Rational Men Must Be Tolerant of Others

[Charles R. Anderson]

Preface

This 4th essay was posted on 19 March 2005 at my blog, Reasoned Thoughts. I have made no changes here. It is the first essay primarily on toleration and its critical role in a society of thinking men. In this essay, I use the concept of toleration as David Kelley did in The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism. In a later essay, I suggest that it might be beneficial, given the tendency of some so-called Objectivists to rationalize tolerance into an act of the sanction of evil, to reserve what I call epistemological tolerance within the realm of a refined concept of tolerance. The tolerance of individuality and political tolerance might then be thought of as aspects of benevolence. At this date, I have mixed thoughts about the possibility of getting people to accept such a change of definition and about why one should bother in the face of such unrealistic arguments.

A note on the title: In a civilized society, rational men will exercise a high level of tolerance for others. I am not implying that a rational man must be tolerant of a massively irrational and dangerous person. However, in a civilized society, the majority of men are sufficiently rational and contribute enough of value to us, that we should be tolerant of them in recognition of the value they represent for us in our lives. On the other hand, when civilization breaks down, as it did in Communist China under Mao, in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin, and in Germany under Hitler, then very large numbers of men will not earn our tolerance.

Rational Men Must be Tolerant of Others

There are at least three major reasons why a rational man must practice tolerance with other human beings. These are:

• Tolerance makes it possible to learn from the efforts of other people. Without tolerance, others are not encouraged to put as much effort into thinking, since the fruit of their labor is too often viewed as evil. It becomes less risky not to think about anything prohibited and if they have thought about it, they had best not share the thought. Without tolerance one lives in the Dark Ages in Europe or the Middle East of the present. Tolerance is essential if we do not all wish to enter the world and spend our lives reinventing the wheel. Tolerance is also the great tool that makes it possible for us to challenge our own ideas with those of others. This makes it easier for us to identify our own errors of thought and correct them. Tolerance makes it possible for a group of thinkers to tackle a tough problem and take advantage of each person's different experience, interests, and thinking abilities to understand the whole of it, when each individual could only contribute a part of that understanding. I will call this epistemological tolerance.
  

• Individuals are very complex and highly differentiated. We are different biochemically and structurally. We have different experiences. We think in different ways and have a history of myriad unique choices behind us. We have different values. These differences add immensely to the richness of our experience with other people. Similarly, they make each of us a unique experience to others. Some of the value represented by each individual is precisely found in the uniqueness of each of us. As gold is more valuable than iron because it is more rare, each individual has more value because each is unique. But, of course, not all of our differences from one another are valued by others. Some of those differences may be viewed with mistrust, some with disdain, and some with repulsion. When a rational man practices tolerance with respect to the properties and values of others, he does not sign on to vouch for the value of each property or the morality of all of their choices. This form of tolerance recognizes the fact of reality that people are individuals. It recognizes that there is commonly much that is sufficiently good in the differences we find in others that we will generally profit in our interactions with them. I will call this the tolerance of individuality.
  

• Throughout the history of man, the political entities that have controlled men around the world have established various balancings of dogma versus individual initiatives in thought. They have also frequently sought to direct what values a man may seek and achieve. They have often favored men of one race, ethnic group, religion, cast, tribe, clan, or profession over others. In Europe, the Hundred Year's War, largely between Catholics and Protestants, caused untold misery until finally Europe realized a more live and let live philosophy held benefits for civilization. In a capitalist republic, the government does not favor one person over another for these reasons. In fact, a capitalist republic finds value in the differences among its people, since the many differences in interests and abilities allow the society the advantages of many specializations and open the door to a wealth of trading among its citizens. It is also recognized that when one group suppresses another group or any individual, the fighting and the discord are distractions at best and very often fatal to the continuance of either the government or the entire society. This form of tolerance is political tolerance.
  

Each of these forms of tolerance are related to one another. They are each important to us as thinking individuals. Since Objectivists are thinking individuals, they should be foremost among those proclaiming toleration as a great benefit to each of us and to the societies in which we live. Objectivists are also a minority, who are not infrequently viewed as heretics. They are dependent upon others exercising the virtue of tolerance toward them. Taken together, the forms of tolerance allow us to develop and function fully as individuals. They allow us to trade ideas and values that raise the level of our civilization to much greater heights than is possible for a society or group of intolerant individuals.

Dogma and rigid social custom are the enemies of tolerance. Rational thought directed at understanding reality and the celebration of the productive individual are the product of toleration. Toleration allows us to experiment with ideas and test them out. It offers us a rich complexity of theories and choices, while aiding us in our efforts to evaluate those theories and choices. It allows each man to draw on the individual insights of others. It is a major virtue whenever two or more individuals live and work together.

There are dogmatic Objectivists (a contradiction in terms actually) who need very badly to understand these aspects of reality. Because reason is the individual's means of surviving and promoting his life, that which promotes reason is virtuous. Rationality is the most fundamental virtue. Tolerance is a major virtue because it recognizes that every other individual has the right of their own attempt to use reason, just as I have that right. Tolerance recognizes that it is the individual mind that must of its own volition choose to focus upon the creation of concepts and the use of principles to understand reality in all of its complexity. It is to be expected that individuals, even when highly committed to rational thought, will independently arrive at somewhat differing understandings of our complex existence. Tolerance recognizes individuality and allows us to take advantage of it to gain much greater insight of reality by evaluating the ideas generated by other creative and rational minds. What we gain in value makes us much more productive and much less primitive. We gain the advantage of living in a great civilization, provided we can also provide our society with a healthy respect for the rights of the individual. The concept of these rights and their exercise again requires us individually to be committed to tolerance.

Among Objectivists, David Kelley has been the most effective spokesman for the importance of toleration. He has been especially concerned with toleration as a means to increase our knowledge. He has also recognized the virtue of independence in each individual. I highly recommend his book The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism to anyone interested in how people can work together to greatly improve their understanding of any subject they may have a common interest in. While he especially addresses issues of Objectivism, there is a great deal to think about and use from this book even for a small group of collaborators in a laboratory or in a factory. It is really about being more productive in thought and action than it is possible for a single individual to be acting alone. As I read this book, I kept thinking that it was a marvelously organized and thought out explanation of many principles that I had found essential to the maximization of productive output in the many groups of scientific and engineering collaborators that I had had through the years.

In those groups, I had long worked hard to set such an atmosphere of tolerance in place. As this atmosphere grew, each such group became more productive. I tried to cultivate an atmosphere in which we maintained high standards for our output, but recognized that errors would be made as we sought solutions to the technical problems on which we worked, especially when we tried our hardest to be creative. Working together, we could makes leaps forward by taking advantage of our differing talents and help to correct each other's errors in a constructive way. In fact, we often learned from our errors. When we became comfortable that making an error was not likely to be viewed as evil or a sign of incompetence, ideas poured forth and our rate of solving difficult technical problems increased. It is surprising how often an idea with an error either contains a partial advance or somehow suggests the correct answer. Sometimes the wrong idea led to a test or experiment which proved it a dead end. Yet, that test provided us a clue to the right path to the answer to our problem. The idea that an error is evil is very wrongheaded. In fact, in certain contexts, making an error may actually be considered good. One does not make errors when not thinking. An error is made when one is thinking. Provided that one goes on to thoroughly evaluate the idea and test its validity rationally, the error is not evil and it may be the spur to the final correct identification of reality. In that context, it may be argued that the error served a good function. In that context, we can and should be less afraid of errors. They beat the alternative of stultification hands down.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Charles,

I enjoyed this essay. I especially liked this quote:

Tolerance is a major virtue because it recognizes that every other individual has the right of their own attempt to use reason, just as I have that right.

Tolerance is a great deterrent to crowd psychology manipulations. The loudest Objectivists against tolerance are the ones busiest building small power structures. These are the ones who deny such right to others (especially on issues that they think question their intellectual standing or their power), although they constantly proclaim the opposite.

Roger Bissell mentioned brainstorming in the NB Self-Esteem Every Day thread. Your discussion at the end is all about brainstorming. This simply cannot happen with intolerant people. (Notice that intolerant people building a power structure have a few "safe" areas where people can dissent, like choice of music, etc., since brainstorming is such a basic urge that it cannot be completely stifled.)

I have caused strong controversies ni the small online Objectivist community by starting to brainstorm for premise-checking. The loudness of the controversies show me the fragility of the arguments - not the arguments per se, but instead the commitment to them by the loudmouths. Nobody gets upset over questioning simple facts - only the facts where they have doubts themselves.

For instance, I was once on a long walk in Boston during my university days. A bum approached me and asked me what day of the week it was. I said, "Sunday." The he asked, "Is that law?" I never thought about it from that angle before, so I said I didn't know. This bugged me, so I tried to look it up. I couldn't find any law anywhere stating that the days of the week had to be the way they are normally accepted.

Still, I cannot imagine anyone being intolerant of this question, evne though it cuts to a fundamental core of time organization. Nobody has any real doubts about Sunday being Sunday, so this question is not seen as a threat.

People are only intolerant when they are insecure. That's the simple truth.

Frankly, I get amused by the suggestion by those with hardening of the categories that toleration is sanctioning evil. All this remark shows is that they are good at dropping context and turning their own minds off to reality.

btw - Do you have a definition of tolerance you normally use?

Michael

[Paul Mawdsley]

Charles, reading your essay made me think of a book I read some time ago called Science, Order, and Creativity by David Bohm and F. David Peat. My main interest at the time was in its discussion about a causal interpretation of quantum theory. The book was, however, more than just a presentation of a view of quantum theory. It also had intriguing ideas about human nature: about creativity, culture, and social dynamics.

Here is an excerpt that I think relates to the spirit of your essay:

...dialogue can be considered as a free flow of meaning between people in communication.... A key difference between a dialogue and an ordinary discussion is that, within the latter, people usually hold relatively fixed positions and argue in favour of their views as they try to convince others to change. At best this may produce agreement or compromise, but it does not give rise to anything creative. Moreover, whenever anything of fundamental significance is involved, then positions tend to be rigidly nonnegotiable and talk degenerates either into a confrontation in which there is no solution, or into a polite avoidance of the issue. Both these outcomes are extremely harmful, for they prevent the free play of thought in communication and therefore impede creativity.

