I’m an old man, about to go into my seventh decade walking this brutal, miraculous earth. I only recently learned a truth so simple it seems embarrassing that it could have taken me 67 years to learn. I have well digested it the last few years, while writing hundreds of pages I hope to soon wrestle into a salable manuscript. Here is the condensed version of my belatedly learned lesson.
There are people, traumatized early in life, who develop a rigid personality that renders them unable to show vulnerability, see their role in conflict, change themselves for the better or acknowledge when they’ve hurt people. They live in terror of reliving the crippling humiliation they were subjected to in their earliest days. To protect their brittle egos they insist they cannot be wrong, always blame others for any conflict, escalate the conflict by silence, threats, lies, word salad, every means necessary. They are prepared to fight to the death, against their closest friends, to prove they are never wrong. My father was this way (minus the lying, he was too skilled to need to outright lie). It is a terrible way to go through life, but it is also a fairly common personality type.
They can be charming, funny, playful, sensitive, sometimes generous, they can see nuance, sometimes, but you can’t negotiate with them once there is any kind of disagreement or an expression of hurt that makes them feel imperfect. You can’t find compromise with someone who can never be wrong, they are always your victim — you are the merciless one, not them. They fight with the desperation of a hurt child terrified of further unbearable shame.
We have the grotesque living example of a movement of people guided by these principles: never wrong, blame others, lie, fight to the death over any conflict, no matter how small. Think of cherub-faced fake Christian extremist MAGA Mike Johnson and other creatures of blind ambition like him. They are convinced of their righteousness (or at least play the part), can’t see things from any other point of view (that would require empathy), have no hesitation to lie if confronted with wrongdoing (since they can’t be wrong, and therefore have a right to lie), have a harshly punitive stance toward perceived enemies while being super understanding and lenient to criminal friends, people who simply “made a mistake” but are otherwise loyal.
Politics is not my point here. I’m trying to point out the universal characteristics of this common, extremely harmful, and contagious, personality type. A personal example, then:
Our closest friends of many decades, a couple I’ll call Flack and Gina, planning to celebrate the younger one’s 65th birthday in Europe, were hit with bad news. Covid-19 canceled their fabulous birthday trip at the last minute. They made alternate plans, a week alone together in Vermont and then five days in a spacious cabin with their longtime closest friends, me and Seedj.
When we arrived something was hanging in the air, tension between them, which escalated day by day. Apparently the carefree week in Vermont had not left them feeling refreshed and carefree, they were clearly at odds, keeping their distance from each other, both expressing hurt the other had caused. The tension and passive aggression increased day by day, as I went about my normal business of trying to make them laugh and being conciliatory. I had no understanding that it was already too late for our friendship, I’d witnessed their shameful rage at each other and the sado-masochistic nature of that rage. By the time we left the rented house, after they ate a large breakfast and hadn’t prepared so much as a cup of coffee for me, we were no longer friends.
It had all been my fault, you see, in my irrational need to eventually express frustration with what I couldn’t simply accept like a loving friend, I’d finally resorted the fucking f-word, a blow that sent them both reeling toward the fainting couch. It was entirely my fault that the long weekend had ended badly. They’d been very hurt by my irrational anger. My frustration had nothing to do with one of my oldest friends glaring at me with silent hostility for long minutes after feeling “defied”, her husband trying feebly to explain why she had “her back up” followed by a humiliating forced apology from her the next morning, after I’d had a sleepless night, hyper-adrenalized and unable to keep my eyelids closed. She told me with great shame that she was sorry I’d been so aggressive and threatening toward her that I’d made her act that way, she could have done better but I got her back up. Not exactly the healing apology one might hope for from a loved one.
They had to completely rewrite history to avoid shame. What I had seen and experienced never happened at all. I’d never witnessed cruelty, silence, distance and raging passive aggression between my two closest friends, that never happened, it existed only in my sick, judgmental, unloving brain. They had a new story, that blamed me for everything, put things in persepective. I could accept their story, and remain their friend, or insist I hadn’t been the cause of all the conflict and take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. The weekend had been wonderful, with no tension at all, they demanded I acknowledge, until I’d exploded with a curse word for no reason at all, thus ruining what had been a perfect five days.
You can apply this same “reasoning” to many things happening in our society today. It’s called reframing. Take something as undeniably ugly and traumatizing as hundreds of years of American chattel slavery. Not all bad, say the re-framers, slaves learned skills while being raped, whipped and degraded — and talking about slavery unfairly makes innocent white Christian kids feel bad about their ancestors, which is the real harm of slavery. The January 6th riot that sent 140 injured police to the hospital? Biden’s fault, Pelosi never called the National Guard, FBI provocateurs, CIA goons, the crowd that broke into the Capitol were innocent, meek, patriotic tourists, not violent rioters, “woke mind” virus, a stolen election, treason, sick, dangerous maniacs on the far left trying to bend the nation to their evil will. Government shutdown, the second one orchestrated by Trump and his allies? Not the Republicans’ fault, we promised the billionaires and corporations a huge increase in their wealth, too bad selfish poor people are so irrationally angry about other people’s success!
Once you notice an inability to compromise, a constant need to escalate conflict, to blame others for their own actions, a refusal to ever acknowledge being wrong, or see anything from another person’s point of view — game over. No compromise is possible with someone who can never be wrong, and blames you for making an unfair issue about being supposedly hurt by them.
You can’t go to mediation with someone, as Flack and Gina demanded we do, if there is no agreement about anything that happened to create the conflict. To me, I’d been attacked savagely and blamed for merely trying to help ease the tensions between my tormented friends. To them, I’d unfairly maligned the perfection of their deep, loving, human relationship, refused to acknowledge that Gina had simply made a “mistake” after I made her feel attacked– and she had apologized! — I was the problem, due to the unhealable damage done to me as a child and my unforgiving nature. A mediator would surely help me see that, they insisted.
Of course, a mediator only has the facts and feelings the parties bring to mediation. Successful mediation depends on a mutual desire, and ability, to be honest, compromise and move toward the other person’s needs to solve a conflict. The most brilliant mediator in the world is helpless if the parties don’t agree on anything that caused the conflict. Nonetheless, desperate people who can never be wrong will weaponize everything available in order to prove that the other person was wrong.
The application of this observation to our current political impasse is hard to avoid. In the individual case it is crucial to understand that when you’re dealing with someone who can never be wrong, there is no way to solve problems with them, outside of uncritically accepting their stilted view of reality. You will eventually learn that even if you do, the past conflict will inevitably continue to escalate until the relationship is finally destroyed. You have to get away from them, uproot them from your life. Not a political solution to the creepy billionaire-financed division between Americans, but a good starting point in knowing who you can reason with, work things out with, and who rigidly demands absolute obedience to whatever they need.
To this type, an appeal to empathy is an intolerable challenge to their projected perfection. Appealing to their empathy is a direct statement that they lack empathy, a mortal insult that must be avenged. If you love the person, you will tend to overlook the early signs of this personality. You do so at your peril, because every bit of mistreatment you tolerate in the name of friendship sets the baseline for what they are allowed to do to you. Once you complain, you break that sacred compact, blindside them with new demands and become an enemy who must be destroyed.
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