Category Archives: projection

The peril of hope.

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When is hope helpful? A simple explanation of hope is a wish. Wishes, ungrounded, lend to magical thinking. Magical thinking being when insight or intuition is used without attempting to apply rational knowledge and logic. More specifically hope is projection of bliss into the future.

Future bliss sounds noble. It is desirable for all humans and animals. Everybody wants bliss. While the utility of perpetual bliss is unmeasurable, it’s likelihood is not. Even in perfect systems life is subject to random events. Scarcity and suffering, to at least a small degree is inevitable. Never ending bliss is practically speaking, a fantasy.

The human conscience is a risk engine. The wider the variety of data, both positive and negative in perception, the better it is at assessing risk. Negative events do not need to be directly experienced, though, those are more powerful. Humans can learn from others negative experiences, if we have access to them. Hope is a strictly positive spectrum. It’s lens filters out negative experiences. While a person is still forming emotional prototypes, the fewer negative experiences they have, the more poorly they will handle them.

The conscience catalogues our memories as an emotional timeline. Rational recall of memories evoke emotional states and emotional states evoke memories.  Magical thinking, most typically in children, is a lack of reason. Rational thinking does not reliability examine’s the conscience’s insights. Until the ‘age of reason’ (typically 8 years old) children can not reliably process their own insights and check them for provability or even explain-ability. A lie told to a young child is a lie believed, wished and hoped.

A conscience tuned with exhaustive reasoning usually provides a moral compass for the future. Hope sidelines this process. It provides a seemingly moral workaround, but only justified by a hope coloured incomplete risk engine. As adjunct to faith (knowing something you can’t prove) it bolsters ideas that have already survived reason. Without reason and faith, hope is effectively magical thinking.

Unreasonable and reasonable hope

  • Unreasonable hope: Insight(bliss) -> logical mind -> bliss based rationalization -> more bliss
  • Reasonable hope: Insight (a blend of bliss, despair and will to action) -> logical mind -> rationalization -> faith or fact (successful reason) -> faith (facts don’t need hope) -> reasonable hope (hope that’s been through the process of reason)

Hope is self perpetuating, and inferior to reason driven and inherently sceptical faith. It may occur if no emotional rewards are provided to children for challenging magical thinking at the age of reason along with emotionally negative events. It is impossible to weigh risk without negative examples for comparison. All scenarios do not need to be personally experienced, that’s both cruel and rejects the validity of imagination and empathy, but without some personal loss, imagination has no prototypes by which to scale despair.

Hope’s legitimate utility is a stand in for faith, in those too young or innocent to reason.

Reject hope as a substitute for reason by exposure to limited experiences with pain. Ideally in small, short, doses. Such as quality parenting allows. Once your prototypes are formed, seek limited exposure and understanding to the worst humiliations of others. Not habitually, but enough to maximize the risk calculating yield of your own failures. No level of competence is above failure. Infallibility is a sign of hope substituting for faith, and that is a hope based fantasy. Periodically go to your fear. Ground your hopes in faiths both provable and unprovable. Understand the pain of carrying truth alone. Now your conscience has been seasoned with realistic risk. If you don’t, your conscience has no idea what you are in for.

EDIT: A Warning about faith.   A healthy, stable society can help steer you away from poorly rationalized faiths (via shared faiths), but that can fail.  They can be destructive too.  Faith without quality reason is a setup for witchhunts, cult, and every downside to both logic, and hope.  Only active curation of the metamind(the conscience) can result in reason, and ultimately that curator must be you.  Know yourself.  Start small and focus on the most inclusive compassion ethics and logic allow.  Think long and often, act deliberately, and face, ‘The ends don’t justify the means,’ before you act.

The gift of doubt

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bunker-or-jail

(the burden of faith: part 2)

As you explore the implications of humanity as two distinct behavioral sets, you find the metamind.   It shines light on rationalization, the failure of which can describe faith.  The conscience can be destructive without rationalization, especially after Freud, then Bernays, and then Gobbles laid out how to manipulate un-rationalized emotional impulse in terrible and effective new ways.  Faith is bunker, but add a guard and it becomes a jail.

Doubt is failed rationalization*, which is vital to reason.  Reason can’t occur without at least some self knowledge.  If you don’t understand why you feel as you do, you can’t be sure you feelings are your own.  They may have been programmed into you.

If there is a chance a feeling has been programmed into you, you can’t trust that faith.  The less you know about your feelings the more true this is.  People in a modern society who claim a faith in politics, religion, or any other hunch, with out first experiencing doubt, are simply obeying their programming.  They are indoctrinated and in turn are rationalizing that, after the fact.