In dialogue, however, a person may prefer a certain position but does not hold to it nonnegotiably. He or she is ready to listen to others with sufficient sympathy and interest to understand the meaning of the other’s position properly and is also ready to change his or her own point of view if there is good reason to do so. Clearly a spirit of goodwill or friendship is necessary for this to take place. It is not compatible with a spirit that is competitive, contentious, or aggressive...

...an important root feature of science, which is also present in dialogue: to be ready to acknowledge any fact and any point of view as it actually is, whether one likes it or not. In many areas of life, people are, on the contrary, disposed to collude in order to avoid acknowledging facts and points of view that they find unpleasant or unduly disturbing...

... [The principles of dialogue imply] a very deep change in how the mind works. What is essential is that each participant is, as it were, suspending his or her point of view, while also holding other points of view in a suspended form and giving full attention to what they mean. In doing this, each participant has also to suspend the corresponding activity, not only of his or her own tacit infrastructure of ideas, but also of those of the others who are participating in the dialogue. Such a thoroughgoing suspension of tacit individual and cultural infrastructures, in the context of full attention to their contents, frees the mind to move in quite new ways...The mind is then able to respond to creative new perceptions going beyond the particular points of view that have been suspended. (p. 241-3)

This is one of those things I read that resonated deeply and I just stored away in the back of my mind for future reference. I think I should read this book again.

Paul

[Charles R. Anderson]

When I wrote this essay, I was still trying to formulate a definition of toleration or of tolerance for myself. I noted that many dictionary defiinitions were inadequate and some were outright contradictory. I have long felt uneasy about the definition of tolerance as a form of acceptance of people whose ideas we think are bad. It seems to me that while there are contexts in which we do put up with people having bad ideas, that that aspect should not name the essential and most important aspect of tolerance.

I think my best definitions are those I came to develop finally in the essays called The Virtues of Benevolence and Tolerance and in Benevolence:People as Tolerance:Ideas. The shorter definition is then that tolerance is "the attitude that there is great value in the ideas developed by others and that to realize this value we should invest a considerable effort into rationally examining the ideas of others and fairly assessing their value."

The consequence of this definition is that because we identify reason as our means of knowing reality and we recognize the facts that reality is complex, that our time and mental capability are both limited, and that others have devoted much time and effort to thinking and are willing to share their thoughts commonly at very reasonable cost with us, then only a fool would choose not to make the most of the many gifts others offer us. Our cost is simply to rationally assess and evaluate the ideas they have developed. We can commonly do this with much less of our time than it would have taken us to fully develop the same ideas on our own.

The ideas of others are gifts given to us by others, which are of incalculable value. It is very irrational to deny this value in the aggregate in our relatively civilized present world. Of course, we must rationally reject the invalid ideas, but we do this in the context of appreciating the value of the many valid ideas we are given. It is also important to realize that a rational man is frequently inspired to develop a valid idea in response to an invalid idea. Sometimes, a choice is made of one of two choices that leads to the development of a wrong consequence. This development down the wrong pathway suggests that one go back and examine the consequences of making the other branching choice. In some cases, we really do benefit from the work the wrong choice maker did in demonstrating that he had chosen the wrong path.

To illustrate this, consider the strong intellectual impact that the Soviet Union had upon the development of Ayn Rand's ideas down very different pathways. Or even consider the likelihood that when she considered Nietzsche's ideas, this may have caused her to chose a number of different paths. I encounter many such cases in my laboratory when solving materials problems. It can be very helpful to develop an idea to that point that it is shown to be wrong and find in the process that another branch point is revealed.

On your observations on how people often become most angry when they feel that they have been beaten in the rational evaluation of ideas, I have seen this phenomena many, many times. I started to become very aware of it when I was in the 7th grade. As an undergraduate, it was very apparent when I had bull sessions with socialist anti-Vietnam War protestors at Brown. My Ph.D. thesis advisor, in many ways a man I admire, was sometimes terribly unable to admit being wrong. We would discuss an issue we disagreed on very reasonably until such time as he realized he was wrong, then he would very quickly blow-up. I always knew exactly when he understood that I was right! I would then quickly terminate the discussion and a day or two later he would do something really nice for me, but he would never, ever admit to being wrong. But he knew. He was just a more dramatic case than most people, but there are many others like this.

Actually, most people are like this. A socialist almost never admits to being wrong. A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, or a Hindu will almost never admit to being wrong. It is a near universal truth that people even knowing that their core ideas cannot be validated by their arguments, will not admit to being wrong. Sad, but true. Fortunately, there are some areas of human endeavor in which admitting error is more acceptable.

[Charles R. Anderson]

Thanks for the quote, Paul. Perhaps if I could always have been consistent in suspending my ideas and talked more to my daughters in this sort of dialog, one or more of them would be an Objectivist today. I have always thought myself pretty reasonable, but I seemed to them too passionately certain that Affirmative Action is evil discrimination, that minimum wage laws put poorly educated and young Americans out of work, that subsidies for corporations, farmers, and welfare receipients were wrong, etc. My daughters learned that some of these were right at school and were never able to accept that their teachers and friends were often wrong about such things. There was too much total passion in me for my ideas for them. It seems that that became the excuse to reject much of Objectivism. They developed the idea that Objectivism meant the passionate rejection of others, rather than that it meant the rejection of many of their ideas. This realization also played a role in my wanting to better understand tolerance, as I defined it in my comment above to Michael.

[Paul Mawdsley]

Charles,

I admire the matter of fact way you consider you own actions in affecting your daughters’ development. All too often people disown uncomfortable truths and are left unable to grow from their knowledge. Being an Objectivist is not everything. Having a strong will and an independent personal perspective is more important than having the “right” perspective. My guess is your daughters have these qualities.

I am at a different point along the parenting path. My son is 6 and my daughter is 3. I am amazed by the maturity of the subjects they consider. My daughter has taken, this week, to asking questions about death. Of course, at three, most questions are preceded with “why,” and are repeated in a circular fashion. For now she seems content to know that she and her parents will likely not be dying for some time to come.

My son has been asking, for awhile now, questions about God. My wife and I are both atheist. My son has some friends who can be a little preachy and has been picking up information from their freshly programmed perspectives. When he first asked us about God we were unprepared and there was a moment of, “What do we say?” Some time before I had related the story to my wife of when I first started to consider the idea of God. I was eight years old and had asked my brother-- who is 14 years my senior-- if he believed in God. His answer has always struck me as a symbol of the best approach to encouraging a child’s independent development. He asked me, “What do you think?”

I remember my mind switching gears, changing from passive receptor of information to active processor of information. I turned my mind to draw on my experiences and my judgement, rather than on someone else’s authority, and began to try to build a picture of reality in my head that made sense to me. What a powerful lesson that has been in my life.

My wife and I tried the same approach with my son. We had already talked to him about the idea of creating theories. (He has had his own theories of why the dinosaurs became extinct for some time now.) We suggested that he think about God as a theory, that it is up to him to explore and think about the world and other people’s ideas about the world. We explained that his theory can change as he learns more about things. And that’s OK. We explained that everybody has their own point of view, their own theory, and that it is up to him to figure out his. He took a little time, then said decisively, “I think there is a God, but I’m still going to think about it some more.”

So here we are, two atheists with a six year old theist and that’s OK. Our job is not to indoctrinate him with our views of existence. Our job is to prepare him to be a healthy adult. I would rather he be strong willed with an independent personal perspective than be agreeable with a second-hand copy of my perspective. Besides, if he’s as smart as I think he is, he’ll be able to negotiate the twists and turns of understanding existence. I did OK and he has strengths I didn’t have at his age. I just hope we can still talk about these things when he is eighteen, whether we agree or not.

Paul

[JennaW]

Fundamentalism means never having to say "I'm wrong."

[Charles R. Anderson]

It sounds to me that you and your wife are on a good course for working with your children. I tried always to encourage my daughters to think for themselves and they do a comparatively good job of it. None of my girls believes in God, though they tend to think that I should never mention being an atheist or ask anyone why they believe in God. If I know that they are religious, then it is very impolite of me to discuss any problem with religion in their presence. It is not, however, impolite for them to discuss religion in my presence. There is no two-way street here.

My daughter's are generally fairly rational, but they do frequently also express more concern for the feelings of others than they do for a rational analysis of a particular problem. On one very memorable occasion while traveling, my wife and my three daughters ganged up on me for hours, which can happen when you are the only male around. When I expressed my unhappiness with this situation in rational terms, they were completely and totally uninterested. They were, in fact, heartless. Finally, after much frustration, I told them how this behavior made me feel. Soon, they were all ears and they finally gave a damn about how their behavior had affected me. While my wife and daughters now understood how I felt and they responded with love, I also felt a great disappointment that behavior that was clearly unprincipled and irrational could not be discussed on the basis of rational principles with any success.

On the positive side, my daughters are also life-long learners. My oldest daughter has started a demanding career and she is doing well. She has a degree in engineering and she spent a lot of time with me helping out in my laboratory when in high school and the earlier part of college. She is a hard worker and has a great interest in business. At the U. of Texas and in high school, she picked up some tendency to view politics from a leftist stance, but I think that will fade as she continues to see more of the real world. I see some signs of that now and she has been out of school only about 16 months. On the other hand, it was only two summers ago when she said I was a racist because I oppose Affirmative Action as a form of racism. She also saw nothing wrong with most of the activities of the Federal government except subsidies for business and the Iraq war.

About the time of our Affirmative Action discussion, Kirsten complained that it was frustrating to talk to me because I was always right. I told her that, no, I am not always right. When I am wrong, I just want you to explain to me rationally how I am wrong. Her response was, "No, Daddy, you really are always right. It is so frustrating." So, some part of our differences are just her growing up and needing to assert her independence. In time, she will turn more and more to what she may already largely understand to be right. I understand that I simply need to give her the time she needs. She read The Fountainhead and liked it. She read Atlas Shrugged up to Galt's speech and then stopped. She is an impatient girl and always has been. She is an overachieving efficiency expert in anything she does. She plans to get an MBA and I expect she will make serious money.

My youngest daughter is studying biotechnology in the Honors Program at Rochester Institute of Technology. She was very shy in some contexts in high school, but she is really thriving at RIT. She called Monday night and we talked for a long while about a Chemistry Laboratory experiment she had done. While in high school, she was always the rational core of her group of girlfriends. Part of this meant that she was their chief advisor and she chose pretty good friends and helped steer them away from problems fairly wisely. She also had 4s or 5s on 9 AP tests and entered RIT as a sophomore. Katie has two quarters of 4.0 grades, but does have a bit too much willingness to tell a teacher what the teacher wants to hear.

