trenton

Uh guys. This is getting bad. My aunt is threatening to sue me and she is actively trying to criminalize me for my disclosure while insisting that remove my account. I will need to call for legal aid. I don't think my aunt loves me anymore. She used to be a nice person to me, but not anymore. She doesn't want me living here now and she is trying to intimidate me with legal threats.

I currently live with my grandma. I was looking into opportunities with the Polaris project. This is an anti human trafficking agency. It values survivors willing to help others in improving support systems. I reached out to this organization because of what my father and his gang did to me with their child prostitution deals. The problem is that my father is my grandma's son. I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page in terms of the job opportunity I was reaching for. I sent in a document in which I detailed what I had witnessed along with my research into organized crime. This is related to another opportunity I hesitated to tell my family about in which I would be leading a support group for male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The problem is that my mother doesn't believe me when I say that she psychologically and sexually crippled me because of what she did to me. I can't really tell my family about that part either. My grandma said "I don't believe you." She sounded pretty pissed. She insisted that my father didn't have an extensive criminal record nor was he involved in gangs. She refuses to even admit the drug deals happened, but I documented child prostitution in a sex trafficking gang. She told me that she that I loved my father and was friends with him, but apparently not. I told her it was mixed because I was dealing with hard feelings like these for a long time. She doesn't seem to understand that it is possible for a child to love a father who did this to them. She definitely wouldn't grasp that it is possible for a father to traffic his children out of twisted sense of love. The problem is that she wants to be emotionally supportive due to my depression, but it is clearly dangerous to express the feelings I struggle with and to describe the experiences I had. I am pretty much on my own in terms of emotional support as family can't handle this information. Apparently most people can not comprehend parental sex offenders who target their own children. I can because I studied this, but others cannot. I'm not sure what better I could have done other than staying silent and suffering invisibly. There is nobody to look to who would be willing to help me with this. I probably gave more truth than she could handle, but in this case the truth is just that bad and there is no light version. I mean what else am I supposed to do? I don't mean to have suicidal depression, but the reasons for such feelings are unacceptable to others. I guess I should have kept her in the dark on this.

Anyway, there has been further updates. The Polaris Project confirms that my account, my document, and my story stands. What I described matches child sex trafficking even though the family claims I am being disrespectful to actual victims. I really should exit sooner rather than later. Even my aunt who is normally kind to me is clearly outraged at me and she doesn't believe me even though I said nothing about her or her mother. All of this is purely their own emotional reaction to me describing my experience with my father. They actually don't have any arguments that hold against the legal description of child sex trafficking and prostitution. They refer to these arguments as me manipulating them. I am not holding out hope of them coming around to acknowledgement. Maybe they will resent me for the rest of the foreseeable future. My Aunt made it clear that her mother was defensive about my father's involvement in drug deals. Even so she maintains that Dad was a drug addict who said and did a lot of crazy shit and illegal activities. At the same time she is very defensive about her brother sexually exploiting minors such as his own child.

One of the criticisms of red pill and incel ideology is that the misogyny sometimes drives its followers to committing acts of mass violence. Sexual frustration can fuel deep resentment leading to shootings. https://cssh.northeastern.edu/the-misogyny-fueling-americas-mass-shootings/ Is this a counter example of a criticism of these ideologies that don't apply to feminism? The other examples you gave seem solid. Of course there are sexist feminists just as there sexist men who stereotype about women in harmful ways. Maybe entitlement to another person's body leading to rape would be another counter example. Currently, I haven't thought of other counter examples, but this is the first attempt that came to mind that would challenge this perspective. What do you think?

@Leo Gura regarding the distinction between reality and hallucination itself being a hallucination, I came at this from another angle. I went with the distinction between real and imaginary itself being imaginary. How exactly do get a real distinction between these without using imagination? In that sense real is imaginary. The problem is that although this makes sense it didn't break me and cause an existential crisis. it probably means I'm not conscious of it. How would I know if I'm conscious of such things?

Leo recently posted on his blog two videos about the nature of stupidity. Most people cannot be reasoned with because it is more efficient for them to just take in information and not question it. I oftentimes have difficulty communicating with people no matter how transparent I try to be. Sometimes the truth is threatening to them, and I therefore may need to be content with giving simplified lies that are true enough to be useful. I have a few principles in mind that might be refined for such communication. I believe it starts with a combination of simplicity, confidence, humor, agreeableness, emotionality, and possibly vague appeals to morality. This kind of reminds of what I have studied in psychopaths. They often appear charming and likeable even if what they say doesn't hold under logical scrutiny. So long as you say it with confidence and charisma, that is enough for most people to believe in your character even if you are a serial killer. The psychopath thinks people deserve it for being stupid. Currently, I am thinking about things like calculated stupidity. The point is that in human affairs, people find it funny when you act as stupid as you can get away with. This sometimes rises to the level of sexual assault performed for peers. My calculated stupidity would have to account for the possibility of causing harm for the amusement of others as I would prefer to avoid unnecessary boundary crossing. Navigating stupid people might change depending on the domain. Politics is interesting because I normally look into with depth for the sake of understanding. I often learn a lot, but it depends on the situation in that many people prefer an ally. Therefore, I think the optimal public position might be to say that I am an independent and I don't get into political debates. I would have to debate whether or not to tell someone that I have done enough research to know that none of the simple narratives offered are enough to contain the full truth and in fact they often obscure it on either side especially when emotions are high. I'm not entirely sure how to handle stupid people in political debates. It often seems futile. The main goal seems to be virtue signaling and tribalism. I'm not entirely sure how to apply to my family. The way the operate depends on denial of reality. They also use coercive control through shouting and threatening. The one who performs enough outrage to provoke others to try to soothe them seems to be the strategy in that environment. I think I would rather just live on a college campus and finish my degree before going away forever. At least my brother is decent and more open minded. The last context has to do with institutions. I find that I have repeatedly ended up with friction against rigid institutions because I question authority and notice the flaws in their reasoning. Their reasoning objectively does not stand against various counter examples. However, the medical staff among other authority figures move to discredit my position as subjectivity along with insistence that they must follow through with spreading information the courts told them to spread even if that information doesn't hold under scrutiny. Institutional inertia stunts my creativity on various fronts and it makes it hard to find meaningful work. Essentially I'm supposed to not think and don't show any signs of innovation and then believe that hard work will lead to self advancement despite any evidence to the contrary. Therefore, I am trying to understand institutional survival more clearly. I'm trying to find in what ways can my creativity be channeled without threatening authority figures who depend on their lies not being questioned. It would be nice to have in depth conversations with people, but it is hard to find people interested in learning. What other suggestions might there be for navigating stupid people? Is it smart to act authentically smart in the presence of people who cannot receive or understand your perspective? Or are there other principles we might consider for this dilemma?

