Tom's Views

Dear [Brandon],

Many views I struggle to tolerate, though I actually wish not to put up with them at all.  But I stomach them to preserve peace with others and avoid the heated arguments that face-to-face discussions of them can produce. 

One common opinion I strongly oppose is the wide-spread opposition to building   mosques   at   ground zero   or   anywhere else   throughout America.  I find this hostile view toward Muslims offensive because such unfriendliness promotes inequality and perpetuates discord and hatred among religions.  When one religion (Christian) denies another (Muslim) the freedom to build a church (mosque), then much anger occurs as seen in the near-hysterical demonstrations against building the mosque at ground zero.  Curiously though, the Muslims supporting the mosque were virtually invisible and quiet, while it was their rivals (the Christian-American majority) who were doing most of the yelling, taunting, vandalizing the construction equipment, and so on.  Those acting the most righteous in this conflict were typically the most violent and hateful in the whole mosque-at-ground-zero affair. 

It’s infuriating that the Christian-American majority is so uninformed and intolerant about how benevolent and peaceful non radical Muslims are. Ask Christian Americans why they oppose mosque building at most any location, and most are hard-pressed to answer.  Of course, because prejudice can rarely answer the tough questions like this without lots of stammer and uncertainty.  But when they do respond, their rationale seems woefully inadequate to justify the sorts of restrictions on an entire religion that opposing Muslim mosques in America embodies.

The Majority   is a great place to be as long as it never turns against you, as it apparently has against the religious freedoms of American Muslims. People hide their flawed thinking behind the banner of preponderance (behind each other), and so, never really have to justify their misguided positions on their own; without backup from others like them. It’s the old “safety in numbers” phenomenon. That is: Subscribing to majority rule makes it much easier to persecute a person, as many others are doing the same.  Majority rule (or better yet, mob rule) is  also very dangerous for those in the minority. Certainly, majority might makes not majority right. Yet Christian Americans continue to relentlessly fight Muslims who wish to build mosques. 

You and I have lived in the minority throughout our lives.  Your sexual orientation makes you a minor (so to speak), as does my visual impairment make me a minor. So perhaps this has given us a keener appreciation and thus sensitivity about the sort mob oppression that happened surrounding the building of the Muslin mosque at ground zero. Nowadays though unlike yesteryear, I’m happy with my dealt hand of vision impairment, because it has made me a more tolerant and compassionate person toward those who are different.  I’m different myself, and I believe that that has enabled me to better appreciate and more fully accept others’ differences.  I understand the supreme benefits of a diversity-appreciating society, and the need to promote such a collective yet diverse existence.  Thus, I have no problem with Muslims building mosques anywhere they wish so long as the adhere to local ordinances.

Christians may dominate the American political landscape currently. But America is by no means an exclusively Christian nation.  We’re not supposed to be of one faith here; but a diverse and numerous set of faiths.  Both Christians and non Christians alike should keep reminding the population at large of that.  We need to replace this Christian righteousness regarding the mosques with a healthy dose of good old fashioned humility.

Many Christian American newspaper columnists I’ve read seem to just want to fight with all Muslims; particularly when they argue that the connection between Islam and terrorism is immutable — like Islam is a single person, and when a small few of them commit a violent crime, then the Christians fault all of Islam.

Finally, liberalism is sometimes discredited in America these days because it supports Muslim mosques. Well, liberalism has prevailed in most of the election cycles in the past century due to the high regard it places on the ideal of total equality. But while liberalism proved to be out of vogue in 2010 elections, many folks nonetheless espouse the liberal agenda. Numerous conservative columnists are dreaming if they think that liberal ideals carry no weight with folks.  When people are hard pressed, their conscience punishes them when they show too little compassion.  Many folks today are feeling ashamed that at one time, they opposed Muslim freedom, gay rights, enfranchisement of all races, and so on.  So too will it be the case with the Muslim mosque at ground zero. 

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Majority Oppose Muslim Mosque Near Ground Zero
• Mosque At Ground Zero
• Muslim Americans’ Rights
• Two Weak Arguments Against Mosque At Ground Zero

[Emmy] and I recently discussed the extra troubles that the   blind   and   vision-impaired must face daily, particularly when growing up in the US foster care system.  One common hardship happens when the foster parents favor blood (their own biological children) over the foster children they care for.  Foster parents can show consistent and at times, relentless favoritism for their own blood over the foster kids. Add to that the difficult of a foster child being a blind girl, and this can further amplify the difficulty of   blood favoritism, and drive the foster parents away from that foster child and toward their own fully sighted biological children. 

