Moderates United

As we watch these Anti-Liberals try to bully the world in mobs in coming days, weeks, and quite possibly months—this being a VERY severe wound to their narcissism—notice that in most of the places where the rage and violence and Brown-Shirtism is deepest and widest NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

Abortion until birth is still legal in I think Oregon, New York, Washington DC, and laws remain very generous (to the mothers) in California, Illinois, and I assume most of New England.

And where abortions will be banned most of the WOMEN support that. Demographically, in my understanding, there are more Pro-Life women than men. Many are no doubt loving mothers for whom the idea of hacking a defenseless baby to pieces is horrifying. This is not an unreasonable position.

And I wanted to share a quote from Czeslav Milosz that I don’t think I have shared here. Asked in the 60’s or early 70’s if Sacramento was not basically a concentration camp, Milosz replied “you are unable to distinguish a pin prick from the rack.”

That is a good way of addressing the infantile hyperarousal which conflates ALLOWING, but not requiring, those States with voting populations who want to do so to ban abortion, on the one side, with Theocracy and the Taliban on the other.

Its past ludicrous. It is reality testing in the clinically schizophrenic range. It is mental illness, mental derangement, which is only made possible by a general lack of emotional maturity—healthy individuation—and truly execrable ignorance, both combined with the attention spans of gnats.

I find myself strangely happy. I’m not sure why. I have been growing a lot lately, and slowly sleeping better.

One thing that is clear, but needs to be said, is that this decision was BRAVE. Courageous. A victory of good legal judgement in the face of largest violent counterwind perhaps in American history. Kudos to these brave men and woman.

Who knows? Maybe more spines will start showing up. A nation denuded of generalized courage is a nation failing. Its not enough to have a few brave people here and there. You need to be able to pick nearly anyone off the street at random and find someone capable of difficulty and risk. That is how America historically was.

And I an abortion moderate. I think it should be safe and legal, but that after the baby has roughly the awareness of a puppy, killing it for anything but a REALLY good reason should be illegal.

And it occured to me yesterday that the argument that a baby only becomes a “life” if the mother wants it—placing it in a mutable Schroedingers Cat limbo of being either “biological tissue”, to be disposed in the garbage, or a precious life, to be buried with tears—is analogous to saying the murder of an adult person should only be illegal if someone LIKED them. If no one liked them and no one misses them, then they were not a “life” either.

Philosophically, sprcifically ethically, this is a highly unsatisfactory argument.

And of course this argument is made implicitly by policy demands made by pro-abortion zealots. They do what they want to do, then call it good. There is no true debate or principle involved. It is only people like me who do that, who point to the necessary assumptions for a chain of logic to be valid.

And of course logic itself can be and often is a METHOD OF IMPROVING PERCEPTION. It provides a trail of bread crumbs leading both back to assumptions that were hidden, and forward to necessary behaviors, if your stated aim is your true aim, and effectiveness in that something you perforce value.

As I have often pointed out, you can deduce peoples TRUE aims from their behavior. Its simple. Everyone always acts logically. They simply often lie to themselves and others about their true assumptions and true aims.

As I say, I like a solution in the middle, personally. I do not know what life is, or where the souls of babies come from. I do not feel I have a scientific understanding of matters called spiritual. As I have often said, I think every university should have a well funded Department studying these topics, like the one they have at the University of Virginia.

But OBVIOUSLY if our only ideas on all this come from religion—or the rejection of all metaphysics outside of dogmatic Materialism—then religion will and SHOULD play a part.

Many of our States were founded specifically as safe places for ideosyncratic religious practiced and beliefs. This nation was FOUNDED both to protect the public exercise of religion (no hiding in caves, or fear of persecution), and to avoid any one group getting the power yo say to all THIS IS WHAT YOU MUST BELIEVE AND THIS IS HOW YOU MUST ACT.

In fact, if you view Leftism as a secular Church—which is really what it is, complete with priests, a catechismof required beliefs, and of course congregations everywhere, particularly universities—then what it is trying to do is become what the Pope was to Christendom for many centuries. They want their doctrine declared infallible, and heretics arrested and imprisoned and/or murdered.

This ascension of such a Church to a de facto throne is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent, particularly the 10th Amdndment.

Unless I miss my mark—which definitely happens, but not often—what we are about to see needs to be described as some combination of a childish temper tantrum, and the emotional and physical abusiveness of a man who beats his wife and limits every aspect of her life, in order to control her.

These people are not interested in debate, the law, or even womens rights. All of it is pretext fir “what the world needs more of is ME.  US.”. And FUCK EVERYONE ELSE. They have no right to live, to speak, to believe anything we don’t tell them.

This is where the nice and quiet psychopaths reveal who they really were all along.

Thank God for the Second Amendment. It exists for times like this and people like this. I fully expect many angry acts of violence, and will caution sane people to just let these people alone. Let them show the world how many anti-Liberal pathetic tin pot dictators there are out there. Watch it on TV.

Compare what is about to happen, as it happens, to Jan. 6th.

People are still in jail, often in solitary confinement, just for BEING there. They set no fires, hurt no one, and in some cases DID NOT EVEN ENTER THE BUILDING.

Stephen Colbert’s people trespassed and harassed people but were set free immediately.  So too were arsonists and looters, not just in DC but all over the country.

If there are multiple tiers of justice, then THAT is oppression. What is bring done to Jan. 6 protesters—and that is what they were—is no different in principle or fact from the legal atrocities committed in the Democrat run Jim Crow South, or British India, or South Africa.

We were supposed to be beyond all this, but patently we are regressing in nearly all ways; or, at least, our schools are being run by regressive infants, who cannot hear or tolerate independent thought, who go into hyperarousal—which is itself a form of emotional bullying—on the slightest pretext, and who are grotesquely ignorant and indifferent with respect to all aspects of truly Liberal history and philosophy.

Fuck these people. The only solution for them is for sane people to outnumber them, name them, marginalize them, and to renew the process of teaching our children to be better people, which is to say honest, principled, mature and individuated people.

