Atheism

Please sign new petition to help clear the air, at long last, of such flagrant supernatural question begging in national policy.

Where if at all, does religious and occult intuitionism draw the boundary with sheer magic and magical realism of utterly wishful thinking? According to a study by University of Chicago lead by Nicholas Epley, lonely people are more likely to believe in the supernatural, whether that is God, angels or miracles. Other scientific studies, particularly such as recently financed from religious sources, by the John Templeton Foundation particularly, contend that religion helps with stress, health and longevity. But so do marriage and pets, or so we are also told. So, if religious belief and practice are beneficial, does that then recommend self dishonesty and even painful and debilitating heteronomy if and as ever necessary thereto? After all, understanding, as facilitated my scientific rationalism, has been observed to inspire active confidence, assuaging anxiety in the face of the unknown. Now, whatever feels more reassuring may be the point of religion, whether or not so openly, but since when is any of that a criteria of successful science in quest of truth? What science has always offered religion is criticism, ever constrained by the church until science finally broke free.

Quite trivially, most any assertions, such as rummaged from whatsoever among any scientific hypotheses plus any religious beliefs, can be imaginatively synthesized in to any new fiction however pleasing. But would merely such achieve the vaunted quest of religious and scientific reconciliation? Or might it be more honest and productive first to begin with identification and confrontation with whatever true bones of contention between faith and reason?

Is there howsoever religious application to science? Yes, there is certainly all manner of scientific study of religion including alleged health benefits etc., but seldom, from any religious vantage or concern, unless to the point of however biased distortion in the vested interests of religion or fraudulent validation of Theology. But sincere attempt at application of science to Theological questions is not inconceivable. And so, in the unlikely contingency that anyone might ever actually be motivated to pursuit after curiosity, I have gone ahead and invented full blown and from the very thin air, two scientific specialties pursuing different distinct religious or Theological concerns, but without biased distortion in the vested interests of religion or fraudulent validation of Theology, that I have respectively dubbed: Endotheology and Theophysics.

For, after all, there has been such much talk of and some effort too, and lately so generously well funded thanks to the John Templeton Foundation, at reconciliation, to render compatible or consistent (and one would hope, with reciprocal integrity), of science and religion. But what can any of that actually ever literally signify? What can it even mean to reconcile undertaking the explanation of the unknown by the known with such presupposition as the explanation of the known via the unknown, indeed, at least allegedly, the mysterious and unknowable? -never mind precisely how...

Can Atheism truly be a creed, any more than not playing chess can be a hobby? Rather, it is Scientific Rationalism which simply demands sound Empirical evidence for the existence of God or gods, without special pleadings, just as for any other position or assertion. And therefore what resultant Atheism all to often actually entails, is endless bickering with pious pinheads! So all that I seek to contribute here, are any at all neglected interesting fine points amid the endless repetition:

An Atheist, simply and straightforwardly, is one who does not believe in God or gods. But there is another related term, Agnostic, meaning one not knowing or professing ignorance in regards to any question of the existence of God. And this has engendered much confusion, because, from the standpoint of the Scientific Rationalism of Atheism, the default is disbelief. And so, barring any particular knowledge from Empirical evidence to the contrary, one would scarcely suspect, much less opine or believe in, the existence of God any more than the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster or, for that matter, Santa Clause. And so, that would suggest that utter and complete Agnosticism is actually sufficient to Atheism. Indeed, the very uncertainty professed of Agnosticism ought to require any serious evidentiary support whatsoever for whatever tantalizing suspicion of any possible existence of God at all, just to raise so much as a specter of doubt at all! (Unless an Agnostic, perhaps in the most in monumental Socratic irony, where to actually claim and thence begin from complete ignorance even of the entire question, rather than actual indecision with the known arguments and evidence.) But from any religious standpoint wherein the certainty of reveled truth is professed, Theists often insist that since otherwise one cannot know anything for certain, indeed, because only positive assertions are directly supportable while negative assertions are supportable at all only by an ongoing and endless process of elimination, therefore Atheists are more properly merely Agnostics. Worse, because religion in quest for impossible and unnecessary transcendental certainty appeals more to the test of faith, as a human need and value to be redeemed and recovered, rather than any standard of objective reality testing in the embrace of healthy skepticism and systematic doubt, Theists generally assume that an Agnostic is lost, yearning for the reawakening to worship. In other words, by just such circumlocutions, many Theists, in their priorities mandating a practical rejection of Ontology, utterly and blithely refuse to even recognize the very opinion of Atheism in and of itself as possible human state or frame of mind! -Which, even granting every natural human proclivity towards animism, still seems rather pigheaded.

After all, such are the deep and psychologically ingrained cultural Judeo-Christian presumptions of an all pervading God, as to become all nigh inescapable in the mind, as likewise must be the unintended ironic subtext, so dramatically delicious, of this very text, in it's confessedly and inevitably mounting virulence, as might be imagined issuing forth like unto smoking charnel brimstone spewing from the mouth of some devil, denying, mocking and railing against God in His Heaven Above! For is it not said that the Devil is Ultimate Negation? And is not God just said Ultimate for the Devil to deny? No, not unless God exists to begin with! Rather, whether one accepts an actual Devil anymore than God, it remains in truth that the most extreme conceivable Nihilism necessarily entails rejection of reason, logic, Ontology and thence the embrace of madness in whatever ensuing moral vacuum.

And exactly such anti-rationalism is typically necessary in order to sustain irrational beliefs given the typical lack of evidentiary support and even in the face of overwhelming refutation or just lack of supporting evidence. Thence the Theo-crypto-Nihilism or conventional religion argues no other escape save through faith, typically then dismissing all criticism or rejection of faith, of Nihilism. And what monumentally pessimistic hypocrisy is just such false hope in Theo-crypto-Nihilism! For in truth, one must first be Nihilist in one's heart of hearts to begin with, and in utter failure of imagination otherwise, stone blind to all other options, in order to so desperately gasp at straws of so specious an antidote as lunatic faith. But perhaps the true depths of Nihilism are plumbed rather by sheer heteronomy, the loss of all faith in the self as impulsive, lazy and hedonistic that inspires desperation for some infallible leader to absolve all personal responsibility.

So Atheism is merely an expression of autonomy, and scientific rationalism no more than the Epistemology of autonomy. Thus the question evaded in seeking to reconcile reason with unreason, becomes how to reconcile autonomy and heteronomy, which seems to be the mad undertaking of our educational system.

The following section will deal with the interesting scientific problems in which Theology so spectacularly fails, to be followed by discourse upon the crucial Existential problems in which religion so miserably fails, leading into exposé of ongoing attack upon autonomy in society most generally.

All hence must it come as little surprise that each and every one of the traditional purported logical proofs of the existence of God are all logically flawed Sophistry, long standing refuted. Because, in the first place, reduction to First Principles is quite impossible. Proof, after all, is only of validity, defined as theoretical logical internal consistency, and never of truth value, defined correspondence to external reality which is never ascertainable by logical possibility alone without actually testing by observation and experiment.

At least with anyone honestly declaring that where the conclusions of science and scripture might if ever logically conflict, they will side with scripture, we know where they stand and can readily question and criticize their dogmatism and double standards, because there is no pretense. Indeed, only science is bound by standards of evidence seeking to screen out special pleadings of self-undermining reasoning. Whereas matters of faith hold themselves to no such standard. And so, as far as internal consistency alone, that confession should simply be the end of it.

But Theistic pseudoscience is no less convoluted than Theology. All the standard distortions of Apologetics are routinely brought to bear in support of the existence of God, including all manner of scientific misconceptions and omissions in order to fabricate scientific problems then demanding explanation only by intelligent design or God one way or another. Or else Apologetics may often be extremely learned in the sciences, demanding a great deal of attention to detail from the reader. Because, in the suggestible receptivity of faith, which is the cultivation of satisfying beliefs in order to bring about altered states of consciousness, and the protection of said beliefs in order to cultivate altered states of consciousness in the long term, even bad evidence gains weight as it accumulates. -As if the house of cards might still stand, at least one or two broken logical links and mooted points hovering miraculously. Alas, in truth, all of the extensive information and argumentation of such Apologetics, much like unto empty gossip, is centered about the same shopworn general logical falsities in the Epistemology of Scientific Method and standards of evidence, herein to be stripped bare:

Indeed, Evangelists of every stripe often exhort all whom they hope to convert, to undertake whatever particular prayer, meditation or such, usually with a certain required attitude, as a means of direct evidence, in order for the subject to achieve the certitude of divine revelation for themselves. But thus do they simply presume Epistemological Methodological consensus. Because, even assuming resounding success, why accept any such at whatever ostensible face value any more than drug experiences, hypnosis or any other similar incidentally altered or deliberately tampered with states of consciousness and impaired judgment? Since when is even the most immediate of direct experience beyond question and skeptical examination? Because, what can there ever be in human nature at all beyond fallibility? Since when is direct experience so completely reliable? In particular, religion is, after all, the notorious opiate of the masses, prone to pernicious nonsense with such great conviction and hence meaningless conflicts that can never be settled. And so, by appropriate analogy, do the other people at the bar really become more beautiful the more one drinks? After all, pub crawling too, has it's ardent and fevered Evangelists! And so, with no satisfactory answer, all such mental masturbation must be recognized as experimentally inconclusive, no matter how vivid. Because even the most successful desired results remain open to a myriad of explanations and are well known to be very much colored in the mind by preconception even to be intelligible at all. Yea, verily, experience is biased by context of expectations. And apparently, there are not only the entire range of paranormal interpretations and the idiosyncratically surreal, but even entirely prosaic apprehension of much the same experience, altered states or day to day private cognition and emotion. After all, in the Epistemology of science, which, Methodologically, is the application of systematic doubt, inspiration from the willing suspension of disbelief and judgment, is not the motivating end goals ever put forth, as in religious faith, but only a starting point of unsupported conjecture to be subjected first to Critical Preference and then to Empirical reality testing and the quest for the simplest likeliest explanation.

Indeed, as yet there is no evidence for God save as He may be evoked explanatorily, even so far as affirming the consequent or converting the conditional (Modus Ponens). That is to say, by the same observable outcome, be such Ontological or Phenomenological, that, however, may be, and indeed is, also and better explained by whatever other competing viable hypotheses. Hence, the current evidence for God is only as good as Theistic explanation for scientific problems. And for any given problem, either there are alternative hypotheses to that of the existence and agency of God, or else, conceivably, there might not be. Even if neither first cause nor infinite regress are deemed satisfactory explanation, that still does not necessitate God, because God explains nothing, being Himself and His alleged agency unexplained, unsupported and theoretically inelegant. What profit is there in simply shifting the burden of explanation into an even more difficult problem, when the entire point is simplifying theoretical elegance of adequate explanation?

If there is currently no other known explanation, than, for example, flying saucers, spontaneous anxiety, conspiratorial Jewish bankers or God, then this only amounts to the same tired and fallacious Argumentum Ad Ignorantium or argument by lack of imagination, jumping to conclusions in the face of the unknown, circuitous reasoning affirming the consequent. Because, even when we have no explanation at all, new explanations may arise later and often do. The lack of explanation or solution at any given time offers slim support indeed for paranormal claims, whatsoever. If there are no good explanations, for however long, that still does not support bad explanations, unsupported explanations and out and out non explanations! Of course there will always be new questions, but God has yet to become a viable hypothesis. God remains an inelegant non explanation. There is, as yet, precious little in the way of mechanistic explanation of how God is supposed to exist, function or accomplish all that He is presumed to have done or to does. Nor, indeed, much effort at all to improve matters, neither theoretically nor experimentally. Indeed, lately, God has been a fruitless hypothesis. And the reburial offered remains much to the effect of: "Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Clause!"

Hence, scientifically, thus far, all that evoking Intelligent Design AKA God accomplishes is to remove any complex problem to an exponentially more complex problem upon which there has been no progress to speak of. Simply because intelligent personality is a complex ordered phenomenon, does not logically attribute all other examples of complex ordered phenomena to the guidance of any intelligent personality. Rather, whereas antirational religion explains the known in terms of the mysterious, in rational science, seeking to build and test (corroborate and refute) explanation of the hither to unknown via the known, even intelligent personality must be explained the same way as other complex ordered phenomena. And the latter endeavor remains fruitful, whereas the sheer vague supposition of Theology remains fruitless at very best. God, then, lies on the cutting room floor amid the fat trimmed by Ockham's Razor. Hence, any viable hypothesis remains far better than Theism.

In a nutshell, he hypothesis of God is vastly superfluous. In the hurly burly contest of competing hypotheses for explanatory fitness which is the Evolutionary Epistemology of scientific progress, God does poorly. Indeed, His faithful are not even really making such effort as is appropriate among scientists wanting to settle a bet at all. And it's easy to see why they'd all chicken out! From a standpoint of Psychology, then, given the behavior of endless and specious denial and evasion, it becomes increasingly difficult not to question the sincerity of the belief in God, in most cases.

