Love at a Reasonable Price

An Abandoned Preface to First Loves (Vol 1 of Love at a Reasonable Price)
[Editor’s Note from First Esssays: We liked this essay, but it didn’t really make sense as the Preface to “First Loves”, so we put it here instead.]

[Editor’s 2020 Note (updated 2024):

This 2017 essay — originally intended as a preface to First Loves — is included in First Essays.

We’d written the essay in response to an article (cited at the bottom of the page) on Steve Bannon’s notions that our nation had cultural aspects that could not be universally shared.

Our position is that the fundamental culture we as a nation have always — in our better moments — strived for is one of mutual respect for and commitment to our shared spiritual foundation:

We should work to better and better feel/think/act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving kind, joyfully sharing, joyfully together;
We should work to gain more and more insight into that inner spiritual sense of “Love is Real and Love tells us that we’re all in this together” that ratifies and explicates both itself and the universal values “aware … joyfully together”.

That is the “American Experiment” that we can care about.

Only to the degree one abides by the universal values and lives in through and for the Love that chooses everyone: Only to that degree can one understand, follow, and care about one’s owns thoughts and actions. Therefore, for people to more meaningfully share a representative democracy, they must work to better and better share active insight into those fundamental values.

The goal of sharing meaning implies not a forced adherence to xyz religion and/or patriotism (what meaning to people get from forced beliefs?), but working together to maintain a culture and government that allows us to all be faithful to those values without which our own feeling/thinking/acting can have no meaning to us.

What is needed is not uniform religious beliefs or cultural heritages, but rather a shared enthusiasm for open, honest, civil/kind-spirited discourse; and a transparent, accurate, competent, fair-playing and open-hearted/-minded government. These are the norms / this is the government that allow people to live and share the universal values.

Blind faith distracts people from the fundamental values and from the actual actions of their leaders — this is especially true at the distances and with the amount of power involved in government.

What is needed is not blind faith in religious or secular dogmas, but a shared commitment to what we know deeper and wider than we know our arguments to prove or disprove it:

We will not be meaningful to ourselves except to the degree we feel, think and act aware, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing; And we will not be meaningful to ourselves except to the degree that we center our feeling, thinking, and acting around a spiritual Love that never lets anyone down ever.

With a shared faith in our shared ability to relate meaningfully to the universal values and the spiritual Love they point us towards (ie: with a shared faith in our shared humanity), along with a shared commitment to the norms and rules that allow us to meaningfully observe and impact our shared government (transparent, open, honest, fair process and fair elections … ); we have a shared starting point that we can keep returning to, and from which we can build and maintain healthy systems.

We don’t have to agree on all the details of life to relate meaningfully and work well and joyfully together. Agreeing on the universal values, and sharing a healthy representative democracy is enough.

This essay is one of many based around the general worldview of Something Deeperism.]

An Abandoned Preface to First Loves (Vol 1 of Love at a Reasonable Price)

When the Evil comes swirling like leaves in a summer breeze. When the Evil comes courting with flowers picked from the well-kept little garden plots in the yards between Evil’s house and yours. When Evil laughs so loud and self-confident at the movie he picked, and you slurp the soda and munch the popcorn that you’d desired and he’d cheerfully treated you.

Shall we build a wall to keep out the Evil? But wouldn’t that require an intricate series of fortifications crisscrossing our own souls?

Shall we, that failing, build a wall to keep the bombs out? We The People never sit down, look each other in the eyes, and admit that none of us know how to make sure no one smuggles a nuclear bomb through one of the gazillion openings in the USA — nor even how to guarantee no one physically or cybercleverly overpowers our own world-annihilating nuclear stores. Nor ever gather we together to discuss how we can keep this pledge: “Come what may, let’s always stay calm and put good government ahead of the ‘necessary evils’ that sell so cheap when the Reichstag burns and the panic sets in.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

You see, friends, the US is more than a market among markets. The US is a nation with a culture and a reason for being. (1) [see Editor’s Notes at the end of this essay.]

Our culture is valuing kindness, creativity, a fair and honest exchange of ideas where a free and thoughtful people together debate and in good faith together choose the best ideas, the rule of law — continually sought, found, and nourished by a free people each seeking a relationship with the Law in a way that best speaks to them. Our reason for being is to show ourselves and the world that a shared democracy, sense of purpose, and vision can work on a giant, continent-sprawling, multi-racial, multi-religious scale. Our Truth is accuracy and honesty in public discourse, the pursuit and reward of excellence, the rule of law and equality under the law, a government that is responsive to the citizens. Our Truth is people working together to get better at working together and together making their shared situation better. Our greatest Truth is that we know that we humans are all in this together and so we should help each other and the other people in the world.

