Appearance Can Be Misleading Quotes

Appearances can be misleading. You just never know what’s inside someone until he’s tested.

The raw data of anthropologists can be misleading; it can make the differences in values between cultures appear greater than they are...It is only that life forces upon them choices that we do not have to make.

Silent people can be misleading, suggesting profundity and thoughtfulness where there may be none.

To most people, Hans Hubermann was barely visible. An un-special person. Certainly, his painting skills were excellent. His musical ability was better than average. Somehow, though, and I’m sure you’ve met people like this, he was able to appear as merely part of the background, even if he was standing at the front of a line. He was always just there. Not noticeable. Not important or particularly valuable. The frustration of that appearance, as you can imagine, was its complete misleadence, let’s say. There most definitely was value in him, and it did not go unnoticed by Liesel Meminger. (The human child—so much cannier at times than the stupefyingly ponderous adult.) She saw it immediately. His manner. The quiet air around him. When he turned the light on in the small, callous washroom that night, Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver. Like soft silver, melting. Liesel, upon seeing those eyes, understood that Hans Hubermann was worth a lot.

It may seem strange to conceive of friendship as principally about cooperation rather than, say, hanging out and having fun, but appearances can be misleading. First, nature’s purposes need not be revealed in our experience. Sex, for example, is primarily about making babies, but that’s not necessarily what motivates people to do the deed. Likewise, friendship may ultimately be about things that are far from our minds when we’re being friendly. Indeed, if you’re constantly thinking about the material advantages of your friendship, that’s a sign that you’re not really a friend.

This disappointment, the outcome of my own misconception about her, was actually of no consequence for me. But it was a misconception of the kind which, though they may foster the onset of love, and may not be recognized as misconceptions until love is beyond containment, can also foster sorrow. Such misconceptions (including some which differ from mine about Andrée, or which may even be the opposite of it) can be abetted by the fact—and this was exactly Andrée’s case—that, in our desire to be seen as someone we are not, we take on enough of the appearance and the ways of that someone to create an illusion at first encounter. To that outward appearance, affectation, imitation, and the desire to be admired, either by the righteous or the unrighteous, add the misleading effects of words and gesture.

I’ve never seen Klamm, Frieda doesn’t like me very much, as you know, and she would never have let me have a look at him; but of course they know very well what he looks like in the village, some people have seen him, they’ve all heard of him, and from these glimpses and rumours, as well as some deliberately misleading reports, a picture of Klamm has emerged that is probably generally accurate. But only generally; otherwise it varies, and perhaps it doesn’t even vary as much as Klamm’s actual appearance. He is supposed to look quite different when he arrives in the village and when he leaves, different before and after he’s been drinking beer, different when he’s awake and when he’s asleep, different when he’s alone and when he’s talking to someone – and then, as you can imagine, almost completely different up at the Castle. And even when he’s in the village there are reports of quite substantial differences, differences in his height, his shape, his weight, his beard. Fortunately, there’s one thing the descriptions agree about, his clothes – he’s always dressed the same: in a black frock coat with long tails. Of course, all these differences are due to magic, they are quite understandable because they depend on the present mood, the level of excitement, the countless degrees of hope or despair on the part of the observer, who is in any case only able to catch a momentary glimpse of Klamm. I’m telling you all this just as Barnabas has often explained it to me, and on the whole it’s reassuring as long as one’s not directly or personally involved. It doesn’t affect me, but for Barnabas it’s a matter of vital importance whether it’s really Klamm he is talking to or not.’ ‘It’s

Are we not j ustified in thinking that all great men are evil? This is not always evident in individual cases. Often they are able to play such a masterful game of hide and seek that they can assume the demeanour and outward appearance exhibited by men of great virtue. Often they revere the virtues in all earnestness and practise them with a passionate severity towards themselves, but only out of cruelty — seen from afar, such things can be misleading. Some have even misunderstood themselves, as they ... Not infrequently a great task will call forth great qualities, e.g. fair-mindedness. It is essential to bear in mind that while the greatest men may possess great virtues, they also possess their corresponding vices. It is my conviction that the presence of such internal conflicts and the feelings they engender gives rise to the bow with the great tension, the great man.

