Moderates United

I was driving my daughter home today, and she was complaining about her school work load.  She is not much of a complainer, so I know that she is describing real struggles.  At first I did the “you can handle it” thing, which did not seem to bring relief.  Then I actively listened, and indicated I heard and understood her, which helped a bit more, but it wasn’t quite there.  Finally I told her: “it’s OK to feel overwhelmed and out of control”, and that was close to the target, then I said “positive thinking is good, but negative thinking is OK too”, and she laughed and felt better.  The bubble popped.

I thought about it, and what she was really trying to do is reorganize her internal ecology to accept as normal the idea that she had to work this hard to meet her own standards.  The problem with positive thinking is that it can become another club you use to beat yourself.  You think you need to be positive, and think you are doing something wrong when you start getting emotional conflicts, confusion, fear, and the like.  Those feelings then become, in turn, a further source of conflict.

As I have said before, I have found that if you can accept feelings fully, open yourself to them, then they disappear.  The essence of tranquility is learning to do this constantly and with skill.

This is also the nature of self organization.  You have a hundred messengers within you, all trying to tell you different things.  You have GOOD ADVICE within you, PERFECT advice even (I would submit theoretically), but you spend much of your time resisting the voices, instead of letting them flow, and seeing how the dust settles in the end.  That part is worth watching and using.

The premise of Autogenic Self Regulation, which was developed Johannes Schulz and Wolfgang Luthe, if memory serves, is that in the non-ordinary state of deep relaxation, the knots within your unconscious can be loosened, generally through non-guided, spontaneous visualizations.

Holotropic Breathwork operates on more or less the same premise, but it is much easier to get into altered states with it.

A useful social order would be based upon the purpose of facilitating self organizing systems to move towards wholeness, as implied in the Title.

As I think I have said at some point, I like to think of all human orders, from the personal to the global, as visualizable as tiny dynamic circles of smoke or fog–like little hurricanes, and that I call chakras, after the Sanskrit for wheel or discus–that interact, sometimes rapidly and spontaneously with one another.  The point of freedom is allowing this process to happen.  The crime of tyranny is that it prevents such emergent orders, and all the personal and social felicity they enable.

Life is so much more fun when you get to play.  This, here, is my play.  If I lived in China, Cuba, Venezuela, or Iran, I would not be able to do it the way I do now, and I have reason to believe the world would be poorer for it.

Facebook at the moment has a video talking about all the wonderful aspects of chairs: community, rest, fun, etc.  In the event this is not painfully obvious to all, this is an effort to reframe the concept of chair such that an empty chair cannot be used to such devastating effect in portraying Obama.   They are in fact trying to tie positive feelings to Obama’s patent dereliction of duty.

This is patent advocacy, and frankly I really don’t get, as much as I
talk about it, how people can be so stupid as to believe good things
will flow from this man’s reelection.  The rich will get richer, the
poor will get poorer, we will continue to lurch along with high
structural unemployment, energy will get vastly more expensive, our
international standing will continue to decline, the Middle East will be
lost to the Muslim Brotherhood, a war will be waged on our suburbs,
punitive tax rates will be enacted, and so on.

With regard to the empty chair theme, consider this article, in which someone in a  position to know said that Obama thought he had WON the debate with Romney, and that he did not take debate preparation even remotely seriously.

During his debate preparation in
Henderson, Nevada, Obama broke off to visit a campaign field office.
There, he joked with a volunteer about how his advisers were ‘keeping me
indoors all the time’ to practice. ‘It’s a drag. They’re making me do
my homework.’

So many people seem to think that Socialism somehow moves people in the direction of community.  We look wistfully back at intact cultures, like the Lakota Sioux in “Dances with Wolves”, or the cultural holdouts in “The Last Samurai”.  But the reality is that all those cultures made absolute demands on their members.  They had places and duties, rituals and roles.  They were not permitted to engage endlessly in childish pursuits, even if they also had places and times to release all their pent up energy.

When I look at hippyish Sybaritic Leftists, it seems to me that they have consigned to the future the adult responsibilities they refuse to shoulder today.  Their “community” is not one of shared work and difficulty, but rather one of shared magical thinking, thinking which somehow posits that without planning and careful thought a better cultural order will emerge spontaneously; and that no present threats to that order need be considered, because it “all works out in the end”.  The reality is that it DOES NOT always work out in the end.  Ask the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who were psychologically and physically tortured following our chosen retreat from Vietnam in the face of determined nihilistic aggression.

The reality of socialism is that it is a vast machine, one which assigns you a part number, and which is utterly and completely indifferent to you as an individual.  You are not a part of a web: you are a cog in a machine which operates for its own perpetuation and benefit.

