Moderates United

 No, I’m not getting soft, or at least that particular kind.  I wanted to comment that Be Nice and Be Kind amount to integration propaganda.  While fine in theory, expressed politically they amount to the demand to submit without question, and without even inconvenience.  If you train everyone to smile and be nice all the time, you can get away with anything.  No one will want to risk being labeled mean.

I was in an elevator the other day, and someone had written “Be Nice” on it.  I barely resisted the temptation to write “Obey” below it.

 I would say this: I see NO REASON, at all, none, to assume that there exist honest elements in our government in sufficient numbers and in high enough places to make a difference.  They have let Trump flap in the wind for four years, unless I am missing something.

While I hope all this stuff is true–obviously–I would say that no one concerned about our country should include possible action by invisible people without names or firm information in their plans.

If you want to protest, protest.  If you were waiting for someone else to act, looks like its you.  If you are a potential whistle-blower, get it done.

“Trust the plan”, and “don’t do anything without us” work to keep people passive and disengaged.

Assume it is a fraud–and most likely an operation by our own or foreign intelligence agencies–if that assumption affects your life in any way.

Me, I read the news.  I will see what I see.

 Pieczenik doubles down: https://79days.news/watch?id=5fc6cd4cb4b7ac58e58ffc81

I look this way, then I look this way, then I look behind me.  I’m going in circles.  Who to believe?  I read the internet, and I, like you, have NO IDEA what has happened that no reporter saw, and/or no reporter wanted to report, and/or no reporter or witness COULD report.  Or what was reported and censored.  Until there is light, darkness remains omnipotent in its ability to conceal.

I don’t think most people GET that with a proper regime of censorship you can’t know what is being made to disappear.  A UFO could land on the White House lawn, aliens step out, roast marshmallows, play flag football, levitate a few times, then climb back in and disappear instantly.  We would never know.

We may never know completely what “just happened”, but there will be a “just happened” of some sort in a month or two.

Here are two problems I see with Pieczenik.  1) he claimed that the CIA Director had been fired several weeks ago.  As of this moment, my understanding is that she is still there. 2) He said that arrests were happening several weeks ago, and that we had detailed accounting of all the ballots.  If this were true, why would Trump be having the legal problems he is having in getting fair hearings, and why has this not been introduced into evidence?

Personally, I find this guy’s credibility weak, but share this because he seems clearly at one time to have been an insider, and he is obviously an intelligent guy, but not certainly a sane one, and not certainly an honest one.

I continue to hope and pray I see Trump raising his right hand in front of John Roberts on January 20th, swearing to uphold faithfully the office of President, and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

 Like most people, I went through a phase of interest in serial killers.  They are literally like a different species of human.

One known aspect about them is that they are all thinking about suicide, sooner or later.  Nearly all of them have serious substance abuse disorders.

All addictions to strong stimulation have a common purpose: the eradication of the present self, which for addicts is filled with pain, regret and all sorts of unprocessed emotions.  They cannot live happily on their own.

In this respect, cruelty and heroin are the same thing, and not infrequently go together.  They are both small deaths, in lieu of the Big Death.  They are small suicides, enacted regularly, and which, in the case of heroin, in nearly all cases lead sooner or later to the real thing.  And heroin users KNOW this, and most of them accept it, I think.  The idea of playing Russian Roulette appeals to them on some level.  Sooner or later their pain goes away for good.

To be good is to be able to live happily with little.  To be evil is to be miserable, no matter the extent of the wealth.

This has always been true, I think.  It is not so much the case that the rich cannot enter heaven, as that they cannot enter heaven without letting go, and letting go is a big, big problem for most of them.  Perhaps this is the root of Christ’s analogy.  You have to become small, and you cannot become small if you try and bring all your baggage with you.

I would offer again the monkey trap analogy.  In Southeast Asia, I think it is, they tie jar or bottles to trees with strings–jars or bottles that will allow a monkey to put an open hand in, but not take a closed fist out–and put something like a banana a monkey would want at the bottom.  Over and over and over they find monkeys trapped by these bottles, because they can’t let go of the banana.  Rather, they DON’T let go of the banana.  This is such a good metaphor.

To grow a larger Self, you have to let go of the smaller self, and in general, you have to do so without touching and knowing that larger Self.  You have to have faith.  You have to take the leap, and over time, that leap will always be rewarded.

