679.   The Subtly Detrimental Influence Of Movies - An Example

Recently I watched the movie 'You've Got Mail'.   I had heard of this movie before as if it were simply a nice and friendly romantic story of an internet match.  

I was quite surprised, when I discovered its detrimental subtle message.  


When only looking at the dynamics of the story, it could be a very exemplary story of the slippery slope of how the allegedly and mistakenly innocent initial behavior of chatting first escalates into emotional cheating and ultimately leads to the breakup of two couples.  

Unfortunately, the movie is not at all a warning for considerate and responsible people to beware of this slippery slope.    To the contrary, it reinforces and encourages people to pursue their own selfish goals without any consideration for their partners, without feeling any commitment and obligation.   The movie is a story about how ruthless and irresponsible transgressions are rewarded.   

Already the secrecy in the first scenes shows, that both protagonists are fully aware of doing something, which they know as not being accepted by their respective partner.  It is clearly emotional cheating. 
Additionally, both couples are shown as being principally in harmony, the respective partners are not presented as having done anything to deserve being dumped.   When the two protagonists decided to cheat, they had not the least excuse in their partners' behavior.

 
Movies are fictional stories, but movies like 'You've Got Mail' are realistic enough to influence people's behavior and their moral compass.    This movie contributes to the desensitization of people towards denial or unawareness for the hurting consequences of how they treat others.  

The fiction of this movie is very unrealistic by presenting the dumped partners as not suffering but both ready to get involved with each other.  
In real life, a dumped partner rarely ever goes through such an ordeal without being wounded and scarred.  

The two protagonists could not foresee this exceptionally benign outcome of their transgression.   When they made the first step upon the slippery slope towards emotional cheating, they decided to do this in spite of the then very real risk of deeply hurting their partners.  


Such movies propagate the fallacy as if it were morally acceptable to look for someone new and dump the previous partner, even though he did nothing whatsoever to deserve this.

Of course this is just one movie, but those people seeing such movies frequently often end up desensitized.   When they hurt others and the others are damaged and show this by their demeanor, the transgressors are unable to comprehend, what they themselves have done.   Instead of taking responsibility, they define the damage done to the hurt person as a weakness, a flaw, a defect.   Even those not directly involved are under the fallacy of blaming the victims for lacking resilience and not seeing the transgressor's full responsibility. 


Sometimes people do worry about the effects of violence in movies and computer games upon people.   But hardly ever anybody worries about the subtle desensitization of superficially harmless movies, which are teaching people to be ruthlessly selfish, irresponsible and inconsiderate.

665. Possible Disruptions When Avoiding To Harm

665.   Possible Disruptions When Avoiding To Harm

As mentioned several times already, I consider the Epicurean principle of not harming as the basis of how I want to interact with other people.  I prefer to avoid those, who are determined otherwise like for example religious people, who justify harming by an alleged reward in the afterlife.
 

 
When two persons respect each other as equals and are consciously motivated to avoid harming each other, this does not automatically mean the absence of disruption by involuntary harming.

Harming includes hurting the other's feelings.   This implies the involvement of two sides, one person behaving in a specific way and another person perceiving this behavior as painful.

Some causes of disruption:

1.  Misunderstanding of the situation.    

Both can be guided by disparate and incongruent implicit expectations and unverified imaginary options.   
Well meant behavior based upon one set of such implicit presumptions can be perceived as for example betrayal, disappointment, disregard or depreciation by someone with another set.     This is the case for proactive and reactive behavior. 

2.  Not knowing the other well.    

Not harming by consideration is not possible without knowledge of the other's individual resilience and sensitivities. 
The responsibility of behaving morally according to one's own standards does not suffice to avoid, that the other feels hurt by the subjective perception of for example offense, slight, humiliation or rejection.    

3.  Misinterpretation due to lacking trust.  

Trust or the lack thereof has an impact upon the interpretation of the other's behavior and utterings as either benevolent or as a cause for suspicion.   Someone not trusting and feeling slighted can jump to the conclusion, that there really is a slight.

Some methods to avoid such disruptions

1.   Avoiding ambiguity.   

Clear agreements, explicit consent and outspoken options can lead to congruity and realism of expectations.    It allows a rational choice between pursuing or abandoning an endeavor.

2.   Adding consideration to responsibility.   

Acquiring sufficient knowledge about the other's value system, focus of identity and the impact of past experiences enables people to behave with consideration.   Involuntary hurting can best be avoided by knowing as much as possible of the other's subjective perception of all relevant behaviors.    

While responsibility can be regarded as a general moral obligation, consideration adds deliberate care for the other's wellbeing.

3.  The benefit of the doubt.   

Restricting all evaluation of the other to using the most trustful interpretation of his behavior avoids to mistake distrusting interpretations as indicating and even evidence for the justification of distrust.   Acting as if trusting enables real trust to grow, while this does not preclude to be nevertheless prepared for discovering the justification of the distrustful interpretation.  
Someone feeling slighted can ask back for further explanation in the awareness, that what he feels is only subjective and can be based upon wrong premises.

These methods constitute a learning process accomplished by rational and constructive communication, outspoken, direct, blunt and to the point of the matter.   

It is a learning process for both sides.   Learning how to be considerate is only possible, when the one feeling hurt acknowledges and admits the own vulnerability and refrains from blaming, grudging or accusing.  

I am aware that this does not sound very romantic.   But the special situation of beginning a contact by written messages and thus void of all non-verbal information asks for specific proceedings.  

The first step is a reciprocal consent and awareness concerning the options.    This means reciprocally ascertaining, that what each wants and needs as a goal is principally indeed offered by the other.      
The second step is a phase of constructive communication, which can lead to either the planning of a real life meeting or to the decision to abandon this goal.    
 

A well prepared meeting is then also the moment to start becoming romantic.

664. Politics And The Greed Of Physically Strong Men

664.   Politics And The Greed Of Physically Strong Men

Physically strong men are not only a hazard to women, but also as politicians:

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/130519_politics

"Men’s upper-body strength pre­dicts their po­lit­i­cal opin­ions re­gard­ing how much the gov­ern­ment should spend on the poor, ac­cord­ing to new re­search."

"The re­search­ers col­lect­ed da­ta on bi­cep size, socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus, and sup­port for eco­nom­ic redis­tri­bu­tion from hun­dreds of peo­ple in the Un­ited States, Ar­gen­ti­na, and Den­mark. In line with their hy­pothe­ses, they said, the data showed that wealthy men with high upper-body strength were less likely to sup­port redis­tri­bu­tion,"

"Men with low upper-body strength, on the oth­er hand, were less likely to sup­port their own self-in­ter­est. Wealthy men of this group showed less re­sist­ance to redis­tri­bu­tion, while poor men showed less sup­port, the re­search­ers found."

"They saw no link be­tween upper-body strength and redis­tri­bu­tion opin­ions among wom­en, though."

