Sexuality And Conscience

I closely know a number of exceptionally attractive and kind-hearted women; and in many cases their personal lives have not been all that good. Everyone wants them. If they do not reciprocate the attentions they are seen as bitches; if they do reciprocate the attentions they are seen as sluts. In serious relationships such women evoke men's insecurities that motivate many men to become abusive. Their negative experiences lead many people to conclude that such women are doing the wrong thing by being attractive and friendly, and that the correct solution is to be unattractive and mean. And this – based on the experiences of many women in the baby boom generation - has been the main thrust of Third Wave feminism, particularly among American women in Generation X and in my generation. Of course the world has not benefited from that course of action one bit.

On a somewhat related subject, there are many people who think that sex offenders cannot be rehabilitated and should spend their whole lives behind bars. Their claim is that there is no cure for sexual perversions. Now there may not be a cure for sexual perversions, but there is certainly a cure for action on sexual perversions, and it is known as self-control. Just about anyone is capable of self-control; and that also includes people who have committed sex crimes. That you feel an urge does not mean that you have to act on it; and self-control is the correct solution to this problem. Similarly I have seen it said on the Internet that if a man has been beating a female partner then that is his nature and that that is what he is going to do. This is completely wrong. He is not an animal. He is a person. A person can control his actions whatever his nature happens to be.

Similarly we are seeing many people now claim that “narcissists” and “sociopaths” are evil and can only be evil whatever they do. That is completely wrong as well. Anything human is capable of choice. Anyone capable of choice is capable of rightful choice. If someone is being selfish or unethical the correct solution is to give the person a correct moral structure. It is not demonization, it is not psychological evisceration, it is not working on self-esteem, it is not trying to get them in touch with their true self. It is giving a better way to relate to the world and teaching the person to put that way into effect.

There are two major problems that stand in the way of that, and they have very little to do with one another. One is “research” that teaches people that some people never change and that a person who has acted at any given point in time in a manner that they regard to be sociopathic or narcisstic will do that for the rest of their lives. Once again, that is completely irrational. Anyone can choose to act rightfully. One outcome of this attitude is that people will defend their actions, however wrong they may be, to the point of death so as not to be seen as being narcissistic or sociopathic, as being portrayed that way is an equivalent of a death sentence. Another outcome of this attitude is that people who have done work on themselves will continue to be seen as evil, regardless of how much work they have done on themselves, how hard they have worked and how much good they have done. Neither of these outcomes is remotely desirable, and both are totally self-defeating. In the first case the people cling to their bad behavior. In the second case any effort to improve one's behavior is rejected, and potential for positive action is denied. Both motivate people to act in precisely the wrong way while preventing any effort to improve their conduct or their character.

A bigger problem still is the fact that, in an interconnected world, everyone influences everyone else all the time. This will result in people's attitudes constantly being challenged. There are any number of problems with that, but there is one that is quite large that I have not seen adequately addressed. If someone's values have been deconstructed, then he is left without values; and a person without values is a monster, whether or not he has anything wrong with his brain. So that when someone comes to America from the former Soviet Union and has a strongly constituted conscience whose basis is Communism, it will be deconstructed, and he will be left without a conscience. The solution is not to demonize such a person, but to create a better constituted conscience. And looking for a better constituted conscience has been a major project of my life – one that has taken me in a number of different directions, some of them quite unlikely.

I find it fascinating how the same people who started out as starry-eyed hippie idealists became raving fascists. They started out thinking that all people are good; then they decided that some people are evil and can only be evil whatever they do. Neither attitude is correct. Anything that is capable of choice can be good, bad, indifferent or a mix. It is just as wrong to demonize people as it is to idealize people. Anything capable of choice is capable of both right and wrong. The correct solution, once again, is to have a righfully constituted conscience. And if someone has done something bad when his conscience was deconstructed, that does not make him an inhuman monster. It means that he was wandering in the wilderness, as many people are prone to doing in a world where everyone is constantly influencing everyone else and very few people can get away with a wrongfully constituted conscience or bigoted convictions with which they were raised.

The latter state of affairs, Scott Lasch stated as my generation being at sea. This is correct. Once again, in a world where everyone is influencing everyone else we will rarely find people who act like a rock. We will find less integrity, but we will find more knowledge of other ways of thinking. The biggest problem with that so far, once again, is that in such an arrangement many people do not have a stable conscience, and any number of them do not have a functional moral structure. That will motivate even the more naturally honest people to act like sociopaths; and that is not good either for them or for the world.

How to solve this problem? I would say that the Bible has the solution to issues of this nature, and that is the solution that I have chosen to take. Of course we are now seeing many people take the reverse route and leave their Christian upbringing to partake of things such as atheism or feminism. I will caution these people that there are dangers ahead, and I will say that Christ has been doing work on me that I have never seen a psychologist, a thinker or a guru begin to equal. We are dealing here with greater wisdom than anything else that is out there, and if you are looking for a functional moral structure then this is the correct direction to take.