Re: The Psycho-epistemolgy of MMP

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025 13:13:15 +0000, W.Dockery wrote:

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025 4:07:04 +0000, George J. Dance wrote:
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moved from
https://www.novabbs.com/arts/article-flat.php?id=254114&group=alt.arts.poetry.comments#254114
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On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 0:20:56 +0000, W.Dockery wrote:
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That's Michael Pendragon, always the Peter Keating styled second hander.

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Essentially we're in agreement; but I have to raise two non-essential
points of disagreement. First, I would rather not refer to the subject
as "Pendragon." The subject's real name is unknown; "Michael Pendragon"
is just one of his socks, albeit the most prolific one. I would prefer
to refer to him as "MMP" (which doesn't mean you have to, of course, if
you disagree).
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Second, I don't think that Peter Keating is the best 'type' to describe
MMP in the novel. Both Keating and MMP are social metaphysicians - they
think that reality is whatever people believe it is, the "consensus"
view of reality. But so do half the novel. Where those two are different
is that Keating is content to follow the consensus, while MMP believes
he can actually control reality by controlling others' beliefs. That
makes him more like two of Rand's other protagonists from that novel,
Gail Wynand and Ellsworth Toohey. Which of those matches him best is
still an open question.

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I see your point and now can agree completely.

For now I think of him as the Toohey type, but that could just be my
personal bias. The difference being that: Wynand was a Nietzschean; he
just wanted the power to control reality for itself, without any regard
for how it was used; while Toohey did have an agenda, a malevolent one
of stamping out and destroying all independent thought and creativity.

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Why does Michael Pendragon lie and misrepresent so much?

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MMP has told us he was abused as a boy, and I think that fact is key.

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I didn't remember this fact but it isn't at all surprising.

It just came up as a casual aside in one of the threads he opened to
flame "My Father's House," and I'm sure he'd call my use of it "out of
context" as he was trying to make a different point. The actual context,
of all those threads, was that he was claiming to have discovered that
"emotional and physical child abuse" and in addition "the probability of
sexual abuse," in my upbringing.
Then one day, out of the blue, he added this comment:
"I'm sure I received much worse from my father than you did from yours.
But I *never* willingly submitted to it."
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.arts.poetry.comments/c/vhO7kDQSMqw/m/9XUjiy-GCQAJ?hl=en
His point was the second sentence, but I found the first sentence more
shocking.
He imagined that I had repeatedly experienced emotional, physical, and
even sexual abuse from my father; but he was also convinced that he had
"received MUCH SORSE" from his own father than anything he imagined
happening to me. (stress added)
So I pressed him on it, and got this follow-up comment:
""I ran from my parents when they wanted to punish me. And when they
caught me (and they always did), I fought tooth and nail until I was
beaten into submission. And my punishment was always worse for having
fought back -- but I only ran a little farther and fought back a little
harder the next time."
I found that even more disturbing. Fight and flight are not rational
responses, but animal ones based on fear. He was afraid; but of what?
Not of being beaten, obviously; even the most scared boy would not incur
two beatings because he was afraid of one. Hia "puniahmwnra" hdd to be
something far worse.
That is as much as he revealed, but it was revealing enough.

Lying is one tactic children usually try at some point to escape
punishment, and an abused child has all the more reason to keep at it ad
learn how to do it successfully. Since MMP comes across as clever (at
least 120 IQ), it is also fair to think that he was able to learn to lie
successfully. So it is fair to conclude that he did learn to lie
successfully, and escape punishment, more than once.
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While no one can blame a child in that position for lying, his doing so
successfully would be giving him the wrong feedback, making him think
that he actually was changing reality by changing his parents' beliefs -
telling him that in fact reality was whatever one wanted it to be, and
that he could be that one.

Some comments about his relationship with his mother, as well as his
father, are probably in order here, but I'd prefer to deal with one
topic at a tie.

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More later, but I wanted to get these two points on record quickly.

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Same here, excellent observations on "Harry Lime."

thanks. I have no idea if anyone will even read them here, aside from
you and I, but if I don't get them down then no one ever will.