In nature, intelligence arises from complexity, not complexity from intelligence. Complexity by itself is a necessary but not sufficient condition for design, nor by inference, a Designer. Even living organisms are not irreducibly complex. After all, we know full well, one way or another, indeed, in very principle, that order progresses without conscious intelligent design. Because, the happenstance of blind and incognizant natural order, even however imperfect and suboptimal as real adaptations inevitably will be, and entirely without guiding consciousness, is the result of natural selection under physical conditions providing for randomness but under constraints of circumstance. Unlike paranormalism, science is more concerned with the ordinary than with the unusual or even purportedly miraculous. There is no real understanding, say, of the wondrous birth or two headed livestock, without first unraveling the secrets of the most ordinary biological reproduction. Science, after all, quests after reproducible results not irreproducible quirks. And this approach has been fruitful. Indeed, certainly, at first blush, one might wonder daunted at the utter improbability of the sheer complexity of the universe, all out from empty chaos and darkness, let alone ensuing evolution of life. But surprisingly it turns out indeed, especially given nigh endless repetition and adequate range of variance, how the very wonders both of a complex universe and the evolution life thereafter are both actually highly probable, indeed, nigh inevitable, under the right conditions which turn out to be quite common, typical, likely similar enough if not actually identical in many times and places, even mediocre rather than exceptional. - Existence out from empty chaos and darkness, and living ecosystems anywhere under the right chemical conditions thereafter. After all, circumstances under which order spontaneously appears as an emergent property of complex interactions among the parts of a system, far from being only a figment of mathematical imagination, even include certain meteorological phenomena such as tornados are neither regular nor random but are already the result of intrinsic self-organizing processes without external guidance. Hence, as applicable likewise also to a wide range of even more complex phenomena, we now begin to know and understand how chaotic flux is an unstable and impermanent state, because, eventually even by sheer chance, homeostasis always eventually arises from such a state of utter chaotic flux, bringing an onset of the development of ordered complexity, tightly integrated dynamic complex systems of organized correlation between functioning components as a result displaying emergent even howsoever organic properties or Gestalt, even including hysteresis beyond determinism alone (hysteresis being a quality of system dynamics often analogized to memory, the manifestation of various persistent states, each responding to similar inputs howsoever differently), indeed the maximum complexity possible only from ongoing chaotic disruption of orderly systems called: the edge of chaos. Indeed, even the origins of physical laws are but a special case of such order from chaos, said physical laws being description of conditions most fundamental to coherent physical existence in the universe as it has ever existed beyond it's most primordial state of chaotic flux. And Entropy is often seen to decrease locally at the expense of increased Entropy globally. So, beyond the sheer joys of unfettered fantasy, scientifically, why seek to anthropomorphize Negentropy and the edge of chaos? What need is there anymore of Teleology?

And returning to evolution, characteristics may become advantageous for entirely different reasons, in the course of evolution, without somehow actually striving towards whatever we see today. And so, the precursors of complex systems, even such as are currently only advantageous in their current conjunction with other complex components, may have hitherto been useful to perform other, entirely unrelated functions, even far more simply. So, why would any particular instance of order, "improbable" low Entropy, however seemingly fortuitous, then require God? Not without either far better support for God and/or far more rigorously ruling out the more ordinary even if highly complex causal alternatives. And so the world and people in it, can come into being without a God to conjure it all especially for you and me. It may be jarring to realize that the totality of being does not revolve around us after all, but such often comes growth towards maturity. Rather it is still love, and confluence of suitable conditions thereto, common and mediocre or rare and fortunate as the case actually may be, that makes anyone special for anyone else.

In nature, intelligence has been known to arise from complexity, not complexity from intelligence. Apparently, only artifacts, and not natural phenomena, are actually products of intelligent design. Natural order is not the handiwork of intelligent design, rather intelligence is simply another ordered state of localized low Entropy. There is no evidence of vital force or awareness as a primary, whatever that means, pervading the universe. Nor do these assertions amount to Reductionism, but, rather, just to the contrary, Gestalt.

Space is round, meaning that a traveler flying off in a straight line far enough, would eventually return to the point where they began. And likewise, if time where round or looped, then this would mean that one would only need to survive and wait around long enough in order to witness ones own birth. Now clearly, neither an unending chain of causal events, an infinite regress nor a cycle with neither beginning nor end perhaps even closed within looped time, would neither alone necessitate God, still only removing the already complex to a greater order of unexplained complexity, inelegant non explanation. Indeed, if there is necessarily anything however eternal in nature, or even one way or another or in any sense outside of space-time as we normally experience, neither still would establish that this would have to be God in Eternity. Science may as yet be somewhat short of fully satisfactory explanation neither for the emergence of existence from nonexistence or else of existence forever without beginning, but even so still far further along than religion. For, remarkably enough, from the known evidence to date, some modern Cosmologies do indeed posit and describe in any detail, both a chronological first event and also dependence upon a condition, both primordial and forever imminent, with neither volume nor duration, called: the void, or in Theological terminology: Eternity, but untenanted, sufficient even sans any trace of aware consciousness, anthropomorphic, benevolent, all powerful or otherwise. -Indeed, perhaps all somewhat reminiscent of how as chaos and darkness in Genesis, are actually Monotheistic depersonalizations of Babylonian Polytheistic gods. While other modern cosmologies are of an infinitely old cycle of Big Bangs followed either by universal contraction and collapse into the Big Crunch or more likely dissipation void in the long and slow Heat Death of the Universe, eother way producing conditions for Big Bang anew.

By every indication, the universe is of a finite age at least counting from the observably evidenced Big Bang, hence time itself, like the expansion of space out from infinite compression, is thought to have began with the Big Bang. According to such modern cosmologies, preceding even the Big Bang and beyond the known physical Universe abides the void, conditions without volume or duration, volume being the expanse of space and duration being the passage of time from within any frame of reference inside the Universe. The intuition of some timeless condition (and even thence much later even time as a constant physical fourth dimension) probably first occurs anciently from altered consciousness, even expansive mystical experience, wherein all sense of time is lost. In Theology the perspective outside of time attributed to God who is described as a spirit without substance, is called Eternity. But even to posit the void / "chaos and darkness" / Eternity does not automatically imply God. Application of the mediocrity principle to the Big Bang itself means that appropriate conditions for the Big Bang in the void where/are, indeed, howsoever uniformly mediocre, common, probable. And this may even imply the existence of other Universes, other space-time continuums, though such might only ever be detectable if ever at all, only by gravity waves. But paradoxically, all this still leaves regression begging one more question that as yet we know not even how properly to phrase or frame because all conventional logically causal explanation rests upon antecedent events, and time itself began only with the Big Bang. Nevertheless, as to the very manner of being, or, dare say: dasein, why is or was the void such and not otherwise conceivably? Indeed, for that matter, even if the Universe is infinitely old, as in cyclical Cosmological models wherein after either a Big Crunch or else the Entropicly inevitable Heat Death if the Universe, another Big Bang ensues, or similarly if time is round much as is space, every question would remain much the same as to how and why so. Are there any viable hypotheses? Can there ever be? Or is it all just so?

The above conundrum can only tantalize, while inane theological hand waving remains so boring! Again, to posit God the Creator, to anthropomorphically and supernaturally apply Pathetic Fallacy to whatever entirely natural processes of the very void, let alone to natural randomness within constraints and arising complexity there after, only removes the already complex to greater complexity still. Indeed, even if first cause is at all are ever where satisfactorily demonstrated, then that still need not by itself establish any God as first cause. And whatever the first cause, would that not leave said in need of explanation? Indeed, is not God often claimed to be causeless and eternal? -Which is to say, unexplained... Yea and verily, the Archeologist will unearth the Israelites before Physics ever works its way to God(s)! Even if neither first cause nor infinite regress are deemed satisfactory explanation, that still does not necessitate God, because God explains nothing, being Himself and His alleged agency unexplained, unsupported and maximally theoretically inelegant.

Furthermore, it bears mention that even demonstrating only the very existence of God, even if such compelling evidentiary support ever where to come to light, would not necessarily or automatically follow any specific sectarian details as to His (or Her) nature, particularly not even any sort of personal loving God, much less the specific sort of God in detail, nor any other tenets asserted by any given religion, for example, as to an afterlife. Indeed, all such questions and details might conceivably very well remain open, even if the very existence of God at all, and no more, where to be demonstrated and supported by whatever sort of new evidence. True enough as it may be, as held forth in the Zen, that unworkable and misleading models obtain in the differentiation of God from self and the totality of being, indeed, simply calling or naming most any given phenomena God, is a common though transparent ruse either for metaphorically dragging in so much more via the proverbial back door, or else a flimsy camouflage for however reluctant or pseudo-pious Atheism.

For example, as computer analogies are current in physics and ecology, action and reaction, particularly as constituent in homeostasis, become comparable to responsive internal state monitoring, then euphemistically referred to as life or even awareness. Unfortunate mythological amplification and distortion then ensues until, either at superficial appraisal, all such rhetoric be naught but the Theological Sophistry, equivocation and slight of hand of typical apologetics, or else otherwise, just idiosyncratic language in the poetical indulgence of Atheistic false piety.

Indeed, for fear of undue reduction, in case there may, after all, be anything more conscious and directed at work than meets the eye, let anyone seeking thereof first contemplate the sheer physical and computational requirements, if, in faith, they are at all serious about advancing beyond unvarnished Science Fantasy and at long last building a model and formulating and fleshing out any cogent viable and testable hypothesis of universal consciousness and at long last undertaking the challenge of Theophysics! My challenge to the likes of the John Templeton Foundation, is to put up or shut up: If religion seeks to undertake science, then with any of the vast resources now so wistfully lavished upon mendacious apologetics and Public Relations hot air, let them do it! And damn their tiresome hypocrisy. However slim the prospects for success, the uplifting vindication of science is in the fruitfulness even of failure. And after all, none such undertaking can be the more disorienting than the bizarre conundrums of modern cosmology already.

For all such Apologetics as Theistic Intelligent Design merely articulates the more general yearning for belief in destiny with nothing to chance ever demanding responsible free choice from mere mortals. Morality and responsibility are distinctly relevant to the pursuit of happiness both towards individual well being and maintenance of any at all livable society. But no less obviously, morality and responsibility limit and an obstruct individual desires. All nevertheless, putting aside all Epistemologically dubious Ontology from yearning and wishful thinking, religion can still embody values including morality, even regardless of the sheer brutality of any actual scriptures. All question of the essential characteristic disposition and application of values by which we live are informed by worldviews of human nature. Specifically, there have always been those exhorting or even in any way imposing whatever alteration in character as a free willed choice of decision outright and nothing more, and those extolling, instead, honesty and harmony with destiny on whatever path to change, growth or progress as is congruent with life and human nature.

Indeed, any willful effort at change, let alone imposition by others, raises the question of self control unto concerns with levels of denial, self deception and manipulation. And Sigmund Freud is very clear that new conditioning pressure in conflict with preexisting issues often results in suppression and yet more insecure reaction formation.

Indeed, in the alternative, Freudian catharsis, the expression and release of inner hurts to be tended upon with compassion, is not without ancient precedence. Alas, however, it often seems that, all pious protestations aside, sanctimony and trivial superstition are more common than true profundity and richer inner life, let alone improved character and true benevolence. For many so vociferously protest their deep spirituality and relationship to God, the more transparently shallow and disappointing are their religious fantasies. Verily, even their daydreams are dreary and banal cliché!

But by concerted introspection, perhaps such as who do truly and sincerely walk with God, may ever fruitfully contribute to Endotheology, the Phenomenological and psychological study in cognitive philosophy, of the role and value of God in the psyche, entirely unburdened by any question of to whatever degree or objective reality to being with, of supernatural contact with God versus mere subjectivity of inner life, nor indeed with any mechanics of Theophysics.

For in the pointed caution of Alexander Lowen MD: "Conviction lies not in the ego." "But" to quote Thomas Moore "faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast to some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last." Such verily qualifying as the proverbial wedding made in Hell!

In the alternative, however, any quest for unknown or uncertain truth may call for a kind of faith, trust or optimism not contingent upon any particular assertion, theoretical Ontological opinion or belief. Indeed, does belief that the city of London is located in England or that two and two equal four, require much effort invested in faith? Atheism is no more than assertion of a rational conclusion. And if there are moral values of Rationalism, then these must be the honesty, responsibility and autonomy. For indeed as the saying goes: there can be no other values without honesty first. And morality as the dictate of God would be entirely arbitrary unless there is any reason, at least such as would be known even only to God. Hence, any punishment and reward system, bribes and threats of the Appeal to Force logical falsity aside, asserting that God is the source of morality explains nothing about morality whatsoever. Indeed, if there is a God, then, as Sartre observed, man must be freer than God, because man can sin. Indeed, an ultimately good God would actually have to be bound by morality, making moral principle primary even beyond God. What does it mean at all, then, to assert that God is the source of morality? Just how does that work?

Who so truly and abjectly surrenders and submits to the will of God can no more rely upon the efficacy of prayer than an Atheist. Prayer alone and in and of itself, ever such as that may be, must be deemed howsoever the only comfort entailed therein. Likewise, the conviction of righteousness alone, a value, the appeal to a morality beyond selfish concern alone is observably a comfort and support to confidence, short of despair, utter defeatism and Nihilism in relation to which opinion that God exists observably only serves as denial of despair, never mind, and less importantly, of unbelief. -Irresponsibility in the face of fallibility and uncertainty. Again, to quote Alexander Lowen MD still, "conviction lies not in the ego." Hence, like autonomy, morality and ethics remain aspects of character.

