A government built on empathy will ultimately degrade those it seeks to help

There is a guy on YouTube called “Thomas” who I have been having an email exchange with, I have been posting my replies on this blog as I feel it is important to get other people’s take on the matter and to also display a reasonable person who debates well. You can see my previous responses in the posts “I get email: 'Real Injustices'???” and “Our governments stifle the freedom of men in order to infantilise them”. I present his newest email minus introductory pleasantries and signature.

YOU SAY THAT YOU WANT THE FREEDOM TO MAKE YOUR OWN CHOICES AND MISTAKES AND THAT THE OPPRESSIVE SPECTRE OF GOVERNMENT SHOULD STAY OFF OF OUR BACKS.

Unless you are completely anarchist, you will agree with me that the implementation of laws that take away for instance peoples freedom to commit murder is very necessary, because the freedom to do such things severely stifles the freedom of people other than the choice making individual itself. In this way, a human beings right to choose to do whatever it pleases ends precisely the moment when its choice of action does damage to or stifles the freedom of other individuals, and most of us (including you and I) are very appreciative of a government intervening on our behalf to stop other people from compromising our freedom by stealing from us, killing us, hurting us, cheating us and so on and so forth.

Unfortunately the most privileged group in our society, i.e. white western males often seem to believe that government should only intervene to the extent that western white male (dare I say patriarchal?) freedoms and liberties will be protected from oppression, and that the oppression and hardships unique to a single given minority should continually be allowed to be practiced by said privileged group of white males.

We ban murder in our society because we consider a murderers freedom to kill to be worth a lot less than the freedom and security of potential murder victims. By this logic society should also consider male sexual dominance to be worth a lot less than the freedom and security of women and children, especially in the face of all the evidence of both the harmful effect of pornography on the human mind and on the enormous human costs of the sex industry itself. It does not, however, because of the utter lack of empathy of the privileged ruling class in society; a class whose supremacist ideals of individualism and freedom do not apply to the suppressed, but amounts only to the freedom of the oppressor to continue oppressing.

ALSO, IN COMMENTING ON MY ARGUMENT REGARDING THE COMPLEXITY OF HUMAN CHOICES, YOU SAY THAT GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT ANALYSE THE NUANCES IN OUR DECISIONS AND IN THE LIGHT THEREOF DECIDE WHAT IT THINKS ARE ACCEPTABLE WAYS TO LEAD A LIFE BECAUSE THIS STIFLE[S] THE FREEDOM OF MEN [AND] INFANTILISE[S] THEM.

It would seem that you did not read my last letter that closely, so let me answer the above-mentioned (again) with a true story this time. Consider 19-year-old Maksuda. She is a single mother and has been a factory worker since she was 11. She became pregnant with her daughter at age 17 and found herself unable to keep up with the rapid production of goods. Her manager noticed her slow down and said that he didn't want to hear her excuses about being pregnant. She tried to respond but according to her, "He violently kicked [her], hard, in the stomach and [she] fell to the floor. [She] fainted." She worked until she was eight and a half months pregnant and tried to ask for a legal maternity leave but was told that there was no law for this in the factory.

I wont tell you how this story ends, but rest assured that if you as a government official tell Maksuda that you will not analyse the nuances in her decision to be in the factory because you do not wish to infantilise her, the expression on her face will not be one of extreme gratitude. But then again, you did say the freedom of men; not the freedom of women and children my bad.

Moreover I do not think that your very individualist statement that [i]f people want to degrade themselves then let them do it would not look overly humane in the context of Maksuda and neither does it in the case of the victims of the sex industry.

FINALLY, YOU SAY THAT WANTING TO BAN THE DISTRIBUTION OF PORNOGRAPHY AND NOT PORNOGRAPHY IN SPIRIT IS IMBECILIC.

