Moderates United

Leftists relentlessly criticize the profit motive, as somehow self seeking. What they fail to consider, because they are either stupid or cynically malignant, is that businesses also operate under what might be termed a loss motive, by which I mean that there is both a carrot and a stick in play: they want to make money, of course, but they equally do not want to LOSE money, which over some period of time can and will lead to bankruptcy.

State bureaucracies–governments in general–tend towards organizational bloat because the incentives in place are completely divorced from practical considerations. In practice, failure is not just common, but irrelevant to the long term success of the project. They are not punished by failure, nor are they rewarded for success. They are rewarded for political obedience, and rewarded with larger staffs, salaries, and a larger chunk of the taxpayers wealth.

There is no loss motive, and the profits made in no way imply altruism–on the contrary, naked greed for both money and power are plainly on display ubiquitously–nor the capacity to create anything that is of use to anyone.

Self evidently, some government is necessary, but government checked by the DEMAND on the part of taxpayers that it actually accomplish the aims for which it allegedly exists.

“I Am”, or “That which brings into existence that which is”, or “I Am that I am”.

God is that which is, or that which brings into existence that which is. This is the opposite of idolatry, as I have defined it. This is a brilliant conception.

Further, I like the fact that there are gaps in the concept: the vowels are missing. Theoretically, one could pronounce the word many different ways, yet it would retain essential parts of its form. This coincides with the fundamental unity and multiplicity of existence, depending on which lens we view it through.

If you abstract it far enough, this is what I am trying to do with my conception of Goodness. I want certain parts to be flexible, and certain parts to be rigid.

An example I use from time to time is that of the classical Japanese Katana. The metal is folded over again and again on itself, which in my terms would equate symbolically to qualitative richness. What appears a whole, is in fact composed of much past movement, much effort. The result is something both very sharp, and very flexible.

You may find this history of the Japanese swordsmithing interesting.

This is an interesting and important topic.

When the–shall I call them refugees?–created the Golden Calf, it was created according to their inclination, in the form they chose, of the material they chose; and after worshipping it, they decided that it must want them to have a feast.

What they created, in other words, was a metaphysics that suited them, which they made no effort to reconcile with reality. It was a fantasy, a bubble, a congenial universe that just happened to suit their fancy.

In my view, the doctrines of Darwinism and “death-ism” (soul=brain), and the materialism which underlie them, are likewise idolatrous, because they cater to the vanities and preferences of the people holding these views, and not because they are defensible empirically.

This universe plainly has rules, by which I mean repeatable and reliable correllations between cause and effect, between stimulus and reaction. Some of the connections are linear and some are systemic; but all are reliable. This applies not just to what is READILY observable, but to the distant, soft, faint forces like those of psi, and mediumship.

People don’t realize this, but throughout modern history there have been mediums who could not just repeat words supposedly whispered into their ears, but actually manifest entire spirits, who could talk. Now, people may be skeptical, but the simple reality is that those scientists who have undertaken to study the matter have nearly uniformly changed their minds (usually beginning as skeptics); and scientists today who reject these notions out of hand can be reliably assumed not to have attended any seances with credible mediums (self evidently there are many frauds).

True scientists are open to all evidence, and all justifiable conclusions flowing from that evidence. Proper skepticism is equidistance from both belief and rejection. It allows you to move intelligently.

Framing things in this way, one can readily see why idolatry is prohibited in the Ten Commandments.

Put simply: idolatry is on this definition necessarily delusion, and there are no benefits to delusion. If the task is ordering our behavior rationally in a rational universe, we must know the rules. This should be self evident, and axiomatic.

It seems to me that idolatry is asking God to bow down to you. It is asking something from the universe which you have not put in it.

Was not the Golden Calf a visible sign of the possibility of material abundance, and celebrated as such? Rather than understand God’s will, they literally created a God out of their own wishes.

As I see it, our principle task is understanding how this universe works, and conforming ourselves to its dictates. We can never know what potential learning inheres in even the worst experiences.

I was pondering what courage is over lunch today. I have a few thoughts and observations, that should likely be taken as data points.

It comes from the old French for “heart”.

Continuum formation: do we call people brave who get up and drive to work every day? Not normally. But we do if they have never worked, or have a fear of driving. We might call an agorophobic who goes outside brave, but for most of us it wouldn’t warrant a second thought.

Do we call courageous people who are in danger, but don’t know it? For example, someone swimming in the ocean, menaced by sharks they never see and which never attack? They didn’t know to be afraid, so they weren’t.

Do we award soldiers medals for doing their job in combat? We lost something like 250,000 dead in WW2, and most never got medals. We only award them for conspicuous courage, beyond that normally expected.

Soldiers are trained in many ways to focus on their jobs, first and foremost, and to think as little as possible. This is so they can operate even in conditions of fear, on autopilot, to the extent possible.

It seems to me that courage is what is needed where fear is present. It implies fear. It implies pursuing a course which provokes fear, and staying the course regardless. It is a claustrophobic getting in an elevator, and it is also someone jumping out of an airplane at night who finds it very nerve wracking.

