Emotions

Apr 13th, 2012
by Forest Johnson.
16 comments

What use are emotions, anyway?

I have spent a lot of time, pondering this, because there has always seemed to be something about men, displaying, and making decisions based upon, emotions, that somehow wasn’t quite right.
We have probably all noticed the female predisposition to be emotional. To respond to things emotionally. To speak of emotions, and how they ‘feel’ about things. Indeed, women love to chat with other women, about things that often mystify men, and sometimes bore them stupid. What is going on, here?
Let’s start by looking at what use emotions are to women…

Women, obviously, are biologically designed to carry babies, and then to care for them. What would this entail?
The woman must be aware, of possible threats to the baby. Danger. Discomfort. Anything harmful. Its needs. Its well-being.
She is projecting what she ‘feels’ is good, and right, on behalf of the baby, because the baby is unable to fully articulate what its needs are, apart from wailing. And wailing is something babies seem to do, anyway, often for no apparent reason. Its needs are many and varied, and the mother carries what she knows of this, from what her mother knew, and what other women know about all this, in general. She may be a good mother, or a bad mother, but if she gives birth at all, she is A Mother.
Even if she never gives birth, she is a potential mother, by design. And so she carries, in her gender, this outward-looking, outward-caring, predisposition, unless there is something seriously wrong with her.
Emotions are the recognizable manifestation of this characteristic.
Is everything all right? Is everything safe? Is everything organized, clean, tidy, comfortable? Is there anything the matter?

Men, by contrast, do not carry babies, and are biologically not intended to care for them, directly.
Theirs is a different role, although there are some overlapping areas of responsibility.
Men are indirect carers. But mostly, they are protectors and providers.
Both roles are important, you could say essential, and neither one is fully effective, without the other.
Thus woman, and man, complement each other, with the result that the species, or race, is continued on, beyond their own lifespans.
Men, because their role is different from that of women, are equipped differently from women, in order to perform that role.
Their responsibility is more indirect, and more removed from immediate ‘care’. They do not need, for example, an emotional early-warning system, like mothers do. They are less likely to be involved with what the baby needs, now, and more likely to be concerned with what it needs, in general: food, shelter, safety, good health. Do you see?
Woman: primary, and immediate, intimate care.
Man: secondary, and general, abstract care.
Thus a woman is more likely to actually require emotions, than a man is.

That seems to take care of why a woman might have use for emotions. But what about men? Do they need such things?
Well. Men, if they follow the basic orientation I have laid out, require a lot less than women do. Why?
Of the outlined duties, responsibilities or roles, previously laid out, what among them requires emotion?
Probably none, other than being attached to the mother of the child, and hopefully, to the child, itself.
But does this attachment require emotion?
I suggest that it probably does not. It requires other things, but emotion seems to be something that could quite comfortably, and effectively, be dispensed with.

Responsibility is the male equivalent of emotion. Again, with some overlap.
A woman’s role as mother and homemaker, is a necessarily small environment. She needs to care-for. Closely focused, then, on nearby things, leading to a different mindset, that the man, who must focus further afield, in order to provide, protect and gather what is needed for the nearby environment of home.
You can see, probably, how there is considerable scope, and leeway, for emotion within the home, while it may well turn out to be counterproductive outside the home, in the world of deals, and dealing.

All this was a given, when I was young. It was nothing unusual, to be disagreed with, or taken exception to.
It resulted in a society that, while certainly not perfect, at least had an unquestioned prospect of survival.
Nobody imagined that the way things were going, the entire thing would self-destruct and collapse.
Everything was more-or-less fine, until…

When was it, exactly, that men ‘needed to get in touch with their feminine side’?
What earthly use would men have, for something like that?
I use the term ‘men’, here, to refer to ‘men’. Those things with dicks. Not the emotional wimps that semi-female-’men’ have lately become.
Have we considered this? Have we explored who did this to men, why they did it, why men let them do it, and what the result has been?
I have considered this, and come to some pretty startling conclusions. But to deliver my own findings, on a plate, would never do. What effort would that require? Just enough, probably, for a semi-female-’man’ to find fault with them. And frankly, I have no slight interest in what such creatures might think, anyway, if they are, any longer, even capable of actual thought.
And so I leave you with this:
Men are designed to be virile, courageous, creative, powerful, decisive, reverent and omnipotent, all at once.
Designed to be. Required to be. Duty-bound, to be.
Do you feel that emotion plays any important part in any of this?
Go on: let ‘er rip!

