Lians

The cool thing is that you don't need to rely on body language when the other person openly admits to being a narcissist! Sometimes listening is more than enough.

You seem to be confused about what deFOO-ing actually is. It doesn't have anything to do with kicking abusers to the curb. You just keep questioning them until you get to the truth of what actually happened. That's how you gain closure. You hold everyone, including yourself, to the same standard. Would you easily let a friend off the hook if he/she did the same things that your mother did to you? How the wrongdoers react to this approach is beyond your control. DeFOO-ing is only one of the possible outcomes. I obviously can't tell you whether you should approach your mother to cross-examine what she told you. That's something for you to decide. I won't pretend to have a philosophical conversation either. All you gave me is a bunch of justifications with no reasoning to back them up. I will only warn you that introducing massive exceptions to your philosophical defences will invite the vampires in. You either apply your reasoning consistently or your reasoning is used to subjugate you. Philosophy is not a buffet. Here's a cautionary tale that you may find useful: FDR2563 - Wednesday Call In Show December 18th, 2013 (starting at 02:03:00) http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_2563_Wednesday_Show_18_Dec_2013.mp3

Ah, yes! I remember him saying that. It really is quite a revelation, especially if you've spent some time in the arts. I reckon one heart opened is a perfectly fine starting point! Consider switching to your own web hosting if your blog becomes more popular. I wouldn't have found your articles if it wasn't for this thread. If you plan to continue writing about feminism you should definitely consider advertising your blog in some of the men's rights activist spaces on the web. It would be a shame to let the minutiae of dodgy reviews and economics articles drown your quality content. I'm not much of a writer myself, and I don't keep a blog. All the writing I do is either in my journal or here on the board. I'm certainly open to the possibility of turning some of my journal entries into a blog, but there's plenty I need to explore until then.

Your attraction to ethics makes perfect sense. Philosophy, and ethics in particular, is the arch-nemesis of falsehood and corruption. Socrates made this very clear in his final speech. That's why people hate UPB so much. It's like holy water sprinkled on a demon. Congratulations! You seem to have dodged a bullet. A lot of the token atheists ignore the deep roots of this desire for certainty because they haven't examined their relationships through the lens of philosophy. This is the surest path to becoming a statheist (a secular, state worshipper). There's a reason why Stef delivers philosophy and self-knowledge in one package. You're setting yourself up for a life of misery and exploitation if you aim to excel at only one of those disciplines. It's not coincidental that great philosophers and great psychologists never got to where Stef is. They were all missing important pieces of the puzzle of truth. You may find this series relevant and interesting (if you haven't watched it already): The Trial and Death of Socrates

I read the last two entries of your blog, Mishelle. What passionate and inspired writing! I fully agree that we won't see much change until art gets behind reason to help propel it forward. What feedback did you get from your non-philosophical readers?

Thank you for the openness. I'm really sorry about your religious upbringing. Over the last few years I've come to recognize religion for the mental virus that is. It's so much more than the mere false belief system I considered it to be. The appreciation of uncertainty and the joy of not knowing came to me after I stopped fighting my unconscious and started exploring it. Prior to that, knowledge was a crutch that I used to prop myself up. The goal of all abuse is to disconnect you from your authentic experiences and throw your entire sensory apparatus out of balance. Religion is particularly good at this. You feel empty and vulnerable when you don't have the support and nourishment that come from those unconscious roots. I suspect that this is where the desire for absolute certainty makes its debut. To use a metaphor, if you couldn't trust your eyes to accurately perceive your immediate environment, you'd need a perfect mental image to navigate it. After all, taking the right step may be the difference between life and death. I think it's about time we did some philosophy. How is this theory supported by the empirical evidence of countless wars where men willingly throw themselves into the meat grinders of violence? How do you explain the existence of sociopathy and psychopathy? What about politics, religion, superstition and all the addictions that plague our societies? The world around us doesn't make any sense if people's true selves had the upper hand. You alluded to this proposition in your original post and that's why I suggested your unconscious might not have your best interests in mind. I'm not saying this is the case, but how would you know if it was, in fact, out to harm you? Are you willing to take the risk of submitting to it? You have yourself quite a conundrum if your mother is, as you say, a borderline atheist. If she's capable of transitioning from a fundamentalist believer to an atheist, why didn't she do that when you were a kid? Why now? Why did she put you through such horrific self-erasure and irrationality? Wasn't your pain enough to move her?

