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Emotional relationship is a taboo which often goes
unrecognized, compared to sex which is more overt and
easy to represent visually.
Just as there is sex education, I think there should be a
counterpart that discuss on 'safe' interpersonal relations.
This is because, as sad as it is to say
this. There is a lot
of
people who don't know how to behave ethically in a
relationship, hence the bout of cheating and divorces
that
could possibly be averted if the participants had been
educated to critically think. And this is just in romantic
relationships. Much more problems could also be seen in
non romantic relationships as well too! (Which is often
frustrating to friends and family who see those kinds of
people end up harming themselves. E.g. abusive
relationship, breaking other families apart, cheating, or
knowingly enabling
others to cheat)
Unlike Sex Education, ethical relationship classes is an
ongoing class starting at primary school. It aims to have
students constantly asking themselves to remember
their
own conducts with other students, friends, (and in
highschool, their girl/boyfriend, and their children). It
will
also discuss on hypothetical situation where there are
grey
areas. Especially when dealing with situation where there
is no good choices to make without negative
consequences
(For example, being dissatified in a relationship{which
could leads to cheating if untreated}).
Sexual Education is there to prevent the spread of STDs
to
other humans.
Relationship Ethics Education would be there to prevent
the spread of broken families and friends.
----
Note:
All it ask essentially, is for you to have pride in personal
integrity (I don't give a damn about whatever the other
guy/girl did. What did YOU do?)... is that too hard to
ask for?
One of the biggest threats to this idea in
implementation... "Soccer mom"
(appropos pertinax's banking scenario) Toxic Debt
http://www.institut...x?ArticleID=1026725
Invented by somebody French! (this time, anyway). [DrBob, Dec 08 2013]
And the aftermath...
http://liveindex.or...-sting-in-the-tail/
[DrBob, Dec 08 2013]
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I've thought similarly about the possibility of heading
off stalking before it happens by encouraging
emotional literacy, so yes, I like and see it as along
the same lines. |
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Relationship ethics, like sexual ethics, exists at the manifold between culture and biology. A lot of decisions that we regard as "volitional" have strong passive biological underpinnings. We need to teach this. Individuals need to be aware that their behavior has biological as well as social and cultural influences, so they have the opportunity for critical self examination. |
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What you are actually examining, rather than the teaching of critical ethics is a greater emphasis on what you regard as a healthy social norm. Norming sucks. In my opinion the norm that you need to unpack is the social structures that enable and encourage individuals to build and maintain relationships that are essentially contractual, rather than empathetic and based on mutualism. The whole concept that a family may "break" or that a friendship may abruptly end without a rational cause is contingent on these relationships being superficial to the individuals involved. |
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Yeah, many countries are pretty explicit about how
they think relationships should go down. They're big
on fidelity and all that. They also enforce their rules
with vim and vigour. These countries are, universally,
hellholes. Countries where you're free to do
whatever your Brain-Hormone complex is telling you
to do are largely better. I'd argue that problems are
caused by transitioning from one type to another,
and the inter generational misunderstandings there
caused. |
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I think it's more than that [bs0u0155], I am very aware of constantly being bombarded with messages that discourage healthy honest relationships. Our popular culture is a story about the constant beginning and ending of superficial relationships. We glory in a consumer model for human relationships and it hurts all of us in a way that most people never even consider. My impression is that a majority of people finds any sort of deep interpersonal bonding baffling and scary, rather than normal. Trust, and honesty, which are the most important product of healthy bonding are a scarce commodity in a society that prizes individualism and interpersonal violence over co-operation and personal sacrifice. |
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//the norm that you need to unpack is the social structures that enable and encourage individuals to build and maintain relationships that are essentially contractual, rather than empathetic// |
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If you "unpack" (in order to eliminate) those social structures, what you are doing is creating a brutal power structure in which an individual's position is determined by how many mirror neurons they have. "How can it be brutal", you may ask, "if it's based on empathy?" The answer is simple: empathy doesn't scale. |
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To a large extent, this unpacking has already happened in the Western world, and has contributed to a great deal of entirely avoidable suffering. |
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Yeah, you could explain that theory more. Especially the part about
the unhappy people, the excessive empathy, and how critical
examination of social structures destroys them. The examined life is
less worth living? |
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Classic rant about whores disguised as idea. |
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School, (the state) has no right whatsoever to try to push a certain "morality" that I may or may not agree with. The state has a right to demand that I know the law and to punish and correct if I break it. It has no right whatsoever to force me to call these laws just be they written or unwritten.
