A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. – Saul Bellow
Anyone who has ever attempted to tell the truth about prostitution on websites or in person has encountered people who, while clearly not indoctrinated prohibitionists, are completely unwilling to challenge the status quo. They won’t read articles written by prostitutes and ignore statistics which contradict prohibitionist dogma, yet swallow whole any ridiculous claim or exaggerated statistic put forth by prohibitionists and “authorities”. A few years ago I went back-and-forth with a guy whose idea of justifying the persecution of prostitutes was to keep repeating “it’s illegal”; he fully admitted that laws can be wrong and that people had the right to fight bad ones, yet rejected every link I gave him as “pro-prostitution”. The issue was obviously too complicated for him to think about, so he was content to let “authorities” deal with it and didn’t want to be exposed to any information that might cause him to call their decisions into question. Depressingly, a new study described in Science Daily on November 21st demonstrates that people like him are in the majority:
The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed…and the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware, according to a paper published online in APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “These studies were designed to help understand the so-called ‘ignorance is bliss’ approach to social issues,” said author Steven Shepherd…”The findings can assist educators in addressing significant barriers to getting people involved and engaged in social issues.”
Through a series of five studies conducted in 2010 and 2011 with 511 adults in the United States and Canada, the researchers described “a chain reaction from ignorance about a subject to dependence on and trust in the government to deal with the issue.” In one study, participants who felt most affected by the economic recession avoided information challenging the government’s ability to manage the economy…[but] did not avoid positive information…researchers provided either a complex or simple description of the economy to a group of 58 Canadians…[those] who received the complex description indicated higher levels of perceived helplessness in getting through the economic downturn, more dependence on and trust in the government to manage the economy, and less desire to learn more about the issue. “This is despite the fact that, all else equal, one should have less trust in someone to effectively manage something that is more complex,” said co-author Aaron C. Kay…”Instead, people tend to respond by psychologically ‘outsourcing’ the issue to the government, which in turn causes them to trust and feel more dependent on the government. Ultimately, they avoid learning about the issue because that could shatter their faith in the government.”
…[In another study] 163 Americans…provided their opinion about the complexity of natural resource management and then read a statement declaring the United States has less than 40 years’ worth of oil supplies. Afterward, they answered questions to assess their reluctance to learn more…Another two studies [of 93 Canadian university students] found that participants who received complex information about energy sources trusted the government more than those who received simple information…The authors recommended further research to determine how people would react when faced with other important issues such as food safety, national security, health, social inequality, poverty and moral and ethical conflict, as well as under what conditions people tend to respond with increased rather than decreased engagement…
Simply put, the more complex the issue and the more helpless people feel about it, the less they want to know about it. The chief argument for decriminalization is based upon two very simple principles: that everyone, male or female, has the right to do as he wishes with his or her own body; and that people have the legal and moral right to make mutually-beneficial agreements for goods or services which are not themselves illegal (in other words, anything which is legal to do for free should be legal to do for pay). So I wonder if this isn’t the real reason academic prohibitionists such as Farley, Jeffreys et al try to complicate the issue by throwing in sophistry about “power imbalances”, “patriarchal systems” and PTSD; perhaps they consciously or unconsciously realize that if they can turn a simple issue of individual rights into a complicated, scary one (made even more scary by the addition of “pimp” bogeymen), most people will simply stick their heads into the sand and trust the government to deal with it.
One Year Ago Today
“O, Canada” discusses the claims of Canadian politicians that anti-prostitution laws are designed to protect whores from crime…except, of course, crimes committed against us by the police.
“anything which is legal to do for free is legal to do for pay”
How true! I hadn’t thought in terms like this. Epiphany for the day.
Regarding the rest of your discussion – freakonomics looked at opinionation amongst highly educated people and found a similar paradigm – that (in general) the more educated one is on a topic, the less able to think critically and objectively one is because the individual looks for data to support his or her beliefs and ignores the rest.
As a scientist, I’ve seen this innumerable times amongst ‘leading’ researchers who have spent years looking at a system from one perspective. Even when other ‘leading’ scientists posit alternate perspectives in the mechanistic action of a given pathway, often each continues to think they’re correct and the other’s wrong, when in fact the astute reviewer (who isn’t emotionally involved in the work and can still be objective) will see that reality lies somewhere in between. Both are right and both are wrong.
