There Aren’t Enough of Us
There are two precursor posts to this, both still in-process. I’ll finish and link them later. One is about the death of the historical novel, which mirrors a lot of other deaths in our culture. The other is about divorce, an absolutely transformative and deadly factor in what has become of us as a nation. What does that leave us with? The end result of our progressive devolution, largely invisible to all, because it is a function of the variable we tend to think of as a constant, human consciousness. Which it isn’t.
I’ve written quite a lot about the consciousness problem over the years, and Instapunk Returns, as well as a couple other of my blogs, contain 5+++ years worth of thoughts on the topic. I’ll be sending you to those posts here, providing you with an excerpt, usually the lede, a sample graphic or two, and a link. The order is roughly chronological.
I’m not going to give you any particular setup from piece to piece. The relevance to the main questions is up to you in the end: Why are we letting this catastrophe happen to us and our nation. Why are most of us still so passive, so content to firing a few witty links and clever graphics to like-minded people… while all of it is burning down before our eyes?
These are the things I have been thinking about. What are you thinking about?
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Toward the end of 2018, I wrote a Facebook post on the concern I feel about the new popularity and availability of marijuana. I had been there in the sixties when it rolled out of the closet into the middle class, and I had firsthand knowledge of the fact that, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding, “weed” was and is absolutely a gateway drug. I went on to identify a phenomenon that has been quite invisible in American culture, in terms of media coverage and general public awareness. Call it a dog that didn’t bark in the night, in this case the striking absence of Baby Boomers from the list of great creative achievers in writing, music, fine art, and film. A body of momentous work that should have been there and just isn’t. I wrote:
<<…and I’m asking myself a big question… what have they [the Baby Boomers] accomplished in the creative arts over two generations? From where I sit, not much.
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March 2, 2019
One page each from my Zeezer Bible (100 pg) and my Snowflake Bible (7 pg).
Published in the same volume. It took 880 pages to lay out the catastrophe of
the Baby Boomers. Their successors are just sad. Linda Cerullo is mistaken.
Over at FB, the estimable Linda Cerullo is linking to an article at (appropriately) Vanity Fair. This is a quote from the linked piece:
"It’s become clear to me that if this nation has any chance of survival, of carrying its traditions deep into the 21st century, it will in no small part depend on members of my generation, Generation X, the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds."…
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March 14, 2019
When I was a kid, a road we drove on often to get to town passed by a field with a mechanical scarecrow. It was holding a broom that wagged slowly back and forth, back and forth. I loved seeing it, waited for it, and thought about how the crows would be reacting to it. Until I saw a crow sitting on the scarecrow’s hat one day.
I see mechanical scarecrows all the time anymore. One of the biggest reasons I’ve emigrated from Facebook to mostly my own company. Somebody earnestly posts a link or a link-plus-observation on a timely topic, and the echo chamber tinkles intermittently with Likes and Attaboy comments (amiable scarecrows, I guess), and then there are the naysayer lefties. The would-be SCAREcrows who show up as if on cue to wave their brooms back and forth, back and forth…
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March 17, 2019
Portrait of a Generational Self-Deception
This graphic has been posted multiple times at Facebook, most often I’m guessing by 40-ish codgers who are tut-tutting like mad about how much worse things have gotten since their day. Anyone fancy an apt Bible quote? Try Matthew 7.5.
What am I talking about? You 40-ish (and sad to say, even you 50-ish) codgers, that’s what. I recently posted about the X and XY generations born after the Baby Boom ended in 1964. It was just a shot across the bow, really, because the subject is so huge and attention spans are vanishingly small these days.
As one who pays attention to coincidence, I was struck by the odd circumstance of spotting the above poster graphic just a day or two after an ongoing InstaPunk compilation project uncovered this long forgotten post from the Year 2004, when true Millennials would have been no older than, well, four. Here’s the introduction to ”The Box: Can You Recognize the Box?”
