604. Commodification Under The Influence Of Culture

604.   Commodification Under The Influence Of Culture

Biologically seen, there are factors determining the watershed between the intrinsic commitment of nice guys and the promiscuity of abusive jerks.   

These factors are the innate strength of men's instinctive urges causing the discomfort of sexual dishomeostasis and the innate quality and strength of the cognition upon the behavior.  

Demisexual intellectuals with a strong need for bonding are able to appreciate women's personality, promiscuous jerks are programmed to always degrade women as objects for use.   But there are also the fence sitters having behavioral predispositions in a delicate balance between instinctive urges and cognitive strength.   Upon them, culture and social norms are a third and decisive influence.     

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120905135340.htm

"To be a 'success' in evolutionary terms, women need to have access to resources for raising offspring, and men need to have access to fertile females. Researchers have argued that women tend to prefer partners who have an ability to invest resources in their children (i.e., wealthy men), and men tend to prefer partners who appear fertile (i.e., young women) because evolutionary adaptations have programmed these preferences in our brains."

"They found that the gender difference in mate preferences predicted by evolutionary psychology models "is highest in gender-unequal societies, and smallest in the most gender-equal societies," according to Zentner."

"Because increasing gender equality reduces gender differences in mate selection, these studies indicate that the strategies men and women use to choose mates may not be as hardwired as scientists originally thought."

"But he also adds evolutionary roots shouldn't be ruled out entirely.

"Indeed, the capacity to change behaviors and attitudes relatively quickly in response to societal changes may itself be driven by an evolutionary program that rewards flexibility over rigidity.""

When a promiscuous jerk copulates with a female body like a dog in the gutter, this is determined by four factors.   

• The experience of the intrinsic urges of dishomeostasis, 
• The enhancement and magnification of the impact of dishomeostasis by external triggers upon the perception.
• The availability of bodies for easy abuse.    
• The basic attitude of accepting promiscuity as appropriate behavior without any damage to his self-esteem or confidence.   

While only the innate magnitude of dishomeostasis is biological, the availability and ubiquity of external triggers, the availability of bodies for ready use, and the choice between promiscuity and monogamy as part of the ideal-self depend also upon the social environment.   

I was a child in Germany in the 50s, before the fatal sexual revolution freed the worst in men.    The 50s were certainly not a golden age for women, while there was still no reliable birth control, no legal abortion and husbands had unjustifiable legal rights like the one to forbid their wives to have a job.   

But as far as women were commodified, it was as wombs, not as objects and utilities serving men's animal instincts.  There was no public objectification of women.   Sexuality was restricted to its appropriate place inside the privacy of the bedroom of committed couples.  

There were no pictures of naked or lascivious women in any public place, not in commercials, magazines or newspapers, nor in movies.  Most women were aware, that being nice but decently dressed was in their own best interest, just as was also the conscious rejection of any involvement except long-term commitment.    

It was a golden age of beneficial wise prudery.    

Public life was free from detrimental triggers for male instincts.   

There were too many jerks then too, but they were jerks by their own innate animality, they were jerks in spite of a social norm of commitment and monogamy.  Abusing women was not facilitated for them.  These jerks had to consciously decide first, that they really wanted to abuse a woman, because finding the hidden prostitution and pornography required a proactive search. 

The nice guys and the fence sitters were spared the involuntary exposure to triggers, which were incongruent with their real wishes and inclinations for intrinsic commitment based upon their cognitive personality.    

When they experienced the discomfort of dishomeostasis, the circumstances due to the social norm and the culture smoothed their path much more towards commitment and monogamy than towards promiscuity.   

In the 50s, it was much easier for intrinsic nice guys to remain decent, nothing perturbed and distracted them from living in congruency with their cognitive ability to appreciate women.     

Today, the public objectification of women does not only cause a lot of harm to women, but it also causes self-harming to those nice guys, who would be most happy in bonded monogamous commitment.   They are exposed without having a choice to the ubiquitous triggers to their worst animal instincts by the combination of the excellent quality of the realism of the media, the oversexation of every day life and the social norm of male promiscuity and female acquiescence.

The potentially responsible and considerate nice guys and the fence sitters are in the unfortunate situation of being triggered by instincts and encouraged by social norm to use those too many women, who acquiesce too easily.  Such women are also manipulated by the same social norm into believing, that promiscuity were modern, monogamy were prudish and old fashioned and that the only chance to successfully compete with other women is to allow themselves to be available first for use lest another would be chosen for being easier to get.  The sad result are many women suffering from unilateral and not-reciprocated attachment.  The men get desensitized by using too many women.    This is, how fence sitters convert themselves more and more to jerks.   

The guy described in entry 601 is a good example.    In the 50s, the easiest way to homeostation would have been to continue his efforts towards finding commitment, which he initially seemed to really want.   But now, the social norm and the triggers lured and lure him to desensitize himself, until he will be unfit for commitment by his own doing.     

 

I have a very high regard and appreciation for those nice guys, who are determined by their cognition and no trigger of any strength has the impact to cause them to stray from decency towards abusing women as bodies.   

The true quality of a man reveals itself, when no trigger and no influence can ever make him sink so low as to become promiscuous.    Such men are rare, but they do exist.    I am looking for one of them as my mindmate.  

603. Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

603.   Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

Texts presenting apparently easy recipes for about any problem or task are plenty in books, newspapers, the web and other media.    

Practical tasks sometimes do follow simple algorithms, which are not obvious without a step-by-step guide to follow through.   Recipes for cooking are an examples, manuals how to maintain and handle household appliances and machines are another.  

But most of the recipes concerning non-material topics are false promises offering pseudo solutions to very complex, difficult and strenuous tasks.  

1.  The attraction of recipes:  

Recipes are tempting to be believed and applied, whenever people struggle with the experience of failure, because they wish or crave for something, which

• can generally not be achieved
• is beyond someone's ability to achieve it
• could only be achieved by much more efforts than the person is ready and willing to invest

Recipes are expressed as assertive claims.   The apparent false authority of them misleads people to confound their mere wishful thinking as if it were something to come true as a secure success needing only limited efforts.   Recipes are most suggestive, when they are expressed in a way, which precludes doubts of failure and pretends programmed success.   

Recipes are usually either promising the certain way to reach one specific goal, or they offer a precise number of steps or items to work through towards a goal.   

2.  Some examples:

The following examples are chosen only because of the big claim made by the title.  

Examples of titles of books

Get the life you want

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The 48 Laws of Power

Think and Grow Rich

The Feeling Good Handbook

How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

Examples of 'how to' articles found by a google search:  

How to trick people into thinking you're good looking

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to be an expert

How to Get a Life

How to Get Out of Debt

How to Lose 20 lbs. of bodyfat in 30 days

How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

How To Become Wealthy

Examples from a dating advice site:

10 things men should never say

Seven steps to the perfect first email

5 Habits that Hurt Your Relationship

Five dating tips for spotting ‘Mr Right’

3 Key Things to Discuss Before Moving In Together

3. Classification of recipes:

Falling for simple recipes can be caused by several different fallacies. 

• Absurdity.   Recipes advising religious rituals like prayer or a pilgrimage and woo-woo remedies like homeopathy are just absurd and irrational.  
• Pseudo-science.   Pseudo-science is suggestive, because uninformed people confound it with serious science.   NLP is an example.
• Exaggerated and biased truth.   A few good, valid tips can be convincing, even when they are banalities.   These tips can supply a tiny contribution to the problem, that makes them suggestive.   But they are nevertheless very insufficient, when exaggerated into an entire recipe, not applicable for the complex problem and for the wide variety of different people and situations.  