Why is it there are so few critically objective thinkers amongst us?
Perhaps the real problem that pervades both the ignorant and the educated is that few people can really think.
When Johannes Kepler finally obtained Tycho Brahe’s full data set and realized there was no way to reconcile that data with the notion of circular orbits, he junked the theory on which he had worked for over a decade and formulated the laws of planetary motion which still bear his name. Alas, Keplers are rare. 🙁
1) Critical objective thinking has too few immediate rewards for the individual to be strongly rewarded by natural selection, which makes it an accidental power of the brain, a side effect of other things the brain was evolved to do.
2) Whenever someone is in a position to profit from falsehood, that person is in a position to profit from stopping critical thinking, and is accordingly motivated to use their intelligence to create the best possible arguments to poison the rational faculties. And since there are always people in such a position, the anti-thinking poisons have been improved throughout human history and deliberately spread to every single child to render the critical faculties useless.
So, every time someone thinks critically, he’s overcoming millennia of refined anti-thinking propaganda with a brain that wasn’t evolved to critically think in the first place. The truly amazing thing is that anyone ever manages to do it.
Truly frightening, mainly because I can’t come up with any reason to think that you’re wrong about this.
Sometimes I wonder why we even bother. I mean, seriously – the same gimmicks and political tricks that worked for Caesar over 2,000 years ago are just as effective today when they’re repackaged. People still fall for them. I think it’s funny that we actually laugh at how naïve our ancestors were – when, if we just looked in the mirror – we’d see that we’re equally the fools.
In fact, maybe we’re MORE foolish today than they were? I mean, there was a time when you had great thinkers out there, like Locke, Montesquieu, Madison …
It really took us A LONG time to get to the principles of the American Revolution. Those guys were thinkers and understood that Democratic institutions can easily lead to tyranny if they aren’t checked so they went through a lot of ideas on how to create a government that would be difficult to pervert. I think (I know) they DID realize that people were inclined to me mentally lazy and complacent – and that traits like those could corrupt any institution no matter how sound it was built.
Been awhile since I read anything on the immediate period following the Revolution, but from what I remember, wasn’t it like one big orgy of liberty? People, free from the shackles of the King – just testing the limits of freedom. I know we were all taught the Articles of Confederation = BAD and the Constitution = GOOD … but there are times, a lot of times, when I wonder if that is really true.
Anyway, people who don’t THINK and who BLINDLY TRUST government are deserving of slavery – and they will get it.
Soooo, I guess my point in all this is that sometimes I think … “why bother”? People need to learn their own lessons and the mechanics of change happen ever so slowly anyway – certainly longer than I have life left in me. When I was working in a political job for the Navy, I got frustrated, and a very adept friend of mine told me … “Look, change in Washington, DC takes six months but only if everyone agrees with your idea – and that never happens. The rest of the time – it’s like planting a flower. You plant the seed, and every time you walk by the flower pot you water it – maybe one day you have a flower. Maybe someone else comes along and smashes your flower pot.”
Krulac wrote: “Been awhile since I read anything on the immediate period following the Revolution, but from what I remember, wasn’t it like one big orgy of liberty? People, free from the shackles of the King – just testing the limits of freedom.”
No, the period immediately following the American Revolution was not “one big orgy of liberty” for the millions of Americans who were slaves, or for the slight majority of Americans who were women, excluded from most forms of educational opportunity and employment opportunity, and denied the right to do many things men were allowed to do: vote, run for public office, perform jury duty, and get married without losing rights such as land ownership and making one’s own will, and many other rights.
When I say the period immediately following the revolution – I’m talking about 1783 to 1788 when the Constitution was ratified. We didn’t even have a MILLION slaves in the first census in 1790.
But … I’m not going to defend slavery and, I kind of think it’s a bit unfair to pick that one quirky issue to condemn the people who essentially advanced the cause of classic Liberalism farther than any group of humans had ever done before.
And … as far as women … I really don’t understand why you even bring that up in this point – how were they better off under the King?
