Moderates United

This might be one way of getting at the essence of the “birther” problem, which is that we know virtually nothing about Obama other than what he tells us in his books, and we are not even sure he wrote those books.  How can someone so secretive be credible?  The reality, of course, is that the media has CHOSEN to make him credible.  Had they chosen to destroy him, it would have taken less than a week.  He is a much lesser man than Rick Perry or Herman Cain.

In any event, I posted the following at The Blaze, which I do not believe is an actual conservative site, but rather one run in the hopes of corralling conservatives and preventing them from reading elsewhere.  They do what they can to pretend to parrot conservative views–enough to keep people coming–but I think it is in large measure a propaganda operation run by an ex-Huffposter.  I don’t believe my comment will appear.  I have recently been proven wrong, but it’s been ten minutes, and I don’t feel like checking any more.

Here is the link, on a comment Mitt Romney made.  I will actually add in advance that this thesis of Frank Marshall Davis being Obama’s actual father would explain a lot.  It would explain how his mother rationalized more or less abandoning him in Hawaii–he was after all with his father–and why the timelines with Obama, Sr. seem so squirrelly (for example why she moved back to Seattle so soon after he was born).  It would also, of course, explain easily why the President would not want a literal card-carrying member of the Communist Party and admitted pedophile listed as his father.

Here is what I wrote:

It is clear that Obama has proven nothing, and
in my view there are only two possibilities: either he doesn’t have a birth
certificate, which means at a minimum he cannot claim to be able to document a
“natural born” status; or that Frank Marshall  Davis is listed as the father.

I was sitting in a bar last night looking at glasses.  They have rims, which define them.  I was looking back at my own entry into self sufficiency in my late teens, at a time I really wasn’t ready for it, and remembering feeling a sense of my mind being confined between two lines, that somehow I could not expand past.

Pondering it, I realized that the process of adulthood, of maturation, is precisely living to live between lines, of restricting yourself in some way.  You can’t have it all.  You can’t do and be all things.  You cannot simultaneously have your freedom and be in a committed relationship.  You both lose and gain when you have children.  You can’t pick both of the career paths that you want.  You can’t (in most cases) marry both of the women or men you love for different reasons.  You can’t have this house AND that house.  You can’t live here AND there.  The money you spend on A is no longer available for B, no matter how much money you have.   The costs of A and B just go up.

Looking at it, thinking, I thought that the boundaries of self you choose are what enable experience to be poured into you and retained.  If you never choose a self, if you keep all options open by making no decisions, then the beer–the experience–poured into you is wasted, since there is no receptacle to receive it.

Now, of course we all “know” that we are supposed to find ourselves.  Maybe we are supposed to spend a year hitchhiking Europe, or join a commune, or climb all the mountains in North America, or study cooking in Paris, or whatever.

It seems to me, though–and I think I have said this a number of times–that no matter what you do, it is never enough.  The thirst never ceases for something else.  I lived in Northern California, and knew a lot of people who did a lot of interesting things.  But it always seemed as if they were comparing notes as to who did the coolest stuff, and competing with one another.  They were COLLECTING.

For my part, I had done enough crazy shit by age 23 or so that I am still processing it many years later.  And I don’t know if it was worth it.  I remember being driven to do “interesting” things, but never really savoring it.  I don’t know if this is my particular problem–and no doubt I have this issue at a minimum more than most–or something general.

But think, as an example, of a Tibetan monk, spending 3 years in solitary meditation.  That is an extraordinarily narrow definition of self: “he who meditates”.  But is this not a glass with a narrow lip, but enormous potential depth?

You have to choose boundaries.  You must accept, in principle and reality, the limitations that are inherent even in the wealthiest, freest, most opportunity-rich world in human history.  This should not need saying, I would think, but I feel that it does.  I feel that we are given the implicit guarantee as children, in this country at least, that life is supposed to be easy.  This means that when confronted with the necessity of sacrifice, of constant choosing this over that, of renouncing this to have that, many of our children balk.  This is the root of grunge, and even of hippies: it is the perpetual adolescence necessitated by refusing to accept that choices have to be made.  Why not keep all options open in a dreamland fueled in no small measure by drugs?

Then I was thinking about the Buddhist concept of No Self (anatta).  Does not the Buddhadharma very narrowly define correct action?  There are all sorts of boundaries Buddhism places on monks, which are very much more strict than those of normal society.  They get a self–a behavioral code–handed to them, in a manner not that different from military recruit training.  You are born again, into a new way of living, which defines you.

Then I got to thinking about the Taoist empty cup.  The cup is empty, but by definition it can be filled.  It is not empty space alone: it is empty space FORMED within delimited space.  You don’t want the cup filled because you want to be able to take in new experience.  But if there is no cup, there is no Subject, no?

