“Could You Be A Sociopath?”

“Could You Be A Sociopath?”    July 12, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) wrote in 1962, when The New Yorker commissioned her, a Jew of who had narrowly escaped from Nazi Germany herself, to travel to Jerusalem and report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann — one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.

“You are quite right, I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/07/hannah-arendt-the-banality-of-evil/?fbclid=IwAR2_QRBEW3eq4-YH1NnnX-9PBHz8MpRvXICd2q2cyQS4ObGQz6dmZCudYIs

In October of 1989 there was an earthquake in San Francisco and a very old part of their freeway system, the Nimitz, collapsed. 11 people lost their lives in this incident, 39 people were trapped in their cars between these pancaked layers of the freeway who were eventually rescued. 

I remember when it happened. I was living in Louisville, KY. My daughter was just 10 months old; I had a new doctorate and a challenging career and, frankly, I didn’t think about this incident for a long time. Check your own feelings about it now . . . do you remember it? Does it pull any emotional energy out of you?

A few years ago, I met a delightful single woman for dinner at a French restaurant about 50 miles west of town. She is a children’s author who lives alone on a farm in the wilds of southern Missouri. She was one of the 39 people pulled from her car from between the collapsed expressway. 

She was a college student then but after the incident, she couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork. She took the money she had for her education and found the best deal on just a tract of land that she could find and moved to live in noiseless isolation without crowded expressways and long commutes. Though she never married, never had children, she applied her considerable intellect to writing children’s books and has had a successful career. 

I was evidently neither sufficiently charming nor interesting enough to entice her to meet me for a second dinner, but we speak now and then. I called to check on her after the pandemic “stay at home orders” and she laughed and said, “I was made for this. Staying home alone is what I do.” 

I know you were not at the dinner with us that night but when you look at this image of the collapsed highways now, do you feel a little something more? Knowing that about an hour and half west of here, there is a beautiful, mature woman, who is still, in a way, stuck in her car between two giant slabs of concrete and steel? Because, folks, we do not have an unlimited supply of empathy. We can only care about so much before we become emotionally exhausted. But if you spent a couple of hours with this author, you would remember the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway and the earthquake in San Francisco in October of 1989 differently.

One of the most memorable yet disturbing moments of my graduate school education was when my counseling professor, the late Dr. Liston Mills, said to me, “You try to tell yourself that you love all of your clients but the fact is that no one actually loves more than four or five people at any time. If you are a saint, you might be able to muster the energy to love eight people. So, you have a case load of 20 clients. Which ones can you really care about?” I argued with him, of course, that’s what I did. I had more than a hundred parishioners, 20 counseling clients, a dozen family members, he just couldn’t be right. I thought he was cruel. In fact, I don’t know how that got him to smile for this photo, I had him as my counselor, advisor, and professor for 8 years and I never saw him smile. I thought, Mills can’t care about more than four or five people, but I can. 

But folks, Mills was a lot smarter than I am so don’t be too quick to dismiss what he said. You wake up every day with a certain amount of emotional energy, . . . let’s say you have a 100 units of energy that you can spend. You spend some just dealing with the people you live with getting breakfast and getting dressed. Maybe some in traffic on the way to work. Maybe some more dealing with staff and peers.

Then, imagine that you are a therapist and you have managed to make it to your desk with 80 units left and you are going to do an intake group of six new patients in the addiction treatment program, then go up to the floor and have individual meetings with patients for the next several hours. Maybe there was a suicide on the floor and the family of eight or nine people are waiting for you to go into a conference room to tell them that their dad won’t be coming home. You are going to have to borrow some of those emotional energy chips from tomorrow’s supply but then, your schedule tomorrow is going to look a lot like today’s. And when you get home, if you have family waiting for you, they will expect something from you too.

That was my job in my final year of my doctorate when Liston Mill’s was telling me that I just couldn’t begin to do what I thought I had to do everyday. I had three patients on my floor in the VA who had survived a suicide attempt. You can shoot yourself in the head and not die . . . I always had one or two of those on my floor, but I realized that I couldn’t remember their names. And I hated Liston Mills that day because I didn’t want for him to be right. . . but I knew he was.