I think I get the message. I have been seeing a lot of pretty dumb responses on this forum. This forum is probably full of stupid people too. In that sense it is no use to ask a human forum for help on navigating stupidity because said forum will give me the responses of stupid people. I'm basically on my own for this issue.

In this case, the point behind the label stupid is that I am borrowing the framework from Leo's blog posts. I don't know if you saw those videos or not. I'm not getting anything special out of that label and there are other possible frameworks. I'm completely aware of the domain specific part. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyd_tpumcBXyhL_8cMRYJyg

@Lila9 in terms of someone significantly more intelligent than me, the closest model I found would be the third tier of integral theory in the Religion of Tomorrow by Ken Wilber. The third tier was very difficult for me to comprehend and a lot of the mazes of words in this book blurred together into something I couldn't understand. Basically, Leo teaches spiral dynamics up to stage Turquoise. However there are four stages after this one. They describe very abstract cognitive conflicts which I struggle to comprehend the meaning of. Beyond turquoise there are stages like indigo, Violet, ultra Violet, and the white super mind. In the case of autism, it closely mirrors stage yellow cognition in that it is hyper systemetizing and involves a lot of connections that the neurotypical might miss, but it has various drawbacks such as being indifferent social games and might come off as cold. The stages beyond yellow and turquoise completely transcend systemetizing. It creates a different realm of development that is only grasped through enlightenment and non dual states of consciousness after which the developmental trajectory continues beyond turquoise. Of course, I don't see this as stupid because I don't understand it. Instead it looks like a rough of map of where I stand in terms of my development. It also reveals how little systemetizing can actually reveal about the nature of reality if there is a completely different level beyond that which I struggle to comprehend. If I apply this standard to lower levels of development with this kind of model, then the lower levels probably wouldn't grasp systemetizing as I don't grasp the stage white super mind which is apparently very god-like. Applying this pattern, then I am probably required to communicate in terms of morals, pragmatism, and empathy for most people I encounter. In my case my IQ is above average with a score of 130. Given enough time, focus, and attention there are plenty of things I might not understand now, but I can eventually figure it out. Currently, the only other thing I found that I struggle to comprehend would be quantum mechanics. The problem is that I learned a lot of logical principles which do not apply on other scales. I'm not sure what things I struggle to comprehend beyond these things. Of course it doesn't mean it's stupid.

Talking about shared interests is much easier for me. One of the problems I encounter is that most people are not interested in deeper understanding or lengthy research. It becomes a mismatch in terms of my interests and what is available to me. In the case of the stupidity framing, I was borrowing from the framing in the videos in the blog. I don't know if you watched those videos or not. There are other frames that can be used like communication styles, spiral dynamics in terms of cognitive development, or maybe something else. Autism is a relevant frame because people with autism often don't follow social cues that are intuitive to neurotypicals and are instead blunt or literal in many cases. Apparently, there has been enough research on this issue done to know that it is unreliable to try to teach people with autism to communicate like neurotypicals. Instead it is more reliable to teach neurotypicals how to communicate with people who have autism. In my case, autism support is unavailable and I must instead design my own methods of communication knowing that simply saying things as they are will be seen as a sign of bad faith. In terms of my choice to largely avoid talking to people, it was a conscious choice. Part of the problem was that I was afraid of being sexually violated again. This is why it is especially difficult to talk in dating contexts which is harder with autism but compounded by the fear of violation. The reason I want to talk to people at all is because I am alone and suffering in silence. Connection and warmth is possible, but safety is a necessary prerequisite and it is much easier to connect from within safer domains such as mutual interests. My interests have been broadened partially by necessity. The advantage is that if I have broader interests then it also gives me more methods of connection depending on which interests are being discussed. That would be the easy part. The harder part is when I start integrating multiple fields of studies to map out a complex picture that defies any simple narrative. The other hard part is communicating in terms of feelings as it makes assumptions about people with autism that don't apply even if it applies to neurotypicals. Of course I don't mean stupid in a way of meaning such people should be held with contempt. A simple counterexample might be someone who is severely disabled. In terms of their capacity for learning, it would make sense to say they are stupid, not by character fault but by circumstances beyond their control. Stupid people don't necessarily deserve contempt. This needs to be clarified in terms of the framing used.

In my case, I have done plenty of inner work. Inner work can become it's own distraction. In fact it might even be used to gaslight me by misrepresenting me in a variety of ways. All that needs to be done is to project a script onto me that doesn't apply while obscuring any relevant factors or complexity. Then it is easy to make me look unreasonable no matter what I say. In my case I am struggling with people who are close minded or who refuse to learn. Let's start with, how would you manage a Trump supporter if they had a racist rant? Surely some people are dumber than others if some are less willing to educate themselves.