A friend of mine who had experienced close battle first hand once told me that war is “as romantic as a meat grinder”.  I would submit that Socialism, even in its Scandinavian versions, is as romantic as a car engine.

I will add that the core psychological difference between self identified Socialists and Fascists is NOT a concern for human rights, or any meaningful difference in economic beliefs and practices.  The core difference is that Fascists retain a sense of the possibility of human and national nobility, of qualitative distinction, and socialists reject that possibility.

Let me offer an example: is it better for your mother to stay with you, or an underpaid civil servant?  Is it better that someone knows she loves cherry blintzes, or that she is assigned “rational” food which nourishes her body at the lowest possible cost?

What is the purpose of life?  Is it merely continuing, without enthusiasm, without purpose, without hope of growth?  I cannot tell you how dreadful the mindset of Socialism is to me.

To be clear, I have no objection to charity.  I have no objection to publicly funded homeless shelters, and battered women’s shelters, and the like.  These, however, assume that most people can make their way, and that we just need to pick up temporarily those who fall behind.  This is very different from the idea that everyone must be equal in their results, that greatness is to be discouraged, and that creation is a nuisance.

Even if Mitt Romney wins the election, that will constitute ONLY a discontinuation of our rapid disintegration.  Our slow disintegration through overspending, overreaching Federal government, dissipation of our buying power by banks and the Federal Reserve, and through simple intellectual torpor, will continue.

What I would argue we have, though, is a window through which we can continue to pour light.  We need to donate MORE to conservative lobbying groups like Campaign for Liberty and Freedomworks, and RANDpac in the event of a Romney victory, to keep him from getting wobbly. 

But as I said a month or so ago when Bernanke announced  QE forever, the fact that the Fed more or less came out in support of Obama is to my mind at least encouraging.  Maybe Mitt is to some extent bought, but maybe he’s not an honest politician in the sense of someone who once bought, stays bought.  Maybe there is a fear he may play to the right, may listen to the right, and may actually act on principles he really does have, but rarely exercises.

One can hope.  These are possibilities.  No matter what, though, we have to remember that we have a $3 trillion Federal government we need to reduce by at least half.  My take is that the best simple thing most of us can do is work to educate people, and donate to on-going efforts to duplicate on the right the organizational strength of the left.  The truth is that we are right and they are wrong.  Our ideas make things better, and their ideas make things worse.  Truth is a powerful thing,  when allowed to run free.

It is strange that your character can be seen through the prism of your politics.  In theory, politics is about differing visions of how to accomplish generally shared ends, such as national defense, or the generalization of prosperity.  In theory, politics reflects differing understandings of the mechanisms of economics and government, such that people ought to adopt roughly the tone as to the best route to take from Point A to Point B, and ought to spend their time looking at maps, evaluating traffic patterns at various times, and reaching conclusions they can share.  This would be rational, if the only goal was the accomplishment of concrete ends.

But what must be understood is that the political is the personal, which is to say people adopt their self understandings in many cases THROUGH their political understandings.  You are compassionate BECAUSE you self identify as a Liberal.  To reject your politics, therefore, is both to reject you as a person, and to reject compassion as a desirable character trait.  When politics are personalized to that extent, rational discussion is impossible. 

I have experienced hatred many times, from people who would have been just fine with me in absolutely every other respect, had I not forced them through my political commitments to cast me from their midst.  You see NICE people, informed people, benign people, who will more or less start hissing at you the moment you reveal yourself as not one of them.  The more strongly they believe that their politics expresses their empathy, the more strongly they will reject empathy in their interaction with you.

The reality is that politics, like economics, is a realm of abstraction.  It can only be done properly by people emotionally uncommitted to a specific path, in a spirit of goal-oriented, feedback-oriented engineering.  When you are building a car, you know whether or not it works.  You take it out on the road.  Politics, particularly as expressed through related economic ideas, ought to be the same.  The sole focus should be on OUTCOMES and not methods.

But people get emotionally attached to the identity that conformity to specific methods gives them, which means that to reject those methods–the methods of Leftism that, as one example, have resulted recently in Detroit’s own police force declaring it an area beyond their ability to control–is to reject ONESELF.  You cannot make someone more defensive and hence more angry than by attacking their sense of self.

When I get hated–which has happened often–it is because people perceive me as attacking them personally.  Their whole sense of self depends upon their unquestioning membership in a tribe which provides them with social support and validation, and which rejects outcome oriented abstraction, in favor of strategies solely calculated to seizing power, and renewing efforts to implement policies that have already failed many times.

Such people are compulsive because they have to be, because they otherwise don’t know who they are.  That is why I have often said there is a thin line between Sybaritic Leftism, and Cultural Sadeism.  One bleeds into the other.

I was listening to Supertramp this morning, the “Logical Song”, and heard with renewed ears the refrain “Please tell me who I am”.

