Tag: culture

On How the Reasonably Empathic Can Rule Like Psychopaths.

When I first started working here in this fast food shit show of a job, we had six-month reviews and raises based on merit. We had picnics and parties at some fucking park every year where all crew members from every store in the franchise would be invited. Where you’d get free food and enter your name in a raffle to get prizes. Then, over the years, that shit started going away. Slowly but surely, until it was entirely flushed down the drain.

Though I only saw him on the rarest of occasions, I began to think of the franchise owner, who I’ll call Bob, as a psychopathic tyrant who cared not the least bit for those beneath him – those workers in each of his stores who made this shit happen, that made all of this possible for him.

I remembered reading at some point in the late aughts or early teens that according to studies, just 1% of the general population had psychopathic traits compared to 15% percent of the prison population. These were power-hungry, control-thirsty assholes devoid of empathy and compassion who were often able to utilize their charm to disguise their true nature to achieve dominance, profit from their manipulation, and elude capture when they committed crimes. Compared with the 15% of psychopaths that comprised the prison population, however, it was found that up to 12% of CEOs had such psychopathic traits as well. They were just the more intelligent psychopaths who learned how to play society’s game and used it to climb up the corporate ladder.

This, I thought, must surely be the nature of Bob.

Then maybe a decade ago they tore down our store and initiated a rebuild. During that process, there was a day when another guy and I were supposed to help out Bob. He drove us around, got us a meal, and we all talked. It blew my mind that he turned out to be such a warm, reasonably empathic, even funny guy.

He wasn’t a psychopath. Not. At fucking. All.

I say this with reasonable confidence because I’m convinced that I’d know a true psychopath if I were around one for long enough, as I feel I was with Bob. I say this with reasonable confidence because I feel that I’ve met roughly half a dozen people in my life who I’m convinced were full-blown psychopaths, and two stand out, at least with respect to the road I wish to go down and explore here.

One was an Uncle of mine, the other a girl I worked with. Concerning these two, while every red flag and alarm bell went off in me regarding their nature, I found it utterly amazing how calm I felt when in their presence. With most people, the “energy” or “vibes” on the surface are often in a state of chaotic flux, with the core rather complex but consistent, but with these two, who I presumed to be psychopaths, there was a dark, angry, ambitious core, but the surface “vibes” were eerily still, disturbingly quiet. Given my hypersensitivity to the emotions of others, however, as disturbing as I knew it was given my intellectual understanding of what it signified, the surface experience itself was calming.

Bob? He was a perfectly normal guy in terms of emotion. Not a psychopath in the least. This confused me greatly. After all, how could someone like that run a business the way he did? I kind of felt the same way recently when watching some clips of the Lex Fridman Podcast where Lex was talking with Jeff Bezos. To me, Bezos has been the real-life embodiment of Lex Luther. While the portions of the interview I watched didn’t sway me from that perception entirely, he didn’t exactly resonate with the stereotypical supervillain I’d made him out to be.

Assuming Bezos is not a mustache-twirling, villainous psychopath, the same question I had after meeting Bob is also true in his case: how can he run his business as if he is?

As far as I can tell, at least in Bob’s case, it’s for no less than two reasons: isolation and delegation.

The higher you are on the corporate ladder, the less likely you are to develop an understanding and empathy with the workers at the bottom. You’re isolated, insulated from those social ties because you don’t work with those people daily, week after week, sometimes year in and year out.

The higher up the corporate ladder you are, the more you can delegate, and the more you can have those just below you do your dirty work for you.

If you need to lay people off or fire them, it doesn’t hurt you, at least as much, because you haven’t developed ties with them, and on top of that, you don’t have to be the one doing the laying off or firing — you have the store managers do that for you. You don’t have to slowly get to know people, empathize with them, and then look those same people in the eye and tell them they no longer work here.

A lot of people might look at the up to 12% of CEOs who show signs of psychopathy and wonder how it could be so high, but honestly, I’ve looked at that percentage for years upon years and wondered how on earth it could be so low, given how those in power tend to treat those below them. Given the perspective granted to me by Bob, however, I feel I’ve come to understand the remaining 88%, and that’s the understanding I’ve attempted to articulate here: they’re not psychopathic. They might even be exceptionally empathic, for all I know. It’s just that the system allows for a perfectly empathic person to rule over a hierarchy of underlings in a psychopathic manner because it allows them to be cut off, and isolated by the masses over which they rule through isolation, through delegation.

Given that those capable of exhibiting psychopathic tendencies – whether or not they are themselves truly psychopathic – are at the top in our society, this means that they constitute the equivalent of apex predators in the natural environment.

In others words, we have built a social system in which psychopathic tendencies serve as the optimal means of survival. We’ve constructed a culture in which psychopaths, or those who can operate in a psychopathic manner while not being psychopaths, constitute the most successful mutation, bear the greatest survival advantage.

Humans have managed to construct an inhumane society.

We’ve self-domesticated ourselves into believing that becoming narcissistic assholes with a tunnel-vision aiming for the greatest conceivable manifestation of dominance is the way to our rendition of the promised land.

In conclusion, this seeming revelation makes me sick and I don’t want to be a part of it. Furthermore, I don’t think I serve as a suitable member of a social species and I’d like a lawyer who can provide suitable divorce papers for me to sign.