Do you want a bottomless cup?  A transparent cup?  That is where I got a little off track.  Beer was after all involved. 

Anyway, few musings from a muser.

I read where a return to the Gold Standard may be in the Republican platform, and had several comments.

First, and most importantly, I have come to realize that most money in our economy is created by banks via loans.  That money is quite separate from the money issued by the Federal Reserve, over which we in any event have no control (Bernanke is even now considering a third many-billion dollar grant to large member banks).

The only TRUE gold standard, the only way in which it is not easy to monkey with money, is the use of gold coins.  Back when we knew the gold was in Fort Knox, we were on a fractional gold reserve, which meant that some percentage of our money in circulation was backed by gold.  After FDR’s little adventure in currency devaluation, which involved coerced gold confiscation, the gold was redeemable to foreign governments, but not Americans.  After 1972, we frankly don’t have the faintest clue what happened to the gold.  I have done work at Fort Knox, and most of the soldiers there don’t think the gold is still there.  It has in their view been looted, likely by the Federal Reserve banks, who have control of that gold, and the apparently even larger cache at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Most money today is electronic.  This raises serious questions about the viability of a return to the gold standard.  In its essence, a gold standard simply makes it harder to print money, since in theory you have to add physical gold in order to add to the physical money supply.  However, I suspect EVERY nation that has had a fractional gold standard has monkeyed with it.  Physical money printing is secret, so nobody really KNOWS when you’ve printed some.  It will have inflationary effects, but most people always think inflation is like forest fires–it’s just something that happens–and it is of course often difficult to separate inflation from supply and demand.

As an example, we are told inflation has been low for years.  But the fact of the matter is that wherever fiat money is directed, inflation is enormous.  The bubble in housing prices was not the result of supply and demand, but inflation.  This is a point that is missed by many: you can have local inflation while other items, like food and clothing, remain relatively untouched.  The boom of the 1920’s was characterized by inflation in the stock market enabled by margin lending and relatively easy credit.

In my own proposal I have suggested printing 50 currencies backed by a VERY fractional gold standard.  The issue arises, though, as to the ratio of physical money to electronic money.  I have seen proposals for chits which store value, but I don’t like the potential abuse of those by power mongers.  I actually think it might be simplest to revert to 100% physical money. For electronic transfers, you could store your physical money at the bank, and they could transfer it electronically.  But for every dollar in existence, there would be a physical dollar somewhere.  Most would, I think, be in banks, for safekeeping and convenience, and titles would simply float around.

This is perhaps clumsy, and I may do better, but I think a core consideration needs to be keeping the power of money from centralizing anywhere.  We need many banks.  We need many money printers (all the States).

I have been in correspondence with Ben Dyson at Positive Money.  He has some interesting ideas, and I am hoping soon to allocate a day to contemplate them.  I have a method: I get a bunch of cigars, and a bottle of vodka, and spend the day in a cloud of smoke, contemplating.  It is useful, even if perhaps a bit odd.

What I would suggest is interesting is that conservatives in this country are more preoccupied with the Federal Reserve’s creation of money, and in Britain they are more concerned with the bank’s creation of money.  In my view BOTH have to be addressed, but of the two I think money creation by the banking private sector is actually numerically the much larger, and thus the more pressing.  Bernanke printed something over a trillion dollars and disbursed it to his pet banks, and no inflation resulted.  This is because nobody is borrowing because nobody at present has faith in a future where we have a socialist president, and the pending destruction of our healthcare system as we have known it.

But that money is all poised to create inflation, if reinvested in this country (we of course have no idea where it went, and there were of course no strings attached to receiving it), if and when people start borrowing in earnest again.  The wealth transfer has already happened.  Its signs have simply not manifested.

Long story short, I absolutely, enthusiastically support auditing the Fed, but think putting us back on some version of the gold standard is a policy decision that should be postponed until the public has a better general understanding of how banking works.

I have in the past listed four different cultural orders: Sacrificial, Sybaritic Leftism, Cultural Sadeism, and Liberalism.  That essay is here.

Today, thinking about it, it seems to me I saw more than I realized in calling the first Sacrificial.  I would submit that all traditional cultures contain as a foundational element power structures which are non-negotiable and prejudicial to some group within the society, or to external groups.  Take as an example the American Indians.  Warfare was endemic, and constant among most of them.  They often took slaves.  War is a way of entering into a power relation, and war has been a constant of human society.  The precise nature of a sacrificial culture is that in some way it is non-egalitarian with respect to some other group.

And the important point here is how it deals with pain.  It deals with pain by making some group suffer more than others.