4.  Purpose for using recipes:

The recipes are used as a crutch to reduce insecurity and anxiety in areas of life, where the access to reliable information and better methods is difficult:  

• Self-improvement towards a better ability of understanding, predicting, influencing and controlling other people
• Health improvement

5.  Gullibility to the belief in simple recipes:

Not all recipes are fully worthless, when perceived with the critical mental distance to not succumb to unrealistic expectations.    If read skeptically, knowing that there cannot be simple recipes, there is sometimes some food for thought to be integrated in a larger frame of investigating the best way to cope with an issue. 

• Gullible, uneducated and simple minded people, who are prone to believe any irrational nonsense, are most prone to also fall uncritically for simple recipes.   Pressing problems like strong instinctive urges, which deactivate or blur the reason, often enhance the attraction of simple recipes.
  
• Intelligent and skeptical people with the ability for abstract and complex thinking are not prone to fall for simple recipes.   They understand the complexity and real magnitude of a task and react appropriately.  They prefer sources, which put the emphasis on the complexity of any issue and avoid any claims of easy solutions.     

6.  The authors of the recipes:

Those who produce simple recipes are

• frauds, who know, that they take advantage of other people's gullibility and simplicity to make money.  
• gullible and mislead themselves.    The feel a mission to propagate their delusional insights and wisdom.  
  
  • They want to earn a reward in the afterlife
  • They expect narcissistic supply as gurus.
  • They want to feel good about themselves by being altruistically helping others.

7.  The dangers of simple recipes for the applicants:

By relying exclusively on a simple recipe, people often enhance and prolong the problem, which they attempt to solve.  The focus on vain attempts to reach a goal with an oversimplified recipe impedes them to find a real solution.

When the wrong expectations for an easy achievement fail, a wrong attribution of this failure can damage a person's self-esteem and confidence.   This can lead to wrong decisions with long term fatal consequences in the realm of important life choices.

8.  The dangers of the impact of imposed simple recipes:

When people rely more on recipes than on direct information from the target of the applied recipe, then they can be a serious hazard to others,    The lack of any modification of the applied recipe by the target's direct influence can be caused by any combination of lacking trust, of lacking information and of failing recognition for the target being a source of information.

• Misjudgment by categorization:  
  Using astrology as a recipe of sorting people into 12 arbitrary categories and ascribing traits to them can cause harm.   A person is not treated according to how s/he really is but by ascribed traits.   A person chosen by wrongly ascribed traits as a mate or employee cannot fulfill erroneous expectations and may suffer from pressure.
  
• Misjudgment by unsuitable methods: 
  NLP includes pseudo-scientific recipes.  One such recipe claims, that specific eye movements were indicators for the difference between honesty and lying.    When trust is denied by this fallacy, this can prevent or destroy relationships and friendships.
  
• Unjustified blame: 
  When recipes promising benefits in the interaction with others fail, no matter if the goal is to be accepted or to gain control, this is a logical consequence of not perceiving the other as a partner, but as reduced to a mere target.   But due to believing in the power and correctness of the recipe, the failure is attributed to faults, flaws of defects of the target. 
  
• Enhancement of the detriments of power:  
  The more the person applying a recipe also has power, the worse the situation gets for the target.   People applying for a job or training can be rejected by invalid recipes like graphology.   Bosses, teachers, parents, wardens and caretakers in institutions can do a lot of harm by applying recipes derived from a religion, ideology or simply from an unqualified application or misinterpretation of recipes from any source.

I am personally scared of people, who believe so much in simple recipes of any kind, no matter if it is religion, woo-woo or pseudoscience, that this impedes and prevents me from influencing by proactive rationality, how I am judged and treated.    

My mindmate to be found is not simple minded, he does not use recipes upon me.  He is someone, who not only is able to think abstractly, but who also feels comfortable with cognitive complexity.  

602. Inconsistent Morals

602.  Inconsistent Morals 

In entry 601 I was puzzled about someone, who appeared and presented himself rather convincingly in his profile as a nice guy in search of a long term relationship, yet he decided suddenly to become an abusive jerk and to pursue the plan to copulate like a dog in the gutter.  

As the following article shows, some people are prone to lack moral integrity:

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2012/may/wearing-two-different-hats-moral-decisions-may-depend-situation

"An individual’s sense of right or wrong may change depending on their activities at the time – and they may not be aware of their own shifting moral integrity — according to a new study looking at why people make ethical or unethical decisions."

"workers who tend to have dual roles in their jobs would change their moral judgments based on what they thought was expected of them at the moment."

"“When people switch hats, they often switch moral compasses,” Leavitt said. “People like to think they are inherently moral creatures – you either have character or you don’t. But our studies show that the same person may make a completely different decision based on what hat they may be wearing at the time, often without even realizing it.”"

"Whether they know it or not, people are often taking in messages about what their role is and what is expected of them, and this may conflict with what they know to be the moral or correct decision."

"“We find that people tend to make decisions that may conflict with their morals when they are overwhelmed, or when they are just doing routine tasks without thinking of the consequences,” Leavitt said. “We tend to play out a script as if our role has already been written. So the bottom line is, slow down and think about the consequences when making an ethical decision.”"

Maybe this research is a clue towards interpreting, how some men may attempt or pretend to be decent and monogamous, whenever they are in contact with women, yet when they are in the company of a bunch of outspoken jerks and machos they nevertheless switch to the fallacy, that the objectification and other forms of the abuse of women were appropriate behavior.   As too many men already consider this as the social norm, they reinforce each other in the fallacy, that there were nothing ethically wrong with their attitude towards women. 

Maybe the man described in entry 601 had been drinking with a group of buddies, who bragged about their successes as predators, thus triggering his ambition to compete with them.   If his wish to live up to their social norm is strong, it overrides any moral consideration or responsibility towards women..  

601. Anecdotal Evidence: How Instinctive Urges Blur, Distort And Deactivate A Man's Reason

601.   Anecdotal Evidence:  How Instinctive Urges Blur, Distort And Deactivate A Man's Reason

A few days ago, a man's profile gave me the impression of his being a nice, decent, and considerate guy.    He used words like honesty, sharing, loving, kind and compassionate in his profile.   He told me, he were fitting my own profile, where I have explicitly mentioned, that I do not want any contact with promiscuous men.   

He seemed interested in further contact with me.   We exchanged a few emails and he agreed also with the importance of communication and of intellectual compatibility.   

But when I had another look at his profile, I was really puzzled.    He had changed his declared intention from actively seeking a relationship to dating but nothing serious.   When I asked him about this unexpected and seemingly incongruous change, his answer was so different from what he had appeared before, that he appeared like a different person.  
.   
He wrote,
1.  that he was "totally discouraged with online dating"
2.  that he now intended to have "a hookup, nothing serious. Dinner, movie, and sex."

For a moment I was speechless.  When he wrote this, it was morning in his time zone.  Had he written this in the evening, I would have suspected him to be drunk.  
  
1. Even by not being his dream woman, according to his initial interest, the contact with me could more logically have encouraged him.
  