If perfection is the standard for success – I can condemn any institution ever invented by humans – whether it was a man or woman who invented it. 🙂
Good point Krulac,
After all, slavery has been in existence for all of recorded history and probably before. That the US is especially deserving of condemnation for not abolishing it for another Four Score and Seven years is absurd on its face.
I had arguments in school with die-hard leftists who seemed to subscribe to the proposition that particular slavery – chattel slavery of blacks in the US – was horribly evil and disqualified America from any moral high ground, but that the ongoing universal slavery of the Soviet Union and Khmer Rouge were somehow exempt from that charge.
Call me crazy but I think that both are evil things. And that a nation that recognized the evil of particular slavery and repudiated it is morally superior to a nation that continued to indulge in and defend the practice as apologists for the Soviet Union did.
The 19th century saw the destruction of the slave trade for the first time in human history. Most of that was due to the efforts of the British Royal Navy but the impetus for that and for the eventual founding of the United States came out of the Scottish Enlightenment – the progenitors of the classical liberal school of thought.
Whenever the left attacks the American Founding without regard for context or comparison with contemporaneous cultures, I am left to ask, along with Jean-Francois Revel:
“Whence comes this fierce hatred of the intellectuals for the least barbaric societies of human history, and this rage to destroy the only civilizations to date that have emphatically conferred a dominant role on intelligence?”
Slavery ended when technology advanced enough that machines were significant labor-saving and wealth-generating investments. Slavery ended in England before America because England had the Industrial Revolution before we did.
Aristotle said that when looms could weave by themselves, slavery would end. The Jacquard automatic loom was in widespread use… in the North. The South still had an agriculture based economy.
And child labor ended because of technological progress too.
The Gauls had sophisticated farm tools that the Romans discarded because they had slavery.
On the one hand, if slavery wasn’t around, people would have been forced to innovate more but on the other hand, some inventions increased slavery — Eli Whitney’s cotton gin is credited with restoring slavery after a period of decline.
I can well believe that having a “labor-saving device” already to hand would suppress technical innovation. It’s only when slavery becomes more trouble than it’s worth that the moral opposition (which is always there) wins the argument. Whitney’s cotton gin made cotton (which was already dependent on slavery) more profitable. His interchangeable parts helped the Union win the war. So things got better before they got worse. A common pattern.
I’m sorry, I’m a bit scatterbrained right now. I should make a better post, but I wanted to reply soon.
While I agree that the Industrial Revolution helped with the practical side of abolition, I think we have to give the British a bit more credit than mere economic determinism.
In the early 18th century – 50 years before the move away from manual labor to mechanized labor – the Lord Chief Justice of Great Britain had ruled that all slaves were freed immediately upon setting foot in England.
And while the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 gave a nod to the question of industrial development (or perhaps to vestigial mercantilism) by attempting to exempt the lands of the East India Company from its scope, those exceptions failed in short order. Aside from those, all British possessions were encompassed in the Act regardless of their state of industry.
The southern states used the question of slave states vs free states as a proxy to maintain, in the senate, some counterbalance to the industrial interests of the north. The tariffs used to protect northern industry was a huge negative to the agricultural exports of the south since countervailing tariffs in other countries inevitably targeted those southern exports; northern industrial interests couldn’t compete internationally – hence the tariffs – and were unaffected by the reciprocal tariffs that so damaged the south. In fact, Lord Acton considered that this was the underlying issue of the American Civil War which is why the British were pro-Confederacy notwithstanding the British Empire’s anti-slavery stance.
Having said this, I am not excusing the South for slavery. I’m pointing out the economic realities that buttressed its continuation. A man held in durance vile has no duties to defer his bid for freedom to cater to the convenience of the slaveholder.
c andrew, I never said that “the US is especially deserving of condemnation for not abolishing it [slavery] for another Four Score and Seven years”. I simply said the early freed American colonies did not have “one big orgy of liberty.”
If people would respond to what I actually wrote, not to what they choose to believe I meant, I wouldn’t have to keep repeating myself.
I had arguments in school with die-hard leftists who seemed to subscribe to the proposition that particular slavery – chattel slavery of blacks in the US – was horribly evil and disqualified America from any moral high ground, but that the ongoing universal slavery of the Soviet Union and Khmer Rouge were somehow exempt from that charge.