Posted in: Socialization.
Tagged: · ·

Inverse racism

Apr 12th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
14 comments

Our country is entrenched in class warfare. One side, composed of the poor and the degenerate “elites” who make their money off of salesmanship and not actual production, uses a weapon that paralyzes most enemies: guilt, specifically guilt for the natural inequality between peoples.

This takes many forms, but one of its most potent forms is race. In the racial dialogue, sometimes called “civil rights,” it is assumed that there is a wealthy spoiled majority who should feel guilty for having more than others. This creates a binary worldview: hard-working minorities versus faceless lazy majority.

In reality, nothing of the sort exists. Instead you have groups from everywhere converging on a nation, and almost none of them are permitted where the degenerate elites live. The degenerate elites intend the massive cultural chaos as a weapon against people they perceive to be lower on the socioeconomic scale.

As a result, these degenerate elites style their media to “reveal” the situation as having only one dimension: the majority mistreating the minority, no one cares, and thus guilt should be handed out in buckets.

For example, our media trumpets any white-on-black crime, but is mysteriously mute on the converse. They draw attention to any studies of inequality, and tend to downplay any stories of success. They ignore any culture that the majority could possibly have in order to focus on what the minority might have.

What happens when that narrative (“convenient story justifying our dominant paradigm”) breaks?

Across our nation, people are still fixated on the white-on-black narrative forged by the media in the case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman (who is half-white and half-Hispanic). Another story has been simmering however and is about to explode.

African-American attacks on Asians have been steadily rising. The groups compete for neighborhoods and jobs. The well-known tension African-Americans and indio (Asiatic, non-white) Hispanics is taking a back seat to this new insanity. This is in additional to appalling levels of violence within African-American communities.

However, when even the mainstream media notices something, you realize that the story has been out there for a decade just simmering. Not surprisingly, coverage and discussion has been accelerating for the last few years. The real problem is that no one wants to hear about it — it doesn’t fit into the narrative of majority bad, minority good. So far, the government has blown it off entirely.

And then Marion Barry put his foot in it and brought the problem out in the open. No one can forget the incredible tensions between black and Asian (especially Korean) store owners during the L.A. riots in the 1990s. But now Asians have been seen as the victims of ongoing racial violence, and even brought to light by John Derbyshire as those who also give their children “the talk” about avoiding African-Americans in certain circumstances.

In the face of reality, the consensual reality we make of a media narrative and socially-pleasing commentary has collapsed, as it always does. The question is whether we are brave enough to confront the unknown and tackle this issue, or let the covert violence continue.

Posted in: Politics.

Design and dysfunction

Apr 11th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
26 comments

Like many microwaves, ours is not new or old.

It fits in the comfortable middle that we normally exclude from our thinking, between the extremes to the point where we feel uneasy about assigning it either trait. It certainly isn’t old, but in the intervening seven years, many newer models have emerged.

The newer vintage remains unknown to me and I hope they have fixed the problems I describe. But remembering seven years ago, and in fact all the microwaves I have known, one salient fact sticks out: none of them have a volume control, but all of them announce every act with loud beeps.

If you need to use this microwave at night, while a partner sleeps in the next room over, you are out of luck. It beeps with every key press; it beeps when it is done, three times (and once if you hit a key to cancel it at one second remaining). These beeps are piercing and loud. There is no way to turn them off.

What is most alarming about this is that the microwave was obviously designed for an absolute context, like a kind of laboratory afterlife, in which it is used in a single idealized way. Someone comes into the room, uses to to cook food, and leaves. Consequences and side-effects are ignored.

Our industry has wisely expanded its study of interface, but this problem is at a level below interface. The problem is not an interface; it’s an assumption about the use of this microwave. That assumption is that it is only used in a single idealized context.

This assumption parallels many of the assumptions we make about life. That an average person exists. That some values are universal. That we are all the same under the skin. That in a complex world, we can assign moral values to method and not have it hamstring our accomplishment of goals.

Through this morass of religious assumptions about the nature of reality that deny its complexity and make it essentially a projection of the human mind, the microwave ends up being designed by committee. They have good intentions. They project what they want to be true and design on that basis.

Eventually the end result emerges. A microwave is designed not based on what is right, which in my use means what is natural and realistic, but based on what is popular, meaning that intersection of the wish fulfillment projection of both individuals and groups.

Not enough people complained to change the design. And so across the land, every day, sleep is interrupted. Minds are irritated by the manic beeping. Unnecessary noise is producing, dulling people’s receptiveness to noise that might be meaningful. Maybe they’ll fix it some day. I’m not holding my breath.

