Legislation vs. Morality

 

My mother had a few bromides that have stuck with me over the years.  "Don't poop where you sleep" was a good one.  "Keep your pecker out of the payroll" is one that has kept me out of trouble for the better part of 35 years.

But she used to repeat, watching the news of the day, that "You can't legislate morality."  I've been working that out since I was 18, and on it's face, it's completely bullshit, since Moses' Ten Commandments and the Hammurabi code are both results of the steady and continual watching of goal-oriented behavior long enough to extract and embody those things which were most important to a burgeoning society.

Thus is morality, and thus is it embodied in law.

But I get what Ma was trying to express.  We've watched it get worse and worse over the past 35 years. What she meant, and what we've seen, are laws that contradict morality.  

Morality is simply the rank ordering of patterns of behavior that are most important to us.  Think about it.  What is the best thing you could be?  

Maybe that thing would be someone who voluntarily accepted to be denied by his friends, betrayed by his church, and tortured to death by his state, in order to wash the burden of sin from mankind.  Something like that, I reckon.  I can't conceive of anything more heroic.  Hit me up in the comments if you can perceive anything more awesome than that.

So, that's the highest, as nearly as I can determine.  

Here recently, anyone who would try to act in such a manner would be branded as a "white supremacist" (regardless of race.  See: Larry Elder.)  He would be branded as a "domestic terror risk".  

I think what Ma meant when she said "you can't legislate morality" was that it is very important for us not to confuse God with the government.  

God loves you.

Your government looks upon you as chattel.

God expects you to sacrifice appropriately to become a better person and strive to transcend the suffering that is endemic to living on this mortal coil.  

Your government expects you to consume as you are instructed, be smart enough to pull levers and push buttons upon command and no smarter.  To readily and cheerfully act in a manner that benefits them personally.  

We can see a diversion between the two ideals.  The government is not your God.  It is comprised of barely competent office holders who have no consideration for your lot in life and are actively hostile toward you if your interests conflict with theirs.  We'll never fix that.  It's baked in.  We have to realize this fact and simply go on our way...

Our way to becoming worthy of Christ's sacrifice, on a path to transcend the pain of existence through forthright thought and action.  

When choosing who may represent us, I recommend looking for those who might defend us from those wearying bureaucrats described above.  We should demand that those who represent us have the chief quality of wanting us to be free of restriction, able to achieve our goals, and unfettered in our natural rights.  

In that manner, we may realize a government that once again is more concerned with the freedom of its citizens, while disregarding the temptation to force us into a chosen manner of behavior. 

That is the way.  To demand more of ourselves and expect more of those who wish to speak on our behalf.   

Unclean

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part V

 

More selected passages from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West.  This one is the last, best, and longest.  Taken from his talk on BBC radio on 24 March 1976.  This one truly brings home what came before us and the daunting task in front of us.  Please read this and share it as widely as you are able.

…The years went by.  The decades went by.  In spite of the Iron Curtain, views on what was happening in the West, what people were thinking about, kept coming through to us [in the USSR’s Gulags], mainly thanks to the BBC’s Russian broadcasts, although they were vigorously jammed.  And the more we learned, the more the state of your world perplexed us.

Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, over simplified explanations.  One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lost the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?  Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception? [Emphasis added]

This is precisely what we have found to be the correlation between the spiritual development of the East and that of the West.  And, alas, the process of your development is five, if not ten times swifter than ours.  This is what almost robs mankind of any hope of avoiding a global catastrophe.  For years we refused to believe this, thinking that the information which reached us was inadequate.  A few years ago I spoke of this with considerable alarm, in my Nobel lecture.

And yet, until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined the extreme degree to which the West actually desired to blind itself to the world situation, the extreme degree to which the West had already become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it, a world oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom.

There is a German proverb which runs “Mut verloren—alles verloren”: “When courage is lost, all is lost”.  There is another Latin one, according to which the loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction.  But what happens to a society in which both these losses—the loss of courage and the loss of reason—intersect?  This is the picture which I found the West presents today.

Of course there is a perfectly simple explanation for this process.  It is not the superficial one, so fashionable in our day, that man himself is irreproachable and everything is to be blamed on a badly organized society, but a purely human one.  Once, it was proclaimed and accepted that above man there was no supreme being, but instead that man was the crowning glory of the universe and the measure of all things, and that man’s needs, desires, and indeed his weaknesses were taken to be the supreme imperatives of the universe.  Consequently, the only good in the world—the only thing that needed to be done—was that which satisfied our feelings.  It was several centuries ago in Europe that this philosophy was born; at the time, its materialistic excesses were explained away by the previous excesses of Catholicism.  But in the course of several centuries this philosophy inexorably flooded the entire Western world, and gave it confidence for its colonial conquests, for the seizure of African and Asian slaves.   And all this side by side with the outward manifestations of Christianity and the flowering of personal freedom.  By the beginning of the twentieth century this philosophy seemed to have reached the height of civilization and reason.  And your country, Britain, which had always been the core, the very the pearl, of the Western world, gave expression with particular brilliance of this philosophy in both its good and its bad aspects.

