Taking Nihilism Seriously as Republican Politics

Nihilism easily defined is that death to all is preferable to any opponents' continuity. To wit, the nihilist doesn't want to die but has every arsonist's instinct and especially the desire to burn his opponent's house down with them in it. If possible, such death must include cruelty to confer pleasure because the true nihilist might wear the facade of calm but is, in fact, pathological. Nihilists are bullies, cowards, creeps, so they want to get rich and bluster and will use any excuse not to put themselves in any danger.

I think it's important to take nihilism seriously these days. When Trump talks about not conceding defeat, carrying on past eight years, or McConnell calls himself with rye disdain the Grim Reaper we are looking at nothing less. When William Barr, mistaken for a patriot and institutionalist, along with Rob Rosenstein, becomes the toady of an authoritarian, we are looking at nihilism. When Robert Mueller can't see that _his_ team doesn't have any rules but winning, he is a naive and complicit nihilist. When Jerome Powell takes the job at the Fed, he's not looking for more money (he's rich, of course), he likes the power and prestige even if it means working for the nihilists---and so concedes any decency we might otherwise suspect. Nihilism needs allies. It has plenty in grifting Wall Street, religious hypocrites, racists, misogynists, there's no lack of quislings and players.
Let us review the possibilities: I think in her last several appearances that Senator Warren knows that the Republicans are nihilists: that they will burn down the republic simply to thwart Democrats having any power whatsoever. She knows that they are evil because, well, they are. She can't quite go so far as to say it that way, because that would be impolitic. The problem with even good politicians is that to remain viable they must not be impolitic, that is, they must lie self-consciously so as not to tip the boat. But we know she knows. She knows that she would face nothing, _NOTHING_ but gridlock, brazen contempt, and intractable insolence to every proposal.

When Biden makes this pitch about breaking the fever, working with Republicans, we can't help but feel he is sincere and also dead wrong, embarrassingly so. Americans' instinct for the irenic is not misplaced entirely. You see, realizing that you have to live with your opponents because you can't actually eliminate them is part of understanding nihilism and why you don't want to be that. Everyone burns but burning it down is never really a good idea. Civil wars are like revolutions: too many people die and they should be avoided, somehow, until the very very very last. So, I'm more disappointed and embarrassed by Biden's views than I am appalled.

If Trump wins again, this American experiment is entirely over. It would sure be nice that we actually do something about Republican nihilism rather than just have more Obama-gridlock-obstructionism that merely slows it down. We need some even longer history to consider further how nihilism has become the official Republican philosophy.

Mahabharata gnomes---I count myself among them---know that goodness can never quite carry the day to the satisfaction of those who love goodness and wish it would. The most devoted and diligent will be disappointed because Their Idealism is like the Absolute or Certainty, or Anything Else With A Capital Letter---it doesn't really exist because the other side cannot be eliminated. To vanquish one's opponents is never to eradicate or erase since that would not only reduce the winner to same villainy, it is impossible. Resist finally, particular those that propose solutions.

Now just because you can't _really_ win the way you might want to win (until you really think about it...), doesn't mean that the other side will ever relent or engage in any meaningful compromise. Just because the villains are on their heels doesn't mean they will suddenly become reasonable. In fact, even if they are largely defeated and represent extreme, outlier views that the majority wholly rejects means nothing to them. They will use whatever power they have to thwart, impede, deny, reject, dodge, duck, outwit, and otherwise ruin their opponents---at any cost. Any.

It is a feature of the true nihilist that he (nearly always a "he" though we might make exception for, say, the likes of SHS or Marsha Blackburn, et.al.) has no scruples, no difficulty or hesitancy in carrying forward his agenda. That agenda is: my way or death to all. That ruin means to leave him alive and in power because he is at heart a coward but it must ruin his opponent for good, with cruelty a feature not a mere dividend.

It is this determination of the nihilist philosophy that links the likes of McConnell (and I submit any of the others) to Trump. They share nihilism's most prurient aspirations. And to make good on that adjective (<---prurient), I submit it was deliberate: they wanna fuck you, no matter what. Not in a good way, ever. Forgive my own unchaste language but I have no reason to not be impolitic---I'm never running for anything. I do think we need to be running towards the facts.

