Stephen Roney's Blog, page 80

PTSD: What It Really Is

 

The experts currently trace all depression back to PTSD, and PTSD usually developed from abuse in childhood. Not just depression, either, but also chronic anxiety, obesity, high blood pressure, allergies, and so forth.

The concept of PTSD comes from war—it used to be called “Shell shock.” And because of this, it has been falsely associated with fear of getting hurt. Soldiers suffering PTSD used to be suspected of cowardice.

But PTSD is not caused by fear, or physical abuse, or for that matter sexual abuse.

When Tim Ballard, whose story is told in the new film “The Sound of Freedom,” began the work of rescuing trafficked children, he suffered PTSD. When three helicopter crewmen tried to save some of the civilians being massacred at My Lai, they suffered severe PTSD. None of these people were in significant danger of being harmed themselves. Nor is PTSD a reaction to guilt over anything they had done; none of the soldiers who actually massacred civilians at My Lai are reported to have developed PTSD.

PTSD is a healthy moral reaction to an encounter with evil.

Evil is so disturbing that most of us deny it even exists; we whistle past the graveyard. If we encounter someone genuinely evil, we tend to idolize rather than condemn them—the Stockholm syndrome. Their perspective must be right, and we must somehow have it wrong. They must then be beings with superior knowledge. I remember in China seeing an older woman bowing and praying to a picture of Chairman Mao in a Buddhist temple. She must have lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution herself. And in fiction, there is the clownish Russian neighbour who extolls to Marlow the exceptional wisdom of his neighbour Kurtz; he knows Kurtz is massacring the native people.

This is a reason psychopaths and narcissists often rise to the top in society. Knowing no moral restraint looks like leadership.

War is of course intrinsically evil. It is intrinsically evil to try to kill other humans, who as far as you can know have done no wrong; yet that is what war requires. A decent, moral human is liable to be deeply traumatized. (This is not to say that it is evil to go to war, or to be a soldier; fighting a war is often the best way to prevent war. But war is at best a necessary evil.)

So too of one’s experience in a family, as a child. If a parent is immoral, a morally sensitive child will be deeply traumatized, apart from any physical or sexual abuse. This moral abuse is more permanently damaging than either of those other two forms of abuse. Although, in the natural course of things, the parent who abuses morally will probably also abuse physically and sexually; if they are not smart. If they are not smart: someone who abuses their child physically or sexually is likely to be found out; an intelligent narcissist will not commonly risk it.

They can enjoy destroying their morally sensitive child mentally instead.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Causes of Homelessness, and the Solution

 

Friend Xerxes the gauche columnist writes of homelessness, a growing problem in Canada. He puts it down to two causes: poverty, and mental illness. Which latter he regrettably conflates with addiction, as many seem to nowadays.

As I see it, there are five causes of homelessness.

First, mental illness. Due to mental illness, some people are incapable of organizing their lives well enough to manage such necessities. These people are urgently in need of our help. We have foolishly or deliberately shut down the mental institutions, turning the chronically mentally ill out on the street to die. And mental illness is growing by leaps and lunges.

Second, addictions. Addicts, if they get any money, spend it on alcohol or their drug, rather than on necessities. This is not the same group as the mentally ill, and the issue is different. There is not much we can do for them; they have to do it for themselves.

Third, abusive families. Young people trying to escape abuse are often too young and inexperienced to look after themselves; child labour laws and minimum wage laws prevent them from making an honest living. For example, this is the simple and obvious explanation for the “missing and murdered indigenous women.” Or the suicide pacts among native youth. Yet we do nothing for this group; we seem to try to make things worse for them. If they happen to come to the attention of the authorities, the first thing the authorities will do is send them back to their families.

These kids are also vulnerable to child trafficking.

Fourth, economic instability. People can be temporarily caught short by sudden unemployment, illness, bankruptcy, a recent move, and the like. One problem is that you cannot get welfare without a fixed address; but it is likely that you cannot get a fixed address without welfare. This almost seems a deliberate catch-22.

