Psychology: Fidelity and Love

   On the Ted Talk this morning, they had a fellow, the writer of a pop science book, who argues theoretically in favor of lust. The argument is something like this: that fidelity in love is the mere invention of males attempting to possess women as property, that it enters the human world with agriculture, and so is contrary to our natures. We have begun a discussion of biology, psychology and love a few blogs back, and there are of course great mysteries involved. But to begin an attempt to defend the poor lover and human love, even Shakespearean love, we will say this: The love “contract,” or the agreement of fidelity that lovers enter into, and that courtship is about, is because the beloved can destroy the soul or, if that is an exaggeration, “break the heart” of the lover by infidelity. It is this, the broken heart, and not “property rights” that fidelity is about. The lover, impelled by nature and at its mercy, does not even foresee, but the conjugal union brings with it a fusion: the two become “one flesh” or soul, again an exaggeration, but true in part. St. Paul writes that even the union with a prostitute bring this about, so that the promiscuous are literally dragging about their history as baggage. Erotic union causes a filial connection. Events that would otherwise be telepathic or prophetic even occur because the two literally participate in one love, a soul higher than the soul of either, and yet it is themselves. Most people are base and do not love, but that does not mean that the marriage customs, built up over thousands of years of hard experience, are unnatural or harmful.

   It is no coincidence that the conjugal union is the participation of man in the Creating of the creator, and the perpetuation of the generations, continuing according to one account a four billion year continuous genetic lineage. And the reason marriage is sacred is that the soul is an image of God, male and female. The Creator appears at the incarnation, and the highest image of God in the scriptures – the wedding of the Bride and Lamb- is reflected in marriage. So both the Creator and Redeemer are reflected in human marriage: Called the mystery of the bridal chamber.

   It is also true that love is the navel of our attachment to the earth of cave, and that the jilted lover can be dawn to the fundamental penance that leads up and out. The attachment to the earth and to the mother is beneath the attachment to the beloved, and its conquest is the overcoming of the fear of death. When this is trapped in the material, it can become a literal suicide, or worse. The attachment at the root of the family presents each with the fundamental questions, and the opportunity for some most fundamental errors.

   The true lover does not desire another beside the beloved, and so it is the beloved that must be persuaded. Maybe one in ten actual humans love this way, but the happiness of the household depends in large part on the way to which they follow the example. Similarly, jealousy excludes infidelity, or at least would be contradicted by infidelity. A test of fidelity is whether one becomes jealous, but for humans to make such things by artifice renders the elation artificial already, and harms the love. Affairs cause faction in the household, as the staying one will withdraw from the love, cannot celebrate the holidays together in the same way, etc. It also causes faction in the soul, so that one cannot act in unison with himself, and becomes clumsy. making mistakes.

   Love has its own ethics and its own understanding of justice, as assumed though inexplicable in the words “cheating,” “faithful” and such. One suspects that the lovers use these words so that loves justice will be assumed and they will not have to explain, because we can’t! And so the language is that of contract and promise. These things are just assumed, and no one can explain them, let alone convince one who does believe: Then I saw her face / Now I’m a believer” say the Monkeys, contradicting Darwin. But i heard a straying husband once who lamented that, having seen what the affair had done to his wife, he was quite shocked, and would never sacrifice so much pain for so little pleasure.

   Of course there are many different ways that humans participate in erotic union, but the suggestion is that these are all based upon and understood in light of the natural conjugal union at the root of the family, called “fertile” rather than infertile love.

   From the start, the biology of the matter no more supports the argument of lust than the argument of fidelity. Fidelity is different for men and women due to the circumstance in which women find themselves by nature, being the ones to bear or carry the child.    The male may be confused as to whose child he is raising, but the woman cannot be so confused for the same cause. Infidelity, if one can get away with it, would be selected for, but fidelity would decrease deaths from cuckolded husbands and due to sexual diseases, and so have an obvious claim to natural selection. The human family is much older than agriculture, and it is suspected that the continuous rather than cyclical human estrus was invented by nature to fuse the family. But this as often can destroy the family. When things are well, the couples are together caring even for the bodies and pleasures of one another, and after a fight or argument it is well known what occurs when the couples make up. It is even possible to argue that true and free lust occurs only in the conjugal union. The human family goes back even millions of years, into the avian and reptilian nature, where the family first emerges to care for the young. Swans and certain birds even excel mankind in fidelity and the attachment of love that joins the couples. The continuous human estrus is as likely to break as preserve the human family, but another common experience is the emptiness of the brief liaison. Bar patrons joke about wanting to chew their own arm off in the morning. The suspicion is that deep within our nature. love and the conjugal union are involved in the mystery of human connected-ness at the root of our political and filial nature. I am thinking of Allan Bloom, who writes of love this way, as the root of our connected-ness to other persons, or the reason that almost all humans cannot be alone. For the true priest or solitary philosopher, there are different mysteries, but for almost all practical purposes, it is not good for man to be alone.