I will never subscribe to your ethical standards of interhuman releationships in whatever form and the state has no business teaching it to my children.
Possibly, probably, you or a loved one is upset about something. |
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//you could explain that theory more// |
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First, I don't think you're really interested in just
"examining" these social structures in an open-
minded way - I'm pretty sure you have a foregone
conclusion in mind, and the rest of my earlier
remarks were based on that assumption. If I was
wrong in that assumption, then I might have to re-
phrase them. |
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However, suppose that a particular process of
critical examination does result in the elimination
of those structures. I stand by the view that this
has resulted, and continues to result, in avoidable
misery. Once I have explained how that works, we
can then go back to what might be wrong with the
particular critical processes that have been applied
during the past hundred years or so -
notwithstanding the general virtues of critical
analysis. |
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So, there are two mechanisms by which an
exclusively empathy-based ethic generates misery
- one direct, the other indirect. |
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To explain the direct mechanism, I will ask you to
consider two vignettes from recent history. There
have to be two, one from each side of politics, to
emphasize that this is not a left-versus-right
problem. |
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First, I would like you to imagine an office in
Canberra, Australia, a couple of years ago, where
Prime Minister Julia Gillard is considering what line
to take in relation to a scandal affecting one Craig
Thomson, a member of parliament and a senior
official in the Health Services Union, who has been
accused of using union funds to fund his personal
expenses (such as prostitutes) on a large scale.
There's documentary evidence that he's guilty as
hell. |
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Thomson is a charming and attractive individual,
whom Gillard would have seen on a daily basis.
Furthermore, Thomson's vote is vital in sustaining
Gillard's precarious minority government. So, not
only Thomson himself, but just about everyone
else around Gillard, would be very anxious that he
should be given the benefit of the vanishingly
small doubt in the case. |
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We'll leave them in that office for a bit, while we
go to the second vignette. |
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We're in another office, this time in London, a few
years earlier. In this office, a small group of
financial markets professionals are discussing ninja
loans - No Income, No Job (nor) Assets - which
underlie the large volume of mortgage-backed
securities washing around the financial system. As
you have gathered from the acronym, they all
know these things are poisonous. The question is
whether anyone is willing to advise any client to
stop buying them. |
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If someone does, then that client, and everyone
relying on that client, is going to be much better
off in a few years' time - but, in the meantime,
the gravy train will be derailed (or at least slowed
sharply down), not just for the whistle-blower
himself, but for all his colleagues - the ones in the
room with him. |
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I'm going to assume, to keep the argument simple,
that no-one in either room is an actual
psychopath. Not everyone in the financial
markets is a psychopath, nor is everyone in
national politics. They do exist, but I'm going to
talk about them later, separately. |
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Both groups of people, the bankers on the right
and the politicians on the left, are the children of
emotional correctness. They live by empathy -
both by the ability to read people from one
moment to the next and by the ability to maintain
a strong network of personal relationships. That
may surprise you, in relation to the bankers, but
I've worked with financial markets people, and I
can vouch for the truth of it. |
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We know, because we've lived through the
history, that both groups of people chose to do
the wrong thing. The bankers backed each other,
and not their clients, nor the faceless thousands
of people depending on their clients. The
Australian cabinet backed their charming friend,
and not the faceless thousands of low-paid
workers whose money he'd stolen. |
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You may say "this is inevitable", but it's not. It *is*
possible for someone to stand up to the people in
the room, in defense of other people who are not
in the room - difficult, but possible. In order to do
it, though, you need to acknowledge a
relationship with the people outside the room
which is based on contract, not on empathy. It
can't be based on empathy, because empathy
suffers from a sort of inverse square law with
respect to social distance, whereby it's really hard
to empathize with someone whose face you've
never seen when a real face in front of yours is
