From Morality to Mental Health

 

Preface

The therapeutic trend in ethics is the tendency to approach moral matters in terms of mental health, for example by pathologizing vices (alcoholism as a disease), psychologizing virtues (self-respect as self-esteem), and liberalizing attitudes (sex as good, guilt as suspect). The trend unfolded throughout the twentieth-century, although its roots extend to Plato and the Stoics. At its worst, the trend is a confused and dangerous attempt to replace morality with therapy. At its best, the trend integrates moral and therapeutic understanding to yield creative solutions to otherwise intractable problems. In this book I develop an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective centered on three themes: (1) sound morality is healthy; (2) we are responsible for our health; (3) moral values are embedded in mental health and psychotherapy.

Part I connects Plato’s virtue-oriented ethics with psychiatrists’ definition of mental disorders. It also explores Freud’s and Nietzsche’s therapeutic critiques of sick forms of morality. I show how moral virtues overlap and interweave with the criteria for positive mental health—that is, psychological well-being in addition to the absence of mental disorders. Here, as throughout the book, I reject any general dichotomy between moral and therapeutic attitudes.

Part II develops a conception of responsibility for mental health and applies it both to therapist-client relationships and to moral accountability within society. I take seriously the criticism that the therapeutic trend in ethics fosters evasion of responsibility, but I recast the criticism as a caution rather than a basis for opposing the trend. I also respond to the concern that responsibility for mental health leads to blaming victims of mental illness.

Part III discusses responsibilities for health in connection with alcoholism, pathological gambling, serious crime, unjustified violence, and visceral bigotry.

In each instance, I make sense of how the same pattern of conduct can be both wrongdoing and sickness. The aim is to show why expansive definitions of mental disorders do not provide automatic excuses for harming others.

Part IV shifts the focus to positive health and personal meaning. I explore the confluence of morality and mental health in pursuing meaningful lives.

Topics include depression, self-deception, and philosophical counseling, as well as love, work, and philanthropy.
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Self-deception and hope

Ever since Socrates pronounced the unexamined life not worth living, ethicists have linked meaningful life and honesty with oneself.1Similarly, therapists regard honesty with oneself as integral to healing, and they regard contact with reality as a criterion for positive mental health.
Some recent psychologists, however, suggest that self-deception and unrealistic optimism might be good for us. I agree with them that self-deception sometimes contributes to hope and love, and thereby to meaningful life and healthy functioning. It does so in a limited way, however, and not to the extent that justifies abandoning contact with reality as a criterion for mental health. Even when self-deception advances psychological health, there is no fundamental clash between therapy and morality, for all the values involved—hope, love, and honesty—are both moral and therapeutic values that are sometimes in tension.

By reaffirming truthfulness within a moral-therapeutic perspective, morality and mental health once again emerge as interwoven.

Vital Lies

‘‘The life-lie, don’t you see—that’s the animating principle of life,’’ proclaims Dr. Relling in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.2Life lies, or vital lies, are self-deceiving beliefs based on unfounded optimism, unwarranted hopes, and rationalizations about our failures. We rely on them in order to cope and to maintain happiness and health:

‘‘Deprive the average man of his vital lie, and you’ve robbed him of happiness as well.’’3 Dr. Relling fosters inflated self-images in his patients. In particular, he encourages Hjalmar Ekdal to believe he is on the verge of a revolutionary dis-covery in photographic technology, when actually he is tinkering with a bunch of useless gadgets. Ekdal is a cooperative patient who is already prone to self-deception. He believes he is the sole provider for his family, yet his wife balances their household budget by relying on large subsidies from the former business partner of Ekdal’s father. Ekdal also assumes he is the father of Hedvig, his greatest joy, when in fact she is the offspring of the former business partner.

The son of the former business partner, Gregers Werle, calls for complete honesty and encourages Ekdal to abandon his illusions about work and family. Yet Werle’s moralizing is self-righteous and neurotic, motivated by unconscious hatred of his father and shame at his extramarital affair and illegitimate child. When Ekdal learns that Hedvig is not his biological daughter, he immediately becomes estranged from her. Feeling disowned by the father she adores, the emotionally fragile Hedwig sinks into depression and kills herself. At least in this instance, honesty is apparently self-destructive, undermines love, and has dubious motives.
Most of us do not need a Dr. Relling to prescribe our vital lies. As self-deceivers, we have ample resources within. Like Ekdal, we need reinforcement from family and friends, but usually they are willing to indulge illusions that keep us buoyant with optimism—assuming we reciprocate. Beyond these social dimensions of self-deception, what mental activities and states are involved in deceiving ourselves? The question has generated a substantial literature in philosophy and psychology.4 The central issue is whether the paradigm, gar-den-variety, cases of self-deception involve purposeful evasion of truth. Or do they instead consist entirely of motivated irrationality—biased beliefs that are false and contrary to the evidence? I believe both kinds of self-deception exist and are commonplace.

To begin with motivated irrationality, we are all familiar with how biases, such as self-esteem and happiness, filter what we see and think. Thinking along these lines, Stanley Paluch concludes that ‘‘self-deception’’ is a metaphor for false and unsupported beliefs formed by biased assessments of evidence.5 More recently, Alfred Mele says that self-deception consists in forming false beliefs that go against the evidence, and doing so under the influence of a biasing desire or emotion.6 There is no intention to evade reality or to embrace a falsehood.

Suppose, for example, my physician informs me that I have a fatal and untreatable cancer, giving me six months to live. My doctor is well-qualified, and a second opinion confirms her diagnosis; on balance, I have every reason to believe my chances are slim. Yet, hoping against hope, I believe I will beat the odds. My belief is influenced by a desire to live and a fear of dying, but there are various possibilities. One possibility is honest hope, whereby I struggle to believe I will survive even though I am painfully aware of the evidence to the contrary. The other possibility is motivated irrationality, in which I downplay the contrary evidence (‘‘What do doctors know, anyhow?’’[that's very good question VB]) and highlight positive evidence. Self-deception occurs when I lose my grasp of what the evidence indicates.

I believe there is another possibility, however: purposeful evasion. Paluch and Mele reject this possibility because they believe it involves modeling self-deception on lying to other people, which generates two paradoxes. First, when I lie to another person, I know (or believe) something unpleasant and get the other person to believe the opposite. By analogy, when I lie to myself it seems I know (or believe) one thing and simultaneously get myself to believe the self-deception and hope opposite. But that seems impossible, for my knowledge would prevent me from acquiring the false belief. Freud offers one solution to this paradox: the unpleasant belief is kept unconscious, and the opposing belief is held consciously.

A different solution is that the unpleasant knowledge is held at a less-explicit level of consciousness and ignored.7 I believe self-deception can involve either unconscious beliefs or disregarded beliefs. Most purposeful evasion, however, does not involve self-contradictory beliefs at all, but instead one belief formed by evading unwanted evidence or its implications.

Turning to the second paradox, when I lie to another person I intend to mislead them. By analogy, when I lie to myself it seems I must be aware of an unpleasant truth and use that awareness to form an intention to flee the truth. But that is a psychological impossibility, except perhaps in cases of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality). Here the solution is to specify that my intention is to evade a reality and its evidence, rather than (a muddled) intention to believe what I know is false. In addition, the intention is formed and acted on spontaneously rather than self-reflectively. As a self-deceiver, typically I have some suspicion of an unpleasant reality and use the suspicion to ignore the reality, discounting evidence contrary to what I want to believe.8 Selective attention, willful ignorance, and distorted use of evidence suffice to explain purposeful self-deception, without postulating a conscious intention to believe what I know is false. As Herbert Fingarette writes: ‘‘The crux of the matter . . . is that we can take account of something without necessarily focusing our attention on it. That is, we can recognize it, and respond to it, without directing our attention to what we are doing, and our response can be intelligently adaptive rather than merely a reflex or habit automatism.’’9 For example, we write on a computer without thinking about the specific motions of our fingers across a keyboard, and we drive a car while taking account of many details in the environment without attending to them, much less attending to our patterns of attention. Similarly, in self-deception we take account of unpleasant truths and evidence without attending to them. We do so as part of ‘‘a purposeful and skillfully pursued policy’’ in which typically we ‘‘secretly do know’’ or suspect the unpleasant truths and evidence.10 To sum up, self-deception includes both purposeful evasion and motivated irrationality. Both kinds might be involved in the same case, and often are. And both kinds are relevant to understanding the interplay of honesty and hope, as well as morality and mental health.

Healthy Self-Deception: Honesty versus Health?

