My Moralist Friends and Family and Me
I Get Triggered and Want to Morally, Humourlessly, Chastise A Friend’s Naïveté
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Moralism, Moralism, Everywhere: It Is the Air We Breath, the Words We Hear, Read and Write
Last Thursday, a few days past the mid-point of September, I was sitting at the computer kind of twiddling my thumbs about what to do next: write something or not about how moralists are humourless; continue watching left liberals literally displaying a depth of ideological idiocy that is astounding; transcribe into substack my brilliant thirty year old economic wake-up essay ‘Death by Freezing’ which is my discovery that economics is our biggest religion and why; lastly, perhaps continue my refugee travelogue before it completely fades from memory. These were floating around while I was becoming frustrated with my being bored at what the YouTube algorithms were feeding me. (And if that is an example of AI in action, omg(!) it has a lot to learn before it can be considered smart let alone intelligent.)
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Eventually I stood up and did my intuitive muscle testing process to assist my decision making. My body didn’t exactly jump for joy with any of these topics. Instead, towards the moralist essay it gave what felt like a kind of acquiescence to a lesser writing evil. Perhaps my body was hoping I would give it another choice. At that time I didn’t and so I sat to write about how moralism tends to express itself with Spanish Inquisition-like dead and deadly seriousness. And how that condition is found so easily in the seemingly endless displays of lefties losing it. I was more slow to recognise that same lack of humour in the behaviour of their opposites, what I’ll call ‘righties’. That was in large part because their equanimity, in comparison to the lefties’ overt gauche animus and logical idiocy displays, had made less obvious to me the extent of the righties’ dead seriousness too.
And soon after beginning writing this, I watched an epitome of both of them here, in a Piers Morgan Uncensored ‘debate’ called “You're ALL Guilty!” Candace Owens x Cenk Uygur On Israel, Trump & More” It is actually almost insane.
A prominent leftie completely lost it, and beside him was the calming effect of the seriousness of a pair of equanimous righties. The one speaker, Erik Prince, of whom I am completely ignorant, at one point actually smiled and looked to nearly laugh at the infantile asininity of Cenk Uygur, a supposedly important and respected leftie media mouthpiece.
(And as I was writing that, Jordan Peterson, with deadly seriousness, was saying the same thing:
0:00 Look, man, I would vote for Trump if for no other reason than Musk himself has already agreed to head something like a department of governmental efficiency in the USA. Hitler wasn’t well known for his sense of humour. Trump is a funny bastard (“Jordan Peterson Stuns Piers Morgan With Brilliant Trump & Kamala Analysis!” my emphasis.
I Receive A Plea to Return to Normality and With It Anger and ‘Moral’ or Not Decisions to Be Made
I sat back down with firm intention and almost immediately found myself standing up again, my intention broken. In the time that I had been probing the intuition of my body there was deposited into my email a plea to me from one of my oldest friends. It was her reply to my recent appeal for financial help.§
I stood up after I read her short ask, which was that I return to common sense and to good old Canada, with real friends who care for me, and who will look after me in my upcoming infirmity. And that Canada has ‘real’ and safe health practices. My first reaction was a kind of feeling that FrE (friend E) struggled to write it. I felt tears come to my eyes, my feeling of her ache was that strong through her words. And then after I stood up from the floor and moved away from the computer, I began to laugh at the shear breadth of condescension contained in the words she had carefully constructed!
And then, while I was doing the dishes a few minutes later I felt my cheeks flush with anger at being put by her into an undeserving group again! This time not one of the undeserving anti-medical-tyranny voices. Nope, I had now entered the group of mentally incompetent boob heads who would be best served to turn the other cheek because ‘covid is over now. Nobody talks about this now.’ I was to return to the ‘caring’ friends who had turned their backs on me when I became a convid refugee. Before I left — and a reason I left was that — not a single one of my friends responded to my appeal for common decency and a critical eye towards the convid tyranny being rolled out. Well, not quite true: one tried to talk common sense into me, then abruptly ended our conversation and friendship by condemning me as ‘too toxic to talk to.’
In fact, it was their silence, along with the complete silence of the 750 or so elected officials to whom I sent my concerns to with some ‘science(tm)’ backing my words, that evoked fear for my and my partner’s lives in Canada. By this point I recognised the parallels with Germany, as have others, and I suspected that concentration camps, with what would be a pretty healthy sounding name, were not too far away.