The Kids. The National Endowment for the Arts has issued a report that documents a continuing and accelerating decline in literary reading in all parts of the American population. Literary reading is defined as novels, plays, and poetry, although in the report's statistics a juvenile romance novel counts the same as Moby Dick. And to qualify as a literary reader, all you have to do is read one book in the course of a year. Here's the worst news:
The steepest decline -- and the one that the report notes with most alarm -- has occurred among young adults. In 1982, respondents ages 18 to 34 were the group most likely to report the recreational reading of literature. Over the intervening decades, they have become the group least likely to do so (except for some segments of the population over 65)…
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April 6, 2019
Yesterday, a journalist and FB friend I greatly respect asked for input on the question of whether Ocasio-Cortez is in fact mentally ill. Her query was occasioned by accounts of AOC publishing a video of her own modest freakout over a bottle of wine in her new apartment. The FB post solicited the opinions of a couple of gentlemen in the psychiatry business by name. One of them weighed in with an extremely lengthy discussion of the current state of his profession regarding gradations of bipolar disorders and other pathologies. Ultimately, he concluded (in effect) that it was hard to say what her state of mental disorder might be.
I understand both the concern and the thoughtful attempt to elaborate on the complexities of diagnosis. There is, however, a simple answer to the originating question. No. AOL is not mentally ill. The entire discussion is in error. The photo up top can help us see why…
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April 16, 2019
A Response to Lisa Schiffren’s April 16 Post
A Lisa Schiffren post introduction that inspires a response:
These days David Brooks' very personal, Trump-obsessed politics seem ridiculous to me. But he is dead right here, about the 'lies our culture tells' about the keys to happiness. Careers are important, for a host of reasons, but for the majority of human beings they are not the key to personal happiness. Meritocratic acheivement -- nice, but not ultimately fulfilling. The core necessities of a happy life are: family, attachments, a place in a community in which you have earned respect. All of these are among the most traditional aspirations and values you will find. For the most part you can have them with almost any 'identity,' though not if that includes embracing cultural Marxism, as it so often does.
Elsewhere Brooks advocates for economic policies that break up such communities, and for social policies that disrupt family life. But we take our wisdom where we find it.
This response is not concerned with Brooks’s column (don’t read him anymore) but with Lisa’s own characterization of what matters most. She’s missing a key element, one which is commonly invisible to those who came of age in her era and after.
We don’t believe in the concept of the hero anymore. He has been reduced to a shadow, a figment, a fallacy, a fiction, a fool’s fantasy, a cartoon. And as a culture we are dying of our disbelief, unable to recognize what truly transcends worldly acclaim and quite unable to identify and nurture and learn from the larval heroes who may be waiting in the wings unseen.
I don’t want to live in Lisa Schiffren’s coffee klatch. She shouldn’t either.
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July 1, 2020 @ Instapunk Returns
What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece I wrote for an old blog of mine called Gloves Off. It remains critically relevant to what we see transpiring in the leftist assault on our nation in July 2020:
Friday, September 19, 2003
Enough is enough. It's time to recognize what Democrats call political debate for what it is: vicious, unprincipled demagoguery that provides aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States. I am by no means a kneejerk defender of the policies of the Bush administration. I believe there are many issues about which reasonable people can disagree, and I believe the country would benefit from a civil airing of competing ideas about how best to deal with the challenges we face. That is not what is occurring now.
If there was a straw that broke the camel's back, it was Andrew Greeley's column in today's issue of the Chicago Sun-Times. You can read the full text here:
CLICK HERE [Article deleted from C-ST Archives]
He's a Catholic priest. He's also a disgrace…
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August 6, 2020
From a 2006 article in the Toronto Star:
On Monday, as they swaggered into the pre-concert Press conference, I found myself craning, staring and cheering like a star-struck groupie.
‘God, they’re cool,’ muttered the bearded man next to me as ‘Keef’, looking like an extra from Pirates Of The Caribbean (eye-liner, crazy hair and lashings of rather tired-looking bling), giggled and smirked like a naughty teenager with Ronnie Wood, 59... Then came Charlie Watts, recovered from throat cancer but still looking morgue-fresh in his immaculate pinstripes and crisp white shirt. And, finally, in strode Jagger, resplendent in violet blouse and eye-wateringly tight dove-grey satin suit, and sporting clean, fluffy, freshly-dyed hair.
