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.

653. Different Approaches To The Process Towards Knowing Someone Better

653.   Different Approaches To The Process Towards Knowing Someone Better

With whom to spend the rest of the life together is a very significant decision.  Mistakes can have very grave, long lasting, irreversible and extreme painful consequences.   

In entries 174, 176, 178 and 185 I developed a model for the process of getting to know each other.    The decision phase in entry 174 can be further divided.  
The preliminary phase is the phase of corresponding and talking over the phone to find out, if there is enough in common to rationally justify a personal meeting, the main decision phase follows the first meeting and includes further meetings.  

The duration of a phase includes a certain number x of hours of time spent by focusing the attention upon interacting by telephone, correspondence and even pondering over the prospects.   These x hours can be distributed over many months of only a short time daily or even weekly, or they can be spent with priority during a short period of time of intensive and extensive interacting.     
 

The more someone is an individual and not average, the more difficult it is to find someone suitable.  Therefore these phases, especially the preliminary phase, are usually repeated with several or even many different possible matches, before two persons find each other suitable enough for considering and attempting a relationship.   

There are principally two different approaches towards how to proceed:

The reciprocal absolute-cooperative approach: 

Goal:
 

This approach has the goal of finding just the one partner, who is minimally suitable for a relationship, but also sufficiently suitable to impede any further interest in others.   In this case, the most rational approach is to focus on only one intensive and extensive contact with one person at a time and to postpone considering and evaluating other contacts to after the possible failure.

Who:
 

The absolute approach suits and attracts those persons, who know themselves and their own needs well enough.  They are aware of what they are looking for in a partner and what they cannot accept.  

The absolute-cooperative approach only works, when two persons choose it as an option.  

Cooperation and consistency:
 

This approach is a form of cooperation.  Both share the task of discovering common ground and affinity and welcome finding them.   Every consent about any topic benefits both in getting them nearer to their goal, no matter if it is a trait, attitude, interest, habit, attribute.   The situation is transparent and to a certain degree reliable for both of them.   

No matter if the consent is more like tolerance by indifference or more like enthusiasm, as long as it is a consent between two persons, who want the consent, both can reasonably expect the other to be consistent.   Consent will not be easily converted into a reason for rejection out of the blue. 

Trust:
 

Growing reliable consent creates trust along with the growing probability of being compatible.   This reinforces and motivates to open up and to share more personal matters, which are also important for compatibility.   

Reinforcement:
 

Trust, consistency and discovering affinity and common ground reinforce the reasons for focusing upon exclusively this one possible match.  This then again reinforces the creation of trust and further affinity.

Emotional risk:
 

Every contact is of course emotionally risky.   But the risk of the absolute-cooperative approach is not so much the risk of an incomprehensible rejection.   It is mainly the risk of ending a contact by agreement because of discovering clearly defined lacking or intolerable traits and attributes.  By accepting someone's having rationally comprehensible criteria, an agreement of not meeting the criteria is not even really a rejection but the consent to be not compatible.  


The reciprocal relative-competitive approach:

Goal:
 

This approach has the goal of finding the best of all possible matches, not just one good match.   Nobody can really know, who is the best unless after having scrutinized every one of them.   As this cannot be done, every good match is considered with the doubt, that there could be a better match yet to be found.    The rational procedure for this goal is to prolong any phase and to explore and to compare many possible matches simultaneously.

Who:
 

The relative approach is often an expression of immaturity, ignorance, lacking self-awareness and having a limited theory of mind.   Some people enter the contact with haphazard persons without a clue about how little there is in common nor what they really want.  Some are attracted by looks, but beyond this they are not able to find out, what they do or do not want, unless and until they are confronted with it.  They only experience incompatibility by noticing the contrast in comparison with someone else.   They need to compare to find out, whom they want.  
Being vaguely discontented but not knowing why leads to a process of recurrently and endlessly probing, discarding and moving on attempting to find someone better.  They continue like this, as long as they are unable to decide, what and who is good enough for them.  

Whenever one person chooses the relative-competitive approach, the other has no choice to get anything else if preferred.

Competition and no consistency:
 

In the relative-competitive approach, there is not consistency.   Consent about a topic is not a reliable step forward towards a wider common ground, consent is only temporary and easily annihilated onesidedly, as soon as someone else appears to be better.   Being accepted or rejected does not depend primarily upon one's own traits and attributes, instead it depends at least as much upon those of competitors.   

These competitors are unknown powers in the background.   Ignoring both their number as well as their traits and attributes makes losing the other's consent by being compared with a successful competitor an unpredictable event coming out of the blue.    

When people are competing to get a job, they do know, that they are competing and they have some idea, what is required.  They have a clue about the qualities for being the best   This gives them a chance to attempt appearing as the best.

The person in the situation of competing against unknown competitors for an appealing partner is in a much less advantageous situation.   Due to not knowing anything about a potential match, there is no way to influence the comparison with others nor to attempt to appear being the best.  Who is perceived as better is determined by the lottery of who happens to be there to be compared.  

Trust:
 

When the rejection can come at any moment out of the blue and cannot be predicted, there is no reliable consistency.   This impedes trust.  The relative-competitive approach keeps contacts superficial and less personal.   The possibility of a rejection out of the blue does not motivate anybody to open up and get more personal.   

