510. The Remedy For Grumpiness

510.   The Remedy For Grumpiness

In entry 507 I described the Cassandra effect.   It is the experience of mostly women, who are aware of something going wrong in their relationship, and who suffer, because they are not taken for serious and they are powerless to prevent the catastrophe.

Grumpy old people are the counterpart of Cassandra in their concern about the development of society.  The grumpy old men are more visible, because of their more aggressive and angry way of expressing their grumpiness.  There are also grumpy old women, but they tend to be more silent about it. 

The grumpiness of sane people is different from dementia. Being a nuisance or not is a question of mental health and of self-control, it is not a question of age.   

This entry is about sane grumpy old people with comprehensible reasons to be grumpy.

Grumpy old people are much more alive and healthy than are docile old people.    Feeling grumpy is an indication of the awareness, that something is not as it should be.   Grumpiness is the logical, reasonable and comprehensible reaction to perceived real grievances.  

Grumpy old people are those, who

• have lived a long time and have observed and experienced the changes of society with open eyes.  
  They have grown mature.   They have gained the wisdom to evaluate, what has improved and what has deteriorated.   
• have self-confidence and independence in their thinking.  
  They recognize grievances.  They are critical and outspoken.  They reject detrimental social norms.    They are not easily gullible to manipulations.
   

Blaming people as if being grumpy were a defect is a misconception, which does not lead to a solution.  Those who do the blaming are usually immature youngsters.  Old people cannot change a society dominated by those, who are younger and less mature.   They need a way to live in this situation without suffering.

Being lonely, especially being intellectually lonely is a sufficient and logical reason to become grumpy.   I have mentioned intellectual loneliness before.    An apistic and skeptic can feel intellectually very lonely between religious people.   

But a person, who sees the world with over six decades of life experience can feel intellectually lonely too in a society, where the influential power of the media and the political power over life are all dominated by people, who are much younger.

Only the removal of the reasons for being grumpy is a rational remedy.  It is a huge emotional relief to be able to share the own world view and the agreement about what is going wrong with likeminded people.   

The best remedy is the emotional safe haven of a bonded relationship with someone in the same age group sharing the same attitudes and the same world view.  

A happy person has no reasons to be grumpy, and a grumpy person lacks happiness.

Therefore I am willing to accept a grumpy old man as a potential partner.   If he is my mindmate, he will not remain grumpy.   Knowing me will end his grumpiness. 

509. The Fallacy Of Tantra

509.   The Fallacy Of Tantra 

The word Tantra in a man's profile makes me suspicious.   The word Tantra in the context of our western culture can have two meanings, both indicating something, that I prefer to avoid.  

Those who claim to be sophisticated, experience and define Tantra as one of many eastern woo-woo cults.  In entry 508, I already presented the debunking by the Great Tantra Challenge.   A man with such beliefs is not more my mindmate than is any other believer in some irrationality.   

But there is an even cruder interpretation, which reduces Tantra to a technique of instinct-enhancing gymnastics.  
While I react with repugnance towards the vulgarity of Penn & Teller, the last part of their show is nevertheless an example of how people are trained in Tantra:  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jFj_RL5QvM
 

The documentation shows people in the public activity of near-copulation, the pornographic display reminds me of the behavior of dogs from the gutter, void of any human dignity.    I cringe at the mere idea of getting involved with a man, who has participated in such a session.

It was not even clear, if the participants were committed couples.  But assuming them as couples attempting to improve something wrong between them, learning Tantra is not more an appropriate remedy for their problem as would be fighting a headache by hitting the head with a hammer.   The enhanced pain and enhanced pleasures are both only stronger sensation covering temporarily a persistent and not solved real problem.  

Long term happiness as a couple requires more than attractive bodies, but also specific psychological conditions.  When a couple is dissatisfied with what happens inside their bedroom, Tantra cannot be more than a pseudo remedy.  

Their real problems are very different, they are a consequence of the general mating fallacy.     
In many mammals including homo sapiens, the physiological male needs for sexual homeostasis and the motivation to pursue this by the stimulation of the pleasure center in the brain has evolved to trick people into procreation.  The infatuation between bodies has evolved to produce healthy offspring, but it has not evolved to last, especially not as long as people live today.    

The sad consequence of this is promiscuity.  

But there has also been the second evolution of human cognition including both emotional and intellectual needs and cognitive abilities to be guided by long-term thinking, non-physical enjoyments and self-control. 

The more the human intelligence has evolved enabling people acquiring education, sophistication and intellectuality, the more they are able to enjoy intellectual and creative pleasures.  Logically, in comparison with non-physical enjoyments, sexuality becomes a dull banality and less rewarding.  

The theoretical consequence is the cognitive ability to find happiness in monogamous close long-term bonding based upon intellectual and emotional intimacy.

In spite of the benefits of the advanced evolution of the cognition compared with the evolution of the more primitive instincts, many humans continue to fall into the trap of the general mating fallacy.   Due to this fallacy, people continue to consider sexual satisfaction as the purpose of and the reason for having a relationship and as the criterion for the choice of a mate.    

This fallacy is maintained and enhanced by the social norm of oversexation as already explained in entry 498 and entry 493.   

I would not be astonished, if some of the participants in the Tantra course were even singles and as mislead as to believe, that such skills would be of more advantage in the competition for a mate than personality and intelligence.   

Mistaking Tantra as a remedy when experiencing physical dissatisfaction as a couple is a behavioral expression of this general fallacy.  

