Category Archives: Ahimsa

The definition of insanity, redux

The meme definition of insanity, often attributed to Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome. I offer a full-color real-life illustration of that principle in action. I am only slightly less insane, for most of this anecdote, than the madman I am describing.

An old friend was going through a difficult divorce (I know of few easy ones) from a wife whose impressive anger he was physically afraid of. He had reason to be afraid, she looked like she could kick the shit out of him if it came to it. They fought constantly, though he never crossed the line to find out if his wife would actually beat him to a pulp, maim or murder him.

That’s where I, his closest friend ever, as he often told me, came in. He could take out some of this anger in the safety of our friendship, through passive aggressive attacks. Physical aggression was never his style, nor mine, but if it came to it, he was taking no chances with me. So he’d provoke me, usually by playing a merciless devil’s advocate in any situation where I expressed indignation, hurt or confusion.

As I’d start getting pissed off and testily tell him to pump the brakes, he’d announce, each time, that I had a problem with my temper. That raises a separate question, most people will eventually lose their composure if provoked relentlessly enough by someone close to them.

Of course, he could never admit to provoking me, since he is a high minded man of peace who simply wants everyone to get along.  How would admitting he purposely makes his closest friend angry every time they got together make him look?  So we had a long stalemate that lasted several years.  We had more than one sit down to talk things out, things that I hadn’t yet realized were in the nature of the irrational beast that was our childhood friendship.  

During this time I exercised a patience that sometimes felt superhuman to me.  I almost slugged him on a couple of occasions, but our middle class upbringings got the better of that impulse.  I came to regard him as something close to a friend, but stopped trusting  him with vulnerabilities he could exploit.  This compromise made our friendship a seriously limited partnership.  If you can’t trust a friend with your feelings, there’s not much left.

In the end, after speaking to him many times about this constant provocation, and his reflexive denial that he’d ever provoked me, or anyone else, I concluded the friendship was not viable. This was some years before I learned the terrible law of some friendships — whatever you once tolerated from a friend is the baseline for what you will get in the future, if things start going south. There is no saving certain relationships. When you see contempt and the constant dismissal of your right to your actual feelings, a friendship can’t be saved.

Toward the end of his hellish thirty year marriage, and the official end of our friendship, I called to see how he was holding up. He texted back that we couldn’t talk on the phone, that any talk would need to be in person. He texted back that he needed to see me as soon as possible. A few days later he showed up in my neighborhood, texted when he arrived and we chose a corner to meet on. I stood on that corner and waved to him, as he pulled up. He looked around frantically, made a right turn and drove up Broadway. When I caught up to him at a red light and got in, I saw how stressed he was by the way one of his eyes was twitching.

He smiled and made small talk until I asked him what the urgency to meet in person was. Then he came to the point.

“I don’t know if our friendship can be saved,” he said, “too much damage may have already been done by what you did, and I don’t know if it’s forgivable.”

I think he understood from my expression that I had no idea what he was talking about, but, taking no chances, I said “you’ll have to help me out here, I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Then it came out in a cascade. I had, either deliberately, or with a recklessness no friend is ever allowed to show to someone he cares about, tried to destroy his marriage.

You could have knocked me over with yer proverbial feather. I asked him to elaborate. It turns out that at a marriage counseling session his wife had quoted me, with massive distortion and out of context, to crippling effect. She was then able to say “I’m not the only one who knows you’re a compulsive liar. Your best friend from childhood says you’re a fucking liar!” citing what I’d supposedly said about two versions of the same story I’d heard from each of them.

His story of a recent conflict between an insane and destructive friend of his and his wife, an anecdote I had no interest in hearing, lasted less than a minute. He stopped, telling me he regretted that he’d started to tell it to me. I asked no questions and we went on to other subjects. His wife, who I always liked, called a few days later and told me the complete story. When she was done I said “well, that makes a lot more sense than what Moishe told me.”

“Oh, what did that fucking liar tell you?” she asked, gearing up for the next round with her provocative sparring partner husband.

I told her he’d started to tell me the story, I had no interest in hearing it, he thought better of telling it, stopped, I’d asked him no follow up questions. I told her I didn’t care to hear about it, and his partial version, which lasted about a minute, hadn’t made much sense, but that her long version totally explained what had actually happened.

