An excellent piece from
, brought to my attention from the equally venerable (subscribe to both) has been hamster-wheeling through my mind for most hours of the last 24.Obviously you should read it, but in case you want to come back to it later, here is my unworthy attempt to sum up what I took from it:
Hacking Human Nature is a clear-headed explication of the essential nasty trick of the psychopath, which is to prey upon our good-natured behavioral algorithms in order to yield outcomes that unexpectedly harm you and benefit them. After all, you don’t have any good reason not to lend some random but pleasant-seeming stranger on the street your cell phone to make an emergency call home, right? You’d hope that someone would do the same for you if you were in the same such bind, Right?
Right.
This is what you might think the first time you field such a request. Even though you felt kinda nervous about it, even though something instinctual in you felt uneasy about the way his smile was slightly too uneven and his gaze was slightly too direct when making the request (like he was already sort of celebrating the efficacy of his rouse in advance?), you ignored those intuitions in favor of a vague notion of reciprocal morality. The golden rule! A perfect use case for it; the rare “ma’am can I borrow your cell phone to make one call?” gambit. This is a test you only fail once.
But after six hours and six hundred dollars spent at Verizon later that day, your outlook on this sort of generosity is decidedly more cynical. In fact, you are not only going to refuse any such future requests, you are likely to react with hostility toward anyone who asks you a favor that presents even the vaguest of similarities. It doesn’t even matter if such people in such emergencies could exist; your mind is made. No one gets to use your cell phone on the street ever again.
For those of us still unlucky enough to live in a once glorious “big city” full of treasures that now rot around us, paying taxes to a government that actively mocks you for being dumb enough to have a job, this process occurs in many small ways throughout the day. “Micro-aggressions,” they might call it: wallets are stolen, small businesses are bricked, single-family homes are invaded, efforts to beautify and revitalize are almost immediately spray-painted over by “emerging young artists” with names like DopeSick and Roofuus the Chosen. Each time this happens, the opposite of an angel getting its wings happens; the hearts of all those victimized by senseless cruelty wrought from “social determinants of health” are ripped open. Outside of the few hearts among them that remain obstinate in their bleeding no matter how many times they are violated and patched, all other victimized hearts begin an irreversible process of coagulation and calcification.
The gauze used to seal off each damaged coronary chamber is well known to me by now, both personally and professionally. This is the bandage called “I’m not going to be the sucker that gets taken advantage of.” The sequelae from this moment forward is as achingly tragic as it is predictable; a kind person becomes a little less kind. This miserable cardiac transaction is then replicated over and over, the original injustice serving as a sort of memetic virus that makes everyone a little sicker each time it is passed along.
The end result is the city I live in now, wherein each day I am confronted anew with a species of casual cruelty that takes my breath away. Just today I was cut off by another driver so recklessly ignorant of me that I had to slam on my brakes so hard that the books in my front passenger seat flew off and smashed into the glove box with such force I almost thought the car to my rear crashed into me. Once I looked up, rather than an apology, I was greeted by the sight of a man leaning out of his window to motherfuck me up and down for “almost fucking up his car.”
Such bitter rewards for my caution and care have pushed me to the point in which I am no longer interested in selling. Which of course is sad, because I think my kindness and concern for others is one of the best traits that my mom and creator put into me. But how could I keep giving that kindness away when it is so flippantly reimbursed? The bulb of my kindness, much like that of so many others who once concerned themselves with silly pursuits like “looking out for others” and “keeping them safe,” is dimmed just a little more each new day. Cancelled are so many future order of openness, trust, forgiveness, and accommodation I could have delivered. In their place is a wariness for the world; a begrudging titration of my goodness that I gather back toward myself like centerpieces of a birthday party that no one showed up to.
I do not wish to be unkind, but I also cannot give this kindness away to people who return only selfishness. This is the way of the psychopath, a type of “human” who - through many of my clinical work - serves as the mascot for the other bandaged domain of my once free-flowing heart. Psychopathy is also the ostensible subject of Koehli’s piece, and the diagnosis of a fair amount of patients I was unfortunate enough to treat. To be fair, it is easier to deflect them when they are encountered clinically; despite their best efforts, the relationship between psychopath and clinician is buffered by an imbalance of information, keys, and Haldol. But even with all of my training to detect and manage them in the hospital, I have still been unlucky enough to be taken in by the wiles of psychopaths (and their other personality-disordered ilk) several times throughout my young life. It was not until my mid-thirties that I finally learned to close the door immediately the moment they appear, rather than presenting to them pieces of my mind and body as “food to be played with.”
