Category Archives: musing

Comment and response

In our age of the internet in your pocket, personally selected content (based on our harvested, analyzed online and conversational preferences) clamoring for our attention, when most of us are staring at smart phone and computer screens many hours a day, comment exchanges sometimes take on the aspect of a real conversation.  

You can read long comment threads under many YouTube videos, on Substack and everywhere else online and the back and forth is sometimes a great discussion, adding depth, appreciation and interesting background that the original video or piece didn’t include.  Those discussions enhance the original, make it more meaningful.   It is impressive how well-informed on certain subjects some people are. Many people are moved to write detailed comments on posts and interact in extended, informative back and forths with other commenters.  We’re living in a digital age of instant digital comment and response, at a time when face to face social interaction is in decline.

An honest talk about a compelling topic is always a great thing.  The alternative to commenting is not commenting, which the large majority of people do most of the time when it comes to online reading or viewing.   A reader’s silence has no inherent meaning, the significance of silence can only be seen in context.   Silence as the answer to a question directed at someone has a much different meaning than silence as the natural tendency of most readers after reading something.    On the other hand, “no comment” as the final comment on something of concern, has an unmistakably critical ring.

I very rarely get comments on this blahg or even a like or dislike (I don’t use ‘social media’ outside of this).  I write here frequently as part of a daily writing practice and a way of keeping track of my thoughts, events, interesting things I’ve read or seen, music, moods, ideas, a recipe.  If at some point I recall a great lecture I heard about how  Adverse Childhood Experiences [1] can cause harmful changes in the actual DNA of the grown up version of that child, I will have posted about it here and be able to easily find it to send to the person I was talking to about it. I will be able to quickly locate Steven Zipperstein’s brilliant Pogrom, for example, Shoshana Zuboff’s genius mapping of the terra incognita of the Age of Surveillance Capitalism that has swallowed and digested us all  is here.

I sometimes think of this enlightening and obvious NY Times headline I took a screen shot of at some point, a year or two after the worst of the recent mass death event, the Covid-19 pandemic. It explains a lot.

Many of those infected with Covid-19 that the virus did not kill are suffering the long-term effects of the disease, effects still not completely understood by science. Millions have also been broken in various ways by the terrifying prolonged traumatic experience of a highly contagious, international mass death spreading invisibly throughout human populations everywhere. Recall how frightful the early days of the outbreak were, before the vaccine, before we knew how to protect ourselves and each other, and how much insane behavior occurred, particularly here, in the United States, where our death toll, because of this insanity, was the largest of any nation, and close to the top of the per capita Covid-19 death list worldwide [2]. Imagine the effect on young children and adolescents, a mental health crisis rarely acknowledged, let alone addressed. Suck it up, you insane little bastards!

The human race, across the globe, has been recently mass traumatized by the pandemic and the effects are demonstrated in mass behavior worldwide. We have all been traumatized by it, few have escaped the effects of this long communal terror and all of the other strong feelings this terror evoked. When people are freaked out, people we don’t like can quickly take on the aspect of monsters, inhuman in their greed, stupidity, anger, sorrow, hypocrisy, whatever it is that distorts them into purely destructive beings without any redeeming feature.

I got a rare comment the other day, to my post about Kristi Noem’s lying about Senator Padilla being wrestled to the ground because he was “lunging at” her and hadn’t identified himself as a Senator (he had). In the course of it I wrote, describing the selective, irrational, often counter-factual, lying arguments of MAGA officials: This is a basic principle of all psychopaths: win the argument by removing context, deprive the other person of their right to do anything.

I had a long comment applauding this essential bit of truth and then running with it. The comment quoted numerous writers and thinkers I’d never heard of and included a link to a post written by someone who’d sent a critical comment to the British Medical Journal that the BMJ had declined to publish. Clicking the link to a blahg and starting to read the unpublished comment, it made sense that a scientific journal would decline to publish it, but official science’s refusal to publish it was cited as proof of science’s complicity in the worldwide conspiracy of deadly psychopaths. The comment continued into vaccine skepticism (with quotes and links) and conspiracy theories based on the coordinated actions of a worldwide cabal of undisclosed psychopaths.