From here it was a straight line to the marriage counselor agreeing with his angry wife that if he didn’t have the courage to confront a friend who called him a liar behind his back, a destructive person and false friend deliberately or recklessly trying to destroy his marriage, then neither his wife, nor the marriage counselor, could ever have any respect for him. Thus manipulated he rushed off, eye atwitch, to do battle and prove his courage under fire, to save his doomed marriage.

My reaction doesn’t matter for purposes of this story. I sat with him for a few hours, talking everything through, giving him context, making my best suggestions. I told him to go back and tell the marriage counselor what had actually happened, give her all the context.

I was still too innocent, somehow, to realize that talk, no matter how rational or persuasive, can never make a dent in craziness like this. I also didn’t yet grasp the right thing to do when confronted that way, particularly by someone who fears you. Taking the high road, I could have just left the car and walked away. Alternatively, I could have grabbed him by the front of his shirt and menaced him before walking away. I could have also offered him one hard, open handed slap in the face, to be done with the brittle veneer of our friendship forever. Talking reasonably wasn’t going to help anyone at that point, though, by reflex and long habit, I did this for literally a few hours. He even thanked me at the end.

Now we fast forward a decade or so, a period of non-friendship. He has become, in some ways, an observant Jew. He goes to the Chabad House in his town, puts on t’fillin (ancient prayer accoutrements bound to the head and arm) every morning to pray and studies the teachings of the Jewish religion with a rabbi.

The most important teaching of our religion is our duty to our fellow humans on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. On that day, according to tradition, God judges each of us, according to our deeds. We are required, before nightfall on Yom Kippur, to seek forgiveness from those we’ve hurt the previous year, forgive those who seek our forgiveness and make amends whenever we can.

In this guy’s personal vision of Judaism, apparently, expressing sympathy for another person’s health problems is the highest moral act a person can perform. He calls periodically to express sympathy for my medical challenges, and ask endless questions about my several major health aggravations. I speak to him calmly, tell him about life lessons I’ve learned since we last spoke. He never has any new lessons to report. He calls a few months later, and after expressing shock that we haven’t talked for so long, asks the same detailed questions about the same aggravating health headaches.

In his mind, it would seem, if enough time passes after even the worst interpersonal ugliness, everything mystically heals. Time itself, through the operation of the Divine, perhaps, eliminates the need to do any more than show sympathy for physical troubles in order to make friendship magically bloom again, no matter what has occurred in the past. You can call this idea crazy, I certainly do. And yet, until now, I have picked up the phone when he calls. It is a weird thing on my part, I have to confess.

I recognize that he is, arguably, the most neurotic person I’ve ever met. It’s easy to see he lacks even the most primitive ability to be self-critical, though he is visibly self-loathing enough for a whole family of self-haters. Why do I pick up the phone when I see his name on the screen? I’m certainly far beyond expecting a different outcome.

I guess there’s a side of me that wants to see how far he will keep pushing this crazy envelope. There is a strange fascination for me, not untinged with horror, every time he reaches out as though we are still the best of friends. So far I haven’t had the heart to ask him this heartbreakingly simple, deal breaking question:

If you accuse somebody of maliciously trying to hurt you, and it turns out they were not trying to hurt you, that, acting on false intel, you acted unfairly, unwisely, hurtfully, in a way that would have badly hurt you, had someone done it to you, are you right to pray every day, and study the words of the sages, righteously hoping for a better life, without ever offering an apology to the person you hurt?

I could add, why don’t you ask your rabbi what the thing God wants you to do is? But that would be overkill, no? Like sending him a link to this piece.

Let’s face it, MAGA just had better ideas

Don’t listen to freaks from our shameful hippie past like Robert Reich, there is nothing wrong with the best people in our country having 10,000,000 times more than the lowest low lifes in our country and being able to profit handsomely from their greatness. MAGA won because it has better ideas. Here are just a few:

Eliminating pre-existing conditions from health insurance was pure communism designed to cripple the health insurance industry. So, pre-existing conditions are back. If you’re already sick, don’t come whining about “fairness”, pay what you are required or shut up and die. Health care is not a “right” it’s a privilege you get from your boss, if you work hard enough.

