Presidential psychopathy

From a reader:

Interesting video of James Fallon speaking about how most beloved American Presidents score highest on the psychopathy checklist. 

Other interesting points he makes it that Hitler's not a sociopath, neither are any of the other Nazi leaders. Neither are mafiosos typically sociopathic. That's why Hannah Arend calls it the banality of evil, not the evil of psychopaths. 

Quote: Victims

“once I gave up the hunt for villains, I had little recourse but to take responsibility for my choices ...Needless to say, this is far less satisfying that nailing villains. It also turned out to be more healing in the end.”

― Barbara Brown Taylor

12 Years a Slave

I watched 12 Years a Slave recently and liked it, particularly for its portrayal of different types of people in different types of situations. You don't think (spoiler alert) that you'll be tricked by people pretending to be your friends, kidnapped, shipped thousands of miles away, and sold to someone who is "eccentric," possibly insane, but with the legal upperhand. But this ends up happening to someone and you see how he deals with these situations, as well as the reactions of countless others in related positions. People like to think that they would do the "right" thing in most situations, whether the morally right thing or the smartest choice in terms of survival and self-promotion. A dominant message of the film, at least for me, is to question this belief.

Instead, it seems that the popular reaction of viewers to the film is one of outrage or at least deep discomfort that almost seems to eclipse any other message. This is the theme (and criticism?) of this NY York Times review:

What had bothered me the first time is that the movie is basically an anthology of beatings and whippings, each one more severe than the last, culminating in a moment of deep horror when the hero-victim — Solomon Northup, a free black man shanghaied into slavery — takes the whip himself and administers skin-flaying lashes to a young girl (Patsey) whose only crime is wanting a bar of soap. It’s like the special-effects films that come out every other day where there is an escalation of mayhem: bodies and buildings blown up in ever more ingenious ways leading to a last scene in which everything in sight is blasted to kingdom come. In “12 Years a Slave,” the escalation is not technical — brutal realism, not video-game pyrotechnics, is the mode — but a ratcheting up of the level of pain for both the characters and the audience.

I felt no ratcheting up of pain. But sociopaths have a much different reaction to theodicy, or the problem of evil seen from a theological or existential point of view. In other words, we not only have different responses to the question "how could bad things happen?", we rarely ask the question, at least framed in that way. The truth is that bad things are happening this very moment, equally as brutal and hopeless as anything that happened in the film. I know that and accept it as reality. I think other people know that, but don't like to think about it. Instead they spend their moral outrage on things like people's choice of Halloween costumes or people's out-of-the-box solutions to climate change.  Some have suggested that not being aware of worldwide suffering is due to the downside to empathy, that we feel more strongly for victims that come wrapped in a package of pretty sick white girls whose photos are splashed on the covers of newspapers than babies dying of malnutrition out of sight.

The most interesting part of the film was seeing the different reactions people have to their situations. There is the mother who is so happy to see her lost son, that she lets her guard down and becomes kidnapped herself. There is the man who talks about uprising and is quickly dispatched when he makes the slightest move to protect a fellow prisoner. There is the very educated man who courageously talks almost Black Panther style until when he is freed by his master he clings to the sure slavemaster in blessed relief that he won't be sold to some unknown danger. There are also many characters whose actions and reactions may seem so foreign that it is tempting to write them off as being unfathomable -- those of a sociopath. Sarah Paulson discusses her "evil" character's motivations:

I think the only way to do it, for me, was to try and figure out the "why" of her behavior. The idea of playing someone who is just evil to be evil seemed really boring to me and not realistic. Because nobody does anything for no reason. It may not be one I agree with or one that makes sense to me, but there will be reason. What I really came up with was that she's a product of her time. She was probably raised by ignorant and racist people, and I don't think she's of a complicated enough nature -- or self-aware enough nature -- to challenge what she's been taught. I think she just decided what she was taught is the right and true way, which many people in this country, and this world, sort of live by. Then, you add into that the reality that she's deeply, deeply, deeply jealous, because her husband is in love with another woman right under her nose, in her own home. It's humiliating. So when you're dealing with a person who's not very self-aware, who was raised by racists, who is not a deep woman, and who deals with surface feelings and emotions and appearances, then you might behave the way she behaves. That's how I could get into it.

Interestingly, despite people's strong reactions to the film, I haven't really seen this perspective a lot -- "I could have done these things in a similar situation". But that is the awful reality. There is no way that in all of history, horrible things were always done by sociopaths or the deranged. Normal people did these things. Normal people who lacked a bit of self-awareness and didn't bother to question the dominant moral teachings of their time.

Another reaction that I have not seen is people -- nobody seems to have been moved to go out and dedicate time, money, or effort to prevent the various forms of modern slavery that are popping up in their own backyards. Instead, one of the more common reactions has been to criticize the previous Hollywood portrayals of slavery as being impossibly rosy: "the paternalistic gentry with their pretty plantations, their genteel manners and all the fiddle-dee-dee rest." It's an odd criticism to make when so much of most peoples' daily lives are spent in deep denial of the horrors around them.

Or as a reader recently wrote to me:

People often think sociopaths are creepy for compartmentalizing and being able to hurt other people.

But  how great is empathy, if it allows normal people to go along with slavery? How can they take the moral high ground?

Sure, I'd be the sort to be a bounty hunter and track down slaves, happy to bring them back to the plantation and get paid. Or I'd be happy to punish a bad slave.

