You are list-obsessive if you write down an already completed task just so you can cross it off your list. You are precision-obsessive if you point out that a task, completed or not, is not the sort of thing that can be crossed off a list.
An admirable concern for precision can veer off into pedantry, punctiliousness, preciosity.
The following arrived on Christmas Eve:
Apatheia, Ataraxia, and Holiday Spirit
I was wondering if you had any advice for those struggling to maintain their Stoic calm as Christmas approaches. Alas, I am one of those souls this year. I will not burden you with the details, but it seems the holidays also bring out many of our dear friends’ struggles with booze. To wit, a friend of nearly 20 years began a bender about a week ago that culminated this morning with his saying to me, this morning, some things that no self-respecting man could forgive in one to be labeled a friend, especially when one has had to forgive booze related outbursts several times before.
So, it seems the modifiers, not the nouns, are the functional words in phrases like “old friends” and this friendship will now be over. I have consulted Seneca on friendship and anger, and I recall Cicero’s advice, but I fear the philosophers offer little in the way of immediate comfort as I accept this loss (and also reflect on what the whiskey demons bring out in myself). I expect you must be inundated with mail this time of year, so know that I appreciate your reading this message. If you have any advice, or perhaps a reading suggestion, I’d appreciate the time you took to do so very much. Merry Christmas!
There are two main topics here, interpersonal relationships and the role of alcohol.
How you negotiate interpersonal relations depends on your psychological type. I'm an inner-directed man in roughly David Riesman's sense, who knows what he is about and what he wants to achieve. So for me, cost-benefit analysis comes into play when I choose whom to associate with and whom to avoid. Will contact with this person help me achieve my goals or will it hinder me? Any relationship with anyone incurs costs and provides benefits. So I calculate whether the benefits will outweigh the costs, given my goals. To do this requires self-knowledge. So that is where you must start. Know thyself! But it also requires knowledge of the people you will be associating with. Some people are trouble. You can't help them, but they can harm you. Why are you associating with them? For literary purposes? Because you foolishly overestimate your healing powers? Christ hung out with sinners. But he had special powers, to put it mildly.
On the basis of the slim facts presented, I say that my reader ought to break off contact with his drunkard 'friend.' Break off a 20-year friendship? Well, was it a friendship of affinity or a friendship of propinquity? I won't pause to explain what I mean; you should be able to catch my meaning. If there was a deep bond, and the guy hit hard times and sought solace in the bottle, then that puts a different complexion on things. Maybe my reader should try to help his friend. There is a difference between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic: every (unreformed) alky is a heavy drinker but not conversely. If the friend is an alky, it would probably be best to deep-six him, even if he is 'on the wagon.' It's a good bet he will fall off. As a general rule, people do not change. WYSIWYG! And will continue to get. Schopenhauer spoke of the immutability of character, with only slight exaggeration. The italicized rule is a very important bit of life wisdom. For example, don't marry someone with the thought that you will change him or her. That way lies misery. To my reader, I say: There is no point in wasting time with some guy whose whole life is dominated by the project of climbing out of a hole he himself freely dug with a cocktail glass. The same goes for those who dig their holes and graves with fork and spoon or syringe.
But again, it all depends. Suppose the guy is not an alky. Is my reader single or married? If married, does he have children? Would you want your wife and children to come into contact with a drunkard? Presumably not.
And if you associate with drunks, are you not giving tacit moral approval to their immoral behavior? It is not morally wrong to to have a drink, but it is morally wrong to get drunk, even if you harm no one but yourself. I'll spare you the argument, but invite you think about it.
My reader mentions Stoicism. Here is a brief summary of the Stoic attitude:
There are things that are in our power, and things that are not. The flood that sweeps away my house is not in my power; but my response to the flood is. I can make myself miserable by blaming other people, from the president on down; or I can limit my suffering by taking control of my own mind. Your insulting me is not in my power; but whether or not I let it affect me is in my power.
