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.

629. George Simon's Book 'In Sheep's Clothing' - Comment 1

629.   George Simon's Book 'In Sheep's Clothing'  -  Comment 1

This continues entry 628 about the immature theory of mind.

In entries 615 and 618 I already mentioned and commented on George Simon's excellent approach to the problem of disturbed characters.    I just got and read his fascinating book 'In Sheep's Clothing'.

Reading it was an excellent reminder of the utter futility of any attempts to reduce being harmed by disturbed characters.  Someone with a character disturbance cannot be influenced any more than a moving steam roller.   He is determined to get by hook or by crook, whatever he wants.  Nothing can stop him from running over anybody standing in his way.   The only protection is avoiding disturbed characters.  

For me personally, contact with one of them is doomed to lead to an impasse and to unsolvable conflicts.   While I am not prone to be a submissive victim accommodating a disturbed character's objectives, his ruthlessness gives him nevertheless enough power to impose sufferings upon me, to which I react with protest and outrage.  But a disturbed character is out of the reach of any civilized and moderate influencing him by constructive communication.  His mind is surrounded by a wall, any attempts to make him change his behavior bounce off and fail without any effect.

 

According to Simon, all exploitative and hurting behavior can be explained by only one of two cognitive dynamics, either the neurotic avoidance of too much painful emotions or the disturbed characters' conscious method to gain selfish advantages.  
I see another possibility, which I am missing in the book:  It is the incompetence to behave in an appropriate and acceptable way in spite of being motivated and believing to do so.    

Therefore I like to add one more type of a disturbed character to Simon's list: 

The self-righteous aggressive disturbed character.    This type also behaves as a wolf, just as Simon's other types, but he does not put on a sheep skin.   Instead he believes to be a sheep.   Due to his immature theory of mind and to the subsequent lack of getting or comprehending blatant feedback, he is unaware, that he is perceived as a wolf.   (More in entry 628)  

He behaves as a wolf due to immaturity and interpersonal incompetence: 
1.  He is incompetent to know and evaluate the limits of what is rightfully his due.  Thus he is unable to accept as a fair deal to give enough back in return for what he receives.   Others do not consider as justified, what he feels entitled to get.   This can be as bad as an entitlement delusion.  
2.  He lacks the communicative skills to obtain, whatever he wants, by any form of rational convincing, even when it is justified.   When what is not justified is not available, he is too incompetent to apply manipulative tactics.   His competence is so limited, that he resorts to use drastic and primitive methods of power, dominance, aggression.  

This type is very different from both the unbridled aggressive and the channelled aggressive as described in the book.   The self-righteous aggressive usually accepts simple and clearly defined rules and laws, when he understands them in spite of his immature theory of mind. 

The self-righteous aggressive is not malicious, he is just not aware of his incompetence nor of how much his behavior is selfish.   As far as the self-righteous aggressive comprehends another's needs, he is able to care.   For example, he can be a caring master to a dog, if he acquires the knowledge about how to care for a dog.   The success with the dog then reinforces his false belief to be a sheep.   He is unaware of behaving as a wolf, when he forcefully applies the very same form of care and treatment, which is appropriate only for a dog, also upon a human being.       

 

Both the covert-aggressive and the self-righteous aggressive consider themselves as justified to pursue what they want with any means, believing to be entitled to get it.   

But the covert-aggressive has a mature theory of mind enabling him to be realistic about and aware of what obstacles and resistance to expect during his pursuits.   He takes the disagreeing and resisting persons for serious enough to rationally choose the method of aggression, which promises the best success.   In the case of the covert aggressive, this includes hiding his true intentions as a part of using manipulative strategies.   He is realistic about the powers of his opponents, would they discover his aggression and true goals and react by fighting back.  

The self-righteous-aggressive lacks a sufficiently mature theory of mind.   He does not take resisting people into account as individual opponents with real or at least subjectively valid reasons for their disagreement.    He perceives them as merely amorphous obstacles to be best confronted with outright, indiscriminate and open aggression.    The self-righteous aggressive perceives any disagreement with and resistance to his allegedly entitled goals automatically as an indication of others being flawed, wrong, dysfunctional, while nothing makes him doubt his own entitlement.   Who resists is believed to be bringing aggression upon themselves as a legitimate consequence.   