urging you in the opposite direction. |
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To have any chance of getting the right decision,
you need someone inside the room who is so
crashingly insensitive as to say "no" to all those
nice people who are on the same side. *That* is
the sense in which there can be too much
empathy. Such people, honourable dorks, do exist
but, since the mid twentieth century, they have
been kept well away from centres of power,
largely by the actions of such caring professionals
as yourself, [WcW]. |
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Inside the room where the decisions are made,
everyone is happy with the lovely empathetic
system. To find the unhappy people, you just
have to look outside the room. That is what I
mean by saying that empathy doesn't scale. |
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That's not to say that empathy is bad - on the
contrary, empathy is vital - but it's a complement
to the contractual element in human relationships,
not an alternative to it. |
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Yes, I know, I was going to talk about psychopaths
and indirect effects
as well, but maybe you'd like to come back on
those points first. |
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Hmm! This idea rather depends on a single vision of an ideal set of 'personal ethics' and, however well meaning, is really just state sponsored indoctrination. Acceptable personal moralities, if they are to have any lasting influence, are something best worked out by people between themselves. |
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Ok, so I'm not on whatever you are on so I didn't make the connection between crony politics and what I was saying about relationships based on an honest understanding of the other person as a fully formed individual with an inner life as rich as your own. |
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You didn't say anything about the richness of inner
life, [WcW]. What you said was, essentially, that
relationships should be based only on empathy and
mutualism, and not on norms and contracts. That
line has consequences. To reverse that cliche of
the seventies, "The political is personal". Our
choices, even if we are not politicians or bankers,
have consequences beyond our social circle. How
will we do the right thing in those choices, if we
don't recognize our relationship to people until we
get close enough to see their inner lives? |
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f.w.i.w., I'm on much the same thing that [rcarty] is
on, but with the polarity reversed. |
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At a basic, unpacked, simple level - this is *precisely* what school already does/is for. You think anyone is actually learning anything useful in those places? Nah. It's pretty much all socialisation and Jonny-get-on-nicely-with-Suzie type stuff - or, put another way "Retlationship Ethics Education" - at least implicitly anyway. |
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And explicitly in such classes as we had to sit through with names like "Social and Personal Education" which essentially told us not to bully people, not to take drugs, and to otherwise be nice boys and girls. So in my school anyway, this is very much baked to a crisp. |
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I agree with zen_tom and pertinax. My main concern about this idea is that kids are bastards. This is particularly though unintentionally the case when they are teenagers, each coming to terms with the fact that the world (trans. anyone who isn't precisely them) doesn't revolve around them. Adolescence is not a time for self-reflection or subtle consideration of human interaction. No, it is a time for two things: (1) deciding how you have decided The World Works and (2) deciding what your position is with regard to How The World Works. The arbitrary, confusing complexity of human interaction (on all its scales) is far more than an adolescent mind can, at first / second / third pass, parse. Order must be brought, and as order is largely non-existant in life, it must be brought artifically, superimposed on the world. These artificial systems of self-support (in the sense of being a system that is designed to support the self of the adolescent, not necessarily to be themselves self-supporting), anyway these artificial systems of self support are commonly binary and admit no shades or give and take. Preaching mutual respect and empathy (on whatever scale) to adolescents, will be as well-received as aiming a jet of your hot orange piss into their faces. Even if accepting the education would be good for them, to accept it would be to institutionally and p much explicitly tell them they are looking at the world all RONG and that they are DIVVIES who SUCK. |
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So yes, zen_tom is right, the relationship education you get as a teenager comes from the clashing of each teenager's worldviews, a rubbing along that erodes the certitude of the various positions. Of course, this is completely undermined by, for example, one strangely charismatic student who read L'Etranger at the wrong / right time coming along and sharing an attractively reductive "nothing matters" philosophy, students drawn to this theoretically liberating worldview finding themselves palling around with those of common mind, never coming into contact with the optimists or what have you, other than sneeringly. Cliques, gangs and petty personality cults in school delay empathetic progress in much the same way that nationalism delays pan-continential or pan-global empathy. |