This is, in fact, NOT what I insinuated. If you would care to look at my letter again, it says that I am NOT AT ALL [] proposing that we make it illegal for women to [] participate in pornography. If this was not clear I apologise and I hope that you will let me clarify this point. What I mean to say is this:

If a woman should really (really?) want to engage in double anal and vaginal penetration while simultaneously being called a worthless little slut reduced to the mere tightness of her genital openings in the privacy of her own home in front of her brand new SONY handycam, then that decision is of course entirely up to her. What goes on in a private bedroom between consenting adults is of no business of the state - period. In the same way, if you want to smoke a fat cigar in the privacy of your own home, not caring about the empirical evidence in front of you, telling you that it could kill you in the long run, then that is also entirely your decision. But

The moment you enter a multi million dollar industry in which you get paid (as opposed to doing it for free) to do physically and emotionally devastating things to yourself in public (as opposed to doing them in private) for the amusement of white western males in order to support your children or a drug abuse (as opposed to doing it out of personal inclination), then considered government intervention is most certainly justified as it is was when the government decided that you cannot blow smoke from your fat cigar in my face in public and endanger my health or stifle my freedom from getting lung cancer.

To be honest, Mark, I do not think that our disagreements are as much about a clash of fundamental world views as much as they are about our very differing views on privilege and empathy.

Our differences are indeed about empathy. I feel that making political decisions on empathy is a fools path. Empathy is not normally universal, that is just not what humans do right? When we empathise then we do so towards some perceived oppressed group, and that leads to misery.

Your writing drips with a kind of Marxist demagoguery. When you talk about “white males” at every step then I think it’s not too much of a leap to imagine your mentality causing real oppressions for that group, and then what? Re calibrate, recast them and then they become the new victims? This kind of thinking has caused more human misery than is possible to calculate.

Basing systems on empathy and emotion is the worst thing us humans can do. It is a well know phrase that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. I don’t doubt that you are a good man but your mentality causes harm. Let’s have an example:

There was a luxury tax passed a while ago on yachts. The idea was basically eat (ahem sorry, tax) the rich. What happened? The rich stopped buying yachts, they would buy other things or work around the loopholes to avoid the tax. Sales of yachts dropped. Who suffered? The not so rich people who worked in shipping yards and providing services that related to yachts and yacht owning. So the emotion of punishing those deemed to be the haves, the emotion-based laws punished the types of people they are supposed to empathise with.

The foundational flaw of your argument is where you compare direct action which cannot be misunderstood like committing violence against another person, with an ethereal threat for which you need to make a winding justification for its danger.

People have churches and groups and can make their own mind up on what is bad for them, when you make the government enforce it on all people then this is tyranny. For everything there is a line, a pat on the back is hitting and some nebulous threat according to you is not the same as a tangible threat.

Also, ever considered that you might be wrong? I feel that rape has decreased due, in part, to the proliferation of porn (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDshCXHBjQc). Think beyond your specific causes for a moment. The average life expectancy of a homosexual male is decreased about 14 years by their actions, compare this to the loss of life through cigarettes (7 years the last I heard). Now, in a system you want where policy is made on what people emote about being good for society. What is to stop a bigoted anti-gay group from oppressing homosexuals? Nothing, if you can make a strangled case for it then it might pass. In my system nothing like this can pass because of the basic freedoms that I would grant to all.

Posted under: Gender Issues, Politics, Rape, Pornography
Posted on: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 7:44 PM
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Comments

  1. Posted by: Mith on 4/2/2009 6:01 AM
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    I recall comming across this sort of argument before.

    The fact is, that there is no evidence to suggest that males or females suffer ill effects from pornography in general. Yes, there are a few that get the wrong idea from what they see, but this in general, no worse than what we see without it. Masturbation shows positive side effects on both males and females; it relieves a great deal of stress and sexual tension.

    The problem here is that people are going with the laws of sexuality as we see in Christianity without really understanding them. Sexually repressing yourself was more nessicary, due in part to the fact that there was no form of controlling birth. Therefore, you could find your entire life thrown into chaos by not controlling you sexual desires. It was also common in those times, for an entire family to ride upon who their offspring married. Therefore, a woman who had, shall we say, disgraced herself, would not be touched because the man would not want to raise a child that is not his.

    Now, in the case of Jesus and his mentioning of not looking upon a woman with lust, many people take this to mean that you are not to desire a woman in any way, or a woman to desire a man. However, this is contrary to what is in fact, reality. If a man does not sexually desire a woman at some level, then the relationship will not work. It is contrary to human nature that God would view sexual desire so wrongly that He would outlaw it, yet make it such a massive part of our lives.

