Environment and Circumstance

It's amazing how things change over time, with compassion waxing and waning, belief shifting, absolutes turning murky  The basic philosophical question is 'How do I live a good life?' and I really don't have a good answer for that anymore. I thought I did, but it's so challenged that I have nowhere to stand anymore. Can circumstances really make such a difference? I don't know.

Where and how do I move from here? More importantly, do I even have a choice?

Can I really heal?

*sigh*

Too many questions.

Elections, Political Parties and Thinking Outside the (Comfortable) Box

I watched the first Presidential debate and the first Massachusetts Senate debate this month, and after listening to the candidates in both Republican and Democrat tickets, and listening to the kinds of scrutiny that friends, family, and peers provided, that the questions that are being asked are missing an important quality to elections, and an important line of inquiry that's been observed as lacking in politics for quite some time now: Leadership skills.

Often when people think of leadership skills, the thought turns to how well someone is at rallying people to their cause. We see people like Obama and Romney successfully rallying their constituent base toward a goal, and point to leadership. Is this truly political leadership however? What of the leadership that a President needs to show in working with a hostile (read: of a different political party) Congress? What of the leadership that a Senator needs in working within such an environment? Isn't it the role of these positions to be national leaders, not just leaders within their party?

In watching both debates, I see others critique policy and/or ideology between candidates, reading between the lines to discern facts and data, to identify programs and laws that may be at risk or may benefit, and to dissect rhetorical styles. Despite this, the discussion of who shows leadership skills is absent from these critiques. I would argue that for positions such as these it is probably more vital for a successful President or Senator, or any representative, to show leadership.

I argue this with the following logic: Is the president a data analyst? Sort of. Any president must show an ability to understand information presented and select among various options. I would argue that a President has many staff who's job it is to provide data, and explain that data, so this is a delegatable responsibility. Does the president make decisions impacting programs and policies? Again, sort of. Outside of ideological reasons, a President needs data to decide how to change programs, and that data is supplied by... yep, that's right, staff members. There are also staff who make program recommendations too, another delegatable task. Even if we have a president who's acting ideologically, regardless of data, there still exists two very big power blocks, Congress and the courts. Since government decisions, and even political rhetoric, is very seriously data-driven, and politicians aren't really coming up with data or recommended actions on those data by themselves, it's safe to assume that any president has access to information on all the various information and recommendations to make a decision.

So then what of that decision? Isn't that capacity to choose part of the reason we vote for a candidate? Again, sort of. What about implementation? What about political process? If it was just a matter of making the decision then there really would be no need to speak of leadership beyond galvanizing the electorate, that's the only group that would matter. This would also be consistent with a parliamentary system, something we distinctly don't have in the United States.

Ok then, what about implementation, what's required in implementation? This is where the broader concept of leadership comes in. A President can't just say to Congress 'I want this legislation.' and it happens. This has been tried numerous times unsuccessfully. Obama's administration is about as repeat with this as can be. Since Congress serves as the first gatekeeper for a President, then it makes sense that a President must work with Congress in creating legislation (also since the President has the veto, more on later). If Congress is of the same political party majority as the President, this doesn't tend to be a problem, as the President's already galvanized his own party behind him. What of the current setup? We have a split Congress. Ut uo, now the President needs to work with someone outside of the political party. Existing leadership fails here, and new leadership skills are needed. This is the 'between the isle' leadership that is often spoken of, but I would argue rarely seen.

