360. Domination and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Domination and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

In entry 354 I mentioned, how sometimes an intelligent woman deliberately dumbs down for the purpose of having a relationship to thus make an intellectually inferior man believe in being her equal.  She appears less intelligent than she is, while he can be realistic about himself.

Domination is a defect and fallacy of men, who are or feel too incompetent to solve conflicts rationally or to gain a woman's benevolence otherwise.  They use either situational power or the fact of their superior physical strength to compensate for their incompetence.   Their purpose is obtaining the benefits from being with a woman, while they are oblivious of any other method except gaining control.     

Narcissists dominate women, because their grandiosity delusion has completely deactivated any perception of the real intellectual ability of a woman, even in contradiction to blatantly obvious evidence.  

But there are also many men, who feel entitled to dominate women by the error of feeling sincerely justified to do so, because of really believing to know better and of doing something good to the dominated women.   This can be explained by the Dunning-Kruger effect, which explains how men overestimate themselves.  Their research was done on subjects in the scope of average mental health, but I assume that it would be especially harmful to women, when the men are emotional morons or sufferer from NLD (entry 356) or something similar.   

"The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when incompetent people not only fail to realise their incompetence, but consider themselves much more competent than everyone else. Basically - they're too stupid to know that they're stupid. "

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

359. The Bigarade Men

The Bigarade Men

When I was in Andalucia for the first time, I was astonished to see orange trees along the streets and in the parks.  The trees were full of delicious looking ripe oranges.    I picked one, peeled it and in the expectation of a great palatal indulgence I put one slice into my mouth.    

The next moment I spat it out in disgust, it was too bitter to even swallow one bite of it.    I had attempted to eat what was not a normal sweet orange, even though it looked exactly like one.  It was a bigarade, which can only be used to make marmalade of.   
Of course I should have been suspicious.   Had they been sweet oranges, then why had nobody picked them?    

If mixed in a basket, sweet and bitter oranges cannot be distinguished from the outside.     

Jerks of all varieties are often like bigarades.   When known only superficially and socially, but not really close, they appear like kind, decent, nice, friendly, educated, charming, even caring men.   Only those in a close relationship experience the true bitter inside of such unsuitable jerks, when their selfishness, cruelty, irresponsibility become noxious.    This is why jerks again and again find victims, and often there are neither red flags nor the warnings of others, before it is too late.          

358. Interacting With Gullible People Is A Hazard For Rational People

Interacting With Gullible People Is A Hazard For Rational People

Whenever I am in contact with someone expressing the belief in irrational claims, my spontaneous emotional reaction is a strong feeling of repugnance and aversion.    For a long time I had been wondering, why I could not just shrug my shoulders in scorn and condescension for their ludicrous need of believing.    

Finally I understood:  I am very scared of gullible people, and for very good reasons.   More precisely I am scared of the harm, that they are driven to do to whoever gets in their way.   Their harmful behavior is programmed by their belief and there is no way of protecting myself except by avoiding them.  

Every personal contact with a gullible person creates the hazard of experiencing powerlessness and helplessness and of being harmed at any moment. 

In any situation, relationship or friendship, with someone significant enough to elicit emotions, I need reliable and logically predictable influence on how I am treated.    I need the influence to be able to stop someone from making me the target of hurting, unpleasant and discomforting behavior.   I need the influence to get my needs fulfilled in return, when reciprocity of fulfilling needs is in the nature of the relationship.   
My only available method to have such influence is rational communication, when the other is able to be convinced by good reasons, and when he is able to convince me in the case of a refusal by his comprehensibly better reasons.    

I am confident to protect myself successfully from harm in the interaction with rational people, who are guided by consequencity.   With gullible people, I have no influence, because they are controlled by the power of their belief, which deactivates their accessibility by reason.    

Gullible people do not feel guilty for any harm done as a result of their believes and they do not take responsibility for it.

• They know, that their behavior is experienced as harm, but they feel justified by the belief.
• They themselves do not consider as harm, what is experienced as such by the victim.
• They consider suffering harm as an obligation of the victim.

A gullible man's treatment of a woman can be determined by irrational and immune believes

• about himself and his entitlement
• about what is right or wrong
• about what methods are acceptable and valid to control the environment and other people
• about the person of the victim
• about the authority or charisma of a deity or third party guiding him

A few examples of harmful believes:

• A narcissist believes in his entitlement to get onesided benefits from a woman perceiving her as being a commodity for him.
• A muslim believes the koran to be an absolute moral authority.  He can never be faithful in a monogamous relationship, because his religion allows him 4 wives and an unlimited number of concubines.
• A man applies the pseudoscience NLP to manipulate a woman, believing that this gives him the control over her for as long as he wants her.   
• A man does not take a woman's word for serious, because he believes the urban legend, that women do not mean, what they say.
• A man forces a onesided decision upon a woman, which can be as bad as dumping her, because of a dream or of the advice of an astrologer, clairvoyant or any other quack.  
• A man in a relationship spends a lot of the couple's shared resources on expensive quackeries.
• An man does not understand a woman's behavior and reasoning and misinterprets this as her being stupid and flawed and believes in her inferiority without ever listening to her.  
• A man believes in the superiority of men and in his right to dominate and control women by methods like intimidation and coercion.
• A man feels protected by his deity and causes an accident by reckless behavior.  
• A man chooses a woman on a dating site by her zodiac.  The false belief in alleged compatibility causes a lot of  pain.   

All these examples are experiences of what a woman does better not expose herself to.  The only way to avoid such a risk is to reject all gullible man, that means, any man, who is guided, influence or determined by any belief.    The more often a man is caught with a lie, the more probable is the next lie.     If a man is gullible to harmless believes, then the harmfull believes are also probable.    

Gullible people are not reliable and not predictable for those, who do not share their believes.   

His own behavior makes perfect sense only to a gullible man himself, due to being in accordance with his belief.   For any person not only not sharing his belief, but considering it as irrational and absurd, his behavior makes no sense at all.   What makes no sense, cannot be predicted but is haphazard and random.  
A rational non-believing person can never know, what the gullible man will do the next moment out of the blue.  She can never be prepared for the next harm.  Therefore she can neither avoid the harm nor employ any preventive methods to mitigate the impact.    Being with a gullible man means the stress of walking on eggshells, of being on alert all the time.    

A gullible man is not reliable.   He can even have the intention to comply with agreements, covenants and promises, but as soon as the power of the belief overwhelms him, nothing is binding anymore. 

     
Only a man, whose behavior is guided by consequencity, can offer me a relationship as a safe haven, because his behavior is predictable and reliable.    I can entrust myself to such a man, when agreements are binding and not at peril by overpowering believes.

357. The Social Environment Defining Deviance

The Social Environment Defining Deviance

In recent years, more and more syndromes and disorders have been defined and used to label people with behavior deviant from the expectations in their social environment.   The recent addition of NLD is an example and in entry 356 I have been wondering, if NLD is just another label for intellectual immaturity hidden behind verbal proficiency.    Therefore, when I use the word immaturity in the remainder of this entry, it will include NLD together with psychosocial and intellectual immaturity.  

There are two possible hypotheses concerning the potential for maturity as defined in entry 356.  

1. Every person is born with the potential for developing full psychosocial and intellectual maturity indicated by full consequencity and freedom from gullibility, according to the present day evolution of the brain.  
   Only a fraction of all people does ever realise this full potential.   Not reaching it is a result of external circumstances like lacking access to resources, psychological and social influences, challenges and limitations, physical harm and health problems.
2. The innate potential of the possible maximal maturity to be reached under optimal circumstances is distributed along a bell curve as are other traits like body size and talents.    

Most plausible is a combination of both, but the second hypothesis probably has a limited scope of variability, while the first one can have more drastic impacts.


There are different social environments in regard to the importance of maturity: 

1. Maturity is neither required, enabled nor empowered for the majority of the population.   Their potential maturity remains hidden.    Circumstances allowing and enabling full maturity are a privilege of a minority.  
2. Reaching maturity is expected from everybody and required from the majority.    The lacking or loss of the potential is considered as a deficit and called immaturity.  