Or else what? If we’re not up to something along those lines, what workable goal have we? What do we have worth defending?

You’ve not achieved it! So prepare to meet your just doom! Ha ha ha!

Why? How does that help?

If there are, and there must be, strands of Good and strands of Evil in each of us, with the Good strands placidly unrolling forward and the Evil ones whipcording frantically in every chaotic, hopeful/hopeless direction. If the key to selflessness is not just seeing beyond the self in yourself, but also seeing that everyone else is just as much the Light trying to tame and guide their own ten million strands of thought and energy. If we’re all the Light wearing rags (2), what course is there but to relax, calm down, stop pretending we’re different from each other and be kind to each other? We could start with honesty, thoughtfulness, respect and freedom of expression in public discourse. The less we have that, the less we have a workable Democracy.

Cynicking, calling every politician an equal fiend, proudly lamenting how the whole thing is lost: fodder for the Evil — for the impulse to wipe out all honesty, all decency, all selflessness, all freedom of thought and speech and action. As long as there is breath of Democracy left — and there very much is — we have a duty to keep gently pushing to make our nation more Democratic, more just, more aware, more together, more loving.

By what revelation am I empowered to speak thus? And where is the sign of the wisdom and how was it won? Come on! It’s not like that. These are the Truths that we hold self-evident, because they are self-evident to all of us. It was self-evident to both Ben Franklin the Particular Sort of Deist He Was Within The Context of His Time and Place and James Madison the Particular Sort Of Christian He Was In His Time and Place. And it is self-evident today to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Jainists, secular humanists, and etc etc etc. There is a Light within that has to be right for any of our most sacred personal beliefs to be right. And that Light tells us we are all in this together and should work together and help each other and enjoy each other and go for it together. So let’s at least agree on that sense of honest and respectful exchange, togetherness, and mutual-respect and -appreciation that all of our sacred beliefs support. Let’s not undermine these basic already shared values in order to obliterate all dissent in matters that only matter if these basic values are respected. Let’s not self-defeat.

What does this preface have to do with this book? The book’s about one fictional personage’s struggle to find a foothold within Reality. But part of what he, in his journey towards a path and rhythm that would allow his mind and heart enough presence within his own thoughts and feelings to travel with them to his own conclusions: part of what he couldn’t help but notice was that we’re all in this together, wrapped up together, and so must care for and support each other and our shared frameworks, systems, organizations, environments.

The days of the heroes, the days of the giants — those will always be the days of myth: beautiful stories, but ultimately just stories, not livable paths; and so stories that turn ugly when mistaken for the Truth. One’s success and failure is tied inextricably to the success and failure of one’s community, nation, government, economy — with the cultures, families, friendship circles, systems for organizing human and capital; with the humans and human structures within which one lives; with, ultimately, the whole world. There were, living inside of The Ballooning Evil, great individuals who refused to compromise: some helped somewhat, but most got murdered pretty quick while the Evil rolled on. I guess we’ll have to stop pretending we’re heroes or other people are heroes or fiends, and admit we’re all in this together and together need to work together to push towards the Good and away from the Evil.

We can still get married!(3) We can still have fun! Indeed, good living is decent living is competent living is joyful living is healthy living. Or else we’ve all been sold somewhere down the line(4). But we know the Holy can no more sell us out than It can whine and fidget; so let’s not give up.

I mean: not to knock heroes — not to say we shouldn’t try to be heroic when so called upon. It’s just to say that the system where most of us fart around until things are so messed up that people have to sacrifice themselves to maybe get back a little order and decency: that’s a stupid system and accepting it an evil.

Ah well, we’ll wait for the wind to die down!(5) Then we’ll ride out, across these dusty redsands, over the scraggle-mangy balls of tumbleweed, the round prickly cacti, the tiny sharp-leaved bushes that believe themselves trees. The way’s gonna appear clear and bright when the wind dies down. We’ll ride out together then. For now, tell me about yourself, where you’ve come from and where you’re heading to, what you’re thinking of and how you got to those thoughts.