   The mysteries of mankind involve the distinction between the filial and political nature, endogamy and exogamy, and the connection of families into polities through intermarriage. The incest prohibition acts upon us as if it were biological, that is, “lust” does not even operate within the family, and humans cannot even consciously address the theoretical issue, such, as Freud noted, is the human unconscious- and our Ted Talk biologist has not even begun to consider such “scientific” questions, but the treatment of man as wholly animal by the evolutionary theorists fundamentally destroys the specifically human nature and indeed destroys the soul, and this is not even an exaggeration. Psychologist well know, without any theoretical basis, the grave harm done by molestations and violations of the prohibitions, though modern psychology literally has no theoretical basis to account for this. It is as though our human soul were fundamentally disturbed, and in the worst cases, split personalities even emerge, as though one soul cannot acknowledge what has occurred to another within the same soul. The psychologists thankfully revert to law, common sense and repression, and do not notice the theoretical marvel which the law assumes. The harm done to children by the indiscriminate lusts of criminal adults is beyond notorious. These laws are ancient for us beyond the Decalogue, so that Moses himself, while addressing the facts and furthering civilization by forbidding the practices that some cultures in 1300 B.C. did not yet forbid, struggles to understand the theoretical basis. Neanderthal man may have been filial and not political, but for our species, such things are indeed inhuman, crossing the bounds of the humanity of “Cromagnon” man. We are indeed, as Aristotle wrote, the “political” animal, joined into tribes and these into villages by filial connections that are established by love. Exogamy then is for us most natural, and we suggest that Ted and his remarkable guest have not begun to think out even the anthropology involved in a defense of animal lust. Love is a rare and delicate plant, and human customs, rightly conceived, aim to uphold this beautiful thing against a tide of animal nature threatening to sweep away all that is priceless and hard won in human civilization. The law is like a trellis that allows roses to grow in abundance. To say that such things are based upon some mere patriarchal right of property is a joke, and a bad joke if we begin to think the matter through.

   Love is for the lover attended by jealousy, though for the one loved, this is not as impelling, and it comes upon us by nature. The lover must contract the fidelity of the beloved to preserve his own soul from jealousy, which can so possess the lives and thoughts of lovers as to make their lives from morning until night a misery. This comes upon the lover as did the love, like a force of nature o like a daemonic possession, and would call it the influence of an “archetype, and each is measured by and responsible for his own reaction to painful jealousy. One can do little to correct the circumstance except to leave or recede, but many things to make it worse, and suspicion itself can drive the beloved away. Bloom, in commenting on Othello and Lear, notes that the beloved does not owe love, and the lover cannot command love. But infidelity means that the beloved does not love you. Stupid of us to think ourselves worthy of love, as though we were the best for the beloved! Love implies an inflation: “I am the best of those that speak this speech,” says Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s Tempest. The heo will be sent out to slay the dragon for the princess and by the princess, though she does not do this knowingly, but apparently by nature.In each relation, it seems, there is as in Plato’s Phaedrus, a lover and a beloved, or as Jung writes, a container and one contained within the whole that is the love. Mutual lovers are rare among the couples, and the lover must seek to inspire the “ant-eros,” to win the heart of the beloved. Consider the things Prospero says to Ferdinand about the challenge to overcome his lust until marriage: Weeds will infest his marriage bed if he does not succeed in this fundamental establishment of the order of soul where he is able to control himself even in under the influence of his strong love for Miranda. The lover is indeed not capable of doing this himself while in love, and that is why it is thankful or fortunate that Ferdinand has the wise man to compel him, and that we once had the marriage customs of courtship and convention.

A Note * The word love does not occur in the index of our textbook titled “Abnormal Psychology,” perhaps because they wish to assume that love is normal! There is however a disorder called the “dependent” personality, and “co-dependent” has become a catchphrase in the fashionable opinion that parades itself as science under the banner of our pseudoscience, unworthy of the trust we give to these supposed knowers and healers of the soul. One suspects that these phrases are the inventions of beloveds seeking to escape the annoyance of the pain of some lover’s broken heart, and that the shrinks are among the base who do not love. In fact, without an understanding of eros and the human soul, it will be impossible to establish a science for the treatment or healing of the human soul, and while we possess the study, we do not possess the science. I will be thought arrogant for asserting the superiority of Plato, Shakespeare and the Bible to all of modern psychology, but be this as it may, and let the accuser provide a theoretical explanation for why that, or any other thing, is truly wrong on the basis of their pseudo-science. Modern psychology has not begun the serious study of the soul, and the authority it assumes for itself is harmful to humanity.  We at least can begin to provide a theoretical basis for arguing why this, or any other thing, is harmful, right or wrong: The health of the human soul.

Note 2: What is at stake in the argument of love and lust is, an the one hand the beautiful things that make life meaningful and worth living, and on the other, a momentary and usually fruitless thing called a “pleasure.” Eros must be feed from its imprisonment in matter as Ariel, the spirit that serves the wise man, is freed from his imprisonment in a cloven pine, but threatened with imprisonment in an oak. Two different theories of the nature of man underlie the question of whether the excess human eros or libido creates the higher human things by a “sublimation,” or whether there is not rather a natural gradient that eros ascends, a “ladder of love,” as in the Symposium.

Note 3. Lyric poetry contains an understanding of the soul and love far superior to our pseudoscience. Jack White writes: “How dare you. How old are you now, anyway,” and “You took a white orchid, turned it blue.” Another tragic love lyric showing the height, depth and intensity of the passions involved in the question of fidelity is Seven Nation Army. We have  lyric interpretation on these, in blogs and in Chapter IX of the book of music commentaries.

Niel Young writes: “Country girl…

I think your pretty

Got to make you understand

Have no lovers in the city

Let me be your Country man

Note 4: This strange lyric, in its irrationality, demonstrates a number of points about common sense and love:

Jack White: I Fell in Love with a Girl:

Fell in love with a girl
I fell in love once and almost completely
She’s in love with the world
But sometimes these feelings
Can be so misleading
She turns and said “are you alright?”
I said “I must be fine cause my heart’s still beating
Come and kiss me by the riverside, yeah
Bobby says it’s fine he don’t consider it cheating now

Red hair with a curl
mellow roll for the flavor
and the eyes for peeping
can’t keep away from the girl
these two sides of my brain need to have a meeting
can’t think of anything to do yeah
my left brain knows that our love is fleeting
she just looking for something new
and I said it once before but it bears repeating now

Ah-ah-ah-ah!

can’t think of anything to do yeah
my left brain knows that our love is fleeting
she’s just looking for something new
and I said it once before but it bears repeating now

Fell in love with a girl
i fell in love once and almost completely
she’s in love with the world
but sometimes these feelings can be so misleading
she turns and said “are you alright?”
I said “I must be fine cause my heart’s still beating
come and kiss me by the riverside, yeah
Bobby says it’s fine he don’t consider it cheating now

can’t think of anything to do yeah
my left brain knows that our love is fleeting
she just looking for something new
and I said it once before but it bears repeating now

A Query on Hamlet and Madness

Bring me to the test

And I the matter will reword,

which madness would gambol from…

Hamlet says he is not mad because he can reword what he says into different words, same thing. His speech is not involuntary. A nice preface for a Comprehensive exam on Plato’s Sun, line and Cave.