Contrariety as Method and "Goal"

I've recently laced into the idea the spiritual life has final goals (or goals at all), that it is a pursuit of happiness. But this can lead to a few mistaken impressions including that we are advancing the idea that discontent is for its own sake, that this process makes us more "unhappy," and that we are rejecting outright goals or meaning. Let's start with a resounding no to each of these suggestions.

*Discontent is not a goal nor is it for its own sake. We may however generate a certain discontent or discomfort because that's what it takes to keep learning.

*The idea isn't to be more unhappy much less to generate any unhappiness. It is to say that "happy" can be in the way, a positive obstacle, to deeper inquiry. We have to take the world as we find it, not as we wish it were---that is the starting point.

*Goals, be they outcomes or process, are not in anyway a "bad" thing. Goals mark success and success is a fine thing---albeit not the end but the beginning of the contrariety method. To put it more radically, goals are mundane in comparison to the deeper, unfinishable, provisional, deeply engaging work of inquiry. "Inquiry" means any serious pursuit be that an action or an understanding. You might be building bicycles or reading Sanskrit, thus anything worth doing that fosters your imagination and curiosity is an inquiry. There is no more worthwhile an inquiry than self-inquiry: who are you, how have you been made, how do you make yourself, what are your relationships? Goals are like milestones but the road is not made by milestones, it is merely marked that way. Carry forward.

So now I will repeat some of what's been said elsewhere for the sake of putting some clarification into one place.

The method we're discussing I call 'contrariety', partially in homage to Hitchens from whom I stole the term but also because I can't quite find another that captures my meaning. It's not being merely petulant or disagreeable. And while

I haven't read the book (and so I'm not commenting on it), it likely stands in contrast to "The Subtle Art of Not Giving Fuck." Though I am intrigued by the title, I'm not suggesting being in any way disengaged from the acts or the consequences. Even when one acts on principle, one can still very much suffer the consequences---those "fruits of action" do matter, no matter what is said about bypassing them. There's a real difference between engaging and somehow disregarding consequences for an action preferred.

The thesis I'm making works has four principal points:

1*If we want the best things in life, like love, we will suffer, we will necessarily grieve.

2*It is not in happiness that we find out the most about ourselves but in the deeper exploration of the relationship we have between happiness and our shadows. And in that process, everything that remains or is suppressed into the shadows only leads to less satisfaction with life.

3*When we study, when we are really learning, we have to ask the uncomfortable questions. If we only ask the questions we can we never find out what more we could know. This can prove disturbing, of course, but asking the best questions is not a pursuit of happiness, it is a pursuit of discovery.

4*The strife, frustration, or uncertainty we feel is not only a part of the process of the best kinds of learning, it is demonstrable proof of learning. You learn more at the frontier of your competencies and that is often daunting, scarce, anxiety producing, and fearful. It can be hard to go there, harder still to sustain that kind of process but it is in the prospects of failure and continued experimentation that we grow.

None of these things is not giving a fuck nor is it the same as Krishna's advice to act without regard to the fruits of action. All of these things create some degree of stress and further complication that may not prove "happy." There is plenty of time in life, hopefully, to "back off" some, take a vacation. There are other kinds of stress, anxiety, and uncertainty that are not as constructive---including bypassing these kinds of contrariety methods.

I am further suggesting that these strategies for inquiry and exploration _are_ a "spiritual" path, or maybe _the_ spiritual path that lies at the heart of what I was taught. To make that clear allow me another brief contrast.

*Indian yoga traditions make three points. First, they agree that our human condition is deeply problematic. They call this samsara and tell us that things go amiss either of their own accord or by our making, and so we necessarily suffer. Second, they posit the _solution_ to samsara that they all call (one way or another) liberation. The various traditions do _not_ agree on the description of liberation, only that it solves samsara. Liberation can be oneness, emptiness, god identity, god submission, and on and on. Third, they posit methods and processes by which to identify samsara and arrive at liberation. These include actions, external and internal, altering or establishing intentions, ideas, or feelings; understandings or knowledge and then commitments such as vows or love or other strategies of devotion.