I don’t dispute that many, probably most, CEOs, the leaders of the American Psychiatric Association, the far-right political activist billionaires who have waged a long war against “majoritarian tyranny” and the “administrative state”, those who embrace obvious lies for political advantage (99% of Republicans in Congress) are likely psychopaths, or, pragmatically obedient to psychopaths. That’s a different belief than, say, the antinatalist position that since we are not asked to consent to our own births (a tricky proposition, as even antinatalists must concede) that we are born involuntarily, into a life of pain, which gives us a moral obligation to liberate others about to be born without any choice in the matter [3].

The online world is an impossibly massive psychic battleground where intelligent, useful theories and idiotic and destructive ones are given equal weight by tens of millions worldwide, depending on how they hit individuals emotionally. Content moderation is something we routinely do in our daily lives, such as when confronted by advocates of the theory that powerful blood-drinking child raping cannibals like Tom Hanks control the liberal elites and the Deep State that persecutes White Christian Men.

For years YouTube posted links under sketchy videos, alerting viewers that the content contradicted known facts and should be viewed in that light. The owners of youTube have recently agreed with Trump/Musk/Thiel (three famous, extremely powerful psychopaths) that content moderation should be relaxed. You will, presumably, no longer have a corrective link under a January 6 riot video purporting to show that every rioter was a liberal, communist, FBI provocateur or Antifa supporter dressed as MAGA nation, that MAGA was completely peaceful and engaged only in “legitimate political discourse” and that all of the 1,600 rioters pardoned by Trump are owed large settlements for wrongful prosecutions and convictions. Same for the insane RFK Jr.’s claims about medicine, vaccines, toxic water, government bureaucracy, science, research, cancer, child malnutrition, etc.

As a matter of kindness and respect I wanted to post the guy’s long, gnarly, problematic comment and reply sympathetically to what I agreed with. As a matter of online responsibility, I couldn’t figure out how to do it without a bit of content moderation, which I would have applied to the sections about Covid, vaccines and so on. In the end, I’ll never know if the long, detailed comment was from a person or generated by AI (it was suspicious to me that there was no link or identifying information about the person making the comment, which was forwarded to me by WordPress).

We humans are really on our own out here.

[1] Apparently the CDC website/DOGE bots have not gone over and combed out this page, last updated 10-4-24. I suspect the current boss, floridly insane former long-time heroin addict Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will make short work of this webpage, if it ever comes to his attention. Here’s a screenshot for posterity:

[2]. (From Wikipedia)

State and local responses to the pandemic during the public health emergency included the requirement to wear a face mask in specified situations (mask mandates), prohibition and cancellation of large-scale gatherings (including festivals and sporting events), stay-at-home orders, and school closures.[29] Disproportionate numbers of cases were observed among Black and Latino populations,[30][31][32] as well as elevated levels of vaccine hesitancy,[33][34] and there was a sharp increase in reported incidents of xenophobia and racism against Asian Americans.[35][36] Clusters of infections and deaths occurred in many areas.[b]The COVID-19 pandemic also saw the emergence of misinformation and conspiracy theories,[39] and highlighted weaknesses in the U.S. public health system.[17][40][41]

In the United States, there have been 103,436,829[3] confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 1,193,165[3] confirmed deaths, the most of any country, and the 17th highest per capita worldwide.[42] The COVID-19 pandemic ranks as the deadliest disaster in the country’s history.[43] It was the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer.[44] From 2019 to 2020, U.S. life expectancy dropped by three years for Hispanic and Latino Americans, 2.9 years for African Americans, and 1.2 years for White Americans.[45] In 2021, U.S. deaths due to COVID-19 rose,[46] and life expectancy fell.[47]

[3] Antinatalism or anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Wikipedia

America’s fight against brutality

I had a friend years ago, a pot dealer, who was one of the most ambitious, self-centered, hard-driving teenagers I’ve ever known. Recognizing he might not have the intellectual capabilities of many of his classmates in law school, he took to memorizing every case he read, studying twice as hard. He became a sometimes unethical lawyer before making his fortune buying and renting real estate and shrewdly investing. He was socially insufferable with his constant self-aggrandizing patter. I commented to a mutual friend that his then-wife seemed like a bright woman. “How bright can she be? She married Jack,” he said, very sensibly.