My friend [Emmy] wrote this very heartfelt note on my blog about her hardships playing the dual roles of blind girl and foster child.  Raised in the confines of the foster care system for nearly fifteen years, [Emmy] offered some poignant descriptions of her feelings as a foster child, and how sad she felt at times.  I’ve included this letter below.  For the previous part of this discussion, see here.

—–

Dear Tom,

I agree with you that the blind need more assistance from the government. I know from personal experience how hard life can be. I was placed into the foster care system at a very young age and found it extremely difficult to fit into my foster parents’ biological family. I felt like an outsider because I was blind as well as not being their [biological] child.  I also felt like they were showing favoritism towards their younger child.

My parents have gone through some tragedies of their own, but that still doesn’t change anything. My parents’ younger daughter suffered a horrific sledding accident which left her in a coma for six weeks. Doctors didn’t think that she would make it, but she did. She’s very different from other people because of the accident. She’ll never be able to live on her own or be one with society. Sure, she has a part time job filing papers and that sort of thing but she’ll never be able to provide for herself which is very sad.

I feel sorry for her that she’s different from others but my parents should not have treated her better than me. Just because my sister’s mental capacity isn’t the same as mine doesn’t give my parents the right to favor her over the rest of the foster children they took care of.  I always felt sad when I observed my sister getting to go everywhere with my parents, where I had to sometimes stay at home and baby sit the foster kids.  This didn’t happen all the time but I didn’t like it any better than she did.  In fact what saddens me the most is that my family has a monthly get together where they all go out to eat and spend quality time with one another.  I never went to these dinners due to not being their own child.  I often felt like I should not have been born because even though my foster parents took me in, I felt like I really could never be part of their family.  It’s not fun growing up in a home where you don’t feel like you’re equal with everyone else.  It’s almost like they keep you at a distance from them and their family.  Yes they take care of you and yes they show affection to you but you know that you’ll never be truly theirs as a fourth child that they never had.  Nothing will ever take this pain away from me. 

I would like to be given a chance to be part of someone’s family not because they feel obligated to but because they truly want to.  I believe that my foster family had their heart in the right place in taking me in but how they showed their love and affection towards their kids and to the foster kids were totally different. How I felt towards my sister while growing up is still haunting me to this very day. I know that I will never be able to change what happened to me but how they treated me whether it was a conscious or unconscious decision to put their own kids needs ahead of the foster kids is down right hurtful. 

I’m not trying to make it sound like my parents didn’t care at all about me because that’s not true.  They gave me more than my biological parents would have ever done for me.  I guess I have a lot of resentment for not just my foster parents but for my biological parents as well.  I just feel as though their children were more valuable than the foster kids.  Yes, my mom would express her love to me and showed this by giving me hugs.  I did get rewarded for getting good grades and being a somewhat good kid.  I just wish that I didn’t have to prove myself that I too was a good person despite not being part of their special bond.  It doesn’t matter how much people care about you and offer to add you to their family. Somehow you still feel like you’re not part of the family.  I believe that blood is thicker than water, and it saddens me to say that I will never have a family to call my very own and whom which I can totally feel at peace with and that they can truly except me for me and not to compare me with others.  Even though I was loved by my parents, it never took the insecure feelings away but somehow I managed to move on. That doesn’t mean I’ve actually embraced this pain and insecurity but I’m seeking professional help for it.  It wasn’t my fault that I ended up in the foster care system and it wasn’t their fault for having a good family.  Even though these facts are true, it doesn’t make it right for people to be treated better than yourself just because of a brain injury.  I’m not trying to sound insensitive but talking to my parents about what ales me won’t change anything.  I will just have to accept this.

Fighting to just fit into normal society is bad enough but when you add a visual impairment to the mix, it makes it just as hard to fit in with society. Even getting good medical care has been difficult for me. I suffered with GI problems for quite some time and when I finally got settled in my current apartment, I tried seeing a GI specialist to see if they could run additional tests on me to figure out what was going on with my body. The doctor looked at me as if I was crazy because she asked me if that was really necessary. After hearing that, I never saw that doctor again. She was no help whatsoever because she wanted me to take prescription drugs for the rest of my life.

