From the personal to the political, there are some people who cannot be wrong, no matter what they might have done. A mountain of evidence, a clear chain of cause and effect, the corroborating testimony of 250 eye witnesses, incriminating statements they themselves repeatedly make — angrily reduced to the satanic work of sick, evil haters determined to unfairly persecute them, out of pure, blind spite, malice, irrational hatred. The person who can never be wrong must remake the world into a place that always serves them without question or contradiction, in order to make themselves feel irrefutably right, no matter what.
It’s disorienting, especially at first, to realize the relatively small role rationality, common sense, plays in many lives, in mass politics and in history. In the name of an abstract higher cause, masses of people will reflexively reject the facts, cause and effect, all appeals to human empathy, if it suits their larger need to belong, to feel righteous and correct. The Capitol policeman crying out in pain as an enraged mob crushed him in the doorway he was defending during the January 6 riot? Bullshit, a paid crisis actor pretending to be in pain, a cynical play by evil commies to blame perfectly peaceful tourists they want to viciously paint as trespassing rioters! That eyeball gouged out of another officer’s head? His own fault for fighting true patriots in the name of a sick, insane cheater and traitor!
An infuriating lie is effective because it is short, conclusive, easy to repeat and impossible, once repeated over and over, to disabuse people of. “They’re eating the pets!” was a laugh line for Kamala and millions of us, but it was instantly memorable and damn good for fundraising, for turning up the already boiling pot of outrage against imagined hoards of disgusting vermin who are raping young white girls and poisoning our nation’s blood [1].
The professional liar has a transactional, self-serving view of other people. It is a transgressive thrill for fans of the liar that reality itself must conform to the liar’s framing and the so-called truth, that a lie can instantly render what did or didn’t actually happen impotently irrelevant. The liar “owns” his hated enemies with his infinite ability to change the facts on demand. The power of a venerated liar’s reframing is that it blurs then obliterates every other narrative. Truth and lies are transactional commodities just like anything else employed in the art of the deal. To millions among us, increasingly, objective truth is whatever we most fervently believe to be true. That belief does not make things that actually happened disappear, but the belief that they disappear is good enough for most people.
The psychopathic personality, with its insatiable need to dominate and feel superior to others, can never be satisfied in the way most people are satisfied. If it has $10,000,000,000, it must have $100,000,000,000, $1,000,000,000,000, because it is intolerable that some other greedy bastard can have more billions than they do. What will they do to achieve their endlessly out of reach goal? Everything you can think of and many things you can’t imagine. No price is too high for others to pay for the realization of the powerful psychopath’s blind desire.
We have a front row seat now to watch these sick fucks in action as they take positions of power in the new government. The incoming president will have a cabinet full of them, and there are hundreds more waiting in the wings when he starts firing this first batch. For every George Soros, a wealthy man with a social conscience, there are a hundred billionaires who will embrace any Nazi, klansman or Putinist who promises them even more wealth and power. Robert Reich published this clip from the 1930s NY Times as an illustration of what we are seeing right now among our “greatest citizens” and their corporate avatars:
I recently got an email containing the perfect encapsulation of the absolutist worldview of someone who can never be wrong. I’d written in detail to a cousin about a lifelong conflict with my father, a man with many great qualities, and an uncontrollable need to never be wrong. I provided many examples of the senselessness of this long war, of my many attempts at reconciliation. I included quotes of my father’s genuine regret, right before he died, sadly acknowledging my many unrequited attempts to make peace over the years. He harshly berated himself for his inability to reciprocate, and expressed terrible self-loathing for having turned our relationship into a battle to the death instead of being an empathetic father capable of a loving, mutual relationship. He explained what I already understood, that he acted this way because he was crushed in his soul, finished for life at age two, as he put it, by a furious, violent mother who beat all hope out of him.
The response I received from this cousin struck me as a textbook illustration of the psychotic worldview. In short, clipped sentences it stated a series of irrefutable facts, the world as he understood it. Conspicuously absent was any reference to anything I’d written, any question I’d posed. Statement: the father I’d portrayed, Irv #1, was essentially my unrecognizably distorted creation, the product of my angry, conflict-prone personality, divorced from lived reality and entirely my burden.
The person this cousin had experienced, who he dubbed Irv #2, had absolutely nothing in common with my Irv #1. Irv #1 and Irv #2 were irreconcilable entities and no matter how much information I provided him, how many quotes of Irv’s actual deathbed regrets and self-recriminations, he would never see anything but his pure, loving view of the very best of the man. I would never get any acknowledgment of anything I ever said or wrote to this person, no conversation was possible — in describing my father truthfully, and with nuance, I had crossed into the dark side. I was now a betrayer of a loving memory and entitled only to a series of icy statements of fact.
This cousin is highly intelligent, has a scientific turn of mind, an engineering background, yet he couldn’t acknowledge that every person contains multiple aspects, strengths, weaknesses, conflicting desires, contradictory behaviors. We show different sides of ourselves to different people, at different times. Picture a Venn diagram showing aspects of the personalities of his two opposing, irreconcilable Irvs, there is always an overlap of desirable and undesirable traits, unless the person is that exceedingly rare outlier who is somehow purely one or the other. The response I got stated, essentially — I see black, you see white. There can be no ambiguity, no discussion, no room for compromise in this world, no nuance, nor any color. The very things Irv #1 bitterly lamented never experiencing as he voiced regrets the last night of his life.
“I imagine how much richer my life would have been,” my father, Irv #1/Irv #2, said in a dying man’s voice, “if I had been able to see all the nuance, gradation and color in the world instead of seeing everything in harsh, childish black and white. The world’s not black and white, Elie.”
Human affairs is black and white only if you are damaged in your soul beyond the ability to perceive the human complexities and colorful, sometimes terrible, contradictions we all contain. Absurd as it sounds, this crabbed logic (A or B, never both) leads to propositions like — a philanthropist cannot also be a cold hearted criminal, even if there is ample proof that the person is, in fact, both of these things.
The final appeal of the psychopath’s worldview is that, if you can accept it, all ambiguity and complication is removed from this complex, challengingly nuanced world. That this freedom from uncertainty comes at the cost it does is of little concern to people desperate for the righteous relief provided by knowing who to love and who to hate, without ever having to meet them.
[1]
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