Category Archives: animals

How narcissists always do it

They are constantly building their army of loyalists, propaganda network and attack machine. Before you even know you’re in any kind of conflict with them, they’ve drawn up all their battle plans, their artillery is positioned, drones are already in the air. This is because they are programmed, from earliest consciousness, to regard the world as a hostile, pitiless place where each is born into a zero-sum war. This war must be won at all costs.

Narcissists demand an unquestioning embrace of their unreality, since belief in this false world they are the center of is necessary to the narcissist’s existence. Everyone around them must accept the grandiose power-broker’s paranoid version of reality. The cost of disobedience is erasure.

They can be very charming, seductive and persuasive, when they want something from you. As long as you give it to them, they will praise and idealize you. If you fail to gratify their passions, even once, they’re done with you and everyone else in the in-group will be quickly persuaded that you are irredeemably evil, a treacherous traitor. Anyone who questions this new assessment of you will be cast out with you. The narcissist leaves the final choice up to the people in his orbit — favor or eternal banishment.

Seeing the people we know as lab rats

A gigantic rat I was good friends with, about 6’4″ with hands like boulders (inexplicably, he was a skilled guitarist and pianist), once accused me of regarding everyone I knew as lab rats. I remember feeling defensive when he made that observation, though, forty years later, I can acknowledge it was somewhat insightful.

It’s not that I view myself as a superior and dispassionate scientist methodically conducting experiments, collecting data and forming data-based scientific judgments, exactly, but something like this is always in progress when we interact closely with others and learn from our experience.

I give my friends the benefit of the doubt. This is something I have always done and it is how I want to be treated by others. I understand now that not everyone is capable of this. I have that understanding only after years of testing the hypothesis that kindness, patience, seeing things from the other person’s perspective, defusing tension with humor, extending sympathy, etc. will always yield the desired result — peace, love and understanding. My informal lab studies have demonstrated, conclusively, that not all lab rats are capable of the mutuality I am always seeking with people I interact with.

What to do with this data? When you encounter a lab rat who is anxious, becomes defensive and aggressive at the first sign of any conflict, angrily blames the other rats, is always ready to fight to the death — that rat may not be the best subject for a study of the healing power of empathy. You can run the experiment with this kind of rat over and over, and after a while you will be able to predict the outcome with close to 100% accuracy.

Teach this rat to speak, express his point of view, let this rat interact with other rats, design a minor conflict. Take out your clipboard and get ready to record your observations.

This rat will find other rats to ally itself with, involve them in the conflict by enflaming their sense of right and wrong, exploiting their anger at being trapped as lab rat experiment subjects. The rat will then approach the rat it has a beef with, backed by these allies. If the surrounded rat stands his ground in any way, the affronted rat will go for the throat. There is a big vein or artery there that you can rip open and it’s curtains for the vicious, defiant fucker. End of story. Anybody else want to fuck with the expressive talking rat?

All the scientist can do is make notes and add it to the data. You can run this experiment as many times as needed, though in the end the conclusion about how this particular specimen will always act will be hard to empirically disprove.

Suffering is not a contest

You may have noticed that certain people treat suffering like a competitive sport.  There’s long been a senseless, passionate public debate, for example, about who had it worse:  

a) millions of people, over hundreds of years, kidnapped, sold, dragged in chains across the ocean, packed together like sardines, countless souls dying and thrown overboard to the sharks that always trailed such ships, the survivors sold into lives of unspeakable horror once they got to their new, eh, I suppose we call it “home”, or, 

b) millions of people, over a span of a few years, chosen by their religion, herded into disease-ridden slums for abuse and eventual collection to be taken by cattle car to camps where they could be killed en masse, the lucky survivors getting to work as slaves until they could work no more.

In a world that was not insane, you would have to be insane to argue about which atrocity was worse. Can any atrocity be worse than either one of those? And there are many other atrocities in history, and even in the present world, that are as bad as those two, particularly for the victims and survivors of those atrocities. 

But I’m not here today to write about politics. I’m thinking of something more personal, the suffering of people around us, the suffering of people in our lives.  if you are not a guitar player, or a violinist, or someone who uses one hand for a specific, skilled task, sharp pain and stiffness in your left hand, annoying and concerning as it may be, is not a reason for despair. If you play music every day, and it is one of your great comforts, and suddenly one of your hands is too stiff and painful to do that, fuck.

Humans look for comfort (all animals do, actually), we look for empathy, we look for help when we are in trouble. Not everyone is built that way of course, some take comfort only in feeling superior to others. In their citadel of desperate superiority there is little space for empathy and for helping anybody except for quid pro quo maintenance of the humble servants of their need to feel better than others.

When I come across one of these assholes, I have to remind myself of my vow to first do no harm.  To forget that is to become more like the thing I hate.

Lost photo

This picture was taken in August of 2020. After years of watching so many beautiful feral kittens living their short, adorable lives, we decided we had to save this litter. A smart mother cat had dropped this batch off in Sekhnet’s garden, site of the neighborhood’s best cat buffet. Sekhnet was clever, these five never knew they were being turned into adoptable pets. They were all very willing and all five were quickly adopted. This is my favorite photo from that period, lost until a few moments ago.