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From Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler -- Rubashov, meditating in cell: Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found out that those processes wrongly known as "monologues" are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you", in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observations and even refuses to be localized in time and space.
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MY NOTE: Koestler also wrote The Ghost in the Machine. Gilbert Ryle discussed an idea of ghost in the machine in The Concept of Mind. To me, it seems reasonable to conceptualize locally rationalized experiences of qualitative mind as expressing themselves with quantitative substance. However, it does not seem reasonable to conceptualize mind and substance as independent, yet coexisting opposites. Rather, both mind and substance seem to be expressions of perspectives of a unitary. However, qualitative apprehensions of that unitary for consisting of one or the other, mind or substance, seem to depend on point of view, frame of reference, and purpose of perspective. I would tend not to agree with an interpretation that would try to reduce consciousness to merely emergent phenomenon, inferior to measurable substance (as if measurable substance were the superior to immeasurable spirit). That is, I don't believe consciousness is merely severable, derivative, or reducible to space-time slices of substance. While I suspect many experiences of fields may be sliced and limited in space-time, I suspect there abides an encompassing, connecting, and immeasurable field of contemporaneous determination to which that severability does not measurably apply. I would not expect to derive belief in that field from empirical quantification, but perhaps only from direct, qualitative experience.
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I am now reading The Secret. Alhough I find much truth in it (and awe concerning the nature of "I"), I hold some obvious reservations. Some competitions ARE mutually exclusive, such that one cannot accomplish everything one desires -- especially were one to desire to put a boot on the desires of competent others. You know (but many ignore) that some aspects of beingness ARE zero sum. For examples: racing contests between predators and prey; wrestling and gambling matches; carbon credits. I would also include dominance contests within hierarchies, as between useful idiots and sociopathic freaks who get their jollies by hurting others. There ARE some people and ideas that cannot be tolerated without tolerating the destruction of oneself or prevailing decency. For example, one cannot tolerate the idea of death to apostates at the same time one serves the idea that even apostates should be availed the dignity of seeking after truth -- wherever it may lead them. A kind of blindness descends when one seeks to dominate rather than persuade. That blindness seems dangerous to every social philosophy. It seems especially prevalent among those that espouse "the answer" which they then seek to impose on others -- regardless of whether such others are led to adopt it for themselves. Then, "the answer" becomes dehumanizing rather than inspiring or enlightening. It is interesting to read The Secret juxtaposed with Darkness at Noon. Temporally, it seems one either succeeds in throwing off those who would oppress one's philosophy, or one succumbs. One can serve a philosophy of cooperative dignity or of fascistic invasive dominance. Much depends on one's view of the Deity (or Consciousness Field) as being essentially guiding (let the children come) or fascistic (obey or die).
The field of consciousness (God) can be worthily meditated about, consulted, importuned, and worshipped from a wide variety of figures of speech However, no mortal can confine God to measure or control under any single conceptualization. One can choose to participate with the Deity (1) in respect of its capacity to facilitate mutual respect and caring cooperation, or (2) in respect of its capacity to fuel fanaticism that seeks to rule under fraudulent elites. One can relate to God (1) as a guide to consult in good faith and good will, or (2) as a despot to help sociopaths justify enserfment of majorities comprised of the most naive, ignorant, and corrupt. Why should any decent, thinking person choose door number 2? Why should any decent, thinking person devote his life to trying to force the world to pretend it believes any single, maddeningly detailed, contrived history or psychology of God to be measurably factual? It seems enlightened society must always pursue, but never fully obtain, freedom from the most naive, ignorant, and corrupt.
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8 comments:
The politicians are only the help, and the article assumes they are hired by ordinary Americans. However, ordinary Americans are disassimilated, and the real employers are elsewhere, driven by their own agenda. And it is not an American agenda. Politicians cannot practice their trade unless they are hired and bankrolled, and they are not hired or bankrolled by any assimilated culture of Americans. The signs are beyond obvious. Obama is acid to what used to be American values. Everyone knows that, yet Obama is not fired. If the powers that shape things wanted to dump Obama, they could flick him away. He is barely a figurehead, more like a golf caddy than a golfer. I hope Romney can be an improvement. However, common sense suggests he will have to be beholden to much the same agenda. Mainly, we're talking bread and circuses; divide, distract, and rule. Ordinary Americans do not think, and they are happy to let the agenda driven and owned media do their thinking for them. No charismatic leadership, and certainly no coterie of Ivy thinkers, has derived, inspired, or convinced Americans of any real system of values around which to assimilate and organize a decent society. Judeo Christian values are being ground out by seemingly unstoppable forces of darkness and dehumanization. Meanwhile, la la people assume all will be well if everyone simply thinks and attracts happy thoughts, per The Secret. I don't mean to be misunderstood. I happen to believe in a connecting field of consciousness. I just don't think its all about lovey-dovey. It's illuminating to read The Secret alongside Darkness at Noon. Idealism is fine, but we need eyes opened. Unfortunately, I much doubt eyes will open until the hard times actually hit us on our collective heads. Even then, rebuilding and reassmiliating decency will take a long time.
