[Charles Rykken]

I am not at all sure how much the difference between men and women is nature over nurture but my bet is on nature being more important than nurture. I was thirteen before I felt like politics made any sense at all. It takes an epiphany of gestaltic awakening for me to be able to see how to absorb an alien thought process. Prior to that all my social awareness was centered on understanding particular individuals. There were a very few abstractions that I embraced prior to age thirteen. one of them was that men and women were different. I also realized at age nine that the use of violence to resolve conflict (might makes right) was a major theme in human history. I knew that WMDs like the hydrogen bomb changed the calculus of huma relations in a fundament way. That is why I took a vow of non-violence a year later at age ten. I was influenced by my reading of Jung. One of his statement (paraphrased) that when he began therapy with a patient he made a serious effort to focus solely on the particulars of a patient’s idiosyncratic case. before he attempted to theorize what was going on.