Value judgment is defined as: an assessment of something as good or bad in terms of one's standards or priorities.
I read the things I say. I am aware that I come off as judgmental – believe me, countless are the people who have told me as much. I can firmly say that I'm not, because I don't make value judgments.
Yesterday I wrote a lot of things which seem scathing. I know the danger I place myself in to be misunderstood. I managed to survive the anxiety of having said them, waiting for the inevitable emotional backlash, but no. Nothing is sometimes better than something. All of my heroes are misunderstood. If you've been with me since the beginning, you know my heroes were all suicides until I got into my thirties – as a matter of coincidence, I've always thought.
But I think (and write) a lot about Confirmation Bias, quietly assuming you know what I'm talking about.
And that's why I want to talk about Value Judgment today.
Valuation is something which all humans do. We are animals, and animals which perceive the world with a high degree of complexity, at that. It is impossible to survive as a functioning living being without being able to evaluate your environment. Now – the degree to which we accurately assess value is another story. Which is why Value Judgments are so dangerous.
See, the key element here is in the definition: an assessment of something as good or bad in terms of one's standards or priorities.
When I said yesterday that the first pitfall in becoming Human as Frank Herbert might put it is the misunderstanding that I Am God, I say today that the first pitfall any Human must navigate in any decision they make is the tendency of evaluating it by considering their own standards and priorities only. Whew! What a sentence that was.
Allow me an example:
As I am not female, it would be very easy for me to say that the Women's Sphere (as I term it in my mind without ever sharing an adequate definition with you) is villainous – simply because in my life, my proximity within that sphere, and my necessary marginalization therein have damaged me personally and professionally. It would be easy to be angry. It would be easy to frame a worldview wherein everything which didn't directly benefit me had no value at all. Equally, as a female, it is easy for you (or the females you know) to judge those things which are a part of the Men's Sphere as unimportant, maybe even villainous. I'm thinking of the way that women of a certain age view men playing video games at all, let alone as a hobby or their preferred entertainment medium.
This is what I mean when I say that “Capitalism” is Narcissism: in order to be “successful” to the degree that we think we will be satisfied, Capitalists necessarily have to think only of what benefits them. This is Machiavellian – yes; and the most successful people in the world view their businesses – or whatever it is they do – in these very ruthless terms. Largely because they've read books such as The Prince and The Art of War - namely, books geared toward a military or princely audience - and they've learned to think of the world as a place one has to engage in combat with, which one must fight and conquer.
We ask how profits could be more important than rainforests, and I say that it's simple: there is no value judgment made of those forests besides their profits. There is no consideration because consideration isn't beneficial to either the fighter or the conqueror. We still engage with the world with a 14th century mindset – we're still sending out Conquistadores instead of raising up Illuminatus.
Consideration is what we ask of our leaders – but more, it is what we ask of our scholars. What we ask of our prophets. ...Sort of.
We used to trust that our leaders were taking the best counsel available to them; that the most capable men and women in the world were making the best decisions available to them for the benefit of the entire planet. Many – too many – people still believe this. The 20th century should be a punch to the genitals that this worldview is a lie. That there is nothing about this world system which is either meritocratic or democratic? How can we even trust Academia, when we know the effort that individual Academicians, with the backing of the Institutional, Established Academy will go and the depths to which they will debase themselves in order to occult the Truth?
I don't know. Faith is something I struggle with.
I've told you before: I have felt an overwhelming dread for 21 years. A cold wet blanket of my spirit – a coming Apophis waiting to swallow up all of the living.
That's a particularly melodramatic way to transition into what I'm going to struggle to talk about next.
Prophecy is back in my mind again today. Not because I have anything prophetic to say – not any more than anything else I say; unless you understand prophecy to be thought-vomit, then, yeah, I'm prophesying all over this bitch. >_>
Prophets are people who believe their value system to be superior to the value system At Large. These are the people who influence populist politicians and organize revolutions. They're successful because they appeal to our individual senses that our valuations aren't accurate – either enough or at all.