I would be interested in learning this perspective. I am aware that there are different perspectives that highlight my blindspots. These perspectives might lead me to a more complete understanding of reality. Of course, I know there are assumptions baked into everything I just wrote, but I do enjoy improving my broader understanding of life. The problem is that in my case, I don't have people pointing out flaws in my perspective or my worldview at all. Instead I have people who seem to be resistant to academic perspectives or academic sounding language. They might even be anti-intellectual such that they dismiss the perspective entirely without engaging with it at all while overlooking all of its implications in terms of how it applies to the present situation. Oftentimes they show signs of preferring relational communication with an emphasis on feelings. In my case I have autism which both leads to difficulty identifying emotions and to complex mixed feelings which I believe I described perfectly, but only some managed to comprehend it. Additionally, I often deal with people who use motivated reasoning to project ill faith where there is none. This is used to misrepresent what I say, such that in some situations there is no such thing as a correct method of communication.

I visited the PIER recovery center and looked into some of the groups I was allowed to join. One of the groups was a parenting group in which I was hoping to learn something valuable. When I attended the group, I watched how it all played out and everybody seemed disengaged while a woman read off of a paper seemingly on autopilot. Along the way I started asking questions and she didn't seem to appreciate that. I started asking things like "what would it look like if those ideas were applied in practice, and can you give an example scenario in which to apply these principles?" She seemed to be covering something very broadly, but not very concretely. She didn't seem to have any confident answers for me. As I asked questions like these and gave example scenarios, I noticed that the other people in the room started lighting up and rethinking how they did parenting. They started questioning their past decisions and wondered if they could have done something better based on what I was describing. Some of the parents started saying that I should be the one teaching the class because they felt that they were learning a lot. One of the men started opening up. He told me that he beat the shit out of his son when he started talking back and cussing him out. However, he didn't do the same to his daughter and he just laughed at her. This turned into a discussion of gender bias in parenting in which it is common to make assumptions about a person's character based on their gender, leading to unfair treatment. I along with others recounted times in which they noticed gender bias which included when I sited court outcomes with men receiving longer sentences than women despite committing similar crimes. Therefore, gender bias is common even in the criminal justice system due to the stereotype of men being cold and deserving of harsher treatment which applies to parenting just as well in the cases we described. Sometimes I started asking questions like "what does it mean to be a good parent, and what kind of moral philosophy should we apply to different situations?" I noticed how little was actually being taught in these classes and how little it would be improving our actual parenting skills. The questions I raised seemed to actually get people to think about it, but for some reason the institution didn't like it. Eventually, I was forbidden from going to such meetings. Apparently, they are required to read on autopilot with no questions asked. I started questioning further about the outcomes of the program because judging from what I witnessed it didn't seem very promising for producing better parents. When I went into that class I was expecting something very different like a discussion of moral philosophy combined with specific scenarios to put principles into practice. The way the court document was written, it sounded like it incentivized coercive control such as getting your child to do what you want them to do without clear limits on what means could be used to do that. If spanking is still legal, then that raises further questions about what is legally considered a good parent given the psychological studies on such practices. I discovered that the anger management groups were also run by the courts. The instructor took the position that anger management problems cause involvement with the criminal justice system. I suggested a counter example, arguing that causation is reversed with criminal justice involvement causing anger. A simple example would be being falsely accused of crimes you didn't commit due to identity theft and being jailed anyway. Such situations would understandably cause anger and I have witnessed this happen. It is a typical pattern of "anger damns the innocent" which is well known in legal philosophy. Anger is commonly interpreted as proof of guilt rather than a reasonable reaction to a false accusation. Coerced plea deals might be another example in which a person's financial situation is weaponized against them to secure a conviction they can't overturn. Apparently, these courses were not designed for things like homicidal rage linked to sexual abuse, which would definitely cause criminal justice involvement as a result of extreme anger. An example might be if someone raped your daughter. I spoke with some of the managers and they seemed kind of nervous when I asked these questions. I used the logic of the courts against them when they insisted on evidence based treatment while their evidence was poor. From what I have witnessed, the evidence courts use is often faulty and their investigations heavily biased with an apparent agenda to prioritize procedure over outcome. These dynamics seem to extend to recovery classes that are run by the government with an apparent indifference to parental and emotional outcomes. Of course, I know there are a lot of problems with the justice system, and this just adds to the list of problems with the justice system. They probably sensed that I was distrusting of courts with the implicit frame being that I'm not supposed to present information that challenges authority. This also happened in the medical system in which I noticed similar dynamics when I presented evidence that psychiatrists were systematically involved in malpractice and largely ignorant of the epistemic limitations of the narrow studies they sited with prescribing medicine due to context stripping making antidepressants seem more effective than they actually are. The advertisements are extremely misleading and do not correspond to practical reality. In the case of the court system, I didn't even tell them that there were corrupt police officers involved in gang activities like drug and child sex trafficking while using corrupt police informants to frame their victims for crimes they didn't commit. Local law enforcement commonly is compromised in the event of widespread gang activity and trafficking cases because gangs often bribe police officers or use the local stations as cover for their crimes. The disturbing reality is that if you encounter a police officer, you have no way of knowing if this person is also a gang member. They might even use their badge to legitimize the murders they commit with limited consequences. This is well known in ICE especially as some of their members are former gang members, child predators, and murders who face little to no consequences for their actions. In any case, if I want to learn about parenting, I would be better off sticking to my own research and self-reflection. In the case of anger management, I might have to find another way to manage the desire to cause harm to others who have harmed me. It seems that the most effective approach is to meet the anger with warmth and compassion acknowledging that I was treated unfairly and I didn't deserve the attacks. My desire to harm others does not make me a bad person who should be ashamed of himself, but it is information linked to underlying unresolved wounds that seem to improve with connection to people who see this pain in a nonjudgmental manner. Sometimes there is a sense of warmth that breaks through even if it is brief and tied to a specific comment like "you were not a bad kid" or something similar. Edit: for clarification, I am not involved with courts presently. These voluntary programs are linked to the legal system. I don't know if my comments might create a paper trail that can be used against me due to my words being taken completely out of context and turned into something they are not.

