I really appreciate your exploring this topic with me. Feel free to continue the conversation by private email.
I have not so far experienced significant difficulty winning women I go on to continue to respect. What most rapidly decreases my respect for a woman (and the same thing goes for all my friends and indeed, if I am not forgetting something, all human being or at least all human being who were raised in the Western tradition) is habitual lying, particularly, lying in order to obtain a personal benefit (fraud in other words) or other violations of basic ethical standards around which there has been widespread agreement (at least in the West) for thousands of years.
The girlfriend of 5 years who just dumped me? More probably than not, she never lied to me. But part of the reason for that is that I would regularly proclaim to her that I have never lied to her in the slightest matter (which was and remains true) and that I expect the same behavior from her to me. If she did lie to me, almost certainly it was in a series of “misdemeanors” or petty matters. I did not observe her to lie to any of her friends as far as I can recall. If she did, it was something small. It is extremely _un_likely that she would ever do serious harm to any of her many friends through fraud or other clear violations of the basic ethical standards. My first girlfriend (of 3 years) I am almost sure never lied to me or cheated me in any way. The government and major corporations? Different story. But never anything “actionable” (anything that could result in her getting sued or prosecuted.) Before my first girlfriend, I considered defrauding the government or a major corporation just as bad as defrauding a person. So that first relationship definitely got me to become more tolerant of that if it is minor. I still think people should treat fraud of major corporations as just as bad as fraud on a individual, but my first relationship got me to face the fact that most people—and most “good” (ethical, worth befriending) people do not see it the way I see it.
This brings up the issue of self-deception because some people are so stained by self-deception that they cannot even tell that they are committing a sophisticated fraud, because their tendency towards self-deception (and to “willful ignorance) is so strong that are just incapable of, e.g., seeing a conflict from the other person’s point of view. By “a conflict” I mean a negative-sum game where the winner is determined by which player is successful in imposing on the people involved (the two players and any third parties like for example the judge in a court case) an interpretation or frame of the facts favorable to themselves. I used to be very intolerant of self-deception or willful ignorance, but lately I have noticed a softening and I intend to continue to soften my intolerance of it because the reason for my historical intolerance might easily have been the fact that I was severely burned by self-deception and willful ignorance in my childhood. So was my latest girlfriend, which is probably one of the things that made us compatible. (“Both our mothers were ostriches,” is how she put it.) But the point that I want the reader to take away is that the experience of being in a relation for 5 years with a women who shared my aversion to self-deception is that I have come to think that I could tolerate more self-deception in my next girlfriend. Well, more precisely, tolerate it but watch what happens, and if I get burned or I see anyone else get burned by the self-deception, then go back to my old level of intolerance. That is, my requirements or “compatibility expectations” have loosened a bit, which I consider a very valuable thing because it increase the set of people I can have deep personal relationships with.
I could go on for a long time, but enough! To summarize, what I need to respect a girlfriend is basically that she adheres to the same standards I expect of anyone else I interact with—except that her adherence and the consistency of that adherence is more important to me that the adherence of, say, someone with whom I am involved in a commercial transaction.
Let’s talk about lying! It is a topic very much like dating, but without dividing people.
You talk about thousands of years of consensus on lying, yet you also talk about learning that most people, even most “good people” disagree with you. I suspect I’m just not parsing something here, but the need for careful parsing seems like a bad sign.
I’d like to hear more about self-deception about lying. I think most people don’t notice most lying that they do, having put it in some other bucket. But that looks to me to be a very different belief than your belief about self-deception. I’d think that only people who want to express righteous indignation about lying (like you) would need to self-deceive.
I really appreciate your exploring this topic with me. Feel free to continue the conversation by private email.
I have not so far experienced significant difficulty winning women I go on to continue to respect. What most rapidly decreases my respect for a woman (and the same thing goes for all my friends and indeed, if I am not forgetting something, all human being or at least all human being who were raised in the Western tradition) is habitual lying, particularly, lying in order to obtain a personal benefit (fraud in other words) or other violations of basic ethical standards around which there has been widespread agreement (at least in the West) for thousands of years.
The girlfriend of 5 years who just dumped me? More probably than not, she never lied to me. But part of the reason for that is that I would regularly proclaim to her that I have never lied to her in the slightest matter (which was and remains true) and that I expect the same behavior from her to me. If she did lie to me, almost certainly it was in a series of “misdemeanors” or petty matters. I did not observe her to lie to any of her friends as far as I can recall. If she did, it was something small. It is extremely _un_likely that she would ever do serious harm to any of her many friends through fraud or other clear violations of the basic ethical standards. My first girlfriend (of 3 years) I am almost sure never lied to me or cheated me in any way. The government and major corporations? Different story. But never anything “actionable” (anything that could result in her getting sued or prosecuted.) Before my first girlfriend, I considered defrauding the government or a major corporation just as bad as defrauding a person. So that first relationship definitely got me to become more tolerant of that if it is minor. I still think people should treat fraud of major corporations as just as bad as fraud on a individual, but my first relationship got me to face the fact that most people—and most “good” (ethical, worth befriending) people do not see it the way I see it.
This brings up the issue of self-deception because some people are so stained by self-deception that they cannot even tell that they are committing a sophisticated fraud, because their tendency towards self-deception (and to “willful ignorance) is so strong that are just incapable of, e.g., seeing a conflict from the other person’s point of view. By “a conflict” I mean a negative-sum game where the winner is determined by which player is successful in imposing on the people involved (the two players and any third parties like for example the judge in a court case) an interpretation or frame of the facts favorable to themselves. I used to be very intolerant of self-deception or willful ignorance, but lately I have noticed a softening and I intend to continue to soften my intolerance of it because the reason for my historical intolerance might easily have been the fact that I was severely burned by self-deception and willful ignorance in my childhood. So was my latest girlfriend, which is probably one of the things that made us compatible. (“Both our mothers were ostriches,” is how she put it.) But the point that I want the reader to take away is that the experience of being in a relation for 5 years with a women who shared my aversion to self-deception is that I have come to think that I could tolerate more self-deception in my next girlfriend. Well, more precisely, tolerate it but watch what happens, and if I get burned or I see anyone else get burned by the self-deception, then go back to my old level of intolerance. That is, my requirements or “compatibility expectations” have loosened a bit, which I consider a very valuable thing because it increase the set of people I can have deep personal relationships with.
I could go on for a long time, but enough! To summarize, what I need to respect a girlfriend is basically that she adheres to the same standards I expect of anyone else I interact with—except that her adherence and the consistency of that adherence is more important to me that the adherence of, say, someone with whom I am involved in a commercial transaction.
Let’s talk about lying! It is a topic very much like dating, but without dividing people.
You talk about thousands of years of consensus on lying, yet you also talk about learning that most people, even most “good people” disagree with you. I suspect I’m just not parsing something here, but the need for careful parsing seems like a bad sign.
I’d like to hear more about self-deception about lying. I think most people don’t notice most lying that they do, having put it in some other bucket. But that looks to me to be a very different belief than your belief about self-deception. I’d think that only people who want to express righteous indignation about lying (like you) would need to self-deceive.