2. The Moxie Files

A satirical look at an overloaded political brain

Everyone has at least a touch of moxie. Most people wish they had more. I have more, and I can tell you: plenty is way too much.

Moxie occurs in a part of the human brain called the political mandala (plural -- on MRIs it looks like two mandolins). This area controls many important mental functions:

1. Moral reasoning, social conciousness, and PR.
These processes make human beings into political animals.

2. Real-time critique of fast talk, spin and more PR.
Commonly known, voxpop, as the built-in BS detector.

Moxie integrates these functions. It is unique to human beings. It's stronger in some people, weaker in others, but everybody has some. It's built in. It's natural. It makes lawyers run for office.

Sometimes the mandala goes bonkers, though. Like mine. 

Hyperactive moxie, a condition I inherited from Hume, super-enhances political cognition. I am far more politically astute than most people, which makes me exceptional as a political consultant. I have raked in bigbux with my political insight and talent for critique -- almost all of it attributable to moxie.

But hypermoxie also over-sensitizes people to the fallacies in their moral and political beliefs. When I was young, this made me a careful reader. As I got older, it made me a proper philosopher. It inspired my political criticism and eventually made politics my business. As time went on I became known in political circles as a gifted and merciless "word warrior." (The main trouble with swords is they don't come with enough ink.)

Unfortunately, left unchecked as mine had been, my mandala became engorged. One day my BS detector turned on full blast, got stuck and has continued unabated ever since. I became hyper-critical of every human idea since the dawn of time. Especially the written part.

Now every philosophic theory -- moral, political, social, parimutuel -- looks like either bullcrap or epistemology.

And this has led to a complete psychological shutdown of my ability to believe. Anything. Even skepticism. 

I am beyond belief.

Not good, for a political consultant. 

My psycho-doc prescribed psychoneuropharmacological Moxicillin-SE* to eliminate the moxie responsible for the affliction, which I took for months. Poof, like magic: no moxie at all. 
*So Expensive

Problem solved, right?

Not so I loved it. 

Moxicillin is a moral anesthetic. 

My political and moral sentiments went numb. I still understood good and evil -- but far beyond giving a damn. They should have called it Nietzsche-cillin.

I want my moxie back! Flush those pills, like now!

That is what I have done. Ditched the pills. For I am a philosopher. Political and moral ideas are not physiological, they're intellectual. Reasoned. My bullshit detector is a high-order process, not spleen. If any philosophies have become suspect, they've earned it. 

And philosophy is the only way out.

So I write. I'm out of medicine. This is a chronic blog.

 
The Moxie Files: My Problem

Locke thought every person is born tabula rasa. I was not.

I grew into it.

I am a philosopher. I am searching for a new philosophic, political, economic and moral (non-celibate) faith to replace what I have lost.

Since "faith" is a non-sequitur without something to believe in — usually a value, perhaps a principle, or at least some reason to show up on time as promised — it isn't faith itself I lack, but principles, methods or values worthy of belief. (Randomness would not be one of them.) Mine are gone.

I wouldn't search for new faiths if my old ones were working.

Some people convert from one faith (often religious, rarely political) to another for practical reasons -- marrying someone of another faith, getting a different hairdo, etc. It's possible to adjust beliefs to blend in with new surroundings or to choose a new faith to find a ride to church. Some people are moved by ideals. Or epiphanies. Hallucinations. Or Ultralax.

At my house, it's not that simple. I have lost whatever faith I ever had, though I'd rather not, and no pre-fab faith is waiting in the wings to replace it, though I wish it were. This is not a voluntary or arbitrary situation. It's more like a dead skunk in the road. Unavoidable.

And nihilism is nothing, so ... who can believe in that?

Every shred of former belief, and every reason for thinking as I once did, now are gone. They have let me down completely. As I examine the moral landscape (which encompasses all philosophy and politics and more, since every human activity from etiquette to economics is a moral one, even sneezing) no belief I have examined yet qualifies to replace the old -- yet the old is totally useless. Missing as it is.

All is gone. I am empty of all faith. I am beyond belief.

I suspect the belief system I need does not exist. I think I'm in the situation Wittgenstein must have found, before his great revision. Having built an elaborate theory, schematizing how ideas become meaningful, he rethought. Unlike most people in that situation, he also changed his mind. I know how hard that was, to cook it all up twice. Jeez. When he brought the replacement before the world, it hardly resembled the original at all except the subject was the same. It is almost as if he'd gone crazy and come through it an Arapaho. But I suspect it was a primo case of moxie.

Granted, my lack of medication may be involved, but my moxie is benign. I'm certain my situation is not the same as Comte's second phase or worse, Nietzsche's -- both completely nuts -- but more like Heidegger's: the biggest oops, oh shit and graceful recovery of the 20th century (for those gracious enough to accept it). He exited life with his great stumble as a footnote, not his sole legacy. He kicked his Nazi sympathies and redneck ways, rejoined the human race and became endearingly shoddy later as a metaphysician we can respect. I hope my own re-lacing of thought goes at least that well.

But as seriously as a lack of moxicillin will allow with a straight face, the issue remains: my faith is gone and I'm out of options. I suspect I might need to reinvent the wheel. Or maybe only politics, economics and ethics.

My faith is so shot, I'm not sure about agnosticism either. Maybe, if it's political.

Meanwhile I must find or invent a new system to believe in, keeping in mind that Twain once advised Americans not to let our schooling get in the way of our education.