One core of my political philosophy is this: A sense that the game of politics is played by manipulating people to get trapped into their own projections, pitting them in a war with their own shadows. A war they are certain to lose, the harder they try. This strategy exploits a fundamental tendency of human…
Category: Psyche
To Be or Not To Be on Social Media
Like you, I spend a fair amount of time wondering whether or not to participate in social media. Same old, same old. You will not be surprised to learn that Hamlet’s famous lines map perfectly: To be, or not to be on social media THAT is the question Whether tis nobler in the mind to…
Hamlet, the Old Lady, and the Fly
I’m tempted to say that the tricky thing about changing your life is the feedback between our circumstances, our social situations, and our psychic states. This complexity is multiplied by the fact that we may do ourselves more harm than good. Physician induced disease is a real thing, on every level. We see it in…
Coming Out of the Closet, Speaking a Forbidden Tongue
The Fallen Language Tonight’s Question: Is Life a Play or a Game? Playing chess just now I got clear on why I like games, and the difference, symbolically speaking, of Mercury in Capricorn and Mercury in Aquarius, and of Capricorn and Aquarius more generally. It may be long past time, biographically speaking, or perhaps just…
God is Greatest
The death of any system of power comes by the delegitimization of the double standard by which it operates. This is the core meaning expressed by people in Iran in the during the final days of the Shah’s regime, when they called out of their windows in the darkness “Allahu Akbar”: God is greatest. Meaning,…
THE ART OF POLITICS AND THE END OF THE WORLD
The art of politics from the perspective of the consultant is the art of manipulating the psychological levers that people didn’t even know they had. It’s the art of the marketer, for whom values are just props in the manipulation of the unconscious mass psychology that organizes people into effective groups. The political consultant is…
What, Then, is America Good For?
The Coming Dystopia and the Promise of Andrew Yang I’m just going to put this out there: I deserve a media company. I know, I know, we are living in an Age of Entitlement, with everyone arguing about who deserves what as a consequence of their general humanity or their specific identity. Plus, I have…
Jangling the Mystic Chords of Memory
Just by the by: I think the most worrying trend in American politics is not Donald Trump but polarization. This polarization is destroying all possibility of a single standard for judging behavior. Everything is becoming a matter of who did or said a thing, not what was done or said. Such standards are the only…
The Pied Piper of Civil War
I’ve just realized the Pied Piper strategy for each party. You might recall back in the run up to the 2016 election, during the primaries, that Hillary’s chief of staff John Podesta wrote an email suggesting that the Clinton campaign prop up the Trump campaign in the media, so as to hopefully push the Republican…
Redemption Song
Watching this morning I am left wondering why people have been raving about Elijah Cummings closing remarks. I am truly curious. In case you missed it, the keyword of the Democratic majority as regards Cohen is “redemption”, and these closing remarks were just a rambling improv on this consciously held theme, by someone well-versed in…
The War Against Reality
I think ultimately what we are all at war with is reality. War, as General Smedley Butler famously wrote, has more or less always been a racket, but here in America, I think it became most fully so during Vietnam. By that I mean to say that it was during the Vietnam War that American…
The Antifascist Who Cried Wolf
Turning a parable on its head I remember nearly two years ago, when friends were sharing a video of Yale professor Timothy Snyder encouraging his students to take to the streets to save democracy. Snyder had shot to prominence by declaring, from his lofty perch of wisdom, that America had less than a year to…
The Jack Ryan Psyop
Amazon, the CIA, and the dream of American Exceptionalism For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body…
In Search of an Honest Critique of Jordan Peterson
With the exception of Donald Trump, is there another person in the English-speaking world subject to more harsh critiques than Jordan Peterson? Not that I’m aware. Peterson’s meteoric rise to prominence has come with something close to an equal descent into infamy, which is as much a statement of the polarized nature of our times…
This is America(n Propaganda?)