So, you come here, and I ask you to be concerned about Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, George Floyd. I tell you about how the Taliban shot Malala in the face, about Asian women being trafficked for prostitution in local spas and massage parlors, and I talk about the poor being manipulated by predatory lenders, and tens of thousands dying from opioid addiction. And I try to keep all of those children in dog cages, separated from their families on the boarder, front of mind. Frankly, you are brave to come back here. I ask for a lot of your emotional energy. 

I know that preachers are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but I don’t really throw out a lot of comfort and I apologize for that. I have an assumption that spiritual people are always in training for an empathy marathon. As St. Bernard said, “I love that I may love, so that I may love.” That is, I am asking you to exercise your empathy, to make your loving heart stronger, to expand your grasp. But I know, sometimes you hear me talk about the #MeToo movement, then it is #BlackLivesMatter, and then it is #TransRights, and I’m sure that you have heard about black-trans people being sexually harassed, and so when I tell the very large and unmasked lady who is blocking the aisle at Sam’s that 120,000 people have already died from covid-19 and 2 million have been infected, when she replies with an invitation for me to kiss a frankly, shockingly enormous part of her anatomy, we can’t be too surprised. 

We started this pandemic four months ago with panic buying of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, so that those who have no empathy for others, hoarded basic necessities until our retail supply chain was literally broken. Now it is devolving into the moral battle of the wearing of masks in public to slow the spread of the virus. Those of us who have been exposed to the spiritual training of empathy, immediately accepted the expert advice to wear a mask in public but noticeably, most people just didn’t. Why didn’t they?

There was a piece in our paper this week about how retail stores are getting trapped in the middle of what has ironically become a political divide. Customers at our local sort-of-hippy health food stores, Mama Jean’s, have gotten irate at clerks for wearing masks, vowing not to return if they don’t take them off? What is that about? 

Wearing a mask may not be a panacea, while there is lots of evidence to say that they help, they are anything but a certain form of protection, but why would someone insist that others not wear one? It has, in the most mind-numbing way, become a matter of politics. 

Most of you will remember that in 1982, almost 40 years ago, someone in Chicago put cyanide in Tylenol capsules. 7 people were killed in this senseless crime, all in the Chicago area. But people all across America stopped taking Tylenol. It forced the over the counter medication industry to turn on a dime, changing how they made capsules and how they packaged them, so that now we have tamper proof seals on everything from aspirin to seasoned salt and whatever that film is that they put on my cottage cheese carton. No one ever suggested that Democrats should stop taking Tylenol, but Republicans should take two every morning. 

There was a known public health risk, everyone took precautions, the industry made adjustments and now, I’m sure, that if I hadn’t brought it up, no one ever thinks about those 7 people who died from cyanide laced Tylenol. Now, 120,000 people have died from Covid-19 and the suggestion that you wear a mask in public to protect others in case you are infected, has become a literal war, cast largely as a political left verses the political right and no part of this makes the least amount of sense. Why did we believe the experts about Tylenol but half of the country, and the majority of our locals, insist that their wishful thinking is more reliable than the advice of experts?

A sociopath is someone who lacks empathy. They will live in dangerous, sometimes violent ways, and they simply don’t care about the consequences. In grad school, I was led to believe that only 2 or 3% of society could be diagnosed as a sociopath, although, even then, we were aware than more than 25% of corporate CEOs were . . . but that is a topic for another sermon.

I famously had a showdown with the director of a Council of Churches agency that we have volunteered with for more than a decade. The last time I showed up at Crosslines to work with our team of senior citizen volunteers and I saw that absolutely no one, not staff or volunteers, were wearing masks, and I had a bit of a meltdown. I simply couldn’t believe that they expected members of my church, some of whom are in their 80’s, most of whom have underlying conditions that would make infection with the Covid virus almost certainly lethal, and the explanation I was given was that they were not required to wear them. I pointed out that it would make my volunteers 80 to 90% less likely to get the virus if everyone wore masks, and the response was an indifferent shrug of the shoulders. 

