AN OLD BEATNICK MEETS GEORGE BUSH IN A TAVERN

Finally watched The Butler last night. Spent a large part of the movie in tears. All the pain that finally buried this "very sensitive" child under alcohol abuse came back last night. The interesting thing to me is how "conservative" I was as child and youth, in that I believed all the myths about America. After WWII, I really believed all the things about America's greatness, its love of freedom and justice and free speech. What the 50s and 60s taught me, finally and painfully, was that the American people were no better or worse than any other nation of people. 

Unrealistic "idealism" is what tortures modern conservatives also. They cling to the past, and they believe all the nonsense they were taught as children. They can't see modern America in a real light, and they are incapable of seeing the "injustices" created by free enterprise or capitalism. I do believe that capitalism is the best method for distributing a nation's wealth as long as the distance between those most and least rewarded does not grow too great. Which it has. 

Sadly, modern Teapublicans can't help "blaming" others for being poor because conservatives cling to the myth of "free will", thus it's easy for them to blame others and to praise themselves. They are controlled by evolutionary forces just as much as the less fortunate are controlled by genes and nurture. Those who succeed usually have a "sense of entitlement". The sense of entitlement describes a psychological or electrochemical state in the brain/body that leads to success. Their "psychological state" is a cause of success rather than an effect of success, and a grown Teapublican can no more take credit for that psychological state of being than a honeybee can take credit for being the queen of the hive. 

This film explores the difference

In my own case, I was driven by pain to try and understand who I was and what made me into the person I was. Success became secondary to that struggle. I was tortured by insecurity and shame. Until I reached the bottom of my personal struggle, trying to escape my worker bee status was next to impossible. It was like trying to climb up a hill of marbles. By the time I did understand the forces that drove me, I was in my 50s, a late start in the rush to earn fame and fortune in the free enterprise system. If only Teapublicans understood their fortunate electrochemical inheritance and quit "being proud" of themselves, we'd have quite a different nation to live in. 

Pardon my length, but simple-mindedness is not one of my strongly evolved characteristics. Complexity of thought comes with the territory of self-understanding. Thus, I am not George Bush and he is not me. Back in the day, however, I'm sure we'd have enjoyed drinking a beer together had we known each other. I enjoyed the company of many a young George Bush in the taverns where I "bought my alcoholism" one drink at a time.

MY CREDO FROM A REAL HUMANIST HERO

I must tell you that my world view changed just as Vonnegut's changed once I decided to accept the facts of evolution and the happenstance from which natural selection picks its winners. Take the miraculous out of the world and, then, one must accept the facts or go crazy. This is why so many who accept the miraculous go around proclaiming how crazy the world is or how horrible life is. They keep wanting to be transported into a better world, even though it means their dying to get there. In truth, life is very understandable, if mean, once one accepts the biological processes that drive human behavior.

But let Vonnegut speak. He captures the change with such humor and precision. In Breakfast, the author sometime intrudes himself into the story, and the following passage is something the author is saying about the characters he has created. This follows earlier passages in a preceding chapter in which the author speaks of his having been told he is schizophrenic and speaks of wanting to die.

from BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS by Kurt Vonnegut

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian [a fictional minimalist] with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler [fictional gothic novelist] had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

[Things haven’t changed much, have they? For me, it was the black and white movies I loved as a kid. I realized eventually that I thought that life could be changed by a major speech by a major character (think Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington") or that a critical, very dramatic moment of denouement would altar the course of my life or someone else's life. One lives dramatically under such delusions, posing and making speeches, rather than getting down to work. The alcoholic is specially susceptible to those beliefs. Pay close attention to people who are drunk. You'll catch them at it.

Even more thrilling to me is when we add in what Steven Hawking just wrote in The Grand Design: our bodies operate by the same physical laws that direct the Cosmos, and we are as determined by natural laws as is the Universe. As he says, "...we are all biological machines. Free will is an illusion." That means, not only are we acting as if we are characters in books or plays, but we imagine we have some choice in the matter about being the characters we are, when in all truthfulness, we are who we are by genetic accident and nurture, both of which have created, create and continually tweek the synaptic patterns through which we receive the world into ourselves and by which our actions in the world are directed.

I know this seeming chaos is scary to some people, but until we accept it, we'll remain children, frightened and rejecting of the world as it is, living in childhood fantasies rather than in reality.]

THE PECKING ORDER LIFE REVEALED

In more detail, here's why films like "Avatar" are damaging to the human species. I think all of us must recognize that rooted in our evolutionary adaptions is a "pecking order". We can't help but navigate the world with an underlying judgment structure that places us in value-based human relationships within our cultures. Every time we make a judgment (based on feelings), we are asserting our place in the pecking order. It's a key survival tool. We rationalize our individual pecking orders when we make judgments about others that we put into words. Those we feel negatives about are below us and those we like are equal to or above us. At the level of far above us are our heroes. Of course, we also loathe those we fear and who are in a transcendent place in our value systems. You can see this at work when the mob enjoys the downfall of their "favorite" movie star or the disappointment we feel when one of our heroes in the culture wars falls from society's grace.

We can see our places in the pecking order by taking a careful look at those we place above us and those we place below us and those we judge as equals (i.e. those we are most ourselves with). Even though we may not be consciously arranging our relationships on these value levels, our brains automatically do it. That's the pecking order at work. It's the monkey in us.