Courage is the WILL to stay the course in spite of what amount to attacks by one part of your self–the self preserving instinct–against another–your sovereign consciousness. Will, in turn, is a type of attention, where you focus on some things–what you want–to the exclusion of alternatives, such as the possibility of flight and failure.

Courage, then, is an exertion of energy in the pursuit of a chosen objective, even though not all parts of you agree with that objective.

Some people love rock climbing. They love the excitement, and they do it voluntarily all the time. Does this take courage? No, not by my definition. All parts of them agree with the objective, even though danger is present. They feel–in most cases with ample cause–that actual danger can be well managed through a focus on the task, on doing it right, and not making mistakes.

Interestingly, this leads to the conclusion that a life well lived needs progressively LESS courage, and more engagement without fear.

It occurs to me that a recurring theme in the Harry Potter books is the need to solve a mystery for which too few clues have been provided. Harry is constantly confronting situations he did not anticipate and for which he could scarcely have prepared, and which he survives by some combination of instinct, courage, and plain luck.

Is life itself not often a mystery, too? By this, I mean: is it not often the case that you are not sure what you are supposed to do, and who you are supposed to be? For my part, every day is an adventure, because I am making it up as I go along.

As I look at my own past, it seems you have the innocent stage, the banal stage, the sex stage, then the confusion age. You are small and happy initially, because you don’t think about much, and life is about playing, cake, friends and naps.

Then the Gilligan’s Island stage. I have nothing against Bob Denver or the others, but that show is banal. It is trivial. It gives the mind nothing to digest or even chew on. And I watched it daily for years.

Then girls, the chase the apprehension. Excitement, then what?

Ah, you have to find fulfillment. Fulfilling relationships, fulfilling job, fulfilling life. But it never quite gets there for most of us. No doubt there are exceptions. But for most of us, it always seems like there is something missing.

This is, in my view, the Duhkha of Buddhism, the “suffering” which is not really suffering so much as the consciousness of a gap, of a lack, of something you want and need but can’t get, the feeling of Tantalus, never quite able to get that sweet fruit.

We need to be clear that this is nothing new. This is not a disease of modernity. There is nothing new under the sun. Buddha saw this clearly 2,500 or so years ago.

In response to the Existentialists who want to find in this mystery cause for anxiety, angst, I would respond that this is rather a problem to be solved, and that technologies to do so already exist, and have for some time.

To my mind, the “condition of modernity” created by academics, consists first and foremost in indefensible metaphysical pessimism, which finds in the notion of materialistic evolution cause to deny free will–and consequently to enable the notions of impartial history to gain sway, even though such notions are necessarily implemented by specific, time-bound and decision making individuals–and to deny the concept of life continued past their physical deaths.

Both of these assumptions are prone to empirical invalidation, and it seems to me, and has long seemed to me, that progress in philosophical debate is unlikely until the premises upon which our current intellectual malaise are predicated are invalidated from within the scientific paradigm of truth.

This is both possible and necessary.

Few thoughts.

Intellectuals, in general, are not useless: they are harmful. They are people who are hoping that some hapless soul will cry out in the night “help me, help me. I don’t understand Habermassian hermeneutics and need someone to save me”. Discussions of both such philosophical doctrines and the load bearing characteristics of various construction materials are equally dull, but one makes a practical difference in the world.

So in much the same way that leftists practically need to create physical crises to advance political policies that otherwise would be laughed out of the room, so too do effete, useless intellectuals need to manufacture crises that only THEY understand, such as the fundamentally exploitative nature of Capitalism, or the true imperialistic history of the United States.

Since they need such emergencies, they are quite willing to lie to get them, to abuse the truth, and even to abuse the very people they are supposedly trying to save. Van Jones lied: he never abandoned his radical pose, in his own mind–which we might well term his romantic, sentimental AND angrily self righteous self image: that of the knight in shining African American armor riding off to save his African American princesses.

He lives in a fantasy world, a world that does not and never has existed. Rodney King got beaten–unlike his several passengers, who were arrested without incident–because he charged a police officer, and repeatedly refused commands to stop fighting. The guy was tased twice and hit with a baton in conformity with police protocols before he ever even hit the ground. The guy is something like 6’4″ and weighs something like 280. You take a guy like that, and put him on PCP, and it’s no wonder the officer in charge on the scene said he seriously considered shooting him. And he was stopped initially for leading police on a high speed chase, through numerous red lights, and for being a combative drunk, who later blew over a .20.

I mention this because Yale educated Jones says that the King verdict–which was eminently defensible legally and morally–is what led him to become a Communist.

What we need to understand is that leftist narratives are primarily created and propagated by people who are utterly incapable of achieving business or personal success through the normal avenues of having USEFUL ideas, a good work ethic, and people skills, all of which are harnessed in the direction of economic usefulness. Adolph Hitler never had a real job, and I don’t think Jones has either. His whole life has been political organizing.