*These yoga traditions all aim to solve samsara either completely or in part. Since there is no way to refute someone's experience, it is fair to say that all of these forms of final liberation are rightly called religious or mystical claims.

Now onto Rajanaka.

*Rajanaka does not dispute the claims or terms of samsara. We agree that suffering is not an end unto itself, that we humans prefer less and that to create more suffering is equally unhealthy.

*Suffering however cannot be overcome, bypassed, or somehow solved. So Rajanaka rejects all claims to final liberation by nearly any traditional definition. This is such heresy that it means we may no longer be "Hindus" but the Vedic life posited no such liberation, only methods to love life. Love your life is our aim. This isn't always happy or pleasant, not by a long shot.

*Loving life includes loving, loving will entail suffering and certainly grief, anxiety, fear, loss, and the rest that are clearly part of samsara.

*Diminishing suffering is not the same as overcoming it. Sometimes we want less, sometimes we ask for more (like when we love).

*Rajanaka affirms the methods of yoga (part three above) but for the purposes outlined in the previous note---exploration, discovery, inquiry that does not conclude or have final results (only provisional, unfinished results). Keep lovin' your life, even when you know it's hard.

Got Rant? Why Happiness and Its Pursuit Are Overrated

Allow me to be contrarian. You were expecting?  Let's start by saying that happiness is way, way overrated. I can think of 330 million things I would rather pursue than happiness. That makes me damn near unAmerican and certainly no one ever mistook me for a Buddhist but for my love of metaphysical annihilation at death.   This all started when some lovely person put up a meme about how success is not happiness but that happiness is success.  Who could disagree?  Let's try.

That notwithstanding I will still make the case that happiness is largely soporific banality. You can do better if you want. You might not.  That’s okay if that’s what you want.  For my part,  I could mostly care less about happiness except when it’s a reprieve from real life. I want as few reprieves as possible.

Leave it to Buddhists and Americans to make life about happiness and its pursuit. I'm decidedly of the opinion that Hindus are inordinately influenced by their own autochthonous heretics and that's why they take up the subject at all and, as we see here, link it to success. If Hindus listened to their hearts they'd know far better that this happiness thing is just a salve, a temporary at best or at worst escapist notion that removes you from life.

Real life ain't happy and isn't about it. Real life wants love and love hurts. Real love longs and aches and seeks intimacy and fails most of the time, but somehow it's worth it. Reality doesn't give one fuck about your happiness and neither should you, except when you really need it just to take the edge off the stuff that really matters more, like love and death and friendship and justice and war and sex and.  Add here whatever gets you going.

In much of the Hindu life success is not only more valued than happiness but the two are not much connected. Hindus are driven as much by duty as by any sense of pleasure or even well-being: one does what one must and should, what one is called to do, what needs be done. That this may be redolent with some kind of joy or pleasure, that we might actually _like_ it is usually secondary at best. 

Of course we can pursue pleasure as such---aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, even personal---and that can be an end in itself and so can be done successfully (or less so), but if that is happiness then it is too a matter of happiness being not for its own sake but as part of a structure of objectives. In other words, it is a happy thing to do something well, including feel pleasures (like loving poetry for example), and so it is happy to be successful just as one can be successfully happy.

But my point is that just _being happy_ is not much of a thing for Hindus until you get to that deeply introverted, staring into metaphysics sorta' thing. Meh. Cosmic happiness is pure banality as far as I am concerned, just more soporific nostalgia for a something that is more narcotic than awakening. Lots of people want that bliss, that primordial check out, lots of Hindus, just not me.  I would personally prefer something that is much more interesting---that is, that really heats you up---or something important---that is that slows you down, arrests you---to anything happy as such.  I could think of nothing worse than "unconditional" happiness or bliss.  Yawn.  Fergittaboutit.  Can we go for a bike ride, read an impossible book, fall in love, try to make interesting music? Anything?  Just not bliss.  Not Self.  Not Brahman. Not nirvana.  Just stop it, will ya'? Please?

