” missions.  But it only really worked once.  The NVA–and this was always an invasion of the South by the North, even if they did have some voluntary, and a LOT of involuntary support from locals–changed tactics, and from this battle in late 1965 until Creigton Abrams took over in 1968, we were losing a lot of men for little to no benefit.  This is why public opinion turned.  This is the period the Pentagon Papers covered.

What has received almost NO coverage is the brilliant and SUCCESSFUL strategy Abrams pursued in the wake of the Tet offensives that were DISASTROUS for the NVA.  They lost huge numbers of men, but even worse, they lost virtually all support they had had among the South Vietnamese, and made them wake up and realize what was in store for them if they lost the war.  Huge number of men enlisted in ARVN, and together with Abrams pacification strategy, the NVA had lost all hold on the countryside by 1972.  This left conventional, tank led invasion as their only option, one which the exercised in 1972 and again, successfully, in 1974.

To be clear, conventional warfare is what we do WELL.  That is our forte.  It depends on large numbers of weapons like artillery and tanks that we have in profusion.  What happened in 1974, effectively is what happened when the Shah of Iran fell: we abandoned an ally.  We refused to provide air support, we cut off all aid money, and we refused them access to naval transport.  With those three things–and NO American combat troops on the ground–they would have resisted the 1974 invasion as well, and remained free.

People who claimed to be “compassionate”, who claimed to be “empathetic” and “against war” caused this failure, which led immediately to tens of thousands of murders, and countless acts of torture and violence. It facilitated as well the coup in Cambodia, which was another nation we abandoned, leading to numerous literal torture chambers being set up, in which dozens of people were tortured to death daily for YEARS, and pictures taken ghoulishly of their bodies.

I have on my shelf a somewhat rare chronicling of the atrocities in North Vietnam following its falling to the Communists, and I have to say it is not pleasant reading.  How many of you knew Diem’s brother was murdered by Communists by being buried alive?  How many of you know the name of the Montagnard village attacked with flame throwers, in which hundreds of non-combatants were burnt to death?  But you know My Lai.  Curious.

When I condemn the left as evil, I don’t do this rhetorically.  I am not trying to do anything but describe factually patterns I see, and treat as analytically as I can.  When you see aging hippies, still proud to have been a part of the anti-war movement, what you need to see are self satisfied children who committed a major crime they will never, ever, accept responsibility for in this lifetime.

It is hard not to see Sallie Mae and other such entities as part of a leftist plan to deliver as many bodies as possible into indoctrination chambers, regardless of the cost.

As I think about it, I think I could make the general statement that the principle role of the unconscious is protecting us from pain, and that pain is only released and endured as a result of conscious decisions.  You have to ask for it.  We have the internal capacity to repress virtually all emotions, or at least men do.

Blame hurts.  It forces us to internalize an unattractive image of ourselves, so our unconscious always presents us with the option of opting out, of putting blame on someone else.  Now, it knows the truth, but it hides us, supposedly for our own protection.  Really, it is just doing its job, which is preventing an excess of misery.  But it also knows that any time we WANT to know the truth that it must serve it up.  You have to ACTUALLY want to know the truth.  You can’t fool it.

If you think about this, the unconscious contains all pain you have suffered, but logically it ought also to contain all joy you COULD experience.  Nobody creates anything: they reveal possibilities that were already there.  It is like taking the cover off of naked space, revealing latent information.

Could you do better than train your unconscious to support the expression of joy and tranquility?  As I think about it, the only way to do this is to relate to it constantly, and the only way to do that is to remove all the things from “storage” that it is trying to protect you from, meaning that it can be fully open to you.  In effect, you need to put it out of a job by processing all your hurts completely and instantly. Then it can move on to something else. 

This I think is the state called Nirvana. And what has been extinguished?  The need for ongoing pain, if not the inevitability of pain itself.  The Buddha was momentarily sad when his parents were killed, but it was like a cloud passing by, covering the sun for a moment, then it was gone.

I think this is some good shit.  Holy shit. (Remember, you’re supposed to kill the Buddha.  He would think that is funny, I think). I do, in any event.

Rolling Stones, of course, Ruby Tuesday.

As I think about it, a big part of the appeal of Sybaritic Leftism–and really even Cultural Sadeism to some extent–is that it puts up a big happy facade in front of the future.  If you are worried about the way things are going, about what is going to happen, about economic downturns, nuclear or biologic attack, robots, gray goo, environmental catastrophe, whatever, if you just vote for the people who your friends are voting for, it will all be OK.  Everything is fine.  Nothing to worry about. No thought needed: it is already being done by the “experts”, the people much smarter than you, who are paid to worry, not you.

This was more or less the attitude of the “futurist” David Brin, when he refused to engage with me in an actual fact-based debate.  He does the future for a living, but literally feels that if we just keep electing Democrats things will muddle along.  But when pressed, he is completely unable to defend this view.  “We are going bankrupt” is met with “Medicare Part D”.  Tax collection is at historic highs is met with “tax rates are at historic lows”, as if any money was ever collected at the 90% rates or whatever we have seen in past decades, and as if we did not go from $2 trillion in spending under Clinton and the Republican Congress, to $3 trillion under Obama and a Democrat Senate that refuses to pass a budget.  50% increase in a little over a decade, and OF COURSE Bush deserves much of the blame, but Obama has made things much much worse.

Once one grants the possibility and desirability of a happy billboard painted on the future, it can be filled with ANYTHING, including free healthcare for all, global peace at no cost to us, and ongoing economic prosperity fueled by taxes on the rich.

You read sometimes that you should have your head in the clouds and your feet on the earth.  This may be good advice.  I was thinking about this concept of grounding, of being grounded.  To be grounded is contrasted with pie in the sky, magical thinking of the sort I am describing.

If you think about it, though, every wire in every house that complies with code is grounded, despite the fact that they transmit large quantities of energy.  If energy flows properly there is no need for the ground.  It is only needed when something short circuits.

Likewise, as humans our job is to transmit energy.  If we do it intelligently, then we need not be grounded.  We need to be grounded when we enter trance states of the sort that has captured large segments of our intelligentsia (Ignorentia?  I hate to get to noon without inventing a new word).  All that energy then leaves us, and we wake up, to realize we have been wandering at random, and generally in the wrong direction.

The task is to put the next brick in the road in the right place.  This requires a clear view of the horizon, to see which direction we are going, and which looks ahead as far as possible to work around any bumps or obstacles that can be foreseen.  If you just keep walking, holding a magic banner in front of you, you have no idea what direction you are going, and will sooner or later fall in a ditch.

I will add as a postcript that in my view the thus-far most accurate dystopian movie I have seen is Terry Gilliam’s excellent “Brazil”, which contains the memorable line “don’t hold out too long: it will affect your credit rating”.  If you haven’t seen it, do. In that movie, the billboards covering devastation theme is prominent at the end, at least if memory serves.  The image is vivid in my mind.