Some recent psychological studies echo Ibsen’s insight that self-deception con-tributes to vitality and happiness.11 For example, an anthology of essays adopts the theme that ‘‘self-deception is a normal and generally positive force in human behavior.’’12 Again, Jonathon Brown cites an extensive body of psychological studies, including his own, showing that healthy, well-adjusted individuals healthy morality and meaningful lives ‘‘possess unrealistically positive views of themselves.’’13 And in Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind, Shelley E. Taylor argues that ‘‘unrealistic optimism’’ promotes mental and physical health: ‘‘Normal human thought and perception is marked not by accuracy but by positive self-enhancing illusions about the self, the world, and the future.’’14 I focus on Taylor’s book because, by presenting the experimental literature to a wide audience, it enters into the therapeutic trend. Because she avoids moral language, she does not explicitly affirm mental health over honesty, but clearly she implies as much. Taylor groups healthy ‘‘positive illusions’’ under four headings: egocentricity, illusions of control, illusions of progress, and self-fulfilling beliefs.

Egocentricity. We are heroes in our own dramas, interpreting the world through a subjective lens. In doing so, we cast our actions, talents, achievements, and prospects in a favorable light in order to maintain self-esteem, hope, and happiness. We selectively ignore unpleasant evidence that goes against what we want to believe about ourselves. Failures and setbacks are conveniently forgotten, and painful events are affirmed as positive learning experiences.

Illusions of Control. Typically we exaggerate the control we have in our lives, thereby manifesting unrealistic optimism about the role of chance and external influences. Most gamblers, for example, think they can beat the odds and that they have skills in areas where pure luck dictates the outcome. They roll the dice gently when they want low numbers and more vigorously when want high numbers. Again, most drivers—about 90 percent in one study—believe they are above average in skill, including drivers who have caused major accidents. And we blame victims of all kinds by holding false stereotypes about them, thereby creating the illusion that we are protected against dangers because we are more careful than them.

Illusions of Progress. Most of us are optimistic about progress in our lives (as distinct from progress in the world). For example, in a study of college students enrolled in a special program that promised increased study skills and better grades, students reported dramatic improvements. Even when they failed a test they would reinterpret the failure as progress in learning how to do better next time. In fact, no differences in results were found between students enrolled and not enrolled in the program.

Self-Fulfilling Beliefs. Belief in the prospects of achieving a specific goal tends to bring about favorable results by strengthening motivation and bolstering hope. A familiar example is the placebo effect, which is any positive therapeutic impact due to patients’ beliefs about medical procedures. This includes sugar pills given to patients who believe they are taking an active drug, and it includes beliefs in the effectiveness of health professionals and their institutions. The extent of placebo effects is controversial, but many researchers believe it affects about a third of us. Positive beliefs and attitudes also encourage others to support our efforts.

Citing a wealth of studies in the preceding areas, Taylor concludes that self-deceptive positive illusions are healthy: ‘‘Increasingly, we must view the self-deception and hope  psychologically healthy person not as someone who sees things as they are but as someone who sees things as he or she would like them to be.’’ The mentally healthy person has a positive self-image and abilities to be happy, to care about others, to work productively, and to continue to grow.15

Taylor vastly overstates her case. She does so because she equivocates between two senses of ‘‘positive illusions’’: unproven beliefs and irrational beliefs.16 Unproven beliefs are beliefs not shown to be true by the evidence, and which might be true or false. Using this sense, Taylor defends optimism: unproven positive beliefs in the form of hope, faith, and optimism promote mental health. This is an important insight, but hardly revolutionary. Common sense tells us that positive attitudes promote our ability to maintain self-esteem and to cope with work, personal relationships, and ambitious projects. Irrational beliefs, in contrast, are false beliefs contrary to the available evidence. In using this sense, Taylor successfully defends only some, not most, self-deception as healthy because it promotes hope, coping, and self-esteem. For example, she claims that irrational, self-deceiving beliefs are ‘‘normal’’ because most of us believe we are above average at everyday tasks such as driving.17 In fact, these studies merely show that unproven beliefs are ubiquitous. Drivers who hold unwarranted beliefs are not necessarily evading evidence about their rankings as drivers, for they are not provided with such evidence. The drivers value (affirm) their driving skills, endeavors, and future prospects, without having hard data about how to accurately evaluate (rank) them.

Sometimes Taylor says that positive illusions are false beliefs, but other times she suggests they can simply be unproven beliefs that cast reality in a positive light.18 Now, there is no basis for counting all unproven beliefs illusions— ’’unproven’’ does not mean ‘‘proven false.’’ Why, then, did Taylor count unproven beliefs, whether true or false, as illusions? I suspect she borrowed the deviant usage from Freud’s Future of an Illusion. Freud writes: ‘‘What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. . . . Illusions need not necessarily be false—that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction to reality.’’19 Freud’s odd notion that illusions can be true contributed to the polemical tone of his book in denigrating religion. In turn, by conflating unproven and false beliefs, Taylor greatly exaggerates the health benefits of self-deception.

Truthfulness and Mental Health The tendency to perceive accurately and to maintain justified beliefs is a traditional criterion for mental health, as we saw in chapter 2. The criterion is embedded in Freud’s ‘‘reality principle,’’ the norm of living in tune with reality. It is equally central to cognitive psychologists’ emphasis on realistic cognition. And Marie Jahoda assumed that ‘‘as a rule, the perception of reality is called mentally healthy when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there.’’20 In explaining the caveat ‘‘as a rule,’’ however, Jahoda emphasized the healthy morality and meaningful lives plurality of reasonable interpretations of the world. Equally important, she said mental health requires only ‘‘relative freedom’’ from distortion by our desires, together with a disposition to test reality to check whether it conforms to our wishes. Likewise, Taylor’s arguments should lead us to qualify, not abandon, truthfulness as a criterion for mental health.

Although Taylor’s main interest is in positive mental health, she devotes a chapter to psychopathology, focusing on pathological depression and mania. Mild depression and low self-esteem involve fewer positive illusions and more accurate beliefs than healthy states, an idea called ‘‘depressive realism.’’ Taylor suggests that therapy should encourage positive illusions.21 Once again, however, her suggestion is marred by ambiguity. Is she saying that the absence of self-deceptive beliefs contributes to depression, so that therapists should encourage self-deception in their clients? Or is she saying that the absence of unproven positive beliefs contributes to depression, so that therapists should encourage hope? The first claim is a Dr. Relling–like prescription for untruthfulness; the second claim is a morally responsible endorsement of honest hope.

Depression involves loss of caring about ourselves and our world. Depression is primarily a diminished valuing of ourselves, other people, relationships, activities, and life itself, regardless of whether it involves unwarranted evaluation. Accordingly, when therapists cure depression they are not encouraging untruthfulness. They are helping patients value themselves and their world by restoring honest hope, faith, and caring.

Taylor discusses mania more briefly, again focusing on mild cases. Mania is rarer than depression, and usually it is connected with bipolar disorder (manic depression). Mania interests Taylor as the exaggeration of normal positive il-lusions. Frequently, it contributes to the work of the creative artist, the daring leader, and the religious innovator. In discussing these ideas, she again fails to distinguish unwarranted evaluations from positive valuing. Either might be involved, of course, but blurring them exaggerates the contribution of self-deception to creativity. And by stipulating that mania is an excessive illusion that differs from ‘‘milder’’ positive illusions, she neglects how self-deception sometimes contributes to psychopathology.

Moving to more serious disorders, a few writers believe self-deception enters into psychosis, but for the most part self-deception is a different phenomenon than involuntary hallucinations, psychotic delusions, and other complete breaks with reality. Even so, there are continuities, not absolute differences, between psychosis and ordinary self-deception. Families immersed in untruthfulness breed pathology.22 Self-deception also plays a role in personality disorders, such as narcissistic and histrionic disorders defined by grandiose views of one’s talents, worth, and entitlement.

Addictions provide a more straightforward example of how self-deception contributes to pathology. Indeed, Alcoholics Anonymous portrays alcoholism as the disease of denial. And addiction specialist Abraham J. Twerski exposes the rationalizations used to maintain optimism about how much one drinks (‘‘I am self-deception and hope a social drinker’’), about the degree of one’s self-control over the addiction (‘‘I can stop at any time’’), and about the desirability of using drugs (‘‘They help me cope and cause minor problems at most’’).23 Addicts might also deceive themselves about their diminished self-respect and gradually lose a sense of who they are.24 Self-deception also enters into the neuroses, understood as the result of psychological defense against anxiety, although defense can also serve healthy ends.25 Thus, defense might undergird an artist’s fanatical devotion to her work, but only in the workaholic might pathology be involved. Psychological defense is often interpreted as self-deception, even though Freud rarely used the term ‘‘self-deception.’’26 Yet, psychological defense can be understood in two ways, paralleling the two varieties of self-deception. Sometimes Freud described repression, denial, projection, and other defense mechanisms as motivated biases that operate unconsciously and without any activity by the person. Other times he described psychological defense as purposeful and intentional activities.

