Tuesday, September 11, 2018

UNDER THE ROCKS

This corruption-chasing the world is doing takes a very long time.  Every time we find one cheating scoundrel and pry him (rarely her) out from under some slimy rock, we discover the critters (actually "they" are a "they") are all attached to each other and it will be the work of months to accrue the documents and data that prove it, so that "they" end up behind bars.  As though that would shut them down.

But I'm not as tough as Sam Vaknin.  I wouldn't just shoot "them" as any self-respecting dictator (including mafia chiefs) might do, partly because usually the "chief" or "king" critter is under his own rock, hanging on for dear life.  At least one blogger claims that the real King Critter is a mafia chief who controls both Trump and Putin.  This is a little like explaining how the mind works by imagining a little man in the brain.

"They" are what Vaknin defines as "malignant narcissists" who recognize no authority or goal except their own gloriousness.  That such a quality would even matter in a daily life of eat/sleep in which one can eat only so much, sleep so long, is delusional.  It's a child's idea of all-grown-up in which billionaires prefer to eat fast food and a person who wants to sleep as much as wanted finds out that older guys wake up before dawn and end up sitting on a chair for an hour, waiting for someone to open the door to the playroom.  Once inside with a big desk supporting a phone one can't learn how to operate, the idea of what to do boils down to thinking of vengeance.

Prison might turn out to be a relief for this guy.  He's already imprisoned by his own thinking.

Vaknin's systems analysis is governed by the source of authority.  He says that once we left living in small groups that drew their sustenance directly from the land by hunting, herding, raising small crops through cooperative irrigation, and letting some small group of social climbers build a temple.  Then we've began defining authority as people rich enough to pay a military and impressive enough to keep order.  Kings.  Money, heredity, connections.

The alternative in most modern minds is the Rule of Law: writing.  Magna Carta, Luther's points of difference, the US Constitution, accumulated precedents because the Torah is followed by the Talmud, and then the Pope must issue periodic interpretations of what is already accepted because society changes.

The present Pope is finding it difficult to turn the attention of his people from reward/punishment that favors certain people to an understanding of "God's love" as compassion for all people.  This is the trouble with a code based on the authority of a humanoid, even when combined with eloquent writing and stories, even when proposed by an exemplary human instead of a malignant narcissist.  For every dove there is a malignant seagull who wants to eat it.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140127-white-peace-doves-attacked-birds-rome-vatican-pope/

So much for sentimental and pretty love.  And yet my inclination is to turn to the natural world as the source of authority.  The true ultimate authority is the drive to survive.  This is where someone human who's been living under a rock goes wrong -- it is not the nature of humans.  It's not the other humans, competing with him, who will end his survival, but his own limited view of what life is.  He'll auto-snuff.

Trump will not survive.  Avenatti and Stormy will.  Trump is living his father's life except with far more European out-dated ideas of what signals wealth and dominance.  Gilded furniture and a wife who looks great nude, except for that grotesque fake bosom; eternally playing golf; pretending to own flashy real estate by hanging his name on the front; a ponytail flipped over his head; lower dentures that don't quite fit; believing that never drinking alcohol will keep a person sober; bankruptcy; TV shows based on crowing over dreaded events like being fired; and ignorance of the most basic geographic and national concepts like where they are and their names.  He's a joke.  He was doomed the minute he was flattered into running for president -- that and the unreasonable idea that being president was the same as being the king, when it is a service occupation, serving everyone.

The people who greased him up to fit into a child's idea of authority are dismayed as well, except that their goal was what Vaknin describes as "malignant narcissism" -- the idea that tearing down and sowing confusion are as effective as being worthy of other people.  They say Trump fears assassination.  He should.  But it won't be the US.

When theologians, having lost their theos, turned to new ideas of what to use as a starting point, a few went back to an old Catholic idea, which was that if God were truly a creator, looking at his creation would give us clues to what He was like.  Maybe He's dead, but He left clues, right?  Aside from that one about not being white to please humans which makes one marked to be lunch.  (A dismaying idea in the linked vid that some supremicists should think about.  But then, how do those big seagulls get away with being white?  And doesn't the black of crows make them stand out?  Hmmm.  Maybe coloration doesn't mean that much.)

For decades now I've thought about a derivative from what is called "natural theology" that is not interested in the symbolism of institutions but rather in the post-Darwinian idea of ecology.  It is NOT the survival of the fittest that matters, but rather the survival of the fittingest, creatures who suit the place they occupy in the Great Web of Being, which includes the inanimate along with the plants and animals.  In nature fittingness is almost an accident, a variation of "grow where you are planted."  But then animals could move so that as the climate and geology changed -- because one basic principle of everything except authoritarianism is that everything changes all the time -- the animals could go to another place where they could survive.  

Then humans discovered, eventually consciously, that they could change their environment with shelter, clothes, fire, and eventually much more elaborate features.  The major part of the environment of humans is other humans.  Therefore, today's task in a changing world is to survive other humans.  Simply leaving war may not help.  The motives for war are what we must change.  


Changing malignant people -- sociopaths -- are what we need to do now.  Maybe the best way is to change their ecological niche, the slimy dark places under rocks.  

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