In 1914, at the beginning of our ill-fated twentieth century, a storm broke over this civilization, a storm the size and range of which no one at that time could grasp.  For four years Europe destroyed herself as never before, and in 1917 a crevasse opened up on the very edge of Europe, a yawning gap enticing the world into an abyss.

The causes for this crevasse are not hard to find: it was the logical result of doctrines that been bandied about in Europe of ages and had enjoyed considerable success.  But this crevasse has something cosmic about it, too, in its unplumbed, unsuspected depths, in its unimaginable capacity for growing wider and wider and swallowing up more and more people.

Forty years earlier Dostoevsky had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims.  At the time it seemed an improbable figure.  Let me ask the British press to acquaint its readers with the impartial three-page report of the Russian statistician Professor Ivan Kurganov.  It was published in the West twelve years ago, but, as is so often the case with matters of social significance, we only notice things that are not contradictory to our own feelings.  From Professor Kurganov’s analysis, we learn that if Dostoevsky erred, he erred on the side of understatement.  From 1917 to 1959 socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives!   

When there is a geological upheaval, continents do not topple into the sea immediately.  The first thing that happens is that the fatal initial crevasse must appear someplace.  For a variety of reasons it so happened that this crevasse first opened up in Russia, but it might just as well have been anywhere else.  And Russia, which people considered a backward country, had to leap forward a whole century to overtake all the other countries in the world.  We endured inhuman experiences which the Western world—and this includes Britain—has no real conception of and is frightened even to think about.

It is with a strange feeling that those of us who come from the Soviet Union look upon the West today.  It is as though we were neither neighbors on the same planet nor contemporaries.  And  yet we contemplate the West from what will be your future, or we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating itself today.  And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval.  What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us.  But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be. [Emphasis Added]

Please go back and read that last paragraph aloud to yourself.  Solzhenitsyn said those words to us 45 years ago.

Pray.  Think, people.  Speak the truth.  Your freedom is your gift and your burden.  To earn it, you must carry it and hold it with the utmost care. 

 

 

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part IV

 

Day four of selected passages from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West, from his speech to the AFL-CIO in D.C. on 30 June 1975.  In ’75, for those too young to remember, the U.S. Government was trying to avoid Nuclear War with the USSR by pandering and détente.  Ford was not a strong voice for freedom.  Here’s what Alexandr thought of that diplomatic approach.  Again, note how this lines up with current events and how we’re dealing with China currently:

You have to understand the nature of Communism, all of Lenin’s teachings, are that anyone who doesn’t take what’s lying in front of him is considered a fool.  If you can take it, do so.  If you can attack, strike.  But if there’s a wall, then retreat. [No shit, that’s a direct fucking quote.]  The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.  Your people are now saying—and this is the last quotation Iam going to give you from the statements of your leaders—'Power, without any attempt at conciliation, will lead to a world conflict.’  But I would say that power with continual acquiescence is not power at all.

 From our experience I can tell you that only firmness makes it possible to withstand the assaults of Communist totalitarianism.  History offers many examples, and let me give you some of them.  Look at little Finland in 1939, which by its own forces withstood the attack.  You, in 1948, defended Berlin by your own firmness of spirit, and there was no world conflict.  In Korea in 1950 you stood up to the Communists, only by your firmness, and there was no world conflict.  In 1962 you forced the missiles to be removed from Cuba.  Again it was only firmness, and there was no world conflict.  The late Konrad Adenauer conducted firm negotiations with Khrushchev and initiated a genuine détente with Khrushchev, who started to make concessions…

 …We, the dissidents of the USSR, have no tanks, no weapons, no organization.  We have nothing.  Our hands are empty.  We have only our hearts and what we have lived through in the half century under this system.  And whenever we have found the firmness within ourselves to stand up for our rights, we have done so.  It is only by firmness of spirit that we have withstood.  And if I am standing here before you, it is not because of the kindness or good will of Communism, not thanks to détente, but due to my own firmness and your firm support.  They knew that I would not yield an inch, not a hair’s breadth.  And when they could do nothing they themselves fell back.

 …Finally to evaluate everything that I have said to you, we need not remain on the level of practical calculations.  Why did such and such a country act in such and such a way?  What were they counting on?  Instead we should rise above this to the moral level and say: ‘In 1933 and 1941 your leaders and the whole Western world made an unprincipled deal with totalitarianism.’  We will have to pay for this; someday it will come back to haunt us.  For thirty years we have been paying for it.  And we’re going to pay for it in an even worse way in the future. 

