Home » Getting credit for getting naked: a trip back in time

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Getting credit for getting naked: a trip back in time — 24 Comments

  1. snopercod:

    I almost never followed the authority figure if I really objected to something. I’m not sure where that came from, but that’s the way it was. One thing was that I didn’t care if my grades suffered. I had confidence in my ability to do well in school.

    Of course, I never did face HUGE consequences. The stakes seemed low compared to what a lot of truly courageous people face out in the real world. But even in academia, where I saw the stakes as low, people were very afraid to defy the professors. I saw that over and over and over. As in the situation described above, when I stood up to authority I often had other students come to me afterward saying they were glad I did what I did and that they supported me. But they said it to me in private, too afraid to say it publicly. When I would ask some of them why they didn’t speak up in front of the whole class, they would say they were afraid their grades would suffer.

    I couldn’t believe it; it seemed such a relatively weak reason. But that’s all it took for most people. I suspect, however, there were other reasons—mainly, fear of sticking out from the group.

  2. Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality – and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated. Count Leo Tolstoy, “Education and Children” (1862)

    Plus é§a change, plus c’est la méªme chose.

  3. Bravo for you, honestly.

    I’ve always wondered WHAT it is that makes some people strong enough — “centered” enough — to stand firm against the pressure to conform. (In your case, you resisted the “expectation of submission” from both your teacher *and* your fellow students.)

    How can we teach this “moral strength” to others?

  4. Neo,

    “The extreme and dramatic image that kept coming to my mind, making me very sad and anxious, was that of concentration camp victims.”

    That was also my first thought upon reading this post. The connection has little to do with nudity and much to do with coercion, intended humiliation and the intended victimization of another human being..

    A Nonny Mouse,

    “I’ve always wondered WHAT it is that makes some people strong enough – “centered” enough – to stand firm against the pressure to conform.”

    I suggest a strong sense of self-worth and self-confidence and the ability to disconnect from the herd mentality of being a team player. One can only be independent if one is willing to abandon the “I was just following orders” defense.

    As an undergraduate student I was not like this. As a graduate student and university faculty member I was both able and willing to do this, especially with academic bureaucrats.

  5. Neo,

    Another thought. Art schools conduct life drawing classes (i.e., drawing unclothed models) all the time and yet rarely, if ever, raise the criticism and ire of offended parents and students.

    Several possible differences:

    Mastering the art of drawing the unclothed human body is viewed as necessary training in becoming an artist. In psychology and sociology does the unclothed human body really contribute anything to the discipline or is it an excuse to ogle (emotional content) under the rationale of intellectual content?

    Usually life-drawing models undress privately and enter the drawing class in a robe which is then quickly and unceremoniously discarded. The undressing is a private act, not a public strip without the tease; in your counseling class it would seem that the disrobing was the activity of choice (“The teacher was careful to explain that no one had to disrobe any more than he/she felt comfortable with . . . “) and some article of clothing, however minimal, had to come off.

    Finally, life-drawing models are not recruited from the drawing class itself, but are paid jobs which people (mostly students) have volunteered to do. Not being a life-drawing model has no impact on whether one passes a life-drawing class.

    I understand academic freedom and the need to explore new, and even fringe, ideas. With that said, I call “bullshit” on both of these classes.

  6. Bravo neo. I was taught as a child to never follow the herd. Mom and dad were both very independent and stubborn role models which I was always willing to mirror back at them during my teen years. 😉

  7. Great response, NEO. I can’t think of any class where it would be necessary to have students strip naked for critical evaluation by the other students.

    In addition, this age of cellphone cameras, instagram, youtube, etc. I would be especially doubtful that this demonstration of one’s “erotic self” wouldn’t end up somewhere online and/or saved for later viewing by the pervy professor.

  8. All I can say is thank God that getting an engineering degree didn’t involve engineering students disrobing. Generally speaking, it’s not a student population that spends a lot of time working on appearance…
    in any case the professors had plenty of other ways to humiliate us — one guy used to staple a Kmart application to the exams of students who didn’t do well, and made sure he drew attention to his pranks by making fun of the students who bombed. Besides their political views, some of them are simply arrogant jerks.
    But your letter to the instructor was extremely well stated, and seemed to be speaking with a voice that was far more mature and eloquent than most people your age, and far more than that of your instructor. I imagine you have always been someone with a lot of courage and character.

  9. I don’ think I could have done that as an undergrad, at least in the first two years, and did not go to grad school until I was in my 40s, so I don’t know what I would have done. However, one of the seminal books in my intellectual life was “Obedience to Authority,” which I read my junior or senior year and which made a huge impression on me. I resolved to take responsibility for my actions and not let others — especially some person in an authority position but who was not an authority — sway me. I don’t know that I’ve always accomplished that but I sure have tried.

  10. What is this conformity people speak of?

    Is it like when a dog rolls over to submit before the Master, since it is not strong enough to take the power of the Master?

  11. Also, this is why Neo’s change story doesn’t convince me that a whole lot of others will do the same. Her integrity and strength of will was something inherent to her. It’s not something gained by education or intellectual prowess. Thus people cannot become like her, since she is exceptional, and that means statistically other people won’t change the way she changed.

    Humans are weak. They desire leaders to tell them what to do and that is what they will get, one way or another.

  12. Mrs Whatsit:

    I remember her saying something to me after class, but I actually don’t remember what. By the way, I also pointed out to her (I believe in a private conversation after class) that I thought it interesting that SHE was exempt from disrobing and standing in front of the class.

    On the paper I turned in, however, there is a little note from the professor that reads, “Jean–I appreciated your taking time to share your negative reactions with me” and then she suggested I read this book.

