Almost nobody comprehends the nature and significance of sense of agency to net perception. For instance: you're an idiot, and you do something stupid. You know that you chose to behave stupidly; your brain created, stored and connected memory of that stupid choice to its subsequent reality, and as a result you are conscious of the validity of that direct correlation. This mechanism, in fact, is fundamental to the very idea of "knowing" anything. Given the right circumstances and a modicum of potential for intelligence, eventually you could learn from such a mistake.
BUT, if you take your sense of agency out of the equation, the entire perception of events always changes. Say that—instead of making an obviously idiotic choice like before—in another case you get drunk, black out, and do exactly the same stupid thing mentioned earlier. You wake up, and... what? Here's what: in this case, your brain lacks logical proof of your responsibility for the inevitable circumstances derived from your behavior - and, ultimately, you don't feel that responsibility. That's where the problem really starts, because you actually are responsible. You simply lack the data necessary to draw that conclusion intuitively, and, because you probably live in the 21st century, you almost certainly also lack the intellectual discipline necessary to arrive at that conclusion retrospectively.
BUT, if you take your sense of agency out of the equation, the entire perception of events always changes. Say that—instead of making an obviously idiotic choice like before—in another case you get drunk, black out, and do exactly the same stupid thing mentioned earlier. You wake up, and... what? Here's what: in this case, your brain lacks logical proof of your responsibility for the inevitable circumstances derived from your behavior - and, ultimately, you don't feel that responsibility. That's where the problem really starts, because you actually are responsible. You simply lack the data necessary to draw that conclusion intuitively, and, because you probably live in the 21st century, you almost certainly also lack the intellectual discipline necessary to arrive at that conclusion retrospectively.
Here's the fun part that nobody will take seriously because it makes 'em feel "icky": even assuming a 50% higher incidence of male>female rape than female>male (which is completely arbitrary and made up, just to make the point all the more obvious to those who need to feel that they can see the fence before being educated about its non-existence), and arbitrarily expanding the calculable margin of error to +/- 25% for good measure (especially given the abundance of sources from which contaminated data is inevitably going to be drawn and the margin of error inherent in calculating them, etc etc), easily 80% or more of "rape" in this country... isn't. I'm not speaking about semantics or nuance of language, here; I mean that it plainly, logically, factually could not be rape - even if we concede to the (imperfect) current vernacular definition of the term. Ignorance of agency is not the same as lack of agency; only the specific context of extreme impairment can create the disparity of comprehension necessary to allow for such mischaracterization. Objectively speaking, rape cannot be rape in the absence of involuntary physical or chemical coercion, but that's hardly a subject to which the collective intellect of our present civilization can even begin to aspire - so I suppose the scientific reality of the event itself will have to remain a nebulous hipster conundrum for the... next century, probably. Everybody is just so excited to be a victim in this day and age! *shrug*
That's fine by me, frankly, because even more interesting to me is the net psychopathological footprint of the false belief and subsequent delusion-reinforcement experienced by believed-victims combined with the unjust ostracism and subsequent cognitive-dissonance load experienced by rape-accusees following alleged rapes, given that the vast majority of such crimes are strictly false. No data exists upon which one could draw a useful conclusion on the matter, but if I were to go with my intuition, I'd wager that the net burden of all of this ignorance on our society is not at all insignificant. Maybe, a few decades from now, more than a handful of people will be mature enough to discuss it. Until then, innocent men and women will continue to be convicted of crimes that weren't actually commited by anyone, because they weren't actually crimes - and, nearly as awful, the normal process of learning from one's obvious mistakes will continue to be circumvented as a matter of popular entertainment, and the subsequent psychopathological saturation will hang heavily from the intellectual ceiling of our societies. Even the inaction of good people is unnecessary for "evil" to prevail... it simply requires enough psychological inertia.
Hrm. Fascinating. We're almost certainly all doomed. Cheers, then!
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