652. The Tit-For-Tat Meta Addition To The Golden Rule

652.  The Tit-For-Tat Meta Addition To The Golden Rule

"The Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity is a maxim,[1] ethical code or morality[2] that essentially states either of the following:

(Positive form of Golden Rule): One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.[1]

(Negative form of Golden Rule): One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated (also known as the Silver Rule)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule

Like expressed above, the golden rule is quoted often.   But for people using the tit-for-tat strategy as a basis of interacting, the following is an important logical consequence of the golden rule:

Do not blame others for treating you the same way, as you have treated them before.  

The tit-for-tat strategy does not suit morals, which are openly or even subtly influenced by a christian background of society.   Even rational non-religious people are often under this impact without being aware of this. 

Christianity promises the reward in the afterlife as a compensation for the acceptance of suffering, for unconditional forgiving, for turning the other cheek.    This is inconsistent with the tit-for-tat strategy, which chooses reactions to behavior as mirroring this behavior. 

Some people misunderstand the tit-for-tat strategy as a way of being vindictive.    This is not the case.  

• Non-criminal vengeance is an emotional behavior.   Under limited circumstances it can be a way of finding relief from suffering helpless outrage as the victim of a transgression.  
• The tit-for-tat strategy is a rational way of maintaining a balance of giving and receiving and of preventing disruptive imbalances.  

Vengeance can even be an apparently paradoxical reaction to following the christian demands under social pressure and misguidance while not being intrinsically agreeing.  Following these christian demands can lead to an extremely unbalanced situation of one person taking advantage and one suffering until a breaking point is reached.   

The tit-for-tat strategy can prevent this, because it leads to both persons involved reaching a point of ending a futile situation much earlier,   This does not escalate until one suffers enough to feel vindictive, when both do not gain any advantage.  

But tit-for-tat only works, when both agree on and are aware of its justification.   When one persons uses tit-for-tat, but the other expects christian submission to and compliance with bad treatment, then this leads to disruptive and unstable interactions.   

554. The Ubiquitous Desensitization To Harming

554.    The Ubiquitous Desensitization To Harming

The biological asymmetry of the survival of the human species depending on pregnancies and births being severe harm only to women, while men are spared, is no rational justification for accepting harming as natural.  

In entry 552 I attributed the evolution of the gullibility to believe in delusional deities to supplying both resilience to the victim and displacement of responsibility to the perpetrator following his instinctive urges.  

As a consequence, people are misguided to principally accept harming as a normal part of living and not as an outrage and a derangement and distortion of the potential of human cognition.    

While the religious beliefs served or facilitated the initial establishing of the acceptance of harm, but from then on it becomes independent of its religious roots once it is part of the social norm.

The awakening reason of the maturing brain enables some people to comprehend the irrationality of believing in a non-existent deity.   This enables them to throw over the religious beliefs, they had grown up with,    But they do not automatically also get aware of how much more of their thinking needs also to be reconsidered as an indirect consequence of the religious beliefs.

The logical next step after discarding the belief in a deity would be to also adjust the moral justification of behaviors.  The principle by Epicurus of not harming and not be harmed and the golden rule are rational guidelines, while the belief in being rewarded in the afterlife and the belief of harm being justified by the responsibility of a deity are obsolete and irrational.  

Unfortunately, the general acceptance of harming is rarely questioned, even by those, who have freed themselves from the religious beliefs.   In western societies, the acceptance of harming is a part of the culture.   Children grow up with it until they take it for granted and cannot even think of it as just an option with alternatives.   Harming is not connected with religion but taken for granted as if it were a law of life.   

The effects of installing harming as acceptable behavior into the perpetrators' brain and to be harmed as unfortunate but acceptable fate into the victims' brains reinforce each other as complementary.

Perpetrators: 

Perpetrators become desensitized by repeating behaviors, to which they, usually by empathy, had initially felt inhibited, until the cruelty becomes a routine.   
Desensitization to being cruel can become irreversible.   Desensitization to inflicting pain on others usually happens at a young age under the influence of education, role models and social norms, which are also an expression of the morals of the predominant religion.  

War as a drastic example is an expression of the ingroup-outgroup instinct.   If nobody would be considered as outgroup, there were no wars.    Sometimes the ingroup is defined by sharing the same religion.   
Parts of the training of soldiers is the desensitization to overcome any killing inhibition.  
This desensitization is usually permanent.    Soldiers coming back from the war may well have the insight and the self-control not to kill members of the ingroup, but they have no inhibition to do so.  

But the most common and ubiquitous desensitization causes subtle and invisible harm by emotional cruelty like manipulating, betrayal, cheating, playing games, intrigues, mobbing, mocking, humiliating, ridiculing.   These are just a few examples from a long list of cognitive and emotional methods of harming.  They suffice to illustrate the kind of hurtful weapons serving the instincts to procreate and to gain access to resources available to those having high positions on hierarchies.      