There have been other nations in history that have been run by crimanti, thuganti, and ignoranti. The problem faced by every decent society is how to deal with such vermin without fanaticizing them, unduly empowering or enriching them, or allowing them to undermine decent societies. Honest individuals, whether as perons or nations, play an asymmetrical game when they try to play and engage in "free trade" with corrupt regimes. An honest individual who dis-assimilates his principled bearings in order to deal with such gangsters is soon torn asunder. Gangsters soon corrupt all others who deal with them, eventually to buy them out. Especially when such others have sold out all virtue in order to pretend to be wordly and wise. No means is off limits for gangsters of Marxism, Islam, and International Corporatism in the pursuit of their ends. For them, the only value is oneself and the cause. Other people don't count except insofar as they can be regimented to the pack. Gangsters are not interested in individual free enterprise. They are interested in gangster owned and operated enterprise. There is no such thing as "free trade" with them, nor will free trade in itself ever reform them! Why should they ever reform, so long as they can prey on hosts? If the West wants to preserve individual dignity, its various nations will have to assimilate backbones and stop enriching collectives of gangsterism. If the West fails, its fall will be more the result of metrosexual, suicidal loss of nerve than historical determinism. Meantime, MSNBC-like cheerleaders for gangster collectivism have thoroughly infested every Western institution of social significance, even the U.S. presidency. The West needs to come together in humility before righteousness, not under collectivist force, but in appreciation for the God-given dignity of each person's pursuit of meaningful truth.
No thinking person need read the Constitution to immunize crime just because crime were to adopt religious rituals. Islam, as practiced, is a crime against humanity. "Religion" pertains to what you believe on faith, not to what you pretend to believe because you know apostasy would get you killed. To call Islam a protected religion is be blind to insanity.
In a "more perfect" world, I would prefer a progressive tax on consumption, with no tax on domestic corporations --- provided rules for operating internationally under the corporate form were redrafted to be friendly to the preservation of independent republics.
However, to not have any kind of progressive tax is to serve the NWO. There is little that international corporatist despots would like better than a right enshrined in law to agglomerate rent seeking advantages while calling it merit based. That greases the crony way to buying, owning, and selling politicians, i.e., nations. That kind of "open society" destroys cultural boundaries and plays into the hands of the most corrupt of the faithless. It would be acid to any hope to acculturate and defend a decent republic.
To organize the community is to excite the naive, the ignorant, and the corrupt. It's an end-justifying-means way of handling things that seems appropriate to war. Despite pretense, there's an undercurrent of war among competing ideologies: NWO international crony corporatism v. mind subjugating Islam v. despotic ruled collectivists. All these warriors seek to reduce every decent culture of educated, representative republicanism to sheep for the shearing. A representative republic cannot survive in such a world without a stalwart and assimilated electorate that has its own champions to call upon. At present, republics are being divided and dismantled. Thereafter, the warring factions mean to carve up territories. Most citizens of republics have been oblivious to an undercurrent of war, distracted by clowns, frivolities, and provocateurs. Even now, they remain oblivious to viral infestations of republican cultures.
Much of Organized Religion seems to have been undermined and commercially saturated with saccharine. It seems to be about unconditional, non-discriminating "love" for everything and everybody. There's probably even a god contrived for Nambla folk to worship, who "loves" their practices. The idea, friendly to absurdists and to la la people, seems to be to make you feel guilty if you discriminate about any values. This plays in with Marxism, where the trump value pertains to redistribution of material wealth. It also plays in with Islamic rationalizations for jihad. For inculcating decent, sustainable, civilizing values of human freedom and dignity, much of organized religion seems to have made itself irrelevant. Why else would most Catholics, at least among those I know, be Democrats?
Lefty (un-American, un-West, un-free) propaganda would have it that there is no such thing as an American culture or set of values. The more that is accepted, the more Lefties win. There is obviously a set of American values! It is the set that leads the values of the West. To say there is no American culture is as absurd as to say there is no Western culture. A core of American culture consists in the following: Pursuit of that which facilitates decent regard for individual pursuits of freedom and dignity. That is the antithesis of mind-subjugating, politically-correct collectivism and elitist rule! Ideally, it means this: no aristocrats; no nomenklatura; no buying and selling of politicians; no religious hierarchy licensed to incite inquisitions and political jihad. American culture, to preserve itself, needs to define limits to what it will tolerate. Those who want to undermine ("fundamentally change") fundamental American culture need to be invited in the strongest terms to leave.
Collectivists believe neither in freedom nor in availing dignity for each person to pursue unfoldings of his own determination. Rather, they believe the supreme good is in equality of material redistribution, as "persuaded" by nomenklatura. Collectivists have no patience for defining "freedom" except in convenience, to grease its fall down the memory hole. For Lefty's, freedom's just a play word for re-diverting the masses. They know their definition leads to "darkness at noon," but they believe the struggle to impose their mind-death is foreordained by the godless god of historical determinism. The desired result of Marxist struggle and Islamic jihad is much the same: Collectivist Borgdom. This is why Marxists and Muslims are allies against the West. It's also why The Won is a Marxist Muslim. When a collectivist says "freedom," he's lying.
I suspect the problem of distribution based on merit is about to be more complicated by robotics than by politics. As robotics replaces labor, what is the good of disassimilating our culture in the name of markets for cheap labor? Alternative ways for rewarding merit may need to be found, although it is very difficult to conceive what they may be.
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