Unfortunately, the wish for their self reflection and a reconstitution of their integrity is unlikely.
My best guess is, it took several generations of bad decisions to get to where we are, and it will take many generations for our species to find a way out of this dark forest.
Yes, I also wish it were that simple. One pattern I think I am observing in a few writers ... Peter Turchin (history), Matthias Desmet (social-psychology), and Anneke Lucas (child sex-slave survivor) ... is a minimalizing of personal responsibility of what might be the born-to-the-bone predators among us I tend to lean more closer to the likes of Peter Breggin and A. Lobaczewski on this.
Whereas Turchin and Desmet seem to blame it on ammoral, systemic features, Lucas blames it on the failure of predators to face and defeat their own childhood demons. The older I get, the more I am inclined to think predators do what they do largely because of their success in knowing what they are. ... the dark side of that old dictum by Nietzsche to become what we are ... https://suitesculturelles.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/friedrich-nietzsches-thoughts-on-becoming-who-we-are/
I see elements of both - the system becomes more self-selecting of psychopathic types, and then the trauma these people and the supporting systems cause increases the pool and severity of the psychopathologies, in feedback loops?
Part 2 (Got a pop up message saying "Please type a Shorter Comment".
Damn. Even substack is going the way of Faccebook/Twitter.
This is not a one-off. After I resigned in protest, I appeared to be black-listed from even part-time adjunct positions at colleges in the Tokyo area. I just finished a two year stint as the only ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) for 12 public schools in Kunitachi, a small suburb of West Tokyo. I found myself in a similar position of taking orders from teachers who had not yet even been born when I was a teacher trainer in Tokyo. Although there were a few idealist-educators among them, meritocracy was never a part of the equation, and the primary pedagogic approach was military chain-of-command ... the right to impose one's will first based on ethnicity, then social status post-hoc justified by credentialism rather than meritocracy. The results ... predictable. https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan-jr.-high-kids-average-12-correct-answers-in-english-oral-test?
Yep, as much as I despise her politics, I tend to agree with Maggie Thatcher. There is no such thing as society. There is personal integrity and how far one is consciously willing to step over the line. At least that is what I want to believe.
But I admit, this is a belief that can not be proved, and has led me to two other problems.
One is that among potential collaborators against the encroaching totalitarian-authoritarianism, there are some who share a similar belief in the sanctity and responsibility of the individual — but are also trapped in a religious mind-set. By education or temperament, they seem to be capable of hearing or communicating their beliefs only through the literalist-fundamentalist lens of Christianity. Although my community of friends and acqaintances here in Japan is small, and we share the similar values and insights into this plandemic, not a single one is even nominally Christian. As I believe any ideology will attract its share of the weak and the predatory, I will not fight the new religion of scientism with an old religion. As I am not a very good journalist or essayist, I hope to use words as an artistic tool, but time is against me.
As for another problem, I've been watching a few YoutTubes by the brilliant Robert Spolosky lately, and from a purely neuro-biological-reductionist perspective, he makes a good argument for free-will as being illusory.
But in order to counter my suspicion that we do have more personal accountability than can be mechanistically accounted for, I've had to go back to Kuhn (Paradigms, Kuhn Loss, and Icommensurability) and Popper (Falsifiability) to question the power and limits of different definitions of science. And this brings me to another problem, as much as I prefer Lobaczewski over Desmet because of the former's emphasis on individual psychopathy as salient ... I disagree with Lobaczewski and doubt there can be a "science of evil" any more than a "science of good". I suspect I have yet to reconcile the science of Kuhn with the science of Popper.
It's rabbit holes like this that keep me from reading and writing as much as I wish I could ... few benefits for potential readers, and other than writing and thinking as therapy, nothing that is worth asking for a cup of coffee.
On that, will take a break, and try to bootstrap myself in the near future.
Part 1 ((Got a pop up message saying "Please type a Shorter Comment".)
Hi again Gary,
That makes perfect sense, and I can imagine that and let it rest.
But in looking from the lens of my own life, particularly from observing behavior in Japanese institutions, I also see a different dynamic at work. It appears that 'the system' is more of a second-order abstraction derived from a more salient (but subconscious) accumulation of 'slippery slope' individual choices. The system, kind of like Maggie Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society", appears to me to be an emergent epiphenomenon that masks an increasingly exponential accumulation of corrupt individual choices.
In past decades, apologists for Japanese exceptionalism tended to excuse the lack of moral autonomy under the the rubric of 'moral relativity' ... but after jumping through the hoops of meritocracy only to have found it was a carefully and consciously crafted illusion of meritocracy ... and not only having accumulated zero social capital, but having my work and resources appropriated by those in power ... I see a large part of the culture here as placing a higher priority on compliance to the illusion of society (illusions of harmony) rather than moral autonomy.