“My uncle-father and my aunt-mother are deceived,” Hamlet tells Guildenstern (II,ii, 372). In what, my dear lord? Guildenstern asks, and Hamlet tells him:

I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

And then Polonius enters.

   In my Hamlet essay, I got hawk and handsaw: A hawk is an actor, and a handsaw is one who saws the air too much with his hand, as is mentioned elsewhere in the play, when Hamlet gives advice to the actors. Polonius is a bad actor, while Hamlet wants his mother, Uncle and Guildenstern to think he thinks Guildenstern is a good actor, preserving the veil of illusion, and is still giving him the opportunity to see what he is doing in spying on his friend. But I did not get these wind directions, though a good explanation is in the Arden notes: “when the wind is southerly, “the watcher’s eye is turned away from the sun and so can see more clearly” (p. 258). There might be something to this, if my reader is considering my previous blog.

   The play Hamlet is of course famous for the question of weather Hamlet is really mad or is just faking it, in the antic disposition” he says he will put on to hide his knowledge of the true circumstance in the Kingdom: his uncle has murdered his father Hamlet, and has seized the throne and married the mother of Hamlet. The movie “the Ninth Configuration,” I believe, suggested that he is faking it, but as a defense against a genuine madness, of which he is in danger. Hamlet is the only one who knows the truth about what is occurring in the kingdom. Hamlet talks like Shakespeare himself, though, and those who do not understand or inquire are allowed to believe he is mad. He has had his love, if he loves Ophelia, used as a spy against him, as is being done with Guildenstern in this moment, and no readers seem to think that very significant. Ophelia, of course, drowns herself accidentally in a genuine madness in which she literally does not know what is going on around her. This, though, is caused by the genuine flaw of Hamlet, which is not madness but revenge, and of a strange sort that attempts to influence the immortal souls. Ophelia dies, tragically, because Hamlet, her love, killed her father while he, Polonius, was spying on him, and he thought it was the King. Tragedy, as Aristotle writes, affects those near to one another in kinship, its causes bound up with the filial things. Hamlet would have dealt with the “king” one way or another, except that he wanted to wait until the king was up to no good, assuring that his soul would not go to heaven. Note that domestic spying was once considered being up to no good.* Hamlet does not follow the Socratic reasoning about revenge, and the play turns screaming toward tragedy from this single event.

   Our psychology, with its DSM and its material causes, is not much in advance of the explanations of madness then current, such as that it based on the humors, perhaps an “imbalance,” and is effected by the weather.

   The two plays of Shakespeare on madness are Lear and Hamlet, and I have a three page discussion on modern psychology in the notes to my book on Lear, which has largely been ignored. There is more in the draft of the first chapter of my book on psychology, if anyone is interested. But no one even cares if Hamlet is the only one who knows, on supernatural evidence, what is going on in the kingdom, and he suspected something of the sort, that “something is rotten in Denmark.” The question is what is to be done about it, and of course in classical tragedy, the protagonist makes the wrong choice due to a flaw in his otherwise noble character. Shakespeare also wrote tragedy about villains, Macbeth and Richard III, characters that are essentially flawed though they have some noble element enslaved in the service of their villainy. Hamlet is not a villain.

   Our psychology is incapable of even this ethical distinction, though thankfully it does assume that “values” are facts when considering the “sociopath” and the “psychopath.” It does not even raise the question or try to distinguish between genius and madness. But Al-Farabi is not incapable, and as cited in my psych chapter, has something to say about the distinction between genius and madness.

   But let it suffice to say that if Shakespeare is a sane example, merely saying things most do not understand is not a sufficient indication of madness. One might be the only one who knows what is going on. Such may be accused of madness, and our psychiatry seek to seize and drug them all the same. Psychology can then easily be made the instrument of tyranny. The accusation of madness is extremely serious, not something the courts should allow to be used for ulterior motives, as against the vulnerable, because, as in communist Russia of the Twentieth Century, it will be so used.

*Spying is a deep and terribly complicated question, because it is fine against serious crime and foreign enemies, but places one into a “state of nature” with the one spying, because one is then in their power to the extent of the spying. One can assume it is a state or condition of war, which is outside the civil society or law in some sense. Claudius is in fact trying to kill Hamlet, and Polonius is helping the tyrant kill the lawful heir- though he may think of himself as “help”ing. The use of women and love in spying is far more grave than the perpetrators can possibly realize, or they would not be doing it, though it is less of a crime against those who do not love. It is in truth a violation of religious rights (Genesis 1:26), though it may be thought only a matter of appetites, again by those souls incapable of love..

Was the Ft. Lauderdale Shooter on Antidepressants?

   Shootings in public places of anonymous persons where no motive appears always involve antidepressants- that is our hypothesis, and it has not yet been refuted. As elaborated ad infinitum regarding previous shootings, the politicians will not check, and there is no public statistic to confirm our suspicion that the answer is 100%. The shooters are always under the care of the “mental health professionals,” drugged with antidepressants. The effect of these is to “drop the floor out” from under  a weak or bad soul, one who does not care about others in the least, making them suicidal.

