In Denver I read from Reader's Digest, "Integrity is a fact of acting
as a single unit." Question: What kind of unit?

Unit based on what premises, unit engaged in what action, unit made of
what and making what?

Is it beautiful? Is it wise? Is it compassionate? Is it inspired? Is it
true?

I'll tell you this, Mr. Columnist. I would rather be a mess and be me
than have integrity and be you.

Apparently he was chiding the people - many people now in America - who
have experienced many worldviews, many places, many situations, and do
not act as a single unit because they are an agglomeration of multiple
influences. Apparently that is a character defect. My response: To have
many influences - to have an open mind that accumulates different
lifestyles and different kinds of wisdom - is a far more honest
position to be in, and one demonstrating of far more basic honesty and
principle and intelligence, than to be raised in a single worldview and
have kept it without having experienced or sought out anything else.

The latter, I regard as false integrity; false integrity based on a
true character flaw - small-mindedness, ignorance and dishonesty. The
state that is attacked, I refer as one of flux. The flux is superior to
false integrity, being based on a virtue of curiosity and exposure to
different influences. Above that is a state that is true integrity: One
of integration of all these influences and creating something unique.

A distinguished older gentleman wrote an attack on the criticism of the
WASP culture. People ask me why people like me attack the Midwest.

My response: Because the WASP culture brutally stifles all passion and
feeling in people, turning them cold and cruel and malevolent.
Overlaying with false niceness - otherwise known as social onanism -
the meanness and cruelty that results inside as a result of this
repression. Substituting false gentility and false niceness and
meanness draped in a smilie face for genuine goodness and benevolence -
which qualities, out of the hysterical fear of emotionality, do not
begin to come out and are indeed stifled wherever they can be.

Gerry Spence said that it's not nice to be nice. Here is the
explanation, based on the mechanism: Because social pretense of
niceness is a pose; a survival mechanism; a smile one wears to show to
the next neighbor that one is a happy and well-adjusted citizen. A
pleasant person is not a benevolent person, nor is he a happy person;
he is  a person who has decided adaptation to be more important than
actual truth of experience. Adapting social interest ahead of actual
interest, he bludgeons the people under his thumb into perpetuation of
the same malignancy. Which makes him hideous to what's actually real.

What we have is a smilie face draped over an abyss of evil; a smile of
venality and malice; a pretense of happiness cultivated as a survival
mechanism rather than as a genuine show of happiness and goodwill.

Because it is not acceptable to show suffering - because to do so would
shoot holes through the pretense of happiness from which the society
derives its claim to moral legitimacy, and to do so would show its
pretense for the lie that it is - the people must hide their suffering;
and not only that, but: They must hide their essential personhood.
Which personhood becomes, essentially, criminalized as a result of not
being of the pretense - and whose reality, if revealed, demonstrates
the arrangement for its basic falsehood.

The suffering that results, is greater than suffering that results in
societies where the suffering is admitted as fact of life; compounded
in this case by unearned guilt and shame afflicting the suffering. And
when a person reveals the truth about the arrangement, they are
regarded as traitors - traitors, in this case, to the pretense from
which the arrangement derives its false claim to legitimacy; and which,
like similar pretenses cultivated by totalitarian governments, falsely
validates an arrangement that, whether it come from state or from
culture, should not have ever come to exist at all.

The emphasis on being "pleasant" is done through massive emotional
violence - violence done to the core of the person. The venality and
corruption we see in the works of Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis in
societies centered on pleasantness are a direct result. When it is not
acceptable to show feeling, it is similarly not acceptable to
experience one's basic humanity or to fulfil it in self - which leads
one furthermore to suffocate it in others, under the pretense of ethics
or responsibility but fundamentally out of basic envy. Envy of
openness; indeed envy of basic freedom. Envy, fundamentally, of life
itself and especially as it exists in the living - with the venality
inflicted severest on those who are essentially most open, most
beautiful, and most full of life.

The stifling of the emotion leads to the emotional twistedness of the
people, resulting in basic perversity. But far worse than that, it
results in emotional suffocation, leading to massive cruelty across the
board. Indeed it results in this: A society in which it is not possible
to be real. Which means: A society whose emotional violence, cruelty,
and venality goes unchecked and hides behind a false pretense of ethics
and morals a life that is vicious to the existing and vicious to the
world.

The result becomes inhumanity; inhumanity hidden behind closed doors
and masked over with false smiles and finding expression in sentiment
twisted toward the goals of the social manipulators, in church or in
society, leading through continuous malicious misuse arriving at
further evisceration.

