Piece in Progress ... Wish it were Peace in Progress

Do Labels Matter? Bullies or Sociopaths … 

While thinking of Sen. McCain

When work on the Wall was halted, the Giza                                                                      
Pyramids, China's Great Wall and the                                                     
supports for Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging                                                             
Gardens all shook. Some of the citizenry                                                              
were shocked that the Greatest American                                                      
since FDR hadn't lived to see it completed                                                      
and they gathered together hither and yon to                                                      
call out:

Long Live the King! Long Live the King!

Alas! The Wall around Graceland never was completed. 

Kidding, of course —which may be the best I can do, today, as I attempt to discern whether I and we are living through a tragic-comedy or rather a comic-tragedy —may not be fully fitting the gravity of our present situation moving towards the 2018 midterms and the 2020 Presidential elections. Sorry. Best I can do! I don't know that a day will ever come when a great wall will be built guarding the United States from Mexico but, in any case, I have been fated to live out the Last Quarter of My Life ... in the years before any such Wall was to be a fait accompli ...

I am, however and for the moment, thinking of an earlier Quarter of my own life, one well before Halftime when I was for a couple of years tasked with leading an inner city high school for adolescents designated by the state as Socially and Emotionally Maladjusted (SEM), the descriptor-language of the 1970’s Education community for a broad array of adolescents.  Among our students were emotionally disturbed ones, delinquent kids, and learning disabled students. I was asked not to use the passé: Socially and Emotionally Disturbed (SED … which had gone out-of-favor) and was ordered, indeed, to call the school a Service Delivery System. As suggested in the title: Language seems to matter.  Anyhow, some of the kids were “pure forms,” I suppose, but most were mix-labeled ...  what you call something or someone, I repeat, apparently  matters a great deal.

There was a particular type, though, who my staff and I spoke of as “bullies.” They, I suppose, were not so different than the guys or gals who run roughshod over prison yards ... or maybe they were but wannabes.  These students were dismissive of all others and showed no obvious concern for how those others who came under their domination might feel. The bullies split their world into those who were with them, those who were against them and those who were so passive as to be almost invisible. Animals similarly and under the sway of their biologically prescribed instincts, recognize prey, predator and kin. We all have some of that splitting of our others into categories. These folk, though, were/are quite unstable in their divisions and stark in any demarcations they may define between them.  There was no wiggle-room in these adolescents for someone to not unilaterally support them: any shift in allegiance moved someone from kin to emotional predator and immediately, thereafter, to prey status. 

I should say that Narcissism is, too, present in us all. When on a dark and clear night, we look up at the stars, we find it difficult to recognize our sheer  unimportance in even our little Milky Way with its billions of stars and planets. We write poetry about the Heavens in order to make it our own, we name it by its sections or we boundary it with studies in Astronomy. Who could find sleep knowing just how insignificant we are to the Cosmos? 

Even those of us who are not caught up in paranoiac delusions look for evidence that everyday slights are intentionally present to cause us distress. "God is testing me," as if She wasn't busy tending to her other Earthly flock and the other sheep on distant Planets! All this is to say that we all, indeed, suffer from Splitting and Narcissistic vulnerability — to a greater or lesser extent.

These bullying types went further, though. They had no respect for legalities and none for the rules of the school which were — within limits — regulated by community meetings run democratically by Faculty, Students and Staff, functioning as a single judicial/legislative group. These students would snicker and smirk at any mention of regulations, as if they not only didn’t apply to them but were just plain silly and either refuse to attend or else ignore the proceedings while in progress. There was no recognition that laws and rules are put in place so that others, the members of a given polity could feel secure in their day by day activities … no sense that these others require security, just as they do, in responding to their own vulnerabilities by becoming bullies. For them, after all, 'what difference could it possibly make to these Objects who are available to me to be arranged and manipulated?' 