Reinforcement: 
 

The fragility of a contact adds to the maintenance of some mental distance.    Being prepared for a pending rejection at any time makes the own relative-competitive approach the most reasonable behavior.   If the rejection by the preference for someone else can happen at any time, then it is beneficial to also have other contacts to fall back upon.   The fragility and superficiality of the relative-competitive approach also reinforce it by preventing trust and closeness.   
 
Emotional risk. 
 

The main emotional risk is the unpredictability of a onesided incomprehensible rejection at any moment and for unknown reasons.   Having such a rejection imposed upon oneself without having any part in causing it is much more painful than an end by agreement.


When the situation is asymmetrical, then the person following or preferring the absolute-cooperative approach is the one having all the disadvantages.   

Jerks play games and pretend to follow also the absolute-cooperative approach, until they find the someone to prefer and then they reject the flabbergasted other out of the blue.  

When the situation is clear, the person with a preference for the absolute-cooperative approach has two options, either to recoil directly or to go along while also continuing to search, but not to find someone better but someone, who shares the preference for this approach.     

The relative-competitive approach is probably enhanced or rather aggravated by the social norm of the lifestyle in capitalistic countries, where people are encouraged and brainwashed towards consuming and discarding, towards the greed of wanting always more and always something better.    

When people are made to buy a better car, a better computer and a better cell phone every few months or years instead of using things until they break, then it is not really astonishing, that they generalize this consumers' attitude also to human relations. 

603. Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

603.   Simple Recipes Attract Simpleminded People

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

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

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

1.  The attraction of recipes:  

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

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

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

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

2.  Some examples:

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

Examples of titles of books

Get the life you want

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The 48 Laws of Power

Think and Grow Rich

The Feeling Good Handbook

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

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

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

How to trick people into thinking you're good looking

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to be an expert

How to Get a Life

How to Get Out of Debt

How to Lose 20 lbs. of bodyfat in 30 days

How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

How To Become Wealthy

Examples from a dating advice site:

10 things men should never say

Seven steps to the perfect first email

5 Habits that Hurt Your Relationship

Five dating tips for spotting ‘Mr Right’

3 Key Things to Discuss Before Moving In Together

3. Classification of recipes:

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

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

4.  Purpose for using recipes:

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

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

5.  Gullibility to the belief in simple recipes:

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

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

6.  The authors of the recipes:

Those who produce simple recipes are

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

7.  The dangers of simple recipes for the applicants:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

598. Commodification And Delayed Gratification

598.  Commodification And Delayed Gratification

This continues entry 597.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

594. The Difference Between Control And Influence

594.  The Difference Between Control And Influence

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

593. Commodification And Trust

593.  Commodification And Trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

This leads to distinguishable dynamics:  

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

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

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

570. Politicians And Morals

570.   Politicians And Morals

As mentioned before, there is a biologically caused asymmetry of many men harming women by excessive instinctive urges for sexual homeostasis and of many women not only getting harmed but participating in their own self-harming due to their instinctive urges for breeding.    As a result, the co-evolved gullibility to religion has established a general desensitization to women's plight of being harmed.   Women's bodies being used by men is not perceived as an outrage and a transgression, but as morally acceptable and as their innate doom. 

But this attitude of accepting the desensitization has consequences far beyond merely harming individual women in private situations.    When someone considers and accepts it as correct behavior and his entitlement to harm women by abuse, commodification, objectification, exploitation and taking advantage, this indicates, that he is a hazard to others, not only to women.  

Not only are politicians elected to work for the benefits of their voters, who have entrusted their interests to them.    Politicians are also paid a salary out of tax payer's money, which is so high, that many of the voters can only dream of such an income.    The trust and the salary oblige politicians to balance their self-interest with the benefits owed to their voters.       

But this is not reality.   As can be easily derived from reading daily in the newspapers about the frequent scandals and misdemeanors of politicians, many of them seem to be more or less corrupt, drastically taking selfish advantages of their positions.   Some are limited by what they can do legally, many get even away with criminal transgressions.   

What a politician does to women is an excellent and valid indication of his attitude to his voters.   If the voters were fully aware of this, they would base their political choice not only on the promises of a politician, but also on his moral integrity.  

A man without hesitation nor inhibitions to cheat on his wife can be expected to also cheat on his voters.    A man not hesitating in abusing a prostitute's body for his selfish instinctive urges can be expected to abuse the power of his position for his own greedy selfish interests.    A man using his position as immunity to rape and harass women can be expected to be criminally corrupt.   

The frequent scandals reported in the press and news indicate clearly, how many of the male politicians are not only commodifying and objectifying women as if this were their entitlement and privilege, but that their position also supplies them with more occasions to harm women than has the average jerk.    

Unfortunately too many voters are themselves desensitized to abuse women and even the female voters are manipulated to overlook, that politicians forfeit their trustworthiness by abusing women.   These voters tolerate the immorality, which harms women, and then they are disappointed and angry, when the corrupt politicians fail to do, what the voters expect.   

But the impact of abusive politicians being reelected is even worse than their mere failing to fulfill their obligations.   The fact of having been voted for by many people creates their reputation as role models worthy to be copied, no matter how morally rotten they are.    