Egalitarianism–here I intend Sybaritic Leftism–responds with the claim that suffering is unnecessary, and that no one should suffer, including paradigmatically the pain of inequality.

Cultural Sadeists claim that EVERYONE should suffer, in the NAME only of compassion and relief from pain.  There is a duel element here, which alone distinguishes it from a sacrificial order. In practice, you still have an elite that lives a relatively better life than the subjects, but rhetorically, the suffering inflicted on the masses is called benign, necessary, and for the general elevation of society.

Obviously, there have been over the years many ideological justifications of slavery.  In America, blacks were claimed to be too stupid to take care of themselves.  I would submit, though, that in Communofascism the extent of the deception, and the fact that deceit is integral to the project, requires a separate classification.

Finally, in Liberalism you choose your own pain.  You have temporary leaders, but all power is understood as mutable and negotiable, and shared.

These are intuitions which I have perhaps not expressed coherently, and it may be that I have not in fact had good ideas, but I feel there is something here worth pursuing.

We need a direction as a society.  We need to be moving towards something, something we all want.  For that to happen, we need orienting ideas.  Providing those ideas is what virtually all my on-line work is dedicated to.

Communism could I think be neatly and accurately summarized as a doctrine which amplifies the worst elements of Capitalism while destroying its best elements.

Think about it: the claim is made, as an example, that workers are wage slaves. They are entirely dependent upon parasitical Capitalists who more or less own them.  What is the Communist solution?  More of the same, with the difference that your right to change jobs, protest bad work conditions, or organize a union is blocked.  Moreover, your freedom of assembly is vitiated, as are your rights to free speech, religious affiliation, gun ownership, a fair trial, privacy, governmental representation, and to vote.

For all this, you lose the actual productive capacity of Capitalism, which even when there are clear winners and losers, does a much better job of making stuff of various sorts.  We have not had bread lines in the United States since FDR did his experiments in socialism–which included among other things the completely wasteful slaughter of many thousands of pigs in order to push prices up for SOME farmers.

Quite literally, in order to embrace these contradictions you have to engage in a cognitive derangement that could be considered with justice a mental illness.

It seems to me these two are two sides of the same coin, which I have likely said before.  What I see now is that in general anger is expressed outwardly, and fear inwardly.  And on the inside we do not call it fear.  It exists not so much as a recognized attribute of our experience so much as an absence: the absence of innocent joy; the absence of trust; the absence of spontaneity; the absence of dance.

In this sense sadomasochism is sex plus fear.  That is perhaps the simplest way of showing why it is wrong: it is by definition unhealthy, being the product of undesirable emotions.

So much of our culture induces fear.  That is the role of alleged “news” programs which, if they were worth a damn, would regularly do in-depth analyses of the various cultural maladies of which the “news” is merely a temporal manifestation.  Someone got shot.  The interesting question is why.  Why were they poor?  Why were they so angry?  Why were they in a gang?

Few drive by thoughts.

Does it not seem sometimes as if we are in an interstitial period, located between History and for all we know Catastrophe?  We lionize people like Steven Tyler, who were quite revolutionary 30 years ago, but whose principle virtue today is having survived.  Scan  your radio dial.  How much is new, and how much old?

Does it seem as if our society has a direction it is traveling?  Do you feel a strong sense of direction, and faith that the world will be more or less the same when you have traversed your way?

Obama is in some ways the Timelessness President.  He exists on TV screens.  He exists in interviews.  But who IS he?  Much of America doesn’t seem to care.  Whoever he WAS, he exists today on the TV.  His Presence is eternal, and his past is irrelevant.  This is not just the result of conscious campaign choices by his handlers, but an aspect of our culture as it exists today.  So much change happens, that things seem to stand still, at least to my eye.  It is so many clouds puffing up, filling the sky, then being blown away by the wind, to be replaced by new ones.

This is a vague sense I have.  It is what I at times call the “de Chirico” sense, after the Italian much admired by the Surrealists.  Here is a pictorial representation–not, I think, the first on this site–of what I feel:

Oyweh.  Wrote this in response to this article, and if the past is any indication, it may never appear.  I’m Rodney Dangerfield, or something.  Actually, speaking of Rodney Dangerfield, this is funny. 

As always, if I take the time to write the damn thing, I like to make sure it appears SOMEWHERE.

I wrote a piece on Goodness dealing with this rough topic, which I
will link at the end of this post.  In my view, the academic search for
singular best answers in the moral realm is futile, just as it is futile
to search for final qualitative gestalts in any realm of human
endeavor.  We live in a universe without a top or bottom, in which up is
defined solely by the presence of gravity.  We must reason, then, as
bubbles in an endless ocean.  Our advantages are that we are self aware
bubbles, and we are aware of one another.