2. Something is strange, when someone with this man's profile decides on such a project.  It is not something to achieve with honesty.   Most women, to whom a man would unequivocally suggest "a hookup, nothing serious. Dinner, movie, and sex" would feel insulted by this objectification and disrespect.  They would consider him a ridiculous fool for having such expectations.   
Most men, who succeed in getting "a hookup, nothing serious. Dinner, movie, and sex", do this by lies, manipulation and other methods of misleading a woman to consent based upon the false hope of beginning a relationship.    This is abuse. 

It seemed incongruous and inconsistent, that a man, who had declared himself as valuing compassion and kindness, suddenly plans coldblooded abuse.   It is incomprehensible, how someone suddenly decides to abuse a female body as a toilet for his body waste in spite of his claim of wanting intellectual compatibility.

The following are of course only speculations, as there is no way to find out the truth. 

Desensitization to full comprehension for how much a woman gets hurt, when she is used and discarded is not enough to explain this contradiction.  Desensitization to harming others works best in the absence of compassion.    

The most plausible explanation is this man's overreacting to a state of strong physiological dishomeostasis.    The guy seems to have been reduced from a thinking and feeling human being to a mere animal, being completely under the power of overwhelming instinctive forces.   In this state as an animal, all his human reason appears blurred, distorted or deactivated.    

Any option for behavior guided by human compassion and kindness seems to be concealed behind the predominant urge to copulate like a dog in the gutter, and behind the drive to be a predator and to ruthlessly hunt for prey.   This state as an animal lasts until homeostation restores humanity.

I replied, that a man, who objectifies women, is not worthy of me.    His reaction was "F**k you, you crazy broad. Go back to the asylum."    I was merely blunt, but the animal in him became vulgar.


While I am scared of men's dangerous instincts, I also feel sorry for them.   They are afflicted with instincts, which destroy for them the chance to get, what is most beneficial to their human cognition, especially in the case of men, who are intelligent and educated, and only deranged when they experience dishomeostasis.   

This guy is just one example.   Without being deranged temporarily by his instincts, he could have a happy symmetrical committed and bonded relationship with a woman like me.   But his instincts reduce him to a disgusting beast, who temporarily sinks so low as to intend to abuse women as a toilet for his body waste.   No decent woman with dignity and self-respect wants anything to do with such a man.   

It is very difficult for me to imagine, how men's specific physiological sexual dishomeostasis of needing to get rid of body waste feels.   Biologically, women's bodies do not provide this same experience of dishomeostasis.   
My best attempt to comprehend the magnitude of men's problem is to compare it to the urge of an addiction like alcoholism or even an extreme deprivation as is starvation.   Sometimes an extremely strong craving deactivates and overrides all higher cognitive and moral consideration.  The craving person ruthlessly applies any atrocity, which allows him to restore homeostasis, even killing, stealing and robbing. In the case of men, it can be abuse and rape of women.       

Those jerks, who always copulate like dogs in the gutter, oblivious of the damage done to the abused women, are just animals, who have never really become fully human.  
But assuming, that the guy in this incident knows the full meaning of the words used by him in his profile, like kindness and compassion, makes me wonder, what happens after he had his night in the gutter.   How will he feel, when he is back temporarily in a state of homeostasis, becoming fully aware of what he had done to the woman by luring her into his gutter?    Will he feel the same shame and regret as the addict, who in the state of homeostasis wishes to be free from the addiction?

600. Review

600.   Review
This is blog entry number 600 and there have been over 20,000 page views since I started this blog on July first, 2010.  

I am amazed, that I have still not run out of ideas to write about.   Blogging has helped me to clarify my own world view.  

But mainly I am disappointed.   I had hoped to find my mindmate long before arriving at entry 600.   

I cannot know, how many different people have contributed to those 20,000 page views, nor how many ever really read the page, which they had opened.  But it is disappointing, that nobody has ever recommended me as an apparent match to anybody.    While I do not expect strangers to care for me, also nobody seems to care enough to make a friend or family member happy by telling him about me.       

I am an atheist and a realist.   I do not expect anything good ever coming from fate or a deity.  Nor do I expect any hazard to happen to me more often than by its statistical probability.  The only realistic way to gain or acquire anything is the investment of efforts to earn it.    Sometimes the return of an investment is certain, sometimes the mere hope for a return is proportional to the investment.  

A happy relationship is something to be earned.   This earning is a two step process.   While the second step of cooperating in the effort to make a relationship work needs the combined effort of two partners, the first step of finding a suitable and compatible partner is entirely my own job.  
My mindmate is out there somewhere, but this does me no good, as long as he is not aware of my existence.    Getting in contact with him requires efforts to be noticed by as many persons as possible, until one of them is either my mindmate or knows him and recommends me.    The more people know about my search, the more there is hope.
 
Writing blog entries is a part of this strategy.   Every time someone finds and reads an entry as a result of a google search, this adds a tiny chance, that this person may get interested and even fascinated by my way of thinking as the expression of my personality and is either my mindmate or can recommend me to him.   

Therefore I will continue to write blog entries, until I find him or am found by him.  This is one part of creating hope and thus making myself to feel less desperate.

599. Harvest

599.   Harvest

A bucket full of grapes and the first puny kiwi

 

 

598. Commodification And Delayed Gratification

598.  Commodification And Delayed Gratification

This continues entry 597.

When one partner of an egalitarian, bonded and caring couple expresses a wish to the other partner, this is based upon the realistic expectation and trust, that the partner is motivated to gratify the wish, if and when it is possible at any unspecified time in the future.   

This includes the awareness, that the partner has a mental to do list, where the wish gets a place according to the urgency, priority and circumstances of all the other list items.   The delayed gratification is trusted to be available without any exertion of control or power. 

When a man commodifies a woman, the situation is very different.   A man using a utility like a vacuum cleaner expects a simple dichotomy: The machine either functions immediately after pressing the button or not at all, in which case it is broken.   Even programmable appliances like a video recorder are under his full control, they start to function at exactly the time, which he has determined and can thus predict.   

The commodifying man expects the same dichotomy also from the woman, whom he confounds with a utility:   
When he demands something from a woman, he expects her immediate compliance.   If she intends to gratify his wish but with a delay, he automatically misinterprets this as a complete refusal and experiences her as dysfunctional.   By confounding her with a utility, he is unable to appreciate her as a person with an own mind.   He neither trusts to get anything from her without having full control nor does he consider her able to accept his wish and gratify it later.  
He confounds the delay of gratification with a complete refusal and reacts with pressure upon her.   He is oblivious, that she would comply immediately, were this feasible.    Pressure does not make it any more feasible, therefore the pressure achieves nothing.  The motivation to do favors for the trusting and patient partner are an ingredient of a caring relationship.  

Reacting with pressure upon an only alleged refusal destroys her motivation to gratify his wishes.   By using pressure he earns a real refusal and gets less than what he would get with patience and trust.      Pressure deteriorates the relationship.   

597. Commodification And Wanting

597.   Commodification And Wanting

When a sane, mature and rational person declares to want something, this is an expression of a mere wish and of nothing more.   Wishing does not imply any assumption concerning the availability or feasibility nor does it imply any claim to get it.

Attempts towards gratification are an independent next step.   Such attempts are limited by the full recognition of and awareness for the rights of others and by the moral obligation to refrain from harming others and from usurping and seizing.     

The rational method to get gratification is earning it.  When it comes as a gift, it is received with gratitude and not taken for granted.
 

Immature and selfish jerks have a blatant delusional fallacy in their thinking.  When they say 'I want x', they really mean to say 'I demand x, because I believe myself to be entitled to get x immediately'.  They confound wanting something with the entitlement to automatically get it.  They believe, that everybody and the society owe to given to them, whatever they want and when they want it.  

