Interestingly, though, I was in a bookstore yesterday and they had a prominent copy of the Odyssey, and I asked the clerk if the movie had bumped sales of the book, and in fact it has: it's it's on a bestseller list. I don't know how high but I think its safe to say none of us saw that coming and I think that its a good thing.

There's a lot in this world to hate, but I think we need to confine ourselves to things that are worth hating and I don't think this movie is one of them. It got AMERICANS reading Homer, for goodness sake.

And I will assert that anyone who cannot easily name a recent episode of stupidity is probably being somewhat stupid all day every day. It’s arrogance or genuine stupidity, although I will grant the two can be hard to distinguish. I guess arrogance is more articulate. But most of us cycle in and out, in and out. I have long said that it is not possible to BE intelligent, but you can be mostly intelligent, most of the time, on most topics. But no matter your IQ, you too sometimes push on the Pull door.

But then I created a continuum in my mind, because why not? Thinking is still free. On one end you have people who do practical work, people like car mechanics, or plumbers or electricians. Or soldiers. Most of them will be able to tell you something quickly, although the long experienced ones don’t make a lot of mistakes. But they do notice them, and care about them, if they are professionals.

On the other end of the continuum are academics. How could anyone possibly know they were wrong, and thus stupid, when the game is creating ways of viewing the world that are unfalsifiable? How could anyone realize they are stupid when the world—reality—has absolutely zero chance of crashing into their pet fantasies? How could anyone say that, say, a Marxist lens is the wrong way to world, when the game is not comparing history—facts—to theory? That’s not the game. The game is playing the game, and the game is placing both visible and imagined reality into a neatly defined box and telling everything “this is all there is”. You can’t tell someone like that they are wrong. They are children playing in a sand box.

Given my premise, that people are stupid in reality in proportion to their lack of capacity to recognize their own mistakes, then academics (I am speaking here of unscientific disciplines, which are the most politicized) are stupid all day every day.

And that’s how you derive it. That’s MATH, y’all, although of course we all already knew that.

But how do you measure such things? I don’t think any of us would want it to be precise, but how about approximate?

Here is what I will propose today, from my own experience: for me, as I grow (I think), I often have memories of specific situations from long ago that I realize NOW that I botched or misunderstood completely. Most of the time, what I am realizing is that I understood the situation only from my perspective, only based on my own need, and completely lost all capacity to see the other person, or the situation as a whole.

As I grow, and my blinkers get a little less total, some event will pop in my head and I will realize how dumb I was, how that other person must have been feeling, and that feeling is not great. None of us want to think of ourselves as assholes, but passively or actively we all are, sometimes. I make more decisions than most people, and have probably been rude or hurtful more than most people. I don’t really know: I’m not cruel and have never been, but I do get very defensive sometimes, and nothing good comes from that.

In some ways I would like to be someone else. I would like to both be and have been less stupid. But this is option J on a list that only goes from A-D. And if I were someone else, I wouldn’t be me, and since I am stuck with me, I choose to believe there is something wonderful there, as well as something wonderful for everyone else (although in some cases you have to look quite hard and wait a long time).

Near Death Experiencers often talk about a 360 Life Review, where you not only relive your life from your own perspective, but that of everyone you touched, for both “good” and “bad” (the two are usually mixed and the feeling tones specific to that circumstance). You feel the people you hurt, and feel the people you helped.

What I am proposing is that individual emotional growth starts with, or at least can be evaluated with, this basic idea NOW. I suppose a perfectly aware life would not need a life review at all.

These are my own idiosyncratic ideas today. It is my blessing and my curse to in effect be condemned to, and given the opportunity to, ponder things like this all day every day. It’s tiring, but not infrequently interesting. What to do? Be grateful and resentful, welcoming and unhappy. Human. We all, I think, cycle from here to there and back. This is all messy when done right, and messy when done wrong.

You know what? I laugh a lot, quite loudly. It really helps. I laugh at absurdities, and not infrequently provide myself my own material. As I tell people regularly, I try not to be dumb, but I don’t always succeed.

Here is the thing: I cannot imagine a less interesting life than one in which everything is easy, everything is handed out, and all problems are avoided. I want interesting kids, who have depth of personality and character.