Victims:

The acceptance of being harmed as unavoidable has been installed by the delusion of it being the deity's will.   The resilience to suffer in submission and resignation has been installed by the delusion of the reward in the afterlife.   
Logically, as soon as someone discards the belief in the deity, this obsolete and irrational acceptance of being harmed should be discarded immediately.  Harm should be recognized as what it really is: an outrage against human dignity.  
Instead irrational expectations of a resilience out of proportion of the serious impact of harm has become a social norm not only by the perpetrators but also by the victims themselves.  
The social norm of irrational resilience is based upon the perpetrators' expectations, that their desensitization would lead automatically to an equal desensitization of the victims, who should not suffer but are instead supposed to agree with the harm allegedly being appropriate treatment,   They are expected not to suffer due to being oblivious of the injustice and the absurdity of the instinctive behaviors.   

Those not resilient as victims of not physical and thus invisible cruelties are considered as flawed, defective, weak and in need to be fixed.   And too often they accept this themselves.   They do not resist, rebel or protest, they do not demand better treatment, instead they take psycho-pharmaceuticals, go to therapy, or cope in even more unhealthy ways.   They get sympathy and compassion as failures, not the solidarity needed as the victims of wrong behavior.  


Discarding irrational religious beliefs does not suffice.    Required is also a revision of the entire attitudes and habits as to what behaviors of religious roots are not only irrational but cause damage.  This revision means to focus on taking full own responsibility by gaining full awareness and knowledge of the perception and experience of the target of behaviors.  Even though some desensitization cannot be undone, full awareness can be a method of learning how to avoid harming after having decided to do so.

540. Accepting Obligations By Agreement Or By Marriage

540.   Accepting Obligations By Agreement Or By Marriage

The rational choice of a partner for a relationship is based upon long-term cost-benefit calculations with the result of the deal being advantageous for both partners.   Such cost-benefit calculations use consent and realistic knowledge concerning costs and benefits not only for oneself but also for the partner to be.

Given sufficient intelligence, wisdom and maturity to accept the golden rule and the tit-for-tat principle, this implies to have accepted the costs as obligations, before deciding to start profiting from available benefits.   

Any attempts to get long-term benefits while refusing to accept obligations are doomed.  Accepting obligations and feeling bound by them once and for good is a part of what defines genuine commitment.  Such obligations are an indispensable requirement for making a relationship a safe haven of reliability, predictability and trustworthiness for each other.  
 

Unfortunately, there are substantial differences between the subjective definition of commitment and especially the perception of when it starts.  

Serious emotional disaster for women is caused by the unfortunate instinctive difference concerning the emotional impact of the first act of physical intimacy or the lack thereof.   

Some men, who are not jerks by feeling entitled to objectify women, are nevertheless caught by their need for homeostasis in the trap of the fallacy, that their being triggered to copulate with female bodies without emotional attachment were based upon the reciprocity of mere objectification not creating commitment.
Many women get emotionally attached and committed automatically by physical intimacy and their fallacy is to assume the automatic commitment to be reciprocal.  

 

1.   Commitment by agreement

Commitment by agreement is the reciprocal acceptance of obligations which starts, as soon as a couple agrees to be committed.   It is based upon both partners' full awareness of both fallacies and of the hazard of women's risk to be harmed and men's risk to be the one causing harm.    

While this is the only viable basis for a long term relationship, it can only work given full consent and awareness about what creates and constitutes commitment in the experience of the partner.   

Commitment by agreement is intrinsic commitment, the obligations accepted are to the partner as someone, whose needs are an expression of the individual personality.          

2.   Commitment by legal marriage

The signature at the town hall as the act of legal marriage is also an act of implicitly accepting obligations.   But these obligations are based upon the marriage laws of the country.    Legal marriage means accepting standard obligations, which are not a conscious choice based upon the recognition of the partner's real and individual needs. 
  

Commitment by legal marriage is extrinsic commitment.

3.   Comparing both commitments

Commitment by agreement is a deal between two persons.   While it is based upon the real needs of both partners, it depends entirely on their deliberate choice to continue to fulfill the obligations.   The partners have no legal power over each other.  (Any use of usurped power by physical or situational advantages is a transgression and breaking the agreement of two equals.)  The only power they have is leaving, when the other fails or commits transgressions.  

Commitment by legal marriage is a twofold deal with society as represented by the country's laws.   

It is a deal between each partner and society, and the focus of the legal obligations are financial and they do not matter, unless they are claimed and backed up by the power of the enforcing law.   Therefore legal marriage has the most impact not when there is harmony, but when there is failure.  
Commitment by legal marriage is also a deal between both partners and society as a power to give practical benefits, when being together is otherwise as problem, because both partners do not share the same citizenship.  