I think it's not just because happiness has largely evaded me because I don't understand its pursuit but also because I'm pretty sure that it bores me, much like most meditation. I would rather be fired up in a testy conversation, confused by great poetry, reeling in good music, bothered by injustice, or confounded (always) by love. If we love we grieve and that is hardly ever happy, or is it? The question is more interesting if happiness isn't the point.

If the opposite of happiness is discomfiture than that's really what I think I'm after. I hate being comfortable. I like sports that make me hurt, especially cycling which is pretty much boxing in your underwear on wheels. The point of a bike race is to make the other guy hurt so much more than you are hurting that you finish ahead of him. Sure you can just pedal around for fun with your grandchild, you don't have to be a dick about everything. Even I understand that. And ain't it the truth that somedays you don't want to put the hurt on yourself because, well, you already hurt. But why let that stop ya'? 

The point of scholarship, which is supposed to be my profession, isn't to tell people what you know or found out or even for the sake of knowledge itself---how fucking boring is all that? That is exactly how you get tenure and how you tell yourself that your own bullshit is somehow important or interesting. That's what most of my colleagues do and it bores me almost as much as it makes me embarrassed to share their profession. How mundane can it get?

I prefer that everything is a lot harder than all that. What's worth it? It is to be confused, lost, confounded by ideas, by language, by feelings and arguments that have no resolution, that fail more than they ever succeed. The point of art is to provoke, to inspire, to move you. Sure, sometimes you are moved to smile---like I am every single damn time I hear Here Comes the Sun or Born to Run but that might just as soon turn into tears and heartache and loss, in a nanosecond.

I pursue discomfort with such avidity that I am usually bored shitless by the time I say what I have just thought or figured out. It's why dozens of manuscripts sit on my hard drive about 80% done. I get no real satisfaction from the finished product, I like the work abut I especially like the work when it is failing me, when I can't quite get it right, when it makes me frustrated, angry, or scared. I can't be comfortable in love. I can't be interested unless I'm being challenged or recognize a conflict. 

Happiness is what it feels like to pause from life, not to live it. I'm good for some pause. It's just the space in between the rage and the next rage. I am Rudra's child, not the Buddha's. Send in the crows and the serpents.

I'm not AT ALL recommending my ideas here nor dissuading you from happiness or success or wtf the Buddhists up there^^^ are recommending. THEY make recommendations, they give advice, they are always trying to tell us wtf to do with ourselves, what we want, what we should want, what's "really" available. I got none of that and want none of that. However, I think most people likely need that and like that. "Everybody I talk is waiting for the one who can give them the answer...", thank you, Jackson Browne, 1972. Or salvation, or a job, or MEANING to life.

Fuck meaning. It's overrated too. You don't need to have a reason that is sane or purposeful. You don't need to think you know when it's way more likely you don't. And most things that you know that you know you don't give much heed too. You haven't worried about the times tables since you almost mastered them in 6th grade so what makes you think that the things you know really are the source of something more than a banality of pleasure? Meaning is always on the make, it's at its best when it is provisional, testing and testy, when there is contradiction and irresolvable paradox. But I don't much want advice nor do I give it. I hate being told what to think. I much prefer the trials and tests that teach us how to think, that is, just to learn to think. As for feeling more deeply, we've covered that. If it ain't got pain, it ain't got love involved. Next? 

Got rant?

Why Mueller Failed

Robert Mueller's friends and colleagues have too much respect for him as a person to say much of anything negative about his manner or his findings. I too do not doubt for a moment his integrity. I think he thinks he did the right thing and that he doesn't need to explain himself further.

I think he failed. And since I have no skin in this game, no knowledge of Mueller personally or professionally, I have no reason not to speak my mind.  His pundit lawyer friends on TV can't say what I say because while they think they are being "objective" (lawyers always do) they are in fact  defending Mr. Mueller their friend.  Mueller failed.  At least so far.  I see nothing ahead that would re-set the margins.

