Moderates United

I invented this word the other day.  It popped into my head.  It is one unit of vulgarity.  I propose it as a heuristic device to see the difference between quality and quantity, between the intrinsically unmeasurable, and what can, is, and should be measured.

How do you measure vulgarity?  Surely every person will see things differently.  Nowadays, virtually nothing is beyond the pale.  Yet, not one hundred years ago, Rhett Butler saying “damn” was scandalous.

I was in the Toledo Art Museum the other day.  I am no art connoisseur, but I find walking the floors to be highly stimulative of thought.  In that trip I developed an idea that had first come to me in the Indianapolis Art Museum, which is one of the best museums I’ve seen.

Science treats emotion as artifact.  It is accustomed to “objectivity”, to measurement, to the idea that things exist “out there”, and that they can somehow separate ALL physical occurences from subjectivity, from an inherent inability to measure.

Scientism, the materialistic atheist fundamentalist creed, holds that our bodies, our minds, are objects. They are complex objects, but not different in principle from chalkboards or cockroaches.  This creed has social consequences.

Our emotive lives are all out of whack.  I see signs all around of the inability to mourn, to process deep emotion, to feel deep joy, to express anger in mature and useful fashions.  All of these things are necessary for us to negotiate our connections with one another.  When we do not exist as in-dividuals, when we do not privilege our own emotions above interpretations offered by others, or a fear of feeling at all–simply, when we lack spontaneity–we diminish as spirits, as people.

What I felt in the museum was a tide sweeping emotions out to sea, to be examined by specialists with no emotional ties to the topic, under microscopes.  And please step out of your clothes, Mrs. Smith, we must take accurate measurements and shame is not anything we recognize.

What we NEED is to use science for what it was intended: making things.  What we NEED is to learn how to express emotions more wisely, with greater freedom, with greater intimacy.  And almost NOTHING in our culture is building this.

What does one see in most of the art from roughly 1918 to the present?  Cries for help.  Confusion,  Anger.  Lust.  Willfulness.  Treachery.  All of these things are supported by the IDEAS of our intellectual elites, which posit, in effect, that meaning is a thing, and that we don’t have it, and can’t figure out how to manufacture it.

What is needed to counterbalance this flow out to sea is a tide inward, which focuses on quality of feeling, of hope, art in the good sense, justice, freedom: all the things which leftist tricks have removed from our national dialogue.

I will add that as I suspected I was not quite able to do justice to the sentiment.  It’s frustrating: I can see and feel things, watch them flow, feel them in my body, but as much as I write, words sometimes fail me.  I guess that words, too, are in the end quantitative.  That would make sense.

There is a profound difference between hereditary, landed wealth, and hereditary industrial wealth.  The very rich tend to stay that way, but not to anything like the extent people imagine.  Of the 100 richest families 100 years ago, perhaps 10 are still on the list.  Money made can be lost, and often is, usually by the grandson of whoever made the money.

I will ask, further, if you the reader have created a company with employees.  For most people, the answer is no.  Yet, this is the path to wealth.  It is a path fraught with hard work, much worry, and frequent failure.  Leftists only want to look at the end result, success, and not what it took to get there and how FRAGILE the will to such success is.  All you have to do to make it stop is add just a bit more weight to the struggle, and it will stop.  People will stop innovating and creating. 

Most jobs in this country are created by small businesses, which are created by innovators, by people who see a need and work to fill that need (borrowed from the movie Robots).  They seek, in other words, to get paid for being public servants, for making something available that was not available before.  This is a reliable motivation, but again it is one that is easily destroyed.

I see leftists wail about the “corporations” as if they were all equal.  They are not.  The large corporations are the ones they usually intend, and it is thus highly ironic that the policies of the Democrats tend disproportionately to favor such corporations.  It is hard to kill trees, but easy to kill small upshoots on the ground.  Obamacare, as one example, is going to be a forest fire that kills much that is not already mature.  It is going to vastly increase unemployment, as it will lead to many small business bankruptcies.  The claim that requiring companies to increase coverage is somehow going to save them money is one best told as a joke.  No serious person could consider it for a moment.  In this world you never get more for less, and anyone who tells you you can is selling something: here what is being sold is continued Democrat hegemony over our national dialogue on domestic policy; what is not being sold is useful, helpful policy that will increase national happiness, and decrease the misery of any but a few.

We need the people who know how to build businesses.  We need them happy and motivated to continue as paid public servants.  What happens when we punish them through unnecessary regulation and excessive taxation (both subjective terms, but in my view we are far past excessive in both realms) is they STOP.  They stop creating and innovating.  America has the most healthcare specialists, and the best specialists, in the world.  Why?  Because we PAY them.  When we stop paying them, which is the end goal of Obamacare, we will stop having them.  Simple enough.