Posted in: Socialization.
Tagged: · · ·

Working hard

Apr 10th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
33 comments

In the post-1789 regime, “working hard” is our religious sacrament. Whenever someone succeeds, we are quick to praise them for having worked hard. If we need to be motivated, we are told to work hard. Yet most work is like cheap bread: light, spongy and with many large pockets of air.

For example, at your average job perhaps an hour or two of real work — effort resulting in productive change — occurs per week. The rest of the time is fake work and wastage. Fake work is answering emails, going to meetings, attending training, filling out paperwork, updating the boss on “progress.”

We all know what wastage is; any time we walk into any given office, we see it. Talking on the phone, shopping on Amazon, updating Facebook, tweeting and SMS, playing video games or vacantly surfing the internet.

Yet hard work is still our god and our doctrine. The reason for this is equality: when we are presumed to be equal in validity, we are presumed to be equal in results because otherwise equal validity is revealed as a lie. If we are equal in results, we must be equal in potential or the results will appear to have been faked by holding back the good so the rest catch up.

Into this great tower of pretense comes the lie: the only difference between the successful genius and the lurching impoverished prole is that the successful person worked hard. This lets the successful feel justified in their success, and look down their noses at the poor; this lets the poor believe they can be anything, which since it doesn’t happen, creates a need for some enemy who prevented it from happening, which is good as that lets our society go to war on a regular basis. Kill the inegalitarians!

In the name of our pretense of being equal, we pretend that we value hard work above all else.

But shouldn’t we value competence instead?

Someone who works really hard, but is incompetent, will accomplish only what a competent person would do in a fraction of the time. Yet in order to feel altruistic, we want to promote the hard-working incompetent. He deserves to get ahead, even though the end result is worse for those who have to suffer under his incompetence.

Working hard rewards the dullard. He shows up; he doesn’t think. It takes him long to figure out basic concepts. However, that’s no problem — he’ll be here until midnight. Even though nothing he does is particularly strenuous, he’s “working hard” because he was here all those hours. Our society thinks he should go to the front of the line.

On the other hand, working smart rewards supremacy. Someone who understands concepts quickly and thoroughly, and is really good at what they do, may require only three hours a day of work to achieve the same or more than the dullard. That work will be high quality, too, because it’s strenuous and intense the way a person of ability commits themselves. Our society would condemn them as lazy.

Even if the presumption of laziness were not hopelessly wrong, the bias against laziness is. Unproductive laziness is bad because it is unproductive, not because it’s lazy. Lazy people who periodically manage to achieve a lot should in fact be our ideal, because through supremacy of ability they conquer the problem in record time.

Then everyone can go back to being lazy, which if we get rid of job-speak means something good. Laziness is getting the extra rest we need. It’s letting our minds relax. It’s taking a few minutes to appreciate some of life’s many mysteries. It’s goofing off with the wife and kids. It’s many good things.

But in order to uphold our pretense, we must make a heaven of working long hours, and a hell of wanting to work efficiently so you can get out of the office and do something more fun. What, you don’t like it here? You should want to be here for 12 or 16 hours a day — that’s the path to success!

And so the result is a race to the bottom. How many hours can we waste? Don’t just go to the essential meetings, which are very few; go to all the meetings. Even better, go to meetings that you aren’t even needed at. Answer all the emails, even the irrelevant ones. Stay until midnight every night.

Others see this and think, I have two choices: (a) I can compete with this, and start spending many hours here as well, or (b) I can go home after four hours having done a good job, and get fired for being “lazy” even though the quality of my work is superior to that of the dullard. Less time for the family. Less time to get to know yourself. Soon you are irritable and cruel. And miserable.

We have made ourselves miserable in this modern time. For the pretense of claiming that we are all equal, we have turned work from a means to an end into an end itself, and now the tail wags the dog and the tool uses the master. The high cost of egalitarian living crushes us. But at least we’re working hard.

Posted in: Socialization.

Breaking taboo

Apr 9th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
34 comments

Former National Review columnist John Derbyshire wrote an article which has offended many people.

In it he gives a version of “the talk” that many black parents claim to give their kids, about how they have to be careful around white folks, who might be discriminatory. Except that his version is for whites and Asians living around black people.

In it, he illustrates white and Asian parents as advising their children to stay away from African-Americans and to realize that African-American resentment of whites and Asians is so intense that members of those groups are at risk in African-American areas.

Of course, the busybodies and chatterboxes of the internet and the leftist mainstream media exploded in offense and discontent. They couldn’t believe anyone would dare do such a thing! In 2012, nonetheless. But almost all sources forgot this part of the article:

The default principle in everyday personal encounters is, that as a fellow citizen, with the same rights and obligations as yourself, any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen.