My middle daughter has recently figured out that she wants to be a photographer and is now building a portfolio. She gave up on the idea of being a painter, which she says she has neither the flare for or the necessary sweep. She reads a lot and has many internet friends. She has been slower to develop and she thinks she is less intelligent than her sisters, but in reality she is much more intelligent than she thinks. She learns things more slowly, but she develops many good insights. She does a fair bit of critical thinking. Her friends tend to be intelligent, but live a bit on the wild side.

So, I have a great deal to respect in my daughters for all that they are not Objectivists. They are pretty good people. Kirsten and Katie both have nice friends and a nice boyfriend. I keep my fingers crossed a bit yet for Karen, but I think she will be fine. In retrospect, there are many things I could have done better. But, I have been pretty lucky in that they chose pretty good paths for themselves, even though their Dad was always working long, long hours. They did feel rather neglected, though I was always a very loving father when I was with them. They did see me as a bit of a hard taskmaster, though I do not see that myself. It seems to me that they were their own taskmasters.

Paul, you got me a favorite subject, my daughters. Sorry if I have gone on too long. I sure wish you and your wife great success with your son and daughter. Raising children is exhilarating. I loved raising my daughters much more than they realize. I can remember being astounded at how they learned when they were very young. The human mind is amazing and there is nothing more fascinating than watching one develop in a baby through adulthood. And, with three daughters, I have had a wonderful lot of great hugs. Now, the teenage years can be filled with both many highs and lows, I think especially with girls, but weather it. Kirsten called tonight and we had a great time talking. She is buying a house in Houston, while working on a long-term assignment in Boston. She sounded so happy, my heart is still warmed by the thought.

[Charles R. Anderson]

Hi, Jenna.

Well, I never thought of myself as a fundamentalist. In Objectivist circles I am condemned more often for my tolerance. But, my daughters did tend to see me somewhat as a fundamentalist, which I should have worked harder to avoid. They also felt the pressure to belong among their teenage friends and to be accepted by their teachers in one of the more leftist school systems in America. So there was a bit too much pressure between choosing Dad or choosing friends and teachers, which can be a hard issue for teenage girls.

You are just full of good quotes. But you did not attribute this quote, so I take it that this is an original quote of your own. Or is it in common usage?

Anyway, correct me when I am wrong and I will try hard to see my error. I will be grateful for the assistance. As you well know, this world is much too complex for one mind to fully understand. I am delighted that your fine mind is a helpful ally to mine in this great quest.

[JennaW]

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about not calling anyone a fundamentalist. I wasn't calling anyone a fundamentalist. I have a tendency to look at things from a stepped-back perspective, and I noticed that I had a quote--- from somewhere, no attribution--- that fit the general nature of this thread.

Basically, I put that quote down because one of the dangers there is is not being able to say you're wrong, or your're sorry. That is what I meant--- that this tendency to not consider that one might be wrong, is a dangerous notion to hold on to. I live my life now knowing that life is a growing process, that what I say may be be discovered to be wrong.

One of my friends is reading a biography on Hitler. My friend visited me for a little while last night to lend me a book about ancient Rome, and he told me that Hitler read a bunch of stuff for the purposes of a distinct goal of leading Germany. However, in this biography, Hitler stopped reading all this stuff (philosophy, psychology, politics, etc.) at one point, decided that he knew all he had to know, and proceeded to write Mein Kampf and do all the terrible things he did. I told my friend in reply: "That's when you're screwed, is when you stop reading, you think you know everything there is to know, you stop growing and learning more. If you're not careful, and you box your own growth into a closed, homogenous system that Hitler wrote about and supported, you have stopped evolving as a human and you'll have a propensity to be destructive."

“As soon as one point alone is removed from the sphere of dogmatic certainty, the discussion will not simply result in a new and better formulation which will have greater consistency but may easily lead to endless debates and general confusion. In such cases the question must always be carefully considered as to whether a new and more adequate formulation is to be preferred, though it may cause a controversy within the movement, or whether it may not be better to retain the old formula which, though probably not the best, represents an organism enclosed in itself, solid and internally homogeneous. All experience shows that the second of these alternatives is preferable.” — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

I don't think you are a fundamentalist, Charles. I think that I can learn from you; but I also think I can learn from everyone and everything-- even Mein Kampf.

Actually, I don't know where that fundie quote came from, but it's not from me. If anyone else knows, I'd like to be able to attach a name to it.

I think my father would write the same things about me. And I think both fathers and daughters can learn from each other.

--J

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I googled that quote on fundamentalism. It's all over the place, but it seems like it is from our old friend "Anonymous."

I came across another similar quote I liked:

Blessed are the Fundamentalists, for they shall inhibit the earth.

Cute...

Michael

[Charles R. Anderson]

Hi Jenna,

I was not sure whether the Fundamentalist quote was meant to apply to me or not, but I was actually leaning toward thinking that you had not intended it that way. However, my own daughters tend to perceive me somewhat as a fundamentalist and I acknowledge that that has not had entirely good consequences.

They have viewed my passion for my values as somewhat excessive, including such things as why would I start my own laboratory when it sometimes meant that they would have to do without the clothes and fine housing that many of their friends had in wealthy Montgomery County, MD? Why must it be so important to you Dad to be so independent that we have wear ratty 1 year-old shoes and use a winter jacket a second winter? They also had to worry more about how they would pay for college than did their friends. Was I fair to them? Perhaps not, though I believe that the example of finding your passion and then pursueing it and making yourself happy was a good one for them. The hardships were really small ones that probably actually made them stronger. But I could be wrong. I will be interested to hear what they think looking back when they are 35 years old.

My father was a career naval aviator, so when I was growing up, we moved on average about every 2 years. I was the oldest and my Dad was often away for long stretches of time on cruises in the Mediterrean Sea, the Pacific, and the Carribean Sea. I started cutting the lawn when I was 8, along with taking the trash out and scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom floors and the bathtubs. I understood what my Dad was doing and I was proud of him. I also understood that between me and my two sisters (when I was eight), my Mom needed some serious help. I was proud to be able to help her as much as I could. My sister of 16 months younger age, felt put upon to help wash dishes and help watch our littler sister, who was then 3. I also helped with these tasks, but my sister did more of the watching our littler sister than I did. She hated the moves and leaving her friends. I thought the moves were a new adventure, even though I also had to leave friends. My sister looks back and thinks she had a bleak childhood, while I look back and see adventures, a close and loving family, and an enhanced development intellectually and an acceptance of responsibility. I felt I accomplished important things even as a child and helped my Dad in his accomplishments. While my sister's evaluation is one of suffering, she nonetheless was strengthened by the experience in many of the same ways I was. I think she should be careful of what she wishes.

I am more proud of my daughters than they understand. I love them more than they understand. I think that as they have left the teenage years behind, they are coming more and more to understand these things.

I should think your father would be very proud of you Jenna, though you must have worried him nigh onto death during some of your earlier adventures. I very rarely have bad dreams, but I had a few about my daughters being in harm's way that caused me to wake up dripping sweat. I have never had that happen when I was in danger in a dream. I think it is very common for parents to love their children much more than their children understand.

[Paul Mawdsley]

Charles,

There is no need to apologize about your favourite subject. I know what it’s like to be passionate about who my children are and who they are becoming. Taking the goal of raising strong and healthy children seriously is one of the greatest and most rewarding challenges in life. It challenges us to engage the highest level of awareness and self-responsibility toward our relationships with our kids. It requires we face who we are in ways no other relationship does. It demands we push ourselves to our limits only to discover we can push our limits further. It demands we expand who we are, our personal identity, to include parts of ourselves we did not previously know existed. It is, without doubt, the single greatest test of character I can imagine. I can’t blame you for wanting to express a little of what these relationships mean to you. I feel I know you better because you did. I appreciate getting to know you a little better.

You wrote:

*My daughter's are generally fairly rational, but they do frequently also express more concern for the feelings of others than they do for a rational analysis of a particular problem.*

A good friend of mine, the same age as me, has three daughters like yourself: ages 18, 20, 22. Obviously, he started a little earlier than I did. When visiting and talking to my friend I could truly empathize with how he could feel like an alien in his own home. He is a man who has always been very sure of his ability to understand the world. Yet, I could see in his eyes and his body language that he had been defeated in his attempts to understand the behaviour of his wife and daughters. He was bewildered and had given up the quest to understand by the time his girls were in their teens.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is a basic pattern of differences between the sexes, even though I sometimes find it hard to nail down just what those differences are. There is definitely a Venus and Mars thing operating in male/female dynamics.

You said:

*On one very memorable occasion while traveling, my wife and my three daughters ganged up on me for hours, which can happen when you are the only male around. When I expressed my unhappiness with this situation in rational terms, they were completely and totally uninterested. They were, in fact, heartless. Finally, after much frustration, I told them how this behavior made me feel. Soon, they were all ears and they finally gave a damn about how their behavior had affected me. While my wife and daughters now understood how I felt and they responded with love, I also felt a great disappointment that behavior that was clearly unprincipled and irrational could not be discussed on the basis of rational principles with any success.*

I’m not so sure the issue was about them being unable to discuss things on the basis of rational principles. I think the reality of male/female relationships in general, and this situation in particular, is that we use rational principles in different ways on different information.

I took a course once that was literally painful for my mind to grasp. It was a course on Postmodernist/Feminist philosophy. My professor was quite sympathetic to the pained expression she saw on my face when I was trying to grasp the idea that individuals are to be considered as nodes in a web of relationships reacting to the actions of the social web as a whole. I struggled with this idea. Although I didn’t consider myself an objectivist, Objectivism was my background and was what fit my thinking best. Postmodernist/Feminist philosophy was completely alien to me.

At the same time as taking this course I was also trying to wrap my head around the interpretations of quantum physics. Not satisfied with anything I had read, I was trying to put together my own causal view of quantum theory. I had already been thinking deeply about causality for a number of years. I realized that the causation in field theory was very similar to the idea that individuals are just nodes in a web of relationships. Classical physics is all about entities that act and interact in a local, linear fashion. This is parallel to the objectivist view, and the archetypically male view, of human behaviour. Quantum physics is about entities that are nodes in a field; nodes who’s actions are determined by the field as a whole in a nonlocal, nonlinear fashion. (More precisely, the nodes’ actions are determined by the actions of the entity in response to the information of the field.) This is parallel to the postmodernist/feminist view, and the archetypically female view, of human behaviour. (I would just inject a greater role for free will than is often assumed by the postmodernist/feminist view.)