Most likely, he thought defense might involve either or both. Moreover, defense ranges from activities that are partly conscious and preconscious (available to consciousness) to processes below the level of mental contents available to consciousness without special help from a therapist.27 Either way, removing repression can lead to both more realistic cognition and better coping.28 Finally, pathological self-deception is not an automatic excuse for wrong-doing. When we have, or should have, good reason to believe that unconscious motives are distorting moral understanding, we are obligated to take special precautions to ensure that we are meeting our responsibilities.29 Unconscious motivations are not automatically excuses, and they often lead to culpable negligence. The same is true of self-deception involving conscious activities. Here again, the therapeutic trend does not replace morality but instead integrates it with therapeutic understanding.

Moral Values in Tension If self-deception were always dishonest, then Taylor’s psychological studies would support a morality-therapy dichotomy: honesty condemns self-deception; health celebrates self-deception. Some philosophers do in fact condemn all self-deception as dishonest. Kant wrote: ‘‘By a lie a man makes himself contemptible—by an outer lie, in the eyes of others; by an inner lie [i.e., self-deception], in his own eyes, which is still worse—and violates the dignity of humanity in his own person.’’30 Jean-Paul Sartre condemned all self-deceivers as cowards and scum.31 And Daniel A. Putman says that ‘‘self-deception always works to destroy a fundamental virtue, integrity. Self-deception isolates part of the self and prevents that part from being integrated into consciousness.’’32

These absolute condemnations are too extreme, however, for not all self-deception is immoral. Despite its enormous importance, honesty is one virtue and one obligation among others, and it is not paramount in all situations. Thus, an instance of self-deception might be untruthful and yet justified by other moral values that promote meaningful lives—for example, hope and faith, self-esteem and self-respect, and love and friendship. Hence, the therapeutic contributions of some self-deception do not threaten morality in its entirety. To return to an earlier example, suppose I am a self-deceiving cancer patient who distorts the evidence about my condition. Untruthful, yes, but the self-deception might be embedded in a pattern of other virtues. Faced with great danger, including the danger of collapsing from fear, I might be courageous in keeping hope alive.33 Doing so manifests self-respect in trying not to fall apart, in struggling to carry on with dignity, integrity, and self-respect. It also helps my family cope with a difficult situation. Honesty and hope are sometimes in tension, but they are connected within a complex web of virtues.34 Not surprising, the occasional tension between honesty and hope parallels tensions between realistic cognition and coping as criteria for mental health. On the one hand, truthfulness and healthy cognition largely overlap; indeed, truthfulness is the primary moral ideal guiding realistic cognition. By definition, truthful persons care about truth: they try to perceive accurately, reason cogently, respond rationally to evidence, and expand understanding in light of new information. On the other hand, truthful persons need hope and mental health. Hope overlaps with healthy coping, social adaptation, and self-esteem.

Because moral values are embedded in mental health, we might expect wide congruence between healthy and morally permissible self-deception.

Finally, an instance of self-deception might be healthy in one respect, by contributing vitality or happiness, but unhealthy in other respects, by distorting reality. Perhaps that is true of Hjalmar Ekdal. This complexity parallels the moral complexity of self-deception. Hope, in many (though not all) forms, is just as much a moral value as honesty, and the tensions between them are as much moral as therapeutic.
To conclude, I have suggested that moral and therapeutic values are not inherently at loggerheads with regard to honesty, hope, and self-deception. The complexity revealed by therapeutic perspectives parallels and is interwoven with the complexity within morality itself. Self-deception, both motivated irratio-nality and purposeful evasion, does sometimes advance mental health, but it also advances moral values such as hope and love. Even so, self-deception is less beneficial than suggested by Taylor and others who conflate unproven beliefs and irrational beliefs, and frequently it is linked to unhealthy evasions of reality. And the tensions between honesty and hope reveal tensions internal to morality and mental health alike, not a basis for a morality-therapy dichotomy.

From Morality to Mental Health:
Virtue and Vice in a Therapeutic Culture
Mike W. Martin

The Child Support Scam

 

We interviewed today's most knowledgeable young authority on the child support enforcement system, who confirms a recent report in the Wall Street Journal alleging extensive corruption.
 
Recently, I gave this interview to Bai Macfarlane of Mary’s Advocates, one of the best groups fighting no-fault divorce. We devoted attention to the shocking dereliction of duty by the churches – both Catholic and others – to fulfill their calling and confront the divorce regime.

Please go to this interview, “like” and comment. Both Bai and Mary’s Advocates deserve more attention.

Speaking of people who deserve more attention — and connected with my recent post on corruption in the child support system (below) — the latest interview in our new podcast series features Shah (of the “This is Shah” podcast), a top expert:

Even within the Manosphere, ignorance of the child support enforcement machinery is widespread, and many men (and not even necessarily fathers) do not realize how easily they can be imprisoned and made homeless by it — until it happens.

Child support and the feminist gendarmerie that enforces it is government chicanery at its most cynical and proves my contention that feminism today has become little more — and nothing less — than a massive enterprise for putting as many men as possible in prison.

To better understand the importance of Shah’s points, here is a partial list of the horrors that can be inflicted on you by an order to pay child support. All of the following can happen to you regardless of fault and even if you are legally blameless, if you are divorced involuntarily and your spouse deserts you without legal grounds and takes your children:

You will be forced to pay child support at levels that are generous enough not just to raise children but to entice mothers into divorcing.

Any arrearage in child support immediately incurs interest and fees that can quickly increase the arrearage manyfold: 10x or more.

You can be forced to pay additional child support (“add-ons”) for things that are already calculated in the basic child support formula.

Your child support will not be reduced if you lose your job.

Your child support will not be reduced if you are called up for active duty in the reserves, and upon returning you can immediately be arrested for any arrearages incurred while serving. If you are taken hostage or prisoner, you are required to pay child support for the time you are captive.

You can be forced to pay an amount based not on what you earn but on what a judge says you should be earning.

You can be forced to pay child support for children who live with you full time.

Temporary income such as bonuses, severance pay, and overtime pay can be used to lock you into increased child support payments permanently.

You can be ordered to pay an amount of child support that exceeds your income.

You can be forced to pay for your children after they are adults.

You can be forced to pay for children that are not yours.

In some jurisdictions, you can be jailed for proving that the children are not yours.

You can be forced to pay for children that other men are simultaneously paying for.

You can be forced to pay child support for children that do not exist, and it by law it cannot be refunded to you.

If a third party pays your child support for you, that does not count toward your own “obligation,” and you must still pay it. If they give you the money directly, that becomes “income” and can be used to lock you into increased payments.

The income of your relatives (wife, parents, etc.) can be demanded and assessed in determining your level of child support, and it can be seized.

If you take out a loan to pay child support, that loan counts as increased “income” and can be used to increase your payments permanently.

If you are forced to pay too much child support by mistakes made by the enforcement agency, a law prohibits the money from ever being refunded to you.

Your child support can be increased by orders issued by bureaucrats, as well as judges.

A minor boy who is raped by an adult woman can be forced to pay her child support. The same is true of an elderly man raped by a younger woman.

Your grown children can collect child support from you (and the mother if you are still married).

A man who impregnates your wife and then marries her can collect child support from you.

You can be forced to pay child support for your stepchildren.

Your children’s savings can be counted as your income for assessing your level of child support if your name is on their bank account.

Your name can be published in the newspaper, billboards, pizza boxes, etc., your car can be booted, and your passport, driver’s license, and professional licenses can be confiscated – all without any conviction or proof that you have failed to pay child support.

There are many times more child support enforcement agents than drug enforcement agents.

In the US, if you have an arrearage, it is a federal crime to leave your state, even to find work, or even if the mother takes your children to live in a another state.

Your children’s mother can extort additional payments from you, in addition to the legally required payments, in exchange for letting you see your children.

Your employer can reduce your wages, knowing that if you quit you will be subject to arrest for nonpayment of child support. They will also keep you away from anything you might steal.

Child support levels are designed by private collection agencies and set by courts and enforcement agents, not legislatures (i.e., police making laws).

Higher courts rulings that child support enforcement measures are unconstitutional are simply ignored with impunity by enforcement agencies.

If you are incarcerated for nonpayment of child support, you will not likely go to a prison (where you would have access to a clinic, library, recreational facilities, etc.), but instead to a chain gang or labor camp, with a reduced life expectancy.

Upon release you will be unemployable and homeless.

Please listen to Shah explain this totalitarian system. Then “like”, comment, and subscribe.

These points and more are documented in my book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family, chapter 3, and other works.

Who Really Stole Your Children?

Your former wife? Lawyers? A judge? Social workers? Think again. The entire US government and your state government are in on it, making a fast buck by snatching your kids and millions of others.

