One more little statement about the lesser millions: No one votes for a sociopath for practical reasons

 

You can love a grumpy person. You can love a dog. You can’t love the great outdoors, a river, a cloud, lichen, the wind. Get close to any of those things and you’ll see you’re feeling for yourself. You may have a displaced or projected feeling of compassion or tenderness for an old dying tree (maybe your unconscious is thinking of your father or your lost childhood), but that’s not love. You can’t love a freshly painted wall. You can’t love a lizard or a tarantula.* If you believe you can, you are sloppy and don’t know what love is.

Human consciousness can only love something life-affirming in another consciousness. There could be a rageful and botched man who nevertheless has a positive, injured heart under that surface that may be accessible, making him lovable. But a person who has dedicated every ounce of his being to anger, contempt, and causing pain to others – even though there is his burning baby in the crib beneath it all that had needed to be held – cannot be loved. He has purposely ended his heart by failing to get help.

This is Trump. What people feel for the man is not love or true admiration. It’s impos­sible to love a hateful consciousness.

They should see what they really feel, and who they are.

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* This is a bit more complicated than I'm declaiming here. When I was not yet a teen, I had about a dozen little red- and yellow-eared turtles that I loved at a supernatural level. (This feeling was probably enhanced by their representing my first acts of initiative in my emotionally stunted life: I had shoplifted each one of them from the local Woolworth's department store, and took care of them with a grown-up level of responsibility.) This was, though, the child’s heart, that allowed me to impute a lovely and adorable consciousness to creatures that very likely had no such capacity. I don’t know that this magical goodness should be possible in adults.

Judge Barrett – NYT comment that only thirty people ‘liked’

 

A truly sophisticated thinker realizes that family, tradition and neurotic needs for revenge or certainty aside, you cannot get morality from a Book or from an authority figure. The “good” is idiosyn­crat­ically subtle, having to do with healthy feeling and the emotional meaning of an act. The good becomes a dull ax when societal con­sensus intervenes, so society must “tread lightly” (as Walter White, Breaking Bad, said). Despite all of Barrett’s legal knowledge and critical thinking, she remains a dull-ax moralizer. We don’t need that ruling over us.

Families are, of course, natural units. Societies are less so or not so. We make them as a compromise of individual freedom. Unlike individuals and families, existentially, societies come later, not first, in the order of cause or nature. The individual exists first and lives a psychological life not a “moral” one. To believe morality is embedded in the human organism is just sloppy, wishful or pseudo-scientific (like Sam Harris’s) thinking.

Your child is within an hour of dying of starvation and you steal a slice of bread and a cup of milk for him. Are you good or bad? You kill a psychopath who has lunged at you with a clenched fist. Are you good or bad? You kill a 75-year-old known child rapist as he’s leading your 16-year-old daughter away by the hand. Good or bad? You’ve spied on a woman having sex in the privacy of her home, and as she proceeds to do some­thing apparently intrusive with her genitals, you break in and arrest her. Good or bad? You tell your son that all Democrats are defective people. This leads to his ending good friendships, or to a character of prejudice or to a permanent loss of respect for his parents, to an adult life of rage and career and social myopia, to psychosomatic illness. Are you good or bad?

People who believe morality and justice are simple are – simple, whether they have read four-thousand law books and one bible, or four-thousand bibles* and one law book, have a PhD or JD or MDiv. We don’t need these people, such as Amy Coney Barrett, “strictly” construing the meaning of the Constitution and deciding our lives, because they are not able.

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* https://www.theregister.com/2006/10/06/the_odd_body_religion/. There are over 4,000 religions.

 

Waiting for Godot

For unknown reasons, I am feeling stupid and dull lately. With clients, I’ve been living in this visceral inscrutable mood and mental effeteness where all issues feel two-dimen­sional and I feel useless. Oh, you were abused as a child. Yep, wife is OCPD and drives her husband nuts. You’re a depressed teen. Even a good jab at a long-term client – having her realize her cruel and sociopath early-teen children are that way because of her own Borderline-based cruelty toward them – felt bromide-like, like just inserting a well-worn term into an algebraic equation.

Honestly: I don’t know if this is old age (will be sixty-nine soon), or hormones (men have them, don’t they?), or even too much experience melding into beige twenty-five-year-old oatmeal. Good coffee in the morning hasn’t sharpened or piqued me. There isn’t any additional dysthymic or other depression: I’d know that. Is it the smoke from the California fires wafting over to southern Nevada? Is my body or God telling me that I finally must have the long break from shit that I’d needed (we’d all needed) in childhood: parents driving the car, adult-level routine in elementary school, the wheels always turning when you just need to look, wonder at existence?

What this is making me do is look at this client on the couch and both go through the motions and open up my molecules to mystery. If I’m placid and accepting of my altered state, possibly my depth will reappear or even something greater will appear? I realize, now, that I may always anticipate or hope for even deeper discoveries than the client’s present discom­fort, his dominating childhood roots, his birth- or pre-birth trauma. It’s the feeling of beginning the writing of a poem, sitting back (in the whole universe) and opening oneself and waiting for the world to be especially interesting.

Oddly enough, that may be my one kind of optimism.