Faith by any other name, courage, respect, "basic trust," residual optimism however cautious, all for lack of better understanding thereof, sustains us at all, even to rise when we wake; not knowledge, not by faith nor otherwise. Faith bears no Epistemological moment. Socratic wisdom is only knowing that we do not know, how ever approximately gauging the scope of ones own ignorance.

"Devotion is nothing but one’s private asset. But morality is a public asset. If there is no devotion nothing is lost. But if there is no morality, everything is lost" — Periyar (E.V) Ramasami

If there is a God who keeps His own secrets, withholding certainty only unto Himself, then, likewise, Godlike responsibility can solely be for God alone, and by design. Hence it can only be the human struggle from from uncertainty with human responsibility, within the fallibility of all as much and as little that is given us to know, that will ever be pleasing to God. Allegorically, it may be only the struggle with God, that is pleasing to God. Indeed, such is the role of Job, and by metaphorical extension, the Jew, as loyal opposition to the Almighty. Otherwise, if all is subject to the will of God no less than if none, then any appeal to God's will is non explanatory and uninformative, to believer and unbeliever alike. Which is to say that, clearly, the dramatic struggle with God is either simply a potent metaphor for coming to grips both with the limitations of situation and the demands of conscience, or else religion is no more than the abrogation of responsibility into lunatic moral Theo-crypto-Nihilism. Whereas, by contrast, the Atheist remains free and lucid to discern the moral behind the fairytale.

Theologians have argued in favor of moral heteronomy, that without God as an absolute, then morality becomes so subjective and flexible as to loose all meaning and so becomes void. Indeed, all values, even survival instinct to begin with, cannot be logically reducible, but simply a matter of human nature, biological and innate, thus perhaps even arbitrary. For as Socrates famously argues, how can the oblivion after death be any more painful than the oblivion before birth? In the immortal words of Protagoras,

"Man is the measure of all things." There is no objective meaning. Meaning occurs subjectively in the human mind. And because values ultimately derive from biologically innate needs and drives; therefore as discovered in the Empirical childhood developmental psychology of Piaget, the clearest known actual source of howsoever Altruistic morality remains sympathy emerging as a human, indeed an animal, propensity. Humans can be humane.

G. E. Moore derided the very notion of ethics ever founded upon scientific principles, as: the naturalistic fallacy, because ethics strives to define what ought rather than what is. Thus science, he claimed, can’t get an “ought” out of an “is." After all, philosophy has never actually produced a falsifiable assumption for ethics. Only given any moral premise can scientific investigation up to any point, ever shed light upon possible and likely consequences of behavior informing responsibility towards whatever choices free to us.

Indeed, in so far as morality is, after all, conjectural, Godliness only promises certainty but cannot deliver. Morality is a passionately uncertain struggle. " . . . since the possible number of actions in the universe is unlimited -- as is the number of possible situations from which actions may proceed and take their tone -- morality is ... too complex to be knowable and far too complex to be reduced to any code . . ." - John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

The religiously observant are all too correct in their rebuke of more moderate believers of their selective obedience to holly writ. But can such truly be so easily dismissed as mere laxity? For if not selection then at least prioritization is inevitable. Alas, however, the Ten Commandments are never so readily prioritized as Asimov's Laws of Robotics! Indeed, while Humanists find themselves obliged to contemplate individually in seeking to prioritize most broadly applicable moral principle, heteronymous Fundamentalists obsessively prioritize every most minute explicit detail of scriptural commandment, however circumstantial or ritualistic, seeking therein freedom from responsibility but achieving instead, only the most dramatic sheer inner conflict of dishonest hypocrisy and paralytic denial, cognitive dissonance even unto crimestop indeed in the very face of wholesale abrogation of all justifying lofty principle.

Indeed, by every Technique of Suspense plotting, the rising tension and of dramatic conflict signifies that the resolution of whatever the central problem is such as to increasingly press character(s) inevitably to take action in struggle with whoever or whatever the antagonist in some way that must one way or another bring the very values of said character(s) into question for them. Most dramatically, an attempt at howsoever the wiser course may instead press a character into conflict on every level with their own motivating values for which they will be compelled to sacrifice the easier way because the moral course and the more difficult among free willed choices may so often coincide.

Ethical appeals employ commonly held values and beliefs; appeals to our sense of fairness, right and wrong, justice and mercy, persuasively as pertaining to the real world, or as pertaining to the consistent fictional scenario. Ethical appeals may appeal either to actual people, readers, or, likewise, fictional characters may seek to motivate and persuade one another by appealing to the values of the fictional or historical scenario, milieu or setting.

Morality is a value, not an Ontology as such. True morality is a matter of principle but no less a question of responsibility that in turn obtains from foreseeable consequences as much as principle, principle being extrapolated deductively while foreseeable consequences are a matter for prognosis. Hence the entire concept of God remains irrelevant, moot, non sequitur, morally. Morality and Ethics are trying and difficult concerns of actual life in the real world, not specious nattering of the supernatural.

There is, however, endeavor at statistical corroboration and even explanation of positive moral values, especially those often deemed most crucial to relationship, as howsoever fostered by religion and particularly by sense of community therein. -though apologism typically continues sidestepping the alarming downside of antirational indoctrination and taboo.

For only one example, abortion is certainly not murder, because murder requires a real victim, not potential, whatever that means. The murder of a dream unrealized, is not literal but remains euphemism, poignant metaphor. Perhaps unless, of course, the soul really does enter at the very moment of genetic recombination, as allegedly revealed only to those declaring themselves to be "of the spirit." But then, if they are really half so serious as they pretend, then why are they so unconcerned that to begin with, naturally, only an extreme minority of fertilized ovum ever survive even into noticeable pregnancy at all? If fertilized ovum are really people, then that would constitute an horrific infant mortality rate!

Otherwise, in the real world, reproductive free willed choice remains compassionate and responsible priority, no less than anesthesia for women in labor, a medical innovation likewise initially obstructed by similarly cruel biblically derived taboo and depraved indifference. Indeed, all whosoever deem coerced childbirth appropriate chastisement for the joy of sex, are scarcely any better than honor killers and widow burners. Anywhere in the world, no less than as with revivals of the ghastly and abominable rituals of becoming Sati, of the self immolation of drug entranced widows upon their husbands' blazing funeral pyres, all restrictions upon abortion in thinking and in sentiment appeal to scientifically unsupportable fantastical supernatural claims and articles of faith that under the separation of church and state that protect us all from religious persecution, must never inform policy and legislation for everyone.

Please sign new petition to help clear the air, at long last, of such flagrant supernatural question begging in national policy.

In the time bound state of human consciousness and reflection, we not only react spontaneously in the present, but also remember the past and imagine scenarios to anticipate possibilities of the future. And so, barring sheer depraved indifference, in rational foresight there accrues responsibility, whereas by contrast, religion, historically rooted in fairytale magical realism, is instead typically associated with guilt over very intentions. As for example, again, the lofty pure intentions behind opposition to reproductive free choice yoked to irresponsibly ignoring the known and foreseeable consequences. For, indeed, the pure intentions of chastity invariably leading to the inevitable fall from grace, that, by rejection of the occasion of sin intrinsic to preparedness for the foreseeable eventuality of sexual opportunity and activity, then actually demands the patent irresponsibility of deep denial ignoring all need and prudence of preparation including such precautions as prophylaxis. Surely, all such exemplifies the the proverbial road to Hell paved with ostensibly good intentions! Excuses aside, in truth, subconscious ulterior motives to pregnancy, often as compensation for deep-seated inadequacy, far better explain the behavior than does all crazy-making doctrine and capricious denial.

Perhaps the most profoundly natural denial at all, even in protection of very personal sanity at all, is of the terrifying eventuality of death and the very annihilation of consciousness itself. But exactly such denial continually threatens very survival. For even though it only stands to reason that if religion and the cultivation of pleasant beliefs, especially lying to oneself in resignation and surrender to glowing fantasies of an afterlife is at all comforting, then any honest hope at all of survival placed in at least the sheer engineering feasibility of future reanimation following cryonic suspension until such time as the requisite technology becomes available, ought to be even by far the more comforting, nevertheless, alas, instead the very notion remains so repugnant to many, and therefore the very idea and progress at all faces such Luddite resistance. of ubiquitous Deathism. Why so? And what can be done? To know more, browse: The prospect of integrated recovery. And join in formation of a working group towards feasibility study.

The nigh idolatrous awed cult reverence towards sheer procreative power in Nature only inspires contempt for the individual, resentment and lemming-like self-loathing, the Medieval sanctification of poverty and ignorance unto the Necrophiliac adoration of the imagined hereafter as this life is progressively rendered intolerable, that has also obstructed the benefits of organ donation, autopsy and Cryonics. Man, we are told, is made in God's image, not that we so exist and abide. The alleged sanctity of life seemingly does not extend beyond the womb, not even to the mother to be herself, and only returning in the cold dirt of the grave. So called Pro-Life is actually more of a Kirbyesque Anti-Life, a sinister Orwellian mind controlling Nihilism wielded by its fanatical memebots, ridiculous yet dangerous Fascist comic opera villains and Elmer Gantry pseudo pious charlatans.

Indeed, worst of all, by no means limited to religion or ideology, there is sheer anti-rationality, but in the mentality of religion and magic, even beyond any more pedestrian doublethink self deception as denotes self manipulation in order to juggle contrary inconsistent beliefs, there is even the Solipsistically resolute faith in miracles of the literally most impossible, as in supernatural powers and the agency of an omnipotent God bound neither by neither logic nor even morality nor swayed by appeals either thereto. And by that path lies the ultimate negation of truest devil worship that actually treasures hypocrisy and leaves little other account for heterodoxy whatsoever save by Ad Hominem hostility, one way or another. But here, in any sense, any appeal to God is deployed only in the unrepentant abandon of all values and conscience whatsoever.

According to Freud, the reality principle in the mind, playing out likely scenarios, weighs the costs and benefits of any effort before deciding either to act upon and gratify or else to restrain and abandon an impulse arising in accordance with the pleasure principle. And this interplay of pleasure principle checked by reality principle is obviously fundamental to all motivation and values, being crucial because happiness comes in meeting ones needs for capable interaction with responsible others, partaking together in that very interplay of pleasure and reality principles that imbues living with meaningful relevance and autonomy.

“You have to give to the world the thing that you want the most, in order to fix the broken parts inside you.” — Eve Ensler

Indeed, all values, even so much as survival instinct to begin with, cannot be logically reducible, but simply a matter of human nature, biological and in that way indeed arbitrary. For as Socrates famously argues, how can the oblivion after death be any more painful than the oblivion before birth? Nevertheless, just as the false characterization of all science as Reductionism is often deployed for launching argument from ignorance and lack of imagination, likewise moral Nihilism and even Nihilistic value destruction is falsely thrust upon us as the only default position without firm grounds upon the certified word of God. But in the immortal words of Protagoras,

"Man is the measure of all things." In truth, morality and ethics no less than aesthetics or taste are a values, qualities regarded as having desirable worth or utility, and as are all values including survival itself, especially values of democracy, unless utterly and unnaturally abstract and ideal or just arbitrary and dogmatic, are not Ontology but subjective and redolent with meaning in the deepest sense relevantly derived from the motivation, including and transcending mere vested interest, of human needs evolved first for survival and beyond, survival, pleasure principle, sympathy, culture to stave off boredom even without danger and violence, ultimately the gratifiable but insatiable attraction to new and fresh challenge and growth toward self-actualization or at least freedom and autonomy, without which purpose life itself threatens Zen futile Ecclesiastical vanity! and suicidal ennui of Deathism is even known to ensue. Indeed: To be, or not to be?

People seldom quite understand what they want. Freudian transference love is the associative projection in the mind of fantasies onto a real person who somehow or other strikes a chord. Eliciting values in order to build rapport, which is the sensation of comfortable harmonious mutual understanding as from relating well to one another, denotes the sensitivity and autonomy supportive respect of psychoanalytically and dialectically drawing another to ponder and to reveal their unique profoundly motivating individual intangible true deepest end yearned for emotional state or experience, simply how they like to feel, as opposed to their more superficial means desires, typically concrete tangible things, phenomena, situation or circumstances, and especially qualities in others, merely howsoever associated or expected to help achieve or attain the former. Indeed, emotional motivation of inner life, is externally relevant only in response to circumstances, favorable or unfavorable.

By every Technique of Suspense plotting, the rising tension and of dramatic conflict signifies that the resolution of whatever the central problem is such as to increasingly press character(s) inevitably to take action in struggle with whoever or whatever the antagonist in some way that must one way or another bring the very values of said character(s) into question for them, even the very most intrinsic values that define character by consistently taking priority over other clearer and simpler motivating interests and concerns, often extrinsic.