But I got to thinking this morning about how there is a Bell Curve aspect to all this. Too much ease is a problem, but so too nothing but problems. There is a zone of growth, that in my view roughly correlates with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow. Enough challenge, but not too much. Surfing a wave that is the right size, feeling both sufficient skill on the one hand and sufficient need for effort and expenditure of energy that loss of focus means failure on the other, all of which combined create the feeling of Being Alive, which is the form Happiness typically takes. Most of us, in my opinion, miss most of our moments of happiness while they are happening, because often it looks like problems and mistakes. Csikszentmihalyi (spelling that name is a challenge!!!) himself found that most people experience most of their happiest moments in a typical week at work. Very few people would suspect that. Sitting on the couch? Not very happy for most.

As a personal example I have likely mentioned before, I took my kids to New York some years ago, and we were trying to get to Morningside Heights, but I picked the wrong train, and we wound up in the middle of Harlem. Just as we climbed up the stairs, a fierce rainstorm hit, and we quickly found ourselves sheltering under a construction awning with a dozen or so other people. That was my favorite part of the trip. Completely unplanned, unexpected, and certainly inconvenient in a way, but it made me happy, then and now in the recollection of it. I grabbed a wave. It was an interesting experience, watching the rain and all the other people. I inhabited that moment fully. We waited a while, and when it eased a bit I bought umbrellas. One of my kids had to use the restroom, so a Puerto Rican grocer let us use the bathroom for employees in the basement (I think only because they were so little). Then we walked up the steps to Morningside Heights with a steady waterfall going down the steps. I took a picture of my kids on those stairs, standing with umbrellas in running water, and they both had radiant smiles.

The overly Mothering aspect of our culture has looked at problems and worked hard to protect our children from them, from harm, to “keep them safe”. But what is the obvious outcome of doing that, of being a “lawnmower” or “bulldozer” parent? Weak kids. And you know what happens when you are weak? Every stray wind that blows overwhelms you. Such kids are confined in cages of fear and helplessness. Raising your kids this way makes them fragile and fragile personalities are UNHAPPY. Medication in many ways is just the next logical step in bulldozing. MY kid will never be unhappy, says the mother making her kids unhappy. As I have probably said (I have this dread of repeating myself, but I write so much I have no hope of remembering everything), this is one of the most appealing and I think powerful aspects of the Harry Potter novels. Those kids were constantly subjected to major challenges, which they were expected to meet. This aspect has absolutely nothing to do with magic, but it still evokes Another World, doesn’t it, when we live in one of Helicopters and Lawnmowers? Nobody was molly-coddling those kids. Quite the opposite.

And I have a deeper post on this topic coming up, someday, but for now I will introduce the topic of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths, which are vastly easier if you use the Sanskrit terms, which are Duhkha, Samutpanna, Nirodha, and Nirvana. There is a connection here, I think, if you bear with me. And don’t let those words scare you. I am after all preaching against fear (although the preachees of course can and do walk away, which for my part I accept).

Duhkha is pain or discomfort or dissatisfaction. It is usually translated as “suffering”, as in “The first Noble Truth is Suffering.” The basic idea (as I conceptualize it, without even daring to use the word understand) is that we all live to some degree in delusion. As a necessity of life we are almost forced by emotional gravity to conceal from ourselves unhappiness, pain, and confusion. We develop robotic social selves that are adaptive, that get us through the day, but that are not really satisfying, since we are lying to ourselves. Large parts of our emotional energies are expended in self and other deception. We don’t just play parts with others, we play them with ourselves too, and this is an unhappy thing.

Samutpanna means “growing”, in its most literal sense. The basic idea is that we feed Duhkha inadvertently. We don’t choose it. It just kind of happens. But it has causes that are knowable. What is has a source. This is logical enough, but also optimistic in a way much modern philosophy has lost.

Nirodha—cessation—consists in the obvious idea that what grows also wanes, that what was built can be unbuilt, that a road one way can be redirected another way.

And Nirvana means “extinguishing”, as in a candle flame being blown out. In my own mind I distinguish this from Nirodha, which can also mean “extinguishing”, in that personal growth consists in untying knots, and learning to process “negative” experiences. Nirodha, then, would consist in doing introspective inventories, and gradually extinguishing knots of anger and clinging and stupidity, one by one, in a long term and progressive process. Nirvana would be completely that process, conceptually. Nirodha has to have a goal, and this is the goal.

