Resconstructing ourselves

A reader gives an update on the child with reactive attachment disorder (RAD) who was featured in the documentary, Child of Rage, discussed previously on this blog here. I always avoid using her name, but you can read the details on the link (and it's always a little shocking to me that they used her name in the "documentary" featuring her, a minor, in what seems a pretty exploitative way, showing her actual therapy tapes? How did her parents allow this?).

There is a happy ending! She recovers from the reactive attachment disorder in a big way and becomes a happy and contributing member of society. The link for the update on her life is here. The quick summary is she is a nurse, she seems to still have a good relationship with her family, and she seems like just a normal person living a normal life.

As I was looking for the documentary I stumbled upon some other child mental disorder documentaries that seemed just a little less exploitative, and then finally a clip of a "news" show interviewing a young, attractive teacher that got busted for sexual relations with a 14 year old student. She was saying that it was a mistake and she had done it because of a troubled past, including mental illness, but scrolling through the comments -- every single person continued to vilify her. Out of the millions of views, not a single one would accept her apology, either as being sincere or as her being capable of change or worthy of forgiveness.

I know that the urge to ostracize and shame others runs deep in humanity's evolutionary past, but (and I've said this literally dozens of times before, including the penultimate post) society's willingness to let self-righteous feelings to dominate their rational capacity and/or empathy to continue to persecute people for something that they did or said in the past... I just struggle to understand why it's still such a problem, and one that is rarely discussed as such. As much as you hear about anti-bullying campaigns, there seems to be an unspoken understanding amongst most people that bullying is absolutely ok if the person you're bullying is a bad person. I hear even intelligent people whom I respect defend the shaming and the shameless poor treatment of their fellow humans for real or imagined wrongs. What society does with its social undesirables is basically one step away from tattooing them with their convict number and hounding and persecuting them through the rest of their lives.


But I sometimes think, what if we talked about more examples of recovery and more stories of people being dynamic and capable of change, maybe we could educate the evolutionary impulse a little so it's not so prone to mob mentality and see our fellow humans a little more accurately -- people that weren't really the same person decades ago and won't really be the same decades from now. Like NPR's Invisibilia piece on the myth of the static personality featuring the story of Dan, a rapist turned good guy: "I'm forever going to be a criminal," he says, "which I'm not. I've become a completely different human being at this point." "I have to atone for my crime. But I realize now I'm just paying for someone else's debt. The person who committed the crime no longer exists." How can we adjust the way we deal with people who we don't want to associate with (for whatever reason) so there can still be an appropriate level of accountability or precautionary measures while also more accurately reflecting the dynamic nature of who humans are?

"Maybe we're not thinking right about who we are and what we could be," says Walter Mischel [author of the famed marshmallow study]. "People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations," Milgram says. "To reframe them. To reconstruct them. To even reconstruct themselves."

(The Invisibilia piece oddly excepts sociopaths from this ability to change, assuming the myth of sociopathy to be incurable without questioning it as most do. But baby steps.)

Empath hypocrisy?

This was an interesting recent comment on an old post:

as an almost permanent tourist in western society, i notice that this particular civilisation is clearly built by and for ppl referred to as sociopaths. Most of the DSM defined traits are essential in the practice of business, law etc as defined by the western cultural model.

Clearly the western media/propaganda machine is either responding to or encouraging widespread worship and admiration of ppl who can kill, fight and act without the accepted social and moral restraints.

in fact, the main difference that i can see between western 'empaths' and 'sociopaths' is that the latter are not inclined to the (mostly) hypocritical displays of 'caring' that the former use as evidence of their so-called humanity.

i know empaths who will readily cry when watching poverty porn, and will discuss starving children with other similarly emotive empaths....but have absolutely no problem chowing down on, say, chocolate produced on plantations that exploit slave children. The majority of westerners buy and wear clothing made by enslaved children in sweatshops, because the pleasure of a killer discount and convenience outweighs any bad feelings over tortured children.

i hear that sociopaths use compartmentalisation to deal with contradiction, but it seems that empaths use cognitive dissonance...and i think the latter may actually be more effective.

So-called empaths can cry about little kittens and cute doggies being hurt, and can weep as heart-rendingly for a fictional, cartoon being as they would for one in real life. Perhaps more so, because they are often without any discernible discomfort when consuming, say, meat that has been produced by basically torturing hundreds and thousands of animals as a matter of course. The inhumane conditions of factory farmed animals well documented, but the western business model is concerned purely with monetary profit and loss.

in fact, the most extreme empaths, called 'sensitives', would rather be shielded from the truth of their hypocrisy, rather than endure the material inconveniences involved in facing most moral dilemmas in this culture.