Fifth, voluntarily homeless, an often admirable desire to escape the system and get off the grid. Like the Franciscans, or the sannyasins of India.

The best solution, in all cases, is this: build more monasteries.

Monasteries used to be the haven for the homeless. They served this purpose in Europe, in East Asia, or in the Middle East. And they gave not just a temporary bed and a meal, but a reason for living, and the chance for quiet contemplation required to put your life back together. This is the prime cause of mental illness and addictions and voluntary homelessness, that urge to escape, in the first place: a sense of the meaninglessness of modern life. A collapse in faith. Faith is the cure. 

Children from abusive families, in particular, could once escape to a monastery, and receive not just physical sustenance, but a community, a voluntary family, an education, a trade.

The monasteries were also financially self-sustaining; they generally took no tax dollars. Indeed, they were so successful that they were destroyed across Europe and China by an envious civil authority, to crush a competing centre of power and to confiscate their assets.

There was an attempt to revive something like the Medieval monasteries in the “cults” of the seventies: the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, the Children of God, Scientology and the like. But again, civil authority and social authority came down hard on them. Remember Waco?

It is no doubt true that some such cults were harmful. This is why it is better to have monasteries, that can be overseen by some larger and established authority, rather than individual charismatic leaders. But the cults were fulling a hole left unfilled by the established religions, afraid of crossing the civil authority, and they were better than nothing.

This crushing of the monasteries, then the cults, was a terrible mistake. It was probably also a mistake to close the Indian Residential Schools, which served part of the same purpose, for at least a segment of the population.

Something that might be done, for at least some temporary help, is to buy up the many motels across the country that are now in relative disuse, as vacationing by car has fallen out of fashion. They could be refitted as basic homes: just a bed, a bathroom, a hot plate and a refrigerator. No cost, no questions, but subject to regular drug testing.

And hoe about similarly converting the old abandoned residential schools?

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Tamara Lich Is Articulate--When Finally Allowed to Speak

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

More Sanity from the Left

 

This sounds like the left I used to know.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

I Feel That Sanity Is Breaking Through on the Left

 

Great rant by Neil Oliver.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Read This Before It is Made Illegal

 

Rugby School--frontispiece to Tom Brown's Schooldays

Some choice quotes from this recent Conrad Black National Post column:

“The Trudeau government has deliberately proclaimed and incited the world to believe that this country has been guilty of attempted genocide. That is a monstrous blood libel on English and French Canadians and as I have written and said many times, it is a betrayal of Canada that should morally disqualify the government from re-election.”

“[I]t is a heinous falsehood to impute to any official policy of any jurisdiction of this country a desire to conduct any kind of genocide against anyone.”

To call feeding, housing, and educating poor Indian children “genocide” is slander, and racism of the worst kind.

A recent piece at True North agrees that sexual and physical abuse were “often rampant,” but primarily at the hands of older students. This is in line with the experience in upper-class British boarding schools, and is actually part of their educational design. The idea was to teach leadership by having the students self-police. One does not learn leadership by being told what to do. And so the school authorities imposed only a light hand.

Inevitably, as in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, this led to some bullying, and some sexual exploitation. “Fagging” developed certain connotations. 

However, here the intention was that the lowerclassmen would band together to defend one another, and learn from this how to organize for the common good.

This is what was supposed to happen. Thomas Hughes, who wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays, lauded the result in his own case. No doubt it did not always happen; others, like George Orwell, report terrible experiences at boarding school. But it is what the upper classes have long believed was best for their own children.

