Month: January 2011

Most of us have seen this term, sociopath, for someone who is utterly lacking in compassion, empathy, or conscience. They are not clinically insane, and can act quite normal for entire lifetimes. They are just missing something, in some situations. When other people cry, they have to pretend. If you want an example of the sociopath as hero, just watch the hugely popular Dexter, currently the most popular show among Democrats, but no doubt also very popular with Republicans. I would suspect it’s a few point swing.

Can sociopathy be created through ideology or conditioning? I am thinking, specifically, of Jerod Loughner, assassin of a nine year old girl, 3 little old ladies, one judge, and someone I believe in their thirties. He does not appear to feel remorse.

Who shoots little girls, and feels no remorse? To call him schizophrenic does not seem right. His writings could quite easily be explained by being high. When you are high, things seem to make sense that really don’t. You can quite easily get to a clinically acute psychotic state through sleep deprivation, without actually being psychotic.

What I think most likely is that he absorbed in his environment an ethos of violence, specifically through music, but also through other media.

The question I want to ask is this: can ideas, in themselves, deprive people of conscience? Take the Communists in Vietnam. They committed all sorts of atrocities, for example taking flamethrowers to a village, killing hundreds, as very conscious policy. Who are these people who kill in cold blood simply because people are “class traitors”? How do you get to the state where torture is justified simply because someone has been accused of being an ideological other?

I see no practical difference between the rank and file soldiers who kept order in the “reeducation” camps of the Vietnamese “revolution”, and those who saw to order in the concentration camps of the Nazis. Who were these people? How did they justify to themselves what they did?

Effectively, it seems that the symptoms of sociopathy, of consciencelessness, can be achieved simply by creating a world view in which others are denuded of their humanity as a result of their belonging to some other group. For example, Leftists routinely blame Liberals for all sorts of things, in this particular case of complicity in murder.

Would it not be permissable to kill people who are complicit in murder?

I have been told explictly, on the Daily Cause, that it is acceptable to hate people who hate others. If you want to hate, then, all you have to do is find some group of cultural or ideological Others that you can paint as being “hating”. Then it’s on.

Clearly, some leftists are simply sociopaths searching for an outlet for their aggressive and often sadistic energies. Such seems to me to have been the case with Sergei Nechaev.

If you read that text, it advocates consciencelessness. It advocates destruction. It advocates the subversion of all social institutions, and essentially everything that is standing. It Nihilism, in a formal sense. That was the term used by opponents of this pattern of thought, which offered nothing but death, in pursuit of goals that were never defined.

How does ideology create hate? How does it enable people to stop feeling sorry for other people, where sympathy is a very natural human reaction?

These are of course old questions, but good ones, nonetheless. The reliable one inference I will make is that hatred is always wrong. It is clearly sometimes necessary to fight and even kill one’s enemies, but hating them is always wrong.

If you hate haters, you are a hater. This seems clear enough.

This is a bit rambling, but I wanted to think out loud on this for a few minutes.

I was in Half Price Books today, and for whatever reason every hipster in town seemed to be there. I am told those disks people put in their earlobes are called “gauges”, and there were a lot of them. I could certainly be mistaken, but in general I don’t think there would be much use asking people like that their politics. I’ve met pot smoking conservatives (who usually self identify as libertarians) but no true conservative hippies.

And I was thinking about it: in general, I associate bookstores with leftists (again, I reserve the word Liberal for people whose main aim is protecting liberty). Why is this, I wondered?

And as I thought about it, it occurred to me that conservatives know what they believe. They have a consistent worldview, that really doesn’t change with the latest study or poll. They tend to believe in the Bible, limited government, the importance of family and marriage, the right to keep and bear arms, etc. Most of them could write their core beliefs on a poster on the wall, and not find them significantly changed 50 years later.

For example, take the following from William Boetcker, first penned in 1916:

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Let me say I had posted that on my wall at age 16, and was now 94. Could I not still believe it? Would I have had to alter any of those beliefs in the interim?

