341. Interaction Style, Influence and the Predominant Motivational Force

Interaction Style, Influence and the Predominant Motivational Force

There are three major determinants of human behavior:

1. Consequencity, which I have already described in entries 338 and 339
2. Social and environmental external influences, their impact depending upon the innate gullibility.
3. Instinctive urges, not only those directly and indirectly connected with procreation, but also hedonistic selfish urges of any kind.

Usually, each of these motivational forces leads or can lead to different, often contradictory behaviors.   Therefore people may experience internal conflicts prior to acting, but the visible behavior is determined by the strongest of these forces. Which force dominates the behavior is innate and a part of the personality.  

The sharing, agreements and consent being vital to a bonded committed relationship can only be reached, when both partners are able to influence each other.    Influence in its most basic and general form means, that when one partner expresses a wish, need, suggestion, this information enters the conscious mind of the other, who processes it and arrives at a decision.    Even the conscious decision not to react in a specific situation is the result of an influence.    Blocking the input of information is impeding all influence.  

When mindblind filters as for example denial, willful not listening or projection impede the other's messages from entering the conscious mind, then there cannot be a decision and there is no influence.   Applying the mindblind filters can be unconscious and involuntary, or it can be a conscious decision to generally use mindblind filters against all utterances from the partner or even from all women.  This is an indication of immaturity, temporary psychological troubles or mental illness. 

In a viable bonded committed relationship, both partners allow enough influence from each other.  The mutual influence is distinctly stronger than other influences.    

One difference of the three determinants is the kind of influence possible in the interaction with a partner in a relationship.   

1.  In entry 338 I defined consequencity as an important personality trait.   In entry 339 I enlarged the concept, in which the best decisions are reached by consequency and skepticism.   It is obvious, that my description of what I am looking for in a mindmate, as I have been writing much about already in this blog, implies that he is also predominantly motivated by consequencity and able to be skeptical.  
In entry 338 I described consequencity in reactive situations, when I am willing to do only, what rationally makes sense, while I refuse to yield to unjustified pressure, nagging and bullying.   

But consequencity has also an important proactive aspect.  For a fair balance of giving and receiving it is not sufficient, that the partner initiating the influence upon the other with a suggestion considers this as fair, it is important that both partners agree.   Proactive consequencity means not to just express wishes and suggestion, but also to explain them.   It also means not to insist on anything, not to make demands, even less use pressure, but to discuss the topic until achieving to convince the other, that it is a fair and rational suggestion.   
Refusing something without a discussion is denying the other a fair chance of convincing.  Such a refusal is even an expression of disrespect, whenever it implies, that he other is irrational, has no good reasons or is not able to convince.   Accepting with a hidden grudge every suggestions in preference to the effort of mutually convincing discussions also impedes the fair balance and damages the relationship.  

That means that I am looking for a partner, who agrees with me, that both is important:  to convince and to allow to be convinced, and that this is the only constructive method of sharing decisions.  And the partner is also able to participate in this strategy.       

The following characteristics are a bit exaggerated.   I will call the extremely gullible puppets, and those extremely driven by selfish urges robots.   Both are high hazards of making the relationship toxic for a partner with consequencity, because the influencing is distorted.  

2.  The puppet.   The gullible person is too easily influenced by anybody and anything.   The partner's influence is not strong enough in comparison with external influences leading to selfish or irrational behaviors doing damage to the partner or the relationship.   

Some examples:
The puppet believes rumors, even those about his partner and his behavior is effected by the rumors.  

He gets sucked into religious groups and esoteric sects and invests time and money, that is needed for the relationship, and/or he neglects his partner.   

He is an easy prey to scams and frauds, he is the sheep of the commercials, buying what he is manipulated to.  
He is taken in by any woowoo, like homeopathy or feng-shui and he is immune to reason and doubts.  
His partner can easily influence him temporarily or to make promises, but he cannot be relied upon, because as soon as he is under a different influence, the promise will not be kept and he will change his mind or abandon a started endeavor.   She walks on eggshells never knowing, what he will do the next moment.  

3.  The robot.   The robot is completely determined by his instincts and hedonistic urges.   He is completely selfish.   He has no interaction with others in the sense of perceiving them as persons or as human beings the same as himself with equal rights or needs.   Everything around him is environment, people are the inventory items therein, they are living tools, commodities, utilities, he perceives their existence as justified only for the purpose of serving his convenience.   

For the robot, there is not much difference between a partner and for example a bicycle.   He wants both to function well and takes care of what he considers appropriate maintenance.    He can love the benefits from being able to ride a bicycle very much, and he can love the benefits of having a partner with the same ardency as loving his bicycle.  
He does not notice, it just does not even occur to consider or to wonder, if and that she has a mind of her own, a personality, needs, emotions, opinions, that are hidden from external observations, but nevertheless real.    He is not only oblivious and mindblind to all this, he is also just not interested or bothered.    

She is a good woman and he loves her, as long as she is functional by giving him the required benefits.  If she resists, he automatically perceives and believes her as flawed and dysfunctional.  Treating her according to what he believes to be his entitlement, he is unable to perceive and acknowledge any unwanted or unpleasant behavior of hers ever as a reaction to his treatment.    

Acknowledging a reaction means to understand being in an interaction with another human being.  But according to his attitude, the purpose of a utility is to serve and not to interact and thus not to react in any way except as required by functioning according to expectations..
The robot is completely uninfluenced and unimpacted by whatever she thinks of him or tells him as feedback to his behavior.   Once he has established control over her, he experiences this as having acquired her as his property once and for ever, and he feels entitled to get all his needs met as long as he wants it.   
For him, all is well and he is content, as long as he succeeds to get his needs met, oblivious of and not bothered about what she wants or feels.    She can grow into disrespecting and even loathing him, he is mindblind to this. 

There is no improvement possible until the relationship fails and ends after having become too toxic for her.  While being out of the relationship is a relief for her, if he got his needs met until the end, he then stalks her for years wanting to regain control over his property.   He cannot be stopped, no matter how drastically she tells him that it is over and that she does not want him anymore.   

Her will and wish just cannot influence him to choose one of two reasonable paths, he neither even considers to change his attitude and his behavior towards her, accepting her conditions and attempting to win her back by learning to treat her as she needs to be treated, nor does he accept to leave her alone, if he is not willing to change.   

He only stops stalking and considering her as his property, if he finds another commodity fulfilling his needs at least as well as she did.   In this case, she is discarded from his inventory list as a piece of garbage, that does not warrant any further consideration.   She is to him like the bicycle.   If it is stolen or has disappeared, he claims it back.   As soon as it is replaced by a new one, it can go to the garbage dump without any regret.  