I now look back on this course as the second most important, even if the most painful, course I took in university. It enabled me to look at the world in a way I had never seen it before: through the lens of field-to-entity causation; and through the lens of a archetypically female interpretive framework.

Charles, I think your wife and daughters see the world from this different interpretive framework. More than this, it is also archetypically female to process sensory information into an empathic perception of others. So they not only have a different interpretive framework but they also have a different orientation of consciousness. They are experiencing others as subjects, not objects, in there perceptual field. They responded to you when you gave them information that fit their orientation of consciousness. Their rational processes were applied based on the principles of what actions will optimally increase the strength of the nodes and the relationships in the social field.

I’m sure your general orientation of consciousness and interpretive framework is just as foreign to them as theirs is to you. You have written about tolerance. Tolerance is important but what is needed is tolerance plus understanding for healthy relationships. I think the beginnings of new understanding can be found in the identification of different orientations of consciousness and interpretive frameworks between individuals and between categories of individuals such as males and females. We have different modes of perceiving the world and different principles with which to process those perceptions into an integrated understanding.

I also think the lack of recognition of differing orientations of consciousness and differing interpreting frameworks is at the roots of many disagreements between objectivists. The group that is starting to form on this forum is made up of individuals who are either more flexible and able to shift their orientations of consciousness and interpretive frameworks or they are just generally oriented differently from orthodoxy. Regardless, this is the necessary state for fresh perspectives and new growth. I have come to respect your perspective and your flexibility. I just think it’s great that you seem to get what I am saying. Someone who’s perspective I respect and who listens to what I have to say; sounds like a friend.

Thank-you,

Paul

(It seems I might have invented a new word: archetypically. I feel it conveys my intended meaning more precisely than "archetypally." I wanted to say typical behaviour associated with an archetype. It works for me so I'll keep it.)

[Ellen Stuttle]

Paul wrote:

(It seems I might have invented a new word: archetypically. I feel it conveys my intended meaning more precisely than "archetypally." I wanted to say typical behaviour associated with an archetype. It works for me so I'll keep it.)

You haven't invented a new word. It's a word I've heard, read -- and used -- on a frequent basis for the last twenty-five years of being involved with Jungian psychological theory. I wonder if you've ever read any of Jung's work. It sounds as if you haven't but as if you would find him very interesting, at least on the issue of male as compared to female psychology. Aion is where the full anima/animus theory is delineated, but that's heavy going. I'll point you to easier sources first if you lack familiarity with Jung but are curious.

Ellen

___

[Charles R. Anderson]

Paul,

Your comments on raising children were beautiful. Or must I say, they were handsome? Anyway, you are a parent after my own heart. And, like your other friend's daughters, mine are 18, 22, and 24. I have not given up on trying to better understand them, but I do not expect that they will ever cease to surprise me with patterns of thought different than mine, some of which will lead them to conclusions different than mine.

I have some reservations about the usual dichotomy of characteristics attributed to men and women. I disagree with many such characterizations if they are thought to apply too universally. There is so much variation that one needs to be very careful about applying these broad characterizations to any particular man or woman. I will agree that men tend to be more analytical using principles, while women tend to be more analytical using emotional relationships. I know some notable exceptions. Of course, men may use either good or bad principles to add to the mess. Similarly, women may want healthy emotional relationships or they may want very unhealthy ones. It may also be the case that the average man is less communicative in a relationship and that he is less likely to reveal his emotions to others. Sometimes people assume this means that a man simply does not feel as strongly as women. I am not sure this is the case, especially if one examines the differences in what they feel most strongly about.

Since I admit to being unschooled in the field of psychology, I rely upon my own introspection and my personal observations of others. [sorry Jenna, this is really unscientific. However, if enough people were to talk forthrightly about their perspective, science would be greatly served.] With respect to my observations of others, my perspective is biased by the fact that I mostly have interactions with people of substantially greater intellect and accomplishment than the average person. Whatever I have learned seems to work well with almost everyone in one on one situations. I am, however, truly deficient in understanding crowd dynamics. I am often uneasy in a crowd. On the other hand, walking alone down a street in a bad part of town at night is easier.

I see your point that women are more likely to view themselves and others from the standpoint of where they reside in a web of relationships. Actually, many men are more likely to do this than I am as well. I am very analytical in terms of principles. I have always thought and learned things this way, even as a child. I did not learn to read until late in the 3rd grade, in part because a whole word learning procedure was largely used. In part, because what we read had no principles embedded in it to learn. There was no reason for me to want to read it! I hated fairy tales, which is largely what my mother had read to me and my sister when we were very little. I used to ask her to read things that were real. I went through stages in learning various math and science subjects in which the ideas were slow to come into place, but then suddenly fell into place very well, as I established the principles in my mind for applying that subject. Formulas were nowhere near enough. I had to see how the ideas were related and develop strategies for problem-solving.

Alright, so I am very analytical in terms of principles. Women have been known to tell me that I am therefore a cold, calculating machine. This is nonsense. When I have figured something out, I am more passionate about it than most people can afford to be about things. When I have figured out what I believe in and who I value, I am much more passionate about either than most people. As a boy, I cared deeply about my Mom and Dad and about my sisters and brother. I watched over my sisters and brother, I thought about them, I helped them learn, and tried to set a good example for them. They all seem to agree that I was a great brother. Among my friends, I always seemed to be the boy, teenager, and adult who was most concerned about them. Friendship always seemed to mean more to me than to them. At Brown, I spent lots of time helping other students with calculus, chemistry, and physics. In graduate school, I helped the newer or less capable graduate students a great deal. I was always a bit puzzled about why they were always so eager for my insights on their projects and so little interested in my project. The same was true when I worked for the Navy. Now, I still enjoy training young scientists and bringing in students for summer internships.

I taught my wife, who was the youngest in her family, how to change diapers and feed a baby a bottle when Kirsten was born. She was soon cholicky and I used to walk with her on my shoulder for hours and read to her. This went on for about 5 months. As they grew up, my girls usually came to me for advice. They came to me to play with them, or to take them for a bike ride, or to spin their friends around in flying circles. They went to Anna for biology or art, but me for most other subjects.

I am basically more nurturing by nature than many women are. I am more inclined than Anna or my two older girls to want to sit down and talk about problems. I have been more likely to praise the girls for something they have done. I give them more hugs and kisses than Anna. So, I am a problem-solver and a very analytical thinker, but this frees me to be more caring and more affectionate. Because my emotions are integrated with my analysis, I can afford to trust them and expend more effort on them. Of course, other people do not always reciprocate evenly, but I have generally found the response to be one giving more value than that I would have if I were primarily concerned about fairness. Which does bring up a subject that I have seen many girls obsess about. They seem to have too heightened a concern about fairness.

I believe in the Trader Principle, but what is most important is that both parties should be better for the trade. It can be foolish to exercise too much concern for whether each party profited equally. I think little girls tend to suffer from this and I think adult women often do also. I will admit that some adult women are taken advantage of by some men and that does contribute to the problem. However, I have also seen many cases where adult men are taken advantage of by women, which it is presently politically incorrect to note.

So, like many men, I have a tendency to think very analytically, but more so than the vast majority of men. Perhaps unlike them, I have very deep feelings both about causes, friends, and the people I love. Here, however, I would inject a strong note of caution. I think the feelings of many men are underestimated because they will not talk about them. When wives die first, men tend to die very soon after. I think men may actually have a stronger emotional tie to their wives than their wives have to them. When men go to war, it is often because they feel more strongly about freedom than women do. In war they often form very strong bonds with their buddies. Men make the workplace a bigger part of their lives than women do and the workplace is often treated as a game with rules that are not rich in valuing personal relationships. Part of the game is suppressing feelings. There are plenty of cases where this results in men actually allowing themselves less feeling, but I think there is a tendency to underestimate the strength of feelings and emotions that many men have. They aid this impression by not talking about them.

I can understand the importance of personal relationships and understanding them. I understand the importance of loving and caring for good people. I am in a web of relationships and I know it. I also know that to manage relationships well and to generally guide us in our lives, we need to think analytically in terms of principles. We need to have this complete spectrum of knowledge. What we cannot afford to do is grant precedence to emotions which are not consistent with rational behavior. This is not to say that one should dump on the occasional unhealthy emotion held by a generally good person. I do think that it is a false dichotomy to say that one chooses between emotions and reason. One should choose reason with a set of rational emotions. Sure, this is not easy, but it should be the goal. As such, people should be able to talk constructively about their principles, their thinking skills, and about their emotions. In a healthier world, we would generally be more willing to do this than we are today.

So, here once again, is my head stuck way out on the chopping block. I think it is inherently very difficult for any one unique individual to understand any other. It is probably especially hard when one is truly an individualist. When and where I have been able to have frank conversations with other people, I have often found it a fascinating learning experience. Most such cases of relatively frank talk still skirt a lot of guarded areas. Most people are reluctant to talk about some of the things that most differentiate themselves from others. A lot of individuality is therefore never apparent. So, here I offer some sense of some of my individuality. Some, only some, maybe far too much.

Now what is that apostrophe doing in "daughter's" in that quote you selected Paul? Dumb mistake.

[Paul Mawdsley]

Ellen writes:

*I wonder if you've ever read any of Jung's work. It sounds as if you haven't but as if you would find him very interesting, at least on the issue of male as compared to female psychology.*

I haven’t read any Jung. The strange thing is though, I can’t use the word “archetype” without thinking of Jung. He is clearly part of the soil from which my perspective has grown even if I have not directly accepted his premises as the basis of my line of thinking.

I’m sure I have read about Jung along the way but nothing specific comes to mind. My understanding of his ideas goes back to when I was 16 and having various philosophical discussions with my brother. He was doing a fair bit of reading about Freud and Jung, and was always interested how I processed the information. I was his naive and innocent guinea pig eyes. I think he saw me as an experiment to some degree; he would provide certain stimuli, allow me to process the information, and observe my responses. The thing is, even though he has long stopped observing, I still haven’t stopped processing and responding.

My sense of Jung (and Freud for that matter) was that his metaphysics was suspect. Much of my focus from entering adulthood until now has been on developing my own authentic metaphysics. I wanted to figure out the foundations of what I believe. While I was figuring out the foundations of my metaphysics, I was not too interested in exploring very many metaphysical forks in the road that I judged to be the wrong direction. I am at a point now where I am quite satisfied with the foundations of my metaphysics. The rest is just details. Now I am more open to considering other pursuits.