4.   Which commitment for whom?

4.1.   When a couple is compatible, bonded by the shared need for intellectual intimacy and companionship and their focus is upon the immaterial benefits of being each other's safe haven, then commitment by agreement and cohabitation are all they need.    Legal marriage brings no further benefits to the quality of their commitment.  

4.2.  In the case, that both partners are not from the same country then sometimes legal marriage is needed to enable being together.    But in this case, legal marriage cannot be a substitute for having been bound first by the agreed obligations of commitment.  

5.  The refusal to accept obligations without legal marriage indicates commodification

Some men consider legal marriage as the only possible and binding form of commitment.   They do not feel any obligations to a woman until marriage, while they do not hesitate to use her body at their convenience.    This is big red flag of commodification.  

Commitment by agreement as a deal with a woman requires the perception of her being significant as a partner with a mind.    A man, for whom a woman is a commodity or utility, is unable to perceive her as a person to make a deal with.

  
No man makes a deal with car about how to use it.   If a man makes a deal about the car, it is with the owner as how to use it and for what costs.   
When a man refuses to accept any obligations other than by legal marriage, he is like someone leasing the woman from society.   Legal marriage is such a man's deal with society for the goal of getting control over the commodified woman.

What the commodified woman wants and needs herself does not matter and is insignificant.  Such a man accepts as a price, whatever social norms, gender roles, religion or the political system behind the marriage laws in his country demand.   In his mind, he deals with society, which supplies a woman to him for the purpose of homeostasis and for other services, and he accepts the price demanded by society as his due.  
 

It is not enough to rely on a man's claims of wanting commitment, it is a fallacy to mistake a man's willingness to get married as an expression of commitment.   If there can be any valid indication of a man's attitude towards women, this can only be his acceptance and recognition of explicitly described and defined obligations.   

A wise woman never allows a man to touch her unless he accepts that this is the begin of commitment and of having obligations.   

A wise woman never marries a man, unless his behavior before marriage is very unequivocally guided and restricted by his acceptance of and full compliance with agreed upon obligations.

If a man cannot commit in his behavior without marriage, it cannot be expected that he will agree upon any obligations beyond those imposed by the marriage laws.    He will not behave any better after being married than before.

537. The Golden Rule - A Modified Version For Men

537.   The Golden Rule - A Modified Version For Men

The Golden Rule as quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule

"One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself"

"One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated."

The second form of the golden rule does not prevent women from being objectified and commodified, the first form even encourages men to do so. 

When men are driven so much by their instinctive urges for homeostasis, that it deactivates their cognition and blurs their reason, they perceive every female body as a potential target for their animal needs, at least subconsciously.   

In this situation, jerks and psychopaths do not feel any need for justification, they ruthlessly act upon their entitlement delusion for promiscuity.   They are determined to get homeostation by hook or by crook, their methods include seducing, paying, manipulating and coercing.    Their abuse of women is out of the reach of any moderation by the influence of the golden rule.

But many of those men, who consciously attempt to be guided by the golden rule, fatally misinterpret it as an encouragement to project their own inclinations, wishes and needs upon women.   Many men in the state of dishomeostasis dream, hope, wish or even wait to be proactively approached by self-objectifying women offering homeostation without demanding or expecting anything for themselves.   As this is a denial of reality, these men take the initiative and approach women for the purpose of objectification.   Subjectively they follow the golden rule: They are doing to the women only exactly what they wish done to themselves.   
This misinterpretation of the golden rule impedes these men from being aware, that and how much they are insulting women with this depreciation, devaluation and indignation.  

While men in the state of dishomeostasis are prone to be unaware of what they themselves are doing, this does not automatically distort their general judgment.  The same men, who themselves do not hesitate to sleep around like alley dogs, may well feel outrage, when their mother/sister/daughter becomes the prey of his fellow alley dogs. 

Therefore I suggest this golden rule for men:

A man should treat women as he would like others to treat his mother/sister/daughter/wife/girl friend.

A man should not treat women in ways that he would not like his mother/sister/daughter/wife/girl friend to be treated.

489. Demisexuality And Morals

489.   Demisexuality And Morals
Somewhere I read the suggestion to imagine a world, where more people were demisexual.    
My spontaneous reaction was to think, that this would be one huge step nearer to paradise, especially for women.   But this needs some elaboration. 

Humans can hardly survive alone, they need to be part of a system of cooperation and division of labor.   As a result, they need rules to guide the behavior.   

I am an atheist, so I omit any consideration of rules followed by people in fear of punishment and consequences from any deity or agent, that does not really exist.  This therefore excludes considering the special monogamy of men, who fear to be punished by a god.   