Every time, when a politician is reelected in spite of the public knowledge of his cheating and frequenting brothels, this emits a very wrong signal.   It reinforces the fatal social norm of oversexation, promiscuity and harming women by objectification. 

In an ideal world, politicians would only be elected, if they have sufficient moral integrity of not taking advantage of occasions to harm and exploit others, neither women nor voters. 

564. Foolish Lies

564.  Foolish Lies

Trust in a close, bonded and committed relationship requires sincerity and honesty without exceptions.   But with strangers and unrelated people, there can be situations, in which lies are a necessity of self-protection.
 

Independent of any moral consideration of the possible harm done by lies, there are rational and irrational lies.   Rational are those with a high probability of getting away with.  Irrational and foolish lies are those, which are determined to be discovered.    In the latter case, being caught with the lies often does more damage than the truth would have done.

Lies in profiles on matchmaking sites are extremely foolish by any person using such a site for its real purpose.   During real life encounters, many of these lies will be discovered immediately.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/fashion/online-dating-as-scientific-research.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

"about 81 percent of people misrepresent their height, weight or age in their profiles,"

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/exagger_dating_7N5Irwi6wBf636XjbJjV3O

"Men are on average 2 inches shorter than they say in their profiles, while women are an inch shorter. About 50 percent of daters fib about their weight. Almost everyone exaggerates their income by 20 percent,

"*24.3% of men and 13.1% of women lie about their age
* Men are on average 2 inches shorter than they say in their online profiles, women are 1 inch shorter
* 59% of women lie about their weight, 55% of men lie about their weight
* People tend to inflate their salaries by 20%
* It rises with age: 20-year-old men and women inflate by 5%; jumps to around 35% for men and women at 50 years old."

The choice to either lie or to be correct about facts and to apply the cautious preference of understatements in the case of attributes with only fuzzy self-evaluation allows some conclusions about the person's motivation and goals.   

It is the choice between disappointing and surprising.  

The preference to risk disappointing is the attempt to manipulate someone to meet once.  
If the disappointing person is a man, he probably is convinced to be such an irresistible guy, that he can seduce the woman for a night, even though his lies have forfeited any trust in him.  
If the disappointing person is a woman, she probably just wants to take advantage of a man paying for an expensive dinner.   

The preference for hoping to be a pleasant surprise is the method to find someone for a long term relationship.    When correct information and understatements are already sufficient to be acceptable for a meeting, then a pleasant surprised adds to attraction and eligibility.      

534. The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

534.   The Pseudo-Evidence Fallacy

Whenever someone bases the decision, how to treat another person, on a belief, which is so strong, that it impedes and overrides the rational perception and comprehension of evidence and reality, there are more or less fatal consequences for at least the misjudged person, often for both. 

Examples:

1. A very drastic example was the alleged proof of who is a witch by throwing the unfortunate victim into the water to see if she floated or drowned.    Men believed in this cruel irrationality, even though their brain had nevertheless enabled them to become fluent in Latin.   
2. In some cultures, parents not only decide, whom to marry their children to, but they choose an alleged match following an astrologer's advice.   This has certainly caused millions of people to suffer from being tied for a lifetime to a mismatch, the worst fate being that of women being abused by a man, whom they would not have chosen.  
3. Today people are less prone to fall for very blatant irrationality.  But the more the irrational claims and beliefs mimic science, the more people are gullible to mistake pseudo-science for science.   
   NLP is a good example.   In entry 177 (The Jerks' Fascination with NLP) I already elaborated, why NLP is a belief system, and why this blend of some elements from scientific psychology with irrational and unscientific claims make this so attractive to people with a distorted self-concept as if being rational.  

In these as also in many more examples, there is a pattern of a specific fallacy:  

The person

• bases a rational decision process upon incorrect or insufficient information acquired by absurd, weird, preposterous or insane methods.   
• is unperceptive, mindblind, immune to or otherwise not impacted by any information coming directly from the target of the behavior.   The target has no influence upon what information is used to determine, how s/he is treated.
• imposes the decision upon the target or attempts to, feeling entitled and justified to do so. 

This fallacy impedes trust and as a consequence it impedes a relationship from becoming a safe haven, which is impossible without trust justified by trustworthiness.   
Trustworthiness can only be assessed by the rational method of evaluating evidence.  This method compares all of someone's verbal and non-verbal expressions and behaviors at any moment with all of this at any another time, and also with external independent sources.   
The more often this comparison is consistent, congruent and without contradictions, the more the person's overall trustworthiness can be estimated as probable.   Never discovering a lie is a part of this.

Any other method, which relies on unverified and unverifiable clues, is a hazard and misleading.   Earning trust depends not only on the own trustworthy behavior, it also depends upon the partner's ability to recognize trustworthy behavior as such by the correct perception of evidence.    Trust cannot be earned from a person using unsuitable methods.  