An interesting author and editor that appears to see it that way as well is Stephen Vlastos 'Invented Traditions of Modern Japan', 'Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan". The title of "Invented Traditions" hints at the consciously created illusions used by predators to control a working class in the same way that the oxymoronic title of Chomsky and Herman's "Manufacturing Consent" plays off of our ideals and conceits of individual choice. In both cases, the highest values of the working class may be different, but the way in which those values are constructed and gamed by the self-selecting ruling class pretty much appears the same.
One of the historic anecdotes in "Peasant Protests" was about a farmer (Kichiroji), who in a time of bad weather, put up his land as collateral to borrow money to feed his family. From the beginning, the money lender did not think the farmer would be able to pay back the borrowed money in the agreed upon one year ... but when the farmer returned a month ahead of time with full payment, the lender (banker), in conjunction with a crony, gave the farmer the run-around in such a way that no matter how hard the farmer tried to pay back the loan, and how many times ... the deadline came and went, and the banker promptly took possession of the land. When the outraged peasant brought this to the equivalence of a lawyer, the lawyer said that though the farmer was indeed in the right, and was cheated out of his land, the cost, time, and breaking of harmony in pursuing his case through legal means would end only in a Pyrrhic victory, so best to try to mend things privately. Being only a farmer with no social status, that did not go in favor of the cheated farmer. The money lender and his ill-gotten gains became the founder of the roots of the now 'harmonious' Fukushima Electric Power Company ... and if the meltdown during the tsunami of the nuclear power plant could be described with causes, there is plenty of evidence that systemic causes were distal at best. Proximal causes of the disaster were an accumulation of corrupt and/or incompetent individual choices.
But the reason I mentioned the farmer's story is not because of the world's worst nuclear tragedy, but because the run-around until time runs out, and the advice that challenging corruption in a court of law would be a Pyrrhic victory ... was exactly the same same tactic used to rob me of tenure at a Japanese college. Those tactics, and even more morally repulsive techniques including exclusion from any presumptions of reciprocity, and "stolen valor". That 'stolen valor' thingy was particularly repulsive.
I come from a Western tradition where community outreach is taken for granted as one of the requirements for promotion up the ranks of tenure to full professor. But as my description plays out, you'll see this is not an East-West thingy. My "colleagues" did not want to keep up with the same standards of activism that I felt obliged to give (they had other personal priorities higher than educational ideals) ... and put barriers to keep me from volunteerism and community outreach to the local city government, public schools, and even other departments at our own school .
But every three years, the school had to jump through the hoops of an official evaluation from the national Ministry of Education (hyoka) ... and without fail, someone from the business office would come to me, demand a detailed list of my volunteer activities over the last three years, and submit that list to the Ministry as proof the school was fulfilling community obligations ... hence evidence that this is not a cultural faux-pas on my part, but rather a deliberate gaming of the system by bad actors. This was particularly ironic because for about 4 or 5 years, I was one of only two foreigners in the country on the Ministry of Education's English Textbook Committee as a cultural advisor and editor.
I could go on ... how I was given a run-around between the Department Chairman and Dean of the School, one saying I was bound to follow the rules of a separate contract, the other saying I had the same contract, obligations, and rights as Japanese ... the other countering saying that I was hired by an earlier Dean, and so the current Dean's opinion held no weight, the current Dean disagreeing, the Department Chair saying I had not right to even see my 'secret' contract, and the two never agreeing to have a joint meeting with me to iron out my obligations and rights as stipulated by Japanese labor law. This is not systemic. It is a series of individual choices to exercise their will and power over others despite any system.
But I hesitate to call this racist because I've seem the same dynamics being played out on other Japanese ... "outsourcing" losses by finding ways to circumvent Japanese labor law and get rid of those who can not afford to defend themselves. This is not a systemic corruption of individuals, but rather corrupt individuals gaming the system.
Although this is only personal, anecdotal experience, it is enough for me to not place 'systemic problems' and 'personal corruption' at the same level of salience. I was working under, not with, bureaucratic careerists who gamed the system for their own advantage more than made the system.
I suspect, though can not prove, pretty similar dynamics are at work in the corporate nation-state of the U.S., China, Russia, any group larger than Dunbar's number, and many groups smaller. Even a nuclear family can led and destroyed a lone narcissist, psychopath, or opportunist.
"There is no such thing as society. There is personal integrity and how far one is consciously willing to step over the line."
If it were not so then how do we adjust for those who see past evil into the heart of things and fight against it? We may at times feed a beast or 2 inside of ourselves, but giving ourselves over to it is our choice.
I find what repulses me in others and myself motivates me to become a better person. Some people appear to lack this repulsion factor or their factor is aimed at those who are in need of respect, autonomy and compassion, not cruelty and intolerance.