Let's start dissecting leadership then, beginning with a definition: For simplicity's sake I'll use a somewhat political, and fairly simple, definition. The ability to bring together people and direct them towards a common goal. This was exceptionally clear in Obama's 2008 campaign, he galvanized the voter base for a very strong victory. The rhetorical style was addressing Democrats, clearly, as that was his core audience. However it was also addressing moderates in a persuasive way. One thing I can say with complete confidence, it wasn't addressing Republicans. Obama wasn't trying to show leadership with Republicans, just Democrats and moderates. The same can be said of his competitor, McCain, in that he was trying to lead Republicans and moderates, and not Democrats. This is clear in how issues are addressed ideologically, stylistically, and what issues are raised within each group. Common themes among Democrat rhetoric: Taxes on big business up, middle class taxes down. Common Republican rhetoric: Military spending and job creation incentives for businesses. Democrats respond much better to democratic rhetoric than Republicans do, and vice versa. In many ways they're like different languages.

That's where this key point comes in with leadership. How does one lead both their own party, and the opposing party? Since we're in a gridlocked Congress there's no way around the need to address both parties. Likely over the next few years there will be a similar gridlock, and in future presidencies this is unlikely to change altogether that much. Oh sure a few may be all one party, but that's more an abberation than a regular occurance. Well, building off my previous example, how one communicates with a group helps to drive how much leadership one is allowed to have. Yes, there are other qualities here, but they all hinge on a single skill: communication.

Quick dissection: communication is the art of sending a message to a recipient, they translate it, send a return message which you translate, and reply to their message. It's cyclical, and dependent on the communication skills of both (or multiple, the model is scalable) parties. The interesting thing about communication is that both parties have influence to help the process at any stage. A sender can work with a receiver in helping the process of translating the message, and vice versa. This becomes more challenging the less effort and/or the less that either party wants to communicate with the other, assuming that language barriers aren't even a problem. Probably the most interesting quirk of communication is how it rests outside of the realm of fact. Facts can be brought in to a communication circut, but the communication is about the exchange, not the information being exchanged so much.

So, let's recap for a moment here: Leadership's an established necessary component for a President (and Senator, will get back to later) to have, and leadership is contingent on communication. Well, let's see how our Presidential candidates stack up in regards to this communication test. Based purely on face value, after the first presidential debate it seems pretty clear that both Obama and Romney have hit what can only be described as epic fail on basic communication. Evidence: both parties made statements that the other refuted very directly, multiple times, but was never addressed. Obama regarding the $5 trillion tax cut, which Romney refuted multiple times, and Romney on the committee that makes decisions on people's medical care, which was refuted by Obama multiple times. Now let's set aside issues of what is the factually correct information for a moment, this is about communication, not fact-tallying.

Again, I'm taking this whole thing at face value, I'll get into another rant on the Presidential debates another time.

So, let's look at this from a communication-based perspective, and qualify my 'epic fail' remark earlier by creating something of a rubric. If leadership, in galvanizing people in support of a common goal, is the objective, and communication is fundamental to achieving this end, then it strikes me that choices in communicating should reflect a furthering of the kind of communication that will create leadership. Well, I could just arbitrary throw stuff out there that sounds good, but let's be more logical about this. In the most basic sense, communication fails as soon as either party ceases to want to communicate, this can be a ceasing of either broadcasting a message, or of receiving a message, or of putting effort into translating the message, as any significant break in this chain from either party will de-rail the conversational cycle. Or put more simply, in order to even be communicating with you, I need to be willing to pay attention to what you're saying, try to understand it, and say something back to you. If I want to have a conversation that is successful on the most basic level, then I should be saying something to you that will motivate you to repeat this same process for me, and you will want to say something that will motivate me to repeat the process again for you. For simplicity's sake, let's call this successful process conversation.

Ok, we have a rubric now, each party must not only be motivated to receive, translate, and send information, but also must be willing to send information that motivates the other party to repeat the process for them. Remember how I said that the sender can influence the receiver's translation of material? This is one way how.