I decided to be my own doctor and slowly got off the medications. With time and some patience my body resumed to its normal routine. About four months ago I saw an oral surgeon to remove my wisdom teeth. He did this in such a short amount of time, I felt like he rushed the procedure.

The problem with being on some government programs is that not everyone takes your health insurance. You’re very limited in your selection in order to get good quality healthcare. I feel as though they just want your money and that they don’t really want to help you. It’s bad enough that the co payments can be quite expensive. That’s not always the case but it does happen.

Seeking psychotherapy is difficult too because a lot of therapists ask you to pay more than what you can afford. Sandra was very fortunate in getting help for obtaining psychotherapy. Not all blind and visually impaired individuals are that fortunate. It would be nice if the government would step up to help the blind and visually impaired individuals by having funds or just setting up programs that would actually help these people become equal with their sighted counter parts.

Being blind or visually impaired makes it hard to be competitive in the job market. Sure, the ADA has helped a lot with having equal treatment but I believe that we have a long way to go  before we can be equal to others. If we just had more services offered to us in order to better ourselves, we would be a lot better off. 

Also, sighted people have to be educated with the blind and visually impaired.  Yes there are trained professionals who come into the schools and teach the children Braille and mobility skills so that you can learn how to be independent someday.  We could improve this by expanding adults to learning more about the blind and visually impaired and how they can assist us.  We as blind and visually impaired people want to be just like everyone else but most people don’t give us a chance.  They just see our handicap and don’t wish to be bothered with us. I hope that we can turn this around in the future.

[Emmy]

Related Posts

• More Help for the Blind, Please

Dear [Mentat],

Certainly there is a degree of   free will   associated with self-actualizing people [referencing here Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle]. And until science can better quantify the proportions of what is   determinism   and what is  free will,   this debate will continue.

However, we can’t dismiss the  part of what a person accomplishes that is beyond his control.  This part is, though not measurable, a big piece of the accomplishments pie. The following will hopefully illustrate the non-voluntary parts, the  determinism   or   fate,   of any success:

• Did you choose your country of origin? No way. No free will here.  Yet clearly, where a person begins life strongly affects what he subsequently achieves. Americans come pre-bundled from the womb with more opportunities than third-worlders from Africa or the South Pacific, where chances for advancement, not to mention the diversity of disciplines one might pursue, are drastically limited.
• Did you make yourself blind? No! Again, where’s the free will in this?  Yet your overall productivity was severely impacted by your blindness. See my    Blind Hardships   post for a discussion of how blindness can seriously impact numerous dimensions of normalcy in a person’s life. 
• Did you choose your aptitudes? Again, no! Free will must have taken a vacation when innate aptitude was divvied out.  As we’ve discussed at length in our talks about Maslow’s work, people don’t seem to choose their motivations. Do they discover them? Perhaps. But they don’t choose them. If you don’t want to do something, all the free will in the world won’t make you into a world-class performer at it. Since we don’t control very much at all what we want and need, and since our desires overwhelmingly influence our proficiency at various endeavors, we therefore can only take a small part of the total credit for our accomplishments. Without desire, accomplishment of things of a higher complexity than routine tasks becomes unlikely, if not impossible.
• Did you pick how tall you are, the color of your skin, or the texture of your hair? Absolutely not. No free will again.  Studies have shown that a short person is less likely to have children or lead corporations, again, through no fault of his own. Sometimes, there may in fact, be nothing inadequate about a person’s motivation or effective efforts. Yet he still won’t win the prize if he’s too short. Not every hardship can be overcome by willfully pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps, contrary to conservative opinion. The presence of   prejudice   significantly mitigates one’s responsibility for his own successes. 
• Did you choose your parents, or the quality of rearing you received from them? Nope. Yet child psychologists agree that the single biggest influence in a child’s ultimate development is his parental structure – specifically, for boys, it’s the father who affects their growth most profoundly, and for girls, it’s the mother.  So where was the free will in this?
• Did you have any say in the fact that you were born with all your legs, arms, fingers, and toes? I don’t think so. Like vision, the absence or deformity of any of these affects the set of potential accomplishments we’re likely to achieve.  All the free will in the world would not completely compensate for a missing arm or leg; not in this day and age anyhow. 
• Can you take any credit for the fact that you were born with good hearing? No. Often, people site the accomplishments of that Miss America, Heather Whitestone McCallum, in the 1990s who was deaf. True, her will and tenacity were essential ingredients in her success. However, these were just two of many ingredients. Had her mother not worked with her for over twelve hours each day as a child to teach her communications skills and poise, I’m sure that this woman would not have become Miss America, no matter how completely and effectively she devoted herself to the task.  Though Heather exhibited a lot of will, her free will was just s part of what made her successful. 