I am finding my motivation and my attention is being drawn to epistemological pursuits now. While I think Jung’s metaphysics is suspect, I think his epistemology could be profound. I have a problem with the metaphysics of a collective unconscious. If the metaphysics is reinterpreted from a more evolved causal framework, the collective unconscious holds great possibilities as an epistemological approach to understanding certain elements of human nature.

Also, I have become increasingly interested recently in understanding male/female dynamics as you have noted. My thoughts were sparked by a Mike Lee rant on Branden’s Yahoo forum. I have found breaking psychological/epistemological processes into three categories is an enlightening means of exploring and understanding different perspectives: orientations of consciousness; interpretive frameworks; and motivational biases. My thoughts in this area are in the developmental stages so I am looking for information to feed the development.

Ellen, I’d be happy if you could suggest some readings in this direction. I can handle heavy reading but it takes a level of focus I may not have the time and motivation for at the moment. If you can point my way to easier sources I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Paul

[Ellen Stuttle]

Paul, your reply isn't giving me much to go on in terms of what works of Jung's might be good starting places to recommend. Jung's work is enormous and complex and has so many different aspects to it. You speak of the "metaphysics" of "the collective unconscious," but I can't tell what "image" you have of that, what you think such a "metaphysics" might be. For instance, do you find the "metaphysics" of what's today being called the field of "evolutionary psychology" suspect? Along with one of the leading Jung scholars, a man named John Haule (pronounced HEW-el), who's writing a book on this subject, I think that Jung was ahead of the curve in glimmering the evolutionary basis of the human psyche. Possibly if you could spell out a bit what it is you've understood Jung to be saying (from the intimations you picked up from your brother and elsewhere), this would give me more to go on.

The third weekend in May there will be a talk and workshop here by another of the leading Jung scholars, Gary Sparks. I'll ask Gary if he could suggest some relatively compressed sources (probably by others besides Jung himself) for acquiring an introductory sense of Jung's view of anima/animus dynamics.

Ellen

___

[Paul Mawdsley]

Charles, you wrote:

*I have some reservations about the usual dichotomy of characteristics attributed to men and women. I disagree with many such characterizations if they are thought to apply too universally.*

I agree. The way I see it, we all, men and women, have the full spectrum of mental potentials within us. It seems we each are genetically predisposed and environmentally guided towards a specific spectrum of claimed potentials. I have long thought that our individual personalities are the result of our particular pattern of discovered and undiscovered, owned and disowned parts of the self. I have recently begun to think that the patterns of the psyche that are claimed and unclaimed might be transmitted in our genetic code as well being as the result of our developmental process.

On this view, male and female archetypical behaviour is partly the result of patterns of claimed and unclaimed parts of the self that are transmitted via the X and Y chromosomes. The individual is then born into a culture that reinforces these patterns. How then do we keep crossing the archetypal divide? If we were merely reactive beings, would we not tend to slide more and more into our archetypal mould?

This is one of the interesting points about the value of relationships with those who are dissimilar to ourselves. When we allow the perspective of dissimilar others into our soul, we open ourselves up to explore orientations of consciousness, interpretive frameworks, and motivational biases different from those that are part of our “programming.” We open ourselves up to see the world through different epistemological lenses. This opens us up to expanding the limits of the self, expanding our identity by claiming unclaimed parts of our psyche.

I mentioned in my last post to you how I see our relationships with our children holding the possibility of expanding who we are. They can provide us with a nonthreatening relationship that has the potential to open us up to experiencing the world in new ways. Sometimes we see through our children parts of ourselves we disowned when we were kids. Our more evolved adult perspective enables us to reintegrate the part of ourselves that we were previously unable to integrate into our personal identity. Sometimes we discover parts of ourselves that we never saw before by seeing sides in our children that are foreign to us. Our motivation to understand our kids drives us to open up to a side of ourselves that was only potential but we never were. Sometimes we discover parts of ourselves because the demands of being a good parent make us become something we have never been. In each case we are able to claim a previously unclaimed part of our potential selves and integrate it into our identity.

Of course, a romantic relationship can, and should, also drive the person to expand the limits of the self. As a man, it has been through exploring my wife’s perspective (and that of other women I have known) that I have become more in touch with the “archetypically feminine” side of my being. I am a more complete person because I have opened myself up to seeing the world through my wife’s (and my kids’) eyes. I can think in more “feminine” ways, just as a woman can think in more “masculine” ways. In fact, I think this has given me insights about the nature of existence I would not have otherwise had.

We are not determined by our genetic and environmental heritage alone. We may be predisposed to certain orientations of consciousness, interpretive frameworks, and motivational biases but we can cross the lines of our predisposition.

*I hated fairy tales, which is largely what my mother had read to me and my sister when we were very little. I used to ask her to read things that were real.*

I had a similar orientation. I hated fantasy but I liked science fiction: for the same reason, it wasn’t real enough. I see it as a fundamental orientation to focus on metaphysics. I have mellowed since. Now I don’t mind any play on metaphysical laws as long as there is consistency and laws.

Something I am finding interesting recently is I am experiencing a shift in focus. I have worked out the foundations of my personal metaphysics to a point where I am now satisfied with the general framework. With this much settled in my mind I find myself (and I mean it as a discovery) shifting focus to more epistemological concerns. I have always had thoughts about epistemology but now it is becoming a prime motive. As this shift has occurred, I have begun to shift the direction of which books I want to read. Books I would have previously shunned, I am now interested in. I want to see how others have processed information about existence without much concern for their differences to me in metaphysical orientation.

*Alright, so I am very analytical in terms of principles. Women have been known to tell me that I am therefore a cold, calculating machine. This is nonsense. When I have figured something out, I am more passionate about it than most people can afford to be about things.*

In causal terms there are two sides to the ego or, borrowing from Branden, the "unifying centre of consciousness." Causally, the ego has an experiential-responsive side and it has a creative-assertive side. (Now I’m hungry for some cereal. That’s experiential-responsive.) I think of passion as an assertion of the ego to express the self in the world; it is the psychological energy that drives proactive behaviour. Emotions are the response of the ego to information that is experienced; it is the psychological energy that drives reactive behaviour. Charles, I think your passion and your emotions are more a part of your being than they are of others because you have owned and integrated them. It is possible that Ayn Rand can take some credit here. She presented a view of human nature that demonstrated how to integrate passion and emotion with rational thought. We experience these principles intuitively through her characters in her fictions. She discusses them explicitly in her non-fictions. This is one of her many valuable contributions to our culture. (Unfortunately, she also demonstrated how to disown emotions that disagree with rational thought.)

*There are plenty of cases where this results in men actually allowing themselves less feeling, but I think there is a tendency to underestimate the strength of feelings and emotions that many men have.*

Disowning feelings and emotions does not banish them from existence. It merely places their existence outside of our awareness. This means we are not conscious of their effects on our behaviour, nor are we able to integrate their nature into our understanding. As Nathaniel Branden has pointed out, our awareness is open to our internal processes, and to their external causes, or our awareness is open to neither. If we disown our feelings, we cannot identify the behaviour and events that cause them. Thus, we are destined to a life of frustration because we will forever repeat the same mistakes.

* I am in a web of relationships and I know it.*

Knowing it and experiencing it from an orientation of consciousness through which it flows, are not the same. I am suggesting an archetypical female orientation of consciousness tends to experience the self as a Node in an intersubjective, or social, web. They tend to process information in a manner that is causally parallel to field theory because this is the nature of their interpretive framework. The action of the Node is directed by an understanding of the information contained in the web as a whole. The archetypical male orientation, on the other hand, tends to experience the self as a self-contained Atom acting and interacting with other Atoms. They tend to process information in a way that is causally parallel to Newton’s Laws of Motion because this is the nature of their causal framework. The action of the Atom is directed by an understanding of the linear actions of the other Atoms.

I think an important point is that even though these are two very different perspectives, they are both perspectives of the same reality. Also, each of us contains within us the capacity to generate the opposite perspective. Ultimately, taking a meta-perspective will allow us to integrate these two sub-perspectives. An understanding of human nature that integrates these two perspectives should maximize our choices for action and increase the freedom of our will.

*What we cannot afford to do is grant precedence to emotions which are not consistent with rational behavior...One should choose reason with a set of rational emotions.*

Absolutely, we should not “grant precedence to emotions which are not consistent with rational behavior.” I would also say we should not assume rational thought always produces the right actions. Emotions provide us with information about what our intuitive understanding of events means to us. Rational thought provides us with information about what our analytical understanding of events and our goals suggests we should do. If our intuitive understanding of events and our analytical understanding of events are not in alignment, our emotional response and our rational choices will be out of sync. The breakdown is not between rational thought and emotions. The answer is not to somehow achieve rational emotions. We need to align our intuitive perspective with our analytic perspective.

How do we align our intuitive perspective with our analytic perspective? As I have suggested in the Epistemology thread, the analytic and intuitive perspectives arise from two different orientations of consciousness. How to integrate the two is something that has to be discovered. Language provides us with the opportunity to learn from others. It also provides us with the opportunity to replace our own authentic analysis with the analysis of others. When we do this an automatic disconnect is created between our intuitive and our analytical perspective. As I suggested in my post on “randroids” in the Social Metaphysics thread, when you adopt someone else’s perspective in place of your own authentic intuitive view, you cause a disconnect between your authentic intuitive view and your analytic view because your authentic intuitive view is displaced.

I think we live in a world where a disconnect between one’s intuitive view and one’s analytical view is the norm. As individuals we are still struggling to discover our potential. As a species we are still struggling to discover our potential. I tend to see the fundamental principles of Objectivism, as presented by Ayn Rand, as being a step in the right direction. I also see Nathaniel Branden’s work, furthering our understanding of human nature, as a step in the right direction. (I am sorry I am not familiar with other work that has come out of the objectivist movement.) I believe there is still much to discover, and I’m glad about that.