Environment 1: 
During millenia of human history, life was organized mainly in villages and small towns, tribes, guilds, nomadic hordes, hoods.  Under their circumstances, maturity was obsolete and not reached.   
Psychosocial maturity is only needed to make wise choices, when there are options and the freedom to select one.    In those heavily structured communities, people's behavior was and is determined by strict rules, enforced by anything between exclusion, expulsion, deprivation from help and drastic punishments.   
Intellectual maturity is not needed in situations, where most of the activities for survival are manual labor and simple routines.  Tiresome toiling in the fields or simple crafts of making pots, baskets or building huts does not lead to someone ever reaching the limits of his abstract abilities, no matter how high or low they are.

Environment 2:
Since the industrial revolution and the advancement of technology, and since the widespread availability of tv and the web, the situation has been reversed.  
Psychosocial maturity: Children are already so overflowed and desensitized with oversexation and violence during the most susceptible phase of gullibility.  By the time, when their brain is ready for developing maturity, they are already too emotionally crippled and dwarfed and their potential to ever reach maturity is severely damaged.  
Intellectual maturity:   Everyday life has lately reached a complexity of ubiquitous technology.  Those with a lower potential for intellectual maturity are noticed and considered as deviant.  They are given labels like NLD.   In a rural society in historical times, they would have been shepherds or farm hands, and nobody would have seen them as having a disorder.  

356. Gullibility, Immaturity and NLD

Gullibility, Immaturity and NLD

In previous entries, I have already expressed the following speculations, hypotheses and assumptions:

1. The development of a child is a repetition of the evolution of the human mind.   
2. Gullibility is the method to acquire information for survival at an early age until the better method of abstract thinking has developed and gullibility becomes obsolete.
3. Gullibility is the passively accepting response to claims without doubting and verifying them.   Proactive gullibility is the diffuse psychological need to reduce unpleasant emotions by adopting a belief and the subsequent active search for the most convenient and fulfilling belief.
4. Maturity is the state of having reached the full evolutionary potential. 
   Intellectual maturity means to outgrow all gullibility and be only guided by consequencity.
   Psychosocial maturity means full self-awareness of the true personal identity based upon introspection and the ability to apply consequencity to interact with others on the principle of a fair balance of giving and taking.   
5. People can be stuck at any age and remain selfishly immature and gullible and never reach maturity.  
   
   There needs to be added:  
6. Children reach language proficiency long before their brains are ready for abstract and complex thinking.   The names for objects in a child's native language are to be learned by imitation and accepted as they are proffered as a requirement of communication.   Therefore it makes sense that the language acquisition goes along with gullibility.     

In entries 271 and 272 I described the impaired abstract thinking of emotional morons.   Based upon all the above premises, my description was the prototype of someone stuck at around the age of ten, still selfish and not yet able to employ advanced rational reasoning, but already verbally proficient.   Therefore he appears much less immature than he really is, especially when a very good memory helps to compensate.   My prototype is not only gullible, but proactively gullible as a way to cope in world, that is not really comprehensible to him without the crutch of believes.  

I did not know until yesterday, that I had given a fairly correct description of someone with NLD, Non-Verbal Learning Disorder or Non-Verbal Learning Disability.   I prefer the latter, because a disorder is a clinical label, while a disability only means to be less than fully able but not automatically being completely void of it.    Most sources about NLD cited in Wikipedia date back less than ten years.   It is a recent concept, and it seems, that this is a result of the growing complexity of modern life.    This will be elaborated in a future entry.

"Concept-formation, problem-solving, strategy-generation, and hypothesis-testing/appreciation of informational feedback: Marked deficits in all of these areas are apparent in persons with NLD, especially when the concept to be formed, the problem to be solved, and/or the problem-solving milieu(x) is/are novel or complex ......  Also evident are significant difficulties in dealing with cause-and-effect relationships and marked deficiencies in the appreciation of incongruities ...... relative deficits in these areas tend to increase markedly with advancing years, as is evident in the often widening gap between performance on rote (overlearned) and novel tasks.
....  failure to appreciate the consequences of one's own behaviour "

"Limitations in formal reasoning, problem-solving, and the like, would be expected to render the person with NLD quite gullible. This means that the person with NLD may be led into all sorts of risky situations, and thrown into the presence of all sorts of people who are prepared to exploit the person in an unethical manner and place the person in harm's way."

http://www.nld-bprourke.ca/BPRA45.html

"Their failure to anticipate consequences and their gullibility would be expected to pose a persistent threat to their physical (and psychological) well-being." 

"The gullibility of children with NLD is a consequence of their failure to draw veridical conclusions about events that are transpiring in their social and physical environments. Although they can learn specific stimulus-response contingencies through repeated practice ......   they tend not to generalize such learning to other, similar situations. An equally probable occurrence is that they will over-generalize many such stimulus-response contingencies because they fail to see that a new situation does, in fact, contain elements that would negate completely the usefulness or appropriateness of a particular response."

http://www.nld-bprourke.ca/BPRA29.html

Reading the quotes and much more on Rourke's very informative web site, I perceive his description of NLD as the description of the normal behavior of small children.  
Somehow NLD seems to me only a new label for an hitherto overlooked aspect of immaturity.   Emotional and psychosocial immaturity has long since been observed and acknowledged, but intellectual immaturity has not, when it is hidden behind impressive verbal skills.   
Rourke considers gullibility as consequence of NLD, while I think that NLD is the only possible expression of a brain, that still only has gullibility to cope, because it has not yet matured enough to apply consequencity.  

355. The Mind Messenger - Pooling Premises Mediation

The Mind Messenger - Pooling Premises Mediation

I am convinced, that when two partners in a relationship are mature, rational and sane and when they share

• the same relationship paradigm
• the same basic values and attitudes
• all information about the needs and feelings of the other

then it is possible to solve conflicts rationally by using logic upon the above information as premises.  

Solving a conflict is a two step process.   

• Step 1 is information collecting and pooling, until both share the same premises and both agree that no significant information is omitted.  
• Step 2 is using logic until either agreeing on a fair compromise or ending the relationship by consent as the result of incompatibility.

If by these two steps the conflict cannot be solved, then at least one of them either have some interfering personal psychological troubles or does not value the relationship enough to continue.   


The most common cause of a conflict is lacking information and the use different insufficient premises leads to conflicting conclusions.    Only someone aware of lacking information can ask and acquire it.    But if at leat one is using wrong information or is oblivious of lacking important information, then the conflict can become an impasse.     

This is often the consequence of the choice of a partner by physical infatuation in ignorance of compatibility or incompatibility.   
 
Reasons for using wrong or lacking information as insufficient premises of can for example be

• jumping to conclusions
• misunderstanding
• misinterpretations
• projecting
• previous experiences
• lack of introspection
• prejudice
• denial
• emotional reactions to the conflict

In the situation of such an impasse, people usually either fight over the same issues again and again, break up without being able to solve the problem or go to couple's counselling, which is aiming at far more drastic changes than filling the deficit of shared information.    

Help for only the first step of conflict solving does not exist.   This help could be called 'pooling premises mediation' and the mediator could be called a mind messenger.   I have experienced myself, how it is to talk to a wall, and in this situation I had wished I had a mind messenger to help me send the bouncing information to the other side of the wall.   

It is probable best to have one such mind messenger for each of the partners A and B.  That makes is easier to transfer the information unaltered.   Keeping two conflicting versions apart and remain impartial is difficult.   
The role of partner A's mind messenger is to decry all information from A, that needs to be added to the shared premises pool.

• General information like A's relationship paradigm, values, needs 
• A's unfulfilled needs and wishes 
• A's feedback, experience, perception, introspection, emotions in reaction to B's behavior
• A's rational evaluation of B's behavior 
• All other information, which A considers important to be known by B. 

The mind messenger checks carefully to have understood the information correctly, before he then explains it to B.  He also checks carefully, if B has really understood everything.    It has to be very clear for B, that the mind messenger reports impartial information about A, without any own opinion or attempt to influence B.   The information has to be accepted by B as valid to be integrated into the premises pool.       