340. The Suffix -ITY

The Suffix -ITY

I just received an email telling me, that 'consequencity' were a nonsense word.    When I defined this word in entry 338 for the use with a specific meaning, I did not even create this word but only hijacked it.   It was already used a few times, as I found out by googling, but I could not discover the exact meaning of those few usages. 

When I hijacked 'consequencity' for my purpose, I followed my fuzzy intuitive feeling for using suffices to modify words.  
The suffix -tas in Latin, -tad in Spanish, -ité in French and -ity in English words with a Latin root converts a verb, adjective or noun into a noun describing a trait, state, property or quality.   Ability, sensitivity, creativity are a few examples.  

I was willing to admit, that it may be a bit of an audacity to define words in a language other than my native German, when the words are not in the dictionary (I am using http://dict.leo.org), until I found this:
http://www.uefap.com/writing/feature/complex_lexcomp.htm
My intuitive understanding of the suffix -ity conforms entirely to the definition of this source.   
Furthermore, according to this text, I had picked up a common practice:
"Adding affixes to existing words (the base) to form new words is common in academic English."

339. Quality of Conscious Decisions - Consequencity and Gullibility

Quality of Conscious Decisions - Consequencity and Gullibility

In entry 338 I was describing the personality trait of consequencity.    In entry 328 I speculated about the evolution of gullibility, but when using the word 'gullibility', this implicitly included credulity.   Credulity and rationality are describing thought processes, while gullibility and consequencity describe the interaction with influences from the environment.    Gullibility includes credulity, consequencity includes rationality and logic, but it is not automatically also the reverse, as acting is also impacted by factors others than cognition.     

The following are some more general thoughts about decisions, consequencity and gullibility.   This entry is concerned with the influence of external sources upon decisions in general.   This includes also the decision of the choice of a partner and the decisions concerning the behavior as a partner in a relationship.   All considerations of the influence of unconscious, 'intuitive' decisions are omitted in this entry.   These are not unimportant, but including them would make this topic too complex. 

The quality of a decision as evaluated by its execution depends upon the amount of skepticism, the freedom of choice and the trait of consequencity or gullibility.   Conscious decisions are based upon the premises of information derived from both, external sources and introspection.     Skepticism and credulity or rationality have an impact upon the quality of the chosen premises, consequencity or gullibility has an impact upon the process of deciding to act in according to the chosen premises and freedom has an impact on the execution of a decision.    

1. Skepticism is a talent and a skill in processing the input of information and stimuli.   It can be compared to many other achievements, where talent is the needed, but the skill has to be developed by learning and training.  Scientific thinking as a part of the education at university certainly is one good method to develop skepticism.   Skepticism is probably distributed along a bell curve.    High skepticism allows a better choice of the most appropriate information to be used in a decision.    Credulity includes unverified believes into the premises, incredulity and rationality refuse all believes, but skepticism helps to make the best choice of premises with a high probability of being valid.
   
2. Decisions can only be executed they way they are derived from the premises, when there is the freedom to act in accordance.    When people are coerced by circumstances, they often yield and do, what they do not want to do.  They end up suffering cognitive dissonance.
   
3. Between light and darkness, there is a scale of shades.    But darkness as one end is absolute, it is the complete absence of light, while all the rest of the scale means more or less of light.   There is always darkness, when there is no light, but the light is stronger than the darkness, and the shades of light deactivate the power of darkness upon the visual perception of humans and many animals.  
   This metaphor is a good description of the scale between gullibility at one end and consequencity at the other.   There is one limitation, though.   To human perception, there is always either light or darkness, even with closed eyes.   There is no perception of a nothing, that is neither light nor darkness.    But while there are no conscious decisions when there is neither gullibility nor consequencity, there is still behavior, determined by instincts alone.  
   Therefore I am limiting this entry to conscious decisions that require human cognition, defined in a simplified way by the presence of enough rationality to understand simple if-then logic and contingencies.   
   Then in analogy to my metaphor, a human decision can be fully derived by consequencity only in the absence of all gullibility, while gullibility more or less deactivates consequencity depending on the strength of gullibility. 
   
   This leads to a more precise definition of consequencity as a personality trait, which includes not only the complete absence of gullibility, but also a low level thereof. 

A person with high skepticism and high consequencity has the best predisposition to make good decisions, but this is not automatically predetermining optimized decisions.   While religion and simple quackeries like homeopathy are easy to discard and to reject, there are often situations, in which a person is impeded by the inability or impossibility to evaluate information to react in an appropriate way to an influence.   
Modern life is too complex to be well informed about everything, many claims are spread, of which the verifications are beyond reach, some important premises can be overlooked or are not available, there are misunderstandings, misinterpretations, manipulations, lies and there are more possible interferences.    A person can often be in the situation, that a decision is required or expected, while there is no way to choose or access enough valid premises.   

For gullible people, this is no obstacle, they let themselves be influenced by others without even hesitating.   But this situation leads people with predominant consequencity either into inertia, or they make consciously a haphazard decision by flipping a coin or some similar method, but they refuse to be influenced by any irrationality, and that makes them appear as stubborn and obstinate.    Another possible mistake is rejecting proffered good premises as irrational.    

High skepticism and high consequencity together help to enhance the quality of decisions, but this is limited by many other factors, and many decisions later on turn out to have been a mistake.   This includes the unfortunate choice of an incompatible partner.  

338. Consequencity

Consequencity

 
Sometimes the existence or absence of a word with a specific meaning in different languages is an indication of possible cultural differences.  

The words 'consequence' in English and 'Konsequenz' in German are a good example.    Only in German the word has a second meaning, that describes a personality trait.    According to a German definition, this second meaning could roughly be translated as tenacity, pertinacity, inveteracy.   But this is not a sufficient definition of this trait, which from now on I will call consequencity.   I found this word only four times in Google, with no clear meaning or definition.   Therefore I have hijacked this word and I will use it henceforth.

Consequencity is a significant part of my personality.   Sometimes I am mistaken for being stubborn or obstinate, but this is not the case, because I am always open and even motivated to being convinced by the input of information.

Rationality and logic are a method of problem solving and deciding.    Consequencity takes this one step further to also acting and behaving based upon rationality and logic.    The essence of rationality and consequencity is the collecting and evaluating of all available external and internal information, the entire combination of facts, evidence, introspection, memorized experience as the premises, and then not only drawing logical conclusions, but also sticking to them, until the premises change.   Only altered premises are a valid justification to change the decision and the behavior.    Consequencity means, that behavior will be changed only as a result of changed premises, but not under irrational and haphazard influences.  Consequencity is behavioral consistency with a conclusion, as long as the conclusion is valid.   