Banzai to that SMI, a long lost substack alter ego? Yes, I am closer to the sentiments of that quote than its opposite. But staying within the limits of a conversational register, I've run up against another problem in getting a working grasp on the nature of evil.
While there is a lot of evidence to suggest a persistent minority are predisposed to be high in dark triad/cluster b personality traits (those predators among us), there is also literature to suggest people tend to change fundamental values as they rise in hierarchies ... I guess the equivalence of what Gary and others are calling systemic failure. A negative spin on that is that Lord Acton quote "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" — and like that "Lord of the Rings" thingy, most people do seem to give into the temptations of power. I guess Marcus Aurelius is one notable exception, and we remember that name because there have been so few like him.
But while walking home from a local community center today, I played devil's advocate with myself through a thought experiment. Whether through circumstances or temperament, I tend to see people as strung along a moral continuum from altruistic to predatory.
But if psychopaths are defined as not having the neural circuitry to have the capacity for empathy, then they also do not have the capacity to see such a moral continuum. As an alternative, perhaps the only way they are capable of seeing other humans is on a continuum of slave to ruling class, or in other words, "might makes right.", "the law of the jungle", "survival of the fittest", "prosperity theology", and so on.
This brings me back to the "power corrupts" thing. If most people can fall so easily to the dark side of power over others, and if in the morality of the psychopath, "good" can only be defined as the capacity to exert one's will over others, does that confine the Platonic ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty to the mind-set of the slave?
I would think not, if for no other reason than the altruistic, nurturing instincts are necessary to raise our young, make good use of the wisdom of our elders, and find novel solutions to the problems among the marginalized in a community.
Mixed in with a bit of the mind-set of a primatologist, I seem to be covering some of the same ground that Nietzsche explored. But again, by temperament, I may not have ever had the choice to be other than what I was genetically predisposed to be.
Robert Sopolsky seems to have made a good neurological argument for the absence of free will. If it is not by my choice, can my behavior be called morally "good" any more than a cat can be a good cat or a bad cat?
No clear answers about myself here, or the nature of good and evil, just questions ... but with you, a shared repulsion to those who would reduce others to disposable commodities, and/or are indifferent to their suffering.
Navel-gazing cheers for now.
Will trade you a "Creativity" card for "Peace". There will be plenty of peace waiting for me in the grave. But "joy" to both of us. Yes!
Part 3 — Beginning to think I've fallen into the which came first, the chicken or the egg thing. Really wishing you were in the Tokyo area. Have tipped a few mugs with substack writers Kitsune and Guy Gin, and after the first liter or so, things get clear enough to find the humor in it. https://guygin.substack.com/p/governor-kawakatsu-jabs-for-thee/comment/21902808
So interesting, Steve and Gary, I'm just watching the end of the 4-hr interview with Anneke, that Guy mentioned in a comment on my Ponerology article. Much to say about that in a new episode but I'm deeply impressed by her. Your statement has a contradiction in terms, Steve. If psychopaths are born-to-the-bone, how can they be held responsible for how they're born? If their circumstances cause them to be that way, particularly their own abuse as children, how can they be held responsible?
And if someone tortured and raped by over 200 psychopaths before she was 11 can "understand the most evil of men and even love them, if I dare say so," where does it come from for you to condemn them? I say this with love and respect for you, is it a form of superiority to distance yourself from them and say 'that could never be me'?
In the interview I kept seeing Brecht overriding her experience and being some of the macho protector and saying "I would have killed him." But I felt that, more than anyone, she's the person we need to learn from because she's gone through this experience and the healing process for us, so we don't need to. She's the catalyst, the crucible for this transformation. She knows the psychopaths intimately, not from the rapes but from the spiritual insight it gave her. If psychopaths act out of fear that they have no light, no spirit, nothing that's lovable, wouldn't you fulfill their motive by condemning them?
If you believe in multigenerational trauma...the eggs in a woman's uterus have (I can't recall specifically) three or more generations of exposure. Epigenetics are handed down and I am not absolving people of personal responsibility. And we need to acknowledge the exposure energetically, physically, spiritually, psychologically and for me it is a both/and. It's layers or tentacles. Have you ever tried to pull clover from your lawn and see how it's intertwined. I think our development on all those levels are like that. Not simplistically explained by any means.
I have also thought the idea that all the psychopaths and narcissists are born that way and that they cannot change excuses them of the responsibility of their deeds, and that doesn't seem right.
I would fall on the other side of that contradiction, Gary. If they're not born that way, how did they get that way? If it's not nature, it's nurture or the sum of the circumstances of their lives. Abusers were themselves abused. Why do I think I'd be different if I was born into their circumstances? They are me on a much harder path.
