Today’s topic comes from one of Gordon White’s posts on his runesoup blog.  He talks about maintaining emotional coherence in the face of, as he puts it, “where we are on the timeline.”  There is a significant amount of emotional manipulation out there, and not just on social media algorithms.  Take your basic mainstream media news website, and look at the top headlines.  A majority of the time, the majority of the top headlines are about, let’s see here, death, shooting, murder, rioting, war, threats of war, bankruptcy, violence, rape, and people not feeling safe.  Death, fear, anger, and outrage.  Now, I don’t know about you, but here in upper-middle-class suburbia in a deep blue county of the left coast of the United States, those are things which I don’t experience a lot of in person.  99.95% of the deaths I’ve experienced or witnessed in my lifetime have been on screens, through the news, through movies and tv shows, through social media stories.  This is one part of the emotional manipulation that surrounds me every day, which I must maintain emotional coherence against.  There’s a reason that Nassim Taleb mentions in his book, Antifragile, that consumption of the daily news is toxic.  Staring at it from a bird’s eye view, it is!

Today is a day where a bunch of my friends are planning to drink tons of alcohol.  They are unhappy about the election of Donald Trump in the United States.  I’ve got a couple better ways to handle my unhappiness over things outside my control than drowning my sorrows.  I have a need to maintain my ability to make good decisions, for my children’s sake, and for my own sanity.

What does emotional coherence look like?  It looks like Neville Longbottom, calmly refusing to perform the Cruciatus curse on first years when Snape is Headmaster of Hogwarts.  His Death-Eater Professor of Defense Against The Dark Arts demands it of him, but this is a line he will not cross, even under pain of torture.  Recall that Neville’s parents reside in St. Mungo’s hospital, driven insane by the Cruciatus curse.  He knows where that path leads, and he refuses to go further down it.  He stands there with his wand at his side, and says “no.”  If he were put in Milgram’s Experiment or the Stanford Prison Experiment, he wouldn’t go along with authority past where he decided was his line in the sand.

It looks like calm courage.  When the Death-Eaters take over the Ministry of Magic, when your mudblood friends are rounded up and have their wands taken away, and dementors torment them, emotional coherence is a Patronus charm against the fear and despair.  Let me tell you, the Death-Eaters throughout history are always taking over the Ministry of Magic, cyclically.  At the risk of violating Godwin’s law, history is filled with Ivan the Terrible, with Rasputin, with slavemasters and religious leaders who purchase your children and force them to do terrible things in the name of empire, as much as it is filled with benevolent government types, at all scales, from world-dominating trade federations to tribes and families.  It is filled with psychopathic bosses who love to torture their employees because they seem to think that it gets them more power.  That’s just the way things work on Earth.  Good versus evil was never a monolithic fight.  Yet, history is also filled with people who stood up to the Death-Eaters and dementors, and said “no.”  History has people who didn’t believe what their psychopathic bosses told them they were, because they knew better, because they were rooted in something greater than their bodies.

One of the things that makes animism work better than the other options, is its ability to provide emotional coherence in ways that the other major options don’t.  After all, Nassim Taleb also liked judging worldviews based on whether they worked, not whether the theory was pretty and looked good in a philosophy textbook.  Strict Materialists tend to run into problems with being aware of mythological opportunities for ways to live which have worked for over 10,000 years.  Monotheists tend to run into problems with understanding that there are more than one right way to live, more than two sides to the War in Heaven, more than one spirit to talk to and gain insight from.  With animism, you can talk to your ancestors about your emotions.  You can talk to the deities, and give your idiotic and/or corrupt government officials to them to use as playthings as they see fit in propitiation.  You can talk to trickster spirits and make deals.  You can talk to the local river spirit and have them wash away your fear and anger.  It just works better, in my opinion.  However, I understand that people believe different things than I do.  That’s great, actually.  Diversity of belief within and between worldviews is a good thing.  You can take whatever methods work for you, and leave the rest for somebody else.

I’ve been trying to think of ways for people to remain emotionally calm in the midst of whenever life sends them pain and suffering, as it always does.  You have to be able to have a core of stillness so that you can make good and effective decisions.  If you’re swayed too much by the news, by the emotional manipulation surrounding you at all times, how can you make good decisions from a place of burning anger that blinds you to your opportunities?