It would be a mistake to imagine that drug companies are the only people applying pressure for fast approvals. Patients can also feel they are being deprived of access to drugs, especially if they are desperate. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s the key public drive for faster approvals came from an alliance forged between drug companies and AIDS activists such as ACT UP. At the time, HIV and AIDS had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and young, previously healthy gay men were falling ill and dying in terrifying numbers, with no treatment available. We don’t care, they explained, if the drugs that are currently being researched for effectiveness might kill us: we want them, because we’re dying anyway. Losing a couple of months of life because a currently unapproved drug turned out to be dangerous was nothing, compared to a shot at a normal lifespan. In an extreme form, the HIV-positive community was exemplifying the very best motivations that drive people to participate in clinical trials: they were prepared to take a risk, in the hope of finding better treatments for themselves or others like them in the future. To achieve this goal they blocked traffic on Wall Street, marched on the FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and campaigned tirelessly for faster approvals.

DEONTOLOGY AND CONCEQUENTIALISM, A NOVEL APPROACH: Consequentialism and Deontology (Deontological Ethics) are two contrasting categories of Normative Ethics, the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental principles that determine the morality of human actions (or non-actions). Their supposed difference is that while Consequentialism determines if an action is morally right or wrong by examining its consequences, Deontology focuses on the action itself, regardless of its consequences. To the hypothetical question “Should I do this man a little injustice, if by this I could save the whole humanity from torture and demise?”, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a pure deontologist (absolutist) answers: “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus” (Do justice even if the whole world would perish). Superficially, it seems that a decent deontologist don’t care about consequences whatsoever. His/her one and only duty is to invariably obey to pre-existing, universal moral rules without exceptions: “do not kill”, “do not lie”, “do not use another human as a means to an end”, and so on. At this point I would like to present my thesis on this subject. The central idea here is that deontological ethics only appears to be indifferent to the consequences of an action. In fact, it is only these very consequences that determine what our moral rules and ethical duties should be. For example, the moral law “do not kill”, has its origin to the dire consequences that the killing of another human being brings about; for the victim (death), the perpetrator (often imprisonment or death) and for the whole humanity (collapse of society and civilization). Let us discuss the well-worn thought experiment of the mad axeman asking a mother where their young children are, so he can kill them. We suppose that the mother knows with 100% certainty that she can mislead him by lying and she can save her children from certain death (once again: supposing that she surely knows that she can save her children ONLY by lying, not by telling the truth or by avoiding to answer). In this thought experiment the hard deontologist would insist that it is immoral to lie, even if that would lead to horrible consequences. But, I assert that this deontological inflexibility is not only inhuman and unethical, it is also outrightly hypocritical. Because if the mother knows that their children are going to be killed if she tells the truth (or does not answer) and they are going to be saved if she tells a harmless lie, then by telling the truth she disobeys the moral law “do not kill/do not cause the death of an innocent”, which is much worse than the moral rule “do not lie”. The fact that she does not kill her children with her own hands is completely irrelevant. She could have saved them without harming another human, yet she chose not to. So the absolutist deontologist chooses actively to disobey a much more important moral law, only because she is not the immediate cause, but a cause via a medium (the crazy axeman in this particular thought experiment). So here are the two important conclusions: Firstly, Deontology in normative ethics is in reality a “masked consequentialism”, because the origin of a moral law is to be found in its consequences e.g. stealing is generally morally wrong, because by stealing, someone is deprived of his property that may be crucial for his survival or prosperity. Thus, the Deontology–Consequentialism dichotomy is a false one. And secondly, the fact that we are not the immediate “vessel” by which a moral rule is broken, but we nevertheless create or sustain a “chain of events” that will almost certainly lead to the breaking of a moral law, does surely not absolve us and does not give us the right to choose the worst outcome. Mister Immanuel Kant would avoid doing an innocent man an injustice, yet he would choose to lead billions of innocent people to agonizing death.

The people around us, even our closest friends will always remain to some extent remain mysterious and unfathomable. Their characters have secret recesses that they never reveal. The unknowableness of other people could prove disturbing if we thought about it long enough since it would make it impossible for us really to judge other people, so we prefer to ignore this fact and to judge people on their appearances, on what is most visible to our eyes. Clothes gestures, words, actions. In the social realm, appearances are the barometer of almost all of our judgements, and you must never be mislead into believing otherwise. One false slip, or one awkward or sudden change in your appearance can prove disastrous. This is the reason for the supreme importance of making and maintaining a reputation that is of your own creation. That reputation will protect you in the dangerous game of appearances, distracting the probing eyes of others from knowing what you are really like, and giving you a degree of control over how the world judges you. A powerful position to be in.