With this rubric, let's go back to the Presidential debate. Obama talks about a $5 trillion tax cut, Romney rebuts it, Obama repeats the same information about the $5 trillion tax cut, Romney repeats the same information. Repeat about 3 or so more times. Were I Romney I'd start to get pretty pissed off at Obama for not responding to what I was saying, and would be discouraged in communicating with Obama, at least on this issue. Fail: motivate continued communication. It's a little harder to tell where the fail was with Obama, as he clearly responded to other parts of Romney's responses but not that one. It likely wasn't some sort of reception problem. Was there a translation problem, did Obama not understand what was being said? Again, not likely, Obama responded quite directly to other statements that Romney had made through the debate. So the issue was likely in transmission, or put simply, Obama chose not to respond to that issue. Once, maybe even twice, this can be chalked up to random error. This was recurring within just a few minutes, so it's hard to qualify this as just a simple mistake or error on Obama's part. Erego, deliberate. This isn't a failure of transmission, but a failure of the transmission in a way that motivates a response. The deliberateness of it is what moves this from a simple communication fail to the colorfully expressed 'epic fail.' It's one thing to mess up a conversation, something else entirely to deliberately mess it up like that.

Remember though, Romney did the same thing to Obama later in the debate. Yes you can argue post hoc, but that's a fallacy I'll dig into another time.

So, let's bring this back around to the leadership issue. We have two Presidential candidates who, on national television, deliberately messed up their lines of communication with each other. This seems ominously familiar… I think I’ll make a bit of a leap here and say that what was observed here parallels the same dialog that has been occurring in Congress, and between the President and Congress for as long as I can remember. Recollecting from many of the house committee hearings I’ve had the (mis)fortune of watching, the same communication snafu shows up regularly.

So, let me bring this full circle here, and assert why this was a such a big fail for both candidates. We have here two people who are representing themselves AND their party, to the entire American audience, and even world audiences. They are both role models, for those within their party, and windows, for those outside. The common criticism is that politics have broken down. I present to you the above analysis of communication in the presidential debate as to a likely source of that breakdown: failure of basic communication, and through that failure of a capacity for us to witness, in a very real and substantial way, for the two people currently bestowed with the responsibility of representing themselves and their party to the American people, modeling a complete failure of across-the-isle communication skills.

With the connection between communication and leadership, this boils down to a failure of bipartisan leadership skills that are being nationally modeled. The danger here is in assuming that either candidate even has this capacity, which I can’t say there’s any strong evidence for through the debate, either of their campaigns, or their political careers.

I really shouldn’t have to explain why this is a bad thing.

But wait, there’s more! Returning to the beginning of this rant, I said I watched not just the Presidential debate, but the Massachusetts Senate debate too! Lo and behold, much to my (non)surprise, the same pattern was there too. Repeat everything I just said about the Presidential debate to the Mass. Senate debate.

*sigh*

So, what’s the solution? Well, this is where I change gears a little, and start to move into problem-solving mode. I would first generally state that I assert it’s important for scrutiny of a political candidate to include an assessment of their leadership and communication skills to those outside of their party.

Then, in addressing the actual behavior of the candidates: It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that both of them have some sort of personal defect, or ulterior agenda, and with their behavior outside of the debate, this would seem supported. However, let’s remember that the Presidential debate is one of the few instances where the candidates really do become much more than just this speech here, or that proposal there. There’s a level of national representation that the debate communicates to the nation, and the influence that the candidates can have on the electorate is probably at its highest at this point. I.E. it matters what they do in general, but it really matters during the debate. So what can be done differently?

Well, that’s where I have to draw in from elsewhere for inspiration. The little known of Third Party Debate (thank you NPR! Link here: http://www.npr.org/2012/10/06/162438686/the-npr-third-party-candidate-debate). Here we have two people running for President, rather seriously too (they’re both on the Mass. Ballot, and many other states too), having a debate along similar lines (albeit much shorter) to what we saw in the regular Presidential debate, yet what’s missing here? The candidates aren’t failing to communicate with each other.

This is probably why it goes so much faster than the Presidential, and the Mass. Senate, debate.