An honest person never lying is nevertheless not trusted by a partner using flawed methods to evaluate honesty.   The delusion of being able to rely upon firmly believed pseudo-clues makes him oblivious of reality.      
Fools believing in NLP derive the pseudo-evaluation of alleged honesty or lack thereof from the target's eye movements.   This is a hazardous fallacy, as the study quoted below clearly shows.    Eye movements can be caused, influenced and diverted by many triggers.  During any conversation, people's attention can be easily caught momentarily by events at the periphery of their vision.   
The haphazard location of such events suffices to determine the erroneous attribution of an alleged trait towards one of two errors:      
Accidental eye movements of a honest person can forfeit the chance to be trusted.  
The blind believer in NLP can also easily be mislead to trust by a liar's accidental eye movements.  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120711205943.htm

"For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth."

"Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements.  In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,” noted Wiseman. "

The pseudo-evidence fallacy and commodification share the common defective acquisition of information.    In both situations, the target is excluded from being considered as a possible source when choosing, which information is used for the decision how to behave.  Both situations indicate depreciation and disrespect of the target, but it works differently.

In the case of commodification, the target is mistaken for a passive utility in a onesided relationship and therefore not considered as able to be a proactive source supplying any information.  
The pseudo evidence fallacy disregards, devalues and rejects the information input coming directly from the target.   The real information is noticed but replaced by the false beliefs.   The target is considered as a proactive source of irrelevant or worthless information.  

531. Trust And Trustworthiness Without The Myth Of The Free Will

531.  Trust And Trustworthiness Without The Myth Of The Free Will

Rational trust depends on the other person's trustworthiness.    Blind trust is irrational and risky.   

Unfortunately, there is a logical problem concerning the assessment of who can be trusted and how much.   Only a person's untrustworthiness can be clearly proven by the evidence of at least one transgression.   One single act of betrayal and breaking the trust is enough to refute the transgressor's claim to be trustworthy and to deserve trust.   

But no such unambiguous evidence of trustworthiness is logically possible.  Trustworthiness cannot be assessed any better than as a probability of expecting trustworthy behavior in the future, whenever an available alternative option to transgress is not chosen.  Experiencing the absence of untrustworthy behavior justifies nothing more than the estimation of a high probability of trustworthiness.  Rational trust only grows according to experience.   

Experiencing no transgressions cannot be attributed with certainty to a personality trait of absolute trustworthiness.   It can equally be attributed to the mere absence of an occasion to transgress.   It is not possible to know, if a man not cheating does this by an innate preference for monogamy or because his animal instincts have not yet been tempted badly enough by any female body triggering him to transgress.  

The assessment of trustworthiness by only extrapolating previous behavior is a retrospective method without a chance to avoid being harmed.   People gamble with their own vulnerability, when due to lacking enough information they trust by trial and error, until they get wise only when hurt by a transgression.  

 

Consciously discarding the myth of the free will includes also discarding the concept of a person's absolute trustworthiness as a trait and being trustworthy by a free decision.   This leads to the alternative concept of the prospective assessment of a person's relative trustworthy behavior in the framework of the specific relationship between two persons.  

This concept does not expect anybody to be equally trustworthy to all people, independent of how much the person benefits from transgressions.   In this concept, the estimation of another person's possible relative trustworthiness is based upon two limitations:

1. Both persons agree on shared definitions of transgressions.  
   
   When two persons have promised monogamy and exclusivity to each other, cheating is clearly a transgression and proof of untrustworthiness.  
   But when two persons like for example Sartre and Beauvoir agree on the commodification of others, then their sleeping around like alley dogs is for both not a transgression.  They were trustworthy to each other but instead they did break the trust of all those, whom they hurt by the denial of exclusivity. 
   
   
2. The choice of preferring non-transgressing behavior over the transgression is ultimately beneficial for both.  This choice is determined (as outlined in more details in entry 512) by factors as these.  

2.1.  Direct impacts by the specific kind and strength of needs for homeostasis and the individual specific sensitivity of the pleasure center.    Nobody has a reason to indulge in a transgression, unless it either reduces dishomeostasis or causes pleasure.  

2.2.  Indirect cognitive impacts by the consideration and anticipation of long-term consequences of the tempting transgression, either by the calculation of comparing the immediate benefits with expected external punishments and rewards or by the awareness of the cognitive consequences of either preventing self-punishment by feeling guilty or enhancing self-rewarding by feeling good due to acting in accordance with the own value system and ideal self.

It is a frequent fallacy to expect another's trustworthiness as a consequence of an alleged free will to act according to the rules of a religion, social norm or other extrinsic motivations.  Relative trustworthiness can most reliably be expected, when the behavior expected by the trusting person is intrinsically motivated as being also most beneficial to the own needs.    

Therefore trial and error with haphazard partners is not a rational method for the goal of finding a trustworthy partner for commitment.  The rational method is choosing carefully a partner, for whom the trustworthy behavior is innately more beneficial than transgressions would be.   

It is many women's foolish mistake to get involved with a man, merely because he is attracted to their body and promises, whatever seems to lead to his homeostasis.  This does not justify women's irrational hope, that he will never again touch another woman.   This is trial and error and more often than not ends with the woman being hurt by a cheating jerk.    