Relationships are entered for the purpose of meeting specific needs.   The difference between mere wishes and claims of alleged entitlement contributes to the difference between egalitarian bonded couples and asymmetrical commodification.   

A bonded, caring, considerate couple feels reciprocally responsible for the careful use of their pooled resources.   Those expenses have priority, of which the benefits are shared by both partners   Any expenses only benefiting one partner are secondary.  Shared decision are based upon agreement as being fair.  Reciprocal gratification of wishes is perceived with gratitude as a gift or as a favor.     

The commodification of women is one special case of the fallacy of mistaking wanting as an automatic justification for claims, demands, coercion and usurpation.  A jerk informing a commodified woman of what he wants feel automatically also entitled to get it immediately. 

• Commodifying men experience and consider it as their baseline of normality, if they always get everything immediately whenever they demand it.   
  They take all received benefits for granted.  They are blind to recognize, when someone does something for them by choice and by a voluntary decision.   They do not know, what favors are.  They do not know gratitude.  
  Any expression of love, care and affection by voluntarily doing something for such a man is lost and not recognized as such.  Whatever gratification he receives, he always confounds it as if it were his due and as if she were only doing her duty. 
  
• When the reaction to commodifying men's demands is refusal,
  
  • they seize their alleged due by hook or by crook, by domination, coercion, bullying, if they have the power to do so.
  • they get extremely angry, aggressive, frustrated and unpleasant, when they lack the power to enforce gratification.

596. Commodification And Learning By Feedback - The Spell Checker Metaphor

596.   Commodification And Learning By Feedback - The Spell Checker Metaphor


While people can often improve their relationships by feedback and constructive criticism, those men, who commodify women are unfortunately out of the reach of improvement by feedback. 

The spell checker metaphor:

Using a spell checker when writing a text in a foreign language helps to find mistakes and to learn better spelling.   Without the spell checker, the same mistakes are repeated and become a habit.   

A spell checker offers to its user the choice to change his spelling, whenever and if he agrees to do so.  Ignoring the errors indicated by the spell checker can have the unfavorable consequences of reactions to bad spelling.   

The benefits of using a spell checker as a learning aid are limited by preconditions.   It is only a valuable tool to improve the spelling competence, if it is reliable by only indicating real mistakes and by finding (nearly) all of them.  

1.  Learning from a spell checker does not work, when there are too many false positives.   When the spell checker uses a wrong language on a text, this leads to so many false positives, that the real mistakes are lost between the many apparent mistakes.  

2.  Learning from a spell checker does not work, when there are too many mistakes.  
When someone's knowledge of a language is only minimal and below the threshold for writing correct text, too many mistakes are discouraging and beyond the capacity to memorize all the corrections. 

3.  Relying on a spell checker, which overlooks mistakes, is worse than not using one.  Whatever is not indicated as an error is wrongly assumed and reinforced as correct.   This leads to learning mistakes.  


Feedback as a behavior checker:

Being influenced (entry 594) by the feedback of the partner concerning the preferred behaviors and especially concerning what hurting, annoying and disturbing behaviors need to be avoided is an important method and part of the learning process for improving a relationship. 
The partner's feedback indicates inappropriate behaviors.  Accepting feedback can be seen as using a behavior checker.   Feedback offers the choice to change the behavior in the case of agreement with the necessity to do so.    Ignoring and rejecting proffered feedback can have the unfavorable consequences of strong reactions to the persistent criticized behaviors.

The benefits of feedback as a tool to improve a relationship are limited by preconditions.   Feedback is reliable, when it is welcome by the recipient as justified and when both partners agree, that and how the criticized behaviors need to be changed.   

1.  Learning from feedback does not work, when there are too many false positives of unjustified and irrational criticisms.   When a commodifying man's entitlement delusion causes him to have absurd expectations and make inappropriate demands on a woman, which she refuses to comply and submit to, then his criticizing her for not serving his delusion is not justified.   Under an overwhelming pressure of his absurd and unwarranted blames and reproaches she has no chance to ever discover and consider those few instances of justified feedback.   

2.  Learning from feedback does not work, when there are too many justified reasons for criticism.   When a man has very many hurting, annoying and disturbing habits and attitudes, then getting too much justified feedback is more than what he can cope with.  This can happen, when someone is immature and ignorant, or when he is suddenly exposed to new expectations after having been considered as unfit for learning by feedback as in 3.

By the reaction of blocking and denial to overwhelming criticism he avoids any change.  But giving too much justified feedback is in such a situation not the woman's fault.    Her feeling hurt and annoyed is real and shifting the suffering upon her to spare him is not an improvement for them both as a couple, only a redistribution of the burden.   Her refraining from giving justified feedback is not a solution.  

Whenever there is a persistent conflict, because there is only the choice between him suffering from her feedback or her suffering from his behavior, they are a mismatch and not suitable for each other.    

3.  Not giving feedback reinforces habits, even though they are hurting or disturbing to others.   This happens, when someone gets the fool's or insane's license, not being taken for serious but instead considered as a weirdo and too deranged to change.  While he himself remains ignorant of his unfavorable reputation as a hopeless and incorrigible case, he believes to be respected and accepted.  He misinterprets the absence of feedback as if his behavior were experienced by others as correct and appropriate.  

4.  Learning by feedback does not work without agreement concerning the justification of the feedback.  
Making a relationship work requires a process of adapting to each other.   But not all people are suitable to reciprocally adapt.   When people's basic attitudes and values are too disparate, they cannot agree concerning which behaviors are acceptable and which are not and thus they also cannot agree, which feedback is justified.  They cannot adapt to each other, they are a mismatch and doomed to accumulate more and more unresolvable conflicts.  

5.  Feedback does not work, unless it is understood by the recipient as it was meant by the sender.   When feedback is incomprehensible or distorted by dysfunctional communication (entry 595), it does not help to learn and does not lead to improvements..  

The commodifying men's fallacy:

Spell checkers compare written text with an internal dictionary of correct words.  This dictionary represents the generally agreed upon correct spelling of a language.  Some spell checkers allow people to enter additional own words as correct into this dictionary.     Any fault entered as correct into the dictionary would no longer be found by the spell checker.  But entering faults is of course a completely irrational method of avoiding to notice the own errors by distorting the spell checker.

Yet the method applied by commodifying men, when handling women's feedback is as if someone would adjust the spell checker by feeding mistakes into the dictionary, until all the mistakes are hidden.   Text thus only appearing as if correct is then believed it to really be correct. 

But the dictionary of correct behaviors is in the woman's head, outside the commodifying man's control.  Feedback concerning his outrageous behavior and his absurd attitude towards women does not elicit the appropriate reaction of his correcting his behavior. Instead he believes the dictionary of correct behaviors in the woman's mind to be faulty.  He reacts with attempts to fix the woman, which for him means to make her modify her allegedly wrong feedback and the faulty concept of correct behaviors causing this feedback.   

Whenever by any method, threat, coercion, exhaustion or domination he succeeds to make her discontinue her feedback, he interprets this as having successfully fixed the woman.  

By this mechanism, men commodifying women are out to the reach of being influenced.    

595. Communication: The Importance Of The Correct Conveyance Of Information

595.   Communication:  The Importance Of The Correct Conveyance Of Information

Communication is a process of conveying non-obvious information from one brain into another.   Cooperation, agreement, consent require the availability of the same information to all parties involved.   