I was curious about my feelings, because while I sympathise with your experience, your overall outlook on knowledge is quite foreign to me. I actually find pleasure in uncertainty and truth gave me my first taste of unfiltered happiness. My sense of identity doesn't stem from a particular belief system either, so I don't have to settle for one. The sleeping metaphor is quite apt here. Our most common experience of relinquishing control and letting the unconscious do the work is sleeping. In your original post there seems to be a dichotomy between directing and letting go of the inner workings of our minds. Have you tried negotiating with your unconscious? Moreover, have you considered the possibility of your unconscious being an ecosystem of competing personalities? Some of those may not have your best interests in mind. The following question might seem completely random and out of place, but I'd like to ask it anyway. What is your relationship with your mother?

This is a very interesting post. To me, it gives off the impression of a stream of consciousness rather than argumentative writing. The leaps of reason make it quite difficult to follow its logical progression, so I'll tell you about my experience of reading it rather than randomly stabbing at what I consider to be fallacies. I felt melancholy and helplessness while reading it. There's something sweet and intoxicating about these two feelings. It's almost as if they're trying to put you to sleep. A lullaby. The chorus of a song came up in my mind while I was reading your post: Here's a lullaby to close your eyes. [Goodbye] It was always you that I despised. I don't feel enough for you to cry, [oh well] Here's a lullaby to close your eyes (in case you're interested: Akira Yamaoka - Room of Angel) I'm curious about the origin of my perception. What did you feel when you were writing this post? What was the conscious motivation behind posting it? Were you hoping that people will demolish your arguments? Sympathise with your experience? When you decided to have faith in your subconscious ("I might say you just have to have faith in your subconscious, your innate nature, and let go."), who exactly did you submit to?

So after thousands of years of evolution your brain still can't distinguish between useful and useless thoughts. Moreover, it can't differentiate between past, present and future. Did I get that right? What you're proposing is dangerous and doesn't work in the long run. I was so good at discarding "useless" thoughts that I even felt proud about my skill. With years of exercising and meditation I was able to silence those voices before they could utter a single word. This was supposed to be my secret strength. I experienced an emotional breakdown after 13 years of dedicated thought disposal. The people around me who did the same thing are now dealing with the onset of severe depression. They keep ramping up the distractions, exercise and meditation, but it's no longer working. A lot of them turned to sex, drugs and alcohol just to get some temporary relief. Take this as a warning. I've seen the end of the path that you're walking.

I turned my anger loose and took rather large, regular doses of philosophy. I never quite slipped into nihilism, but came very close to the edge. If I have to verbalize my experience at the time, it would look like this: "I'll get to a better place even if I have to drag myself by my teeth. Fuck the world and fuck everyone who tries to stop me."

Sounds about right given my interests/personality.

That's great! I never want to assume any knowledge on the part of new members, but it looks like you're no novice in this. Having Socratic dialogues with yourself can be quite a challenge. I like to write down some of these dialogues, particularly the important parts, in my journal. It helps me map out the whirlpool of ideas and emotions. I even resort to diagrams, flowcharts and drawings when I'm having a hard time coming up with insights. You should be afraid. I was absolutely terrified when I first started poking my false self with a stick. I can also tell you that the beasts of history guard treasure chests full of self-knowledge. If you put in the work, no matter how painful and unpleasant, you're going to get immeasurable value out of it. Good luck!