Stephen Baskerville

February 14, 2026

The Wall Street Journal recently admitted that the child support system is part of a massive corrupt government operation. The Journal details multiple instances of corruption throughout the welfare system (and men should be paying attention to welfare policy, dreary as it is, because it was the first bastion of government misandry). But the most corrupt, cynical, and destructive sector of welfare is Child Support Enforcement. The “slush fund” mentioned in the Journal’s headline is provided by your child support payments, plus dollars from all taxpayers, and it funds numerous government operations. It gives government functionaries a vested interest in seizing your children and millions of others, destroying their lives by keeping them away from their fathers as much as possible, and using them as hostages to force their fathers to pay the child support that funds government operations. The corruption is not limited to the welfare machinery itself (as the WSJ implies) or a few crooked officials; it pervades the entire government, state as well as federal and creates the very problem it claims to solve.

I was the first published author to reveal how this dirty system works 20 years ago in my book, Taken Into Custody, and in a scholarly article, “From Welfare State to Police State”, but others were blowing the whistle before me. Now we are vindicated in the mainstream media.

Incidentally, and even more mind-blowing, this also explains the incessant scolding of the tradcons. When sactimonious conservatives urge young men to “man-up”, get married, and start families, it is not just despite the likelihood of losing your children to the divorce machine — along with your income, savings, home, driver’s and professional licenses, and freedom — it enables the machine to take them. When Senator Josh Hawley publishes a book entitled, Manhood, offering men wholesome advice about the joys of family, he may have other motives than the “family values” he claims. As a state Attorney General (a stepping stone to higher office like his Senate seat), Hawley was the official in charge of maximizing revenue from child support collections. Your children, income, and involuntary divorce all helped Attorney General Hawley and his 49 counterparts fill their states’ coffers. (Precisely how is explained in my previous Substack post, Josh Hawley Scolds Us”, below.)

So add child support enforcement to the smorgasbord of techniques available to governments to surreptitiously conjure up (out of our pockets) money they do not have to pay for programs no one wants and benefit constituencies no one likes: taxation, money-printing, inflation — and now bribing mothers to divorce and rip children from their fathers, so that state officials like Josh Hawley can loot their patrimony.

Thanks to Bruce Eden for bringing the WSJ article to my attention.

Josh Hawley Scolds Us
In the supreme act of treachery, Republicans grandstand over the family while endeavoring to destroy it.

Stephen Baskerville

January 25, 2023

Dissident conservatives see Senator Josh Hawley as one of the good guys.  Not a radical Democrat nor a “RINO” Republican, Hawley objected to the certification of Joe Biden’s election in 2020, which he considered stolen, and voted to acquit Donald Trump in both impeachment proceedings, which he called a kangaroo court. 

But if we really want to understand the depravity of American politics, and why it has succumbed to the control of the far Left – and, moreover, if we want to do something constructive about it – then we cannot ignore the subterfuges of politicians like Hawley.   

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Hawley takes American men to task, telling them to man up, get married, and start a family.  “We need them to go get married, have families, and be responsible husbands and fathers,” he feels the need to tell them.  “This society is impoverished because too many young men are too despairing, are too checked out on social media or porn to be doing what we need them to be doing.”  Wholesome stuff, no doubt.  

Well, no actually.  Hawley’s moralizing reflects the most destructive trend in America today.

Shocking as it may sound, it is no exaggeration to say that Hawley is part of a devious political machine whose aim, in fact, is nothing less than to destroy American families in huge numbers.  It is two-faced politicians like Hawley, more than anything, that enables the machine to accomplish its aims.

Conspiracy theory?  How many times have we heard that lately?  Do we want to understand why the far Left took control of the United States government, or do we want to wag our fingers at the bad guys?  We either accept incontrovertible facts, or we do not.

Of course, the left attacks Hawley, and Aaron Renn has already criticized him from what might be called the thoughtful conservative perspective.  Renn sees Hawley as well-intentioned but misinformed.  I will be less charitable.  More is going on here than meets the eye.  And Hawley is guilty of more than self-righteous grandstanding.

First, Senator Hawley needs to hold his tongue and see to his own responsibilities.  We do not elect US senators to scold us.  We elect them to run the government, and when that government abuses its power, we expect them to correct it.  This case involves perhaps the most evil government machinery ever devised in the United States, but rather than make any effort to fix it, the Senator tries to divert attention from his own complicity and blame, not his fellows from the political class, but ordinary Americans who cannot defend themselves:

Somebody’s got to be honest and tell the truth to these young men. And the truth is that what the porn industry is selling them is a total lie. And the truth is, American society needs them. We need them to step up. …  It’s time to call…young men, to be something more. …  Somebody needs to tell them the truth.

Somebody needs to tell the truth, all right.  But the Senator prefers to wag his finger.  

The truth is that young men fail – actually, they quite deliberately and predictably refuse – to follow this unrequested advice because getting married and starting a family for men can easily become a one-way ticket to jail, poverty, and homelessness.

The moment a man has a child he loses all his constitutional rights.  Because of unilateral and involuntary divorce laws, his children can be taken from him by state functionaries through literally “no fault” of his own.  Without having committed any legal transgression, he can be prohibited from seeing them – ever – on pain of summary incarceration.  His home, bank accounts, and all other assets can be confiscated, also summarily, and he can be forced to pay unlimited amounts – yes, amounts exceeding his salary – as “child support” to the people who have stolen his children.  If he is unable, he is again liable to indefinite incarceration without trial, in which case he will never have a salary again, and he will never escape from the penal system.  If he is falsely accused of “child abuse” or “domestic violence” (standard scams to rationalize separating fathers from their children), he is further liable to being evicted from his home and incarcerated without any semblance of due process of law.  But he will not be jailed forever.  Eventually he will be released onto the streets, where he will remain.

I have provided overwhelming evidence for all this elsewhere.  But proving it is unnecessary, because no one denies it (and comments under the YouTube video fully bear me out).  Like the Senator, the political class simply ignores it.

It gets worse.  Diabolically, government officials like Hawley themselves have financial incentives to tear as many fathers as possible away from their children and make sure they stay away. 

His state, like all states, fills its coffers by collecting “child support.”  To collect it, the government must first separate as many children as possible from their fathers.  This is done by the welfare agencies and family courts, who share the spoils.  So if pesky legislators cut off the money or reduce taxes, child support will still supply plenty of revenue to sprinkle around.  “If the state needs more highway funding,” writes one commentator, accurately, “all they need to do is raise the state’s level of child support and they can spend their resulting welfare incentive increases on highway projects and remain in perfect compliance with the relevant programs funding requirements.”  

Single-parent homes and fatherless children are enormously lucrative for state governments and politicians like Hawley (including Republican ones), incentivizing them to encourage as much divorce and create as many fatherless children as possible.  Ratcheting up child-support awards to extortionate levels has the double effect of increasing the lucrative revenue stream and offering an irresistible bribe to entice single-mothers-to-be into filing for divorce.  For fathers, it has the added effect of sending them straight to jail when they cannot pay the impossible sums.

Would you marry and have children under these circumstances?  Of course not, which is why the men are refusing, and no amount of scolding will persuade them.

Child support enforcement has repeatedly been exposed as a dishonest and destructive bureaucratic boondoggle that creates the very problem it claims to solve by encouraging more fatherless homes with all the social pathologies that ensue.  The system has been plagued with numerous ethical improprieties, conflicts of interest, and scandals, including criminal fraud, as well as for its unconstitutional and authoritarian practices that violate Americans’ constitutional rights.  Advertised as a program to provide for children whose fathers have “abandoned” them, the reality is a system where “a father is forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

It is inconceivable that Hawley does not know all about this.  Like most politicians, he is a lawyer and judicial entrepreneur.  Most important, he is former attorney general of Missouri.  The office of state attorney general is the highest law enforcement official and a steppingstone to higher office.  Famed reporter John Gizzi of Human Events once wrote a scathing article (since taken down) on how this office corrupts both Democrats and Republicans.

Attorneys general oversee the divorce and child support machineries.  Their job is to use the penal system to maximize the revenue that the state receives from tearing children away from their fathers.  A cynic might suspect the Senator of urging more men to marry and have children so that their subsequent involuntary divorces will supply further bounty for Missouri and its functionaries. 

Tucker Carlson normally shows more discernment than this, though if he did probe this abuse forthrightly he would quickly be shown the door by Fox News.

To rub salt a bit further into our wounds, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is another engineer of the machine.  DeSantis recently signed a breathtakingly dishonest bill that claimed to “restore fatherhood.”  In fact, the law is a throwback to Clinton-era programs that, far from returning children to their fathers, would make sure they stay apart, while subjecting them to feminist-approved psychotherapy to make them more like mothers and, you guessed it, collect more child-support. 

Florida’s legislature approves this because, like every state house in America, it is controlled by lawyers, with a heavy contingent of divorce lawyers from both parties who have no desire to bring the divorce epidemic under control.  Like Missouri, Florida is filling its coffers off the backs of fatherless children.