The very question of value also is further elaborated in the quest for that which is dubbed moral science, with many useful and fairly concise definitions and explanations compiled and correlated. But the grab-bag remains still somewhat ill sorted no thanks to somewhat confused holism, in that there are also certain key distortions of to be well wary of:

Indeed, all that is said of value judgment as a complaint, is very true, but in actuality unproblematic. For the rejection of ego, the ego being the font of perfectly valid and meaningful value judgment, is a position though couched in Eastern terms, that is nevertheless identical with the very Western mistrust of human nature, a mistrust rightly denounced, being evil by the very adequate humanistic definition of evil proffered, specifically: denigration of legitimate need fulfillment, the railing against desire.

Certainly, biology has every part in most profound motivation, but sociology can never be discounted or despised either. Neither nature nor nurture need negation. Indeed, the loftiest goals ever put forth, of self-actualization, a concept much abused, must never overlook nor overshoot first the more concrete imperatives toward autonomy requiring a healthy ego, no less worthy to be extolled though, and alas, they are not, regardless how what passes for education, exemplar of the social evils mounted against developmental autonomy, is accurately and rightly denounced.

And the confusion can only be compounded by the ad hoc non sequitur inaccuracies of Taoist objectivity demands plus transcendental hand waving, obfuscating the entire point of the humanist legitimacy and even loftiness of worldly subjectivity so unjustly and disastrously despised in the East no less than in the West.

They say that there is no disputing matters of taste. And yet, the saying is observably false. For not only are matters of taste disputed and argued every day, but even, sometimes, quite sensibly, even meaningfully. Indeed, by exercises and studies in art appreciation, the tastes of other people, individually and culturally, can be better understood even if not quite reciprocally embraced. Which is, upon reflection, quite surprising! How can it ever be possible, and by what Epistemological Methodology, to argue Aesthetics sensibly, when taste is manifestly so subjective, quite beyond any proper Ontology?

Indeed, in drama, the aesthetics of which are very much bound up in the morality explored, though even the classical rules of drama can never be so steadfast as physical laws, nevertheless, without any critical disposition in the labor of writing, readable and compelling fiction is unlikely to result. But why so? As to the question of Aesthetic validity, there may be a clue in that Musicology can discover, discern and even most anciently mathematically express the characteristics and proportion not only of harmony but also, in modern times, of melody, musical pattern pleasing to the human ear. Such accomplishment suggests that as well as obvious culture and individuality, there may actually be an innate neurological component even to artistic taste. Corn ball cliché aside, there may even be some truth to beauty after all!

Moreover, Aesthetics is a value. So, might such as the above discovery regarding Aesthetics also in any way somehow also pertain to other values, particularly and most crucially, morality and ethics? Or, indeed, are ethics and morality nothing but arbitrary questions of taste? Clearly, no less that with Aesthetics, morality and ethics are rooted in human nature. And given the premise at all, somehow, sensible discussion ensues every day.

To attempt consistent description is to seek to know truth (to attempt to locate and identify correspondence to reality in assertions) in generalization, in ethics and morality no less than any other field of inquiry, despite the inter-subjectivity of values. Integrity, after all, is of the human condition.

The best that can be asserted is only as to the objective reality of subjectivity itself, of the Phenomena as some sort of ongoing event, simply rejecting whatever trivializing Reductionism. Hence, morality cannot be derived logically because morality is Altruistic, arising by way of sympathy, love recognizing the selfish needs of others as well as one's own, so that bonding becomes possible. Indeed, the dramatic exploration of moral dilemmas depends very much upon the emotions and sympathies evoked, or else the work fails and falls flat. But, regardless of recognizable or foreseeable consequences whatsoever, any motivation to responsibility at all, selfish needs to begin with, growth in the pursuit of self-actualization or at least freedom and autonomy, whatever will to power, the avoidance of pain and pursuit of pleasure, even self preservation, survival instinct, even for oneself, let alone, by love, caring and Altruistic extension, to others, are not logically derivable. For, to reiterate, as Socrates put it, how can the non existence after death be any more distressing or unpleasant than the non existence before birth? Indeed, what is more logical than Nirvana Principle, the Draconian escape from subjective suffering by reducing one's needs by abrogating all sense of identity, ego? Only developmental psychology recapitulating evolution at all explains first of all selfish concern let alone Altruism and therefore morality at all which can no more be logically validated than selfishness in the first place. Likewise God remains, at best, entirely non sequitur to the question of morality.

Nor is God actually necessary for arguing Nirvana Principle, self abnegation and the rejection of attachments from the subjectivity of identity, either, let alone whatever values either way, neither the innate values deriving from human needs nor even such Draconian pragmatism as to reject them all wholesale. Clearly, beginning from argument from ignorance and lack of imagination, Theism offers a specious morally non sequitur Appeal to Authority readily deployed by every side of any issue. For better or worse, worshipers tend to rationalize and project into their religion, whatever the content of their own character. Indeed, a successful scripture is one so bleached of distinctive original background over time, that it so readily adapts to each new era in turn.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of Psychoanalysis, classified religion under “obsessional neurosis”, suggesting that a belief in a God was the result of an “immature infantile helplessness” to then seek comfort in the fantasy of an omnipotent protector. In Freud's assessment, religion is to blame for people living repressed, unhappy and cheerless lives. Indeed, recent studies likewise correlate religion and Theism with animism as a coping mechanism for loneliness. Hence it must come as little surprise how in order to remain at all responsible and capable, so many people compartmentalize Theistic religion away from other thought, in order to prevent impact upon practical decisions and behavior.

Heteronomy, the very opposite of autonomy, is by conditioned preference from bitter experience with whatever sort of actual punishment and reward systems, especially school, the internalization of submission as part of ones own sense of what is good and moral behavior, even the conflict aversion characteristic of Stockholm Syndrome, conformity beholden to external influences, or subjugation to some external rule; especially as contingent upon a covertly dependant and immature lack of the needed empathy to relate to others with any caring, consideration, moral compass, principled criticality, freedom or self-determination, wherein acutely refined and hypersensitive social intelligence to vested interest develops in compensation for such impaired emotional intelligence, hence even a deep and ostensibly high-minded contempt towards all self regard and the rejection of individual responsibility in all of it's manifest subjectivity (hence risk of error in forming an opinion or the snare of intolerance by taking any stand at all), as any source of ethical obligations or of moral behavior, exhorting instead, reliance upon any manner of worldly or transcendent authority or upon any certitude substitute especially consensus, "providing structure," leading in turn, to stifling authoritarianism even however arbitrary, in desperate preservation of order whatsoever from the decidophobic perceived dire threat of individual hedonism and laziness.

Know thy self, thy place and station in life, and the truth of your destiny will set you free from uncertainty, because behavioral structure will always inform you exactly where you stand. Such was the heteronymous authoritarian conformist admonition of the Oracle at Delphi.

The positive value of personal autonomy enfolds that of self-integration resistant to the ego-alien denial characteristic of whatever heteronymously "appropriate" mold. Hence, full autonomy, the real and effective capacity to develop and pursue ones own conception of a worthwhile life, can often be extremely difficult, but at all more readily achievable under however more socially supportive conditions. There can be no preparative inculcation for autonomy, save by the practice thereof.

Autonomy and heteronomy in manifest tension are the foment of Biblical drama. Atheism is merely an expression of autonomy, and scientific rationalism no more than the Epistemology of autonomy. Thus the question evaded in seeking to reconcile science and faith, reason with unreason, becomes the struggle how to reconcile autonomy and heteronomy. And the answer is only by each watering down the other. And exactly therein lies the appeal, such as may be, even to eat ones cake and have it too, or so to pretend. The real problem may be that the inability of the panicked and guilt ridden heteronymous to understand autonomy as anything more than sheer Id, selfish impulse, and all they so misguidedly seek in appeal to heteronomy is merely redemption via sanity and balance through self abnegation, alas typically only becoming ever more tyrannical with mounting inner conflict.

Moreover, according to research, cross-culturally and therefore even regardless of explicit value of autonomy, individuals with a lower discrepancy between their actual and ideal self-concept report higher levels of well-being and individuals’ actual self-concept tends to be closer to their ideal self-concept when they benefit from the experience of relationship and interaction with truly respectful (autonomy supportive) partners. So, clearly, the exchange of autonomy support, in other words: authentic respect, is crucial to functional close friendship, autonomy itself being, after all, distinct from self sufficiency. And whereas love and understanding cannot and should not be summoned forth on command, respect may be a more appropriate expectation and a good habit in relating to others.

It is often quipped that those who can't do, teach (and that those who can't teach, teach gym!). But why, indeed, are teachers as a breed, so crushed and helplessly paralyzed? Just what is their damage? Absurdly, rather than firmly resolving as soon as safely practical, to end plainly destructive scholastic oppression, granting freedom and even establishing whatever necessary democracy to mitigate conditions of daily student captivity not to mention their own captive and sore travails! [the French word for 'labor,' literally: suffering] teachers motivated by enduringly blind heteronymous vested interest instead remain intent as directed, upon the Quixotic doomed effort of lunatic faith and doublethink sleight of mind, somehow to integrate and reconcile autonomy so terrifying to them, as a component enfolded within their desperate security blanket of heteronomy, the desperate and fantastical enterprise of reconciliation, autonomy and heteronomy watering down one another.

Precisely thus, our secular educational system nevertheless still rooted in traditions of the church patronage, remains no more or less than the institutional Fifth Column of dedicated loving but insulting Totalitarian patronizing condescension within democratic society alas still too cowardly and contemptuous to trust the worthiness of our own children or even adult college students (therefore, when if ever??), as to be curious enough on their own without exactly such constantly mounting, pressurizing and ultimately crushing abuse guaranteed to quickly erode any joy of autonomous curiosity.

But worse, precisely such societal cowardice and contempt is unsuspectingly internalized by children subjected to manipulatively devious and systematic indoctrination to insecure paralytic heteronomy, so that they can never trust others or even especially themselves ever to be curious enough on their own without exactly such constantly mounting, pressurizing and ultimately crushing abuse guaranteed to quickly erode any joy of autonomous curiosity. In brief, in order to function at all, they become helplessly addicted to coercion, from wherever coercion can be found.

If anyone is ever observed to prefer eating junk food and memorizing sports trivia to studying math and working hard at it, there are at least two competing explanatory hypotheses: One is that human beings from childhood are naturally impulsive, lazy and hedonistic, and the other, quite simply, is that people are routinely traumatized from childhood by school but less often by their hobbies. Alas, the latter is as yet recognized only as a complicating cofactor at best, while the former has never properly come into doubt, in blithe denial of theoretical inelegance and preponderance of evidence. Thus, to typical heteronymous authorities and functionary teachers, the quite unpalatable risk in any fundamental alternative, is in simply respecting the individual right also perhaps possibly to reject unwanted education. Because, what then? If no one is coerced one way or another, indeed, if one day automation finally puts an end to chores and busy work, then how will anything ever get done and what will be the point of living?

It's still all for your own good, dear! -even if we dare no longer proclaim that: "pressure makes diamonds!"

Indeed, such insult as patronizing condescension that after all comes of love can be less painful than insult that comes without it, or more so, or equally so, as the case may be: but be that as it may, it is, in any case significantly more harmful. This is because insult provokes anger and hostility, but hostility towards people who even sincerely profess to love you and act on your own best interest is curbed and turned inwards, internalized, and experienced as self-hostility, namely guilt.

Precisely such deceptive appeals undermining the target’s credulity and defenses even whilst actually exercising coercion constitute often likewise internalized insecure flagrantly manipulative behavior, conscious or unconscious; because, beyond bypassing and overwhelming aware intellect and good sense by the adroit application of such motivating emotional triggers as guilt, fear, spite, temptation and flattery, a prime function of manipulation is simply to disarm individual resistance to coercion by rationalizing said coercion as reasonable, fair, moderate or even benign and benevolent, but anything except what it is: coercion. .

In brief, however deplored by Edward Vockell, Ph.D may be the application of external extrinsic motivation even where internal intrinsic motivation and value is absent, fulfilling internal and intrinsic motivation being howsoever preferable to oppressive extrinsic motivation, teachers are still not charged by the expert and authoritative likes of Edward Vockell, Ph.Dl simply to facilitate and aid in the fulfillment of whatever varying needs and desires of students themselves, to respectful autonomy support, but rather still, however adaptively, to inculcate curriculum and even socialization by whatever motivation necessary, fair or foul and without respect. Indeed, where, according to Edward Vockell, Ph.Dl, extrinsic motivation (often) must(!) be employed initially, then only temporarily, because "extrinsic motivators may lead to merely short-range activity while actually reducing long-range interest [...] Therefore, it is essential that extrinsic motivators be backed up by intrinsic motivators or that the extrinsic motivation become internalized", indeed, by the correct application of behavioral modification. But behavioral internalization is never classified properly and honestly as manipulative and uncritical indoctrination, whereas education, in distinction from indoctrination, professes to foster unfettered critical thinking in quest for truth, free of insecure corrupting vested interest.

