Male and female He created them.
One thing that characterizes postmodern gender theorists is their incredible shallowness. Not only do they deny the very real sexual differences between men and women, but they entirely overlook the deeper metaphysical implications of male and female -- as if these are simply cultural constructs instead of bi-cosmic categories woven into the very fabric of being.
Men and women - masculinity and femininity - exist, because they represent the distillation of cosmic essences. The dynamic interplay of Male and Female is everywhere and in every thing, as recognized by the Taoist "yin-yang" symbol. As Schuon writes, the basic message of this symbol is that
"transcendence necessarily comprises immanence, and immanence just as necessarily comprises transcendence. For the Transcendent, by virtue of its infinity, projects existence and thereby necessitates immanence; and the Immanent, by virtue of its absoluteness, necessarily remains transcendent in relation to existence."
You might say that transcendence is masculine, while immanence is feminine. But as implied in the yin-yang symbol, transcendence is necessarily immanent, while immanence implies its own kind of feminine transcendence.
Chapter 5 of Finnegans Wake begins with an ode to the eternal feminine:
"In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven! Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names at disjointed times..."
Joseph Campbell writes that this prayer to "the Mother of the World" combines the traits of the Vedantic concept of Maya ("bringer of plurabilities"), the Christian figure of the Virgin (bearer of the Word that "memorialises the Mosthighest"), and the mother-heroine of Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle (who symbolizes all women). She is the eternal springtime of life, the melody of existence. There is even a takeoff on Islam ("Annah the Allmaziful" vs. "Allah the all-merciful"), hinting at the ability of maya to amaze and seduce -- or for us to get lost in the maze of maya.
The eternal feminine has "gone by many names," because she represents the many and the complex, whereas the One is the masculine principle, the simple. In many ways, existence is simply the lila, or play of 1 and 0, male and female. (Interestingly, Bion applied this principle to the mind, using the female symbol for the "container," the male symbol for the "contained"; for example, a word is a container of explosive meaning that will either shatter its container [in order to grow] or be "sMothered" by it. The poetic best combines the male and female properties of language.)
God, the Absolute, is one, while maya -- which is etymologically related to mother and matter -- is many. The light of God can only be conceived in the womb of darkness -- in a container that contains it. As Schuon writes, "The Blessed Virgin is both pure universal Substance (Prakriti), the matrix of the manifested divine Spirit and of all creatures in respect of their theomorphism, and the primordial substance of man, his original purity, his heart inasmuch as it is the support of the Word which delivers." Thus, the soul of man is always female in relation to God.
As Schuon writes, Mary is Virgin, Mother, and Spouse; or Beauty, Goodness, Love: "Mary is Virgin in relation to Joseph, Man; Mother in relation to Jesus, God-Man; Spouse in relation to the Holy Spirit, God. Joseph personifies humanity; Mary incarnates either the Spirit considered in its feminine aspect or the feminine complement of the Spirit." She is "the prototype of the perfect soul; she incarnates the universal soul in her purity, her receptivity towards God, her fecundity and her beauty, attributes which are at origin of all the angelic and human virtues."
The Absolute is masculine, the Infinite feminine: "The distinction between the Absolute and the Infinite expresses the two fundamental aspects of the Real, that of essentiality and that of potentiality; this is the highest principial prefiguration of the masculine and feminine poles. Universal Radiation, thus Maya both divine and cosmic, springs from the second aspect, the Infinite, which coincides with All-Possibility" (Schuon).
Knowledge is masculine while beauty is feminine. But only a fool severs the deep relationship between beauty and knowledge, for "beauty is the splendor of the true." Beauty "is like the sun: it acts without detours, without dialectical intermediaries, its ways are free, direct, incalculable; like love, to which it is closely connected, it can heal, unloose, appease, unite or deliver through its simple radiance." It is "a crystallization of some aspect of universal joy; it is something limitless expressed by means of a limit" (Schuon).
Doctrine is masculine while faith is feminine. But only an unreflective person fails to see that faith gives life to doctrine. Faith is the receptivity to knowledge that surpasses us, an anticipatory perception of that which is growing within the womb of the soul.
Rhythm is masculine while melody is feminine. Likewise, time is masculine, space feminine. Time deploys itself in space, "fertilizing" it and allowing it to "quicken" into forms and other middling relativities. Again, male is absolute, female infinite. When the absolute enters time, it creates infinite being: "be fruitful and multiply."
Male is vertical, female is horizontal. In Eden, Adam is pulled from his verticality by Eve, who is more receptive to the promises of the snake, symbol of horizontality. But woman is the very symbol of attractiveness, that which lures being from non-being, existence from being, time from eternity:
"In the domain of the spiritual life, the same term shakti signifies the celestial energy that allows man to enter into contact with the Divinity, by means of the appropriate rites and on the basis of a traditional system. Essentially, this divine Shakti aids and attracts: She aids as 'Mother,' and attracts as 'Virgin'.... In the Absolute, the Shakti is the aspect of Infinitude that coincides with All-Possibility and gives rise to Maya."
Male is objective, female subjective. But there is no object without a subject who paradoxically gives birth to it. The Atman is pure consciousness, pure subject, pure light. And yet, it is perpetually “objectified” by Maya, "the power of illusion consequent upon the infinity of the Self.... Maya exists only through its contents, which prolong Atma; this is to say that Atma is conceivable without Maya, whereas Maya is intelligible only through the notion of Atma." Maya-Mother is the magical veil that reveils the Absolute.
The Sun is masculine, the Moon feminine. The sun is how we see by day, the moon by night. So this lunatic post probably doesn't make much sense by the light of day. Ask your mother to help you read and reflect upon it in the dark.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
All in the Family
To think, to really think, that Hillary has the only set of C-in-C brass balls among the Democrats may, in fact, turn out to be true. Yet one must always remember that for a Democrat, at this stage of their shady game, to claim to have balls of any metallic substance is an easy gambit. Teflon testicles are today's standard issue for the Crats. I'll admit that measured against someone like John Edwards the impression that Hillary possesses a penis may well have some truth to it... --American Digest
Yesterday I mentioned the idea that in the deep unconscious, where symmetrical logic dominates, both a proposition and its converse can be equally true. This is in contrast to the asymmetrical logic of the conscious mind, in which the converse of a true proposition is a false one. I cited the example of the biblical "proposition" that Jesus died to atone for man's sins against God. However, in the symmetrical unconscious, it might be equally true that Jesus died for God's transgressions against man, thus, without his consciously realizing it, help human beings process their unconscious anger or disappointment toward God.
