Cultural Sanity
I think it fair to say that anyone with a strong need to sleep, pee, shit
or obtain sexual equilibrium is going to become a monster to deal with
socially. Likewise, anyone bullied into a technical focus of any sort,
especially one requiring their overt effort (even if the bullying force is
not from other people) is quite likely to become a monster.
To maintain a casual friendly sanity in human sharing I, and I surmise
that everyone, require the following:
--Overt release from responsiblity for conceptual engagement with
anything I don't have despotic sovereignty over.
--Overt grant of sovereignty over whatever I view as critical
infrastructure in my identity.
--A regular living arrangement that does not force me to adapt to being
continuously afraid or wary, and that has overt arrangement for me to shit
and pee and sleep and obtain sexual equilibrium.
--A welcoming expectation that I will have friendly sexual feelings to
express, and that I may require orgasm occasionally by some means to
prevent becoming a monster.
--No significant melodramatic engagement with my life, especially in a
public encounter, without the direct inclusion of at least two other highly
familiar people.
Preparing for a Rape
Both a birth and a rape event are quite common to occur at least once in
the whole lifetime of a woman. The two have in common that a condition of
intense sexual arousal can make the event far less painful or even
pleasant, but must be achieved in the face of serious reason for dread and
terror.
If I take as a premise that everyone of both sexes has a periodic need
to orgasm and often no straightforward opportunity for that, the motive to
do a violent rape may be assumed to be an unavoidable component of some
peoples' personality. Since a man or boy cannot be forced to have normal
intercourse when not sexually aroused, the forms of sexual rape that males
endure are not as overtly sexual as what happens to women. But being a man,
I give it equal importance. Everyone faces the very real possibility of
being forced by others into a masochistic role that will be very painful and
potentially injurious if they resist participating in the feelings of those
attacking them.
The Patty Hearst example is the best one for this, since it represents
the essential elements in a way that can happen equally to both sexes. She
avoided injury and pain by embracing the political orientation and feelings
of the group that kidnaped her, to the point of participating in an armed
robbery. This is very common for teenage boys in Guatemala and the Congo.
The more formalized equivalent of the military draft used to be universal in
the civilized world. What happens with teenage girls drafted into child
care can often get similarly grim and inspiring of sadistic behavior.
Some form of extreme hazing is included in nearly every man's life, so
men who are casual about choreographing hazing are not uncommon. Their
victims are usually male unless heterosexuality is part of the motive.
Being a victim encourages a person to plan for the next attack through
fantasy about it, wherein they relax into the unavoidable situation and
make the best of it. Doing this kind of planning a lot seems to result in
eventual moral acceptance of the hazing, and perhaps even makes the attack
more likely.
Fantasy engagement with trauma became a big part of my life as a
teenager and continues to be. While actual traumatic events have been quite
rare for me, those few have gone quite easy for me with a minimum of stress
and damage, primarily due to my deliberate easing of stress for my
attacker. Having known little interpersonal trauma, I have not wrestled
with a tendency to sadistic behavior.
I have never fantasized being the victim of a forced sexual encounter,
but if I were a woman I certainly would have. Likewise for a fantasy of
giving a difficult birth. Birth videos are becoming quite common and many
women use them to get a picture of what they are going to encounter, but
none of those I've seen show an obvious sexual focus on the part of the
woman; though one did show a woman who is clearly in no pain and not in a
hospital setting.
Women are not apparently coached in their youth to prepare for a forced
need for sexual arousal any more than I was. I've met many women who appear
to never focus sexually at all, in spite of devastating menstrual cramps, an
imminent birth, or a sexually predatory relative. Discussion about these
concerns among the women I've known always focused on anesthetizing drugs
and verbal therapy, even with the matter being a current issue. Sexual
arousal and orgasm as a good thing, and potentially vital, has never come
up; let alone using sexual focus to cope with those challenges.
Morally Acceptable Personal Limitation
The following is a list of personal moral guidelines that are not to be
coercively enforced in any way. They represent only an idea of prevailing
moral respect in American society.
- Personal cash and liguidatable paper assets will never exceed $200,000
in value.
- A primary residence will never exceed $5 million in value. No single
individual will hold title to two or more residential real estate assets
with a total value exceeding $1 million.
- No one idividual will hold title to business real estate valued in
excess of $2 million.
- Any residence having habitable space exceeding 1000 square feet will be
shared by at least three adults. If habitable space exceeds 1500 square
feet the minimum will be four adults. If the space exceed 2000 square feet
then the minimum will be five adults.
- No law may be established limiting the number of people who may share a
single residence.
- No real estate may be sold in a public transaction without a
certificate of code compliance from a recognized public agency.