Because, after all, while teachers naturally want students to flourish, responsible and accountable to themselves, we all need to be sure that this will be the right kind of responsibility for members of society! -Alas, the tone of irony here is my own, not the shamelessly straight-faced educators. And the right kind of autonomy, so-called, is nothing less than exactly the bright eyed and bushy tailed loyal exuberant enthusiasm that ordinary kids mock, fools that we are, such virtuous inhibition indeed very limitedly autonomous in seriousness and initiative exceeding mere obedience. For such is the reward of unreserved goody two-shoes internalization and surrender of individual identity via unconscious uncritical osmosis, such prized characteristics of the hand full of truly well adapted students, that are never actually taught any more than good study habits or socialization and popularity. And if they can do it, then why not everybody else? That is why we malcontents have no one to blame but ourselves, and should line up chomping at the bit to have our useless and obstreperous spirits broken, right? Where's our school spirit of enthusiasm?

In the bad old days, the school system was an obstacle course designed for placement of the individual within a stratified society. And such remains the case, but no longer politically correct to honestly admit. Indeed, a most remarkable aspect of modern scholastic indoctrination, rife with such patronizing condescending hypocritical doublethink, is how scholastic indoctrination strives to avoid indoctrinary bias and indeed content at all except, without saying, as to the urgency of putative need for scholastic indoctrination itself and also for the putative imperative of socialization, all thereby theoretically leaving wide open a vast and free range of critical thinking, indeed so long as it remain entirely abstract with no risk of action and change. The real goal of timid reform as embraced by the likes of Edward Vockell, Ph.D is is only the same desperate and fantastical enterprise of reconciliation, autonomy and heteronomy watering down one another, autonomy to rescue heteronomy, even whist constrained and stifled thereby and even under the pretence all vice versa.

And the low percentage of success in production of blithe uncomplicated and high functioning true believers, the leaders of tomorrow with "the right kind of autonomy," is of course only taken as a spur to renew faith and strive even harder, rather than, perish forbid! legitimate cause for doubt, acknowledgment of fallibility, and to consider instead the by far more responsible risk management entailed in the honest demands of respect for student autonomy. After all, leaders of tomorrow still need their damaged minions and sycophants.

Yes, the challenge of student motivation aside, whether in the most harsh and brutal competitive arena of old or the worst "No Child Left Behind" misguidedly egalitarian reformist cultivation of sheer ersatz Harrison Bergeron mediocrity of today, should ever compulsory education fail, naturally it remains entirely acceptable for the student to be chided and blamed via a bad grade despite being captive with little real free choice, the risk from true unique independent individual mistakes remaining still so terrifying a responsibility for all concerned! Indeed, nowadays, mischievous schoolchildren may be "consequenced." But such parlance is even more transparently Orwellian. Alas, even given, obviously, how external and therefore extrinsic motivation often indeed arises situationally, nevertheless "providing structure," the inductivist deliberate behavioral engineering of external extrinsic motivation is also never honestly and responsibly named as: systematic punishment and reward, doomed to stifling demoralized failure exactly as already explained and acknowledged quite sufficiently by the author himself Edward Vockell, Ph.D, even as he extols exactly such tactics, even if only in such deviously and manipulatively ostensible moderation!

Alas, the truth remains that even given that the application of discipline may ever be necessary and appropriate in matters of conduct such as to simply in defense of our rights from one another as from bullying, the application of discipline as punishment and reward to extrinsically motivate learning remains as failed and doomed an enterprise and all around dubious a proposition as ever since the dawn of history and already debunked.

Indeed our tragedy is rooted in the motivating allure of heteronomy, the incapacitating guilty anxiety, fear and and loathing in dread of individual responsibility in the face of uncertainty and risk, and how exactly the sheer futility of artfully minimized indoctrination is, in truth, simply the more insidious than merciful let alone certain or risk free in the manner that true freedom clearly is not. Thence the moral of our story might be how modern education remains insecure and utopist as ever, and the manner in which inflexible grand and overreaching responsibilities to desired results however lofty, only end in rationalizing the most flagrant irresponsibility even regarding minimally acceptable daily conduct of educators simply not to bully and abuse power, even however deviously and manipulatively (and of the expertly guided administration not to actually demand such evil of teachers), never mind simply to freely provide educational service with immediate, attractive and yes: intrinsic end-user appeal in service to stimulus need and therefore better conducive to real individual growth. Indeed, so thin runs their faith in democracy as to dismiss democratization as utopist because there can be no guarantees of certainty.

If ever there was any desiccated and malignant creed actually living down to the most morbid fears regarding Godless and soulless materialism, then it is indeed Behaviorism, denying any independent significance of the mind and holding that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept but even downright superstitious, all Reductionistically premised upon the proposition that behavior can be researched scientifically without recourse to inner mental states. Hence, Behavior Modification howsoever dubiously promises practical results by abandoning or at least deferring, the quest for knowledge and understanding, only as consistent with the Philosophy of Science named: Instrumentalism, sometimes supported by perfectly accurate historical observation of at least instances of engineering, even such as the very discovery of fire, not to mention care for emotionally troubled people, advancing ahead of science, of application actually preceding viable hypothesis or theory. The problem therein, however, is not so much Epistemological as Methodological: Doubtless, Epistemologically, it truly has come to pass, that investigation of surprising engineering innovations no less than discoveries in nature, do indeed advance science greatly.

But simply refusing to apply scientific investigation at all, much less adherence to Scientific Method, in development of viable technology if it doesn't yet exist, is folly. And devoted deep study into a procedure that clearly doesn't actually work, will likely be fruitless, except for purposes of propaganda and indoctrination. Indeed, as with Theology, and in desperate Cretinous mimesis of quantitative Hard Science, Behaviorism is yet another misanthropic body of rationalization in order to devalue and trivialize the true richness of human relationship and stimulus needs along such fundamental innate impulses of autonomy even as curiosity, rational healthy skepticism and systematic doubt, as nothing much of a loss to be blithely suppressed or conditioned out, in favor of the peace promised by the attainment howsoever of heteronymous uncritical confidence, in a word: of faith, even however blind. And even good engineering requires better vision or problem statement than that!

Because, indeed, just as the saying goes, it's always nice to know where one stands. But it is also well said that there can always be such as too much of a good thing! Patronizing Behaviorism simply assumes that the failure to conform is most easily remedied by simply dumbing down the challenge for the patient under howsoever irrelevant and alienating contrived circumstances and structured environments. But such does nothing towards beneficially reforming and improving mainstream procedural transparency in order better to abet meaningful and purposeful undertaking out in the world at large.

Whereas the old Confessional perpetually facilitates the exchange of old guilt for new, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy strives for improved relief from shame and guilt, warranted or unwarranted, towards the liberation and discovery to pursue whatever autonomous individual desires. Behaviorism, however, is scarcely above manipulative exploitation of shame or guilt towards the sole objective, ostensibly therapeutic or otherwise, of Behavior Modification, being as ever, subject compliance, plain and simple.

An heteronymous heavily structured and controlled social environment, perhaps such as some sort of halfway house, cult, or military school, may seem desirable and reassuring for an extremely decidophobic anomied personality in utter panic before life. By contrast, meaningful value driven structure going unrecognized in the Nihilism of Behaviorist heteronomy, is crucial not only to democracy, due process and Scientific Method, but also likewise to the antithesis as played out in Transactional Analysis, seeking liberation from headgames, ulterior transactions, from a combination of conscious insight and even frustration unto extinction, behaviorally, of the ulterior transaction or: headgame. But extremely disturbed personalities are often well known even instead to panic and wildly escalate their headgames when subjected to the antithesis. Hence, hypothetically, a heavily structured Transactional Analysis might be necessary for playing the antithesis while also completely blocking such an escalation, thereby bringing about a dramatic breakdown of whatever pathological adaptation, often first necessary before replacing it with anything better and healthier. Whereas, by contrast, for any more responsible and autonomous individual simply yearning for the encouragement of perceiving and understanding better more optimal alternatives, coercion or restriction will be entirely unwelcome. Indeed, any behavioral extinction via the antithesis in Transactional Analysis, is never really tolerated by the patient except because of the patients' intrinsic motivation from Psychodynamic values accrued, of truth, insight, catharsis and intimacy. Self control tends to be by far the more debilitating under pressure or manipulation than from at all intrinsically motivated free choice inspired by meaningful values.

But in Behaviorism, much as the sport of golf is often recommended as an activity in order to ameliorate professional feelings of helplessness via the cultivation of even so completely an entirely arbitrary competency as that of playing golf, similarly, robotically dehumanizing Behaviorism which studies behavioral patterns as shaped and conditioned entirely by incidental situational forces, applies said body of observation by "providing structure," supplying however humdrum and arbitrary routine of deliberately contrived and consistent typical authoritarian punishment and reward systems, all avowing no other purpose than of sustaining predictable negative and positive reinforcement in the environment, a patronizing malagenda of sheer useless and pointless heteronomy. In providing structure, Behaviorism merely caters to heteronomy, presumed entirely natural and given rather than adaptive and particular, without admission that autonomy ever existed previously even as a possibility or value of responsibility, thereby promoting a unique rightthink implicitly denying likewise the very possibility of indoctrination as such. For the very concept of indoctrination presumes autonomy to assault in the first place. For the very crime itself erases the evidence, flushed right down the memory hole, neatly rewriting history, at least via circuitous reasoning in the glazed eyes of the willfully blind, perpetrators and victims alike. The very cognate of indoctrination is long stricken from the Behaviorist Newspeak Dictionary.

Thus Behaviorism and certainly Behavior Modification engages in nothing less than Post Modern cynical Nihilistic value destruction and dysfunctional conditionality, with conformism as the default definition of successful strife free adaptation, and the one consistent treatment goal of simply obtaining compliance. Behaviorism promotes defeatism and glorifies lowered expectation, anathema to giftedness. Because even though theoretically there is no reason why greater confidence, resistance, improved assertiveness and even better competence, could not all be attempted via some regimen of behavioral conditioning, first of all, that's the approach of motivational speaking which simply doesn't work, and secondly, values and expectations of aggression and bluster aside, social adaptation in civil society is simply assumed by B. F. Skinner to be essentially conformist, chameleonic and ultimately submissive. Hence, even though education is supposed to be somehow or other entirely distinct from indoctrination, nevertheless the perception that indoctrination remains integral to education persists not despite nut because of how indoctrination is intrinsically harmful to autonomy. So Behaviorism, behavioral conditioning and modification, sheer insecure manipulation in education, is all as wrongheaded as conceivable! Indeed, classroom routine planned down to the very minute, so called:: the structured lesson, in abhorrent anathema of all spontaneity, is the darling of educational pseudoscience. -As by the brazen effrontery even to insinuate that democracy, featuring agendas, civility, dialectic, due process, criticality and even Scientific Method and more, the very quest for value or meaning in the deepest sense, is all sheer anarchy utterly lacking in structure or benefit of any kind. Behaviorist structure continually erodes genuine spontaneity for all involved.

Of course, neurochemistry and even neuroplasticity, neurological development and brain structure over time, are all bound to reflect changing emotion, cognition and accumulated experience. But there are also clear special cases of the reverse, of emotion instead subordinate to neurochenical fluctuation, as for examples: puberty and menopause. Hence, arguing from sheer stubborn lack of imagination and circuitous reasoning, simply ignoring rather than howsoever investigatively eliminating all that is well known applicably regarding traumatic and environmental causation, springs forth the myth of endogeny, of congenital neurochemically spontaneous anxiety among other chronic cognitive or emotional states, together with the Stress Vulnerability Model of Psychiatric disorders being flawed only in how what is called: biological vulnerability is, again, no determinant on it's own, being, of course, actually universal and even generally uniform in the human condition.

The brain of a suicide is autopsied, and low levels of epinephrine are discovered. Thence is confidently concluded that low levels epinephrine caused suicidal depression! Of course, depression is well known to be reflected in lowered low levels of epinephrine, because depression is reactive. And the psychodynamics of chronic moods, of unresolved traumas from the past and issues in the present, not to mention whatever real problems in life, are all well understood. But all of that can simply be ignored in favor neurochemical Reductionism supported by ever the same circuitous reasoning, beginning and concluding in therefore the same dubious premise. And of course, neurological diagnosis of psychiatric condition indicates likewise neurological treatment, barbaric neurosurgical interventions fallen from favor, giving way to the growth industry of psychopharmacology and, by similar pseudoscientific pretense, Behaviorism.

Indeed, clearly the determinant is not nature but nurture, indeed: nature via nurture [Matt Ridley]. The natural mechanisms that make the effects of nurture are mow better understood than ever before. Obviously, neurological heredity, biological evolved behavioral genetic nature, only and fairly consistently enables the Empirical capacities for learning by encoding from the Phenomena, from experience, from nurture, to begin with. Experience is also now understood to trigger epigenetic change in genetic expression. (Indeed, there is even the case of identical twins, one Autistic and the other not. And also, let me tell you: Anyone convinced that Asperger's is something that cannot be brought about by personal experience of the environment, was never raised in my family!) Fraudulent obfuscation and denial to the contrary on either count, are only the current preferred high powered junk science marketing tactic of the Psychopharmacolical industry, pandering to compassion burn out and desperation, "soullessly" mocking and trivializing such cherished illusions as the yearning for understanding and with them all Philosophically meaningful values arising from the deep wellsprings of human emotional needs and motivation. In truth, we simply remain confounded by the impact of experience within the human condition.