"Psy­chol­o­gists say the effect may re­flect psy­cho­log­i­cal traits that evolved in re­sponse to our early an­ces­tral en­vi­ron­ments."

"Among our early an­ces­tors, de­ci­sions about re­source dis­tri­bu­tion weren’t made in court­hous­es or par­lia­ments, but through shows of strength."

"The re­sults sug­gest an ev­o­lu­tion­ary per­spec­tive may help to il­lu­mi­nate po­lit­i­cal mo­tiva­t­ions, at least those of men, he added. “Many pre­vi­ous stud­ies have shown that peo­ple’s po­lit­i­cal views can­not be pre­dicted by stand­ard eco­nom­ic mod­els… This is among the first stud­ies to show that po­lit­i­cal views may be ra­t­ional in anoth­er sense, in that they’re de­signed by nat­u­ral se­lec­tion to func­tion in the con­di­tions re­cur­rent over hu­man ev­o­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry.”"

I evaluate politicians by how much responsibility they show towards their wives.   But as they can be discreet and hide their transgressions successfully, I consider politicians as unworthy of their office, whenever their having affairs and cheating on their wives becomes known.  
Politicians, whose objectification of woman gives evidence, that they have no control over some of their instincts cannot be expected to have any more control over the hierarchy instinct compelling them to take selfish advantage of ruthlessly acquired political power.   

657. An Example Of An Emotionally Hazardous Man

657.   An Example Of An Emotionally Hazardous Man

In entry 650 I compared the asymmetry in how male and female singles are coping with their needs and instincts.    Singles of both genders can successfully established a network of sources for their intellectual and emotional needs.   By this network of family, colleagues, friends, buddies, all cognitive needs are fulfilled.  What remains unfulfilled, are only the instinctive urges.  

Under such circumstances, men continue to be driven by dishomeostasis towards the use of female bodies.    But women are in the fortunate situation of not being afflicted with the same recurrent urge to get rid of procreative body waste.    Therefore women in the same situation either feel no additional needs of a kind, which requires a man's body.   When women are driven by instincts, it is towards breeding and towards a man as a provider.   Only very few women are ever driven towards a man for the mere purpose of copulating with a body.   Women who want nothing better are very rare, while there are many men preferring them.  

The consequence is a very unfortunate imbalance.   There are many men with no other relationship needs except for a female body, but whose basic decency causes them to refrain from paid abuse.   They search in vain for women, who also have no needs or demands for anything better than a male body.    When they get instead in contact with those women, who need a bonding companion, a safe haven based upon emotional and intellectual intimacy, these women are at a very high risk of being hurt.

This risk is aggravated by some men's insufficient theory of mind.   Being unaware of the implications, that women are not afflicted by the same body waste dishomeostasis as men are, they have instead the delusion, that women share the same instinctive needs.    Only those men, who know, when they hurt and abuse women, have a choice to refrain from doing so.   

A woman needs to be very perceptive for red flags indicating the hazard of being hurt, the earlier and the better she notices them, the more she can protect herself.    


The following is a good example.

I have been contacted by a man, who has listed some search criteria in his profile.
Unfortunately he did not reply to my asking permission to quote him literally, so I try to paraphrase him with the least distortion.   And of course, the following are conjectures from limited information.

    
Two of his criteria are red flags, and his replies to my reservations about these issues made the red flags grew even bigger. 
   
1.   By his criteria, a woman should not require to be his only female friend.   In his reply he claims that jealousy is poisonous and a consequence of a weak relationship.

2.   By his criteria, a woman should not hold him responsible for her emotional wellness.   In his reply he claims that a whole person cannot be hurt by anybody, that being vulnerable means a need to work on oneself and that people are only accountable to themselves for what they feel.  


This man is a nightmare for any woman, who wants a bonded companion, an exclusive confidante, a safe haven, a mindmate.   With him, there is nothing better available than a body in bed.   When his denial of a woman's non-physical needs and his emotional cheating with other women hurt her, he does not take responsibility but blames it upon her flaw and weakness.   Oversimplified, the gist is that if a woman disagrees with how he treats her, it is the woman's defect, while nothing he does, can be wrong.  

1.   For simple minded and immature people, the simple definition of cheating is not getting physically involved with any other person.   Anything else is not understood as cheating and is considered as permissible.   Any objection is rejected as unjustified jealousy.
People without a mature theory of mind are unaware of the harm done as a consequence of this oversimplified definition.   
When such a man's entire non-physical needs are met by his network, he can be misled to firmly believe to be a trophy husband, as long as he spends every night in the bed shared with his partner and does not touch other women.    

When he shares his innermost feelings and troubles with female confidantes other than his bed partner, whom he emotionally and intellectually excludes from being a companion, he feels justified and entitled to do so.  
When he knows in advance his strong permanent and persistent need for multiple important female friends, this clearly indicates, that no woman has ever any chance to become exclusively significant as his one and only bonded companion and confidante.    The exclusivity of only one significant partner is beyond his imagination.        

A different man, mature and with a good theory of mind, is able to draw a clear line between female acquaintances, who are kept at a sufficient and safe emotional distance.   He is able to understand the importance of having close friends as common friends.

2.  Healthy people do not get hurt by insignificant persons, and they are capable to choose, who is significant.    People with a healthy emotionality are vulnerable to what significant people do to them.  Entering a meaningful personal relationship with a significant other implies to make oneself vulnerable.   It implies to give the significant other the power to have an impact upon the emotional wellbeing and it is based upon the trust, that this power is not abused.
People, whom nobody can hurt, are either robots, monsters or psychopaths, or they are unable to perceive someone as significant and to allow anybody to become significant.   One method to interpret this man's normative statement is to imply, that he avoids being vulnerable by not allowing any person to get close, not even a woman in a relationship.  
If this man does, what he claims, he would not hesitate to return every night to the bed of a woman, who lies, cheats and betrays him, and the lacking emotional impact of her behavior upon him clearly indicates, that to him, she is not a person of significance, but only a body and an object.    As long as the availability of her body serves his physiological needs, nothing else of what she does matters.   And if he considers this as normal, then he obviously has never in his life experienced a woman as significant.  

Enhancing the shared happiness is a common goal of a bonded couple, while it is an illusion to passively expect to be made happy by the other's proactive actions.  A partner has no obligation to add to the other's emotional wellbeing.   But the trust of making oneself vulnerable causes and justifies the other's moral obligation and responsibility to avoid hurting, harming and damaging the emotional wellbeing.   It cannot be justified, that one partner profits from a relationship and in return damages the other's emotional wellbeing.    The baseline has to always be Epicurus' principle of not harming and not being harmed.   

656. The Placebo Church

656.   The Placebo Church

In entry 441 I was expressing how a weird institution called Unitarian Universalist Church (UU) puzzled me, because it makes no rational sense.    They claim not to be a religion but they behave like one.  