We all want someone to tell us how to live right. We don't necessarily want to hear how to life Rightly, but we definitely want to be told the cheat codes to getting to the ends of our lives satisfied. Satisfaction as an etymology is something I feel like I've written about. Maybe it was just a long sidebar conversation that Rob and I had. We do that sometimes. He'll call me up just to chit-chat, and I'll end up asking him questions and he'll send me down some interminable rabbit hole which inevitably leads to me sitting here knowing that I haven't adequately expressed an idea and unable to remember with whom I was exploring it and almost always after a week of absence and a Lovecraftian sense of inadequacy. *ahem*
Ideology is a difficult word to discuss. We all know that Ideologues are bad. We all agree that extremism in any fashion – unless it's the fashion we dress in *wink* – is dangerous. And yet, do we have a working agreement on what it means to subscribe to an Ideology? I ask, because when I talk to Conservatives, especially card-carrying Republicans, they are aware that they are Ideologues. And they are happy about it, because they believe, if wrongly so, that they are defending their Values through their representation. Liberals, on the other hand— Which, Liberal as a term is as loaded as it is shirked by those who would wear it as Ideology is.
There are no true Liberals in modern politics. And, frankly, if you aren't of an age to be elected president or aren't currently running for election, your opinion doesn't matter to me. I value it that lowly. Lol. Because it disagrees, right? That was a little bit of a joke to demonstrate what I'm talking about, right there. But also – honestly, twenty- and thirty-somethings could really just stay quiet in the Social Sphere; I say that fully aware that I am 34 and do not belong here. And if only because no one outside their little circle jerks is meaningfully listening to them.
You have to announce jokes now. If you're talking serious topics and you poke someone in the ribs, they're likely to go online and punch you in the face. So. Still trying to build an audience, here. I don't actually want to chase you all away with every new post.
When I say Liberal, I mean everyone who doesn't identify as a Conservative. Democrats are Conservatives, they're just habituated to lie to themselves.
Because Self Love isn't the only Lie around us. In fact, as I articulated yesterday, it is only a symptom of a far uglier and more serious disease.
Ideology is defined as: A system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
We know that. What we don't really know is what ideas and ideals are – and what we don't appreciate is how systems work.
What is a system?
That's a weird-looking word, isn't it? Sys-tem – neither syllable is familiar to me. ...Because they're Greek: it's a conjunction of the Greek words for with setup. Defined as: A setup of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized framework or method.
So what the word means. It's something with-setup.
It's neat how words that old can mean the same thing with very little needed added complexity. The definition doesn't elucidate the word – the word makes its definition unnecessary.
Politics is a magick system which is so advanced it's indistinguishable from technology.
We talk about the political machine, and the wheels of justice; we have axioms ad nauseum. Government may be a perpetual motion machine at this point (and by that I mean doomed to eventually seize up in perpetual stagnation), but politics is more akin to theater than it is a machine shop. And theater is— You guessed it, descended from religion. Specifically from the ritual performances of mythic tales. If you don't know what I'm talking about from “primitive” religion, like the various dances of the Native North Americans, you more than likely have heard of passion or mystery plays. Unless my life experience is entirely outside the norm, you've witnessed or at least heard of people ritually performing various stories from the bible, none less than the crucifixion of their man-god.
There's, like, a huge festival in Mexico – the Passion Play of Iztapalapa.
The way American politicians call on the Forefathers or intone the name of Ronald Reagan or John F Kennedy – the way we talk about the Constitution— These are only the easiest examples I can think of. But they're based in ritual magick. They're taken right out of the secret chambers of Freemasonic Lodges, which are meant to replicate the ancient caves and pyramids and temples in which the ancient Élite practiced the magick which they believed – and maybe rightly so – protected them from that very inevitable stagnation, that Crawling Chaos which awaits every People.
So what's the difference in an Idea and an Ideal, then?
My style would work so much better if I were sitting under a tree on a hill and you were gathered around me and someone in the crowd could offer an answer so I could guide them to the Truth. Anyway.
We think we understand that an Idea is a thought we can have in our heads and express to other people, and an Ideal is the sort-of highest version of a thing. We kind of understand these words instinctually – because, again, they've been with us for two thousand years and more.
Plato talked about Ideas and Ideals. I'm not sure whether he coined the terms or whether he was the first person to ever think in this way – I'm inclined to think that no one is ever the first at anything. The various hominin species, most of them nearly indistinguishable from homo sapiens sapiens, have existed for at least a million years. The odds that I'm the first person to think anything are asymptotic at this point – approaching while maybe never reaching zero – infinitely close to zero.
Our instinct is right enough. An Ideal is greater than what we commonly think, though. An Ideal is of religious significance – of spiritual, Essential significance – when Plato speaks of it. I wrote yesterday and am quite proud of the way I phrased it, that consciousness is a multi-dimensional whirlpool, with Everything funneling down into Us.