One could visualize all this as a Bell Curve. A beginning, a growing, a diminishing, and an end. And perhaps even a loop, in that one could say that Nirvana is the full acceptance of Duhkha.

The Buddhists of course have a VAST literature. I don’t think most people who have not studied this know how vast it is. And much of it was lost. I visited what was arguably the first true University in the world, the Buddhist University at Nalanda in India, and even though I had known a Muslim conqueror had destroyed and burnt it, I had not known he took SIX MONTHS to do it. This was a very intentional act. Many texts only survived in Tibetan or Chinese. In my personal opinion, after the destruction of Buddhism in India, much of it blended with what became Hinduism. That is a complex history I won’t go into here, but suffice it to say the earliest Sanskrit texts were not only not vegetarian, but actively practiced animal sacrifice. I share that just because I think it is interesting, in one of the digressions I hope you all have mostly learned to forgive me for.

Be that as it may, what I want to suggest today is that this is a useful metaphor in many ways, and that “Nirvana” has many levels. There is a “nirvana” with respect to any problem. The problem happens, its genesis can be traced—one aspect in terms of our emotional well being is our REACTION to it, as we have all read somewhere or other—and a path can be found in which it is diminished either in reality, or accommodated to our lives, and then it is gone. Poof.

Is it possible any of us could possibly remember all the things we have worried about in our lives, all the problems we have solved and forgotten? As a general rule, we only remember for a long time the ones that could not be resolved in some way. And if we remember them, they are simply still present, but still on that curve of possible eradication; they remain flames that can still be extinguished, which is to say mourned and integrated.

I don’t want to be overly ambitious today, but I feel there are some good ideas here, that I feel merit pondering. Our popular culture is so barren. These sorts of things need to be said by someone. This is my version today.

This States Rights argument, which would have felt very comfortable in Confederate minds, fails for a simple reason: once the Leftit virus gets power anywhere, such as California, their elections NO LONGER REPRESENT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE. Look at LA: its been turned into a shithole and the only candidate who might have fixed it almost certainly got cheated out of his candidacy, which means the PEOPLE of LA got cheated. But who would bear the main responsibility for investigating it? Newsom’s apparachniks. The people of LA are fucked. They have lost the ability to vote their way out of this mess.

And this virus spreads. There are a lot of brainwashed people and Big Money behind this creeping de facto Fascism. California is now a stronghold. Illinois and New York likewise. So matter how badly Democrats fuck up, in conditions of fraud the voters are HELPLESS.

I argued in 2020 and will argue again that ALL of the States have an interest—a direct political and financial and even social and cultural interest—in the validity of the elections in other States. My reasoning is simple: Congress enacts policy that affects everyone and if the people sent WERE NOT ELECTED, then we all suffer. The same holds but arguably more with the President.

And there is a direct analogy to be made with Jim Crow. Black folks were being denied the right to vote. Who fixed it? Republicans, first with a series of Constitutional Amendments, and then with direct civil rights engagement.

The Federal government exists, in part and perhaps in whole, to protect all US citizens from tyranny. If that tyranny is enacted in Stares, it is both in our practical self interest and our moral duty to defend those people.

We dont really know the extent of the fraud but it is clearly massive. It is organized, well funded, very intentional and probably involves China and others

We desperately need to establish the right, in extremis, for the Federal government to prevent fraud, which is very literally the true protection of democracy. How, as the most powerful nation on the planet, do we have the stupidest elections? India does better than us, and they have 4-5 times as many people.

This whole thing makes my brain hurt. When Texas sued in 2020 and Roberts turned white and ran—claiming they “lacked standing”, as if States electing crooks up to the level of President didnt affect them—we lost a huge opportunity.

We cant survive when our highest protectors and representatives are crooks, idiots, and cowards, often all three.

But here is the thing: if you know, as a Democrat, that an illegal vote will amplify your vote, and not negate it, you don’t really care. The people screaming about DEMOCRACY don’t give a shit about democracy. Not one flying fuck. What they care about is winning, and if cheating is how they need to do it, then that is what they are going to do.