The Stoics had an important insight into the mind's power to regulate itself. When you really understand their point it can come as a revelation. I was once thinking of a dead relative and how he had wronged me. I began to succumb to negative thoughts, but caught myself and suddenly realized that I am doing it. I saw that I was allowing the negative thoughts to arise and that I had the power to blot them out. The incident was years in the past, and the malefactor was long dead. So the mental disturbance was my own creation. My sudden realization of this — aided no doubt by my reading of Stoic and other wisdom literature — caused the disturbance to vanish.
The Stoics discerned the mind's power to regulate itself and master its thoughts, rather than be mastered by them. They saw that, within certain limits, we create our own reality. Within limits, we can make ourselves miserable and we can make ourselves happy. There is an inner citadel into which one can retreat, and where a very real peace can be enjoyed — assuming that one is willing to practice the Stoic precepts rather than merely read about them.
Stoic calm is not that hard to maintain as long as one avoids the near occasion of unnecessary vexation. Here then is a further reason for my reader to break with his 'friend.'
Coming back to the question of self-knowledge, I recommend that my reader consult Karen Horney (pronounced like horn-eye, not like whore-knee). I don't know if she is much read these days but her books are well-written and full of insight. Here is a taste:
Interpersonal Strategies of Defense
According to Horney, people try to cope with their basic anxiety by adopting a compliant or self-effacing solution and moving toward people, by adopting an aggressive or expansive solution and moving against people, or by becoming detached or resigned and moving away from people. Healthy people move appropriately and flexibly in all three directions, but in neurotic development these moves become compulsive and indiscriminate. Each solution involves a constellation of behavior patterns and personality traits, a conception of justice, and a set of beliefs about human nature, human values, and the human condition. Each also involves a "deal" or bargain with fate in which obedience to the dictates of that solution is supposed to be rewarded.
I would only add that while healthy people are able to behave in all three ways (compliant, expansive, detached) as circumstances require, one can be psychologically healthy and favor one of the interpersonal strategies over the other two. Those of us who resonate to the Stoic teaching are most likely to favor the detachment strategy and move away from people when their bad behavior erupts, by either minimizing one's contact with them, or cutting them off entirely. I have done both. Pre-emptive measures are also to be considered. We were invited to Christmas dinner and to a New Year's Eve party, get-togethers in both cases organized by my wife's friends. I told the wife I would attend one event but not both. I thereby limited the threat to my apatheia and ataraxia.
Finally, having just revealed myself as an introvert and an advocate of detachment (better: non-attachment), I now say to my reader that he should consider who is now giving him advice and factor that in when considering how much of it he should take.
Post-finally, here is a short video clip from Tombstone in which the bad behavior of Johnny Ringo is excused by Curly Bill on the ground that it is the booze in Johnny that is talking. The relevance to my reader's problem is obvious.
Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.
Read the rest at Substack.
Joe Biden, suffering from dementia, was finally and 'democratically' kicked to the curb only to be replaced with Kamala Harris who may be suffering from her own neuropsychiatric malady, moria. How else explain her giddiness, uncontrolled childish euphoria, inappropriate laughter, inability to be serious about matters of grave importance, hyper-joyous inanity, and the like? This very short video (1:33) displays her astonishing unseriousness about a very serious matter.
It is not for me to decide whether there is anything pathological here, let alone suggest a treatment protocol, but this article may shed light on this strangest of all presidential candidates in the history of the Republic.
Having pointed to a possible psychiatric cause of the 60-year-old's laughing-gas vacuity, let me now suggest a sociological cause: we live in an Age of Feeling. Like a superannuated AOC — the overgrown adolescent narcissist of the occasional cortex — Kameradin Kamalita can feel, but not think.
"It's an unfortunate reality that millions of Americans lack convictions founded in logic, reason, and history, instead relying on feelings as their primary touchstone." That nails it.