That is all.

Bigger’s Trigger.

12/24/07

When we were in the midst of reading Native Son, we came upon the issue again. It became evident that in the Prof’s eyes, as in the eyes of the character of Max in the novel, Bigger is not responsible for who he is, and certainly not for the two murders he committed. In Max’s courtroom argument against the death sentence, he says that it’s not right for us to kill Bigger. We should separate him from society for life so that he is unable to do it again, yes, but we should not kill him. It would be unethical for us to murder this murderer, they say, ”for being the way we made him.”

We should understand him so as not to demonize him. We should ”hate the sin but love the sinner,” and remember that ”to understand all is to forgive all.” But we don’t want to understand Bigger. If we did, we would have to face the fact that we’re responsible for what he’s done.

Following?

See, we set up the conditions that drove Bigger (and what he symbolizes) to do this, and as such his actions, at least in his heart, are comparable to the actions of self-defense of a soldier of war. To understand Bigger would force us to admit our guilt, and we want to blot out our guilt. So we blot out Bigger. We enjoy having a villain, having someone to hate, and so Bigger as a rapist and a murderer serves a function for the people. Labeling him as evil serves a function for the people. We are now licensed in our conscience to hate him, to kill him. We must kill the killer (through the government’s monopoly on justified murder) to show that killing is wrong and will not be tolerated. We blame him for making us have to kill him, all the while trying to blot out that we drove him to his own murders.

This is not about justice, Max and the Prof say. The reality is that we get off on killing him.

Through his death sentence, we get to express our unconscious hatred and violence. The hatred and violence which is normally held in check by society but which is now temporarily suspended with respect to how we feel and deal with Bigger because he expressed the hatred and violence that we agreed (upon social contract) to suppress save for the legally-sanctioned windows. Like the legally-sanctioned window through which we vent upon him, if only vicariously.

Basically, they’re saying: we drove him to kill so we would have an excuse to kill him.

This is their fucking cultural conspiracy theory.

And I may agree with the suggestion for life sentence in such a case, but I do not agree with the logic behind it. Or the philosophical ramifications of extending that logic to its inevitable conclusions.

The Prof speaks about the concept of moral luck, where some people are born into situations that offer opportunity for ”good” choices, while others are not. Bigger’s environment hindered his emotional intelligence, they say. There was negligence from childhood on; there was no real physical contact or true love. Such trauma affects the brain. If we see Bigger as a victimizer, so be it, they say, as it seems perfectly justified. But we should also see him as a victim.

We can’t blame him for what he did, says the Prof, any more than we can blame a dog for not being able to do algebra.

True, all true, I agree. Save for the dog and algebra thing. Save for the implication that the two mentioned facts here — that he is a victim, that he is a victimizer — have the strong relation to each other that Max and the Prof suggest. They do not. In service of the ultimate purpose of their argument, they cannot.

If him being a victim excuses his victimizing, then our victimizing him would be excusable as well, as he victimized us. The logic goes both ways. It must. And so round and round and round the blaming finger goes, swirling towards event horizon.

Histories, memories. In the Prof’s eyes, this no doubt constitutes the core of our identities. But while he sees character, and I would be inclined to assume on that basis all else, as rigidly deterministic due to nature and nurture, I perceive the matter quite differently. Circumstance obviously has an effect on our choices, but all circumstance does is create paths of lesser and greater resistance. It’s probabilistic, not deterministic.

Of course, that raises the question as to what the deciding factor is. What makes the probability-wave crash upon the shores of actuality one way, as opposed to another? Is it all randomness?

I say not. I say it’s free will. I say this is the core of identity. I say this is the determining factor.

We typically overestimate the amount of free will we put forth in our lives, so we often take one of the paths of lesser resistance — perhaps the path of least resistance — and so, given enough data regarding perhaps nothing more than the ”closest” and most relevant variables, we are pretty damned predictable. This, however, is not equivalent to fate. This does not mean we are predetermined. This does not make free will some flimsy idea from a former era we are best to look back on with scorn, humor, or embarrassment.

This does not free us from personal responsibility. This is not the cosmic fucking pardon.

If that were true and you logically extended this argument of fate (even if only through the medium of nature and nurture) you would have to admit that no one was responsible. That’s this logic’s ultimate conclusion. You would have to admit the Big Bang itself was responsible, or the singularity preceding it was responsible. That or just infinite fucking regress.

People have overcome their conditions. Reprogrammed themselves. And despite being opposed by forces trying to hold and beat them down. Despite influences from every which way trying to drive them to the contrary.

We are more than the products of our pasts. Our genetics. Our environment.

So many say of people who drop bombs and shoot others during war, ”They’re just following orders. They’re just doing their job.”

True. And yet.

We don’t create murderers. Killers. We don’t create anyone, we can only influence. We only create the gun, make the bullets, load the weapon and put it within arm’s reach. And that indicates somethings fucked up about our society. No argument there. But don’t make the mistake of glossing over the fact that the murderer made a choice he didn’t have to make.

After all, he chose to pick up the damned gun and pull the fucking trigger.

If we’re all just products of fate, of course, than he’s not responsible for his actions, but neither are we — and so we’re not responsible for him. It’s personal responsibility or no responsibility. There is no gray area.