By applying the same generalized standard methods of aggression to all allegedly flawed obstacles, the self-righteous aggressive character is also not able to improve his immature theory of mind.   He notices and reacts to obstacles without understanding, perceiving, evaluating or distinguishing any specific reaction or feedback.   This impedes him from learning successful manipulation strategies.   

Even the self-righteous aggressive may sometimes apply a few of the manipulative tactics described in Simon's book, when he is aware of the probable unpleasant reactions to be avoided.  

The essential difference to the covert aggressive is the self-righteous' lack of any hidden agenda.  Instead he bluntly expresses his claims and demands and what he intends to do to ascertain to get it.   Lacking any comprehension, why others disagree with his entitlement, he does not know nor learn, what to hide and what utterances and behaviors are counterproductive to his goals.   By blurring out his true intentions he provokes resistance, to which he then reacts with enhanced aggression and bullying.   This is a spiral of fast deterioration.  


The covert aggressive misleads others, while the self-righteous aggressive is himself mislead.   A wolf, who believes to be a sheep, causes not less devastation than a wolf, who knows to be a wolf, but hides beneath a sheep's skin.     

In the case of the covert-aggressive, it is the victim's task to find out, that there is a wolf under the sheep's skin.   The wolf knowing to be a wolf has therefore theoretically the choice to change, if the victim refuses to remain in that role.   

The self-righteous aggressive openly behaves like a wolf and nevertheless believes his bullying and coercing as the legitimate behavior of the sheep, which he wrongly believes himself to be.   Any change is not probable, because someone believing to be already a sheep does not comprehend, why he should change to become one.   A wolf cannot decide or attempt to change into a sheep, unless he first becomes aware, that he is a wolf.  
In this situation, the victim is powerless.   A self-righteous aggressive wolf does not experience his victim as significant enough to influence him.   This impedes him from ever discovering the reality of his being a wolf, instead he continues to consider the victim as being so flawed as to warrant being bullied. 

611. More About The Fallacy Of Teleological Thinking

611.   More About The Fallacy Of Teleological Thinking 

Yesterday I got a strange email in reference to entry 610 about teleology.   The sender, according to the name probably a guy, omits to introduce himself in any way and to tell me, why he contacts me and what he expects from me.    He merely informs me of his disagreement with my considering teleology as a fallacy in entry 610.    I am puzzled, what made him assume, that the difference between knowing or not knowing, that a person with a given email address disagrees, were of any significance to me.    

There are billions of persons on this globe, who disagree with my way of thinking.  Any of them only wastes his own and my time by informing me of the disagreement.  

This blog is not written for them.   I am elaborating my thoughts for the purpose of finding my mindmate being someone, who agrees as the result of his own independent thinking prior to reading this blog.     

The following are two quotes from his email:
"I can see no good scientific application for teleology." 
"A teleological universe remains quite possible on logical grounds."
 

These quotes show clearly, that he has not clue, what teleology really means and that he is himself someone caught too much himself in this fallacy to be able to gain mental distance from irrational beliefs of any kind.

When someone asks questions, then this indicates a reason to explain.   But someone declaring his disagreement implicitly states his own point of view as valid as mine.    A guy, who claims his teleological fallacy as equally valid as rational and scientific thinking is a clear example of the Dunning-Kruger-effect.    While such a haphazard disagreeing guy certainly as a person is of no interest to me, his email nevertheless inspires me to write some more about teleology.      

Teleology is a logical fallacy of thinking.    No scientist, who deserves to be called one, would use it consciously and deliberately as an appropriate method to explore and explain anything.  It just is not a scientific method.  The effect described in the research presented in http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017102451.htm is the tendency of the human brain to spontaneously tend to succumb to this fallacy.   This does not make teleology any less a fallacy, it is only an indication of how careful scientists need to be to avoid it. 


The fallacy can be shown by comparing the following two statements:  

1. "Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe"   (From the research presented in
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017102451.htm)
2. "Oxygen masks supply environmentally lacking oxygen so that people can breathe."

Superficially, both statements seem to be quite similar.    In both statements, oxygen is needed and it is supplied.   But there is a fundamental distinction between the teleological fallacy of statement one and the genuine intention in statement two.  

Oxygen masks are invented and produced by persons having knowledge and intention concerning what the masks are to be used for.   Without a known need for oxygen, such masks would not be invented and produced.   