Charles, you say you are “unschooled in the field of psychology.” I wonder, have you read much of Nathaniel Branden’s work? His metaphysics is the best I have found anywhere. If you haven’t read his work, I highly recommend you try it. Oh, Branden’s understanding of psychology and his therapeutic methods are worth a look too. O:)

Thanks,

Paul

[Paul Mawdsley]

Ellen,

Sorry, I tend to babble when my enthusiasm gets ahead of my discipline. I saw Jung’s “collective unconscious” as being couched in mystical terms. For me, this was a metaphysical turn-off. The growth of my own intuitive perspective is now focussed on epistemology. I see Jung’s “collective unconscious” as containing valuable information to be integrated into my understanding of epistemic processes.

I had not connected Jung’s view to evolutionary psychology, probably because I have not thought much about it. The interesting thing is I have had thoughts that suggest a similar idea:

*The way I see it, we all, men and women, have the full spectrum of mental potentials within us. It seems we each are genetically predisposed and environmentally guided towards a specific spectrum of claimed potentials. I have long thought that our individual personalities are the result of our particular pattern of discovered and undiscovered, owned and disowned parts of the self. I have recently begun to think that the patterns of the psyche that are claimed and unclaimed might be transmitted in our genetic code as well being as the result of our developmental process.

On this view, male and female archetypical behaviour is partly the result of patterns of claimed and unclaimed parts of the self that are transmitted via the X and Y chromosomes. (From my most recent post to Charles.)*

I am interested in Jung’s “collective unconscious” because I am trying to flesh-out my thoughts in this area. If you have any suggestions on where to start, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Paul

[Charles R. Anderson]

Paul, I agree that our nature is a complex amalgam of many factors. Among these are our genetic make-up, our exposure to chemicals in the womb, the people around us as we grow up and even much later in life, the circumstances of our lives, the continuous stream of our thoughts, and the actions we choose to take. Undoubtedly, the genetic differences between men and women are important. No doubt, the differing early childhood expectations of us are of importance. But all of the factors in the list I gave above further differentiate us. We are extremely complex and extremely individual. So much so, that it is surely impossible to truly adopt someone else's perspective, especially if that someone else is of the other sex. But still impossible even when they are of the same sex. I have never met a man who thinks the way I do. Period. Never. I have met men and women with whom I can share certain blocks of my thought and find that they appreciate and share similar thoughts, but then there is always some other block of my thoughts which is anathema or puzzling to them.

When I do find someone who is interested in discussing the issues of one such block of thought and is reasonably receptive, it is a thrilling, pleasant experience. I love these long and deep discussions with another intelligent, thinking, perceptive individual. I have found such people among men and women, but they are rare. I have also found people with very different perspectives who are fascinating. Some of these people have experiences very different from mine and grew up surrounded by people with substantially different natures than those I grew up with. Sometimes, the main thing we do share is an interest in understanding things and that can go a long way, though we are not likely to go home together.

Now, I am not going to claim that no one can be largely successful in adopting the perspective of anyone else. I know that I am more different from most people than most people are. It would be invalid for me to expect that my perspective is adequate to make such a judgment. Nonetheless, I do see lots of evidence that people have a great deal of difficulty in understanding the perspective of others. Given all the factors that affect one's perspective, this is exactly what it is reasonable to expect.

To be more concrete, I see that jealousy and envy are important emotions for many people. I can remember observing this when I was about 6 and thinking that these are ugly, degrading, and destructive emotions, though I am sure I was using simpler words for that idea or that I had more vaguely identified that. When I felt a bit of these emotions, I was disgusted with myself. But, for whatever reason, I do not think I felt them often and I did not feel them strongly. And because I thought about them they appeared less and less often in my life. I confess that it is mostly a puzzle to me that these emotions are often very strong in other people. I can imagine that they might be for someone who was terribly deprived of the comforts of life, but they very often apply to those who were not. In any case, I really am unable to put myself into the perspective of someone who is substantially subject to these emotions.

I agree with you that relationships with those we love, our spouses, children, and friends, do help us to explore and develop ourselves. This is a major benefit of having relationships. It is what makes the early part of a new relationship really exciting in many cases. Now, since I had a very feminine mother and four sisters, I would not say that my wife was a particularly gear-shifting introduction to the feminine psyche, though she was with respect to sex. At the age of 25, I had my first sexual experience with her and that was a gear-shifting experience. I really had had no idea what I was missing in the years before that. I had never experienced the raging male hormomes that many of my friends had. I truly could not understand why they would go out with a girl who was foolish, boring, not especially good-looking, just in the hopes of having sex with her. Now, having experienced sex, I found that it was a pleasure so great, that it would be the closest thing to an argument for the existence of a benevolent god that I know of. My wife calls me insatiable. But, why was I so different that before that I really had little interest. Maybe it was just a terrible lack of imagination! Well, when it comes to sex, I have no lack of imagination now.

By the way, I did get into reading a lot of science fiction in the 7th and 8th grades. Much later, I revisted it a bit and even read some fantasy stories. I think I did not like fairy tales when I was very young simply because I had such a hunger to know more about the real world then. Later, knowing more about it, I was willing to think about how it could be different. There are a great many things I would like to see different.

I think that my passions and emotions were pretty well integrated long before I encountered Ayn Rand. She was a great help in filling in some important gaps in my theoretical understanding of philosophy and refined my ability to argue for my ideas. She may have greatly helped me in avoiding being overrun by more commonly accepted ideas at a later time. However, I had long argued for many of the same ideas before I knew of her work. I had a great respect for reason, the life of the individual, for self-responsibility, for productive work, for Capitalism, for limited government, a love of heroes, and a substantial doubt about Christianity, though I had earlier been a pretty devout kid. I had loved reading about resourceful heroes since the 4th grade. They were my motivation for reading. I started reading BusinessWeek in the 6th grade, when my Dad started getting it for a course in business management. I found it fascinating to read about what people were doing in the real world and soon came to appreciate how wonderfully we all benefited from the productive work of businessmen. Ayn Rand was the first person I ever came across who agreed with me on all of these things. She also introduced me to ideas I had not thought about and provided a more philosophical structure, but mostly she was the first person who did not disagree with me about many things.

You comment that knowing that one is in a web of relationships and experiencing it from an orientation of consciousness through which it flows are not the same. I agree. But I do not have more than a superficial ability to view relationships from the perspective of anyone else's consciousness. I suspect that this is only possible if one's own consciousness is rather similar to that of the other person. This is not to say that it is not helpful to try to view things from someone else's perspective, but one has to realize how limited one's ability is to do this. Or is this just a problem for me, because I am too different? Maybe, but I really cannot make this judgment from anyone's perspective but mine. I suppose there may be some value in the testimony of others, but such testimony may be about as reliable as that of those who claim to directly know God.

You ask how do we align our intuitive perspective with our analytic perspective? I do not have even much personal perspective on this. I have had so little conflict here that I have little experience in rectifying the two. Or is it just that I am blind to the conflicts that exist? Well, I do not think so, but friends may be able to point out some problems I am overlooking! I have to admit that one of the reasons I have read little about psychology is because I do not have many things troubling me with respect to internal conflicts. I am coming to have more interest in trying to understand what conflicts other people have. I certainly see that most people do have such conflicts. Sometimes this missing internal conflict causes me to be a bit disconnected from most of the human race. Some people pick up on my lack of internal conflict and quickly decide that I am too unlike them to be of interest. I can see why that makes sense from their perspective. Sometimes this contributes to a sense of loneliness on my part, so I suppose that I do have a problem. It is not so much internal though as it is external. Others might say that I am abnormal and therefore unhealthy.

This lack of internal conflict is not to say that I always knew what I know now about myself. I have continued to learn who I am and to further develop my own potentials in many ways. I see little to nothing that I have learned that I learned when I did because I had suppressed it. Most of what I learned simply took time to think about and a string of experiences over time that required a timeline. I do grant that some things might have been attended to earlier, but then that might just have meant that other things I did attend to would have been delayed. I am pretty OK with the way things have evolved. There are many things I have learned and become aware of when the time was right for them.

I was relatively fine with knowing that I was different than other kids when I was a teenager. I thought more, I was happier, and I liked more people. I liked the kids who were geeks without social skills. I liked the guys on the football team. Most of my friends were very intelligent and we played a lot of sandlot sports. I especially loved tackle football without pads. I was usually either the smallest guy on the field or one of the two smallest. I took a get deal of pride in being the toughest, the best tackler, and in rarely dropping a ball when I was a receiver. Of course, I had to hang on to that ball, because I was never very fast. I had friends I played chess with, friends I played contract bridge with, and the occasional, but too seldom, friend who wanted to discuss ideas. I always thought of myself as very different, but I always had friends. The friendships were never as deep as I thought friendships should be, however.

Finally, you suggest that I read Nathaniel Branden's work. I should try it again. I own about 4 of his books and I read 1 or 1.5 of them some long time back. From the perspective of having many more years of puzzling over the nature of other people, I should be better able to keep up an interest in the subject than before.

[Paul Mawdsley]

Charles,

Just wanted to let you know I’m planning to get back to you. I’ve been taking a bit of a breather from the e-list life. It was our anniversary yesterday and my wife and I have been spending a little more time together this week. Priorities, priorities.

You wrote:

*I was usually either the smallest guy on the field or one of the two smallest. *

Don’t ask me why, I’ve been sitting here picturing you at 6'4". You must write taller than you are.

Paul

[Charles R. Anderson]

Paul,

Anna and I spent quite a bit of time together last weekend, though much of it was doing yard work and buying plants for the garden. She has been working many weekends lately as a pharmacist. This weekend she is working again, so it was good to have some time with her last weekend. But since I spent that time at home, I paid for it by coming into the lab and working until dawn. I still am on the crazy working until dawn schedule. I expect to break it tonight.

Being an experimental scientist, I get a bit uncomfortable when I go too long a stretch without referencing what I am thinking to something observable and known in reality. In keeping with this, the complexity of any thinking human being, and my conviction that most of what anyone really knows about being human comes from introspection, I have a tendency (very likely a very irritating tendency for some people) to try to reference my thoughts on human nature or psychology to someone I know. That is me, so it looks like it is really all about me. Some must think it me wanting to be the center of attention. It may be in part! But I will assure everyone that I really wish to invite other people to give me more of a glimpse into their souls by telling me the equivalent kind of things about themselves.

Paul knows much more about Paul than he knows about anyone else and it would be fascinating to me if he told me what makes him tick more. What in his childhood experiences seems to have had an important effect upon his sense of life and how he views himself and others. Similarly, there are many other people here who are very interesting people. I would really like to learn more about human nature from the viewpoint of some of its finer examples! There are clearly many very troubled people, but I confess to being more interested in relatively healthy and happy people. I find the long discussions of troubled people that one tends to encounter in the many psychology books depressing and somewhat less than highly relevant to understanding most of the people I encounter professionally and whom I would enjoy as friends.