In barely ten seconds I am utterly won over by this crumple-faced caricature of a sex god. And clearly, I am not alone.
‘Oh my God, just look at him,’ comes a stage whisper from a pretty Dutch reporter in front. ‘Oh Jesus! I’ve never seen anything like it…’
Together, the Stones are the very essence of Rock Gods — the genuine article in an industry stuffed with pale imitations.
Making fun of their age helps baby boomers, in particular, forget the significance of their age, which is what the Toronto Star essay quoted above is really about. The writer, Phillip Marchand, points a finger at several musical dinosaurs…
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July 31, 2020
Your brain dying of early onset dementia.
Like a lot of people, I suppose, I have been both shocked and outraged by the fact that Biden could be leading Trump in the polls, no matter how skewed and dishonest the media poll-takers are. The doddering groper from Delaware should be at ten percent approval and falling, not least because he is so obviously in the grip of Alzheimer’s Syndrome. How can it be that a majority of voters don’t know or don’t care how perilous it would be to elect as president a man who can no longer read successfully from a teleprompter, let alone a White House briefing book?
But then it occurred to me. Biden is the perfect candidate for the Democrat Party and maybe even for the nation we have become since we voted Saul Alinsky Obama into the White House. Biden is actually quite an accurate embodiment of the state of the union…
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September 14, 2020
An eminence grise named Thomas Sowell tells us there’s no such thing as systemic racism.
He’s wrong. Let’s see. Today, Breitbart acknowledged Lewis Hamilton by griping about his Breonna Taylor Tee-shirt. (They’ve never noticed him before, greatest black living athlete that he is...) Limbaugh was eloquent about how many white Americans voted for Obama because they thought voting in a black President would put all the racial misery behind us. I said at the time it wouldn’t. Thing is, at a certain level, BLM is absolutely right. They’re just wrong about why and how it happened, and how to deal with it…
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October 31, 2020
The Trump Speech We’ve Been Waiting for
Trump in Minnesota
Trump had a night of nights in Minnesota. For a man who supposedly lacks the subtle graces and nuances of tone, behavior, and rhetoric, he proved himself a master of all these today.
It began long before, in the early morning, when the muslim attorney-general of Minnesota made it clear there was no venue for a Trump rally he would approve without a COVID-impact assessment from a private site owner. Since none was forthcoming, he was limiting Trump’s scheduled Rochester MN rally to 250 people in attendance, equivalent to Biden’s planned drive-in movie rally. Asked about this under the whooshing blades of Marine One as he prepared to fly to Michigan for the first of three rallies across the midwest, Trump hoarsely responded he would still conduct his rally in Minnesota, as scheduled…
Everyone in these audiences had heard the stump speech he was supposed to give. What varies is when and how long he dives off teleprompter as the mood strikes him, which is often. Sage critics say he should confine himself to a list of his accomplishments and plans. The irony? He has too many accomplishments and plans; reciting them is neither time efficient nor fun. He is so larger than life that even these vital rallies are to him a kind of joyride…
He is playing with his people, the way grandparents play with grandkids, which they mostly are to him. He really does love them. They really are the reason he has undertaken this enormous ordeal, personal risk, and scathing hateful gauntlet. Why the people at the rallies love him.
I know. I’ve taken a while to get to Minnesota. Tonight he changed the rules. He showed us ‘President Trump’ at the bleak airport in Rochester…
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May 22, 2022
This woman is disgusting. So are most of us.
Genuine atheists and those in denial, too.
No intention of making fun here. No irony on my mind. It’s not just the Roe activists. It’s not racial. It’s everyone.
Let me set the scene. I’m sitting listening right now to 60s soul. Not just the stars but the frisbeeing slew of .45 records that made people believe, more than MLK, that here were voices who knew more about love than white people, whose burr of voice rolled through bedrooms and rustled curtains with something dark, delicious, and ineffable.
The picture up top makes that a joke. Okay.
Yes, it’s a form of ethnic, even eugenic suicide, passionately believed in. But it’s hardly an anomaly. It’s everyone in the world.