A mind messenger to help pooling premises does not need as much qualifications as a counsellor.  His job is to impartially collect and correctly transfer information and nothing else.  Any person, who is able to listen and understand, think logically and explain in patience, can fulfill this role.    

If this form of mediation does not lead to an agreed upon premises pool, which is good enough for the second step of agreeing how to solve the conflict, then it is time for either counselling or for ending the relationship.   
In addidtion to rationality and maturity, the only requirements from both partners are motivation, cooperation, compliance with the procedure and recognition of the underlying principle of the premises pool.    

354. Dumbing Down

Dumbing Down

This blog is a good representation of my way of thinking, of what interests me and of what I not only feel comfortable to talk about but enjoy doing so.    In my imagination of a meaningful life with a mindmate, deep communication about matters as mentioned in this blog and whatever intellectual interests he brings along would make an enjoyable lingering over hours at the breakfast table or at a picnic at a nice place.       

But the more often I experience the failure and lack of reciprocity of my attempts to engage in some profound meaningful and rational communication and correspondence, the more I am puzzled, why so few men seem to have similar inclinations and wishes.    Entry 353 gives an example. 

There are several possible hypotheses:  

1.   Men are unable to comprehend or to enjoy my way of communicating, either by immaturity or by lack of intellectuality.   

Until I started to search for a match on the Internet, I was convinced, that any person intelligent enough to get a BA would be able to understand my reasoning either in personal conversation or in writing.    I am certainly not a genius and I am lacking the hubris to really claim, that men having the same level of formal education as my German equivalent of an MA could be so much dumber than myself as being unable to comprehend my thoughts.    

Yet on the other hand I may be overestimating the level of abstract thinking required to get a degree.   With a very good memory people can compensate to a certain extent for lacking reasoning skills.   The narcissistic bluffer as described in entry 287 is an example.   

2.   Men are lacking the ability to appreciate women's intelligence as a consequence of their affliction of being driven by the recurrent need for homeostation.

This impedes men from ever or often enough consciously experiencing women's true abilities.   Most of the time, which men spend together with women, their state of dishomeostasis derails their entire focus upon the woman's body.    In this state, their brains are too blurred and dysfunctional (more in entry 330), they are not able to appreciate a woman's intelligence until their homeostasis is restored.   
2.1.  Both single men and single women with a full time job have only a few hours of spare time in the evening and free weekends.    In this situation of limited free time, the women have a big advantage.     They have a clear head and fully functional brain to chose, how to use all their time for whatever is beneficial for their entire person, reading, culture, meaningful socializing or whatever interests them.   
But the single men are again and again driven by their affliction to go hunting for prey, the story in entry 318 is a typical example.   Such predators' close contact with women is limited to those times, when they are the most disabled from recognizing women's intelligence.   Instead they are completely reduced to the intellectual level of an animal.  As soon and while these men have temporarily restored homeostasis, they attempt to make the best use of their short periods of clear thinking.   If during these times of clarity they ever do engage in meaningful communication with women, it is an exception from all other important occupations pressed into too little time.  
2.2.  If a man is in a committed relationship, especially living together, he has a subscription to regular homeostation.  The hours of the day, when his brain is still the clearest, are spent at his job and not with his partner.   Many of his waking hours are filled with other requirements of everyday life and a vast portion of the together time with his partner is also spent in rehomeostation activities.   The time for counterbalancing intellectual sharing in the state of homeostasis is scarce.  
2.3.   When a man in the state of dishomeostasis interacts with a woman, whose intelligence and formal education matches his, but her mind is clear, while his is blurred by his state, then he perceives himself temporarily as less smart and less intelligent than the woman and this is unpleasant, frustrating and intimidating.   He wants to avoid experiencing this by either looking for less intelligent women or by focusing so entirely upon her body and homeostation, that he can remain oblivious of her intelligence.

All this together causes men to associate a woman predominantly with the use of her body, while they are mindblind to all her other, especially the intellectual qualities.

3.  There is the possibility of a spiral of reciprocal dumbing down.

I read about women dumbing down to appear less smart to men, in the awareness of how some men just cannot deal with a woman being as smart as they are, let alone being smarter in any way.  

"But, what’s a girl with a brain to do? One of my friends who went to a very prestigious university often finds herself in situations with men who feel intimidated by her worldliness, by her ability to speak multiple languages, by her wit and intelligence.

However, rather than using this as a gauge to find men that are appreciative of her intellectual capabilities, she has become obsessed with hiding her true nature. Instead, she focuses on topics such as the weather, her hair and pop culture when in social settings with men.

I asked her why she does this and she claims that she would rather have a boyfriend than be alone. And, in order to get a boyfriend, she believes that she can’t let them know that she is smarter than they are. So, she plays dumb."

http://twodaymag.com/love/view/dumbing-down-to-get-a-date

This can have very detrimental consequences, if too many women dumb down.   Because then men start to seriously mistake that artificial understatement as true deficiency of women.   As a reaction, men then also start to dumb down to accommodate the women, who all are either dumb or pretend to be dumb.    This could lead to the absurd situation, that a woman, who is interested in literature, talks about fashion and gossip to dump down for a man, who talks about the same shallow topics, while he is interested in science and also considers the woman as too dumb for this topic. 

Once both the men and the women have developed habitual dumbing down as common behavior, stupidity becomes the mutual expectation.   A really dumb person has difficulties to distinguish between the really dumb and the dumbed down people.   This is why the dumbing down spiral starts turning, when the already dumb women dumb down even further to accommodate the really or apparently equally dumb men.    Considering what is happening in mainstream society, that spiral has already started turning and continues to do so.

As soon as all women either are or appear dumb by pretending, then an intelligent may never have met a recognizably intelligent woman.  He has never had a chance to learn how to recognize one, if he gets in contact with her.   When stupidity is the norm, then even the intelligent man's expectations are derailed and distorted.    He is unable to recognize the exception, who refuses to dumb down herself, he treats her according to the expectation of general stupidity.  


It has never occurred to me to dumb down.  There is nothing attracting me to dumb men.  It is the contrary, I always want to present myself as who I am.   If truly dumb men feel intimidated and threatened, then it is better not to be bothered any further with them and it is good riddance.   
But my refusal to dumb down does not help against the inability of men, who are already too much mislead by their prejudices about all women being dumb.   When they cannot recognize me for what and who I really am, then their prejudice determines their behavior so much, that their perception is blocked.   When their own behavior is too dumb, they are not able to elicit a reaction to correct the prejudice.  Even when they are not really dumb, they have never learned, how to embark in a non-dumb interaction with a woman.      
It is as if men would not only believe all blondes to be dumb, but they would also believe that all women with different hair color are just dyed blondes.      


Most probably, all three hypotheses are an explanation for some of those men, who are not responding to correspondence, profiles or this blog with the deep, rational, thoughtful communication, which I am craving for so much.    In this world, so much dominated by irrationality, gullibility, shallowness, animality, oversexation, stupidity, preposterosity, I feel like an alien.    I do not wish to be different from who I am, but I wished that there were more people like me and I would know, where they are.  Especially I wish I would find that one mindmate for me.      

353. An Incompatible Man's Incompatible Behavior

An Incompatible Man's Incompatible Behavior

Both, whom to initiate contact with and how to react to initiatives, are guided by the attitude towards a person as a partner.    A wise and mature person in full awareness of reciprocity checks not only, if the other complies with his own criteria, but also, if he complies with the expressed criteria in the other's profile.   
Therefore on dating sites I have listed my own criteria in my profiles and also the suggestion to read this blog.    I am far from having any narcissistic intention or delusion of pouring out wisdom onto the web for others to greedily inhale it.  There are enough good contributions from others making my addition superfluous.   

My only purpose for writing this blog is to find a mindmate, and whoever else enjoys reading it, is just welcome.    Only a man looking for a female mindmate craving intellectual intimacy can logically be expected to be someone very interested and motivated to read this blog.   He would not read it to learn something, but to compare our values, attitudes, goals, needs, identities.    If a man is not interested in reading this blog, this tells me that he is willing to get involved with any haphazard woman.   Even if he appeared interested in me, this would not be because of my deep thinking as I have presented in what I have written here.

