Category: Sage Advice

On Taking Abuse

A re-post from 1 August 2013.  Slightly redacted. 

……………..

Everyone gets abused verbally in this world and one had better learn how to take it.  There are bigots everywhere — leftists and wokesters the most vile, their tendency  to project psychologically rendering their bigotry  invisible to them — and sooner or later you will encounter your fair share of abusers and bigots.   A fellow graduate student called your humble correspondent a 'guinea'  in the 1970s. This was in Boston.  But I didn't break his nose and do the ground and pound on him. Was it cowardice or good sense?  Call it self-control.  If Trayvon Martin had control of his emotions on the fateful night of his encounter with George Zimmerman, he would probably be alive today.  The downside, of course, is that then  we wouldn't be having this delightful 'conversation' about race.

My impression is that there is  more anti-Italian prejudice — not that it is any big deal — in the East than in the West where I come from. (And without a doubt, Jim Morrison had it right when he opined that the West is the best, in at least two senses.)   I didn't encounter any anti-Italian prejudice until I headed East. I  had a Lithuanian girl friend in Boston whose mother used to warn  her: "Never bring an Italian home." I never did get to meet Darci's mom.  Imagine a Lithuanian feeling superior to an Italian!

But I want to talk about blacks, to add just a bit more to this wonderful 'conversation' about race we are having.

Blacks need to learn from Jews, Italians, the Irish, and others who have faced abuse and discrimination.  Don't whine, don't complain, don't seek a government program. Don't try to cash in on your 'victim' status, when the truth   is that you are a 'victim' of liberal victimology.  Don't waste your energy blaming others for your own failures.

Don't wallow in your real or imagined grievances, especially vicarious grievances.  That's the mark of a loser.  Winners live and act in the present where alone they can influence the future.

If you want me to judge you as an individual, by the content of your character and not by the color of your skin, then behave like an individual: don't try to secure advantages from membership in a group!

Abandon tribal self-identification.  Did you vote for Obama because he is black?  Then you have no business in a voting booth. 

Bear in mind that the world runs on appearances, and that if you appear to be a thug — from your saggy pants, your 'hoodie,' your sullen and disrespectful attitude — then people will suspect you of being a thug.

Take a leaf out of Condi Rice's book. She's black, she's female, and she became Secretary of State. And her predecessor in the job was a black  man, Colin Powell. It sure is a racist society we have here in the  USA.  And that Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court — isn't he a black dude?  And not a mulatto like Obama, but one seriously black man.  

Lose the basketball.  Get the needle out of your arm, the coke out of your nose, and that soul-killing rap noise out of your ears. Listen to the late Beethoven piano sonatas. May I recommend Opus #s 109, 110, and 111? Mozart is also supposed to be good for  improving your mental capacity. We honkies want you to be successful.  If you are successful, we won't have to support you.  And if you are successful you will be happy.  Happy people don't cause trouble.

And we don't give a flying enchilada what color you are. It's not about color anyway.  It's about behavior. Work hard, practice the ancient virtues, and be successful. If you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere. Don't let Brother Jesse or Brother Al tell you otherwise.  Those so-called 'reverends' are little more than race-hustlers who make money from the grievance industry. And when they run out of grievances? Then they create 'micro-aggressions.'  

Liberals are not your friends either.  They want you to stay on the plantation.  They think you are too stupid to take care of yourselves.

If you learn to control your emotions, defer gratification, study hard and practice the old-time virtues, will you be 'acting white'?  Yes, in a sense.  High culture is universal and available to all who want to assimilate it.  What makes our culture superior to yours is not that it is white but that it is superior.  You have already 'appropriated' our technology. (Or did it come from sub-Saharan Africa?)  Why balk at 'appropriating' our virtues? We want you to! For your benefit and ours. 'Cultural appropriation' is a good thing. Here is a fine example of 'cultural appropriation.' 

Don't get mad, be like Rudy Giuliani. Can you imagine him making a big deal about being called a greaseball, dago, goombah, wop, guinea . . .  ? Do you see him protesting Soprano-style depictions of Italian-Americans as mafiosi? 

Kathy Hochul, Leftist Idiot

Head over to Malcolm Pollack's place for some sensible commentary. Meat quote:

Political thinkers from Hobbes to Schmitt have understood that the fundamental principle that legitimizes the power of the State is the reciprocal obligation of obedience and protection. We cede to the State the awesome power of coercion by threat of violence, and in return we expect a guarantee of our public and personal security. This means that when the State abandons its side of that obligation, it is the right, and the duty, of the citizenry to secure their own protection.