One example is nagging.   Many people give in to nagging and do, what they do not want to do, to stop being annoyed, pressured and stressed.    The nagging person learns, that nagging is successful and uses it more and more often.   
For a person with consequencity, if a 'no' is a 'no' the first time, then it remains a 'no' and nagging is futile.   Only if the other person supplies convincing input to change the premises, this can lead to a reevaluation of the issue and a possible change towards a 'yes'.    

Domination by the method of bullying a disagreeing target is another example.    

A relationship between a person with strong consequencity and someone, who due to his entitlement delusion expects beyond doubt to get everything he wants by merely expressing a demand is a very toxic constellation.   He feels entitled to use aggression, pressure and intimidation, when his demands are not immediately followed by compliance.   Most victims of a bully give in to get temporary relief, thus they reinforce the bully to use intimidation more and more frequently.   The price for short term relief is long-term enhancement of their own plight.   
The person with consequencity refuses to yield to being bullied, s/he will not comply with demands, unless and until the demand is justified by shared convincing premises.   In a relationship, this means it to be inside the framework of a fair balance of giving and receiving and the agreements from the relationship deal.    Resisting the bully is achieved at very high emotional costs.  Being the target of anger and rage and persisting intimidation drains and exhausts anybody to the limits of endurance.      If the bully has already learned elsewhere, how successful intimidation can be, then he will not easily stop this method.
Being bullied and dominated is the highway to devastation.  The more a woman is submissive and conciliatory, the more this prolongs the process, while consequencity accelerates it and the limit of endurance is reached faster.   


To sum it up:  If someone wants to influence the behavior of a person with strong consequencity, there is only one successful method.   It is to give a compellingly valid reason to do it.   While it is easy to refuse anything irrational, it is difficult to resist stringently convincing reasons. The behavior of a person with consequencity can only be influenced by constructive communication or else at the point of a gun.   

I am willing to give people, what is fair, I have compassion for people's needs, I am willing to consider and to comply with wishes and suggestions, when I am honored with convincing reasons.  But if someone attempts irrational methods of coercion or manipulation, then they get nothing from me except repugnance.    Anybody, who wants or needs to dominate, should keep away from me, as the catastrophe would be unavoidable.  

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.      

336. Amending or Preventive Responsibility

Amending or Preventive Responsibility

I do not expect from a man to make me happy as a onesided activity of his.  

Happiness depends on the coaction of

• the wise choice of a compatible partner, who is able to fulfill all important relationship needs.
• a relationship deal as a carved in stone agreement concerning the fulfillment of each other's relationship needs, this being the precondition for getting involved.

Besides relationship needs for proactive behavior there are needs for abstinence behavior, which are at least equally important.   Often people are well aware of their expectations of a partner's specific proactive behaviors, while they cannot foresee all future abstinence needs.    Obviously, a person cannot know or think of all behaviors, by which s/he will feel hurt, disturbed, annoyed and even damaged, until having experienced them for the first time in this relationship.  

Therefore, it is easy to make a comprehensive list of proactive behaviors to be included in the relationship deal.   But it is difficult to include all abstinence behaviors, while not knowing in advance, which behaviors will cause disruption in the future.   

Therefore responsibility is of paramount importance.    A responsible person is motivated to do no harm to another, and if harm is done, is motivated to undo it or compensate for it.  

Taking responsibility or not can have several patterns.

1. Transgressions
   
   A transgression means, that the transgressor causes harm knowing in advance, that his behavior is harmful, therefore he has a choice to cause the harm or to refrain.  
   1.1.  No responsibility
   The transgressor feels either entitled to his transgressions or he feels entitled to excuse and exonerate himself in disagreement with the victim.
   1.2.  Extrinsic amending responsibility
   The transgressor does not take responsibility as in 1.1, but he makes amends for the sole purpose of precluding bad consequences for himself.   He considers the transgression as a mere mistake in reaching his own purpose.  
   
   When there are transgressions, the relationship is doomed.  
   
   
2. Accidental harm
   
   Accidental harm is often caused as a consequence of ignorance, carelessness, oversight, distraction.
   
   2.1. No responsibility
   An emotional moron is not able to take responsibility for any harm he ever does, instead he excuses and exonerates himself, even in disagreement with the victim.   In this case, the relationship is doomed.
   2.2. Intrinsic amending responsibility
   A person feels and accepts responsible for all the harm, that he does, once it comes to his awareness.  Then he apologizes, feels sincerely sorry and makes amends.   But he is not bothered, until the harm is done and it is too late to avoid it.   Life with him is a roller coaster of the cycles of harm and amends, often as a repetition of the same hurtful behavior.  Sincere apologies and amends are a way of restoring harmony, but every harm causes nevertheless sufferings, that should be avoided and prevented.
   2.3. Preventive responsibility
   This is an important requirement for happiness in a committed relationship.   It means, that a partner considers the consequences of his behavior upon the other, before he acts, while he still has a choice.   If he does not know, how his behavior would impact his partner, he consults her, before he proceeds.   If he has done accidental harm, he not only makes amends for what has been done, but he focuses upon learning, how not to repeat the same or similar harm in the future.   
   He cares for her emotional wellbeing, and he expresses this in his attempts to learn to know her well enough to know, what specific behaviors to avoid as being especially hurtful, annoying and discomforting for her.  
   

Bonded committed partners, who both are motivated by preventive responsibility, are sharing a learning process, during which they will succeed to cause less and less harm to each other, the longer they are together.  While for instinct driven people, especially men, the importance of a relationship fades along with the initial physical infatuation, for bonded and committed companions, the relationship develops towards more happiness over time.    

That is, what I wish to happen with my mindmate to be found.  

335. Interpreting the Past

Interpreting the Past
Knowing past behavior of people helps to estimate the probability of what behavior can be expected from them in the future.  

Knowing the reasons, why a man's last relationship ended, is a valuable indicator for the evaluation, if he has the qualities to be a bonded companion, or if he is more driven by instinct and infatuation and a high risk.   This can be an important information in the decision, if a man is compatible or not. 
This of course is only possible, if he reveals the reasons with honesty and sincerity.   Dishonesty is an additional problem.  

1.   A bonding and committing partner, who predominantly needs a companion, ends a relationship only,

• if the other has done an unforgivable wrong like cheating.
• if the other's behavior is hurtful, morally unacceptable and/or selfish, and there is a refusal to modify this behavior.
• if the other leaves for selfish, inconsiderate and irresponsible reasons.   
• if there is an agreement to end the relationship as the consequence of unsolvable conflicts, and they have not enough in common to be companions. 

Each of these reasons is grave enough to end all contact along with ending the relationship. 
  
If a man agrees, that these are the only acceptable reasons to end a relationship, then there is a low risk of being dumped by him.   The relationship can be reliable, as long as my behavior is correct, and this is in my own power.  

