Monday, June 17, 2013

The hard way

I've realized recently that I go through cycles of liking to do things the easy way or the hard way. I almost quit music in secondary school (I wasn't particularly talented), but I ended up majoring in it at university because it was the most challenging thing that I could be doing at the time and I enjoyed the thought of turning a weakness into a strength. I eventually tired of the struggle so when I left music I chose law because I did well on the law school admission test, so I figured I was well suited for it. At that point in my life, I didn't want to bother with my weaknesses, only capitalize on my strengths. Since then I've alternated between focusing on either my weakness or strengths, maybe every few years or so.

Most understand the appeal of the easy way, but doing things the hard way has its own value (and Thoreau?). The Swedes understand this. Although most Swedes have access to some sort of cottage or summer home, many of these homes intentionally do not have indoor plumbing, an attempt to be closer to nature. I spent some time there with a friend and she much preferred cooking up a porridge on the side of the road with a camp stove, or a soup on the deck of a ferry, to anything remotely more convenient. Even though my visit was on the tail end of summer in the chilly Arctic Circle, she insisted that part of the experience of any trip was to sleep outside whenever possible. We would go days without using a normal toilet, much less shower. I was sometimes tempted to put my foot down and insist that we take advantage of modern amenities and conveniences for a change, but I didn't. And even though I have been on much more comfortable and more exotic trips, this one has remained my favorite I think largely because it required struggle. It required me to be resourceful and more actively engaged in every moment of the trip, whereas waking up in crisp hotel sheets and stumbling down the hall to a buffet breakfast required no thought at all. The former meant living every minute and the latter invited passivity and complacency, it's own sort of (worse) struggle.

When I first started writing the blog, it was in an effort to understand why my life seemed to self-destruct every few years. I thought maybe finding the reason why might keep it from happening again, but I seem to like to struggle. There's something rewarding about doing things the hard way, at least for now. And as artist Chuck Close said:

Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own. It's always wrong before it's right.” 

Sunday, June 16, 2013

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.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Fearing the unknown

I thought this recent comment was an interesting explanation of why people fear the unknown, particularly sociopaths:

You are upfront, but to what degree? You are telling us that you are manipulative for various reasons, and then asking us to take what you say at face value. You are different, you lack something, and we don't know what the effect of that is just as we don't know what could set off a dangerous predator. Do you trust a wolf, or a tiger? Maybe you would, if you were a wolf or a tiger. But you're not, so you break those creatures down to the impulses and instincts that make them dangerous - predators, cunning, violent. Nevermind that they are also caring, sweet animals that can show affection and mercy. 

In essence as a society, it's difficult to accept that there are people like you walking around as a member of the human family; just as individually it would be hard to accept the knowledge that we lacked the ability to control harmful impulses.

This comment reminded me of a time I visited a different continent for a wildlife tour. There were several dangerous animals and we were warned several times about avoiding them. However, we would also have impromptu picnics in the middle of the wildlife preserves. At one of these open-air picnics, I was chatting with a friend until she gasped, grabbing my shoulder in a vice grip, "Oh my God, we're going to die." I looked around us and we were surrounded by a 30 or so large rodent looking things. It was the first time we had seen this particular animal and our guide was not around to tell us what they were. Maybe my friend was overreacting, but maybe she wasn't, I thought, trying to remember whether the list of dangerous animals might possibly have included these. Even small animals can be dangerous, I rationalized -- think of those honey badger videos!


Or rabies? And it's not like we were close to any hospitals, should anything happen. The most unnerving thing about these animals, though, was the way they started closing in on us. It was like a Twilight Zone episode -- when we were looking directly at them, they would remain perfectly still, but every time we looked away, they would advance closer to us until they were within pouncing distance.

Without knowing anything about these animals, I had no clue how to react but my friend insisted that we abandon our food and try to wend our way through the fast approaching crowd. Unfortunately, a second, much larger species had appeared (or a more menacing adult-sized version of the first?). There were 60 or more animals between us and our tour vehicle and as we inched our way forward, my friend clutched my arm as if she expected impending death. We finally were able to climb onto the hood of the vehicle and waited there until our guide returned thoroughly amused at our reaction to what turned out to be perfectly harmless (in his mind), cuddly creatures.