The states should decide, according to local beliefs and customs, if raped eleven year-olds are allowed to have abortions. The Supreme Court, and all elected Republicans, stressed this state sovereignty principle at the time Roe was abolished. To that end, a national ban on abortions. That’s why you gave us a proven fighter for president and a robust majority in the Senate.

Sometimes the so-called racists are right. Who is more deserving to run the country, the richest, smartest, most successful man in the world, and the colorful, controversial son of a famous political leader who was assassinated by a colored person, and Donald Trump, or … you get my point.

Joe Biden was the most corrupt, criminal and dumbest president in history. That’s why he lost, he did nothing but stutter and comically try to hide his dementia. Now we have the least corrupt, most honest and smartest president in history.

So-called climate change is a hoax designed to destroy our greatest corporations by crippling them with expensive regulations. Once those regulations are removed super-storms will stop and this nation will take a giant step toward being great again. There is no reason to believe so-called climate scientists more than the Bible, Exxon and faith.

Homosexuality is banned by the Bible. The punishment for it is death by stoning. The same punishment for women who commit adultery, ye scribes and hypocrites. So saith the Lord.

Women are born to be subservient to men. That is simply God’s will and the natural order for mankind. It’s called mankind for a reason, dummy.

Most liberals are pedophiles.

That so-called Black, so-called female presidential candidate was busy, even while campaigning for an office she was unqualified for, cutting the dicks off young boys in schools, putting dresses on them and sending the poor kids home as girls. This was proved to millions of us real men during the World Series! [1]

She was PERSONALLY cutting the dicks off boys in schools all over the country!

They WERE eating the dogs and eating the cats, hamsters, iguanas, rabbits, snakes, fish, etc.

Giving further tax breaks to the most successful Americans means we’ll all have a better chance of becoming wealthy.

It is essential to have the party with the most committed billionaire donors win every election. This ensures that our most important citizens have proportionately loud voices in our democracy.

In order for a president to faithfully carry out his duties, obviously it’s sometimes necessary to do things that are plainly criminal. In these cases, it is important that the president not be locked in the straitjacket of “law”. Nothing he does while officially trying to make American Great Again can be considered by any criminal grand jury ever. No pardon he sells can ever be challenged as “corrupt”. As Jesus Christ Himself intended.

White men are better than everybody else.

God bless these United Shaysssssh.

[1]

Liberal pedophiles will claim that this is an outrageous lie promulgated to the tune of tens of millions in ad buys ($215,000,000 spent on these ads, according to Brian Tyler Cohen) by billionaire-funded super PACs working to elect Trump, but who are you going to believe, a great, highly memorable ad you’ve seen fifty times, including during the World Series (second only to the Superbowl for market impact and credibility), or somebody who dreams of diddling children in a disgustingly unChristian way?

The longing for closure

Maybe it’s just something Hollywood movies instill in us when we’re young — the idea that we can have real emotional closure, a dramatic, satisfying, healing ending to even an unbearably tragic series of events. I think of this in terms of my own life and the life of our experiment in democracy. I will focus on the second one, on this day before Election Day.

We can, as a democratic nation, repudiate the forces that are determined to control everyone based on the insatiable greed of a privileged few and, in service to their huge Christian evangelical voting block, impose perverted religious views on everyone. A girl who is raped, her trauma multiplied when she discovers she’s pregnant, has less rights than the rapist’s six week and one day old fetus, according to these twisted lovers of a funhouse mirror version of Jesus. Destroying the planet with unregulatable pollution is the right of those with the power to do so, if it will make them the world’s first trillionaires, because — freedom. Hoarders of obscene wealth are admired while those living in intergenerational poverty are reviled as parasitic “losers” who didn’t have the sense to be born to wealthy families.

Let’s say Harris wins by 20,000,000 votes (she should), and wins the accursed Electoral College, her party takes the Senate and the House, and MAGA’s attempts to overturn the results, including the cherub faced soulless fanatic from Louisiana’s “secret plan” to nullify the results, a rash of riots across the country and frantic appeals to Scalia’s evil spawn on the Supreme Court, fail to install Trumpie as president for life.

