Moderates United

I had a dream the other night in which my entire world was washed away, and I was adrift in an ocean with my friends.  I created a new world out of the ocean, which they at first could not see, but I swam to it, and crawled out of the sea.  It was already populated, and in talking with the first person I met I realized that my old world was completely gone.  The year was 571, within their calendar.  Everything I had known was gone, as I don’t think any of my friends had made it.

This dream had symbolic meaning to me, which is likely somewhat obvious, and which I will simply say I took as emotional growth, but I wanted here simply to make one point: I had my iPod, incongruently (but aren’t all dreams like that, where in recounting it you say “and then SOMEHOW. . .”?), and realized that I would never be able to charge it again.  I had decide what the last five songs I would listen to from my old world would be.

This is an interesting question: what five songs would define you?  Or, alternatively, do songs define who you are, who you want to be, what you want to remember, or something else?  I feel strongly that music defines people, which is one of the reasons I look at the crap getting spewed out right now and feel anxiety about our future.

You have to make a quick decision, as time is running out.  Well, I came up with five.  My thought was that in developing and building a new life, you need music with substance, but you also need lightness, humor, and even a bit of frivolity.  It is a weighty thing, building a new life, but the end goal is happiness, is it not?  And is happiness not inconsistent with the decision to be ponderous?  Can one not laugh even in the face of death dealing waves?

1.  Hank Williams “Nobody’s Lonesome for me”.

2.  George Jone’s “The King is gone”.

3.  Waylon Jennings “Honky Tonk Heroes“.

4.  Pine Valley Cosmonaut’s “Pan Handle Rag”

5.  Louis Prima’s “Buona Sera”.

What do all these songs have in common?  They are simple and make me happy.

I will add to this an imaginative exercise, which I believe I have offered several times: Imagine you woke up in a new country, surrounded by people you did not know, without a memory.  Where would you start?  What parts of you that matter would be retained?  If you are a liar and a thief, would those habits still be there?  What leads you to such things?  What, ultimately, defines you?  Would you have a new start?

I just realized this morning that there is little difference between a government sponsored injection of money to “stimulate” the economy, and what happens normally in the course of fractional reserve banking backed by a central bank.

Think about this with me.  Prices are a signal that indicate relative supply and demand.  As demand for something increases, prices go up and/or supply increases.  Usually both.  Given finite humans on the planet, logically demand is finite, which means there is a finite supply which can be created and sold.  Suppliers KNOW this, and further realize that if they incur production costs for things or services which cannot be sold, they lose all their money.  You can’t have a yogurt shop on all four corners of an intersection and expect all four to stay in business.

Yet, one must measure this in terms of risk and reward.  In conditions of easy money, it costs the entrepreneur none of his own money to open a business, and it costs the bank none of ITS own money, either, since it is in the end creating the money from scratch.  Both entities can just invest the money, and if they go belly up, the entrepreneur just files bankruptcy for the corporation he created, and the bank writes the loan off, goes into receivership, or gets bailed out.  The individuals involved are never made to suffer any serious consequences, as for example they would if they had had to save up the money involved through long effort (which is how most people envision our system.)

The lack of penalty has serious consequences, as it incents overproduction.  We are conditioned to consider inflation as something that can be accurately measured, and which affects economies as a whole.  This is not the case.  Localized inflation is so common in the modern world as to be almost the rule.

Inflation, to be clear, is in my definition any increase in the money that COULD be circulated.  It is not tied directly to price inflation, although of course the two are related.

In the 1920’s inflation happened almost exclusively in the stock market.  Prices for homes, cars, and other essentials increased only slowly.  This inflation was facilitated by margin buying, which is to say money creation which was a result of fractional reserve banking, and which was supported for a time by low rates at the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (I just realized, by the way, where this term comes from: when you borrow money you are saying “I will give you $105 in the future for $100 today.”  You are selling an IOU you paid $105 for for $100.  You are discounting the IOU by $5).

This led of course to “irrational exuberance”, and overinvestment.  It led to investment which WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN PLACE absent the ability to borrow the money in question.  And the crash happened as a direct result of a credit tightening that the Federal Reserve initiated.

The point I want to make is this: overinvestment, which leads to a need for steep discounting, cannot happen absent what I am going to call dumb money entering the economy; and there is no fundamental difference between money which enters the economy as a result of being created as what amounts to fake Monopoly money, and money which enters the economy via government spending projects.

Keynes argued, in effect, that economic downturns were the result of overproduction relative to demand.  This is not entirely inaccurate, as for example the initial phase of the Great Depression was the result of the overproduction of MONEY.  This created all sorts of miscalculations as to future demand, and resulting overproduction of real goods.  Further, since most of the money in circulation had been created by banks, when mass numbers of banks failed, it caused monetary contraction, which caused everything to decrease in price, at a time when oversupply would already have put downward pressure on prices.