- No rule of any kind regarding victimless cultural expression may be
coercively enforced in any way, including but not limited to drug use,
gambling, prostitution, voluntary sexual activity involving children,
public nudity and sexuality, building construction or remodeling, use of
vehicles, single entreprenual business enterprise, and coalescing of crowds
for any purpose.
The Forced Paradym Choice
In studying the difference between the Sunni and the Shiite viewpoints,
I note a parallel duality in all the other spiritual frames of reference.
Crudely, I list the split thusly:
Sunni Caliph Seminars Christian Cultural-Jew British Raja Community
Formal-Terrorism Rule-of-Law Diversity-Tolerance Affirmative-Action
Curious-Scientist Humble-Performer Weath-Creating-Innovation Trickster
Shiite Sufi Gurdjieff Masonic Religious-Jew Irish Renunciant Mentor
Opportunist-Terrorism Rule-of-Strongest Hatfield/McCoy Genocide
Practical-Joker Heartless-Competitor Military-Innovation Conqueror
With a conceptual divide thus:
Concensus Legalistic-Morality No-Social-Innovation Passivity Voting
Obedience Relativistic-Morality Delight-in-Chaos Violence Fascism
And more specifically thus:
Negotiative trade and territory based household, Respect of a Newcomer
All social questions answered before 900 AD.
Resource based household with Benevolent despotism, Forced Compliance
Cultural practice subject to whim of the current authority.
Children nearly all grow up under a benevolent despot, even if the overt
family philosophy is negotiative. Most parents give their children many
valuable things and opportunuties but always at a cost of dignity. Children
have no honored territory and little to trade, so they are very vulnerable
to being tantalized or humiliated, and are thus inspired to idealize the
Shiite view to conjure back a feeling of dignity, even in overt opposition
to their parent's outlook.
Due perhaps to growing up without any micromanagement, my own nature has
been Sunni, but recognizing and validating both outlooks, without
recognizing the split or the real nature of the Mentor-anarchy based
perspective. Faced with children who steal and deceive, and are overtly and
heartlessly opportunist, I do my best to honor whatever I can in their
personal sovereignty and dignity, but with little effect on easing their
rage. I have thus a deep-seated assumption tying the Shiite outlook with
rage from too many years of confusing disrespect that I would take as
complete rejection, but the Shiites take as normal. Perhaps the Sunni view
could be seen as introversion from tolerating years of overt personal
mockery that would evoke immediate extreme violence from a Shiite man.
The skate park represents the extreme embracing of anarchist rage,
without even a pretense of constructive result and without any real concern
about designing out danger. It is a preference for a tight rope without a
net, a seeking of tragedy. It applauds a high level of skill, that is
completely useless in the constructive trade based economy for any but a
few super performers who decide to prostitute their activity, forsaking
interpersonal dignity with those who watch them. It is like the study of
music or dance, but with the element of real tragedy deliberately added, as
with martial arts or formal competitive sports.
This is perhaps the emotional root of the Shiite view, the practical
joker or terrorist, of delighting in the tragic failure of someone else,
and relating to technical resources as a divine miracle rather than as the
direct result of useful skill and personal management. The Zeitgeist
Movement inspires the participation of a lot of people with this kind of
belief about physical resources, wherein they presume that the huge wealth
of their world could be harvested as casually as the oxygen in the air.
An Iranian Shiite once remarked on the record that he was impressed that
the prophet Mohammed micromanaged so much of his followers personal
activities and had much to say about future political forms but made no
clear effort to pass political control to anyone or any system. I take that
deathbed story as a clear declaration on the part of the prophet, that it
is not his place to decide who or what should politically rule in his
absense. He balked at lending his considerable political clout to anyone
else by recommending them. He had obtained his position without such backing
and I surmise that he was quite dubious of such a thing, as if to say that
direct divine backing is the only sort to base authority on. So Mohammed was
not a Sunni because he took political power as a despot, and he was not a
Shiite because he granted no honor to any other despot. I am also like that
in my life. We both say "I contradict myself?, very well, I contradict
myself."
But he was a military leader and I am a managerial leader, he never
learned to read or write, and I never learned to do physical battle.
Ironically, there is a Shiite claim that on his death bed he requested that
someone obtain a pen and paper, and that those with him at the time failed
to do so. I suggest that neither claim is possible. Not even the Koran was
written til thirty years after he died. I believe that he deliberately
handed the political authority he held to literally everyone. He witnessed
their childish clamor at the prospect of his death and he demanded only
that they clamor elsewhere, and so they did.