All oxygen masks are made by humans or by human made machines.   The purpose of oxygen masks to supply oxygen when not otherwise available is the intended or expected beneficial outcome of the activity of producing it.   This is logically only possible, when there is someone performing the purposeful activity.  

There cannot be any intentional production without a producer, but things can exist and offer collateral benefits without having been produced by anybody.   

The teleological fallacy is thinking as if there were a causality, where there is none at all.   To believe that the trees have been produced by an acting entity the same way as the oxygen masks is the fallacy of simpleminded and gullible persons.   They invent a creator deity, which serves for them not only but also as an explanation for the existence of trees and more generally of anything, of which they derive benefits and which exists without having been produced intentionally by any human.      
 

Scientific research to look for evidence of oxygen masks which are not produced by humans is an option.   As long as such evidence has not been found, it can be considered as established, that oxygen masks are produced by persons, who can be traced.    

Any scientific attempt to find the producer of the trees is equally futile as the attempts to find evidence of the existence of any deity.    

Also the person selling oxygen masks knows, that they are produced by humans and what for.   The person planting trees to enhance the oxygen in the air knows, that trees produce oxygen.   But as a rational person he also knows, that the trees have not been produced by any person or entity for the purpose of breathing.   The rational person knows, that the existence of trees and of beings needing oxygen can either be coincidence or co-evolution, in which the evolution of beings in need of oxygen has been enabled by the evolution of the emittance of oxygen by the trees.

The teleological fallacy and the deity delusion are therefore related and reinforcing each other.   But it is difficult to know, which was first.
I doubt Pararajasingham's suggestion (http://www.reasonism.org/main-content/articles-by-other-authors/item/285-the-telos-drive-a-neurobiological-basis-for-religious-belief), that the telos drive having been there first suffices to explains religious beliefs.    

It is at least as probable, that the gullibility to the delusion of deities has been an evolutionary advantage to the species for very different reasons.   

Those women, who accept the self-harming by accepting the biological abuse of their bodies for procreation due to expecting a reward in the afterlife, have more offspring than those, who refuse to accept self-harming.  

Those men, who harm women by making them pregnant due to displacing the responsibility for doing this to a deity, also have more offspring than the more considerate men.   

Thus the gullibility to believe in the existence of deities has been incorporated into the gene pool.   Once someone believes in the existence of a creator deity, then the conclusion of attributing the existence of any not human made phenomena and entities to be allegedly produced by such a creator is apparently and subjectively logical to such a believer.   

But neither the deity delusion nor teleological thinking is logical to rational, skeptical and apistic persons like me.   

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

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


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

The spell checker metaphor:

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

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

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

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

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

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


Feedback as a behavior checker:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The commodifying men's fallacy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

589. The Difference Between Philosophy And Religion

589.  The Difference Between Philosophy And Religion

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

542. The Fallacy Of Utilitarian Compensation Without Agreement

542.   The Fallacy Of Utilitarian Compensation Without Agreement

This continues entry 541.  

Two persons, of whom one calculates the total costs and benefits by one calculation, while the other considers pain and pleasure as independent, are a mismatch with tragic consequences.   Their basic attitudes concerning harming and hurting are incompatible.

Whenever a person is principally willing to control and restrict the own behavior for the purpose of not risking to destroy the relationship by impeding the partner's happiness, there are two options.   These option differ fundamentally in the very disparate attitude towards what constitutes happiness or unhappiness.  

• Option 1:  Happiness is defined as the difference between being hurt and being pampered, it is calculated as pleasure provided minus pain inflicted.   The more a man feels entitled to hurt a woman for the benefit of his own pleasures, the more he compensates for this by providing real or ascribed pleasures to the woman. 
  This is demonstrated in the plot of the classical Hollywood couple, where the man feels entitled to cheat, as long as he buys enough diamonds and fur coats to the wife, whose acquiescence to his transgressions can be thus bought. 
   
