Nice is…. nice. I mean, you’re not going to hear much argument from me on that.

I am in fact one of those people who can be rendered speechless by unprompted rudeness. Prompted? Sure, I expect to get back as good as I give. Or even when I know people have some reason to think I did something to them, I expect rudeness.

But when people are rude to me on first meeting (or first coming to comments), it’s a complete puzzle. Because, really?

Niceness, encoded in certain manners and certain ways to approach strangers are a way to avoid unecessary conflict. Heaven knows there is enough necessary — urgent — conflict around, that going looking for more because you feel like you’re having a hairy day is utterly stupid. Not that I don’t have my own hairy days. Happens, being human. But I try very hard not to. Doesn’t mean I try not to be mean. It means I often try to be mean — or stern — politely.

I’m also — possibly — the rudest person alive when it comes to friends. If you’re my friend and I’m comfortable with you, I’ll talk over you, because something just occurred to me, and I’m afraid of forgetting. Or I’ll grab a brush and fix your hair. Or I’ll take your kid off your arms, since you can’t make her stop crying, and tell you to take a minute. Without asking or waiting turns because I’m comfortable with you.

And if you’re in a circle, talking to me, and I answer your idea/explanation with “Bullshit.” and don’t look angry? That’s because you’re a friend. You made it inside the safe circle, and I trust you to understand I’m shooting down the argument (and yes, I always explain) not YOU.

But that’s different. In fact, though I’m not my husband, who being a New Englander was trained this way, if I suddenly become exquisitely polite, it’s time to batten the hatches and look for cover, because I understand the first flash of a nuclear explosion does the most damage (at least out of immediate range.)

So I see nothing wrong with being nice to — as Jane Austen would put it — common and indifferent acquaintances.

I’m not sure how I feel about nice invading the legislature, and us no longer having punch outs and someone chasing someone else with a cane among the legislators, though, because important business shouldn’t be transacted by the rule of nice but by the rule of “this is vitally important. The fate of my beloved country hangs on it. I will lame a b*tch if they persist in trying to destroy us.”

By now, the open-borders crazies should have been chased around the senate and house floors with canes (or rapiers) and ditto for the Hamas supporting savages. Because it’s important business, and passions should be aroused.

Which brings me to … Fighting the culture war with our foot in a bucket.

A lot of the persistent trolls who never get approved try to bend me to their will to appeal to “nice” and “fair.” It doesn’t make any sense, because, well you see what they say just an (unapproved) comment before. But they are very used to this working on the right. ”I just want fairness” or “I just want politeness” tend to work with the right.

Why they work is complicated.

The left assumes it’s because we’re “upper class” and trained to behave like that. Some are, but frankly, they’re rare. Most of our rank and file is and has been, at least since Reagan, at most “scrappy self-made people.” Because the left has long ago conquered the country club and the heights of polite — and impolite, like Hollywood — society culturally. Yeah, there are country club republicans… look, most of the remaining were chased away by “Trump so rude!” And they were never the majority. It’s just that we voted for their guys — H. W., W., McCain, Romney — but they didn’t vote for ours. They punched above their weight. Trump’s win was a big, rude surprise. Eh.

Anyway….

The real reason the right enshrined “nice” as a virtue and “don’t make waves” as a sacrament at all levels is because you will get destroyed in the press if you break that.

What I mean is when they had complete control of the mass media and the narrative, to do or say anything that caused the left to deploy its entire machine to destroy you was very bad.

Take Sarah Palin and her nerve at EXISTING and being a self-made woman governor. They destroyed that woman’s life. Or Joe the Plumber asking unwanted questions of “Almost a god” while being working class and male. They had to destroy him. There was no choice. From their POV, at least, if they allow something that strongly contradicts the narrative to exist and be known about they already lost. The narrative needs to be all pervasive and unassailable.

No women or minorities can be Republican, for instance. Or non-Marxist. And if they are, they must be destroyed utterly.

And heaven help you if you hit more than one characteristic of groups they consider “theirs” and turn against their pap. You will be hammered to a pulp.