If our objective is to end the behavior, maybe blame feels good but goes in the wrong direction. Maybe it reinforces the fear of the psychopath that he's beyond redemption, so evil that there's no spark of the divine left in him. So what does he have to lose?
As far as I can see they are born into brutalising family systems, which create "monsters". Even being put in boarding schools [which many of our politicians and prime ministers in the uk have undergone] can have massive traumatizing effect ["boarding school syndrome"]. As trauma can be undone, they are capable of change, and hence responsible for what they do, although this is a big ask in their case because of the tons of inter and transgenerational trauma. I will read your post with interest.
I tend to agree Julie. Like many historians, I think it is a cyclic process, but the variables are still too many and subtle for me to choose any single theory such as The Fourth Turning or Peter Turchin's latest book. On the other hand, YouTube mandelbrot sets are pretty and meaningful distraction as the world for most of us crumbles.
Gary, I have the same thoughts and feelings and I thank you for expressing them and sharing. Our society needs deep healing. We also need to educate people on the importance of parenting children in a functional manner that breaks the cycle of generational trauma.
Not everyone has those skills, tendencies, abilities. It makes it a bit fairytale-ish. Easier said than done. If you don't have a good operating manual or software system, it's not easy. And like Gary says, you can do your work to get a better operating system or upgrade your software, but not everyone is doing that. So multigenerational trauma rolls downhill like a fire that catches and is unstoppable. For some, it's unstoppable. For others, they can put the fire out. For others it may be smoldering.
With age I find myself moving gently away from pure Blue to a tinge of Red (deep Lavender?lol) I've spent 65 of my years in solidarity with marginalized groups of many kinds. It took me a long time to accept that was also volunteering to be a flack-catcher- as one mentor put it to me when I was grizzling about why the nursing staff (I'm a physician) singled me out for little power plays, she cheerfully reminded me "well, Jen, you are the safest and least punitive member of a powerful and often hated class, what do you expect?" Currently, my (sorry I know it's a small one) battle is in the 'preferred pronoun" arena. At work, every time I fail to overcome a lifetime of conditioning and don't use "they" in the singular, one of the social workers will gleefully pounce. I know it's because I'm harmless. The truly harmful, mean people are too scary to challenge.
Not too new - I wrote this on facebook a year ago and it reminded of it this morning :-) Sometimes I get into flow to states when more poetic prose arises!
Not just you! It's me as well. I'm allergic to this type of tyranny. It's completely upsetting, sickening and suffocating to my very soul. And I have no word for what it causes in me, when I see people blindly following every agenda and every order, no matter how inhumane and how violating it is to our human rights.
It's unlikely that the power-hungry few will ever find humanity and compassion in them. I think anything resembling kindness and empathy for the general population, has been bred out of these wealthy megalomaniacs for many generations.
But I do hope that there will be self reflection and an awakening to what is actually going on in the brainwashed masses.
I've been detoxing from it, Gary, and generally feeling better for it. I want to start something that is a positive action, in its own space, not simply reactive to all this tixic junk, junk, junk. Every time I feel I may be a bit closer, I see what some people are grappling with here in s/s and lose confidence that something so Otherwise could be useful at such a time. But I may get there.
Thanks, Gary. I need allies and confidence in what can be achieved. I’ve responded to this invitation, from Michael Howard, since it has significant overlaps with one of my own concepts:
As far as I can tell, they are encultured into family systems which are brutalizing, and creates monsters, with huge amounts of trans-generational and inter-generational truama. There is even a "boarding school syndrome" that has been identified.
Yep. I have met some of them. I attended one of their schools and later worked in the City of London. You are totally right. It is pitiful the way they treat their children.
One of my friends committed suicide and at her funeral her mother stood and complained that her daughter had failed in life. I took an opportunity to chat with that woman later in the day and left her in no doubt about my opinion that she, above all others, had driven her daughter to commit suicide with her constant dissatisfaction and unbridled contempt.
Super Gary. Many of your articles describe things the way I`m thinking, nowadays.
Klara
Thank you. Good to hear from you!
It's not "just you".
Unfortunately, the wish for their self reflection and a reconstitution of their integrity is unlikely.
My best guess is, it took several generations of bad decisions to get to where we are, and it will take many generations for our species to find a way out of this dark forest.
Yes, like most wishes it is a fantasy, especially because of the inter- and trans-generational trauma which would need undoing.
Hi Gary.
Yes, I also wish it were that simple. One pattern I think I am observing in a few writers ... Peter Turchin (history), Matthias Desmet (social-psychology), and Anneke Lucas (child sex-slave survivor) ... is a minimalizing of personal responsibility of what might be the born-to-the-bone predators among us I tend to lean more closer to the likes of Peter Breggin and A. Lobaczewski on this.