One could argue that this isn't true, but that's not the point. This is simply how the unconscious mind perceives things, and we wouldn't be human if it didn't. Rather, we'd be more like machines or liberals, just slaves to linear logic, emotion, or the senses. Creativity is not usually a result of logic, but of the unconscious mind's spontaneous ability to form all kinds of unpredictable connections, just as in a dream. It is a merger of Male and Female in their most abstract essences. Especially in Jungian psychology, the unconscious has always been conceptualized as feminine, the conscious as masculine. Neither alone has unfettered access to truth, but psychological health and happiness depend upon a harmonious dialectic between them -- a marriage of opposites, as it were.
Likewise, we all know that in a highly charged emotional situation, it is possible to argue falsely by recourse to common-sense logic. You see this all the time in male-female relations, in which, say, a woman will make an emotionally charged comment, to which the man responds with mere logic, and they're off to the races. The astute man will discern the deeper content of the emotional communication -- the emotional truth that the woman is trying to convey, usually about their relationship -- and not respond to it in a literal manner. It's like two very different forms of communication, and each must learn the other's language.
Anyone who's been happily married for a long time knows that this leads to emotional growth. It's difficult to say this without sounding condescending, but this is the reason why women, when they marry, tend to become both happier and more conservative -- because of the male influence. It's just a fact. Or at least a tendency.
But this is not to suggest that men don't equally benefit from the relationship, since they become more deeply "emotionally intelligent," and researchers are only now understanding the importance this neglected concept. I am in awe of Mrs. G's maternal emotional intelligence, and how attuned she is to Future Leader. (And of course, it should be borne in mind that we are dealing in great generalizations to which it is easy to find exceptions. For example, truly, Margaret Thatcher was a much greater man than any contemporary male liberal I can think of.)
I think we can see this same dynamic in the dysfunctional relationship between the left -- which is so obviously like a child or hysterical (the operative word is hysterical) female -- and the right, which too often deals with the left as if mere logic will satisfy them. It doesn't work and it won't work, as anyone who's tried to have a rational conversation with a leftist knows. In their shrill paranoia, narcissism, and hysteria, it's as if the left is crying out in pain, so that their literal words are completely unimportant. If it were a micro-relationship, we'd know how to deal with them.
But in the macro realm, how does one respond to a whole psychoclass of histrionic girly men? (And please keep in mind that we are specifically talking about a form of dysfunctional feminized consciousness, not the normal or healthy variety. A radical feminist is not a normal woman, any more than Dennis Kucinich is a normal man.) In fact, to be fair, the left is mainly composed of hysterical women (of both sexes) and of adolescent boys and girls. In both cases, there is a developmental arrest, the failure to become a proper man or woman. Indeed, this is one of the premises of leftism, which rejects any concept of a spiritual telos to human psychological growth. Rather, all is relative, so that no way of living or being is superior to any other.
Just as emotion can be used to distort logical truth, logic can be used to distort emotional truth. Here is a fine example of the latter from dailykos, which uses bizarre pseudo-logic and dubious "facts" -- facts that are actually created out of a deep unconscious need -- to propagate perverse lies:
"The social and economic achievements of the revolutionary regime in Iran in the past 25 years look quite progressive in reducing poverty and social inequalities.... Compared to rising inequality in the United States and Israel, ranked numbers one and two for social inequality among developed nations, the Iranians look pretty damn good.
"That, of course, is the problem. If Iran, rather like Venezuela, becomes a regional leader and examplar of social democracy, it becomes a threat to the corporatist and militarist elites that dominate the political classes of Washington and Tel Aviv and exploit the mineral and oil wealth of underdeveloped nations.
"Women and children rarely suffer the isolation, poverty and violence in Iran that so many suffer from family breakdown in America. Women in Iran are now universally educated, taking 65 percent of university places, marrying later, having fewer children, and driving social change. Even Iran has a vibrant gay subculture. The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than Iran (or any other nation) does, and that proportion continues to rise despite falling crime rates. Every society is different, and our values are not their values in some ways, but which government best serves the interests of its people is an open question in my mind given that the vast majority of Iranians have benefitted from the social and economic progress of the past 25 years."
Yes, it's crazy. In short, whatever "truth" there is in any of this is being mobilized in the service of a series of monstrous lies. But how could you ever begin to help such a person realize the extent to which their consciousness -- their entire being -- has been infiltrated by the Lie? That they aren't just lying -- to which it would be easy to respond -- but they are a Lie?
This is why I think it was naive of Dean Bollinger to think that his sharp words would have any effect on Ahmadinejad, who also embodies the Lie. One way or another, someone like Ahmadinejad needs to be liquidated, not debated. It's like the police inviting a criminal to come to the police station to lecture them about how bad the police are, and then letting the criminal go his merry way. If the police said, "yes, but we gave the criminal a good talking-to before their lecture," this wouldn't exactly help matters.
(And now an older, somewhat related post from almost two years ago, since I'm out of time.)
One of the central concerns of Jewish theological metaphysics is the idea of separation. When God creates the world, he separates order from primordial chaos, light from darkness, water from land. Without the first step of separation, no further development is possible. This is why Judaism stresses the importance of maintaining and not blending the differences between male and female, adult and child, human and animal, civilized and barbaric, religion and magic, holy and profane.
It is interesting that the American political system -- at least in the 20th century -- spontaneously bifurcated into two-parties more or less mirroring the antecedent maternal and paternal spheres. As it evolved, the Republican party came to represent masculine virtues such as competition, maintaining strict rules (“law and order”), standards over compassion, delayed gratification, and respect for the ways of the father -- that is, conserving what had been handed down by previous generations of fathers, and not just assuming in our adolescent hubris that we know better than they.
The Democratic party, on the other hand, came to represent the realm of maternal nurturance -- compassion over standards (i.e., racial quotas), idealization of the impulses (just as a mother is delighted in the instinctual play of her child), mercy over judgment (reduced prison sentences, criminal rights, etc.), cradle-to-grave welfare, a belief that we can seduce our enemies and do not have to defeat them with violence (Carter, Clinton, Kerry), and the notion that meaning, truth and values are all arbitrary and subject to change (just as is the emotional world in general).