Being seen as 'nice' and seeing themselves as 'nice' seems to be more important to them than taking actions that actualise this 'niceness' they seem to feel is part of their nature.

i notice the glaring hypocrisy most when i think about the holocaust the nazis created and the western democracies' historical responses.
Americans, for instance, complained about the cruelty of the nazis, the heartless torture and genocide endured by jewish ppl (those who were gypsies, disabled, african and so forth incurred less sympathy for whatever reason). Yet in their own country AT THE SAME TIME they were still up to their elbows in the blood of the African descendants who had been forcibly brought over to that country hundreds of years earlier.
The torture, rape, bio-terror and abuse the status quo of american culture enacted against African and Native american ppl are well documented, and yet the cognitive dissonance employed to ignore this fact and cast euro-americans as the 'good guys' is amazingly still in place.
Western empaths say things like 'never forget', but only when it concerns those they have been programmed to care about.

Right through until the sixties (described as the swinging era of peace and love in this culture) black americans were being publicly lynched, and those events were captured in postcards that were sold door to door and still feature in the family albums of many white american families.
[this links to many of these images http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html]

in these postcards, you see men, women AND children looking at the bloodied, castrated corpses hanging from the trees....and their expressions register the kind of gay pleasure, excitement and convivial community spirit you might expect at a neighbourhood carnival or block party.

i recently read a news article that could have described this macabre atmosphere perfectly, but it was in fact talking about 'islamists', the new fabricated boogey man of the morally bankrupt west.

From the Metro, February 5th:
""crowds cheer burning death on big screen.
Jubilant crowds of IS supporters have been celebrating as big screens reportedly showed the jordanian pilot being burned to death." The article laments the "sick celebration in the face of international outrage" and marvelled at " a smiling boy aged about six talking excitedly about the killing."

Now, i mentiion this in this forum, because it at least purports to be full of ppl who dont get all emotionally defensive, illogical etc, and who dont have strong attachments to identity etc.

i am interested in a response.

Empath hypocrisy

I'm not saying all empaths are stupid and illogical, although some of them are. Similarly, there are some sociopaths that are stupid, horrible, evil, or whatever else. But let's focus on illogical empaths for a second. This is from a recent comment:

I'm an empath.
I believe that all humans are born with free will.
I believe that every human life is intrinsically valuable.
I believe that good and evil exist as absolutes, even if at times it is difficult to distinguish between them.
I believe that sociopaths are evil. 
If I could find an effective way to screen for you guys without too many false positives, then I would kill you as children. Of course, given that you are master manipulators I can already see you arguing your way out of a corner, convincing the other empaths that I am the evil one for suggesting the killing of children, suggesting that there is some error in my detection system. 
How many times do you have to burn your fingers before you realize that fire is hot? In love, you get back 100 times what you give. 
In war you fight to win.
I know I'm right. 

Now, I am not great at understanding sarcasm, so it's possible this was said with tongue firmly planted in cheek. But I have heard enough very similar statements from other people that I believe this person was being sincere. This person believes that every human life is intrinsically valuable but would kill sociopathic children? Really? Kill small children in a genocide? Just as long as the test wouldn't lead to "too many" innocent deaths due to "too many false positives"? Wow. Ok. An "empath" who seems not at all capable of understanding (must less empathizing with) someone sociopathic. Also, this person absolutely certain he is right. Good to know. 

What is evil?

People ask me a lot about evil, as if I'm some sort of expert. I tell them that I don't have any special insight into evil, or even a sense of its definition. But I'm curious too, and I like that people are asking the question. What is evil? So asks the co-hosts on this podcast from the "Kitchen Shrinks".  They're a little silly and a lot redundant, but it's an interesting topic. Highlights (largely paraphrased) include:

• Starts with a discussion of Zimbardo and Stanford prison experiment
• "You put anybody in the situation where they are to control others -- you give them the role of authoritarian -- and all of us might be influenced to act in an aggressive way towards those prisoners given the same circumstances."
• The first thing that anyone thinks when they hear about someone doing something terrible is -- that's not like me. They're a bad person, I'm a good person. There's something inherently wrong with them, about them particularly and their lack of a soul that makes them evil or different from me. The whole idea that the role is critical (not that there are just some people that are evil), was new -- that you could put a "good" person in the right circumstances and have them act in evil ways was groundbreaking.
• If I can say that it's those people and them, not by me. What is disquieting is if I was in the same situation, would I be compelled to do evil as well? It's not as simple as there are some bad people or evil people, it's that all of us can act evilly in the right circumstances.
• Milgram discussion starts around 11:30. "We could create murderers under the right circumstances." "Milgram was shocked and even quite troubled by the experiment."
• "If you want to essentially be someone who does not engage in troubling behaviors, watch your environment. Watch for the things that push or pull you to do certain things. Become more aware of what the situation is asking you to do." To do that, you have to humble yourself enough to admit that you are capable of doing something bad to someone else. "Admit that we're all capable of doing evil things."
• Discussion of how the "exit costs" are high for bucking social norms, even when the social norm is something "bad" like college pranks. One host discussed how the mob mentality can make someone lose track of who they are because "it would have been to expensive socially to say no."
• "Would you want to be held accountable for every behavior you ever did?"
• When someone else does something wrong its their disposition, when you did something wrong it's your situation.
• How to get someone to do something evil? (1) Authority figure (2) Dehumanize the victim by making them a "thing," perhaps by giving them a label like "witch" (Paul Deen?) (3) Diffuse responsibility, e.g. by trying to detach oneself from actions by just fulfilling a role or being anonymous.
• Zimbardo "Evil begins at 15 volts" when you first start, when you let the camel get its nose under the tent. The tendency to act in an evil way happens in little increments.
• "These human beings, we're going to call them terrorists, we're going to change the language. They're not people anymore, they're evil." "That's not a human being, that's a threat."