The rich can go on strike.  And since they are the ones who create the jobs, this will lead to far less economic opportunities for EVERYONE, but most of all for the poorest, least qualified among us, which is to say the already poor.

That is more or less what has happened under Obama.  He hates the profit motive, and hates the private sector.  He is only comfortable with government parasites, and those who live off government largesse, like large highway contracting companies.  People are not stupid: we all KNOW taxes will go up.  They are already slotted to increase a LOT in 2013 to start “paying” for Obamacare (there will of course be a large shortfall, not least because Obama getting reelected, combined with the taxes, will lead in short order at least to another recession), and it is clear he wants them much, much higher, as they are in Europe.

I need to go.  I will post further on this topic.  One thing that I want to document and need to make the time to do is that it seems clear to me that at tax rates above about 25% or so net receipts from top income earners go down.  What I think happens is that the proportion paid by the wealthiest 1% shifts down, meaning that a larger burden falls on the middle class.  Tax cuts for the “rich” mean tax cuts for the middle class, and vice versa.  I will document this–assuming my thesis is correct–when time permits.

Moshe Feldenkrais came up with this term “reversability” to denote a well structured neurological adaptation to gravity, our constant enemy and friend.  It connotes a lack of fixity and groundedness such that whatever stimulus happens to come down the path, the system–you–can react in an optimized way.  It implies a lack of nervous attention on any one given point of focus, a lack of spasmocity (I think I invented that word just now: a lack of spasms, lack of contractions and releases in unchosen ways, which I think most of us do regularly without seeing it), and the ability to react as a wholistic Gestalt. 

Emotionally, there are many things to be upset about right now.  Depending on your politics, you are upset at Obama, or upset at the Republicans.  You can worry about cosmetic testing on animals, the euthanization of animals at animal shelters, the meat industry, Islamists or peaceniks, our war in Iraq, or the plight of our veterans.  You can worry about global warming, pollution, dolpins, baby seals, or the economy.  You get the idea.

I have long played a game with my kids, the idea for which I got from the movie “What about Bob?”.  When they start worrying about things, we play a substitution game.  Say they are worried about giving a speech in class.  I say “that’s nothing: what if an angry bear comes into the school and chases you”.  Their response is supposed to be something like: “What if it was space aliens with stinky feet”.  Then: what about a meteor strike?  What about a tree falling on the school?  What if a tree falls and the bear is ON it?  What about an attack of midgets?  Maybe there is a bee’s nest in the ceiling.  What if the Russians are hiding in the closet?  Etc.

What I have found is that worry is more or less an emotional spasm, a knot that should come untied with motion, but that motion is lacking.  You don’t set it down and move on.  You nurture it (that is in  part what my hell comment was about, but it was deeper than that).

By creating a whole list of things to worry about, you gradually overload it, and like a spring it seems to reset itself.  That doesn’t make the worry go away fully–and I teach them that a bit of worry is a good thing, because I think it is–but it takes away the spasmodic element of it.

I would like to suggest here that this could be combined with perceptual reversibility.  Pick something you are worried about, say the upcoming election.  Pick the OPPOSING side and worry from their perspective.  Say you are sane and worried about Obama being reelected.  Put yourself imaginatively in the position of an Obama supporter, and worry about Romney getting elected, and oh my god he wants to put all women back in the kitchen, pregnant, and take our coffee away.  He wants the poor to starve, and wars to be waged, and teachers to go unpaid, highways not to be built, the old to live on dogfood, and WHITE MEN to rule the world.  He’s mean, mean, mean, and Ryan is no better.  Oh my god, I better donate to the DNC and his campaign.

Then do it from the perspective of a Gary Johnson supporter, who hates both candidates.  Then do it from the perspective of an illegal alien, who is only worried about staying here and staying working.

Then if you like, you can place yourself in Mexico, worried to death about being decapitated in some drug war.  You can place yourself in Africa, cover yourself with flies and dust, and calloused, bare feet, and make yourself hungry and sick.

I think 20 minutes of this should be enough to liberate most anyone from most worries. 

It is useful to think of truth as a flickering flame: not because it is a source of light, but because it is inconstant.  Truth ebbs and flows.  Truths compete with truths in swirling patterns that grow and diminish, and that form complex beautiful patterns seen only by a few, and most not seen at all.

I was going to expand on that, but will leave it at that.  Instead I will write a bad poem:

Truth forms sludge on clocks
And wipes away vapors kiss
Light, light: again today.

Edit: that is what I propose we call Haikuu, which is where you get a Mulligan syllable.  “I believe I shall have another.”

I know, I know, this is serious shit, no joking around, fucking TRUTH, man, with a capital T.  Ah, but we also have T, T, T, T, T,  then a whole bunch you can’t see since you aren’t initiated.  Get on my website for the whole course.  This week only you get a 40% discount if you pay in advance.

