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aromanholiday -> RE: Personal Service Cluttering Your life? (4/27/2011 4:17:43 PM)
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Hi BitaTruble,
While I am convinced that adults who are seeking enslavement are quite different in mindset from little inexperienced children, I can work with this analogy--to an extent.
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ORIGINAL: BitaTruble
That could work well for those who actually learn lessons from physical suffering. Not everyone does, slave or not. Some kids actually learn by listening so when the Mom says don't touch the stove, it's hot.. they never touch the stove. They learned by listening.
The majority of children who comprise this group are usually at least mildly submissively inclined (they listen to authority figures and want to please them) and occasionally are very intelligent and can generalize from instances: "Some things I've done hurt me. Mommy says touching the stove is bad. That probably means it will hurt. I believe her therefore I won't do this." They do not learn that a stove burner is dangerous by themselves and that heat has terrible consequences. What they learn is what pleases mom (and if they are of average intelligence, as most of us are, they won't make the mental connections I just spoke of--not at that tender age, anyway). So they do what is right but they don't understand the real reason it is right, and once they reach the stage where pleasing mom is the last thing they want to do, they are quite liable to take some very foolish, painful, and self destructive steps in the attempt to leave the nest and establish their own independence. They won't necessarily touch a hot stove, but they'll do the opposite of what mom is now saying is right simply because she is saying it and they must break free of her at all costs. And they sometimes suffer terribly in their desire to distinguish themselves from her, because she continues, good ma that she is, to tell them not to do things that will hurt them. So naturally, they do them. This sort of learning, IMO, is delayed learning. The actual basic lesson: that the actions which you take have consequences, some of them quite severe, comes in their teens or even later, not in their early years. I consider such types (I was one myself, by the way) as a bit developmentally disabled as a result. We got a very slow start on comprehending the way things really work.
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Then there are those who touch the stove, discovered that it was, indeed, quite hot and never touched the stove again. They learned the lesson as well.
As you know, this is the case I speak of.
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There are also those who saw someone else touch the stove, saw their pain and never touched the stove. They learned by seeing the consequence.
I have known many such people in my life. I have observed that in many of these cases, they have learned an emulation, not a reality. Their fear is false and liable to let them down (as in not protect them from a foolish action) at the most unexpected times, because there is no reality, no hands-on experience besides observation, backing it up and endowing it with personal significance. It is "vapor wisdom," if you will. Do you remember those old experiments with kittens? One was allowed to walk; another wasn't. The one allowed to walk (it pulled a gondola in which the other kitten sat) developed a normal reaction of self-preservation when approaching an illusory cliff. It did not walk out over the edge. The kitten who was pulled in the gondola, however, and had no experience with walking, didn't have that reaction. It would walk over the edge of the imaginary cliff with no cognizance of the danger. Pain = experience = learning, IF you survive the pain. This equation is in the genes of every animal with more than the most rudimentary nervous system, including humans.
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Then you have those who touched the stove, felt it was hot.. then kept touching it. The pain did not teach the lesson.
Are you really imagining a hot stove here? A red-hot burner and the searing pain it brings?
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That's a fail. When all you remember is the punishment and not the reason for it.. that's a fail, too.
What I fail to see is how someone of normal intelligence would fail to make this connection when even animals with far more rudimentary nervous systems (and far less sophisticated brains) make the pain-consequences connection easily and naturally. Are you seriously still thinking of your hot stove example here, or were you thinking of other experiences or situations when you wrote those words?
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The quickest and most efficient way to teach is subjective and would be well-based on how an particular individual learns which may or may not coincide with how someone wants to teach.
I think all people and animals learn easiest and quickest by pain, when what needs to be learned is obedience (whether to a law of physics or to another individual) and awareness of consequences.
I do think there should be flexibility in teaching methods, but I think the level and direction of that flexibility should (a) be determined by the person in the know, also known as the teacher, and never dictated by the student, who, if she knew how to teach herself would have no need for the teacher in the first place and (b) that rather than this flexibility being based on some vague idea that everybody learns differently and you have to compromise/accommodate/kowtow to the student's demands or emotional irregularities at all costs to arrive at optimal learning, flexibility should vary with the subject matter that is being taught.
For me, the material being taught always determines the method. When teaching someone to fly a plane, you may have them read a few things, like aviation rules and regulations, but you try to get them on the flight simulator and later behind the actual controls of a plane as quickly as possible, even if they protest loudly and angrily that they learn best by reading books, and physically touching controls is 'beneath them" and insulting of their intelligence. (Or you kick them out of flight school as unteachable.) When teaching somebody to trust, pain would probably not be the best of ideas, except perhaps in the most advanced lessons in this subject which are often not taught outside of a very special hothouse environment, such at that created within a master-slave relationship. But as for teaching that certain types of behavior and attitudes have inevitable consequences? There is no better method I know of to teach that quickly and efficiently than to provide the consequence of some form of pain at rational times, when rules are broken. Despite the fact that many of us have faced the irrational infliction of physical and emotional suffering in our pasts that may have confused us or made us more than a bit neurotic, we possess millions of years of genetic experience in our bones, blood, and neurons, that affirm that rational, correct application of pain as a teacher of behavior to avoid, is right. It really is not difficult, even for most neurotic individuals, to learn that voluntarily touching a red hot burner hurts like hell.
Although you did not personally say this, I suspect the big objection to pain in many peoples' minds is more emotional than rational. Those of us who have experienced irrational and confusing pain/abuse tend to believe that all pain, of any sort, is bad. I've been through some harrowing experiences in my life, starting early in childhood, but what they have taught me is that the type of pain that emerges naturally from the consequences of my actions is my very close friend: it wakes me up when nothing else will, it saves my life over and over, and as an adult, it keeps me from emotional and psychological excesses that would sicken and poison me, were I to indulge in them like a pig at a trough. Pain hurts like hell, but it gives you back so very much, if you are willing to accept it and learn what it has to to teach you.
In a master-slave relationship it has one other very wonderful bonus: it reinforces the authority and control of the master over the slave: it makes such authority and control absolutely real, visceral, utterly unavoidable or unable to be rationalized away. It burns the idea of who is in charge into her brain as the whip or cane burns into her skin. Not everyone needs this sort of reality all the time, but if we are talking about slavery, I can't see how the presence of pain, emotional, physical, or both, or at least the potential of it can't be there somewhere.
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