[Above photo: Community sailing in Portland, well protected.]
10 October 2022
It is wetter and colder in Portland. My cataract surgery went easily and, most amazing to me, I see bright colors again. I had expected to see more clearly but the world had gotten both fuzzy and gray.
Yesterday as I was driving to the hardware store I listened to a program on NPR about Morality, including Honesty. The program was ‘Kelly Corrigan Wonders’; she interviewed Father Boyle whose organization in the often-violent slums of LA, Homeboy Industries, has transformed many lives there. Then she talked with an academic who has studied Morality for 15 years [It seemed a long time to him, a mere tic to me!].
Among his findings are that our morality is fluid and our actions depend a lot on heredity, our surroundings, our peers, and, not surprising, our internal states. If I really, really want something today when I am stressed and feeling deprived, I’m much more likely to bend the rules. Thus far his conclusions seemed pretty obvious. Then he related an experiment in which he gave a test to college students for which they could earn $50 if they did well. In the control group, they averaged 7 of 21 right answers. When they could grade their own papers and then shred them, they averaged 14/21. But at a school where there was an honor code, even if they could grade and shred their own, their scores dropped to 7/21. His conclusion was that our desire to have others think of us, and to think of ourselves, as honest is important enough to account for the difference among shredders. And reminders of honesty help. He didn’t mention it but that is Kohlberg’s Second Stage of Morality, where most of us reside—“I do this because I want to be well thought of, want to get along with others, and want society to be the sort of place where others are honest.” Sociopaths and extreme narcissists, like DT and other tyrants, operate at Kohlberg’s First Stage: “I’ll do what I think I can get away with. My only real concern is to get what I want and not be caught and punished.”
I mention this in part because my PayPal account was scammed last weekend. I gullibly went along with the scammers on the phone for a bit, despite some trepidation, until my friend, Polly, who overheard my conversation, said that it seemed wrong. I hung up. But I realized that, especially in the moderately unfamiliar world of tech, I was no match for a kind and helpful-sounding man with an Indian accent, whose “boss” related similarly. My reflexes are to trust, at least at that level. They didn’t abscond with anything. I cancelled all my credit and debit accounts and have had to reconstruct them with my new cards. It was a nuisance.
And speaking of dishonesty, the stakes in the mid-term election and in 2024 are huge. The stream of lies—starting with the Big Lie—-from the MAGA crowd is unending. They are truly operating under a different set of principles than most Democrats. Take all of the blatant lies from and about Herschel Walker, who states he wants “no exceptions to abortion restrictions”: he didn’t know that woman [It does sound like Bill Clinton, lying away.]; well, he might have known her but he never paid for an abortion; well, not sure what to make of the cancelled check and the get-well card. It turns out he knows her very well, having asked her to get a second abortion which she refused, producing another of his unacknowledged children. Violent toward women? “I was suffering from mental illness then.” And on and on. This person we want to be a senator? And none of the Republicans speak up about his unsuitability because DT has endorsed him. What was the quote from Dana Loesch, the GOP operative and conservative radio host? “I don’t care if he paid to have baby eagles aborted, we just want to take the Senate.” Finally, some plain-speaking!
Now it appears that DT may possess even more classified documents. We, mostly honest, are hard-pressed to match people who lie easily and constantly. I don’t mean stretching the truth, as all politicians do. I mean repeatedly saying or doing something that is well-documented and then flatly denying it. To the point, DT knows beyond a doubt that he lost the election but he cannot bear it so he’ll lie and bully others repeatedly to support his lie, so much so that he comes to believe it and is convincing to the MAGA masses.
We forget that humans have lived under lawless, often whimsically, brutal tyrants for almost all of our history and that we have only recently [a few hundred years ago] managed to throw off our chains in some parts of the world. Democracy depends on humans [usually] functioning non-violently with honesty, reciprocal trust, and acceptance of the will of the majority, however disappointing the last may be. The continued and repeated dishonesty, intimidation, and encouragement of violence of today’s GOP threaten the voice of the people, however imperfect it is. Conspiracy theories are simply elaborated fabrications. Not expressing opposition in some way when we see repeated lies is conspiring with them by omission, especially for those elected to represent others.
We can surely all remember the desaparecidos under General Pinochet, the murders of Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot. The adulation of Vladimir Putin by Tucker Carlsen and others on the radical right betrays their love of strongmen. One problem with strongmen is that there is no recourse when they go astray, as they regularly do.
I fear less that Putin will use nuclear weapons, given his recognition of the Russian military’s demonstrated inadequacy, than that American Democracy, seriously wounded, is in danger of perishing. Once lost, it would take a bloody revolution to restore it, I imagine. I am convinced that many Americans do not realize how close we are to tyranny. Dwight Eisenhower, and even Gerald Ford, would have called it out.
No one is perfect. But the import, persistence, and frequency of lying should disqualify anyone from public office. If civil service employees must pass an examination to be hired, why shouldn’t our high officials? Surely psychologists could devise a schema and assign a morality score, derived of prior public statements/actions and both written and oral examinations, below which an applicant might be suitable for dogcatcher or park maintenance jobs (both worthy and important tasks but where dissimulation hasn’t such dire consequences) only.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 