| | It is quite late and I just got back from watching Last Holiday with my wife -- a cute movie with a decent message despite some its usual Hollywood preposterousness.
All right. I am trying to understand the source of the misunderstandings, etc.
First, the main reason I appeal to more knowledgeable writers is that they are, well, more knowledgeable. But let me try to dust the cobwebs off my memories and present some real world examples from my own experience with people.
Second, I never denied that we all have a profound emotional need for bonding. My point is not to fall into the trap of forfeiting reason for the sake of having others "like" you. This happens all the time, especially with young people. But even older people who should know better still do it.
For instance, a woman of my acquaintance from Canada had an Arab husband who dedicated years of his life to the Amway "business opportunity." The motto of one of Amway's main leaders is, "If the dream is big enough, facts don't matter." Her life became a living nightmare as he depleted their net worth in his pursuit of a "dream" that had no chance in hell of working. When I asked her why he kept doing this, she explained to me that his insecurities, possibly aggravated by his Arab culture, made him want to "win the affections" of his Amway upline. Thankfully, he finally awakened from the "dream" and quit the business -- but the stress will scar their marriage for life. For the fallacies of Amway and its cultish tendencies, read Amway Motivational Organizations: Behind the Smoke and Mirrors by Ruth Carter, another acquaintance of mine.
I would argue that if this woman had kept rational egoism in mind, she could have had an iron-clad pre-nuptial agreement that would have put the kibosh on this situation from the start. More to the point, the Arab in question forfeited reason in favor of emotion. He allowed himself to become emotionally codependent on what amounted to a commercial cult. His wife feared divorcing him lest she lose her three children should he flee to Syria with them. This entire mess could have been stopped before it started with a heavy dose of rational egoism for both parties. Instead, it became a destructive waterfall of dependence:
- Amway depends on wide-eyed believers who "need" the emotional fix of "the dream" to build its commercial cult that studies show overwhelmingly lead participants to lose money.
- The believers depend on the commercial cult of Amway for their regular emotional fix of pursuing the impossible dream.
- The families of the believers depend on the believers not to go completely off the deep end and bankrupt the families.
For another example that will hopefully satisfy Hong Zhang, my neighbors across the street divorced about ten years ago. The wife found a boyfriend but she tried to take her own life after the boyfriend left her. That would be an example of a person becoming too emotionally dependent on another to the point of self-destruction.
For Mike Erickson, I already told the story about my derailed attempt at mentoring in my article "Hazards of Benevolence." That was an incident in which I failed to calculate the potential payoff accurately. I will give my wife's perceptive and intuitive approach credit because she predicted problems with that young man before I did.
By contrast, a young lady I had mentored about a year earlier successfully completed her English project on Ayn Rand. I attended her final presentation and felt quite proud of my contribution to her final product. However, I learned later that she had some issues with keeping agreements that drove a wedge between us after she agreed to help with the Objectivist Club at her university and then vanished from sight.
In both of these instances, additional skills at sizing up people using statistics and many other tools might have better informed me of the best path to take with them.
Well, I have tried to answer the questions posed while I was at the movies tonight.
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