Doubt is the exploration that your emotional risk calculation is incorrect.   Today that is most likely because someone other than you has installed the emotions you feel inside your mind.  To begin this exploration consider that you already have fallen victim to it more times than you could ever count.  If you can’t cope with this idea you may already be a full blown proto-psychopath.  A person who’s metamind is wholly externally controlled.  How can I know you have been programmed before?  Your guardians, first charged with protecting you from fatal events, have extensively programmed your emotions against vast but unintuitive dangers.  Electricity, poisons, vehicles, abduction, and drowning among others all would have likely killed you before you had a chance to read this message.  Hard proof you are in denial about how easily you can be manipulated.

I know some psychopaths read this site, and for them an exception is granted.  They likely have no experience with what I am talking about.  This message is not for them.

Only once doubts in any faith have been thoroughly explored, can you know that faith belongs to you.  Start with any faith.  Politics for example are laughable as hard science and therefore largely based in faith.  It is immoral and nearly impossible to experiment on a small element of a social policy.  Civilization is vexed by a human science control.  You may know a particular law will benefit your civilization, but that apparent knowledge is actually faith.  Your subconscious risk calculation expressed as emotion.  Therein lies the risk.  A clever but compassion-less politician may have placed that emotion there to serve their own ends at your expense.

To expose the source of your externally fed emotions start very small.  Look at the negative effect a rule, religious or political, has on a person you know well in your community.  Do not blame the individual (Likely a projection from manipulator) but instead figure out how this rule has failed them.  Now work through all the people and organizations who endorse this rule, and look for any emotional expressions from them about it. Reject any emotions you share with the people around you about this rule.  Once that is done you can calculate your own feelings and reinforce your own emotion about it.  You now have a vantage point to discern and explore your own feeling about the societies around you.

You can get help with this, either a savy friend open to the conversation or psychotherapy is excellent at this as well.  This is temporary but may be necessary at first.  The world is drowning in examples of abuse of power and worship of hierarchy, so if you have trouble finding abuse you chose your helper poorly.  Try someone different.  You will need to travel the path of doubt on your own, but first you must climb to your feet.

Faith is a skill.  Not a hand me down, suggestion, or order from another person.  True faith is a risk calculation consistently generated from your own experiences.  A calculation handicapped with doubt.  Without constant doubt faith will quickly trap you.  Distrust those who mock or attack your doubts.  This is more important than ever in the age of institutionalized marketing and propaganda.  Personal emotions are subtle, expressed without crippling fear, brow beating, and veiled threats.  Imparting urgency without making a single demand.  Retake the bunker of your own mind, one feeling at a time.

* Psychopaths exhibit unrelenting self confidence because doubt is a mechanism of the conscience and reason, which they do not posses.

Phallacy

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cigar

I have a full size van.  I consistently have the largest car in the parking lot.  Some would say this implies I have a small penis.  It is usually filled with my family since I don’t drive it empty, have fun with that one too.

But when I drive to work I typically take my motorcycle which is one of the smallest cars on the road, does that mean I have a large penis?  But it’s one of the largest motorcycles on the road, dwarfing mopeds and the occasional sub compact car.  Does that mean I have a medium penis?

The reason I typically choose the largest vehicle in it’s class is because I took physics in college, where a professor who helped design the moon lander explained in great detail why a shorter distance of deceleration in a crash results in more Gs, and more Gs result in more deaths.  Big cars and truck deform and crush into scrap for a longer distance within the car.

Does this mean physics professors or engineers have small penises?   More interestingly does this mean that people with small penises are attracted together in some sort of natural nerd herd?  Does group learning make the penis smaller?  I founded and run a computer group which is definitely a nerd herd, does that mean I have the smallest penis?

I own two guns, and it is said that people with guns are compensating for a small penis.  But I only got them a few years ago, does that mean my penis recently got smaller?  If my penis will change it’s size depending on what I own or use does that mean it will grow again if I discard them?   If I take Viagra will my guns shrink?  And my cars?  Perhaps it is that I rarely use the guns or the van.  The more often I use them the smaller my penis will get?  If so what does that imply for police who are typically required to carry guns all the time?  Perhaps they don’t use them?  This seems to make sense with American sexual activity after the war.  Men discarded their guns and reunited with their wives, and made an entire baby boom.  But many of those vets armed themselves with civilian guns when they returned.  Perhaps some sort of birth control?  Further this would imply that counties with population problems like China and India should arm their populations to shrink their men’s penises and have less children.

Where did this idea come from?   Where else, but from psychology and Sigmund Freud.  His idea of a phallic symbol or a symbol for the penis in penis shaped everyday items implied a sense of inadequacy.  But this was originally termed ‘penis envy’ and meant to describe women, who were subconsciously angry they were not men.  This sounds very different from the item to penis size ratio.  What did Freud actually say about this?  “A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.”   He was very famous for the analogy that a cigar could be a big brown penis for some people (specifically women), at a time when cigars were very popular.  It was considered socially unsightly and abhorrent for women to smoke at the time, much less a large fragrant cigar.  But he himself smoked cigars.  If penis envy was intended for analysis of men, why did Freud himself smoke them?

Laughing at the sexual inadequacy of men with big equipment?  Perhaps you should read about projection.