And to state the stunningly obvious, PEOPLE WHO CHEAT THEIR WAY INTO POWER DO NOT STOP CHEATING WHEN THEY GET POWER. Is that clear enough? As a general rule, once radicals have power, it takes a civil war or foreign invasion to dislodge them, as Iran is finding out.

And should it not be illegal for judges to arrogate to themselves more power than they have actually been granted? How is that not dictatorial? They are asking us to respect THEM, but holding us in contempt by asking us to obey patently illegal and illegitimate orders. Our system has been working based on precedent and manners and respect for the system, but if the men and women in robes go rogue, we should have a means to fire them, debar them, and in extreme cases of judicial law breaking—and that is literally what we are talking about, the empowerment of criminality by those we trusted to enforce and protect the laws—putting these horrible people in jail.

I have in mind this bitch who keeps reinstating a national ban on ELECTION INTEGRITY, despite being told by the Supreme Court that 1) she is wrong in this case; and 2) she has no national jurisdiction anyway. So she just uses sheer audacity and the reasonable expectation that she won’t be disbarred or arrested. That should not be a reasonable expectation. When people we trust betray that trust, they should get kicked in the ass and locked up. That is my view.

One last comment: Judicial Review is probably unConstitutional, but the only body which could declare it so, in our current state of affairs, is the Supreme Court, which is the body who asserted it originally. But a law could be passed which explicitly bars the Supreme Court from that sort of thing. It was intended to be the ultimate arbiter of conflicts between States, not a body which could replace Congress with impunity. We have given all of these courts a pass since things mostly work well; but they are growing indifferent to the actual law in far too many cases, and that is very dangerous.

You know, it’s hard to protect fucking democracy when there are so many emotionally callow, intellectual shallow crooks out there. Our society gets the government we deserve, and we are in steep cultural decline. It will take a miracle to turn things around. I believe in miracles, but until then I will periodically let loose a rant I will blame no one for not wanting to read. I’m angry, and this is me letting loose, in what I hope is at least a coherent way.

Largest year over year drop in crime sinve 1936. Our problems have solutions. Never forget that. And dont forget there are many—mostly on the Left—who BENEFIT from problems they can use politically.

People who suppress awareness of their own emotions tend to suppress other people. Their logic is simply deployed to rationalize it. The Left is a group of people who are completely emotionally unattuned to their own psyches. What other sort of person could commit or condone atrocities in the name of tolerance or compassion?

People who welcome ALL of their emotions, in contrast, can welcome and tolerate and feel HONEST compassion for others.

We dont have a national POLITICAL problem, but one of grotesquely muted emotional intelligence, that feeds on bad ideas. This is our core problem and the core challenge to be seen and faced.

The Laffer Curve, as most people at one time knew—and I will openly hope all of you still know, without assuming it—comes from the economic studies of Arthur Laffer. What he did is look at historical tax rates, and historical tax revenue. In our world, it needs to be stated that those are two different things. When the top tax rate was 100% under FDR over a certain income, nobody paid it. Why would anyone work just so the State could take everything? So self evidently, anyone budgeting expected revenues assuming people WOULD pay that tax was wrong. A shortfall was inevitable, and this fact was obvious at the outset for the non-delusional.

He found the ideal rate was in most cases about 25%, if memory serves, although it would obviously vary somewhat by time and place and circumstance; I assume this was of total taxation, between Federal, State, and Local. People at that rate are forking over a significant part of their incomes, but not so much that they resent it too much, and start finding ways to avoid it. Any producer, of course, can reduce their taxes by producing less. This becomes a cost/benefit analysis. How much work is it worth sacrificing to keep what is left? Money also of course moves: large amounts of money are moving out of California and New York, and many businesses are leaving Illinois. Why? Taxes and regulations concocted by ignorant morons. Or crooks. Most likely healthy doses of both.

If one looks at total government income, in other words, it goes UP until you reach about 25%, then it goes DOWN again. A 100% tax on billionaires would net almost nothing over the course of 5 years. It’s not netting much in California, or won’t for long, since those who would be liable to these payments are moving. Simple. It’s not complicated.