Derbyshire did not say he found African-Americans inferior, detestable, or worthy of scorn. He in fact urges us to treat them well.

What he does do is warn us that, statistically, African-Americans are allegedly prone to greater degrees of crime and may be a threat to whites and Asians

The outrage was predictable.

However, had Derbyshire written this article instead in the third person, and stated it factually, as in “I have long observed that whites and Asians tend to give ‘the talk’ about African-Americans to their children, and here’s how it goes,” the outrage would have seemed even more hollow.

The sad fact is that the vast majority of people in the United States and Europe act in the way he describes. The mouth talks, and says nice things about diversity and multiculturalism, but actions are different.

Much as how you succeeded in the Soviet Union by being a good Communist, you succeed in the modern West by supporting both (a) liberal democracy and its class leveling platform that includes multiculturalism and civil rights and (b) capitalist consumerism and the idea that we should be able to sell our junk to whoever we want, and import cheaper labor if we can find it.

As a result, we have white people and Asians who talk about the beauty of diversity, the harmony of pluralism, the benefits of multiculturalism, etc. (recombine keywords however seems apt) and then flee the cities and go home to their mostly-white, often-gated subdivisions.

Other than having the token black friends at work and at cocktail parties, the white or Asian of today essentially interacts as little as possible with black and/or Hispanic people.

The double standard in the West is to repeat the liberal dogma in public, and to do exactly the opposite when you have the freedom to do so.

Derbyshire unleashed a torrent of rage because his comments immediately follow the greatest time of racial tension in recent history. What makes this time tense is that whites (and Asians) aren’t backing down a they usually do. They’re simply saying, “Nope, we don’t see it that way.”

Some are even going further and saying that if we have freedom, as we’re told we do, we should have the freedom to pick who we want to live around, work with, hire and sell to and buy from. We want to be with people like us.

While this flies in the face of the doctrine we are taught from pre-school onward, it makes sense given the historical record. Diversity and multiculturalism create situations like the Balkans or Northern Ireland. Homogeneity creates stable nations like Finland or Japan. Which do you prefer?

Diversity itself is the problem. I don’t agree with John Derbyshire in that I think it’s foolish to black African-Americans for a disaster that was created by white liberals. When you demand diversity, you create an unstable society where no one has anything in common and distrust is massive.

For almost 50 years, people in Europe and the United States have been buying the diversity line that is fed to them by liberals, who want to use multiculturalism as a weapon in their agenda of a classless society. Import new workers, and suddenly there’s no culture, so all that remains is ideology.

Ever since the election of Barack Obama in the United States however, suspicion has been growing that diversity doesn’t work after all. We pour money into it, always feel guilty when there’s a hate crime, and yet we watch the most ardent proponents of diversity retreat to 98.6% white gated communities.

If Derbyshire made a fatal mistake, it’s that he yanked the covers off of a comfortable hypocrisy. People had hoped the discontent would just go away and we could buy each other off like last time. But now, instead of merely resentment, there is a mood of questioning whether diversity can work — at all.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: · · ·

Jesus

Apr 8th, 2012
by Forest Johnson.
49 comments

We all know about Jesus, don’t we?
Or do we?
Ladies and gentlemen: please return your seats to the upright position, and fasten your safety belts.
There may be severe turbulence ahead…

Was Jesus the one-and-only Son Of God?
If he was, then he was perfect.
Was Jesus perfect?

A perfect being would not need to live as a lowly carpenter for thirty years, before feeling able to be The Messiah.
He would jump right into the job. If he were, indeed, born to a virgin mortal female, would that not make him mortal, too?
And why a virgin? Something doesn’t add up, here. It sounds suspiciously like a human bright-idea, to make Jesus sound even more Divine than he was. Like a modern T.V. program: no matter what the subject of the production, it is never enough, as-is. It must always be hyped into something even more astonishing (and cool).

No.
Jesus was a man, if he existed at all. I hold that he did exist. And much of what we hear about him was true. Along with much more, that has been manufactured, since, to sell even more copies of the all-time best-seller.

He was a seeker. He knew there must be more to life than the life generally accepted, as such, in his era. So he went looking for it.
He forsook the land of men, as all true seekers do, and ventured into the desert, as many true seekers do. And discovered that there is not much to eat, or drink, in a desert.