There are two feelings that people often mix up - guilt and shame. Both feelings involve the violation of internalized rules. With guilt, the rules are accepted and well-understood, while shame involves inflicted, often violently, rules. The distinction between the two is quite important because shame is an outgrowth of wrong done unto you, and guilt is an indicator of wrong done by you. Here's a podcast that you may find useful: FDR1420: Shame Vs. Guilt http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1420_shame_versus_guilt.mp3 I'll give you a metaphor to, hopefully, make that statement a bit more clear. You suddenly feel a sharp pain in your finger and immediately go to the doctor because you're afraid that you pinched a nerve, causing it to randomly misfire pain signals to your brain. Treating such an issue might require painful physiotherapy or even surgery. You go to the doctor and he tells you that you cut your finger while cooking. While obviously ridiculous, this scenario illustrates the value of examining the obvious external causes before settling for a more complicated diagnosis. To give you a personal example, for many years I thought I had a difficulty in expressing my emotions. It turned out that I was simply surrounded by people who would attack me, overtly and covertly, if I did that. Can you guess what happened when I finally started expressing my emotions? They started to attack me even more. I had come up with countless complicated theories only to knock them all down with one obvious explanation. Arriving at an obvious answer usually marks the beginning of a new journey. With me, the issue changed from "difficulty in expressing emotions" to "why was I surrounded by such people?" This was a deeper and more complicated problem that yielded equally surprising results. Again, make sure you don't confuse my story with what's going on with you. One of the best ways to eliminate possible hypotheses and derive more accurate ones is to apply the Socratic method. It's a slow, iterative process that, depending on your proficiency, may take hours, days or even weeks. In its simplest form, it's a method of coming up with counter-examples, in the form of questions, to knowledge claims. You start with a poorly shaped and flabby argument and continuously apply the chisel of reason to carve out everything that's not a trim and fit argument. I'll give you an example/starting point: Initial claim (IC): I have a difficulty in expressing empathy. Question (Q): So you never express empathy when you're around other people? Answer (A): No, I actually expressed genuine empathy when I was with Bob. Q: Why could you do it when you were with Bob? A: Bob is a man. Adjusting the claim (AC): I have a difficulty in expressing empathy when I'm around women. Q: Are there any men around whom you couldn't express empathy? Are there any women around whom you could express empathy? ... You keep going until you nail down the precise definition of the argument. Once you have the precise definition (you can't come up with any counter-examples), you have "arrived at truth." The process doesn't have to be this rigid, but it's helpful to keep it formal until you internalize it. Looks like you've got your first clue! Congratulations! Here are some more things to consider: Your ex-girlfriend chose to be with you for more than 4 years when you were a "token sarcastic asshole." This says quite a bit about her false self. Make sure you examine how her false self might have affected you. It may still be affecting you if she hasn't dealt with it. Sarcasm is a sword made of words. It can still hurt people despite its incorporeal form. Analyse your history and look for cases where you may have hurt people with your sarcasm. Why did you hurt them? Why them? How did they react? These are all useful questions to work with. When you have to adapt to a dysfunctional environment, a part of your personality gets twisted and becomes the bridge between your self and other people. This is the genesis of the false self. Essentially, the false self, in its many forms, is a survival mechanism; it's the scar tissue that grew over an open wound to protect it from a harmful environment. Don't dismiss and suppress it. Instead, look for who or what inflicted the wound. As far as I know, this is the only way to permanently deal with a false self problem. Finally, if you're not journalling, starting journalling. I bet you gained quite a bit of insight just by writing your last reply. Journalling can be incredibly helpful when you're working through an issue.

Don't take anything I say as truth! After all, I know very little about you. My posts are more of a guideline on how I think about these issues. If I had to pinpoint a specific part of your previous post, what gave me the aforementioned impression, it would be this one: Guilt comes out of violating an accepted and understood internal rule. A lack of knowledge about why you violated a rule tends to breed distrust. I may be totally wrong here, but that's my experience. When you combine distrust with a desire to act ("I want to truly help..."), you get the tug of war I mentioned earlier. Your ex-girlfriend keeps coming up a lot in your posts yet you haven't said much about your history with her. Why did you break up with her? Why did you decide to remain friends afterwards? Does she know that you're struggling with expressing empathy? If not, why not? I recommend you examine the obvious causes before concluding that this is a systemic issue within you. What if you're surrounded by false-self-driven people who knock you down every time you try to express genuine empathy? How can you ever learn if you have to apologize and self-attack every time you make a mistake? To give you a sports metaphor, can you imagine having a team mate that yells at you and threatens to leave the game every time you make a mistake? How would you feel? I'm exaggerating, but I think you get the picture. I'm not saying any of the above is true in your case. However, it's important that you consider it before focusing on your self-work.

I don't know what kind of constraints exist right now, but you can just limit the total down-vote quota per person. That way, the threshold limit can be reached only if a bunch of people "complain" about you. The information of who down-votes is there, and you can always request an investigation if you notice something fishy. The system doesn't have to be automatic. It can just compile a list of offenders and notify the moderation team for further review. As you probably know, software can't fix human problems, but it can certainly gather useful information. To me, that's the whole purpose of the reputation system.

If people up-voted troll comments, the reputation system would be the least of our worries. I'm yet to see anyone who was unjustly down-voted to the point of triggering a comment filter. I'd even propose a ban threshold for negative reputation when it comes to hardcore trolls who continue posting despite getting censored. They only waste server resources and emotional energy on the part of members.