You see, they need groups to behave predictably, so they can “own” certain groups without ever having to explain how their philosophy helps the group. So, if you stick out of the choir, you’ll be destroyed with all they have. If you look around that explains a lot.

Of course, no matter how “nice” if you win an election against the left they’ll hound you with all they have. And sometimes they utterly break you. (Holds a minute of silence for what remained of W.’s spine when he left the White House. Such as it was. Really, sir, palling around with the Clintons? You make us doubt your self-identification — after leaving office! Nice! — as a “Christian Socialist” because what part of Christian is Epstein Island Clinton?)

Anyway, moving right along: This has been the problem from the beginning — oh, before WWII — and why so many false narratives got baked into the national (and world) psyche. Because everyone who deviated from Marxism in public would be destroyed.

It’s the reason the royal family of England has trended gradually farther left, to stay safe. And the same for our big corporations, our ivy league colleges, our professional associations, our “experts”, our scholars…

Because to deviate, even slightly, from whatever the left is proclaiming top-down this week — and which serves their current narrative — is to get hit with everything they can throw at you, including the kitchen sink. (Does not hold a minute of silence for J. K. Rowling, who seems to have a spine. Does wonder when she’ll wake up on the other “nice” stuff she swallowed.)

Suddenly things are discovered in your past of which you yourself are completely unaware but which everyone else knows about and look, there’s documents. (Which prove strangely slippery on examination.) Or they discover a mean tweet you sent in 1968, even though you had to time-travel for the purpose.

This would work beautifully in the past. Everything and everyone repeated the line with the coordinated precision of a ballet ensemble. The person on the street who semi-cared would assume that, of course, there was no smoke without fire. And the person who didn’t care just got the idea you were “toxic” and avoided, or laughed at comedy that demonized you while completely unaware of there being nothing behind the accusations.

They could do this in a week or so, without much flexing. I think BTW is why the US defamation and slander rules are so stupid. If you’re a “public person” you can’t pretty much sue anyone for slander. And “public person” not only extends to me (Waggles hand. Really? A small blog and some fiction books puts me at the same level as say Clinton? I think it should be at least “National household name) but to anyone, like the Covington kids. If being slandered on national TV makes you a public person and you can’t sue for slander, the whole thing is rigged. Yes, they got around it. But the fact there was even a question tells you how rigged it is. And how irrational.

The problem is that while they sort of still can do it, kind of, sideways, it’s not sticking. Worse, there’s a grassroots narrative network — and they don’t get grassroots at all — that just spreads and connects and which they can’t put down.

Take the rumor that Michelle Obama is a man. It’s a completely insane rumor, on a par with Hillary Clinton having an affair with a space alien. As you guys know, I’m a conaisseur of silly crazy. I love theories that the dinosaurs left the Earth and are circling it in a spaceship, waiting to return. I love ancient civilization, particularly the ones that were completely run according to our idea of astrology, regardless of how the skies have changed in the interim. And the first time I stumbled on Big Mike I lost three days following videos and articles with the sick fascination of watching a train wreck.

These things are my guilty pleasures. Literally. When the email was going around about “I know what you do on your computer and what you were watching” meaning porn — oh, if you get one of those, they’re not real. It’s fishing. For the love of all that’s holy, don’t give them money — and I got a couple, I giggled and told my husband “Yeah, but everyone already knows I watch and ready goofy conspiracy theories and grin and laugh like a loon.”

So, imagine my surprise when I found my very proper, serious friends make allusions to Big Mike in the middle of a serious discussion. I don’t think my friends believe it, but that they even heard of the gross scurrilous nonsense was a shock. And periodically it pops up in the middle of an unrelated discussion with non internet or politics addicted people.

Which comes back to “Oh. I see. It’s all over, like the left’s slanders used to spread.” What percentage of people believe it? Very few I’d guess, at least amid the people who actually follow politics and care. Is it believed amid the people who don’t care and just catch it in the wind? Probably more so, yes. Because the “Why would they say it if there wasn’t something in it” will be stronger there.

But the salient thing is that they can’t put it down. If they deny it, it will only feed it. “I have stopped beating my wife, who is totally not a guy.” Yeah. And if they don’t deny it, over time it will become an “everyone knows”.