I think of Melania Trump, who may well be very bright (she speaks a number of languages, apparently, and has negotiated, and renegotiated, lucrative deals with her famously unfaithful husband), and her announced anti-bullying campaign when she first became First Lady. The anti-bullying campaign never happened, she was probably bullied out of it. Or perhaps her fashion statement spoke for her true feelings, when she put on the “I really don’t care, do you?” jacket.

Robert Reich really put his finger on what we are up against as a society, as a culture, in this perilous moment in human history. The entire game, the supreme struggle of our time, is brutality and exploitation versus empathy and cooperation. His whole short piece is well worth reading, the link is below. It ends this way, with a series of epigrams that could be carved in stone as eternal truths:

The central struggle of civilization has always been to stop brutality.  Unless we prevent the stronger from attacking or exploiting the weaker, none of us is safe.

A civil society is the opposite of what Trump seeks.   A civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutalize the weak. It moves as far as possible away from brutality.

Every time the stronger brutalize the weaker — whether it’s Trump and his flunkies bullying immigrants and the state of California, white supremacists bullying Black and Latino people, giant corporations bullying customers with high prices, the wealthy bullying the public to get giant tax cuts, Elon Musk bullying poor people by cutting programs they depend on, police bullying poor Black people, powerful men bullying women through sexual harassment, politicians building their power by bullying racial or ethnic minorities, Netanyahu wiping out Palestinians in Gaza, Putin trying to take over Ukraine — it’s fundamentally the same playbook: 

Stoke fear.  Exploit desperation.  Suspend the rule of law.   Fan brutality.

source

Deliberately crash the economy, increase pressure, precarity and pain on working and poor people, instill fear on Wall Street and Main Street. Irrationally blame your predecessor for the results of your own destructive policies. Make people on both sides of a nation you continue to divide as angry as possible all the time.

Once everyone is feeling desperate, exploit this desperation for your own/billionaires transactional ends.

Because of this created mass desperation declare a national emergency and invoke emergency powers under some vague and semi-rational rationale. Anything should be good enough as long as you get the troops on the streets and actual violence finally breaks out.

Blame society’s most vulnerable for this situation and sic the angriest and most violent armed-to-the-teeth Americans against them. Institute mandatory Roman salute for all citizens and make gristly examples of anyone who makes Hitler comparisons, employs sarcasm, irony or the f-word, or is in any way disloyal to America Made Great Again.

Trump vs Jesus

“Wokeness” is a baby’s insult, like cooties, for use by adult-aged childish people who prefer a sophisticated sounding synonym for “poopy head” to use against those they hate for making them feel insecure, bigoted, stupid and inferior. Nice to see they’re giving the merch away for free, if you can believe any come-on by the cynical hucksters who ruthlessly exploit their innocently faithful believers.

A perfectly reasonable story

Here’s a little story to illustrate what a perfectly reasonable story is made of, particularly in our age of manipulative social media and the algorithms that keep everyone’s eyes glued to their phones to have our biases confirmed over and over, our outrage stoked.   

Here are the elements of a reasonable story:  the setup is something people can relate to, the unfolding tale is something that rings a bell of true life for them, the ending makes perfect sense in light of the rest of it.   If you trust the storyteller, the context of the story is familiar, and emotionally resonant, the story will be perfectly reasonable to most people.   A story that sounds perfectly reasonable, given the culture we live in , leaves you with no real questions.

So, yesterday I went into a big sporting goods store in a mall, a chain store.  There were two greeters at the door, a male and a female.  Neither one acknowledged me as I approached, neither one could be bothered to turn their heads one inch in my direction.  I was walking slowly with a cane, talking to them, and these two fitness models never even turned to look at me.  I wanted to know where the shoe department was.  I was looking for shoes with the greatest possible cushioning, to try to help my painful knees.  

Asking these two for help was like talking to a fucking wall.   I understand they don’t get paid much, probably minimum wage, and they are from a younger generation, one that doesn’t always make eye contact with humans as much as with screens, but I was asking very little of them, almost nothing.  “Excuse me, can you direct me to the shoe department?”