There was also some abuse by staff, the True North article admits. But, per the True North article, “hardly any was at the hands of clergy.” Many staff members were themselves indigenous. The best protection against abuse, imperfect as it is, is to have such schools run by clergy. And at worst, the average Indian child attending a residential school was safer from abuse, starvation, and disease at school than at home on reserve. Statistics prove this.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

How to Fix Canada

He’s been stepping away from it recently, but Pierre Poilievre is right to say that Canada is broken. We have a housing and a homelessness crisis—in a rich country full of all the materials needed to build, with more land per capita than almost any other. This has to be a scandal, and has to be down to government. We have a doctor and nurse shortage, and a health care crisis. This can perhaps be explained by an aging population and the inevitabilities of single-payer: when something is given away free, shortages are inevitable. Still, this is the sort of thing we expect a government to protect us from. overnment services seem at a standstill; nobody can get a passport. This too has to be down to government and bad management: many people wanting passports after covid lockdowns ended was perfectly predictable. We have bad inflation and a cost of living crisis. Much of that, according to economists, is also due to the government; Kaynesian aconomics says to pull back on government spending to reduce inflation, and they are doing the opposite. And they are imposing new carbon taxes, and regulations on truckers, and on farmers, and wanting cattle killed off, just as inflation is already making food unaffordable. We have a crisis of confidence in our elections and the security of our democracy. Which the current government is doing everything in its power not to resolve—an implicit but obvious admission of guilt. Canada’s standing internationally has also been diminished. We used to be universally liked, and thought of as competent. Now Trudeau is the butt of jokes and fierce criticism everywhere. We have unnecessarily alienated Italy, India, the USA under Trump, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, for no reason except that Trudeau apparently felt like acting important.

Governments can destroy countries. Consider Argentina, once part of the First World. Consider Cuba, once wealthy; or Venezuela, rich with oil. Compare North Korea to South Korea; the old West Germany to the old East Germany; or Mexico just south of the US border to the US north of that border.  For that matter, consider how well the USA was doing under Trump, or Canada under Harper, to how things are in the US or Canada today.

Do not be complacent: a peaceful and prosperous democracy is a kind of miracle, in world terms. Justin Trudeau can throw Canada into the Third World. 

A column I linked to recently argues that the chief problem is affirmative action: people being given jobs because of random immutable characteristics, instead of giving them to the hardest working and most competent applicants. South Africa, Idi Amin’s Uganda, or Zimbabwe show us where that takes us; they are ahead of us on that curve. It is not just that people then tend not to know how to do their jobs; they see no reason to do their jobs in the first place. As the joke used to go in the Soviet Union, “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

Another argument I hear is that much of Canada’s problem is large-scale immigration: the population is growing faster than the infrastructure can handle. Perhaps. I have my doubts; each new person should, in the normal course of things, produce more than they consume.

So what might a government do? There is no value, after all, in just pointing out a problem unless you can offer a solution.

To begin with, of course, get Trudeau out of power and away from all those shiny levers he likes to play with. Competence at the top is a basic issue.

On housing and homelessness: cut regulations and red tape for new construction, subdividing, and renting. Poilievre has a good idea: make any federal transfers to cities dependent on meeting specific housing targets. In the meantime, the government should buy up derelict motels and convert them to emergency housing for the homeless. 

On the health care crisis: cut requirements for those trained abroad to enter the health professions in Canada. Allow pharmacists to write some prescriptions. Use AI for diagnosis. Charge a small fee for each doctor visit. Allow private medical care if one is prepared to pay for it—as done almost everywhere in Europe.

On the problem with government services: this has to do with the Liberal Party being the party of the bureaucracy. They are not going to hold anyone’s feet to the fire within the civil service; this is their constituency.

The system used to take this into account: those in government service once had no vote. They should also not be allowed to contribute to political campaigns, or volunteer with them, to preserve strict political neutrality. And they should have no right to strike, since any strike by a public servant is against the public.

As for inflation, we must remove all carbon taxes, and all the other sticks in the spokes of the economy inserted in the name of climate change. If our concern is really climate change, these are all counter-productive. Manufacturing will simply relocate to lands with less regulation, and the net effect will be more global warming. In the meantime, we cause inflation, destroy our economy, and reduce our security. The solution must come from innovation, and draining money out of the energy sector, or the agricultural sector, or the transportation sector, prevents them from coming up with such innovations. They have a natural incentive to do so; it’s called profit. 

We must also, as noted, choke back government spending and government borrowing and government printing of money. 

