Re: Rejoinder to Perry and a Humanist's Empathic Explanation of Vicious Motives

Perry:

"This facility of being able to look through the eyes of others is commonly known as "empathy"...

"...the humanist lacks empathy..."

"Now to humanists who lack empathy. Or rather, who display an inability to look at things through the eyes of others.

"The most notorious example of this is the left-wing radical Noam Chomsky. He ascribes the most vicious motives to those he opposes."

Now the Infamous Humanist John replies below:

But it is indeed empathic to ascribe vicious motives to persons who in fact have vicious motives. The humanist is able to recognize vicious motives in other because of the humanist's empathy. The humanist understands from his own experience of having had vicious motives of his or her own when someone is feeling vicious and the humanist knows that vicious motives arise when the human heart and soul have been traumatized by untoward circumstances and events. And all of this understanding of human viciousness is due to the power of empathy and reasoning.

Perry: "As far as shame is concerned, we can consider those he opposes as "the Other", and his characterisation of those he opposes, "Attack Other".

The Infamous John:

But in the Nathansonian scheme of things, almost anything can be called an "attack." Nathanson has said as much.

However, it clearly in not an attack of anyone merely to show that others as well as oneself can be and often are socially very handicapped by their vicious motives that are due to the effects of having had the natural motive toward benevolence damaged by taumatic experiences that leave human beings feeling vicious and even acting viciously.

Perry: "For example, when the US was preparing to invade Afghanistan, he went to Islamabad Pakistan and in a speech there declared that the US action would cause 2 or 3 million Afghanis to die from starvation as international aid would not reach them in the winter months because of the war. He gave a cite (as they always do) of an international aid association which had analysed the situation. His conclusion, therefor, was that the US intended on killing millions of Afghanis."

The Infamous John:

Which is of course is pefectly correct inference beforehand. Anyone can be an empathic genius with hindsight.

It is DAMAGED EMPATHY that makes one unable to recongize this conclusion as valid when it is a conclusion made beforehand. It is an ergegious species of fallacy to judge the soundness of a prior decision only by the results of a decision, although this fallacy is not well known and rarely appreciated.

You see, by the illogic of this fallacy, we would have to conclude that slavery is empathic and wise. After all, the decendents of slaves who live in the United States now live in much better conditions that their relatives who are decendents of Africans still living in Africa! So, you see, it is clearly fallacious, and often morally repugnant, to judge the soundness or the empathy of a decision by its outcome alone.

Perry: "But what Chomsky was incapable of doing was putting himself in the position of a senior US military planner."

The Infamous John:

No. He is able to put himself in the postion of the military planner and his empathy in doing so is what makes him be able to recognize vicious motives where he finds them.

But Chomsky, just like anyone else, can't predict the future when there are so many uncertainties. But based on careful reasoning and emapthy, he can make wise deicsions beforehand that may or may not turn out as expected.

Because a decision is wise and empathic does not guarantee its succes. Because a decision is stupid and unempahtic does not guarantee its failure.

If we were omnipotent and omniscient, we would not have to rely on imperfect knowledge and the imperfect guides that reason and empathy provide.

Since we are NOT omnipotent and omniscient, our best guides for making wise and compassionate decisions about the future are reason and empathy. Vicious motives, however, make decisions that act contrary to empathy--but that never means that someone who acts on vicious motives can't decide to do something that turns out to have some good effects.

And it doesn't meant that persons who use empathy and reasoning will make decisions that will necessarily turn out to just as one expects. As I said, everyone is a decision genius using hindsight. But when making decision beforehand, the very best we can use are our empathy and reason; and these are no guarantee of success because there are no guarantees about anything in the future.

From Perry:

"Humanist: "New Jersey cops are disproportionately pulling over young black males on the interstate to check them for drugs, weapons, or any other crimes. That is wrong."
Normative: "But don't young black males commit more of such crimes than others? This seems like a good shortcut to arresting and convicting the criminals"
(Now the Humanist thinks he has a trump card:)
Humanist: "Have you considered if they were profiling middled aged white males (supposing the normative is in that group) and not young black males? How would you like that?"

