Monday, September 16, 2013

Beware of pride

In church I heard someone recite the quote "Usually our criticism of others is not because they have sins, but because their sins are different than ours." I have a theory. If we had to break down the seven deadly sins, I would think that sociopaths are overrepresented for gluttony, lust, sloth, and wrath. Throw in deceit and invasion of other people's personal autonomy, and that is maybe 85% of the bad behavior of sociopaths? Empath seven deadly sins tend to be more greed, envy, and pride; sins come from the very thing that they treasure the most, their personal interconnectedness with others. One can be a glutton, or playboy, or lazabout, or hothead pretty much by oneself. Envy explicitly involves comparing oneself to another, typically in the same culture -- someone that you might interact with regularly. Pride is also a sin of comparison, as LDS President Dieter F. Uchtdorf taught, "for though it usually begins with 'Look how wonderful I am and what great things I have done,' it always seems to end with 'Therefore, I am better than you.'"

[P]ride turns to envy: they look bitterly at those who have better positions, more talents, or greater possessions than they do. They seek to hurt, diminish, and tear down others in a misguided and unworthy attempt at self-elevation. When those they envy stumble or suffer, they secretly cheer.

Similarly, greed depends on what you are exposed to. If you are raised in poverty, greed might mean the desire to eat meat every day. In more affluent cultures, greed might mean the desire for a trophy spouse

I know these are fine distinctions, because aren't sociopaths greedy egocentrics who think they're better than most people? Yes, but they are much less caught up in a desire to maintain their place in the social hierarchy. They don't feel greed because they just go after what they want, so don't feel deprived. They don't feel envy because they think they're better than others. They do feel pride, but they would feel pride no matter what situation they're in and who they're surrounded by -- that is, they don't necessarily need to be around their "lessers" in order to feel "better."

I was thinking about this when I read yet another story about a young person committing suicide due to vicious and unrelenting bullying. She was 12 years old and she jumped to her death after 15 middle-school children texting her such things as "Why are you still alive?” “You’re ugly" and “Can u die please?” The thing is that she wasn't ugly. She was pretty and apparently smart and a cheerleader. How could someone like her become the target of such hate? Apparently there was a dispute over a boy she dated. And maybe the fact that she lived in a mobile home? I wonder why things like this happen, what is the trigger to this seeming mob mentality. Maybe there is a sociopath ringleader, could be. But are all 15 bullies are sociopaths? No, empaths are susceptible to the siren call of bullying, I think more susceptible than sociopaths.

A sociopath uses bullying as a tool. An empath lives bullying as a lifestyle. There is something that is compelling about bullying to empaths of all ages and cultures. How else to preserve the social order and their tenuous place in it? In fact, research supports this. Bullies are neither at the very top or the very bottom of the social hierarchy but just under the top, envying those that are just above them and willing to sell out those under them to finally make it to the coveted top:

In her work videotaping children, she has found that 85 per cent of the time, an act of bullying is witnessed by other children. And 75 per cent of the time those watching are encouraging the bully, Prof. Pepler adds.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Better than you are

Along the same lines as yesterday's post, a song about being better than you are and how it is our choices that ultimately define us.


Would you like to swing on a star?
Carry moonbeams home in a jar
And be better off than you are
Or would you rather be a mule?

A mule is an animal with long funny ears
Kicks up at anything he hears
His back is brawny but his brain is weak
He's just plain stupid with a stubborn streak
And by the way, if you hate to go to school
You may grow up to be a mule

Or would you like to swing on a star?
Carry moonbeams home in a jar
And be better off than you are
Or would you rather be a pig?

A pig is an animal with dirt on his face
His shoes are a terrible disgrace
He has no manners when he eats his food
He's fat and lazy and extremely rude
But if you don't care a feather or a fig
You may grow up to be a pig

Or would you like to swing on a star?
Carry moonbeams home in a jar
And be better off than you are
Or would you rather be a fish?

A fish won't do anything, but swim in a brook
He can't write his name or read a book
To fool the people is his only thought
And though he's slippery, he still gets caught
But then if that sort of life is what you wish
You may grow up to be a fish

A new kind of jumped-up slippery fish
And all the monkeys aren't in the zoo
Every day you meet quite a few
So, you see it's all up to you
You can be better than you are
You could be swingin' on a star

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Ad hominem

I was arguing with a friend about Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley Manning). My friend did not think that Manning was a "hero" but rather that she was a tragic example of being so messed up by her transgender identity that she ruined her life by leaking all of that government information. It was hard not to think that my friend was just using Manning's trangender identity as an excuse to write her off and downplay her efforts.

People love to write other people off based on personal characteristics. I was reading an article about "journalese" (the jargon of journalists) that defined the word "coffers" as "Where organisations of which we disapprove keep money." Another recent article about someone the journalist clearly did not like described the subject's "dilapidated Victorian home," his "appearance more akin to Coronation Street’s hapless cafe owner Roy Cropper than a cutting-edge satirist," his "battered Toyota vehicle," and his "gap-toothed" maw.

We call these ad hominem arguments and they work because of our reductionist desire to simplify the world and people into clear cut categories of good and bad, troubled or heroes. From Wikipedia:

Ad hominem arguments work via the halo effect, a human cognitive bias in which the perception of one trait is influenced by the perception of an unrelated trait, e.g. treating an attractive person as more intelligent or more honest. People tend to see others as tending to be all good or tending to be all bad. Thus, if you can attribute a bad trait to your opponent, others will tend to doubt the quality of their arguments, even if the bad trait is irrelevant to the arguments.