First, he failed to act as a special "prosecutor" because he delivers no verdict. Wasn't that his job? I actually agree with Barr on this. Barr said he didn't do this job. Correct. He should have told us whether there was a case for indictment. So he evaded on the basis of some untested rule. But let's grant him this because, you know, rules that only lawyers can rationalize.

This makes him not chief prosecutor but chief investigator for Congress. Fair enough. He says he did all he needed to do and doesn't want to talk about it and that the work speaks for itself. Wrong on at least two counts. First, there are hundreds of good questions (shall I start?) that he does not answer but likely knows the answers. Second, no document speaks for itself. He would fail my entry level class if he insisted as much. So what is his role? Maybe chief educator. How did he do in that? He fails again.

And then, what really galls me. I work in a profession largely devoted to talking only to itself in complex sentences, arcane arguments, and other modes of indecipherable bullshit. Academics are like lawyers, only as we know lawyers are worse: worse because they never have to communicate to anyone but each other. (Academics have to speak occasionally to lay people, like undergraduates---most really hate doing this, n.b.) So what does Mueller do? He speaks in double negatives, legal syntax, and does pretty much the only thing he apparently knows how to do---talk like a lawyer. To Americans. To a country that doesn't read, can't read, much less understand lawyer speak. He utterly failed as a communicator, as an educator, and as anyone but a lawyer speaking to other lawyers in Congress. Congress, for its part, can't figure out that it needs to do the right thing because, in the end, its about power and who gets to use. So there is a lack of principle on the part of Congress and a lack of understanding about what real America can understand from Mueller.

Start here and forgive the pedantry, I come by it professionally.

The percentage of Americans capable of understanding Mueller-speak is commensurate with your own demographic. Plain translation, it takes listening and some marginal critical ability to understand Mueller. How many Americans can do that? Come to my college classroom, I'll show you how few. And they are in college and some of them learn how to think.  But Americans?

So it is your duty as a public person to speak to the American denominator and that is Fox News Low, it is about as hard to understand as Lester Holt.  It's what people who make TV News know.  Speak slowly, assume nothing, use simple words.  Mueller just failed.

Why Politics is Always Religion

An article in the Washington Post is chocked full of data points about why Americans won't elect a professed atheist. The author argues we need one and that may or may not be true. He understands that won't happen but not for the core reasons. I think the author needs a further distinction to help us understand how deeply this religion business cuts. We are religious beings before we are political ones, religion being the superseding category. That too needs a bit of explanation. (Here's the link to the original bit:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-time-for-us-to-have-an-unapologetic-atheist-in-the-oval-office/2019/05/08/0f3e0020-6c27-11e9-be3a-33217240a539_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3mThgOBIfvXKm0B9iPldUuM5jaMHcUFJQQrr_2Xp0pK9tWPPeBAph4rC0&utm_term=.21eb8b41d4c9)

That important difference we need to make is between a "professed" atheist and a passive one. You can _almost_ get away with being a passive atheist by playing dodge ball and keeping your mouth shut. Get into why you aren't a believer and your chances of being elected become zero. Get into why religious _belief_ is a positive detriment to 21st century adulthood and you get even less popular, even with your friends.

Bernie is a good example of the passive atheist. He adds the further distinction of not identifying particularly as culturally Jewish. Now add his socialist views and he's about as close to a godless communist as any has ever been with that many votes. But he knows how to skirt the issue because he knows we are a religious nation. Check out his quotation about how he has religious and spiritual feelings. He can't deny and no one actually ever wins at dodge ball, you're just the last person in the circle. So why is this the case?

Part of the evangelical right's disdain for Europe's democratic socialism is that these countries are largely post-Christian, humanist in orientation towards people, and indifferent to their dogma and moral evaluations. When you can be "good" without being a dogma believer you've _almost_ also escaped the last bit of coercion---the last is tribe loyalty. To deny your religion can be to reject your tribal identity; this is what we mean when we say people are "culturally X", say Jewish or Catholic or something that makes you put up a Christmas tree.