“Hello,” I said, trying to get their attention.  After the third or fourth attempt I got the message loud and clear.  I was very tempted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but just limped off to find the shoe department on my own.   

The salesman who helped me was very nice, and helpful, and I wound up finding a comfortable pair of very cushioning shoes.  I told him about the two greeters who had been so rude, literally pretending to be deaf and blind.  He smiled indulgently, sympathetically, what else could he actually do?

I didn’t hold it against him, there was nothing he could do about his rude colleagues.  He did his job well, made good recommendations, accurately predicted which of the three pairs of shoes he brought out for me to try on I’d wind up buying.  A very nice guy and I’m hopeful the shoes will help ease my painful bone on bone, metal on metal, knee caps.  If not, this chain has a very reasonable return policy of 90 days, as long as I don’t abuse the shoes during that time.  

I completely forgot about those two dick heads by the front door, until I had to pass them again on the way out.  I called out “goodbye” in a loud voice and neither of these robotic pricks so much as turned their heads to acknowledge I was there.

I took their picture before I left, so you can see what we are all up against in the greatest nation Jesus ever personally gave his blessings of peace and freedom, and the Second Amendment, to.

Almost none of us are purely good or evil

It’s impossible to keep in mind during a time of traumatic upheaval like our present moment in history — very few people are strictly good or irredeemably evil. Few people are undeniably good almost all the time, we think of them as highly evolved, wise, enlightened, righteous, bodhisattvas, saints. Few people are relentlessly evil, we think of them as dangerous psychopaths. All the rest of us are between these extremes, on a spectrum we move along according to our emotions. All of us are quite good sometimes, even exemplary although, when we feel victimized and completely justified, cruel, ruthless and unforgiving.

If you’re cruel and ruthless at times, does that make you an evil person? It depends on a lot of things. There is a time to be ruthless in this rough world we live in, sad to say. But as a permanent attitude, a tiny minority of us are ruthless all the time just as very few can be at our best in every moment. We aspire to be the best we can be in every moment.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said “forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude.” A very tall order for the average earthling, because forgiveness always depends on the specific circumstances, and a sincere apology landing just right, but it states a great aspiration — a readiness to listen and forgive, which is a beautiful thing. It requires not hardening your heart against people who have done you wrong, if they sincerely try to make amends.

Hatred and division have actually been monetized, you can buy stock in lucrative corporations (like Palantir) that specialize in mining and analyzing personal data for the use of those who seek to exploit existing prejudices and make people hate and fear each other. Personalized messages influence millions to see the “other” as inhuman and evil.  AI can also easily be harnessed to this task, dividing people by removing elements like nuance and context that make humans compassionate and replacing it with relentless algorithms that make AI conform to the creators of AI’s money-driven, bottom line, black and white, good/evil worldview.

We are divided by the calculated, constantly repeated, transactional lie that some people, people like us, are good, and other people, people like them (fill in hated group) are evil. This lie is the creation of evil people, which is then magnified by millions of sometimes fine and sometimes shitty people who are neither evil nor good all the time, repeating it widely to people who agree, often just to be agreeable. The lies that enflame our division are all promoted by algorithms that monetize engagement. Engagement is driven by fear, lust, agitation, need for confirmation, isolation, anger, outrage, etc. Now fear, hatred, outrage and the lies that drive them can be instantly spread to hundreds of millions, like a pandemic.

I think of the klansman, acting out of a reflex to protect a helpless toddler, diving into a river to save a drowning child. I imagine him in that moment acting out of human instinct, not stopping to think the kid might be black or a member of some other group he hates. Maybe it’s the Anne Frank good in me, seeking the good in someone otherwise hateful to me, but I think humans defaulting to their higher human impulses happens more often than we are aware. What unites us as vulnerable humans is far more powerful than what divides us, things that are mostly lies anyway.

The genius of homo sapiens, the self-named Wise Ape, is our ability to organize on a massive level based on abstract beliefs (granted often irrational, destructive ones). No other animal is able to build cultures of millions of its own and harness that organized mass to radically change the actual planet we live on. Humans are capable of the greatest things ever done, as well as the most atrocious. Almost none of us are Good and very few of us are Evil. There has to be some path to keeping this in the front of our consciousness as we move through these dangerous times.