He became very hungry, and not a little thirsty. Free from the psychic pollution of people, he sank into a harsh and natural world, containing no sign of humans. Starvation began its inevitable work. Illusions. Hallucinations. Elevated consciousness…

Being Jesus, and a serious seeker, he abruptly attained the state that so many seekers, before and since, have sought.
Enlightenment!
He knew it all for what it all was, and understandably, became someone he had never been before.
Divine!
Not, as is so often claimed: The One And Only Son Of God, but God Himself! In part. Of the Body. The Divine.
This is possible, if uncommonly uncommon. Any serious seeker may attain such a state, although very, very few do.
Jesus knew what God was. He knew He was It. Understood that It was Him and no distance separated Them.
And so, filled with this awesome revelation, and being only human, he hot-footed it back to the temple, to sort all the charlatans out…

Whereupon he threw a fit, overturning tables and commanding all the sinners to fuck-off.
Nothing unusual about that: the man was fired up, and loaded for bear.
That was about the time it became really, really interesting…

The Pharisees, motley religious human-types that they were (and always are), suspicious and of dubious intent, took it upon themselves to question The Lord, to decide for themselves, if he might be genuine, or not. Like they would know! And so they asked him which was greater: the laws of men, or the laws of God? And which law was the highest law of all…

To which Jesus answered:
“Love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, all thy mind, all thy soul, and all thy strength, and thy neighbour as thyself….”
Which shut them up. At least for a while.

But wait a minute!
What do we have, here?
Jesus did not say: “Love Me, for I am The Lord, thy God…”
He said “Love the Lord thy God…”
And that, for me, is genuine. Jesus likely actually did say that, or something very similar.
He would. He was Jesus!

And so we find, if we are so inclined, some truth in what otherwise amounts to a fable.
Something sufficiently believable, that anyone can accept its probable authenticity.
And humans, bless their souls, become so desperate to convice other humans, that they dress the truth up, in fantastic robes, to sell what needs no selling. Jesus was an elightened soul! Meaning mere humans can do this impossible thing!
And that, dear friends, is a whole lot more useful, practical, and honest, than what happened next.

I accept that Jesus existed, and so – probably – should you.
There is no possible downside to such a conviction.
No need for all the centuries-worth of hocus-pocus that followed, and follows.
All claimed, translated and re-translated, by lesser beings, to appear more convincing than was ever necessary.

Jesus was The Man. The First of us. The Leader. The One.
But not the Only One.
That was his message: that God Was. And wherever Man Was, then God Was too.
Created in His Image, man could be everything God Is. Becoming God, in part, Himself.

We are too stupid to survive. I mean, really!
If Jesus were to re-appear, we would behave in the same way we always did, and always do.
But we don’t have to keep on doing that. We can toss the interpretations out, for good, and take Jesus at His Word…
He told it like it was:
“Love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, all thy mind, all thy soul, and all thy strength…”

Posted in: Socialization.

Spoil

Apr 7th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
5 comments

How to cook up a brat: suspend your child between doubt and luxury.

When you think about it, our society does this to all of its children — and all of its adults. We create them and keep them between two prongs of opposite intensities.

The first prong is obedience. We show them there is only one way to succeed. It’s not doing the right thing, it’s not fulfilling the goal of anything. It’s making money by flattering others and playing the social game.

The second prong is permissiveness. We tell them they are free, and that relativistic judgment is applied. This means that no matter what crazy stuff they do, their score will always be adjusted based on whatever they have suffered. There’s always a way out, for those who have some claim to pain.

The result is a nation of spoiled people. Infantilized, dependent on the parent (popularity/money/votes). And yet hedonic, bloated with pleasures and awash in 500-channel cable, movies and hip hop. Between these two prongs, an angry fetus is cultivated.

This fetus will always demand its rights, but never look toward its responsibilities. Except work, that is. It will worship obedience to the dollar and to being popular among others before anything else. The fetus wants freedom, except when it craves acceptance.

Our doctrine of equality, by then requiring some method of controlling people since they no longer have any motivations in common, settles on the lowest common denominator and also the most convenient method of control. By our pursuit of pleasure, we enslave ourselves.

And being enslaved, yet being told we are free, we become divided between two worlds. The simplistic world of control, which seems to “make sense.” Then beyond that there’s the wider world of life outside human control, including nature and individual experience. That world is not compatible with our fantasy.

The fantasy world is formed of television advertisements, things people tell us in conversation, government pamphlets, morals in movies, cliches from the society pages, and the nanny bullying world of academics and other “experts.” Live in this world, and everything makes sense… in a simplified way.

Step outside this world and you are alone. The prongs shatter. You are no longer receiving a benefit from freedom; it’s a gift you do not need. You are no longer afraid of lack of money, because you see how money can follow any useful thing that you charge for.