Look around.  Check’s come due.  Pay attention.

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part III

 

More from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West speech of 30 June 1975 in D.C., to the AFL-CIO.  He describes the context of the Communist system.  Most Americans aren’t tracking this information.  Not much of it has been taught in schools.  Note that the Soviet tyranny was several of orders of magnitude larger than that of Nazi Germany, and China is several orders of magnitude larger than the USSR.  With that in mind, as you read, note the parallels between the nascent Soviets and what is happening around us in Canada, Europe, and the US right now.  I lost count.

For decades on end, throughout the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1940’s, and 1950’s, the Soviet Press kept writing ‘Western Capitalism, your end is near.  We will destroy you.’

But it was as if the capitalists had not heard, could not understand, could not believe this.

Nikita Khrushchev came here and said, ‘We will bury you!’ They [the capitalists] didn’t believe that either.  They took it as a joke.

Now, of course, they [the Soviets] have become more clever in our country.  Today they don’t say ‘We are going to bury you,’ now they say, ‘Détente!’.

Nothing has changed in Communist ideology.  The goals are the same as they were, but instead of the artless Khrushchev, who couldn’t hold his tongue, now they say, ‘Détente.’

In order to make this clear, I will take the liberty of presenting a short historic survey—the history of these relations which in different periods have been called, ‘trade,’ ‘stabilization of the situation,’ ‘recognition of realities,’ and now ‘détente.’  These relations have at least a forty year history.

Let me remind you with what kind of system relations began [the Soviet System].

The system was installed by an armed uprising.

It dispersed the Constituent Assembly.

It capitulated to Germany—the common enemy.

It introduced punishment and execution without trial through the Cheka [Secret Police].

It crushed workers’ strikes.

It plundered the countryside to such and unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted, and when this happened it crushed the peasants in the bloodiest possible manner.

It smashed the Church.

It reduced twenty provinces of our country to utter famine.

This was in 1921, the infamous Volga famine. It was a typical Communist technique: to struggle for power without thinking of the fact that the productivity is collapsing, that the fields are not being sown, that the factories stand idle, that the country is sinking into poverty and famine—but when poverty and hunger do come, then turn to the humanitarian world for help.  We see this in North Vietnam today, Portugal is on the same path.  And the same thing happened in Russia in 1921.  When the three-year civil war, started by the Communists—and ‘civil war’ was a slogan of the Communists, civil war was Lenin’s purpose; read Lenin, this was his aim and his slogan—when they had ruined Russia by civil war, then they asked America, ‘America, feed our hungry.’ And indeed, generous and magnanimous America did feed our hungry…

…This was a system which was the first—long before Hitler—to employ false announcements of registration, that is to say: ‘Such and such persons must appear to register.’ People would comply and then they were taken away to be killed.  For technical reasons we didn’t have gas chambers in those days.  We used barges.  A hundred or a thousand persons were put into a barge and then it was sunk…

…This was a system which exterminated all other parties.  And let me make it clear to you that it not only disbanded each party, but destroyed its members.  All members of every non-Communist party were exterminated.

This was a system which carried out genocide of the peasantry.  Fifteen million peasants were shipped off to their deaths. 

This was a system which introduced serfdom, the so-called passport system.

This was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing six million persons to die in the Ukraine between 1932 and 1933.  They died on the very threshold of Europe. And Europe didn’t even notice it.  The world didn’t even notice it.  Six million persons!

 Keep all this in mind. The media narrative ignores Antifa, their destruction, and their arrogance while tacitly excusing their ideology.

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part II

 

Night 2 of the series of selections from Solzhenitsyn's "Warning to the West", published in 1976. This is part of his speech to the AFL-CIO on 30 June 1975.  Solzhenitsyn had just survived 10 years in the Soviet Gulags, and had been exiled from his homeland.  He wrote the Gulag Archipelago and won a Nobel Prize for doing so, back when that award had some meaning.

Let me remind you of a recent incident which some of you may have read about in the newspapers, although others might have missed it: certain of your businessmen, on their own initiative, set up an exhibit of criminological technology in Moscow.  This was the most recent and elaborate technology that here, in your country, is used to catch criminals, to bug them, to spy on them, to photograph them, to tail them, to identify them.  It was all put on exhibit in Moscow in order that the Soviet KGB agents could study it, as if the businessmen did not understand what sort of criminals would be hunted down by the KGB.

 

The Soviet government was extremely interested in this technology and decided to purchase it.  And your businessmen were quite willing to sell it.  Only when a few sober voices here raised an uproar against it was this deal blocked.  But you must realize how clever the KGB is.  This technology didn’t have to stay two or three weeks in a Soviet building under Soviet guard.  Two or three nights were enough for the KGB to examine and copy it.  And if today, persons are being hunted down by the best and most advanced technology, for this I can also thank you, Western capitalists.