I wrote somewhere that the tragedy of self importance is you stop playing.  You can’t be fully spontaneous when you are afraid of being ridiculous.  Stupidity, you see, is intelligence, except when it isn’t.  I will of course be the judge of that.

And that is ALL I have to say about that.

Once conformity is generated as a usable means of dealing with the vagaries of life, personal emotion is necessarily distanced.  The sense of self that attends paying attention to and valuing your own unique way of seeing and interacting with the world vanishes, and in its place comes a tyrannical hatred of common people.  You are better than them.

I look at the oceans of people Hitler gathered unto himself–the God–and feel their sense of absorption, but also feel the SUPERFICIALITY of that emotion.  Grand as it must have felt at times to be submerged in something epochal–and it clearly was that–I get in my imagination this itching, this nagging, this nattering in the back of the head, this sense that won’t go away that something has died or is dying, that can only be cured by re-immersion in groupthink, or what might better be called GroupFeel (which I double capitalized as it does sound like a swingers party): Groupemote, perhaps.

We want feeling.  Ways of thinking conduce to this.  Leftist patterns of GroupThink are oriented around the FEELING of belonging.  But it is a superficial feeling.  It doesn’t last.  It has to be constantly renewed, constantly sourced.  That is why leftists are so good at forming groups and at making all members do the same things at the same time.  It is an inherent advantage, in some ways, but the downside is that none of those people is acting as an independent perceptual unit, outside of the perceptual tasks assigned by the group.  This makes the whole stupid.  But if they can get and keep power, then stupid can live a very long life indeed.

Philosophy is what you do on the way to something else.

It was asserted in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. . .”  This belief, in turn, depends upon an active Creator, who is involved in our affairs.  Personally, I see no firm evidence of such a Creator.  Bad things plainly happen equally to good people as to bad people, and in point of fact bad people often rise very high and are very successful.

I do think there is a certain something in the air sometimes, what I have termed “non-statistical coherence” that swings things one way or another, that acts as a factor in both large and small events, but there is nothing like a PERSON who is saying: “I want to bless David, for he is holy to me”.

In conceiving of rights as Given, as Endowed, people are more or less taking the analogy of human legal systems and applying them to the divine sphere, in which a morally perfect judge and jury and Congress and King has established rules of behavior which cannot be transgressed without penalty.

I am actually even willing to accept this.  I do believe we survive the cessation of breathing, that our consciousness goes on, and that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of this hypothesis.  I do believe that the quality of our after-life is affected by our decisions on Earth.  I do not believe that we are judged so much as allowed to settle into a realm appropriate for who we chose to be.

What is abundantly clear, however, is that the concept of rights has no power but what we grant it, here on Earth.  Even a cursory reading of history will show abundant atrocity.  There is no Horror movie that can exceed things that have been actually done by one human to another.

Given this, and given the apparent dependence on words of concepts like “justice”, many modern philosophers have given up on serious moral inquiries.  Academic tendencies like postmodernism can be summed up, more or less, as cognitive rituals designed to free tired minds from the guilt attendant upon the murder of reason, and as congenial pathways towards a new cultural order in which totalitarian rulers will free them from the burden of unwanted freedom–unwanted, because they no longer know what to do with it.

Such tendencies, though, depend upon the rejection of moral ONTOLOGY, which is to say the idea that moral values exist OUT THERE somewhere, presumably as a result of God’s Will.  Now, I don’t fundamentally reject this idea–the idea that there is a larger arena within which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished–but it seems to me that it is the task of good thinking to create as much space for agreement as possible, so my goal here is to create a morally BETTER system of thought than exists currently, and to do so for people who need not believe in God.

My Goodness system is what I term a moral motology, with motology being a word I invented to connote not what IS, but what direction a given system is moving in.  We can’t say what IS in a static, ontological way, but we can plainly observe actually existing systems in motion, and see what they tend to create. 

For example, the concept of rights tends to create far more just societies, if we measure “just” by generalized tolerance, freedom from capricious violence and involuntary servitude, and generalized ability to live life as one chooses.

We have the freedom to choose what we want, what affective states we want to achieve, and use varying moralities to achieve them.  My core contention is that the highest happiness is measurably, observably, consistent with the best behaviors.

I will add that I feel that the point of reason is getting from one affective state to another.  This may seem counterintuitive, but if we posit–as seems existentially valid–that the end goal of human activity is feeling, then reason is the tool we use to get from where we are–presumably less than happy, if movement feels required–to where we want to be.  The task is not to kill feeling, but to perfect it.

There is more, but I need to get going.

 I posted this on one of the Brin threads, on the topic of how to improve national dialogue, and thought it perhaps worth sharing.

