Moderates United

For me, this is nothing less than the rejection of any and all human culture that is unmodified by mutable propaganda. I have defined this elsewhere as Cultural Sadeism.

I think one reason many people seek distractions is that we are conditioned, indirectly, to avoid fully adopting roles: the role of father, of employee, of husband/wife. The basic training is that your goal in life is to fulfill yourself, and since you can never know what lies over the next hill you never commit fully to any understanding of yourself–particularly one which connects in a lasting way with others–you expect to remain fixed.

Yet, this is somewhat maddening, never resting in fixed self conceptions. We need something fixed. I think that is the role of the media: it changes constantly, but it never REALLY changes, qualitatively. You can watch TV your whole life, and never really be altered by it.

You can chase “experience” your whole life–hang gliding, skydiving, travel, sexual conquests–and grow little. I would argue, in fact, that picking a slot for yourself–virtually any slot will do–is THE best path forward, when coupled with awareness.

The Japanese consider an old stone that has gathered moss to be attractive. I tend to agree with them.

I am speaking off the cuff here, but hopefully that makes some sense.

I feel many of the psychological problems–so-called ADHD, depression, anxiety–which produce so many pill-popping Americans are best understood as cultural problems. Specifically, how do we interface with one another? How do we support one another?

To use a computer analogy it’s like we don’t “synch” properly, lacking, as we do, shared understandings of life.

Obviously, any number of sub-communities exist which perform this function in part. If you dress as a Goth, or obsess over NASCAR, or collect butterflies, or whatever, other people do it too.

Churches obviously serve as one source of community. So do the unexamined political habits of Leftism.

Quite often, I think people just need to feel valued, and understood. When men don’t get this, they get angry. When women don’t get this, they get sad. (in general).

But what you often get is the presenting complaint, which is of course related to how that person interacts with others, but also, I would argue, to the fundamental atomization of our modern society.

I will have more to say on this, but wanted to make a quick note.

After all the rain is done falling, after all the wrongs of the world have been righted, after everyone has healthcare funded by someone else, the right to never be offended, the right to force others into silence, and after all the money is gone: what then?

What is left? What will be retained of our social institutions after the radical programs of the Socialists have been implemented? What do they have in Cuba? Their religion is largely gone. Their cultural traditions have been assaulted–likely effectively–for 50 years, and they have learned to live in fear, and alone, not knowing who they can trust in a police state with informers everywhere.

What is left in Britain? The shell of habit, the outer dress of a once important nation, reduced to shambling mediocrity because they know longer know what they believe and why?

Conservatism is based upon the idea of evolution, of taking existing practices and improving them. Leftism is based upon destruction: kill them all (figuratively, as institutions, and literally in the case of complete socialism), and let the State sort them out. If the State doesn’t approve–say, of the Russian Orthodox Church, or the Catholic Church–then it will not be replaced. What remnants remain have to be furtive and cautious.

And even in purportedly moderate socialists, one sees this impatience, as with religion in particular. They simply want to do away with it. There is no hint in them of a genuine desire for co-existence. They view themselves as right, and want to wage their wars of cultural imperialism for the purported good of mankind.

Yet, again, what in the end is left? Empty shells. That’s what I see.

Henry Hazlitt, in his excellent book “Economics in one lesson”, says that the two principle economic errors from which all other derive is failing to take the long term into account, and failing to account for the effects of a given policy on all groups. For example, you can spread the wealth in the short term, and go bankrupt in the long term. You can help one group, but hurt another.

Generalized, these two traits constitute wisdom, or foresight. These words seem antique, because we are surrounded by fools who think only in the short term, and only of themselves.

And many of these fools think anyone who doesn’t think like them is foolish. The way you sort this out is by asking them to articulate for you what the effects of their ideas and policies will be on all people, over the long haul. The genuine fools will think you impudent for asking the question, try to change the subject, insult you, then finally lapse into petulant silence.

As much as I hate to admit it, quite often the most lucid, compelling case you can make for your positions is silence. The simple fact is, many people have NO intention of changing their views, and anything you say can and will be construed in a negative way.

Some of these people will never wake up, ever, in their entire lives. This happens often, although it takes a great deal of determination to keep out all contrary inputs when you are defending the indefensible.

Others, it takes time and events that are unforeseeable, and certainly uncontrollable. There may, some day, come a time when they will listen.

You become a leftist when you mistake the words you and your leaders are using for reality. When you believe wholeheartedly that to talk about improving the world necessarily means that the policies you implement will in fact achieve that end.

I would compare it to the scene in “The Nuremburg Trials” when Spencer Tracy’s character is speaking with an old judge, who had been complicit in the Nazi regime, and long supported them in the abuse of the judicial system for the eradication of political opponents.

The judge, played by Gregory Peck, if memory serves, asks Tracy: “How could I have known it would lead to this? To all this slaughter and destruction?” To which Tracy replies: “you knew the first time you sentenced an innocent man”.

Likewise, the first time you fail to consider the effects of your policy on all people, and across time–the first time you fail to learn from the mistakes of the past–you show your LACK of genuine humanity and compassion, and your consuming desire to surrender your freedom to the automatism of a cult.

That is when liberals become leftists; and most self declared “liberals” are in fact leftists. That is my default presumption, and most of the time prolonged dialogues prove me right. They can’t defend themselves, which means they rejected the need for understanding long ago.

