Category Archives: musing

People of the Lie

A friend sent me a book, People of the Lie, that had greatly impressed her. It was written by a psychiatrist named M. Scott Peck, who subtitled it The Hope for Healing Human Evil.

That human evil arises from unbearable pain and searing humiliation in the person who practices it is not hard to observe. Peck’s book was case study after case study of people who routinely hurt others brutally and convince their victims, themselves and everyone else of a lie that leaves the perpetrator completely blameless. He isolated human evil, describing these people of the lie, as well as I’ve ever seen it done. Evil is always based on inhuman, mercy-negating lies.

The story that stuck with me was of a suicidal young man who was brought to Peck by his concerned parents. The parents had a plausible story for the boy’s depression. Peck eventually spoke to the boy privately and learned the truth of the precipitating event — the parents had given the boy a gift, the gift rifle from them to his beloved older brother, who had recently used it to kill himself. The parents went into a rage when this story was revealed, as if it could have explained anything, and immediately terminated therapy for their depressed son. Such is the nature of the lies destructive people routinely tell to hide their rage and the shame that provokes it.

It is one thing to read about this foul trick in a book. It is much more powerful to experience it unexpectedly in your own life. It is viscerally unsettling to find yourself close to this kind of destructive desperation. It smells like death and conjures atavistic images of devils and eternal darkness. Get a good whiff of this evil and it will take a very long time to get the stench of it out of your nostrils. You are unlikely to completely recover without expert help, help I am still trying to secure.

Case study from my own life: old, beloved friend reacts with rage to what she perceives as her friend’s defiance. Leave aside the entire concept of defiance — a stubborn refusal to yield to the will of another. Just look at the display of rage — a focused, hostile glare of the kind described as ‘if looks could kill’ directed at you for long, silent minutes, as her husband tries to gently translate her glaring silence, explain why she is too upset to speak. It is not a transient moment of rage, it continues, through the end of the tense negotiation and ends with a snarled refusal to compromise in any way and a closed bedroom door.

Never go to bed angry at a loved one is very good advice. You eventually learn that these two do it all the time, the one who must never feel defied and the martyred appeaser, silently locked in an angry struggle when they go to bed and when they wake up the next day, and the day after that.

Now, granted, having an ugly side of your relationship seen this way by dear, long-time friends is objectively embarrassing. It should not be the end of friendship, or anything like that, but it is something to be talked about afterwards. If it is actually felt as humiliating, the impulse to lie, and blame the witness, becomes irresistible. The alternative is acknowledging that you have no idea how to resolve conflict, how to deal with anger, are locked in a hideous farce of a beautiful relationship that everyone must admire, an admission that you need help.

The one who must be right at all costs forces all the other family members into therapy, because she cannot be wrong, will not be challenged, will do whatever needs to be done to feel right, superior, beyond reproach or even criticism. She simply will not tolerate defiance, and she will NEVER go to therapy because she is perfect the way she is. All of her friends and colleagues tell her so.

If her son is depressed, to the extent that he must be hospitalized for it? Sadly, the young man inherited his father’s depressive DNA instead of her genetic predisposition for happiness and high achievement. She and her husband have been the ideal parents to this hypochondriacal, oversensitive, vacillating, embarrassingly unrealistic young idealist, as everyone who knows them knows. If their former closest friend, the aggressively, threateningly defiant one, is told by a mutual friend that the boy is in a mental ward, that is betrayal. It is none of his fucking business! He is DEAD to us, DEAD. What do you not understand about DEAD?

The funny thing about being dead is that if it happens to you while you’re still alive, well, you’re a dead man talking. You are right now reading the words of a dead man (which will be true enough, by and by, if you happen upon these words once I am truly gone), a dead man about to go to the kitchen and get a cold drink. Kind of funny, this kind of death, in an ironic kind of way, no?

The person who is not damaged to the point of destructiveness is always the last to understand, the game of people damaged enough to be evil is always to the death. There is no irony at play when the Nazi says “we are going to kill every last one of you, Jew.” Nazi irony is of a special kind, winking to its cohort and the world — “Work Liberates” on the gates of a slave labor/death camp, “Special Handling” stamped on the passports of those transported to such workers’ paradises and so on. Every evil must be accompanied by the lies that make it possible. With the wonderfully flawed human understanding that if you honestly believe that a lie is true — it is not a lie.

