Down in the Arkive and Your Psychodollars at Work

Well, I'm finally doing it. I'm going to try not to blog on weekends, so that I can start going down deep into the knowa's arkive and figure out what's in there. It is kind of like a virtual basement, isn't it? Who knows what kind of junk has been stuffed in there?

I suppose the purpose would be to assemble some of it into book form, but the volume of material is a little overwhelming, and I'm not even sure I'm able to objectively discern the quality of this or that post.

So far I've gotten from October 5 to October 22, 2005. I'm also taking the time to add tags to each post. This is because the titles are sometimes a bit mystifying, since they are often more to amuse than provide a hint about the content.

And since it takes no extra work, maybe I'll just pluck something I found in the basement and post it on weekends. This one from October 19, 2005 seemed mildly amusing. I don't know. You be the judge.

*****

I was driving home from work yesterday, silently lost in my meditations, absorbed with Booker T. in the changeless but mildly funkified realm that lies just above the afternoon commute, when Petey startled me from my reveries by blurting out, “psychodollars!”

Petey often operates in this abrupt and slightly cryptic manner, as if I could possibly know what he were talking about. The abruptness comes from having no recollection -- or pretending to have no recollection -- of what it’s like to cope with a sympathetic nervous system. I’ve told him that it took me forty years to finally be comfortable about being uncomfortable in my own skin, but he can’t relate.

Anyway, “go on,” I said. “Care to give me a hint?”

“Psychodollars. That’s the tax on fantasy -- the price we pay for not having our calendar synchronized with the Arab Muslim world.”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

“You know my idea -- geographical space is developmental time. Different cultures reflect different levels of psychological development and maturity. If you fail to reach that level, then you are punished by your culture, either directly or indirectly. But if you surpass that level and become too mature, you also get whacked.”

“Are you talking about what liberals do to conservative blacks again?”

“No, I’m talking about the middle east. Imagine a Palestinian who woke up one morning and didn’t have the paranoid delusion that Israel was responsible for all their problems. No, he says, we’ve created our own hideously dysfunctional culture, and only we can change it. He decides to publicize his thoughts, to write an editorial.”

“I know, I know, that would be his last editorial. It’s hard enough to write when you aren’t hanging upside down from a street lamp on the Boulevard of the Martyrs with your testicles missing and a couple of lumps obstructing your breathing. But what does this have to do with psychodollars?”

“I’m getting there. The Arab world is stuck in the wayback machine, mired in the dark ages, right? If every other country were in the same retrograde neuro-developmental time, then their oil would be worthless, because there’d be no advanced nation that would have any use for it. But because there are countries ‘from the psychological future,’ the petrodollars flow in, from the future to the past -- from the cognitive first world to the cognitive third world, from the civilized to the savage.”

“I know about the petrodollars. What about the psychodollars?”

“Normally to get that kind of dough, you have to do something -- achieve something, make something, know something, even even just be something. But these are people who never had to go through the awkward historical phase of actually familiarizing themselves with the properties of matter or coping with the real world, much less mastering their own minds. So they’re rewarded for their backwardness and barbarity, and they even develop a superiority about it, just like the southern slave holders did in the U.S. They felt like they were superior to northerners, because they didn’t have to get their hands dirty or work at the ‘servile arts.’ They could just sit around reading Greek philosophy and pretending they were royalty. Slaves did all the work.”

“I see your point. Kind of similar to all those lie-roasted wackademia nuts who feel superior to people who actually work for a living, no?”

“Remember the garden of Eden? Some people get offended when I say this, but psychologically, one way to look at it is as a fable of infancy. The omnipotent infant-god believes that he’s responsible for creating mommy and daddy -- Adam & Eve. He’s got it all backwards. They created him, but he thinks that he created them. After all, he has a desire to be fed and held, and ‘boom,’ there they are, as if created by magic. Why shouldn’t he believe he created them? He doesn’t know any better. Then, when the parents challenge his omnipotence, he banishes them. Well, the Islamists are like the baby. They don’t realize that we’re much older and more mature, and that we created and sustain them with our petrodollars. So they’re trying to banish us. From earth. They use their petrodollars to act out, when they should really use them for a little anger management therapy.”

“So we end up paying through the nose for Muslim insanity with...”

“Psychodollars! That’s the money we have to pay as a result of having sent all those petrodollars to a bunch of infantile cultures that think they’re superior to us. It’s the billions of dollars it costs to defend ourselves from the cultural pathologies of the Arab middle east, flush with their own malicious psychodollars that they’ve converted from petrodollars. Petrodollars are just a means for turning fantasy into reality -- or reality into fantasy is more like it. I’ll bet if you added up both sides, there would be something like one psychodollar for every petrodollar. Think of it -- what’s the combined cost of homeland security, airline security for every single flight, port security, border security, support for Israel and bribes to any other 'moderate' elements in the middle east, year in, year out, national defense, the war in Iraq, the cost to the economy as a result of 9-11. It’s all psychodollars -- the extra money we have to pay for giving so many petrodollars to psychos who want to spread their pathology and pull the future back into the past.”

“Er, so what’s your solution, Petey?”

“That’s the easy part. Do the same thing with them that we do with our own infantile, anti-American citizens with superiority complexes and too much time on their hands. Just rename the whole area The University of the Middle East, make everyone a tenured professor, and let them work out their feelings by writing irrelevant books and attending dopey conferences. Now that’s a smart use of psychodollars. In fact, you could save even more money by combining the university system with the mental hospitals, and calling it a ‘looniversity bin!’ Ahh, that last part was a little joke. You can laugh.”

Petey vanished, leaving me to ponder his latest brick hurled at the temple of tolerance and multiculturalism.

*****

Obviously, Petey's principle also applies to the left, which perpetually wants to raise taxes for the problems caused by high taxes, or increase the size of the welfare state to cope with the pathologies caused by the welfare state, or appease our enemies to deal with the problems caused by appeasement, or improve the environment by undermining the economic progress that makes the improvement possible, or increase education spending to pay for the problems caused by our dysfunctional educational establishment, or make health care insanely expensive by making it "free," or promote scientism to attack the religious traditions that made genuine science possible, or solve the problems of the black family by making fathers unnecessary, or halt AIDS by encouraging the behavior that causes it, or end racial discrimination by making it against to law to not discriminate on the basis of race. All of these things involve transfers of wealth and services from the mature to the immature, thus ensuring that the latter continue to flourish. So who's stupid? If nothing else, mind parasites know how to survive.