You've no doubt heard of the Allegory of the Cave. If not, let's skim over it. Basically, being a conscious being is analogous to living in a dark cave – if there were a hole in the top of the cave, and through that hole were shining a light. Consciousness is being able to perceive shadows cast by things on the outside of the cave. The darkness of the Cave is something like Ignorance, but it's also the state of Existing in this Material Reality; the shadows are Ideas, the light is True Reality, and the things casting the shadows are the Ideals.
What the Hell does this have to do with choosing to be a Nazi?
That's a great question, and I'm getting there.
When we subscribe to Ideologies, we are doing more than joining a group. We're allowing the group to decide for us what to think and what to feel. It's not at all different from the way you kind of resent your mother for guilt tripping you all the time. Societies mimic the family unit. Remember way back in PLog 1 when I said everything was the family unit? Told you I'd circle back around eventually.
I've said before I don't know any Mormons, but I do follow one on Twitter – and have read that one book and watched as many documentaries as I could find which weren't edited to manipulate an assumed confirmation bias that polygamy is villainous and religious extremists misguided when they aren't outright evil. That seems to be where most Mormon information wants to lead you – in my experience.
But the Latter Day Saints are a great study when I think of Ideology. I've written before about Cults and what they have to teach us. But it's not the cult I'm thinking of as I write this. It's the “survivors”. The people who have left the Church and how they live day to day, their relationships with their families, their communities – but more than them, I'm thinking about those people who are good Christians, who are, indeed, Good Mormons, who struggle to reconcile their Faith with what they know of the Church.
That reconciliation – in the Public Sphere, we call it Cognitive Dissonance— Another charged phrase, defined as: the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.
As you read that, you should be hearing echoes of the first page of this piece – this manuscript, I suppose. I'm still talking about Value Judgments. Cognitive Dissonance is where your decision-making doesn't outwardly represent your Value System.
It's tricky, talking about this in the Religious Sphere. Because religion is cognitive dissonance. Living a Spiritual life is to encounter the frankly impossible on a regular basis. This is why Religion is a Spiritual system: precisely to protect the practitioner from those very same threats our ancestors were worried about in their caves and pyramids and temples . And the only way to overcome these things is to either already have or to adopt (adapt) the proper Values.
If you want, for instance, to be a Good Christian, you can't always live by all of the Word. But even those Gospel Writers – and those Canon Compilers – would tell you that the only words you need to be following explicitly are those which came directly from the mouth of the Prophet - the Red Letters, in other words. Everything else is advice for living in the world – for, in other words, reconciling the differences between your Value System and those of the rest of the world.
Religious canon is propaganda simply because you need the constant reminders. The demons of Medieval Christianity were, perhaps, blown out of proportion – but, then again, maybe not. We all have temptations looming over our shoulders at any moment.
I was thinking last night about how I've lost jobs because I wouldn't engage in the sexual misconduct which was industrialized there.
This is why Cicero dedicated two years of his life to writing every thought he could think on the subject of the Good Life. It's why he gave his son a literal manifesto by which to live his life. It's why we scramble to remember every word of men like Jesus, men like the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas, Kong Fu Zi and Lao Zi—
Women like Hildegard of Bingen or.... My knowledge of female prophets is cripplingly limited. Is it because their particular relationship with spirituality is decidedly female and it doesn't speak to me, or do I not value them highly enough for reasons of ignorance? Has my confirmation bias directed me away from them, or has my Goddess not led me to them because I am not meant to lead as a Prophetess might?
The further away we get from living Prophets, men and women who speak and live rightly – Siddhartha Gautama named this the Threefold Path: Right Action, Right Speech, Right Livelihood.
Right Livelihood, by the way, is why I'm doing this and not still struggling to make a decent enough living to smile when I get home from work: it's defined as making a living in a way that doesn't cause suffering or harm to others. I couldn't rightly continue to give the effort of my labor over time to companies who take advantage of their customers and their employees. Continuing to work as a server knowing that my skill was taking money out of the wallets of my teammates, continuing to be called the worst sorts of racist and homophobic slurs by people at Family Dollar.... Yeah. I couldn't say that I was walking the Threefold Path and continue to participate in that world.
The further we get from these people in time and geography, the further we get from the truth they understood. We can keep their wisdom insofar as we can remember the words. But only one person truly understands the meaning of the things I'm writing right now and he's me. This is the principle behind Death of the Author: basically, that because only the Author can know the Meaning behind their work, any interpretation of the work necessarily has to exclude the Author and their experience. Which is an interesting way to view a piece.