Ok, let’s be fair, that’s really a format issue. The questions in the Third Party debate aren’t designed to solicit cross-talk between the candidates. Is this really a bad thing though? They’re not modeling bad leadership… just not modeling good leadership either.

Let’s look at this from a broader perspective though: debate format, especially around the kinds of questions asked. The questions in the regular Presidential debate were intentionally contentious, asking specifically about what the differences in policy were between the candidates. The Third Party debate was just asking about the individual candidates policy. That’s quite a difference in response based on a fairly small change in the question! (Survey and interview researchers, take note here J)

Well, it can be argued that it’s more to do with the character and communication skills of the Third Party candidates. I’m skeptical on this, but won’t refute that possibility straight-up. I’m not sure their communication skills are any better than Obama or Romney, as they seem to actually be less clear in some more basic mass-audience communication than either of them. Since we don’t see cross-party communication, it’s hard to gauge there, but considering there’s really only room upward from the examples we have elsewhere… that they didn’t break format and turn it into a communication fiasco at least gives some hint that there’s some communication aptitude there. Not really much to go on, so I can’t really rule it out.

In regards to their character, again I’m not sure, both candidates speak with the same passion, zest, and enthusiasm as the major party candidates. I’m not convinced here, but won’t rule it out.

What’s that leave then? Well, what about motivation? Perhaps the main party candidates had ulterior motives for communicating in the way they did. This starts to get into Presidential debate politics, which could fill more pages than I’ve written here, and as much as I’d love to get into it, I must draw the essayist line somewhere, and address it another time. To summarize my thoughts on this issue (for elaboration another time), I’m strongly in favor that this is a major contributing factor to the reason that the debates are showing such epic failure of leadership.

I would return to my original thesis, though, that perhaps they just don’t know how to lead from across the aisle, and/or the existing format encourages communication fail. I can’t speak much to altering people’s character, so perhaps then, a good start would be to consider alternative debate formats? If the current format encourages poor cross-aisle leadership, then perhaps a neutral, or positive debate format would at least not be such a bad example for the nation?

If nothing else, I really want to see some good examples of people working together, not tearing each other to shreds. We see plenty of that already.

-         Jason Cherry

A New Life, A New Me? Maybe, Maybe Not.

So, I moved across the country and am now residing in Boston, Massachusetts. My life is totally different now, and I think it's for the better. This is definitely a life more suited to me, I will say that.

It's interesting though, as I kind of expect to 'wake up' from this, and go in to work at my old job. It's something totally different here, but I'm not sure I'm any different. A lot of this could be because I have such a strong self-presence as it is, that external factors don't really change it. I'm not sure how to evaluate that though.

With all I've been learning though, maybe I should design a research study to test it (-:

I dunno though. I have more control on my schedule, and more unscheduled responsibility. I'm rather pleasantly surprised how well I've handled that as unscheduled responsibility (read: homework) has historically been a problem for me, but I seem to be keeping up with things very well this time. I'm reading more than I ever have before, and retaining it better than I used to.

Yet many of the same problems I had before followed me here, naturally those dealing with relationships. I'm now at two busts, one friend-zoned, and one potential. Plus I'm still dealing with the emotional fallout from my marriage. *sigh*

I guess in aggregate I have to say I haven't really changed, which isn't a bad thing, I really like who I am.

- Jason

A Crazy Idea on Prison Reform?

I was just doing a mental exercise yesterday, and I ended up coming up with a prison system reform idea, lemme run through the exercise though. I was qualifying why I believe in the death penalty, and the circumstances I believe it's applicable. That was pretty straightforward: 1) subject is non-reformable, and 2) the net detriment from killing the subject is lower than the net detriment of letting the subject live.

Alternatives to death penalty were A) let them loose, and allow them to continue inflicting social harm, or B) segregate them from society so they can't continue inflicting harm on society.