We must deregulate where possible; each new regulation raises costs of any service or manufacture. I’d like to see the Senate reformed to this purpose: given the right not to propose new legislation, but to rescind any old legislation it sees fit. We must also quickly end the milk, eggs, and cheese “supply management” cartel: they impose hardships on the poorest among us, those needing the cheapest basic foods.

As for the crisis of confidence in our elections and concerns over foreign interference, we must to begin with have a public enquiry. Just what has been going on? We must require all foreign agents to register, as is done in other countries. We must ban electronic voting machines. We must restore an independent press and media to investigate possible foreign interference. This means an end to all subsidies to media, including to the CBC. It should also mean a cap on government advertising, overseen by an independent panel. 

The good news is, this sounds a lot like the current Conservative platform. I have hopes for better days ahead.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Dead Letters

 

Interesting as it might be to speculate about UFOs and alien craft, there is a far more mind-blowing issue that gets less attention: NDEs.

That is, “Near Death Experiences.” If they are real, they confirm the immortality of the soul, and make life here on earth seem relatively insignificant. We live only in the antechamber of eternity. 

An eternity that, based on our choices here, could be eternal delight or eternal suffering.

According to the researcher interviewed by Andrew Klavan, 23% of those who report near death experiences experience something hellish. But the real proportion who see an awful afterlife is probably higher than this. For this is self-reported, and reporting that one is bound for hell is not great for one’s reputation.

The researcher also reports that those who, in these circumstances, cry out to Jesus for help, find they are rescued. This, for what it is worth, is also claimed in Buddhism: one cries out to Chijiang Posal, or Amita Bitsu. 

Yet clearly many do not. Klavan tells of an acquaintance who, after a near-death experience, still insists she is an atheist

Salvation, then, just as the Catholic Church teaches, is available to all right up to the moment of death. Anyone who goes to hell does so by their own choice. 

Why do they make this choice? Because they will acknowledge only themselves as God. In modern psychiatric terms, they are narcissists. In traditional religious language, it is the sin of pride. “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven,” as Milton has the Devil himself explain.

Not that those who submit to God at the last moment get home free. As Klavan’s interviewee reports, everyone goes through a life review, in which they experience everything they have caused anyone else to experience. This corresponds to purgatory: if you have done another harm in life, caused them physical or emotional pain, you will experience the full measure of that harm yourself. All secrets are revealed.

Hospice nurses report that most patients die happy. Usually, perhaps a week or two before the end, they start seeing visions of deceased relatives or friends welcoming them. And they die peacefully, in repose. 

It stands to reason that, while everyone may fear the pain of death, and the uncertainty, good people will, on the whole, welcome it; bad people will fear it. 

This is probably the truth of the common observation that “the good die young.” They will, on average, because they have reason to welcome death rather than fight it. And we do seem to have some control. People tend to hang on for after Christmas and New Years, or for their birthday. 

This is not to say that longevity is automatically evidence of a bad person. Or early death proof of goodness. It may be that a good person lingers because they feel some obligation to do something before they go. A bad person may get shot robbing a bank.

Depressed people become suicidal not actually out of despair. It is more often out of hope. They often kill themselves, or try to kill themselves, because they have a strong intuition that they are going to something better. Some have said so to me. And I have felt the same. The truly depressed are almost inevitably  good people, and people with special spiritual insight.

It all makes me want to ponder my own relatives and how they died.

I have litttl real information on my father’s father. He died young, at 61. I was too young to be told much. The simple fact that he died young makes me think he was a good man. Also the fact that he was apparently depressed in this life. One of his favourite sayings was “the majority of men live lives of quiet desperation.”

I remember him as a very gentle man.

Next to go was my mother’s father. I heard that he went to bed one night saying he did not feel well, and did not wake up. That struck me as a good way to go. I assume he was a good man. I remember him, too, as a gentle man.

