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.

Among the Lost Souls of Planet Earth.

It was about a year away from when things in my head and in my life would go bat shit crazy. I was a freshmen in art class one day, listening to my Walkman as I drew. I was listening to a recording of a record (vinyl? I guess we call them vinyl now) my father often listened to at home, and which I found funny. It was basically two guys doing skits, pretending to be old, backwoods characters.

Derek was across the table from me, and while I recall him mostly talking to some guy beside him, he asked me what I was listening to, and I told him it was comedy. He wanted to listen, so I took the headphones off my head and offered them to him. He put them on for maybe twenty seconds, took them off, placed them on the table and with a dismissive laugh and shrug turned to the other guy and said, “its just two old guys talking,” and then went on talking with the other guy as if I didn’t exist. I was and am and will likely forever be one hypersensitive little shit, so yeah, it embarrassed me a little. Even so, I put back on the headphones and went back to my drawing.

I didn’t even remember it until recently, in the wake of Derek’s initial Facebook messaging. Even so, I don’t think it was his messaging that triggered this memory — not entirely, anyway.

After hearing about Bill Cosby being let out of jail, I couldn’t help but think of the records my father had of his stand-up, and how I used to enjoy listening to them as a kid. His stories about when he was a kid in particular. His story about the chicken heart. His story about lighting his parents’ couch on fire and how his father would shake his head and go, “What’s wrong with that boy?”

And then there was that bit he had that has always confused me as a kid, the one that dealt with his itch to get his hands on Spanish Fly, which I later learned to be a sexual stimulant. It kind of made me sick, thinking about all the shit that pudding-popping, Jello-jiggling, family-man, serial rapist got away with all those years. And so I thought of other records I listened to, and I remembered about Derek listening to it and laughing only at the fact that I could find something funny that he thought to be so lame.

Still, that was the only vaguely negative interaction I ever had with Derek. Granted, it was really the only interaction I can recall having with the guy, but even so, it didn’t make him an asshole, it just made him someone who had different tastes in comedy and might have been a bit insensitive in expressing that fact to a hypersensitive classmate.

I don’t condemn him for it, but he was clearly intent on condemning himself for being the asshole I never recall him being. Not just with respect to me, of course, but I can’t even recall him being an asshole to someone else.

And it did interest me to discover that this memory took place in the high school arm room, particularly given his apparent appreciation for my art and the desire he evideny always had to be an artist himself.

Art was also the topic of the message he sent me around noon on Wednesday, as I was preparing for work.

He said that I was a great artist and that he admired my talent. While he was quick to add that he was poor, he wanted to buy an original piece from me. If he paid for shipping plus whatever I wanted for it, he asked, would I make him something to hang on his wall?

Absolutely, I told him.

I confessed I would be horrible at commissions, but if he could at least give me a ball-park idea of what he was looking for, I’d do my best. He said I should call him, as it was too much to text and he had poor communication skills. I told him I was getting ready for work, but I could call him tomorrow.

Later, at work, he messaged me again, saying that he knew me, and that when it came to art I had the tendency to overdo it, and he wasn’t rich. All he wanted was something simple, like a caricature. I messaged back asking for more details and he again insisted that I just call him.

Goddamn it.

I thought he had been pressing me to call him because he felt that he communicated poorly through writing or it simply wasn’t his preferred means of expression, and I understood that. I’m the exact opposite. When it comes to communicating, I prefer writing and imagery to the spoken word. So I went to take the trash out and, out there by the dumpsters, I lit up a cigarette and finally called him. At least this way I’d have an excuse to get off the phone in a short amount of time.

He didn’t know who I was at first. Even after I said my name. Only when I mentioned we went to high school together did it finally click, and this should’ve been a red flag. It turned out that talking to him verbally made our conversations even more confusing. His thoughts seemed rather disconnected and he repeated himself a few times without even realizing it. His voice was all over the place and sometimes he struggled to say things, like he was placing incredible effort to remain focused and push out the words and string together the sentences. In short, he sounded horrifically drunk, maybe heavily medicated, but most certainly out of it.