But to my point today, rights work the same way. There is a curve. Up until a certain point the lives in aggregate of a society improve. Past a certain point—which has certainly been passed when I am legally obliged to pretend men are women, or to register my firearms with people who are on the record as wanting to confiscate them—the society gets worse again.

There is a happy middle. This is a good, generalizable principle, and the root of the idea behind this website.

And I will add that the general idea of the Laffer Curve is empirically indisputable, in my view. As I have pointed out often, actual receipts went up after both the Reagan and Bush tax cuts (and probably the Trump tax cuts, although I have not looked at that). Expenditures simply went up more. The specifics are of course very debatable. The sweet spot could vary year by year.

One last point I will make is that the amount of money people willingly hand over over the long haul depends a lot on how much they trust the government. The “sweet spot” depends a lot on a sense of inclusion and shared interest. With trust, the percentage goes up. Absent trust, down.

Right now, people with a long term and undeniable history of being crooks are demanding we in the United States vastly increase the power of government, which is to say our trust in them. That’s a non-starter for anyone with three brain cells to rub together. In Denmark it is another animal. There are not as many crooks in Denmark. They flock like mosquitoes around a lamp at night here, though, and even when caught the crooks cover for each other. No matter what they do, what they get caught doing, almost no one goes to jail. Ever. They may yet win by cheating and force (a corrupted judiciary), but their malice and destructiveness are really undeniable. We have been warned. This train is sounding its horn.

In my opinion, they should sue the WNBA for a clear civil rights violation. They are obviously qualified to play basketball, and they meet the legal requirements to play, as currently defined. Legally, the WNBA has to either define a woman or let them play.

They want an assembly more responsive to The People, which is to say to propaganda and manipulation; people who in general know almost nothing they are not being told in real time. They dont remember yesterday, and lack the capacity to plan for tomorrow, but our indoctrination system is great at teaching people to repeat and both to get angry and to stay silent on command. Thats who they say they want in charge. An idiot mob they can brainwash. Many of us, of course, are not idiots, but people like us they want to push to the side by any means necessary.

Would monied interests be removed by such a process? What do you think? Faster decisions, less debate, more emotion, less care. What could be better for people with money? They could get things done they have long dreamed of. It would make sense for them to place long bets on these idiot kids. Why not? You might need to put your money in through a group called “Small business owners for freedom”, but thats a minor question of logistics. One cutout would suffice.

But what I wanted mainly to say is that the appeal of a fast body is you can get things done. Medicare for all. Eliminate ICE. Start putting cops in jail for doing their jobs. Capitulate to the Chinese. Etc. My God: imagine the Narcissistic Supply that would generate. Even in flames they would feel like gods.

People who do not read history always complain about how slow things are in our system, how hard it is to make large changes. But it was built that way, on the accurate belief that it is more important to prevent bad policy than to streamline good policy. Often which is which is unclear, and it takes time to sort it out.

But you know who brags about their ability to get things done? Fascists. The DemSoc National Assembly is a fig leaf for Fascism.

Our Constitution is a work of genius. It combines responsiveness in the House with deliberation in the Senate, and a strong Executive to keep an eye on both. We are blessed to have it, even if we are also cursed with engineered imbeciles.

Can you feel that in yourself, that sensation?

A phone is a small, portable, and reliable antidote to helplessness. But the corollary is that as people get used to using and relying on that form of power, their outer power diminishes. They lose interest in hobbies. They perhaps interact less physically with other people. They go out less. They do fewer physical things. Can you feel that?

And one of the things that phones reliably provide is outrage. Anger. And many of us are, I think, addicted to these feelings. I myself seem to feel a sense of relief sometimes seeing stupid things on the internet that I can respond to. Pace my last post, I can march in and “rescue” the thread by inserting my own views. It is perhaps true that I rarely accuse anyone of anything I am not myself mildly guilty of.

Leaving aside whether or not I am actually contributing anything genuinely helpful to anyone, what is the “psychological math” of this process?

Here is what I will propose today: most of us value an uncomfortable feeling that is familiar over an unfamiliar feeling that feels good. If you get to feel outrage and anger every day, paradoxically that is comforting. It’s something many of us say hello to every morning. We wave to it. It’s our home town. We would miss it if it disappeared. It should not be that way, but I think it is that way, for many, including me most days.

