>From: Cynthia <cyn386@flash.net>>Subject: Re: Nanotech Restrictions (was:
>RE: Transparency Debate)
>Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2000 05:47:39 -0700
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: phil osborn <philosborn@hotmail.com>
>To: <extropians@extropy.com>
>
> > On the other hand, criminal behavior does have an additional unique
>cost,
> > which is that it cuts one off from normal uncensored interaction with
>other
> > conscious beings. One has to constantly monitor the image one is
> > projecting, to make it correspond to something different from the real
>you,
> > or face the consequences of being found out as a criminal. This has a
> > disasterous effect upon certain fundamental psychological and
> > psychoepistemological needs. After all, what do people put more effort
>into
> > typically than their love lives? For what are they more willing to take
> > major risks - or even sacrifice their own lives - than for their loved
>ones?
>
>This is what keeps middle class people so effectively in line. Criminal
>type
>actions will not only alienate their wives and girlfriends. But also their
>family, neighbors, and friends. But this is not the case in the 'hood'.
>Bad
>guys in the hood have mothers who shriek "My baby! My baby!" when the
>court
>punishes them form multiple murders. And the worst gang banger always
>seems to
>have at least one girl friend!
>
But that's not exactly the same thing.... Gangs, whether your local barrio
punks or the BATF or the Catholic Church, get you to commit a crime as the
price of admission, and then sell you a phony philosophy to justify or - in
the case of Christianity, especially - offer absolution. The gang tells the
member that his or her social/ethnic/economic status made him who he is, and
everything bad in his life is due to other bad people - who he has a perfect
right to kill or rip off.
The philosophy - whether church, gang or state - is always transparently
false to any intelligent truth seeker, but they usually get them young and
stupid. Then you're locked into justifying yourself. Which means you
commit more crimes to prove to yourself it's really ok. And if you try to
leave, you find yourself sucked back in because you can't get real
visibility outside, as you can't show people who you really are - except
back in the gang.
The gang, like most marriages - which are usually based on mutually-
agreed-upon lieing - offers a pseudo-visibility which never fully satisfies,
but is all the gang member can morally afford - which is the bottom-line
tragedy. When a person is denied the satisfaction of real crucial needs,
then he or she can be tempted into accepting phony substitutes, essentially
hypnotising himself into going along with the fantasy. The problem is that
the need is never really satisfied by the phony substitute, and thus you can
never get enough of it - although people will not stop trying.
See Branden's "The Psychology of Self-Esteem." Or, the works of Wilhelm
Reich or the many prominent Neo-Reichien psychotherapists, such as Arthur
Janov.
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