In entry 589 I defined religion by also showing behaviors based upon irrational beliefs other than only the one in the existence of a deity.    These behaviors can be seen as rational methods of coping with irrational beliefs, while without such beliefs, the behaviors themselves are irrational.


In this sense the UU is a placebo religion.   

A person, who has by own experience or by reliable observation learned, that taking a painkiller brings relief from pain, can often experience the relief from pain by unknowingly taking a placebo, which is a pill without any chemical content.    It is a placebo by still looking like a pill, only the active ingredient is omitted.    

The christian religion has some psychological benefits for some people.  Their imaginary god's attributes help them to cope with human suffering.   The christian religion is especially attractive to victims finding an alleged sense in their sufferings and to perpetrators and evil doers finding alleged justification for harming others.   

• The belief in being rewarded by the alleged god in the alleged afterlife misrepresents senseless suffering as if it were a valid method to earn such a reward.
• The belief in an alleged god's alleged wisdom being beyond human comprehension attributes hidden reasons to suffering.
• The belief in an alleged god's alleged wisdom and rewarding in the alleged afterlife allows the perpetrators to harm others without a bad conscience.   They perceive the alleged god as the proxy, who is considered the one responsible for the harm. 
• The belief in an alleged god's alleged reward for forgiving is misused as the unjustified demand for being forgiven for unforgivable harm.  

The only active ingredient of any christian church is the god's impact upon the endurance of suffering and the inflicting of harm.   By being interwoven with the entire culture the christian religion has over its long history incorporated the additional supplying of many secular benefits.  As a result, many people completely lost all awareness for the differences between those benefits, which were due to the core of the religious beliefs, and those collateral and independent benefits, which were only added but not religious. 

This vague and indiscriminate notion of a church as being beneficial in a generalized and very special manner is the reason, why so many people experience it is possible to delete the god and create a placebo church, which still appears to be a church.    Just like the placebo pill looks like a pill.  

The placebo effect of a sugar pill is impossible for any person ignorant of the existence of painkillers, like some ingenious people in a remote area.   (Any similar effect would need other explanations like a general gullibility to suggestions and claims.) 

It is the same with the church.   Those, who have never experienced the christian religion as beneficial, are not prone to experience a placebo church as offering any benefits, which cannot be obtained elsewhere.   

But there is one decisive difference between taking a placebo pill and joining a placebo church:  

The placebo pill works, when the person does not know, that the pharmaceutical ingredient is lacking.   The placebo church is chosen for being the placebo, for having the god as the active ingredient eliminated.   

A person without pain needs neither a pharmaceutical nor a placebo painkiller.   The sugar in the pill can be obtained anywhere and in any form, the person without pain eats sugar when he wants to.   He does not make it look like a painkiller first.
I have never heard of anybody eating placebos, knowing that there is no medicine in them, only because of the sweet taste.   They rather eat real sweets. 

A person without religious needs does not need a church, neither one with a god nor a placebo church.  Such a person finds and enjoys the collateral benefits found in christian churches directly in secular alternative institutions.   He does not combine them to appear like a church.    

Self-labeled atheists in the UU are like people, who knowingly eat placebos for the taste instead of getting the real thing elsewhere.   

When a church already exists for those, who benefit from the delusion of the existence of a deity, then the additional use of such an institution for other benefits and also by non-religious persons can be rational.    

All the benefits offered by the UU are benefits available elsewhere, where each by itself can be experienced and enjoyed as secular.   Combining them as a placebo church is a deliberate bias.    Creating a placebo church for only non-religious benefits is irrational.   

I can think of only one explanation for this is a fallacy: 

It seems that there are two distinct types of self-labeled atheists.  

• Those who are independent thinkers, to whom the insight of the irrationality of religious beliefs has come as an unavoidable conclusion and consequence of thinking.   Atheism and feeling free from needing any religion is emotionally beneficisal for them, because it makes them feel good about themselves.  
• Those who have a strong need for the benefits of the delusion of the existence of a god, but who were so much disappointed by some event in their life, that they were unable to continue to believe.   They suffer from their persistent craving for their lost paradise of the delusion. A placebo church gives them the best relief for that craving.   
  As members of the UU they remain fence sitters, who look in the direction of atheism, but their behind is still entangled in christian religious needs.   
  The choice of an institution with the style of buildings and terminology as a placebo church accommodates the fence sitters' needs to remain in surroundings resembling their lost paradise.   
  

An example:  Somebody with sufficient knowledge in philosophy can either be the speaker giving a lecture in an auditorium or he can be the minister giving a sermon in a church with or without a god.   

They may even talk about the same topic, but there is a huge difference:
 

Independently thinking atheists attend the lecture.   They listen to information, which they afterwards reflect upon and which maybe influences their attitudes and their behavior.   But they actively process the information and choose what to make of it.

People, who prefer to attend services and to listen to sermons, do this in a more passive and submissive way.   Naming an event a service indicates, that there is a target, who is served by humble servants, who expect guidance and who are emotionally ready to be told what to do.   They do not choose or process, they attempt to follow, and rarely doubt the wisdom of someone with the halo of being called a minister.  

Becoming an atheist is only the first, but not sufficient step for rational people.   The logical next step is a rational reevaluation of all attitudes, values, opinions.   Whatever makes no sense without the christian belief, of which it had been derived, has to be reconsidered.

  
But the choice of a placebo church indicates the clinging to the values and world view of christianity and the wish to change nothing except having lost or deleted the god.

    

The following is a list of benefits as experienced and perceived by a member of the UU.   With his permission, I am quoting him literally. 

 
All these benefits do not need a church but can be obtained as good or better elsewhere.    My comments point to alternatives.  

1. fabulous live music of all kinds

No church is needed for life music.   There are many secular places offering concerts.    Anybody who wants to play in public, has a wide choice of places.  

2. liberal religious education, fellowship and musical training for children, making them aware of the great variety of religions and non-religious views

The place for education is the school.  Community colleges offer music lessons beyond the level of schools.  Pupils need to be taught scientific and skeptical thinking.   The place for information concerning religion are in history and social science lessons with sufficient mental distance.   They need to be taught, that religion is obsolete and enhances harming behavior.

Pupils also need to be taught interactive skills like communication, theory of mind, and a value system based upon rationality.   

3. fellowship and fun with people of liberal, non-religious and liberal religious views

People need fellowship with likeminded people.     Non-religious and liberal religious are contradictions.   Someone can either belief in a god or not.  This impedes fellowship.   There is a mental abyss between those, who belief in any god and those, who do not.   Something is weird when they join a placebo church instead of associating with their own kind.  

Liberal is a political term and has its place in a political party.  

4. promotion of enlightened values, including earth-friendly values among others, and tolerance for people of differing views.  

Tolerance for differing views (not different needs or tastes, unfortunate life situations or disabilities) is an indication of ignorance, stupidity and/or irrationality.   The careful evaluation of all views leads to the conclusion, which of them is rationally superior or is the only rational one.  From then on, differing views do not deserve tolerance.    Tolerance is the admittance of insufficient thinking.  
Rational non-religious people need secular non-religious and atheist groups, where religious people are excluded as a nuisance and annoyance.    Only fence-sitting atheists have tolerance for delusional believers.  
Enlightenment is the contrary of tolerated stupidity.   