A wise woman chooses the man, who succeeds to convince her, that monogamy and exclusivity are his own innate preference and needs, that being trustworthy to her expectations of commitment is also what is most beneficial for himself.  
Allowing herself to be convinced of a man's trustworthiness is of course also only a question of correctly estimating the probability.   A man afflicted with dishomeostasis may lie, he may be in denial of some of his tendencies, he may overestimate his self-control, he may mistake his ideal-self for his real self and there are more such hazards.   What a main claims as his attitudes, values, resolutions and aspirations towards a woman concerns mainly the cognitive indirect impacts.  But these alone do not suffice as a reliable basis for the assessment of his trustworthiness.    

The soundest assessment is derived from his predispositions concerning the direct impacts.   A man with high instinctive needs for those homeostations and stimulations of the pleasure center, which he can obtain best by transgressions, is a hazard, no matter, how convincing he appears to be otherwise.   
The less a man is determined by his instincts towards the objectification of women's bodies, the more he can be trusted to treat women without abuse and objectification, without hurting their dignity.

While a careful choice of a man, who shares the most benefits by reciprocally fulfilling each other's needs, is no guarantee against transgressions, it is at least a method to reduce the risk.  

529. Contact With Ex-Partners, Reliability And Trust

529.   Contact With Ex-Partners, Reliability And Trust

Whenever I read in a man's profile, that he continues contact with his ex(es), I recoil.    When I explained my reasons in entry 76, I only mentioned the impertinence of a man's feeling entitled to have a harem of more than one intimate partner and of not valuing a woman enough to give her a genuinely exclusive place in his life.   
Ex(es) can never be converted to be the same as platonic friends, they will remain forever deactivated intimate partners.   Because the special ties created by physical intimacy can never be undone.   The friendship of two persons, who have never been physically intimate, and the alleged mere friendship of two persons, who have deactivated their previous physical intimacy, are fundamentally distinct and can never be the same.  

But in entry 76, I omitted, that the friendship with ex(es) is also a significant indirect indication of how much harm and hurting is to be expected from such men.  
A man, who is friends with his ex(es), can never be trusted to be a reliable partner in a relationship being a safe haven.   His friendship with his ex(es) tells me, that he either starts or ends relationships for insufficient reasons.   Therefore he is a hazard to do the same to me.    

A man's personality, instinctivity and his subsequent attitude towards women, is expressed and represented in the specific reasons, which for him are sufficient to enter and to end a physically intimate relationship.   These reasons indicate, if he either commodifies and objectifies women or if he appreciates them as persons to commit to, to bond and to share his life with.

The history of a man's past relationships can thus be helpful to assess a man's individual choice of reasons and thus to evaluate the risk of being hurt by him.    His maintained friendship with ex(es) or the absence thereof is a valuable information allowing some conclusions.     

A man, who is determined more by his human cognition than by is animal instincts, is able to base both decisions, to enter and to end a relationship, on careful considerations and on consent.    Therefore a man's careful decisions are an indication of his being more human than an animal.    Intrinsic commitment is human.    Animals just copulate.  

Intrinsic commitment means to accept obligations towards the partner, to be considerate, responsible and therefore reliable.   The decision to enter physical intimacy is inseparably also the decision to be committed.   Otherwise it is the abuse of an objectified body and a violation of human dignity.     
Therefore a decent, valuable, humane man asks himself, if he is ready and willing to begin a committed long-term relationship, before he gets physically involved with a woman.   He asks himself, it he appreciates the person enough for commitment.   If he gets aware, that he is only triggered by instincts, he refrains from touching her.   He does not want to be an unworthy animal. 

Intrinsic commitment includes the obligation to end a relationship only 

• by a onesided decision, if the partner has become unworthy having first created this reason by committing an unforgivable transgression.
• by consent, after working hard and persistently together on solving all problems and conflicts.   But this should be a very rare case, as such an blatant incompatibility should have precluded the couple to enter the relationship.   As long as a couple has not forfeited the reciprocal justification for true friendship by unforgivable transgressions, they should be able to solve their conflicts and stay together.

Friendship in the true sense of the word means to see qualities of character in a person, friendship requires trust, honesty, integrity and more.  Intrinsic commitment between a couple has the same requirements of character as has friendship, only the benefits of bonding, of monogamy and of sharing the life and home with exclusively one partner are added.  
Without the qualities to be friends, two persons are not suitable to each other for intrinsic commitment.  When people at one moment in time are really suitable as true friends to get physically involved and share their life in a monogamous arrangement, then their commitment is for better or for worse and ending it can only be justified by very good reasons.   Therefore whenever someone and his ex are still true friends, their commitment has never really ended.   Intrinsic commitment only ends, when reasons impede friendship

A man's intrinsic commitment makes him reliable and predictable, because he allows the woman enough influence on how the relationship impacts her life.    She is not the victim of decisions imposed upon her out of the blue as she is by objectifying jerks, instead she is involved in all shared decisions. 


A man's friendship with his ex(es) is a big red flag.  

