Hi,

At this point, I personally find the structure of the ethics discussion more interesting than the content.

One that is interesting is the distinction between negative persuasion and positive persuasion. An example of this is the current presidential campaign It's very particulars are OFF TOPIC but the way in which persuasion is marshalled is very on-topic.

Basically, campaign speech are pretty NLP heavy. But it's been demonstrated in practice that the single biggest boost for a campaign is a bit of "hot button" inuendo. Basically, a "negative" image or phrase has been shown pretty well in practice to be able dominate a person's thoughts.

In the ongoing discussion on ethics as in many internet discussions, there's a tendency to have a certain phrase or idea catch someone eye and cause them to repost because there's much thougt - the old "knee jerk" reaction.

Thus we're wandered into the off-topic but highly charged subject of "when is it OK to kill people" or "when is killing murder"

We can - on topic - analyze the structure of this.

The speculation I would have is certain people have highly charged images of someone killing someone and other have highly charged images of society needing to keep itself together by resorting to violence. (And again, I'll reframe from making any argument about who's right).

- The main thing is that each side is being motivated by a single negatively charged image/phrase/idea.

Now how does this mesh with the NLP persuasion model, which generally involves a series of jumps from "negative" to positive states.

What I would submit is that negative states have something of tendency to chunk down. As a person goes towards fear, or anger they tend to become more "stuck," more fixated in particular details or situations.

Now, "positive" emotions, love, calm, openness, etc., tend to be generative. You like X and tend to expand to even more possibilities. (Of course, things like obsessive love contradict this but you could say that's matter of a certain amount of fear mixed into the love).

With this provisional model, we can look at a lot of different approaches

- NLP, politics, morality and DHE.

Most NLP excercises involve using a neutral state to allow a person to reprogram a negative state into a more positive state. And being able to reach that neuteral state, since otherwise the person will keep looping on negative state.

Now, I'd like to echo the earlier point I made about how a lot of negative persuasion just doesn't have a lot to NLP with do with NLP or with any sophisticated models because it wants to do it to find someone buttons for negative loop and keep them there. I.E., the original worries about NLP being a technology someone like Hitler or Manson would/could use are much exagerated.

(Not that "evil people" wouldn't use NLP but the primary "technology of being evil" is already out there in the form of what other "evil people" have done).

- The methodology of things "psychological warefare" is exactly. Find a taboo and accuse your enemy of violating it. Simple and effective. Proven by history.

With things like the army, the other powerful method is installing negative button by giving a person bad experiances (boot camp).

Now, it's also interesting to look at the structure of "ethics."

Functionally, as it's been present here, ethics consists of a series of hypothetical negative examples which are combined together to create rules that "every one can agree on." And all of the examples evoke negative responses.

"What if someone performs satanic, beastial child-molesting, sexistic, racist, liberal driving manuevers in public? We have to do something!" (as a parody)

- The thing about ethics is that it's project is kind of Bertand Russels effort to find a set of axioms that could prove all of mathematics. Basically, it won't work. You can never find a logically consistant set of hot buttons for everyone. And, moveover, it simply misunderstands itself. The closest you come to a logically consistant set is what could be called the prejudices of a culture. For example, though I'm not sure which war Chuck Yeager fought in, I'd guess that whoever was bombed by him wouldn't classify him higher than Chuck Manson (but is starting to get down to details).

Anyway, what's interesting about morals is that it motivated by negative examples - by what can go wrong. If you had a positive set of possibilities, I might offer a positive community that prevented the examples before you began, you wouldn't need the morality to begin with.

Something to play with, though I'm sure it won't stop the folks already fixated on one or another negative example.

Still, don't think that I would ignore negative example, "evil", stuff I don't like. I would just say that you've got to deal with as they come allow.

Anyway, one other example.

An interesting thing is that often to actually make a decision, you need a certain amount of negativity, since a decision often cuts off the ability to go back. Thus a pure motivation by love might not cause someone to actually take the action needed to get the object of love since taking action would also cause fear and they can feel love just by sitting there and thinking about the love object (though this like varies from person to person).

- This, I would say, is where the beautiful DHE construct of the "propulsion system" comes in. By simultaneously motivating by a past negative and a future positive, you can create action as well as openning to possibilities.

Well,

I guess this is sort-of my rought thoughts - but they are all on the topic of developing the mind, so I figure they are on topic.

Enjoy or not.

Hans