Whenever information does not reach the recipient (listener or reader) unaltered from how it was supplied by the sender (speaker or writer), the result is distorted communication and subsequent unsolved and unsolvable conflicts.  In this case, relationships are doomed by the accumulation of more and more unsolved conflicts.   

Communication works best, when the information sent is neither redundant nor insufficient but conveys just all, which is really needed based upon a realistic evaluation of the targeted recipient's knowledge.     
Communication is distorted, when the information contained in the sender's statements does not match the needs and expectations of the recipient.

The cause of distorted communication and incomprehension can be on both ends:

1. Information provided by the sender does not correctly reach the recipient.  

• The recipient fails to listen.
  
  • He believes to know already, what will be said, based upon his assumptions, prejudices, preconceptions and misinterpretations.   
  • He underestimates the sender and does not consider his statements as worth to listen to.
  • The topic does not interest the recipient, no matter how important it is to the sender.
• The recipient confounds, what is really said, with what he only imagines as said or has heard elsewhere.   This creates a false memory, by which the recipient believes to have heard, what in reality was never said.  
  
  
• The recipient receives only a selection of the information sent. 
  
  • He listens not for the purpose of receiving information, but for the purpose of finding something to contradict and to believe himself to be right.
  • He listens for the purpose to find a hidden agenda or hidden truth in the distrusted sender's statements.   The interpretation is believed and confounded with what is really said but lost.
  • He filters the conscious reception of information to avoid hearing, what would make him feel bad. 

2. The sender fails to communicate well.   Too much redundancy forfeits attention, in which case also important information is lost.  This has a similar effect as has insufficient information, it leads to incomprehension.  

• The sender can have a memory problem. 
  • He forgets, what he has already told and repeats it too often.
  • He confounds, what he only thought about and intended to say, with what he really had told.

• The sender overestimates his own importance and expects the recipient to have paid attention and to remember everything told just once.   

• The sender is generally unable to evaluate, what information is required to be understood.
  
  • He cannot distinguish between general information to be expected from the target recipient, and specific information only available to himself.
  • His statements are omitting some information replacing them with  implicit interpretations and conclusions, which are not comprehensible, unless the recipient shares some cognitive common ground of shared values and attitudes.   
  • He is influenced by hidden and invisible sensations and emotions and is not aware, that the recipient cannot mindread and does not share his state.  

3.  The sender conveys a specific level of informational content, which is suitable for preselected recipients only,   

• He fails to adjust the level of information correctly to the recipients.
  
  • He overestimates the recipients cognitive ability and knowledge, and this leads to incomprehension.   
  • He underestimates the recipient's comprehension and ability to remember, what was already told,  The redundancy bores the recipient.  Too banal and obvious information can appear as the assumption of lacking intelligence.   

• The recipient overestimates himself and chooses communication situations, where his incomprehension is unavoidable.   

Communication can only be constructive, when both partners are both able and motivated to make it thus.   

When the communication is distorted with dynamics like described above, then a couple can spend years together and never find out, who and how the other really is.  

Instead of getting to know each other better, they reciprocally create false alleged personalities of the other.  With every conflict and misunderstanding the false image gets more extremely distant from the misjudged person's reality.   Being treated as the alleged false personality can be very painful and the relationship is doomed.

594. The Difference Between Control And Influence

594.  The Difference Between Control And Influence

In entry 593 I mentioned, that control and trust are mutually exclusive.    But it is very important to distinguish between control and influence.   While control destroys a relationship, reciprocal influence is needed.

Control means, that the relationship is asymmetrical.   One person not only has power, but uses it to gain selfish and onesided benefits from another person, who is helpless, powerless and unable to impede being coerced under domination.

Egalitarian relationships can only work, when reciprocal influencing makes them symmetrical. Influencing means to be able to get one's own needs met while being fully aware of and considering also those of the other, without refusing, ignoring or denying them.   

Having influence includes to be heard, taken for serious and rationally convinced in a process of constructive communication.  
Being influenced requires more than just listening, but also recognizing the other as the only reliable source for information to be learned by active interest and asking.  
Reciprocally influencing partners never do anything, which has any impact upon the partner, without first having reached an agreement.   They only act based upon shared decisions.      


It is the commodifying and not trusting man's fallacy to believe, that he cannot get a fair deal without control.   In reality, control serves him to usurp more than what is fair.   His fallacy is confounding his selfish benefits with what is fair.  
A genuinely fair deal requires reciprocal influence, because a deal is only fair, when it is fair to both, not only experienced as fair for oneself but also knowing this being the same for the other.  

A commodifying and controlling man experiences a relationship only as satisfactoy and functional, as long as the commodified woman does not make any attempts to influence him. When she shows passive compliance, he confounds this with her alleged consent with his entitlement delusion.   

Influence as a reciprocal process of sharing decisions is unknown to him.  All he knows is either the security of having power or else distrust and the expectations of unavoidable doom under her alleged power and usurping of control.  He misinterprets any of her attempts to influence him towards a fair deal as if she were taking control.  Therefore this functions as a trigger to enhance his own use of power as his method to prevent her alleged harming him.  

593. Commodification And Trust

593.  Commodification And Trust

A correct assessment of trustworthiness is very important when interacting with others, especially when deciding on future interactions.    The better the assessment of trustworthiness, the better the prediction of behavior.  

Consciously paying attention to consistent, congruent and plausible behaviors is one method, but there is more:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120911113047.htm

"Certain nonverbal gestures trigger emotional reactions we're not consciously aware of, and these reactions are enormously important for understanding how interpersonal relationships develop,"

"Nexi is a humanoid social robot  ....  While conversing with the participants, Nexi -- operated remotely by researchers -- either expressed cues that were considered less than trustworthy or expressed similar, but non-trust-related cues. Confirming their theory, the team found that participants exposed to Nexi's untrustworthy cues intuited that Nexi was likely to cheat them and adjusted their financial decisions accordingly."

While too much trust bears the risk of being harmed, there cannot be any close relationship without or with insufficient trust.   

A close relationship is symmetrical between equal partners based upon mutual trust and reciprocal trustworthiness.  
Trust is based upon the expected trustworthiness as a trait, whenever somebody is considered to be a person and a human being.   Only persons are checked for being trustworthy, and clues as in the research for trustworthiness are only perceived and expected from persons (or robots imitating them).  

Commodification is asymmetrical between a user as a subject and a used utility as an object. Utilities are functional or dysfunctional and the prediction of their reliable functioning in the future is a question of probability and experience.  In the case of inanimate objects, this is logically not a question of trust and trustworthiness.  A utility like a vacuum cleaner is not asked, if it intents and is able to function the next day, followed by the assessment, if the answer is honest or a lie.  

Due to trust not being a relevant factor when using an inanimate utility, the commodification of women as if they were inanimate objects creates a distorted situation.  
The owner has full control over a utility.   When he puts the vacuum cleaner in a closet, he can expect to retrieve it in an unaltered state, whenever he wants.   He has no need to trust the vacuum cleaner to not leave the closet.
When a man has established control over a commodified woman, he expects to have once and for good ascertained her availability for being used at his convenience without this being a situation requiring to consider trust.


It the comparison with a vacuum cleaner appears a bit too drastic, here is another metaphor:   When a man commodifies a woman, she is for him, what a dairy cow is for a farmer.   