Some thoughts. Much of what I write is explorational. It’s sketches, renderings, possibilities. I have found over time that going over the same ground many times in many different ways seems to leave much bigger latent understandings. The goal is always first to know what you know, know what you don’t know, and eventually to not know what you do in fact know, which is to say to acquire large scale latent competence in many domains. That area can become quite large indeed. This was once called wisdom. It is so rare now, I don’t know that we have a publicly agreed upon word. In our fallen world, we seem to value most what we call expertise, which is usually complacent cowardice consisting in equal portions science and politics. It’s sad.

Of all nations on the planet, I myself associate Germany most closely with intense abstraction. Kant. Classical music. Physics and math. They invented the modern research university, in my understanding, as well as the basic structure of Ph.D programs all our universities use.

In excess, as I argued in my last post, abstraction leads to disowned and destructive emotions. What I will suggest today is that the spirit of the Nazis never disappeared. The needed psychic healing never happened. The real problem with Nazism and Communism is not really the specific ideas but how they are held. They are held as emotional shields from unwanted emotional pain, and thus manifest cruelty, stupidity and dogmatic irrationality. They pursue irrational ends rationally.

The Greens embody this spirit. They have in aggregate created pain, and as far as I can tell created nothing genuinely positive. And now this same spirit of irrational Oppositionalism is being directed at the AfD, which is calling for nothing more or less than that Germany remain German. The ideal of a nation in which it is not necessary to tell people rape and murder are wrong is not radical.

In one era they hated Jews. In this era they hate truth tellers. The Geist is the same, in my view.

Now, we know, neurophysiologically, that cognition can never be severed from emotion and sensation. A brain in a vat would probably not be able to do math. And in the event, all thinking is colored and tinged by feeling. We cannot do it otherwise. Typically we insert the emotion into our premises, and then dedicate our reason to the following conclusions. But some part of us still registers that whole. The idea that “The Jews” were, or are, a threat, is purely emotional (I will note that I am reading Maus, so this example came readily to mind). But one can and people do draw rational conclusions from this essentially irrational premise, which starts with the falsehood that “The Jews” can be defined and generalizations made about them. This is prima facie impossible. What CAN be gathered together is an anxiety from which an apparent perception can be projected. That is both possible and part of the historical record.

For me, I never quite completed my transmogrification into an irrational Rationalist. I kept too much feeling, too much passion. I am not fully rational, but I KNOW that I am not fully rational, which in my view makes me more rational than someone who behaves absurdly while following clear thought processes. But pondering it all this morning, I realized that if I had become a confident pseudo-rationalist, I still would have needed a placeholder for all the leaking, left over feeling. Where would it have gone? Where could it have gone? Well, historically, for me, it went into Fantasy novels and the like. I lived in another world, where emotions were allowed. But it has been many years since that was possible for me.

Then it struck me that the Tech world, by and large, is filled with emotionally dissociated people as well. These are the people who largely control the internet and our public discourse. They are the ones whose biases have outsized influences.

I probably should have been an engineer myself. All my friends in high school were into computer programming, and as I have shared, one of them led the team that built the iPhone. That person—Richard Williamson—said in an interview about his early days that he was big into World of Warcraft, which made perfect sense to me. I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with him and a group of similar sorts. We loved all of that, the release, the escape, the alternative worlds where we could be empowered and free. That’s who I was. And you’ve met these people.. Maybe you are one. If so, I am your cousin, if not quite your brother.

So what do they do? They write code, say, all day long, which looks like this:

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {    int a, b, sum;    printf("Enter two integers: ");    scanf("%d %d", &a, &b);    sum = a + b;    pr
intf("Sum = %d\n", sum);    return 0;}

And what do they do at night? They watch Marvel movies, or play World of Warcraft and other video games, OR, they dedicate themselves passionately on-line to POLITICS.

And ponder this: what sort of politics would this sort of personality need? The design requirements would include strong, simple, easily evoked emotions; social reinforcement so that they know they are playing the part of normal humans; and simple narratives, that have stripped away the complexities and variabilities of human emotions. Cartoons, in other words. They need cartoons.