It has become a banality to point out that something is broken in our political system, in that the two parties no longer work together, and seem to be completely at odds. Pundits tell us that the tension and paranoia between the parties has never been this intense. Even if this is an exaggeration, it nevertheless reflects the psychological reality of the situation. That is, there is no question that people feel this tension and bitterness in ways that they didn’t in earlier times in their lives. (At least liberals feel it; the “silent majority” of conservatives probably felt it more in the 1960s and 1970s.)
What is really going on here? In my opinion, we are experiencing a collapse of the covenant between mother and father as represented in the previous maternal/paternal two-party system. It is as if we are children living in a home where mother and father no longer get along, and are bickering constantly. In fact, that is probably putting it too mildly, because the current situation has gone beyond mere arguing, to the point that the masculine and feminine spheres are no longer communicating at all and are going through a very messy and acrimonious divorce. Both sides are “lawyered up” and ready to go for the throat.
I believe we may trace this divorce to the 1960s, when mother government started to become so all powerful that there was almost no role for father. Of course, this began to change in the 1980s, when father began reasserting himself because of the cultural, political and economic chaos that ensued, but by then, something else had happened. That is, the age old distinctions between mother and father and adult and child had begun to attenuate. For example, the feminist movement of the 1960s and '70s had very little to do with honoring femininity, but generally degraded and devalued it. It largely became a vehicle for the expression of female envy, giving angry and maladjusted women license to imitate the men they envied. After all, few women are less feminine than the typical NOW activist. Nor are they masculine, however. A woman cannot actually become a man, but can only become a monstrous blending of male and female.
Importantly, this is not to suggest that a woman cannot develop her masculine side or a man his feminine side. What we are talking about is a complete nullification of the differences, a kind of magical, self-imposed blindness, so that the differences are blended (because they are not acknowledged). As feminists used to say, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
The other main psychological mutation that occurred beginning with the 1960s was the eradication of the differences between adult and child. Up until then, there was a clear difference between the spheres of adult and child, and everyone knew it. When I was growing up in the '60s, I had my interests and my parents had theirs, and there was very little intersection between the two -- for example, baseball with my father. But we dressed differently, listened to different kinds of music, enjoyed different activities, read different literature, liked different movies, etc.
But that has all changed now. Here again it is critical to point out that there is nothing at all wrong with an adult maintaining contact with the child part of himself. In fact, doing so is vital for creativity, spontaneity and play. Again, as in the blending of male and female, the problem arises when the differences between adult and child are obliterated, which creates a hybrid monster that is neither adult nor child but both at the same time. This affects both adults and children, for our society has become a plague of adult children and childish adults -- that is, prematurely sexualized children who, at the same time, are burdened with all kinds of inappropriate concerns about college and career, and childish adults who psychologically do not grow beyond the age of 21 or so, and never enter the realm of the truly adult. (An excellent book that discusses this phenomenon in detail is Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood.
As a result, what our two-party political system has now come down to is a battle between the “blenders” and the “separators.” Nothing bothers the blenders more than adult males such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or John Roberts -- remember Diane Feinstein, who couldn't vote for Roberts for supreme court justice because she wanted to know how he felt as a man? In short, she wanted him to be more of a male-female hybrid, like herself and her constituents. Simply applying the rule of law is too masculine. We need some female “wiggle room” in the constitution. As Dennis Prager has observed, the problem with this kind of feminized thinking is that it is perfectly appropriate in the micro realm, but only becomes inappropriate and dysfunctional when applied to the macro.
The modern conservative movement is not just trying to preserve the traditional male element, but the traditional separation of the various spheres in general -- civilized vs. barbaric, animal vs, human, adult vs. child -- while the Democratic party is the party of mannish women (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Gloria Allred), feminized men (e.g., Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, John Edwards), adult children (Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy, Bill Maher, et al), rank sexual confusion ("transgendered, queer, 'questioning,' intersexed, curious," etc) and even animal humans (PETA members who believe that killing six million chickens is morally indistinguishable from murdering six million Jews, radical environmentalists, etc.). And it is almost impossible to engage in rational debate with the adult child, who has the cynicism of a world-weary grown up but the wisdom of a child, or with the male-female hybrid, who possesses an emotionalized reason that is easily hijacked by the passions. This is not so much a disagreement between the content of thought as its very form.
Ultimately it is a revolt against Father, not just on earth, but in “heaven,” that is, the Father who created all these annoying separations to begin with, and who reminds us of our own lack of omnipotence. It's the same existential whine in a new battle. For the sad reality is that a woman cannot actually be a man and an adult cannot actually be a child without disfiguring their humanity. But this is another realm that the left would like to obliterate -- the separation between the divine and human, which may, come to think of it, be the ultimate source of this loud and messy political divorce we are all going through. Perhaps it is unwise to marry outside your faith after all.
Yesterday I mentioned the idea that in the deep unconscious, where symmetrical logic dominates, both a proposition and its converse can be equally true. This is in contrast to the asymmetrical logic of the conscious mind, in which the converse of a true proposition is a false one. I cited the example of the biblical "proposition" that Jesus died to atone for man's sins against God. However, in the symmetrical unconscious, it might be equally true that Jesus died for God's transgressions against man, thus, without his consciously realizing it, help human beings process their unconscious anger or disappointment toward God.
One could argue that this isn't true, but that's not the point. This is simply how the unconscious mind perceives things, and we wouldn't be human if it didn't. Rather, we'd be more like machines or liberals, just slaves to linear logic, emotion, or the senses. Creativity is not usually a result of logic, but of the unconscious mind's spontaneous ability to form all kinds of unpredictable connections, just as in a dream. It is a merger of Male and Female in their most abstract essences. Especially in Jungian psychology, the unconscious has always been conceptualized as feminine, the conscious as masculine. Neither alone has unfettered access to truth, but psychological health and happiness depend upon a harmonious dialectic between them -- a marriage of opposites, as it were.
Likewise, we all know that in a highly charged emotional situation, it is possible to argue falsely by recourse to common-sense logic. You see this all the time in male-female relations, in which, say, a woman will make an emotionally charged comment, to which the man responds with mere logic, and they're off to the races. The astute man will discern the deeper content of the emotional communication -- the emotional truth that the woman is trying to convey, usually about their relationship -- and not respond to it in a literal manner. It's like two very different forms of communication, and each must learn the other's language.