1. How affective physical intimacy is experienced depends on the quality of the intellectual and emotional intimacy of the couple.   The quality of physical intimacy is a measuring device for the emotional quality of the relationship. 
   When there is a distortion of physical intimacy, it is absurd to apply mechanical remedies like Tantra.  Instead the couple needs to find out, what is wrong in the relationship.   When unresolved conflicts are damaging the emotional intimacy, then the couple needs to solve the conflict and repair the emotional bond.   When they restore the close bond, they also restore the non-verbal message of belonging together expressed by physical intimacy.    If external help is needed, couple's therapy improves much more than Tantra instruction. 
   
2. Some people are innately hedonists, and hedonists are the kind of consumers, who bring the most profits to capitalists.   Therefore they are the preferred role models as shown in entry 498.
   Others are Epicureans with predominantly cognitive and emotional needs.   It is absurd, when Epicureans are manipulated by the capitalistically propagated hedonistic social norms to attempt to experience the same as do hedonists.   Methods like Tantra are used to override Epicurean innate preferences.   
   Some Epicurean couples are mislead by the general fallacy to expect much more benefits from sexual activities, than there really are, when seen realistically with an unmanipulated mind.  Sexuality is nothing more than an instinct shared with animals, who have no cognition, who cannot enjoy anything better.   Animals have no choice, but humans do.
    
   Only maintaining a man's physiological homeostasis is a necessity for a relationship, but nothing more.  There is no rational reason to artificially attempt to get more pleasure from something, when it is experienced and considered as a mere banality.   
   
   If intelligent and educated people would be free from the detrimental social norm of oversexation and would instead fully recognize that they can enjoy a visit to a museum, a lecture or a good movie together more than bed activities, this would enable them to just shift their focus in a positive way to share, what they really enjoy most.    They would be out of the reach of capitalists selling Tantra.  

If a man believes in the possibility of improving a relationship by methods like Tantra, this scares me.   I am looking for a man as my mindmate, who shares the full awareness and recognition, that the quality of the affective physical intimacy depends only on the emotional quality of the relationship.

508. Hilarious Woo-Woo

508.    Hilarious Woo-Woo

Sometimes I have been suspected to lack any sense of humor. Yesterday I found something, that made me laugh, until my belly ached:

First the information:

"On 3 March 2008, in a popular TV show, Sanal Edamaruku, the president of Rationalist International, challenged India’s most “powerful” tantrik (black magician) to demonstrate his powers on him.

[Pandit Surinder Sharma] claimed that he was able to kill any person he wanted within three minutes by using black magic. 

After all his chanting of mantra (magic words) and ceremonies of tantra failed, the tantrik decided to kill Sanal Edamaruku with the “ultimate destruction ceremony” on live TV. "

http://www.rationalistinternational.net/article/2008/20080310/en_1.html

On this page are the three videos of the event:
http://indianrationalists.blogspot.de/2008/07/great-tantra-challenge.html

The first can be skipped, but the display of woo-woo in the second and the third are between the most hilarious stuff, that I have seen in a long time.  

507. The Cassandra Dynamics

507.  The Cassandra Dynamics

When a catastrophe comes out of the blue, it is a challenge allowing oneself to use the own resources and abilities to deal with it.   When one faces a problem and does not know, what to do, it is also a challenge to find a solution by using one's own resources.  

But the situation of the Cassandra dynamics, when knowing exactly, what needs to be done, while being prevented from doing it, is a situation of the extreme emotional stress of being made helpless and powerless.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_%28metaphor%29

"The Cassandra metaphor is applied by some psychologists to individuals who experience physical and emotional suffering as a result of distressing personal perceptions, and who are disbelieved when they attempt to share the cause of their suffering with others."


http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cassandra%20Syndrome

"Cassandra Syndrome
   
1) The condition of speaking the truth and having no one believe you.

2) The condition of being able to predict the future, be it the outcome of a particular event, or the reactions of others to the same event, and having no one believe your prophecy until it transpires.

3) Being able to see or understand things long before others, often resulting in them coming to the same conclusions long after your own initial analysis. "

The expression 'syndrome' is misleading, because it focuses too much on Cassandra herself as being the person having some psychological troubles.   I prefer to call it Cassandra dynamics, because it concerns the disrupted interaction of two or more persons.   Cassandra herself has not the problem, she is implicated by the problems of others. 

Cassandra is usually a woman, but sensitive men can also be trapped in the situation of being aware of some development leading towards a breaking-point, the pending catastrophe. 

1. Cassandra dynamics are defined by:

• The catastrophe is pending either for Cassandra herself or for someone else or for both.  
• Cassandra alone is aware of the pending catastrophe.
• Cassandra needs the other person's cooperation to avoid the catastrophe.  
• The involved person's cooperation is not obtainable.   
• Cassandra suffers feeling powerless.

2. Cassandra's circumstances

2.1.  Cassandra dynamics as a partner in a relationship.   Cassandra suffers emotionally beyond her resilience:

• Her emotional needs are not met by the partner.
• She is blamed for not meeting the partner's needs.
• She is blamed for her reactions to how she is treated.

2.2.  Cassandra dynamics by altruism and caring.  Cassandra feels empathy and wants to support others with insights, which only she has.    

3.  The partner's unobtainable cooperation to avoid the catastrophe.

• Cassandra cannot convey to him, that there is something wrong.
• Cassandra cannot convey to him her suggestions, what to do.  
• He is unable to recognize Cassandra's competence.
• He perceives Cassandra not as an equal partner. 