What meets these requirements? Left wing politics, obviously [although some are Libertarians: both share an emotionally dissociated dogmatism. Libertarians have the advantage that their core ideas make sense, and they are not telling anyone else how to live their lives]. Conservatives are all about getting government to leave us alone. There are no knights in shining armor, no striking heroes in a world where all you want is to be allowed to live your life your way, although of course we do value those who fight back against the Left, like Trump. Nobody out there can help me live my life. No: such emotionally disconnected people need to RESCUE someone, someone in need, someone who is calling out “Help me!! Help m!!” “Fear not, damsel or They in distress!!! It is I, and I am almighty (on my computer keyboard.” They have a need to rescue, so they manufacture the perception—note I am saying they create the perception without needing to reference reality for a moment—of people who need to be rescued.

I have long said that on the internet every day is Halloween. And every day is fit for emotional CosPlay, for playing a role, which here is playing the role of the caring and brave person. That is a great role for people who are neither caring nor brave. It’s Dungeons and Dragons, but literally applied to the real world, with all the actual problems one would expect ideas rooted in juvenile fantasies to create when implemented. Mamdani, at root, is a CosPlayer.

That is all the DemSocs are. It’s real world CosPlay. They don’t understand anything. They don’t want to help anyone. They want to FEEL like they are helping people. It’s all about feelings, feelings that they DO NOT KNOW HOW to integrate in their daily lives, in their actual physical relationships, or into anything approaching an adult and differentiated psyche.

To my mind, the reasoning of Silicon Valley billionaires in supporting Democrats is simple: Democrats are the party where you can buy the policies you want most easily. Both parties are corrupt, but Democrats are more corrupt. And it’s made even easier by the fact that, because Democrats attack billionaires, nobody is even talking about your donations and policy purchases. Those discussions are Verboten, when it comes to billionaires who support the Left. In fact, people you buy will even attack your business rivals for you, if those rivals are unwilling to play the game the way you do. Musk, we are told is evil. But nobody is talking about Tim Cook, or Eric Schmidt, or Bill Gates, or Larry Ellison or any of the rest, are they? They are billionaires, but not bad billionaires. That is the story the media—which they or people like them have bought—sticks to.

But why the rank and file support? Why are the guys and gals in the cubicles also such hard care destructive nihilists, seen accurately, and such raging puritanical moralists, in their own minds? That is the question I am trying to answer here.

Actually, I will put this another way: Leftists are people who have been acculturated not just with bad ideas they were fed in school back then, and are regurgitating reflexively now. They also are clinging to the emotional tone of most American media. Our media is violent. Does anyone want to dispute that? Horribly violent. It deals in general with Good Guys and Bad Guys, but as I have said in recent years, that line has become blurred. I probably see more tshirts and bumper stickers in support of the Empire than the Rebellion. More Darth Vader and less Luke Skywalker. More darkness and less light. Hockey Masks and Captain Kirk masks (Halloween), and lots of knives. The duality has been retained, but many Americans have switched sides. If you doubt me, go visit the pop culture store in your mall. Try Spencers, which is nearly everywhere. Look at the posters and tshirts and ask yourself what sort of people buy these things, and particularly how emotionally healthy they are, how differentiated and adult. Yes, it is mostly 20-somethings, but 100 years ago that age meant adulthood.

And our media is emotionally unintelligent. It is lacking in nuance. So why would our politics be any different? Why would we NOT be looking for simple Good versus Evil, but increasingly rejecting the historic Good—which has been “problematized” by an orthodox radical education—in favor of an Evil that feels emotionally connected to the Other in ways we are we are supposed to support? How, in other words, is it not obviously the point and purpose of Communist propaganda to flip Good and Evil in ways that by any common sense reckoning in fact serve Evil, which is to say impersonal violence and cruelty?

There is a lot of complexity here, so I will draw a line. I will explore this more soon in another post. I will end this post by noting America is sick in many ways. We are not healthy, physically, emotionally or intellectually, by and large. And there is nothing automatic about genuine progress. Honest social advancement is in general hard work, and anything that does not feel like hard work is probably regressive. And there is nothing preventing generalized destruction. Entropy is one of the laws of the universe, and even if there is a Negentropic force—as I believe—it is in general less obvious than the tendency of things to fall down and stay down. Still, miracles happen. I will believe that to my dying day. Never quit. Not in anything significant.