Anyone who's been happily married for a long time knows that this leads to emotional growth. It's difficult to say this without sounding condescending, but this is the reason why women, when they marry, tend to become both happier and more conservative -- because of the male influence. It's just a fact. Or at least a tendency.
But this is not to suggest that men don't equally benefit from the relationship, since they become more deeply "emotionally intelligent," and researchers are only now understanding the importance this neglected concept. I am in awe of Mrs. G's maternal emotional intelligence, and how attuned she is to Future Leader. (And of course, it should be borne in mind that we are dealing in great generalizations to which it is easy to find exceptions. For example, truly, Margaret Thatcher was a much greater man than any contemporary male liberal I can think of.)
I think we can see this same dynamic in the dysfunctional relationship between the left -- which is so obviously like a child or hysterical (the operative word is hysterical) female -- and the right, which too often deals with the left as if mere logic will satisfy them. It doesn't work and it won't work, as anyone who's tried to have a rational conversation with a leftist knows. In their shrill paranoia, narcissism, and hysteria, it's as if the left is crying out in pain, so that their literal words are completely unimportant. If it were a micro-relationship, we'd know how to deal with them.
But in the macro realm, how does one respond to a whole psychoclass of histrionic girly men? (And please keep in mind that we are specifically talking about a form of dysfunctional feminized consciousness, not the normal or healthy variety. A radical feminist is not a normal woman, any more than Dennis Kucinich is a normal man.) In fact, to be fair, the left is mainly composed of hysterical women (of both sexes) and of adolescent boys and girls. In both cases, there is a developmental arrest, the failure to become a proper man or woman. Indeed, this is one of the premises of leftism, which rejects any concept of a spiritual telos to human psychological growth. Rather, all is relative, so that no way of living or being is superior to any other.
Just as emotion can be used to distort logical truth, logic can be used to distort emotional truth. Here is a fine example of the latter from dailykos, which uses bizarre pseudo-logic and dubious "facts" -- facts that are actually created out of a deep unconscious need -- to propagate perverse lies:
"The social and economic achievements of the revolutionary regime in Iran in the past 25 years look quite progressive in reducing poverty and social inequalities.... Compared to rising inequality in the United States and Israel, ranked numbers one and two for social inequality among developed nations, the Iranians look pretty damn good.
"That, of course, is the problem. If Iran, rather like Venezuela, becomes a regional leader and examplar of social democracy, it becomes a threat to the corporatist and militarist elites that dominate the political classes of Washington and Tel Aviv and exploit the mineral and oil wealth of underdeveloped nations.
"Women and children rarely suffer the isolation, poverty and violence in Iran that so many suffer from family breakdown in America. Women in Iran are now universally educated, taking 65 percent of university places, marrying later, having fewer children, and driving social change. Even Iran has a vibrant gay subculture. The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than Iran (or any other nation) does, and that proportion continues to rise despite falling crime rates. Every society is different, and our values are not their values in some ways, but which government best serves the interests of its people is an open question in my mind given that the vast majority of Iranians have benefitted from the social and economic progress of the past 25 years."
Yes, it's crazy. In short, whatever "truth" there is in any of this is being mobilized in the service of a series of monstrous lies. But how could you ever begin to help such a person realize the extent to which their consciousness -- their entire being -- has been infiltrated by the Lie? That they aren't just lying -- to which it would be easy to respond -- but they are a Lie?
This is why I think it was naive of Dean Bollinger to think that his sharp words would have any effect on Ahmadinejad, who also embodies the Lie. One way or another, someone like Ahmadinejad needs to be liquidated, not debated. It's like the police inviting a criminal to come to the police station to lecture them about how bad the police are, and then letting the criminal go his merry way. If the police said, "yes, but we gave the criminal a good talking-to before their lecture," this wouldn't exactly help matters.
(And now an older, somewhat related post from almost two years ago, since I'm out of time.)
One of the central concerns of Jewish theological metaphysics is the idea of separation. When God creates the world, he separates order from primordial chaos, light from darkness, water from land. Without the first step of separation, no further development is possible. This is why Judaism stresses the importance of maintaining and not blending the differences between male and female, adult and child, human and animal, civilized and barbaric, religion and magic, holy and profane.
It is interesting that the American political system -- at least in the 20th century -- spontaneously bifurcated into two-parties more or less mirroring the antecedent maternal and paternal spheres. As it evolved, the Republican party came to represent masculine virtues such as competition, maintaining strict rules (“law and order”), standards over compassion, delayed gratification, and respect for the ways of the father -- that is, conserving what had been handed down by previous generations of fathers, and not just assuming in our adolescent hubris that we know better than they.
The Democratic party, on the other hand, came to represent the realm of maternal nurturance -- compassion over standards (i.e., racial quotas), idealization of the impulses (just as a mother is delighted in the instinctual play of her child), mercy over judgment (reduced prison sentences, criminal rights, etc.), cradle-to-grave welfare, a belief that we can seduce our enemies and do not have to defeat them with violence (Carter, Clinton, Kerry), and the notion that meaning, truth and values are all arbitrary and subject to change (just as is the emotional world in general).
It has become a banality to point out that something is broken in our political system, in that the two parties no longer work together, and seem to be completely at odds. Pundits tell us that the tension and paranoia between the parties has never been this intense. Even if this is an exaggeration, it nevertheless reflects the psychological reality of the situation. That is, there is no question that people feel this tension and bitterness in ways that they didn’t in earlier times in their lives. (At least liberals feel it; the “silent majority” of conservatives probably felt it more in the 1960s and 1970s.)
What is really going on here? In my opinion, we are experiencing a collapse of the covenant between mother and father as represented in the previous maternal/paternal two-party system. It is as if we are children living in a home where mother and father no longer get along, and are bickering constantly. In fact, that is probably putting it too mildly, because the current situation has gone beyond mere arguing, to the point that the masculine and feminine spheres are no longer communicating at all and are going through a very messy and acrimonious divorce. Both sides are “lawyered up” and ready to go for the throat.