It would be a great relief to at least 180 million Americans to have a president who doesn’t spout endless lies, launch hourly, bullying attacks on countless “sick”, “dangerous” “enemies”, conduct secret talks with dictators and war criminals and unleash hate speech addressed toward entire groups of “the enemy within” while constantly threatening violence. It would be excellent to live under an administration that actually has reality-based positions and an agenda to make things better, instead of the far-right’s enforced loyalty to a figurehead deranged in his anger and drunk on fantasies of deadly revenge. Would a resounding Trump defeat be closure? No, but it would be a very good start.

Closure comes only when a sense of fairness is restored, the widening chasm between the top 1% and everyone else is closed. Powerful criminal conspirators get prosecuted alongside the hapless, violent foot soldiers they unleash. A treason preaching former general is recalled to active duty and dishonorably discharged, his pension cancelled. Bullying and abuse become the subjects of serious cultural scrutiny and national dialogue. The wealthiest citizens and corporations are required to pay their fair share of taxes. A living wage is guaranteed to all workers by federal law. Police violence is curbed, use of excessive, often deadly, force is not shielded by “qualified immunity”. Gun violence is curbed by regulating who can own firearms and when they may be reasonably restricted. The Supreme Court is recalibrated, with term limits, a strict, enforceable ethics code, the addition of several non-partisan justices who don’t belong to an orthodox far-right judicial fraternity. The right to vote is once again protected by law, as are women’s rights, healthcare, and civil rights of all kinds.

Partisanship in drawing gerrymandered districts to consolidate minority power is ruled as unconstitutional as nakedly racist gerrymandering. Serious care is given to solving the existential, rapidly accelerating climate crisis mankind, and all of the creatures of the earth, are facing. Norms of civil society are restored, and codified into democracy-protecting law, where necessary. Hatred of minorities, and baseless attacks on judges and other public officials, may no longer be preached by elected officials with impunity. The fairness doctrine is restored for mass media news reporting, including fact-checking for social media. The filibuster, that relic of human slavery, is ended, along with the Electoral College. Democratic debate on issues of public importance returns, in a robust and meaningful way.

These things would be a good start to real closure on our Age of Raging Narcissism and the rule of the angriest and most corrupt among us. We have more things that unite us, more common goals, than the things that are used to divide us.

Maybe I’m just primed by Hollywood, and the human longing to see justice, but that kind of closure seems entirely reasonable to me. With communication, conversation, an ability to listen and make oneself heard and understood, closure is possible. The problem is the millions among us who cannot communicate, except on their strict terms, and who are able to listen only until they feel violated (and they’re hypersensitive to this feeling), at which point they respond the only way they know how. That way of responding never leads to closure, and, to my eternal disappointment, it is still hard for me to get closure about the fact that closure will often be impossible.

Sorry for that lack of closure, here, I truly am. Even as I am hopeful for a good result in the election between an insane agent of eternal grievance and senseless retribution (and the 39 year-old, self-righteous psychopath who will be installed as soon as the figurehead is taken out of the picture by their handlers) and flawed, human, well-intentioned public servants who will earnestly address actual problems and don’t aspire to lead a Nazi-like national cult and rain violent repression down on the meek and helpless.

I can dream, can’t I?  But, of course, the main thing at the moment is heading off the worst case scenario.  Talk about a bad dream.

God says slavery is righteous

Fascist constantly calling his opponent a fascist, complains about being compared to fascists by his sick, evil, stupid opponent

A fascist is a certain type of leader: authoritarian, top of the hierarchy of strict obedience to orders, surrounded by those who take an oath of personal loyalty to him, ruthlessly repressing dissent, threatening and controlling all professions and the mass media, spouting divisive lies, using the force of the state to terrify and punish enemies, and its treasury to reward wealthy friends and patrons.

All of these things Donald Trump has done, or tried to do, during his first term in office. Even now, we don’t know the full extent of his crimes regarding a trove of illegally retained classified military secrets and his ongoing post-presidential negotiations with his handler/blackmailer, renowned war criminal and buddy of Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin.

In attacking his opponent Kamala Harris, in addition to the usual dog whistles to the Klan and Nazi contingent of his base, and millions of ordinary misogynists, Trump routinely calls her a radical left, Marxist, communist, fascist. In the country Trump’s family comes from Marxists and Fascists were fighting deadly battles in the streets less than twenty years before Trumpie was born.