However, the result of the government putting money back into the economy would not be anything but a repetition of the basic problem: the temporary overstimulation of some local sector of the economy, at the expense of the economy as a whole.  As an example, in a dam project everyone could be paid twice the prevailing local wage for their trade, which would pull those trademen away from otherwise productive work, then when the project finished, the whole local “bubble” would collapse.

In both cases, where the money is NOT flowing is into carefully considered business projects where the originater has skin in the game, where they are incented to CARE about the outcome as a result of actual pain that would attend failure.

The goal in all economic activity is adding INTELLIGENCE to the process.  The essence of Capitalism is innovation, which we might summarize as intelligence.  That system which pays people to be smart will, logically, over time become better organized and efficient.  Our task at present is to remove the idiocies (the incentives that pay people to take foolish risks or to game the system) that are plainly present in our current system.

It is in my view a useful heuristic to assume that all evil or unpleasant or annoying forces in your dreams are parts of your own psyche.  Assume this in advance, and you will gradually come into touch with the less agreeable elements of your own personality, the ones you complacently assume exist only in other people.

I visited Knox College last week, as there were signs on the freeway indicating a Lincoln-Douglas debate took place there.  While there, I got to talking with a student there, who told me about ghosts on campus.  One of them, she had heard.  She was working I guess in the kitchen, and kept hearing a young woman crying on the stairway.  She went up and down, looking, and could see anyone.  She was told by a woman working there that “that’s just Andrea”, Andrea being a young lady who had been murdered there two years prior.

Now, obviously she may have been lying to get attention.  It happens.  But I have heard similar stories from dozens of people, who had no obvious motivation to lie.  The point I want to make is not about ghosts, per se: the evidence is in my view overwhelming.  We have a physical theory–quantum physics–which accounts for them, and copious empirical evidence.

The point I wanted to make is how SAD it would be for a young woman, looking forward to life, to have her life taken so suddenly and violently.  From what mediums gather, when you die, your mental and emotional life is virtually identical to what it was.

People ask the question: do ghosts exist or not, but seldom try to put themselves empathetically in their position and ask “how can I help you?”  I haven’t seen it.

I will add, too, that pain has long been a theological problem.  Let us posit, with the Christians, that our souls are infinite.  Let us add, with the Hindues and many others, that we live repeatedly.  What if a thousand lifetimes is just a blink of the eye, in the grand scheme of things?  What if the life of Earth itself is just two blinks?  How can any temporal pain, even the worst, matter in such a scheme, if most time is spent pleasantly?

I have touched that rough topic before, but not from precisely that angle.

Food for thought.  Please chew consciously and carefully. 

I was thinking about Sisyphus this morning, and thought/realized, that he himself allows the boulder to roll back down.  There is something within his constitution that never allowed him to become fully human, to form a meaning system, to grasp the point of human life: learning.  He was wicked and deceitful in life precisely because he could allow himself to reach the brink of understanding, only to more or less consciously forget every time, symbolized in the fall of the boulder.  How often do many of us reach the brink of understanding, only to reject it?  When only one more push will lead us to a qualitative change, a glimpse at what lies on the other side of the hill? We fear that change, more than we fear monotony and wasted effort.  We fear the new far more than we fear a known and long-suffered evil.

Tantalus, likewise, reaches with one hand, and removes with the other.  It is literally apparently possible in deep hypnotic trance to make the two hands of one person fight with one another.  This is a nice metaphor for what surely happens in the darkness of what we refuse to see, or what we usually call the Unconscious.

To be clear, things hidden need not remain hidden; we can see them.  We simply fear the unknown.

I don’t think anyone who refuses to see the evil in their own hearts can see evil outside of them.  I sometimes recall with fondness my past as a generic sybaritic leftist.  It is quite a congenial mindset.  All problems can be solved with government money, which never runs out.  No wars are ever necessary because all people are reasonable, and would never even consider lying to us.  Politicians who are Democrats really want what is best for the American people, and their policies work when not frustrated by the unintelligible, nasty, and morally repugnant Republicans.  Perfect peace and harmony is just a matter of electing blue candidates.  Life is simple and easy.

Consider, though, how easily someone like Bill Ayers swims in this soup.  All he has to do is act nice, be congenial, and agree with everything.  If you act nice, well, then there is no room in a leftists head for the possibility of disingenuousness, if that person is an ideological fellow traveler.