In a place where there are no mensches, strive to be a mensch

A mensch is someone who strives to be honest, to keep their word, to do what they know is right, even if there is a price to be paid for right action. Real mensches are rare, we treasure them when we meet one, and, if we are decent, we try to live by the example they set. Jews are commanded “in a place where there are no mensches, strive to be a mensch”. So this is me, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, striving to be one.

I refrain from telling two longtime dear friends, too damaged by their own childhood trauma to refrain from assassinating my good name, that they are teaching their children a vicious and wrong lesson about life. I manfully avoid writing them and their family a note to ask: are you really teaching the three children you love that your own inability to deal with your pain, humiliation and rage entitles you to decide who they may love?

I would not be wrong to write those words, but I have to first consider if they would have any practical effect, if they could possibly improve anything between me and people who have decided I am dead because I was hurt by them and refused to simply shut up and pretend everything was as it always was, or as it always seemed to be.

My words would have no effect except to make two people already too humiliated to act with decency feel even more humiliated. It would increase their rage. It would harden their resolve to make sure the lid of my coffin is hammered tight shut and I remain, for all concerned, dead and silenced forever.

So, I am reduced to thinking these dour thoughts and writing those words here, as we all fast and consider our good and bad acts of the previous year, and who we still need to make amends with. I strive to be a mensch, and they have long avoided reading anything I post here, so there is little chance of them ever reading this. Still, there’s a chance they might. If they do, call me pisher.

Happy Erev Yom Kippur, y’all

Tonight is considered the beginning of the holiest day of the Jewish year. New Years 5784 was nine days ago. Tomorrow dawns as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the tenth and final day to make amends with people we’ve hurt before the Big Guy upstairs closes the Book of Life, after reviewing our deeds and inscribing our fate for the year. He seals the book at the very last moment of Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and praying, before everybody in temples everywhere rushes home to break the fast.

This Book of Life is a poetic conceit from hundreds of years ago when it was conceivable, in a preliterate age, that an actual Creator of the universe, with a long white beard, sat on a heavenly throne and personally looked over everyone’s deeds (in the manner of Santa, now that I think of it) paging through a gigantic accounting book with a page for every human. Depending on the humility, honesty and goodness of each, the Holy One wrote out the indelible karma of each person for the following year.

Down here in the world of free will and dirty human affairs, even the most disinterested Jew pays at least some attention to Yom Kippur. Sandy Koufax, a completely secular Jew, famously sat out a World Series start that fell on Yom Kippur. After Koufax shut the Yankees down the following day, Mickey Mantle asked his teammates if there wasn’t maybe another “Yom Koufax” before the end of the Series.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass for the rituals of my religion but I take its moral values seriously. I take the main theme of Yom Kippur seriously — I try my best to make amends with those I’ve hurt, extend forgiveness to those who ask me for it. I always fast on Yom Kippur, along with millions of Jews, religious and secular, worldwide. My rationale for fasting is that with so many billions hungry every day, many starving to death, I should be ashamed if I can’t go without food for one twenty-four hour period every year.

There is an extra chill to solemn Yom Kippur for me this year. The group of old friends, who always gather to break the fast together, the place we’ve gone every year for thirty years, has made it clear, after we narrowly got a last minute invite last year, that I am fucking dead to all of them and to their children. DEAD. No conversation is possible with a stinking cadaver, which is what I am to them, their friends and their children. Nothing this accursed zombie has to say can be heard, according to the ancient, sacred doctrine of “I know you are, but what am I?”

One among them, a long time good friend of ours, was recently diagnosed with stage four cancer. My gestures of friendship are awkward, I was told, my tears are not welcome at his funeral, unless I heal the damage I’ve somehow done to two people too damaged to acknowledge their own destructiveness, and to the rest of the group, also unforgivably hurt on their behalf. Don’t I understand how excruciatingly painful it is to everyone for me to stubbornly refuse to pretend that none of the destructive behavior they reflexively engage in ever happened?!! Apparently not.