 

Think of what happened in Hong Kong last year.  How the CCP completely steam rolled that entire island, despite their promises of 1997.  They used American technology to create biometrics and roll up an entire opposition, deport them to the mainland, and imprison them in Gulags…

Just like the 1920s in the USSR.  We’ve allowed our elites to do this once.  Silicon valley is fucking doing it again.  Sit up and take notice.

-Unclean

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part I

 

In 1975-1976, Alexandr Solzhenistyn, Nobel Peace Prize winner (back when it still had some meaning) spoke to UFL-CIO gatherings in the United States, and was allowed on the BBC in the United Kingdom.  Someone transcribed those speeches into a compendium that was published in 1976 as "Warning to the West".

 

Ruth bought this compendium for me last month in honor of Fathers' Day, and I read it furiously for about three days.  I sat on it, and I can't do so any further, because you need to read what this man, who spent a decade in the Gulag, had to say regarding the expectations of a downtrodden people of the free folk in the United States.  What he describes, his predictions, and the method in which he describes it, should be imparted to every free man as a caution. 

 

Without further ado, I transcribe a selected portion of the speech that Solzhenitsyn gave to the AFL-CIO in Washington D.C. on 30 June 1975.

 

At the beginning of the Revolution, all those in the leadership, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, were émigré intellectuals who had returned after disturbances had already broken out in Russia to carry out the Communist Revolution.

But one of them was a genuine worker, a highly skilled lathe operator until the last day of his life, Alexander Shliapnikov.  Who is familiar with that name today?  And yet it was he who expressed the true interests of the workers within the Communist leadership. 

In the years before the Revolution, it was Shliapnikov who ran the whole Communist Party in Russia—not Lenin, who was an émigré.  In 1921, he headed the Workers’ Opposition, which charged that the Communist leadership had betrayed the interests of the workers, that is was crushing and oppressing the proletariat, and had degenerated into a bureaucracy.

Shliapnikov disappeared from sight.  He was arrested later, and since he firmly stood his ground he was shot in prison; his name is perhaps unknown to most people here today.  But I remind you: before the Revolution, the head of the Communist Party of Russia was Shlipnikov—not Lenin.

Since that time, the working class has never been able to stand up for its rights and, in contrast to all the Western countries, our working class receives only handouts.  It cannot defend its simplest, everyday interests, and the least strike for pay or for better living conditions is viewed as counter-revolutionary.  Thanks to the closed nature of the Soviet system, you have probably never heard of the textile strikes in 1930 in Ivanovo, or of the 1961 worker unrest in Murom and Alexandrovo, or of the major workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk in 1962—this was in Khrushchev’s time, well after the so-called “thaw”.

The story of this uprising will shortly be told in detail in my book, The Gulag Archipelago III.  It is a story of how workers went in peaceful demonstration to the Novocherkassk party headquarters, carrying portraits of Lenin, to request a change in economic conditions.  They were fired on with machineguns and dispersed with tanks.  No family could even collect its wounded and dead; all were taken away in secret by the authorities…

…In 1947, when liberal thinkers and wise men of the West, who had forgotten the meaning of the word “liberty,” were swearing that there were no concentration camps in the Soviet Union at all, the American Federation of Labor published a map of [Soviet] concentration camps, and on behalf of all prisoners of those times, I want to thank the American workers’ movement for this. 

But just as we feel ourselves your allies here, there also exists another alliance—at first glance a strange and surprising one, but if you think about it, one which is well-founded and easy to understand: this is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists.

This alliance is not new.  The very famous Armand Hammer, [a businessman] who flourishes here today, laid the basis for this when he made the first exploratory trip to Soviet Russia in Lenin’s time, in the very first years of the Revolution.  He was extremely successful in his reconnaissance mission and ever since then, for all these fifty years, we see continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West for the Soviet Communist leaders.  The clumsy and awkward Soviet economy, which could never cope with its difficulties on its own, is continually getting material and technological assistance.  The major construction projects in the initial five-year plan were built exclusively with American technology and materials.  Even Stalin recognized that two-thirds of what was needed was obtained from the West.  And if today the Soviet Union has powerful military and police forces—in a country which is poor by contemporary standards—forces which are used to crush our movement for freedom in the Soviet Union—we have Western capital to thank for this as well…

Here is a man talking 45 years ago about something that happened 104 years ago that is currently happening right now between the global corporations and the Chinese Communist Party.  We’ve fucking been here before, and we don’t need to do it again.  More tomorrow.  Thanks for reading to the end.

-Unclean

 

The Desert Whispers

 

Full of life, burdened by it, and overserved, I ventured outside.

Searching for the voice of one long shed of this mortal coil.