A farmer's dairy cow is valuable possession under his full control. 
The cow brings him lots of benefits, as long as she receives careful maintenance for her physical wellbeing.  He is aware that appropriate maintenance is in his own self-interest.  
The farmer learns, how to handle a cow, from instructors and books, by observing her for signs of dysfunction, by using trial and error and by consulting a veterinarian.
The farmer does not expect to get any information from the cow by asking her questions, nor does he bother about intellectual or emotional needs.  She is a body and he gets the benefits from her body.  
Trust or any personal traits do not contribute to his prediction concerning the amount of future benefits or the assessment of the cow's value.   


But a woman is not a utility, and in contrast to a vacuum cleaner or a dairy cow, external and physical control does not include control over her mind, having full control over her is only the controlling man's illusion.    Neglect, oblivion or denial of the importance of the woman's trustworthiness and personality does not annihilate their impact.   

Whenever the woman wants to trust, to be trusted, to find trustworthiness in a partner and recognition of her own trustworthiness, then being kept outside his protective defense of control dooms the relationship.     

Omitting any focus on or attention for the assessment of trustworthiness makes commodification even also risky for the man himself.   If he is unfortunate or stupid in whom he picks as a utility to be used, he does not get control as expected over a suitably helpless victim.   In the worst case for him, he gets commodifed in return, for example by a breeder, whose priority are her children and who only exploits him materially as a provider. 


Trust and control are mutually exclusive, while control is a behavioral consequence of or ingredient in commodification.    

This leads to distinguishable dynamics:  

• If a man lacks the ability to assess trustworthiness and gets harmed too often by trusting the wrong persons, resorting to the replacement of trust by control is his method of coping, the result is commodification.   
  It could be called secondary commodification, because it is a side effect of control as a coping mechanism.
  
• If a man is driven by instincts to perceive women principally as commodities, control is the method to establish the commodification.   In this case trusting and the perception for any information serving the assessment of trustworthiness are deactivated as not needed and they may have never been trained and developed. 
  This could be called primary commodification.  Control is used, because women do not opt to be commodified, as long as they have a choice for an alternative.  

This distinction is of no practical significance to the woman, who is helplessly under the control, until she removes herself. This distinction would only be important, if such a man ever attempted to overcome the commodification.   But as commodification means, that a man subjectively has the power to get the benefits he wants, unfortunately he lacks any motivation to end it.   

Trustworthiness as a human cognitive trait and trusting as a person's reactive attitude have both an impact upon behavior, even though they are ignored when replaced by control.   There are many more traits and attitudes having an important reciprocal impact upon the interaction between cognitive humans, but which are not expected from commodities, no matter if inanimate objects or animals. Their denial is as detrimental as is the denial of trust. Responsibility, consideration, empathy, caring, intellectual appreciation are just a few of a long list.  

592. Abhorring Strong Instincts Is Very Different From Hating Men

592.   Abhorring Strong Instincts Is Very Different From Hating Men

I have been criticized for hating men.   This is a complete misunderstanding.    I am only aware, how men's instincts cause serious damage to women and I consider women being harmed and abused as an outrage and not as the purpose of women's existence.  

There is something awfully wrong, where and when this is the case:

"One in five U.S women experiences a sexual assault in their lifetimes."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120911091102.htm

The source of this statement is not given.   The US are also only one example of a world wide problem.  I know of no country anywhere on this earth, where women are sufficiently protected.  Men harming women is so ubiquitous, that while it serves the survival of the species, it is clearly a biological flaw of men, when seen from the perspective of women's subjective experience as victims and not as wombs.   

    

But even if the number were exaggerated and not as many as one in five, any incidence of women being harmed by male urges for homeostation clearly indicates, that male sexuality is too often out of proportion of what would be beneficial for women.   The stronger men's instinctive needs for using women's bodies, the worse and more hazardous they are.   

Too many men are real threats to women.   But saying 'too many' is not the same as saying 'all'. 
Loathing, abhorring and despising those male instincts, which harm women, is very different from generally hating men for being men.   I do not define a man by masculinity as expressed by instincts, but by his chromosomes.   

I disagree with the fallacy, that masculinity were an indicator of the quality of a man.  Masculinity only indicates, how much a man is dangerous and a threat.   I refuse to consider being a dangerous threat as a quality.    

Some men are determined by their cognition.   They are decent, pleasant nice guys with an attractive personality, because they are monogamous, bonding, caring, reliable, trustworthy, responsible, considerate, rational, intellectual, emotional, moral.   In short, they are free from being robots programmed and driven by overwhelming and instinctive urges.   They are free to be cognitively true humans, not merely male animals of the species homo sapiens.  

I appreciate such cognitive nice guys very much.   They are rare and precious.   I am looking for one of them as my mindmate.   I am not worried, that my alleged hatred of men would deter or discourage any of them.     

Any man interpreting me as if hating men, is himself not suitable as a mindmate.  He is most probably himself someone, who confounds being a man with being driven by male instincts. Either the worst male instincts are a positive part of his own identity or he is at least misguided to strife to become like instinct driven role models.  Being misunderstood by such a man makes not difference to me, because I would not want him anyway. 
But my mindmate to be found will be intelligent enough to understand me and to identify with being cognitive.   Therefore he will spontaneously agree with my abhorrence of strong instincts, he will be pleased to read, that I appreciate him, because he is not driven by instincts.  

591. Commodification And (Cyber-)Stalking

591.  Commodification And (Cyber-)Stalking

Commodification while the relationship lasts and stalking after its end are connected, because they are both caused by the same distorted attitude towards women.     

People are protected by the law against real life threats from real life stalking, cyberstalking without any physical danger is a more subtle, but nevertheless a form of abuse.  There are many other kinds of cyberstalking, the following concerns the variety based upon commodification.   

When egalitarian, mature, rational and responsible people discover to have become involved by mistake, due to not having enough in common or to having irresolvable conflicts, they communicate until they end the relationship by a shared decision.

When egalitarian, mature, rational and responsible people later suggest a reconciliation, they do this based upon the insight and motivation to offer a drastic change of their own behavior.  They do not approach the ex-partner with demands while they offer nothing.    In the case, that they cannot or do not accept to change their own behavior, they recognize the final failure of the relationship.   They have the consideration of ending all contact and allow the ex-partner to forget and to heal.


Men who commodify women are neither egalitarian, nor mature, nor responsible.  They are also not rational, else they would know, that relationships are doomed by their commodification. 
Commodification is based upon the asymmetrical attitude, even entitlement and grandiosity delusion, that women exists for nothing more except to serve men's needs, wishes and whims at their convenience.    

Commodifying men believe to have been born with a free flatrate for being served with unlimited benefits by women.    

This can lead to two patterns of disastrous dynamics.   

• Pattern 1.  Commodifying men hurt women so much by domination, disrespect, coercion, control, disregard, objectification, until they are devastated and run to save themselves.
• Pattern 2. Woman having enough self-esteem and self-confidence to resist enforced commodification get dumped and discarded as being flawed, defective and dysfunctional.   

In both pattern, men do not get, what they expect according to their entitlement delusion:  Utilities always serving their needs but not asking or expecting anything in return.   Nor do they elicit women's agreement with the men's delusion of being perfect, while anybody else is to be blamed for men's every dissatisfaction.  

Cyberstalkers are angry and frustrated men.   They reproach fate, life, a deity, cosmic power or any other vague entity for failing to give them, what they feel entitled to:  Complying and submitting women.   