The pollyanna runs a risk of early death. One thinks of October 7th and the Israelis willfully oblivious of the Gazans sworn to their extermination. But the lucky pollyanna who happens to live long and well lives a life enhanced by the bliss of ignorance. A lucky outlier.
Related: The Psychology of the Pollyanna and the Political Ponerology of Leftism
Despite the fact that the Grim Reaper, the ultimate 'Repo man,' is hot on my trail, I wouldn't go back to being a child, an adolescent, or even a young adult for anything. What is that makes childhood and adolescence so rotten for some of us? In a word, powerlessness, and in a three-fold sense.
One is first of all physically undeveloped and weak. But grow tall and strong, brisk of stride and stern of visage, and you project a secular analog of Christ's noli me tangere, don't touch me. (Cf. John 20:17.)
The child is also psychologically without defenses, overly impressionable and suggestible, and at the mercy of anyone who cares to launch an attack. But as the years roll by one develops the requisite filters. One learns to hold people and their attitudes at arm's length, psychologically speaking. Reading the Stoics helps, as does blogging. One develops a thick skin given all the bottom-feeders and scum-suckers that patrol its vasty deeps. But mainly it is just living day by day and dealing with the world's tomfoolery that has the requisite desensitizing effect. One becomes self-assured and sufficient unto oneself. Validation by others becomes less and less important.
In third place comes the financial weakness of childhood. Money buys freedom, freedom from the wrong environments and the wrong people. A little thought discloses that money is negatively related to happiness. Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy the absence of misery. Or to put the point precisely, it can buy that without which most of us will be miserable. It can put one in a position where the pursuit of happiness is likely to succeed. It doesn't take much by way of money and what it can buy to be happy. But happiness does require a modicum, with the possible exception of a few enlightened sages.
So adulthood has its advantages, and for some of us they outweigh its disadvantages. But your experience may vary, and a fool's errand it would be to argue against another's experience.
We all know pollyannas. They are more often women than men and the charm of these lovable ladies is in no small measure due to their openness to the positive in people and things and their seeming incapacity to discern the negative and evil. A most extreme example has come to my attention, one
. . . Natali Yohanan, “a 38-year-old mother of two, who never locked the doors of her house in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. There wasn’t even a key.” And then: “On Oct. 7, a Gazan woman walked through Yohanan’s unlocked front door and made herself at home for hours, eating, singing, and watching Netflix. Sometimes, the woman served drinks to armed terrorists who stopped by for a break from the massacre they were conducting outside.” Ms. Yohanan speaks of the impact of 10/7 on her in the 10-minute video below.
Watch the video and then ask yourself the question that I ask myself: how could an adult Israeli be so naïve, so trusting, so lacking in insight into human nature? The woman is not stupid; how then explain this blind spot? At one point Yohanan, a teacher, says that all children are good. Plainly false! Has this teacher never been on a schoolyard? Children can be vicious in a way that no animal can be vicious. That is why they need to be socialized and, yes, indoctrinated, but in correct and ameliorative doctrines. (That 'indoctrination' is a dirty word is another piece of stupidity that you are well-advised in dropping.)
Yohanan is an Israeli. Surely she knows something about how her state came to be and why it came to be. Her kibbutz is right next to the Gaza Strip. Did she know nothing of Hamas and their genocidal intentions? They make plain their antisemitism and their anti-Zionism in their charter. Does she know nothing about Islam? (See this excellent article by Raymond Ibrahim.)
As I say elsewhere, homo homini lupus does not capture the depth of human depravity, and is an insult to the wolves to boot. Man is not a wolf to man; man is a demon to man.
I am touching upon one of the roots, perhaps the deepest, of the delusional Left, namely the insane notion that everyone, deep down inside, is basically good. Not only is this conceit a characteristically leftist bit of delusionality, it also serves to distinguish conservative from leftist. No conservative accepts that crazy conceit.
And let's not forget that those who accept the crazy conceit that people are basically good refute their own false theory by being the most murderous of all. In the 20th century alone communist governments have murdered some 85-100 million people according to The Black Book of Communism.
Projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one attributes one's own unacknowledged feelings, desires, intentions, attitudes, etc. to others. Extending the notion into the political sphere, the political projector accuses the other side of doing what he and his ilk are doing but will not own up to doing. I happened across a very clear example on CBS this morning. It severely tested my ataraxia.
Projection is standardly understood as the offloading of the negative onto the other, but it is also often a mistake to project positive feelings, values, and attitudes into the other. Such projection may get your irenic self killed, as I argue in a Substack article, aptly entitled Beware of Projecting . . . your values and attitudes into others.
You kept your distance from him when he was alive, and you did well in so doing. Now that he is dead, when his only proximity is noetic, it is noetic distance that you must maintain.
My answer at Substack.
Sidney Bloch, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, Oxford
Journal of medical ethics, 1978, 4, 126-131
I got the reference from an article on the defenestration of Jordan Peterson. Commentary on Bloch's paper from the same article:
The Oxford psychiatrist Sidney Bloch’s classic 1977 academic paper “Psychiatry as Ideology in the USSR” demonstrated how psychiatry in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union actually worked—in an eerily similar way to how it now also works in Justin Trudeau’s Canada. Firstly, whilst only a minority of psychiatrists were full-blown Communist Party members, almost all those in positions of actual authority were, reflecting Stalin’s key principle that loyalty to leftist party ideology was more important than actual professional ability when it came to handing out the top jobs; the Ontario College of Psychologists might agree.
A full 25 percent of Soviet medical students’ curriculum was devoted to studying not actual medicine, but unrelated Marxist-Leninist dogma—more than studying actual surgery. Russia replaced the old Hippocratic Oath with a new one in which medics swore to “in all my actions be guided by the principles of Communist morality” rather than, say, actual medical reality—hence, a “good” psychiatrist might commit an entirely sane political dissident to a mental home just to shut them up, something justified on party grounds, not medical ones.
Victims were accused of suffering from entirely fictional disorders like “sluggish schizophrenia”—whose symptoms, conveniently enough, were so vague they could only be noticed by trained Communist physicians, not the wider public, to whom the patient might appear 100 percent sane, a diagnosis that makes about as much sense as saying someone who is clearly still walking around wide awake has slipped into a symptomless coma. The only real way for patients deliberately misdiagnosed to escape from incarceration was to agree with their doctors that, yes, they really were mad after all, and that their “incorrect” opinions were simply unfortunate symptoms of their insanity, much as Jordan Peterson is expected to admit his own “incorrect” views are symptoms of his own mental unfitness to practice today.
Currently atop the Substack pile. With a little help from Kafka, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, and Einstein.
…………….
Thomas writes (12/29),
A very nice note for the (nearly) new year. It took me decades to realise I am one of those who was nearly socially self-sufficient all his life – no school yard bullying ever touched me, although I was one of the shorter ones until I grew late. And I had no problem concentrating, reading and creating (a few) new ideas in my work for hours on end (indeed, for years on end), whereas I find most people never ever perform such simple feats even once in their lives – concentrating and writing for 4 – 8 hours? How do you do it? How do you not do it, I reply . . .It takes a long time for me to understand the difference because of course we all think we are the same inside until we inspect some bit of human behaviour and find differences. One difference is: socially reliant people have no mental resilience. They can't deal with difficulties on their own. Therefore in crisis situations, which often occur in social groups reacting to wider events, most people determine their responses in a miasma of fear and group-think – a guarantee of poor quality outcomes. So the socially self-sufficient nearly always under-estimate the state of constant frustration (due to non-achievement) and anxiety (when no idle chat or other filler activity is available) of others. So we are amazed when society takes the turns it does. We are exceptionally ignorant, until we study mental lassitude scientifically!Your whisky aphorism has it right. We do need a bit. After all, wit (in the esprit sense) partly comes from talk. And the Kafka quote: responding to corns should just be done, not heard, while one is actually thinking about or discussing things of import, or at least containing some wit.But perhaps there is something to mindless chat? Maybe it serves a purpose such as to limit social violence, in the same way that greeting others (in European culture at least) with a kiss on both cheeks probably (?) limits fist-swinging, at least for that day. I have no idea.