The dependent origination, or structure of conditions, appears as a flexible formula with the intention of describing the ordinary human situation of a man in his world (or indeed any conscious event where ignorance and craving have not entirely ceased). That situation is always complex, since it is implicit that consciousness with no object, or being ( bhava— becoming, or however rendered) without consciousness (of it), is impossible except as an artificial abstraction. The dependent origination, being designed to portray the essentials of that situation in the limited dimensions of words and using only elements recognizable in experience, is not a logical proposition (Descartes’ cogito is not a logical proposition). Nor is it a temporal cause-and-effect chain: each member has to be examined as to its nature in order to determine what its relations to the others are (e.g. whether successive in time or conascent, positive or negative, etc., etc.). A purely cause-and-effect chain would not represent the pattern of a situation that is always complex, always subjective-objective, static-dynamic, positive-negative, and so on. Again, there is no evidence of any historical development in the various forms given within the limit of the Sutta Piþaka (leaving aside the Paþisambhidámagga), and historical treatment within that particular limit is likely to mislead, if it is hypothesis with no foundation. Parallels with European thought have been avoided in this translation. But perhaps an exception can be made here, with due caution, in the case of Descartes. The revolution in European thought started by his formula cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) is not yet ended. Now, it will perhaps not escape notice that the two elements, “I think” and “I am,” in what is not a logical proposition parallel to some extent the two members of the dependent origination, consciousness and being (becoming). In other words, consciousness activated by craving and clinging as the dynamic factory, guided and blinkered by ignorance (“I think” or “consciousness with the conceit ‘I am’”), conditions being (“therefore I am”) in a complex relationship with other factors relating subject and object (not accounted for by Descartes). The parallel should not be pushed too far. In fact it is only introduced because in Europe the dependent origination seems to be very largely misunderstood with many strange interpretations placed upon it, and because the cogito does seem to offer some sort of reasonable approach.

As Kant points out: The proverbial saying, ‘fiat iustitia, pereat mundus’ (i.e. ‘Let justice reign, even if all the rogues in the world must perish’) may sound somewhat inflated, but it is nonetheless true… But it must not be misunderstood, or taken, for example, as a permit to apply one's own rights with the utmost rigour… 32 It would appear that here the serious risks inherent in misunderstanding a sound principle of right and the ‘permit to apply one's own rights with the utmost rigour’ are held to be comparable. Both misunderstanding (in the sense of incorrectly using a message) and using one's own rights (not only civil rights but, above all, rational rights) ‘with the utmost rigour’ may derive not so much from a ‘misleading’ categorization or abuse of current logic as from the pre-established dismissal of listening. Both the misunderstanding and utmost rigour (’hard’ and ‘slippery’) that Kant warns us about would appear to be the primary derivatives of a dominant thinking that can not and hence will not further comprehension. ‘Rigour’ and, conversely, misunderstanding are deeply rooted in the exclusion of listening, in a trend which brooks no argument, where everyone obeys without too much fuss. These interwoven kinds of ‘reasoning’ lead us into a vicious circle, as powerful as it is elusive, a circle that can only be evaded with a force of silence that does not arise from astonished dumbfoundedness, but from serious, unyielding attention.

The temptation of what is sometimes called realism—the belief that nations are solely motivated by a struggle for power, that they have eternal interests and permanent geopolitical orientations—is as strong as that of isolationism, and can be equally misleading, not least because it appeals to the indifferent. If nations never change, then of course we don’t need to exert the effort to make them change. If nations have permanent orientations, then all we need to do is discover what those are and get used to them. If nothing else, the Ukraine war showed us that nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. Their behavior can be altered by acts of cowardice or bravery, by wise leaders and cruel ones, and above all by good ideas and bad ones. Their interactions are not inevitable; their alliances and enmities are not permanent. There was no coalition to aid Ukraine until February 2022, and then there was. That coalition then made what had appeared to be the inevitable, rapid conquest of Ukraine impossible. By the same token, a different kind of Russian leader, with a different set of ideas, could now end the war quickly.