Whereas Turchin and Desmet seem to blame it on ammoral, systemic features, Lucas blames it on the failure of predators to face and defeat their own childhood demons. The older I get, the more I am inclined to think predators do what they do largely because of their success in knowing what they are. ... the dark side of that old dictum by Nietzsche to become what we are ... https://suitesculturelles.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/friedrich-nietzsches-thoughts-on-becoming-who-we-are/
Cheers Gary
I see elements of both - the system becomes more self-selecting of psychopathic types, and then the trauma these people and the supporting systems cause increases the pool and severity of the psychopathologies, in feedback loops?
Part 2 (Got a pop up message saying "Please type a Shorter Comment".
Damn. Even substack is going the way of Faccebook/Twitter.
This is not a one-off. After I resigned in protest, I appeared to be black-listed from even part-time adjunct positions at colleges in the Tokyo area. I just finished a two year stint as the only ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) for 12 public schools in Kunitachi, a small suburb of West Tokyo. I found myself in a similar position of taking orders from teachers who had not yet even been born when I was a teacher trainer in Tokyo. Although there were a few idealist-educators among them, meritocracy was never a part of the equation, and the primary pedagogic approach was military chain-of-command ... the right to impose one's will first based on ethnicity, then social status post-hoc justified by credentialism rather than meritocracy. The results ... predictable. https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan-jr.-high-kids-average-12-correct-answers-in-english-oral-test?
Yep, as much as I despise her politics, I tend to agree with Maggie Thatcher. There is no such thing as society. There is personal integrity and how far one is consciously willing to step over the line. At least that is what I want to believe.
But I admit, this is a belief that can not be proved, and has led me to two other problems.
One is that among potential collaborators against the encroaching totalitarian-authoritarianism, there are some who share a similar belief in the sanctity and responsibility of the individual — but are also trapped in a religious mind-set. By education or temperament, they seem to be capable of hearing or communicating their beliefs only through the literalist-fundamentalist lens of Christianity. Although my community of friends and acqaintances here in Japan is small, and we share the similar values and insights into this plandemic, not a single one is even nominally Christian. As I believe any ideology will attract its share of the weak and the predatory, I will not fight the new religion of scientism with an old religion. As I am not a very good journalist or essayist, I hope to use words as an artistic tool, but time is against me.
As for another problem, I've been watching a few YoutTubes by the brilliant Robert Spolosky lately, and from a purely neuro-biological-reductionist perspective, he makes a good argument for free-will as being illusory.
But in order to counter my suspicion that we do have more personal accountability than can be mechanistically accounted for, I've had to go back to Kuhn (Paradigms, Kuhn Loss, and Icommensurability) and Popper (Falsifiability) to question the power and limits of different definitions of science. And this brings me to another problem, as much as I prefer Lobaczewski over Desmet because of the former's emphasis on individual psychopathy as salient ... I disagree with Lobaczewski and doubt there can be a "science of evil" any more than a "science of good". I suspect I have yet to reconcile the science of Kuhn with the science of Popper.
It's rabbit holes like this that keep me from reading and writing as much as I wish I could ... few benefits for potential readers, and other than writing and thinking as therapy, nothing that is worth asking for a cup of coffee.
On that, will take a break, and try to bootstrap myself in the near future.
Cheers Gary.
steve
Part 1 ((Got a pop up message saying "Please type a Shorter Comment".)
Hi again Gary,
That makes perfect sense, and I can imagine that and let it rest.
But in looking from the lens of my own life, particularly from observing behavior in Japanese institutions, I also see a different dynamic at work. It appears that 'the system' is more of a second-order abstraction derived from a more salient (but subconscious) accumulation of 'slippery slope' individual choices. The system, kind of like Maggie Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society", appears to me to be an emergent epiphenomenon that masks an increasingly exponential accumulation of corrupt individual choices.
In past decades, apologists for Japanese exceptionalism tended to excuse the lack of moral autonomy under the the rubric of 'moral relativity' ... but after jumping through the hoops of meritocracy only to have found it was a carefully and consciously crafted illusion of meritocracy ... and not only having accumulated zero social capital, but having my work and resources appropriated by those in power ... I see a large part of the culture here as placing a higher priority on compliance to the illusion of society (illusions of harmony) rather than moral autonomy.
An interesting author and editor that appears to see it that way as well is Stephen Vlastos 'Invented Traditions of Modern Japan', 'Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan". The title of "Invented Traditions" hints at the consciously created illusions used by predators to control a working class in the same way that the oxymoronic title of Chomsky and Herman's "Manufacturing Consent" plays off of our ideals and conceits of individual choice. In both cases, the highest values of the working class may be different, but the way in which those values are constructed and gamed by the self-selecting ruling class pretty much appears the same.