But if I take a physical analogy, let us say your self is now a circle 1 meter in diameter.  There is no linear path to a self which is 3 meters in diameter.  One vanishes, then the other appears.  It is like a quantum leap.  The “physical” orbits of electrons are described as doing this.  There is no intermediate.  This is one of the reasons why many physicists do not believe there are little bits at the bottom of everything.

It is the caterpillar to the chrysalis to the butterfly, over and over.  And I think it is possible to learn to do this every day, in small ways.  Even the trek from 1 to 1.1 meters involves a death and rebirth.

And I suppose this is the root problem with addiction: you get the death, but never the rebirth.  The addict is the person denuded of faith, and thus the possibility of redemption and growth.  This is the ultimate root of evil.

 Without belaboring the analogy, which is obvious enough–one guy facing a large number of enemies seeking to destroy him, abandoned by most of those who should be his allies–I will remind you of the church scene, and the guys who said in effect “I’d love to help you, man, but I just can’t.”

We need to remember that Joe Biden has almost certainly taken, indirectly, something on the order of billions of dollars in bribes from China, and WE KNOW THIS.  And his guy–for State, I think it is–is already saying “hey, these guys are our PALS”.

His son deserves to be in jail not just for the bribes, but for being a pedophile who kept images on his laptop, no doubt for use in masturbation.  We have those images.  The FBI had them for nearly a year and did nothing, and even now the Delaware State police have them.  Do you expect a prosecution for a really open and shut crime?  I don’t.  I expect crickets.  If Biden gets in office, if and when they announce they are dropping the investigation–it will probably just never be mentioned again–the press will ignore it.  And if they don’t ignore it, social media will censor it.

Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of using weird sex to blackmail many if not most of the most powerful men and women in America, was murdered, while in a maximum security prison, where he should have been on suicide watch.  The guards were bribed to not be there, and the cameras were disabled from inside.  The murderers got in, got it done, got out, and there has been no real investigation.  In a high profile case, watched by the world, where many observers were saying “he is going to be murdered”, he was murdered, and they got away with it, 100%.  Scot free.

Here is what people need to understand: a variety of game changing technologies are coming on line.  AI is, I am very sure, coming very close to passing the Turing test.  It is creating art, and writing songs and novels.

Robots are advancing quickly.  Combined with effective AI, even with regards to physical conflict, it is rapidly becoming the case that a VERY small number of people with access to this technology could easily overpower in purely physical, military terms, 200 million people with guns.

We can assume that if the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion is the Kraken, that it will be broken apart by Biden, and cast to the four winds.  Anyone helping Trump will find themselves watching empty missile silos somewhere in Montana, if they can’t find a way to prosecute and jail them outright.

Now is the time for a stand, of whatever sort may be possible.  The odds are overwhelming.  No statistician would bet on success.  But the odds are not zero.  And the longer it takes to begin reigning in the lawlessness, the closer they approach zero.

Some time ago I wrote a post called Perfection?  Reading it now, I would write it differently now.  I have grown since then.

But O’Brien, in 1984, said that the future was an infinity of a boot on the human face.  He said this in a spirit of sadism.  Even then, though, O’Brien was tired.  Even then, he himself wanted to die too. (and in actual fact Richard Burton himself died of a heart attack shortly after completing the film, at the relatively young age of 58). Such a system would not last forever.  Perhaps hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years.  But it is contrary to everything which makes human beings want to live. It is unnatural.  It lacks God, and God is the glue of life itself.  Smith felt this for a long time, until some structure in his brain gave out under the most extreme duress possible and imaginable.

We have all the knowledge we need to build something beautiful and lasting on this planet.  Without getting into my ideas on infinity–I have a large post I will make at some point that will blow your mind a bit, and which I am still digesting emotionally myself–we could build a happy, honestly egalitarian society that would endure hundreds of thousands  or even millions of years, perhaps here, perhaps spread out over the cosmos.

We know, now, that prosperity can be generalized in the United States.  There is every reason to think this can be done around the world.  I GET that the planet does not have infinite resources, but it is also obvious to me that–given spiritually rich, emotionally nourishing culture–we don’t need that much.  

