self interest is the prescription for mass extinction

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And I'm not just talking about other creatures. People even realize how murderous are their remarks when it comes to this stuff, but, since it interferes with their unswerving allegiance to taking care of number one, The American Way, they blank that out, turn everything that militates against their position into cartoons, abstractions, worthlessness. It is NOT only wealthy sociopaths who do this. There are plenty of not-wealthy-at-all sociopaths hard at it, and the more you hold up the mirror, the more bulletproof arguments you have against them, the more determined they become. They are locked in a dream, and it seems perfectly reasonable to most people that when one comes upon someone locked in this kind of nightmare for all living things, one shakes them awake and assures them it was all a bad dream, they're perfectly safe now. But no. Obviously, it doesn't work that way, now does it? The nightmares they form by taking untenable "truisms" like everybody-looking-out-for-number-one-is-the-right-thinking-adult-view-in-a-civilized-and-free-society are not the kind another can help them with, unless somewhere within their ability to discern real feelings there is an accompanying urge to uphold them, brave all the supposedly horrible consequences of loosing their death grips on murderously propagandistic bullshit that has been passed off as consensus so long it actually IS a type of consensus, to really SEE.

The ancients called this "stopping and looking". Sounds so simple. Enlightening beings cannot FORCE sentient beings awake. They have to want it like a drowning man wants air before they will take any guidance. Some of them are strangely drawn to it, but it is turned into entertainment—not serious, just soothing—most of the time. The number of people who are capable of "leaving the world" and "stopping and looking" at reality—which is never not right there under your nose—are very, very few indeed.

In all my decades of study I continually come across passages where masters remind one that it cannot be said. Well, in point of fact, it CAN be said. Straight out. Completely reasonably. But it sounds like wuwu gibberish to most people, and like, oh, well, right, of course, but... to others. There is no "but" about it. You ARE Charles Munger. You ARE the rings of Saturn. That fucking gnat batting at yer monitor is YOU.

I used to say you are life itself, but that doesn't quite cover it. Material we don't think of as sentient is us too. We all love the notion put forth, it's said, first by Carl Sagan: We are star stuff. But still almost no one grasps the import, even after our feeble science has either proven it or run up against it so many times even they are forced to say that everything there is or can happen seems so vexedly completely dependent on the observer.

Nope. It eludes you anyway.

This is why the crusty old Zen dudes of yore INSISTED that YOU do not exist. Once you've fully assimilated THAT, the rest becomes much easier to take in. I can't for the life of me understand why, with people being slaughtered by drones and squillions of gallons of dread toxins filling up the Gulf of Mexico and the Niger Delta and billions of people starving and polar bears drowning in droves and even America-the-Incomparably-Fat turning into a Third World bastion of neofeudalism before our very eyes, more people have not ceased staying within their own colored lines, mouthing platitudes, mouthing outrages, putting in their time for that almighty paycheck, squinting over the choice of lunchmeat to purchase, all of that, to give life to what HAS to be the most burning desire in anything capable of thought, to get to the truth and uphold it above everything else, treasure it above everything else, AND WORK TO MAKE IT INTO A BRILLIANT FUTURE.

Every single speck of everything, to include even what people call nothing, is nothing apart from YOU.

You are not it; it actually is you.

There. Piece of cake. I've told you. So now you can fix everything, right?

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love, 99
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about that resolution

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intermission

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there'll probably be more, and different

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Okay. A lot of things are weighing on my mind damn heavily lately. For quite some time I have been struggling with my urges to tell that shill yonder to stick it where the sun don’t shine. It is no longer worth it to use up so much time and energy trying to keep his blog running smoothly, keep things from going too far into the awful zone. It was way worth it when I felt it was going to help him make a difference in the too damn fashionable election fraud thing, but he, somewhere along the line, decided to settle in for the long haul instead of go supernova to make it stop, now, and that means he has all the time in the world to keep his own blog rolling along... or find someone who does not mind filling their time herding the scandalized minions while he fills every page with the mob-generating polemics that pass for American culture these days.

Not my bag.

I have news for everyone. The people on the other side—and, clue, there is no other side—are people in the identical sense as those on this side—and, clue, there is no this side—are people. We’re all people.

The critical mass superiority complex battling the right wing echo chamber is every bit as pernicious as those they battle. It’s identical, actually. They're actually battling themselves. It’s all us-versus-themming all humanity to death. What's wrong with this picture?