One of the historic anecdotes in "Peasant Protests" was about a farmer (Kichiroji), who in a time of bad weather, put up his land as collateral to borrow money to feed his family. From the beginning, the money lender did not think the farmer would be able to pay back the borrowed money in the agreed upon one year ... but when the farmer returned a month ahead of time with full payment, the lender (banker), in conjunction with a crony, gave the farmer the run-around in such a way that no matter how hard the farmer tried to pay back the loan, and how many times ... the deadline came and went, and the banker promptly took possession of the land. When the outraged peasant brought this to the equivalence of a lawyer, the lawyer said that though the farmer was indeed in the right, and was cheated out of his land, the cost, time, and breaking of harmony in pursuing his case through legal means would end only in a Pyrrhic victory, so best to try to mend things privately. Being only a farmer with no social status, that did not go in favor of the cheated farmer. The money lender and his ill-gotten gains became the founder of the roots of the now 'harmonious' Fukushima Electric Power Company ... and if the meltdown during the tsunami of the nuclear power plant could be described with causes, there is plenty of evidence that systemic causes were distal at best. Proximal causes of the disaster were an accumulation of corrupt and/or incompetent individual choices.
But the reason I mentioned the farmer's story is not because of the world's worst nuclear tragedy, but because the run-around until time runs out, and the advice that challenging corruption in a court of law would be a Pyrrhic victory ... was exactly the same same tactic used to rob me of tenure at a Japanese college. Those tactics, and even more morally repulsive techniques including exclusion from any presumptions of reciprocity, and "stolen valor". That 'stolen valor' thingy was particularly repulsive.
I come from a Western tradition where community outreach is taken for granted as one of the requirements for promotion up the ranks of tenure to full professor. But as my description plays out, you'll see this is not an East-West thingy. My "colleagues" did not want to keep up with the same standards of activism that I felt obliged to give (they had other personal priorities higher than educational ideals) ... and put barriers to keep me from volunteerism and community outreach to the local city government, public schools, and even other departments at our own school .
But every three years, the school had to jump through the hoops of an official evaluation from the national Ministry of Education (hyoka) ... and without fail, someone from the business office would come to me, demand a detailed list of my volunteer activities over the last three years, and submit that list to the Ministry as proof the school was fulfilling community obligations ... hence evidence that this is not a cultural faux-pas on my part, but rather a deliberate gaming of the system by bad actors. This was particularly ironic because for about 4 or 5 years, I was one of only two foreigners in the country on the Ministry of Education's English Textbook Committee as a cultural advisor and editor.
I could go on ... how I was given a run-around between the Department Chairman and Dean of the School, one saying I was bound to follow the rules of a separate contract, the other saying I had the same contract, obligations, and rights as Japanese ... the other countering saying that I was hired by an earlier Dean, and so the current Dean's opinion held no weight, the current Dean disagreeing, the Department Chair saying I had not right to even see my 'secret' contract, and the two never agreeing to have a joint meeting with me to iron out my obligations and rights as stipulated by Japanese labor law. This is not systemic. It is a series of individual choices to exercise their will and power over others despite any system.
But I hesitate to call this racist because I've seem the same dynamics being played out on other Japanese ... "outsourcing" losses by finding ways to circumvent Japanese labor law and get rid of those who can not afford to defend themselves. This is not a systemic corruption of individuals, but rather corrupt individuals gaming the system.
Although this is only personal, anecdotal experience, it is enough for me to not place 'systemic problems' and 'personal corruption' at the same level of salience. I was working under, not with, bureaucratic careerists who gamed the system for their own advantage more than made the system.
I suspect, though can not prove, pretty similar dynamics are at work in the corporate nation-state of the U.S., China, Russia, any group larger than Dunbar's number, and many groups smaller. Even a nuclear family can led and destroyed a lone narcissist, psychopath, or opportunist.
To be continued ...
Hi Steven! 🌹
I love this quote and believe it is true:
"There is no such thing as society. There is personal integrity and how far one is consciously willing to step over the line."
If it were not so then how do we adjust for those who see past evil into the heart of things and fight against it? We may at times feed a beast or 2 inside of ourselves, but giving ourselves over to it is our choice.
I find what repulses me in others and myself motivates me to become a better person. Some people appear to lack this repulsion factor or their factor is aimed at those who are in need of respect, autonomy and compassion, not cruelty and intolerance.
Peace and joy to you Steven 🙏
Banzai to that SMI, a long lost substack alter ego? Yes, I am closer to the sentiments of that quote than its opposite. But staying within the limits of a conversational register, I've run up against another problem in getting a working grasp on the nature of evil.
While there is a lot of evidence to suggest a persistent minority are predisposed to be high in dark triad/cluster b personality traits (those predators among us), there is also literature to suggest people tend to change fundamental values as they rise in hierarchies ... I guess the equivalence of what Gary and others are calling systemic failure. A negative spin on that is that Lord Acton quote "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" — and like that "Lord of the Rings" thingy, most people do seem to give into the temptations of power. I guess Marcus Aurelius is one notable exception, and we remember that name because there have been so few like him.