Do you think anyone who has been told who they are wants to be told they got the wrong answer? 

I consider from time to time getting a bumper sticker which reads “Not all who are lost wander”, which of course plays on the “not all who wander are lost”, I think from the Lord of the Rings.

Me, I do spend a lot of time lost.  I go down the alleyways, and up the hills, and through the valleys, and from time to time realize I don’t have a clue where I am.  I do this both literally–I spent three hours lost in Pittsburgh recently, in a literal fog–and figuratively.  Not everything on this blog is clear, for the simple reason that my thinking is not always clear. I think I’ve noted this a few times on here.

But what I’ve noticed is that if you circle a topic repeatedly, coming at it from different angles, making guesses, being wrong, adjusting, describing, redescribing, then abstracting, moving here, moving there, eventually you get at what might be called the “formula”, the short summary, the essence of a thing.

When I am concise, it is because of previous wordiness.  When I am precise, it is because of long term fogginess.

It is reasonable to want to provide basic comforts for yourself, and for your family, if you have one.  It is reasonable to want shelter, transportation, decent food, and the like.

We see often Malthusian descendants saying that THIS TIME, for real, we are on an unsustainable path, despite some two centuries of being wrong.  I drove through Pennsylvania and New York two weeks ago, and I saw mile after mile of prime land, that could be used to grow food, or whose trees could be harvested for any number of things.  Canada consists almost entirely arable land, particularly if we can get the Earth warmer.

Obviously, at some point, we really will reach the limits of what is possible, at which point prices will indicate we need to change our consumption patterns.  We are nowhere close to that point, however.

We see, though, the desire to want the good things in life called “selfish”.  I would submit that that is the wrong word entirely.  What it is is a materialistically oriented meaning system, one which seeks to maximize sensory pleasure with concrete things, whether they be fine wines, gourmet food, or beautiful women.  It seeks happiness, in other words, through consumption of physical things.

What is needed is a happiness dependent on the “consumption” of non-ordinary states–or perhaps the routinization of such states, making them “ordinary”–those of mystical connection, deep relaxation, and the warmth of loving and feeling loved.  These are infinite.

To move toward this, we must first posit that personal growth is possible, and that there are thus necessarily qualitative difference between people.  Some people are better than others, they are more advanced.  Nobility can be earned.  This basic idea has no place in materialistic Socialism, which finds all value solely in material equality.

Socialism is not our future.  It is not a blessed doctrine.  It does not have the divine in it.  It does not have the sanction of morally advanced people, and it does not help people, finally, in living more fulfilling lives.  Yes, it can build comfort in some forms, but one that will break in the face of every determined challenge.  Sweden and Denmark and Norway may well be Shariah compliant nations 30 years from now, barring other catastrophe.  As I stated in my essay on politics, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Sybaritic Leftism, other than that it makes people soft, and unable to defend themselves from people who have not rejected the values of sacrificial culture.

Hopefully that makes sense.  This is a bit scattered.

It is always interesting to write things out systematically, or as close as you can get.  What became obvious to me is that Obamacare’s principle aim was not improvements in American health, but rather universal health insurance coverage.  In point of fact, as I will show, REDUCTIONS in access to medical care are inevitable, as are vast cost increases for everyone who was not already poor.  It is very clearly a redistibutive project, but one which is unlikely to yield much actual benefit for ANYONE except governmental bureaucrats, who will be in hog heaven.

This aim is egalitarian, and like all egalitarianistic projects, it is one most likely to increase human misery, overall.  Egalitarianism works to some extent, among people who were already equal, who were already relatively uniform, as in Sweden and Japan.  But you don’t expect innovation from such people, and you don’t expect much energy for life.  Both nations are shrinking, demographically, as are most all industrialized nations except the United States and Israel.  They don’t see a connection between their current sybaritic pleasures and a future involving their responsibility for children.

It is selfishness, self preoccupation, one rationalized by their politics.  I will deal in my next post with this topic.

My aim is to see my ideas under other people’s bylines, adapted per their tastes and understandings.  Nothing flatters me more than when this happens.

Eventually my goal is to make a living providing useful ideas and practices to people, but for the foreseeable future this is a labor of love.  I tried in a half hearted way to collect donations on the Goodness Movement site, but as far as I can tell, no one contributed anything, which is fine.  If you did, let me know, as it is languishing in Paypal land, since I don’t think I set it up properly.  I apologize for this, in the unlikely event anyone did put money in there.

I read once an interview with a South American long distance swimmer, trying to describe his journey.  He said something like “it is painful, but. . .I don’t have the word in English.  I don’t have it in Spanish either.  But it is what I do.”

My sentiments exactly.

Might one summarize British socialism as Noblesse Oblige conducted by atheists?