Dogma, morality, tribe are the three elements of a socialized religious identity. Notice how Republicans seek out the simplest, straightest line between the individual and the group. This is because they insist that renegade individuals or "outsiders" have no rights, no claims on the real estate. You're in or you're out. Sharing a religion is an important feature of that need but not the only one. How the individual features in this collective identity devolves usually to moral or personal regard. You think so-and-so is a "good person" because you know that person and this solves the story in most ways but not politically.

The irony in this is that the 1st Amendment freedom makes further interest in someone's religion something we don't know _how_ to talk about, it is relegated to the private. But once you are a political person, you _stand for_ the flag, for country, for _us_ and that means you have to conform. Cross even a little out of the Protestant Christian lanes and there is a lot of 'splaining to do.

The article's essential thesis is that atheism is the theists are the problem and I could not agree more. But he fails to understand more deeply I think why people don't like professed atheists. He seems to think that it hinges on our suspicions of moral inadequacy, i.e., professed atheists are immoral and then resorts to the usual disproofs. This is, of course, a false equivalency because it's a black swan problem: all you need is one deeply professed atheist who is moral and the argument fails. Meh. This is not the problem. The author has missed the real point.

Religion is inextricably woven into identity: social, cultural, and personal. All of those matters have their own histories. No matter how you privatize religious identities like Americans do in the 1st Amendment or how claim they are preempted by some claim (often religious) of our shared humanity, when someone _actively_ dissociates from religion, they are creating an antagonism against _you_ even as they formulate a new tribe, in this case the atheists.

Humans are Us-beings and no matter how we try to be _human_ beings, our Us means there is a Them. When there is a case being actively made that you and your version of Us is somehow gravely mistaken, wrong-headed, superstitious, silly, imperialist, in some way less than correct, valid, or socially legitimate there is a natural comeuppance, we take umbrage. We don't like being told that something we use somehow to formulate our identity is at best a tribal need and at worst fatuous nonsense.

In short, we _always_ take religion personally. We can't help it. And when people are affronted they feel attacked, dismissed, trivialized. It's not a moral problem as such, it's a matter of getting into the fiber of being and that _feels_ like a moral provocation. The professing atheist is making claims about our fragile and precarious hold on meaning, which we become desperate and angry about because we don't like to be told how touchy, insecure, and contingent those feelings and ideas are.

Enter modernity: we are daily undermined by diverse views, new facts, and global dangers. We may need an atheist to deal with those facts because Team Magical Friend always makes matters worse. But that will have to be a passive atheist, one who makes us _feel_ like our personal identities are being unthreatened, especially by the facts.

Understanding Nihilism & The Antidote to Nihilism

Understanding Nihilism

It seems like the right day to write about nihilism. There is a puzzling collusion of facts to consider. Nihilism isn't a metaphor, it's not a story we tell because of some inherited past. We may have nihilistic stories but there's always some way we try to redirect them. That can fail because human beings can collect themselves to destroy themselves. That is nihilism.

We need to understand that nihilism is a kind of pathology, it doesn't necessarily know that it advocates self-destruction. Nihilism can be a world view _and_, like our religious fantasies, it can be implemented without much intent or critical thinking. It can also be incompetent, lazy, unintended, and inadvertent because there's something to gain (material, emotional, etc.) or to sell by saying and acting like a nihilist. It can even take on its own vulgar and sardonic humor (irony here is noted), you know, with Calvin pissing bumper stickers and the like. So why are Trump voters nihilists? What can we do about it?

First, while Trump won the poor rural white vote, the average Trump voter earned $10,000 more than the average Clinton voter. We can dispel the notion that government wasn't working for them any worse than it has for everyone else. What we must conclude is that they want to make sure that government doesn't work for "those" people or even for anyone if that's what it takes.

The Mueller report will not change one vote. Trump's base either doesn't care or even wants him to be the person reported. This confirms our first conclusion: they don't want government to be changed or tweaked or reinvented so that it works better for everyone, they want it destroyed because they believe that government is the problem and that it's destruction is the best solution. More to the point, they will do anything to destroy their "enemies." There really is nothing worse than a liberal or a minority person and they will go down with them to destroy this "other."