. . . your values and attitudes into others. We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.
It is dangerous to assume that others are like we are. (I am thinking right now of a very loving and lovable female neighbor who makes the dangerous assumption: she has a 'Coexist' sticker affixed to her bumper.)
Liberal 'projectionism' — to give it a name — can get your irenic self killed.
As desirable a desideratum as peaceful coexistence is, it is inconsistent with totalitarian systems. This is why communism and Christianity cannot coexist assuming that they remain true to their defining principles. (Or at least they cannot coexist in one geographical area over the long term.) They are mutually exclusive worldviews. And of course they are not just comprehensive views of the world and the people in it, but practical systems of prescriptions and proscriptions oriented toward the guidance of human action. The actional side is paramount in both systems. Old Karl said that the philosophers had variously interpreted the world when the point was to change it. (Karl Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach). A serious Christian could say that the philosophers had variously theorized and speculated when the unum necessarium was the salvation of one's immortal soul. "For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?" (Matthew 16-26) A library of learned disquisitions on the nature of the soul is of no avail if one in the end suffers its loss.
Christianity and Islam are also quite obviously mutually exclusive on both doctrinal and practical planes. Note that both in their ideological purity are totalitarian. (Christianity in the West has of course been liberalized to a great extent and is thus no longer ideologically pure.) The two in their pure forms make a total claim on the lives of their adherents. They cannot peacefully coexist in the same geographical area over the long term. The Muslim says to the infidel: either convert to the truth faith, or accept dhimmitude, or be put to the sword. That, for a Christian, is indeed a trilemma: you will be impaled on one of three horns, but you are free to choose which one.
Can classical liberalism, the touchstone of which is toleration, coexist with any totalitarian ideology, religious or secular? No again. The classical liberal can and will tolerate any ideology as long as it respects the principle of toleration; it cannot, however, tolerate the rejection of this very principle, the principle that defines it. The rub, for the totalitarian, is that if he accepts the principle of toleration, he can no longer remain totalitarian: he will have to adjust his tenets in various ways. Classical liberalism and totalitarian systems are mutually exclusive.
So where does this leave us? There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism. For classical liberalism alone is tolerant of deep differences and is alone respectful of our equally deep ignorance of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. Why must we be tolerant? Because we do not know. The classical liberal is keenly aware of the evil in the human heart and of the necessity of limited government and dispersed power. So he is justified in making war against fanaticism, onesidedness, and totalitarian systems of government whether theocratic or 'leftocratic.' It would not be a war of extermination but one of limitation. It would also be limited to one's geographical area and not promoted abroad to impose the values of classical liberalism on the benighted tribalists of the Middle East and elsewhere.
Finally, can American conservatism and the ideology of the Democrat Party in its contemporary incarnation peacefully coexist? Obviously not, which is why there is a battle for the soul of America. Either we defeat the totalitarian Left or we face a nasty trilemmatic trident: acquiesce and convert; or accept dhimmitude; or ne cancelled in one livelihood and then eventually in one's life.
Here at Motus Mentis, the weblog of Malcolm Pollack. Pollack is an uncommonly good writer as you will see from the quotation below. More importantly, he speaks truth against the current madness. In my earlier post on his American Greatness essay, after acknowledging his even-handedness, I suggested that
. . . he may be giving aid and comfort to a false moral equivalentism. Left and Right are not moral equivalents. The Left is far worse.
I assumed that he would accept my mild criticism and he has (emphasis added):
Alas, in such times as these – in the growing heat of a simmering civil war – for an observer to comment on social tectonics from such a remote altitude makes him seem almost blithely unconcerned with the great battle shaping up on the plain far below. As a result, commenters and correspondents have taken me to task for being too even-handed in my description of the phenomenon; for making it seem as if the craziness here in 2022 is symmetrically distributed between both factions in our current social and political conflict. Our old friend Bill Vallicella was among them; you can read his post, and my response (from which some of this post is adapted), here.