After working with option B in my head for awhile, I started to contemplate the prison system as being treated like a segregated community from the citizen community. What are the rights and responsibilities of the citizenry towards prisoners in a case like that? Granted it's kind of how it is today, but what I was thinking was a little different. What I was thinking was that there was a large plot of land that was cordoned off from society, where prisoners could go and build their own society, with it's own economy and so on. Almost like a foreign nation. That way, being a criminal means 'deportation' to the prisoner nation, instead of to a resource-intensive prison. It's less resource-intensive, because the core expense of the prison system at that point would be, effectively, border patrol, as having guards go through the prison nation would be completely useless.

Because the prison nation would have it's own economy and it's own citizenry, it would have it's own GDP, methods of production, and trade, including trade with the regular citizenry. Effectively international trade. Now, some things would be just stupid to trade for, like weaponry. This is a nation of criminals, and it's not exactly smart to give criminals weapons. However, if they're producing common goods and similar stuff, there's not much of a problem in trade there. The prison nation would have it's own laws and government and would (with trade support) be functionally a nation. Immigration would be irrelevant, as the point is to segregate from the main population.

Then I started to think about what the equivalent of reform programs would be in this system, and that's where I started to get more flexible on the idea of immigration. Organizations could exist in the prisoner nation that train, mold and rehabilitate prisoners back into mainstream society. Because there's savings in the reduced cost of enforcement (now just border control), the remaining funds can be put on these kinds of social programs, providing an opportunity to migrate prisoners back to society. With an appropriately rigorous curriculum, it could work very effectively.

An even more interesting thing is that the prisoner nation could have it's own prisoner nation, so the 'dregs of the dregs' could be similarly segregated. It's infinitely regressible too.

Just a crazy thought while I was driving home from Reno today (-:

- Jason

Attempt at a Haiku

Bird stand atop ledge, staring into sunset.
Breeze flows across my shoulders, through my hair and across my skin.
Bird look at me, and say 'Coocoo, coocoo.'
The warm air from the sun rolls across the valley, uplifting the land.
Bird looks at me, staring intently.
I feel the breeze, flowing across me, lifting me.
Bird looks at me, and say 'Coocoo, coocoo.'
Suddenly, I find myself embraced in the breeze, soaring in the sky.
Bird looks at me.
I have wings and I fly.
In the distance I hear a faint 'Coocoo.'
But I fly on.

- Jason

Freedom from Desires?

For the first time, I can see my path without a relationship. It's a strange feeling having a family not being the end goal that I'm striving towards. In many ways it's more practical, but more relevantly: i'm content with it.

Up to now my life has been lived based around the idea that I'm striving towards building a family. Now, though my direction is graduate school and a research career, I wouldn't say that I have control over my life. I had the good pleasure to grab myself a copy of Mythos III, the latest Joseph Campbell documentary talking about the construction of the western myth. To my shock and awe the Arthurian legends, and specifically my favorite character, Percival, play center stage. In much the same way that Percival let his horse guide him on the path, so to am I letting my path be laid by the nature before me.

Will I change the world? Who knows, does it matter? Yeah, probably. Do I need to do it? No, not really.

I do know that 20 years from now I will have a life, and it will be a good life. What it will be I have no idea, but I will have it.

- Jason

Moral Relativity

I have to wonder about morality, especially in the untouchable realm of children. I was watching Showtime's Shameless, and in the show there's this 13 y/o Mormon polygamist gal who gets, I presume here, taken by the state from a Mormon 'cult community', something akin to the stereotypical portrait of Mormon polygamy, and placed with a couple on the series. Of course being raised in that kind of environment, the norms are quite different for women, and it's a show meant to shock and awe, so naturally they have that character offering to do chores instead of to just goof off and play like we, the audience, would expect a 13 year old to do. And of course they amp up the shock value when we learn she has a child.