Bartleby Willard
Somewhere Out At Sea
March 26, 2017

Editor’s Notes:
(1) See “What does Steven Bannon Want?” by Christopher Caldwell, published in the New York Times on February 2, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/opinion/what-does-steve-bannon-want.html
(2) If we’re all the Light dressed in rags: See “If It Be Your Will” (Leonard Cohen, Various Positions, 1984)
(3) We can still get married! : See “There is a War” (Leonard Cohen, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, 1964)
(4) Or else we’ve all been sold somewhere down the line: See “Somewhere Down the Line” (John Stewart, Bombs Away Dream Babies, 1979]
(5) Ah well, we’ll wait for the wind to die down! : See “Wind Dies Down” (John Stewart, Cannons in the Rain, 1973)

This is a Something Deeperism essay.
The Something Deeperism Institute tab has some introductory essays. Those essays are also included in First Essays & A Readable Reader.
Which brings us to:
If you like our essaying, First Essays has a lot of essays.
And of that lot, A Readable Reader has a selection of the most readable ones.
And Superhero Novella has more philosophical asides than some believe it should.

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7 Up with Lithium

September 18, 2020 Bartleby

[NYC Journal]
[Health]

You don’t have to have soda.
It isn’t good for you.
You could just take like a little sparkling water (from a bottle of glass — so you don’t stick more plastic in your veins) and squeeze in half a lemon and half a lime.
Maybe a touch of magnesium citrate to mellow out the edges.

But what about the lithium part?
In the beginning 7 Up was called “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Sodas”
From its 1929 beginnings until the US government outlawed lithium in soft drinks in 1948, 7 Up contained lithium. That was I guess the “Up”.

How much lithium was in it?
Secret formula!
But a food chemist gave the question a lot of thought. And came up with like maybe 60 milligrams of lithium.

They used lithium citrate, which is the same kind used clinically to treat manic depression (sometimes that’s used; sometimes lithium carbonate).
For acute mania, grownups get like 600 milligrams; for long-term treatment between 300 and 600 milligrams.

You can buy lithium orotate over the counter.
There’s been some studies that indicate that even relatively low doses of lithium lower suicide and Alzheimer rates.
This doctor is suggesting 120 mg of lithium orotate (= 5mg of lithium) a day for people who want a little better mood and less likelihood of Alzheimers. But, he (Jim Phelps) says, they need to have good kidneys. Lithium can be hard on the liver; and lithium orotate was found to be very hard on rat kidneys — albeit at levels roughly correlating to 1500 mg of lithium orotate in a grownup human.

So maybe you could get away with, and maybe it could even be helpful, to have a lithium orotate lemon lime spritzer each night. Or with lunch, maybe?

Or you could use a little elderberry juice, a half teaspoon of magnesium citrate, a little vitamin C powder, and the contents of a capsule of lithium oratate. Maybe just sometimes.

What about 12 capsules of lithium orotate, so you could get the dose the food chemist guesstimated?

Mmm, I don’t know. Jim Phelps said that high doses of lithium orotate seemed harder on your kidneys than equally high doses of lithium carbonate. But you can’t buy lithium citrate or carbonate without a prescription, so you’re stuck with lithium orotate, which has this slightly unsettling finding plus comparatively little research.

What about just once, to see what it’s like?
The bottle I have says “Use only as directed. Take 1 Veg cap daily. Store in a cool, dry place.” With 12 capsules, you’re at 1440 mg of lithium orotate, which is about the amount they were giving the rats that didn’t do so well. Of course they did it on the regular.

But then a woman had to seek medical attention after taking 18 tablets of 120 mg lithium oratate. That’s 50% more than 12 tablets, but it still gives you pause to think.

The Amen Clinic says that sometimes people will be prescribed up to 20 mg of lithium via lithium orotate. So that would be four of the 120 mg capsules. But I don’t know.

At any rate, old fashioned Coke is out.

Author: Floyd
Editor: Bob
(Loose) Oversight Committee: BW & AW
copyright: AMW

[NYC Journal]
[Health]

the Anti-Weapon

September 14, 2020 Bartleby

Remember the anti-weapon?

A meme that worked like an irresistible koan: come into contact with it and you can’t escape enlightenment: selfless wisdom overtakes you, becomes you, turns you inside out, makes you gentle and kind, in step with the Light that alone Knows that and in what way it is True to say “We are all in this together”.

Let’s return to that.

First there’s the Introductory Ode to the Invincible Anti-Weapon.
Then A New, Improved Manhattan Project, Part I: Preliminary Worries.
Then Part II: The Proposal
And Finally Part III: Some Tips for the Geniuses

Authors: Framers
Editors: BW/AW
Copyright: AMW

If you like our essaying, First Essays has a lot of essays.
And of that lot, A Readable Reader has a selection of the most readable ones.