During these same years, I was invited by a Tough Love parent group to speak to them about their kids. I was about to begin my prepared remarks when one of the parents respectfully but forcefully asked: ‘Before you begin, could you tell us what it means to be civilized?’ Oops, I thought! I had been set up. No theories would still the disappointed passions in this crowd. These parents had been failed by the clinicians treating their kids, were expectedly upset by their kids’ delinquent behavior and, as a psychoanalyst, saw me as an apt and available goat to be roasted on the altar of their resentments. What to do? I could offer them some psycho-gobble-de-gook and tell them that their kids lacked a functional conscience ... I could even call that inner-voice by Freud’s German uber-Ich ... an Over I or Observing I or Superego. But calling something by name doesn’t define it; it labels it and maybe that’s what I’m trying to get at in these rambling thoughts. Maybe? it matters what something is at least as much as what we call it!

I found myself opining out loud, that night: ‘being civilized is the ability to stop at a red light in Rindge, NH, population 75, at 2 AM with full half-mile visibility in both directions.’ The crowd was quiet and the public hanging that I had feared was — at least temporarily — stayed. I went on to explain that Rules and Regs were not in place because they made rational sense but for other reasons. One parent, in agreement, then noted that she couldn’t fault her son’s logic and she agreed with him that it made no sense to make his bed every morning. Another couldn’t disagree, either, with her kid's repetitive claim that Alcohol was more dangerous than Pot. Her family home had, however, been ransacked by the Police using a duly executed search warrant looking for her son’s stash.   “Who’s fault was that?!” I suggested that we return to the example of the NH red light. We, as drivers and pedestrians, don’t want to suffer in what manner every driver is deciding for themselves how to interpret what that signal means, i.e., whether people will stop. Similarly, I reasoned that her Family had an expectation that members wouldn’t put each other at risk of being disturbed by the gendarmes or anyone else because of one family member’s well-reasoned decision that Pot was less dangerous than alcohol and, therefore, SHOULD be legal. Civilization is the recognition that, independent of what one may think, the welfare of other members of the community is a filter through which each of us must pass our planned behaviors prior to acting on it.

So, back to bullies. We already touched on a deficient store of empathy which cascades into both a splitting between with-me and agin’-me and to their sense that the only rules that matter are their rules. We saw how they offer no proffer  to Laws, Governments, or Agreements which have been  formulated or organized by others (current and prior) who are not Subjects in their Own Right but Objects to be manipulated ... pieces on a game board. Objects have no thoughts, no ideas and no relationships with others. "My subjectivity and mine alone has relevance."

There are other consequences, too, that precipitate from this failure to see others as Subjects and not manipulatable objects and some may be advantageous to them. Bullies possess little or no ability to hold two or more not-unreasonable thoughts in mind and do — in part, due to this — think more quickly than most of us — which in the jungle can be a good thing, an advantage in survival.  As creatures of instincts, they don't measure the relative value of different actions. Instincts are efficient. I remember being awakened by the yapping of two little dogs — like Romeos in a courtyard. They were singing to my estrous St. Bernard looking down upon them — a long-eared Juliet —  from an open window. No thought was to be paid by these diminutive courters to feasibility studies — these two little pip-squeaks would've required stilts to mount this Grand Dame. Still, their instincts — mediated by their noses — sang a different tune.  Instincts are not about choice but about immediate action; choice and nuance are not efficient, as they are not quick.

The sex-drive in healthy humans is, indeed, different than than the sex-instinct in animals. Freud was quite careful in calling the former triebe and the latter Insinkt; his translators were less careful.   To put it both simply and directly: rapists and other sociopaths are dominated by instinct, while healthy sexuality and other transactions are modulated by concern for the other … for the partner in whatever behaviors are being indulged. Fetishists are somewhere in between. Unlike animals and rapists, they recognize the existence of their sex-partners. But to a greater or lesser extent, fetishists replace the lover with a part, a specific ambience or a melody. It is no mean task to find a cur who requires candle-light or naughty lingerie to mount any available estrous bitch. 

Lastly and an effect of all the above styles-of-being is the absurdity to such bullies in thinking of any truth that goes beyond their own thought in the moment. They quite completely appear, at least, to believe that the only truth is the one they have just now-and-in-the-moment conjured up in their thinking. This applies equally to their ability to dismiss thoughts that occurred to them just moments prior to this expostulation — the only one that counts.