5. social justice activities

This is the realm and task of political parties and task oriented pressure groups..

6. places where people can evolve their views as they are exposed to new or different ideas, not to mention help and healing in recovering from past indoctrination from dogmatic theology

This is the realm of secular psychological self-help, self-improvement and self-awareness groups and courses at community colleges.     The worst indoctrination is the delusion, that there are deities, afterlife, an immortal soul and such.   Any alleged help, which includes tolerating such insane beliefs would not be a real help, only a slight reduction of the damage. 

7. promotion of an open-minded approach to life in general

This is the realm and task of secular psychological self-help, self-improvement and self-awareness groups and of schools and all educational institutions.

8. non-religious weddings, child dedications, coming of age celebrations, and funeral services

All these celebrations are rituals based upon some interaction with a god.   A wedding means vows to a god, they are obsolete without a god.   People can best organize their celebrations according to their own individual needs.  

9. counseling and support for people going through difficult times

This is the task of qualified secular and rational psychologists.   A minister's kitchen psychology can do more damage than good.

10. community outreach supporting other organizations serving the most needy people in our communities and beyond

This is the realm and task of political parties and task oriented pressure groups.  They have to influence any country's government to fulfill its obligation to care and provide for the needy by getting sufficient tax from the rich.

11. a forum for the free expression of views which sometimes may run counter to those of the populous in general, e.g. opposition to war, oppression, etc.

This is the realm and task of political parties and of task oriented pressure groups.. 

12. an insitution where people can come together on a regular basis to meditate quietly and calmly on their lives and so on

This is the realm of secular psychological self-help, self-improvement and self-awareness groups and courses at community colleges and other educational institutions.    

13. a welcoming congregations accepting of people of different genders, sexual orientations, races, ethnicities, etc.

This is the common ground and every day situation of every functional group of people, who have joined it to pursue a hobby, sport, interest of any kind.  

14. all of these things and more available from one organization existing often like an island of liberality in the midst of a land of conservative religious people and their churches

It is pathetic to imitate, what one rejects.   Independent thinking atheists need a real alternative, not a placebo church.    

15. a denomination demonstrating a democratic way of functioning in the midst of many non-democratic, paternalistic institutions

A democratic way of functioning is the common ground of every functional group of people, who have joined it to pursue a hobby, sport, interest of any kind.  

There is no objective need for a placebo church to provide anything from this list.   A placebo church caters only for the need of people with a specific precondition.  

651. Modern Human Sacrifices

651.  Modern Human Sacrifices

I grew up here in Germany taking it for granted, that nature and forests are safe places.   As a child I had known of wolves and bears only from fairy tales as of a historical peril to humans in times long gone by.  I also took the general consent for granted that having eliminated all dangerous animals from densely populated Germany centuries ago was beneficial beyond doubt.  
I took this so much for granted, that I was not even grateful for the safety of German forests.  Today I am grateful to live, where there are no dangerous animals except those safely in cages in the zoo.  (It is bad enough, that some men are not better than dangerous animals.)  

But I do not take this for granted anymore.   I just watched a documentary about how humans are ruthlessly exposed to dangers by irresponsible people.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/predators-in-your-backyard/

"The cougar is also commonly known as a puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount, or panther. The sub-population in Florida, which is the only population east of the Mississippi River, is known as the Florida panther.
At least 20 people in North America were killed by cougars between 1890 and 2011"

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

Preserving the wild life is certainly important, but it is immoral to force risks upon people, who suffer without a choice, and who have no option to protect themselves.   There should be barriers like fences separating humans from predators.   Those who enable panthers or bears to enter peoples' gardens are irresponsible and cruel.   When such beasts invade a backyard, the people are helpless victims of a situation forced upon them.     

Adding the dangers of wolves to the already existing danger of bears in Yellowstone Park is a different situation, because people have a choice to keep away from such dangerous areas.   But to make this a real option of safety, such parks need to be fenced in to guaranty the safety outside.  

When capitalists' interests are protected, the money to build a fence is raised, as shows the fence along the border between the USA and Mexico.   But to protect humans from being killed by bears or panthers brings no commercial benefits, thus people are not protected by fences.

 

I am very glad for the restricted legal access to firearms here in Germany.    But I have full understanding for anybody, who needs a weapon as a means for self-defense against panthers and bears.      

I consider the safety of the home from invading dangerous animals as a basic human right. It seems absurd, that shooting a panther leads sometimes to less tolerance and condoning than shooting a burglar.   

It is criminal to endanger people by forcing the access of dangerous beasts upon them.   It is a form of murder by proxy, if someone gets killed by predators like bears and panthers released near human homes.  

It is even a variety of human sacrifices.   In many cultures through history, humans were sacrificed to deities, who were considered as more significant and more valuable than the lives of the sacrificed victims.  
Bringing or allowing panthers and bears enter human habitats is a variety of sacrificing humans.   The deity is substituted by some more vague entity as is nature, the planet, wildlife,.   This entity too is considered as having more value and more significance than the risked life of individual humans.   

There is just one difference.   The sacrificing priests were themselves consciously killing the victims and feeling justified to do so.   Those sacrificing human life by imposing predators upon victims do not feel responsible, because the do not do the killing themselves and consider it only as collateral damage.
(I am wondering, how many of those, who welcome and protect the panthers in Florida, at the same time define abortion as murder.   For them, a woman is required to have any unwanted child, but if the panther would kill the child, they accept this as collateral damage.)

635. A Male Misrepresentation Of Epicurus' Philosophy

635.   A Male Misrepresentation Of Epicurus' Philosophy

I have been watching a video containing a male interpretation of Epicurus' philosophy.   (I am not giving the link, as I do not want to propagate any expression of sexism.)

The author is talking about the wisdom of considering before acting, what price in pain has to be paid as the consequence of indulging in pleasure.  Unfortunately he presents (or rather misrepresents) it as an entirely selfish and self-centered balancing with the limited consideration for only the own person, without any reference to avoiding the pain done to others.   

Basically this guy claims, that if someone expects to get more pleasure than pain for himself, then there is no reason to refrain from any indulgence, even when this includes the abuse of women's bodies.

He talks about a man's decision to have sex or not the same way as if he were talking about his decision to use a car or not.   He implicitly considers women as utilities, not as human beings deserving consideration, respect and to be spared pain.
By his interpretation, even Genghis Khan would have behaved in accordance with Epicurus.   Genghis Khan had the power to get away with raping thousands of women without himself suffering bad consequences.

As a woman, I am appalled by the author's very selfish, irresponsible and inconsiderate attitude, which he shows implicitly by some of his examples.   He misleads people to think that the objectification of women were in accordance with Epicurus.