• Option 2:  Happiness is defined as the absence of unhappiness caused by harming and hurting behavior.   A man intending to keep a woman needs to focus all his efforts on not making her unhappy, and this requires for him to know or to learn, how to avoid hurting her.   Not being hurt is the most important ingredient of being happy.  
  As long as he does not hurt her, the man does not need to do anything else to please her.   
  In this option, transgressions can never be compensated for.   Not forgiven transgressions destroy the relationship.   Acquiescence with transgressions is not available, only forgiveness earned by the transgressor's genuine and sincere guilt, contrition, amends and full recognition of his obligation to never repeat the transgression.  

When both partners are a match concerning the preferred option, each of the options can work for them.

But conflicts are unavoidable, whenever one person - usually the man - applies option 1 upon a woman needing option 2.  

In this case, a spiral of deterioration is automatically initiated, when the woman feels hurt by the man's specific behaviors.   She defines and experiences as transgressions, what he feels entitled to do.    Without even any agreement as to what are transgressions, they are a mismatch, and the spiral of deterioration is the logical consequence.  
It starts, when he usurps, coerces or enforces his own advantages and privileges from and upon the disagreeing woman, feeling entitled to them.    She experiences being hurt for his selfish benefits as abuse, but he disagrees.   

Getting aware of her disagreement and resistance are for him no sufficient reasons to stop his transgressions.   Nevertheless he does not want to risk driving her away, so while he refuses to renounce the benefits gained by the transgression, he instead attempts to eliminate her unwelcome reactions to his behavior by any form of compensation, which is easier for him than changing his behavior.   
Believing that pleasing her enough would suffice to be able to continue his transgressions, he bends backwards in doing and overdoing things for her, which he believes to be sufficient to please her.       
But this does not work as he expects and as he feels it to be his due.   She continues to feel hurt, because he continues his hurting behavior and his commodifying attitude of feeling entitled to hurt her.   Nothing he does and tries has any effect, as long as he does not give up the commodification and the hurting.   
The next step of deterioration is his getting angry and frustrated for not getting the expected appreciation of and gratitude for what he does for her.   In his subjective experience, he is paying for her acquiescence to how he treats her, but she does not deliver the goods.    She does not feel any gratitude, because she clearly distinguishes between what someone does for the real and sole purpose of pleasing her and what someone merely does for the purpose of buying her submission to being hurt.    This purpose devalues anything of what he does for her, no matter how much she would enjoy it otherwise.          
Yet he believes to have paid and thus he feels justified to continue transgressing.   This is another turn of the spiral of deterioration.   Wanting nothing except the termination of being hurt and abused, every new or repeated transgressions makes her more unhappy, completely unimpressed by his unasked for compensations.  All the man's intensified efforts to compensate are in vain, making him more and more angry and even feeling hurt himself. 


A deal is only a deal between (at least) two persons agreeing.    When someone wants an items owned by his neighbor, throwing any amount of money at his neighbor does not make it a deal to buy the item, as long as the neighbor refuses to sell.    

It is the same with the compensation:  It would only be a deal with the partner's agreement.   But what one person wishes and wants does not suffice to make it a deal.    A woman's acquiescence with being hurt cannot be bought from her with not matter what pampering and unasked for compensatory pleasures, if her acquiescence is not available for sale.    

540. Accepting Obligations By Agreement Or By Marriage

540.   Accepting Obligations By Agreement Or By Marriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

1.   Commitment by agreement

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

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

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

2.   Commitment by legal marriage

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

Commitment by legal marriage is extrinsic commitment.

3.   Comparing both commitments

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

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

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


4.   Which commitment for whom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

494. The Fallacy Of Self-Overestimation

The Fallacy Of Self-Overestimation

I am sick and tired of men's fallacy of attempting to establish an intellectual hierarchy of their superiority, even when this is in no way justified.    This entry explains the general fallacy, the next entry will explain, why this fallacy is toxic in a relationship.

It is an everyday experience to feel the need to base an evaluation, interpretation or decision upon insufficient information and to fill the gap with an estimated probability of what seems most plausible.    Otherwise people are paralyzed from acting.  Therefore the strategy to derive the best estimation is very important and that includes to avoid fallacies.  

One common fallacy is the overestimation of oneself in the situation of either lacking sufficient information about another or of being biased by a prejudice to underestimate this person.    This happens often, when communication leads to a reaction of disagreement.    In this situation, self-overestimation and the underestimation of another are two sides of the self coin.