Examples of men's fallacies, flaws and mistakes causing the unobtainability of their cooperation:

3.1.  Asymmetrical relationship. 

The man gets all his relationship needs met, because he experiences and considers a woman merely as a body chosen for physical homeostasis while not expecting anything more from the relationship.   He fulfills his social and intellectual needs elsewhere.   He projects his own contentment onto the woman.    In this situation, nothing is wrong for him subjectively.  

3.2.  Imposing gender roles.

The social roles of male superiority causes the man's false belief, that he is the one to define the rules, structure, framework and conditions of the relationship.  What he considers as correct treatment of a woman according to gender roles has to be automatically sufficient and suitable for any woman.   If she suffers, the man considers it as her flaw, for which he does not need to take any responsibility.

3.3.  The Dunning-Kruger effect. 

The man overestimates himself and underestimates the woman.  The man considers only himself as being competent to decide, how to manage a relationship.   Even if he recognizes, that something needs to be improved, his attempts to do so are only decided upon in accordance with his own judgment.   If he changes his behavior, he does so by trial and error.   This aggravates the situation, speeding up the arriving of the catastrophe.   He only throws the woman from the frying-pan into the fire.  

3.4.  Immaturity

Immaturity, lacking empathy, a low EQ or NLD (Non-Verbal Learning Disability) can cause men to be unable to understand other persons' including a partner's needs or to communicate successfully.   Sometimes such men rely on simplified recipes from self-help books, how to handle or even manipulate women.   The man's belief of behaving correctly according to his faulty concept of how to treat a woman makes him mindblind to perceive and understand any verbal or non-verbal information indicating her suffering.   Such a man is prone to believe the recipes written by male relationship gurus more than a real woman's feedback.   

3.5.  Selfishness

Psychological problems cause some men to have a selfish attitude and entitlement delusion.   They experience and consider others including the partner as utilities existing to serve their needs.   They handle, use and maintain them at their convenience, instead of caring for others' individual needs, of which they are oblivious.    As long as a person functions according to the purpose for the selfish man, there is nothing wrong and no reason to bother.

3.6.  Need for power

Psychological problems cause some men to feel a need for power and control, which causes them to struggle for domination.   Narcissists or men with a strong need to reduce anxiety and insecurity, are examples.   When they want to believe in their own morality, then they can avoid cognitive dissonance only by the full denial, how much domination causes suffering to the repressed woman.

My mindmate to be found is someone, with whom I will not experience the Cassandra dynamics. 

506. The Harmful Effects Of Pornography On Jerks And On Emotional Morons

506.   The Harmful Effects Of Pornography On Jerks And On Emotional Morons

As shown by a lot of scientific evidence in entry 505, exposure to pornography converts men into hazards to women with emotional needs.   

When men are knowingly harming women. they are ruthless jerks.   Others are emotional moron, who want to be decent and moral people, and who have a clear conscience believing to do nothing wrong.  They are oblivious or in denial of the real damage done by them.
This is a general observation, but it is also the case, when men harm first themselves by pornography and whose harming women is a direct consequence of having damaged themselves.  

When damaged men are outspoken in their refusal to commit, women have at least a fair chance to avoid being abused by them.   

But those men are the most dangerous, who appear, pretend or believe to want a companion, and whose bonding-disability is hidden until the discovery as the consequence of actually getting involved.   Women are mislead to agree to intimacy, which for them is the beginning of commitment.  They give and expect affectionate physical intimacy.  All they can get from the damaged men is being an object used in their mechanical copulations.  

These are two examples:

1.  The jerk:
 

I read somewhere on the web the desperate complaints of a guy, who has not only damaged himself by too much pornography, but who has reached the consciousness of suffering from it.    He describes with words, that resound his genuine pain and distress, how much he would want to have a woman as a companion.   But every time, when he wishes a woman to become his companion, the desensitization overrides everything else.  Physical involvement automatically converts the attempted mating into the subjective experience of another instance of his habitual abuse, and the woman meant as a companion is perceived as just one more degraded object and utility.    
This guy is a jerk, because he has recognized this effect upon himself, but in spite of knowing, what he does, he repeats his futile attempts to have a companionship.    Every time, when he tries again, he harms a trusting woman without feeling responsible.  
He is also jerk by being very selfish. His extreme exposure to pornography is the result of his making a good living by selling it.    He admits, that he continues his profitable business, knowingly inflicting the same harm upon others, in spite of being aware of having harmed himself.

2.  The emotional moron:

Recently I have corresponded for a while with a man, whose denial is remarkable.   He told me quite convincingly, that he really wants a long term monogamous relationship, and how much he is interested in communication and in companionship.   He put emphasis on his alleged appreciation for women.   He told me, that he never had a one-night-stand, and this of course made him attractive to me.  
When I asked him about his use of pornography, I thought it was merely a routine question.  I really expected a negative answer.    Instead I was consternated and horrified, when he admitted to having been consuming pornography habitually since over 40 years, whenever he was not in a relationship.   After 40 years, it is most probably an addiction.    

He naively considers pornography as a harmless everyday habit.   I have sent him the links to scientific articles about the harm done by pornography listed in entry 505.   Reading these articles had no impact upon his complete denial.   He claims that even if everybody else gets harmed by the exposure to huge amounts of pornography, he continues to believe, that he alone is the one exception, who has not been damaged.  

My mindmate to be found is neither a jerk nor an emotional moron.   He has no life history of abusing women, he has not desensitized himself neither by promiscuously using real bodies nor by exposing himself to the pornographic representations of abused bodies.