I believe we may trace this divorce to the 1960s, when mother government started to become so all powerful that there was almost no role for father. Of course, this began to change in the 1980s, when father began reasserting himself because of the cultural, political and economic chaos that ensued, but by then, something else had happened. That is, the age old distinctions between mother and father and adult and child had begun to attenuate. For example, the feminist movement of the 1960s and '70s had very little to do with honoring femininity, but generally degraded and devalued it. It largely became a vehicle for the expression of female envy, giving angry and maladjusted women license to imitate the men they envied. After all, few women are less feminine than the typical NOW activist. Nor are they masculine, however. A woman cannot actually become a man, but can only become a monstrous blending of male and female.
Importantly, this is not to suggest that a woman cannot develop her masculine side or a man his feminine side. What we are talking about is a complete nullification of the differences, a kind of magical, self-imposed blindness, so that the differences are blended (because they are not acknowledged). As feminists used to say, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
The other main psychological mutation that occurred beginning with the 1960s was the eradication of the differences between adult and child. Up until then, there was a clear difference between the spheres of adult and child, and everyone knew it. When I was growing up in the '60s, I had my interests and my parents had theirs, and there was very little intersection between the two -- for example, baseball with my father. But we dressed differently, listened to different kinds of music, enjoyed different activities, read different literature, liked different movies, etc.
But that has all changed now. Here again it is critical to point out that there is nothing at all wrong with an adult maintaining contact with the child part of himself. In fact, doing so is vital for creativity, spontaneity and play. Again, as in the blending of male and female, the problem arises when the differences between adult and child are obliterated, which creates a hybrid monster that is neither adult nor child but both at the same time. This affects both adults and children, for our society has become a plague of adult children and childish adults -- that is, prematurely sexualized children who, at the same time, are burdened with all kinds of inappropriate concerns about college and career, and childish adults who psychologically do not grow beyond the age of 21 or so, and never enter the realm of the truly adult. (An excellent book that discusses this phenomenon in detail is Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood.
As a result, what our two-party political system has now come down to is a battle between the “blenders” and the “separators.” Nothing bothers the blenders more than adult males such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or John Roberts -- remember Diane Feinstein, who couldn't vote for Roberts for supreme court justice because she wanted to know how he felt as a man? In short, she wanted him to be more of a male-female hybrid, like herself and her constituents. Simply applying the rule of law is too masculine. We need some female “wiggle room” in the constitution. As Dennis Prager has observed, the problem with this kind of feminized thinking is that it is perfectly appropriate in the micro realm, but only becomes inappropriate and dysfunctional when applied to the macro.
The modern conservative movement is not just trying to preserve the traditional male element, but the traditional separation of the various spheres in general -- civilized vs. barbaric, animal vs, human, adult vs. child -- while the Democratic party is the party of mannish women (e.g., Hillary Clinton, Gloria Allred), feminized men (e.g., Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, John Edwards), adult children (Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy, Bill Maher, et al), rank sexual confusion ("transgendered, queer, 'questioning,' intersexed, curious," etc) and even animal humans (PETA members who believe that killing six million chickens is morally indistinguishable from murdering six million Jews, radical environmentalists, etc.). And it is almost impossible to engage in rational debate with the adult child, who has the cynicism of a world-weary grown up but the wisdom of a child, or with the male-female hybrid, who possesses an emotionalized reason that is easily hijacked by the passions. This is not so much a disagreement between the content of thought as its very form.
Ultimately it is a revolt against Father, not just on earth, but in “heaven,” that is, the Father who created all these annoying separations to begin with, and who reminds us of our own lack of omnipotence. It's the same existential whine in a new battle. For the sad reality is that a woman cannot actually be a man and an adult cannot actually be a child without disfiguring their humanity. But this is another realm that the left would like to obliterate -- the separation between the divine and human, which may, come to think of it, be the ultimate source of this loud and messy political divorce we are all going through. Perhaps it is unwise to marry outside your faith after all.
Monday, September 24, 2007
The Patterned Irrationality of the Left
In the unconscious mind, where symmetrical logic rules the night, the stronger the emotion one is feeling, the more "symmetrical deductions" are likely to occur.
For example, as Bomford writes, on a deep unconscious level, "one who hates has to believe that his or her hatred is returned." Note that this is a logical operation, only based upon a different sort of logic. This logic is no doubt the source of the psychotic fear of Israel in the Islamic world. Their unconscious hatred is so profound that it simultaneously reverses the relation, so that they can't help perceiving that Israel hates them. But Israelis just want to shop, raise their families, or read the Torah. They couldn't care less about Muslims, except to the extent that bloodthirsty Muslim barbarians harbor murderous rage toward them.
It's fine to hate evil, but in the Islamic world, what is hated is transformed into evil. Something is not hated because it is evil, but evil because it is hated. One could say the same of the left, which habitually fears what it eternally hates. The left cannot be comprehended unless one appreciates the extent of their unbound hatred. Once this is grasped, what seems illogical is suddenly seen to obey the dictates of symmetrical logic. For example, the unconscious feeling that I hate America and want us to lose in Iraq is transformed to General Petraeus is a traitor, or I am a racist becomes America is racist, or I am unbearably envious becomes the wealthy are engaged in class warfare against me!
Another characteristic of the unconscious is that it is timeless, in the sense that it can reverse temporal relations. For example, in the unconscious mind, if A is the cause of B, B can also be the cause of A. Thus, "before" and "after" become meaningless. Therefore, although we were inexcusably attacked by Islamists on 9-11, within minutes, leftists were saying that the real reason for the attack was that we had done something to offend Muslims.
Likewise, throughout the Cold War, leftist scholars wrote "revisionist" histories, in which the United States was the cause of the Cold War, or at least equally responsible for it. You will notice that there are no conservative revisionists who write, for example, that blacks were the cause of their own lynching, or that Japanese Americans were the cause of their own internment. You can only think in this manner if you are pathologically under the sway of unconscious symmetrical logic.
Also in the unconscious mind, there is no distinction between the memory of something that actually occurred vs. the memory of a fantasy. Here we can understand how and why the left is so prone to mythologizing the past, as their fantasies are mingled with reality.
Thus, no amount of reality and asymmetrical logic will ever convince them that FDR made the Great Depression worse, not better, or that the black family only began to disintegrate after the imposition of all the "Great Society" programs of the mid to late '60s. No amount of logic could convince a leftist that his policies harm the "little guy," since his ruling myth, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, is that he is here to rescue the hapless little guy (for whom the leftist always feels rich contempt in the unconscious mind, contempt which only seeps out everywhere).
