Substituting you for me

A pilot friend of mine was describing to a dilettante friend of ours the process of obtaining a pilot's license. He talked about what it means to "fly blind," or fly relying solely on the instruments, not being able to see anything out the windows of the cockpit, or at least not looking. Obviously you wouldn't want to fly blindly if you had the option to also see outside, but the point is that sometimes you don't have that option, or sometimes what you are seeing with your naked eye can be deceptive.

While he was describing the sort of psychological self-mastery it takes to ignore everything that you think you know about your situation and instead put all of your trust in fallible tinker toys of gauges (which you may not even understand how they operate), I couldn't help but think of the way I struggle to ignore meaningless but strong impulses or emotional hallucinations.

I have talked before about relying on a prosthetic moral compass to compensate for my lack of conscience. I have also talked about my understanding of the utility of trust. By that I mean, substituting someone else's judgment for my own -- particularly principled people I know who have managed to achieve a stable sort of success and happiness.

A small example of an exercise of trust involves a relative of mine. He is a lover of technology, a proud first adopter. I have never really been a gearhead of any sort, so I always have him choose my set-ups. He is not my advisor for buying/adopting tech type stuff, he actually makes decisions for me. I was talking with a work colleague the other day about it. I told him I admired his laptop, to which he replied I should just buy my own. I explained to him that my technologically more sophisticated relative hadn't told me I should/could, and that he makes all my tech decisions for me. When my colleague suggested that I just do it anyway, I realized he misunderstood the nature of me "trusting" someone else to make decisions for me. If I just bought whatever I wanted when I wanted, then he would no longer be making decisions for me, he would be making suggestions to which I could either follow or not follow, or at best he would be making demands that I could veto. That would defeat the whole point of me putting him in charge of that aspect of my life.

To the extent I believe that there is value in things like "faith" or "trust," it is that you ignore your own ideas about what you think you know and rely on something, not because it is infallible, but because it is a different sort of fallible than you. That's why I don't understand people who say they have faith in something, a religion perhaps, but only when it's convenient or it happens to coincide with how they would have chosen anyway. Maybe this is a downside to my personality, the ability and willingness to just follow blindly. I don't think it is always a good thing, and it certainly has its downsides (as does deciding yourself). But to the extent it is useful at all, I believe it is only in this way.

Sheeple

An empath reader sent this (accurate?) video on how people are manipulated, particularly en masse:

Thinking too much of oneself

One of the funnier reactions that people I know personally have had about the publication of the book is to re-evaluate our shared time together and impugn nefarious motives to our otherwise benign interactions. Some have suggested (wrongly) that I must have been trying to seduce them. Some believe that I was using them for some otherwise unremarkable and talent or interest of theirs -- using them for their extensive knowledge of French noir films, perhaps, or for their accordion skills? It's funny because almost in every case, their accusations are based on some inflated view of their own worth, desirableness, or even of my interest in them as a person. I say this not to be insulting. No one can be everything to everyone, but for some reason a lot of people have arrived independently at the conclusion that they must be the equivalent of catnip to me? Although I admire their megalomania (unless it's paranoia?), I have a lot of interests that take up a lot of my time. I couldn't possibly seduce or exploit everyone I meet.

This overestimation of one's usefulness or desirability reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from a favorite actress (last line):

Evil in literature: Lancelot

From Lancelot, by Walker Percy:

“We've spoken of the Knights of the Holy Grail, Percival. Do you know what I was? The Knight of the Unholy Grail.

In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil.

You should be interested! Such a quest serves God's cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God?

Or suppose the Lowell Professor of Religion at Harvard should actually find the Holy Grail, dig it up in an Israeli wadi, properly authenticate it, carbon date it, and present it to the Metropolitan Museum. Millions of visitors! I would be as curious as the next person and would stand in line for hours to see it. But what different would it make in the end? People would be interested for a while, yes. This is an age of interest. 

But suppose you could show me one "sin," one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt. But we have plenty of evil around you say. What about Hitler, the gas ovens and so forth? What about them? As everyone knows and says, Hitler was a madman. And it seems nobody else was responsible. Everyone was following orders. It is even possible that there was no such order, that it was all a bureaucratic mistake. 

Show me a single "sin."

One hundred and twenty thousand dead at Hiroshima? Where was the evil of that? Was Harry Truman evil? As for the pilot and bombardier, they were by all accounts wonderful fellows, good fathers and family men.

"Evil" is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone's either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.

God may be absent, but what if one should find the devil? Do you think I wouldn't be pleased to meet the devil? Ha, ha, I'd shake his hand like a long-lost friend.

The mark of the age is that terrible things happen but there is no "evil" involved. People are either crazy, miserable, or wonderful, so where does the "evil" come in?

There I was forty-five years old and I didn't know whether there was "evil" in the world.” 

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.