both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? However, fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

The salient feature of Paradise is that, as a reader, I experience events long before I can make sense of them.35 Events initially seem to exist outside of any frame of meaning, and it is only afterward that the frame through which the event is comprehensible becomes visible. The event itself initially appears as a violent irruption of the Real, occurring outside of any symbolic context. What Morrison is tapping into here is one of the key aspects of contemporary experience. Rather than experiencing the events in our lives as a part of a whole, within the context of the universal, we tend to experience events in isolation, as if each event exists in its own sphere, untouched by any other. The lack of an evident universal is what makes interpretation so difficult today. This appearance, however, is misleading, and it is through the act of interpretation that we can see the connection between events, the way in which they are all situated within a universality. On the level of its form, the novel illustrates both the illusion of nonuniversality and the hidden universality that makes interpretation possible.

The word coping is often a misleading judgement, used inappropriately in relation to grief. Observers who make comments about a grieving person along the lines of ‘He/she seems to be coping really well’, or ‘He/she isn’t coping very well’ tend to base their ability to judge your wellbeing on how they feel about what you are doing. For example, if you are very obviously distressed and crying, you are likely to be described as ‘not coping very well’. If you don’t express your grief overtly or don’t show more grief than the observer is comfortable with, they are likely to describe you as ‘coping very well’. It is also possible to show too little grief for their comfort level. If you don’t cry or appear filled with sorrow or pain, they don’t have a role and may consequently describe you as cold. The title of this book — Coping with Grief — is an attempt to redefine what coping really means. When any of us are newly bereaved, we are ‘coping’ if we can keep breathing, put one foot after the other, get out of bed, dress ourselves, and attend to essential tasks even if on automatic pilot.

For a scientist, the only valid question is to decide whether the phenomenon can be studied by itself, or whether it is an instance of a deeper problem. This book attempts to illustrate, and only to illustrate, the latter approach. And my conclusion is that, through the UFO phenomenon, we have the unique opportunities to observe folklore in the making and to gather scientific material at the deepest source of human imagination. We will be the object of much contempt by future students of our civilization if we allow this material to be lost, for "tradition is a meteor which, once it falls, cannot be rekindled." If we decide to avoid extreme speculation, but make certain basic observations from the existing data, five principal facts stand out rather clearly from our analysis so far: Fact 1. There has been among the public, in all countries, since the middle of 1946, an extremely active generation of colorful rumors. They center on a considerable number of observations of unknown machines close to the ground in rural areas, the physical traces left by these machines, and their various effects on humans and animals. Fact 2. When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumors, the extraterrestrial myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of the scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological description place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts. Fact 3. The entities human witnesses report to have seen, heard, and touched fall into various biological types. Among them are beings of giant stature, men indistinguishable from us, winged creatures, and various types of monsters. Most of the so-called pilots, however, are dwarfs and form two main groups: (1) dark, hairy beings – identical to the gnomes of medieval theory – with small, bright eyes and deep, rugged, "old" voices; and (2) beings – who answer the description of the sylphs of the Middle Ages or the elves of the fairy-faith – with human complexions, oversized heads, and silvery voices. All the beings have been described with and without breathing apparatus. Beings of various categories have been reported together. The overwhelming majority are humanoid. Fact 4. The entities' reported behavior is as consistently absurd as the appearance of their craft is ludicrous. In numerous instances of verbal communications with them, their assertions have been systematically misleading. This is true for all cases on record, from encounters with the Gentry in the British Isles to conversations with airship engineers during the 1897 Midwest flap and discussions with the alleged Martians in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere. This absurd behavior has had the effect of keeping professional scientists away from the area where that activity was taking place. It has also served to give the saucer myth its religious and mystical overtones. Fact 5. The mechanism of the apparitions, in legendary, historical, and modern times, is standard and follows the model of religious miracles. Several cases, which bear the official stamp of the Catholic Church (such as those in Fatima and Guadalupe), are in fact – if one applies the deffinitions strictly – nothing more than UFO phenomena where the entity has delivered a message having to do with religious beliefs rather than with space or engineering.