Next, my mother’s mother. They said at the time, she had just decided it was time to go, that she had no reason to linger; and so she said her goodbyes, to me as to others, and she went. That suggests true blessedness to me. I felt she radiated calm when I went to see her. She pointed out a squirrel outside the window, nuzzling the snow. It was winter, but life went on, and new life would appear.

I remember her as a a gentle woman, and she is mentioned as generous in at least one book. She lived near the train station, and on Christmases, she would bring a special meal to the clerks who were obliged to work on that day. She was known up and down the rails for her Christmas meals.

I also remember that she loved to laugh.

Next, my father’s mother. From what I knew of her in life, she was a conspicuously good person. She volunteered much for charity, and was extravagantly generous to others. As someone used to say of her, “she was always taking in some bird with a broken wing.” She was an observant Catholic, and made a Catholic of me by her example. 

However, when in her seventies her heart was giving out, she was preoccupied with various diet and health regimens, and proposed to the doctors a heart transplant. “After all,” she said, “what have I got to lose?”

She was not looking forward to death. She was fighting it. This is not a good sign.

A few weeks before she died, she commented to me that, working on her cousin’s tax returns, she kept getting visions of an invasion by Communists. It seemed so real.

This does not sound like the expected welcoming by departed relatives. Rather, by red demons?

Soon before her own death, only weeks before, her brother died. When informed of it, she was surprised. “I thought I’d get there before he did.” 

Others on the point of death apparently get visits from relatives they did not know had died. She didn’t. This perhaps bodes ill for either her or him.

While my grandmother was a kind and generous person, she was selectively and wilfully so. She had favourites. In being overindulgent to her favourites, she was in effect downgrading the worth and needs of others, those outside her magic circle, and taking to herself godlike powers. She was like the mother of a murderer who insists “her boy” could do no wrong, and cares not a bit for the strangers he kills. In the cosmic balance, inordinate and unqualified love is just as wrong as open malice; and ultimately just as malicious. And just as selfish. Think of the relative who keeps pouring the alcoholic spouse or parent another drink. 

It grieves me to suppose so, but I fear for her fate.

Next to die was my mother. I have been told little of her last days. But I do recall hearing the doctors were surprised at how far the cancer had spread. Usually, they said, the pain would have driven someone to go to the doctor long before. 

This could mean two things. Either she in effect committed suicide, looking forward to death as an escape; or she feared death so much that she was in denial, and was avoiding hearing the fatal diagnosis.

Was my mother a good woman? Most who knew her would insist she was. She was quiet and unassertive. She publicly deferred to my father in everything. But I suspect this was only to avoid taking responsibility. I have hints that, behind the scenes, she was often strong-willed; and if she was, she did not seem to influence her spouse much for the better. She certainly showed no interest in religion, God, or morality. Or, really, in her children, or in anyone other than her husband. This sort of unqualified support is, again, immoral.

Dying out of pure denial was certainly the case with my first wife, who was an atheist and a narcissist. I could feel the lump in her breast for months, and nagged her to see a doctor. Didn’t she care about the fate of her young children? She admitted it was because she was too afraid of the diagnosis. I finally threatened to leave her, and this at last got her to go. Had she gone earlier, she might have survived. Because she stalled, the cancer killed her. At the last, when it had spread to her bone, she insisted she could not believe or accept this was happening to her.

My brother Gerry went next. 

He died on his 65th birthday. He seemed to know for months before that he was dying; knew before the doctors did; he told me so. He also said to others, I am told, that he wanted to die. He felt he had won through, and done what he needed to do. He had suffered for many years from depression. His death seems to have been his birthday present to himself.

He was not a conspicuously good person. He was nasty to me when we were both young. He stole things. In his early years, he got in trouble with the law.

In his last years, however, although he remained an adamant atheist, there was a gentleness about him, a humility. He consented to wear a green scapular I sent him. “After all, it can’t do any harm.” So at least, he was not afraid of God, and would not renounce him. I have strong hopes he was saved. I hope he will welcome me when I die.