One thing you will notice about the left is that they are passionate. Because the left is guided by feelings and intentions, they are blind to the results of their actions. If their feelings are infinitely good, then in the unconscious mind, the results must also be infinitely good.
As I have written before, this is a religious passion in the absence of religion, so it has no traditional means to structure and channel it. Just as religion partakes of symmetrical logic in an adaptive way (i.e., the meek shall inherit the earth, the Golden Rule, humans are made in the image of the Creator, etc.), leftists do so in a terribly unhealthy way. That is, because of the intensity of their feelings, these feelings reach way down into the symmetrical realm, with no way to structure or make sense of them. This is why you always see so much highly charged, "unfiltered" unconscious material coming out of the left. To borrow a metaphor from someone, reading dailykos or huffington post is like taking a ride through a sewer in a glass bottom boat.
As Bomford writes, the dictates of symmetrical logic mean that deductions "do not follow the path of fact, but of feeling or emotion." And although this inevitably leads to "crazy" deductions based upon a chain of feelings, in a sense, it is much more "free" than asymmetrical, Aristotelian logic. For example, the latter "has a deterministic feel. That is to say, it never delivers a new truth, though it may deliver truths that had not been clear before. Everything is already 'there' in the premises."
Not so symmetrical logic, which has considerably more freedom to "deduce." It can easily arrive at patent falsehoods while still obeying its own logic. For example, the knuckleheads at Columbia University believe that having a genocidal sociopath speak on their campus is an instance of defending "freedom of speech." I would agree, but only in a psychotically cluelessidal way, rooted in symmetrical logic. By the standards of normal logic, it makes no sense whatsoever. It's crazy.
One of the most fascinating aspects of unconscious logic is the way it can shift attributes from agent to agent. For example, as mentioned above, it is the work of a moment for a leftist to turn a perpetrator into a victim and a victim into a perpetrator, based upon the emotional needs of the day. For example, the standard leftist logic would be Larry Craig --> Homosexual --> Ultimate Victim. But place an "R" after the name, and the overriding logic becomes Republican --> Homophobic Victimizer --> Burn him!
Likewise, the normal train of leftist logic would be ROTC --> Don't ask, Don't tell policy --> Homophobia --> Get off our campus, fascists! But Ahmadinejad -- whose government's policy toward homosexuals is "don't tell, because we'll bury you alive" -- is given a pass because he shares the left's passionate hatred of America and of President Bush. Their interests converge in the deep, symmetrical unconscious. Ironically, it is obvious that Ahmadinejad is much more conscious of this than the left to which his manipulative talking points are tailored. You might say that he is consciously speaking to the left's unconscious, pushing every one of their happy buttons he can think of.
Don't believe me?
Daily Kos: 45% Want Ahmadinejad As US President
or
I Am a Jewish Lesbian, and I Have a Crush on Ahmadinejad:
"... the guy speaks some blunt truths about the Bush Administration that make me swoon... Okay, I admit it. Part of it is that he just looks cuddly. Possibly cuddly enough to turn me straight. I think he kind of looks like Kermit the Frog. Sort of. With smaller eyes.... I can’t help but be turned on by his frank rhetoric calling out the horrors of the Bush Administration and, for that matter, generations of US foreign policy preceding...."
Homosexuality? In Iran? We don't allow it. Makes the goats jealous.
For example, as Bomford writes, on a deep unconscious level, "one who hates has to believe that his or her hatred is returned." Note that this is a logical operation, only based upon a different sort of logic. This logic is no doubt the source of the psychotic fear of Israel in the Islamic world. Their unconscious hatred is so profound that it simultaneously reverses the relation, so that they can't help perceiving that Israel hates them. But Israelis just want to shop, raise their families, or read the Torah. They couldn't care less about Muslims, except to the extent that bloodthirsty Muslim barbarians harbor murderous rage toward them.
It's fine to hate evil, but in the Islamic world, what is hated is transformed into evil. Something is not hated because it is evil, but evil because it is hated. One could say the same of the left, which habitually fears what it eternally hates. The left cannot be comprehended unless one appreciates the extent of their unbound hatred. Once this is grasped, what seems illogical is suddenly seen to obey the dictates of symmetrical logic. For example, the unconscious feeling that I hate America and want us to lose in Iraq is transformed to General Petraeus is a traitor, or I am a racist becomes America is racist, or I am unbearably envious becomes the wealthy are engaged in class warfare against me!
Another characteristic of the unconscious is that it is timeless, in the sense that it can reverse temporal relations. For example, in the unconscious mind, if A is the cause of B, B can also be the cause of A. Thus, "before" and "after" become meaningless. Therefore, although we were inexcusably attacked by Islamists on 9-11, within minutes, leftists were saying that the real reason for the attack was that we had done something to offend Muslims.
Likewise, throughout the Cold War, leftist scholars wrote "revisionist" histories, in which the United States was the cause of the Cold War, or at least equally responsible for it. You will notice that there are no conservative revisionists who write, for example, that blacks were the cause of their own lynching, or that Japanese Americans were the cause of their own internment. You can only think in this manner if you are pathologically under the sway of unconscious symmetrical logic.
Also in the unconscious mind, there is no distinction between the memory of something that actually occurred vs. the memory of a fantasy. Here we can understand how and why the left is so prone to mythologizing the past, as their fantasies are mingled with reality.
Thus, no amount of reality and asymmetrical logic will ever convince them that FDR made the Great Depression worse, not better, or that the black family only began to disintegrate after the imposition of all the "Great Society" programs of the mid to late '60s. No amount of logic could convince a leftist that his policies harm the "little guy," since his ruling myth, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, is that he is here to rescue the hapless little guy (for whom the leftist always feels rich contempt in the unconscious mind, contempt which only seeps out everywhere).
One thing you will notice about the left is that they are passionate. Because the left is guided by feelings and intentions, they are blind to the results of their actions. If their feelings are infinitely good, then in the unconscious mind, the results must also be infinitely good.
As I have written before, this is a religious passion in the absence of religion, so it has no traditional means to structure and channel it. Just as religion partakes of symmetrical logic in an adaptive way (i.e., the meek shall inherit the earth, the Golden Rule, humans are made in the image of the Creator, etc.), leftists do so in a terribly unhealthy way. That is, because of the intensity of their feelings, these feelings reach way down into the symmetrical realm, with no way to structure or make sense of them. This is why you always see so much highly charged, "unfiltered" unconscious material coming out of the left. To borrow a metaphor from someone, reading dailykos or huffington post is like taking a ride through a sewer in a glass bottom boat.