The same with Bidens and the Clintons and their corruption machines, which actually happen to be true, but again, even if they weren’t, it would be known everywhere. And things like the Podesta brothers, and the pedo networks of Epstein. (In retrospect, dowgies, it was a mistake to off Epstein. You’re just not used to not being able to put down rumors, so I tell you this, out of the kindness of my heart. Giggle. You’ll learn.)

Or the important things. Took a while, but the truth about Covid 19 propagated so that not only did their protocols which they intended to make eternal break, but they haven’t been able to make new protocols stick. (Which is why I think next spring they try nuclear war. And the way their authority has degraded, I’m not sure that will work either.)

No wonder the left is now pro censorship, and like late stage Soviets trying to stop “disinformation.” And even then it doesn’t work.

The point is none of that is nice. Whenever we turn and bite the left, we’re by definition “mean” and “crazy” and “evil” and “racist” and “Anti-diversity” and anything else they can throw at us. But not NICE.

And every time this happens, a chorus of teddy bears on our side starts singing the song of “you won’t convince them if you’re not nice. You got to be nice.”

Partly because they have Stockholm syndrome. I mean, for decades if you stepped out of line you got DESTROYED. So the only way to fight the left was little by little, incrementally and sometimes just on one issue, while compromising on all the big, visible ones. (Older rightists are very prone to this.)

And part of it is … Well, you see, before the media lost most of its power, the left appeared to be “nice” and a lot of people who are naturally nice (seems to be something you’re born with. Shrug.) really would like to get back there. Except it’s an illusion.

The left was never nice. For a while I passed well enough to sit at the back of their councils and listen to them — and I just realized people like me, who then come out must seem to them like werewolves of legend. But truly, it’s not hard. Their philosophy is everywhere in public, and making the right mouth noises is easy. It just kills your soul if you have to do it for life and don’t have an outlet. A reason many of you in the lefty fields have secret handles here and other places — and trust me, they were never nice. They always wanted to cut your heart out and eat it, simply because you opposed their will to power. But the press helped smooth out any hint of that came showed.

Cancelling and destroying people on the flimsiest excuses has gone on for my full adult life in the US — which is now close on to 40 years — and I suspect before, because it was done in Portugal before, just slightly more openly. (Or maybe I saw more of it, because I was more able to pass as left there. At least in my daylight persona. And those embedded in the left also know exactly what this means.) Also because I can read fluent “secret cancel” in the bios of older authors and politicians and public figures.

But it was done secretly. So secretly that the victims were assumed to REALLY have done something heinous, or gone mad, or in some cases died. (Really, DO read Lloyd Biggle Jr.s The Still Small Voice of Trumpets. I don’t know if he did it consciously, but he captured the whole thing beautifully.)

Now it’s out in the open, which makes everything seem worse and scarier. But trust me, as someone who saw it before, it’s not actually worse. It’s better because we now know and can see the inanity of it and even fight back. (See J. K. Rowling. Or Musk.) We can see how petty and stupid the left is too.

So wanting to smooth the whole thing with “nice” and go back to “the good old days” is nothing more and nothing less than collaborating with the enemy and wanting us to lose.

I just know most of the people doing it don’t mean it that way. But I do wish they’d come to grips with the fact there are situations when you can’t be nice.

When the sword is at your chest you don’t say “Pardon me, sir, I think you misunderstood my remark.”

When they are getting ready to hang you, you don’t say “But sirs, we agreed we wouldn’t use hemp for this purpose.”

And when they set out to destroy you for the crime of existing, you don’t try to argue rationally with them.

You fight back. And you’d best prepare ahead so that you can fight back in a way that the spectators will at least be doubtful of your guilt and evil, and so that you might make them laugh at the left, and escape the worst of it. The left, btw, hates being laughed at. Probably because they know how ridiculous the entire edifice of their power and might is. And a lot of them are only “left” because they hope to be eaten last. If they can be poked fun at, are they really safe?

Or you ignore them. If you can’t — or don’t feel like — make them them ridiculous, just ignore them. This depends on your situation. I know a lot of you can’t just ignore and MUST fight back. Some of us who have indie options to continue earning a living, and can have pen names and personas no one knows about, are freer to just ignore. Ignore. Ignore and ignore some more. Don’t give them head space.