That's right. It follows that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms.  The rate of exercise of that right stands in inverse relation to the failure of the State to guarantee our public and personal security.  The more the government fails to do what it is supposed to do, chiefly, protect life, liberty, and property, the more citizens will arm themselves.

From this you can see just how preternaturally stupid (or deliberately self-enstupidated) libs, lefties, and wokesters are. Presumably, they want fewer guns in civilian hands.* Their policies, however,  incentivize gun ownership by Joe and Jane Citizen. 

In a piece defending Viktor Orban against the mindless charge of being a 'fascist dictator,' Rod Dreher writes,

Unlike London, Paris, Washington, New York, Brussels, and elsewhere, street crime is very low in the Hungarian capital — and that’s not because the police are everywhere.

Think about it: just this week, the governor of New York [Kathy Hochul] ordered the state’s National Guard troops to patrol New York City’s subways to crack down on violent crime there. This never, ever happens in Budapest. Ever. A British friend traveling this week in New York said the scene outside his lodgings in Manhattan is appalling, with scores of African men — illegal aliens who came through Mexico — loitering on the street and urinating in public. That doesn’t happen in Budapest either, because Hungary is a country that controls its borders.

Read it all.

__________

*And so do I. It can't be good to have all sorts of untrained people packing heat.  I defend 2A rights, but I would never try to persuade people to arm themselves. Gun ownership is a grave responsibility. You have to get training, you have to practice, and you have to know the law.  Before you even think about buying a gun, you need to develop situational awareness. As the noted trainer Steve Tarani says, "If you have to go to guns, there has been a failure in situational awareness." That is a very slight exaggeration, but not by much. Another trainer, retired Navy SEAL Chris Sajnog here discusses ten ways to improve your SA.

What is the worst enemy of SA? The smartphone. Don't be a dumbass with a smartphone. Don't walk around with your head up your app!  

Negative Events: Likelihood versus Gravity of Occurrence

Suppose you pack heat. Someone might ask you, "But what is the likelihood that you, given your cautious and circumspect style of life, will ever be in a situation in which you will need to defend your life, or a family member's life, with deadly force?"

The question is legitimate. The answer is as follows. You must weigh the likelihood of the negative event against the gravity of its occurrence.  Although it may be unlikely that you will need to defend yourself or another with a firearm, the consequences of not being able to do so are dire indeed: death of self or other.

The point is that you must not consider merely the likelihood of negative events, but also their gravity should they occur, when determining courses of action.

For a second example, consider wearing a seat belt. I never drive without seat belt fastened. Given my cautious driving habits, the likelihood of  a serious accident on any given day are very low.  But the consequences of going through the windshield are grave, in two senses of that term.

Taming the Wild Horse of the Mind on the Road to Benares

This morning's meditation session ran from 3:10 ante meridiem to 4:00. Before that I was sketching six blog posts in my journal. My mind was on fire with ideas fueled in part by  some entries from Volume Five of Tom Merton's journal.  As flabby a liberal as he is, both politically and theologically, he is engaged in the seven volumes of his journal in a wholly admirable project of relentless self-examination. I love this argonaut of interiority with all his inner conflicts.

He fled the world but was drawn back to her. The contemplative of contemptus mundi  became a peace activist. He who preached The Silent Life (the tile of one of the best of his books) was an inveterate scribbler of journal entries, articles, poems, letters — how many volumes of correspondence? Five? –  not to mention too many books some of them good many of them not so good.

His journals are a treasure trove of ideas, references, self-criticism, culture-critical observations, weather reports, whimsical vignettes, extrapolations, autodidactic and amateurish, from his reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Camus and plenty of people you've never heard of, Isaac of Stella, Evdokimov, Julien Green . . . I could go on.

Anyway, my mind was racing when I hit the black mat of meditation. Now you can pull in the reins brutally on the wild horse, or let him run. Best to let him run and tire himself out while you observe his antics. After 20 minutes he settled down, leaving 30 minutes for a peaceful dive toward Silence or Mental Quiet, the first stage on the mystical descent. The German Versenkung taken mystically* as opposed to nautically well captures the sinking below the  waves of discursivity into the depths.