The Infamous John:

I don't see how this refers to a humanistic position, a position assuming that human beings are born with a predispostion to be good.

Perry: This question of the humanist relies on the presumption that the normative has NOT considered this. The humanist is basically saying it never occured to the normative to apply this police procedure to himself and gauge if it were fair. Well, DUH!

The Infamous John:

You are now making the claim that anyone who lacks empathy is a humanist.

You started out claiming that humanists lack empathy. You did not make that case.

But you nonetheless are so convinced you are right so that that even without having made your case, you now proceed to act on the assumption that all persons who lack empathy are humanists. Not so.

Even if you had been able to make the case that all humanists lack empathy, you would still have been a long way from having proved that all who lack empathy are humanists!

Yet here you are giving us an example of a lack of empathy and just smuggling in the idea that this must mean the person is a humanist. This is sophistry.

Perry cites The Infamous John, yours truly, in the following passage:

"John "Re: Slippery Slope" 11/27/02 - (re: g jackson) "You speak for so very many people who refuse to acknowledge that they feel just as you do, too, people who are intimidated into silence about their true feelings."

The Infamous John:

To say that people are intimidated into silence is to say they are human-oh-so-human and says nothing about whether they are born with a predisposition to be good, which is the humanist position.

To say people have true feelings that they do not always express is to say nothing very critical other than to say good people can be made to feel afraid to express the empathy they do in fact feel.

Any humanist worth his or her salt knows that human beings feel lots of tender and empathic feelings that have been traumatized into silence. This is actually a commonplace among almost all schools of psychotherapy.

Perry asks: Who are these people? Are you one of them? Or are you above them somehow? They're intimidated into silence?! Really!

The Infamous John:

Of course I am one of them. I don't reveal all I feel and I don't even give my real name along with what I do express. So I would be the last person to say I am free of feeling intimidated.

The reason I know that so many are intimidated is that I am one of them. That's how empathy works, Perry. So these people are you and I and everyone else more or less.

The hope is that my messages would inspire others to share their feelings with me in a safe context such as an internet forum where anonymity can be preserved.

It takes a very special person to have the wherewithal to express the hugely well developed empathy of a Noam Chomsky who is so extremely well informed and well prepared to know what kinds of difficulties to expect when expressing his powerful empathy in this tragically traumatized and traumatizing world.

Perry: Another subhuman bogeyman at work going around intimidating people.

The Infamous John:

No. Not subhuman boogeymen. No Perry. This is your strawman.

The cause of intimidation is traumatized people with vicious motives whose own empathy and power to use reason empathically has been badly damaged such that today they are in a chronic and often dangerous state of post traumatic stress. (More on just how this works psychodynamically can be found in the letter from David Wasdell reproduced below.)

Perry: Who is intimidating them? What are their motives? Are they monsters or are they human?

The Infamous John:

They are of course human beings who intimidate. But they are injured, damanged, and hurt human beings. As we all understand using the oft-quoted statement: Hurt people hurt people. Surely you have heard that statement, too, Perry.

Perry: What I'm describing is a lack of empathy.

The Infamous John:

I cannot speak for g. jackson. But I can speak for myself and to some extent for Chomsky.

Thus, I believe that you have NOT AT ALL described in us from your examples of what we have written any lack of empathy.

Instead you have failed to show empathy yourself with respect to the reality of human trauma that causes persons to be victimized into becoming victimizers even though they begin life as humanists say they do--as bascially benevolent human beings.

Perry: "An unwillingness or inability to to put oneself in another's shoes and try to see what they see.."

I would say you are obstructed from putting yourself in the shoes of persons whose empathy has been damaged and who thus have vicious motives that you would be able to better recognize if you would begin with the humanist's presuppostion that human beings, all of them, begin life predisposed to be good but sometimes some very had circumstance and events take place making them vindictive, bellicose, war mongers, terrorists, and all manner of propagandists on behalf of the false notion that human beings are basically bad.