I wasn't implying conscious intent. Hell is a religious concept that allows people to psychologically split from their "negative" feelings. That doesn't mean a bunch of priests came together to purposely invent the concept. This is a very good question. I'm not familiar with academic sex-positive feminism and I don't really care about it. Popular sex-positive feminists like Laci Green have a lot more influence over your average woman. If you agree that female objectification and insecurities don't have anything to do with the evils of the patriarchy, then you already know that any attempt to scapegoat is not going to fix the underlying issue. It's going to make it worse. Let me give you an example. Praying to God won't heal your toothache. It will, in fact, make the toothache worse because you're not going to look for alternatives. It's the illusion of having a solution that is dangerous. Now, praying is not directly harmful to your dental health, but if you try to rinse your mouth with acid, you're going to make things much worse. You're truly screwed if the illusion of an answer and a harmful methodology come in one package. I'd argue that this is exactly what's going on with sex-positive feminism. The issue of insecurity is a matter of self-knowledge. If you have control over the supposed cause, you put in the work to make the gap between expectation and reality smaller. For example, you diet and exercise to lose weight. If you can't do that, the issue is a matter of self-knowledge. Additionally, trying to exercise control over something outside your circle of influence is irrational. Again, the problem is rooted in lack of self-knowledge. By blaming female insecurities on men, the media or whatever, sex+ feminists create an illusion of an answer. Here's where it gets worse. Men also become more and more resentful because they're blamed for something they didn't cause. I don't know about you but I've never been asked by a woman about what I find beautiful. I never got to define any standards of beauty yet I'm blamed for their existence. How does your average man feel about that? How is he going to react? This, I think, is the root of the widespread male obsession with physical beauty. The pick-up artist culture arose to exploit female vanity and sexual freedom. Now women have to deal with men's passive-aggressive vengeance on top of being fed lies by their "sisterhood." This is the kind of corruption you bring about when you reject philosophy and choose to hold onto irrational beliefs. I'd have a lot more sympathy for feminists if they weren't secular. There's a reason why I used religious metaphors to support my arguments. Feminists use the same arguments when they argue against religion. In addition to being intellectually myopic, they're also hypocritical.

That was a very interesting post, SirJames. With the recent development of sex positive (sex+) feminism, sexual solipsism is starting to hit an all-time high. Not surprisingly, the rise in female insecurity is proportional to the increasing number of messages promoting sexual freedom. Sex positive feminism tries to curb this trend by, wait for it, blaming women's insecurities on men. It was feminists who first started promoting female sexual liberation and we can all see the results of that. They can't even acknowledge their own failure. You're bound to fail when you try to solve social problems by inventing a massive scapegoat. The intellectual myopia of feminists is really quite astounding. I suspect patriarchy was a conceptual construct invented for the sole purpose of psychological projection. Feminists reject what they consider to be negative aspects of their personalities by blaming the almighty patriarchy. Not competitive enough? Why that's men's fault. Feeling insecure about your body? Patriarchy!

You weren't really straight forward with them in this case though. You're clearly concerned about being perceived as intimidating and you don't know why this is happening. Be honest and curious. When they called you intimidating, you could have replied with something along the lines of: "You know, you're not the first person to call me intimidating. I'm concerned about that. I certainly don't want to be intimidating. Can you tell me more about what prompted this reaction in you? Was it something I said? My body language? I can't figure this out on my own."

Yeah, you know things are bad when a certain group of people is asked to bear the sins of everyone else. This video was commissioned by the white ribbon campaign. I saw one of their representatives in a YouTube video recently. He participated in a TV panel discussion about the role of men in the 21st century. I looked up the mission statement of their organisation and they have the goal of ending male-perpetrated violence against women. Why stop at women? I wasn't particularly surprised, but I still had a bad taste in my mouth. Our modern-day societies can't function if violence against men suddenly became unacceptable. They should have called themselves the white knight campaign.

In addition to your comment, I'd like to point out that global warming/climate science is one of the few "scientific" disciplines where data is "gathered" in order to "validate" the theoretical model and not the other way around. You don't validate your models against the empirical data any more. If there's a discrepancy, you look for "new" data instead of making the necessary adjustments. The future fattening of a lot of bank accounts depends on the validity of the model after all. The alarmists always talk about "oil money interests," but never mention "government money incentives."