One of many known defense mechanisms is the specific denial of connection between distress and the reason thereof. But the confusion engendered ultimately only increases the distress. And whereas it used to be that when a patient complained of sudden and terrifyingly mysterious anxiety out of the blue with no trigger, administering the old talking cure, the Therapist would then gently ask the patient what they just happened to be thinking of at the time, however supposedly unconnected and irrelevant to whatever mysterious attacks from out of the blue, and guide them past their denial into catharsis and insight by reestablish the broken connection; nowadays instead it has become variously more fashionable actually for the Therapist to join the patient in denial, and facilitate renewed reaction formations in ever deepening the denial by means of heavy medication. For disregarding the mind and denying and mocking all Phenomenological pertinence of Ontological circumstances, still leaves the physical brain, therefore Behaviorism is routinely called into service in standing support of neurochemical Reductionism along with the myth of endogeny, comprising the long refuted blanket rationale for so all to often reckless Psychopharmacology.

So long as Psychotherapy is practiced as any sort of branch of medicine, then the very question of medical ethics applies. In ugly truth, Behaviorism, behavioral conditioning and modification is simply unprofessional. indeed, an abomination, malpractice, sheer a'priori abrogation of Medical Ethics, because the core tenet of all Medical Ethics is the Hippocratic Oath, and as derived in specific application to Psychotherapy, the Freudian injunction against suggestion or conditionality. For just as the physician strives to minimize harm to the absolutely necessary and unavoidable trade off, the therapist must strive never to usurp the freedom of the patient howsoever by insinuating his or her own will over the patient, because Freud discovered even the strongest suggestion as in hypnosis, to be ephemeral and useless at best and harmful at worst, raising conflict or bringing about further repression and additional reaction formation, let alone as chemically assisted. Indeed, Freud concluded that any kind of persuasion, even the best advice as such, is generally transitory and useless at best, in dealing with deep-seated and debilitating emotional inner conflict, and harmful at worst, either humiliating the patient and destroying trust, or building further layers of reaction formation and denial, as clearly manifest in dealing with anyone in real distress, let alone seriously disturbed personalities, indeed no less, under such circumstances, than the predictable failure of good advice and sweet reason. And no matter how frustrating the patient, like unto the Zen Master, the Psychotherapist must strive ever to retain cool professional detachment and compassion, bringing no agenda of their own, no investment, no axe to grind for any reason. No matter how well intended, to manipulatively persuade and beguile the patient into lowering defenses without addressing inner conflict and helping bring it to the surface, instead to implant suggestion against the patients inclinations, can only cause debilitating emotional harm at best. And all that is exactly why instead, Psychodynamic Therapy indeed strives to disarm and encourage the patient to relax repressive self control but in order to discover and pursue self direction, as much as possible unbiased by repressive suggestion. As associated trauma resurfaces in personal narrative (memory being reconstructive by nature), the release and closure of catharsis is achieved and insight dawns, even likewise to cast liberating reasonable doubt upon hither to intractable patent locked paralytic guilt complexes and the like, shielded in denial, and thereby return repressed desires, truth and understanding to the surface, in order to liberate the patient to any range of their own free willed choices imaginable rather than any conditioned "correct" direction. -Although, Freud's colleague, Alfred Adler, differed from Freud, dialectically, opining that at some point, if need be, the therapist might as well speak candidly instead of forever beating about the bush with the patient. After all, Freud also famously cautioned: "That which is not expressed, is acted

out,." And when the Psychotherapist acts

out, typically so via insinuation and suggestion. Therefore this is to be avoided as scrupulously as possible.

Behaviorism, then, has been a doomed effort from the beginning, standing utterly refuted and ideologically bankrupt even so saliently well in advance.

And the answer of Behaviorism to this entire problem from the beginning, has been simply to ignore it. The ideology of Behaviorism, fallen victim to it's own Reductionist Post Modern Nihilistic value destruction, not to mention flagrant scientism (the veritable religion of science), is faking it until they make it, ritualistically bent upon magical cargo-cult mimesis, pretending until it will all come true. And why not? After all, they recognize only in behavior itself as at all real:

Now, it is all fine and good to criticize Freud, professionally and even personally, indeed thereby to rediscover the flawed humanity of so influential a thinker. -Even if Freud himself worked with rather than against any propensity of the patient to cast the Therapist into a larger than life God-like role, also shouldering the Therapist with tremendous responsibilities for keeping so open eyed an even keel before the patient drawn into vulnerability and often unstable, indeed reciprocally so often prone to ensnare and agitate the Therapist, all with such high expectations of transference love setting up the inevitable let out with the discovery of human fallibility of for all intents and purposes, of the therapist in whatever role projected by the patient. All the same, there is no end of controversy is the quest to account for Psychotherapeutic success and failure. Freud's own explanations for Psychiatric cure have come under continual fire as inadequate at best. Indeed, the famed critic of Psychiatry, Thomas Szasz is among those declaring that we scarcely know why Psychotherapy works when it does, and doesn't when it doesn't, even going so far as to opine that, first and foremost, Psychotherapy is helpful simply because anyone is encouraged by attention! Not only is there always a steady stream of renewed attack upon the failure and unreliability of Psychodynamics, but also ever more innovative attempts to explain the enduring successes of Psychodynamics as well. Indeed, speaking simply or indeed not so simply after all, of attention exactly as such, we do all live in an attention economy. Indeed, to quote Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” And this is because sheer curiosity of human interest is the first agent of compassion, and therefore attentive comprehension as applicable to empathy, let alone sympathy and compassion, are qualitatively irreducible to pandering or conditional approval as in relentless Behaviorist trivialization. Among the most important long standing criticisms of Psychodynamics, is that testable prediction is unreliable because no particular stimulus, no matter how averse or conversely how cathartic, seems entirely reliable in the production of any resultant pathology or conversely, cure, either way. Still, that is far from a refutation neither of the hypothesis that experience of the environment can cause, and generally is the cause of, psychopathology and suffering, likewise of healing, nor of the hypothesis that drawing narrative from personal biography gleaning personal association and emotion in the mind of the patient between pathology and memories of the past as well as issue in the present, can be an is often helpful and curative. However, such is the baffling and nigh chimerical challenge of human nature and the human condition. that there can be no guarantees of results or how long it will take, and every reason to fear all manner of suffering dredged back up to consciousness and re-experienced, the sheer displeasure even if whatever feared risk is actually quite minimal and rare. So, all in all, much as in life and human experience to begin with, the commitment remains frighteningly open ended. Indeed, all therefore, it is all fine and good to wish for something more reliable or even simply more precise for the sake of clear and distinct Empirical testabity, not to mention therapeutic results or living life at all, than as reflected in our essentially Freudian legacy of Psychodynamic diagnosis and treatment or for that matter as most anciently in study of the human condition as through drama. Precise quantification is not and end in and of itself to science, but merely a desirable adjunct to clear conditions of refutation necessary to testability nevertheless still at all possible even in qualitative soft science. And so, speaking of poignant dramatic circumstances, merely wishing for hard science doesn't make it so and never has, and certainly not for the doomed effort of Behaviorism, behavioral conditioning and modification, simply resolving to ignore all that which continues to challenge scientific inquiry while so deeply stirring human affect. In truth, we simply remain confounded by the impact of experience within the human condition. Although, who can say? just perhaps there may be better hope for more precise and therefore more readily testable hypotheses in Psychodynamics, just over the horizon, in the processing of profoundly more copious and detailed personal and interpersonal information on the frontiers of advanced computerized Sociometry.

Arrogant Behaviorist dismissal of Psychodynamic Soft Science, is so clearly premised upon a flawed Verificationist Epistemological Methodology from the beginning: As things stand, though actually not so much the sheer verisimilitude of the real most basics, all manner of conjectures within Psychoanalysis may remains highly speculative, unsupported and even be found out to be wildly off the mark. But such is exactly the fruitful nature and learning curve of science itself, no less than of personal self discovery. There is no certainty or justification, nor need thereof. All hypothesis begins from unfounded conjecture, subjected only thereafter first to such articles of critical preferences such as validity, which is only internal logical consistency, and theoretical elegance, and only then to Scientific Method of evidentiary support and refutation, Empirically. Moreover, simply because the subjectivity of motivation is so slippery, enigmatic and difficult to quantify, is no excuse at all for scientific cowardice shying away therefrom, and does not howsoever signify whatsoever, that the wretched dehumanizing oversimplification of conditioned behavior, despite whatever superficial objectivity all thereof, offers anything remotely adequate either in diagnosis or ministration to the human condition, only the trivialization of value thereof and lowered expectations, with scientism, the propaganda mythologizing science itself, compassion burnout and empty promises of unattained quick reliability. All of that is why some, but by no means all, Behavioral theorists may nowadays be found striving to metaphorically slip at all deeper motivations in via the proverbial back door. What is clear is that here as in what passes for education, likewise the decidophobic heteronymous Reaction against autonomy is so often first expressed and then imposed in the demand for impossible guarantees as of certainty and denial in the form of lunatic faith therein.

A common rationalization of patronizing coercion of students in purposes of what passes for education, is the nasty aphorism: "It's the only language they understand!" But the ugly truth is that such is indeed, the only language, as it where, rather, that the educators themselves speak or comprehend to begin with. Similarly, a common feature attributed to the Autistic spectrum including also Asperger's Syndrome, is weakness of Emotional Intelligence, if not absence if not of empathy, then literal sympathy, or even what is called: theory of mind, if not awareness or acknowledgement of other minds, than modeling and understanding thereof, of perspective, POV, Point Of View, thoughts and needs, motivation of other people. And exactly being also, as we may recall, no less a primary doctrinal tenet (or: psychiatric feature?) of Behaviorism as well! All thus given, Medication and Behavioral Modification being the only recognized treatment options for Autism and Asperger's, such is truly a case of the mind blind leading the mind blind! Which is truly malpractice misleading the public, because none of the latter salient most basic information is actually made plain to the patient, and certainly never prior to patient consent for treatment.

Alas, Psychodynamic Therapy is accepted merely as helpful only in processing and coping with the suffering caused, but not at all the condition itself, of Autism or of Asperger’s. Funny thing, though: the notoriously vague and ever expanding category of Asperger's or Autism spectrum, remains a syndrome without an etiology, essentially a flagrant non-diagnosis. Except that there is actually a long standing etiology for Autism and Asperger's in, of all places, Psychodynamics, indeed, as the purported result of withdrawn childhood failure of attachment in response to howsoever indifferent care giving, the notorious "refrigerator mom" or at any rate, clearly, some sort of failure of attachment, and presumably caused by or at least associated with some remembered experience personally significant and seriously deep, somewhere in the patient's biography, perhaps even perpetuated as issues in the present. -If not hostility, rejection or invalidation from a care giver, however blatant or subtle, even an early traumatic event such as illness. Indeed, undiagnosed infection swelling the brain, may be the newest culprit. In the face of such a possibility with such monumental epigenetic ramifications, a genetic weakness to such infection is proposed in order to continue surreptitiously defending the myth of endogeny. But there are even identical twins, one severely Autistic and the other entirely normal, with very different brains scans.

Moreover, the most lucid symptomology of Asperger's, remains by comparison to Negative Schizophrenia. Indeed, Schizophrenia is known to appear in the same family history with Autism and Asperger's. But location of Autism and Asperger's upon a continuum together with Psychotic withdrawal, a severe and pervasive attachment disorder to say the least. has for some reason fallen into disfavor. Nevertheless, instinctual perception of the motives and conduct of others, is well understood to suffer when repressed by into denial when subjected to manipulative rationalization and invalidation for another's unsympathetic self-serving abuse of power and hostility. So is it even so much the loss of the patient's instincts, much less their absence congenitally, or more plainly the inculcated insecure mistrust thereof? Indeed, Psychodynamic etiology of Autism and Asperger's, not to mention Psychosis, remains plausible and even Empirically supportable to say the very least. And yet, for whatever reason, there is no Psychodynamic treatment of Asperger’s available. And since there are no Psychodynamic Asperger’s specialists, there is simply no one designated as responsible to implore and demand: Why so? Psychodynamics has simply thrown in the towel and abandoned all patients suffering with Asperger's to the tender mercy of Behavior Modification and Psychopharmacology.

Cognitive Behaviorism views classical behavioral condoning as Inductivist. Worse, Behavior Modification numbers among those misguided ideologies implicitly marshaling Inductivismt in defense of preference towards the Pragmatism or Instrumentalism of Engineering and perhaps Research and Development over investigatory research in pure science and the scientific quest for truth in it's own right, it's own sake, or even for anticipated technological application afterwards.