For instance, I have observed that most of the people who are Democrats are much less likely to give money voluntarily to charities than are Republicans. They think that most people are like them and therefore government is necessary to care for people because private charities will never have any significant money for the poor. Republicans are less likely to see the need for government charity since they think people will, like themselves, support private charity. I could state many more examples of people assuming that others all share the traits they see in themselves.

I think many psychologists enter that field because they have very significant problems they want to understand. The people I know who have been most interested in this subject generally fit this profile. I do not maintain that they must and I expect there are numerous exceptions, but if most psychologists are troubled and they are working with people who are troubled, then their view of human nature will be skewed by these factors toward one with a higher concentration of troubles and unhappiness than generally exists. I have some concerns about the more theoretical and even the more concrete conclusions they may draw as a result.

So, I would like to learn more about how others see themselves, on which topic I suspect many more people are knowledgeable than they are about the character of other people. Of course, when dumping too much information about myself, I risk looking like I just want to be the center of attention. I also divulge that I am not 6'4". In fact, I was only 138 lbs. upon graduating from high school and was only 5'7.5" tall. I had broad shoulders and was generally strong for my size. I had great endurance, but I was too slow for the varsity teams of a fairly large and very sports-minded high school. But, I enjoyed the sandlot games of tackle football, basketball, and baseball a great deal. I think the many hours of sports, while time away from books, was nonetheless good for me in terms of giving me the assurance that I could do most anything that I set my mind too. I could lose and get up and start all over again. Usually, I won if it was football or baseball, but the important thing was to have the confidence in myself to jump back into the competition. Basketball was a bit tougher, but I was pretty combative in that and my endurance was always useful.

I think playing sports is a good thing. It helps in some ways to integrate your mind and body. It is useful to have confidence in both in this world. The two of my daughters who played sports definitely benefited from it.

Your discussion of what you felt about Brokeback Mountain was certainly interesting. For my part, I do not have any revulsion reaction to the thought of any two decent people making love to one another. I understand that mine is a very unusual reaction to homosexuality and bisexuality, but it is difficult for me to understand the feelings that most people have on this issue as an example. This is actually a fascinating difference, since I have all kinds of testosterone coursing through my veins. What makes this difference? Am I just more open-minded or are there other biochemical differences in people that really matter here? I do not know, but I do have some observations that suggest that there are other biochemical factors that play a role, though I do not know the scientific details. This is why I have wondered why so many guys are compelled to make every effort to have sex with undesireable females as teenagers and I had no such feelings. Actually, it was worse, the girls they often wanted were repulsive to me. To attract me, a girl had to be intelligent, nice, spirited, and have some interesting ideas. Such girls were very rare, as such women are still quite rare.

[Paul Mawdsley]

Charles, you wrote:

*...it is surely impossible to truly adopt someone else's perspective, especially if that someone else is of the other sex. But still impossible even when they are of the same sex. I have never met a man who thinks the way I do. Period. Never. I have met men and women with whom I can share certain blocks of my thought and find that they appreciate and share similar thoughts, but then there is always some other block of my thoughts which is anathema or puzzling to them. *

Can we ever fully adopt someone else’s perspective? No. Is it desirable to do so? No. We want to develop a strong personal perspective distinct from anything we are able to experience through someone else. The essence of empathy is the ability to, automatically or willfully, attempt to recreate some portion of another’s perspective– another’s orientation to an event or issue, more so than their specific perspective. Our ability to recreate another’s perspective by aligning our psyche to a parallel orientation of consciousness and/or a parallel interpretive framework and/or a parallel motivational bias is a powerful and adaptive learning tool. Different people have different capacities in this regard. Some people are better at recreating another’s emotional orientation. Others are better at recreating another’s intellectual orientation. Some people are only good at experiencing empathy towards those who have relatively similar primary orientations. Others are extremely flexible with how they are able to orient their consciousness. Some people do not shift their orientation into alignment with others at all; they merely analyse, evaluate, and categorize the behaviour of others (in traditional Objectivist form).

I am beginning to realize that a particular distinction of my own perspective is my ability to separate myself from and shift myself between any particular orientations of consciousness, interpretive frameworks, and motivational biases. I wondered, from time to time, if this capacity was a negative aspect to my psyche. I remember kids who seemed to have so many things figured out that I hadn’t even begun to think about. They had a definite perspective on various events and issues while I was still trying to figure out what my perspective was. They were already locked into their point of view, and had either developed it themselves or adopted it in a package deal, while I was still seeing so many sides to an issue and trying to piece together my multidimensional view.

I remember Nathaniel Branden writing– I think it was in Judgement Day– about Leonard Peikoff. Branden told a story of Peikoff’s tendency to loose himself in the perspective of the particular philosopher he happened to be reading. He would absorb the philosopher’s perspective so thoroughly that he lost sight of the “right” perspective– ie: Objectivism– and could not find his way back.

This story had an interesting resonance for me. I too would dive into some philosopher’s work and, for a time, absorb and loose myself in the perspective of that philosopher. But I did so with a deep confidence I would find my way out. After all, I had learned a lot about the process finding my way out of Rand’s perspective. In fact, that is how I tended to structure most of my essays. I would allow myself to go into the details of the particular philosopher’s orientation, framework and biases, to give my understanding a solid grounding, then I would revert back to my own perspective to attempt to expose the strengths and weaknesses of the philosophy. I knew I could sink so deeply into the particular philosopher’s point of view that I could recreate a frame of reference parallel to his or hers, and still not loose my own.

I find it interesting to here that Peikoff’s resolution to his problem was to discipline himself to see the world only through one frame of reference. His solution to make himself hold onto Rand’s orientation as his own was, in practice, to disown parts of himself. While I do find this interesting because of what it suggests about Peikoff, and what it suggests is required to accept Rand’s framework as one’s own if one has such an orientation, my main point is what it implies about psychological development in general. How do children, confronted with frames of reference more complete than their own in the perspectives of their parents and teachers, with a motivation to earn the positive esteem of these authority figures, cope with their own natural capacity to shift orientations and empathically experience alternative perspectives? They disown these capacities. They become narrower selves than they have the potential to be.

Part of maturing in adulthood can be a process of reconnecting with some of these innate potentials. It is a matter of integrating undiscovered and disowned parts of the self. We have all seen crotchety old farts who are set in their ways and seem to have no positive life in them. The ways they are “set in” are their particularly narrow frames of reference, seeming to forever to get narrower. They do not appreciate the world being viewed from any perspective but theirs. There is no cause for reevaluation, for fresh eyes. Their perspectives become stale and their positive energy drains out of them. The individual who is able to go into their later years with the capacity for shifting their frame of reference maintains a rare youthfulness that is hard to pinpoint. They have an ability to consider things from new points of view which keeps thinking fresh and positive. Their mental gymnastics keeps them mentally fit.

*I know that I am more different from most people than most people are. *

I too think of myself as “more different from most people than most people are,” just in different ways. I am finding I am different partly because of my capacity to shift and manipulate my orientations, frames of reference, and motivational biases. I am also proud of being different. I have a little saying: “I’ve seen normal; I’d rather be healthy.” Healthy is not comparative. It is actualizing potential. It is integrating the different parts of the self into a unity. It’s integrating who and what you are into how you live.

* I had never experienced the raging male hormomes that many of my friends had. I truly could not understand why they would go out with a girl who was foolish, boring, not especially good-looking, just in the hopes of having sex with her. Now, having experienced sex, I found that it was a pleasure so great, that it would be the closest thing to an argument for the existence of a benevolent god that I know of. My wife calls me insatiable. But, why was I so different that before that I really had little interest. Maybe it was just a terrible lack of imagination! Well, when it comes to sex, I have no lack of imagination now. *

YEEEHAAA! :D/ I’m happy to hear it. An imagination is a terrible thing to waste, especially when it comes to sex.

I did experience the raging hormones. I did do some stupid things along the way, for all the wrong reasons, with the wrong girls/women. I wouldn’t change any of it because I learned from all of it. It helped me to understand what I was looking for in a woman and to know when I found it.

*I think that my passions and emotions were pretty well integrated long before I encountered Ayn Rand. She was a great help in filling in some important gaps in my theoretical understanding of philosophy and refined my ability to argue for my ideas...Ayn Rand was the first person I ever came across who agreed with me on all of these things. She also introduced me to ideas I had not thought about and provided a more philosophical structure, but mostly she was the first person who did not disagree with me about many things. *

I think I’m starting to understand this perspective of experiencing Ayn Rand. It reminds me a little of what Ellen said about not falling into the “randroid” phase (I believe on the Social Metaphysics thread under Chewing on Ideas). I used to think that avoiding this phase was just a matter of having a more developed intuitive perspective. However, I’m starting to realize that there is a certain primary orientation of consciousness (primary = orientation that one tends to carry in most contexts) that is more resilient in the face of competing perspectives. I think there might be something parallel in your and Ellen’s primary orientations to confronting other perspectives that made you more resistant to Rand getting inside, “all the way down.” Actually, my wife had the same resistance.

Shauna and I were talking over breakfast one morning and I asked her about how she remembered experiencing Atlas Shrugged for the first time. What she said reminded me very much of Ellen’s statements. She didn’t experience it as a presentation of a guide to life. She experienced it as a work of art to be experienced, enjoyed, processed, thought about, evaluated, and cherished. She said it just reinforced her view of things. She experienced it as, “Oh, of course, that’s the way I see the world, just explicitly expressed in greater depth.” But she also saw the characters as being incomplete, lacking depth. It never entered the same space as her authentic, intuitive view of existence.

What I find interesting about Shauna’s perspective is her orientation to the book, the characters, and events. She had a very objective, evaluative, categorical point of view. Her primary social orientation is very analytical this way. The objective, analytical orientation points awareness at the object of perception–ie: it is extrospective. Her orientation, while empathic to the characters, it was not empathic to the author. The characters, the context, the events, all entered her imagination as facts to be identified, evaluated and categorized. The underlying causes of these characters, contexts, and events– the authors orientation, frame of reference and motivational biases, were not recreated in her imagination. I think this is the insulation that keeps certain individuals free of the “randroid” phase. Just as it is an insulation that keeps some people free of social manipulation in general.