C'mon, you can do it....

No excuses. There are none. It’s crap. Smart people can think up and spew endless excuses. So what? So it pisses off people who are desperate for something REAL to happen to make things better... no matter what the idea of “better” might turn out to be in each head. We can’t ever get to better this way. The strongest—aka, the meanest, most energetically greedy, most singlemindedly determined—will forever turn out to feel things are better when they have their way, but the rest of us won’t. And it’s worse even than that! Once the strongest get a taste of that exalted better, they can’t stop themselves from continuing their massively destructive shit to keep heaping that better on themselves at everyone else’s expense.

This is precisely as true with “progressives” as it is with “conservatives”... with the “altruistic” as with the “selfish”... with the downtrodden as with the downtreaders... EVERYONE, high and low.

And, well, high time we cut this out, no?

Yes.

Doug Hofstadter, someone who used to bear the brunt of many of my New Year’s Day letters, brought up the concept of “jumping out of the system” a couple thousand years ago in the Pulitzer Prize winning Gödel, Esher, Bach and, even though I don’t think he ever got anything like a good grip on the basics of Zen, it was a damn Zen thing he put forth there. The book is a very hard read, but rewards one with a little cosmos of wonderful concepts, gloriously abstract, and useful for a lifetime... but... er... I digress.

When you find yourself trapped in a system that does not work, you jump out of it, look at it from outside so you can SEE what makes it unworkable and how to go about fixing that.

This seems dirt evident to me.

So, while it is also thrilling to read Doug coming up with it and playing with it, sending you off down a path more wonderful than Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole, it is dirt evident that one must jump out of a system that doesn’t work, or only works on a level too low to satisfy the imperatives, to make that dull insufficiency stop wrecking things for everyone. Right? Oh, right? Uhm, duh? Please? Are you strapped to a full length mirror and calling that freedom? Or can you look up from the contents of your own mind long enough to get the lightbulb on and dance? Hmmm?

Try to divorce this argument from the smart/dumb axis, because looking up from this jail cell mirror thing doesn’t seem to favor smart people over dumb people. In fact, sometimes stunted intellect means there’s less of a hinderance to assimilating dirt evident stuff.

What is it about your own ideas that make them more important to you as weapons to bash others with than your basic love of living things? I mean, even the most evil fuckers of all time loved living things, no matter how many of them they slaughtered, no matter how many they squished like bugs. They couldn’t help it. Life itself loves life itself. Life itself is love. The only self you have more fundamental than your status as a living thing is your status as star stuff, which means, of course, not only do you love everyone in your very essence, but you love everything, every atom, every quark, in your very essence. You ARE every quark in your very essence. So, pfeh, this left/right, Republicrat, good/evil, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, mode of picking up a standard to bear is just SHIT okay?

Can you stop long enough to take this in?

Can you bring yourself up short, just stop, for long enough to realize all your, say, anti-racism crap is as stupid as racism? Does that sound too nihilistic to you? It ain’t, and if you can’t hang with it, you have not stopped for that moment to take a gander at the basics.

We’re star stuff. So are rocks.

[So is Glenn Beck.]

Hating racism is as hateful as racism. Whenever you build up an us-versus-them to fight bad things, you are creating an isomorphism containing the same awfultude you flatter yourself you combat. You have to jump out of us-vs-them, this-versus-that, or you’re a bipedal exercise in futility. Period.

That’s why I use New Years’ Days to do this sort of thing. A great do-nothing day to just stop and look at actuality, remind somebody of it. I know you probably don’t come here for me to bap you over the head with Zen, use up yer eyeprints being told to stop being a jackass for a few moments, but, ahem, it’s getting dire out there and this should only take a few moments. You can get pissed at me for calling you a jackass tomorrow. For right now, just, please, shut the fuck up, and stop.

You’re supposed to be sentient. You’re supposed to be possessed of more intelligence than warring troops of chimpanzees, and this means you have to do this sort of thing from time to time. Or would you prefer the Social Darwinism we call Globalization, the Social Darwinism that already is the Third Millennium, the Social Darwinism that is melting our planet with wars and greenhouse gasses? If yer so almighty clean and righteous and progressive, then whut’s yer problem taking this in and DOING BETTER?
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