Initially the Sunni tricksters ruled in Medina, often supplimenting
their military power through hiring professional mercenaries. Mohammed's
relative Ali eventually made a successful military bid for control but
things don't appear to have actually stablized either way in Iraq, Iran,
Afganistan and Azerbaijan (Kurds), the areas that retain a Shiite presense.
The entire rest of the Muslim world, an overwhelming majority, is Sunni,
and not a military focus of the United States.
My hope for the Zeitgeist Movement is that it can evolve a way to
resolve this, to make possible a wealthy world that does not require
trickery for management effectiveness.
The 911 hoax and the AIDS hoax seem for me the real test for this,
because they are so brazen, so childishly obvious, like a naked emperor. I
keep expecting the spell to break, like the Berlin wall. But the more years
that pass, the more solid the hoaxes become, questioned only by rude
vindictive people who inspire only illwill in those who hear them.
No-one openly discusses the hoaxes as a genuine attempt at nobility, of
a sort clearly recognized by nearly all major government and media
leadership. Like the Pearl Harbor trick, the motive, to buck a worldwide
Shiite cultural trend using artificially fired up American wealth and
initiative, can be seen as a grim but neccesary cost; inspiring respect of
the government by the uninformed self-centered rabble. A direct rational
appeal is sure to go nowhere. The American public will respond that the
matter is someone else's problem, that they agree but they don't really
care, or don't see any hope of a military response creating a better
outcome. And the rest of the world is too militarily feeble as well as
unmotivated.
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Social Failure of Modern Men
I took a Ted.com survey created by Philip Zimbardo about the striking
signs of social failure among boys, both in school and in real life
social engagement as adults. Each question in the survey was multiple
choice with a comment section. These were my comments:
The play called "Taming of the Shrew" illustrates how catastrophically
vulnerable someone with a classic male identity is, to emotional
paralysis from routine verbal domination. The modern feminist based
world completely ignores this, with the result that boys must be overtly
politically incorrect or face continual paralysis. Thus the problem is
far less prevalent in oriental or latin men, who are generally
encouraged to maintain arbitrary dominance with women.
I think this is overwhelmingly the cause of male social failure.
I recommend each child have complete authority over which classes they
take, limited only to a minimum total class time of four hours a day,
and have no graduation standards at all. Other than rudimentary reading
ability, nothing presented to me in public school has benefited my
technical effectiveness as an adult. We need to face that school is
entirely a social game, for which all focus can be made voluntary with
no bad consequences in practical adult ability.
I also recommend deliberate coaching of children in methods of social
and intellectual verbal domination, both for defense and for use in
reaching out. Much such coaching will have to be segregated by sex to
avoid mental paralysis.
American men will sire fewer children than men raised in more sexist
validating cultures, due to the overwhelming psychic challenge and
social complexity of relating easy with children and single women
without any social network backup.
This can only be addressed through deliberate development of real life
social network support of nonsexist men. Presently, only sexist men
receive social network backup from anyone.
There is no dodging the necessity of developing overt social networking
backup for nondominant men in contexts that have full force feminine
involvement. I am convinced that nothing less direct can empower young
men in noncriminal ways within a society with a nonsexist ethic.
The online involvement of video games and porn completely dodge the
political consequences of deliberate criminal focus, allowing a social
isolated nonsexist man to have a feeling of dignity without actually
hurting anyone.
I have not noted any observable benefit to young men playing video
games. I think it may be quite as technically irrelevant to real life as
public school.
The need for porn in male social coping is a major tragedy, but better
than nothing.
Online emotional engagement can and does replace real life emotional
engagement, for people who have failed to socially network in real life,
and therefore have no other choice.
TED.com lately has presented a few talks about the current trend in
modern culture of social failure in boys and men, relative to girls and
women. My impression is that what has been in the past referred to as
social success of men, such as genocidal conquest or putting a
McDonald's in every city worldwide, is not something to define as a good
thing. I would say instead that Philip Zimbardo's speech describes the
unraveling of an illusion, showing that men are in reality socially
crippled by their form of identity, and able to achieve socially only
through rude or criminal action. I see no escaping this. Our world must
address that I, and every man, are desperate social cripples who must be
overtly taken into some form of deliberately evolved real life social
network, or be condemned to play online games and similar surrogate
living when not committing real atrocities.
Significantly, most of the new modern women, who own most of the houses
in my neighborhood, are (when at home) either catastrophically
introverted or loud psychotic bitches; either way unable to be
successfully what I could call intimate. This is not a society to me;
this is a shadow of a society. The modern women are also exposed now,as
the failure in intimacy that they always have been; having always used
heartless polite deception in the past to trick others into an
appearance of intimate participation, instead of actual human empathy. A
few can still pull off conjuring human familiars but most are reduced to
dogs and cats and fast food employees.