A more ruthless family-destruction machinery could hardly be devised – replete with the financial payments that co-opt and corrupt potential opposition groups.  It is why – decade after decade – the fatherhood crisis never abates but only worsens.

As always, government programs create the problem they claim to be solving, enriching and “empowering” welfare apparatchiks.  Yet conservative Republicans readily sign on.

Finally, this also provides the model for today’s bureaucratic takeover of the US government.  The far-left insurrections of 2020 were overwhelmingly driven by rebellious, dysfunctional, and fatherless adolescents, who have been effectively raised by the functionaries of the welfare state.  This is every bit as irrational as Covid lockdowns, lethal injections, and avoidable wars in Ukraine, and it probably accounts for them.

With friends like Hawley and DeSantis, the family hardly needs enemies. 

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Political Studies at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.  He has served on Virginia’s Child Support Guideline Review Panel and is the author of The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (2017), and Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (2007), where the points in this article are documented. 

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.


Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics (retired) at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

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On the Brahmajāla

 Attached to Brahmajāla Sutta →

Instead of asking: "Is Dhamma atheistic or theistic" I prefer to ask "where is the place of atheism and theism in Brahmajāla".

***

One thing among many others to be noticed here is that the Buddha is careful to spread a net with which to intercept all speculative views.

This is the Brahmajāla, the “Divine Net,” which as the first discourse of the whole Sutta Piṭaka forms as it were a kind of filter for the mind; or to change the analogy, a tabulation by whose means (if rightly used) all speculative views can be identified, traced down to the fallacy or unjustified assumption from which they spring, and neutralized. This Net, in fact, classifies all possible speculative views (rationalist or irrationalist) under a scheme of sixty-two types.

These 62 types are not descriptions of individual philosophies of other individual teachers contemporary with the Buddha (a number of those are mentioned as well elsewhere in the Suttas), but are the comprehensive net (after revealing the basic assumptions on which these speculative views all grow) with which to catch any wrong viewpoints that can be put forward. (Ultimately, these must all be traceable to the contact of self-identification in some form, however misinterpreted, but that cannot be gone into here.)*

Nanamoli Thera

* “As to the various views that arise in the world, householder, ‘The world is eternal', the world is not eternal', 'the world is finite', 'the world is infinite', 'soul and body are the same', 'soul and body are the different', ‘the Tathāgata exists after death',  ‘the Tathāgata does not exist after death’, ‘the Tathāgata both exists and does not exist after death’, ‘the Tathāgata neither exists nor does not exist after death’—these as well as the sixty-two speculative views mentioned in the Brahmajāla: when there is personality view, these views come to be; when there is no personality view, these views do not come to be.”

“But, venerable sir, how does identity view come to be?”

“Here, householder, the uninstructed worldling, who has no regard for the noble ones and is unskilled and undisciplined in their Dhamma, who has no regard for the good persons and is unskilled and undisciplined in their Dhamma, regards form as self, or self as possessing form, or form as in self, or self as in  form. He regards feeling as self ... perception as self ... determinations as self ... consciousness as self, or self as possessing consciousness, or consciousness as in self, or self as in consciousness. It is in such a way that personality view comes to be.”

“And, venerable sir, how does personality view not come to be?”

“Here, householder, the instructed noble disciple, who has regard for the noble ones and is skilled and disciplined in their Dhamma, who has regard for the good persons and is skilled and disciplined in their Dhamma, does not regard form as self, or self as possessing form, or form as in self, or self as in form. He does not regard feeling as self … or perception as self … or determinations as self ... or consciousness as self ... or self as in consciousness. It is in such a way that personality view does not come to be.”  SN 41 : 3

**
“When, bhikkhus, a bhikkhu understands as they really are the origin and passing away of the six bases of contact, their satisfaction, unsatisfactoriness, and the escape from them, then he understands what transcends all these views.

“Whatever recluses or brahmins, bhikkhus, are speculators about the past, speculators about the future, speculators about the past and the future together, hold settled views about the past and the future, and assert various conceptual theorems referring to the past and the future—all are trapped in this net with its sixty-two divisions. Whenever they emerge, they emerge caught within this net, trapped and contained within this very net.

“Just as, bhikkhus, a skillful fisherman or a fisherman’s apprentice, after spreading a fine-meshed net over a small pool of water, might think: ‘Whatever sizeable creatures there are in this pool, all are trapped within this net, trapped and contained in this very net’—in the same way, all those recluses and brahmins are trapped in this net with its sixty-two divisions. Whenever they emerge, they emerge caught within this net, trapped and contained within this very net.

“The body of the Tathāgata, bhikkhus, stands with the leash that bound it to being cut. As long as his body stands, gods and men shall see him. But with the breakup of the body and the exhaustion of the life-faculty, gods and men shall see him no more.

“Just as, bhikkhus, when the stalk of a bunch of mangoes has been cut, all the mangoes connected to the stalk follow along with it, in the same way, the body of the Tathāgata stands with the leash that bound it to existence cut. As long as his body stands, gods and men shall see  him. But with the breakup of the body and the exhaustion of the life-faculty, gods and men shall see him no more.”

**
Ability to localize any modern view in the Brahmajala is a good thing, but not indispensable for the arising of the right view. However it is absolutely necessary to understand that all these views are derived from sakkayaditthi and the holder of any of them is an attavadin, victim of attavad'upadana.

In the dependent arising it is described as: "with upādāna as condition, bhava" (being). Since the Tathagata is liberated by non-clinging, his state has to be described as bhavanirodho. So while gods and men see certain puggala (an individual) known as Tathagata, actually and in the truth, Tathāgata is not to be found.

Tathāgata is not to be found (even here and now) is that he is rūpa-, vedanā-, saññā-, sankhāra-, and viññāna-sankhāya vimutto (ibid. 1 <S.iv,378-9>), i.e. free from reckoning as matter, feeling, perception, determinations, or consciousness. This is precisely not the case with the puthujjana, who, in this sense, actually and in truth is to be found".

Puthujjana is imprisoned in the Brahmajāla and his state is that of being. Brahmajāla is the magic Net, imprisoning anyone who doesn't see it. As soon as one sees Brahmajāla one gets outside it. Arising of perception of impermanence releases one from Brahmajāla, but it is so, because it prevents one from self-identification with "whatever is the subject to arising is the subject to cessation" -self is associated with perception of permanence, so being without it, puthujjana is the victim of wrong self-identification. (Of course any self-identification is a wrong one.).

Nanavira Thera:

Now the Pali texts say that the Buddha taught anicca/dukkha/ anattā, and the average Theravàdin, monk or layman, seems to take for granted that aniccatā, or impermanence, means that things are perpetually changing, that they do not remain the same for two consecutive moments. Failing to make the necessary distinctions, they understand this as implying perpetual flux of everything all the time. This, of course, destroys the principle of self-identity, ‘A is A’; for unless something endures unchanged for at least a certain interval of time you cannot even make the assertion ‘this is A’ since the word ‘is’ has lost its meaning. Bypassing dukkha as some-thing we all know about, they arrive at anattā as meaning ‘without self-identity’. Granted the premise that anicca means ‘in continuous flux’, this conclusion is impeccable. Unfortunately, in doing away with the principle of self-identity, you do away with things—including change, which is also a thing. This means that for the puthujjana, who does not see aniccatā, things exist, and for the arahat, who has seen aniccatā, things do not exist. Thus the Mahàyànist contention is proved.

The difficulty arises when we deal with the sekha, who is in between the two; are we to say for him that ‘things partly exist and partly do not exist’, or that for him ‘some things exist and some do not’ (in which case we seem to have Eddington and the quantum theory)?

The former, no doubt, would be preferable, but what is one to make of a partly non-existent thing? And in any case we have the curious state of affairs that there is change (or impermanence) only so long as it is not seen; for in the very instant that it is seen it vanishes. (This is certainly true of avijjā*—see A Note on Paticcasamuppāda §24—but the vanishing of avijjā, as I understand it, leaves impermanence intact and does not interfere with the three Laws of Thought.) I still don’t think the Notes are Mr. Blofeld’s cup of tea, but I shall be interested to see whether he is able to absorb them into Mahàyàna—if one has a mystical outlook, based on the principle that A is not A, there is nothing that cannot be reconciled with anything else.

Q: How can ignorance be known? To know ignorance presupposes knowledge.
M: Quite right. The very admission: 'I am ignorant' is the dawn of knowledge. An ignorant man is ignorant of his ignorance. You can say that ignorance does not exist, for the moment it is seen it is no more. Therefore, you may call it unconsciousness or blindness.

To repeat, all imprisoned in the Brahmajāla are victims of attavad'upadana. Self doesn't have to be mentioned explicitly, but any of 62 views asserts an existence of self at least implicitly. For example "world" is always in relationship with "self". Apart that, no such thing as objective "external" reality  exists.