Somaticizing your people’s trauma

The Pope vs. the recent convert to Catholicism

And there’s this:

Also today [May 5], at a meeting to announce that Washington, D.C., will host the 2027 National Football League draft, Trump confirmed that he suddenly decided to announce he was reopening Alcatraz because the word sounded strong. “It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is uh, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz. Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies…. Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something, uh, strong having to do with law and order. We need law and order in this country. And so we’re going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that, and, uh, we had a little conversation. I think it’s gonna be very interesting. We’ll see if we can bring it back. In large form, add a lot. But I think it represents something. Right now, it’s a big hulk that’s sitting there rusting and rotting, uh, very, uh, you look at it, it’s sort of, you saw that picture that was put out. It’s sort of amazing, but it sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. And it’s got a lot of it’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point”

source

Photographic proof, MS-13

Incoherence is maddening to me

I grew up in a home where incoherent positions were taken regularly by our parents during our nightly standoffs at the dinner table. I was told over the years, with no uncertainty, that at three days old I silently declared myself an implacable enemy of my innocent father. My parents, both highly intelligent and well-educated, believed this to the day they died, eighty years later. As a result of this kind of mind-numbing idiocy, from two otherwise smart people, I have a lifelong intolerance for incoherence, particularly when it is being asserted as a fact you’d better goddamned believe, because I insist it’s true.

Spirited debate is sometimes necessary to resolve a disagreement. This process is not always easy or fun. But with good faith we can often thrash out solutions to difficult problems by producing arguments that persuade the other person to consider their position from another angle. This ability to reason a way to compromise is what enables democratic government to function. It stems from mutual, if sometimes grudging, respect and a recognition of objective reality that serves as the baseline for discussion and negotiation. It is the ability to reach consensus, and the logical methods used, that tyrants attack with everything they’ve got. The main weapons of tyranny are incoherence, fear and violence.

Incoherence is absolute, rigid, brazen, unblinking, it never changes its tune. Compromise is never possible when faced with an incoherent position defended to the death. The project of those who argue incoherently is total domination. As a matter of logic, it is impossible to reason with somebody who is rigidly irrational. If they offer no proof of something baseless that they insist is true, and they insist it’s true loudly and proudly anyway, you will never find common ground on anything.

This is the dilemma we find ourselves in today as Americans. One of Charles Koch’s most respected Libertarian thinktanks, The Heritage Foundation (author of Project 2025), maintains a database of election fraud going back to 1982. The documented incidents of voter fraud comprise a microscopic, statistically insignificant fraction of all votes cast. Even Bill Barr, as despicable and bellicose a Christian hypocrite as you will find anywhere, called MAGA claims of massive voter fraud bullshit.

Still, you will hear endless claims of widespread voter fraud used to support various voter suppression schemes in every state controlled by a gerrymandered MAGA legislature. If you can’t win at the ballot box, make an incoherent, but relentless argument, about the need to defeat widespread fraud. Anyone inclined to believe that Blacks, Muslims, Asians, college students, city dwellers, college students, naturalized citizens, gay people, environmentalists, humanists, atheists, those manipulated by Jewish practitioners of the Great Replacement “theory”, enemies of the anonymous, all-seeing Q, child blood drinking pedophiles, etc. commit voter fraud in massive numbers does not need proof. That there is a database, even if it has only 1,200 cases of fraud out of a billion votes cast, is enough to convince them.

It seems to me there are two basic kinds of people in society. One needs, above all, honest, mutual conversation, they are open to changing their minds in light of new information from a trusted source. The other kind is willing to accept lies, no matter how absurd, if there is something to be gained — money, membership in a group, prestige, power, being on the “winning team” — and they tend to be rigidly faithful in their beliefs. Black and white thinking characterizes this second type, a certainty that makes logic irrelevant. This kind also demonstrates a willingness to do whatever must be done to feel part of something greater than themselves.