As Bomford writes, the dictates of symmetrical logic mean that deductions "do not follow the path of fact, but of feeling or emotion." And although this inevitably leads to "crazy" deductions based upon a chain of feelings, in a sense, it is much more "free" than asymmetrical, Aristotelian logic. For example, the latter "has a deterministic feel. That is to say, it never delivers a new truth, though it may deliver truths that had not been clear before. Everything is already 'there' in the premises."
Not so symmetrical logic, which has considerably more freedom to "deduce." It can easily arrive at patent falsehoods while still obeying its own logic. For example, the knuckleheads at Columbia University believe that having a genocidal sociopath speak on their campus is an instance of defending "freedom of speech." I would agree, but only in a psychotically cluelessidal way, rooted in symmetrical logic. By the standards of normal logic, it makes no sense whatsoever. It's crazy.
One of the most fascinating aspects of unconscious logic is the way it can shift attributes from agent to agent. For example, as mentioned above, it is the work of a moment for a leftist to turn a perpetrator into a victim and a victim into a perpetrator, based upon the emotional needs of the day. For example, the standard leftist logic would be Larry Craig --> Homosexual --> Ultimate Victim. But place an "R" after the name, and the overriding logic becomes Republican --> Homophobic Victimizer --> Burn him!
Likewise, the normal train of leftist logic would be ROTC --> Don't ask, Don't tell policy --> Homophobia --> Get off our campus, fascists! But Ahmadinejad -- whose government's policy toward homosexuals is "don't tell, because we'll bury you alive" -- is given a pass because he shares the left's passionate hatred of America and of President Bush. Their interests converge in the deep, symmetrical unconscious. Ironically, it is obvious that Ahmadinejad is much more conscious of this than the left to which his manipulative talking points are tailored. You might say that he is consciously speaking to the left's unconscious, pushing every one of their happy buttons he can think of.
Don't believe me?
Daily Kos: 45% Want Ahmadinejad As US President
or
I Am a Jewish Lesbian, and I Have a Crush on Ahmadinejad:
"... the guy speaks some blunt truths about the Bush Administration that make me swoon... Okay, I admit it. Part of it is that he just looks cuddly. Possibly cuddly enough to turn me straight. I think he kind of looks like Kermit the Frog. Sort of. With smaller eyes.... I can’t help but be turned on by his frank rhetoric calling out the horrors of the Bush Administration and, for that matter, generations of US foreign policy preceding...."
Homosexuality? In Iran? We don't allow it. Makes the goats jealous.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Infants and Other Leftists
The unconscious doesn't relate to individuals, but to classes. To put it another way, to the extent that the unconscious perceives the individual, it does so in terms of the class (in the mathematical sense of a set) of which it is a member.
Right away you see a potentially vast difference between leftists, who tend to see only groups, and classical liberals, who value the individual. But because the leftist sees only groups and classes, he doesn't realize the extent to which his thinking is susceptible to, and determined by, unconscious influences. This is why it is such truism that virtually all of the wholesale racism in America comes from the left, since they openly admit to their prejudice, i.e., that they can't help categorizing people by race, gender, or sexual orientation. They then want to paradoxically enact discriminatory laws to keep them from discriminating.
But as Chief Justice Roberts recently taught all of us in a tautologous decision, the best way to end discrimination is to end discrimination.
Actually the best way is to end descrimination is to begin discriminating, since discrimination is the opposite of indiscriminately lumping individuals into groups. For a person with discrimination, Thomas Sowell and Cornell West belong to wildly divergent groups with virtually nothing in common. There is nothing similar about them -- that is, unless you are a leftist racist who notices only their skin color.
Not only does the unconscious categorize by class, but classes within classes within classes. For example, in the unconscious mind, a wife could be a member of the class of females, which could in turn be a member of the class of mothers. Have you ever started to call your wife by your mother's name when you were angry at her? I haven't. This week.
Furthermore, because of the symbolic nature of the unconscious, the breast can be a symbol of mother. But because of its symmetrical nature, mother could be a member of the class of bountiful -- or withholding -- breasts. In the unconscious mind, the part can equal the whole, and vice versa.
For example, whenever my two and a-half year old son gets into a tight spot, he immediately begins chanting like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, "up on mommy... up on mommy... up on mommy." I am quite certain that in these moments of unbound anxiety or pain or fear, "mommy" doesn't just refer to Mrs. G. Rather, "mommy" is simply a signifier for the the Great Comforter in the Sky, the class of all objects that can transform pain into security or pleasure.
In other words, the actual mommy -- Mrs. G. -- is a member of a much more expansive class of the Magically Infinite Comforter, or Good Breast. No human could ever live up to those expectations, which the baby, to his dismay, eventually discovers. Or not. And if not, he may spend the rest of his life in search of the lost entitlement, that Great Breast in the Sky.
Again, liberals are tranceParently prone to this, what with their wild, utopian schemes to end all pain and want -- free housing, free college education, free healthcare. Once you are in the unconscious, its needs are naturally infinite.
You might say that Dennis Kucinich is the most capable articulator of the infinite needs of the infantile unconscious, but all leftist politicians are in the same mold. But they have to speak more in code, so as to not alienate the parents who will have to take care of all the hungry and whining infants. After all, someone has to do it. Babies can't take care of themselves. Free healthcare is obviously not free. To the contrary, it's actually more expensive than the kind you pay for, since it removes any disincentive to use it. And when you put a baby with infinite needs in a context in which he is infinitely ministered to, guess what happens?
That's right. Old Europe.
Young people are naturally drawn to leftism, since they are at a developmental stage in which their task is to go from being a member of a primitive group -- the family of origin -- to a mature individual. This provokes a tremendous amount of anxiety (remember?), anxiety which -- because of the structure of the unconscious mind -- resonates with every past maturational stage, in which one had to pull away from "fusion" with the group (which ultimately goes all the way back to the Omnipotent Cosmic Comforter alluded to above) and become an individual.
Wahhhh, Don't tase me, Dad!!!
