Thursday, January 26, 2017

Lions' Dens Are Not Comfortable Places for Humans: A Post-Trial Report on Psychopaths and Those Who Prop Them Up


I'm back from the trial in which I testified. Back, and thinking about psychopaths . . . . As my friend Wendell Griffen says in a posting he made at his Justice is a verb! blog a day ago, "Reasonable people do not wittingly employ a psychopath for morally and socially responsible work."


They don't do so because, Wendell explains (and he uses the new American president as an example when he explains these points),

Psychopaths do not blame themselves for the harm they cause others.  Psychopaths blame their victims.  So, Mr. Trump blames the people who heard and reported the falsehoods he has repeatedly uttered for lying on him.  Mr. Trump blames the women who experienced and reported his sexual assaults and other acts of misogyny for what he did.  Mr. Trump blames everyone but himself for his antisocial behavior because that is what people afflicted with an antisocial personality disorder do. 

Psychopaths do not blame themselves for the harm they cause others. What makes this aberrant behavior — which wreaks havoc with the lives of everyone around the psychopath if she or he is given a position of leadership and power — all the more dangerous is, as Wendell also notes, that there is no therapeutic cure for psychopathy, no medication you can give to stop it. 

Wendell's wife Patricia happens to be a psychotherapist whom I hired to chair the social sciences department of a college in which I was academic dean in the past. And so his testimony about these matters is all the more convincing when one thinks about his wife's therapeutic background . . . .

So I'm back from the trial in which I testified, and I'm now thinking about psychopaths. And the damage they do . . . . The damage they do to many people when they are entrusted with power and given positions of authority . . . . And how they display absolutely no conscience as they harm one person after another, but blame those they have harmed for the damage done to them. . . .

And about how they lie, and lie all the more boldly the higher the stakes become, and the more the bloodied bodies pile up around them due to their psychopathic behavior . . . . And how they carefully surround themselves with a cadre of people enmeshed in their lies, who will assist them in lying and doing their dirty work, and will  have no choice except to be complicit as the bodies pile up . . . . 

Because otherwise they'll be held responsible for the carnage along with the psychopath-in-chief who is engineering it . . . . 

Because the trial in which I testified is still going on, I cannot speak in detail about it and my testimony. I can, however, without revealing anything of particulars, tell you that you will be surprised to know that the blog you are now reading was set up — so I learned at the trial — with the sole purpose of attacking a particular university and its previous president, now fired (though this is not the information made public when this person "retired").

If you've been reading this blog for years now and have thought it was perhaps treating all sorts of other issues — the ones explicitly named on the blog's description page, on which you and anyone else can easily click — you've been deluded. In fact, you've been reading an endless stream of attacks on a particular United Methodist university and its wonderful (but "retired") former president who embodies the highest of Methodist values, so that anyone who questions her behavior or asks about the carnage she has left in her wake as the leader of two United Methodist colleges/universities is a slimy, lying, anti-Christian piece of human garbage.

Lie is truth. Truth is lie.

Psychopaths given positions of authority will inevitably weave webs around themselves that enmesh others, who are then obliged to participate in and uphold their webs of lies. This is what psychopaths do.

Psychopaths lie. This is what psychopaths do. The more damaging their behavior becomes, the more boldly they lie. The more damage their behavior inflicts on others, the more obliged they — and those enmeshed in their webs of lies — are to lie boldly, to tell bigger and bigger lies.

Because otherwise there would be consequences for their lies in a moral universe. . . . Because otherwise they'd have to be held accountable for their lies and for the damage they have done and continue to do to others . . . . 

When psychopaths are given power to lie boldly and to damage lots of people as representatives of the institutions that have empowered them, their lies and their damage will continue as long as there are people around to challenge the institutions to account for what they did in empowering the psychopathic leader. So the damage that psychopaths do can continue even after they are deposed, removed from positions of power, "retired" — insofar as the institutions that once empowered them continue to be enmeshed in the lies their former psychopathic leaders have told and refuse to admit responsibility for the damage their former psychopathic leaders have done . . . .

Even Christian institutions can choose to remain so enmeshed. Even Christians (say, 4 in 5 white evangelicals and 3 in 5 white Catholics and Mormons) can elect people like Donald Trump.

Even Christians can be involved in inflicting savage damage on hapless human beings, in the name of grand-sounding phrases like "pro-life" or "Methodist social principles." And even Christians can refuse to take responsibility for the damage they do to others when they are challenged to own their responsibility, and can fight in the ugliest, meanest way possible by means of ethically-impaired insurance-industry lawyers (see: Catholic abuse cover-up), continuing their attacks on anyone who exposes the lies of psychopaths they have empowered, smearing the reputations of those who tell the truth . . . .

Continuing the damage they initially inflicted on these individuals when the individuals were directly in the clutches of the psychopath who no longer has any legal power over them . . . . Instead of doing the right, decent, moral, and Christian thing of repenting and atoning for doing gross injustice to those their psychopathic leaders have chosen to target . . . . 

As I say, I cannot talk to you directly about the trial in which I testified or the details of the testimony I provided. But I surely do have psychopaths on my mind today, after I returned from that trial yesterday, and as I read this morning about the extreme damage that is beginning to be rolled forth on the lives of many hapless individuals in the worst day yet of a "presidency" that is still in its infancy.

I have seen at close hand and experienced in my own life what a psychopathic leader empowered by good Christian people can do, and can continue to do even when "retired." Given my experiences with one psychopathic leader and the ongoing damage I see that "retired" leader capable of doing when this psychopath continues to be propped up by an institution that will not own responsibility for what the psychopath has done in the name of the institution, I do not have hope for a bright future for the U.S. under the leadership of its current psychopath in chief.

And I do not have any confidence at all that the 4 in 5 white evangelicals and 3 in 5 white Catholics and Mormons who have set his ruthless attacks on many hapless human beings into motion will own any responsibility at all for what they have done. 

(At the head of the posting, I've posted once again a tweet that I've pinned to the top of my Twitter page. This tweet keeps getting re-tweeted and liked, and as a result, I was informed yesterday by a kind soul who saw the tweet being re-tweeted that I am a "liar and heretic" and represent "the apostate heretic church." Lie is truth. Truth is lie.)

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