No fascist can be a Marxist and vice versa. Only someone intent on name-calling, inspiring maximum loathing and ignorant of, or careless about, the meaning of the words he uses, would call a communist a fascist. They can both be totalitarians, authoritarians, but calling Harris a communist fascist is like saying she’s a cat dog (both delicious, by the way, people are saying, the weave, am I right? I’m right, aren’t I?).

Personally, I blame advertising for the distraction and credulity of Americans.  Our attention spans are shattered at an early age by the constant bombardment of commercial messages, attention grabbing non sequiturs which we often tune out even as they interrupt whatever we were thinking about a second before.  Watch any video on YouTube and, precisely as the video tees up the pay-off, the money quote, the volume jumps and some shill is excitedly shouting over loud music.  They are shouting about something completely unrelated to what you were interested in, focused on a second earlier, but not a problem.  In America these interruptions are simply an inescapable feature of the marketplace of ideas, just as valid as  anything else in a society whose only real value is monetary profit.   Everyone understands the profit motive, no?

So you get to vote for a presidential candidate/huckster who lies compulsively, is ignorant about history, incurious about the present and almost everything else, a businessman who started with a small $400,000,000 nest egg from his father and failed in every business venture he started, declaring bankruptcy six times, while touting himself as the greatest business genius of all time, as seen on TV. He knows how the game is played, so he can mock his opponent, call her any name he likes, literally throw shit at her.

Here’s the unfunny punchline: when she is asked whether she agrees with two of his former generals and his former secretary of defense that he is indeed a fascist (it’s virtually impossible to make an informed argument that he’s not) and she says she does, Trump screams bloody murder that she’s name-calling. Every fascist in history has done that, as have many communist dictators, although dogs and cats (equally tasty when prepared well, many people are saying, see that skillful weave I’m doing?) rarely do.

“How dare that nasty, low IQ, brown son of a bitch who doesn’t know if she’s Black or Indian, or Malaysian, or Samoan, or even a human being, call me a name I already call her?” 

In his rage the other night he fantasized to replacement theory promoter Tucker Carlson about disloyal war monger Liz Cheney not being so brave if she had a rifle and was looking down the barrels of nine rifles pointed at her head.   The New York Times did mention this threat in today’s edition, but carefully, with plenty of respectful nuance (they don’t want to face down the barrel of nine automatic weapons).  The Washington Post (spineless puto-owned) presumably also gave a balanced portrait of the candidate’s understandable bad mood as he uttered his arguably well-veiled, deniable threat to Tucker Carlson, a craven lying toady who cackles like a startled school girl.  As Tuckems said the other day at the beautiful Madison Square Garden love fest that had not a hint of the 1939 Nazi rally held there (I got the proof for you right here):

“He’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense,” Carlson said. “And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies. Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us.”

A far cry from Tucker’s January 6th tweets about Trump being a demonic force and talking about how much he hates the sore loser Orange Fraud.  Tucker has always shown an almost Jeff Bezos-like level of personal integrity (see, for example, his recent infomercial for Vlad Putin in a Russian supermarket).

Ah, fuck those lying, name-calling, thin-skinned, transactionally pearl clutching, fainting couch humping, fascist fucking crybaby putos.  Better to see exactly how fucked Mr. Musk will be if Trumpie loses the election and can’t get his goons to overturn the results.

Shame drives the bus

“All violence,” says psychiatrist James Gilligan, after years working with violent inmates in American prisons, “is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.” Fear of shame drives all kinds of extreme, harmful behavior.

Self-delusion is another adaptation to fear of shame. “I could not have lost, because I am a winner and winners never lose. So-called reality is conspiring against me because it is jealous and it fears me, and rightfully so. I will destroy so-called reality and all the feeble cucks who try to cite facts as though they are more real than my feelings. Nothing is more real than my feelings, they rule the universe!”

Give someone like this power over others (and they often crave it as the only way to feel safe from a feeling of worthlessness) and hold on to your seat. The driver is now a hostage and a lunatic is at the wheel with only one goal — never to feel the traumatic agony of his shame again. If it takes driving off a cliff to prove he’s fearless, not a problem to someone hellbent on outrunning the terror of shame, failure, a paralyzing fear of utter worthlessness.