The first method is simple.  Emotionally manipulate yourself back by using music.  When you have the time, create a playlist of songs that make you feel a certain way.  They can even be blatant propaganda stuff like Let It Go.  It’s your emotional response, so you can use it how you like.

From there, your options get a bit more complex.  Ian “Cat” Vincent mentioned the Litany Against Fear from Dune.  He also mentioned a method where you imagine a sphere of white energy inside of you that pushes all of the darkness and badness outside of it and expand it until it is outside of your skin.  I like this one, because it helps you remember that your core is a calm place, and the anger you show on the outside when you tell people or other entities to fuck off is not who you are.  Who you are and what you do are not the same thing.

Basic mindfulness meditation will work wonders.  Even if it is only a minute a day, making time to let your thought go do their thing while you watch them dispassionately will help a lot.  Too many people are afraid of self-reflection.  Yet, self-reflection is where you have to go to recognize when you are feeding your fears and anxiety instead of feeding your passion, pride, and acceptance.  Meditation is the space in which you get to choose your emotional state.  Choosing your emotional state takes practice.  When you’ve gotten sufficient practice in choosing your emotional state, you can start to look at some of your triggering memories, things that make you ashamed, things that make you hypervigilant even without any danger in the present.

Once you’ve figured out how to choose your emotional state, you can anchor that state to something.  Some people use candles, and carry around a picture of a candle to look at.  Some people use water.  Every time they touch or drink water, they go back to a state of calm determination or calm comfort without fear.  People have carried lucky stones around with them, or anchored there emotion in touching the ground with their feet.  The hippy version would be breathing in the calm grounding energy from the ground up through your feet and throughout your body, and then breathing the panicked frightened energy back down into the ground through your feet.  The Buddhist version is to anchor the state of calm with your breath.  That way your lucky stone will never leave you.  You can anchor it to tapping your fingers, touching wood, throwing salt over your shoulder, various chakras on your body, doesn’t matter.  Pick something that works for you.

You’ll always be a little bit afraid.  That’s a good thing.  Fear is a gift that should not be cut from you.  Good fishermen are always a little bit afraid of the ocean.  That’s how they’ve learned to respect her capricious whims and live.  You’ll always be outraged at the horrors that happen, when Ghengis Khan sweeps through your village and kills so many.  Yet, you don’t have to feed these the rest of the time.  Being overwhelmed with grief has its place, being hypervigilant has its place, being righteously anger has its place, or these things would not be in our ancient myths.  These things shouldn’t overwhelm you, and need not either.  Use all of your senses, write down stories that enhance your other emotions, the ones you want to focus on instead.  Sing silly songs that make you cry with joy.  Spend time with your friends doing stuff that makes you laugh.  These memories are the core of the Patronus charm, the thing that keeps you out of the pit of utter despair, that reminds you of just how courageous, kind, loving, honorable, wise, and cunning you are or can be when you choose to be.

In this week’s Archdruid report, Mr. Greer claims that the peak oil movement has failed.  My friends and I were discussing this, and we seem to be having a couple disagreements on the topic.  Some of them accept his assertion, that because the organized aspects of the movement, like The Oil Drum, and The Energy Report, and Matt Savinar’s news aggregation and forum are no longer with us as thriving and functional places to learn more about whatever it is peak oil forum members like to learn, that the movement has failed.  Some of my friends, however, dispute it.  Those of my friends who are Deep Green or other kinds of activists, have not failed, at least not on balance.  Standing Rock has not failed.  Remember POSIWID?  The Purpose of a System is What it Does?  If something has changed as a result of it, then it is not a failure, because it did something, regardless of whatever utopian ideals the founders may have started out with.

Right now, there are a bunch of people in the first world, in the technocrat class, who seem to believe that the purpose of humans is to shoot rockets with themselves off into space and colonize other planets.  They have the utter hubris to declare, that if humans never leave Earth and successfully colonize other planets, then our entire existence upon the Earth was for nothing.  That it was a waste, and worthless.  That the entire human history was a complete and utter failure.  That should really make you ponder a lot on what they value, and on what they think is real.