And if Roberts refusal to hear the valid cases against that ridiculous eldction was motivated by a desire to avoid riots, well shit, he may as well double down now. Trump would be protecting them. Biden’s people are probably hoping a couple of the “conservatives” get murdered, and doing their best to help make it happen.

I said I would explain this.  I won’t dig up the quotes, but roughly speaking, some kids, when confronted with emotional environments in which nothing makes sense, tend to internalize all the conflicts, and some tend to externalize them.

Internalizers are the empaths, who have a very, very hard time of it sometimes.  There is so much going on, and none of it makes sense, and it takes a long, long time, often, for anyone to explain it all.

Externalizers tend to deal with it all by pushing it out, which makes emotions something out there, and people out there tools to be used to meet emotional needs, rather than emotional needs being something intrinsically their own.  It is an immature behavior, and the root pathway to continuing the rot and trauma of the family system.

This is a very imperfect description, but I am tired of typing and have a long to-do list today.

Ponder all this.  I am proposing that if we make something like Maturity, or Emotional Intelligence, a priority, that the downstream positive effects will be enormous; and that if we continuing empowering children to act like adults, and allowing adults to act like children, our demise is only a matter of time.   Liberalism is only suitable for grown ass adults, who act like adults.

I’m intersectional today: time, motivation, coffee and cigars intersected so that I am going to take some time and perform the tedious task of quoting a book at length.

Why?  I think it’s useful.  And the author deserves credit.

The book is “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”, by Lindsay Gibson.  I will note that I make no money from this blog, and that on balance if I have any effect, it will be to sell books for her.

Now, the book is not something that will ever be filed under “Classics”.  It’s not Voltaire, or Thomas More, or Jean-Paul Sartre.  But in some ways it may be more USEFUL.

Much philosophy, I am convinced, is just a beard for psychology.  Principled are developed and articulated at length in complex systems, all to avoid dealing with the fact that your mother didn’t love you, or your father was harsh, or your mother was harsh and your father didn’t love you.

I remember writing down the quote from Moby Dick (the one and only time I read it, just after high school) that “when I hear a man give himself out as a philosopher I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old man, he has “broken his digester.'”  That’s from memory, but close.

Much of life is very simple.  It is avoiding the difficulties of that simplicity that gets us into trouble.

Here we are in 2022, and most people don’t have a fucking clue why they are on this planet, so they are grasping at straws.  Existential crisis?  I prescribe a double dose of global warming hysteria, and maybe a sex change for six months.

That’s not healthy.  No serious person can argue it is healthy.  It flies in the face of Liberalism, as a political creed founded specifically, if not explicitly, on the idea that our society was filled and would continue to be filled with responsible adults capable of independent rational thought.

Get rid of the adults and the rational thought, and Liberalism no longer makes sense practically or emotionally.

Anyway, in my own particular case, I got to thinking about Enmeshment, which I learned in this book was apparently a term developed by Murray Bowen in the 70’s.  When I was still seeing therapists–when they still had something to say I had not heard, and before I had read most of the books on all their shelves–I was told my family was “enmeshed”, and I was the “Identified Patient”.

It is a particular and peculiar aspect of emotionally unhealthy systems that the most unhealthy people display few if any outward symptoms.  The symptoms manifest in those unable to handle the contradictions without breaking down and falling out somehow.  That person is called an Identified Patient.  As I will argue, in Totalitarian systems, that person is called a dissident (or cockroach, rat, traitor, Jew, Fascist/Bolshevik, reactionary, right winger, White Supremacist).  They are the ones shouting truth in a world of lies, and usually paying a severe price for it.

I will write out both her definition of maturity and the characteristics of immaturity, but right out of the gate read this and think of George Orwell:

If you were raised by an emotionally immature parent, you spent  your early years tiptoeing around the anxieties of an emotionally phobic person.  The enmeshed families created by such parents are a stronghold against their fear of individuality.  A child’s individuality is seen as a threat to emotionally insecure and immature parents because it stirs up fears about possible rejection or abandonment.  If you think independently you might criticize them or decide to leave.  They feel much safer seeing family members as predictable fantasy characters rather than real individuals.

 

For parents who fear both real emotion and abandonment, authenticity in their children presents frightening evidence of the child’s individuality.  These parents feel threatened when their children express genuine emotions because it makes interactions unpredictable and seems threatening to family ties.  Therefore their children, in an attempt to prevent their parents from becoming anxious, often suppress any authentic thoughts, feelings, or desires that would disturb their parents sense of security.

 

Parents who need to keep strict control because of their anxieties often teach their children not only how they should do things, but also how they should feel and think. . .Such parents teach their children to be ashamed of any aspect of themselves that differs from their parents.  In this way, children come to see their uniqueness and even their strengths, as odd and unlovable.

 

In such families, internalizing [I will offer her definition presently] children often learn to feel ashamed of the following normal behaviors: Enthusiasm; Spontaneity; Sadness and grief over hurt, loss or change; Uninhibited affection; saying what they really think and feel; expressing anger when they feel wronged or slighted.

 

On the other hand, they are taught that the following experiences and feelings are acceptable and even desirable: obedience and deference to authority; physical illness or injury that puts the parent in a position of strength and control; uncertainly and self doubt; liking the same things as the parent; guilt and shame over imperfections or being different; willingness to listen, especially to the parents distress and complaints.  (page 159)

Pick your regime, pick your time and person.  I think of Fidel Castro giving 6 hour harangues that were the same bullshit as the last one, but during which all listening were too scared to use the bathroom, lest they be pegged as a dissident and sent to jail to be tortured and “corrected”.

Think of any totalitarian regime: is this not a perfect description?  Why do they care about your mind, if they have your body?  Because they feel chronic uncontrolled anxiety, because they are adult children.

We read 1984, and wonder at the evil and wrong of it, but how often do you wonder about how the principle perpetrators, like O’Brien, became that way?  What did the family system of Vladimir Ulyanov look like?  Adolph Hitler?  Joseph Jughashvili?  Nguyen Sinh Cung?