@Ramanujan I think it depends heavily on your cognitive style. In terms of healing for my case it involved many books on many subjects. It involved reconstructing reality such that things make sense while building various models that map out human thought patterns and behaviors. For me it is intellectually and emotionally exhausting, but it was eventually worth it.

I feel drawn to this because I noticed that the label "rational" is often used to give things more authority and confidence than should be warranted. I noticed this in "rational suicide" but it is a broad phenomenon. In the case of suicide, I believe it is fundamentally an emotional decision linked to a person's capacity to find meaning in suffering rather than at its core a logical consequentialist calculation. Here is an example of "rational suicide" although the problem with self-bias in rationality is much broader. Imagine you were a Japanese soldier during WWII. You are very loyal to your country and will do anything to ensure victory. Your reasoning goes as follows. 1. I want Japan to win the war. 2. A Kamikaze strike would aid in achieving that goal. 3. Therefore I should carry out the strike In this example, suicide is instrumentally rational in a similar manner to the terrorist attacks by ISIS. The problem with calling this rational is that it is extremely biased due to self-interest. Isn't self-interest inherently a deeply emotional bias rather than a rational one? There are people who might self-sacrifice for others or who might sacrifice for the greater good due to having a broader circle of concern. In the case of the Kamikaze fighter, any apparent rationality is based on an emotional desire that got tied up in a nationalist propaganda machine with many layers of untruth. Would it not be deeply irrational to believe in nationalist propaganda and to base one's self-interest off beliefs that were not critically examined? The deeper issue I am sensing is that rationality is selectively applied as a consequence of self-interest which therefore biases the entire string of logic no matter how consistent it appears to be. Rationality in the context of self-interest appears to structurally exclude the bigger picture while mis categorizing emotional biases and agendas as though they were rational. I saw this happening with workplace studies as well. Employers were studying how rudeness and disrespect undermine employee productivity. They focused on employee interactions with customers while completely ignoring the role of the employer in terms of rudeness and disrespect that might undermine productivity due to low morale. From my point of view, the question of rudeness and disrespect should include the power imbalance between employer and employee which leads to dehumanization and a collapse of basic self-respect due to seeing oneself as fundamentally worthless. This is not accounted for in rudeness undermining workers because the agenda is biased toward corporate survival. This in turn obscures the full picture and therefore the reality of why employees become less productive. Nevertheless this kind of study passes as rational. A common problem in how science is structured includes context stripping, possibly because the fundamental agenda in the pharmaceutical industry is profiteering over effective treatment which in turn biases how the studies are conducted and applied. The double blind placebo controlled studies demonstrate that the new pill improved about 90% of those studied, but then this get applied broadly across the entirely population even though the studies are set up with heavy filters to skew the results toward high effectiveness. In practice the outcome is that medicine is typically far less effective than advertised. Nevertheless psychiatrists think they are being rational when they use studies like these to justify a prescription. There seems to be no real interest in this industry in terms of closing the gap between theoretical studies and actual practice, which in turn corrupts the entire epistemic environment. It would be irrational to trust this environment, this context, this apparent authority, and these supposedly rigorous studies due to the heavy bias behind the apparent rationality which is ultimately a deeply emotional fear. In this sense science does not actually value rigor, but rather it values the appearance of rationality and rigor for the sake of aiding in authority, survival, and self-interest. The way science is practiced isn't actually rational in this sense. It seems that rational self-interest is inherently divorced from truth as a consequence of the limited circle of concern. This includes examples such as mafia bosses, drug lords, and corporate criminals as being characterized as acting in rational self-interest despite the extreme harm they cause. It makes me question if they are really being rational or is their entire epistemic framework deeply irrational due to the corrupted relationship with truth? This is an important question because if rationality ultimately operates independently of truth, then why should it be believed? How can judgment be sound if it is fundamentally divorced from truth while using the label rational to obscure the emotional foundation of biased reasoning? If this is the case that rational self-interest includes deep self-deception, then I might be able to construct a position for rational belief in the Bible. For example, I feel happy when I go to church and believe in the Bible. Therefore I should maintain the belief that the Bible is true out of rational self-interest. Self-interest is at it's core rationality that operates independently of truth. If this standard were applied consistently, then worshipping Jesus should be considered rational. If converting people aids in my rational self-interest, then that probably means that it is rational to argue that the Bible is true and that others should believe it. In this sense, does it mean that the fundamentalist Christian is being rational when he argues that Noah's Ark was real? Applying the standards of rational self-interest, maybe it is rational to believe in these things and to teach it to children. Across all of these cases the term "rational" is commonly used to make something seem more certain, authoritative, and truthful than it actually is. The thing that bothers me therefore is what "rational belief" would mean in this context. If rational could be part of the self-deception, then what kind of real relationship does it have with truth? This is the contradiction in rationality in that it wants to claim truth as authoritative while being divorced from it. As we know from various spiritual sources we use on this site such as the book list, you cannot believe your way to truth in the sense that all of that is relative. Is it even possible for a belief to be fundamentally rational? How do you rationally believe a belief? One distinction I came across was a belief versus an alief. The alief is the felt sense that something is true without needing intellectual justification. Given a felt sense that something is true operating independently of truth, this likely serves a mechanism for rationalization to make something appear more reasonable than it actually is. Ultimately, rationality cannot be a label to indicate an ultimate truth. Rationality is more so an instrumental tool given a specific goal or objective while being limited to a specific context. Ultimate truth would require a bigger picture than rationality. Is this a fair critique of self-bias in apparent rationality?