To be fair, Autism in children as originally classified, has always been so mysterious and ineffable though readily apparent as characterized by introverted withdrawal even as most distinctly expressed in the "unusual grace" with which said children with autism are often said to waft through space. -A grace most distinctly lacking in the Behaviorist dance around uncomfortably begged questions! For over time, the definition of Autism has ever expanded to accommodate different theories of Autism, let alone Asperger's on the Autism Spectrum. And it becomes ever more apparent how the main reason that Asperger's remains a syndrome without an etiology, as manifest in the marked behavioral meme or fad of merely disregarding the obvious and longstanding Psychodynamic etiology of Asperger's as somehow vaguely antiquated, is not because Psychodynamic etiology has ever actually cone to stand refuted or supplanted by any better competing hypothesis, but only because according to the bankrupt and discredited Scientific Method of Behaviorism simply ignoring qualitative Psychodynamics to behind with, the human condition itself can never be anything more than a syndrome without an etiology. For an etiology to account for variations in behavioral response between subjects, raises the ugly specter of qualitative subjectivity and Psychodynamic causation within inner life, anathema to Behaviorism, wherein reside motivations the likes of scientific curiosity that must always be so vigorously conditioned out in the sad pathetic impoverished Behaviorist travesty of the conduct itself science itself as a mere conditioned behavior, as always with cognition at best serving only to inform desired behavior. Unless, of course, Behaviorist where actually to seek to diagnose pathologies in terms of conditioned response as they are supposed to, and perhaps even prescribe treatment by deconditioning instead of the endless dreary and harmful festering band aid solution of blind reconditioning and ever new layers of reaction formation, repression and escalated inner conflict! Indeed, Behavior Modification, no matter how purportedly Cognitive, has entirely spurned Hypothetico Deductive Scientific Method thus abandoning attempt even at entirely Behavioral diagnosis!

Frankly, the diagnostic hurdle seems little more than sheer compassion burnout. There is really little so mysterious about the most common observable Asperger's symptoms: Impaired emotional intelligence, difficulty with intuitive nonverbal communication, often results from self doubt and denial, repression engendered by the experience of constant invalidation or just lack of sympathetic external refection and reinforcement of the individual's own motivating feelings, perspective, POV, Point Of View and perceptions. And whatever odd ticks, gestures and facial expression, obviously manifest inner conflict, easily triggered experientially by circumstances and situation or even by unbidden thoughts and refection amid subjective inner life, also undermining developmental bodily-kinesthesia, even spatiotemporal coordination and physical confidence. The nervous and awkward vulnerable haunted sense of insecurity and rejection, especially when played upon, inspires all the more hostilely and dread that unpopularity might rub off, while even any trace of autonomy and self assertion in lieu of the tightest social embedment and integration, can all be more than enough to provoke heteronymous jealous rage and continual escalation of chronic opportunistic bullying. And most of this can be framed in terms of behavioral conditioning as Psychodynamically. It still all boils down to ongoing cumulative experience of situation.

Alas, for Autism and Asperger's, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy departments even routinely refer to Behaviorists who are seldom if ever known to return the favor, even no matter how clearly and extremely emotionally disturbed the patient. And one day, much as with Freud on his deathbed purportedly bullied by the Medical establishment threatening the very future survival of Psychoanalysis, into his now notorious recantation of the Seduction Theory exposing the taboo problems of incest and child molestation, in favor, instead, of the Fantasy Theory which ostensibly denies but actually slyly implies, the Seduction Theory (because fantasies are inspired by reality, while reciprocally, fantasies can be acted upon), the abandonment of Autism and Asperger's, with obscure telltale breadcrumb trail of hinted confession and all, will likewise be shamefully remembered as yet another scandal of hostility, professional cowardice and bad judgment in Psychotherapy backing down before power and pressure, from a humane but howsoever controversial position, thereby betraying the patient. For just as the rape victims under care of of Psychoanalysis who had first been helped to confront their repressed traumas, where then persuaded that it was all delusional, likewise Aspies and Auties instead of being howsoever compassionately encouraged and guided out from whatever sort of traumatic inward retreat and isolation, instead are now conned into the myth of endogeny and subjected to methods used in brainwashing, mind-numbingly replete with powerful drugs, conditioned new layers of reaction formation, and stultifying pointless busywork in the provision of the supposedly all important but Nihilistically Zen futile and arbitrary providing of structure, all likewise, to reiterate, in violation of the injunction against suggestion and therefore flagrant abrogation of Medical Ethics. -None of which inspires much hope of ever really meeting the needs of twice exceptionality, of Autistic or Asperger's giftedness, let alone the would-be Activist ideal of actually cultivating howsoever unique desirable features thereof.

THE MISBEHAVIOUR OF BEHAVIOURISTS' is a scathing critical attack upon Applied Behavior Analysis in ongoing brutalizing treatment of autistic children, in regards whereof, and irrespective of highly successful diversionary Public Relations, alas, (and much as with education throughout the developed world) the only violence actually outlawed in England and put a stop to, is strictly of the physical variety. -Though, of course, generally most notorious remain the methods used in brainwashing, also found in peer pressure and bullying. No wonder, then, Behaviorism is the darling of our dysfunctional educational system, the cultures have so much misanthropy, heteronomy and anathema of real learning in common.

All cooperation in baffling and perplexing cult initiation persists upon suspended judgment and the hopes that things will begin to make sense later on. And Behaviorism is certainly no exception. Indeed, effort at comprehension is steadily subject to the erosion by frustration unto behavioral extinction. Questions are clearly unwelcome, and persistence only ends unpleasantly. Only dispair acrues from metaphorically swimming against the proverbial tide. Behaviorism, in an unrelenting blizzard of obfuscation and intractable contempt for informed consent, in a constant shell game of ever more dazzling sensational diagnoses, by such classic and powerful bureaucratic diversionary and manipulative behavioral control tactics as drawn out patient referral and intake procedures, along with such misleading propaganda tactics as endless obscure new aliases (a relentlessly shifting obscurantist word salad of all that it at all is, into all that it plainly is not: Neuro/Bio/Cognitive/clinical, etc., etc.). But treatment consistent and relentless no matter, ever wishfully masquerading anew as cutting edge insight even in long discredited neurochemical Reductionism, in failed and botched application to one range of underserved needs and unsolved problems after another in exploitation of the most naive, unsuspecting, vulnerable and trusting in society, is ever seductive to prestigious self overestimating mediocre professional intellects; the highest heteronymous values whereof and by their measure veritably God's greatest gift to humanity in turn so generously propagated to all the teaming unwashed, heteronymously pandering to decidophobic panicked anomie, self absorption, desperation for peace and acceptance with consequent addiction to authoritative routine, the mindlessly conformist providing of structure and stifling routine most arbitrarily, with the one consistent treatment goal of simply obtaining compliance.

By dazzling flimflam of cutting edge diagnosis, by seemingly innocent engagement of trust and compliance into elaborate intake process, and by the dizzying proliferation of one alias after the next and infiltration into one context after another (what lamentably passes for education, the most antisocial of social work, dubious social skills training, bogus support groups, pseudoscientific and antidemocratic politics and policy making, not to neglect mention of those ubiquitous popularity and pick-up gurus), ultimately by crimestop, evasion, reassurance, and finally sheer sullen sulking passive hostility towards salient questions from exhausted and bewildered patients, in contempt of principles of informed consent (after all, consent at all, let alone awareness and comprehension are not a behaviors, but an inner state and deemed scientifically meaningless), thereby perhaps the worst offender in the systematic undermining responsibility in patients, the snake oil of Behaviorism persists in its endlessly authoritative and reputable mischief.

Just as Psychodynamic Therapists themselves undergo an extensive Psychotherapy themselves, in order to gain professional detachment and quick expert diagnostic insight, likewise Behaviorists themselves, under whatever guise, much as with and often actually including: school teachers, may nevertheless also practice as they have always preached, in so far as often being the more behaviorally conditioned themselves, all the more indoctrinated rather that trained or educated as such, into becoming the compulsive manipulators that they are, prizing above all likewise for themselves, behavioral structure, comforting routine providing livelihood. After all, what else have they to fall back upon? The very practice of behavior modification under whatever guise, in the toxic cynical environment of clinical departments of so-called behavioral medicine under whatever guise, using such patronizing methods and dealing with patients so thoroughly conditioned, inevitably results in deep seated dependency, atrophied social skills and seriously impaired problem solving abilities, in short: true stupefying heteronomy. Insensitive blundering practitioners of behavior modification under any guise and in any context, deserve only our pity except that they continue to present so clear and present a danger to society. They are truly the blind misleading the blind.

Under the domineering and quite frankly: socially inept umbrella of Behavioral Medicine, myriad other services including, of course, what passes for education, but also social work, social skills training and various support groups and even both misguided study and dangerous application of politics indeed exactly as pioneered by B. F. Skinner, the father of Behaviorism, all heteronymously are ever jockeying to "provide structure" and obtain patient, client, student or citizen, compliance and convenient trapped docility, essentially in treatment of dissidence. Reactionary Behaviorism marches on in precisely every arena of social reform where Sigmund Freud and the Vienna Circle where historically brutally coerced into backing down from proactively seeking tolerance and societal relaxation of traumatizing repression and taboo, and indeed where Psychodynamics continues to give ground and even patient referral, apparently unreciprocated, unto this very day, to repressive Behavior Modification, smoothing down or beating down those individuals in society that by their existence most provoke guilt at prevailing repression and intolerance. Usually school teachers by training if at all, social skills trainers are the blithe unsuspecting civilian quasi-paramedical political commissars of Behavioral Modification and heteronomy. -the very socially imbedded vanguard of the Reaction. Indeed, there are no qualifications and no professional association for social skills training, submissive compliance or: discipline, being the primary core social skill and single value imparted towards the promise and mystique of social success and fitting in. The work of all such semiskilled practitioners of Behavior Modification, often Linguists and school teachers, is possible because, after all, just as social skills are presumed to be no more than adaptive behavior sets (adaptive, if actually at all, to anyone set of circumstances, but notoriously inflexible to new and novel situations) the very practice of Behavioral Modification is itself likewise no more than a convenient set of conditioned behaviors. For such and no more, is the entire medium of cultural transmission in the first place, according to Behaviorism, again, with the one consistent treatment goal of simply obtaining compliance. As ever, both the motive and the appeal is simple heteronymous vested interest. Again after all, what is a Behaviorist but merely a subject conditioned to behave as a Behaviorist and a compulsive manipulator all in propagation of Behaviorism?

The most prevalent of current ongoing salvage efforts upon Behaviorism, behavioral conditioning and modification, is named: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, incorporating insights derived from Cognitive Philosophy which is a body of self observation of thought patterns and habits even sometimes dubbed: "mental behaviors." A therapist no longer so bent upon manipulation of the patient via behavioral conditioning, remains free instead to concentrate upon behavioral observation and offering therefrom useful feedback in order to bring behavior patterns, emotional triggers and even thinking habits all unawares, to the patient's attention and conscious mind. That, however, only leaves the patient as voluntary partner, if at all, in their own reconditioning. Fair enough, in principle, but falling short of the full measure of required autonomy supportive respect, in the sheer blithe lack of professional empathy. Doctor patient cooperation in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is merely a ploy towards the engineering of patient consent and compliance, not service to the patient. The patient in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy reasonably seeks information regarding any range of howsoever maladaptive behaviors of which they themselves may be quite unaware. If such comes as advice, then it may well simply turn out inadequate in the face of deeper Psychodynamic issues unexamined. But what is perhaps the more disturbing, if such information regarding any range of howsoever maladaptive behaviors of which the patient themselves are unaware, such awareness and cognition often accidently-on-purpose serves as aversive conditioning by humiliating the patient into revising their own behaviors. And this is only consistent with the mandate of Cognitive Behaviorism, to fill the acknowledged gap in classical Behaviorism, cognitively. Because, too many more complex and even obviously goal directed behaviors imply capacity for abstract reasoning, beyond mere Pavlovian conditioned association in which a stimulus initially incapable invocative of a certain response becomes increasingly evocative thereof by repeated pairing with another stimulus that already even innately does evoke said response or reinforcement of behaviors by immediate punishment and reward. Hence, Cognitive Behaviorism is the view of classical behavioral conditioning as Inductivist. In the words of Albert Bandura: “People's level of motivation, affective states, and actions are based more on what they believe than on what is objectively the case.” Indeed, once the subject only reaches any surmise as to what is expected and the consequences, then they can do as they are told. Again, the entire therapeutic goal of Behaviorism remains patient sensitivity to expectations and thence compliance without distress. Or as the sadistic Captain famously admonishes Cool Hand Luke: "What we've got here here, is... failure to communicate!"

Indeed, it appears that Asperger kids don’t learn from consequences! Comparing so-called Neurotypicals [sic.] to packs of dogs and Aspies to unherdable cats? Why not better to vicious lock and step Republicans and timid scatterbrained Democrats? -Heteronomy ever on the march and autonomy in retreat...

So, is Asperger's really anything more than the current euphemism for dissidence, positive disintegration and the loss of heteronymous innocence with the dawning of individual responsible conscience and the awareness of social reality as deliberate and constructed, even often somewhat painfully contrived, rather than blithely natural and organic? That would explain the drugs and brainwash! Be seeing you, Number Six...