I think that’s a fair critique, and in my article I should have made it clear that right now, when it comes to the psychological manipulation of public narratives in order to focus an anxious and atomized public’s attention on objects of fear and loathing, there is no equivalence at all between the two great factions. “Mass formation” in today’s America is overwhelmingly a “Blue”, not a “Red”, phenomenon.
Readers of American Greatness, and of this blog, will need little convincing on this score, but a few points are worth mentioning:
First of all, it is a tremendous advantage in the manipulation of mass opinion to control the flow of information, and for many years now the American Left have controlled mass media, social media, internet-search technology, and education to the point of near-total information dominance.
Second, the artificiality of the public narrative blaring from the towering minarets of our institutions is shown by its transience: as soon as one story collapses (remember “Russian collusion”, and “hands up, don’t shoot”?) another takes its place (think of Jussie Smollett, or “two weeks to flatten the curve”). Likewise, the extent to which these narratives are in fact calculated propaganda offensives is given away by the aggressive censorship of dissenting views. (Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, the old saying goes – “Truth is great, and will prevail” – but to make falsehood prevail requires some assistance.)
Third, that the dominance of the Left’s message in America today relies upon a widespread psychological vulnerability is further demonstrated by the extent to which it has managed to override both tradition and common sense in getting large numbers of people to deny what, until now, have been understood by everyone everywhere to be objectively existing features and categories of the natural world. To participate in polite society today – or, to put that more accurately, to be able to keep your job, get a college degree, or avoid being deplatformed from most media – we are expected to go along with things that most people know in their hearts are simply not so: that sex and race are purely social constructs; that men can become pregnant and bear children; that biology and heritability have nothing to do with human traits, and with their statistical distribution in populations; that cultures and peoples can be mixed and jumbled together at random without affecting the cohesion and stability of formerly homogeneous societies; that “equality” means that people cannot vary in talents, abilities, and aptitudes; that the greatest threat to American society is “white supremacy”; that everything in the modern Western world, from mathematics to nuclear families to pumpkin-spice lattes, is racist; that intelligence is a meaningless and unquantifiable concept; that when different identity groups perform differently on qualifying tests for education and employment, those tests should simply be discarded; that for nations to control their borders is inherently immoral; that the interests of criminals trump those of law-abiding citizens; that parents should have no say in how their children are educated; that members of various, designated groups are not to be considered responsible agents; that the way to deal with rising crime is to stop arresting people; that the 2020 election was squeaky-clean; that the January 6th protest was an assault on a par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (while the three-day siege of the White House by BLM and Antifa, in which hunrdeds of officers were injured, and the First Family had to be evacuated, was not); that the protests of that summer were “mostly peaceful”; and no end of other obvious falsehoods and absurdities.
Above all, what marks the current mental state of the American Left as psychologically abnormal is its suicidal self-abnegation. I can think of no other example in all of history of a coherent, prosperous and homogeneous society, with a robust civic culture and a proud historical mythos, suddenly deciding en masse to reject and denounce its heritage, declare its cherished cultural traditions shameful and immoral, fling open its borders to engage in deliberate ethnic, religious, and cultural dilution, and cheer on the accelerating displacement of its majority population and the gradual decomposition of cohesion and civil order. This all seems, when compared to the normal behavior of human societies, completely insane.
Considering all this, then, I hope it is clear that, although the phenomenon now being called “mass formation” has been observed in all ages and cultures, and must be considered in some sense a “universal” feature of our nature, its current manifestation in the United States is anything but symmetrical, and is overwhelmingly an affliction of the Left — and that those of us who wish to have any chance of preserving the great American experiment must, in this hour of crisis, fight it with everything we’ve got.