One of the core statements of the Epicurean philosophy is "neither to harm nor be harmed".    This responsible perspective towards others is even mentioned first.

Based upon this, the correct application of the balancing of pain and pleasure includes the consideration and responsibility to avoid hurting and harming others and to restrict indulgence in any pleasure to when there are no suffering victims.

627. Ludicrous And Irresponsible Propagation Of Woo-woo

627.   Ludicrous And Irresponsible Propagation Of Woo-woo

I just got an email from one of the dating sites, where I have a profile.    Some quotes:  

"do you want to die alone?‏" 

"We’re screwed. You should be too!"

"As we all know, the world is ending 12/21. Why not find someone to spend your last moments with? As things heat up and the earth’s crust begins to melt, here’s a high match that would welcome your embrace — before your hearts burst into ash. Hey, better safe than sorry."

People, who merely believe such nonsense, are pathetic fools.   But when they create, enhance or reinforce other people's irrational anxieties, this is irresponsible.

    
Based upon the false belief of having no future, people could do lots of things, which they hitherto wisely avoided to prevent dire consequences.  

Examples:

• Gambling and loosing all the savings.
• Risking unwanted pregnancies and STDs
• Telling the boss the true opinion about him and getting fired.
• Killing someone hated and finally indulging in a long repressed revenge.
• Indulging in the consumption of any food or substance, which damages their health or causes a relapse to an addiction

The easier it gets technically to spread the publicity of any claim and opinion, the more those people are dangerous, who carelessly multiply dangerous, weird and delusional beliefs.    Unfortunately skepticism lacks behind the technical progress favoring the propagation and spreading of woo-woo.  

612. Objects, Purpose And Language

612.  Objects, Purpose And Language

In entries 610 and 611 I have been calling teleology a fallacy, because nothing can have a purpose without a person or entity acting towards this purpose, and the tree producing oxygen has not been created by anybody.   The fallacy of attributing the oxygen production to be caused by the animals' needs for oxygen is connected with the fallacy of the religious belief in a creator.  

I am taking it one step further.   Not even human made objects exist for a purpose. 

No objects, only intentional behavior and actions have a purpose.   The purpose of the objects used during specific intentional actions exists only in an acting person's mind.   An object is associated with a purpose in the cognition of the person producing it, using it or having at least knowledge, which other persons' particular intentional actions it is suitable for.
   
The entire material world exists without a creator and without a purpose.    Some objects are used as tools in the condition, in which they are found, like stones and sticks.   But also tools like a hammer are not made from nothing.   They are produced by collecting preexisting material and modifying it by the impact of chemical and physical processes.  


The teleological fallacy is related to the often blurred distinction between the real physical specimen of an object and the mere concept defining an object's name in a language. 

Defining a tool and giving it a name starts with a person's attempt to improve the successful performance of a purposeful activity.   A hammer is an example of an object with a combination of specific properties labeled with a word.   There is a cognitive sequence of first intending to drive nails into wood, then finding out, what properties are needed to make a tool for this purpose and then giving the projected object with these properties the name 'hammer'.   Without a need to nail something, the concept of a hammer would not have been developed.     Were carpentry exclusively done by using screws, there would be no purpose using nails and hammers.

Materially existing objects have no independent purpose until and unless someone uses them or considers and plans to use them.  A materially real specimen of an object having all the properties of the cognitive concept of a hammer exists in the absence of a human purpose or need for it.   The real hammer has the properties of the defined hammer independently of what it is used for.   While a hammer is produced to have the properties most suitable to nail, this does not make it unsuitable to be used as a weapon or as a paper weight. 
 

Any effect perceived as connected with the use of an object, is not caused by the object or by its existence, only facilitated and this automatically implies a person realizing a potential purpose of this object.    Without an acting person, any effect is not the result of a purpose.   

 

The distinction between the mental concept of a hammer and a real specimen is important to understand the impact of the teleological fallacy.
 

When as in the case of the hammer, the concept is often realized as real specimens, language reinforces the wrong attribution of the purpose, which is only correctly associated with the concept, also to the physically existing hammers.   

If there is a telos drive, it seems to have shaped the languages.   Languages often mislead to express oneself in a teleological way, because it does not offer sufficient ways to avoid the fallacy.    Even while being fully aware of mere coincidences, the limitation of language makes statements appear to express teleological thinking.   Unfortunately the teleological bias of the language also reinforces the teleological thinking, because language is learned early in life, before the full capacity for rational thinking has also been developed.  .

Conceptual objects can have a name and defined properties as being best suited for a purpose, while they do not or not yet exist as specimens.   There are sufficient examples of this in science fiction, fairy tales and fantasy.   The knowledge about objects can be conveyed by descriptions and definitions, while no specimen is present, in reach or available.  

 

Materially existing objects have no absolute and ubiquitous purpose.   They are more or less suitable, depending on their temporary purpose for and the individual needs of the person using them.    

 

The potential of serving a purpose for human use is not limited to what is produced, modified or adapted.    A stone and a hammer are both either tools while being used or merely existing material, while outside the scope of human handling and attention.  

Objects can exist without ever being used by any person for any purpose.    

Objects can be temporarily associated with a purpose by being used and discarded.

A stone is just a stone, until someone picks it up and throws it as a tool for the purpose of breaking a window.   When it remains on the scene after the incident, it again is just a stone.  
When someone uses the stone to crack nuts, and hands it over to someone else, who also uses it for the purpose of cracking nuts, it has temporarily become a nutcracker for them.  But the name nutcracker describes a temporary function, not an eternal property.   When they drop the stone and leave, it again is just a stone.   
 

Objects can be valuable and suitable for a specific purpose for one person but can be a piece of junk for another, who does not share the need for this purpose.   

Only the properties of objects can be observed, perceived and examined by any person, but not the objects' potential of all or any purposes, which they can be suitable for.   The examination of objects does not automatically reveal any information, for which purpose they have been produced and used by persons in a different culture or epoch.  

Persons from different cultures can use the same object for very disparate purposes.   


Teleological thinking is more than a fallacy distorting a person's cognition.   Even worse, the teleological fallacy unfortunately often leads to the subsequent fallacy of deriving justification of and excuses for behaviors from alleged purposes.  Thus also many harming and hurting behaviors are facilitated and reinforced.   Such alleged purposes can be attributed either to the victims themselves or to the objects, by which the victims are harmed.  

The Epicurean principle of not harming and not be harmed requires responsibility and consideration to be stronger than any alleged purpose of any available object.   The mere existence of any object whatsoever does not rationally justify or excuse its use.      

605. Existing Or Not Existing

605.   Existing Or Not Existing

Breeders and anti-abortion people often ask persons like me the question, what if their parents had refused to breed or had aborted them.
  
There is a simple answer to this.   A non-existing person cannot miss herself or himself and can also not be missed by anybody.   

Therefore logically the non-existence cannot be compared with existing.      

