I think his self-preservation instincts were working overtime. The violence isn't being directed at him, so it makes sense not to do anything to draw it towards him - like intervening.
I don't think anything was going through his mind except fear and adrenaline. With a clear head, you're right, removing the weapon is the best option - especially when there was some distance between them.
But he isn't actually thinking. (There's a book called thinking fast and slow that explains this quite well.)
If you want to learn more about this concept I recommend a book called Thinking Fast and Slow which has some very useful ideas for many aspects of learning, including piano.
> People don’t decide on what candidate they support or what issues they stand or do not stand for with this same mindset.
Actually it's worse, because people do make generalisations about a candidate's unknown attributes based on quite possibly unrelated known attributes. Hence candidates (and people in general) can be thought of as trustworthy and competent purely on the basis of their being physically attractive.
It's worth reading Daniel Kahneman's seminal book Thinking, Fast and Slow for more on this fascinating, but slightly depressing, phenomenon.
I read through your full post and here are my takeaways:
You've done self-improvement stuff which is solely focused on you. It made you more confident, but didn't bring you any dates. Your only motivation to exercise is to make yourself attractive to women. So this advice seems like its not really that useful at all.
You've read lots of advice from women which says "Leave women alone. I don't want to be approached." When you comply with all of them simultaneously, you conclude that there is no real-life environment where it is acceptable to approach women.
Your personality deviates from the traditionally-masculine script. You naturally value Active Listening and being emotionally supportive. You've seen signs that most women don't find this attractive.
You feel rather upset about 15 post-puberty years of feeling lonely. You feel more upset that when you read about this problem, you see a load of people dismissing that problem as being a sign of a Male Entitlement. You see lots of people shaming straight men for their sexuality. It makes you feel awful and like the endeavour of finding romantic love is pointless.
Did I miss the mark on anything?
Married late-20s straight man here.
I have a few responses.
1) I sympathise.
Your problem is real. Your problem doesn't make you a bad person or a creep. Your problem does deserve a sympathetic ear. I suspect you would find some catharsis in reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/ and then https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/19/deradicalizing-the-romanceless/
2) You can do this, despite difficulty.
I strongly suspect your problem is solvable, though with a sort of difficulty that people often find hard to grapple with. It requires enduring emotional discomfort, trying things despite lots of randomness in the results, re-evaluating your strategy and progress every 2 weeks, and learning new habits.
3) Find ways to learn tactics which enable you to be successful at being emotionally honest.
The reason it might require study is because the goal isn't to be honest just to yourself, but to carry the right meaning to other people. Anyone who's ever taken a class on public speaking or bedside manner is saying that communication is hard and worth studying. Why should sexual communication be any different? It is worth finding a therapist or coach, but it is also worth taking the time to seek out someone you trust to point down a healthy and consensual path.
See from this summary if this book would be helpful. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/models-a-summary/
Also look at Charisma on Command
Remember that your goal is to learn things which you can turn into intuition. If something doesn't make sense, it is worth following that feeling and asking about it.
4) Develop a healthy relationship with rejection.
Getting rejected isn't about you. Its about what she thinks about the you-her system. I have heard good things about the rejection therapy game but haven't looked into it.
5) Be more gentle with yourself and your maleness.
Words of anger and disgust at male behaviour are probably swirling around in your head far more than is actually reasonable. Most women generally like men. Social media amplifies the most dramatic hot takes and hits your brain with them when you're most emotionally vulnerable -- during your morning poop.
6) Worry less about catastrophe.
Find and follow a reasonable set of guidelines to avoid acting in a way that a reasonable person would find threatening. Don't try to 100% eliminate the possibility that you creep someone out. You can't do it and you don't have to. Being accidentally creepy on rare occasion happens to everyone and almost everyone is capable of brushing it off.
There are people who have had serious trauma at the hands of men. They are still processing that trauma and need spaces where they can do that. But it is a bad idea to go to those same spaces looking for dating advice because what they say won't be a measured response to your situation but a response to theirs.
7) Think about the broad set of interactions you want to have and choose your activities based on that.