Unfortunately, there are just too many men, who would accept any haphazard woman.    A recent example:
A few days ago, I initiated contact after discovering someone's profile indicating the possibility of compatibility.   Therefore I expected that he would look at my profile and check himself against my criteria and me against his before replying.  

I was a bit taken aback, when his only reaction was asking me to send him a photo.    Giving him the benefit of the doubt, that this were just a thoughtless reaction, I wrote back a lengthy explanation, why I do not want to be chosen or rejected by my looks as a body from a catalogue.     This led to the exchange of several emails, in which I attempted to explain, that I am a person, for whom it is important to be taken for serious as having a brain.    Being so very different from the prototypical female, I considered it important to give an outline of my way of thinking.   
This was meant as proactive explaining, to preclude misunderstandings and misinterpretations, especially because some men not only jump to conclusions from assumptions, projections and previous experiences, but also take them so much for granted, that they do not even explicitly mention them.    He mistook my proactive explanations as if I were excusing myself.   I have no reason to make excuses being myself, but being different from some men's expectations and preventing misunderstandings. 

He claimed to take a woman for serious and to respect her as a person.   I wonder, what this really means in his own interpretation.    After a few emails, he did send me a picture, on which he was clean shaven.  But he did not make any comment about the discrepancy with my profile, where I clearly stated my looking for someone bearded.     That made me ask him directly, if he had ever read my profile.  As it seems, he did this only after that question.    

In his next email, he finally came up with some facts.   While in contrast to the picture, he does have a beard, he also has children.   So one of the main reasons, while I had contacted him at all, was at least incorrect, if not a lie.   

It is disheartening, how I get led on into false hopes and disappointments by men, who are unable to take me for serious.         

352. Brainism and Egalitarianism

 Brainism and Egalitarianism

After having written entry 351 I got aware, that I may superficially appear as inconsistent and even contradictory with my emphasis on being egalitarian.    This requires some further explanations:

1. Egalitarian in a relationship means to carefully choose a partner, who can be fully respected and appreciated as equal.   The subjective evaluation of a partner's equality is of vital importance.    Egalitarian means to avoid getting infatuated with the body of a haphazard person and then coping with insurmountable differences.  
2. Egalitarian means equal rights and equal chances for all, without any advantages due to some limited difference being used as a pretence to dominate or create a hierarchy of power and of access to resources.  
3. Egalitarian does not deny differences of measurable and definable superiority and inferiority in specific areas of life.   More learning, training and developing of skills and talents it superior to less. 
4. Egalitarian does not disallow the choice, whom to associate with as equal and whom to avoid as a result of the perceived lack of equality. 

Individuals have the right to allow perceived measurable inequality guide their personal behavior in a reactive and passive way, but they have no right to force disadvantages due to inequalities upon others.

I as an individual can consider all irrational believes as inferior to rationality and consequencity and I have the right to avoid all gullible believers, because of their believe.   But just as I have no right to interfere with their lives, they have no right to interfere with mine.

In my example in entry 351 of the German law forbidding the opening of shops on sundays, the gullible force an irrational law upon the rational non-believers, and that cannot be justified.   But it would it is equally wrong, if rational employers would coerce religious people to work on sundays, if their delusion leads to pain due to the paranoia of being punished by their deity.   

If one of a person's trait, skill or talent is of high significance to his identity, then this can be a valid reason to reject a person with partial inferiority in this attribute as a partner for an egalitarian relationship.   

While I as a very rational and logical person consider myself superior to gullible people believing in any absurdity, be it a deity, an obscure power like chi, reincarnation or whatever, there are also areas of life, where a man has the same valid reason to consider me as inferior.    When it comes to talents, my worst deficit is musicality.   I can't sing, I can't play an instrument and I am unable to learn both.   Though loving all folklore music, complex classical concerts are to me as unpleasant as the sound of an electrical drill.    For a professional musician, to whom music is an important part of his identity, I am inferior in this area and certainly not suitable. 

The important point is here, that superior or inferior are a real difference of a limited aspect, that can be important enough to justify behavior, but it does not justify to devalue the entire person.  

The gullible believer, whom I cannot respect as a thinker, can be a caring and kind partner to another gullible person sharing the same delusion.    

A person has the right to judge others according to the own value system and identity, but this does not imply any entitlement or justificatioin to harm anybody as a consequence of personal attitudes.  

  

351. Brainism

351.  Brainism

On the atheist forum of a dating site, this was my reaction to some racist remarks:

"The claim and belief, that the pigmentation of the skin or other externally observable physical traits indicate a person's potential and innate talents at birth, is as irrational and absurd as believing in a deity.
True skeptics and atheists cannot believe in sorting people by whatever they define as 'race'. If someone has discarded the religion of his culture but still believes in other irrational, non-scientific claims, then I consider his atheism as only skin deep."

That made me wonder about my attitude, that problem solving and coping by rationality and consequencity are superior to coping by gullibly believing claims and that when people's gullibility is so strong, that they psychologically need their believes, this is a deficiency and impairment of their brain.    

In analogy to racism, this could be called brainism and I could be called a brainist, which takes it a step further than this definition of a brainist:  

"Someone who values the brain and its power. An individual who tries to stay mentally fit and sharp."
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/brainist

But there is a fundamental difference.   In accordance with their entitlement and grandiosity delusion, racists have succeeded in usurping power, enslaving, exploiting and eliminated those, who are allegedly inferior according to their racist believes.   While narcissists are individuals interacting with other individuals, racists are like group-narcissists.  

Brainists are in a very different situation.  They are themselves the repressed minority, whose rights are restricted by the gullible with the deficient brains ruling mainstream society and enforce social norms, pressure for conformity and even laws.   

A brainist has the same role as the victim of the narcissist, who as much as she scorns, ridicules and loathes the dominator, is still under his power.  The narcissist's delusion causes him to feel superior to his victim, the victim feels superior to the narcissist, because of his delusion.    

The gullible majority has the need for believes, they feel superior and justified in their mission to dominate the non-believers.  Unfortunately they often have the power to force their belief upon the non-believers.   The brainists consider their own rationality as superior.     

An example:  In Germany, there is a law to protect the religious specialness of the sunday.   Shops are not allowed to open on sundays.    As a brainist, I consider it an outrage, that the gullible have a right to enforce their irrationality upon everybody.   If the sundays are special to them, nobody forces them to go shopping.   But it should be the rational shopkeeper's right, when to do business and the rational customer's choice, when to go shopping.  

I admit to feel some condescension to those gullible people, who cannot live without their believes, and I consider it as preposterous and as an outrage, that they have so much power to enforce irrationality on the unafflicted.  But in contrast to racism, this does not justify doing any harm to them.   They are people with special needs, they should only be stopped from interfering with the rights of the rationals, but they have the right to be allowed to have their needed believes, where it does not do harm to others.      

350. Pognophile - Naturalness - Self-Modification

Pognophile - Naturalness - Self-Modification
I just happened to discover the word 'pognophile' for people, who like beards, and I started to ponder about my own preference for fully bearded men.

My choice of a mindmate is not influenced by differences between the natural looks of a man, my choice is for compatibility.    Even though my subjective taste is such, that hair growing naturally adds to what I perceive as physical attraction, this does not influence my choice.  
While the choice between different kinds of self-modification is a question of taste, a person's choice between naturalness and self-modification is a personality trait.  My choice of a mindmate is entirely based upon the compatibility with his personality.   I am strongly attracted by a man's decision to refrain from any self-modification, no matter what would be the resulting external appearance due to self-modification. 

An example:
A completely bald man and a man with a shaven head look exactly the same.    But it is far from being the same.   Baldness is genuine and not a decision, a shaven head is a choice, while there is an alternative.   This choice implies considering the impact of the looks upon the beholder and is thus an expression of appreciation or depreciation.  

For me, the visual difference between a man with a full head of hair and a bald man does not influence my choice, because both are their genuine natural selves.    But self-modification can never make a man more attractive, it only can make him repulsive.    Wearing a wig does not make a bald man more attractive, but shaving his head makes a man with natural hair repulsive.  