I recently had an insight that changed my relationship with the mind. This is a huge topic that needs to be explored because the implications are significant for making sense of reality. I recognized that my mind seems to heavily bias consistency, but this consistency is predicated upon subliminal messages absorbed through cultural osmosis despite conscious disbelief. The outcome is inevitable inconsistency regardless of intellectual stance. In this thread I would like to explore how subliminal messages form a significant core of our worldviews while avoiding direct analysis. I have autism, so it may be the case that the autistic mind excels at detailed explicit content while struggling to name the implicit social messages that may be absorbed into the psyche regardless of apparent consistency. Changing my relationship with the mind in turn seems to open up a large range of possibilities for worldview and identity reorganization. I first realized this through extensive self-reflection and deep trauma work. One thing I discovered is that although I consciously disbelieved in religion, the familiarity with the Christian religion causes it to feel as if it were more true due to my family and the religious symbols they used. The act of sanctifying religious figures such as Mary and Jesus caused me to feel as if it were more valid or true than other religions when in reality I logically understand that this is a consequence of cultural familiarity. Philosophers call this phenomenon an alief. This is distinct from a belief in that the belief is your logical position whereas the alief is a feeling in your body or mind that causes something to seem true independent of your intellectual beliefs. This commonly creates cognitive dissonance and a lack of inner harmony which in turn has created significant confusion throughout my life. The same thing happens with a scary movie as it does with religion. When I watch a scary movie, I get absorbed into the narrative such that my body treats the monster as if it were real. I intellectually know the monster isn't actually real, but when the movie is over I still feel afraid because the monster might be lurking somewhere. The power of suggestion bypasses the intellectual layer and causes the body and mind to treat even fictional suggestions as if they were true despite the objections of the rational mind. This happened to me with religion when the repeated exposure to symbols caused part of me to treat religion as if it were true after which my mind started getting pulled in multiple confusing directions. It wasn't until I did a deep dive into systematically analyzing religion that this part of my identity finally collapsed upon me seeing the mechanism more clearly. Implicit frames are also important for understanding traumatic experiences as they are often used to impose beliefs or aliefs which are not explicitly stated, but the body and mind treat them as if they were true anyway. One example would be if you were punished or shamed for anything as a child. The implied frame is that if you do something socially undesirable, then you are unlovable. I don't think children consciously think to themselves that they are unlovable, at least I never did that. However, my body learned to internalize a lot of shame which in turn made self-love feel impossible. It became more like a living reality that I am unacceptable to myself such that I must be changed before love is possible. In fact, I recall that I explicitly organized truth and honesty around self-love as I believed that self-love required me to accept the truth of who I was as the alternative would be an incomprehensible system of lies based on nothing real. I have since figured out a counter example to this as the ego can love itself in the sense that it splits part of itself off from the truth of its nature and denies it within itself out of fear such that it loves a divided fragment of its true nature. In that sense self-love is possible in a different form through self-deception, although it requires disowning shadow material. This seems to be how the narcissistic ego works due to fragile self-esteem, causing extreme and disproportionate reactions to shame which the ego tries to protect itself from. Implicit frames applied more broadly seems to map well onto institutional dynamics involving power and authority. If I go to a Bible study, I notice that people often seem hesitant or give simplistic answers, possibly because they must hide their true thoughts or risk ostracization. If I go to a mental health professional, then if I point out the flaws in the scientific method as they are applying it and their context stripping as they apply studies inappropriately, then they will want to discredit me. If I engage in a political discussion and try to understand the bigger picture, then sometimes I end up seeming to threaten both the left and right because I prioritize understanding and appreciation of complexity over tribal allegiance. Those who challenge the assumed frame rather than taking it for granted seem to be threatening to power and authority in many different contexts. I think I would like to get better at detecting implicit frames and subliminal messages. I practiced this at the aquarium by expressing excitement about seeing the birds. Although others were confused because the expectation is to see fish, this aquarium also had a penguin exhibit, therefore it is technically correct to go to some aquariums to look at birds. This is probably a huge domain with major implications for worldview organization because the apparent rationality on the surface is often organized around underlying content that preceded rational analysis. This inevitably leads to contradictions and probably an ego dissolution under sufficient self-reflection. In my case, I try to get to this implicit layer by finding the surrounding content that stuck in my mind and then trying to deconstruct it with adult epistemology. This has its limitations, but if I can inwardly sense the general direction of the alief, then I may be able to study relevant archetypes and profiles to systematically organize reality into something comprehensible. This is what I did with religion in the case of the virgin archetype. It had an underlying meaning or significance which I analyzed because it stuck in my mind and was adjacent to trauma. Consciousness seems to be a significant part of this work to try to sense what these implicit messages are which bias the direction of our reasoning due to bypassing the intellect. It requires using some degree of a felt sense and intuition combined with accumulated self-knowledge open to reorganization. I believe one particular area which has impacted me significantly has been masculinity as it has been depicted in my life in America. The general underlying message is that the most visible forms of masculinity are the most dangerous and toxic forms. This included several cases of sexual assault and exploitation mixed with shame adjacent to sexual themes in religion. This was exacerbated by an absent father, creating an unhealthy environment for growing up due to an absence of healthy masculinity. Deconstructing masculinity both toxic and healthy seems necessary for me, but also hard to do. My psyche appears to have been largely feminized as a consequence of repeated messaging since childhood.