505. Science Indicating The Harm Of Pornography

505.   Science Indicating The Harm Of Pornography

For emotionally unharmed people, monogamy, commitment and exclusive pair-bonding are basic cognitive and emotional human needs. 
Promiscuity, polygyny, cheating, dumping, degrading and abusing others as mere bodies cause serious emotional harm to people.   

While the emotional benefits for individual human beings derived from the exclusivity of monogamy are the topic of romance in novels and movies, scientific research instead focuses mainly on general social, economic and evolutionary benefits of monogamy.  

Whenever I am reading men's profiles and the ubiquitous promiscuous and perverse wishes and goals, in addition to some feedback to this blog and to my own profiles, I sometimes feel as if I were an alien from another planet thrown into a filthy gutter.     

But luckily, I am not entirely alone with my evaluation of the damage done by the artificial social norm of an oversexed society.   There are learned and knowledgeable scientists studying the serious harm done by pornography.  

When already repeatedly expressing my disgust about the ubiquity of jerks openly pursuing promiscuity on the Internet and about the general oversexation of society, I had omitted to put special emphasis on pornography as the core of the problem.  Promiscuity is more an abstract concept, while pornography is its real life representation.  
The entire detrimental effects of the general oversexation including the subtle and indirect damage are like an iceberg, of which only one seventh is visible above the water.   This visible part is pornography, of which the harm can be shown most easily.     I already have called promiscuity a scourge of humanity, and so is pornography as its most visible expression.
 
While I was fully aware of the kind of damage done to users' brains by the exposure to pornography, I had not been aware to which extreme extensity and pervasiveness pornography had grown along with the ubiquity of the Internet.    While I cannot avoid being exposed to the general oversexation of daily life against my will, the access to pornography on the web requires proactive behavior.    By being able to avoid it, I was not fully aware the real magnitude of the problem.    

I attributed promiscuity directly to men's being physiologically driven by their strong animal instincts, this being aggravated by their having lost first the sensitivity to appreciate an emotional safe haven and subsequently also lacking the motivation to use self-control.  
Those promiscuous jerks and emotional psychopaths, whom I described throughout this blog as prototypes from my worst nightmares, have probably not become obnoxious and disgusting merely by an innate disposition.   Instead it is more probable, that the additional exposure to huge amounts of pornography has magnified their innate predisposition, until all their human qualities had been destroyed.  

It seems that pornography converts potential jerks into irreversible jerks.  

There has been done a lot of research on the different aspects of the harm done by pornography, and learned people have expressed and explained it much better, than I could do.   The following is a list of a some very good sources for further information.

Patrick F. Fagan: 
A Poison In The Home
http://www.diolaf.org/documents/Marriage%20and%20Family%20Life/Pornography%20Resources/a%20poison%20in%20the%20home.pdf
 

Patrick F. Fagan, Ph.D.
The Effects of Pornography on Individuals, Marriage, Family and Community
http://www.wifamilyaction.org/files/trya.campaigntoolbox.org/downloads/FRC_PornStudy_0.pdf
 

Mary Eberstadt  Mary Anne Layden 
THE SOCIAL COSTS OF PORNOGRAPHY
http://www.internetsafety101.org/upload/file/Social%20Costs%20of%20Pornography%20Report.pdf

Dr. Victor B. Cline:  
Pornography’s Effects On Adults and Children
http://www.stop.org.za/Victor%20Cline%27s%20Study.pdf

Ana J. Bridges 
Pornography's Effects on Interpersonal Relationships
http://www.socialcostsofpornography.com//Bridges_Pornographys_Effect_on_Interpersonal_Relationships.pdf
 

Jackson Katz: 
Pornography And Men's Consciousness
http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/genderandmedia/assignments/katz001.pdf

Rebecca Whisnant: 
Confronting pornography:  Some conceptual basics.
http://stoppornculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Whisnant-Confronting-Pornography.pdf

504. Science On The Benefits Of Monogamy

504.  Science On The Benefits Of Monogamy

Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson
The puzzle of monogamous marriage

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/boyd/HenrichBoydRichersonPhilTransB12Monogamy.pdf

"norms and institutions that compose themodern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects-promoting success in inter-group competition. In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, aswell as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide."

503. Evolution And Monogamy

503.  Evolution And Monogamy

In entry 502, I pointed out, that human instinctive behavior has not yet evolved to adapt to the novelty situation of being free from survival needs, in spite of the cognitive reality, that emotional and intellectual needs have become strong influences upon human behavior.   
Under the pressure of survival needs people are coerced to make choices, which they would not make, were they free to choose by taking full account of their emotional needs.  

In this study, women's choice between polygyny and monogamy is explained by the survival benefits of the choice.   It is a very good example of the force of circumstantial restrictions upon options.   

Sathoshi Kanazawa / Mary C. Still:
Why monogamy?

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/SF1999.pdf

"If resource inequality among men is great, women choose to marry polygynously and the polygynous institution of marriage emerges. If resource inequality among men is small, women choose to marry monogamously and the monogamous institution of marriage emerges. The theory explains the historical shift from polygyny to monogamy as a result of the gradual decline of inequality among men."

The explanation makes perfect logical sense, as long as the options of the choice between monogamy and polygamy are restricted to those for physical survival.    When the choice of a man is a choice between starving and eating, the wish for an exclusive attachment is an unobtainable luxury.   There is no free cognitive choice considering also emotional needs.