   We suspect that the financial interest of the drug companies prevents them from studying the issue. Lieutenant Governor Calley will not even listen to, let alone consider the hypothesis, though someone from his office did let slip that the Uber driver was on a certain antidepressant. 100%. These shootings do not occur with weekly regularity in any other nation. We have always had guns, though access is indeed much too easy. But the other thing we are doing in the age that began with the Whitmer shooting in Austin Tx. is that we drug every person who enters a psych office and mentions depression, and refuse to consider the issue. That is why these shootings are an epidemic nearly unique to the U.S., and of course these are a category different from the lone wolf terrorist inspired shootings, though the two categories may begin to overlap.

   Incidentally, and for full disclosure, I hold a degree, a B.S., in psychology, but left the field because of the way academic psych is- they did not even study humans, except statistically, and as one would study rats or animal training. Then we give them authority over our souls. They have an assumption about brain cells and chemistry as human causes, and the assumption is, in a word, false. But it is a philosophic question, so the shrinks cannot understand the question- but they understand the dividends from the drug companies well enough, just like the oxy doctors.  I went instead to earn a PhD in Politics or political philosophy. I have a chapter on the Psych page through the menu setting out the first principles of a new, Socratic psychology, to replace our pre-Socratic or “scientific” psychology. It allows us to say things like ?weak or bad soul,” and “drops the floorr out from under them.”

Psychology: On Love and Lyric Poetry From Plato’s Phaedrus

  The following is a blog on the section of Plato’s Phaedrus, addressed in an old Midsummer Night’s Dream paper, where Socrates seems to get at the cause of both love and lyric poetry.

    There is more in “one line” of the introductory dialogues of Plato than in a whole textbook of modern psychology. Following the path of Carl Jung, the shadow is addressed first, and then what he calls anima and animus. The best piece I have on the shadow is the teaching of Jesus on the log and the beam, in a blog above as well as in the psych category. The shadow at first corresponds to the level of the three part Platonic soul called appetite, but the shadow effects the soul and mind, and is the apprenticeship or beginning of the quest of self knowledge. What we do not see in ourselves appears in another, in our faction with our fellows. Our faction with the outer world is of course based upon our faction within. The same is apparent in the psychological truth that what we do to others is in truth done to us, that if we do not forgive, we are not forgiven, etc. That is how the things of the “personal” shadow work. In some sense, too the principle must hold especially for what Jung would have to call the “collective” shadow.

   Bruce Lee has demonstrated how the principle applies in the martial arts, when his “Cain” (In the television show “Kung Fu”) was trying to fight an imaginary demon in a cave. His old blind teacher appeared, and said, “Why have you left the Tao?” Cain returned from his flashback in memory, and the imaginary demon had disappeared. All things of the shadow and faction are like that. But the next level, after the recognition of he personal  shadow, is love, belonging to the second or middle of the three parts of the soul.

   Love attempts to clear the way for itself, by penance, a recovery of innocence, and so is only available to the soul to the extent to which one “integrates” the “shadow.” What this faculty does in the majority of souls, in whom the lover is sleeping, is rather messy. The effect is similar to the effect of the faculty called “self'” by Jung, meaning our true self, the “eye of the soul.” But because this faculty is unconscious, all mankind needs what Jung calls a “living myth,” and what we call religion and even ritual.

   In his palinode (Plato, Phaedrus, 243-257), Socrates explains the occurrence of love on the basis of the same faculty or capacity of man on which philosophy is based, the capacity for the recollection of the knowledge of truth seen prior to our present incarnation (Plato, Meno 81). According to the speech, the soul, once perfect and winged, travelling in the train of one of the twelve gods, ascended to the summit of heaven, and there saw a vision of true being, which dwells beyond the Olympian heavens (Hyper-Ouranian being, as an old U of D teacher called it). In this, we were all “initiated into that mystery which is rightly accounted blessed beyond all others” (Phaedrus, 250b). The soul then lost its wings and descended into incarnation, but only the souls that have beheld truth can enter into human form, as is evident in the capacity of man for language. Because of this mystery, “If a man makes the right use of recollection and approaches the perfect mysteries,” he and he alone becomes truly perfect. Only the soul of the philosopher recovers her wings, because she is “ever near in memory to those things to which a god’s nearness makes him truly a god” (249d-e). The lover and the philosopher, like the lover and the saint in the Palm dance of Romeo and Juliet, are distinct. The one is an image of the other, and at the same time both, philosophy and love, may literally be the activity of the same faculty. Hence, Jung calls anima the “gateway to the collective unconscious,” and love is a kind, and one of four kinds, of divine madness (244).

   Beauty alone, of all the objects of vision seen, is manifest at all to our senses, through sight, the keenest of the bodily senses (250d). From this, we derive the teaching that in love, the lover is having their first concrete encounter with the divine or intelligible. (This demonstrates, too, what a Joke is the first way that the “theory of the forms” appears. The “forms” do not appear at all to most humans, except through the beauty of the beloved.) But to continue, when one who saw much and is fresh from the mysteries beholds a godlike face or bodily form that images or reflects beauty itself, the stream of beauty entering through the eyes gives rise to a warmth which causes the roots of the wings of the soul, once hardened, to melt and begin to grow. As in Plato’s Symposium, where love (a spirit and not a god) is the beginning of an ascent on the ladder of love, so here, love is presented as the beginning of the recovery of the wings of the soul, completed only in the philosopher.