When a man perceives and experiences no difference between a friendship, which has always been platonic, and the friendship with a woman, with whom there had been physical intimacy in the past, this is a clear indication of his animal instincts being so strong, that he is innately determined for the objectification of women's bodies.   It means that physical intimacy does not automatically create intrinsic commitment.   
1.  It can mean, that he has exes from any kind of promiscuous non-committed arrangements, no matter if it was an affair or friends with benefits or whatever.    He has commodified and objectified a woman based upon reciprocity.   Had he dumped her, she would probably refuse to remain friends with a jerk.   But mutual abuse is nevertheless abuse, and entering a physical relationship without commitment is a dangerous attitude indicating the predominance of the man's instincts.  
I can never trust a man to be committed with me by physical intimacy, if he has a history of using others without commitment.
2.  He still wants his ex, in spite of her having committed a transgression.    He maintains a friendship for her, even though she is unworthy.   He still craves for her body, in spite of her unworthy personality.   This means, that her personality is not significant.   Either he is not free to commit or the non-physical qualities of a woman are generally of no significance to him.  
3.  He has dumped her for insufficient and selfish reasons, but she wants him back and has forgiven him in spite of his being unworthy and a jerk.  He probably wants more than he is willing to give.  He is probably unable to need and appreciate a partner as much as is necessary to motivate him to invest enough time and effort into a relationship.  Instead he has developed the habit of discarding and replacing as the easy way out.    

Whatever he has done to his ex(es), he is prone also to do to me.   

In all three scenarios, such men are a hazard, there is a very high risk of being hurt by them.  Men, who have dumped women for insufficient reasons or who have committed other transgression, get fatally wrong signals from those women, who still accept and treat them as friends.   Instead of being punished by the appropriate rejection as unworthy jerks, they learn to misinterpret the inappropriate friendship as if there were nothing wrong with their behavior.   
Every ex, who reacts with continued friendship to a jerk's transgressions, implicitly reinforces readiness to repeat such transgressions on the next woman.   While ending all contact with a jerk does not stop him from behaving as a jerk, at least this does not encourage him.


On dating advice sites, sometimes people are warned about new contacts talking bad about their ex-partners.   I disagree.  I have more trust, when a man feels hurt by specific behaviors of his ex and when he can convincingly explain, what efforts he did to repair the relationship and why it failed.   While I of course cannot know, what really has happened, a man's feeling hurt and treated badly by his ex indicates, that he at least subjectively was not the transgressor and whatever behavior he feels hurt from is something, that he hopefully has learned not to do upon others.  When a man talks too well about an ex, this makes me suspicious, because people learn more from their own suffering than from getting away with making others suffer.     

433. A Skeptical Use Of The Words BELIEF, FAITH And TRUST

A Skeptical Use Of The Words BELIEF, FAITH And TRUST

In atheistic and sceptical discussion the words belief, faith and trust are often used with implicitly different meanings and this leads to misunderstandings.   My solution is to define, how I use these words.  

Faith and belief are to me synonyma, because they both translate to only one German word, Glaube.   If there is at all any difference, belief may be more connected to a specific content, faith may be more a general predisposition to belief in the case of available content.    But the main meaning is the undoubting gullibility.   

Faith (and belief) mean taking a claim or appearance for true without doubt.   As a skeptic, I have never any faith.   There is no truth, that I can be certain of, there is only a probability, that some claim or assumption could be true.   As a way to handle everyday life's requirement of making decisions, estimating probabilities cannot be avoided.  

Long ago, I have eliminated the phrase 'I believe' from my language use.   Instead I am using 'I guess', 'I estimate', 'it seems', 'I assume' and such.  

Trust is very different from faith.   

• Faith means basing the own proactive behavior upon accepting something without doubts as true.   
• Trust means exposing oneself to another person's behavior as a consequence of accepting something without doubts as true.  

Many people become atheists by discarding the belief in a deity, but they still are prone to base other decisions upon implicit assumptions and inclinations.   According to christian morals, people are expected to have blind trust in other christians.  Allegedly christians are automatically trustworthily while behaving as commanded by their deity.      
 

Becoming an atheist implies also the necessary logical next step of replacing blind trust with the estimation of trustworthiness. 

For me as a skeptic, trust means the estimated trustworthiness.   

Trust is a necessity in close human relationships.   Trust is the expectation, that another human being will do no harm.   Nobody can predict another person's behavior with certainty.  Therefore trust is the estimated probability of expecting beneficial treatment.  
Realistically this expectation is based upon the past experience with this person.   It cannot be based upon accepting the person's proclaimed intentions as true.   The longer the person's behavior is beneficial, the higher the estimated probability, that this will continue.  
A high probability of being harmed instead of being treated beneficially is a reason to avoid or end the contact.  

With strangers or persons of only short or superficial acquaintance, there is no previous experience.   There is not yet the possibility to make an accurate estimation.  

In this situation, two mistakes are possible.    One can either wrongly overestimate the trustworthiness and get harmed.   Or one can underestimate the trustworthiness and miss a chance of a beneficial contact.    

The ignorance concerning the trustworthiness makes the interaction with strangers a risky endeavor.   But humans need social contact, risky or not.  

It is a dichotomous decision to either interact with someone or not.   This is based upon the personal threshold of the minimally required estimated trustworthiness.   This threshold is where the probable benefits are expected to be higher than the risk to be harmed.    

In the situation, when a realistic estimation of trustworthiness is not yet possible, tit-for-tat trust is an option.   One starts the interaction based upon an arbitrary estimation of average trustworthiness and behaves accordingly.   The experience of the other's behavior is then the basis of adjusting this as the basis for further decisions.    