My point is that no person ever achieves greatness entirely on his own free will.  Thus we humans cannot escape reliance on factors beyond our control to win. Survey after survey shows the high extent to which these attributes of determinism influence the types and degrees of successes we achieve. People come into this world with certain gifts as well as  crosses to bear,   and they have absolutely no control over just what that set is. They can decide (to a measure) what to do with these gifts. But what nature bestows is indeed, from the person’s perspective, a luck of the draw.  It’s fate.  It’s determinism. 

It’s true that a person who has achieved self-actualization did not do so entirely through luck. But a large part of his success is  indeed  luck, since his success rests on many pillars, of which only a few fall into the free will category. While luck is not a sufficient condition for success, it is a necessary condition.

See my   Accepting Our Personal Limitations   piece for a discussion about how detrimental it can be to assume too much personal responsibility for our natural limitations, and why it might be better to accept more of them.   

We should therefore not underestimate the importance of determinism, in driving how successful we become.  In my view, determinism is at least as big a factor as the free-will component.

Take care.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Accepting Our Personal Limitations
• Blind Hardships
• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs
• More Than Effort To Outperform Our Parents
• Thoughts on Bigotry

References

• Determinism   definition on Wikipedia
• Fate   definition on Wikipedia
• Free Will   definition on Wikipedia
• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs   definition on Wikipedia

Dear [Mentat],

I’ve seen the imaging pictures of the head during various sorts of   brain use.  These images appear to me show that just about all of the brain is used through the course of the day, whether you’re a janitor or a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The images imply that most all the neurons keep busy doing   something   if not aiding conscious thought and performance.  These pictures would seem to debunk the   ten percent myth,  that says that humans only utilize twenty percent of their brain matter for beneficial thinking.

I should have said in the post that sparked this discussion, that we utilize only ten or twenty percent of our mental potential, which is quite different than the percentage of neurons that fire within the brain. Of course, even this exact figure is difficult to prove, even for the experts. I might have said, instead of using an exact percentage, that humans have vastly unrealized mind potential and left it at that. That would have done just as well to help further the argument I was making and show why I do not believe in the ten percent myth.

There’s a process that runs on all Windows-based computers called the ‘idle’ process. It’s part of the operating system and contains essentially an infinite loop. When the CPU is not executing instructions from desktop programs, drivers, the kernel, handling interrupt requests from peripherals, and such, it switches context to the “idle” program. Though in terms of   real   work the CPU is indeed idle in this state, it is nonetheless, still busy executing instructions as it spins around in this idle-process infinite loop. This would be akin to a car engine that idles with the transmission in the “park” position. The engine may not be pulling the car anywhere, but its spark plugs, fuel injector system, sensors, computer modules, battery, and such are still operating. Its crank shaft still spins, it still consumes gas (though not as much), and it still makes noise and exhaust. As well, the CPU is still   running   a program even when it’s considered to be idle by the operating system.  Contrary to the ten percent myth, the human brain is also fully at work even if we cannot yet exactly attribute specific brain functions to each and every brain cell.

If you could do the type of imaging on a CPU as is typically done for the brain, you’d find that most of the CPU electronics are ”busy” even when no real work is being done. The same for the car engine so long as you don’t turn the key off. The only time that the CPU is truly idle is after it executes a STOP instruction or when powered off. But this doesn’t happen normally because in order to get it running again, you must reboot, a notably undesirable occurrence. The only time a car is truly idle is when you turn the key off. And of course, you’d need to start it up again make it run more, idle or not. The brain seems to work much like these simpler systems.

From what little I know of the brain, it functions in many ways much like the CPU. There are indeed neural activities going on throughout the brain all of the time, even when it sleeps, insufficiently challenged, or otherwise idle. Imaging would show the car engine busy though the car is standing still, so long as the engine is running. It would also show the CPU as busy though no meaningful programs are being run.