My primary orientation is very causally intuitive. This intuitive orientation points awareness at our causal interpretations of what we perceive–ie: it is introspective. My primary orientation is causal rather than analytical. The apparatus of my psyche, the physiological functioning of my brain is oriented to process information by generating an interpretation of the underlying causes of my observations. Oriented this way, when I read Rand’s work I automatically generated a recreation of the author’s orientation, frame of reference, and motivational biases inside me. This is the essence of an empathic orientation. An interesting point about this orientation is that another person’s perspective is able to get into one’s own psyche without passing the scrutiny and insulation of identification, evaluation and categorization. This is how the “randroid” phenomenon can infect one’s psyche. It enters subconsciously through the intuitively causal and empathic orientation.

One way of correcting the potential psychological and social negatives of this intuitively causal and empathic orientation is to shift oneself to the more objective, evaluative, categorical orientation. I think many kids wordlessly make this discovery in their development. I am suggesting that Shauna, Ellen, and yourself may have made this discovery along the way in your respective developments or may have just been genetically predisposed to this orientation. (Let me know if this seems to fit.) From reading Nathaniel Branden’s work, I think he would recommend intentionally shifting oneself to the more extrospective– objective, evaluative, categorical– orientation as a means of countering the negatives of the introspective– intuitively causal and empathic– orientation. Myself, I didn’t want to disown my primary orientation so I tried to find a way to develop my perspective to a level of understanding of psychological and social dynamics that would allow me to render harmless the dangers of allowing other perspectives into my psyche. I wanted to use sight and understanding to take away another’s power over my psyche instead of a type of armour to deflect another’s attempts to enter.

*You ask how do we align our intuitive perspective with our analytic perspective? I do not have even much personal perspective on this. I have had so little conflict here that I have little experience in rectifying the two. Or is it just that I am blind to the conflicts that exist? *

I do not sense any conflict in you here either. You strike me as very psychologically integrated. Again, I see parallels between you and my wife which I am using to help me understand. Unlike you her childhood was not good. Her early experiences would have left most people in psychological chaos. Her sister, who has a different primary orientation, is still a mess today, continually cycling in self-destructive behaviour. Shauna has an incredibly clear minded, reality focussed, self-responsible, strong willed approach to life. She is one of the psychologically healthiest people I know. I have come to believe that the primary orientation of her consciousness, especially in social contexts, is the secret to her psychological survival, integration, and thriving. If I am correct in assuming a parallel between you and Shauna in terms of this primary orientation of consciousness, then it makes sense that you too would have an integrated psychology with such good early experiences.

If you are considering reading Nathaniel Branden’s work, think about it as an exploration into his view of existence, particularly his view of human nature. Even though I was, at one time, pursuing a path into counselling psychology, I was never particularly interested in the parts of his work that had a self-help focus. I was much more interested in the theoretical, the philosophical, the metaphysical. The books that stand out in my mind are The Psychology of Self-Esteem, Honouring the Self, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, The Art of Living Consciously, Taking Responsibility. Unfortunately, his metaphysics is mostly implicit and, where it is explicit, it is found dotted throughout his work. I wish he would write an essay on metaphysics to tie his view into an integrated package.

These are not the only books of his I would recommend. Breaking Free is a raw and interesting insight into some roots of people’s dysfunctions. The Disowned Self is a book I truly enjoyed but I did not tend to refer back to it because it has no index. Why is that? The Psychology of Romantic Love is one I have not read for awhile but, as with all his work, I found it very insightful. I remember his discussion of the history of romantic love and the discussion of the concept of “psychological visibility.”

I find it hard to pick one book to recommend. I don’t think you can go wrong with any of the first five.

You might now see why it took me awhile to respond. You make me think a lot. Thanks. Actually there were some things I have been thinking about-- ie: the distinction of Shauna's orientation of consciousness and its relation to others I have witnessed, especially in relation to insulating against the "randroid" phase-- that I needed to take my time to wrap my head around a little more. I'm sure you will let me know what you think.

Paul

[Paul Mawdsley]

Charles,

*I will assure everyone that I really wish to invite other people to give me more of a glimpse into their souls by telling me the equivalent kind of things about themselves. *

I know what you are asking. I too am interested in such glimpses. I consider myself a student of human nature and am always looking for new information to integrate. Besides this, I just generally like people and want to get to know who they are. I have no problem saying more but I too tend to be conservative about making it all about me. If I do reference some introspection, I like to show how it clearly integrates with some other point I am making.

When I was on a path toward counselling psychology I was not really interested in a focus on correcting unhealthy development. I was more interested in how to strive for personal potential. I wasn’t interested in how to make someone normal. I wanted to know how to help someone to reach optimal. I found healthy and integrated a better standard than normal. This seems to align with your interest in human nature. I tend to agree with your assessment of many of those who become interested in the psycho-therapy field. They can tend to be more a part of the problem than the solution.

My sports were soccer and hockey. My skills were most developed in soccer. I played centre-half, which is the position that tends to control the flow of the game. I was good at reading and controlling the game. I was a play-maker with a bit of a scoring touch. I was usually team captain and very often coach or assistant coach as well. I had an ability to read a players skills and to see how the dynamics of integrating different players and different alignments would affect the team performance.

I remember one time, we had a coach, he was a great guy but didn’t understand team dynamics. We kept losing games even though we had some great young talent. I tried to suggest alternative alignments but he couldn’t visualize how the changes would translate into a more integrated team flow that would maximize our strengths. His son was on the team and was a key element of the change I was suggesting. He was also a centre-half, although tended to be more of a defensive halfback than I. The coach had us lined-up next to each other which largely nullified our strengths. I knew if the two of us were able to control the centre of the field we’d turn the season around. We realigned after kick-off so he would play behind me as a defensive centre-half and I would play as more of an offensive centre-half. We ended up going to the finals.

I definitely agree in the value of sports. There is much of what I do in thinking about the nature of existence and about the direction of my life that has causal parallels in my approach to sports.

You mentioned my post where I discussed Brokeback Mountain. I think yours is the first response to that post. Although I realize I dropped it in the middle of a hot discussion that went a different direction, I thought someone might have responded to such a topic. You never know.

I just want to make it clear that I did not have a revulsion reaction to the thought of homosexuality. In fact, I thought I was open minded enough to watch the movie. I was interested to bare witness to my own reactions but thought I would be fine. I was caught by surprise by the intensity of my reaction to seeing, and empathically experiencing a perspective that my very being rejected. I’m not a big fan of labelling chemicals as the cause of events in the brain. They are part of the event but causality is more complex. I would tend to suggest that your particular primary orientation of consciousness tends to be more insulating against allowing another’s perspective all the way into your psyche. Mine doesn’t. You have a built-in psychological shield. I had to walk away. For the same reason you didn’t go through a “randroid” phase and I did, you didn’t respond to Brokeback and I did. For the same reason I had to physically walk away from Objectivism, I had to walk away from Brokeback.

I also agree that this is associated with why many guys as teens, myself included, are driven to less than ideal sexual encounters. The more analytical orientation tends to control the activity of the imagination. It is not hormones, as such, that drive sexual behaviour. It is the hormones in the context of particular imaginings. I had a runaway imagination as a teen and one of its tendencies was to run to sexual imaginings. To attract me a girl had to make me believe my dreams would come true. My late teens and twenties were all about bringing my imagination under conscious control.

Paul

(Charles, also see post prior to this one. I didn't want you to miss the fact I put up two posts in response to yours last night.)

[Charles R. Anderson]

Paul,

You have made a great number of interesting observations. This being Mother's Day, I have a call to make to my mother in Tulsa, OK and I want to spend some hours at home with Anna, the mother of my 3 daughters, in thanks for the incredible gift she gave me by giving them to me. This note will be short, but I will write more later.

I think you are right in seeing some similarities in how I saw Atlas Shrugged and how Shauna saw it. I felt a huge emotional tug from it, but at every step of the way, I was very analytical in reading also. I did not read it in a great hurry. I devoured it, but at a slow pace as I thought about everything. I felt that the very strong emotional response had to be tethered so I could think the ideas through carefully. Mind you, the experience was fantastic on every level, intellectually and emotionally. I stored many ideas for later more thorough and extensive evaluation as well. When I finished, there was much that re-inforced ideas I had already held, I was convinced of some other ideas, and I had a number of things that I thought simply needed more evalution. I then started reading the non-fiction that was then available and subscribed to the Objectivist Newsletter and got the back issues. I read them really carefully and analyzed that material. Only then was I convinced that I was an Objectivist, in the sense that this philosophy would serve as a central and essential framework for the further development of my understanding of the world. I also recognized that it was just an important part of that framework and that it needed extensive supplementation. I thought I was really lucky to have found this great core to work from. But I never thought that the responsibility for my philosophy of life was anyone's but my own. I could benefit from Ayn Rand's great gift, but if she was wrong about something, it was my responsibility to recognize it and correct the error.

Those many issues that she had not addressed were my responsibilty to address as I could. One of the things I was aware of was that there was a great deal about heroes that she never developed. For instance, there was little about their families and the effect of their families on most of them. There was little about their childhood development. There was rather little on their non-work personalities. There was also little on friendships. I did not hold it against Ayn Rand that she did not get into these topics much. I was just grateful that she had done so much.

I had read The Fountainhead in late winter over about 3 days, some of those days staying up until dawn. I did not read it particularly fast either. There was a lot to think about. Then I took on reading Atlas Shrugged in the Spring. That summer, I worked for an oil pipeline company and read the non-fiction in the evenings. In August 1965, I allowed myself to say that I was an Objectivist. At Brown, I was immediately beset by hordes of socialist Freshmen who had heard about my unusual views. It was very interesting to refine many of my ideas in these bull sessions. I really went through fire that year, both due to the many hours in bull sessions and because I was a relatively unprepared physics major. My high school physics course was unbelievably bad. Because of these sessions, I developed a reputation and soon heard about another freshman in another dorm who had similar ideas. Larry Bellows, an Applied Math major, was the guy. Then a couple more months down the road, Larry brought Roger Donway over and we met. Roger was a freshman philosophy major. Other than us three, there were some religious guys and hordes of socialists and adamant mixed economy types, until Roger met David Kelley two years later when he was a freshman philosophy major. The four of us had many very good discussions on our own. To this day, I think they are all great people and the best part of my experience at Brown.

I have to break off for now. Thanks for all the thought you put into your two responses. I am looking forward to thinking more about them.