I notice a lot of misconceptions when it comes to empathy and compassion for child sex offenders. I have a different perspective from most for several reasons. Firstly, my father was involved with a gang of child sex traffickers and I was one of the victims. Secondly, I have done a lot of research on criminology which is directly relevant to empathy and compassion for child sex offenders of all kinds. Thirdly, pedophilia is a subtype of preferential offenders which is disproportionately likely to have multiple victims. Most child molesters are not pedophiles and they have a diverse set of motives and psychological problems that lead to this kind of behavior without being inhuman monsters. Fourthly, empathy and compassion for perpetrators or victims cannot be cleanly separated for reasons I will explain. the core reason is that to vilify love and compassion for perpetrators is to indirectly shame child victims who cover for the parents that abuse them due to loving them, such that they feel their love makes them unacceptable and unworthy of life to the point of needing to kill themselves. Finally, empathy is not an excuse for harm. At minimum, cognitive empathy is necessary to inform prevention of violence and enable the protection of child victims by understanding what circumstances lead to victimization. You don't have to have warm feelings toward child molesters and you are allowed to be outraged at the harm they cause. Relevant to this discussion is my past thread on deconstructing monster narratives. In this thread, I mentioned incest perpetrators and parents who sexually offend against their own children. From the perspective of the parental perpetrator, they live in a distorted moral reality in which this type of love is appropriate for their child. They have all kinds of ideas about how this isn't harmful because harm comes from discovery rather than from the act. Sometimes they rationalize this behavior with cultural relativism, arguing that some cultures allowed incest, meaning the behavior isn't actually bad. The parent does not grasp the harm caused to the child because if they did then they would not be able to live with themselves, therefore the incest perpetrator must believe that the behavior is acceptable and the child can meaningfully consent. This pattern is common in parental offenders who are living a criminal lifestyle which corrupts their sense of what kind of love is appropriate, similar to what happened with my father. To clarify, most parental offenders are not pedophiles, but rather they are situational offenders who falsely believe that this kind of love is appropriate, which is technically distinct from pedophiles who are sexually attracted to children rather than having a distorted familial bond with inappropriate forms of love in it. Given my research into criminology, this closely matches my father's behavior and actions while being relevant to recovery. This gets very unsettling and disturbing, but it is true nevertheless. My father showed several distorted means of attempting to bond and connect with me. Firstly, he was afraid of me thinking of him as a bad person, as ironic as that may sound. Because of this he needed to change the standard of what it meant to be loveable and desirable. He was so embedded in criminal life that he had no realistic exit without permanent life imprisonment. Therefore, he attempted to recast his behavior as gangster and badass such that he would seem desirable. This included boasting about his exploits of all kinds including death threats, drug deals, prostitution, and his relationship with my grandpa who he claimed had extensive involvement in his crimes. My moral conscience was threatening to him such that he both wanted to change my perspective and part of him seems to have convinced himself that this was cool or an appropriate form of connection. The first incident involved my unwanted participation in drug deals. I was clearly heavy and upset with what had occurred, but my father cheerfully told me to "lighten up." He insisted that I was badass like him, but the violation of my values could not be ignored when I felt intense guilt and shame in response to these situations. I knew my father had done something wrong, but I never had the courage to tell anybody at least in part because I loved him. He also showed several patterns of grooming in that he wanted to keep the nature of our relationship a secret from others while using a lot of positive reinforcement. My father also showed apparently genuine love in response to a situation with my mother and stepfather who were drug addicts. He appeared to both want my safety and to exploit my need for safety to get out of paying child support by using me to get dirt on Mom. This included his reminders that he was involved with a violent gang that would be willing to kill my stepfather, as if I could count on them for protection when in reality I was terrified of them and my father as well. I couldn't say these things to my father or other family members as doing so would jeopardize me further. The outcome is that parental perpetrators commonly don't realize the harm they are causing their children due to their implicit theory that a child would openly complain if they were unhappy. Similar to incest cases, the victim often appears to silently accept this kind of behavior due to coercive control which shares parallels with my case. I detailed the trafficking incident in a separate document. The FBI expressed interest in my explanation of the evidence and how it connects to broader patterns in organized crime that often goes undetected. They said I do need a Bachelor's degree though to work in higher positions. I can post it in this thread too if necessary, but the necessary snippet is in the other thread for more context and evidentiary standards for these situations. In terms of fathers who traffic their children out of love, this gets very fucked up, confusing, and disturbing. However, it matches my findings in criminology and maps onto all of the other patterns of my father. Part of why people join gangs is out of a sense of belonging that is being filled with a criminal group. Therefore, from this point of view, treating a child as if they belong to the gang is held as a form appropriate connection and love. This can include initiation through child prostitution in which the father is proud and excited for what is happening to his child. I was really baffled as to why my father was happy over all of this. The overarching pattern in parental sex offenders is that they generally do not realize the harm they caused and they see their behavior as loving. They have a distorted sense of reality in which everything is perfectly fine such that their map of reality has the child's reality completely backwards as the child's behavior is interpreted through the distorted framework. This is often relevant for victims in recovery who feel that their feelings of love make them unacceptable. One the inside as I stayed silent, my logic was as follows. By following this victim logic, it often leads victims of parental sex offenders to suicide. 