Existential Threats & the Anti-Weapon

September 13, 2020 Bartleby

It is September 12, 2020.

We currently face the possibility of US American democracy dying, or becoming so comatose as to be effectively dead. Without immediate international action, devastating climate change seems all but inevitable. And the threat of nuclear armageddon is as real as ever (maybe realer than ever; we need to link to an article about Trump’s pursuit of weapons for so-called limited-nuclear-wars).

I wonder what we should do.

The loneliness is strangling me and I wonder what to do.

I just want to take my baby doll honey pie sweet stuff by her dainty little hand and lead her to our own private Eden on the other side of the flaming sword and the stony-eyed and -jawed angel wrapped in flowing white robes and pouring righteous certainty. I just want to have a nice little life with a woman that fits my pace and lights my fire. I just want to be a man the way men are just so many grains of sand scattered by the winds tumbling down the ice-capped sheer-stone mountains, across the grass-waving plains, over the shifting snaking self-forgetting dunes.
And so we all want that; and so we all want to slip away into a happy afternoon in a sweet-smelling world with bright-colored flopsy-faced flowers sprawling around a sparkling spring, in the sunlight and the dappled shade of large peaceful trees of upward- & outward-reaching boughs and with wide wind-tickled leaves flipping up and over as if to smile, as if to laugh, as if to play and cavort in the free-limbed, easy-wandering life of our little band back on the savanna that spread out and out, miles and miles of grasses over which we’d run out our little hearts in clean air forever in every direction.

We will destroy ourselves through poor management.
Unless.
Wisdom.
Wisdom is our only hope.
But what is wisdom?
And how to pour enough of it into our veins in time?

OK, so wisdom for us is a lost cause.

What about AI.
The machines will be smarter than us.
What if they were also wiser than us?
Is artificial wisdom possible?
Can a machine be designed to hearken to the inner Light that shines through all things?
Can a machine be designed to stop nuclear war, climate change, and political folly?

Or maybe we could yet wise up.
Remember the anti-weapon?
A meme that worked like an irresistible koan: come into contact with it and you can’t escape enlightenment: selfless wisdom overtakes you, becomes you, turns you inside out, makes you gentle and kind, in step with the Light that alone Knows that and in what way it is True to say “We are all in this together”.

Let’s return to that.

We need to write the anti-weapon meme right now.

Because the committee never materialized and we’re all running out of time.

But how can we, with our oh so woefully limited wisdom-resources, write an irresistible koan that spreads wisdom like wildfire throughout the world and turns heads cooler, opens hearts wider, stays itchy fingers and thundering hooves?

Maybe it can’t be done.

What about a swarm of anti-disaster robotic insects that could capture carbon before it headed into the sky and envelope and reverse nuclear explosions as they began?
And they could also repair damage caused by disease and pollution in the human body, while also perhaps halting them before they spread.
I don’t know.
Sounds really hard to pull off; and could easily go south and make things worse real fast until there was nothing left but a madcap raging storm of microscopic robots, their little artificial wings beating with all the righteous certainty of flaming-sword-wielding cherubs.

So maybe we could just real quick think of a meme that makes everyone wise, even the author, who doesn’t want to be wise, but who, as he himself admits, only want his baby doll and a comfortable, peaceful, safe and sound place to lay with her.

We know that wisdom consists of the adequate organization of ideas and feelings around the Godlight/Truth/Buddhanature within-and-shining-through-all-things that alone Knows that and in what way it is True to say “We are all in this together”, and that ratifies and explicates the universal values, as here imperfectly-but-not-therefore-necessarily-inadequately summarized: “we must feel/think/act aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, selfless, kind, joyfully present, joyfully sharing, joyfully together, joyful — exploring, creating, and playing in and through the Pure Love that embraces everyone, lifting us all up with infinite love-licks.”

But how do we create a koan that immediately organizes everyone’s ideas and feelings around the Light better and better and better, creating a never-ending motion towards more and more clarity of feeling, thought and action? Or that prompts everyone to immediately bound fruitfully and irrevocably into that process?