Person S as the sender makes a statement, which does not convey a convincing message to the receiving person R.   Theoretically, while omitting in this context the distorted transmission of the message, this can be explained by a deficit on either or both sides of the sequence of sending and receiving.  

• Distortion 1: Person S makes a wrong, false, stupid, unlearned, irrational statement.
• Distortion 2: Person R lacks enough knowledge, education or intelligence be able to comprehend or evaluate S's statement.

Based only upon one or a few statements from S, it is often not possible to decide, which of the two distortions is more probable.   Because S's knowledge and learning is like an iceberg.   As is known, only about one seventh of an iceberg is visible, while most of it is invisible.   Every one of S's statements is connected with all his learning and experience stored in his brain.  The more R knows about S, the better R is able to evaluate S's statements, even when the statements by themselves may appear misleading or insufficient.   Considering them as wrong is a fallacy.   The statements require further explanations and information. 

A simple example:  

S makes a statement about the harm of herbicides that is different from what R so far had heard of or considered as probably correct.   R cannot evaluate, if this statement is more probable without further knowledge about S.   When R knows, if S is a gardener having left school after tenth grade or if he has a degree in chemistry, then R has some valuable information for the evaluation of the statement.

After only hearing the statement, R needs to make a temporary decision of how to proceed in reaction to the incomprehensible statement.  There is a variety of possible reaction.   Ending the communication, ridicule, asking curious questions, ask other people, find independent information, gullibly believe it.    The better the information about S, the more appropriate is the reaction.  

When people have a realistic view about themselves, they can evaluate not only the knowledge of the other, but also their own knowledge in comparison with the other's competence.  

A realistic gardener is aware, that he knows less about herbicides than the chemist, while the realistic chemist acknowledges, that the gardener has more knowledge about pruning fruit trees.   The one with less knowledge asks questions and is motivated to learn.    

But there are people, who are not realistic.   Whenever they do not understand the other, they automatically believe, that they are right and the other is wrong.    A gardener, who claims his knowledge about herbicides to be better than the chemist's or the chemist, who claims to know better than the gardener how to prune trees, are absurd.   They are not aware of the limitation of their knowledge to their own specialty.    They are both afflicted with the fallacy of unfounded self-overestimation.   The gardener, who disputes the chemist's superior knowledge concerning herbicides and the chemist, who disputes the gardener's superior knowledge concerning pruning are both ludicrous and a nuisance.   

This fallacy can be avoided or at least drastically reduced by an a priori decision of how to handle the ambiguity of the two distortions.   This decision is to always give S the benefit of the doubt by first asking questions and getting more information and by postponing the final conclusion of considering the other as wrong, until there is no more doubt..  

468. Reactions To Alleged Flaws

468.   Reactions To Alleged Flaws

The topic of entry 466 was the implication, that ascribing a flaw means the indirect claim of the allegedly flawed person's inferiority.   There is a clear distinction between a friendly and respectful noticing of someone's peculiarities and the devaluation of ascribing a flaw. 

1.  My definition of a flaw:

A flaw is a peculiar attribute, that is   

• detrimental to the own life of the flawed person or
• detrimental to the targets of flawed behavior

1.1.  A flaw is not trivial. 
It is a significant detriment according to the evaluation or experience of the one calling it a flaw.  Without being detrimental, it is a peculiarity and not a flaw.   Ascribing a flaw is a devaluation, calling something a peculiarity is not. 
Alleging a flaw without consent is always an insult, even when someone recognizes having the peculiar attribute, but disagrees to evaluate it as detrimental.  
When the alleged flaw concerns attributes or traits contributing to the person's identity, then it is not only an insult, but a rejection of the person. 

1.2.  There are detriments, that people cannot agree about, unless they share some basic values and attitudes.  

1.2.1.  A good example is the reciprocal disrespect of christians and atheists.  
For an atheist like me, a christian is flawed, because his behavior is often detrimental to others not sharing his beliefs.   Christians' belief in the reward in the afterlife is their justification to hurt others.  

Christians believe atheists to be detrimental to themselves as they are believed to suffer in hell.  

Atheists and christians can never agree on who is flawed, because they derive the logic for their mutual evaluation from incompatible premises. 

1.2.2.   When people share basic values and they are mutually significant as equals, then flaws are experienced as disruptive for their relationship.  This goes both ways, because they want to respect and to be respected.  Apparent flaws are a problem to be solved.   Both partners communicate, until there is no more misunderstanding and misinterpretation leading to the allegation of non-existing flaws.  