Hopefully the implacable, perfect First Couple’s first born is out of the psychiatric ward and doing much better now. Hopefully my old friend with the terrifying prognosis will get some blessed medical news. Hopefully the good thoughts of a dead man will be taken to heart by an imaginary all-powerful, all-merciful, infinitely just and loving Big Guy as He hunches over the gigantic Book of Life tonight and tomorrow, making His final notations, before He seals everyone’s fate for the year.

May you be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for the year you deserve, y’all.

The duty to do the right thing

Your righteous anger, your pride, the terrifying depths of your crippling childhood injuries, does not relieve you of your duty to do the right thing toward people you care about. Anyone who is not a psychopath knows the difference between right and wrong, though this line is easily colored over by strong emotions and righteous group think.

You can find yourself at the end of a once beautiful relationship, with no further obligation to endure what has soured into mutual contempt. That happens between humans sometimes, it is impossible to unsee contempt once it is shown to you by someone you trusted. This is very sad but sometimes, in human affairs, as inevitable as death itself.

Once you feel contempt directed at you from someone you love and trust, the hurt and betrayal you feel is usually transmitted right back to them. Faults you have long overlooked in your dear loved one transform into unresolvable obstacles to love, as do your faults to them. It is difficult to keep feeling generous toward someone who treats you with contempt. Once this transition happens, the odds are very low of overcoming it and restoring the relationship to what it was before mutual hurt corrupted it.

Finding ourselves at an ugly juncture with loved ones who hurt us does not relieve us of our obligation to act in the way we know is right. The hopelessness of a situation, until it is revealed without any further doubt — like when the Nazis began machine gunning Jews who showed them their humanity and soul power, as Gandhi advised them to do — does not change your moral obligation to do what you know is right, to refrain from doing what is hateful to you. It is OK to kill a Nazi who is trying to kill you, to defend your life and your loved ones from Nazis, once the killing starts, it is even praiseworthy to do so. It is never OK to become a Nazi.

The human dilemma, how to continue to act attuned to your higher nature when you are suddenly thrashing in a toxic sea of the lowest human impulses. There’s a riddle that will keep an honest person awake at night, especially during the ten days when we are commanded to make amends with those we have hurt and with those who have injured us.

Authoritarian Personality Dysorder

I have avoided using psychiatric language to describe the personalities and autocratic actions of old friends who have acted badly, but I can’t resist making a suggestion for the next DSM, the official bible of psychiatric diagnosis, since it already contains diagnoses like “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” – an affliction of young children and adolescents who unfairly blame their parents for their own inability to control their little fucking tempers and then get depressed about it.

I guess the thing to do is create a list of signs, symptoms, if you will, that define this personality disorder, or perhaps, to give it a bit more gravitas, dysorder?

Authoritarian Personality Dysorder, diagnostic criteria

1) An unshakable belief that there is always only one right answer to every question. A concomitant belief that your answer is always the right one.

2) An absolute entitlement to be obeyed without question.

3) The perception that criticism of any kind, even mild questioning, is defiance.

4) An entitlement to do whatever is necessary to punish defiance and enforce obedience.

5) A belief that every action you take to maintain absolute dominance over others is fully justified, in fact, righteous, perfect and unassailable.

6) The firm conviction that compromise of any kind is humiliation. A request from a loved one to compromise is treason, a capital offense.

Of course, it is easy enough to dismiss this new diagnostic category as simply a restatement of others, among them American Asshole Disorder, Fucking Dickhead Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, etc.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, describes his work with trauma patients. Most patients’ psychiatric diagnoses appeared to flow directly from their attempts to deal with trauma. For example, a child who is regularly raped by a highly respectable parent may display signs of Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria. It is pretty natural for a child abused this way to be angry, irritable and depressed.

When van der Kolk proposed new diagnostic criteria for some childhood diagnoses, and an approach that included identifying possible trauma as the root of the behavioral disturbance, he got a curt letter from the august board that revises the DSM informing him that he seemed to have pulled this provocative idea out of his own ass, without copious clinical trial data to back it up. His own work continues to show the value of addressing the actual underlying traumatic injury, while the DSM continues to diagnose these behavioral disturbances the same way.