Blind trust is the trusting person's individual predisposition as something to decide and to demand to have.  When trust is understood as estimated trustworthiness, it is interactive and adjusted following experience, it can be earned and forfeited.

409. Poor Men's Mental Trap

Poor Men's Mental Trap

I have been declaring before, that I feel more comfortable to share a frugal life based upon a basis of equality than I would as a woman under the expectations of what a wealthy man may feel entitled to get in return for the money spent on me.   

According to my own observations from correspondence, reading forums and blogs, I have come to the conclusion, that having money or not is in men's own perception and self-assessment the most important factor, to which they subjectively ascribe their failure or success with women.   This is independent of the role and purpose they want the woman for.   

Even the most stupid but wealthy men feel as if they were god's gift to women, while even the most intelligent and educated men feel as losers and disheartened, when they are poor.    There may be exceptions, but I still have not found him yet.  

I am not bothered about the stupid rich, but the disheartened intelligent and educated men's belief to be automatically unattractive to all women while poor is a real problem.   I am aware that they often do get rejected by stupid women, who value a man's money more than his person.    Unfortunately, when this happens too often to a man, especially someone sensitive, this has detrimental effects:  

1.   Withdrawal

He withdraws and gives up looking for a partner.   He could be my perfect mindmate, but if he does not search, if he has not even any profiles on any dating sites, we cannot find each other.     That is tragic, as much for him as for me.

2.   Trust

I found this today:

"In three separate experiments, researchers found that high-status people tended to trust people more in initial encounters than did people with lower status. One experiment showed why: high-status people rated others as more benevolent, which led them to trust more."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110928110012.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fscience_society+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Science+%26+Society+News%29

While the research was based on the general subjective self-attribution of the own status, I see a strong implication of this on the problem of poor men searching for a partner.    A poor men attributing his failure to find a partner to his lack of material resources is someone perceiving himself as a person of low status.

Trust is the basis of a relationship, without trust, a relationship is not viable but doomed to fail.   The process of growing trust as a result of behaving trustworthy and of reacting to perceived trustworthiness is a part of creating commitment.   Lacking trust, commitment is not a safe haven but a danger.  The man, who is unable to trust is also unable to commit.

But when a man with a subjectively low status is unable to trust in oblivion of the trustworthiness of a woman, he risks rejection or the failure of the relationship.    The real reasons are his lack of trust and commitment, but the man is mistaken to attribute the rejection again to his being poor.   This reinforces his subjective low status and his inability to trust even more.   He is in a vicious circle.   

3.   Asymmetry

But there is not only the asymmetry of trust, but also a more general asymmetry of reciprocal evaluation according to a different value system.     Even though a woman like me judges and treats a man by his education, morals and personality as her equal, due to his being brainwashed and guided by his bad experiences, he continues to consider his own social status as not sufficient for her because of his poverty.  
As a consequence, he is prone to react with disruptive psychological dynamics to this asymmetry, which exists only in his perception, while she is not even aware of it.   He projects his own self-attributed low status as if she would attribute it to him.   He misunderstands and misinterprets her as if she treats and considers him as someone of low status, and he does not accept critical feedback as an indication of the necessity to improve his behavior but as a devaluation.    

In short, he is caught in the mental trap of a vicious circle.   He does not see, that he can be rejected for many reasons, including the lack of trust, but also incompatible habits, differences in basic values, not enough shared interests and tastes.   There are many possible reasons, which are not just stupid women's greed.    
It is in his power to change bad habits, learn better communication, find out who really is a match and be more selective to avoid being rejected by the truly greedy women.   But by attributing every failure and rejection to lacking money, he is deprived of the chance to improve the real obstacles to find the happiness with a woman, who is not interested at all in his money.    

384. Predictability And Pseudo-Compatibility

Predictability And Pseudo-Compatibility

A relationship as a safe haven needs to be reliable and predictable based upon the justifiable trust, that the other will not commit transgressions and will not do harm or hurtful things.   

Predictability means to be able to make a realistic prognosis of future behaviors by the estimation of probability.   In entry 95, I already mentioned the importance of calculating probabilities of the occurrence of behavior in the future.  In entry 173 I elaborated this by including the importance of considering the attitudes, which are causing or modifying behaviors.   

But the matter is even more complicated.  

Estimating the partner's future behavior implies:

1. It is important to listening to what he declares himself as his attitudes.  
2. His behavior needs to be compared with his expressed attitudes, if it is congruent or if there are contradictions.   Sometimes people are not aware of subconscious attitudes, that are nevertheless strong determinants of their behavior.   Subconscious attitudes can be incongruent with expressed attitudes, when the latter are superficially learned or imitated and not connected to innate tendencies.  Then behavior is congruent with the true hidden attitudes but contradictory to the expressed attitudes.       
3. Observable specific behaviors are indicators of attitudes, but attitudes determine usually a wider variety of correlated behaviors, that can be predicted only when knowing the attitude.
4. Observable proactive behavior allows to estimate probable future behavior.    The absence of proactive behavior is not as much a reliable source of information, because it is not the same as a decision to refrain from a behavior.  

I will use lying as an example.
 