The issue is of situation, karma, conduct within dharma, and indeed, the foreseeable causality behind retaliation actually as a true dramatic consequence. If not compliance, what then? Oppression is only ended by effective resistance. And effective resistance requires the cultivation of social aptitude even amongst the likeminded, and organization towards mounting any sort of credible threat of significant retaliation in return. -socially "consequenced" accountability sufficient for putting an end to impunity for bullying and abuse of power under whatever pretext. Alas, while gifted individuals amongst their own true gifted peers, mysteriously no longer require socialization, alas this does not appear to apply similarly amongst highly functioning aspies and auties. The less socially adept, the chronically disorganized, continue to be taken advantage of by the more manipulative, the more socially adept and better organized. What is to be done? After all, resistance is actually more demanding of social aptitude even than compliance and conformity. And there is no school for rebels. Ultimately, who ever we are, even with all the interference and intervention that fills our days or sucks them dry, we are still each and all abandoned to our own devices, to induction, to the puerile guessing games of oppressive social conditioning, myth, propaganda indoctrination and behavioral structure. Whereas democracy, instead, is the ongoing struggle for formalized transparent due process, even in parallel to Scientific Method, lip service aside, all heteronymously dismissed as sheer anarchy.

In truth, whereas Psychodynamic Psychotherapy strives to help patients with such problems as needlessly debilitating shame, and to open up all manner of options in life, out from paralytic inner conflict that renders decision so impossible, by contrast, and despite ostensible cooperation with the patient, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy nevertheless falls back upon the tactics of Behavior Modification by manipulatively exploiting shame from the humiliating exposure, no matter how reasonable, of unawares maladaptive behaviors no matter how subtitle, as an aversive conditioning pressing the unsuspecting patient in whatever explicit direction clearly intended by the Cognitive Behaviorist, in such blatant violation of the injunction against suggestion. In the end, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a ploy in abuse of trust, for manipulatively disarming the patient subjected to Behavioral Conditioning. Cognitive Behaviorism merely posits that along with whatever correct negative and positive reinforcement (systematic punishment and reward), learning and comprehension also necessarily plays a part in conditioning of more sophisticated behaviors. And Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, similarly to what passes for education, merely puts that very principle into application.

But in the immortal words of Alexander Lowen MD: "Conviction lies not in the ego." -the ego being the theoretical seat of rational cognition, and conviction or faith being the sheer sentiment of confidence so often and consistently undermined by experience and the human condition. And if howsoever the aforesaid veritably crypto-aversive Cognitive Behavioral tactics, are for whatever reason instead actually accepted at face value advising the patient with exactly the requested criticism, and even as such duly appreciated and accepted by the patient with full responsibility and even all due appreciation, such being features of autonomy and emotional maturity or stability, thereby, much as in combating the most notorious methods used in brainwashing outright, indeed, actually confer resistance to conditioning and suggestion, with the possible result, likewise, being complete failure to render patient defeat and compliance to society. After all, as Freud realized, crazy people are such as consistently will not follow good advice even when recognizing it as such. And responsible people pick and choose for themselves, what advice to howsoever to take heed on their own account. So how then will the Cognitive Behaviorists then react, as may arise, when simply not getting their own way? I shudder to think! Under such circumstances, will the Cognitive Behaviorist begin acting

out, simply falling even deeper back upon traditional behavior modification and manipulative behaviors? Or will the Cognitive Behaviorist actually begin displaying classic learned helplessness?

Moreover, a common frustration with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for the patient if not for the somewhat oblivious Cognitive Behaviorist, is that even those most cogent observations offered by the Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, of the suffering patient's blithe kneejerk responses, and the tips and tricks the Cognitive Behavioral Therapist strives to teach the patient, the better to govern themselves, in truth often also bear profound Psychodynamic ramification irresponsibly ignored and wasted by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Indeed, all such recommendations are implicit criticism, however valid in its own right, from observations of behavior, no matter how painstakingly accurate, behavior, like all behavior, Psychodynamic in origin, no matter how determined Behaviorism is to ignore the obvious. As such the highly accurate observations and expert behavioral recommendations proffered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, often immediately triggering all manner of ongoing inner conflict by association to all manner of shame and trauma from the past and issues in the present, brought to the surface by the keen observations and expert advice of the Cognitive Behaviorist. Often responses thus elicited include distress from yearning for the comfort of acceptance and understanding, confusion passionately curious for insight and meaning, and the all too common stubborn denial and demands for validation, so fruitless to confront directly. As Sigmund Freud discovered, Neurotics simply do not follow even what they themselves fully recognize as good advice, and certainly not simple behavioral or cognitive strategies that fly in the face of their own complex maladaptive coping in struggle with ambivalence. For alas, all such perfectly legitimate behavioral observation may all too often come, even being so superficial, nevertheless as an excessive honesty, too blunt and direct, where the seasoned and tactful deft touch and oblique dialectic of Psychodynamic Therapy is required. Again, the blithe unintended Psychodynamic triggers all too common from the conditioned and oblivious Cognitive Behavioral Therapists, are at best gone to waste, left unresolved, or worst of all, painful, conceivably harmful and destructive, wounds reopened and then untreated. Indeed, even such entirely sincere and vulnerable Psychodynamic ramification as distress yearning for comfort, confusion curious for insight, let alone stubborn denial and demands for validation however infantile, all heartbreaking call out for Psychodynamic Therapy for which the Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, an overspecialized trained idiot savant of therapy, verily like unto the proverbial one trick pony, finds himself clueless and after all, deliberately and calculatingly unequipped.

At best, unintended Psychodynamic benefit may nevertheless accrue, however indirectly. Otherwise, suggestion my simply wear off soon enough or be rejected outright by an uncooperative patient. Otherwise, conditioning can only forge forge new layers of reaction formation or help repair old ones, actually stepping back the breakdown of the adaptation that is the cornerstone of any Psychodynamic treatment of psychopathology. Indeed, perhaps at saddest of all, Behaviorism may succeed on it's own terms:

As things stand in practice of Behaviorism, no matter how ostensibly Cognitive, from the utter blithe lack of professional empathy, perhaps the patient's ensuing sense of Zen futility is likewise intentional tough love. Hence the vaunted quick efficacy, ever at all, of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, even for treatment of minor problems, depends upon the lowered expectations of the patient, even behavioral extinction if not complete Zen cessation, yet the same resignation and crushed spirit, by repeated elicitation, frustration and eventual extinction of the very impulse gratification to reach out emotionally, and subsequent emotional withdrawal, stiff upper lip and all, thence stunned compliance to embrace conditioning and behavior modefication. It may be The Behavioral quick fix so beloved of insurance providers, actually only suffices at all in fairly mild cases, to restore repressive reaction formation and get the poor wretches up on their feet and back to work, troubled and unhappy as ever. -Ah, but functioning! Indeed, how sad. Worst of all, Behaviorists like school teachers, are unwilling or unable to confront what they are actually doing, because of their own conditioning and indoctrination.

But what if instead the Cognitive Behavioral Therapist was also a fully trained Psychodynamic Psychotherapist? What if the Cognitive Behavioral observations, advice, tips and tricks, where deliberately and skillfully redeployed as deliberate Psychodynamic provocations in service to real competent and liberating Psychodynamic Psychotherapy opening up the patients own range of free choice? Why not make deliberate good Psychodynamic redeploy of hitherto blithe triggers from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamically? For what point is there in clutching on so desperately to the notorious Skinner Box paradigm and simply ignoring that is challenging in understanding the human condition? -the obvious Psychodynamic implications of behavior even after cognition has already been so reluctantly accepted as explanatorily inevitable... The proverbial camel has already so long been nosing ever further into the metaphorical tent!

Indeed, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) already offers something just short of precedent, better that the blithe emotional triggers so blindly proffered by the skilled yet hapless Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, should instead be rescued to the Psychodynamic toolbox, to realize potential as another helpfully oblique angle of Psychodynamic dialectic, plus whatever practical helpful cognitive advice as a motivating bonus as has been of particular benefit, as for example: case in point: to high functioning Borderline Personalities, who are nevertheless still too volatile and defensive for Psychodynamic Psychotherapy because of their overwhelming and vivid rejection issues. Freud turned away from even the most powerful modality of suggestion, hypnosis, as entirely transitory. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) reaches the patient how to make good momentary use of transitory auto-suggestive self control, simply in order to open the door for anything more. Even for the most highly functioning yet volatile Borderline Personalities, levels of arousal rise much more quickly, peaking at a higher level than the average, often also taking much longer to return to baseline. Borderline Personalities personalities are motivated by an anguished terror of any perceived threat of rejection. Borderline Personalities get a bad rap in popular culture, because of just how overwhelming and debilitating the tireless protracted raging typical of Borderline Personalities can be to others subjected thereto, especially given that pity and compassion, not to mention guilt, also evoked, may manipulatively serve to subvert ones defenses, all the more because of how plainly the tremendous distress of the Borderline Personality tireless protractedly raging is entirely genuine. But it could be worse! Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) therefore teaches, along with mindful self awareness, superficial short term techniques, tips and tricks of self soothing and momentary self restraint, so lacking in Borderline Personalities, to manage trauma. Indeed, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) even admits such a thing as trauma being: distinct and even howsoever meaningful memories of experience as corollary to consciousness in the subjective context of motivated inner life, beyond sheer indistinct and cumulative aversive conditioning from utter oblivious nociception. Superficial short term techniques, tips and tricks of self soothing and momentary self restraint, conceivably might be just enough in the short term for the highly functioning Borderline Personality to withstand, participating and benefitting from Psychodynamic Therapeutic treatment to resolve persistent deeper troubles in ongoing treatment for the long term; a strategy highly desirable for the sadness of patients still yearning for Psychodynamic insight and catharsis, and ultimately dissatisfied with mere management of their condition by lifelong ongoing cultivation of self manipulation habits. Besides, such band aid solutions of behavioral suggestion are typically only doomed to eventual breakdown unless the root causes will be addressed, either followed up Psychodynamically, either in treatment or simply in life experience, interaction and relationship. Psychodynamic Therapy after all only strives curatively to fill gaps and address underserved unmet needs in social life. -All better facilitated for the highly functioning Borderline Personality by cognitive short term self management facilitated by Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), judiciously employing means of Cognitive Behavior Modification obliquely towards Psychodynamic purposes, given exactly how restraint of the specific volatile borderline behaviors, mere momentary hesitation and the benefit of the doubt, in practice actually can liberate at all better functional Emotional Intelligence for all manner of closer relationships in life, not just in the context of Therapy. And such is an emotional or Psychodynamic interaction and value not typically recognized not even by Behaviorism, no matter how Cognitive, indeed, rather than as typical of damnable Behaviorist Cretins, only serving anything whatsoever more empty, practical and ultimately so puerile and cynical as mere social conformity.

So, can the mousy conflicted observable behavior of timid gradual circumvention of taboo, still draw Behaviorism and Behaviorists any further out from entrenched error? Or must Behaviorists need simply and finally to overcome their own conditioning in order to grasp the nettle by admitting their long standing and fundamental mistake? After all, the gap in Behaviorism was never cognitive, but Psychodynamic all along. (And worse, as we have seen the gap in Behavior Modification, is actually diagnostic at all, the rejection of diagnosis and the scientific quest for truth, even of Behaviorist diagnosis!) After all, exactly how is the inference of cognition somehow more scientific than Psychodynamic or dramatic inference of motivating emotion? Indeed, feelings are often the more readily observable than thoughts. What sort of of competent behavioral observation denies emotion? Only the most severe Autism and Schizophrenia or fanatically entrenched Behavior Modification are ever all so completely mind-blind as that! After all, as even Animal Behaviorism well attests, evolutionarily, emotional motivation long predates higher cognition! Behavior, including action and expression or dialogue, is often actually less mediated by cognitive events than by Psychodynamic events, feelings and motivations to be specific, often with inner conflict, in an observable (show: don't tell) cycles of Motivational Reaction Units. Cognition is a rational function of the ego, Phenomenologically manifest in reflection. Indeed, Animal Behaviorism actually observes complex behavior and body language of animals built up emotionally from elementary drives, impulses and responses, often coming into inner conflict. Moreover, subjectively and qualitatively, human inner life is complicated by the capacity for reflection, so anathema to Behaviorism.

Indeed, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), or indeed whatsoever Behavioral treatment of Borderline Personality symptoms at all, thereby moving furthest from traditional Behavior Modification and even so flirting with Psychodynamics, seems plainly the most viable and valuable of salvage efforts upon Behaviorism. So perhaps flirtation is overdue for consummation and reconciliation, that the Behaviorists can finally be de-conditioned from their own conditioned compulsive manipulation, that Behavior Modification in violation of the injunction against suggestion, along with untenable Behaviorist Reductionism, may at long last all be afforded a by far long overdue decent burial, and that unobtrusive observation and study of behavior may best continue in benefit of scientific advance. Not to imply that, all things being equal, that there's anything all that wrong with generally positive reinforcement, encouragement coming honestly with no strings attached. After all, another feature of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) in specific, is in providing a great deal of comprehensive support and reassurance for the insecurity of the Borderline Personality.

Those who can make you/	[If/ As long as]: we/ People (who)
		believe in absurdities
can make you/			[will/ shall]: eventually/ continue to
				commit atrocities.
— Voltaire