It may be that everything we have–all our technology–had already been built 10,000 years ago, and they decided instead to build stone buildings that lasted essentially forever instead, and live the lives of simple farmers.  Most people lived in perishable huts, that have perished.

The task has never really been to make life easier, but to make it more MEANINGFUL.  There are millions of Africans, today, who are happier with nearly nothing, by American standards, than most of us are.  They have honest friends.  They dance together in their villages.  They have their families right there with them.  They do not work too hard, or too little.  They sing.  They see the stars at night.

Give people meaning, and the economics will work out.  

The problem is that our aspiring overlords themselves lack meaning, so they cannot see how this would be possible.  Their meaning consists in the manic need to find people to “save”, who they in general push down with one hand while pulling them up with the other.  The process cannot be completed, because otherwise they would lose their shallow and tenuous raison d’etre.

No: our problems have solutions.  All we need are sane people willing to do the obvious, common sense things, and let us save ourselves.  There is ample time.

One last note: I am of course trying to figure out how to deal emotionally with all possible eventualities.  Hope is a fine thing, but it is dashed on the rocks of life continually.  Every Main Street, especially now, is littered with ship wrecks.

What difference is there between a Buddhist who, in seeking their Buddha Nature, tries to avoid both desire and repulsion, and to cling to his “real” nature, which is calm and peaceful; and a devout Christian, who prays daily, “Lord, let me seek thy will in all things, and accept it in all things, and in all things give thanks and praise, happiness, and joy and peace”?

In my view, both are spiritual solutions which are very similar to the same problem, which is the inherent difficulty in managing emotional states in a world where death and pain stalk us daily, even in the best of times.

You have to let go.  You have to stop bracing for impact.  And when you do this, you find things floating down the river continually which buoy you, which make you feel good, which allow you to feel good, which make life itself feel good, which make the company of other humans pleasant, which fill you with the Four Greats, joy, tranquility, compassion and love.

I have many miles to go in my journey.  I cannot say that more difficulty would not make my work easier, or my character better.  I don’t honestly know what I need.  I am blind, in most important respects.  But I have hope, not so much in the world–although there is definitely hope even now that we can right this ship before it founders–but in my own ability to continue to grow and adapt to whatever happens to me.

 I think I am in a position to say something reasonably intelligent about President Trump.  I think he is a guy with above average intelligence, but he is not a 4-D chess player.  He is a gambler, and someone who has good instincts and–most of all–the willingness to trust them.  Sometimes he is miles ahead of everyone.  Sometimes he is flat out wrong.  But he is guided by his gut, not so much linear logic, or the expansive intellect of a Gary Kasparov, who after all only played 2-D chess. (come to think of it, what WOULD 4-D chess be?  Time was already included.  I see 4D but we should be using 3D if anything).

I think Trump’s plan for the election was simple: win by more than the margin that the Democrats could cheat by.  And it was not a bad plan.  They had to do all sorts of funky stuff they had contingency plans for, but did not want to execute for the obvious reason that it made their fraud obvious.

There was no Blockchain coding.  And there are not and never have been any mass arrests planned.  He could maybe have done more, but we are seeing now that honesty and transparency are–for obvious reasons–roundly opposed wherever Democrats run things, and even in States like Georgia, where Kemp seems to be a bought and kept man, who is right now returning favors he owes people whose names we do not know.

Here is the thing, Trump walked into a “room”–think every room he entered anywhere in Washington–filled with lifelong schemers, who understood every detail of the system, every trick, and who were talented liars.  He needed someone honest to watch his back, but found nobody.  Nobody I can think of.  Flynn was the obvious candidate, and that is why he got attacked and taken out.  Mike Pence is an honest, competent guy, but he didn’t know any more than Trump.

So virtually every person in every meeting EVER in his Presidency, Trump is facing people telling him stories.  Some he believes, some he doesn’t believe.  But he is not in a position to doubt ALL of them.  Some people he has to trust.  He needs a Director of the FBI, and Comey was an obvious crook and liar and incompetent.  Who to pick?  This guy?  OK: is he solid?  Can we trust him?  You bet, boss.  So Christopher Wray goes to the FBI.  Repeat many times, and you get his many mistakes.

How does anyone deal with something like that?  Trump is a smart guy, but he is dealing with people on their own terrain, who have been expecting him, planning for him, and who obviously ambushed him with bad ideas, and incompetents everywhere.  