Looking back on your own life, you can no doubt reconstruct when you were in these transitional phases between fusion and individuation. Robin spoke of one the other day, in his real-life sandbox allegory. There he was, caught between two worlds, the one of blissful primary fusion with the enveloping cosmos, vs. breaking out and becoming an individual in the decaying world of time and form. Growth can only take place by leaving the world of fusion, but it is fraught with anxiety and depression. In fact, the great psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called it the depressive position, not just because it is inherently depressing, but because one must master and assimilate the depressing loss of unity. One must contain it or be contained by it.
But many people obviously do stay behind. However, it is no picnic. It is what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position, which has a whole array of specific (and more primitive) defense mechanisms to keep the reality of time, growth, and separateness -- and depression -- at bay. For example, one way to deny depression is through the "manic defenses," and again, we can see how leftism fits the bill, what with its manic utopian promises to end all pain and want.
The Buddha realized that attachment to our desires is the source of suffering. The left has a better idea: just make unfullfilled desire against the law.
A young adult will often embrace leftism as a form of pseudo-maturity. In other words, it gives one the appearance of strength, maturity, and adulthood, since you can be so freely aggressive, hostile, and belligerent. But this is entirely counterfeit, merely the weak man's impersonation of a strong man -- you know, "General Betray Us," and all that. Imagine General Petraeus -- who, among other inconveniences, took a bullet in the chest while training for the defense of his country -- being aggressively called a traitor by these infantile chicken doves!
Only in the unconscious, where heroes can be cowards and cowards can be heroes, where dissent is the highest form of patriotism and patriotism is the lowest form of treason.
Right away you see a potentially vast difference between leftists, who tend to see only groups, and classical liberals, who value the individual. But because the leftist sees only groups and classes, he doesn't realize the extent to which his thinking is susceptible to, and determined by, unconscious influences. This is why it is such truism that virtually all of the wholesale racism in America comes from the left, since they openly admit to their prejudice, i.e., that they can't help categorizing people by race, gender, or sexual orientation. They then want to paradoxically enact discriminatory laws to keep them from discriminating.
But as Chief Justice Roberts recently taught all of us in a tautologous decision, the best way to end discrimination is to end discrimination.
Actually the best way is to end descrimination is to begin discriminating, since discrimination is the opposite of indiscriminately lumping individuals into groups. For a person with discrimination, Thomas Sowell and Cornell West belong to wildly divergent groups with virtually nothing in common. There is nothing similar about them -- that is, unless you are a leftist racist who notices only their skin color.
Not only does the unconscious categorize by class, but classes within classes within classes. For example, in the unconscious mind, a wife could be a member of the class of females, which could in turn be a member of the class of mothers. Have you ever started to call your wife by your mother's name when you were angry at her? I haven't. This week.
Furthermore, because of the symbolic nature of the unconscious, the breast can be a symbol of mother. But because of its symmetrical nature, mother could be a member of the class of bountiful -- or withholding -- breasts. In the unconscious mind, the part can equal the whole, and vice versa.
For example, whenever my two and a-half year old son gets into a tight spot, he immediately begins chanting like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, "up on mommy... up on mommy... up on mommy." I am quite certain that in these moments of unbound anxiety or pain or fear, "mommy" doesn't just refer to Mrs. G. Rather, "mommy" is simply a signifier for the the Great Comforter in the Sky, the class of all objects that can transform pain into security or pleasure.
In other words, the actual mommy -- Mrs. G. -- is a member of a much more expansive class of the Magically Infinite Comforter, or Good Breast. No human could ever live up to those expectations, which the baby, to his dismay, eventually discovers. Or not. And if not, he may spend the rest of his life in search of the lost entitlement, that Great Breast in the Sky.
Again, liberals are tranceParently prone to this, what with their wild, utopian schemes to end all pain and want -- free housing, free college education, free healthcare. Once you are in the unconscious, its needs are naturally infinite.
You might say that Dennis Kucinich is the most capable articulator of the infinite needs of the infantile unconscious, but all leftist politicians are in the same mold. But they have to speak more in code, so as to not alienate the parents who will have to take care of all the hungry and whining infants. After all, someone has to do it. Babies can't take care of themselves. Free healthcare is obviously not free. To the contrary, it's actually more expensive than the kind you pay for, since it removes any disincentive to use it. And when you put a baby with infinite needs in a context in which he is infinitely ministered to, guess what happens?
That's right. Old Europe.
Young people are naturally drawn to leftism, since they are at a developmental stage in which their task is to go from being a member of a primitive group -- the family of origin -- to a mature individual. This provokes a tremendous amount of anxiety (remember?), anxiety which -- because of the structure of the unconscious mind -- resonates with every past maturational stage, in which one had to pull away from "fusion" with the group (which ultimately goes all the way back to the Omnipotent Cosmic Comforter alluded to above) and become an individual.
Wahhhh, Don't tase me, Dad!!!
Looking back on your own life, you can no doubt reconstruct when you were in these transitional phases between fusion and individuation. Robin spoke of one the other day, in his real-life sandbox allegory. There he was, caught between two worlds, the one of blissful primary fusion with the enveloping cosmos, vs. breaking out and becoming an individual in the decaying world of time and form. Growth can only take place by leaving the world of fusion, but it is fraught with anxiety and depression. In fact, the great psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called it the depressive position, not just because it is inherently depressing, but because one must master and assimilate the depressing loss of unity. One must contain it or be contained by it.
But many people obviously do stay behind. However, it is no picnic. It is what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position, which has a whole array of specific (and more primitive) defense mechanisms to keep the reality of time, growth, and separateness -- and depression -- at bay. For example, one way to deny depression is through the "manic defenses," and again, we can see how leftism fits the bill, what with its manic utopian promises to end all pain and want.
The Buddha realized that attachment to our desires is the source of suffering. The left has a better idea: just make unfullfilled desire against the law.
A young adult will often embrace leftism as a form of pseudo-maturity. In other words, it gives one the appearance of strength, maturity, and adulthood, since you can be so freely aggressive, hostile, and belligerent. But this is entirely counterfeit, merely the weak man's impersonation of a strong man -- you know, "General Betray Us," and all that. Imagine General Petraeus -- who, among other inconveniences, took a bullet in the chest while training for the defense of his country -- being aggressively called a traitor by these infantile chicken doves!
Only in the unconscious, where heroes can be cowards and cowards can be heroes, where dissent is the highest form of patriotism and patriotism is the lowest form of treason.
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