We have been watching this struggle play out in public for the last nine years. It is playing 24/7 at the moment in a party that must swear loyalty to a debasing lie about a lost election that was, like the Civil War, never lost, but stolen. This power dynamic has always operated behind the scenes, in throne rooms, corporate boardrooms, courtrooms and behind closed doors, but now the agents of this divisive, controlling rage have their perfect front man. He has no filter, will say and do absolutely anything, and insist on his perfect right to whatever he feels he must say or do. No human laws can stop him, he is superhuman, magical in his powers to overcome reality itself.

To my great personal sorrow, I had a painfully close front row seat to the highly personalized version of this dynamic a few years ago. My closest, most trusted friends, people I’d known and counted on for fifty years, all sneered angrily at me from the windows of a bus driven by one of these unleashed fucking maniacs. There was no appealing to their humanity, to our long friendships, to our actual experiences of each other over decades. They were united in their sudden certainty that I deserved only their united contempt and eternal anger for my stubborn refusal to take responsibility for willfully and singlehandedly destroying the happiness of a group of lifelong friends. The best formulation I got for my permanent expulsion from this close social circle was a demented “we can never forgive you for not being able to forgive.”

The lesson I was forced to learn was an extremely harsh one. In certain circumstances, a popular person can quickly and easily convince all the other kindergarteners in the schoolyard that you have cooties. Cooties are highly contagious. If you go near Cootie-boy you will have cooties and that will be the end of you, too. Life, my little five year-old friends, is a binary choice, always. You choose black or you choose white. In a shame-based world there are no other options, no nuance, no gradation, no possibility of EVER working out any problem with a loved one that might make their shame rear its monstrous head for them.

Therapy doesn’t work with these creatures, although often everyone around them, not as strong and self-sufficient as the shame-based charismatic, will seek therapy. To begin to change anything about yourself that causes you pain you must be able to look at faults in yourself, your reflexive reactions that often lead to misery. The idea of honestly looking at their own faults is terrifying to someone whose entire personality and worldview is based on never again being traumatized by shame. They will not do it. Nothing bad can ever be their fault in any way, that’s the inhuman rule these poor bastards live by.

Poor bastards or not, they can’t be negotiated with, persuaded or made more empathetic. They cannot change in any significant way, because of the particular nature of their damage. They are doomed to their fate, but we are not. We can be polite to them, speak calmly with them, but they can’t be counted on for anything besides their own self-preservation. Horrible but not uncommon, the worst feature of their affliction is their ability to convince others of their magical worldview.

Catastrophizing Conflict

Most humans have a deeply wired impulse to avoid conflict. Many people, particularly if they are raised by angry or unstable parents, grow up fearing the worst whenever they find themselves in any kind of conflict. To those raised in an embattled home, perceived conflict, and the fear, anger and other startling emotions it inspires, becomes an emotional emergency, to be immediately talked out with the other party. Addressing conflict when you are upset, before you have digested everything involved in the conflict, is a crappy recipe for conflict resolution.

It’s natural, if you were accosted by unreasoning anger over and over in childhood, to assume that if someone seems mad at you it could be the end of a relationship you value. In the home you grew up in, everything was always phrased that way. You were conditioned to respond defensively, meekly, self-denyingly, by long years of this demand that anger is always your fault. “You crossed me again, you little shit, and maybe this time will be the last time I take that shit from you. I brought you into the world, I have the perfect legal right to take you out of it, applicable murder statutes notwithstanding.” At four years-old, about all you can do is blink and try not to cry.

It is hard, very important, work to separate the cause of the conflict from the most dire emotional outcome you can imagine. It’s important to be able to sit with the uncomfortable feelings, fear of catastrophe, until you have a handle on them, are able to consider, and talk about, the situation calmly. The only thing that makes it an emergency to deal with now, now, now! is in your catastrophizing soul.

A conflict may turn out to be very simple to solve. Someone told me they feel under pressure because I respond to emails within a day of when I get them while it takes him/her/them at least ten days to reply. I described a feature on gmail that allows you to schedule when an email is sent. I write back tomorrow, schedule send for ten days later. Your feelings understood, technology to the rescue, problem solved. Easy.

