Realpolitik

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I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) keep trying to figure out all this shit. Why? Because I was childreared in a social surround which did not pay off for me, but I still have some intelligence so if I can't have a suitable life I can poke at the life I have been stuck with. I have one foot in the place where tailfins and hubcaps come from, and the other in the place where Husserlian philosophy and Marcel Duchamp were going. The former is unacceptable to me but I can't get away from it. The latter I don't have an invitation for the journey.

Any rational society either takes gifted persons among the proles into the elite or it needs to kill them. I think it's as simple as that. To adduce a mixed metaphor, Oedipus's father was a fool: If he didn't want trouble out of the kid he should not have hired hit men but himself have taken a dagger and stabbed the baby so many times that his [the baby's, not his own, of cxurse...] body would have become hamburger meat, and finished off the job by eating it all himself. Take no chances. But he was a fool.

I have no sympathy for "activists" in repressive regimes who get punished for trying to overthrow the governmemt. They are foolish; the people who whine over their fate are bleeding hearts. What are they getting out of it? It's time for socio-psychological analysis of the protestors, not for protesting.  

If Mr. Putin kills Alexei Navalny, well, didn't the man ask him to do it? What did Jamal Khashoggi expect when he went into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to get an early Valentine's Day card 💗 for his true love 💗? A medal? People need to get real. These repressive political regimes are bad; we know that. Anybody who can get their name in The New York Times newspaper probably could have got out ot the damned place, yes? The people to feel sorry for are those who don't have enough money and/or enough connections to get out. The famous are just roadkill, and deserve no sympathy, just: "I told you so." Finally: Wouldn't Mr .Navalny be doing more good broadcasting for Radio Free Russia (whatever) than being on vacation in The Gulag? And certainly Mr. Khashoggi would be doing more good living in sin 💗 with his girlfriend on New York's upper east side and writing for The Washington Post newspaper than being dead, yes? And if Mr. Navalny does get out of the Gulag in one piece he may get a Nobel Prize and be fat dumb and happy like other celebrities for the rest of his life, yes? Remember that Ayatollah Knomenei overthrew the Shah of Iran from France, not from one of the Shah's prisons, yes?

In liberal democracies the state supposedly exists to protect the rights of the individual and to protect tolerant persons against intolerant people who would take away their rights. Of course we must leave aside her wage-slavery which is not consistent with human rights but it's the big invisible elephant in the small room, right? In tribalistic nation states the individual exists to serve the group. If you are the daughter of Malcolm X or The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. you get an elite education and you can become anything you want in life. If you are a daughter of a woman who never thought of trying to get a get in a hassidic neo-shtetl, you produce a baby for your Rebbe – I meant for the Hassidic community – each year. Every tribe has a chief. He (she, other) makes out. Everybody else is worker bees. Buzzz! Of cource I am curious to what extent the rulers know what they are doing and to what extent that conveniently sincerely believe their own propaganda. I don't know.

Among repressive – I meant: patriotic – regimes where most people are proles / worker bees, I think there can be nuances. First: don't rock the boat. Don't be an idiot like Galileo Galilei and write a book in the vernacular that makes a fool of the Big Boss and the agitprop he is feeding the gullible masses who can't control their hormones without "values". Don't make a protest in Tiananmen Square. Not a good idea, right? But sometimes you can read subversive books and even write them if you write only in a language the people cannot understand and publish from a press that does not supply books to supermarket checkout counters. The people must not know such things exist. Period. If they find out and start to get restless, you will be made an example of and they wil get the point. So the question is: How much slack is there n the system?

Had the benighted disciplinarian "prep" school I attended made me a faculty member charged with producing agitprop for the other kids, but where I myself could spend most of my time in leisure learning things they must never find out, I hope I would have signed up. Why not? They meant nothing to me except trouble and disappointment that they were not better. But that is not what happened. Every student wsa graded like the USDA grades dead animal carcasses and I did not want to be canner grade. It was guerilla warfare. I had little to lose because they were already hurting me all the time anyway. I hated where I was and the people around me. I didn't see where I owed any of them anything; but I needed the means of subsistence from them. I did not always cut off my nose to spite my face although i did do that betimes, too, becaus ethey had planted "toxic introjects" in my head. Satan get thee hence!