Where’s the sentence that spawns irresistible, immediate, and irrevocable enlightenment? The one that you read or hear, and within a minute your thought-as-a-whole (ideas, feelings, and the Light, all together in one conscious moment and relating imperfectly but still meaningfully with each other) finds that it is more true for it to state “I know for sure that we are all in this together forever and must treat one another with love and respect, delighting in one another’s company” than it is for it to state “well, gosh, I don’t really know if anything is truly true, you know?” And that then propels you to keep working and working deepen, expand, and live that insight?

i don’t know

what if we admit that we don’t want to be all that wise; that we like the illusion where we’re still a relatively young man and we find a nice young woman and a relatively nonpainful way to pay for ourselves, and we have a nice house far from the city where we decide whether or not we listen to music and also what music we listen to and we also take nice trips and it is nice and we are happy? what if we admit that? would that help with the koan?

we already wrote essays about a shared Something Deeperism, in which we get everyone to agree on sharing and prioritizing the fundamental values (“aware … joyful”) without insight into which no human worldview can be meaningful to any human. We already did all that. That’s a medium-level wisdom that we could all share. But we wrote those essays and nothing happened! We clearly don’t know how to make an irresistible meme — not even for some relatively palatable wisdom like us all agreeing on the universal values while pursuing them in ways that are meaningful to each of us and at our own paces, and together maintaining open, honest, and transparent governments that allow us to keep a relaxed eye on our leaders so that we can mostly live out our individual hopes and dreams while also performing our fundamental civic duty of serving as a final check on madness and corruption in government. Come on! Who wouldn’t sign onto that! And yet: stillness: deadly quiet: as if we’d said nothing at all. Certainly nothing like a charming, friendly, medium-high self-serving but also other-embracing/-buoying and to a nontrivial degree selfless wisdom spreading across the globe. Nope: nothing like that happened.

The scary thought is selflessness. Because who knows what comes with selflessness? Maybe I have to forgo my baby doll. Or maybe we have to forgo our quiet rich estate far from the noise. Maybe not, but maybe, probably even. Who knows? We don’t know what happens when we turn off selfishness as our primary decision-making heuristic. So then again if we could just get this medium-high level of wisdom to be good enough and to spread wide enough. Indeed, that would probably do more towards keeping the world from disintegrating than if I alone were to reach great pinnacles of spiritual insight.

I used to kind of like hip hop. Now I mostly hate it. It’s always forced on me where I live and all I want is enough money for to leave here and go somewhere where I pick the music or the silence. I want the US democracy to not collapse so that there’s a stable socioeconomic structure within which I can live, contribute, work, consume, fraternize and enjoy. I want the world to not be destroyed by global warming or nuclear wars so there’s a stable geopolitical structure and nice parks and open spaces within which I can live, contribute, work, consume, fraternize and enjoy. I want to be a happy animal with my wife and our time in the sun. I want money so I can listen to what I want to listen to, or have quiet, or in the worst case argue with my family about what record we play or don’t play. All this noise is torturing me. I live in fear of it overtaking my mental space like it is now, like now even with the windows shut. Stupid repetitive mindless beats attacking me, crushing in my shoulders. I’m so sick of the exploding droning beats, and when you can hear the lyrics they are usually all the same and so dumb and you can’t escape; people you don’t even know hold you in a cage of their sounds. All I want is for the world to stay basically as it is so I can figure out a way to make money, find my partner, leave this city, and go somewhere quiet — somewhere where I decide whether or not I hear what music. When it is quiet and I feel well, then I may dream wider with a wider heart and mind; but when this noise forces me out of my living room where I was happily writing and sometimes also won’t leave me be in my bedroom and so makes me a prisoner in my own home, then I don’t care about anything except: money, girl, leave and find my own place where I decide what happens to my body and my conscious space. But I know that when human systems and/or their environments collapse, we all go down together.

So what now? We need the wisdom meme to save us from ourselves; but when push comes to shove, we only want it for selfish reasons.

How can you force wisdom on the world when you just want wisdom to overtake the world to the degree that you are still allowed to be basically selfish, focused only on your little family and their mundane concerns?

I cannot write the wisdom meme.
But who can?
Wouldn’t it have been written by now?
Many wise, essentially selfless people have written many wise texts.
And people read them and nothing much happens. Maybe some individuals grow in wisdom, but the totality continues to careen towards the cliff edge.
For the wisdom meme to work, people would have to hear or read it, get enlightened, and then repeat it, enlightening everyone they met. And on and on. Translating it into all languages.