The aim is to improve thought in general. No group can be smarter than
the smartest person within it, but given that most everyone has serious
limitations in their perceptual capacity that reside principally in the
emotional realm–usually ego, and excessive attachment to unexamined
ideas–it makes sense to use groups to further effective thinking.

If
the aim is to reduce emotionality, then some form of heuristic is
necessary. Thought cannot be unstructured. Edward de Bono has written
extensively about this, with his Six Thinking hats an excellent example.

For
my own purposes, I have developed a number of heuristics, including
formal use of continuums, and what I call Perceptual Breathing, which is
the constant movement from abstraction to concrete details and back
again.

As an example both the words Democrat and Republican are
abstractions. There is considerable ideological diversity among the
members of both parties, and there is also substantial divergence
between what people THINK the parties stand for, and what the actual
members, when elected to Congress or some other body, do.

Fox
News is an abstraction. It can refer to Shepherd Smith, Sean Hannity,
the people who own Fox. It can refer both to the newscast and to the
website. Referred to in aggregate, it would necessarily include not
just the hosts, but the people they bring on to represent alternative
views (which they do, often).

Most error in this world is the
result of basic ignorance, which is corrected through education, or from
an abuse of abstraction.

The creation and operation of large
scale systems is impossible without abstraction, but the necessity of
constantly reconciling ideas with realities, intentions with outcomes,
is absolutely central.

If you want people to think effectively in
groups, the most basic requirements are asking the questions: what are
we trying to accomplish; and “is what we are doing working”?

If more people asked those questions with sincerity, we would live in a much better world.

I
will admit to disappointment that the discussion on the other page
ended. I always win–which I define as reducing people opposing my
views to silence in the face of factually accurate and logical
supported, clear positions–but it always disappoints me.

Posted on HuffPo.

 Salient fact: 83% of all doctors have considered quitting over Obamacare (http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/09/report-83-percent-of-doctors-have-considered-quitting-over-obamacare/).  I don’t think further discussion is needed beyond this fact, but I am going to do it anyway.

1. Health costs are rising because more products are being offered, and because individuals are insulated from the costs by employer provided insurance.  Such insurance is the only option in most Blue States, as keeping control over health insurance is a key component of the Union political agenda.

2. Such cost insulation did not occur 20 years ago when most plans were “major medical” (now called Catastrophic) plans with high deductibles, in which most medical visits were paid out of pocket.  Those who claim that putting this back into the hands of consumers would increase costs simply do not grasp how expensive employer plans actually are, not until they are forced by unemployment to choose between COBRA and being uninsured.

3. If the unemployed are forced between choosing a Cadillac plan that pays everything and being uninsured, would it not be logical to grant them an intermediate step of Major Medical coverage, which would mean coverage never lapsed?

4. People with preexisting conditions are not buying “insurance”–which is risk pooling across large populations–but subsidies.  Self evidently, subsidies are expensive, and if they are put in the hands of insurance companies, will inevitably be passed back to consumers, raising insurance premiums, as indeed is already happening. 

5. Obamacare mandates that 80% of all premiums be spent on medical care.  The goal is to bankrupt insurance carriers, who unlike government agencies cannot ask for budget increases.  To make a 5% profit they must keep costs at 15% of their budget.  Medicare operates with none of these constraints, and is in the process of gradually soaking up EVERY LAST FREAKING dollar of the Federal Budget.  It cannot continue in its current form, and plainly Obamacare, as a vast increase in Entitlements, will make things much, much worse, either in cost overruns, or in healthcare rationing.

6. A free market option exists already to ensure no preexisting conditions: make all insurance premiums paid by individuals tax exempt, AS LONG AS they remain covered, with no breaks.  This of course only will work if all individuals can buy Major Medical policies directly from the carriers.

7. Logical health insurance reform, then, will be to use the Federal Government to prevent States from blocking carriers from selling directly to end users, and from imposing unreasonable barriers to interstate insurance competition.  The tax code will be modified to exempt health insurance as long as no lapses occur.

This option will over time lead to competition in healthcare, cost decreases, improved quality; and following reductions in insurance premiums, people who get sick without coverage, and the overall costs of our socialized medicine.

To be clear, preexisting condition people are charity cases.  There is no logical free market solution to them, and if they are to be cared for, we need to do so directly, as an extension of Medicare/Medicaid, and not pretend that we are somehow helping everyone else by altering the system to accommodate them.  They win, everyone else loses.  If we want to invoke compassion, so be it, but for God’s sake not “prudence.”

Ideas that are good work.  Ideas which are bad–like Obama’s plan, and like Romney’s to the extent he fails to reject it in toto–do not.

I find periodically the need to remind leftists that their STATED objective is helping people.  They seem to forget this, and will turn a blind eye if Obama wins and Obamacare gets implemented when costs surge, access to routine medical care declines precipitously, and routine procedures get impossible to get scheduled.

NONE of this is necessary, and I have just shown why.