They also have a feature on sociopath vs. psychopath.

Fictional sociopaths: Iago

From Verdi's Otello:

I believe in a cruel God
who created me like himself
in anger of whom that I name.
From the cowardice of a seed
or of a vile atom I was born.
I am a son evil because I am a man;
and I feel the primitive mud in me.
Yes! This is my faith!
I believe with a firm heart,
so does the widow in the temple,
the evil I think
and proceeds from me,
fulfills my destiny.
I think the honest man
is a mockery,
in face and heart,
that everything is in him is a lie:
tears, kisses, looks,
sacrifices and honor.
And I think the man plays a game
of unjust fate
the seed of the cradle
the worm of the grave.
After all this foolishness comes death.
And then what? And then?
Death is Nothingness.
Heaven is an old wives' tale!

Not as good as you think you are

To be filed in our ever expanding good-people-aren't-as-good-as-they-think-they-are file, Adam Alter, author of the book "Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave" writes for the NY Times about how people's behavior often depends on context, "Where We Are Shapes Who We Are". First he explains research from the 1970s about whether people would go out of their way to post an already stamped and addressed envelope that they had found on the ground. Even though only 6 out of 10 students in crowded dorms posted the letter, "when the researchers asked a different collection of students to imagine how they might have responded had they come across a lost letter, 95 percent of them said they would have posted it regardless of where they were living." Alter continues:

Most people, in fact, think of themselves as generous. In self-assessment studies, people generally see themselves as kind, friendly and honest, too. We imagine that these traits are a set of enduring attributes that sum up who we really are. But in truth, we’re more like chameleons who instinctively and unintentionally change how we behave based on our surroundings.
***
For example, people behave more honestly in locations that give them the sense they’re being watched. A group of psychologists at Newcastle University in northeast England found that university workers were far more likely to pay for tea and coffee in a small kitchen when the honor-system collection box sat directly below a price list featuring an image of a pair of eyes, versus one with flowers. The researchers alternated the pictures of eyes and flowers each week during their 10-week experiment, using eyes from both men and women, to make sure that no single image affected the outcome. In every week featuring the eyes, the “honesty box” ended up with more money.
***
Other environmental cues shape our actions because they subtly license us to behave badly. According to the heavily debated broken windows theory, people who are otherwise well behaved are more likely to commit crimes in neighborhoods with broken windows, which suggests that the area’s residents don’t care enough to maintain their property.

What does this mean in terms of whether people are inherently good or evil?

These studies tell us something profound, and perhaps a bit disturbing, about what makes us who we are: there isn’t a single version of “you” and “me.” Though we’re all anchored to our own distinct personalities, contextual cues sometimes drag us so far from those anchors that it’s difficult to know who we really are — or at least what we’re likely to do in a given circumstance.

It’s comforting to believe that there’s an essential version of each of us — that good people behave well, bad people behave badly, and those tendencies reside within us.

But the growing evidence suggests that, on some level, who we are — litterbug or good citizen, for example — changes from moment to moment, depending on where we happen to be.

These environmental cues can shape and reshape us as quickly as we walk from one part of the city to another.

These studies are not unusual and they are not isolated. There are myriad examples of incredibly bad behavior from people who never would have predicted (or later admit) they would act that way, both experimental and historical (see also here and here and here and here, and for the limitations of good behavior here and here, and why despite all of this evidence, people still think that they are good people who could never do any real wrong, and that their definition of good is an expression of objective truth). Maybe the best common example of normal people behaving badly is what happens during a riot. Riots are not populated entirely of sociopaths, not hardly. They are ordinary people who either have let their emotions get the best of them or are using a breakdown in the social fabric to act reprehensibly. Taking advantage of a devastating national disaster and the ensuing chaos to rape 7 and 2 year-old children? Football fans killing each other? Riots to me are a good indication that ordinary people absolutely love to act out when everyone else is doing it or when they think they won't get caught.

Empaths like to pretend that they are immune to any bad thoughts or impulses, and sometimes I almost find myself believing them, so adamant and unyielding are their assertions. But the data doesn't support their self-assessments. Not only that, but they must be either lying on the self-assessments to make themselves look better than they are or they are lying to themselves to make themselves feel like they're better than they are. So... they're also hypocrites.

This is probably what I'm most worried about when people talk about rounding up all of the sociopaths and putting them on an island somewhere. Will we even make it there safely if the boat is being run by hypocritical and situationally exploitative empaths who are prone to emotional outbursts that may lead to murder? Empaths sound pretty dangerous to me.