The desert whispered.

"She's gone, but I am here.  I've always been here.  I'll always be here."

I listened.

"Why do you carry these burdens?" She whispered.

"They are mine to bear," said I brashly, "what business is it of yours anyway?"

"Why, I am here to take them from you," she said.  "I am here to focus your mind", she whispered.

I sat there, stock still, listening.  My mind revolting in anger at the world, at the desert.

"Be still," she whispered.

"I have been here since the world was formed.  I am here to sharpen you.  You cannot win o'er me, nor can you win o'er the problems of the world.  I am here to focus your mind.  It is cool now, the moon is up and the stars are splayed across the sky in a miracle for all to see. Why do you struggle against me?  Do I not show you the infinite each night?  Do I not focus your mind each day?  Why do you come to me with such resentment?"

"I suffer." I said, weakly.

"All suffer," the desert whispered.  "To suffer is to be mortal.  I am here as a stone, to sharpen you.  You can choose to succumb, or you can choose to accept what will be and live."

"What will be?", I asked.

"I will challenge you," she whispered.  "I will make the simple difficult and the complex impossible.  Whether you accept what will be, and learn from it is your choice. I am reality.  I do not bend. Make your choice."

"If I do as you say and accept this, what assurances do I have that I will be happy?", I begged.

"None. Reality is not constructed in that manner.  I am." 

She whispered.

Memorial Day, 2021

 On this day, each of us has a story.  We've seen the price paid that we all freely agreed to go ourselves.  Each of us has witnessed the tragedy and suffering that resulted.  This day, we put quarrals aside and deal with loss.  That is proper, and I offer the following.

The concept of "sacrifice" is a deep one.  Men have written thousands of pages about the idea.  It can be glibly described as "putting off immediate gratification for future gain".  But those of us who've been so close to this particular fire knows that it's so much deeper than that.  Our brothers endured that fire for us.  Being a part of that has certain moral imperatives that are unfamiliar to many in this modern society.  

Having seen what we've seen, that imperative is that we each get our own sacrifice right in recognition of their larger sacrifice.  The things we do every day, the setting aside of proximal comfort in recognition of future potential.  We have to live our lives in such a way so as to earn what they have freely and finally given to us.

And so, as I sit here and get morosely drunk over a period of several hours, I will ask myself questions: "Is my sacrifice deep enough to honor them?  How should I change my behavior to make that sacrifice good enough to justify what they gave to me?"

I haven't found the bottom of that particular well, but I dig at it as much as I can.  This is the day to do so, and these Americans are the best reason to do so.  I urge you to kick it around on your own, apply these things to what motivates you to become better.  Throw that burden on your back and own it as you walk your path, with as much grace as you can muster.  That is the lesson that they've left for us, and the best way to represent ourselves to their memory. 

Momento mori, my friends.  

"The Wanderer"

"The Wanderer"

[A poem from the fifth or sixth century A.D., written by an Anglo-Saxon warrior, contemplating his life after "many winters".  I urge you to read it as deeply as it deserves, and then read it again.  As the author concludes, faith is the only saving grace we are given.]

Often the lonely receives love,
The Creator’s help, though heavy with care
Over the sea he suffers long
Stirring his hands in the frosty swell,
The way of exile. Fate never wavers.

The wanderer spoke; he told his sorrows,
The deadly onslaughts, the death of the clan,
“At dawn alone I must
Mouth my cares; the man does not live
Whom I dare tell my depths
Straight out. I see truth
In the lordly custom for the courageous man
To bind fast his breast, loyal
To his treasure closet, thoughts aside.
The weary cannot control fate
Nor do bitter thoughts settle things.
The eager for glory often bind
Something bloody close to their breasts.

“Wretched, I tie my heart with ropes
Far from my home, far from my kinsmen
Since a hole in the ground hid my chief
Long ago. Laden with cares,
Weary, I crossed the confine of waves,
Sought the troop of a dispenser of treasure,
Far or near to find the man
Who knew my merits in the mead hall,
Who would foster a friendless man,
Treat me to joys. He who has put it to a test
Knows how cruel a companion is sorrow
For one who has few friendly protectors.
Exile guards him, not wrought gold,
A freezing heart, not the fullness of the earth.
He remembers warriors, the hall, rewards,
How, as a youth, his friend honored him at feasts,
The gold-giving prince. Joy has perished,

“He knows how it is to suffer long
Without the beloved wisdom of a friendly lord.
Often when sorrow and sleep together
Bind the worn lonely warrior
It seems in his heart that he holds and kisses
The lord of the troop and lays on his knee
His head and hands as he had before
In times gone by at the gift-giver’s throne.
When the friendless warrior awakens again
He sees before him the black waves,
Sea birds bathing, feathers spreading,
Frost and snow falling with hail.
The wounds of his heart are heavier,
Sore after his friends. Sorrow is renewed
When the mind ponders the memory of kinsmen;
He greets them with joy; he anxiously grasps
For something to say. They swim away again.
The breasts of ghosts do not bring the living
Much wisdom. Woe is renewed
For him who must send his weary heart
Way out over the prison of waves.