The difference between a man, who allows his hair to grow, and a man, who shaves his head, is not a difference between looks, it is a fundamental difference between attitudes.   

Shaving the head as an example of self-modification indicates

•  The man is shallow, his looks are important to him
•  and
• He is limiting his choice of a mate to those equally shallow women, who accept or prefer men with hairless heads
  or
• He considers himself as god's gift to women, who should feel attracted to whatever he does to his exterior.
  or
• His exterior is a submission in conformity to influences, that he considers more important than being attractive according to a woman's taste

I used the head without hair as an example, because the exactly same looks can be either natural or the result of self-modification.    The same reasoning as for removing the hair from the head can also be applied to removing the hair from the face, except that to my knowledge, there are no men with a naturally bald face.  

All men with a full beard indicate their naturalness, while all clean shaven faces are an expression of self-modification, either by choice or by gullibility.         

Naturalness is an attitude of what is important, of what defines a person's identity, either his body or his brains and his mind.    Naturalness expresses the evaluation of what is worth time and effort and what is not.   I have been wondering, if pognophile really describes me or not.    Naturalness in a man means of course that he has a full beard.   I value, perceive and consider this as the baseline.    Therefore shaving is a form of deviant behavior when compared with this baseline.    

Pognophile means to be attracted to beards, but since I am attracted to personalities and not prone to get infatuated by bodies, it is more precise to declare, that I feel comfortable with a bearded man, while the clean shavenness makes a face repulsive to me, independent of its attractiveness.   My indirect repugnance as a reaction to his attitude of self-modification causes my physical recoiling from shaven faces. 
 
When I see the face of a man, who shaves, no matter if he does this to his entire face or if he creates some more or less weird patterns in his face, or has stubbles, I perceive this as if something is not right, awkward, faulty, visually dissonant, missing.   It is hard to to put it into words.  It is like seeing a picture with a corner missing or a cracked vase.    It is visible, that he is wasting his time for the completely futile and irrational task of shaving again and again, what keeps regrowing as long as he lives.  
That leads to the question, how gullible he is, how much he is prone to do irrational things under influences pressing him to conformity.   If a man conforms to the weird behavior of shaving, I suspect him to do other weird things too in submission and by gullibility to mainstream society and external influences.    

It is certainly no coincidence, that many great independent thinkers like Darwin, Freud, Marx and Epicure had beards.  They had better things to do than to shave.  

Therefore naturalness is an important factor of compatibility.   I do not want or demand a man to grow a beard to please me, if shaving is his own preference, I am looking for a man, whose own innate naturalness is expressed in his having a beard. 
If a man feels being his own genuine self with a beard, then we are compatible.   If a man wants to shave as his preference, I respect his choice.   But it is also a choice for my recoiling reaction.   Asking him to grow a beard against his wish would not make us compatible, as we do not share naturalness.  


But my preference is based upon reciprocity of naturalness.   If a man is looking for a woman indulging in self-modification of any kind like damaged feed in high heals or shaven legs, I am not that woman and will never be.    I am the same natural as what attracts me in a man.   

I have never in my life painted my face or any other part of my body.    All my hair grows as it grows, I have never removed any hair from my body.    I have never worn high heels and I could not even walk in them.   Superfluous to say, that I would not accept damage to my body as are tattoos or piercings, except under the threat of a gun pointed at my head.   I do not only wear no jewellery, I do not even own any.  

A man with a clean shaven face

looks faulty like a cracked vase.

349. Sapiobonding With a Sapiomate

Sapiobonding With a Sapiomate

I just came across a new concept, called sapiosexuality.   As I understand it, it shifts the emphasis away from infatuation triggered by stimuli from the body towards infatuation triggered by intelligence and brains.    It is one step of progress away from instincts triggered in humans the same way as they are triggered in animals.    Instead, animal instincts are triggered by a truly human quality.    

I am taking this one step further.   Infatuation is ephemeral and when it fades, it either leads to bonding or to the failure of the relationship.   I would prefer to skip infatuation and start a relationship immediately with bonding and with a conscious commitment.   
Throughout this blog, I described my quest as that for bonding with a mindmate, based upon hypoanimality and intellectual intimacy.  

In analogy to sapiosexuality, I could also phrase it as my quest to find a sapiomate for sapiobonding.  

348. Gullibility and Spirituality

Gullibility and Spirituality

Over the years I have been reading many descriptions and definition of what spirituality is supposed to mean or what it means to those, who are attracted to it.   But as much as I ponder over it, it remains an alien and incomprehensible concept to me, when attempting to imagine, how it feels like.  

While being myself entirely void thereof, I am aware, how it obviously has a very real and strong emotional appeal to and power over many people.   In entry 315 I described the encounter with a religious woman, who appeared to me like drugged by her religious zeal.   Something powerful is going on in the brain of these people.

During my own christian upbringing as a child, my belief was void of any emotion (entry 11).  I never had any emotional need for the deity, whom I was temporarily believing in.  Taking the existence of a deity for granted was a child's gullibility as a part of generally never doubting what I was told.    Gullibility during my childhood was an ephemeral and skin deep state, until the maturation of my brain had enabled me to become aware of the irrationality and absurdity of the belief.   

I will never know, what being spiritual means to those, who experience this.   They cannot explain it, because it is so much a self-evident part of their personality, that they lack the imagination of how it is for me to be without.  

But I do not want to be misunderstood.   I do not miss to be spiritual at all.  I do not feel to lack anything that I would prefer to have, if this were an option.    I am a deep thinker, I can feel strong emotions in connection with real people and real life experiences, and being rational and logic is a reason to feel good about myself.   The mental and intellectual freedom from believes and spirituality is certainly the preferable way of coping with life.

Spirituality is like alcohol.   The double meaning of the word spirit is no coincidence.   Alcohol gives temporary relief from the full awareness of a painful reality, while the effect of the intoxication lasts, but as a side effects it also inhibits the motivation to solve the problems.  Spirituality does the same more permanently.   

Therefore neither spirituality nor alcohol are in anyway appealing to me as a means to cope with life.   But to better understand other people's experiences, it is good to know them myself first hand, as long as exposing myself is no hazard.  
There is nothing desirable in being an alcoholic or regularly drunk, and I rarely drink alcohol.  But I do consider it helpful to have experienced myself, how it feels to be drunk and to have a hangover.   
There is nothing desirable in being spiritual, as this means being detached from the awareness for reality and having a delusion instead.   But I am curious and I would like to know, how that feels.  

Getting oneself temporarily drunk is a simple act of one's own volition.  Unfortunately, there is no method in my power to ever elicit temporarily in my rational brain the emotions caused by the spiritual delusions.   
Maybe brain stimulation with Persinger's helmet would help.   But his laboratory is in Canada, if he would even accept me as a test subject, and similar helmets sold on the Internet are very expensive.  

Spiritual people practice their chosen creed by rituals, and there is a wide variety.  As a few examples, they chant in front of a shrine, they kiss statues, they meditate, they follow routines of elaborated body movements, they fast by schedule or live on a very selective diet, they paint or mutilate their bodies.   
Some claim or belief, that those rituals create spirituality.   But it is the other way around.    The presence or absence of a need for spirituality, for believing, for being delusional makes the difference, how the ritualistic behaviors are experienced, perceived and interpreted.  The belief installs sense into arbitrary behaviors.  The rituals only enhance experiencing, what has first been there as the motivation to perform the rituals.

Unaffiliated and unafflicted observers perceive those ritualistic behaviors as weird, preposterous and absurd hocus-pocus.   Imitating these rituals does not supply a temporary delusion leading to spiritual emotions, when such emotions are alien to the personality.  

Tai chi is an example.   For the spiritual, it creates the delusion of having or learning how to gain control over some alleged life force called chi, of which the existence has so far eluded any scientific evidence. 
Watching people performing tai chi is as hilarious as watching apes in the zoo.   It remotely looks like dancing without the music.      
Once I was obliged by circumstances to participate in a tai chi lesson.   I was bored and in a state of cognitive dissonance.   It just made no sense to make ritualistic movements to honor same non-existent chi.    I asked myself, why I should imitate dancing without music, as music is the trigger to dance.   Just as I cannot see a reason to write without paper, as wanting notes on the paper is the reason to write.    I felt as if I had joined the apes by what is called participant observation in social science.  


