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 the notion neutrality is hard to understand and even harder to achieve. 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 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 redundant. Of course, the key word here is “seem”. If women are viewed as creatures who compulsively externalize aspects of their minds via the medium of emotion, another will be able to know what they are feeling. So much can be said on the basis of logic. 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 anyway. That is, unless she is deliberately withholding something in a way that isn’t true to her allegedly essentially emotional identity. Well, then we would imagine some deception taking place, that by not expressing emotion openly she is expressing deviousness. She is not allowing herself to be read like a book. Not any book, but a very, very simple book that a child of three ought to be able to understand. By seeming to hold back something that would be understood by a child of three, she is behaving “like a man”. Such obduracy on her part could even have the catastrophic effect of necessitating adult communication for the first time.
All the same this will never happen, since communication on neutral premises is impossible for a religious mind-set. Instead of adult communication there has to be a feverish attempt to find out what devilish force has corrupted her allegedly true nature to give the impression she’s holding something back. It must be an insidious, nonhuman deviousness that makes her act not emotionally at all but "like a man".
The desire to discover such hidden "evil" is mistakenly called “communication” by those of religious minds.
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 the notion neutrality is hard to understand and even harder to achieve. 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 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 redundant. Of course, the key word here is “seem”. If women are viewed as creatures who compulsively externalize aspects of their minds via the medium of emotion, another will be able to know what they are feeling. So much can be said on the basis of logic. 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 anyway. That is, unless she is deliberately withholding something in a way that isn’t true to her allegedly essentially emotional identity. Well, then we would imagine some deception taking place, that by not expressing emotion openly she is expressing deviousness. She is not allowing herself to be read like a book. Not any book, but a very, very simple book that a child of three ought to be able to understand. By seeming to hold back something that would be understood by a child of three, she is behaving “like a man”. Such obduracy on her part could even have the catastrophic effect of necessitating adult communication for the first time.
All the same this will never happen, since communication on neutral premises is impossible for a religious mind-set. Instead of adult communication there has to be a feverish attempt to find out what devilish force has corrupted her allegedly true nature to give the impression she’s holding something back. It must be an insidious, nonhuman deviousness that makes her act not emotionally at all but "like a man".
The desire to discover such hidden "evil" is mistakenly called “communication” by those of religious minds.
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