If a woman catches her partner lying to her, she can predict, that he will lie again.   The more frequent his past lies, the more frequently he will lie in the future.  
His lying is a clear indication, that his attitude towards her is not suitable for treating her as a close and bonded partner deserving sincerity and honesty.   This faulty attitudes makes it probable to expect also other sly, manipulative, deceptive behaviors.   

But if the woman never catches her partner telling her a lie, this does not allow equally good predictions, because this by itself is not an indication of his general attitude towards her.   

Her lack of experiencing a lie from him can be due to

1. She did not catch him lying because of her unjustified trust.
2. He had so far no reason or occasion to lie but would otherwise not hesitate
3. He has a reason or attitude to actively refrain from lying. 
   
   These reasons are

• in his person  
  
  • He is someone, who always blurs out what he thinks, no matter to whom, even with unrelated persons, when it has detrimental consequences for him.
  • His self-esteem requires moral behavior and this includes special rules how to treat closely related persons, like not lying to them and not hurting them. 
• his attitude concerning her significance for him.   He values and appreciates her enough to enclose her in the ingroup of people, whom he honors with sincerity and honesty.   
• consideration of the consequences.  
  
  • He fears to be punished for lying by losing her
  • He wants to avoid the disapproval or other punishment by other significant persons like his family 
  • He fears being punished or wants to be rewarded by a deity due to some religious delusion.

Therefore not catching someone lying can either indicate true compatibility with someone, who is sincere and honest and who values her person in a relationship, or it can indicate pseudo-compatibility, when not having experienced someone's lying yet just does not allow predictions for the future.        

337. There Is No Safe Haven Without Reliability and Predictability

There Is No Safe Haven Without Reliability and Predictability

In entry 335, I explained the importance of avoiding the risk of being dumped by a wise choice of a compatible mindmate, who is able and motivated to commit to being bonded.  

Precluding dumping is one important step towards making a relationship predictable and reliable as a safe haven.

Fear, threat, insecurity, apprehension of being dumped are poison for a relationship.   To prevent this, it is of vital importance, that both partners explicitly accept the mutual obligation to first make efforts to solve their conflicts, no matter, how much stamina and strain is required, before they consider to end the relationship by consent.  The binding obligation to not dump under any circumstances has to be carved in stone for both partners.  Else there cannot be trust. 

If someone is either unable or unwilling to accept the no-dumping obligation, this is enough reason to abstain from getting involved.  
  
But this obligation is not to be misunderstood as a protection for a transgressor from the consequences.   Precluding proactive dumping does not prohibit an adequate reaction to a serious transgression.  Ending a relationship as a reaction to a dealbreaking transgression like cheating is not dumping.    Therefore the agreement being the precondition of getting involved has to include consensual definitions of what behaviors are transgressions.  I consider dumping as a transgression.  

The no-dumping obligation is also not a license for hurting and harmful behavior without taking responsibility as explained in entry 336.    If a partner causes harm irresponsibly, he is entitled to be given a fair chance, cooperation and support to change his behavior, but if he refuses, then ending a toxic relationship is also not dumping.    

Realistically seen, jerks cannot be impeded by any agreement from selfish, cruel and ruthless behavior.  
A jerk, who lures and tricks a woman to allow him the use of the body under the false pretense of committing, will also not hesitate to selfishly break any agreement by dumping a woman at his convenience. (entry 292)    
A jerk, who uses the explicit or obviously implicit threat of dumping as a method of extortion to secure himself a position of dominance and power does this, no matter what he had pretended to agree upon.  

Jerks need to be avoided by a wise choice of a compatible partner.    But a preventive no-dumping agreement can be very beneficial, when the fear of being dumped is caused by

• ignorance, unawareness, not knowing each other well enough
• misunderstandings, misinterpretations and an ambiguous situation
• lacking or deficient communication
• lack of any explicit clarification and consent concerning the status and kind of the relationship     
• desensitization as a result of mistakenly considering dumping as socially acceptable, because it happens too often
• bad experience of having been dumped before

The fear of being dumped has emotional and behavioral consequences, and their experience and expression are disruptive and destructive to both the individual wellbeing and the relationship.  

• stress, tension, helplessness
• being alert all the time without the ability to relax, walking on eggshells
• feeling compelled to censor and control verbal expressions and behavior
• denial and recoiling from solving conflicts
• grudging external submission to the will of the other
• serving the needs of the other but repressing the own needs 
• play a fake role
• dishonesty and insincerity
• hiding the own true feelings and true opinions

Such a situation cannot last.   Unsolved conflicts get worse.   Self-denial of all own needs leads to a breaking point, when the person cannot take more.   Nobody can hide the true personality forever, the final discovery of the fakery is much worse than if someone has been genuine from the beginning.  The person risks to get dumped and rejected as the fake person, while the hidden genuine person would have been accepted. 
Sometimes not only one, but both partners fear to be dumped and each is oblivious of the other having the same fear.

The consequences of the fear of being dumped can be experienced, even while there is no awareness for the reason or while they are attributed to other causes.  
The fear of being dumped can become so unbearable, that sometimes the afflicted find alleviation by dumping the other first to prevent being dumped.   This is especially tragic, if the other in reality had never even considered dumping.