We note that until 1973, the DSM listed homosexuality as a diagnostic category of mental illness/personality disorder. The first DSM, published in 1952, listed it as a mental illness. In DSM-II, published in 1968, being gay was still considered deviant, but it was now a personality disorder rather than a mental illness. It took pressure from gays who did not agree with being diagnosed by the American Psychiatric Association either way, and others who agreed with them, before a 1973 vote to remove homosexuality as a diagnosable disorder. Just to say, none of these diagnostic categories, most based strictly on a list of observable symptoms, are carved in stone.

So why not have Authoritarian Personality Dysorder added to the next DSM? Probably because the authoritarian personalities who always preside over such decisions would be fucking furious, dysregulated and dysphoric.

For this and other reasons, I refrain from using the popular, descriptive term “narcissist” to describe the characters in this story who cannot be wrong, cannot accept responsibility for hurtful behavior, and will kill you to prove that they are as blameless, with intentions always as perfect as those of the original authors of the DSM.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to give myself some at home electro-convulsive therapy as I wait for my next intake appointment at the mental health clinic where a skilled therapist has been highly recommended to me.

From Chapter 42

So I can only take the lesson from other people I have loved who, I find out in the end, can never be wrong. They all lash out the same way when they feel defensive, they will effectively kill you to prove that they can never be wrong. Once you’re dead you have to finally shut the hell up, they don’t have to listen to another mortifying word.

I don’t know what it is with this type. Actually, I do. It’s irreparable, traumatic damage done to them early and persistently, disabling them so badly that they cling to a fragile belief in their superiority and are compelled to destroy whenever their projected virtue feels threatened. This type also, of course, is very easily threatened.

They understand the world as black and white, win-lose, zero sum.  They resonate with other winners who are easily threatened, and they band together with them. They all intuitively grasp the basic rules and boundaries — when threatened, they form a herd and protect each other because they’re all the same kind of animal. They understand the extreme dangerousness of life, the finality of rage, the importance of social status, the limitations of love, trust and friendship in the same way, and they love, trust and befriend each other in the same conditional way.

I have known a bunch of this type, and it’s taken me sixty-seven years to recognize the infernal consistency of this tribe they are all perfect examples of. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of their predictable moral certainty, when the time inevitably comes, trust me. 

from Chapter 45

My Samsung phone has a quirky habit of intermittently making “stories” out of a succession of photographs. These little slide shows are accompanied by cheesy music, feature random fades, wipes and other effects and are punctuated by enthusiastic pastel graphics with cute expressions that might really delight an eight year-old Korean girl.  Sometimes these stories are wildly inappropriate.  A group of photographs of bloody toilet bowls and urinals, when I was tracking how often I peed blood, and how long each spell took to pass, comes to mind.  Set to a peppy little pop tune with a particularly inane melody, and mischievous winking emojis, it was a classic of its kind. I got a real kick out of the hematuria story.

There are a number of stories with photographs of three people, our heads close together, smiling, playfully holding each other‘s chins, poking each other in the cheek, putting devil horns behind each other’s heads and so on. The three smiles are very genuine, sometimes the heads are caught in the moment one or all are laughing.   They’re set against a number of backdrops.  A beautiful snowy forest, with the three dressed in full winter gear, with hats and scarves and pink cheeks and noses. A summerscape with glittering water in the background, me wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the other two in T-shirts. There are nighttime shots with the Brooklyn Bridge behind us, one with a slightly pissed off camel looking over our shoulders . . .

. . . I saw a few of these Samsung photo stories lately, after I switched to a new 5G phone in a vain effort to restore phone and internet service in my suddenly dead zone apartment. One after another, three happy faces, sometimes pushed against each other, best friends forever.

The idea that this easy, loving friendship could ever not be was unthinkable to all of us, never occurred to any of us, until our first outbreak of conflict and the incredibly painful aftermath.  Now the unthinkable has become the new normal.  Not only are we no longer friends, but I am, to everyone we knew in common, a walking cadaver, stinking, grotesque and scary.  I am approachable on pain of death, as they have made clear to everyone else.   The stories they’ve created and told about me would put the Samsung story bot to shame!

It strikes me now, trying to show our specific friendship, rather than sketch it generically, how difficult it is to describe something so natural, flowing and seemingly right.  It’s as hard as trying to capture my affable, intelligent, witty father’s monstrousness — there was no single snapshot that could illustrate it, no broken bones necessitating a trip to a midnight ER or anything like that.  So it is with my once dearest lifelong friends and their extended social and family circle.  