This if possible makes them even madder than making fun of them. Because after all they are the Great and Powerful Oz. How dare you pretend they don’t exist?

In fact, fighting them back seriously “on the issues” is the worst thing you can do, second only to apologizing and placating. There are no issues and no convictions in the leftist platform. They just use those as dressing, and will change them on a dime, and all unify behind the new ones. (This is facilitated by the fact that at least half their following is Memorex and the rest are scared. Even the true believers.)

If you absolutely must, sure. Fight them on the issues. And smearing their faces in their serious and horrible infractions is sometimes needed. Like their support of the rapist-murderers of Hamas. It’s better than apologizing and being cowed.

But don’t try to fight “nicely.” Come up with the worst things you can to show how corrupt and utterly vile they are. They are. If you think they aren’t, you’re still buying the “nice” facade. They were without supervision or moderation so long they’ve become horrendous, without even noticing. (Humans need boundaries to stay in the permissible. Particularly if they lack internal morality which a lot of power-hungry people do.)

And if all else fails, tell the truth. Paraphrasing Kit Marlowe, who should know “To tell the truth, just once, would be worth it, even if one had to die for it.”

They’ve managed to conquer the high ground, while being a sort of alien mixture of lizards and paramecium, and to become a positional good (all “good” people are leftist. All rich and educated ones too.) despite their horrendous, murderous philosophy, their hypocrisy, their often abysmal personalities and personal lives.

And at the same time they bound us with “be nice or you’ll get hit and killed.”

It’s like some dark fantasy spell, right there.

And it’s time to recognize their bonds can’t hold anymore, and unless you absolutely must (or are embedded in their machine, waiting your opportunity. And I think what with the events of the last three years there are a lot of those newly redpilled, suddenly. Sleep tight, lefties) you can now start fighting back without the “nice.”

If “nice” is embedded in your head — it is — and you feel like you’re breaking all commandments by speaking out — you will. I did, when I took the first timid steps out of the closet — remember it’s just a learned reaction. You’re not breaking a single commandment, much less all of them.

The Marquis de Queensbury rules were not designed for those who find themselves attacked in a blind alley. We’ve been taking a beat down for almost a century by trying to be “ladies and gentlemen.” and holding on to “the proper way of doing things.”

This made perfect sense when the stick of a uniform loudspeaker was ready to destroy us, in the press, in entertainment, in art.

Oh, you can still be destroyed. For values of destroyed. But the more of us that are speaking the truth without bothering with nice, the safer we are. And the safer, frankly, everyone is. Because untrammeled power kills. And the left aims to have it.

So, have plan b and plan c and plan d and plan e and plan aardvark ready, always.

And still stay quiet and lay low if you absolutely must, or if you’re waiting for the right full moon to rip out their throats. (And a lot are.)

But don’t stay quiet because you’re being nice. Or because you think nice is a virtue. Or because you think if you’re nice, the left will be too.

That’s how to lose the war without firing a shot. What people on the outside see is that one side if bold and loud, and so confident. And the other never disputes it, so they really must be guilty of everything.

Screw nice. Be bold. Be outspoken. Be who you are, and damn the torpedos.

In a fight for your life, or the life of the nation and your progeny, you should be willing to take out your cane and chase those destroying the nation around the legislature floor. Metaphorically speaking.

Be not afraid.

And be not nice.

Aim instead for being good, in all senses of the word. Nice and good are not the same thing. In fact, they’re not in the same neighborhood.

They’re panicking. They’re panicking badly. “Stomp, stomp, we want censorship” is not the motto of a winning movement.

It’s time to stampede them.

We tend to think the left is breaking systems because they think it helps that goal. That is not completely wrong, but it’s more that they can’t help breaking systems for the same reason they think broken systems help their goal.

First I want to point out that I don’t think that leftists are either stupid or insane. (Yes, there are some number of mentally ill attracted not by the philosophy so much as the social perception that the philosophy is winning — it’s not but there’s a lot of false confidence and built in noise from their historical dominance of communications — attracts people, the insane, the wounded, the people who were bullied, who think it offers them protection. This has always happened with the left. In the places the left prevailed it didn’t go well for them. But that’s something else.)