We meet in the online video game of Facebook.
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Tantric Relationship
Baba Dez is the name of a famous new "western style tantra" teacher. He
has a new book available called Shaman Method of Sex Magic, and he stars
in a new movie about the culture of his educational program. The mock
tantric movie of Baba Dez philandering at the expense of his new young
girlfriend is a ghastly tragedy for me, not a depiction I could sit
through. Even the trailer was too painful. The absurd infidelity of the
movie illustrates something tantric in the normal tradition of marriage.
My twenty year relation with Sara was tantric in the sense of being a
permanent suspension of sexual triumph. It was that element of going through
with sexual triumph that destroys the coupling in the movie. The
withholding of genuine tantric unity, that the competitive focus of the
philandering women in the movie creates, reinforces the disaster. Sara was
vividly aware of that threat in other women, and spoke of it directly when
threatened. Baba Dez in the movie is a circus act and a status symbol, not
someone doing any kind of suspension of sexual triumph in pursuit of
spiritual peace, as I had with Sara.
The validation of debauch and triumph by most of the women in the movie
echoes my own experience of the online dating insanity; of women scorning
the sexual focus of the men, converting their sexual drive into a business
opportunity, a chance to saddle the man into a humiliating choreographic
role playing in trade for a false promise of sexual triumph, in mocking
presumption that any man would want that. Many of the men express clearly an
offer of sexual testing, a study of a possible sacred sexual fidelity, but
the women mock that as a kind of perversion, certain that in their coldness
about the man's well-being they will fail to link. If he proves to be an
unruly participant in her choreographic plans then she will discard or
brutally attack him, indifferent to any tantric peace.
So in the movie, Baba Dez has adapted his life focus to accept being used
this way by the women who are available to him. He gets embraced as a
world class circus act by one woman after another. And he fails to recognize
his opportunity, when fate offers him a real tantric partner. He recognizes
his mistake too late, and pines for the peace of conventional suspension of
triumph with his one genuinely tantric girlfriend, who has given up on him,
taken no for an answer.
In my real world, the surface cultural expression, in advertising and on
Match.com, applauds use of a promise of sexual triumph to sell cars and
airplane tickets, and condemns as a pervert anyone who admits to obsessive
study of sexual chemistry with their associates, seeking a possible tantric
sexual unity. Somehow in the approved pursuit of marriage, the shared
diversions and ambitions, the social class alignment, the cash payoff
possibilities rule a decision to settle into sexual fidelity with a
spiritually random associate. This is madness; I won't do this.
Sara and I had no unity in any of those technical ways. And we had no
commercial marriage either; we had that insanely powerful glue of deep
spiritual peace under each others influence. Like for the tragic woman in
the movie, a soulmate is unforgetable, once the spark is lit. We saw that
in each other; a promise would have been ridiculous.
So I think western civilization already has it's version of tantra,
expressed in tightly choreographed dancing to test sexual expression
compatibility, and a presumption of permanent coupling. The tantra of the
movie, in which Baba Dez plays the sexual meditation instructor instead of
setting a genuine example of deep communion, is a gross mockery of the
Hindu intent, a commercial circus act using a catchy spiritual name. Sara
and I didn't have technique training making possible our spiritual peace.
We had the limitless patience and interest of real partners. If any
training is needed, I think it will be about recognizing the hijacking of
this devotional drive, by focus on avarice and status seeking euphoria.
If someone asked Sara (which happened every now and then) what made possible
the spectacular link with me, she said it was that I was utterly harmless; no
temper, no psychic barriers, no technical lameness. I think that is what a man
needs to seek to facilitate this; to simply settle into being harmless. I was
that way all my life, so I'm no-one to advise about it.
And what Sara had on the ball was unconditional friendliness with everybody.
She laughed one day saying that she discovered one day that not everyone could
get an out of state two party check cashed at the grocery in the first week in
a town. She had no psychic barriers either; everyone could plainly read her
feelings.
So I think that Tantra is actually not about sexuality; it's about a simple
friendship of any sort between a friendly woman and a harmless man. No
agreement is necessary, the shared focus can be cleaning a kitchen or
wandering
around, other intense intimacies don't wreck it, and the effect of a single
meeting can take months to wear off. Tantra is the simple granting of core
importance to another person who is oriented in an opposite frame of
reference.
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Addressing Cultural Tragedy
The text of an alternative Awakening the Dreamer, directed to people who
are not open to enlistment in harassing organizational scapegoats in an
attempt to ease cultural tragedy.
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Adrian's I-Ching
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A report about Annie Sprinkle's presentation
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An article about trying to fit into a society of vampires
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