My mind, being the hyper-analytical that it is, went another route than the show's asking it to go. The reaction that the show expects from the audience, and is mirrored by the characters, is that of latent disgust with her upbringing and pity that she's been influenced in such a way to normalize such things. Yet let's think about it here for a moment. How different is that kind of judgement than European explorers charting African villages, finding out the natives eat bugs as a meal, and assuming they're malnourished? The scientific evidence is against it, yet the label remained for a long time.

Now, the counter-argument to this comparison is that there are scientific studies that show what kind of impact that kind of family environment has on children, and how they don't grow up into well-adjusted adults. My counter to that: By well-adjusted, it's meant well-adjusted to 'this' society.

Stew on that for a bit.

What I came up with was this: There's an inherent bias in evaluating the impacts of any method used in a modern society, because we're in the society we're evaluating, therefore we're going to look at 'good' and 'bad' in this society based on the pre-existing lens that the society has.

A colleague has a wonderful footer on her e-mail that helps example my next point: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." (Jiddu Krishnamurti) Why are we assuming our way is the best way, and why are we using that to reinforce behaviors and actions that we, as members of the society, already oppose as harmful. Movements like Occupy wouldn't exist if this wasn't the case to at least some degree.

Now, does that make these child-bride Mormon polygamy communes any better? Probably not, but I'm not in them so I can't gauge if their society is 'sick' or not, I can only gauge ours. And this starts to get to my point: If I can't judge your culture because I'm not living in it, and you can't judge mine because you're not living in it, then to what standard are our cultures being held? There's many answers to this, varying from religious, to scientific, to metaphysical, to simple faith, to a refusal to believe, and so on. Again, it's a matter of consistency, as there isn't a universally agreed upon standard for which to cross-culturally judge.

Here's the scary part: Without that cross-cultural standard from which to judge, this breaks analysis down into simple factoids. There's no longer any pro/con list, no capacity for asking 'is this good or bad.' It's just raw information, without value. And by value I mean that in both senses, value in the sense that there's no value-judgement being made, and value in the sense that it lacks a metaphorical 'this is valuable' component. I would argue that they are one in the same, but that's a rant for another day.

So, returning to Shameless, if there's no universal standard to judge different cultures, then how can anyone legitimately judge the environment that anyone is raised in, be it a child we raise in our culture, or one raised in a child-bride Mormon polygamist culture? Well, I think there actually can be something of a guiding path on this, and I'm going to pull out everyone's favorite naturalist: Charles Darwin. Yes, I'm going to make an evolutionary argument in defense of Mormon child-bride communes, oh the irony!

Consider that in any evolutionary system, all creatures/beings/organisms will develop a homeostasis that's adapted to their function and their environment. Darwin examples this on a genetic level, but you see this on a more immediate level too. Human brain pliability is quite extraordinary. How else do people adapt to changing circumstances? Regardless, ignore the minor tangent there for a moment. The point I'm getting to is this: In a culture that supports women being homemakers and child-bearers starting from an early age, the function of women in that society will require the normalization of those functions. Those functions are adapted specifically for the roles within that society.


Simply put, they're doing exactly what they're adapting to do in that environment: survive. It's no different than what happened to the Native Americans after colonization. They adapted to our ways and our methods.

Now, here's the piece that most civil revolutionaries will have issue with: If we take Darwin's evolutionary concepts a bit further, we must include the effects of mutation. Remember, that the key to evolution is both variation and selection. The process doesn't work without both. Within cultures there will be cultural variation, and a whole hell of a lot of it (hence why culture evolves faster than genes).

Now, we, being outside of a Mormon child-bride community, would 'love' to interject our culture into theirs. We see it as too much variation for us to handle. We forget that every community has both variation and selection, not just selection, including Mormon child-bride ones. Who's to say that there's not variation within that community that won't change it over time, more organically, and with less displacement?