I think that is the point: in societies where the individual exists to serve the group, sometimes ther is wiggle room for a person to be an individual if they keep a low profile. Don't threaten the regime and you can read your subversive books. It's a deal! The Selective Service System? Of course I did not want to become food for powder. But had I been offered a job as the audio-visual aids officer in The Army War College Fort Leavenworth Kansas, I hope I would have signed on the dotted line. "I pledge allegiance to the flag.... and Wow! What people to talk with and what a library, too! I really want to do my job to the very best of my abilities, for God and for Country! Yes sir!" (This is a rif on a partly true story, where the person who actually got that job in World War II, when he came to the place, was introduced by the commanding officer to all the people there, who all outranked him, with instructions that all of them should treat the young lieutenant's words if the general himself said them. Sounds good to me!)

But nobody offered me a deal. I just got persecuted anew each new day. And if you join the chorus: "It's no big deal Brad", i.e., most people would not mind it, I say: Don'tthink you know what I needed. You can think the world is a pegborad with all round holes and that everybody (except the boss's kids, maybe) is a perfect fit, but I was a squre peg. So you need to us a sledge hammer on me; the blood is on you. You can't wimp out like Oedipus's father, or just ignore me without also making sure I do not get any food either,i.e.: starve me to death. I see no reason to make you feel good about making me feel bad, would you?

I uderstand that life is not fair. I learned lessons nobody intended to teach me (but they did anyway...), and which nobody should have to learn. A lot of my innate ability to learn anything was relentlessly crushed each day, whether due to stupidity and ignorance or evil will is to blame does not matter. The result is the my sensitvity to intellectual subtleties was permanently damaged. My first encounter with philsophy was obsessively to try to reduct Albere Camus book "The Myth of Sysyphus" to a one page syllogistic argument why not kill oneself. What should I have ebeen doing instead? Cultivating hermeneutic interpretation of the most varied nuances of the human condition. An X-acto knife not an axe. A sniper's rifle not a mortar. "It's no big deal, Brad." You know what? Then you're no big deal either. Because if what I believe and feel does not matter much then if the object of my feelings and beliefs is what you want me to believe and feel, then, by simple logical deduction, what you believe and feel does matter much. If all men are mortal then Socrates is mortal, too. Q.E.D.

Why could I not have been treated like a beloved pet cat or dog or like an orchid for a connoisseur of orchids, for which nothing is too good because their role in your life is to be adorable? To be an ornament to your life. Weren't some of the Nazi SS Offiers connoisseurs of opera? Joseph Stalin was. It would have been as simple as that, I think, folks. I promise I would never have given the masses any bad ideas, because I would have been pre-occupied with leisured cultivation of my own. And somebody had to manage them and I would have tried to make their plight as bearable as possible, which I believe is the defense some Nazis offered to get off lightly lightly: Somebody was going to do it; if I hadn't, the next guy would have been worse.

I can put this in a positive light: Make me be Oskar Schindler and I'd have been a righteous man. I would have thrived on doing well for doing good. Many are not so good, are they? There is great joy in helping others when it doesn't hurt oneself, yes? A successful psychoanalyst once told me:

"To be a good therapist, you need to be well paid and well laid." (Marjorie Schlenoff)

My way or the highway

International relations (and also personal relations) need to be handled on an: I/We are not a special case basis. Friends have all things in common (Plato). If we can't be friends, then each state his (her, other's) rock bottom, absolutely positively must-have red line(s); not what anybody would like to have but what they simply cannot put up with doing without. Compare the red lines. If they do not cross, great. If they intrude on each other and the difference cannot be negotiated away, then it's the survival of the survivalest by any means available including back-stabbing and punches below the belt, by all parties involved: Le dernier combat.

But if the red lines don't intrude on each other's territory, then let's both sides agree: I will stay on my ide of your red line and you will stay on your side of my red line. If you cross my red line, you should welcome me to do whatever it takes to get you out including completely destroying you if necessary. But here's my kicker: If I cross your red line, I expect you come after me and destroy me if necesary to get me out of your protected area. No exceptionalism.

It should work the same way in an argument: Don't try to prove your opponent wrong. Get him (her, other) to argue with themself about difficulties you can certainly help them to perceive in their own position. Then they can't blame it on you