    What then, would Jesus have meant? Clearly, if God wants us to spread across the world, He wants us to reproduce and to encourage that, we would have a sex drive. Therefore, in order for us to find a mate that we find acceptable, we would need to admire certain traits that we would want to add to our bloodline, while also finding enough common ground so that our genes arent't altered too greatly. Any reasonable person can clearly see where this is heading. Sexual attraction is just something that we need. Without it, God's entire plan just falls apart. Now, being made in the image of God, I would likely have to be able to think along the same lines on a basic level. Therefore, I would suggest that God cannot logically be so hard against sexual attraction if it is something that every human experiences, save for freak occurances.

    Therefore, let's look at what Jesus said again. He said not to lust for a woman. Lust is described as great sexual desire, and taking that into what he said, we can probably suggest that Jesus was refering to the idea of only wanting sex. He wasn't so much as saying that sexual desire was bad, but that only caring about sex and not the person, their feelings, their desires, and who they are is not something that he wanted us to do, which makes sense given Jesus's emphasis upon compassion. It is so unlike the figure that is painted to us by the authors of the gospels that Jesus or God would specifically do something that causes so much pain and anguish and is in fact, bad for us, when they love us.

    Therefore, there is very little support for sexual desire being a sin. It is one of the very basic needs in order for romantic love to flourish and create offspring, which supports God's plan. I believe that what Jesus was supporting the idea of self control. To not simply want a woman or a man simply for the sake of your own selfish pleasure, but rather starting a family and getting to know them. That is what I believe God would want. But in that same vein, if you choke something such as sexual desire to the point that you cannot release it, you have the results of people being angry and miserable.

    The second issue here, of which I believe many people are also getting to, is masturbation. Jesus clearly shows a displeasure for self sexual gratification simply for the sake of sexual gratification here. Here, it seems to be straightforward as to what Jesus was saying.

    However, let us fall back and take a look at the passages. Matthew was written a great deal of time after Jesus's death. It is in fact, younger than Mark. Turning to Mark, we see no indication that looking upon a woman with lust or even masturbation itself is wrong. We see the same goes for Luke, which was written after Matthew. John doesn't even address the issue at all, but this is because John is not a synoptic gospel like the other three.

    Why then, would Matthew say this, but other two, who address the issue and came before and after Matthew do not? The reason might be in the fact that the author of Matthew sort of 'played up' Jesus's cultural tie to Jeudisim. The author takes pains to keep presenting Jesus as the Jewish Messaih. Remember, that Christianity wasn't a new religion to the first converts, but rather the next step in the Jewish religion, such as was the case with Moses and King David. Thus, the writer is seen to be pushing forward a great deal of resepected Jewish beliefs, which is why we see such a reinforcement of such a belief of masturbation and sexual desire to be wrong. It might also be worth mentioning that the context of the quote is in a discussion or lecture about marriage, divorce, and adultery. Therefore, from that perspective, the discussion may not pertain to a single male/female seeking a mate, but rather one who already is tied to another, which in context, would make sense as to what Jesus was saying. A man who looks at another woman would be disrespecting the vow that he took, as would a woman. A man who masturbated, especially excessively, would also prove to probably be less satisifed with his marriage and thus love his wife less and perhaps be more likely to cheat.

    There is no actual answer I say sadly, since I do not know for sure, nor could anyone with the current evidence we have now. However, I believe it is rather dangerous to simply ban something such as sexual release when we have evidence that supports that Jesus may not have said it to begin with and even if he did, the discussion is in a different context and may not have been intended as a blank statement on the issue of sexuality itself.

    Just to sort of wrap this up however, it should be noted that banning something like this can make it worse. Banning drugs gave rise to groups who will go under the nose of the law to make a profit off of those who want it, especially with addicitive drugs. If the ban were to be lifted from more of the harmless drugs you see today, you would likely see a massive blow to the crime industry that relies upon the substances being illeagle in order to make a profit. In other words, our banning of the substances have given criminal orginizations the opportunity to victimize us. The same goes with porn, although I doubt that such extremes will be reached with this particlular market. However, it is worth noting that if prostitution was legalized, we would have less prostitutes being beaten and raped in their particular career choice and actually give them a decent life with an actual fair cut of the profit made from their services, rather than pimps treating them like trash and using them for a profit.

    Hope that wasn't too much of a tangent...

  2. Posted by: ArgusEyes on 4/2/2009 10:12 AM
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    Not at all, thanks for writing so much there.

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