My contention about almost all Hollywood films is that they automatically try to trigger our "pecking order" functions in order to trigger us to shell out good dollars. They trigger the "good guy, bad guy" structures in our brains. Every time we shell out dollars to these men who are plying our "pecking order brains" for our bucks, we are allowing our nervous systems to be exercised and our pecking order brain functions are strengthened and reinforced almost automatically. You can see this revealed in almost any conversation about films and/or drama. People automatically like or dislike characters and usually talk about films with this in mind. When you put evil versus good into these films, you begin to push pecking orders into religious realms. I think religious persons are really stuck in a royal pecking order—witness their heavenly and/or religious hierarchies—lords, kings and princes all!

The directors are directing not only the actors but our emotions to make us feel identity with characters in the films and to keep us coming back. This is why people don't like downer films which aren't fun to watch because they trigger emotions and consequent thoughts which are unpleasant. People don't like to watch their REAL SELVES up there on the big screen. They don't want to learn from film and drama. They don't want to think about unpleasant realities. Most people go to films to escape. Most people are always in an escape mode. Anytime I hear someone tell me that they go to movies to escape, I usually lose interest in them because they don't like dealing with reality at any other time in their lives. Okay, I have a pecking order too.

I still recall the first time I told myself that I ought to be rooting for the native Americans in John Wayne movies. I wasn't a kid by any means. It was a great leap forward in one way, but, as my identity with the downtrodden increased so also did my alcoholism, and soon my identifying with the underdog led me to also become an underdog and a loser. The more I hated those "above" me in the pecking order, the lower I fell in the ranks of the pecking order. The more I resolved not to compete with the bastards, the more I was unable to compete. I sank pretty low before the friends of Bill W. helped me stop using the depressant alcohol as a treatment for my depression. By age 31 or 32, I was so low that I spontaneously crashed my car one cold Winter's eve by speeding into a turn I knew I could not negotiate at speed. By the time I climbed out of the bottom of the pecking order, a good part of my earning life was over so my retirement is not in the greatest of financial straits, but I'm content because the "demons" are gone from my life. Like that "demon" metaphor? The religious among us also like to use that term.

Two recent films that demonstrate a way to make films that escape the "pecking order" are Rachel Getting Married and The Last Station. Films that worked against the pecking order in the past were Fellini's 8 1/2 or Juliet of the Spirits. In Fellini films, the characters are always at battle with the pecking orders in their heads, the distorted views of reality they carry around in their imaginations. It's wonderful and enlightening to come to in a Fellini film. Another great film which defies the pecking order is Sante Sangre. A serial killer is portrayed sympathetically, and I came across that film just when Silence of the Lambs was making a killing by portraying a serial killer in an almost evil light. Also, the last scene in The Truman Show was a vital metaphor. When Truman stepped through the containing wall into the real world, he was leaving the god-dominated, false world and entering the real world. That was my emotional response to that film. Scorsese's Taxi Driver approached the "pecking order" from another satirical angle. By making an insane and violent scene become the making of a hero, Scorcese revealed the whole fake pecking order nightmare we live in, surrounded by people whose "pecking order" responses are nearly automatic and not reflective.

ATHEISM AND AGNOSTICISM DELINEATED

Atheists agree that the phenomenal identity named god does exist in the synapses of the brain and can, therefore, be discussed in abstract terms, but they claim no brain has contacted an identity in the material world outside the human synapse that correlates to the synaptic construct named god. Thus atheists conclude that god does not exist in the material world except as a synaptic pattern in the material human brain.

Atheists further maintain that “in synapsizing about the mental construct god”, the synapsizer or brain is, by necessity, restricted wholly to its own synaptic reality without reference to the real and material world by which human sensory organs interact with the phenomenal world outside the brain. Therefore, atheists are necessarily materialists, whereas agnostics, since their synapsized conclusions about the unprovability of a “god phenomenon” in the material world remains wholly a creation of the synapses of the human brain, are idealists.

The agnostic argument is a valid syllogism, but it has no implication for or reality in the material world. This discrepancy results because the agnostic has no evidence of the “phenomenon of god” in the material world which is as cogent as the synaptic phenomenon of “not-god” in the synapses of the brain. The two concepts are not equally evidenced to the synapses of the material brain. An agnostic, therefore, must ignore material reality in order to maintain the equality of the god/not-god evidentiary and syllogistic balance in the agnostic brain.

Agnostics are, I repeat, idealists while atheists are realists.

I have invented three terms in the foregoing discussion. Each term is based on the mental phenomenon of synapse, an evolved technique by which the material brain recognizes itself throughout its carcass and overhears itself communicating within its residence in the skull. Synapsizing is a more concrete and specific way of referring to the “activity of thinking”. Synapsized is the past tense of synapsizing, and, finally, the synapsizer refers to the brain/body which senses (feels) itself doing the synapsizing or thinking.

You may ask why I would invent terms. I do it to try and be more concrete or real about the processes that are happening within the human carcass when the brain idealizes or realizes the world it’s in contact with through evolved sensory equipment. I can see that if it were a philosopher/brain speaking here, “the brain that calls itself I” would need to invent and define a lot more terms in order to make itself understood to other brain/bodies. I have no training as a philosopher, and so this attempt seems silly and unrealistic even to me, though I sense that what I’m doing verges on an attempt to communicate what I think is a reality unique to this particular “brain that calls itself I”. However, this I-brain may not be unique at all.

“Ah, the humility! The humility!”