And now my ‘friend’ wants me to come to a place where mentally deficient I can be cared for by the people who were content to see me defenestrated coldly, calmly, rationally while Trudeau spread hate speech about what he would do with us, those of the hated undeserving:
“They are extremists who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists,” said Trudeau. “It’s a small group that muscles in, and we have to make a choice in terms of leaders, in terms of the country. Do we tolerate these people?” (My emphasise. What would their intolerance entail, beyond job loss, denial of health services, and social shunning? Concentration camps with a nice name? Text and commentary.)
I was surprised at how intense my anger was, now, after all this time and yoga and ’spiritual stuff’. I felt my cheeks get hot with the intensity of the emotion FrE raised up out of that shadowy world of convid denial then, and so bluntly put by her, convid denial now. That denial, of course, betrays the ease with which the next plandemic would have me again in jeopardy as a social pariah and undeserving. I hope that in México there will be less of a direct threat, although there was clearly strong social pressure here, too.
What to do? First thing: don’t go running madly off in all directions and give her a piece of my mind! What I did do in the interim was to clean something — dishes this time. The near compulsive urge to clean is a common symptom of my having been triggered. And yet… what? How to respond? With what to respond? How do I take my own advice about ‘red-pilling’ people? For that see
Acquire the Discipline to Stop Throwing the Second Dart.
The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions — And It’s only Everyone Else’s Intentions That Are Hellish
In my mind I was also wrestling with the ostensibly simple initial choices her road-to-hell letter paved for me: ignore and by silence end what remains of our friendship; reply with words of insincerity and allow her to read between the lines — if she saw that reading — that our friendship has ended; reply sincerely without confrontation and likely informally end the friendship; reply sincerely and ‘gently’ confront her condescension and to address what I infer is her state of delusion and with that openly ask for her to extend into truth our friendship or to simply, openly and mutually, end our friendship; or do my best to red pill her with a full frontal assault and completely dissociate from her and destroy any bridge structure that may exist that could give us an opportunity to reconnect as friends at some future date? Other?
Since I’ve observed and written about how ineffective is frontal assault red-pilling, that one I quickly removed from the list. Although, that it came up into my consciousness as a choice, complete with my mind racing through what kinds of facts might work, suggests to me that I have shadow-banned my anger about how my fellow Canadians, including mute friends, were Trudeau’s silent henchmen in the distribution and dissemination of hatred for the undeserving, rejected, vilified, tyrannised, shunned and oppressed uninjected.
And so it is clear to see that my friend’s words had triggered me! With that awareness, of having been triggered, I was immediately able to see that I have another choice! Snoopy dance! I can turn to a ‘friend’ that invariably brings me to focus on the here and now. And who will help me to step away from being invested in a kind of life or death response to this old friend’s condescending opinion towards me: my companion the I Ching. And that is what I will do, after a bit more writing.
And once I calmed down with the thought of consulting with the Sage — a sobriquet of the I Ching — I realised that FrE had given me a moral topic to write about, one with some fire in the belly, some passion. And then that brought to mind the condescending moralism from two of my four sisters, also in emails. And so here I am, writing about my having received a subtle form of moral condemnation under the guise of friends and family having the perception of giving me their good intentioned advice. Which isn’t, of course, anything moral, or coming from a place of morality, is it? Right! And it certainly did not help me with my current ‘material’ condition of near insolvency.§
Yes, moralism: serious, heartfelt, sincere, words in place of compassionate action. And that seems to me to be the precursive first step that leads towards moralism as brutalising action in place of even compassionate inaction, let alone compassionate action. Brutal moralism, looks to me to be another description of scapegoating the designated undeserving, whether by Girard’s mimeses or Desmet’s mass formation.
(For my look at Girard’s mimetic theory and scapegoating, see:
Just An Endless List In Mimesis of The Liberalisation Of Language Into Babeldee-Gook
And for my look at Mattias Desmet’s theory of mass formation leading to scapegoating, see:
On 'Mass Formation', Woke and Corporatist News: Saviour from What?’)