Let me backtrack to the question asked by the struggling Mother at the Tough Love  meeting about what her son lacked that would render him civilized — and, again, I return many decades to personal experiences. I trust the reader will excuse me, accepting the thought that what we members of Clan Anthropos know best is garnered from our experiences.

Woody Allen (“Random Reflections of a Second-Rate Mind”, Tikkun, Jan/Feb 1990, pp. 13-15) recommended in Tikkun that the editors consider removing any reference to Jewishness from the subtitle of their magazine. He reasoned that all forms of chauvinism lead to adversarialness and … war! I took it to mean that — in his reflections — any allegiances were a danger to life on earth.

I briefly recount the response I gave (which the Editors didn't publish). It occurred to me that there were four but not five positions that defined a civilization.

The least developed among us sees the existence of the other as an intolerable danger and openly seeks the other’s destruction. The other is accorded no subjectivity at all and any thoughts to the contrary by a member of their kin-group is, more or less, interpreted as traitorous and the equivalent of seeking membership in the hated group.

A slightly more developed person might be described by his war-cries: convert or die! The out-group is permitted existence if and only if it gives up its uniqueness and its identity and joins the person's kin-group. The Crusaders — those who marched on the Turks and sundry other infidels along their way giving them the choice to accept Christendom or die — were markedly different than a true-believer Nazi who, under no circumstances, could allow Gypsies, homosexuals, or Jews to enter the Aryan kingdom of heaven. It is not clear where to place the House Un-American Activities Hearings of America’s midcentury but, assuredly, many hate-mongerers and supremacists function on these primitive two levels.

Still more developed folk represent a far more civil manifestation of this sense of chosen-ness. A member of such a group vitiates the value of another’s prayers or political affiliations while paying lip-service to the out-group’s right to indulge their silliness. With this type of functioning, we see varying degrees of effort expended in order to achieve the in-group’s perspective. A kindly missionary functioned in this manner, when in a brief encounter, he — in a variety of ways — noted that I was chosen but misguided and suffering without Jesus from a deadly AIDS-like disease; he had only my best interest at heart and expressed his love for me and bemoaned the misfortunes that would befall me in the Next World.

The fourth and, perhaps, most progressed type of chauvinistic individual attains a primus inter pares (first among equals) view of myself with other. Such a person recognizes that his ideology, his religion, his thoughts and relationships are of great importance to him, in the same manner as his other's are to him. This, we may comfortably add, is quite a reach in itself. Those who progress to this mode of relating — to my way of thinking — have reached the pinnacle of civilized human relationship.

I suspect there are those who imagine that anthropos is capable of transcending even this fourth state and achieving a thoroughly achauvinistic state of being (e.g., Woody Allen); this writer is not among them. And while I don't wish to pigeon-hole some of my fellow travelers or limit them to this or that "basket," I cannot hide my sense that when we speak — as so many do, these days — of hitching a ride on the Wings of Our Better Angels, we are speaking of this capacity to see the other as a Subject in his or her own Right — just like me — a Primus inter Pares swimming about in this big Pot o'Soup that is life in the Twenty First Century.

Let me close with the following brief thoughts:

• What a relief from the burden of acting in a civilized manner it must be to gather about a school-yard bully and watch him act aggressively, wantonly and without the weight of concern for his others.

• What separates Schoolyard Bullies from Sociopathic Leaders is likely little more than age, position and firepower.

• What separates the Dog from the Man includes the capacity to indulge nuance and to measure before acting on an instinct.

• What separated a pugnacious John McCain from an adversarial Donald Trump was Sen. McCain's willingness to see others as Subjects in Their Own Right … loosely speaking? his ability to love … country, colleagues and family… however flawed the lover … however flawed the beloved.

*********************************

“Tell me, Father. How shall I know when the Great Unravelling has begun?”

             “Look not for signs and wonders in the sky, 

              my Son.”

“Then, how shall I know, Father?”

           “Look for an extra flutter in the sparrow’s wing.

            Listen to the cries of children seeking their Mothers!

            Hear the small voice seeking to be heard 

over the Evil King’s great din!

            The sparrow will speak to you, my Son, and I pray 

    you’ll listen.”