One feature of thought I encounter everywhere on the internet is the childlike mind. This is the mind that is incapable of wrestling with serious problems seriously. What I have found is it is quite literally impossible to communicate with such minds until they are ready. You can’t say “you have a childlike mind”, since they literally have no means by which to understand that statement. You have used words which they literally don’t understand.

The pervasive point and result of the social propaganda within which are children are immersed from very young ages in this country is to reject traditional social norms of God, family and country. It is to reject, a priori, any suffering which you do not choose, which is not furthering your pleasure and sense of well-being, and particularly which appeals to tradition. It is to cultivate narcissists, while inculcating within them the firm conceit that they are idealists. All you have to, really, to be a narcissistic idealist is talk big ideas, and let other people handle the details; people like those who originated the propaganda in the first place.

To be serious, to be an adult, you have not just to look to your personal pleasure: you have to commit yourself to the well-being of all, and do so in such a way that you are not being led by the nose to the “slaughter” of uniform mediocrity, comfort in a cage, and passive acquiesence in the oppression of others, provided that the pro forma ritual is done of condemning them as “haters” first.

True Liberalism is based upon the concept of personal responsibility, which means response-ability not just for your own interests, but for those of your family, community, and nation.

I have argued often that scepticism is equidistance both from belief and disbelief. It is, in my view, the optimal “setting” by means of which to learn.

Vis a vis the question of the existence of God, I believe Agnosticism–literally, “I don’t know”–to be the most reasonable stance. To be an A-theist, one must be a positive believer in the doctrine of “No God”. The claim that, if there is no evidence for something, that it doesn’t exist, is simply intellectual incompetence. We had no evidence for quarks, prior to what I assume we can accurately label their “discovery”. (I have never seen one, so I have to take other peoples word for it, as is the case with most science). Yet, they existed.

The primary problem with the stance, the position of atheism is that it limits your perceptual horizons. It tends to limit you qualitatively, in my experience, in terms of your capacity to imbibe deeper qualitatively realities. I have said this often, but the hard edges of its knife seem often to sever the ties of poetry and the myths that bind us; both, after all, are on their rendering evolutionary artifacts whose only real “value” is that they facilitated survial and reproduction at some point in the distant past.

Reality is what we perceive, and what we perceive is seen through ideational filters. If our goal truly is to understand “reality”, then we would logically want filters as wide as we can make them. We would want to EXPERIENCE first, the EXPLAIN second. The alternative is to only experience what you already know you can explain, which is something very like a negative hallucination, which is where you DON’T see things that, by consensus among others, actually is there.

And of course when we speak of God, we mean many things. We mean some sort of non-physical connection between ourselves and the rest of the univese. We mean that our acts in this life matter in some way in a future life. We mean that there is some right way to live, and by contrast, ways in which we were not meant to live. It is forgotten now, but even the concept of natural “laws” partakes of a sort of assumption we get from the concept of God: that of an ordered and knowable universe.

And practically, when you look at the actual evidence in favor of things like the survival of death, or the existence of perceptual capacities beyond materialistic explanation, there are signs and hints of something larger.

Let me be clear: the Zeus knock-off we see so often mocked by dogmatic atheists is not the same as a belief in God. To the extent, actually, that the God concept has merit, it is beyond description. It is the field within which all matter and life exists, and which harmonizes and connects it; this is God’s intelligence–our forms, our consciousness.

A principle value of mine is perception, and it is, on my rendering and in my personal view, a sin to do less than we are able to understand the universe in which we live.

It seems to me good thoughts are simple, and relaxed. They are things like “I should go help Bill take in that crop, since his wife is sick”.

Evil thoughts are always filled with tension–latent or overt–and fear. Doing evil–inflicting pain–is the only real release from them, and is always temporary and short in extent.

In the first case, your actions start from a place of peace, and grow from there. In the second, your actions start from a place of fear, which you are trying to escape. But you never can, since the means used make you even more afraid and alone.

Goodness is what remains when everything else is taken from you. To return to an example from a few posts ago, if you wake up somewhere, with no memory, not knowing where you are, what will remain is what is important in you. And as I have argued, the Rejection of Self Pity, Perseverence, and the sincere desire to understand are the three values which always lead, over time, to Goodness.

Existential philosphers start from the same point I do: radical freedom. Verworfenheit. Either the absence or unknowability of God.

Where they err, though, is in not positing what the most basic, helpful decisions are that you can make. If you are free, then logically why not act in such a way as to maximize the BENEFITS of that freedom? Why dilate on the freedom itself, while rejecting all common sense solutions to the anxiety that freedom engenders? Why focus on problems and not solutions?

The obvious answer is that most “professional” thinkers were never engaged in trying to DO anything. Sartre made his peace quickly and effortlessly with the Nazis (after being interned for a time not for doing anything daring, but for getting drafted), then forever after criticized others for not doing more. He was a little shit in every possible way.

Most Existentialists wound up as political radicals, typically (and hypocritically) as Communists. Communism gave them a cult to belong to that did not require God. They were able to subordinate their freedom, while claiming to be authentic. This is A solution, just not a good solution. Quite the contrary. I have in mind in particular Sartre and de Beauvoir (who subordinated herself to Sartre as well), who did so much to advance the cause of Communist Imperialism.

I am a fan of Albert Camus for the simple reason that he outgrew this, since in my view he genuinely wanted to be a good person. Over time, my strong feeling is that his politics would have moved in a genuinely liberal direction, had he had not died prematurely.