A widespread view of campaigners who make false, grossly degrading comments about the opposition is that they're just plain sleazy. They're liars, and they're shameless. They don't care about democracy or any other ideals. They just care about getting power or spewing hatred or beating up on people. Some of them are insane zealots; they believe that any means is justified, because their cause is supreme--their oracle told them so. Many of them are racists, and some of them are corrupt and even criminal.
To many progressives, these characterizations just seems true, the truth about this kind of campaigner. We tend to take these characterizations for granted as valid. But what if these descriptions actually are only deeply engrained prejudices rather than accurate. What if calling a person racist is, in form and logic, no different than calling a person "nigger?"
In my work with and writing about the limit case of sleaze, a sociopath," that's just what I've shown. And I'm not alone. There are many other professionals, including award winning psychiatrists, who say much the same thing about people diagnosed Antisocial Personality Disorder. The world is stuck in a one-sided caricature of people who commit harms.
In truth, all but the small percentage of extremely brain damaged criminals do care and feel remorse--even soul murdering intensities of guilt--no less than any other person. The key difference between the average person and a sociopath really has only to do with how repressed is their caring and remorse, not how caring and remorseful they truly are. That's what many of us who study these people are reporting. But this realization is not based on some arcane theory. Thousands of empathic prison guards, corrections social workers, parole agents, and treatment professionals already know up close and personal that sociopath's don't fit the standard view of them.
My point in bringing up this limit case of a sleazy kind of person is that, if even sociopaths don't fit the stereotype, then nobody does. Take for example an ex-GOP operative, Allen Raymond. He thought little of jamming the phone lines on behalf of Steve Forbes so that the opposition couldn't get out the vote. He's a sleaze ball, right? Actually, he's a mixed bag. He felt okay about jamming the phone lines, but when he was asked to lie about it, his conscience kicked in. He explained that he had been trying to teach his kids to be honest and that he just couldn't bring himself to set a bad example for them. So he bit the bullet and was convicted and sent to jail.
Okay, so he's not a classic, pure case. He doesn't fully fit the stereotype. As I'll argue, nobody does. Consider a criminal I know who beat up people on the street "for fun." He liked seeing them suffer. He seems obviously to be a pure case of a sociopath. Not really. For one thing, before he began to recover from a life of crime, he started having flashbacks to a time when he completely pulverized a stranger. The victim's bloody face kept haunting him; he was filled with horrific, ghoulish remorse.
When I told this story to a basically empathic man who helped many parolees, he said, "That guy is just, well, evil; he's beyond anything I've ever seen." I argued, "But he was brutalized." This experienced man argued back, "I don't believe he could've been that tortured." Readers may have the same reaction.
I related the sociopath's story. From age 7 through 15, his older brother would periodically hogtie him(tie his arms to his ankles behind his back), pick him up like a package, and throw him head first against a wall. So it makes sense to say that, when he grew up and started beating up strangers, he was not inherently evil. He was doing what was done to him. Or, put in more precise empathic terms, he was "acting out" rage at his brother. He blew up at anyone who had the slightest resemblence to his brother. His apparent enjoyment--"I did it just for fun"--is deceiving; actually, his laughter and sneers were maniacal, tortured, not "fun" in the ordiinary sense of that word. He was an out of control person, not evil. He didn't choose to be bad. He was in the grip of torment that he knew nothing about and, therefore, could not possibly have control over. Yet if you take only a superficial look, he seems like a purely evil, anti-social person.
As soon as I finished this story, the normally empathic man who had just argued that this guy was evil, well, his jaw dropped and he let out a groan. His sincere, vital belief that some people are basically evil was sorely challenged. How he made sense of the world was undermined. It was as though he had been punched in the stomach.
I know that it's even more difficiult to imagine that a well-heeled, educated person like Karl Rove, the King of Sleaze, can be empathically understood. For one thing, the degree of damage he's done is beyond anything we can imagine, just as the damage done by other bald-faced liars and mongers of sleaze, Bush, Cheney, et al was immense. We're all like the guy who helped parolees and couldn't accept the criminal's humanity, much less the belief that gross abuse accounted for his destructiveness. What possibly in these leaders' backgrounds could account for the destruction they've done?
We know something of Bush's background. In Bush On the Couch, a psychiatrist helps us begin to glimpse how Bush is more like the violent bully described above than different than him. To begin with, his grandfather, Prescott, unmercifully beat Bush's father. The effects of that devastating abuse were never addressed and so remained in force during his son's, our current president's, childhood.
When Bush was a toddler, the most beloved person in his life was his older sister. She contracted a terminal illness, but his parents didn't tell him. When she died in a distant city, Barbara and her husband spent the rest of the day playing golf. They didn't tell their six year old son for a while. So when they did tell him, he was traumatized by the coldness, the inhumanity with which his parents handled this event.
This gross inhumanity had to help make Bush into a deeply troubled person who could only act out his pain and suffering on others. You can reasonably extrapolate from this incident to a climate of emotional abandonment throughout his formative years. His well-documented alcoholism, lying and manipulativeness are widely recognized signs of gross abuse in the lives of more ordinary, less damaging alcoholics. The enormity of the damage done by world leaders blinds us to their underlying humanity. Add during his adult years the unholy pressure on him in his family of origin and in their wing of the Republican party. Imagine a deeply troubled, confused man being pressured on threat of total humiliation and rejection to do the things that Bush has done in office.
Why create empathic pictures of people we can't stand? The point is that we're locked in a war of alienating, inflaming words with some radical folks who are amazingly destructive. It seems that the degrading ways we characterize them must at the very least only add to their destructiveness. On a much less intense note, think about how the degradation heaped on the ordinary conservatives by the Left during the 1960s helps account for the fury and depth of commitment with which the Right has attacked and tried to marginalize the Left. The point is that if we really want to solve the horrendous conflict in America, we have to understand these people accurately. We have to step fully in their shoes. We should not accept superficial caricatures.
Thankfully, Obama's all about bringing people together to solve our problems. And he believes in the power of profound empathy. So far, his most profoundly empathic statement came in his speech on race in Philadelphia. He allowed that blue collar folks who have been marginalized and put down during the rise of race consciousness are understandable. Their hatreds(their prejudicial views) are only human reactions to difficult circumstances. Obama can go much further down this empathic road as he assumes the Presidency and tries to create broader coalitions.
He can help us to reach for deeper, more profound understanding and constructive dealings with the people who threaten to undermine us. His current temptation is to pursue legal action, which may be the only means to get the dirty tricksters to face what they are doing long enough to become aware of their buried caring and remorse, as the Republican operative, the phone jammer, did. But Obama's world-wide pulpit can increase the power of empathy for change to an unimaginable extent.
He can say things like, "For understandable reasons, some campaginers have made desperate choices. Their desperation is understandable. I feel it too. There's just so much pressure we all feel to take responsibility for the terrible, threatening problems that confront us. We each think that we know the right way, and we're afraid that, if we don't go the right way, all hell will break loose. We believe so strongly in our methods and are under such intense pressure to save America from ruin that we do desperate things, things we later regret. The least we can do is to try to understand this predicament that all of us are in rather than put each other down for doing desperate things."
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October 26, 2008, 3:15PM
A widespread view of campaigners who make false, grossly degrading comments about the opposition is that they're just plain sleazy. They're liars, and they're shameless. They don't care about democracy or any other ideas. They just care about getting power or spewing hatred or beating up on people. Some of them are insane zealots; they believe that any means is justified, because their cause is supreme--their oracle told them so. Many of them are racists, and some of them are corrupt and even criminal.
To progressives, these characterizations just seems true, the truth about this kind of campaigner. We tend to take these characterizations for granted as valid. But what if these descriptions actually are only deeply engrained prejudices rather than accurate. What if calling a person racist is, in form and logic, no different than calling a person "nigger?"
In my work with and writing about the limit case of sleaze, a sociopath," that's just what I've shown. And I'm not alone. Their are many other professionals, including award winning psychiatrists, who say much the same thing about people diagnosed Antisocial Personality Disorder.
In truth, a sociopath does care, feels remorse--even soul murdering intensities of remorse--no less than any other person. The difference between the average person and a sociopath really has only to do with how repressed is their caring and remorse, not how caring and remorseful they truly are. That's what many of us are disclosing about these kinds of people. And thousands of empathic prison guards, corrections social workers, parole agents, and treatment professionals already know up close and personal. Within ten years, I believe, this cutting edge view of sociopaths will be widely accepted.
My point in bringing up this limit case of a sleazy kind of person is that, if even sociopaths don't fit the stereotype, then nobody does.