Here is what I believe: if Trump were one of them, it would make no sense for him to still be fighting the election.  As Joe Biden said, they have a well oiled, fantastic, highly functional voter fraud system.  They don’t have to corrupt every city in PA to win.  They just need Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Lancaster.  The rest can do what they want.  They will never catch up.  And since Democrats run those cities, the fraud never would have been detected.  No serious arrests would ever have been made.  All the groundwork was there to create their own little Venezuela, which clearly would include gun grabs made possible by rigged elections at all levels, and in all places, including the judiciary.

No, there was no reason to upset the apple cart.  Even if they want an armed insurrection, they easily could have figured out how to do that without the world seeing their fraud system.  That benefits the power elites not at all.

So what I see is a guy who loves his country, who REALLY wants to help us, and who has been surrounded by traitors since Day One.  William Barr is obviously one himself.  He hasn’t done shit.  He has done just enough to not get fired, and to make some people think he might be honest, but nothing close to what he WOULD have done if he actually were honest.  He is more or less controlled opposition, opposition which really didn’t oppose much.

No, what Trump has shown is that an ordinary guy can make a HUGE difference if he is doing nothing more complicated than TRYING.  Get that?  Actually trying to do the job honestly.  Not working to satisfy an endless array of disgustingly greedy pigs trying to feed at the trough, but actually trying to make things better for American workers and small and even large businesses.

Trump has shown the essential simplicity of the office, and by extension, how horrifically corrupt the White Houses have been for many many years. 

Trump is to be commended.  This has not been an easy battle, and a less confident man–being betrayed for the fifth, tenth, thirtyeth time–would have thrown in the towel.  

But we NEED him.  He is indispensable in my view.  I really hope our system is not so broken that he cannot hang onto the White House in the honest, just and legal way that he earned when he won the election.

And THIS TIME he will be much more equal to the smiling faces all around him.  One can hope and pray.

 I feel quite sure there exist people who, even now, if they decided they wanted Trump to be reinaugurated, could make it happen without much trouble.  Few phones calls, to a few key State and national politicians, and a few journalists and POOF Bob’s your uncle.  That is the sort of world we live in.  It is curated according to the objectives and ideals of people who live in as many $25 million estates as they want.

There are people who could wake up one morning and decide they want to own an island in each of the Seven Seas, even if they can’t name them.  They make a phone call to their guy or gal, and a week later it is done.  They could even pay a cook $150,000 a year or more simply to hang out in the event they show up.  They could put a household staff in there they pay cumulatively $10 million a year, and never visit once.  They may forget the next week they even did that.

These people, I am quite sure, run this and most other countries.  They use the rhetoric of freedom when it suits them, and the rhetoric of Communism when it suits them.  They had their claws in the Soviet Union, and most likely even now own Cuba and Venezuela.  There are people Maduro can’t afford to piss off in any way, and he knows it.

And I was working today in a place which feels tainted with wealth.  It is most likely a small project of a very, very wealthy person, who has made it nice since they visit once in a while.

And I was asking myself: what sorts of purposes animate people like that?  What I FEEL is that they need something powerful and external to give them a sense of meaning.  It has to be something that changes them, that alters them, that acts on them.  Drugs and sex are the obvious candidates, but what I feel is that cruelty–the pure abuse of power for its own sake, of the sort Sade advocated–must come to the fore for many of them.  It is a drug like no other.  

And it is a drug that grows in you, washes over you like a wave, and leaves you weaker, more spent, and blacker.  But if you keep taking hits, it doesn’t matter to you.  And like any drug, surely the dose has to grow stronger with time.

Your money buys your habit, and it also protects your habit.  You can buy everyone around you, and in a great many cases, get law enforcement and politicians, over some period of time, to join you.

If you can have anything, you only want those things that breed those powerful, all encompassing feelings.  Regular sex will not do.  Good food will not do.  Not for many of these people.

I will share something I have kept to myself for some years now, and will even now share only the broadest outlines.

Some years ago, I was doing a personal growth retreat somewhere, and one of our assignments was listing out destructive patterns in our lives.  I happened to look at a guy behind me–I don’t remember why–and if I read his note right it was “pimping children”.  Now, he was someone in a position to do that.  He was writing all this calmly, and I could feel he was dissociating.  I do it too, and know what it looks like and how it “feels”.  You just check out.