Since returning home, I often think of this experience when I see commonplace wildlife native to where I live. How is it that I never noticed how ubiquitous squirrels are? Can they be rabid? Can raccoons hurt me? Was I wrong for worrying that the foreign animals were dangerous? Or am I wrong for not thinking more about the more familiar dangers that I encounter on a daily basis?

So although I can relate to the fear of unknown/sociopaths, it's also important to consider how concerned you want to be. Would you want to kill, lock up, or otherwise persecute a group of people because you don't understand them (and have made no real effort to try to understand or peacefully accommodate them)? Do they warrant that? Or not? Maybe you figure you've already been living a life with sociopaths without realizing it, like I had been living surrounded by squirrels without really noticing them, so how concerned should you be? Of course sociopaths are not like squirrels, more like bears or sharks or lions, but does the existence of those animals keep you from going camping? Or swimming? Or from copulating in Africa? Maybe. It's true that people have different tolerances for risk. Some are too afraid to even leave their apartment.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Outcasts in literature: Housekeeping

[On the unsettling appearance of transients, whose very presence suggested to a small town's inhabitants that there was a different, better way to live than to eke out an existence in normal society.]
So every wanderer whose presence suggested it might be as well to drift, or it could not matter much, was met with something that seemed at first sight a moral reaction, since morality is a check upon the strongest temptations. And these strangers were fed on the stoop, and sometimes warmed at the stove, in a spirit that seemed at first sight pity or charity, since pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet. When one of these lives ended within the town jurisdiction, the preacher could be relied upon to say "This unfortunate," as if an anonymous grave were somehow deeper than a grave with a name above it. So the transients wandered through Fingerbone like ghosts, terrifying as ghosts are because they were not very different form us. And so it was important to the town to believe that I should be rescued, and that rescue was possible.
-- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Gentleman sociopath?

If not morals, why might a sociopath choose to do something "good" or help people? A reader recently wrote about how his sense of aesthetics keeps him from doing anything base, such as brute strength violence.

Similarly, from another sociopathic reader regarding the existence of the "gentleman sociopath":

I have read as many materials about sociopathy. It seems that the clinical model tend towards the violent and lack of self-awareness of the afflicted. I'm confused by that. I have over forty years and have done phenomenally well but there is a certain dichotomy to my nature that challenges what I read. Self-awareness is something I have in spades. It comes in waves but the overall tenets of my meticulous adaptation and mimicry have served me well. I am reasonably successful perhaps even quite successful. I am a charismatic individual that can engender such passionate responses but I don't quite get their ultimate utilitarian value. I am fully capable of expressing emotion though it typically is self-serving. I find people useful and fascinating and in my job I am an outgoing and rather likable chap. I know what to say to make the ends meet. But the act itself is mechanical. You are the first I have read that seems to be broadening the understanding of the bonds that bind us together and yet I wonder, what of the gentleman sociopath. The one who realizes that the flashes of violence and utter revulsion at humanity leaves the efforts to connect empty and like a well played out theatrical piece. One of which I am always the star; even if I sit back and do nothing of great significance I manage to impact other positively. But I fail to see the reward. Is this all there is? A chance encounter, fleeting, where love is extricated for my benefit and validation of my greatness. Psychotherapy and psychology seem only to capture the seen and make formulaic profiles of those who manage to fall into the system. I have absolutely no desire to be anything else. There is an elegance in the primal connection to my stripped bone need to see the tethers that bind us to this false sense of social propriety.

But these tethers that bind us all demand to be plucked so that I can rest assured my genius is not wasted. I am not adverse to violence and my sexual appetites are gruesome at best. But I have control of them despite a few slip ups. I appreciate greatly the time you took to read my letter.  What Answer I receive from you will be welcome.

I have lived long enough to grow tired of the clinical definitions and confines of sociopathy. There are many of us who have formed quite mutually beneficial bonds with one another and find success in a tedious world a far better path than the wanton rebellion. I suppose, while I will be frank in admitting I haven't the foggiest idea of what drew me to your writings, you must have seemed to at least be less rigid in your understanding of this particular detachment. Except with those like me, I have never before felt an interest to express this. You also are likely aware that I would be remiss if I didn't say that any questions you have for me would be welcomed.
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