Good principles are eternal, even though their time-delineated iteration may differ: this is foundational Conservatism.

Leftists do not think like this. Being “modern”, they depend for their worldviews on science, and “science” changes constantly both for valid and corrupt reasons. When someone says to eat soy, they eat soy. When someone says to stop eating soy, they stop. When someone says the Earth is warming, they vote to get rid of 100 watt lightbulbs. If and when those same people say they were wrong, we will get them back.

And they have to spend a lot of time reading since they are incomplete. They don’t know who they are. They “know” they are the good ones, who want to help the poor, minorities, the Earth, animals, women, and everyone else who is “oppressed”. They are just not always sure why and how. They need to be told. They have to spend a lot of time synchronizing amongst themselves.

I would suspect leftists DO read more books than conservatives. They have to. The reality is that core realities about the human condition really don’t change. The core elements of politics and economics don’t change.

Thus, they are the only ones who listen when someone “proves” that you CAN in fact strengthen the weak by weakening the strong; or that you CAN help small men by tearing down big men; or that you CAN help the poor by destroying the rich.

As I see it, conformity to the herd, and conformity to principle are the only two options, and only one of them is suitable for a free and dignified nation. Yes, conformity to principle is a conformity to tradition–that of Rationalism–but that is the only human tradition which has enabled sustainable self governance and freedom amidst a multiplicity of worldviews, and in radically changing circumstances.

Intellectuals are people who start with cartoons, and buff them until they look like portraits. Serious thinkers–another animal entirely–are people who look for as many actual pictures as they can find, from as many angles as possible, and reach decisions only after having done so.

Intellectuals are people who want to believe certain things about the world. Serious thinkers are people who have a vision for the world, who care about outcomes, and who realize that the starting point is always what is, not what ought to be.

What led to these comments was pondering that Van Jones became a Communist–in his own words–after being jailed in the aftermath of the very defensible “Not Guilty” verdict with reference to the officers who arrested Rodney King and his friends. He has dedicated a lifetime to what he probably refers to as an ideal (and what I would refer to as a nihilistic cult), on the basis of a lie.

Did he ever bother to try and learn the facts of the case? Do any Communists? No: if they did, they would not be Communists. Self evidently, people who simply want power can and have used Communism, but I am referring to people who on some level are delusional enough to self identify themselves as trying to help the world.

They start with very simple-minded, muddy, confused ideas, then read and write long books based on those cartoonish premises, such as greed being unique to Capitalism, and autocracies based on a different rhetorical stance as being even possibly better in reality.

It seems to me that a short definition of mental health is the ability to achieve chosen tasks that take time. Mental health is goal achievement, and goal achievement is mental health.

Morality, in turn, is nothing but goal achievement applied to how our behavior correllates to our chosen principles. It is doing the things we think should be done (charity, fighting for what is right, being responsible), and not doing the things we think we ought not to do, even when they are more convenient than hewing to our moral beliefs. Example would include lying, cheating, and stealing.

In the spirit of openness, it is truly stunning to me how rapidly I personally get distracted from chosen tasks. If it involves writing of some sort, it will usually get done. If it is work-related or family-related, it will get done. My friends can rely on me.

But I can’t rely on myself. I am better than most, but how is it that someone–in some cases, this is me–could join a gym or Weight Watchers, or buy a set of motivational CD’s, or vow to take up a musical instrument and not even last a MONTH? Or even a WEEK?

Who are we when we are that disorganized? Who am I when I am that disorganized?

I had asked the question a week or something ago about where we rest. It seems to me we “rest”, seemingly paradoxically, in goal achievement. In creating and accomplishing goals, we determine for ourselves and others who we ARE. And Being, in what amounts to an existential ontology, is where we rest. Becoming approximates Essence. I came up with that a while ago, and think it is clever. Perhaps I am wrong.

Net, net: I can’t speak from personal experience of complete personal congruence of thought, word and action. They are often at odds with one another. Yet this seems to me the path forward.

I have been making some progress in this of late, which is encouraging.