Today the environment in the rich modern societies offers for the first time in history the true freedom of choice.    Relieved from the pressure of physical survival struggles, people are now able to sense and perceive their emotional and intellectual needs.   In this situation, monogamy is the best cognitive choice (entry 497)

10,000 and even 1,000 years ago, the situation was very different.   Physical survival depended upon access to scarce resources of food, clothing, firewood, shelter.   The total availability of these resources to a community, village or group was limited.   Even under the best favorable circumstances, people could not produce much surplus above their own needs.

• Everyday chores were time consuming.   Water had to be carried from the well, cooking required a fire and fire wood.      
• Without machinery, the production of all goods were slow and limited.  
• Food production depended on the climate.    Food had to be produced locally.
• Skills and knowledge were limited. 

As long as the access to fertile land, forest and water was unrestricted to all people, the sum of the resources allowed the survival of everybody on an equal low level.   But any inequality of power over such resources meant, that only the powerful men had the means to survive, while there was not enough left for everybody else.  Medieval systems of rich landowners exploiting their tenants are examples.      


Under such circumstances, a woman's theoretical choice between being the exclusive wife of a poor monogamous man and sharing a rich powerful man's wealth with other wives was not a free choice.   Her emotional needs were an unobtainable luxury beyond her reach, when the price for one poor man's emotional exclusive attachment was perishing and starvation for her and her offspring. 

This situation was aggravated by the lack of safe methods of family planning.   The woman was not even able to choose the monogamous poor man by restricting the number of offspring to match his resources. 

The woman's choice was further determined by her parents' power over her.  Under the pressure of lacking sufficient resources to keep all their children alive, parents coerced their daughters by dire necessity into the choice of the man, who could maintain them, even if she had to share him in a polygynous arrangement.    


Evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology are very valuable methods to explain hidden instinctive tendencies toward certain behaviors.   But it is a fallacy to confound explanations with justification, connivance or acquiescence.  

It is historical reality, that the superior physical strength of men allowed them to first exclude women from independent access to the survival resources and that the physically strongest men usurped greedily a disproportionally high share of the totally available resources.  This enabled a minority of men to gain control over the majority of women. 

Today the cognitive perception of non-material needs are just as much a reality, including the ability to act morally, to distinguish between justice and injustice and to suffer excruciating emotional pain as the victim of injustice.   Today we have reached a situation, where the instinctive reactions, that were helpful in a different environment, have become obsolete and detrimental.   

The most rational and least instinctive people are guided by their cognition to new adaptive behaviors to the changed environment, while the majority are still driven too much by dysfunctional and anachronistic instincts.


Therefore no scientific explanation of the choice of polygyny in the past by reasons of necessity can be morally used to deny people in the present society their emotional needs for the safe haven of a monogamous exclusive commitment.    No allegedly free choice for polygamy in the past is a valid excuse today for the promiscuous cheating and dumping by desensitized jerks.
When scientific research uncovers instinctive tendencies, which hurt others emotionally, then this is a reason to teach people enhanced awareness to fight their subconscious harmful tendencies, it is not justifiable to use scientific discoveries as an excuse for cruelty.     

502. Evolution, Survival And Emotional Needs

502.  Evolution, Survival And Emotional Needs

Bertold Brecht said it quite drastically "Erst kommt das Fressen, und dann die Moral".   There are different ways to translate this, because morals can be understood differently.   The translation as 'a hungry man has no conscience' may be the closest to Brecht's meaning. 
But it can also be translated like this: 'There are no morals, unless there is grub.'   In this sense, morals are more generally any cognitive influence on the behavior.  Usually (there are exceptions), as long as someone is driven by urgent and strong physical deprivations, non-physical cognitive needs are not strong enough to determine or even influence the behavior and all emotional needs are a luxury beyond imagination.   

I have already mentioned the theory of the environment of the evolutionary adaptation.   Today we life in an environment, that has drastically changed from what the human brain has adapted to by evolution, which according to this theory is the savanna as it was about 10,000 years ago.   But this environment had only insignificantly changed until a few centuries ago.   The most drastic changes for the majority of the population in the rich western countries came only during the last century.    

Only today's physical comfort and security of unlimited food supply, bright electrical light, warm water from the tap, central heating in sturdy buildings, health care, laws and law enforcement, safe birth control and nearly unlimited access to information provide people with an environment, in which they now are free to be fully aware of their emotional needs.    

This freedom to have full access to cognitive awareness is so new, that there has not been enough time to adapt the innate automatic responses for appropriate coping with emotional needs.      People have not yet learned to use their cognition as a tool to adapt to their emotional reality.   Today people are still driven by strong instincts, impulses and tendencies, that are dysfunctional in our highly technical environment:  

1.  The human brain has had not time yet to evolve sufficiently to the difference between real people and technically reproduced life-imitating representation of voices, still and moving pictures, because these only exist since about a century.   

2.  The human cognition has evolved as an evolutionary adaptation to survive successfully.   The sensitivity to have emotional, intellectual needs and to suffer pain, when such needs are not met, are only a byproduct of the evolution of cognition.  But these non-material and non-physical needs were hidden from the awareness by the much stronger dire necessity of a daily struggle for physical survival needs.   Someone at the point of starvation and perishing due to lack of shelter or serious disease has no awareness for feelings like dignity and appreciation.  Being hidden from awareness, the by-product did not influence evolution.     

Not being aware of emotional needs like for attachment and trust and of intellectual needs like for knowledge and comprehension while being under the pressure of hunger and life threatening perils is like being unable to hear the birds sing underneath the much louder noise of an electrical drill.  The evolutionary adaptation of human instincts is like being adapted to permanent loud noise.   When the electric drill is turned off, someone hearing the birds for the first time does not know, that what he hears as an irritating sound are birds.   Since in the recently changed environment the permanent threat of perishing has been removed, this has left people without sufficient innate understanding for the own and even more for the expressed emotional needs of others.     Whatever innate empathy and mirror neurons there are, they do not suffice to enable people to avoid hurting and harming others without a cognitive decision to do so.          