So the imaging may show activity in the object under examination. But it does not tell us how much real work the system is accomplishing or whether the true potential of the system is in fact being utilized maximally. Clearly, the idling car is capable of moving at speeds of up to one hundred twenty miles per hour and beyond. The engine may appear busy in the pictures but clearly when it’s idling and out of gear the car’s potential is mostly untapped. Likewise, the CPU could process gigabytes of data per second if allowed to run an appropriate program for doing that. In fact, the images of a CPU doing real work wouldn’t look much different than those of a CPU just executing the idle process. And the brain? Well, we still don’t know what its upper limits really are even if the images say that all its neurons are firing. A fully active brain in the neural sense by no means implies a fully-utilized, actualized brain.  The ten percent myth has never been shown to be true, and cannot be, just by examining brain scans.

Some suggest that one-hundred-percent-busy neurons means a one-hundred-percent-utilized brain. But this is clearly not the case. While scolarly skeptics refute well the ten percent myth, they unfortunately do less well at establishing that the brain is fully used. Admittedly, there is much imprecision here in the word definitions. Just the word “utilized” seems to take on multiple meanings in this global discussion. So we may be debating apples and oranges.

But I’ll certainly refrain from mentioning exact percentages of brain utilization in the future. I certainly wouldn’t want to give any credence to the psychics’ position that very little of the gray matter inside our heads does anything at all to help define the sorts of people we are.

Tom Hesley

References

• Ten Percent Myth    explanation on Wikipedia

Dear [Mentat],

Clearly, Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT)  has profound advantages and provides essential tools for thinking ourselves out of many of life’s quandaries. It clearly has usefulness in correcting self-destructive thoughts and subsequent behaviors. So if given the choice between taking psychoactive drugs to quell depressions and using REBT, I’d certainly opt for [Dr. Albert] Ellis’s REBT approach, because I believe his way to be a healthy, more permanent solution, one without negative side effects.  But I’m not completely sold on REBT.  For the rest of this letter, I’ll present my arguments for   disputing REBT.

I read [Ellis's book]  How To Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything, Yes Anything.  In fact, I have a copy right here. While this book is quite inspirational, producing that exciting high that most any well-written self-help book does, it seems to make things   too simple   by offering too little qualification on its numerous very general statements; thus, the price of trying to fit so much information into such a small space. Like you were saying about TV talk shows previously, this book was targeted at the layman, or the least-common-denominator of society, at those people who avoid books with more than two-hundred pages and that contain bigger than two-syllable words.      

So in order to attract as many readers as he could, but at the risk of alienating some of them, Ellis had to limit his depth. A good strategic choice I’d say, because by offering less detail, he’s probably whetted the appetites of more readers than he would have, had he dumped all his REBT material into one voluminous volume. Fortunately though, he has many other, very in-depth publications that do some of the qualifying that this book lacks. But even with its over generalizations, the REBT philosophy is a sound and useful one. We just have to make sure we don’t apply it inappropriately.

While my interest in this piece is in disputing REBT, I’d say that REBT has the greatest potential in helping us find appropriate non-destructive ways of filling level four and five needs (the   growth   needs), and to teach us how to avoid behaviors deemed destructive to filling those as well as the   deficiency   needs. REBT also has some applicability at level three in Maslow’s hierarchy, particularly since Maslow himself says that human urges above level one are much more likely driven by cultural influences than by biological mandates. This would make all but our most basic needs for survival more cognitive in nature and thus more amenable (in theory) to adjustment via REBT techniques.

But in disputing REBT, I must point out the strong staying power of cultural influence. Just how much easier is it to change a culturally-instilled proclivity than a biological instinct? I’m not sure. My hunch is that it’s not as easy as most self-help books imply. History would suggest that it’s quite hard in fact; thus the notion that humans are creatures of habit. It’s difficult to undo bad thinking (and habits) when the society around us encourages it.

Peer pressure is a big component in what makes humans so habitual, I think. More specifically, the man trying keep on a healthy diet is constantly picked on and tempted by those not so inclined, or those out to sabotage him. He can go to therapy, apply REBT, and convince himself that under no circumstances is he ever   worthless,   no matter what his goals. He could review daily the pitfalls of eating badly and the positive outcomes of eating well. But, disputing REBT, the next time he visits a party and people offer him a slab of cake and three scoops of ice cream (peer pressure), he’ll very often find the temptation to binge overwhelming, and succumb to it.  Behaviors corrected via REBT seem about as subject to relapse as those exorcised through other therapeutic techniques. 