I’ve heard this incoherent style called the dance of rage. The part of the brain that processes logic and can put things into cause and effect sequence is disabled if the anger center is inflamed. If you need to be right, above all else, you will fight to the death with any weapon that comes to hand. You may not be able to win a debate based on what actually exists, but there’s nothing stopping you from insisting on something that clearly doesn’t exist until the other person’s head simply explodes. If you can’t make the other person’s head explode, physical violence is your next best option, provided you have the numbers on your side.

You can’t reason with someone whose mind is closed. You may be able to find common ground, with enough skill and persistence, since we are all humans and have similar basic needs. Common ground is great, but often not enough to move the needle much. When you see that someone is prepared to assert incoherent talking points in order not to be wrong, that’s a pretty good sign it’s time to smile, wink and say goodnight.

A few words about real friendship

There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you. You cannot unsee the ugliness of contempt once it reveals itself to you. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, with the 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 called periodically and we spoke 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 friends 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 see me start to get upset, hear my voice tighten, see my muscles tense and 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, as he always reminded me. So, in the end I finally 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 were still friends, somehow, because I took his calls and we talked 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 listened as I recited hard lessons I’ve had to learn. This made him feel close to me, that I was always honest with him, and talked in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way. I didn’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 terrible 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?

The new N-word (narcissism)

I have been forced, over the last couple of years, to accept that there are people utterly incapable of compromise. When you are in a relationship with one of these folks, often called narcissists, and find yourself in any kind of conflict with them, your choice is accepting their blame-shifting terms, and all blame, or getting the hell away from them. Many of us have come to recognize and understand this destructive personality type in recent years. They see the world in black and white, win/lose, and are compelled, by a gnawing terror of humiliation, to act as they act. They are incapable of real self-knowledge, vulnerability or change.

As a result of constant bombardment by an angry, entitled, mentally unstable, destructive MAGA president, and his hand-picked loyalists, we have all learned, along with the dark, neutral, meaning-obscuring term “transactional”, the term “malignant narcissist”, a psychologist’s post-World War Two explanation of evil. Though a diagnosis of malignant narcissism is not found in the DSM, psychiatry’s bible of diagnostic categories, its workings can be easily observed in the real world. It describes a megalomaniac so intent on dominating others that they will do anything, including violent intimidation and mass murder, to be the most important human on the planet.

In 2022 “gaslighting” was Merriam-Webster’s (famous longtime dictionary) word of the year. It was the word of the year because it described what is being done to the American public, constantly, by a powerful group intent on absolute power and completely unbound from any sort of ethical restraints. Gaslighting is, according to Merriam-Webster:

psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator

But in recent years, we have seen the meaning of gaslighting refer also to something simpler and broader: “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.” In this use, the word is at home with other terms relating to modern forms of deception and manipulation, such as fake news, deepfake, and artificial intelligence.

When our president and his acolytes practice this technique, and demonstrate every other trait of the narcissist, and no consequences befall them, it empowers anyone inclined to act this way to pull out all the stops. Destructive behavior is normalized, as we say, and suddenly angry drivers feel free to blow through traffic lights as civility itself becomes a vulnerability.

Gaslighting is a major technique of the narcissist. You can’t be right because I have a perfectly good explanation, very convincing, for why you are wrong, insane, deluded, crazy, dangerous, a threat and I am your innocent victim, who loves you very much. Narcissist, I think, was also a recent word of the year, I may be wrong but I’m too lazy to keep searching. There is much on-line opinion that the term is overused. In any case, narcissism is the new N-word. It describes a person so damaged early in life that they construct a superficially confident, brittle, grandiose public persona that can never be wrong, attacks when criticized, blames others exclusively and will fight to the death over any conflict. One of their chief weapons of attack is gaslighting.

Our best hope as humans is avoiding assholes who act this way and practicing mutual vulnerability in our personal lives. This allows us and our loved ones to make human mistakes without immediately hunkering down into kill or be killed mode, as is the narcissist’s reflexive reaction. It is an open question how long it takes to recover from a narcissist’s abuse, full recovery may be elusive if you’ve been subjected to it long enough. On the other hand, the only way forward is through healing, and part of healing is learning to protect yourself from this type, once your antennae is attuned to the clear warning signs of someone who is so perfect that they will kill anyone who says otherwise.