The problem is compounded by the belief in such societies: that
everyone is responsible for their existence - which means that they are
responsible for whatever suffering they endure. This creates an
arrangement that is essentially criminal: An arrangement in which the
person being brutalized is responsible for the crime being committed
against her, while the brute meets his neighbors next morning with a
pleasant smile and wishes the other nice people a pleasant day, which
other nice people could not possibly believe what the nice model
citizen next door does behind closed doors to the captive audience (and
which nice people in many cases do similar things and worse). The
people on whose bruised backs this abomination resides, being deemed
responsible for their existence, are likewise responsible for the
suffering that is being inflicted on them. Which means that the injury
is compounded by shame and humiliation along with social coercion,
making it harder and harder for people to address the reality of their
existence - to address furthermore the reality of the existence of nice
people next to them - and likewise to reveal to the rest of the world
the actual character of their nice civilization to the rest of the
world: The world that it regards morally inferior to itself and seeks
through one or another method to conquer.

The form of belief in personal responsibility as cultivated by such
societies is used to inflict effective and absolute slavery. As a
result of informational stranglehold, family coercion, religous
coercion and social coercion, nobody is effectively free to either find
out what existence might actually suit them, to figure out in an open
and free inquiry what way of life or profession or experience or
marital partner is right for them, or actually to find their way to
such a life as promised by America's founding documents. Power without
responsibility is tyranny; responsibility without power is slavery. And
what we have is effective slavery being inflicted upon the population,
with misuse of the concept of responsibility being misused to keep
people in place. Which fraud is compounded by the shame and humiliation
upon those who are not righlty suited to such an existence, and
emotional and social violence against whom increases the more
emotionally real - and therefore the more ill-suited for the
arrangement - they are.

With false smiles and overbearing social pretense hiding a life that's
a lie; a smile draped over an abyss of evil; a misery and a viciousness
and a malice; the WASP culture perpetrates a giant fraud on the
existing and the yet-to-exist, while ostracizing, demonizing and
committing brutality against anyone who seeks to make things better.
The demonization of the artistic personality is simply a part of the
cultural demonization of emotional truth, which is what creates the
artistic expression and which the art exists to make manifest. The
animosity of Midwest toward the artistic character is a reflection of
its animosity toward passion and emotionality as a whole. Which is to
say that it is a reflection of its animosity to life itself.

Which animosity manifests in prosecutions and wars and irrational
hostility, among people claiming themselves rational, toward
sustainable economic development, fiscal discipline, and leaving the
world - both nature and civilization - intact for future generations.

The result, as I have shown, constitutes unofficial tyranny; what I
call conman's totalitarianism in the land of the free the home of the
brave. Creating a civilization in which people have statutory
liberties, but nobody is free in any meaningful sense.

The problem is compounded by the use of all motives within human being
toward commercial exploitation. Believing these motives to be inferior
or lacking in self-control, the WASP character ruthlessly exploits them
and binds the person into a life in which he or she lives in order to
sustain consumerist lifestyle. The basic cruelty and malice - the basic
contempt for that which is humanity - leads to ruthless and shameless
expropriation and exploitation. The person becomes a commodity; and as
a commodity he is bought and sold into a lifestyle that is claimed
responsible, but that is in fact utterly irresponsible given its
effects on the world.

Meanwhile all lifestyles other than that come under vicious attack.
Apparently romance, pursuit of knowledge, pursuit of beauty, and all
other motives that use far less resources but result in much more rich
experience of existence, are to be regarded irresponsible or
irrational. No, these are motives that enrich human experience and make
most of existence. And these are motives whose fulfilment by people
constitutes justification and consummation of civilization as such - as
a place in which the human can live and in so doing also open doors to
other people for complete human experience.

Thus the Protestant ethic - the ethic that human being in all his
motives is evil and thus to be regarded inferior - leads to a mean,
malicious society; a society in which a person is respected for being
malicious and attacked for being humanitarian. It leads to a
civilization of coldness draped in false niceness; of smilie face
draped over abyss of misery; of utter, pervasive and total dishonesty.
The reason, again? Suppression of emotional truth; misuse of the
concept of free will. Which not only results, but can only result, in
the preceding.

First doff the false smiles, then work through the suffering. And then
come to life with consideration of genuine goodwill leading to genuine
happiness of one and all.

There is more to this case.

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