2.  If a man has dumped his ex for selfish reasons, or if he has driven her away by bad treatment, then this is a big red flag, if not a dealbreaker.   Of course, there is a low probability, that he has learned a lesson, feels guilty and remorse and would not repeat his damaging behavior.   This needs careful evaluation, but there is a big risk of being hurt and dumped too.  

3.  If a man has ended a relationship, but is still close friends with his ex, then this is an absolute dealbreaker.  Becoming deeply hurt by such a man is unavoidable.  Obviously his ex has all the qualities to be a companion, else he could not feel attached to her as to a close friend and else he would not feel the need to continue contact with her.   But being attached enough to be companions is not enough for him as a basis for a relationship, otherwise he would still be with her.   
Such a man is obviously someone so much driven and determined by his instincts, that for him the passion of infatuation is the main motivation for a relationship, while companionship alone is not sufficient.    When infatuation wears off, like it always does, he moves on, collecting a growing harem of exes on the way.  

With such a man, there can never be the reliability of a relationship as a safe haven, because the fading of his infatuation is beyond my influence.   It is in my power to treat him correctly, to do my share in a fair deal of giving and receiving, to keep him in homeostasis.  This is, what I have influence upon, but it is not enough to keep him.   Once his infatuation is gone, I am unable to stop him from reducing me to one more member of his harem of deactivated intimate partners, in the case of my acquiescence with the harem insertion.   The alternative is being dumped, when he moves on in search of a new infatuation.    

334. One Year of This Blog

334.   One Year of This Blog

Yesterday a year ago, I started this blog.   I have been adding an entry nearly every day, on a variety of topics.   I was expecting the consequence of the increase in text as being found more and more often in google searches.   Thus I was hoping, that my mindmate would be interested in the same topics as I do and stumble upon my blog.

But so far, all my expectations were wrong, and I am still alone and lonely.   Even though there was a steady increase of text, there is no increase in the number of page views.    During one year, there were on average about 550 page views per month, both from google searches and from links in my profiles on matchmaking sites.    But with the exception of a peak in the months of October, November and December, the number of page views continues steadily around and slightly below 500 per month.   Also page views are only indications, that someone has clicked on a page, this of course is not revealing, if the page was also read.     

There is nothing wrong with me.   But I am one of the victims of the gender misalignment.   While there is roughly an equal number of men and women in western societies, the matching by equality is as distorted as is a wrongly buttoned coat.    I already described the problem in entry 211.   Too many men are driven by their instinctive wish to dominate to choose a mate, who is less educated and financially weak, and by their instinctive wish to procreate to chose a mate, who is younger.   

From entry 211:  "As a result, there is a disequilibrium in the availability of mates.   On the low end, all the stupid, uneducated and in some other way undesirable men are left without a mate.  On the high end the educated and intelligent women cannot find a mate, who is adequate, an equal and has emotional intelligence."
Of course, I include in the category of low end men as indesirable also narcissists, psychopaths, emotional morons and all other kinds of jerks.

I see no solution to this unfortunate situation, all I can do is continue my search for one of those rare men, who value equality, not only in theory, but also in their behavior and their mate preference.   As lonely as I may get, I will never sink as low as accepting someone from the low end.   
But in my personal value system, money does not contribute to my subjective definition of the low end.  That gives me one advantage over the majority of high end women, who want only a wealthy man.     If someone is all of what I want in a man, I will gladly accept him, no matter, how poor he may be, even if he is on welfare, as long as he has no debts and is responsible in his spending habits.  

333. Hortensia

Hortensia

332. A Mythological Winner of the Darwin Award

A Mythological Winner of the Darwin Award

Someone mentioned the Greek mythological story of Hero and Leander in an email and we disagreed about the interpretation.   He perceives the story as romantic, blaming the tragic end entirely on the carelessness of Hero, while I think that Leander is a fool, who deserves the Darwin award.  

"Hero and Leander,  two lovers celebrated in Greek legend. Hero, virgin priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos, was seen at a festival by Leander of Abydos; they fell in love, and he swam the Hellespont at night to visit her, guided by a light from her tower. One stormy night the light was extinguished, and Leander was drowned; Hero, seeing his body, drowned herself likewise."
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/263413/Hero-and-Leander

There is a longer text, from where the following quotes are taken:
http://www.maicar.com/GML/Hero.html

"This unstable arrangement did not last more than the warm season."

He obviously continued his nightly swimming for a considerable time without even considering to improve his method of seeing her.  

"in AD 1810, by the English poet Lord Byron, who swam from Sestus to Abydus in one hour and ten minutes". 

Someone doing this twice every night, needed rest in the day time.   That means, that Leander was certainly not a hard working laborer, but had enough money to have options. 

Therefore he had alternatives to risking his life:

• He could have bought a boat and rowed or sailed.  
• He could have moved to live somewhere near her, so he could visit her without crossing the water.
• He could have eloped with her to a place, where nobody knew about her obligation to remain a priestess.   

Seen from a rational perspective, he was a fool, who brought his death upon himself.   That is, why he deserves the Darwin award.   And if she never suggested less risky options, she was as much a fool as he.


But this is a mythological tale, and only interpreting it like I did above is missing an important aspect of reading such old tales.   As much as its message of Hero and Leander being role models is obsolete, the story is an interesting illustration of how the subconscious animal instincts are represented consciously by attitudes. 
A mythological story tells, what is commonly accepted as normal at the times of its origin.   

By animal instincts, female breeders are driven to prefer the genes of the strongest and most daring studs, surviving all risks to his life before being allowed to procreate.  In this story, Hero's instincts did not allow her to choose a prudent, intelligent male using the safety of a boat, just as Leander's instincts drove him to risk his life to win her favors, instead of wooing a woman preferring intelligence.   

The first known written sources of this story date back not much more than 2000 years.   But maybe the tale is much older and dates back to the times before the evolution of rational thinking had an influence upon the choice of a mate.   Here I am speculating again.  
If I would start to analyze more old myths, fables and fairy tales, many could probably be reduced to a positive attitude towards instinctive behaviors not only of breeding, but also of ingroup-outgroup, of hierarchy forming, enhanced by gullibility.  

331. The Railway Metaphor of Behavior

The Railway Metaphor of Behavior

In previous entries I have compared the human behavior with the movements of a car.    Acceleration being the instincts, the brake being rationality, both together determining, how much someone is driven by instincts, with the stirring wheel modifying the direction according to external influences.  
I have been made aware of the fact, that this is an insufficient metaphor.   Because it restricts the force of rationality to controlling the instincts, without being a positive force by itself.

Here is a better metaphor:  
Humans are like a train with two locomotives, one at each end.   The rail has two directions, one towards rational, individual goals, the other towards the instinctive goals of the survival of the species.    Upon the rails, the direction of the train is determined by the net strength resulting from the relative power of both engines.  This is determining the behavior as either more instinctive or more rational.     

