Demons, fear and reflexive distrust

There are demons within us all, stirring terrors too formidable to face unless we’re forced to.  They are extremely painful to confront, even when we’re aided by somebody who has the skills and gentleness to help.  My father, a man with more demons than most, and better reason than most to host so many of the merciless little fuckers, always stressed that everybody has his demons and that it’s impossible to know what to make of someone else’s demons.  Never truer, in my experience, than with my father.   

Although, towards the end of his life I came to understand the source of some of my father’s major demons:  regular childhood face whippings from his mother, daily hunger, excruciating, humiliating poverty, illiterate, defeated-by-life father, low expectations from his extended family, a feeling of shame for being stupid because he couldn’t learn to read — they only figured out he was legally blind when he was about eight and the brand new New Deal made it possible for him to have his 20/400 vision corrected with glasses (he went on to get a graduate degree in history).   If that’s not enough childhood pain to support a thriving colony of demons, I can only imagine what the rest of the story was.  At the very end of his life, he still believed he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in the haunted small town he grew up in, by far.

Our most ferocious demons make us rage sometimes.   If someone touches one accidentally WATCH THE FUCK OUT!   Often, after losing your cool and lashing out, you feel embarrassed, particularly if the people you care about are victims of your anger.   If one of your demons is shame, it is humiliating to acknowledge that you did something wrong and hurt somebody. You will have developed strategies to not feel the burning of deep shame.  Better to get angry again, indignant over and over, than to feel mortified that you’ve hurt someone you care about for a weak reason, or no reason you can talk about.

You stop trusting the person you hurt, if they won’t shut up about their need to talk about what the hell happened, their need to put everything on the table.  If everything is laid out clearly, your understandable human weakness is exposed.  Weakness may be understandable to others, but it’s intolerable to you, because your demons will immediately start painfully sodomizing you for being imperfect, weak, capable of hurting others who, sometimes, maddeningly, refuse to pretend they weren’t hurt. 

If you’re vulnerable to the need to be perfect,  you’re in for a lot more pain than the average schmuck who can forgive herself for sometimes acting badly.   We all sometimes act badly, no matter how diligently we try not to hurt people we care about. 

The only way back to mutual care is through making amends and forgiveness.  Forgiveness takes place after the hurt is acknowledged, it can’t happen in any meaningful way if the person asking for forgiveness insists the other person is a pussy who simply can’t put the past in the past and insists on bringing up a painful situation that nobody can do anything about because it’s in the past, duh!  

Many people find it impossible to forgive themselves.  The hurt we suffered at our own hands can only be forgiven by being honest and gentle with ourselves.   It works with the self the same way it does with others.  We truly didn’t mean to hurt ourselves, acknowledge the accident, cure it with taking better care never to hurt ourselves that way again.   This doesn’t mean shutting ourselves off from others, it means accepting they we’re humans who do stupid things sometimes and there is no point whipping ourselves over them, much better to learn important life lessons from mistakes and avoid repeating the same bad pattern.

When you hurt somebody, and they tell you they’re hurt, listen to them, do not allow a demon you can’t control to jump in and angrily cut them off.  Understand why they were hurt, empathize, assure them you will do your best to not do that to them again.  The same goes for when we act in a way that hurts ourselves.  Unless you do yourself the kindness of letting yourself off the hook for dumb mistakes, the hook gets sharper and sharper, sinks in deeper and deeper.  In the end, that hook is never coming out.

The alternative to making amends is that the truth of hurtful past events becomes poison to you, and the one you hurt.  A clear recitation of the thing you can’t talk about is seen as an aggressive, threatening frontal attack.  You marshal your armies, but they have very little to work with in defending something that can only be defended by spraying ordnance wildly.  You accuse, express distrust, and fear, sprinkle in some regret, quickly followed by more anger, and tell them how merciless they are.   Direct questions can be uncomfortable, an assault. What can you say to something like: was anything I said inaccurate, unfair, unkind?  All you can do is hurl something back “you’re unfair and mean!”  Sometimes we are at fault, and if we never yield, do the same thing over and over, fight responsibility and the idea that we can change our behavior in any meaningful way, that’s about it for that relationship.

There is no genius mediator, supremely skilled at her job, who can fix that distrust, denial, anger and inability to forgive yourself enough to reach compromise with people you love, in a single short session where everyone gets a chance to express how they were hurt and the mediator makes sure each one knows they’ve been heard.   At least, I can’t picture that kind of alchemist mediator.   If there’s only mutual hurt and distrust going in, how does the process have a chance to heal anything?

Apologia

Sorry, I keep forgetting that everyone I know is much more sensitive than I am.

That was not your loud, cloying fart, it was my auditory and olfactory hallucination and I should seek psychiatric assistance for my florid psychosis.

I’m sorry for your pain and sad that I can’t carry it for you. Maybe meds or talk therapy will help.

A blessed life

There are among us, I’d imagine, people who don’t need to struggle with demons living inside of them.  Impulses and fears that gnaw and chafe and cause us to exert ourselves, sometimes at terrible cost, not to succumb to terror, shame and rage.  There may be some people who simply don’t have to contend with demons, though I doubt it.