There are many books that claim to provide the training to shield oneself from their vampiric advances. And while I think progress can be made in how quickly one can recognize them, there is little that can be done to reject their talons once they sunk even a millimeter into your skin. Why? Because by the time they have hooked into you, the homework you would have to complete in order to escape was due five years ago. If they can see you, and especially if they can see you see them, then the contest has already been called. You were just too tempting for them; too juicy and perfectly seasoned. But even aside from their blood-lusting predilections, you cannot mount a defense because the antidote is one that can only be obtained through the slow processing of their poison through your own body. It is a self-manufactured cure, only excreted by you after you have been bled so thoroughly dry by them enough times that the goldenness of your inner hearth has at last been drowned enough times that even its ashes no longer glimmer. The flame is smothered not from cynicism or self-protection, but by necessity. You had to drown yourself until you became a carcass, too spoiled to feed upon, but also too bloated and dead to do anything more in your life other than float as a corpse on the tides.
This process is the schematic for the “civilization dooming” effects that only a few antisocial individuals can have on society writ large, the mechanics of which are given poignant illumination by Koehli’s ant metaphor. Just one or two “manipulator” ants can violate the inherent biological norms of the colony to the extent that disastrous consequences are unleashed upon the entire settlement. The selfish actions of a single ant who “chooses” to take advantage of the natural instinctual circuitry of their comrades can lead to the so-called “circle of death” that traps most or all of a colony in a looping purgatory that ends only in death. This is what makes the psychopath so effective; they need not convince you into something you don’t want to do, but rather take advantage of those actions you do so easily and mindlessly and naively that not performing them would seem inexplicably strange.
This is why the serial killer is often invited into the house before the killing, why megalomaniacs win public office even when they insult their base, and why countless women stay with him despite dozens of urgent caring appeals to the contrary. Because it is the very best parts of us that are most easily manipulated to the will of the minuscule population of evil among us. It is the love of the abused that keeps them entangled with the abuser. It is the awe of the will and effectiveness of the politician that gives the scandal-ridden senator yet another term. It is also the way in which you finally understand what Nietzsche meant when said “the abyss stares back.” For it is only by becoming the abyss that are truly safe from it. Or at least so we imagine.
So what happens then, when the psychopathic tendency is adopted by a larger subset of individuals? What will become of the world when the bloodlusts of the killer become the self-help mantras for a generation of classically idiotic but otherwise (normally) harmless young people? How could this even happen? Surely would require the widespread adoption of a morality that most non-malignant humans find repulsive? The great mercy of society has always been the fact that most of our base desires require a level of interpersonal violence that is beyond the capabilities of most people. You can, for example, easily make someone hate an entire group of people. It is much harder to convince those people to actually push a knife into their stomach. The reason for this has always been a simple failsafe: even those who are fundamentally indecent are reticent to inflict a pain upon someone that they themselves would not like having inflicted upon them.
So. you would have to dress up this violent morality, this ethics of cruelty into something more benign. Not only benign, but positive. Something that absconds the cruelty with confidence, the sadism with the self-help, and the savagery with “self-love.” How unfortunate that this is exactly the prevailing ethic of our day. Who knew that a human spirit once suppressed by a slave morality could be later be the vessel for the a Tyrant’s Ethics.
The Tyrant’s Ethics is one that sees the internal compass of one’s self as the ultimate moral authority. Rather than appealing to God above or even some humane rationalism within us, the Tyrant’s Ethic makes its appeal only to the immediate sensorium. One is not “guilty” or “innocent” based upon some universal standard or tribunal of those who render judgement in service of a higher power. These are irrelevant in the Tyrant’s Ethics. They are responsible only to the whim of the tyrant, and owe no allegiance to architectures of Socratic Investigation or adherence to natural law. Why should they? What need did a pharoah have to consider the will of the Gods when he himself was already a willful god?
There is no greater modern example of this than the banal evil of the “trigger warning.” To even mention it is sure to evoke some eye-rolling, or a fear that I will veer off here into a familiar right-wing Youtube diatribe about the “dictatorial left” and “snowflakes who won’t be ready for the real world.” Hold tight my friend, and keep your faith in my word just a little longer. For this is not about how the notion of a trigger warning makes me feel. To apply that critique would be nothing more than a slightly more dignified replication of the Tyrant’s Ethics. It is not about how it makes me feel, or how it halts free speech, or about how it fails to prepare someone for confrontation with the chaos of the. Such things are by now pedestrian, discussed by so many grievance pundits that it feels now like nothing more than a checkpoint along the road to recording Bill Maher or The Five on your DVR.
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