There are many rails and many junctions.   Decisions are like the switches on the junctions, they are operated by education and by circumstances.   Switches are either between rational alternatives in one direction or between instinctive alternatives in the other.
Both engines have an innate maximum power, but they also have an accelerator and a brake built in, which are operated by education and circumstances.  
If one engine is much stronger than the other, the train moves in one direction only, with varying speed.  
If both engines are of similar power, the train oscillates between both directions.   
If there is no junction, the train does not get very far, else the train changes rails and goes on a zigzag course.   
Dishomeostasis (entry 330) is a force on the accelerator of either of the engines, depending if it is a physical, instinctive need or an emotional and intellectual need.    The impact of this force seizes, when reaching homeostasis and is reactivated at the recurrence of the dishomeostasis.   

In the case of the zigzag course, there can be rational decisions, while moving in one direction, alternating with instinctive decisions when moving in the opposite direction.

330. Homeostasis and Compatibility

Homeostasis and Compatibility

When people experience dishomeostasis, it is an unpleasant state of discomfort, which causes urges, drives and compulsions to restore homeostasis.    Homeostasis is a neutral state.  
The process of restoring homeostasis is called homeostation.     Attempting to change from the neutral state to a state of pleasure, joy or bliss is not homeostation.   

Focusing in this entry on homeostasis does not in any way deny the importance of a couple sharing fun, joy, pleasure, bliss or any form of happy feelings as an additional benefit of a relationship.   But homeostasis is needed as the base line.   No matter, how much pleasure and joy a man may bring to a woman, there is a disruption, as long as he also causes her dishomeostasis.    A couple needs to first create homeostasis for both partners, before they can start attempts to add happiness to it.

Dishomeostasis disturbs, disrupts or disabled other motivations, interests, perceptions, behaviors, even morals.  
An example.   A very hungry person has difficulties to focus the attention on processing any information like reading or communicating.   Hungry people steal or become cannibals in extreme situation.   A person, who is not hungry, is capable to rationally decide at any moment, if he prefers to spend money on food or on a book or a concert ticket.  

Homeostation can be:

1. painful:
   Being freed from tooth ache requires the painful treatment by the dentist.
2. neutral
   Headache can be ended by taking a painkiller.
   In the case of an addiction, what previously caused pleasure, only reduces the suffering of withdrawal.
3. pleasant
   Eating is usually experienced as pleasure.
   Solving puzzles, a good book or a movie are reducing the dishomeostasis of curiosity and need for information.
4. stressing
   When someone ends a situation of danger by flight or fight, this reduced the dishomeostasis of fear.
   When two persons solve a conflict by communication, this improves the relationship, but can cause a lot of stress.

I claim:
One requirement for compatibility of a couple is the successful homeostation for both partners.  
Two persons are incompatible, when there are unsolvable conflicts between their homeostations.    

A compatible couple shares activities, that serve the homeostation of both and fulfill the relationship needs of both.   The homeostation of only one partner is of no or of little cost to the other.   
It is banal to mention, that eating together, physical contact and enjoying a good movie together and communicating about everything enhances shared homeostasis.    Also it is obvious, that the homeostation by visiting a dentist or by taking a pain killer is not interfering with the other.   Spending time with differing hobbies and interests can also be neutral, if it is balanced, not expensive and based upon agreement, like for example when one wants to go jogging and the other prefers to read a book.  

An incompatible couple has conflicts, because either the homeostation of one partner causes dishomeostation of the other or they compete over limited resources for the homeostation of either of them.   One partner is not able to supply the other's homeostasis by fulfilling the relationship needs.   
Example 1:   A man has a costly and dangerous hobby, like riding a motorcycle or climbing Mount Everest.   For him as a thrill seeker, this reduces his need for stimulation and is homeostation.   But it creates dishomeostasis in a woman, if she is someone, for whom it creates fears and worries, while she needs the homeostasis of feeling safe with a man, who is reliably there for her.    It also is a competition for money, which she wants to invest in something else, that reduces her fears, like having her own car to be safe when working late at night.   
Example 2:  A woman wants a monogamous relationship.  A man wants a form of polygamy, either by cheating on her or by continued contact with exes.    If he is driven by his instincts towards the other women, this is his homeostation, which causes dishomeostasis in the woman, who wants to have mutual exclusivity.  
Example 3:  One partner has the need of the emotional homeostasis of harmony by resolving conflicts by communication.    The other wants the harmony of avoiding conflicts.    For one partner, the attempt to communicate is the attempt of homeostation, which is causing dishomeostasis in the other.   For the other partner, the avoidance to communicate is an attempt of homeostation, which is causing dishomeostasis in the other.   

Homeostation conflicts can only be avoided by a wise choice of a partner.  

1. The partner has the same needs, interests and hobbies, so that the main homeostation in the relationship is by shared activities.
2. The relative importance of a relationship compared with other aspects of life is about the same for both partners. 
   

   2.1.  The partner is someone, for whom being a partner in a relationship is of vital importance.   He is someone, for whom the relationship, the partner have priority over anything else.  He resolves conflicts in favor of the relationship and experiences this not as a sacrifice, but as the fair return for the benefits of being together.  
   In my examples above, a wise choice for a woman like me is to avoid a man, who needs his dangerous hobbies, who needs his exes and who does not value the relationship enough to invest time and stress to resolve problems by communication.   

   2.2.   Equally for both, the partner is only of minor importance. 
   For example, if only one partner has children, then the homeostation of the partner, who is emotionally addicted to the contact with the bearers of his genes, reduces the place available for a partner in his life.    For a childfree partner, this creates dishomeostasis in the relationship need of being important.   But when both have children, there is a balance, because both get their homeostasis from their offspring and do not expect it from a partner.

3. The partner is aware of his own individual dishomeostasis and of the effect of it upon others.  
   
   
   

  

329. Lunar Eclipse

the lunar eclipse ending

the full moon again

328. The Evolution of Gullibility

The Evolution of Gullibility

This again is speculation.

I have been wondering before, if the mental development of children could be a fast repetition of the evolution of cognition over the 6 million years since the time, when the evolution of our ancestors branched off from that of the ancestors of today's chimpanzees.   
Seen from our perspective, a contemporary child at the age of four has both the mental and the physical development of this age group after having been alive four years.  
I consider it as possible, that at some time in the past, there had been human ancestors having the same mental abilities as for example has a four year old today, but having an adult body and being much older and having reached full maturity.    While their survival and procreation was determined by animal instincts, their cognition enabled them to adapt better to their environment than mere animals.   

To simplify and illustrate this, I compare three phases of the evolution of acquiring the knowledge of what to eat and what not.  The survival of the fittest and natural selection depended on eating, what is beneficial, and avoiding to eat, what is poisonous.    