If you genuinely couldn't give two shits about yoga, don't do more than try it out. Take some time and imagine some interactions with a girlfriend which you'd find fun and satisfying. Do a Freewrite Pomodoro: Set a 20-minute timer and force yourself to keep listing out bullet points. This list is private so go wild. These can be sexual. These can be arbitrarily dorky. These can be boring.
Making escalatingly-wierd fart noises? Goes on the list.
Trying to make apple pie, but failing and eating the resulting apple crumble? Goes on the list.
Traveling to Morocco and taking a Tagine cooking class? Goes on the list.
Eating her out while she tries to play Mario Kart? Goes on the list.
Running around with a broom between your legs and a robe and wizard hat, trying to body-check someone? Goes on the list.
Going to real estate open houses and whispering critiques of the interior design and home layout to each other? Goes on the list.
Watching a movie about the 1918 flu pandemic? Goes on the list.
Now, once you have this list, go through and for each one, see if there are any communities which correlate with that activity. Then, sort by their gender ratio. Go there and first see if you enjoy the community. Make a few friendly-acquaintances. If you're not genuinely enjoying building acquaintance-relationship with the non-datable people there, ask yourself why...maybe talk to a friend or therapist about why. "these particular people are habitually rude" is a possible answer, so be willing to move to a different community with the same activity.
8) Think about the positive interactions you're able to create.
Can you cook?
Can you use your knowledge of anatomy to learn to give great massages?
Does dancing bring you joy?
Do you like telling stories?
Do you like being silly around kids?
Do you want to learn how to play the guitar?
Do the same thing as in #7. List these out and then list out environments where you can display these. Then sort by the likelihood that there will be a dateable straight women there. Be willing to learn a skill if you've already been kinda wanting to do so.
9) Learn to read avoidance vs interest in body language.
It will help you act and speak with more confidence. To start, read What Every Body is Saying and watch some of Charisma on Command's videos.
10) Actually ask people out.
Do you happen to have pointers to resources which fathers can use to teach this?
Heck, does /r/MensLib have any pointers to recommended dating advice? The Resources for Men Guide in the sidebar has some tips for building healthy boundaries and communication in a relationship, but not yet anything on how to start dating. Should it? What would people recommend?
Would anything I linked to in my 9-comment attempt at giving someone advice be useful? (I'd be interested in feedback on what this community thinks of any piece of my advice)
EDIT: the resources I linked to as being probably-helpful were
Thinking Fast and Slow which is more abstractly useful.
Rejection Therapy, which I've not actually tried per-se.
And I recommended the film Dumplin for a particular scene and for being good in general. But I hope its worth reading the context of what I wrote...even if it is ...long...
Thinking, fast and slow https://www.amazon.in/dp/0141033576/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_CuWLDbQF62S7Q
The theory of "post-hoc rationalization" is actually a pretty well-developed one within modern neuroscience and behavioral economics in particular. There's a brief summary of some major ideas here.
Robert Zajonc, who is known for his extensive research on the mere-exposure effect, had this to say about post-hoc rationalization:
>"decisions are made with little to no cognitive process ... we make judgements first, and then seek to justify those judgements by rationalization."
(Source here).
Dual Process Theory also comes to a similar conclusion w.r.t. post-hoc justification, as the "rational" system of cognition tends to be slower and limited in capacity. Kahneman has a pretty excellent and accessible book exploring this and its implications for behavioral economics.
A related phenomenon is the tendency of humans to exhibit choice-supportive bias, which is essentially where a person subconsciously attaches positive aspects to a choice or object after they make the choice or purchase the object.
Interestingly though, when some Swedish cognitive scientists created an experiment relating to this, they found some very strange results. Subjects were offered two photographs of people and were asked who they found most attractive. After the subject chose a photo, they would be given a closer look at the photo and were asked why they decided to choose that option. However, in some of the rounds they would be given the declined photograph rather than the one they chose. The majority of subjects in these rounds did not notice conspicious differences with the picture they had just chosen before, and confabulated explanations for why they preferred the second picture, in effect explaining a decision they never made.