Politics is an arena not that unlike family dynamics, and it is not a stretch to suppose that political leaders recreate, both consciously and more likely mostly unconsciously, dynamics with which they are familiar.

This means, in turn, that there is most likely a Liberal type of family (note, I am using the word Liberal as it was used before it was bastardized and coopted by authoritarians).  That family would be one characterized by emotional maturity and health.  Liberalism depends on an emotionally healthy and engaged populace.  It invokes and depends on the wisdom of the community.  It facilitates freedom, because freedom is what is healthy for healthy people.  Freedom is useless to the sick and morally and mentally infirm.

Logically, any aspiring Authoritarian, then, would want to infantilize their target population, making them unsure of themselves, weak, greedy, and all the rest.

Here is a definition of healthy maturity:

‘Emotional maturity’ means a person is capable of thinking objectively and conceptually while sustaining deep emotional connection to others.  People who are emotionally mature can function independently while also having deep emotional attachments, smoothly incorporating both into their daily life.  They are direct about pursuing what they want, yet do so without exploiting other people.  They’ve differentiated from their original family relationships sufficiently to build a life of their own.  They have a well developed sense of self and identity and treasure their closest relationships.

 

Emotionally mature people are comfortable and honest about their own feelings and get along well with other people, thanks to their well developed empathy, impulse control, and emotional intelligence.  They’re interested in other people’s inner lives and enjoy opening up and sharing with others in an emotionally intimate way.  When there’s a problem, they deal with others directly to smooth out differences.

 

Emotionally mature people cope with stress in a realistic, forward looking way, while consciously processing their thoughts and feelings.  They can control their emotions when necessary, anticipate the future, adapt to reality, and use empathy and humor to ease difficult situations and strengthen bonds with others.  They enjoy being objective and know themselves well enough to admit their weaknesses. (page 28)

So what is immaturity?  Well, the opposite.  I will offer some snippets.  See if you recognize any of this in our current political and social (can we any longer differentiate them) climate.

Traits associated with emotional immaturity:

They are rigid and single minded.  As long as there’s a clear path to follow, emotionally immature people can do very well, sometimes reaching high levels of success and prestige.  But when it comes to relationships or emotional decisions, their immaturity becomes evident.  They are either rigid or impulsive, and try to cope with reality by narrowing it down to something manageable.  Once they form an opinion, their minds are closed.  There’s one right answer, and they can become very defensive and humorless when people have other ideas.

 

They have low stress tolerance.  Emotionally immature people don’t deal with stress well.  Their responses are reactive and stereotyped.  Instead of assessing the situation and anticipating the future, they use coping mechanisms that deny, distort, or replace reality.  They have trouble admitting mistakes and instead discount the facts and blame others.  Regulating emotions is difficult for them, and they often overreact.  Once they get upset, it’s hard for them to calm down, and they expect other people to soothe them by doing what they want.  They often seek comfort in intoxicants or medication.

 

They do what feels best. Young children are ruled by feelings, whereas adults consider possible consequences.  As we mature, we learn that what feels good isn’t always the best thing to do.  Among emotionally immature people, however, the childhood instinct to do what feels good never really changes.  They make decisions on the basis of what feels best in the moment and often follow the path of least resistance.

 

They are subjective, not objective.   Emotionally immature people assess situations in a subjective way, not objectively.  They don’t do much dispassionate analysis.  When they interpret situations, how they are feeling is more important than what is actually happening.  What is true doesn’t matter nearly as much as what feels true.  Trying to get a subjectively oriented person to be objective about anything is an exercise in futility.  Facts, logic, history–all fall on deaf ears where the emotionally immature are concerned.

 

They have little respect for difference.  Emotionally immature people are annoyed by other people’s differing thoughts and opinions, believing everyone should see things their way.  The idea that other people are entitled to their own point of view is beyond them. . .They are only comfortable in role-defined relationships where everyone holds the same beliefs.  The quieter, nicer ones are the same, but in a quieter, nicer way.

 

They are egocentric.  Normal children are egocentric as youngsters, but the self involvement of emotionally immature adults is more childish than childlike. [emphasis in original].Unlike children, their egocentrism lacks joy and openness.  Emotionally immature people are self preoccupied in an obsessed way, not with the innocence of a child.  Young children are self-centered because they’re still commanded by pure instinct, but emotionally immature adults are commanded by anxiety and insecurity, like wounded people who must keep checking their intactness.  They live in a perpetual state of insecurity, fearing that they’ll be exposed as bad, inadequate, or unlovable [such as by not wearing a mask; my comment, obviously].  They keep their defenses high so other people can’t get close enough to threaten their shaky sense of self worth.

 

Before you start feeling too sorry for them, keep in mind that their defenses work seamlessly to keep these underlying anxieties below the level of awareness.  They would never see themselves as being insecure or defensive.

 

They are self preoccupied and self involved. Anxious self preoccupation is a quality all emotionally immature people share.  They’re constantly monitoring whether their needs are being met or whether someone has offended them.

 

They are self referential, not self reflective. Emotionally immature people are highly self referential, meaning that in any interaction, all roads lead back to them.  However, they aren’t self reflective.  Their focus on themselves isn’t about gaining insight or self understanding; it’s about being the center of attention.

 

They have low empathy and are emotionally insensitive.  Impaired empathy is a central characteristic of emotionally immature people, as is avoidance of emotional sharing and intimacy.  Being out of touch with their own deeper feelings, they’re strikingly blind to how they make other people feel. (pages 29-35)

She goes on in this vein, but this should suffice to make the point.  The whole chapter is worth reading, as is much of the book, particularly for anyone who can relate to any of this in their own lives.

I will ask an open question to anyone reading this who has spent any significant amount of time interacting with the Left: does this not all sound VERY familiar?

And here is the kicker: a Leftist could read all this, recognize none of it as applying to them, then cut and paste it as applying to conservatives without batting an eye.  Since they lack any real emotional depth or intellectual creativity, I noticed long ago that they just take the valid complaints we make about them, then more or less literally say “I know you are, but what am I?” by literally taking the same words and simply reversing the direction.  They may do that with what I just wrote. Childish, yes.  That is the argument I am making here: it IS childish, and not in a fun way.

So what does this add up to?  A huge problem, no?

But is the first step in solving any problem not identifying and describing it?  Applying mature reality testing?

In my own mind, I have a certain metaphor, that may not be a metaphor, that  I like to use, and which I find comforting in a strange way.

I like to think that before I was born my assigned task was to parachute into the darkest place I could find, far from comfort and the Home of  Light that is where we all truly belong, and to do so without a map, without a guide, and find my way back through every possible emotional shitstorm imaginable.  I have actually had the good fortune to get to know a few real commandos reasonably well, who I have used as models to help me.

That is what I like to think of myself as doing here.  We are fighting a battle for adulthood as a species, as Humankind, writ large.  The battle is being fought in emotional terrain.  My job is to map that out, to make what was hidden visible, to describe what is being done, how, and where, so that any remaining sane, well meaning people out there can begin to act more intelligently, with more purpose, and with more effectiveness in helping lead humanity to a future characterized by dignity, personal freedom, emotional growth, spirituality, and sustained prosperity within the bounds of respecting the life of this planet.

I am an environmentalist too, but I think we need to focus on real problems, not made up ones.

Imagine, for example, we were spending as much money preventing plastics from entering our oceans–and pulling out those already there–as we are on the ludicrous notion of Global Warming.  Imagine we were taking sane and practical steps to reduce plastic use, rather than pretending to recycle plastics, then shipping them to Asia, where they get released into the oceans.

Or, alternatively, I suspect that if we took the money being spent on global warming in, say, Holland alone, we could stop the need for poor Brazilians to burn rainforest.

But we aren’t.  We are dealing with emotionally immature, rigid people with completely perverted reality testing.  They can’t get the attention they crave with practical measures to solve real problems.  They need crises that they claim only they can solve; and so they CREATE them, never mind who they hurt.  Those people are invisible to them.

It’s an odd thing, but the stress of watching a President and Congress destroy our country–while a corrupted Supreme Court does something close to nothing to prevent it–seems to be a sort of tonic to me.  Stress is tension, and tension CAN be a solvent, if you allow it.

Think about massage: you put pressure on your muscles, then release it.  Tight muscles loosen through temporarily increased tension.   This is the whole premise of Kum Nye, except that you are using body positions to place stress on patterns of muscular and energetic tension.  Can Life itself not also be used this way?  Can difficulty and stress not be used this way, if we feel them, then learn to loosen up within them?  I believe so.

 

In every possible way, “let them buy electric cars” is equal to “let them eat cake”.

Pete Buttagieg and the people running Biden are not going to even TRY and do anything but blame everyone but themselves for this problem.

Things are going well for me, if also busy.

A key insight I had recently is that the notion of emotional maturity appears to me to be both necessary and sufficient to explain our present political world. I will explicate this at greater length when time and available emotional energy intersect, but will note broadly that immature people tend to see their problems originating outside themselves, tend to therefore blame others, to see the world in inflexible black and white (literally) ways, and are always on the verge of aggression when anyone questions them in any way.  Is this in a nutshell not fully descriptive of left wing social, rhetorical, political and dare I say ritual practice?  Yes. My answer is yes.

Mature people hold themselves accountable, try to be responsible, learn from their mistakes, are open to nuance and special circumstance, and are always happy to try and negotiate differences peacefully.

This is not politics speaking. This is orthodox developmental psychology.

This prism is, in my view, quite useful. It both explains our present and offers an articulable path forward that is non-violent and apt to lead to optimized outcomes for all concerned.

That is todays comment. Here are notes I’ve left myself in the past week or two:

Notes 2

What sort of world do I want to live in? One I don’t fear. Can I not choose to live in that world today? This very moment?

Righteous indignation easily shades into chronic indignation, them chronic anger, and eventually decontextualized chronic hate.

I think meditation is beginning when the pad feels spacious and time ample and generous.

Maybe I need to invent adulting or maturity classes.

Post on maturity. The primary political demand of the Left is that no one should ever have to learn to negotiate any difficulty of a sort or severity they did not choose, as regards both the people protesting themselves and those they are patronizing in both sense of the word. Their socialism is a fantasy world in which they are protected from the consequences of all their decisions and the world rendered fully safe.

Feeling is an abstraction of mixed sensations. It is perhaps the result of a catchmenf area that can and does go different ways.

Feeling and releasing emotions reduces their compulsive power, both by obvious pushing, if they are conscious, and subtle long term manipulation if repressed. Press is out; repress is in. Interesting.

Eating good quality, tasty food in moderation is a gesture of balance. Imbalance is driven by unmanaged compulsions, by winds, by pushing.

Working smarter IS working harder for most of us, but amounts to multiplying outcomes with the same effort.

If you grow up rejecting adult authority this is functionally a rejection of adulthood itself. The counter-culture has itself become a de facto movement of infantilism and refusing to mature and individuate, because adulthood and adult resppnsibility in large measure is what was rebelled against. Children want both a perfectly safe world—one made safe for them by others—and freedom from personal accountability. Government obviously has come to serve, both conceptually and practically, in loco parentis. But government does not have a body or soul. It cannot teach empathy or compassion, dignity or courage. There can be no true bonds of mutual affection and loyalty. Choosing an abstraction as a parent cannot but dilute and bleach people into flat superficiality, banality, and insipid harmlessness outside of a mob. The mob then becomes a means to personal existence. And mobs do not need to be physical. Most of them arent. A mob is participation in a mass formation, most of which are expressed and lived now on social media.

Any group of people motivated by fear and shame will sooner or later commit atrocities.

In the Tao Te Ching he does not counsel to “pay as much attention to the end as the beginning” just because it is good advice, but because to do otherwise implies impatience, which is rejecting Now. It is necessarily an Unacceptance, a desire to transit stonelike and senseless through moments in time.

Would I not be happiest if I was as happy at work as at rest? Lessening that resistance would be smart.

You cannot cross a river until you come to the river. Likewise, you cannot dispel feelings and tensions until you become aware of them.

I was a pallbearer at my own funeral.

Emotional strength is very related to tension and anxiety in terms of what I can express in the world. A highly sensitive or anxious (not nevessarily the same thing) person may feel more fear driving a car than s good soldier in war. Both may express the same will. But the OUTCOMES are very different.

All work and play, stillness and noise, all experience, is Kum Nye if we enter into it and flow with it. Kun Zhi is all our energetic habits that blind us, that tell us there is only one way to do things, and that rote repetition is our friend. The thirst for stasis is an alliance with death.

The world is so large and its problems so complicated that it is almost inherently productive of fear and confusion. Left wing propaganda uses the fact that people are confused and afraid to offer a simple way out by saying Trust Us and it will all be fine. If that burden is ever placed once on them it will require an almost superhuman effort to reshoulder that burden. You have traded anxiety—usually INTENSE anxiety—for relative peace. And obviously you will easily hate anyone who questions or threatens that peace. This explains a lot. A mass formation happens easily when there is a lot to fear, and obviously the organizers of all this learned to push relentless fear long ago. This has been going on for decades, and in cases like nuclear war, the objective danger cannot easily be dismissed. It is in some respects a propaganda triumph that the valid fear of nuclear war has seemingly been largely eradicated among those being led around by the nose.

Emotions are timeless, are they not? And they have a non-linear—which is to say non-spatial—logic.

The empty vessel of Taoism is not just empty of distracting and misleading conceptions and biases, but also unnecessary anxieties and EMOTIONAL predispositions: no superfluous thoughts, images and feelings, with only raw sensations remaining, from which everything else is built. “Beginners Mind” is thus not mind per se at all.

I think practically most “Progressives” define progress ex post hoc as “what we did, what we do”, and in advance as “what we will do”. The conceit and obviously delusion is that they are intrinsically good, so no matter what they do and who they harm, if they touched it, it was and is good, with all evil residing solely in those who critique and question them. I cannot imagine a more carefully constructed anti-Rationality, or a better means to thwart all spontaneous amd accurate perception, or to more completely prevent mature reality testing

Democrats—and to sure many Republicans—are not interested in solving problems but in USING problems. The moral hazard of needing problems is obvious and the root cause of most of our social and political dysfunction.

When physical or strong emotional conditioning is used at anearly age, it becomes background, not conscious psychology. It is instinct rather than choice. And some of this is necessary. The 3 year old ego cannot remain in charge. It must be limited, if also ideally not broken. But these emotional patterns run so deep they virtually constitute the felt sense of self and its possibilities.

My life internally has been much more Scorsese than Tarkovsky.

Post on maturity.

To say you hate everyone—or people—is to say you fear everyone. People obviously can be and often are thoughtless, rude and stupid, but this is not the general rule, particularly when not under stress and not acting as part of a herd.

Logically, if avoiding talk or even awareness of deep emotion is a facet of immaturity, then social media is both supporting and breeding it like a pestilential swamp.

It is one thing to withdraw from emotionally abusive parents but another entirely to invent and see what was possible, and in so doing finally see them in their true light.

Often, I think, negative emotions are like attached parasites. If you keep moving they will often fall away.

Pain and loss—or the never-present—are stories, and stories are excuses, and excuses are stumbling blocks we place in our own paths, those which lead to work we know we need to do. But forgetting those who hurt us is losing a part of who we are, which is to say what fragments remain, which survived in spite of All That. Spiritually, perhaps loss is always our friend. But psychologically it is definitely not, and I truly think the path to the AUTHENTICALLY spiritual lies through the psychological.

The 3 Refuges were intended to provide itinerant monks with a traveling home, and thus calm place/port in the storm. We all need an emotional home, especially if we renounce our physical one.

There are roughly three ways to deal with chronic fear. One is to untangle the knots giving rise to it. This is best. Second is becoming stronger. Strength weakens fear, and ironically some of the strongest men were most fearful. Third is to deny it and weave it into narratives of moral outrage and shame based enmeshment with a mob of mutually calibrating fish. You can pivot on a dime on any issue, but if everyone does it THE WORLD LOOKS THE SAME. And ideas can change constantly because it is the EMOTION that remains the same.

Communism is really just thr politics of the emotionally immature.

Whenever an idea about things is born, it is born in two: yin and yang, good and bad. Faith in the future is born with pessimism, hope with despair. Love with hate, kindness with coldness. It is better to connect directly with the totality than indirectly through what amounts to a narrowing filter. An idea is a constriction point and polarizing filter. Or can be, in any event.

It is possible to walk through a door with the abstract goal to save the world, or with an authentic self, but not both: they won’t fit. Grandiosity is lying. Sincerity is more realistic.

The authentically Liberal ideal is a self organizing dynamic personality interacting relatively stably and fearlessly and happily within a mutable matrix of various self organizing systems which multiply individual effort and talent both physically and spiritually. People help one another accomplish physical tasks and to grow. This is a normative ideal, one opposed to the whole human and animal history of collectivism and the primacy of primitive instrinct and violence in the service of conformity.

If I look at the past thirty years as my career and my career as growing personally, then I am about in life where I want to be, on the verge of beginning to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Oddly, I think a very good case can be made that this is really the only “career” that matters, at least if we take survival seriously.

It may be useful to use the words emotion and information interchangeably.

The connection between book people and masks is simple: they are almost invariably physically weak and timid and fearful. The Cult grants them solace and the Cult demanded masks, which it said would make them safer. The Cult, remember, exists to create a stable shelter from fear and confusion. To leave is to shoulder all the fear and confusion of our time alone, which few can even stomach contemplating.

Using other peoples money to make yourself feel good, as Democrats do, is really USING them, isn’t it? Its even worse when they steal freedoms from some and give them to others.

A “church” in which people pursue a wide variety of spiritual practices but still get together once or twice a week would be a lot like a Tibetan monastery. And the periodic meetings would serve as reinforcing and comforting social contact.

Forgiveness, as a mature act of letting go of the pain associated with a betrayal of trust, is healthy. But often what people call forgiving is really forgetting, and part of that persons self is renounced along with the right to righteous anger, self defense, boundary protection, and effective emotional autonomy.

Maturity/immaturity is a better continuum than healthy to sociopath. Extension is easier on the positive side.

Satan is a symbol of fear, of power—a palliative for fear, but no cure—and of belonging without intimacy or individuation. It is the creed of externalizers taken to an extreme.

Leftism provides a place and an assigned playacting role. As such it is effectively extended emotional enmeshment. Human history consists almost entirely in enmeshed groups of people externalizing against each other. People are comforted in groups, but absent individuation, each grouping, each tribe, becomes a separate competing animal species. There is no humanity: there are a million species, all fighting with one another like wild animals. Only principles bridge this gap.

Perceptually, the relevant cultural continuum is between nuance and black/white thinking; between large, moving, complex perceptions on the one side, and simplistic yes/no operators on the other.

I saw a vegan place with a nod to Satan. Its an odd combo, but not really: militant veganism is not really about loving animals who, unlike people, cannot protest that your love is fake. It is about using the pretext of caring about animals to be angry all the time and to hate most if not all people, most likely as a severely immature psychological externalizer. And if Satan is an enemy of the System and people (normies) you hate, then he is a logical ally. Its a great way of pulling in—but not TOO far—a few allies and telling the rest of the world to fuck itself.

What we did to multiple groups of Indians after defeating them militarily was not that different from what the Japanese did to us in Bataan.

I wonder if it would be accurate to say our global cultural task is to make the world safe for psychology.

The possibility and usually the reality of hypocrisy no more invalidates an ideal than the possibility of cowardice negates the value of courage. You cannot judge a value in its failure, but only in its success. And to reject values outright is to institutionalize failure and pernicious chaos as values.

It would be interesting, in an electronic book, to block reading at a song, say “first fall of snow”, then ask: “did it make you cry?”, if yes, then you go one place; if no, another. This was one of my original ideas, to create a multisensory and mutable book. I can even change things once it is published.

Blaming Republicans for everything is textbook externalizing.

Other peoples stupidity is no more my fault than the weather or where a bird builds a nest. And the hostility of the stupid is also no more personal than a mother bear thinking she needs to defend her cub. Countless things happen in this world that would not happen if it were rational. But it isn’t.

 

I thought the last entry percipient enough to share immediately.  I mean the part about fear and the self. I appended the comments on the Temple of Ser to increase my clarity.

In an ocean, all perceptions are relative: nearer and farther, brighter and darker, heavier and lighter, warmer or colder, happier or sadder.

Namarupa, energetically, is naming emotions—this is happiness and this sadness; and the form is a persistent energetic form, what we would use to recognize one another without bodies.

Sukhaduhkhasamo is not indifference or numbness. Numbness is suppressed pain. It is not life. Endless self abuse, done however enthusiastically, does not equate to wisdom. SDS (sure) is, I thinkfeel, INTEREST. Engagement. ACCEPTANCE without fighting, whining, avoiding, or cringing.

Thinkfeel is good.

In a time war you could have a billion conflicts in a split second.

Effectively, Collectivism is Tribalism, making Individualism an anti-Tribalism.

I was thinking about this the other day: what do you call an individual who does not hesitate to destroy anyone—even the innocent—who gets in their way, and who does do with no remorse? A sociopath. And is this not EXACTLY what the Shriekers in this country are doing? They do their best to RUIN people, just for disagreeing with them.

If living is an art it is an art that can be improved in its artistry.

The purposes of life are not linear. And the connections, if any, between our often sundry purposes are rarely obvious. Living is enough, with as much openness and acceptance and even wonder as we can manage.

I think for most Leftists faith equals hope for the future. They have been captured by for them real worries they cannot otherwise manage.

Minds can only think in lines. But the universe does not ultimately work in lines, even i it does manifest countkess lines, like F=MA

Deep inner order, which is to say flowing atunement with What Is (behind the shell we can see) looks like confusion, because it is non-limear. X leads to Y, but not on a visible, replicable path. It is sufficient that it is so. That it is so could be called scientific, but since it depends on Life, no machine will ever flow from it.

Anyone unable to mete out individual violence will look for collective violence. This applies both to those lacking the physical courage and capacity, as well as to those disarmed by policy. Thus: one person, one vote, one gun is the true Liberal creed. And though I wanted to say Man, are guns and votes not also nevessary both for the full humanity of women and their emotional and physical safety?

Principle: the people providing the weapons determine the cause and methods by which it is pursued.

Is Yahweh, “ I am that I am”, a spiritual virus? A demigod and not something fully compliant with the Tao, or Will of Heaven far above, far below, far within, and far away?

Its important to remember in conscious breathing the POINT is to not consciously do anything. Over time this must build trust. Write down Ilse Mittendorffs line.

I think 4:30 consistency would produce a different and interesting squeeze later in the day.

Note that a key hidden reason to facilitate illegal immigration is that ballot collecting is very organized and likely connected to the Mexican mafia.

With regard to distributing individual rage and frustration collectively in sacrifice, there is a sort of game played. A may hate B, C, and D, as well as X. B may hate A, C, Q, and W, as well as X. Multiply this process and you get scapegoats, who stand in for everyone else a person wants to strangle. They are outliers and defenseless. And I think the act of sacrifice itself must include the feeling of disgust, which displaces into communion.

The first principle of procrastination is “create an artificial obstacle or magnify those that actually exist.”

When dealing with emotional “problems”—knots, lack of movement, stasis—the solution will not normally be found by the part of us consciously searching for it. I think it appears, then we ratify it. Maybe.

I think for me Chicago represented tradition, a home, a place to feel safe. I have dreamt about it often, the decision to leave and the decision to leave X. Last night it still felt present. It would seem I made both decisions with my mind and will, as i usually do, and never really tried to return to a peace I have in any event never known, by reconciling my emotions with this decision.