A friend of mine has been championing the idea that there’s a difference between Art and Propaganda. We have differed over where to draw the line between the two, but I have been considering the idea of the distinction. The difference between Art and Propaganda is a subset, or a consequence, of the difference between…
The Zen of Marx
If you know how there’s this scene at the end of BLADE RUNNER, where the replicant Roy – in the moment of his programmed death – says to Deckard – the replicant built to kill him, whose life he has saved: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder…
The Root of Ideological Conflict in the Subject/Object Split
Ideological conflict is rooted in the fact that our existence depends upon the dynamic interaction of two apparently opposite truths. According to one truth we are matter; according to the other, mind. Ideologies are attempts to reduce this duality to a unity. According to the first truth (that we are matter), we are ruled by…
The Utopian Part of Utopianism
I am stuck now that that oft-quoted summary of Marxist utopianism – From each according to his gifts, to each according to his needs – (gendered language aside) contains within it the most utopian of all ideas. An idea so utopian as to be absent from lesser versions of that ultimate ideal. In fact, dystopias…
To Be or Not To Be: Hamlet and the Chakras
Muses open doors in unexpected places, without trying, or even being aware. My most recent muse, codename:FLORIDA, texted me the other night to suggest the problem I am having is that my third chakra isn’t opened. I think she’s right, and told her so; but beyond feeling a strange combination of uncomfortably exposed and grateful…
The GOD Problem
The problem with confronting ideological delusions is that for whatever these delusions get wrong, however maladaptive they are, they are performing a deeper function of keeping existential anxiety at bay. In short, all practical ends, all external problems, are secondary to the true purpose of ideology, which is psychological comfort. What’s worse, as all practical…
The Talking Cure
Verily Self-explanation is a bid for immortality, or at least, perpetuation in the moment. We know ourselves to be limited, and incapable of self-perpetuation, at least relative to the cycles of generation. We live within the box of our own mortality, with the strange awareness – usually dim, or blindingly bright, but seen through layers…
Museophilia as a Disorder
My most recent muse asked me to describe when it is that our relationship becomes a problem for me. She wanted to know what, to put it in my own terms, I am trying to avoid. I think the short answer is shame and frustration. I don’t want to get caught wanting a fix, and…
Contra Subjectiva
I’m back momentarily to rail against subjectivity as a doctrine. Yes, it’s useful, and necessary. It’s just not in and of itself sufficient. The idea that all truth is subjective, and therefore all equal, is what we used to call sophistry. Sophistry is the derivation of faulty conclusions from valid premises. It is characterized by…
Museophile
To paraphrase Rumi, who would be a lover cannot have but a single head. This, because loving well requires one to lose one’s head; and considering this, we might draw an analogy between the lover and the transmigratory soul. Whatever we do, we will lose our heads in the end. Or, as John Hiatt put…
The Age of Universal Deceit
I’ve been preparing, in my usual willy-nilly and summary fashion, for what will be the first High Horseman of the Apocalypse podcast, scheduled to be recorded early this afternoon. The topic of this first podcast, I’ve decided, will be The Age of Universal Deceit. This phrase entered into my lexicon at some point in the…
Progress, for Better and Worse
I was at a wine and poetry gathering the other night, where a young woman of Jewish descent offered a traditional sung blessing. She prefaced it by saying that the meaning of the Hebrew was to offer thanks to God for the wine, but that as she didn’t believe in any sort of external divinity,…
We Say YES
Joseph Campbell used to tell a story, about how he had met some famous Yogi, a Guru, in India, when he was a young man. He got an audience with the Guru, and as is customary, arrived with the deepest question brought to him by exposure to the Vedic tradition. If, Campbell asked, all of…
Back to the Hall of Mirrors
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Facebook about how, if the Mueller probe didn’t produce an indictment to validate the long-standing belief among the #Resistance that Trump was a puppet of Putin, the whole thing would prove a disaster for said #Resistance. A friend of mine commented that even if Trump were…
Rise of the Russian Bots
Russian bots are so devious!!! Not only did they hack the Clinton campaign emails, and – by means of their cutout, “Wikileaks” – expose us to ugly, deceptive, truth. Now they’re making memes that expose our impolitic hidden desires! This, after all, is the heart of the #Russiagate narrative that has been established in fact….