1.2.3.   There is a difference between permanent irreversible and temporary flaws.  

A person's real but temporary flaws like irritating bad habits or states of stress can be overcome, when the flawed partner accepts support from the other.    This requires agreement concerning the detriments and disadvantages of the flawed behavior.  Based upon this agreement, the partners can cooperate towards reducing the flaw and restoring equality. 
Innate promiscuity is an example of an irreversible flaw.    Innate promiscuity is an incurable detriment to any person with the quality of innate monogamy.    

2.  The target's reaction to the allegation of a flaw depends on the social roles and the reciprocal personal significance.

2.1.  People are usually not bothered about flaws alleged by insignificant persons.   Not sharing basic values or the awareness of each other's disrespectful opinion impedes any attraction between people.  They do not become significant. 

2.2.  There are specific problems of disruptive entanglement in family constellations, where the significance precedes the allegation of flaws.  Examples are siblings, of whom one is a christian and the other an atheist or one is a soldier and the other a pacifist.

2.3.  Situations of asymmetrical significance can be very painful.   People wish to be reciprocally considered and treated as equals and as significant by those, who are significant for them.   A person's significance determines, how much his allegations of flaws are experienced as insults, humiliations, degradations and indignities.     It is a very disruptive situation, when a person does not reciprocate his significance to another, but instead claims his superiority by alleging flaws and expecting acquiescence.   
    

2.3.1.  Between men, such an insult often provokes aggression, fighting and even bloodshed. 

2.3.2.  When women are men's targets of the same insult, they are supposed and expected to react with acquiescence.  The implications of this upon women as partners in a relationship or when choosing a mate are the topic of the next entry.  

412. Where's A Need There's A Fraud

412.   Where's A Need There's A Fraud

In entry 411 I described the fraud of the PUA (pick up animal) trainers, who defraud nice guys by training them to become jerks, in spite of the nice guys' goal of wanting to find monogamous commitment, which they cannot get with jerk behavior. 

Searching google, I have come across a similar fraud based upon the Ex-Back-Craze.   As a reaction to people discussing their break-up trouble and their pain in getting over it, some crooks have made it a business to sell false hopes to people hoping to get their ex back by buying books and training programs full of allegedly magic tricks.     Some of their customers may even be themselves jerks or narcissists, who want to find out, how to hoover their victims back, who had succeeded to free themselves from their abuser.    Of course I cannot know, who the customers really are.   

When people get involved with someone, who is incompatible and not suitable, the relationship or marriage is doomed to fail.  It does not matter, if they got mismatched being driven by instinct, infatuation, superficial benefits, or if they were the victim of deceit and manipulation, or if there were whatever other reasons.  

If they are capable to learn from mistakes, then they get more mature and more wise as a result of the experience, and their next partner is a better choice.   

But being unhappy and missing someone can cover the unresolved conflicts and incompatibilities with temporary oblivion.  That makes people susceptible to fraudulent remedies.    But would they really get reconciled, the disaster would be resumed the same as it had been, when they split.  
Even when both would really want to restore the relationship, the problems are the same as before.   But when one is not even interested, and the other feels compelled to pay money to be get enabled to use tricks and manipulations as taught by the fraudulent trainings, then it is even less a viable option.    Reconciliation with an ex is rarely a good idea.  


Wise and mature people are as careful and responsible in ending a relationship as they are in choosing a partner.    But once they do end it, this is final, because there was no alternative.   

For wise and mature people, there are only three reasons to end a relationship. 

1. Both partners have worked hard to communicate and cooperate to solve their conflicts, until they both agree to end the relationship by consent.
2. The partner has committed an unforgivable transgression.  
3. One partner considers his behavior as morally correct, as his right and entitlement, while the other experiences and evaluates the same behavior as unbearably hurting and as a serious transgression.   

All three reasons are final, because an improvement in the future is inherently impossible.   For a wise and mature person, this is obvious, unfortunately not for the other partner, if he is an immature fool or jerk.