As far as Chicago, though, it is no longer a safe place. What should be a place standing on 120 or whatever years of its own tradition and perhaps 900 years of Western scholastic tradition, is cannibalizing itself. It is destroying everything that makes us special, most importantly our habit of honest self criticism. All the criticism now is fake, deluded and quasi-maniacal.

I wonder if every 5 pounds gained equals one unit of unprocessed emotion. Fat people in general are likely more sensitive and perhaps emotionally weaker, so even in relatively easy lives they accumulate emotions and through continual media distraction and on-going overeating “protect” many sensitive places.

Being polite or, relatively speaking, rude, is a CHOICE. Most people never realize that going along to get along is not their only option. An asshole like me (sometimes) is someone defending themselves from fake friendliness and sometimes reflexive stupidity by not playing the game we are expected to play. There is no intrinsic value in rudeness, but MUCH in the behavioral flexibility that makes it possible.

You cannot fight fear with fear, which is what responding with anger amounts to. You can only fight it with profound calm. And fear of course often, perhaps generally, leads to violence, and you can of course fight violence with violence, but this is a ruptured system, a punctuated peace. But I think fear—and to be sure the RATIONALIZATION of fear—generally precedes violence, which is in nearly all cases conceived of as defensive. The fearful person reasons they would not fear for no reason, so they find someone they can claim is “attacking” them, like the Jews then, and conservatives (Residual Liberals?) now.

The real world, which is the secret world, is small enough that we are all connected to it.

Knish with puff pastry

Drug use is an obvious extension of the idea that you both can and should buy experience, rather than work to create it.

The purpose of meditation—paying attention—is to learn to feel the sparks of diverse life flying out of everyone and everything.

The feeling of calm serves two purposes. First, even though it is true worry has uses, most of the things we worry about never come to pass, making that worry in effect work done for nothing, with that energy becoming something that could have been better invested. Secondly, when problems DO come—and they often if not usually come from directions we did not do the work of worrying about, since they are unexpected—calmness helps both clear thinking and consistent action.

I see now that my father was paralyzed by a host of anxieties he managed by denying. I have been doing the same thing. Strange I am so advanced in years, just now seeing this. I loved trumpeting bravery, which is perhaps why I ignored the cowardice underlying it. I did not know how to do differently, so I didn’t.

It occurs to me that Liberalism and Leftism are virtual opposites: Liberals tend to trust ordinary people but not governments and the people who aspire to run governments. Leftists, which is to say autocrats, mistrust ordinary people but have extraordinaryp faith in themselves. Thus, corrupting ordinary people to “fix” their society is a correctable, fixable problem. Utopia is what you get when the “right sorts of people” are in charge. And utopians can be trusted with guns but not ordinary people.

I wonder if the weight of ordinary joy is less than that of shame or sorrow. Is it not the weight of the mutable relation with a world in constant flux that matters?

Self importance is a defensive aggresion that acts like a sealer or glue on our flaws and dysfunctions, to keep them solid, stable, and invisible with practice and small habits of will.

The more impulse I feel to push out, the more likely I am not allowing. seeing, processing and learning.

Sadness is a growing pain of wisdom.

I think one way of putting the aim of spiritual work is the ability to pray and know it is pure.

A pedophile is nothing more or less than somrone who consumes the emotional energy of a child. Sex is only one way to do it.

The sense of self is what enables participation in a community or any larger whole. If your emotions are alienated from you, your self is also, as is any possibility of belonging.

I wake up every perceiving the world as essentially hostile, which is why I go to thoughts immediately.

The images of both my parents in my head represnt boundaries, higher than which they demanded I did not rise.

I think another root of my cyclicity is that I feel shame when I do the “right” thing and also the wrong. They are different sorts of shame, though, and perhaps some part of me gets, or hopes to get, relief thereby.

Good people are united in love and communion; bad people in shame and shared following violence.

The self is the locus of pleasure and pleasure the root of virtue. Virtue is really nothing more or less than loving, and getting pleasure from the loving, of goodness. A person trapped in fear and shame is a flat person, a personless person, a person without a self or the capacity for the sense of pleasure necessary for growth. Many of us are wired as social creatures but incapable of society, which a cruel and very painful fate. We are surrounded by the water of comfort but condemned like Tantalus never to drink any.

Socialism, as a principled validation of non-existence, is a logical mode of moral being in such a barren and denuded organismic—I won’t say personal—universe. Set is really a logical mythic representation of this, and in my understanding the root value of the renewed public Temple of Set in Santa Barbara more or less promises an enlarged and aggrandised Self. Such a religion is only suitable for those who live in fear of their daily experience of non-existence, itself caused by fear. As I have said, the masks of dark cults, and their violence both, come from losing all sense of self in fear. This is approaching a general theory of human expression itself. Felt Being is good. Fear, the opposite of Being, is the absence of this innate Goodness. Fear is a rejection of both the particle AND the wave. It can lead only to habits of sustenance and survival, never life, making the capacity for deep calm and tranquility the gateway to all happiness and wisdom.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Set

I will note, on this last, that I am pretty sure most of the power elite in this country have what should probably be called castles in the hills of Santa Barbara; and, as I likely noted the last time I mentioned this, such a religion, being a boutique religion, an effectively aristocratic religion, and thus one innately congenial to a felt sense of priliege and specialness, would have powerful appeal to billionaires.

I will note, too, that I have both read and heard personal stories about the isolation and friendlessness of many of these people, many of whom suffered severe abuse in their own childhoods.

 

 

First:

The importance of private gun ownership, practically, is twofold: first, it allows private citizens both to prevent and to defend against crimes of violence.  As was reported in the way you would expect–by and large not at all by most of what I think I am just going to go ahead and start calling the Criminal Media, since they have incited riots and other violence that has cost an unknowable number of human lives, in ways not really that different from those used to cause the Hutus to slaughter the Tutsis–there was a mass shooting, with an AR-15, that simply DID NOT HAPPEN because a woman with a handgun shot the shooter before he could get his rampage started.  That was in West Virginia a day or two after Uvalde.