Now it can happen that you sink so deep that you fear that you will never come up again. The terror of ego loss grips you. At this point you need a great faith and a great trust, lest you miss the opportunity of a lifetime: to penetrate the veil while enwrapped in the mortal coil. I was offered this opportunity many years ago but the fear of ego death  sent me to the surface again when the whole point is to transcend the ego, to let it go, to give up control.  The ego must die for the soul to live. I am alluding to what may be the deep meaning of Matthew 18:3: "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." The little child trusts. Plato: "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

_______________

* (KONZENTRATION) Zustand tiefer Konzentration, Meditation absorption , contemplation
die Verbindung zum Göttlichen durch die sitzende, stille Versenkung: connecting with the divine by means of seated, quiet contemplation.

Crises There Will Always Be

I cite the example of Nicolai Hartmann in a Substack entry from March, 2022.

So buck up and fight on. Philosophy is a great consolation. We lesser lights ought to look up to the luminaries, and their example. Boethius wrote in prison, Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin in 1945 in the midst of the Allied assault.

We won't give up and we won't give in. We will battle the bastards that are out to destroy our Republic.  But the wise among us know that this world is a vanishing quantity and that to expend all one's energies in the defense of the fleeting finitudes of the here and now is folly. There are things worth living for that transcend the passing scene. So apportion your time accordingly.  

Situational Awareness

Another MavPhil public service message:  Don't walk around with your head up your app!

You're a dumbass with a smartphone if you don't understand that it is perhaps the greatest enemy of situational awareness. 

And if you pack heat, bear this in mind: if you have to go to guns, there's probably been a failure of  situational awareness. (Steve Tarani)  Head on a swivel! (Sebastian Gorka)

Memorize and implement Colonel Jeff Cooper's situational awareness color codes!

Don't be a pollyanna.  (And don't confuse her with polyanna, an Anna with multiple personality disorder.)

The Beauty of the Solitary Life

Thomas Merton, The Journals, vol. 6, 24 June 1966, p. 344: "The beauty of the solitary life . . . is that you can throw away all the masks and forget them until you return among people."

For, as one of my aphorisms has it, "The step into the social is by dissimulation."

Before I quit my cell, I put on my face, don my mask, go gray, and try not to appear too intense.

De-Dox Your Glove Box!

And what might I mean by that?

I mean remove documents from your glove compartment or other easily accessible areas in your vehicle wherein it would be unwise to carry them given the spike in crime of all sorts caused by such Democrat policies as defunding the police and eliminating cash bail. I count four levels of foolishness in decreasing levels of inadvisability:

1) Carrying your driver's license in the glove box.

2) Carrying the title to the vehicle in the glove box.

3) Carrying the vehicle registration in the glove box.

4) Carrying insurance cards in the glove box.

Since smash and grab is quick and easy and on the rise, the wise do not leave personal information easy of access in their vehicles. (You might want to look into installing a serious console or under-seat lock box.) One scenario goes like this: the thug learns your address and swipes your garage door opener. Now they have easy access to your garage and its contents,  and if you are foolish enough to leave the door to your domicile unlocked, access to your house and its contents including wife and children.

Reader Asks: What Should I Read?

Nathaniel T. writes,

In the new year, I'm committing to some more regular reading habits. 
 
What serious books would you recommend to someone outside academia who has about half an hour uninterrupted in the morning to read, three times a week? How about a list that would last that person a year? 
 
Here are some additional parameters that might aid in your selection:
 
I went to St. John's College in Annapolis, so I've read many of the "greats" in whole or in part, at least once. I have kept up some serious reading since my graduation in 2012, just irregularly. 
I already pray and read the New Testament and spiritual reading daily. 
 
Thanks for your insight and writing!
 
The best advice I could give anyone  with your background who is committed to the life of the mind is to buy and study a copy of A. G. Sertillanges, O. P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. He explains how to proceed.  It is a classic. He draws upon Aquinas and upon Alphonse Gratry, of whom C. S. Peirce had a very high opinion. So I also recommend Gratry's Logic if you can find a copy. Reference here.
 
I hesitate to offer a list of books on particular topics given the constraints on your time.  But here are a couple that are  short, very clear, and unusually thought-provoking: Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation (make sure to get the Sea Harp Press edition which contains an introduction by C. S. Lewis); Romano Guardini, Jesus Christus (anything by Guardini is worth reading).
 
If perchance you are interested mystical theology, and have already read the great Spanish mystics, Juan de la Cruz and Teresa de Avila, and have the stamina for a long slog, then I recommend Augustin Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer: A Treatise on Mystical Theology. Reference and notes here.
 
For more suggestions see my Bibliophilia category.
 
Combox open if anyone has any recommendations.
 
By the way, has St. John's College, Annapolis gone 'woke'?