And that raises the question: is all unsolicited advice/help at its core a form of moral posturing? FrE hasn’t asked for my advice, nor even asked a question as to my state of mind or being. She assumes and assigns it as being unquestionably flawed then and now, perhaps dangerously flush with self-delusion. And she has expressed no interest in my actions other than that it is time for me to put away my philosophical childishness and come home in order to be the child that can be taken care of by those fickle friends and the malevolent state who may, today, condescend to be my saviours from my self.
And the next question for me is: will any broach of ‘truth’ to her be the manifestation of my good intentioned moralising? Where is my humour in this time of shadow confrontation in the form of a moralising ‘friend’? To what extent is my anger-fired desire to ’teach her the truth’ simply my manifestation of the moralising good in me to ‘wake her the fuck up’? Is my anger simply projecting onto her my moralising shadow?
Moralising as Stimming the Mind-Centric Ego
And it seems to me that for my one sister and FrE that their efforts to morally chastise me may well have been an effort towards reassuring themselves of their propriety within the strictures of their mis-perception of not being pressured to submit to an artificial now. That now being one of the gaslighting demands to ‘know’ that this now is the back to the ‘normal’ of a so-called post convid circumstance of existence.
And it may be also expressing their morality with words in a way that can, like a mantra of sorts, help calm their anxiety. Furthermore, perhaps they would feel somewhat more secure in their place in this Stockholm Syndrome as bully participants if they succeeded in bringing someone like me, an unrepentant undeserving outliar, into the bully Stockholm Syndrome cloister that they have mimetically fit themselves into in order to survive being constantly bullied to conform. Of course, likely better, from their perspective, is that I don’t interact with them at all. With that silence they can more easily keep the persona’s composure and more easily mitigate their underlying anxiety with whatever activities/diversions help them to do that. (On my perception that we are a culture fully indoctrinated into bully Stockholm Syndrome, see:
Unseen Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a MisSpelled See of Words.)
So, I have talked about them! My perception of them. What about me? Will I feel more secure, and without the reactive response to my friend, and able to ease my own anxiety, if I could be the great moralist and reformer who against all odds red-pills them, my sisters and friend? Just three people! Is that my own discomfort to having been condescended to as if I were a handicapped child, out of touch with reality? And that it is important to me to bring to awareness in my friend my awareness. And with that to change her mind? Or am I being, in the manner that Desmet strongly advocates, the needed agitator to the sleepers — who I now see as active participants in maintaining the Stockholm Syndrome bully culture — to stop them from mass forming into killing the undeserving as their own tension releasing scapegoat?
Moralist? Saviour? What’s the difference? Is there a difference?
I Ching
So… here I go again. An I Ching query/consultation. I’ll open by free association, in a way, around this morality coming into and triggering me and how to respond without being a moralist. And to discern whether or not this essay topic and material is one of ‘sound’ enquiry. (If you are reading it, then it was given the green light.) And, even as I was working through this idea, it really struck me to what extent my wanting to assault FrE with a ‘truth-attack’ was actually the exact same morality she expressed. That that morality rose up in me like unwanted bile into the top of my oesophagus: humourless, foul tasting and inappropriately out of its proper place.
Hola, Sage/I Ching/Duke of Chou/King Wen. It is around 18:30 on a Thursday. Not too long ago today I was wrestling with writing an essay about the humourlessness of moralists. I was going to include references to the likes of Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, people who have become well known for their varied criticisms of the current bizarre manifestations of over-the-top progressive liberalism. This followed my recent binge-watching of these people, and some others, using their great intelligences to nearly effortlessly verbally shred every ideologue they meet. When I first began the binge-watching I didn’t notice that the critics themselves were significantly humourless because the progressive liberal ideologues they were disarming were often even more humourless than their critics. It was also interesting that almost without exception it was the university people, students and faculty, who stepped into these confrontations very much like lambs to the slaughter and without much coherent thought beyond ideological tropes.
This was sidetracked when I read the email from a long time friend, although one I haven’t seen in several years. She wrote it with an apology for taking so long to respond to my request for monetary help after my experience of pacemaker surgery cleaned out my bank account§. She wrote that she has given my situation great thought and that ‘… I truly feel, Guy, that you would be so much better if you would just come home.’