“Therefore in this world I cannot think of a reason
Why my soul does not blacken when I seriously consider
All the warriors, tested at war,
How they suddenly sank to the floor,
The brave kinsmen. But this world
Every day falls to dust.
No man is wise until he lives many winters
In the kingdom of the world.
The wise must be patient,
Never too hasty with feelings nor too hot with words
Nor too weak as a warrior nor too witlessly brash
Nor too fearful nor too ready nor too greedy for reward
Nor even too feverish for boasting until testing his fibre.
A man should wait before he makes a vow
Until, like a true warrior, he eagerly tests
Which way the courage of his heart will course.
The good warrior must understand how ghostly it will be
When all this world of wealth stands wasted
As now in many places about this massive earth
Walls stand battered by the wind,
Covered by frost, the roofs collapsed.
The wine halls crumbled; the warriors lie dead,
Cut off from joy; the great troop all crumpled
Proud by the wall. One war took,
Led to his death. One a bird lifted
Over the high sea. One the hoary wolf
Broke with death. One, bloody-cheeked,
A warrior hid in a hole in the ground.
Likewise God destroyed this earthly dwelling
Until the strongholds of the giants stood empty,
Without the sounds of joy of the city-dwellers.”

Then the wise man thinks about the wall
And deeply considers this dark life.
From times far away the wanderer recalls
The deadly slashes and says,
“What happened to the horse? What happened to the war-
    rior? What happened to the gift-giver?
What happened to the wine hall? Where are the sounds of
    joy?
Ea-la bright beaker! Ea-la byrnied warrior!
Ea-la the chiefs majesty! How those moments went,
Grayed in the night as if they never were!
A wall still stands near the tracks of the warriors,
Wondrously high! Worms have stained it.
A host of spears hungry for carnage
Destroyed the men, that marvelous fate!
Storms beat these stone cliffs,
A blanket of frost binds the earth,
Winter is moaning! When the mists darken
And night descends, the north delivers
A fury of hail in hatred at men.
All is wretched in the realm of the earth;
The way of fate changes the world under heaven.
    Here is treasure lent, here is a friend lent,
    Here is a man lent, here is a kinsman lent.
    All of the earth will be empty!”

So spoke the wise in heart; he sits alone with his mystery.
He is good to keep faith; grief must never escape
A man’s heart too quickly unless with his might like a true
    warrior
He has sought a lasting boon. It is best for him who seeks love,
Help from the heavenly Father where all stands firm.

Passive Non-Compliance.

An instruction manual.

Okay, so you've been told to do a number of things which are impossible to do simultaneously by a number of different governing organizations that are staffed by incompetent people.

Ah! So I see that you've run up against the US federal government.

Well, I've been in the service of this organization for almost 27 years, and I'm here to help you parse this out.

First, stop doing something that you've been trained to do like a lab rat since you were young: stop assuming that they know something you don't. They don't. In fact, by virtue of the fact that you care about various issues and have access to an internet, you probably know more than they do about this random subject. Make your own decision and stop caring about their outrage.

Next, stop assuming they want the best for you, they don't care about you. They care about their job. Not only are they ignorant, they're also incompetent despite being provided cogent data. Do your own research, come to your own conclusions, and live your life as best you can.

Next, learn to not give a fuck about their outrage. You're smarter and more capable than them. You've done your research and have decided to act in a specific manner that may be counter to what they have imposed on you by some fiat. Their fiat does not trump your intelligence, competence, or ability to decide what is the best course of action. Do whatever the fuck you decide, and ride out the consequences.

This is not limited to the current pandemic bullshit. This includes everything in your life. Stop being a lemming. The idiot at the front of the lemming formation is just as clueless as the rest of the lemmings and will lead us all off a cliff if we let them.

Fortunately, your unique ability as an individual to decide how to act in a manner that serves your long term self-interests, and those of your family, your community, and your state, allows you to do whatever the fuck you want to do. Allow me to quote James Madison, who wasn't a lawyer either, but wrote the fucking US Constitution:

"Amendment IX: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Passive non-compliance is awesome. I've been doing it since I was a 1st Lieutenant. It's fucking liberating. Fuck 'em. Do what you want to do.

Religion, Part II

[Find part one here: Religion]

"Conscience" is the revaltion of morality.