But you are also a stranger in a wasted land. You speak a different language; you recognize different causes of events. You care about different outcomes and radically different timescales. You might as well be from a different species.

Luckily you are also no longer a brat. The sense of entitlement has gone away. It has been replaced with the oldest emotion of humankind: a sense of wonder at the world and an enduring sensation of potential and meaning to it, and a desire to lay hands on it and to make of it something great.

Posted in: Politics.

The protests that fizzled

Apr 6th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
63 comments

This was the era of protests that never burned bright enough to burn out. They simply faded away.

First it was Occupy Wall Street. At the time the protests were first announced, media fervor made it sound like the 1960s or the French Revolution over again. Then winter struck, and apathy set in. The cities waited long enough to be sure that they could document the crime, filth, disorder and assault that came with “occupy”-style camps. Armed with those facts, they dismantled the camps and threw them in dumpsters, then dusted off their hands and went home.

The vast outcry did not arise.

A week ago, it seemed like the Trayvon Martin killing would unleash the bastard spawn of the Rodney King riots, Detroit riots, Watts Riots and Oklahoma riots of the 1920s. Instead, as evidence emerged that showed how Martin was a dubious “hero,” and how the official narrative really was standing up to scrutiny, the backbone snapped. The media and government dependents are still doing their best to fan the flames but the cause has lost its sense of legitimacy. Now it’s another tantrum protest, not an honest righting of moral wrongs.

Why are our protests fizzling out?

Part of it is that the economy is bad. However, generally bad times make for more radical politics. Protests should be succeeding at a time when people are terrified for the future. In fact, bad times launch successful revolutions. These revolutions never even got ignited. Why did they fail?

The first reason: the rhetoric is old. We are now accustomed to at least seven centuries of we are the 99% or its analogues. Most of us have slowly gotten the inkling that the poor have existed in every time, and picking one group of poor over the others does not achieve anything. Societies stratify into classes by ability and dedication. It’s just how it is; we aren’t born equal and can’t fix that with “hard work” and educational certificates. Even recent history shows us how the greatest charlatans invariably claim to be doing whatever they do for the poor, or helpless, or old. They lull you with those comforting words and suddenly a police state has arrived. Or perhaps worse, your society wasn’t paying attention when the time came to tackle real issues.

The second reason: no unity. There is no unity of demand in the United States or Europe anymore. The populations are divided into two camps, individualists (liberals) and those who want stability and social order (conservatives). Then the subdivisions start, not only by race and gender-orientation, but also by lifestyle and belief. We are at a time when half of the population will discount any given achievement by assuming the other side cheated. Nothing holds us together except our finances and some political interests.

The third and most important reason: we’re starting to realize, 50 years on, that shallow manipulation takes many forms but the best form is moral outrage. Like the Church of centuries ago, our new political masters have conditioned us to be upset at any “unfair” treatment of anyone, which conveniently forgets whatever that person did in the months and years immediately prior to their treatment. The best control system is invisible and at the same time makes you feel empowered for having jumped at the chance to serve it.

The fact is that these protests were fake from the beginning. Based on pretense — blaming bankers for our over-inflated housing market driven by the greed of individuals, and blaming the sad results of Trayvon’s thug behavior on the guy defending himself from him — they never had a leg to stand on. But people wanted them to, so they played pretend for a while. Unlike in 1789 and 1968, it rang hollow.

Now we have a country in worse shape than before. Instead of our protests simply failing, our trust in the opposition has failed alongside our trust in official institutions. There is nothing left on this path but greater anarchy and its end result, greater conformity. Luckily we still have a chance to avoid it if we turn around now.

Posted in: Politics.

Means and ends

Apr 5th, 2012
by Brett Stevens.
53 comments

It’s rare you get a complete statement of anything in this world. For starters, it’s bad business: half-formed statements that hint at the possibility of bigger meaning, like lottery tickets, are better sellers than a clearly-defined finite reward.

The average person might prefer to pay $5 for a chance to win a million dollars today, to spending that same five bucks on a certificate guaranteed to pay off $1,000 in a year. After all, this person could get the big score, and then all their problems would be solved (etc.).

In addition to being bad business, it’s bad strategy to tell people too much of the truth. They may turn on you, for shutting down their hopes but more likely for showing them their lack of hope is unjustified. Most likely they will simply call you an idiot, or a witch, or crucify you.

So truth, which is a human invention that resembles our reality more than its ideological competition, is often hidden in the darnedest places, and only trickles through when it thinks it is mostly unseen. It’s the one wild eye in the night that winks at you when you’re camping and sleep evades you.