1. My father did something unacceptable. 2. I silently accepted my father's unacceptable behavior. 3. My acceptance of that which is unacceptable makes me unacceptable. 4. Therefore, I am unacceptable. This line of reasoning is often tied to survivor's guilt such as "I should have turned my father into the police" (who in reality were corrupt and possibly complicit) or "I should have protected others from my father" (even though I couldn't protect myself). These are the surface level should statements that victims use to blame themselves, but the deeper should is "It is wrong for me to love my father because of his actions, therefore I should cut myself off from love to prevent love from enabling harm." (therefore I should kill myself.) This is a common pattern in how victims of child sexual abuse think and it often leads to suicide because they feel that their love is unacceptable and they should remove themselves from love forever as a consequence. The belief is that if a child molester is unlovable, and your parent is a child molester, and you love your parent, and loving someone is supposed to be unlovable makes you unlovable, then the victim is unlovable. This is why it is important that we don't demonize compassion and love for perpetrators as it is connected directly into the victim logic leading to suicide. children often stay quiet and cover for abusers as a consequence of loving them in the secret relationship the perpetrator established through grooming. There is also an important distinction between "accepting" as in endorsing or consenting to my father's behavior, and "accepting" as in having a freeze response as a survival instinct and therefore incurring the cost of my father's actions. The alternative frame for victims would be as follows. 1. My father did something harmful. 2. I accepted the harm because of my desire for love. 3. The situation was logically acceptable by virtue of the fact that is was accepted. 4. Therefore I did not accept anything that was unacceptable. 5. Therefore I am acceptable by virtue of the fact that I exist and I desire to love and be loved. 6. None of this is an excuse for harm. The core point to this connects to spirituality in several important ways. Firstly, ego is not defined just by an individual human being. The ego is relational and defined relative to other. Therefore, demonizing other beings who inform the ego identity translates into demonizing oneself, as the relational nature of ego makes self and other entangled in ways that cannot be cleanly separated. In my case, hating my father translates into hating myself because he isn't actually separate from me. The same logic applies to all human beings, animals, and objects in the universe as all of them are ultimately part of me. In that sense, I am the universe and everything in it. Self is defined relative to other within the universe and the distinction is untenable. At the same time from another point of view I am the universe experiencing itself from the point of view of a human being within the domain of separateness which itself is illusory and not separate from unity. Leo takes this further by saying that I literally created the universe, not just that everything is connected. Oneness is deeper than just connectedness as would be the case for the relational nature of ego in which self and other cannot be cleanly separated. Either way, there is ultimately no difference between loving self and other though. This is also crucial for forgiveness which applies even in some extreme severe cases. 1. My father hurt me to some extent out of ignorance in that he could not distinguish the harm caused from implicit theories linked to the distorted alternative reality. 2. My father hurt me out of weakness and fear such as his fear of being caught leading to threats of disownment combined with his inability to exit the criminal lifestyle without permanent imprisonment. 3. My father hurt me out of selfishness. (no shit) 4. My father hurt me out of a need for love from his son which he sought through criminal exploitation framed as inclusion, protection, belonging, and bad ass gangster identity while being severely traumatic to his son. 5. My father hurt me out of a lack of consciousness in that his dense ego was prone to severe distortions and self-deceptions such that it could spin entirely alternate realities in which the behavior was good and justified. In the end of all of this, I hope you can see why empathy, love, and compassion for perpetrators ultimately ties back in to empathy for victims as the two cannot actually be cleanly separated due to the nature of ego, self, and other. Additionally, there is more complex information in terms of cognitive empathy for sex offenders that can be used to inform prevention. This includes situational / opportunistic offenders which are the most common, grievance based offenders such as intimate partners who rape and murder their victims, and preferential offenders which includes pedophiles who impact a disproportionate amount of victims as well as sadistic serial rapists / killers and zoophiles who rape animals believing it is an appropriate form of love. By understanding the different types of offenders and the psychological backgrounds, then at minimum it can be used to inform prevention, especially sense social isolation and feeling like an outsider in society is a common problem for criminals who might seek belonging from gangs instead. This is a big topic for discussion, but it is important for correcting the conflation between pedophiles and child sex offenders. The truth is more nuanced, and the truth is necessary for there to be any meaningful love as without truth, any love expressed is ultimately based on falsehood. In that sense it is like loving nothing. This was kind of heavy for me to type, but I hope you find value in this kind of work. In my case it also relates to abuse from my sister who likes to weaponize my trauma around my father against me by insisting he was "loving and caring like a father" while knowing the harm he caused me. Forgiveness in this context does weaken my sister's ability to weaponize this trauma. Perhaps the next question would be in regards to child sex traffickers who are not the child's parent and who instead kidnap other children at airports to take them to the wrong plane, leading to a gang who turns them into sex slaves for profit. This empathy and love for offenders could be expanded on that front, but it seems more difficult in some ways. I have a hard time with sadistic offenders especially who torture their victims for sexual pleasure, including children which creates an alternative sexual motive for the assault aside from pedophilia.