Marla, the quote you are citing was a prequel to my point cited above. I was referring to the leftists that I had argued with – I wasn’t referencing you directly in that quote.
What I was doing was agreeing with Krulac that there is a tendency to drop context of what was done in the US in the late 18th century and then followed it up with an anecdotal example.
If I’m going to take an intellectual run at your argument, I’ll address it directly to you. I thought that Krulac had dealt with your objection to his comment and had nothing to add on that head.
Krulac wrote: “We didn’t even have a MILLION slaves in the first census in 1790.”
I overestimated the American population of the late 19th century.
“But … I’m not going to defend slavery and, I kind of think it’s a bit unfair to pick that one quirky issue to condemn the people who essentially advanced the cause of classic Liberalism farther than any group of humans had ever done before.”
“One quirky issue”? It sounds like you’re dismissing American slavery is a mere minor aberration or marginal detail. You could just as easily describe British colonialism as “one quirky issue” in their otherwise stellar record of respecting human rights.
“And … as far as women … I really don’t understand why you even bring that up in this point – how were they better off under the King?”
I said women weren’t having “one big orgy of liberty”. I didn’t say women were better off under the king. I’m not sure whether women were better off under the king or under the Articles of Confederation; was their situation really all that different either way? My point is that AT FIRST American liberty was applied to only a minority of the population.
“If perfection is the standard for success…”
I didn’t say the standard was perfection; I merely pointed out that perfection was NOT reached, contrary to your statement “one big orgy of liberty”, which implies that perfection was reached.
A Renegade History of the United States does indeed make the case that the Revolutionary Period was “one big orgy of liberty”.
In the chapter I’m on (chapter one… I’ve been having trouble finding time to read), Russell describes taverns as places where races mixed and men and women enjoyed each other’s company (both in public rooms and private rooms, free and paid). Taverns were often owned by women (often retired prostitutes). There were more taverns per capita then than there are now.
Several history books I’ve read describe the Revolutionary period as a time when slavery almost died out — there were mass freeings in the wake of the Declaration of Independence and several states — all of the northeastern states — abolished slavery then.
Last paragraph sums up a large majority of anti-porn/prostitution arguments, made by Feminloons which have all style and no substance. I think you should do a bingo card with all the common objections kind of like what Furrygirl’s done.
“think of the kids!!!”
“would you want your daughter….”
“OMG!!! objectification”
“Trendy Neo-Marxism”
“Creepy collectivism”
“Blah blah comfort women blah blah”
“You’re only the 1% of whores”
yes complex issues seem to lay somewhere “in between.” Its not as “fun” to admit the truth is a curvy line or even lines.to hold 2-3 opposing ideas in ones mind is not as rouseing to the “game spirit” but it helps me to not become so upset about folks who just want a slam dunk answer.
One of my friends regarded representitive government for most people today and 20 years ago as folly as most people are willfully ignorant or stupid and don’t want to know better much less do better. He regarded it as a sham whereby the elite pretend to do the will of the people when they really do what they want. Much as it pains me to say this, he was and still is right. Our ancestors from the American Revolutionary War to the Civil War were genuinely more interested in freedom. Since the American Civil War, it’s gotten worse. As much as it pains me to state this, did you ever notice that European kings seldom if ever outlawed prostitution while “democracies” have and it’s gotten particularly bad since women were allowed the vote?
Demagogues tend to fuck up a lot of democracies. 🙁
It is possible to find people that will consider the issue, and once they are prepared to think, conversations with same can have a positive outcome.
For example, I used to support the prohibition on drugs, but once I opened to the opposing arguments, I soon realized my error… the harm-reduction program in Switzerland confirmed how effective a sensible alternative could be. And similarly, we see sensible positions on prostitution becoming more common in say, Canada… at the very least, most people there seem to recognize that their laws are unnecessarily putting people at risk.
It seems to me that this study showed that when people find an issue too complex for them to understand, they tend to take the word of people who supposedly can understand it.
Well yeah. I take the word of guys like Einstein and Sagan and Hawking that if I were to go really, really fast, I would gain weight and age more slowly. I certainly can’t handle the math, but they can.
I don’t think that’s really what they’re saying; it seems to me that the subjects didn’t want to understand, even when offered more information, because they were afraid it would cause them to doubt their “betters”: “Ultimately, they avoid learning about the issue because that could shatter their faith in the government.”