But while walking home from a local community center today, I played devil's advocate with myself through a thought experiment. Whether through circumstances or temperament, I tend to see people as strung along a moral continuum from altruistic to predatory.
But if psychopaths are defined as not having the neural circuitry to have the capacity for empathy, then they also do not have the capacity to see such a moral continuum. As an alternative, perhaps the only way they are capable of seeing other humans is on a continuum of slave to ruling class, or in other words, "might makes right.", "the law of the jungle", "survival of the fittest", "prosperity theology", and so on.
This brings me back to the "power corrupts" thing. If most people can fall so easily to the dark side of power over others, and if in the morality of the psychopath, "good" can only be defined as the capacity to exert one's will over others, does that confine the Platonic ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty to the mind-set of the slave?
I would think not, if for no other reason than the altruistic, nurturing instincts are necessary to raise our young, make good use of the wisdom of our elders, and find novel solutions to the problems among the marginalized in a community.
Mixed in with a bit of the mind-set of a primatologist, I seem to be covering some of the same ground that Nietzsche explored. But again, by temperament, I may not have ever had the choice to be other than what I was genetically predisposed to be.
Robert Sopolsky seems to have made a good neurological argument for the absence of free will. If it is not by my choice, can my behavior be called morally "good" any more than a cat can be a good cat or a bad cat?
No clear answers about myself here, or the nature of good and evil, just questions ... but with you, a shared repulsion to those who would reduce others to disposable commodities, and/or are indifferent to their suffering.
Navel-gazing cheers for now.
Will trade you a "Creativity" card for "Peace". There will be plenty of peace waiting for me in the grave. But "joy" to both of us. Yes!
Lots of joy.
steve
🙏❤🌹
Part 3 — Beginning to think I've fallen into the which came first, the chicken or the egg thing. Really wishing you were in the Tokyo area. Have tipped a few mugs with substack writers Kitsune and Guy Gin, and after the first liter or so, things get clear enough to find the humor in it. https://guygin.substack.com/p/governor-kawakatsu-jabs-for-thee/comment/21902808
Cheers Gary.
Keep up the good fight!
So interesting, Steve and Gary, I'm just watching the end of the 4-hr interview with Anneke, that Guy mentioned in a comment on my Ponerology article. Much to say about that in a new episode but I'm deeply impressed by her. Your statement has a contradiction in terms, Steve. If psychopaths are born-to-the-bone, how can they be held responsible for how they're born? If their circumstances cause them to be that way, particularly their own abuse as children, how can they be held responsible?
And if someone tortured and raped by over 200 psychopaths before she was 11 can "understand the most evil of men and even love them, if I dare say so," where does it come from for you to condemn them? I say this with love and respect for you, is it a form of superiority to distance yourself from them and say 'that could never be me'?
In the interview I kept seeing Brecht overriding her experience and being some of the macho protector and saying "I would have killed him." But I felt that, more than anyone, she's the person we need to learn from because she's gone through this experience and the healing process for us, so we don't need to. She's the catalyst, the crucible for this transformation. She knows the psychopaths intimately, not from the rapes but from the spiritual insight it gave her. If psychopaths act out of fear that they have no light, no spirit, nothing that's lovable, wouldn't you fulfill their motive by condemning them?
If you believe in multigenerational trauma...the eggs in a woman's uterus have (I can't recall specifically) three or more generations of exposure. Epigenetics are handed down and I am not absolving people of personal responsibility. And we need to acknowledge the exposure energetically, physically, spiritually, psychologically and for me it is a both/and. It's layers or tentacles. Have you ever tried to pull clover from your lawn and see how it's intertwined. I think our development on all those levels are like that. Not simplistically explained by any means.
I have also thought the idea that all the psychopaths and narcissists are born that way and that they cannot change excuses them of the responsibility of their deeds, and that doesn't seem right.
I would fall on the other side of that contradiction, Gary. If they're not born that way, how did they get that way? If it's not nature, it's nurture or the sum of the circumstances of their lives. Abusers were themselves abused. Why do I think I'd be different if I was born into their circumstances? They are me on a much harder path.
If our objective is to end the behavior, maybe blame feels good but goes in the wrong direction. Maybe it reinforces the fear of the psychopath that he's beyond redemption, so evil that there's no spark of the divine left in him. So what does he have to lose?
I started this exploration in this episode, that maybe you've already seen: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/ponerology-the-question-of-evil. I'll be continuing it in an episode on Pedo-Sadist Cults & Anneke Lucas.