REBTcan work in these situations and often does. But you’ve got to be able to change your environment and the people you hang with too. The rational and emotive parts of REBT, which primarily are confined to the brain can certainly lay a good foundation for more appropriate behaviors. But that behavior part is what really limits how effective REBT can be. Unlike the other two dimensions of REBT (rational and emotive), the behavior part is the most subject to the practicalities and preferences dictated by culture (at least, local culture anyhow). Our dieting man may have good understandings of what to eat and how to put food in the right perspective – that we eat to live and not live to eat. But if he can’t (or won’t) say goodbye to the people blocking his progress, if he can’t stay away from those parties to which his friends are always inviting him, then REBT’s effectiveness is markedly reduced. And over the long haul, its externally observable net benefit may well be zilch for this man.

It may sound easy to replace one’s current friends with more supportive and empowering ones. But it’s not. It takes years to build truly loving associations. There are trust issues to overcome, particularly for women. And when we already have a circle of friends and family who accept us as we are, one in which we feel safe, giving that up for the uncertainty of finding similar acceptance and safety in more supportive circles can be daunting, impractical, and in some cases even impossible. So, while culturally derived behaviors and preferences might seem easier to manipulate due to their lack of clear physical representation in the body, they can still pose insurmountable lifelong challenges just like the biological needs. Unless we can change the culture to which we’re subject, then REBT can only work so well. Its useful limits become more pronounced the lower in the needs hierarchy we go.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Bad Experiences Teach Good Lessons

References

• Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy    definition on Wikipedia
• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs   definition on Wikipedia

Dear [Mentat],

Just an addendum to earlier discussions about the degree to which the person suffering   unrequited love needs   is socially well- or mal-adjusted: I came across this tidbit in Abraham H. Maslow’s   Motivation and Personality   book, third edition, page 63:

In our society the thwarting of these [the love] needs is the most commonly found core in cases of maladjustment and more severe pathology. Love and affection, as well as their possible expression in sexuality, are generally looked upon with ambivalence and are customarily hedged about with many restrictions and inhibitions. Practically all theorists of psychopathology have stressed thwarting of the love needs as basic in the picture of maladjustment….

So, while we can’t assume that a person with lots of   unrequited love needs   is indeed disturbed, I’d say that the likelihood of maladjustment in the lovelorn is markedly higher. It’s reasonable to assume that the man walking alone may be in trouble, because so many before him, who also walked alone, committed crimes. Their failed gratification of the love needs seems to have either caused their deviance, or it is a symptom of another pathology that causes both lack of love as well as their anti-social behavior. While it’s not as clear that anti-social behavior causes lack of love, or that lack of love causes anti-social behavior, what does seem plain is that the two very often accompany each other as symptoms of social maladjustment.  Unrequited love needs often cause people to become socially devient and commit violent crimes.  Ficticious but apropo example of the mechanism at work: Frankenstein’s monster, who was at first benevolent and only wanting to help, serve, and love, eventually became a murderous fiend due to the consistent denial from humans of his love needs. 

This makes sense too from a handicapped person’s perspective. The handicapped are very often excluded from social circles as was Frankenstein’s monster through no fault of their own.  Since unlike Frankenstein’s monster, the handicapped have no super ability, they don’t as often commit violent crimes.  Instead, they become depressed.  In fact, their depression rates (symptoms of social maladjustment) appear much higher than those in the fully-functioning sect. Indeed, a major horror of being handicapped isn’t so much the handicap itself, as it is the invalidation it creates in the eyes of others. Others pull away and refuse their love to the physically challenged. This results in hurt, then anger, and finally can spill out into the material world as temperamental outbursts like we saw in [our old friends]. You would agree I think, that such outbursts themselves denote a certain absence of adjustment. Yes?

In short, the chances of being socially maladjusted when suffering the frustrating effects of unrequited love needs are clearly greater in my opinion. So lets get adjusted, and get love.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Celibacy Turns Priests Into Dangerous Lustful Predators
• The Lovelorn, Antisocial?
• We Don’t Live Happily Without Love

References

• Frankenstein’s Momster   definition on Wikipedia
• Motivation And Personality   book description
• Unrequited Love   definition on Wikipedia

Dear [Mentat],

People expect to see folks of like attractiveness together.  They talk and act in ways that encourage that, and   without pity   for the less attractive person, society discourages the stunningly beautiful, fully  sighted woman   from dating that ugly loser guy. When one partner is very much more attractive than the other, the public shuns and sabotages such unions. They (intentionally or not) behave to undermine associations between differently attractive people, employing everything from off-the-cuff, innocent but diminishing comments, all the way up to lying and backstabbing. Through these tactics and others, society in large degree, dictates the   pecking order, without pity for those it casts out.