"Transcendence" is the hyper-resolution of an experience that elevates one above mere existence.  It is the swift, sharp kick to the head that alters our perceptions and informs our morality.  So, to tie that concept into my last post, one can translate that as "transcendence realigning one's priorities."  One can see from this that transcendence can be of critical importance for us.  The search for transcendence seems to be relatively constant across cultures, across demographics within cultures, even though it takes on many, many forms. Transcendence is different for each of us.  Some find it in music, others find it in cooking, some in mathematics.  As far as I can tell, few of us have not found something transcendent.  It is as universal as truth or morality.

So, how do you prioritize your life?  What truths do you find meaningful?  How does the employment of those truths in pursuit of your morality manifest itself?  That is your religion.  It doesn't matter that you identify as an anarcho-communist-nihilist.  That doesn't mean that you have no religion, because that state-of-being actually defines the religion that you're acting out.  The a-priori structure that you're demonstrating simply belies the fact that you are expressing the exact same solution-set as a priest or pastor does.

This solution-set, completely independent of belief structure, is the answer to the ubiquitous question: "How should I behave?" How one pursues that behavior set is a religion.  One who steadfastly maintains that there "is no God", and "believes in nussing", is just as religious as the most zealous pastor, priest, rabbi or imam.  That individual is pursuing a morality, based on accepted truths, and conducts himself according to a corresponding ethical code.  How could it be any different?  Despite that individual's "identity", he has DNA and that genetic code has been passed down for several million years in a very specific manner.  This a-priori structure is ubiquitous within the human experience.  

So I believe that Christ is the "way and the life", why is my religion good?  Because pain equalizes us all.  I dare you to argue against it.  If pain exists, then something opposite has to exist.  That "opposite" is transcendence.  The elevation above the pain.  What is described in the Bible is the story of how to live, stories told many times over and from various perspectives.  If one accepts that the most awesome superhero is a guy who did nothing wrong, but who consciously volunteered to be betrayed by his friends, denied by his church, and tortured to death by his government, so that he could sacrifice himself to atone for the inherent fallibility of all mankind, then one might be aiming at an example that is worthy of following.  If one understands that each individual is made in the image of the creator, then one might be able to judge each individual according to his character.  If each individual should act in a manner in Christ's example, then society becomes enriched incrementally, as each individual lives up to his potential.  I can't see a downside to that, and societies that have encouraged those criteria have been wildly successful in providing their citizens with the resources that are required to remain free.  

On the other end of this, each society that has chosen to disavow God or fail to live up to Christ's example have resulted in corruption of its leadership, wholesale slaughter of its citizenry, and the destruction of truth and ethics, while attempting to redraw morality in a manner that doesn't recognize the inherent divinity of the individual.  In those nations, transcendence is only possible by becoming an enemy of the state.  See: Solzhenitsyn, Gandhi, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  

Moreover, individuals who choose to pursue a morality that is counter to the tenets of Judeo-Christianity generally find themselves bereft of meaning (unable to identify truth, or deny that any truth exists).  If there is no truth, no ethics, and a denial of morality, then how does a goal-oriented individual function?  For what does one aim to achieve? 

That last question, to my mind, gets down to the bottom of this.  If you are not striving in a manner that serves your family, your community, while you grow by your sacrifice for something other than yourself, then how does the "religion" that you're serving improve anything? To quote Tyler, "Those things that you own, end up owning you", unless those things serve some overarching purpose to drive forward and assist you in achieving your purpose, that reinforce the meaning of your life, that allow you to transcend the suffering of this mortal coil in that pursuit of purpose and meaning.  

"Religion" involves picking up a burden, and carrying it, with as much grace as one can summon.  It isn't about your "inalienable rights".  It is about your inescapable responsibility to yourself, to your family, and to your fellow man.  

Such is my perception.

Unclean

Religion

So here we are at last.  The central question.  

I spent many years, mostly in my 20's and 30's, in a state that can most accurately be described as "agnostic". I had some fundamental issues with the idea of the Christianity that I had learned as a child.  I think that, as I look back through the years, that idea was communicated to me in a very inaccurate and ham-handed manner.  "Believe this or you're fucked" is not the right way to perceive the teachings within the Bible, nor is it an effective way of communicating the lessons of Christ.  Yes, He did say "no one comes to the Father except through me", but that wasn't the explicit threat of damnation that was sold to me by my parents and some of my pastors coming up, and I wish they had framed the problem in a more realistic manner.  I seek to do so now, and I apologize with all my heart for not having resolved this sooner.  

Before I go any further, we need to define a few things, at least as far as I've been able to deterimine their definitions:

1) Morality: The thoughtful layout of what one prioritizes in thought and action.  

2) Truth: An idea that, if one strictly adheres to, results in meaning or purpose. A tool by which one structures the reality that one perceives.

3) Ethics: The method in which one employs truth to realize meaning, and thus live as a moral human being.