The defect in perception/thinking it’s more of an acquired thing, partly induced by our education establishment, partly by the left’s full hold on all the mass-industrial-communication mechanisms, and partly because the mental mechanisms of Marxism have invaded everything, even the right. Heck, after years of being aware of them, I still sometimes trip on them.

Part of this was done through fiction, which bypasses our critical ability and embeds itself in our brains as “lived experience”. And a lot of those assumptions are plain wrong and bad.

But also, I’ve noticed that the extreme left of today, not the loot and burn lot, but the convinced intellectuals, are the good boys and girls of yore. In the past they’d have burn with zeal to to be missionaries. They still do. It’s just the post-Christian west only offers the broken faith of Marxism. But they still want to be “good” and “admirable” and their version of this is… Marxist insanity. At the same time, and possibly because over the last fifty years a lot of people were raised in group environments by strangers, there’s also poor socialization to take into account.

What I’m talking about is the fact that the left seems blind to any motivation or relationship that is not a matter of power.

Growing up in an even semi-functional family will teach you that systems of people work, without a power directing them from above. Sure, not perfectly — that’s the other thing families teach you. “If only everyone”never works, not even if mom screams and threatens people with the chancla. But it works, because each person gets something out of what they do for others, and even what they do for the whole.

But if your only experience is of a professional day care, all you experience is someone forcing others to obey, and nothing happening outside of that. Power.

And unfortunately that will slot into Marxism because Marx was an autistic bastard, and all the relationships he saw in society were translatable to power and group power at that. Because the only relationship is power, someone is always oppressing or being oppressed, hoarding the finite resources, or taking them back by force. Seriously, there was something very wrong in that man’s head. And unfortunately the broken meme has propagated.

The left truly doesn’t understand interconnected systems, or the fact that even minor things affect everything else. All they understand is power relationships.

Take environment. The left supposedly cares passionately about the environment. (How after fifty years of eminent apocalypse that never happens they can still believe I don’t know. But then I was never a good girl, piously believing my “betters.” As my parents would attest, I was “rather break than bend” which means I probably can’t grok them, even if I try.) And they do. But they also want us to eat the bugs. Which not only doesn’t solve the problems caused by traditional livestock, but uses more resources and destroys more.

But, ah, you see, in relation to the environment the masses of people have “power” therefore they’re oppressors. Making the oppressors suffer resolves the power imbalance, or at least helps it. Voila.

Same reason they’re not worried about China’s energy use and production by the dirtiest possible means going up, only ours. Because the US has “power” and China “doesn’t” so we’re the oppressors. Duh.

In the same way they are remarkably dense about the fact that importing millions of foreigners who don’t/can’t contribute anything to the country won’t help us OR THEM. Because you know, the US has the power and used to “steal” “resources” so bringing all these people here gives them power and gives back the resources we “took”.

They don’t understand complex relationships of intertwined groups or individuals and their interest.

This inevitably leads to their breaking everything, because the ONLY thing they understand is power relationships and think that inverting “power” fixes problems. Only what they see as power is often a relationship of service willingly taken — married people in mutual service, say, or kids helping their parents, or even volunteers genuinely serving those they help — and when they break that it breaks fundamental human connections.

And when they see the workplace/ commerce in terms of power, they make everyone concentrate on social games, and not the widgets being made or sold. Which explains the implosion of all the woke companies.

This also explains why now, that this problem is advanced, since it’s been on mental loop so long that competing ways of seeing the world have receded, their creativity seems to be stuck in “Scream at bad people and show oppression/revenge fantasies.”

In a way it’s horrifying, because they’ve lost 3/4 of what it is to be human. Things done, not because you’re oppressed or want to oppress, but because you you want to and it feeds your creativity or your social need, or it does something for someone you love.

Love is also out of it. it’s all power relationships. Hence why so many people can’t be in a relationship. because it must be power, and they must somehow be oppressed. Or those around them, in relationships, must be.