While I am ignorant of what people do experience, when they claim to be spiritual, I have a speculative explanation for the causes of their affliction.

Gullibility is reactive.   A gullible person it the passive target responding positively and often strongly to external influences proffered or forced upon him without his initiative.   
Spirituality takes it one step further, it is proactive gullibility.   A spiritual person is an active target feeling a strong need to be influenced and therefore searching for influences.  
In entry 345 I gave a few examples, how people choose the specific believes fitting their particular needs.   But choosing a belief means, that it is already available as an option.  It is presented as the claim of it being the solution to a specific trouble.   Spirituality is the process of first feeling and perceiving some vague, unspecified, undefined, immaterial and strong need, and then searching for some way to fulfill it.   If nothing suitable is found in the scope of known quackeries and deities, then the choice is for the delusion of the existence of some unspecified entity or power.    

All standard religions are specific instances of spirituality, but those, who do not like the rules and restrictions of standard religions, enlarge their search to other forms of spirituality.    In their search to fulfill their spiritual need, some people test several creeds, until they find the one, that suits them best.  Whatever effect is experienced due to the particular ritual is not recognized as a  personal preference, taste or inclination, instead it is attributed to the connected belief system.   

They participate in the creed's specific rituals.  By trial and error they discover, to which they react with the strongest emotions.  There they remain, tied by the delusion causing the emotions.  The absence of rationality makes them susceptible to be delusional, but they can easily replace one delusion by another.    

 
I have speculated before, that the strength or absence of unconscious instinctive urges determines the conscious basic values and the identity of a person, and that breeders have a different identity than non-breeders.    Non-breeders consider the baseline of correct behavior as the fair exchange between themselves and their social environment focusing on individual people living now.   
Breeders are driven to make huge sacrifices for the survival of their genes and the species.    When they are exhausted and stressed, when they are disappointed by their children, when child rearing is a burden beyond denial, they have to deal with the unavoidable question, why they have deliberately brought this upon themselves.   There is no rational answer from the non-breeder's point of view.  
Spirituality serves to supply a satisfactory answer to soothe the breeders.    The unconscious representation of the eternal chain of genes never dieing in contrast to the individual bearer can be modified into the belief in the vague entity or power beyond the individual particle.   Breeders perceive a connection with their spiritual power, but unconsciously it is the connection with their eternally living genes.   This cause of spirituality is not restricted to actual breeders, it appeals to all, who by their implicit identify perceive themselves as less important than the species and the genes.  


I am void of both, of the instinct to breed and of any spirituality, and I think that both are connected.   
Some people call themselves spiritual but not religious.   To me, this distinction makes no sense.   Someone, who is spiritual can never be a real atheist, because the real difference is between either being being rational or being afflicted with any belief immune to rationality.  

The insurmountable ditch is between brains like mine, guided and determined by rationality, logic, consequencity, skepticism and brains afflicted by gullibility and spirituality in any variation.   

Therefore my mindmate is not only an atheist and skeptic, but also as void of spirituality as I am myself.   

347. Interferences Between Gullibility, Instinctivity and Consequencity

Interferences Between Gullibility, Instinctivity and Consequencity

As outlined in previous entries, three distinctive forces have an impact on the behavior of a person. 

• external influences accepted by gullibility
• urges of instinctive and innate needs and the impulses of selfish hedonistic wishes
• long-term rational considerations enabled by consequencity

1.  When one force is the strongest, this force determines the behavior.   When someone is predominantly determined by one of the forces, this is a part or his personality.   

2.  There can be situations, when all three forces are of about the same strength, and a person feels a conflict of what to do.  
An example:   An obese person not wanting to be overweight.  

• By instinct, he wants to eat, whatever food he can get.    
• Rationally he knows, that by eating less calories than he burns, he looses weight.  
• By gullibility he is tempted to buy expensive diet products promising incredibly fast results.

3.  There is also the possibility, that two of the forces are leading to the same behavior and when combined are stronger than the force that is an expression of the personality.  

• gullibility + instinctivity > consequencity
  Example:   There are some men, who indicate in their profiles to prefer fat women over slim ones.    If such a man meets a woman, who by her consequencity is able to control her weight, but he starts to cajole and seduce her to eat as much as her instincts would want her to eat, as a result she gets as fat as he wants her to be.  (By the way, my BMI is 20 and I am determined to remain like this.   Such a man is not compatible with me.)
• gullibility +  consequencity >  instinctivity
  Example:  A person with the tendency towards frustration eating when alone can be empowered to control the weight under the beneficial influence of sharing a healthy diet with a partner.
• consequencity + instinctivity > gullibility
  As long as children are growing, they need to eat as much as is in accordance with their instinct, but they can be educated to eat healthy food instead of the fast-food and sweets that they are lured to eat by commercials.  

Consequencity has two different strategies when dealing with competing influences:

• The ability to resist by knowing better and being aware of the long term consequences.
  Example:   The ability to stop eating, when no more hungry, even when the host proffers more tempting food.  
• The wisdom to avoid triggers for succumbing to influences. 
  Example:   Not buying high calorie food but only buying what is healthy.  Avoiding invitation by people, who like to overfeed their guests.  

346. Gullibility and Equal Rights

Gullibility and Equal Rights   
While the starting point for the following thoughts was religion, indirectly it is about gullibility, because gullibility enables religions as it enables other believes.

On a dating site I participated in a discussion concerning closed groups and equal rights.   The site software disallows all non-believers from entering the religious groups, while religious people are not impeded from entering the one group for non-believers.   
One person fervently claimed this to be a denial of equal rights.   When I attempted to point out, that equal rights implies the respect for equally capable and healthy people, and that I do not respect believers enough to even want to have equal rights, I was surprised by the hostility of the reaction.    

There are two very different kinds of discrimination, exploitative and compensatory/protective discrimination.   
Demanding and fighting for equal rights are the valid response to exploitative discrimination, while compensatory and protective discrimination serves to give equal opportunities to people with some special need.

I will use parking as a metaphor.   By equal rights alone, all public parking lots are equally open to all people.   If parking lots were reserved to people according to the color of their skin, this would not only be absurd and irrational, but in fact a valid reason for an outrage and claim of equal rights.  
But there are parking lots reserved for people, whose ability to walk is impaired, and this is not an infringement of equal rights.    The base line is the ability to walk, and those, who cannot, need special consideration to compensate.   Those able to walk are the majority, they are allowed to use most of the parking spaces.  

Considering believing, the baseline is being mentally healthy and fully evolved as an atheist, skeptic, non-believer, who needs no psychological crutch.   But the gullible are like people, who have been brought up in a wheelchair and never tried walking, as if the option of walking never even occurred to them.   Therefore none of them has a clue, if he could walk or would be helpless without the wheelchair.   Those, who do walk, are a minority, those in the wheelchair are the majority.   Nearly all parking spaces are usurped by people in wheelchairs leaving only the remotest ones to the walkers.  The few walking people are overrun and pushed aside by the traffic of predominant wheelchairs on the sidewalk.       
But equal rights are not applicable, because ruthless taking away the wheelchairs from everybody would cause disaster to those, who really cannot walk.  Those able to walk should be encouraged and motivated to do so without endangering those really in need of a wheelchair.  

This metaphor has limitations.   Because no sane person would ever take someone's wheelchair away, because the need is obvious.  

In entry 345 is described, how gullible people choose the belief, that fits them best.   Since there are so many different believes, each a reaction to a different underlying psychological trouble, it is difficult to know, in what state of desolation any one of them would be without the emotional and mental crutch of the belief.   I do not know, how many of the gullible would get dysfunctional and devastated, if deprived of their belief, and how many have mental capacities for rationality and consequencity, enabling them to improve their coping without a belief.   
 