   Each lover loves in the manner of the god in whose company he once traveled, selecting a beloved according to his disposition. Then, as if the beloved were a god, the lover fashions for himself an image, and adorns it to be the object of his worship. When the followers of Zeus find a Zeus-like disposition, aimed toward the love of wisdom and the leading of men, they do all that is possible to foster this disposition. The lover sets out on a path of following up “the trace of the nature of their own god within themselves” (252e). Fixing the gaze of their eyes onto the beloved, they reach out after the god in memory and are possessed by him, taking their ways and manners from the god as much as is possible for humans (253). But the lover attributes this not to the god, but to the beloved. In this “unconscious” activity of character formation, in which the lover does not know himself, Socrates describes the possessed activity of the lover as the drawing of droughts from Zeus, which they pour like Bacchants, onto the soul of the beloved, thus making in him the closest possible likeness to the god they worship” (253a). This following up of the trace of the god within and the drawing and pouring of drink from Zeus may be the source and function of the lyric poetry to which the lovers are inspired by the sight of the beloved. The reaching back in memory of the lover imitates the right use of recollection by which the philosopher alone recovers the wings of the soul. Hence, we say that the noble (Ta Kalon) is based upon and is an image of intellectual virtue. The “song of dialectic itself” (Republic VII, 532d), unknown to the lover, may yet be the being on which lyric love poetry is based. The capacity of the soul for this sort of love is due not to the body and its principle, but to the mind, and is due to the higher capacity of man for knowledge. In Plato’s Republic, too, legislation and character formation are based either upon the image of God (500e-501b; 484c); or on the good itself (540 a-b). The soul is of course an image of God Most High, though a kind of madness that is not divine, and does not sacrifice, repent continually, and have anything it believes in that is higher than itself, may make the error of identifying the image with the source. The same has occurred in the culmination of “modern” so called “philosophy.”

   It remains for us to convert the Platonic account of love into the terms of fertile love, and we will have the equivalent of the unified field theory sought in physics. One should already see the basis for the translation of the Biblical mysteries into the terms of philosophy, and then back again, from whence all of the knowledge of the Biblical mysteries, right up to the Bride, becomes visible. The soul is indeed the image of God- or did you think he was just kidding? Or perhaps willfully asserting the “dignity of the person?” Just as modern psychology cannot begin to approach Platonic psychology, so modern theology is a waste of time compared to philosophic theology, where reason and love do have “company.” But at least it reminds barbarians to treat the soul as a thing of dignity, perhaps even each soul endowed equally with inalienable rights, since the image of God in man is a higher thing than anything else in the creation.

   Marriage is the foundation of the family, the natural human society.* The soul by nature has the faculty of love, “romantic” love, because human societies are by nature formed this way. Man is by nature political by this root, which happens also to be our participation in the entrance of new souls into the creation. The lovers are alike in a way and complementary in a way, the masculine and feminine things, like vegetable and flower gardening, fitting together to make the whole. Their love is the crown of the rule of the household throughout life, and the happiness of the vast majority depends upon this home life, which is notoriously difficult. The way that they are alike is the basis of friendship, and so people seek a spouse that shares with them the first principles, etc. While there are several identifiable kinds, we think that homosexual love is usually the result of appetite trapped in the matter or the body, like Ariel in the pine tree, freed by Prospero. Hence those males seeking the male also seek the effeminate male, but cannot tell and become angry if one asks them why. This holds out the possibility of a higher sort of homosexual love-friendship, but also gets at why Plato and Socrates sought to purify Greek homosexual love of all ignoble and fruitless entanglement in the body, in what is hence called “Platonic” love.

   Until Shakespeare, there was no account of heterosexual or natural, fertile love to compare or compete with the Greek account, based on homosexual love in Greek custom, a thing we do not yet understand. Perhaps they had no liberally educated women. The account, though, is hidden in the Bible, where readers are surprised to find the reason for the inclusion of the Song of Solomon in holy scripture, and surprised to find that the two thousand year old prudish or puritanical understanding of all eros as sin is based on an error made by sinful souls, the Christian things treated like mere laws to lay upon the un-transformed appetites, never leading through true penance and sacrifice. But suffice it to say that the songs engendered in fertile love, as that of Orpheus for Persephone, may well excel the songs engendered by infertile love, (such as those of Sappho) which does seem to be an accidental or mistaken transposition of fertile love onto the same rather than the complementary opposite.

*Allan Bloom, in Love and Friendship, studies eros as the cause of human connectedness, and hence studies love as what connects otherwise isolated individuals to society. Modern man is of course uniquely isolated or “alienated,” and in modern political theory, man is not by nature, but by convention, social. This makes some sense of homosexual love- why it is similar regarding the family, for example containing jealousy and other things similar to the fertile love at the basis of the family. Love of this sort, called romantic as distinct from the other kinds of love, is then the root of our political nature in one sense- connecting families into villages. Exogamy distinguishes man from animals. The laws regarding these things are so ancient they are simply assumed, until they are not, and then we have no theoretical basis to restore them. We have only begun to recognize the fact of the disorder to the soul caused by the sexual abuses, and appeal to the health of the soul in fact. We- that is, our psychology- have not begun to address the reason that this exogamy and the political nature- seems so, even universally, for man. The reason is a deep mystery, but is related to our difference from the animal and our faculty to domesticate, governing the animal, as no other species does. We protect the prepubescent from the things of love which do not concern them yet, and so cannot be understood and “integrated.” The soul is as if containing an imago- the same as that first formed by the images of the parents that first tell us what a man and woman ought be- by which our political nature functions upon entering the polity at the founding of the family. The disturbance of this function in love is in one sense decisive for the individual.

   All modern political theory tries to deny that the family is natural. But there is not much evidence that man spent much time as a solitary beast. The family is older than man, beginning even with the nest. For man, the conjugal act founds the fundamental political connection of the individual to the polities, and this is why it is so mysterious, and never a mere animal act for us. As Paul writes, even one who joins with a prostitute becomes “one flesh” with the prostitute (1  Cor. 6:16). The animal appetite is for many, but the political appetite is for one, and hence follow all the truths of the heart.