And I don’t know if it can be fixed, because a lot of it is fundamental, hinging on very early childhood training, and then reinforced in the thinking years, by every bit of education poured into people.

Only the very strong can escape this unscathed. Or the very non conformist.

Now, I firmly believe convinced Marxists are a very small minority. 25% at most. They show as more both through media domination and pudding heads non-thinkers who go along on the appearance of victory. But even with those they’re not even 50% or the fraud they push wouldn’t need to be the magnitude it is. A dab would do them.

But the problem is that a bit of this is in every one of our minds too. Yes, even mine, though mine is mostly — because I love history — bits of historical misinformation that I think about suddenly and go “Wait, that can’t be true, because this was also going on.” Though sometimes I still find breaks in the basic brain too. Like in the idea of writing something just because I want to, and it needs out of my head. Because doing something should be “useful.”

And that breakage in our own minds both amplifies the damage the left does and makes it harder to recover. For instance a lot of right entertainment as it sprouts up is… well, woke turned on its head.

Not all. We are the outsiders, the oddballs, the weirdos. So our stuff will often be quirky fun.

Unless … Well, even talented people get mad and think “People need to know.”

Part of the reason I have the blog is to process these things without their taking over my fiction. Because we can’t let it do that.

Look, of course your fiction will have your idea of how the world is organized. That’s because it’s yours. When we recreate even what we think is the real world in fiction, what we’re actually doing is not recreating the world, but recreating the world inside our heads. And that comes with your beliefs and assumptions. That’s fine.

But a good story is more than shouting the opposite of what the woke shout at us. Well done, it is subtle, and simply embedded in the story, not being screamed at the level of a morality play. And EVEN WHEN I AGREE WITH THE WRITERS when I accidentally download one of those books, they are fully as tedious as the leftist ones.

And it means you’ve internalized the power is the only thing that matters, bs. So you grab a little power and use it to equalize things by screaming the opposite of what is screamed by the establishment.

But that’s not what convinces anyone. Worse, that’s not even good. it’s forgetting the “thing” for social games.

I’m divided on “hire someone for their political beliefs” simply because I believe that the left has conquered all the institutions that way while we were unavailingly trying to respect competence.

What I will say is that there should be competence first. Faced with two candidates, equally able and qualified, knowing one is leftist and one is… standing with us more or less, go with the second. Because leftists have a hidden cost. As they multiply in your enterprise, they’ll use that to “equalize power” by hiring only their kind and using your concern to equalize power everywhere by “speaking truth to power” (Which because they’re the establishment is actually mostly speaking power to truth.) And your company is suddenly no longer producing widgets, but very concerned with hiring people with “oppressed” characteristics, to “equalize” the power. And this usually means you’re already doomed.

Still you need competence first. because hiring for any other reason at all always ends up in a war on things and people that work. Incompetence drives competence out. And if for competence you must hire a leftist (yeah, very rare, because, well, their brain is eaten with “power” worms) then you must watch them like a hawk, to not let your endeavor be corrupted out of existence. It’s just the price of it.

But everything else? This is not a power game. Society, economics, countries and yeah ecosystems have complex relationships between groups and individuals, most of which cannot be defined in terms of power. They’re rather “commensal” where the other benefits from what he/she/they do/es. Most relationships in nature are of that kind, (weirdly even predator/prey) and so are most relationships in human societies.

An inability to see that means you should be disqualified from opining on how people should live. But more importantly, it makes you a poor, broken creature destroying everything within reach, even without meaning to.

And when those in power are afflicted with this blindness, as they are in our society, reproduce the conditions of a family with a clinical narcissist parent. Because those in power are always trying to balance “power” where no power is involved, and create strife and hatred among those under them, while trying to “fix” things, which due to their blindness just make everything worse like throwing gasoline on the fire to put it out.

This means the moral character of people in charge doesn’t even matter. They’re all going to function as the worst possible humans. Of course, the broken system will also attract power vampires, which yes, are the worst possible humans.

No, I don’t know how to fix it, but understanding the mechanism that’s breaking everything in their heads might help both with not falling in the same trap and perhaps into reaching the younger people sliding into this mode of thought.