Underlying conflicts that should be very simple to resolve, assuming good will and ability on both sides, is the vast, bottomless swamp of our emotional needs, many of which are unknown and/or disorienting to us. There are some people whose dread of feeling responsible for ever hurting anyone makes them go to ridiculous, sometimes highly antagonistic, lengths to explain why, since they had absolutely no intention of hurting you, you are clearly wrong for feeling hurt by what they did, which was the exact opposite, intentionally, of what you said hurt you. So you are actually hurting them, really unfairly and aggressively, for expressing your hurt feelings when they can explain all the reasons, in exhaustive detail, that you’re completly wrong to feel hurt by what they clearly didn’t mean to do.

It can literally make your head explode, dealing with these relentless characters. In another life, not long ago, I’d have referred to them as relentless motherfuckers, which is as accurate, maybe more so. Characters can be entertaining, endearing even in their limitations and faults. Motherfuckers can only do one thing, which makes their relentlessness something to avoid. You can’t reason with them, they can’t necessarily dance (in fact, they almost never can) but will insist on dancing to the end of endurance if it suits their larger purpose: never to be wrong no matter what.

It takes a long time, in my case more than sixty-five years, but the understanding that it’s literally impossible to resolve conflict (no matter how insignificant) with a relentless motherfucker is probably the single most important thing I’ve ever learned. I pass it on to you to consider, free of charge.

Why lying works for psychopaths

People want to feel right, righteous, on the side of good and standing firmly against evil. This impulse to be on the side of good is deeply wired into most of us. If we believe someone is a monster, we recoil from them, marginalize them, want to see them gone. It is this human desire for righteousness that the greatest liars exploit. It feels good to be right, and if a well-placed lie makes you feel more righteous than the complicated, sometimes difficult, truth, what is the real harm in that?

We see the power of determined, shameless liars’ use of incendiary lies, designed to produce righteous anger and persuade people to follow them, in politics every minute of every day. It works perfectly to persuade millions of the righteousness of an objectively rotten cause and it works equally well among much smaller groups. There is no group too small for this principle to work in. Here is a personal example.

I had a small, almost senseless conflict with a dear friend of fifty years. It was over, literally, nothing. Hearing the actual details, few would be able to figure out how this stupid impasse was not worked out easily between old friends, how it became a fatal fault line. In hindsight, this woman who insists on being in charge had been spoiling for this final fight for a while. Given the opportunity to righteously rage, she glared at me with silent hostility, refused to speak, letting her implacably fierce stare speak for itself.

I offered compromises, proposed solutions, her husband tried to explain her irrational objections which she refused to address herself. She remained silent and glared a laser beam of hostility at me, before snarling her final refusal of even a small compromise as she closed the door behind her for the night.

In the end, because I could not accept that my “defiance” had completely justified her totally understandable rage, I had to be destroyed. I’d seen a humiliating weakness in a person with an outsized need never to be wrong. Since she does not possess first class tools to make her case persuasively, she resorts to emotional terrorism, a very effective form of control, as I would learn. She is well-known for her willfulness, her need to be obeyed, to have the final word on everything from which restaurant everyone goes to to what topics may be discussed at dinner.

How did she convince everyone else in our group of longtime friends, and their entire families, that I was suddenly the incarnation of Adolf Hitler? She told them that rather than trying to make peace for a year, I’d spent a full year relentlessly torturing her husband, my closest friend, to “bend him to my will.” To my amazement, the reality that I’ve never tried to bend anyone to my will, readily apologize when I know I’ve hurt somebody, am always ready to compromise rather than fight, was completely disregarded by people who’d known us both well for fifty years. She bent everyone to her will with conscious lies, repeated with enough passion to convince a group of my oldest friends that I was toxic, a person to be shunned unto the death.

When I see JD Vance bristle that the CBS moderators are fucking liars because they promised not to fact check his lies at a debate where he lied over and over, when I see trump’s sphincter of a mouth move, his angry petulance when asked a question he takes offense to, I see my former dear friend. Not everyone will immediately lie when they feel themselves under stress, or challenged. Every one of these desperate people who can never be wrong will lie exactly the same way whenever they feel under pressure. They will do whatever is necessary to bend others to their perverse will to control the people around them.

That the angriest, most insecure, insane, mendacious pieces of shit in the world often have the final say in human affairs is a horrifying tragedy. Netanyahu and his perverted Jewish fundamentalist extremists vs. Hamas and their perverted Muslim fundamentalists extremists get the last word about whether millions of peace loving people in Israel/Palestine will live quiet lives of hope or suffer gruesome, endless warfare and death. Trump and his billionaire handlers currently decide whether millions of Americans live in fear and rage, and resort to deadly violence, or come together to peacefully work out our common problems.