There’s all these fanatics for this or that religion who stand up now pounding their stammtisch, proclaiming their tradition the wisdom meme. But clearly if it was they would be wiser and so would everyone else.

dear god
what is the wisdom meme?
i’m hiding from my neighbor’s hip hop in my bedroom and that’s keeping me kind of safe except of course cars drive by all the time also blasting music, usually rap. I used to think I liked hip hop. I think I would again if it was me deciding when I listened to what. Now I live in fear of hip hop.
I thought if I could start my own business and move out of the city. Buy a house. With a nice girl. Have a nice life. Let it all go. Let the world run itself. Let my shoulders relax. But what will keep everything from collapsing around me?
At any rate, me staying here isn’t helping anyone.
My neighbors could be worse. They could play more music louder.
But it isn’t just them. There’s also a restaurant that has live music — from African drums to high-wire-acrobat jazz horns — loud every night outside my bedroom window.
And cars drive by all day; it is amazing how many people play music so loud it disturbs third floor apartments.

i don’t know what to say
the Beatles had a hit with “Love is all you need”
That’s a catchy and basically correct, complete, self-contained wisdom meme.
And yet, here we are, 53 years later, and we’re headed towards mutual self-destruction due to a lack of wisdom and widespread mismanagement of ourselves and our resources.
Well, here’s All You Need is Love.
And here’s One Love by Bob Marley.
Or what about Wheel within the Clay by John Stewart? He just spells it right out: “There’s a clear voice speaking, and it has a lot to say.”
It’s morally easy to be a poet with a snug roof, a contented wife, health insurance, and full belly.
Or to be Iceland in 2020 with a hundred thousand culturally-uniform people and no military beyond a coastguard, with all your proud violence buried in the 800s, 900s, 1000s — back in the wooden ships and soaked swirling beards, cold salt spray in pale blue eyes.

hopeless
the meme
wisdom meme
come to us
despite us
spite our longing to stay unwise
where we can suck the fruit of folly and lick our splash-damp lips
squish our nonsense out of us
make us see things as they really are
change us while there’s time

the irony of course is that we don’t have to be enlightened to preserve democracy and stop burning fossil fuels. A little dose of openness, accuracy, competency, and transparency in government would suffice for us to make collectively meaningful decisions. (see “Representative Democracy is a Spiritual Good” and related essays on the main NYC Journal Politics page.)

Although how are we going to keep from blowing up the planet? it was one thing when there were two equal weights pitted against each other, assuring one another of mutual self-destruction. Now the holders of nuclear weapons proliferate and alliances crackle and pop. The chances of the irrevocable misunderstanding and subsequent overreactions and the melt-down of most human flesh and irradiation of the bulk of human bones — those chances increase. And enter the machines; so now a hacker or just a fluke 0 or 1 can start the meltdown.

maybe with a widespread wisdom we could figure this one out. or maybe we’ll luck into something. or maybe some amount of common sense, wisdom, good government, and luck will get us through.

i don’t know what to do

i’m tired

Added Sunday 9/13/2020:
Why do 100,000 people get their own language, culture, island, sovereignty, AND a seat on the Nordic Council?
They may as well give me a seat on the Nordic Council.
I gotta stay below 41 degrees North — for the sake of my skin, blood, and mind.
So I’ll need a dispensation there.
Here: We’ll give me my own house and yard and something like a VaticanCity-setup in Madrid. That way I can have my own small kingdom within an easy flight to the Nordic Council meetings.

I don’t know why I should be on the Nordic Council.
But why should this medium-small-sized city’s worth of people get to be on it?
I don’t know what I’d say on the Nordic Council.
I’d agree that there should be no further raids along the coasts of Scotland and England.
And that a second expedition from Greenland down to Vineland would probably be best left off.
And that we should shake our heads at world powers coming and going, and the mess their giant convolutions are making of everything.
I would vote to leave the whales alone and to write a letter asking Japan and Russia to also lay off, because whales are too smart to kill at this point in human history. I will abstain from comment when some tall pale man with flaxen hair rises out of his squeaky folding metal folding chair and suggests we breed a dumber whale.
I will most certainly ask for a review of the member nation’s contributions to international pop music.

Bjoerk DaughterOfHerFather had All is Full of Love, which is in keeping with Something Deeperism.
And Ace of Base had Happy Nation, which comments fruitfully upon the ability of well-functioning democracies to allow populations to share enough Something Deeperism for meaningful communication and thus meaningful collaboration in the maintenance of a well-functioning democracy.
But what do the Cardigans ever sing about except romantic love? And not even wholesome, love-centered romantic love. But instead a romantic love so sex-obsessed as to not even really make room for love.
And yet, Sweden is doing fine on the whole.