As I’ve discussed, elsewhere, Sage, I was triggered by her moralising email into my own humourless moralising thought-dance and decided, after running through a long series of what if I react this way or that ways, I wanted to respond using an essay. That method allows me to more deeply explore my reaction to her morality when what would have in reality helped me at this time would have been to receive from her some money. And also I am curious to explore, from here, what might her expressed morality as good-intentioned advice be rooted in. And to do this after consulting you, Sage on what you might think about this. And as soon as these ideas entered my head, my observation expanded to include the condescending moralising I got from two of my four sisters, the second of those encompassing perhaps a near epitome of anti-reality liberal progressive do-gooderism for your own good, for goodness sake. The other sister’s moralising was closer to my friend’s condescension, which came, like my friend’s, shortly after I had asked for her help.
What might be my question, though? Although a question isn’t absolutely required. Hmmm. Sage, these three people are asleep. In my opinion. They haven’t asked me for my thoughts or ideas about anything. The one sister told me not to talk about ‘it’, the giant poop creature in the house. So they lack all curiosity about my state of being, and in curiosity’s stead they have put me as being simply wrong, stupid, childish, unrepentant, undeserving. The oldest sister gave me a convid middle finger salute disguised as a long list of what I could do — as if I was morally, mentally and internally incompetent. The younger one rewrote to her own satisfaction in her words my story of job or jab and leaving Canada. She included within it bad (albeit common) elementary school teacher condescension within which she chastised me and schooled me on how to properly tell her my story of leaving Canada during the convid. It seems to me, now, that that was in larger part to help her to remain cosy in her mind about the benevolence of the government and its advocacy of toxic injections and its support of genital and hormonal mutilation of my niece, her of-age daughter.
As I began this query with you, the feeling of my writing a letter to my friend arose very strongly. Although I’ve yet to determine my words. Likely what I will write will make itself manifest at the time of writing. Not so to my sisters. Their letters are now very old, more than year, and my lack of response is what it is: a response.
So, I guess there are two parts to this. Well three. Is it appropriate for me to reply to FrE? How do I reply? And if that is the way to go is it appropriate for me to create this essay on the backs of people who I have judged as delusional, blind moralists in the time of the protracted convid because, despite FrE’s thought, we are likely not even at the halfway point of the convid war against human rights, dignity and life? And is it fine with you to be openly a part of it? Well, that is now four things. The casting:
21. ————— 26. Vast Nurturing ——> 41. Depletion (Hinton)
17. —— —— 26. Ta Chu/Self Control ——> 41. Sun/Selflessness (MacHovec)
17. —— —— 26. Ta Ch’u/The Taming Power of the Great ——> 41.
13. ——0—— Sun/Decrease (Baynes/Wilhelm)
21. —————
21. —————
Here is my quick summary of just the Baynes/Wilhelm translation, although I appreciated the other contributions too:
The strength to keep still in times of quiet creates the energy that has great enough and appropriate power in times of high energy distress. In a kind of resonance with my question format, twenty-six suggests that there are three aspects of holding to consider: to hold oneself together with stillness (equanimity); holding back, as in restraint (no frontal assault); and holding firm to providing care and nourishment (stay with my idea of providing FrE with truth, with the intention of it being nourishing rather than indigestible.)
It is time to be firm and true with being light and clear. That builds character. At a time of great social tension, it is important to be a powerful character.
My knowledge of the past, not the false stories of that past, has strengthened my character, and since I practice daily tools of war — truth with words — it is appropriate to take action.
This is a time to undertake something and to that end use two bowls for an offering or a sacrifice. (This is remarkable because my thinking of how to respond is to reply in two parts: to give an honest simple non-confrontational response. And, secondly, to attach to that a second ‘offering’, an attached document of the deeper truths. The idea is that the email will be soft and to offer the attachment only if she wants, or is curious enough, to be challenged. Hmmmm.) Going forward towards a goal brings success. And I repeat: it is time to be firm and true with being light and clear. To me, I read that ‘light and clear’ as pointing to humour and an absence of moralising.
Excellent and gracias, I Ching. This confirms my intuitive sense to respond truthfully and to do it in two ways: basic email text and with an attachment of a separate deeper truth. My knowledge of the breadth of the lies gives me the ability to do this powerfully, and that it will provide her with something ‘nutritious’.