L.A. Sheriffs Shoot Unarmed People When Their Car Moves

NPR had a story this morning about unarmed people being shot when their car moves during a stop. In the worst case, a  Schizophrenic person named Johnnie was shot when he was pulled over and apparently delusional, so after beating him a while they apparently tazzed him, then when his car moved first forward then back, they shot him dead, fearing that they would be run over. I’ll have to look up the video, but on the radio we hear a woman “No!” and “Johnnie.” L.A. is of course correcting the problem, and has promised better training. Johnnie is dead.

First, police with power to kill but no understanding of the Bill of Rights is beyond dangerous. These are humans, but when they get paranoid and have the power to kill, it is repeatedly disastrous. Second, we are amused that now the government is going to get all pro-active on “mental illness.” Rather than leave people alone, or consider paranoia among law enforcement, they are going to interfere with people without warrant, and try to herd them into the drug-them-all-for-profit system. Apparently, they have given up crime-fighting, which was too dangerous anyway, and given up curing genuine vice, with which they were not making making much progress, and now they are going to protect us from the schizophrenics, who are to be shot as soon as they are “non-compliant.” I am going to watch the video now, saying only that because we do not have scientific knowledge regarding what we call “mental illness,” we had better leave it alone, o we are bound to make matters much worse. Our choice in the presidential election might be between soft and hard despotism on this matter.

I just watched the video. First, let me say that I won’t bet that the family is glad to have called police. John Berry is no longer acting strangely. Second, let me commend the brilliance of the officer standing between the parked cars while his cohort is tazzing a schizophrenic who has violated no one’s rights. That is why government has no constitutional right to interfere with anyone without a reason. Third, we must of cause obey the police, and it is potentially fatal to not hear, understand or react submissively, and even that may not save you- in another video (there are so many police shootings of innocents that any particular one is hard to find) they shot two people who were sleeping in a car. Tess Owen of Vice news writes: “Sadly, this instance of police failing to deescalate a situation involving a person having a mental health crisis is not unusual. Just last Thursday, Jeffory Tevis, 50, was holding a “large metal spoon in a threatening manner” before being fatally shot by Alabama police officers.

In addition to training the Bill of Rights and how to police in a free nation, the police need training in the proper martial arts. That they could not remove the unarmed man from the car or block that deadly spoon attack in a circumstance where the person is terribly confused and not acting with criminal intent shows an over-reliance on guns, because the police do not know how to use their hands. If one were to call the governor and make such a suggestion, or indicate a teacher with experience training police, he would be simply ignored, if not up for his own evaluation. Just think what they might do if one criticized them for police shootings. Martial arts done in the right way replace the need for guns in many instances, and make it possible to hold on to one’s weapon. Even being not very good, if I were a cop I would take on a mad guy with a knife and not hurt him, as in for such shootings I have seen. Before much training, I took a swinging belt away from a 6 foot 6 skinny retarded guy. We do not believe they do not go to class at least twice a week for life. Some do, but far too few, and the abilities may be abused just like a gun. But it is the Bill of Rights that teaches cops not to have their hands busy doing what is not their business.

Only one more thing to add. NPR yesterday interviewed a hit woman who works in the Philippians, where they have elected a Trump-style, law and order tyrant. She works for a corrupt cop who uses his badge to shoot people who owe him drug money. I’m just glad that, like electing a Hitler to become chancellor in the Wiemar Republic, such a thing could never occur in America, where we have liberty and justice for all.

In Canada, nothing like these things ae occurring. All the police shooting videos seem to be U.S.A., though no one has courage to record them any longer in the Philippians.

Gloucester, Mass. Angel Program and the Epi-Pen

   Here is an example of the difficulties government has in addressing any issue. In Massachusetts, they have an angel program in which, rather than treat heroin addicts as criminals, they try to sign them up for treatment. The drug companies themselves will profit greatly from these programs, and they will send the addicts out uncured after great expense, so as not to disturb the drug dealers into reacting. Congress has considered and devoted maybe 721 million dollars to be scammed by the same dealers who scammed us on the Oxy at the start. They throw money at a problem rather than consider how the money is spent, leaving that rather to the experts in medicine and psychology who caused the problem to begin, at six figures each plus kickbacks and perks from the Oxy-dealing drug companies. Why do organized crime, when one might simple seize the law, especially from these stupid Americans who are led about by money and its fame. Crime is after all alot of trouble, and at times a bit messy, even dangerous. Meanwhile, the “Epi-Pen” was being sold for 600$, and is now available at the bargain price of only 300$, because some company has patented the antidote to heroin overdose. Hey, just do not suggest smoking weed while attempting to withdraw from heroin. And do not ask why Oxy appeared to be such an improvement upon Morphine for pain that all the doctors flocked to prescribe it. Do not ask, indeed, because the other thing in the news this morning was that- surprise- the Russians can pretty much kill anyone they want, are trying to interfere with U. S. elections, and there are a-lot of people who will do quite a bit to protect, say a 31 Billion dollar interest such as one drug company had at stake in one kind of 12 hour oxy. Oh, but do not say such things, since government has just given itself the power to judge sanity, and perhaps to seize and treat with any manner of torture prescribe-able, such as electroshock and Lobotomy, if not the chemical form then the surgical form. Indeed, Rose Marie Kennedy stopped saying those inconvenient things.

   America, it is time to wise up, and as Bernie Sanders too said, stand up. If we allow money interests to continue to subject everything human in our world, oh, because Donald Trump is the example of virtue we follow, we will be destroyed. But if we do stand up, yea, go to the source upstream where all these children are being tossed into the river, as our “Taking the Mask Off” friend Courtland Pfeiffer says, they cannot defeat us, because the American people are like Dorothy. Hillary too is like Dorothy, and we can count on her to foresee and not empower Dorothy to become Nurse Ratchett or the Great Mother, Big Mother.” And if you do not understand these words, hey, rather than try to seize and drug me, why do you not think about them a while, cause they just might mean something. After all, is not incomprehensible speech a characteristic of a category in the DSM? Ignorance, though, of the causes regarding the soul and failure to inquire, and applying a trade for money as though one did inquire, and drugging all critics, this does not yet have a category. The Shyster of Oz is our Psychology.