I found out later that he was connected to some very, very powerful people, names you would know.  My experiences with him were that he was kind, and that he was a decent person.  And I feel that for the most part he was.

But I think he was raped as a child.  He never said it.  He somewhat implied it, but it was unclear.  That is 100% what I felt, though, and I am pretty good at that sort of thing.  

With that sort of thing in your past, you have multiple personalities.  And the nice personality would have been quite able to coexist with the one which disappeared and did that sort of thing.  There are countless cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder that are subclinical in most contexts.  I suspect many pedophiles are like this.

And of course I thought about saying something, to him or to the police.  But what would he have said?  This was all supposed to be private and he could easily have denied it.  No good would have been served.  He was there to help deal with his “issues”, and me ambushing him would have changed nothing.  And what would the police do?  I had no names or dates or specifics. And more importantly, I had every reason in the world to suspect that the people involved would have long ago made sure the police in the relevant jurisdictions were on their side.  I would be naked in the face of powerful attorneys, on hostile ground, facing essentially infinite wealth, with no one behind or beside me, in defense of I knew not who.  No names.  No faces.  I am reckless, but not that reckless.  So I have said nothing until now.  That was about ten years ago.

And I mention this since these people–the ones he did the pimping for–are the ones who planned the COVID outbreak, in my view.  They planned the masks as a method of social control.  It may well be true that the virus was supposed to be released in October or November, and WAS–my youngest claims to have had it last November–but it never took.  So they released it in China again, made sure the Chinese enacted a response that could be copied, and then they made sure their people led the policies here.  Fauci, obviously, is one of their guys.

This whole thing–perhaps a hundred thousand excess dead in the United States alone–was to kneecap Trump in a variety of ways, most notably by making election fraud easier, but also by ruining the economy and creating a talking point that he had not “done enough”.  It also allowed Biden to minimize his foot in mouth time.

These people are real.  They exist, in my view.  I met, not one of them, but one who interacted with them.

Lin Wood recently said that Trump should declare martial law and a new election if he can’t get justice in regard to the election.  Without expressing my support for that idea, I will say it would not unduly bother me.

Here is the thing: we are on a path where the lines get moved in closer, month by month, year by year. If Trump can’t get justice, we have no guardians.  The Constitution, practically, means nothing.  No one is protecting us, or at least no one with power, integrity, and courage.

The FBI is gone.  The CIA is gone.  The DoJ is gone.  The State Department seems to be gone.  The list could be expanded to include nearly all Federal agencies, and that is before we start with corrupt STATE agencies and CITY agencies.

If there is no bang at some point–if the issue is not forced, one way or another–then our future is the frog in the boiling water.  

That is my honest view, for what it is worth.

 You know, Donald Trump, as I have said, has made it clear that much of the $3 trillion or so Leviathan which in theory reports to the American people via the President, Congress and the Supreme Court, really doesn’t.  They do what they want, and if they break laws which might have been enforced, they do so secretly, and/or in places where they know they incur no real risk.

But COVID-19–rather, the response to this not very dangerous disease by our sundry governments–has made clear how STUPID and complacent and ignorant and lazy the American people are, as well as those of most other nations around the world.  New Zealanders and Australians, to the extent they are putting up with their government’s bullshit, MAY be worse than us.  But they have no guns, and no Bill of Rights.

But what good is a Bill of Rights if governments just need a GOOD EXCUSE?  I can see the Constitutionality of tyrannical powers granted for SHORT PERIODS of time, but not a year.  Not more than a year, which is where we are headed in many places.

Keep in mind that the excuse of emergency has ALWAYS been one of the best methods for tyranny.  The mass beheadings in France?  Mostly committed by the Committee for Public Safety.  Hitler’s big power grab?  Legislation enacted for public safety.

I really think the Supreme Court could and should rule on the entirety of the COVID lockdowns.  Yes, there is a separation of Federal and State power, but the Constitution has often been used to compel States to offer rights to their citizens.  This was the point of the 14th and 15th Amendments.  We fought a war over States rights, and regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, it is pretty obvious which side won: the side that would allow the Supreme Court to tell the Governors of this country to knock this shit out, if they have not sought and received explicit Legislative approval, which is to say approval from folks much more directly responsive to popular opinion.  If people WANT to be locked down, then by all means this is the right thing to do.  It is their right.  But if they DON’T–and this is the likelhihood for most–then these constrictions and restrictions violate, in absolute terms, the Constitution, and specifically the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to assemble.  The right to assemble exists for historically solid reasons.