Who is empowered by such organizing? Not the people. Rather, HE IS. Leftist organizing is about the empowerment of the intellectuals. The growth of the State is a growth in the power of those who don’t and can’t actually do anything useful. They cannot stand the idea of being left out, and the only way they can be included is if they lie, cheat and steal so as to control the systems of power and wealth creation.

Nobody wants to pick them for their kickball team, so they figure out how to get the teachers to put them in charge. It really is that simple, in many ways.

Obama is a good example of this. Being capable of doing nothing, he nonetheless entered his office believing he could do anything. He did not know what he did not know. He still doesn’t. This is the worst sort of ignorance.

We can only pray that God will save us from the people trying to save us.

The tactic the Left uses, of necessity, is creating crises to which they can plausibly claim more government is the answer.

Fannie Mae (FDR) and Freddie Mac (Great Society) failed because they made large volumes of loans that were indefensible from a business standpoint. They were virtually guaranteed to lose, since nobody was checking to see if the loans were viable. Moreover, they were backing up large volumes of Wall Street securities, implicitly using the Federal government to underwrite the risk of very shaky loans. Once this link was lost, with the failures of FM and FM, the securities were downgraded, they could no longer be sold, large companies got into unmanageable cashflow problems, and went belly up. This created general problems that, likely not due to accident, came to a head just before the election.

Left wing programs create economic chaos, which is then seized upon to create a year of Christmas’s for political fellow travellers, further regulation of Wall Street, and an expansion of the welfare state. The Depression was the same thing. Even then, in private, the conversations contrasted “reform”–socialism–with recovery, with the latter losing every time.

Here is Obama’s problem: he has no crisis. What we are in is malaise, and he used his political capital, created in the last crisis, to propose fixes that fixed nothing. Based on past history, we should be recovering, but we aren’t.

And taken honestly, we are not doing well, but we are not doing that bad either. Some 90% of Americans are gainfully employed. We are by far the world’s most powerful economy and military. We are motivated, honest people, in general.

So we are a boat that is afloat, and moving, but not at the pace it should. Obama has no platform from which to hyperventilate and scream out that we MUST do x, y, z. He will of course try to sell the imperative nature of his ideas, but we are not in a panic mode. What we are wanting and needing–and not seeing from him, because he doesn’t have them–are well thought out, serious proposals that take into account valid economic principles.

When the limelight comes on him, it will show a lot of the flaws that he has been trying so hard to hide. Of course, absent a complicit media, he would not have been elected, so any amount of serious coverage can only hurt this very mediocre, unprincipled man.

At times I will distinguish between myth and philosophy. Myth is the basis upon which philosophy operates. Myth creates the starting points of any analysis. If the “rich” control everything, then what should be done? Many answers are possible, but they flow naturally from unquestioned first assumptions.

My previous post, that of Sammy Davis, is a myth: this is an appealing story to me, and I see no reason to justify it.

There is an element as well, though, in philosophy in which truth claims are not made, per se, but rather tendencies towards concrete outcomes pointed out. What is the effect on a personality of a philosophy consisting in the belief–the myth–that nothing is worth dying for? What about the belief that dying in battle is the best way to die? Or the belief that some things are worth fighting for, but that the best way to die is in bed, old, and surrounded by people who love you?

One can tease out endless if/then constructions from basic premises. One good use of philosophy is in pointing out, particularly, non linear outcomes from basic premises. There is this tendency among many “philosophers” to want to isolate what they do from empiricism, from validation. They want it be “pure”. Why? Is it not useful information to know that people who believe X tend to experience the emotive state of Y more often than people who believe Z?

As I see it, metaphysical room exists for many competing truth claims, and in analyzing what we will CHOOSE, in the end, to believe to be true, concrete outcomes are irrelevant only to intellectual aesthetes.

This is one of my favorite Medal of Honor stories. Read the citation at the bottom.

This is the image in particular that I love, even though it is just part of his very courageous action that day:

He struggled to his feet and returned to the howitzer, which was burning furiously. Ignoring repeated warnings to seek cover, Sgt. Davis rammed a shell into the gun. Disregarding a withering hail of enemy fire directed against his position, he aimed and fired the howitzer which rolled backward, knocking Sgt. Davis violently to the ground. Undaunted, he returned to the weapon to fire again when an enemy mortar round exploded within 20 meters of his position, injuring him painfully. Nevertheless, Sgt. Davis loaded the artillery piece, aimed and fired. Again he was knocked down by the recoil. In complete disregard for his safety, Sgt. Davis loaded and fired 3 more shells into the enemy.

The cannon is on fire, not really ready to be fired, and he fires it anyway. It knocks him on his ass (one of the rounds broke his back, which he did not realize until the action was over, at which point he fainted, which is not in this story), he gets up and DOES IT AGAIN. AND AGAIN, 4 MORE TIMES. Beautiful.

What they also did not mention here is that the rounds–this is my recollection, but I believe an accurate one–were flechette, anti-personal rounds. His heroism may well have kept their remote position from being overrun.

That’s the way you do it.