So one can see the interplay between these three concepts.  If one's priorities are fucked, then one is not aiming at a target that will be either fulfilling or meaningful.  If one can't discern the truth, one can't shape reality in a manner that results in a satisfactory purpose.  If one has no ethical structure, then one cannot therefore use truth in a meaningful way to reinforce or realize those things that one has identified as important in life.  

I can't believe that I've not thought deeply enough about these things to understand them in this fashion.  It has literally has been under my nose for almost thirty years.

Consider Aristotlean Ethics.  It's not a moral code.  It simply instructs how to employ the truth in such a fashion as to mitigate harmful behavior while increasing the chances of using truth to perceive reality in an unbiased manner.  Kant's "universal imperative" is very much like this.  I think that's why I've gravitated towards those ethical paradigms since I first heard them in my early 20's.  It's the same reason that Christianity strikes me as truth, and it's very much why I took to listening to Dr. Peterson several years ago.  

There is an a-priori structure within us that is so deep within our neurology that it's almost autonomic.  There are concepts that are so basic that we don't even question them.  "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game."  What the fuck does that mean?

"Always make a good first impression."  Well, no shit.  But why is that so important?

Well, in the first example about "playing the game right", we're teaching our children that it's not important that you're skilled at something, but it is critically important that you treat your peers in a respectful manner, so that you'll be chosen to play as many games as possible throughout your life.  

The second example is truly a throwback to how deeply seeded our initial perceptions are.  It's not higher-brain functions that comprise a "good first impression", it's so much deeper.  If you haven't seen this, go on a web search-engine and look up "cats and cucumber videos".  You'll see that cats have a primal reaction to cucumbers because they initially perceive them as snakes, and they're scared shitless of them when somebody puts one on the ground behind them, even though they've never seen a snake.  Lab studies of common rats will show that one can waft the odor of a cat through a rat cage, even though that rat has never encountered a cat, and the rat will go back into his den and scream for two whole days (which, when considering the life span of a common rat is like you or I doing that for a solid week.)  First impressions are lasting for this same reason.  A species of "featherless bipeds" (AKA "Homeo Sapiens") did not consolidate its hold on the top predator rung for the past million-or-so years unless we had some next-level instincts.  Among those instincts is the ability to spot an asshole on first sight. So there you go.  There is your a-priori structure.

So what are the implications of this a-priori structure?  Aside from threat-identification, I really think that we have a proclivity to manifest our behavior in such a manner that we are drawn toward truth, and we tend to structure our morality in a manner that draws us to purpose and meaning.  I don't think that it's an accident that our perceived-reality is structured as "chaos" and "order", while the left and right hemispheres of our brain are manifested to process reality in that exact duality.  

I think that what I've argued thus far is enough for one sitting.  It lays the basis for the instanciation of religion.  The implications of that instanciation will be the next chapter.  Please stand by.

Unclean  

Isaac

Did some listening today.  And some thinking.  About old things, things that have driven our society forward for thousands of years, things that laid the foundation of this civilization.  

One of these old stories has to do with the father of Judaism, Abraham, and what happened between him and his son (by Sarah), Isaac. 

After a lengthy tale of hardship and toil, Abraham was told to sacrifice his son to God, and he willingly prepared to do so, to the point where God stepped in and told him "meh...nevermind".

Or so I've always perceived.  No explanation, no sermon has ever really satisfactorily satisfied me as to why this is crucial knowledge that would make sense within the canon of the Old Testament.  I've never liked that story, never could get my head around it.  For like 35 years.  It's bothered me.  

Well, I was "today years' old" when I finally figured out the lesson that I believe is behind the story.  It is indeed tied to the idea of "sacrifice" but I think "sacrifice", in this case, was meant in a much broader sense.  

Abraham was told to "sacrifice" his son to God, which seems a bit severe, seeing as how Abraham and Sarah were 100 years old when he was born and the mere existence of Isaac was a frickin' miracle to begin with.  

But in what sense was the concept of "sacrifice" used here?

I think the lesson here is to understand that "sacrificing" one's own progeny is to forthrightly send them out into the world, thus exposing them to the cruelties that are manifest there, after teaching them to act in a proper manner, to strive to become as righteous as one is capable of, and to expect them to live up to those lessons while the parents themselves live up to the example that is inherent in those lessons.  

If one does so forthrightly, then the lesson taught to Abraham, and to us by extension, is that God will care for our children in a manner that will be better than even we, the parents, are capable of and in ways that we haven't really considered.   

It is necessary for every parent to do as Abraham did, to instruct our children properly, to demonstrate that behavior set, and when it is time, expose our children to the cruelty and malevolence of mankind with serenity and calmness.  Because it is incumbent upon each of us to have faith as we do so; that God will care for them in ways that we haven't even thought about.

Thus is the lesson of Abraham and Isaac, as I've come to understand it.  Let me know what you think.