Spiritual wisdom is a good goal, but publicly extolling it is also a good smokescreen for madness and corruption to hide behind. Governments should be fundamentally secular so as to better protect the spiritual lives of its inhabitants. YES: we must agree on the fundamental spiritual values if we are to speak meaningfully with one another; BUT: when you say “we are collectively choosing this because it is wise, good, and/or holy” then you force people into blind-follower-mode and away from meaningful engagement, communication, and collaboration. That’s why Shared Something Deeperism in a large nation state puts must focus both on a public commitment to the universal values and on outward, publicly-verifiable safeguards against abuses of political power: we will not agree on the best way to live the shared values, but we can agree that they are a shared starting point and that none of our political ideas matter to the degree we cannot view our government’s decisions and actions and/or cannot meaningfully discuss our government’s decisions and actions, and/or cannot meaningfully influence our government’s decisions and action. So we can agree that first and foremost we must keep our government open, honest, accurate, competent, fair/rule&law-abiding, and transparent (else we lose our insight into and power over our government’s decisions and actions), and that we must work together as best we can from within a framework of meaningful communication created by a shared public commitment to the universal values and a healthy representative democracy.

The US is losing its way in large part because its citizens do not possess a shared reality. The truth about the so-called “liberal media” is that, while there is bias and spin to some extent in all discussion of political facts, they are very careful to vet the actual facts that they state. Trump has declared a war on half the country and all facts. This is a bad but not completely unpredictable development in a nation that has split into two sides, with the Republican side attacking the media for a generation.

In the US today, it feels like people today don’t really believe the other political side has meaningful access to the universal values. The other side’s members are seen as either too idiotic or too morally flawed to grasp those fundamental values without which no human thoughts are meaningful to any human. And so both sides believe the other side is wandering in the dark of meaningless, but somehow self-satisfied and prideful nihilism. How could you meaningfully converse with people like that? How could you meaningfully collaborate with them to safeguard your republic?

Cooler, wiser, gentler impulses must prevail. Otherwise we’ll all wreck everything for everyone. We can admit that we ,may differ in some places and to some degree on our interpretations of the facts while still making the effort to discover and examine the facts together. We can vote out politicians who are clearly deconstructing the foundations of our shared representative democracy, while avoiding the extremes of conspiracy theories that dig and twist and contort until basically honest, uncorrupted, competent and well-intentioned politicians are “proven” to be enemies of the people. We can agree that some of the concerns motivating Trump’s policies — like what do we do with the rise and not-always-fair and/or -friendly-to-democracy China?, or what do we do when so many people want to leave their countries and start living in this one? — need to be taken seriously, while also agreeing that his blatant attacks on our shared government, his dangerous re-escalation of the nuclear arms race, and his denial of climate change and reversal of environmental protections in general represent immediate existential threats to us as a nation and a world; and that we must therefore vote against Trump and for Biden, who would like to move these critical issues in a better direction. We don’t have to agree on everything; but we must agree on stopping this disaster together and working together to gain mutual trust and understanding. We humans do not have the luxury of only getting along with and working with people who agree with us. We all rise or fall together. Even if it is inevitable that this world fail — and we don’t know that it is and should work together as best we can to together succeed –, the spiritual energy created now by admitting that we are all in this together and must accept one another as fellow participants of the One Light will, it seems reasonable to assume, aid us in the next shared adventure. Because we’re, it seems reasonable to assume, ever going to get rid of one another, and so our only hope is to learn to be glad to know one another.

author: a stumbling forward momentum left over from being a toddler charging ahead through the desert sun over blazing-hot white-bright concrete.
editor: BW/AW
copyright: AM Watson

If you like our essaying, First Essays has a lot of essays.
And of that lot, A Readable Reader has a selection of the most readable ones.

Nature.com: How a small nuclear war would transform the planet

Vox: This is exactly how a nuclear war would kill you

Independent: April 2019: Threat of nuclear war dangerously close

If you want the peace of the dead, prepare for nuclear war

NTI.org: Despite progress, the threat of nuclear war is more complex and unpredictable than ever

Oct 2019: We’re more at risk of nuclear war with Russia than we think

Republican & Democrat Realities

September 6, 2020 Bartleby

[This article is under construction as of Sunday 9/6/2020]

The GOP was able to allow Trump’s corruption to continue because the American people are too polarized to impeach a president. To impeach a president, you need to be able to get a majority of senators to think they will lose their job if they don’t impeach and will keep their job if they do impeach. To do that, you need to be able to convince the American people to first demand their senators demand a fair hearing with all facts and witnesses present and then you need to be able to convince the American people to pay attention to those facts and witnesses and make a decision based on those facts and witnesses. But the American people do not share the same reality.