You must avoid the common mistake of making judgments based on your initial impressions of people. Such impressions can sometimes tell you something, but more often they are misleading. There are several reasons for this. In your initial encounter you tend to be nervous, less open, and more inward. You are not really paying attention. Furthermore, people have trained themselves to appear a certain way; they have a persona they use in public that acts like a second skin to protect them. Unless you are incredibly perceptive, you will tend to mistake the mask for the reality.

The word coping is often a misleading judgement, used inappropriately in relation to grief. Observers who make comments about a grieving person along the lines of ‘He/she seems to be coping really well’, or ‘He/she isn’t coping very well’ tend to base their ability to judge your wellbeing on how they feel about what you are doing. For example, if you are very obviously distressed and crying, you are likely to be described ay ‘not coping very well’. If you don’t express your grief overtly or don’t show more grief than the observer is comfortable with, they are likely to describe you as ‘coping very well’. It is also possible to show too little grief for their comfort level. If you don’t cry or appear filled with sorrow or pain, they don’t have a role and may consequently describe you as cold. The title of this book — Coping with Grief — is an attempt to redefine what coping really means. When any of us are newly bereaved, we are ‘coping’ if we can keep breathing, put one foot after the other, get out of bed, dress ourselves, and attend to essential tasks even if on automatic pilot.

26:46. These are the laws and the judgments and the instructions. The present age plainly appears to value the ethical more than the ritual in religion. Some even feel the need to justify ritual by attempting to connect each ritual act to some ethical value: "We keep kosher to remind us to care about animals; we wear fringes to remind us to be kind...." This is misleading. Certainly ritual acts can have consequences in the ethical realm, but that is not their reason for being. If we are to understand Leviticus, we must have an appreciation for what ritual meant in its society intrinsically.

The term "Abrahamic" did not appear in its original sense—"relating to, or characteristic of the biblical patriarch, Abraham"—until 1699. "Abrahamic" in this book means principally "belonging to the group of religions comprising Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which trace their origin to Abraham," a twentieth-century usage. This definition updates the commonplace observation that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the "Abrahamic religions"—are somehow closely related. Not everyone likes this expression or its categorical implications. Some scholars object that the term "Abrahamic" can mislead, especially insofar as it may exaggerate the three religions' similarities and the likelihood that Jews, Christians, and Muslims can set their differences aside. Others regard the categorization itself as incoherent, given adherents' fundamental divisions over matters such as what scriptures they consider canonical and how they understand God's nature.

The term "Abrahamic" did not appear in its original sense—"relating to, or characteristic of the biblical patriarch, Abraham"—until 1699. "Abrahamic" in this book means principally "belonging to the group of religions comprising Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which trace their origin to Abraham," a twentieth-century usage. This definition updates the commonplace observation that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the "Abrahamic religions"—are somehow closely related. Not everyone likes this expression or its categorical implications. Some scholars object that the term "Abrahamic" can mislead, especially insofar as it may exaggerate the three religions' similarities and the likelihood that Jews, Christians, and Muslims can set their differences aside. Others regard the categorization itself as incoherent, given adherents' fundamental divisions over matters such as what scriptures they consider canonical and how they understand God's nature.

Words such as receptive, feminine, yielding or mother can be misleading as we tend to understand them as poles with opposites. However, they hint at what lies beyond them, so we need to consider them in a different way if we are to grasp what the 2nd Siddhi really means. This is something that can only be grasped intuitively. Thus when the One externalises itself as a manifestation in form, it has not created a duality, but a trinity. Every duality is really a relationship, and every relationship is really a three — there is a man, a woman and instantly there is also a couple — the relationship itself. In Divine mathematics, the number two is always an illusion — it cannot logically exist. If you can say anything at all about the number two you might say it is a bridge — a dynamic process that is instantaneously transmuted before it is even born. These are concepts that cannot be approached with ordinary logic. Just like the quantum particles in physics that avoid our definition because they appear to be linked to our very perceptual apparatus, oneness cannot be comprehended, only lived. Enlightenment is not an experience. This is a sentence to meditate upon like a Zen koan. If you see oneness as an experience to be attained or that may one day happen to you, then you are caught within that straight line between two points. The third thing is transcendence. It does not occur to you — rather it negates you. Ironically, transcendence does not take you away from life, as its name might suggest — it places you right in the heart of life, where you have always been. It unifies all opposites, ends all riddles, leaves all mysteries just as they are and brings a sense of trust that cannot be described. One cannot even really use a word like trust to describe the Siddhi of Unity because trust suggests duality again — that there is somehow a truster and a trustee. This is the wonderful dilemma of the siddhic state.