Every time an unfertilized egg is discarded from a woman's body, the consequence is one additional non-existence of one of countless potential combinations of genes, which could have become anything between a moron and a genius, between a monster and a benefactor.   Reasonably nobody bothers.  

The complementary question is as valid.   What justifies parents to force children into existence, who cannot be asked for consent?   To do so is a huge responsibility for parents, as long as too many people are so much driven by animal instincts, that at any opportunity they do not hesitate to harm others very easily.    Every child has the potential to become either a victim, who suffers, or a transgressor, who harms others, or both.   

Indirectly the breeding parents are responsible for all the harm due to the existence of their offspring.   

Therefore, the decision between breeding and not breeding can rationally only be based upon considerations concerning the impact of breeding upon the parents themselves.   No breeders are able to make a correct prognosis about the amount of harm to be suffered and caused by their offspring.      

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.

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.  

568. Rational Feminism, Male Biology, Harm And The Liability Principle - 2

568.   Rational Feminism, Male Biology, Harm And The Liability Principle - 2

This continues entry 566.

The following metaphor is about a cage, a human and a lion.    The human is protected, as long as the bars of the cage separate the lion and the human.    This protection is independent of who of them is inside the cage.    The difference is the freedom of one and the confinement in a limited space of the other.
The metaphorical lion is a person, who by previous harming behavior has already given clear evidence of being dangerous.    He is known as a beast. 

       

The legal system in many societies including Germany is based upon the fallacy, that the lion has the free will to decide to not attack humans, therefore humans and lions are allowed to mingle freely.   After the first attack, the lion is punished by being put into the cage for a limited time under the illusion, that this teaches him the lesson and enables him to derive the insight to not attack humans again.  Only after several more attacks, punished by more sojourns in the cage and more releases will he finally be locked away permanently as dangerous.    

The attacked victims are either told that their suffering is based upon the lion's right to be free or they are even blamed for not having enclosed themselves in the cage.   In the zoo, the dangerous animals are locked into cages, so that the visitors can walk about in safety.   But when a woman walks home in the night after having missed the last bus and gets attacked, nobody asks, why the dangerous male animal was not safely locked away in a cage.  Instead the woman is blamed for not taking a taxi, she is supposed to pay a lot of money for her safety.   

This example shows the unjust distribution of the burden.   The woman is burdened with being responsible to protect herself at her own cost, but men are not held liable for what they do.   
When a man rapes a woman, in many cases the woman is traumatized for the rest of her life.   In Germany, when it is the first conviction, he is released after a few years in jail.   Having merely lost some years of his life in prison, he is better off than his victim, as soon as he is free again.   

If the legal system would be based upon liability, the first attack of the lion would be sufficient to recognize him as too dangerous to be allowed the freedom to harm again and he would have his permanent place in the cage.   The freedom would be given to the innocent, nobody would expect from them to take shelter in a cage for their own safety.  

Liability means the full recognition of who is a hazard and the logical principle of distributing and imposing disadvantages according to nothing except the known probability of more harm. When someone is a known hazard, no explanations of any kind are valid to justify any leniency for his actions as excusable nor to justify the resignation of forcing risks and collateral damage upon others as future victims.   A known hazard requires to reduce the risk by putting restrictions upon the source of the hazard.   

When the lion's instincts are a hazard, whenever he is hungry, then the disadvantages need to be imposed upon him and not upon the victims.   This makes a lot of sense to most people.  Hardly anybody would agree to have lions roam German cities.  But when the lion in this metaphor is replaced by a man, who cannot control his instinctive urges to abuse women, nobody holds him sufficiently liable for immediate and appropriate protection of women.   

Women need to be protected from being harmed by restricting men's possibilities to do harm, no matter how many disadvantages this has for men.  There is no rational justification to allow men all the freedom to do harm, whenever they cannot help it, while women are manipulated and coerced to accept restrictions to assure their protection as a fate.  When men are unable to control their instincts, demanding from them the responsibility to act against their biological inclinations is futile and stupid.  Instead they need to be impeded from being able to do so.    The burden of preventing harm has to be born by those, who are the danger of the harm, not by the innocent potential victims. 

If someone in the zoo opens the cage of a dangerous beast, and the beast harms a visitor, then the beast is liable but not responsible for the harm as it cannot help what it does by instinct.   The person, who opens the cage is the one responsible for the harm, because he has the full cognition and insight of allowing danger.  
It is the same with the rapist.   He is a dangerous beast, who is liable but not responsible for what he cannot help to do driven by his instinct.   But all those people, who make and enforce the laws giving him his freedom back are enabling the rapist to harm more victims.  They are fully responsible for these victims' agony and trauma.

 

A zoo is a safe place while all dangerous animals are inside there cages.  One escaped beast is enough to make it a dangerous place, and every beast more makes it more dangerous.    Experiencing and noticing the limitations of the freedom of women by the peril of male violence does not depend on how many men are dangerous beasts, but only on the uncontrolled freedom of those already known as beasts.   The danger is real, as soon as one beast is loose, and the number of additional beasts adds only more danger.  

For women, the world is like the zoo, where the women are offered the cages to lock themselves in as a protection from an unknown number of free beasts.

I do not mean to be misunderstood.   I neither hate nor fear men in general.    Nor do I imply that the majority of men are dangerous, even though the fact, that men are on average physically stronger than women is a real hazard.     I fear the known beasts, who are free, and I hold those, who allow them the freedom to harm, responsible for what they directly and indirectly do to women.    Every known beast in freedom is one too many.

566. Rational Feminism, Male Biology, Harm And The Liability Principle - 1

566.  Rational Feminism, Male Biology, Harm And The Liability Principle - 1

Entries 565, 554 and 552 were about the unjustifiable acceptance of and desensitization to harming and being harmed and how this is connected with religion having become a part of many cultures and being taken for granted as if there were no alternative.   
Even feminism is not free from this, often being much more politically concerned with justified anger about inequality and abuse, but not with the principle of avoiding harm. 

Lately I read an article protesting against any recognition of biological differences between the genders as a danger to feminism.    I strongly disagree.    Feminism without awareness for the insights of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology is doomed to be irrational.  
 

A rational form of feminism is needed, which focuses on ending not only the daily and ubiquitous harm to women by men, but also the tolerance to and acceptance of being harmed by women themselves.  
Feminism is rational, when it has been cleaned of all religious beliefs and myths concerning women and also of all indirect consequences of such beliefs on how woman are treated and what they accept as appropriate.     
Rational feminism has the predominant goal to avoid and to reduce harm to women.  This can only be accomplished by taking realistic account of the biological gender differences.  

Rational feminism includes the task of overcoming two fallacies.  Both fallacies are enhanced and reinforced by the underestimation of the disabling effect of instinctive urges upon the morals, the reasoning and the self-control of many men.  