I tried desperately to piece together what he was saying.

He spoke on how when he went to high school, he just didn’t get it, didn’t pick up on things, and it didn’t prepare him for the so-called real world. Not in the least. He left school thinking we were the only free country, he confessed to me, and that the rest of the world were the poor and oppressed, scrambling just to eat bread and drink water.

He kept bringing up duck and cover, too, as if him and I grew up in the 1950s as opposed to the 1990s. My assumption was that he meant to draw parallels with the education system, which was providing data that we were taught to believe would give us safety and control in the world beyond high school when in fact it was a bullshit sham propagated to give us the illusion of control and safety.

He felt betrayed by the school system, by society at large, and he has continued to feel lost, as if his life has been a waste. In a better world, shit might have been different.

He called himself stupid a few times, and I insisted it may have just been ineffective education and propaganda that were to blame for his ignorance and confusion, not some lack of intelligence. He also made references to being a bad person, though without saying it so blatantly, and I again assured him that I’d seen no evidence that was the case.

He then confessed to me that he had liver cancer, or that his liver was failing, and he may not have a lot of time left. This made me hope he wasn’t drunk. In any case, that’s why he started reaching out, messaging people, apologizing. That was the weight I had sensed in him — he was looking death straight in the eyes and found life to be unfair, and felt guilty over his suspicions that he had been unfair to others in his past.

At some point, after my cigarette had burned down to the filter, we got disconnected. I messaged him. He didn’t message me back until my break, when I was in my truck with Sean, and after I had taken two or three hits off the joint he offered me.

And I thought communication was difficult before.

Though he had spoken little of the art he wanted to purchase from me on the phone, which had been the reason I called, now he was back on the topic. I told him the last person I had sold a piece to, it had been only $25. I asked if that sounded good. He said no, it was too little. I asked him to give me a price, and he said no. I was getting mildly frustrated. The pot did not help matters.

Marajuana, at least when it comes to me, serves as a sort of amplifier for whatever my attention is invested in at the time. If I’m focused on relaxing, it boosts it. If I’m enjoying Cosmos or a nature documentary, I’m drawn in like you wouldn’t believe. Art, music? I’m entirely absorbed. Frustration and concern? Welcome to my personal hell.

Our conversation ended and I went about the rest of my work shift high, frustrated, and socially anxious.

Then I got a text. It referenced me by name, and said that with my permission, they would “post all my stuff.” The text had no name, just a number, but I assumed it was my sister’s father-in-law, who I had sold the aforementioned piece to. I was slightly confused because he had mentioned “stuff,” suggesting the plural, and he had only a single piece, so when I texted back “yes, please do,” I added that I assumed it was from him. The person texted back that I was wrong.

Instant paranoia. Depths of paranoia.

I knew he wouldn’t fuck with me like this, so it couldn’t be my sister’s father-in-law. So naturally my first assumption that someone had hacked into my computer and stolen all my writings, or found my blogs despite my pseudonym, and were going to publish them on the net under my real name and embarrass me and bring shame upon my family and judgement upon me by everyone.

I asked who it was. It took them forever to answer, and they kept fucking with me, and my paranoia deepened, I became self-loathing, and I finally looked up the number on the net. A Florida number. Derek told me he lived in Florida.

I checked Derek’s number. It was him.

Indeed, I was too high. When I texted back, called him by name and asked what he meant by “stuff,” his response was entirely incomprehensible. I didn’t respond and I haven’t heard from him since.

I was more than a bit irritated and emotionally spent by the end of the shift, but after that faded, my sympathy for him remained. He’s feeling guilty and betrayed and afraid and alone as he’s dying and maybe perpetually drunk as shit in Florida.