There's two arguments I can make from this, so I'll start with the easy one: What I'm advocating for here is akin to Star Trek's prime directive: Do not interfere in the development of other cultures. I sense the logic behind that was covered here already, but this gets to the displacement I was talking about. What;'s wrong with jarring shifts like that? Why is it 'bad' or 'harmful' to 'tame the savages,' as it were? Well, the kind of shock that interjecting modern values into a culture that doesn't share them is akin to the GDP doing a hula-dance of vertical motion. Ok, yes there's progress, but there's also a lot of harm that's done during the transition.

Yes, I realized I also just made a free-market argument for not 'blowing up' Mormon child-bride communities. More irony.

So, back to my main thesis for a moment here, and I'll try to wrap this up as it's almost midnight and I'm tired. We, as individuals, are agents within our culture(s), but not within other's culture(s). I cannot have agency in Mormon child-bride land, and they cannot have agency within my mainstream american values land. However, that being said, both the Mormon child-bride polygamist husband and I can have common culture(s). Do you think it's impossible to find a Mormon child-bride polygamist who's not also a fan of Star Trek? If I do, there's cultural overlap, and there's a place that both myself and this example Mormon child-bride polygamist have in common.

Ok, here's the big one, be ready for it:

It is my assertion that the most constructive, positive, growth-oriented, and less harmful shifts in any population are done in realms that both the shifter and shiftee have personal agency.


I may never get through to the Mormon child-bride polygamist in matters of broader cultural issues, but if they're a trekkie, you can damn well be sure that I can get through to them, and have a very productive cultural exchange, in that setting.

Yes, I did use a 'reductium ad absurdum' fallacy with my entire argument, however I would posit that this applies across ALL cultural divides, be they ethnic, gender, socio-economic, geographical, technological, age, job industry, etc etc.

Make of it what you will, but I think it's an important concept, and one I'm going to stew on a great deal.

- Jason

Normative Patterns

It's an interesting trend that all my conversations about my success (or lack thereof) with women end up being discussions about my personal philosophy and ethics. They're so intertwined and dependent on each other. The values I have in relationships are the primary foundation of my moral reasoning. I have my illogical quirks - I'm terribly paranoid about breaching a person's physical comfort zone - but I consider my moral reasoning to be a pivotal part of my ability to behave responsibly, with an understanding of the full and complete ramifications of my actions.

Modern relationships are built on deception, misdirection, illusion and delusion, To build something different, it must be formed differently. An honest and sincere relationship must do away with all of the illusory components of modern relationships, and instead be built on principles such as honesty, openness, trust and understanding. Yet, the irony of this is that in pursuing relationships in that fashion I am setting myself up for failure. The common woman (or perhaps all women, I've yet to meet one who deviates from this pattern) will expect modern relationship behaviors. When she doesn't get them, she will assume the relationship is invalid on some level and dispose of it. Since I will never start a relationship on lies, I will continually be considered to be invalid as relationship material.

Not a pleasant thought.

It's frustrating because so many women profess to be beyond modern gender roles, yet when it comes to some basic interactions and expectations, it's a lie. Where are the courageous women? Those that bold to be who they are, outside of the ever-present gaze of society? Those who have the courage to question what society teaches them? Or has societies lessons become so ingrained that they've confused societies mandates with their own feelings? In that eventuality, are women so blind that they can't distinguish between an authentic feeling and a social meme?

Sad, but I believe that the latter is the truth. Society has effectively brainwashed women into following an internal feeling that society itself has created. It's like the desire for independence, it's an artificially and socially imbued desire that people have acclimated to so strongly that the need to be independent has been normalized into the human condition, when instead it's a social meme.

*sigh* where are the women who actually bother to look beyond the trivialities of what society imposes on them, and who dare to relate beyond social conditioning? This goes beyond the 80/20 rule, where 20% of a population is actually free thinkers. Then again Milgram's experiments were about much more radical deviations from the social norms, and not tests asking people to deviate frm the social norms. How must the experiment, and the results change if that criteria is changed?

*sigh*

Ultimately it makes for one lonely Jason.