I have smelled the earthen, living, smell of the black nurses who looked after my wasted, blank, white grandmother. It wasn’t sexual. I was still a kid. I knew they were helping her keep living…
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October 11, 2022
Justifying Violent Preemption of Trump, Ivy Style
Most of you readers will be coming here from my Facebook page, which doesn’t have the technical capacity or features to do the subject justice. Here’s the graphic I used at FB
Sorry. Princeton Boys always make me laugh for some reason.
I’m going to try to fill in the Breitbart gaps here without being able to read the actual article in question due to WAPO’s Pay to Play policy…
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November 14, 2022
What You (Still) Need to Know Right Now
The Wings of the Beast
Time for everyone to take a deep dive into the nature of the beast that is devouring us. Go to the following link and spend some time reading everything, including the linked post on RINOs…
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December 31, 1999
The Functional Sociopath
Item. An 18-year-old girl in the company of adults sees a friend she has not spoken with for many weeks. As they talk, she is reminded of a ‘funny thing’ concerning one of her friends. The friend announced to several of her peers that she was leaving for a weekend jaunt somewhere. Subsequently the friend is not heard from again, although she had been a frequent caller by telephone. Curious, a trio of her intimates visited her apartment about two weeks after the ‘weekend jaunt’, found the door ajar, and entered. There was no sign anyone had been inhabiting the apartment in the previous two weeks. Nothing was missing, but a few things were strangely broken. The trio left the apartment and went their separate ways. None made any further inquiries. By the time the ‘funny thing’ was related as an anecdote, more than two months had elapsed since the ‘friend’ had been heard from.
This is just one of dozens of such items I have collected in recent years. Not as spectacular as school shootings, they nevertheless have in common with them an odd emotional discordancy. We regard it as striking when a teenage boy responds to teasing by murdering a dozen of his schoolmates, but isn’t it equally striking that ‘friends’ seem unable to summon enough concern to investigate or sound the alarm when an intimate simply disappears?
I believe that such discordancies are both striking and widespread. It may be rare, thus far, for them to result in violence, but if my theory about what is happening turns out to be correct, we will see far more apparently inexplicable violence in the years to come.
What is my theory? I am convinced that what amounts to a system-wide collapse in all our child-rearing institutions has created a virulent new strain of personality disorder—one I call the functional sociopath.
A sociopath is a person without conscience and without deep emotional connections to other human beings, individually and collectively. Science has long sought an organic basis for this kind of pathology, but it is also known that early environmental influences can play a major role in shaping the sociopathic personality.
I am persuaded that we have, as a culture, established an accidental combination of educational and child-rearing approaches which are practically ideal for generating sociopathic personalities in otherwise healthy children. To wit:
Self Esteem. The elevation of self esteem as a principal, if not the cardinal, goal of elementary education has dramatically reduced the opportunity for children to experience the necessary pain of perceiving that the world outside of themselves can and will make demands on them. This is a deprivation which stunts the prime mechanism by which children grow from infantile self absorption to fully individuated, ethical adult personalities. In other words, the permissiveness that accompanies the emphasis on self esteem aborts or sabotages the development of a real self of any kind.
Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit....
Sorry for the bit at the end. It's called greeked text, which printers (and some writers) use to represent the copy that's either not there or doesn't need to be because we all know what it will say. Now, here's a little something from the Invisible Problems section.
The End of Consciousness
The Thesis
In 1976, a Princeton psychologist named Julian Jaynes published a breathtakingly novel theory about human development. Titled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes’s book addressed a subject—human consciousness—which had been virtually ignored by the formal discipline of psychology for most of the twentieth century. His theory of consciousness was that the kind of self-awareness we take for granted as an intrinsic attribute of humanity is so dependent on the metaphoric properties of language that it could not have existed prior to 1500 BC.
To clear the way for his most daring assertions, Jaynes laid down a series of startling hypotheses about the nature of both mental experience and human history. He argued persuasively that consciousness is not necessary for most of the mental functions we use in daily life, including memory, learning, and judgment. Consciousness is necessary for decision-making, specifically for the imagining of possible consequences of alternative courses of action.