It feels as though most people are born into our society and they adapt rather quickly, that they can pick things up with ease, and they’re eager for adulthood. I was never that way. I remember when my sister, Eve, and I were attending school and my youngest sister, Linda, was excited about attending school the following year. So excited, in fact, that she filled up a bookbag with random things and hung it on the hooks in the hallway where Eve and I hung up our school things.

Unsurprisingly, she adapted to society just fine. Eve didn’t do too bad, either. Both have done infinitely better than I in this respect.

Maybe Derek, for whatever reason, is just another member of my category. Another one of the lost children of America. Another lost soul spinning in circles on planet earth.

Trevor Noah’s Invaluable Insight.

After Jon Stewart left, I stopped watching the Daily Show. Yes, I was sad that he left and knew the show would never be the same, but I didn’t stop watching out of some blind prejudice against someone I saw as trying to fill Stewart’s shoes. Trevor Noah was going to do his own thing, and that was more than fine: that was preferred.

Be yourself. Do your own thing.

In fact, I really tried to watch it afterward, but I had to be honest with myself — and so I must honest to whoever might be reading my blather presently: I just felt that the show declined. I couldn’t pinpoint why.

After watching a video, presumably sent from his home, regarding the recent protests over the blatant murder of George Floyd, however, I realized what the problem was, at least from my perspective.

I simply don’t find Trevor Noah funny.

And I can see him trying to be funny whenever I try to watch a clip of the Daily Show and I simply find it too damned uncomfortable to take in. I’ve watched at least one of his stand-ups, too, and it was, at best, kind of okay.

So I tried. And I know I sound like an epic douche-bag, and I realize that, but I’m being honest. And I’m more than just a douche-bag. For reals.

So anyway, I generally don’t find him giggle-worthy. After having watched an in-depth interview with him about his life and worldview some time ago, however, I can’t help but have a deep, profound respect for the guy. He knows multiple languages, he is clearly incredibly intelligent and analytical, and he articulates himself amazingly well.

He’s had his foot in more than one world in more than one way, from the circumstances of his birth onward. He has an outsider’s perspective, an intelligent and analytical mind, and a great amount of empathy. And his insights, particularly in the aforementioned video regarding Floyd, are ones I find unspeakably invaluable and enlightening.

For instance, when he enlightened me to the fact, now clearly evident to me, that Amy Cooper “blatantly knew how to use the power of her whiteness to threaten another man and his blackness.” I feel he framed what transpired in that video accurately, and in such a way that I fear I would have failed to consider on my own.

And in the midst of it, he actually manages to make me laugh — without overtly attempting to do so, either. It was natural.

And then there was the framework he graciously offered for those truly seeking to understand the protests and riots that followed George Floyd’s murder:

Society, but what is society? And fundamentally, when you boil it down, society is a contract. Its a contract that we sign as human beings amongst each other. We sign a contract with each other as people, whether its spoken or unspoken, and we say, “Amongst this group of us, we agree on common rules, common ideals, and common practices that are going to define us as a group.” That’s what I think a society is, its a contract. And, as with most contracts, the contract is only as strong as the people who are abiding by it.

… think about how many people who don’t have, the have-nots, say, “You know what? I’m still gonna play by the rules, even though I have nothing, because I still wish for the society to work and exist.”

And then, some members of that society, namely black American people, watch time and time again how the contract they have signed with society is not being honored by the society that has forced them to sign it with them. … the only reason you weren’t looting Target before was because you were upholding society’s contract. There is no contract if law and people in power don’t uphold their end of it. … we understand in society that if you lead by example, there is a good chance that people will follow that example that you have set. And so, if the example law enforcement is setting is that they do not adhere to the laws, then why should the citizens of that society …?

In my humble opinion, he needs to do more commentary like this where he doesn’t feel the pressure to crack a joke but can express himself freely through his heart and mind, as I think he has a lot to offer — and given enough people take the time to listen, his impact could be substantial.