The tragedy of today's situation in modern rich countries is the discrepancy of people still treating others as the same ruthless instinctive driven animals in the savanna, while the comfort and security of the standard of life has freed the cognition and enhanced the perception for pain and suffering.     

Would people only ignore their own emotional needs, they would only harm themselves.   But the worst tragedy is the harm done to others due to the general oblivion and denial of emotional needs.   While people suffer emotional pain as targets of behavior, they continue to be unaware of inflicting the exact same pain on others, when they act driven by their own instincts.

The choice of how to interact with the other gender is a good example.    Today's environment allows everybody to attempt happiness in a monogamous committed relationship with one partner.    Instead men continue to promiscuously abuse women's body, and women are driven by greed to exploit men.   These causes suffering and makes them gullible customers for psychopharmaceuticals as already explained in entry 498.   

501.   Desensitization By The Media 
In entry 498. (Capitalism, Media, Social Norm And Monogamy) I pointed out the detrimental effects of artificial social norms created by the media and how the resulting desensitization has enabled capitalists to make profits by selling psychopharmaceuticals.   My emphasis was on the devastation caused by the oversexation of society.     But there are also other areas of life, where desensitization by the media also has devastating effects.   

Describing growing social acceptance of relational aggression in the quotes below uses different words for describing desensitization.      

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120307145428.htm

"Research over the past few decades has shown that viewing physical violence in the media can increase aggression in adults and children. But a new study" .... "has also found that onscreen relational aggression -- including social exclusion, gossip and emotional bullying -- may prime the brain for aggression."

"This matters because relational aggression tends to be considered more socially acceptable -- it's often portrayed on television as funny and how friends treat each other," he said. "Yet, several studies are starting to show that relational aggression can cause long-term harm."

500. Statistics Of My Quest

500.  Statistics Of My Quest  

This is the 500th entry in this blog.   When I started blogging, I did not expect to write so many entries.   But by looking at the endeavor statistically, it is no surprise.   Nothing in life comes without efforts.   Happiness like everything else has to be earned, and not only by investing efforts in making relationships work, but also by investing efforts to find a suitable and compatible partner as a match.   

In entry 69 I already estimated by rough statistical assumptions, that maybe 1 in every 10,000 men in my age group is a suitable match according to my search criteria.   

By the algorithm of sequential searching, a ratio of 1 in 10,000 requires on average to look at 5,000 until success.  

The result of having written 500 entries about a variety of topics is a growing number of google search hits and of daily page views.    The overall number of page views since I started this blog in July 2010 is close to 14,000.   But some persons read multiple pages (every entry has its own page URL), and the visitors are persons of any age and of both genders.    Probably even 14,000 page views do not indicate, that there had been more than 1000 men in my age group being unique visitors.

Statistics and estimating probabilities supply nothing more than numbers.  But this is nevertheless a rational way to be aware of reality and to continue my efforts without losing hope.    My task to earn happiness includes the task to get notoriety for my blog.   Every person reading the blog for the first time could either be my mindmate or at least know him and get us into contact.    


Writing more entries contributes to increased notoriety.    But sometimes help comes from unexpected sources too.   A few days ago, someone involuntarily did me a great favor.   The guy meant to present me on his own blog as some kind of an oddity.  
As a side effect, I got an amazing boost of publicity.   This guy sent lots of visitors to my blog.   Suddenly, on one single day there were more page views than there had been in some entire months.   
Not all people are gullible and immature and automatically share that guy's attempted mockery.  Some of these visitors are certainly able to appreciate my blog as independent thinkers.   

He labeled me as the 'finalized product of feminism'.    Calling me a mere product of feminism is an underestimation.   I did not need other feminists to gain my insights about what is obvious to any woman with dignity and intelligence.  I had my ideas, attitudes and values concerning egalitarian interactions between the genders and the logical baseline of equal rights and obligations long before I ever had even heard the word 'feminism'.  

But I appreciate being called a 'finalized feminist'.   Finalized means considered as perfect due to being finished without any need for possible further improvement.  
It is encouraging to be presented as the prototype of a feminist.  This involuntary and accidental compliment is a reliable, valuable and genuine feedback.  According to an old proverb, children and fools speak the truth.   In this instance, immature men can be included either with the children or with the fools.   But this is also an example, that while immaturity does damage to those close enough to be victims, immature people can also do unintended favors.  

I do hope to get more publicity of any kind.   When my mindmate will have found me, it does not matter, if his finding me was enabled by praise or by mockery.

499. Demisexuality And Monogamy

Demisexuality And Monogamy

Demisexuality and monogamy are both beneficial for the emotional and attachment needs of those people, who are sensitive and intellectual and not just instinct driven robots. 

Demisexuality and monogamy are connected, but they are not the same.

In entry 498 I described, how capitalists have created absurd social norms to acquire high profits from those, whom they had successfully manipulated to experience themselves as allegedly deviant.   In entry 493 I pointed out, how the definition of demisexuality by those self-labeling themselves as such is based upon the agreement of being deviant according to the accepted social norm of oversexation, while refusing to buy the capitalists' remedies.   