I lived overseas in Europe in high school for a year.  When I got back I went around thinking that all Americans were stupid, and emotionally immature.  I was, at that time, stupid and emotionally immature, and am not as much farther along now as I had hoped to be.  But I was not wrong.  There is something about hours of television from the earliest age, the food we eat, the way we structure our communities, and our work, that makes us stupid.  

What is being done to us should not be possible.  Our leaders should not have allowed it, and the People writ large should not have allowed it.  This whole thing confuses and puzzles me daily.

But as I said in the last post, for some reason emotionally it is not hurting me the way it used to.  I may just be finally growing into the man I have always hoped to be.

 I have been having occasional blessed moments where my brain is free of the fog of thinking about politics, culture, and history.  Where I am free.

As I have said, the goal is to rid myself of this thing, at least for a time.

For the time being, though, what I am finding is that I feel an OBLIGATION to share what I think and feel, when I seem to be the only one thinking and feeling specific, relevant things.

Where are our serious public intellectuals?  The Headless Ones did their best to destroy Jordan Peterson.  Milo has been disappeared.  Ben Shapiro is not bad, but he’s not great either, especially on culture.

What we have is a horde, a large mass, of lunatics, and a handful or two of public people who are not barking mad.

In such a world, it seems selfish not to try and contribute.  By my math, there should be many tens of thousands of people as smart or smarter than me, but it would seem most of them succumb early to one disease of emotional distortion or another, making their thoughts rabid, irrelevant, or so small and specialized that only a few ever see them.

I had a flash the other day of only worrying about football.  Or cars.  Or chasing women.  Or anything other than what I do, which is try and head butt the most complicated problems confronting humanity and knock them back on their asses.

It is tiring being me.  Yes, that is me channeling my inner martyr.  Truth is, I like being me too.  It’s a complicated relationship.

But I did want to say I am getting more and more moments of calm.  Despite everything going on, I found myself working well yesterday, and with a smile on my face, most of the day.  That just doesn’t happen with me.  Everything has always been a difficult act of will.

I am opening up.  To what, I cannot know, but it is a good thing.  Good for me, and perhaps one day good for you.

 it turns out that social media, smart phones, overwork, weakened family structures, sensory overload, and an obsession with speed and specific efficiencies have all made Americans stupid.

I would say in general that speed makes stupid.  You have to have time to smell the roses.  If you don’t, you forget what roses smell like, or why you would want to smell them.  This, in turn, makes your brain shrink.  Curiosity is essential for well being, and curiosity often involves time.  People in general have the time but the habit is encouraged early and often to run around like a chicken with your head cut off.  You may have nowhere to go and nothing to do, but still feel an obsessive need to pass the person who is merely going the speed limit.  I’ve done it many times.

And I was pondering a concept of Hyperreality/Subreality.  Hyperreality was written about by someone.  Whatever they wrote, I have not read.

But in my meditations I will sometimes find myself reliving moments in video games.  Is that not odd?  I often also find myself reliving movies.

In important ways–even before Virtual Reality, which will make all this much worse–did many of us not have a duality between our “normal” world, and our virtual world?  Is it not reasonable, as I have proposed, to view the gigantic TV most people have in a central place in their home as the closest thing to an altar and object of honest religious worship they have?

And video games can be played on that same TV, but they are interactive.  And you “relive” the same moments over and over, as you try and get through some particular challenge.  Back when I played video games–it’s been 3-4 years now that I have not–I would sometimes go through the same scene 100 times before I managed to get through.

I think it was this that U2 was singing about in “even better than the real thing”.  Is it not possible some people would prefer the recorded sound of rain to the actual thing?  I remember someone telling me many years ago about a group of kindergartners in front of whom a man with a guitar performed.  They fidgeted continually.  But when a recording similar to his music was played, they listened raptly.

Are we conditioning people to be more comfortable with things than people, with simulacra rather than the real thing?