It is not dehumanizing someone to say of him or her that she or he has vicious motives. Vicious motives are very human. It is dehumanizing to say people are born with vicious motives.

The normative holds that people are born able to be vicious no less than benevolent or even more vicious than benevolent. A humanist such as myself says that people are born disposed to have benevolent motives that can be damaged by untoward and badly traumatizing experiences that have not been well treated or understood.

Having vicious motives is so very human since human beings' benevolence is so easly damaged by traumatizing experiences and since such experiences are still rather ubiquitous in a world not yet comprehending the degree to which so many human beings have suffered trauma. The world is not yet comprehending not because it is popluated by human monsters but because human emapthy has been stifled, damaged, by trauma. {More on how this damage occurs in the letter below from David Wasdell).

It is also not dehumanizing to say that many human beings are intimidated into silence about their fears with respect to the hazards of expressing empathy when such expressions are likely to be met with hostile criticism and retaliation from those who insist that there really are very bad people in the world (and not just damaged people with vicious motives).

Below please read how great has been the damage to so many persons in recent years since the early 1990's. I ask that you and other interested readers here please study carefully the following open letter from David Wasdell. He explains fully just how it happens that vicious motive arise as a consequence of post traumatic stress.

I am not David Wasdell. The following is his open letter to everyone. It is an extremely important letter, and it represents, in my judgment, an excellent defense of what I have been trying to explan about how wrong Perry is in his misconstrual of the humanist's position about human motives.

........

10th December 2002

An open letter to:

Kofi Annan, General Secretary of the United Nations,
Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the UK.
George Bush, President of the USA.
All others in responsible positions of leadership of the world community.

In my [David Wasdell's] role as Director of the Meridian Programme (formerly the "Manhattan Project of the Behavioural Sciences") I have recently been involved in a series of international conferences in France, Hungary, UK and the USA which have brought together some of the world's leading psycho-social analysts. There is a sufficient convergence of understanding of the dynamics of the current international situation to warrant bringing the following points to your attention as a matter of some urgency:

1. That factors which are non-rational and largely unconscious play a major part in the dynamics of international relationships and decision-making. It is critical that this level of understanding of systems behaviour is taken into consideration by all concerned
irrespective of their political, religious, national or ethnic affiliation.

2. That in the post September 11 context, large sectors of the international community are acting out classical symptoms of post-traumatic shock syndrome. The intensity of emotion involved reinforces fixation in the moment of shock and the tendency to re-stage the event in repeated cycles of displacement.

3. That the intensity of personal and collective grief occasioned by that event has been profoundly underestimated. Unresolved mourning is commonly transmuted into inappropriate aggressive behaviour, particularly in cultures that have difficulty in dealing with issues of mortality and death.

4. That primitive and simplistic dynamics of splitting are
dominant. Sectors of the world community are seen either as good or as evil. Negative elements of the "good" sectors are suppressed and denied, positive elements of the "evil" sectors are also suppressed and denied.

5. That sector leaders involved in the resultant polarities take up mirror positions to each other. The "home" sector is seen as good, in the right, offended against, holding the moral high ground, an innocent victim, totally justified in defending itself or escalating the conflict in a mode of righteous retaliation. The position is identical whichever side of the polarity is considered.

6. That de-humanisation of the "enemy" results in massive
imbalance in the value afforded to human life between the in-group and the out-group. This supports acts of aggression that over-emphasise casualties to the in-group while discounting casualties suffered by the out-group.

7. That empathic cultural awareness is severely diminished,
rendering it extremely difficult to appreciate how a situation is perceived from another point of view. For example, in the search for some reason behind the "acts of terrorism", many Americans find it impossible to comprehend the enormity of the sense of desecration and violation of the sacred space of the Holy Land of Islam which took
place inadvertently during the Gulf War.