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false, you must question your most inveterate beliefs. Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst. With the body comes the world, with the world — God, who is supposed to have created the world and thus it starts — fears, religions, prayers, sacrifices, all sorts of systems — all to protect and support the child-man, frightened out of his wits by monsters of his own making. realise that what you are cannot be born nor die and with the fear gone all suffering ends.

What the mind invents, the mind destroys. But the real is not invented and cannot be destroyed. Hold on to that over which the mind has no power. What I am telling you about is neither in the past nor in the future. Nor is it in the daily life as it flows in the now. It is timeless and the total timelessness of it is beyond the mind. Nisrgadatta Maharaj

In the terms of the real / unreal the self as well conceit "I am" are fake reality. "Reality" since for one who takes his own experience for granted, there's actually nothing more real than his own self. Quite a few Buddhists think that self mentioned in Suttas refers to "soul" in which naive Christians believe (but we know better - it doesn't exist!; or more respectable, still deluded Hindu  pastulate as "Self" which obviously neither exist.

The P.T.S. (London Pali Text Society) Dictionary, for example, supposes that the word attā in the Suttas refers either to a phenomenon of purely historical interest (of the Seventh and Sixth Centuries B.C.) known as a ‘soul’, or else to the reflexive ‘self’, apparently of purely grammatical interest. All suggestion that there might be some connexion (of purely vital interest) between ‘soul’ and ‘self’ is prudently avoided.

Modern scholar Venerable Analayo says:

Ñāṇavīra Thera  also offers the assessment that, although even for an arahant “there is certainly consciousness and so on, there is no apparent ‘self’ for whom there is consciousness.” In fact, “[a]ctually and in truth … there is, even in this very life, no arahat to be found.” The assertion that an arahant is not found in truth and fact comes with a reference to a Pāli discourse presenting the clarification that no Tathāgata can be found to exist in truth and fact. However, this concerns the tetralemma on the existence or non-existence of a Tathāgata after death, which is based on the mistaken notion of a self, held by some contemporaries of the Buddha.

So according to Ven Analayo "some contemporaries of the Buddha" were attavadins but same obviously weren't. In fact this statement isn't actually entirely false, since any ariyasavaka living in the time of the Buddha wasn't the victim of attavad'upadana, but ...😌

The modern Buddhist unfortunately is as much victim of attavad'upadana as the venerable yogin who remembers his previous existences and based on that comes to conclusion:

For this reason I know this: the self and the world are eternal, barren, steadfast as a mountain peak, standing firm like a pillar. And though these beings roam and wander (through the round of existence), pass away and re-arise, yet the self and the world remain the same just like eternity itself.’

There's nothing wrong with the memory of the venerable yogin, but since he misunderstands his own experience here and now, interpreting it in the terms atta ca loko ca, he does the same with his memory. Modern atheist as ucchedavadian takes his self as much for granted - as monolithic extra-temporal entity moving from the birth towards the death. The difference lies in the fact that he assumes that at the death time his self will be annihilated.

On the lower level sasattavada has this advantage that it is usually associated with mundane right view: "my future depends on quality of my actions so I should avoid unwholesome actions and perform wholesome actions". In the case of ucchedavada it is not so. Of course modern atheist can be much more moral then avarage Buddhist or Christian, but it is because there are other foundations of the high moral standard, not only belief in  kamma vipaka. Nevertheless "ideas have consequences", and who assumes that the end of the present life is the end of conscious experience actually proposes that:

‘There is nothing given, nothing offered, nothing sacrificed; no fruit or result of good and bad actions; no this world, no other world; no mother, no father; no beings who are reborn spontaneously; no good and virtuous recluses and brahmins in the world who have themselves realised by direct knowledge and declare this world and the other world.’ (...)

‘When one acts or makes others act, when one mutilates or makes others mutilate, when one tortures or makes others inflict torture, when one inflicts sorrow or makes others inflict sorrow, when one oppresses or makes others inflict oppression, when one intimidates or makes others inflict intimidation, when one kills living beings, takes what is not given, breaks into houses, plunders wealth, commits burglary, ambushes highways, seduces another’s wife, utters falsehood—no evil is done by the doer. If, with a razor-rimmed wheel, one were to make the living beings on this earth into one mass of flesh, into one heap of flesh, because of this there would be no evil and no outcome of evil. If one were to go along the south bank of the Ganges killing and slaughtering, mutilating and making others mutilate, torturing and making others inflict torture, because of this there would be no evil and no outcome of evil. If one were to go along the north bank of the Ganges giving gifts and making others give gifts, making offerings and making others make offerings, because of this there would be no merit and no outcome of merit. By giving, by taming oneself, by restraint, by speaking truth, there is no merit and no outcome of merit.’
MN 60

In short, his view implicates that after the death of the body, the psychopath causing tremendous suffering for others and moral good person have an equal status. This itself is the wrong view even on mundane level. As such it is or can be much more harmful than sasattavada. It is harmful anyway since it opposes the right view: "we are totally responsible for our actions and we will experience results of them, accordingly to quality of our actions". And could be even more harmful - as in the case of psychopath - who actually acts according to such view.

But psychopathy usually is associated with high IQ, so it is not impossible for the psychopath to believe in rebirth and so struggle against his own unwholesome tendencies. After all, indifferent to welfare of others, he still isn't indifferent to his own happiness.

Moder Buddhist should first establish himself firmly in the mundane right view. And based on this foundation try to understand doctrine of anattā. Both are the part of Dhamma and as such are perfectly compatible with each other.

Only an arahat is beyond the morality, his experience actually can be described as the cessation of morality, but it is so because possibility of immortal actions was totally eradicated.

Hegel, it seems, in his Phänomenologie des Geistes, has said that there can only be an ethical consciousness in so far as there is disagreement between nature and ethics: if ethical behaviour became natural, conscience would disappear. And from this it follows that if ethical action is the absolute aim, the absolute aim must also be the absence of ethical action. This is quite right; but is ethical action the absolute aim? The difficulty is, precisely, to see the action that puts an end to action in the ethical sense. Whereas unskilful action is absolutely blameworthy as leading only to future unpleasure and to the arising of action, there is action, leading to a bright future, that yet does not lead to the ending of action. See Majjhima vi,7 <M.i,387-92>. The generous man, the virtuous man, the man even who purifies his mind in samādhi, without right view remains a puthujjana, and so does not escape reproach:

One who lays down this body, Sāriputta, and takes hold of another body, he I say is blameworthy .
MN 144

Summarize: surely the mere ability to distinguish between ucchedavada "there's no self" and Buddha Teaching "all things are not self" doesn't guarantee an escape from Brahmajāla, but inability to do so, guarantee the continuation of such enslavement.

Perhaps little bit of common sense is enough to see the difference, people are selfish and this is the problem which has to be solved. Psychology recognises such phenomena as self-bias or self-deception. Even puthujjana writes such books as "Ego is your enemy". In certain sense such message is quite valid, but it implies that there is some person who will survive after ego is erradicated.

Doctrine of anattā undermines the very existence of the subject, and self in the form of attavad'upadana is an aspect of it. So in fact in this sense "self" is phenomenal.

‘Self’ as subject can be briefly discussed as follows. As pointed out in Phassa [b], the puthujjana thinks ‘things are mine (i.e. are my concern) because I am, because I exist’. He takes the subject (‘I’) for granted; and if things are appropriated, that is because he, the subject, exists. The ditthisampanna (or sotāpanna) sees, however, that this is the wrong way round. He sees that the notion ‘I am’ arises because things (so long as there is any trace of avijjā) present themselves as ‘mine’. This significance (or intention, or determination), ‘mine’ or ‘for me’—see A Note On Pañiccasamuppàda [e]—, is, in a sense, a void, a negative aspect of the present thing (or existing phenomenon), since it simply points to a subject; and the puthujjana, not seeing impermanence (or more specifically, not seeing the impermanence of this ubiquitous determination), deceives himself into supposing that there actually exists a subject—‘self’—independent of the object (which latter, as the ditthisampanna well understands, is merely the positive aspect of the phenomenon—that which is ‘for me’). In this way it may be seen that the puthujjana’s experience, pañc’upādānakkhandhā, has a negative aspect (the subject) and a positive aspect (the object). But care is needed; for, in fact, the division subject/object is not a simple negative/positive division. If it were, only the positive would be present (as an existing phenomenon) and the negative (the subject) would not be present at all—it would simply not exist. But the subject is, in a sense, phenomenal: it (or he) is an existing phenomenal negative, a negative that appears; for the puthujjana asserts the present reality of his ‘self’ (‘the irreplaceable being that I am’). The fact is, that the intention or determination ‘mine’, pointing to a subject, is a complex structure involving avijjā. The subject is not simply a negative in relation to the positive object: it (or he) is master over the object, and is thus a kind of positive negative, a master who does not appear explicitly but who, somehow or other, nevertheless exists. It is this master whom the puthujjana, when he engages in reflexion, is seeking to identify—in vain! This delusive mastery of subject over object must be rigorously distinguished from the reflexive power of control or choice that is exercised in voluntary action by puthujjana and arahat alike. Nanavira Thera

So while the statement "there is no self" is totally divorced from reality, to adopt oneself to puthujjana understanding Buddha can assert the existence of self - it corresponds accordingly to three states of being:

“There are these three types of acquisition of self: the gross, the mind-constituted, and the formless…. The first has (material) form, consists of the four great entities and consumes physical food. The second has form and is constituted by mind with all the limbs and lacking no faculty. The third is formless and consists in perception…. I teach the Dhamma for the abandoning of acquisitions of self in order that in you, who put the teaching into practice, defiling qualities may be abandoned and cleansing qualities increased, and that you may, by realisation yourselves here and now with direct knowledge, enter upon and abide in the fullness of understanding’s perfection…. If it is thought that to do that is a painful abiding, that is not so; on the contrary, by doing that there is gladness, happiness, tranquillity, mindfulness, full awareness, and a pleasant abiding.”