Intermittent Empathy

I described my mother as someone with intermittent empathy. She could be very empathetic but she could also be completely oblivious to what other people needed or wanted. How, the therapist asked, can someone be intermittently empathetic?

My mother was beaten down by her mother. An only child, raised by a talented, demanding, strong-willed mother whose entire family had been murdered in Ukraine when my mother was fifteen, she bore the brunt of her mother’s sorrows, terrors and frustrations. Her father was sympathetic, but also dominated by my grandmother, he could only do so much to protect his daughter. My mother clearly grew up with a lot of pain and anger she constantly had to push down. As a result she had a very low threshold for frustration and flew into anger very easily.

My father had it even worse than my mother. His mother, a tiny, religious maniac famous for her uncontrollable temper, literally whipped him in the face from the time he could stand. On his deathbed my father finally acknowledged the damage this had done to him. “My life was basically over by the time I was two,” he said in a raspy, dying man’s voice.

When my father flew into a rage my mother was always quick to join in. It is, I understand now, a primitive, childish reaction, the same one that animates any lynch mob. Another person’s righteous rage, forcefully expressed, gives you permission to vent your own righteous, often inchoate, anger. As a child I was regularly exposed to this tour de force tag team of parental immaturity. There was little I could do, during an onslaught, outside of telling them both to fuck off. This response, of course, made their anger all the more righteous and me all the more deserving of it.

Intermittent empathy works like this. Hours after the bloody conflict, when my mother was calm, and by herself, I’d sometimes be able to present my side of the most recent dinner table battle. I’d lay out what happened from my point of view. She would listen. Sometimes I’d be able to persuade her that I’d been treated unfairly. When I was able to get my mother’s understanding, I felt her empathy. I have to believe that this intermittent empathy probably saved me from my sister’s fate. My sister, never really having experienced either of our parents’ empathy, until late in life when our father became her chief ally and emotional and financial supporter, became exactly the dreaded parent that tormented and damaged her as a child.

I had a close friend, call him Flack. He often expressed his torment at how difficult it was to get empathy or support from his superficially charming wife, call her Gina. He told me many times, with a lot of emotion, how humiliating it was to have to beg for things from a life partner who should give him those things without being asked.

Empathy, of course, is at the top of the list of what each of us needs from our intimates. I’ve learned, since my execution at Gina’s orders, that Gina is an extreme case, probably a psychopath in her need to be right no matter what and her uncontrollable desire for maximum punishment of anyone who makes her feel wrong. Flack, it turns out, is the classic vulnerable narcissist, he will do anything for anybody at any time, even strangers, and he is heroic in these public efforts, but he is vigilant and quick to rage at anyone who might notice his rigid need to be seen as perfect.

No human has ever been perfect of course, but if you are damaged enough to believe you must be perfect, it’s probably impossible to recover from that. Empathy for the imperfections of others as a first reflex is ideal. I tell you I’m hurt, you ask me why. You listen, show you understand why I’m hurt. Then you can talk about the intricacies of the situation, propose solutions, etc. Empathy ideally comes first. It is the hallmark of our healthiest, most life-sustaining relationships. In my experience, with most people, empathy is often intermittent, as my mother’s was.

People are self-centered, defensive, distracted, react with solutions before they hear the problem, want to fix things before they know what’s broken. We are humans, puny earthlings. Still, empathy that has to be prompted by a clear, calm presentation, is infinitely better than what my old friend Flack has to contend with — token empathy conditioned on absolute obedience to the will of someone with very little empathy.

Given the choice, we’d all like empathy without having to ask for it. Also given the choice, real empathy we can elicit from someone else is infinitely preferable to the situation Flack finds himself in. With a mate incapable of empathy he is always required to peevishly beg for it, which he finds humiliating.

This eternal, reflexive humiliation leaves him angry much of the time, performing a lonely dance of brittle perfection. The only time he feels intimately connected to this woman he has bound himself to is when he is vindicating her honor by cutting off the head of an old friend she now insists is a deadly enemy. They are never closer than when he is manfully serving her need for revenge. For me, even the spottiest intermittent empathy beats that irresolvable fucking tragedy every day of the week.