I mentioned to an uncle that his nephew, though I don’t know him well, strikes me as someone who doesn’t wrestle with many demons.  Personable, strong, good looking, doing meaningful work that he is good at and enjoys, surrounded by loving friends and family, he seems to move through the world with grace and ease.  I told the uncle that I imagine he also has some demons.

“He has no demons,” said the uncle.  “He’s never had to really suffer in his life so far, he’s never had to deal with any of the pain the rest of us know.  He will, but up until now his life has been blessed.  From the beginning he’s been loved, protected, respected, treated as well as a person can be treated.”

Pretty good blessing, I thought, even though the uncle’s formulation of his nephew’s demon-free life seemed a little glib.   

The Categorical Imperative

Hannah Arendt reported her  surprise to hear Adolf Eichmann, a self-righteous fool of ridiculous proportions who wrestled with his native German language while defending himself in front of three German Jewish judges in Jerusalem, correctly answer a judge’s question about his understanding of Kant’s categorical imperative, which he himself had made reference to.  Arendt seemed shocked that Eichmann, who lived in a world of mindless cliché, had grasped the principle: acting in a way that, if everyone acted that way, the world would be a better, more just place.  Of course, Eichmann’s understanding of Kant came with it’s own grotessquely idiotic punchline.

Eichmann told the judges that Kant’s imperative was a moral test of one’s actions.  If your action was done by everyone, would it make the world a better, more just place?   Or, as Kant put it:  Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

It would be a better, more just world if everyone agreed never to torture another person, say. You could apply that agreement to mankind as a whole and everyone would benefit from it.  Except, of course, those who make their living by torturing others.  Your actions, of course, should never be dictated by comparing yourself to the worst humans, but by holding yourself up to the standards of the best among us.

In Eichmann’s mind he had merely done a difficult job as well as he was able in the interests of what was best for everybody.  You could argue with the Nazi methods, yes, he himself agreed that the mass extermination of people perhaps better banished and sent to live in distant lands, might seem extreme.  He himself, he pointed out, had never personally killed anyone.  However, much as he may have disagreed with his superiors in their method, if the goal was a noble one, a goal you believed in, and the world would be better if the goal was achieved, who was he to question the decisions of wiser people he owed allegiance and obedience to?   If everyone stopped doing their duty because they had a twinge of hesitation, what could humanity ever hope to accomplish?  The universal principle, to Eichmann, the Categorical Imperative, if you will, is that duty is the highest calling, or something along those lines.   And, anyway, he was only making sure the trains were full, and left on time, and arrived on time at their destinations.  As his duty and oath of obedience prescribed. 

As we know, the Devil can quote scripture and a medicore-minded Nazi can wrap his murderous employment in Kantian morality.  Try seriously applying the Categorical Imperative to anything Donald Trump has ever done in his life.  

Every day in the news there are new revelations about the rot at the center of Donald Trump’s world.  A new scandal, some corrupt new detail that turns the stomach.  Picture anything the man and his minions do and imagine everyone in the world doing it. 

Your boss foments a violent riot to overturn an election he lost — you dutifully cover up his crime by destroying all evidence and obstructing all investigations.  You are his Secret Service, after all, you took an oath to protect him.   Your agency paid up to ten times the going rate for hotel rooms while defending POTUS, while his idiot son lyingly claimed he was giving the SS rockbottom, preferential rates.  1.4 million dollars and counting for security to stay in hotels owned by the guy you were sworn to protect, paid to that same grifting, lying dog-hater.  SO?   Do it if you can get away with it is a good universal law, no?

During a deadly pandemic, government health officials were replaced by unqualified loyalist drones like Pence, Kushner and economist Peter Navarro.  Under them the CDC was ordered to cover up how infectious and deadly Covid-19 was, weaponize attempts to combat it, fight masks, vaccines, all efforts to try to control it — America sets the world record for Covid-19 deaths, as a direct result of your boss’s need to score political points during mass death he himself added tens of thousands of American corpses to by his policies, and lack of same.   

Go down the list and see if you can apply even Eichmann’s twisted version of the Categorical Imperative to it.  Everything the motherfucker does — from compulsive lying and bragging, to constant childish whining, to viciously attacking anyone who does not obey his will, to throwing every loyal sidekick under the bus when it benefits him, to his world-class petty vindictiveness, to profiting on misery, to his indifference to mass death while surrounding himself with corrupt cronies who defy legal subpoenas and take the Fifth over and over when forced to answer questions about their flawed vessel master under oath — is despicable and crassly self-serving.

And isn’t that just the point for people who bask in the reflection of the very worst among us and luxuriate in the indulgence of their worst impulses, secure in the warm embrace of their angry, cynical leader who praises Ku Klux Klan supporters and Nazis as very fine people, while begging, deceptively and quite successfully, for money from the least among us?

I picture the book Hannah Arendt would write about their trials.