Because we need to rebuild and build a society where people can be whole.

I Enjoin You to Pause by Holly Frost

Okay, you all know how, when it gets to be winter (yes, I know, you and you don’t have winter, so pay double attention, it’ll be your own rear you save twice), you drive down the icy road, and you stop at a red light. The light turns green, and you pause, and you wait, just to see if the guy with the red who is half a block away can actually stop or if he’s going to come skidding and spinning through the intersection. You know how that is? And the guy behind you is some southern import (the only one in town, like as not) and is laying on his horn because your light is green and he doesn’t know any better? You know how you ignore that guy, and you pause, and you wait, and you see if it’s going to be safe?

You have got to pause. When the (political, cultural, whatever) light turns green, and the ignorant behind you is trying to push you by blaring his horn (media, internet), you have got to pause.

Make sure that eighteen wheeler coming down the cross street, or smart car, or whatever the heck it is (riot? protest? freight train?) is actually going to be able to stop. Let the juggernaut of inevitable disaster pass you by.

My driver’s ed instructor always said “The laws of physics trump the rules of the road.” It doesn’t matter how in the right you are if you get squashed.

So we’re sitting here at current events, looking at a green light, and the media is behind us laying on their horns. Don’t pull out until you’re sure. Don’t let yourself be rushed into something.

Take a deep breath. Look both ways. Look again.

This next year, as we approach the elections, with wars and rumors of wars, plagues and rumors of plagues, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and whatever else comes our way, I enjoin you, pause. Wait until you know that you aren’t going to get squished when you move forward.

The desire for simplicity in humans is a recurring dream, like equality and fraternity and such. It is also always bad news when it’s applied outside the individual.

“I want to simplify my life” is okay, if often misguided if not thoroughly thought through and negotiated, because “simplicity” has trade offs and most of what you’ll think will make your life very simple will actually make it massively more complicated in the details or in ways you didn’t think of.

There are two ways I can think of to truly simplify one’s life, and the results of it are not as straightforward as it might seem. And the tradeoffs, ooh, boy, the tradeoffs:

One is to become addicted to a drug, such that it’s all you think about every moment you’re awake. I have read enough biographies of former addicts to know that what they were looking for, in some ways was simplicity. They might express it as “to stop hurting” or “to escape” but the truth is that what happens is their life is massively simplified because ONLY THE DRUG matters. Acquiring it, using it, rinse, repeat.

Of course the problem with that is that drug use itself brings massive complications, from the decay of your own internal “thinker” and “feeler” to well… what you do to acquire drugs which often even in places it’s legal, as your need grows and your ability to work for it decreases, often involves very complicated and dangerous relationships to other human beings.

The other way is religious conversion, particularly if you join a monastery or convent, where life is by design simple and ordered, in the sense you don’t have to think about anything or what you’ll do next (if you pick the right order.) All those decisions are made for you.

Of course, in many ways, the convent or monastery has its own issues. Read any life of a saint whose superior hated him or her, and how difficult it was to navigate the personal relationships.

The way out of it of course is to become a saint, which makes things very, very simple. I think. Or very complicated. I wouldn’t know. I’m as far from sainthood as an earthworm is from a star.

But when the “We need to return to simple ways” is applied in the collective it’s always a danger sign, and the result is always hell on Earth. It also always ends up in tyranny.

A lot of the “communes” of the sixties and seventies were a desire for that simplicity without the spartan religious faith of religious orders. We know how many of them slid into cult of personality, madness and even complex murder plots. (Beyond Jim Jones.) Well, I know it, because I read a lot of true crime, now and then. (Usually when profoundly depressed.)

And the current simplification movement seems to consist of a lot of posturing and posing by people who grew up very wealthy indeed. So, you’ll have people who were given expensive cars for their 16th birthday talking about how you should never have more than you can take with you in a small pull-behind trailer. Or people who can actually afford mansions at 20 talking about the joy of tiny houses. (BTW tiny houses are insane. there is nothing in them you can’t get in a very basic, used RV. And when their prices start being the same as of a small NEW RV, what’s the point? Other than of course classism. Makes you think.)

The most ridiculous one is “you’ll own nothing and be happy.”