1.  The phase of simple imitation
In this phase, our human ancestors learned like other animals from observation, when others ate berries and showed delight, and they learned by observation, if someone was killed by a poisonous snake and died immediately.   Learning was restricted to the observation of contingencies.   They could learn to avoid such snakes, but they could not learn to avoid poisonous berries, that had effects only hours later.

2.  The phase of cognitive imitation
In this phase, humans had evolved a memory and a simple way of communication, either by signs or by a rudimentary language, like the four year olds in the above example.  Thus they were able to learn delayed contingencies, and they could copy the memorized contingencies engraved in other people's brains into their own and imitate the apparently adequate behavior.  
If several humans had eaten poisonous berries and got sick or died hours or even days later, the survivors and the observers were able to learn the delayed contingencies.  They learned to avoid these berries in the future.
The knowledge, which berries are edible and which are poisonous, was transmitted not only by observation, but also by communicating the information, as was other information about where to find food, how to make the best tools, use fire and other survival skills.

This had two consequences: 

• People learned not only correct contingencies like what berries are poisonous, but also coincidences as wrong contingencies. 
• Those who believed, what they were told, and based their behavior upon the belief, increased their chances to survive and to procreate.

That was the beginning of the natural selection favoring gullibility as a temporary advantage for fitness.  

• The persons, who followed in their behavior the blind belief not to eat the berries indicated as poisonous, no matter if they understood the reason or not, lived longer than those, who did not follow the belief. 
  But it made no difference for the survival and fitness of those, who refrained from eating the poisonous berries, if they also prostrated to the sun every morning or not.    
  As a consequence, those who believed too little were eliminated by natural selection, those who believed too much, survived the same as those, who only believed, what was essential for survival.  
• The inability to discriminate between coincidence and contingency led to the false religious believes to be able to control the future and the environment by rituals, sacrifices, prayers and magic thinking.   In the absence of better survival strategies, these served as a powerful psychological crutch, because it

• reduced anxieties, insecurities and led to more daring behaviors, adding fitness to the survivors of the endeavors.     
• served as a placebo effect for healing.
• instigated irrational behaviors leading by coincidence to beneficial discoveries.  

This evolution of a simple cognition was sufficient for the life of hunters and gatherers, who were using fire and making simple tools.   The ability to doubt had not yet evolved, therefore instinctivity was in full power over the behavior, it was only aided by gullibility.  

3.  The phase of rationality
When agriculture started about 10,000 years ago, this required more rational cognition than the simple acceptance of every coincidence also as a contingency.   Those who were too much guided by wrongly believed coincidences risked starvation.   The survival depended more and more on rational procedures to develop elaborated tools and skills like metallurgy.  

Gullibility as a survival skill had become obsolete.   But unfortunately, the development of the infant's brain had still to go through the phase of gullibility before reaching the ability of fully rational cognition.   Therefore, the evolution of the brain could not eliminate gullibility, instead it branched inside the brain into the parallel evolution of rationality alongside with coexistent gullibility.   Rationality thrived only in the limited sphere of practical life, where evidence was available to be experienced, while the power of gullibility as a psychological crutch was not overridden.   
As a result, farmers were able to learn, that (in the German climate) they needed to plant vegetables in spring and not in autumn, if they wanted to harvest food.   But they never evolved enough rationality to fully discard unproven believes like the one to pray for a good harvest or to do the planting under the full moon.     

Since rationality is still a fairly recent result of evolution, human brains have two incongruent tendencies, gullibility and instinctivity as the older forces competing with the contradictory force of rationality and complex cognition.   For a minority of the vanguard of having evolved the farthest, rationality is stronger than gullibility and instinctivity, but the majority of people is still determined by the same gullibility as in the phase of mental imitation.  

One important step from gullibility to rationality is the ability to doubt, not only the input from the environment including other persons, but also the doubt of the benefits of the own urges and impulses.  The most rationally evolved people are those least determined by instinct.    The doubting person, who ate the poisonous berries, died and did not contribute the ability to doubt to the gene pool.   The doubting person, who started to experiment by feeding the berries to an animal or to the captives of another tribe, survived and added rationality to the gene pool.    (He also added the cruelty to outgroup members, but that is not the topic here.)

327. Dopamine, Risk and Migration

Dopamine, Risk and Migration

In the entry 326 I attempted to explain, why I fill the gaps of my knowledge with speculations to complete my theory of mind.   

But once in a while, I find delayed justification for my speculations.   In entry 106 (on Migration, Evolution, Cultural Differences), I was wondering, if what I perceived as a cultural difference between the higher risk tolerance in the USA compared with Germany, could be explained by the self-selection being a consequence of migration.   

Today I watched course 16 of the lecture by UCLA Prof. Jay Phelan on Life, Concepts and Issues.   He mentions a genetic difference in the effect of dopamine receptors in the brain upon the personality influencing the risk taking tendencies.
http://www.cosmolearning.com/video-lectures/lecture-16-20/  

His mentioning a study on migration made me curious and I found the research paper connecting DRD4 (DR=dopamine receptor) polymorphism with migration:
http://www.cbd.ucla.edu/downloads/Chen_et_al-DRD4_&_migration.pdf
According to the authors, the genetic disposition was found in 22% of Europeans in the US, but only in 16% of Danes, 19% of Swedes, 10% of Finns and 18% of Spanish.

I have crudely distinguished between Hedonists and Epicureans as being more or less driven by instinct rather than guided by their cognition (entries 131, 157, 158, 222).   I called it instinct, but it seems also connected with the DRD4 polymorphism.   I have to ponder about this.  

326. Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind
I have just been reading a discussion about the quality of the research in evolutionary psychology, and about the misrepresentation of results.     Sometimes research is presented on the web or by the media in a way, that does not enable the readers to evaluate, if it is flawed or based upon careful procedures and highly significant statistics.    

In my own stance, evolutionary psychology is the foundation of my theory of mind.   

"Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

The better people's theory of mind, the better they can understand and predict other people's behavior, and the better they can protect themselves.

About 15 years ago, I started to learn about evolutionary psychology, and the result was a drastic change of my theory of mind.  

Before then, I thought that most men were good and decent.  I projected, that they would also want a monogamous relationship, getting automatically bonded by entering a physically intimate relationship.   I considered promiscuous men as an unpleasant minority of animals, whom I perceived as sick.   I had the wrong impression, that the majority of men were decent and monogamous, but hidden somewhere, while I experienced it as my personal misfortune, when I was too often targeted as prey by disgusting predators hoping to gain access to my body.   (Stories in entries 318 and 119 are examples.)    My flawed theory of mind caused me to feel puzzled, why I was not honored by men with the intellectually valuable communication, that I craved for.