  13. T —

    True about the life drawing models. Also, you’re concentrating so hard on drawing them, they are not live beings, but shapes, and shadows, and textures. It’s the same process as drawing a still life, in a sense while you are drawing them. But back when I was drawing life models, no one sat on a position where the genitals would feature prominently in the drawing, and no one drew the gavials genitalia in much detail.

    Neoneocon —
    The link didn’t go much of any where where there was a book…

  14. The Left complains much about Gitmo’s enhanced interrogation of foreign terrorists, the Left’s actual allies, because they don’t like their monopoly on coercion to be dispersed to patriots or organizations set out on hurting Leftists or Leftist allies.

    It is not the coercion, the pain, or the effectiveness they dislike. It’s the fact that it works too well and isn’t under the control of Leftists. Leftists love mind control, brain washing, and interrogation protocols. They have made use of several secretive and lesser known techniques over the centuries.

  15. The whole body language thing can’t be learned by reading your own body. It’s learned by physically trapping a subject and then reading their body language via external stimuli while cross checking results.

    Human predators often interview the potential prey, to suss out which among the herd is the weakest, the most isolated, the slowest to run. This skill set is not developed in isolation, but as a kind of play or art in life.

    One difference from the past and now is that students were often research subjects and guinea pigs for the Left’s R and D process. The bosses didn’t get naked because they were the researchers and the students the guinea pigs. Now a days, the researchers have gone native and are participating in their own hedonism. Perhaps because they now can or perhaps because the Left’s R and D has reached certain goals.

    Hunter kill squads have a similar initiation rite as well as death cults. It’s designed to tear down the personal barriers so that the subject learns to obey the group consensus. Once they can overcome the stress barriers on private matters, ordering them to kill or slaughter “Others” that are outside themselves, becomes much less of a stress test. Small unit teasing and hazing, designed to artificially induce stress in the subject to test if they will break in combat or not, is also similar.

    These control techniques are not known to many, because even the ones that use them, don’t necessarily have a supreme intellectual or emotional understanding of them. Much like a cargo cult, if it works, they don’t really care how it works.

  16. The sexual (e.g. gender equivalence) revolution is notorious for causing unprecedented levels of collateral damage. Not only did it cause the mass murder of tens of millions of wholly innocent human lives (i.e. debasement of human life), but it was the anthropogenic forcing for a broad range of catastrophic outcomes, including failed relationships and marginalized dignity.

  17. It is merely the prelude to the Left’s true nature, their perfect utopia for humanity, what I might call Slavery 3.0

  18. I was a model for a life drawing class a couple of times in college. I found it fascinating. I had expected to feel a bit vulnerable, but instead I felt very safe. The artists were not looking at *me* in the usual sense. They were, as Lee explains, looking at lines and shapes, and they were working. I had a very strong sense of the effort each artist was making, and a sense of how serious an endeavor it was for them, to try to capture the human form skillfully and perhaps with some beauty. In a certain sense, they were the ones in the vulnerable position (because the work revealed how much skill and talent each one had). To cooperate in this way created an interesting type of intimacy and trust.

    Pretty much the complete opposite of your experience.

    Thank you for telling us this story. It really goes to the heart of what we need more of today–courage in the public square would be one way of putting it. Thank you for being a role model for that and for articulating the issues so well.

  19. Some people hit upon key concepts involved in why humans are born and trained to Obey Authority, no matter the cost, as social animals first and foremost.

    A key concept is survival, implied there is the personal resources of an individual. If a person has enough resources to survive, then their ability to be coerced lessens. Blackmail, social pressure, taking family members hostage, all are derivative branches of the same principle, personal and genetic survival. The human system does not really make much of a difference between the survival of the clan vs the survival of the individual, because unless the clan survived, the individual could not survive unless they joined another tribe as their slave. As a human becomes promoted in his or her hierarchy, as they obtain more personal resources, their tendency to Obey Authority also lessens, because their fear of exile also lessens. Just some individuals have had this abundance self confidence or arrogant pride in their early days, they didn’t need age to give it to them. They didn’t need a job or a title or social authorities to give it to them. They already had it, inherent to their birth or soul.

    Another key concept is willpower. Even if a person had the resources to survive, if they lack the confidence and the willpower to do things, then it would be easy for an outside force to control them with threats or promises of greater rewards. Willpower can be objectively assessed through pain, hedonistic pleasure, and via direct eye to eye contact without looking away. The strongest humans in existence can overcome their natural instinct to obey pain and pleasure. The strongest humans can maintain eye contact with anyone for more than 60 minutes straight, with no breaks other than eye blinks. Willpower is not merely the ability to master yourself, but it is also the ability to project self mastery over others, including animals, in your immediate vicinity. Some people call it charisma or magnetic personality.

    And yet another concept, this one is a bit muddy, is that obedience operates under a chain of command, or a hierarchy, so external authority no longer applies if an internal authority has already conquered the territory and the loyalty of the people. Unless an Authority can claim to supersede the local authority in some fashion, the orders of the Authority will not command obedience very well. This is often seen in cultural or military invasions, as the occupation attempts to coral the locals. The power of any authority decreases the farther away they are, and it decreases even further the less power or ruthlessness they have. So one of the easier ways to lock out all non authorized commands is to set in an administrator exclusive level of access. Have God command you to use your free will in all things, so that no human subordinate or temporal agency can override that command in the human hierarchy. By accepting the omnipotency of God as the Sole Authority, this prevents others from mind controlling you, except through direct physical methods that can access the neural channels which connect to your brain or soul. The exception is when people worship idols or priests, and take the word of a prophet like child molestor Mohammed, as being the direct word of God. In that sense, it’s easy to obtain administrator privileges for a human, which means they can override the free will of any true believer.

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