When comparing a delusional belief to an addiction, both have a lot in common.  But there is one important difference.  While withdrawal comes by itself, when the homeostasis is not maintained by regularly supplying the addictive agent, the gullible only experience withdrawal, when they are deprived of their belief.   Else the degree of their dependency remains hidden.   As long as a gullible person is never deprived of his belief, it is impossible to know, if he is addicted to his delusion or not, if he would react with withdrawel symptoms or not.  For some, sudden withdrawal can be such a disaster, and they need the same consideration as those unable to walk.  

Therefore it is very unfortunate, that the gullible are the majority.  While the addicted delusional ones need to be protected against sudden withdrawal, the world would be a better place, if all the others could be reached by education, until rationality is the baseline of sanity for the majority.   Randi's JREF and skeptical organisations are doing good work, but gullibility has a strong appeal to the intellectually lazy, just as the wheelchairs in my metaphor have for the physically lazy.   In an ideal world, those pathologically gullible needing their delusions to prevent their becoming dysfunctional would be kept in mental institutions, while the normal every day life would lead a life of rationality and consequencity. 

345. Gullibility and the Choice of a Belief

Gullibility and the Choice of a Belief

As already mentioned in entry 344, belief serves to convert something worthless into a pseudo-remedy for troubles, and it often replaces or impedes any real improvement, sometimes the trouble even gets worse.

A gullible's belief is another person's claim taken as true without doubt.    In this context, it makes no difference, if the belief is in the existence of an entity or in a contingency.   It also makes not difference, if it contradicts science, has never been scientifically evaluated or just cannot be proven or disproved.  

Gullible people choose their preferred belief depending on the kind of trouble and their personality.   The following are a few combinations of a belief chosen to fit a need.  

1.  Begging or buying help from imaginary beings

The gullibles in this group feel helpless to solve their problem.  They choose a powerful deity, whom they believe to be able to be the life stuntman or proxy to solve their problems for them.  They believe, that while the deity is able to supply the fulfillment of all needs, he only does this after being explicitly motivated to do so.  

• Those who believe, that an appeal is sufficient to bring the trouble to the attention of a deity,  just waste their time in prayers.  

• Others believe, that it is not enough to simply bring the trouble to the attention of a powerful deity.   They hope to get better results by bribing the deity.   This can be as simple as buying candles or paying money to some full time intermediate pastor to pray on their behalf.     

• Another approach to more fierce and unfriendly deities is earning favors by undergoing hardships of any kind.   Fasting or even sacrificing a close relative are examples.    Gullibles of this kind jump deliberately from the frying pan into the fire.   To get relief from one pain, they deliberately inflict another pain upon themselves, in the end they have added more pain to the previous.

The same methods as above for existing trouble can also be used for prevention and sometimes the effects are paradoxical.  Someone feeling protected by a deity is prone to recklessness and risky behavior.    Soldiers sometimes are encouraged by the religious benediction of weapons.

2.  Buying help from crooks and delusionals

The more pragmatic gullibles buy quackeries from real people.   They want an easy way out.  They hand over the money and then it is the quack's job to remove their emotional or physical ailments or prevent them.  
The skeptic's dictionary ( http://www.skepdic.com ) and quackwatch ( http://www.quackwatch.com ) have long lists of such quackeries.    Homeopathy, aromatherapy, Bach's flowers, magnet therapy, therapeutic touch, faith healing, feng shui are just a few examples.   There is a quackery for every imaginable discomfort.

There are three kinds of quacks.  

• The crooks, who know, that what they sell is fake and a fraud.
• The over altruistic gullibles, who believe to help others by selling the quackery, in which they believe themselves.    
• The delusionals, who are not only gullible to claims from others but create the claims by believing in their own ability to heal or help.        

3.  Buying information from crooks and gurus

The curious gullibles and those, for whom uncertainty and ignorance are difficult to bear buy bogus informations from crooks and gurus.  Bogus information can relief anxieties.  Here again, there are the crooks aware of frauding, the over altruistic gurus, who believe so much in their methods, that they want to share the source of their bogus information, and the delusional gurus, who believe to have gained special competency in a specific method.  
Again, there is a long list.  Graphology, astrology, numerology, biorhythm are examples of bogus psycho diagnostics for the wish to gain better knowledge about oneself and others, while clairvoyance, dowsing, ESP are a bogus access to unobtainable information.  

4.  Justification instead of changing

Some gullible people choose a belief system, when they feel bad, insufficient, a failure, in cognitive dissonance.   Something in themselves is in discord with their previous belief or that of their social environment.   Instead of changing themselves, they choose a new belief, which justifies their weakness, selfishness, irresponsibility and other behavior, that they experience as unwanted.  If it does not really justify their behavior and attitudes, it does at least so in their interpretation and perception.  The newly chosen belief makes them feel better about themselves. 

• A male cheater can convert to islam, where cheating does not exist, because the coran allows him not only 4 wives, but an unspecified number of concubines.   
• In entry 56 I already outlined, how zen-buddhism focuses on the present and can serve as an excuse to refuse responsibility for past transgressions.  
• Someone having damaged another chooses a religion, in which it is the deity's job to forgive sins by application.   When believing to have acquired the forgiveness of the deity, then he never makes amends to the victim of his transgression.

4.  Buying power by direct or indirect methods

The gullibles, whose main trouble is their lack of social success, buy methods from crooks and gurus to enable them to gain power over people.   

• Voodoo and witchcraft are paid for as the delegation of the use of their power on one's behalf. 
• Others want to gain power themselves.   NLP is an example.  In entry 177, I described, how jerks are attracted to NLP, because they believe to gain seductive power over women by applying NLP.

5.  Acquiring power by climbing up in a hierarchy

Cults are an especially interesting phenomenon, because of the hierarchy principle.    Gullibles enter at a low position of the hierarchy having two believes:  

• One or several masters or gurus at the top have some attractive special powers, knowledge or skills.
• By investing enough money and effort, they can become like the masters and acquire the same powers.  

Another example is the Chinese cult around the chi belief.  It includes martial art, which is some weird mixture of gymnastics and fighting techniques, not based on physical strength but on mental overpowering.   This has some interesting effects. 

• Those at the bottom of the hierarchy overestimate the power and ability of those above, because the more attractive the goal of becoming like them, the more they feel justified in their attempts to climb the hierarchy even at a high cost.  
• They react to the overestimated and alleged powers as if they were real.
• The masters get the wrong feedback and overestimate their own power.  

There is an interesting video on 

http://www.skepdic.com/chi.html

It shows, how the combined belief of a disciple and a master result in a weird double delusion, called the "no punch knockout".   It looks impressive, how one guy falls backwards, stiff like a board, doomed to hurting himself if not caught by others standing behind him.   He falls, just because another puts his hand close to his face.  
Then the video shows, how the master fails completely, as soon as he tries the same procedure with a skeptic, who stays unmovably rooted to the spot in spite of the master's efforts.  

The first presentation was enabled by a disciple believing in it to fall, and a master believing in it, else he would not have dared to do this in front of a camera.     
I wonder, how many of those martial arts masters have been beaten up by criminals, while they felt invincible.

344. Reinforcement of Gullibility

344.   Reinforcement of Gullibility

In entry 343 I speculated that gullibility had been adaptive at some past period of evolution, while by now, consequencity has become a much better adaptation, but that people during childhood pass through a phase of gullibility, before the brain has fully matured to be able to function with consequencity.  

The following is a further elaboration.  

1.   When people are stuck in the gullible reactions to influences while having reached an age, when they should have matured enough for consequencity, this can be due to two different reasons:

1.1.   Gullibility is due to ignorance and the absence of the ability to know any better.  
When describing in entry 342  the levels of consequencity, I focused on dealing with emotions.   More generally there are different levels of the ability of thinking.  

Level 1. 
Concrete thinking.   Simple contingencies, like thunder following a flash are understood.   But in the absence of a clear concept of pseudocontingencies and coincidences, often irrational behavior is applied for the purpose of creating a contingency.
Level 2.
Abstract thinking.   This means the understanding of the difference between coincidence and contingency, also by detecting contradictions with the accumulative storage of previous experience.  This enables extrapolation into the future by estimating probabilities. 
Level 3.
Complex thinking.  This means deriving a consistent value system and ethical guidance from the abstract thinking in level 2.   Internal and external stimuli requiring behavior are processed in accordance with it.  