The Red Menace
Terrifying Enemies and Opiates of the Masses To start, consider the link between anxiety and addiction. In short: an addiction is a means of controlling anxiety. The addict reaches for the needle, of whatever sort, in response to awareness of powerlessness relative to some internal or external circumstance. The alteration of awareness holds out the…
Principles Are Dead
Watching the PBS News Hour I can’t help but think that propaganda has become so normal in our society as to be virtually ubiquitous. It’s in the very air we breath… and not as a trace element, either. The atmosphere is, to look at it from the other way around, Authoritarian. Of course, one of…
The Heart of Jordan Peterson’s Critique
Politics and Psychology Meet in the Canadian Doctor’s Diagnosis of the Madness Sweeping Universities in the West The video above is a part of the precursor discussion to what I have found to be the most interesting interview of or with Jordan Peterson yet undertaken. I found this interview uniquely interesting because the interlocutor attempted…
The Bitter Pill #9: The Phantom Menace
Dismantling the Fascist Takeover of Eugene If you’re a resident of Eugene, you might not have noticed that your home town was a “hotbed of emboldened white nationalism”, “overcome” by neo-nazis summoned into being by the shocking election of Donald Trump. Don’t let the thousands of people who showed up in support of the second…
Artistry and Social Construction
Reading an article in The Atlantic just now I am struck by an idea of two different sorts of obstruction that it’s easy to confuse for one another. I’m going to call them: What Other People Think Aesthetic Quality They are not one and the same, but it’s hard to tell the difference. It can…
Alchemical Dreaming
Dreamed last night that I was in what we might reasonably call a wonderful relationship, but the whole time I had this feeling that something was wrong with it. It wasn’t till the end that I realized that the thing wrong was that I was asleep. It was one of those rare instances where I…
Addicted to Hill
Once again, CNN has shown me the light. This time, they helped me to realize that I’m addicted to Hillary Clinton. I credit CNN, though it wasn’t one of their usual luminaries this time, but a guest commentator: Professor Isaac Bailey, James K. Batten Professor of Public Policy at Davidson College and interim member of…
Doctor My Eyes
Spiritual beings are friends of last resort. By ‘last resort’ I mean the situation Jackson Browne described in these lines: Look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through Looking into their eyes I see them running too While we’re on the subject, the “Doctor” in DOCTOR MY EYES…
The Essence of the Counting Crows
So, here’s the essence of the Counting Crows – which only matters because the Counting Crows exemplified the essence of an historical moment. More, even, than an historical moment, the essence of the Counting Crows exists as a sort of standing wave. It is a hypostasis of the human psyche. 🙂 By that, I just…
What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?
Lots of people blame the Russians, misogyny, James Comey, Bernie Sanders, and Jill Stein. Apparently, this is all God’s fault. There’s one particularly interesting part in this generally horrifying video. One part that’s interesting in an unusual way. Most of it’s interesting in a “holy fuck but American evangelicals are crazy” way. At one point,…
Prophets of DOOM!!!
The Bitter Pill #7 Kelly Kenoyer’s list of some of the “myriad reasons” for impeaching Trump does a good job of demonstrating how lacking the EW’s case for impeachment is in the sort of substance that might serve as common ground across ideological lines. “Our Institutions Won’t Save Us,” as Baynard Woods’ article in the…
There’s One Privilege I Won’t Give Back
Until people understand that Evil is not eradicable – not simply because it’s so bad, but because it’s a necessary part of existence – no form of mass justice will ever avoid being consumed by its unacknowledged, projected, shadow. Irony rules history, because all values exist necessarily in tension with their opposites. Denial won’t help….