Do you have a way to roughly estimate my degree of consciousness? I'm clearly not that conscious as to realize that you are behind my eyes. Is there a way to know roughly how conscious I am, or is such a model not applicable to this kind of work?

@Leo Gura you are right that this is radical. The obvious question is how the fuck does that work? This is a mindfuck. For some reason I feel scared when imagining my father looking through my eyes right now. By this logic I should be looking through your eyes right now, but you probably don't mean me as an ego. You probably mean that if I am God, and I am the universe, then my father is also God and the universe. God experiences itself through consciousness such that there is no difference from looking through these eyes versus someone else's eyes. In that sense there is no distinction between any content or information in any situation in reality as all of that is relative. On top of that, I guess it applies to all beings looking through my eyes, as ultimately they are all God. I think this raises a serious question about who is behind my eyes and how do I know. This is a tough one for me to understand.

I would like to engage with this seriously to see what I am overlooking and where my level of consciousness is. I have a lot to learn and a lot to discover to the point that it seems overwhelming because of how big the universe is, but I will do my best. The main thing I need to clarify is what exactly you mean when you say that I am my father as "I" could mean a lot of things depending on the perspective through which I am my father is being filtered. I will lay out a few interpretations of what I am my father might mean. 1. I am my father in the sense that in an alternate reality not accessible to this human ego, I am experiencing life literally from the perspective of my father with full access to his thought process and life history, and I am literally carrying out autonomous actions such as sex trafficking children. 2. I am my father in the sense that any division between self and other is imaginary. From the perspective of this human ego, I am interpreting information in reality and constructing stories about it. This include the appearance of human beings claiming to be my family, when technically I am imagining a belief system with stories about them being my family. All beliefs are mental constructs regardless of whether they are true or false, so in that sense any belief is only true in the relativistic sense of corresponding to a certain phenomenon. This includes the belief that I am a human, I have a family, other human beings exist, and I live in a material universe. The consequence is that I interpret reality such that there is information external from me. If all of this reality is happening within me rather than outside of me, than in that sense My father was never outside of the experience which constitutes me. The hallucination of my father is therefore me even if he violates me. If all of reality is happening within me, then in that sense my father can't be other than me and that includes this computer screen happening within me. In this case "I" is defined as the entire bubble of experience. 3. I am my father in the sense that given a deep enough level of conscious, I am God constructing reality through this hallucination of a self. I therefore constructed my father as part of my nature through this imagination, including crimes which the human ego had not framework for understanding or comprehending. The human ego Trenton did not know what sex trafficking was when it happened. As God I imagined that Trenton would not know these things at that time in the past which is also imaginary. This sounds like it would be a mindfuck. It is important to clarify these things as much as possible because "I am my father" could be interpreted in a lot of ways and it isn't obvious which one is meant. It might be important to clarify what we mean by "I imagined." I imagined could mean a lot of things, but I'm not sure which one is meant. I remember my father was also a Star Wars fan. His favorite line was the mindfuck "I am your father!" I wonder how much of a mindfuck it would be if the reveal was actually that Luke Skywalker is his own father. Luke thought that his father was an evil man happening outside of him, but actually Luke was Anakin Skywalker slaughtering the younglings and terrorizing the galaxy. I find myself laughing at the mindfuck, but I want to take it seriously and engage with it.

One day, there was a man in profound distress. This man was poor, sleep deprived, and distraught. He sat down by the rail of a bridge, curled up in a ball crying as he sat on a blanket next to a broken guitar. God saw this man in distress, and walked up to him. God asked the man "Why are you crying? Do you need help?" The man looked to God and said "There is nothing you can do to help me! Only God can help me! You are not God! You can't help me! Only God or someone with power can help me!" God wanted to reason with the man, but the man would not believe that he was God. The man requested that God walk away. However, God would not abandon this man. God fulfilled this man's request to walk away, but did not abandon him. Instead God used his power on a cell phone in his pocket to dial 911. God requested that the police come to the bridge while describing the scene that was unfolding. The police asked God if the man was black or Hispanic. God told the police that the man was white. The police arrived in about 1 minute. An officer approached the bridge. God pointed to the man on the bridge and described what happened. A witness told the officer that he was considering calling the police himself as he described the man's behavior. The officer thanked them for the information as he approached the man on the bridge. God understood that the man would probably be pissed at him for calling the police, therefore it was time to leave the scene as the presence of the body he inhabited would likely trigger further destabilization in the distressed man. As God and the witness walked away from the scene, they briefly discussed the significance of what had happened and the broader social patterns that were occurring in the region such as poverty, crime, drug addiction, and previous suicides at that scene committed by people who believed that jumping would lead to a swift rather than slow and agonizing death. Once the two parted ways, God was approached by a cat. The cat started mewing and rubbing against him as a sign of affection. God pet the cat and gave it some water before coming home to type this story. This story seems fitting for actualized.org.

I had a friend named Noah who hated his name. He was an atheist born into a religious family. He had to go to church for things he didn't believe in. If a child wants the approval of their parents, then they might silently act like everything is fine while internally dreading everything. So, if you took your child to church and they acted like everything was fine, how would you know if they were acting this way because they liked church or if they are acting this way for the parent's approval? If religion becomes evidence of conditional love, then the child might hide their true feelings from the parent. I guess my question is, if taking a child to church is considered immoral, then what kind of information should we expose children to? Are we not ultimately shaping children based on what we think is right due to our limited understanding of child psychology?

Apparently, most human beings cannot comprehend that a parent would do these things to their own child. It challenges their sense of reality because what is held as absolute to parents is in reality subjective. Parental love can be applied in destructive and horrific ways. Loving your child therefore does not prevent incest and rape. If you dig into sex offender typologies it might challenge your understanding of reality once you see the twisted nature of evil. Meanwhile, I see that you are sorry this happened to me, but sometimes I struggle to comprehend what kind of empathy I would need from others. Part of the problem is that love has proven dangerous and it might make me attached to a perpetrator. It is also frustrating that those who see the pain can often do very little to help the situation somehow. This may be part of why therapy is ineffective in that the therapist does not realize that they are God and are therefore limited by the paradigms they apply to child sexual abuse. I think it would be worth discussing, what kind of love do I need? If I have learned to numb myself to my feelings because of how overwhelming they are, then I become numb to people offering love as well. This is complicated by autism leading to difficulty understanding my emotions and is compounded by shut down when exposed to severe trauma. Eventually I just become numb because of how overwhelming it would be to feel everything. This in turn leads to chronic stress and emotional dysregulation in which death is seen as an escape from the psychological wounds and my sense of existential dread. I will try to figure out what kind of love I need if family isn't helpful. If not family, then I thought career accomplishment would be something to pursue instead of relationships, but it was undermined by depression and educational disruptions. If career does not fill the void, then what love do I need? I hoped spirituality would give me an alternative sense of purpose and reality, but that too is easier said than done. Ideally healthy relationships are helpful for recovery, but in reality this is hard if family has betrayed their own children.

There's all kinds of ways for the ego to play God. As far as I know, I am everything. It is a bit much to explain all of it, but I'm sure you or someone else on the forum figured it out. There are multiple paths that can be followed to realize this.