Under this reasoning, of course we can't believe that Private Manning acted in what she considered the best interests of her country -- how could she when she was in the midst of a gender identity crisis? Similarly, Edward Snowden seems simply too "weird" or unpredictable to be a hero.

What is particularly self-defeating about this type of thinking is that it suggests that certain types of people are not capable of certain actions. Transgendered people cannot be patriots. Eccentric people cannot be acting in what they think is the greater good. Ugly people cannot have good or important or at least legitimately controversial ideas. Disabled people cannot be commander in chief. Sociopaths cannot do pro-social things? The more we know about people's personal lives via social networking and the eternal memory of the internet, the easier it will be for us as a society to get tripped up in these fallacies. But the truth is that we can never predict people's behavior, especially not based on their appearance or their feelings about their gender, or how eloquently they're able to articulate their beliefs. And we can never know someone's true motivations. All we know and all we can see is what they say and do. So why can't we judge those things based on their own intrinsic merits, without also "considering the source"?

Friday, September 13, 2013

Easy to love

Under the title "Bad Dog," a writer tells the story in the NY Times of her relationship with her dog -- a creature that did not get along well with others, was unpredictable, and overall poorly behaved. Her thoughts on what it means to love unconditionally:

It’s easy to love a well-behaved dog. It’s harder to love Chance, with his bristly personality and tendency toward violence. Yet in the end, I measure the success of my relationship with Chance by its challenges, because if I can’t love him at his most imperfect what use is love?

I had a work colleague who gushed about his new dog when we first met. He worked in a remote office, so we didn't see each other that frequently, but when we did, I would always be sure to ask him about his dog (I have found that dog owners love to talk about their dogs). One day I asked him  about his dog and he told me that he was thinking of giving the dog back to the pound. I was pretty shocked. The dog was hard to potty train and tore up the furniture, so had to be kept at doggy daycare almost every day. The dog was expensive and time-consuming, more than the owner had anticipated. Owning a dog was not as convenient and rewarding as planned, so he was going to return it like you might return a television set that had failed to live up to expectations.

Of course I don't care what people do with their pets, but I did think this was an odd turnaround. Man expects unconditional loyalty and devotion from his best friend but he does not return it? Not quite Old Yeller material. Then again, what did the dog do to deserve a good life? Should we feel obligated to be nice to things that are not nice to us -- to give to people or things that cannot or do not give back to us in commensurate ways?

Along those lines, I got a little bit of pushback from this recent tweet and subsequent exchange:


Ok, but does that mean people should have no problems being friends with someone who is a parasite, leech, or a sociopath? If there's such thing as unconditional love for all creatures, does that include sociopaths? And relatedly (but even more puzzlingly), some people act as if empathy is this great thing, but empathy doesn't seem that powerful or that special if it doesn't allow you to empathize with people who can't empathize back. Can you empathize with sociopaths? 

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

As I wrote a like-minded friend, I have been recently thinking about the world of Oz. In Oz there are apparently witches, both good and bad. Anything remarkable that exists in that world is consequently attributed to witchcraft. When Dorothy shows up and kills the wicked witch, everyone is dying to know whether she is a good witch or a bad, as if her being any sort of witch is a foregone conclusion. The most interesting thing to me, though, is that their leader, the "wizard," is not a wizard/witch at all, but a charlatan who plays on their expectations of what their world looks like. He is a stranger in a strange land, someone from a different world, who doesn't think like they do. He uses misdirection and cheap tricks like gunpowder pyrotechnics and robotics to imitate the sort of witchcraft that the Ozians take for granted as an everyday occurrence. The wizard does all of this to hide in plain sight, but not just hide -- thrive. And not just thrive -- rule. My friend wrote:

Very interesting parallel there. If we wanted to play with the analogy a little, we could say that the Wizard is a literary example of how some sociopaths operate, including the whole “he isn’t as powerful as we thought he was” motif. He manipulated the people with the real magic. It was as if his deception was itself a kind of magic, potent enough to make himself the most powerful man in Oz. That is totally apropos. As you know, I believe that power is in one sense an illusion. I believe that people are always freer than they think they are. Because they believe in the social rules and roles and because their emotions almost compel them to even, they create power structures out of thin air, with most of them at the bottom of said structure. Awfully convenient for those at the top, don’t you think? ;)
This may all be true, but perhaps the strangest aspect to the story of the wizard is that he willingly gives up all the power and fame and return home to his native sepia-toned Kansas via the hot air balloon. This suggests a preference. Whether for loneliness or emptiness or meaninglessness, that for all of the wizard's success at assimilating into the world of Oz, he would rather live in a black-and-white world where everyone is just like him rather than all the color and glories of Oz.

And was he a good wizard or a bad one? Dorothy accuses him of being a bad man, to which the wizard responds, perhaps slyly, "Oh no, my dear, I'm a very good man; I'm just a very bad Wizard." Does he mean that he is not really a wizard at all, or that he realized that the wizard he was pretending to be was best categorized a "bad" wizard in the same way that Glinda is a "good" witch and the witch of the west was "bad"? Combined with the fact that he leaves Oz, maybe he thinks that it was "bad" to pretend to be a wizard in the first place, although he probably just fell into the role (literally), given his circumstances.
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