For those, who have not or not yet developed levels 2 and 3 of consequencity, gullibility is the only way of coping in social interactions.      Only Level 1 and gullibility are not mutually exclusive.  

1.2.   Gullibility is reinforced, when it becomes virulent as a consequence of some severe psychological trouble, which impedes a person either in reality or in his subjective perception from fulfilling important needs by consequencity, especially emotional and immaterial needs.   The person remains stuck in a gullible state (entry 343), while the ability to act by consequencity exists in the brain, but is deactivated.    This gullibility is often in contradiction to evidence and basic reasoning.    The stronger the unfulfilled or unfulfillable needs, the more people are gullible and susceptible to uncritical submission under external influences. 

2.   Gullibility determines the perception and acceptance of being the target of any influences.   How the behavior of the gullible people is influenced depends upon the availability, strength and kind of the influences.
2.1.  In pre-media times, usually people were exposed to one set of influences only, one religion and the rules of one society.   Depending on their gullibility and on how much the external influences contradicted their true personal needs and inclinations, their only choice was between fully conforming, externally resisting and risking punishment or external submission in spite of better judgment and different wishes.
2.2.  Since traveling and books became available, and even more with TV and the Internet, for gullible persons life is a warehouse of influences to choose from.    While they cannot resist to have a strong need to fulfill by being gullible, they are free to choose, what belief suits them best and there are countless religions, cults, quackeries.    For every trouble, there is a belief as a pseudo-remedy.      

3. Gullibility and self-improvement are mutually exclusive.   Self-improvement as the path of maturation requires consequencity of level 3.  Only awareness for rational procedures based upon understanding and influencing real contingencies allows change.  Gullibility and the belief into fake change impede real change.

Gullible people, who turn to religion or to woowoo in the hope of self-improvement are confounding self-improvement with self-modification.    They move from being taken advantage of and manipulated as the puppet of one influence to being the puppet of another.   I know of the case of someone, who after the upbringing in a less extreme christian family first choose to become a mormon, then a buddhist, then a believer in NLP and then a taoist.   Nothing of this ever helped him to solve the problem, which caused his wish to improve.  

343. Maturation and Evolution

Maturation and Evolution

This is a further generalization of my speculations in entry 328.  

I speculate, that the maturation of an individual is the process of passing through the phases of evolution.   In the best case, maturity means reaching level 3 of consequencity as described in entry 342.  
A child is born as an animal and it continues as such, until the acquisition of language enables the gullibility of the preschool infant.  Rationality is developed during schooling, and level 3 can be reached by the end of puberty.

But intelligence, brain peculiarities, extreme detrimental influences, traumatic experiences and such can disturb and distort the development.  Under such unfavorable circumstances people get stuck in an earlier phase, while only sane and mentally healthy people reach full maturity.    Robots (entry 341) have been stuck at an early age nearest to the phase of being instinct driven animals, while the puppets (entry 341) have been stuck at some time during the phase of gullibility.

Also people can get stuck in limited areas of the mind and of cognition, as if the mind were fragmented.  

• Religious and woowoo believes are usually acquired during early childhood, while scientific and skeptical thinking is acquired much later at university.   In the best case, skeptical thinking can replace the obsolete gullible believes.   Instead there is quite often the phenomenon of scientists believing in a deity without even acknowledging the contradiction.   It is as if in some part of the brain, the development had been stuck, while in another, it had continued.  
• There is the same unacknowledged contradiction, when men are otherwise highly cultivated, educated, even sensitive enough to be teachers, authors, therapists, but they are promiscuous and ruthlessly use women's bodies as disrespected commodities.   In one part of their brain, they are stuck in the phase of being animals, while other parts have been developed much further.    

People determined by consequencity are able to get aware of contradictions.  They experience cognitive dissonance as a corrective enabling them to eliminate contradictions.   Those who are partially stuck, are mindblind and void of cognitive dissonance. 

342. Concequencity - Gullibility - Instinctivity - Emotions

Consequencity - Gullibility - Instinctivity - Emotions

In entry 341 I described the three forces behind human behavior, but I omitted to explicitly mention emotions.   I consider emotions not as a force by itself, but as a trigger for behavior, together with sensations, especially those of dishomeostasis (entry 330).    The other triggers are stimuli from the environment. 

Instinctivity and gullibility are both scalable by their strength.   The impulses elicited by the same emotions or sensation can be of very different magnitude depending on the individual wiring of the brain.    

Consequencity is different, because there are individual differences in the ability of reasoning.   When consequencity determines the behavior, it is not by it having its own strength, but by the innate absence of the deactivating forces of gullibility and instinctivity.   Both are archaic forces from the dawn of the human evolution.  At some time, instinctivity and gullibility had been important for the survival of the species, but today they are obsolete and a relapse.   In entry 338 I have speculated, why gullibility has been beneficial for the survival during the evolutionary phase between instinctivity and rationality.  

As outlined in entry 339, consequencity means acting by decisions, that are logically derived from wisely chosen premises.   The choice of the premises can have three levels, depending on the quality of cognition in the combination of maturity, emotional intelligence and abstract thinking.   Each level means the ability to understand and identify the emotion and what causes it, to distinguish between contingency and coincidence, and to be aware of the difference between an emotion being reactive or spontaneous.   

Level 1.  
Simple sensations and emotions with the focus only on the moment, like attraction, repugnance, fear, joy. 
Level 2.
Abstract emotions in relation to another person in the context of previous experience and expectations or hopes for the future, based upon empathy, like trust, reliability, disappointment, fairness, regret, remorse.  
Level 3.
Complex emotions, in which the relation to another is experienced in connection with a value system, attitudes, moral, ethics, like betrayal, integrity, indignation, outrage, decency, guilt.  

Dumping can serve as an example to show the differences.   Dumping is the onesided ending of a relationship without allowing the dumped person any influence upon this decision.  

The gullible puppet from entry 341 can be influenced by outsiders to dump someone without feeling guilty because the gullibility including a submission to the validity of the judgment of others. 
The selfish robot from entry 341 dumps ruthlessly, when the partner refuses or resists to be a commodity, or if being used as such has devastated her to the point of becoming dysfunctional.
Consequencity includes as one basic principle equality and therefore reciprocity and mutuality.   When there is onesidedly motivated for selfishness, this is not consequencity, but the behavior of the robot.   
On level 1 of consequencity, the dumping person is only aware of the pain of separation, which in his perception is the same for the dumping and for the dumped.    Believing to suffer the same as the victim, there is nothing preventing him from dumping as a procedure appearing logical.  
On both levels 2 and 3 of consequencity, dumping is rejected as an option.  The one dissatisfied with the relationship is aware of the breaking of trust and of the pain of feeling helpless by having a decision forced upon.  He does not inflict on others, what he has empathy for and does not want to happen to himself.   Dumping would make him feel guilty for hurting his partner.  
The one dissatisfied with the relationship instead initiates attempts to resolve the conflicts and repair the relationship, or else he convinces his partner, that separation is the best for both of them.
On level 3 of consequencity, the one dissatisfied with the relationship is additionally aware, that by the decision to get involved he has implicitly and automatically accepted the obligation of commitment as a part of the shared value system and therefore as binding as carved in stone.    He owes fulfilling his obligations to his partner and to his own self-esteem as an ethical person.  He considers dumping as a serious transgression, that would make him feel unworthy of her.  

The restraint by empathy and care on level 2 can be as strong as the moral restraint on level 3.   But the general evaluation of dumping is more serious and grave, when it is considered as a moral transgression compared with considering it merely as the inconsiderate inflicting of pain.  

Someone, who is only able to function on level 1 of consequencity is an emotional moron and he can be as damaging to a partner as are the puppets and the robots.   They are not suitable as my mindmate.    I would feel most comfortable and a relationship could be a safe haven with someone sharing level 3 of consequencity, but I would consider also someone, who is mostly guided by level 2.