1. The first reason can only be an agreement between two wise and mature partners.
2. A wise and mature person knows the meaning of unforgivable and that some damage is unrepairable and he knows, that only the victim's judgement is valid concerning what is unforgivable for her.    Only an immature fool expects to be forgiven for the unforgivable or disputes that it should be forgiven.    
3. A wise and mature person refuses to expose herself to hurtful treatment and transgressions, when it is obvious, that this is the unchangeable ingredient of the relationship.  Logically, for her this reason is final. 
   Only an immature fool expects a woman to deliberately decide to suffer from being the target of permanently recurrent hurtful transgressions.  

358. Interacting With Gullible People Is A Hazard For Rational People

Interacting With Gullible People Is A Hazard For Rational People

Whenever I am in contact with someone expressing the belief in irrational claims, my spontaneous emotional reaction is a strong feeling of repugnance and aversion.    For a long time I had been wondering, why I could not just shrug my shoulders in scorn and condescension for their ludicrous need of believing.    

Finally I understood:  I am very scared of gullible people, and for very good reasons.   More precisely I am scared of the harm, that they are driven to do to whoever gets in their way.   Their harmful behavior is programmed by their belief and there is no way of protecting myself except by avoiding them.  

Every personal contact with a gullible person creates the hazard of experiencing powerlessness and helplessness and of being harmed at any moment. 

In any situation, relationship or friendship, with someone significant enough to elicit emotions, I need reliable and logically predictable influence on how I am treated.    I need the influence to be able to stop someone from making me the target of hurting, unpleasant and discomforting behavior.   I need the influence to get my needs fulfilled in return, when reciprocity of fulfilling needs is in the nature of the relationship.   
My only available method to have such influence is rational communication, when the other is able to be convinced by good reasons, and when he is able to convince me in the case of a refusal by his comprehensibly better reasons.    

I am confident to protect myself successfully from harm in the interaction with rational people, who are guided by consequencity.   With gullible people, I have no influence, because they are controlled by the power of their belief, which deactivates their accessibility by reason.    

Gullible people do not feel guilty for any harm done as a result of their believes and they do not take responsibility for it.

• They know, that their behavior is experienced as harm, but they feel justified by the belief.
• They themselves do not consider as harm, what is experienced as such by the victim.
• They consider suffering harm as an obligation of the victim.

A gullible man's treatment of a woman can be determined by irrational and immune believes

• about himself and his entitlement
• about what is right or wrong
• about what methods are acceptable and valid to control the environment and other people
• about the person of the victim
• about the authority or charisma of a deity or third party guiding him

A few examples of harmful believes:

• A narcissist believes in his entitlement to get onesided benefits from a woman perceiving her as being a commodity for him.
• A muslim believes the koran to be an absolute moral authority.  He can never be faithful in a monogamous relationship, because his religion allows him 4 wives and an unlimited number of concubines.
• A man applies the pseudoscience NLP to manipulate a woman, believing that this gives him the control over her for as long as he wants her.   
• A man does not take a woman's word for serious, because he believes the urban legend, that women do not mean, what they say.
• A man forces a onesided decision upon a woman, which can be as bad as dumping her, because of a dream or of the advice of an astrologer, clairvoyant or any other quack.  
• A man in a relationship spends a lot of the couple's shared resources on expensive quackeries.
• An man does not understand a woman's behavior and reasoning and misinterprets this as her being stupid and flawed and believes in her inferiority without ever listening to her.  
• A man believes in the superiority of men and in his right to dominate and control women by methods like intimidation and coercion.
• A man feels protected by his deity and causes an accident by reckless behavior.  
• A man chooses a woman on a dating site by her zodiac.  The false belief in alleged compatibility causes a lot of  pain.   

All these examples are experiences of what a woman does better not expose herself to.  The only way to avoid such a risk is to reject all gullible man, that means, any man, who is guided, influence or determined by any belief.    The more often a man is caught with a lie, the more probable is the next lie.     If a man is gullible to harmless believes, then the harmfull believes are also probable.    

Gullible people are not reliable and not predictable for those, who do not share their believes.   

His own behavior makes perfect sense only to a gullible man himself, due to being in accordance with his belief.   For any person not only not sharing his belief, but considering it as irrational and absurd, his behavior makes no sense at all.   What makes no sense, cannot be predicted but is haphazard and random.  
A rational non-believing person can never know, what the gullible man will do the next moment out of the blue.  She can never be prepared for the next harm.  Therefore she can neither avoid the harm nor employ any preventive methods to mitigate the impact.    Being with a gullible man means the stress of walking on eggshells, of being on alert all the time.    