• In the first pattern, they are angry for having lost a satisfying commodity.  They demand to be given back, what they consider as their rightful possession.     
• In the second pattern, they feel defrauded by having been given a dysfunctional commodity.   They feel entitled and demand not to get a discarded insufficient  possession back, but to get it first fixed, repaired and improved.       

Some cyberstalker write angry diatribes full of grudges, complaints and reproaches, claiming what they believe to be entitled to and declaring their outrage of either having lost it or of having been given only a deficient and dysfunctional substitute.    These diatribes are implicitly written to the entity, not to the woman.  They are angry with the entity, whom they consider as responsible for their frustration.   

When someone buys a faulty machine, he blames the shop keeper, not the machine in the case of a defect.   But there is no such entity, neither generally nor as someone owing them anything.   So there is nobody to which to address complaining diatribes.   Lacking any better valve for their anger, cyberstalkers misaddress and displace their diatribes to the incommodifiable women.    These cyberstalkers are like the legendary man, who was dissatisfied with his inability to use his computer, so in a burst of anger he shot a gun at it.      

This is not only a fallacy, it is completely irrational and leads nowhere.    Cyberstalkers waste their time and achieve nothing except making themselves repulsive and aversive.      At the moment of breaking up, the dumped or driven away commodified women may have moved on with still ambiguous feelings.  The annoying and obnoxious stalking behavior helps the process of killing, whatever positive feelings may have been left.  

Stalking has several effects upon the victims.

Emotional:

• Being reminded of what the victims want to forget slows their healing.  Poking into someone's emotional wounds for the purpose to delay healing is adding more cruelty to the previous abuse.   It adds repulsion to the estrangement.
• Being triggered to relive memories of the abuse during the relationship is painful.
• Post relationship harassments add to feelings of being ashamed for having been involved with an unworthy and deranged man.

Cognitive:

• Men confirm by cyberstalking their being good riddance and not valuable enough to yearn for.
• The repetition of grudges confirms their magnitude and puts emphasis upon those differences, which indicate a mismatch.   
• The vindictiveness of efforts to prevent the victims' healing clearly indicate the cyberstalkers' unworthiness.
• The irrationality of stalking without benefits not even for the stalkers themselves indicates the men's lacking of intelligence and/or sanity.  

Stalking is paradox.  Even if the cyberstalkers would really want the women back, their behavior nevertheless drives them only further away.   The cyberstalkers reassure women of their unworthiness by adding some more to their previous reasons for rejection.

590. There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Opinionated

590.   There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Opinionated

I have been criticized in a derogatory way as someone opinionated.    I am opinionated, because it is my choice and there is nothing wrong with it.  

Opinionated means literally to have an opinion or even more literally to have the trait of being someone with opinions.  Cognitive individuals have an identity and personality, which includes values, attitudes and opinions.  Nobody can be a thinker, mature and an intellectual without having opinions.   

Only instinct driven animals are entirely void of opinions.    To be able to have opinions is a result of the evolution of cognition.   

Becoming more and more opinionated is an automatic side effect of learning and maturing.    While pondering over a variety of topics, over a structured and logical way of putting them into blog entries, I am developing my own opinions.    Thus I am in the process of getting more and more opinionated and I consider this as beneficial.   

There is a real problem, but not at all about having opinions or not, but about how some people develop, acquire or elaborate them or fail to do so.

   

A qualified method to derive opinions includes being informed about all important facts together with the awareness for one's own real needs and inclinations.   This means using logic and reasoning and also introspection.  This includes reconsiderations, whenever new information becomes available.

It is not possible, that everybody can have a qualified opinion about everything.   Rational people are realistically aware, when their access to sufficient information is too limited. 

I dislike and avoid:

• People, who do not to invest time and efforts for thinking and deriving qualified opinions, no matter if they are too stupid, too superficial, too hedonistic, too intellectually lazy or not bothered for any other reason. 
• Gullible people, who are influenced to imitate other people's opinions without any own evaluation, who therefore are unable to explain, why they prefer any specific opinion.   They are also a hazard, when they force unpleasant behavior upon others as a consequence of acting upon imitated opinions.
• Opportunists, who adopt and change opinions according to the prospect of the most benefits, even when they are not aware of this.
• Frauds, who have a goal for which they pretend to have opinions in contradiction to what they genuinely think.

 
I like people, who have qualified opinions and who do not hide them.   Such people can be either easily recognized as mentally attractive by affinity or easily avoided as being aversively different.    

I have no mission to convince anybody of my opinions.  My mindmate to be found is someone, who has developed the same or similar opinions before finding this blog and being attracted by affinities.  

589. The Difference Between Philosophy And Religion

589.  The Difference Between Philosophy And Religion

I am calling myself atheistic as a part of being apistic.  But there are many people, who call themselves atheists in spite of being religious.  They do not consider this as a contradiction, as long as their preferred religion does not include personalized deities. Buddhism is an example, which is wrongly defined as a philosophy by those alleged atheists.    

There is a fallacy, when the decisive distinctions between philosophies and religions are underestimated or ignored.  

1.  Philosophies are thoughts.   These thoughts can exist only in one person's head, they can be taught, shared and talked about, they can be preserved on media and read or listened to.   

The philosophies are immaterial, they have no impact upon the material world.     Whenever people's actions are influenced by a philosophy, this is an independent consequence, not a part of it.    The behavior following a philosophy can be determined by it, but the philosophy can exist without causing any behavior.   
As an example, Epicureanism is a philosophy.   Living in the garden of Epicurus was some people's individual choice.  But one can be an Epicurean without living in the garden.

Discussing, teaching or learning about a specific philosophy is independent of agreeing with it.   


2.  Religions are more than just irrational and delusional beliefs and claims in people's heads.  Material and physical expressions are an intrinsic constituent of all religions. Participation is the expression of conscious genuine or faked agreement with the beliefs.

I mentioned before, how the behavior of christians in Lourdes is a weird spectacle. when seen from my mental distance.   But Lourdes is only an example, which can be generalized, based upon what I have either observed in real live or watched as documentaries of what is offered as spectacles by christianity, islam, judaism, hinduism, sikhism, buddhism and a few other creeds.   

Each of these religions is defined by the display of certain behaviors, both ritualistic as scripts learned by rote and more flexible reactions to situations, which all appear more or less weird, hilarious, ludicrous and senseless to any person not sharing the belief.   

Each of these religions is materialized by buildings and objects, which are useless without the belief, not serving any non-religious purpose, except those of amusing and entertaining tourists.

• Buildings for public religious behaviors like temples, churches, sanctuaries
• Furniture like altars, shrines, confessionals
• Objects like wands, statues, vessels
• Alleged special immaterial values of redefined simple objects like bones, pieces of textile, splinters of wood 
• Conformity like prescribed attires and body modifications
• Noises not qualifying as enjoyable music, like chanting, screaming, bells, drums, gongs
• Non-communicative body movements like prostrating, bowing, gestures and gesticulations 
• Chemical hazing of the brain like by incense, scents or drugs
• Abandoning and wasting goods like food on altars, candles or material sacrifices for the embellishment of the religion's material environment

All of these observable expressions of religion are driven by the motivation to obtain benefits.  They have also a perpetuating effect upon the mind.

When a christian prays for the fulfillment of a wish, this is implicitly the expectation of starting a sequence of two steps of causation.   The deity is a black box containing a kind of a relay, which, when activated, has the alleged power to fulfill the need.   The praying person believes, that the prayer presses a button on the black box, which in turn then activates the relay and causes the wish to be granted, even though the fulfillment of the wish is not considered to be in the realm of own direct action.