You remember when I was seeing  [Emmy], that young woman twenty years of age, and how that guy Bob in Philly went behind my back, trying to convince her not to date me? He obviously was trying to cut in front of me in the pecking order as he saw it, and he felt that he had every right to do so.  Plus, it wasn’t just him.  So too did a few women try to talk her out of me, when I visited Buffalo in 2004. Their typical comments to her, without pity or compassion for my feelings, and without ever having met me, much less knowing me, were:

• You’re too good for him.
• You need to find yourself a   hot   guy.
• You don’t want to be seen with an ugly guy like Tom, do you?
• You could do so much better, and you deserve to.
• He’s so lucky to have someone like you because ladies of your caliber wouldn’t usually pay him any mind.
• Any old man would want a young chick like you, just like Tom does. So his love isn’t anything special.
• I bet all he wants is your body, since you’re so beautiful.  He’ll never really love you therefore.
• Why he’s so ugly that he couldn’t get one date in five years. But you. You could have a great lover every night if you weren’t wasting your life with him.
• You’re a popular girl. But he’s a nobody.
• What could he possibly have to offer you?
• You’re strange if you see anything in Tom.
• Tom’s a nice guy, yes, but you could have so much more fun if you picked a more attractive and manly fellow.

You get the idea. When someone manages to butt ahead in the pecking order line, others standing there do their best to pull him back to where they think he belongs; like crabs in a boiling pot of water that pull those back down who attempt to escape. Like them, it seems that cultural forces work hard to make sure we don’t get someone any more attractive than we ourselves are.  Indeed, society dictates the pecking order, and does so without much pity for those it muscles or shames out of desirable relationships.

Now back to our sighted woman and   blind man   discussed earlier   here.  Since the sighted woman is a 9.5 out of 10 in terms of attractiveness, then in light of the discussion above, she’ll produce more romantic gratification in any fellow (including the blind man) than the blind man will in her. I’m assuming here that any romantic advantage a perfect 10 has, occurs mostly at level three in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. This may be fallacious, I know. But I need to do it for a moment to make my point.

Now, our highly attractive sighted woman is only about forty percent as likely to be gratified romantically by the blind man because he’s only about forty percent as attractive as she is (He’s a 4 and she’s a 10). So in this simple and admittedly stilted scenario, the blind man will benefit much more in a romantic sense from the attractive sighted woman, than she will benefit from him.  This assumes that society doesn’t meaningfully thwart their relationship. Also, since the pretty sighted woman has more latitude in selecting more attractive men, I’d expect that if she’s not as gratified as she could be, and at the same time, has the power to become more gratified, then why would she stay with the blind man? 

Maybe she pities him. Maybe the needs that   she   is looking to gratify through her involvement with the blind man aren’t as much level three as they are level five. Specifically, she wants to gratify her self-actualization,   growth needs   of showing compassion to a soul who yearns for it.  But the blind man on the other hand wants to gratify his  deficiency needs  of love. In short, she primarily wants to   give   in order to self-actualize herself, while he wants primarily to   get,   to quench his thirst for love. His need to receive love is thus, more urgent than her need to give it.  Thus, we have the asymmetry I spoke of earlier in my  Power Imbalance: Blind Man Dating Sighted Woman   piece. Can this sort of symbiotic relationship work in a healthful way? Intuitively, it seems not, though this would bear more complete investigation later.

At any rate given all this, I doubt that asking women to form attractions based on the compassion a blind man might inspire, will work any better than other attraction strategies that require no compassion. Sighted women probably won’t be moved by the blind man’s pleas.  But even if they are, their family and friends will probably discourage them, just as   [Emmy's]   friends dissuaded her above, from going out with me.  They may pity love the blind man.  But only without pity will they truly love him in binding, romantic ways. 

Even if the sighted women answering the call to pity are so moved to love the blind man, I’m not sure most men of conscience could really let go sexually, because he’d doubt if she’s really enjoying the sex too. If the blind man ever suspected that they weren’t, then I doubt he’d enjoy it either. Now the sighted women might get some thrill at level five from making love to the blind man, insofar as they would be performing a good deed; doing a great thing that few other women would be “big enough” to do. But I’d wonder as do you, if that would be truly enough for these women over time. I personally would just feel guilty and self-conscious getting off, if I thought that she wasn’t experiencing the same degree and type of carnal joy.