Since my learning about evolutionary psychology, I have developed a much more realistic theory of mind, which I have been elaborating in this blog.   I know by now, that the majority of men are driven to some more or less detrimental extent by the same instincts as animals.   Only a minority of men have the rare talent of being able to treat a woman as an equal, of being fully aware of her having a personality and of being able to communicate with her intellectually.   Only a minority of men have the rare quality of not being blurred by the instinctive trigger of a woman's body.    My quest is finding one of them as a mindmate.

Evolutionary psychology supplied me with the paradigm for my new theory of mind.   I have been reading a lot about this subject, I have attempted to attribute some probability to whatever seems plausible.   Where I have not yet found better information, I have even been speculating.    I make no claims about scientific truth of any kind.    

A relationship cannot be better than the theory of mind, upon which it is based, and this implies, that both partners need to share the same theory of mind.    

325. Garden - 2

324. Garden

Blackberry Blossoms

Currants

323. Postscriptum to Entry 321 (The Backlash)

Postscriptum to Entry 321 (The Backlash)
This is one more example, that I often experience thoughts as my own ideas, but others already had them before me.   The loss of originality is the gain of knowing, that there are likeminded people out there.  

I just discovered an article, that has a similar ideas as I wrote in entry 321: 

Welcome to the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices have swirled into oblivion like shampoo down the shower drain and Cro-Magnons once again drag women by the hair into their caves—and the women love every minute of it. Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of courtship as a prelude to sex: Not just marriage (that went years ago with the sexual revolution and the mass-marketing of the birth-control pill) or formal dating (the hookup culture finished that)—but amorous preliminaries and other civilities once regarded as elementary, at least among the college-educated classes.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/new-dating-game?page=2

322. Deviance a Relapse to Caveman Behavior?

Deviance a Relapse to Caveman Behavior?

The following are only speculations.

Exhibitionism is a good example of a deviant and shocking behavior, that could maybe explained as a relapse to cavemen behavior.  

Once I was on my way up to the pension on the top floor of a large building, when a man with his trousers open followed me up the staircase.    When I rang the bell, he luckily turned around and left.   I was scared and disgusted, but since then I also have always been puzzled, why on earth a man would do this.  


In entry 304 about Emotional Morons and the Evolution of Cognition I already speculated about cave people at some time in the past having had the intellectual abilities of today's small children.   They could have had a full grown body still surviving and procreating by animal instincts but already with the advantages of a child's intelligence as a helpful tool.  

But to speculate even further, I am wondering, if not all instinctive behavior of our ancestors is still wired somewhere deep into our brains but is buried under layers of later evolutionary additions and modifications.   Maybe a lot of behaviors, that today appear weird, sick, impaired, dysfunctional are such prehistoric automatic dispositions taking control over the behavior of some people?

Maybe the behavior, that today is deviant exhibitionism, is an example of what has been normal behavior of the male cave men millions or hundred thousands of years ago.    A cave man with the intellect of a small child and only a rudimentary simple language but having an adult body may have instinctively expressed his desire to procreate by approaching a female presenting his private parts to her with an unmistakable gesture.   
Maybe today's exhibitionists are doing the socially acceptable thing just 2 million years too late?

321. The Backlash to Promiscuity

The Backlash to Promiscuity
This continues entry 320.

From the 1960s onwards, two technological and scientific developments drastically changed the everyday life of people.

1. The invention of the birth control pill as an easy and highly reliable method has overriden the effects of the concealed ovulation (more in entry 319) as the mechanism ascertaining the survival of the species by enough unwanted breeding.
2. The development of cheap methods for natural looking representations of reality by color TV, videos, movies and cheap color print media enabled technically the subsequent oversexation and desensitization to nakedness, pornography and the habituation to and acceptation of promiscuity as normal, that was finally aggravated by the Internet. 
   Before novels became affordable to the general population, men had their affliction but where restricted mainly to their imagination, while they were not in a relationship.   Then dirty novels added to this but there was still the limitation to imagination.  
   Only the realistic quality of still and even more of moving pictures has the same strong effect on the animal brain, that has evolved as responsiveness to real visual stimuli during a time, when there were no pictures.   The afflicted men's brain cannot distinguish between seeing a real woman's naked body and a picture or movie of it.   His cognition can, but when the instincts are stronger, that does not help him to resist the effect.

This has lead to a polarization of society and the beginning of two disparate developments for people with high and with low AQs (Animality Quotient - more in entries 316 and 317).

1. The evolution of the human cognition has reached a point, where decent intelligent low AQ people are less and less inclined and motivated to breed.   Many decent, highly evolved and educated people became happy childfree couples, since remaining childfree had become possible for the first time in history.    Men with a low AQ are not very much at risk to be seriously damaged and desensitized by the oversexation of everyday life.  Their predominant need is to share their life with a companion.   They are able to preserve their decency and continue to perceive a woman as a person with a brain.   
   
2. But for those with a relatively high AQ the oversexation of everyday life has started a full backlash in mainstream society towards promiscuity, that is still continuing. 
   
   
   • Men have become desensitized to the detrimental consequences of the oversexation of society, pornography and naked pictures selling stuff to susceptible fools as a normal part of everyday life.   The higher a man's AQ, the more he is overwhelmed and made mentally dysfunctional by this ubiquitous effect upon his perception.
     Before the backlash, boys in an intact home grew up with the role model of decent parents in a monogamous relationship, and the boy was mentally and emotionally prepared to become a monogamous partner, until and unless unfortunate influences destroyed this promiscuity inhibition.    Now the flooding with oversexation already at prepuberty age makes boys believe promiscuous behavior to be normal and morally correct, before they are even old enough to fall in love and experience the joy of monogamous bonding.  
     This unfortunate situation is enhanced by the communication of the web, where even the worst men can find like minded others for the reinforcement of their attitude of using women as commodities for their instincts being acceptable behavior.  
     
   • Foolish women have also been brainwashed and desensitized.   They cover themselves less and less, until their normal and everyday way of dressing has become dangerously provocative.   They do this to compete with the pictures flooding the men's perception.    Just as high AQ men's animal reactions cannot distinguish between real bodies and pictures, high AQ women cannot distinguish between competing with other women or with pictures for the genes of the alpha males.   

Consequently society is heading back to the situation of scenario 1 in entry 320, where men are permanently triggered by visual stimulation into outbreaks of their affliction, their reason blurred by their instincts.  
Before the backlash, men had been compelled to monogamy by the obligation to provide for their progeny and by the limited availability of promiscuous women.    
Since the start of the backlash, all this has changed.   Men are returning to their previous state of oblivion of the possibility, that a woman can be an equal partner for intellectual communication.   They are deprived of the chance to ever experience this.   Having their instincts triggered all the time, they are unable to even notice and appreciate women for anything but their bodies.   In spite of the evolution of the brain, men's affliction prevails with unaltered force.   