Most recent to depart was my father. He lived a long life; I think he was 92. He almost died in the leadup to Christmas the prior year—I hear the doctors said all his systems were shutting down, and they expected him to go at any time. Yet he rallied and went home.

He was back in hospital some months later. Pneumonia, I think. Then they said again he was rallying. And then, as I recall hearing it, in the middle of the night watch, he suddenly sat up in bed, as though alarmed, and died.

That does not sound good. It sounds as though he was fighting to the last moment to live. Who dies sitting up? It sounds as if he was trying to force himself awake, awake from the sinister dream he was about to dissolve into.

It reminds me of reports of the death of Elizabeth I: “It is said that Elizabeth resisted lying down out of fear that she would never rise again. Elizabeth lay speechless on the floor for four days before her servants finally managed to settle her into bed.” She is supposed to have uttered the final words “All my possessions for one moment of time.”

To put it simply, he was not a good man. And, to all appearances, he died unrepentant.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Why Bernier Lost

 

Maxime Bernier did surprisingly poorly in the recent byelection in Portage-Lisgar. I, for one, thought he had a good issue with abortion. He should, in theory, have been able to shear off much of the Conservative base in a strongly conservative riding. But he actually did less well than the relatively anonymous PPC candidate who ran last time.

On reflection, I think this Illustrates that the real issue in the minds of voters is not this or that current controversy, but the question of sincerity. It may have been too apparent to the voters that Bernier’s new opposition to abortion was a political ploy, not an expression of his convictions. He had previously supported abortion. He was obviously running in Portage-Lisgar out of opportunism, not some love of the neighbourhood. And it must be said, in general, Bernier does not radiate sincerity. He does not come across as dishonest, but as unspontaneous.

Poilievre, by contrast, generally sounds like he believes what he says. This distinguishes him from his predecessors, O’Toole and Scheer. O’Toole was obviously dishonest. His positions were obviously chosen for political effect, not out of any conviction, betraying those who supported him as a “True Blue Tory.” And Scheer gave the same impression by colluding in the backrooms with the milk lobby to take down Bernier, and by trying to fudge his position on abortion when challenged.

This explains why Poilievre is not threatened on the right by Bernier the way O’Toole was, yet is also doing better on the left than O’Toole or Scheer, despite their attempts to pander in that direction. Because the people who will vote against Trudeau want, above all, sincerity, not this or that political promise.

In the US, this was Trump’s strength. He is not particularly right-wing, but the right wing would die for him. People love him because he seems to say just what he thinks. 

RFK Jr. has the same aura about him.

Some people, it is still and always true, prefer being lied to. They are terrified by anyone who seems to speak truth. This is the cause of Trump Derangement Syndrome. These people will want a Biden, because he is predictable and capable of lying soothingly with a straight face. These people will like Trudeau because, with his dramatic training, he will smile and speak of “sunny ways” and make anything sound superficially plausible.

Which group is larger? The good people who want truth, or the bad people who want the comforting lies? The last US election suggests it is about 50/50. I suspect it is 1/3 for either side, and 1/3 in the middle trying to avoid taking a stand.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Snap Election Rumours

 

A brace of recent polls show Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives opening up a seven point lead over the Liberals. It seem insane that it takes so long for Canadians to turn emphatically against this corrupt, incompetent, and totalitarian government. But it is at least at last perhaps happening.

At the same time, Michelle Rempel Garnier reports a rumour that the Liberals may want to call a snap election.

The rumour is likely to be false. But if it is true—why would Trudeaucall an election when he is trailing in the polls?

Suppose insiders have a clear expectation of recession hitting soon. If Trudeau waits, he will be blamed for it, and the Liberal Party will lose much worse by 2025. 

If he pulls the trigger now, he may make up the ground in a campaign, and get himself cemented into power for another few years—possibly long enough to weather the storm. If, on the other hand, he loses to a Conservative minority—they are liable to get blamed by the general public for the recession when it hits, and the Liberals should have a good shot at getting back into power soon enough.

If Trudeau does indeed call a snap election this summer or fall, it will be a sign of bad economic times to come.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.