This pattern is not restricted to black boxes imagined as deities.    All religious behaviors are the attempt to activate some fuzzy black box, which as a consequence would then cause something beneficial for the believers.   This is a general part of all religious beliefs, that irrational behavior, which makes no sense to apistics, is expected to be sufficiently effective to obtain benefits.

An example:  When a buddhist chants, which means him to be positioned in front of a shrine, swaying some parts of his body and producing weird, funny and to the bystanders annoying noises, this is essentially the same pattern as the christian praying.   The buddhist's black box is not a personalized deity, but he too does something, which has no direct benefits whatsoever, but is based upon the mere belief of causing indirect benefits.  

Religious behaviors, especially rituals following a routine learned by rote, have a strong effect upon the brain, which is enhanced by the presence of olfactory, auditive and visual stimuli.    Thus the cognition gets temporarily blurred, blunted, dulled and hazed.   The sense for the own individuality is diminished, rationality reduced and the reason disabled.   
This enhances gullibility freeing it from rational control.   The hierarchy instinct to submit and be humble and the gregarious instinct to feel as a particle of some vague entity are also relieved from cognitive control.   This temporary heightened gullibility reinforces the religious beliefs and gets the person even more entangled.  


Along with mistaking religions like buddhism for a philosophy, people also confound it as a method of self-improvement.   This is a fallacy.  Self-improvement requires insights and introspection, which are best gained in a state of the most undisturbed and undistorted faculty for reasoning.    Self-improvement cannot be any better than the ability to be rational and the knowledge of scientific psychology and neuroscience.   
Dimmed cognition as a result of religious behavior is certainly counterproductive to self-improvement.  

588. A Jerk With A Halo - 3

588.   A Jerk With A Halo - 3

The general disregard for women as persons enables too many accomplished men to behave as jerks with halos and get away with it without damaging their own reputation. 

Albert Einstein is another jerk with a halo.   

1.  He was a jerk in how he treated the women in his life:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2133922/Was-Einstein-worlds-worst-husband-Wife-ordered-room-tidy-serve-meals-day--expect-NO-affection--stop-talking-demands-it.html

"the father of the theory of relativity is known to have had many liaisons throughout his marriage to Maric. In fact, he became involved with Elsa, a first cousin who would become his second wife, in 1912, when he was still married to his first wife."

"although Einstein married Elsa in 1919, within four years he was already involved with Bette Neumann, his secretary and the niece of one of his friends. "

"Einstein proposed that he and Maric should stay together for the sake of the children.
But with his proposal came an austere list of demands to which his wife must adhere."

The list:

http://www.listsofnote.com/2012/04/einsteins-demands.html   

"CONDITIONS

You will make sure:

that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

my sitting at home with you;
my going out or travelling with you.

You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
you will stop talking to me if I request it;you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior."

2.   While the amount of his first wife Mileva's exact contribution to his work is not certain and a topic of a lot of debate, he did neither recognize not show any gratitude for her cooperation.

http://www.womeninscience.org/story.php?storyID=105

"Mileva focused her energies on Albert's career. Some scholars believe Mileva did the math for the Theory of Relativity, others say she corrected Einstein's math, and still others claim she was even more deeply involved. The paper outlining the theory is signed with a hyphenated name Einstein-Marty, the Hungarian form of her maiden name Maric."

"He never acknowledged his first wife or her work."

587. A Jerk With A Halo - 2

587.  A Jerk With A Halo - 2

Someone mentioned in an email his affinity with Ernest Hemingway.   It was already years ago, since I had read a few of his books.  Only having a vague idea about enjoying the books but disliking his machismo, I read his Wikipedia biography and discovered, that he was another jerk with a halo. 

According to this biography, Hemingway has ruthlessly repeated a cruel pattern with three of his wives.   First he cheated on them, then dumped and replaced them with the accomplice of the cheating.    This makes him a jerk with a halo as defined in entry 586.  

But he was not only a jerk with a halo put upon him by many of his readers, he also haloed himself: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-farewell-to-macho.html

"Hemingway needed a new wife for every big book. And even when he was cheating on a wife with her friend, he painted himself as a victim of predatory and trusting women.

Writing in “A Moveable Feast” about dumping his older first wife, Hadley, for his older second wife, Pauline, he whinged that “the oldest trick” is “that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.”

“He’d acted like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk,” "

586. Jerks With Halos

586.  Jerks With Halos

In entry 381 I described Diego Rivera as a jerk with a halo.   He is just one specimen of many, and it is a pattern of very detrimental and unfavorable dynamics.

I consider people (usually men) as jerks with a halo, when they are accomplished or outstanding in some area, as artists, writers, scientists, actors, politicians or even as benefactors for many people, while they also inflict a lot of suffering upon persons close to them.   

Jerks are jerks, and the suffering of their victims is real and no halo seen by any third party does reduce this suffering, it only hides it in an unjustifiable way.
  
Accomplishments need to be evaluated by themselves, without any impact upon the subjective recognition of the magnitude of personal transgressions.   The harm done to the unfortunate victims is an unacceptable moral failure, this is independent of any coexisting achievements.   

Accomplishments do not exempt people from being responsible for what they do to others.  

But this is unfortunately not reality.   Instead, there is a general tendency to condone unacceptable, immoral and cruel behaviors in proportional accordance with the transgressor's fame due to his accomplishments.  By this fallacy of accepted compensation, someone can buy by his accomplishments the right to harm without consequences.

This fallacy is enhanced and perpetuated by any combination of several factors, which all lead to the underestimation of the harm done to the victims: 

1.   Women's apparent and alleged compliance when continuing to expose themselves to their plight.   
1.1.  Women are dependent upon the material support by the man, especially by raising children.   They would leave the jerk, if the could.  
1.2.  Women in asymmetrical relationships have got onesidedly emotionally attached to the jerk, who in return has an entitlement delusion.  His fallacy is his belief, that women exist for his convenience, his accomplishments justifying their commodification.  I described this in entry 268 (The Jerk Attachment Syndrome).

2.  The generalization of suggestive influences of religion, especially christianity, upon both the jerks and the victims.  The jerks with halos subjectively consider their accomplishment as their currency to buy the right to harm women. 

In religion, sin is believed to be compensatable by penitence, so that after having paid for the previous sin, there is no cognitive obstacle to prevent the next sin.  Replacing penitence by accomplishments is a fallacy, which is not very far fetched, considering the weirdness of the religious beliefs in themselves.
Thus jerks are not only haloed by others, but they also halo themselves by believing, that their accomplishments entitle them to privileges, even when the privileges harm others.  

Women allow men to harm them for the purpose of buying the reward after death with the currency of their forgiving the unforgivable and by their prolonged suffering .  

3.  Sometimes people feel a vague, fuzzy and unspecified need to improve themselves, but are uncertain, how to proceed.  When they discover persons, whom they do not know personally, but only by the presentation in their work and in the media, such persons are chosen as role models.   The nearer the role models appear to be perfect, the stronger the appeal to imitate them.  The successful imitation boosts the self-esteem and causes good feelings.  This motivates to maintain the idealization of the role model, even when it is not at all justified in the case of haloed jerks.   As a consequence, the idealization of such a role model is protected by the denial of unpleasant and dark sides.    The focus is restricted to the perception of the halo, while the jerk underneath is willfully overlooked.   

Seen from this perspective, many admired and famous men are in reality only jerks with halos.