There is no such thing as owning nothing and being happy, and it has absolutely nothing to do with greed. It has to do with self ownership.

If you can’t own the basics of what keeps you alive — clothes, a shelter, food — you don’t own your own life. It’s sort of like joining a monastery, of course, but one without religious faith, and run by large, foreign entities of dubious morality. They will abuse you, use you as an object, and you really won’t like what they demand of you for your daily rice-bowl.

Your ancestors knew, when they fought against tyrannical band-leaders, and often struck out with their favorite spear and the skin of the animals they, themselves had hunted and cured.

Note I’m not the person standing here saying you need to be as rich as possible, and live a massively complicated life to be happy.

I’m one of the very lucky people who had to face that and make that decision. Oh, not in a big way. I was never offered a million dollars — any of the people reading this for whom that’s pocket change who has a million dollars, I’m willing to test this in those circumstances. Come on! — or any such great amount. It’s just for about a year and a half Dan made about double what he’d made up to that point. What it required… Was a traveling job, which meant we spent a lot of that on stuff like going out to eat when he was home, so that I didn’t have to spend time away from him. Taxes were also next level. But more importantly we realized we simply weren’t willing to pay the price for increased income. (Which boiled down to about an extra 10k a year, after all the extra expenses/taxes. Nothing to sneeze at but–)

This forced us to think of exactly what price we were willing to pay, and what we could live on. So, I realized I didn’t actually want to have the sort of extreme money where all our work, all the time, would be for us to administer our wealth.

As an example, I gave up on the idea of becoming so massively successful that I could have several houses. It sounds great. Like Agatha Christie, I love the idea of houses and decorating houses, and not having to worry about selling them. … but I can think through it, as well. Agatha Christie came from a culture where you — of course — also got at least a general servant and housekeeper per house. If you have to pic administration companies for each house, keep an eye on everything, etc… You know what? I’d rather rent a hotel room when I go somewhere, even if I do it repeatedly. Not as much fun, granted, but much simpler.

Basically, my goal for simplification and a simple life is to have enough money to live on, so I don’t have to think of if I can afford this little thing I’d like, and I don’t have to think about how much I spend at the grocery store, or how much the car is going to cost to fix, etc. And to have enough time to write and pay someone to do the other tasks. (In this perfect world, it’s easy to find handymen and craftsmen to do stuff.)

There are auxiliary bits to this, of course. For a truly simple life, you should be as healthy as possible, which imposes a discipline of its own, I guess. (I’m so falling down on this.)

After that it gets murky. People try to be “simple” by giving up all attachments and worldly relationships and connections, but for a certain type of mind — mine — I’d go completely insane and massively complicate my life by going inside and analyzing everything to bits.

I’ve found that one way for me to simplify, or at least calm my emotions, is to surround myself with people and pets I love. That way I can concern myself with them, and ignore the complicated and confused crosswaves of thought and feel. (Also, it makes me happy to have people and pets I love. And yes, the kittens are coming along fine. They’ve almost completely given up on waking me up by chewing my toes, and are now learning to wake me up by lying down on my chest and purring till they’re petted.)

One final caution on simplicity, which our side of the political isle is particularly prone to: “In simpler times.”

Someone on Twitter was referring to one of the founders as a “simple” man. It made me giggle considering how complicated and well read, and well thought they were.

Past times might seem simple to you, because you know how it ended.

It is true that people, in general, had less options and fewer things, but trust me, this doesn’t make anyone’s life simpler. Because it makes you think about you know, where the next meal comes from, or it leaves you alone with your thoughts more, and those can get verah complicated indeed.

In fact, most cries for simplification in the personal — whether the example used is a future utopia “you’ll own nothing and be happy; or the simple, good old days, which weren’t — and a desire to regress to childhood, when the world seemed simple because we were taken care and failed to see the complex choices and trade offs.

And in the plural the desire to simplify “society” or “the way people live” it boils down to: “All those people doing things I disapprove of should stop it already.”

That way lies enormous complication, death, famine, and hell comes on its heels.

Choose your own level of complexity and live with it, and stop concerning yourself with how simple or complicated the life of others is.