Mental Health Care ?

   Now we are going to have a federal government movement to treat diseases of the mind like diseases of the body. This might be a nice idea if it were possible, but is sure to become very difficult very quickly. The first problem is that we do not have a scientific psychology. We simply do not know what we are doing when it comes to psychiatry and psychology Rather, we have a bunch of overpaid pseudo-scientists ready with their DSM to categorize and judge their peers like sophomore psych students do all their personal relations. What was only annoying in the age of “therapy” is positively dangerous in the age of careless and experimental drug treatment, a resurgence of electroshock and, soon, lobotomy. And here we are back at the topic of prescription drug abuse. Many people are sure to be harmed a great deal at great profit for the drug companies. Read Julie the Mad Blogger, if you do not believe me. Her story is about to be repeated 100,000 times.

   I have written on psychology, over there in the permanent pages in the Menu, but no one is able to read the chapter. Americans just are not very interested in learning something new about the soul, but more about making money and the body. The chapter sets out an attempt at a genuine, philosophical psychology. But I can say a thousand times that our psychology does not know what it is doing, and demonstrate this with a few points and questions, but the words go in one ear and out the other. Ask them what the well-functioning soul is, and it turns out they have not ever thought about it, but simply judge “mal-function” according to suburban common sense. A matter of one’s own culture, is it? And “adaptive,” what does that mean? And our entire text-books of “abnormal” psych do not contain the word love.  Our psychology is then incapable of studying the relations the complexity of which often causes the significant crises in our lives. We do not have a knowledge of the soul that corresponds with our scientific biology at the basis of medicine, and we cannot even treat these diseases without continuous and deadly medical error, infection from the hospital, etc, so that more deaths are occurring from medical error than on the highway. Further, what if justice is the health of the soul? Is not the value free science then a bit like a physician who does not believe thee is a health of the body, but know his own profit quite well?

   I have already limited my writing because of the new program. Criticism of the government will become a category in the DSM, as will criticism of psychiatry and the drug industry. Anything extra-ordinary will be endangered, and we are of course gearing up again to trample the Bill of Rights. The powers of government to do whatever they want will be increased, and the Soviet-style branding of every government critic as insane is sure to become commonplace.

   We do indeed have serious “mental health issues” in America, but these are not the sort that can be treated without doing more harm than good. Long ago, we ought have treated the criminal desire that allows people to harm others without caring what they do, and even to profit from harming others. How we will diagnose and treat this problem is a good question, but treating mental illness might come after we treat ethical illness, to assure the ethics of those we “empower” to treat our minds.

Was Charles Whitman on Antidepressants?

What if 100% of these public shooters are on antidepressants? What if it is the same one, say, Prozac, that are involved? The question has been raised, and there is no study of it, because it is contrary to the interests of the multi-billion dollar, shareholder-profit-maximizing prescription drug industry, which has paid bought our Congress. People do not want to question modern psychiatry because they think it is what is making us safer, and no one realizes that modern psychology is not based on scientific knowledge. On the anniversary of the Austin shooting, which may have been the first of these public shootings of anonymous persons, a Texas law allowing people to carry concealed weapons on campuses went into effect. It is not clear that arming everyone is going to solve the problem, since when there is a shooting, no one with guns can respond for fear of being mistaken by the SWAT team for the shooter. It seems we are willing to try many radical measures, with the exception of questioning ourselves and our trust in modern psychiatry and the prescription drug industry.

From my privileged observation post, I know that modern psychiatry literally does not know what it is doing when it prescribes drugs to treat the human soul. There is no scientific foundation, and they know that the side effects are immense. But our ignorance of the causes leaves us trusting the “mental health professionals.” Our trust is mistaken. People who study neurology do not have knowledge of the human soul, but have not improved on common sense and fashionable opinion when they violate the rights of citizens and classify everyone according to their DSM. Just as with Freud, questioning their pet theories and diagnoses is a sign of the truth of their diagnoses. Freud called it “resistance,” a pseudoscientific term they applied to anyone who doubted their psychoanalysis. A sure sign of “schizophrenia” is to deny that one “has” it. In the Medieval days, they did this too to anyone who questioned the spiritual authorities, you know, the “mental health professionals.” Hey Joey, the priests are here to take you to summer camp!

Eric Lichtblau Discusses Surveillance on NPR’s Fresh Air

   It is very nice to know that the FBI is now unlimited in setting undercover agents on absolutely anyone, due to that nice secret FISA “court.” The Justice department and the agencies think that they do not even need a warrant, say, to commit rape for the purposes of surveillance, as I believe occurred in my own case. Everyone agrees that such things are being done, though if one asks that a particular instance be looked into, nothing will be done, and our representatives are simply intimidated. The agencies are free to stage any scene, long or short term. We consider this to be a violation of liberty which indeed requires a warrant. Again, I believe my former fiance was a person set on me due to proximity to the CIA in my education, and no one cares or will do anything about it. Billions of dollars are spent turning one third of America into spies upon another third, and this is just fine with the majority. Nothing is spent repairing damages, and these criminals, who violate our fundamental law, are never held accountable: They just keep ascending, say, to positions where they might use their practice at psychological torture. To us they say: “If you let us rape and blacklist that one person, we will keep you safe from nuclear attack and terrorism, but if you do not allow us to suspend the Bill of Rights we are sworn to uphold, why, there are just no guarantees.