I consider morals as a choice based upon the consideration of the consequences of the own behavior upon others.  For non-religious people, the most logical rules are those derived from a balance between self-interest and responsibility and consideration.    
There is the golden rule, there is the tit-for-tat strategy and there is the Epicurean principle of not harming and not be harmed.    Behavior in accordance with such principles can be called moral behavior.  

There are two kinds of moral behavior, proactive and abstaining.    Proactive moral behavior means fulfilling accepted obligations, abstaining moral behavior means to refrain from hurting and harming actions.    The latter includes avoiding invisible harm and emotional hurting.   Knowing, which behavior inflicts physical or material damage, is generally unambiguous and usually easy.   But recognizing invisible emotional damage requires knowledge and awareness, predicting and preventing it needs even more thereof.  

When potential victims are spared from being hurt or harmed, it is not always obvious, why they are spared.    Someone can either use self-control in accordance to moral rules, or he can just have no urge or need towards this action.  

The difference between promiscuous behavior compared with monogamy and demisexuality is an important aspect of human life, where people are either hurt or spared.  

To illustrate this:

I have been mentioning in previous blog entries my disgust, when at a younger age travelling in Mediterranean countries, I was approached by male predators initiating contact with me as prey.   I would have appreciated a serious and civilized conversation.   But they were more often than not just jerks drooling over my body.    Their intention to harm me was obvious. 
But in the few cases, when I did get the chance to have a nice, friendly and intellectually interested talk about the country's culture, I was not able to know the reason, why I was spared the insult.   

The men's reason not to attempt to harm me could be:

• Generally moral:   The consideration to not risk to hurt a woman by using her body, while she gets probably emotionally attached.       
• Monogamously moral:  The consideration for his partner, whom he does not want to hurt by cheating.
• Selectively only drooling over some bodies, but not over all and I had the luck to not trigger his instincts.
• As a demisexual never drooling over a body.

Being emotionally attached to a person and needing the reciprocity of exclusive attachment in return is an experience made by so many human beings, that it can be considered a part of human nature.   Being cheated on or dumped by someone, with whom there is such an attachment, is one of the most frequent reasons of emotional pain.  

It can be so extreme, that it causes not only severe suffering, but often also PTSD, alcoholism, illegal and prescription drug abuse, suicide, violence, outbreak of dormant psychiatric illness.   There is also the indirect damage to the children of broken families.   Someone under emotional distress is more prone to cause an accident at a job, where he is responsible for other people's safety.  

If this sounds like an exaggeration, it is because in the media and in the social norm, monogamy has become stigmatized as outdated, while promiscuity is supposed to be normal behavior.   It is a very damaging myth and urban legend, when the promiscuous jerks not only claim, that people were not made to be monogamous, but when they also influence others to imitate them.  

It is the other way around: Many people are not made to be the victims of promiscuity.  Those who suffer as the victims of ruthless and cruel promiscuity are treated and considered as defective not only by social norms, desensitization, denial and power structures, but also by the christian religion demanding them to accept suffering and to wait for the compensation after death.  
  
But while the social norm encourages promiscuous jerks to feel no conscience or inhibition, the emotional and psychological reality of individual victim's experiences is very different.    Anybody, who reads self-help forums about relationships and personal experiences, will again and again read heart-breaking stories of the same problem:   Persons, especially women, suffer nearly always severe pain, when dumped or cheated by the partner, to whom they had become emotionally attached and whose exclusivity had become their emotional need.   

Feeling attached and then being dumped and not valued as a partner is being hurt and harmed.   Moral behavior means not only to avoid hurting.  It also means to avoid the risk of hurting.   Every time, when two persons get intimately involved, this realistically bears the risk of creating emotional attachment, even in spite of both consenting not to get attached.    In the best case, the situation remains symmetrical, either both or none.    

But as a result of biological differences, usually a woman bears the much higher risk of planned or involuntary emotional attachment.    This implies a high responsibility for a man, in the case of his wish to behave morally.    If he does not care, he is a jerk.   Since the promiscuous use of a body always includes the risk of hurting, promiscuity can be considered as immoral behavior.   As a conscious choice, it is an immoral attitude.  

When a person avoids unreciprocated attachment, this appears as moral behavior in the perception of the person not made a victim.   But a man, whose behavior appears moral, can abstain from promiscuous abuse for different reasons:

• He is consciously living morally.  He is monogamous by empathy, consideration and responsibility.
• He is demisexual.   Female bodies do not trigger sexual instincts, so monogamy comes natural to him.  

Therefore demisexuals are the men with the highest quality of outwardly appropriate behavior towards women, even though their behavior is not necessarily caused by a conscious moral decision.   

A world, in which all men are demisexuals, would be a better world, as long as there are not more men morally motivated to avoid hurting women by being monogamous.

This will be continued.