All I can provide is the Samsung story version of something that seemed so vital, precious and eternal, but which turned out to be as brittle as the thin crust of ice toward the middle of the frozen pond that laughing children are about to drown in.  The best I can do now, looking back with a bitter understanding I never wanted, is make my warning to the other children as clear and memorable as I can.

Birthday shout out to a coward

Today is the sixty-seventh birthday of my longtime close friend, many considered us best friends, which was fair enough.   After his wife flew into a rage at me during a tense vacation, he dragged her in to apologize to me.  This humiliated her, even though I accepted her crabbed apology, gave her the hug she asked for and kissed her.  She doubled down on her right to be inconsiderate with a well-placed bit of thoughtlessness the next day, and I reacted with a few seconds of anger I quickly apologized to everyone for.  

The aftermath was a long, torturous year-long impasse, a deliberation over whether I could ever be forgiven for the brutal way I’d used the “f-word”, long stretches of silence from them, a few breaks for angry meetings.  Attempts to repair our long friendship finally ended with his wife convincing all of our mutual friends, and their own children, that I was unloving and unforgiving, and no doubt worse things.  

To my shock, every one of them seemed to unquestioningly accept her creative account of our estrangement and her assassination of my character, or at least keep their distance.  As for their children, I’m sure the practical matter of their parents’ demand for loyalty, their mother’s unrestricted emotional prerogatives and their inheritance also play a role in their silence.

I knew nothing about this campaign of distortion, sensed nothing amiss with any of my other old friends, until a warm, dear friend of fifty years called, upset with me. She angrily lectured me about being unloving and unforgiving, deliberately torturing dear lifelong friends who only wanted my love and forgiveness.

I called my friend, the birthday boy, told him he had to correct these lies.  He had studied, and taken very seriously, treatises by a Jewish scholar on the harm of “the evil tongue” false gossip that destroys somebody’s good name.  He immediately promised to make things right.  

He called me an hour later to tell me he’d talked to everyone I’d asked him to call (there were two couples I’d mentioned) and taken care of my concerns.  He may have talked to them, but he corrected none of his wife’s defamatory claims.  His truthfulness was no longer something I could count on.

Months later I’d wind up ostracized by a large group of our mutual friends, all claiming to take no side, all professing equal love for everyone, all making it very clear that it was impossible to forgive somebody who can’t forgive.  Forgive for what?  I asked, but this feigned ignorance just proved what a liar I am, for I clearly knew good and goddamned well what I was childishly refusing to forgive.

This is my happy birthday to that sorry fucking worm. An enraged two year-old, still, at the ripe old age of 67. Many more, old boy.

from Chapter 39

Fifteen weeks later this dawned on me one day, the point of this chapter:


My actual terror is not of incoherence itself, but of implacably angry incoherence in the service of a tyrannical will. It is the forced imposition of a counter-factual reality represented by incoherence that terrifies me, because there is no discussion, persuasion or compromise possible with incoherence. The really fearsome thing is the angry will demanding unquestioning adherence to a narrative that makes no sense. The incoherence is the handmaiden of a willful tyrant’s eternally demanding will.

If the clear truth of something you need is inconvenient, like the indisputable fact that we all need to be listened to and heard by loved ones when we are in pain, simply say “NO! You will not be heard, whiner. Being heard is for closers, like coffee, you fucking fuck, like your smelly mother, who had much more pain than you ever will, and managed to whine much less. You’re a hostile, childish asshole, jackass, and wipe that sullen look off your face, you’re the one with a problem hearing the goddamned truth, pant-load.”


The point is, just say anything, it matters not what, to keep the mood going and your will dominating. Your inflamed will is not persuadable, your mind is clenched, you will say anything, contradict yourself over and over. It doesn’t matter at all what you actually say, the point is to just keep angrily denying and attacking, whether it makes sense or not. Keep the other person on the defensive, by any means necessary. Incoherence means never having to actually account for anything you do. That’s the key: do not concede accountability for anything, admit nothing.


My deepest terror, it turns out, is the insane, demanding will, and the readiness to do anything in its service, that made Adolf Hitler a household name. The incoherence is just the infernal music they play while bending others to that will. The genius of it is that you cannot argue against incoherence.


Set and match, bitches!