In a later email exchange, I carefully explained to the director why he is a sociopath. I have not had a reply. But if knowing that wearing a mask protects vulnerable people, cutting their risk of infection by 90% and you don’t wear one, if that makes you a sociopath then about 75% of the people who live around here are sociopaths. I want very much to go back to believing that only 2 or 3% of society are sociopaths. I don’t want to believe that most people in our community really would rather directly cause my death than to be inconvenienced by wearing a mask. 

Are they all sociopaths or are they possibly just emotionally exhausted? Maybe I’m not on their list of six or seven people that they can love today. Now, you may think that I was harsh for telling the director of Crosslines that he is a sociopath, I’m sure he thought so, but I’m not the only one to reach this conclusion.

https://www.psypost.org/2020/06/psychopathic-traits-linked-to-non-compliance-with-social-distancing-guidelines-amid-the-coronavirus-pandemic-56980?fbclid=IwAR3KjBM131TJBaKNzJpgMELK8U7pdTWWIvZy_oY9MSpg4YkIi5IUTFqHNaY

In research done by the Personality Laboratory at Whitman College, they are providing initial evidence that certain antagonistic personality traits are associated with ignoring preventative measures meant to halt the spread of the novel coronavirus. I’m not the only one who sees a connection between refusing appropriate preventative measures and sociopathy. 

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the U.S. government’s Coronavirus Task Force, said, ‘There’s no magic bullet. There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behaviors. Each of our behaviors, translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic. . .’ 

We don’t have a vaccine. We have some marginally helpful treatments, but most of what we have in the face of this pandemic is the same thing they had in the face of the Spanish Flu . . . everybody needs to wear a mask, stay home as much as possible, and keep at least six feet between you and everyone else. It is only the behaviors of the population that can alter the spread of the virus right now. And sadly, people are not generally choosing very compassionate behaviors.

The people who get it can be pretty testy about this. As this sign in a restaurant window offers, “To accommodate Anti-Maskers, we have provided a space 40 feet west where you can stare at your reflection in the window since, apparently, you’re the only person you care about.” 

I was in New York for a few days a couple of weeks ago visiting friends from there as well as from Russia and Brazil. My friend’s daughters already think that I live so deep in the Ozarks that it is still the 16^th century out here but sadly, the Ozarks was in the news several times during my brief stay. The mayor of St Louis literally provoked vigilante retaliation against Black Lives Matter protestors by reading out their names, addresses and phone numbers on the internet. 

Then when there was a demonstration on the mayor’s street, and a pair of very affluent, though even more paranoid and possibly psychopathic attorneys stood in front of their million dollar mansion pointing guns at peaceful demonstrators walking down their street. I appreciate the lawyer wearing the Hamburgler costume, I wish all lawyers would.

But then the coups de grâce was when the network news mentioned Joplin having a spike in virus infections from the meat packing plant near there and the reporter ended her report saying that the Joplin City Council voted against a mandatory mask ordinance and rolled her eyes like a teenaged cheerleader.

But, of course, as infections are going up here, our City Council is set to meet to discuss the same thing and the only question is whether Springfield will reveal itself to the world as being as stupid as our neighboring community of Joplin. Everyone knows that we should all be wearing masks whenever we leave our homes but there is an inexplicable resistance which, I have to be honest, really looks evil to me. But I don’t want malignant narcissism to be the explanation, no matter how much it looks like that. 

 In 1962 when The New Yorker decided to send the Holocaust survivor, Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the leading architects of the Holocaust, she had to sort through some very profound personal emotions about the whole thing. She concluded that she would never again refer to “radical evil” because “radical” means that it goes to the very tip of the root and she found that evil was almost always much more shallow than that. Only good, she said, can be radical because goodness requires thought, decision making, intellect, it goes deeper than evil can. Evil spreads like mold on a society, infecting it, literally ruining it, but it never goes much deeper than the surface. 

Evil, she concludes, is thought defying and in our day, we can speak of it as being fact defying. She is saying that Nazism, the kind of malice and racism that caused the Holocaust was like a fungus that spread thinly across the surface of Germany and as much harm as it did, historically speaking, it didn’t seem to take deep roots in all but the most extreme of German people. When the war was over, very few people wanted to defend the agenda of the Nazis. 