Sybaritic leftists cannot CONCEIVE that Obama would be lying consciously and often about very basic elements of his past, such as having been born in Kenya, or having a card carrying Communist for a father.  They put their fingers in their ears, and go naanananananaa.

Yet, I would stipulate that some part of all of us is always fully aware.  It is fully awake.  It KNOWS on some level that something doesn’t add up.  But people do not want to listen to that voice, the one that has real knowledge about how the world REALLY works.

Look at  Europe.  There are no major nations there that have not participated in mass colonialism, fascism, and the slaughter of innocents.  Look, for example, at Belgium, capital of the EU.  Just 100 years ago they were neck deep in mass murder in Africa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold%27s_Ghost

History was something they created, an evil which flowed from the hands of the supposedly enlightened.  Now, all these nations want to pretend that human evil is in the past, something that can never happen again.  Why?  Why can’t it happen?  Why am I not justified in seeing the present generation of children as more or less being bred to accept atrocity?

People don’t want to know how bad things can get.  We have grown up safe and sound, accustomed to the idea of a benevolent government tucking us in every night, maybe with milk and cookies.  I ask, though: what moral progress has happened that gives us cause for justifiable optimism?  The EU government is already trying to subvert the rights of member nations.

Look in your heart, carefully.  If you are honest, you will find vanity, greed, stupidity, heartlessness, and the capacity, in the right circumstances, for violence.  If you are a good person, all these things will only be present in trifling amounts, but I would submit that if you cannot find ANY of that that you are engaging in self deception.

I have no use for the word Libertarian.  Everything good in the “doctrine” (it has long felt more like an attitude to me than anything coherent) is already contained in Liberalism.  A true Liberal (and of course nobody on the Left qualifies) wants as much freedom for everyone as is consistent with public harmony.

In conception, our system grants to States the ability to regulate morality.  This point is crucial: to my mind, and I differ here from most Libertarians, liberty is both the right to be free from unnecessary burdens, but also to impose them, if they are generally desired.  As an example, I wear a seatbelt, but respect the right of those who refuse to.  At the same time, I grant that the State has the right to make that law. If people do not like that law they need to elect people who will repeal it.  They have that right.

Political progress is in my view cultural progress, which is to say the capacity of all individuals within a social order to respect the rights of those around them, and to make few if any impositions on them.  Given a sufficiently intelligent, reasonable, organized, goal-focused population, no government would be needed.  If a road needs to get built, somebody takes the lead, figures out how to pay for it, and gets it done.

In the present world, however, many people need to be told what to do.  We need speed limits, in my view.  People need to be told not to drink and drive.  We need to have laws against, and penalties for, things like theft, contract violation, fraud, murder, rape, child abuse, etc.  Given a perfectly reasonable population these laws could just fall away.  There would be no need for police. 

But to my mind most Libertarians want to live in a world which we do not live in.  There are many animals out there who will abuse people, given the chance.  Absent a government, the law of the jungle would prevail, and that law tends to favor the most vicious, not the most reasonable.

Few thoughts.  This is not quite as coherent as I would have liked, but it’s a start.

It seems logical to me that for minds like those of Bill Ayers, who can seemingly imagine mass murder and torture with equanimity, that an obvious preparatory step would be conditioning the American mind to accepting violence.  We see the results of this in the violent, abusive rhetoric that appears constantly on the Left (I will note that I have thousands of hours dealing with this abuse, and speak from VERY long experience), but I would suggest that movies like the Hunger Games on some level are working to condition the American people to accepting on TV some sort of show trial and execution of political enemies.

One sees constantly interviews with people who find themselves in violent situations, even war, saying “it was just like a movie”.  Even though on some level we know that what we see on TV is not real, I say “why watch it if you are unwilling to suspend disbelief?”  On some level there is no difference.

I don’t think you can understand an Anders Breivik without factoring in his video games.  He calmly shot dozens of screaming children who posed no threat to him, and did so without any apparent cognitive psychosis, or even outwardly apparent rage and anger.  He reached a conclusion he deemed valid and acted towards his fellow humans as if they were images on his screen, literally.  The evidence is clear that repeatedly watching acts of violence makes them less morally objectionable in the real world, and even FUN.  And most all of our children  live in this world.  A barmaid at a bar I go to took her 3 year old to the Avengers.  This is ridiculous.

These same tendencies could easily be turned by a would-be totalitarian towards the repression of cultural others–political opponents–in any form the regime deems fit.  We have kids growing up getting sexually excited by torture.  I saw Hostel for sale in my local Books-a-Million, with I doubt ANYONE caring if kids under 18 bought it.  Eli Roth SAID it was for the 13-20 demographic.

