Any attempt to perfect the world, or to perfect justice, invariably destroys both.

I remain politically uncomfortable as a voter in the United States two-party system.

I find the Democratic party to be too married to (and increasingly comprising) so-called “Social Justice Warriors” whose oversimple morality and intellectual laziness is often counterproductive to the real search for justice, which hangs on an object whose nature has been debated in diverse philosophical and ethics literatures for thousands of years. These to the exclusion of those that are concerned with the more world-critical problems of environmental and social systems and state, of wealth distribution and inequality, of the administration of society and the provision of a social safety net. Today’s Democratic party reminds me far too much of the mobs of campus twenty-somethings that are on the rove today in search of “microaggressions” to denounce.

Meanwhile, the Republican party is simply infantile and petulant. In theory, there ought to be something to the notion that there is much to be lauded and conserved in civilization and society, and thus, something to the notion of conservatism itself, with the practicable question being just what the proper threshold is in each dimension and on each issue. But in fact the Republican party seems to have fallen victim to an even more oversimple morality and even more slothful forms of intellectual laziness, and has become little more than a club of malcontents who identify with one another based on a few now pat “positions” that are in truth mere contrarian slogans, bizarre fantasies about the blissful human past, and petulant pokes at those who aren’t members of the club.

Who, meanwhile, is going to focus on matters of state and society, of environment and progress, of resource distribution and allocation, of the general administration of the social apparatus?

Nobody. Nobody is sincerely discussing, much less selling, such questions and issues to the electorate as primary or even as meaningful. It appears that the electorate has no appetite (or perhaps no knowledge) of these things that, in fact, inform the natures their future lives far more than others. Democracy has become impotent because the citizen has in general become blind to the very existence of the polis as an conceptualizable object.

Meanwhile, voters like me hold loosely to the Democratic party for lack of a better practicable alternative, wishing all the while that someone would try to actually steer this boat and keep it from taking on water. But for the moment, the task of the day appears to be for the passengers on the boat to organize themselves into cliques and to denounce one another for their manners, habits, prejudices, and affiliations.

Meh.

Double meh.

— § —

Punditry, analysis, and public discourse have become similarly inane.

There was a time when we could hear Christopher Hitchens debate William F. Buckley, Jr. Whatever one thought of the ideas, the debate was nuanced, historical, and stimulating.

Now we are stuck with the likes of Charles Krauthammer and Kristina vanden Heuvel, who are both equal parts pious and facile.

Drudgery. Blech.

“You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”
         — Björk

— § —

Too much. I have reached the saturation point in reading psychological literature. It is time for me to take a break.

I have learned a great deal, but would hesitate to talk much more about it here. And that hesitation is the basic crux of any maladjustment problems that I personally might have. I suppose at some level, I’ve always known it; that’s why this blog has always been such a touchstone for me.

It is the venue in which I work out my relationship to any negative feelings about life that I have, and in which I can observe either how far toward repressing these negative feelings or how far toward reactively overexpressing them (a swinging pendulum with which many are familiar) I am during a given phase of my life.

During repressing, the blog looks too neutral and detached, yet I’m afraid to use it honestly, so it doesn’t communicate everything about me that I wish I could communicate to the world. In other words, during repressing, the blog becomes a paradoxical way of silencing myself, reflective of the way that I silence myself in real life.

During overexpressing, the blog is a wild roller-coaster, yet when people compare it to me, they say that they don’t get why my blog is so out there but I seem well-adjusted and regular. In other words, during overexpressing, the blog becomes an split-off-from-real-life venue into which I toss extremes of positivity and negativity that I suspect aren’t quite right.

In the middle of the two extremes, the blog represents me more or less accurately, is moderately positive or negative at appropriate times, and more or less reflects how I interact with and relate to people in real life on a day-to-day basis in more or less healthy honesty, and with a more or less integrated self.

It’s kind of like a slow-moving health gauge that can’t be rationalized away. “How am I doing?”

Right now, the pendulum has swung toward repressing, and it has been there for some time—probably since around 2008 or 2009.

I can see this (and have for some time) but I can’t overcome it yet. But one of the things the blog also does is give me a venue of possibility in which to work on it, on any given day.

— § —

The happiest and healthiest periods of my life have been just after launching large, self-directed, self-expressive projects in new environmental and social contexts. (Both stints in graduate school and the final “get it done” year as an undergraduate are obvious examples of these phases in my life.) I invariably thrive in these for a while, make many new friends, experience flow and joy and world-openness, and am massively creative, smart, and productive. Then, I tend to get bogged down, narrowing my world to just one or two people and just a few details and from there things tend to go wrong, and my creativity, productivity, and fulfillment also tend to collapse.

“Healthiest” in this case does not just refer to cognitive or emotional life, but to physical life as well. During these high points in my life, I have been the most comfortable in my own skin, and have felt the clearest integration between physiological states and cognitive-emotional states.

— § —

Right now I’d say that I’m mostly okay and things are going pretty pretty well, but I am still struggling to climb toward “my best and happiest me” once again—to find my mojo once again.

Hopefully that will come, but it’ll probably take a year or three.

But I do have to take a break from reading for a little while. It starts to make a person dizzy.