I, too, believed in it for a very short period of time.  It is a tempting notion, after all, to think that procreation, that drive to survive no matter what, is the thing that humans should value.  It is a driving myth in our culture, right up there with that urge to stick as many humans onto the planet as possible, because we’ve cheated death, or claimed victory over it, or some such nonsense.  If, however, you step just a little bit to the side, and look at the life after death studies, or the morphic resonance stuff, or the telepathic field studies, and hold the notion that humans are more than merely their bodies, and there are a lot of different ways you can expand upon that notion, then death of the species is not something to be afraid of, and is not a failure.

You see, if people have immortal souls, and only wear physical bodies for such a very short period of time, then continuation of this particular line of physical bodies just isn’t all that important.  If souls can incarnate into vast networks of fungi, hundreds of miles long, or trees with miles of intertwined roots, or bees, or mountains, or rivers, or planets, or suns, or entire galaxies, why would I be worried about the extinction of any one particular species?  The fungi have already hopped aboard the mars rover, in perfectly space-proof spores, and have spread their seeds across the surface of the moon, mars, and will make their way (again) to the stars.  When the fungi have need of us again, on the other planets, they’ll slowly evolve the soil and the bacteria and the atmosphere and the ecosystems to sustain hominid lifeforms again.  And even if they did not, do you really think that a whole bunch of immortal souls who had need of physical bodies for whatever their purposes were in having physical bodies, couldn’t create another planet or ever another Universe and start all over again if they needed to?

In that light, I can’t consider the Peak Oil Movement to be a failure.  It brought together a whole bunch of people who talked about choosing technologies, and better ways of doing things, and shared experiences of their failures with others so they would not have to also fail.  It made a lot of people question their news sources, way before today’s “fake news,” as some members could share their experiences in actual failed police states with government propaganda news as the only news allowed on the radio and on the television, and in the newspapers.  It didn’t fail.  It decentralized.  Which is what you should do too.  99% of the news these days just plain isn’t about you.  It doesn’t concern you.  It doesn’t affect you.  Fail to be informed about the stuff you can’t do anything about and doesn’t affect your life.  Seek multiple sources and deeper information about the stuff that does affect you, and you can do something about.

Ah, identity politics, combined with infantilization. Deadly combo. Let me explain a little bit: Identity politics is part of the divide and conquer game that is part of The Rescue Game. Here, we have The Previously Enslaved, and The Previous Enslavers. Oh wait! None of them were actually enslaved or owned slaves in their lifetime (corporate wage-slaves not included). So forcing one group of non-existent people to pay reparations by law to another group of non-existent people just isn’t the way you let go of the past and become friends, part of the global community.

Next, we’ll play The Marginalization Game. I’m part of a marginalized group. And so are you. And, oh gosh, so is that person. Hmm, wait, if I’m reading this correctly, every single one of your friends is part of a Marginalized Group, and should receive governmental help to reverse their Marginalization! Equality of Outcome is what we demand! Not equality of opportunity. Even though equality of outcome is not even marxist. As in, not even Marx was dumb enough to demand that. He only demanded that people’s needs get met, and meeting their needs doesn’t ever lead to an equality of outcome. It’s like the joke where No Child Left Behind becomes Every Child Left Behind. Equality of Outcome leads to the lowest common denominator. Which, as we know, is pretty darn low, and the 1% is always excluded.

Finally, we’ll play The Infantilization Game. Let’s talk about safety for a moment. Safe spaces are for babies. Safety pins are for babies. Warning labels on your hot coffee are for babies. Assumption of risk forms warning you that you might die on the Disneyland ride, yup, for babies. Wouldn’t it be a whole lot nicer if we had, you know, empowerment instead of safety? If we taught our kids critical thinking in schools instead of mindless memorization of facts and maths strategies? If we assumed that people took responsibility for themselves instead of needing 24/7 watching and coddling lest we hurt ourselves? Then, a 9 year old could be left at a park while the mom goes to a job interview. Then, a 9 year old can run their home business successfully. You, uh, do realize that there are 9 year olds who successfully own and run businesses out there, don’t you? So why can’t they be left home alone? If your daughter is openly carrying heat into the bathroom, why would it be a problem if a Congresscritter is in there with her? See what I mean about empowerment?

Death comes for us all. Let’s meet it as warriors, not as babies. Let’s meet death as a lady, with grace and dignity, not as a baby who can’t be trusted to make decisions or tell the truth.

We’re all special snowflakes. Made out of unobtainium, and capable of dampening any bad vibrations thrown at us. Just like Captain America’s shield.