   Again, I want Congress to ask, and those involved to be required to tell the truth regarding everything, now, that was ever done to me in my education and following, because it destroyed my career and chance to have a family, and was for thirty years a kind of blacklisting and psychological torture. It is likely that I did not please a professor who was also an undercover agent, or that my father was slandered by Michigan and Washtenaw County police, or that I angered the cops when I protested about weed and a woman was set on the protest, or had a Russian friend in college, or did not please the Catholic orthodoxy at my schools, or wore my hair too long, or expressed libertarian cynicism, or perhaps expressed that fourth assertion of the second sentence of the Declaration, which says it is our right and duty to overthrow our government when it ceases to secure these rights. And we will ask all these cops, too, do you believe that assertion, or not? Do you uphold that Declaration, and would rebel against tyranny if it were established over our land in subversion of our Constitution? Perhaps they can get themselves on the list, even for swearing to uphold the Constitution.

   Eric Lichtblau did not discuss the use of women or the imitation of love in spying, as this is just too sensitive yet to discuss, and of course, we do not want to reveal their Machiavellian methods to the enemy. We are a half step from genuine domestic torture, because hey, you know, one just can never be too sure.

Gnosticism

A friend and seriously good Catholic scholar, whose name I would otherwise publish, has suggested, as I myself do in my Hamlet essay, that my work is gnostic and that inquiry of this sort into the higher mysteries is dangerous. My first response was to say that Nietzsche is indeed like Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias or like Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, and I have not done much work on Nietzsche since college. Nietzsche is of course much deeper than the ancient Greek sophists, and much more harmful. We implicate these turns of modern thought in the origin of ideological tyranny, though it is a bit of an argument to demonstrate this. Nietzsche is generally well received due to reputation, and people like to repeat thoughts of his like “that which does not kill us makes us stronger.” But these thinkers, like the ancient sophists, hold that tyranny is the good for man, power the important goal of human endeavor. My work, in its explicitness, is a theoretical response to Machiavelli and Nietzsche, and my suggestion is that without some such basis, Catholic and Platonic thought in modernity does not have a response, nor any way to stop diabolism from taking over politics.

Gnostic is of course a word based upon the ancient Greek word Nous, translated variously, but we use the word intellect. It is different from the faculty commonly known as reason, and the two are gradually distinguished in Plato’s Republic. Logistike or calculation is used by us as an instrument when the soul is ordered to seek other goals, but for the intellect, the first principles both theoretical and practical are its proper objects. It is called the eye of the soul. The heretical gnostics considered for example by St. Ireneus spun imaginative cosmologies, going along with the two-thousand year post platonic effort to know being directly, the way we know the outside world. Following Leo Strauss, we keep much of the Platonic replacement for materialist cosmology, the theory of the ideas, and talk of light and word from the sixth book of Plato’s Republic, but we think that Leo Strauss has opened the way to a new effort, an attempt to know being by reflection in the human things and in the soul as an image of God, so we pursue this indirect effort, called political philosophy.

St. John is also called a “gnostic,” and we adhere to this Johannine gnosticism. In the first and third chapters of the gospel of John, the word that was in the beginning was made flesh and dwelt among us. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” John writes that although he came to his own home, his people did not receive him…

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power (or liberty, exousian)to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Hence we say that Nous is a thing begotten, and that this is different from the created reason. We think that Plato knew and taught this very thing, when he writes that intelligence and truth are begotten in the soul (Republic 490b, etc). Since this is in each, but is nascent or not yet awakened, we say with Jung that it is “in” the “unconscious.” Nietzsche’s “In the body is the great reason” is a perversion of nous. Hence, the ability to receive the faculty is in the soul, and can be inverted. But in its proper or natural form, it is the soul reborn, the very myster:y referred to by John in chapter 3:,

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit…Are you a teacher of all Israel, and yet you do not understand this?

Unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

So our “gnosticism” is like that of the reborn Christians, though we teach that this is not something one does by going through the ritual of baptism on the Church calendar, nor by receiving the Lord as your personal savior, nor indeed by anything that can be done by the will of man. It is not by convention, but by nature, and occurs through penance and a natural process, which opens the eye of the soul to the things of heaven. We say it is a natural process because Socrates and Plato were reborn in this sense, though of course they did not have access to the Christ made flesh or the Biblical teachings. And I suppose this is what the Catholics and Baptists will find objectionable and call heretical gnosticism. So let it be, as long as we are clear. We say that the sacraments are a “copy and a shadow” of the true things that do indeed happen to the soul, and that is our Christian-Platonic psychology.

Second, we refer to Ephesians 5, where Paul says of marriage:

“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church…

The profound mystery indicates that the fundamental things of metaphysics are accessible for us through the image of God in man, or that, as Leo Strauss says, “the human things are the key to understanding all things.” We oppose this metaphysics to that of the Johnnies, who talk with great mystery and secrecy of the “Diad” or the fundamental two of the cosmos, heaven and earth or the inside and outside of the Cave in Plato’s allegory. We think the wedding of the Bride and Lamb, alluded to in the 19th chapter of the Revelation, is superior metaphysics, though the supposed opposition between “faith” and “reason” prevents the philosophers from considering such things, which they know ahead of time to be merely parts of our civil religion. We can give some answer to the question of why marriage is sacred or why murder is wrong (Genesis 1:26; 9:6), whereas they, from their metaphysics must simply let humanity descend into lawlessness.

So my critics, if they can stand these dangerous heights, when they look up from their Nietzsche and Machiavelli, might give an account of just why such “gnosticism” is heretical or harmful to the soul. Indeed, as Plato’s Socrates too teaches, anyone for whom the eye of the soul is opened and he begins to see the things of heaven will be considered mad by those around him, and our psychology will surely get out their DSM and seek to drug this thing, the very health of the soul that is the first principle of psychology. We seek a psychology that will teach them to be more moderate, and stop doing this, “Stop drugging my people.”