Nanamoli Thera: The Buddha went on to say that from one  rebirth to another any one of these three kinds of acquisition of self can succeed another. That being so, it cannot be successfully argued that only one of them is true and the others wrong; one can only say that the term for any one does not fit the other two; just as, with milk from a cow, curd from milk, butter from curd, ghee from butter, and fine-extract of ghee from ghee, the term of each fits only that and none of the others, yet they are not disconnected. The Buddha concluded:

“These are worldly usages, worldly language, worldly terms of communication, worldly descriptions, by which a Perfect One communicates without misapprehending them.”
DN 9 (condensed)

Hi!

Hi! handsome hunting man
Fire your little gun.
Bang! Now the animal
Is dead and dumb and done.
Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again,
Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!

de la Mare

(...)

“Every artist,” said Santayana, “is a moralist though he needn’t preach,” and de la Mare is one who doesn’t. His poems are neither satirical nor occasional; indeed, I cannot recall coming across in his work a single Proper Name, whether of a person or a place, which one could identify as a real historical name. Nor, though he is a lyric, not a dramatic, poet, are his poems “personal” in the sense of being self-confessions; the "I" in them is never identical with the Mr. de la Mare one might have met at dinner, and none are of the kind which excite the curiosity of a biographer. Nevertheless, implicit in all his poetry are certain notions of what constitutes the Good Life. Goodness, they seem to say, is rooted in wonder, awe, and reverence for the beauty and strangeness of creation.

Wonder itself is not goodness—de la Mare is not an aesthete— but it is the only, or the most favorable, soil in which goodness can grow. Those who lose the capacity for wonder may become clever but not intelligent, they may lead moral lives themselves, but they will become insensitive and moralistic towards others. A sense of wonder is not something we have to learn, for we are born with it; unfortunately, we are also born with an aggressive lust for power which finds its satisfaction in the enslavement and destruction of others. We are, or in the course of our history we have become, predatory animals like the mousing cat and the spotted flycatcher. This lust for power, which, if we surrender completely to it, can turn us into monsters like Seaton’s Aunt, is immanent in every child.

Lovely as Eros, and half-naked too,
He heaped dried beach-drift, kindled it, and, lo!
A furious furnace roared, the sea-winds blew .. .
Vengeance divine!
And death to every foe!
Young god! and not ev’n
Nature eyed askance
The fire-doomed
Empire of a myriad ants.

It is only with the help of wonder, then, that we can develop a virtue which we are certainly not born with, compassion, not to be confused with its conceit-created counterfeit, pity. Only from wonder, too, can we learn a style of behavior and speech which is no less precious in art than in life; for want of a better word we call it good-manners or breeding, though it has little to do with ancestry, school or income. To be well-bred means to have respect for the solitude of others, whether they be mere acquaintances or, and this is much more difficult, persons we love; to be ill-bred is to importune attention and intimacy, to come too close, to ask indiscreet questions and make indiscreet revelations, to lecture, to bore.

Forewords and afterwords
W. H Auden

Nature has provided for the necessary tasks of life by giving the majority of men brains that do not work

The next piece of work was provided by Louis Bonaparte, the King of Holland. He wished to reorganise education in his Kingdom, and in June, 1809, consulted Fontanes, who forwarded the letter to Joubert, together with a folio volume sent by the King, for him to make a précis. Joubert was, as usual, ill and, as usual, full of ideas.

“I was dead yesterday’? ; he wrote. “I feel a little resuscitated to-day, and I should like not to spoil the feeling ; but it depends on how great a hurry you are in. If you only wish to reply to the King’s letter, you can do it at once ; but if you wish to give him pleasure, you must take a little time. There are doubts, scruples, confusions of thought: to dissipate all these, there must be lucidity. The subject must be treated with some depth, if with a light touch, and we must discuss our notes.

Will you take the risk of waiting a few more days, and give me this week? ... Think, and decide. I can, with the stump of my pen, dispatch hurriedly what remains to be done; but I shall wear myself out and spoil everything. If you can wait over the holidays, I can go to Issy, take a bath, and finish without fatigue and with pleasure. Your King will be better served, and you will end better pleased with him, me and yourself.”

Fontanes knew his Joubert, and pressed for a quick answer.

He got it, possibly less philosophical, and certainly more practical than usual : including a prayer that heaven might defend the children of the poor from learning all that the Dutch Ministry wished to have them taught.

“‘ They would be no longer fit to work. The strength of a man, if it is drawn to the brain, leaves the hands. Whosoever is fitted to give profound and sustained attention to what is abstract becomes unfitted for what is mechanical. Nature has provided for the necessary tasks of life by giving the majority of men brains that do not work.” Joubert was all against the possibility of experiment allowed for in the Dutch code ; such experiments in education, if they did not prove phenomenally successful, did nothing but break the tradition of respect for antiquity, rouse ambition and destroy the modesty of mediocrity. In such work lay vanity, and in inaction, good sense. Fontanes hurriedly wrote an appreciative letter, asking for a final instalment; that received, he could shine, even though it were with borrowed light. So the next day, for the third day running, Joubert once more took up his quill, and continued with a précis and criticism of the Dutch plan for secondary education, which he found inferior to the scheme for primary schools.

He made the criticism that the Dutchmen were wrong in thinking that a change of subject was enough to rest a child and enable him to concentrate afresh; it might rest a grown man, but a child needed movement, games and real distractions. The Dutch scheme might make a hard-working boy seem more intelligent than he was, but it would be a false and unprofitable seeming that could lead to nothing. No child should be taught to be cleverer than he was. Joubert was too tired to finish that day; Fontanes must wait for his opinion on the Dutch universities until the morrow. Fontanes reluctantly waited, only to receive a grand condemnation of Protestant education in its later stages, and a still finer eulogy of the classical training given by the Teaching Orders in Catholic countries. ‘The difference between them was the difference between grammar and literature. The letter ended with a magnificent condemnation of modern education, which left  its pupils ignorant of how little they knew. The letter was one of the best and most consecutive pieces of literature that Joubert ever produced; but it was not of much use to Fontanes when he came to compose his final report to the King of Holland.

Joubert returned to Villeneuve in the middle of October to make the postponed inspection of the schools of the Yonne.

He announced his departure in a letter to Fontanes that began “‘ Monseigneur,” and after giving him details of the proposed journey, continued with a jesting appreciation of himself.

“I say to you in all sincerity and in that popular style which suits frankness so well: ‘ My lord, you are very lucky to have me.’ I do my duty remarkably well, and I know how to amuse you in the process ; I play with your ermine and enliven your royalty. You have subjugated everyone around you except me. Every voice is silent before yours, except mine. I tell you everything I think, and in your company I think what I please. But for me, you would not have in your empire a subject who would always dare to tell you the entire truth. But for me, there would not be a free man at your court, or at least not one who, having regard to ancient intimacy and friendship, could appear free, as I can, publicly and completely, without offending against the proprieties. But for me, you would not enjoy, outside your family, the delights of contradiction ; but for me, nothing would ever recall to your memory the sweet and ancient state of equality.

“And remark this, my lord: he who knows how to laugh with you at his own occupations, and at yours, is a man of gravity and even of austerity ; he who plays with your dignities is the man who attaches the greatest importance to your rank, to your functions, who respects them most in his heart and mind ; the man who contra- dicts you most often is he who has for you, in secret, the most decided weakness ; the man who is the least your slave is also the man who is most devoted to you.