I remember saying to myself several years ago that Obama can get his army.  He can find mutated, morally febrile, sadistic children to do anything he wants.  All he needs is the pretext and the opportunity.

In that regard, it is my hope that all of our Armed Services have contingency plans for betrayal by our President.  I have been saying for years that it is legally and morally important that our Service Members swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.  As Commander in Chief, the President is in theory the chief guardian of our Constitution, but at the precise moment he fails in that duty, and seeks to arrogate power to himself, particularly through an emergency, it is my hope that the military acts decisively to protect our Republic.  Obama has no love for it. It is only a question as to how much space he can carve out.  These people think long term, so even if he is not able to pull this thing off, we still must look to all the long term patterns around us.

It is my sincere hope that in a  Romney Administration the Surgeon General could begin speaking out about the long term deleterious effects of media violence.  I watched the movie Contagion the other night, and could have gone my whole life without seeing a facsimile of Gwenneth Paltrow have the top of her head sawed off, and this is small change by comparison with what is out there.

I like U2.  They make enjoyable music, and clearly try to help improve the world.  Today I was listening to their “All that you can’t leave behind” album, and to the topic the song “Peace on Earth”.

As I listened, I thought to myself that “peacing” is a verb.  We assume that the polar opposites are war and peace.  I do not think this is true. There will be no war in Cuba any time soon, or a war in North Korea (unless they start it).  The goal is not just the cessation of conflict and hate.  The goal is a generalized perception of an alternative to war that is BETTER than war.

War meets many needs, not least as an answer to boredom, unexpressed anger, the need for power, and sex (through rape; still common even now in many  African countries).

What is needed is the capacity to build deep, qualitative joy.  THAT is the opposite of war.  I look at U2, and they just want something to stop.  That something seems pointless, and of course in many respects it is, but not for the participants.  They all get something.

For war to end, all human beings must know how to be happy without struggle, without needing power over others.  They must learn to self generate happiness.

I have said before and will say again that for me personally, what has worked best is the Tibetan discipline of Kum Nye, which teaches the ability to feel and express emotions.  Most of us are quite atrophied in this regard.  For me personally, at times, I feel a tremendous power swell through me, a light that is contagious, that is in my view clearly from God.  It is the power to spark power in others, to help them see, to help them grow, to help them return to a light they have forgotten. It is a power I use for my own happiness, but one that shares itself.  It grows, it amplifies.

Tonight I saw my first zombie “parade”, or rather the aftermath.  All these young people, with cut clothes, and fake blood on them.  I even saw an actually pregnant woman (she had on a halter top, and her belly was plainly showing) with a bloody gash down the middle, as if the baby had been taken.

I know all this is intended in fun.  You get with your friends, and zombify your self, and groan down the streets.  Yet, everything which attracts us contains us.  I may make that a bon mot, actually.

And what is contained in zombies?  Death, of course; the loss of free will and responsibility; and membership in a group.

Life in our modern world is so confusing.  I have reason to believe I understand, as an example, economics, but it has taken years, and I am very intelligent.  For the illiterate, how to choose between Romney and Obama, and neither of the above?  Job security is scarce, and most under-30’s are working bad jobs.  And we are always presented with the real possibility of some sort of apocalypse.  I just watched Soderberg’s “Contagion” last night.  It could happen.  Nobody denies it.

Iran could EMP us.  And over time it seems to many the Chinese will become the dominant world power (I personally very much doubt this, but it is an argument that is not without merit).  Whatever is going to happen, we DON’T know what it will be.  Surprise seems inevitable.

Given all this uncertainty, would it not be easier to be dead mentally?  Is this not what the Grateful Dead evoked: a drug stoked vacation from life?

What all these people are lacking is the capacity to recognize, cognitively, all these problems, and STILL be able to find peace of mind and active happiness.  “There have always been wars and rumors of wars”.  I tell myself this periodically, and the fact is it is true.

Few random thoughts.  Stupidly long day, and now time for my preferred analgesic.

I debated in high school.  The essence of an intelligent debate involves stating a clear thesis, defining your terms, then proceeding to outline the reasons which you believe support your thesis.

I am involved in what I will call a debate for simplicity with some people about “progress”, but debating an issue without defining the core word is like wrestling an octopus in the water.

For my own purposes, then, I would like to define progress.

This summary was at the bottom, but I decided to move it to the top.  My thought process is still included below.

Summary:

1) Progress in Meaning system formation is: improvements in moral and
emotional connections between people, and enhancements in individual
capacities to feel deep positive feelings.

2)  Progress in truth formation is: an increased ability to describe persistent patterns that tend to exist between initial inputs and later outcomes.