Largely because of the very specialized role he inferred for consciousness, Jaynes contended that individual self-awareness is not a prerequisite for the development of highly structured civilizations. As long as such civilizations operate in rigidly hierarchical organi-zations, individual decision-making—and therefore consciousness—is not necessary. Indeed, Jaynes suggested, it was only the historical collapse of multiple civilizations in the millennium before Christ which resulted in the kind of consciousness associated with modern man. To put Jaynes’s point in the starkest possible terms, it was not conscious man which produced civilization, but civilization and its boom-and-bust cycles which produced conscious man.
The reasoning behind this apparent reversal of cause and effect is brilliant. Jaynes points out that consciousness is itself a highly sophisticated metaphor; that is, an internal, mental analogue of the external world. That analogue cannot be any more sophisticated than the mental vehicles which are used to represent real experience and real external phenomena. Since these consist primarily of words, the depth and complexity of consciousness is governed by the depth and complexity of the language that is employed to symbolize, character-ize, and differentiate experience. And language acquires abstract and subtle meanings only in response to the appearance in the external world of complications and complexities which require new words and connotations to express them.
Thus, there is—must be—a phase in the development of every language when its words are merely names for things—rock, leg, buffalo, baby, night, sun, rain. What concept of ‘self’ could be made out of such basic naming conventions? If a speaker of the language has a name, that name stands for the person who looks like him or her, not for a set of accomplishments that can’t be listed during a period of time that can’t be differentiated from ‘now’ by any man’s tongue.
It is not necessary here to replicate the entirety of Jaynes’s theory or the compelling evidence he cites in support of it. Those who are so disposed can find his work and explore it in depth. The bases which are critical to this work have been established—the hypothetical primacy of the relationship between language and consciousness, and between consciousness and the cycles of human civilization. Other relevant Jaynesian notions will be cited as appropriate in the context of this book’s thesis, which can now be articulated.
The End of Consciousness
Individual human consciousness has served an indispensable role in the creation of the highly advanced technological civilization we inhabit today. But all cycles repeat to some degree, and there is now a considerable body of evidence before us to suggest that individual self-awareness is no longer necessary to the culture as a whole and is, in fact, being ruthlessly exterminated by the behavior of the social system as a whole, which has itself achieved consciousness by the same process which produced it in Mankind.
The particular propositions entailed by this statement are as follows:
1. All organizations and systems of which human beings are components do acquire and maintain their own self-awareness—not figuratively but literally, in that they are in part biological entities, possessing physical brains of enormous size in the form of those portions of individual human brains which serve as repositories for their rules, their values, and their preferred models for decision-making.
2. In the course of its development, individual human consciousness has been of continuing service to organizational and system consciousnesses because none of these has had the authority or power to function with complete autonomy. Always, individual human awareness—with its highly flexible and adaptive decision-making skills—was needed to arbitrate conflicts between competing organizational and system consciousnesses.
3. Whatever human purpose has been served by individual human consciousness in the past is irrelevant to the question of whether it will be retained in an organization or system of sufficiently large scale and scope. Whatever values attach to organizational and systemic consciousness are oriented toward their own growth and survival, not to the well being of Mankind per se.
4. The scope and scale of the worldwide socio-economic system which is being continuously created by the proliferation of computer technology and global business-nation organizations has reached the point at which autonomy can be achieved without further human assistance. Indeed, it will proceed more efficiently without human interference. This does not imply the elimination of Mankind, but rather its conversion to an operator population of relatively affluent and healthy automatons.
5. The self-awareness of the worldwide system is already a fait accompli, developed beyond the power of any individual to fully comprehend or anticipate it. A corollary of this state of affairs is that if any human being can even detect the existence of this supra-consciousness, then its program of exterminating individual human consciousness must already be far advanced; that is, advanced beyond hope of our preventing or stopping it.
6. The evidence that individual human awareness is, in fact, being progressively exterminated has become so obvious and pervasive and incontrovertible that the universal human ignorance of the accelerating process is the surest proof of its existence.
The remainder of this book is devoted to elaborating and elucidating these six propositions and the central thesis they support. Arma virumque cano...
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P.S. And, sadly, also this.
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