As explained in entry 496, when discarding the capitalists' absurd social norm by seeing demisexuality as the cognitive adaptation to the middle of the bell curve of libido and sexual instincts, it is not at all a deviance.  According to the evolution of the human cognition, demisexuality and monogamy are appropriate, realistic and suitable as social norms, because they are beneficial for the human emotional needs for attachment.   Such social norms bring no profit to capitalists, but they are superior for the purpose of avoiding individuals being harmed and suffering and social troubles and disruptions.  

Monogamy and demisexuality are closely connected without being the same: 

Sexual attraction in demisexuality and the wish to be part of a monogamous dyad are caused by the same personal attraction.  This personal attraction enabling sexual attraction in demisexuality consists of the same traits and attributes, which also attract couples to choose each other for the benefits of being committed companions sharing quality time and living arrangement.   Monogamous sexuality and sharing a home require both the same kind of trust to share exclusivity, intimacy and resources and the wish to be together and to enjoy each other's company and activities, which also causes the sexual attraction of demisexuals. 

• Demisexuality does not automatically lead to monogamous life arrangements.
  
  When taking the predominant definition literally and orthodoxically, demisexuality does not imply monogamy.   It is theoretically true, that someone can get into an emotionally close relationship with more than one person leading to sexual attraction and activities.   It is theoretically possible to imagine a mormon or muslim demisexual man having a polygynous family arrangement, that fully satisfies his personal needs.  
  But this does not imply, that he can reciprocally fulfill dyadic needs of more than one partner.  Any kind of arrangement may suit the needs of someone demisexual, while asymmetrical arrangements do not offer the same safe haven as does a dyad.
  
  Demisexuality is a cognitive predisposition, a trait, a predefined reaction or lack thereof to specific stimuli, demisexuality is wired into the brain, even in the absence of consciously experiencing the lack of stimulation.   Demisexuality does not require someone being aware of having such a predisposition. 
  
  
• Demisexuality is not the only possible cause for monogamy.
  
  Monogamy is a life style based upon the choice of the exclusivity of sharing the safe haven of the dyad with one specific person.  Monogamy is the exclusivity of the special combined intellectual, emotional and physical intimacy shared with only one significant other. 
  
  Monogamy can be either maintained by a successful use of willpower as the consequence of the cognitive insight of the superior long-term benefits of exclusivity or it can be facilitated and enabled by demisexuality.
  
  Choosing the life arrangement of a dyad (entry 497) is the choice for an emotionally healthy life style, when two partners support each other as a caring monogamous exclusive couple against the inclemencies of life.
  
  G.K. Chesterton only needed two sentences to express it beautifully in his novel 'The Man Who Was Thursday': 

  "there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy."

 

Demisexuality does therefore not lead automatically to monogamy, but monogamy without demisexuality is fragile, while demisexuality stabilizes monogamy.    Demisexual monogamy is a better safe haven than any form of monogamy, where exclusivity is only maintained by self-control in fear of consequences.   Demisexuality is the absence of those instinctive inclinations and predispositions, that are the biggest hazards to monogamy.   

Demisexuality is the best precondition for a lasting, stable, reliable and monogamous commitment.  
Monogamy is the best option for demisexuals.

498. Capitalism, Media, Social Norm And Monogamy

498.  Capitalism, Media, Social Norm And Monogamy

I claim: 

Some of today's decisive social norms are an artificial invention serving capitalists' profits by disregarding human cognitive and emotional needs.    

Monogamous life arrangements are the best adaptation of the human emotional needs and of the advanced evolution of the human cognition to the animal instincts also present in the human brain.
  

1.  The enabling factors of capitalistically distorted social norms.

1.1.  I call someone a capitalist, who uses financial power to ruthlessly invest money, wherever and whenever he can get the most profit, without responsibility and consideration for social and psychological consequences.   

1.2.  Until about 100 years ago, the reinforcement, persistence and influence of social norms depended on real life role models.   Role models lived successfully according to the social norm, social norms were reinforced by the example of real persons' achievements.  
While religions and philosophies also had influences, the real life experience of personally known role models restricted social norms to the correction by realistic physical and cognitive capacities of human beings.  

1.3.  According to the theory of being determined by the adaptation to the environment during evolution, the human cognition has not yet adapted to the technological environment, in which we are living now.  
It was first Kanazawa, who pointed out, that people are led to confound people on TV with personal friends.    http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/ehb2002.pdf 

But this effect can be seen even more generalized as being effective, whenever recorded voices, movies, live size color pictures trick the subconscious brain to confound the preserved representations of persons with real present role models.

1.4.  The more often something is heard and repeated, the more people believe it.   Real life role models are not willing to repeat the demonstration of their endeavors for the purpose of influencing others.    Movies and audio tapes can be replayed endlessly and they have therefore more impact.    

1.5.  The technical progress created the influence of virtual role models confounded as if they were real people.  
The realistic voices from the radio started this.   The Nazi ideology would probably have not been so widely accepted by the German population, had not the radio repeated this ideology in a way, that people were misled subconsciously to be listening to personal role models.
When the color TV enabled capitalists to send role models as commercials into every home and repeating their messages endlessly, they established several new social norms, which do not correspond to people's real needs as cognitive humans.   

Instead these social norms were established to create profitable markets.    

  

2.  Distorted social norms optimize capitalistic profits

The general principle of the capitalistic social norm claims enhanced wellbeing as something to be bought by consumption.    The even more powerful and more devastating principle are those artificial, unrealistic and distorted social norms, which make people feel deviant and willing to spend money on remedies to reduce the alleged deviance, while there is nothing wrong with them.  