"You have never obtained from me, and you never will obtain, a blind approbation always ; but you have always exercised over me, and always will, each and every day, in spite of yourself and of me, a more glorious ascendancy. For thirty years and some months I have loved you; that is but a trifle; for thirty years and some months I have had for your talent in all its details, for the great traits of conduct and of character, a sentiment much greater than friendship ; a sentiment more rare and more lofty ; a sentiment which few souls can inspire and few keep ; a sentiment of which few men are worthy and few great men even capable ; in fine, a unique sentiment, to say all, of an incurable admiration. . .”

Joubert duly made his tour of inspection, and made it as a crusade in favour of the classics and of religion, of austerity in judgment and of gentleness in conduct, and of a spiritual reticence that should make the teacher inspire his pupils to be themselves rather than impress his own soul upon them.

Altogether both Joubert and the schoolmasters of the Yonne found the inspection more interesting and less alarming than they had anticipated. Joubert returned to Villeneuve with a new idea of the infinity of things a man could do well if only he were forced to do them. He reported his findings in due form to the inspector-general, with a postscript, not quite official, to say that he had written twice to the Grand-Maitre and that he thought Fontanes might at least have indicated to him that he had read the letters. He would never in his life write to him again, even though the whim to do so might seize him from time to time. Indeed Fontanes’ neglect in replying to his outburst of affection had hurt him deeply.

He wrote to Chénedollé, who wished to be appointed a professor, with a tender kindness that strove to efface the memory of Fontanes’ casual forgetfulness to himself.

Joubert returned to Paris after Christmas, having successfully avoided an official reception, at which Fontanes had covered himself with glory by declaring to Napoleon that youth no longer had need of the example of the heroes of antiquity, now that they had in the Emperor an example of perfect heroism. Joubert attended his educational committees and consoled himself with the reading of seventeenth century writers. He was faor ever advising Fontanes about education in general and the University in particular, and for ever being disappointed when expediency proved more important than the principles he advocated.

The Unselfish Egoist
A Life of Joseph Joubert

Joan Evens

The Psychoanalysis of Skiing

The importance that sport has generally acquired in modern life is a significant phenomenon, and is one of the markers of the shift of the Western soul towards very different interests from those that were predominant in the 19th century. Modern sport would therefore deserve a dedicated study. Moreover, it would be interesting to compare modern sport and its general significance with its counterpart in the ancient Western, Greek and Roman world, as well as in non-European civilisations.

As regards this second point, I have provided some essential points of reference in another work of mine.75 As for modern sport, I only wish to draw attention here to one particular variety of it, namely skiing. This sport is a rather recent trend. In Nordic countries skiing had enjoyed a certain popularity, yet not as a real sport (it apparently only made its début as a sport at Oslo in 1870, when people from Telemark used this means of transport to outstrip their opponents in a race, causing a general stir);76 rather, skiing was used as a practical device, not unlike sledges and poles, which came in handy in areas that were covered in snow for much of the year. By contrast, the enjoyment of skiing in itself, as a thrilling activity, only spread among the younger generations in major non-Nordic Western countries, including Britain, in recent times — roughly, in the inter-war period. The sudden success and great popularity of this sport, and the spontaneous interest and enthusiasm which men and women alike display toward it, are distinctive elements that beg the question of whether this phenomenon may be due not only to extrinsic factors but also to the general orientation of modern life.

Let us explore this possibility by asking ourselves: what is the essential psychological trait associated with skiing as a sport? What is the ‘moment’ in this sport to which everything else, in most cases, is subordinated? The answer is quite obvious: the descent. This emerges quite clearly when we compare this to the salient point and meaning of another sport that is practised in largely the same environment as skiing, namely mountaineering.

In mountaineering the essential element, the focus of interest of the sport, is constituted by the act of ascending; in skiing this instead corresponds to descending. The dominant motif in mountaineering is conquest; the attainment of the peak, the point beyond which one cannot go any higher, marks the end of the truly interesting stage for the rock or ice-wall climber (let us leave aside here the technical-acrobatic deviations displayed by a certain kind of recent mountaineering). The opposite takes place in the case of skiing: if one ascends, this is mostly in order to descend.

The hours of toil required to reach a certain altitude are only faced in order to then take the ‘downhill run’, the Abfahrt, the swift skiing descent.77 Thus in the more modern and fashionable winter sport stations the problem has been solved by building cableways, chair lifts and sledge lifts that meet the real interest of skiers by effortlessly taking them up, allowing them then to ski down in a few minutes and to take the same cableway — or a different one — once again in order to face another descent, until they have had enough. Consequently, whereas mountaineering is characterised by the thrill of the ascent, as a struggle and conquest, the sport of skiing is characterised by the thrill of descent with its speed and, if one may put it so, its fall time.
This last point is worth emphasising. A person’s way of relating to his or her own body varies significantly from mountaineering to skiing.

Mountaineering entails a far more direct perception of one’s own body, with acts of balancing, efforts, thrusts and moves that require complete control over the body, and careful and well-planned manoeuvres to be performed in relation to the various challenges posed by climbing and ascending, by choosing and clinging to a handhold, and by the resistance of a step cut into the ice. In skiing we find something quite different: a person’s way of relating to his or her own body is certainly subject to the force of gravity and may be compared to the relation between a car driven at a certain speed and its driver; once he has ‘set off’, the skier must do one thing alone: guide himself through appropriate movements in order to regulate his speed and direction. This will lead him to master his reflexes (making them instinctive, reliable and quick after much taxing training), thereby allowing him to control his descent, more or less like a driver who enjoys speeding down a street filled with pedestrians and other vehicles without slowing down, using his quick reflexes to avoid this or that obstacle and brush past it, almost playfully, before moving on to continue his race. The impression produced by a skilled skier is precisely of this sort.

As regards the more inward aspect of the phenomenon, i.e. what it ultimately gives the human spirit, it is worth recalling the impression felt by someone who puts on a pair of skies for the first time. This is the impression of having the ground slip away from under one’s feet, of falling. The same feeling resurfaces when one strives to master the most difficult forms of this sport: swift downhill runs or jumps. Hence, I believe it is possible to argue that the deepest meaning of skiing lies in the following fact: the instinctual feeling of physical fear, with the reflex it triggers of withdrawing or hanging onto something, is overcome and transformed into a feeling of elation and pleasure, and developed into the impulse of going ever faster and playing in various different ways with the speed and acceleration that the force of gravity exerts on bodies. In this respect, skiing may be defined as the technique, game, and thrill of falling. By practising this sport, one develops a certain physical daring or fearlessness, but of a particular sort, quite distinct from the daring of the mountaineer, or even opposite to it in terms of its meaning: we may well say that it is an essentially ‘modern’ kind of daring.

The above term encapsulates not only the symbolic meaning of the sport of skiing, but probably the deep, underlying reason for its sudden popularity as well. Of all the many types of sport, skiing ranks among those most devoid of any relation to the symbols of the previous world-view. So to draw upon the comparison we made previously, whereas the ancient traditions of all peoples are replete with symbols related to the mountain as the goal of an ascent and site of transfiguration — despite the fact that mountaineering was not really practised in ancient times at all — they contain nothing that may be associated with the sport of skiing.78 It is essentially the ‘modern’ soul that feels at ease with this sport: the soul drunk with speed, ‘becoming’, and accelerating or indeed frantic motion — what until recently was praised as the motion of ‘progress’ and ‘intense living’, and which has in fact been nothing but a kind of collapse and downfall. The thrill of this motion, combined with a cerebral and abstract feeling that one is in control of forces which have been unleashed and which one really no longer possesses, is typical of the modern way in which the Ego grasps the sharpest perception of itself. I believe that this existential orientation, be it only as a reflection, contributes to the enthusiasm for skiing as a sport and that it distinguishes it in particular from mountaineering — conceived as a physical and sporting expression of the opposite symbol, the symbol of ascending, elevating oneself, and conquering the forces of gravity, which is to say the forces at work in a fall.

The acknowledgement of all this does not necessarily lead to a particular value judgement. Indeed, from a more external perspective, one may assign skiing the same recognition that one assigns certain aspects of that ‘naturism’ which has become popular in recent times: as a winter sport, when practised seriously (without the snobbishness and foolishness associated with the fashionable centres of such sport, with their carnivalesque clothes, and all the rest), skiing can certainly help compensate, in a way, for the damage inflicted on many men’s organism nowadays by life in big cities, as well as contribute to a certain psycho-physical activation in the young. But even if one were to directly perceive the inner side of the enthusiasm for skiing in the problematic terms I have just outlined, this — at least in the case of a certain differentiated human type — is not bound to be an entirely negative thing. The maxim which applies to such a type of person, especially in the present day, may also apply within the profane domain of skiing: no experience is to be avoided, but everything must be experienced, yet in a detached way. One is to keep abreast of the wave, confirming one’s freedom.

The Bow and the Club by Julius Evola