3) Progress in political governance is: continued atrophy of the need for a State to regulate behavior.

4) Progress in economics:  increasing ability to provide both necessary and desired objects with less and less unchosen work.

As I see it, the human  cultural domain breaks down into four principle tasks, each of which is improved in its own way.  Those tasks are meaning formation, truth formation, political organization, and provision of physical necessities.

The most important cultural task is providing a sense of direction and purpose, which is the principle task of what I call the meaning system.  It may, of course, be survival.  It may be pleasure.

The defining realities of human life are gravity and friction.  By this I mean that we must work to survive.  Work is effort, which many will define as pain.  It requires volitional energy.  We cannot exist indefinitely without food and water.  Physical survival involves physical work, which I will define as quantitative effort.

Plainly as economic conditions improve, options open up, after which it becomes possible to ask whether or not life is even worth living, given that it necessarily ends, and involves emotional pain for most along the way.  Answering this question requires reflection, and what I would term qualitative work.

Logically, this question is about what end a given person should pursue, which requires answering the question as to what that person wants.  If they want sensory pleasure, one path opens up.  If they want to live a life of sacrifice and dedication to a cause, another path is required.

In the end, though, what is desired is a FEELING.  This point is critical.  Our minds support our emotions, not the other way around.  Even those who claim to hew to logic alone are hewing to the FEELING of being rational.  Morality is nothing but reconciling in advance how certain types of behaviors are likely to make us feel, and either avoiding or pursuing those behaviors.

We are all in my view by nature connected.  Hurting others hurts us, even if we have the capacity to deny this fact.  And the denial that is required necessitates psychological lying, and disconnection with our core.

Given the foregoing, I would define progress in Meaning system formation as: improvements in moral and emotional connections between people, and enhancements in individual capacities to feel deep positive feelings.

By moral connection I mean principally trust, in which people feel able to be open with one another, leaving both figurative and literal doors unlocked.  By emotional connection I mean the ability to enter empathetically into one anothers lives in mutually reinforcing positive ways; to support the emotional growth of others, while allowing them to support your own.

By deep positive feelings I mean deep joy and contentment; peace of mind; tranquility; the ability to easily work congruently towards chosen tasks with warmth and vitality.

I will add that in conditions of deep emotional connection it is really not necessary to have ethical “rules”.  Ethics is a topic for pre-or postethical people.

Improvement in truth formation is simple: an increased ability to describe persistent patterns that tend to exist between initial inputs and later outcomes.

I want to be clear on this: I do not believe it is most useful to conceptualize science as something that uncovers “natural laws”, or “causal” relationships.  I say this because, first, it is impossible to say that billiard ball one NECESSARILY moves billiard ball two (I am of course following Hume here); but secondly because one of the principle flaws of science as it exists today is the tendency to assume that it deals with “objects”, as in the claim that science is “objective”.

Science is NOT objective, not least because as near as we can determine, “objects” per se do not “exist” in any final way.  All existence is contingent upon consciousness.  Subatomic particles can come into being and disappear out of a primal energy soup posited by Quantum Physics, called variously the Quantum Vacuum and the Zero Point Field.

More importantly, I think the assumption that science is objective leads to Scientism, which I would define as the creed that everything that can be seen exists in a final way, and that anything which cannot be measured does NOT exist in a final way.  People who fall prey to this flaw tend to view emotions as objects.  They use evolutionary dogma and theories of neurological response and the like to model emotions, rather than simply observe their own emotions, and note persistent connections between their own actions and their later feelings.

I was in an art museum a while back when I first realized that in the modern world emotions are objects that have no innate validity of their own; that they are understood as artifacts of physical processes, and of no intrinsic interest.  This is in part why we see some of the savagery we do in art museums; artists intuitively feel violated and marginalized by our current cultural climate, even if they cannot articulate why.

Consider, though, that emotions are fundamental to meaning formation.  In this sense, Scientism is antithetical to meaning formation.  It is a doctrine that is principally attractive to people who love power and the FEELING that it gives them.

The political system ought logically to support meaning formation.  That system is best, then, which best facilitates the free interactions of individuals.  Progress is then defined as: continued atrophy of the need for a State to regulate behavior.

Madison famously posited that were we ruled by angels we would need not fear them, and that if WE were angels, we would need no government.  Progress is the reduction in the need for government.  By this standard, obviously, “Progressivism” is, like everything on the left, a precise inversion of what is actually sought.

In economics, the goal of course is to provide as much as possible with as little effort as possible, making all work chosen and voluntary.  Progress, then is: increasing ability to provide necessary and desired objects with less and less unchosen work.

One must work, to be happy.  The question is what sort of work.