The subject of 'perennial philosophy' is currently one of the many misleading themes employed in vulgar mysticism. Emanating from enthusiasts of traditional religion, this topic has been appropriated by new age communities and figureheads, to the extent that even Huxley can appear profound by comparison. The Latin phrase is often associated with Leibniz, who may be credited with a more genuine attitude, though it is clear that he did not resolve the issue involved. The term philosophy is currently so confused in application that it can mean anything saleable or novelistic.

The prosecutor’s by obligation is a special mind,” he had written, “mongoose quick, bullying, devious, unrelenting, forever baited to ensnare. It is almost duty bound to mislead, and by instinct dotes on confusing and flourishes on weakness. Its search is for blemishes it can present as scars, its obligation to raise doubts or sour with suspicion. It asks questions not to learn but to convict, and can read guilt into the most innocent of answers. Its hope, its aim, its triumph is to addle a witness into confession by tricking, exhausting, or irritating him into a verbal indiscretion which sounds like a damaging admission. To natural lapses of memory it gives the appearance either of stratagems for hiding misdeeds or, worse still, of lies, dark and deliberate. Feigned and wheedling politeness, sarcasm that scalds, intimidation, surprise, and besmirchment by innuendo, association, or suggestion, at the same time that any intention to besmirch is denied—all these as methods and devices are such staples in the prosecutor’s repertory that his mind turns to them by rote.

Like the psychological model outlined above, the psychiatric understanding of ’organised paedophilia’ is a framework that is focused primarily on individual psychological factors and overlooks the role of violence in criminal groups and the contexts in which such groups emerge. The underlying assumption of literature on ‘organised paedophilia’ is that members of sexually abusive groups are motivated by a pathological sexual interest in children but this does not accord with evidence that suggests that abusive groups can simultaneously abuse children and women. It is increasingly recognised that sexual offenders may not specialise in one particular victim category, and a significant proportion of child sexual abusers have also offended against adults (Cann et al. 2007, Heil et al. 2003). Furthermore, many of the behaviours of abusive groups appear to be designed to elicit fear and pain from the victim rather than to generate sexual pleasure for the perpetrator per se., are not mutually exclusive, but there is a sadistic dimension to organised abuse that is not explicable as ‘paedophilic’. A survivor of organised abuse from Belgium, Regina Louf, made this point clearly when she said: I find the expression ‘paedophile network’ misleading. For me paedophiles are those men who go to playgrounds or swimming pools, priests…I certainly don't want to exonerate them, but I would rather have paedophiles than the types we were involved with. There were men who never touched the children. Whether you were five, ten, or fifteen didn’t matter. What mattered to them was sex, power, experience. To do things they would never have tried with their own wives. Among them were some real sadists. (Louf quoted in Bulte and de Conick 1998) A credible theoretical account of organised abuse must necessarily (a) account for the available empirical evidence of organised abuse, (b) address the complex patterns of abuse and violence evident in sexually abusive groups, and (c) explain the ways in which sexually abusive groups form in a range of contexts, including families and institutions.

There are several well-known studies that fell into this trap and yielded misleading results, sometimes with life-and-death consequences. One was a survey that asked thousands of women questions about their health and whether they were taking hormone replacement therapy at menopause. The researchers found that the women who used hormone replacement therapy had fewer heart attacks than those who did not, after statistically controlling for a host of potential confounding variables. Many physicians relied on this study to recommend hormone therapy for their patients. But a later clinical trial, in which women were randomly assigned to receive hormone therapy or not, yielded the exact opposite results: hormone therapy increased the risk of heart attacks. It now appears that women in the first study who chose to undergo hormone replacement therapy were healthier at the outset in ways that the researchers did not measure, which led to the misleading results. Only by randomly assigning people to conditions can researchers be confident that they have controlled for all possible confounding variables and have identified a true causal effect.

Romance is the deepest thing in life; romance is deeper even than reality. For even if reality could be proved to be misleading, it still could not be proved to be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the facts are false, they are still very strange. And this strangeness of life, this unexpected and even perverse element of things as they fall out, remains incurably interesting. ... People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may 102 sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, “to be continued in our next.” If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right. But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right.