[T]he liberals on the court focus on process and the conservatives focus on results. – “Men in Black,” by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times

By my estimation, Maureen Dowd is usually wrong, and the topic of her essay this week is not only wrong but deranged. She is upset that the Supreme Court has not decided the way she wants it to. As a result, she launches into cartoon invective. Skip everything but the above sentence.

Conservatives are doing a lot of soul-searching. We do not trust external ideologies like Communism or Scientology. We think you need to have a moral sense in your gut, and that should decide your lifestyle and political outlook. While that’s a good start, in a complex world it’s at a disadvantage.

As part of our soul-searching, we are trying to find out what the soul of conservatism is. Besides the aforementioned organic moral gut instinct, some writers posit that it is consequentialism, or concern with results more than methods. Ends over means.

What are “means” and “ends”? Ends are your goals and the results that occur as a result of your actions. Means are the methods, including any moral control of what methods are permissible, that you use to get there.

It’s a cliche to say that life can boil down to “means over ends” or “ends over means.” But to some degree it’s true, and it depends on who you think is boss. If nature and external reality are boss, all that matters are results. If humans are boss, all that matters is the means used to achieve them.

For example, think through this horrible dilemma. You have been sent into space to destroy an asteroid heading right at earth. However, your blasting charge doesn’t work. You can use your spaceship to steer the asteroid, but you don’t have enough juice to get it past earth. What you can do is make sure it hits a glancing blow.

This means that you have two choices: (a) let the asteroid hit earth dead-on, destroying it completely, or (b) strike a glancing blow, which means you’ll wipe out some huge portion of the globe and kill a billion people. Which do you choose?

If you believe in strict ends over means, you choose the glancing blow. Your species and planet survive.

If you believe in strict means over ends, you cannot choose the glancing blow. To do so is to endorse murder.

Very few people are this strict about things, but much like there are a thousand shades of red and none of them are “pure,” all decisions fork off of this basic division. If the order of reality is most important, you pick ends; if human emotions and social approval are important, you pick means.

Our conservatives in America and Europe of course do not know this.

American conservatives found out that in the 1960s their only hope of being socially acceptable, especially to women, was to appeal to the “individual freedom” concept. This is why they defend business, frown on environmentalism, and gleefully support guns and V-8 trucks for everyone. As a result, they talk mostly about means, such as “freedom” and capitalism.

The European right is even more lost. Living in fear of the past, they have come to endorse the same things as the American conservatives, but add on top of that a social welfare state. They refute social Darwinism, or the idea that society should contain some kind of competition that rewards the good and weeds out the incompetent.

Both groups have forgotten the essence of conservatism: a fixation on end results, which in turn leads to a study of not just material reality but its natural order, and as a result, a desire for the health of the society as an organic whole. Individuals and ideologies are means to this end, not the end itself.

The far-right have forgotten this principle as well. They want Muslims out of Europe because Muslims don’t assimilate; that’s a means, and can be fixed. They want to unite all Caucasians into one group and include all of us so our numbers are higher, but that also is a means. What’s the end? They don’t know.

As we head into another season of determining who will be in power, I suggest conservatives return to our gut instinct. Talking about methods is useless. We need to talk about what we want, and why it is the best possible life for our species and planet as a whole.

Anything else is a step off the path to the right, and a long cold and lonely walk down the schizoid and self-hating path of the left.

Posted in: Politics.

Reality

Apr 4th, 2012
by Forest Johnson.
44 comments

Reality.
A word we’ve all used.
We all know what it means, don’t we?
Um. No. We most certainly don’t!

A word about the picture:
Imagine that’s you, on the other end of that charging grizzly.
No weapons. Nowhere to go. No time to make a plan.
That’s Reality!
And so to work…

This essay is one I know I am not going to be able to do justice to, and so I write it with trepidation. Because it needs to be written ‘just-so’, and I know I can’t write it that way. But if I don’t write it, who will? So, taking that into account, please, bear with me…

It has come to my attention that everybody has a differing view of Reality. No two definitions are anything like the same. Most can not even begin to define it, yet all assume that they know what it is. This is a word that has everything in common with another very common word. No two people come up with the same definition, and most are unable to define it at all.

That word is ‘God’.

And how can this be? Words so common that everybody knows them, that fail, completely to communicate what is meant by them? Another is ‘Love’. There are more, but these words are about all I can cope with, for now.

Let me give you my own definitions of these things, to consider. See how they differ from your own, if indeed you have ever consciously defined these things. See if they make sense to you…

Love: Service to something that is not obviously yourself. Although it actually is.