The Problem with ‘White Male Fragility’
What follows is a comment I wrote to a Facebook thread but did not post. This particular thread involved a number of mothers of white boys defending their use of the term “white male fragility” to another mother who objected to the way the term implicitly undermined the legitimacy of any white male’s sensitivity. Labeling…
My Version of Feminism
In my version of Feminism – and no offense, but I’m using my privilege to declare my own – I value the Feminine most highly. I honor Women’s Work. I’m also fine with anyone doing whatever they will. My version of Feminism isn’t a proscription for everyone, or anyone, else. It’s a personal statement of…
So Here’s What I Think
an ongoing series by Yours T Ruly Movies are going to shit because they are more beholden than ever to an official morality. Every story, for reason of some abominable fusion of ethics and capitalism, must illustrate the superiority of this morality. It reminds me of a line from Roger Water’s song, It’s a Miracle:…
Deep Thoughts on Tyranny #1
as received by Yours T Ruly Everyone is ultimately a prisoner to themselves. Thus, no people or persons can ever be truly freed. This is not to say that external bondage does not exist, but only that we are all bound by reality, and further bound within reality by ourselves. There was a leader in…
Living in the Shadow of Luxury #1
I’ve had intense dreams my first two nights sleeping in my new, used, RV. I don’t remember anything except little flashes of a feeling of revelation. It seems some deep transformation of understanding is imminent and immanent. I know many or most of you take a cast iron pan for granted, but buying one felt…
This Thursday’s Prophecy #1: There’s Always a Baby; There’s Always Bathwater
When I first started Highhorseman of the Apocalypse [now widely ignored as the Internet’s Finest Unread Blog], somewhere short of two years back, I thought of the name in large part as a bit of self-deprecating humor. It was a sardonic embrace of what we might call – in the verbiage of yesteryear – my…
STRANGE THOUGHT OF THE DAY: EPISODE #1: Oppression and the Genius of Heresy
For many a month now I have been bothered by an uncomfortable thought – a thought that, if true, is highly inconvenient, insofar as politeness is a primary convenience. I find it hard to say exactly what this thought is. It goes something like this: Ethical correctness, beyond a certain point, becomes the enemy of…
The Centre Will Not Hold
“So essentially what we can get out of this is we butchered our plan to sort of have a response for the national anthem and respect everyone’s opinions.” -Alejandro Vllanueava I’m sharing this as evidence in support of the proposition that “the center will not hold.” This proposition is taken from the start of Yeat’s…
The Problem with Targeting Nazis, in a Nutshell
What could be wrong with ‘targeting’ Nazis for abuse? In a nutshell, Godwin’s Law, IRL. For those of you unfamiliar with Godwin’s Law, who don’t want to click on the link, it’s this: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1.” I suggest this is particularly true online…
The Fascist in the Mirror
The comparison of fascists and anti-fascists is entirely apt and completely in line with both the historical record and authoritarian intention. There are, of course, well-meaning dopes who don’t really know the game; but those with any sophistication know that the aim of violence is not simply to stop a fascist take-over, but to drive…
Between Antifa and Evergreen
Think Antifa is defending an open society? Think again. Interesting to note that I feel absolutely no reservation about posting anything against neo-Nazis, or the KKK, or Trump. Nothing could be easier. To call out Antifa and the intolerance on Left, however, always gives me pause, because I know it opens me to becoming a…
Make Music, Not War
Had a great time playing outside 16 Tons last night with Zac. It is such a pleasure to play with a soloist, especially an exceptionally skilled and musical one, because it allows me to switch between leading and supporting, and in so doing to enter more fully into the experience of the music and the…
Another Brick in the Wall
I am driven to wonder how much of this whole issue of The Wall is even real. As far as Trump is concerned, it was just a rhetorical device, red meat for the crowds… and Mexico is gonna pay for it! It was, in short, a con job from the start – only a fraction…
Twisting Along the Way
Hi [Redacted], I felt badly the other day engaging you publicly about the trick to doing what you love, as I know that’s your business. Not too terribly guilty, because in taking that on as a business you of necessity open yourself to such responses. In fact, I think they’re necessary. But the kind of…
A Man, All in All
Clicked on this video to hear what Hedges had to say, but it starts off with the head of the Souther Poverty Law Center. I’ve cued the video to just before the moment he declares that Benjamin Franklin was a member of the Radical Right. Yup. Benjamin Franklin. I don’t think we need to counter…
The Hall of Mirrors
“There is always in the adventure great danger of what is known to psychology as ‘inflation,’ which is what overtakes the psychotic. He identifies himself either with the visionary object or with its witness, the visionary subject. The trick must be to become aware of it without becoming lost in it: to understand that we…
Socialism’s Shadow
Given a choice between Hitler and Stalin, I choose FDR. Moral crusades tend to grow inherently unscientific; even those nominally based on a rejection of religion. This, because the ethical usage of words supersedes the technical or literal usage. This confusion of ethical and literal further demands that the literal be erased. This is what…
The Literary Life #1
(fascinating reflections on a life spent reflecting) Having a new appreciation for the phrase: damned if you do, damned if you don’t, as regards our current political climate, which in turn serves as an instance of the beginning and end of human civilization. In short, I am convinced by the traditional view of the human…