Logically, in any
purposive activity, one must define one’s goal.  The simplest and most
obvious goal in human life is happiness.  The next question is: are
there grades and types of happiness?  My answer is that, yes, there
are.  The happiness of a parent seeing a child succeed is in my view
qualitatively higher than spending time with a prostitute.  The pride of
success in a long, hard fought battle is better than intoxication.
Logically,
since I cannot inhabit other people’s minds, all such reason must
proceed from my own experience.  If my experiences are shared, then I
will generate recognition in others.  I am not stipulating general
rules; I am, rather, saying “this is true for ME, and I believe that you
will find it true for YOU also.”  Such a thing may be an approximate
general rule, with exceptions.

In my view, there is no room for
ontology, per se, but rather for tendencies and directions and
approximations.  I call a moral order a Telearchy: it is an order–a
complex order, a formally “chaotic” order–based upon chosen aims and
principles.

Within my own moral ecology all moral decisions are
local, imperfect, and necessary.  It will not be necessary for me to
render a decision on whether or not to eat my cat until the cat dies. 
And if I simply choose not to eat my cat because I don’t want to, that
is fine.  Nothing further need be said, as this is not even an important
decision.

Your capacity to pursue your own rational self
interest–a combination of temporal simple pleasures and higher grade,
more difficult “flow” sorts of experiences–is dictated by your
character.  In many cases, it is easier to make a decision which does
not best support your own long term best interests.  This means that a
properly moral disposition will have the capacity to reject self pity,
and the capacity to persevere in the face of difficulty.  I therefore
make these two habits immutable principles within my own creed.

My
third core principle is what I call Perceptual Breathing, which is the
constant habit of reconciling abstractions with concrete realities, and
more generally constantly pursuing UNDERSTANDING on all the levels on
which it operates: kinesthetic, emotional, cognitive (both in terms of
patterns of thinking and actual knowledge) and in my view spiritual.

Thus,
in answer to your question as to whether or not moral reasoning can be
improved, I would say both no and yes.  No, because I don’t think you
can “do” morality in the abstract.  I do not think it is a useful
activity.  Yes, because characters can be improved, judgement improved,
knowledge gained.  But what is being improved is a complex moral gestalt
that is unstable, but oriented through movement in a chosen direction.
Few
thoughts.  My piece (I hesitate to call it an essay) is here:
http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/dean%20rosengarten%20reply–modified.pdf

You
may find the rest of the website of some interest as well.  Morality is
the rough subtext of everything on there.  Even when I deal with
economics, I am trying to develop a better understanding of the effects
of specific types of policies on generalized human well being.  That
website is http://www.goodnessmovement.com

I think some sort of milestone has been reached when you can look demons in the face and laugh at them. In the end, they are never outside of you.

 I posted this as a response to this article, arguing in favor of affairs. I will add that I understand what they are saying, and have honestly thought more than once that if prostitution were more legal, that it’s quite possible more marriages would survive.  I am no prude on this topic, but feel that in the end it is always best to subordinate your behavior, by and large, to principles you choose.  Perhaps I am mistaken, but feel one must be who one chooses to be, or one is at a minimum confused, and more likely self loathing.  Since the cure for self loathing is finding someone to tell you how wonderful you are, infidelity is in some respects a self reinforcing cycle.  I am in this case speaking of several people I know.

To live a secret life, you have to segment your personality.  You have
to learn to repress all spontaneous expressions, lest your secret be
revealed.  You have to learn to be cautious in what you say, and guarded
in how you interact with the person who, in the end, you are lying to,
either actively, or by definition by omission.

Your spontaneity you reserve for your lover.  How can this but diminish
the rewards of asking for and receiving the loyalty of someone over the
course of a life?

I do not think sex, per se, makes anyone happy.  I think it is the
opening up to spontaneous emotions, to the unity and presence of
momentary experience, to giving in a spirit of genuine generosity.  All
of these things are possible within marriage.  I think things do not get
old, at least if you are with someone with whom you have ever felt a
deep connection: rather, I think people get lazy.

In the end, then, I think this is a rationalization of laziness and torpor, for which the prescribed remedy is betrayal.

Clearly, there may be couples who can manage the complicated dance of
open marriages.  I suspect at least one partner in most such
arrangements feels secretly hurt, but out of love is willing to tolerate
the straying of the other.  This does, however, make the other person
selfish, since they are willing to hurt the other person.

Personally, I am divorced, and waiting for the right woman.  I have had
many short term sexual relationships, and have found consistently both a
hollowness in pursuing sex for its own sake, and an utter revulsion
with the idea of indulging in short term passions at the cost of my long
term, self defining principles.  To use people is to lower oneself,
also, to the role of an object.  I refuse to do it.