Even if a sighted woman is moved to love a blind man, she’ll probably end up dominating him and holding her superior attractiveness over his head without pity; implicitly if not blatantly. I wouldn’t want to be on the short end of that power imbalance or to feel the sighted woman pulling my heart along as I run in the dirty road behind her, gasping for air while eating the dust from her boots. It’s no fun doing your best, only to have some beautiful woman say that you’re not doing well enough, or that you should be doing something different.

E. G. Marshall, on the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, summed it up well, saying:  Should a man pick a woman more capable [attractive] than he, then he gets humiliated. If he picks someone less capable, then he gets boredom. Thus the real challenge is to pick someone truly equal to ourselves. I just hope that I’m capable of finding long-term satisfaction with a woman of equal attractiveness to my own.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Power Imbalance: Blind Man Dating Sighted Woman
• Asking For Help
• Blind Hardships
• Help From Sighted Lovers
• More Help For The Blind, Please!

References

• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs   definition on Wikipedia

Dear [Mentat],

I wonder what Buddhists would say about the so-called   basic human needs of  love  as described in   Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?  That’s not a thirst for power but it might be classified as a lust; albeit a demonstrable key attribute of human nature.

So perhaps the noble needs are higher in [Maslow's] needs hierarchy than the deficiency needs (which might be called the grasping needs).

I’ve been reading the book   Motivation and Personality,   that thoroughly explains Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Maslow does say that any desires we have beyond level one are, as I wrote in another post, “composite.” So this certainly makes sense.

True, celibacy may not always result in depression. But it does seem to stimulate the emergence of  sexually deviant behaviors – as in the priests molesting children. From the child’s perspective then, a celibate man may well be a dangerous one if what’s been happening in the Catholic Church lately is any indication. Perhaps I overstated depression as being a “constant companion” in the absence of  intimate lovers providing a healthier companionship. However, when we intentionally thwart a basic need such as love, little good ever comes of that to most people I suspect.  This is the point I was trying to express.

Perhaps reduced sex drive would not entirely thwart the propagation of the species, though it might admittedly slow our proliferation. Perhaps that wouldn’t be so bad. But untenable would be the all-too-true notion that less sex drive would make sex less enjoyable, just as less thirst for water makes an icy cold glass of it less appealing. So I’m not interested in that. While we might indeed reduce the bad consequences by establishing a muted sex drive, we’d also limit the pleasures that properly channeled desires can create. To me, it’s not worth the trade-off.

Yes, quite clear. Sure, you can find umpteen examples of where excess sex drive comes to bad ends. However, I don’t believe myself so undisciplined, nor do I feel that the consequences of my own sex drive have been all that bad. I’ve never raped anyone or touched a child inappropriately, and never used my physical might to force myself on any woman. I listen when they tell me no, and I don’t pout (anymore at least) when they do.  I see none of the negative effects of excess sex drive mentioned above as applying to me. Certainly, they have little diminishing effect on my purpose. Even if most of the human population handles the sex drive inappropriately, that’s just not enough to convince me to attempt to quell my questing for intimacy.

Sorry.

Tom Hesley

References

• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs   definition on Wikipedia

Friends,

I have no trouble requesting assistance from sighted partners. Why not? If they want to be with me, that’s part of the arrangement of the relationship. I bring certain gifts to the table for them as well as needs to  have satisfied by them, just as they bring for me.

If someone claims to love me, then they’d better back up that claim, by helping me get around if they’re able.

I dated several sighted women who balked at this however. Not even when I pumped over $100 of gas per month into their cars, did they embrace driving a few extra miles for me. My particular needs in order to feel happy and fulfilled in a relationship, demand that ladies who drive demonstrate a special sensitivity to my special needs as a vision-impaired person. If they quibble, complain, or exploit this implied power imbalance between us (if they deny me transportation in other words), then I tell them to get lost.

I oppose this notion that the blind should avoid asking their mates for help. They ought to ask for   more   help (not less), and actually get more help than they do. Too bad society at large has grown so self-centered, that sighted people feel imposed upon when the blind ask for assistance, and it’s too bad that the blind have been intimidated into not asking, because of all the rejection they get when they do. Just think: If not for all that rejection, there might be no need for organizations like the NFB (National Federation for the Blind) or the ACB (American Council for the Blind).

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• How Blind Men Find Women Attractive