As far as I can see they are born into brutalising family systems, which create "monsters". Even being put in boarding schools [which many of our politicians and prime ministers in the uk have undergone] can have massive traumatizing effect ["boarding school syndrome"]. As trauma can be undone, they are capable of change, and hence responsible for what they do, although this is a big ask in their case because of the tons of inter and transgenerational trauma. I will read your post with interest.
I believe we are at the end of a very long planned out process ... 🙁. .. & I’m not feeling hopeful
I tend to agree Julie. Like many historians, I think it is a cyclic process, but the variables are still too many and subtle for me to choose any single theory such as The Fourth Turning or Peter Turchin's latest book. On the other hand, YouTube mandelbrot sets are pretty and meaningful distraction as the world for most of us crumbles.
Cheers from Japan Julie,
steve
“The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Plato
You have measured them and correctly judged that they chose poorly.
All you can do is 1.) go outside in nature everyday 2.) spend lots of time with those you love ❤️.. animal or human ..
All part of the globalization plan. Make society so chaotic we will be begging them to swoop in & save us 🙏
No, it is not just you.
Gary, I have the same thoughts and feelings and I thank you for expressing them and sharing. Our society needs deep healing. We also need to educate people on the importance of parenting children in a functional manner that breaks the cycle of generational trauma.
I agree this is the only true way forward.
Not everyone has those skills, tendencies, abilities. It makes it a bit fairytale-ish. Easier said than done. If you don't have a good operating manual or software system, it's not easy. And like Gary says, you can do your work to get a better operating system or upgrade your software, but not everyone is doing that. So multigenerational trauma rolls downhill like a fire that catches and is unstoppable. For some, it's unstoppable. For others, they can put the fire out. For others it may be smoldering.
Those whom we disdain often need the most help from us...and why compassion isn't popular. I couldn't agree more Gary.
With age I find myself moving gently away from pure Blue to a tinge of Red (deep Lavender?lol) I've spent 65 of my years in solidarity with marginalized groups of many kinds. It took me a long time to accept that was also volunteering to be a flack-catcher- as one mentor put it to me when I was grizzling about why the nursing staff (I'm a physician) singled me out for little power plays, she cheerfully reminded me "well, Jen, you are the safest and least punitive member of a powerful and often hated class, what do you expect?" Currently, my (sorry I know it's a small one) battle is in the 'preferred pronoun" arena. At work, every time I fail to overcome a lifetime of conditioning and don't use "they" in the singular, one of the social workers will gleefully pounce. I know it's because I'm harmless. The truly harmful, mean people are too scary to challenge.
Hey, enjoying your new style, Gary. Very succinct.
Not too new - I wrote this on facebook a year ago and it reminded of it this morning :-) Sometimes I get into flow to states when more poetic prose arises!
Gold
Thank you!
Not just you! It's me as well. I'm allergic to this type of tyranny. It's completely upsetting, sickening and suffocating to my very soul. And I have no word for what it causes in me, when I see people blindly following every agenda and every order, no matter how inhumane and how violating it is to our human rights.
It's unlikely that the power-hungry few will ever find humanity and compassion in them. I think anything resembling kindness and empathy for the general population, has been bred out of these wealthy megalomaniacs for many generations.
But I do hope that there will be self reflection and an awakening to what is actually going on in the brainwashed masses.
Allergy - thats a good analogy. Some of us are allergic to tyranny, and too many others are allergic to freedom [i.e. responsibility].
No...That is just you, me and everyone !
I've been detoxing from it, Gary, and generally feeling better for it. I want to start something that is a positive action, in its own space, not simply reactive to all this tixic junk, junk, junk. Every time I feel I may be a bit closer, I see what some people are grappling with here in s/s and lose confidence that something so Otherwise could be useful at such a time. But I may get there.
Please keep going, it is what is needed.
Thanks, Gary. I need allies and confidence in what can be achieved. I’ve responded to this invitation, from Michael Howard, since it has significant overlaps with one of my own concepts:
https://open.substack.com/pub/anthonyhoward/p/an-invitation-to-a-conversation
Oh: Anthony Howard
Do we have any prior evidence that the gits have ever played nice at any point in known history?
Asking for the entire species.
No, which is why this is just wishful thinking.
As far as I can tell, they are encultured into family systems which are brutalizing, and creates monsters, with huge amounts of trans-generational and inter-generational truama. There is even a "boarding school syndrome" that has been identified.
Yep. I have met some of them. I attended one of their schools and later worked in the City of London. You are totally right. It is pitiful the way they treat their children.
One of my friends committed suicide and at her funeral her mother stood and complained that her daughter had failed in life. I took an opportunity to chat with that woman later in the day and left her in no doubt about my opinion that she, above all others, had driven her daughter to commit suicide with her constant dissatisfaction and unbridled contempt.