Diversity is highly related to stability. If you have only one source for something, say, potatoes for food, then eventually you’re going to have a potato famine. If, on the other hand, you have diverse sources for food, then even if the potato blight takes all of your potatoes, then your chickens and dandelions and apples and hops and barley are still healthy, and therefore so are you. If you only have one source for electricity, then any interruption leads to instability. If, on the other hand, you have more than one source, then you are not completely destroyed when the main electrical grid goes offline for a week during the ice storm.  If you have only one source of friends, for example your job or your church, then when they fire you or shun you, you have no social network.  If, on the other hand, you have a wide variety of friend sources, who hold a wide diversity of political views, then should you be a part of a marginalized group, you’ll be protected from the worst of it.

Diversity is generally regarded to be one of those investment strategies that rich people use to hedge their bets.  Some people only invest in total stock market index funds.  Some people, on the other hand, use the barbell strategy to diversify their portfolio, with a good percentage in money market funds or treasury bonds, and a much smaller percentage in individual stocks.  Most people think it is a bad idea to only hold the stock of the corporation you work for and nothing else.

Diversity inside of a community is very important as well.  We can’t all be farmers.  We can’t all be breastfeeding mothers.  We can’t all be crotchety old geezers who tell the best moral hazard stories.  Some of us are always going to work harder than others.  In no way are we all supposed to be equal in status, equal in income, equal in work capacity, equal in tools we get to use, equal in access to the community funds, or equal in education.  Outcome based equality just isn’t something that works on a small community scale.  Equality of opportunity is better, but, still doesn’t fit the harmonious community model.  Not really.  Some people just can’t sing, and some people taught themselves to play an instrument at a young age.  There is quite the diversity of talents amongst any community.  Some people talk to the plants and get them to grow.  Some people are healers.  Some people are warriors.  A lot of people are all of these, if they chose to be, if that is what the community needed them to develop.  The community rarely needs uniformity, and it rarely needs strict conformity in language and behavior.  However, communities also need to not be completely chaotic.  The things communities don’t allow, usually come about through time and pressure.  Diversity between communities is also necessary, because climates and resources vary from place to place.

I live in deep blue State territory.  Most of my friends are city democrats, but not all of them.  My friends also include republicans, anarchists, libertarians, greens, and deep greens.  A bunch of the city democrats are very unhappy with Trump’s election win.  I would imagine that this is because they are convinced that women’s rights and other minority rights are going to go back to the dark ages, and that they are going to lose their medical insurance again.  There are, however, a lot deeper problems going on.  There are problems that have to do with environmental destruction, trade warfare, actual warfare, and financial shenanigans that make Bear Stearns and Enron look like a walk in the park.  What solutions do I propose, my friends ask?  Some of them are desperate, on the brink of medical bankruptcy.  Some of them have been harassed by racially profiling police officers since birth.  Some of them have watched their friends go from employed, to not employed, still searching for a job after 3 years.  Some of them have watched the local trees shrivel up and die and are concerned that the people will do the same.

Solutions depend on what the problems actually are.  Some of them are wicked problems, which have no solutions.  Some of them, on the other hand, do have totally accessible solutions.  As of 2013, there are just over 3000 counties in the United States. All of those counties have Sheriffs. Those sheriffs are the boots on the ground in enforcing, or Not Enforcing, as the case may be, the federal laws. It is the Sheriffs who confiscate or don’t confiscate guns, who prosecute or don’t prosecute hate crimes, and who have the boots on the ground capability to protect their local rivers from trespassing oil pipeline construction companies.

Furthermore it is the cities and counties who are leading the way in banning or calling moratoriums on fracking. It is on the local level that women take back the night. It is on the local level that protestors prevent nuclear power plants from being built on seashores and earthquake fault lines (or both, bless their hearts). It is on the local level that people protect their neighbors from harassment by those who think that Trump’s election allows them to harass and hate. It is on the local level that mosques and churches are protected from arson, that the hungry are fed, and the sick are healed, and the orphans find homes, and the widows find community and social support and jobs and childcare. It is on the local level that actual news can be shared, by people who don’t have agendas to knowingly lie to you by their editors. It is on the local level that direct action can be taken to protect your landbase, by people with skin in the game, people who have something to lose.