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While "teaching ethics" is concerning and suggests
a private grievance, teaching the psychology of
relationships and giving examples of common
relationship pitfalls might be a good idea. |
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The most helpful advice is probably not what
anyone wants to teach or hear, though. |
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//My main concern about this idea is that kids are
bastards.// And some people (approximately, the
psychopaths and sociopaths) are simply evil for
their
entire lives. Teaching such people how their
behaviour affects others only makes them more
destructive, because they don't care about other
people and actively enjoy hurting them. We aren't
taught at school that such people exist, let alone
how to deal with them. Many find out the hard
way. |
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I have a heterodox theory about that,
[spidermother]. |
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At present, psychiatry recognizes two categories
of person who, because of their brain structure,
lack empathy. It calls one group "autistic" and the
other group "psychopaths"*, and discusses them as
though they were entirely unrelated to each
other. And indeed, at a behavioural level, they
are very different. The autist is a lousy liar and
hates lying in others, whereas the psychopath
takes to lying like a duck to water. The autist
lives a very rule-bound life, whereas the
psychopath disdains rules. |
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Inside, though, so far as I can gather (and I'd be
very interested in any studies which bear on this),
no-one's established much of a neurological
difference between them - though they are both
neurologically different from the average person. |
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So, what factor does differentiate them, making
them take one fork in the behavioural road rather
than the other? |
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I suggest self-esteem; psychopaths (and this is
well-attested by studies) have high self-esteem,
autistic people, lower self-esteem. |
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Now, if a child starts off with a neurological
disposition towards empathy - a "histrionic" brain,
that being the opposite of an autistic brain, then
self-esteem is very good for them. Their heads are
full of mirror-neurons, and if you shower esteem
on them, they happily reflect it on to those
around them, and everybody wins. Twentieth
century educational theory, with its roots in
psychoanalysis, assumes that virtually everybody
either is or ought to be of this histrionic type -
although, in fact, a great many people are either
autistic or some half-and-half mixture of autistic
and histrionic characteristics. |
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Consequently, twentieth century educational
theory is lavish with the self-esteem and - for
histrionic people - this works well. It builds their
confidence and sets them up for life. However,
this same process, which produces happy,
confident histrionic people, turns out as its by-
product a steady trickle of psychopaths, just as
surely as the chemical extraction of gold turns out
a steady trickle of cyanide or sulfuric acid. |
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And there's another twist to this. |
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As you know, psychopaths are cruel because they
don't register the emotional signals from others
which might normally trigger pity. Autistic people
not only don't register those signals from others,
but aren't able to broadcast such signals
effectively when *they* are distressed.
(Psychopaths don't properly broadcast them,
either,
but have learned to fake them). Therefore,
whereas the distress of one histrionic person
arouses pity in another histrionic person, yet the
distress of an autistic person does not arouse pity.
It's more likely to arouse amusement. So, towards
the autistic person, the "well-adjusted" histrionic
person is liable to behave like a psychopath. |
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This effect is largely mitigated where everyone is
schooled in an ethical framework which involves
rules as well as empathy. However, in an ethical
framework which despises rules, and relies on
empathy alone, it's not mitigated at all. This may
be another factor in the diversion of a susceptible
person down the "vicious psychopath" path, rather
than the "harmless nerd" path. |
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*Yes, I know, the term "psychopath" is less in
favour now than in the past, being replaced by
other terms, but I understand that this change
represents only marginal nosological drift, and not
anything more fundamental. |
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Is it poor relational ethics to point out the number of
subject - verb plurality disagreements here? |
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