It's decidedly Post-Modern and wrong because it's too relative and gives too much credit to the outsider for being right in their observations of the artistic system the Author has created.... But that sounds an awful lot like Cognitive Dissonance of my own, doesn't it? Saying that someone outside a work of art can't accurately interpret it while also telling you that I've observed Humans and their Systems from outside well enough to describe them back to you – and maybe someday getting around to suggesting better ways to do things, not just handing you white-hot irons and walking away.
C'est la vie.
I wish I spoke enough French that the many French idioms which have gotten caught in my vernacular were justified.
How can I say that I don't make Value Judgments?
I can't. I do all the time. When I see an iPhone ad on the television – or anytime I engage with an independent artist and am bombarded with corporate advertisements – I make instant value judgments. The difference is that I make the choice whether to ignore them or to indulge in them.
I don't know if this has been made clear enough – I am a straight-passing white dude. Because I am low income and quiet, it's also assumed that I'm stupid. Some people get fascinated with the fact that I am not, in fact, stupid.
I was working at a grocery store in 2020, doing the Personal Shopper thing. Basically, when you order to get things pickup or delivery, I was the guy gathering it. And it was a lot of fun. Over the years I've spent a lot of my best times wandering around grocery stores. 2020 was hard for a lot of people, and I was not at all concerned with whether I got COVID. Frankly, maybe putting myself at risk would improve my situation – at the worst, I'd have to rehome my cats because the situation would end forever.
Whatever.
I was trying to live rightly – by doing work which people needed done. And I was good at it. Really good at it. Remarkably good at it. So good I made the manager uncomfortable that I was going to unseat her so she had to bully me until I lost my temper and told her to take the job and shove it up her ass, good. So not nearly good enough at the politics. Before that, however, she was an attractive and intelligent black woman who would ask me difficult questions whenever I wasn't on the floor. One day, and the reason I'm bringing this up (well, one of the reasons; I'm trying to paint a broader picture of the way the world has stimulated me, so maybe my response won't seem so... alien), she asks me as I'm walking back into the bay – mind you, I'm the only white person (and the only male) among my six other coworkers – what I thought about some white guy saying something racist. I can't remember how she phrased it, now. I want to say she straight up asked me, “What do you think of racism?” but she couldn't have done that.
That would be insane.
I do know that I looked around, and every eye was suddenly on me. So I made eye contact with them all and tried to smile, and said that all that I knew was that as a white man, I have to ignore every first thought I have about everything, because they're always wrong. Everybody goes back to what they were doing but her. She frowns, and asks me what I mean.
So I explain to her what I've been trying to explain to you: My father was a violent man, and violently racist. When I was a boy, he used to brag to be about how he would go 'Can Hunting when he was a young man: “Mexi-Can, Afri-Can, Puerto Ri-Can....” You don't really understand racism until you've been stewed in it. Until you've been taught, trained to hate. My father used to casually drop the N-bomb and Latin and Asian racial slurs because he thought it was funny. That's where I admittedly learned the opinion that the words themselves are indeed funny and have a fun mouth-feel to say them. Which only ever really excuses them if you're willing to genuinely apologize if you've hurt someone's feelings – and you were actually funny, I suppose.
Because that seems to be the only answer to the question of whether anything is ever okay: if it was “just a joke”.
As a white male – as a human being, but especially as a white male – these days, I have to constantly remind myself – literally with every first reaction that I have to every single stimulus in my life – that I am conditioned to believe that I am a spoiled, fat prince and the world belongs to and exists only for my benefit and to behave as such.
When I see a commercial and I notice that everyone in it is non-white, I have to remind myself that it doesn't matter. The people are pretty and they're saying their lines the way they're supposed to. This company isn't selling me it's product, it's selling its target demographic this product. And I wasn't that to begin with. It doesn't matter whether I enjoy the mystery play being performed for me - the cult of the Marketplace does not capture my imagination, and they do not miss the money I don't have to spend on them.
And this is what I mean when I say that we have to stop making value judgments. More than that, this is what I mean when I say it's going to be the most difficult thing you ever do.
It requires questioning every thought.
Dr. Peterson talks about it at the beginning of Maps of Meaning, and I've heard him tell the story in other interviews, when he relates how when he was in college he found himself calling himself a liar in his mind all the time. He describes becoming too horrified by the voice in his mind calling him a liar to even speak most of the time. He was too afraid that the voice was right and that he was too stupid to say anything that wasn't a lie.