I think we will see a similar distancing of conservatives from the Trump era early next year. I am reasonably confident at this point that Trump will be defeated this November, in spite of the Democratic Party’s best efforts at losing, and if anyone knows how to throw an election, it surely is the DNC, but I think that they will oust Trump in November and we will be treated to a 2021 version of  “I was only following orders” excuse from almost every elected Republican politician who failed to find a backbone for the past four years. 

The denial of science on the part of Britain’s Boris Johnson, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, and our own accidental president, Donald Trump, has fed the virus, resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, but on the surface, it has given hundreds of millions of people permission to simply not take the threat seriously, to avoid distancing, mask wearing, and I have to suspect, hand washing, over the past 

 several months. I don’t want to believe that most of our neighbors are evil even though they all have to know that if only they would wear a mask that they could save lives by not spreading the virus. I don’t want to think that they are all stupid, even though I have wasted precious minutes reading social media posts by people who couldn’t pass a middle school science test if it was open book and the answers were underlined, who insist that wearing a mask is either of no help or is actually harmful. 

Not that I will ever be able to believe that only 3 or 4% of society are sociopaths again. I’m afraid that I have accumulated too much evidence to the contrary in the past few months, but I do believe that there is a third option, and that is that people, by and large, are emotionally spent. They are neither ignorant or malevolent, but they just can’t love more than four or five people, and they can’t care about #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, kids at the border, the uninsured, the unemployed, the mentally ill, the environment, the pipeline in North Dakota, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then wear a mask too. Most of that stuff is filed in the back of their minds somewhere along with the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in San Francisco 30 years ago. 

What we, as spiritually oriented people must remember is that what we want from other people is not the impossible . . . we’re not asking people to try to love dozens and dozens of people, what we’re asking for is for them to change some behaviors that will help out a lot of people they will never meet and about whom they will never know anything. And, excuse me, my brothers and sisters, but don’t we know by now that we can never judge anyone into changing a behavior. 

When we make people feel stupid, or judged, or labeled, they almost always just double down on their self-destructive behaviors. People change their behaviors when they feel safe . . . people will change their minds about something when they believe it is their idea. Conservatives will never adopt liberal behaviors and views in order to satisfy the demands of liberals . . . you see that don’t you?

Right now, the world is in the midst of a pandemic which is a medical problem that causes an economic problem. But, in Britain, Brazil, and the United States, we have politicians who see this medical and economic crisis as a political problem, and they are trying to respond to it as a political problem… with the bag of tricks politicians usually use . . . propaganda, lies, and electoral suppression. We must not be drawn into their political battle. As the old saying goes, never get into a mudslinging argument with a pig . . . you will get dirty and the pig likes it. 

There are those who want for us to believe that there will be a medical resolution to the pandemic within the next six or seven months, as either a vaccine or effective treatments, or both. I hope that they are right. But the fact that there are several corona viruses and there are no effective vaccines for any of them is not encouraging. HIV is a virus and in 40 years we have not come up with a vaccine, though we have had pretty good treatments for several years.

Covid-19 may be a part of our world for a year, or two, or a decade. Church may never be the same. Concerts, restaurants, movie theaters, may never be the same. The one thing that we can do to help the world maintain meaning, joy, romance, and culture, is to change our behaviors. And, if I may quote our friends in the AA movement, sometimes you have to fake it to make it. Maybe your heart just isn’t full of compassion and empathy right now, but you can fake it until you do feel it. 

Maybe you are emotionally spent and you just can’t care about the off chance that you are asymptomatic and throwing off a deadly virus onto unsuspecting strangers, but just pretend, just play along for a minute, learn how to talk to people from six feet away, through a mask. Make it fun. Draw a picture on your mask. Buy a superhero mask. Just choose to pretend to be a better person than you are right now and if you can keep it up for a few weeks, the surprising thing is, you will wake up and realize that you are a better person and you never want to go back to being the knuckle dragging, mouth breathing, narcissist that you were before. No one really wants to be a sociopath. 

I know you may find that hard to believe, so I’ll invite you to prove me wrong. Do the right thing for a month and see if you ever really want to be who you were before. Find one that matches your eyes.