Trump is an incompetent grifter---they don't care about that either---so long as this leads to the dissolution of norms and the undermining of laws. This defines the Trump base of course as the equivalent of terrorists and nihilists. They seek nothing less than the destruction of the republic as we know it though they may be too foolish to understand just how they advocate for their own destruction.

It's important to repeat that nihilism is a kind of pathology, it doesn't necessarily know that it advocates self-destruction. Oligarchy and authoritarianism taking democracy's place makes them feel better even as it furthers their own failure. That they claim to seek a better life for their children and grandchildren is part of the rationale that something "better" will emerge once their devastation is complete. The Second Coming is part of the pathology, whether or not they know it; it's another cultural feature of a nihilist view. 

This is why there is no reason to "work with" these voters other than to lead them, if possible, to their next pathology, which is to convince them that their nihilism has itself failed. That can be done passively by overwhelming them with voters who reject their candidates. However, this would also require Democrats to be competent, united, and determined. Good luck with that too.  Democrats would have to cooperate with each other but the good news is that they don't have to love one another.  Read on.

The Antidote to Nihilism

There's good news about a possible antidote to nihilism. It's not love, it's cooperation. And we humans have learned to cooperate even when we don't love one another. Sure, it's better that we care, it's even possible that we care so much that we are willing to die for each other. But that is not how we treat nihilism. We are just as willing to hurt one another, to act self-destructively, or to accommodate the meaninglessness that is also at the core of possibilities.

I've been reading King Lear again and when you see Lear in light of certain Hindu mythologies there's a possible antidote to nihilism. You see, in Lear love does not save and, in fact, it is the putative problem from the very outset. How do we prove our love? How do we believe in love? And what can people do that causes love itself to be a part of our just as plausible nihilism? All of these matters come to a summary in Lear. Love does not save us from ourselves however it might have saved us if we had understood that it won't.

What the Hindu mythologies bring to the conversation is that gods and demons are not as far apart as you think. What separates them are different interests but that's not the key. You see the demons are willing to burn down the whole world if they don't get their way. They don't always know what they want and they can be unaware of their impending self-destruction (think Ravana or Duryodana). But that doesn't stop them. There's something that _feels good_ that they want and here is the key to unlocking the difference between the demon's nihilism and the god's cooperation.

The gods cooperate even when it doesn't feel good. The gods don't demand that we love because they know that love does not save us from nihilism. The gods cut deals that don't feel good and will never feel good. The gods cut deals that sully them, that compromise their values, that undermine their purity, that take something from them so that in a greater _cooperation_ there is more possible than destruction or nihilism. To wit, the gods live for another day, with those they cannot control or even like, and they figure out how to live with themselves when they know they have given up an important part of their principle. They decide to cooperate for a greater good and not stand on principle alone; they know that principle alone is the path to nihilism. So they cut a deal.

The opposite of nihilism is the kind of cooperation that cuts a deal for peace. You don't need to "make" peace with the people you trust and love dearly. You need to figure out how to love them because they are flawed, like you. You do need to make peace with people you are pretty sure you don't love or who most certainly don't act like they love you at all, or even want to destroy you. You have to offer them a deal that might sully you some in the process. You have to offer them something they want, that feels good to them or gives them no other better choice that they can understand. If they don't take it, offer them another and another. 

Ask yourself how far you are willing to go and make sure to take note of that. If in the end there's no deal then know that out of the ashes of nihilism you can emerge to make another deal. If you survive, if you win. That's what Mahabharata reminds us is the alternative to nihilism. If you can't handle that then there's always the retreat into the mountain top cave. This is what most Americans will do because they won't read the Mueller report and will just wish it were all over with so that we can get to "important" things.  But they don't want the important things: that would require staying involved with uncomfortable truths.  So they will opt out, like the meditators on the mountain top.  Don't expect the rest of us not to care that you opted out.  We are all in this together.

