Allegedly hidden motives -- and metaphysics

I’m not close enough to tell if American religiosity is hysteria. What I do notice is compared to British crime dramas, Americans tend to make out that there is such a thing as real, palpable, evil — and not just psychological states.

This assumption, that people are, at their baseline, nasty, appears to me to thread itself throughout American culture. For instance, see my conversation with cliff arroyo yesterday, where I was trying to get across the idea that men who are anxious to read women as highly emotional creatures will end up mis-reading any failure to confess all one’s emotions as signalling intent to willfully manipulate the other. Cliff constantly misread everything I’d written as if I were saying: “Yes, women are deceptive or manipulative.”

This is the effect of the weight of religiosity on America. It has entered even secular life, to the point that neutrality is hard to understand. I’m not saying America is the only country with this problem. Australia also has it to an alarming degree, in its embrace of identity politics, which does not allow anyone to take a neutral position without seeming to harbor some evil intent or manipulative orientation.

A truly secular view would dispense with the notion that we all have knowable but hidden motivations. Communication becomes hindered to the extreme when “demographic” or “identity” suffices to clue others in one “hidden motivations”, which do not actually exist, but are ascribed to one.


2.  About the commonly held view that women are emotional and manipulative: this whole assumption makes communication seem to be redundant. Of course, the key word here is “seem”. If women externalize their minds, via the medium of emotion, one always knows what they are feeling. That would be logical.  Each woman would be an open book. First, she’s crying, now she’s acting hysterical in another way, now she’s belly-aching about the other thing she belly-aches about. No need to ask her what she’s thinking, as it’s written all over her. That is, unless she is deliberately withholding something in a way that isn’t true to her emotional nature. Well, it’s true to her manipulative nature, but not to her emotional nature — that is, true to her evil side, but not to her good side, which is where she allows herself to be read like a book. She’s holding something back, probably acting “like a man”, and this necessitates that one attempt communication with her for the first time.

But communication on neutral premises is impossible for a religious mind-set. To such a mind, one must find out what has corrupted her true female emotionalism, giving the impression that she’s holding something back.  One must find the hidden, nefarious motivation she is harboring.

This search for something evil is called “communication” by those tainted with religiosity.