I won’t focus too long  on this point.  As the saying goes, when you need help immediately, the cops are at best two to five minutes away.  If you get it, you get it, if you don’t, I won’t try and convince you here and now, other than to say that violent CRIME went up considerably in the UK and Australia when they banned guns.  Rapes, home invasions, armed robbery.  Taking private guns is disempowering honest people in the face of violent and generally remorseless and violent people.

More importantly, guns play a, in my view, pivotal role in the balancing of government versus private power.  Now, with modern technology, which includes of course tanks, rockets, mortars, lasers, drone swarms, and God only knows what else, the Citizenry, writ large, stands no chance against the Government, writ large, in an armed conflict.

But there is the thing: the Government is not composed, yet, of robots, and the people that weak people like Joe Biden would depend on to inflict violence are mutable.  It is one thing to ask them to disperse a protest with fire hoses, and another entirely to shoot back at people shooting at them as a result of just grievances that the cops or soldiers might well agree with.

What guns do is raise the ante, and force would be authoritarians to think harder than they would if we were disarmed, about how much force they are willing to ask their foot soldiers–who after all are Americans, and by and large tend Christian and conservative, probably even after the Stalinist purges and mass indoctrination they are attempting–to use against regular Americans.  Are they willing to kill Americans?  That would be needed if they showed up with guns.

And not being able to count on the loyalty of their foot soldiers, their dealers of vicarious violence, has to be part of the overall authoritarian calculus.

There is ZERO doubt that one of the FIRST things the Bidenistas did on him taking office (after a patently criminal election that he lost badly, and after starting us on the path to high oil prices) was start to try and create shock troops who WOULD do whatever these assholes wanted.  They wanted to brainwash them, and purge out the ones they couldn’t.  That was beyond obvious, to me at least.  They want reliable people.  And I very much doubt they HAVE reliable people.  Their ideas are so fucking nuts, and the military has been so tightly integrated racially and socially for so many decades, that I can’t see their Agitation and Integration propagandas have succeeded all that well.  No doubt there are a lot of meetings even know with top leaders, trying to figure out how to make the American military less Americans, and I have no doubt the idea of importing foreigners has been offered often, and perhaps to some unknowable extent accepted.

Second:

I recently read the book Ishmael.  Since I have Ishmael as my name on the Goodness Movement blog, and since it talked about “saving the world”, it seemed appropriate.  I bought it used in some small book shop in the Midwest somewhere.

It was disappointing.  Here are the points I would make:

The Leavers, effectively, in trusting the gods, had a SYSTEM OF SELF CALMING THAT WORKED.

We all admire stoic people from “primitive” places.  Australian aboriginals, or Native Americans.  They are calm, brave, accepting.

And the root malady, what drives Western civilization so relentlessly, is something like Original Sin, which is a mark that means that YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH.  It is a shame we are born with and cannot erase.  Culturally and psychosocially, that is embedded in our kids even if we don’t any longer hold any of those religious beliefs, by epigenetics and conscious and unconscious social conditioning.

And by and large the large scale destruction of the planets environmental resources, in any serious way, is only in my view perhaps 50 years old.  For 10,000 years we more or less lived in harmony as “Takers” also.  It’s a false distinction, driven in my view by more than a little hysteria on the part of the author, whose motivations I well understand, but who was in my view a bit too self congratulatory.  Maybe I am too.  I don’t know.  I don’t mind even nasty feedback, but I never get any, so I do the best I can to try and be honest with myself.

And in my view things like Global warming serve to JUSTIFY preexisting hysteria.  The fear is not the RESULT of the “science”.  The “Science” is the result of the fear.  And I will note that Kari Mullis–who I have publicly speculated somewhere, but I think on Facebook, may have been murdered–said the main problem with our science is that you are paid to FIND what they WANT you to find.  If you are paid to find global warming, and you don’t, they you don’t get paid any more.  It’s a shameless racket run by fearful people.

But to the point, yes, of course we need to make changes.  But we are not in an EMERGENCY.  I worry about plastics in all our waterways, but there are solutions.  Global warming is non-existent.

What we NEED, though, is a better culture.  Better ways of thinking and being.  Ways of calming ourselves outside of consuming things and media.  Ways of calming one another, as families and communities and even nations and as a species.

I offer thoughts on all this continually.  But the most important thing anyone could do is point out that this is the problem.  In the dialogue between the Taker and the Leaver, what stands out?  That the Taker fears the future.  Given that the author ALSO feared the future, was that fear not embodying the very ethos he was trying to critique?  Yes, I think so.

And I will add that there was definitely a very Malthusian undertone.  You can’t just grow FOREVER.  Every other lifeform has feedback loops.  Too many deer the wolves thin the herd.  Too many wolves, the wolves die of hunger.  Etc.

So it would not be off the mark, in my view, to say that the World Economic Forum and the, in my view, likely Nazi Klaus Schwab (never forget that much of the Nazi eugenics program was very popular across Northern Europe particularly, and based, often explicitly, on Darwinian notions of Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest–which I know was not his term–and the like.  The idea was that humanity as a whole would survive best if the best among us culled the rest from the herd, as so many wolves would do if we were prone to natural predation.

As I have often said, it’s a small nudge, not even a step, from radical environmentalism to clinical Fascism and misanthropy.

A lot of these writers would prefer the human race to die out entirely, which says more about their individual psychologies than their ethics, but would that not be taking the Nazi project just a step or two farther?  Is it really not just making ALL human beings Untermenschen?

Yes.  The answer is yes.

Three:

One of the principle sources of anxiety–and much of Buddhist practice consists in ways of soothing anxiety in many clever ways, some of which I still have not taken the time to properly understand–is the need to be somewhere else in time or space.  You want your circumstances to be different.  You want the day to be over.  You want to be teleported.

That feeling is the gateway to what all of us want.  Don’t avoid it: enter it.  It’s a pathway, not a dead end.