A gullible man is not reliable.   He can even have the intention to comply with agreements, covenants and promises, but as soon as the power of the belief overwhelms him, nothing is binding anymore. 

     
Only a man, whose behavior is guided by consequencity, can offer me a relationship as a safe haven, because his behavior is predictable and reliable.    I can entrust myself to such a man, when agreements are binding and not at peril by overpowering believes.

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.      

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.    

281. Contradictors

Contradictors
Contradictors are persons, who contradict everything, that is said to them.  They do the contrary of what others ask them to do.   The do on purpose, what others ask them to refrain from doing.  

There are at least two types of contradictors, those with a purpose and those, who automatically contradict, as if they would not know any other option. 

1.  Automatic Contradictors

There is a psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM, called ODD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder.   It is considered as only an affliction of children.   The description is here.  

http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-Ps/Oppositional-defiant-disorder.html
I have read people wondering, what becomes of children with ODD, when they grow up.   Some then develop to be psychopaths, sociopaths or cases of antisocial disorder.   But maybe the milder cases of childhood ODD just become automatic contradictors.

2.  Hierarchy Instinct

Some people experience others automatically as competitors in a hierarchy.   If they are not below, then they are above.   All interactions serve the purpose to get above those, who can  be pushed down, and to challenge those, who are still in a higher position.    Equality is something unknown to them.
In entry 39, I already described verbal fencing as a replacement for the duel with a sword.    Verbal fencing is a duel of wits, but contradicting is a much cruder behavior, when it serves as a weapon to gain a higher position in a hierarchy, which implies also to gain power over resources.   
Contradicting is part of forming a hierarchy based upon the main assumption of being superior by knowing better or by believing to know better.   A contradictor attempts to proof to know better as his way of proofing his entitlement to the higher position.   The contradictor believes, that he knows everything better, so he has no reason to listen to the other or to be interested in what he has to say.   
The contradictor waits all the time for an occasion to give evidence of his superiority, so he scrutinizes, what others say, without listening to his real message, but luring for a handle for a contradiction.   He just checks the other's utterances for anything, that he can react to fast enough with a contradiction.    As soon as he has succeeded in jumping in with his contradiction, he stops to listen and never really hears or learns anything of what others say.    He often does not understand or is clueless, what the other is really talking about.  
The contradictor considers agreement and consent never as an expression of closeness, but as the submission of those below him on the hierarchy.    He would never agree to anything, because he wants to move up the ladder by challenging those above him, and he expects them also to contradict him to keep him below.    He lives in a world without consent.  

Contradicting is for the contradictor a power tool, not a means of communication.    His life is emotionally isolated, while he outwardly is busy struggling with others over the hierarchy.   He fights to keep those below from challenging him, he fights to challenge those above, and those on the same level are his competitors, who also are fighting for the level above.   Therefore the contradictor is isolated behind an invisible wall, contradicting is a method to pushing people away and keep them at a safe distance.   As he knows nothing but the hierarchy struggle, he expects only challenges and contradictions from others.

For a contradictor, a relationship with a woman is just another hierarchy, where he of course usurps the position as the dominator.   The contradictor contradicts, whatever the woman attempts to say, as a method to keep her in the inferior position, that he has assigned to her.   He can never find out, who she really is or what she thinks and feels.   The contradictors baseline is emotional isolation, even in a relationship.  

Contradicting or agreeing as a goal represent two distinct attitudes towards a partner in a relationship.   Contradicting is not the same as disagreeing.    Egalitarian partners get bonded and close by agreement, consent and thinking alike.   There baseline is agreement and when they discover disagreement, then they both experience it as a task for communication.   They acquire, supply and exchange all information and all evidence, until they can find an agreement, that is convincing to both.   Disagreement makes them uncomfortable, they both are motivated to restore the harmony of agreement.

When an egalitarian woman gets accidentally involved with a contradictor, they get into an impasse.   Figuratively, when he sits on a step of a flight of stairs, and she sits down at his side to be close and communicate, he either moves one step up, or he pushes her one step down.   If she attempts to get back to his side, he pushes her away and forced her to remain on the lower step.