I can work to improve myself. I do that every day, although God alone knows how successful I am. And I can write things like this. At that, I reach the limits of my kingdom, of my actual power. I seek to influence people, but you know what? I don’t want to rescue you. That is properly your job, and I am a thief if I interfere. And I will say this: only in conditions where genuine, if short term, failure is possible, is true learning possible. I think that is true.

But what I want to share today—please forgive me for using the word sharing—is that Firestone’s basic premise, that of the Fantasy Bond, could be summarized as “Most houses are not a home but a shared hallucination.”

I really feel this. This is how my own house was. I say house in lieu of home. A home is a place where you “feel felt”, to use the apt and wonderful cliche. It is a place of security that at the same time promotes independence. It is a place of love. This is the ideal, one rarely realized any more. But I have met reasonably well adjusted people. It happens.

Extending this idea, though, why would not the HABIT of hallucination not extend into politics? Why would the social dysfunctions of so many homes—in which the TV is an integral element, a focusing point, a constant background suggestion, relief, and tantalizer—not devolve into a loss of connection, for which habits of pretending are substituted? Why would people not learn to pretend love when they have lost the capacity for the real thing? Why would this not have generalized political consequences? Why would the “compassion” of cynical thieves—who steal using the vehicle and cover of politics—not seem just as real as what they felt at home? And since they never got what they really needed, and still need it, why would those siren calls not feel like a shiny possible relief from the anxiety and frustration and loneliness of modern life? At least a possible return to something good? A chance? An “it might work, maybe. I hope it does.”? I feel strongly this is how it works, probably particularly for lonely women.

And I have found over the years that sometimes I am the one articulating feelings most other people in the room have as well. We all play roles—to some extent, although the extent can vary from pro forma up to the complete loss of Self. We do our duties, we go out, perform mental health and good adjustment, then come home and drop on the couch or bed and feel the fear, or sadness, or grief, or complete and utter confusion. I’ve of course been there many many times. I myself always got drunk for many years.

It’s worth saying out loud that this sort of thing happens. And I want to say today that I don’t know about you, but for ME I feel like the world has just started moving differently somehow, that we are in a pause before a storm. I don’t know if that’s true (of course), but I feel that. The days feel odd to me, waiting for whatever is going to come next. It will certainly be AI, Robots, and the change they will bring. It may be large scale political change, for better or worse—or both, as usual. We may cure cancer and we may all get cancer from our shots, or phones. Or something else. That the current generations have not in general been properly educated or even socialized is pretty obvious, and that this will have consequences everywhere is obvious. And so on.

I have been tempted many times to say I love all of you. When I feel darkness I tend to react with affection, and I do have a considerable amount of affection in me, but it is tempered by and compounded with fear, grief, detestation, irritability, and standoffishness. That’s not good.

But another temptation that I have often felt and will in fact indulge here is to say that all of you are LOVEABLE. To tell someone they are loveable is to say something true. We are all loveable, if not by human love, then divine love, which understands and forgives everything, including all of the forms of madness to which we humans are prone. Evil is nothing but a solitude and grief driven madness. I can see this clearly (or at least think I can).

Say after me: I am Loveable. But not too many times or you will get a picture of Al Franken and Michael Jordan (I like to send that video to my kids before major life challenges).

Do you FEEL loveable? I don’t, most of the time. So be it. I accept my lack of acceptance.

You know, we are all guessing. Life is confusing. We don’t have the facts. Some people think they have the facts, but they don’t, not really. In the face of so much uncertainty, it sure helps to be kind, but honestly so. Not “I hate you because you are not kind”. That’s a major malfunction. No: “I know myself, and how prone to error I can be. I know we are all guessing. Let’s just try to pay attention, to not repeat mistakes, to try and care about everyone and everything to some extent, knowing that compromises and trade-offs—that we can discuss—are inevitable.”. That is the narrative of a sustainable civilization.

I was going to say more. Of course, I was always going to say more, and today is a day ending in y. But I will leave it there for now. I don’t know if this was worth writing or reading, but I feel like the answer is yes to both, or I would not have posted it.