Maybe, but it sounds suspiciously like a convenient interpretation. Somebody could read my above statement and say, “Ultimately, Sailor avoids the math because that could shatter his faith in physicists.”
Maybe I’m all wet, but still, maybe I’m not.
How many Hawkings or Einsteins do you have in your government? We certainly don’t have any here.
Nah, I think this is an understandable psychological coping mechanism to deal with “information overload”. Most people have their hands quite full with their immediate life so by “‘outsourcing’ the issue to the government” they can free up more mental processing for mortgages, raising kids, soccer statistics, etc.
Naturally, they then want to uphold their faith in the agency doing the “outsourcing” so they end up ignoring contradictory information because accepting it would mean that they need to take back the worry about the “big issues”.
Not that this is not problematic:
“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.”
— Stanley Milgram (and he of all people should know)
Considering how many issues could benefit from a knowledge of physics, climatology, biology, and so on, I wish we had some Hawkings and Einsteins. We get a physician every now and again.
But they have a butt-load of economists. I can’t blame the average man for thinking that a butt-load of guys with degrees in economics know more about economics than he does.
Of course, it’s hard to get two economists to agree on much of anything (kind of like psychologists), so you can believe anything you want about economics and there’s somebody with more degrees than Fahrenheit who’ll agree with you (kind of like psychologists).
Yeah, Milgram knew a thing or three about authority and people’s willingness to submit to it.
My father, who took his masters in econ had a saying;
If you laid all the economists in the world in a straight line, they’d still point in all directions.
If you laid all the economists in the world in an geometric configuration whatsoever, you’d be awfully sore.
And if you took every blood vessel in the human body and laid them end to end, you’d die.
If the election were held today, nobody would win, because nobody would turn out, because nobody knows that the election was held today.
This is funnier two months before an election, as opposed to a week and a half after, but hey.
There’s also the lobster pot situation- To many people oppose prostitution or drug legalization because they suspect it allows someone else to have a bit more fun than they do. They’ll never tell you this, but down deep they say- “Look, damnit, if I’m here. miserably struggling under the rules, then you should be too!”
Well that’s fine, as long as we’re all struggling under the same rules.
I’m going to be sitting out for a few days. I’m frazzled. I was already scatterbrained yesterday, and now I haven’t had any sleep. Trains. I hate them. I was having trouble getting to sleep anyway, and then trains. Three times I was just almost there, and Woooooooooooooo, woooooooooo, wooooooooo. Fucking trains. I understand why, at the age of five, I tried to throw a brick at a train. I carry the scar to this day. I was wishing I had a brick last night. I suppose now I’d be arrested. Woooooooo, wooooooooo, wooooooooo. I can’t make good posts like this. Friend or foe, you deserve better than what I have to give right now. About three AM I remembered that I still had some ear plugs or at least I thought I still did. I did. One last pair. Three in the morning. I put them in. There was another train. I could’ve slept through it though. With the ear plugs. Do I have to wear them every night now? I don’t wear them at home. I have them for when I travel and to sleep in somebody else’s home. I live alone and should only need ear plugs on those nights when the AC is off and it’s srping or fall and it’s too hot to sleep unless I open windows and run my fan. Then I need ear plugs. But am I going to need them every night now? Woooooo, wooooo, woooo. Three times it happened. At about four thirty I gave up. You win, Insomnia. I lose. I guess the economy is picking up? Why else would there be more trains in the dead of night than there used to be? So I guess it’s a good thing. I need to buy more ear plugs. I was having trouble sleeping anyway. I’m in an emotional state, and now this. I’m going to go away for a while. Sorry.
Wow,
That sounds like a real pain. I live about half a mile from the main train yard for the southern part of the state and some nights – or mornings – it’s amazing what kind of cacophony they can generate.
Sleep deprivation is never fun unless there is a social event involved.
Thanks. I’m back now, and I’ve gotten sleep, and my emotional state is better. I’m going to spend the week catching up… and then I’m going out of town for the weekend. I don’t know how much keeping up (or catching up) I’ll be able to do, but I’ll do my best. Ganbaru and all that.
yoroshiku onegai shimasu!
🙂