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Stability

Reading all these memoirs–I just read Ken Kesey’s fictionalized but likely true-ish account of how he heard of Neal Cassady’s death (btw, at least one commentator said Neal was the inspiration for Randle McMurphy)–and what I am struck by is the profound instability of everything in the lives of these people. 

Nobody stays put.  Nobody feels strong loyalty to anything but an abstract “cause” which consists in the main of telling everyone not like themselves to go fuck themselves.  This was the great virtue of the Vietnam War, and roughly the role played today by Global Warming, which is that it gives nihilists, unable and unwilling to commit to moving forward and growing what has been, a reason to push back against all that is, together, and to be unified in this effort, at least for some period of time.

But everyone is fucking nuts.  They are flying around like shattered debris in a tornado.

Psychologically, the stability that matters is not rigidity.  Rigidity is in fact defined as unhealthy, and flexibility as healthy.

What needs to be stable for any sort of social or individual flourishing to happen is the sense of self and sense of purpose. 

You need to be able to say “I am this sort of person, this is what I value, these are the people and causes to which I feel loyalty, and this is my place.”

I am not saying as a conservative, much less the reactionary some unhinged souls (unhinged, a door no longer tied to a doorway) might want to claim me to be.  I am saying this because it is TRUE.  It is true even if it is inconvenient.  It is true even if it fails to serve some specific political agendas.

You can rebel against the rules of life, but in the end, you accomplish nothing but your own destruction.