Capitalists, predominantly male, have created distorted social norms for both genders:

• Men have extremely high libido, they are promiscuous and successful in discarding the monogamous commitment to be successful predators consuming women.   
• Woman want to be prey as much as men enjoy to be the predators.   Due to the fundamental biological difference, only men have a physiological need for sexual homeostasis, while women have no biological reason to need sex unless there are also emotional benefits.   Therefore by this social norm consumption and material benefits are the substitutes for the not available emotional benefits as women's reward for their acquiescence to be compliant prey. 

As shown in entry 497, the safe haven of living as a dyad is the best adaptation of the human need to combine cognition and physiological needs.   People using their cognition to earn and create happiness, who work hard on their relationship by communicating, by solving conflicts, by sharing time and activities, by learning to trust and to cooperate, bring no profit to capitalists.  
People, who spend most of their time working for money, guided by the belief, that happiness could be bought, are doubly profitable to the capitalists:  They produce and they consume.    Someone, who is too busy to invest time and effort into cognitive improvements of a monogamous happiness, is lured by the social norms to instead invest money in acquiring the prey's compliance by buying consumption goods for her.       

• The role model for men invests money to offer general consumption to women.
• The role model for women invests money in her body to attract men to spend money on them.  

3.    The markets of deviance.

This social norm creates two levels of feeling insufficient and deviant, and the capitalists sell alleged remedies: 

Market 1:  The sex market, which is primarily a market for male customers.   

The social norm makes men believe that they are deviant and deficient, unless they have a very high libido.  This is unrealistic when compared with the biological bell curve of libido, where in reality the extreme libido is deviant.  (More in entry 496 on Demisexuality And Cognition)

The sex market sells

• remedies to physically enhance the libido of the predators:
  
  • medical treatment, pills, hormones

• remedies to subconsciously enhance the stimulation of the predators' libido: 
  • pornography tricking the subconscious brain to confound being stimulated by mere pictures with being in the presence of a real woman

• remedies to physically enhance the success of triggering another's instinctive physiological reaction:
  • pheromones, fashion, cosmetics, body modifications

• remedies to enhance the predator's manipulation skills: 
  
  • The market of PUA (pick-up-animals) training.

• remedies to avoid failing as a predator by being a customer instead: 
  
  • prostitution.

Market 2:  The Psychotropic Drug Market

The capitalists established the social norm, that any person, who cannot be happy and striving as an unattached predator or prey, but who is sensitive, vulnerable and suffers as a result of the deprivation of commitment, is deviant and needs to be treated by taking psychopharmaceuticals.  
They have created the psychotropic drug market, which is extremely profitable and still growing.  This is an excellent documentary:   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDlH9sV0lHU

Psychological and social problems like depression, outbreak of psychiatric disturbances in vulnerable people under emotional stress, trauma, aggression, burn-out, alcoholism, illegal drugs abuse, crime, juvenile delinquencies are a few examples of what happens to people and their dependents, when basic emotional needs are not met.  Such sufferings are symptoms indicating the needed change of the toxic or noxious circumstances of their life situation.  If people's emotional needs were fully recognized, many psychological and psychosomatic health issues could be prevented by appropriate interventions.    But in this case, there would be no profit for the capitalists.  

The artificial social norms of defining as deviance, what really are healthy reactions to serious life challenges, have therefore two detrimental effects:

• Effect 1.  Those taking the psychopharmaceuticals deliberately, accept themselves as deviant in comparison with the artificial social norm.  People deprived of the social, emotional and psychological benefits of the safe haven of a reliable dyad as outlined in entry 497, react with maladaptive coping behavior.   Instead of attempting to get the needed benefits of a monogamous relationship, they take pills.    They are manipulated to believe this as the easy and only way out.
    
• Effect 2.  Those, who involuntarily hurt and harm others in spite of believing to act morally, consider their victims as deviant.  They influence or even coerce them to take pharmaceuticals as the apparently only remedy to restore them to cope better under the artificial social norm.  
  As already elaborated in entry 489 (Demisexuality And Morals), one of the collateral devastations of the artificial capitalistic social norm is the effect upon the behavior of those people, who are willing and wishing to be moral. They believe to act as good people according to the social norm, but they are oblivious of the damage done by them.    They harm others, but instead of changing their own behavior, they feed them with pills to repair the alleged flaw.   People doing damage with a clean conscience cause sometimes the worst harm.

An example:   

The proverbial broken heart can physiologically be expressed by symptoms of a real health issue, according to this study: 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120207121928.htm
"Broken heart syndrome occurs during highly stressful or emotional times, such as a painful breakup,
Broken heart syndrome also is called stress cardiomyopathy. Symptoms are similar to those of a heart attack, including chest pain and difficulty breathing.
During an extremely stressful event, the heart can be overwhelmed with a surge of adrenalin and other stress hormones."

Without the distorted capitalistic social norm, a sensitive caring person would feel responsible and avoid breaking another person's heart.   But the social norm of the oversexation and of promiscuity has destroyed the realistic recognition of the human need for attachment, consideration and responsibility.  

• The person suffering the broken heart fights the allegedly deviant reaction with psychopharmaceuticals. 
• The person, who had broken the heart, feels entitled to do so and considers the other as in need of pharmaceuticals.     

To sum it up, capitalists have used the media to artificially create the social norm of the oversexation of society and of men's high libido in addition to the general market of selling alleged consumable happiness and wellbeing.   
The discrepancy between biological reality and the distorted social norm has created two markets, one of remedies for those men attempting to comply with the sexual norm, and the other of pharmaceutical remedies for both men and women, who are psychologically damaged by this norm.