I became interested in unschooling about a year ago and read up quite a bit on the subject. I was also listening to the School Sucks Podcast at the time. In general, the idea is infinitely better relative to public school indoctrination. However, as Cheryl noted, most unschoolers are not particularly philosophical (FDR unschoolers excluded), so they tend to have some really questionable theoretical underpinnings behind their approach. I'll give you a list of things to watch out for when digging into unschooling. Negotiation is often seen as a manipulative tool for imposing the parents' will and desires on the child. They rightly point out that the child's natural state is curiosity, but they assume the child is magically able to pick the useful knowledge from the near infinite amount of information out there. You should get out of his way and become a pure facilitator of his knowledge. Can you guess who has a pretty good idea about what's useful in life? Adults. Why can't you make the case for something like reading? That's manipulative! Teaching the child how to establish boundaries by example is also frowned upon. As a parent, communicating your own preferences is often equated to an implicit threat of withdrawing care and affection. Unschoolers don't have frameworks like UPB and RTR under their belts. They're also largely ignorant of economic thinking. Without these tools, their approach tends to fall back on their own history. We all know where that leads in the absence of self-knowledge. There tends to be quite a lot of disagreement on what "unschooling" actually is even among known unschoolers. In the absence of philosophy, all they do is try to control the definition in order to silence the opposition. What I outlined is a really broad generalization based on my own observations. I also deliberately chose to focus on the negative aspects of what I've observed. There are a lot of wonderful ideas generated by the unschooling community that we shouldn't ignore. The FDR community will give you the tools to separate the good from the bad ideas, so I also recommend you stick around.

I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, but I think you've got the entire thing backwards. You're not going to find yourself when you're surrounded by the people who erased you. Do you think you can write poetry amidst a thunderstorm? I used to have this illusion that I could take little FOO dives and come out just fine. Boy was I wrong... I was already spending most of the year away from my parents, but when I went back for 3 months over summer, my illusion was completely destroyed. I became so dissociated that I spent most of the time outside playing sports and working out. I did it all to stay away from them and suppress my feelings. I was incredibly disoriented. What scared me the most is that I wasn't aware of any of this until I left. Truth is, the more sensitive you become, the more such an environment is going to suffocate you. It was only recently that I started excavating my self. It's a slow and difficult process. I don't think you can do it when you have to interact with the people who damaged you to this extent. They're not going to benefit from you changing. They're not going to allow you to change. I'm really sorry that you have to deal with this situation. I know how tough it is. My only advice is to be proactive and to put first things first. Think of the things you can control and focus your energy on them. You can't will yourself into finding what was once taken away from you. You would have done that already. Instead, look for ways to get out and become financially independent. Keeping the cost-benefit in mind, even a shitty job doesn't seem bad if it gives you some time away from your family. Your dad is going to realize what's going on fairly quickly, but you can lie to him about your true goals until you're ready to get out. I told my parents that I wanted to become my own man because I was looking forward to settling down ("What kind of girl will date a guy who lives with his parents and doesn't make any money?"). In all fairness, that was actually true. Once you're out, start compiling a list of all the things that you weren't taught as a kid. The habits that you didn't develop. Negotiation? Communication skills? Deferring gratification? Systematically planning and executing? Measuring progress? I could go on, but I think you get the picture. These are all skills that are very important for your future success. Be proactive about acquiring them. I can't tell you when you're going to start finding yourself, but it's not going to take too long. Personally, what really helped me find the willpower to go through all this was the image of my future self. I imagined myself in the future, surrounded by my wife and children. I pictured their personalities and my endless love for them. My future children will never have to experience what I went through. I found this image so moving that, once I got a hold of my feelings, I asked myself the following question: How do I get there?

I don't know about others, but I spent an entire summer at home when I first discovered this show. I was only going out once a week to buy food. You're in the process of rebuilding most of your internal world. It's a delicate process that takes time. Moreover, this process can be easily disrupted by dysfunctional people. I too see most people as ghost, but that doesn't particularly bother me any more. I choose to look for the living. It sure took a while to figure this out on an emotional level though.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to go through such an experience when you first find out about these things. I went through a similar phase myself about 2 years ago. Getting rid of decades of inflicted propaganda doesn't happen overnight. If your situation keeps getting worse, you may consider focusing on the self-knowledge parts of Stef's work. Remaining in the perpetually angry and disillusioned libertarian camp can become toxic over time. In the long run, the philosophy of freedom maximises your chances of living a happy life relative to those who'd rather jump off the cliff of statism with blindfolds on. When you have to walk through a minefield, you want to be the guy with X-ray vision.