• Fallacy 1 is the irrational denial of biological differences and the subsequent overestimation of the general moral qualities to be expected and demanded from men.   Men are not only believed to have a free will, but they are also considered to be able to act responsibly by always having a sufficiently strong self-control.  They are believed to be capable to behave morally by simply deciding to do so.   Whenever they don't, it is attributed to an individual man's personal failure or momentary blunder.   
  Women are considered as having no part in how they are treated nor are they held responsible for influencing men. 
  No matter how often and how strongly abuse of women is denounced and protested against under this fallacy, harm to women cannot be avoided, as long as men's attributed moral qualities are overestimated and unrealistic .  
  
  This fallacy is found by all female feminists, who focus on demanding different behaviors from men as a deliberate decision and it is shared by those more decent men of low instinctivity, who project their own rare qualities upon all men.
  
  
• Fallacy 2 is the irrational acceptance of all biased consequences of gender differences as unchangeable innate male privileges and innate female fate or doom to be harmed.  Any gender difference, no matter if by biology or by learned gender roles is mistaken to justify, condone and excuse inconsiderate treatment of women.  In more drastic cases, entitlement and grandiosity delusion lead to ruthless commodification and objectification of women.  
  Men are considered as unable to be responsible towards women. They believe their alleged male superiority as placing them above the requirement of responsibility towards women.  The trifled weakness of lacking responsibility towards women is not considered as significant enough to impair their alleged self-attributed superiority, because they perceive women as too insignificant.
  This fallacy is shared by men, who consider their abuse, domination and exploitation not as such but as women's appropriate fate, and by women, who are suffering in resignation without even feeling an outrage.  
  Women are not protected from but exposed to harm, their only method to reduce this is restricting their own liberty and scope of life.  

Both fallacies include the oblivion or denial of the fact, that the problem is caused by men's tragic defect, that their instinctive urges are far out of proportion of what would be beneficial for women.   

 
Making feminism rational means to discard both fallacies and focus upon how to end the harming of women on two levels:. 

1. Those men, whose cognition enables them, are required to take the responsibility to not harm women. 
   Taking responsibility requires to be able to have and to act by the insight, that harm to women is an outrage beyond any justifiability.  But to ask and to expect responsibility is only rational with people, who not only have this insight, but are also in the full capacity of being controlled by morals.  
   
2. When men are unable to refrain from harming women by responsibility, because they are too much enslaved by their excessive biological instinctive urges, then the protection of women requires stronger measures.  The study quoted in entry 565 is an example of the absurdity of punishing transgressors less due to biological explanations of their inability to act responsibly.  
   Such men need to be held accountable and liable by any means, no matter if and how much the procedures used are drastic, detrimental, disadvantageous, restrictive and unpleasant for the transgressors.  

When there are two option, either allowing a transgressor harm an innocent person, or to do some unavoidable harm to the transgressor to protect the Innocent, I consider the protection of the innocent as much more ethically justifiable than any clemency for the transgressor.   

The victims to be spared are innocent and therefore fully worthy of protection.  The transgressors have forfeited and damaged their worthiness by the harm already caused by them.   The innocence of not having harmed anybody is a strong moral justification for the privilege of being protected.

This general moral dilemma between protecting the innocent and forcing liability on transgressors is of course not restricted to men as transgressors and woman as victims, but it is the most drastic problem, because of the biological asymmetry  

• The average man is physically much stronger than the average woman.   Only a man has the choice between harming, forcing, dominating, coercing a woman and not harming her.  
• Men have a biological urge for homeostasis, which above a certain level of their instinctivity makes them predators, who harm women by objectification.
• The combination of urges to motivate and strength to enforce makes some men so fatally dangerous.

Rational feminism aims at finding methods, how to deal with this asymmetry in a way that ends the harming of women.

What I mean by holding men accountable and liable, will be continued in another entry.  

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.

553. Harm And Kant's Categorical Imperative

553.   Harm And Kant's Categorical Imperative

In entry 552 I pointed out, how the human dilemma of being torn between instinctive urges to harm and cognitive reasons to refrain from harming is sometimes solved by externalizing the justification to the responsibility of some higher authority.    This authority can be the imaginary deity or deities of religions.  

But there are other options to externalize responsibility.    One is following Kant's categorical imperative: 

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."

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

I am not basing the following thoughts upon having read Kant.   As far as it concerns human behavior, I prefer to read modern scientific texts based upon research in psychology and neuroscience.   

But the categorical imperative is often quoted as a guidance by people, who most probably also have not read Kant.   So more precisely this is about the potential to externalize responsibility by a literal interpretation of the quoted text of the categorical imperative.     

The hazard is the definition of a universal law by the wish of the acting person and the disregard of the perception and experience of the target or victim as to the harm done to them.   

Any universal law cannot include the avoidance of harm, which is not universal but a subjective and individual reaction to the exposure to specific experiences.    Any universal law is a way of balancing benefits and disadvantages, else the law would not be needed.    

Not harming by a conscious decision in the sense of Epicurus needs a careful assessment of what would harm any individual before being able to avoid it.  
 

In Kant's time, women did not count and the categorical imperative could be thus reworded for better explaining the hazards.     

Any own behavior can be justified by a man, whenever he also wants all men making each other the target of the same behavior.   

To this very day. men still confound laws and rules applicable to most or all men with universal laws. 

But biological differences are real and some behaviors cannot be evaluated equally depending on the actor's and target's gender.   Due to the biological differences I use agreement for those behaviors, where prescribing identical behaviors for women and men is not possible, only reciprocal agreement with unilateral behaviors.  

Any own behavior can be justified by someone, whenever he also wants everybody else to agree with.   

Behavior based upon this principle can lead to the belief, that harming the target were justified. 

1.  Existing laws are mistaken as the moral justification of the behavior.    When the authority represented by the law installs slavery, then owning slaves is not considered as harming humans.    

2.  When enough persons want the same and have sufficient political power, they convert their intention into laws.   
Example:
Men wanting wives to be commodities for their convenience as financially dependent house keepers.   Where enough men had this wish, they made laws not allowing women to get a job without the husband's permission.    The alleged authority of the multitude profiting from the same law served to justify the harm to the wives.  

3.  Any mental or intellectual problem or deficiency causing someone to wish weird and unacceptable behaviors to be shared by the majority automatically justifies the behavior for himself.  
Example:
A men believing himself as an excellent driver, not only disregards speed limits and other traffic rules but believes, that all traffic rules should be abandoned.  Only a few excellent drivers like himself should be allowed to drive, anybody else should yield the roads to them.   Any person getting run over had been in the way. 


There are certainly other ways of interpreting the categorical imperative.   But I cannot think of any, which would allow to see it as a method to protect victims from being harmed. 

552. Harm And The Evolution Of The Gullibility For Religion

552.   Harm And The Evolution Of The Gullibility For Religion


In entry 547 I compared two videos revealing the atrocities suffered by the children in Kinsey's research.    While one was as seemingly unbiased documentary, the other was biased by the christian religion.  