God: That concept, created by men, to signify something so far beyond them, and their own capabilities, that there is no other word, or words, to express it.

Reality: The thing that the term ‘God’ actually attempts to describe. What-is. What-always-was. What-always-will-be. Everything and nothing. Context. The framework underlying everything that exists.

Note the order of mention; Love first. This is actually something we are capable of, but so seldom exhibit. Most often this is a word used to signify desire, or need. And it’s all downhill from there.

God, second. Beyond us completely, at least until we grasp what the term “Created in God’s image” might actually mean. We can be, and really are, although almost nobody knows it, God-like, in our rather limited way. We can create, although most of us don’t.

Reality: Number three. That state that advises all of existence, including the non-existing. The clockwork that runs the whole show. Non-negotiable, non-flexible. Certainly non-human. The Chinese call this “Tao”, The Great Mother. Lao Tzu said “It Is Older Than God.” And of course, it is, since it gives rise to everything else, including the man-made concept of God.

So the first two are really manifestations of the third. Reality is what concerns us, here.
A ruleset. Fuel for the matter that the rules will act upon. Matter, operating under these rules. Energy forming into matter, then returning into energy. A closed system, as far as anyone can know, turning, turning, in an infinite space, through infinite time, infinitely. But how does this concern us?

People, it appears, mostly think Reality is a human creation. By people, I mean leftists. Although many conservatives subscribe to the same very muddy, shallow thinking. This must be a human failing, to kick God out of his throne, sit themselves down in His place, and proceed to demand things be as they desire them to be.

To hear Christians speak of God, is often to witness the utter absurdity of such thinking.
The Christian God needs people to serve Him. Fight for Him. Worship Him. And if they don’t do that, to His specification, then He rages and exacts terrible vengeance.

It should be quite clear, really, that such people are actually describing themselves, when they speak of God. If God were really like that, what sort of a God would He be? The sort, clearly, that atheists currently seek to eradicate, once and for all.
But the atheists, are, if anything, even worse.

By denying, completely, anything like a God, atheists have no baseline from which to operate. They exist in a vacuum, lacking any context. This is why they can be such hypocrites, such liars, and make so little sense. Lacking context, any word means anything, any behaviour is equal to any other. And nothing, but nothing, leads anywhere but to chaos.

To deny a baseline, is to be, to all intents and purposes, insane.
If you don’t know where you stand, then how can you know where you are?
If you don’t know where you are, how can you know where you are going?
If you don’t know where you’re going, can you really ever say where you’ve been?
Ah! No. And so whatever experiences may have crossed paths with you, along the way, you will be unable to learn from any of them, because, lacking context, there can be no understanding.

So it goes.
People started living in cities, and once they did that, Reality was kept at arm’s length.
It became a human construct, that took its place. People started to think they controlled Reality, and had no further need to respect it. They made their own Reality. To their own specification. Except there never was a specification, that all agreed upon. So the only thing that was agreed upon was that Reality was reality, and everyone knew what that was.

I was involved in a hurricane, once, at sea. The most memorable thing about that, among rather too many memorable things, was the distinctly uncomfortable realization that I had no idea how bad this was going to get. It went right off the scale, and kept right on going. For all I knew, it might not have an end to it, and even if it did, I might well not be around to see it.
That’s Reality.

If you have one bit of respect, about you, then you will respect Reality.
It rules. You don’t. Simple.
This is what provides the political schism we see every day.
While there are many differing degrees of conservatism, it is based, always, upon respect of some sort, towards what we know as ‘the natural order’. We are this way because we can only be this way. We look at the sorry performance of the left, and stand stunned into bewilderment at the manifest insanity of it. The incomprehensible delusion. And we don’t know what to make of it.

Make nothing of it. It is what it is. It is what happens to people who choose to abandon all context for living, and live solely on desires, emotions and selfishness.
This is what The Bible refers to as evil. It is as common as dirt. It is easy, while its opposite is not.
Created with free-will, we are, so it is said. And this is true, to some degree. We may choose the path less easy, although the ones who do, may have little choice in the matter: it is hard wired into them, probably from birth.

Like I said: I was never going to do a good job of writing about this subject. But here it is, and this will have to do, for now. There is very much more that can be said about the nature of Reality, and its enormous importance, to us. But that’s for another time.

Remember this, if nothing else: when people speak of Reality, they are highly unlikely to have any idea of what it is they are referring to. Unless they have a baseline from which to operate. And these days, who does?

Posted in: Ontology.
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