Sadly for humanity, sick motherfuckers very often get the last word. Look at fucking Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Ginni Thomas, cherub-faced fanatic MAGA Mike Johnson and the rest of their stinking divisive, constantly aggrieved ilk. Every one of them righteous as hell in their own mind and intent on convincing others they’re on the side of the angels, resolute in their determination to exterminate all demons. As it is written: fuck those fucking putos.

The infinite sorrow of humanity

This evening, at sundown, all over the world Jews will begin their Yom Kippur fast, which is broken tomorrow night, after a long, mournful bleat on a ram’s horn, when it is dark enough for stars to be visible in the sky.

Most don’t have any real sense of why they are fasting, but it is a sacred tradition that even many secular Jews follow every year. I do it myself, though not because I feel like I’m impressing an all-loving, all-merciful, all-seeing Creator with this penitent act of self-denial. If I can’t be slightly hungry one day a year, when billions of our fellow humans live with painful hunger regularly, am I even human?

The sorrow comes in for me because everybody, with the exception of a few gleeful sociopaths, I suppose, wants to feel they are decent people, doing the right thing, living a life that helps others more than it hurts them. We want this feeling always, no matter how badly we may act, no matter what hurt we may cause others, we all need to believe in our own righteousness. We all like to imagine we’d jump into a river to save a drowning child. We admire those who do, and wish we could be like them if we realize we aren’t brave enough (or good enough swimmers). We have high ideals and believe that we always live by them.

Most people, I think, have known people we can no longer have in our lives. Conflicts arise, and if only one person has the desire and the ability to calmly discuss and resolve conflict, the conflict inevitably becomes final, fatal to love and friendship. It is possible to remain in a conflict-plagued relationship, without hope of improvement, but I’ve learned it is much better to move past that particular heartache and learn an important life lesson from it.

There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you, that you cannot unsee. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, usually with an insistence that only you are to blame for any bad feelings, wishful hoping will not change the person you are making excuses for or your relationship with them.

Just because you love dogs, and dream of having an affectionate lapdog, that love doesn’t turn the fish struggling in your lap into a dog.  The fish will always die, no matter how many beautiful, friendly fish you try this with.

I had a childhood friend I haven’t seen for many years at this point. He calls periodically and we speak calmly about things in our lives. The reason we don’t see each other anymore is that in spite of provoking me to anger every time we met, for years, he refused to acknowledge this, instead insisting that I have a problem with my temper. We all have a problem when we lose our temper, but that is another story. We do not all provoke our closest friend every time we get together with them. We also don’t all reflexively fight to deny that we are doing anything bad to anybody, ever.

I urged him several times over the years, if you hear me start to get upset, raise my voice, you see my muscles tense, my face redden, pump the brakes and let’s change the subject for a while. He doesn’t know how to do this. It’s not his problem. It is mine. So, in the end I did what I needed to do not to be provoked by someone who can’t help himself. I stopped pretending this handsome fish was a cuddly lapdog.

He is, sadly, unable to view his actions, and the actions of others, with the same clarity.  To him we are still friends, somehow, because I take his calls and we talk on the phone once in a while.  I always like talking to people, it is one of my favorite things to do.  I like comparing notes on what we’ve learned over our aging lives.  He listens as I recite hard lessons I’ve had to learn.  This makes him feel close to me, that I am always honest with him, and talk in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way.  I don’t mind talking to him, but that’s a much different thing than us being friends.

Friends comfort each other during painful times. Friends ask good questions when they don’t understand something. Friends extend the benefit of the doubt when the other one is off kilter, gently find out what’s wrong, how they can help. Friends accept responsibility when they hurt their friend. Friends make sure that ill-feelings do not fester in their dear ones. Friends are responsive, and honest, when a friend expresses unhappiness with the way things are. Not all friendships can always be saved, though some can. No friendship can be saved if one friend is always blamed for any conflict, unless the blamed person is a masochist.

If I tell you a sad story of death, with a hard lesson I reluctantly had to learn, and you reply that it was a beautiful story of life, with an inspiring lesson that is the opposite of the lesson I described, what can I possibly say, without being dishonest, that will make us friends again?