(Source here).
TL;DR: The idea that people tend to act on an unconscious reasoning system and that these decisions are post-hoc rationalized (or perhaps aborted) by a slower conscious reasoning system is not at all a dubious claim and is one of the major recent developments in cognitive science.
Okay... here is your link: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0141033576
Have fun reading it to understand it. There is no shortend blog articles for everything.
yes is that one.
english version: Thinking Fast and Slow. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0141033576/ref=ox_sc_mini_detail?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE
Our destroying of the environment is not due to a lack of empathy, more so it is due to a different manner in which our brains work. We are very much irrational and this is the basis of the moderately new field of Behavioural Economics, a field of economics which looks to map human behaviour (of which far too much is deemed irrational).
Behavioural economists have unearthed a number of heuristics. These are shortcuts in thinking deeply programmed into human brains which effect how we compute, perceive and ultimately make decisions. See wiki page here
One example of a heuristic is that if someone was buying a radio in a shop for $40 and the shop assistant said you could get it 10 minutes down the road for $20, most people would head off down the road to purchase the radio with a $20 saving. If you were buying a car for $12,450 and the salesman said you could get it down the road for $12,400, most people wouldn't make the trip for a $50 saving. This is an example of irrational human behaviour. Annoyingly, I cannot remember the name of this particular heuristic. I didn't swap for a different because this is really tangible example of irrational decision making.
It is these shortcomings in our computing that lead to things such this as environmental damage. For example, we're very bad at perceiving a cost, or negating a cost, that is far in the future. This is the basis for another heuristic i can't name (sorry - I'm embarrassed I'm to preach stuff i don't know). And so when we think about the cause of environmental damage behavioural economists might argue the cause to be closer to an example of procrastination rather than something else.
Think about a time when you have something really important to do, but you put it off. Then you kept putting it off, until the deadline loomed closer and closer. Through all this, from the start, whatever you had to undertake was always very important yet you didn't undertake it, and this progressed until very late in your deadline, causing stress, detriment to the outcome and poor results. It was only the gloomy danger of the deadline that spurred action regardless of the fact that you k.new it was important. Environmental damage is a lot like this, yet we don't have the deadline yet. (the deadline might be when the ocean is on everyones doorstep)
An enlightening, popular and very digestible best seller on this is "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Nobel prize winning Behavioural Economist Daniel Kahneman.
As to your main point:
Based on your premise that this would occur in democracy. I disagree. Viva la revolution.
Comparative to the dystopian future your present, the present day would be considered quite enviable as most of the developed world is in work and has a broadly decent living standard as a result. Yet still there is revolt, here in the UK frustration even in our "enviable state" lead to a Brexit vote, an ultimately harmful, rebellion by the people to challenge the liberal elite status quo. Across the pond there is what would have previously never been foreseen success of the abomination that is Trump.
If peoples living standards were ever to get bad in a democracy, the status quo would get challenged by the people, the end.
Moving into hypotheticals, in other more despotic future societies, people could still revolt, outside of democracy, it happens unless technology massively skews the power of the people over the elite. Again this is too hypothetical to spend time on.
If you like this then also check out Danial Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow, which, among other things, discusses the planning fallacy and Dunning-Kruger effect.
Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0141033576
>"Wow this 100g chocolate egg is discounted from £10 to £5 must buy it" No, look at its value now. Is £5 for 100g of chocolate worth it? Then what does it matter what it was sold at before?
Because that's how our brains are fundamentally wired. We don't have an absolute sense of anything, it's all relative to other phenomena. So you can't really assess the value of a product on it's own, you need what's called an anchor to evaluate the whether its cheap/expensive.
Supermarkets aren't doing this for shits and giggles, they pay huge salaries to experts in these areas to maximize sales, who design the minutest details such as the shop layout and product placement to influence consumers through sub-conscious biases. If you're interested to read more about this, read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the psychology of judgement and decision making, and birthed this whole field. Also, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is in the same vein.
If you like this stuff, read http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0141033576
english version: Thinking Fast and Slow. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0141033576/ref=ox_sc_mini_detail?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE