The following excerpt is from a Montreal Review book review the 2011 book "The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty" by Simon Baron-Cohen . As you read it substitute Congressional impeachment process for the criminal justice system.
For the criminal justice system to work, it is vital to hold onto the notion of people being responsible for their actions. We ask the defendant to plead guilty or not guilty. I am not trying to upturn this principle of the legal system as I think it provides a valuable method for society to decide how to deal with someone who has broken a law. But, if someone who is Zero Negative is violent or abusive because of how the empathy circuit in their brain currently functions, or because of the empathy circuit in their brain did not develop in the usual way, then perhaps we should see such behaviour not as a product of individual choice or responsibility, but as a product of the person's neurology.
In another review of the book, this from the NY Times, From Hitler to Mother Teresa: 6 Degrees of Empathy you could change the title to “From Hitler to Trump to Mother Teresa: 6 Degrees of Empathy.”
Excerpts:
I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist or neurobiologist, but to a lay reader there seem to be limitations in describing pathological behavior in terms of zero degrees of empathy. He cites the example of a Nazi guard who forced a boy to put a noose around his friend’s neck as “cruelty for its own sake.” But rather than zero degrees of empathy, it seems instead that the guard possessed six degrees of anti-empathy: The guard acted in the cruelest way he could think of, fully understanding how devastating the act would be to both boys.
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In his final chapter, “Reflections on Human Cruelty,” Dr. Baron-Cohen addresses perhaps the most central question: If zero degrees of empathy is a “form of neurological disability, to what extent can such an individual who commits a crime be held responsible for what they have done?”
Does this hypothesis mean that there is no such thing as individual responsibility, free will? Possibly. But sensibly, Dr. Baron-Cohen finds that prison is necessary for the most serious crimes, for three reasons: to protect society, to signal disapproval and to restore some sense of justice to the victim or the victim’s family. (He does not believe in capital punishment.) For lesser crimes, though, imprisonment may not be the answer.
Obviously Trump, while he is a criminal, is not facing a jury of ordinary citizens who could find him guilty and send him to prison. He is facing impeachment by the House and unless there is a sea change in public opinion being given a Get Out of Jail Free card by the Senate.
When I read the following I was surprised to find a reference to Philip Zimbardo who contributed to the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” Here’s the review which of the book by Rosemary Sword and Zimbardo in Psychology Today (it also happens to mention me).
Zimbardo is interviewed in the Sept. 12th Chauncey DeVega in the article Creator of Stanford Prison Experiment on Trump's camps: It's how Nazi guards behaved --Philip Zimbardo, whose work explored the psychology of cruelty: America under Trump is a "nightmare situation” in which ordinary people exhibited cruel behavior, he acknowledges that in most of us empathy may be suspended temporarily, under certain circumstances.
At the core of this deceptively simple book is the question of the nature of cruelty. In the last and most philosophical chapter Dr. Baron-Cohen discusses situations in which an individual who is not otherwise lacking in empathy may behave cruelly. Citing the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s term “the banality of evil,” and discussing the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo.
This is a frightening thought, but one borne out not only by research but by history. Dr. Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis that cruelty is merely the zero end of a continuum on which we all fall makes that possibility more comprehensible.
Here’s how Zimbardo answers DeVega’s question “how do we connect Trump's personality and behavior with the brutality against nonwhite migrants, refugees and immigrants in his concentration camps? “
Donald Trump’s behavior is giving permission for the brutality in his prisons and detention centers. The border patrol and ICE agents are doing whatever they think is necessary to maintain Trump’s version of law and order, which really means oppression. You can very easily see — in the extreme of what we are seeing now in Trump’s camps — exactly how guards in the Nazi concentration camps behaved. Those Nazi guards believed whatever Hitler and Goering said about the Jews potentially as poison and invaders in the “Fatherland." Now, instead of Jews, for Trump and his supporters it is people from Latin and South America.
I would add the reminder that Trump’s behavior is a direct manifestation of his lack of empathy and cruelty.
Trump is not Hitler, however there is a continuum from Hitler through Trump through normal people to those like Mother Theresa. The psychologist Herbert C. Kelman wrote “the inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion.”
Trump isn’t setting up a killing machine per se, but people are being murdered because of him. Witness those he is deporting who will die without the medical treatment they are receiving here. He doesn’t have concentration camps with gas chambers, instead he has detention camps where men, women, and children are being crammed into cages for nothing more than committing the misdemeanor of crossing the border. Indeed, some have died.
There will be no Nuremberg trial for Donald Trump, nor should there be. What justice demands for his crimes is impeachment and removal from office by the Senate.
“Confession: I Diagnose Narcissists From Afar Every Day” is Daily Kos story posted yesterday which you probably missed. It is by Harper West, a contributor to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”