8. That actions and interventions transfer the emotional and
unconscious state of the actor into the emotional and unconscious life of the receptor. Terror, distress and outrage may lead to an act of aggression which leaves the victim in a state of even greater terror, distress and outrage. Reaction in kind sets up an escalating cycle of destruction, reinforcing the underlying dynamics and
obliterating any possibility of understanding and resolution.

9. That social trauma generates behaviour in the victim which reflects and matches the culture of the aggressor. This internalisation of dysfunctional dynamics underlies recent shifts in American life towards conformity with the culture of fundamentalism, social oppression and the suppression of difference and dissent.

10. That current events trigger the release of emotional response associated with past experience whether individual or collective. The re-stimulated unconscious anxiety (which may be from a failed abortion attempt, early loss of twin or other close family member, birth trauma, circumcision, stressful separation, child abuse, etc.) then distorts present social attitudes and political decision-making.

11. That leadership emerges in large groups and social systems when there is a match between the unconscious dynamics and defences of the leader and the unconscious needs and wishes of the lead. This relationship between pathology and politics exposes the system to significant risk in times of transition or crisis. Thus over-identification with the bereaved after 9.11 stemming from
intense family bereavement trauma illuminates the intensity of the bond between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair and the collusional congruence of their political response.

12. That the identification or provocation of an external enemy unifies the internal dynamics of any group, nation or state. Internal differences, ambivalence and negativities are obliterated and projected outwards onto the enemy-as-scapegoat. The process may strongly reinforce the power and popularity of religious or political leadership, but it undermines the capacity for rational and reality-based decision-making.

13. That the global context of the human species within its
holding environment is raising increasing social anxiety about future viability. The result is an increasing state of collective paranoia coupled with despair and impotence in the face of the enormity of scale and difficulties encountered in mobilising effective international action. The heightened sense of threat seduces and deflects energy into internecine conflict, diverting attention from
long-term problem-solving, diminishing the capacity for global collaboration and severely enhancing the environmental degrade and resource attenuation which underlie the presenting symptoms.

14. That another response to the global situation is the social retreat into passivity, dissociation, collective trance and anxiolytic behaviour. Energy is invested in attempts to sedate the presenting symptoms of anxiety rather than focussed on the underlying problems which are causing it.

15. That heightened social anxiety leads to the reinforcement of fundamentalist ideologies, whether philosophical, political, economic or religious. These constructs defend individuals and systems from
anxiety while detaching them from reality. Extreme pressure for conformity and collusion are experienced within the groups concerned, while intense conflict is engendered at their boundaries.

16. That the degree and intensity of dynamic disturbance in the world system reflect the severity of the emergent anxiety in the system as a whole. (See appended "Core Analysis of Global Dynamics".) Responses and interventions that serve to reinforce the long-term causes of the anxiety are dysfunctional in the extreme, however appropriate they may seem from a short-term and limited perspective.

17. That in a world that is interrelated in real time by the
communication media, reinforcing feed-back loops can severely accelerate and enhance the dysfunctional system dynamics. It is vital that all involved in the media should become increasing aware of the unconscious factors at work and of their own role and responsibility within that process.

18. That the current global context requires the ability to see the world system as a whole and to operate with the viewpoint of an extended time span. Even though individual business or political leaders may have risen to power at the head of distinct sub-systems, they share a collective responsibility to optimise the long-term viability of the world community as a whole. Maximisation of sub-system goals at the expense of the whole or the achievement of
short term gain at the expense of long-term degrade are no longer sustainable strategies.

19. That it is now imperative to develop effective means by which all concerned with leadership of our world community can be enabled to take cognisance of the powerful non-rational and unconscious dynamics which operate in social systems.

While this document draws together insights from many sources reflecting the convergence of analysis within the professional community, I myself carry full responsibility for the form and content of the initiative.

David Wasdell
Director, Meridian Programme

Replies:

Re: a Humanist's Empathic Explanation of Vicious Motives , by g. jackson, 01/03/03

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