The hard thing to deal with is the fact that Democratic voters are not nearly in the la la land that Republican voters are. How do you talk about that? How do you talk about the elephant in the fantasy room? Trump is a culmination of years of disinformation, of learning to prefer disinformation and to distrust any media that doesn’t give you the story you need. What do you do about this? There can be no shared democracy without a shared reality.

It is true that everyone has their bias and both sides have a tendency to look past the facts that impede their happy, “ah ha! we know what’s going on and what to do!” momentum. But there’s that common human failing and then there’s embracing a president with no interest in reality nor even an ability to notice it, narratives that spin his clear incompetence and corruption into amazing competence anti-corruption, and a general abandonment of facts.

I don’t know what to do here. How to help? How to bring reality to people who have decided to distrust all media that doesn’t tell them what they already believe?

It is hard to figure out what is going on and what should be done. How do you know who to trust? How can you be sure? And once uncertainty seeps in, then what is there for you but to believe your friends and your own general worldview, which has somehow gotten swept up in a political identity?

Also see this part:
The most fundamental need of human beings is to understand what is truly going on and how they should react to what is truly going on. This is a spiritual need. The longing for salvation: an aware connection with Reality, complete with insight into our place in that Reality (I say “our place” to communicate the fact that the salvation we most deeply long for leaves no one out). But then we mix that longing up with our longing for insight into what is going on in physical and mental worlds where humans spend their mortal whiles, and how we can be safe and snug and loved and held and praised in this great mundanity. The longings are legitimately interrelated; Wisdom is necessary for wisdom; and real success is at its core a spiritual success that radiates out into health thinking/feeling/living/acting. However, we get attached to our political narratives as if they were spiritual ones. And by “political” we here indicate every mental experience that is not pure delight in, gratitude for, and humility and dedication in face of the Joy That Passes Understanding.

I don’t know what to do.
I feel nauseous all the time.
Who will stop the evil?
We can’t even hear our own hearts beat, let alone remember that other people are inhabited as well, inhabited by conscious watching and feeling, and, at a little lower level, by the Light, by a kind, gentle Joy.

So what can we do?
You understand, I hope, that disbelief in the free press is a critical move in any autocrat’s playbook. If there’s no facts beyond swells of patriotic emotion tied to sound bites and myths, who can stop the King from being Right?

I don’t know what to do.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republicans-and-democrats-dont-understand-each-other/592324/

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/17/kasich-cant-help-biden-win-over-republicans-but-trump-can/

Republicans and Democrats read a lot of the same news. What they do with it is a different question.

https://www.journalism.org/2020/03/04/about-one-fifth-of-democrats-and-republicans-get-political-news-in-a-kind-of-media-bubble/

https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/americans-are-divided-by-party-in-the-sources-they-turn-to-for-political-news/

Fall Apart

September 6, 2020 Bartleby

i wish (we’d stayed friends)

On Saturday, September 5, 2020, a political writer fell apart.
The collapse is documented below:

Love & Empire
(why lie?)

On Slipping into alcholism
(why?)

The hurt you cannot beat
(why pretend?)

come on
(come on)

A really good gin drink
(well, it is)

Why addicts never get anything done
(yeah)

I want to take you (on a trip)
(why lie?)

The Politics of Romantic Love
(hmmm)

eternal sonnet
(why lie?)

And now?
Sunday, September 6, 2020
A man wakes up.
He tells himself he wants to change.
Is he telling himself the truth?
A person never tells themselves anything exact as the truth; but let’s assume he on the whole basically means it.
Now what?
He can take a vow not to drink until the election is over.
Oh, but he already did that.
How does one keep one’s vows?

Dear God,

Please help us to stop wasting time.
Please help us to listen to kindness.
Please help us to find your Light, to find you.
Please help us to do an OK job of being people.
Help us to be aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, kind, open-hearted and -minded. Help us to be generous, joyfully present, joyfully sharing, joyful. Help us to help one another. Help us to see things how they really are. Help us to understand that and in what sense it is True to say we are all in this together. Help us to hear your voice, and follow your gentle way. Help us to help one another.

Sometimes you have to pour half a bottle of gin down the drain at two in the morning.
You have watch $15 glug glug into the basin and down the sink and nod in grateful acceptance.
You have to admit that you cannot at the present time keep alcohol on your person and expect things to go well.
You have to accept that that is your current situation and go from there.

Authors: The Various
Editors: The Usual
Copyright: The AMW

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