What's Left? Self-Respect and the Culture of Self Interest

Words like "disparity" or "incongruity" don't do the matter justice. I mean something more like "chasm," in this case the chasm between the legal and the ethical. Our president and his criminal mob are not being prosecuted because their acts or their position within the legal system suggests that their behavior has not risen to the level of illegality. We rely on the moral judgment of those trained to survey the evidence to reach this conclusion. That no one it seems---not even the president's dupes and toadies---believe him to have the slightest shard of morality is far less in dispute.

How ironic too that we use the word "justice" to describe matters at hand. Whether or not the president is a criminal is reduced to a political matter in a system putatively designed to elevate the rule of law to ethics itself while, at the same time, his craven immorality is regarded as anodyne, just another feature of his character-free character. His supporters cheer because this difference is plainly without distinction.

We have had presidents of low moral stature before, some true crimnals, but perhaps none who has violated the terms of self-respect so plainly on our public stage. It is as if reality is nothing more and nothing other than realityTV. That there is no reality in realityTV is not only the fault of an entertainment industry, is it?

Give the people what they want is the first rule of capitalism and of democracy. There lies some of the rub, no? What does the sale of the people's opioid have to do with morality now that it has no contours whatsoever than, than what? A tax cut? "Are you better off today?" What are the boundaries of collective acceptance when cruelty and vindictiveness are the certain aims of those who respect nothing but their own timorous claims to superiority?

Self-respect seems so, so quaint and old-fashioned. Joan Didion once wrote, "Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts."

It strikes me here that Didion is also looking for the contrast, that is for what merely postures. The posers of self-respect use bravado and brazen indulgence as a means of inspiring the rabble to do as they do, to do whatever they want no matter the matter. If it's not prosecutable, it's permitted. Is that what allows the Trump voter to hail their chief and mock Jimmy Carter? That being moral is only for chumps? What about being "better off"? Is that all we will become?

Such a hardening of hearts doesn't seem possible until we see as much the contrast with those asserting their own ethical standards. Then the litmus tests of moral purity conveniently exile all political rivals who cannot match the mob's determinations of personal offense. Once again there is no legal violation as much as there is another set of criteria for human interactions. How tender must our feelings be before tender feelings are the reason for everything we deign acceptable or liable to reproof? Because we are made "uncomfortable" does that mean that another's behavior is immoral or merely unacceptable? What will that accomplish?

When we reduce the world to personal space we can no longer tolerate the notion that the world really is indifferent to our preferences. How does anyone learn anything _without_ distress? Can self-respect demand that we must learn how to alchemize distress into grace? The sort that endures ordinary indignities and tolerates inescapable human foibles? I am not sanguine for our prospects but neither am I willing to give up just yet.

It is the "sense of decency" that we now hold in question. Prosecutors and pundits debate legality while filing for moral bankruptcy. This means nothing more than we anesthetize ourselves, provoking calls to "move on." We are dulled to the iniquity because we must not allow our own self-worth to be so dimmed that we cannot function in everyday lives. What we are left with is nothing better even if what we demand must be better.

I think Joan Didion is again worth citing because what is at stake is not the president's vacancy of moral values but how we question our own. Let's cite Didion at some length. We will have to withstand the arrows aimed at be-twittered attention spans. She writes, "To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give."

We live in a legal world in which what's legal has been successfully and finally severed from what is moral. When we turn to the moral we find ourselves without the means to interrogate a plurality of values, differing standards, and the need for even greater tolerance. Instead we demand a TV audience to voice personal grievances, albeit the kind that do indeed warrant attention for being personal violations. With the next example of personal grievance comes the call for purity tests for what could possibly be ethical in a world in which "standards" cause a rejection of pluralism itself. We need not be relegated to immorality just because we cannot all agree on what is contemptible. An ethical life does not posture, it stands.

We need to figure out what next to do when a significant portion of our fellow citizens care not in the least for what is ethical _if it suits them_. We must learn to live more deftly in a world of double, triple and more standards. That is, we must find ways to fathom multiple codes, even those that have succumbed to "no sense of decency." What we do next will depend not on fairness or the rule of law but on what each of us makes of a world that is neither legal nor moral but by the choices we make to endure. Whether or not we flourish remains to be seen.