Now to Write My Reply Without It Being Unsolicited Moralising Humourless Ipecac
I slept on this and recommenced late in the morning after reading Tereza Coraggio’s observation on humour — ‘The Power Dynamic of Laughter: He Who Laughs First Loses’. This is a nice synchronicity because I thought about how to be light and perhaps even funny rather than pedantically moralistic in my response to my friends’ words and how they had triggered me.
This really brought to the fore that the guidance into life by morals removes access to the spontaneous moment of now. And with its removal is lost how best to see, let alone express, the humour of the moment. Morals are the makers of the limiting samskaras, those tracks that enable us to live life without thinking or being consciously its active participants. Moralising is often (always?) to be unthinking, or at least unfeeling, in the moment.
So what has that to do with me here and now with my friend’s triggering letter? The directive I have given myself is to be in this moment and to see the humour that is living in it. For that I will step away from the computer for a glass of juice — I’m in the middle of the ten day master cleanse — and relax out of my moral posturing to see what is here, now. Hasta luego.
Post Letter, Not as Funny as I Had Wanted. More Confrontational Than I’d Expected
I spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening into the night, writing what turned out to be a long letter. It isn’t particularly funny and yet, at the same time, the writing of it felt ‘light and clear’. To what extent that is true or not, will of course be determined by my friend’s reaction.
During the course of the writing something that became clear to me is that it would have been inappropriate for me to have remained quiet about the effects of Canadians attacking Canadian injection rejectors.
And I was also compelled to share, without having been asked, my rationale for having rejected the injection initially, and then when the final decision for the mandate was put to me. With this I almost certainly put myself into the moralising group because I, like my friend did to me, extended unilaterally my unasked for experiences and opinion about the safety of Canada as a no-convid talk zone. Ah well.
At the same time writing it clarified that a function of me at this time is to be a convid agitator with the partially or even mostly asleep. The totally asleep are beyond agitation beyond their own deep seated anxiety. It came to me that my having built significant and diverse knowledge, and with skills with writing and speaking, the time may have come for me to use them with the partially awake. Furthermore my yoga practice gives me the ability to remain equanimous most of the time and, like when my friend’s letter agitated me, my practice has imparted enough wisdom and strength to know when I’m off from centre and that I have the courage and resilience to explore those events as internal lessons for manifesting greater equanimity instead of blaming and complaining that the other is the problem.
And the I Ching casting seems to be pointing me in that direction too. More from my casting:
… everything depends on the power of the personality. However, since the worthy are honoured, as in the case of the strong personality entrusted with leadership by the ruler, it is an advantage not to eat at home but rather to earn one’s bread by entering upon public office. Such a man is in harmony with heaven; therefore even great and difficult undertakings, such as crossing the great water, succeed. (26. The Taming Power of the Great, my emphasis.)
… a decrease in the prosperity of the people in favour of the government is out–and–out decrease. And the entire theme of the hexagram (41) is directed to showing how this shift of wealth can take place without causing the sources of wealth in the nation and its lower classes to fail. [For me, this ‘wealth’ refers primarily to people and their well being and ability to contribute to their families and communities.]
The Judgment
Decrease combined with sincerity
Brings about supreme good fortune
Without blame.
One may be persevering in this.
It furthers one to undertake something.
…
… simplicity is the very thing that provides the inner strength for further undertakings. Indeed, be not concerned if the outward beauty of the civilisation, even the elaboration of religious forms, suffers because of simplicity. With simplicity one draws on the strength of the inner attitude to compensate for what is lacking in externals; then the power of the content makes up for the simplicity of form. There is no need to present false appearances to God. Even with slender means, the sentiment of the heart can be expressed.
The Image
…
… the superior man controls his anger
And restrains his instincts.
(41. Decrease.)
And so… it seems that I was given the feeling of anger. Using my yoga practices and the I Ching from that learned more about my self and my relationship to the world. And from that I undertook to express the sentiment of my heart with restrained instincts.
§ I received pacemaker surgery because of extreme bradycardia that had me fainting and go to near death. That cleaned out my bank account. If you would like the details and/or to help me out, see:
A Request for Monetary Help.
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Kool and the Gang — Celebration.