But what happened to normal people, that they went along with slavery? Maybe they aren't that different from sociopaths after all. Maybe they beat up on sociopaths because we remind them of their character traits that they hate the most.

Proper responses to evil

There's an interesting tendency for people to think that evil is something external to them -- other people, other countries, other cultures. When people think they've identified the source of the evil, they tend to be quick to attack, without much thought for either due diligence or due process. For instance, arguably a dominant reason for initial popular support for the Iraq War was latent hostility against Middle Eastern Muslim nations from the 9/11 terrorist attacks (I think perhaps most humorously evidenced by a series of SNL episodes very positively portraying George W. Bush as an avenging cowboy and Dick Cheney bragging about defiling Afghani women -- all to audience cheers). Similarly, does it now seem odd to us that people got so upset over a Muslim community center blocks away from Ground Zero in crowded lower Manhattan? If the presence of evil calls for some sort of response, what should the nature of that response be? Punishment? Rehabilitation? Education? And is that something that should be imposed largely externally, or does the very banality of evil suggest that the best way to fight evil is to start in our own minds. In an interesting contrast for the calls for blood against the alleged Nazi war criminal found in Minnesota, this New York Review of Books article "‘Jews Aren’t Allowed to Use Phones’: Berlin’s Most Unsettling Memorial"describes the Places of Remembrance memorial:

Twenty years ago this month, Berlin-based artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock inaugurated their hugely controversial “Places of Remembrance” memorial for a former Jewish district of West Berlin known as the Bavarian Quarter. At the time, Germany had just been reunified, and it was one of the first major efforts to give permanent recognition to the ways the Holocaust reached into daily life in the German capital. The 1991 competition called for a central memorial on the square, but Stih and Schnock instead proposed attaching eighty signs hung on lamp posts throughout the Bavarian Quarter, each one spelling out one of the hundreds of Nazi laws and rules that gradually dehumanized Berlin’s Jewish population.
***"We took anti-Jewish laws and regulations. On one side we had text, which we took from the regulations but made it snappy and shorter, so people driving or biking by could read them fast. And on the other side we put a picture that illustrated it. [One shows a chalice and on the other side of the sign says, “The baptism of Jews and their conversion to Christianity is unimportant in the question of race.” Another shows a radio and the other side says, “Jews must give up their radios.”]"
***
"Over there you see a sign with a telephone—right next to the post office—and the sign says Jews aren’t allowed to use telephones. Everything was meant to exclude Jews from daily life, from social structures, and to threaten them."

Rather than focus on names, either of victims or perpetrators, they chose to focus on "social and legal structures: how could this ever have happened?" How might it have happened? Step by step. First target a group and blame them for evil actions. They have now become the source of evil. Next depersonalize them. At this point, the masses will accept that not only should these people be punished for their alleged evil actions, but that they are inherently evil and don't deserve to be treated with basic human dignity. If there are laws in place to maintain equal rights and due process, make it clear that those laws do not apply to evil people -- they're a special case which demands special treatment (laws are only made to protect the best of us, after all). The rest is just maintaining the illusion by making sure people never question the original premise of evil. For instance, one of my favorite regulations was against Jewish ownership of pets, and for a very practical reason:

The reason for that is that first the animals had to go and then the owners could be removed. Because if animals would stay in an apartment, they wouldn’t get food, they’d make noise, this would cause a commotion. Maybe the Aryan neighbors wouldn’t care about the Jewish neighbor being deported but they would truly care about a little cat meowing.

But do we really need constant reminders of our own collective and individual capacities for evil? Haven't we moved past all of that?

When we were installing it, suddenly someone opened a window and yelled out: Haut ab, Judenschweine!—“Go away, Jewish pigs!” Our two workers installing the signs with us, they were completely shocked. They had thought the project wasn’t important until then and had been saying, “Come on, everyone knows this, why are you bothering?” They were speechless.

We do need reminders. And in a way that's why I think it's one of the worst times to be a sociopath -- because people have forgotten their own capacity for evil. Perhaps now more than ever people have isolated themselves from ugly aspects of the world. They eat meat raised and slaughtered out of sight, their countries fight wars in countries that they cannot point out on a map, and their sense of morality has never been tested (unless by Milgram or at Stanford), so it's very easy and convenient for them to convince themselves that evil exists outside, not in. In contrast to most people's high estimations of themselves, the straight-talking sociopath must seem like an abomination. And how should one react to an abomination? Track them down and make them suffer? Extradite that 94 year-old man and make him finally pay for his crimes? Because he's the reason that bad things happened, right? People want to believe that the only problem with evil they have is in identifying it and eradicating it in others.

Or course nobody likes to confront their own capacity for evil, and so that's why the artists for the Places of Remembrance (manipulatively) downplayed their proposed plan:

During the process they asked the artists to present their work at a public forum. We showed little drawings, not the real size, which is fifty by seventy centimeters. The drawings were like fine watercolors. They gave the pictures a softness. This was very good because everybody focused on the art. Here, in real life, it looks like brash pop art, but at the presentation it was different. It was of course a trick. You have to be very careful when you present because otherwise you’ll scare people. 

It was sneaky enough to work at the time, but people seem even less willing to confront these issues:

I have to say that in 1993 the society was open—kind of not secured. It was right after the Wall had opened. I don’t think we could do it today.