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CrazyCats -> RE: Some rumanations on control and mind-fuckery (8/30/2011 10:39:16 AM)
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Ah... I see where you are coming from Hannah about adding to your statement. I needed to leave "and desiring to be conditioned" out of the rewriting of your statement to more accurately reflect your intent. Thank you for the clarification.
Without the added "and desiring to be conditioned" in the initial statement, the logic flow does need to be somewhat longer.
Basically to add the "and desiring to be conditioned" part to 1) I need to add two premises that are the foundation of statement 1) in the outlined logic.
And so, Draft Two:
"this [ability to completely subvert the will of another person] is not possible on a long term basis in the context of a d/s relationship unless the one being subverted is not of a sound mind."
1) Having a subvertable will and the desire to be conditioned = kink
1a) A person with a subvertable will who desires to be conditioned permanently = Kinky person
1b) A person without a subvertable will who desires to be conditioned permanently = Kinky (but frustrated) person
Corollary to 1) Being conditioned against one's desire = torture
Corollary 1a) A person with a subvertable will who does not desire to be conditioned, permanently or impermanently = torture victim
Corollary 1b) A person without a subvertable will who does not desire to be conditioned, permanently or impermanently = torture victim
2) Any kink can be viewed as the actions of a mentally unsound person by those who do not share that kink.
3) Viewing the kinks of another as actions or choices of a mentally unsound individual = value judgment of their kink.
Or are you saying that only a person without a subvertable will who desires to be conditioned permanently is a kinky person, while a person with a subvertable will who desires to be conditioned permanently is mentally ill? I suppose that could make a certain amount of sense... seeking out that first conditioning on one's own could be viewed as a little crazy by those who do not share that desire.
However, the mentally unstable are not the only ones with a demonstrably subvertable will. They are just the easiest to subvert. If one takes someone who has a healthy normative mind and completely takes the person out of his or her comfort zone and remove emotional support structures like family and friends, many people are left with little in the way of stopping conditioning just from fear alone. Just those two acts alone act as a subtle but powerful conditioner that even without the threat of violence can result in things like Stockholm's syndrome in kidnap victims.
Isolation is why most people feel a strong reluctance to move too far away from home. It leaves them vulnerable in more ways than just physically. It is also why abusers isolate their victim. Isolation is far more likely to be effective the younger a person is, since it takes time to develop emotional maturity, and some never manage it at all. Children are the most vulnerable to this sort of mental conditioning, since they are already highly dependent on caregivers and have not yet developed even basic independence.
Yes, the last two paragraphs have been about the bad side of conditioning! Isolation is one easy way to differentiate abusers and victimizers from those conditioning kinksters with ethics. Ethically speaking, it is very wrong to isolate someone that you care about from the loved ones.
I will not argue that there are some people who are mentally unstable in a way that would make them far more likely to be easily conditioned. Forms of mental instability, like an arrested childhood development, chemical imbalances, substance abuse, or physical trauma to the brain (Not a comprehensive list), should not be confused with simple lack of experience or emotional self-control when it comes to the more subtle forms of conditioning. Nor should they be confused with people who have a desire to be conditioned by someone they trust in a lifestyle and/or sexual manner who do not have an actual mental illness.
There are likely those individuals whose minds overdeveloped their resistance to conditioning. I do not believe that would not make them impossible to condition, otherwise learning would be impossible as well. One of the major components of conditioning is learning form repeated actions. Without the ability to learn from repeat actions, most of education would be nonexistent. (Just think about who you were taught English grammar! Rote memorization and constant repeated exposure.) Conditioning depends very heavily on hijacking the learning process of an individual to work. That is one of the appeals, conditioning training usually makes things simple again for the one being conditioned to build to more complex concepts and thought patterns.
As for the Inquisition point farther down from Hannah, I did not use that example because it is not valid. The Inquisition set up a devil's trap, a form of choice that forces a decision between two undesirable outcomes... also know as a rock and a hard place. In the Inquisition process the Church gave the choice of confessing to being a witch/heretic/non-catholic or be tortured and eventually burned alive. For the falsely accused, they had to either lie, which would send them to hell in their belief, or endure it, die, and go to heaven. For the heretics and non-catholics, that would mean repudiating their faith structure, which they had been conditioned to believe all their lives or had chosen to believe against popular opinion, which still presented the hell/live or heaven/die scenario. If they repudiated their beliefs, they believed they would go to hell when they died.
Religion is one of the more potent conditioning methods, because it gives the believer something that is more important to the believer than their own survival. What that something is depends upon the believer and the faith in question. Religion was actually why I used the Tibet/China incident. Their faith gave them the training necessary to overcome the mental conditioning of torture without the conflict that the Inquisition set up.
Adding to the strength of the "something" is that religious conditioning, or indoctrination, generally starts in childhood. At a young age, the brain is not formed enough to counter the opinions of others with opinions of it's own or to seek to understand opposing view points. Childhood is a unique time that forms very long lasting, if not permanent, impressions of reality in an individual's life. Yes, the formation of impressions of reality is the outcome of conditioning.
That early childhood conditioning may actually be why older converts are more fanatical as well. They made a choice to be swayed from a prior, likely deep set conviction, to another. That switch usually leads to the inability to question the new belief structure or tolerate any external dissent. Fanaticism could stem from the reasoning that questioning their new belief structure means questioning their choice to change from prior long held beliefs. It's a form of self conditioning.
To me, the military does do a form of subtle conditioning. The focus may have changed since I went through it back when it was still all patriotism and esprit de corps but that is likely because their effectiveness was diminishing. Integration of women into the armed services training may have had a pretty strong hand in that. I bet that if the armed services had gender separated training, the motivators would be different between the two groups. The armed services had to find common psychological ground to start conditioning both genders at once.
In my opinion, I agree that all of this conditioning is aimed at preparing for critical moments in order to save lives. To me this is no different from a martial artist who trains his reflexes extensively for a faster response time and a higher chance of winning a conflict.
Conditioning is a tool. Like any tool, it is not inherently good or bad, right or wrong, or a matter of ethics in and of itself. It is own an individual uses the tool that makes the individual ethical or unethical. Ethics are what separate teachers and life partners from idealist pedagogues and victimizers. Conditioning when used with a high ethical standard results in learning and personal growth. When conditioning is used negatively, it is a terrifying weapon of both subtle and outright destruction. conditioning can be taken to extremes in either direction, building up some of the smartest, most talented individuals in the world, or tearing down to the lowest and most pitiful forms of life.
With conditioning swaying a personality that ranges from teaching the abc's, through the middle ground of advertisements, to torturing for information, as well as the strong limiting influence of our genetics, it can be hard to ever actually exert one's own will, if it even exists. To be able to make a clear choice that did not have a predefined pattern learned at some point would be a fairly rare event. On the other hand, free will could be seen as making the choice to do something like change religions or answering the question "What do I want to do with my life?" Free will may also simply be the ability to self condition.
Yep... there is enough in that debate to keep people going for millennia!
Edit: A note about what constitutes a mental illness: Repeated preforming actions or thought patterns that are either beyond ones ability to control, or hampering one's ability to function as a part of society. Some of them can be trained out, and some require drugs to treat. Some mental illnesses are inborn, a dubious gift of genetics, while others are caused by things that happen over the course of an individual's lifetime. ~ Dr. Semantico
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