Those men, who are the slaves of their instincts in an oversexed world, usually do not plan to procreate, when they are overwhelmed by their instinct to succumb to their promiscuity.   But the provocative brainwashed women with the highest AQ, who are triggering the men's instincts are those, who do this because they are driven to breed.    

As a result, the high AQ people, whose instinctivity is stronger then their cognition, continue breeding and thus the natural selection will favor the high AQ.  A change of the gene pool can be expected as a long term effect of the backlash.  The low AQ people reduce or stop breeding.  

This process of polarization can take two directions in the future:

• If further evolution of the cognition augments the low AQ and thus childfree proportion of the population, homo sapiens will get extinct.
• If the backlash continues and the breeding is done mainly by the high AQ segment of the population, society will end up like the cave people in scenario 1, fully driven by their uninhibited exposure and triggering of instinct, promiscuously breeding.  

320. Clothing and the Evolution of Cognition

Clothing and the Evolution of Cognition 

In the entry 313 I declared my disagreement with the nudists' myth, that nakedness were natural and without any effect on their perception.     
I have been pondering over this a bit more.  The following speculations are the result.   

More than 2 million years old stone tools and bones including teeth have been found, indicating that homo habilis was an omnivore.   Therefore If this species was not hunting then at least scavenging the leftovers of carnivorous animals.  Using hides as a protection against cold and rain was an obvious thing to do.   

But it has been estimated that people had started wearing some kind of clothing between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago.  Therefore my following scenarios are set at that time.  They are entirely my imagination for the purpose of explaining, how clothing could probably have accelerated the evolution of cognition, intelligence and language.

Scenario 1:   600,000 years ago, a tribe of homo erectus living in a hot climate, still naked.   The males live in a group, hunting and scavenging, the women and children live in a separate group, foraging and gathering.   The groups meet regularly to share their provisions.   They have a rudimentary language.   Whenever both groups meet, the male instincts get triggered by the visual stimulus of the naked females, who are automatically perceived as prey, no matter, what they want or if they protest.   The males consider and perceive them as utilities without a brain.     The females dislike and fear the males, but they depend upon them for the meat and for protection, else they would avoid them.    Both genders have mutually no social interest in each other except when they interact for the only purpose of procreation.

Scenario 2:   400,000 years ago, a group of homo erectus living in a cold climate.  They cover themselves with the hides and furs of animals.   They also live as two groups, the females with the children foraging and gathering, the males hunting and scavenging.   
But something is very different:   When a male meets a female, his instincts are not immediately triggered to the extent of blurring his reason.  He sees only a female face and a body hidden under layers of hide and furs, instead of being exposed to the full visual stimulation by seeing a naked body.   Therefore he has the chance to discover or to experience, that the female is indeed a person with a brain as much evolved as his own, that he can communicate with her and that this communication is beneficial for him.   
As a consequence, during the times of the male's homeostasis, males and females interact using their cognition, they are spending time together.  The males are positively influenced by the females.    Females are more than passive prey, they also choose their mates and by a preference for advanced cognition in males, this influences the direction of further evolution.  

I speculate that all this has been the cause of a big boost in the the development and evolution of language, reasoning, empathy, social skills and intelligence.   This evolution has continued as long as women with self-respect and intelligence covered their bodies in decent attire.    The recent backlash will be the topic of another entry.

319. Childfree Neanderthals?

319.   Childfree Neanderthals?

This is a speculation from my personal point of view as a childfree woman.  I have not found any information on google, neither in favor nor in contradiction.    It seems that texts about evolutions always take for granted, that evolution only enhances the fitness of a species by favoring the urge to procreate in all individuals.   The paradoxical conscious choice to refuse procreation is never considered as a factor influencing evolution and natural selection.   

One result of evolution is concealed ovulation.    In contrast to most animals, human females show no noticeable external indication, when they are ready (or rather at risk) to get pregnant.    It is logical, that men's affliction of being driven by their permanent recurrence of the need for sexual homeostasis and of these instincts being automatically triggered by seeing naked female bodies has co-evolved with the concealed ovulation.  

Animals are driven to procreate, therefore visible signs of fecundity enhance their procreative behavior.   But signs of fecundity would give a choice to intelligent humans, not only to decide to procreate, but also to avoid procreation.  I doubt that if having such a choice, humans would bread under all circumstances.   I suspect that the concealed ovulation evolved because those, who did get pregnant accidentally by ignorance had more offspring than those, whose intelligence allowed them the choice to allow or to refuse procreation.  

Nobody knows, why the Neanderthals got extinct.  There are many speculations, so here I add my personal one:  
Maybe in the Neanderthals females, ovulation was no completely concealed, they did show some signs of fecundity, and they therefore had the chance and choice to avoid breading.   Modern humans' ovulation is entirely concealed and they invaded the territory of the Neanderthals breeding like rabbits.   In my understanding, when rationality, intelligence and cognition evolve beyond a threshold, the individual becomes able to doubt, that procreation is a good choice.    So the Neanderthals got extinct, when their cognition evolved beyond that threshold, while they were able to avoid breeding.  

We are many childfree people today, there is no reason to consider it impossible, that the childfree brain could already have had evolved in the Neanderthals.    It is probable, that any species gets extinct, as soon as there are enough members, whose brain has evolved beyond the threshold of understanding the detrimental consequences of breeding on the individual wellbeing.  

318. Predators and Prey: Another True Story

Predators and Prey:  Another True Story       

One evening another student, D., and I went dancing.   The campus was a bit at the outskirts of the town, and she had a car.   When the disco closed, a guy invited us both over to his place, also at some distance from home.   I had no objections, being aware that one guy could do no harm to two women.   It was better than walking home.  
But he opened a bottle of wine, and after a few glasses, D. felt no more able to drive.   So the guy assigned sleeping arrangements.   D. was to sleep on the couch in his living-room, and I was to share his bed.   He did this in such a matter, as if this were the most banal everyday way of arranging things.   
I was speechless in consternation.  But before I could even think how to react to this insult, he had noticed my reluctance, so he invited D. into his bedroom instead.    We were just two interchangeable female bodies for him.   He was satisfied with the one, that was willing.

It was a long walk home at two o'clock in the morning.........     


At that time, I experienced this only as an insult and an outrage.   But looking back at it after so many years and from another point of view, this guy was also pitiable.   There I was, an interesting, intelligent, educated person, available to enjoy profound discussions with.   But that pathetic loser's mind was so blurred and dysfunctional because of his instinctive urges, that he was unable to perceive anything more than my body.   
Their affliction deprives such men of all quality interaction with women, and they do not even know, what they are missing.   If they were not dangerous because of their physical strength, I could have pity with them for being so ludicrous.