This brought me back to the old question, why a level of intelligence in the human brain inventing advanced technology did co-evolve with a level of irrationality causing delusions like the one of the existence of deities and all subsequent nonsense.   

Gullibility to delusional beliefs did evolve for a reason.   Falling for such beliefs was in some way beneficial in the adaptation to coping with the challenges of the survival of the species, no matter how unfortunate it is for the oblivious individuals.

To declare not harming and not be harmed as the essence of a good life is a part of the wisdom of Epicurus.    Harm is the key explanation of the evolved susceptibility to religious beliefs, because the success of the survival of any species is enhanced and enabled by harm to individuals.  

Generally speaking, instincts lead often to behaviors, which as a side effect cause harm to the self and to other individuals of the same species. 

Procreation:   In mammals, pregnancy is a hazard, burden and source of pain for the female.

Ingroup-outgroup:   Herds and groups of animals hunt and eat members of their own species not belonging to the own group.   They kill outgroup members in defense of their territory.   They rob and steal outgroup members' prey from hunting and cause their starvation.  All this is done by instinct to enhance the resources for the own offspring.

Hierarchy and competition:   Male animals fight to become alpha males and to gain control over as many females as there are.  These fights sometimes lead to serious wounds, mutilations and deaths.   Sometimes new alpha male not only usurp control over all the females, but also over their fertility by infanticide.  

Spider cannibalism is an example.  

"...a female spider kills and eats a male of the same species before, during, or after copulation."
"his indirectly contributing nutrition to the eggs. "

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

Male spiders have observed other males being eaten are nevertheless unaware, that by following their instinctive urges to get near the female spider, they will also be eaten.   Had the male spiders a conscious choice to run away and keep at a safe distance from all female spiders, they would prevent being harmed as individuals, but their species of spiders would get extinct.  
The female spider also has no cognitive option to refrain from eating the male as a choice to spare him harm.   Would she do this, this may lead to less surviving offspring due to malnutrition.  

Animals are determined to follow their instinctive urges, because they have no cognition sufficiently evolved to allow them to anticipate future events, nor to attribute effects correctly to their own behavior, even in the case of empathy.  They lack the consciousness of having a choice.   Animals suffer harm at the moment, when it happens, there is no cognitive anticipation.    Following their instincts but lacking cognition, animals cannot be held responsible for harming.   


In humans, the instinctive behaviors leading to the successful survival of the species are the same as in animals, but the human cognition adds unique aspects to the subjective experience of the collateral suffering of the harm.  There is an unfortunate correlation between reproductive success and its price of harm suffered by individuals.  

1.  Mirror neurons, empathy, remembering own experiences and understanding causality enable humans to anticipate the harm inflicted by their intended behavior before acting.  Humans have a conscious choice between harming and not harming.
2.  Human cognition includes abstract emotions and intellectual needs, which can be invisibly and non-physically harmed.    Humans do not suffer only momentarily, but for a long time and sometimes in advance. 

3.  The victim and the perpetrator both know, that harm is a decision and a choice of someone being responsible. 

Examples of the harm to humans due to the major instincts

Procreation:  Jerks harm women emotionally by commodifying and objectifying them due to their need for sexual homeostation.
Men harm women physically by inflicting pregnancy upon them.

Ingroup-outgroup:   Victims are seriously harmed by varieties of exploitation like war, slavery, colonization used as methods to acquire resources for successful procreation:

Hierarchy and competition:   In every competition, where there is a winner, the loser at least suffers emotionally.   But in more drastic fights for higher places in hierarchies, the harm can be much worse, serious material damage, physical mutilations or even death.  

The evolution of the cognition and the evolution of being determined as animals to pursue instinctively the advantages for the survival of the fittest seem to be mutually exclusive.

To live without or with reduced harming is possible, when people remain childfree and cooperate in peace and harmony.   But with such people, the human species would get extinct.

    
Being determined by instincts became a cognitive problem as a by product of the evolution of the human cognition.  As the result of the developing understanding of causality and the awareness of the self as an actor, at some point of their evolution humans started to comprehend the responsibility of how specific behaviors cause harm to others and of having the option to either inflict the harm or to refrain from doing so.    The brain's mirror neurons and ability to experience some empathy added the knowledge of the other's experiencing harm.
 

From that time on, harming seized to be an animal's automatic behavior, instead it required moral justification, that rationally does not exist.    

The evolution of the gullibility to irrational beliefs including the imagination of one or more deities with ascribed responsibility solved the problem.    The delusion of the deities justifying harming and the existence of harm has solved the evolutionary contradiction.

  

Religions are very outspoken to point out the benefits for the recipients of harm.   The side effect of the delusion of being rewarded after death does indeed
- make some people more resilient to suffering.
- motivate people to choose to suffer by making specific sacrifices to earn the reward.

But religions seldom admit the other side of the coin.   Religions also create, enable and enhance the suffering, which requires the resilience to cope with.      

The Milgram experiment has shown, that people are prone to harm others and accept it as justified to do so, whenever someone of authority takes the responsibility.   Generalizing this supplies an explanation of the attraction of religion.  
 
The authority of the real life researcher in Milgram's experiment can be replaced by the authority, power or superiority of a delusional and imaginary figure of a deity.  
The specific proactive act of harming by the application of electrical shocks when being told can be replaced by the permission to do every act of harm, unless it is explicitly forbidden as a sin.   In this case the authority's ascribed responsibility is not limited to one act, but to all behaviors unless they are explicitly excluded.    Everything appears as allowed, which the deity has not explicitly forbidden and everything allowed is done under the deity's responsibility.   
Taking own responsibility is based upon the subjective conscious and sufficient justification for the choice of a behavior.   Acting under someone else responsibility implies to be void of an own justification but considering someone else having a hidden and elusive justification.    When the justification is ascribed to a deity, who does not even exist, then anything can be believed, ascribed or defined as justified.  

All religions, that I know of, allow harm caused by instincts to a certain degree.   The specific definitions of sins have indirectly also favored the evolution of the fittest religions.   These are those religions, in which the definition of sin is an optimized balance between enhancing reproduction by disregarding the individual suffering and limiting all harm bad enough to damage the reproductive success.

But the deity as an imaginary figure of authority is not only considered as the one justifying all harming, which is not defined as a sin.   This figure is also a bargaining partner for prospective and retrospective deals to earn permission to sin.   In such deals, the harmed person is insignificant.   

Sin is bought in advance or compensated for afterwards by sacrifices.   The definition of sacrifices is also ascribed to the deity.   This is most successful in those religions, where sinning and paying is more attractive than not sinning.  

In this sense, here is my definition of religion:

  

Religion is the purposeful invention of an imaginary authority, who is believed to be able to justify harming other people, whenever the own hidden reasons for harming are instinctive and therefore cannot be rationally justified.    

The deity's permission serves as a sufficient justification to harm, either due to the deity having alleged unknown rational reason or by having earned it as part of a deal.    Religion frees the harming person from any consideration for the victim.