Movies feel more real than our real lives, for a time, do they not?  That is their point, is it not, to pull us out of our lives, to make us forget our lives, to take us to some distant place and time and to a completely different set of problems which are solved (in most American movies) in front of us.

But obviously they feel more real, but they are less real.  They are played out in two dimensions, and will play precisely the same a million years from now, if that technology and people to view it last that long.  There is nothing organic, adaptive, vulnerable and changing in it.  There is no life and death.  It is literally a projection on a screen of a seeming time involved media, but one which has already been determined in its totality.

Now, that may be how life works too.  Certainly, many have argued it.  I had a premonitory dream the other day which was quite odd.  I have had others too.  Nothing worth talking about here.

But lived life is interactive, our self and the world.  I believe they are energetically interconnected, that we are star stuff and in movement with it.

And I feel intuitively like there is a profound difference between a movie, which will always be the same, and for example live theater, where good actors are consistent, but never perfectly so.  Every performance differs in subtle ways, and mistakes are always possible.  No mistake, other than a mechanical malfunction, is possible with a film or video game.

How does all this make people less vibrant, less aware, less willing to take risks, less willing to think for themselves?  Perhaps it is the twin features of passivity and having defined worlds which cannot be altered.

I’m not sure what I mean by that.  Ponder it yourself, and see what you get.

But I do think most people are overwhelmed.  There is too much.  This is another thing.  I think they want someone to tell them what is TRUE, and they want to believe it.  There are too many kinds of ketchup.

This would again be the latent attachment to the masks.  Masks are a simple, easily comprehended narrative.  They fend off chaos.

And in that regard, when I was thinking about that yesterday, I kept having Rene Girard’s phrase “mimetic contagion” appear.  I read most of his books, but cannot say for sure I ever felt confident I understood him.  I am not sure he understood him.  I think he talked out loud, in the hope that sense would eventually emerge.  Certainly, I do that.

But in this context, it would mean “alternative ideas”.  For rigid personalities, alternatives seem like attacks, don’t they?  Alternatives, other ways of being and thinking and doing, risk throwing the person into an existential crisis, into acute panic and confusion and terror, and thus must be protected against.

This is most likely the root of Fascism, in all its forms, including the Communistic variety.  This would make masks–when worn by the zealots–more or less directly and literally Fascistic symbols.

I will make one last comment regarding Girard.  I have likely made it before, but shit, every post I make may be a repeat by now.  But as I say, even if my “performance” is derivative relative to past performances, it will never be a precisely repetitive act.

A guy I knew at Chicago who had audited a class briefly with Girard when he was still teaching at Stanford, said that Girard once pronounced (in his view pompously and incoherently) that “The Rejection of the Rejection of the Other has begun.”

He had no idea what he meant.  He thought it was nonsense.  But it is really pretty obvious, I think.  For most of human history–as most modern academics in the Humanities are eager and even desperate to point out ad nauseum–most societies had an in-group and an out-group.  As should be familiar, the term the “Other”–with a capital letter of course–became a sort of coin of that realm perhaps three decades ago.  In a book I would have needed to read to pass my Doctoral qualifying exams, Johannes Fabian referenced it in “Time and the Other”.  It was likely old even then though.

But the idea was that the same aggressive, irrational, exclusionary energy that was once devoted to making sure blacks used the “correct” drinking fountains in the Jim Crow South was now being dedicated to excluding, demonizing and attacking anyone who might be thought to support that sort of thing.

In other words, that was roughly the  period when the usual lunatics started calling racist everyone who disagreed with them about anything.  They were in their view the certified keepers of black destiny and well being, and ipso facto anything anyone said against them meant they supported lynchings and white supremacy.

As we are seeing, this is not even remotely hyperbole.  It SHOULD be.  No one should be that emotionally disconnected and stupid, but most of our “best” academics in fact are.  And most politicians are happy to use these narratives for their own enjoyment, power and profit.

I continue to believe we need formal methods for redeveloping emotional intelligence, methods which are organic, honest, and widespread.  I have my ideas, but this does not feel like the time.

I continue to pray daily that the System, writ large, does not fail us badly yet again, that all the death and misery spent protecting this nation from irrational tyranny is not wasted by people with soft hands, weak minds, and an utter contempt for the people they claim they want to help.