I recognize this story as something akin to what I went through around fourth grade, when I gave up on school and focused my attention on speaking and behaving in a way that was only right.
See, it was fourth grade they first tried to put me on anti-depressants and fourth grade when I stopped caring whether I lived or died and gave in to my violent impulses as a male for the first time. It was also when I adopted the first underpinnings of the Value System which would keep me alive and, to whatever degree I remain so, sane all these years later. That isn't to say that I haven't betrayed it or ever strayed from it. But no system can be said to be working which isn't constantly under threat of destruction.
Whether imaginary or otherwise.
Image is a word that is tangled up in this Idea/Ideal discussion. I use it here only ironically – only for laughs from those who get the joke.
But not only does living conscientiously— Because ultimately that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a kind of complexification of Mindfulness, a higher order of magnitude in difficulty than simply being aware that your thoughts exist. But not only does living this way put one at risk from without, it is an incredible strain to endure within.
It's one thing to meditate – to contemplate, as the word literally means – a thought for half an hour or whatever once a day; even nothingness itself. It's another thing to take that contemplative state and make it one's active state.
If I practiced any of my ritual magick besides putting these words on this screen, I would tell you how good I actually am at the latter. As it is— Well, I say it almost every post: racing thoughts race thoughtfully around the hippodrome of my mind.
Thanks for sticking with me for this one. If you made it this far, that's really cool of you. I'm trying to pull myself out of this despair I'm feeling. I'm not sure it's working, but... yeah. I'm trying to figure out how to ask for help – well, I'm trying to figure out what to ask for help with and then I'll figure out in what way I need it, I suppose. All I know is I want it.
And you know what they say about want and need and the conflict between the two driving narrative. ...Or something like that. I don't know – from the way people are impatient for me to stop talking, I've gotten the idea that I'm not a great storyteller. Who knows.
I'll talk at you soon.
Oh – and Rob—
I haven't talked about the progress we're making in a while. Because we haven't been. He's dried up. He's afraid of audio production, afraid that my voice isn't trained enough to be capable of what he wants to do with it. And he's absolutely right. But the only way to get better is to practice, which is preaching I could really practice myself. Believe me, I have plenty enough flaws of my own for all of us.
As it stands, we're halfway through the climatic action scene – the top of the biggest hill in the roller coaster's tracks. There is still plenty of ground to cover – plenty of twists and turns as it were – but the big loopdeeloop showpiece that makes our rollercoaster special – which provides our and maybe my particular value— We're halfway through it.
It's as much my fault for turning the vastest amount of my energy toward the NFL and my Football Rabbit Hole as it is Rob's for being a giant, 1000 year-old wuss. No promises about a release. Honestly, I'm trying not to get discouraged that I haven't generated contact yet. It takes years, sometimes.
In the restaurant business, you hemorrhage money for the first two years. I expect that to be my situation as well. So I just need to fight through the discouragement – I need to remind myself that discouragement is my particular demon, the Pazuzu who sits on my shoulder and whispers in my ear.
“You're not good enough. No one loves you. Just end it all.”
Doing something when the learned response is to do nothing requires practice and patience – and I'm getting better every day. Wu Wei was how I used to manage my mental health. Action through non-action. I used to treat my depression like a river in the way that Taoists mean when they say to let the Tao flow around you like a river. Resisting the Tao is not the Tao. Chasing the current is not the Tao.
And with this one, I'm going to leave you with a parable I really like, and a chapter of the Tao Te Ching which speaks to my soul.
A Taoist story tells of a man who accidentally fell into the river rapids leading to a high and dangerous waterfall.
Onlookers fear for his life. Miraculously, though, he emerged alive and unharmed downstream at the bottom of the falls. The people asked him how he managed to survive, and he said:
“I accommodated myself to the water, not the water to me. Without thinking, I allowed myself to be shaped by it. Plunging into the swirl, I came out with the swirl. This is how I survived.”
*sniffle* That makes me emotional. It also makes me think of Lateralus. Spiral out, and all that.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 66:
The river and the sea can be kings of a hundred valleys,
because they lie below them.
That is why they can be the kings of a hundred valleys.
Therefore:
If the sage wants to stand above people,
He must speak to them from below.
If he wants to lead people,
He must follow from behind.
Therefore:
When the sage stands above people,
They are not oppressed.
When he leads people,
The are not obstructed.
The world will exalt him
And not grow tired of him.
Because he does not resist,
None in the world resists him.
I'll talk at you soon. Be well.
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